by Tim Waggoner
“Suit, you gotta be kidding me,” Xander said as he took it all in. “This is impressive. No wonder our country’s a trillion dollars in debt. Do you really need all this gadgetry to catch the bad guys? You could just use some Xander swag.”
“Oh, we don’t need any of it,” Marke said with a grin. “But it makes the catching a hell of a lot more fun.”
“Xander Cage, holy shit! Live and in concert, one night only!”
Xander turned to see a woman coming out of the cockpit and hurrying toward them. She was a pretty brunette with wide-lens glasses that made her look something like a sexy owl. She wore a white blouse unbuttoned farther than was strictly professional, black slacks, and a simple gold chain around her neck. She spoke at a rapid-fire pace, so fast that Xander had trouble keeping up.
“This is crazy, which is saying a lot because I was at Coachella when Guns N’ Roses got back together, but this is way cooler. Well, I wasn’t actually there, but I heard about it, you know? Oh my god, am I still talking? This is really embarrassing. I’m sorry. When I get started, I just can’t stop—I just keep going and going, and then I can’t breathe…”
“Don’t worry,” Xander said, concerned the woman was on the verge of hyperventilating. “It’s gonna be okay. Slow down, take deep breaths. I know mouth-to-mouth if necessary, but I don’t perform in front of an audience.”
Xander wore a black sleeveless top, and the woman reached out and placed trembling fingers on his biceps.
“Oh wow, check out those arms. Are you kidding me with these guns? Look at you, you’re like the frickin’ Terminator! I’m not talking about the first Terminator, but the second Terminator who was sent to kill the first Terminator, but he was liquid metal like—”
Marke, her patience clearly at an end, interrupted. “Agent Clearidge worked closely with Gibbons. She’ll handle support on this operation.”
The agent yanked her hands away from Xander’s arms as if she were a little girl whose mother had caught her doing something she shouldn’t—not in public, anyway.
Xander smiled. “Ah, the new Shavers.”
“Yep, that’s me. And I bet a guy like you needs a lot of support. What are you, like two-twenty? Two-thirty? Be honest. Two-fifty is like the hard limit for my swing.”
Xander laughed. “Oh, come on. You’re clowning me.”
“I’m kidding! It’s not like I have a safe word or anything. Kumquat. I don’t ever think about stuff like that. Seriously, it’s kumquat.” She winked. “But enough about me. What about you? What’s your safe word?”
Xander liked this woman, and he decided to play along. “Sister, safe is not in my dictionary.”
“Touché,” she said.
“Never had a need for a safe word. And something tells me you never really had a need for one, either.”
Marke sighed. Clearly, she wasn’t enjoying their comedy routine. “Yes, well if you need anything, Becky can source it within the hour.”
“Except any sort of illegal drugs. Those I’ll have within fifteen minutes. Kidding! You need a fifty of Martian Mean Green, I am not the girl to ask.” Another wink.
“Okay, so follow me, Cage. I’ll introduce you to your ground team. Thanks, Becky.”
Marke headed for the stairwell, and Xander followed, but just before he started down, he turned back and gave Becky a serious look. “Kumquat? With a K?”
She gave him a broad smile in return. “C, K, whatever.”
Xander smiled, nodded, and started down the stairs. As he descended, he heard Becky speak to the other techs in the Command Center.
“Stay in school, kids. Don’t do drugs.”
* * *
The Globemaster thundered across the tarmac, rose into the air, and disappeared into the clouds. When they were well underway, Marke led Xander back to the cargo bay. The bay was filled with vehicles and boxes of supplies, all fitted with parachutes so they could be airdropped wherever they were needed. Five NSA spec-ops men were getting equipped for the mission, pulling on tactical camo gear. As the men finished their preparations, the team leader—a broad-shouldered, thick-necked, barrel-chested sonofabitch who looked every inch a professional soldier—saw Marke coming and barked an order.
“Boys, let’s fall in!”
The men rushed to line up, and as Marke and Xander approached, the leader looked Xander up and down. It was clear from his scowl and pursed lips that he wasn’t impressed with what he saw.
“Oh look,” the man said, “it’s the poster child for Red Bull.”
Marke frowned, but otherwise she ignored the comment. “Xander Cage, I’d like you to meet Paul—”
But Xander interrupted her.
“Donovan,” he finished. “Captain Paul Donovan. I remember you. I saw you on TV. The President gave you a medal. That must’ve been pretty cool. What was it for, again? You protected a village from terrorists with no reinforcements for a week?”
“Actually, two weeks,” Donovan said, “but who’s counting, right?”
Marke continued the introductions. “This is Lieutenant Vasquez, Corporal Jones…”
Xander interrupted her once again. “Lieutenant? Corporal? Suit, with heroes like these, what do you need me for? I mean, these guys are the real heroes. Think of what they’ve seen and done. They must have great stories to tell. I wanna hear all of ’em.”
Xander moved down the line of operatives, shaking hands and fist-bumping as he went. When he was finished, he turned around to regard the men.
“But I wonder,” he said, “have any of you ever pulled a triple no-hander on a BMX bike?”
“We don’t play on bikes,” Donovan said, his tone cold.
“Okay, but surely at least one of you must have carved out an R4 on a snowboard with an avalanche on your tail?”
Donovan’s eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched. “We’re soldiers, not slackers.”
“Really? Not even you? You look like a shredder to me.” Xander addressed the other men as he moved toward a set of controls mounted on the cargo bay wall, close to where Marke was standing. “Any of you guys ever HALO jumped over Eastern Europe using only a standard-issue armor deployment parachute?”
The men looked confused, but Donovan had had enough.
“No, because we’re not all jacked up on Mountain Dew and Red Bull.” Donovan turned to Marke. “Where’d you find this clown? Is he for real?”
“Well, guess there’s a first time for everything,” Xander said.
Xander slapped a button on the control console and the cargo bay door opened. A windstorm erupted in the bay, catching a drogue chute and pulling it out of the plane. The drogue chute, in turn, activated an extraction chute attached to a jeep. That chute filled with wind and yanked the vehicle along the cargo deployment ramp. As the jeep rolled toward the open door, all five operatives, including Donovan, were swept off their feet by the wind. Xander held onto a support bar with one hand, and he grabbed hold of Marke with the other, preventing her from being pulled out with the spec-ops team. As the jeep rolled out the bay door, Donovan and his men grabbed for it, and then both vehicle and men tumbled away into the open air. A few seconds later, the wind died down as the pressure equalized, and Xander let Marke go.
The normally unflappable woman seemed absolutely shocked at what he’d done.
“You dumb cowboy!” she shouted. “What did you just do? I don’t believe this shit!”
“If they’re as highly trained as I think they are, they’ll catch hold of the jeep and ride it down together. But as heroic and altruistic as those GI Joes seem, I can’t have monkeys watching my back.”
Marke sighed. “I know I’m going to regret asking this, but who would you trust?”
Xander smiled.
4
Back in the C-17’s Command Center, Xander called up a file on a workstation computer screen. Several paragraphs of text appeared, along with a picture of a heavily tattooed woman with short green hair, dressed in a black sleeveless tee and leather pants.
“Adele Wolff,” he said. “Triggerman, sniper, overwatch. You name it, she does it. And she does it better than anyone else in the world.”
Marke leaned closer to the screen so she could read the text that accompanied the photo. “Says here she’s also wanted by the FBI on counts of felony destruction, assault, possession—”
“So you were never a teenager? Besides, she did the time.”
Marke turned to Xander and raised a questioning eyebrow. “She has seven outstanding warrants with the justice department.”
“No, that’s not what I mean. She wrecked her BMX on a two story, broke twenty-seven bones. She was horizontal for two years.”
Becky’s eyes widened. “Two years?”
Xander nodded. “Believe me, she did the time. After she recovered, she couldn’t ride anymore—not at the level she used to, anyway. She was bored out of her mind, and lucky for us, she picked up a sniper rifle.”
“And some green hair dye,” Marke said with obvious disapproval.
“Let’s just say she’s the kind of person who turns a hobby into an obsession.”
AFRICA, THE SERENGETI
The setting sun hung low over the Masai Mara National Reserve, painting the clouds with a spectacular combination of pastel colors—yellows, oranges, pinks, and blues. The trees in the distance became stark silhouettes, lonely sentinels prepared to watch over the land as night descended. But Adele knew there would be no one standing guard over the grasslands here this night.
She crawled through the tall grass, wearing a rifle case backpack, senses alive and alert, intricate tattoos acting like camouflage. The Serengeti was one of the most beautiful places she’d ever been, but more than that, she felt at home here, moving silently through the brush as if she was born to it. In her own way, she was an apex predator, and tonight she was on the hunt.
She caught sight of a lion sitting on a kopje, a rocky outcropping. The big cat was stretched out near the edge of the kopje, head resting on his paws, eyes closed. Lions were the only cats on earth that formed close social bonds with others of their kind and regularly hunted in groups. But Adele saw no sign of any other lions in the vicinity. Maybe this lion had decided he needed some “me” time and had taken a break from his pride to enjoy a quiet snooze on a comfy rock that had been warmed by the sun all day. Or maybe he simply preferred being on his own, with no one to answer to and no one to tie him down.
Adele smiled. I know just how you feel, big guy.
One of the things that Adele appreciated the most about the Serengeti was that it was the last place on earth where big mammals lived. Most people didn’t realize that these animals were the remnants of prehistoric creatures that had gone extinct throughout the rest of the world, that this place was like a glimpse into another time, in many ways a better time, before humans had come on the scene and started fucking everything up. A time when life was much simpler, when it was hunt or starve, kill or be killed. The only real question was where you fit into the ecosystem—were you predator or prey? Adele figured it all depended on circumstance: sometimes you were the hunter and sometimes you were the hunted. And tonight the lion was the one being hunted.
The Masai Mara was world-renowned for its large lion population, and here—as in eighty percent of the Serengeti in Tanzania and Kenya—the big cats were legally protected. But just because it was illegal to hunt and kill lions in the Mara didn’t mean that people didn’t do it. If you were smart, careful, and above all sneaky as hell, you could get away with it.
And that’s why humans are the most dangerous predators of all, Adele thought. Because we don’t play fair.
She slipped off her backpack, opened it, and began assembling her sniper rifle. When she was finished, she lay prone in the grass and put her right eye to the scope. The image was blurry at first, and she made a simple adjustment, and then the lion came into focus. Honey, you’re absolutely gorgeous, she thought.
She gazed at the lion for several more seconds before repositioning her rifle. Now the scope showed three men approaching the lion from the other side of the kopje. All three were armed with rifles, and they moved slowly and silently so as not to alert the big cat.
Adele’s upper lip curled in disgust. Fucking poachers.
She aimed, drew in a breath, held it for a second, and then squeezed the trigger as she exhaled. Thip! She shot the first poacher in the leg. Thip! She shot the second in the arm. Thip! She shot the third in the ear. The silencer on her rifle had muffled the sound of her shots and she’d fired in rapid succession, so the poachers had no idea what was happening until they were all hit. The three men went down, dropping their weapons as they fell. They also cried out in pain, and the lion’s eyes snapped open.
Adele smiled and began disassembling her rifle.
Several moments later she was walking through the brush, weapon safely stowed in her pack, when she felt a phone buzz in her pocket. Surprised, she stopped and answered it.
“No way,” she said in an Australian accent. “No one has this number.”
“So why’d you answer?” said a familiar male voice, one she hadn’t heard in years.
She grinned from ear to ear. “Well, when a dead man learns how to use a phone, it piques my curiosity.”
“What are you up to these days?” Xander asked.
“Me? I’m evening the odds.”
She started walking again as behind her the lion roared and the poachers screamed.
* * *
Xander closed Adele’s file and brought another up on the screen. This one belonged to a tall fedora-wearing, plaid-shirted man in his forties, with a thick black beard and a slightly crazed look in his eyes.
“Tennyson Torch,” Xander said. “Stunt driver out of Chicago. Hundred-ninety-eight lifetime crashes. He’s walked away from all of ’em.”
Marke read a line from Tennyson’s profile aloud. “Acute psychosis and severe paranoia brought on by massive head trauma.”
“He’s not fast,” Xander said, “but he gets you where you need to go.”
CHICAGO
Tennyson climbed behind the wheel of his Chrysler sedan, the car creaking under his weight. Not because he was fat, but because the vehicle’s suspension had seen better days. He closed the door and started the engine. The car might be old, but its motor sounded strong and sure. Just like him, right? A little worn on the outside, but inside, still raring to go. He pulled a plastic mouth guard from his shirt pocket, placed it between his teeth, and then gripped the steering wheel with both hands, and gazed through the windshield and out into the street. Visualization was the key to a successful stunt. The more times you pictured what you intended to accomplish—experienced it on a mental level—the greater your chances for pulling it off. So that’s what he did now. He ran through the scenario once, twice, three times. But he stopped there. Four times was too much. Four times and you were likely to jinx yourself. After all, in Mandarin Chinese, the pronunciation of the word representing the number four was similar to the pronunciation of the word for death. Coincidence? Tennyson knew there was no such thing.
Go time, he thought.
He put the car in drive, pulled away from the curb, and jammed his foot down on the accelerator. It was nighttime, and the traffic was lighter on the street now than during the day, granting him an unobstructed pathway to his goal: an ATM vestibule at the end of the block. Tennyson gripped the steering wheel tighter and bit down on his mouth guard as the car roared toward the ATM. As he always did just before impact, he closed his eyes. He heard the shattering sound as the vehicle crashed through double-reinforced glass, but he didn’t hear the car smash into the ATM. He didn’t feel it, either. For an instant, everything went black and silent. He wasn’t afraid. This happened to him during every crash. He never knew if it was because he was momentarily stunned or if this crash was the one that was finally going to make him take the off-ramp to the afterlife. Not knowing was all part of the fun.
Tennyson returned to aware
ness as he fell out of the car. Evidently the driver’s-side door had sprung open during the crash. But that wasn’t the only machine that had opened. Amidst the smoke and debris, twenty-dollar bills rained down around him. He was rich!
Laughing, he rose to his feet, leaned over, kissed the car’s roof in thanks, and then began snatching money out of the air and stuffing it down his pants and shirt. When he figured he couldn’t carry any more, he turned and stepped off the curb, only to see an FBI SWAT team waiting for him, guns at the ready. Before he could react, a pair of officers charged Tennyson, grabbed hold of him, and slammed him down on the vehicle’s crumpled hood.
“It was like that when I got here,” Tennyson said.
* * *
The next file belonged to a young Asian man wearing a hoodie, black hair buzzed close to his scalp.
“Nicky Zhou,” Xander said. “Everybody calls him Nicks. If you have a problem and he’s around, you don’t have a problem.”
Marke frowned. “I don’t get it. What’s that mean? He have training?”
“No.”
Her frown deepened. “Any sort of field experience?”
Xander shook his head. “Not really.”
NEW YORK CITY
The underground club was called Valhalla, not that there was any sign outside to let people know that. If you were one of the people who were supposed to know the club was here, then you knew. If you didn’t, then you were shit out of luck. And even if you did know about Valhalla, that didn’t mean you could get in. A veritable mob of people crowded the sidewalk outside the club, many of them pushing and shoving to get through the door, but precious few could make it past the pair of bouncers on duty—a six-foot-seven, 280-pound, shaven-headed, red-bearded, pierced and tatted monster, and a scary five-foot-five dude who had muscles on his muscles, a thousand-yard stare, and teeth that looked as if they’d been filed to points.
