“That said, there is only so much intel he will be able to feed us. In this race against time, we need more assets over there fast. These fruit bags in the Neo Iranian Nazi Party are well embedded within the nuclear plants.
“With your skinhead appearance and overall approach on life, you’re going to have to hide your Jewish heritage and tuck away that small piece of you that is of English decent. And then you need to embrace that one fourth of your ancestry that hailed from Germany with a big smiling Nazi skinhead face. You’re going to join the Neo Iranian Nazi Party. First, you will do it online and develop as many relationships as possible through social networking. The main relationship you will cultivate online is with a guy named Hamid. I’ll get you his dossier. He’s all gung ho on the Persian Aryan thing. More importantly, his cousin, who is also a NINP member, works at Bushehr. He’s a researcher. He’s our objective. When the time is right, you will make a trip to visit your new digital Persian buddies. Then the real fun will begin.”
“Hacking away on a computer isn’t exactly my idea of a mission. Hopefully I can get off the nerd and into the field quickly so I don’t die of boredom. Who else is in on this?” Zack was thankful for the history lesson but more interested in hearing about the part of the mission in which he would actually engage the bad guys.
“Blaze.”
“Blaze? I thought he was out? I thought he turned into a suit and was doing the civilian family man gig?”
“Yeah, well, the beast inside has come out again. He’s back with a vengeance. Well, pending approval from his wife of course. But he’s working on that.” Gallagher smiled big as if he was gloating about his own flesh and blood.
“Now I’m excited. When Blaze and I get together, near death experiences and unexpected twists and turns become the order of the day. Hopefully we’ll survive this one like the ones back in the day.” Zack was smiling ear-to-ear and ecstatic with the thought of being re-connected with his old warrior pal Blaze McIntyre.
“I’ll relay your enthusiasm. Now let me get the hell out of here and work on getting you out of this rat hole. Stand by for more instructions and a hotel address.”
“Roger that.” Zack was not only relieved to be sprung from the slammer, but amped up beyond belief about the reality of going on a new mission side by side with Blaze.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
HENRY FORD HOSPITAL, DETROIT, MICHIGAN
The tubes were everywhere. Blaze struggled to open his eyes. Once he did, he grappled with attaining some sense of cognition and consciousness. His vision was hazy and shifty. The pounding in his head was piercing and rhythmic. At first he had hoped that it was merely a hangover. If only that’s all it was. The sight of the tubes negated that thought and sprinkles of lucidity began to emerge. No stranger to pain, Blaze instantly tried to discipline his mind to assimilate the agony he was feeling.
The nurse came in to give him another shot of narcotics.
“Did you have a nice visit with your family? Your wife is so beautiful and those kids are just darling.”
Blaze cocked his head up to notice some flowers next to him that appeared to be dancing in his vision. He had no recollection of his family’s visit whatsoever.
“Oh, yeah, thanks. I’m very thankful for them.” Blaze was still trying struggling to make sense of why he was lying in a hospital bed.
“Well, I’m sure you are. Your wife told me stories about your past. She made it clear that this wasn’t the first time you’ve found yourself in a hospital bed. This one though, she said, was unexpected since you’re not presently involved with anything for the military.” The nurse smiled at Blaze with an obvious admiration and appreciation.
Blaze rendered a slight smile and a nod to acknowledge her comments while simultaneously signaling that he was too weak to respond fully with words. His mind began racing in a million different directions. The recollections were fragmented and volleyed back and forth between indiscernible visions of potential realities and apparent figments of his wildly inconsistent imagination.
The driving he remembered. He was by himself on his way home from the office. He remembered the flames. But they came from inside the vehicle. Blaze swore that happened before the crash. But yet he remembered more. Flames, that is. He was certain that these flames were outside the vehicle, after the crash. Swirling, furious, and shrouded with thick smoke and bursts of blazing red, purple and orange movement. He remembered Harry. Again, he struck. Damn it. And now, here he was in the hospital as a result of what he tried to rationalize as ‘war-induced psychotic mechanisms’ that his mind triggered randomly as therapy for his buried, tortured past. He knew it was common for his brain to play tricks on him. Hell, Harry had been dead now for almost ten years. It would only be natural for him to have occasional visions of him. But it sure as hell wasn’t natural what he saw. Or had been seeing. Regularly.
The ghostly visitations started shortly after Harry passed away—from a nasty heroin overdose. Harry Saylor was one of Blaze’s closest and most influential childhood friends. He walked to the beat of his own drum. When got into something—whether it was weight lifting or shooting heroin—he committed more fully than almost anyone Blaze knew. He was one of the most extreme and unpredictable people Blaze had ever met. Harry carried an intensity with him that was coupled with courage, bravery and unfortunately, recklessness. Harry also had one of the most eccentric and bizarre senses of humor you’d ever come across. Blaze remembered sitting in the cafeteria in high school and hearing a small explosion coming from the bathroom near the cafeteria. The women’s bathroom. As the explosion went off Blaze glanced over at Harry. Harry cackled loudly. The laughter was devious and was emblematic of his juvenile hooliganism. He had commissioned a very popular and gorgeous cheerleader to set off a series of M80’s in the bathroom. She was clean as a whistle in her scholastic reputation and would never draw the slightest bit of suspicion. He had devised the perfect cover. Harry’s life was littered with such pranks and tomfoolery. Never a dull moment.
Harry was an outcast, a misfit, and a rebel. He was feared by many on two levels. Most feared his physical strength and reputation for fierce street fighting. Others feared that he’d recruit them as pawns in his various plots, schemes, and trickery. He had his own code. Looking back, it struck Blaze that Harry was much like Jack Nicholson’s character Frank Costello in the film The Departed.
But as is often the case with those who possess strong propensities towards eccentricities and extreme behavior, self-destruction ultimately clawed its meat hooks into Harry’s soul. From the first shot of the needle, Harry fell head over frickin’ heals in love with H. He went from being a master of various domains and realms of life to becoming a dependent, sick slave within months. But it lasted for years.
Somewhere along the journey, Harry came to grips with the depravity of his life and sought deliverance. Although jail was a place he knew well, and he wore the ink to prove it, his conversion to faith was not one of the jailhouse variety. During a brief period of relative lucidity, during which Harry had been off smack, but on methadone, he and Blaze had gone mountain biking for the day. They had stopped to take a drink of water, and for Harry to smoke a cigarette, and they discussed life. But mostly they discussed death. Harry’s death, to be precise. Harry may not have been high on heroin at the time, but he was far from recovered. His profound obstinance had been an asset in his fight against his addiction, but it was going to take more than that, and he knew it. Blaze knew it too.
Harry and Blaze sat down on a rock. Harry took a deep drag from his Camel cigarette. He then proceeded, in a moment of typical forthright vulnerability, to describe some episodes in his life in which he saw angelic visions. Harry explained that while he was using heroin, and was fully under the drug’s control, that the angelic voices felt like torture and mockery in a sick psychotic sense. He did not recognize them for what they were. It wasn’t until after his las
t stint in the joint, where he was forced to detox, that Harry finally saw the angels with his eyes wide open, even if not everything was clear.
Although the visions were for the most part fragmented and unclear, a host of things were clear about the mysterious angelic appearances. They were terrifying. They were from God. They warned of Harry’s future death. They lamented the future of the world’s system. And they were real. So real, in fact, that Harry, while sitting there on the rock, amidst the scintillating scenery of the surrounding woods, enjoying his cancer stick, spoke plainly about these experiences with a visible fear in his eyes. He detailed the transformation that his soul went through as a result of these terror-filled, yet redemptive, angelic hauntings. He professed to Blaze that although the furious demons of his heroin addiction were still very much battling for the domain of his affection, he had given his soul to God that very afternoon as a result of their conversation.
When Harry finally lost his battle with heroin, Blaze took deep comfort in the notion that his friend had won the protection of his eternal soul through his submission to the Almighty. That submission was something he was constantly reminded of by the frequent, haunting encounters with Harry’s ghost. These visits hovered around Blaze’s consciousness constantly and the visions seared his soul with a teasing and brazenly prophetic urgency.
On this occasion, Harry’s ghost did not arrive with the preferred temperament with which Blaze would choose to have him return. He arrived with agony, fury, indignation, and murderous pleading. This particular sighting—the one that prompted him to end up in a hospital bed—was extremely violent and frantic. Harry’s intrusion into Blaze’s vehicle was sudden, urgent, and altogether jarring. The pieces of Blaze’s memory were starting to join together as the narcotics they pumped through him loosened their grip.
Before the crash, Blaze was thinking about Diem and his children. He was praying that they would remain safe in this increasingly uncertain world. He knew first hand about the fragility of the globe. Hell, he’d been commissioned to gallivant around it while neutralizing unseen bad guys for over a decade. Also weighing on his mind were the various events and political changes he had been hearing about in the news. He had been stringing the developments together in his mind as he filled in the gaps with all the intel he possessed from years in the field. He was convinced by the rise of global villains coordinating against the welfare of the United States that something more and more wicked was this way coming.
It was when his trepidations and meditations focused on this ominous thought that he peered upward as he drove. He then saw the droplets of blood slowly dripping onto the dashboard after originating magically out of thin air. He blinked several times, banged his chest to test his alertness, and cursed incessantly for several seconds before he witnessed a wrist dangling, again out of thin air. The wrist hung from the interior roof of his vehicle just a few feet in front of his eyes. There was a star of David tattooed on it and a nail had been driven through it. It continued to stand alone in the air dripping blood like some whacked out cartoon image—one that would freak out even the most wasted of acid dropping slackers seeking such a visual thrill.
Blaze had swerved several times while trying to maintain composure. He tried to assure himself that this vision was nothing but a result of his sleep deprivation, his stress, and years of seeing things in war that no man ought ever need see. He was wrong. And he knew it as soon as the wrist revealed the body connected to it. The body was Harry’s earthly body in ghost form. The image was like the holograms he saw in old sci-fi films; like Princess Leah emerging from R2D2.
Harry’s ghost began speaking in a violent, ranting gibberish. Blaze remembered some phrases and general themes that Harry was shouting about, but nothing real specific. He recalled many passages quoted from the Old Testament book of Ezekiel, but couldn’t remember which ones or even if they were quoted in their entirety. Harry repeatedly heeded Blaze to be a watchman. That, he urged throughout the visit. Harry raged about a coming war and spoke in strange ways about evil rising in the nations.
He then began pontificating on personal things that related to Blaze. He seemed to be consoling Blaze and urging him to embrace his loneliness and sadness. Blaze had not a clue what the hell he was referring to. Harry told him to move on with honor. He spoke about Blaze’s family as if they were no more. This confused Blaze and horrified him to the core.
Harry also railed against world leaders in his raving rants. The ghost continued on and on, eventually weeping for the poor, the lost, the addicted, and the foolishly proud.
And as Blaze recalled, almost fully recovered now from the haze of narcotics, Harry had disappeared mid-rant as furious flames emerged within the vehicle. He then exploded before completely disappearing. It was in that sudden burst of flames that Blaze had passed out and smashed his vehicle into a tree. Blaze always knew he never wanted to be a tree hugger. He could now say he had tried it, and it wasn’t a lick of fun. Nor were the lingering messages he wished he had not internalized from the ghost of his long dead friend.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
LAREDO, TEXAS
Juan Herrera was fat. Because he was fat, and was always fat, those around him suffered from the cruel wafting stench of his demonic body odor. He was teased practically from the time he was in diapers. Teasing eventually led to bullying, and bullying took the form of real, street-thug issued beat-downs by the time he became a young teenager. By the time he was sixteen, Juan was determined to reverse this dynamic and find a way to exert not only his masculinity, but also his forceful dominance over others to compensate for his feelings of inadequacy. The deep-seated feelings of inadequacy that plagued his youth did as much damage to his psyche as his body odor did to all who came close to him. Now eighteen, Juan was full of piss and vinegar.
Juan loved playing Assassin’s Creed on his XBOX. Sure, it was an older game, but he took what he could get, when he could get it. This game was handed down to him from a cousin. Juan’s family was royally screwed up and he knew it. His father was a ghost that disappeared at Juan’s earliest memories. He was barely around past his initial sperm donation.
The section eight housing was deplorable and most of the time Juan was alone. His younger sister was eleven and usually was at daycare or a relative’s house. Juan got the privilege of staying home by himself from age thirteen on, and primarily spent the time in a daydream world of video games and rap music. When he did get out, he would hang out with the only two older kids who accepted him in the neighborhood. They still teased him of course, but they would beat the living shit out of anyone else who dared to tease him. He was their punching bag, no one else’s. This gave Juan a sense of a safe cocoon of protection he had never felt before in his life. He would do anything these kids would ask. They were the only people in the world that ever stood up for him. His mother couldn’t even stand up for herself, let alone him. She was a junkie whore, and Juan knew it, and understood the horrible implications of his mother’s addiction as early as age five.
When Juan went out to the clubs and cantinas across the border into Mexico with his mentors in the neighborhood, he was able to escape the fact, and temporarily forget, that his mother and all her stupid bullshit even existed.
Juan’s mentors were all in their early twenties. Juan was their young protégée. They would protect him even when he would begin to provoke fights with other kids. This was entirely new for Juan. He was used to being bullied, not doing the bullying. Now, he was insulated from repercussion and could feel the invigorating rush of pushing others around, just as he was pushed around his whole life.
He began to feel like some sort of Superman, and he loved the feeling. His acts became more and more brazen, and his respect amongst his buddies, and anyone that now knew him, began to grow exponentially in a very short period of time. It was only a few weeks ago when he commanded the respect and attention of some serious players across the border.
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br /> Juan was kicking ass at Assassin’s Creed as he waited for the orders from his new business associate, an anonymous member of the Mexican Gulf Cartel. Juan was wooed and lured with all kinds of promises of money, glory, prestige, and affiliation, but none of that was even really necessary. Sure, he wanted to make some money to take care of his sister and get her and himself as far away from that whore of a mom he was cursed with, but he would have agreed to work for the cartel regardless. He had come to love the feeling of violence, regardless of where it pointed, because he internally used it as a reconciling force for all the shit he had been through in his life.
The order he was waiting on would be his initiation directive and he couldn’t have been more stoked to get going on it. He had no idea what the target had done to deserve the hit, and he did not give a shit at all. He had a buddy, who introduced him to the cartel, who was ordered to do some real crazy shit. Straight-up beheadings. No shit. Heads rolling on the streets of the freakin’ United States of America. Juan could only imagine the thrill.
The only thing he knew about this hit was that he was one of many new and recent recruits that were being commissioned to do hits on a particular group of people in the states. That’s all he knew. He didn’t know the common affiliation or the offense that earned the targets their brutal consequence. He fantasized that it would be a heroic, high profile hit like the one that was attempted on the Saudia Arabian ambassador back in 2011. If Juan got such a job, he swore he wouldn’t screw it up.
Finally, his cell rang.
“This is Juan.”
“Juan, pay attention. The address for the target will be delivered to you shortly, along with a description. You’ll be given a van with a motorcycle inside of it, and clear instructions. Your instrument will also be in the van, with instructions. Use it carefully or it will harm you as well. You’ll need to plan some reconnaissance time to successfully execute this job. Observe your target thoroughly before you attempt the mission. Failure on an initiation order could result in your own elimination. Remember that.”
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