Falling! It was like a dream. He needed to awaken before he hit the ground.
Water enveloped Max in a cooling embrace, shocking him from his dazed torpor. He gasped, inhaled slimy, shit-ridden pond water, felt himself drowning as he flipped over. His boot soles embedded in the sandy bottom. He pushed with his legs and exploded to the surface, found himself standing in about five feet of water.
Swift leaned through the sundered railing, the baton poised above his head, a homicidal smile on his face. “Here, maybe this’ll help, ya fuckin’ dipshit!”
Still coughing up water, Max raised his forearm and steered the thrown baton aside, yet another bruise for the day’s failed efforts.
Swift finger whistled. “Git him, Betsy!”
Oh shit… Max turned from the platform, saw the top of Betsy’s head as she swam lazily in his direction. He pulled his Glock, put the red dot between her golden, gleaming eyes, and squeezed the trigger.
The pistol only clicked when the firing pin came down.
“Fuck!”
“Yeah, fuck is right, dumbass.” Swift guffawed, then whistled again. “Eat him up, girl!”
Water rippled behind Betsy as she wriggled her thick tail just beneath the surface, gaining speed to seize her meal.
Max ejected the defective round, aimed once more, fired.
Click!
Betsy closed to within a few feet, then doubled her speed.
Max thought of his Ka-Bar. Not enough! Despite his prowess at knife fighting, facing Betsy with the combat knife would be a fool’s errand. He might as well stick her with a toothpick. He wracked the slide once more, ejected the wet round, prayed, and fired into Betsy’s face as her maw sprang open to devour his head, the carrion stench of her breath nauseating him. He heard nothing but the groan from deep in her gullet, saw nothing but pink tongue and piercing spikes of browning yellow teeth.
Never had the single pop of a gunshot brought such relief. The bullet took her high in the back of her mouth, penetrating the soft flesh to find her tiny reptilian brain, which it blasted into mush before lodging in her thick skull. The round’s impact barely budged her great weight. Her jaws closed gently, for the last time, mere inches from Max’s face.
Betsy floated before him like a torpedoed dreadnaught, slowly rolling belly up, her tail end starting to sink.
Max stood there; feet planted in sandy muck as he caught his breath. “Don’t sweat it, Betsy. All the girls say I taste like shit.”
Swift. Max turned to the platform, found it empty, caught a glimpse of Swift fleeing down the path leading to his house. “You better run, you piece of shit!” Max made for the bank to pick up the chase, his quest to take Carter alive forgotten. The luxury of savoring this revenge had come and gone.
CHAPTER 3
After chasing Swift halfway around the chain of ponds, Max reached a fork in the path. The left fork ended at Swift’s house but down the right fork, Swift ran for the swamp with a shuffling, elephantine gait, bound for the rickety dock where he kept his airboat tied up. Max, in far better shape, gained on him. Less than a hundred yards separated them now. He figured he could get in range and take out Swift before he escaped.
A hot wind laden with lead and smelling of cordite blew past his back. Max grunted when something like a hornet stung him in the shoulder. He turned, saw Imogene standing on the concrete patio before the house, wearing a soiled housedress and holding a double-barreled shotgun. Dammit! He ran to take cover behind the massive trunk of a live oak, felt again the wind and whistle of buckshot, though none of the pellets struck him.
He reached the oak, then leaned out from cover with his pistol leveled toward the porch. Somehow he retracted his head a heartbeat before the next shotgun blast tore into the trunk, kicking up a storm of splinters. “Shit!” It felt as though fire ants feasted on his face. How the fuck did she reload so fast? Perhaps he’d been mistaken; maybe she had a semi-auto shotgun instead of a double barrel. Conscious of each wasted second, Max stuck out his gun arm and retracted it an instant before Imogene’s next shot roared past. He then stepped from behind the tree, got his reflex sight on her as she broke open and reloaded with great speed, her shotgun shells held ready between splayed fingers. Just as she snapped the breech closed with a flick of her ample wrist, Max fired a single shot that took her high in the chest, knocking her back into the house’s open front doorway.
He had no idea why she was home, not that it mattered now. He looked to the dock. Oily smoke puffed from the airboat’s exhaust as Swift cranked the ignition. Max took off at a sprint, running the most crucial hundred-yard dash of his life.
He was fifty yards away when the engine turned over in a cloud of white smoke, quickly blown away by the fan. “Motherfucker!” He fired wildly at the boat as Swift cranked up the fan and pulled away from the dock. A bullet sparked as it pinged off the fan housing; another ricocheted off the aluminum hull. Max halted, sighted in carefully on the airboat’s engine as Swift gunned it. The spray kicked up by the fan obscured his view at the last instant, ruining the shot.
Bellowing rage, Max emptied the magazine in the general direction of the diminishing boat, striking nothing important, as Swift took off for parts unknown.
Thoroughly disgusted with his failed efforts, Max paused on the path to collect himself and ponder his next move. He put a fresh magazine into the Glock and chambered a round. But for the groaning of a distant alligator and the sound of thunder from a far-off lightning strike, silence reigned on the farm.
Max figured he would find interesting things in the spacious outbuilding of corrugated metal in the back yard. But fuck it; start with the house, maybe there’s something there. What that something might be, he had no idea.
First, he had to take care of Imogene, if she required it.
Max trudged to the house, typical of residential structures in Florida: a single story of concrete block with a flat roof, garishly painted a light mint-green trimmed with red. Unlike most homes, bars adorned all of the windows. Confined in a pen out back, Swift’s three bloodhounds howled and bayed.
He could tell from twenty feet away that Imogene wouldn’t be getting up again. His shot had taken her dead center in the chest, just above her fat, pendulous tits. Her blue eyes stared up at the porch overhang; pooled blood clotted in her cascade of greasy brown hair.
Her shotgun lay on the concrete beside her. Max’s eyes bugged when he saw the intricate engraving on the breech, the craftsmanship of the wooden stock and foregrip. Holy shit, a Prussian Daly. Only at Swift’s house would someone try to end him with a $5,000 shotgun.
“You should have gone to work today.” He dragged her body into the living room through the open front door.
The motif of Swift’s living room could best be described as white trash wins the lottery. His black leather furniture and mahogany tables were of high quality and had probably cost him a few bills. A TV of at least 75” dominated most of one wall. A spacious wire cage housing a long green iguana took up another. A cold pellet stove sat in one corner, waiting patiently to combat one of Florida’s rare winter cold snaps.
Despite the grandeur of the décor, the place was a fucking mess, a chamber of clutter and filth. Junk food wrappers, empty cans of Red Dog beer, and overflowing ashtrays littered dirty shag carpeting from the 1970s. The cracked and peeling paint, once white, was tinged a dingy tan from decades of cigarette smoke.
Swift, a non-smoker, had placed an antique spittoon next to his favorite chair, the oxidized brass green from want of polish. Max smiled. Déjà vu had struck. Just the way I always pictured it.
Though he wanted to thoroughly toss the entire house, Max knew he didn’t have all day. Swift would return, probably at the head of an angry redneck posse with itchy trigger fingers. He might even decide to fetch the law. Max figured Imogene would cost him at least forty years in prison, if not a lethal injection. The living room wasn’t likely to yield any useful information, so he moved on
in search of a more likely space such as a home office.
He navigated through the unsanitary kitchen and down a hallway, opting to skip Swift’s bedroom, which smelled of more ass than a locker room after a college football game. He didn’t even want to ponder what might have transpired in that chamber of horrors.
He found the cramped office, little more than a walk-in closet, located in a back corner of the house. Two display racks of vintage long guns hung on the walls, beautiful examples of the finest rifles and shotguns ever made—Beretta, Weatherby, another Daly. Max appreciated the quality workmanship, but past that they did not interest him. He collected military firearms exclusively.
Swift’s desk consisted of a six-foot plastic table with folding legs, its surface obscured beneath disheveled piles of paperwork and a laptop computer. Max moved the mouse, woke the computer from sleep, finding access restricted by a pin number. Shit, I’ll have to take it with me to get cracked. A thought occurred to him. Worth a shot. He moved to the filing cabinet, also locked, and spent a couple of minutes prying open the drawers with his Ka-Bar. Quickly scanning the tabs on the files, he found the Carters’ tax returns, both business and personal.
“Here we go.” He sat at the table, felt his knee bump something beneath it. Swift had duct-taped a holster to the underside of the table. Max pulled out the revolver, an old .44 snub-nose bulldog, then returned it to the holster. He probably has guns hidden all over the house. Typical enough, Max did the same thing. In their line of work, Judgement Day might come any time.
Consulting last year’s tax returns, he typed Imogene’s birthday, 31576, into the box, and laughed when the computer unlocked. “Fucking idiot.” But he wasn’t about to complain of Imogene’s laziness in choosing her obvious pin number.
Within a minute he realized the computer would be a dead end. It contained little else but the books and files for their two legitimate businesses: the tackle shop and Swift’s venom business. Max scanned the receipts. I’m in the wrong line of work. Swift made thousands of dollars per vial peddling snake venom to pharmaceutical companies that made antivenom and other medicines. Their legit businesses earned more than enough to obscure the money trail from Swift’s illegitimate work as a mercenary. Max found no entries in the books regarding those payments, though he knew Swift had been paid a full half-mil in cash for the Guyana mission.
Max closed the computer, stood, and opened the closet. “Thought so.” A rusting safe about a hundred years old sat on the floor beneath hanging clothing, which included a couple of Swift’s old army uniforms. Locked, of course, and Swift wasn’t foolish enough to use his birthday as a combination.
I’ll get it open.
Max exited the house through the kitchen, stopping briefly to nab a ring of keys hanging on a hook next to the back door. His presence angered Swift’s bloodhounds as he jogged to the metal outbuilding. He opened the thick steel door with one of the keys and stepped into an orderly workshop. Swift’s truck, a brand-new black Dodge Ram with dualies on the back and a full gun rack in the rear window, sat center stage.
The vehicle didn’t interest Max, who stared in awe at the machine gun on the workbench—an old German MG34 that Swift had been tinkering with. “Come to papa.” The MG was fully assembled. Hope all the parts are in it. He slung it over his shoulder to add to his personal collection of legendary military weapons, then moved on to the two closed doors in the back wall.
The lady or the tiger? He chose the left door, which accessed a lab space of concrete and steel as opposed to the usual sterile white tile. A spartan space, clean and well organized, it housed a steel table, refrigerator, and snake handling implements on the left wall. The right had two rolling carts, each loaded with a dozen plastic tubs a foot high and about three feet long. Twelve reptile terrariums lined the far wall, with snakes visible in several. An electric space heater kept the place uncomfortably warm.
Each of the tubs—translucent, yet cloudy enough to obscure their occupants—was labeled with a Latin taxonomical binomial, scribed in a meticulous cursive hand that Max found difficult to attribute to a ham-fisted brute like Swift. He read a few of the names: Micrurus fulvius, Crotalus adamanteus, Agkistrodon piscivorus, none of whom he wished to meet. A quick check of the fridge revealed snake venom in various hues of yellow contained in beakers and vials, all likewise labeled, and not at all what he sought.
The other door, which he unlocked with a barrel key, accessed a concrete bunker containing Carter’s work weapons, combat gear, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. Unlike Max, Swift employed classic, time-tested weapons as opposed to the latest firepower. Every warrior had his preferences. Max found explosives in government-issue wooden crates: square sticks of TNT, grenades of several varieties, white blocks of C-4 plastic explosive. Jackpot.
He returned to the house with an ALICE pack, a block of C-4, blasting caps, and a digital timer, as well as a five-gallon jerry can of gasoline from the workshop. The safe would not be budged, so he wired it where it stood, set the timer for thirty seconds, and waited in the kitchen. The explosion shook the slab foundation. Not surprisingly, the blast flipped the table and set the piles of paperwork in the office afire. The paper that mattered, however, remained intact within the safe, $775,000 in cash, which Max hurriedly stuffed into the backpack along with a flintlock pistol several hundred years old, likely the gem of Swift’s extensive collection. He would get it appraised and then sell it when he returned home to Las Vegas.
The rest was simply arson. Max soaked the dirty carpets with gasoline. The office, now nicely afire, would provide the spark. He would leave no fingerprints behind. Blowing Swift’s workshop proved ridiculously easy, requiring nothing more than another block of C-4 wired up next to the explosives in the munitions room. Max set the timer for one minute and hauled ass.
Though well clear of the shop when the building exploded, the concussion nevertheless knocked Max to the grass as he fled. He suffered no damage other than ringing ears, however, as bits of debris rained down nearby. The house went up in a ball of fire as he made his way off the property, around the ponds and back the way he’d come, moving double time. A column of black smoke had already climbed high into the sky, visible for miles over the flat Florida landscape. I hope you see it, Swift, wherever you ran off to.
The law would be along shortly to investigate.
Max pondered his failed mission as he ran through the slicing fronds of the palmetto jungle.
Though Swift had eluded him, they would certainly meet again. He’ll be gunning for me now. But Max had no intention of letting him take the offensive. I’ll be back in your face before you know it. Locating him again wouldn’t be so easy, however. Max would require assistance and not through the usual channels. Marklin had given him Swift’s name, but Max doubted he would help search for him. Max would check his contacts when he got to safety, figure out who still owed him, a list of men that grew shorter all the time as he called in more favors, mostly to no avail.
He turned to check his six and catch one last glimpse of Swift’s burning property in the distance through the grove of trees. That was a real goat fuck op, Max. Real smooth.
It wasn’t a total loss though. Money never stretched very far in the private security racket, and $775,000 would buy a lot of information and private jet miles.
Max tried to focus on the positives. Though Swift and his associates would know he was gunning for them now, it might work to his advantage. They may reveal themselves inadvertently as they attempt to hide or come after me. And I got a really cool machine gun out of the deal. Sometimes, you can win by losing.
Even botched missions had their rewards.
CHAPTER 4
Max pulled his rented Toyota Tundra off of US 1 into a strip mall parking lot. After passing several typical shops—a nail salon, Dunkin Donuts, a pawn shop advertising top dollar for military gear and memorabilia—he parked in front of the last rented storefront, a bar named the Back Gate Grill
. The name wasn’t lost on him. Outside the back gate of just about every military base in the world stood at least one bar that catered to military personnel. Instead of referencing the bar by name, men headed out to drink would just say they were going “out the back gate.” In this case, the savvy owner had made the term literal, though the Back Gate was several miles down US 1 from the back gate of Marine Corps Base Quantico.
Max’s phone vibrated on the passenger seat. He read the text message from Ben Fisher, an FBI agent with whom he’d once served with in the Corps: Held up at office. Leaving now be there in a few. They had agreed it would be best to meet off base, away from the many thousands of probing ears. “Not that we have anything to hide,” Fisher had joked when they set up the meeting. Speak for yourself, had been Max’s only thought.
Max had a second reason to avoid Quantico. The place brought back too many memories, oddly enough, most of them good. He’d left his civilian life behind upon entering the front gate at Quantico in the late nineties. There, at OCS and then the Basic School, he was torn down and rebuilt into an officer of Marines. Marine Corps advertising billboards of the day had read “The Change is Forever” beneath the picture of the Marine in dress blues: calm, stern, and possessed of unshakeable bearing, the antithesis of the typically scatter-brained civilian. And it was certainly true. He left Quantico a better man, a motivated leader of men ready to confront and defeat any enemy unlucky enough to stand in his way.
But he had one huge problem with visiting the base—it always got him thinking what if? What if he’d been allowed to stay in the Marine Corps? He might be a lieutenant colonel waiting for wings or even retired. All contingent on not being killed, of course. Young infantry officers made their living dodging bullets, and he’d been assigned to an elite MARSOC unit—Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command—when he’d parted ways from the corps.
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