by John Grit
“Give it up whitey,” one taunted, brandishing a pistol. “We see you hidin’ back there, pissin’ your pants.” Like true wolves, they split into two groups, one heading around the left side of the brush, the other the right. He didn’t like the odds of waiting until they came at him from opposite sides, so he rushed the three on his right and killed them so fast the other group hadn’t processed what happened until he had already turned to come at them, his pistol in both hands. Their eyes rounded. In an instant, they flushed like a covey of quail, flying through the woods.
Yep, the old man’s got a gun. Raylan calmly unscrewed the suppressor and put it in the inside pocket of his vest, then picked up the bags. I’m not going to play with street thugs. He emerged from the woods and continued on. A heavy black woman with a small boy sitting next to her at a bus stop had seen the thugs rush into the woods after him. “I see you still got your stuff and your life,” she said. “I expect those boys got what was comin’ to them.”
Raylan tipped his hat to her. “Nice day, but a little warm.”
The woman laughed.
~~~
When Raylan drove up to the trailer, the door was open, letting the July heat and humidity in. He backed out of the lot and parked down the little dirt road behind a vacant trailer. He got out and locked the car. Approaching their trailer from the side, he made his way to the door and peered in. Someone had ransacked the place. His pistol came out on its own volition.
Carla yelled out from the edge of the woods, “Over here!”
He darted across the twenty yards of poorly maintained yard, stopping behind a tree.
From ten feet away, Carla said, “We had visitors. I took a stroll and happened to see them drive up to the office. Four of them. Looked more like Mob thugs than company personnel to me. Anyway, I had time to get back and hide our stuff out here in the woods before they were through in the office. I checked after the goons left. The old couple running this low-rent place are dead.”
Raylan kept his eyes busy looking for trouble. “So they went through the place and left?”
“I could hear a little of what they said. They thought we had already skipped out, since there was nothing in the trailer.”
“When did this happen?”
“They left only about ten minutes ago.”
Raylan moved to where she hid in some brush. “We need to get our stuff in the car and hit the road.”
Five minutes later, Carla sat behind the wheel of the Crown Vic, racing down the dirt drive, throwing sand as the car fishtailed.
Sitting in the passenger seat, Raylan had the M4 in his hands and his window down.
Carla hit the paved road doing thirty, executing an impossible turn, tires smoking. In seconds, they were barreling down the road at one hundred. She looked in the rearview mirror. “We have a tail, coming up on us fast. Looks like the thugs I saw before.”
“I want them,” Raylan said. “Leaving their bodies behind will make it less likely we get blamed for the murder of that couple.”
She stared down the road and pushed her right foot to the floor. The engine roared. “Sharp curve ahead. Be ready to bail.”
He grabbed the door latch. “When you slow, keep the car on the edge of the road, so I can roll onto the shoulder and not hard asphalt.”
She nodded, “Right. How fast do you want it?”
“Better slow to ten. I’m getting too old to bail out of a car moving much faster than that.”
She smiled. “You got it.” After another glance in the mirror she said, “They’re far enough back, you can run across to the inside of the curve if you’re quick about it.”
“Good. That assumes I don’t break a leg when I roll out.”
“Yeah, don’t do that. You’re going to be alone back there.”
“I want them,” he repeated.
“Hold your temper, Raylan. That old couple’s not worth dying for.”
Raylan’s muscles tensed. She slammed on the brakes, leaving black marks and billowing smoke behind. He allowed the momentum of the car traversing the curve to swing the door open as he rolled out of his seat and held the carbine close to his chest. The world spun at high velocity. Dirt flew. He was as worried about damaging the carbine as breaking an arm or leg. He didn’t want to face a carload of killers with just a pistol if he could help it. Coming up with dirt in his mouth and eyes, he ran across the road to a position he thought best. The Buick appeared, racing around the curve, tires screaming. Raylan brought the carbine up and clicked the selector to full auto. Concentrating on the driver, he dumped ten rounds into the left window as the car flew by. They saw him standing beside the road, but there was no time to react, and the driver had his hands full keeping the car from skidding off into the trees. The window shattered and Raylan saw several bullets connect with flesh. The car now driverless, he allowed physics to do the rest. The Buick veered off the road and slammed into trees.
When the noise and smoke cleared, it looked as if a bomb had gone off. Raylan approached the wreck with his carbine shouldered. The back half had been sheared off by a stout pine, and two men riding in the back seat had spilled out, their bodies dashed against an old windfall. One coughed up blood as Raylan walked over to him, hoping he could talk. “Who sent you?”
The man just lay there, breathing with difficulty. One of his legs had suffered a compound fracture, splintered bone stuck out two inches. Rayland stepped on it. The man was too weak to do more than moan. Realizing he would not get any information from him, Rayland put a bullet in his head. He searched the pockets of two of the men, finding nothing to identify them.
Carla raced up and spun the car around. He jumped in. She hit the gas and looked him over for injuries. Seeing none, she said, “Feel better?”
He looked out his window. “Much.”
~~~
The freezing Moscow wind sent a flurry of snow to pelt the careworn pedestrians as they slogged down the sidewalks on their way to their individual destinations. The stink of exhaust soured the air, belched out by the decrepit Soviet-era sedans that rattled along next to late-model luxury cars. The disparity between rich and poor was evident on the clogged streets of this grimy city, where the ruling elite that included the Russian Mafia were transported in warm luxury while the rank and file trudged through the sleet or drove worn-out vehicles.
Mikhail Janowski stood looking out over the city he ruled with an iron hand, or at least the underworld part. His ostentatious villa in the high-income neighborhood was better guarded than any other home in the country, its windows bulletproof, its walled grounds patrolled by his private security. Infrared cameras, motion detectors, and all the latest technological innovations protected him from a world filled with rivals, enemies, and common street thugs.
Exhaling noisily, Janowski moved from the window to the mahogany bar, where a bottle of Jack Daniels – one of the few American products he liked – stood next to crystal tumblers and a full ashtray. After ripping into a pack of Marlboro Menthols – another American product he enjoyed – he shook out a cigarette and put it between his lips, then poured a stiff shot of whiskey into one of the glasses, lit the Marlboro with a 14-karat gold lighter, and drew the smoke deep into his lungs before blowing a gray stream into the room’s atmosphere. He raised the glass to his lips and sipped the whiskey. Nobody would dare question his preferences in anything, so he didn’t really care that it wasn’t a product of Russia. Hell, he wasn’t Russian, either. Born in a hellhole of a little farming community in a hellhole of a little country under the thumb of Russia. Far from Moscow and the concerns of those ruling the former Soviet Union, he endured grinding poverty as his parents worked him close to death in the fields. Only by chance did he escape the world he was born into. Two government suits, straight from Moscow, appeared one day at his two-room school and had every child take an extensive examination, a series of tests that measured not only mental abilities, but physical. The two strangers, who might as well have been from outer space as
far as the wide-eyed children were concerned, seemed to be interested in him above the others for some reason and had him perform such feats as jumping over pits with sharp stakes in the bottom, pointing up to kill any child who fell in. The memory of those days had never left him, though he was only eleven at the time.
One test involved walking a narrow beam between two buildings one hundred feet above the ground. Only two other children would attempt it, and one of them fell to his death just before it was his turn. The one girl who had the nerve to try turned back after only two steps. The government suits watched closely as he stood at the edge of the roof, and he knew they were wondering if he had the balls after seeing his fellow classmate die. No one would make a coward of him. There was no hesitation as he stepped off into empty space and walked the three-inch wide beam as casually as if he were on solid ground. When he stepped onto the other roof and turned, the suits were nodding and muttering something to each other. It was then he knew they had chosen him, and only him out of eighty children. But for what? The next thing he knew, he was saying good-bye to his cruel parents and the crueler world of a peasant. The years that followed entailed grueling training that turned him into an efficient killer and one of the best espionage agents Russia had ever produced.
Janowski paused from his reminiscing to savor the taste of American whiskey, appreciating the burn. After another drag of smoke, he turned and retired to the custom-made brown leather chair he always sat in and no one else, bringing the bottle with him. Such luxuries were part of being one of the most powerful and wealthy men in Russia. His empire spanned the globe. Shipping, export and import of both legal and illegal products, such as weapons of war out of Russia and drugs into Russia. One of his most lucrative export items was girls for the sex slave trade. Many of the women and teen girls went to parts of Europe and the U.S., but some wound up in obscure, far-flung reaches where blue-eyed blonds were sold to oil-rich sheikhs at a premium. With connections at the highest levels of the KGB’s successors, the FSB (Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation) and SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service), his background, connections, power, and ruthlessness had ensured his good fortune once the wall came down. Everyone (except the younger upstarts) running the country was ex-KGB, so the coveted opportunities naturally had landed in the laps of the powerful in government.
He punched a button on a remote with a thick finger on a fat hand, and a flat screen television lit up. After hesitating, his finger seemed to hit start on its own volition. An image of the street just outside the walls of his compound filled the screen. The color footage was clear. There was no sound. At the far edge of the field of vision, he saw motion, a man falling backwards into view, thirty yards from the camera, which was mounted twelve feet off the ground. The man was one of his security guards, ex-Spetsnaz and not a man to be snuck up on. Yet on that night someone had gotten close enough to cut his throat as he stood watch over Janowski’s home.
A spray of blood was visible in the glow of the street light when the guard’s jugular was sliced, but he wasn’t interested in the guard or his fate. His eyes grew intense as he waited for the delicious second the image he knew would appear for a disappointingly brief time. There. As he had seen so many times before. A man, in black from head to toe, moving with the confidence of a high-speed operator – U.S. Special Forces. Though he learned later the assassin was not Special Forces, but CIA. One moment, the area was empty, the next a streak of movement as the figure threw a hook over the wall and climbed up a rope so fast he was over the lip and gone in one fluid motion. A second later, the rope snaked up and over the wall. Even he had not been that agile back in his prime, when he was young and thin.
Then the final scene from a different camera. The scene that Janowski both savored and dreaded. He had watched it at least a hundred times.
The view of a hallway inside his home. A man in black again. He opened a bedroom door and entered. His twenty-seven-year-old son was sleeping inside, staying with his parents that week on vacation from his work at the SVR, (Russia’s External Intelligence Service) where he spent much of his time collecting valuable information for his father to use in his business. Seconds later, the bedroom door opened again, and the black-clad figure stepped out, a streak of blood across its torso, the head masked in a balaclava. The figure moved down the hall closer to the camera, a pistol gripped in his right hand. And then the man looked up, as if he knew the camera was there. Janowski’s blood chilled. Every time he saw those eyes, he felt death stalking him. He froze the image and forced himself to stare back until his blood warmed, then began to boil from the special hate he reserved for the man who killed his son.
He understood fully that there was no profit in hate, and profit had always been his main motivator — that is, after he had clawed his way up from the bottom and survival was no longer on his mind twenty-four-seven. And yet he couldn’t stop himself from hating. He had even wasted much money discovering the name and background of this killing machine from America, then wasted more money searching for him. By then the assassin had left the CIA and disappeared. Even the U.S. Government was looking for him without success. Then a break. Information fell into his hands when an informant told him the CIA had located his son’s killer and had his new alias and address. No further action had taken place, as higher-ups had not decided whether this Raylan Maddox, AKA, David Sutton, was really a security risk after all. He had been gone more than a year, yet there was zero evidence he had talked to anyone about what he knew of CIA activities during his work there. Perhaps it was safer to let this sleeping lion alone.
He reminded himself that this American had come to kill him on that night, creeping into his bedroom right rafter killing his son, finding his wife asleep and leaving her bound and gagged. That was why he had to hunt this American bastard down. He lived that night only because he had been called away on business: the execution of a rival thug who had been digging into Janowski’s profits a little too much. You don’t leave someone as dangerous as that American alive, he told himself. Bullshit. He wanted this Raylan Maddox dead for murdering his only child. There was no need for excuses. He didn’t need an excuse to kill an enemy of his business, his family, and his country.
Janowski swallowed another drink in three gulps. He had been so close, but this American bastard had escaped, taking out nearly every man in America he had in his employ, and several CIA operatives in the process. The Director of the CIA was in his pocket, and the operatives were following the Director’s orders, not knowing they were actually working for an international crime boss. But this Maddox was crazy. All Americans are crazy, he told himself. Killing machines, the bastards are. He had made many phone calls to the States and his people there had managed to build another team of thugs to hunt Raylan Maddox down. Only Maddox had managed to kill many of them, too. Damn him! He was costing Janowski a fortune and still lived. When would this be over? Until it was, he couldn’t sleep well or have any peace of mind. At least now, with the cooperation of a few U.S. senators, and the help of certain people in the CIA, including the Director, his men were closing in on Maddox. It was just a matter of time, he told himself, not really believing it.
Later, he would stagger to his empty bedroom where his wife should have been. She had died of a heart attack the month before, still grieving over the murder of their son. Fortunately, he had an eighteen-year-old slave waiting that he planned to keep for a while before shipping her off to the highest bidder. Too bad he was too old to really enjoy her. Viagra helped, but a man his age just couldn’t turn back time and become twenty again; the blood loses its vigor, and there was no cure for that.
His thoughts turned back to Raylan Maddox as he staggered down the hall to his bedroom, feeling the excess poundage on his body more than usual in his inebriated state, and he reminded himself not to vent his rage on the girl like he did last week. Her face was still bruised, and that wasn’t very sexy. He might even accidently knock out a tooth or two, reducing her value when
the time came to sell her.
Chapter 5
The east glowed with a blue haze as Raylan pulled the pilfered blue Cadillac into the parking lot of a shopping mall. They had to lose the Crown Vic. It had obviously been burned someway, perhaps satellite surveillance or traffic cameras. It may have been a security camera at the restaurant where Carla broke into the deputy’s car to use his computer. Maybe a drone got the temporary tag number off the car when they were leaving the Wally World the day she called her ex-handler. Who could say? Certainly, the company was utilizing every trick they had. To be safe, they would have to assume their aliases had been burned and therefore their credit cards flagged. They would use cash from then on, until they started using one of their other aliases.
He hated to wake Carla, who sat sleeping on the passenger side, but there was work to do. He nudged her shoulder. “We’re not far from McLean, Virginia.”
She opened her eyes, right hand holding the H&K MP5 that she hid under a newspaper in her lap. “My turn to drive again?”
“No,” Raylan said. “But I think it’s time to load our little autobiographies onto the flash drives I bought, so we can send them to major newspapers.”
She rubbed sleep from her eyes and looked at him, examining his face. “Know what I’m thinking of?”
He smiled. “I better not guess. I have a dirty mind, especially when a woman looks at me like that.”
“Well, in that case you’re probably not far off.” She reached over the back of the seat to grab the laptop. “I was thinking of screwing some people royally.”
“Hmm,” Raylan said. “I’m not enough for you?”
She smiled and opened the laptop. “It’s crooked politicians I’m thinking of screwing. Every crooked politician in Washington.” She smiled mischievously. “I’ve added more names to the list that have used the CIA as their personal Killers-For-Hire.”
