by Al Ruksenas
It was then that they noticed several shadowy figures climb out of a dark panel van parked on Constitution Avenue ahead of them. The figures headed in their direction.
Laura looked with apprehension, grabbed Caine’s hand, pressed it firmly in a gesture of growing alarm and quickened her pace.
She could feel the Colonel’s body tense as he slowed back their pace and peered through the darkness to discern the figures who were perhaps twenty feet away from them.
“It’s all right,” he murmured firmly. He stopped and brought Laura around him—changing hands as if in a dance step—in case he decided to draw his pistol.
They were midway along the western side of the block‐long museum building when three unkempt, but muscular men blocked the sidewalk before them. Two were black and the third was white. Just beyond them, along the wall of the building, slinked two more men, whose features he could not distinguish.
“Hey now! What’s a nice couple like you doin’ all alone out here?” taunted one of the black men.
“You’re on our turf!” declared his white companion.
“Yeah!” emphasized the third.
Caine stared past them at the two figures along the building wall, making sure they did not disappear from his view.
“Hey! I’m talking to you,” sneered the first man.
The three men glared at them menacingly.
Caine’s eyes shifted to the man who was talking. He stared coldly into the man’s eyes.
“Why don’t you say somethin’?” the accoster taunted.
The Colonel said nothing. He knew their fixation with having him reply was distracting them.
Laura’s heart was pounding violently with fear. She looked at Caine with eyes wide and mouth agape, describing in her look what he already knew.
Caine looked at her with such a deadly stare of determination that she shuddered.
“Hey now, man! Afraid to talk? No use playin’ brave for your lady here. You’re in the wrong place! This is our turf man! Our time!”
The three came closer and stood challengingly before them in an arc. Laura pressed against Caine, grasping his left arm with both of her hands.
“Now, that’s a nice dress you have there lady,” sneered the white man who was wearing baggy jeans and a dark zippered jacket over a blue sweatshirt. “I forgot to dress up for our date tonight.”
As the assailant spoke he pulled a stiletto from his hip pocket and with a deft flick of a button flashed its long slender blade. He aimed the blade menacingly toward Laura then looked with a daring stare at Caine, reinforced by his two leering companions.
Caine’s eyes narrowed and he leaned imperceptibly forward on his left foot.
“Now, what would you do, man, if I cut that nice dress off your lady friend?”
“You’d be too dead to try,” Caine spoke.
He struck with the speed of a lunging cobra. Caine pulled his hand from Laura’s grasp with such force that she almost keeled over backwards. The thug with the stiletto shifted his weight backwards in stunned reaction. Before he knew what happened, Caine had moved in on him, grabbing the man’s right wrist with his own right hand as he pivoted into the man with a backward embrace, his back pushing into the man’s chest. In that same movement Caine rammed his left elbow into the man’s midsection, while twisting the assailant’s right wrist with such opposing force that the stiletto fell easily from his grasp. In the same motion Caine bucked his left foot upwards with deliberate force into the man’s groin.
The Colonel then released his grip and took one step forward out of the man’s empty embrace.
The assailant crumpled in agony to the ground.
Before the other two could react, Caine flipped back his jacket and deftly drew his pistol, pointing it squarely at the forehead of the man who had first confronted them. He saw the other men along the museum wall pull what appeared to be weapons of their own and crouch to a firing position. He cursed himself silently for not bringing his military issue Beretta, instead. It held 17 rounds, but would have been too obvious at the reception.
Caine grabbed Laura by the hand and pulled her several steps to one side so that the assailant, at whose head he was aiming the pistol, was now in the line of fire of the two other men crouched at the museum wall.
He gruffly shoved Laura downward, took a quick step backwards and fired seven shots in rapid succession past the ears of the thug in front of him.
The two figures by the museum wall crumpled like rag dolls.
The thug stood frozen after Caine’s bullets whizzed past him. Then, with renewed bravado he taunted: “Bad shot, man! Bad for you!” He moved in on Caine with a cocked fist.
The other assailant undid a length of chain from his waist under his grimy sweater and began swinging it over his head and moving towards Caine.
The man Caine had disabled was still doubled up in pain on the ground.
“Ask your dead friends,” Caine said to distract him. He grabbed another clip of bullets from his jacket pocket as he deftly released the empty clip from the grip of his pistol and in one continuous motion shoved the new clip in and chambered a round.
He aimed it at the arm of the man swinging the chain and fired one shot.
The assailant’s hand, pierced by the bullet, dropped just enough to cause the chain he was swinging to complete its rotation onto the thug’s own head. He crumpled with a short yelp of anguished pain, then lapsed into semi‐consciousness.
The assailant in front of Caine froze again.
“Hey now, man! Don’t shoot us! We don’t have no guns, man!”
“Down!” Caine ordered. “On your back!”
“Hey man! You ain’t gonna shoot us! We’re just doin’ like we’re supposed to do!”
“Yeah, man!” added the thug who had pulled the stiletto. He labored back to his feet. “We’re just doin’ like we’re supposed to.”
“Shut up!” Caine barked, his body still throbbing with adrenalin. “Down and strip!”
The three assailants seemed puzzled, but momentarily relieved that Caine was not about to shoot them.
“Can’t leave them here,” Caine declared. He stared at the men lowering themselves to the ground. “They’ll prey on someone else.” Caine squatted near one of them, casually brandishing his pistol in their direction.
As they prostrated themselves, Laura ran up to the mugger whose stiletto she had instinctively picked up in the tumult. She grabbed his baggy jeans at the waist and cut them open. “Now what would you do, you creep, if I cut your balls off?” she seethed. He looked at her in horror. “Hey, man! Hey, man!” he called in Caine’s direction.
Caine ignored him.
Laura ripped through the man’s pant leg, grazing his inner thigh as she did so. She hesitated, then slowly straightened herself, while glaring into the thug’s eyes. They were pleading. Laura continued to glare at the man, her feet set apart in a combative stance with the stiletto firmly in both hands pointed towards the attacker, her amber pendant dangling from her neck just above the stiletto’s blade. She was breathing heavily as she stroked her tussled hair back with one hand.
“He’s got a gun strapped to his thigh.” she said matter‐of‐factly.
The man saw in her face a determination to lunge at him again, but Caine was instantaneously upon him, grabbing a Glock .357 caliber “pocket rocket” from a small holster.
“Thanks,” he said and stepped away from the prostate man.
The Colonel wagged the powerful pistol at the lead assailant. “More reason now for you nice, honest folks to give all your clothes to charity.”
Laura was still standing over the assailant.
“Are you about finished?” Caine asked quietly.
She didn’t respond.
Then slowly, calculatingly she backed off towards the Colonel, stiletto still in hand.
The three grudgingly removed their clothes, having to wriggle awkwardly on the ground to do so. The two injured thugs had to be helped b
y their companion. When they were stark naked, Caine spoke pointing with his pistol: “Go up the middle of the street here while I call nine‐one‐one. I want to be sure the police recognize you. How shall I tell them you’re dressed?” he asked facetiously.
The three reluctantly made their way into the street with their hands placed self‐consciously on their groin areas. The man Laura cut was limping and adjusting his holster strap as a bandage for his bloody thigh, while the chain twirler walked dizzily in the middle bumping back and forth between his companions. They turned their heads to the museum to see the fate of their other companions who lay motionless against the wall.
As they approached Constitution Avenue they quickened their pace, the limp seeming to disappear from the man Laura slashed and the wounded man coming to his full senses from the effect of his own chain whipping around his head. They suddenly darted from the middle of the street to the tree lawn of 12th Street out of Caine’s line of fire.
The van from which they originally had emerged, just as suddenly careened into a u‐turn off Constitution Avenue, screeched up 12th Street, and stopped with a lurch as the three assailants leaped into its open side door and sped away towards Pennsylvania Avenue and into the heart of Washington.
Colonel Caine aimed his pistol in their direction. He squeezed off a round and heard a distant clunk of metal against metal. Caine turned with an assuring look of relief towards Laura Mitchell.
His gaze was met with a look of frightened concern.
“It’s okay, they’re gone,” he said holstering his pistol.
“No, listen!” she exclaimed. “Did you hear that?” She turned her head towards the wall of the Natural History Museum. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” His eyes followed her gaze to a window at an upper level of the building.
“It sounded like a scream! A woman’s scream! Inside the building!”
“There’s some feral cats roaming around here. It’s spring. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” she replied impatiently. “But I heard a scream in there! A long, piercing shriek! It ran the coldest chill down my spine!”
“Cats can make the craziest sounds,” Caine asserted as they walked to the side of the building. “Their yowling sounds like human cries.”
“Where do you see cats around here?” Laura retorted as she watched Caine draw his pistol again and approach the two men he shot.
He pointed it in their direction, but was certain they would do no more harm. Laura was close behind him as he stooped to examine the bodies.
“I know what I heard!” she persisted. “You should do something!”
“We’ll do something,” he assured, as he ran his hands through the sweaters and jeans of the two men lying in front of him. “We’ll do something.” He found no identifying papers as he had expected. Next to one of them, an Asian, lay an Uzi submachine pistol. Caine turned the other man onto his side. He appeared Middle Eastern. He, too, had an Uzi and had fallen onto it when three of Caine’s bullets pierced his body.
“Lucky, they didn’t get a chance to use these. They each could have sprayed us with sixty rounds. Mean weapons. Especially these automatics. Illegal, you know.”
Caine’s apparent flippancy was affecting her. “What about the scream? What are you going to do? What about these men? You shot them! Are you going to call the police?”
The Colonel realized he was totally preoccupied and ignoring her concerns. He got up and faced her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to put you through this.”
She looked at him in a mixture of fear and relief and collapsed into his embrace, still clutching the stiletto.
They hurried to his car with the night breeze turning to a brisk wind that rustled the treetops in the Mall and swayed them back and forth in seeming mimicry of the assault that had just been thwarted.
In the roadster Caine grabbed his secure phone and raised the night duty officer at his Pentagon office. He asked the officer to relay a message about the two bodies to the Washington police. “I’ll file a report.” He signed off.
Caine looked with concern at Laura.
“If I’m going to keep seeing you, I’ll have to take up karate,” she said.
As the Viper’s taillights receded in the darkness, a head peered from an upper window inside the Museum of Natural History. It looked intently through the pane at the scene of the commotion below. Even though the hallway beyond the window was dimly lit, the features of the derelict whom Caine had seen under the tree on his way to the reception were unmistakable. He glowered into the darkness outside, then disappeared into the depths of the building.
Chapter 8
Massive expanses of black‐topped parking areas ringing the Pentagon were still void of cars that morning, giving the vast complex the look of a fortress surrounded by a tar moat. Colonel Caine drove his dark red roadster into an area off I‐395 and parked at an eastern entrance to the building.
Passing security, he hurried upstairs then along an infinite corridor towards the office of his commanding general on the fourth floor. It was in the third section of the five concentric pentagons making up the familiar headquarters of the Department of Defense. Due to the ultra‐secret nature of the Omega Group, the office was deliberately located outside the prestigious “E ring” where the most senior officials had their offices.
As he passed the office adjoining his own, he heard the inevitable through an open door.
“Yo! Swamp Fox! The General’s got our orders.”
Caine looked in on his fellow‐officer, Colonel Garrison Jones, one of the ranking field officers in the Omega Group. “Morning, Arie.”
“It’s the Middle East again,” Jones said. He rose from his chair and approached Caine in the hallway. Jones, like Caine was athletically built and out of uniform that day. Still, his khaki slacks and matching safari shirt, complementing his dark complexion, gave him a crisp military bearing.
“Where to?” replied Caine.
“The old man will fill us in. I hear you were at the Smithsonian last night. Talking to mummies?”
“I may as well have,” Caine replied as the two walked towards General Bradley’s office.
“Didn’t you catch Sherwyck?”
“There was no sign of him. But we got tangled up with some baddies outside.”
“We? I thought I was your partner.”
“Dr. Laura Mitchell.”
“Here I am sittin’ at my desk with paperwork up to here and you’re mixin’ it up somewhere with a strange woman?”
Caine did not reply to his friend’s usual banter as they entered General Bradley’s office. He was at his desk with a cup of coffee in his hand.
The General beckoned them to sit down on the studded leather sofa along a wall opposite his desk. He joined them and sat down in a matching armchair facing the couch.
“I hear there was some gunplay at the Smithsonian last night,” the General said as he took a careful sip of his steaming coffee.
Jones looked over to Caine.
“Yes, sir,” Caine replied. He recounted the details of the previous night’s encounter; the three who fled and the two men he shot.
The faces of the two were fixed in Caine’s mind. The Colonel remembered the Asian was frozen forever in a queer, hateful look that seemed triumphant even in death. The other, a man with Middle Eastern features—probably of Egyptian origin, Caine surmised—had a death look of simple surprise. Five of his seven shots had found their mark, he reported.
“It’s unlikely it was a gang,” Colonel Jones offered. “I don’t know of any turf battles going on over the Mall or public monuments. It’s out of the ‘hood.”
“These muggers were ethnically diverse. It’s usually homogeneity that welds gangs together,” Caine added. “Besides, they don’t usually carry Israeli submachine guns.”
“Our night watch got a call from the D.C. police,” General Bradley interspersed. “They were on the scene within ten minutes
after you patched through. They didn’t find a thing. No bodies, no blood, no clothes.”
“Impossible, sir!” Caine retorted. “The woman with me witnessed the whole thing. She got some licks in herself.”
“Under your umbrella, I’m sure,” General Bradley surmised. “I don’t doubt you for a minute,” he assured. The General took another slow sip of his coffee. “Actually, there is something. Chinks in the side of the Museum of Natural History and a couple of thirty‐eight caliber cartridges in the grass. So, I know you shot at something. But that’s for the Washington Police Department, there’s no need for us to get off track here.”
