by Marcus Wynne
The old woman screamed and grabbed at Hunter for support and gripped his gun arm like a life preserver. He couldn’t shake her off before the terrorist lunged at him with the knife. Rashid Ahmed was good with a knife. He had trained with the brothers from the Filipino Muslim organization Abu Sayeef, and he knew the difference between point and edge. He lunged in point first and his plastic knife chipped off the brass buckle of Hunter’s gun belt and gouged down, shredding pants material and cutting into his groin.
Hunter jackknifed back, all the training in the world can’t over ride that kind of pain, but it can force you back on track, keep you focused on what needs to be done, pick out the targets, slam the hammer fist holding the Hideaway into the terrorist’s head, and then the terrorist bulled forward, tackling Hunter and running him right back to the cockpit door, where he slammed with force that knocked the breath from him and the terrorist, desperate with adrenaline and rage and the pure fury of the fanatic, stabbed Hunter again and again, the jagged knife cutting into his abdomen and groin and hip and legs. Hunter slammed his pistol into the terrorist’s head, but the desperate man grabbed the pistol and shoved it up, discharging it, inducing a stoppage with an expended casing caught in the ejection port, making it a club, and Hunter felt his bladder cut loose as the terrorist’s knife jabbed into him, and he dropped an elbow to the back of the other man’s neck, hooked the Hideaway into the terrorist’s forehead and cut back, throwing back the head, cut to the bone and scraping, then clubbed down with the pistol again and again, then stuck the point of the Hideaway in the hollow behind the man’s left ear and ripped forward, taking everything from the major vessels to the larynx and esophagus out in one crunching rip, and the terrorist’s eyes rolled back in his head, white, then spotted pink with sudden hemorrhages and Hunter slid down the cockpit door, leaving streaks of blood, dragged down by the sudden weight of the terrorist discovering he was dying, but still trying to shove the shards of his knife into Hunter.
The pain rose like a red tide in Hunter. He rode it like he’d been trained to do and let vent with a cry of rage, designed to rally the body’s defense, to bring the useful parts of anger to bear: release the body’s pain killers, keep the adrenaline pumping, keep the machine running till he did what he had to do.
His job wasn’t done.
He ran his left hand over the top of the slide and brushed the casing out of the ejection port, saw the comforting brass of a seated round in place as the slide snapped forward. He paid no attention to the blood and urine and body fluids running from him, took the huge ball of pain and compressed it into a small ball of fire red color, turned the color green, damped down the sensation of pain by pure will power and the techniques drawn from neuro-linguistic-programming, taught to him by the old Jedi himself in Minneapolis, were all working just the way they were supposed to, and he fought off the narrowing of his vision, fought his way back from shock, can’t be shocky yet, Hunter, job’s not done, that nagging voice in his head, the acerbic tone of Raven: Hunter, draw from your core, tap the strength you don’t know you have, on that day, you’ll know how, draw it up, you’re the warrior and it all hinges on you…
In the aisle, Nawaf Alhazmi crouched, his knife in his hand, the lone remaining terrorist, and studied the dying Air Marshal slumped against the cockpit door, the only remaining obstacle to his goal. And despite his training, despite his mindset forged in the brutal hardship of his life and hammered on the anvil of his training, Nawaf Alhazmi felt a deep and certain stab of fear when he looked at the mortally wounded man and the look in his eye, and how he fought to steady his pistol with both hands.
Beside him, a woman clutched her young boy to her, her eyes rolling white with terror. The little boy held a doll, a black and white cat. Nawaf stared down at him, and he saw the image of his mother, one day in Beirut, before the bombs, before the fighting, how he’d fallen in the garden, and she’d rushed to him, picked him up, soothed him, wiped the tears from his face and kissed away the pain in his knee, and something in him, long buried, rose up and he saw, really saw, the pain and terror in the boy’s face, and he thought of himself wandering alone in the streets of Beirut, through the rubble, and he looked back at the Air Marshal struggling to prop his pistol on his knee, and Nawaf Alhazmi put away what was left of compassion in him, crushed it down finally, and grabbed the boy by the collar of his shirt and snatched him from his mother.
“No!” Amy Prescott screamed. “Zach! Oh, God, no!”
“Mommy!”
Amy lunged at Nawaf, tugged at his arm, and he turned to her as though she were an insect and punched her, brutally, as hard as he could, again and again, beating her down into the chair, striking her with all the rage he had till she was still, lifting his knife hand over her, but the boy grabbed at his hand, “No!” and struggled with him, and Nawaf turned to the aisle and put his knife to the boy’s throat and marched him forward, screaming and struggling, towards the cockpit door.
“Air Marshal! Put down your gun!” Nawaf screamed.
Hunter fought for his breath; air rasped in and out of his lungs, and weakness was a black tide rising in him. His hands shook violently, and he forced his breath under control, in for a count of two, hold for a count of two, exhale for a count of two, force his heartbeat down, stabilize the shaking pistol on his upturned knee, his back to the cockpit door. He felt the plane going down fast, getting below 10,000 feet like he’s supposed to, he heard the pilot screaming into the radio, he saw little dots of black around the corners of his vision, the pain he kept at arm’s length, and the terrible damage the knife had done to him, his life leaking out of him, and he put the trembling front sight on the terrorist’s head, don’t look at the boy’s face, Hunter, don’t acknowledge the terror and the pleading there, don’t be distracted, Hunter, stay focused on what’s important, that little sliver of metal up there, the pad of his finger against the trigger, his breath, the trembling knee, the face of the terrorist looming at him, holding the struggling boy in front of him, knife to his throat, and the world shrank to that front sight and the glimmer of head behind the boy, and then Hunter found a brief space of stillness between heartbeats, like a sniper, and he pressed the trigger and watched the front sight jump off his knee and saw the bullet in its passage score a white, then red furrow alongside the terrorist’s scalp, and then the man screamed in rage.
Nawaf felt the bullet graze his scalp, saw the flash of the weapon though he didn’t hear the shot, and he gripped the kicking boy hard by the nape of his neck and thrust him at the Air Marshal.
“Watch!” Nawaf screamed.
Hunter saw the boy’s face as though in a slow motion close up, saw his fear and his eyes widen as the terrorist sawed the jagged edge of the plastic knife across the thin white throat.
“No!” Hunter shouted, and his rage lifted him forward, his legs betrayed him, and he fell forward, but he caught himself and forced himself up, the boy falling from the terrorist’s grasp, the tiny hands clasping at his throat, and Hunter fired again and again and again till his slide locked back, and again he speed loaded with his last magazine, and dragged himself forward, shouting “Doctor! Is there a doctor! Someone help him!”
Hunter crawled over the body of the last terrorist, oblivious now, reaching for the boy, lifting his head hopelessly as it lolled on the slashed neck, the eyes still seeing, and Hunter looked into those child’s eyes, brown with life, then fading, the look, the look the boy gave him, the puzzlement and the sadness, no pain, thankfully no pain there, just confusion, and his little mouth worked soundlessly, and the eyes glazed, his gaze drifting off to something that Hunter couldn’t see, not yet, and Hunter held him close, that was all he could do, he couldn’t save him, it was too late for that, but he could hold that little boy close so that he wouldn’t cross over alone, he would do that one thing, since he’d failed to save him, though he’d tried, he’d done his best, but it wasn’t enough, not this time, and he felt the passengers around him, and he looked up and saw
Amy Prescott, her face blackened and broken, reaching for her child, taking him, trying to press the wound closed, but even she could see that it was too late, and she rocked her baby in her arms, unable to scream through her broken mouth, and she looked at Hunter, and all he could say was, “I’m sorry…I’m sorry…He wasn’t alone…I held him. He wasn’t alone at the end…”
22
Hunter watched the hands of the clock on the whitewashed walls of his private hospital room blur and drip off in a pale imitation of a Salvador Dali painting. Morphine was a wonderful thing, Hunter thought, a very fine drug indeed. He had a little switch, just like a gun, and he could pull the trigger whenever he wanted to and get another shot of the sweet joy juice of forgetfulness. If he took enough, he’d slip back down into sleep, but he didn’t want to go there yet. He needed to get enough into his system so that he slept without dreaming. He didn’t want to dream any more. He didn’t want to talk to the people who came to see him. The doctors had warned him. Intensive care psychosis they called it, something that happened when you had all the natural chemicals floating around in your system, along with the finest opiates medicine could provide, lack of deep sleep, disorientation, shock, the aftermath of surgery, the hangover of anesthesia -- all that contributed to strange visual and auditory hallucinations. They offered him more drugs to deal with that, but Hunter didn’t want those. He liked his hallucinations.
He wanted something for pain.
He wanted something that would take away the image of Zachary Prescott’s eyes in the last moment of his short little life. Something that would take away the image of Zachary’s mother hopelessly rocking her boy. Something to take away the sting of the words of the doctor, one of the many who’d worked on him in the days after The Battle of Flight 923, as the press called it.
“You’ll never have children,” the doctor said, a young guy. His name was Steve Weber, one of Hunter’s many surgeons. “I’m sorry. There’s nothing to be done about it. We did all we could. You’ll get your erectile function back, you’ll be able to urinate normally, but there’s only so much we can do with that damage. And you’ll have a few more surgeries for that.”
“No kids.”
“You can adopt…is your wife…?”
“Gone. A while.”
“I’m sorry…”
Sorry didn’t begin to describe it. Hunter dozed, then woke again, like he had every night since the hijacking, in the darkest hour, between three and four a.m. The head nurse, a sweet young girl in her twenties, came in from her station.
“You all right, Hunter?”
“Yes.”
She poured him some water, checked the pitcher, held the cup with it’s straw to his lips. “Good?”
“Yeah.”
“You need anything else, hon?”
“No.”
“Rest up, hero. We need you back.”
She turned on the television, handed him the controls. “Check out CNN. They say the President is going to give you a medal.”
She walked out of the room.
Hero.
He looked after her with something like hatred on his face.
She didn’t know any better. She meant well. She doesn’t know what that word really meant. He thought of Sean Young, who fought till he fell, his last word an appeal to his partner; John Valentine, snuffed out at 27, who died like the fine man he was just becoming; Kristy Wang, woman warrior who rose to the occasion and fought better than most men could have; Bill Dillon, who died without firing a shot, though if people who knew them were betting on the outcome, the money would have been on Bill and Hunter as the last two standing.
The last man standing.
That’s what the one reporter who’d gotten through security had shouted at him before the cops took him away. “What was it like to be the last man standing, Agent James! Agent James, what’s it like to be a hero!”
Hero.
The word sickened him.
He thumbed the control, and flipped through a blur of channels. MTV, VH-1, the rock videos even more bizarre under the influence of the morphine, Fox News, Bill O’Reilly lambasting the head of TSA while Congressman Sam Waters, of the House Transportation Committee, cut in from time to time, then CNN, the thirty minute Headline News update, and there was an image, of Hunter on a gurney, IV bags running into his arms, three paramedics working on him, running towards a helicopter on the airfield beside the 757 ringed by SWAT teams. There was some running commentary in the banner beneath the images. Hunter turned up the sound, picked out a few words, and then the image changed to the face of Amy Prescott, clean and well scrubbed, a happy face, a pre Flight #923 face, and then the words of the announcer cut through Hunter’s morphine haze: “In a sad note in the aftermath of Flight 923, Amy Prescott, a survivor whose son Zach was murdered by the hijackers, committed suicide today at her father’s home in Vienna, Virginia. Prescott was said to be despondent in the aftermath of the hijacking and the death of her son. In financial news…”
Hunter turned off the television.
Dead.
“Ah, God…” he whispered.
He turned toward the wall, and let the drugs lull him into a deep sleep, where children and mothers ran laughing in safe fields of green, far away, far, far away.
PART 2: CREATE SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING
“Design a counterfeit front to put the enemy off guard. When the trick works, the front is changed into something real so that the enemy will be thrown into a state of double confusion. In short, deceptive appearances may always conceal some forthcoming dangers.” The Thirty Six Stratagems
Chapter One
Hunter James limped slowly through the milling crowd of passengers in O’Hare’s Terminal 3. He paused for a moment in front of the American Airlines counter, far enough back not to be trampled in the herd barely corralled by pedestal mounted ropes. He took a deep controlled breath through his nose, let it out in a slow measured eight count, and imagined the nagging ache from his groin and lower abdomen as a little fog of pain that dissipated as he breathed out.
Hunter lived with pain every day.
The body is slower to heal after forty, even for an athlete who’d educated himself in state of the art alternative and complementary medicine to augment the surgery and physical therapy he’d been through in the year since the Battle of Flight #923.
At his last physical therapy session, his therapist, a tiny but nail tough brunette named Janny, told him, “Some of this will probably never go away. Your visualization exercises help, but nerves take a long, long time to grow back. You’ll have residual numbness and phantom pain for a while. The Kevlar patches in your abdomen…eventually the pain will fade as your tissue grows over it. But you’ll always feel it.”
“Any good news?” Hunter said.
“You’ve still got a sense of humor,” Janny said. “That’s important, big guy.”
He didn’t feel very humorous, though he’d done a credible job of appearing to be so while convincing his management that it was best that he get back on the job. The Flight Surgeon made his case for medical retirement and a lifetime of disability payments. Hunter fought that with every bit of political savvy he could summon, and bolstered his case with the cooperation of his extended medical team.
Now he was back, on limited duty, yes, but at least he was working. If you could call limping slowly through a crowded terminal work. He was grateful for it. He wasn’t ready to get back on a plane, though every SAC in the country had dropped him a note saying that he could have his pick of any team or even just a gunfighter slot if that’s what he wanted. The Training Branch had offered him a full time position in training and training development, which had seriously tempted him.
If you fall off the horse, get back on.
That’s what Raven would have said. Back in the saddle and flog the horse another mile. So it was back to the Chicago Field Office. He was glad to work, even if it was just the tedious job of working the ticket counters and terminal und
ercover while other Marshals flew. It was simple enough: look for suspicious passengers, move in and check them out, discreetly point them out to the new “profilers” in front of the ticket counters and make sure the TSA screeners knew to watch them. The other agents found it boring as hell, though riding on an airplane wasn’t much better, in Hunter’s opinion. The hours were regular, he went home every night, he was able to schedule regular physical therapy and he felt of use.
It kept his mind busy.
In the past year, he’d had too much time laying in bed, too much time sitting alone in a chair staring out the window…that weighed on Hunter, especially now in the middle years of his life. For a man who’d lived an exuberantly physical life, and then to have it literally cut out of him…there was a toll. A psychic toll and an emotional toll.
Hunter had been ordered by his physicians to attend mandatory counseling with the psychiatrists the Air Marshal Service kept on retainer. He found them to be well meaning but mostly useless with their ham handed fumbling at what they thought to be his wounded psyche. Hunter made the appropriate answers to their questions, smiled and joked, and got the boxes ticked on his mental fitness evaluation. Then he took some leave and made the long drive over to Minneapolis to visit an old friend and mentor.
