With a Vengeance

by Marcus Wynne

  It was funny how his life was now.

  On missions, he was the go-to guy for everything combative and tactical; he did the training work ups pre-mission, thought through the tactics, walked the team through the game plan. In flight, if there was a profile, it was him who worked the guy up close. On the ground, in hostile environments, he was the guy everybody else looked to tell them how to operate. But even on a mission, he preferred to break off on his own. His usual partners were inured to it; they’d offer to go to dinner, go exploring together, but Hunter preferred to roam alone, and often would get up early on lay-overs, before any one else, and take off. His solitary ways drew comments, not all of them friendly, from other team members who thought he acted as though he were better than everyone else.

  “He is better than everyone else,” his partner Butch had said once, in Hunter’ earshot. “Leave him alone. That’s his way. When it goes down, that’s the guy you want in front or backing your play. That’s just the way he is. He lives and breaths this stuff; nothing else really matters to him. So let him alone. He’s fine the way he is. He chooses his life.”

  And so he wandered.

  In Athens, he sweet talked the chubby girl concierge into finding him a pankration club and went down and trained; in Turkey he wrestled at a gym; in Tel Aviv he trained krav maga with some of the Sayaret Maktal operators who were interested in trading technique for tips on air marshal tactics.

  But everywhere he went, he asked about the knife.

  In Paris, in Charles de Gaulle airport, he noticed one police inspector toying with a letter opener. On a hunch, he chatted with him about knives, and ended up getting an impromptu class on the intricacies of the classic French folding knife, the langouille.

  Always the knife.

  He read the books, he continued a lengthy and continuous e-mail correspondence with Paul Raven, he trained.

  Always the knife.

  There were women, sometimes, flight attendants mostly, casual and friendly bed partners, though some of them hinted at their desire for more. He was careful to avoid entanglements, as he felt he wore the mark of his divorce like a badge that set him out in the herd.

  One of them, a sweet and wise beyond her years flight attendant from Warsaw named Ilona, had surprised him one morning. They’d spent two days together in Bombay, in the Oberai Hotel, and she was due to depart. Hunter woke to find her sitting beside the bed, fully dressed, in a chair she’d dragged from the desk.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  “I like to watch you,” she said, in her careful and precise English. She was vocal and cried out in Polish when they twisted together in the bed, but otherwise she always practiced her English with him. “It’s like you are a tiger, sleeping. I love that about you.”

  “Come back to bed.”

  She smiled, and showed the slightly crooked incisor he liked so much. “No, I cannot. I don’t think I will see you again.”

  Hunter sat up. “Why? We’re both on this route all the time…”

  “Not that, Hunter. I am liking you too much. I begin to love you. And you are not easy man to love. You are very much alone. You like alone. Even with me, in the bed, you are alone…sometimes. Sometimes I feel you with me. But mostly you are alone. And I am woman. I want to change that for you. I want you to be with me, not be alone. I think all women try this with you, but you go away from them. So I will go away instead. I will be sad, and I will think of you. But I want a man to be with me always. You, I think, you like to be alone.”

  “Sometimes, I do.”

  “Yes. I know this. I am sad for you.”

  “Don’t be sad for me, Ilona.”

  She touched his face. “All right, Hunter.” She went to the door. “I hope someday you will find someone you can be with always, Hunter. You are good man. Very good man, with a kind heart. I hope you will have children because you will be good father.” She left the room and said over her shoulder, “Goodbye.”

  So many good byes in his life.

  He shrugged and shook his head to himself to wake up from the walking dream, and stopped to look at the latest offerings from Ontario Knives, including a production version of the Bill Bagwell Bowie. He picked one up, twirled his wrist in the whirling circular cut favored by the Keating School, then flipped the blade in a snapping back cut, the signature move of the Bowie Knife as taught by the Keating School.

  “You handle that well,” the salesman said. “Who’d you train with?”

  “Joe Hartlaub, Jim Keating, a few others…”

  “Good guys,” the salesman nodded.

  “They’re not bad,” said a familiar voice from behind Hunter.

  Hunter grinned, and said without turning, “Guess I fail Situational Awareness 101, huh?”

  Paul Raven slid up into his peripheral vision. “Big fat fucking F, that’s for sure.”

  They shook hands.

  “How are you?” Paul said.

  Hunter shrugged. “More of the same. Bureaucrats starting to lean on us now that the war’s over…”

  “Didn’t see any of them working planes, trains or automobiles during the Storm, now did we?”

  “No. We didn’t.”

  “Must be a tough adjustment for you…coming from war time service, real world missions…I heard about you rolling up that courier in Athens, and then that action cell in Frankfurt…”

  Hunter was surprised, but not really. While Raven was never specific about what he did, it was pretty apparent to anyone in the business that he was one of the great white sharks of black operations, probably CIA, maybe DIA, or one of the nameless teams that roamed the globe on behest of the powers that be. Hunter’s team, AMU 10, had captured a courier working for Hezbollah on behalf of Saddam Hussein with an attaché case full of fake identification cards, passports, and cash. Hunter’s well trained counter-surveillance crew had identified an action cell comprised of Iraqi special forces operators working in the Frankfurt airport doing work ups on the American airlines counters…and in conjunction with the German national police and the BKD, had rolled on them and bagged them all with no fuss and little muss, except for the bruises one of them sported when he tried a half hearted escape attempt.

  “You stay well informed, Paul.”

  “Yep. Let’s walk.”

  The two men strolled the busy aisles among the tables, Hunter floating just off to the left and slightly behind the older man.

  “You like Nealy’s work?” Raven said, as they paused before Bud Nealy’s table. Raven treated the attractive red headed woman there with a slow smile.

  “I do,” Hunter said. “Handle’s a bit small for my hand, but I love his grind on the blades. Especially the Persian variants.”

  “Great for punching through armor, if you got to do that,” Raven said. “I like his concealment system.”

  They moved away to the Spyderco table, where a stunning blonde woman in snug designer jeans and a Spyderco polo shirt chatted with an enthralled group (mostly men) of blade enthusiasts. Raven and Hunter stood at the edge of the crowd. The blonde woman smiled at them and nodded, clearly recognizing Raven.

  “Friend of yours?” Hunter said.

  “Joyce Laituri. Runs Marketing for Spyderco. One of the smartest women in the biz.”

  “Gorgeous, too.”

  “Yeah. Looks like Sharon Stone, only better.”

  Paul nodded at the banner beneath the Spyderco logo. “Sal stole my favorite line.”

  The banner said ALL GOD’S CRITTERS GOT KNIVES.

  Hunter laughed.

  “That’s why I never miss a knife show,” Raven said. “All God’s critters got knives, and this is where I gets mine.”

  “What are you carrying these days?”

  Raven grinned. “Nothing but production blades for work, young man.”

  “Why is that?”

  “You know why. When you have to run through Customs as a civilian, having a fighter is awkward to explain…and if you have to stick somebody wit
h one, you either have to wash it in Clorox for a week to get the DNA off it, or throw it away, and who the hell wants to throw away a $500 custom? Most of the time, in country, I go and buy me a kitchen knife and throw it away when I’m done. One of my buds, he’s an outlaw biker in California, San Jose, he’s cut and stabbed more people than all of the so-called knife combat instructors in this country put together…I asked him what his favorite knife for fighting was. You know what he said?”

  “No.”

  “Schrade Fisherman’s Knife. Cost about $15 in any hardware store in the country. Strong, holds an edge, just the right length for a concealed fighter, and you can drop it in a ditch anywhere when you get through with it. His favorite technique was to get one of his opponent’s arm up and then stick through the armpit into the lung, multiple hits. Fucks up the lung and breathing, and slows and stops them faster than just about anything unless you get a good clean shot on one of the neck arteries or else into the kidneys. Learned his technique in Folsom Prison.”

  “That makes sense…doesn’t take an expensive knife to finish a fight.”

  “Only time it makes sense is when you need a survival combat knife in the field…I’ll pay the premium for a good blade then, good steel…can’t be messing around with breaking your primary tool out in the boonies. But sticking humans…hell, you can do it with a sharp stick, a pencil, whatever.”

  Her presentation over, Joyce Laituri came over, her hand extended. “Hi Paul…great to see you.”

  The handshake morphed in a hug, and Raven grinned over the woman’s shoulder at Paul.

  “Be careful, gorgeous, my heart can’t take it,” Raven said.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “I really believe that.” She smiled at Hunter. “Hi. I’m Joyce Laituri.”

  “Hi, Joyce,” Hunter said.

  “Are you a Spyderco person?” Joyce said. She reached in her pocket and pulled out a knife and thumbed open the blade, spun it expertly in her palm and offered it to Hunter. “Latest Ken Goddard design…”

  Hunter weighed the blade. “Nice.”

  “Keep it,” Joyce said. “Any friend of Paul’s is a friend of mine…and of Spyderco.”

  Paul grinned. “Low friends in high places, young gun. That’s how things get done.”

  1

  Later that night, at an Italian restaurant in a strip mall a few exits down from the convention center, Paul and Hunter picked their way through the leavings of their meal.

  “A little dessert?” Paul said.

  “Sure,” Hunter said. He waved to the waiter. “Tiramisu for me, Paul?”

  “Sorbet, what kind of fruit flavors do you have?”

  “Lime, strawberry….”

  “Lime,” Paul said. He waited until the waiter was out of ear shot.

  “So how do you like your gig?” Paul said. “Now that the war is over…for now. We’ll be back in there soon enough. You getting enough action?”

  “You offering me a job, Paul?” Hunter said.

  Raven smiled, a cold smile with no humor in it.

  “Would you take it?”

  “I’d need to know more about it.”

  “Little more action than you’re used to in your current gig.”

  Hunter toyed with his coffee cup. “Is that it?”

  “You could try it out for awhile, make sure it’s a good fit for you.”

  “How would I do that?”

  “There’s an official way, and an unofficial way.”

  “Which one pays the most?”

  Paul laughed. “You won’t go poor.”

  “So what can you tell me?”

  “The talking part’s done, Hunter. Best to jump in the deep end, get a little wet.”

  “How…”

  Paul cut him off with a chop of his hand. “I’ll take care of it.” He smiled winningly up at the waiter, settled his sorbet cup carefully, and dipped the long spoon in and out of the glass cup. “Good,” he said approvingly. “I’m always surprised at what you can find hidden in suburban malls.” He paused, then reached down for the small battered day pack he carried everywhere with him. “I’ve got something for you.”

  Hunter pushed aside his half-eaten tiramisu. “Is it sharp and shiny?”

  “Bad luck, you know, to give a knife as a present,” Paul said. “Something better.” He pushed a paperback book, trade sized, across the table at Hunter. The title was THIRTY SIX STRATEGEMS, translated by Koh Kok Kiang and Liu Yi.

  “What’s this?” Hunter said, picking up the book and flipping through the pages.

  “You read THE ART OF WAR, right?” Paul said. “This is like a companion piece.”

  “I’ve never heard of it before.”

  “Most people in the West haven’t, except for military scholars and students of 4th generation warfare. There wasn’t a usable English translation until the late 40s, and it languished for a long time. A fair number of follow on translators fucked with the structure of the book, which robs it of a lot of the lessons implicit in how it was written. I like this translation, the translators teamed up with a manga-type illustrator and kept the book close to how it was written.”

  Hunter thumbed through the pages. “This will take up some flights.”

  Paul nodded. “Dip into it. It gets better with re-reading. It’s like THE BOOK OF FIVE RINGS that way. Early on in my training, all of that was over my head. Then after I got some experience, things started to come together.”

  Hunter put the book away. “So what now?”

  Paul smiled and looked out the window. “I take it that you’re interested, then…we’ll keep this official. Protect your job, for now. It’ll come through your chain of command.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Pretty soon. After that…look for me where you don’t expect me, Hunter. Read that book. It’s going to be important to you.”

  Chapter Four

  Hunter sat in the Secure Compartmented Information Facility where the Special Activities Branch of the Federal Air Marshals kept their office. Mike Jones and Bob Fielding, the two joined at the hip managers who ran Special Activities, studied him from across the conference table. Hunter’s personnel file and several manila folders labeled with classification stickers in bright red: TOP SECRET (NO FORN) were strewn in front of them. The pudgy man in the expensive tweed suit who sat to one side hadn’t bothered to introduce himself, and Mike and Bob followed his lead and ignored his presence while they spoke to Hunter.

  “We’ve been asked to lend you to another agency, Hunter,” Bob said. “You were name requested.”

  “What agency would that be?” Hunter said.

  “We can’t say right now,” Mike Jones said, with some satisfaction. “Nothing more than it’s another agency with counter-terrorism responsibilities…similar to ours.”

  Hunter noted a slight quirk of lips on the tweedy visitor.

  “Okay, so CIA wants to borrow me,” Hunter said. “For what? Surveys, air marshal training, general lob cockery?”

  “Uh, we didn’t say CIA,” Bob said.

  “You don’t need to, Bob,” Hunter said. “Let’s cut to the chase, shall we? What do you, or your friend here, want from me?”

  The two managers were, as usual, nonplussed by Hunter’s bluntness. The visitor, however, grinned in appreciation and leaned forward to speak.

  “Hunter, we’ve heard some good things about you, and we want to poach you to put some of your special skill set to work for us. Mainly because you’ve got a perfect cover, and, according to our sources, a pretty unique skill set,” the man in tweed said.

  “And what do I call you?” Hunter said.

  “Call me Morgan,” the man said. “Just Morgan. We have a friend in common, but that’s just a need to know, so we don’t need to burden Mike and Bob with that, do we? I thought not. Look, I can see you don’t like to fuck around…either do I. We want you to do some things for us while you’re on mission. This has been cleared by your management and mine…it’s a sticky area. Black i
nto gray, if you follow my meaning. Most countries in the world allow you in because you’re going in as a law enforcement officer…a cop. You’re not supposed to do anything else…but our read is that some of the activities we want you to help us out on fall into the compass of special activities related to your law enforcement and counter-terrorism function. You in or not?”

  “What, specifically, would I be doing?” Hunter said.

  “I don’t normally like to go into specifics when we’re talking in generalities, but that’s a good question. We would give you taskings from time to time to accomplish during your down time between missions, in lay over cities. Those taskings might include doing covert security assessments and surveys of specific sites and buildings; low profile reconnaissance and evaluation of certain venues; servicing dead drops; filling in a slot on an action element we have already deployed.”