With a Vengeance

by Marcus Wynne

  “Fuck!” Alec leaped back, creating distance, and Hunter closed, but cautiously, because if he’d been stung, he’d do the same and count on the aggressive entry to finish him off; but Hunter had learned at point from the best of the masters of the blade that the art of the knife is deception, and between two masters -- and no mistaking, these two were masters -- all other things being equal, the one with the most tricks and the greatest control of deception would be the one to walk away.

  Alec laughed. “Good one! First blood to you, Hunter!”

  Alec smeared his own blood, running from the gash on the bottom of his right hand, all across his face, making a crazy blood mask that matted his eyebrows. He tasted the blood, flashed his red stained teeth at Hunter in an insane grin.

  “I love the taste of blood,” Alec said. “I’ll taste yours soon.”

  He shifted to a high guard, circling right, left hand up, a steady drop drop drop of blood on the floor from his wounded hand, but he showed no sign of weakening, and his grip was just as steady on the blood stained handle of his knife. He moved quickly, in then back, in a footwork feint. Hunter circled in the Circle of Steel the two of them had both walked, kept his knife at eye level, just slightly higher…

  …and then he changed the rhythm by feinting long, then dropping his knife hand close to him and he brought his trailing foot up behind him to close the gap….and with his off hand he looped his fingers through the capsule of his Hideaway Knife and accessed the knife as Alec rose to the bait of Hunter’s knife hand…

  …and again Hunter circled to the left, but this time his left hand whipped forward and slashed down at Alec’s right arm, cutting at the deltoid as he slammed his body into the other man (the body of the rock, as Musashi would have said) crashing him off balance…

  …and Hunter flinched as he felt a sudden pain in his right leg….

  …and recognized the Gryphon M-10 boot knife embedded in his thigh…

  …and ducked beneath the wild cut Alec threw while Hunter slammed his left fist, Hideaway pointing out, into Alec’s armpit, cut out, and then when he felt the man fading back, recoiled to regain his balance, his wounded leg shaky beneath him…

  Blood on his left hand, not his own, but a steady pulse of his running down his right leg, and he wouldn’t look down, he had to be careful of his footing now, there was a steady stream there he had to avoid, be careful…

  “Oh, you cunning beautiful son of a bitch,” Alec said. “You are good, you motherfucker, you. But I’m better…”

  He coughed, twice, hard.

  “Nice shot,” he said. “But you’re going to die before I am.”

  And he had another knife in his hand, and the Keating style changed into the fluid two hand double knife attack of the Sayoc fighters, just as Hunter had done, but Hunter was ready, because he knew that Alec’s lung was punctured, he was losing air and the lung was filling with blood, he had only moments left of consciousness, minutes left of life…

  …so he parried to the outside again, but this time it seemed that Alec was ready and he whirled, bringing one knife around in a pikal insertion at eye level…

  …but Hunter ducked under it, and as the other man turned Hunter lunged forward and thrust his long knife deep into Alec’s kidney…

  “Aaaahhh,” the other man screamed and flinched away from the long knife, stumbling forward, his back still to Hunter, but Hunter approached cautiously, kicking at the back of Alec’s knee, which dropped him forward…

  …but not out of the fight, as he spun around, his Retribution held pikal style, the point down and edge in, as he thrust out at Hunter…

  …and Hunter slammed the edge of his long knife against Alec’s hand, then followed again across his eyes with the Hideaway, cutting up then with the Retribution first the right then the left of Alec’s face with a lightning fast back cut…

  …Hunter stepped back, as Alec struggled to get to his feet, his brilliant blue eyes dimming, a dark blot of blood in the white of one eye…

  “You pathetic fool,” Alec hissed, his breath raspy as his lung filled with fluid and his life ebbed. “You’ll never, ever get it, will you? You never, ever saw it…”

  The dying man fumbled with his left hand.

  Hunter lunged forward, the straight fleche, and the unwavering point of his Retribution entered the hollow of Alec’s throat and exited the back, and the blade stopped only when the handle rested against the open wound.

  As the last moment of life slipped out of Alec Frovarp, he looked up at Hunter, his eyes glazing…

  …and smiled as he mouthed the word, “Pathetic…”

  Chapter Four

  “How badly is he hurt?” Lisa Coronas demanded. “He’s not answering his cell phone.”

  “Deep puncture in his leg is the worst of it, but it didn’t hit a main vessel,” the FBI agent on the other end of her line said. “I’ll have him call you ASAP once they get done sealing him up.”

  “Do that,” Lisa said. She snapped her phone shut and stood still, radiating intensity in such a way that the other agents in the ad hoc Command Center tip toed around her. The Special Agent in Charge of the CIDG stalked to her designated work station and sat down in front of her computer terminal. Her face was harsh and drawn stark.

  Her e-mail prompt pinged.

  At the top of her INBOX was a message with an attached file marked URGENT. She clicked on it. The body of the message said, CLEAN UP. Her brow furrowed, and she clicked on the attachment, a Word document. It was a short list, of two addresses in the Chicago area. There was one name beside the first, and three names beside the second. In a separate column beside the names, there was a list of armaments: the first name had only the notation “handgun, minimal training.” The second notation was “small arms, significant training. High risk entry.”

  “Hackers?” Lisa said in a loud, clear voice.

  “Yeah, boss?” Technical Assistant Kathy Barch answered from her corner.

  “Get on this right now. HRT?”

  Ole Bjornstadt looked up from his copy of TACTICAL KNIVES. “Yes, boss?”

  “I’ve got some addresses for you to look at. Right now.”

  1

  It didn’t take long. The hackers came to a screeching halt when their backtrack found that the e-mail originated in a server protected by the best counter-measures in the world -- an NSA server on a clandestine military facility in West Virginia. And when Ole Bjornstadt’s HRT crews rolled on the two addresses, they caught, flat footed and unaware, four real middle eastern terrorists: two Saudi nationals, a Yemeni and a Somali, with weapons, paperwork, and computers loaded with incriminating evidence.

  Linking them to Sword of Allah as action cell members.

  And somehow, news of that, and of the death of a major player in Sword of Allah’s organization in Washington DC, hit the national media.

  2

  President Taylor sat in the Oval Office with his National Security Advisor, White House Counsel, CIA, FBI, DHS, and his Press Secretary.

  “What kind of lid do we have on this?” the President said.

  “Not much, Mr. President,” the Press Secretary said. “There’s somebody in the know who’s leaking this stuff even as it happens. We can put a spin on it, you do a press conference with FBI and the FAMs, put James and Coronas out front, commend them for taking down the Sword of Allah. Non-disclosure agreements from all the investigators….don’t know how that will fly.”

  “We’ll classify all the investigative materials, those can go away,” the FBI Director said.

  President Taylor looked pointedly at CIA. “Well?”

  The Director squirmed in his seat. “We’re doing our back tracking, sir. That last e-mail, that server has been disconnected, taken out of service. There was a program in there, auto-execute, that sent that message and the pre-written press release. Then it went about overwriting itself. By the time we got a team of technicians there, much of the server had wiped itself of data. We’ll be able to get
a lot of it back, according to NSA. Frovarp apparently had hacked that machine years ago, used it in support of off the shelf operations in Iraq. With that kind of access to our databases, he was able to mount a mining operation and identify those people who had lost family members. Many of them were in a watch program already…”

  “We were watching them?” Natalie Sonnen burst out.

  “Yes,” the CIA Director said. The FBI Director nodded. “We wanted to make sure they weren’t targeted by any groups…”

  “Like for media exploitation of the weaknesses in the aviation security system?” Sonnen said. “Who the fuck knows about that!”

  “Burying it doesn’t solve the main problem,” the Press Secretary said. “The public…the voters…their confidence is completely shattered. Look at the fall in airline revenues. We’re going to have even more airline bankruptcies. We need to restore confidence.”

  The President nodded. “We have the Special Commission. But that’s not enough. We need a visual statement.”

  The Press Secretary nodded.

  “I want all the Administrators: FAA, TSA, DHS, all of them, on a civilian flight. Put them on a plane with a television pool, and have them transmit from in flight.”

  “Mr. President, it’s not a good idea to put everybody on a plane like that…” the FBI Director said.

  “It will serve the purpose,” the President said, overriding him. “Put them on a plane. With a TV crew. After all, it’s safe now. Isn’t it?”

  The attendees stirred. No one said a word.

  “Put Hunter James on that plane, with his choice of air marshals. And you can put a discreet escort out on it, can’t you?” Natalie Sonnen said. “You all will be safe as pie. Invite some of the families, of the Flight 923, of 9/11, whoever. Put them on, too. Free flight, paid for by the TSA. From DC to NYC. That will be a great joy ride and show piece.”

  She grinned a nasty grin. “You’ll all be safe. Won’t you?”

  Chapter Five

  Alexander Fields, the head of the Federal Air Marshal Service, gave the briefing himself.

  “We all know it’s a dog and pony show,” Fields said. “But we’re going to treat this like a real mission. Hunter runs the show on board; you five are his hand picks.”

  The five air marshals, two women and three men, not counting Hunter, nodded.

  “Standard deployment, but whatever Hunter wants to do he’ll do. In addition to you all, TSA has additional screeners working the checkpoints…”

  “First time most of these fat cats ever been through security,” Lindy Halser, one of the women marshals, muttered.

  Fields looked at her and she made a point of staring right back at him.

  Hunter hid his grin.

  “As I was saying, additional screeners on the checkpoints. This is a brand new MD-80, two pilots. The co-pilot is a Federal Flight Deck Officer, he will also be armed. The other passengers have all been backgrounded. So for all intents and purposes this is a routine flight from DC to NYC.”

  The marshals all laughed, to Fields’s discomfiture.

  “What about the press?” one of the marshals, a big ex-cop from Atlanta named Darron Jump said.

  “They’ll be there with all their bells and whistles,” Fields said. “A pool from the networks, also we’ve got print journalists from most of the major papers.”

  “They’ll all be sniveling for free drinks,” Jump said.

  “That’s enough,” Fields said.

  Pat Haydon, one of the other air marshals, a former Marine fighter pilot who retired out and took up a gun with the Marshals after 9/11, laughed out loud. “Lawdy, lawdy, as my momma would say. What a goat rope this is.”

  More general laughter as Field flushed.

  “I’ll turn this over to Hunter,” Fields said. “Thank you, and I’ll be in the Command Center following this in real time.”

  Fields hurried out of the room as Hunter stood and took his place.

  “Okay, kiddies, let’s behave,” Hunter said.

  “Do we have to?” Lindy said, grinning.

  “Yep.”

  “Okay, boss. You, you I’ll listen to. How’s your leg?”

  “Not great, Lindy. That’s why you’re going to do all the heavy lifting.”

  1

  “Goat rope,” Pay Haydon said. He loitered in the boarding area, where news crews prowled with their cameras at the ready as they stopped and talked with the passengers, the regular ones, the family members and a handful of true travelers, and then paused for their sound bites with the politicos and the administrators.

  “You got that right, sweet cheeks,” Lindy said. “I’d of bumped off this if it weren’t for Hunter.”

  “Got that right.”

  “Make him take it easy, Pat. He’ll listen to you. He needs to take it easy on that leg; the Flight Surgeon was having a fit when he heard that he had to certify him fit to fly for this mission.”

  “Listen to me? Hell, he don’t listen to nobody but God, far as I know. Just step up and do the work, won’t be much on this. It’s a short flight, thank Jesus, and we’ll be off quick enough.”

  2

  In the cockpit, the pilots went through the pre-flight checklist. The co-pilot checked and stowed his handgun.

  “That’s overkill today,” the pilot said.

  “You never know,” the co-pilot said. He was a quiet, trim, somber man in his fifties. His name was Bob Guillette, and he’d never flown with this particular pilot before. “That’s what it’s there for. Cause you never know.”

  3

  The flight attendants gave their briefing, and got a round of vigorous applause from the passengers. In First Class, Hunter gave the lead flight attendant a wink as she went through her spiel, and was rewarded with a warm smile. She walked back through into the Coach section, about 2/3 full, not a bad load considering they were mostly strap hangers comped by the airline. She paused by one of the cameramen, an older man with bad skin, a baseball hat and thick coke bottle bottom glasses.

  “How you doing, honey?” she said.

  He smiled up at her, exposing teeth yellowed with nicotine.

  “Not bad for an old guy.”

  “Why are they making you carry the camera?” she said.

  “I’m out to pasture, but they brought me back for this. The young guy who is supposed to be here is off catting around. I taught him everything he knew.”

  “Well, if I can get you anything, let me know.”

  His eyes were huge behind the big glasses. “Oh, I think I have everything I need, darling. Thanks for asking, though.”

  4

  The aircraft taxied down the runway, turned, and accelerated into flight. Hunter liked the MD-80s; they took off and flew like a corporate jet…or a fighter in the hands of a skilled pilot. And the two up front were skilled, the airline made sure of that. With all their precious cargo on board, they wanted only the best for their passengers and the television audience out there watching their every move.

  Two seats behind Hunter, the young blond anchorwoman from CBS asked her seat mate, “Are we going to be able to go live? I thought we couldn’t transmit while in flight because of the FAA or FCC or something regulations.”

  “Ask your camera man,” her seat mate, a crusty old timer from the Washington Post said. “Something about high speed wireless, they can use the wireless channels for it. I’m of the pencil and notepad generation.” He raised his hand to the flight attendant. “As soon as you can, a bourbon, hon. Whatever you got.”

  5

  The old cameraman in the back squirmed in his seat. He spent far too much time sitting these days, but then, he had to make some accommodations to his age. He’d spent his life being athletic, and the demands of old injuries and wear and tear were hard to accept. He took a deep breath, and looked around at his fellow passengers. Bureaucrats, political hacks, media. And a smattering of regular folks. No kids, though. This was most definitely not a kid friendly flight.

  6
>
  The flight got to it’s approved cruising altitude, and the pilot announced that he was turning off the FASTEN SEAT BELT signs and that the passengers were free to move around the cabin. He added that the press were free to work now, and that they had been approved to use their cellular equipment including the wireless feeds for the camera transmission. After his announcement, he stretched, and said to the co-pilot, “Easy run.”

  Bob Guillette nodded. “So far, anyway.”

  7

  The Fox news crew won the chance to work the cabin first, and they began to move down the aisle, framing their shots, as the reporter asked passengers what they thought of today’s flight, and of the security for the traveling public today.

  Everyone else had to wait their turn, while the plane flew steadily towards New York City.

  They were already fifteen minutes into a 70 minute flight, though the pilot had been asked (discreetly) to delay landing if the press didn’t have all their footage.

  The old cameraman got out of his seat and went forward to the First Class section, slipped by the Fox News crew and went to the forward lavatory.

  “You don’t mind if I drain my aging kidneys up here in Gucci Class, do you, honey?” the cameraman asked the lead flight attendant.

  “Normally, yes, but for you, okay. It is a special occasion today,” she said, mock sternly.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The older man brushed Hunter’s arm as he went by. Hunter looked up and automatically clocked the small shoulder bag the man carried. Not the usual thing you’d see on an old grandpa, but he was a cameraman and festooned with gear in his battered photographer’s vest anyway. The cameraman slipped into the lavatory and latched the door. Hunter heard a thump, twice, from inside the lav, as the man probably was edging around finding enough room to take down his pants and sit.