Strike (A Ray Hammer Novel Book 3)

by Aaron Leyshon

  The suit-and-BDUs guy arrived, except this time he was actually wearing a suit; his alter ego was in play. He held out a hand to Ray. “Solomani,” he said with solemn, old-fashioned courtesy. “Solomani Rodriguez. Sorry about your face.”

  Ray Hammer made an effort to smile, felt the bruises, the thudding in his head, and decided not to. He stuck out his own hand, “Hammer. Ray Hammer.”

  “Come with me, Mr. Hammer,” he said. “They’re waiting for you.”

  There was no blindfold, no handcuffs, and no gun pressed against his spine, threatening to do maximum damage, so Hammer followed Rodriguez down the hallway, along a long corridor with a number of small cells as tiny and malodorous as the one he’d been sitting in a moment ago. It felt good to be out, and only one of the other cell doors was closed as they passed. Hammer had a good idea who might be in there. It wouldn’t be easy to get her out, but he’d figure out a way. He always did.

  Was this an attack of the conscience, his version of helping an old lady across the street?

  What the heck was he doing here, even?

  He’d been asked to watch her, not rescue her. Whitcombe thought she was important but hadn’t given Ray enough details to go on, to know why, and despite much pressing, he hadn’t been able to answer any of the questions his editor had thrown at him Ray flew to Guam.

  Raised voices reached Hammer’s ears before he even got around the corner and up the stairs to the meeting. The room was stark; just a big desk, a whiteboard, a couple of maps and flags strung up haphazardly around the walls. A bunch of stuffy military types in dress uniforms sat in their chairs, and leaned back, coffees in hand, feet spread wide to assert dominance. At the front of the room was the one person Hammer hadn’t expected to see here, not in this setting anyway.

  Inspector Whitcombe held a meter-long ruler and tapped it, hard, against the whiteboard. “And this,” he announced, “is why we need to act now!”

  Inspector Whitcombe was a special Deputy Marshal, a man with significant political influence, an ex-military man, but not someone Ray Hammer expected to find on base despite the fact that he was the one who sent Ray on this mission.

  Whitcombe glanced up, noticed Ray, but continued speaking in a deep drawling voice.

  “If China wants to meddle with our systems, wants to hack into our databases, fire our nukes on us, then we need to retaliate. Heck, the president’s foaming at the fucking mouth at the moment. He’s ready to go. But, we’re not, and we need to be ready. We need to know what’s coming.”

  Now he made a show of noticing Hammer for the first time. “Ah, we have a guest. Come in, come in.”

  Rodriguez pushed his thick hand into Hammer’s back and launched him forward into the room. Ray glanced around but there were no empty seats. Instead, he stepped to the front of the room and perched himself on a desk, the only piece of furniture, next to where Inspector Whitcombe was presenting. Whitcombe clamped a firm hand on Ray’s shoulder. He wasn’t wearing dress uniform—or any uniform at all, just a set of Nike pants and a thin threadbare sweatshirt that was two sizes too small for his great paunch.

  “That crash out the front yesterday,” said Whitcombe, “that was Hammer. He was snooping around, trying to meddle in our business. What was I just saying about China? What happens to people who snoop around US military facilities?”

  The men in uniform jeered and banged their fists on the table, shouted out some obscene things about Ray’s mother.

  Hammer just stared Whitcombe in the eyes. Double-crossed, he thought, thrown under the bus, by the very person who’d gotten him involved in the first place . . . for what?

  And then, Ray opened his mouth. “You’re breaking my heart, Frank.”

  “I think you must have misheard me, Ray. We’ll be breaking your balls.”

  Chapter Nine

  The ‘all-American’ man pulled Adam Winters back against the wall, and then watched as the fighters tired themselves out. Eventually, the man with the suit grabbed one of the men, slapped him a few times around the face, and then walked out of the restaurant and into the night.

  “Let’s go,” said the ‘all-American’, and he yanked Adam to his feet and pushed him through the debris of the bar brawl. He waved and smiled and said “arigato gozaimasu” to the proprietor, and then they were out on the street.

  Adam made to run, but the man grabbed his elbow and swung him hard to the left and into an alleyway. They kept moving through the narrow passage. Up in the distance was a sign on one of the buildings, advertising in bright colors—red, white, yellow. It said Osaka City Tours, and the Japanese flag was flanked by an American, a British, an Australian, a Russian and a Chinese flag. Below that, a blue sign stretched across half the façade, it read: Kansai Region Tourism Board.

  “We’re in Osaka? Adam wondered out loud.

  The man just pushed him along until they came to a dead end, a street lined with bamboo and faded lights. Tacky concrete tiles flanked the cobblestones. There were three large dumpsters standing against a wall, and next to them, the man in the suit, with blood smeared on his face leaned into a concrete wall. He wiped at the blood with his sleeve, which did nothing to improve the suit.

  “You have to learn to control your temper,” said the ‘all-American’ to the guy in the blooded suit.

  “And you got to learn to have some pride,” said the Japanese man with a slight hint of an American English accent.

  “What?” screamed Adam, and he stamped his foot. “What the hell is this? What was that all about? Who the fuck are you people?”

  They both stopped and stared at him, but neither of them answered his questions.

  “They insulted his clothing choices,” said the all-American.

  The other man shrugged. “They had to pay. Nobody insults Haruki.”

  “Jesus! Get over yourself,” said the all-American.

  Haruki shook his head once, a single move, decisive. “Nobody,” he said slowly, “insults Haruki. Not even you, Marlowe.”

  “What is this?” said Adam, “What are you, a bunch of high school boys? Too cool for school. Neither of you have any pride, bickering and carrying on and fighting the way you were. And what the hell are we doing in Osaka? And who’s got my flash drive?” It came out of him in a torrent.

  “Shut it, kid,” said Marlowe.

  Haruki nodded and then cocked his head to the side. “Should we tell him?”

  “Tell him what? There ain’t shit to tell him,” said Marlowe with his thick down-home-Dixie accent.

  “You guys are who I was supposed to be meeting,” said Adam Winters, trying to make it easy for them, trying to throw them a bone, something they could latch onto and actually answer rather than just avoiding his questions and bickering between themselves.

  “No, we weren’t,” said Marlowe.

  Haruki nodded. “We weren’t. But, we work for the person you were supposed to meet,” he said, “and I suppose…” He looked to Marlowe for support.

  “We’re your handlers,” said Marlowe, not sugarcoating anything.

  “Look at us like your babysitters,” said Haruki. “D’you ever watch that movie, the one with Arnold Schwarzenegger?”

  “Terminator,” said Adam. “Which one of you is Sarah Connor?”

  “No, no, no,” said Marlowe, “Not Terminator.”

  “Kindergarten Cop,” finished Haruki. “We like Arnie.” Then, changing the subject with breakneck speed, said, “We’ll teach you a thing or two, take you where you need to go, where our boss needs you. Make you some money.”

  Adam was in no position to argue and no position to make any demands, but he couldn’t help himself. “The post said there was $10,000 as an advance, if I could prove I could get in. I got in. It was on the flash drive.”

  “What flash drive?” said Marlowe.

  “I think he means the flash drive we sent to the boss,” said Haruki.

  “Oh, that flash drive,” said Marlowe.

  Adam wasn’t sure if he
was being sarcastic or not.

  “Look, kid, you’re in no position to make demands. You’re the fucking high school boy in this situation. And you have no life experience. So, 10 grand, that means shit to you. What are you going to do with it, spend it on some fucking video games, a new sound system? Heck, you’re not even old enough to drive.”

  Haruki nodded and withdrew a phone, and then he pulled out several bundles of hundred-dollar bills from his inside suit pocket.

  “Hold onto these, kid. When we get somewhere you can deposit them into your bank account, we’ll do that. Until then, you do what we say, follow every direction, and if we ask you to fight, you fight. Got it?”

  Adam nodded, and wondered if he’d ever be able to fight. And if he couldn’t, then he wondered if he’d ever see the rest of his money.

  “Are we going to Guam?”

  “Shit it, kid, stop asking so many damn questions.”

  Chapter Ten

  Every time Ray Hammer closed his eyes, someone turned on a light, bright; blinding, the kind that brings green fairies to your vision. He rolled over, tried to block it out, and every time he did, someone would enter the room, grab his legs, and roll him back until he was looking up at the light.

  Ray wasn’t sure how long it had been going on for, but he was starting to break. He’d been through trials like this at training. He’d even been captured once in Afghanistan. But, since he’d retired, those times had become memories, dreams, and nightmares where he kicked his sheets from one side of the room to the other and woke up in a sweat. Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, his doctor called it, suggested he see a shrink. Ray preferred to deal with things on his own. In his own way.

  Instead of seeing a shrink, he found the job at the newspaper, and took up the task of annoying Ed, the nickname he gave his editor. That was his psychiatric care, his psychology sessions with himself, a chance to feel normal, feel whole, to get away from his past. It helped that he was able to get out of the US most of the time, and go to different places. It didn’t help to be in this situation, in a cell, in the Joint Region Marianas in Guam.

  At some point, on one of the days without sleep, with only the blinding light and the trickle of his piss in the corner, in the edge of the room, and the stench of effluent to keep him company, Ray’s jailers changed tack. To supplement the light, headphones were brought in. They were placed over his ears, and Ray was forced to listen to the cries of children screaming for their mothers over and over and over again. Nobody came to ask him any questions. Nobody wanted to know what he’d been doing snooping around.

  There’s only so long you can stay in your own head. And only so long you can live without sleep, without rest, with the sound of screaming children, babies crying, in your ears. They weren’t trying to get anything from Ray. All they wanted, he figured, was to break him, to turn him into a ghost of himself, to create someone they could use for their own purposes. But, who was ‘they’? Whitcome? The Naval Command? The Rear Admiral on the base?

  Whitcombe was supposed to be on Ray’s side. He was the one who asked Ray to come out here. Sure, he’d tried to kill Ray once, but that had been a test—and so was this… perhaps. But, perhaps not. Perhaps Whitcombe didn’t want to prevent the nuclear destruction of the world. Perhaps he was hoping to facilitate nuclear warfare.

  Ray could hardly think. The screaming was unbearable, the lack of sleep unbearable, the men, who came and shook him and rolled him over and rolled him over and tied him down and strapped him to the bed and dripped water just behind his head. It dripped onto his forehead, it splashed on the metal of the bed, where it lay, small sprinkles touching his hair; and another scream, another child, another traumatic memory. It might have been minutes, it might have been days, it might have been weeks. Ray couldn’t tell.

  And then, a big man he’d seen before came in and unstrapped him and turned off the light and pulled off the headphones. Ray grappled for his name but couldn’t recall it. The man in the suit helped him out. “

  Solomani Rodriguez,” he said, holding his hand out.

  Ray felt a sense of déjà vu and peace run through him. He’d be okay. Maybe.

  Chapter Eleven

  “I can’t work like this,” Adam said to Marlowe and Haruki who hunkered down beside him, watching over his shoulder as he typed away and glanced at the big array of computer screens/ They filled one wall of the Caddy van in which they sat. They were parked on the edge of the Anderson Air Force Base, Guam. The van was parked alongside one of the communications boxes, one of the few lines between the military base and the outside world, “A weak point.” Adam Winters muttered to himself as he typed away.

  “Hurry up, kid. We can’t stay here forever,” said Haruki.

  “You’ve got five minutes,” said Marlowe, tapping hard on his watch, a G-Shock, one of the new models.

  Adam glanced at it, ran a few calculations in his head, figured it was worth a pretty penny; but then, these guys had handed him $10,000 in cash. They were made of pretty pennies. Adam wondered where they’d got the money from, who they worked for, why they’d had to drug him to bring him down here. But then, he considered it again. It made sense. Really, he probably wouldn’t have come with two strangers holding guns.

  He tapped away at the keyboard and code flowed across the screens. He needed more than five minutes; ten at least. He told the men. They told him no. There were three minutes left by Marlowe’s G-Shock.

  “Once we’re in, it’ll be easier. We can get in from anywhere then,” said Haruki. He scratched at his hair, and a fluff of dandruff snowed down onto his suit.

  Adam Winters ignored them. He kept typing, faster and faster, trying to get in.

  “You told our boss you could do this.”

  They weren’t making things any easier for Adam.

  “Yeah,” said Adam.

  “And, you showed the boss how you got into the outer layer of the security from Japan. So, this should be easier. We’re right next to the communications box.”

  “Yeah,” grunted Adam, “easier. Sure thing. This is a communication box for a military base. This is hardly fucking high school coding.”

  “You’d know,” said Marlowe. “One minute.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” said Adam, and the code in front of him disappeared. He started typing again.

  “Thirty seconds,” said Marlowe. “If you don’t get this, we leave. You lose five thousand.”

  Adam considered the ten thousand dollars in his pocket, thought about what it meant to him, and considered the potential extra 40k that was coming to him if he could pull this job off. He didn’t like the sound of losing money, not did he like them changing the goalposts on him. He tried a different line of code.

  “Ten seconds, nine, eight.”

  The code spewed out on the screen. Then Adam wrote a shorter piece of code, a backdoor, maybe just enough to get them in.

  He punched the keys hard.

  “Five seconds, four seconds. That money’s burning as we speak,” said Marlowe, and Haruki laughed and scratched at his nose, and then his hair again; another fluff of dandruff.

  A loud sneeze and the smell of sweat, and too long spent in the same suit in the back of a Caddy van, on a tropical island.

  Adam ran a few more keystrokes.

  “Three seconds, two seconds.”

  He pressed Return and held his breath.

  Chapter Twelve

  They were back in the hotel overlooking the bay. Adam trawled through the Anderson Air Force Base records. His handlers stood behind him. Haruki sat on the bed, his feet up and his shoes off, the gun resting across his lap as he watched daytime television and then the news, and then another news channel, and then back to daytime television. It didn’t matter that the hotel had cable—he just flicked through the channels as Adam flicked through the records one after the other and scanned them for the information that Marlowe asked him to find. He was supposed to be looking for the launch codes for Guam’s THAAD defens
e system and some B61 tactical weapons. Adam had no idea what the B61s were, but they sounded seriously deadly. He looked into it in the records.

  “There’s practically nothing on the missing B61s,” said Adam.

  Marlowe grunted. Haruki changed channels—another infomercial, another commercial. It was all the same to him. It didn’t matter what was on the screen. He was killing time, waiting. Adam wondered if they’d let him get out of here once he’d done what they asked. Maybe they’d just shoot him. A bullet in the head. A shallow grave. He pictured Marlowe throwing him into the ocean somewhere off the coast. It would be easy to do. Nobody knew he was here.

  He wondered what his parents were thinking, whether they missed him, whether they’d even noticed. Perhaps they thought he was still just hiding in his bunker under the stairs. Adam shuddered and ran a database search, which turned up three articles. He flicked through them. One mentioned a missing warhead, but nothing else, and only in passing. It was a training document about what would happen if a shipment of B61s were to be hijacked on the way to base. Maybe this was what his handlers were looking for.

  “When do you think the room service will arrive?” asked Adam.

  Marlowe ignored him. Haruki turned to him. “Who knows? Have you found the damn codes yet? We need them yesterday. There’s big money tied up in this.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” asked Adam, pressing for the first time since that night with the fight in Osaka.

  “The boss doesn’t pay you to ask questions. Just get on with it.”

  Adam thought about this for a moment and decided to run a search of his own on the databases.

  He typed in each of his handlers’ names with an ‘or’ search function. Boolean. The computer trawled through the database, it seemed to search and search, and at first nothing came up.

  There was a knock at the door, and Marlowe got his gun out and stood to open it. He brought back the pizza and a club sandwich, with a side of lemonade for the kid and two glasses of red wine for the grown-ups. Funny how they didn’t seem to mind kidnapping and extortion, but drew the line at giving alcohol to minors.