by Marc Olden
“Sounds like somebody I know,” said Sand.
The Baron didn’t stop grinning. “Maybe. I had my periods of wanting it all and not giving a rat’s ass how I got it. Point is, now I’m trying to put some of it back. There’s another big difference between me and Drewcolt: I ain’t out to take your life.”
Sand stared at him for a few seconds, then said, “I’ll need a few things for tomorrow night. Whatever happens, I’ve got to be extremely careful about that virus. If it breaks open tomorrow at the airport, this entire city’s dead.”
Setting his glass down on the bar, The Baron turned back to the Black Samurai, clapped his hands together, and stepped toward him, his breathing faster. Action, excitement. He would always need them. “Let’s talk, son. Let’s you and me talk.”
Harley Canning said, “Up ahead by that mailbox. Stop there.”
The black cab driver said nothing. In Washington, D.C., he rarely had a white man in his cab, and this one was creepy. He didn’t talk, didn’t smile, and probably was the kind of white dude that only sweated cheese. Sheeit. White people were all full of shit, and this cat wasn’t any different.
Stopping the cab, the black driver looked up into the rear-view mirror into Harley Canning’s face with its long nose, small mouth, and hard brown eyes. Neither man said anything.
Canning looked out of the cab window at the light rain falling on Washington, D.C., turning the town and the day into dull gray.
The small park was miles away from where Canning worked at the White House as number-three man on the presidential staff. As a forty-six-year-old white Republican and Presbyterian with power and money, he was used to being obeyed.
Still, he wanted no trouble with this colored cab driver. “Here,” he said, taking his hand from his pocket and passing two twenty-dollar bills to the round-faced driver. “I want to be alone for ten minutes. Take the money and your keys and leave the cab. Stay over by that bench where I can see you. When I’m finished, I’ll call you back. There’ll be two more of these for you when you return.”
The driver twisted his thick purplish lips from left to right, his eyes on the money. Then he looked at Canning. “You—”
And that’s as far as Canning let him get. He was used to being obeyed. “Take it or leave it,” he said. “No talk, no questions. You’ve got the keys. You want the money or don’t you?”
Lifting a corner of his mouth, the round-faced black driver muttered, “Sheeit,” zippered up his brown leather jacket to his neck, opened the curbside cab door, and stepped out into the rain. Money was money, even if it came from a weird white dude.
Slamming the door behind him, he hunched his shoulders. A dark-blue wool cap was pulled down on his head, his hands jammed into green corduroy pants. When he reached the park bench, he turned and stared at the cab, his eyes now slits against the light rain.
As soon as the cab driver was facing him, Canning took a small tape recorder from his pocket, set it on the seat to his left, and pressed down a small black plastic lever. Silently, the two spools on top of the machine began to turn, the shiny brown plastic tape moving quietly from one spool to the other.
Canning was Print Drewcolt’s man inside the White House. Four times a year, money from Drewcolt went into a numbered Swiss bank account belonging to Canning. Neither cash nor checks ever passed between them. This method of payment, plus a communication system, had been worked out between the two men.
There were to be no phone calls, letters, or telegrams from Drewcolt, nor was there to be a third party approaching Canning. Canning received tapes, and destroyed them when he was finished. Then, in a prearranged code, he would make one call to a CCE representative in Washington. That was it.
At the moment, Canning was in a place that he knew was not bugged or watched. These days, you couldn’t be too careful. Canning had used electronic devices on enough people to be cautious as hell. So he sat in the back of the cab, listening to Talon’s instructions about the virus.
Canning was to take the virus from his cellar, pack it in an ice-filled container, then call for a messenger service.
The service would deliver the package somewhere else. It was that simple. Nothing more.
When the tape finished, Harley Canning played it back again. This time he relaxed, leaning back against the cracked leather seat, his eyes on the black cab driver standing in the rain. Twenty-two years ago Canning had begun to hate. Now he smiled, enjoying that hate.
In 1952 he had left a leg at the Yalu River in Korea. At that time he was luckier than most Marine platoon leaders. In combat, a platoon leader had a life expectancy of thirty seconds. On that agonizing day he had screamed and wept, his hands sloppy wet and red with his own blood.
The Yalu River. That’s where the Red Chinese had fought like insane men, blowing bugles and beating gongs and drums as they swarmed down from the north, killing American and South Korean soldiers and Harley Canning’s dream of a military career.
There was no place for a one-legged officer in combat or in the Marines. The throbbing in his right stump was nothing to the bitter hatred for the Chinese that burned inside him. It didn’t matter who threw the hand grenade that had chewed away his meat and bone. Eight hundred million yellow men, women, and children were guilty, and now it was time to even up.
Harley Canning didn’t give a shit whether the President posed for pictures with his arm around Red China’s leader. Harley Canning wanted the sweet taste of getting even. That meant killing Red Chinese.
He owned five artificial legs, stiff ugly things of wood and steel kept hidden in a closet. It was an unspoken agreement that his wife was never to go into that closet, even though she knew what was there.
The tape finished.
The black man was walking up and down in front of the park bench, his faded brown leather jacket now dark with rain.
Fuck him, let him stay there, thought Canning. Taking the tape from the machine, he reached in his overcoat pocket, removing an empty white envelope and a small pair of scissors.
Slowly, he sliced the tape into half-inch pieces, the destroyed tape falling into the envelope. Before returning to the White House, he would stop off at a restaurant for lunch, flushing the envelope down a toilet.
Rolling down the cab window, he yelled at the black cab driver, “O.K.”
Chapter VIII
THE TRAP WAS READY. And Robert Sand, the Black Samurai, moved toward it.
He was dressed in black leather jacket and pants, with strong rubber-soled black work shoes. He wore no hat against the chill March rain, and water lay in beads on his hair like pearls against black velvet.
Ahead of him in the darkness he saw the first man, the man’s hooded green poncho slick and wet, both of his hands under it, tightly gripping a sawed-off shotgun.
One guard on the roof. That was all. More like an afterthought than a precaution. On top of the airplane hangar, in the darkness and rain, the man could hardly be seen except up close.
In an almost deserted section of the gigantic Dulles Airport, three huge hangars stood side-by-side like gigantic empty boxes, abandoned and used for storage or occasional repairs.
One man patrolled the top catwalk. Down below, in the middle hangar, more of Talon’s men waited. A small white panel truck with “Gregory Wiring, Inc.” written on both sides stood just inside the hangar and near the left wall.
Two men with shotguns were inside the truck, the freezer behind them in a corner. Two guards each with a scoped rifle and flashlight, lay hidden on a dirty catwalk above the floor, boxes and abandoned pieces of equipment offering them cover. They watched the huge space where the only door had been pulled back. Rain gently pockmarked the puddles outside in front of the door, the pockmark lasting an infinitesimal fraction of a second, then disappearing.
Three more men hid in the darkness on the hangar floor, eyes on the door and the rainy darkness. All three were in sight of the small white panel truck. For them, it would soon be killing time. The CC
E plane was due to take off in thirty minutes. If no one came in twenty minutes, the truck and its two-car convoy of CCE gunmen would drive out onto the huge runway and place the virus aboard the plane.
Twenty minutes. And the signal would be given by Cal, the CCE gunman who was not in a cop’s uniform tonight. He was nearest the hangar door, tense, nervous, frightened, because he knew what the black man could do.
Up on top of the roof of the first hangar, Sand crawled from under the huge black tarpaulin and silently moved through rainy darkness, crouching, then stopping and flattening himself against the wet surface.
Under his black leather jacket, the bulges of flares and smoke grenades pressed against his chest in hard lumps. Gripping his bow tightly in his right hand, his left hand tight around the four steel-tipped arrows, he crawled closer in snake fashion, blinking his eyes against the rain.
A waterproof canvas bag hung around his neck and down along his back. If he lost it, he’d be a dead man. Among other items, it held a Colt .45 APC Commander and two clips of ammunition.
For three hours the Black Samurai had lain patiently under the black tarpaulin, showing the results of his tough training under Master Konuma. In the afternoon he had entered the first hangar and made his way to the roof, where the tarpaulin he’d asked The Baron to have put there had been waiting for him.
The bow and arrows had been waiting there, too. The roof and all three hangars had been empty then.
Talon had chosen his ground carefully. All hangars had only one entrance, a huge door that slid open. Only the middle hangar—the trap—had a direct way to the roof, or so Talon thought. Sand had found a way to the top of the first hangar. Using a grappling hook, he’d climbed the wall, knowing one slip meant falling to his death on concrete below.
Later, the rain had drummed steadily down upon the tarpaulin and seeped under it, but the Black Samurai’s concentration and alertness had not wavered or grown weak. He closed his mind to the cold and water surrounding his body, concentrating on what he had to do.
He had been trained well.
Three men had come up from the middle hangar and looked around, seeing no one. No one came near the tarpaulin lying flat on the roof. They had talked, tried to light cigarettes in the rain, and given up. Minutes ago two had left, leaving one man behind.
Three hours of patient waiting had given Sand his first advantage. And when he crawled from under the rainsoaked canvas, he now knew for sure there was only one guard on the roof. Moving to one knee, he set the arrows down. Wiping the rain from his eyes, he blinked again and again, clearing his vision.
Carefully he picked up his bow, notched an arrow to it, then raised it to his face, drawing the string back, his right thumb lightly brushing his cheek, his eyes steadily on the man in the wet green poncho. Holding the string back for a count of ten, he focused his eyes more strongly on the man, shutting the rain and cold out of his mind.
He released the arrow, the bowstring snapping sharply back into place, vibrating, and slapping against his black-leather-clad left arm.
The shot was perfect. The arrow tore into the guard’s throat, sending a spray of blood into the water running down the front of the poncho. Falling to both knees, the guard tried to lift his hands from under the poncho to his throat and failed.
He slumped to his left side, then rolled over on his back. Rain washed the blood from his poncho and throat, and his eyes grew wide and his mouth opened, but nothing came out. He died staring up at Sand, who calmly stood over him, then bent down and removed the dead guard’s poncho.
Inside the hangar, high up on the dark, dusty catwalk, Riggins sat with his back hard against the cold steel wall. Fifty feet below him, the filthy concrete floor was dark, except near the open door, where distant airport lights reached the hangar in small handfuls. The rain and the waiting were getting on his nerves. His ass was numb from sitting on wood, and his back was stiff from being jammed against cold steel.
One thousand dollars per man, plus the same in a bonus to the man who shoots the nigger. This wasn’t a cheap hit, what with nine guns scattered throughout the darkness. Talon didn’t want him dead, just shot in the leg or maybe the ass. Of course, if the spade wanted to go down hard, then Talon had said there was no choice. Blow him away. But first, try to take him alive. Dead niggers ain’t conversational.
Christ, the rain! Above him, he could hear it on the roof making sounds like a man chewing graham crackers. He was sure glad Cal hadn’t put him up there. Let Dave freeze his balls off. Wet as hell outside, and colder than a well-digger’s asshole.
Watching the door was pissing him off, too. First there were the puddles, then the rain trickling into the puddles like a woman peeing. Stupid ass noise. Water on water.
Worse, there was the waiting. Darkness didn’t bother him, though he hoped to hell there weren’t any rats around. He’d read somewhere once that rain made them hairy fuckers come out of their holes and look around for God only knows what. Rats. Ugly as shit they were.
Waiting. And more waiting. For some crazy-ass nigger who was supposed to be out there in the dark, cold, and rain, ready to cop whatever the hell was in that truck down there near the door.
Bet the spade wasn’t all that stupid. He was probably somewhere warm eating pigs’ feet and greens, thinking about fucking some white man’s sister, feet up in front of his stolen television set.
If it wasn’t for the bread, Riggins would be off doing something like that, too. But a chance to pick up two big ones didn’t come along that often. So he had jumped at the chance when word came down from Talon to skip working security tonight at CCE’s Washington office building and do a special, very private job.
Riggins ran his right hand over the chilled steel of the long rifle barrel resting across his knees. The scope was infrared and sighted in on the truck below him, almost one hundred feet away from where he crouched in the darkness.
Shit. Ain’t no way a flea can get in here and lay a finger on that truck without getting both nuts shot off. Both hangars on either side were empty, and neither had a catwalk, ladder, or any other way to the roof. Connecting doors were either locked or permanently sealed.
All that shit was checked out. Nobody could get on the roof unless he had wings, and that only left walking through the front door. Anybody, black or white, who wanted to go up against nine guns wasn’t playing with a full deck.
Well, no skin off my ass, thought Riggins. We’re guaranteed a grand, no matter what goes down tonight. Been sitting here almost an hour, and nothing’s come through that door but some dirty water and cold air.
Suddenly he snapped his head to the left, looking up at the trapdoor, which had just cracked opened, the cold and rain hitting his left shoulder at the same time.
His heart jumped, and his teeth dug into his lip, as his hand slid toward the trigger of the rifle. Above him in the dark, he saw a figure in a poncho reach down an arm and beckon to him.
What the hell …?
Moving to his feet, his cramped legs wobbly, his shoulders stiff, he whispered hoarsely, “Dave? S’happening?”
Cracking the trapdoor wider, the figure beckoned to him once more and whispered something Riggins couldn’t quite hear. Then the trapdoor was opened all the way, and the rain and cold hit Riggins in the face.
Down below him, from the darkness, a harsh, angry whisper said, “For Christ’s sake, you guys keep quiet. Damnit, Riggins, see what the hell’s on his mind!”
Muttering under his breath, Riggins walked to the small iron ladder, its gray paint peeling and being replaced by small patches of orange-brown rust.
Leaning his rifle against the wall, he climbed the small ladder, his eyes narrowing against the rain, his body stiffening against the chill.
At the top, he saw the figure in a wet, rain-slicked poncho, and Riggins passed on his anger at being ordered out into the rain again. “Man, what’s on your asshole mind?” he whispered hoarsely and rapidly, stepping clear of the ladder and letting
the trapdoor fall shut. “You’d better have a damn good reason for getting me out here, and I ain’t just kidding, you hear?”
His body rigid with anger and cold, Riggins stepped toward the figure. “Listen, Dave—”
And that’s as far as he got.
With the speed drilled into him through years of practice, the Black Samurai moved in quickly, until his body touched Riggins’.
Sand’s right hand shot out, hard fingers digging into Riggins’ throat. At the same time, Sand stepped to his own left, his left hand grabbing Riggins’ jacket at the right elbow and pulling it down hard toward the roof.
Now all of Riggins’ weight was on his right heel, his left leg now off the ground. Sand’s steel grip on his throat kept him from crying out, and he felt himself being pushed backward.
That’s when Sand raised his powerful right knee high, then drove the leg down, clipping Riggins in the back of the right knee. A strong, powerful osotogari throw, driving Riggins down toward the wet roof.
For a second Riggins’ body was level with the ground, as though he were resting in midair. When he hit the roof, the pain exploded in his hip, and he felt ribs snap, and it was as though he had been stabbed, while also being hit with more lead pipes than he could count.
Instantly Sand straddled Riggins’ body, his knees on either side of the guards’ chest. Riggins’ mouth was open, and his head flopped from side to side as he desperately gulped air. “Ohhhh, Jesus, oh, Jesus …” he moaned.
He felt the cool rain on his face and on the back of his hand, but the pain in his back kept eating away at him like a lion digging into raw meat.
Christ, the pain!
A soft voice, gentle but hard, said to him, “You could be dead. Think about that when you answer my questions.”
