Grayman
Book One: Acts of War
by Michael Rizzo
Copyright 2013 by Michael Rizzo
Table of Contents
Part One: Deleted Scenes
Part Two: Action Heroes
Part Three: War Toys
Part Four: Faith-Based Initiatives
Part One: Deleted Scenes
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You finally see her. And you feel sick. Because you know you won’t be able to save her, only stop her. Assuming you still can.
You were stupid to try to anticipate the route she would take from the small apartment she shares with her father to her target, thinking you could position yourself on her most likely course and head her off early, maximize your opportunity to stop her bloodlessly. You should have just stayed put and covered the café. But now, because of hope—the hope of saving one life so determined to end itself—you may have just killed dozens of innocent people.
Because now she’s gotten past you. She’s well between you and her target, and heading for it at a determined but cautious pace.
You try to hope you’re wrong, but you really have no doubt it’s her. You knew it was her as soon as she emerged from the narrow alley almost a full block behind you, even with only a quick glimpse of her face as she glanced both ways—looking for the obvious official kind of interception—before she turned her back to you and started walking with the fatalism of someone who is mostly sure that death will mean nothing bad. You’ve been studying her photos and videos obsessively for the last twenty-four hours, while you rehearsed how you would save her, how you would be the hero. How you would not have to kill her yourself. (Can you kill a child? Even if it means saving so many others?)
She’s got almost a fifty-yard lead on you, weaving her way through oblivious pedestrians. No way you’ll be able to catch her in time. You’ll be lucky to get close enough to get a shot before she does what she came to do.
Still, you don’t discard the retaining pin clutched in the fingers of your left hand, unwilling to discard your fantasy of hope along with it.
You spend the few seconds you have while you chase her trying to rationalize your failure, how your neat little plan went wrong: Cautious, nervous (and very probably terrified despite the resolve her father’s been programming into her since he won sole custody two years ago), she apparently chose to take a more circuitous path to her fate. Or maybe she just wanted to buy herself a few more precious moments of life (hope again: because she might hesitate, might let you save her).
You consider blaming others: You left ample intel at your last little act of “justice” for them to find. They—the local authorities, NATO, CENTCOM, whoever should be responsible for making sure atrocities like this don’t happen—they should have already intercepted her, neat and quiet and safe and hell-and-gone from this crowded urban neighborhood. But then, you’re here now because they’ve apparently ignored your previous helpful hints, left you to do their work for them. (Maybe that’s somehow what they want. Maybe one day you’ll get to ask them why.)
You’re distracting yourself. Stay in the moment.
Her sandy hair is tied up modestly, too adult for her age. You only get glimpses of her round innocent features as she keeps darting her gaze from side to side, vigilant for any sign of police or anyone who looks like they suspect her (or expect her). She pulls her heavy coat tightly closed, even though her device is well-concealed. The coat is much too thick for the mild weather—she has to know it will make her look suspicious (hope again: that she wants someone to stop her).
You impulsively consider running her down, trying to make it happen the way you rehearsed it: Grab her right hand, clamp down so she can’t release the dead-man switch, slip the pin into the mechanism to immobilize it, cut the wires in the right order, and somewhere in that sequence manage to render her unconscious with minimal injury. Then leave her to the local authorities while you go see to her father.
But you know you can’t reach her in time. If you run, if you start shoving through the pedestrian traffic, she will hear, she will turn and see you. And then she’ll either run for her target or freeze and detonate where she is. If you shoot her down, she’ll detonate as she dies. You reflexively count the number of oblivious pedestrians in the likely kill radius of her device. She’ll take at least a half-a-dozen unsuspecting innocents with her. (But if she makes it to the crowded café…) All because daddy insists that’s what God wants. (And martyrdom is one of the few ways a female can gain entrance to that particular perversion of heaven.)
Your stolen intel can’t be faulted. She’s timed it to maximize her target: fifteen minutes into the professional lunch hour. The large open-air café is packed. It looks like there could be over a hundred people in there, sitting at small tables behind the chest-high concrete “safety wall” that surrounds the dining area (they don’t call it a blast shield, at least not officially—that might discourage customers). Your only consolation is that the street-traffic (which is all pedestrian since this old cobblestone street has been closed to vehicles) has thinned. If you kill her right here, maybe three or four die: A young couple, an older gentleman, a kid hanging out in a doorway…
(And you get to decide: Trade three or four for thirty or forty.)
You’re hesitating. She’s almost there—half-a-block to go—and you’re almost that far again behind her. You really don’t have a clear shot. She could make a run for it right now and you wouldn’t be able to stop her.
But then you get lucky—a lot luckier than you deserve.
Chalk it up to the fact that this neighborhood favors foreigners: Even with the street vehicle-free, most of the pedestrians are habitually clinging to where sidewalks would be rather than walking down the middle of the avenue, leaving a relatively clear space that she must cross to reach the cafe. This slim window of opportunity gets expanded when she decides to cut across diagonally, forgoing her cover in the foot-traffic in favor of a more direct path. If you can cut her down right in the middle of the street…
Discarding your hopeful fantasy (but not the retaining pin, not yet), you smoothly but discreetly draw the gaudily engraved and gold-appointed Browning, trusting its natural point to hit a moving target (even though you haven’t had much practice with it since you killed its former owner). You hold the pistol low in the folds of your cape-like coat, speed up your pace, get as close as you can because you can’t afford to miss, get…
She freezes. Right in the middle of the street.
Something’s startled her, stopped her in her tracks maybe fifty feet from the café wall. But she’s not looking at you—her back is still to you—she’s…
Fuck.
A four-man team of military police is coming from the opposite direction, a show-patrol to convince the tourists and foreign businessmen and diplomats that they can prevent this very thing. And they see her (probably only because she froze so blatantly in the open at the sight of them). And they take two full dull seconds to realize why she’s so nervously holding her big coat closed around her. And then the fuckheads raise their weapons and start shouting at her.
And just to make this as bad as it can get, they almost immediately shift targets and start shouting at you. You realize you’ve also stepped out of the flow of foot traffic right into their line-of-sight, and absolutely look scarier than a young girl (who they probably don’t want to believe is doing what they have to know she is).
Assault weapons point at you. (At least the raised guns get everybody else ducking for cover.) You have just enough time to wonder if they’re loaded hot enough to penetrate the layered armor of your overcoat, when the girl—Sarah, her name is Sarah—takes her opening and makes a ru
n for the café.
The patrol guns shift back to her, but they hesitate, hopeful…
You don’t. You drop the retaining pin and sweep up your pistol and point and track and breathe and squeeze. Let go. Let it happen.
One shot, one life.
You feel the bang and see her head jerk and don’t wait to pull the protection of your HAMAS-made overcoat over your face.
You are over thirty feet away, but the explosion still hits you like a truck, takes you off your feet and throws you backwards. You feel the bomb-belt’s shrapnel pepper the coat’s shell like hateful hail. The blast wave feels like it wants to crush your sinuses—it kicks the wind out of you and pounds spikes of pain into your ears despite the protective plugs. You hit the street on your ass and try to roll with it, and succeed in flopping around in your cloak-like coat like a fish in a net.
When you can see again, the first thing you see is meat and bone scattered on the cobblestones, some in bits of clothing. And a girl’s shoe. The smells of hot coffee and fresh breads and good cooking have been smothered by the stink of C4 and blood, so thick you can taste both. But then mostly you see intact bodies: bloodied and thrown around and disoriented, but clearly alive.
You stopped her. You kept her from getting to her crowded target and you dropped her in the best possible place to minimize casualties. You saved the fucking day.
Somehow you don’t feel at all good about it.
You manage to get up like a drunk. You find your hat in the street. The police are still on their backs, stunned, flailing and rolling in slow motion, bloodied in the places their armor wasn’t. Everyone who isn’t knocked down is hunkered, cowering behind whatever cover they can find in case there’s another blast. Or running away.
Which is what you do, before the wounded police can get themselves together enough to send pursuit after you.
You run away like you’re the bad guy, the villain.
You realize bits of a thirteen year old girl are sprayed all over your armored coat.
Grayman Book One: Acts of War Page 1
