Grayman Book One: Acts of War

by Michael Rizzo

4

  Lawrence Henderson:

  I love this part:

  Three camera views inside the little concrete cell let me see it from multiple angles: two beefcake SEALs bulging their veins out trying to be loud and threatening with their fists and their stun batons, and him. Sitting there. Hands zipped behind his back. Stripped mostly naked and soaking wet from his last dunking. And looking at them like he’s looking at a pair of mildly interesting insects.

  I almost think I should have warned the SEALs about his trick with the zip cuffs, but I enjoy getting to watch it in realtime: he manages it in a few dozen of hours, rubbing them through on the concrete behind or under him whenever he gets even a brief opportunity. He masks it by doing it slowly, pushing hard for friction, working just one spot.

  Aggravated by his stoicism, his “guards” hood him and douse him with cold water again and try shocking him at random. And Ram shouldn’t be able to see (maybe just a flash of floor under the hood), but he suddenly snaps the cuffs (thankfully they give before they cut him to the bone) right when both batons are basically under his nose, and in a flash, he has them both. Almost.

  His left hand gets a better hold, gripping so that he’s got wet-skin contact with both the baton and the fist holding it—if the SEAL triggers it, he’ll get nailed himself. The other one he just manages to catch long enough for that one to jerk the weapon away. This gives him both room and opportunity.

  Ram rides the left-side SEAL, letting his grip on the baton-hand help pull him to his feet. Then he uses both hands to flip the baton, contorting the SEAL’s wrist, freeing the weapon and jerking his enemy forward into a hard pommel-strike to the face, which opens the SEAL up to a similar shot to the bladder. This all takes about one second.

  Ram shifts his captured weapon to his right hand, tears the hood off his head with his left, throwing the sopping hood at SEAL Two’s face to distract him. Ram parries the SEAL’s baton with his own, chops down on the SEAL’s forearm with his free hand, and whacks the SEAL in the face with the charged baton, all faster than I can see. Then he uses the baton like a crowbar to wrap and crank the SEAL’s arm down hard.

  Now the SEAL is a hell of a lot bigger and stronger than he is, so Ram lets the sailor wrestle himself back up. Ram follows him up and—with a hand on either end of the baton—punches the SEAL hard in the face with the butt of the baton, then stabs it into the side of his neck. Just to be sure, he sticks the tip of the baton to the back of the SEAL’s neck and shocks him all the way to the floor. Four seconds.

  Ram spins back into the first SEAL and smacks the baton hard across the back of one of the hands the SEAL is using to guard with. The SEAL goes offensive to try to regain control, lunging for the tackle in the tight space. Ram spins through the lunge like a bullfighter, around behind the SEAL, stabbing the butt of the baton in between his shoulder blades as he passes.

  The SEAL roars—or tries to, because the blow partly knocked the wind out of him—and grabs for his comrade’s lost baton. But when he turns, Ram weaves his own baton through his guard like a fencer and shoves it straight into his open mouth, driving him backwards. The stun charge makes the SEAL’s eyes bug out and he gags violently. It’s amazing he’s still on his feet—he is a SEAL, after all—and he tries a desperate but solid kick, only to get his leg caught in Ram’s free arm. Ram shoves forward, holding on to the kicking leg, driving the SEAL up against the wall and pinning him there. He kicks the SEAL’s supporting leg away but keeps him nailed to the wall until the baton succeeds in shocking him unconscious.

  All the while, Ram’s face is the same cool, calculating mask—despite the brutality of what he’s doing, it looks like he’s playing a game of chess.

  He’s reaching down to collect the second stun baton when the two SEALs who were out in the corridor come running to check out the noise. The first shoves the door open on the scene and goes for his sidearm. Ram hasn’t quite picked up the second baton, but instantly throws the first straight in the SEAL’s face. It’s charged, and gives the sailor enough of a shock to partially blind him. Ram steps in, drops the second baton on the SEAL’s wrist as he’s pulling his gun free of its holster, and somehow manages to catch the first baton bouncing back. Then the two batons are doing this tight, lightning dance. It reminds me of a cross between Japanese Taiko and an old school hard rock drum solo. I count a dozen hits to the face, head, arms, ribs, neck and knees (I have to rerun it five times to catch them all).

  Ram catches the SEAL in mid-collapse, drops one of the batons to get a grip on his gun-hand, and cranks the arm up so that the weapon is pointing back over the SEAL’s right shoulder, just in time for his backup to come running with his own weapon drawn. But his partner has become a combination human shield and gun platform.

  The views shift to the hall cameras. Two shots take the oncoming SEAL’s legs out from under him—the pistols are loaded with stunners, each round delivering more punch than the shock batons on full blast—and he goes face-first into the deck. The SEAL in Ram’s grip tries to struggle—Ram twists the sailor’s own weapon around to shoot him in the side of the neck and drop him (not the head, though—a shot to the skull at that range could be lethal). Then he calmly pumps an extra round into each one’s back to keep them down.

  After that, he goes looking for Burke and the rest of his team.

  “And what the hell was that?” Richards demands after the file video runs. He looks a bit pale, even on the holoscreen.

  “I think it speaks for itself, don’t you?” I give him, just coolly enough to rile him.

  “You put him back there, right back where he came from,” he makes the obvious accusation, “and he lost it.”

  “He didn’t lose anything, Colonel,” I calmly insist.

  “Two of those sailors are still in the infirmary…”

  “They were SEALs,” Ram excuses himself on cue, cool deadpan. “I didn’t think I needed to hold back. Much.”

  I enjoy watching Richards freeze. I’d “forgotten” to tell him that Ram was sitting over in the corner of my office this whole time. So now I expand my video feed to let the Colonel see him: a little battered, bright white gauze taped where the zips cut into his wrists, but otherwise none the worse for wear, sunk into a soft leather armchair—not at all looking like he just endured two days of nonstop professional abuse.

  “Watch the films, Colonel,” I defend. “He avoided crippling or potentially lethal attacks. The training proctors had nothing negative to say. Hell, if he did something like this for real—rescuing his entire team—he’d be getting the Medal of Honor.”

  “But he knew this was training,” Richards criticizes, playing right into the obvious conclusion. “What’s he going to do when it’s not?”

  “Then it’s time we tried him in something live, isn’t it?”

  He doesn’t have a reply for that one. He knows it’s out of his hands.

  “I am not comfortable with this…” he grumbles, then logs out without further complaint like a good soldier.

  I lock eyes with Ram again, trying to see something resembling trust or gratitude. The fact is, he doesn’t feel all that different than he did in the hospital, after we first took him, when he made the deal. Those damned dark-pit eyes of his still give me nothing—they almost look at me the same way they looked at the SEALs who were abusing him.

  “Get some rest, Captain.”