War of Shadows

by Leo J. Maloney

  Morgan stood on no ceremony or Queensberry Rules. He unceremoniously raised his revolver, then froze. He could find no holes in their head to toe outfits. And with only five rounds in the Ruger, he couldn’t afford to waste bullets on the bulletproof. He took a quick look around, and found what he was hoping for. He picked up the nearest high-tech weapon that wasn’t damaged by the explosion.

  Just his luck, it was the pin-shooter, which was the smallest, sleekest and least easily-damaged of the three armaments. Morgan grimaced since the polymerized metal exterior was still hot from the flames. But short of barbecuing his flesh, he wasn’t about to drop it now.

  If these chuckleheads could use them, so could he. Sure enough, the thing had a trigger, and there certainly hadn’t been enough time to engage any safety or similar security device. Morgan pointed the barrel at them, making the rifle an extension of his arm, and let his forefinger do the rest.

  The pin-shooter gave a satisfying burp, letting Morgan feel some sort of small pyro charge in the shell engage. Then, as if he had drawn a straight line between the barrel and the first target’s forehead, he got a glimpse of a needle-thin missile with a shining top making the same sort of hairline fracture in the man’s helmet visor that it had in the townhouse’s windows. The assassin went down and stayed down.

  Morgan brought his aim over to the next one trying to get up. As the smoke and dust around them cleared, Morgan got the undeniable feeling that he had stepped into a zombie killer videogame. Pin-pointing the same place on the second man’s visor as he had on the first, he pulled the trigger a second time. That man went down as if yanked by a wire attached to Satan’s thumb.

  Now that he was prepared for it, there was no missing the needle’s shining crown. Diamond-tipped, Morgan guessed, which explained how the cunning, seemingly rocket-powered, pins could pierce level ten bulletproofing. Despite all the man-made materials scientists came up with, diamond was still considered the hardest thing on Earth.

  By then the third man was staggering to his feet, pulling up what Morgan assumed was the laser Amina had planned to execute him with. He couldn’t help but let the smallest flicker of a grin play on his lips as he brought his pilfered pin-shooter to bear.

  Live by the laser, die by the laser, he thought with vengeful irony, and pulled the trigger just as the man got his own death ray to waist level.

  Nothing happened.

  Morgan stiffened, realizing his pin-shooter was out of pins.

  He looked down at it, as if betrayed, then his eyes scrambled around to try finding another. There was nothing he could see, so he looked back at the third assassin, who, by then, had reached his unsteady feet and was leveling the domino shape that served as the weapon’s barrel at Morgan.

  There was little else Dan could do. He hurled the pin-shooter at the man like a javelin, ducked, brought up his Ruger, and charged in a tight curve.

  The assassin had to take a shaky step to avoid the spear, but that didn’t stop him from firing the laser. Like a sniper’s bullet that the victim never heard, Morgan thought that if he didn’t feel it, it hadn’t hit him. He hadn’t expected to see it, but he did hear something crackling behind him.

  Morgan kept running, but with his revolver in front of him. The assassin started shifting the laser’s barrel toward him, so Morgan decided it was better to kiss his bullets goodbye than himself. He watched as the slugs slammed into the man’s helmet and chest like fists, knocking the killer back.

  Just as he managed to keep his feet, Morgan followed the bullets with himself, slamming into the man like a battering ram. The result was gratifying. The man flew back, the laser spinning from his hands.

  Morgan shoved the Ruger in his pocket and caught the rifle in midair. As the man splayed out near the mouth of the alley, Morgan brought the new gun to bear, centered the domino-sized rectangle in the middle of the man’s body, and pulled the trigger.

  The result almost made him sick, despite having seen the aftermath of many a battlefield. The weapon opened the assassin up like a starving man tearing open a baked potato. Morgan remembered that this might have been one of the men who helped blow up his house. His gaze hardened and he marched toward the street, looking for any more like him.

  He stopped when he saw a smaller, splayed, figure where the alley wall met the sidewalk beyond. Her face was ash-covered and her short hair was charred, but there was no mistaking the Serbian mercenary. The car’s detonation must have thrown her like a spoiled child’s rag doll.

  Fine, Morgan thought as he took a step toward her. Now she knows how it feels. Unlike the others, he was keeping her for an intensely thorough interrogation.

  But one step was all he got. As he bent to grab her, the corner of the building separating the two shattered. Morgan quickly back-tracked, bringing the rifle up as he saw what a combination of pins, lasers, and air fists could do to wood, concrete, brick, and even iron work.

  He ignored the explosions to see where they were coming from. Appearing out of the shadows, fog, smoke, and dust came Amina’s back-up—three more helmeted, uniformed killers, with one weapon each.

  Morgan felt an urge to take them on, but he did not like the odds, nor the chances that his own laser device might hit someone other than them. Having seen what it did to its previous victim, who knew how many walls it could pierce before dissipating?

  Morgan turned to run the other way. He stopped again when he saw three more silhouettes coming from the other end of the alley, each holding similar weaponry.

  Of course. After what she had already accomplished on his work and life, why wouldn’t the Serbian she-devil have reinforcements of reinforcements of reinforcements?

  Morgan stopped again when he felt something under his foot. He almost laughed when he saw it was his Walther PPK. He hefted it as he turned toward the mistress tunnel. He hadn’t even gotten a step when the passageway turned into a mass of holes, tears, and punctures.

  Morgan froze once again, stepped back and put his hands up. He turned slowly to see the new helmeted trio helping Amina to her feet as the book-ending trio made their way around what was left of the Mustang, each one of them keeping the tips of their weapons centered on his face or chest. To his own surprise, Morgan found himself chuckling.

  “What’s so funny, govnojedno?”

  Morgan turned his head to look at Amina, who, if he guessed correctly, just called him a piece of crap. After all, on the way back from the dark territory and his first run-in with her, his daughter Alex and partner Cougar had filled him in on some of the more colorful epithets of Serbia.

  Morgan looked at the mercenary’s fatigued, scratched face and the way her expression mixed clear resentment with a strange, angry, respect, and he felt his grin widen.

  “I couldn’t figure it out, slatki,” he said with far more humor than he felt. “Blow up my house, blow up my headquarters, sure, that I understand. But blow up my car? And right here, giving me a chance to fight back? That I couldn’t figure …until I looked at your šarmantan face.”

  His using the words for “sweetie” and “charming” seemed to affect her like gentle slaps to awaken the groggy. She shook her head, her eyebrows arching downward. “What are you talking about, idiot?”

  That term needed no translation. “I’m talking about this little display of pique,” he said back, feeling he had nothing to lose as he motioned toward the car. “The only reason I can come up with is that you wanted to destroy everything I love right in my face.” He spoke slowly as if he were dealing with a rebellious teenager. “You’re taking this way too personally, slatki.”

  It looked like the mercenary was going to take the bait, giving Morgan even more precious time, but then the sound of distant sirens reached all their ears. Shrill, three-tone sirens, getting stronger by the second.

  Amina pulled herself free of the man who had been helping steady her. “Idiot!” she repeated
. “I don’t have time for this.” She turned back to the mouth of the alley and waved her other arm dismissively. “Someone kill this supak and let’s get out of here.”

  When Morgan saw her try to cover the look of consternation on her face, he realized that the car’s double explosion might have stymied her as much as it had surprised him.

  A man in front of him raised a laser toward his nose. Dan’s eyes widened and jaw dropped.

  “Here we go again,” Morgan muttered, but instead of those being his last words, he watched as the man’s head erupted like a watermelon hit by a sledge hammer.

  Chapter 7

  Dan Morgan was grateful, but he wasn’t surprised by his last-second stay of execution. In fact, he had been more than half expecting it—or something like it—ever since his Mustang had leaped into the air. After all, that had obviously been no accident. Besides, he didn’t need to freeze and gawp—he had seen this kind of cantaloupe-bursting eruption before, on both military and espionage battlefields.

  If he had previously suspected Amina’s minions were amateurs, he was all but certain of it now, as they practically spun in place, desperately trying to find somewhere to shoot back and all but ignoring the man who had just been about to firing-squad Morgan …not to mention Morgan himself. Instead, only Morgan witnessed the executioner slowly toppling over, the smoking crater where his head had been pumping guts as his death ray slipped from his fingers.

  Assholes, Morgan thought, keeping an eye on the scattering assassins. They should have finished their crony’s job before stumbling around, but their stupidity was another thing he was grateful for. He only hoped they didn’t start indiscriminately spraying the surrounding brownstones with laser, needle, and air-punching power.

  These thoughts flashed into his brain as he lurched toward the executioner’s fallen weapon. As if impelled by karma to mix bad luck with good, an assassin’s foot sent it clattering away. Morgan’s eyes swept the sky for the source of the head-exploding shot.

  Morgan wasn’t about to go chasing after the rifle, not with possible executioners all around him. And, although his fingers ached for his Walther or Ruger, he knew these guys were still wearing bulletproof helmets and clothes. He wondered if their boots were bulletproof too, but didn’t want to waste a round or attract attention finding out.

  Instead, he decided to continue the cycle of revenge with the nearest weapons to him—namely, what was left of his car. Seemingly as if he hadn’t even paused to think about it, Morgan scooped up a twisted, jagged hunk of the Mustang’s step bumper, ignored the heat burning his hands, and swung it into the head of the man nearest him, right where the guy’s jawbone and throat met under his helmet. It was perfectly placed and vehemently swung—so vehemently, in fact, that Morgan felt, more than saw, the man’s neck break.

  By then Morgan had already moved on to the next idiot nearest him. Not being an idiot himself, he left the step bumper where it had lodged between the lip of the first man’s helmet and throat. Instead, Morgan scooped up a jagged length of a windshield wiper and used it as an arrow to slam into the submaxillary triangle of the next man’s chin with enough angry vengeance to lift the bastard off his feet.

  Morgan took only a micro-second to “enjoy” the feeling of the windshield wiper tearing through the man’s cricoid and thyroid cartilage before lodging in his hyoid bone, then moved on rapidly to grab the spare tire’s crowbar where it had been spit at the base of the alley’s far wall. But by then, others were noticing the swath of destruction that Morgan was leaving in his wake. His heedless, not headless, targets who had been scanning the horizon and the skies, were now turning toward him and bringing their own weapons to bear.

  Morgan could tell he wouldn’t get to the next guy before he brought up his needle gun, but it was too late to stop his momentum. Trying to dodge or duck would be more destructive to his bones and ligaments than just plowing on. Just as it seemed he would slam his own head into the hostile weapon, the man’s helmet, then his head, tore open as if by a giant’s hands.

  Morgan didn’t have time to thank his guardian giant before he swung the car jack crowbar through the dissipating, missile-torn, bones, blood, and brains—right into the helmeted skull of the assassin behind the sniper-shot victim, who was far more surprised than Morgan. So surprised, in fact, that he all but spun in a tight, mid-air somersault, landing on his feet like a seasoned acrobat.

  That, in turn, surprised Morgan. Worse, it threw the Zeta operative off balance, and he spun to his back on the ground. Morgan found himself lying on a bed of the ruined, still smoking, still hot Mustang skeleton. From that vantage point he got a split second to restudy the situation.

  The bulk of the assassins were still lurching around like homicidal zombies, waving their weapons like angry villagers storming a monster’s castle. Morgan saw the man he had just crowbarred stumble and fall, slamming hard on his side, his laser rifle skittering away toward Pinckney Street.

  Enough with the Mustang guts, he thought, let me really put the rest of these babies to bed. Inspired by the seemingly seasoned acrobat, Morgan vaulted into a crouch, then continued the motion to dive toward the fallen death ray, fully intending to grab it, somersault, roll to his feet, and start shooting.

  It didn’t happen that way. Just as it seemed his fingers would clamp on the rifle, a leg speared between his outstretched arms, and a booted foot connected with his chest. Morgan grunted as his rib cage seemed to compress around his inner organs. His forward momentum was halted, then reversed. He found himself flying back, just inches off the ground, before his back slammed down and he slid back into the ashen burial ground of his car.

  He couldn’t afford to take any time to deal with the pain, so he didn’t. The difference in that half-second saved his life—again. So he was halfway up when the Serbian whirling dervish was back on him. It seemed as if the vicious mercenary had recovered enough from the initial surprise explosion to get back into the fray.

  “Želiteneštoučinitiispravno,” he heard her seethe, “uradi to sami.”

  If you want something done right, do it yourself.

  It was lucky that Morgan’s muscle memory had been so well honed by trainers and enemies alike. If he had dealt with this new flurry of punches and kicks in a fully conscious way, it was most likely that he would already be down for the count. Only in this alley fight, there would be no ten count—only a brutal, battering death.

  Even Amina seemed surprised that the man managed to withstand, even avoid, her renewed assault. The Morgan she remembered was a punching bag—albeit a punching bag inside a rocketing locomotive who had just jumped down from an expertly, even brilliantly, piloted helicopter just above them.

  “You’re an idiot fighter,” she murmured, as if trying to convince herself.

  They both stilled. They seemed to be alone in the alley, in the center of some sort of mind palace coliseum. Morgan knew how Roman gladiators must have felt, standing in the center of a circle, surrounded by tens of thousands, yet still only seeing the single opponent in front of them.

  Then the moment was over.

  “C’mon, macho man,” he heard Amina spit as she took a sharp step forward. Morgan took a mirroring step back, his back thudding against another person’s spine. That helmeted assassin brought his weapon around as Amina brought her fingers forward like a lance to try tearing Morgan’s eyes out. Then the assassin’s helmet shattered like glass and his head practically wrenched off his own neck like another watermelon hit by another sledgehammer.

  Morgan managed to avoid the mercenary’s fingers, watching them get caught in the storm of blood, bone, and brains instead. Despite her ruthlessness, the mercenary couldn’t help but recoil, giving Morgan another second to regain his bearings. He saw one of the few remaining assassins with his back against the wall opposite him. But as the man swung his own weapon up and around, his head, too, went the way of the watermelon. />
  Now pretty much everyone in the alley knew the score. Try to kill the unhelmeted guy, get your head blown off by some unseen, extremely skilled sniper.

  Unable to quell a grim glee, Morgan jerked his face back toward Amina with a tight, wicked grin. But when he came at her, she responded in the opposite direction. He tried coming at her from the right, and she, again, mirrored him. He feinted to the left, but she wasn’t falling for it, remaining opposite him. Just as he realized that she was purposely, and expertly, making sure that the sniper would have to shoot through Morgan to get to her, she sped toward him like a pouncing cheetah.

  The next few seconds were both amazing and macabre. All Morgan thought he’d have to do was cock his head, giving the sniper a clear shot, but Amina mirrored that too. He tried twisting around, but Amina also copied that movement. And all the while, her hands and feet were stabbing out, connecting with his throat and just under his right knee.

  Morgan choked and fell to both his knees. Amina was there too, aping his exact position like a sadistic nun counseling a fallen supplicant. He looked into her cruel eyes, his own eyes tearing. He didn’t know what she was going to do next: cup his chin or tear it off.

  “Your little sniper can’t save you,” she hissed into his face as a short, wicked knife seemed to appear from her left fist like a deadly snake’s tongue. Normally she would’ve gripped the back of his neck to draw him closer to the blade’s kiss, but she didn’t want to risk her fingers being shot off.

  “Yeah,” Morgan growled back at her. “But the cops can.”

  That was just enough. She became aware of what he had let himself hear mere seconds ago. The sirens of the Boston Police. They were still too far away to prevent a split-second stabbing, but they were close enough to break her concentration.

  Her eyes flitted away, up and to the right, and that was all he needed. His own boot knife was in his right hand and his blackjack was in his left. They met in the middle, and although the Serbian was wicked fast, she wasn’t fast enough to completely avoid the double-edged coated stainless steel spear point of the Hostage Rescue Team blade, or the eleven-ounce molded lead weight encased in heavy gauge leather.