Warrior Knight
Knights of Justice Book 2
By Aarti V Raman
Copyright © 2020 by Aarti Venkatraman
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the author.
Piracy is not cool! Please don’t do it.
Aarti Venkatraman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this book. This is a work of fiction in entirety including the fictional country of San Magellan and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Second Edition, Version 1.0 April 2020
Cover images from Deposit Photos
Cover designed by Merril Anil
Edited and formatted by Aarti Venkatraman
Table of Contents
Books by Aarti V Raman
GEEKS OF C@LTECH
Still Not Over You
Crossing Lines
The Heart of You
Against All Odds
A Tale of Two Christmases: A Geeks of Caltech Novella
ROYALS OF STELLANGARD
The Soldier Prince
A Night Out With Royals: A Royals of Stellangård Novella
MEMORY DUOLOGY
Forgotten Husband
Make Believe Husband
HOT KIND OF WRONG
The Perfect Fake
Roark
More Than You Want
KNIGHTS OF JUSTICE
Guardian Knight
STANDALONES
The Worst Daughter Ever
Days of Our Lives
BOX SET
The Hot Kind of Wrong (A 3-in-1 compilation)
Something Old, Something New: A Desi Readers Adda Anthology
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Dedication
This book is dedicated to:
Mom, the first warrior knight I have ever known, and my own True North.
Bala Maama and Maanasa, two warriors whose light shines on in the night sky forevermore.
Edgar Ramirez who was, is, and will always be Krivi Karthik Iyer for reasons too numerous to count. If you don’t believe me, watch Domino and The Wasp Network.
And Prachi Percy Sharma, a dear writer friend whose unfailing support never amazes me. Love you, sweetheart.
Warrior Knight Playlist
Listen to it here – with a BONUS track.
This is the accompanying playlist for this epically thrilling and heartbreaking story. I sincerely hope you listen to it while reading Krivi and Ziya’s story!
Xx
Aarti
“How do you kill a man who has no Achilles heel? You cut off his foot.”
-Tom Jones.
Prologue
London
Midnight
July 2008
He had to get out.
Krivi Iyer figured that as long as he had breath, bone, blood left he had to try and get out. As long as he could still think, he should get out. He should get out before he snapped. And did something unforgivable.
He ran rhythmically, his feet pounding the pavement, rivers of sweat running down his back, soaking his body, already drying in the cold night air. There were no thoughts here. He didn’t have to be anything here. Not even himself: Krivi Iyer.
Krivi didn’t want to be himself ever again.
His shoes were well-worn, with the tread marks of long usage. His grandmother would have called them scuffed and ruined. His socks were somewhere between the shade of white and pristine white that he tried to aim for when he remembered to do his laundry. The music playing on his mp3 player was pulse-pounding rock.
The more noise filled his head, the less his head hurt.
It was six months to the day, today… and there were no words, nothing that meant anything to him anymore.
They had told him, the price he had to pay for doing what he did: for doing it so well. That his actions had damaging consequences. He’d told this countless times to cocky new recruits during orientation at River House, with a heartless smile and dreams of glory and courage. That they didn’t know what price they had to pay for the glory, the courage and the dreams.
He dreamed of them sometimes.
The fallen. The ones who had gone away forever.
He didn’t believe in either heaven or hell. But he did believe, absolutely, in the right and the wrong. In truth, justice, and freedom.
Most of all, Krivi believed in choice. Except, Gemma hadn’t chosen anything.
Gemma had been bright and cheerful and happy. She’d brought light into his world when he didn’t think he could see anything except black. She’d made him laugh at himself.
Gemma had been everything to him. She’d been light and sunshine itself. She’d made him see what was missing in his life. What he’d never thought about.
Gemma would laugh no more.
And missing her would kill him, he thought while mechanically streaking past the benches at Notting Hill Public Park.
His fear, his anger increased with every step. Dreams that disappeared when he ran, came back to haunt him virulently.
Krivi dropped down on his knees in the middle of the pavement. The concrete grit digging into his skin, making little pores and sticking to his sweaty skin. Rock poured out of ears that should have bled at the appalling noise level. His shoulders were shaking at the abrupt loss of motion.
His hands were shaking too, when he pulled his cell phone out of his shorts pocket and looked blindly at the terse text message.
His mind was still caught up in the past. It was still trapped in a moment where flash and fire and earth exploded. Where worlds stopped, ended. It was caught in a frame of time when a bomb went off in a car and killed not one, not two, but four lives.
Krivi didn’t know how he was going to live with any of it, the ghosts, the memories and sheer anger. Everything hurt right now. Even looking at a message: Application accepted. Briefing in two days. Report to Koenig in Dallas for further instructions.
A part of his mind that wasn’t wrapped in the hard kernel of grief, understood the words. Knew what to make of them. He hated that part of his mind.
The part of his mind that was relief. That rejoiced at one word. Escape.
~~~~~~
On the other side of the world, a man was watching the person torturing him play the old Knife Game.
The game was simple.
You placed your palm on a flat surface, spread your fingers wide, then started moving the knife point in the spaces between the fingers. Slow, slow, fast, faster and then so fast your movements were an indistinct blur. And you did it without taking your eyes off your opponent.
Raoul, watched the knife flash a silver dizzy motion. Tut, tut, tut, tut, tut. The point flashed back and forth, back and forth until he felt physically sick.
He wanted to vomit, but there was nothing inside of him to throw up. He looked at his side of the table, which was a disgusting mass of sick, saliva and blood.
"If you vomit again, I will make you eat it, Raoul," his torturer spoke in a perfectly pleasant voice.
Raoul's chest heaved as he tried to settle his nausea and escape the bonds he was tied in. He was only successful with the first.
The knife paused; the silence deafening.
"Good boy, Raoul," the torturer approved. "Now if only you’d been a good boy yesterday and not blabbed to the pretty chica
."
Sweat poured from Raoul’s temples. "Madre dio! She is nothing. She is a stripper. She will not talk, I promise. On my mother, I swear."
His torturer gave a cold, killer’s smile. The knife point gleamed like a jewel as the torturer twisted the blade this way and that. A slow, concerted movement that was hypnotic in its grace.
"Your mother is dead, Raoul," the torturer said softly. "You know that. So is Maria. You know that too."
"Spare me then. Spare me, please!"
Raoul started babbling in a mixture of Portuguese and English - prayers, incantations, and invocations. His tears mixing with the blood flowing from his busted eye. He was blind in one eye because of the force with which the torturer had simply heaved a rock paperweight at it.
But he could live with the blindness. He could live.
The torturer gave him a sharp look. "I am bored." It was a flat statement.
Raoul was still screaming obscenities when the knife struck, sure and true. Piercing the jugular and blood and life poured out of Raoul: The Canary Who Sang.
~~~~~~
The terrorist was called The Woodpecker.
The terrorist’s specialty was bombs in public places. It was his signature and his calling card rolled together in a burning mass of twisted metal and humanity.
The file on The Woodpecker was three inches thick, tying the terrorist to so many international bombings that the organization was getting worried now. No one terrorist was supposed to be such an efficient, soulless killer.
The terrorist’s father, the terrorist’s mentor looked at his child’s file, filled with the exploits of a lifetime of terror and mercenary killing. He had encouraged… honed the skill, the spark, the madness that had led to the creation of this file.
The Woodpecker - the bird that chipped and chipped away at the branch in a tree to make a nest for herself and her chicks.
The Woodpecker who never gave up.
The man shut the file closed and leaned back in his swivel chair. He looked out at the cloudless blue skies that denoted summer on the beach. He felt a weight around his heart, an organ he had forgotten existed. He tried to name the emotion that was weighing down his heart and identified it as…
Regret.
Tom Jones smiled; a regretful smile as the gears of his devious, devious mind started moving.
He picked up a sat-phone, made a call and set his plan in motion.
Things couldn’t be helped anymore. They had to change. And change was good.
He had always believed so.
STEP ONE: IDENTIFICATION
2011-2012
One
It was said that God himself lived in these hills surrounding the northwest frontier of India. The air was purer than air, clean and pure oxygen. The waters gleamed an unholy turquoise blue; the sky was an infinite, uniform blue. The horizon was a stretch of land and sky that met as far back as the naked eye could see.
This nature’s paradise was called Ladakh.
It was also home to some of the worst atrocities humanity had committed against itself.
Ladakh was on the very border that separated India from its neighboring countries situated in Jammu and Kashmir. It was fair game, for all the neighbors that wanted to encroach and possess it. Although, by some miracle, Ladakh itself had escaped being the target of the constant cross-border violence that raged in the most turbulent political state in India, nearby Kargil was not so lucky.
Kargil, and the rest of Kashmir, was home to war and fallen heroes in the last decades.
It was a beautiful part of the country that formed the crown jewel: the Himalayas. It was in demand, for the territory was valuable too. The lakes on the mountains provided special metals mined for five times their value in the free world, and more in the black markets.
The scenery was so stunning; it actually took your breath away.
Ladakh was not known for lush greenery and foliage; it was as much dessert and sand as it was flowing streams and lovely air. The land and people were a study in contrasts.
The team of six men who entered a lonely isolated cave on one such hillock on the roughest terrain did not pause to look at the stunning, contrasting scenery. They were dressed in green-black camo outfits that just barely hid them in the approaching dawn.
The team leader, with black marks on his face, stopped at the mouth of the cave, and indicated the two next to him to go ahead.
The two men removed tiny chem lights, lit them by breaking them and sprinted inside like black ghosts. They were the recon guys – who’d report intel on the situation inside the labyrinthine caves. The team leader marked their position on a tiny handheld device, two green dots racing away like pinballs through the black screen.
There were four more dots on the tiny handheld, one for each man on the mission.
A radio crackled to life as the green dots stopped and the team leader tapped on an ear-bud and spoke quietly. “Yeah?” he asked.
“Route’s clear. Can’t see the target, but there are no unknowns out too. Intel seems fine. These guys do not do rounds.”
“They left no one to guard the target?”
The leader’s voice was expressionless, ghost-like in the early morning air. If he was surprised at all, he didn’t let it show. Surprises were not part of the package on retrieval missions; their intel had to be one hundred percent correct or lives could be lost.
And intel was someone would be left behind to guard the target.
Kidnapping and Ransom was tricky work at best, fucked up at worst.
“Not as far as I can see. I could check again, do sweeps.”
“Do it.”
The team leader held the handheld out, so his team mates could also have a view of the green dots moving around in several directions, checking for guards with the heat-signature scopes on their sniper rifles.
Recon guys had a hard job, they went in first, sometimes with no knowledge of what was going to meet them, so they only packed light ammo: sub-machines with automatic loading and throwing knives.
The rear guard carried firepower, grenade launchers that could level a school building. But the launcher had to be assembled, and that could take up to three minutes, depending on the situation and how many limbs the rear guard had left when the launcher was called for.
The team leader was neither recon, nor rear guard.
He and his partner were the guys in the middle of the action. The ones who had to hold it together when things went to hell, as they sometimes did. They had the hardest task of all: retrieval of the package, at any cost. Sometimes, they had to pay the cost with life and limb.
So far, this mission was routine, apart from the glitch of there being no one to guard the target.
Were all the kidnappers converging at the ransom drop off point (DP), while the industrialist father paid off ten crores for his sixteen year-old daughter who had been taken from her boarding school in Dehradun? Intel suggested there were ten of them, in the team. So that meant a cool crore for each of them.
And the ransom drop off point was in the middle of the market in downtown Leh, where plenty of cover could be provided for both the good and bad guys. But, regardless of how thoroughly the kidnappers wanted to cover their asses at the DP, would they be so overconfident as to leave their location unguarded, along with the target inside?
No.
“Boss?” The radio crackled again.
“Yeah, Anil?”
“We can hear screams. They’re pretty loud.”
“Okay.”
“Boss?” Anil waited for instructions.
The team leader exhaled. “The coast is clear. I’m coming in. Rear guard waits here and guards the entrance. Hopefully we can be in and out in five.”
“Roger that.”
The team leader looked at the four men around him and murmured, “Cover the entrance. If you see movement, radio in. Hold off as long as you can in the event of serious trouble.”
He nodded at the man holding a long
, metal case that looked like it could hold an accordion. “Worst comes to worst, level the place.”
The man stroked the case, as he would a particularly loved pet. “Yeah, we got it, boss. Go, save the girl. Like you always do.”
The team leader didn’t crack a smile at the moment of levity, he just fixed his second-in-command with a myopic stare and said, “Evac the girl however you can. That’s a priority.”
“Boss.”
He handed the tracking device to his beta. Then he switched his scope on and went in low; a wraith all in black, melding into the darkness, becoming one with it. No one could even hear him breathe. But they weren’t supposed to.
Darkness was his companion, his lover. He was all right in the dark.
~~~~~
The leader walked because the cave roof was about fifteen meters in height, which gave him enough room to move in. He’d already told the recon guys that he was moving in and arriving at rendezvous point in two.
The cave sloped off east, and then opened in three directions. He consulted a GPS strapped to his hand and took the third one. The cave became danker; smelling musty. His combat boots made no footfalls as he moved at a steady clip, ready to anticipate any trouble at any moment.
The cave split again in two directions, he again consulted his GPS and moved further in, until he came to a well-lit passage, and saw the shadows of both of his men. They were at the ready, even though their weapons were held loosely at their side.
“Boss?” Anil spoke in his ear.
“Yeah.” The leader slung his own weapon on his shoulder and strode forward. “Behind you.”
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