by Ben Bequer
We faced a few difficulties this year that we didn't expect. We lost two people very special to us. My writing partner, Joshua Hoade, lost his mother in March and I lost my mother in law Lucy, in October. I'm sure most of you have faced this kind of loss, and you know that it can wear on you. For my part, my mother in law was as far from the cliché as you can get. She wasn't easy, but there was kindness in her heart, and a selflessness that I couldn't hope to ever understand. I'll miss her.
I was also close to Josh's mother, Veda. She was talkative and opinionated and raunchy, and alive. So very alive. Every experience with the woman was memorable, every conversation. I saw it take a toll on my writing partner, my brother, and I felt helpless that I couldn't do more, couldn't be more, but these things affect us in so many different ways.
We'll hold them dear and carry them with us for all the years to come.
But there's a lot to be thankful for as well. Josh and I are thankful for our families, for our children and for the fact that you’re here with us. It’s humbling and a great honor at the same time.
We’re also thankful we were able to finish book 4. If you've reached this section, you're done reading it, and it's my sincere hope that you enjoyed it as much as Josh and I did in writing it. Blackjack is more than just a character we're throwing down, he's a part of us now and we're indelibly tied to him kind of like Shatner will always be Kirk. We're interested in so many stories, with so many new characters and concepts, but in the end, we always keep coming back to Blackjack. We started with Villain, not expecting anything, really, and were shocked and amazed at the response. This continued into Wayward, and again, you guys were amazing (and patient with our second book struggles). Dead or Alive felt easier, flowed clearer than the previous two, leading to Messiah, which was the easiest of the bunch to write.
But as I mentioned above, other ideas come. We were sidelined by a project called Interstellar Overdive for about a year – writing nearly 1,000 pages of story. IO isn't that far from Blackjack other than being in the future. It's a sci-fi buddy-cop romp with a lot of the same elements and outlook. The idea came at the end of Wayward, and sidelined us for enough that Dead or Alive came out 3 years later. Likewise, we got a killer idea for a tech-thriller that sidelined us after Dead or Alive. By the time we finished the fourth book, two years had passed. We finished Patriots & Tyrants before we were done with Messiah, but we put it on the back burner, as it were. If we had done things right, we should have released it sometime last June.
And going forward, we're probably going to keep that release paradigm. A Blackjack book, something else, then back to Blackjack. Fortunately, we're more on top of things than ever and the next book is well in hand. It's a melding of the energy of the Street Fighter/Tekken games, with the history and legend of Chinese Wuxia movies/stories, and set in modern day San Francisco with elements of Harry Potter. It's Young Adult, but OUR take, and so far, it's the most fun I've had writing.
But after that, we'll return to Blackjack with a brand new story.
It'll start with a wedding.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Extras: Patriots & Tyrants
Michael Grayson knew it was the last time, and while everyone from his partner to his ex would say that a man in his position should not be jumping out of a perfectly good aircraft at 50,000 feet in the middle of the night; there was something simple about plummeting towards the ground at two hundred miles per hour. Scrub away the variables of wind and drag, the small oxygen mask that ensured he could breathe despite his velocity, and the real question was whether the parachute would work. It could fail or he could get tangled in the lines and end up a patch of raspberry syrup dressed in sixty pounds of gear. The real irony was that men in his line of work tried to climb the ranks so they wouldn’t have to jump out of planes anymore, and here he was, king of the hill, doing his best to be the first man on the ground.
The rest of the team followed in near unison, breaking off to preset positions in the fall formation, an important detail for a nighttime HALO drop to ensure none of them tangled their chutes once they deployed. A trailing light at his ankle gave the rest of the team a point to orient with as they raced to the ground. It was impossible to spot from below, designed for the lead man in a night-time HALO drop. The strike team was eight men, two women, and a terrified German shepherd, encased in a molle vest and tied to the rig of her handler. They were out there above him, and that was a comfort – knowing his team was with him, but they were only a small part of the operation.
Based in Miami was Home Team, twenty specialists overseeing Grayson and his team, controlling a dozen drones circling the target zone. They were on a real-time satellite monitor, overseeing the situation strategically, as well as monitoring the individual members of the strike team. Home Team was under the command of Travis Wright at the main office of SSI – Strategic Services International.
Home Team was mostly former military and law enforcement, many of them recovered from serious injuries. They huddled in SSI’s command center, the CIC, they called it, using the term reserved for a warship’s command and information center. Michael had designed the room to emulate an average US Navy vessel and as a result, the lighting was blued and dim which made staring at monitors for hours on end easier. They had readouts from each of the strike team’s mission cameras along with full vital signs. Even Waffles, the German shepherd, was wired for video. They were also in charge of a small team of pilots and technicians operating out of a small, dusty airstrip in Chad, just across the border from where Michael and his teams were operating. Travis and crew were now redirecting the C-130 used for the HALO drop back to base, and assisting on the approach of a trio of old-school UH-1 Iroquois that would recover the strike team.
There lay the rub. The seventy people being utilized in the operation were his employees. Formed with his partner Ritchie McCullough, both of them former operatives in the cause against the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and Saddam, with the hope they could leverage their skill and experience into the fast-growing private military contractor scene. The deal was Michael would handle the Americas, Ritchie would take Europe and Asia, and they would split the Middle East and Africa given scheduling and availability.
They handled all sorts of jobs, executive protective services for the famous or corporate VIPs, military training, as well as weapon and munition acquisition for friendly government forces, and KNR, or kidnap and rescue, and in the company’s infancy it was common for the both of them to travel the globe and take the lead both in the boardroom and in the field. Skip ahead ten years and SSI had shot into the top ten among most successful PMC’s in the world. Ritchie could not wait to step away from the danger of field missions and enjoy the monetary success.
This time, the client was Carlo Brunetti, attorney at law, most recently of Perla-Vasconcelios, based out of the British Virgin Isles, SSI’s primary law firm. He was also a friend, an important member of the firm that SSI turned to for just about everything. The KNR insurance was still at play, but Brunetti was a guy Grayson would have gone after regardless – you take care of your lawyers. So when a Boko Haram associate came forward with information about his location, Michael organized the team and within twenty-four hours they were boots on the ground.
Brunetti’s case was interesting, originally captured off the cruise ship Seabourne Pride coming around Cape Guardafui near the Gulf of Aden. A group of Somali pirates took the Pride and chose him specifically amongst all the other rich passengers. The pirates then sold him to Boko Haram, across the African mainland. Boko operated out of Nigeria, Chad, Niger and Cameroon, more a harassing occupying force in a remote hinterland of West Africa than the insurgency they tried to portray.
Two months and two million dollars in seed money had netted them nothing. A Boko representative would call demanding money, and then shuffle the negotiating team off to another person in the chain. No details, no offers to exchange, no lump sum demand, and most telling, no proof of life. There seemed to be n
o chain of command either, something that set Michael on edge as he tried to buy back the lawyer. They could argue whether or not this particular sect of Boko was gaming him or incompetent later.
Brunetti was coming home.
KNR seldom involved armed incursion. Michael and a team of specialists would inhabit a suite in a hotel close to the kidnapping and buy their client back. It was always a negotiation, bearing in mind the financial limitations of the insurance policy, the violent nature of the kidnapping force, and the importance of the client. It was a zero-sum game, an application of subtle coercion along with the floating of vast amounts of money that eventually led to a number. Nineteen times Michael had led a KNR negotiation, and nineteen times the client had returned home safely.
A voice rang out over comms, “I’m getting an itch on my foot.” Despite the air rushing past as Grayson fell out of the night sky, he could tell who it was. Only Edberg would break communication silence during freefall to complain. “Do any of you guys see me? Can you scratch it for me?”
“Man up Edberg,” Rebecca Gali said. Nicknamed Cyanide, her South African accent was crisp in his ears as she bit back laughter.
“Hey, Grayson, she doesn’t have to talk to me like that.”
“Quit being such a bitch, Edberg,” Cyanide said. “Waffles is less nervous than you.”
“It’s not nerves you crazy bitch,” Edberg said. “And fuck that dog. I think he pissed on the way down and I caught some.”
“Leave Waffles out of this,” said Peanuts, the dog-handler. Edberg’s nickname for Lester Perry came from his habit of always having shit in his teeth as if he had just finished eating a full bag of peanuts.
“Fuck that dog,” Edberg went on. “Seriously Grayson, there’s no reason these people need to be talking to me with such disrespect.”
Edberg was Ravel Rahmed Sultan Khan, the only Muslim member of the crew. American born and raised, the former U.S. Air Force Pararescueman had more jump experience than the rest of them put together.
“Then quit staring at Scratch’s tits all the time,” Cyanide said. “You’re like a fucking drooling dog.”
“They are nice tits,” Edberg said.
“Well, get one look and move on,” Scratch chimed in. She was the other female in the group. Cyanide was a lean and lanky six feet tall, Scratch was the diametric opposite, short and stocky with thick legs and thighs, and a large bust.
“I’m working on it,” Edberg said.
“Edberg, ain’t you in Ramadan or some shit?” said another voice. This was Melvin Joseph “I’m too cool for one of your fucking nicknames, Edberg” Wargacki, native of Church Hill, Tennessee, and prouder than hell of both his hometown and the sing-song accent that, as he put it, was “Laying into the English language with a bit of attitude.”
“It’s not Ramadan, you stupid ignorant fuck.”
“I’m just wondering, buddy, ‘cause it sounds like your blood sugar is down.”
“Shit, you might be right. Scratch, when we get ground side, you can check my vitals.”
“I forgot my rectal thermometer,” she snapped.
“Then use your finger and estimate,” Edberg said, finally breaking into laughter.
“You know what, if this was a serious unit, most of y’all would be court-martialed or worse,” Warren “Oz” Valentine said, in his sugary Georgia accent. The oldest member of the team, Oz had the distinction of knowing Michael Grayson longest, serving as his instructor in BUDs training before joining him in active duty in Afghanistan and Iraq. In addition to serving as a rifleman in Grayson’s unit, he was also in charge of SSI’s training facility in Central Florida, Hell on Earth, as some called it. Its official nickname was far tamer. “Wait ‘til I get you back at The Resort. Gonna have you screaming out your dickhole. You’re not cheesedicking your way through this op, you fucking hear me, wingnut?”
“You want me to do PT right fucking now?” Edberg said. “I’ll do it right now. It’s hard as fuck with all this wind, but I’ll do it. ONE, TWO,”
“Thirty seconds to deploy altitude,” Franklin Lagos said. He was former British SAS and prior to that a belligerent in the mid-90s Rwandan conflict.
“Shut the fuck up, Lagos, I lost count. Fuck, where was I?”
“Jesus Christ, Edberg,” Funko said. “Life is tough, but it’s hella tougher if you’re stupid.”
“Oorah,” the former Marines in the group rang out.
“I have an ancillary question,” Wargacki said. “Does a bigfoot have a regular prick or one of those pink rocket things that dogs have?”
The combined laughter overwhelmed the comms for a second, turning everything to light static.
“Ask Waffles,” Edberg said, fighting back laughter.
“I tell you what, Grayson,” Edberg said. “I don’t know what we’re going to do without you. Lagos is going to turn us into hard men, even Cyanide. I think she might grow a dick.”
“You’d do good to unfuck yourself, and get your shit straight,” Franklin said.
“See what I mean?”
“Come on, guys,” Michael interjected. “This is Franklin’s op. I’m here as a regular squaddie, no more.”
The countdown rolled down to ten seconds, and Franklin started calling it over comms. Grayson felt movement behind him, even if it was impossible for him to actually feel it, sensing his people deploy their chutes. He hesitated, falling a little further to create space and then released the parachute. He felt the subtle vibration along his back as the fabric rushed out of the bag, opening wide and slowing his descent from almost two-hundred miles an hour to less than one fifth that speed in an instant, his intestines trying to squeeze out of his rectum as the straps caught against his chest and pelvis.
“Deploying target light,” he said, unclipping the green light from his boot and letting it fall to the ground. The blinking light acted like a beacon to the rest of the team, giving them a rallying point. They didn’t aim for it on the descent to keep from tangling with each other. Instead, each diver’s altitude and relative location was being monitored back at Home Base, and the silence meant their spread was good and no one was in danger of impact.
Moonlight broke through the heavy cloud cover, and Grayson saw the ground approaching. Bracing to land, he fought with the controllers to bleed off more speed in the last meters before impact. His boots touched ground, his entire body jarred by the force, and a gust of wind caught his chute, dragging him off balance and driving him into a thick copse of spiky brush. He grunted as a rogue branch snapped across his face, rough leaves tearing against his cheek and ear.
“Fuck!”
Laughter.
“Bet you he broke his nose again!” Edberg said.
Grayson released the clasps to his chute, ending the heavy pull forward, but fell down into the coarse brush.
“Fifty says he’s covered in blood,” Cyanide said.
“Hundred,” Oz snapped.
“Make it a thousand, Oz,” said the last member of the team, Drama. “But who’ll take it?” George “Drama” Bloomfield was a former Navy SEAL, like Michael, and also former JSOC operative. He retired earlier than the rest but was one of the first people to join SSI after its formation.
“Good point,” Oz said.
Michael came to his feet furiously, fighting the urge to snap at his team. He touched his face, feeling sticky blood dripping from half a dozen tiny cuts on his cheeks, and pouring from a gash across the bridge of his nose.
“Fuck!” he repeated, seeing figures approaching from the darkness. First to him was Franklin Lagos.
“You alright?” he said. Franklin was a beast of a man, taller even than Michael and wider than a bus, with taut muscle strapped across his chest and arms. “Damn, Michael. Every fucking time...”
Laughter hit him in surround sound as the team landed and made their way to him. Funko and Edberg were first, with Cyanide, Peanuts, Oz and Scratch and the others gathering.
“Oh, hell, boy, look at your fac
e,” Oz said, as Scratch dug into her kit and used a pencil light to illuminate the damage. With her other hand, she wiped blood away with a thick gauze.
“I’m fine, goddammit. Rally up and let’s go,” he snapped, pulling the drop beacon by its tether and disengaging it.
“That’s a nasty laceration on your nose,” Scratch said. “Sure you don’t want me to put a staple or two to stem-“
“Make it fast,” Michael said, standing and looking around. “Headcount?” Scratch dug into her kit and stapled up the slice across the bridge of his nose without bothering to give him a painkiller.
“All here,” Franklin said.
“All done,” Scratch said.
“Just the staples?” Drama said. “That shit’s bleeding a lot.”
“Boss is bound to fuck himself up again, bumping into a shadow,” Edberg said. Scratch shrugged in agreement. No point in closing up the wound now.
“We couldn’t lose Edberg to a chute accident, could we?” Grayson said, slapping the man’s shoulder. “Okay, people. We have a two-click jog to our objective.”
“No time to bleed,” Edberg said. “Badass, boss.”
“Something like that. Okay, let’s get spread and…” Michael’s head ached as he turned to see his team sharing uncomfortable glances. Franklin shook his head, his lips pulled in a tight grimace. “My bad,” he said. “Run the op, Franklin.
“Gear check, people,” Franklin said and the rest of them halted a second before complying. It was a bush league request, but making sure everything worked correctly was never a bad thing.
They were free to use whatever gear they liked so long as the rifle chambered standard 5.56 mm M-4/M-16 rounds for inter-squad magazine swapping using the STANAG standard. Wargacki was the squad heavy, running a 7.62 mm, and loaded down with extra ammunition as a result. There was no standard uniform, but they all wore some variation of the dark, rugged clothes that were most practical for these types of scenarios. All creative licenses had gone into the headgear. Adam Jenkins, dubbed Funko because, in Edberg’s word, ‘you have the biggest fucking head in human history’, always wore a full face mask with a white skull smeared on the black material. Wargacki had a polymer hockey mask with flames airbrushed on it. Michael preferred a shemagh scarf around his neck and face with a tactical helmet with integrated comms, night vision, and camera, and most of the team followed suit. Edberg wore a balaclava with Boba Fett’s mask painted on it. When wearing goggles, the effect was pretty good. Franklin Lagos didn’t wear headgear once they landed, eschewing his dive helmet and any night optics for his traditional red beret. He ‘endured’ the comms gear wrapped around his neck and jutting out of his ear, but he preferred a cleaner feel.