Badger Games

by Jon A. Jackson

  Boz reconsidered. The narrow path had been quite scary when they were farther up. Now that they were only twenty feet or so from the ground below, as rocky and jagged as it looked, he felt much more secure. Even if he fell here, the worst that was likely to happen was a broken leg, not death. The thought of climbing all the way back up there, in his spacey condition, was not appealing. He figured he could cover Kibosh with the rifle, in case he tried to escape … but what if he ducked back into the mountain? There was no way he was going to go back in there after him.

  “To hell with it,” he said. “I’ll get more at the house. Come on, let’s go.”

  The bottle had crashed not far from Joe. It had startled him, then he’d realized what it was—just Boz heaving an empty bottle. He lay there, his face still down. Finally, he dared to peek upward. The men were moving. But they had made the turn and were coming his way. He was lying in the open, no real cover, just small rocks not much bigger than a bushel basket nearby. And the sun was racing down the face of the cliff. If it reached him he would be too obvious to be missed, unless the men had already passed. He lay still and begged Kibosh mentally to hasten, get past him.

  A gentle breeze, stirred by the warming air above, began to shift the still dense mist off the river and toward the cliff. The cold fog rolled over Joe.

  Oh, yes, he breathed. Now he could hear the men’s shoes scraping on the path. He glanced at the H&K. It was set on automatic fire. The clip would empty in a second. Did he dare to set it on the three-shot cycle? Would it make a noise? He decided against it.

  The steps came closer. Somehow Joe kept his face down. The mist helped. They were abreast of him. Moved another step beyond. He scrambled to his feet.

  “Drop it!” Joe yelled.

  Boz spun, lost his footing for a second, and reeled back against the cliff, sitting down roughly. He hoisted the rifle to his shoulder, pointing in Joe’s direction—the scope was a nuisance at this range. Kibosh stooped, found a rock, and hurled it at Boz. It struck him on the shoulder as he fired, the shot going wild. Boz swore, racked the bolt back and forward to bring another cartridge into the chamber. Kibosh began to run down the ramp, toward Paulie’s position. Boz looked first in the direction of Joe’s voice, but all he saw was mist. He turned toward the running Kibosh and lifted the rifle.

  Frank fired, a full clip of .223-caliber bullets. The rifle made a continuous string of flat punching noises. The bullets spanged off the rocks above and to the left of Boz.

  When Boz slipped, Joe had found that his target was obscured by the rocks in front of him. He scrambled up, slipping and scraping his ankle and lurching against another sharp rock, desperately seeking an angle of fire.

  Boz turned and raced back up the path, in a crouch. Joe twisted, off balance, and pulled the trigger on the H&K, spewing an entire thirty-shot clip into the cliff face in three seconds. In his haste, he’d forgotten the autofire.

  He scrambled after Boz, ejecting the clip and finding another, stumbling, half-falling. He had to stop to jam the clip home. And now he discovered a further difficulty: how to get up onto the ramp? Above him, he could see that Boz had made the turn and was chugging rather more slowly up toward the cave entrance. He could even hear the man’s gasping breath.

  Joe clambered onto a boulder, then hopped to another. The H&K was an annoyance, but he wasn’t about to abandon it. Behind him he could hear Frank, who had finally remembered Joe’s instruction of how to put another clip into the Stoner rifle, and also to switch to semiautomatic fire: he was firing slowly spaced shots—light, cracking shots, the bullets ringing off the rocks. His angle of fire would not provide much of a target, Joe knew. Then he heard a loud crack from above as Boz fired back, followed by the racking of the bolt.

  Joe hauled himself onto the path, on his belly, swinging his leg up, confident that Boz couldn’t have a fair shot at him. He got to his feet and raced up the path.

  He made the turn and started up the longer run of the ramp. Far ahead, he could see Boz laboring, crouching with one hand against the cliff face, the rifle in the other. Joe stopped and yanked out the retractable skeletal buttstock and took aim, taking care this time to move the fire selector to single fire. He fired four evenly spaced shots, to no visible effect. Then Boz disappeared.

  Joe raced on, his breath tearing in his throat. When he reached the top he stopped short of the mouth of the opening. Oh, for a grenade, he thought. Boz was in an unassailable position. Joe had no idea how the tunnel lay, but he supposed that it ran straight back for at least a short distance. Boz could take his stand there, and if he could work the bolt fast enough, he’d be able to shoot three, four, maybe five attackers, who would have to enter more or less one at a time.

  “Boz!” he called. “It’s no use. You might as well save us all some trouble. You can’t come out and you’ll never make it back. We’ve got the other end blocked.”

  There was no answer. Joe hadn’t expected one. He listened. All he could hear was the breeze and an occasional stone rattling down the cliff from above. He leaned against the cliff to recover his breath and to rest his aching legs. He looked off at the view, the sun over the mountains to the east turning the trees to green from black, a raven soaring, the silvery thread of the river in the distance.

  If I had a cowboy hat, he thought, I’d hang it on the barrel and extend it out to invite a shot. But he had no hat. He wiped his brow and waited for Frank, trudging up the path, followed by Helen. There was no need for them to hurry, they knew.

  When Frank arrived he rested his back against the cliff and breathed for a minute, then straightened and said, “Sorry, Joe. I’m not such a good shot.”

  Joe smiled wryly. “Ah, you know how it is … you take it out of a case, throw it in the back of the car, take it out … the sights get totally out of whack. Anyway, it’s a hell of a shot to hit a running target at that range. You did fine.” Joe knew that Frank was never going to actually fire at Boz, but any kind of fire was helpful.

  He looked down at the H&K, moved the lever to the three-shot position. “I think he’s gone in deep,” he said. “Probably thinks he can walk all the way back. But we have to find out. I’m going to jump across to that opposite wall, low, firing bursts. When I go, you just stick the barrel in the entry and let a whole clip rip. Okay?”

  Frank looked at him, his face streaked with sweat and dust, his glasses smeared. “Give me another minute,” he said. He breathed deeply, checking the clip. He took it out, decided to replace it with a full one, then delved in his pockets for cartridges to reload the partially depleted one. He stuffed that one in his shirt pocket. “Okay,” he said.

  Joe nodded and dove for the opposite side of the opening, firing as he went, then flattening himself as best he could against the wall while Frank stuck the Stoner around the corner and emptied a full clip into the drift.

  No response. Joe got to his feet and moved into the drift. He could see now that the drift angled upward. Their shots would have struck the floor perhaps twenty feet within. Frank entered beside him, inserting a fresh clip and racking the slide back and forward.

  “Got our hands full now,” he said.

  Helen arrived and peeped in. “Now do we call the colonel?” she said.

  “No,” Joe said. “It would take a company of troops to get him out. The colonel won’t send them. But”—he smiled wearily at both of them—“at least we’re out here, and Bazok isn’t. We know where he has to come out. Don’t we?”

  “Kibosh knows,” Helen said. “He’s down there, being comforted by Paulie.”

  “You want to stay here?” Joe said to Helen. “I’ll go down and talk to him.”

  “Take your time,” Helen said, “but someone better bring me some water, pretty soon, and maybe some coffee. A doughnut would be nice, although the thought of it gags me at the moment.”

  Kibosh had recovered when Joe found him with Paulie. Joe explained the situation to them. They listened to Kibosh’s account of the nightmarish t
rek.

  “I don’t b’lieve he’ll git very far,” Kibosh said. “He was awful scared in there, panicky. An’ he didn’ seem to have any notion of the signs I made. Been drinkin’ awful heavy, too, since we got up yesterday mornin’. Lord, I didn’ know if I’d see this mornin’. I’m grateful to ye.”

  In response to Joe’s careful questioning, Kibosh opined that Boz might get no farther than a few hundred feet into the interlocked drifts and shafts of the mines. “He’s got a horror of it,” he said. “It’s a real hell to him. But the man’s got guts, ye gotta give him that. The thing of it is, he could stumble on one a them other passages and find his way out, on this side. I don’t know how many exits there could be. Probably not more’n a half dozen that a man could get through. I never explored the whole thing, not on this side. But I reckon he won’t find none a them. I reckon he’ll give out, afore too long. Did he snatch up that pack of mine?”

  Joe said he hadn’t seen the pack. “What was in it?”

  “About three a them packs of Twinkies,” Kibosh said, “a jug a water, a fif’ a whiskey—he’ll be glad a that—some rope. Lessee, what else?” He thought. “Oh, a can a sardines. A little jar a them pickles, whatcha call ’em, gherkins. Some matches, my good pipe, and some terbaccy. That’s about it.”

  “Pickles?” Joe said.

  “I jist grabbed ’em off the shelf,” Kibosh said. “An’ the flashlights, a course. Two of ’em.”

  Joe asked which was the most likely alternate exit. Kibosh pointed downstream. There was a very old mine down that way that he had actually taken the time to investigate. He was pretty sure it closed off before it reached a drift that would communicate with the one Boz was in. But it was possible that if it wasn’t much of cave-in, a person could get through. If he was desperate enough.

  “He’s desperate enough,” Joe said. “Come on, we’ll take a look.”

  Kibosh sighed. “I’m dead beat,” he said. “I could use some grub. An’ we’d need some flashlights.”

  Joe nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “We better regroup. Boz is in there, though, and aching to get out, I’m sure. I think you’re right—he won’t try to make it out the other side. Paulie, can you take Kibosh back to the house and get what we need? Helen and Frank and I will stay here, keep watch. Oh, and try to get through to Jammie, explain what happened. I think she can come on over. I’m with Kibosh … Boz won’t try to backtrack.”

  Parannoniac Arrest

  Colonel Tucker was in his office for hours before he received a call from the deputy director of operations. In that time he did little more than sit and think, doodling with a pencil on a pad while he tried to sort out the meaning of Ostropaki’s reappearance, and the possible problems that lay ahead.

  The obvious inference was that Ostropaki had lied, that the whole operation had been a setup, including “Franko.” Ostropaki must have been working with the drug dealers—if not from the start, then at least for some time. They had colluded to set up this “interdiction” operation in order to mask their real trade routes. It was a shell game. And when the war began to get too close, they shut it down, by “eliminating” first Ostropaki, then “Franko.” The colonel wondered if there had ever been a real “Franko,” or if that was just fiction, too. If so, little wonder that the redoubtable Joe Service had been unable to find this mysterious nonperson.

  He got on the computer and logged in to see some files on the operation. He jotted down a column of figures representing drugs seized, along with money, in the various intercepts of this operation. The whole thing had run for more than two years. Counting seizures in ports, on the sea, in Italy, and so on, he came up with a quick rough figure of more than two thousand kilos of heroin and opium, plus upwards of a million dollars in actual cash of various denominations. More than a dozen drug runners had been arrested and prosecuted; others were killed in fleeing, or in violent confrontations. Vehicles were impounded, including boats. All of this with no loss of life to any agents of the DEA, except the “adjunct agents,” Ostropaki and “Franko.”

  There was no denying it: the “Pannonian Putsch,” as some DEA wag had dubbed it, invoking the ancient Roman term for those hinterlands of the empire, had been a resounding success. In fact, some had taken to calling it the “Parannoniac Arrest,” playing on the constant atmosphere of distrust and betrayal that had seemed so typical of Balkan dealings.

  He wrote PANNONIA in large block letters on his pad, then began to analyze the figures again. Quite a few of those seizures were not verified, merely estimated. This was particularly true of the seizures at sea, where items were frequently cast overboard during chases by coast patrols and/or international police agencies. And there was frequently no real verification that all of the materials seized were analyzed before destruction or being turned over to local authorities—conceivably a large percentage could have been other substances, only resembling a bag of heroin, say.

  Quite a few of the people arrested were highly expendable types, either untrustworthy or incompetent, and no loss to the smugglers. There were, in fact, no major figures in the trade arrested and prosecuted. Indeed, the major losses to the campaign were Ostropaki and “Franko.” Even the million-plus dollars dwindled to what might be considered a normal loss in this trade, the cost of doing business.

  When looked at with that kind of harshly critical eye, the Pannonian Putsch began to look like a farcical Keystone Kops raid. But the colonel was unconvinced. Any operation could be made to seem a failure. You went up on Route Pack Six, destroyed a SAM site, bombed the railroad, the steel mill, and had a possible MiG kill and the analysts told you the next day it was a wash, hadn’t slowed the Cong at all. Still, they’d known you were there, and you were coming again today, and tonight. Maybe it was a similar run, here. It all depended on Ostropaki.

  He noted, incidentally, that one of the more active DEA agents in these interceptions was J. Sanders. She had really gotten her feet wet in this operation, he recalled. It was how she had first come to his attention as a potential recruit to the Lucani.

  The phone rang shortly after nine. It was the deputy director’s office, asking for Tucker’s presence. He said he’d be right in. Before he made his way to the DDO’s office, he tore off the sheet of paper he’d been doodling on, to stick it into the shredder. He saw that he had unconsciously overwritten PANNONIA to make PARANNONIAC, and then made bold the letters that spelled PANIC. For some reason, this lightened his spirits.

  “Vern, do you remember a fellow named Theo Ostropaki?” the DDO asked when he entered. The DDO was a stocky man who often wore what struck Tucker as a civilian version of marine dress khakis, smartly tailored tan or at least light brown gabardine suits, to go with his ex-marine brush haircut. He was generally genial, though not particularly so this morning.

  “Of course you do,” the DDO answered his own question. “Man, that was a sweet operation! We put a real dent in the flow of that pipeline. Well, can you believe it, he’s surfaced! In Brooklyn!”

  The colonel managed to look surprised. He listened to the whole account, a hastily paraphrased version of Kravfurt’s report. “What does this suggest to you?” the DDO asked with the shrewd look of a used-car salesman.

  “It sounds like the reports of his death were exaggerated,” Tucker said.

  “Heh, heh,” the DDO said, with no joy. “I believe I’ve heard that one. But beyond that?”

  “Our assumptions of Ostropaki’s role may have to be reevaluated,” Tucker said.

  “Your assumptions,” the DDO amended. “But, what the hell, you had to draw reasonable conclusions from inadequate intelligence—your own intelligence, I might add.” He was being generous, not actually kicking butt.

  Tucker listened closely, trying to read any nuances here. He reminded himself of the panic inherent in paranoiac. The DDO, he realized, was more concerned to establish firmly who was responsible for this debacle than to seriously examine the merits of the operation. Tucker could not detect any s
uspicion in the DDO’s remarks that he thought his actions had been other than inept.

  “Sir,” Tucker said, eschewing any familiarity by not using his superior’s first name, although they were on good terms, “I take full responsibility. I’ve got to admit, it looks like we—I—accepted too readily Ostropaki’s evasions and explanations. But if you’ll allow me a word of caution here … sometimes in the morning mist the ducks look a lot like the decoys.”

  The DDO liked that metaphor. He narrowed his eyes with a little half smile, perhaps recalling some morning in the blind. He opened a desk drawer and took out a large black cigar. “Care for one?” he said. “They’re not Havanas, but good chewers, Honduran. No?” He put the cigar in his mouth and began to chew, gently. “Okay, Vern, I take your point. Why don’t you get up there to Brooklyn and see which of these ducks can fly? It looks a little murky right now, but no need to panic. Hell, we may end up giving this guy a medal. But if it plays out like it sounds, it’s your mess. I’m going to let you clean it up.”

  There was a slight emphasis on those closing words. Tucker relaxed. The DDO would be happy if all this could be explained in some defensible way. And if not, even a familiar plot line might suffice: it wasn’t as if the community was unfamiliar with the sad story of a contract agent who had played a double game. Happened all the time. The manly thing to do was own up to a mistake and then sweep it under the carpet.

  The DDO even rehearsed the well-known scenario: Ostropaki had allowed them to snatch a few shipments, diversions, so that the real shipments got through. The “real dent in the flow” was instantly reduced to a paltry leak. The best deal might be to find out if Ostropaki could be turned again, give them a real handle on the main villains. That would get Ostropaki out of the country, away from congressional oversight committees and possible publicity of their failure.

  “The NYPD’s task force is going to pick him up the minute he shows his face,” the DDO said. “They’re happy to cooperate. It was our coup that identified him. They’ll want some quid pro quo, of course. I’m counting on you to handle this with discretion, give them something, but don’t let them see that our faces are red. Don’t be arrogant, Vern. We can’t just hustle this guy off to some safe house. It’s got to be done in plain sight, with them looking on. Think you can handle that?”