Mark one.
The next pair of hostiles was just as easy to spot. The driver was a kid with long, slicked-down hair pulled back from a face so pockmarked it looked like the fucking Sea of Tranquility, wearing wraparound Oakley knockoffs and sitting astride a big Kawasaki at the end of the hotel driveway. Either he was wearing a black radio earpiece or he had the worst case of earwax known to medical history. I double-checked the Mercedes, looking closely. Yup: Moon-face took directions from the goon riding shotgun in the Mercedes, who was talking into a small transceiver.
Moonface kick-started the bike, and veered into traffic, weaving in and out as he maneuvered close to me. His armed passenger held on to a strap with his left hand, like a practiced bronco rider. Moonface’s rice rocket was quickly followed by a second greaser wannabe, a kid in a UCLA tank top and black Levi’s knockoffs, who was riding a dinged, black BMW 750 that needed a lot of muffler work.
How did I know the passenger on the rice rocket was armed? I knew it because he was wearing a three-quarter-length leather coat, zipped up to his throat. You do not dress like that in hundred-plus-degree weather unless you are carrying your own brand of heat.
Now, as we embark on this sequence, allow me to tell you a few things about surveillance, my friends. Surveillance is a tough job. The best surveillance crews in the world are from British, Frog, and Israeli units. The Brits have a bunch of operators (the unit was formerly known as 14 Intelligence Company39), which made its bones working Northern Ireland. Unlike most other surveillance units, the folks at are shooters as well as sneak & peekers. They were able to put a dozen people on an IRA bomb maker while she was working an SDR, or surveillance detection route, without her suspecting anything. Then, when she’d led the team to her bomb cache, they waxed her ass and retrieved two hundred pounds of plastic explosive.
The Israelis have Shabak40 (Internal Security) units capable of close-tracking Hamas tangos in the safe havens of the Gaza Strip, or Palestinian-controlled towns like Nablus or Jenin. Like their Brit brethren, the Israeli units do double duty as shooters if they have to. The Frogs are good too. They use single-purpose teams from the DST (the Directorate for Surveillance of the Territory, the organization that is responsible for counterintelligence on French soil), known as Groupes Chasse, or more commonly, GC, pronounced Jay-Say, which may entail as many as 150 people, to surveil a single target, if the threat is high enough.
I’ve operated with DST. My old compagnon d’armes Jacques Lillis is an inspecteur with the GC. If the target is important enough, he’ll use multiple automobiles, vans, trucks, and mopeds. DST Groupes Chasse have operators dressed as street people, students, tourists, priests—you name it. And the French understand the subtleties of surveillance. When DST agents change their clothes, they also switch shoes. Because the easiest way to check on whether or not you are being followed is not by looking at someone’s face, or their clothes. It is by watching for the same pair of shoes or boots.
Today, I was being watched by amateurs. Zero-class gumshoes. Twerps. G&G (Goon and Gunsel) wannabes. They did it by the numbers—and from the look of it they’d all flunked math. The Mercedes stayed three cars back, following the taxi with the obviousness of an old KGB tail. Moonface and his passenger dawdled along the curb lane, to make sure the ancient taxi didn’t pull a fast absquatulation down some alley or side street. The Greaser wannabe handled the hammer lane, just in case my driver knew how to pull off a bootlegger’s turn and skedaddle back the way we’d come.
They were so fuckin’ obvious I was surprised they didn’t have toilet paper stuck to the heels of their shoes (maybe they did—I just couldn’t see). I settled back in my seat to enjoy the ride. This E&E was going to be APOC.41
We’d made it about two-thirds of the way to the Hyatt, where I planned to shake these clowns, run a long SDR, and link up with Ashley, when events took a definite turn for the worse. Until then, it hadn’t been a bad ride. The driver knew how to stay out of traffic. He’d run west on Karl Marx Strasse, then took a hard left onto Khan Shushinski Street, where he drove past a squat bloc of government apartments that could have been lifted from 1950s Albania, or 1930s Moscow. Then it was another left, followed by another right.
That was when we encountered Murphy Avenue: a crowded, anonymous four-lane boulevard leading south toward the croisette and (ultimately) the Hyatt. Except, now traffic moved comme un escargot (that’s the way my copain42 Jacques Lillis from the Jay-Say says, “at a snail’s pace”), enhanced by carbon monoxide–enriched, diesel-fume-intense, stop-and-go, bumper-to-bumper traffic.
6
WE STOP-AND-WENT THREE BLOCKS, WORKING OUR WAY meter by sulfur-enriched meter until we reached what was obviously The Problem. I stuck my head out of the window to see. I didn’t see a damn thing. So, I climbed out and stood on the rear bumper to increase my perspective. What I saw reminded me of Cairo on a bad traffic day, or Mexico City on a good one. We’d obviously arrived at the intersection from hell. Sixty feet ahead of where we sat, our four lanes of roadway were bisected by a six-lane avenue, which came at a bizarre angle. I went to my tippy-toes and craned my neck. Holy shit. There, on the far side of the intersection, was a third, one-two-three-four-lane avenue. It, too, was gridlocked.
That made a total of fourteen lanes of traffic with nowhere to go, compounded by double and triple parkers, pedestrians, donkey carts, and bicycles. Oh, yeah—the traffic signals were all nonoperational, and, no, there was not a single cop on scene to direct vehicles.
I swiveled so I could check our six. Guess what: the Mercedes was nowhere to be seen.
Which struck me as odd. As you already know, it had stuck to our bumper like fucking glue since we’d left the Grand Europe Hotel, dutifully maintaining a two-car distance.
Well, that’s Baku traffic for you. We’d shaken our tail without even trying. I climbed out of the diesel fumes and smoky exhausts, back into the taxi, and slammed the door shut. The driver shook debris out of his huge, thick mustache and shrugged helplessly. He wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. I sat back, sucked on the fumes, and thought about the headache I was going to have by the time I rendezvoused with Major Evans.
I closed my eyes and lost track of the time. When I opened them, I saw we hadn’t moved more than twenty meters. But at least we were within two vehicle-lengths of the intersection.
I closed my eyes again. Then I blinked ’em open. Because, through the carbon monoxide fog in my addled brain (and as if from a great distance away), I heard the unique, distinctive sound of a rice rocket accelerating, its high-pitched throttle growing louder and louder above the ambient traffic noise. And then, as has happened so many times before, the hair on the back of my neck stood straight up, and the Klaxon horn in my brain went ougah-ougah—dive, dive!
I threw myself over the front seat just as the big red bike, its engine screaming, threaded the needle between the beat-up bus behind us, the huge tractor-trailer truck on our right flank, and the car full of native-costumed Azeris directly behind us. I rolled to my left, yanked the driver out of his seat, threw him across me, and rudely, crudely, lewdly slid behind the wheel and took control of the taxi.
I guess the driver was screaming and yelling, but frankly I didn’t hear anything. Right then, everything was happening in the sort of slow motion under which most combat takes place.
The cycle braked, veered sharply, and came up on our starboard side, the driver working his way dangerously close. Then it pulled abreast of the rear window. I glanced back and right and looked into Moonface’s mirrored, wraparound sunglasses. He didn’t react noticeably, except to edge forward. That was when I stared right into the boyish face of the leather-coated passenger. And into the muzzle of the suppressed .32-caliber Skorpion submachine pistol he one-handed, level with my face. With the sort of meticulous attention to detail that is common to trained observers and those who are about to die, I noticed that Leather Boy chewed his fingernails.
And then I realized that thi
s was no time for focusing on shit like that. To hell with all traffic lights. Belay that. To hell with all traffic. I threw the car into gear, stomped the accelerator, smacked into the car in front of me, pushing it ahead. Then I backed, smacking the car of screaming Azeris behind me. And then into first gear again, yanking the wheel to my left and cutting into traffic, heading blindly into the intersection just as the rear passenger window disintegrated. I heard the bullets impact the undercarriage as they tore through the seat cushions. But I didn’t give a shit about the upholstery.
I sideswiped a small truck coming the other way. Too fucking bad. Hit the brakes; double-clutched. Backed off, tried to smack the rice rocket with my front quarter panel, but the sumbitch had pulled off just enough to save himself. At least the fucking gunman was holding on for his life. Which meant he wasn’t shooting at me.
Oh, shit—I slammed on the brakes just in time to avoid broadsiding a big lorry. I jerked my head to the right. Oh, shit again—the rice rocket was staying with me—and the scheißkerl43 with the machine pistol had brought the fucking weapon up one-handed for a second go-round.
I reversed, K-turned, went left. Hit a dead end. Backed up, reversed, then edged my way around the truck in a herky-jerky, smack-the-horn, stop-and-go manner so as not to fucking get shot. I wedged the taxi between a car and a truck and steered left and right into their side panels as a way of hinting that they should keep the fuck outta my way.
Oh, fuck me. My peripheral vision told me that motorcycle man had maneuvered around to my six again and was about to align himself for another try.
I swung the wheel to the right, forcing him to disengage, or vault a tank truck. He chose to disengage, stopped, backed off, then veered wildly to the right and jumped ahead of me by eight, nine, ten yards and three cars. The kid with the Skorpion swiveled and swung the gun barrel over his shoulder toward my windshield. He wasn’t worried about aiming—he was gonna spray and pray, and if he killed half a dozen bystanders, then it was too bad for them.
That’s the thing about fucking kids today. They got no respect. They don’t mind wasting ammo—or innocent people.
In that single careless instant, Leather Boy had signed his death warrant. He was no better than the scumbags who’d killed all those innocent people on the road to Baku yesterday morning.
It was time to stop these assholes. So I threw the taxi in reverse, backed for about ten feet pedal to metal, then braked, shifted into first, popped the clutch, and fucking stood on the accelerator.
Now, Peugeots—especially old diesels like the taxi I was riding in—have notoriously slow acceleration. But that didn’t matter. I wasn’t even thirty feet from the motorcycle, and didn’t hit the sumbitch at more than twenty miles an hour.
But twenty miles an hour was enough, believe me. I drove the rice rocket forward like a fucking croquet ball. The driver panicked and stood on the brakes, which caused him to slide and veer and smack—splat—into the undercarriage of a big, long truck.
Was it perfect? No—because I didn’t kill the pair of ’em right then. But given the traffic, it was good enough for me. I reached into my pocket, found a bunch of greenbacks, yanked the driver out of the front seat well, and pressed the bills into his hands.
Then, as my cop friends are fond of writing in their reports, “Subject rapidly exited the vehicle so he could commit further violence and mayhem.” Translation: I hadn’t finished the morning’s work yet.
By which I mean, I reached around and unholstered the P7. There was a crowd gathering around the downed bike. Good news was that Moonface was in pretty bad shape—he’d sheared most of his scalp off as he’d gone under the truck bed, and he was bleeding profusely.
Bad news was that the gunman was down, too—but he wasn’t out.
We made eye contact as I came around the nose of an old Zil sedan. Leather Boy may have hurt. But he was ready to go. He pulled himself out from under the downed bike, waved the Skorpion around to scatter the crowd, shouted a whole passel of words I couldn’t understand, and pointed the tiny weapon in my direction.
You couldn’t hear the shots, but I could sense the impact of the rounds as they hit all around me. I swept a young woman out of the way with my left arm, pushed a pair of men to the ground, stepped in front of another Azeri and shoved rudely to make her hit the deck, then brought the P7 up, up, up to get a sight picture, and squeezed off three, four, five, six, seven rounds of the 147-grain Hydra-Shok ammo the pistol likes so much.
The noise fucking scattered the crowd. Leather Boy may have had the automatic fucking weapon—but no one could hear it going off. My pistol, however, made a shitload of noise. So I was the one who caused all the pandemonium.
But do not forget what part I play here: I am THE sole, official, authenticated, gin-yew-whine, and legally trademarked Rogue Warrior®. I love confusion, chaos, and turmoil—shit, I’d trademark them if I could. So, anyway, my shooting wasn’t range-perfect. But it was combat-efficient.44 I hit him in the legs and the groin—a particularly painful place to get shot. Leather Boy obviously didn’t like what I’d done because he rolled into a ball and tried to hide behind the downed rice rocket.
That was what we SEALs call a BMOLBP—Bad Mistake on Leather Boy’s Part. If someone is shooting at you and you are armed, SEALs understand that they must use every molecule of their energy to shoot back. Because if you don’t return a withering barrage of suppressive fire and kill the asshole who’s shooting at you, you’re probably gonna die.
Just like this asshole was about to. I kept advancing on him: six yards, five yards, four yards, my sight picture getting better by the second.
Pedestrians were scattering. I could sense them running, blurry shadows in my peripheral vision. But all I could really see was Leather Boy, getting larger and larger through my front sight.
Big mistake. Humongous-as-my-Marcinko-dick mistake. I was tunneling. Which is the quick way of saying that I’d become a victim of tunnel vision. I wasn’t scanning left/right, right/left. I wasn’t breathing, forcing oxygen into my lungs. I wasn’t doing any of the things that one is supposed to be doing when one engages in CQC. And let me say right now that CQC doesn’t have to always take place in a small room, or on a plane or boat, where there are hostages. CQC can take place anywhere. And I should have remembered that. But no one’s perfect—even moi. And so, I wasn’t the least attuned to my environment. I’d become fixated. All I wanted was to wax this asshole’s behind, and then get the hell outta Dodge.
Except, I’d forgotten where I was (in a hostile environment), and what I was supposed to be doing (checking on the surveillance). Most critical, I’d completely forgotten about Beemer Man, as well as the two goons in the Mercedes.
I remembered about Beemer Man when I heard the big Kraut bike’s muffler-less engine bearing down on me, whirled, recognized the kid’s UCLA tank top and black jeans, and realized (lightbulb!) who he was and what he wanted. He’d fought his way through the gridlock, walking his bike, gesturing rudely and pushing people aside. Now he was twenty yards away and heading in my direction, a nasty look on his pockmarked face and a small pistol clamped atop the right handlebar grip by his hand.
Do you remember the Rogue’s First Rule of Engagement? I did—and I knew exactly which target I wanted to engage. And so, I held my ground and pumped four quick rounds into Leather Boy’s head, just to make perfectly sure he stayed where he was. Then and only then did I turn to deal with the no-goodnik on the Beemer.
There are times, friends, when I become clairvoyant in situations such as this one. There are other times, like my present situation, when I become, for one reason or another, negligent, heedless, even oblivious to the basic facts of life and truths of existence. Now, let’s pause just long enough for me to give you an overview of my predicament.
I was standing in the middle of a fucking intersection of the capital city of a country in which I do not speak the language, holding a loaded weapon with which I had just shot a native-speaking indiv
idual. The gravity of my dilemma was made immediately apparent when, instead of shooting at me, the kid on the Beemer waved his pistol in my direction and screamed something at the crowd of shocked pedestrians and gridlocked drivers.
What did he say? Since I don’t speak Azeri I have no fucking idea what he said. But I knew the gist of it as soon as the words came out of his mouth. The gist was: “That ugly sonofabitch with the big flat nose and the long French braid just killed my brother/cousin/ uncle/friend, so we should hang the motherfucker from the closest lamppost. But before we string the cocksucker up, let’s beat the shit out of him and tear him limb from fucking limb to teach him a lesson he won’t forget.”
Y’see, right then, all of a sudden things came to a complete stop. Like—whoa. S-t-o-p. Total freeze frame.
And then, and then, the whole fucking crowd turned on me. And started to scream. And come toward me.
Oh, fuck, oh, shit, oh doom on Dickie. This was not going to be any fun. None at all.
Some fucking bearded Azeri put his hands on my shoulders. I swatted him away. Two more grabbed at my vest. I elbowed them aside. I tried to talk my way out, but no one was listening. This had gone from crowd to mob by now—and all they wanted was a chance to lay their hands on me and do some damage.
I pushed back, hard, straight-arming the chests of a trio of guys who, judging from the clumps of old food in their mustaches, were probably related to my taxi driver. They gave way and I started working my way toward the relative safety at the far side of the intersection, beyond the wreckage of the rice rocket. But it was like trying to run the forty-yard dash inside a crowded New York subway train. There was just no place to go. No wiggle room.
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