A pair of big, burly guys smelling of garlic tried to double-team me, wrapping me up in a simultaneous headlock and a body lock. I smacked the first one with my elbow, catching him in the nose. He slapped his hands to his face and backed off just far enough so I could use the heavy steel slide of the pistol on B2G.45 I smacked him pretty hard. He staggered back, releasing his grip, too. But by then there were other hands on me, grabbing, gripping, clutching at my clothes and various extremities. My vest was ripped. My shirt pocket was torn. A hand yanked at my French braid, snapping my head back painfully. Then some cock-breath took hold of my left hand and wouldn’t let go. I tried to disengage, but all I succeeded in doing was getting him to release his grip on my hand, take hold of my pinky, and try to head south with it. I struggled to free the fucking digit, but he wasn’t about to let go. Maybe he wanted a souvenir. Who knew—and who cared. Well, I did. It was my fucking finger after all. Then an arm in a rough peasant shirt wrapped around my neck, squeezed tight, and pulled me in the opposite direction from the one I’d been more or less going in. Another set of arms grabbed me around the torso and pulled me in a third direction. All of a sudden I heard an ominous pop, and an icy shaft of pain radiated from my hand into my brain. Oh, fuck me—the asshole had dislocated my fucking pinky.
I was getting mad. I began to flail, swat, elbow, and claw my way out of the mob. I didn’t necessarily want to hurt any of these people, but I wasn’t getting a vote here, and they sure as hell wanted to nail my ass.
The only thing to do was get out of the intersection and outrun ’em. Except outrunning is a hard thing to do when you have a couple of dozen people trying to tackle you. I screamed, “Back the fuck off—” It didn’t do a bit of good.
Time for a diversion. I fired the P7. Two, three shots went into the black macadam of the street. And then the slide locked back and I was out of ammo.
Oops. Bad move. Remember all those times I told you about counting rounds, and how hard it is to do under combat conditions? Well, now you see how right I was. Fuck. I squeezed the cocker, slid the slide forward, jammed the pistol back in its holster, and hoped that no one would try to grab it.
And all the while, the crowd was getting nastier and nastier and more and more aggressive. I cold-cocked one motherfucker who came at me with a club. Somewhere in the background, I could hear the electric hee-haw of a police siren. It was getting closer, too. I didn’t want, or need, to deal with the cops.
I screamed, “Back the fuck off!” in what’s known as Command Voice. It worked—kinda. The dozen or so folks closest to me hesitated—a few even stepped backward.
I tried it again. This time with much more menace in my Command Voice. Shit—it worked. They backed away some more. And then, I spied a single narrow venue for escape opening up. To be precise, the big, heavy truck that had destroyed the rice rocket was only eight or nine feet away. If I could make it to the truck and squeeze underneath, I’d have a fighting chance of getting away. I headed for the truckbed.
But just then, the damn dam must have broke, because the fucking mob came collapsing on me, and damn near all of ’em had their War Faces on. The pair of Burly Guys, both of whom had murder in their eyes, led the charge. It was T2A—Time To ACT before they shut me down completely. I flailed, and slapped, and kicked, and finally scrambled under the big, high-bed truck.
Wild-eyed, I emerged on the far side, scrambling on my hands and knees. GNBN. The good news was that it immediately became apparent to me that the folks on this side of the intersection hadn’t heard Beemer Man’s exhortation. Or, if they had, they hadn’t understood him, so they didn’t quite know what or who to look for. The down side was that I was the only guy running from the angry, hell-bent mob on the other side of the truck.
Except these folks didn’t know that. Not really. I whirled and pointed back at the first B2G, whose puffing, red, determined, puss poked out from the truck’s undercarriage. “He did it,” I bellowed. “That’s the guy—he’s the one. That’s the motherfucker who did it. Kill the cocksucker!”
Did they understand me? No. But, just as I’d been able to grasp the underlying substance of what Beemer Man had shouted to incite the mob against me, what I’d just shouted was instantly understood—and acted upon.
Angry hands reached for him. B2G was pulled out, stood up against the truck, and pummeled, all the while protesting his innocence. Me? I didn’t waste a millisecond. I backed away, slowly, trying to attract zero fucking attention, until I’d managed a total and completely successful exfiltration from the nasty AO.
Total? Completely successful? Well . . . not quite. I wasn’t alone. Mister Murphy, who can obviously pass for Azeri when he wants to, had followed me as I’d snuck away. I picked my way south and west, moving contrapuntally to the sounds of the approaching sirens. But somehow, Beemer Man had managed to thread his way through the gridlock, squirt past the mob, and head for the exact same thoroughfare I’d chosen to make my escape on.
And Beemer Man wasn’t alone any more than I was. He had a passenger on the back of his big black bike—the goon who’d been riding shotgun in the Mercedes. And said goon didn’t look very happy at all. In fact, he looked pretty much like a POG, which as you can probably figure out, stands for Pissed-Off Goon.
I checked for anywhere to cover and conceal—and came up dry. Off to my left was the yawning entrance of a metro stop. But I knew better than to head toward it. I didn’t have any tokens, or whatever the fuck they use here in Baku, and I wasn’t about to try to figure out how to use the fucking system sans a map, or a diagram. Ahead and to starboard I saw a jam-packed Irish pub theme-bar. I rejected that, too. I’ve learned the hard way that if you go into some bar or restaurant or café in a strange city, you can simply bottle yourself up inside—and moreover, the bad guys can call for reinforcements.
There are times when you are being followed that you want to attract attention to yourself. This was not one of them. So, my pinky now swelled to the size of a half-dill, I left the main drag and headed into what looked like a working-class neighborhood, half-walking, half-jogging against the traffic flow, moving up a narrow, one-way street, heading away from the bad guys. My ploy didn’t bother Beemer Man at all—he simply followed me, taking his time and working the bike along the curb, its engine growling noisily, while the POG peered over his shoulder and scowled a War Face scowl.
But he didn’t take any hostile action. Why? For the same reason I didn’t want to attract attention: there were just too many potential witnesses on this lower-class side street. Look, Baku may be a big, congested city with a lot of skyscrapers that look as if they’ve been transplanted from Paris, or Tel Aviv, or Tulsa, Oklahoma. But don’t let all those glass and steel towers fool you. Baku’s not a rich city, yet. Even though the oil business has brought a lot of money into the country, there’s still a lot of poverty, much of which takes the form of hundreds of thousands of unemployed Azeris who have nothing to do but park themselves on the sidewalks in front of their dilapidated, grimy Soviet-era slum apartment houses, and sit in the stifling heat on broken-down chairs, with folding tables and shesh-besh boards (which is how they refer to backgammon in this part of the world), between ’em. No—neither Beemer Man nor the POG wanted to kill me publicly.
And I could use that to my own tactical advantage. But first, I needed the sort of environment that would help me—and impair the opposition. I moved at a steady pace, scanning left and right. On impulse, I cut through a narrow alley. Beemer Man and the POG crawled up to the entrance, perhaps sixty, seventy feet behind me.
I turned—and saw the smile on Beemer Man’s face as he realized the alley dead-ended, and I was apparently trapped.
Except, from where he was, Beemer Man couldn’t see what I saw: the alley didn’t dead end. It came to a T. And off to the right, about thirty yards away, I could make out the back side of a small, shabby, under-inventoried, but nonetheless bustling street market.
So far as I was concerned, that was like B
rer Rabbit finding the fucking briar patch, when hungry Brer Fox was on the wily bunny rabbit’s heels. I tossed the bird toward Beemer Man and the POG, then whirled, and ran like hell for the street market. As I ran, I extracted one of the spare magazines in my back pocket, reloaded the P7, reholstered it, and made sure my ripped vest still covered the weapon.
Thus armed and dangerous, I slipped between a couple of vegetable carts, then paused long enough to get a sense of where I was. And guess what—just as I’d hoped, this block-long cluster of rickety carts and rattletrap stalls and makeshift counters was no different from poor folks’ street markets all over the world, from Philadelphia to Cairo; from Damascus to Shanghai.
They’re all laid out roughly the same. The sidewalks have rows of jerry-built stalls, or chocked-wheel carts. Behind the stalls are small stores, where butchers, bakers, and cheese dealers ply their trade. At one end of the street, you’ll always find dry goods—everything from disposable diapers to the kinds of plastic kitchen goods common to all Second, Third, and Fourth World countries. At the other, are the vegetables, legumes, and spices.
I’d landed between the veggies and the dry goods. I dropped low and made my way past crates of tiny cucumbers and radishes whose green tops lay withered in the heat, slipped behind a kiosk that sold towels and soap, then scampered across a narrow break between stalls to take up a defensive position behind a small, shriveled pyramid of past-their-prime Jaffa oranges. I stuck my big Slovak snout over the top of the orange pile, snuck a look, and liked what I saw. Which was that Beemer Man had stopped before committing himself to running the gauntlet of the market, and sat astride his bike, idling and gunning his engine, at the head of the street.
The POG climbed off the cycle and scanned the crowd of shoppers, his face reflecting both confusion and aggravation. He turned back and shouted something at the driver, gesticulating angrily, then stalked off in my direction, in obvious exasperation.
The bike pulled away, burning rubber as it did—no doubt heading around the block to cut me off at the far end of the market. It was a move that made sense, assuming I was going to actually go to the far end of the market. Of course, I had other ideas. But Beemer Man didn’t know that.
I eyeballed the opposition. The POG was squat—built like a fireplug. He had a round face, and wore his hair short on top and white-walled around the sides, like a Ranger or Marine recon grunt. He was dressed in double-knit trousers and a scruffy, soiled short-sleeved band-neck shirt, over which he wore a long, sleeveless photographer’s vest very much like my own.
Before the POG did anything else, he unzipped the vest, which I understood only too well gave him quick access to whatever weapon he was no doubt concealing beneath it. Next, he felt at the top left-hand pocket of his vest, his thick fingers working around what appeared to be a small, rectangular item. That told me he was carrying a cellular phone. Then, satisfied that everything was properly stowed, he started down the far side of the street, working his way around the stalls in a classic squared-off search pattern. The way he moved plus the hair style told me he was no Mafiya wannabe, but a military professional, probably Russkie or German.
Oh, but God loves me. Yes, He does. Why do I say that? Because He divides my enemies for me, and thusly divided, I can (and most certainly will) conquer them.
I stood up, put two fingers to my mouth, and whistled. Loud.
The sound brought the POG up short. He looked in my direction. I grinned and tossed him the bird. A nasty look came over his round, ugly face, he snorted like a fucking bull in heat, put his head down, and charged, bowling over a poor babushka in his haste to get to me.
I sprinted away from him, broken-field running around the stalls; slaloming past the carts, until I spotted what I’d been looking for—an open door that led to an interior courtyard.
I turned on the speed, and burst through the doorway, into the courtyard, took my bearings, then fled up a narrow flight of stairs that led to the apartments on the second, third, and fourth levels of the building. I could hear the POG huffing and puffing as he proceeded at flank speed in my wake. Great—we were all on schedule. I charged noisily up the stairs, then at the first landing, I took a hard left and clattered down the hallway, my feet thumping boldly pa-whap, pa-whap.
Abruptly, I stopped. I listened to the sound of the POG in pursuit. Then I whirled and, silent as a fucking jaguar, I quickly retraced my steps and positioned myself at the corner of the hallway, just out of sight of the stairwell, and coiled to spring
I listened as the soon-to-be-posthumous POG came huffing up the stairs, paused to get his bearings and his breath, then charged headlong into the hallway. I drew back and, using every ounce of strength I could muster in my legs, my torso, my shoulders, and my arm, I sucker-punched him just as he turned the corner.
Except—the sonofabitch stopped short. Maybe to take a breath. Maybe to fart. Maybe to—well, who knows and who cares. Well, I do. Why? Because my roundhouse missed, my momentum carried me forward, and I caromed rudely off the wall in front of him.
This POG knew how to carpe the diem, believe me. He used the small, stainless steel pistol in his left hand to swat me upside the head as I came off the wall. The blow brought tears to my eyes. But it was a small pistol, and it caught me on the back side not the up side of the ol’ Rogue haid. Oh, I was gonna have a chestnut-size knot back there tomorrow. But at least I was going to still have a head on my shoulders.
I shook the spots out of my eyes and flailed, to give myself a second to recover. Shit, he’d hit me harder than I’d thought.
Well, fuck the pain. It was time to show this asshole how things were done. I reached around, caught him by the wrist, dropped, turned, kneed him in the chest, and twisted. Voila—fucking textbook. The gun came loose and went clattering across the tile floor and down the hallway.
Being a pro, he knew better than to worry about the weapon. Instead, his hands flew up into a defensive martial arts stance, and he swiveled, turned, feinted, then came back under me and delivered an elbow to my gut that made my eyes cross.
Ooh, that hurt. But I had no time to think about pain, because this sumbitch was trying to kill me. From the way he was handling himself, he’d been to Spetsnaz school. They teach a martial arts style that relies on lots of blows being delivered quickly—the optimum number is just over two hundred blows a minute. I can guar-on-tee that this asshole had done his best to get an A+.
But as you all probably know, for every measure, there is an active countermeasure. In this case, I used an old UDT martial arts technique taught to me by Roy Henry Boehm, the Godfather of all SEALs. The technical nomenclature for this Froggish martial art is known as PFW/PFD, which stands for PURE FUCKING WILL and PURE FUCKING DETERMINATION.
Roy once took on four Marines, all of them fifteen years younger than he, at the bar of the Little Creek Virginia Amphibious Base O-Club. I see you out there, asshole, scoffing because Roy didn’t take on eight or nine Marines. Well, the only place you see that kind of horseshit is on TV shows or in movies. In real life, taking on four Marines—shit, taking on four bikers, or longshoremen, or four cops—can get you killed. But not Roy Henry Boehm, who was—and is—a man in ten million.
Anyway, Roy was a sarcastic sonofabitch, and he’d probably made some nice-to-see-you comment like, “You know why God gave Marines one more I.Q. point than horses? It’s so Marines can march in parades without shitting on the street.” Anyway, whether he started the fun, or they did, is unimportant. Here is the bottom line: Roy didn’t demolish this quartet of younger, faster, and better-conditioned opponents because he was more skilled than they were. He demolished ’em because he wanted to win more than they did. He was meaner and more vicious and didn’t give a shit about fighting fair. As Roy was always fond of telling us tadpoles, “Remember, you worthless scumbucket assholes: the Marquis of Queens-berry was a fag.”
That night at Little Creek, Roy’s pure will and his sheer determination gave him the edge. He simply could
not conceive of losing—and so, he fought with such wild ferocity that his opponents had to give way. HE COULD NOT FAIL. Thus, when he’d finished, not one Marine was left standing.
Now, this here POG was just as big as I, and just as strong. And his technique was pretty fucking good. But all of that didn’t mean shit. Because, thanks to Roy, I’ve been taught the key to victory. I knew, deep in my Roguish soul, that I wanted to kill the POG much, much more than he wanted to kill me.
And so, as he kept up his rain of blows, I enveloped him, smothered him like onions on liver, and shut the motherfucker d-o-w-n. He fought me off; he came back with elbows and knees and fingernails and teeth. I answered him with a head butt that rocked him back on his feet, followed by a wide, sweeping kick that caught him behind the knees and took us both down to the floor.
I rolled on top of him and we grappled hand to hand. He tried to keep me away from him. Tried to struggle to his feet. But I wasn’t about to let him up. See, I know that most fights end up on the floor. And if you’re not comfortable on the floor, you’re gonna lose. I’ve been a floor brawler all my life. This asshole? He was in good shape so long as he remained on his feet. But now, rolling around on the dusty landing, he was out of his fucking element—while I was in mine.
He tried to use his weight to muscle me onto my back while holding on to my wrists with his hands. I twisted and broke my left hand free, brought it up, and hammered my fist at his face with as much power as I could muster.
He saw what was coming, twisted away at the last minute, and my fist smashed into the tile of the hallway floor.
If you recall, you will remember that someone had very recently dislocated my left pinky. I’m glad you remember, because I hadn’t. And the pain of striking the swollen digit on that hard floor shook me to my toenails.
The POG wasn’t about to let me recover, either. He grabbed hold of my French braid and yanked, snapping my neck back. He thrust his fingers, spearlike, toward my Adam’s apple. I parried the blow with my arm, catching his fingers and bending them backward, making him scream. I wriggled out from under him, and using every fucking ounce of energy I had left, body-blocked him with my shoulder, then used my forearm to slam his head against the wall.
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