by Basil Sands
A voice echoed up from the stairwell in the tiny room. Marcus caught a brief glimpse of the top of a man’s head as he climbed the steps, stopped, and shouted back down the tunnel.
“It’s in the boot of the car.”
Mike looked at Marcus with a quizzical expression. While Marcus had understood what the man said, it took a moment for his mind to register that the words the man had spoken were not English. In the Marines, Marcus had been trained as a linguist, as well as a sniper. He was fluent in four languages before enlisting, and the Corps decided during the Yugoslav conflict of the nineties that he needed one more. That language was the one he heard now, Albanian.
The Albanian speaker continued up the stairs toward the door. The two men quietly hustled around the side of the building as the door swung open.
Feet crunched on the gravel out of sight behind the building. Mike tapped Mojo on the shoulder and hissed. “Someone’s coming around the other side,”
They took several quick steps and moved between two of the large white fuel tanks as the guard came around the building. Farrah walked out the door and toward the car. As he opened the trunk, one of the port security guards rounded the building and called out.
“Mr. Farrah, how’s it going down there?”
“Coming along, George, coming along.”
“You guys gonna be long tonight?”
“Leka and Kreshnik will be a few hours,” Farrah reached in the trunk and picked up a box. “I’m leaving soon, though. Why?”
“Just checking so I can let the next shift know.”
“Yes, the cousins will be here most of the night. Lots of upgrades to do,” Farrah shut the trunk and moved back toward the building.
“Well then, I'll let you get back to work so you don't get stuck here too long. Have a good one, sir.”
“You too, George.”
The door shut and the guard spoke into his radio as he passed near Marcus and Mike's hiding place. The pair held stood completely still, not even letting a breath escape with the slightest sound as the man moved by.
“They’re going to be working all night, Farrah says. Just the twins, though. He’s leaving in a bit.”
“They’re cousins, not twins,” came the reply over the radio.
“Whatever. They look a lot alike, they talk the same, and I can’t understand a word either one of them says.”
“Anyway, get back over here. I need to take a break,” said the voice on the other end.
“I’m supposed to walk to the end of section seven on rounds.”
“Finish it later. I gotta take a crap.”
“Again?” said the guard with a voice that was half chuckle, half exasperation. “What did you eat, bro?”
“My wife is trying to make me healthy,” said the distant voice. “All these damned vegetables she keeps forcing down me, I think she plans for me to shit myself thin.”
“Sucks to be you, dude,” said the guard with a slight laugh. “All righty though, I'm on the way.”
The guard trotted away at a jog, his footsteps making a high-pitched rythmic scratch as he crossed the gravel lot. The sound of his steps faded until the ambient noise of the port was the only sound that rumbled in the distance. An excruciating silence hung around the building as Mike and Mojo waited till they were sure the coast was clear. They went back to the fallen tree and climbed out, returning the way they had come.
Chapter 8
Alaska Railroad Maintenance Yard
Anchorage
Monday, June 20th
10:05 p.m.
Silence lay thick like a blanket around the warehouses at the end of the train depot. Pastel shades of pink colored the evening sky, sparkling across the tight cluster of glass high-rise hotels in the distant downtown center. It was after ten o'clock and the sun still hung above the horizon, lulling the city into a strange, half-awake feeling, an odd combination of the bright intensity of early evening and the quietness of late night. The angle of the light stretched shadows, creating dark crevasses between buildings and in low spots on the ground. In a few hours, sometime around midnight, the sun would descend just beneath the horizon, rendering the sky a flat, dull, not-quite-twilight for several hours as it circled the top of the globe and rising again before five a.m. to full brightness.
The clank and scrape of rail cars on tracks, the rumble of engines and the voices of workmen floated from the distance on the warm evening breeze that wafted through the open windows. Neither woman was a stranger to spending long hours in places just like this. Surveillance operations were usually little more than long periods of staying awake and waiting with the knowledge that what you were waiting for was not likely to happen while you were watching.
“So.” Hilde's voice broke the silence. “How did you and Marcus meet?”
“At a high school track meet in 1984.”
“Really? And you've been together since?”
“No.” Lonnie looked out the window, let out a sigh, and adjusted her position in a fruitless search to find a point both she and the baby agreed was comfortable. “We fell apart for a long time—nearly fifteen years.”
“Fifteen years?” Hilde’s eyes went wide as she turned to look at her. “What brought you back together?”
“Fate.” Lonnie put her hand on her belly, remembering. “Marcus proposed to me in 1989. He was stationed in Norway at the time, and had invited me to join him to watch the Berlin Wall come down. He had a ring and everything, and I wanted to marry him. But selfish me, I was not willing to share my husband with the Marines. I didn’t want a chaplain coming by to tell me how my husband was a great hero who gave his life for the glory of the Corps, saving some third-world village in a country I'd never heard of.”
“That’s not selfish.” Hilde turned to look back out her window toward the road. “That’s very understandable, actually.”
“I guess,” Lonnie said. “Marcus was a very good Marine. As I understand it, he and Mike worked together pretty frequently around that time. Anyway, we kind of broke up shortly after that. I mean, he still wrote to me and all, love letters, even poetry, trying to woo me to change my mind. And I kept waiting for him to come to his senses and get a normal job. Neither of us was willing to change, though, me especially. He was experiencing a pure adrenaline lifestyle in the Marines, jaunting around the world to wars that never made the evening news while I had my 'normal job' teaching math to bunch of hormone-crazed teenagers at my old high school in Fairbanks.”
“You were a high school teacher?”
“Yeah, nearly five years.”
“Me too,” Hilde said. “Not that long, though. After two years, I couldn’t stand it. The boys seemed to be unlike any kids I remembered from school—one half of them were stoned out of their minds all the time in class, and the other half seemed to think they had a chance of sleeping with me.”
“You should’ve learned the evil Korean Ajumma stare,” Lonnie said. She turned toward Hilde and froze her face into an expression that could make a grown man begin to stutter in fear. She only held it for moment before softening back up, her face brightening with a grin, a mischievous sparkle in her eyes. “The boys were all too terrified to flirt with me.”
Hilde let out a laugh. “That is one scary look! I’ll have to give that a try sometime, but to be honest, I’ve never been able to look mean, no matter how hard I work at it. That's why I never made it as a field agent.” She paused for a moment as the sound of a loud metallic clang echoed across the yard. She glanced out the back window toward the source of the sound, but saw nothing. As the stillness returned, she continued the small talk. “So what made you join the troopers?”
“One of my favorite students, a really good straight-A girl, died from a drug overdose at a rave party. That was the final thing that drove me to get more proactive.”
“Wow, that’s so sad.”
“Yeah, well, since then I saw a lot worse, sister, believe me.” Lonnie stretched her lower back and contemplated get
ting out of the car, but her feet were swelling and she didn’t want to stand. She relaxed as best she could and went on. “After I graduated from the state trooper academy and started on patrol, I began to understand the connection Marcus had with the Marines. It was too little too late, though. Just as we were starting to make up, Marcus’s whole unit was wiped out on a peace-keeping mission in Africa. He had been declared “missing in action and presumed dead.”
“Oh, my God,” Hilde said. “That’s awful. Obviously he survived, though, so it was okay, right?”
“He came out of the jungle two months later, ready to leave the Corps and marry me.” Lonnie looked toward the rows of warehouse buildings across the parking area, silent and contemplative. The sound of a large hammer repeatedly pounding metal drifted toward them like the ringing of a bell. “But I had given him up for dead. The chaplain had come like I feared, except to his mother instead of me since we weren’t married.”
Lonnie took a deep breath, then let it out with a resigned sigh.
“And I went out and got drunk and acted like a whore.”
Lonnie glanced over at Hilde, whose cheeks had reddened, a shocked expression on her face. Hilde blinked a few times and opened her mouth, but the words didn't seem to form.
“Sorry to burst your bubble, if you had one about me,” she said. “I was a month pregnant and newly married when I got a letter Marcus sent from New Guinea. I didn’t even have the guts to talk to him. Just left his letters unanswered until someone else told him what I’d done. We had no contact for more than ten years after that.”
Hilde stared at her. After a long of silence, she mumbled, “You’ve got another child?”
“The baby miscarried. A couple of years later, my playboy husband left me for a teenaged Air Force floozy and I ended up burying myself in a career of beating the crap out of bad guys.”
“How…when…” Hilde stumbled over the words, struggling to grasp this new depth with which she was getting to know Lonnie. “How did you and Marcus finally get back together?”
“After he retired from the Marines, he came home and we kinda got tossed back at each other, thanks to a police call, of all things.”
“Your life sounds like a movie,” Hilde said. Motion high in the sky caught her attention. She glanced up and saw an eagle, its massive wings spread wide. It floated in a long, lazy arc on a current of air several hundred feet above them. Even at that distance, it still looked huge.
“I don't know about that. But things turned out pretty good in the end … so far at least,” said Lonnie. “So how about you and Mike, how did you two meet?”
“Fate as well, I guess. It's kinda complicated as well. He and my boss were old buddies in the Marines. Mike's first wife and son...”
“Got your side arm?” Lonnie blurted, instantly derailing the conversation.
“Huh?”
“If not, there's one in the glove box. Get it out now.” Lonnie reached into her purse and produced a.45 caliber Glock 39 pistol.
Hilde turned toward her and saw why. More than half a dozen men walked out from behind a warehouse building on Lonnie's side of the truck. Dressed in baggy blue jeans and white T-shirts, most sported tattoos that covered their arms and wriggled out of their collars. Pieces of pipe and short baseball bats swung at the sides of many of them. Pistol butts jutted from a couple of waist bands. One man flipped a long butterfly knife back and forth in his hand, the metal handles snapping rhythmically with each flick of his wrist. Their feet crunched on the gravel surface of the rail yard as they crossed.
“Who are they?” Hilde asked, her voice rising with the tension.
“Local gang,” Lonnie said. “Get ready with the gun. Glove box. It's chambered. Get it out, but keep it beneath the window for now.”
The men encircled the truck. Hilde discreetly opened the glove box and found a Smith & Wesson 4566, .45 caliber pistol on top of the car's registration form. She recognized the weapon as one that many FBI agents had carried in the past. She’d fired one a few times but the power and kick of the large caliber were too much for her. She preferred her personal side arm, the much smaller SIG P232. Hilde slid the mean-looking weapon out of the space and held it low. The weight of the blued steel felt cold and awkward in her hand. She was an analyst, not an operative. She only qualified on her own weapon, once a year and wasn't sure if she'd even remember how to use it if things got crazy. Her heart smacked against the inside of her ribcage.
“I'm not a field agent, just surveillance.” Her voice rattled with nervous tension.
“You know how to use one of these?” Lonnie asked without looking back at her.
“Yeah, but I've never shot anyone.”
“Pray we don't have to tonight. Got your badge?”
“In my purse.”
“Get it out, but keep it down too.”
One of the men approached Lonnie's side of the truck, stopped several paces away, and raised his hands above his head in a recognizable gang-style gesture. The other punks probably thought looked cool, but anyone with half a brain would’ve thought looked like an underfed, hairless orangutan waving his arms at a bunch of flies.
“Hey, baby,” he said with a generic “urban” accent that was not native to any part of Alaska, an obvious imitation something he'd seen on television. “Whatcha' doin' in my yard?”
“Two hot chicks like you parking out here at night?” another said. “Must be a couple of lezzies left over from the fagot parade getting it on in there.”
“Ooh, I wanna watch.” said a third man.
“How’s about I give you some man flesh,” said the leader, a pistol hanging loose in his hand. “Show you what you’re missing.”
The men's lustful glares twisted Hilde's stomach into sickened knots. The leader stepped closer, and Lonnie stared back at him with her practiced evil Korean ajumma glare. Once he was within ten feet of the truck, she raised her badge to the open window. Hilde did the same. The gang leader paused in his tracks. A look of confusion crossed his face, but vanished right away, replaced by a serpent-like smirk.
“Boys, we got us a couple of dyke police officers here.” He sneered at them. “Two horny bitch cops all by themselves in our territory.”
“Hey, Snake,” said a nearby man, “I think they got tired of playing with their night sticks and came looking for some real gangsta thang.” He grabbed his crotch and shook it at Lonnie.
The men encircled the truck. Someone smashed a heavy metal pipe against the tailgate, and a metallic crash echoed against the buildings. Hilde flinched at the sudden noise. She struggled to mask her fear with an unconvincing snarl. Seeing herself in the side view mirror, she thought her expression looked less like she was fierce and more like she had indigestion. She caught a glimpse of Lonnie's expression, her eyes sparked with violence that rivaled that of the gang bangers surrounding them. A loud hiss sliced through the tension and the back of the truck sank as two of the thugs pulled short knives out of the sidewalls of the tires. Lonnie gripped her pistol tightly, but kept it out of sight just below the window. The front tires went next.
“Leave us alone,” she said. “Just turn and go.”
“Or what, bitch?” said the leader from about three paces away. “You gonna arrest me?”
“No,” she said. “I’m going to kill you.”
Her pistol slid into view, and she trained it on his chest. Hilde raised hers into view as well. Everyone stopped in their tracks. The leader stared at her, a mixture of fear and hatred smoldering in his eyes.
“You ain’t got the balls to kill me.”
“You’re very observant,” Lonnie said. “Women don’t need balls. We’ve got hormones, and if you take one more step, I am going to hormone your ass straight to hell.”
“There’s seven of us.” He gestured around the group with a sweep of his hands. “You can’t get us all.”
“Maybe not, but you’ll die for sure.” Her eyes remained locked on Snake's like a snare that trapped him, ch
oking him with her stare. She continued, her voice a low growl filled with unbridled menace, “And at least three more will die before you can stop me. I'm really good with this thing.”
Hilde glanced in her side mirror and caught a man sneaking along the side of the truck toward her. A creepy grin stretched his lips as he glared up at her. Right handed, she couldn’t swing her gun hand toward him, and he seemed to know it.
A sudden yelp burst the air like a popped balloon. The wet smack of flesh, followed by a thump of bone on metal, echoed from the back.
“You dented my brand-new truck,” Marcus's voice boomed, shaking the air. He jammed a fist into the man’s gut, then let him drop to the ground, “and you slashed my tires!”
The next man's left leg snapped sideways as Marcus drove a kick into his knee so fast his foot was a blur. The man screamed as he dropped to the ground, grasping at the dislocated joint. A heavy thud forced a gasp out of another man as Mike delivered a two-fisted blow to his kidneys. He tumbled forward, knocking a third man off balance. Mike lashed out with a hook kick that cracked the jaw of the man who had been sneaking toward Hilde. He crumpled to his knees and started to raise himself back up to fight. Mike stepped forward and hammered into his temple with the side of his left fist, slamming his head against the side of the truck with a thud, the nearly lethal force dropping him to the ground.