THE THOUSAND DOLLAR MAN: Introducing Colt Ryder - One Man, One Mission, No Rules

by J. T. Brannan

  Cooper got there next, handing over the man and getting right back on his rifle, covering me as I too made it to safety – although I soon learnt that it was a relative term. The area of cover was nothing more than a recess between buildings, just a couple of dozen square feet of space with no way out. To escape would mean crossing the open ground of the square; but to remain ran the risk of a direct attack by the enemy onto our position. Just one rocket-propelled grenade sent our way would finish us off without much difficulty.

  ‘How is he?’ I shouted to Cooper, who was bent over Zito.

  Cooper shook his head, and I could see that the heavy breathing of Zito was over, the chest still. ‘Dead,’ Cooper said, with as much control as he could muster. ‘Round got him in the fuckin’ throat.’

  Shit. I’d been wrong about the chest after all; he’d been shot in the damn neck.

  I quickly went through my options; more than quickly, actually – it was that subconscious thing again, running unbidden through so many options that the conscious brain would never have managed to cope.

  And then I was moving.

  Through the confusion and the chaos, I had seen that most of the shots had been coming from a tall building to the left of center, a few over from the location of the sniper.

  As I raced away from safety – unbidden, unplanned, my mind doing its own thing, forcing my body to follow it – I was stunned by a blast to my right, a huge concussive explosion that rocked me to my bones.

  ‘Shit yeah,’ came Janes’ voice over my comms system. ‘I wasn’t getting anywhere with my little rifle, so I used the AT4. Son of a bitch.’

  Good old Janes – too far for his night vision to give him a proper target for his sniper rifle, he’d simply taken our section’s M136 AT4 light anti-tank weapon and let rip with its 84mm high explosive anti-armor warhead. Son of a bitch was right – that sniper wasn’t getting any more shots off; as I looked across, I saw the façade of the building cratered, concrete blasted, windows shattered.

  ‘Thanks,’ I barked back, legs still pumping as I raced across the square, grateful for suppressive fire from the boys behind me as I went.

  I was reaching the building I wanted, close now, so close; rounds were flying around me, but so far – somehow – I still hadn’t been hit.

  And then I was there, and it was only then that I realized Cooper was right by my side, having made the suicide run just behind me.

  I saw him smile through my night vision goggles. ‘You didn’t think I’d let you have all the fun, did you?’ he asked.

  I smiled back, nodded my head in appreciation.

  It was then that Cooper’s face exploded across my own; I literally saw the eyeballs leave their sockets, the cheek bones shattering outwards as a blast of blood flew out of my friend’s shattered features, covering me in gore; and then I felt the pain, knew the bullet had passed through Cooper’s skull, exited his face and nicked me on the side of the neck on the way through.

  There was another explosion, and another section of the right-hand building was cratered by the AT4. ‘Fuck,’ came Janes’ voice, ‘fuck, I’m sorry man, sniper must have moved in time, missed the first one. Fuck.’

  My hand went to my neck, came away black with blood in the green haze of the goggles; but I was still standing, which was more than could be said for Cooper. But I couldn’t think about him now, couldn’t afford to waste the time, couldn’t let myself break mentally, lose the momentum, lose the aggression.

  ‘I’m going in,’ I said, and that was it; I turned, braced myself and – boom – the door was open, my boot smashing straight through it.

  What happened next was almost a mystery to me, my body taking over completely, mind on autopilot, responses and reflexes operating on a purely instinctive level.

  I saw two men racing down the stairwell toward me, and then they were gone, blasted back by my M4; and then I was past them, taking the stairs three at a time. Four more men on the next landing, firing AKs toward me, lethal 7.62mm rounds buzzing around me but never touching; my own trigger finger sure, aim steady, men dropping before me like ten pins, black blood spilled over the walls in buckets.

  I cleared the rooms, checking, shooting, checking, shooting, changing magazines in the blink of an eye and then shooting again, body after body hitting the floor in my wake.

  Room after room, floor after floor, my rifle an extension of me, so many men before me, muzzle blasts exploding violently across the goggles, flashes of light followed by more dead bodies.

  The rifle dropped from my hands, and I barely realized why; but my left arm no longer responded and I instantly drew my Sig Sauer pistol and carried on fighting.

  I continued to move upstairs, now on the fourth and final floor; and as soon as I got there I felt a white hot pain in my guts, felt my pistol fire in my good hand, felt another pain in my shoulder, fired again, saw men go down; saw three more with rifles, saw my handgun erupt at them, saw them hit the floor; watched in disbelief as one pulled himself up and came at me with a blade, running toward me, my own body sluggish now, moving slower; and then I coughed and jerked as the blade entered my bowels, jerked inside me, tore upwards; without knowing what I was doing, I clamped hold of my enemy in a death grip, felt the icy pain deep inside me, and ran with him toward the window, felt the glass smash as we crashed through it, felt the air whistling past us as we plunged toward the hard ground below.

  We hit moments later, the man with the knife first, his body only slightly cushioning the impact.

  But that was it; my battle was over.

  And it would be two weeks before I eventually woke up again.

  Chapter Two

  When I finally came out of my coma, I began to wish I hadn’t.

  Cooper was dead, and so was Zito; the Rangers had finally won the battle, but the losses were great. Twelve men killed in all, a terrible tragedy. A terrible night. And to top it all off, the promised al-Qaeda leadership hadn’t even been there.

  It had all been for nothing.

  Fifty-six of the enemy had been killed though, so I supposed it hadn’t been a total loss. It transpired that my own actions had accounted for roughly half that amount; when the village had been secured and daylight came, the building I’d raided had been a charnel house, corpse piled on bloody corpse.

  My own body was wrecked as a result though – one 7.62 round through the left bicep, another through the shoulder, another tearing through my stomach and coming out through a kidney. The knife had done plenty of damage too, and I was horrified to be pissing and shitting into a bag, my own bowels unable to process anything.

  My skin had been cut to ribbons by the broken window glass, and the four-story fall to the square below had broken most of the major bones in my body.

  It was a miracle, the doctors all said unanimously, that I had survived at all.

  But at least my efforts hadn’t been in vain; with the main enemy force taken out, the Ranger section went back into action and re-took all the other buildings in the square, before moving out toward other sectors to assist other teams. The citation for the Congressional Medal of Honor that they gave me for what I did that day cited my ‘courage in the face of enemy fire’, my ‘inspirational leadership’, my ‘incredible combat performance’, and credited my actions as having reunited the effort of US forces to win the battle.

  Despite the congratulations, the adulation, the respect, the glory, my mind didn’t fare much better than my body though – I’d lost my friends, lost parts of myself. How do you handle that?

  I was in hospital for months, had to learn to walk again, to eat again, to use the toilet again; but eventually I did recover, and I did leave.

  The mental scars were harder to get rid of though, and I didn’t know how to handle it – they offered me counselling but, like many soldiers, I declined the help. And when it was forced upon me, I just went through the motions, unable to help myself. I didn’t feel I deserved it; I should have died with my friends.

&nbs
p; We’d provided the intelligence after all, we’d been the ones to tell HQ about the place, to suggest the raid. It was our fault.

  Even when it later turned out that the man who’d been translating the transcripts from my listening devices for the battalion commander had actually been playing both sides of the fence, had actually been an al-Qaeda agent feeding information back about our recon efforts to his terrorist friends, the knowledge didn’t help. The traitorous Iraqi translator had been arrested and thrown into Guantanamo Bay – and had later turned up dead, allegedly beaten by other inmates but more likely than not tortured to death – but it still didn’t help me sleep any better.

  I was upset about Bobby Zito, and even more so about Tom Collins; he had been my best friend, I’d been best man at his wedding, was the godfather to his three kids. I’d promised him that I’d look after his family if anything happened to him, but what good was I now? My military career was over, and what else could I do?

  I left the service finally in 2005 with a hearty slap on the back and one hundred grand in my back pocket – twenty months of severance pay for ten years of duty. I gave it all to Tom’s wife and kids; they needed it more than I did.

  My body was healing, but it was difficult to find work; nobody in the real world cared if you had the Medal of Honor, or if you had two clusters to your Purple Heart; they didn’t care if you could hit a bulls eye at six hundred yards with a hundred different weapons, or if you could survive in the wild as long as you had to. What use was the ability to drink sap from tree bark, or to know how to kill a man silently with a knife, to a factory owner, or an office manager?

  And so I’d gone from place to place, and from one lowly-paid job to another. Day laborer, bouncer, dock hand, delivery driver, grill chef – I did it all. But nowhere wanted me permanently, nobody was willing to take me on and give me a proper contract, proper terms of employment.

  But then – eventually – I got a job in a meat-packing factory; regular work at last, and I began to settle down, rented out a little trailer and – with some unlicensed pit-fights down at the slaughter yard on the side – started saving a bit of money.

  I took another sip of my espresso, which was cold now, and considered carrying on with that line of thought; but, knowing where it was going, I finally snapped out of it and brought myself back to the here and now, on the café patio.

  But I knew pain, and pain knew me; it was safe to say that at least. A couple of black eyes and a broken nose were nothing, in the overall scheme of things; it was all about keeping things in proportion.

  Everything was relative, and what I’d experienced in the past day or so wasn’t really up there with the worst things to have happened to me.

  Not by a long shot.

  Chapter Three

  I wore sunglasses to cover the bruises under my eyes, as well as to help disguise my features from the casual observer, and I wore a peaked baseball cap. I’d also bleached my hair and applied a copious amount of fake tan to my usually pale skin, so that I looked very little like the man who had entered Nuevo Laredo the previous day.

  I had to assume that the police were looking for me, as well as the cartel’s hitmen and petty gangsters. Such a simple disguise wouldn’t throw them off the scent forever, but it was better than nothing. And what were they going to do? Stop and interrogate every foreigner in the city?

  It was actually possible, and I’d already decided to abandon my hotel room; the police might well be going door to door asking questions, and I didn’t want to get caught out again. It was a shame that I’d lose my things, but I’d stocked up on weapons back in the slaughterhouse; that table was like an Aladdin’s Cave of violent goodies.

  I wasn’t really relaxing as I sat outside the café, actually; I was still working, waiting for Miguel Ángel Sanchez to show himself. He was eating an early dinner at Koto Sushi, across the wide and busy Avenida Reforma from my little café.

  When my friend with the damaged hand and head had talked, back in the slaughterhouse just a few short hours before, it was the second time I’d heard the name Miguel Ángel Sanchez.

  It made sense; Santiago must have alerted him, or told the police, and they’d passed me onto his cronies. And from what I’d recently heard, it wasn’t a smart move to get on his shit list.

  Whereas Z201 were just regular street hoods, the parent organization of Los Zetas – for whom Sanchez did his work – was the real deal.

  Its genesis could be found in the late 1990s when a group of elite Mexican Army commandos deserted and joined the Gulf Cartel as armed enforcers, before forming their own criminal organization in 2010. Unlike most gangs, they brought military organization, training and tactics into the criminal underworld, and took power through ruthless and systematic armed warfare.

  Only half of their wealth was generated by the drug business, as they had their fingers in every pie imaginable – from pirated DVDs to human trafficking, and from local shakedowns to organized kidnappings, Los Zetas did it all.

  To help enforce their domination, the cartel – presumably due to its military background – even ran training camps for its hitmen, known as sicarios. They were taught how to kill with a knife, a garrote, and with a wide variety of guns. A favored tactic was shooting from a fast-moving motorcycle – all the better to sweep through traffic and avoid police pursuit – and such skills were also practiced widely at the camps.

  Miguel Ángel Sanchez had been Los Zetas’ number one hitman in his day, with a total body count numbering in the hundreds, including several more complex kills including political, law enforcement and military officials. He’d plied his trade for years, and had got away with it every time.

  He was now semi-retired from active duty, and instead helped train and organize a new generation of sicarios, which gave him the same status as one of the second-tier bosses within the cartel, a position of great power.

  I would have to tread carefully; he wasn’t just connected, he was actually dangerous too. Like the original army deserters, Sanchez had been a member of the elite Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales, the Special Forces Airmobile Group. He was well-trained and – perhaps more importantly – vastly experienced.

  I wondered, again, what he’d wanted with Elena Rosales. Had he seen her one night, demanded that she be brought to him for his own pleasure? Or had he brought her as a special treat for his men? She’d been just thirteen at the time, and the thought made me want to kill them all.

  I also wondered where she was now, what had happened to her over the past three years. Was I wasting my time here? Would I ever get the answers I wanted? That her family needed?

  But I cut out the doubts as soon as they reared their ugly little heads. I’d taken the money, and I had a job to do. I would find Elena, or at least find out what had happened to her, and nothing in this world was going to stop me.

  Not even Miguel Ángel Sanchez and his dreaded sicarios.

  Chapter Four

  I was halfway through my fourth espresso when Sanchez emerged from Koto Sushi, red-faced and angry. He was shouting into his cellphone, then shouting at two of the six men he’d left the restaurant with, then shouting back into his cellphone. I couldn’t hear what was being said from across the road, but the man definitely wasn’t happy

  I put down my demitasse with a slight smile, hoping that I was the reason for the man’s displeasure.

  It stood to reason – it would be about now that the reports would be coming back from the slaughterhouse. Five of his own men dead, and the supposed victim up and gone, nowhere to be found.

  Sanchez was heavier than I’d imagined, a short pot-bellied man whose youthful muscle had turned to fat; and yet he still moved with a fluid grace that indicated his years of training, the command he still possessed over his own body. He’d let himself go a bit perhaps, but he still looked lethal.

  He wore a lightweight cotton suit, expensive blue shirt open at the chest, gold flashing underneath from more than one chain. His fingers were
the same, adorned in gold rings; and I assumed that he wore them more for the knuckle-duster effect than as a fashion statement. Everything was practical with men like that.

  His long hair was slicked back, and his swarthy features were dark, brooding and brutal; he was not a handsome man by any token, but he displayed a kind of animal magnetism that defied his physical appearance. I knew what it was; it was the unbreakable, unshakeable and impossible to fake confidence that came from having killed people with his own two hands, in sufficient numbers for him to have a heightened sense of immortality, of his superiority to other men.

  I made a mental note again of how dangerous the man might be, then stood up, peeling off some bills to pay for my drinks and leaving them on the table behind me.

  Sanchez and his men were heading for the cars parked around the outside of Koto Sushi, two Cadillac sedans and a black Mercedes. I wasn’t surprised to see the door of the Mercedes opened for Sanchez, who slid into the back seat as his driver and bodyguard went upfront.

  Two more men went in each Cadillac, and the convoy pulled out onto Avenida Reforma, Sanchez in the middle car, protection at the front and rear. Good tactics.

  I was already in my own vehicle, an old Honda SUV I’d stolen from a long-term parking lot, and I pulled out into traffic after the convoy, careful to leave a couple of cars in between me and my target. If I followed too closely, they would spot me easily; the trick was always to hold back. They might still see me, but that was a risk I had to take; following a target by yourself was hard and risky work, much harder than when you did it with a team. Then again, you had to play with the cards you’d been dealt, and I was on my own.

  I didn’t know whether Sanchez would want to go and investigate the scene at the slaughterhouse himself, or whether he’d go and see his bosses; whether he’d visit one of the bars or nightclubs he ran, or whether he’d just go home. But no matter; I’d follow patiently and wait for my opportunity.