by Matthew Funk
"And of course, you had to destroy the church," McCreary hissed.
"We are not animals, Capt. McCreary." Azov said "We waited. And when Lt. Hawkerov let us know that you were en route, I decided that the church would be the perfect demonstration. The perfect incentive for you to visit us again."
"You've disobeyed orders," McCreary snickered. "Your own superiors can't trust you."
"As you disobeyed orders to come here," the general said. The ice in his glass clinked. "We're not that different, you and I, Capt. McCreary. We love our countries. We love the warrior's path. But at the end of the day, we are men who live by our own rules. "
Calm down, Jake old boy, McCreary thought. There's a way out of this. Don't let him get to you.
And in his calm, McCreary's plan gelled. He could taste its humble brilliance. It tasted like freedom.
"That's where you're wrong, General," McCreary said. "I'd never take another man's town, much less his wife. I'd never engineer a sneaky invasion of another country. That's not the American way."
Azov drained his glass and leaned forward toward McCreary. "You Americans," he said, "always so idealistic."
"Yes," McCreary said, "idealistic—and very good at untying knots. Especially us Eagle Scouts."
Azov's eyes twitched in recognition that he'd made a grave error. Rope flew and McCreary's fist circled in from the right and smashed the good general's cheekbone. Azov crashed into the desk and crumpled to the floor. McCreary stood over Azov, fists ready.
"Get up, you Commie sonofabitch!"
The Russian guards at the door had already pulled their sidearms and had them leveled on McCreary. "Ostanovit!" one of them cried. "Ostanovit, vas kapitalisticheskaya svin‘ya!"
McCreary turned to them. "Go ahead. Do it," he said. "Shoot me, you godless puppets! I haven't got all day."
The arrows that pierced the windows of the mayor's office hit the guards' chests so quickly, it appeared to McCreary that they'd burst from their hearts. Both Russians slowly sank to their knees.
Still tied to his chair, Whitefeather let out a shrill cry. "It's my brother warriors, Captain! They heard my call on the spirit winds!"
Outside the mayor's office, three sets of dissimilar sounds rose: Russian cries of alarm, sporadic AK fire… and a hundred Comanche war whoops.
McCreary had the big Indian untied in seconds. Azov was struggling to his feet, but the general collapsed again, moaning, struggling to unholster his Nagant.
"That was some punch, Cap!" LaRoy cried. "Look at that Mongol bastard! He can't even stand!"
Whitefeather untied LaRoy. They each took one of the guard's sidearms. "You better do the same, Captain," Whitefeather said. But McCreary was way ahead of him. He grabbed Azov's pistol from the general's weakened grasp.
Outside, the battle raged. Through the windows, McCreary caught glimpses of action: scrambling Russian soldiers, flashes of gunfire, mounted Comanches in deerskin and full regalia, chasing them down. Gunfire. The twang of bowstrings and the thud of tomahawks. Screams of panic and pain.
McCreary pulled the dazed general to his feet.
"Leave him!" Whitefeather said. "The sacred battle is joined!"
"No," McCreary said. "You and LaRoy go. The general and I have someplace to be. Don't we, General?"
LaRoy was beside himself. "Let's go, Whitefeather! I always wanted to be an Indian brave! Whoooooop!" And out they went, leaving McCreary and the General.
"On your feet," McCreary said grimly. "Take me to my house."
McCreary's homestead lay to the north of town, away from where the battle between the Russians and the Comanches was playing out. McCreary had to resist the urge to shoot Azov, rescue Sunny on his own, and sprint out of town. But he couldn't leave his men, and bringing Azov back alive might be the only thing that would keep Gen. Pearce from court-martialing him on the spot.
As McCreary moved Azov through the abandoned streets, they saw only flashes of action through streets and windows. Tanks rumbled. Russian APCs sped along, surrounded by bands of jogging, terrified soldiers. None of them seemed to notice that McCreary had their beloved commander at gunpoint.
They neared McCreary's home. There was the mailbox, painted bright white. There was the same grass. The same picket fence. The same gate, the last thing McCreary had made before shipping off to North Dakota. The only thing that was missing was the American flag that always hung from a bracket off the porch.
"She'd better be alive," McCreary said.
The general had said nothing since leaving the mayor's office. In fact, nothing since McCreary had socked him. But now, the general seemed to perk up.
"Oh, she is alive, Jacob," Azov said, as he walked through the gate. "If things had gone as planned, she'd be baking bread like a good Russian wife. Waiting for her husband, me, to show up. To enjoy a good meal. Then enjoy her, afterward."
"Careful, General," McCreary said. Through the windows, McCreary could see that everything in the house had changed. Gone were the photos of his family, of Sunny's family, the oil painting of Jesus that Sunny had painted for the state fair. Instead, McCreary could make out mostly bare walls, adorned only with the occasional image of Marx, Lenin, and old Papa Joe himself.
Azov opened the front door. They walked inside. There was no smell of bread.
"Where is she?"
"In our bedroom."
McCreary responded by shoving the barrel of the Nagant between Azov's shoulderblades so hard that the general staggered toward the stairs. Up they went, one step, two, the steps creaking. In the distance, a tank fired. The house shook.
"My Svetlana!" Azov called out. "I have brought you a guest. He is… so… very eager to see you."
They reached the top of the stairs. Down at the end of the dimly lit hallway was the door to their bedroom. Where McCreary and Sunny had learned about the sacred covenant between man and wife.
"You'll be happy to know, she's been very resistant to my charms," Azov said, a few feet shy of the door. "It's taken much… persuasion to even get her to look at me, but never without distrust in her eyes. And I must admit that she has resisted even my more… skilled methods."
"Shut up," McCreary said. "Open the door."
The General obeyed.
The bedroom McCreary had shared with his wife had been stripped down to three things: a four-poster bed, a Soviet flag hanging from a six-foot staff in the corner, and Sunny herself. McCreary's wife was unconscious and pale, tied on the bed, clad only in the virginal white nightgown she'd worn on their wedding night. Her hair was a curly blonde halo around her sleeping head.
He couldn't restrain himself any longer. McCreary shoved the general aside and raced to Sunny's bedside. "Sunny! … Sunny, it's me! It's Jake!"
Sunny opened her eyes. They were sunken and tired—from what, McCreary didn't want to know—but they were the same bright blue. They lingered on his. He saw a flicker of recognition—and a flash of red in their reflection over his shoulder.
Instinct. McCreary turned and fired. Again, and again, and again. McCreary barely registered the sight of Azov, brandishing the Soviet flagstaff as a sharpened weapon. It was a sea of red—flapping fabric, and the general's blood.
Azov staggered backward. Blood poured from his surprised mouth. But somehow, the general lurched forward again. McCreary fired twice more. And again. Then, remembering that the Nagant held seven rounds, he saved the final shot for a spot right between Azov's dark, beady eyes.
Azov's dying body lurched backward, his shiny boots clattering against the hardwood floor. Back he flew against the window, and through it, shattering the glass, and tumbling to the yard below.
Sunset. McCreary carried his wife's limp form across the high school football field. He could barely take it. The unholy lines that passed on the turf at his feet. Those aren't yard lines, he thought. The goddamned Reds turned this Texas high school football field into a soccer field. Soccer!
Suddenly the sound of hoofbeats erupted. McCreary turne
d. Here came Whitefeather, astride a brown and white paint, with streaks across his face, the color of Russian blood. Behind him was LaRoy on a gimpy palomino and no less than a hundred Comanche warriors. In prewar life, they'd been proud working men and boys on the Reservation, content to do whatever it was Indians did. But now, they proudly had revived the spirits of their ancestors.
"The battle is ours, Captain!" Whitefeather cried. "The Russians didn't quite know what to make of this outfit."
"Well, a fitter bunch I never did see!" McCreary said, happy but weary.
"Captain, look!" LaRoy held aloft a long knife. "They made me an honorary Injun!" McCreary nodded, his eyes drifting to the dark, dripping mats that hung from their saddles.
McCreary didn't want to know.
"We have to get moving," Whitefeather said. "The Russians retreated, but you know they'll be back. We have to get back to General Pearce and tell him what we know." The big Indian turned and raised an AK-47, and let loose a war whoop. The warriors behind him responded in kind.
McCreary turned and hunkered down to his wife. "Did you hear that, Sunny? We have to get going. … Sunny! Sunny?"
Lying beautifully on the grass, Sunny opened her eyes.
"Sunny! Did you hear me?"
His wife smiled faintly.
"Da," she said.
THE END
Christopher Blair is a teacher, freelance writer, and former crime reporter. In addition to being raised on ten-for-a-dollar used paperbacks, he grew up on a nutritious diet of comic books, Stephen King stories, and pure cane sugar. "Texasgrad" is his first published short story.
Raker: A Review
By Thomas Pluck
He knows what proud America stands for, and he'll fight for it.
After reading RAKER by Don Scott, I'm still not exactly sure what that is. Raker works for The Company. But he's strictly freelance, not some government stooge. They call him when no one else can do the job. He's tall. He's white. He's blond. And he is not homosexual. Raker is Hitler's wet dream, and when white cops are being gunned down in the ghettos, he's let off the chain to mete out justice…
Published by Pinnacle, who gave us the immortal Destroyer series, Raker is Remo's very pale and blond shadow. The Destroyer destroys. Raker, well, if ungrateful minorities are the leaves, Raker is the gardening tool the Company uses to tell them to shut them up and be glad they're allowed to be Americans. Whether they're homosexuals, suspected homosexuals, blacks, Chinese, or Jews- I'm sorry, I meant liberal pansy radical lawyers with "large features"- Raker hates them and wishes they would stop their whining and work harder so they could be rich and white someday.
Raker lives in New York and hates everything he sees except the Statue of Liberty. And he doesn't even like her as a work of art, but the idea of her. "Because of the idea of her, he sometimes had to kill people." How can you not love a line like that? If Don Scott had run with that, instead of going off on racial tirades about how the Chinese were a hard-working people until the Reds took over and made them run drugs, this could've been a good fun read. Instead, it's like drinking with your crazy racist uncle, except you can't leave or call him a jackass. You can only throw the book at the wall so many times.
Raker works with a black man named Lawson, who's a "real Oreo, black on the outside, white inside." A Harvard grad who can talk jive, he's Raker's eyes and ears on the streets. In fact, Lawson does all the work, really. Raker just shows up when someone needs killing, or he gets bored and poses as a mugging victim to karate chop some street thugs. He takes a nap while the cops are being killed, his sources are shotgunned in the nutsack for sleeping outside their race, and his Company flunky is murdered for trying to help. Raker shrugs it off. He doesn't even care much that the cops are getting killed, just that some black radical group has the temerity to do it. Raker's kind of an asshole, really.
But he's the perfect protagonist for a story about black radicals, led by a Jewish lawyer, killing white cops to incite a race war. They have to steal a supercomputer to do it, to figure out what cop cars have white cops in them. It's kind of like a James Bond novel written by the Illinois Nazis from The Blues Brothers, and felt about ten years out of date for its 1982 release. By then we had Reagan in office and were scared shit of Arab terrorists, not black radical groups.
Raker only made it to two novels, but I'm almost eager to read the second one, Tijuana Traffic, to hear what crazy shit he has to say about Mexicans.
Thomas Pluck writes unflinching fiction with heart. His stories have appeared in Plots with Guns, Pulp Modern, Crimespree Magazine, Beat to a Pulp: Hardboiled, Shotgun Honey, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Utne Reader and elsewhere. His work will appear soon in Hardboiled, Needle: A Magazine of Noir and Crimefactory. He is working on his first novel, and is co-editor of Lost Children: A Charity Anthology.
Tiger Team Bravo in: BONDS OF BLOOD
By Lance Matrix
(discovered by Matthew C. Funk)
MATTHEW C. FUNK has been a lifelong fan of Lance Matrix's Tiger Team Bravo stories, one of the great mercenary team series. If they ever decide to revive it, no one knows the canon like Funk. A quick warning: if you ever get the chance to see Funk's mint-condition complete TTB paperback collection, don't touch. That is, if you prefer your ass unkicked. Thanks to Mr. Funk for choosing this gem from 1976.
The Tiger leapt the ramp, caught air snarling, all four tires smoking, soared over the jeeps of the Colombians. Met the highway still gunning it. Stacked shocks ate the impact and the car shot for the big-rig ahead.
Banzai Billy Takamura smoothed a hand over his pomade hair. Relaxed into the waft of Marlboro and fuming rubber. Gave Colonel Professor a nod of his mirror shades.
"Ramp was just where you said it'd be."
Colonel Professor didn't look up, eyes fused to his homemade transponder. "Kill point's in five minutes."
Banzai ground snakeskin boot into the accelerator. Highway vanished. The Cartel big rig loomed—a white chip in the shimmering blank of Texan desert.
Gunfire from the Jeeps behind. 9mm slugs tapping on the 2-inch steel plating Banzai had welded to the Tiger. A sound that echoed the heavy pour of Khe Sanh rain to both men.
Colonel Professor tilted out the window with his MP-40 and let the machinepistol yell at the Colombian gunmen.
Banzai launched on. The Tiger closed to 200 yards on the big rig. Two more Jeeps pulled alongside the truck from the front. Slowed by its flanks to cut off the Tiger.
The Tiger's rear-glass spiderwebbed with dozens of bullet prints. Ricochets kicked the tires. Banzai caught a whiff of sweat through the leather of Professor's bomber jacket.
He stuck the Marlboro in his lips; stuck out the empty hand to Professor. Colonel Professor filled it with the MP-40.
Banzai ripped the wheel left. The Tiger spun. Professor worked the brake.
Banzai stuck the MP-40 out the window.
Tires shrieked over V-12 engine roar. The MP-40 firing was a bright white line of noise. Banzai's aim honed to pure fate behind mirror shades.
Professor cancelled the brake. The Tiger spun on. The two Jeeps spiraled off the road loaded with two dead drivers and two dead gunmen.
Banzai wrenched the wheel in line with the big rig. Gunned the Tiger deep into the red line. Professor watched the dying Jeeps flip behind.
"Couldn't have just shot them aiming with the rear-view, Banzai?"
"Don't be ridiculous."
"Four minutes until Kill point."
Kill point—the moment when the mission failed. The instant both men had been outrunning since Tiger Team Bravo had been abandoned in the Cambodian jungle to march their way out of a war that had cancelled their existence.
Neither man frowned to think of it. They hadn't frowned since they'd been orphaned to that long march from enemy lines with Captain Teague and their other teammates left for dead behind them.
Outrunning that moment was what they did. It was who Tiger Team Bravo was.
Banzai kept
it in the red and Professor kept the blank expression on his slate black face. He'd worn it since he smelled the pre-historic flowers and burning fuel ofVietnama decade ago.
"Three minutes, thirty."
Banzai had his own clock: Seven seconds before the Jeeps alongside the truck trailer would reach its rear.
He punched nitro. The Tiger's roar sliced into a scream. Asphalt disappeared.
Five seconds. 100 yards between the Tiger and the Cartel trailer's rear.
Three seconds. Banzai lifted the MP-40 again. Sneered to ash the Marlboro.
One second. Banzai jerked the wheel right.
The Tiger's front bumper clipped the rear of the Jeep to the right just as it dropped past the trailer. Slammed the smaller vehicle into a skid. The coked-up Jeep driver panicked; the skid became a spin.
Banzai balanced the MP-40 on his arm, sent a cloud of 9mm parabellum into the Jeep on the left. Opened the driver's skull like a can of creamed corn. Sent the gunman sprawling.
The Tiger pulled straight. The two Jeeps joined the others twisted aside the nameless desert highway.
"Three minutes." Professor lifted the M79 grenade launcher from the roof rack. Rolled down inch-thick bulletproof glass with his other hand.
The target held more than 300 kilos of Colombian flake. The Cartel used it as a mobile command for its drug shipments: Always moving, shifting the routes of its drug runners to dodge State cops and Feds.
It had taken Tiger Team Bravo three months for their source, Baretta, an ex-Army Intel joker they knew from MACV-SOG to worm his way into the Cartel enough to cough up one of the big rig's routes.
It would be worth it.
The brain-trust of Cartel trade in the South, the big rig held the records of all Cartel border runs.
As Banzai brought the Tiger to within 50 yards of the 18-wheeler's rear doors, the big rig showed it held some secrets too: The doors blew wide to show a cage of steel plate sprouting a .50 heavy machinegun.