In a case like this, there is only one thing to do—and I did it. I charged. Put my head down, used the window well as a starting block, and ran like a motherfuckingbull toward him.
He was still working at the zipper when I got there. He dropped his hand and feinted left, then right, as I came up on him like the proverbial Mack truck.
Feint, schmeint—I went barreling into him the way a fucking cornerback goes after a wide receiver, I took him down onto the pavement—the momentum carried us three or four yards beyond the car—and we scrambled for position. He rolled on top of me and brought his knee up into my balls. Ooh. it took my breath away. But not before I slammed him upside the head with my fist. We rolled around some more, our hands, arms, and legs grappling for advantage.
The training regimen for Alpha Teams, the most elite of both Soviet and post-Soviet special forces, divides hand-to-hand combat training into two parts: combat for capture, and combat for killing. This Ivan was trying to use Part Two on me. And from the way he was simultaneously chopping at my throat, elbowing at my face, and trying to remove my eyeballs, he had obviously gone to Spetsnaz school. What they teach there is rapidity—that is to say, they want their students to be able to deliver more than two hundred blows a minute. This guy was trying—really trying—to do a lot better than that.
But speed ain’t everything, folks. Accuracy counts, too. So he chopped, and he punched, and he gouged, and smacked, smashed, and swatted. And he was pretty good at it, too—powerful in the resilient, supple way that thin, wiry guys are strong.
But I outweighed him by fifty pounds at least. And I am a big, solid, strong sonofabitch who presses 400 pounds, 154 reps, every morning at 0545 on the outdoor weight pile at Rogue Manor. Rain or shine. Snow or sleet. Hung over or hung out. So 200 blows a minute or not, when pousser comes to bousculer, as they say in Paris when you’re roughing and tumbling, I was able to muscle him more than he could muscle me. I threw him the same way rodeo riders toss a heifer, rolled him over onto his stomach, straddled him, contained his flailing arms with my legs, grabbed him under the mandible—that’s the jawbone in medical school—and turned his head about 270 degrees to the right, which did downright nasty things to all those small cervical vertebrae in his neck.
You could hear the bones go ka-pop-pop-pop. I chopped him a downward blow just above the shoulder blades with my elbow to make sure he’d stay down for good, then rolled off his body, exhausted.
The whole episode, from the time he’d seen me until now hadn’t taken more than twenty-five seconds. But they were a tough twenty-five seconds, believe me.
I lay on the pavement with my eyes closed, sweating, hyperventilating, and feeling sore in every single one of my muscle groups. Finally, I looked up to see Doc Tremblay’s handlebar mustache twitching nervously above me.
He knelt, reached down, and plucked my left arm from the ground, held it and lightly pressed two fingers across my wrist. “You’re getting old, you broken-down asshole,” he whispered. “Two years ago, your heart wouldn’t have broken a hundred dealing with him—” He gently shoved the corpse with the toe of his boot. “Now your pulse is about one forty, one forty-five.”
“Yeah, but this is the second time in one night for me,” I croaked. “And besides—he’s still dead and I’m still alive.” I wiped the sweat from my face, rolled over, went to my knees and began searching the corpse. I extracted a locked, loaded suppressed Tokorev autoloader and a spare magazine holding eight rounds of jacketed hollowpoint ammunition from his shoulder holster. The rest of him gave up the cigarettes and lighter, a thin, cheap wallet, a crumpled handkerchief, and the car keys, which were on a stainless steel band that held more than a dozen others as well. I checked the wallet. There was a photo identity card—military or paramilitary from the look of it. I tried to make out the Cyrillic lettering, but it was impossible. Was he a cop, or a soldier? I knew that a lot of both worked for the mafiya as bodyguards and security types, so either was altogether possible.
I handed the key ring to Wonder, who’d moved up with the others. “See if any of these fit in the door.”
Then I pulled myself to my feet. “Let’s get Ivan back where he belongs so we can get to work.”
Gator reached inside the Beemer and switched off the dome light. Then Doc took Ivan’s feet, I held him under the arms, and we schlepped.
None of the keys worked the gate lock or the gate doorway. That set off my danger Klaxon, which sits positioned between the pussy detector and the bullshit meter in the lower-right quadrant of my brain, right behind the cerebellum. I sent Rodent and Gator to do a quick sneak and peek. Their fast recon uncovered nothing amiss. It was still all quiet on the Eastern front.
Why did the fact that the dead Ivan’s keys didn’t fit any locks trouble me? Because, friends, from experience I know that sentries usually have the keys for the gates of the houses they are protecting—especially if they’re posted outside and there is no security in the inner courtyard.
Yeah, yeah, I know that on the one hand, we hadn’t checked that last element yet. But on the other hand, no one had come out to check on the noise we’d made—there hadn’t been a lot, but there’d been some.
0331. We stacked outside the right gate single door. Wonder picked the rudimentary lock in less than ten seconds, then eased behind the door, which opened outward, and pulled it wide, allowing us to make entry.
Have I spoken to you before about the military discipline of what we were doing here? No—okay, while we’re getting into position, let me explain. These kinds of moves are what I call R2D2S—that is, Ritualistic, Rehearsed, Disciplined Drills. At units like Delta Force or SEAL Team Six we practice them thousands of times under all kinds of physical situations and conditions. That way, when we do it for real, we don’t have to think about which of our shipmates is doing what, and how we go about accomplishing the rudiments—all of that has been so thoroughly inculcated deeply inside us that we JDI—Just Do It.
Hallways, doorways, and gates; ships’ passageways and superstructures; fire escapes, ladders, stairwells, and foyers—all of ’em get rehearsed, over and over and over. We practice at all hours, too. I’ve been known to stage a call-out for a live-fire room-entry exercise at 0345, about seventy-five minutes after my guys have sacked out, exhausted after a long evening of pussy chasing and beer swilling at a series of user-friendly saloons. They just love it when I do that. But I have always believed in the SpecWar doctrine that I first saw on a hand-lettered sign tacked up over the doorway of UDT-21’s quarterdeck at the Little Creek, Virginia, Amphibious base. It read, THE MORE YOU SWEAT IN TRAINING, THE LESS YOU’LL BLEED IN BATTLE. That sign, as you can probably guess, was the source for one of the Ten Commandments of SpecWar.
It was also a credo much taken to heart by the chiefs who trained me. Chiefs like Grose, Red Coyle, Hoot Andrews, Mugs Sullivan, and of course my favorite sea-daddy, Everett Emerson Barrett, Chief Gunner’s Mate/Guns for whom I worked at UDT-21, never let us young Frogs slack off. Under their dedicated and inventive tutelage, we learned to polish both the tops and the soles of our boots. They found ingenious ways in which to keep our minds and bodies busy, too. When we trained in Puerto Rico, for example, they made us construct neat little walkways bordered by sand-filled empty beer cans outside our tents. And when we visited the Virgin Islands (where we never found a single virgin, either), Ev Barrett once sent us scampering up palm trees to find tender fronds from which to make straw hats.
Palm fronds? Straw hats? Yeah—it toughened our feet, and sharpened our climbing skills, although Ev never bothered to explain himself to us at the time.
Of course, he didn’t have to explain—he was the platoon Chief. That word is spelled G-O-D. His every wish was my command. And despite the fact that most of us were younger than he by a couple of decades, and we thought of ourselves as t-o-u-g-h motherfuckers, he could (and did) regularly plant his size nine-and-a-half, double-E, spit-shined boondocker toe firmly six inches upside our recalcitran
t bungholes whenever he felt the situation demanded it.
Another momentary digression here. I grew up in the tail end of a Navy culture in which discipline in the ranks was enforced by chiefs, not officers. They called it Rocks and Shoals back then. And it meant that every once in a while, a chief would beat the bejeezus out of you for making some dumbass mistake. There were no memos, no notes, no written reports. Nothing would ever appear on your record. You would fuck up. The chief would simply flatten you, right there, on the spot. Lesson learned. End of story.
Well, today, there is no longer Rocks and Shoals. There is the 967-page Uniform Code of Military Justice, which is enforced not by chiefs, but by officers. In fact, under the UCMJ, any chief who lays hands on a sailor gets himself court-martialed. And since there are so many rules and regulations in that big fat book, a lot of sailors get written up for a lot of infractions by a lot of officers. But discipline in the Navy is, in a word, lousy. The officers aren’t leading—they are, in effect, writing traffic tickets. And chiefs aren’t teaching. No—they are worried about protecting their own butts from the officers. And the men aren’t learning—by example, or any other way. If you ask me, we could benefit the system by returning to Rocks and Shoals. Of course, nobody’s asked me.
Anyway, the point of all of this nostalgia is to explain that, coming out of the Ev Barrett, Red Coyle, Mugs Sullivan, Hoot Andrews tradition, I push my guys harder than most COs do. I also lose fewer men in battle than most COs do. In fact, after more than three decades of the Warrior’s life, I can still count my losses on the fingers of one hand. So you R2D2. Over and over. And when you think you’ve got it all down absofuckinglutely perfectly, and there’s nothing more you can learn, you train some more—and you learn some more.
No matter what the situation, the principles remain the same: you go through the entryway, moving quickly so as to get the greatest number of shooters inside without hanging up in the choke point, where you are vulnerable. As you go in, you scan for the nearest threat. If there is a threat, you move toward it and you neutralize it. You never stop moving. Let me repeat that, because it is important. You never stop moving. Never, ever.
Where was I? Oh yeah—we’d just stacked. Wonder stood next to the unlocked door. He nodded, letting me know that he was ready. Even though I couldn’t see it happen, I knew that Rodent was giving Gator’s left shoulder a squeeze to tell him he was ready. Then Gator would do the same to Duck Foot, who would do the same to Doc, who—yup—squeezed my left shoulder firmly. That told me we were all ready to go.
I nodded my head up-down once. Smoothly, Wonder pulled the door toward him. I went through the opening and advanced immediately to my right, my back parallel to the wall, my eyes scanning. Now, if you are a devotee of all those quote realistic unquote Hollywood movies about SWAT and SEALs and SpecWar, you’ll remember how they do this—the guys go in from opposite sides of the doorway, pistols and SMGs pointed up toward the ceiling, fingers on the triggers, moving and stopping, moving and stopping in jerky, macho choreography.
Well, friends, there is a SEAL technical term for that stuff. It is: bullshit. What it is, is Hollywood horse puckey. Pure fantasy. You go into a real-life situation like that and two things are definitely gonna happen. First, you’re going to shoot your swim buddy when you trip on the doorsill. Why? Because your finger is on the fucking trigger, and he is standing directly across from you, and Mr. Murphy has his hand firmly in the small of your back. That’s why we always stack on the same side of the doorway—so we know where we all are and we don’t shoot one another.
Second, if you manage not to shoot your buddy when you trip, you’re going to shoot the ceiling. Why? Because that’s where your gun is pointed. I am a big believer in what is known in the Warrior biz as the laser rule. Simply stated, the laser rule is that you never point a gun where you aren’t going to shoot it. You say you don’t want to shoot at the ceiling? Okay—don’t point your gun at it. The P7 in my hands was in what the folks at H&K call the low ready—that is to say, it was held close to my chest, my finger indexed on the frame next to the trigger guard, in the revolutionary and effective strong left-hand, modified Weaver grip pioneered by the Mid-South Institute’s pistoleer John Shaw. The gun’s position was more or less horizontal—the barrel was pointed slightly downward, so that my eyes could sight-align instantaneously but not remain locked on the front sight. If your eyes lock on the front sight, they will not scan left right, left right. If you do not scan, you will not perceive threats. If you do not perceive threats, you will get dead.
Okay. So I’m through the doorway. Moving. Scanning. Breathing. Whoops—have I said anything about breathing? No? Well, you gotta remember to b-r-e-a-t-h-e during these types of maneuvers, because if you don’t, you will actually seize up and fuck up. You will not move, or scan correctly, because your body will become oxygen-deprived, and hence not be working at 110 percent. Moreover, you will almost immediately begin to hyperventilate, which is a Bad Thing during an entry, where your heart rate is going to be pumping somewhere in the 160 range under normal (!) circumstances.
Okay, let’s try this one more time. Through the doorway. Move. Scan. Breathe. Doc right on my tail, going left as I go right. Gator, Duck Foot, and Rodent behind him. Wonder, with the suppressed MP5, brings up the rear. Scan. No threats. Breathe. No threats. Move. No threats.
We worked our way all around the courtyard—it was deceptively large, perhaps seventy by seventy—exploring quickly and efficiently. It was empty—and it was clear. I silent-signaled Rodent to pull the gate door closed and remain behind as rear security until we’d made entry. Then he could join us. He answered me with a rueful, single-fingered salute.
I pointed toward the drainpipe and gestured “up.” Duck Foot, the lead climber, nodded once. He stowed his weapon and double-secured it in its holster, using both the thumb break, which snaps closed, and a Velcro strap that rides over the top of the thumb break and secures it. Many is the time that a pistol has worked itself loose during a climb, only to drop five or six stories and leave its unfortunate owner with no more than his own limp dick to threaten the bad guys with. Pistol secured, Duck Foot checked the coil of soft nylon rope slung across his shoulder, then started up. When he was ten feet above the ground, Gator, who’d been securing his own weapon and equipment, gave me a dirty look and followed him.
Now it was up to Doc, Wonder, and me. Vynkenski had said there were four wooden doors leading from the courtyard to a series of stairwells. Each of the stairwells led to six pairs of apartments—two per floor. I picked up that quartet of stairwell doors. But just to be certain, I slid my night vision out of my jacket pocket and scanned. Guess what—there were four more doorways, two on each side of a narrow, garbage-strewn passageway that separated the two wings of the building.
Great. Exactly what we needed right now: bad directions. Which fucking door was the one we needed to go through to get up to Andrei’s private landing? Vynkenski had sworn it was the second door on the left-hand side of the courtyard. But there were now two second doors on the left-hand side of the courtyard. Which one was ours?
The answer was, we had to pick each lock, and then go exploring.
Which is exactly what Wonder did. And, true to Mr. Murphy’s law, the first lock took him more than his accustomed ten seconds. He worked on it for a minute and a half. And if you don’t think that’s a long time when you’re hanging out all exposed in the middle of an operation, just try counting to ninety right now—no, do it slowly.
Wonder was either cursing or praying in six or seven languages by the time he’d convinced his fingers and his brain to read off the same sheet of music and act in tandem. You could see his sweaty lips silently reciting whichever form of catechism it was he’d chosen.
Finally, through gritted teeth, he whispered, “Okay,” opened the door, and slid his picks back into his pocket. He started to head toward the second door. I silent-signaled for him to stop. No use disturbing any more doors than necessa
ry.
I put my night vision to my eye and I went through the door into the blackness. I saw a light switch at the base of the stairs. The French call these auto-timer light switches minuteries, because when you allumer la minuterie (figure it out yourself—it’s pretty basic French), they stay allumed for about a minute, then automatically switch off, having allowed you to scamper up the stairs in light.
I peered up the stairwell. It was empty. Andrei was in apartment fifty-two. There would be a number on the door. I knew the information was good because Vynkenski had been in considerable discomfort when he’d given it to me.
I made my way to the first landing. The doors were numberless. I climbed another floor to find another pair of unmarked doors. I went up another flight of stairs. More doors sans numbers. I knew that this was the wrong stairwell. But I had to make the fucking climb anyway—because Thou Shall Never Assume anything. So I humped myself to the top landing, checked the doorways, saw no numbers, and quietly descended to the ground floor.
Wonder’s quizzical face greeted me at the bottom of the stairs. I turned my thumb down, then hooked it toward the other doorway. He rolled his eyes to tell me I’d wasted his time by keeping him waiting, retrieved his lock picks, and shuffled into the passageway, slaloming his way around the frozen garbage.
Wonder breezed through the second lock without an ambient scrape, scratch, or graze. Night vision to my eye, I took point and slipped inside. I hugged the wall, and scanned the floor to make sure there weren’t any trip wires, marbles, tin cans, or other makeshift alarms set out. The floor was dirty, but clear.
I moved toward the stairwell and inspected each tread leading to the first-floor landing. All clear. Now I angled my neck and panned slowly up the stairwell itself. Nothing. I made my way up until I could see a door. There was a number on it: 11.
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