Dirk Ramm: Suited and Booted

by Matt Hilton

  Ever forward, he told himself.

  But not by the direct route.

  Going through those doors was tantamount to instant death.

  He checked and saw another door to the extreme left and he went through that way instead, finding himself in a narrow stairwell that should take him to the roof. He recalled that there was a gunman up above. So what, he decided, last place anyone would expect him was up there. He went up the stairs and pushed out onto a balustrade that ran the length of the side façade of the big house. Crouching near the front corner was the rifleman who’d tried to kill him out by the fountain. The guy didn’t see or hear death coming for him. Ramm shot him in the back of the skull. Then he checked for what was a feature of this style of steepled roof: an access hatch into the attic space. He discovered it at the back of the house and went inside. The attic was jet-black darkness and the footing precarious, as he would be traversing beams. Walking along the balustrade from front to back after killing the shooter, he’d counted his steps. He now stepped out three quarters of the same number along the central wooden beam. He checked his Makarov, held it close to his side, even as, with his other hand he eased out his Tanto blade. Then he took a jump to one side, snapped both heels together and plummeted through the fragile ceiling of the room where his enemies had gathered.

  His surprise entrance was both noisy, and disconcerting. While he bent his knees to absorb the fall of more than fifteen feet, his gun was already on its way up and he capped two shooters with their eyes screwed shut against the fall of plaster and dust. He pivoted, shot another man, then another. The rubble he’d knocked loose hadn’t even finished clattering to the hardwood floor before four men beat it to it. Shouts rang out; Ramm remained silent. His Makarov spoke for him. It barked once, twice, three times, and another trio of would-be killers had the tables turned on them.

  Ramm moved.

  The initial surprise appearance was spent and guns began tracking him.

  Ramm counted figures.

  Eight still living: one of them Missy.

  A round hit him in the chest.

  Ramm staggered, but fired back, and his attempted killer fell with a gaping wound in his skull.

  Two men to his left, two to the right. They opened up, their handguns belching death. Sadly their target was no longer in their bullets’ trajectories because Ramm had tucked and rolled again. Crossfire took out a man to each side before those still living realised their error. By then it was too late for the man on the right. Ramm fired on him, took out his left kneecap, and as the guy crumpled in agony, Ramm put another round in his bean. That only left one of the original four standing, but Ramm was quick to charge in, taking another solid punch of lead into his chest on the way. The guy should have aimed higher, because his heart shots didn’t stop Ramm, only left him open to a swipe of the Tanto across his throat. Blood fanned the air around him. Ramm grabbed the dying man by his gun arm and twisted with him, placing the body between him and the other bullets seeking his life. Ramm felt the impact of half a dozen bullets in his human shield, even as he sucked in oxygen to shake off the wounds he’d taken.

  Dust still billowed in the room.

  More plaster fell from above, jagged lumps that thudded on the hardwood floor. In the moving dust clouds Ramm checked for his remaining three enemies. One suited and booted guy was crouching behind a plush couch, his silver hair bobbing up and down as he shouted orders. The silver crown belonged to Brandon Gitchsler and Ramm was tempted to put an extra splash of colour in it with a well-placed bullet, but he resisted the temptation: he wanted Gitchsler for last. The final two hitters had concluded that their sharpshooting skills weren’t as good as they’d hoped. They’d figured it out that Ramm was wearing a ballistic vest of some kind beneath his sweatshirt, and that they were wasting their time shooting at centre mass. They didn’t know that Ramm was wearing an experimental Israeli nanocomposite anti-ballistic/stab suit beneath his entire clothing, and that bullets to his legs wouldn’t stop him either. They wasted a few seconds figuring that out too.

  Ramm fired over the corpse’s shoulder, taking out one of the men. Then it happened: the dead man’s click. The slide on his gun locked open as his ammunition ran dry.

  Ramm threw aside the now shattered human shield, and re-holstered his Makarov. The dead man’s gun was on the floor at his feet, but to bend for it would place Ramm’s unguarded skull firmly in the shooter’s sights. He gripped his Tanto and leapt for the man. The mobster wasted what little opportunity he had left in firing his gun at Ramm’s head. But the target was too elusive, the bullets missing entirely or whacking off Ramm’s burly shoulders. By the time the gunman changed tactics and kicked out at Ramm, it was too late. Ramm’s blade danced in and out, slicing the tendons at the back of the thug’s knees, then as he collapsed like a clipped puppet, ended in the juncture of throat and breastbone. During Ramm’s vicious assault, he’d snatched the gunman’s pistol out of his dying fingers. He turned it on Gitchsler as the mob boss stood up, showing placating palms.

  ‘Don’t shoot, Ramm. I’m unarmed.’

  ‘Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t.’

  ‘Because I’m not your real enemy here.’

  ‘What are you talking about, punk? You kidnapped Missy. Laid this trap for me. Now you’re trying to tell me it’s all been some big mistake?’

  ‘No,’ Gitchsler said. ‘None of this was a mistake. It was indeed a plot to draw you here and kill you. There’s a rather large bounty on your head. But I wasn’t the one who wished to claim it.’

  Ramm frowned at the man’s words. If not Gitchsler, then who?

  ‘It was me,’ Missy Dolan said from behind him as she brought down a heavy vase on Ramm’s head.

  Stunned by the blow, Ramm staggered. Missy followed quickly, tripping him with one of her finely turned ankles. He sprawled on the floor in a billow of dust and plaster particles. Gitchsler bounded at him, stamping down on his gun hand and pinning it to the floor. Missy snatched the Tanto out of the throat of the nearby corpse and placed it against the nape of Ramm’s neck.

  ‘Fight me,’ she warned, ‘and I’ll do worse than kill you. I will insert this blade between your vertebra and leave you a cripple from the neck down.’

  ‘Damnit, Missy, what’s this all about? You telling me you played me like a fool and set all this in motion? For what…Money?’

  ‘The money means nothing to me, Ramm. I am only interested in satisfaction.’

  ‘I gave you more satisfaction than this old man could, I bet,’ Ramm growled.

  ‘Is that all you think about? Sex?’

  ‘With you, Missy? No. There was more than the great sex, I actually thought I liked you too.’

  ‘Liked me, ha! Was that your big dream, Ramm? That we’d fall in love, live happily ever after? Did you really think I could love a man like you?’ Missy sneered. ‘You are a fool and an egotist to boot. I was only playing a part.’

  ‘So that wasn’t my name you were whispering during the throes of passion, you were just giving me instruction?’

  ‘Your ego is about the most inflated thing about you, Ramm. Now shut up and listen to me. It’s as I said: I want satisfaction.’

  Missy stood up relaxing the blade from his nape, but it was only a split-second before Gitchsler had the gun out of his hand and aimed at his skull.

  ‘Turn over on your back, but keep your hands where I can see them,’ Gitchsler warned.

  Ramm rolled over.

  He folded his hands over his abdomen. Prone, as he was, it was evident how many bullets had struck him from the number of charred holes in his sweatshirt and the strands of faux spider silk padding sticking out of them. The super tensile silk, and the nano-gel inserts beneath, had halted all the bullets. They had stopped the murderous projectiles if not the pounds per inch impacts and - beneath his suit - Ramm knew he’d be black and blue from neck to navel. The pain of his bruises would follow soon, if he was allowed to live that long.

  G
itchsler grinned down at him.

  ‘To think that some of the Red Mafia’s best have failed to stop you, and all it took to bring down the dreaded Battering Ram was to lay a honey trap.’

  Ramm ignored the mob boss’s taunting, looking instead at Missy. She mugged at him, hands at her throat, letting out a pealing scream the likes of which drew him to this room.

  ‘That was always your weakness, Ramm. Never could turn down a damsel in distress, could you?’ she said.

  ‘Actually, I don’t see it as a weakness,’ Ramm said. ‘In my book it’s a virtue.’

  ‘Yes, but when was that book written…the goddamn Victorian era?’

  Ramm smiled at her misplaced humour.

  ‘You know something, Missy. You’re even more beautiful like this. A little anger in your eyes, instead of the tears you used to suck me in to your trap.’

  She snorted at him.

  Ramm wasn’t telling lies. He did indeed believe she looked incredibly beautiful. But then Ramm always found serpents beautiful too, and he was under no illusion that she was as deadly as a nest of rattlesnakes.

  ‘What’s your real name, Missy?’

  Missy balanced the hilt of his Tanto in her left palm as she teased the diamond tip with a well-manicured fingernail. ‘So you’re not as dumb as you look. You’ve figured it out, eh?’

  ‘You said you wanted satisfaction,’ Ramm explained. ‘If you weren’t talking about in the sack, then that leaves only one other thing: Revenge.’

  She flipped the blade, caught the hilt in her left hand, tossed it to the right, the blade projecting below her fist. She knew how to handle his weapon, Ramm noted. But that, he now understood, was always a given.

  ‘Missy Dolan. I get it now: You’re Mizinovskaia Dolohova? Daughter of Petrov Dolohov?’

  ‘The same Petrov Dolohov that you murdered, Ramm,’ she reminded him.

  He had no excuse. He had indeed murdered her father, albeit as payback for the murder of his own parents and brother.

  ‘You did not recognise me when I came to you like this.’ Missy ran a languid hand down her voluptuous body. ‘Not surprisingly, I suppose. I was only fifteen years old the last time you laid eyes on me. Aah, I see now that you remember. Yes, I was that plain looking child, yet to flourish into full womanhood, when you left me crying over the body of my dead father. I swore then that one day I would have the satisfaction of seeing you lying dead at my feet.’

  ‘And now that the time has come, does it give you the sense of justice you thought it would?’ Ramm asked.

  Missy eyelids flickered momentarily.

  ‘And yet you haven’t got it in you to kill me when you have the chance,’ he said. ‘As you did not when I lay asleep in your arms last night. You could have as easily took my knife then and cut my throat. I don’t think you know exactly what you want from me, Missy.’

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ she said. Her gaze flicked to Gitchsler. ‘Do it, Leonid. Shoot him dead.’

  Gitchsler – or Leonid Dzerzhinsky – took a look around at the devastation that Ramm had wrought upon both his home and his personal army, and he smiled in satisfaction. ‘Gladly,’ he crowed.

  He pointed the gun at Ramm’s head, pulled the trigger and the gun bucked in his hand.

  Ramm didn’t die. Not because his skull was bulletproofed, but that he’d jerked to one side at the very last moment and the bullet only punched through floorboards. Jerking back again, Ramm’s one hand came away from where he’d unsnapped the buckle on his belt, while the other held a grip on the leather. As he continued to roll to one side, he unfurled the belt, swinging it up and out at Gitchsler. The holster and Makarov wedged into it smacked painfully against Gitchsler’s extended hand, knocking the gun aside, as Ramm smartly bounded to his feet. Before Gitchsler could take another shot, Ramm swung the belt and its load at his face, smashing teeth and jaw into pulp. Ramm had promised himself he would use the Makarov to kill the mobster, and that’s exactly as he intended now. He snatched the gun out of the holster, and drove the barrel deep between Gitchsler’s sagging jaws, directly through the soft palate and into his brain. The Russian mobster’s eyes crossed, then Ramm twisted the gun in his grip, stirring the grey matter with the extended sights on the tip of the barrel. As Gitchsler slipped dead to the floor, Ramm withdrew the gore-drenched gun and turned to face Missy.

  He thought her beautiful before.

  Now her face was twisted with the ugly light of murder.

  She shrieked like a wild cat and came at him, the glinting Tanto stabbing at his face.

  Ramm sidestepped her lunge, and as she had with him earlier, he stuck out a foot and tripped her. Instead of going face down on the floor, Missy floundered to keep her balance, but her heels skidded on the hardwood floor and she couldn’t halt herself. She pitched headfirst directly into one of the large floor to ceiling windows that Ramm had earlier wondered if he’d find her behind. The glass shattered, erupted outwards, and Missy flew into space, screaming. Ramm had noted on his way in the mobster’s lack of security arrangements concerning his grounds, and he knew now that Gitchsler had also been lacking when it came to shoring up his house. Some bulletproof glass would have stopped her plunge, saving Missy a smashed skull after falling thirty feet to the hard ground.

  Ramm stood at the shattered window, staring down at the dead woman.

  Shame, he thought, because he really had liked her.

  No regrets, he told himself. Missy had been the daughter of a Russian mob boss. Judging by the apparent power she’d held over Gitchsler, she herself had rated highly in the hierarchy, and his enemy.

  Ramm picked up Gitschler’s discarded weapon.

  There were still Russian mobsters alive in the house and grounds.

  He wasn’t going to be finished until he’d killed every last one of them.

  Now that the parameters of this night’s mission had altered, their deaths would be Ramm’s only guaranteed form of satisfaction.

  DIRK RAMM: UNSHEATHED

  By Matt Hilton

  Now…

  Dirk Ramm feared no man.

  At six feet two inches, with not an ounce of lazy fat on his lean muscled frame, he knew how to fight. He held black belts in the better-known Japanese combat arts of Ju-Jitsu, Karate and Aikido. On top of that he was an exponent of lesser-known but equally deadly styles like Savate, Krav Maga and the secretive bone breaking arts of Ninpo Koppojutsu and Hawaiian Kuialua. Plus, he was happy in a blood-and-snot-barroom-brawl if it came to it. He could fight for fun, and had proven himself during a long career with the CIA, and then later during his one-man campaign to bring down the Red Mafia. Put him up against any man, armed or unarmed it didn’t matter, and he’d at least give out as much punishment as he received.

  Attack dogs were a different story entirely.

  These dogs didn’t care about black belts or any title other than master.

  They answered to different rules of combat than men, were unpredictable in their attack, but totally predictable in their intent. Unlike the inherent weakness of most men, who preferred that they survive an encounter, attack dogs were driven by one savage predisposition: kill or be killed. Instinct bade them tear out the throat of anything their master sicked them on.

  Three slavering beasts were on his trail as he ran, coming like silent spectres through the fog. Trained to stay quiet, so that their attack came with shock and awe, none of the trio elicited as much as a yip of excitement or even a deep throated growl. If not for the tackety tack of their claws on the hard packed dirt the first Ramm would have known of them was when one of the huge Doberman’s barreled out of the mist and clamped its jaws around his throat.

  He couldn’t outrun the beasts.

  He couldn’t fight them in the open. While one went for his throat, the others would hamstring him, maybe core out his groin, and bring him down. He searched for a wall to put his back against, but in the cloying mist could spot no refuge. He cursed himself for foregoing his combat suit on
this mission. Formed of super tensile silk, a layer of nano-gel inserts beneath, it made him largely infallible to bullets or knives. Jokingly referred to as his Sheath of Steel, his experimental Israeli nanocomposite anti-ballistic/stab suit would have saved him from the ripping teeth of the dogs. But this mission had called for a mode of apparel unlikely to conceal his suit, and he’d regretfully left it behind.

  Quit worrying over spilt milk! Better he concern himself with his unspilled blood and kept things that way.

  Ramm continued running.

  The dogs were barely exerting any energy as they kept pace. Any second now and they’d hit the afterburners and they would catch him. They were disciplined fiends, though, and were waiting for the precise moment to launch their three-pronged attack.

  Through the fog shapes began to materialise: a farmhouse, a barn, a couple of smaller sheds. Ramm had no intention of placing any innocent at risk of the dogs, so angled away from the house, sprinting now for the barn. He hoped that it had doors that he could throw shut, but also that the wished for doors weren’t locked. As soon as he dug in for an extra spurt of speed the dogs came as fleet and as deadly as arrows. And, with the extra push came their first sounds of anticipation. The lead dog made a huffing noise deep in its chest, and Ramm knew that the beast was going to lead the charge.

  A knife would have been handy, a gun more so. But Ramm had neither. Like his NAS suit, he’d had to leave behind his weapons when infiltrating The Bishop’s compound. Suit or small arms would have picked him out as an interloper and though he’d have brought blazing fury among The Bishop’s flock, it would have done nothing for saving Shelly Cannon who’d been secreted deep within the tunnels beneath the compound. His only weapons here were his bare hands and his willingness to fight to the death. Partly he didn’t regret the coming battle. Maybe he’d grown complacent of late; that he’d grown to rely too much on his technologically advanced suit and weaponry, and going tooth and claw against these dogs in primal combat would just be the test he required.