One of the men, a solid figure with wide shoulders and a head shaped like an upside-down bucket, moved with familiarity through the dim space, avoiding tables as he went directly to a store closet at the edge of the dining room. Behind him a slimmer, shorter figure limped in pursuit. I shot Rink a look, held out two fingers to my side. He nodded in understanding. Returning my attention to the new arrivals, I watched as the thickset guy returned from the closet lugging a weighty kitbag. He placed down his burden, and then began digging in the bag. His skinny pal moved beyond him, out of my line of sight. I scanned their back trail, anticipating more men to enter with them. But after I’d made a slow count to thirty in my head, it was likely they were the only ones to worry about.
The skinny man joined his pal.
They stood in a pocket of darkness, but they were backlit by the amber glow through the window coverings. I recognised their shapes. It was the two gunmen who had arrived too late to stop me shooting their pals outside the art supplies store. The skinny man I’d shortly hit with the getaway van I’d stolen – which explained his limping gait – while the stocky one was the Middle Eastern gunman who’d tried to shoot me in the head through the van’s windscreen.
I could feel the heat radiating off Rink. Or maybe it was my imagination. Still, he was tense and ready for action. But I stalled him with another silent gesture of my hand. The bigger man had pulled from his bag a machine pistol with a folding stock. He tossed it to his pal, and then delved again in his bag. He withdrew a second machine pistol. Judging by their shape, both guns were identical and recognisable as Ingram MAC-10s fitted with two-stage SIONICS suppressors. The inclusion of the suppressors helped with noise abatement, and also control of the guns when fired on full automatic. Civilian ownership of the guns had been illegal in the US for more than two decades. But it was doubtful that PMCs in Viskhan’s employment cared about gun laws.
The two men began inserting box magazines, and dependent on the calibre they were long enough to hold thirty .45 ACP or thirty-two 9x19 mm rounds. Whatever, between them they easily quadrupled the firepower available to us in my Glock. They had the upper hand if it came to a shootout, but we had the element of surprise on our side.
The two conversed, random bullshit that usually passed between friends comfortable in each other’s presence, although there was urgency as if they were short of time. As they bounced comments and curses back and forth they checked the actions on the machine pistols, and the manner in which they did so told me they were experienced handlers. All the while, we waited, allowing the mercenaries to relax as they worked at routines they could perform with their eyes closed. As each weapon was given their approval they were set aside on a table, then the bigger man delved in the bag again. While his head was down and the skinny guy turned away to watch the shadow-play on the front window, I gave Rink a nod. Without comment he slipped away, using the counter as cover as he moved for the far end of the kitchen and a swing door that allowed the easy movement of servers from kitchen to dining room. He rose up, out of sight of the mercs, and checked I was ready. We shared a brief nod, and with it we moved.
Rink kicked the swing door open and pounced into the dining space. He held his KA-BAR in a reverse grip, the point angling down towards his right hip. He emitted a guttural challenge. The immediate effect was that the big mercenary jerked in surprise, both his hands deep inside the kit bag. The skinny man spun around, stunned by the sound and bluster and, caught in indecision, he looked at the nearest MAC-10, but his hands flew out from his sides, showing empty palms. It took a second or so for their brains to process the situation, see that Rink was armed only with a knife, and come to a collective decision. As the first guy began pulling free of the bag – choosing to go for a prepped weapon on the table next to him rather than assemble a gun from the bag – the skinny guy began a loping run for the machine pistols.
I darted up, the Glock extended in a two hands grip, and I shot Skinny in his right thigh. With no good leg under him, he collapsed down on his front and almost slid beneath the table holding the guns. I swung my aim on the big guy. He halted, fingertips an inch or so from snagging a gun.
‘Go on,’ I challenged him. ‘Reach for it, you son of a bitch. See if you can dodge my bullet.’
His fingers withdrew.
He lifted his open hands to shoulder level.
‘Good decision,’ I said. ‘Now move away from the table.’
He did as commanded. Rink rushed him, grabbed the collar of his jacket and kicked the backs of his knees, forcing the man down.
‘Hands on your fucking head,’ Rink snapped at him.
The big guy glared back over his shoulder, and Rink sneered at him. Laid his KA-BAR alongside the man’s swarthy jawline. ‘How’s about I cut off your damn head instead and have done with it?’
His hands went on the back of his head, thick strands of blue-black hair jutting between his fingers. Rink rapidly patted him down and found a pistol holstered under his left armpit. He used the merc’s gun to cover him with.
In the meantime, I’d come out from behind the service counter, gun again aimed at the skinny guy. He grimaced, his hands slapped over the wound in his leg. I bobbed the barrel of my gun, silent instruction for him to move from under the table. ‘I… I can’t move,’ he snarled. ‘You shot me, you bastard.’
‘Move,’ I warned, ‘or I’ll shoot you again.’
He played up the agony, making a meal of dragging his lame legs from under the table. He grasped for stability with a bloody hand, and only a blind man would miss that he was groping for a weapon. I curled my lip at Rink, and my friend got the message. He lunged, stabbed down with his left hand, and his KA-BAR went right through the questing hand and into the table. While Skinny howled, his body thrashing for freedom, I collected the MAC-10s and deposited them on the counter behind me. Next I grabbed the kitbag and swung it out of reach, allowed it to drop on the floor.
The big guy cursed us. He spoke in his own tongue, but you didn’t need to speak Arabic to get the sense of his words.
‘Shut it, scumball,’ Rink hissed, with a tap of the gun barrel against the man’s cheek. He checked Skinny, who had fought to his knees and had his free hand hovering too near the hilt of the knife impaling his hand. He only wanted free, but he was a soldier, and might go for broke if he did manage to tug it out. Rink leaned over, grabbed the KA-BAR and yanked it loose. The skinny merc fell backwards, his injured hand cupped inside the other against his chest. He moaned in dismay.
‘Quit your damn grumbling,’ Rink told him.
I grasped the injured man, hauled him around the table and deposited him alongside the kneeling merc.
‘Get up like a man, Monk,’ his friend encouraged him. I made note of the name.
‘Yeah, Monk,’ I said. ‘You should kneel like you’re praying to God.’
‘M… my leg…’
‘Suck it up.’
I grabbed him and jostled him onto his knees. Blood pulsed anew from the wound in his thigh. It was dark red, so not oxygen-rich blood from an artery. He wouldn’t bleed to death quickly enough for me. I stepped back and observed our prisoners, while Rink was an unseen, dangerous presence behind them.
‘You know who we are, right?’ Both men had chased me, but they also had to understand the implications of making an enemy of Rink. He’d already displayed his willingness to hurt them, but it was better they understood the full urgency of their predicament. The big Middle Easterner nodded, his eyes seething. ‘Then you should know that we aren’t the type to pussy around. You will answer our questions, or you will die. What’s it going to be?’
‘I’m not afraid to die,’ the big guy announced, this time in accented English.
Rink beat me to the punch. He set the KA-BAR against the man’s jaw again. ‘How’s about I cut off his ears, Hunter?’
The big guy snorted. ‘Then how would I hear your questions?’
‘We only need one of you to answer us, pal,’ I told him.
On cue, Rink sliced upward with his knife.
Despite his tough guy attitude the merc exhaled sharply, and was desperate to slap a hand to the side of his head – to check if his ear was no longer attached.
‘Chill, dude,’ Rink grunted in mirth, ‘I’ve cut myself worse shaving.’
In truth the cut was deep enough, a raw strip that extended behind his left earlobe and into his thick hair. Warm blood dripped onto his collar. If the guy was seething before he was now volcanic. But – unlike some of his brethren – he wasn’t suicidal. He forced himself to remain kneeling, hands locked on his head.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
He didn’t reply.
‘Monk,’ I directed at his cringing pal, ‘what do you call your buddy?’
‘Fuck you,’ he replied, but with little force.
‘That’s an odd name. Oh, wait! You were being defiant, right?’ I aimed the gun directly at his skeletal face. ‘Like I said, we only need one of you, pal. Is your life worth keeping his name a secret when really it doesn’t matter to me? I can just call him asshole and it’ll do.’
‘My name is Omar Hussein,’ the big guy finally snapped. ‘Why does it even matter that you know our names?’
‘So we get them right in your damn obituaries,’ Rink growled in his ear.
I thumbed over my shoulder. ‘Either of you like to explain what the hell we found back there?’
Neither elected to answer.
‘See, if either of you were involved in what I suspect what went on in those cells, I’ll happily cut off your ears and feed them back to you.’
‘Man, we ain’t into that shit,’ Monk said. ‘We’re like you guys, we’re just old soldiers earning a living.’
‘You’re nothing like us,’ Rink said. ‘You’re murderers.’
‘And you are more virtuous?’ Omar laughed. He turned his accusatory gaze directly on me. ‘You shot three of my friends in cold blood.’
‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘With the guns I took from them that they intended using on me and an innocent woman.’
‘You shot Sierra in the back. To me that was the action of a coward and a murderer.’
‘I also recall you trying to shoot me in the back while I was at it,’ I countered, and offered him a snarky smile. We were arguing semantics. It wasn’t helping anything, so I switched tack. ‘Where is Mikhail Viskhan?’
‘We don’t know.’ Omar was too quick to lie.
‘I don’t believe you. Where is he?’
Monk shook his head. ‘He’s in hiding. Seriously, man. We don’t know where he is.’
‘Bullshit,’ said Rink.
Monk shook his head again, emphatically. ‘It’s part of the arrangement, man. We take our instructions from Cahill, not directly from that Chechen prick.’
‘So where’s Cahill so we can ask him?’
‘Searching for you,’ Hussein said.
‘To kill us?’ I asked, and didn’t need an answer. ‘Shame he didn’t save us all the trouble and come back here with you. He send you here to prep those MAC-10s for tomorrow or was that an executive decision?’
The two mercs glanced at each other.
‘You were arming yourselves, right, and for something much sooner?’ I shared a quick glance with Rink, and his eyelids narrowed in understanding. It was beginning to feel like a scene from a spaghetti western. I firmed up my stance, my gun unwavering as I aimed it at Hussein’s face. ‘You got a location on us?’
He only raised his eyebrows, and a smile flickered across his mouth.
‘Son of a bitch!’ Rink quickly stepped away, shoving away his appropriated gun. He wasn’t expecting an imminent attack on us. That wasn’t what we’d realised at all. He snatched out his cell phone, hit buttons. ‘Harvey? Don’t ask me a thing, brother. Just get Trey the hell outta there right now!’
Before he’d even finished warning our friend, Hussein saw that things could only end badly for him and Monk, so decided to go out fighting. He was a big man, but surprisingly agile, and not in the least encumbered by his kneeling position. He seemed to pop up, landing flat on his feet and immediately springboarding to grapple my gun away. Monk was a second slower to move, but even he scurried forward, again going for the MAC-10s.
I shot Hussein, catching him in the gut. But a single 9 mm bullet will rarely stop a big man who’s already committed to an attack at close quarters. I saw the impact reflected in the hot sheen of his eyes as he crashed into me. Then he had one huge hand around my windpipe and another on my wrist. He thrust me backwards and I smashed into the counter. He loomed over me, face inches from mine, and his wide mouth opened in a wolfish howl as he attempted to crush my throat to mulch. His saliva sprayed my features. My eyelids screwed momentarily in response, but I forced them open again. All the better to see him with. He had control of my wrist, but not my gun: I twisted it towards him. It’s the beauty of a Glock. You squeeze the trigger and bullets come out. I slotted him three new holes in his left side, most or all of which found his lung. He was already slumping aside when Rink hammered him from behind, his KA-BAR plunging into the soft flesh behind Hussein’s right collarbone.
Monk had his hands on a machine pistol.
Before he could use it to kill us he had to aim it, and he wasn’t too successful with his damaged hand and gimpy legs.
Even as Hussein crashed down, I side-kicked Monk’s knee, and as the MAC-10 flashed it did so into the ceiling. Even suppressed by the SIONICS silencer, the noise was like the angry flapping of giant bat wings. I returned fire: a close grouping of three bullets to Monk’s chest. He sat down hard on his backside, and the MAC-10 slid from a hand now lifeless. He slumped at the waist, head deep between his splayed knees, almost as if he was attempting to kiss his butt goodbye.
Rink and I again looked at each other.
‘Well that turned into a damn clusterfuck,’ Rink said.
He’d get no argument from me. Besides, there was no time. Monk and Hussein had been sent back to their temporary armoury to bolster their team’s firepower during an impending assault. Harvey and Trey were in danger, and we couldn’t help them while we were on the opposite side of Biscayne Bay.
30
A safe house is only such until its location is discovered. By the very nature of its clientele, using the motel as a hiding place was always risky. There was no telling who had dropped the tip to Cahill and his goons – it could have been a member of staff, another customer, or one of the prostitutes plying their trade in the area. It was always a problem for Trey that many of her husband’s sex workers knew her by sight, and that even those who’d managed to get away from him to work on patches governed by other pimps still knew who she was. Harvey suspected that Viskhan or Cahill had enrolled streetwalkers and local hoods into their army of seekers. Whoever had given them up didn’t matter, only that their safe house was anything but, and it was time to leave.
Trey had no belongings to gather, and Harvey wasn’t far behind her. Everything he’d brought to Miami with him he stuffed into a large carryall – electronics equipment and all – and he slung it on his back as if he was heading out on a mountain trek. They had no vehicle – Rink’s rental car was their only mode of transportation – so they had to move on foot, and fast. The telephone call from Rink had been short, left no room for clarifying the threat, but its urgency told Harvey everything he needed to know. Their safe house was compromised and they had to flee. Thankfully they made it out of the room before their hunters arrived.
Harvey led them not back towards the main road, from where their hunters would surely arrive, but through the motel’s parking lot to a low chain-link fence that separated it from the adjoining property.
‘I thought I was done with climbing fences and walls,’ said Trey, referencing something that she’d been forced into the previous night. She offered a meek smile to show she was only trying to lighten the situation.
Harvey stepped one leg over the fence. His long frame made easy
work of it. Then he forced down the uppermost wire with both hands, lowering its height and making an easier climb for Trey. She balanced herself on his shoulders and almost leapfrogged over. Harvey followed, cursing under his breath when he snagged the material of his trousers on the tip of a twisted wire. He pursed his lips in mild anger when he felt the frayed edges of a hole in his trousers. ‘Every time I get involved with Hunter I end up needing a new outfit,’ he told Trey.
She took a quick glance down at her own makeshift costume. ‘Tell me about it. Just don’t tell me I’m going to wind up at the bottom of another creek.’
‘I can’t promise that,’ Harvey said as he urged her away from the fence, ‘but if we’re chased I’ll do everything I can to keep you safe.’
His announcement proved both prophetic and problematic.
Two vehicles pulled into the motel’s parking lot, one of them staying near the entrance gate to cut off any escape in that direction. The other sped directly for the room at the end of the block. Men disgorged from both vehicles: two from each. In response, Harvey and Trey crouched low. It was dark now, but there was ambient light from the trailer and RV park behind them. If any of the men looked their way they’d be spotted, but for now all attention was on the motel room.
‘That’s Sean Cahill,’ Trey whispered, indicating a sturdy-built man with reddish hair and moustache who was directing his men. Even as Harvey checked him out, he saw Cahill slip a sidearm from under his jacket and hold it tight against his middle. Cahill turned briefly to signal one of the two men approaching along the path outside the row of rooms. ‘That’s Dan StJohn,’ Trey added. ‘I don’t know the names of the others.’
The team moved with familiarity, experienced in the tactics of room clearance. Cahill covered the door while his companion moved to the right, covering the side of the building so nobody could escape through the bathroom window. StJohn and his pal approached, and they too now had their sidearms prepped, but held close to their bodies. The blinds were still shut in the room, though Harvey had left the lights burning inside. Before leaving, he’d also switched on the TV, loud enough so it would be heard through the closed door. StJohn and his pal skirted the path, keeping away from the window until they were in place. Then StJohn set his back against the wall adjacent to the door. He looked at Cahill, received a nod. He tried the handle. The door had locked shut behind Harvey and Trey as they vacated the room. Instantly the third man in the team kicked directly beneath the handle and the flimsy door was smashed into the room. Cahill followed it, going in fast and low. StJohn was a beat behind him. The third man covered the door while the fourth man never took his aim off the bathroom window. Within seconds all four were back on the sidewalk, peering around, conversing urgently. Harvey cautioned Trey not to move: even a flinch could be enough movement to draw their gazes.
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