Binder - 02
Page 6
As he got within three strides of me, the bearded man pulled back his knife arm like a rattlesnake preparing to strike. I think he planned to skewer me to the door with that Bowie knife. He sprinted the last two steps to give himself some momentum.
I waited until the last possible moment, until he was leaning forward and fully committed. Then I spun right, moving out of the path of the knife. I hit the middle of his forearm, blocking the blade away from me and toward the door. Then I tripped him. He went flying into the door, and the knife buried itself in the cheap wood. Before he could stop himself, I drove my forearm and shoulder into his back. He hit the motel room door flat on and I heard the hinges break and the frame splinter an instant before the door gave way. He fell with it, landing flat on his face in the middle of the motel room. There was a high-pitched scream and an angry baritone voice from within. I turned to deal with the other three men.
I flicked open the 16” Leverloc extendable baton I’d been gripping as I stepped forward and juked left toward the fastest of the three men. He was thin and chalk white, but he jabbed at me like a flyweight boxer; I could see that he was setting me up for a roundhouse with his other, chain-wrapped fist. I ducked back from the jab. Then as his ironclad punch powered forward, I brought up the knife-edge of my hand in a circular motion and bobbed to the side. The blow whispered past my ear. I grabbed his extended arm at the wrist with my blocking hand and pulled him off balance. Then I brought the baton in my other hand down hard on the side of his elbow.
As I felt the joint wrench, I turned again, wrapping my arm around the back of his neck as he staggered forward. I spun him around full circle like a matador with a bull, just in time to meet the tip of the baseball bat a bald man was swinging hard at me. It smacked the thin guy solidly on the top of his skull and I heard a crunch of bone as his skull fractured. He dropped flat to the ground when I released him.
I leapt forward before the bald man could take another swing with the bat. I swept my forearm straight up, catching him under the chin and pulled him backwards off his feet. I wrapped my arm around his neck, pressing hard on his carotid arteries. With my free hand, I raised the Leverloc to parry a blow from the last man standing, who wore an Army surplus jacket and a brown hunter’s cap with the earflaps pulled down. He swung again hard with the pipe, bringing it down like a hammer. I blocked the blow with the Leverloc raised horizontally and kicked his shin with the reinforced toe of my boot. He swore.
I felt the bald man go limp in my grasp as he lost consciousness and I dropped him. The guy in front of me thrust his pipe forward like a sword, and I parried with the baton. Then I lunged forward, driving the tip of the baton into the soft spot two inches below his Adam’s apple. He started to choke and dropped the pipe, his hands moving instinctively to his throat. I sprang forward and to his side as I dropped to one knee. With my arm extended straight out beside me, I drove the side of my balled fist into his solar plexus. He crumpled to the ground.
I heard a heavy step behind me and rolled as a big black boot swung through the space where I’d been kneeling a second before. The big guy had extracted himself from my neighbor’s motel room. He turned and tried to kick me again while I was still on my knees. I caught his boot with my hands and twisted, then spun to kick the other foot out from underneath him. He fell flat on his back and I made it to my feet while he was still struggling to get up. Stepping in behind him, I drove three fingers into a spot just below his armpit. The human nervous system works like an electrical circuit, and you can short it with training.
Only it didn’t work. He twisted around as he stood and grabbed me by the throat instead. The big man pulled me toward him with a surprising amount of strength. The guy’s mouth opened and I realized in a terrifying moment that he was going to bite me. His breath was foul and his pupils were dilated enormously. I tried to ignore the fact that I couldn’t breathe and managed to get an arm in front of me, pressing it under his jaw before he could tear into my face. Then I kneed him hard in the groin. He didn’t flinch. He clawed at my face with dirty, ragged fingernails, so I dropped the baton and slipped my hand from his grasp. Without warning, I pulled back the arm I had under his jaw and brought my forehead down on the bridge of his nose, breaking it. Then I knocked the inside of his elbow with mine and managed to pry his hand off of my throat.
The guy was insanely strong, but not terribly quick. I stepped behind him and tripped him as he turned to confront me. When he stumbled, I grabbed him by the elbow and the back of his collar and slammed him into the window of a Chrysler 300. It shattered and he howled madly, then bulled himself straight backwards, trying to knock me over. I got an arm around his neck and locked it in. I ducked my head down between his shoulder blades to keep him from butting me with the back of his skull.
I rode the big guy like a bronco as he yelled, struggling and staggering around the parking lot. He backed me into a car, whipped me around, even knocked me into a lamp pole, but I kept hanging on. After an eternity that probably lasted no more than ten seconds, the man went limp as he passed out. I lowered him to the ground and, seeing that the other men were still immobile, slid down against the black 20-inch rims of the Chrysler to catch my breath.
* * *
“You’ve had quite a day,” Sheriff Casto said as I held a chemical ice pack to my neck. The first police cruiser rolled into the motel lot less than two minutes after I finally got the big guy down, while I was tightening a tuff-tie I’d slid from my forearm down around his wrists. The quick response wasn’t surprising—we were within walking distance of the county courthouse, after all. The ambulance arrived a moment later and quickly sped off with the two men who’d suffered head trauma.
“Yes, sir, I have,” I replied. One of Casto’s Deputies, Mark Collins, was standing with us. He had the bearing of a professional lawman and wore a Stetson hat with his uniform.
“You took down four guys single-handed?” Collins asked.
“They were a little clumsy. Most of the damage came from them running into each other.”
“Bullshit. I’ve seen guys like you before. Which branch?”
I eyed him again. He had the look, so I didn’t dodge the question. “Army,” I admitted.
“I was Navy. Shore patrol,” he said. “What unit?”
“Fifth Special Forces.”
“Yeah, that’ll do. That’s why the couple in Room 8 back there said it looked like someone was filming a Chuck Norris movie in the parking lot.” Collins smiled.
“I can promise you that it was nothing like that. Just a little self-defense.”
“I hope we don’t see a lot of self-defense around here, then,” Casto muttered.
Me either. “Someone really doesn’t want me around, that’s for sure. What’s the deal with that one?” I looked over at the big guy, who’d just regained consciousness. Four deputies were struggling to subdue him. Even flexi-cuffed, he was shaking them off. One of the deputies pulled out a Taser.
“My money’s on Bath Salts,” Collins says.
“Bath salts?” Sheriff Casto asked.
“New drug,” Collins explained. “It has synthetic cathinones, and it’s supposed to give a high like cocaine or methamphetamine but with different side effects. Started showing up last year. It was originally imported from Asia but now they’re manufacturing it in meth labs in the hollers. Until this summer they sold it in packets labeled ‘not for human consumption,’ and it wasn’t even illegal here. But now it’s against federal law. They’re calling it the ‘Zombie drug’ because an addict chewed off some guy’s face in Miami.”
We watched a deputy Tase the giant a second time.
“He tried taking a bite out of me,” I observed while I checked my ribcage. I would have some bruises but nothing was broken.
“I don’t know whether this is happening everywhere, but the local blend is driving people crazy. We’ve seen a big spike in violence over the last few months. It’s started to hit the rave scene, so we’re finding high sc
hool kids amped up on it. When they get really worked up on Bath Salts, they don’t feel pain.” Collins nodded over to where the big man was still struggling. “How’d you get the flexi-cuffs on him, anyway?”
“I stopped the flow of blood to his brain first.”
“Yeah, that’s what my wife does with me. Looks like a bunch of it landed on you, though,” Collins observed, gesturing to my face.
I realized that the man had probably bled on me. I lifted fingers to my chin and felt a familiar stickiness over the day’s stubble.
“Do you mind if I wash up?” I asked.
“Not at all. I called the District Attorney’s office. They’re sending someone over to talk to you, but it’ll take a spell. Just come on back out when you’re done,” Sheriff Casto said. He opened up his notebook and turned to Collins.
I had my hand on the doorknob to my room and the key in the lock when I froze. Something was missing. Something important. Two little pieces of cork I’d left wedged in the hinges of the door were gone. It’s a little bit of tradecraft that tells you if someone has been in your room. Not so useful in a high-end hotel, where you can count on a maid or mini-bar checker to eventually violate the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door, and pros can generally spot the telltales if they’re looking for them, but in a little motel, the odds of someone having entered my room for a legitimate reason after it had been cleaned for the day were miniscule. I carefully withdrew the key from the lock and backed away from the door, toward Casto and Collins.
“Someone’s been in my room,” I said.
“Housekeeper?” Casto asks.
I shook my head. “I was in the room right before dinner. I’m pretty sure they don’t have turndown service here.” Collins chuckled at that. “Maybe one of these thugs broke in, but I’m not going to bet on that. None of them looks smart enough to pick a lock.”
“I’ll call Charleston,” Casto said. I looked at Collins quizzically.
“With all the attention we’re getting right now, we need to play it safe. There are only two bomb squads in West Virginia,” he explained. “One for the Kanawha County Sheriff’s Office—they cover the capitol—and one for the State Police, also based in Charleston. It may take them a little while to get here.”
“If there’s actually something behind the door, I’d really like to get a peek at it before the bomb squad carts it off,” I told Collins.
“What do you think the odds are that anyone who set an explosive charge would have set a trigger on the window?” Collins asks.
“Anything’s possible. But it would surprise me. Someone who’s smart enough not to open the door isn’t going to break a window to get inside his motel room. And rigging a device with a vibration sensor in a busy motel is tricky.” I answered the question reflexively. The look on Collins’s face told me I’d displayed a little too much expertise on the subject of bomb making.
“Well let’s hope the staties think I’m dumb enough to not bother trying to get me fired for this,” Collins replied. He turned and walked over to the window, sliding his baton from his belt as he did. He covered his face with his jacket sleeve and hit the corner of the window hard with the end of the baton. The lower portion of the glass shattered and I ducked, instinctively covering my eyes. Nothing happened. I let out a breath that I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. Collins raised the baton higher and hit the section of window above the jagged gap. He cleared the glass from the sill, then pushed back the curtain and shone his flashlight inside the room. After a second he whistled. He turned to me slowly.
“When’s the last time you saw an IED?”
11
“The FBI investigates street fights?” I asked the brunette in the expensive suit.
“That was hardly a brawl, Mr. Herne. The injuries were one-sided.” She was distractingly attractive, with eyes just greener than hazel, high cheekbones and an angular, exotic face that suggested a bit of Native American ancestry in her ethnic mix. Her name was Nichols. Special Agent Harper Nichols.
“You do realize there were four of them, Agent Nichols? And that they jumped me? I defended myself. There were witnesses.” Federal employees play “Whose Turf Is It?” I was bound to lose because I wasn’t in West Virginia on government business. But backing down too quickly would have invited Agent Nichols to come down even harder on me.
“You made sure of that, didn’t you?”
Deputy Collins stifled a laugh and turned away quickly when Nichols glared at him. She obviously hadn’t been told that the witnesses were the couple whose door I’d wrecked. They’d been in flagrante delicto when I pushed the big guy through the door to their room. Apparently they were married—but not to each other. “And if you’d defended yourself any more vigorously,” Nichols continued, “we might be investigating a murder.”
“Which would still be a state matter.”
“When a federal employee with a Top Secret security clearance from a department of the Executive Branch with no domestic jurisdiction arrives in our state and starts asking questions that relate to an ongoing federal criminal investigation, we notice,” Nichols countered. “When this federal employee continues to cross our investigative path, we pay special attention.” She was fairly tall, only a couple of inches shorter than me. Her straight hair fell near to her shoulders. I wondered if she pulled it back at the office. The suit she was wearing fit her well enough to mark her an athlete. She fit that part of the profile, anyway.
“And when my SSA is in a meeting with the Governor and they’re interrupted so the commanding Colonel of the State Police can report an explosive device has been discovered in this federal employee’s motel room, then it becomes the business of the FBI,” Nichols concluded.
“Your SSA was in a meeting with the Governor of West Virginia at 10 p.m. on a Friday night? I hope he wasn’t losing too much money,” I said dryly. Deputy Collins snorted loudly and started coughing into his fist. Nichols glared at him for a second, then grabbed my arm and pulled me a few feet further away.
“Does it matter?” Nichols asked. Her response confirmed what I suspected. FBI agents are among the most territorial creatures on earth. After needling this young, aggressive agent, I had just taken a shot at her boss. I gave Nichols an ideal opportunity to threaten me, but she hadn’t; I knew she’d been ordered to play nice. Since my job with the State Department is at roughly the same level and pay grade as a municipal dogcatcher, Alpha must have already reached out to the FBI. It also hadn’t escaped me that they’d sent an attractive young female agent instead of a couple of surly, seasoned old pros to question me.
“So how did you draw the short straw?” I asked.
A small smile pulled tightly across her lips. “This is my case, Mr. Herne.”
“Then I’m sorry to have ruined your evening, ma’am.”
“Perhaps you could fill me in?” she suggested.
“Is there any place we can get coffee at this hour?”
* * *
I sat across from Special Agent Nichols in a booth at a truck stop a mile out of town. I had my hands full following her Suburban on the wet roads from Hamlin. The woman could drive a truck. She projected a highly specific brand of self-confidence. It was one I recognized.
“Naval aviator?” I asked.
Her smile reached her eyes for a moment. “That’s right. Annapolis, then wings plus eight.” So she had fulfilled her eight-year service commitment after finishing at the Naval Academy and completing flight school.
“What did you fly?” I asked. There weren’t many women in the Tier One Special Ops community when I served, but women have flown combat in jets for years.
“The F/A-18F Super Hornet.”
I let out a low whistle. Flying a fighter for the Navy is about as easy as making the starting roster on an NFL team. “That’s a serious job. When did you get out?”
“Two years ago. I applied to the FBI when I made Lieutenant Commander. I started at the Academy three weeks after my discharge.”
“No, but having a law degree or a law enforcement or accounting background is useful.” I heard an edge in her voice. Her looks were undoubtedly a double-edged sword. She’d have had to work twice as hard as an average-looking woman to prove her competence in a conservative outfit like the FBI. And carrier pilots are a very specific breed. You have to have a lot of nerve to land a jet plane on a runway that pitches and rolls while you’re trying to set down.
“I know what you mean. I’m an intelligence analyst without a master’s degree working in a department full of PhDs. I take it you’re not from around here?”
She shook her head. “Arizona. But the FBI is like the Navy. You go where they send you. You?”
“New York State, south of Albany. But I haven’t lived there since I was eighteen.”
“And where did you serve?”
“Special Agent Nichols, I think you’ve already seen my service record.” I smiled.
“I scanned the file,” she admitted without hesitation, “but I don’t believe that you sat behind a desk for half your time in the Army.” Our waitress ambled over with two cups of black coffee. I’d suspected all along but the confirmation shook me all the same: I’d been in West Virginia for just over twenty-four hours and the FBI had already pulled my service record.
That file, even the one the FBI can access, is intentionally incomplete. It correctly notes the time I spent as a Ranger and in the Special Forces, as well as some of the things I did in Afghanistan. But it lists me as having been partly disabled, finishing my enlistment as a Master Sergeant in a logistics support unit based in Arlington, Virginia. The fake logistics unit was the operational cover for the Activity.
“You know how it goes,” I responded, because while I couldn’t tell her the truth, a lie would have insulted her intelligence.