by Michael Priv
6:42 a.m. Through the hole in the back wall I peered into the developing grayness. Darkness was on the retreat and a new day was dawning. The still-lingering darkness swallowed the details of what lay ahead, but I could about make out the shapes of two cars some fifty yards away. Nothing moved out there.
I climbed through the opening and drifted cautiously toward the cars. The body of a dead American soldier lay not even twenty feet from the back wall. I found two more dead bodies in the tall grass and then two more closer to the cars. I also found the last of the Russians. He must have been the one who’d charged the American position and was probably responsible for most of the dead Marines. A goddamn hero. A dead hero. What a waste.
At 7:00 a.m., the morning was on the offensive full swing, sending darkness to run for cover, where it was still lurking. Lush North Bay vegetation stood in its green glory all spruced up by the rains, ready to receive the brilliance of the new day. Small birds, woken up to the beautiful morning, shrieked hysterically all around the battlefield, jumping among the dead bodies, snatching insects and other nonsense in the wet grass and darting here and there through the crisp morning air.
I carried Andrey and the other wounded Russian to the Colonel ’s Crown Vic. The unconscious Colonel, a big guy, managed to slump over both front seats, large as they were. Supported by the seat belt, the Colonel held the sitting position reasonably well. With the two Russians laid out on the back seat, I was almost ready for the return drive to San Francisco to rescue Linda—except for the money. A stroll through the brisk morning freshness to the Russians’ car rewarded me with the moneybag, my two hundred thousand dollars. Why did Andrey decide that I would want to hole up on some Caribbean island the minute I laid my hands on any money? To me, there was nothing more intolerable in the known universe than a long, boring vacation. What a crazy idea. Nauseating piña coladas and coconut sunscreen lotion—life sweet enough to sugar-shock you into permanent brain damage.
20 The uneventful drive back to the city was complicated by my adrenaline giving out. Kind of a repeat of my drive out of the city last night, plus the money and minus the Marines, the rain, and most of the uncertainty. The situation was much clearer in my mind now. I had some computer files that the Defense Secretary of the United States of America wanted. He’d ordered his minions to buy them from me. His orders were vague and had been flagrantly misinterpreted locally, which resulted in the loss of two FBI agents, fifteen Special Ops troops and three Russian gangsters, not to mention a bunch of wounded. Well, if O’Hara didn’t really want me killed earlier, he probably did now, after everything that had happened. I bet, to him, I felt like a nasty thorn in his ass. Now he’d really want to keep a lid on it. Damn Colonel! I jabbed the unconscious Colonel in the ribs. He moaned.
The major conundrum remained. Why the hell would General O’Hara want to pay four million dollars, taking considerable political and administrative risks, for a picture of some hills and a poem in a foreign language? Furthermore, why would such presumably valuable files be given to me? Why me? What special qualities did I possess that made Jane take the chance of placing such important documents in my custody? The only conclusion I came up with, upsettingly enough, was that it was my mediocrity, my depressions and drinking that made me the least likely custodian of the documents, thus landing both Linda and myself in the middle of this seething snake pit of trouble.
I drove the Crown Vic straight into the cavernous underground Safeway parking on Fulton and Masonic, one block away from Eugene’s Café, walked across the street into the Starbucks and called Eugene on my go-phone with some fresh brew in my hand.
Eugene picked up right away. “Hey!” He was probably sitting there waiting for my call, phone in hand.
“Hi, Eugene.”
“Norman! Where have you been, man? How did we do? Why isn’t Andrey answering? Did you get the money?” “Hey, slow down. We got into serious trouble at the second position. You lost three guys. I have Andrey and one other wounded in my car. I also have a wounded special ops Colonel.”
“Shit. Who did I lose?”
“Don’t know the names.”
“What about Vasily, my Buriat sniper?”
“The one who was supposed to kill me? He was having a very bad night. First, he missed me, twice, can you believe it? And then he got dead. All on the same night.”
“Buriat missed you twice? Impossible! How?”
“Well, he…”
“Never mind. I don’t want to know.”
“He…”
“I don’t want to know, I said! What am I going to do with the Colonel? And what about my money?” He never denied that the Buriat was supposed to take me out. Some friend. Dear God,please protectme frommy friends.Thank youvery much.“The Colonel is supposed to get the money at nine,
here at their C2 at Furniture Express on Florida and 27th.” “So, another hit then?”
“Sure looks like it. A hardened target. Bring Linda. You get your money, I get Linda.”
“I knew you were trouble. Okay. Drive straight to the restaurant, we’ll plan it out and get to it.” Yeah, drive to the restaurant, right. What if Eugene decided to hit the Furniture Express without me? What if he felt I was quickly becoming a liability? His restaurant was not the right place for me at the moment.
“I have to take care of some things, Eugene. You’ll find the car on A Level at the Safeway parking garage on Fulton and Masonic, a black Crown Vic with the three wounded inside. Can’t miss it. I’ll see your guys at the furniture store in an hour or so. Send some good guys and don’t forget Linda.”
“I get the impression you don’t trust me, Norman. Are you still upset about the Buriat? Come on! You know how it goes. Nothing personal. Stay by the car, we’ll pick you up.”
“I’m gone already. Like you said, nothing personal.” Time to visit the furniture store. I flagged a cab. The Furniture Express, an old, warehouse-like, red brick structure, occupied the entire block. Eight cameras on the front face of the building—at the first glance. And what were those steel circles every few feet on the sidewalk? A rising traffic barrier perhaps? Also, the high warehouse ceiling offered a security-conscious furniture dealer a chance to install a catwalk along the top with gun ports. That’s what the small, blackened windows looked like to me. Not an ordinary furniture shop by any measure. The occupants probably wouldn’t skimp on hardening the lower structure as well—in addition to the snipers on the catwalk and the anti-traffic fortifications. Bad news all around.
The coffee shop across the street, named appropriately Coffee Medley,was all eclectic wood, mismatched sofas, and lots of bricka-brak everywhere. Autographed photos of all sizes, depicting nobody I knew, covered all the wall space not otherwise occupied by toy train models, old beer bottles, rusty garden implements and other trinkets of dubious nature. Half a dozen oblivious customers livened the drab couches here and there, all diligently plugged into their
laptops and iPads. The business day had started.
“Coffee?” the gangly, tattooed sales guy at the counter asked hopefully.
“Sure.” I adjusted my backpack with the two hundred grand. “And something good to eat.” “Like what?” he asked.
“Surprise me.” I threw a twenty on the counter. “Milk. No sugar.”
From my seat by the window I saw the entire front of the furniture store, including a ramp down into the basement leading to a huge roll-up door.
I needed to get inside. I couldn’t just walk in, they would recognize me in an instant—as they had proven earlier—in the darkness, on a roof top from quarter of a mile away. Shooting my way through was out of the question. They’d probably outgun me fifty to one. I did have a Glock and Jane’s Beretta on me. There were no other adjacent buildings since the store took up the entire block. Sewer lines? Storm drains? Unreal. A conundrum.
Tattoo brought a hot ham and cheese croissant and a steaming cup of coffee with milk and no sugar. Good man. I thanked Tattoo. Paraglide down onto
the roof? Dig a tunnel from across the street? I needed a real plan. I didn’t have one. Gnawing through my breakfast, I thought that perhaps I didn’t actually need to get inside. Eugene could just keep all the money, as far as I was concerned. I only wanted Linda, that’s all I wanted. If I didn’t show up, the Russians would not kill Linda here. They’d still need her to reel me in. They’d take her back to holding and try to contact me. Possibly I could get her out of there. Possibly I wouldn’t have to get inside this fortress at all—if nothing went wrong with the Russians getting paid in the basement. Things could get out of hand, if they were forced to shoot their way out.
The Russians arrived in two nondescript sedans, eight goons in total plus the Colonel and Linda. I saw the Colonel slumped in the front passenger seat of the front car and Linda in the back of the second car. I didn’t get a chance to take a good look at her. Disappointing. My heart squeezed with apprehension. I desperately wanted to bring her to safety but had no workable plan.
Down the ramp the cars went and stopped for a long minute, while the Colonel talked to a couple of guys, who came out of nowhere to inspect. The short convoy was let in through the roll-up door. Linda was inside. I decided to stay away from the Special Forces C2 for now and hit the Russians later at a softer location. There simply was no feasible way of getting into this building or bringing Linda out intact. Of course, my decision was contingent on the Russians getting their money safely and driving out of that basement without a war.
In the relaxed quiet of the coffee shop, the almost sleepless night and the recent losses suffered took center stage. My dead friends, Bill Hall, Jane, Yvette, the kidnapping of Linda—I felt it all now.
My mind suddenly became a kaleidoscope of hundreds of happy pictures of Linda in rapid succession—laughing, smiling, talking, just looking at me, listening to me, cradling my face in her hands, kissing me, Linda’s face ablaze with sexual ecstasy, Linda’s body heaving in delicious orgasms, Linda cooing to Yvette, Linda talking to me gently in bed, her face next to mine. I felt sluggish and suddenly tired, very tired. I felt alone, overwhelmed. I felt that I was letting Linda down and worse, that I was possibly losing her, and it was all my fault. My recent bangs and scrapes started hurting all at once, sending lashes of pain throughout my body.
A UPS delivery truck stopped right outside the coffee shop entrance. A young, uniformed driver jumped off the truck with a couple of packages. As a true tree-hugging San Franciscan, I noticed right away that he left the motor running. It probably took more gas and more exhaust to get the truck started again than to leave it idling for a few seconds. It was, however, taking a bit longer than a few seconds, as the driver and Tattoo got into a long discussion about the Warriors. Not a basketball fan, despite my current circumstances, I felt slightly annoyed by their lack of environmental sensibility.
Sudden change across the street became apparent as automatic blinds slid down in all the furniture shop windows at once. The cheerful neon green OPEN sign in the door flipped to the angry red CLOSED. Linda! Alarmed I ran outside. Two muffled explosions shook the neighborhood, then two more. Grenades—somewhere inside the basement. The Colonel must have blown the whistle mid-transaction. The round steel pegs that I noticed earlier, about six inches in diameter, four feet apart, began rising on the sidewalk all along the front furniture shop wall.
Surprisingly, the idling UPS truck, was a lot more agile than I expected from such a boxy contraption. I rushed full-throttle at the furniture shop entrance, ignoring the driver, who was now galloping after his truck, yelling obscenities at me.
I eyed the rising security barrier nervously, the barrier designed to stop any attacking vehicles, such as the UPS truck I was driving at that very moment at top speed right into the building. The truck, riding high, cleared the rising security pegs in the nick of time, it seemed. My windshield shuttered under machine gun fire from the top level gun ports and several lower level gun ports that I had not even seen. I ducked just as the back of my seat was disintegrated by bullets, stuffing flying everywhere. In the next instant I rammed the store and its glass window crashed all around the vehicle. Crouched under the dashboard, I muscled the gas pedal, putting the weight of my entire body into it. My fatigue and feelings of inadequacy evaporated without a trace. The pain was gone as well, replaced by the adrenalin rush. The truck was under incessant gunfire. The shot-up engine coughed and whined, but, astonishingly, the truck kept going.
Bumpy. My path of travel inside the store was obstructed by furniture, supposedly. I couldn’t see anything, crouching under the dashboard. The careening truck hit something hard, listing to the right, and stalled. It was about to overturn. I pushed out of the driver’s door while I still had a chance and scrambled for cover. Lots of heavy sofas and gunfire from twenty points or more. No time to assess the situation, normalize breathing, find the targets, or figure out the location of the stairway or the elevator—no time for anything. Sometimes zero to sixty is an instantaneous proposition. No forgiveness if we can’t hack it that one instant when we really must.
The stairwells are usually located at one or both of the side walls. My point of entrance into the store was closer to the left wall, so using sofas as a cover and not bothering to return fire, I slithered toward the left wall as fast as I could. The UPS truck on my right burst into flames, assisting my escape. A fleeting ping of guilt for stealing and destroying the truck and who knows how many packages from the environmentally-insensitive driver did touch me ever so slightly and was gone like a puff of smoke. Guilt was irrelevant right now.
I finally saw a target, a man dressed casually in khaki pants and a green shirt, probably one of the sales people, with an EXIT sign above his head, shooting something small, possibly a MAC-10, blindly in my general direction. He did not see me in all the smoke. I took him out with a head shot, betraying my position, and dove for cover under a hailstorm of bullets from all directions, including the high angle from the cat walk. I did not like this place at all. I was pinned down behind a heavy leather sofa. I swear to God, you people, this shopping experience was not up to par. From now on I’m taking furniture shopping elsewhere.
The UPS truck exploded with a powerful bang, momentarily throwing off the opposition and offering me an instant to look around. I dashed toward the exit, only about twenty feet away. A steel security door started sliding down, cutting me off from what must have been the stairwell to the lower level. Another “salesman” with a handgun, this one wearing a Kevlar, materialized to my right, shooting at me. One more joined him. A bullet nicked my shoulder. I ignored it, dropping to my knee, and firing at both targets midexhale, bringing one down. The other one ducked under the closing steel plate, which was coming down too fast for me to make it. Bullets, fired from somewhere behind my back, pounded the closing steel plate. I couldn’t possibly make it if I tried. The door would squash me like a bug, breaking my spine, crushing my bones, cutting my body in half. I was upon it. In an instant I would surely die here under this door. Gonna hurt like hell, too. I leapt toward the almost closed door, fortifying my all-out effort with the mental kick of all the intention I could muster, and slid under just as it clicked closed, catching my jacket, pinning me down. Damn close! Bullets pounded the steel door from both sides in rhythm with the blood pounding in my ears.
I found myself in a short, smoke-filled hallway, terminating at a stairwell door. Thanking Jesus Christ and the United Parcel Service for the smoke cover, I wrestled out of my pinched jacket and returned fire. The Glock was empty. I still couldn’t see my opponent through the smoke. Then I saw him, or rather guessed him, down the short corridor, crouching next to the stairwell door. The instant I saw him, he saw me and took a shot. I returned fire with Jane’s Beretta.
The soldier pushed the door open with his feet and rolled inside—a fancy move. Self-closing mechanism prevented the door from slamming instantaneously, but it was closing. Upon it in two strides, I pushed the door open, firing blind and still taking fire from the lone
but very determined defender, his exact position in the stairwell unknown. I ducked bullets, lurching to my left, and slipped. A roll down a flight of stairs would probably leave a mark. No matter—nothing felt broken. My opponent stopped firing. Crouching on the landing between the floors, I must have slipped out of his line of vision. That gave me an idea of his exact location—right by the basement door, waiting for me.
Without looking, I took a shot with my left hand. What do you know, I got one into his Kevlar-protected chest, knocking him backwards, as my quick glance confirmed. The path down to the basement was clear.
Grabbing the backpack, I dashed toward the “salesman,” who was recovering way too quickly after being shot in the Kevlar. A good whack in the face with the butt of my Beretta toppled him over again. I frisked him, pocketing two clips and his Glock. I also yanked his security card off his neck.
“The place is in lock-down. You can’t use the card.” The contempt on his bloodied face was beyond words. “Fucking terrorist,” the soldier hissed, holding his broken nose with both hands.
“Who, me terrorist? No, no. Just looking for my girlfriend.” His chuckle didn’t come out right. “Try the coffee shop across the street.” “No, she’s here. Russians got her in the basement,” I explained over my shoulder, as I gave his card a go in the electronic door lock. It worked just fine. Lock-down my ass. “Did you know you had a basement-full of Russians? And you are shooting at me? You should be shooting them!”
An astonished “Dude!” was the last word I heard from behind, as I slipped into the murky, greenish cavern of what must have served as the Control Room.