With a Vengeance

by Marcus Wynne

  “You’re welcome, Hunter,” Raven said. “We’ll chat some more…”

  Hunter watched the older man walk away, and noticed how he just blended in with the other men, nothing about him standing out, nothing about him out of place…

  3

  It was the end of Warrior Week on the River, and the dock was stacked with duffle bags, backpacks, and other bits of luggage and gear. Joe Hartlaub went from man to man, shaking his hand and squeezing them into a bear hug before he shoved them towards the shuttle boat waiting to take them down the river to town.

  “Hunter, it was great to have you here,” Joe said. He pummeled Hunter’s back as he hugged him. “Come back next year.”

  “I hope to make it, Joe,” Hunter said. “Never can tell in my job.”

  Joe grinned. “Give the flight attendants hell, will ya? And keep your blades sharp and close to hand, your powder dry and your eyes open!”

  Hunter laughed. “Will do, Joe. Will do.”

  Raven stood by himself at the landside end of the pier. Several of the men had stopped to speak to him and shake his hand. Hunter waited till they were all through before he went up to the old warrior.

  “Mr. Raven, I want to thank you…”

  “Call me Paul,” Raven interrupted. “Or Alleycat…I enjoyed working with you.”

  “Well, it was an honor,” Hunter said. “I learned a lot.”

  “Joe tells me you’re an air marshal.”

  “Yes sir, I am.”

  “I didn’t realize that the air marshals spent much time on blade work.”

  “They don’t,” Hunter said. “I’m a voice in the wilderness. The prevailing attitude is, hey, we’ve got the guns, who cares about a knife?”

  “And I don’t need to say to you, obviously, that they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about, do I?”

  “No. Someday, we’re going to see somebody, or more likely, a small group, armed with blades, make a run at taking over a plane. The bureaucrats just can’t make the jump into their heads to understand the blade threat.”

  Raven nodded, slowly. He turned slightly and stared across the river at the hills there on the other side. “Sometimes people don’t understand till they’ve got one at their throat. Even then…” He paused, then went on. “Where else are you going for training? I see the Inosanto blend in you, you’re getting some Keating…what’s the next step for you? You pay for this yourself, don’t you? I don’t see your agency exactly leaping to foot the bill for the politically incorrect art of cutting humans with steel, am I right?”

  “You see a lot,” Hunter said. “I’ve learned a lot from watching you.”

  Raven smiled without looking at Hunter. “Yeah. I know. So what’s your next step?”

  “Do you do training?”

  “No. Not really. I don’t have time. I travel a lot. But there are folks I’d recommend…”

  “Like who?”

  “Oh, I’ve got quite the shopping list,” Raven said lightly. “There’s a lot that goes into the training of an operator.”

  “I’d appreciate your thoughts.”

  “That’s something I like about you, Hunter,” Raven said. “You appreciate…nuance. There’s a subtlety you have about you that most people miss…and you see more, naturally, than most do with training. You have a lot of potential. A lot of potential. And I don’t meant that to sound condescending, because I’m not. I see talent, and you’re in a work environment where subtlety pays off, discretion, deception…all of the nuances of the fight, that’s where it pays off. And I take it that your time is your own, that you don’t have obligations you need to fulfill?”

  Hunter turned and mirrored Raven, stared at the hills gleaming gold in the fading light. “Had a wife. Good gal, just couldn’t hang with me being gone all the time.”

  “Any kids?”

  “No. I wish…wish I had some. I like kids.”

  “I don’t have any obligations, either,” Raven said. “Maybe you’d like to meet up some place, do some more training together? Some of my friends would be on the list of people I’d recommend to you.”

  “I’d really like that.”

  “Let’s see what we can do,” Raven said. He handed Hunter a business card. On the upper right hand corner was the logo of a slyly grinning black and white cat. In the center his name, Paul Raven; on the bottom left an e-mail address. Claws@hotmail.com. “That’s how I keep in touch. Send an e-mail any time, I check it pretty regularly. When you send it to me, I’ll save your address and get back to you.”

  Hunter held the card up and looked at it. “I recognize that cat from some place….”

  Raven laughed. “You’re not old enough to remember Felix the Cat. He was my favorite as a kid. Early, early cartoon.”

  “So that’s where Alleycat comes from, huh?”

  Raven’s eyes became hooded. “No.”

  Chapter Two

  “Hi ya, mate, I’m Si Squires,” Hunter’s partner said, shaking his hand. Si Squires was short and built like a fire hydrant; thick and solid with hands like a butcher’s, and a genial grin on a face cut and battered like an old leather glove. Si wore a heavy padded blue suit that made him look like the Michelin man in the tire commercials, and sweat ran down his face, matting his dirty blond hair to his head.

  “Hunter James,” Hunter said.

  “Reckon you got the drill, right?” Si said.

  “Sure,” Hunter said. “You beat the shit out of me till I can beat the shit out of you. Is that about right?”

  Si laughed, a deep bellow that echoed in the small training hall steamy with sweat and the acrid stink of the fighter. “Just about right!”

  Dennis Martin, the lead instructor of the combatives class, wandered over. He was an older man, maybe 60, but hard and lean and weathered like a seaside oak. He too had a genial grin in place, but he was truly deceptive -- Hunter had just watched him strike a pad with an open hand slap...and knock the pad holder, a 240 pound Norwegian commando, back several feet.

  “Cheers, lads! Got it sorted?” Martin said.

  “Yes, sir,” Hunter said.

  “Right, then! On the whistle…”

  Si stepped back and fastened his oversized blue helmet in place, then turned his back on Hunter while he got his suit sorted out. In the meantime, Hunter worked through the mental preparation drills that Martin taught as an integral part of his combatives program, the drills that made his work so unique. While the techniques of World War 2 combatives were simple, deadly, and effective, what Martin had done, in conjunction with the reclusive and eccentric Mark Wayne in Minneapolis, was develop a series of mental exercises based on neural-linguistic programming that allowed a fighter to “access state,” that is, to harness all the body’s natural energies in a fierce fashion to strike harder, last longer, fight more viciously and effectively for as long as the bodies chemicals, ATP and other hormones lasted.

  Hunter leaned forward, in the natural fighting position, shifted his breath and tensed his jaw as his “anchor,” then felt a rise of rage within him as subliminally implanted commands took hold in his subconscious…Who the fuck do you think you are, fucking with me, I’m going to fucking kill you… the voice in the back of his skull hissed, and he felt himself grow hot and fluid with the anger flowing through him…

  “Wanker! What the fook are you looking at? You want some trouble with me, poof? I got something here for you…” Si Squires shouted at him.

  Even though he was prepared, having watched multiple fights before his own, the sudden transformation in the genial and easy going Squires took him aback for just a moment -- just as Hunter had tripped his switch, so Squires had tripped his, and the hostility and willingness to hurt that radiated off him, even through the blue suit, was fearsome.

  Dennis Martin blew the whistle and suddenly Squires was all over Hunter, slapping him, kicking at him, pushing him…and the switch went full on in Hunter, and he growled like a mad animal in the fight, and threw powerful palm st
rikes, elbows, knees and even a few chin jabs, and suddenly the tables were turned and Squires was falling back, still throwing some hard blows, but on the back foot…then Hunter saw his shot and threw three palm jabs directly into the face plate of the helmet, followed by a powerful chin jab with everything he could put into it, and the blue-suited Squires went stumbling backwards, then tripped and fell.

  Hunter sprang on him, pinning him to the floor and continued to throw blows till the whistle sounded. He pushed off, blood pounding in his head, then reached down and pulled Squires to his feet.

  “Bloody great!” Squires said. He tugged his helmet off and shook Hunter’s hand. “Best of show, mate! Great!”

  “Good one, Hunter,” Dennis Martin said. “Excellent state access. Next up for a turn!”

  Martin turned and nodded in approval at Paul Raven, who leaned against the wall, a walking stick beside him and a cut down tennis shoe on one foot. Hunter saw Raven tilt his head as though to say, “Not bad,” and then wink at Hunter.

  Hunter walked the floor, hands on hips, taking deep breaths, nodding at the other fighters in the seminar. The Brits were a tough bunch; even the smallest of Martin’s students fought like a rabid wolverine, and many of the men, the instructors especially, bore scars from knives, fists, bottles, and even a few bullets. He stopped and leaned against the wall next to Raven.

  “Looking good out there,” Raven said.

  “Thanks. This guy is amazing.”

  “He’s an old school samurai, that’s what Dennis Martin is. Lots of people, they give lip service to the concept of the warrior…it’s a sexy phrase, you know, and a lot of guys are enamored with the pose of it. But being one, that’s a different thing from acting like one. Dennis, he’s old school…he doesn’t care about money, he doesn’t care about fame, all he cares about is training and teaching and using his skills. That guy is sixty years old…and you know what he does for fun? He works as a bouncer in the toughest bar in this town, and Liverpool is one of the toughest cities in the UK. As you can see, the Brits, they like to fight. They’re the ones who coined the phrase: Out for the night, grab a pint and a fight. They just like to knock heads. And Den, he deals with them, guys a third his age and bigger. Just for training.”

  Raven laughed. “That’s one hard old fucker, that Dennis Martin.”

  Hunter took a deep breath, and let it out slowly, nodded. “That’s for sure.”

  He watched one of Martin’s assistant, a much younger guy in his early 20’s -- Slacky, the others called him -- coach a group off to the side on the refinements of accessing state. It was astonishing to watch the transformation in the assistant instructor; one moment he was smiling and congenial, the next instant his face and body morphed into the physiology of a predator about to pounce.

  “How’d he come up with this stuff?” Hunter asked.

  “He worked with Mark Wayne, took a lot of technique developed in neural linguistic programming and brain based learning, ran it through his filters, and threw it into the street…watched what worked and what didn’t. It’s a tried and true model, something Musashi wrote about. How are you finding that, by the way? The Book of Five Rings?”

  “Like all the recommended reading,” Hunter said. “It’s stuff that seems simple, but when you get into it…the simplicity hides the depth. Like the surface of a lake or a pond can be really still, and you have no idea how deep it really goes.”

  “One of the things I like about you, Hunter, and one of the reasons you’re going to go really, really far with this stuff, is that you get it, and you get it in a fashion and make it your own. Nice metaphor, by the way, the lake thing. I might start to suspect that you’re a hidden poet if you’re not careful.”

  “Not likely,” Hunter said. “But you get what I mean…all of this stuff, the training, the mental aspects…it’s a dimension I never saw before. I mean, I’ve been doing martial arts since I was a kid, but I’ve never seen things this way…that sounds like I’m gushing, I apologize for that, but it’s like a door opening up for me, or somebody switching on a light in a room I didn’t even know was dark.”

  “That’s what most people don’t see, Hunter. They see moves, they see techniques, but they don’t see what’s really the master game, the game that goes on before the physical fight starts, the mental game…that’s something that’s hard to quantify, hard to break down and teach, hard to understand in an intellectual way, because it’s not really an intellectual thing, though we approach it like that…it’s deeper than visceral, it’s, well, energetic, spiritual in nature. The spirit of the knife, the spirit of the warrior, it infuses the practitioner in such a way that there’s a fusion at the core between intention and action -- Zen in play, Zen in war…”

  “You need to write a book, mate” Dennis Martin said to Raven. “It could be the next Book of Five Rings.”

  “I’ll write one when you write one,” Raven said. “You caught me in a philosophical rant.”

  “Worth listening to,” Martin said. “You’re lucky, Hunter. This one doesn’t take on many apprentices.”

  “Is that what I am?” Hunter said lightly. “An apprentice?”

  Dennis Martin and Raven both laughed.

  “You are, lad,” Dennis said. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice…the Force is strong in this one, Raven…”

  Both men laughed and laughed at the look on Hunter’s face.

  1

  The Chung Kuo Restaurant in Liverpool was probably the safest place to eat in the entire city; it was a favored hang out for martial artists, professional bodyguards, and the fearsome pack of door men that made safe the club life. It wasn’t unusual on any night to see men like Terry O’Neill, Tommy O’Malley, Dennis Martin, and a wide range of their students holding forth over tables littered with small dishes and endless cups of tea.

  The “Post Training Scoff” was part and parcel of any Dennis Martin course. Upon conclusion of training, the instructors and the students assembled in the Chung Kuo, and an after action debriefing and general debate about the pros and cons of combatives and technique in general took place over heaping plates of Chinese food. Dennis and Raven held forth from one end of the table, and Hunter sat a few seats down, close enough to listen to the two old masters, but not so close as to crowd them.

  After the usual rush of questions to the instructors, the students settled down to eat, and the conversation was lost in the click of chopsticks on plates and the occasional “Mate? Pass the tea, eh?”

  Hunter watched how Raven and Dennis Martin pushed back from the table a bit and inclined their heads together in a private conversation. He utilized some of the technique he’d been taught, and watched their lips in his peripheral vision and listened for the scrap of conversation.

  “Can you meet me in Frankfurt some time?” Raven said. “I’m working out of the base there, and I could get together some of my guys for a session. I’ve got funds.”

  “No worries on the funds, mate,” Dennis said. “You’re on the side of the angels.”

  “Time is money, old friend. I’ll take care of you.”

  “Right, then. Just give a bell, I’ll need some notice.”

  “Will do. How do you rate my guy?”

  “Hunter? Good lad, that. Quick study, hard worker. Always thinking. He work for you?”

  “No.”

  “You mean, not yet?”

  Private laughter and then both men turned and looked at Hunter, busy with his plate, pretending he didn’t hear.

  Chapter Three

  The Chicago Custom Knife Show was held in Arlington Heights, at the Sheraton Hotel, in their ball room. Hunter had been to plenty of knife shows, but this one was shaping up to be one of the best regional shows in the country. He’d come to the inaugural show a few years back, and picked up a nice Bud Nealy from Nealy’s beautiful wife Toni, who’d talked him into a Pesh Kabz fighter with the Nealy concealment system. It was a good knife, though Hunter found the grips a little thin for his taste.

&n
bsp; Like most shows, the floor was lined with neat rows of folding tables; the number of tables bore a direct correlation to the fame (and earning ability) of the knife maker set there. Emerson Knives had a substantial display off to one side; as usual, a throng of Emerson fanatics (as they proudly referred to themselves) hung out and chatted with Ernie and his wife, all of them holding tickets to the lottery drawing to be able to purchase a rare Emerson at the end of the show.

  On the opposite side of the floor, Mick Strider stood behind his tables, the big banner of Strider Knives behind him on the wall, and he sorted through the samples he had spread out across the table for his own throng of followers.

  Hunter paused at Gil Hibben’s table; the old knife maker was dressed in fashionable Western garb with a beautiful bolo and buckle. His knives looked like props from movies, and had in fact been props in everything from the original RAMBO to a few science fiction films. Hibben nodded and smiled at Hunter.

  “Care to look at anything, young man? Glad to show you.”

  “Thank you sir, just looking.”

  “You go right ahead. You military?”

  “Not any more, sir.”

  “Thanks for your service.”

  “Thank you, sir…”

  Hunter moved on, surprised by the sudden welling of emotion in him. He was proud of his service, yes, he’d seen a little bit of action, nothing to speak of really, and he never thought about it, though he always made a point of thanking veterans when he met them. In truth, his service as a Marshal had taken more from him than his time as a paratrooper in the 82d Airborne…the time away had cost him his marriage, and in some ways led him to the almost monastic single life he led, walking the path of the warrior in training in between missions that took him overseas for three to four weeks at a time.