With a Vengeance

by Marcus Wynne

  “Is this the only way you can do this?” the woman said, a New Jersey accent.

  “Yes,” the man at the podium said. “It is.”

  “Goodbye,” he said.

  1

  Later, the man who called himself, on occasion, The Sword of Allah sat in front of a mirrored make up table in the back bedroom of an anonymous apartment in a massive complex in Fairfax. He was just one more face, an Arab face, in a complex packed with immigrants and ethnics.

  It was time to take off that face.

  First came the wig, exposing the close cut shock of blond hair. Then carefully lifting the custom configured face mask that altered the shape of his face so thoroughly that even state of the art face imaging software couldn’t identify the true topography of his face. Designed and manufactured by one of the amazing artists of the CIA’s Disguise Section in the Technical Services Division, this particular mask had been made in support of a black operation long ago put to bed -- a penetration operation. But the operator retained the mask…

  …and the kit that came with it for applying it.

  After it had all come off, the blond man removed the base chemicals that held the mask in place, removed the dye from his eyebrows, brushed out the eye liner…

  …and finally, the clean cut, blue eyed blond aging surfer face of Alec Frovarp stared back out of the mirror at the man who sometimes called himself The Sword of Allah.

  Alec had a moment where it seemed as though he truly saw his face, his real face, or at least the face he was born with, for the first time. His eyes had changed, he thought. There was a depth to their seeing that hadn’t been there before, a sadness, an anger…different than what had driven him before. His face was leaner; it looked as though it were falling in on a hollow.

  The hollow was inside him.

  What had eaten him up had hollowed him.

  Hate.

  Vengeance.

  There was a long laundry list of things he could cite, but those were the two. After he had gotten the call, after Flight 923, something had hollowed out in him. A piece of his soul had taken flight. And what came into him then was hate, focused on vengeance.

  Hunter James.

  He was at the heart of it for Alec, though he wasn’t the only target.

  And James had turned out to have more lives than The Alleycat, that was for sure. Alec had watched the video footage of the failed sniper attack, one of his own hand picked operators on the long gun; had read the classified briefing and after action report from the captured Filipino Sparrow; had seen video footage of Hunter again and again.

  He just kept dodging the bullet.

  But not today.

  He dressed carefully. A lightweight UnderArmor shirt, to keep cool, and polypropylene briefs. Loose fitting 5.11 pants, a Maxpedition Liger belt. Behind his right hip his favorite Browning High Power, as done by Karl Sokol; two mags on the opposite hip. Forward of the pistol his favorite Retribution in a Sastre concealment sheath; on the left hip a Hideaway.

  Then he put on the slim bomb vest he had built himself. Flat sheets of plastic explosive with a few carved blocks of C4; over all that another plastic sheet in which were embedded roofing nails. It made him a bit bulky, but he could still move and access his weapons. He put on a baggy Patagonia flannel shirt over the bomb vest, and looked in the mirror.

  Good.

  He unbuttoned the front and rigged the firing mechanism, ran the cable down the sleeve of his left arm, and mounted the firing switch in a wrist brace, where it could drop into his left hand with just a motion. He tried it several times, then activated the mechanism.

  He was a walking bomb, but then, he’d been told that all his life.

  He allowed himself a grim smile at the thought of the Alleycat, old Paul Raven, telling him that he was a walking time bomb, and Raven, as had so often been true, had been proven to be exactly right.

  He’d be proud of him today.

  He shrugged on an old Carhartt jacket, worn and wrinkled, and put on a baseball cap to complete the look.

  He was ready for the knife show.

  Chapter Three

  Hunter sat alone in his government issue Taurus and watched the line of knife nuts file into the Washington Area Custom Knife Show. Knife nuts was a good acronym for the eclectic collection of enthusiasts you saw at a knife show. There were always a significant assemblage of serious collectors; they were generally first in line, well dressed in expensive casual clothing, a large concentration of Asian, mostly Japanese, diplomats and engineers in this locale, and then the other collectors, all with the slightly anxious look of an obsessive worrying about whether someone else would get to his favorite knife maker first; the martial artists were pretty easy to spot -- clad in sweats or sporting jackets/polo shirts with the logos and names of martial arts schools, or crossed daggers, or seminars…there was one wearing a River of Steel t-shirt, but Hunter didn’t recognize him, so that was good; and then there were the real nuts; unhealthy looking overweight guys dressed like urban ninjas, constantly fingering the array of expensive designer knives they festooned themselves with, like merit badges in a strange fraternity; who stared into space and didn’t meet anyone’s eyes.

  There were the others, though; and those were the ones that Hunter watched most closely. Quiet men, athletic or reasonably fit appearing, in casual non descript clothing. Something military about some of them, maybe it was the haircut or the way they stood. But some didn’t have the military sense about them; it was something else.

  Those were the ones he watched.

  At every knife show, there’s a handful, a real minority in the crowd, of knife users, men who used knives on other men, on humans. And while even within in that tiny minority there were some who were loud and bombastic, most were quiet, often intense. Some of them carried a dark aura around them, something that a multiple killer with a knife acquires…some of them just had the set fixity of purpose that settled on a warrior after he’s been blooded. And maybe some of them had not yet taken a life with a knife, but in their heart and souls they were prepared to do so, and that also conveyed a certain aura to a man.

  Hunter had that aura. As the Alleycat had, as Joe Hartlaub had, as did James Keating and Ray Dionaldo and Kelly Worden and Micheal Janich and Steve Tarani all the dozens of top knifers that Hunter had trained with.

  Alec Frovarp had it, too.

  He would know how to hide it, to cloak it, to conceal that capability in the same way that Hunter did. But Hunter counted on that fine tuned intuition, that other than conscious processing that built upon his innate gifts enhanced by the very best training and seasoning and experience over the years to tell him, to feel the intention radiating from the man who was most likely The Sword of Allah.

  That was why he had to be here by himself, with no back up, no connection. In a way, this was another milestone, a graduation exercise bequeathed on him in a strange way by his long dead mentor, Paul Raven. He had to see this through.

  Who will do the hard things?

  Those who can.

  Today he had a hard thing to do.

  The line thinned out, and there was only a trickle of patrons in and out. Hunter got out and went to the ticket window, bought a general admission ticket, and gave it to the pleasant older woman at the door.

  “Enjoy yourself, dear,” she said.

  “Thanks,” Hunter said.

  The knot in his stomach was anything but enjoyable.

  Hunter walked through the big set of double doors onto the main floor of the conference center. Tables and booths were set up along all four walls, and long neat rows through the middle of the space. Lots of familiar names and faces here: Spyderco, Hossom, Emerson, Strider, Hibben, Brock, Krein, Hideaway, Sastre, Bagwell, Nealy, Crawford, Hogstrom, Terzuola, Tighe…the list went on and on. As he walked through the crowd, he kept his eyes in soft focus, looking, looking, but also feeling for anything out of the ordinary…

  “Hey Hunter!”

  Hunter looked
and saw Jerry Hossom waving at him.

  “Get over here, kid!” the knife maker called.

  Hunter held up one finger, waved, pointed vaguely ahead.

  “Come back by!” Hossom bellowed after him. His booth was set up next to Mick Strider’s and the rest of the Badlands crew.

  Hunter kept walking past people he knew them, and he saw the puzzled looks, but this wasn’t the time to think about that. He had to do a walk through and see for himself, get a sense of the place, and then find a point of vantage, somewhere he could watch the crowd, calibrate the passer by, get a feel for how things were…

  Something…

  Hunter slowed, began to turn as though something on the table (Nealy’s, his wife starting to smile in recognition…) and did a slow scan behind him, and then across the aisles.

  Nothing.

  The image of Alec Frovarp rose up in his mind as he’d known him, as he’d seen him last in the hospital bed in Baghdad, the look in his eyes when he said:

  Mark my words, Hunter. Mark my words. People better never fucking forget those of us who die for this shit. Never ever, man. “

  “Or I swear by all the blood I’ve spilled, I’ll fucking remind them. Remember that, man. Remember that.”

  But what had set Alec off? What about Flight 923 had so enraged him, set him far off the reservation, turned him into a terrorist against his own people? He was an only child, both of his parents long gone to old age, and no one connected with him had died in any aviation terrorism incident. Hunter could sympathize with the rage of those who lost loved ones; he could only imagine what it would be like to lose a child or a parent to terrorism; he’d lost his own friends, his team mates, on Flight 923, but he saved his rage for those who had killed them, and those who had sent them. And he’d dealt with them in the way they needed to be dealt with.

  But what about Alec? The only family he had left was the family of brothers in arms he had from operating…the only thing close to a relative he’d had was Paul Raven, his (and Hunter’s…) surrogate father, and he was long gone…

  …but something nagged at Hunter about that thought…

  “He was a great man. A great man. The greatest man I’ve ever know, will ever know. And these fucks killed him. I’m going to have to tell his people, man…”

  “I didn’t know he had people.”

  “There’s a lot you never knew about him, Hunter.”

  What was it that was nagging Hunter now about Alec’s words so long ago? He caught himself getting fixated, raised his head to look around.

  Ten yards in front of him, Alec Frovarp stood with his hands in his Carhart jacket pockets.

  “Hey, Hunter,” Alec said.

  Hunter stopped.

  The two men regarded each other across the interval between them. A few passer by gave them both a curious look. The intense glare between the two and the palpable hostility grew, and several men stopped to look. Conversation at the surrounding tables ceased.

  “Alec,” Hunter said.

  “Figured to take the hint. Bring any cover today?”

  “Let’s not do this, Alec. Enough’s been done already.”

  “Didn’t see any when I made the rounds. All I saw was you walking along, lost in a funk. You lost in a funk, Hunter? I thought you were the king of situational awareness. Or the crown prince.”

  There was something about Alec’s posture…the bulkiness of his shirt and jacket suggested something underneath. Armor?

  “Shall we go someplace else and talk, Alec? What do you want to do? You called me, I’m here. Let’s talk about this.”

  “Remember what Alleycat used to say? Well, you got the talking part done. Remember how he used to say that?”

  “Yes, Alec. I remember.”

  “Me too. He’s a good man.”

  “He was a good man, Alec. But he’s gone. And nothing that you do is going to change that. Let’s walk out of here together.”

  A burly man with the look of an off-duty cop stopped. “What’s going on here? Is there a problem?”

  “Move along,” Alec said.

  “Hey, asshole, I’m a cop…” the man said.

  Alec stepped back and then to the cops front. Without breaking stride his right hand flashed out of his pocket and slashed across the police officer’s throat, opening a wide wound that gaped white and red before the blood began to pump. Some of the spray spattered across Alec’s face, but he didn’t blink.

  “First blood, Hunter. Remember that night?”

  “Alec!” Hunter shouted, too late.

  The cop fell to his knees, both hands trying to hold his throat together.

  “Christ!” someone yelled, and there was a panicked rush away from the two men facing off.

  Alec took his left hand out of his pocket and showed Hunter the switch in his hand. “Recognize this?”

  “Bomb!” Hunter shouted. “Everybody out!”

  The words scattered the crowd as though the explosives had already gone off. People screamed, men swore, vendors vaulted tables and customers ran for the fire exits. One of the security guards, an Arlington police officer working in uniform, ran up on the two men, his hand gun out, shouting into his lapel mounted microphone.

  “Stay back!” Hunter warned. “I’m a federal officer…this man is armed and has an explosive vest on.”

  Alec yanked the front of his shirt open, scattering buttons on the floor. The Arlington cop skidded to a halt when he saw the vest.

  “What do I do?” he said to Hunter.

  “Get everybody out,” Hunter said. “Call for back up, the bomb squad…and an ambulance.”

  “Make that the coroner’s wagon,” Alec said, coolly. “Neither one of us is walking away from this today, Hunter. This is how it ends. With a whimper. Or a bang. What’s it going to be?”

  “What do you want, Alec?” Hunter said, as the cop hurried away.

  “Your blood on my knife.”

  “What’s the bomb for?”

  “To make sure it’s just you and me, Hunter.”

  “It’s just you and me.”

  “Got a knife, Hunter?”

  “Always.”

  “Let’s see your steel.”

  Hunter held his hands open wide. “Take it easy with that trigger.”

  Alec laughed, a chilling sound. “Let’s see your steel, Hunter.”

  Hunter reached across on his offside and slowly pulled out a full length Retribution from the Sastre Southern Comfort.

  “I recognize that blade,” Alec said. “I gave it to you.”

  “You did.”

  “I’ll be taking it with me today. You don’t deserve it. You should have died on Flight 923, Hunter. Along with all the people you didn’t save.”

  The words cut Hunter as deeply as any knife could have. But he recognized the ploy for what it was, and took a deep breath and controlled himself, modulated his response. He weighed the blade in his hand.

  “What about you, Alec?”

  “I’ll stick with this one. It’s served me well.”

  “You going to put the detonator away or is that what you expect to help you win the last fight of your life?”

  Hunter saw the flush rise in Alec’s neck, the insane and insecure pride that drove the man to perform at the levels he did. Alec safed the detonator and slid it into his sleeve, flipped his knife to his left hand and drew his pistol with the speed of a striking snake. He pointed the High Power past Hunter and fired two quick shots.

  Hunter looked over his shoulder and saw the cop duck back out of an exit door.

  “Stay out!” Hunter shouted. “Don’t come back in! Don’t let anyone else in!”

  He turned back to Alec. “Good enough?”

  Alec grinned fiercely. “Good enough.” He holstered his pistol and flipped the knife back to his right hand, then eased forward in the blade forward stance of a Keating trained long knifer. “I’m finally going to get to see what your heart really looks like.”

  Hunter twi
rled his big Retribution in the grip change favored by the Sayoc clan and Ray Dionaldo in particular, then eased his right foot forward and circled to his right. He twirled the knife again as he moved.

  “That’s not going to work,” Alec said, a tone of mock pity in his voice. “Is this when I’m supposed to be distracted by the steel, not see you shifting your weight, getting ready for a fleche? Let me know when I’m supposed to be scared…”

  Alec lunged forward, but at the last second the fleche became a back cut, then another and another, five or six of them in a flowing series of cuts that came so fast the eye can’t process fast enough to discriminate them, but Hunter sensed the intention and shifted back and to the outside of the whirling blade, angling for the punta mandrata entry, matching Alec’s style…for now…

  …but the younger man had cat-like reflexes and he snapped back into a tight guard, his blade closer, the tip whirling around and around, inviting Hunter in…

  …Hunter feinted high, extending…till at the last second the flat of Alec’s blade twitched up to intercept, but Hunter had already disengaged from the line, dropping in a risky shot for the leg and as Alec snapped his leg back, bringing his blade down Hunter snapped his blade up and the sharpened back edge of his Retribution cut into Alec’s knife hand…