by A. P. Texan
“You get the one coming from the left, I will take the right. After you get him down drag him as quickly as you can back here out of sight, then grab my guy and do the same. I’ll cut the fence.” I tell Charles just as the two guys come around their opposite corners of the chain link.
As they approach the point where they cross each other Charles and I pounce; letting our bodies react like well-oiled springs being released from compression. I swing my Parang as hard as I can at the junction of my guys spine and the base of his head, almost completely severing head from body. Charles approaches his man from behind grabs his man around the throat and pulls him backwards as his body is coming back the blade sinks into the base of his skull, cleanly severing the spinal column from the brain stem. In the movies they always slit people’s throats to silently kill someone. In reality this is neither quiet nor quick. As the throat opens air escapes the lungs, the body is still trying to breathe. This can make horrible sounds of gurgling and spewing. In addition, the man whose throat you just slit is still alive kicking and trying to scream. But you cut the arteries, right? Well one that is difficult to do, as you have to cut really deep and fast to do this and two, it still takes a couple minutes to bleed out. The only true way to make a silent kill with a knife is to separate the spinal column from the brain stem or destroy the brain stem itself.
As Charles is dragging the bodies away, I am quickly going to work on the fence. As luck would have it the remainder of the prisoners are in various states of unconsciousness and don’t seem to notice what’s going on at the rear of the cage. The guard at the gate however might have heard something or sensed something because, just as I was making the final cut to get through the fence; I look up to see him turn my direction his eyes went wide and his mouth began to open just as his head popped like a grape and I hear the cough of a suppressed rifle.
“Come on Shannon”, I say as she squeezes through the hole I cut. I hand her the Parang and she looks at it swings it around a few times, flips it around her hand and shrugs
“It isn’t my Katana, but it will work.” She says to me, then falls into line between Charles and myself.
“Okay show off, let’s get your man and get the hell out of here.” I say as I take off at a trot and unholster the suppressed 1911, no longer worrying about stealth as much since Nick used the big rifle. I see some of the guards starting to glance around, wondering where the strange sound came from.
Nick’s voice comes through my headset, “Twelve o’clock, twenty meters in 3,2,1.” As he says one, a Jihadi comes around the corner of a tent. Before he can even open his mouth to scream, my parang goes flying by my head and embeds itself in his Adam's Apple. Before he has even hit the ground, Shannon has the big knife back in her hand, she twists the wide blade in his throat and rips it out, through the side of his neck. His soon to be lifeless body has barely hit the ground before we are past and moving closer to our target.
“Fifty yards then take a right and it will be in front of you twenty yards,” Nick’s voice, again comes through the headset. “Chase, you got front right, Charles take rear left, tell Shannon to take rear right.”
We slowly move and I relay the plan to Shannon, who nods approvingly. We make the turn and move into position. As Nick counts down from three, I use my fingers to do the same so Shannon can see. “On three, two, one, go!”
I bring up the 1911 and a quick double tap takes care of my guy, the first shot catching him in the chest, the second just below the nose. I don’t know what happened with the other three as I was in a zone however, I do know that the combination of the pistol inside the camp and the rifle outside has caught the attention of the rest of the camp. We can hear people moving around and yelling.
I grab the keys off the guy who opened the door to Church’s cell and unlock the door. “Come on buddy time to go.” I reach around his body and throw an arm around my neck and get him out of the tiny cell.
“I got him Dad; you just keep us covered.” Charles takes Church and lifts him up into a fireman’s carry.
“Get out of there”, I here through my radio and then I hear the rifle cough two more times. “Holy shit-balls, you have got to be kidding me.”
“That doesn’t sound good what’s going on?” I say.
Then the big rifle goes into a more rapid-fire barrage.” You need to get out of there now. The whole game just got a lot more serious; I will tell you when everyone is safe. I’m falling back to the boat, see you down-stream.”
We take off towards the closest perimeter wire as fast as we can with Charles carrying Church. When we get there, I reach for the bolt cutters “DAMNIT, DAMNIT, DAMNIT! I lost the bolt cutters”
“These?” Shannon holds them up. “You dropped them at the cage. I picked them up when we went by.” She moves past me and gets started on the fence around the camp; Charles and I keep her covered with our pistols. Both of us dropping a few guys as they are running our direction. We also take some fire, but it is wild and doesn’t get anywhere near us. Seconds later, we are out of the camp and heading towards the closest tree line hoping to be able to disappear in the darkness.
“Dad, switch” Charles says, so we stand back-to-back and switch Church from his shoulders to mine. And then take off again.
Thirty minutes and about a mile later we hear the outboard; through the trees and turn towards the river. There it is the big boat with the big black sniper standing at console. Nick comes over and lifts church into the boat. I immediately drop my pack and grab a mylar space blanket and wrap Church up in it, then take my place behind the wheel at the console. Once everyone is aboard and ready, I reverse us back out into the inky black water, aim the bow of the boat upstream and hit the throttle.
As we approach the area where the camp is, Nick sits up and brings the machine gun to his shoulder. “Chase, hit the spotlights.” I reach down flip the switch and the area around the front of the boat lights up with eight 10,000 lumen spotlights; lighting up the shoreline, so Nick can see where to shoot and shoot he does. With practiced control he works the trigger dropping lead at a rate of 600 rounds per minute keeping heads down as we fly by at full throttle. Once we are past the camp, Nick transitions to watching our six o’clock for any pursuing boats.
But twenty minutes later we still don’t have any pursuers, so we all start to relax. “Maybe we have their only boats?” Charles asks.
“I didn’t see any as we flew by” Shannon says, holding on to the seat she is on with Church leaning against her.
“Chase, thank you I owe you,” Church croaks out through cracked lips, his face and body badly bruised and beaten.
“Thank me later, right now I just got to get you home and get you patched up.” I reply.
“And dressed” Charles adds “I mean seriously, who tries to go through the apocalypse naked,” as he rubs Church’s very bald head.
We pull up to the bank of at the Smith ranch and disembark, Church managing to extricate himself from the boat. “If we scuttle the boat here it will just point here for more problems, let’s just push it out and let the river take it back down stream.”
“You guys get Church in the truck; I’ll be there in a minute. Here take my weapons and pack.” I take my pack, rifle, and battle belt and hand them to Charles. Then jump back on the boat and idle it out into the water. I start playing with the throttle, until I find where it is just enough to hold the boat stationary against the current and then tie the wheel off with a piece of five fifty cord once I’m sure the boat isn’t going anywhere, I grab the closest fuel can and begin to splash it around the deck then kill the engine toss a zippo on the deck and jump overboard. The fuel starts ignites and starts to consume everything on the deck.
I swim to shore and jump in the passenger seat of the big hummer; Charles hits the lights and we start the trip back to the farm.
“Okay Nick, what happened?” I ask.
“When I was in Afghanistan, I was briefed regularly by CIA guys, on who was in country and
what they were doing. One of these guys was Nikolai Arroyovich. His CIA code name was ‘The Ghost’. Apparently, he was a big time Russian FSB Operative and Assassin in the late 90s early 2000s, but sometime around 2002-2005 he dropped off the radar. Then around 2010 he popped back up but not for FSB apparently, he got into contract work and started working for the highest bidder. It was even rumored he did a couple jobs for the US. Anyway, he was in and out of country frequently up until 2019, and the last I heard, he had sold out to the Iranians. If that is true, then we have bigger problems than just a bunch of Raghead terrorists.”
“So that was his name,” Shannon adds to the conversation as we are pulling up to the barn. “Yeah, he was pretty much running the place. He and another guy would speak what sounded like Russian, when they were around each other but would speak in a middle eastern dialect when addressing the masses. He also spoke good English, as did a few of the guards.”
“Cynthia, Elizabeth!” I holler and the two of them come rushing out of the barn. “Long story but we found Church and Shannon. Church needs you guys to check him over, and we need to go through all the clothes and see if we can find anything that fits.”
THE END