Dead Six (23 page)

“On it, chief.” He ran for his computer.

I flopped onto the couch next to the girl. My hands were starting to do the post-action shake. No matter how many times I did something like this, that part never changed. Carl sighed, folded the stock of his stubby Galil, and set it on the coffee table.

“Pretty bad in there, I guess?” he asked slowly, sitting down. We had been working together for over fifteen years now. We’d met in Africa, where he had been working as a mercenary, and we had both gotten screwed over by our respective employers. Working with me had proven more lucrative, and we’d been together ever since, through all sorts of craziness, and it still took me a moment to realize that Carl was
trying
to be comforting. He just wasn’t very good at it.

“I shot three of them. Took out some more with a grenade.” I shrugged. “The guys before me made a real mess.”

Carl regarded me suspiciously, wheels turning, probably wondering if I was going soft on him. “Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.” He gestured at the girl. “And what do we do with her now?”

I studied her for the first time. She was young. Probably in her twenties. I had thought that she was from the Philippines when I had first seen her, as most of the servant girls in Zubara were imported from there or Indonesia. They were literally a slave class. Now I wasn’t so sure. She would have been unusually tall for a Filipina and didn’t look quite like most of the servant girls I had seen here. She was snoring peacefully in a drug-addled haze. One eye was badly bruised, and it made me glad that I had shot those men.

“I couldn’t leave her. You should have seen the girl upstairs,” I said. Carl didn’t respond. Acts of mercy were few and far between in his life. I patted her down: no documents, no passport. Something caught my eye. “Check this out.” I held up her wrist. She had a gold ring on one finger.

“What’s that say?” he asked, squinting his beady eyes.

“California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo.”

“Think she stole it off a tourist, I hope?”

“I’m thinking that we’re going to need to come up with a pretty good cover story for when she wakes up.” I gestured around the room. Hundreds of pictures were tacked on the walls. Posters of Al Falah, Adar, building schematics, road maps, and miscellaneous paper littered every corner of the room. A scale model of the Phase Three target was on the coffee table, and there were at least ten visible guns, and that wasn’t counting the RPG in the corner.

Carl took his time responding. He would have just left her there. Hell, I don’t know why I hadn’t just left her behind. We were thieves, not heroes. “You’re the one with the imagination. I just drive good and shoot people.”

“Guys, come check this out,” Reaper called excitedly from the other room. “I’ve got your shooters.”

We entered the makeshift computer room and hovered over Reaper’s shoulder. He was playing some Finnish goth-metal over the speakers. “I’m skipping past the torture porn. This Adar guy was one screwed up son of a bitch . . . and
here
is where your shooters come in.”

“Why isn’t there any sound?”

“Audio’s all screwed up, chief. It’s all static. The DVR probably didn’t burn the disk properly.”

“Slow it down.” There were two men, dressed in camo, faces smeared with black greasepaint. They were armed with blocky submachine guns. One was just over six feet, kind of stocky, and left handed. The other was thin, a lot shorter, probably about my size. Both were Caucasians. “They’re Americans.”

“How can you tell already?” Reaper asked.

“That’s Remington A-TACS camo. Not that common. They’re either Americans or Canadian airsofters. Look how they move, too. Pretty typical Western CQB doctrine.”

The two had entered the room at the same time, weapons shouldered. The shorter one covered the room to his front, while the taller one peeled off to the right.
They’ve done this before.

Their professionalism seemed to fall apart a second later as the bigger one froze when he saw the girl hanging from the ceiling. Adar turned toward the shooter with a strange look, almost a smile, on his face.

The shorter of the two shooters kept his weapon pointed at Adar. The other one just flipped out. First he said something to Adar, but the Butcher didn’t seem to respond. He just stood there, smiling. It was creepy. The shooter then dropped his subgun, leaving it to hang on a single-point sling, reached down to his left thigh, and drew his handgun.

“What the hell is
that
?” Reaper asked.

“That’s a .44 magnum,” I said as the shooter put a round into Adar’s left knee. The kneecap exploded into blood and pulp, and the Butcher of Zubara dropped to the floor. The other infiltrator flinched and covered his ears as the powerful weapon discharged.

From there, the shooter proceeded to take Adar apart piece by piece, systematically. Adar tried to say something, holding up his right hand, only to get it blown off. The next round went into Adar’s left bicep, mangling his arm in a spray of blood.

The shooter’s accuracy was impressive. The fourth slug went into Adar’s gut. The fifth went into his neck, nearly taking his head off. The shooter then reloaded automatically, mechanically, without thought.
Damn, he’s fast.
He had the gun reloaded and the cylinder closed before the emptied speed loader hit the floor. I absentmindedly pulled the .44 shell out of my pocket. I flipped it end over end between my fingers as I watched.

After the execution, the two shooters seemed to argue for a moment, then cut the mutilated girl down.

The pair then quickly ransacked the bedroom. Before they left, the tall one dropped the Ace of Spades onto Adar’s bleeding corpse. A grotesque grin remained on the Butcher of Zubara’s face.

“Who are these
fodas
?” Carl asked.

“Who the hell carries a
revolver
anymore?” Reaper asked.

Somebody who’s really good with one and knows it,
I thought.
“Like I said, Dirty Harry.”

“Look at these guys!” Carl was pissed. “What’s with the camouflage? Kids these days all want to wear camouflage and gear and play dress up! How are they going to explain that if they got picked up by the cops?”

“They’d just shoot the cops.” A professional should never be this brazen when there were more subtle ways available to pop somebody. “Play back when they’re arguing.” The taller shooter was young. He didn’t have a killer’s face, but there was no hesitation when he’d stitched those massive slugs through Adar. “He’s definitely American. Looks pretty corn-fed. He’s a pasty northern Midwesterner, probably has a cheese-wedge hat at home.”

“How can you tell when you can’t hear what he’s saying?” Carl asked suspiciously.

“It’s in the way he moves. I do this for a living, remember? His mannerisms, his gear, his clothing, all point to the USA. He might as well be wearing an Uncle Sam hat.”

“I guess. Well, when you play an Arab, I don’t recognize you, down to the dress and the perfume. You say he’s American, I believe you,” Reaper said.

“Go back a bit.” Carl frowned. “These guys have to stick out. How many Americans are in Zubara?”

“Officially? A couple thousand,” Reaper replied automatically. “And thousands more assorted Europeans. Mostly in Al Khor. If these guys have been operating in the poor side of town, they’d totally stick out.”

“Reaper, grab my notepad from the living room. We’ve got contacts in every district. I’m going to give a few of them a call.”

Reaper nodded, adjusted his Glock, and left the room.

“Kid’s gonna shoot his balls off, carrying his gun like that.” Carl said. Reaper flipped him the bird on his way out.

“We don’t have very good health insurance in this business, either,” I muttered, studying the faces of my new adversaries. These men were standing in the way of me completing Phase Three. Until I had that box, all of our work was worthless. Without that box, our families belonged to Big Eddie. I did not know who these mystery shooters were, but my new mission in life was to find them and kill them if I had to. I blew up the picture until it became grainy, zooming in on the tall one. These men knew their business. This was going to be a challenge.

There was a sudden crash and a surprised yelp from the living room. Carl and I both drew our guns and moved apart. I disengaged the safety on my STI and pointed it at the doorway. Carl took up position behind the desk, CZ extended in front of him.

“Reaper?” I shouted. “You okay?”

Our guest had awoken. Reaper stumbled into the doorway, his arms raised in a surrender position. The girl stood behind him with his Glock 19 pressed into the base of his neck. I didn’t have a shot.

“Sorry, chief,” he said slowly.

The girl glared over Reaper’s shoulder. The drugs must have worn off enough for her to come to, and she was obviously angry and confused. Her eyes darted about between us. “Nobody move! I’ll shoot this guy right in the head,” she ordered. I had been right. She was an American, and she apparently knew how to use that Glock. “Who are you people? What am I doing here?”

“That’s kind of complicated.”

She tightened her grip on the Glock. I could imagine a 9mm exploding through Reaper’s head. “Give me the short version, asshole!”

“Okay. So there I was, minding my own business . . . and I ran into some very bad men who had you tied up and were taking you into a house where you were going to be tortured to death on video. I, uh, rescued you.” The girl looked kind of out of it, disoriented and scared. She was still under the influence of whatever drug they had given her. And her finger was resting on the trigger that decided whether one of my crew lived or died. “We’re friends.”

“You expect me to believe that?” she shouted, blinking rapidly. Reaper cringed as she banged the Glock into the base of his skull.

“Look, we’re not your enemies. See?” I slowly placed my 9mm on the table and stepped away. “Carl, put your gun down.”

“But—”

“Do it!” I ordered. Even worse than her killing Reaper would be the noise. Our complex was crowded with rental villas, and I had no doubt that Zubaran fuzz would be crawling all over a gunshot call within minutes. Carl grudgingly responded and placed his CZ on the floor. “My name is Lorenzo. I saw that you were in danger, and I helped. I brought you back here, because the streets are covered in cops, and all hell has broken loose out there. Let me help you.” Why had I brought her to our hideout? Damn needless complications.

“Okay, I don’t think you’re with those men that grabbed me, but who are you, really?” She was scared, but she was hard, and her grip on the gun didn’t loosen. “You’re an American, at least.”

“You first,” I suggested soothingly. Plus it gave me a moment to try to think of some sort of plausible cover story.

“I’m with the US government,” she snapped.

You have got to be fucking kidding me.
“Good,” I said as calmly as possible. If I had brought a fed or a spy back to our hideout, it was either screw the mission or kill her. Neither one sounded like a good option. I caught Carl casting me a look, letting me know how stupid he thought I was. “We’re on the same side. We’re on a top-secret mission. And if you blow Special Agent Wheaton’s brains all over the walls, you’re going to have some explaining to do to your superiors, and I probably won’t be able to get the security deposit back on this apartment.”

When you have to lie, you might as well reach for the stars.

“Are you Dead Six?” she asked unsteadily. Her eyes had narrowed to dangerous slits, and her teeth were a hard white line on her darkly tanned face. I paused, not sure how to answer. “Are
you
with Dead Six?” she repeated.

Fifty-fifty chance on this one. “Yes.”

“I knew it!” she shouted as she stepped back from Reaper. The muzzle of the Glock was swinging toward me. The 9mm hole looked unnaturally large as the contents of my stomach turned to ice. I threw myself to the side, but I already knew it wouldn’t be fast enough.

Click.

Reaper disdained holsters, and since he tended to just shove the gun in his pants, he usually carried chamber-empty. Carl and I called him a sissy for doing that, but as I hit the floor, I was mighty glad Reaper was a sissy.

The girl apparently knew guns, and she instinctively reached up with her left hand and began to rack the slide. The world seemed to dial down into slow motion as Reaper spun and charged her, his stringy black hair rising like a halo. He hit her hard, and they both disappeared into the living room.

I was up in a flash, moving toward the scuffle. In the corner of my vision, I saw Carl scooping up his gun. Reaper and the girl were wrestling for the Glock, the muzzle pointed upward between their faces. He was much taller, but she was stronger than she looked.

Beginning to lose the struggle, she let go of the gun and threw her elbow into Reaper’s temple. His head snapped back like his neck was a spring. Our techie went to the ground in a heap, but at least he took the Glock with him.

Carl had drawn down on her. “Don’t shoot!” I shouted as I leapt over Reaper. “Too loud!” The girl had gone into a crouch, hands open in front of her face. Carl turned and disappeared from the room.
Thanks for the help there, buddy.
The girl circled, waiting for me. Apparently this chick knew how to fight, and I didn’t like hitting girls.

“Just calm dow—” She cut me off with a snap kick at my groin. I swept one hand down to block, but it had just been a feint. She hit me with a back fist on my cheek hard enough to rattle my teeth. That hurt. I stepped back, eyes watering, and cracked my knuckles one-handed. “Oh, it’s gonna be like that, huh?”

“I’m not going to let you kill me, too,” she spat. She charged with a scream, throwing wild punches. She was desperate, but I was a professional. I dodged and swept them aside, waiting for a clean shot. She fought surprisingly well for a girl, and if it wasn’t for the fact that I was going to have to knock her the hell out, I could almost admire the ferocity.

Suddenly Reaper’s terrible music began to blare, painfully loud. The speakers on the computer probably near overload.
What the hell?
Carl came storming back into the room. He had my pistol and was screwing my sound suppressor onto the end of the threaded muzzle. It was difficult to hear him over the noise. “I’m too old for this hand-to-hand crap.” He raised the 9mm and fired. The Zubara phone book sitting on the couch exploded into confetti. The
thump
of the silenced gun was barely discernible over the wailing guitars. He turned the gun on the girl. “Cool down, missy, or your head gets the next one.”