Suicide Mission (11 page)

 

Wade Stillman burrowed his head down in the pillow, hoping he could get it deep enough to shut out the sound, that awful, endless, screeching yap that haunted his waking hours and lately his nightmares, too.

No luck. He could still hear Lucy Kammen talking to him.

“Don't forget the rent's due day after tomorrow, Wade. And if we don't pay the electric company, they're gonna shut off our power, honey. I can't handle that, so you better see if you can get an advance at work, okay? I'd ask my sister, but I've already borrowed so much from Trish . . . Oh, hey, I know, sweetie. You can ask your daddy for a loan. Why don't you go over there and do that today before you go to work, okay? I'm sure he wouldn't mind helpin' us out a little.”

Wade raised his head and blinked bleary eyes. Lucy was standing on the other side of the room in front of the mirror on the old dressing table. She had her blouse on but hadn't pulled on her pants yet, so that meant he had a good view of the round curves of her panty-clad butt.

He moaned and dropped his head back into the pillow so that he couldn't see her anymore. When he looked at her and his brain got addled by how sexy she was, her words actually seemed to make sense, and he didn't want that. He couldn't handle that.

“Did you hear what I said, honey? About goin' to see your daddy?”

Wade wondered if he could push his face into the pillow's soft, enfolding darkness hard enough to suffocate himself. It might be worth a try, rather than facing another day.

“Sweetie?”

He knew she wasn't going to stop until he answered her. He lifted his head again and said, “My daddy don't have any money, Lucy. You know that.”

“Oh, he's got a little put away. You told me he did.”

“That's to pay for the rest home when he gets old. He's been puttin' a little aside for that for years.”

Lucy picked up a brush and started stroking it firmly through the thick auburn hair that tumbled around her shoulders. The motion tensed her muscles and made her butt look even better.

“He's still a long way from needin' a rest home,” she said. “He can spare a little now. Just enough to keep our power on. You know, if you were to go down to the electric company and talk to them, you might could pay them part of what we owe, and that'd be enough to keep 'em from turnin' off the power. What do you think about that?”

“I think you should come back over here to the bed,” Wade said.

“Oh, hell, no, honey, there's no time for that, no matter how good it sounds. I got to get to work.” She set the brush aside, reached for her pants, and drew them up her sleek legs. “If I'm late for the lunch rush, Solomon will kill me, you know that.” She stepped into her shoes and blew him a kiss. “Don't forget what we talked about.”

Two minutes after she was gone, while he was still lying in bed, Wade said aloud, “Wha . . . what was it I wasn't supposed to forget?”

He rolled over and went back to sleep. Chances were, it wasn't important anyway.

 

 

When he woke up, he realized he had overslept and had to hurry to make it to work on time. Avery Calhoun, the manager of the sporting goods department at the MegaMart, always tried to cut Wade as much slack as he could—“Once a Marine, always a Marine,” Avery liked to say, and if he wanted to use that as an excuse to do favors for Wade, that was just fine—but there was only so much he could do. If Wade was late too many times, he'd wind up getting fired, and although the MegaMart job wasn't the best one in the world, it was probably the best one Wade could get in his hometown. He wasn't exactly what anybody would call highly skilled.

Except at killing people. He had gotten damn good at that while he was in the Marines.

So he took what he could get, which in his case was working in the MegaMart selling fishing poles and deer rifles and hunting and fishing licenses. And putting up with Avery's boring stories about 'Nam. All for not much more than minimum wage and no freaking benefits, although he'd been promised that he'd move up to that after he'd been there for a while. Wade wasn't convinced the day would ever come, though.

He took a quick shower and was out of the house he and Lucy rented. A quick stop at a drive-thru window fortified him with a cup of lousy coffee and a greasy breakfast sandwich.

A look of relief came over Avery Calhoun's face as Wade walked into the sporting goods department. Avery was tall and mostly bald, with glasses and a little belly that hung over his belt. The days of him being in good enough shape for the Marines had vanished into the mists of time.

Avery said, “I'm glad to see you, Wade. I was about to get a little worried.”

“Yeah, I know I cut it a little close. But I'm here, and I ain't late.”

“No, you're not,” Avery agreed. “And that's good, because we've got a truck coming in any time now.”

That meant they would spend the afternoon unloading merchandise and storing it in the stockroom. That wasn't Wade's favorite thing in the world, but it beat waiting on customers.

“You look a little tired,” Avery went on. “Are you getting enough sleep these days?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Wade felt a flash of annoyance. He liked Avery, he really did, but the guy could be too much of a mother hen. “Sometimes I dream a little too much.”

Avery nodded knowingly and said, “I understand. It took me years to get to where I didn't dream almost every night about some things that happened in country.”

There he went again, the wise old Vietnam vet. Truth was, Wade hardly ever dreamed about what had happened in Iraq. Most of his nightmares involved Lucy nagging him. Once he had even dreamed that she was trying to beat him to death with a shovel. He had no idea why she'd been using a shovel instead of some more conventional weapon, like a baseball bat, but there it was, for whatever it was worth.

The first couple of hours on the job went okay. They weren't too busy and were able to get half of the truck's cargo unloaded. Then Avery answered the phone behind the counter and held the receiver out toward Wade.

“Lucy,” he said in a quiet voice.

Wade frowned. He wasn't supposed to get personal calls at work any more than she was, and she knew that. So this might actually be an emergency of some sort.

He took the phone from Avery, who was keeping his expression carefully noncommittal, and said into it, “What's up?”

“Did you go by the electric company and talk to them?”

The tense tone of her voice as she asked the question told him that she already knew the answer. He winced, knowing that was one of the things he had forgotten. He wouldn't have had time, anyway, since he'd slept so late.

“Sorry, I didn't get a chance—”

“You didn't talk to your daddy, either, did you?”

“No, but how—”

“How did I know? Because they just called my cell phone. The account's in my name, you know.”

How could he not know that? She was the only one who had any semblance of good credit.

She went on, “They called to tell me they were there at the house right then to shut off the power unless I could bring them the money for that overdue bill. And of course I had to tell them to go ahead and shut it off because I didn't have the money, and anyway I couldn't leave work. Which means that I'll have to go home to a house without electricity and it'll cost even more in the long run to get it turned back on!”

“Now, honey, take it easy,” Wade said. “I'll get it all straightened out—”

Again she interrupted him, saying, “If you trip on something in the dark when you get home, it'll be all your crap that I've thrown out on the front lawn!”

“Look, I'm sorry, I just didn't—”

“No,” she broke in coldly. “You never do.”

The phone clicked in his ear.

Wade looked at it for a second, then replaced it on the base. He sighed and said, “Well, hell.”

“Don't worry, she'll cool off and it'll all blow over,” Avery said. “If I had a nickel for every time my wife got mad at me . . .”

He was the wise old married man as well as the wise old vet, Wade thought. He said, “Lucy and I ain't married.”

“Well, I know that, but still, it's pretty much the same—”

A loud, angry voice somewhere nearby overrode what Avery was saying. Both men turned to look and saw a large man in blue jeans, a T-shirt, and a feed store cap berating a small boy who hung his head in misery and shame. A pale, narrow-faced woman who was obviously the boy's mother stood nearby, fidgeting nervously.

Wade didn't have a clue what the trouble was about. The kid must have done something to annoy his dad, and the guy was the type who didn't mind lacing into him in public and humiliating him. He probably knocked the boy around at home. The woman, too. In fact, Wade thought he saw a bruise on the woman's face that she had tried to cover with makeup.

Wade stepped out from behind the counter.

Avery said, “Now, wait—” but Wade ignored him. He went up to the man in the cap and said, “Excuse me, sir.”

The man jerked his head toward Wade and snapped, “Yeah?”

“You're causin' a little bit of a disturbance here—”

“You see that?” The man pointed at a basket half-full of merchandise. “I'm buyin' all that crap, which makes me a customer, which means you treat me with respect and keep your damn nose outta my business.”

Wade smiled. He knew the man looked at him and didn't see much to impress him, just a slender, sandy-haired guy, medium height, young. Just somebody else he could run roughshod over the same way he bullied everybody else he ran into, including his own family.

“Didn't mean any disrespect,” Wade drawled softly. “Just wanted you to quit bein' such an asshole in front of your wife and kid.”

“You just . . . What the hell did you say? I'm gonna get you fired, you little—”

“Go ahead,” Wade said. “Then I won't have to deal with worthless sons o' bitches like you anymore.”

The man's face was almost as red as a sunset by now. The muscles in his shoulders bunched. He might as well have been wearing a sign explaining what he was about to do.

Avery came up behind Wade and said, “Please, sir, there's no need for a scene—”

The man threw a punch, telegraphing it so blatantly Wade felt like he had a week to get out of the way. Instinct made Wade weave to the side as the fist came at him. The blow went harmlessly past his ear.

Unfortunately, Avery ran right into it. Blood spurted from his nose as the customer's fist landed on it. Avery grunted in pain and went over backward.

Wade saw his friend lying on the floor bleeding, and that was the last straw. Moving almost too fast for the eye to follow, he hit the big man four times, right, left, right, left, driving him back into a display of fishing poles. As the guy rebounded from that, Wade caught his arm and broke it with a simple, efficient twist. The man started to howl in pain, but Wade kicked his legs out from under him and dropped on top of him, jabbing his knees into the man's belly and hitting him in the face again and again . . .

In the end, it took Avery, Carl from Paint, and Lucas from Automotive to pull him off. By that time the cops were there, and they fastened his hands in plastic restraints behind his back and marched him out of the store to put him in the backseat of a cruiser.

Wade laughed the whole way. So much for those benefits he'd been hoping to get one of these days. Getting locked up did have one benefit, though.

He wouldn't have to listen to Lucy bitch anymore.

 

Dixon settled in on the hilltop and rested his cheek against the smooth wooden stock of the sniper rifle. The weapon was more than thirty years old, but it still shot straight and true. Dixon knew it, liked it, trusted it. The rifle had done the job for him more times than he could remember.

The job was killing, of course, and few in the world were better at it than Henry Dixon.

When he'd first gotten into this line of work, after a couple of tours of duty, he had let his hair grow out into an impressive Afro, a throwback to the seventies. That hadn't lasted long because he realized it made him noticeable, and he didn't want people to notice him. He wanted to ease into a place, do his work, and ease out again with nothing to show he'd ever been there except for a body . . . or two or three.

So he'd shaved off his mustache, cropped his hair close to his head, and he still wore it that way all these years later. It was mostly gray now.

Six hundred yards away, the rebel leader who called himself Dugo stepped out of his tent into the early morning sunlight and stretched. He was a tall, lean man who wore boots and a pair of khaki trousers. His torso was bare.

Through the scope, Dixon watched Dugo yawn, then turn toward the prisoner who was tied to a thick post set in the ground, tied so securely that he couldn't slide down and sit. From the looks of the dried blood that covered his dark skin, the rebels had tortured him for hours the day before, until they had grown tired of their sport. Obviously the man hadn't told them what they wanted to know, or they would have gone ahead and killed him and been done with it.

Now it would start all over again. Eventually, no matter how strong he was, the man would break and reveal all the secrets of Colonel Mfunda's lakefront hideaway. Once they knew that, Dugo and his men could start planning their mission to assassinate Mfunda.

The colonel wasn't aware of the threat that hung over him, of course. He would have been outraged to think that any of his people wanted him dead, even that malcontent Dugo. Why, he was their beloved leader, wasn't he? They idolized him, and why shouldn't they? He had taken his small, mineral-rich country and dragged it kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. All it had taken to accomplish that was almost wiping out several of the tribes that had stubbornly and foolishly opposed his benevolent, well-intentioned rule.

Luckily for Mfunda, he had some advisors around him who weren't as blinded to the truth, and they watched out for him by hiring men like Dixon. The colonel had no idea how many times they had saved his life.

From time to time, Dixon had wondered why Mfunda didn't just go ahead and declare himself a general. Or president. Or even king. He was the absolute ruler of this country and could call himself whatever he wanted. But he had been a colonel in the army when he'd led the coup and seized power, and Dixon supposed that was good enough for the man. Titles didn't really mean anything, anyway.

He shifted the rifle slightly and centered the sights on the back of Dugo's head. A squeeze of the trigger would put an end to the man's dreams of rebellion.

But someone else would just come along to take his place, and Dugo was a known quantity, after all. And the colonel's advisors weren't Dixon's only employers. He also worked for men who operated out of fancy drawing rooms in Washington and basements in Virginia. They liked the tension between Mfunda and Dugo and wanted it to continue. If Mfunda got too secure, too complacent, he might decide to kick all the foreign interests out of his country, and nobody wanted that. Better for him to keep on worrying a little, and as long as Dugo was around, he would.

So Dixon shifted the rifle's sights back to the prisoner, one of Mfunda's security officers who had been kidnapped by the rebels a couple of days earlier.

The rest of the camp was coming alive now. Women emerged from some of the tents and stirred up cooking fires. Men went into the trees to empty their bladders. It was all very primitive, except for a truck parked to one side that had a satellite dish mounted on it. Even here, people had to have the Internet.

Dixon had gotten into position while it was still dark. He could have carried out his mission as soon as it was light enough for him to draw a bead on his target. But his employers had asked him to wait and kill the man right in front of Dugo. They wanted to send a message to the rebel leader, a message making it perfectly clear that they could reach out and have him killed whenever they wanted to.

It struck Dixon as melodramatic nonsense, but he did what he was paid to do.

He drew in a couple of deep breaths and blew them out. His body was absolutely still. His mind was serene.

He stroked the trigger.

Six hundred yards away, the bullet passed close enough by Dugo's ear to make him feel the heat of it, then the prisoner's head exploded.

It was merciful, really. Soon he would have been screaming his lungs out in agony as the torture started again.

Through the scope, Dixon saw Dugo stagger back from the corpse. He twisted around, his face splattered with blood and brains. His mouth opened grotesquely wide as he shouted at his men. At this distance, Dixon heard the yelling, but only faintly. The words meant nothing to him.

He crawled backward down the far side of the hill until he couldn't be seen from the camp and then stood up. His jeep was parked on a trail about a quarter-mile away. He trotted toward it, his eyes scanning his surroundings for trouble as he moved. While he was at his best making long, carefully planned and aimed shots, he could handle impromptu fighting, too. He was a good shot with the rifle under any circumstances.

The trees and the undergrowth thickened as he approached the trail. Dixon slid through them without making much noise. Sometimes he thought of himself as a ghost, moving unseen and unheard through life, lacking in substance except for his trigger finger.

Dugo's men would have to take a roundabout route to reach the spot where Dixon had left his jeep. It would take them half an hour, at least, and by then Dixon would be long gone. By noon he would be on an airplane headed to Paris, where he intended to spend at least a week relaxing.

He stepped out of the brush onto the trail and froze.

A truck was parked on the trail behind the jeep. It was military issue, a deuce-and-a-half, but Dixon instantly knew from the ragtag clothing worn by the eight or nine men around it that they weren't regular soldiers. They were members of Dugo's rebel force who had stolen the truck somewhere.

There was no reason for them to be here. Dixon had scouted the trail and knew it was little used. No other vehicle had come along it for days, if not longer.

So what had brought these men here today?

Dixon could think of only one answer.

Bad luck. Sheer bad luck.

And it was worse luck that one of them had a walkie-talkie with him. As they all stood there around the two vehicles in the trail, staring at him as if frozen, a burst of static came from the walkie-talkie, followed by squawking that Dixon recognized as Dugo's voice. The rebel leader was furious as he ordered his men to start searching for the sniper who had just killed their prisoner.

Dixon didn't give the man with the walkie-talkie a chance to reply. He whipped the rifle to his shoulder and shot the man through the head. The walkie-talkie flew out of the man's hand and went high in the air as the heavy bullet cored through his brain and knocked him down.

Dixon worked the rifle's bolt and shifted his aim with blinding speed. He fired again, this time drilling a man who was trying to raise a machine gun. The slug took the man in the chest and spun him around.

With two men down, the others panicked and scrambled for cover. Dixon dropped another one, hitting the running man between the shoulder blades. Then he leaped toward the jeep in the hope that he could start the engine and get out of here before the rebels gathered their wits.

All he needed was a small lead. He had been the hunter most of his life, but on occasion he had been the hunted, too.

It might have worked, but he hadn't counted on the fact that one of the rebels had walked on down the trail to see what was up ahead and now was behind him. The man came running back and opened fire with the machine gun he carried. Dixon had no warning before the slugs laced into the back of his legs and spilled him off his feet. He yelled in pain.

But he kept his wits about him and rolled over to spot the gunner running toward him. The man skidded to a stop and tried to open fire again, but Dixon shot him first. Blood sprayed into the air from the rebel's bullet-torn throat, forming a parabola as the impact flipped him backward.

Dixon knew he was bleeding out from the multiple wounds in his legs. He had only moments to live, and that reduced everything to the starkest, most primitive terms. He wanted to take as many of the bastards with him as he could, so he rolled onto his belly again and started firing as the rebels charged him.

Through the red haze that was slowly dropping over his vision, he saw one man fall, then another, and then the red began turning to black and he knew he was slipping away . . .

Then the oddest thing happened. A great wind began to beat at him, and a deafening noise descended on him. Just before he lost consciousness, he realized that the two things were connected and figured out where they came from.

The beating of a helicopter's rotors.

 

 

When Dixon came to, he had to lick his lips a couple of times before he could rasp, “Am I . . . dead?”

“Not yet, old buddy-roo,” a familiar voice said.

“Somebody got the bright idea of keeping an eye on you to make sure you got out all right after you finished the job. When we saw that firefight break out, we swooped down to get you. You
did
finish the job, didn't you?”

“Y-yes. Am I going to . . . going to die?” he asked as he felt the helicopter bank in the air.

“I'm just a civil servant, not a doctor. But we're gonna get some help for you just as quick as we can, so you hang on, okay?” The man paused, then asked, “You still with me, Dixon? You stay with me, you hear?”

“I'm . . . here,” Dixon said as the man's face swam into view above him. It was a bland, white man's face, the face of someone who ought to be selling insurance instead of treading the murky back roads of international espionage. “Do you think they can . . . save my legs?”

“Sure they can. You're gonna be good as new, buddy.”

“For a spy . . . you always were . . . a terrible liar, Clark.”