Chronicles of War
Part 1: Way of the Storm
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"The genius of you Americans is that you never make any
clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves that
leave us scratching our heads wondering if we might possibly
have missed something."
- Gamel Abdel Nasser
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Chapter 21: Join the Party
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When Jason Clark of the FBI shook hands with the Jessie Cameins of the
Kennewick Police Department, lightning did not flash across the sky like
a silver knife, casting the sallow faces of the worried crowd and
curious onlookers into shadows blacker than the dark side of the moon.
In fact, hardly anybody noticed the two FBI agents, who had practically
earned degrees into disappearing into the background, despite their
business attire and arrival in a squad car complete with flashing
lights. After Clark and Kelly finished their rapid-fire introductions,
the Chief led them into an unmarked van at the edge of the parking lot.
Inside, he made quick introductions all around.
"We don't have a lot of time, so let's make this quick," Clark began
without preamble. "For thirty seconds, you tell me everything you know
about James Rahn. My partner and I will reciprocate for another thirty
seconds, then we address the situation inside. That work?"
The short, balding detective picked up a clipboard and began reading.
"Age, twenty-four. Male. Valid driver's license from North Dakota, a
resident for sixteen months. Valid Masters Degree in Mechanical
Engineering from the University of Reno, Nevada. Graduated with minor
honors, two disciplinary incidents. Changed his name while residing in
the state, no information on previous last name and he claims he can't
remember it due to an accident sustained during his time at college.
High school records have been tampered with and we're investigating that
while looking for a Sean and Diana who fathered the bastard."
The clipboard hit the counter with a slap.
"No military records. No felonies. No sealed juvenile records. He is in
possession of a passport and has used it to travel to much of Europe and
most of Asia. We're currently building a file on travel dates to track
his movements for the past eight years, see who he's been in contact
with. Furthermore, we're getting a search warrant. Anyone who does that
much travel will bring things back. If he doesn't have a stockpile of
souvenirs and photographs somewhere, we can only assume he's a mercenary
of some kind. Now, the mall."
The police officers shared a number of covert glances that did not make
it past Clark undetected. He ignored the clipboard and his fancy speech
for a moment. "Gentlemen?"
The Chief spoke first. "He's been sighted by sniper team two, fighting
some men in black uniforms--they appear to be the same men we've been
observing through every pane of glass in the building since this
started. Apparently he killed several in hand-to-hand combat and signed
for help to the officers. The hostages inside are going to his aid."
Clark clutched the van's work counter like he was having a heart attack.
The hostages were helping this madman? And the Chief of Police just
stood there and acted like this was an every day occurrence? "How long?"
he choked out the question.
"They're en route now," the Chief answered.
"No, how long has James been killing these guys?"
The Chief answered quickly, too quickly, like he had been expecting this
question and practicing his response in front of a mirror. "Since he
showed up. He went in, they attacked him. You know the rest."
Clark felt he didn't, but even if the cops did know more than they were
letting on, that simply wasn't important right now.
----------
Every person lives on borrowed time, life a brief miasma of pleasure and
pain, death a certainty common to all living things. James experienced
the acute sensation of living on borrowed time all of his life. Even
from a young age, when the world was bright and wonderful and new, he
was never anxious to wake up tomorrow, because he always thought
tomorrow might never come. He knew that one day he would go to sleep and
that would be it; he'd never wake up again.
The silly thoughts of a child.
Now it was a sensation that plied at his mind, day in and day out, and
he still wasn't used to it. Didn't want to become used to it. It was his
edge, it was the one thing that kept him ahead of the hunters in the
woods, the wild things circling just out of sight, waiting for the sweet
scent of blood to reach them.
James was a deeply spiritual person, but most organized religions were
as appealing to him as a bad termite infestation. He was biding his time
with them, minimizing the damage to society while he searched for a way
to permanently rid the world of them. Often, he worried that he'd have
to burn down the society that they infected to really get rid of them.
He couldn't decide if that would be a bad thing or not, but the matter
would be irrelevant if he didn't keep himself alive, listen to his
instincts, and do the right thing.
He ducked a wild knife slash, and fell back from the elbow aiming for
his head. He knew it would stun him long enough for the attacker to cut
the tendons in the arm he would raise to deflect a second blow the to
the head. So, instead of doing something stupid, he leaned forward and
smash a fist into his opponent's ribs. An elbows bounced ineffectually
off of his shoulder, and he stepped away to get a better angle at the
man's exposed back. James kicked the backs of his knees, knocking him
down in the blink of an eye, and used a second kick to the back of the
head to send him sprawling.
He launched a flurry of punches at another of the terrorists, screaming
in fury. The man flinched for an instant, breaking his guard. James
rewarded him by breaking his arm, and very quickly, his neck. Then he
felt a knife graze his shoulder and he cursed. These guys were coming
down on him like rain drops, and he couldn't dodge them all.
----------
Ed was giddy with excitement. Finally, he was leaping into action with
hesitation! His stomach felt like it was fighting an octopus, but he
just chalked that up to his manic cheer!
Then Kat's voice struck out like a pit viper roused from its nap early.
"Quit smiling, Ed. It's bothering me."
Ed straightened out his lips, but the smile was still in his face. Eyes
twinkling, he looked at her in what he imagined was an apologetic way.
"Sorry." He returned to scanning their surroundings with a look more
popular with puppies than people, his gun held steady and level in his
hands.
Kat ignored him as best she could, looking for anything out of the
ordinary. It was like looking for fire in a furnace. Never mind that she
might be shot on sight. Never mind that Carl and Jimmy rated their
chances of success with single-digit percentages. Never mind that she
had abandoned her mantra for surviving life in the basin. 'Anything is
better than retail.' Hell, three months and she would be out of this pit
of a city.
If it didn't get her first.
The Marines flanking her moved as if they were one unit. Their eyes
scanned the hallway mechanically, unforgiving. Their faces matched their
intense gazes--cold as the vacuum of space. Their guns were held
comfortably, surely, but every now and then, one of them would make eye
contact with her and smile, and she was reminded of how young they
looked. They were actually younger than her.
Moving to check their six, Carl couldn't help but think of the music
store, now only a hundred paces away, as part of another world. Would
anyone be alive when they came back? He could see the same question
burning in Jimmy's eyes, but the tall Marine just shrugged it off after
every glance and return to watching his side of the hallway. Yeah, they
couldn't afford to be distracted. There was no telling what they were
about to walk into. To hear Rahn's old friends talk about his fighting
ability, the man sounded like a fictional war hero or a mythological
figure of violence. He saw it in their eyes; James Rahn didn't attack
his enemies, he tore them apart. He didn't just kill them, he erased
them from the earth, acting with a certainty only very few people could
muster on demand.
----------
James chucked the empty gun. He was down to his pistol and six men were
closing in on his position. He counted three behind the customer service
counter, two on the left, and one on the right who was lagging behind
his comrades. A pincer move then. James grinned. The trick with a pincer
move was to break the weakest part, but most idiots would take out the
one man falling out of formation. Professionals expected that.
James launched himself off of the wall and veered left. He weaved a path
between stands of clothing, racks of rags for riches, fabric icons of a
an entire civilization that would be forgotten by next week. He'd read
somewhere that the average American second-grader could identify two
hundred different corporate logos, but not the President of the United
States. If children are our future, would this government be one ruling
from the shadows?
He jumped clear over a rack of something pink, his body a flash of black
and blue. He came down practically on top of the soldier he had marked,
catching the man completely by surprise. His partner was just beginning
to track James with blood-shot eyes underneath long black bangs, his
body curled up like a spider hiding in a corner. One round to the face
at point-blank range and the assassin was off without a second thought.
Shouts and bullets followed him, both ineffectual in hurting him, but
the bullets doing substantial damage to the fabric icons of capitalism a
dozen feet away from him. If he kept this up, they might wreck the whole
store. He lobbed his last grenade into the customer service booth, which
came apart like a cherry bomb dropped into a Lego house, and he realized
that it was not until this moment he believed that the day after
Thanksgiving was the greatest shopping day of the year.
He rolled across the hallway leading to the entrance, checked his
backside and the center of the store for reinforcements, and finding
none, settled down behind some cover to nail the two remaining soldiers.
No doubt the two would take a second to think things over now that
they'd lost most of the two squads that had tried to ambush him here.
They might still follow their orders, but he expected them to set their
weapons to burst fire mode and come out shooting to kill. It is, after
all, what he would have done.
A second check of the central area of the store revealed Carl and Jimmy
checking the top of the escalator for threats. Cavalry or death squad?
Ed's head came into view, followed shortly by Kat's. That made them the
cavalry.
James grinned.
Or bait.
----------
The lower floor of the Bon Marche looked like a toddler with a grenade
launcher had been let loose in the store. Gunfire echoed down the
escalator cell as Carl slowly led the group through the carnage. He
approached the stainless steel bottleneck with great caution, but the
lower level was dead.
Halfway up the stopped escalators, a grenade went off. The blast was
completely deafening, the sound hitting him like a very solid pillow to
the face. Bits of shrapnel came flying down the cell, bouncing off the
walls. A sudden stinging sensation in his cheek marked where one got far
too close. The three behind him ducked almost comically after the blast,
though the danger was long past by the time they realized what had
happened. That one was close; another few feet and they could have been
killed.
Carl shook his head and felt the stinging spot on his check. Finding no
blood, he crawled up the last few steps and took a peek at the second
floor.
The place looked like a small bomb had been set off, but that was simply
because that was what had happened. Apart the grenade's damage, a few
bodies, and a few bullet holes here and there, the place was in good
shape, unlike the lower floors, which were not fit to describe to people
who wanted to sleep soundly at any point in the future. He grimaced.
Grenades did ugly things to people.
When he noticed Ed and Kat putting their heads up, he frantically waved
them down. Jimmy grabbed the woman by the belt and pointed out the
correct course of action with only a glance. Ed looked Carl in the eye
and quickly threw off a few hand gestures. The Marine read 'two men, two
o'clock, inbound.'
In the next second, he was sighting down the M16 in his hands. A few
hand gestures had Jimmy ready to provide cover fire, and Ed dropped
back, ready to assist him. For a moment, Carl looked at the two, telling
himself they at least had a chance of surviving this. Then he was out
and running to cover.
He made it five steps before they opened fire. Everything seemed to be
moving slowly, and he could make out each bark of the M16 set to its
three-shot burst mode. One, two, three. Then the bang of a nine
millimeter. A pause, then more bursts. One, two, three. One, two, three.
Carl dropped behind cover just as a trio of loud bangs echoed across the
hall to him. Silence. Jimmy was watching him in peeks, revealing the top
of his head, his gun, and eyes in that order, then reversing the
procedure to drop out of sight. He took a moment to count his injuries.
Then he re-counted them, then re-counted them a third time. Zero was a
good number of injuries to have.
"Dude, you break a nail?"
As the first syllable hit his ears, Carl's heart tried to both suck more
blood in and pump more blood out at the same time, spasming uselessly.
His gun swung around as if on strings, the barrel just two inches behind
the muzzle brake landing neatly in a blood-caked bandage wrapped around
a heavily calloused hand. Its owner smiled crookedly down at him. James.
"Don't do that, please," Carl politely insisted, "It'll get somebody
killed someday."
"Or at least waste some perfectly good ammo." James retorted, his smile
leveling out and widening.
"James!" Kat shouted from behind the assassin.
"I assume the area is clear?" Jimmy asked, ignoring the woman.
"Yes and yes." The man let go of the M16's barrel and offered the
bandaged hand to Carl. The Marine took it, noticing that the other hand
was empty and a Glock was tucked into the man's pants.
Kat pulled out a small notepad. "What happened here?" she asked, looking
at James as if through a microscope.
Carl was hanging on James' every word, and the man hadn't even spoken
yet. Jimmy and Ed were watching him like attack dogs eying fresh meat.
James took a single glance at them, and sense of theatrics fell away,
sloughing down his body like water off a duck's back. "I used the
cameras to check the locations and movements of the terrorists, formed
assumed routes and organizations from this information in my head, and
attacked. Knowing how many there were, where they would be, and how they
would adjust their formations in combat, I eliminated them all."
"Why signal the cops for help?" Kat asked before the others could.
"I needed help." He smiled at them sincerely, holding his arms wide as
if about to gather them up in a group hug. "You guys came and helped.
Thank you."
"There's like, forty dead guys in this store. You just took out what,
the last three of them?" Jimmy pointed around the upper level and
indicated the escalator as he spoke.
"Two," James said, critically examining the nails on his bandaged and
bruised hand.
"Two guys." Jimmy pressed ahead stoically, "Are we late?"
"Timing matters; but you're here, I'm alive, and they're dead. What more
could one ask for?"
"World peace?" Ed suggested, then shrunk back under a number of
whithering stares.
"Of course, there's that," said James, pulling out his phone. "Now, if
you'll excuse me for a moment, I have to fuck with someone's blood
pressure. I advise we take cover behind that luggage display there."
"Wait," Kat said, grabbing James by the arm. "I need to ask you--"
James turned to look at Kat, and she froze like a mouse under the gaze
of a hawk. "Give me a minute," he said pleasantly.
She nodded, her face blank, and walked across the the store with the
others, picking their way between clothing racks.
James made no attempt to separate himself from the rest of the group. If
anything, he looked ready to use them as human shields, letting them
surround him like a posse. Carl marveled at how easily the man could
communicate non-vocal commands. A nod here, a ghost of a gesture there;
he directed them into a defensive pattern with disturbing ease. Like
he'd done this before.
This was a war the man had merely taken a brief vacation from. He wasn't
retired from the assassination business anymore than Carl had retired
from being an American or a soldier. That part of his life hadn't been
carved out by a doctor when he left the Marine barracks, and James Rahn
hadn't magically lost the ability to kill people when he switched guns
for pencils--their surroundings stood in mute testament to that
particular fact.
Another battle was about to begin. Carl could feel it building as James
poked the buttons on his cellular phone like a chimpanzee rousing an
anthill.
----------
James put the phone to his ear. The other end answered instantly. Not
giving the other end a chance to fire off a greeting, he started with a
jovial, "Hey fuckface, what's up?"
"The odds that you can't maintain a civilized conversation if your life
literally depends upon it."
A smooth customer, James noted. "Well, it's your nickname, dude. Don't
shoot the messenger and all that--wait, you are shooting the messenger,
or having someone else shoot him for you, which is the same thing."
"Your voice would give headaches to screaming three year olds."
"They did a study about that when I was in college." James sighed
nostalgically. "Ah, the things I did for money back then."
"Money can't be a big concern for you now. After all, you must have some
big backers now."
"Look, Rick ain't here man, so fuck off. I called to ask about your
security force in the Bon Marche."
"No you didn't."
James triumphant smirked dropped like a clubbed seal. "Fine. I called to
gloat. Is that better?"
"Is that the truth?"
James ignored the question. "Let's see what we have behind door number
one. We have a large pillar with a micro controller for a fire
suppression system. Behind door number two...well, there isn't a door
number two. See, I think you want me, and now that you have me, you're
wondering who me is."
"Never have I heard such a slew of sentences so devoid of logic."
"Why, thank you!" James fluttered his hand against his chest like a
demure school girl. "So, back to door number one, or pillar. You know,
whichever works for ya. Which has a micro controller on it. Now, your
average--curious--citizen would look at this little plastic wonder and
think 'building codes.' They have one of these things everywhere you
know. Safety, right? Great, grand, wonderful. Unless they know about how
these systems are laid out and realize that such a controller has NO
business being here. And what kind of person would know this?"
"The conclusion to your train of thought is easier to solve than a maze
designed by an ape."
"Exactly! They'd be an engineer." The false cheer left James' voice like
a squad of kindergartners with the Boogyman nipping at their heels. "And
who did you call this morning who happened to be an engineer?"
The voice fairly oozed boredom. "You."
"Exactly. So, I think you were lying to me."
"And?"
A team of physicists and a supercomputer would have to be flown in to
calculate the temperature of James' voice. "Apologize."
"No."
"Your funeral. One question," James said.
The voice may well have been tapping its fingers idly against a
convenient counter-top. "I already have a coffin picked out."
James snorted at the remark. "Are you scared?" He didn't wait for a
response. He hung up the phone and stared into the distance. After a
minute, he began slowly tapping the phone against his chin. After this
went one for another minute, Kat waved her hand in front of his face.
"I'm here," he said lazily.
"What's with you and that guy?"
"A way for each of us to blow off steam. We're like old friends. We pose
like cartoon heroes, rant like the insane, and scream obscenities at one
another to feel better." He shrugged, but Kat was already nodding in
understanding. "It's a guy thing."
She looked at him carefully. "And the problem?"
"We're like old friends," James repeated. He sighed and shook his head.
"I'm against someone I can't hate right now. It's rather hard to deal
with."
Carl threw a glare at James. "Don't you respect your opponents?"
"Yes. But then there's the wheat before the scythe; the people who don't
even know what side they're on, who can't make their own decisions, who
gleefully destroy everything before them without a care...I don't fight
those people; they're mad dogs."
"That's fucked up."
"That's the difference between killing because you like it and killing
because it's necessary."
"Is it necessary?" Ed asked with honest curiosity.
James turned to the one of the Marines. "Jimmy?"
"That's a question for the philosophers, sir."
The assassin nodded approvingly. (
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