Right then, Davis began to count.
The windmill is an underrated strike.
Davis rotated his right arm up and then arced down, his fist falling like a wrecking ball. The blow struck between the man’s neck and collarbone, and his head snapped forward. Before his knees could even buckle, Davis grabbed him by the collar and drove the soldier head-first into the engine compartment, slamming his face squarely onto the steaming radiator hose. His screams were cut short when Davis slammed the hood down on the back of his head. The long, rangy limbs went soft like slack rope.
One down. His internal clock was running.
Three …
After a stunned moment, the others at the poker table started shouting. Davis didn’t understand a word, but he didn’t need to. The cadence was enough, explosive and breathless. A plan of action, maybe some profanity mixed in. Let’s kick his ass, Hussein! Something like that.
The man with the beret lunged in from the left, and took a wild swing with the whiskey bottle in his hand. He was the smallest of the lot, a full foot shorter than Davis, built out of matchsticks. His impulse to grab the bottle wasn’t bad. His execution was. Davis raised an arm to deflect the blow, rotated his opposite elbow to the guy’s jaw. The strike didn’t put him down, but stunned him to immobility. Davis’ next swing was big and full, a roundhouse that caught the man squarely in the solar plexus, a good target because it has nerve bundles and vital arterial junctions. Even more importantly, the solar plexus lies very close to an opponent’s center of gravity. If the guy had been any smaller, the blow would have sent him into orbit. As it was, he went airborne in the direction of Davis’ follow-through, sailed five feet through the air, and hit the dirt like a sack of wet gravel. Two down.
Six …
The odds were improving, but the first two had taken three blows, six seconds. Davis was over budget. And so, just like he’d figured, things started to go to hell. The squashed-faced guy was moving for the guns, which was what he should have done. Scarface was going the other way, which was what he should have done.
There was no choice. Davis lunged for the gun stack, got there just as the squat soldier was swinging a Kalashnikov in his direction. Flying through the air, Davis hit the man shoulder first and everything went flying — the soldier, his rifle, the whole tree of rifles. The squat guy was quick to his feet, and the fighter’s nature Davis had expected took over. He started swinging, a storm of short, compact punches that caught Davis in the body and face as he was rising. Davis, however, became a bigger storm, a category five maelstrom of fists and elbows, blocking and striking, backed by over two hundred pounds of follow-through. In close quarters combat, you hit hard and often, overwhelm your opponent. That’s what Davis did. The squat guy doubled over after a knee to the gut, then crumpled like his bones had disconnected after a hammer fist to the back of the neck. Three down.
Davis turned to find Scarface, but didn’t see him right away.
Ten? Twelve? He had no idea. His clock was pointless.
Davis spotted him, ten paces away and half hidden behind the hanging beach towel. He had a knife in his hand, a combat blade. The ten-inch Rambo special would look pretty impressive in a bar or at a poker game. Even useful in a fight if you knew how to use it. Scarface didn’t. He was holding the thing all wrong, jabbing and pointing like it was a fencing foil. Right then, Davis realized that this commander had not been promoted for his fighting skill. Davis walked straight at him, remembering the cut on the kid who’d been with Antonelli.
Scarface started swinging wildly, scything the blade in big defensive arcs. Davis grabbed what was at hand — the loose bicycle wheel. He wound up backhanded, and threw it like a ten-pound Frisbee. It hit Scarface in the head and knocked him back two steps. Davis grabbed an overturned plastic chair and kept going, no hesitation in his advance. The commander recovered and started swinging the knife again. Davis held out the chair and fended him off like a lion tamer, didn’t stop until he’d backed him up against the wall of the building. Davis ripped the Sudanese flag off the support line. With Scarface cornered, he used the chair to keep separation, then the flag to snag the knife on its last pass. He locked down on the man’s wrist, wrestled the knife away and tossed it far into the brush. Scarface should have stopped right there. Instead, his tactical disaster was made complete when he threw what could charitably be described as a punch.
A village somewhere had lost its idiot.
With a vision of Antonelli’s bruised face in his head, Davis pulled back his right hand and unloaded. It was just one blow, a compact delivery, but he rotated all his weight behind the strike, augmented with more than a little anger. The palm heel to the base of the nose, properly delivered, is among the most incapacitating of blows. The force of the strike lifted Scarface off his feet and slammed his head back into the corrugated aluminum wall. In that instant, his head stopped its rearward movement. Davis’ hand did not. Something had to give, and predictably it was the target’s nasal cartilage and vasculature. Maybe to a lesser degree the wall, where a round indentation came pressed into the aluminum.
Scarface collapsed to the dirt. He didn’t move.
Davis took the intermission to check on the others. He saw three men right where he’d left them, barely moving. No threat. The addict was still leaning on the pole in glassy-eyed oblivion. Definitely no threat. Scarface moaned and his eyes flickered. A hand went instinctively to his shattered face. He blinked repeatedly, an involuntary act to wash the blood out of his eyes. When he finally focused, it was on Davis. Six feet up.
“Who … who are you?” he croaked in English.
“I’m with the United Nations — Enforcement Division.”
Scarface spit out a mouthful of blood and asked a slow, gurgling question, “What do you want?”
Davis walked over to the pile of construction equipment, grabbed the dusty jackhammer and hauled it over. He poised it over Scarface’s chest, watched his eyes go wide.
Davis said, “I want you to stop pilfering.” He pointed to the other men strewn about under the awning. “I don’t care about any of them. You are the commander, and from this point forward your unit mission has changed. You will no longer raid. Instead, you are assigned to protect every aid shipment that comes into this territory. If any load of cargo to any aid organization is interrupted, by your people or anybody else, I will come back for the one person in the Sudanese Army who is responsible.” Davis lowered the blade of the jackhammer. “I will find you and use this, and I don’t mean on a sidewalk. I will bend you over and use it on you. Get the picture?”
Scarface nodded to suggest he did.
“Good.” Davis tossed the jackhammer aside, and it crushed the rickety card table in a colorful spray of chips and playing cards.
He walked to his pickup truck. Steam was still coming from under the hood, but less now. There was a chance it might still run for another mile or two, until vital parts of the engine melted and seized. Davis decided it was time for a trade-in, and there was only one other vehicle on this dealer’s lot. He reached into the pickup and took the keys from the ignition, threw them far into the desert. From behind the front seat he grabbed a handful of a mechanic’s most useful tools — plastic zip ties. They were long and thick gauge, probably used for keeping cargo bay panels in place or tying down instruments with broken mounts. A thousand uses really, which was why mechanics loved them. Cops loved them too, but had a different name. They called them flex cuffs.