Always.
But the door was open by a crack. The lock had a few fresh tool marks on it, and it occurred to me that nowhere in my Ranger training had I ever been taught to pick a commercial dead-bolt lock. Blow them with det cord, sure, but not pick them.
Who, exactly, was I dealing with here?
Jun Kwai’s office was tiny. It was shaped like an L, with the small part of the room wrapping around behind the coolers. He kept it packed to the gills with boxes of inventory records and old surveillance tapes and all the other odds and ends he’d accumulated from twenty years of running a busy grocery store. In the cramped little space left over he had crammed an old schoolteacher’s desk and a battered chair. There was hardly enough room to breathe in there, and if I was going to have to fight an operator in a space like that, it was going to be interesting, to say the least.
But hesitating gets you killed, so I threw open the door and leveled my gun on the darkness inside the office.
My eyes adjusted to the darkness in time to see one of Grunt Boy’s sneakers disappearing into the ceiling. He’d pushed back one of the sectioned tiles that hid all the plumbing, and in another five seconds, he’d have been completely out of sight.
I didn’t give him the chance to slip away.
“Hey, what are you doing?” I called out to him.
The foot hung there for a second. It was all the chance I needed.
I jumped onto the desk and grabbed hold of his leg. I felt him flinch, and then start to buck and kick. His leg slipped from my hands, and when I reached back to grab him, he kicked at my face.
I was ready for him, though. I leaned right just enough to let the kick go by, and at the same time threw a block that caught him just above the ball of his ankle. I heard him grunt in unexpected pain, and that was all the encouragement I needed. I grabbed his leg again and jumped from the desk. My body weight pulled him straight through the ceiling tiles, and he came crashing down in a shower of crumbled ceiling panel dust.
He crashed down on the desk with a loud thud. Papers and old VHS cassettes slid to the floor. Grunt Boy let out a noise somewhere between surprise and pain, and for a moment, I thought I had him.
He was fast.
Before I could even climb to my feet, he’d jumped from the desk and kicked the chair out of the way.
I found myself nose to nose with him, the two of us standing in a space no bigger than a bathroom stall. He threw a quick jab with his right. I tried to move, but he was fast. He caught the side of my jaw and left me with a ringing in my ears.
I didn’t let him follow up, though. Before he could pull the punch back and strike with a backhand, I snaked my right arm over his wrist and shot my hand up behind his shoulder, putting him off balance. I jammed my knee into his thigh, causing him to snarl in pain.
I raised my boot to bring it down on the back of his knee, but he was ready for that. He took all the weight off his left leg and knelt down.
It was a basic move, but it was perfectly executed, and with him gone as my support, I rolled over the top of him and landed in the chair.
He was on me before I could get up. He snapped a front kick right at my chin. I managed to deflect it with my hands. Grunt Boy followed it up with another front kick, and I blocked that one, too. When I was first learning how to fight, my sensei told me that one day my techniques would be so finely honed I could fight in a phone booth, and I learned my lessons well. Grunt Boy sure seemed surprised.
He tried the front right kick a third time, but I was ready for it. I caught his heel with my left wrist and pushed up on his calf with my right. With his leg still in the air I lunged toward his other knee with a side kick and caught him just below the joint. He fell forward, hard, and landed facedown on the desk.
When we stood up to face each other again, his lip was busted up and leaking blood all down his chin.
“I bet that hurt,” I said.
That got him mad, but rather than try to hit me again, he just wiped away the blood. “You need to let me go,” he said.
“Yeah, the chances of that happening are hovering right about zero,” I said. “How about you turn around and put your hands behind your back. That way I won’t have to bust that other lip.”
He glanced down at my nameplate. “Look, Officer Ledger, you have no idea what’s going on here.”
“You just described most of my life, buddy. Why don’t you explain it to me after we put these cuffs on you?”
“There’s no time for that.”
“Oh we got—”
I didn’t get the rest of the sentence out. Before I knew it, he’d kicked a broom leaning up against the wall, making it flip in midair. He caught it and swept at my knees the next instant, leaving my calf muscles screaming from the sudden pain. I staggered a bit and lurched forward — right into the business end of the broom. He brought it up under my chin and shoved upward, causing me to rock back on my heels. The last place I wanted to be.
Grunt Boy could have slapped my temples and laid me out, but he didn’t follow through. Instead, he backed off. I heard boots hitting the floor outside the office door, and then the sounds of men barking fast, clipped commands.
So they weren’t worried about us hearing them.
Not a good sign.
“There’s no time to explain,” he said. “I have to get out of here. You should, too. You don’t want to be here when those guys come through that door.”
“Who are they?”
“Sorry,” he said, and tossed the broom aside. “That’s classified.”
He put his hands on the table and was about to jump onto it when the door burst open. He was caught in a bad spot, but Grunt Boy moved fast, I had to give him that. He spun around and kicked the door back into the soldier’s face.
“You’re gonna want to move,” he said, and grabbed the front of my uniform. He pulled me toward the wall next to the door and threw his arm across my chest, as if I were some kid in the front seat and he was my mom trying to keep me from going through the windshield.
The next instant I heard the rattle of a fully automatic rifle and the door exploded into splinters.
Grunt Boy stayed frosty.
Two of the soldiers came running through the door. Grunt Boy kicked the second one in the back, just below his body armor. The man crumpled to the floor. The lead man turned, and even through his gas mask, I could see the surprise in his eyes. He tried to bring his rifle up, but Grunt Boy was on him. He knocked the rifle to one side and got in close enough to throw one arm around his neck. He snaked his other hand under the man’s chin, and kept up steady pressure until the man’s neck snapped like a twig.
Grunt Boy had the pistol out of the dead man’s holster even before the body hit the ground.
He kicked the second man’s helmet, exposing a portion of the back of his head, then shot him twice.
“Whoa!” I said.
I looked down at the dead man. His gear was state of the art, but there wasn’t a single piece of insignia on it. It didn’t look like American gear, though. Russian, maybe. Maybe even Israeli.
“Who are these guys?” I demanded.
“I told you,” he said as he scooped up the rifle. “That’s classified.”
“You just shot a man in front of a Baltimore police officer. You’re gonna need to do a whole hell of a lot better than that.”
“Look,” he said. “All you need to know is that these guys are part of a team, and here in about five seconds, all their friends are going to come running through that front door.”
He walked out the office door and into the bright lights of the store.
I keyed my lapel-mic and said, “Bravo 16–20.”
Nothing.
Grunt Boy glanced at me over his shoulder. “That’s not gonna work.”