“I was a mortar man. Two tours in the suck,” the man said with a smirk, “as we used to call Iraq.”
Kharzai glanced at the tattoo, then back up at the young man’s defiant face. “Unhappy time in the service, I assume?”
“Yeah,” Bones replied. “Turns out the Corps doesn’t really like killing people as much as you’d think — at least, not as much as I do. Contrary to popular opinion, some of us are not part of that 'Once a Marine, Always a Marine' bullshit. There really are some ex-Marines out there. I know ‘cuz I got nothing to do with those cock suckers. They busted my ass right out of there just for taking a few trophies.”
He jangled his bone necklace.
“Yeah,” Blue said, “that and the little girl you told me about. What was she, like six?”
“Like I said,” Bone’s face stretched with an evil grin, “trophies. Tight, smooth little trophies.” He held his hands out in front of his mid-section and thrust his hips forward in a crude sexual gesture.
Kharzai gritted his teeth into a grinding rage-filled grin. No matter how hard a country, any country, tried to keep its military clean, monsters somehow always found their way in and made a mess of things. Like this ex-Marine-turned-gangster, they were a blotch on the face of humanity. Murderers and child rapists were not the type any real military wanted around, especially the military forces of a country trying desperately to make itself out to be the good guys. They usually recognized and caught them quickly, but sometimes one got through until they had committed a heinous act that crossed the line between the warrior code and savage barbarism.
Kharzai made a serious effort not to let his emotions boil over. Years of living a life of violence, of covering his true feelings around evil people, had worn him thin. The veil that kept his emotions in check grew more and more transparent each day, like the skin stretched over an old celebrity’s face as they try to disguise their age. Kharzai felt as though his veil would soon tear through and he would no longer be able to maintain the façade. The monster within him had become restless. It waited impatiently near the surface, barely contained.
“Well then, I suppose you will know what to do with this.” Kharzai looked across the rest of them. “For the rest of you, pay attention as you learn how to use this weapon, or you may not live to collect your payoff. These little babies are not forgiving toward the stupid.”
The group circled around the mortar tube, and Kharzai led them over its features and capabilities. He assigned them to two two-man teams and gave them the basic information they needed to fire the weapon. They ran through setting up and tearing down the equipment. Once he felt comfortable with their skill level at that task, they practiced getting range and elevation, and ran dry-fire drills.
“When do we get to do some live rounds?” asked one of the men after three hours of training and practice. The entire length of his arm displayed a tattoo of a naked woman with a huge snake coiled from her legs up and around her torso. Its head jutted between her breasts, where it flicked out its forked tongue to touch her puckered lips.
“We can only practice dry fire here for obvious reasons,” Kharzai said. “There’s not exactly a place we can set these off without drawing attention. You only have to put two rounds on target. So just be ready to not be surprised by the noise when they take off. It’s louder than a shotgun when it fires. Once you’ve fired two rounds, pack it up and boogie out of there.”
“What about the money?” Blue questioned.
“How’d I know you’d ask? You’ll each get two of those nice little stacks tonight. The day of the event, after I hear all four pops, I will text message each of you the location of the other half of the money.”
“Wait a minute. You’ll do what?” said the tattooed ex-Marine. “We need to get paid up front. I ain’t going to be running around trying to collect afterwards.”
“You don’t have a choice really,” Kharzai said. “You’ve already agreed to be here, and therefore you will do as you’re told. Otherwise, you can choose to walk away now. If you are fast enough, you might actually get away.”
“What, are you going cut me like you …”
Mid-sentence his words became a loud puff and wheeze as Kharzai’s foot drove into the soft flesh of his belly. Bones instantly crumpled to the floor.
“You might think you're tough because you rape little girls, and you might think you are a bad ass because you wear a necklace of finger bones, but let me explain something to you … Bones.” Kharzai put his foot on the punk’s throat. His arm stretched toward Bones’ face, a pistol pointed at the man's eye. None of the others had seen him draw the weapon or realized he was even carrying one, and none of them dared make a move to intervene. Bones grabbed Kharzai’s ankle, but relented when he found himself looking into the barrel of the nine-millimeter Makarov semi-auto.
“I have shown you my secrets. You have agreed to take my money. You try to run, you try to escape, you try to cross me, and you will die a horrible death unlike anything even a pathetic child molester like you can imagine. I have made my living hurting and killing people since before your mother crapped you into this world. I do not need to wear my victim’s bones as trophies. I do not need to brag about my kills, and I do not need to hurt little children. Because I am bad enough to know that there is no man on this earth who can defy me and live.”
Bones’ face darkened to a purple shade of blue. Kharzai removed his foot and took a step back, glancing around at the others. They all averted their eyes, staring at the floor or the mortar tube, anything other than his fiery stare.
“Anyone else want a turn at negotiation?”
Chapter 23
The phone on Undersecretary Paul Hogan’s desk rang twice before he was able to get it off the hook. He didn’t move as fast or as accurately as he used to. Hogan had recently been promoted to the office of FBI Undersecretary for Terrorism Interdiction, a new and little-known division that actively sought and eradicated terrorist threats on US soil. It was a job with which Paul was intimately familiar. Eighteen years in the United States Marine Corps Special Operations detachment ended with him medically discharged just short of retirement after a Taliban RPG ripped up his legs and shredded his baby-making apparatus near the end of his third tour in Afghanistan. Those injuries had granted him a rating of 70 % disabled, according to the VA, U.S. Department of Veteran's Affairs, providing a monthly stipend just more than half the amount he would have been able to make if he'd survived two more years in the Corps to full retirement.
Once recovered, he joined the FBI, and after only six years in the Bureau, he was nearly killed by a single bullet. That incident had occured twenty-four months ago when a former Soviet spy working with the Sons of the Sword Muslim terrorist group had blasted him in the chest. While he survived and the enemy agent died, the bastard's shot had taken one of Hogan's lungs. A subsequent staph infection took his spleen and half of his liver and had caused serious damage to his already arthritic joints by the time the doctors had gotten it under control. No one had ever been able to verify whether he had gotten the infection from the dirt that entered his bloodstream where he landed by that remote Ohio rail bed or from the ten-month hospital stay he had endured. He was pretty sure he had gotten it in the hospital, but there was no proof. Regardless of who was at fault, he was alive, which he figured was better than the alternative.
No matter his ailments and the constant pain and discomfort he endured from all his broken bits, he would be damned if he was going to let the terrorists rob him of his retirement twice. Now he was in charge of the teams that did what he physically could no longer do.