Tom Clancy's Net Force 6-10 (10 page)
Normally, a squatting man wouldn’t have particularly good balance or leverage for such a strike. But Capoeira was an art based on movement in odd positions. Santos’s balance was superb.
He slammed the bodyguard flush on the right temple. The man fell as if somebody had chopped off his lower half.
Good night, Mr. Rader.
Santos stood. He walked around to the passenger side of the limo, leaned down.
The second bodyguard lowered his window.
“Your friend is trying to fix the license plate, but his knife isn’t going to do the job. Do you have a screwdriver in the car?”
As the bodyguard opened his mouth to speak, Santos drove his fist into the man’s throat with as much power as he could. He heard the voicebox break. The man clutched at his neck, and Santos fired a second strike, this one with the heel of his hand to the man’s forehead. A punch that hard likely would have broken his knuckles, but the heel of the hand was padded—you hit hard with soft, soft with hard, if you wanted to avoid damaging yourself.
The man’s head snapped back. Before he could move, Santos jerked the door open and grabbed the stunned guard’s neck with one hand and pinched his carotids shut. Ten seconds was more than enough. The man’s eyes rolled in his sockets, showing white. He was unconscious.
Santos released his grip. He didn’t want to kill him.
In the back, Mr. Dowling started sputtering: “What the—! Hey—!”
Santos could have pulled his pistol out and used it like a magic wand to silence the man, but he didn’t need it. He smiled, a broad, teeth-flashing grin. “This is a kidnapping, Ethan. You be quiet, or I’ll have to kill you.”
The man was terrified. He shut up.
Now, all Santos had to do was immobilize the bodyguards. He hauled the second one out of the car and dragged him to the back. He expertly tied both unconscious men, using the soft cloth ties he had tucked away in his pocket. He didn’t want any ligature marks on them. He placed a loop around each neck and to the wrists, so they wouldn’t struggle when they woke up. He opened the trunk and hoisted the tied pair inside, then carefully shut the lid. He walked back to the bike, glanced at Dowling as he did to see if he’d make a break for it—try to get into the front seat, get the car started, or maybe just open the door and run.
Dowling sat, not moving, and Santos smiled. He hadn’t thought the man had it in him. He was a good judge of such things.
He killed the motorcycle’s flashing lights, unclipped them and the siren and controls from the bike, then pushed the two-wheeler into a clump of bushes nearby, so it wasn’t visible from the road. Now it was just an ordinary motorcycle. By the time somebody found it, this would be all over. And there wouldn’t be any way to connect it to Dowling and his bodyguards anyway—the rest of the night’s business was going to happen thirty miles away on a different highway. The motorcycle wasn’t stolen; it had been bought under a fake name, and there was no reason to link it to the limo. It would be another of life’s little unsolved mysteries.
Santos walked to the car, opened the driver’s door, and sat behind the wheel. “Just sit there quietly,” he said. “We’ll go for a ride, then we’ll have a chat. Behave yourself, and all it costs you is a little inconvenience.”
A lie, that. Dowling and his two guards would be dead within an hour, all things going as planned. But no point in upsetting the man, was there?
Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia
It was the nightmare that had finally pushed Michaels into it. He’d awakened in a sweat, heart pounding, from a dream in which the psychotic doper Bershaw had come to his house and captured Toni. In this one, the would-be killer had Little Alex and was holding him by one ankle, getting ready to smash the baby against the kitchen counter.
Michaels hadn’t been able to go back to sleep after that horrific image.
John Howard had told him whenever he was ready to give him a call. As soon as it got late enough, he did just that.
Now, they were in Michaels’s office.
“I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time,” Michaels said. “Thanks, John.”
“No problem. Makes perfect sense to me,” Howard said. “In your place, I’d have done it a long time ago.”
“I mean, even with all of Toni’s expertise, and the knives and tasers and stuff we have laying around, somebody has twice shown up at my house with murderous intent.”
“I remember the last incident quite well,” Howard said. “It’s about time you got some more serious hardware.”
“Yeah. I want to be a little better prepared if it ever happens again.”
“I expect this will do the trick,” Howard said. “Let me show you what we have.”
Michaels nodded and looked at the gun case, which seemed to be some kind of brownish-gray canvas or oil-cloth, darkened here and there with splotches of lube.
He untied a string at the fat end of the cloth case and slid the weapon out.
“This belonged to my uncle,” he said. “It’s what they call a ‘coach gun,’ being the kind of weapon a lot of the stagecoach drivers used when they rode shotgun guard duty back in the Old West. This one is a European American Armory Bounty Hunter II, actually made in Russia for export. My uncle used to use it in cowboy action shooting.”
“Cowboy action shooting?”
“A competitive sport. Men and women get dressed up in pre1900 costumes like those that might have been worn in the Old West, give themselves names like ‘Doc’ or ‘Deadeye’ or ‘The Kid,’ and while in persona, shoot for scores using period weapons—single-action six-shooters, rifles, usually the lever-action kind, and shotguns.”
“Really?”
“Yep. A grown-up version of cowboys ’n’ Indians. Got Native Americans who wear period stuff and compete, too. Everybody wears hearing protectors and safety glasses and all, but otherwise the look is usually pretty authentic.”
“Huh.”
“My uncle used to love it. There were a fair number of black cowboys on the frontier. After slavery was abolished, and before Jim Crow got going, nobody much cared what color you were, long as you could ride, punch cattle okay, and could shoot snakes or rustlers if they showed up. At least that’s the story I heard growing up.”
“Interesting.”
“It’s not a particularly expensive gun, basic walnut stocks and case-hardened color. The Russians don’t build ’em pretty, but they are very solid and mechanically well-made. Uses 12-gauge shells, the short ones, two-and-three-quarter inchers only. Just as well—the high-powered three-inchers would have a fierce recoil with a barrel this short.”
He pivoted a lever in the middle to one side, and opened the breech. “Got twenty-inch-long double barrels, extractors that pull the shells out, but not ejectors, so it doesn’t throw them on the floor. External hammers, they call them ‘rabbit ears,’ see? This one is a modern copy of the old ones, so the hammers don’t actually hit a firing pin, but cock internal strikers. That way, you can use a hammer block as well as a trigger-block safety, here, this button. It’s about as simple as you can get. You open it up, put a pair of shells in, close it, then cock the hammers. Got two triggers, one for each barrel. Slide the safety off, aim it like you would a rifle, or if somebody is in your face, poke them with it like a stick and pull the trigger.”
“What if I miss? Is this going to go through the wall and kill my neighbor in his bed?”
“Not if you use birdshot. You don’t need buckshot or slugs for close range stuff. Combat distance, a load of bird-or rabbit-shot works just fine, and the little bbs don’t go far after hitting couple of layers of sheet rock and siding. Even though you could get a permit for a handgun, this packs a lot more punch, it’s safer, and it’s legal to own here in the District, even for civilians.”
Michaels took the gun, worked the action open and closed, then tried the hammers out. It had a nice, solid feel to it.
“You should drop by the range and put a few rounds through it. It’ll kick some, but you can hip-shoot easy enough if you don’t want a sore shoulder. Just like pointing your finger.”
Michaels nodded.
“And here’s the gun safe.”
He held up an oblong box big enough to hold the shotgun, with an image of a hand on it.
“This is titanium, lightweight, but strong enough to resist somebody trying to pry it open with a screwdriver. It’ll hold a couple of long arms. You bolt it to a couple of wall studs in a closet in the bedroom, put your gun and ammo inside it. It’s got a fingerprint reader in the hand-print here that will accept sixty-four different ones, so you can program it to read yours and Toni’s and anybody else you trust. Uses a lithium-ion battery to run the reader, battery is good for five or six years, and when it starts to run low, it flashes a diode, right here, so you know to replace it. It can also be wired into your house alarm system if you want.”
“Seems, well,
safe
enough.”
safe
enough.”
“If you really want, you can get Gunny at the range to install the electronic safeties we use in our issue guns, get a transmitting ring, and cover it that way, too. That way, if an unauthorized person should manage to get it out of the safe, it won’t shoot for them—but I wouldn’t worry about that.
“So if somebody starts kicking in your front door in the middle of the night, you can get this out and ready to go in a few seconds. Anybody who sees you standing there with a piece like this is apt to think twice about proceeding in your direction. A lot of guys who would charge a pistol will pull up when they see the muzzle of a shotgun yawning at them.”
“I can understand that. Looks like a cannon.”
“Downside is, you only get two shots. A pump would give you five rounds minimum, more with an extended tube.
“You ought to consider taking the FBI/DEA house-clearing class for shotguns. As head of Net Force, they’d be happy to have you, and it would be worth a Sunday afternoon to learn it.”
“You think I need something like that?”
“Yes, sir. For instance, if you see somebody prowling your house with a gun who doesn’t belong there, what would you do?”
“Tell them to drop it?”
“Not according to home defense experts. You should just go ahead and shoot them.”
“Excuse me?”
“Law enforcement officers are required to try to catch bad guys alive, homeowners aren’t. If somebody is in your house with a weapon, they are ipso facto to be considered a deadly threat. In your case, this has happened a couple of times already. You ordering an armed house-breaker to put his weapon down will just as likely get you shot as not. You hear a
clunk
! in the night, what you are supposed to do is lock yourself and your family in a secure room, get your gun, com the police, and stay put until the cops arrive. You aren’t supposed to stalk down the hall like Doc Holliday with your shotgun looking for the bad guys. If you do, however, and you see one, and he’s armed, you shoot first and ask questions later.”
clunk
! in the night, what you are supposed to do is lock yourself and your family in a secure room, get your gun, com the police, and stay put until the cops arrive. You aren’t supposed to stalk down the hall like Doc Holliday with your shotgun looking for the bad guys. If you do, however, and you see one, and he’s armed, you shoot first and ask questions later.”
“Jesus.”
“Not likely He is gonna be breaking into your house. Take the course, sir. There’s all kinds of things you need to know about the use of deadly force that have changed since you were out in the field.”
Michaels looked at the shotgun. “Yes. I can see that. So, what do I owe you?”
Howard named a price.
“That seems awful low.”
“Well, the gun I don’t shoot, so it might as well have a good home. Box of shells came out of my gun safe at home, been around forever. The only out-of-pocket expense I had was the safe, so that’ll cover it.”
“Thanks again, John.”
“Let me know when you want to go shoot. Might be I could give you a couple of pointers.”
“I’ll do that.”
After Howard was gone, Michaels contemplated the shotgun. He’d never kept a gun in his house—well, not this house. He had a pistol back in the days when he’d been in the field, but he’d never felt the need for a gun at home once he’d been kicked upstairs. He had the issue taser, and for a long time that had been enough—once. There was nothing like having a couple of killers drop by to make you feel like a gun in the bedside table or closet was maybe not such a bad idea after all. He might never have the need for it again, he hoped not, but he had come to appreciate the NRA slogan: It was better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.
Be interesting to hear what Toni would say. He hadn’t consulted her about it.
9
On the
Bon Chance
Bon Chance
“Okay,” the tech said, “here it is.”
They were in Media, a ballroom-sized place divided into cubicles, thick with computers, printers, duplicators, and other electronic impedimenta.
Chance looked at the monitor, a 21-inch flatscreen connected to a top-of-the-line Macintosh computer. The Avid software and the computer’s hard drive would allow up to a hundred hours of film storage, and with such a nonlinear editing system, you could do all kinds of things. Wipes, fades, dissolves, blue-screen, holoprojics, whatever. It was a powerful tool, used in a lot of movie and television productions, and with it you could take an ordinary piece of film or CGI and do amazing things.
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