Echo Platoon (17 page)

I listened as the soon-to-be-posthumous POG came huffing up the stairs, paused to get his bearings and his breath, then charged headlong into the hallway. I drew back and, using every ounce of strength I could muster
in my legs, my torso, my shoulders, and my arm, I sucker-punched him just as he turned the corner.

Except—the sonofabitch stopped short. Maybe to take a breath. Maybe to fart. Maybe to—well, who knows and who cares. Well, I do. Why? Because my roundhouse missed, my momentum carried me forward, and I caromed rudely off the wall in front of him.

This POG knew how to
carpe
the
diem,
believe me. He used the small, stainless steel pistol in his left hand to swat me upside the head as I came off the wall. The blow brought tears to my eyes. But it was a small pistol, and it caught me on the back side not the up side of the ol’ Rogue haid. Oh, I was gonna have a chestnut-size knot back there tomorrow. But at least I was going to still have a head on my shoulders.

I shook the spots out of my eyes and flailed, to give myself a second to recover. Shit, he’d hit me harder than I’d thought.

Well, fuck the pain. It was time to show this asshole how things were done. I reached around, caught him by the wrist, dropped, turned, kneed him in the chest, and twisted.
Voila
—fucking textbook. The gun came loose and went clattering across the tile floor and down the hallway.

Being a pro, he knew better than to worry about the weapon. Instead, his hands flew up into a defensive martial arts stance, and he swiveled, turned, feinted, then came back under me and delivered an elbow to my gut that made my eyes cross.

Ooh, that
hurt
. But I had no time to think about pain, because this sumbitch was trying to kill me. From the way he was handling himself, he’d been to Spetsnaz school. They teach a martial arts style that
relies on lots of blows being delivered quickly—the optimum number is just over two hundred blows a minute. I can guar-on-tee that this asshole had done his best to get an A+.

But as you all probably know, for every measure, there is an active countermeasure. In this case, I used an old UDT martial arts technique taught to me by Roy Henry Boehm, the Godfather of all SEALs. The technical nomenclature for this Froggish martial art is known as PFW/PFD, which stands for PURE FUCKING WILL and PURE FUCKING DETERMINATION.

Roy once took on four Marines, all of them fifteen years younger than he, at the bar of the Little Creek Virginia Amphibious Base O-Club. I see you out there, asshole, scoffing because Roy didn’t take on eight or nine Marines. Well, the only place you see that kind of horseshit is on TV shows or in movies. In real life, taking on four Marines—shit, taking on four bikers, or longshoremen, or four cops—can get you killed. But not Roy Henry Boehm, who was—and is—a man in ten million.

Anyway, Roy was a sarcastic sonofabitch, and he’d probably made some nice-to-see-you comment like, “You know why God gave Marines one more I.Q. point than horses? It’s so Marines can march in parades without shitting on the street.” Anyway, whether he started the fun, or they did, is unimportant. Here is the bottom line: Roy didn’t demolish this quartet of younger, faster, and better-conditioned opponents because he was more skilled than they were. He demolished ’em because he wanted to win more than they did. He was meaner and more vicious and didn’t give a shit about fighting fair. As Roy was always fond of telling us tadpoles, “Remember, you
worthless scumbucket assholes: the Marquis of Queens-berry was a
fag.”

That night at Little Creek, Roy’s pure will and his sheer determination gave him the edge. He simply could not conceive of losing—and so, he fought with such wild ferocity that his opponents had to give way. HE COULD NOT FAIL. Thus, when he’d finished, not one Marine was left standing.

Now, this here POG was just as big as I, and just as strong. And his technique was pretty fucking good. But all of that didn’t mean shit. Because, thanks to Roy, I’ve been taught the key to victory. I knew, deep in my Roguish soul, that I wanted to kill the POG much, much more than he wanted to kill me.

And so, as he kept up his rain of blows, I enveloped him, smothered him like onions on liver, and shut the motherfucker d-o-w-n. He fought me off; he came back with elbows and knees and fingernails and teeth. I answered him with a head butt that rocked him back on his feet, followed by a wide, sweeping kick that caught him behind the knees and took us both down to the floor.

I rolled on top of him and we grappled hand to hand. He tried to keep me away from him. Tried to struggle to his feet. But I wasn’t about to let him up. See, I know that most fights end up on the floor. And if you’re not comfortable on the floor, you’re gonna lose. I’ve been a floor brawler all my life. This asshole? He was in good shape so long as he remained on his feet. But now, rolling around on the dusty landing, he was out of
his
fucking element—while I was in
mine
.

He tried to use his weight to muscle me onto my back while holding on to my wrists with his hands. I twisted and broke my left hand free, brought it up,
and hammered my fist at his face with as much power as I could muster.

He saw what was coming, twisted away at the last minute, and my fist smashed into the tile of the hallway floor.

If you recall, you will remember that someone had very recently dislocated my left pinky. I’m glad you remember, because I hadn’t. And the pain of striking the swollen digit on that hard floor shook me to my toenails.

The POG wasn’t about to let me recover, either. He grabbed hold of my French braid and yanked, snapping my neck back. He thrust his fingers, spearlike, toward my Adam’s apple. I parried the blow with my arm, catching his fingers and bending them backward, making him scream. I wriggled out from under him, and using every fucking ounce of energy I had left, body-blocked him with my shoulder, then used my forearm to slam his head against the wall.

That stunned him some—but not quite enough. He rolled off the wall, scrambled to his knees, then launched himself toward where the pistol lay, about two yards down the hallway.

I shoestring-tackled the cocksucker. But like a good running back, his legs just kept churning and churning, and he reached out, grabbed the pistol by the muzzle, then tried to work it around in his fat hands.

No fucking way. I slammed him in the small of the back with my right fist hard enough to make him gag. He used the pistol butt to open a nasty cut on my forehead, then tried to open my forehead itself.

Big fucking mistake. I sensed the second blow, reached up, and trapped the pistol in my extra-large paw.

That didn’t fluster the POG at all. He worked the gun so that the muzzle was pointing vaguely in my direction, then tried to work his thumb into the trigger guard so he could fire the fucking weapon. I don’t think he gave a shit where the round might go, either.

But I did—and fuck, the muzzle was getting too close for comfort. I wrestled his arm, caught it under mine, and hyperextended it with enough power to break the elbow.

The goddam joint didn’t break, but it must have hurt like hell. He screamed at me in Russkie, but he didn’t let go of the fucking pistol. In fact, he worked even harder to squeeze at the trigger.

I fought back, and finally was able to jam my thumb, right up to the joint, behind the fucking trigger. Now, if he tried to pull it, nothing would happen.

My strategy kept the pistol from firing—but it took my right hand out of the fight. So it was time to end things before the situation deteriorated any further.

I raked his eyes with my left hand—which hurt me just about as much as it hurt him. He tried to swat me away with his one good arm. That opened him up—took his free hand out of things for just a microsecond. It was enough for me. I caught him with an elbow, then a knee, then twisted him up and around, using the pistol as the fulcrum. As he went over the top, his right wrist snapped.

Oh, that must have wounded the sumbitch one whole lot because he screamed, and nasty froth came out of his mouth. Holy shit, I hoped the cockbreath wasn’t rabid.

I used all my strength to wrestle the pistol away from him. Reversed it. Extracted my thumb. Got my paw around the grips, and my finger on the trigger,
then brought the gun around so the business end was pointed in his direction. He saw it coming out of the corner of his eye, and he fought against it real hard. But there was no escape. I had this asshole, and I was gonna waste him. I knew it—and he knew it, too, because I could see the fear in his eyes.

That look meant he was
mine
. I pushed the pistol up into his armpit and let him feel the pressure of the muzzle. I looked at his sweaty, round, red, soon-to-be-dead face, and whispered,
“Zamochit, baklan.”
46

I pulled the trigger three times as he struggled, wild-eyed, against me. The trio of shots was muffled by his body. He fought back another few seconds. I put another round into him and he then went limp.

He dropped in a messy pile, facedown. I put the muzzle of the pistol to the back of his neck, kneeled, held him at arm’s length to keep myself out of the blood spray, then sent a final round into his brain, just to make sure he stayed where he was.

I pulled myself to my feet, exhausted. The one positive aspect of the past few minutes—aside from the fact that the POG was dead—was that, at some point during the fracas, my left pinky had snapped back into proper alignment. It was sore as hell, but at least it was working again.

Well, to be honest, “working” is a relative term. Frankly, friends, I used to be able to do this sort of thing with fewer detrimental aftereffects when I was closer to the tadpole stage of my life cycle. That was when there was never too much beer or too much
pussy, sleep was an unnecessary impediment to one’s existence, and my dick was hard all twenty-four hours a day. Ah, but youth, my friends, is wasted on the young. And—

I heard a noise behind me and looked up, alert for a new threat. But it was only the fucking dweeb editor, blue pencil in hand, who’d snuck up into the hallway to tell me, “Enough with the
fürshtunken
rhapsodizing already. Get on with the effing story line.”

I guess he’s right. Time was a-wasting.

Okay, first of all I was a little surprised that not a single door had cracked open to see WTF was going on. Then I realized that this was Baku, the first boom-town of the twenty-first century. And in boom-towns—Dodge City and San Francisco in the nineteenth century come to mind—you don’t stick your schnozz into other people’s business unless you’re Wyatt fucking Earp and carrying a bad-ass Buntline Special. But just to make sure Mister Murphy or the Azeri equivalent hadn’t called the cops from behind some closed door, I got down to work. I wiped the POG’s blood off the little pistol—it was an old Sig Sauer 230—and dropped the weapon into my vest pocket.

Moving quickly but efficiently I rifled the POG’s pockets. There wasn’t much. I used my dirty handkerchief and his clean pocket handkerchief to staunch the bleeding on my forehead. I took his wallet, riffled through it, and discovered that the POG was named Feliks Maximov. He had an old Russian Army ID, a CIS driver’s license, neither of which I could read, and an American Express Platinum card, expiration date 03/02, with his name embossed in
English. A disorderly bunch of business cards were stashed in the wallet’s inside compartment. I pocketed the billfold, as well as his thick ring of keys. And I plucked out of his vest pocket the little cellular phone that had somehow survived the battle. In fact, I was on my way down the stairs—gingerly, given my dinged condition—when the fucking thing rang.

I kept going, taking the phone out of my pocket as I hobbled, flipped it open, and growled, in the most authentic accent I could muster,
“Pree-
vet
?”
47

I was answered with a flood of polysyllabic Russkie, a language that, as you know, I do not understand, all spoken in a resonant and uniquely mellifluous tone. It was like . . .
Da
Voice
speaks RUSSIAN.
No, really. It was like listening to one of those unctuously lubricious announcers from Radio Moscow introducing the weekly broadcast from Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Concert Hall. And, boy, did this asshole like to talk uninterrupted. He provided a monologue long enough to carry me down the stairway, out the front door, through the courtyard, and back into the bustle of the street market.

As I moved onto the sidewalk, I checked quickly but carefully to port and to starboard, peering down to the end of the line of stalls and carts. Beemer Man was nowhere to be seen.

I suddenly realized that Da Voice had paused, as if waiting for an answer. Well, why not give him one.

“I’m sorry, but Feliks can’t come to the phone right now. Can I take a message for him?”

I heard intake of breath, so I continued. “Not that he’s in any condition to hear it.”

Now, there was nothing but shocked silence. But what’s one shock without a follow-up? So, I gave Da Voice a wake-up call in Russki:
“Otsosi, pedik
—blow me, you miserable cocksucker.”

The connection was suddenly broken with an electronic
bleep
. Rude sonofabitch, wasn’t he?

I looked down at the phone. I pressed the “end” button, then AutoDialed the first number in the phone’s memory. It went through a nine number sequence, then started to ring. After nine double rings, and no answer, I fiddled with the phucking phone until I found the second stored telno, and dialed it up.

I listened as a long, long sequence of numbers beeped off. Then two raucous
bring-brings,
the double rings you hear when you dial up European phones. Then:
“Pree
-vet?”

Ah, the sweet sound of success. It was . . .
Da Voice.
And even from that one-word response I could tell he was PIC’d, which is pronounced piqued, and stands for Pissed, Irritated, and Confused. Good for me. I love it when I can PIC on assholes like this one.