Killer Instincts v5

  KILLER INSTINCTS

  by

  Jack Badelaire

  Copyright © June 2012 by Jack Badelaire

  Cover Design by Jack Badelaire

  Published by Post Modern Pulp Books

  Published in the United States of America

  ONE

  I'm standing on the bow of a 160-foot Benetti luxury yacht, sipping a cup of velvety black coffee from a robin's-egg blue china cup. It's two o'clock in the morning, and I'm forty miles off the coast of Senegal, well into international waters. From the top of my head to the soles of my feet, I'm wearing black: knit watchcap, a long-sleeved wool pullover on top of a polypropylene undershirt, tough black cordura nylon cargo pants and high-top black cross-trainers. It's all very ninja.

  Over all that, I've got a kevlar-lined tactical vest with six magazines of nine-millimeter frangible ammunition. The magazines are for the suppressed Uzi submachine gun slung over my back. I've also got a black tactical belt rig around my waist, suppressed Ruger .22 automatic riding low on one hip, with two spare mags and a combat knife balancing the load on the other side. I've got a short-range secure radio set clipped to my back, the wire running up to a headset tucked around my ear, throat mic hanging loose at the moment. One frag grenade and two flash-bangs round out my arsenal. I've got a small LED flashlight, a multi-tool, a couple of plastic zip-tie restraints, and that's it. I like to keep my loadout light so I'm quick on my feet; I've seen too many guys bite it because they were turtled by their combat gear.

  I feel like a G.I. Joe commando. Hell, all I need is a code-name.

  The yacht isn't mine, of course. It belongs to a seventy-something year old millionaire expatriate by the name of Steiger. He made it big at the start of the Silicon Valley craze, earning mega-bucks locking in government and military contracts all through the 70's and 80's as war went from high-tech to micro-tech. He's spent the last twenty years sailing around the Med on this floating mansion, living out his sunset years in style.

  I hopped onto the yacht thirty hours ago, jumping aboard from the side of a Portuguese fishing vessel. Steiger was on the deck wearing a bulletproof vest, a .45 caliber Glock in one hand and a life preserver in the other, just in case. I immediately found I liked the guy in spite of myself. Steiger was rich as fuck, fit with a full head of hair, tanned and toned. He might have been in his seventies, but they were California seventies, south of France seventies, not living in Philly eating grinders and drinking rye whiskey seventies. While giving me the tour, Steiger showed me his gun locker, just off of the main hatchway. A scoped Heckler & Koch 91 and a bandolier of mags keeps company with a stainless steel Mossberg pump shotgun. Along with the guns, Steiger has a pair of flare pistols, an airhorn, a couple of smoke and tear gas grenades, even a can of mace. Steiger had opened the locker and stood there like a proud parent showing off his kid's first-place science project.

  "You have fine taste in hardware, Mister Steiger," I had said.

  Steiger winked at me then. "I learned a lot from our mutual friend."

  He was referring to my contract-broker, Richard. Apparently the two had some history back in the seventies. That's how Richard got the call when Steiger's granddaughter Maryanne was snatched four days ago, while visiting Steiger during summer vacation. The downside of having a super-rich grandparent is that you look great to professional kidnappers, white slavers, and other lurking scumbags who prey on rich Americans and young white girls. Since Steiger's granddaughter is both, she was irresistible.

  Turns out, it's not just Maryanne we're trying to save. Richard's very expensive intelligence sources pointed to at least four, maybe five other girls who have gone missing around the south of France over the course of two days. They are now aboard a slave ship going back home to deposit its precious cargo of tender young American and European flesh into the meat markets of Africa and central Asia.

  None of these girls will ever be seen by the Western world again.

  I doubt any of them will live to see another year.

  Twelve hours after Maryanne had been snatched from a cafe in Toulon, I was landing in Reykjavik. From there I wound up in London, then Lisbon, and finally on a forty-foot Portuguese trawler going well out of its way for the low low price of twenty thousand American dollars. When you're in my line of work, you travel in one of two ways; either fast and direct, usually in the belly of a cargo plane or sitting pretty on a Gulfstream V, or the most winding, oblique way possible, switching modes of transportation and direction multiple times for the sake of safety and security. It took me almost two days to get from my high-rise apartment in Boston to the deck of Steiger's Benetti, but all things considered, I'm just lucky I didn't get here via Rio de Janeiro. It wouldn't be the first time I've gotten to Europe from the States via South America. As another bonus, my route didn't take me through Africa, either. I hate traveling through Africa. Every time I'm on that continent, I'm in the middle of a different war-torn shithole. All the Irish pop superstars you can shake a stick at won't be able to save that doomed continent. It’s just too depressing to think about.

  I throw the last swallow of coffee down my throat before it goes cold and walk back along the railing. We're sailing south, and off the port side, over the horizon, lay Senegal's territorial waters. We're following the trail of the slave ship, a Liberian freighter steaming along just over the horizon in front of us. Every couple of hours we catch up long enough to ping her with the ship's radar, and we need to make our rescue attempt before we have to follow her into Liberian waters. I would much rather do this out in the open ocean, and Steiger agrees. He's desperate, but he's not an idiot.

  The rest of the team is sitting in the main galley, right through the aft hatchway. The strike team consists of me and three other private operators, plus a French pilot named Andre who owns and operates the Eurocopter EC120B daintily perched on the aft deck of the Benetti. Andre isn't a mercenary; Steiger had hired him a few weeks ago to fly him around for fun along the French coastline. When Steiger's granddaughter went missing, he offered Andre a hundred thousand dollars to perch his bird on the tail of Steiger's yacht and bring us to the fight. The wiry Frenchman is sitting in a corner, smoking little brown cigarettes non-stop and watching the rest of the team prep their gear. I can't tell if Andre is enthralled or so paralyzed with fear he can't say a word. As long as he doesn't drop us in the middle of the Atlantic, I don't much care.

  The guys are finishing their last weapons prep. James has the SAW, the light machine gun. He's young, a big beefy kid all of twenty-three years old, grown up on a diet of Grand Theft Auto and internet porn. He's complained the entire time he's been here that there was "no complimentary pussy provided". Definitely someone who's bought into their own self-projected stereotypes. All I got from Richard was that James found himself not so politely asked to resign from the airborne infantry at the age of 21, after three years in Iraq. I know the type; a gifted delinquent who's hooked on the real-life video game experience that war provides. It makes me a little nervous, but watching him strip, clean, and prep his SAW I can tell he doesn't fuck around when it comes to his wargear. As long as he doesn't try any Call of Duty bullshit while we're in the thick of it, I think he'll be fine.

  Tommy is the complete opposite, the consummate professional. Career SAS until a roadside bomb took most of two fingers off his left hand, as well as a good deal of his face. Plastic surgery has left him merely ugly, but the fingers are long gone, so he was mustered out. I'm sure there's not a large job pool available to maimed horrorshow career commandos, so he went back to doing what he'd been doing his whole life. The only difference now is that he gets paid better. Tommy's got the magazines for his Galil assault rifle fitted into quick-change clips so he can just pull the d
ry mag, turn it, and reinsert, easier for a guy missing some digits.

  Kenneth is the last member of the team. He's tall and lean, with the rangy build of a cowboy. I know he was SWAT for some big southwestern city, maybe Phoenix or Tuscon, and liked kicking down doors and shooting people just a little too much. He's got a week's stubble and a long ponytail tied back with a length of olive drab shoelace, and a fairly grubby baseball cap turned around on his head. He's feeding buckshot loads into the gate of his Benelli semi-automatic shotgun, and his tactical vest has filled cartridge loops down its entire length. There's also an honest to goodness sixgun riding in his thigh holster, a long-barreled Colt Python from what I can see. A couple of speedloaders are pouched on the opposite side of his belt, along with a fairly sizable Bowie knife. Kenneth's got himself kitted out like the hero of an 80's action movie, but word has it he is all business once the bell rings.

  All these years working with Richard, and I'm still amazed at the company he keeps. We're misfits, all of us. Criminals, some of us. Sociopaths...well there’s more than a few of them, too. But one and all, you better believe we know our way around a gunfight.

  I walk through the ready room and further into the bow of the yacht. Steiger is there, holding his wife's hand. There’s a pot of tea next to her, a highball next to him. Thankfully he's not taken on some manly pretense of wanting to go with us, or taking a gun out and keeping it handy as a show of bravado. The last thing we need is an accidental machismo discharge. Steiger looks me in the eye as I enter. It's his money that brought me here, he knows it, and he isn't the least bit sorry. His wife, a tiny little woman still vain enough to dye her hair, but classy enough to keep it a reasonable color, won't even look in my direction. I’m sure I look like something straight from the ugly part of the nightly news.

  "We're ready to go," I tell Steiger.

  He nods and stands up, giving his wife's hand a brief squeeze. She's daubing at the corners of her eyes with a handkerchief. Steiger gives me the once over with an odd look in his eye.

  "I knew your uncle, you know. I met him the same time I met Richard, back in '72. You remind me of him. You have the same look about you, although I'm guessing he was younger than you are now."

  I'm taken aback by this comment. "Uh, yeah. He would have been twenty-two."

  Steiger smiles at me. "I guess raising hell runs in the family. Your uncle would be proud that you're helping me. He seemed like a bit of a wild child, but I think he was a good man."

  I can feel myself blushing, not knowing what to say. "Thank you, Mister Steiger," I gesture towards the hatchway, "I just came to tell you, we need to go now."

  Steiger looks back at his wife for a moment and follows me out of the room. I put the coffee cup down delicately as I pass by an end table. The four other men are on their feet. Andre looks sadly out of place without being weighed down by guns, ammo, and body armor. He stands at attention in his trim navy blue flight suit, cigarette poised on his lower lip in the defiant angle only a Frenchman can manage. I know that of the five of us, he is the bravest. Not a mercenary or an assassin or an adrenaline junkie looking for another fix, he's just a working man who agreed to do what's right to save a young girl from a terrible fate.

  I briefly look at each man in turn, and each gives me a quick nod. While I'm not technically in command of this team, the assault plan is my idea, and therefore the team is looking to me for the go-ahead. The feeling is a little strange, because I'm the second-youngest man in the team. Both Tommy and Kenneth are at least a decade older, somewhere in their early forties, and Andre is in his mid-thirties.

  Steiger clears his throat behind me. We all turn to look. The old man is doing his best to keep a tear out of his eye, but he's failing and he doesn't know what to say to us; action movie speech or something more heartfelt. Finally, he lifts his hand in a simple gesture.

  "Boys, bring her back to me safe."

  Even James feels the gravitas. I see him out of the corner of my eye, shifting his feet uncomfortably. He's probably done a lot of running and gunning over his short career, but this is one assignment that really counts. Bringing a young girl back to her family alive and well gives scoundrels like us a chance to feel genuinely good about what we do for a living.

  Tommy gives Steiger a jaunty salute. Of all of us, he's probably the one most familiar with rescue operations, and he's trying to put the old man at ease.

  "Never fear, guv. They won't know what hit 'em. Lads and me 'll have her back before morning tea time." His voice is like grinding two rocks together. Some of that shrapnel must have caught him in the throat. I honestly can’t tell if he’s exaggerating the stiff upper Brit lip or not, but I almost laugh in spite of the seriousness of it all.

  Steiger follows us to the edge of the aft hatchway, but stays off the deck. Andre has the Eurocopter's turbines fired up, and the rotors are spinning as we buckle ourselves into the diminutive helicopter. The EC120B "Colibri" can hold five people, but when the manufacturers designed the passenger compartment, they clearly weren’t considering that several of those men would be built like linebackers, carrying grenades and automatic weapons. We put James up front next to Andre, where he can lay down suppressive fire with his SAW and where his size, being the largest of the four team members, won't be such a hindrance. I sit behind him, being the lightest, with Kenneth riding bitch and Tommy covering us off the port side of the helo with his Galil.

  Within moments of getting strapped in, Andre lifts us off the deck, then banks out and over the port side of the yacht before flying alongside the ship's hull, heading due south. I see Steiger on the deck now, watching us fly off into the night. I think for a moment he's looking straight at me.

  Flight time to target is less than thirty minutes. Andre has the helo skimming the waves, no small feat for a guy who's never flown into combat. There's little light to fly by, and we're running dark to keep hidden. Thankfully, he's got an excellent pair of night vision goggles and he seems comfortable flying with them. The ocean is calm and although we're no more than ten feet off the deck, I'm not at all nervous. Well, okay, only a little bit nervous.

  Before we make contact, I take a paint-stick from my pocket and blacken my hands, neck, and face. The other three painted up before we boarded, but I felt uneasy about walking around a multi-million dollar yacht drinking from a china cup while wearing my war-face. I make sure I don't miss a spot, even pulling my sleeves up and getting along my wrists and lower forearms. While the others darkened up as a matter of habit, and to make themselves less of an obvious target in the low light, I need to become invisible tonight.

  "I see the ship," I hear Andre say over the helo's communications headsets. I look out past the open doorway of the helicopter and see a faint glimmer of light in the dark.

  "Comms test," I say. We all tuck our earbuds in underneath the headphones, make sure our throat mics are sitting comfortably and the radios are on the right channels and frequencies.

  "Kenny here," I hear Kenneth over his throat mic.

  "Tommy here, Ken sounds good," Tommy replies.

  "This is James, I'm hearing you guys." James is leaning out of the open doorway now, SAW tucked into his shoulder.

  “Andre speaking, does everyone hear me?" Again, I can't tell if Andre is terrified or just excited.

  I press my mic button. “William here. Everyone sounds good."

  Twenty seconds out, and Andre has the Colibri screaming across the ocean. We're probably six feet off the deck now, and well over a hundred miles an hour. Five seconds out, Andre cuts the throttle back sharply and bounces high. We suddenly pop up out of nowhere off the ship's starboard bow, the tail rotor pushing the helicopter around a hundred and eighty degrees, bringing us to a full stop over the cargo ship's elevated foredeck.

  "Here comes the whirlwind," I whisper to myself.

  In the span of three heartbeats, I unclip myself from the safety harness, draw back the bolt on my Uzi, and jump out into the night.

  There
is a simple plan. I drop onto the foredeck of the freighter, hopefully unnoticed, while the rest of the team makes a balls-out assault against the ship's bridge only a few seconds later. Their job is to bring the ship to a halt, cut off communications, and draw as much attention to themselves as possible while holding the bridge against the ship's crew. Simple, certainly not easy, but to the point. If they aren't all dead in the next thirty seconds, chances are those three can handle themselves against the human trash sailing this bucket.

  My job, on the other hand, requires a little more finesse.

  I fall an easy three meters and drop-crouch onto the raised foredeck. Amazingly, I don't snap an ankle or impale myself on some sharp metal protrusion in the process. By the time I stand up, Andre has the Colibri hovering over the ship's bridge, a thrumming black shadow blocking out the stars. The freighter is operating with only the dim glow from the bridge windows to illuminate the ship. Above this, the helicopter is all but invisible.

  Muzzle flare, on the other hand, is easy to see from this distance. The three mercenaries drop onto the roof of the bridge, then down onto the gangway that runs around the superstructure port and starboard. Automatic weapons fire and shotgun blasts light up the night. Even a hundred meters away, it drowns out the sound of the retreating helicopter.

  "Moving to loitering position," I hear Andre say over the radio. He's climbing to two thousand feet and circling us half a mile out.

  "William copies," I reply.

  The foredeck hatchway below me slams open. This is what I've been waiting for, someone to leave the gate open so I can get to the chicken coop. Three guys with assault rifles are running across the main deck of the freighter, heading towards the bridge.

  "William here, going below. Hold fire five seconds," I announce over the radio.

  "James copies."

  I drop down onto the main deck, tucking myself in behind the hatch. I wait a second, listening for the sounds of voices or pounding feet coming closer, and when I hear nothing, I slip around the hatch and down into the stairwell. Moments later, I hear the burp-roar of James' SAW, and I know the defense of the bridge is well underway. I glide down one level, my sneaker-shod feet making no noise on the rusted metal stairs. My Uzi is up and in front of me, pointing everywhere my head and eyes turn. I don't have any night-vision goggles or laser sights, nothing to restrict my senses or field of view, nothing to distract my attention from the task at hand. The dingy caged light bulb on each stairwell level provides just enough illumination to see down to the next level.