Killer Instincts v5 Read online

  Richard saw me looking at his old war wounds and chuckled. "That’s forty years of abuse, but it's been a long and interesting road."

  "Looks like the road had its fair share of bumps,” I said.

  "Bumps and more. But I'd have hanged myself in the sort of life most Americans lead, stuck in a nine-to-five job, going from cookie-cutter condo or white picket jailhouse to a small office box inside a bigger office box. And once you’re there, someone tells you every day they can hire some poor schmuck in India to do your job for a tenth of what you earn. I might have lived through four decades of hell to get here, but by god I was my own man, earning my own way, and beholden to no one who didn't pay for it in the end."

  "So it was worth all the blood and pain?" I asked.

  Richard paused in the middle of sitting and stretching out to touch his toes, leaning with his elbows on his knees and looking out into the brightening skyline.

  "The only worth a life has, is what you accomplish during your time here. If it wasn't for me, and the guys I fought and bled with over the years, the world would be a much meaner place, and I'm not just speaking in hyperbole! That, at least, makes it all worthwhile."

  After we completed our stretching routine, Richard and I went through a full complement of gymnastic exercises. Push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, jumping jacks, back-bridges, leg-lifts, an extensive routine that had me breathing hard and feeling my muscles burn as the sun peeked over the horizon.

  And that’s before we started running.

  "We're going to keep the runs short this week, but we'll be extending the distances over the course of the month. Your body needs to be toughened. We have to burn away the fat and leave just the rawhide and steel springs behind."

  Richard's "short run" took us across the desert rocks and sands, over three dunes and through two valleys separated by long stretches of blasted nothing. Finally, at the top of the third dune, we looked back. The cabin was a fleck of dust on a small flat bump far out by the horizon. I stood there, sucking wind and soaked in sweat, bent over with my hands braced against my thighs. Richard wasn't even breathing hard. We had covered perhaps two miles.

  "I never run any further than this," Richard explained, "I always want to keep an eye on the cabin. I won't get lost out here - you can always backtrack if you need to - but I never want to let the cabin out of my sight long enough for someone to deliver a hit-squad and depart."

  "So what would you do if that happened? You're not exactly ready for a gunfight right now."

  "Follow me and learn, Grasshopper," Richard said with a sly smile.

  We walked down the back slope of the low hill we stood on, cutting to the right and running along the shallow valley. After ten minutes, we came across a small gnarled bush clinging to the side of the hill. Richard stopped next to the bush, looked at me, and then crouched down, digging into the rocky, sandy soil next to the bush. In a couple of minutes, he had dug free a white PVC plastic tube about four feet long and about nine inches in diameter.

  Unscrewing one end, Richard slowly removed the contents one by one; a tightly-folded backpack, two plastic one-quart bottles of water, several packages of dried meat, fruits, and nuts, a long-barreled Colt .45 automatic with a box of fifty cartridges and three magazines, a compact pair of binoculars, a set of lightweight desert cammies, a long-bladed knife, and a partially disassembled bolt-action rifle, with two boxes of twenty cartridges and a scope.

  "Food and water, long-range rifle, mid-range handgun, fighting knife, camouflage, observation equipment. If I can't deal with some armed squatters with this goodie bag, I've grown too soft anyhow."

  I looked at Richard in near-wonderment. "Is this really how you live your life?" I asked.

  Richard nodded. "Keeping two moves ahead in the game, just like chess."

  "Remind me never to play against you,” I said.

  "I shouldn't have to remind you. There's a reason you hired me."

  We alternated between running, jogging, and walking back to the cabin, because at that point I was utterly winded. After some water and a set of light stretches to keep from tightening up, Richard and I began the business of getting to know my newly-acquired arsenal.

  "You're going to start with the long guns first. You need to know them better than you know the handguns, because a novice like yourself should make up for a lack of skill by using superior firepower, against targets who will almost exclusively be using handguns," Richard explained.

  "Do you really think Paggiano's goons will be that good?"

  "Of course not. Do you think these guys belong to a rod and gun club, go shooting after brunch on Sundays and then retire for cocktails? These idiots don't know the first thing about real pistol-craft."

  "So a few weeks of training from you and I should be able to shoot circles around these guys. Where's the problem?"

  "The problem is, these are stone-cold murderous thugs who think beating two women to death and riddling daddy dearest with slugs, then burning down the scene of the crime, is of no more difficulty than you or I changing a flat tire. Behind the slick suits and the gold watches and the Italian sports cars, these guys are all bloodthirsty savages. What they lack in skill, they make up in their willingness to inflict extreme violence without the slightest provocation.

  “When you draw down on one of these guys for the first time, no matter what you do, there are going to be lingering moral doubts floating around in your mind - is this the right thing to do, should I turn the other cheek, am I lowering myself to their level - all things that don't even occur to these dummies. Until you can purge yourself of these concerns, they will always have the advantage because they won't hesitate to blow you into corpse-land the moment they realize you're coming for them."

  "So what you're saying is, I should make up for the fact that I'm really a bleeding heart pussy by bringing a machine-gun to a pistol fight."

  Richard grinned. "I believe the term is, 'peace through superior firepower'."

  The first weapon of the day was the Uzi. We went through the basics of operating the weapon; a loaded magazine goes into the receiver, the bolt gets cocked back, trigger pull lets bolt move forward, stripping a cartridge from the magazine, pushing it into the chamber, and as the bolt hits home, the firing pin strikes the primer, and the gun goes bang. Once the cartridge is fired, the recoil pushes the bolt back, the extractor pulls the shell casing free, the recoil spring pushes the bolt forward again, and the whole process repeats itself until the trigger is released or the Uzi runs out of ammunition.

  "The blowback-operated submachine gun is one of man's greatest military achievements," Richard said. "The process is utter simplicity, and it gives a single man an immense amount of close-range firepower in an extremely small package. You could carry enough ammunition to kill a hundred people stacked in a few magazines and tucked into your back pockets. Ten men could turn a Greek phalanx into a corpse-pile in seconds."

  "So much for man's other achievements, like the Mona Lisa," I said.

  "Da Vinci would've been better off getting his tank to work,” Richard replied.

  Richard handed me seven empty magazines for the Uzi, each capable of holding 32 bullets. We sat and talked about how the weapon worked as we loaded each mag, and by the end, the tips of my thumb and forefingers were raw and sore.

  "By the end of the month, you'll have calluses just from loading magazines," Richard told me.

  Once all the magazines were loaded, Richard and I drove the Suburban down the hill a short distance from the cabin to where the desert flattened out. From the back of the Suburban we unloaded six five-gallon white buckets Richard had packed full of loose sand. Each bucket had a foot-tall number painted on it, from 1 to 6. Walking away from the vehicle, we placed them in a deep semi-circle, an inverted U twenty feet wide and thirty deep, with the opening facing us. I stood ten feet from the opening of the U.

  "We're on a timetable, and don't have the luxury of having you fire at paper targets for weeks at a time. The po
int of this exercise is, to teach you to engage multiple random targets at different ranges. When you're ready, I'm going to call out a number. You fire on that bucket in bursts of two to four shots until I call out another bucket, at which time you shift fire to that target, and so on. When you run dry, reload and keep firing on that target until I say otherwise. Understood?"

  I nodded and slapped a magazine of thirty-two cartridges into the receiver of the Uzi. I pulled back the cocking lever, felt it catch, and then brought the weapon to my shoulder. It was such a crude weapon, all stamped steel and flat black finish, but I felt a sudden love for the thing. It was all fucking business. No engraved walnut stock, no nickel plating, no pearl handles, just a bare minimum of parts and lots of bullets ready to go down the barrel. I pictured Chuck Norris in Delta Force or Arnold Schwarzenneger in Commando blazing away with an Uzi in hand, killing terrorists or pissant soldiers, and suddenly all my nerves and anxiety melted away. I straightened up, leaned into the target a bit, and snugged the extended stock against my shoulder.

  "Ready when you are, Richard."

  "Three!" Richard shouted, and I started killing nameless Hollywood extras.

  We stayed out most of the morning. It was amazing how fast the Uzi could go through seven magazines, and since reloading took far longer than shooting, there was ample time for Richard to critique my work while we loaded.

  "Working with a chatter-box like the Uzi, trying too hard to use the sights will get you killed as you muddle about lining up the perfect shot. Best to sight over the weapon at these ranges and watch where the bullets strike, then correct your aim accordingly.

  "I can see you're trying to count exactly how many shots you're firing. Don't do that. Get good at firing in short bursts, and then practice not necessarily counting the bursts, but knowing how many you've fired instinctively. The more you practice, the more it'll become second nature.

  "Don't put a death grip on the gun, even in full-auto. Trying to keep the gun from jumping from the recoil by holding tighter is just going to tire you out even faster. Instead, use the recoil to your benefit. Aim low with your first shot, then ride the recoil up through the target, like you're closing a zipper starting at his navel and ending at his chin."

  "Only I'm not zippering him up, I'm zippering him open.” I add.

  "That's the ticket," Richard nodded. Our conversations always left me in awe of how casually Richard discussed an automatic weapon's ability to tear a person apart.

  We ate lunch back at the cabin, and in the afternoon, we walked back to the well-ventilated white buckets, bandaged their burst bellies with a roll of duct tape, and topped them off with spilled sand and desert dirt. By now, the sun was a white-hot hammer beating at me from the sky, the desert floor serving as the anvil. We weren’t sweating so much as simply evaporating water directly through our pores, and we hydrated constantly. We guzzled warm water from plastic bottles, left in the shade of the Suburban's cargo bed to keep them at a drinkable temperature, but the water left our bodies almost as quickly as we drank it. Even though I had been drinking water all day, I found by one in the afternoon I had yet to pee.

  I did protect my light skin from the sun, wearing a pair of sunglasses and a wide-brimmed straw hat like Richard, with a bandanna tied around my neck kept soaked with water, the evaporation helping to keep me cool. I made sure to regularly coat exposed skin in sunblock, although Richard had me use a low SPF so that in time I would develop a healthy tan.

  "If you baby your skin out here too much, that one day you forget to protect it, you'll pay. Better to build up a good tan over time and let it do some of the work for you."

  During the afternoon, Richard had me begin working with the little Beretta automatic.

  "Shooting with a handgun in close combat is all about making sure the gun is pointing in the right direction when you pull the trigger."

  "My uncle said much the same thing when we shot that revolver,” I said.

  "Jamie certainly knows what he’s talking about. Problem with a pistol is, its a very short and light object being held out from the body unbraced and subject to many gross motor functions being applied in the simple act of pulling the trigger. Your body's natural action in pulling the trigger, if unchecked, will cause that barrel to wander all over hell and back. The only thing that prevents that mess, especially when the pucker factor is high, is training and muscle memory."

  So, unlike shooting the Uzi, with the Beretta we took things slow. Richard showed me how to hold the pistol correctly, how it should sit in my hand and where my finger should rest on the trigger, repeating the instructions I received from Jamie a few days before. Once my grip was correct, I began to fire slow, sure, steady shots at the buckets, one shot every few seconds, focusing on keeping the movements consistent and smooth, not worrying about putting every bullet as close to the "bulls-eye" as possible, just keeping all my shots consistently center mass.

  "It's cliche to say it," Richard explained, "but you don't pull a trigger, you squeeze it. Of course, it's not a slow squeeze, not in a firefight, but it is a smooth squeeze. There's a difference between doing something slowly and doing something smoothly. It's a subtlety that you'll learn over time and it's going to give you an advantage over all those other dummies. When they draw and fire, their guns are never pointing in the right direction when the hammer drops. If your gun points true when their's isn't, you might just walk away intact."

  "I thought you said this morning that marksmanship isn't as important as having the right kind of killing instincts,” I said.

  Richard gave me an ominous smile. "Don't worry, we'll work on that too."

  As the afternoon shifted to evening and the air began to cool down a little, we collected most of the spent brass from the day's shooting before returning to the cabin.

  "Even though we're in a state that discharges more firearms per capita than anywhere else in the country, I don't want someone wandering through when we aren't around and finding hundreds of new, shiny, spent pistol casings. At best, it might draw unwanted curiosity to what we're doing. At worst, someone might think I'm stashing guns in the cabin and try to break in, which would result in a very bad accident on their part, and me needing a new cabin."

  Before doing anything else that evening, Richard taught me how to break down, clean, and reassemble the Uzi and the Beretta.

  "For a soldier, there is no more important skill than being able to quickly and proficiently service their weapon in any condition; rain, sleet, snow, desert, swamp, jungle, whatever. Guns in the field get dirty, and dirty guns fail to work, which gets you killed. You, on the other hand, will be working for only short periods of time in a mostly clean urban environment, and can break down and service your guns at your leisure, so we're not going to do the whole field-strip and clean blindfolded routine like you see in the army movies."

  After cleaning the guns, Richard put me through another set of stretches, loosening up those muscles that had tightened during a day of range work like my neck, shoulders, arms, and back. Stretches were followed by more calisthenics, which were in turn followed by another run. This time Richard required me to run out to the hidden cache so I knew where it was if I needed to find it, and after a little confusion, I was able to locate the gnarled bush on the back slope of the hill. We then half-ran, half walked back to the cabin, Richard looking none the worse for wear, while I was utterly spent.

  After dinner, it was time to do my homework. Richard had prepared several binders for me filled with photocopied or scanned articles from a number of combat-related periodicals, some geared towards civilian sport shooting and personal defense, some geared towards law enforcement, and some purely for military or "armchair commando" types.

  "This is going to be a crash course in the world of the private sector gun-for-hire, so you need to get your head into that world, and fast. I'm going to be using terms and talking about concepts that I need to express without taking the time to explain them to you, so this is going to be
your required reading."

  That evening I read articles on the history of the Uzi, about point shooting and trigger control, on concealed handgun carry, self-defense laws in various states and the overall perception of self-defense as it pertained to handguns in America.

  "Richard, I suppose this is all relevant, but I'm not looking to engineer my revenge killings into a series of legally justifiable self-defense shootings. Why am I reading this?"

  Richard sat down at the table next to me. "First things first, it’s all about cultural immersion. Illicit or not, you're entering a niche with its own lingo and its own viewpoint on the world. Second, if you ever find yourself caught in the web of Johnny Law, you're going to want to know what to expect. I hope to teach you what you need in order to avoid getting caught, but there aren't any guarantees in life, except for death."

  "So this is hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst."

  "Got it in one," Richard said.

  I finished my reading by ten and rolled into my cot ten minutes later, after brushing my teeth and a quick wash-towel bath. I don't think I’d ever been so tired in my life. Oddly, I don't think I'd ever felt so satisfied in a day's hard work, either.

  I was probably asleep before my eyes closed.

  The rest of the week, we continued what had I started. Every morning Richard and I would start with stretching and calisthenics, followed by a four-mile round trip run. We'd then have a light breakfast and follow that by loading magazines, then spend the morning shooting the Uzi. After a couple days playing "pick a number", Richard had me try shooting at a distance, learning control and technique, as well as firing at a walk and even at a run. I must have fired ten thousand rounds of ammunition by the end of the week.

  Afternoons were dedicated to handgun shooting, and after the third day, Richard had me working on rapid firing two or three shots at a time. I also expanded my practices to include all three pistols, switching between the Beretta and the Glock, sometimes even emptying one, then drawing the snub-nose revolver from a back pocket and emptying it as a follow-up. Richard explained that often, the fastest reload was simply to draw another firearm and keep shooting.