cobra and the delinquents 19

 

Chapter 19 You people just will not learn

 

“Do you have a suit?” demanded Jim when we landed somewhere he told me was ‘MMFD.’ That’s a Brit acronym, and I happen to know it; Miles and Miles of Fucking Desert. I didn’t ask which desert. With Jim it could have been anything from the Atacama to the Gobi.

“Yes, the best available,” I said.

He looked sceptical.

“Skinsuit or balloon?” he asked.

“It’s skin tight,” I said.

He nodded.

“A compression suit is better than a pressure suit,” he told me. “It’s damned hard to move in a pressure suit. Let me see it.”

He regarded my suit with some awe.

“All right, it probably is the best available,” he conceded. “The best state-of-the-art materials, including Kevlar-3^TM if I’m not mistaken.”

He was not mistaken.

“I have Kevlar clothing to wear over as well,” I said. “I don’t want accidental tears.”

Jim grunted, which for him was fairly eloquent.

He drilled me thoroughly in getting my suit on and off, though of course, I would be essentially living in it whilst on the mission. It would not be comfortable.  But there were valves to shut off whilst I removed and replaced waste removal units. This I had to practise too. And to learn to live with what I can only describe as a high-tech butt plug to permit solid waste to go into a ‘faecal containment unit’ rather than spread around inside. Pissing into a kind of motorman’s friend was less unfriendly.

“I don’t think I’m being paid enough,” I grumbled.

“So long as you pay me what I ask, I’m not complaining,” said Jim, cheerfully. “And I get the amusement value of watching you put up with what some men pay a dominatrix to do.”

I told him what he could do with his amusement value, and it was not polite.

“Is that even possible?” said Jim.

I regarded him evenly.

“Maybe I could try to fold you up enough to find out,” I said.

He laughed.

“Can I have your suit when you’re done with it?” he asked.

“I didn’t know you were kinky enough to want my butt plug in your butt,” I said.

“Bite your tongue! Yours is less uncomfortable looking than mine, and I thought I had the best money can buy,” said Jim.

“Mine’s Federal issue,” I admitted. “They didn’t say I have to give it back; but if I need it again, you give it back, ok? It has nanotractors to fit precisely to your body, and more of them as surface shakers to shed any dust.”

“Deal,” he said. “I had mine made to measure; including the butt plug and piss pot. Not my most enjoyable half hour while the memory plastic set.”

I shuddered. The nanotractors had been uncomfortable settling down, but it had been a matter of minutes only.

“It’s got to be better than wearing diapers, or what they described as a ‘faecal containment garment,’ which the first Astronauts wore,” said Jim. “Or as we say in the business, ‘Arse no questions, I’ll tell you no lies, try not to snag the lifeline from your flies.’”

“I don’t think I needed that bit of lore,” I said. It’s the way men cover embarrassment; make coarse jokes.

 

We were getting ready to leave for the moon when my phone went.

It was Ruth’s number.

Ruth knows better than to phone me on a mission if something isn’t important.

“Ruth?” I said.

“We have your sister,” said the voice on the other end. I flipped it onto speaker for Jim to hear.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“What I said,” he said. “We have your sister, and her safe return is dependent on you doing as you are told.”

“How do I know you have her and that she’s even alive?” I asked.

“Here she is; talk to her,” he said.

“Horace!” said Ruth, maintaining cover. “They grabbed me in the street; I passed out. I… I lost my gold ring. I’m sorry!”

“Never mind that, little partridge,” I said, telling her I understood the code, that there were five of them. “Tell them I’ll raise the ransom money, whatever it is.”

The other voice came back on.

“It ain’t about money, Tiber. It’s about your associates. You make sure nobody goes to the moon or causes anyone there any hassles, see? It can’t be done, but it might cause some embarrassment to our boss. And you, you hand yourself over in place of the girl, or there are worse things that can happen to her than just being killed.”

I knew this. I knew this only too well.

“All right,” I said. “When and where?”

“Dawn tomorrow, at the Seattle troll,” he said.

There’s a big concrete statue of a troll under an underpass in Seattle. Don’t ask; this is Seattle.

“Very well,” I said.

The phone went dead.

Jim had not been idle; his fingers had been flying over his electronics warfare suite.

“It’s not in Seattle,” he said.

“Try checking where this is,” I said, reelling off a number. He raised an eyebrow.

“That is in Seattle; in the rubble,” he said.

“Sub-dermal tracker. Passive,” I said. “Only transmits when interrogated.”

“Clever,” said Jim, pulling up a map. “So, they re-routed through another phone to hers, which was out near Nebraska.”

“How invisible can you make this thing?” I asked.

“I can appear on radar like a pigeon fart, a witch on a broomstick, or a flight of bombers,” said Jim. “If we come in low over Puget Sound we can land in the arena without anyone knowing we’re there. And if there’s opposition there, I got some surprises.”

They made a serious mistake in choosing the Rubble. Most shadow folk see it as a no-go area for normal folk.  But I own it. Literally. I bought all the land. And the people there look on me with favour for all the things I’ve done for them.

And the place is riddled with underground passages which my people have been mapping, notably Croc, who is one of the hybrid travesties made by the crazier firms playing god with DNA, he’s a crocodile with horse’s legs, and his best friend is Algy, a mind-reading big cat with a unicorn horn. 

I buzzed Algy.

“Find me,” I said.

He found my mind, and I debriefed him. He was horrified. Ruth is one of the people Algy and Croc love fiercely, for treating them like people.

I’d have a team waiting, and no radio-chatter to betray me assembling it.

And Willow would be there waiting as well, I knew that; Algy and Croc adore Willow. She hugged them when she first met them. Algy hates the ugliness of human thoughts, but he will use his talent to help out those of us who are the Rubble community.

And right now he was contacting Ruth, to tell her that help was on the way.

 

Willow met me as the Condor, Jim’s ship, landed. She had brought my field kit, and I tooled up. Combats, Kevlar, knives, Ingram, plastique, thermite, flash-bang-crash grenades, frag grenades, tear gas grenades, sleep gas grenades, and  all the usual. I carried infra red sights in my eyes as well as low-light – I had upgraded, after Extreme – and I could turn off my breathing, of course. My combats were woven in Heatless^TM to hide my thermal image. Willow was kitted up the same. I painted her face; yellow flash on the forehead for deadly force, and to invoke speed; black handprints on each cheek for a tried warrior, and red marks on our cheekbones for our warrior status.

Jim was grinning rather at this, not quite sneering, but he got growled at by our various friends, and wiped the superior smile.

“You do your checklists,” I said. “We paint up.”

He held up his hands.

“No offence meant,” he said.

“Good,” I said. “Can you kill all communications in and out of our target zone?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Fine.” I said.

Algy sidled up.

“Ruth is tied up in a safe room in the cellar,” he said.  “It’s one of those semi-intact old brownstones which attract gangers. Someone’s done it up.”

“And they didn’t pay their taxes to me,” I said.

He laughed.

“We got a good sewer pipe right in, boss,” he said.

 Croc took us down into the sewers. He had an unerring sense of direction down there.

“That narrow pipe going up comes from the brownstone,” Algy translated for Croc. “It’s in the toilet facilities of the safe room.”

I had a look at the plans I had pulled, and with Algy’s help, aligned them with the sewer.

I moulded my thermite to burn against the main pipe, and it quickly burned through.  A bit of a heave with a crowbar shifted out a square of pipe large enough to climb through; and there we were, in the foundations. Piping demonstrated the layout of the bathroom.

I came up through the floor of the shower, with a little more thermite.  Very few problems cannot be solved with a sufficiency of the right sort of explosives.

And the beauty of it is that thermite used as a cutting charge is not very noisy.

I eased open the bathroom door. There was a living room with bunks. Ruth was zip-tied to a chair, with four zip-ties, one on each limb, at wrist and ankle, cruelly tight so the skin was swelling. She appeared to have been left alone.

I stepped out of the bathroom. “Ruthie!” I said.

“Rick!” she was crying, and it looked as if she had been holding off on her tears until now. I cut through the zip ties, and Willow, behind me, joined in a group hug.

“They hurt you,” I said. As well as the damaged wrists and ankles, she had a black eye, split lip, and moved as if her ribs hurt.

“They put me in a single zip-tie in front, so I broke it like you taught us, and I went exploring to see if I could escape,” said Ruth. Of course she did. She’s my sis now.  “I knocked one out, but another one hit me with the butt of his rifle, and his friend helped. So they called me a little virago, and tied me up tighter, and I need the loo.”

She bolted into the bathroom.

She’s a sixteen-year-old kid who did not ought to have to be escaping from people. The information about the Tiber family must have gone out before we wiped out the Wolfpack in the Feds. Well, this team would be telling me how many others knew, immediately before they ceased knowing anything in this world.

Nobody messes with my family.

Ruth finished.

“Do we go and kill them now?” she asked.

“You go back with Croc,” I said.

“Yes, Rick,” she said, obediently. 

She dropped through the hole in the floor, and into the drain.

I heard Algy think at her to climb onto Croc’s back.

That was a privilege Croc did not offer to just anyone. And I think Ruth was grateful.

I sent Algy and Croc back; it was going to get messy, and though we might take short cuts having Algy read minds, it wasn’t worth upsetting him.

The team who had taken Ruth were expecting to have a cowed and neutralised little girl in their safe room.

They were not expecting to have a pair of professional killers.

The predators just became prey.

 

The safe room was a command centre for the whole building, and held all the surveillance kit. Ruth had overlooked it, but that was not something which surprised me. Algy had filled me in that she had been hit with a tranq dart before being bundled into a car, and she was likely still a bit groggy when she made her abortive escape.

One of them, at least, had something of a headache.

I took the time to download all the records here to my phone; the passwords were the factory default.

I keep telling you people that security is important, and even picking a literary character and a number that has some meaning to you with a special character lifts you way and above the average.

If you’re a bit pedestrian, it’s your mother’s maiden name and her date of birth, which can be easily cracked. A stage better is, say, Polish kings – the spelling is gruesome – and their dates.  Best is some totally random character and a number you like. You get to remember it without writing it down, but the chance of anyone guessing it is low.

Anyway, I tracked down where the five assailants were in the house. The ground floor seemed habitable; and one was some storeys up, and from the camera, this was some kind of lookout post. He did not seem to be taking it terribly seriously.

Two were resting; two were in a sitting room, one lying down on the sofa with a head bandage, presumably the one who was Ruth’s handiwork.  One was in a kitchen, making drinks.

I discovered that there was a bolt hole from this saferoom, which would have taken Ruth beyond the vision of the guard, if she had accessed the plans, but she’ll learn. I would debrief her when she was feeling more herself.

We watched them on security cameras.

The coffee guy came back in.

“How much longer?” asked the undamaged one.

Coffee Guy was the chief, then.

“We move out at midnight,” said Coffee Guy.  “Meet isn’t until dawn. You have to give him a chance to get back from wherever he is.”

“You think he’ll come?”

“He was half wetting himself over the little bint’s safety. He’ll come,” said Coffee Guy.

“What do we do with her?” asked his underling.

“If we get to take Tiber alive, and find out what the chief wants to know, you can fuck her before we kill her,” said Coffee Guy. “We have to keep her alive and undamaged for now, in case anything goes wrong. She’s leverage.”

Worrywart nodded.

Wounded guy groaned.

“I want her hurting,” he said.

“Sure, you do, and she will,” said Coffee Guy.

“I don’t get what some schoolmaster can know about anything,” said Worrywart.

Coffee Guy shrugged.

“Maybe nothing, but Tex will have fun finding out,” he said.

I didn’t roll my eyes but I felt like it; torturers who have fun finding out are not very efficient, nor usually too tightly wrapped. Presumably he was one of those napping; you don’t put psychos on watch.

I had no particular time agenda here. I could afford to wait them out. 

“Your sense of humour is getting the better of you again,” said Willow.

“Of course it is,” I said. “Can you think of anything funnier than Coffee Guy coming to sneer at and terrorise a little girl, and finds the wrong person sitting in the chair?”

“And then I double tap him, from the side,” said Willow.

“No, love, I want him alive to question,” I said. “You shoot him with the flechette sleep round.”

She pouted. She’s adorable when she pouts.

“I want to kill him,” she said. “Ruth’s just getting settled.”

“You can kill the others,” I said. “And you can do your mother hen about to torture a tied-up fox act when we ask him questions. We don’t need to keep the others at all.”

Willow gave a terse nod.

“For what it’s worth,” I said, “Ruth told Algy that she did not fear them, because she’s already been through the worst thing that can happen.”

“I wish we could kill her father again,” said Willow.

“Every time we kill someone who thinks it is okay to hurt kids, we kill him again,” I said.

Willow considered; and nodded acquiescence.

She has the discipline to overcome mother-mode, though I’m not sure that would count if it was Quin.

We didn’t have long to wait before Coffee Guy declared an intent of checking the prisoner.

I sat in the chair, grinning, arms folded.

He came in the door, and froze.

“Guess who?” I sing-songed. “You wanted to exchange Ruth for me. You got me.”

He started to move, and Willow shot him in the neck with the tranq dart.

“But not for long,” she said.

We hogtied him with zip-ties, rope, and duct-tape and duct-taped his eyes. He would suffer when it came off; it takes hair, eyebrows, eyelashes, and tender skin when it comes off, but hey, I wasn’t bothered; it wasn’t my hair, eyebrows, eyelashes or tender skin.

We could give him the antidote when we had him stowed somewhere else, and take off the blindfold then.

More interesting for him than doing so whilst he was unresponsive. We wouldn’t want him to be bored.

One down, four to hunt.