UNCOMMON ASSASSINS

  Edited by Weldon Burge

  Smart Rhino Publications

  www.smartrhino.com

  These are works of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, places, and events portrayed in these stories are either products of the authors’ imaginations or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  First Edition

  Uncommon Assassins. Copyright © 2012 by Smart Rhino Publications LLC. All rights reserved. Individual stories copyright by individual authors. Printed in the United States.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9847876-3-0

  ISBN-10: 0984787631

  DEDICATION

  For my wonderful, supportive, and gorgeous wife, Cindy

  CONTENTS

  NIGHTSHADE

  STEPHEN ENGLAND

  THE PEPPER TYRANT

  J. GREGORY SMITH

  EVERYBODY WINS

  LISA MANNETTI

  FAT LARRY’S NIGHT WITH THE ALLIGATORS

  KEN GOLDMAN

  THYF’S TALE

  CHRISTINE MORGAN

  MISCONCEPTIONS

  MATT HILTON

  SECOND AMENDMENT SOLUTION

  BILLIE SUE MOSIMAN

  KILLER

  KEN BRUEN

  FOR THE LOVE OF BOYS

  ROB M. MILLER

  BLOODSHED FRED

  MONICA J. O’ROURKE

  SLASHER

  F. PAUL WILSON

  FIRE & ICE

  JOSEPH BADAL

  MADAME

  DOUG BLAKESLEE

  THE MAN WHO SHOT HITLER

  ELLIOTT CAPON

  MERCY KILLING

  LAURA DISILVERIO

  SCRUB

  MICHAEL BAILEY

  THE WELLMASTER’S DAUGHTER

  JAMES S. DORR

  WISH I’D NEVER MET YOU

  JONATHAN TEMPLAR

  THE BLUELIGHT SPECIAL

  J. CARSON BLACK

  WELCOME TO THE FOOD CHAIN

  WELDON BURGE

  INSIDE OUT

  AL BOUDREAU

  KATAKIUCHI

  CHARLES COLYOTT

  TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS

  LYNN MANN

  THE WRITERS

  THE ILLUSTRATOR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks go to Nanette O’Neill for her striking cover illustration, to Scott Medina for designing the cover, and to Terri Gillespie for her excellent proofreading skills.

  I must also point out here that, although most of the stories are original to this volume, a number are reprints. Lisa Mannetti’s story, “Everybody Wins,” and Monica J. O’Rourke’s story, “Bloodshed Fred,” were originally published in the anthology These Guns for Hire, edited by J. A. Konrath. Ken Goldman’s story, “Fat Larry’s Night With the Alligators,” first appeared in Black Moon #2 (September/October 1995). F. Paul Wilson’s classic tale, “Slasher,” was initially published in the Predators anthology, edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg. James Dorr’s story, “The Wellmaster’s Daughter,” was first published in the November 1991 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

  NIGHTSHADE

  BY STEPHEN ENGLAND

  5:23 P.M. Local Time

  Ciudad del Este

  Paraguay

  He wasn’t supposed to be here. None of them were. That wasn’t unusual—he’d spent well over ten years of his life going places he wasn’t supposed to go, doing things he wasn’t supposed to do.

  The man looked to be in his thirties, tall, at least a couple inches over six feet—his height and dark, close-trimmed beard betraying the fact that he wasn’t a local, despite the street clothes. He might have been an Arab, though—there were certainly plenty of them in the Tri-Border Area, the disputed zone between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. The AK-47 assault rifle lying by the man’s side was equally common. Ciudad del Este was a nexus for weapons traffickers of all creeds and colors.

  The tall man shifted his weight against the sandbags piled on the floor of the third-floor apartment, taking his eyes off the scope of the SVD Dragunov for a moment. The Russian-made Dragunov wasn’t a state-of-the-art sniper rifle, but local color was more important.

  “Need a break, Harry?” A voice asked from behind him.

  He looked down at his Doxa dive watch, then back at the muscular Asian reclining easily on the dingy apartment’s bed. “Thirty minutes on the scope, Sammy. Thirty minutes off. You know the drill. We switch in five.”

  Below them, street noise drifted up through the open window, noise and the smell of rotting garbage.

  Two hours.

  6:48 P.M. Eastern Time

  CIA Headquarters

  Langley, Virginia

  “Give me some good news, people.” For a man with a prosthetic leg, Director Bernard Kranemeyer knew how to make an entrance. He arrived in the operations center of Clandestine Service with all the subtlety of a storm front moving in, dark eyes sweeping across the workstations until his gaze fell upon a short black man. “What’s the latest from Alpha Team, Ron?”

  Ron Carter plugged the USB cable into the back of his workstation and glanced up at his boss. The director of the Clandestine Service still had all the bedside manner of the Delta Force sergeant major he’d been until an Iraqi IED took off his right leg below the knee.

  “Nichols checked in at sixteen hundred local time. Everything’s still go-mission.”

  Kranemeyer moved to the bank of plasma screens filling one wall of the op-center. Screens filled with satellite photos, their timestamps indicating their sequence over the course of the two months of Operation NIGHTSHADE. “How long before the KH-13 closes within range?”

  “An hour away,” Carter replied, referring to the CIA spy satellite. “The KEYHOLE will be in orbit over the target area for exactly ninety minutes—we’ll have full spectrum coverage, thermal imaging if necessary. That’s our window.”

  A rare smile crossed the director’s face. “It’ll be good to have this over, bring the team back home.”

  “It would have been so much easier to send in a Predator drone—take him out with a single Hellfire when he leaves the apartment in the morning.”

  It would have been. But those weren’t their orders.

  “The president, God bless his soul—isn’t about to make the same mistake twice.” Kranemeyer shot a sardonic look at his lead analyst. “Relations with Pakistan still haven’t stabilized since the bin Laden raid and the administration doesn’t need those types of problems south of the border. The whole idea is to make this look like a local job. Total deniability.”

  That brought a laugh from Carter. “Think the politicos will ever get out of our way and let us do our job?”

  5:57 P.M. Local Time

  Ciudad del Este

  Paraguay

  Jean-Claude Manet, aka Ramzi bin Abdullah. Codename: HARROW. At one point the leader of al-Qaeda operations in Europe. Truth be told, the Agency didn’t know when or why the French-born Manet had converted to Islam, just that he had become radicalized after moving to Marseilles and coming under the “ministry” of a Salafist imam with connections to bin Laden.

  Manet was the perfect recruit. Mid-forties, white, quintessentially French. Even with the thick beard he had grown after conversion, he didn’t fit the profile. For five years, the CIA had worked with the French to bring him down, with nothing to show for it.

  If Manet’s only daughter hadn’t started sleeping with a young khafir artist from Toulouse—if Manet hadn’t then decided to kill his daughter ... well, none of them would be here. He was now an SDT (Specially Designated Terrorist) and fair game as far as they were concerned.

  Harry Nichols laid his binoculars aside, running a hand over his dark beard. Everything was in place.

  A knock came at the apartment door and his hand stole toward the Colt 1911 holstered at his side.

  “Answer it, Sammy,” he hissed, gesturing to his partner. “I’ve got your six.”

  Samuel Han was already on his feet, moving from the bedroom into the living room of the apartment. His suppressed Beretta was clutched in a two-handed Weaver grip, the weapon an extension of himself.

  The Asian moved with a grace born of training—he’d been a SEAL once, in a different time.

  Harry watched him in the cracked mirror as Han advanced on the door, holding the gun to one side as he opened the door a crack.

  “Oh, it’s you,” were the next words out of Han’s mouth as the third member of the team entered the room. Harry slipped the Colt’s safety back on and exited the bedroom.

  “Salaam alaikum, Hamid,” he said with a smile, extending his hand. Blessings and peace be upon you.

  A light danced in the Arab’s blue eyes as he clasped Harry’s hand in both of his. “Alaikum salaam, my brother.”

  They’d worked together for so many years, dating back to their time in Iraq. It was Hamid Zakiri’s native country, albeit a country he and his family had fled in the ’90s.

  “Anyone miss me?”

  Hardly,” was Han’s sarcastic response. “Plenty of great stuff on the TV.”

  Hamid favored him with a grin “Latin soap operas may be corny, but they’re still better than anything you can buy out the

re on the street.”

  That sobered everyone up. They were in the heart of Ciudad del Este’s red-light district and pornographic videos were for sale everywhere—many of them locally produced and “featuring” children. It might have seemed a strange place to be hunting the key player of an Islamist terror network, but those were the realities of the war on terror. Nothing was as it seemed.

  Harry cleared his throat. “You find anything actionable?”

  “I met with SKYWALKER,” the Iraqi replied, referring to the Agency’s informant. “We talked things over in one of the downtown bars. He says the meet is going down shortly after nineteen hundred local—says bin Abdullah is already in the building, staying under wraps until after the meeting.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  A pause, and Hamid nodded, an expression of distaste crossing his countenance. “He’d had too much alcohol to be lying.” A practicing Muslim himself, Zakiri didn’t drink. It was the primary reason Harry had chosen him to make the rendezvous.

  Harry gestured to the sniper rifle. “We’ve not been able to pick up much, just an occasional visual on the wife through the window. Thermal’s useless, can’t penetrate the thick walls. Long and short, we can’t independently confirm. Bin Abdullah could be inside. So could a couple dozen Wahhabis.”

  Hamid walked over to the window. “We have muscle near the door—Libyans by the look of them. Two guys, the big one has a pump gun, but the small one’s the leader. You can tell by the way they interact. Little guy’s carrying a stainless steel Kimber.”

  Amateur hour, Harry snorted. You could tell a lot about hired muscle by their hardware. If they chose their weapons based on their “cool” factor, well then—Islamists or not—they’d been watching too many Western music videos.

  Time to hold the ball, make the call. Over a decade as a CIA paramilitary operations officer and making these decisions never got any easier. They’d waited two months for this night, for this opportunity. But without independent verification ... they were flying blind.

  “Let’s do this,” he announced finally, looking around at his team. “Sammy, get Langley on the horn. It’s time we got the final go-mission.”

  There was no comment, but he could see it in their faces, his own thoughts reflected in their eyes. They had a bad feeling about this.

  7:36 P.M. Eastern Time

  CIA Headquarters

  Langley, Virginia

  “What’s the deal?” As soon as Carter turned and saw the look on the face of the DCS, he knew the question had been ill-advised. He didn’t even really belong here, the analyst thought. The Intelligence Directorate cut his checks, but with his skill set, he was being increasingly schlepped to the Dark Side—as analysts called the operations side of the house.

  “Nichols,” Kranemeyer responded, a heavy sigh escaping his lips. “They’ve been unable to confirm that HARROW is actually in the building.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem.” He didn’t see that it was. They’d planned for this. Multiple redundancy. “SKYWALKER’s wearing a wire. He confirms HARROW’s presence, the team goes in. About as simple as it gets.”

  An unpleasant smile crossed Kranemeyer’s face. “That’s what the President thinks too, Carter. This isn’t a game. Once you’ve got men in the field, illegals in a foreign country—there’s nothing simple about it. Anything could go wrong. Any one of a thousand things.”

  6:46 P.M. Local Time

  Ciudad del Este

  Paraguay

  “Roger that, boss. Yeah, I understand. Have Carter monitor the satellite feed—let me know if any problems crop up. We’ll give this a whirl.”

  Harry hit the END button on his TACtical SATellite phone and slipped the TACSAT back in his pocket.

  “What’s going on?” Hamid asked, glancing over at his team leader.

  Harry laughed. “Langley’s solved all our problems for us. Or they think they have. We don’t have to trust him. Once SKYWALKER is in place, they’re going to run voiceprint analysis on the conversation to determine whether HARROW is really in the room.”

  They both knew what that meant. “Five minutes?”

  Harry shook his head. “More like ten.”

  There went the quick part of it. Sometimes plans didn’t even survive contact with your allies. Forget the enemy. They walked back into the bedroom, where Han lay manning the Dragunov. “The target window opens in twenty minutes with the arrival of SKYWALKER. We need to be ready to strike the minute we have target confirmation, hard and fast. From shots fired we’ve got thirty minutes to clear the area.” He smiled. “The local policía may be too corrupt to put in an appearance, but the same thing can’t be said of the cartel’s muscle. They’ll be all over us.”

  “Tell me again why we couldn’t get a camera on the inside?” This from Han.

  “Too risky.” Harry reached down and picked up a pair of high-powered binoculars, aiming them down the street, watching the pedestrians, the shoppers moving in and out of the myriad of storefronts. Dusk was falling, the dirty, faded buildings casting long shadows in the setting sun. “They’re bound to have swept the room before the arrival of bin Abdullah. They find a cam—game over.”

  “Abdullah,” Hamid whispered behind him, uttering an Arabic curse under his breath. “The slave of God. Where do these people get off believing that they speak for Allah?”

  Harry didn’t take his eyes off the street, but a quiet smile touched his lips. A Christian himself, he and Hamid loved to debate. “It’s your religion, my friend. Not mine.”

  “My religion ...” Zakiri walked over to the window, gently pulling back the shade. “Through history, men have always sought heavenly sanction for their evil deeds. Divine license to kill.”

  8:06 P.M. Eastern Time

  CIA Headquarters

  Langley, Virginia

  It was a beautiful way to fight a war. Carter leaned back in his desk chair, peeling the rest of the wrapper off a Hershey’s bar.

  Movement on-screen caught his eye and he keyed his communications headset. “We have the package, EAGLE SIX. SKYWALKER’s entering the target area—look for a gray Volvo.”

  “License number?” Harry’s voice, from over four thousand miles away.

  The analyst’s eyes narrowed as he tapped a command into the keyboard, watching as the satellite image zoomed in on the moving vehicle. “Here we go ... Echo Romeo Zulu oh-niner-seven. He’s about four klicks out.”

  Five million dollars. Cash. Nonsequential Ben Franklins. Carter interlaced his fingers behind his head. It was Agency money, squirreled away from Capitol Hill through a hundred shadow programs. If people only knew ... a lot of government “waste” was simply money siphoned off into the black budgets of the intelligence community. Five million dollars in the back of that gray Volvo. It wasn’t by accident that Ciudad del Este was the largest cash economy in the Western hemisphere.

  The man codenamed SKYWALKER was a long-time player in the Tri-Border Area, known as a businessman—a middleman willing to deal in most anything. If you wanted enough RPGs to start a small war, enough heroin to send UCLA into orbit, or enough young Thai girls to start an underage escort service, he was your man. A facilitator. It had been five years since the FBI had caught him leaving LAX under an assumed name. Four years since Langley had flipped him, erasing the charges against him in exchange for having a man in Paraguay. Yeah. They’d put a pervert back on the street.

  That was the nasty side of the spy business. Carter made a face, throwing the rest of the Hershey’s bar into the trash. Lost his appetite. “EAGLE SIX, you should have eyes on SKYWALKER any minute now.”