Robert Ferrigno - Sins of the Assassin

Royce fired the machine guns in bursts, keeping the Colonel’s men back as the chopper lurched and jerked.

Rakkim slashed Gravenholtz’s shoulder, drew a cry of pain, but it was a light wound, Gravenholtz’s second skin stopping anything but a direct thrust.

Gravenholtz shifted Baby to his other arm as he retreated closer to the chopper.

Rakkim came in again, blinded for a moment by dust kicked up by the chopper’s rotors, and Gravenholtz swung at him. The blow barely grazed his jaw, but Rakkim felt his teeth rattle, his mouth filling with blood. A look of awful triumph distorted Gravenholtz’s face in the swirling red and yellow lights.

“Lester!” bellowed the raider in the passenger compartment, his sweating face caught in the auxiliary lights of an approaching jeep. Bullets slammed into the compartment, and the raider screamed. The chopper pitched.

I said, cease fire! said the Colonel, visible now at the edge of the yard, waving his arms.

Gravenholtz snarled at Rakkim, hurried the last few feet, and threw Baby into the chopper. Put his hands on the edge of the open door and lifted himself up…

Rakkim launched himself as the chopper started to rise, holding on to the metal door frame with one hand, stabbing Gravenholtz again and again. Most of his thrusts were deflected by Gravenholtz’s armored skin, but he heard the redhead groan at least twice.

“Lester, you in?” shouted the copilot.

Sprawled inside the chopper, Gravenholtz punched at Rakkim-he missed, but his fist shattered an unbreakable plastic jump seat. Rakkim again slashed at Gravenholtz, half severed his ear and the redhead screamed, rolled back inside. The chopper lurched about fifteen feet off the ground, rising slowly.

“Lester?” called the copilot. “Deeks, what’s going on back there?”

Rakkim put his knife away. Standing on the chopper’s skid, he held out a hand to Baby. “Come on.”

“Baby!” the Colonel called from below, dirt swirling around him. “Let Rikki help you!”

“Come on.” Rakkim could see Gravenholtz struggling to get upright, blood pouring down his neck from his ruined ear. He beckoned to Baby. “Give me your hand.”

The chopper kept rising.

“Trust me.” Rakkim grabbed Baby’s arm, drew her closer. He could see her pulse pounding at the base of her throat. “It’s okay, I’ve got you.”

Baby kneed him in the face and Rakkim flew backward, landed heavily on the ground. He lay there, not moving. Above him the helicopter rose rapidly as Royce regained control. Still dazed from the fall and the shock, he saw Baby looking down at him from the passenger compartment, her long hair billowing in the breeze.

“Baby!” The Colonel stood over Rakkim, looking up, and the sadness and longing in his voice carried clear to the stars. “Baby!”

Baby waved to him.

The Colonel sobbed. His troops clustered around the house seemed to take a step back, the night’s silence broken only by the rapidly diminishing sound of the chopper heading over the treetops, and the Colonel’s soft weeping.

Rakkim rolled over, gasped. Slowly got to his knees, then his feet. It hurt to breathe. “Colonel…?”

The bandage on the Colonel’s right hand was soaked with blood. “Joke’s on you,” he said gruffly. “Looks like you paid me two hundred million dollars for nothing.”

“It was something,” said Rakkim, holding his ribs.

The Colonel jabbed a thumb at the chopper and blood flew from the bandage. “There goes your something.”

Rakkim watched the chopper disappear from view.

“Why did you do it?” The Colonel looked at him. “You brought that End-Times scum here, and then you fought beside us instead of stealing the canister. You lied to me, then you saved my life. Why? Are you stupid or just confused?”

“It’s worse than that,” said Rakkim. “I fell for my own cover story. Started seeing you as more than an honorable enemy-as an honorable man. The way you treated the Fedayeen, burying him with full honors…”

“What are you talking about?” said the Colonel.

Rakkim watched two of the Colonel’s men helping Leo and Moseby out of the cabin. “It doesn’t matter now. The weapon is on its way to the highest bidder. The Chinese probably…maybe the Brazilians. There’s going to be all kinds of trouble coming.”

“There’s always trouble coming, and always people willing to face it.” The Colonel stared at the spot over the trees where the helicopter had disappeared. “Right now, I’m trying to decide which of us is the bigger fool. You for changing your mind and standing beside me, or me for thinking that Baby loved me the way that I love her.”

“I’d have to go with you, sir,” said Rakkim. “Unless, of course, you decide to execute me, in which case I’d be declared the winner.”

“We’re going to have to have a long talk,” said the Colonel, still watching that patch of night sky.

Rakkim sucked at the strawberry malt as the high-speed train raced across the Canadian Rockies and tried again to figure out why Baby hadn’t killed Moseby and Leo back at the house. It had to have been her decision-Gravenholtz would have killed them on general principles, beaten them to death just to hear their bones crunch. The maglev train rode smoothly four inches above the guideway, its magnetic propulsion system almost silent, but Rakkim felt a steady hum in his ears that gnawed at him, deepening his bad mood. So, why had Baby let them live?

On the other side of the compartment, Leo snored peacefully as he had for the last three days, ever since he’d tried accessing the computer cores detailing the construction of a hafnium bomb. Three days, waking only to stumble to the bathroom or push food into his mouth. He barely spoke, and what he said was a soft muttering in some other language. They had been on the train for the last day, hurtling along at 285 miles an hour. While Leo slept, Rakkim thought about Sarah and Michael; he thought about Malcolm Crews backing into the forest, and the Colonel’s tears and the sight of Baby looking down at him from the ascending chopper…Most of all, he thought about his own failure.

His mission had been simple. First, find the weapon. Then, steal the weapon from the Colonel and either bring it back or destroy it. Better to bring it back where it could be used to intimidate the Mexicans and the Mormons. Or even better, use it to establish trust between the republic and the Belt, start the reconciliation both nations needed. As a last resort, he was to destroy the weapon, so it couldn’t be used against them.

Yesterday, he had contacted Sarah from Montreal. Told her that he had failed. Failed to secure the weapon, failed to destroy the weapon, failed to kill Crews or Gravenholtz. Other than that, the mission was a total success. Sarah said she was just glad he was alive. Glad Leo was alive too. He told Sarah that his best guess was that the hafnium weapon was probably on its way to a research center in China, and Baby and Gravenholtz were richer than anyone needed to be. Baby, anyway. No way would she stick with Gravenholtz after she no longer needed him. Sarah said she’d alert the president to the changing global paradigm. He wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but he suspected the president wasn’t going to order a parade in his honor or give him another of those a grateful nation thanks you private dinners.

All Rakkim had managed was a mild concussion and three teeth reseated back into his jaw by a dentist in Boonesville who smelled of clove oil. Even Stevenson’s shekel of Tyre was gone. He rubbed his right hand, checked it again. Yeah, the crucifix branded onto his palm was definitely fading, being reabsorbed. He could barely tell what the image was anymore.