Gunstore Knights

[rvm45]

This is a Mercenary story set 10-20 years in the future to give the Politics time to come about...

But with little or no SF—I don't think...


Gunstore Knights




Chapter One






“You have no idea what it’s like over there, Brother Jonathon,” Mike said.

Mike Keller was still just a minister when I went in the US Army.

Do you remember back when Boko Haram was kidnapping little Christian girls in Nigeria and threatening to sell them into prostitution? Acid blinding of Christians was becoming a popular Nigerian spectator sport and there were new atrocities every day.

That’s when the denomination decided that they needed a big missionary presence in Nigeria.

Hell, the denomination has sketchy—if any—representation in twenty of the fifty states, but Nigeria was a priority.

I can see it. I really can. There are adequate Christian churches and schools in every one of the states here—even in those areas where our church isn’t a major presence.

When I got out of the US Army a little over a year later, Mike had been promoted to Elder and had signed up to go pastor a church in Nigeria. Six years later, Mike was a Bishop in Nigeria—a Bishop of foreign missions.

He came back home to raise funds and to see his family. He was staying with his mother and sister while he was in town, so I asked him to come have lunch with me.

I didn’t have a lot of cutter to drop into his collection plate, but I could afford a good meal for two at the local bar-be-que. Three people staying in a two-room apartment can get kinda cramped and I wanted to give everyone a mini break.

Anyway, when I was always broke, Mike treated me as well as others to many Sunday dinners after church.

“I’ve seen the bodies of children that were burned alive, the bodies of Christian men and women who’d been hacked to death with machetes. There are many folk in my area with acid burns on their faces.

“They like to hit Christian boarding schools and orphanages. They hit our hospitals. They’ve been targeting our ministers, teachers and nurses,” Mike said.

“Is this Boko Haram?” I asked.

“No, the MOSSAD trained a cadre of Nigerian counter insurgents and they pretty much smashed the life out of Boko Haram. But it’s like that story of the hydra. For every head that gets whacked off, two more spring up in its place.

“There are a half a dozen Boko Haram imitators nowadays, some small local part-time terrorists, individual crazies and folks just forming bands to rape, rob and pillage during the widespread confusion.”

“MOSSAD? I never knew that they had a strong presence in Nigeria,” I said.

“Well, everyone tries hard to play it down. Apparently someone in the Israeli government feels that blunting the sword of as many of these fanatic Mussulmen uprisings as possible is in their self interest.

“Some folks say that the CIA is helping the counter insurgent forces as well, with platoons of Special Forces veterans,” Mike said.

Mike said that I had no idea what was going on. That wasn’t quite true.

One of my pastimes was watching Nollywood movies—movies made by the Nigerian film industry.

The movies are—how do I describe them?

They’re phantasy. All the people in Nollywood movies are attractive. Even the poor wear clean clothing and have fairly nice housing. All of the houses—rich and poor—are furnished in some kind of Frank Lloyd Wright minimalist style.

You see no litter on the public streets and places are never crowded or cluttered.

Many of the movies are overt morality plays and they have a very different aesthetic.

Nollywood is a pleasant faerie land to visit on occasion—even if it exists only within the confines of one’s mind.

The movies left me rather curious about the real Nigeria—and peace! I’m not being insensitive to that growing minority who fiercely deny the existence of any “Real World.”

I’d picked up a fair listening knowledge of both Yoruba and Ibo. I’m poor at languages, but I’m dogged. I buy a lot of Pimsleur courses. They’re great for slow learners like me.

Thing is, they have obscure languages like French—who wants to learn French? They only have partial courses in far more useful languages like Gaeilge and Hindi and nothing at all in Yoruba and Ibo.

I’m not ready to be appointed ambassador to Nigeria, but I have a fair grasp of Nigerian history, geography and current events. I’ve watched a bunch of online videos just because they showed scenes of Nigeria—scenes uncut and unedited—In the background.

As far as atrocities, I grew up reading my father’s old “Soldier of Fortune” magazines. He lost interest in the magazine about 1990, but he had the 70s and 80s issues all bound into fourteen or fifteen sets—one for each year.

That kinda stuff is good to desensitize someone.

“What’s with all the boarding schools?” I asked.

Mike shrugged.

“The country needs to be rebuilt—structurally, I mean—from the ground up. It’s falling apart.

“It takes skilled welders and tool and die makers and carpenters to build a country as much as it takes doctors and lawyers.

“The church wants to establish some trade schools, but even trade schools require literate students. So we build grade schools and start teaching them young.

“We also like to take in orphans. Train them to think just a bit differently while they’re still young enough—more capitalist and less tribal, as it were.

“Anyway, we’ve largely gone to boarding schools because it cuts down exposure coming and going to school every day,” Mike said.

“Most of our schools have a ten foot tall brick wall around them—Flemish pattern, of course. They stick barb wire and concertina on top that,” He continued.

Mike had been a bricklayer before he became a pastor. That’s why he felt compelled to comment on the Flemish pattern brickwork.

“What good do steel gates and brick walls do against terrorists who’ve got guns and explosives?

“You’d hate Nigeria Brother Jonathon. It’s almost impossible to get a legal gun. Even then, only single-shot shotguns are legal,” Mike said.

“Those terrorists are getting guns somewhere. How hard is it to buy illegal guns?” I asked.

“You wouldn’t break the law Brother Jonathon!” Mike reproved me.

“That’s funny, because I really thought that I’d break a stupid law,” I said.

“Things have gotten so bad that the government is going to allow the formation of some private companies—part security guards for hire, part militia and part…

“I don’t know. We’d call it ‘Posse Comitatus’, but they don’t have that tradition in Africa.

“The denomination decided that we have enough places to guard that it would pay us to charter our own security company.

“But the last word is that some local officials got nervous and they persuaded the government to hamstring the militias.

“They aren’t to be allowed any automatic or semi-automatic rifles or shotguns and no high capacity pistols,” Mike said.

“So? What is the problem?” I asked.

“Brother Jonathon, you can’t expect men armed with bolt action rifles and pump shotguns to be effective against men armed with AK-47s and FN FALs.”

“Why not? Haven’t any of your firearms experts read Jeff Cooper? Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it and those who don’t read, understand and agree with the good Colonel are doomed to be stupid,” I said.

We got to discussing other things right after that and I’d largely forgotten about our conversation until several weeks later I got a call from the denomination headquarters in Memphis asking me to come down and talk to them.




******************* ********************** ******************************

Our church was historically a black church. Nowadays they stress that they’re “Multi-Cultural.”

I will say that they made me feel welcome enough that when I happened to visit, I decided to come back and eventually I became a member.

So here was the scene in Memphis:

I’m tall and fair and blond. I wear my hair as long as it will grow and I wear what folks nowadays call “Wolverine Sideburns.” I don’t mind dressing up, but ixnay on wearing a tie. I wouldn’t don a tie for a guaranteed ten-year contract as CEO of American Toyota. Ditto for tucking my shirttail into my britches. How that uncomfortable and demeaning custom came to be—I do not know.

The pretty secretary escorted me into a luxurious conference room. There was knotty pine paneling on the wall. I mean the kind made with individual planks, not that tacky sheet paneling. The carpet was black shag.

There were a couple Impressionist style still lives on the wall and the large conference table had about a three-inch thick top that seemed to be highly figured walnut. There were a slew of potential fancy gunstocks wasted in piecing that tabletop together.

There were six black men wearing expensive suits. They introduced themselves by name while pointedly omitting their titles and we shook hands all around.

Two of the men wore “Bishop’s Rings.” That’s a ring with a big ruby worn on the right index finger. Counting Mike, I’d spoken to three bishops in my life and these were the first Bishop Rings that I’d ever seen. They’re authorized but not required in the protocols.

Maybe I should explain. Some denominations have “Archbishops” and whatever. We only have the title of “Bishop”, because scripture doesn’t specifically authorize other titles. Notwithstanding, some bishops are much higher up the organizational chart than others. Memphis is a little “Bishop Intensive.”

All these fine gentlemen wore expensive suits. I had a turtleneck and a suit jacket, a Stetson hat and spit-shined cowboy boots. I generally stick to black. The reserve and dignity of the color suits me.

I hadn’t realized that I was coming for a job interview. It wouldn’t have mattered that much if I had.

One dude who was without a ring spoke up. Lets call him “Smith.” Even now there might be repercussions to using names.

“We’ve investigated you thoroughly. You spent a little over a year in the US Army before they gently kicked you out. Your father was a regionally ranked combat pistol champion, but your own competitive career was less than inspiring—downright mediocre.

“You spend about as much time between jobs as you do working and you still live at home at the age of twenty-eight.

“What makes you think that you’d be qualified to train and lead a security company?” Smith said.

He sounded peeved and contemptuous.

“Dude, it is like: watch how you speak to me if you don’t wish for this to degrade into a contest of close-quarter skills,” I told him.

I waved the others back to their seats.

“I’m calm and composed, just making a point. Words won’t offend me—within reason but I am rather sensitive to both tone and especially volume,” I assured them.

“I was not at all suited to military life. Be that as it may. No one has asked me if I even want this job. However, if I accept your offer I won’t be going to Nigeria as a soldier. I won’t be going to teach others to be soldiers,” I said.

“What will you teach,” Bishop One asked.

“Bushido,” I answered shortly.

“Now as to my shooting career: modern ‘Combat Shooting’ has degenerated into a game since my father’s heyday. He warned me about the current state of decline.

“I insisted on shooting each match as a martial arts test. I didn’t expect to win but each match was a valuable learning experience.

“Modern shooters and shooting trainers—as well as the vast majority of military planners are all a bunch of fools because they have discounted the teachings of Jeff Cooper—if they’re even aware of his doctrines at all.

“If you send me, I may live and I may die. I may succeed or I may fail. So long as I’m alive, my students will get a steady diet of Cooper.

“If that is acceptable, cool. If not, the sooner we wrap this up, the sooner that I can get on the road back to Evansville,” I told them.

I spent twenty minutes outside waiting for them to thoroughly hash it out. Then they called me back inside and offered me the job.

“We’re going to elevate you to Elder,” Bishop One told me.

“It will give you a bit more status and legitimacy over there.”

The idea of missions is to get the locals to where they can have their own Ministers, Elders and Bishops. Anything else seems patronizing. But with the very large number of missionaries the church was sending, some confusion resulted.

There were two semi-autonomous organizations—American missionaries and native Nigerians. That’s why I said that Mike was a “Bishop of Missionaries.”

Thing is, what with giving folks titles as inducements to volunteer to go or to stay, there had gotten to be far too many chiefs. Starting as an Elder would at least get me up to scratch in any hissing contests.

And I hadn’t even spent three years as a Minister first, passed “Go” or collected my two hundred dollars.

“If we make you an Elder, will you cut your hair?” Smith asked.

“How shall I put this? No! Is that clear enough?”

****************** ********************** *********************

One of my favorite places was the gun store.

Old man O’Conner owned the place. You’d have to look high and low to find a sourer or more misanthropic old reprobate.

The old man had largely retired about four years earlier and turned the day to day operation of the place over to his sons.

They didn’t quite hate everyone the way their old man did—I really think he even hated his sons—they just hated the vast majority of people.

The boys though were smarter and capable of being far better hypocrites than the old man could have ever been—even if he’d condescended to try.

They were all salesman’s smiles, super helpful and full of “Yes sir,” and “No sir,” to the customer’s face. Then when the place cleared out except for the regulars, the brothers would entertain us by describing the foul and often incestuous perversions that they ascribed to the departed annoyance.

Their abuse was monotonous, but it never failed to crack us up. Guess you could say we didn’t have too many sources of amusement back then.

Both the brothers studied martial arts diligently. Gerald was big into HEMA—Historical European Martial Arts—you know, two-handed swords, shields, bucklers, axes and so on.

His group only had five or six members. Maybe the way they gave newcomers the cold shoulder had something to do with it. I just say, “Maybe.”

At any rate, the gun store had been a home and there were rooms unused. Gerald turned one of the rooms into a sword and armor showroom—though I don’t think he’d ever sold anything to a customer.

Both of the brothers were into comic books, but it was Daniel who decided that if his brother could sell swords, then he was going to convert an unused bedroom and hallway into a comic book store.

Now old man O’Conner thought that swords and armor were useful as trotline sinkers and comic books were second-rate toilet paper. But he needed someone to run the store. God knows that he couldn’t hire anyone to do it for what he paid the boys.

The boys lived at home and got room and board and first crack at some delightful old guns whenever the store acquired them for a pittance and they did no manual labor. I don’t guess that they were too badly off.

So anyway, I went walking into the combined gun, knife, sword and comic book store.

“Norinco sent you a package,” Gerald said.

“I didn’t think that Norinco could import guns into the US,” Larry said.

Larry had been run over by an auto while he was in Colorado going to gunsmith school. He was a graduate of the Colorado School of Trades—a prestigious gunsmithing school.

He couldn’t make a living as a full-time gunsmith and the limp made it hard to do manual labor. It wasn’t that bad, but it ruled out carrying hod for eight hours a day, or something.

He was always trying to break into the gun writing business—and he had sold a few stories.

“Get this straight dudes. I am an authorized end-user who will accept delivery of a large number of these rifles when I get to Nigeria. Right now I’m waiting for some diplomatic wheels to turn, my passport to be delivered and so forth.

“In the meantime, the State Department has authorized me to receive samples—but the ATF says that I have to receive them through my local FFL holder.

“It’s best if you don’t talk about it outside of our little circle at all. The store doesn’t need the extra scrutiny,” I said.

The bolt-action rifle that Norinco had shipped me came as close to being the embodiment of Jeff Cooper’s Scout Rifle as any factory gun ever would.

The gun was in 7.63x39. Cooper wouldn’t be big on the caliber. I planned to use hand loaded cartridges though—soft point, boat-tailed partitioned spitzers loaded about three hundred FPS faster than standard AK ammo, but the gun could still use military 7.62X39 military ball in a pinch.

Cooper said that the Scout should weigh no more than three kilograms scoped and unloaded. That’s about six pounds and ten ounces for those who think in real units.

These rifles were a couple ounces over seven pounds, but they came with ten round detachable box magazines. Like the Enfield, the magazine wasn’t intended for reloads in the field. It would just make it easier for armorers to repair any sort of magazine flaw. They could accept standard AK magazines in a pinch, but handling would go to Hell in a hand basket.

They came standard with a ghost ring aperture and they were all drilled and tapped for a good but relatively inexpensive and fairly durable Tasco Scout Scope.

The bores were hard chromed and the outside finish was frosted hard chrome.

The rifles had seventeen inch barrels with an inch and a half long vortex flash hider. The stocks were a wee bit on the short side and the overall length was comfortably under Cooper’s one meter—a bit over thirty-nine inches in real units.

I tested the trigger pull. It was a bit rough, but it would improve somewhat as it wore in.

“What are you gonna do for an armorer over there?” Larry asked.

“Probably hire an American to travel,” I said.

“Take me!” Larry said.

“Hold on there!” Billy-Bob said.

He was six foot seven and looked like a sasquatch.

“I’m as good an armorer as Larry and better,” Billy-Bob said.

“I’m supposed to start with two hundred students in my first class. I’m gonna need some help. I see no trouble with taking both of you if I can get it approved,” I said.

A couple other guys spoke up. Wilson had been a fairly high ranked shooter in several disciplines before he’d retired from competition. Now he was in his forties and recently divorced and he was clamoring to go to Nigeria just like the twenty-something dudes.

“Dudes, I had no idea so many of my friends wanted to go to Nigeria.

“I am going over there to teach doctrinaire Cooper style shooting. I don’t want anyone confusing my students with Chapman Weaver, much less Isosceles.

“I don’t want anyone leading my students into heterodoxy.

“Wilson, you shoot Isosceles. Break the habit. I don’t want my students exposed,” I said.

“It may very well be better,” Wilson objected.

“I don’t care! I live by Cooper’s teaching and I’d rather die by them than switch if it came to that.”

“I have something else for you,” Gerald said.

A couple of recent acquisitions that I’d sent out to be customized.

It was a Smith and Wesson Model 27—a .357 with five-inch barrel and rounded butt and a newly nickeled Walther PP in .32 ACP along with several magazines.

I’d never owned one of the high end Model 27s. I had a Walther PP .32, but I wasn’t going to expose any of my old friends to risk of damage or loss on the Dark Continent.

The 27 was classic Skeeter Skelton though he wasn’t big on nickel, rounded butts or Mag-Na-Port. The .32 was just me.

“Not very doctrinaire,” Wilson remarked.

He was right. Cooper never stressed multiple guns as either hideouts or back-ups. Thing is, carrying more than one gun is fun, no matter what else it might be.

“The Nigerians tell me that the .45 ACP is a munition of war. So I’m going with 1911A1s in .38 Super from the Philippines. I’m going to carry my 1911A1 strong side and this is my back-up in a shoulder holster,” I explained.

Billy-Bob looked confused.

“You can shoot .38 Super from a .357 in a pinch,” Larry explained.

******************* ********************** ************************

I answered a knock at my door.

“Man in Black?”—Well I reckon.

This dude’s shirt was black too. His white tie was the only piece of clothing that he wore that wasn’t black.

“Can I come in,” he asked.

“Why not?”

“I could whip out some ID and lay it on you, but you know as well as I do that stuff can be faked fairly easily. Lets just take on faith that I’m legitimate—at least for the moment,” he said.

“Okay,” I allowed.

“You think that you’ll be leaving for Nigeria in about three weeks. It will be closer to nine or ten weeks. Everything isn’t quite in place yet and you’ll be delayed.

“You can’t have failed to notice that skids have been greased for you in a number of ways. Norinco sold you your rifles at fire sale prices because The Powers That Be dangled the possibility of their being able to peddle their wares in America once more under their noses.

“I don’t know what kind of carrot that they used on Rock Island Armory.

“There are people in high places in the US government that would like to see these private security firms prosper and stabilize the region.

“Yours isn’t the biggest or the most important of the new firms, but you’re positioned to be a player.

“I have a word to the wise: when you get to Nigeria, don’t put too much faith in MOSSAD operatives. Right now, they want you to succeed too. Whenever it becomes expedient though, they’ll throw you under a bus in a heartbeat. Hell, they never hesitate to cut their own people loose and accept their losses when it’s expedient,” my visitor said.

“What about US agents?” I asked.

“Everyone knows not to trust US clandestine operatives. Some folks think that MOSSAD has a kind of integrity though—maybe once, but not nowadays,” he said.

“I have a little gift for you—Pimsleur’s level one, two and three level courses in Hebrew. You could be over halfway through level two before you even leave.

“It goes without saying: knowing Hebrew is much more likely to save your life around MOSSAD operatives if they don’t know that you’re fluent.

“I’ll see you again in Nigeria. By the way, there are a couple or three other gifts for you once you are in country. Be sure and examine the packaging thoroughly,” he said.

“One question: why the ‘Man in Black’ costume?” I asked.

“It will make a better story when you write your memoirs—now won’t it?” he said with a smile.

I suppose.




.....RVM45

[223shootersc]

thanks for the hard work RVM45

[millwright]

Another story to keep up with.

BONUS!!!!!!!

[rvm45]

I'm pleased that no one has come forward to say that the story is screamingly improbable.

Do I think that anything like that will happen?

No.

Could it?

Yeah.

Right now folks are arming themselves in Nigeria—in outright defiance of the law—and by all accounts, doing a fair job of fighting off Boko Haram.

Can anyone say:

"Great Northfield Minnesota Bank Robbery"?

I was going to write on some of this yesterday. Needed to check some facts on Tropical Diseases and local geography.

Ended up surfing Google Maps and Wikipedia all day.




.....RVM45

[hamrad]

Hi RVM,

interesting concept and start. I look forward to reading Moar..

kev

[crf78112]

I was going to write on some of this yesterday. Needed to check some facts on Tropical Diseases and local geography.

Ended up surfing Google Maps and Wikipedia all day.




.....RVM45

[/quote]

Know the feeling well, I logged on to check the weather, that was 12 years ago.....

[rvm45]

Chapter Two






I don’t fly the fascist skies. I’d asked the denomination to try to book me passage on a freighter. They chose to charter a private jet for my friends and me instead.

Flying in a chartered jet with my friends as if we were all VIPs was less of a thrill than one might expect. I don’t fly at all well. I think that all the vaccines—including several experimental vaccines—that I’d taken were contributing to my queasiness. I felt even less airworthy than usual.

At least if the plane crashed and I died, I’d die as a whole man—fully armed. We were all authorized to carry in Nigeria. We didn’t have to pass through any metal detectors or submit to searches by hobnailed thugs on our side and we were meeting our Nigerian law enforcement liaison as soon as we landed. There was no compelling reason not to be armed.

Since I was not only white but also exceptionally fair, there was no question of me blending in while in Nigeria. I wore blue jeans instead of black for the first time in years. I had a psychedelic tie-dyed “T” shirt and I wore a loud Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned.

My big S&W .357 Magnum concealed fairly well in a shoulder holster under my left arm. I wore my .38 Super in a Summer Special on my right hip. My .32 Walther PP was in a smaller Summer Special in the appendix cross-draw position beneath my “T” shirt.

It’s hard to conceal a big Bowie very well but I had a couple Buck lock-backs, a couple of Cold Steel folders and a balisong. I also had a pair of brass knuckles. That’s ambiguous—I only had one, for one hand.

I was living the dream. I just wished that I wouldn’t feel as though I stood poised on the brink of nausea every time the plane did one of its ponderous side-to-side rolls.

I had looked forward to seeing a bit of Lagos in the flesh, but since our jet was chartered, we flew straight to the city of Yola where there was an airport. Then we had to drive a bit over a hundred miles to get to Jalingo.

Yola was a fair-sized city of over three hundred thousand—about the size of Louisville or Cincinnati. It really didn’t matter much how big it was because we didn’t linger.

We met a policeman and surprisingly he had badges for us—a heavy-duty brass star in a circle. Someone had a sense of humor. It was a fair copy of a Texas Ranger badge. It came in a case with a heavily laminated photo ID on the side opposite the badge.

My badge was nickeled and said: “Captain of The Guard”.

I was surprised how cordial the laws were towards us, but they’d been fighting against superior numbers and they thought of us as a reserve that they could call upon in the near future.

Nonetheless when our liaison caught a glimpse of my big .357 he blanched a wee bit.

The goggles that have come to be known as “Christian Glasses” are standard equipment on many African streets nowadays. They’re good quality eye protection and they’re airtight. A face full of acid might make one as ugly as all Hell, but the eyes would be spared. I’d managed to find myself a pair with mirrored lenses.

Actually, I had several pair with varying colored lenses—much like serious skeet shooters use.

The popularity of Christian Glasses is a sad commentary—not that people want to protect their eyes but because they feel the need to.

I had resolved not to appear in public without eye protection during my stay in Nigeria.

Still, I was a bit superstitious. I believed that it would be bad luck to have acid thrown into my face, even if my eyes were protected, so I was trying my best to be vigilant at all times.

Jalingo is the capital of the province of Taraba. It has a bit over a hundred thousand souls—roughly comparable to my hometown of Evansville. Jalingo is more sprawling and a good bit poorer than Evansville though.

Our compound was both South and East of Jalingo in the foothills of the Shebshi Mountain Range. The mountains are roughly comparable to our Smokey Mountains—I guess.

I’d travelled through our Smoky Mountains several times in a car, both as a child and driving myself as an adult. I’d never had the opportunity to explore the Smokies much on foot.

I looked over my new fief with some satisfaction. The brick walls were thirteen feet tall. There were towers on each corner and a walkway high enough up on the inner wall to let folks take up firing positions.

The grass and brush were too close to the walls at several points for my satisfaction and there were a few trees that needed to come down. We also wouldn’t have a three hundred yard rifle range or a pistol range until someone mowed a corridor and some dirt backstops were bulldozed into place.

There was a huge heavy-duty vault where the weapons were kept.

“Larry, I need you and Billy-Bob to work up a load for our rifles. I want it about three hundred feet per second faster than factory. I want each of you to grab four or five rifles and make sure the load is good for all of them.

“Once you settle on a load, set up several reloading stations and get some of the others to start cranking out 7.62x39.

“Once our mini ammo factory is cooking, start doing trigger jobs on these rifles. We’re going to need a bit over two hundred rifles soon. Get Dalen to help you. He’s a reasonably good amateur gunsmith,” I ordered.

The Nigerian Powers That Be started to get all poogly about the idea of us reloading.

I explained to them that once the barn door is stolen it is futile to lock the horse. Letting us train armed guards and not allowing us to reload was rather inane. My frantic protests over the computer—via computer cam—eventually wore them down.

There were nine of us straight from Evansville and five Nigerian men hired to help us—along with several Nigerian women.

“Friends, anytime that gun vault is open, I want armed men standing guard. Everyone needs to get in the habit of watching his six, but when you’re loading or gunsmithing you aren’t fully aware.

“We don’t have enough folk right now to mount a full guard when we sleep. Trying to would only divide our forces.

“I know that all of you have your own rooms, but until the students start arriving I want all of us to sleep in one corner of the barracks with an armed fire watch,” I told them.

How long should it take to turn men into not only marksmen but also an effective fighting force?

Cooper turned out gifted pistoleros in one week, but I wasn’t Cooper. Most of my students had never held a real gun before and they needed to master several weapons.

I really wanted three months but the brass “negotiated” me down to ten weeks. Still, that’s longer than Basic Training when I was in the US Army.

I adopted a time-tested military weasel—the “Zero Week”. I needed a fairly large labor force to get my facility up and operational and everyone wasn’t arriving all at once. Some of the earlier arrivals had three zero weeks plus a day or two by the time they started “Week One”.

******************** ****************** ************************

“Friends, we’re going to spend all too brief a time together.

“They say that men are either sheep or wolves. Sheep are weak, cowardly and clueless. They are largely powerless.

“Being a wolf doesn’t necessarily mean that one is cruel or that he preys on his fellow men. It does mean that you have teeth. It does mean that you are potentially dangerous

“Scratch ‘Potentially’. You will be dangerous.

“I cannot make warriors of any of you. That is the fruit of many years of diligent study and research. What I can do is try to put each of your feet firmly on the path—but you must walk it,” I lectured my first class.

“Those calisthenics and exercises—it takes months and years to really build exceptional strength—both in the firing support muscles and in fighting muscles

“The empty hand fighting techniques that we teach you: they say that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

‘That is true enough, but it is also true that a man with a poor plan who executes it enthusiastically will generally defeat a man half-heartedly following a grand and glorious plan.

“I strive to give you some reasonably good plans and teach you how to run them down someone’s windpipe.

“Yeah, some of you will meet a superior foe or you’ll simply luck out the wrong way.

“There is no disgrace in falling in battle—however inconvenient that dying may be for you at that precise moment in time.

“I’m going to teach Cooper’s system, but along the way were going to study some other subjects that Cooper ignored.

“I believe that being able to reduce your weapon to possession and then reassemble it helps you to become one with the weapon.

“I also believe that loading some of your own ammunition also gives insight.

“I believe that a sound knowledge of human anatomy helps a man in the process of becoming pistolero.

“This is a Christian enterprise. I think that you should have a firm grounding in the doctrines and scriptures. Otherwise it will be too easy to brainwash you if you’re captured.

“Memorization of anything is good mental disciple. We’ll memorize a number of Bible verses and other things.

“Okay, lets get started,” I said.

Two hundred people were far too many for me to teach at one time, even with a few helpers. I divided them up into four groups of a bit over fifty each—that was bad enough.

I taught group one and then two for about two hours each in the morning then later I often taught each of them for an hour or so in the afternoon.

The next day groups one and two practiced what I’d shown them the day before while I taught groups three and four.

Fortunately much of what I wanted my students to learn could be taught by others—reading the reading assignments aloud to them (because about half of them were poor readers) or teaching them anatomy for instance.

I started with the Modern Technique of the Pistol because pistol marksmanship is often the hardest to get across.

“Listen friends—these techniques were codified by Jeff Cooper in the middle of the twentieth century. Since then some folks have tried to ‘improve’ on the Good Colonel’s methods.

“If you ever encounter someone like that, put your fingers in your ears like I’m doing and shout like I’m doing…La! La! La!”

“Sensei, what if the man truly has a better method?” a student asked.

“That is all the more reason to shut him out. Quit believing in the Modern Technique and you cease to be a warrior or even a good person,” I explained.

************************ *************** ***************************

I was using my students as sentries as it were. I got a call that someone was seeking entrance at the main gate.

I wasn’t all that surprised to see my midnight caller in black. This time he seemed to be channeling Don Johnson from “Miami Vice”. He had on white pants and suit jacket along with a purplish pink “T” shirt. He had a friend along this time—a non-descript fellow with a dark complexion and raven hair.

“This is Levi, he’s with Mossad,” the man said. “By the way, I’m going by ‘Kelly’.”

“My friend has a vivid imagination,” Levi remarked. “I’m a chemical engineer consulting the Taraba officials about the possible construction of a fertilizer factory nearby.”

A Jew named “Levi”? It could happen, I’d even known one—but it almost sounded like the beginning of an ethnic joke.

I really didn’t care if they were representing MOSSAD, the Illuminati or CNN. It simply wasn’t relevant to my aims.

“How is it going?” Kelly asked.

I shook my head in bewilderment.

“I don’t understand it. I started them out with three weeks of pistol instruction—next week we start on rifles.

“All of them more than meet the minimum requirements for speed and accuracy, but they’re all clustered around the middle of the bell curve.

“None of them seem to grasp the incredible power of the pistol and none of them seem to experience the joy of pistolcraft and owning a fine pistol either,” I said.

“They’re African. Something about the African character seems to really groove on high firepower and lots of noise and smoke,” Kelly said.

“Africans aren’t the only ones. Have you seen an action movie lately? They spray. Most guns seem to have fifty round magazines disguised as twenty round ones and hitting one client per fifty-round magazine is good shooting indeed.

“But I’ve tried to stress from day one that only hits count and that firepower is hitting what you aim at, not peppering the landscape with near misses.

“It’s not so much that they don’t believe me. It is more like learning how it is truly done has taken all the joy out of the process,” I said.

“You should have your students learn the isosceles stance,” Levi said.

“Absolutely not!” I said. “Anyone who tries to subvert my students with heterodoxy will be thrown off the premises.”

“But it is better,” Levi said.

“I don’t concede that. However if you’re right, that is all the more reason to shield my students. If it works for someone and he adopts it…

“That will be one more shooter ruined.”

“I brought you something,” Kelly said and started extracting a rifle from a long floppy rifle case.

The rifle he pulled out was an object of great beauty.

“I know how you despise synthetic stocks,” Kelly said. “That is a 1903A3 Springfield sporterized and modified for long range shooting in the field.”

The rifle had a modest Monte Carlo stock of the fanciest grade of walnut that I’d ever seen. The standard trigger was replaced with a double set trigger and since two triggers left the trigger guard rather cramped the smith had replaced it with a double-barreled shotgun trigger guard.

“The gun is chambered in .308. You’ll probably run into more .308 than .30-06 nowadays. The bore is chromed. The scope is quick detachable in case you ever want to mount a Starlight scope,” Kelly said.

“Where would I get a Starlight?” I scoffed.

“There is one right here in my other package,” Kelly said.

I started to get a niggling suspicion.

“Who customized this gun?” I demanded.

“I don’t know,” Kelly said.

“The .308 and chrome lined barrels didn’t appear on the scene until the heyday of rifles like this one had come and gone,” I said.

“I put in an order for one to my organization. I told them that it would help me a great deal in developing an asset.

“A few weeks later they delivered the rifle to my specifications.

“Obviously we have armorers. I have never met any of them. I don’t know their names and I have no idea who built this for you,” Kelly said.

“You like the .32 Walther a great deal, don’t you?”

“I like the PP model. I wouldn’t give a dime for every PPK and PPK/S ever made,” I said.

“Why the .32 ACP?”

“The .32 ACP is a better stopper than either the .380 or the 9mm,” I said.

“Better than the 9mm? How so?” Kelly asked.

“Well, it didn’t used to be—but then I said so. Now it is,” I said.

“Why don’t you have a silencer for it?”

I shrugged.

“I really don’t like the idea of sacrificing a quarter inch of bore for threading for the suppressor. I know that is a minor issue, but it turns me off to the whole idea,” I said.

Kelly reached into his case and extracted a custom Walther PP. It had an aftermarket barrel that extended about a half inch past the end of the slide and it was threaded on the outside of the barrel.

A barrel isn’t a drop-in part on a Walther. Someone had put a bunch of custom work into the little gun.

Of course it came with it own very professional looking suppressor.

I got to thinking about it after Kelly and Levi left.

It wasn’t all that surprising that an agent in the field would have access to a great deal of money. What was baffling was how Kelly seemed to know so much about my taste in firearms.

Someone had been listening very closely to my rants and ravings.

The best bet was the gunstore. I freely expounded my weapon preferences to my small circle of “friends” such as they were.

Then I remembered what Kelly had said the last time I’d met him.

“Be sure and examine the packaging thoroughly,” he’d said.

He’d left the little leather briefcase that held the Starlight, the custom Walther and the suppressor.

I didn’t want to ruin the neat little case but it turned out that I didn’t have to.

There was a reasonable clever false panel and inside were three sets of fake ID including passports. There was also a plain brass badge.

“Sometimes you might want to go armed without worrying about the gendarmes busting you—and a Captain's badge bring’s more attention than you may desire.

“Don’t put all of your baskets around one egg,” the short message concluded.




.....RVM45

[hamrad]

Thank you RVM.

[rvm45]

Chapter Three





What was it that Cooper said? Something about how amateurs will work far harder to win a small silver cup than professionals will to perfect a skill that could save their lives.

It occurred to me that perhaps my students weren’t performing, as I’d liked them to because I’d turned shooting into a chore rather than a joy.

Three weeks in, I had planned to have a small ceremony and present everyone with a nice diploma that said that they were certified with the handgun. I decided to turn it into a fiesta instead.

We had a MIG Welder and some scrap steel on hand. I had a couple of my maintenance people weld up some falling plates and dueling trees. I also had them make me up a bar-be-que grill big enough to turn a whole steer.

I ordered some beverages—actually, I ordered far more beverages than we’d need to drink. I had a hard time convincing the grocer that I wasn’t interested in either quality of the beverages or their flavors—but I did want to be sure to get an assortment of bright colors.

I was a bit reluctant to waste good meat in a land of hunger, but the local butchers assured me that I wouldn’t botch much if anything beyond salvage with my plan.

******************** ************************** **********************

The celebration was a big success.

I had set up a few demonstrations at the outset of the festivities. First of all I dropped a couple big steers with a single shot to the head.

I’ve seen big bulls dropped with a .22 LR or a captive bolt gun powered by a blank cartridge. Dropping them with a rather hot .38 Super round was nothing astonishing. To my students though, it was a revelation.

After I shot each steer, he was hoisted into the air and I bled and beheaded him.

I’d cautioned the students not to turn away, because warriors must be inured to the sight of bloodshed and death.

It had always fascinated me seeing how a butcher could dismember a big carcass with a blade that was downright flimsy. I hoped the sight of me casually beheading each steer would make a similar impression on the trainees.

The easy way that a kill-floor butcher takes off the front legs was always an eye-opener for me as well. Cut completely through the skin all around the elbow. You can pretty much do it with one circling motion.

Then cut through the lateral ligaments on the inside of the joint and apply pressure. It will break completely loose with only the external lateral ligaments still attaching it to the upper arm—literally hanging by a thread.

I wanted to do more than demonstrate that I had the basic skills of a kill-floor butcher though.

“Friends, that steer’s arm was much thicker than any of yours. In a fight, I’d be highly unlikely to use that particular attack. It allows too many counters.

“I want you to realize though, that all knives and other edged weapons are always loaded.

“A man who attacks you with a knife is highly dangerous.

“I also want you to realize that when you have the knife in your hands, you need to act calmly and efficiently. There is no need to go about it like someone trying to kill a snake in high grass,” I told them.

Next I had several hogs between about one fifty and two hundred pounds set up. The pigs had been humanely slaughtered and then scalded and scrapped. They were attached upright to a plywood panel to mimic a man’s upright stance.

“Friends, a pig isn’t a man. Their skulls are noticeably thinner and their bones actually have fat incorporated into them. The bones are strong enough for the pig’s business, but they tend to be softer than a man’s bones and to mush rather than shatter when hit by a bullet.

“Nonetheless, a pig of the right size is a fair approximation of a man. Watch and learn,” I told them.

I went down the line.

This little piggy got a double tap to the sternum. This little piggy took a five round burst to the guts. This little piggy had his brains blown out. The last pig took one shot to one ham and then three shots to the other ham.

I was anxious to have a good shattered leg bone to show the troops.

Each pig was cut up enough to let everyone see the bullet’s destruction path clearly—then the butchers set about salvaging the meat.

I didn’t envy the butchers that had to clean the gut-shot pig, but it’s no worse than field dressing a gut-shot deer or boar. I’d instructed my crew to discard the gunshot hams—simply because bone fragments could be a cause for concern. The rest of the pork was going to be a good portion of our bar-be-que.

Next I had an old car door and a scrap freezer and I demonstrated exactly what kind of penetration could be expected from the .38 Super.

Finally I shot some falling plates and some colorful three-liter carbonated beverages.

I couldn’t afford enough bottles for everyone to shoot some, but I set up several elimination style tournaments—Falling plates, bowling pin shoots, string shoots and dueling tree contests.

The winners all met in a contest to see who could shoot several soft drink bottles the fastest.

Now Billy-Bob had a long barreled .500 S&W Magnum revolver that he was very fond of and believe it or not, he’d brought five .44 Magnums to Africa with him.

He put on an exhibition and five “lucky” student volunteers got to shoot a round through the big .500.

Wilson shot a seven and a half inch Ruger Super Blackhawk .44 Magnum from standing and scored twenty-two out of twenty-five shooting at standard silhouettes at standard distances.

It took me five double action shots from my .357, from standing, to knock over one of the two hundred yard rams that Wilson had left standing—though I hit it twice.

“Your pistols aren’t nearly as good for long distance shooting as Wilson’s .44 Magnum. They’re not even as good as my .357.

“I want you to come away with two realizations from this though,” I told them.

“First of all, a pistol—any pistol, whether yours or your opposition’s—can be used effectively on occasion, well outside its ordinary range.

“Second, we start rifle training Monday. Try to get in some one hundred and fifty and two hundred yard pistol shooting this weekend. It will really make you appreciate your rifle’s greater reach.

“O and third, you might have noticed that I didn’t thumb c*** my revolver. I wouldn’t thumb c*** a double action revolver if I were convinced that only by doing so, could I save my life,” I told them.

That may take some explanation.

A man who shoots a double action revolver both ways must make a decision each time he fires which slows his best speed down a few hundredths of a second.

Mel Tappan said that for someone who views his weapon purely as a “Sporting Piece” this is acceptable, but not for someone who may be called upon to use his revolver as a weapon.

But as a Warrior, every firearm that I own is at least a potential weapon.

That reminds me of “Hunters and Sportsmen”. That was a term of opprobrium that came into use in the mid 1980s and then fell quickly out of use.

I think the term may have fell out of use because in speech it is difficult to put quotes around the term.

A “Hunter and Sportsman” pretends that the only use that his or anyone else’s privately owned firearms have is in the game fields or target range. He also pretends that all gun people are exactly like him. He refuses to recognize that folks who think of their guns as a means of self-defense even exist. Ostensibly, self-defense doesn’t exist in his mental landscape.

My father told me about a conversation that he had with one of these Fudds back in the ‘80s and had pondered many times since.

“They should pass a law that all firearms be kept under lock and key with the ammo also under lock and key but in a different location,” Elmer Fudd said.

“That would prevent all in-home firearms accidents,” Fudd added.

“So how are you going to defend yourself against a forced break-in?” my father asked Fudd.

“I never think about that,” Fudd said piously.

“Think about it and get back to me,” my father said.

After a ten or fifteen second pause:

“I’m sorry but I cannot think about that,” Fudd said.

“A warrior thinks of such things often,” my father said.

“I don’t know what a ‘warrior’ is. You are either naively romantic or being deliberately stupid,” Fudd said.

What fascinated my father was the fact that Fudd obviously had a very clear understanding of what a warrior was. One cannot be so consistently anti-warrior without a very clear notion of what one is opposing.

Now I know that there are combat revolver shooters who disagree with me…

To me though, thumb-cocking a double action revolver is a shibboleth of the “Hunter and Sportsman”…

And no, I wouldn’t dishonour my weapon and myself that way, or any way, to save my life.

I tried hard to inculcate my ideals into my students.

Finally, Larry showed off a silenced Nagant revolver he had.

Most revolvers can’t be effectively suppressed, but because of a design peculiarity the old Nagant is an exception. But suppressors are rather hard to acquire legally in the States.

Larry had brought a Nagant revolver to Nigeria along with all the top quality materials for a quality suppressor. He was proud to show off his handiwork to the students.

I’d brought Billy-Bob and Larry along as gunsmiths. I’d insisted on a modest size Chinese lathe and mill. Larry, never one to leave things to chance had brought along his own cheap ten-inch lathe and a bench mill from America as well.

Larry and Billy-Bob along with four good Nigerian machinists that I’d hired worked in the armory full-time. Three or four of the Americans that I’d brought with me—along with several students—worked in the armory at least part time.

My people were paid exorbitant wages by local standards and some of them were accomplished barterers and scroungers. They had knocked one wall out and expanded the armory. They’d got me to requisition some extra gear…

And the upshot was that I had little or no idea what my armory was up to.

********************** ********************* **************************

The following six weeks were uneventful.

I spent three weeks stressing rifle marksmanship, though pistol marksmanship and hand-to-hand was not completely absent.

I stressed two rules of rifle marksmanship.

A reasonably good rifleman can hit whatever he can see—out to the limits of his rifle’s accuracy.

The priority is then to learn to hit faster.

The second principle that I stressed was that any kind of “Cheating” is allowed and encouraged.

“If you can get Closer, get closer. If you can get steadier, get steadier.”

Most of my students would either be manning a gate, weapon at port arms or manning a post on a barricade.

I stressed “Foxhole Supported”, the student’s choice of kneeling or “rice paddy prone”—a supported squatting position—and off-hand. I reckoned that a good many reactive shots would be taken from standing.

I looked at the student’s rifles as two hundred and fifty yard rifles with occasional use out to three hundred. We did some shooting as far away as four hundred yards, largely to show how hard it was to hit anything and also, to give some hope of hitting in a desperation situation.

The extra three-hundred feet per second and the slightly better ballistic coefficient of our custom loads gave the rounds some extra sting and flatter shooting inside two-fifty and helped a bit beyond that.

But custom reloads might not always be available.

We shot some standard military ball rounds too, just to get a feel for how they shot.

Hitting anything at night beyond spitting distance is problematic. One can’t see either scope or iron sights.

There are Starlight scopes, but they are expensive, fragile and require batteries—and they’re ill suited for reactive use inside fifty or a hundred yards.

It was cheaper to equip each guard one of those good quality Remington 870 clones that the Russians were turning out.

Most of the time, I’d tell someone with a shotgun to use ghost ring aperture sights, get a rifled barrel and use single ball loads. Think of it as a close range, very big-bore pump rifle.

For night work though, I went with screw-in open chokes and buffered and plated 00 buckshot—the 12 pellet standard length cartridge. The ghost ring sights were still there but the shotgun was taught as a rifle that should be aimed, but needn’t be aimed too precisely.

I also threw in some work with a screw-in extra full choke and buffered and plated BB shot for indoor use.

I didn’t stress the shotguns much.

We started learning simple disarms and weapon retention strategies. We practiced very basic small unit tactics—fire, maneuver and get close enough to lob a grenade.

No, we weren’t authorized to have grenades—but our opposition would probably utilize them and I wanted my students to know how getting into grenade range is executed in terms of tactics.

We did paintball attacks, close range drills with airsoft guns and even squirt guns.

Everyone got to go through a tear gas chamber and experienced mace and pepper spray to the face—at different times, of course. Everyone was also tasered once.

Enduring pain toughens and I didn’t want such tactics to take my people totally by surprise.

Soon enough, my students were ready for graduation. Some of them were going to where they’d have to put their life and limb on the line.

I wasn’t at all happy with what I’d been able to teach them. I wasn’t a world-class authority, but there were so many things that I hadn’t even had time to mention in passing.

But training to be a warrior is a life-long commitment. Hopefully I’d set their feet firmly on the right path.

*********************** ********************* ********************

The last couple weeks we’d trained with a camera crew shooting our training.

I wasn’t very keen on the idea, but both the Nigerian government and my denomination seemed to think the publicity would have a positive effect.

It wasn’t my call, but I did manage to get some concessions on equipment and a few other things in return for allowing the film to be shot.

It started out as a Nigerian affair, but then they brought in some consultants who also worked as freelancers for “National Geographic” much of the time. The result was a two-hour feature to be aired worldwide.

They had excerpts from several interviews with some of the students, the other Americans and I had more face time than anyone else.

I wasn’t too concerned about the terrorists copying our methods. They seemed far too much the “Primitive Petes” for that.

I did object to bringing our school to their attention and giving them clear images of some of our people—especially me.

I insisted that all interviewees wear their Christian Glasses for a bit of anonymity.

Me? I wore my mirrored Christian Glasses.

******************** ********************** ********************

My “friend” Kelly showed up with the large crowd of diplomats that attended our graduation.

“Damn dude, ixnay on the publicity,” he chided.

“What choice do I have, if I want to stay on as head instructor? I feel like I’m doing something good here,” I shrugged.

“Be extra cautious about watching your six once that hits the airwaves. The ‘National Geographic’ film may not air for a year or more. The one-hour condensed Nigerian version will be out before the week is out,” Kelly said.

************************* ****************** **********************

The regional Nigerian bishop also came to the graduation. We had a conference afterward.

“We’re very pleased with what you’ve done here,” he told me and presented me with a necklace with orange coral beads—each one about a half inch long and as big around as my trigger finger.

“That is a chief’s necklace. You are a chief of sorts here,” he said.

“You graduated two hundred and seventeen people today,” He added.

“We had a few drop out along the way,” I said.

“Can you train a bit over four hundred in the next cycle?”

“Two hundred had me stretched very thin,” I said.

“You can keep one fifty man platoon plus—o say ten of the supernumeraries,” the bishop said.

“This school is a valued resource and you need to mount a full-time guard. Also, shouldn’t some of your more advanced students be able to function as teacher’s aides like they have in colleges?” he argued.

“We’re also going to hire those three friends of yours that didn’t quite make the cut last time. We’ve located a certified gunsmith and a couple of young men who fit the profile that you gave us.

“You are also authorized to add a dozen Nigerians,” he continued.

Seeing the look on my face, he explained further.

“We need to spread the wealth around,” he said.

“That will further cement our ties to the community.”

“If I must hire Nigerians, I want them legally qualified to be armed. If we’re attacked they can help us repel boarders.

“If I’m going to get more armory help, I’m going to need another lathe and mill—a little better quality this time—a couple more heavy-duty bench grinders and a few other pieces of equipment,” I insisted.

I had no idea what kind of waiting time that there was for the lathe and mill—but more is always better—especially if I was going to take on a couple or three more local machinists.

“We’re also going to add some canine units—mostly trained attack dogs for guard work, but also some tracking dogs.

“Say a dozen American dog trainers and maybe thirty or so Nigerians. They’re training dogs and simultaneously training Nigerians to be dog handlers.

“The first batch of trainees will be graduates of another Security Training center, but you can work in your own graduates for all the subsequent groups.

“That will help you keep uniformity in the area,” the bishop said.

“What type of dog?” I asked.

“Rottweiler’s for security and Bloodhounds for training,” he replied.

“No neutered dogs,” I said.

“That is standard practice,” he objected.

“Anyway, it isn’t up to you. Leave such decisions to experts.”

“I don’t care about spaying, but so long as I’m in charge here there will be no castration or castrated animals.

“I’ll be happy to resign right now. I reckon potential employers will line up to hire me since you’ve made me so well known. Then you can try to find someone else to run this multi-tasking nightmare,” I said.

“Alright. By the way, don’t be so quick to resign. We’re raising your salary by one third. It will take you awhile to match that salary,” he said.

“And my men?” I asked.

We haggled, but I negotiated a fifteen percent raise for all my people—Nigerians and Americans alike.

******************** ***************** ********************

Things went smoothly for awhile. I included more competition and fun type shooting drills from the beginning. I lectured while my assistants circulated to give hands-on coaching and correction.

I even managed to get over into the dog training area often enough to learn something about training. I nagged and wheedled a Bloodhound puppy from the trackers and he was my constant companion.

I think that I had improved noticeably as a teacher since my first class.

Word got back to me that most of my first crop of students had been hired out to guard wealthy men’s compounds. All at once the denomination was seeing the security firms as potentially very lucrative “For Profit” enterprises.

There is nothing wrong with profit or being wealthy so long as one is honest. I was a bit concerned with the schools, churches and orphanages that left unprotected.

Surely though, I told myself, at least some of my graduates would be put to such uses. The faster that I could saturate the market for rich men’s guards the quicker other things would get covered.

We’d had the sixth week celebration and were well into the eighth week of the course when things changed drastically.

******************** ********************* ****************

I’ve found over the years, that one very good man to be on good terms with is the cook.

I’m not talking about how he might slip you an extra baked potato from time to time.

A good cook tends to be cleaver and a head cook is also reasonably good at social engineering. Cooks are on first name basis with many folk. Sometimes informal conferences take place over coffee, in the dining hall between meals.

I always get along well with cooks. I always keep my good friends “Please” and “Thank You” close at hand and there is almost always something in a meal worth complimenting.

Our head cook was named “Dumaka”—“Helping Hand” in English. He invited me to come to his home and meet his family.

That was a bit of a wake-up call for me.

I was here to help the Nigerians, but I’d been so focused on my job that I hadn’t taken the time to really get to know any of them. I tried hard to show respect and look out for evidence of any unintentional cross-cultural slights—but that was the whole extent of it.

“Dumaka, I would be honoured to meet your family. However, the rules state that we must travel in pairs for security reasons.

“I’ll have to ask one of my lieutenants.

“That brings up the topic—I have a modest sized bull’s-eye on my back. Being in my company carries a certain risk…”

********************* ******************** *********************

“Dumaka has three marrying age daughters that he’d like you to meet,” Billy-Bob laughed.

“Still, getting out will do both of us some good. Sure, I’ll be happy to go along with you,” he said.

***************** ****************** **********************

The three of us: Billy-Bob, Dumaka and me were walking along the dirt road leading to Dumaka’s house when three vans and a couple of land rover type vehicles rolled up.

Dudes wearing scarf’s around their faces and carrying AK-47s, Beretta pistols and PPSh machine pistols came swarming out of the vehicles like folks doing a fire drill.

Well all right then. These dudes get off on attacking the weak and the unprepared. I was neither.

The “Hagakure” says:

“A certain person was brought to shame because he did not take revenge. The way of revenge lies in simply forcing one’s way into a place and being cut down. There is no shame in this. By thinking that you must complete the job you will run out of time. By considering things like how many men the enemy has, time piles up; in the end you will give up. No matter if the enemy has thousands of men, there is fulfillment in simply standing them off and being determined to cut them all down, starting from one end. You will finish the greater part of it. “

I wasn’t in this for revenge—except the preemptive kind.

I drew my 1911A1. I saw a perfect target in the head of one of the gunmen. I took the shot. Then I started working my way down the line, giving each man a double tap to the sternum.

No one had ever suggested that I was one of the world’s best combat pistol shooters, but I wasn’t bad. Both the experience of teaching and getting in plenty of practice almost every day had sharpened my skills considerably—as had the knowledge that I was in a dangerous position.

I was down to four rounds in my pistol and I’d dropped four of them, when one of them got close enough to spray me down with capsaicin. My eyes were protected but my face felt like it was on fire and I struggled to breath.

He was a great broad shouldered beast of a man and he followed up the pepper spray attack by trying to pull me into a great bear hug.

I brought the butt of my pistol down hard on his forehead—once, twice and then three times.

He fell away with his skull partially smashed in.

I emptied my pistol into a dude who was still standing and then I ducked behind a tree trunk and did a speed reload.

You’re not supposed to shoot it until the slide locks back—but I’ve never understood why that is such a major concern.

I released the slide and I had ten more rounds on tap.

I had plenty of magazines in reserve, but I was running out of time to shoot them. I leaned out from cover just enough to shoot around the tree trunk and quickly emptied another magazine.

I was shooting one bullet per terrorist. I’d probably shot several more than once in the fast moving chaos. Otherwise there would hardly be anyone that I hadn’t reached out to touch yet. Just because someone is hit doesn’t mean that they’re stopped.

The gunmen started hosing my tree trunk. I think that they emptied at least one of those seventy-six round PPSh magazines into the tree along with two or three thirty round AK magazines.

These dudes were radical. At first they’d acted like it was an abduction. Now they were acting as if it was a high-firepower assassination.

I reloaded once more, dropping the magazine carelessly on the ground. To Hell with that magazine!

Then they started throwing grenades and shooting RPGs at my tree. One of the RPGs took a hefty bite out of the tree. I think that if I’d still been there that I’d have absorbed quite a blast.

I had seen a hand grenade land far too near to me for comfort and I’d taken three fast steps farther away from the road and then thrown myself flat.

“Give your ass to the blast,” they taught me in the US Army.

It had worked reasonably well this time around.

When I rose to my feet I was just a bit dizzy. My ears were ringing. Blood poured from both my nostrils and my goggles had been knocked askew.

Miyamoto Musashi said that it is false to die with a weapon still undrawn.

I reset my goggles and drew my S&W .357 Magnum left-handed. I strode back toward the road meaning to put an end to it—one way or another.

The next two or three seconds was a fast-firing white-hot blur. By then the terrorist were either fled or down and my people had arrived—having ran the whole way from the compound.

Billy-Bob was dead. He’d been carrying a six-inch Smith and Wesson .44 Magnum under each arm. He’d emptied one and then drawn the other. The empty revolver was shoved firmly into the front of his pants. The one lying on the ground had three cartridges yet unfired.

Dumaka had a three-inch round butt Smith and Wesson .38 Special—for which he’d only received cursory training—but he’d managed to get off two rounds before he was nearly cut in two with a close range full-auto barrage.

My vision was swimming, but I set eyes on Wilson.

“Load these bodies and weapons into these vans and get us all back to the compound,” I said.

“Don’t you need to go to the hospital,” he shouted.

“Compound!” I repeated as firmly as possible and then the pain in my head and the waves of nausea took me.





......RVM45

[hamrad]

nice story telling again RVM

regards

Kev

[rvm45]

Chapter Four






“There is a Nigerian police official here along with a dozen troopers. They say that they want to speak to you,” the sergeant of the guard told me over the ground phone.

“Let him in along with four of his henchmen. Make the others stay outside. Bring him to my office. I want six guards and a corporal escorting them. While you’re at it, put the compound on Condition Orange,” I ordered.

“What if they refuse to stay outside?” the sergeant asked.

“Make them stay outside,” I repeated.

A few minutes later a fellow in a uniform who looked more like a soldier in dress uniform than a law came striding into my office.

“This is a very bad thing,” he said and asked me for my account.

I told him as briefly as possible.

“This is a very bad thing,” he repeated.

“There were thirteen bodies. Our experts tell us that as many as seven or eight more may have died from their wounds based on the amount of blood that they left behind,” he said.

“Experts” my rosy red derrière! The Nigerian government had requested a team of American FBI forensics people be loaned to them.

“Why did you compromise the crime scene by moving it all here?” he asked.

“The bodies wouldn’t have gotten left alone if I’d left them behind. The terrorists might have come back to claim them. The villagers might have moved them for any number of reasons. Wild animals would have fed on them.

“I thought it was for the best,” I said.

“This is a very bad thing,” he said for the third time.

“Most of your victims were no more than twelve or thirteen years old,” he said.

“How did you know that they meant to attack you? Perhaps you were too ready to employ lethal force?” he said.

“The vehicles screeched to a halt in front of us and men with their faces hidden by scarves piled out of the vehicles clutching AKs and PPSh machine pistols,” I said.

“I didn’t need an engraved invitation,” I added.

“You gunned down children,” he reproved.

I shrugged indifferently.

“They shouldn’t have taken up arms against me and mine,” I said.

“I’d like for you to come to Jalingo with me for further debriefing,” he said.

“Ain’t gonna happen,” I told him.

“I insist,” he said.

“Insist all you want. I ain’t goin’,” I reiterated.

“Place this man under arrest,” he told his troopers.

They reached for their sidearms only to be greeted by the sight of multiple 1911A1 muzzles.

“Take their pistols. Tie their hands with zip locks and escort them to the gate,” I told my sergeant.

I needn’t have kept their pistols or bound their hands, but I was deliberately adding insult to injury.

When I’d agreed to come to Nigeria I’d resolved never to go to a third world gaol if I could avoid it. Torture, deprivation and possible maiming weren’t on my list of things to experience.

Politicians and the denomination both might be willing to throw me under the bus if it would calm the situation. My training center was rapidly becoming an institution, but it could go on without me at this point.

Hell, it might enhance the school’s reputation that its first headmaster was imprisoned or perhaps executed for being too brutally effective. They might even beat their breast and cry:

“My bad!”

They might do that—at some future date. If they did, it would be too late to do me any good.

I called a full assemblage.

“Y’all are within four days of graduating. This situation could get ugly very quickly.

“Anyone who doesn’t want to get caught up in this struggle, step forward. I’ll give you your certificate and graduate you a few days early,” I told them.

I was surprised that only a bit over two-dozen stepped forward.

“Alright, the rest of you will resume training. I want a detail made up to go into town immediately and lay in whatever supplies you think are prudent. We’re unlikely to have to endure a long siege. Then again, you never know.

“Double the guard and put them on high alert,” I said.

I thought that the government was unlikely to blame me in public while admitting that they were largely impotent to lay hands upon me.

I also thought that they were unlikely to implement a Waco style “Remember The Alamo” type scenario—but I wasn’t positive.

Eventually they might feel forced to declare me absolved of wrongdoing and it would be difficult to crawfish from that. Once that happened, I planned on being on the first plane home. If the government were taking this track with me, I’d pretty much shot my bolt in this country anyway.

There was an excluded middle that I wasn’t fully considering though.

Yeah, I thought that they might try to quietly off me. I hadn’t expected a government-sponsored attack on the compound by terrorist forces.

********************* ******************** ***********************

Life went on at the compound. My second class graduated and the denomination had lined up another four hundred and fifty students.

They apparently weren’t in the loop or they’d have cut us off—or maybe not. They might have been pondering how to turn me over without disrupting production.

I don’t know that anyone in the denomination would be that Machiavellian—but neither would I have been surprised.

At any rate, I unilaterally declared that I was keeping another twenty-six graduates since my need for security had grown.

I still started off with pistols, but I worked in a bit of rifle work—particularly foxhole supported—from zero week. If my students needed to man the ramparts, I wanted them to have some familiarity with the rifle.

All the emphasis on aimed pistol fire would only reinforce the rifle marksmanship fundamentals. I would ordinarily have liked to save the rifle’s ability to reach far beyond reasonable pistol distance as a nice surprise for my students—but things are rarely ideal in life.

Thirteen days into the first third of the training cycle, the terrorists attacked.

They didn’t attack us directly at first. Instead they attacked the village. It was a good tactic—for cowards. It forced us to either sit on our hands and watch the village folk slaughtered—or we could sacrifice the protection of our walls and fixed firing positions to engage the terrorists in a more equal contest.

It was a pity for them that I’d foresaw this move.

I had fifty villagers armed with 12 gauge single shots and a week of intensive instruction as to their use. A single shot shotgun isn’t ideal against AK armed terrorists, but it isn’t inconsequential either.

There were over a score of other guns in the village, ranging from .22 LRs to a couple M1 Carbines from God knew where.

That wasn’t all though. I had a dozen of my best shooters in sniper’s positions all around the small village and another eighteen in specially reinforced and hidden strong points throughout the village.

As the terrorists came into the village shouting and hosing the homes with AK fire they were met with a rather feeble barrage of 00 Buckshot pellets. I think over half of my single shot people lost their nerve and never fired. Half those left were too rattled to wait until someone was in range and then aim before firing. None of them did a really fast job of reloading.

That was about what I’d figured—but then a dozen sharpshooters with suppressors on their rifles started mowing terrorists down. The men with the hidden firing ports were also used suppressors.

These fellows were used to coming in and cowing everyone into submission with the shock and awe of fast firing weapons. They weren’t used to armed resistance much less highly effective return fire.

I don’t know how many casualties they were prepared to accept—but I wagered that it was less than a conventional military unit.

I think that only about a third of my sniper’s victims were in the vanguard. They were getting more shots at REMFs than at the front line troops. That was cool though. Every terrorist down was protein for our side.

When they dropped terrorists on the streets of the village though, everyone noticed.

There’s an old chestnut. Imagine if every soldier in the army was issued ten bullets. Let us further suppose that each soldier managed to kill at least one man with his ten bullets. The war should be over.

I had thirty men in and around the town. They averaged about three hostiles terminated per shooter—plus the dozen or so men that the shot-gunners had killed. There were probably another twenty or thirty walking wounded who’d been hit with a single buckshot or two—out where the patterns opened way up and buckshot had lost much of its velocity.

When they say an army is “Decimated”—it is rim-wrecked. But most folks think that means something like ninety-five percent casualties. No—“Deci-Mate”—it means ten percent casualties.

The terrorists had attacked in surprising force, but we’d killed over twenty five percent of their effectives.

Then when they started to retreat, we set off some primitive black powder claymores that we’d set up along probable lines of retreat and killed a few more and wounded far more than we killed outright.

Wilson was an electronics whiz and a HAM radio enthusiast. He’d set the compound up with several small radio controlled “Quadcopter” surveillance drones—only maybe they should have been called “Octocopters” since they had eight rotors.

The gadgets were too expensive and replacement parts too hard to get for us to keep them in the air at all times, but as soon as shots were fired, Wilson and some of my permanent staff had some of the drones in the air and headed to the scene.

I watched much of the brief battle on one of the three-color monitors.

I hadn’t lost anyone on the ground. There were about twenty villagers killed and twice that many wounded. The terrorists had spotted one of my snipers and shot him out of his tree.

“Tell the villagers to head for the next village with their shotguns for protection. Bring anyone who can’t travel here. Burn the village. We’re leaving nothing for the looters.

“Get yourselves back here,” I ordered.

The village had no name. It hadn’t been there before. It had sprung up as a result of the nearby guard academy and now it was gone.

The people were all so glad to be part of the high-paying circus that we brought with us and they smiled at all of us as if they’d just won a big lottery.

What the Hell else could I have done though?

I came to teach people to defend themselves from coercion. If you resist you may be hurt. You may be killed—or worse yet, maimed. However, if you don’t resist oppression you can still die—and the death of your self-esteem is a dead certainty.

I hadn’t come on a fool’s errand to make these people invincible and invulnerable in battle. I came to teach them how to give a good account of themselves—and they had.

We spotted occasional troopers skulking through the bush the next couple of days, but they tried to stay dark.

On the fifth day after the battle of the village, they attacked in force. There must have been almost two thousand of them. I hadn’t known that there were that many hard-core armed militants in the whole country.

There was a clear-cut firing zone of at least four hundred yards around the compound.

The mujahideen set up mortars on the edges of the clearing and started to bombard us.

I’d puzzled how we could combat mortars without any heavy-duty weapons of our own.

Fortunately both labor and materials were cheap. I’d had them build another double column of brick five foot tall around the outside periphery—about thirty inches away from the first wall—and I’d had it filled with rammed earth.

Sure, it made a small stepping-stone for would-be wall climbers, but if the wall of lead that should keep gatecrashers at arm’s length had petered out then we were already in deep doo-doo.

It prevented mortar or RPG rounds from attacking the wall’s base. It was far less likely that a mortar round would just happen to intersect with the wall on its way down—though it could happen. I didn’t think that the terrorists would concentrate enough RPG rounds on a given spot on the wall just to make a random hole, with no real prospect of bringing a whole section down.

That left the problem of mortar rounds falling inside the compound. There was really only one solution to that—sandbags overhead.

About a third of the elevated walkway around inside of the fence had crude but sturdy scaffolding with multiple layers of sandbags overhead. I preferred my people spread evenly, but while under mortar barrage we could afford to have them clumped together a bit.

There were enough sandbagged bunkers for folks who weren’t on the walls.

Mortar rounds and RPGs are far more expensive than rifle bullets. Not only do they cost more up front, but also they impose a far higher weight tax for people who must transport them on foot.

I had hopes that they couldn’t bombard us for long.

Larry and Billy-Bob had been working on something before Billy-Bob’s demise. They were two bolt action rifles chambered in .50 BMG, but they were more than that. Both the rifles came with chest high tripods—very sturdy and with turning wheels and gears that let the rifle’s point of aim be changed very precisely.

I had them in two of the towers catty-corner to each other.

Once the mortars opened up I had my riflemen direct massed fire at the mortar crew. Then my fifty caliber shooters started to direct their shots toward the mortar tubes first of all and once the mortar was wrecked to try to set off a mortar round—which should start a chain explosion with any luck.

Neither mortar tube nor mortar round is an easy target at four hundred yards even using an eighteen-power scope and a tripod-mounted rifle.

I think that the battle plan was for them to shell us and fire upon us for “X” number of minutes and then rush the gates. I don’t think that anyone who could have called off the attack was aware of how little the mortars had accomplished.

My riflemen calmly dropped wave after wave of riflemen.

After the third wave they quit attacking us, but they continued to lay siege.

There were a few other long-range sniper rifles like my custom 1903A3 Springfield and over the next few days we sniped away at any of them who showed themselves.

They, for their part, erected breastworks and dug in a bit as well as trying to stay behind the tree line.

With the quadcopters to show us exactly where they were, we managed to get a few shooting through the foliage with the big .50s.

****************** ******************** *************************

They’d waken me in the middle of the night and frantically summoned me to the control room.

“What in the Hell are those?” Wilson demanded.

“Looks like they’ve taken some big dump trucks and welded on beaucoup steel plate to turn them into ersatz battering rams or tanks,” I said.

“Sound the call to battle stations,” I said.

********************* ******************** ******************

They waited until dawn. I’m not sure if that was a sound tactic or not.

“If you will lay down your arms and surrender, you will not be harmed. Otherwise we will kill everyone inside,” someone shouted through a bullhorn.

I nodded to Larry and he blew the speaker away with a single precisely placed round of .50 BMG.

We had four gates, but they only had three vehicles. I examined the vehicles through my big field glasses. They had welded half-inch plate together into a form and had poured perhaps four inches of cement between the plates.

The passenger side of the windshield was covered but there was a small viewing port protected with many heavy-duty angled louvers.

The sides seemed to be protected only by a single steel plate. I don’t know if they’d shielded the rear of their battering rams or not.

“Been nice knowing you,” Wilson said to me.

“Don’t give up so soon,” I told him.

“A Molotov cocktail would kill the engine, now wouldn’t it?” I observed.

“Who’s going to get within throwing range?” Wilson demanded.

“Wait until they’re at about the halfway point,” I said into my phone.

“Then fry them. Make sure all three vehicles are a total loss then use the rest to crisp the critters and burn back that tree line a bit,” I said.

“What are you up to?” Wilson demanded.

“Flamethrowers,” Larry told him.

“Big ole fixed emplacement flamethrowers,” he added.

We had two of the big dragon style flamethrowers. First the stream of burning napalm searched out the engine compartment. That shuts the engine down even before the napalm can do any real structural damage. It burns up all the available oxygen.

Next the operators thoroughly hosed the whole armored truck down and then went for the men who’d been taking cover behind it. Finally they started spraying at targets of opportunity.

In a very short time every one of the besiegers had either fled or had been very badly burned.

Once the napalm is mixed up it will only last two or three days without getting too thick and clumpy to spray. Rather than waste it, I had the operators spray it into the tree line all around.

The high-pressure sprayers gave the napalm a range of about five hundred yards. The jungle was too moist to really take fire and burn on its own, but with the inspiration of the burning napalm, our cleared zone expanded to almost six hundred yards.

********************* ****************** **********************

A couple days later Kelly showed up.

“What in Hell do you think that you’re doing?” Kelly demanded.

“You can’t burn that many Nigerians alive without there being some sort of consequence.”

“There was a consequence,” I said.

“They’re dead and I’m alive and the school is intact. What else could I have done?” I said.

“Listen carefully. You have no real reason to trust me. However, what you have done is a stench in the Nigerian government’s nostrils.

“They don’t want an all-out war with the insurrectionists at this point in time. The best way for them to avoid that is to give them you.

“The US government has washed their hands of you. You’re a political hot potato that they’re unprepared to deal with.

“They are negotiating with the French government right now. How do you fancy your odds against a battalion or two of Legionnaires with air support? Think your homemade flamethrowers will hold them off?

“How do you fancy being tried in front of a UN tribunal for War Crimes?

“I could take you to a safe house. I believe that once they’re satisfied that you’ve fled, they can be coerced into letting your school carry on.

“You’ve taped your lectures haven’t you? And your assistants are well versed in your teaching methods?” Kelly said.

I wasn’t sure if he genuinely wanted to help or if it was a ruse to get me alone. I’d been watching the television news and following every online source that I could find though and his analysis rang true.

I decided to risk trusting him and later that night I took a few things and climbed into the small two-man helicopter he’d flown to the school.

That was the first time that I’d flown in a helicopter and the first time that I’d been a fugitive. I was racking up new life experiences quickly.





......RVM45

[kaijafon]

AWE MAN! he was just starting to have some fun! thanks

[biggkidd]

Thanks good reading.

Larry

[hamrad]

Awesome reading RVM and a good illustration of the treachery of Governments every where.
regards

Kev

[rvm45]

Chapter Five





Kelly flew the chopper South an a bit West. We landed beside a small house out in the middle of nowhere. For being so far out in the bush, the place was surprisingly well built. The walls and the floor being foot thick poured concrete slabs.

“This place was built fifty years ago by some wealthy and eccentric fellow. We came across it and thought that it would make a bang-up safe house,” Kelly said.

“It is largely forgotten nowadays and we go to some length to supply it without drawing attention to it.”

“Who is ‘We’?” I asked.

“I could tell you, but you’d have no way of knowing if I’m being truthful or not so why bother?” Kelly said.

There was over a year’s supply of long term storage foods, quite a few canned goods and some dry staples. There was a huge LP tank in the back and there was also a large fuel tank filled with stabilized diesel.

The LP was for cooking. The diesel was to run the generator.

“How do you get that stuff delivered without drawing attention to the place?” I asked.

“The fellow who drives the LP truck and the fellow who delivers the diesel both work for us,” Kelly shrugged.

He had a bit of an Irish accent that came out a very little when he spoke—especially now. He had the appearance and carriage of someone who’d been running on nervous energy for awhile.

I had never heard of any overseas Irish intelligence agencies—but I expect that they had some—just like every other nation big enough to have their own distinctive color in Rand-McNally.

“Listen, I don’t know how long that you’re going to be here. You won’t use all your LP cooking—and if you did, I’m sure that you have wit enough to cook over a wood fire.

“You could very well use all your diesel. If you run out, there won’t be another delivery while you’re here.

“There are a few solar panels—enough to get by, but not enough to run the air conditioning. The air conditioning is what really gulps the electricity. I’d advise that you leave it off everywhere except in the one bedroom.

“You’ll be miserable once the air runs out,” he told me.

He gave me a brief tour of the place. There were three bookcases—each about half full of books. Over half the titles were in English. I spotted German, Spanish and Gaeilge.

I wondered if Kelly had left the Gaelic books. At any rate, I could practice my language skills a bit.

There was nothing in Japanese or Hindi. That was okay. I speak those languages well enough to follow the gist of an Anime or Bollywood movie, but I can’t read Kanji and I don’t have a clue about Hindi script.

I was surprised that there was a computer linked to the Internet via satellite dish.

“That is for reception only,” Kelly cautioned.

There was a television and a score of DVDs for it. There was also a shortwave radio as well as a spare.

“You’re going to have time on your hands and you will probably be bored spitless—so I’ll show you the secret hiding places. You’d probably find them anyway.

“But you can still poke around in hopes of finding more…”

Someone had also set up one room as a small gym.

There was a homemade bench. There was no barbell bar---probably because the fitness enthusiast had come by helicopter and transporting a six foot steel rod in a small two-seat chopper could be challenging. O it could be done, but…

There was a surprising amount of weight for the longer than standard dumbbell bars—six ten pound plates for each bar, six fives, six two-and-a-half pound plates and eight one-and-one-quarter pounders.

That came to one hundred and fifteen pounds per dumbbell—plus there was a single pair of twenty-five pound plates.

There was a pair of forty-eight kilo kettlebells—that’s one hundred and five point six pounds for those of you who think in terms of real rather than imaginary units—along with three smaller single kettlebells.

There was a spring exerciser along with several grip strengthening tools and a fairly good quality exercise bike. That hadn’t come in a small chopper.

I settled into my routine fairly early. I followed Kelly’s advice and only turned on the window AC in the bedroom and kept a blanket blocking the open doorway into the rest of the house.

I fixed me two cooked meals per day—breakfast and supper. I figured that it would be easy for me to let my weight run away with me without any real physical demands to meet.

Sometimes I’d read in the bedroom where it was cool or listen to the shortwave there.

I kept the exercise room at tropical. If I had to meet a physical crisis, I’d need to be as acclimated as possible. I lifted weights there three times weekly—though I did grip work every day.

I rode the exercise cycle as if I was trying to wear it out. I did one fairly long stretch on lifting days and two very long sessions on three other days. I rested one day per week.

After I’d been there a month, I also added long walks outdoors.

Of course I practiced dry-firing my weapons for at least an hour every day.

I followed news about my school with some interest. They’d made Wilson the new headmaster and to his credit, he hadn’t changed any of my curriculums. The man honestly felt Isosceles was a superior shooting method…

But the object of the exercise is to follow Cooper’s teaching—not to propagate heresy and heterodoxy.

The school was soon turning out six hundred and fifty students per term and they were gradually building up to handle twelve hundred.

I had been in the safe house for nearly six months. I hadn’t heard anything at all from Kelly—but then he’d warned me to be patient and not to expect to hear from him unless something was up.

My deadline was eighteen months. If I hadn’t heard from Kelly within eighteen months, I’d try to cross the border into Cameroon on my own and try to fly out with one of the fake passports that Kelly had given me. I mean, Kelly could have been arrested or died or something.

I wasn’t sure that the passport would stand any official scrutiny, but it beat the next best option all to Hell.

So far as spending another year living like a hermit in the bush—I’d always wanted to see Africa and I’d also wanted to try the Thoreau thingy—which I was doing with less economizing of my standard of living.

It was worth waiting to avoid going to Nigerian gaol if at all possible.

I had plenty of time to perfect my weaponcraft.

Miyamoto Musashi said that once one has faced death at sword point, one gains a new insight into swordsmanship.

I’d fought a gunfight against superior numbers. I’d been under siege and I’d racked up eight confirmed kills with a sniper rifle. I’d ordered men into harm’s way and I’d given the order to fry several hundred men and smelled their charred corpses afterward.

I had also seen friends die in front of me.

The experience of teaching also causes one to more fully understand the skills one is trying to teach.

Now I’d had months of solitude to reflect on my experiences.

In addition, I think that I was in the best physical condition of my life. Being challenged by the lack of a bar and the relative lack of weight to lift, I’d created all sorts of unusual methods and techniques.

Also, I had lived years where I lifted fairly regularly and other years when I’d run almost every day. I’d never been able to combine the two for any significant period of time.

Then I heard something on the shortwave that caused me to snatch up the Satellite phone and dial the “Emergency Only” number that Kelly had given me.

Over in the State of Nasarawa a few miles from the town of Lafia…

The Mujahideen had hit one of our Christian boarding schools with overwhelming force. They’d killed the twelve security guards—guards from my school. They’d killed seven teachers and abducted over eighty children—along with killing more than one hundred children on the spot.

I waited impatiently for the appointed hour to try to call. Fortunately for my patience he was there the first day that I tried to call him.

“What’s up with the raid? How did they kill all my people?” I asked.

“There were twelve guards. They divided them into three shifts of four men each. There were only four men on active duty when the compound was attacked.

“Two of the guards that were off duty and had gone to town.

“The school didn’t have a proper fence around it. It was too low and too weak and the approaches to the gates weren’t properly obstructed. Even so, the guards did a remarkable job defending the place.

“You won’t see a relative body count in the news. The government feels that would be too provocative,” Kelly rattled off, his Irish brogue really showing as he talked.

“So what about the two men who went to town? Are they alright? Any chance they were complaisant?” I asked.

“They were targeted and assassinated while in the city. Detola was married and he had three little girls who went to the school—one of the perks of the job,” Kelly said.

“I think we can rule out either of them being involved,” he added.

“Datola’s wife and children?” I asked.

“One daughter was executed and the other two were abducted. His wife wasn’t physically harmed,” Kelly said.

I said a few nice words before I calmed down.

“What is it with these huge raids with casts of hundreds? It doesn’t fit their usual modus operandi,” I said.

“They’re trying hard to discredit the idea of licensed and armed security guards—so the government will crawfish and withdraw their authorization.

“That didn’t work so well against your compound but your successful defense was less than a total victory for the guard concept because you obviously used weapons that you weren’t authorized to have—like big ole flamethrowers…”

“Kelly, can you get me these nine student instructors from my school along with at least one Bloodhound and handler—preferably two? And get a paper and a piece of pencil handy. I have a list of gear that I’d like you to try to get for me.

“Don’t worry about money. I have quite a bit of money salted away,” I said.

“What do you intend to do?” Kelly said.

“I aim to track the kidnapers down and rescue as many of the children as possible. That takes priority over vengeance, but it won’t grieve me to carve the memory of my displeasure into a few nasty folk along the way.”

“Can you keep up with a crew of native Nigerians on foot?” Kelly asked.

“I’ve been working out very hard lately. I think so. Anyway, plenty of combat tabs is one of the things on my list,” I said.

“Combat tabs?” Kelly said.

Apparently he’d never heard the expression.

“Benzedrine tablets—for when you can’t stay on your feet any other way,” I explained.

“You don’t know anything about tracking,” Kelly objected.

“As a matter of fact, I do know a great deal about tracking. I’m nowhere near as good at tracking as I am at pistol shooting. I’m no Geronimo or Daniel Boone, but I’m a good tracker for modern times.

“Anyway, how hard can a large group of guerillas dragging eighty-some odd children through the bush be to track?” I asked.

“They’ve split up into three groups,” Kelly said.

“Well then, arrange to set me down on the trail of the largest group of children,” I said.

“What will you and a handful of men do when you catch up to them?” Kelly objected.

“Have you heard of Gideon and his three hundred? Anyway, get me within five hundred yards of the lopslickers and I’ll tear them apart every night with my Starlight.”

“If you start sniping away at long distance, they’ll start executing hostages,” Kelly said.

“They might. That won’t save them. It will only make their own deaths more certain and painful. I won’t be held hostage to someone else’s homicidal mania.

“You know how the Israelis do it:

“Killing every terrorist is the first priority. Rescuing hostages comes second,” I said.

“That sounds very cold,” Kelly observed.

“Read your ‘Hagakure’. Embracing one’s own death gives one the best chance of surviving—though not if the embrace isn’t genuine.

“Writing off the lives of the hostages at the outset is probably the best strategy to actually save some of them.

“If not, at least it warns away potential copycat kidnappers,” I said.

“Alright. I’m going to have to call in a whole bunch of favors and put my career on the line—but I think that I can get you what you want,” Kelly said.




......RVM45

[crf78112]

Good story,enjoying each line of it.

[rvm45]

Chapter Six







Kelly set the little two-man chopper down in the middle of a small cluster of people.

“This is McGill,” Kelly told me. “He’s a Bushman and a very good tracker.”

McGill was wearing a tan desert camouflage shirt and blue jeans. He had a long barreled Ruger Single Action on one hip and one of the school’s scout rifles slung across his back.

Surprisingly, for a Bushman, he had a pronounced Aussie accent.

He noted my surprise.

“My grandfather was an Australian and a world traveler,” McGill said.

“I learned to track from Bushmen in the Kalahari, Aborigines in the Australian Outback as well as Indians and retired Border Patrol agents in the American Sonoran Desert.

“I’ve hunted Kodiak bears and caribou in Alaska and jaguar in the Amazon. I’ve canoed the length of the Amazon and the Congo and I’ve travelled the Snake River in Idaho and the Colorado River,” McGill boasted.

“That’s a school rifle,” I said. “Have you sighted it in?”

“Now what kind of fool would I be, if I didn’t thoroughly try out my rifle?” he said.

“I’m the leader. What kind of fool would I be if I didn’t ask?”

There were twelve students—ones that had been with me from the first class. I’d wanted nine or ten, but I’d given Kelly a dozen names in case a couple or three declined.

I hadn’t asked for the villager with his two pack donkeys, a double-barreled twelve gauge across his back and a Smith and Wesson .38 Special on his hip.

Dalen had also came along. He saw me checking out the donkeys dubiously.

“This isn’t good horse country, but they say the donkeys are acclimated. We can carry more gear that way,” Dalen said.

“Alright, anyone who doesn’t want to be here—you’re free to go. Anytime you decide that you’ve had enough—just leave. All I ask is that you tell someone so we don’t think something has happened to you.

“We don’t walk on the trail, but parallel to it. Once they know that we’re on their trail, they’d be stupid not to mine it.

“Get a tactical interval between you—about five yards. That way they can only get one of you with a single mine, hand grenade or RPG.

“Now listen up. My tactic is simple. I want to get close enough to start sniping away and cutting their numbers down due to attrition.

“There is a problem with that. They have hostages. They may very well threaten to torture or otherwise damage the hostages if we don’t stop sniping at them.

“I’m telling you up front—I’m not going to stop killing terrorists regardless of what they do to the hostages. Whatever atrocities they commit are one hundred percent on them. If we let them escape by using that strategy, no one will ever be safe from them. We need to put a stop to this.

“However, I think that we can get close enough to take a prisoner or two of our own. I intend to repay atrocity for atrocity. Hopefully it will intimidate them enough to stop the torture of hostages.

“If any of that sounds too hard core for you, please go now.”

We started out.

For all my size and strength, I was a reasonable endurance athlete—reasonably good at running very long slow distances at a survival pace.

I wasn’t at all good when I had to go faster than I wanted to.

I’d found in the Army, that marching with a full pack and keeping up with others was harder on me than it was on most folk. I needed to pump my arms hard, breath fast and deep and concentrate to keep up.

My sniper rifle was the only true long-range weapon in the group. The rifle wouldn’t be much good if it got separated from its high power scope, its night vision scope, its suppressor and its carefully hand-loaded .30-06 ammo.

That meant that I carried all that stuff in my pack.

Many folks in my position would have left the big Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum, its shoulder holster and ammunition behind. They might also have left off the .32 ACP Walther PP that I wore as a hideout.

Instead I added a left hand .38 Super. A man who dies unarmed is a fool—no excuses accepted—and only a pistol truly makes one armed. I didn’t fear death, but the idea of dying without a pistol horrified me.

So there I was getting ready to go on a chase that would have thoroughly tried an Army Ranger.

I cheated.

Injectable testosterone is the simplest and probably the safest anabolic steroid—but I didn’t trust my sterile technique in the tropical environment. The last thing that I needed in the bush was a great pus-filled abscess.

I gave myself a great big shot of testosterone before I left the safe house. I’d rely on oral steroids from then on. Anavar is reasonably safe taken no more than six to eight weeks at a time. It’s just about the only really safe oral steroid.

Dianabol can have a number of side effects that are better avoided. Nonetheless it works well for some people. Arnold Schwarzenegger once joked that Dianabol was “The Breakfast of Champions”.

I intended to take both Dianabol and Anavar while on the trail. They should help me recover from day to day and spare some of the muscle that my body would be otherwise shed in the course of a long chase.

All of the steroids take awhile to really start working, but “Front Loading”—doubling the dosage the first week—should speed results.

I thought that we’d be on the trail three or four weeks at most. I figured that side effects wouldn’t become any sort of issue during that time frame.

There would be a lot more guys complete Ranger training if they were allowed to use steroids. Of course, that would be counter-productive for the Rangers. Completing this course was not counter-productive for me though—it was the whole point of this exercise.

I was facing this pursuit with the same sense of unpleasant anticipation that I’d faced two-a-day football practice back in high school.

“Before we start, we should all pray,” I said.

I could feel butterflies in my stomach but I gave the signal to start the march nonetheless.

********************* ****************** **************************

I once saw a film showing the !Kung Bushman hunting a giraffe. They shot it with one of their tiny poisoned arrows. Contrary to what you see in Hollywood movies, most arrow and dart poisons are relatively slow acting. Those determined little men followed the stricken giraffe at a dogged trot for about three days—occasionally getting close enough to shoot it again and introduce more poison into its system.

By the way, the “!” isn’t a typo. It stands for a sound that we don’t have in English—or any other human language except Bushman and some Pygmy tongues. It’s a sort of click that every child has made, but no child ever considered making it a part of his phonetic system.

Bushmen might be able to jog barefoot through the bush from sunrise to sunset—but my men weren’t Bushmen—with the partial exception of McGill.

More to the point, my men couldn’t run very far—even at a slow jog—wearing a pack, carrying a rifle and wearing leather combat boots. Even if they could, I couldn’t.

On the positive side of the ledger, the terrorists couldn’t travel at a jog either. If anything, they were carrying more gear and swag than we were as well as having hostages to heard.

So long as McGill was successfully tracking the terrorists, we didn’t really need the Bloodhounds. You can’t really shut a Bloodhound up—but there is a big difference in how much they bay and bark simply walking through the bush and what they do on a trail.

I had my handlers do everything they could to keep the Bloodhounds distracted and less likely to sound off. More like the handlers frantically tried to distract them when a dog felt compelled to sound off. They had far less than total success even at that modest goal.

My days turned into grim endurance contests. It took all my willpower and determination to stay upright and to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Even with my heavy-duty rifle and gear, I was carrying less weight than my people. I also left most of the camp duties to them.

It wasn’t so much that “Rank has its Privileges.” It was more that my long-range potential—and willingness to be absolutely ruthless with the bastards we trailed—would be sorely needed at the far end. I needed every possible aid to get me to the far end where I could fulfill my purpose.

It was afternoon of our tenth day on the trail. There was a gunshot and one of our Bloodhounds dropped.

Sniper by damn!

Terrorists in Africa—or Africans in general—aren’t noted for their marksmanship. This fellow must have been a partial exception. From a treetop position he shot one of my dogs.

I dropped to one knee, partially obscured by some sort of big broad leaves growing beside the faint trail.

A second shot rang out and the stricken Bloodhound’s handler fell to the ground holding his mid section.

I spotted the sniper. He was well up in a tree that was less than a hundred yards away.

I calmly flipped up the scope covers on my riflescope. There seemed scant reason to go through many aim-enhancing maneuvers at that range. That’s the kind of lazy and half-hearted rationalizing that causes folks to miss.

My big toes just won’t bend enough to get into a classical kneeling supported position. They once would. I’m kneeling in one of my high school wrestling pictures with both big toes bent well beyond the ninety degree point required of the strong side big toe.

I solved the problem by pointing my foot and kneeling on the whole length of my right shin. I used to put both legs in that position when starting from the “Down” position in wrestling. You can get far more spring from that position and it makes it problematic for your client to seize your ankle.

I’ve never seen anyone else modify the kneeling shooting position in that way. I’m not sure if Cooper would have approved—but since he never forbade my variation, I wasn’t blaspheming Cooper by adopting it.

I rested my left elbow on my left knee, held and slowly squeezed.

My rifle recoiled and the sniper fell from his tree.

I’m mildly phobic about loud noises. My hearing is well above normal and even as a child, noises that were just good nihilistic fun to most kids—firecrackers, cap pistols and whatever else—caused a sensation of pain.

I have been wearing earplugs to mow the grass since I was eleven years old. I almost always combine plugs and muffs when I shoot. I hesitate to dry-fire or shoot a BB Gun without plugs.

My lifetime total of rounds fired without some kind of hearing protection was well under a dozen rounds until the shootout in the village.

Although I could ignore it in dire circumstances, the thing that I remember most about that incident was that metallic ringing sensation in my poor ears.

Mister Mujahideen Sniper turned out to have been using a scoped Mosin-Nagant. I don’t know if it was a genuine sniper or a made over replica. It hardly mattered. I could have made that shot with slugs fired from an open choke 12 Gauge.

I still had the satellite phone and scrambler. I didn’t completely trust it and I had it wrapped in aluminum foil just in case it could be used to track or bug me.

I also had a GPS similarly foiled from view until that moment.

“Kelly, I’m not sure precisely where I’m at. It is damned close to the Cameroon border—unless we’ve already crossed it.

“I got one of my students shot through the gut with a 7.62x54R. I think that he might make it if you can help me evac him. I also have a dead hound that I’d sooner not have to bury,” I said.


“No honestly, I can’t think of anything that we really need—more coffee, sugar and rice maybe. Throw in some sort of treat for hard tracking men.

“Personally, I’ve only shot one round so far.

“Get me help and I’ll owe you a big one,” I said.

A Chinook style helicopter came in after dark. I say that it was a Chinook type chopper inasmuch as it had two overhead blades like a Chinook. I couldn’t tell a chopper model from a hydroplane racing boat.

The thing was all jet black and without markings. The crew didn’t speak a word to us. They just loaded my wounded man, the dead hound and all the weapons that had become superfluous. They tossed me a duffle and then took off.

********************* ******************** *********************

“McGill, have you ever worked with night vision goggles?” I asked.

“Yeah,” the Bushman answered.

“I need you to guide me through the bush to the terrorist’s camp—close enough to reach out and touch someone,” I said while touching my rifle lightly for emphasis.

As I’ve said, I’m no Daniel Boone but I’m not some Gilligan or Bear Grylls in the woods either.

I wasn’t exactly as silent as a ghost moving through the brush. On the other hand the jungle is hardly quiet enough to hear a pin or even an acorn drop most of the time.

McGill and I managed to make it to the enemy camp without setting off any alarms.

I wasn’t up to any super tree climbing in the dark even with the 4th generation night vision goggles. Also, the two of us were badly outnumbered. I didn’t intend to climb into a cul de sac.

Nonetheless I found an accessible perch that gave me a good view of the camp from about one hundred and seventy yards away.

I handed McGill a cloth sack.

“When I start shooting, slip into camp and leave that somewhere—but only if you can do it with an excellent chance of getting away unseen. I can’t afford to lose you,” I told him.

“What is it?” McGill asked me.

“It’s a simple but rather brutal psy-op,” I shrugged.

“But what is it?”

“It’s the head of the sniper from earlier. Now don’t go giving me that look. He was dead. He really didn’t give a rat’s derrière what I did to his body. However, desecrating bodies that way puts the fear of God into a good many folk,” I said.

“You’re not going to out-psycho these brutal murdering swine,” McGill opined.

“Maybe not, but once they see eyes were put out, it won’t be all fun and games anymore,” I said.

McGill took a quick glance in the sack and saw the empty eye sockets in the sniper’s head. He walked off muttering to himself.

It was no grand feat of accuracy to shoot men at that distance. The suppressor on the rifle did nothing for the supersonic crack of course, but it muted enough muzzle blast and flash to make my rounds seem to come from nowhere and everywhere all at once.

Ordinarily one would try to shoot leaders first, but the leaders were all in one of the two big tents and out of my line of sight—hence out of my line of fire.

I didn’t try for anything fancy. I just lined up either on a sternum from the front or a spot between the shoulder blades if the client was facing away.

I’d dropped three of them before anyone figured out that something was going on. Then as they milled around like a flock of rabid schizoid sheep, I dropped two more.

By then most of the Mujahideen had taken cover.

“Hey infidel, look at me,” the man shouted.

He was a huge man—maybe 6’8”, maybe 350. He wore a green beret. I had met a couple Green Berets. I’d love to see them roughing up Rastus Alphonso for wearing their colors—“Stolen Valor” don’t you know—but alas…

R.A. was holding a small girl as a human shield and speaking through a big white bullhorn.

“If you shoot again, I’ll kill this child. Isn’t that what you’re here for? To rescue the children?” he shouted through the bullhorn.

I dropped from the tree and faded into the bush going towards a rendezvous McGill and I had agreed on.

We made our way back to our camp while being careful not to step onto the actual trail anywhere along the way.

They wouldn’t launch a night expedition along their back trail—not tonight.

In the future we’d need to disperse and carefully conceal our mini-camps lest they reciprocate our harassment.

I didn’t harass the terrorists for the next two nights. I simply staked them out and watched them.

The third night I gathered McGill and Dalen around me.

“Dalen, you were a coon hunter. How confident are you in your ability to stalk and sneak quietly in the dark?” I asked him.

“I’m as good an Indian at sneaking through the woods as anyone,” he said.

“Okay, this is what I want,” I explained.

“They will simply retaliate against the hostages,” McGill argued.

“I don’t think so—not once that we up the stakes. Even if they do slay the hostages though, this has to stop.

“Very few folks are stubborn enough to stick their head into a fiery oven. Once we establish that kidnapping and/or killing children only brings death and destruction to the abductor, much of the allure will go out of the activity,” I said.

We walked right into the sleeping camp. McGill stole a bullhorn and set up a delayed incendiary device at the back of Rastus Alphonso’s tent.

Dalen and I chloroformed a sleeping terrorist and carried him out of camp.

I gave the unconscious kidnapper a quick but short acting anesthetic.

I was willing to do whatever needed doing to convince the terrorists that they couldn’t influence us with acts of brutality—but in point of fact, I didn’t enjoy torturing folks.

Our guest didn’t need to be awake for this part of the plan. Besides, my job would be easier by far without him whining or squirming.

At about 4:00 am the device exploded—first spraying the back of the leader’s tent with kerosene and then setting it on fire.

I didn’t expect to inflict any casualties with the firebomb—but it should get the Mujahideen’s undivided attention. It also ruined an unspecified amount of gear.

Then a couple of my men set the prisoner free and shooed him toward his campsite.

I’d wrapped him tightly in Ace bandages from his knees down but once he was conscious he was certain to be to be in extreme pain.

He might have no idea what had happened to him yet, but he knew that he was both disoriented and hurt very badly.

I spoke into the bullhorn.

“Every time that you torture or execute one of the prisoners, I will torture one of y’all,” I said.

“It’s ‘Tit-For-Tat’,” I explained.

They sprayed and hosed the whole general area that the voice of the bullhorn came from. Then they went running in to see if they’d got me.

Bad craziness. I was standing a good thirty yards to one side and speaking into the bullhorn remotely via a cable.

I did have a trip-wire connected to two of the grenades that the terrorist sniper had had in his possession.

When the grenades went off they sorely wounded four or five of the kidnappers, though it didn’t seem to kill anyone outright.

In the milling around and general confusion I managed to get close enough to several kidnappers to fire my silenced Walther PP .32 ACP into their eye sockets. As I moved farther away, I shot a few more in the torso.

A bullet in the lungs or intestines is quite sufficient to take most anyone off of the active and fighting roster—even a mere .32 bullet—particularly in the germ friendly jungle heat.

************************ **************** ************************

The Mujahideen were ruthless. They executed several of their wounded rather than be encumbered with them—and even then, they still had several walking wounded.

About a quarter mile down the jungle trail, I’d had a couple of my people hang up the parts that I’d taken from the prisoner.

I’d executed what medieval torturers called “The Full Boot.” I wasn’t sure that it was even possible to actually take the skin off in a single piece from each lower leg. I’d proven to my satisfaction that it was indeed possible if one had a good sharp knife and some experience butchering.

What can I say?

When people run around blinding folks with battery acid, burning folks alive or chopping them up with machetes…

While raping those same folk’s wives and kidnapping their daughters and selling them into prostitution…

When folks take hostages and then attempt to use the hostages as human shields…

It is only a matter of time until someone takes exception.

Never think that Ideology doesn’t count. Thing is: Ideology counts with a Sword.

I didn’t need to be within eyesight to know they’d spotted the human skin moccasins.

They started tripping out and spraying all the foliage on either side of the trail for thirty yards up and down the trail—as if we were that stupid.

I’d let them stew for a couple more days, and then I’d order them to surrender the hostages immediately or be completely annihilated.





......RVM45

[millwright]

Perfect treatment for musloids.

Should give them cause to contemplate a protracted and painful demise.

[crf78112]

I believe in tit for tat..... X10. An old Marine Corps tradition before the politicians decided war should be politically correct. Warriors today have stricter Rules of Engagement than your local police.

[rvm45]

Chapter Seven




We were travelling in two columns parallel the terrorist’s line of march when the lead man on our right stepped onto a landmine.

The mine tore one leg to frazzles right up to his hip. The other lower leg was completely missing below the knee. The air was filled with blood, rotten plant material and a bit of explosive. It smelled worse than any abattoir I’d ever been in.

Thankfully he lost consciousness within seconds and passed away quickly without regaining consciousness.

Our prey had caught onto our trick of travelling beside the trail rather than on it.

I took my tomahawken and cut down enough saplings to make myself a tripod chair and sat down wearily.

“What are you doing?” Dalen demanded.

“Sitting and cogitating,” I told him.

“You don’t seem that upset by what happened,” he accused.

“I’m plenty upset. The way is mined. My first instinct is to run down the trail willy-nilly to catch up to those SOBs and make them pay.

“That gets me blown up too. So I’m going to sit here until my mind calms and I can think with clarity.

“You need to calm yourself as well.”

“Why did you just turn that fellow that you’d captured loose?” Dalen said.

“Don’t you understand? We’re in the jungle. Even minor cuts and scrapes have the potential to get very infected very quickly.

“In a big city, they might be able to save that fellow’s lower legs with skin grafts. Even so, I’m not sure they could make him adequate soles to walk on. Be that as it may.

“In the jungle, the only way that they might save him from some life threatening infection would be to amputate both legs.

“They aren’t going to do that, because they aren’t willing to carry him.

“They’ll have to kill him. That makes every one of them realize that they may be next. The longer they postpone and the more he screams in pain the more effective our psy-op,” I explained.

“You’re just like them, aren’t you?” Dalen said, switching abruptly from finding me too kind to finding me far too cruel.

“I think not. I didn’t go to their homes shooting their friends and kidnapping their children.

“The world would have spun about the sun until it was naught but a ball of ice or a burnt-out cinder and I’d have never initiated violence against them.

“They came after me and mine. They executed my students. They abducted my little brothers and sisters in faith.

“Jesus said woe unto those who harm his little ones.

“In all honesty, he’d probably prefer a less violent response. We all have our breaking point though.

“As ‘Romans’ says:

“ ‘If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.’

“It doesn’t lie within me to accept this peaceably.

“It is going to end with sad singin’ and flower bringin’.

“Now go away and let me think,” I said.

************************ ********************** **************

An hour later I called McGill over.

“Can you spot these mines?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said.

“Am I correct in thinking that you could travel noticeably faster without us?”

“Yeah, I could run laps around y’all,” he said.

“Spotting booby traps all along the way?”

“Of course. The signs they leave are rather obvious to a tracker like me.”

“Okay, I want you to take the bare minimum of gear and follow these dudes. Eventually you should find a place where the trail makes a big oxbow.

“You know, a big semi-circle that we can cut across saving both ground and avoiding any landmines or booby traps.

“When you find such a place, come back here and get us.

“Can you do that?”

McGill chose to leave both his rifle and his pack and rely solely on his sidearm.

I’d asked him about his gun. It was a custom Ruger .357 Blackhawk with a gunsmith fabricated eight-inch barrel that was both Mag-Na-Ported and had polygonal rifling. The gun also had an unfluted cylinder.

He bought the specialty brass that took a large pistol primer and he loaded it to the old .357 pressures—which SAAMI had backed well off of decades ago.

He said that it was very light for a lion or a pachyderm, but a .44 Magnum or hot .45 was also very light for such big creatures. He could carry half again as many rounds of .357 per pound as he could have carried of .44 or .45.

After McGill disappeared from sight, I asked my men:

“Are any of y’all hunters? Anybody think they could go into the bush and get us something to eat and make it back here without getting lost?”

I was a bit surprised when my Bloodhound handler Oduntan stepped forward and said that he’d been teaching his hound to hunt. I shrugged and let him and Izoduwa go to it.

When they returned about thirty hours later they had both a big fat wart hog and a fair sized aardvark. I was a bit surprised. I’d thought that wart hogs were creatures of the open savannas, but my hunters assured me that they were also present in the jungles.

I had them put both the creatures into cooking pits and sat back to wait for them to cook and to await McGill’s return.

I made good use of the pause to rest, clean my guns and tend to my feet.

We were lounging around enjoying the aftereffects of the big bar-be-que when McGill showed up. His face looked grim.

“They had eighty hostages,” he said. “Now they have thirty. They executed the rest in order to travel faster. They cut the throat of the small ones and anyone having the least bit of trouble keeping up.

“They’ve quit mining the road, but they’re moving fast. We’ll have to move fast to catch them,” He said.

“Alright it’s almost dark now. Everybody eat your fill of meat tonight and concentrate on the fat.

“We’ll take what’s left with us, but it won’t last long in this heat. We’re running short of food and we need to end this soon.

“Get your minds wrapped around the concept that we may have to march a few days on little or no rations,” I told my people.

“Damn,” I said to Dalen and McGill.

“I think that our best course of action would be to storm the kidnapper’s camp at night, but we don’t have any good nighttime guns.

“I wish that we had everyone’s shotgun and a bunch of buffered and platted BB shot and an extra-full choke screwed in, or even 00 and an open choke.

“The bolt actions are almost impossible to sight through at night. Our main advantage against superior numbers is our superior marksmanship. Fighting at night takes that away.

“Cooper always said that an intelligent man does not attack with the pistol. Nonetheless, I’m tempted to tell our people to sling their rifles and go in with 1911A1s in hand,” I mused.

“I might have a solution for you,” Dalen said.

“You know how you said that you didn’t care for laser sights because they broke and batteries went dead?

“All of our rifles have a mounting for laser sights and everyone is carrying a small laser sight and batteries in their pack,” Dalen said.

“Something we’ve been experimenting with since you left…”

“How about sighting them in?” I asked.

“Well they should already be sighted in—we used a quick-detach mounting system.

“However, if the red dot coincides with the crosshair of the scope, shouldn’t that be near enough for close range government work?”

“Brilliant!” I said.

“When we catch them, are we going to give them all the full boot?” Dalen asked.

“Look who has become all bloodthirsty all of a sudden! I don’t expect to take many prisoners.

“Any prisoners that we do take will be shot—with the exception of the younger ones. Circumstances allowing, I may try to reclaim some of them.

“I won’t put my people at serious risk to do it though,” I said.

“Torture adds to our intimidation now. Torture after we’ve won is needless cruelty.

“I’m cruel sometimes because it furthers my agenda. I oppose cruelty for its own sake and I take no joy in it,” I tried to explain.

******************* ****************** *****************************

Have you ever flashed back—not so much to a specific time and place—but to an older and more vaguely defined “Sense of Life” from days gone by?

That happened to me on the trail of the Mussulmen terrorists.

All at once being in Africa, being manipulated by the denomination, the Nigerian government, sharia extremists and spooky hobgoblins like Kelly just didn’t seem real.

Chasing the kidnappers and murderers of small children along a jungle trail somewhere in the highlands on the border of Nigeria and Cameroon just didn’t seem to partake of reality.

I shook the feeling off.

“Reality” as the saying goes, is only a crutch for weak people who can’t take hard drugs.

McGill led us through the jungle to where our straight chord intersected the trail’s arc. Once we’d rejoined the trail, we jogged along it piecemeal, never mind landmines.

McGill led the next man by a good twenty yards, so he’d be the first one to get blown up. He assured me though, that he could spot any evidence of tampering even on the fly.

“Hold-up,” McGill signaled.

“They’re setting up camp up ahead,” he told me when we were stopped.

I signaled everyone to gather round.

“Everyone get your laser sights mounted and make sure they agree with your scope.

“McGill, given a set of NVG can you pick out and guide each man to an advantageous position to storm the village from?

“Okay. Everyone is dead tired. You all need to eat and sleep a bit if possible before dark.

“Even then, we aren’t going to attack until about 1:00 in the morning, give the enemy plenty of chance to settle in.

“We’re all coming from one side of their camp. I don’t want to set up any Kentucky firing squad scenarios.

“Listen to me. The terrorists abduct, brainwash and indoctrinate children to be their soldiers.

“It is a damn shame, but a ten or twelve year old with an AK can kill you just as dead as a thirty year old Army ranger. If someone is armed, shoot him—or her. I don’t care how young or innocent they appear,” I said.

“Some of our people may try to pick up weapons after they’re dropped,” Izoduwa objected.

“True, but after being captive this long—which team do you think they’ll be batting for?” I asked.

“Are you saying that they’re turned?”

“I’m saying that it is definitely possible at this point,” I said.

“What about folks who drop their weapons and try to surrender?” Dalen asked.

“If someone drops his weapon—especially if you think that he has only recently picked it up from the fallen—take him prisoner.

“Listen to me. If you must take a prisoner, keep him covered and stay well back from him. There are too many dirty tricks that can be pulled up close.

“Order him to drop his trousers down around his ankles first of all and then have him get into the front-leaning rest—push-up position,” I started.

Everyone thought that was very funny and a few looked dubious.

“I’m not turning Mussulman,” I assured them.

“Try running or moving quickly with your pants hobbling you. Try to get up quickly from a front-leaning rest. Try to rise and charge with your britches around your ankles.

“Now are we having a meeting of minds?”

********************** ******************* ******************

I’d had everyone line up and I’d given them two amphetamine tablets, a caffeine tablet, two aspirin, 1000 Mgs of niacin and a big dose of B12 each and had them wash it down with a cup of hot strong coffee.

Everyone was dragging and I felt that the stimulants could only help.

I’ve long noticed that most pills take about twenty minutes to start to work and sometimes thirty or thirty-five minutes to really kick in.

I waited eleven minutes—made sure that everyone had finished their coffee and sent them on.

Niacin? Niacin wouldn’t do much for fighting ability but I’d warned them of niacin’s tendency to cause tingling, feverish skin and mild itching. If you can feel the niacin flushing you, you know that the combat tabs are kicking in as well.

I wanted to be in the very front of the assault, but McGill and Dalen convinced me that I’d help the team more if I sniped long range from a high vantage point in a tree…

And McGill had found a fine vantage point and had improved the tree enough with rope and screw-in deer stand ladder rungs that I could get there easily.

I carefully sighted through my Starlight scope. When I fired my first shot, it was the signal for my men to start firing from their hidden positions. One might hope that with plenty of time to get sighted in and comfortable that each man got a hit with that first shot.

I fired off two more rounds while my men fired as many follow up shots as they were able.

Then I covered the objective lens on my electronic scope and turned my face away from the compound while closing my eyes.

James, the donkey driver had brought along a nice surprise—an old M-70 grenade launcher and a half a dozen magnesium flares.

The brightly burning magnesium thoroughly ruined the night vision of anyone who looked.

My men had all been instructed to cover their eyes and wait.

When the last flare burned out, James blew a go ahead on the old hunter’s horn that he carried. He said that it helped him round up the donkeys, but he hadn’t used it yet—and I’d have been reluctant to have him use it when we were trying to be surreptitious.

I sniped terrorists right and left. It was much like making war on blind folks—but even blind folk pose some threat when they spray with automatic weapons. I lost two more men.

Soon enough the fight--such as it was—was over.

I was very apprehensive about one of my men getting shanked or otherwise killed or wounded by some devious and malevolent prisoner.

I slung my rifle and climbed down from the tree as quickly as possible.

No sooner than my feet hit the ground, than a spear—of all things—slammed into me.

In truth, it only grazed me. It caught the right corner of my mouth and plowed a furrow across my face that just missed my right eye—praise God!

I mean, the skin of my cheek was completely split, exposing my right side teeth all the way to my jawbone.

I went to draw my right hand .38 Super, but the spearman had another spear and he thrust and skewered my right forearm.

It was the jungle giant that had came out of the tent the first time that I sniped at his camp and had threatened the children.

He thrust again and I learned what it was like to have a spearhead shoved into my gutty-works.

The slung rifle and my position as I was forced back against the tree blocked my left hand from drawing my left hand 1911A1.

My concealed .32 Walther PP was angled for a right-handed draw.

O well, I’d always known that it might come to this. As the “Hagakure” stresses:

“Cowards theorize with the goal of staying alive firmly in mind.”

“Jesus, tell all my kin that I’m coming to join them,” I silently prayed.

But as Musashi said, it is false to die with a weapon yet undrawn.

Don’t tell any serious combat shooters, but I always thought that I could draw a gun from a right-handed shoulder holster just as well with my left hand as with my right.

I drew my big Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum with a twisting left hand cavalry draw. I shoved my revolver as far towards the spearman as it would go and fired five rounds into his center of mass.

The loud ear-tearing muzzle blasts were the worst pain that I suffered that night.

I saved my last round for a headshot. A headshot it was. A brainshot it was not. It took away his left cheekbone and the spalling bone fragments took out his left eye.

Did the headshot help my case? I have no idea. It might have been one of my first five shots that caused him to let go of the spear, drop to his knees and not concentrate on churning and pureeing my intestines with his spear blade.

The spear blade was still in my gutty-works as I lost consciousness. If either he or I had pulled it out, I might very well have lost too many rose-water fluids to survive.

But I did survive. How else would I tell the tale?

And my story isn’t quite over yet.



.....RVM45

[rvm45]

The End




Chapter Eight





I woke briefly in a clinic that Kelly told me that his people maintained in Cameroon. There are good hospitals and excellent doctors in Africa, but there are also many substandard facilities and poorly trained health care professionals as well.

Kelly said that his organization maintained several small field hospitals scattered around Africa in hopefully strategic spots.

I’m not sure precisely where in Cameroon that the clinic is—and nothing would be gained by revealing its location even if I did know.

“You are very hot in Nigeria right now. Many Mussulmen are demanding that you be tried for crimes against humanity.

“Meanwhile, your success in rescuing the children—you saved twenty seven captives and captured a dozen impressed troopers under fifteen years of age, by the way—has many Christians demanding a right to bear arms similar to America’s.

“Some of them are even proposing that you be nominated as a presidential candidate—notwithstanding that you’re not a citizen.

“The government is pleased by the success of the armed security guard concept and they believe that rescue efforts like yours will force the terrorist to stop targeting schools and children—at least for kidnapping.

“On the other hand, they feel no sense of obligation or gratitude toward you personally. If handing you over would pacify the masses, they’re all for it.

“The UN has also denounced you as a dangerous, bloodthirsty and sadistic criminal. I’m not sure the American government would be willing to defy the UN if they asked for your extradition.

“Let me take you somewhere safe,” Kelly said.

I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into, but Kelly hadn’t betrayed me so far.

I was pretty out of it from the big doses of morphine when they loaded me on a big military style transport.

“We’re the Hellarewees!” I said to Kelly a couple weeks later when I was starting to feel well enough to care.

They had wheeled me out onto a sunny beach in my wheelchair and I gazed at a particularly violet sea.

“You’re in Israel of course. This clinic is on the shore of the Dead Sea. They say the thick air speeds recuperation. It also screens out much of the ultraviolet so you can absorb much more sunlight without burning.

“Bathing in the waters is also supposed to be therapeutic as well. I’m sure that they’ll have you bathing in the water as soon as you’re able,” Kelly said.

As I say, I’m no linguist. Kelly had given me the Pimsleur courses and encouraged me to learn Hebrew.

But I’d been communicating with my nurses and doctors in Hebrew without consciously realizing it. That shouldn’t happen to someone who is as challenged by foreign languages as I am—but then I was both very ill and pretty juiced.

Kelly had deliberately led me to believe that he was CIA—warning me against the perfidy of CIA and other American covert agents abroad while also telling me not to trust Mossad too far either. He’d been Mossad all along.

He also glanced over my journals while I was out of it. He effortlessly broke my Pig-Pen Cypher and he informed me that “Mossad” was not an anagram, so I shouldn’t have been capitalizing every letter.

“Don’t you have other Mossad things to be doing back in Africa?” I asked him.

“You were my full time assignment,” he said.

“And why the Hebrew lessons?” I asked.

Kelly shrugged.

“The Mossad was very ambivalent about you. You teach weaponcraft as if it were a Holy Calling. Everyone agreed that if it caught on that it could become a very powerful force in Nigeria and the world.

“Some were more than a little afraid of the consequences.

“If the day came that they decided to terminate the experiment, I hoped that knowing Hebrew might give you a small advanced warning,” Kelly said.

“In all truth though, I expected you to be in Nigeria for years rather than months.”

“So what’s with the Irish brogue and the Gaeilge books?” I asked.

“There are Orthodox Jews in Ireland—not many, but some. My parents and grand parents immigrated to Israel before I was born—but like Irish everywhere, they kept their ties to their old homeland.

“So you’re a Jew?” I asked in idle curiosity.

“Actually, I was born a Jew. I was a Jew when I become a Mossad operative. They wouldn’t have trusted even an Israeli-born Christian even of Jewish heritage and blood.

“When I became a follower of Jesus—let us say that they had too much time and training invested in me. I do draw all the unusual and oddball assignments though,” Kelly said.

“Are you calling me an oddball?” I asked while feigning offense.

******************* ********************** **************************

I stayed in Israel for over six months after I was released from the Dead Sea resort.

I had ID that said that I worked for Mossad—so I could walk around with my .38 Super and my .32 Walther PP and several blades on me.

It was generally hot, but when I could possibly wear an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt without baking myself, I brought my big Smith and Wesson .357 too.

I camped in the desert Mount Sinai. I swam in the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee. I was baptized in the River Jordan and I walked all around Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth.

I’d heard that being in the Holy Land sends some folks into a Religious mania, but I wasn’t so fortunate.

I walked the streets of Israel and conversed with many people—in Hebrew, in English, in German, In Spanish and even Hindi.

Kelly introduced me to many of his kinfolk and they were happy to help me work on my Gaelige.

Kelly got me into several Mossad training courses. I took a real long-range sniping course—where my custom 1903A1 was the envy of many.

They taught me some things about face-to-face human engineering that I’d never known.

{I’ve been told that I am probably a high-functioning Asperger…}

I took classes on lock picking, escaping handcuffs and escaping ropes…

They taught me the basics of Krav Maga and although they looked askance at the art, I had a Capoeira coach. They even gave me some expert coaching to make me a better pistol shot.

***************** ********************* *******************

“Have you enjoyed your vacation in Israel?” Kelly asked.

“Very much,” I replied.

“Well all good things gotta come to an end,” Kelly said.

“What do you know about the world situation?” he asked.

“Very little. I ain’t been following it,” I answered.

“Your students have done a bang-up job of repelling several assaults by vastly superior numbers.

“Just about every fifth walled enclosure in Nigeria has become a small Alamo—and the numbers rise.

“Of course the Terrorists adapt and try other avenues of attack—but they almost always come off second best against your shooters,” Kelly said.

“What about the other schools?”

“They’re better than nothing, but none of them have half the hostile casualty to friendly casualty ratio as graduates of your schools have,” Kelly said.

“Give all the credit to Jeff Cooper,” I said.

“Jeff Cooper taught one week courses and wrote books. You took his writings and wove them into a three month course that takes men who’ve never fired a weapon and you turn them into warriors—not just soldiers, many militaries create soldiers—but warriors.

“Did Jeff Cooper ever have his students memorize Bible verses? Quotes from Miyamoto Musashi, the “Hagakure” and “The Rubaiyt “?

“No, you’ve taken martial training to a new level,” Kelly said.

“And your reputation has grown. You’re practically a legend,” he concluded.

“That’s flattering. Maybe I should write a book or two to cash in on my notoriety,” I said.

I certainly looked intimidating. The scar ran from the right hand corner of my mouth to the corner of my right eye. It drew the tissue enough that I always seemed to be wearing a vicious lopsided sneer.

The doctors said that they could reduce the scaring, but with no guarantee how much difference that it would make.

Why bother?

Meanwhile, I’d never again need to fear a case of appendicitis. They couldn’t even find the little thing.

And my stomach still cramped occasionally, but it got steadily better.

At any rate, I had a great look for the back cover of some mercenary’s memoires type book.

“Have you heard about all the violence in India, Myanmar and Timor?” Kelly asked.

“No, it’s passed me by completely,” I said.

“Mussulman extremists fighting Hindu extremists—each trying to outdo the other in atrocity and sadism—and both of them lashing out at any Christians and to be honest, any Buddhists trying to stay uninvolved,” He said.

“How special!” I said.

“You don’t sound surprised,” Kelly observed.

“Nah, I read many years ago, that when the American Hare Krishna’s raised a new generation in the faith and they seriously started studying the old Sanskrit manuals that Hinduism has as much justification for Jihad—or whatever the Sanskrit word is—as the Mussulmen. Seems to be happening overseas though,” I said.

“I just can’t remember the term they use for subhumans who have zero potential to advance karma wise—and who are better off dead and out of everyone’s misery,” I added.

“They’re calling them ‘Nirjiv’,” Kelly said.

“That’s not the term that I mean. Anyway…”

“Ceylon is keeping a pretty good handle on things. They’ve had all sorts of ethnic spats over the years but they’re determined to practice all reasonable tolerance and to live together in peace,” Kelly said.

“I’m happy for them,” I said, not certain where this was going.

“The government of Ceylon—they insist on referring to themselves as ‘Sri Lanka’—would like for you to establish one of your Warrior Temples—that’s their term—on Ceylonese ground,” Kelly said.

“Why? If they’re doing so well?”

“Several reasons: the leaders would like platoons of Praetorian Guards trained by you. Anybody with enough money to live in an enclosed compound wants a few of your warrior-trained guards.

“Besides. Once your school is franchised, they intend to open it up to foreigners like the Indians and others—it will be a big money maker, believe you me,” Kelly said.

So I headed for Ceylon along with Dalen, Oduntan, Izoduwa, McGill and Kelly accompanying me.

Billy-Bob was dead. Wilson and some of my other buddies stayed in Nigeria to continue the work we’d started there.

I was a bit surprised that McGill chose to hang. I’d inquire into his reasons eventually. Right now I was just overjoyed to have him. My students would get the proper foundation to eventually become top-notch trackers from the little man.

We’d be light on Gunsmith/Armorers—not!

Do you know how many young men graduate from the Colorado School of Trades as Certified Gunsmiths each year? Do you know how few ever get to be full-time Gunsmiths?

My employers recruited a dozen graduates, paid off any and all student loans and contracted a five year bonus big enough to let each and everyone of them set up their own gunstore or gunsmithing operation with zero dept and enough left to smooth over any rough spots for several years.

Oh yeah, I turned in my Mossad ID. I was never actually working for Mossad. The ID—so I could carry my guns—and the training was just their way of saying, “Thanks!”

Kelly said that Mossad wouldn’t recruit a Christian—not necessarily true. When and if they wanted to acquire an asset who was not from Israel, they probably couldn’t afford to be so selective—I don’t guess.

They never tried to recruit Brother Jonathan—so I wouldn’t know.

Anyway, why should Israel care what Hindus get up to?

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

It does puzzle me why Kelly chose to come along. Like I say, why does the Mossad care what happens in India, Ceylon and Myanmar?



.....RVM45

[kaijafon]

Thank you! as always, very different and interesting!

[ydderf]

I've looked at your story multiple times started it once then let it drop. Tonight I read it through and couldn't stop till the end. Thank you for posting a well written story.
thanks again ydderf

[millwright]

A well crafted ending to a top-shelf story.

Good Job.






What's next?

[dogbone62]

Truly enjoyed it! Thanks for seeing it thru to completion.