The Time of The Cat 19

Jun 12, 2023

NINETEEN

RUDY

When I first met Dec, it was on a battlefield. I’m not saying exactly where, but it was in an Eastern European city. I was leading a small group of experienced fighters; some people would call them mercenaries, but unlike those people, we actually believed in what we were fighting for.

I remember Colin yelling, “Rudy, I’m going to clear that two-story building on the left side of the street. I think that may be where the rifle fire has been coming from.”

I motioned to the rest of the group to provide covering fire for him as he dashed across the street. Sure enough, there were a couple of shots from the upstairs windows in return, but Colin was already under the portico and out of their direct line of sight.

Seeing that he was safe for the moment, I detailed Chandra and Joe to continue shooting at the windows just to give the occupants something to keep their attention. As they began to fire sporadically, I slid along behind a low garden wall on the other side of the street and gradually approached the corner. My thought was to flank the building on the northern end and keep anyone inside from exiting.

The fighting was basic urban conflict – house-to-house and nasty. The sectarian nature of the conflict meant that neither side offered mercy to the other. I don’t know why ostensibly religious people who should exhibit merciful behavior never do. They can be as vicious and bloodthirsty as a pack of wolves when it comes to fighting over a difference in belief. The international rules of war are largely meaningless in such a situation.

I moved to the end of the wall and waited for a moment. Colin had entered the front door with no shooting, but as I waited, a grenade went off in one of the upstairs rooms, so I figured he’d made it up the stairs. I took that moment to run across to the opposite corner. From there, I could see a rear alley behind the building. It looked like the most likely egress for anyone trying to exit, so I moved down the wall until I reached a sunken stairway that led to a basement door. I started down the stairwell to check out the door.

There was a shooter on the other side of the street that I’d not seen until he opened up at me. I ducked down into the stairwell, but not fast enough. A bullet bounced off the wall and hit me in the calf. It felt like a cow had kicked me in the shin, and I dropped to the bottom of the stairs.

It hurt so much that I initially thought the bone was broken, and to compound the problem, it must have nicked an artery because I was bleeding badly. I wrestled around and got out a small first aid pack that I always carry and worked at getting a pressure bandage on my leg. All of the time I was doing this, some idiot somewhere was groaning loudly. As I finished tying the bandage and the blood flow slowed, I realized that the noisy person was me.

There was a sudden burst of firing from the alleyway and then a stampede of boots on the concrete coming toward me. I tried to grab my weapon and prepare, but by the time I looked up, there were six or seven guns pointed at me. Colin had chased the opposition out of the house, and they’d run right up on my hiding place!

Before they could finish me off, there was a burst of automatic fire from right behind them, and they dropped. Incredulously, I managed to work my way up a couple of steps, and there he stood, smoke trickling out of the muzzle of his assault weapon.

He smiled at me and said, “Hi, I’m Declan, and you might be?”

He paused, looked up, and raised his hands in a sort of acknowledgment that he wasn’t fighting as Joe and Chandra ran up, covering him with their guns.

“I’m going under the assumption that the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” he said. “I’ve been working around the back of this place for thirty minutes trying to figure out how to clear those guys out of there, and now you’ve done it for me.”

We’ve been friends ever since and, while we don’t work together all of the time, there have been many jobs on which we’ve collaborated. I owe Dec my life, and that’s a debt that I don’t take lightly.

That’s why, when he called, I came immediately, even though I was actively working on what seemed to be a totally separate issue.

We’d been under contract with a private corporate group for some months. They had us working against some radical groups in a couple of places that I also won’t mention. Most recently, we’d come into the US because they had an idea that we could provide some direction to their training initiative. Collectively, we had more experience than all of their trainers combined.

We’d come across the southern border somewhere in Texas and made our way to their headquarters in Virginia. Joe is the only American citizen of the group, but that didn’t slow us down. The border security of the USA is highly compromised.

I know there are lots of Homeland Security agents, but their job is mainly to put up a good show and to intimidate the citizens. They don’t do much by way of sealing the borders. So, we got across easily and then rented a car in Texas. Within a couple of days, we were in Virginia.

As soon as we got there, we were reassigned to investigate some kind of massive explosion in the western part of the state, and as we were working on that, Dec called.