Mike Lupica - Hero
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- Year:2010
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Mike Lupica: author's other books
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THERE were four thugs, total gangsters, in front of the house with their rifles and their night-vision goggles. Four more in back. No telling how many more inside.
So figure a dozen hard guys at least, protecting one of the worst guys in the world.
Not one of them having a clue about how much trouble they were really in, how badly I had them outnumbered.
Hired guns, in any country, never worried me. The Bads? They were the real enemy, worse than any terrorists, even if I was one of the few people alive who knew they existed.
Even my boss, the president of the United States, didnt know what we were really up against, how much he really needed me.
When he talked about our country fighting an unseen threat, he didnt know how true that really was.
When my son, Zach, was little, I used to tell him these fantastic bedtime stories about the Bads, and he thought I was making them up. I wasnt.
The snow was falling hard now, bringing night along with it. Not good. Definitely not good. I didnt need a blizzard tonight, not if I wanted to get the plane in the air once I got back to the small terminal near the airport in Zagreb. Which was only going to happen if I could get past the guards, get inside, and then back out with the guy Id come all this way for. It meant things going the way they were supposed to, which didnt always happen in my line of work.
My official line of work? That would be special adviser to the president. A title that meant nothing on nights like this. On assignments like this. The real job description was fixing things, things that other people couldnt, saving people who needed saving, capturing people who needed to be stopped. Dispensing my own brand of justice.
Sometimes I had help, people watching my back.
Not tonight. Tonight I was on my own. Not even the president knew I was here. Sometimes you have to play by your own rules.
On this remote hill in northern Bosnia, near where the concentration camps had been discovered a few years before, I had managed to finally locate a Serb war criminal and part-time terrorist named Vladimir Radovic. He was known to governments around the world and decent people everywhere as Vlad the Bad because of all the innocent people hed slaughtered when he was in power, before he was on the run.
To me, he was known by a code name, which I thought fit him much better:
The Rat.
I was here to catch the Rat.
Me, Tom Harriman. About to blow past the guns and inside a cabin that had been turned into an armed fortress.
Almost time now. I didnt just feel the darkness all around me, as if night had fallen out of the sky all at once. I could feel another darkness coming up inside me, the way it always did in moments like this, when something was about to happen. When I didnt have to keep my own bad self under control. When I could be one of the good guys but not have to behave like one.
The me that still scares me.
Time to go in and tell the Rat his ride was here.
I should have been cold, as long as Id been waiting outside. And I knew I should be worried about what might go wrong. Only I wasnt. Cold or worried, take your pick.
As I moved along the front of the tree line, seeing the smoke coming out of the chimney, seeing both levels of the house lit up, I did wonder if it had been too easy finding him. Wondered if the Bads had wanted me to find him, as a way of drawing me here, making me vulnerable.
But that was always part of the fun of it, wasnt it? The finding out.
Someday when Zach is ready, when it is Zachs time and not mine, I will have to tell him the truth about the Bads and about me, tell my kid that the most fantastic story of all was me.
But for now it was time to be the unknown hero again, with the jeep waiting for me on the access road, over on the other side of the woods, with the jet waiting a few miles away in Zagreb. This wasnt the Tom Harriman who testified in front of Congress and briefed the intelligence agencies.
This was the Tom Harriman who did whatever it took to get the job done.
I began to move toward the left side of the house, my boots not making a sound, even on the frozen snow. One of my many talents, gliding like I was riding an invisible wave.
The front four men were fanned out about fifty yards from the cabin, carrying their rifles like they were looking for any excuse to use them. They didnt know what I knew, that even if they did get to use them, the guns wouldnt do them much good.
And just like that I changed the plan, called an audible on myself, came walking out of the woods, in plain sight, talking to them in their native language.
Im lost, I said. Can you help me out?
Every gun turned toward me as the guards shouted at me to stop. But I just kept smiling, moving toward them, asking how to find my way back to the main road. I was such a stupid, they probably never met such a stupid in their lives.
The guy in charge just shook his head, turned and said something I couldnt hear, and they laughed, all of them dropping their guns at the same time, like a fighter dropping his hands.
I was on them before they knew it.
It was as if Id covered the ground between us in one step. Another of my talents. Michael Jordan or LeBron never had a first step like this.
I put all four of them down before any of them could get his gun back up. Wondered if they could hear the roar inside my head, the one I always heard. It was never adrenaline in times like this, it was something more, something Id never been able to understand. Or control very well once the bell rang. Most people only see it happen in action movies, one against four, one guy using only his hands and feet for spins and kicks and jumps. Only this was no movie.
It was over quickly, the four of them laid out in the snow, arms splayed like snow angels. Done like dinner, as Zach would say.
It was then that I heard the crackle of the walkietalkie from inside one of the guards parkas. Heard a voice full of static, asking Toni why he wouldnt respond, that if he didnt respond right now, he was going to come looking for him.
I didnt know whether the voice was coming from behind the house, one of the four back there that Id seen earlier, or from someone inside with the Rat.
Someone on the roof trained a huge searchlight on the front yard, making night as bright as day. The first shot was fired then, from somewhere off to my left. Then another. I ducked and rolled and went in a low crouch in the direction of the front door. They were probably wondering how I could still be moving like this, how theyd possibly missed me from close range.
I didnt have time to tell them they probably hadnt missed, that if they were going to put me down, they simply needed bigger guns.
They werent putting me down and they werent stopping me. Id come too far to get the Rat, to take him to the people waiting for him in London, the ones who wanted to either hang him or put him away for the next ten thousand years.
I made it to the porch, the gunfire still crackling all around me.
First floor or second?
He was on the second floor. Dont ask me how I knew; I just did. Call it a sixth sense. So instead of crashing through the door, I jumped up to the second-floor landing.
Dont ask about making a jump like that. You either can or you cant.
I smashed the window and burst through. There he was, the fat slob, trying to make it to the door, turning to fire a shot with the gun in his right hand. But I was across the room before he could do anything, slapping the gun out of his hand, putting my hand behind his neck, finding the spot, putting him out.
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