The lieutenant is thrilled. “Really?”
“Yes. He was young, bright, ambitious, well educated. And well meaning. But he had certain deficiencies. He had a stubborn inability to grasp the fundamentals of our situation over there. A sort of mental block, if you will, that caused those of us who were serving under him to experience the most intense kind of frustration. It was touch and go for a while, son, I don’t mind telling you that.”
“How did it work out, Uncle Enzo?”
“It worked out fine. You see, one day, I took it upon myself to shoot him in the back of the head.”
The lieutenant’s eyes get very big, and his face seems paralyzed. Uncle Enzo has no sympathy for him at all: if he screws this up, people could die.
Some new piece of radio babble comes in over the lieutenant’s headset. “Oh, Uncle Enzo?” he says, very quietly and reluctantly.
“Yes?”
“You were asking about that pizza car?”
“Yes?”
“It’s not there.”
“Not there?”
“Apparently, when they set down to pick up Rife, a man got out of the chopper and climbed into the pizza car and drove it away.”
“Where did he drive it to?”
“We don’t know, sir, we only had one spotter in the area, and he was tracking Rife.”
“Take off your headset,” Uncle Enzo says. “And turn off that walkie-talkie. You need your ears.”
“My ears?”
Uncle Enzo drops into a crouch and walks briskly across the pavement until he is between a couple of small jets. He sets the skateboard down quietly. Then he unties his shoelaces and pulls his shoes off. He takes his socks off, too, and stuffs them into the shoes. He takes the straight razor out of his pocket, flips it open, and slits both of his trouser legs from the hem up to his groin, then bunches the material up and cuts it off. Otherwise the fabric will slide over his hairy legs when he walks and make noise.
“My God!” the lieutenant says, a couple of planes over. “Al is down! My God, he’s dead!”
Chapter Seventy
Uncle Enzo leaves his jacket on, for now, because it’s dark, and because it’s lined with satin so that it is relatively quiet. Then he climbs up onto the wing of one of the planes so that his legs cannot be seen by someone crouching on the ground. He hunkers down on the end of the wing, opens his mouth so that he can hear better, and listens.
The only thing he can hear at first is an uneven spattering noise that wasn’t there before, like water falling out of a half-open faucet onto bare pavement. The sound seems to be coming from a nearby airplane. Uncle Enzo is afraid that it may be jet fuel leaking onto the ground, as part of a scheme to blow up this whole section of the airport and take out all opposition at a stroke. He drops silently to the ground, makes his way carefully around a couple of adjacent planes, stopping every few feet to listen, and finally sees it: one of his soldiers has been pinned to the aluminum fuselage of a Learjet by means of a long wooden pole. Blood runs out of the wound, down his pant legs, drips from his shoes, and spatters onto the tarmac.
From behind him, Uncle Enzo hears a brief scream that suddenly turns into a sharp gaseous exhalation. He has heard it before. It is a man having a sharp knife drawn across his throat. It is undoubtedly the lieutenant.
He has a few seconds to move freely now. He doesn’t even know what he’s up against, and he needs to know that. So he runs in the direction the scream came from, moving quickly from cover of one jet to the next, staying down in a crouch.
He sees a pair of legs moving on the opposite side of a jet’s fuselage. Uncle Enzo is near the tip of the jet’s wing. He puts both hands on it, shoves down with all his weight, and then lets it go.
It works: the jet rocks toward him on its suspension. The assassin thinks that Uncle Enzo has just jumped up onto the wingtip, so he climbs up onto the opposite wing and waits with his back to the fuselage, waiting to ambush Enzo when he climbs over the top.
But Enzo is still on the ground. He runs in toward the fuselage on silent, bare feet, ducks beneath it, and comes up from underneath with his straight razor in one hand. The assassin—Raven—is right where Enzo expected him.
But Raven is already getting suspicious; he stands up to look over the top of the fuselage, and that puts his throat out of reach. Enzo’s looking at his legs instead.
It’s better to be conservative and take what you can get than take a big gamble and blow it, so Enzo reaches in, even as Raven is looking down at him, and severs Raven’s left Achilles tendon.
As he’s turning away to protect himself, something hits him very hard in the chest. Uncle Enzo looks down and is astonished to see a transparent object protruding from the right side of his rib cage. Then he looks up to see Raven’s face three inches from his.
Uncle Enzo steps back away from the wing. Raven was hoping to fall on top of him but instead tumbles to the ground. Enzo steps back in, reaching forward with his razor, but Raven, sitting on the tarmac, has already drawn a second knife. He lunges for the inside of Uncle Enzo’s thigh and does some damage; Enzo sidesteps away from the blade, throwing off his attack, and ends up making a short but deep cut on the top of Raven’s shoulder. Raven knocks his arm aside before Enzo can go for the throat again.
Uncle Enzo’s hurt and Raven’s hurt. But Raven can’t outrun him anymore; it’s time to take stock of things a little bit. Enzo runs away, though when he moves, terrible pains run up and down the right side of his body. Something thuds into his back, too; he feels a sharp pain above one kidney, but only for a moment. He turns around to see a bloody piece of glass shattering on the pavement. Raven must have thrown it into his back. But without Raven’s arm strength behind it, it didn’t have enough momentum to penetrate all the way through the bulletproof fabric, and it fell out.