“Exactly,” Ratel said. “The key to the initial parry in Krav Maga is anticipation, and that means awareness of your surroundings. If a would-be attacker approaching you has his right hand in his pocket, the weapon is probably in his right hand, so your mental plan of action is to prepare to defend against a right-handed attacker.” Ratel picked up a rubber knife from a shelf behind him and tossed it to Brad. “Try it.”
Brad put his right hand with the knife behind him and approached Ratel, then swung his hand toward him. Ratel’s left hand snapped out, pushing the knife past his chest and half turning Brad’s body. “Foremost, the knife is not near your body, and if the attacker had another weapon in his left hand, he could not use it right now because I turned him away. Like the cane, you now see areas of the body that are exposed.” Ratel made punching motions at Brad’s torso and head. “Or, I can catch the right arm with my right arm and lock it, with the knife safely away from me, and with the arm in a lock, I control the attacker.” Ratel grabbed Brad’s right arm from underneath, put his hand on Brad’s tricep, and pushed. Even with a slight bit of pressure, it felt as if the arm were going to snap in two, and Brad could go nowhere but toward the ground.
That was the first day’s training, and after finishing the third, Brad was starting to wonder if he would ever be able to learn any of those Krav Maga techniques, let alone use them. But he reminded himself that he’d thought the same thing about Cane-Ja, and he figured he was getting pretty good at that. He exited the dojang, put up the hood of his green-and-gold Cal Poly Mustangs windbreaker, and started running east down Tank Farm Road toward Broad Street and the bus stop. Although not quite sunset, it was drizzly, cool, and getting dark quickly, and he wanted to be off this unlit road, on the main drag, and on the bus as soon as possible.
He was halfway to Broad Street, on the darkest part of the road, when a car approached, heading west. Brad left the pavement and stepped onto the uneven gravel “warning track” strip, but kept on running. The car shifted left a little bit and straddled the center line, and it looked as if it was going to pass by him with plenty of room to spare . . .
. . . when suddenly it swerved farther left, then began to skid to the right on the slick road, the car now perpendicular to the road, brakes and tires squealing—and heading right for Brad! He had almost no time to react to the sudden move. The car had slowed down quite a bit, but when it hit, it felt ten times worse than any blow he had ever received in high-school football.
“Oh, jeez, sorry about that, Mr. Bradley McLanahan,” a man said a few moments later through the haze in Brad’s consciousness. Brad was on his back on the side of the road, dazed and confused, his right hip and arm hurting like hell. Then, in Russian, the man said, “Izvinite. Excuse me. Wet road, I may have been going a little too fast, a coyote ran out in front of me, and I could hardly see you in the drizzle, blah, blah, blah. At least that is the story I will give the sheriff’s deputies, if they find me.”
“I . . . I think I’m all right,” Brad said, gasping for air.
“V samom dele? Really? Well, my friend, we can fix that.” And suddenly the man pulled a black plastic garden cleanup bag from a pocket, pressed it against Brad’s face, and pushed. Brad couldn’t breathe anyway with the wind knocked out of him, but panic rose up from his chest in terrifying waves. He tried to push the attacker away, but he couldn’t make any part of his body work properly.
“Prosto rasslab’tes’. Just relax, my young friend,” the man said, mixing English and Russian as if he were an expatriate or foreign cousin from the old country telling a bedtime story. “It will be over before you know it.”
Brad had no power at all to move the plastic away from his face, and he was considering surrendering to the roaring in his ears and the fiery pain in his chest . . . but somehow he remembered what he needed to do, and instead of fighting the hands holding the plastic on his face or trying to find his cane, he reached down and pressed the button on the device around his neck.
The attacker saw what he did, and for a moment he released the pressure on Brad’s face, found the device, snapped it off Brad’s neck, and threw it away. Brad gasped in a lungful of air. “Nice try, mudak,” the attacker said. He pressed the plastic over Brad’s face before Brad could take three deep breaths. “You’ll be dead long before your medic-alert nurses arrive.”
Brad couldn’t see it, but moments later a set of headlights approached. “Derzhite ikh podal’she,” the man said over his shoulder in Russian to a second assailant, whom Brad had never seen. “Keep them away. Have them call 911 or something, but keep them away. Tell them I am doing CPR.”
“Ya budu derzhat’ ikh podal’she, tovarisch,” the assistant acknowledged. “I will keep them away, sir.”