Blood & Tacos #2 (11 page)

 
By Matthew C. Funk

Text taken from an interview with Agent "Sniper" by Matthew
C. Funk, 2012, at Sniper’s home in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Our decisions can’t change the course of the world.

I used to believe different. I used to accept, as a part of myself essential
as a heartbeat or a sinew, that we can change the planet.

Choose door one rather than door two, and kings are torn from the throne. Nations
fall. Freedom rings.

Or not. You fail and your failure means the turn of the world shifts.

CIA operatives buy into that faith—that "for want of a nail"
pipe dream.

That faith made me capable of surviving Beirut in ’87. It’s what
sent me there in the first place.

A black-budget agent for the CIA has to buy into it. It’s not just why
you do what you do. It’s who you are: More important than truth. More
important than morality. More important than life itself.

You lie, fight, and die for that faith—that perfect promise that global
"win or lose" comes down to your decisions.

Then you get old. You watch Al Jazeera English and eat the same Stouffer’s
meals you did when you were a kid. You listen to your West Palm Beach condo
association argue the same way you listened to Hamas and the PLO leadership
argue. You read The New York Times, and the religious hatreds are the same—only
the names have changed.

You watch the YouTube generation grow up, enlist, and die by the same roadside
bombs.

And you realize:

The world’s turning doesn’t change. All the faith there is can’t
change that, no more than faith could make the world flat.

Your decisions have only one effect: life or death.

You kill someone or you don’t. You get killed or you don’t.

You take two fistfuls of the Ativan prescribed under your CIA health care plan
and wash it down with a fifth of absinthe. Or you keep turning the pages, reading
on through the chapters of your life, even through the story never gets different.

I miss Beirut sometimes. I was Jason Malone then.

Malone knew what he was doing. He was changing the world, one choice at a time.

It was Beirut, 1987.

It may as well have been 2007. Or 1967. Or 7,000 years ago. Beirut doesn’t
change much.

Sure, the language on the signs goes from Phoenician to Latin to Arabic to
French. And yeah, the roasting meats now turn upright and run on electricity.
It’s Christians against Muslims against Jews now.

But in 1500 BC, it was Egyptian Ra-worshippers against Hittite storm-god followers.
The aroma of meat roasting on a spit still slathered the air. The language—the
first record of Egyptian and Hittite language together; the Amarna letters—was
still discussing war.

I was sent to stop a war. The conflict between Druze Christian militia, Israeli
hawks and dozens of Islamic extremist groups was on the brink of boiling over.
A peacemaker, David Saxon, on a secret mission for the CIA, had been captured.

Nobody knew by who. Or why. Or to what end.

But my handler at the Company knew that if the captors got David Saxon to talk,
it would all end badly.

Fingers would be pointed just to prove nobody was backing down. Israel, the
Druze Christian militia of Beirut, the Muslim extremists—all would blame
each other of trying to mess up the conflict.

I had to find David Saxon before those names got out. I’d save him or
kill him, before whole nations had an excuse for epic bloodshed.

Right out the gate to Beirut Rafic Hariri International Airport, I should have
known someone would have to bleed.

Right out the gate, someone took a shot at me.

I allow myself just one drink these nights.

I swirl the ice in the glass and watch it melt, as ice is wont to do. The waves
roll in, roll out, and I think.

I think on the inevitability of these things.

I checked into my hotel in Beirut and went to meet an arms dealer, Hammadi.
It was part of my cover: I would act as if I had something to offer Hammadi’s
clients on all sides of the conflict. They, in turn, could hopefully give me
a lead on David Saxon’s whereabouts.

After I checked in, I checked if I had someone on my tail.

If I hadn’t watched my back, I’d have never met the Israeli agent.
For all I know, he could have been killed by the Brotherhood of the Green Flag—the
Muslim fundamentalists whose compound I went on to find David Saxon at.

If the agent had died, I’d have hooked up with the Green Flag directly
instead. I’d have been led into an ambush. I’d have had to fight
my way into their compound rather than have Israeli intelligence parachute me
into it.

If I’d been ambushed, I could have shot my way out. If the Israeli followed
me undetected that night, maybe he’d have killed me.

It all comes down to who took a bullet first.

They named me "Sniper" at the Company because I shot and hit first.
If I hadn’t, my name would have ended up as ash in a Langley burn barrel.

But I lived, and so did Israeli intelligence agent Aaron Ben-David. The KGB-connected
Green Flag thug who tried to lead me to an unmarked grave, Omar, he died.

And David Saxon lived. I shot my way through a West Beirut militia ambush.
I could have shot my way out of an East Beirut Israeli ambush. I broke into
the Green Flag’s compound, grabbed Saxon and shot my way out of there
too.

Life or death, that’s the only difference. The men trying to kill me
were killed first.

Life or death, that’s all that mattered. I lived. David Saxon lived.
His peace deal lived.

And in the end, it didn’t matter at all.

At the West Palm Beach condo neighborhood meetings, they call me That Shithead.

I earn it. I argue every proposal. When some blue-hair in a Chanel pantsuit
raises a voice of opposition against them and looks to be winning her point,
well, I argue against her too.

The men who called me Malone in Beirut are all dead or retired. Either way,
the people we were are gone from the Earth.

At Senior Speed Dating, the ladies call me Mr. Mystery.

They do it with a wink or a coy downward look. I look like I keep my secrets
and they pick up on that. I use that secretive air to pick them up.

Truth is, I could care less about my secrets. The bearded men and boys in keffiyeh
who died to keep those secrets, died to protect a policy that is three generations
outdated.

At the Company, they still call me Sniper.

I go to the reunions in Annapolis every five years with all the other code
names. There’s always less hair and more skin cancer, but the suits never
change. And we drink designer beers and shoot the BBQ-laced breeze about black
ops, just like former football stars turned car salesmen would talk about their
big plays and how they got laid because of them.

Only, people got laid out in morgues, rather than laid. People who we used
to know, who no longer are.

The Middle East still is, and still is at war.

In the valley outside Beirut, Goliaths and Davids still do battle.

In Beirut, Israeli intelligence and Druze militias and Muslim extremists still
play the game, only the names have changed.

Their faith continues, but mine’s gone.

Beirut was blown up three times, but it’s still here. America is still
here and it is still at war in lands where only the language on the signs change.

I keep turning the pages, but the story is never any different—only the
adventure is gone.

Matthew C. Funk
is an editor of
Needle Magazine,
editor of the Genre section of the critically acclaimed zine,
FictionDaily,
and a staff writer for
Planet Fury
and
Criminal Complex.
Winner
of the 2010 Spinetingler Award for Best Short Story on the Web, Funk has online
work indexed on his Web domain and printed work in
Needle, Speedloader,
Off the Record, Pulp Ink
and
D*CKED.

 
By Arch Saxon

(discovered by Andrew Nette)

Arch Saxon’s Bastard Mercenary series, a mainstay of the Australian
men’s adventure publisher Nasho Books Ltd., has had a bit of revival recently;
a film version is in development. Whether or not the books will come back in
print is a different story. Huge thanks go to author and Saxon collector, ANDREW
NETTE, for digging up this gem from 1984.

His name was Thong. Thai for gold. But the only thing shining in the weak sunlight
that streamed through the cell’s barred window was the glint on the six-inch
shiv the lady-boy held in his manicured right hand.

He sliced the air in front of me, shifted his weight from foot to foot. He
looked playful, but I could tell he was a professional. The way he held the
makeshift blade, to cut not stab. How he kept his distance, stopped me from
getting close. Thailand may be known as the "land of smiles," but
the only thing the look of glee on his powdered face promised was painful death.

Lefebvre cowered behind the hired killer. Unshaven and dressed in grimy prison
fatigues, the Frenchman looked like just another shit-out-of-luck inmate of
the Kingdom’s prison system, not the front man for an international Communist-controlled
drug syndicate.

Thong made another cutting motion, testing me, gauging my reflexes. He knew
he had me at a disadvantage.

I’d spent forty-eight hours in the company of two hundred men crammed
into a holding cell barely big enough for fifty. Lefebvre and his bodyguard
occupied one of several smaller rooms reserved for prisoners with money.

The only thing to eat had been rice porridge. I hadn’t slept, constantly
on guard against the rats that came out at night, not to mention much larger
predators. Worst of all, I was unarmed.

"Are you ready to taste my pretty blade, falang?" the lady boy
cooed in the local dialect favoured by Thais from the Northeast, the poorest
part of the Kingdom.

Thong and I stared at each other, two gladiators about to do battle. His eyes
were wide and bloodshot, a sure sign he was on the cheap speed known as yah
bah, used by most of the inmates. As if signalling our entrance into the arena,
the cacophony of human noise from the surrounding prison reached fever pitch.

"You’ve got one chance," I said in fluent Thai. "Put
down the knife, let me have the Frenchman."

Thong put a hand over his mouth, his hot pink nail polish standing out in the
drab surroundings, and stifled a high-pitched giggle.

"Don’t fucking flirt, you idiot," hissed Lefebvre in Thai.
"Kill him."

The Thai swung the blade savagely, missed me and followed up with a rapid criss-crossing
movement. The blade bit into my shoulder, spreading a pool of dark crimson on
my prison fatigues.

Emboldened by the sight of blood, Thong came in close, hoping to finish me
quickly. He lunged. I careened the upper part of my body to one side as the
blade cut the air where my face had been, grabbed his knife hand by the wrist
and bent it backwards. It snapped with a sickening crack.

The shiv clattered to the concrete floor as the Thai fell to his knees, clasping
the broken appendage to his chest. Lefebvre edged backwards across the floor
until his back was pressed hard against the wall. I smiled at him, took Thong’s
head in my hands and twisted it sharply.

It was a thing of beauty, the look of raw fear on the Frenchman’s face
as I let go of the Thai’s lifeless body and picked up the shiv.

"Who the hell are you?" he said in heavily accented English as
I rested the blade under his chin. His breath stank of nam pla, the pungent
fish sauce the Thais used to season all their food.

"Name’s Bruce Kelly. Mates call me Boomer. You can call me your
worst nightmare."

"Please, I beg you, don’t kill me."

"I’m not going to kill you, Froggie. That is unless you don’t
tell me what I need to know."

He nodded vigorously, his pores popping sweat. "Anything."

"Start with the location of Scorpion’s Bangkok headquarters."

"They’ll kill me."

"Well, it looks like you’re shit out of options, because I’ll
kill you if you don’t."

"Not like Scorpion’s people you won’t—"

Most people think pain is the most effective interrogation technique. But in
my extensive experience, one gets even better results from pain when it’s
combined with surprise. Before Lefebvre could finish his sentence, I drew the
shiv across his cheek, paused for effect, and then repeated the action on his
other cheek.

The Frenchman dabbed his fingers on the wounds, put them in front of his face.
His eyes bulged as he looked at the blood.

"It’ll be your ears next, then your nose. I’ll keep going
all the way down to your balls."

Five minutes later I had everything I needed. I threw the shiv to one side,
stood, and turned to leave. A crowd of prisoners had gathered in the cell doorway:
Thais, a Russian who’d beaten a prostitute to death, a couple of gigantic
Africans arrested for passport theft.