Noble Warrior (2 page)

Nerves tingling, his fists curling into the heads of hammers, M.D.—too tightly wound, too eager to deliver a beating—readied for war.

The short, muscular guy fiddled with his hands underneath the counter. Despite his view being blocked, McCutcheon didn't make a preemptive move. Instead, M.D. just breathed in and breathed
out, calm, even, steady breaths. No need to waste energy, he thought.

The tall one raised an axe handle. Hickory. Four feet long. A stick like that, M.D. knew, would leave marks.

McCutcheon stood his ground as if carved from stone. Confidence in his skills had never been a problem for Bam Bam, the legendary teenage cage warrior from the projects of inner-city Detroit.
M.D. had put enough people in stitches, casts, and hospitals to know his own capabilities. The real battle for him was not one of mustering up enough aggression to go to war, but rather of
summoning up enough restraint to see if bloodshed could be avoided. “I said,” M.D. repeated, working hard to remain composed, “I am looking for Ibrahim Ali Far—”

“He's not here,” the tall one interrupted.

“And who's the fuck is you?” asked his thick, squat associate.

McCutcheon glared. “It does not matter who I am,” he said. “It matters that I think that you”—M.D. pointed at his original target, the guy sitting behind the cash
register—“are in cahoots with Ibrahim.”

“Cahoots?” came the reply. “I do not know this word. Are they a type of pants?”

The three Somalians laughed.

M.D. took another long, slow deep breath. In front of him stood Massir “Max” El-Alhou, the CyberFang of Al-Shabaab, a digital Houdini that the U.S. government had been unsuccessfully
trying to apprehend for more than two years. An innovative piece of NSA software had mapped his Wi-Fi fingerprint and tracked him to the state of New Jersey. After two weeks of covert hunting, M.D.
had tracked him here.

“No,” McCutcheon answered. “It means that you are an associate of Ibrahim's, a conspirator.” M.D. pointed at the laptop. “And I have a feeling your computer
contains a lot of cahoot-like information, so I am going to ask that you pack up your things and please come with me. I have a minivan. It's parked out back.”

Silence. No one moved. Menacing looks lasered in on McCutcheon.

“You'll be comfortable,” M.D. added. “It's got leather seats.”

The beefy kid cracked a defiant smile. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Well, cock you.”

Cock me? M.D. thought. I don't even know what that means. The musclebound guy with a neck as thick as a fullback's thigh stepped from behind the counter and McCutcheon saw what had
previously been shielded from his sight.

Knucks. Brass ones. Scuffed, sturdy, threatening from his left hand.

Brass knuckles have always been a favorite of soldiers because they hold the power to transform a glancing blow into a knockout punch and a knockout punch into a cerebral hematoma. But only
wearing them on his left hand? Dude shoulda just made a sign, M.D. thought:
Look at me, I'm a southpaw!

The muscular guy squared his stance, raised his fists, and cocked a big left hand. M.D., quick as a cougar, spun and fired off a low Muay Thai shin kick to the inside of his opponent's
back leg and
CRACK!
a violent pop exploded through the air as his enemy's knee snapped. With his freshly torn anterior cruciate ligament unable to sustain his body weight,
M.D.'s foe buckled forward face-first.

Into an exploding palm strike.

The blow shattered his nasal bone and like a work of art being splashed across a canvas, blood splattered against the white wall in a shower of speckled red dots. Slowly, his enemy's eyes
rolled back into his head and, after an involuntary parting of his lips, a soft sigh, and a gentle exhalation, there was a thud.

Boomph!
He hit the ground.

Night-night, M.D. thought. One target down.

The tall guy launched an assault, and as if by instinct McCutcheon ducked underneath a strike aimed at his temple a tick before it would have knocked him out. His fierce enemy followed with two
more blows, swinging the ax handle expertly, not like a street fighter wildly waving a baseball bat but rather like a martial artist who had been schooled in the skill of stick fighting. Concise,
focused, swift strokes aimed at M.D.'s core, head, and then knees caused McCutcheon to backpedal.

M.D. kicked aside a chair, clearing some space, and
Thwwwwisshh!
the wind of another strike sailed by the front of his face. The angular, fierce Somalian refused to give him an
inch.

McCutcheon knew he was going to have to absorb a blow. His challenge, he recognized, was to make sure it'd only be one shot and not multiple whacks. After that, M.D. told himself,
he'd have him at a disadvantage.

As they say in the cage, everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the face. McCutcheon knew the time had come to see if his tall stick-swinging opponent owned any balls.

His enemy struck from the left; M.D. slid to his right and absorbed a smash to the ribs and groaned. Then M.D. countered. From the inside. Once the two adversaries were only three inches apart,
McCutcheon maneuvered both of his elbows above his foe's forearms, which made the ax handle about as helpful to him as a mosquito net.

Head butt—
Boom!
—just above the eye socket. Few blows are more crippling. As if in slow motion, the sense of alertness in the tall Somalian's eyes shifted from clear to
glazed.

Spleen shot, forearm shiver to the face, a knee to the chin that hit like a brick, and
Bang!
second enemy down.

Only one task remained: apprehend his target.

McCutcheon straightened his spine, stepped around a tall brass pipe that had been knocked over in the melee, and advanced toward the front counter. The time had come to stake his claim. M.D.
looked up, ready to take his man into custody.

And found himself staring into the barrel of a gun.

D
elivering Ibrahim Ali Farah's lead cyber operations officer to the clandestine command center alive was the reason McCutcheon went to Mystic
Wonders in the first place. This was not a “dead or alive” mission; only alive would do. His orders were simple: capture the technology coordinator behind a new-era sleeper cell that
had been created by teens, was recruiting teens, and, most terrifying of all, was targeting teens for upcoming bloodshed. These “kids,” he was informed, were pretending to be regular
students, working late nights, studying computer science, wearing blue jeans and so on, when in reality it had been discovered they were actually a group of young chaos causers plotting mayhem on
American soil. Their leader, Ibrahim Ali Farah, functioned as an underage operative for an international terrorist organization known as Al-Shabaab.

In Arabic, the name
Al-Shabaab
means
Movement of Striving Youth
. McCutcheon Daniels got recruited to the world of hunting them after his own underground mixed martial arts
career in the ghettoes of Detroit. His father had pimped him out like a violent whore to make money. Pound for pound, M.D. was the best young mixed martial artist the Motor City had ever seen.
Maybe the best ever. Undefeated for years and unmatched in his dedication to training, M.D. had taken out some of the best underground fighters from coast to coast. However, a street gang named the
Priests lost a very large sum of money betting on M.D. the night he absorbed the first loss of his career.

A loss that could have been—and should have been—a victory until McCutcheon purposefully threw the fight. M.D. had only done it to escape his father's abusive clutches, but the
Priests didn't care about stupid little father/son squabbles. They'd lost a lot of cash fronting money for uncovered bets made by McCutcheon's dad, and according to the code of
the streets, the only way to pay someone back for such a giant loss of green was with the spilling of a large amount of red.

The High Priest, the gang's kingpin, sought revenge.

Payback for the Daniels family began with having Klowner and Nate-Neck, McCutcheon's two closest friends and MMA training partners, butchered. A hollowed-out eye socket, necks slashed to
the white of the bone, ears carved off with a hacksaw—gruesome, merciless street executions had been carried out on both men. Of course the High Priest had also put a green light out on Demon
Daniels, M.D.'s dad, but he slithered away before hit squads were able to take him out.

As the leader of a criminal enterprise growing more influential by the month, D'Marcus Rose, the High Priest, understood that most people feared death. But what people feared even more
than death, he knew, was excessive, prolonged pain.

This knowledge led him to create a campaign of terror aimed directly at Detroit's most impoverished residents. Targeting the poorest made good business sense because the down and out were
the most easily victimized and the least well-protected by law enforcement. With their fear came power.

Once Detroit became the largest American city in history to declare bankruptcy, opportunities opened like flower buds in the springtime. Fewer cops. Less resources. Virtually no chance to stop
the Priests.

Rose became the city's biggest shotcaller. As the High Priest he held only one aim: own Detroit. Anyone who tried to stop him found themselves in either a wheelchair or the morgue.

McCutcheon's mom, baby sister, and M.D. ended up being whisked away in the dead of day and put into protective custody by the U.S. Marshals' Witness Security Program. Once the whole
family was safe in Bellevue, Nebraska—like who in the world moves to Bellevue, Nebraska, from the projects of D-Town?—some black op government guys, fans of McCutcheon's unique
skill set as a cage fighter, began recruiting M.D. to a covert, anti–domestic terror unit nicknamed the Murk.

Like so many other adults in McCutcheon's life, they too wanted him to fight. But for something more. Something bigger. Something worth fighting for.

America. Freedom. The red, white, and blue.

After all the betrayal and all the violence during his childhood years, McCutcheon hungered for something positive to latch on to. Corny as it sounds, the whole idea of being one of the good
guys appealed to him. M.D. was a badass. He knew he was a badass. He'd been raised ever since the crib to be a badass. At three he was shadowboxing, at seven he was executing heel hooks, and
by the age of nine he was punching the ticket of thirteen-year-olds who outweighed him by more than fifty pounds. There was never a question about McCutcheon Daniels being a great and mighty
warrior; the question, as posed to M.D., was “Can McCutcheon Daniels be a great and mighty warrior who fights for a great and mighty cause?”

A gravel-voiced guy named Stanzer envisioned M.D. as a prototype for the next generation of soldier, the kind that could handle the challenges of fighting the next generation of terrorist.

“The enemy doesn't have an age limit,” Stanzer barked. “Why should we?”

M.D. was young. He was skilled. He was the type of lone wolf that could get into places only teens could gain access to and then do some serious damage in an under-the-radar style.

All in the name of saving American lives. On the inside of Stanzer's left forearm the colonel wore a tattoo that rationalized it all:

Beneath these words rippled the image of an American flag. To Stanzer, his ink wasn't just body paint; these words gave meaning to his life.

“Fact is,” Stanzer said to M.D., “sometimes good people have to do some very bad things.”

Few teens if any had ever excelled in the world of mixed martial arts to the extent that M.D. had. But his whole life he'd been programmed by his piece-of-shit father to fight for
personal, self-centered reasons. Demon Daniels taught his son to dream of winning a belt. Of becoming a world champion. Of living a life of luxury and material wealth. Stanzer spoke of something
more.

Duty. Honor. Service. A higher calling.

McCutcheon loved him for it.

Like legions of others who sign on the dotted line, warring for something bigger than himself rang true to McCutcheon, and M.D. decided to accept the challenge. His country, he was told, needed
him.

It didn't take long for Stanzer to recognize that McCutcheon was unlike any other recruit he'd ever seen. Yet for all M.D.'s physical skills, perhaps the most impressive
quality Stanzer saw in McCutcheon was the manner in which he respected the theater of battle. To M.D., the mixed martial arts were more than just a system of fighting; being a warrior meant living
by a set of principles.

Honor, strength, humility, respect. These weren't just ideals to M.D.; these were his ethics, on display morning, noon, and night. A lot of MMA fighters worked hard to build their physical
skills in a wide range of the martial arts's fiercest of fighting styles. M.D. had, too. Yet, as Stanzer noted, Agent ZERO X1 also worked just as hard to embody the warrior's ethos of
dignity. McCutcheon approached his training with ferocity, his teachers with humility, and his foes with a combination of respect, bravery, patience, wisdom, and unrelenting aggression.