Night of the Assassin: Assassin Series Prequel by Russell Blake (people reading books .TXT) 📗

at the farthest end of the ship, right near the stern, was the gunman, taking cover below the three foot high steel lip of the boat’s deck edge. Raul calculated the distance and an additional forty yards and adjusted accordingly, then waited for the man’s head to pop back up. It was just a matter of time, he figured – correctly, as it turned out – his vigilance was rewarded by the man’s arms and head coming into view as he prepared to empty his weapon at the commandos below. Raul took his shot, and the man’s head disappeared in a bloody puff of fragments.

The deck was now empty, although it would still be ugly fighting through the ship. Not his problem.

The commander gave the squad the all-clear signal, and within seconds men were moving swiftly up the ropes to the ship above. Raul had shifted his attention to the bridge windows again, figuring it would just be a matter of time until some bright lad figured out that he could shoot from the portholes that stretched another four stories above the ship’s deck, picking off soldiers as they climbed over the rail. Sure enough, one of the glass hatches on the side opened, and a gun barrel poked out. He waited patiently because the angle of the shooter’s barrel wouldn’t allow him to hit the deck, and sure enough, more of the weapon slowly emerged from the window until Raul also saw the arm that was holding it. The first commandos were only a few feet from the edge so he only had a second before they’d be exposed to the gunman. Raul fired, and the gun went sailing harmlessly to the deck below, taking three quarters of the man’s still attached arm with it.

That would give the rest inside something to think about.

From there on out it was a textbook incursion. They had to use explosives to blow the doors open, and for fifteen minutes, bursts of gunfire echoed throughout the boat’s hull. Eventually the commander got an all clear call from the men inside, and a status report. They’d taken out six hostiles, no survivors, and lost nine men in the process. Raul listened to the recitation impassively, his face betraying nothing. The commander glanced at him as he heard the casualty assessment, but Raul was busy packing up his gear, his work for the night finished. The commander approached him and stopped a few feet from him.

“Great shooting. You saved a lot of lives tonight,” the commander said.

Raul bit his tongue, didn’t blurt out his natural reaction, which was that if he’d been allowed to lead an amphibian team they would have likely lost only a few men, if any, thanks to the element of surprise, and that the commander had killed those commandos with his lack of flair and imagination just as surely as if he’d pulled the trigger himself. Instead, he nodded and stood, weapon in tow.

“Thank you, sir. I had some lucky shots tonight. We were all fortunate.”

There being nothing more to say, he saluted before descending the stairs to join the remainder of his team. It would be a long stretch of duty as the bodies were recovered and the drugs inventoried and he wanted to get out of the commander’s sight before his contempt for the man leaked through his veneer. It wasn’t worth it. Most of the world was composed of idiots – the commander was simply making up the numbers.

It was that night, on his first live operation, that he realized he had probably already learned everything he was going to from the military. The time had already come, after little over a year in the service, to reconsider his options.

Chapter 6

Ten Years Ago

A year and a half after joining the marines, Raul disappeared without a trace, leaving nothing behind to be remembered by except his assumed name, which he’d quickly grown to despise. He’d participated in seven more operations after his first one, and yet with each mission he became more convinced that his talents were being wasted and he wasn’t progressing any further. To make matters worse, he witnessed countless acts of bumbling bureaucracy by the ranking officers, costing the men under their command casualties for no good reason. If anything had ever convinced him that he wouldn’t do well working for someone else, his half year of active duty after completing his boot camp and all the specialized training had done the trick. When he walked off the base for the last time, ostensibly on two day’s leave to go visit his fictional family in Chiapas, it was with an audible sigh of relief.

Raul had saved almost all of his meager pay and still had a few thousand dollars from the money he’d left home with, after selling his weapons to convert his assets into cash. His identity papers had cost him six hundred dollars in Mexico City, and he’d done some odd jobs before joining the navy, but he would need to put the next part of his grand plan into operation fairly soon if he was going to avoid having to work as a day laborer. Fortunately, the cartels he’d been battling were generous employers, able to pay far more than the navy, so he could pretty much choose which cartel he wanted to approach; as an ex-marine they’d be eager to have him as part of their enforcement team. Although he had different ideas about how he could be of service to them.

He was now three months shy of his nineteenth birthday and free to do as he pleased. Yet there was some unfinished business he needed to attend to back in Sinaloa before he moved on to the next phase of his life. His departure had stuck in his craw, and he felt a pull to return. He’d learned to trust his judgment on these things, so he hopped on a bus and began the long trip from Veracruz to Culiacan. Wearing