Deckard erased the phone’s memory, then removed the battery. He devoured the pizza as his body was still starved from the morning workout. Paying the bill, he made his way back towards the port and tossed his cell phone over the railing and into the Indian Ocean. The city’s main shopping mall was right across the bay so Deckard walked over and bought some food and other household items he needed for the duration of his stay. However long that might be.
Taking a cab back to his pad, Deckard put away the groceries. He had to be careful not to get comfortable here. It was an island oasis that Europeans flocked to on vacation, but for him it was Bad Guy country. More dangerous than Afghanistan or Iraq, his own team mates were the enemy and all it would take is one slip up. It didn’t even have to be his mistake. A few phone calls to the wrong people in the United States, if certain information began to fall into Bill’s hands and Liquid Sky would start to get suspicious. Suspicion would quickly give way to paranoia. You could never be too careful in this line of work. That paranoia would lead immediately to Deckard being executed. He could never let his guard down here. He was always operational, even when not on an operation.
He continued to wonder if his entire house wasn’t wired for sound and video with someone playing voyeur as they watched him on a closed circuit television screen. If that paranoia did set in with Liquid Sky, he would never see it coming once they decided to do him in. He could improvise some weapons like in Dubai, better yet, secure a gun somewhere on the island but for now secrecy was his security.
Laying down, he took a long nap on the couch with the television muted. Late into the afternoon he awoke as someone banged on the screen door that faced out to the ocean.
“Hey Zach said, team meeting before the party. Let’s go.”
“Sure,” Deckard said as he rubbed his eyes. “Be right there.”
Deckard opened the screen door and stepped outside.
Mauritius was a relatively tiny island in the middle of nowhere. Isolated, it was tucked away from all the distractions and complications found elsewhere. The waves broke on the shore, pulling the beach out with it as the tides changed. It felt like he was standing on the edge of the world.
Walking down the beach he crossed Bill’s workout area on the deck and stepped inside. Zach and Paul were shooting the shit about some French tourists they had banged the night before.
“This island is a pussy buffet bro,” Paul laughed.
“Fucking Euro girls don’t lube up right when they’re drunk though. Gotta help ’em out a little,” Zach complained.
“Give them a break,” Rick cut in. “I’m sure she did fine with what little she had to work with.”
The Liquid Sky men roared with laughter as Rick high fived Paul. Everyone went quiet as Nadeesha entered and sat down in a chair in the corner. Bill was sitting on his couch with his laptop open.
“Now that everyone is here,” Bill said as he eyeballed Nadeesha, “we can get started.”
Deckard noticed that Ramon was missing.
“I know everyone has been nervous about the client. Recent events back in the States scared him off and his company decided to abandon a number of classified projects including some indig proxy force they were training out in Nevada. After we got hung out to dry I had to find us employment elsewhere. Pakistan was for a Prince in Bahrain. Afghanistan was a one off, that was a Agency contract. Then Dubai was for the Yids.
“We had a couple interested parties who were going to pick us up on a permanent basis like G3 Communications did but some of those fell through. A lot of the players had experience with BW and the executives over there left a lot of scorched ground between the decision makers and the contractors. I almost set us up working directly for a group of princes in the Gulf States but now I think I got something better.
“A retired American General is going to pick up Liquid Sky and his ‘leadership academy’ or what-ever-the-fuck-ever will sponsor us covertly. This way, his group acts as the middle man between the princes who have plenty of work for us to do. This Arab Spring thing is really fucking up their jive. That’s where we come in. Between them and these Wahhabi sand niggers they got their hands full and a bunch of inept A-rab soldiers in their military who sleep most of the day and spend the rest fucking their boyfriends. So we won’t be hurting for work.”
“So what are we looking at?” Rick asked.
“They got something for us to start on now. Ramon finished his pre-mission prep and has already moved into the target country to begin Operational Preparation of the Battlespace. Tomorrow the rest of us move out to the staging area. The targeted individual has already had five assassination attempts on him in the last two years so he is paranoid as fuck and is prepared. He knows someone will try again and will be waiting for us. This is going to take some brass balls to pull off but what the fuck else is new.
“Don’t worry about that shit now. Party it up tonight. Tomorrow we fly out to begin training and it is back to business.”
A couple whoops went up and the boys began dragging out a keg that they had on ice. The next time Deckard turned around, Nadeesha had already disappeared. Bill tapped the keg and started passing out beers. Paul lined up a few dozen shot glasses and lined them up on the kitchen table. The other guys were making phone calls to some of the expat girls they knew on the island.
Zach shotgunned four shots back to back and the party was started. Deckard was pretty drunk by the time a half dozen women showed up. Four were from France, one from Switzerland, and another from Germany. They brought the drugs with them too.
Bill did a couple lines of a blow off one of his billiard tables. Deckard was starting to get nervous. Former operators filled with booze and coke and haunted by the wars they fought in was not exactly a great combination.
Sitting down with a fresh beer, one of the French girls came right over and sat down on his lap. Deckard had no idea what the blond was saying to him and he cared even less. Across the room, one of her girlfriends was grabbing Zach’s crouch as they took turns downing shots. She frowned at her and then went back to Deckard, kissing him on the lips. They seemed to be in competition with each other.
Rick fired up a couple lines of coke between Vodka shots.
Now the French chick had pulled out Rick’s cock. It was Deckard’s turn to frown. The Prince Albert piercing had to hurt. Getting down her in knees, the blond girl’s friend went to work, deep throating Rick right there in the middle of the party. The European girls cheered, a few offering advice on how to improve her technique.
The blond was clearly pissed over something and jumped off Deckard’s lap to go use the bathroom. When she came back her pupils were huge, dilated from whatever pills she had swallowed.
By then, Bill had bent the big titted German girl over a billiard table, dropped trou and was drilling her, the moans drowned out by the loud death metal music blasting over the stereo.
Jesus Christ, Deckard thought. When he was a young soldier they used to have Squad parties. He ever recalled his Squad Leader doing keg stands all night, throwing the keg off his back deck, and then doing donuts around his house in a beat up Toyota pickup truck. All of that seemed pretty mild compared to this cocaine fueled orgy.
Once Bill finished with the German, the blond pillhead let her jean shorts fall around her ankles and bent over the pool table to wait her turn. Soon, her finger nails were tearing up the billiard table’s upholstery.
Deckard could take a hint, if he stuck around much longer there was a good chance that one of these nymphos was going to handcuff him to a radiator and shock his balls with a couple wires attached to a car battery. He made a hasty exist as Paul and Zach swapped girls and were going for their second round.
Later on, he couldn’t remember stumbling back to his beach house. He woke up in the early morning hours, still wearing his clothes while laying in the bath tube with the shower on, soaking wet.
“What. the. fuck.”
Reflexive Fire 