Unchained Fury : Axel Blaze Thriller Book 5, page 1
UNCHAINED FURY
AXEL BLAZE THRILLER (BOOK FIVE)
BILL RUNNER
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2023 by Bill Runner
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission from the author except for the use of quotations in a book review.
First eBook edition July 2023
www.bill-runner.com
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Epilogue
CHAPTER 1
A fog had begun to roll in from the San Francisco Bay, creeping silently through the city’s streets—a giant eraser obliterating every landmark it slithered over. Silent and unsettling, the amorphous grayness was taking over the streets, swallowing up everything in its path, hiding unseen dangers beneath its thick gray cloak.
The woman moving about inside the house on a desolate street was unaware of the watchful eyes fixed upon her. She was too busy multitasking in the well-lit open plan kitchen—oblivious to any threats lurking outside. It was too dark and foggy for the woman to have noticed the three men sitting in the dark sedan parked on the street outside. They could easily have been standing outside her window, peeping in, and would still have been invisible to her.
The sun had set a while ago. Well before the fog had begun swallowing up whatever visibility remained in the streets. As the fog rolled in from the Bay towards the Golden Gate Bridge, the foghorns had begun emitting their familiar moan. The first thing that began to vanish from sight was the bridge itself. The grayness had spread towards both ends of the 1.7 miles long bridge until only the tops of the 746 feet high towers remained visible. From there, like the stupor taking over the consciousness of a junkie, the fog had oozed over the rest of the city.
The men in the car weren’t some random group of perverts. They had been parked on the street for a couple of hours, waiting for the woman to arrive. A second team following the woman’s car had been informing them about her exact movements. They knew her husband wasn’t around. They knew that because a third team was keeping tabs on the husband, who was cooped up with some woman in a motel on the outskirts of Sausalito, up north beyond the Marin Headlands overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.
At the center of the Marin Headlands lies Hawk Hill, which gets its name from being the lookout point for the flight of raptors—the predatory birds. With their keen eyes, sharp talons, and curved beaks, they are among nature’s deadliest hunters. The three men in the car, packing handguns and automatic firepower, were no less dangerous.
The woman had arrived half an hour ago, pulling into her driveway in a sky-blue hatchback. As she got out of the car, it was clear she was a woman who could make heads turn. About five foot six and 135 pounds, with a toned, athletic body, she had long blonde curls that flowed out from under the baseball cap on her head. She was wearing designer sunglasses and a white cotton shirt tucked into close-fitting jeans. All three men craned their necks as she opened the back of the car and leaned inside to grab a gym bag and yoga mat, which she slung across her shoulders before picking a bunch of grocery bags. She finally straightened up to shut the car door before heading towards the house.
From the looks of it, she was just a good-looking suburban housewife coming back from an afternoon of shopping, mixed with some yoga or Pilates. The well-proportioned body suggested she took her fitness regime seriously. Had she bothered to look, there had been enough daylight around at that time for her to make out the car parked on the opposite side of the street. But she seemed to have too much on her hands.
The men didn’t make any move when she unlocked the front door and left it open while she headed inside to dump all her stuff in the living room. She returned less than a minute later to shut the door. Half an hour later, she was moving around in the kitchen, sipping wine from a glass, swaying lightly to the beat of the music playing on Bluetooth speakers, and laying out dishes on the table while she waited for the microwave to get her dinner ready.
The men still waited, watching her like hawks, but not making any move. The fog was getting thicker, reducing visibility by the minute. The eyes of all three men soon got fixated on another car as it turned the corner and cruised down the street very slowly. It came to a stop about twenty yards from the house, diagonally opposite the men’s car. Its driver had switched off the headlights before it came to a complete stop.
A minute later, as if on cue, two men got out of each car, leaving one man behind in the driver’s seat. The leader of the group signaled two of the men to start moving towards the back of the house.
Once they were out of sight, the other pair walked up to the front door. The boss man stood a little to the side, out of the range of the security camera that had its eye on the space immediately outside the front door. The other man posed as a delivery guy, holding a large packet in his hands. He pulled out a baseball cap from his back pocket, put it on, and rang the bell.
The men didn’t seem too worried. They knew taking the woman would be an easy job. The fog was thick enough to eliminate any chance of someone from the neighboring houses spotting them.
“Who’s it?” the woman asked as she walked towards the door, looking at the camera feed on the monitor beside the door.
“Express delivery for Frank Mitchell,” the man said, lifting the packet in his hand towards the security camera.
The man’s body tensed a little when he heard the woman turning the lock. She opened the door and looked at him enquiringly. She still had her baseball cap on, bill pulled low. The man handed her the packet.
“You need to sign for it,” he said as he moved his right hand to the back of his pants.
In a quick move, the man drew a gun and pressed it into the woman’s waist. Her mouth opened in shock, but not a word came out.
“Don’t do anything stupid. You make a sound and I’ll put a bullet in you,” the man said in a menacing voice.
“What… What do you want? I… I don’t have any cash in the house… I can get some from an ATM. Please…” she pleaded in a desperate voice.
“Shut up and get inside,” he replied as he dug the gun harder into her, pushing her inside the house.
The woman had no option but to obey him. She stepped back with a terrified look on her face. The gunman signaled to his partner before following the woman inside. The second man gave a thumbs up to the drivers waiting in the two cars before following his partner.
The gunman had pushed the woman a couple of yards into the living room when the other man entered and turned to lock the door. The gunman glanced back for a second to look at his boss, his gun still pointed at the woman.
Never in his wildest dreams could the gunman have guessed that taking his eyes off the woman could be a deadly mistake. His lack of imagination proved costly for him.
Before the man had fully turned his head, the woman had taken a step forward and sideways, taking herself away from the line of fire, and grabbed the barrel of the gun with her left hand while jabbing him hard on the neck with her right hand. While the man moved his hand to his neck as he choked and sputtered, the woman followed the jab with a hard upward strike to his nose with the heel of her hand. The strike ruptured the man’s nasal septum, smashing his nose into a bloody pulp.
The woman didn’t stop moving as she swung up her right knee and smashed it into his groin. As the man began doubling over from the excruciating pain, the woman placed her left forearm behind his elbow and twisted it with a jerk, breaking it while kicking out his legs from under him. As she hurled the man onto the floor, she twisted the gun, breaking his index finger as she snatched it from his grip, and pointed it at the other man. The gunman had lost consciousness before his body hit the ground.
The entire sequence of moves had taken no more than three seconds. It took the other man, who had turned to lock the door, a couple of seconds to turn back and realize what was happening. He lost the third second staring unbelievingly at the action unfolding in front of him. The man had been too confident when he entered the house. He hadn’t bothered to draw his gun. By the time he grabbed the gun tucked into the back of his pants, the woman already had a Glock pointed at him.
“Don’t even think about it,” she said in a commanding voice.
The man froze, shock written in large letters on his face.
“Hold the gun by the barrel and show it to me,” she spoke in a voice that demanded compliance.
The man did as he was told.
“Place it on the floor. Very slowly. You make any sudden move and I’ll put a bullet in you.”
The man obeyed her, looking at her with a mix of surprise and anger in his eyes.
“Kick the gun to the far corner. Don’t give me a reason to shoot you. I’m dying to do it but don’t want to mess up the living room,” she warned him.
The man looked at her with murder in his eyes, but complied with her command.
“Now flat on the ground.”
“You’re one dead bitch…” the man muttered in a menacing tone.
His words were cut short in mid-sentence as the woman suddenly took a step forward and struck him on the side of his face and neck with an open-handed strike. It wasn’t a simple slap—the strike was much more painful and powerful. The woman smashed the heel of her palm into the side of the man’s neck while the rest of her palm and fingers landed full force onto his ear in a resounding slap.
“You were saying…” she asked him in a calm voice as she took a quick step back.
The man could barely hear her over the ringing in his ear from the hard slap. He was also disoriented from the strike to his neck. He had been hit on the spot between the ear and chin where the vagus nerve lies between the carotid and the jugular. A solid strike on that spot knocks out the biggest of men. The woman seemed to have restrained herself, as if she wanted him to stay awake. The man’s ears burned from pain and embarrassment at being slapped so hard by a woman half a foot shorter than him.
“You got lucky, bitch. You won’t always have the gun with you.”
“Oh, yeah? There,” she said, starting to sound a little less calm as she tucked the gun into the back of her jeans. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
She rushed towards him as she spoke the words. Everything the woman had done ever since the man had entered the house had been completely unexpected for him. She caught the man off guard once again when she rushed him. He kind of froze. All he could think of doing was try to push her back. The man outweighed the woman by at least half her body weight. Had it been any other woman, he could easily have shoved her so hard she would have landed flat on her back at the other end of the room.
But it was as if the woman anticipated the move. She stepped sideways, grabbed his wrist, pulled him a little forward and downward, and placed her forearm behind his elbow, locking it. She had him perfectly positioned for an arm bar takedown—a standard tactic for any law enforcement officer. All she needed to do after that was apply a little pressure to the back of his elbow. The man would have no option but to go down on the floor—any resistance would break his elbow.
But the man was a slow learner. He didn’t think the woman would go that far. He tried to resist and free his arm from her grip. This time, she wasn’t holding back. She pushed his elbow beyond its range of motion and broke it. The man screamed as he gave up all resistance and fell to the ground. The woman cut off his scream with a sharp jab on the side of his neck, knocking him out.
“Whoa! Easy, tiger,” a voice said from behind her.
The woman spun around to face the speaker, but the expression on her face had changed from anger to something close to a smile when she saw it was me. I had just come in after knocking out the two men trying to sneak in from the back.
When those men moved in for the kill, what they didn’t realize was they never had a chance. They weren’t the hunters about to make an easy kill. They were the prey. They would have been less cocky if they were aware of three bits of information.
One, the blonde woman in the kitchen wasn’t the helpless prey she was pretending to be. She was Ex-Deputy Marshal Brittany Dixon. Until a couple of years ago, she was a Deputy in the Marshals’ tactical unit, the Special Operations Group (SOG). Apart from their job description of responding to extreme threat and emergency situations, Deputies from SOG also provide specialized training to other law enforcement officers in hostage negotiations, tactical operations, and self-defense techniques. Deputy Dixon, or Britt, as we called her, was one of the best trainers in unarmed combat.
Two, not that Britt needed it, but she also had me watching her six. I had been keeping tabs on the men all the while they were parked outside the house. While they were cooling their asses in the car, I was stationed in the dark attic of the house, keeping an eye on the street, and monitoring the feed coming in from the security camera installed in a tree facing the backyard. Folks call me Blaze. I used to head SOG. I was Supervisory Deputy United States Marshal Axel Blaze until a few months ago, when I left the service.
Three, the men never had surprise on their side. The house belonged to Frank Mitchell, another former Deputy who had been part of my SOG team. He left the Marshals when he got married and began working in private security. The men had begun stalking Mitchell the previous day. What those guys didn’t realize was shadowing unsavory characters is what Marshals do for a living. Mitchell was especially good at it. It didn’t take him long to catch on to them. He had immediately begun countersurveillance to find out what they were up to. But what he discovered was something he found almost impossible to believe. Something that made him call me immediately. Information so shocking that it got me on the first flight to San Francisco.
Threats we believed we had dealt with two years ago were possibly alive and kicking. We had no option but to get to the bottom of it. If Mitchell was right, all of us involved in the operation two years ago were in grave danger.
We would have to strike first. And hard. End the threat once and for all.
CHAPTER 2
I was at my ranch when Mitchell called me. I was out on the range with my crew, checking fences, mending breaches, and looking out for strays. It was almost the end of the day. We were getting ready to ride back to the ranch house.
After leaving the Marshals, I had been mostly hanging around my ranch, reacquainting myself with a cowboy’s life. It was a medium-sized spread in Colorado, around 2,000 acres located in the shadow of the San Juan Mountains. Dad died while I was in high school. Mom loved the ranch and took over the reins. Up until the time cancer got to her. That’s when I left the army after eleven years of active duty.
I had enlisted when I was twenty. A few months after 9/11. My big brother, Ryan, signed up first, joining the Marines. I enlisted six months later—that’s how long it took me to convince mom. I joined the army. Eventually made it to the 75th Ranger Regiment.
In 2007, Ryan died under mysterious circumstances. It took me a while to get at the truth, but I did dig it out. And made sure his killers didn’t go unpunished. After that, it became a kind of an obsession—getting justice done when it looked like the bad guys were getting away with any shit. I took early retirement to be with mom in her last days. I retired as Major Axel Blaze in the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment—Delta (Sabre Squadron D). Most civilians know it as Delta Force.
When mom passed, I kind of lost direction. I had already lost Ryan. The bond I shared with my army buddies was what had kept me going after that. But after having lost that, I became a bit of a drifter. That was until I happened to bump into my old commanding officer during my last posting—Lt Colonel Seamus Flynn. He persuaded me to go meet his brother—Assistant Director Mark Flynn, Head of the Tactical Operations Division of the US Marshal service.
Flynn and I hit it off. Before I knew it, he had convinced me to join the Marshals. I stuck around for five years before deciding to leave. When I finally returned to the ranch at the age of thirty-six, it was after having been away for sixteen years.
Mitchell had left the Marshals a year before I did. When my phone buzzed in my pocket and I took it out to check the caller ID, I was surprised to see his name come up on the screen.
“Hey, Mitchell! Long time, pal.”
“You said it, Cowboy. Long time. How you doing?”
In all my days in the army as well as in the Marshals, my nickname had been Cowboy. Not just because I grew up on a ranch… not only because I couldn’t be separated from my cowboy boots any time I was in civilian attire... A large part of it had to do with my tendency to break the rules that didn’t make sense.
