Lady Death

wall behind him with red splatter as he fell.
Three down.
Two more.
Raven advanced, skirting around a dining table. He cut through a small kitchen to a dark hallway running left to right. Somebody fired two shots in his direction. Whoever fired couldn’t see him. The rounds were probing shots. Somebody was in the master bedroom. Maybe two people were in the master bedroom.
Raven leaned out and fired back. A small light lit the master bedroom, and he watched the silhouette of a man duck out of sight. He fired again and stepped into the kitchen. One last grenade. He pulled the pin and pitched it down the hall. The grenade bounced off the door frame and entered the bedroom at an angle. A woman screamed.
The grenade flew back through the doorway to bounce off the hallway wall and fly into the living room at the other end.
Raven dropped behind the kitchen counter. The wall took most of the blast, and it left his ears ringing more than before. Raven jumped up and started toward the bedroom with the M4 Commando ahead when Colonel Radan, minus his shirt, ran out with an AKM at his hip.
Radan tried to jam the muzzle in Raven’s gut. Raven swung the stock of the M4 and clipped Radan on the chin, but the blow didn’t stop the colonel. He collided with Raven’s midsection and the pair tumbled into the wrecked living room. Raven lost his grip on the M4 Commando and the sling tangled around his left arm.
Radan aimed at Raven’s face. The barrel was too long, and Raven batted it away. The M4 was pinned beneath him and his right arm still caught in the sling. He couldn’t punch with his right. He wedged a knee between him and Radan and pushed hard, throwing the terrorist colonel off him. Rolling left, Raven shed the Colt and snatched the Nighthawk .45 from his hip.
Radan completed his roll on the other side of the dining table. He came up on one knee and raised the AKM. Raven fired once. The terrorist colonel’s head snapped back, and he dropped like a puppet with cut strings.
Raven pivoted right. He fired twice through the doorway as the woman emerged to take advantage of his distraction, and the .45 ACP slugs caught her in the chest and neck. She landed in the hallway face first, a pistol tumbling from her dead fingers.
Raven rose and holstered his pistol. Taking a Canon PowerShot from a pocket, he snapped pictures of their faces. A present for the CIA and Mossad.
Time to go.
Two minutes till extraction.
Raven grabbed the M4 Commando and left the house. He ran hard for the water. He’d arranged his own pickup, a mercenary he knew, who had a boat. He reached the shore and found a place to hide among a cluster of rocks and trees. The boat arrived. Its old engine chugged. The mercenary, an American named Hawthorne, flashed a light twice. Raven returned the flash with a light of his own. The boat approached the shore, and Raven ran out into the water to climb aboard.
As the boat’s engine chugged, Raven sat up and watched the shore grew smaller with distance.
“All right?” Hawthorne said.
“Scratch five,” Raven said.
“Good work.”
Raven watched the departing shoreline with a grim set to his jaw.
Radan and his unit had spilled too much blood for Raven to feel true satisfaction. Sure. Good work. Deaths had been avenged. More had been prevented. Other threats now needed his attention, and he turned his mind to the future. His war without end wasn’t finished. He feared it never would be. There were far too many Farzim Radans in the world. Worse, he couldn’t stop them all.
But he’d die trying.

Part I


1
It started with a phone call.
Sam Raven answered his cell midway through the second blast of his ringtone. He undid his tie with his right hand as he said hello. Crisp air and the sound of trickling water filtered through the open windows.
“Mr. Raven?”
A woman’s voice. Soft. Almost a whisper. German accent.
“Speaking.”
“My name is Tanya.”
“Okay.”
“May I see you?”
“For what?” Raven pulled the tie from his shirt collar and tossed it on the bed.
“I want to defect to the United States.”
Raven chuckled. “Unless I’m reading the calendar wrong, it’s not 1985 anymore. You can leave Germany anytime you like with a proper visa.”
“I’m serious, Mr. Raven. My name is Tanya Jafari and I’m a fighter with the Islamic Union. I was born in Germany and married into the jihad and now I want to come to the United States. I will trade information for a new identity.”
“What information?”
“I know the White Widow.”
“The who?”
The woman cursed. “Are you serious?”
“If you know enough to reach out to me,” he said, “you know I’m out of the loop on some things.”
He couldn’t help his gap in information. He wasn’t a CIA paramilitary officer any longer. He worked on his own now, his interests personal. Anything he needed to know—such as the details of the “White Widow”—he could learn through his network of informants.
The woman remained silent.
“Why don’t you tell me who she is,” Raven said.
“Call your friends at the CIA,” she replied instead. “I will find you.”
The line clicked.
Raven shook his head and hung up. Dammit!
He hadn’t returned home to Stockholm to go back to work again. He had hoped to avoid work for a week or two. How did “Tanya Jafari” find him? He checked his Rolex. He’d stepped aboard his houseboat only ten minutes earlier. The open windows flushed out the stuffy air. Can’t a guy get a break?
The “White Widow”. He laughed at the name. Did she steal her moniker from a comic book? He blamed “the Jackal”. Since the reign of Illich Ramirez Sanchez, every terrorist wanted a cool name to show off in the media.
Tanya Jafari, the CIA, and whoever picked her nickname from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, could wait. He wasn’t lifting a finger until he had a shower and ate lunch at the marina club.
As