Competition Breeds Excellence in Captivity

I saw Zarina leave the capital that morning with five plainclothes bodyguards in two unarmored luxury SUVs. Zarina sat in the back of the trailing SUV. I noted that the bodyguards seemed bored and did not make much attempt to hide the printing of their concealed handguns against their shirts. Still, my working assumption was that they had long guns in their vehicles. If I had been in charge of their security, I would have said their SUVs were driving too fast, especially on these snaking rural roads, and too close together. I followed well out of sight and relied on a couple of aerial drone feeds to track their position. When she got to what appeared to be a Potemkin village visit, I doubled back and set in my ambush. 

Some western army doctrine says you should have a 3:1 advantage going into any gunfight, but acknowledges that that you can even those odds with belt-fed machine guns, explosives, and the element of surprise. Heck, I personally know 3 former colleagues who managed to kill 42 enemy soldiers from a respectable unit because they had those advantages. Heavy weaponry is easy to come by if you have the cash in former Soviet Republics and in war zones, and this region was both. I am wary of becoming overconfident, but from my research on Zarina's bodyguards it seemed that I had the edge in real-world combat experience. I have fired all the ubiquitous variants of the Kalashnikov family in anger, dodged one too many RPGs, and thought my life was over every time I had to disarm an IED. 

Further in my favor were the facts that it was a long drive back, so Zarina and her bodyguards would be tired. The setting sun was in their eyes in the spot I picked for my ambush. Spike strips boxed off the area in case one vehicle tried to get away. Even if I could not immediately disable their SUVs, I was not too anxious about them shooting back. I knew from long ago that shooting from a moving vehicle, much less also hitting a moving target, is orders of magnitude harder than Hollywood makes it look. I watched the drone footage of Zarina getting into the same back seat of the same rear SUV, as locals with forced smiles waved goodbye. Goodbye, indeed. 

From my camouflaged hiding spot, I initiated the ambush with a roadside bomb that flipped over the lead vehicle and I quickly finished it off with a rocket propelled grenade. Zarina’s SUV had slammed on the brakes but still crashed into the lead vehicle. I opened fire with a DShK heavy machine gun, aiming at the engine block, front seats, and tires of her SUV, and then shot up the wreck of the lead vehicle for good measure. Then I took a pregnant pause. 

Traditional ambush tactics say you should wait 30 seconds after destroying vehicles to watch for any signs of life. This was not my first real-world ambush, but these 30 seconds were the longest of my life. People who have been in gunfights will tell you how the adrenaline makes time move in slow motion. In that interminable wait I had the time for the worry to crawl into my head that Zarina had been seriously hurt or killed. 

A couple of badly wounded bodyguards tried to crawl out of their vehicles, but I dispatched them with headshots from a Dragunov SVDM sniper rifle. After 30 seconds of silence and no further signs of life on the drone footage, I jumped in my up-armored SUV camouflaged in the woodline and rammed Zarina’s vehicle, to dislodge anyone that might be hiding inside or behind. I donned a gas mask and tossed out canisters of Kolokol-1, a fentanyl derivative used to incapacitate hostage takers at a theater in Moscow back in 2002. Taking deliberate sidesteps—or ‘pieing’—around the corners of Zarina’s SUV, I saw that the driver and another henchman sitting shotgun were full of gaping holes and their bright red arterial bleeds had slowed from geysers to small spurts. Nevertheless I fired a hammer pair of 7.62x39mm bullets into each of them with a Chinese Type 56, an AK-47 knockoff, just to be sure. 

I saw Zarina out of the corner of my eye. She was unconscious with traces of darker veinous bleeding staining her white pantsuit, but I thought I saw her chest breathing. I then circled the lead SUV firing rounds into each bodyguard and every spot where a human could fit, being careful to avoid sending bullets into the other SUV where Zarina lay. Then I opened her SUV’s door closest to where she lay. 

I tasered Zarina and her body jerked, but she had been out cold. I looped flex cuffs around her wrists and ankles and carried her into the trunk of my SUV. My quick estimate was that she could not weigh more than 125 pounds. Thermobaric grenades ignited the SUVs’ gasoline into fireballs that engulfed what was left of her convoy.

I sped away down the road to gather up one of the spike strips, and then a little ways farther to switch vehicles camouflaged in the trees. While switching Zarina into another trunk I slapped high security handcuffs, that are resistant to shimmying or the universal key, on her wrists and ankles and checked the zip-ties from earlier. No sign that she had woken up and attempted to struggle. Her vitals were high as expected for someone had just been in car wreck, but they were within normal ranges. Satisfied, I loaded Zarina into a large aerated Pelican 0550 case. 

Then I torched my previous SUV and drove one of the most common cars in the county on my escape route. There was no one on these roads. My destination was a private airstrip in Georgia frequented by the Eastern European jet set vacationing on the Black Sea. The border was porous and the patrols and security of both countries underfunded. From an overwatch position, I reviewed drone footage for the last 48 hours and scanned for any hint of trap at the airstrip through binoculars. Once I concluded the airstrip was reasonably safe, I boarded my plane with my prized cargo, and flew off to my private island in the middle of a far away ocean.