Page 120 of Kai
“Got it.”
Perching my hands on the merc’s big shoulders, I pinched the wet fabric between my fingers and peeled the shirt off his back.
Oh. My. God. I winced. “Um… Kai?”
“Yes?” he said, kneeling opposite to me, scouring the man’s beefy front.
“We have a problem. He’s got lots of scars on his back. As in lots.”
“Let me see.” Kai scooted around and settled on his shins next to me.
I waved my hand over the horrific sight before me. Between fresh scrapes, bruises, and scratches, groupings of raised lines marked his skin with chilling precision. They covered his entire back from one side to the other and got lost at the waist beneath his underwear.
Kai turned the man until he lay on his belly and whistled aloud.
“This is fucked up.” I grimaced. “His back looks like a whiteboard where someone’s been keeping score.”
“A tally.” Kai traced his gloved fingertips over a small grouping of four perpendicular lines crossed at an angle by a fifth line. “I’ve seen this before in Africa.” He slid a small flashlight out of his tactical vest and shone it over the scars. “I’ve also seen it in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.”
I stared at the puckered scars. “Who does this shit to themselves?”
“This is how Bruckner mercs keep count of the people they’ve murdered.” Kai examined each grouping, one after the other. “Also, bearing the pain of the cuts is a sign of strength forthese fuckers. Think of it as a rite of passage and a way to secure a promotion.”
I shook my head, disgusted. “That’s inhuman.”
“Bruckner operators are in the business of death and torture,” Kai offered. “Humanity is not a top priority for them.”
“Bruckner.” I remember reading something about that. “You mean the Russian mercenary group that committed genocide in Africa?”
“That’s an affirm.”
“I thought they disbanded when someone assassinated their leader a few years ago.”
“Nope.” Kai scrutinized the man’s back. “The remaining mercs re-formed under the control of the Russian’s newest spy unit, The Department of Special Tasks. The Kremlin created the SSD to wage its shadow war in the West. This asshole either works for SSD or the Russians contracted him out to Li.”
Kai used his knife to rip the inseam of the merc’s pants and then, after a few more cuts, tore the fabric off his legs. The tally scars continued. The groupings trickled down his thighs, over the back of his legs, all the way to his ankles. When Kai pulled down the man’s underwear, more tallies neatly aligned over his buttocks.
Each tiny scar represented a person, a life smothered by violence. There were hundreds if not thousands of marks on this man. No, this wasn’t a man. He was a monster, a killing machine. I felt sick to my stomach.
“I’m gonna guess he’s one of those psychos that enjoy giving and receiving pain.” Kai turned the merc around and pointed with his blade at the neat rows of horizontal scars on his thighs. “These slices look like self-inflicted cuts.”
I shoved the sleeves down to the merc’s wrists and found similar lines on his forearms. “With all these wounds, bruises, scratches, and scars, how can we know for sure that he doesn’thave a geolocator implant somewhere?”
“Like this.”
He lifted his arm and pressed a few icons on his Tak. When it beeped, he removed it from his forearm, slid it out of the frame, and waved it slowly over the merc and his clothing. He was thorough, but he didn’t find any traces of a tracker.
“Maybe he had one here.” He examined the merc’s hand, undid a dirty bandage wrapped around his left palm, and waved his device over the crusted cut. “The spot between the thumb and the pointer finger is a common location for subdermal trackers. Yup. If I had to guess, he had one here and dug it out himself.”
“I suppose that could be good news for us?”
“Or he did this to trick us into a false sense of security.”
“Or that.” I forced myself to swallow.
When Kai finished his search, he let the merc keep his tighty-whities and tended to the man’s injuries.
“Are you really going to take care of this monster’s wounds?” I asked.
