raised by wolves

I wake from a dream of fire to the humming of engines in a small air craft. Goober is snoring almost as loud as the plane. Weston, with his stupid cowboy hat and mustache is yelling something across the cabin at the back of Yolita’s blonde head. No one can hear anything, but I can read his lips.

“Five minutes,” he’s yelling. Yolita turns and there’s that scar across her face, under both eyes, across the bridge of her nose. We make bets on how she got it—when she’s not listening—but man it gives me the creeps. Those eyes of hers don’t help either. One black, one gold, I swear to god. Gold.

“Five minutes,” Weston hollers again, now at the side of Goober’s snoring face. I nod and Goober stays asleep. I get up and shove past Goober to the cockpit where we should soon be able to see the boat. He doesn’t stir. Verne is sitting in the same place he’s been sitting since we took off, the very last seat, the one closest to the cargo hold.

The boat, well…

Dole the pilot looks over his shoulder at me as I enter the cockpit. I don’t know how he could tell I was there.

“Ain’t she a beaut’?” he says and points. I have to squint to tell the difference between sea and sky, the white clouds reflecting the blinding sun like a spotlight from every angle. There it is: a red and white speck still some miles out ahead of us. The Olympian, a luxury cruise liner, packed with the wealthiest and most worthless turds off five continents. Sheiks, oil men, bankers, diplomats, entrepreneurs and the like. Millions in assets. These are the cogs that make the world turn and we are the wrench that falls and gums up the works. But we’ll only be a few hours and then everyone will be back to normal, the insurance will cover the damages and everyone will be too busy thumbing through their wallets and counting their absent cents to notice what’s really gone missing.

At the end of World War II, Hitler knew his days as Fuhrer were numbered. So, he did what any spineless shit facing the loss of all his power would do and turned that power into money, liquidating assets and withdrawing huge sums of money in the form of gold bars from the Bank of Germany. In a maneuver so well known it couldn’t possibly fail, Hitler sent three false transports to draw the fire away from the real carrier: an unarmed old man with a single team of horses to pull these tons of stolen gold east towards Russia, where agents of Hitler’s doomed Luftwaffe would then take the gold by plane to a secret base above the Arctic Circle.

That was the plan, anyway. The cart with the gold never made it to the rendezvous in Russia. It was chalked up to sabotage, but by then it didn’t matter. Hitler was already swallowing the barrel of his gun in a cramped bunker with his girlfriend. The men in charge of the gold operation shrugged their shoulders and quietly vanished themselves, much in the same manner as the missing cash.

Now, I don’t know how much I believe in all the Indiana Jones type bullshit, but according to our intelligence, for some reason or another there is a vast sum of unregistered gold being transported in the belly of this stupid cruise ship. And pretty soon, that gold is going to be ours.

Dole is taking us up, up, up, where we’ll put on our gas masks and parachutes and get this done. I go back into the cabin to do just that. Goober’s awake, eating a handful of vile orange corn puff things, getting that radioactive-colored dust all over his face and fingers. His parachute is nowhere to be seen. His gas mask is dangling haphazardly off the back of his head. “WANT SOME?” he hollers and offers me the bag. I smack the bag out of his hand and continue past him, towards Yolita and Weston, the two of them all ready to go. Weston’s still got his sunglasses on, even under the mask. I roll my eyes and pass them, too, all the way into the very back by the rattling cargo door that will be our exit. I put on my mask, but forego the helmet. The one that came with our gear for this job is too small. It will be nice feeling wind in my hair on the way down.

I throw a switch and the cargo door slides open with a metal-on-metal groan. Wind and white noise flood the hold. I close my eyes and think of the jump. Maybe I’ll jump now, without my ‘chute. Nah, just kidding. Sometimes I get a little morbid before a job. I like to think it’ll prepare me should anything go wrong. But nothing ever does. The five of us have been working together since the end of The War in Kuwait, and Venezuela after that. I haven’t had to kill anyone since The War. Lots of nice, clean jobs with nice clean payoffs. And this is the last one. And nothing ever goes wrong. So there’s nothing to worry about. I watch the sea go away, away, away below us. I close the cargo door.

I nearly jump out of my skin when the calm sea noise is replaced in my ear by a violent screeching. Ear piece coming online.

“Weston, check-one-two-three, this is Weston, all units report.”

“’Eunuchs?’”

“Shut up, Goober,” Weston says. He has a way of saying things. Like every sentence is a flat fact. No intonation, no change of volume. A constant flat kind of loud statement. Goober shuts up.

They file in, scary black-suited, helmeted, gas-masked motherfuckers with machine guns and pistols. Goober’s got a shotgun strapped on his back and Yolita’s got a belt of grenades slung across her chest. It looks like an assault mission, but this is all for show, to make these rich motherfuckers think we mean to do some serious shit. The uniforms are so we look professional, corporate, familiar, like there’ll be more of us showing up soon.

“It sounded like he said-”

“Just check your damn ear piece, Goober,” Yolita says. “Queen reporting.”

The rest take her advice.

“Rook reporting.” says Dole.

“Knight reporting.” says me.

“Bishop reporting.” says Verne, creepy fucker.

“Pawn reporting,” says Goober.

“We know you’re on, Goober, god damn it,” says Weston. The earpieces work. These are our code names which we use in front of hostages-

When Suddenly…

Sirens.

This is the sound of something going wrong.