Noble Warrior Read online

  ALSO BY ALAN LAWRENCE SITOMER

  The Hoopster

  A Teacher’s Guide—The Hoopster

  Hip-Hop Poetry and the Classics

  Hip-Hop High School

  Homeboyz

  The Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez

  Nerd Girls—The Rise of the Dorkasaurus

  Nerd Girls—A Catastrophe of Nerdish Proportions

  Caged Warrior

  Copyright © 2015 by Alan Lawrence Sitomer

  Photograph of hands by Maria Elias

  Additional cover photos © 2015 Shutterstock

  Cover design by Maria Elias

  All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.

  ISBN 978-1-4847-2009-7

  Visit www.hyperionteens.com

  Contents

  Title Page

  Also by Alan Lawrence Sitomer

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  Forty-six

  Forty-seven

  Forty-eight

  Forty-nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-one

  About the Author

  Dedicated to Wendy Lefkon

  for her excellence, for her faith, for her awesomeness

  With special thanks to…

  My brother Roberto, for sampling the boo-boo pancake and being the absolute KEY to getting this book right. Love you, dude!

  Terry Kaldhusdal, for making countless hours of deep, challenging discussions feel like mere pleasantly passing moments of good conversation with a good friend.

  Jeremy the Warrior, for teaching me about the true nature of fear and the true nature of strength. (A shout-out to the men, too!)

  Al Zuckerman, for being so much more than a literary agent…a prince among men!

  And of course, to the ladies who live under my roof: Sienna Brynn & Quinn Bailey, for teaching me the real meaning of true love and showing me the unequivocal joy of fatherhood…and for Tracey, whose tremendous dedication to our home is the straw that stirs our family’s drink.

  Plus, a HUGE shout-out to G-money…without his solarium, Wi-Fi, car, cell phone, printer, sushi companionship & couch time, none of this gets written.

  “IF AN INJURY HAS TO BE DONE TO A MAN IT SHOULD BE SO SEVERE THAT HIS VENGEANCE NEED NOT BE FEARED.”

  —Niccolo Machiavelli

  McCutcheon “M.D.” Daniels ate like a caveman. Raw food, raw power. After switching to an exclusively Paleolithic diet nearly three years ago he felt immediate benefits in each realm of the fighter’s holy trinity: body, mind, and spirit. Physically, by cutting out all the crap he used to eat, M.D. recovered more quickly from the vicious toll cage wars take on the human body. Mentally, like most serious mixed martial artists, McCutcheon sought to carry his discipline off of the mat and into his life, which meant that saying no to tasty foods like pizza, burgers, fries, and cake meant saying yes to deep reserves of mental strength. In the sphere of spirit however, McCutcheon owned wounds. Deep ones.

  How could he not be scarred after all the senseless violence and pain he’d already witnessed in his young life? He once saw a neighbor get shot in the face. Saw another overdose on heroin and drown in his own puke. Watched a girl stumble around like a drunken hobo with a knife sticking out of her eye after she’d been stabbed during a robbery gone bad. Yet despite seeing all this and more before the age of seventeen, McCutcheon still deeply believed in religion.

  The religion of being a warrior. In its nobility he found truth. Living by a code wasn’t a burden to M.D.; it was his church.

  “We’re closing in fifteen,” a waitress said. “Here’s your check.”

  McCutcheon clicked a red cigarette lighter and torched up a bowl. “Thank you,” he said exhaling a plume of thick white smoke.

  “Pay at the front.”

  “Shall do.”

  Putting toxins in his body was entirely out of character for M.D., but the waitress didn’t know that. To her and everyone else in the establishment, McCutcheon was just another guy lighting up on a Friday night.

  Which, of course, he wasn’t.

  He gazed out of the corner of his eye across the dimly lit, smoke-filled room at his six-foot-one-inch tall target and took another soft, sweet hit off the brass hookah pipe resting in front of him. The chocolate-skinned Somalian he spied—male, eighteen, typing on a laptop—didn’t lift his eyes from the glowing bluish screen. Arabs had been smoking from hookahs for well over five hundred years, but M.D. hadn’t come to Mystic Wonders to puff.

  He’d come to fight.

  His mission: apprehend a teenage terrorist who had plans to blow up the senior prom of the largest high school in the state. Biggest obstacle: the chances of a radicalized Al-Shabaab soldier simply coming along with an undercover federal agent without putting up a fight landed somewhere between zero and no fucking way.

  The clock ticked to 1:47 a.m., and two girls, one with mysterious brown eyes the other with swollen, perky breasts, rose from their table, threw their purses over their shoulders, and exited through the dark green front door, their men following right behind.

  A brass bell, cheap and tinny, jingled as the door closed. McCutcheon pulled another hit off his pipe and waited seven full minutes before making his move. His training had stressed the importance of allowing a battle theater to settle into stillness before initiating action, and no one trained with more diligence, dedication, or balls-out mettle than the soldier who didn’t even officially exist—Murk Team recruit Agent ZERO X1.

  M.D. walked to the front counter. His target sat on a black bar stool, a woven Persian tapestry hanging on the wall behind him, a twenty-four-inch touch screen digital cash register sitting on the hard wooden counter directly to his right.

  “You paying cash or credit?”

  “I’m looking for Ibrahim Ali Farah.”

  A pause. Eye contact as the North African’s gaze slowly moved to meet M.D.’s. His fingers froze mid-stroke, he turned his head and waited. It was almost as if he expected someone else to come out and answer the question for him.

  Which is exactly what happened.

  A bloodred curtain parted and a muscular silhouette appeared from a private back room. Penetrating, threatening eyes sized up McCutcheon.

  “Zuri. Come,” the shadowy figure called out over his sho
ulder. “Trouble.”

  A second silhouette emerged, tall and lithe, and two men stepped forward into the dim light. They both glared at M.D. with coldness. One stood thick and stocky, biceps like bank safes rippling underneath a white V-neck tee. The other was six feet three inches tall, had a goatee, lean physique, and a two-inch scar above the corner of his left eye.

  Just two? McCutcheon thought. They weren’t as prepared as he’d expected. Nor as they would need to be. Not if they were going to deal with M.D.

  Not tonight.

  Prior to getting the green light to strike his target, McCutcheon had been having a rough evening. Extremely rough. Ever since he made the decision to abandon his girlfriend—no good-bye, no explanations, no “talk-to-ya-soon”s or “I’ll-be-in-touch”s, just Poof! he disappeared—emotional hurricanes of sadness, regret, and anger had been washing over him. As with all elite soldiers, M.D. knew his job was to put his emotions on a shelf and go do the hard work that had been set in front of him—no excuses, no complaints, no bullshit—yet tonight he felt edgy.

  M.D. was in no mood for messing around, and though discipline, patience, and the science of being a poised and methodical warrior usually steered his decision making, frustration, tension, and an urge to just rip through somebody with the rage of a lion raced through his blood. A late night dance with a couple of evil-hearted partners, he thought, might be just the bucket of cold water M.D. needed to douse the flames scorching his wounded heart.

  As much as McCutcheon loathed his father, Damien “Demon” Daniels, an ex-prizefighter who washed out of pro boxing and then fell into an abyss of crime, drugs, gangs, and whores, it was all playing out just like his dad had once told him it would: “Relationships’ll just fuck a fighter up.” McCutcheon dismissed his father’s warning back when these words were first spoken as nothing more than the BS of a jaded man. But this was also before M.D.’s heart had been spiked by Cupid’s arrow. The truth hurts, but when the truth comes from the lips of a person you despise, its sting yields twice the pain.

  Nerves tingling, his fists curling into the heads of hammers, M.D.—too tightly wound, too eager to deliver a beating—readied for war.

  The short, muscular guy fiddled with his hands underneath the counter. Despite his view being blocked, McCutcheon didn’t make a preemptive move. Instead, M.D. just breathed in and breathed out, calm, even, steady breaths. No need to waste energy, he thought.

  The tall one raised an axe handle. Hickory. Four feet long. A stick like that, M.D. knew, would leave marks.

  McCutcheon stood his ground as if carved from stone. Confidence in his skills had never been a problem for Bam Bam, the legendary teenage cage warrior from the projects of inner-city Detroit. M.D. had put enough people in stitches, casts, and hospitals to know his own capabilities. The real battle for him was not one of mustering up enough aggression to go to war, but rather of summoning up enough restraint to see if bloodshed could be avoided. “I said,” M.D. repeated, working hard to remain composed, “I am looking for Ibrahim Ali Far—”

  “He’s not here,” the tall one interrupted.

  “And who’s the fuck is you?” asked his thick, squat associate.

  McCutcheon glared. “It does not matter who I am,” he said. “It matters that I think that you”—M.D. pointed at his original target, the guy sitting behind the cash register—“are in cahoots with Ibrahim.”

  “Cahoots?” came the reply. “I do not know this word. Are they a type of pants?”

  The three Somalians laughed.

  M.D. took another long, slow deep breath. In front of him stood Massir “Max” El-Alhou, the CyberFang of Al-Shabaab, a digital Houdini that the U.S. government had been unsuccessfully trying to apprehend for more than two years. An innovative piece of NSA software had mapped his Wi-Fi fingerprint and tracked him to the state of New Jersey. After two weeks of covert hunting, M.D. had tracked him here.

  “No,” McCutcheon answered. “It means that you are an associate of Ibrahim’s, a conspirator.” M.D. pointed at the laptop. “And I have a feeling your computer contains a lot of cahoot-like information, so I am going to ask that you pack up your things and please come with me. I have a minivan. It’s parked out back.”

  Silence. No one moved. Menacing looks lasered in on McCutcheon.

  “You’ll be comfortable,” M.D. added. “It’s got leather seats.”

  The beefy kid cracked a defiant smile. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Well, cock you.”

  Cock me? M.D. thought. I don’t even know what that means. The musclebound guy with a neck as thick as a fullback’s thigh stepped from behind the counter and McCutcheon saw what had previously been shielded from his sight.

  Knucks. Brass ones. Scuffed, sturdy, threatening from his left hand.

  Brass knuckles have always been a favorite of soldiers because they hold the power to transform a glancing blow into a knockout punch and a knockout punch into a cerebral hematoma. But only wearing them on his left hand? Dude shoulda just made a sign, M.D. thought: Look at me, I’m a southpaw!

  The muscular guy squared his stance, raised his fists, and cocked a big left hand. M.D., quick as a cougar, spun and fired off a low Muay Thai shin kick to the inside of his opponent’s back leg and CRACK! a violent pop exploded through the air as his enemy’s knee snapped. With his freshly torn anterior cruciate ligament unable to sustain his body weight, M.D.’s foe buckled forward face-first.

  Into an exploding palm strike.

  The blow shattered his nasal bone and like a work of art being splashed across a canvas, blood splattered against the white wall in a shower of speckled red dots. Slowly, his enemy’s eyes rolled back into his head and, after an involuntary parting of his lips, a soft sigh, and a gentle exhalation, there was a thud.

  Boomph! He hit the ground.

  Night-night, M.D. thought. One target down.

  The tall guy launched an assault, and as if by instinct McCutcheon ducked underneath a strike aimed at his temple a tick before it would have knocked him out. His fierce enemy followed with two more blows, swinging the ax handle expertly, not like a street fighter wildly waving a baseball bat but rather like a martial artist who had been schooled in the skill of stick fighting. Concise, focused, swift strokes aimed at M.D.’s core, head, and then knees caused McCutcheon to backpedal.

  M.D. kicked aside a chair, clearing some space, and Thwwwwisshh! the wind of another strike sailed by the front of his face. The angular, fierce Somalian refused to give him an inch.

  McCutcheon knew he was going to have to absorb a blow. His challenge, he recognized, was to make sure it’d only be one shot and not multiple whacks. After that, M.D. told himself, he’d have him at a disadvantage.

  As they say in the cage, everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the face. McCutcheon knew the time had come to see if his tall stick-swinging opponent owned any balls.

  His enemy struck from the left; M.D. slid to his right and absorbed a smash to the ribs and groaned. Then M.D. countered. From the inside. Once the two adversaries were only three inches apart, McCutcheon maneuvered both of his elbows above his foe’s forearms, which made the ax handle about as helpful to him as a mosquito net.

  Head butt—Boom!—just above the eye socket. Few blows are more crippling. As if in slow motion, the sense of alertness in the tall Somalian’s eyes shifted from clear to glazed.

  Spleen shot, forearm shiver to the face, a knee to the chin that hit like a brick, and Bang! second enemy down.

  Only one task remained: apprehend his target.

  McCutcheon straightened his spine, stepped around a tall brass pipe that had been knocked over in the melee, and advanced toward the front counter. The time had come to stake his claim. M.D. looked up, ready to take his man into custody.

  And found himself staring into the barrel of a gun.

  Delivering Ibrahim Ali Farah’s lead cyber operations officer to the clandestine command center alive was the reason McCutcheon went to Mystic Wonders in the f
irst place. This was not a “dead or alive” mission; only alive would do. His orders were simple: capture the technology coordinator behind a new-era sleeper cell that had been created by teens, was recruiting teens, and, most terrifying of all, was targeting teens for upcoming bloodshed. These “kids,” he was informed, were pretending to be regular students, working late nights, studying computer science, wearing blue jeans and so on, when in reality it had been discovered they were actually a group of young chaos causers plotting mayhem on American soil. Their leader, Ibrahim Ali Farah, functioned as an underage operative for an international terrorist organization known as Al-Shabaab.

  In Arabic, the name Al-Shabaab means Movement of Striving Youth. McCutcheon Daniels got recruited to the world of hunting them after his own underground mixed martial arts career in the ghettoes of Detroit. His father had pimped him out like a violent whore to make money. Pound for pound, M.D. was the best young mixed martial artist the Motor City had ever seen. Maybe the best ever. Undefeated for years and unmatched in his dedication to training, M.D. had taken out some of the best underground fighters from coast to coast. However, a street gang named the Priests lost a very large sum of money betting on M.D. the night he absorbed the first loss of his career.

  A loss that could have been—and should have been—a victory until McCutcheon purposefully threw the fight. M.D. had only done it to escape his father’s abusive clutches, but the Priests didn’t care about stupid little father/son squabbles. They’d lost a lot of cash fronting money for uncovered bets made by McCutcheon’s dad, and according to the code of the streets, the only way to pay someone back for such a giant loss of green was with the spilling of a large amount of red.

  The High Priest, the gang’s kingpin, sought revenge.

  Payback for the Daniels family began with having Klowner and Nate-Neck, McCutcheon’s two closest friends and MMA training partners, butchered. A hollowed-out eye socket, necks slashed to the white of the bone, ears carved off with a hacksaw—gruesome, merciless street executions had been carried out on both men. Of course the High Priest had also put a green light out on Demon Daniels, M.D.’s dad, but he slithered away before hit squads were able to take him out.