Discover
Shock and Awe

Chapter 01

James Cobalt, 25 years old, looked around the overcrowded Bangkok jail cell and knew violence was headed in his direction.

Sooner, not later.

He found himself in jail for breaking the hand of his Thai attacker. He was in a bar, words were exchanged, and a knife was pulled. He could have hurt him a lot worse, but chose not to. 

Cobalt never looked for trouble, but a strange calm took hold of him when it came. Violence, sharp and sudden, had a way of bringing the world into perfect focus.

The cops were called, who looked at the situation with a boredom only Thai police can achieve, and promptly arrested Cobalt on the legal basis of him being the only foreigner around to blame it on. In Thailand, foreigners are always guilty.
He didn’t resist when taken into custody.

So he kept his head down when he entered the gang cell, refused to make eye contact with anyone, and maneuvered himself to a corner. Since two corners were taken up with bunk beds, and another corner faced the front bars of the cell, leaving the back, left-hand corner of the cell…which was already long occupied by another inmate.

Cobalt proximity sense told him that violence was coming up directly behind him. However, the corner dweller wasn’t in tune with Cobalt’s intentions. So, Cobalt needed to make a decision. The pieces on the chessboard were going to have to move. Either the sleepy-eyed Bishop in the corner, or he would have to stop the rook attack directly behind him now.

He chose the former, not the latter.

Cobalt reached the corner and, in a single move, grabbed the inmate in the corner by the lapels, spinning him in the direction of his attacker in the back, while hooking his heel under the inmate’s ankle at the same time. The momentum of the turn, coupled with losing his balance, turned the befuddled, sleepy inmate into a flesh-and-bone missile, who flew backwards into Cobalt’s attacker.

The sleepy inmate, caught off-guard and unaware of his situation, started flailing against the big Thai attacker, who tossed him aside like so much dirty laundry. With his back to the corner and protected, Cobalt was able to meet his attacker head-on.

His position was protected, and he was ready to engage his enemy.

His attacker was a large, beefy Thai. The kind that the slums of Bangkok seemed to produce in amazing quantities. Cobalt quickly noticed several tattoos on his face and hands. Celebrating, no doubt, either a religious or violent past.

Cobalt figured it was the latter, not the former.

The surprise move checked his momentum, and the Thai knew he had lost the element of surprise, not that it bothered him much. On the other hand, Cobalt senses heightened by adrenaline, and time moving in slow motion, knew Thai had already made his first mistake. When Sleepy had barreled into him, to maintain his balance, he had to step back and re-adjust his footing to stay upright. This meant that Cobalt lost the solid ground to launch an attack. Cobalt stepped in to fill the void. 

The downside of pressing his attack this early meant that he had to give up his back-protected position he had just fought to achieve.

Cobalt slowed his time sense even more. Now, even a random blink of the eye took minutes to execute. He could see with perfect clarity how various moves would, or should, play out. However, since the guards had removed the shackles from his hands but not his feet, his freedom of movement was compromised. The chain between his ankles allowed about 36 inches of movement.

It was a considerable disadvantage. Or was it?

There was no freedom of movement anyway in an overcrowded jail cell. It could be an advantage. How can I turn a lack of movement into an advantage? He asked himself.

The Big Thai shifted his weight to regain his footing. What would seem lightning fast in real time was really painfully slow to Cobalt’s senses. Before the Big Thai could regain his footing, Cobalt rushed him, hitting him with a series of nonstop blows to his upper body. The Thai’s eyes bulged as he realized belatedly that it was he who was under attack, not the other way around. The hunter, in the blink of an eye, became the hunted.

Cobalt pressed his attack. Since the Thai’s momentum wanted to carry him backwards, Cobalt saw no reason to interfere with gravity and made a tight 360-degree turn, hooking the arch of his foot under the Thai’s ankle and sweeping it upward. The Thai was going down, and he knew it. Keeping his turn in motion, and building up kinetic energy, he delivered an elbow strike to the Thai’s solar plexus, hard enough to feel the breast bone crack, but not hard enough to puncture his heart.

The Thai’s breath whooshed out of him, like a strong breeze in a traffic tunnel, and His legs buckled beneath him, and he crashed to the floor with a resounding thud, like the collapse of a towering oak felled in the forest. Dust rose around him as his body sprawled on the earth, limbs splayed out in a motionless heap. He fell flat on his back, unable to breathe. Cobalt hoped the elbow strike didn’t kill him, but he didn’t think so.

The Thai guards and Thai society in general would respect self-defense, but wouldn’t condone or forgive killing one of their fellow citizens. The fact that the Thais would have killed Cobalt given the opportunity didn’t enter into the equation as far as they were concerned. He was a foreigner. He didn’t count.

The man’s body hit the floor like a dropped bag of meat. Cobalt didn’t flinch. Cobalt checked the Thai’s pulse on his neck. Irregular and faint, but there.  His knuckles throbbed. The stink of piss and blood filled the cell.

For a second, everything flickered. Not the fluorescent lights — something deeper. Jungle vines and bullet spray. A scream cut short. A knife glinting in moonlight. His hands, younger then, but just as stained.

He blinked it away. Not here. Not now.

He’d wake up eventually, in considerable pain and needing medical care for his shattered sternum.

The prison cell blurred for a second, replaced by a PTSD flashback of jungle shadows and the copper stink of blood. A man with half his face missing gurgled at his feet—Lo Chin’s enforcer, taken out with a blade Cobalt hadn’t meant to use. He remembered how the body twitched, how the breath left like a leaking tire. No regrets. Just a cold cataloging of consequence.
Ten seconds at most had passed. Cobalt took a moment to eye his surroundings, noticing the other inmates' awe, bewilderment, and anger, and then went back to his corner.

The big Thai woke up screaming sooner…not later.