Chapter 5

One would think, after 2,000 years of rule by Doug, people would get the idea, but some people never learn. Some guy, living in what would have been Poland in Doug's old 21^st Century, decided that he could do a better job of running things than could the local bureaucracy. Jagged Quartz managed to find some minions who didn't know when they were well off, and they helped him steal some guns from the local police station.

There were 19 men in Jagged Quartz's gang, and they decided to set up headquarters in the Governor's mansion. Out of nothing but complete stupidity, they killed anyone who didn't jump to serve them. Therefore, they made enemies at every turn. The fools did not seem to understand that ruling by force required that force always be used, and the ruler never dared to relax his guard.

To compound the insult to the local people, the gang had kidnapped 27 local girls and young women and thrown them into what they called their "harem." Some of the women had actually been attracted to men in the gang, but that was before the gang had been organized. Now, they uniformly hated the men in the gang, no matter what their original feelings had been. The women were shared among the men, except for Jagged Quartz who kept five women of his own separate from the others. Any of these 32 women would have been glad to murder the men and would have laughed while they were doing it.

It took a few weeks for word of the takeover to get out, since the gang ruthlessly killed anyone they suspected of doing anything to harm them. The punishment for any "crime" against the gang was always the same: death by strangulation. If it was a man being hanged, the gang would strip him and tie one rope around his neck and the other around his cock and balls. The two ropes would be pulled until the victim was suspended horizontally and left that way until he died. With a woman, one rope was tied around her neck and the other tied to a meat hook jammed into her vagina. She, too, was hauled up horizontally and kept there until she strangled. The victims arms and legs were left loose, since the gang liked to watch them flopping and flailing around as the victim tried to find some relief from the strangulation and the pain. These "executions" were done in public as a way to cower the citizens, and they were very effective. Everybody was scared to death of the gang.

When word finally got back to Doug, he hit the ceiling. He had promised to protect the populace and, by damn, he was going to. Doug was so mad that he wanted to take care of the problem on a personal basis. However, Doug was persuaded to take a little help, since 20 men could overcome him by sheer weight of numbers, even if he was indestructible.

After calming down a little bit, Doug listened to reason and selected five men to go with him to fix this "problem." All of these five men were top practitioners of special operations. Each was highly skilled in both armed and empty-hand fighting, so each man was practically unstoppable on his own, and, as a group, they were the proverbial irresistible force. They traveled by the fastest transport plane available to eastern Europe and prepared to strike as soon as it got dark enough.

The gang had taken over the main government building to use as its headquarters, so Doug's group had exact plans of the structure. There was a grand entrance at the front that every public building seemed to require and two service entrances at the rear. For some strange reason, the gang had fortified the main ceremonial entrance, but had not done the same thing for the other two entrances.

It was decided that Doug's band would be divided into two groups of three men, each. Naturally, Doug led one group and Sharp Point led the other group. Each group entered by a service door. Even though they were separated, they were in constant communication by means of their tactical radios. That way they could keep from accidentally attacking each other.

There was a guard at each doorway, but he spent more time sleeping than guarding. None of the gang expected trouble from the locals, whom they had so thoroughly cowered, and, strangely enough, none expected trouble from the central government. This latter was because they were not particularly bright bulbs on the tree of life, and Doug kept the central government as much in the background as possible, so Jagged Quartz really thought that he was truly the master of all that he surveyed.

No pity was wasted on any member of the gang, so Doug's plan was to kill the gang members as they were encountered, that is, all but Jagged Quartz—Doug planned to make a special example of him.

Once the guards at the back doors were eliminated, the two groups made their way through the building toward the front door. This had a two-fold purpose, it swept through the building to pick up any surprises that might be floating around, and it isolated the two guards at the front door from support from inside the building. Both of the guards at the front door were also asleep, and were never given the opportunity to wake up.

Intelligence gathered from servants told Doug's people that each of the gang members not on guard duty slept in separate rooms with one or more women "guests" from the harem. This arrangement made the operation simpler because there would be only one gang member at a time to overcome, but it complicated matters because it allowed more time for something to go wrong.

There were now only 16 gang members to account for, but there were only six attackers to do the work. It was believed that overwhelming force was the way to attack the problem, so the original two groups of three men went after each gang member. They divided the sleeping area in half and Sharp Point took his group through one half while Doug took his group through the other half. Everybody wanted to be in on the capture of Jagged Quartz, so they agreed to meet at his bedroom door after taking care of their responsibilities with the minions.

Typically, the attack on a minion was only too easy. The man was found in bed with one or more women and dispatched with a quick thrust of a knife. The idea was to keep the noise to a minimum so that the people in the as yet unvisited bedrooms would not be alarmed by unexpected noises. It made no difference whether or not the women made noise, since screams of pain coming from a bedroom were not at all unusual.

On a couple of occasions, the man was slow to die, so the women had a few moments to help him on his way to that condition. Not surprisingly, there were no women who were sorry to see the end of their male partner, even if she had once loved the fool.

Finally, all of the minions were dead, and the avenging angels met at the door to Jagged Quartz's bedroom. As with all of the other interior doors, this door was unlocked, so all that Doug's people had to do was open the door and walk in. The capture of Jagged Quartz was almost an anticlimax, it was so easy. In fact, the men had nothing to do.

Jagged Quartz was sleeping in a monster bed with his five naked women. One of them woke up when the door was first opened, and she woke the rest of the women when she recognized that the intruders were not a part of Jagged Quartz's gang. Jagged Quartz was a big man, but he was no match for the fury of the five women who attacked him. It turned out that Doug's men had to rescue Jagged Quartz from the women before they killed him! Doug had something better and more public planned for the death of Jagged Quartz.