Vae Victus [Volume 1] [WOE TO THE VANQUISHED]

Chapter 12

With my free right hand, I unbuckled my belt. Luckily this guy did not have the flexibility or the knowledge to wrap his long legs around my upper arms instead of my thigh. That would have been checkmate. 

Heck, if this idiot put his elbows at the back of my body and twisted the wire up with his crossed hands, I would be dead. Instead, he was flailing around with his hand trying to snap both my neck and my hand. He certainly did not know how to use leverage with his weapon, but he was much stronger than me.

The steel buckle on my leather belt was custom made. I ordered it a long time ago from one of the armorers in Mossad. As I pressed a clip on the side of the belt, the buckle went loose. A buckle knife. Two inches long, one inch wide, triangle-shaped blade with the buckle ring as the grip. I had never used this knife before. I prayed that the armorer did not do a shoddy work.

My right hand started to work on his two feets. I stabbed hard and as accurately as I could with my neck and head stretched backward. Those who control the head, control the body. That was the maxim of Brazillian Jiu-jitsu. This man controlled my head, he controlled how much my entire body could twist without breaking my neck. 

But Brazillian Jiu-jitsu never took into account one free hand with a knife. I kept stabbing at his exposed feet. One wrong stab and I would puncture my own thighs and killed myself. He screamed. Payback is a bitch. His mangled feet were finally moved off my thighs.

I bridged backward again, this time I managed to turn, flip and rolled my body to his left side. My head was the pivot point on his chest.

Halfway through the backflip, I realized my mistake. The garotte was too tight. I had just given him the very leverage he needed to snap my neck.

I could let him broke my neck or broke my shoulder. I chose the later. I pushed my left wrist to the right side of my head with all my strength. The wire cut deeper into my bone, but it gave me an extra few inches to prevent the garotte from snapping my neck like a hangman's noose.

I managed to twist my head enough in line with my body and I let my left shoulder broke. The weight of my entire body crashed against the tensile strength of the steel piano wire and my poor shoulder was rotated beyond its maximum range. 

POP. My entire left hand was detached from my shoulder.

Not a single sound escaped my lips. Pain focused me. There will be plenty of times to scream and cry after I got out of this alive.

Side-control position suited me just fine. He no longer controlled my head, and I had managed a reversal from the back position. 

Even with the garotte around my broken left hand and neck, I still had his exposed ribs and my buckle knife. I stabbed and stabbed and stabbed. He let go of the garotte and scrambled away. Two inches was plenty of lengths to hit vital organs, and although half of my stabs hit his ribs, enough of them did not. At the very least, I punctured his lungs or if I was lucky, his left kidney.

He stood up and walked backward. The open fridge was the only illumination for the entire room. He was holding his left ribs. I knelt on my two knees and faced him. The adrenaline started to fade, or was it my bleeding wrist? My vision was fading fast.

"You fucking bitch," I could hear his curse. He was panting hard and his voice was muffled. He wore some kind of mask and I punctured his left lung. I still recognized his voice.

"Robert?" I asked. I had known since the first day we met that he had a military background. Luckily he did not seem to specialize in assassinations.

"Garrotte? Really?" I asked and laughed. Blood dripped from my nose into my throat.

I could hear his growl from the shadow. He had almost killed me, and he still could. I had one broken hand, and he had a few punctures on his left ribs. If he had a gun, this would be over very soon.

I really should get myself a concealed carry permit in this state. A masked man attacking me in my home would be a good legal reason to get one. I could see his hand moving toward his back, searching but found nothing. If he had found something, he would have pulled it out by now.

He dropped his gun when I jumped backward and when we wrestled on the floor. I searched the dark floor with my one hand. He jumped toward me. Found it. I grabbed it.

Glock. Did not have time to check the hammer. Not sure if it was single action or double action. I pressed the trigger away.

BANG.

He stopped. Double action. I pulled the trigger again and again and again. He fell backward and did not move again.

I stood up, shot him a few more times to be sure. I walked out of the kitchen, put the gun on the table and grabbed the landline phone on the hallway and dialed 911. I gave the operator my address.

My back on the wall, I slid down to the floor.

I laughed like a crazy woman on the floor of my home. Blood poured from my broken nose and my left hand was hanging loose like a broken mannequin. My left wrist was cut to the bone and half severed. If the wire had cut any arteries, I would bleed to death in minutes.

As I passed out, all I could think off was John Ben-Gurion. Perhaps I would visit Sarah in the afterlife after all. 

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Author's note:

Wow, I did not realize how complicated it is to use garrote or escape from one. Unfortunately, a lot of the terms was very specific to BJJ (and BJJ does not teach how to escape garrote, or how to take the back of someone with a knife, a version of BJ Penn's rubber guard may work. He liked to wrap his legs around the upper arms instead of the thigh when taking someone's back).

Simply put, a professional with garotte only needs to do a few things right: Wrap the wires around your neck, put his back on your back and used the leverage of his butt under your butt and snap! Your body weight would decapitate or break your neck.

You can use garrote as a version of rear naked choke, but that would be a waste. If you use a belt or something wide and weak instead of thin string wire, that is the best way to use it. 

But thin string wire can cut through someone's neck, all you need is enough leverage of the victim's bodyweight as your arms would not be strong enough to decapitate someone otherwise.

Anyway. I am sure there are a lot of technical mistakes here. But my main concern is how to explain the whole thing to people who never trained BJJ before.  Terms like "taking the back", "controlling the head", "reversal" or "side control" would be foreign to them.