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To Tom Hayse, for helping me understand how satellite phones work and how their signals are intercepted, and for helpful comments on the manuscript.
To Seb Belisarius, ex-SEAL and shootfighting and combatives instructor; Craig Douglas, former Army Ranger, narcotics agent, and combatives instructor; and De
To Tony Blauer, for sharing his decades of research and experience on effectively managing violence, and in particular for his feedback on Rain’s mind-set and tactics in the final confrontation in the book.
To Matt Furey, for devising the Combat Conditioning system that Rain uses to maintain his edge, and for sharing some of his incomparable grappling expertise to make Rain’s neck cranks the deadly weapons they are.
To Marc MacYoung, Dia
To Naomi Andrews and Dan Levin, Eve Bridberg, Alan Eisler, Judy Eisler, Shari Gersten and David Rosenblatt, Joe Konrath, Matthew Powers, Owen Re
To my friends at Café Borrone in Menlo Park, California, for serving the best breakfasts-and especially coffee-that any writer could ask for.
Most of all, always and forever, to the best of everything, my wife, Laura.
Personal Safety Tips from Assassin John Rain
PART OF THE APPEAL of my series about the half-American, half-Japanese assassin John Rain seems to be Rain’s realistic tactics. It’s true that Rain, like his author, has a black belt in judo and is a veteran of certain government firearms and other defensive tactics courses, but these have relatively little to do with Rain’s continued longevity. Rather, Rain’s ultimate expertise, and the key to his survival, lies in his ability to think like the opposition.
Okay, get out your highlighter, because:
All effective personal protection, all effective security, all true self-defense, is based on the ability and willingness to think like the opposition.
I’m writing this article on my laptop in a crowded coffee shop that I like. There are a number of other people around me similarly engaged. I think to myself, If I wanted to steal a laptop, this would be a pretty good place to do it. You come in, order coffee and a muffin, sit, and wait. Eventually, one of these computer users is going to get up and make a quick trip to the bathroom. He’ll be thinking, “Hey, I’ll only be gone for a minute.” He doesn’t know that a minute is all I need to get up and walk out with his three thousand dollar PowerBook. (Note how criminals are adept at thinking like their victims. You need to treat them with the same respect.)
Okay. I’ve determined where the opposition is pla
avoid the coffee shop entirely (avoid where the crime will occur)
hope to catch the thief in the act, chase him down, engage him with violence
secure my laptop to a chair with a twenty-dollar Kensington security cable (avoid how the crime will occur-it’s hard to unobtrusively employ bolt cutters in a coffee shop, or to carry out a laptop that’s got a chair hanging off it)
Of these three options, #3 makes the most sense for me. The first is too costly-I like this coffee shop and get a lot of work done here. The second is also too costly, and too uncertain. Why fight when you could have avoided the fight in the first place? This is self-defense we’re talking about, remember, self-protection. Not fighting, not melodrama. As for the third, yes, it’s true that these measures won’t render the crime impossible. But what measures ever do? The point is to make the crime difficult enough to carry out that the criminal chooses to pursue his aims elsewhere. Yes, if twenty-seven ninjas have dedicated their lives to stealing your laptop and have managed to track you to the coffee shop, they’ll probably manage to get your laptop while you’re in the bathroom even if you’ve secured it to a chair. But more likely, your opposition will be someone who is as happy stealing your laptop as someone else’s. By making yours the marginally more difficult target, you will encourage him to steal someone else’s.
Which brings us to an unpleasant, but vitally true, point:
If you and your friend are jogging in the woods, and you get chased by a bear, you don’t have to outrun the bear. You just have to outrun your friend.
Except at the level of very high-value executive protection (presidents, high-profile businessmen, ambassadors and other dignitaries), you are not trying to outrun the bear. You are trying only to outrun your friend.
Let’s combine these two concepts-thinking like the opposition, outru
If you wanted to burglarize a house, what would you look for? And what would you avoid?
Generally speaking, your high-level objectives are to get cash and property, and to get away (home invasion is a separate subject, but is addressed, like all self-protection, by reference to the same principles). You’d start by looking at lots of houses. Remember, you’re not trying to rob a certain address; you just want to rob a house. Which ones are dark? Which are set back from the road and neighbors? Are there any cars in the driveway? Lights and noise in the house? Signs of an alarm system? A barking dog?
Thinking like a burglar, you are now ready to implement the outer layer of your home security. By some combination of installing motion sensor lights, keeping bushes trimmed so as to avoid concealment opportunities, putting up signs advertising an alarm system, buying a dog, keeping a car or cars in the driveway, and leaving on appropriate lights and the television and making sure there are no newspapers in the driveway or mail left on the porch when you’re away, you help the burglar to immediately decide during his “casing” or “surveillance” phase that he should rob someone else’s house.