by Vince Vogel
So it wasn’t her that called them.
Dorring clambered across the roof tiles and leaped down at the man on the other side of the cottage. Landing on top of him and throwing him down on the floor, he ripped the goggles and mask off like a rabid dog and then followed it with an almighty punch that crushed the guy’s nose and knocked him out.
Four.
Dorring got up from him and climbed back up onto the roof. Two of the men inside the cottage came bursting out the front door and began glancing about.
They called out to the men watching the house. The one standing at the back went to answer, but before he could, Dorring sent the taser into his face from the roof. The guy swiveled his head slowly to Dorring as he juddered to the spasm of the electric shock. Then he dropped to the floor and Dorring tossed the spent taser away.
Three.
“Hugh!?” one of the men who’d come out shouted. “Billy!? Roger!?”
The third man came marching out the door and struck the man calling out.
“Shut the fuck up!” he snarled.
From where Dorring stood, he couldn’t quite hear it enough to tell the speaker.
“I told you this would be hard,” the guy went on. “She says he’s here somewhere. Now get your head in the game and find the bastard.”
The guy sent one of them around one side of the cottage and the other around the other way.
Dorring waited on the roof above the guy he’d just tasered. One of the men strolled cautiously around that side of the cottage. Dorring raised his body and prepared to land on him. The guy spotted the unconscious man and then spotted something in the corner of his eye, turning sharply up to face it.
“He’s on the roof!” he finished shouting the second before Dorring flattened him. Again he went to pull away the goggles, but the guy stretched an arm out and Dorring had to block it. He thumped his fists down on the man’s chest like an enraged ape and the guy’s flailing arms flew back into the mud as the wind was smashed out of him. Dorring got the goggles off him and crashed his fist into the exposed nose.
Two.
Dorring grabbed the guy’s taser just as another man came bursting around the corner. The black, rainswept night split apart with muzzle flash from the assault rifle as it spat bullets at him. Dorring had time to leap around the corner as the bullets flew past.
“Hold your fire!” the lead guy cried out.
The voice was much clearer now, so Dorring knew who it was. It was Conner.
Staying tight to the corner, Dorring looked about for where he could go. He was at the back of the property. Forward was the woods. It wouldn’t provide much cover. Plus, it was a ten foot leap across the yard before you even reached the trees. It would give the guy plenty of time to shoot Dorring with a clear shot.
He could go left. Work back along the edge of the house. But Conner would be somewhere there waiting. Armed whilst Dorring was not.
He looked up into the rain at the overhanging roof above him. It peaked up at that point, so it was too high for him to grab the edge and climb up.
Then he looked down. There was a cavity. The house was built on blocks. There was a gap of about a foot underneath. It would do.
Dorring dropped to the ground and crawled under the house. The dirt ground was fairly dry and he moved along it on his belly. Reaching the middle, he positioned himself so that he could see the feet moving along the edge of the cottage. He watched the man who’d fired at him come to the corner he’d just vacated.
“He’s not here!” he shouted out as he inspected the spot.
“Cut the chatter!” Conner called back.
Dorring glanced in the direction the voice came from. Through the gap, he saw two boots standing in the mud on the other side of the house, close to the gap. Close enough to grab ahold of. Crawling rapidly towards them, Dorring leaped out from the cavity and instantly guessed his mistake upon grabbing the boots.
They were empty.
Quickly, he turned over and saw Conner drop down from the roof, the butt of his assault rifle crashing into Dorring’s forehead. Everything dissolved into darkness after that.
17
“You in it yet?” Conner asked in a hushed voice from the doorway, leaning to the side with his head poked out so that he could see up the empty corridor.
“Am now,” Dorring replied as he opened up the metal chest with the skeleton key Jane had loaned them for the purpose. It had also opened the doors that had gotten them this far into the armory.
Fourteen years ago, they were searching footlockers, having already searched them in the dormitories where men also kept their knives if they wanted them close at all times. But most kept them in the armory lockers as part of their general kit so that it was ready for battle. Though the dagger they were looking for wasn’t necessarily kit. More tradition.
They’d initially gained access to the armory by having the staff sergeant in charge take a look at Conner’s HK G36k assault rifle. He was claiming that the housing lock wasn’t running smooth enough and therefore wasn’t firing the bullets as rapidly as it should. This was due to Conner having pulled it apart the night before during reconnaissance and scoring the end of his knife into the housing lock to give credence to his complaint. It would keep the guy in the shop for the foreseeable future and away from the desk long enough for them to use the skeleton key to gain access to the footlockers and search them.
Of course, tampering with your weapon in this way was a serious offense and if it wasn’t for the fact that they were working with the Royal Military Police (RMP), they would never have dared do it. But they needed a reason to clear the front desk of the armory.
As for the cameras, Jane would take care of them. Being that all CCTV on the base came to servers controlled by the RMP. She’d make sure all footage while they were there was deleted.
Searching through the contents of the locker, Dorring found the knife. Taking a folded up piece of paper from his breast pocket, he opened it out and ran a pen line through the name Barry McCrawley.
“It ain’t Mac,” he said.
“How many more names?” Conner asked.
“Only seven. We’re nearly all the way through.”
“Maybe your girl with the RMPs is wrong. Maybe the knife was a replica. And the numbers are nothing more than a ruse. The whole thing a set up.”
“Maybe,” Dorring said as he put everything back in the exact way he’d found it. Finishing, he closed the lid of the footlocker and moved on to the next. Kneeling down in front if it, he used the key. “Anyway,” he added as he lifted the lid of the chest, “don’t call her that.”
“Call her what?”
“My girl.”
“Ain’t that what she is?”
“No.”
“Oh! I am sorry. Then what was all that: ‘Hi, my name’s Alex’ bullshit?”
“I was being friendly after you’d been an asshole.”
“Then explain why you looked so pleased when she asked us to help her. I mean, you couldn’t wait to do it.”
“It was nice being taken off the rota for once,” Dorring said. “A little break from operations. Don’t you appreciate a few weeks not being shot at by a hundred pissed off insurgents?”
“Not really. I don’t mind shooting rag-heads. They’d put you away for life back home for it. Here, they give you a fucking medal.”
Dorring turned back at him over his shoulder, shaking his head.
“You’re such a dick sometimes,” he said.
“Alright then,” Conner said. “What about the fact that we’re going after our own? Doesn’t that at least make you question doing this?”
“We’re going after a psycho, Conner. Not a soldier. That he happens to be one of us doesn’t mean a thing. And anyway, what if we’re able to prove that it’s not one of our guys?”
“I guess so,” Conner said.
Dorring went back to searching the chest. There was a knife. So he crossed it off and moved on to the next.
<
br /> “Dave Peterson’s clear,” he said.
“Good. I like Peterson,” Conner said as Dorring opened the next locker. “He was always… Wait!”
Dorring’s eyes widened and he turned sharply to the door, his hands paused over the contents of the locker he’d just gotten open.
Conner gazed at the other end of the corridor. He heard approaching footsteps. At the bottom, a shadow became gradually larger, approaching along another corridor that ran perpendicular along the end of the one they were on. If the person turned left, they’d walk straight towards them.
“Shut it up,” Conner said, ducking back into the room and taking a position around the corner of the door, his ears listening hard to the footsteps.
“It isn’t here,” Dorring said.
“What?” Conner said, turning to him from the door.
“It isn’t here. George Bishop. His knife is gone. It can’t be anywhere except here or the dorm lockers. Both are empty.”
“Then we should go,” Conner said.
“No. We still need to see the rest.”
Frowning, Conner peeked his head around the corner and saw the shadow diminishing, along with the footsteps. Whoever it was had passed by the end.
Breathing a sigh of relief, he ducked his head back in and said, “Hurry up, then. I’m not in the habit of being court-martialed.”
Dorring quickly searched the five remaining lockers. He found knives in every one. It appeared that the only person missing a knife that matched the numbers found on the one pulled out of the dead woman was George Bishop.
“Well, I just found out: Bishop’s currently on leave,” Jane said as Dorring and Conner stood in front of her desk. Her own this time.
“I thought you didn’t have the clearance to find that sort of information out,” Conner said.
“Not his operations. But I can find out when the men on this base are on leave.”
“It’s true,” Dorring said. “He’s not due back for a week. He went home for his brother’s wedding.”
“And I don’t have enough evidence yet to request his operation times,” Jane said next, “so I can’t compare any data with the dates of the murders.”
“Yeah,” Conner said with a smirk. “Especially being that the evidence was found through an illegal search.”
Jane narrowed her eyes at him. “You have any better suggestions for getting to the bottom of this?”
“Yeah,” Conner snuffed. “Leave it alone. It’s a bunch of fucking savages getting cut up, that’s all. You should see the shit they do to us.”
“Leave it, Conner,” Dorring said, taking him by the arm.
“Nah, man,” his comrade said in vexation, shrugging the hand off. “She should know. She sits here behind her little desk and deals mostly with drunk squaddies. This shit excites her because she’s bored. Well, guess what!” He leaned forward with his hands gripping the edge of her desk when he said this. “We don’t get to sit in our nice air-conditioned offices,” he went on wrathfully. “We go all the way out into that burning desert. All the way out to the foothills. We see what those bastards do to their own, let alone what they do to our boys when they get ahold of them.”
“Conner,” Dorring warned him.
He wasn’t listening. “You ever seen a dead child with an IED sewn in their guts? Buried real deep so the bomb disposal boys have to cut it out. Won’t touch it because they can’t bear it. Can’t bear to even do such a thing to a child by cutting it out. Even though the kid’s dead. You ever seen that?”
He was glaring down into her. She stood up sharply and glared back with a face so stern that her tight jaw looked about ready to crush her teeth.
“You leave my office now,” she said as calmly as she could. “Dismissed.”
“With pleasure,” Conner said, and he turned and left the room. At the door, he turned to Dorring and shook his head, laughing to himself as he walked off down the corridor.
Jane began straightening her uniform out, glancing around the office as though she expected to see something that would change her mood. Her eyes settled on Dorring and she gazed at him.
“You wanna go for a drink?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said.
The bar on base was always open and it always looked like one in the morning inside. There were no windows, the desert being particularly bright and hot, so you never knew what time of day it was except when the door was opened and the burning light entered the place. They kept no clocks or time keeping devices inside and people preferred not to look at their watches or phones.
The walls were coated in the flags of the many regiments on the base. Photographs of each regiment adorned the walls in the gaps between. Other than that, the place attempted to look as much like a British pub as could be possible in the middle of Afghanistan. So it was all fruit machines, pool tables, beer sticky surfaces, and the smell of stale lager never far from your nostrils.
Dorring and Jane sat at the bar. It was pretty empty except for a couple of drunk soldiers at the pool table behind them. They were busy playing a drinking game in which the loser of any given pool game would have to down five sambuca shots before playing the next game. It appeared that both men had lost several already.
“So what now?” Dorring asked as they sipped their beers.
The barman was busy watching a football game on a television behind the bar. The volume was on low so that the commentators and crowd were a low din.
“Well, we have to watch George Bishop when he gets back off leave,” Jane said. “We have nothing except a missing knife. We’ll have to monitor him as best we can. That’s where you’ll be handy. Other than that, all I can do is request more time with you and your… comrade.”
Dorring guessed she wanted to say something else, but held back out of respect for him.
“He’s not all bad, you know,” he felt the need to say. “It’s this place. It affects you.”
“Yes. It’s affected our killer so much that he’s fallen into his sickest tendencies.”
“It could still be insurgents.”
“It could, but I don’t think so.”
“Why?”
“Because we identified the last victim. She was the daughter of a local chieftain. A man who’s on our wanted list for leading several insurgent groups that have set off bombs in the towns.”
“Maybe she was seen as expendable?”
“Why your own daughter? Why not a stranger if it’s only for the purpose of demonizing us?”
“Maybe he wanted her death. Some kind of honor killing. Two birds. One stone.”
“No. Azzar Shah is deeply upset by the killing. Our people in the local authorities tell us that he’s set a substantial reward for the finding and beheading of her killer.”
“Could all be front.”
“No. There’s too many problems with that theory.”
“So you really believe it’s one of ours?”
She turned to Dorring with green eyes. Under the dim light of the bulb hanging above their heads, she looked absolutely radiant. He couldn’t help feeling a rush of heat travel rapidly up his body as he gazed at her and he feared his face would explode.
“I do,” she said. “I wish it wasn’t the case, but I feel more confident with each new killing that it’s one of ours.”
“Then let’s hope it’s Bishop so we can close this thing quickly.”
“Amen to that.”
She lifted her beer glass to him and he did the same. They chinked the glasses together and then slung them to their mouths, heartily sipping the cold, amber beer.
The door opened behind them and they turned. The pool players placed hands over their eyes to shield them from the sudden burst of white light.
“Shut the door, man,” they cried out.
It closed and the wedge of light went out, the bar returning to its gloomy dimness.
“Thank you!” they cried sardonically.
Standing before the door was Kevin. Seeing Dorrin
g and Jane, he approached and took a seat at the bar next to his fellow RMP.
“You wanna beer, Yates?” the barman asked.
“No thanks, Frank,” Kevin replied.
The barman nodded and went back to the football game.
“So what did you find me on Bishop?” Jane asked Kevin.
“Okay,” Kevin said. “So George Bishop joined the SAS only a year ago.”
“I could have told you that,” Dorring said.
Kevin leaned forward and turned to him.
“Sorry, Alex,” he said. “I never noticed you there.”
Dorring frowned. It had been pretty impossible not to.
Kevin leaned back and went on.
“So before that, he was in a Commando unit of the Royal Marines for five years. Applied for the SAS three years in a row and finally got into training just over a year ago.”
“So he’s a fanatic for the SAS?” Jane asked.
“Yeah. Apparently he’s a collector of SAS memorabilia. His great-grandfather was apparently in the first ever Special Air Service unit back in World War Two. Apparently met Churchill himself.”
“So it’s in his blood?” Jane said.
“Yeah.”
“It doesn’t mean much, though,” Dorring said.
“Why not?” Kevin asked.
“Most of the guys in the unit are fanatics. Conner’s old man was a Marine. Used to go on about it all the time, so Conner decided he’d go one better and join the SAS to shut him up.”
“Conner not too close to his old man?” Jane asked.
“Not really.”
Jane turned her green eyes to him, penetrating him with them.
“What about you, Alex?” she said.
“What about me?” he asked in return.
“What made you join up? You a fanatic?”
“I joined the Marines because I lack imagination and wanted to leave home. I went onto the SAS because I did well with the Marines and special forces offered me more lucrative work.”
“That what this is?” Kevin asked. “Lucrative work.”
“I guess so. I certainly don’t get wrapped up in the politics of the thing. If you ask me, it wouldn’t matter one iota if we weren’t out here at all.”
