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Operation Hurricane
By Benjamin Shaw
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by Benjamin Shaw
Published by Mill Road Media
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review. For more information visit: www.benjaminshawbooks.com
First edition 2021
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For KJ & The Captain
PART ONE
“The laws of science do not distinguish between the past and the future.” Professor Stephen Hawking.
It’s Going To Get Ugly
The following takes place in our past – but firmly in our hero’s future.
Square Maria Blanchard, Paris, France, 1986
Heads began to turn the moment the long, black vintage Mercedes had pulled to a stop outside Café Royale. Not only were cars like this a stark reminder of a time when Paris was in the grip of Adolf Hitler’s terrifying ‘SS’, but parking wasn’t permitted on the square, so having the brazenness to stop the old relic here was a clear signal that the driver didn’t care much for local traffic laws, and anyone with a complaint should probably just keep walking.
There were a few rather interesting facts about the man sat inside the old car. Physically, he was nothing special. He was short, small and muscular, with sharp, weasel-like features. Had one of the many passers-by felt like living dangerously and glanced into the car at that moment, they would have seen something that would have blown their mind. The man pulled back his sleeve to check his watch. The face of the timepiece was a small, black screen which came to life and flashed a set of large numbers, telling him it was 10.04 am - and it certainly didn’t look like anything you would find attached to a wrist in 1986.
Hans Frisbeck sighed and looked around. The old square shimmered in the mid-morning sun. It reminded Frisbeck of a picture from a postcard or an old painting hanging on the wall of a grand house. Thick snow covered every surface, except for the black stones and rails making up the well-worn tram lines that guided the busy carriages around the city.
Despite the sun, the snow had been falling fast all morning, so the pavements were slippery and filled with people cautiously going about their business, without any inkling as to what was unfolding right under their noses. For Frisbeck, the morning crackled with a sense of danger, a feeling he was greatly accustomed to. He had visited many different countries and experienced all kinds of cultures; it was all part of his job. He had also learnt to be a patient man, good at watching people and doing as he was told. A further interesting fact about Frisbeck was his exclusive membership of an elite and savage team, tasked with one simple function: hunting. Frisbeck was sent to find things, to capture and return items that were important to people – and he never hunted alone.
Another large, black car approached, slowly crunching over the thick snow. It was followed by a powerful BMW motorbike and sidecar, carrying two men wearing goggles and helmets. The car hadn’t even fully stopped before it spat out a mountain of a man. His name was Bakker; he had long arms that hung far from his sides, big legs that stretched out like a spider and huge features that seemed to be fighting for space on his face. Bakker took a long stride towards Frisbeck’s car, across the path of an old woman carrying bags of shopping. The woman tried to step back out of his way, but Bakker was colossal; he took up the whole pavement, and he didn’t even notice her as she slipped and tumbled onto the hard concrete. The woman dropped her belongings, gritted her teeth and cried out in pain. Frisbeck wound down his window enough to poke his ratty little nose through it, his small eyes pinched against the cold.
‘Is he in there?’ Bakker asked in his sharp, Dutch accent.
‘Yes,’ Frisbeck replied with a smile, revealing a set of broken, uneven teeth. ‘For over 30 minutes.’
‘Perfect, his stomach will be full – he will be slow. Let’s go and get him.’ Bakker walked out into the road and over to the man on the motorbike, who had been patiently waiting for his orders.
Frisbeck climbed out of the car and shut the door as Bakker talked to the other Hunters; he could feel the electricity start to fizz through his veins. The Hunter in the sidecar was a squat man called Nico. He hopped out and walked briskly down a side street and around the back of the café. Bakker stepped back onto the pavement and over the old woman. She straightened her patterned headscarf and with the help of a good Samaritan, began to scratch through the snow, picking up the shopping she had dropped. A crowd had started to form, a group of onlookers who sensed that something was about to erupt. Still, such was their air of menace that not a soul dared utter a word to the men dressed in black.
Bakker slapped a big, meaty hand on the door, stopped and turned his head, his long, dark hair swinging across his uneven face. He blinked slowly; his bulging eyes fixed on Frisbeck. ‘No mistakes. We get him, then we get the hell out of this place. I hate snow.’ Bakker didn’t like the cold; they all knew he wanted to get home. And where exactly was home?
Well, the last and surely the most interesting thing about Frisbeck and Bakker and all the Hunters was, they weren’t from Paris and they certainly weren’t from 1986. Home was in a different time entirely – and a very long way away indeed.
Boyd was finishing his breakfast of fried potatoes and thinking about whether to order another. He was here to meet someone, a stranger, and they were late. Boyd didn’t like hanging around anywhere longer than he needed to; although being a 15 year-old boy out alone wasn’t rare in this time, the people in these small sections of town knew each other and Boyd clearly wasn’t a local – far from it. Also, patience wasn’t a skill he had ever managed to master.
The little café was decorated with family pictures on the cream walls. It had a small bar on the right and a corridor at the back of the room leading down to the kitchen. Two older men sat on stools, drinking strong coffee from tiny cups; the café owner stood chatting on the other side of the thick, wooden bar. Boyd was the only other customer. He sat at the back of the room next to the corridor and didn’t even look up as the door opened and the winter wind burst in like an intruder.
Then it died just as suddenly as it had arrived when Bakker filled the entire doorway. The huge man ducked his head through the entrance and, seeing Boyd immediately, he wound his way around two empty tables with the speed and grace of a ballet dancer. Frisbeck closed the door behind him. The men at the bar stopped talking and looked down at their little cups. The owner only dared to snatch a glance at the new arrivals, watching carefully from the corner of his eyes.
Boyd chased the last of his potato around his plate. He didn’t need to look up to know that the sudden silence in the café meant trouble. It was something he had learnt to recognise over the last few days and, if he was honest, maybe even quite enjoy. He speared the potato and poked it into his mouth, savouring the flavour. As he did, he finally looked up at the huge man standing in front of him. Bakker was so massive that his head and shoulders blocked out the sunlight and even shaded Boyd from the light hanging on the ceiling. How does someone even get that big? It must be a family thing, maybe his parents were giants
too – Boyd would remember to ask him, just before he knocked him on his backside.
Nico, the stocky man from the sidecar, was glad to be on his feet and walking. It had been absolutely freezing on the ride in; even his thick overcoat hadn’t stopped him from shivering like a frightened dog. All this effort to find some stupid kid; he had no idea why they needed so many of them to grab a teenage runaway. Nico decided he was going to tell Bakker that he wasn’t riding back in the sidecar, he would get in the car with Frisbeck.
Bakker had told him to go and wait around the back of the café, just in case the kid decided to make a run for it. If by some small miracle this boy did manage to get away from Bakker and Frisbeck, Nico actually hoped he did come this way. It was the kid’s fault that he was here in this godforsaken place, in the worst winter he’d seen in his life.
‘Yeah, come on, kid, come my way,’ Nico said, laughing to himself. ‘I can warm myself up by playing basketball with your head!’
Bakker stopped just one stride away from the table, watching as the kid hoovered up the last of his breakfast.
Frisbeck stepped alongside Bakker and leant around him, seeing Boyd for the first time.
‘Seriously?’ Frisbeck said, looking up at Bakker, an ugly smile cracking across his sharp face. ‘This needs four of us?’
Bakker’s bulging eyes seemed to darken, and he glared at his fellow Hunter. He understood Frisbeck’s reaction; at first glance this was a 15 year-old kid, who looked like he was finishing a meal and about to ask his mum if he could go out with his friends. He wasn’t much bigger than most other kids his age. He had thick, brown hair that hung over a pair of pale blue eyes. But if you looked closely enough, you would see it - the difference between him and other boys his age was burning behind those eyes.
Boyd quickly snapped a look at Frisbeck, his gaze narrowing as he smiled; he was ready, and he was going to enjoy this. Frisbeck felt a sudden uneasy murmur of discomfort in his stomach and wanted to look away.
Bakker broke the silence. ‘Kid, finish up, we need to go. We don’t want this to get ugly.’ He picked up Boyd’s hooded sweatshirt from the chair in front of him and held onto it.
Boyd put down his fork and picked up a large mug of hot tea. He ran his tongue around his teeth, looking carefully at the two men in front of him. ‘It’s a bit late for that, lads,’ he said.
‘What?’ Bakker raised a big eyebrow.
‘I said it’s too late. It looks like it already got pretty ugly in here,’ Boyd said, slightly louder, increasing the air of awkwardness in the small room. ‘I was making a joke about how you two are not exactly pretty; but a joke tends to lose its impact when you have to explain it.’ He sat forward and wrapped the fingers of his left hand around the edge of his big plate. ‘I’m guessing you’re not the brains of the operation, am I right?’
Bakker forced a smile. His thick, slug-like lips parted to reveal a set of yellowed, tombstone teeth. ‘The people I work for want to speak to you, so you’re coming with us,’ he said, leaning forward. ‘Breakfast is over – let’s go.’
Boyd looked around his table. ‘A party? Well, why didn’t you say so? Let’s do this.’ He leant in towards Bakker, as if to whisper. ‘But my father raised me to clean up after myself, so any objections if I clear the table? You wash, I’ll dry, okay?’ Bakker screwed his face up in confusion.
Without warning, Boyd was on his feet. He swiped the heavy plate off the table with his left hand and brought it upwards, catching the big man flush on the jaw and stunning him with a loud ‘SMASH’. Just as that piece of crockery connected, Boyd used his right hand to launch his mug at Frisbeck. Steaming hot liquid showered the Hunter, then the mug bounced off his nose and spun into the air above him. With both men stunned, Boyd flipped up the round wooden table and grabbed two of the legs. Holding it flat in front of him like a huge shield, he drove forward. The café owner’s mouth dropped open as he watched a teenage boy use a table as a battering ram against two grown men.
Boyd forced them backwards, crashing through the two tables they had walked past to get to him. Both experienced fighters, Bakker and Frisbeck managed to stay on their feet as they shuffled in retreat, desperately trying to keep their balance. Then, as their legs hit the low windowsill, gravity took away all their choices. They crashed out through the front window of the café, taking the table with them. By the time their backs crunched through the snow and into the frost-hardened concrete, Boyd was already at the other end of the corridor at the back of the café.
The old woman in the patterned headscarf had collected her shopping from the pavement and was now sat on a tram, waiting to leave the square. She looked at the two men as they lay stricken on the cold floor and enjoyed a little smile to herself.
Nico was shadow-boxing to keep himself warm when he heard the crashing from inside the café. He quickly tried the door, thinking that joining a fight inside was a better option than waiting outside in the cold; the door was locked. He twisted and pulled on the handle to see if he could force it open, but it didn’t budge. Then he felt the handle twist in his grasp. Someone on the other side was trying to get out but having no luck either. Almost as soon as the handle had started to move, it stopped again. Nico let go of it and waited. He heard a noise from inside, not crashing this time, something else. It was like moaning and it was getting louder. He leant into the door, put his ear against it and held his breath. Something was on the other side. Nico could hear footsteps pounding against the floor, getting closer, and the moaning built up into something more like a growl; was it some kind of animal?
Suddenly, the door and bits of its frame exploded outwards into the air and took Nico straight off his feet. On the other side of the door, like a human battering ram, was Boyd.
Nico hit the snow-covered cobblestones of the alley with a thud and the air shot out of him. The door was still sandwiched between him and Boyd, as the young man shook his head and took a breath. Nico let out a shallow cry before trying to free himself.
A hand appeared from the underside of the door and Boyd glanced at the ground in surprise. Under the door, dressed in the same black overcoat as those he’d just despatched from the café, was another man. Boyd didn’t hesitate, he slammed his weight down onto the door, ramming into the thick wood with his shoulder once, twice, three times before the stocky man on the other side let out a tiny whimper. Boyd slid from the door, onto his knees and glanced back down at his adversary.
‘I really hope you’re one of the bad guys.’ He gently tapped his hand on the man’s cheek as he surveyed his surroundings and planned his next move.
Behind the alley he was on was a U-shaped apartment building. A set of steps ran up into a small playground at the back of the apartments. All he had to do was get across the playground, through an archway under the building and he would be on another street.
He was jogging towards the steps when he heard the chug-chug of an engine coming from the end of the alley. A beast of a motorbike with sidecar poked around the corner; the rider saw Boyd and pulled the accelerator back once, letting the motorbike roar out a warning. Boyd didn’t hang around; he was already up the steps when he heard the engine snarl for a second time as the Hunter set off after his prey.
The playground was bustling with young children and parents building snowmen, whilst the older kids engaged in a serious snowball battle. Boyd darted straight across the slippery pathway, just about holding his balance when he heard the playground behind him erupt with a combination of screams, protests and the crackling thunder of a motorbike engine. Boyd cut through the archway and saw a small pile of bicycles leaning against the wall; he scanned them as he approached and quickly grabbed the only one that looked fit for purpose - a black and red BMX. He pushed it out onto the road and leapt up onto the saddle.
He risked a swift glance behind him. The motorbike was speeding across the playground, smoke coughing out of its big exhaust as the rider crouched down over the handlebars. If Boyd’s heart hadn’t b
een pounding before, it certainly was now. He began to rock the lightweight bike side-to-side under him, pumping the pedals with all his strength.
He headed away from the square as fast as he could, up into the narrow roads, lined with the houses, smaller shops and bars of the local neighbourhood. The bike was pretty fast, and Boyd was extremely fit but it wasn’t long before the rider started to close the gap. He could feel the rhythmic chugging of the engine coming up through the road, but he didn’t dare glance back again just now, he had to focus on getting away.
He quickly worked out he had two big problems: the first was, he was heading uphill, which wasn’t ideal when you were being chased by a motorbike; the second problem was, however much he wanted to stay clear of the two men he’d just put through a window, he needed to be in that square to meet his contact. Boyd knew he must have been followed to the café and he couldn’t leave his contact to deal with this kind of trouble on their own; he had to warn them and get them both to safety.
He was busy trying to come up with a plan when the man on the bike took a chance, drew in close and swiped his hand at Boyd, grasping the air right next to his arm. Boyd dropped his shoulder and just managed to slip out of reach, then he swerved between two parked cars and jumped up onto a kerb to buy himself some time. He was now heading straight for a group of worried-looking pedestrians.
Boyd glanced over his shoulder and darted back through a gap onto the road, barely avoiding the shrieking gaggle on the pavement. Anger burned inside him. He pulled right and brought the bicycle towards the motorbike, keeping himself just out of reach. For a moment, Boyd was close enough to see the rider’s eyes up close; they were grey and tired, but they creased with curiosity, wondering what on earth this kid was playing at, trying to decipher what his next move would be. Boyd didn’t make him wait long.
Operation Hurricane: The Evan Boyd Adventures #1 Page 1
