A Necessary Hell

by Nigel Price

  Tobacco Man was out first, then Chunky Driver. They both stood at the front of the vehicle for a moment debating. Harry watched them through the front windscreen, their lips moving, arms pointing, sunglasses masking the eyes.

  “They’re going to kill us, aren’t they?” Ingrid said.

  “They’re going to try. Just remember to stand away from me when we get out. Divide their attention. Give me room to move.”

  Ingrid recalled his action in Müller’s farmyard. “These aren’t farmers, Harry. They have guns.”

  “Yes, but they don’t know how to use them.”

  “They’re ex-Special Forces.”

  “Special Forces my arse. They’re lugs. Just a couple of thick, stupid lugs.”

  Tobacco Man opened Harry’s door. His gun was in his fat fist. “Get out.” Harry complied, easing off the big back seat of the 4x4. It was so high, when he dropped down to the ground he felt like a boy hopping out of his Dad’s car for a pee. He stretched, cracking his joints.

  “Get over there.”

  Next Ingrid slid from the car. She went to follow Harry then remembered and moved away at an angle. Chunky Driver had circled round, both he and Tobacco Man forming a half circle around them, insofar as that was possible for just two guys.

  Harry watched, bemused. He could see the thought processes going on in their thick heads. He decided to help them along.

  “Guys, if you’re going to shoot us, you don’t want your nice car at our backs. You’re going to make a mess of the paintwork.”

  “Real smart guy, aren’t you?” Tobacco Man said. “I’m going to enjoy this. We were told to kill you, but no one said anything about making it fast.”

  He looked around at the forest, underbrush close on all sides. The muzzle of his gun dropped to point at Harry’s knees again. He glanced at Chunky Driver then stared long and hard at Ingrid. “What d’you reckon? You in for some fun with her?”

  Sharp as ever, Chunky Driver got the message. His stubble-covered cheeks grinned under his shades. “Sure,” he drawled.

  “You two probably don’t get much sex, do you?” Harry said pleasantly. “Except with each other, of course.”

  Which did the trick.

  Tobacco Man had had enough. He stepped in, closing the distance, and brought his right gun hand up to take a swing at Harry, using the gun as a club. Which wasn’t really the most efficient use for it.

  Harry watched it coming in a wide arc, wondering if he had time for a sandwich before the blow arrived. When it did, his face was no longer in the spot Tobacco Man had aimed at. Harry was under it. The gun skated over the top of his head. He ignored it, and with a rigid open palm slapped Tobacco Man hard on the bulging lump in his jeans where his meat and two veg had been expecting a quiet afternoon with a bit of fun thrown in later. Instead they got Harry’s hand-slam.

  That was when the shades fell off and Harry saw the eyes. Piggy little blue ones with an adorable expression of shock and pain.

  As Tobacco Man doubled over with a deep gut-grunt like a hog, Harry went to work. No point using the great lug as a punchbag, packing punches into the carefully contoured muscle. Short, sharp, positioned blows instead. Throat, kidneys, solar plexus, throat again for good measure, two more to the groin just for the hell of it, and the coup de grâce to the jaw. Tobacco Man went down in a heap.

  Chunky Driver was still staring with his mouth open when Harry flung the Smith & Wesson into his face. At which point his shades came off too. His hands flapped at them, bringing his own gun into the air and letting off a round by accident into the treetops overhead.

  Birds cawed and went berserk at the shot.

  Then it was Chunky Driver’s turn. With fractionally more warning, he had time to bring up his fists in a boxing stance. He took a swing at Harry as he moved in. It missed. He shifted his feet and tried a couple of jabs. Harry had been right. He was a lug. With all the grace and agility of one. His gym time had given him muscle at the expense of speed. Harry went for him.

  Forced back by Harry’s attack, his feet tripped over each other and he stumbled. He glanced down, attention shifting for a split second. And Harry was in there, up under the guard and slugged him in the gut.

  This time he did go for the punchbag approach, driving his fists deep into the midriff one after the other. A right uppercut caught Chunky Driver on the point of the chin and snapped his head back. Harry saw it register in the eyes. All of a sudden they lost interest. The sky up above looked so peaceful and nice. They stared up into it, glazing with the pleasure.

  Chunky Driver started to go over backwards. Timber! Harry gave him room, recovering his breath as the ground thudded with the impact.

  A quick check showed both of them out cold. Harry glanced at Ingrid. “Okay?” She nodded, hands clasped in front of her as if she was about to say a prayer over the fallen.

  Harry gathered up the two pistols and then made a search of pockets and pouches. Of which there were a lot. Cargo pants and vests. Combat shirts. Even the baseball caps had little pockets. Chunky Driver had a very nice Swiss-made Sphinx 3000 – the Rolex of pistols and similarly expensive.

  “Nice.” Harry hefted it in his hands to get the feel of it. He checked the load and that it was on ‘safe’, then slipped it into his waist band. There were spare mags in the cargo pants.

  The Smith & Wesson he inspected, then hurled as far as he could into the bushes.

  “Hey, what about me?” Ingrid said.

  Harry looked at her. The thought hadn’t occurred to him.

  “Gee, thanks Harry,” she said, and set off to find it, muttering crossly as she went.

  “I’ll leave the spare mags here for you,” he called after her.

  “You do that.” More muttering.

  Both of the unconscious lugs had wallets stuffed with both Euros and US dollars. And ID cards. When Ingrid returned, brushing leaves and bits of dirt from the Smith & Wesson, Harry showed her.

  “They’re military,” he said. “US Army Logistics. Based down in Fulda.” He stared at the two cards, half seeing them and half considering what it meant.

  A groan from one of the two bodies reminded Harry that a clock was ticking. In a while, the two lugs would start to take an interest in the world around them once again.

  He put the two wallets and cards on the bonnet of the 4x4 and did a quick search of the vehicle. Tucked in with a tool kit, he found a clump of plastic cable ties and a tow rope. Tobacco Man had owned a German-made lock-knife which now belonged to Harry.

  Tobacco Man came first. Harry hauled him over to a tree trunk and sat him up against it. Ingrid helped him hold the arms behind the trunk while he fastened the wrists with four ties, nice and tight. Then he put another four around the great thick ankles pinning them together.

  Next Chunky Driver. Up against another tree but well out of reach of Tobacco Man, both men facing away from each other which Harry reckoned would nicely screw up their attempts to coordinate an escape. If they ever managed to engineer one. He really didn’t care. They could both starve to death in the forest as far as he was concerned. He finished off the task by cutting the tow rope into lengths and lashing it round each of the two trees, binding the chests of his prisoners to the trunks.

  Job done, Harry and Ingrid stood by the car.

  “Thomas,” Ingrid said.

  “I know. Let me think for a moment.”

  “What’s there to think about?” she snapped. “We have to go and get him.”

  “Hold on. Let’s just think this through.”

  “Harry!”

  “Listen. Right now, at this moment, whoever is behind all this thinks we’re dead. Ernst does, those BKA clowns do, and whoever’s pulling the strings of these two arseholes also does. We’re dead. We’re invisible. For the moment.”

  “So?”

  “So for the moment no one’s after us. We can move around and do whatever we want.”

  “Fine. I want to get my son.”

  “I know.�
�� He was wracking his brains. “Thomas is with your mother. Ernst said there would be a policewoman with them—”

  “And you believe him?” she stared, dumbfounded.

  “On that one thing, why not? They decided to silence us. Why complicate it by killing two more people? That would be stupid. With us, they can concoct some story. That I abducted and murdered you then ran. Or we were killed in a car crash. Anything. But if they start murdering your mother and son, they’ll lose control. Things will run away with them. I reckon they’ll do exactly what Ernst said they would. At least for now.”

  “Don’t gamble with the life of my son.”

  Harry took her by the shoulders. “I’m not. That’s the last thing I’d do. But until we know what’s going on and who is involved, Thomas is safer where he is. Certainly more so than if he was with us. Think about it. What are we going to do now? We can’t just go back to Haus Fischer and Soest and carry on as if nothing has happened. These guys were going to kill us and dump our bodies here in the forest. So now we’ve got to go on the attack. Shine a light on them, get to them, kill them if necessary. Before they kill us. How would it help Thomas to be with us now?”

  “Then I need to call him. Call my mother,” she said, going to look for a mobile.

  Harry caught her by the arm. “No. You can’t. I know it’s hard but—”

  She spun round, tugging her arm out of his grip. “How do you know? How would a man like you possibly know?”

  For a long moment they squared off in front of each other. Harry gave her time. Let his words sink in. Then he said, “There will almost certainly be a police presence in the house. Ernst will want to keep a close eye on them. The moment you call, he will know we’re alive and we’ll lose the tiny advantage we have. They will send someone else after us, probably someone better than these two morons, and next time perhaps they’ll succeed. How will that help Thomas?”

  Ingrid was silent. She drew apart. The forest sounds had returned after the gunshot. It was ridiculously peaceful. She couldn’t believe the turn her life had taken. Harry could sense the debate going on inside her as she wrestled with the surreal things that had happened to tear her life apart, pluck her from the mundane and hurl her into a fight for life.

  “When can I speak to him then?”

  “As soon as we sort this out,” he said, realising how absurd that was. They would be lucky to get out alive.

  “Okay,” she said suddenly. She turned towards the two Americans lashed to the trees. “Let’s start by asking them some questions.”

  “Good idea. Just what I was going to suggest,” he said. “Why don’t you take a walk down the track a little way and leave this to me?”

  “Why?”

  He didn’t like to explain.

  “What? You think I’m squeamish? They’ve separated me from my son, they were going to shoot you, and they indicated pretty damn clearly that before killing me too they were going to rape me. Both of them. And you think I’ll be squeamish watching you beat the crap out of them?”

  She marched towards the car and opened the back. “Just give me a fucking tyre iron and I’ll do it myself. I’ll start at the knees and work upwards.”

  Tobacco Man had recovered enough to catch the last bit. He blinked uncertainly in her direction. She glared at him. “Ah. Welcome back. You fucking bastard.” She found a wheel spanner and a lug wrench and strode towards him, one in each hand, the Smith & Wesson tucked in the belt of her jeans.

  She stood in front of him, feet shoulder-width apart, bracing herself, ready. Choosing the wheel spanner, she dropped the lug wrench and drew back her arm. “What’s it to be, arsehole? Left or right knee first?”

  “Fuck off, bitch,” he snarled blearily, though Harry could see the beginnings of doubt percolating into the thick skull.

  “Fuck off? Fuck off?” Ingrid shouted. “You were going to rape me.”

  “Fucking right we were. And we still will—”

  His sentence was cut short by an ear-splitting scream as the wheel spanner crashed down on the top of one knee cap.

  Harry stepped forward to take the spanner from Ingrid. She pulled it out of his reach. “What? You think I’m soft?”

  “Ingrid, perhaps I—”

  “They’ve got my son, for fuck’s sake, Harry. You said so yourself, until we find out what’s going on and shine a light on them, I’m not going home to my boy.” And she slammed the spanner onto the same knee again.

  Tobacco Man howled for all he was worth. Chunky Driver had woken up and was trying desperately to crane round and see what was happening. Unable to, his imagination went to work, magnifying the terror blossoming in the sludge of his brain.

  Harry took Ingrid firmly by the shoulders and drew her away from Tobacco Man. The moment he saw the relief on Tobacco Man’s face, he bent down and slugged him in the mouth, splitting his lower lip.

  “Listen, arsehole,” he said. “We’ve got all the time this is going to take.” He took out the lock-knife. “In a minute I’m going to start cutting bits off you.” He called over to Chunky Driver. “Then you.”

  “Tell them what they want to know!” Chunky Driver wanted to keep all his bits.

  Doubt flashed in Tobacco Man’s eyes. “They’ll kill us if we say anything,” he muttered.

  “Who will?” Harry asked. There was no reply. Tobacco Man looked down at this knee.

  “Who will?” Ingrid shouted, lurching at him, wheel spanner in the air.

  “The Colonel!” he blurted. “Colonel Franklin. He’s the boss.”

  “There, that wasn’t so hard,” Harry said nicely. He crouched down beside him, lock-knife still in his hand. “Who is Colonel Franklin and what is he up to?”

  “He commands the 101st Logistic Regiment down in Fulda. That’s all.”

  “That’s not telling me anything. I could have got that from a phone book. What’s he up to?”

  Tobacco Man looked up. “I don’t know.”

  The lock-knife was at the base of his earlobe, blade pressing into the soft flesh.

  “I said I don’t know! He arrived from Afghanistan a month ago and took command. We just work for him.”

  “Did you work for him in Afghanistan?” Harry asked.

  Tobacco Man dropped his head and stared at his crotch. “Ain’t never been to Afghanistan.”

  “Right. I did wonder,” Harry said.

  “I was in Iraq though.”

  “In the Green Zone, right?”

  More staring at the crotch. “Yes.”

  “So, Colonel Franklin, what was he doing in Afghanistan?”

  “I don’t know. Just logistics stuff. Flying supplies in and out.”

  “To and from where?”

  “All over. That’s all I know. Really it is.”

  Chunky Driver shouted over. “He’s telling the truth. We just met the Colonel in the last month. He pays us cash to do stuff for him.”

  “Stuff?” Ingrid said.

  “Stuff like this. Errands.”

  Ingrid stared at him. “Killing people is an errand?”

  “No Ma’am. We’ve never done it before. Didn’t want to this time, but Colonel Franklin said we had to. And he was paying us a whole lot. So we thought …”

  Harry sighed. Stood up, folded the lock-knife shut and slipped it in his pocket. He stood back from Tobacco Man. “They’re just small fry,” he said.

  “Pieces of shit,” she snarled.

  “That too. All the same, we’re wasting our time here.”

  “They know more. They can tell us more.”

  He looked at her. Actually he really didn’t want to start sawing pieces of flesh off helpless, bound men. She let her anger go, deflating in front of him as the adrenalin stopped pumping. She leaned forward and put her head on his shoulder.

  “So what now?”

  “We have to blow the whole thing wide open. Make it so public that it goes beyond their ability to cover it up, no matter how many people are involved, or how high t
heir connections go. There’ll be a point where the whole pack of cards tumbles. We’ve got to get to that point and then …” he pursed his lips and gave one big puff.

  “That all?”

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  Ingrid didn’t.

  Harry walked over to Chunky Driver and crouched down in front of him. Chunky Driver flinched back as far as his restraints would allow. “Colonel Franklin. Does he live off base?”

  For a moment Chunky Driver held his peace. Then a single sullen nod. “Thought so. Most of the higher ranks do. I expect it’s some nice big rented house with a big garden and a view, isn’t it?”

  Another nod.

  “I’m going to need the address,” Harry said.

  “Don’t tell him!” came the shout from Tobacco Man. “They’ll kill us.”

  Chunky Driver was not impressed. “Hell, they probably will anyway. And we don’t owe Franklin shit.”

  “That’s the truth of it,” Harry said, niceness personified. “All working for him has done for you, is got you tied to a tree in a wood where no one’s going to find you unless we send them.”

  “You can’t just leave us here,” Chunky Driver said.

  “Oh we can, and in fact we have to. But the sooner we get this all sorted out, the sooner I can tell the police where you are. The real police, that is.”

  He could see the calculations grinding away in the Driver’s skull, weighing the pros and cons. The wrist and ankle ties were rock solid. There was no way either of them was going to leave the forest unless it was with Harry’s blessing.

  “Okay,” he grunted miserably. “It’s in my phone.”

  “Code?” Harry said, going to fetch it.

  “One two three four.”

  “Subtle.” Harry was impressed that Chunky Driver could count that far.

  “He probably thinks that’s a random order,” Ingrid said.

  Chunky Driver started to tell her to go fuck herself, but a groan from Tobacco Man who was trying to manoeuvre his injured knee persuaded him to cut the retort before he was introduced to the wheel brace.

  Harry opened the smart phone and scrolled until he found what he was looking for. “Is Colonel Franklin a family man?”

  “No.”