Rogue

by James Swallow

  He tripped over an exposed stone and fell in a half-stumble, the weapon on his back pulling at him with its extra weight. Marc shot a look back towards the nose of the Hind and saw the gunner gesturing wildly. In the next second, the gunship’s engine note shifted up a gear, and he knew they were about to lift off.

  Once the Hind was off the ground, the pilot could angle it in any direction, and Marc had nowhere to hide.

  Battered by the helicopter’s roaring exhaust and the hurricane from its whistling blades, Marc staggered back to his feet and shrugged off his weapon, bringing it up to aim at the fast-spinning blur of the Hind’s tail rotor. As close as he dared to come, he pulled the buttstock of the park ranger’s net projector gun into his shoulder and squeezed the trigger bar.

  Four explosive charges aimed at angles to one another fired simultaneously, shooting off in different directions to pull open a weighted, heavy-duty net between them, blasting it out and forward. The weapon’s restraining net was a web of nylon cored with steel wire, rated strong enough to put down a charging rhino, and Marc hoped it would be enough. His shot went straight into the hub of the stabilising rotor and immediately snarled around the axle mechanism.

  The tail rotor vomited sparks and juddered alarmingly, even as the Hind’s bulky airframe rose off the ground. The stabiliser oscillated so much, Marc was suddenly terrified it might fly off and cut him in half. He dropped the spent net gun and ran, hearing the engines whine as the pilot applied power.

  Without the stabilising blades rotating in sync, the gunship began to turn with the spinning force of the main rotors, and the mercenary pilot made a fatal error, over-correcting as he tried to get the helicopter back under his control. The Hind lurched and tipped sideways towards the ground. Too low to recover, the Hind’s main rotors thwacked into the earth, distended and cracked.

  Marc threw himself back into the safety of his hiding place as the gunship flipped over and crashed, tearing off one of its winglets and spinning its rotors into twisted, broken shards. The engine howled as the stricken helicopter lay on its side, bleeding black smoke into the night.

  The explosion Marc expected didn’t come, so he fled the scene of his takedown, conscious that the aircrew might have survived and be in the mood for some retaliation.

  He looped wide of the ongoing firefight, running as fast as he could towards the main building.

  *

  Lucy came off the gas station’s awning by sliding down the access ladder on the far side, boots skipping off the rungs, gloves hissing as she let gravity take her to the ground.

  As she hit the dirt, a slim shadow came out of the gloom and she narrowly missed getting a rifle butt in the stomach. One of Simbarashe’s eager fighters was right there, eyes wide and teeth bared as he dived at her, swinging the gun like an oar.

  She didn’t dwell on why the hell he hadn’t just shot her dead. The AK was probably jammed, she guessed, parsing the situation in an instant just as Delta had trained her. These Chinese copies of the classic Russian assault rifle were old and well used, and sometimes all it took was a bang on the frame to get them shooting again.

  None of that helped Lucy here or now, though. The militiaman landed a glancing hit on her shoulder, and she had only the empty rhino-trank rifle to answer back.

  Or not.

  She parried another incoming blow with one hand and plucked the boot dagger Malte had loaned her from the loop of her belt. Metal glittered in the firelight and she jammed it into the side of his head, wrenched it free, and did it again.

  The soldier crumpled against the side of the building and Lucy discarded the trank gun, snatching up her attacker’s assault rifle. True to form, the slide was fouled with a spent casing, and she struck it hard, freeing it up.

  Oily smoke tickled her throat and she cast around, hearing more gunfire and the droning of the Hind’s chin cannon. That did not bode well.

  Lucy filled her lungs and shouted one world as loudly as she could.

  ‘Time!’

  It was the signal they’d agreed on, the get out of Dodge order, the last goddamn word. She broke into a run, sprinting away from the building towards a wide gulley where they had concealed the jeep. Whoever met her there would be the ones who had made it through this.

  *

  Peering out from behind the low wall, Malte saw the man in black tactical gear emerge from cover, and knew that he was looking at a shooter of a different class from the men he had fought so far.

  Combine.

  There was little doubt in his mind that was who he was facing. The clandestine power brokers used Russian muscle from the ALEPH private military contractor, usually ex-Soviet Special Forces troops with reputations for ferocity, and their own elite cadre of hired assassins and black ops specialists.

  The man in black drew Malte’s shots, and his agility made him hard to hit. He kept dodging around the fire smoke, using the cover to his advantage. Cursing inwardly, the Finn made a choice and flicked his rifle over to full-auto setting.

  Malte sprayed the last few rounds in his magazine, gambling that he could hit something, but the risk didn’t pay off. The AK-47’s slide snapped open with an audible clatter as the mag emptied, and the noise rang like a gong in the Finn’s head.

  The man in black rose through a plume of dark haze and put two shots directly into Malte. The first round skipped over his shoulder, drawing a burning line of pain and blood, but the second punctured his bicep, ripping muscle and cracking bone. A hammer blow of raw agony sent Malte falling back, the empty AK tumbling from his twitching grip.

  He swallowed down the urge to cry out in pain and failed, breaking his silence with a guttural snarl. Malte made out the shape of his assailant, carefully picking his way around the burning Hummer. Coming his way.

  The Combine operative would want to confirm the kill. Malte scrambled to reach for his weapon. He still had another half-mag left, but where was it?

  A grave voice spoke from behind him.

  ‘I have you, my friend.’

  Solomon grabbed the collar of Malte’s shirt and dragged him back, away from the wall, towards the main building. Solomon fired as he moved, shooting one-handed to discourage the Combine gunman from his approach. Rounds sparked off the burning Hummer and the man in black retreated.

  A heavy, reeking gloom enveloped Malte as Solomon pulled him inside, and he blinked, panting through the excruciating pain.

  ‘Can you move?’

  Malte managed a nod. ‘But can’t shoot.’

  His useless arm was awash with blood.

  *

  Marc stumbled into the main building through a bullet-shredded door, finding himself in a space that was half office, half general store. Or at least, it had been that before the Rubicon team had arrived with their party crashers following close behind. Debris, shattered glass and broken wood were everywhere, and the brick structure was riddled with bullet holes.

  From the shadows a gun spun in his direction, and he threw up his hands.

  ‘Easy!’

  Solomon lowered his weapon and blew out a pained breath.

  ‘Lucy gave the call. It is time to leave.’

  He gestured to Malte, who leaned painfully against one of the roof supports.

  Marc nodded. ‘Yeah, green for go, I heard her.’ Keeping low, he moved closer to the other men. ‘There’s still a few out there, three or four? Saw them moving.’

  ‘Helicopter?’ said Malte, jutting his chin in the direction of the downed Hind.

  ‘Swatted.’ Marc coughed.

  Malte showed his teeth in an uncharacteristic grin, and that was when Marc knew the Finn was really hurting.

  ‘Right, we’re on the move.’ Marc glanced at Solomon. ‘We’re all set. You lead and I’ll follow.’

  ‘You have done that enough,’ Solomon replied, pulling his jacket close. ‘Get Malte to the jeep. I will be right behind you.’

  An unpleasant tension pulled on Marc as he realised that Ekko Solomon was lying to
him.

  The man had kept his secrets and there were times when he had held back, but Solomon had never once looked Marc Dane in the eye and outright lied.

  Until now.

  He stepped forward, quick enough to do it before Solomon could react, and grabbed the edge of his jacket. The black material was damp, and it flapped back to reveal a makeshift bandage around the bullet wound that Solomon had been hiding from them. Lucy had been on the money. It was a belly shot, a bleeder, a slow killer.

  ‘You got that on the road?’

  Marc remembered Solomon jerking in shock as they had taken fire in the fleeing Hummer.

  ‘I can shoot,’ Solomon said, hefting his rifle. ‘But not run.’

  He beckoned Marc closer.

  Marc gave Malte a look, then shook his head.

  ‘This is not how it is going to play out. No. No fucking last stands. We got a—’

  Solomon tugged his titanium signet off his finger and forced the ring into Marc’s palm.

  ‘Take it,’ he said, then looked down at the rifle in his hand with a wry smile. ‘This is all I need now. My old friend.’

  Closer now, and Marc saw that beneath that wadding, Solomon’s injury was a horror. It was a miracle he was still on his feet.

  ‘We’re not doing this,’ Marc insisted. ‘Damn it, man! Do I have to knock you down and drag you away?’

  ‘Can you carry two people at once?’

  Solomon nodded towards Malte. The Finn’s colour was paler than usual, and he was on the verge of passing out.

  Marc grabbed him as he slumped, shouldering Malte’s weight.

  ‘I’ll come back with the jeep,’ he insisted. ‘Do not be a fucking hero, do you read me?’

  ‘Loud and clear—’

  Gunfire erupted outside, and a new rain of bullets screamed into the building, ripping through whatever was still standing. Solomon dodged behind cover as Marc pulled his injured teammate out of the line of fire.

  ‘Get him out!’ bellowed Solomon, shooting back across the smoke-wreathed highway. ‘Hurry, Marc!’

  He didn’t want to move. That same sense had come over him when he left his mother in her hospital bed for the last time, when he watched John Farrier being loaded onto the medevac flight, when he saw Sam Green fade into the dark water.

  But then he did turn away, and he did move, because to stay was to die.

  Carrying Malte as best he could, Marc staggered back into the burning, hellish night.

  TWENTY-TWO

  ‘What the hell was that?’

  Vine appended his question with a few random curse-words as the gunship flattened itself into the dirt a few hundred metres behind them.

  Khadir bared his teeth and cast around.

  ‘We underestimate Solomon’s people at our peril,’ he growled.

  With the Hind neutralised, the Combine assault team had lost an advantage, but Khadir was certain his objectives could still be attained. He would do it alone, if need be.

  ‘Grace, report,’ he ordered, but the woman didn’t reply. He sucked in a breath, and pressed on. ‘Move in and finish it,’ said Khadir, advancing in a loping run.

  Vine was visible in the corner of his vision as a dark blotch against the flames and smoke. The mercenary’s rifle spoke, the gunshots flattened into a heavy metallic chugging by a sound suppressor on the muzzle.

  Khadir followed, putting three-round bursts through the windows of the petrol station’s main building, aiming at the moving shadows inside. Their renewed attack had the reaction he expected, as a braying flash of return fire briefly lit the darkness.

  Solomon.

  Khadir knew it was him; he was willing it to be so.

  After all this time, years since Rubicon’s agents had ruined Khadir’s terror strike against the United States, the two men were finally within killing distance of one another.

  Ekko Solomon had cost Khadir his greatest victory, and there had to be a reckoning. He had held onto his seething resentment for just this moment.

  He flanked the building as Vine broke into a run, dodging left and right to present a difficult target. His boots scuffing over another fallen tarpaulin, Khadir glimpsed shadows moving awkwardly out towards the back of the building and hesitated.

  Someone wounded, he guessed, but not the African.

  Whoever it was, they were of secondary importance to him.

  Vine lurched into a full-tilt run past the petrol pump and threw himself in the direction of one of the blown-out windows. But Solomon was ready for him, and his AK-47 drew a comma of yellow heat in the air as the muzzle rose in a burst of fire.

  Khadir flattened himself against the exterior wall, seeing Vine knocked out of his headlong sprint as if he had collided with an invisible wall. The mercenary’s right leg twisted under him and he dropped clumsily to the ground. Vine landed on his knees and sagged into himself. Twitching, mortally wounded, but not yet fully dead.

  Then, distinctly, Khadir heard the sound of an empty ammunition box clatter to the floor.

  *

  Solomon let the AK’s spent sickle magazine drop, flicking the release with his thumb and ramming home his last in its place. The action was smooth and intuitive, the assault rifle no longer existing in his mind as an object, instead as a deadly extension of his will.

  Your gun is your life, his teacher had told him, beating young Ekko when his thin boy’s hands could not properly grip the adult-sized rifle. It is like your arm or your leg, eyes or ears. Without it you are no better than a cripple.

  The gun was power. That was the lesson the child soldiers had learned. Death was power.

  ‘A lie,’ Solomon whispered to himself. ‘Life is power, not death . . .’

  He choked off the words as the wound in his side added its weight to the argument.

  He glared at the Combine agent kneeling in the dirt out on the forecourt, and questioned his own convictions.

  At the end, is this how it must be? Bullets and fire, in the dark and the dust?

  There was an ironic kind of circularity to it, he reflected. His homeland had called him back, and now it was reaching out to reclaim him, blood, bone and all.

  In his pain and his reverie, Solomon did not notice the woman in the room with him until she moved into a pool of light and spoke. She had a pistol aimed at his face.

  ‘Lose the shooter,’ she told him, in an accent that mimicked Marc Dane’s.

  Grimacing, he let the Kalashnikov drop and raised his hands. Solomon’s breath was coming in jagged, painful gulps now. It was as if something vital inside him had broken.

  ‘Grace,’ he said, turning slightly towards the woman. ‘Do you remember the name you were born with?’

  A hint of irritation glittered in her eyes.

  ‘Names are for tombstones,’ she told him.

  ‘And graves are for the lucky,’ he replied.

  ‘Where’s my boyfriend and the rest of your gang, eh?’ She kept up the fake Londoner drawl. ‘You and yours take a lot of putting down.’

  ‘The others are inconsequential.’ A heavy, deep voice cut through the darkness, and Solomon turned towards it. ‘He is all that matters.’

  One of the world’s most wanted men advanced out of the shadows and gave Solomon a level look. Omar Khadir appeared every inch the killer he was purported to be. A face that was granite hard and sculpted by cold fury, feral eyes and the manner of an uncaged predator.

  ‘You should be dead,’ said Solomon.

  ‘Men and nations alike have tried,’ said Khadir. ‘I endure.’

  ‘And for what?’

  ‘For this moment.’ Khadir shouldered his rifle and drew his own sidearm, considering it. ‘For hate’s sake.’

  Solomon had often wondered about this man, knowing what he knew of Khadir’s martial upbringing among an Egyptian military family, and the shared legacy of brutal violence that had moulded both of them in their youth. How many points of commonality where there between them? It was more than either would ha
ve wanted to admit.

  ‘I have thought about this meeting on many occasions,’ said Khadir. ‘Of what I could ask you. What I might do to you. There is a balance, you see. Intent, action, consequence. You sent your people to interfere with my destiny, so there must be reparation.’ He gestured with the pistol. ‘You need to answer for what you have done.’

  ‘Yes.’ A rough, pain-laced chuckle forced its way up and out of Solomon’s mouth. It was a bitter, rueful sound. ‘I must. For the last twenty years, that is all my life has been. Consequences.’

  As he said the last word, he tasted blood in his mouth, and wiped a droplet from his lips.

  Grace saw the action and frowned.

  ‘He’s hurt bad.’ She holstered her pistol and pulled a medical pack from her tactical vest. ‘We need to—’

  Khadir silenced the woman with a look, his pistol rising in Solomon’s direction.

  ‘Glovkonin sent me here for you,’ he explained. ‘He wants you alive.’

  Khadir pulled back the hammer on the handgun, taking aim.

  ‘I have something else in mind.’

  ‘That’s not the fucking deal!’ Grace held up her hands. ‘You kill him, we don’t get paid! I didn’t come out here for you to get your revenge on!’

  ‘That is not your concern.’

  Khadir pivoted his aim a few degrees, past Solomon’s head and straight towards the woman.

  He squeezed the trigger, but Solomon was already moving at him, going for the blocky semi-automatic. Solomon knocked Khadir’s arm and the gun discharged, drawing a thin scream from Grace as she reeled back.

  If the bullet hit her, it had not been a fatal wound, but Solomon had no time to focus on the woman’s status. He was vaguely aware of her vanishing into the shadows, stumbling towards the far doorway and out into the night.

  His attention was on Khadir, whose rage at being denied a kill blazed brightly in his eyes. The assassin tried to bring the pistol back around to Solomon’s face, and the two of them locked into a violent struggle, pushing and pressing against one another.

  The black maw of the gun barrel floated between them, the raw scent of spent powder mingling with the gasoline stink from the fires. Their boots crunched on the carpet of broken glass and spent shells as they went around and around. Solomon gasped as he tried to get his leg in a position to trip his opponent, while Khadir kept his strength in the push and pull with the gun.