by Andy Maslen
Erik sounded sulky now, but he wasn’t giving in without at least one more attempt at convincing his partner.
“Listen. Yuri said we could split the money between us. Half-shares, right? So I’ve got half the share of being in charge as well. Who is this Fox guy anyway? From what I hear, he just turns up in Tallinn one day, beats the shit out of Teet down at Jonny Rocketz, and all of a sudden he’s on a fucking search-and-rescue mission for Yuri. Something’s off, Konstantin, I can feel it.”
“Yes, and I know what you can feel, you randy bastard. You can feel your dick getting stiff thinking about fucking those women can’t you?”
“No harm in it. We always used to do it to the women after a fight, didn’t we? Anyway, you agreed. We kill the Chechens, take some souvenirs for Yuri, do the women, and then waste them with the Chechens’ weapons. Pin the blame on them, make them look like the savages they are.”
“And that is still the plan, my friend. But Fox stays alive until either all the Chechens are dead, or it’s clear we’re going to fuck them over. Now let that be an end of it. OK?”
A pause.
“OK, fine. But I want the girl first. You can fuck the mother and warm her up for me.”
*
Gabriel leaned back against the doorframe of the car he was squatting inside. The steel was cold against the back of his neck, adding to the gooseflesh that had broken out all over his body. Shit! Now I really have a problem. Odds of six to one, with two on loan until Konstantin judges I’ve become surplus to requirements. He reached round and put his right hand on the grip of his SIG. So do I off the Russians and take on the Chechens solo? That’s what Erik wants to do. Or do I keep them with me, fight the Chechens and then waste them before they try to do the same to me? Konstantin’s view. Jesus. Time for clear thinking. What would you do, Don?
Well, Old Sport, I’d put the rate of exchange at one of our chaps to a dozen Russians. But then, as you said, we used to go in nine to one. So, you against four bloodthirsty Chechens doesn’t sound too attractive from a tactical point of view. I’d keep the Borises alive for now, but you’d better be ready if they decide they don’t need you earlier than expected.
How about you, Britta? Any tactical insight would be great about now.
Me, I’d off them right away. You can’t concentrate on what’s at your front if you don’t trust what’s at your back. Remember all those stories from Vietnam? They made us study them in class. An unpopular officer flies in from West Point or some cushy job in Texas counting Jeeps and starts ordering his men into risky situations, playing favourites, maybe, or just being no damn good. So the enlisted men let him get ahead in a rice paddy and toss a fragmentation grenade under his boots. They used to call it “fragging”, remember? Lesson number one in warfare: trust your leaders/trust your men. You can’t trust those Russians. You got your SIG right there, with a suppressor. Use it!
For once, Gabriel had no instantaneous decision. No gut feel that said “do this” or “do that”. He twisted round further to ease a cramp that was threatening to explode in his back and dislodged a door that was leaning against the car he was hiding in. It fell sideways and clanged against the Nissan’s neighbour. He heard Erik and Konstantin jump up, swearing. And the ratcheting creak of two M16 bolts being pulled back and released. Three against four it is, then.
He swore loudly, then pushed his way out of the Škoda, through another narrow gap between a couple more cars, and staggered into the space in front of the Merc. The Russians were standing there, back to back, faces tense, eyes narrowed, the muzzles of their automatic rifles making rapid, jerking sweeps in front of them, covering a circle.
“Thought I’d surprise you,” he said, back into full-on Terry Fox mode. “Give you a bit of a fright. Looks like I succeeded, doesn’t it?”
The Russians lowered their weapons, though not before Gabriel noticed the way Erik’s M16 swung his way and stopped, pointing straight at his chest, before he de-cocked it and let the muzzle drop.
“Very funny. English joke, yes?” Erik said, giving Gabriel a filthy look before turning to Konstantin and muttering in Russian, “I told you so.”
“Listen up,” Gabriel said. “I’ve found a sniping position. It’s on top of some old railway carriages.” He pointed back the way he’d come with the muzzle of the Dragunov. “Perfect view of the buildings and the yard. Normally, I’d say wait until just before dawn. About oh three hundred hours. Catch them sleeping, maybe one guard, maybe none somewhere this remote. But we can’t risk it. They could get bored, change their minds, anything, and waste the women. That ain’t going to happen. Not on my watch.”
“Agreed. Now is better. What is plan?” Konstantin said, sliding the magazine out from his Glock and then slapping it home again with a clack.
“Plan is, you give me fifteen minutes to get back in position. Then you wait. I put a round into the first one who shows their face outside that door. After that, we’re three against three. If they come out the same way, I’ll drop them all then we go in and get my mate’s family.”
“Chechens animals. Not stupid,” Erik said. “One down in doorway, others go out back. Come out firing.”
“My thinking exactly. So, one down, three to go, you and Konstantin come up on two of the other flanks. Full-auto, waste anything that moves. Maximum firepower. If nobody moves, you chuck smoke and teargas grenades in through the windows, and shoot the fuckers when they come out. Only one rule: you do not harm the English women. Got me?”
“Of course,” Erik said, smirking. “English women off limits to dumb Russkies, yes?”
“You better believe it, friend. Now, give me quarter of an hour, then wait for my shot.”
This time, Gabriel took one of the M16s himself, alongside the Dragunov. One 30-round magazine in the assault rifle, plus two in press-studded trouser pockets. Ninety 5.56mm NATO rounds. The SIG in his waistband, plus suppressor: fifteen 9mm rounds in the magazine and thirty in his pockets. One-thirty-five rounds. The Dragunov loaded with ten 7.62mm 7N14 body armour-piercing Soviet rounds. One-forty-five. He clinked as he walked away from the Russians. Bombed up.
Ten minutes later, he was approaching the oversized Jenga tower of railway carriages. The smell of the dogs’ blood carried on the warm summer breeze blowing through the scrapyard; it nauseated him and he had to breathe through his mouth to avoid gagging. He carried the M16 across his back by its sling of green webbing. It was still an awkward climb up the side of the tower, the Dragunov knocking against his thigh, the SIG’s suppressor digging into the small of his back. All this while trying to climb onto the roof of a carriage balanced thirty feet above the ground.
Eventually, he made it onto the roof. The black-painted steel was hot under his belly as he slithered into position by the hatch. He lifted it and let it settle back against its stops, forming a small but effective barricade from which to shoot behind. Domed rivet heads ran along the centre-line of the roof of the carriage, and he squared the feet of the bipod against two of these, giving it some protection against slippage.
Gabriel shuffled back on his belly until he could cradle the Dragunov’s hand-guard in his left palm. Then he curled his right hand around the pistol grip and let his index finger find its natural resting position against the side of the trigger guard. As the breeze sighed through the distant conifers and birch trees that fringed the yard, carrying a fresh, sharp scent of pollen and pine needles into his nostrils, he bent his head to the sight, resting his right cheek against the side of the wooden stock.
Through the optically ground lenses of the sight, the door to the central cabin was rendered in such pin-sharp detail that Gabriel could make out the text on the scattering of stickers that dotted its scuffed and fading surface. Most were promotional decals for car component companies: brakes, carburettors, electrics, transmissions, performance parts. He pivoted the rifle to the left, then the right, searching for a gap in the window blinds. Nothing. They were the old-fashioned, wide Venetian slatted ty
pe, and the Chechens had pulled the cords to blot out even the slightest hint of light. Nothing to do but wait for the target – any target – to appear.
*
Whatever else he’d learned in the Army, he’d learned how to wait. Some soldiers brought the ability with them, perhaps having a contemplative turn of mind. Others had to work at it. All managed it, in the end; it was either that or go mad. Gabriel could remember the feeling well: a squirming of nerves in the stomach mixed with a fevered anticipation to close with the enemy, overlaid with crushing boredom. “Standing by to stand by”, that was what they used to call it. A mate of his in the Regiment had spent his downtime writing poetry. Not free verse, either. Tightly controlled sonnets that produced in him a trancelike state from which it was hard to awaken him except by the simple phrase, “Time to go”.
As he waited now, Gabriel let his breathing slow, and focused on easing his heartbeat down into the high fifties. Master Zhao had told him stories of Buddhist monks who were so adept that they could reduce their pulse to a mere whisper of pressure, just sufficient to move the blood around their bodies and keep it oxygenated, but slow enough to resemble death to a casual observer.
He’d been in worse combat situations, but he’d also been in better. The two Russians wanted him dead, their point of disagreement, when they’d do it. They wanted him alive to help them defeat the Chechens; he wanted them alive for the very same reason. The only question was, who would decide enough was enough first?
No time to debate that now; the door was opening. It was the barrel-chested man again. Just as before, he walked into the yard and stood in the sun, looking all around, before rootling about in his jacket pocket and extracting a cigarette from a squashed cardboard packet. As he curled his hand around the lighter he was using and blew the first lungful of blue smoke into the air above his head, Gabriel took aim.
In his career as a soldier for Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II – fighting wars, spying, conducting covert operations – Gabriel had had occasion to kill men many times.
In the Parachute Regiment, they had exclusively been enemy combatants. Men in uniform, like him. Carrying automatic weapons, like him. Doing their duty as they saw it, like him. He was there, in Africa, Bosnia or the Middle East, to achieve a goal. To the politicians who had ordered him there, that goal might be to reassert British sovereignty or to protect a shaky peace deal. To the generals in charge, it might be to win this particular war. To his boss, it might be to take that particular hill, or liberate that particular town. But to him, and to his mates, it was far, far simpler than that. His goal was to protect each other, do their job, and come home in one piece. Or die trying.
Then, later, in the SAS, the picture had become darker, more patches of grey among the black and white of regular soldiering. The enemy then had included drug lords in Latin America, militia leaders in Africa, terrorists of both persuasions in Northern Ireland, and a ragbag of “legitimate targets” that might include torturers, secret policemen, corrupt officials and child soldiers. Those engagements were harder to square with your conscience. All the targets were doing bad – even evil – things, but they were often unarmed and unsuspecting when they received The Queen’s message.
Gabriel had never become used to killing. He was good at it, had won medals because of it, but he had deliberately not allowed himself to lapse into triumphalism. He didn’t want to find it easy to take another person’s life, easy to let a man’s blood out with a slice of a knife, or burst his skull with a rifle round, then laugh at comedy videos back at base.
Was that behind his PTSD? His refusal to take the easy road and dehumanise those he killed? One for Fariyah Crace, he thought.
Gabriel realised he’d dropped his eye from the telescopic sight, so he refocused down the narrow tube crammed with clever optics and electronics that would even register infrared. His heartrate spiked, and a wave of terror washed through him.
Smudge Smith was standing next to the Chechen. He looked over at Gabriel and waved, his teeth bright against his brown skin, his uniform immaculate in the sunshine. Then he spoke. His mouth moved and Gabriel heard Smudge’s voice inside his own head.
“Hi Boss. Going to take the shot, then? Should be a doddle for you at that range. How about we make it more interesting?”
Then Smudge stepped in front of the Chechen and turned to face Gabriel head-on. He reached up to his face, hooked his fingers over the bones at the base of his eye sockets and pulled downwards. With a wet scraping sound the whole of Smudge’s face came away in his hands. He dropped the rubbery mass of flesh to the ground. Below his expressive brown eyes was a hole where his face had been. No muscle or bone, just a gap through which Gabriel could see the Chechen’s own grizzled face, cigarette clamped between his lips. When he exhaled, the jet of blue smoke puffed through Smudge’s emptied-out head and dissipated in front of him.
Please Smudge. Leave me alone to take the shot. I’m seeing a shrink to lay you to rest. I promise I’ll let you go.
“I believe you, Boss. But come on, a quid says you can do him without touching me.”
Gabriel took his right hand off the pistol grip and put the web of soft skin between his thumb and forefinger – his trigger finger – between his teeth. He bit down, hard, drawing blood and grunting with the effort of not crying out. When he looked back, Smudge had disappeared.
He sighted on a point above the Chechen’s heart. Centre-mass shots were less risky, but also less certain of an outright kill. With a familiar rifle, he’d have gone for the headshot, but he’d never shot a Dragunov before and knew nothing about how this particular example had been set up, beyond his instruction to have the sight zeroed at 750 yards.
No time for any more delays. He breathed in, let it all the way out, took up first pressure on the trigger and waited.
A heartbeat.
He tightened his finger a little more.
A heartbeat.
He stilled his mind.
A heartbeat.
He squeezed the trigger.
Chapter 43
The rifle was unsilenced, and in the still of the late afternoon, the sound as the 7.62mm bullet left the barrel was immense. The man’s accomplices inside the cabins would hear it, but he would not.
The round began its fifteen-hundred-foot journey towards its target at a speed of almost three thousand feet per second. Over so short a range, its flight was virtually flat. It arrived, having dropped from its starting elevation of twenty-seven feet to four feet nine – the height of the man’s heart, half a second later.
The damage created by the sharp-pointed steel round was catastrophic – it broke three ribs on the way in, collapsed his left lung, burst his heart and sucked half the shredded organs and flesh out through a six-inch-wide exit wound. It travelled on through the thin plywood wall of the cabin before embedding itself in a tatty vinyl-covered sofa inside.
The man died instantly, while his legs were still holding him upright. Gabriel watched for another few seconds, before leaving the Dragunov and sliding his way off the curved carriage roof, and jumping down behind the mound of rolling stock.
He heard the loud hammering of automatic weapons, M16s and Kalashnikovs. The Chechens must have gone out the back, or through an escape passage at one end or another of the complex of buildings, and were engaged in a furious firefight with the Russians. Gabriel unshouldered his own M16, cocked it, and sprinted towards the front of the central cabin.
He was within thirty feet when a bearded man charged at him from fifty yards to his right, long, straggly, black hair flying out behind him. He’d been hiding in the lee of a huge, yellow crane. The man fired from the hip with a Kalashnikov as he ran at Gabriel, spraying rounds with a deafening continuous roar of explosions. Gabriel dropped to one knee, pulled the M16 to his shoulder and squeezed off a three-round burst. Two of the rounds caught the man in the torso, doubling him over so he rolled rather than fell. Before he could retrieve the AK47, Gabriel shot him again: a double-ta
p to the head.
Crouching low, Gabriel scurried towards the cabin and fetched up against the wall to the left of the still-open door, breathing heavily. Clutching the M16 tightly at his hip, he swung round the doorjamb into the cabin. It was empty. Then, from a closed door to his left, beyond a two-seater orange sofa sprouting foam from a bullet hole, and an untidy tangle of fallen chairs, he heard screams.
“Help us, please! We’re in here. Don’t shoot for God’s sake. Help us!”
He vaulted the chairs and shouted through the door.
“Stand back!”
Then he leaned back and kicked the flimsy aluminium lock assembly with the sole of his right boot. Not a move his mentor would have approved of, but the door cracked off its hinges and toppled backwards into the room beyond.
And there, clutching each other, eyes wide and faces bleached with fear, were Sarah and Chloe Bryant.
“Oh, thank God!” Sarah said. “Please get us out, they were going to kill us. You have to take us away from here.”
“I will. But it’s not safe. Not yet. Please,” he said, as the two women stood and came towards him on shaky legs, “just stay here, under the bed, until I come back for you.”
“No!” Chloe Bryant said. “No. You can’t. You can’t leave us. What if they kill you?”
He looked at the young woman, registering for the first time the ugly, black wound where her right ear lobe had been. “I have to go. Listen to that.”
