Alita still chattered from behind Mitch, translating the words anyway.
“Give us back our man and take yours, then we don’t have to piss in each other’s ponds again. Ever.”
Tomau Codina smiled then and held up a hand. All eyes watched as he closed it into a first and dropped it down.
Dan heard the bullet before the report from the barrel reached his ears. By that point he had ducked and spun away, but the sound of the projectile punching through flesh and bone was played in slow-motion in his mind as he rose to one knee and raised his gun to point it at the chest of the bastard, who was smiling and holding up his hands in a clear gesture of non-aggression. Dan didn’t take his eyes away but spoke to Mitch by muttering his name.
“Both fine,” he replied in a guttural growl, “they killed their own man.”
Dan looked away then, off to his left where the broken sack of meat and bone lay bleeding out beside him, a huge, ragged hole sprouting from between his shoulder blades where the high-velocity round had blown him into oblivion.
“You see now, Englishman,” Tomau with a heavy accent, “you have nothing to trade me for now.”
Dan, for once, was shocked at the brutality of what had just happened. He opened his mouth to renew the threat of his own snipers when the man clearly had a ruthless streak of his own. The next words cut off any such threat anyway.
“My man has seen your sniper, and my next signal tell him to kill them,” he said, seeing the logic flashing across Dan’s face as he intercepted the thought with his next words, “and if I fall then he is to kill you also.”
Dan rose, standing directly before the bastard and looked up into his eyes. The Dan of a few years ago would have the man beaten on size before he had slimmed down on a diet of fresh fish and produce, but he lost out on at least three inches of height which was a psychological battle of its own.
“You may go now,” he told Dan, “if you come back here then I will be forced to kill you. This is not your territory.”
Dan held his gaze for a moment longer, his mouth tightening into a grim line, then he turned and walked away.
Skinning the Cat
I saw the drama unfolding far below me, saw the prisoner drop long before I heard the report of the gunshot, and scanned the view through my optic desperately until I was sure that none of our people were hit. I watched Dan stand up into the face of the man before he turned and walked away, only then did I scan ahead for the shooter. I cut up the view of the rooftops into four segments, searching each one in turn until I found them. Lying flat on a rooftop with the long barrel of a rifle overhanging the edge I swallowed down my anger. The profile of the gun, I couldn’t be sure at that distance but in my heart, I think I knew it, looked just like the weapon I had lost, had abandoned to these bastards, when I was ambushed.
I hoped that Lucien would be steady enough to hold his nerve and not fire until the others were clear as I kept taking my eye from the scope and slowly rotating my head – slowly so as not to attract the attention of the shooter – until I could no longer see Dan and the others.
Waiting longer, just to be sure, I settled in on the enemy sniper and prepared to take aim, but the bastard was up and moving; walking briskly across the rooftop to an access door to a stairwell. I settled in, preparing to make a difficult shot on a moving target, and squeezed off three rounds.
I snatched the shots, rushing them and not taking the time to readjust after each pull of the trigger, and all I served to do was make him duck and run for the door. He was gone before I could line him up again, so I switched my aim to the man who had given the command. He was gone, and I had missed my chance.
I shuffled backwards from the ridge, rising into a crouch where I ran as fast as was safe for the lower ground of the leeward slope, then straightened up and headed down. Lucien was there first, talking to Dan who I saw place a hand on his shoulder before turning away to face me. The gesture spoke volumes. You did the right thing, it said, you were right to keep your nerve and hold your fire. The look he gave me said something different.
“What happened?” he snapped as Ash joined him and looked up at me wearing an expression that bordered on judgemental also.
“I had a line on their shooter,” I said, “but he was running, and I missed.”
Dan breathed in, holding it before letting it out in a frustrated sigh.
“Okay,” he said, “that’s too bad.” He turned away, evidently having forgiven me for attempting to gain a tactical advantage over them when he probably assumed I was taking pot shots at their leader, and called Neil.
“How’s it looking?” he asked.
“All good,” Neil answered, “just need the message writing on here,” he said, pointing at the front of the stolen pickup. He had siphoned off as much diesel as he could, filling the jerrycans and decanting it into the van before refilling them again.
“What’s the plan?” I asked Dan.
“We come at them from a direction they aren’t expecting,” he replied ambiguously.
Alita used a permanent marker pen on the dirty-white paint, etching a message in a language I didn’t read, as Neil waited for her to get clear. He lifted the lever to put the driver’s seat all the way forwards before bending down underneath the chair and fiddling for a while. He stepped back, moving slowly, his hands up as though he was frightened to move then shut the truck door carefully and nudged it to click home.
“Let’s go,” he said, climbing into the front passenger seat of the van. I climbed in the back, Nemesis licking at Ash’s face as they tried to find space among the tangle of bodies crammed inside, and the doors were shut. The van set off, turning in shuffles on the narrow road, and we headed down off the mountain.
“My brother lives?” Mateo asked in English. I opened my mouth to speak, but closed it when I realised I had nothing to say and shot a glance at Alita. She answered him in Spanish, and I watched as his face fell into a resolved hope that Rafi still clung on to life.
We drove for just over an hour, and despite Dan not pushing the unstable van to any kind of speed the ride in the back was a stressful and uncomfortable one. The air soon felt thick and clogged with a lack of oxygen and I was painfully aware that my sweat had dried, and I suspected that I smelt a little funky. Even though Dan scoffed at me whenever he saw it, I kept a can of deodorant in my bag, but I could hardly dig it out and use it in front of everyone out of embarrassment. Luckily, just after I was planning on how to force a rest stop, the van slowed, and the engine stopped. I jumped out, Nem at my heel, and raised my new carbine after leaving the big rifle in the back of the van. I fanned out, clearing the area just as four others did the same to push out a cordon, and when satisfied that we were in an abandoned area I lowered my gun and went to get answers.
I pulled Dan aside, my face making it clear that I wasn’t going to settle for another vague answer, and asked for an explanation.
“You said that the people in Andorra were blockaded from the southern road, right?” he asked.
“Yes…” I answered, drawing out the word suspiciously.
“So we hit that blockade, open it up, and come at those fuckers from their own backyard.”
I thought about that for a second.
“And what guarantees do we have that they aren’t already inside? That they aren’t going to ambush us again in the tunnel or in the open? They have, or at least they’ve said they have more than we do, and thanks to me they’ve got a bloody 417 and someone who knows how to use it. How’s that going to work?” I demanded almost angrily.
He grabbed my arm and led me away from the others in case my words infected them with doubt.
“What’s the mantra?” he asked.
“What do you me—”
“What do we do when some fucker comes at us and threatens us?” he snapped in a low growl as he squeezed my arm for effect.
“We kill them,” I answered simply.
“Yeah,” he snarled, angry at the situation and n
ot me, “we kill ’em all. Just like the King of fucking Wales, just like Bronson and his thugs, just like the ones who attacked the prison and just like that mad shit who tried to blow me up with my own friend.”
And with that he walked away, leaving me with a nagging doubt that he wasn’t in total control of himself.
I found a quiet corner to spray the cold chemicals under my armpits and down my back and chest, feeling fresher even if I was just masking the need for a decent shower to remove the film of sweat and dust from my skin. Feeling refreshed, as much as was possible in a deserted patch of nowhere, I climbed back inside the van and settled in for the long drive around the mountains and into Spain.
~
Tomau congratulated his sniper, a Canadian of all people, named Elias who had been swallowed up as part of the flotsam of humanity stranded far away from his birth country. The man had been a hunter and had expressed an ability in shooting at distance. The captured prize of the big military rifle found strewn across the rear seats in the ruined vehicle they had ambushed provided an opportunity for that claim to be put to the test, and the two of them had snuck through the tunnel before day break to rest on the cold ground far away from the entrance. As the sun rose, Elias took aim at the unsuspecting guard at the toll booth, and calmly blew his left arm off just below the shoulder. The man screamed fit to wake the dead, but such was the fear that the fatal shot had inspired that nobody dared come to his aid. His screams faded rapidly as he bled out, and the two retreated to the other side of the tunnel in triumph.
Tomau knew that the people of Andorra, his people, would eventually submit to his rule and such displays were a necessity if leadership is to be accepted without question. His Canadian had kept the rifle just as Tomau had kept one of the heavier assault rifles to replace the MP5 he had taken from a Spanish police station so long ago, and with the weapons rose their standing and reputation among the group. There were almost fifty of them, half of those armed with something resembling a decent weapon, and he allowed mob rule to establish its own hierarchy amongst the lower ranks, much as he had been forced to fight for recognition and advancement in his life before.
He organised a party to follow the intruders, to see them safely off his territory and see that they weren’t loitering to make a foolish attempt on his town under the cover of darkness. The detachment was well armed and led by a cruel man who he had only recently rotated away from the blockade at the Spanish border as he was growing restless for action. Tomau wanted him closer to his sight so that no orders were given that he hadn’t personally issued, as he suspected the man to be a candidate to overthrow him should he gather enough support.
They quickly found the truck thought lost when their own ambush was so poorly equipped and overrun, and he left two men to bring it back as he drove the lead vehicle down the slopes to chase off the foreigners. He had gone so far ahead that he didn’t know what had happened to them until he returned and found Tomau stood near the smouldering wreck wearing a look of savage intent.
The message on the front of the truck was still visible, and bore the words, “Do not follow us.”
~
The two men dropped off at the truck thought that they had got off lightly in the afternoon heat, and lazily opened the doors of the hot cab. Neither thought to glance inside, and had Neil known this he would have been annoyed at the efforts he went to making sure that the booby trap was well obscured from prying eyes.
As the man went to climb inside he found the seat too far forward to get his body behind. Reaching down for the release handle, he lifted it and slid it back, his eyes meeting his companion across the hot interior as they both heard a metallic sound and a faint pop.
The grenade, one of the few precious items deemed necessary to part with by Dan in return for the execution of his prisoner, had been firmly fixed underneath the driver’s seat with a cable tie looped through the seat runner and the pin of the small bomb fastened securely under the old foam. When it detonated, which it did with a far smaller explosion than any inexperienced person watching would have thought, it blew the would-be drivers legs clean off at the knees and threw enough shrapnel into the body of the passenger to kill them both and leave their bodies to cook by the heat of the burning truck.
~
Tomau was savage, instantly demoting the man by taking the automatic weapon and spare ammunition from him before granting someone else the status of owning the weapons.
“Double the guard,” he shouted as he climbed back into the passenger seat of the vehicle he had commandeered, “I want to be sure that these bastards do not return.”
Invincibility Lies in the Defence
That was a strong belief, especially for those of us who lived behind walls impervious to all but heavy artillery, but what I saw through my scope looked almost too easy.
We had driven all day, reaching the southern border area under looming mountain tops to our right, stopping short as was sensible to approach on foot. The defenders of the blockade, the not-so-merry band of pirates sent to choke off their target from the south, were woefully unaware of any threat other than one they assumed would come from Andorra itself.
Perhaps they imagined some form of sally-forth to assault their barricade, some kind of uprising where the normal people brought their pitchforks against the guns of their besiegers in some desperate attempt to die as heroes instead of living like trapped animals.
Either way, not one of them was looking in any direction other than inwards towards the road they had cut. Lucien had come with me and Dan, another powerful optic brought to bear on the enemy which he didn’t get to use as Dan had simply asked to borrow the rifle and not given it back. He raised his other weapon but stopped before bringing it to bear, realising that he did not have any magnification on the assault rifle. I half rolled slowly and unclipped my own, passing it to him one-handed so that he could at least see a little better than with the naked eye.
“I count eighteen,” Dan muttered, his face screwed up as he peered through the sight. In contrast I kept both eyes open as Mitch had taught me to but came to a different conclusion.
“Seventeen,” I said, “one went inside and came back out wearing a red jacket. It’s not a new one.”
Dan grunted to accept that, not that he would enjoy being wrong but that he had learned to trust my eyes as they were younger and sharper. We watched until the sun set, and fires were lit to warm them and bathe them in flickering orange light.
“The stupid bastards have literally set up camp on the road,” Dan said, incredulity in his voice at the amateur hour he was witnessing, “no reserve base, no separate reinforcements, just… just a bloody campsite behind the barricade.”
“Options?” I asked, feeling him stiffen in annoyance as he always did when I used one of his lines before he could say it. Spend long enough in stressful environments with one person and you develop a kind of pre-cognition about them, unless they’ve annoyed you so much you want to kill them, that is.
“Sniper OP,” he said softly, “highest building to the right. Good elevation and not enough cover to get to the far side. Both of you up there. Main assault by vehicle after you start proceedings; shouldn’t be too hard as they’re not organised. I’ll need to go in to clear out the buildings. Me, Mitch and two others; leave Neil with one of the militia with the non-coms back here.”
Non-combatants, I thought, was there such a thing out here? I pushed that thought away as I ran through the simple plan, trying to find holes in it if I was one of the ignorant defenders who could seize opportunity to break the trap just as I had on the other side of these mountains. Dan didn’t prompt me for an answer, he knew I would be thinking and just waited patiently for the response.
“First light?” I asked.
He grunted, this time in a tone I took as agreement.
“We’ll stay on station then,” I said, “move there tonight to save time.”
“Okay,” Dan agreed, shuffling back from the vantage point b
efore standing out of sight of the far-off barricade and stretching his old back until it popped and cracked a few times.
“I’m getting too old for this shit,” he grumbled, shooting me a sour look in the dying light as I made a grunt of agreement similar to his own. Nemesis stood up from where she lay down after I told her to stay, shaking herself off and shooting out her tongue at Ash’s face to make him avoid her pestering, his eyes fixed on Dan’s face.
“First light,” he said, “see you afterwards.” He reached out to bump my first, hesitating before offering the gesture to Lucien who smoothly returned it.
We doubled back, intending to approach the three-storey building from the direct rear to place the hulk of stone and brick directly in between us and our targets. We had our long guns on our backs and I led the way as I was the only one carrying suppressed weapons; an errant gunshot now would screw the plan up a little.
Lucien moved well as his light, strong body was almost as noiseless as mine. Moving stealthily was like that; it was control and strength and above all discipline to keep your body tense but flexible. He had those qualities, and another I held in far higher regard in that he watched someone perform a task and then replicated it. Dan was like that and I suppose I had become like it too.
Monkey see, monkey do. That’s what Mitch called it.
Lucien adapted how he moved, keeping to the same patterns as my own as I weaved my way through the scattering of dead buildings towards our target. I knew that my own abilities were a mixture of Dan and Mitch in this sense, more Mitch in truth as I was replicating what he had taught me about fighting in urban areas. Dan had the edge on room clearances, just, but the skills of the British Army and the UK’s armed policing manual lived on through me and, in turn, Lucien now. I made a mental note to give some explanations to him as to why I did the things I did, because replicating a skill without knowledge was often dangerous, and found myself actually looking forward to a quiet talk with him.
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