The Refugee

by S A Tameez

  He scanned the area around him and his eyes landed on the black folders that Stelios’ seemed to be drawn to earlier. He wanted to get to his feet, but any sudden movement redefined his understanding of pain. He rolled over to his side and then shuffled along the solid surface towards the folders. He could feel his body loosening up and knew that he would soon be on his feet. He was going be ok.

  He opened one of the folders and immediately figured out that this was all incriminating evidence for Boreas’ illegal activities. This was great, but it was the second folder that really got him excited. This one had details of all the people involved in the child trafficking operation. From general people in the refugee camp and the camp guards, all the way to people in the police force. Surprisingly Harris was not in there — obviously, an underestimated jackal. It made Stavros realise that Harris must have spent a long time making people believe he was too dim to be a normal agent forget about being a double agent in a sophisticated operation.

  “Jackpot!” he said to himself and then took out his phone. He finally had enough to call in the big guns.

  “I need the special operations team now.”

  “How many people?” the voice, on the other end replied.

  “I need the entire team and I need a helicopter – now. Trace this call for my location.”

  “This better be worth it.”

  Stavros looked down at the folders and smiled. “Oh, it’ll be worth it all right, now just make sure they get their butts here now!”

  ****

  Boreas sat in the back of his armoured car. His men had thoroughly checked it for any explosive devices. Thankfully there were none. He’d had this car custom-made with the strongest body armour available, even the tail lights were impenetrable. He wished he’d used this car for transporting his wife and kids. Maybe they would still be alive if he had. His mind filled with a dangerous blend of hurt and rage. He kept his emotions from surfacing.

  Tasos sat in the back with Boreas. In front, there were three cars, and three behind. Each car was filled with armed men, their trunks bursting with all types of lethal weaponry.

  “What are you going to do?” Tasos asked Boreas.

  “I am going to destroy Dimitris. I will kill him with my bare hands… then I will find Goldstein and kill him.” Boreas had his gun clenched in his hand, ready to use. He’d had the gun especially made for him, gold plated .44 Remington Magnum. He’d not had a chance to use it yet, it had remained locked in his glass cabinet at home.

  “It is going to be dangerous, Dimitris will be expecting you to go after him. We could just send some guys over to them.”

  “It’s too late for that,” Boreas said and pulled back the gun’s hammer. “This ends now.”

  “Ok Boss. I have a guy keeping an eye on Dimitris’ movements. He’s at his hotel and has been there all morning,” Tasos said. “We figured that he has chosen that location because he has lots of men inside. They’ll get us soon as we get there, so, I have a plan.”

  Boreas’ mind was too overcome with anger and the need for vengeance to even ask his man too many details. If it were left to him, he would barge in there like a raging bull and kill anything that moved. And Tasos knew that.

  As Boreas and his entourage got close to Dimitris’ hotel, Tasos and two other men got out of their cars and ran towards some neighbouring buildings around the same height as Dimitris’ hotel. Which was perfect for Tasos’ plan.

  When Boreas approached the hotel, loud gunfire filled the air and appeared to be coming from the direction of the hotel windows. Boreas’ men stopped their cars and began returning fire. But it proved futile. It was like trying to penetrate the walls of Troy. They couldn’t even get close, and just like the soldiers of Troy had shot a storm of arrows at their approaching enemies, Dimitris’ men fired their guns mercilessly at Boreas’ cars, and at his men.

  Some of Boreas’ men succumbed to the barrage of bullets fired, and Boreas was worried that this was going to be a flawless victory for Dimitris. Then, suddenly, Dimitris’ men began falling out of the windows. Tasos and two of his other men were stationed high up in a close-by building using sniper rifles to take out the enemy. Boreas was smiling. Sniper style assassinations was one of Tasos’ specialities.

  Boreas’ men were trooping towards the hotel, guns blazing. Every time the enemy opened fire on them, they’d be hit by Boreas’ gunmen.

  One of Boreas’ men opened the boot of his car and removed a huge rocket launcher. The man lifted it to his shoulder like it was a toy. But before he could set it up, he fell to the ground as a bullet caught him on the shoulder. He yelled-out in pain but managed to get up and lift it onto the other shoulder. He aimed it at the hotel and fired, stumbling back from the force of the blast. There was a loud hiss and then a colossal explosion. A huge bulb of yellow flames resulted in a large hole in the wall of the hotel. Debris soared out of the building as fast as the spray of bullets that followed. Pieces of men blown up by the blast, flew out from the building, landing violently on the ground, their body parts in bloody piles scattered around the precinct.

  The man prepared to launch another rocket, but this time wasn’t so lucky and a bullet penetrated his neck. A fountain of blood gushed out. He wasn’t getting back up.

  Boreas got out of his car. “Come on you coward! I am right here.” A few bullets targeted him from the hotel windows, not that they were windows anymore, now they were just holes in the building. The bullets missed him. Boreas stood confidently as the shooter was taken out with a clean shot to his face. Boreas knew that Tasos wouldn’t miss.

  There was brief silence. The shooting stopped and out of the explosion, a figure walked through what was left of the smoke… Tall, majestic, dressed in grey and black leather gloves holding a hand gun.

  Dimitris stepped calmly over the rubble and scattered bodies. The ugly scene didn’t faze him at all. His eyes were locked onto Boreas and he marched towards him with a look of quiet rage. He stopped a couple of meters away and they were face to face, for the first time in many years.

  “I told you that I would destroy you,” Dimitris said, his jaw clenching as he spoke.

  Boreas looked around and smiled. “Yes, but you have destroyed yourself in the process.”

  “I have waited many years for this…” Dimitris took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. He threw his gun on the floor and stepped towards him. “I will kill you with my bare hands and the entire world will see that I am the kingpin! Not you! You’re a washed up old clown!”

  “You fool!” Boreas shouted. “You killed my family… my wife… my… my children!” His legs began to shake in anger. “You took everything from me!” Boreas raised his gun and pointed it at Dimitris’ head. “Did you really think that this was going to end in a fist fight?”

  “You are a—” but before Dimitris could finish, Boreas pulled the trigger and shot him in between the eyes. Blood seeped out of Dimitris’ head, down his nose and the expression of rage remained frozen on his face as he fell to his knees, then collapsed on to the ground.

  His eyes remained open as if he was shocked that he was stupid enough to throw his gun and expect to brawl with his enemy, like two bareknuckle fighters out in the street.

  “The great Dimitris!” Boreas shouted and held out his arms. “Don’t make me laugh!”

  He spat on his enemy’s body. “Fool is he, who thinks that he can defeat me! There’s no man alive that can defeat me!” Boreas voice echoed through the silent street. He raised out his arm and pointed his gun into the sky and fired a shot. “I—am—Boreas!”

  He then calmly got back into his car, as if nothing had happened and instructed the driver to drive.

  “Call Tasos and make sure that he understands that no one should be left alive at that hotel. And then burn it down!” He knew full well that Tasos would happily fulfil this request. He also knew that Tasos, although had showed no expression of sadness at the news of friend Kostas’ death, was hurting. He would ki
ll them, he would kill them all. For Tasos, Kostas was worth more than all the men in that hotel — an eye of an eye would simply not be enough. “And tell him after he has finished with them to head towards the shipping company, we have some more unfinished business.” He clenched his fists, “I’ll make sure that the refugee and his son reunite, all right — in hell!”

  Boreas knew things had gotten messy. Not even the cleaner would be able to sanitise this chaos. The hotel was half destroyed, bodies everywhere and Stelios dead. So, if he was going down, he was going to make sure that Goldstein and his son would suffer. He sat fantasising how he would make Goldstein watch as he executed his son and then he would kill Goldstein slowly, and incredibly painfully. He wouldn’t use a gun or any weapon for that matter, he would strangle him with his bare hands and stare into his eyes as the life seeped out of his body. He wanted his face to be the last thing that Goldstein saw. Only then would Boreas feel the slightest relief.

  “Drive faster!” he ordered as he became more anxious at the thought.

  ****

  It wasn’t too long before Stavros could hear a helicopter hovering outside and the metal clank of footsteps marching up the stairs. He never thought he would ever get excited with those two sounds, yet here he was, wanting to jump up and down like a child. Although jumping up and down was completely out of the question, he could just about walk.

  He stood clenching the two folders as he saw the masked men, dressed in black army gear, approach him. They were his special unit. He didn’t need to see their faces to know who they were, he had spent enough time with them to recognise them just from their body language and size. One of the men took his mask off and smiled, exposing his pearly white teeth.

  “Well it’s a about bloody time, sir!” Stavros said.

  “You look like crap!” the grey-haired man said.

  “Thanks Alexander”

  “It wasn’t a complement.”

  “No, I meant thanks for coming.” Stavros gave him an old-friend smile.

  Alexander nodded. “So, what we got?”

  Stavros handed him the folders and smirked. “We’ve got enough here to put Boreas away for a long time. And I mean a long time!”

  “How long?”

  “Like forever long!”

  “Good man!” Alexander commended as he began looking through the folders, “and what about our terrorist friend? You know… the guy that we sent you out here to nail!”

  “I don’t think Ahmed, or Goldstein as he prefers to be known, is a threat to us. I think Boreas accidently abducted his son from the camp and he is simply trying to get him back.”

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “Unquestionably.”

  “What about the murders?”

  “He is just trying to get his son back.” Stavros’ eyes widened. “How far would you go to get your son back from traffickers?”

  “I really hope you’re right about this! The press is all over this, like ants on a sugar cane.”

  “Me too.” He held his chest in pain. “Oh, and Harris is dirty.”

  “What? Harris?” he gazed into space. “But he’s too stupid to pull off being a double agent.”

  “Evidently not. He even had me fooled.”

  14

  Ahmed hastily made it through the grimy sewage tunnel, back to where he’d entered from. Tentatively, he lifted the lid on the manhole, worrying that perhaps the taxi driver had alerted the police and that they would be there, waiting for him when he appeared. But there was no one around.

  He paused for a moment and sent Antonio a message with the address of the shipping company. And instructed them to be there in thirty-minutes. He knew that they didn’t have to come. He was probably the most wanted man alive right now. They could just live peacefully and not get involved in such madness, but he was a hundred-percent certain that they would come. Antonio and Jane were good people — a rare breed of good.

  He walked in the direction of the shipping company. He didn’t even bother looking at the diagrams he had printed earlier, at the internet café, he had it all planned in his head.

  Like a lot of Boreas’ buildings, there was more than one way to get in. And he had been smooth sailing in his dirty operations for so long that he didn’t really prepare for when things went wrong or when one of his men would take the wrong child. And although child trafficking and child slave labour wasn’t the only illegal activity he dealt in, since the “refugee crisis” it had become his most lucrative. No one was interested in a few boys who went missing that no one would chase up or look for. In fact, them going missing was almost a convenience. For people like the camp guards, the refugee children were an additional income, a large pay increase for just turning a blind eye. For people like Khaleel, they were bargaining chips, a human currency, you could call them if you believed they were human. And for people like Boreas they were a free and submissive labour force, sold for good money across the globe in the child slave and sex trade. His major customers were from countries that protested and preached their contempt for such malevolence. And for the rest of the world, they were a statistic and at most, a news report. In fact, all refugees, man, woman, or child soon became a statistic. The first thing they would lose when escaping torture and persecution, was their name. Their identity immediately changed, from their name to “refugee.” And the word refugees soon became a synonym for inconvenient, irritations and pests. Images of clusters of “not so human” pests cramped together, desperately trying to survive was enough to put you off your cereal in the mornings. The horrible images of foreign speaking cave people, threats of them barbarically breaking through borders and taking siege of the country were desensitising people’s perceptions of their dire situation. They had no history, they had no future, all they had was a stark present. They were a problem, so who, in their right mind, would question or complain if a problem were to just disappear? Besides, it was the child refugees that were the hardest to look at. Their sad, innocent eyes expressed all the horrific things that they had witness in just a glance. So, it was better just to not look at them. Their sad stories were so common that, after a while, they didn’t even help sell newspapers. For refugees to get in the headlines, something so extreme and horrendous would have to occur for people to notice it. A few refugees drowning was everyday news, wasn’t even worth wasting your time to read small paragraph on page thirty. It would have to be ten boats sinking with hundreds dying or perhaps something even more interesting, like them being eaten by sharks that would get readers interested.

  Ahmed hurried towards the shipping company, he knew his time to save Malik was nearly up. He hoped that the chaos he’d caused Boreas meant that most of his resources were being deployed elsewhere. He didn’t know that Boreas was on his way to find him personally, but for now, it was just him and one man standing outside.

  As Ahmed approached, he studied the guard who appeared to have an athletic build. His shoulders were wide and his waist thin, making his torso appear v-shaped. He had long legs that were well built. Ahmed was getting used to the gun culture that had confronted him everywhere he went and guessed that the man was probably armed. Not that this scared Ahmed anymore. He was now used to this scenario and besides, all he could think about was that his son was inside that building. He did not belong to them — they had no right to imprison him in there. He became enraged at the thought and this forced him to scrap his plan of trying to sneak in from the basement entrance at the back. What would he do once he was in? It would be wrong to just find Malik and escape, what about the other children? Thoughts played on his mind. He knew that once he was in, there was a high chance he would get detected and judging by the appearance of the man stood outside, it would be safe to say that it would be game over. He couldn’t let that happen — not now — not after all that has happened and all that he had done. Everything, the escape from the camp, risking his life, the killings, the conspiracy, all led to this moment. The moment that he would find his son and f
ree him from the clutches of these evil people. He knew Malik was in that building, he could feel it in his heart.

  He removed his gun from his pocket and ran towards the man, who was looking in the other direction. Ahmed’s footsteps soon alerted the man as he approached. Ahmed saw the man turn to look at him and reach into his pocket for a gun. He didn’t get the chance. Ahmed aimed at the man’s leg and fired. A loud scream of pain and the man fell to the ground. Ahmed had no intention to kill him but couldn’t risk him hindering his plan to free the children and get his son. Ahmed strode toward him and struck the man on the jaw with the gun, knocking him unconscious. He checked the man’s pulse to make sure he was still alive — he was, thank God!

  Ahmed left him, opened the door to the building and went inside. He held his gun out in front of him as he made his way slowly through the gloom, the lights flickering hauntingly. The floor seemed greasy and the echo of a constant drip from a sink close by was making him feel nervous. Long dingy corridors. It appeared like the sort of place that a fully-grown adult would get spooked out in and for a ten-year-old child, it would be hell.

  There were a fair few large storage rooms and he searched through them all. The large containers were mainly empty, some had a few boxes filled with small bags of white powder, that he assumed were drugs. But there was no sign of any children.

  Had he got it wrong? Ahmed began to feel a sense of hopelessness, that perhaps Stelios had given him the wrong information to throw him off the track. Perhaps the children were being held somewhere else. Or maybe he was too late and they had already shipped the children out and Malik was half way to where ever the hell he was being sent to already.

  This place was his last chance — this was what he based his entire plan around. There was nowhere left. He had run out of options.