“Please,” he said, “come.”
We were handed a small glass of something questionable that emanated a sweet vapour and were cheered by the small collection of townspeople invited to the meal. Outside, the man offered Rafi a cigar from a small wooden box which he puffed on for nearly half a minute to get it burning. I found that I didn’t enjoy the smell of cigars as much as I like their smaller cousins, and just lapsed into a comfortable silence as they babbled to each other animatedly.
“It truly is a beautiful place,” a woman’s voice said from behind me in the doorway. I turned to see Carla leaning against the frame and staring past me at the glow in the evening sky. “The most beautiful place on earth.”
“You’re from here?” I asked, looking to make conversation.
“I was born here, but my parents came from a village called Escaló in Spain, where they sold their hotel and moved here. It was the best thing they ever did, and I studied English to bring more of your people here for skiing vacations.”
I nodded slowly, not having much to say about her family’s good fortune.
“It’s been a long day,” I said, starting to make my excuses for wanting to get away from the small crowd of people and get back to my dog who had been put in the room I was given.
“Of course, I will see you here for breakfast before you leave tomorrow?”
I nodded, shooting Rafi a look and heard him thank the old man graciously for the cigar before he did the same with Carla for the food and hospitality. He jogged to catch up with me, cigar still smouldering in his hand.
“Did you enjoy the food, Leah?” he asked, giving off a sense of increased bravery.
“I did,” I answered, “did you enjoy the wine?”
“I did,” he answered, “and I apologise for my words. I did not mean to anger you.”
“I’m not angry,” I said as I opened the door and felt the dog snake past my legs before closing it again. “I just don’t know these people yet and I’m hardly going to give them my PIN number.”
Even in the gathering dark I could see his face screw up in question.
“Never mind,” I told him as I set off again to walk Nemesis up the road a little, “just don’t be hungover tomorrow morning because we have a long drive back.”
“I will not,” he said, “Rafael does not get hangovers.”
~
Rafael, perhaps in karmic punishment for referring to himself in the third person, groaned heavily when the ham and eggs were placed in front of him at breakfast. I took my time eating, enjoying his discomfort which luckily didn’t last long as soon as the food took effect on him. He seemed refreshed when we strapped our gear back on, shaking hands with those who had risen early to see us off.
I shook hands with the stern Carla again, promising to be back with help.
Firing up the Defender and sending my dog in over the seats to settle behind my own, I beeped the horn twice to the small gathering who waved in my mirrors as they grew smaller. Slowing to give a nod to the two men, different ones this time, on bored-looking duty at the booth we drove into the tunnel, my mind already on the discussion to convince Dan to get involved in someone else’s battles for the value of a little trade. I say that, because my mind wasn’t fully on the road ahead.
Had it been, I might have noticed that the van, the only vehicle abandoned in the tunnel on our way through, was facing a different direction from when we had passed it the previous afternoon and that it was much closer to the further end. As soon as my brain had registered it, the van shot forwards to block our path and I stamped down hard on the throttle to try and beat the ambush.
Rafi gave a shout; an incoherent yelp which both registered shock and fear and somehow conveyed a warning to me, but it was too late.
The van hit us on my side near the front wheel, forcing the Defender over to scrape along the left wall of the tunnel and shower bright sparks in through the open passenger window. The wing mirror disintegrated on that side, and a terrible wobble and grinding noise forced me to a stop. I flew from the vehicle, showering shards of glass from my equipment and hair, I hadn’t even realised my window had been smashed, not even having time to snatch up my carbine as I reached back inside, because a fist hit me in the back of my head and bounced my face off the door pillar. I dropped to my knees, trying desperately look up through blurred vision, and reached for a weapon with clumsy hands as a snarl erupted and my attacker disappeared under a bolt of black fur.
My head rang, from both the crash and the punch which still made my legs unable to respond, and I glanced up to see Rafi slumped in the passenger seat with blood pouring from a cut on his head. A scream, deep and full of terrified pain, was cut off abruptly from my left where Nemesis had crunched the throat of the man who had hit me.
That’ll teach the fucker, my brain told me helpfully, now get your bloody gun.
Reaching back up to the cab for my M4 which I’d laid over the dashboard, I was forced to throw myself back and scramble along the concrete surface to the front of the engine because shots had already started pouring in towards me. I heard glass smash and the whine of bullets in the air punctuated by the hollow thunk, thunk, thunk, of them penetrating the thin metal body of the truck.
“Heel!” I yelled groggily, feeling my dog climb over me. A stolen glance past the damaged wheel and risking the incoming shower of bullets showed shapes pouring from an access door built into the wall of the tunnel. I replayed what I had seen in that split-second, my brain running the footage again slower so that I could count six, no seven people, all shooting.
My chest heaved, and my head swam as it threatened to fade into unconsciousness. I faced at least seven people with only two sidearms versus their heavier guns, and my only other option was ahead of me. I was less than twenty paces from the exit of the tunnel, the bright sunlight beckoning me like some kind of afterlife, and I carefully weighed my options.
I experienced what Mitch called ‘bullet time’.
The way your thoughts in a contact came so fast that it was like the world moved in slow-motion in comparison. I considered my choices, holding them up in my mind against the facts I knew.
Rafi was injured, possibly dead and certainly unable to get out and run.
I was outgunned, outnumbered, and I knew I had little chance of winning any contest with these people; this ambush was well planned and well executed.
I also knew, because the ambush was well planned, that there would, without doubt, be a cut-off force out in the open. My only hope of escape and life was that the cut-off force was either late or wouldn’t be a sniper with any kind of skill. In the space of two more ragged breaths, I ran.
Bullets sang as they bounced off the ground and curved walls. I screamed at Nemesis to come with me, hoping more than anything that she emerges into the light with me unscathed, and tore headlong out into the open where I turned a hard left to get out of sight of the guns behind me.
Break the line of sight, a voice in my head lectured, find hard cover and remember: cover from view is not cover from fire.
Was that Steve’s voice? Dan’s? Was it Rich?
I stumbled on a rock and rolled over the hard ground, pitching into the legs of a woman. I was right about the cut-off force, and luckily right that they were late to the party and that gave me just enough time to get into the open. Nemesis hit her before I could look up, and I only knew it was a woman from the tone of her screams as the dog chomped hard on her forearm to take her off her feet and roll away. I got to my feet unsteadily and didn’t see the man with her until he reached out from my right side and grabbed the grip of the Glock holstered on my chest. He must have thought me dazed or had underestimated me because of what he saw.
Unthinking, reacting only on instinct and years of practice at weapon retention, I clamped my hand down on his, forcing it onto the gun and preventing him from pulling it free. I planted my feet, reached further up the arm with my left hand, and rammed my hips and body back into his to spi
n him over me.
He landed with a heavy thud flat on his back and I drove a knee hard into his solar plexus as the gun came free in my hand. His face registered pain and shock, his hands up in desperate surrender to show me his open palms, then total and utter abject fear as both of my hands settled onto the weapon and he recognised the look in my eyes. I fired twice, both bullets smashing through his face and rendering him unrecognisable in an instant. I stood, staggering slightly as I called Nemesis away. The woman cried and whined as she rolled around in the dust cradling the ruined remains of her forearm, then she received a trio of 9mm bullets.
Two in the chest, one in the head.
“Heel,” I gasped at my dog, before half running and staggering as fast as I could into the cover of the nearest trees.
Time for Bed
“Maman?” called a soft voice from the doorway. “Their bath is getting cold.”
“And that’s all you’re getting for tonight,” Leah said from the chair, groaning again as she stood and shooed the complaining boys off the rug and towards the door, “your cousin is waiting for you to have a bath. Now go, you both smell terrible.”
Both boys erupted into complaints and whining sounds in unison, waking the dog again and sparking another round of exhausted grumbles. She held up both hands in surrender just like the man she killed in her vivid memory had done.
“You want to have a cold bath?” she asked them in a menacingly mocking tone.
“But this isn’t the story you told us before,” Jack said, his small brow furrowed as he tried to reconcile what he thought he knew with what their aunt told them now.
“Perhaps not,” Leah admitted, “but I don’t think I told you how the next bit started, not properly anyway.”
“Will you tell us more tomorrow?” he asked hopefully.
“I will,” Leah said, seeing the look of determination set on the young boy’s face. Once he had been promised something, he would not let it rest until that word had been fulfilled. He was very regimented in that sense; his personality saw things as one or the other. As black or white. As right or wrong, and in contrast it seemed as though his younger brother existed in the grey areas, as he always pushed the boundaries and looked for the hidden meaning in everything. Even at their young ages, Leah could see that these two were like chalk and cheese, and their vast differences would lead them to bicker and fight constantly, yet they were totally committed to one another.
They may fight like they hate one another, but if any of the other children threatened them they would combine to fight the common enemy with a fury unmatched by even the older children.
Leah looked at Peter, his eyes already promising a lack of resistance to sleep, but Jack’s eyes looked away in thought as his eyebrows met in the middle.
“But you said that you went with Grandpapa when you went to Andorra for the first time,” he asked her, “not with Rafi.”
“Tomorrow,” she told him with a sense of finality, pulling herself out of the chair and herding them towards the door with her hands, “go and wash, and come and see your auntie in the morning.”
They went, following their cousin from the room after saying their goodnights to Leah and her old dog, Ares. She stood watching the door after they had gone, allowing herself a small moment of nostalgia as her mind had been taken back over twenty years.
Twenty years, she thought, twenty-five since I first got here.
Most of her life. She rarely thought about the times before, and those memories were snippets of a past she had forgotten as mostly irrelevant. She did not shed tears for her mother, for her brother or any others that she knew and loved before the sickness swept away most of the human race in a blink of an eye; those tears had long since been cried.
Marie told her that it was her age, as well as her temperament, which allowed her to do what she called compartmentalising. It made sense when she explained it, telling her that she had shut away parts of her mind and memories and feelings as though they were packed in a box and stored in the dark; she could only find them again if she went looking for them and rummaged around in the dark until she found them.
The problem with that, Marie’s voice echoed to her from memory, is if you go looking without a torch, without someone to guide you, then you don’t know what you’ll find.
So Leah hadn’t looked. She kept the thoughts from her past in layers, and only exposed the top few that bore no emotion so that she could show others and not be upset. She did that throughout her life, keeping things stored deep down inside and ignoring them so that they didn’t hurt her because she could not afford the time to deal with the troublesome feelings that threatened to put her off her game. She had people, lots of people, relying on her.
“Come on,” she said to the dog, seeing it struggle to its feet with another grumble. She was waiting for the next litter of puppies to wean before choosing one and training it, just as she had done with Nemesis before, and Ares’ mother before that. She knew the old boy was beyond effective now, but she never could bear to part with her dogs and ended up with two generations of Ash’s proud lineage sleeping in her room at a time until the older one finally drifted off in their final sleep.
The dog got to its feet, walking stiffly after her as its aching joints woke up, and shook off the fog of slumber. She walked through the corridors of the keep, pictures and paintings created by the town’s inhabitants, both living and dead, adorning the walls. She saw a few people. All of them smiled in warm deference at her which she returned. She had been the sole leader of Sanctuary for seven years since Dan and Marie had retired to enjoy their last years with grandchildren and relaxation after a life spent battling. It had been longer still since she had been promoted to become the tip of the spear and took the place of Dan who seemed to have lost his lust for conflict after the passing of Ash.
She still relied on them to impart wisdom and knowledge but had evolved as she always did to find her own unique way of doing things. Hers was trust and delegation, as she couldn’t physically be everywhere at once and know everything. She also didn’t know enough about the individual trades and skills of the town, so she had followed Neil’s advice and always found someone who did before making decisions.
Neil had always said of management, that if you didn’t know the job of someone working for you, then you had no way of knowing if they were giving you honest answers and estimates. If she tasked someone to conduct a mission, to be a Ranger of Sanctuary, and they presented her with a plan, then she could tell in a heartbeat if they were lying to her or themselves. When it came to water desalination or sterilisation, or the parts required to fix one of their ailing boat engines that yet still had life in it, then she was forced to either accept the word of the people or have a trusted second opinion.
This style of delegation made her popularity rise further still, and ushered in a generation of trust and cooperation that hadn’t been seen before. That wasn’t to say that she criticised Dan and Marie or Polly, not at all. In fact their stewardship of the town had seen their people through the fall and the period of war and danger that had followed. Humanity, as Dan liked to say after his third drink, had a habit of trying to wipe itself out.
Leah disagreed. She believed, deep down, that the vast majority of people were kind and decent. The problem came when there was one person who wasn’t, because they often made enough noise for ten of those decent people and were followed by the weak who used cruelty as a shield against the harsh reality of life.
That said, when they did encounter people like that, she was sure to kill them instead of sitting them down and discussing their feelings.
As she walked slowly through the courtyard and out past the stable block where grass had grown beside the livestock pens, pausing every so often for her old dog to sniff at something before arthritically lifting a leg to mark it in what Neil had always called ‘checking his emails’, she thought about one such cruel man and the weak people that he had gathered to his cause.
/> Tomau
Tomau Codina had never really been happy. He had been born and raised in the stunning and affluent tax haven nestled in the valleys of the Pyrenees Mountains. His parents, both workers in the tourist industry which accounted for much of the revenue of Andorra, had never set their sights high enough in his opinion. He had been schooled there, even attended the new university there the same year it had first opened and had left after graduating with dreams of foreign adventure and glory.
His plans faded away to nothing when his mother fell ill and had stayed in the family home until she died a year later. His father, a man he saw as weak, could not accept the loss and drank more than he ate until he faded away a handful of years later. By that time, he had joined El Cos de Policia d’Andorra, the Police Corps of Andorra, after being on a waiting list for selection. While he waited he trained to become as physically fit as possible and held a dull job in retail where he was forced to bow and scrape to the foreign tourists who treated his country like a resort.
The police force, comprising of less than five hundred people and less than half of those being actual officers, grew tiresome for him as he had been posted directly from training to border patrol duties. Searching cars in and out of the natural choke points of entry into the valleys was fun to begin with, but he found himself longing for excitement. He spoke with his commanding officer, submitted his request in writing, and took a six-month break from his career to join a charitable program building schools in Western Africa. That time had humbled him in many ways, but when he returned to his home with a renewed sense of worth he soon fell back into a dark mood. His father had been fired from his job and sat in the dark at home drinking, and he was placed back on border patrol duties where he faced the same daily boredom as though he had never even been away.
Andorra_The Leah Chronicles Page 7
