by Andy Maslen
“OK, look. We’ve got some cleaning up to do. You need your wounds looking at. I don’t think they’re too serious but we don’t want infection setting in. Do you know what else Venter had going on here? Any incinerators, compactors, anything like that?”
“Oh, better than that, Gabriel. Much better than that,” Maitland said. He was becoming more coherent. “He told me once he had to get rid of someone. A customer from an old Italian family in Chicago who tried to cheat him. Guess what? His neighbour keeps pigs. A big herd of porkers on a field with a shared boundary to Bart’s place. You know what pigs are like.” Maitland sniggered. “They’ll eat anything.”
“What about the bikes?” Shaun asked. “Even the razorback hogs we got back in Arkansas wouldn’t chow down on a Harley. Well, the seat maybe, but not the rest.”
“Ah, well, good old Barty came through for us again. Follow the road past the shooting field for half a mile and you come to a flooded gravel pit. You could lose his whole house in there. Take the backhoe from the yard and dump them in. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to throw up.”
Maitland weaved over to a corner of the field and emptied his stomach onto the grass. The acrid stench reached them on the breeze, mingled with the smell of the burnt propellant and the blood, drying in the sun.
“So, which of you two does the neatest stitches?” he called.
They half-carried Maitland into the house, supporting him between them. Once they’d laid Maitland down on the kitchen table, Shaun went off to track down a medicine cabinet. He reappeared, arms loaded. It turns out being an arms dealer means you need a decent first aid kit.
“Who knew Venter would have all this? I’ve been treated by paramedics with less kit.” Shaun dumped his booty on the worktop. He’d brought towels, plus a plastic first aid box the size of a small suitcase. He flipped the moulded catches on the case, opened the lid flat and started laying out the contents. “OK, let’s see, we got bandages, splints, Micropore tape, Band-Aids, lots of Band-Aids. Woah! OK, we have field dressings. I have a tourniquet, trauma shears, and, what’s this? Yes! QuickClot ACS.”
“What the hell is Quick Lot?” Maitland said. The adrenaline in his bloodstream had been metabolised and now he was hurting from his wounds.
“Not Quick Lot. QuickClot. ACS stands for Advanced Clotting Sponge. Says here it has a ‘naturally occurring adsorbent mineral’ in it. Zeolite. Speeds up the clotting process.” He turned to Gabriel. “OK, let’s get his jacket and shirt off. The one in his side looks like it’s the worst.”
As Gabriel manhandled Maitland half upright, Shaun reached for the trauma shears – tough steel scissors with dog-legged blades designed for cutting through fabric quickly.
“Oh no you don’t,” muttered Maitland. “I had this made. It cost more than you make in a month.”
“Yeah? Well, right now it’s a fetching shade of blood-red, so unless you want to bleed out and be buried in it, I suggest you let us get on with it,” Shaun said.
Without further discussion, he slid the open mouth of the scissors onto the back of Maitland’s collar and began cutting down. The blades were not just tough, but sharp, and in seconds, Maitland’s jacket, tie and shirt were lying in a bloody pile on the kitchen floor, each garment sharing an identical vertical cut where the scissors had slid through wool, interlining, silk and cotton in one downward slice.
They lay Maitland back down on the table. As Shaun washed out the gunshot wound on Maitland’s side with a pouch of saline solution, Gabriel asked, “You’ve done this before?”
“Sure. I was a medic specialist. Delta train you to perform basic surgery on combat wounds. There wasn’t always a chopper to get us out. I even removed a guy’s appendix once.” With the wound free of debris, Shaun peered at it. “OK, you’re lucky. It just took out a bit of flesh, not even muscle. Must’ve clipped you on its way past. It’s caught a vein, that’s why the blood, but no major tissue damage.”
“Oh, well that’s such a relief,” Maitland said. “As long as all it did was ‘clip’ me.”
Clamping the clotting sponge over the wound, Shaun snapped at Maitland. The first time Gabriel had heard him raise his voice to his boss. Their boss.
“Listen! That was an M16 round. You know how lucky you are? Those bullets hit you full-on, they tumble inside you. Something to do with physics. They rip you up inside like a pitbull with a cat. Now hold this.” He took Maitland’s left hand and clamped it down over the sponge, which had deformed around and into the flesh wound on Maitland’s side. “Look, you’ve got a through-and-through in your hand. Looks messy but I think it’s going to be OK. There’s that big old cut on your head as well. You got a couple of pellets embedded in your upper arm and some superficial burns and cuts. Venter had some fancy pharmaceuticals in his kit as well as all the surgical shit. Gabriel, pass me that bottle near the shears, will you? And a hypo.”
Gabriel reached over and grabbed the little brown plastic cylinder Shaun was pointing at and a syringe, and handed them over.
“This is Ketamine. Anaesthetic. The kids use it in clubs sometimes but this is strictly weapons-grade,” Shaun said. After pulling off the protective plastic sheath from the hypodermic needle, he filled the tiny cylinder with the clear liquid and plunged it into Maitland’s right shoulder. “It’ll knock you over while I stitch you up. He’s got morphine, too, so I’ll give you some of that when you come round.”
“Just get on with it, will you. We have work to do. This is a huge inconve—”
Then Maitland’s eyes rolled upward in their sockets.
“OK,” Shaun said. “Who’s feeling like Martha Stewart?”
The tension of the last few hours was released in a hysterical outburst that lasted for a full minute. While Maitland slumbered, his wounds temporarily forgotten, they clutched their sides and howled.
“Oh, Jesus, man!” Shaun said at one point. “What have we gotten ourselves into? He’s mad, you know that, right?”
“Fucked Up Beyond All Reason!”
“Totally FUBAR!”
This set off another round of giggling that took another thirty seconds to peter out.
“Let’s do this,” Shaun said. “I need chow, coffee, sleep and beer, not necessarily in that order.”
While Gabriel handed him sutures, dressings and powders, and cut stitches off short when instructed, Shaun did a fast and effective job of closing Maitland’s wounds.
The bullet wound in his side was a mess. The copper-jacketed round had gouged a trough through skin and fat; not deep, or even wide, just ugly: the edges were uneven with blobs of fat protruding from beneath the skin. Shaun cleaned the wound again with saline solution from another pouch and put a row of eight stitches along its length. Sprinkled it with white chlorhexidine antiseptic powder, covered it with a big, square field dressing and secured it with a few lengths of Micropore tape.
Shaun pulled the two lead pellets from the unconscious man’s bicep with long-nosed surgical steel forceps, dropping them with quiet clinks into a cup next to the sink. Each hole needed a single stitch to pull it closed. Then Shaun dusted them with more of the chlorhexidine. The scalp wound was trickier. They had to shave an inch-wide stripe of hair away from the cut edges of skin. It took nine stitches to bring the ragged edges of skin together and the result was ugly, if effective.
“He’s going to roast my ass when he sees that next time he shaves,” Shaun said.
“Don’t worry, a comb-over will sort it out.”
“Yeah. Or a hat!”
The wound to Maitland’s left hand looked worse than it was. The shotgun pellet was small, with low kinetic energy, so it hadn’t deformed much while travelling through the flesh. The entrance wound was a quarter-inch hole in the fleshy pad at the base of the thumb, which had already filled with a black clot that Shaun left in place. The tiny lead sphere had tunnelled through the half-inch of skin, muscle and connective tissue and emerged on the other side, leaving a ragged-edge hole about half as big ag
ain. Shaun pulled it closed with a couple of stitches, sprinkled with chlorhexidine and dressed with a pad of gauze and a foot of bandage. Then he and Gabriel cleaned up the burns, swabbing the minor abrasions clean and smearing them all with antiseptic cream.
“We’re done,” Shaun said. “I’m going to give him a shot of morphine. I don’t know how long he’s going to stay under but he’s going to be hurting like hell when he wakes up.”
Once the injection was administered, they carried Maitland upstairs, found a bedroom and lowered him onto the bed, covered by a sheet.
“You know what, Gabriel?”
“What?”
“A beer would feel good right about now. Come on. That monster fridge better have some Bud in it or I’m going to torch the whole damn place.”
They sat at the big rectangular oak dining table – the kitchen table was still bloody from the wound repairs – eating ham and cheese sandwiches and drinking beer from the bottle, for all the world as though they were just passing the time with a quick picnic before heading out to a football game.
Gabriel levered the tops of two more bottles and handed one to Shaun. He was sipping from his while the big ex-Delta man was draining his in long, thirsty swallows. They clinked the new bottles and carried on drinking until Shaun pushed himself away from the table and announced that he was going to hit the hay. It was only nine o’clock. But it had been a very long day. Gabriel let Shaun clump his way upstairs to another bedroom. Then he headed outside. He needed to clear his head.
As if communicating by telepathy, both men were downstairs, showered, shaved and dressed in jeans and T-shirts, by six the next morning. They brewed coffee, ate and then, nodding, headed back to the field to begin the clean-up operation.
Overnight, scavengers – foxes and crows, Gabriel guessed, maybe owls – had removed all the smaller pieces of flesh. But the ground under and around the corpses of Venter and the Hells Angels was soaked in blood, which had turned the dry, brick-coloured soil into deep, dark, wine-red mud. Gabriel had seen plenty of death in his time – from gunshots, grenades, cluster munitions, knives, bare hands – and the damage the Browning had done to Meeks and his men was in the premier league. The bodies were missing whole areas of anatomy. One man had lost half his chest, another’s head lay three yards from his body. Too heavy for a scavenger to carry off, it lay staring sightlessly up at the sky. Thanks to Maitland’s crazed outburst, Venter looked just as bad. A normal wound from a .22, even into the skull, is a relatively insignificant affair: a neat entrance hole and no exit wound. The Ithaca 37’s round, delivered at point-blank range, had obliterated his head and painted the remains into the sides of a six-inch crater in the soft purplish mud.
“How are we going to do this?” Shaun asked, looking at Gabriel. “I’m not a fan of Maitland’s original plan, are you?”
“What, the pigs?”
“Yes. The pigs. Like I said, if they’re hungry and ornery enough they’ll eat anything, bones included. But I don’t fancy pulling this lot to wherever this shared boundary is, do you?”
“No. I don’t. And supposing they’re not hungry? Some pig farmer’s going to go and inspect his herd and find a pile of Hells Angel body parts in a corner of his field. That could get decidedly interesting for the police round here.”
“So?”
“Maitland mentioned a backhoe, for the bikes. We could bury them.”
“But they’d still, you know, be there. Just underground. Don’t you watch TV in England? People are always digging up bodies. They never really go away. We need something faster. And permanent.”
“Venter was an arms dealer, right?”
“Sure. Damn impressive one as it happens.”
“So maybe he has more toys in those barns. Something we could use to stage an explosion.”
Shaun’s face split into a big grin that changed him from scarred fighting man to plain country boy out to do some trapping or fishing with a friend.
“Let’s go,” he said.
The pair jogged up to the farmyard. There were three big barns in a row, made of the same dull grey corrugated iron. Each was accessible via double doors on rails, which were secured with heavy brass padlocks with steel shackles, just like the one Venter had opened yesterday to let them into the firing range.
“Shit! We need some serious bolt-cutters to get through those,” Shaun said.
“Maybe not. I’ve got an idea.”
Gabriel grasped the padlock of the left-most barn. With his thumb he slid the four combination wheels around, each one making a series of precise clicks as the ten grooves snicked over the internal workings of the lock mechanism.
1 – 8 – 9 – 9
He pulled down on the lock body but the shackle didn’t move a millimetre.
“OK, one more try,” he said under his breath.
1 – 9 – 0 – 2
He pulled again and this time, the lock body and the shackle slid apart.
“Bingo!”
“How did you know Venter’s combination?”
“Remember he mentioned his grandfather?”
“What, the one who died in the Nazi camps?”
“Yes and no. He did die in a concentration camp, but it was a British one, in the Boer war. He’d have been too old to fight in World War Two.”
“And?”
“1899 to 1902. The dates of the Boer War. Venter was still angry about it, so I figured it was like a family story, something deep-seated.”
“I guess I should of studied my military history a little harder, then, shouldn’t I?”
“Come on,” Gabriel said, “let’s have a poke around.”
The barn had no windows anywhere, no apertures in the iron walls or roof. It smelled hot and dusty, and of grease, gun oil and metal. Rustles, scurrying and scratching sounds confirmed the presence of rats, for whom padlocks were no barrier to a warm place to nest. Shaun turned the lights on.
“Jesus, Joseph and Sweet Mother Mary!” he muttered.
“Seconded,’ agreed Gabriel.
The two men looked ahead. Before them, gleaming under the fluorescent tubes hanging from chains in the roof, was a collection of weaponry that would have any military armourer salivating. Along the left wall were racks of assault rifles, mostly M16s, but some Russian-made stuff too. Gabriel saw a couple of Barratt M82 .50 calibre sniper rifles, capable of killing an enemy combatant at ranges of over a mile. Stacked in neat rectangular towers were olive green crates with white and yellow stencilled capitals that announced they contained anti-tank weapons. Parked with military precision, dead-centre in the barn, were two BFVs – Bradley Fighting Vehicles. They could hold a crew of three plus another six in the rear compartment: not main battle tanks, but with their tracks, sand camouflage, anti-tank missiles and ferociously effective 25 mm chain-driven gun on the turret, something you’d want to avoid if you were an insurgent or enemy soldier.
“Shit on a stick, he’s got everything in here!” Shaun whistled in appreciation, his Arkansas roots pushing up through the soil. “Y’all could whup some serious ass with one of those Bradleys.”
Gabriel, meanwhile, had wandered beyond the vehicles and was checking a typed list of merchandise fixed to a cheap plastic clipboard.
“Come over here, Shaun.”
“What you got? A Hummer back there? A nuke? What?”
“Better.”
Chapter 25
“If this stock list is up-to-date there’s C-4 in here. Crates of the stuff. Enough plastic explosive to take out a city block.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking we drive the Land Cruiser over here, pack some C4 into it, then take it back to Meeks and his crew.”
“How do you plan on detonating it?”
“Well, you saw those tankbusters back there, didn’t you? I’m thinking we could put a round from a Carl Gustaf into the Land Cruiser. That should light it up OK, don’t you think?”
“Damn straight! OK. Let’s do it. Venter
left the keys in so I’ll go and get the Cruiser, you find the C-4. How much you think we need?”
“Good question. I never did much explosives training. We want to destroy everything but I don’t want to wake the cops in Chicago.”
“Huh. I’m thinking, maybe a couple of pounds. You don’t need much.”
“OK. I’ll make a start. Don’t be long.”
While Shaun was bringing the Land Cruiser round to the farmyard, Gabriel cross-checked the stock list against the numbered steel shelves at the rear of the barn. It didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for. Venter had been meticulous in his stock-keeping. At the end of one row of shelves was a stack of squat, cuboid crates, painted the same olive green, stencilled with the same white and yellow capital letters. Each crate announced that it contained ten pounds of C-4 plastic explosive in M112 demolition blocks. Normally, Gabriel would want fuses as well, but he knew a round from the recoilless rifle should more than do the job of exciting the molecules of explosive to the point they triggered an explosion. He broke open the nearest crate with a pry bar hanging from a hook above a workbench. A waft of stale air hit him carrying a faint smell of motor oil mixed with a puttyish, plasticky aroma. The C-4, known officially in the Army as Composition C-4, was divided into flat rectangular packages, two by eleven inches and about an inch or so thick. Each block was wrapped in black plastic film, with more yellow capitals printed on the top side.
Gabriel lifted six packages from the crate, a total of seven and a half pounds, and carried them past the racks of rifles and anti-tank weapons to the doors. He placed them carefully to one side in the shade of the barn. For a minute or two he waited, listening to the birds singing in the trees and the wind sighing through the branches of the fir trees that shielded the firing range from the house. Then he heard the discordant rattle of the Land Cruiser’s turbo diesel and the heavy scuffing of its knobbly off-road tyres on the gravel track. Shaun swung the big SUV in a tight circle and backed up to the barn. He jumped down.
