Terminal Velocity

by Andy McNab

  Johnny said, ‘Looks like you’ve perfected the hundred-yard stare, anyway.’

  Ethan nodded and gripped the mug even harder, felt the heat sting his palms, tried to force it down his arms into the rest of his body. He didn’t care. It felt good. He took a sip, then another, and as the hot liquid slipped down it felt like it was bringing him back from the dead. Warmth spread through his body like fire through a tinder-dry forest.

  Ethan turned to Sam and asked a question he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer to. ‘How long was I in for?’

  ‘Forty-eight hours,’ said Sam. ‘Time flies.’

  Ethan almost laughed, but at that moment another person entered the room and the laugh caught in his throat like cloth snagged on barbed wire.

  It wasn’t just the pukka suit that gave him away, or the action-man-neat blond hair. It was the way he entered the room with such self-assurance and self-confidence, like he assumed he was in control wherever he went.

  It was the man from MI5: Gabe.

  Ethan felt Johnny rest a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Looks like play time’s over …’

  11

  An hour later, Ethan was cleaned up, fed, and despite being battered and exhausted, feeling a little more human. The rest of the team were also looking more like themselves, though Ethan could see bags under their eyes that looked black as coal.

  They were back in the room with the cobweb curtains.

  Gabe didn’t stand on ceremony.

  ‘Over the past six to twelve months, homeless teenage boys over the age of fifteen have been disappearing from the streets.’

  ‘If they’re homeless and presumably out of the system, how do you know?’ asked Kat. ‘And why would MI5 care?’

  ‘Yes, people disappear,’ Gabe answered sharply. ‘It happens. They fall off the radar, lose touch with their family and friends, with society. These kids were nothing more than a statistic. Little was thought of it. And no pattern in their disappearances was found because no one was out there looking for one.’ He paused, then said, ‘That was until one of them turned up looking like this.’

  Sam passed around copies of a large colour photograph. Ethan looked down at it and saw someone about his own age. Only this guy was a complete mess. Cut, bruised and broken, he was lying on a hospital bed, a respirator strapped to his face, drips hanging out of him looking like his veins had been torn out. Whatever he’d been through, thought Ethan, it looked a whole lot worse than what the team had just experienced. And that was really saying something.

  But then something struck Ethan as odd about the photograph, particularly with Gabe having just said that the boys who’d been disappearing were homeless.

  ‘You sure he was homeless?’ asked Ethan, not looking up from the photograph.

  ‘Yes,’ Gabe snapped.

  ‘It’s just he doesn’t look it,’ said Ethan.

  ‘Trust me,’ said Gabe. ‘He was homeless.’

  Ethan shrugged, but it still didn’t sit right in his mind. If he was homeless, then why didn’t he look all skinny and ill and malnourished? It wasn’t like he’d have been getting three square meals a day, was it? And he’d have been living outside too, sheltering anywhere he could. His skin would be a mess. Everything about him would look battered and beaten and worn. But the boy in the photograph – despite being injured to hell – didn’t just look fit: he looked like he’d spent every hour of the past however many months doing nothing but exercise. His body was lean and toned. Not massive and muscle-bound, but strong, solid. He was as fit as a butcher’s dog. In no way at all did he look like he’d just come off the street.

  ‘What happened to him?’ asked Natalya. ‘He was hit by a car to sustain these injuries, yes?’

  Sam shook his head, and what he said next cut the moment with all the subtlety of an executioner’s axe: ‘He died two hours after that photograph was taken.’

  The silence that slipped into the room at that news more than communicated the shock everyone felt at hearing it. Ethan stared again at the picture; the reality that the boy was dead sent him cold.

  ‘However,’ said Gabe, his voice calm, collected, ‘despite his appalling injuries, we were able to get a few things from him before he died. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to pique our interest. Which is where, I’m afraid to say, you all come in.’

  ‘What about his family?’ asked Kat, and Ethan not only saw raw emotion on her face, but also heard it in her voice. ‘Do they know what happened to him? Have you contacted them?’

  Gabe nodded. ‘Of course. We have carried out all the usual procedures required in such a situation.’

  ‘So you know why he was on the street, then? People don’t just end up there for no good reason, do they—?’

  ‘That was not our concern,’ said Gabe, cutting Kat off before she asked another question. ‘Neither is it yours.’

  Ethan saw Kat clench her jaw, like she was physically forcing herself not to continue with her questions.

  Gabe said, ‘Our focus is on why he was snatched from the street. Not how he ended up there.’

  Ethan looked again at the photo. Gabe’s attitude sounded cold, unfeeling, and Ethan understood why Kat would find that difficult to deal with. Compared with the rest of the team, particularly Natalya, Kat was the one who didn’t guard her thoughts; if something was on her mind then she said it. And now, with that photo in front of her, that’s exactly what she was doing. Secretly Ethan wished he had the balls to do the same.

  With another quick glance to Kat, who by now had turned her attention completely away from Gabe and back to the photograph, Ethan thought again about the boy who he now knew was dead. Whoever he had been – and ‘boy’ really didn’t describe him at all – Ethan could tell that it was no car accident that had killed him. With injuries like that, Ethan hazarded a guess that he’d been battered, kicked till he was half-dead, then left for nature to do the rest.

  He asked, ‘Where did you find him?’

  ‘Someone was walking their dog along a beach on the south coast,’ answered Sam. ‘Saw their dog sniffing at something. Found our boy here. Phoned the police.’

  ‘That must’ve been awful,’ said Kat, and Ethan again saw her face mirror just what she was feeling as she shook her head, closed her eyes for a moment.

  ‘He was barely alive when they found him,’ said Gabe. ‘He regained consciousness twice, each time for no more than a few minutes.’

  Luke asked the question on Ethan’s lips. ‘So if he wasn’t smashed up in a car accident, what actually killed him? How exactly did he get all those injuries? And what does it have to do with us?’

  Ethan realized then he’d been too stunned by what he’d seen in the photograph to think why Gabe was here at all, telling them any of this. Luke had a point; what did this have to do with them? Why exactly was Gabe here?

  Gabe sat back against a table, folded his arms. ‘I’ll cut to the chase. The injuries you see here are not, as Sam has already pointed out, from a car accident, or indeed from a simple beating. Our boy wasn’t the victim of a mugging or a random attack by a bunch of drunks looking for some alternative entertainment after a night on the beers.’

  ‘So what you’re actually saying,’ said Kat, her voice a mix of realization and distress, ‘is that this wasn’t just deliberate, it was planned.’

  Gabe nodded and Ethan was impressed; Kat seemed to have worked it all out before the rest of them.

  ‘So what was the reason?’ continued Kat, like she was positively demanding answers from Gabe. ‘Was it drugs, gang crime … what?’

  ‘For a start, planned isn’t quite the right word,’ said Gabe, ‘but the injuries are more than deliberate, that much is obvious. According to our pathologist, most of them match the type of injuries generally only sustained during a serious fight of what can only be described as ferocious brutality. And by that I don’t mean one where he was jumped on or taken by surprise and had to fight back.’ He held out an autopsy report a
nd Ethan took it numbly.

  Johnny said, ‘You’re not expecting us to believe he got these injuries in a fight he willingly took part in?’

  The fact that Gabe didn’t even nod made his silent confirmation of what Johnny had said even more shocking.

  Sam said, ‘He knew what he was doing and fought back just as hard. As shocking as that may sound, it’s the only conclusion that can be drawn.’

  Ethan looked at the photograph again, flicked through the autopsy report. He had to say something, particularly as no one else had as yet mentioned just how in shape the boy looked. ‘Something else still isn’t right.’

  As he spoke, Kat said at the same time, ‘He just doesn’t look homeless.’

  Ethan looked at Kat and in that brief moment knew they’d drawn the same conclusion. He nodded for her to say some more, but she shook her head, nodded back.

  ‘Ethan?’ said Gabe.

  He glanced again at Kat, then said, ‘Say you’re right and he was homeless. If you ignore all those injuries, he doesn’t exactly look like he’s been surviving on the streets, does he?’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘Maybe I’m wrong,’ said Ethan, ‘but I’m guessing if you’re homeless, you don’t have access to a gym.’ He raised the photograph up to emphasize what he was saying. ‘Whereas he has a body you only get if you train for hours every week and sort your diet out. This is someone who’s lived on protein shakes, not stuff nicked out of wheelie bins.’

  Ethan sat back, pleased to have finally got that off his chest. Out of the corner of his eye, he was sure he noticed a faint smile on Kat’s face. He didn’t respond; it was just nice to know that they were on the same wavelength.

  Gabe nodded and looked again at the files in his hands. ‘For your information,’ he said, ‘his injuries include cracked ribs, broken teeth, split lips, smashed nose, swollen eyes. He has bruises that match those sustained from punching and kicking. He has a fractured bone in his leg and his knuckles are heavily bruised. And that’s just the fresh injuries you can all see here. His body is quite literally covered in older injuries, badly healed fractures, scars.’

  ‘Add to that zero body fat, huge lung capacity, serious muscle mass,’ said Sam, ‘and I think you all know where this is going.’

  ‘But you can’t be homeless and keep fit,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Traces of steroids were also found in his blood,’ said Sam, ignoring Johnny’s comment. ‘His diet seems to have been focused completely on peak performance: high protein, slow-release carbs, dietary supplements like creatine. In a word, all the stuff you’d expect to find in someone training hard for something. And by training, I mean doing little else but.’

  Kat spoke for them all: ‘Like what, Sam? What exactly was he training for?’

  Gabe explained. ‘With the information you have in front of you now, and looking not just at his injuries, but his diet, his physiology … it all matches that of a professional fighter.’

  ‘Not a boxer, though,’ said Sam. ‘But a cage fighter. Someone used to being in a ring where anything goes.’

  ‘Kids cage fighting?’ said Luke, and Ethan heard the usually unwavering voice shake a little in disbelief. ‘That’s impossible, Sam. Cage fighting may be completely insane, but it’s mostly legit, so long as you’re over eighteen. And the blokes who do it are all mixed-martial-arts experts. People get hurt – but they don’t usually die.’

  ‘All we’re doing is giving you the facts,’ said Sam. ‘And they tell us that this kid died not because he was beaten up by accident, not because he was hit by a pissed-up loser behind the wheel, but because he was fighting on a regular basis and got unlucky. Sounds crazy, I know, but there is no other conclusion. Trust me, we’ve tried to find one.’

  Ethan thought back to what Luke had said earlier, and when he spoke next he had a feeling he was asking the question on everyone’s mind. ‘So why are you telling us? Just what the hell happened to him and what’s it got to do with us?’

  Sam closed the file he was holding, pulled out a chair and sat down. He leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees and looked at the team. ‘As Gabe mentioned, before the lad died we were able to get a little information from him about what he’d been through, how he’d ended up in such a state and washed up on a beach. So what we’re telling you isn’t simply based on what we learned from what you’ve just seen. It’s also because of what he told us.’

  ‘He told you he was a cage fighter?’ said Kat, and Ethan heard disbelief in her voice.

  Sam said, ‘Yes. He wasn’t very coherent, and he kept falling in and out of consciousness, but from what he told us, what we now know is that he was kidnapped off the streets. No warning, nothing. Just snatched. A professional abduction with no witnesses, no evidence, nothing.’

  ‘How?’ asked Luke.

  ‘Not sure,’ Sam replied. ‘The lad remembered only that he was taken and ended up in a place with a number of others like him. All of them homeless.’

  ‘I’m beginning to wish I wasn’t listening to this,’ said Kat, and Ethan saw her turn the photograph face down on her knee, like she’d had enough and that was the end of her involvement. He was half tempted to follow suit.

  ‘It gets worse,’ said Sam. ‘From what he told us, we think that this is a highly organized operation involving the kidnapping of homeless lads, just like him, to be trained up and forced to fight in illegal, high-stakes cage fighting.’

  Sam allowed what he’d just said to sink in. Then he spoke again. ‘Whatever happened in the fight, we can only assume that he lost. And losing obviously came with a heavy price; he was probably dumped out at sea and left for dead. He had a bullet graze on the right of his head – someone wanted him dead, but fouled the shot, probably figured he’d die anyway and didn’t go in with another to make sure. Somehow, he managed to get to shore, but his injuries, and the exposure he suffered, were too much for him to cope with and his body shut down.’

  Gabe pulled a laptop computer from a bag on a table nearby. He opened it, switched it on and inserted a disc. A picture flickered into focus on the screen. ‘Just watch,’ he said.

  Everyone fell silent.

  12

  Ethan wanted to turn away, but ghoulish fascination took hold. He couldn’t help but watch what was happening on the screen, no matter how wrong, how violent.

  Two lads, both around his age, one in red shorts, the other blue, were shut in a hexagonal cage at least two metres high. They were circling each other. Both were bleeding. The one in red had only one eye working, his other was swollen so badly it looked like a lump of fresh, bleeding meat. His arm was covered in blood from trying to wipe it clear. The rest of his face wasn’t in that much better shape and his knuckles, held up as they were to try and protect his head from any further damage, were cut and bloody.

  The one in the blue shorts looked in an even worse state, dragging his right foot behind him, his left arm hanging uselessly. Ethan guessed it was broken. Either that or so severely dislocated that he could do nothing with it. Blood was streaming from the side of his head and down his body from a torn ear.

  Ethan turned away from what was on the screen and saw that the rest of the team were all equally horrified. Johnny’s usual carefree demeanour had been replaced by a stare both hard and unwavering. Luke looked the same, though whereas Johnny had leaned forward, his hands clasped together white-knuckle tight, Luke was leaning back in his chair, arms folded. Ethan wasn’t sure if Natalya was looking at the screen at all, but her eyes were narrowed, her lips pursed. Of all of them though, it seemed that Kat was the most affected. She was visibly horrified, and Ethan was for a moment taken aback by just how affected by it she was; there were tears in her eyes, but at the same time she was refusing to turn away, almost as though she was forcing herself to fully understand what the boy in the photograph had been through.

  Ethan turned his attention back to the screen. The fight was becoming even more brutal. ‘Look, I think we get the picture,’ he
said, concerned now about how the film was affecting the team. ‘We don’t need to see any more. We can guess the rest.’

  ‘No,’ said Gabe. ‘You have to see this. You need to understand exactly why we need you and what you are going to be up against.’

  Looking again at the violence on the screen of Gabe’s computer, Ethan wondered just how many times Gabe and Sam had watched what he and the rest of the team were all seeing now for the first time. Then another thought struck him; for people to put money on a fight like this, then others must have watched it live at the time. He had no idea how many; it was a chilling thought that sent him so cold he felt almost dizzy with it. Nausea swept through him. And he saw Kat turn white.

  When the fight finished and the screen went blank, Gabe broke the shocked silence. ‘We believe,’ he said, ‘that the boy found on the beach is just one of God knows how many kids to have ended up like this.’

  ‘You mean dead?’ snapped Kat. ‘Why the hell did you have to show us that? We could’ve guessed what happened!’

  ‘We believe,’ said Gabe evenly, ‘that the whole show is being run by an arms dealer, known to us only at the moment as “Mr X”, who we’ve been trying to catch for years. He runs an operation smuggling weapons into the UK, and we have no idea where or how. We are, to say the least, desperate to nail the bastard.’

  Ethan was impressed with how Gabe managed to stay unfazed by what he was saying, or by the reaction of the team, particularly Kat. He wasn’t being cold, Ethan knew that; he was being professional.

  ‘We have never been able to collect enough evidence to bring him down,’ continued Gabe. ‘However, if we can find a way into this cage-fighting syndicate, we think we have our best chance at not only apprehending him, but also exposing those he deals with: serious criminals, terrorists – you get the picture.’ Gabe nodded back towards his now-dead laptop. ‘This is the kind of game that attracts big earners with questionable moral compasses. Just the kind of punters our Mr X likes to deal with.

  ‘Wherever these fights take place and are filmed – and it could even be offshore – the likelihood is there will be a server to relay the recording to all of the people who are signed up to watch. Certainly Mr X will want to make sure the relay only goes through a secure and isolated server rather than through any other more traceable hardware.’