The Kill Zone

by Chris Ryan

  ‘What do you have on me?’ O’Callaghan demanded. He seemed quite unmoved by her agony.

  Siobhan clenched her teeth. She wished she was stronger, that she could withstand this. But she knew she couldn’t. She knew she didn’t have any option other than to talk.

  ‘Khan,’ she breathed. ‘I know about Khan. I followed him.’ As she spoke, she was looking at O’Callaghan, and she saw an expression of surprise pass over his lined face. ‘He’s got my daughter. He’s a terrorist.’ Even through her pain, she knew it sounded feeble.

  ‘It’s my experience,’ O’Callaghan hissed, ‘that one man’s terrorist is another man’s—’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Siobhan interrupted. ‘He’s got a chemical weapon, a dirty bomb, enough to kill thousands. I don’t know what his target is. I don’t even know which country, but . . .’

  She couldn’t speak any more. It was just too much. The nausea was almost as bad as the pain in her leg and she thought she was going to vomit. O’Callaghan, though, looked almost thoughtful, as though this new piece of intelligence had explained something to him.

  He narrowed his eyes. Contemplation. The sound of Siobhan’s renewed gasping filled the air.

  Cormac O’Callaghan turned back to her. His eyes, suddenly, were fierce. Fiery. He aimed his shotgun at Siobhan’s pelvis and inclined his head slightly like a man curious to observe the effects of what he was about to do.

  ‘Where is Khan now?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  It wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear. Or maybe it was.

  Without another second’s hesitation he put a flame to the dog bowl again.

  When the screams returned, they pierced Jack’s core.

  The hedgerow whizzed past him in a blur. He passed a car coming in the other direction that was forced to swerve into a ditch. Jack didn’t care. Horrific images had filled his head. He pushed them away. There was no space for them. He had to concentrate on what was important. Getting there quickly.

  Getting there in time . . .

  Cormac O’Callaghan deadened the flames again. He had long grown immune to the sight and sound of people suffering. He knew of his reputation, of course – that he enjoyed inflicting pain – and was perfectly happy to foster it. But the truth was he felt nothing. As a younger man he had done terrible things to people, more to see if he could stir up some sort of feeling in himself than anything else. It never did.

  So it was that the sight of this naked, burned, brutalised cop failed to move him; her screams, growing increasingly hoarse by the minute, barely attracted his attention; the stink of her burning skin and her blood failed to nauseate him. It would have been the same even if his mind hadn’t been on other things.

  Like Khan.

  For months now, he’d been wondering why the man had been supplying him with high-quality heroin at such a low rate. Truth was, Habib Khan could have named his price and O’Callaghan would most likely have paid it. There had to be an ulterior motive, and Cormac wasn’t so stupid that he didn’t realise Khan’s ‘additional’ packages, smuggled in on the southern Irish coast, over the border into Northern Ireland then across to the mainland by sea, were something to do with it. But what the pig had just told him made the pennies drop . . .

  He turned back to look at her. She was a mess, no two ways about it. Strapped to that post, with flames licking up her legs and hair straggling over her agonised face, she reminded him of figures he had seen as a child, etched on the stained-glass windows of the churches his mother had dragged him to on Sundays. The young Cormac had never known who those figures represented, and as an adult he’d never been inclined to find out.

  Khan was a clever guy. Everyone thought he was a goody-fucking-two-shoes, and Cormac had always assumed that this was just a front for his drug business. If what the cop was saying was right, though, he had bigger interests.

  Bigger plans.

  It didn’t matter to Cormac O’Callaghan what they were. His only concern was that the drugs kept coming. And if this pig was on Khan’s case, if she had something on him . . . well then, she was a threat to Cormac’s business. To his livelihood.

  And that wasn’t something he could allow to continue.

  She was murmuring something. At first he tried to work out what it was. Perhaps it was of interest. He thought he caught a single word.

  ‘Lily’, maybe.

  He smiled. The woman had said Khan had her daughter and a face rose in his mind: pale, thin, with greasy mousy hair and black rings round her eyes. Khan had wanted a girl when they first met, and O’Callaghan of all people was in a position to supply him with one of the helpless junkies that littered the streets of Belfast. Her name had been Lily.

  He walked up to the whimpering woman and put his lips to her ears. ‘She’s all fucked up,’ he whispered. ‘And I mean that literally.’

  The woman tried to say something, but the words didn’t come. She was clearly on the way out.

  There was no point prolonging it. She needed to be dead. He retrieved his gun from the floor, then placed it against her head. He looked away, not because he was disgusted, but to avoid the spatter.

  And then he fired.

  At the sound of the gunshot, the pigeons in the rafters flocked up in a cloud yet again.

  24

  Jack saw Siobhan’s car thirty metres up ahead; and beyond it, the barn. He stopped the car and approached by foot, running quickly but quietly, driven by panic, past an old tractor and up to the big main barn, where he stopped by the half-open door, mastered his heavy breathing, and peered inside.

  He would never, he knew, be able to forget the scene that awaited him.

  There was a body on the floor away to his right. Impossible to tell who it was, but he was male and still had a half-smoked cigarette in his hand. Along one side of the barn, against some hay bales and with his back to him, was another man, stooping slightly as he put something into a small bag. But it was neither of these two people that commanded Jack’s attention. His eyes were glued to the horror in the centre of the barn.

  Siobhan was tied naked to a post. At least, he thought it was Siobhan. Half her head was blown away, and her legs were charred and blistered. Her skin was spattered with blood and although her body was still upright, it had the appalling limpness of the newly dead.

  Jack felt his strength momentarily desert him. The world seemed to spin, and as he pressed his back up against the outside wall of the barn he struggled to keep his balance. He drew a deep breath, steadying himself, absorbing the shock like a boxer taking a punch.

  And then he felt all his emotions turn to anger. More than anger. A kind of blind, all-consuming rage that filled every cell of his body. All self-control left him. He turned into the doorway and burst into the barn.

  By now the stooped figure had turned. He was a thin-looking man with a deeply lined face, a full head of hair, unruly eyebrows and a scar leading from the side of his mouth across one cheek. Jack knew the face. It was imprinted on his mind from his time in the Province, the result of having studied any number of photographs of the fucker back in the days of the Provisional IRA. He looked older now, of course, but there was no doubt in Jack’s mind that this was Cormac O’Callaghan himself.

  When O’Callaghan saw Jack, his eyes widened, and he tried to open the bag he was carrying. But he didn’t have nearly enough time as the Regiment man bore down on him like a tank, covering the ten metres between them in a second. Jack grabbed him by the neck, then threw him to the ground with a single, brutal thrust.

  For an old guy, O’Callaghan scrambled to his feet remarkably quickly, and rather than try to get away from Jack, he continued to fumble with the zip of his bag. Jack went for it, launching himself at his enemy again, swiping the bag from his hands and then cracking it against the side of the man’s skull. The hard metal of the concealed sawn-off knocked O’Callaghan to the ground for a second time, creating a red welt on the side of his face. He didn’t
move. Unconscious. How long for, it was impossible to tell.

  Jack opened the bag. Inside he found the shotgun, the cross-bolt safety in front of its trigger switched on. He knocked it off, but then looked around him. Two bodies. Two shots. If there were cartridges in the weapon, they’d both been spent. He turned it round, held on to the barrel and started pummelling O’Callaghan’s unconscious body with the butt. He was going to kill the bastard right now.

  But something stopped him.

  Jack looked over his shoulder, and the sight of Siobhan’s trussed-up corpse was once more like a corkscrew in his stomach. Jesus, he’d seen enough deaths in his time, but this was different.

  He turned back to O’Callaghan, ready to finish him off.

  But he stopped again. It was almost as if there was a presence in the room. Siobhan, holding him back. What would she tell him to do? Avenge her? No. She’d want to question him. Find out what he knew. Do it, Jack. He could almost hear her voice in his head. Work it properly. Find Lily. For me.

  He strode up to O’Callaghan and booted him hard in the stomach to keep him out of action a while longer. He walked up to Siobhan and quickly untied her, carefully laying her body on the ground. Only then did he return to O’Callaghan, dragging him to another of the posts, forcing him up on to two feet and then tying him up in just the same way that Siobhan had been bound. O’Callaghan was conscious now and he tried to struggle – but he was no match for Jack’s strength, or his fury, or his determination.

  No match at all.

  When he was bound and immobile, Jack stood with his face only inches away from O’Callaghan.

  ‘Here’s the problem, O’Callaghan,’ he growled. ‘I don’t think you’re nearly scared enough of me yet, so we’re going to do something to make that change.’

  Cormac didn’t reply, but the wildness behind his eyes was eloquent enough.

  Jack looked around, then jogged to the far end of the barn. There was an old tool here, some kind of scythe, rusty, with a long wooden handle. He leaned it up against the wall, then brought his foot down against it until the handle snapped. Smaller. More manageable. He carried it back to where his victim was waiting.

  O’Callaghan’s eyes darted between Jack’s face and the rusty blade.

  ‘Which side?’ Jack mused. ‘The left?’ He waved the blade just in front of O’Callaghan’s shoulder. ‘Or the right?’ He moved it to the other side of his body. ‘Left or right?’ he murmured to himself. ‘Left or right?’

  A pause. And then, suddenly . . .

  ‘I’d say, left.’

  Jack’s arm moved quickly and with great force. He skewered the old blade into the area between O’Callaghan’s left shoulder and his torso. O’Callaghan shrieked with agony, even more so when Jack twisted the blade like he was rotating a spit. There wasn’t much blood, but there would be if he removed the blade, and Jack didn’t want the bastard bleeding to death. Not yet.

  ‘Who killed her?’ he demanded. ‘You or him?’ He indicated the dead male body on the floor.

  ‘He did,’ O’Callaghan hissed. ‘He was going to do me too, so I took him out.’

  Jack gave him a sad kind of look. ‘Seems you’re still not scared enough,’ he said. ‘You’re lying to me.’

  ‘I’m not lying . . . I’m not . . .’

  ‘If he was going to take you out, he’d have done you first. I mean, I know he’s a Mick and everything, but he can’t be that stupid.’

  Cormac just looked at him in terror.

  Jack turned his back and scanned the barn, doing what he could to stop his gaze falling on Siobhan’s body. There were three or four old tyres over in the corner. He ran to them, lifted one up and carried it to where O’Callaghan was tied. He threw it at his feet, then lifted the man’s legs and inserted them into the hole of the tyre.

  There was something else that had caught his eye, too. A big, industrial-grade strimmer, petrol-driven. He dragged that over to the post.

  ‘Jesus, man,’ O’Callaghan breathed, looking at the machinery with wild eyes. Jack ignored him. When he was close enough, he opened up the strimmer’s petrol tank. It was half full. Jack upturned it, sloshing two-stroke and oil all over the tyre, the ground inside it and the bottom of O’Callaghan’s trousers.

  ‘Now then,’ he said, as though to himself. ‘What do I need next?’ And then, as if it had suddenly come to him: ‘Of course!’ He went over to the male body and removed the half-smoked cigarette from his fingers, which he waved in O’Callaghan’s direction. ‘Where there’s smoke,’ he announced, before rummaging through the corpse’s pockets and pulling out a half-full box of Swan Vestas, ‘there’s fire.’

  He returned to O’Callaghan, lit a match and waved it around.

  ‘Here’s what’s going to happen,’ he said. ‘You’re going to tell me everything you know about Habib Khan.’

  Through his fear and wincing pain, O’Callaghan just managed to nod.

  ‘The bitch knew more about him than I did.’

  Jack’s eyes narrowed. ‘You call her that again,’ he said, ‘and it’ll be the last thing you say.’

  O’Callaghan looked like he believed him.

  ‘Khan’s been using me,’ he breathed. ‘He knows I’ve got importation lines set up. For the drugs. I’ve greased the right palms, you know. I can get anything anywhere without the authorities knowing about it. He supplies me with cheap heroin.’ His face screwed up as a new wave of pain spread from the blade. ‘To start with, I thought that was it, but a few days ago he sent something else into the country. Boxes. I don’t know what they are. Nothing to do with me. I just see that they get shipped where he wants them.’

  ‘And where does he want them?’

  O’Callaghan hesitated, so Jack lit another match.

  ‘The mainland,’ he said quickly. ‘A boat to Stranraer. The boxes get picked up there. I don’t know who by . . .’

  ‘You’ll have to do better than that, you piece of shit.’

  ‘I don’t know who by! I swear to God, man – I don’t know who by!’

  ‘When was the last package. When was it?’

  O’Callaghan’s eyes were rolling. ‘Today,’ he whispered. ‘It’s too late. It’s already gone to the mainland.’ And then, a faint grin. ‘It’s too goddamn late,’ he said.

  Jack didn’t know what it was that tipped him over the edge. Siobhan’s death? Maybe. Frustration? Perhaps it was just the look on O’Callaghan’s face which, despite everything, was arrogant.

  He did it without thinking – lit a third match and threw it down at the fuel-soaked tyre.

  The fuel ignited slowly – a low, blue flame that oozed around the area. O’Callaghan’s eyes stopped rolling when he realised what Jack had done. He opened his mouth just as the bottom of his trousers started to curl and smoke. But no words came out.

  Jack watched the rubber start to singe and blister. Tendrils of thick, black smoke started to billow from it, filling the air with a disgustingly acrid smell that caught in the back of the throat. O’Callaghan started to squeal as the flesh on his leg burned, but the squeals turned to a strangled, coughing noise as the smoke entered his respiratory system. ‘Please,’ he barked. ‘I’ve got money . . . I’ll give you anything . . .’

  The tyre was burning hard now, the flames licking up O’Callaghan’s body.

  ‘She asked about the girl . . .’ the Irishman shouted. ‘I know where she is . . .’

  That got Jack’s attention. ‘Then you’d better start talking,’ he said over the crackling of the flames.

  ‘Let me out first . . .’

  Jack shook his head and the terror in O’Callaghan’s eyes doubled. The bastard was lying. It was obvious. If he truly knew where Lily was, he’d be screaming it to the fucking rafters.

  Strangled noises from O’Callaghan’s throat echoed round the barn but Jack was deaf to them. He just stared, unable to stop thinking of Red, all the way back in Helmand, and the manner of his death. O’Callaghan didn’t know Jack’s fri
end. He’d never heard of him. But he was part of Khan’s conspiracy, and he was just as responsible for that death as anyone else.

  But that, of course, wasn’t the only reason why Jack wanted him dead.

  He turned and, very slowly, walked over to Siobhan’s body.

  He knelt beside her and put one hand on the side of her face that hadn’t been shot away. It was as cold as his heart.

  All of a sudden, nothing seemed real.

  Jack knew it was stupid, but he felt he wanted to say something to her. But no words came. More desperate squeals from behind him, and the crackle of flames. Jack barely heard them. All his attention was on Siobhan.

  ‘I’m going to stop this happening,’ he heard himself whisper, his voice choked. ‘I promise you I’m going to stop this happening. And Lily . . .’

  He tried to think of a promise he could make about their daughter, but he couldn’t.

  The flames roared behind him, and so did O’Callaghan. Like an animal in pain. Which he was. Jack didn’t move his hand from Siobhan’s bloodied cheek.

  He stayed like that for a full minute. Then he moved over to where her clothes were piled in a heap. In her khaki jacket was a dark purple wallet. He looked inside. Some money. A few credit cards. And a photograph. He recognised it. It was exactly the same picture he carried around in his own wallet, taken all those years ago on the beach in Ballycastle. Siobhan’s hair was blowing in the wind. So was Lily’s. They looked happy. Jack had no idea that Siobhan had carried this photograph too. No idea that day was imprinted on her memory as firmly as it was on his.

  He stared at the photograph, then down at Siobhan’s brutalised corpse. Then he cast a final glance over at O’Callaghan. The man was enshrouded in flames now, his charred body barely visible as the fire spread up the length of the wooden post, licking towards the rafters. He could see the skin on his face blistering and starting to peel. He wanted to feel good that he’d avenged Siobhan, but he didn’t.

  The fire was going to spread – it was out of control and the birds in the rafters were starting to squawk in panic. It wouldn’t take long for someone to see the smoke and alert the emergency services, and this wasn’t the sort of scene he’d be able to explain to a few Northern Ireland Old Bill. And so, with one final, anguished look at the mother of his child, he ran from the barn, slipping out of the main entrance and heading back to his stolen vehicle. Three deaths and an arson. They’d be erecting a perimeter around the place as soon as they could, and Jack needed to be beyond it. If he could get the car back to the airport, he hoped people would put its theft down to a couple of joyriding kids and not investigate too much further.