Piracy: The Leah Chronicles (After it Happened Book 8)

by Devon C. Ford

  Bringing myself very slowly level with Dan I carefully moved my barrel around to point forwards and allow me to use the scope if I had to.

  “Ahead,” Dan murmured in a voice barely above a whisper but with a soft tone that didn’t carry like whispers had an ironic habit of doing; something about the range of hearing of an average human being made whispering a counter-productive activity sometimes. “Dead ground to your right as it drops away,” Dan told me as he read the signs of nature who would happily announce such things if you knew how and where to look for the clues. “I heard voices.”

  I looked in that direction, seeing how the green grass landscape of the foreground appeared to be one and the same with the more distant ground but the subtle hints like the movements of the grass in the light breeze and the colouration betrayed the hidden dip ahead. Waves lapped and softly crashed somewhere ahead and to our right, and I knew that we would be able to see the wide expanse of the sea if we just stood and walked forwards ten paces. I looked at the barely visible line snaking through the grass where the blades had been bent in many places, giving off a different degree of shine as the sunlight reflected to highlight where people had walked recently, and followed it with my eyes to where it disappeared into the hidden ground.

  “Fiver says there’s a bay down there where they landed,” Dan said, pointlessly betting the irrelevance of cash with me. Now, before the world had ended I had a monthly pocket money of fifteen pounds, so bizarrely that irrelevant sum of irrelevant money seemed like a lot to me. To Dan, who earned close to forty thousand pounds a year before everything went wrong, it was nothing, but to me it gave a different sense of how certain he was about his guess.

  “Let’s find out then,” I said, turning to catch his eye. He met my look, showing me an expression I had seen plenty of times before. It was one that promised a good deal of retribution delivered in his own savage style of speed, accuracy and total violence until the job was done. I mirrored that look, my own cruel sense of redressing the balance in the eternal struggle of good versus evil expressing itself with a ghost of a smile.

  I turned slowly to Nemesis and made her stay where she was. The dog lay flat on the ground, chin resting on the stiff grass as her eyes never left me. I turned back to my front again and slowly moved myself forwards to cover the last few paces to the lip of the high ground where I could see down into the natural bowl containing the trash-strewn beach below.

  I saw the last of them in line climbing up and out of the bay, AK slung over one shoulder casually like it was a handbag, and shuffled myself backwards far quicker than I had reached the position before it was safe to stand and run at a crouch back to Dan and Mitch.

  “Another lot of them,” I muttered, screwing up my eyebrows as I thought about it, “or maybe the same lot come back again. Either way.” I shrugged. “Hostiles.”

  Hostiles. The simple way of labelling people who weren’t us and that we didn’t like. Life had become slightly less of an ‘us and them’ affair since we rescued the Andorrans and established a kind of regional co-operative, but it usually boiled down to that principle.

  This lot weren’t ‘us’, not by any stretch of the imagination, so they were ‘them’.

  “Stay here?” Mitch offered. “Ambush them when they get back?” He seemed to realise the implication as soon as he had said it, but Dan answered anyway.

  “And let them do the same to someone else?” he asked, his hushed words filled with force. He stood, throwing caution to the wind to walk forwards and peer over the edge to be sure there were no sentries left behind with the boats. There weren’t, and I saw his eyes flick over the landscape like an expert mechanic would do glancing into an engine bay.

  “Bugger it,” he snarled, seeing what I had seen and knowing that the topography didn’t leave any positions to conduct an ambush from. “We follow them until we find an ambush site and lure them back.”

  “How?” I asked before my brain caught up with my mouth. Dan said nothing, simply lifting one hand up and miming pulling the trigger. Faking a gunfight by their boat should bring them back quick enough, just like rats running for an escape when the lights came on.

  We followed, moving faster than we usually did and definitely faster than I liked, but speed was more important than stealth to catch up with them before they found more innocent lives to ruin. Following their movements wasn’t difficult, as anything manmade left over from before showed little sign of maintenance or care, and even the remains of the roads not often travelled betrayed the passage of feet unless care was taken. The pirates had traipsed through the dried remains of fallen leaves and trampled grass down with no care for stealth, and to experienced trackers like us they may as well have left glowing markers to show their route, until the wind had swept one patch completely clear to end our trail. None of that mattered, as even if they had tiptoed through the landscape they wouldn’t have been able to hide their scent from the noses of our two dogs.

  “Where are they, girl?” I hissed quickly to Nemesis to wind up her excitement levels. Behind me Dan did the same with Ash, as though he verbally turned a winding handle in the dog’s back to increase the power output. He muttered his own commands, and both dogs set off with their muzzles to the ground to move in random directions until they both caught something at almost the same time. As one, they looked ahead and tracked in a straighter line. We followed, both Dan and I intermittently calling out softly to our dogs so that they didn’t stray too far ahead. After half a mile the route we tracked swung a half right and we stopped to look at the remains of a cluster of buildings ahead.

  We watched and waited in silence for a few minutes. None of us asked questions as none of us were inexperienced enough to not understand the benefits in watching. Guards got bored and moved around. Ill-disciplined sentries sometimes smoked. Inexperienced snipers shifted position for comfort, or else failed to anticipate where the moving sun would shoot glare into their chosen spot to blind them.

  None of these things alerted us to the presence of other people, and I glanced at Dan to see the cogs turning inside his head. His eyes darted to the low roof lines of the single-level buildings. They took in the narrowest point of the tiny settlement where the road contracted to pass between two buildings, offering us an unnaturally natural choke point to exploit. He turned and raised an eyebrow to Mitch, by far the most experienced of us at that form of urban combat, and waited as the soldier considered the ground ahead.

  He pointed to himself, then his larger weapon with the underslung grenade launcher which Dan still called a bomb-lobber. He pointed to the low roof of the building near the choke point before detailing me and Dan to cut off positions either side of the killing ground he would create. Dan nodded, then looked at me to enquire about my approval of the plan. I nodded back and rose to tuck the butt of my carbine into my shoulder and begin moving forwards tactically. The dogs seemed to sense when it was time to go to work, as both of them slunk low at our sides in silence, only the occasional scratch of claws on concrete reaching my ears. It must have taken an enormous amount of physical exertion for them to move like that, to keep their tongues inside their heads and stay silent just as it exhausted us moving on bent legs in a state of semi-permanent crouch as we peered intently through our weapon sights.

  We moved slowly, cautiously, and at all times at least one of us was in cover providing an overwatch for the others as they moved. Mitch reached his destination and slung his rifle to begin the quiet climb up the metal frame of the fire escape to the low roof. Dan signalled for me to move ahead, leaving the pressure of being the rearmost cut off to himself - not that being the one responsible for stopping any of them escaping inland where there were people to protect was any easier, but anyone escaping on that end would endanger our route home.

  As I looked for a place to set up, the world behind me erupted into the brutal sound of an automatic weapon firing.

  Ambushed

  The first thought to bounce around my brain as I
involuntarily ducked my head so far into my shoulders that I must have looked like a cartoon character, was that they hadn’t even waited for me to get into position before they triggered the lure to bring the pirates back through the tiny village to be killed.

  My second thought, arriving hot on the heels of the first and both of them moving quicker than my physical reactions, was that the gunfire didn’t come from any weapon we carried with us.

  That meant one of many things, but my priority at that point was to get my precious self off the street and into cover quickly. As I threw myself behind the corner of a solid stone building my mind reflected that I probably had it easier than both of the men with me, as I had grown up without doing this kind of thing with the trappings of modern military or police infrastructure; they were used to instant communication with one another whereas I had grown up fighting as we were – in the blind.

  I backtracked behind the building line, back towards the heavy clattering of gunfire which, even as I ran, stopped only to be answered by the weak-sounding response of Dan’s suppressed weapon drilling rounds in the direction of our unexpected enemy. I knew it was Dan because Mitch carried an unsuppressed weapon as always, and I knew that Dan must have a good idea where the shots had come from because his answering bullets were triggered off in disciplined pairs and weren’t blind suppression fire.

  As the heavy clatter of more automatic fire filled the air, I could feel the concussive waves of the gunfight I was approaching. Mitch’s gun joined the fight, his lighter cracks sounding smaller than the heavy bangs of the other gun. I reached the corner of another building and fast-checked around the edge, whipping my head out and back to take a mental snapshot for analysis.

  One shooter, leaning over the roof parapet. Black skin. Thin arms. AK spitting flame a full hand’s length away from the end of the barrel as he bared his teeth.

  I also saw Dan tucked hard against the building almost directly underneath where the shooter was, trying to flatten himself into the bricks so that no part of him appeared as a target. His left hand clung desperately to Ash’s scruff to stop the dog from breaking free into the open.

  I took a breath, opened my eyes and readied my gun. Stepping back and around I told Nem to stay and cleared the edge of the building to point my fat barrel at the point where he had been, only to have to twitch it a couple of inches to the right because he had moved. I had a clear view of him from mid-chest upwards, and I fired on instinct with short bursts to explode dust and stone fragments from the lip of the parapet he leaned over. I missed him, but missing him had the bonus effect of forcing him to duck below the ledge for cover.

  In a display of utter indiscipline, and to my extreme horror, he pointed the gun over the top of the ledge with one hand and depressed the trigger to send fat bullets flying everywhere uncontrollably.

  When I look back at that point it makes me wonder why that was so horrific to me, I mean it wasn’t as though the guy wasn’t trying to kill us before but somehow the lack of respect he showed the weapon angered me more than when he was aiming it at us.

  “Fuck this shit,” Dan growled, grabbing my attention back to him for a second. “Ash, HUP!”

  I’d seen him do this before, mostly to show off and entertain people, but I never thought I would see the trick used in real-life combat. Ash, now released, shot low away from Dan and swung around to take three long strides of hard acceleration towards him. Dan crouched allowing the dog, who moved like a motorcycle off the mark, to leap onto his back as he stood to launch Ash higher into the air. I watched in awe, my finger off the trigger instinctively so as not to shoot the suddenly airborne division of our canine unit, and saw him run vertically up the remainder of the wall with two more bounds to launch himself over the lip and disappear out of sight.

  The last I saw of Ash was his tail whipping in circles like a helicopter to balance him as he dropped to the ground on the roof of the low building.

  The blind firing stopped, the heavy percussive noise replaced in an instant by the screams cutting over the sounds of snarling and crunching. Beside me Nemesis let out an uncharacteristic bark of frustration. I imagined how she felt, knowing that when Dan was fighting a battle on his own, I would want to be right there beside him to tip the balance in our favour.

  The sound of splintering wood made me glance back to Dan in time to see his back disappearing inside the doorway he had just opened with his boot. Silence reigned, other than the weak whimpering and the savage growl emanating from the rooftop we couldn’t see, until Dan’s voice rang out with a strong command for Ash to leave the man. Half expecting Dan to want to question him I was surprised to hear the double-chug of his weapon cycling two rounds into the man, the sound of the bullets puncturing his chest cavity to tear through bone and tissue echoing louder than the gunshots.

  I took cover and pointed my weapon up the road just as I knew Mitch would be doing the same back where we had come from. Dan had whatever was in that building under control, and I couldn’t imagine the terror that AK-man would have felt when he thought himself secure on the high ground until a flying wolf landed inside his position to tear him up.

  Movement ahead of me caught my eye, making me snatch the barrel to that position and snap the other half of the sight over to add some magnification. It took me a second to locate it, but ahead I could definitely make out another AK in the hands of a similar-looking enemy. He was joined by two others and the three walked back in our direction without even trying to move tactically or use cover.

  I lined up a shot and fired three single bullets in rapid succession at the one in the lead, dropping him as he let go of his rifle and clutched at his perforated stomach. I had no time to call a warning as I switched my aim to try and lead the other two with him who had cut and run the second they came under fire. They zigzagged, fleeing my carefully aimed attack and frustrating me enough to flick the switch down to fully automatic. I stitched long bursts at them, hoping to saturate the air around them with what Mitch called righteous freedom pills, and that forced them into cover. My gun clicked dry and my left hand moved automatically to drop the spent magazine and drop it into the pouch I kept empty. My hand came back up holding a charged one which I knew without looking would be orientated the right way around and slid it into the housing to click it home. I kept my eyes on the enemy as I pulled back the charging handle and settled in the fire again.

  Just as horrifically as the one dead in the building beside me, these two also flailed their rifles one-handed, spraying bullets in a wide arc covering our general direction.

  I ducked back, turning to make sure that Nemesis was still out of sight of the guns and waving Mitch back to the opposite side of the street.

  “One down,” I shouted as I lifted a single finger to aid his understanding. “Two,” another finger lifted, “in cover, firing blind.”

  Mitch nodded, glancing to his right as Dan poked his head out of the ruined doorway to glance at both of us. Ash’s big chops protruded beside Dan’s padded knee, his muzzle pink with fresh blood, and Mitch communicated with hand signals for both of us.

  He pointed at me, telling me to stay where I was. Looking at Dan he pointed at him and Ash, then to his own chest, before snaking a flat hand in an exaggerated loop around the back of the building they took cover beside. Dan nodded, looking to me to check my understanding. I nodded back, knowing it was my job to pin these bastards in place and exchange fire while they flanked them. To help with that, Dan raised a bloody AK-47 in his hands to show me before sliding it hard across the rough ground and following it up with a fully charged spare magazine. I nodded, watching as they slipped around the back of the building, then flinched as a heavy bullet tore a chunk of stone off the corner of the building above my head and sing out as the round whined off into the distance behind me.

  I let my M4 fall on its sling and hefted the AK to yank back the cocking handle as my hands explored the weight and feel of the unfamiliar weapon. I brought it up to my shoulder, fo
cused down the iron sights, and squeezed off a short burst.

  The recoil and sound of the weapon jarred me, startling me with how aggressive and loud it felt in comparison to my own gun. Rough or not, there was no denying the power of the bullets it fired. I sent burst after ear-splitting burst towards them, stitching the ground around them into plumes of concrete dust to keep their heads down. The magazine was expended in five bursts, and the unfamiliarity of it forced me back into cover as I had to look for the release catch and pull out the spent curved magazine to click the next one in pace. Popping back out of cover I immediately had to duck back as a handful of bullets connected with the building I was hiding behind. One bullet punched through the brick part that offered less resistance than the stone lower section. I looked up, my mind trying to figure out what I was seeing until it clicked: the bullets were coming from behind me.

  Rolling back away from the building I choked desperately through the brick dust I’d inhaled to tell Nemesis to come with me. I staggered to my feet just in time to be thrown back down by the solid impact of a body running into mine. The AK flew from my hands like I’d been tackled, and both of us hit the ground to roll with the momentum of the hit. I saw a flash of dark skin. My nose caught the acrid smell of an unwashed body until it was obliterated by fresh dirt getting in my mouth as we rolled together.

  I landed on my back, the dead weight of a bigger person pinning me under my carbine which had fallen across my chest and what I guessed was his knee thumping hard in between my legs to shoot agony up my entire body. I opened my eyes, seeing the short hair of the top of a man’s head move until yellowed, bloodshot eyes met mine. The stench of his breath would have made me gag if my other senses weren’t screaming at me to do something, to move and protect myself with all the savagery and violence I could employ.