Elements of Risk: A Noah Stark Thriller

by Ridgway, Brady

  Muzzle flashes erupted from the dark: not far behind and to the left. I raised the weapon and let off two short bursts in the general direction. I didn’t have much chance of hitting anything. But they didn’t either. Their first shots had taken Denis by surprise. Now he was zigzagging wildly, an impossible target in the dark.

  Martina stuck her head out the cabin. She saw me sitting there with the sub-machinegun, scanning for a target. She stayed there for a moment, a deer in the headlights.

  ‘Get back into the cabin!’ I shouted. ‘Lie down and stay down until I come and get you.’ For the first time since I had known her she obeyed immediately.

  Denis continued with his wild gyrations. His face was lit by the soft green glow of the GPS screen. He was concentrating on our track, heading for the mouth of the Alter Rhein.

  The mouth was narrow. We would be funnelled into the channel. If they were still close behind us there, we might as well be standing in front of a firing squad.

  I fired off a burst at another set of muzzle flashes then slung the weapon and made my way across to Denis. It wasn’t easy. Denis was still hurling the boat violently from side to side. The mouth loomed on the GPS screen.

  I shouted over the roar of the motors, ‘We’re going to have to ambush them before the marina.’

  ‘Oui!’

  I remembered that close to the mouth of the river there was a choke point where a line of trees stood on a mole that protruded into the river from the Austrian side.

  ‘We need to get further ahead of them.’ I shouted. ‘Then you slow down next to the trees and I’ll jump off.’ Adrenaline drove the cold from my body; I was pumped and ready for action.

  Denis immediately knew the place I meant. A lifetime of soldiering meant that he always surveyed the terrain for tactical ground. The mole was an obvious place for an ambush.

  He stopped the zigzagging and headed straight for the mouth of the river. I poked my head into the cabin. Martina was there, curled like a foetus on the floor. I went back up on deck.

  As we approached the river mouth there was a darker smudge in the gloom: the shoreline. Denis looked over his shoulder. He could see the boat chasing us, but I couldn’t. Suddenly the trees were on us and Denis pulled the motors to idle. We bumped up against the bank. I was about to jump onto the shore, but Denis stopped me. He handed me the night vision goggles. I grabbed them and jumped off, splashed through the boggy shallows, headed for the tree line. While I ran I pulled the goggles on.

  It wasn’t exactly daylight. The goggles turned everything into pallid shades of green. The edges were all blurred. It was like peering through the bottom of a beer bottle.

  But I could see the important things. From the shelter of the tree line I saw a white rooster tail; our pursuers approaching fast. Denis had pushed off and was making his way up the river, but without the goggles he was slow: too slow. His eyes were not accustomed to the dark. He was travelling blind. If I missed, he and Martina would not stand a chance.

  There was a good position at the point of the mole. A big log lay close to the water with a clear field of fire. I sprinted to the log, threw myself behind it.

  The boat was nearly on me. I lined up the sub-machinegun on the speeding boat and then swung the gun slightly ahead of them, estimating the amount of lead I would need for the swiftly moving target. When they were almost on top of me I squeezed the trigger.

  Chapter 20

  There were two men in the boat, both wearing night vision goggles. One was at the helm. The other stood braced next to him, leaning into his assault rifle, aiming at Denis’ back.

  I didn’t squeeze off well-disciplined bursts, the way professionals do, the way I was taught. I went for broke, went Hollywood, held the trigger down, sent a maelstrom of lead towards the target.

  The windscreen in front of the men shattered; for an instant I saw the shock on their faces. Then the bullets battered them.

  The helmsman slumped and the boat veered to the left, towards me. The other man stood firm for a moment, his training keeping him on his feet. He tried to return fire but the swerving boat threw him off balance and he fell over, disappeared behind the gunwale.

  The boat hit the bank only metres from me and lurched out of the water. Halfway up the bank it crunched to a halt, anguished engines screaming.

  I ran across to the boat, yanked the throttles back and pressed the kill switches. Silence. The two men lay motionless on the deck. Green blood ran from them. One moved. It was the gunman. He tried to grab the rifle, but it was out of reach. He stopped moving. I jumped into the boat and grabbed his rifle, threw it onto the bank. I checked the bodies for weapons. Each man had a pistol in a holster on his waist. I threw the pistols onto the bank too. When I was sure there were no more weapons on the boat I checked the men for signs of life. There weren’t any.

  They weren’t a threat any more, but we’d made a hell of a racket, so I stayed still for a while, looked at the opposite shore, listened for anyone coming to investigate.

  There was the sound of a motor. A boat was coming up the river. I melted back into the tree line and waited. I withdrew the magazine from the Heckler. It was empty.

  I clicked one of the spare magazines in and waited to see who was approaching. I recognised the boat. It was Denis returning. He saw the gunmen’s boat before he saw me and nudged carefully up to the bank.

  I emerged from the trees and went down to him. I grabbed the bow rope and Denis scrambled over the prow, jumped onto the bank. Martina was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Where’s Martina?’ I asked. For a moment I had a horrible feeling that something had happened to her.

  Denis shrugged. ‘Still in the cabin I suppose.’

  I leaped into our boat and entered the cabin. She was there on the floor where I had left her, curled up into a ball, facing away from me.

  I kneeled down next to her and put my hand on her shoulder. She didn’t move. I gently rolled her onto her back. She was a mess. There was a pool of vomit in front of her, chunks of it on her sleeve, smears on her chin. Black mascara was smudged around her eyes. She looked like a raccoon.

  I lifted her gently, held her. There was a t-shirt lying on the bunk. I used it to wipe the puke from her face. She looked exhausted.

  She reached up weakly, put her arms around me and began to sob. I held her tight. Normally I recoil from the smell of sick, but this was Martina, my Martina, and I hardly noticed it. I spoke softly into her ear. ‘It’s alright. It’s all over now. It’s okay…’ over and over, reassuring her. I didn’t tell her about the bodies.

  I held her for a little while, then lifted her onto the bunk and pulled a blanket over her. I folded another blanket and propped it under her head.

  Outside, Denis had collected the weapons and put them in our boat. He was wearing the night vision goggles belonging to the gunman. The ones from the boat driver were no good; I had shot him in the face.

  We searched the bodies. There was nothing in their pockets: nothing at all, not even small change. Denis found a small black bag in a locker. Inside were some documents and two wallets. We took the bag. There was nothing else on the boat, only the bodies.

  ‘What are we going to do with them?’ I asked. The boat was riddled with holes from Denis’ Heckler, smeared with our DNA and fingerprints. The Swiss would be all over us like a rash as soon as they found the boat.

  ‘Take it out on the lake and sink it.’

  The trouble with boats is they are not meant to sink. They are packed with flotation chambers to ensure that they don’t. ‘How?’ I asked.

  Denis just smiled.

  We attached a rope to the bow, dragged the boat back into the water. Then we towed it out onto the lake. The chart showed that only six kilometres from the mouth of the Alter Rhein the depth was one hundred and eighty metres. We headed there.

  Sinking the boat was easier than I thought. After wrapping the bodies with an anchor chain and securing them to the boat, Denis used the remaining round
s from the sub-machinegun to thoroughly perforate the sides of the boat, penetrating all the buoyancy chambers.

  We delivered the coup de grace with another surprise from his box of tricks. He had also brought along a block of C-4 plastic explosive. He cut an end off the block and rigged a small charge in the centre of the boat so that it would smash through the bottom, breaking the keel. To dampen the noise and help direct the blast, we put both bodies on top of the charge. While I returned to our boat and started it, Denis fitted a short fuse and lit it. He jumped back across to our boat, I steered it a little way off to wait.

  The detonation was surprisingly quiet, just a low bass boom that reverberated across the lake. It was unlikely that anyone on the shore would be able to tell where it had come from.

  Denis had done a perfect job. Within minutes the boat settled to its gunwales; then it was gone. We motored over to the spot to check that there was nothing left floating on the surface: no bits of boat, no survival equipment, no body parts. Apart from a small petrol slick, it was as if the boat had never existed.

  On the way back, still in deep water, we tossed all the weapons over the side. The beloved Heckler went last. Denis looked as if he might cry as it splashed into the lake. We kept my CZ pistol and Denis’ Glock 17 as insurance. Neither had been used so far. Neither pistol had a silencer. I hoped that there were no more surprises waiting for us.

  Chapter 21

  Denis steered for the Marina while I fetched Martina from the cabin. She was unsteady on her feet, leaned heavily on me.

  It had stopped snowing. Despite the low cloud layer it was still bitterly cold. We stood close to Denis, our arms around each other, looking towards the shore. To take her mind off what had just happened I made Martina put on the night vision goggles. That revived her some. She had obviously never used anything like them before.

  ‘Ti vola! I can see everything.’ She looked out over the lake but there was not much to see there so she took them off, gave them back to me. ‘What was noise?’ she asked.

  ‘What noise?’

  ‘It was explosion. When I was inside.’

  While we motored slowly back to the marina I told her everything that had happened while she was in the cabin. I didn’t know how she would react. While I was telling her she just looked at me earnestly, nodding now and then. When I had finished she didn’t say anything for a while, then asked, ‘What happen to you now?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, will you go jail?’

  ‘Not if I can help it.’ She looked confused, so I explained. ‘Those people, whoever they were, were criminals. Nobody is going to report their disappearance to the police. They are at the bottom of the lake. No one will ever find them.’

  ‘Good,’ she said, put her arms around me again and rested her head on my shoulder.

  That was it. No tantrums, no accusations, no recriminations. I thought at the least she might have had some reservations about me going around killing people. But that didn’t seem to have fazed her much. She was definitely my kind of girl.

  Denis had other things on his mind. He had given me the last of his coffee to warm me up after the dive. He seemed to be going through withdrawal, muttering to himself in French, drumming his fingers on the wheel, tapping impatiently with one foot. He didn’t need coffee, he needed Ritalin.

  When we got back to the marina we tied up the boat and offloaded all the equipment. By the time everything had been stowed in the Land Cruiser and the boat was clean and secure it was almost six o’clock. The sun was still a few hours away. We drove back to the hotel.

  Denis and I kept our pistols tucked into our waistbands and scanned the streets carefully on the way back. We had no idea who had attacked us. There might be others waiting on the shore somewhere, watching us, waiting for us to let our guard down.

  But there was no sign of anyone. Anyone following us would have stood out like a turd in a swimming pool; we were the only car on the road.

  Back at the hotel we parked next to my hire car, left everything in the vehicle except for the osmium, the black gear bag belonging to the gunmen and the pair of night vision goggles.

  Denis took the stuff to his room, while went with Martina to ours. She was still a bit shaky so I ran a bath for her while she undressed. I helped her into the bath, left her to the bubbles, went up to Denis’ room.

  He was sitting at the desk clutching a mug of coffee. His flask was on the desk next to him and I guessed that it was already full. He looked relaxed; no sign of the twitch that had developed on the boat. The osmium box was in the middle of the bed. Next to it he had spread out the contents of the black bag.

  I looked at the box. ‘Have you opened it?’

  Denis just shook his head.

  I picked up the box and put it on the desk, snapped open the catches again and opened it. Water poured out over the desk and spilled onto the carpet. I’d forgotten that I’d opened the box inside the aeroplane. I examined the contents. Inside were five glass vials, each full of glittering crystals, just as I had seen in the aeroplane.

  I carefully eased one from its protective foam and weighed it in my hand. We didn’t have any scales, to check the weight, but it felt about right for a kilogram. I passed it to Denis.

  ‘Is this the stuff?’ he asked.

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I think so, but we’ll only find out when the bank tests it.’

  Denis just shrugged. I didn’t want to go wandering about with over a hundred million dollars of osmium on me, so I put it back in the case, locked that in the safe in Denis’ room. I helped him mop up the last of the water then we examined the contents of the bag.

  There were two passports, both Colombian. Denis found a large amount of Swiss francs in one of the side pockets. I laid the notes out in soggy bundles next to the passports. There were also a couple of waterproof jackets and two room keys engraved with the name ‘Hotel Schiff, Buriet.’

  I picked up the first passport. It was in the name of Juan Fajardo, born Medellin in Colombia, 14th February 1973. I looked closely at the photograph. It was the gunman. He didn’t look Hispanic. Neither did the other one, Jesus Perez, also from Medellin.

  We counted the money: thirty-four thousand Swiss francs. Thanks guys. There was nothing in the jacket pockets, not even a chewing gum wrapper. The most interesting items in our little collection were the night vision goggles. They were PVS-5s. Not the latest thing; capable though. The Hebrew inscriptions on the switches intrigued me. They were Israeli Army issue. I wondered how they had fallen into the hands of two Colombian gunmen.

  We paged through the passports, looking for stamps that might tell a story. They did, but not a long one. Our two friends had left Colombia only seven days before, both with brand new passports. From there they had travelled via London: ‘Leave to enter for six months. Employment and recourse to public funds prohibited.’ Those were the only stamps: a very short story.

  The jackets weren’t much help either: Timberland, made in Indonesia, available for sale almost anywhere in the world.

  Denis and I split the money, stashed all the other stuff back in the bag. We both went to my room to fetch Martina for breakfast. She was dressed, sitting quietly on the bed staring into space.

  ‘You all right?’ I asked.

  ‘Jo.’ She replied; but she seemed far away.

  There was no one else in the restaurant, so we chose a spot near the window, raided the buffet: we were all ravenous.

  While Martina listened intently, munching quietly on a fresh croissant, Denis debriefed me on the dive. As I got to the part about my frantic escape, when the plane was sliding to the bottom of the lake, he whistled softly between his teeth. ‘You were very lucky eh?’

  ‘If I hadn’t managed to cut the bag of money loose I would have been fucked. I’d still be down there.’ Martina grasped my hand and squeezed it.

  ‘’Ow much money was in the bag?’

  ‘I don’t
know. A million? Two million? I have no idea what a million dollars looks like.’

  ‘Coming from Russia, it was probably fake.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘And the drugs?’

  ‘I’m not sure that they were drugs.’

  ‘Sure. The Russian are importing baking powder now.’

  ‘Okay, so it probably was drugs. Who knows.’

  ‘Do you think that is why those guys attacked us? To get their drugs back?’

  ‘I don’t know. If it was the Russians it doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘Pour quoi?’

  ‘Because we were recovering the osmium for them. We weren’t stealing it. They just had to ask.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ Denis knocked back a large draft of coffee. ‘The passports are Columbian. Maybe the drugs were for the Columbians and they thought we were stealing them.’

  ‘No. That doesn’t make any sense. If anything the drugs would have come from Columbia, via Russia. They wouldn’t be going there.’

  ‘I still think it must be some Colombian drug cartel.’

  ‘I don’t. The passports were probably fake. Don’t you think it’s a little suspicious that they were only just issued, that this is the first time they ever left the country?’

  Denis just shrugged.

  ‘What was that writing on night glasses? Was it Arabic?’ Martina asked.

  We both looked at her. ‘No, Hebrew.’ I said, looked at Denis. And we came to the same conclusion simultaneously… ‘Israelis?’

  ‘Why would they… ?’

  ‘I don’t think…’

  There was a short silence as we all absorbed the enormity of it. ‘Why the Israelis want drugs?’ Martina asked.