Hard Man to Kill (Dark Horse Guardian Series Book 4)

by Armstrong, Ava

  “Not sure it’s the same one,” Ben replied.

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “Maybe we’ll find out who the hell’s driving it.” Ben answered.

  Movement, side door,” Gus whispered. “It’s show time.”

  According to the intel, there were five terrorists meeting in the house, but there were six vehicles parked out front. Ben had the M11 ready to rip. He waited patiently as Gus employed the decoy. Not wanting to draw fire from the targets, Gus played a recording of a female’s voice pleading for help in Urdu dialect. He had tossed a synthetic human-like form onto the front yard area wearing what appeared to be a white dress. It was hoped the men would think the commotion was a young woman in some sort of distress.

  “Hold on, Chief.” Gus uttered. “They’re sending out a kid.”

  To Ben’s dismay, a young child of six or seven stepped into the front yard and made his way to the fake female form lying on the ground before him. A voice yelled to the child from the building, “What is it, Yusef?” The child yelled back, but Ben couldn’t understand his answer. Gus allowed the woman’s voice to project into the darkness. Everyone seemed to be collectively holding their breath as two men exited the side door of the house facing Ben.

  The young boy was now standing at the form of the woman, touching her garment. Through the night vision scope, Ben could see the child’s eyelashes. He was gauging his reaction. The boy seemed to think he was seeing a ghost, and jumped back from the form on the ground after fingering the gauzy fabric. The two men were now ten yards from the boy and three other figures were emerging from the doorway.

  “Now,” Gus commanded.

  “Got it.” Ben squeezed the trigger hitting the two of the men emerging from the doorway. By the time the third man realized what was happening, he had turned to go back inside. Ben swung, took his aim, and shot him center mass. Meanwhile, one man, ran around the house, dashed toward a different doorway and got inside. Within seconds, the child scrambled through the doorway and it closed. Gus had taken down one man, very near to the child.

  “Shit,” Ben hissed.

  “The kid ran into the house.” Gus stated the obvious. “And the last guy is in there, too.”

  “Got to go.” Ben was already closing up shop at his sniper position and moving for his pistol.

  What happened next was not expected. There was no movement in the house for at least ten minutes as Gus and Ben moved slowly back to the hidden pick-up truck. Without warning, the young boy emerged without sound from the fig grove pointing a Kalashnikov AK47 at Ben. The man standing behind him trained an HK P9S on Gus.

  “Jesus.” Ben whispered. But before anyone fired a shot, Ben and Gus dove toward their adversaries in the black of night. The AK47 fired and dropped to the ground as Ben secured the young boy. The HK pistol went off grazing Gus, drawing blood, but he took the man off his feet.

  Gus glanced nervously at Ben, “Now what…”

  “We’ll bind them up and get the hell out of here. They don’t know who we are.” Ben uttered frantically. As they rapidly wound rope around the hands and feet of the two, they simultaneously muffled any noise with a bandana stuffed into their mouths, secured with a bungee cord.

  “That’ll hold them for a few minutes. We’ve got to get some photos and run. The cavalry will be here soon. I’m sure they’ve made a phone call. Grab their phones.” Ben’s heart was racing. Gus did so, as Ben photographed the faces of the four dead men. As he gazed one last time at the young man on the ground with the kid, he did not recognize him as a target.

  “Who the hell are you?” Ben uttered, mystified for a second. Gus was in the truck and it was rolling. Ben ran alongside and hopped in. “I hope I just didn’t just make a big mistake.”

  “I didn’t want to kill the kid,” Gus said. “The other guy, maybe. Let’s take him with us.” Gus pulled a U-turn and Ben dragged the bound man into the truck bed. He hopped back in. “We need to fly. We can’t hang around. No time now. Gus floor it!”

  The old truck took off in the darkness spewing mud everywhere behind it. Ben kept an eye on the unknown person bound and gagged in the back, covered with gear getting bumped around, but he was secured to the truck bed. They took a westerly route which was different than the path they took to get there. Now the targets were killed, and they had an unknown to interrogate. Their piece of the mission was completed.

  Ben breathed a sigh of relief. “Let’s take this guy to the cement factory.”

  “No,” Gus was somber. “There’s a cave about two clicks from here. I remember it well. We can take him there.”

  “Don’t like it. Too uncertain.” I’m asking Moshe. Tapping his com, Moshe’s voice came over the speaker. “Yeah.”

  “What is the plan for interrogation?” Ben asked.

  “Go to the pit stop. You remember that place?” Moshe replied.

  “Yes, that crappy little dirt road that ends in the valley…I’ve got it. Is that still there? Didn’t expect to pick this guy up, but he might be of some value,” Ben informed him.

  “Didn’t expect you to capture anyone, but that’s the place for doing what you need to do. I’ll call ahead, there are two guys from my unit on stand-by there. I’ll let them know you’re coming.” Moshe stated.

  Gus laughed, “This shit doesn’t get easier. In fact, it gets crazier every time. Why didn’t we know about the kid and the other guy? Our intel sucked on this one, Chief.”

  “We’ll discuss that in the debrief, you can be certain.” Ben ran his hand over his face and looked at his hand. Everything, including the truck was covered with mud, and his face was, too. The black truck and mud-covered men pulled onto the long and winding dirt road leading to the pit-stop. The only thing Ben didn’t like about this location was there was only one road going in. He preferred to have options if a quick exit was needed.

  The ramshackle building from ten years ago was still standing. Ben and Elvis pulled the prisoner out of the truck bed along with some gear and knocked on the steel door. Within seconds it opened and they entered what was a steel building that had seen better days. It was now covered with overgrown vines and mud from the recent rain.

  “What do we have here?” one of Moshe’s men asked, as his eyes roamed over the prisoner.

  “We don’t know. We didn't expect him to be at the party. There was a kid, too. He pointed a gun at us, but we bound and gagged the kid and left him there. This one we decided to take. He may have some information.” Ben searched through the photographs of terrorists on his phone again…and compared each one to the man’s face lying on the floor. “Nope. None of these matches. So, now we need to find out who the hell he is and what information we can extract from him, if any.”

  ~Abdul Rahman Shafir~

  Although he knew he’d be kicked and beaten by the infidels, Abdul remained motionless on the floor of the building. He had chosen a false name to give these fools, and would feign ignorance even if they beat him to a bloody pulp. He had been beaten before by Salib Madi, his father, his superior, the man he wanted more than ever to impress. He was told the whippings would make him stronger, more resilient when it came time to fight these men he so wanted to kill.

  The tall man with deep blue eyes removed the gag from his mouth. The man glanced at his phone repeatedly as his eyes took in the details of his face. Abdul felt uncomfortable being scrutinized in this fashion and averted his eyes. He knew now that this was Keegan, the man they’d been hunting for years. He’d sensed it in the Subaru when he pulled behind them in Bhakkar. He also knew the man had a family in America, a woman, with dark hair who was beautiful. And she was being followed and might even be captured by now. It was difficult to keep the smile from coming to his lips, but he remained still and kept his eyes closed. He knew more than the blue-eyed man, but he had to remain quiet.

  A chair was pushed to the wall and the blue-eyed man picked him up with one arm and set him in the chair like a rag doll. Then he leaned in closer, and began asking hi
m questions in Urdu. He understood every word the man was saying, but shrugged his shoulders, pretending he did not understand. The longer he could play this game, the more likely it would be he’d be allowed to leave. They’d figure he was a goat herder visiting the house of the men they killed. Maybe. Or, they could beat him bloody senseless trying to get information out of him. Either way, he wasn’t talking. He remained in the chair for several hours, as he watched the four men in the room. He understood English perfectly and absorbed every word they said.

  The blue-eyed man returned and gave him a drink out of a bottle of water. Then sat next to him in a chair, as if he wanted to be friendly. Abdul couldn’t believe he was sitting next to the man who had killed so many of his tribe, the devil himself. The American soldier they had talked about since he could remember. The man gave him a few bites to eat. Then he smiled. Abdul would always remember the details of his face. His blue eyes and thick dark hair would stay in his memory. He spoke with a strange accent.

  “What is your name?” the blue-eyed man asked. Abdul gave no response, just shrugged.

  The man spoke in several different dialects, including Punjabi, Arabic, and Urdu, but Abdul pretended he did not comprehend.

  “Come on, my friend. We don’t want this to get ugly now, do we?” the man spoke closely to his ear. He could smell his breath and he had just eaten onions. His blue eyes looked tired as he turned to his partner, “Gus, you want to talk with him?”

  The other man, very tall and blonde, came and sat in the chair facing him now. He had blue eyes, too, but they were cold and calculating as they searched Abdul’s face making a shiver run down his spine. The tall man reached out and slapped him across the face hard. Abdul pretended he was fearful, even managed to start crying. Another slap, then another. But anything they did would not make him talk. He sobbed like a baby for a while, hoping to gain some sympathy.

  A few hours later, another man interrogated him. Then another. It went on for several hours and Abdul took several beatings but did not speak.

  At one point, the man named Gus said he thought that he was possibly deaf and mute. “He might be a goat herder. We don’t have him on our radar. I say we kick him. We’ve got to get the hell out of here as soon as it’s dark.”

  Abdul was released in the middle of the night. The men named Gus and Tom took him for a ride. Abdul’s hands were bound, but he was released and he ran like the wind. He couldn’t wait to tell his father he knew where Ben Keegan was.

  ~ Saleh Ali ~

  It seemed since birth Saleh was always cleaning up after his half-brother, Abdul. Until Saleh arrived in a white sedan with his father, Salib Madi, he had no idea what had taken place at the house where his father’s henchmen were having their meeting. He rode in his father’s white Mercedes this time because he was training to be a lieutenant in the Islamic state’s army. Pulling up on the scene, he had no idea what had happened. He only heard the other men talking about a shoot-out. Seven other Islamic soldiers were close behind, six of them with AR’s strapped to their bodies. The men and ammo filled the back of an ancient Ford pick-up.

  As Madi exited the white Mercedes, he ordered Yusef, the young boy, untied. He spat questions at the child. “Who were these men? Tell me everything. Did you take a photo of them with your phone? Did they leave anything behind?”

  Yusef dutifully explained what happened, right up to the part where he and Abdul held the men captive with guns for a moment. Saleh watched as Madi’s eyes filled with fury and they seemed to bore through the child. “What? You had the chance to shoot these men and you let them go? Which gun did you have, Yusef. Tell me.”

  Yusef couldn’t stop the uncontrollable convulsions that overtook his body and he fell to his knees and vomited at Salib Madi’s feet. Madi’s heavy foot pushed the young boy over in one swift motion. “You coward. What is wrong with you?”

  Yusef rallied and stood up. He reached for the long gun. “This one.” Yusef exclaimed, holding up the AK47, his dark eyes seeking approval. Salib Madi took the AK away from Yusef and shot him in the head. The small boy stumbled backward as blood drained from his shattered skull and he fell to the ground twitching once or twice.

  “Do you see? This is how you kill someone.” Madi scooped up the pistol that he found lying on the ground and put it in his belt while he spoke to the dead child lying on the ground before him. “You little fool. I gave you the chance to be a man, a fighter. I cannot have incompetent idiots working for me.” Madi turned to his men, “Now you will have to find Abdul. This Keegan is making things much more difficult.”

  Saleh stood shivering as Madi grabbed his arm and shoved him toward the boy’s dead body. “Stop shaking. Clean this up, like a man, if you want to be an Islamic jihadist. You are weak like a woman. Afraid of everything!” Saleh watched as a gob of spit landed on the face of the boy as Madi moved past the lifeless body. He could no longer stand there risking his own safety. He knew he had to find the courage and stamina to do as he was told.

  “Let Saleh Ali clean up the mess.” Madi got into the white sedan and sped off but continued giving orders to Saleh on his phone.

  Saleh could hear Madi’s orders on the speaker. “Get the security feed. The cameras must have captured some images we can use.” Madi was ranting wildly now and the men were jumping at his every command. Upon closer examination one of the soldiers murmured in Urdu dialect, “The cameras did not record….anything…..they stopped working after 9 PM…”

  Madi screamed into the phone at Saleh, “Is that the time they were here? The devils must have done something to the cameras. “Randee ka bacha,” Saleh listened as Madi lost control. Calling him a son of a whore didn’t matter. Madi was his father even though he had killed his mother long ago. He was bound to this man forever and would serve him. He silently chastised himself for even being born. His life was one of service to a madman.

  Since the day he was born, Saleh did as he was told, and this moment would be no different. A jihadist with a black scarf wound around his face picked up the body of the boy and tossed him like a sack of rice into the back of the pick-up. Saleh covered Yusef’s dead body with a blanket, attempting a modicum of dignity. It should not have surprised him to watch his father put a bullet through his younger brother’s head. It wasn’t the first relative he’d witnessed being shot. But for a moment he questioned everything his father did. He joined the men in the bed of the pick-up truck. Sitting above the wheel well, Saleh’s eyes traveled over these men his father admired so much. Killers. Executioners. These were real men, his father would say. And, somehow Saleh had to find a way to measure up. The only way would be to find the man his father wanted dead: Lieutenant Ben Keegan.

  Abdul and Yusef had Keegan right there with a gun aimed at him, yet they hesitated a split second before pulling the trigger. Why? He chastised himself over and over for allowing Yusef to be used in this manner. He was too young. The truck sped toward the compound. If he didn’t dispose of Yusef’s body immediately, he knew he would be in for further punishment. What just happened was only the public humiliation. There would be much worse to come later when they were alone.

  The truck stopped and the men jumped off, scrambling to a tent to eat and be cared for by the women. For a moment, Saleh stayed in the back with Yusef’s lifeless body. Flies now buzzing around, he slid into the driver’s seat after grabbing a shovel and continued driving to the dirt road in the valley. It was a remote place but appropriate for a quiet burial. At least no one would disturb Yusef in death, he thought. In some ways, Saleh thought Yusef was the lucky one. He was gone now to wherever the human spirit goes after death. His short life had been violent and void of love. Saleh wondered what love even was. He had heard about it, but the only love he had experienced was brief with his mother as a very young child and with his half-brother, Yusef, when they played. He could barely remember those times, now. Tears slid down his face as he dug his younger brother’s grave.

  As he lowered Yusef’s wrapped
body into the grave he had dug, he felt a hand around his throat from behind. Two men had appeared out of nowhere with blackened faces. A bag was slipped over his head. He was bound and dragged a long distance. He felt a doorway open and heard it close. The Americans were speaking to one another. When the blue-eyed man took the bag off and looked at Saleh’s face he quickly pulled his phone up and scrolled through photos.

  “Bingo!’ he heard the man say as he smiled. Saleh had never heard that word before, even though he’d been schooled in English. The blue-eyed man was smiling.

  ~ Ben ~

  “If my eyes are not deceiving me, we’ve got one of Salib Madi’s men here.” Ben smiled at Bettencourt, Elvis, Tom and Gus. “He should be a goldmine of information.” Ben detected the wild-eyed panic in Saleh’s eyes and searched him thoroughly while his hands were bound. Then he and Elvis quickly tied him to a chair and began asking questions.

  “What were you doing out there just now?” Ben began. He noticed the young man’s black eyes were shuttered against him, averted, and he was trembling slightly.

  Elvis spoke for him, “He was burying a kid.”

  “Did you kill that young boy?” Ben asked. He detected strong defiance in this young man’s eyes when they met his. The question struck a chord. Ben guessed his age to be twenty, maybe slightly younger.

  “No, I didn’t kill him.” Saleh answered, then his eyes moved to the floor.

  “Who’s the kid?” Ben continued, sensing this was a delicate subject. But there was no answer from Saleh.

  “Your name, it’s Saleh Ali, we know who you are.” Ben informed him.

  “I’m not talking to you or anyone else,” Saleh reacted, eyes still glued to the floor.

  “We can make you talk,” Ben countered, hoping for the defiant look to return and it did.

  Saleh’s eyes met his, “You can’t make me do anything.”

  Ben rummaged around in a rucksack and found a straightjacket. “I think this will fit you perfectly.” After allowing Saleh a moment to drink some water and urinate, the jacket was forced upon him and snugged up. “We’ve got to get the hell out of here. He’s going with us, but we need to cover him well. A rag was stuffed into Saleh’s mouth and he was stowed in the back of the vehicle’s front seat, on the floor, then covered with another blanket.