4. Gray Retribution

by Alan McDermott

  Behind him, in the makeshift camp, all were sleeping, oblivious to the rain that seeped through the treetops overhead. The Malundi soldier to Smart’s right nodded involuntarily, while Johnny Okeke to his left remained, thankfully, semi-alert.

  Of the fifty troops they’d been tasked with training, only a handful had shown anything near the qualities needed for a life in an elite unit, Okeke being one of them. Hansi Cisse was another, though his performance had clearly been hampered by the anxiety stemming from the disappearance of his son a few days earlier. Smart had never married, so he couldn’t imagine how Cisse was feeling, but he guessed the loss was weighing heavily.

  Could he have carried on, as Hansi had done? Unlikely, Smart thought. His instinct would have been to abandon everything else and find the child at all costs, one more example of how their respective cultures differed.

  It wasn’t so much that life in the region had little value, but kidnappings and murders—crimes which would have caused outrage back home—were a lot more common here. Perhaps the locals were desensitised, he mused, in the same way that he didn’t dwell on the government taking a chunk of tax from his monthly pay packet.

  He thought about Tom Gray and how he’d reacted when his son had been killed. Smart wasn’t sure he’d have gone through with anything so elaborate. More likely, he’d have just taken the killer down a dark alley and exacted his revenge. As he envisaged what he would have done in Tom’s place, his mind effortlessly transitioned from daydream to sleep, the efforts of the last two days finally proving too much.

  He didn’t know how long he was out for, but when the outgoing bullet left Okeke’s rifle Smart came instantly awake, already scanning the darkness for the threat.

  He saw nothing, the only sound and movement coming from the rain as it danced on giant leaves.

  ‘What are you shooting at?’ he whispered over to Okeke.

  ‘I thought I saw something . . . ’

  Smart knew he was taking potshots at shadows, and under the circumstances it was understandable.

  ‘Just keep it tight, Johnny. Only fire when you have a certain target.’

  The dim illumination from his watch told Smart that he’d slept for barely ten minutes, but that was enough to clear away the cobwebs.

  For the moment, at least.

  He prayed for the god of war to send Tom Gray a tailwind, then hunkered down to sit out the rest of his shift.

  After suffering the longest hour of his life, Smart was finally relieved by Sonny Baines.

  ‘Get some shuteye,’ Sonny said. ‘Tom’ll be here in a few hours and I expect we’ll be moving out again.’

  Smart nodded and shuffled backwards, away from the edge of the plateau, dragging his kit with him. He found a relatively dry spot underneath a sizable spread of leaves and put his head on his backpack, expecting sleep to come swiftly.

  It wouldn’t.

  He tossed around, trying to get as comfortable as possible, but even though he tried to clear his mind to help his body shut down, something stirred in his gut. He wanted to put it down to a lack of food, but it was more than that; a sense of foreboding, something sinister on the horizon.

  After ten minutes, he gave up and pulled the Kindle reading device from his pack. He made sure the backlight was turned off and pulled out his torch, the red filter ensuring the light didn’t travel too far.

  He was engrossed in a story when Carl Levine walked past on his way to relieve Johnny.

  ‘Christ, Len, is this really the time to be getting your Tolkien fix?’

  ‘I can’t sleep,’ Smart whispered. ‘Something doesn’t feel right out here, I guess. Besides, there’s no hobbits in this one.’

  ‘What you reading this time?’

  ‘Take No More by Seb Kirby. I’d hate to die without knowing how it ends.’

  ‘So what’s got you spooked?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Smart admitted. ‘It’s probably just fatigue.’

  ‘Well, try and get your head down,’ Levine said, and wandered off to give Okeke a couple of hours’ rest.

  ‘What do you mean, they’ve stopped?’

  Sese Obi squeezed the phone in his hand, threatening to crush the tiny handset as his rage grew by the second. Kgosi tried to defend himself, but the excuses fell on deaf ears. Obi was seeing his plan fall apart, as hour after hour, his advance teams were reporting in with news of increasing casualties as they tried to make inroads into the capital. What he really needed was Kgosi and his men up there offering support, not floundering in a wasteland as they struggled to wipe out a handful of soldiers and some civilians.

  As Obi listened to his lieutenant explain how they’d lost the high ground and were unable to get close enough to inflict damage without depleting their own ranks, he wondered how he could have misread Kgosi so completely. As a thief, he was very good, with a brutal streak and distinct lack of compassion. But it seemed that car-jacking middle-aged women marked the limits of his tactical ability and bravado. Facing a real enemy for the first time, he was showing his true colours.

  Much as he’d love to leave the man to languish in the jungle, he couldn’t afford to. Unplanned losses had reduced his fighting capability, starting with guards at the electricity power station putting up more resistance than initially expected. It was a similar story at the water plant and major railway stations. Reinforcements had been sent to patch the holes in the ranks, in expectation of Kgosi forming up with the main spearhead.

  That plan now lay in ruins, and the longer they delayed the final push to crush the Agbi government, the more time there was to dig in and create impenetrable defences, preventing him from reaching his goal.

  Obi put the phone down and grabbed a map, checking the distance between his own position and Kgosi. He once again contemplated sending troops down to assist him—in addition to Fene Adebola’s boy army—but there wasn’t time. Besides, there were more than enough soldiers on site already. It was just the leadership that was lacking.

  ‘Get your men to surround the enemy to the south, east and west,’ he told Kgosi, ‘but avoid contact. I want you to meet up with Fene a mile north of your current position in two hours. He will explain what I have planned.’

  He stabbed at the phone, then called up Fene’s number.

  Fene was a no-nonsense individual who made Kgosi seem like a choirboy. Unlike the lieutenant, Fene had seen his share of conflict over the years. This mission would be straightforward for him.

  ‘Fene,’ he said, once the call connected, ‘Kgosi has created a mess and I need you to clear it up for me.’

  Fene listened to the instructions and agreed that he could be in place at the allotted time.

  ‘The agreement was for me to deliver the children, nothing more. This will cost you an extra ten thousand.’

  It was a princely sum in a poor country, but once Obi was running it and funnelling public coffers into his own accounts, such an amount wouldn’t even bear consideration.

  ‘The money is yours,’ Obi promised. ‘When you get there, I want you to give Kgosi a message.’

  As he relayed his orders, he could almost hear Fene smiling.

  The street was virtually empty as Rob Harman drove down it in the stolen BMW. The false plates were cloned from an identical vehicle registered in Newcastle, so there was very little chance of running into the owner of the real vehicle in this particular London suburb.

  Soft light shone through a dozen front windows as the residents settled in for an evening in front of the television, heavy drapes drawn to protect them from the onslaught of winter. Harman eased slowly past the target house, the engine purring gently as he looked for anything that could impede his mission. The gate looked relatively new, but he would test that later. Beyond it, he was glad to see nothing to impede his access to the rear of the property, as had been the case when he’d first scoped the premises on his phone’s Street Map application. It was conceivable that the occupants might have installed a gate since the image was tak
en, but thankfully he could see all the way to the end of the modest garden, light from a neighbour’s kitchen aiding his reconnaissance.

  A woman glanced into the moving car as she ambled down the street, but her gaze fell away a split-second later. Dressed in a cheap black suit and sporting a short, black wig, Harman looked like just another sales rep, cruising for a sale. Unlike many other career criminals, Harman shunned body piercings and tattoos, preferring the ability to blend in to any environment without drawing attention to himself. It had kept him out of trouble thus far, and he intended for that run to continue.

  Satisfied that there were no physical barriers to entry, he cruised to the end of the street and turned onto the main road, heading for the wine bar he’d seen earlier. After parking in a side street, he collected his briefcase and locked the car, walking the short distance to the front entrance. Inside, gentle rock music was barely audible over the myriad conversations, and he ordered a white wine spritzer before finding a quiet corner with an empty table. He opened the briefcase and removed some papers and brochures, creating the impression that he was merely another worker bee grabbing a little sustenance before the journey home.

  Patrons came and went, but Harman nursed his drink and alternated between his phone and the paperwork until closing time, when he ambled back to his car. Although it was already after eleven in the evening, he decided to wait another couple of hours before getting a closer look at the target.

  Mina Hatcher brought two cups of hot chocolate into the living room and placed one in front of Vick, who was dabbing at her eyes.

  ‘I can’t believe I said that to him,’ Vick sniffed, fighting back another bout of tears. ‘I love him, but I was just so angry.’

  Mina put a comforting arm around her niece. ‘He loves you too, Vick. I’m sure it’ll all be forgotten when he gets back.’

  ‘But what if he doesn’t come back?’

  Vick gave in to her emotions, then, sobbing on her aunt’s shoulder. She’d heard Tom pack his bag and pop into their daughter’s room before leaving, presumably to give her a farewell kiss, but Vick had refused his last-ditch attempt to talk it through. Instead, he’d left, promising to be back in a couple of days, and ten minutes later she’d emerged in tears, her initial anger having been replaced by concern.

  She knew Tom was damn good at what he did, but after all he’d been through, she thought his days of doing anything more reckless than driving in the capital were over. For him to suddenly announce the ad hoc mission had thrown her completely, and it wasn’t until he’d closed the front door that the revelation dawned; it was a fear of losing him that was steering her emotions, not anger.

  She didn’t hate him for choosing his friends over family; she just didn’t want him putting himself in harm’s way. While appreciating the debt they all owed to Sonny and Len, she hadn’t envisaged repaying those debts by having her husband march off to another war zone. Their daughter needed a father, and there was none more loving than Tom Gray.

  ‘You said he was just going to oversee things,’ Mina said. ‘I’m sure he’ll stay out of harm’s way.’

  Vick nodded, hoping her aunt was right. She’d taken Melissa to stay with Mina and Ken after Tom had left, unable to face the coming days alone. The move was partly for the company, but more important was having another wife’s perspective.

  ‘Go and get some sleep. You’ll be no good to Melissa if you don’t get your rest.’

  The day had taken its toll, and Vick was up well past her usual ten o’clock bedtime. She drank her chocolate, kissed her aunt and uncle, and climbed the stairs to the spare bedroom, where Melissa slept peacefully in her bassinette. She spent a few minutes stroking her daughter’s hair, whispering that daddy would be back soon.

  When she eventually lay down, she said a silent prayer for Tom, and the tears came flooding back.

  Harman had spent the last hour and a half wandering the area, scoping the house from the back as well as the front. The rear garden backed onto a school playing field and he’d spent time in the short grass looking for an ingress point. The old, wooden fence was too high to jump over and too flimsy to climb. Going in that way would be far too noisy, so he settled for waiting in the field until the last of the house lights were extinguished. Once darkness fell, he took a long, slow walk to the school gates, then headed down the road and turned into the street where the target house, like all the others, sat silent, streetlights the only illumination.

  He carefully pushed the gate open, glad to find that it didn’t protest at his entry, and crept to the rear of the house. There were two ground floor windows and another two on the first floor, and all were single-glazed wooden sashes. That would afford him easier access than double-glazing, and a plan formed as he peered through one of them into the kitchen. A half-full ashtray sat next to the sink, a welcome sign that one or more of the occupants was a smoker: he would take advantage of that to make the fire look like an accident.

  Harman was about to wrap up for the evening when a faint sound came from one of the upstairs windows; moments later faint light illuminated the curtains as the bedroom door was opened. The sound got louder until he recognised it as a crying child, obviously very young. He quickly dismissed it as irrelevant, his anti-social personality disorder giving him a distinct lack of moral conscience. That he would be endangering the life of a newborn baby didn’t bother him one iota.

  When the sound finally died down, he crept out to the front of the building, and after a quick scan of the area, walked out of the garden and back to his car.

  After programming his return journey into the satellite navigation system, Harman set off for the long drive north, his work for the evening done. He would be back in a couple of days to execute the mission and earn his five-grand payday.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Tuesday 8 October 2013

  ‘We’re ten minutes out,’ Rickard shouted over the roar of the engines.

  Tom Gray nodded and went back into the hold to inform the team, a couple of whom were dozing despite the buffeting the plane was taking in the stormy sky. He passed the message on and they woke the sleepers before checking each other’s kit, making sure all clasps and ties were firmly done up.

  Gray wasn’t sporting a rig. As he’d promised Vick, he would manage the operation from afar. He wanted to go in, there was no doubt about it, but his rib injury would take some time to heal, and the last thing he wanted to do was to exacerbate it with a parachute jump.

  Gray had one of the men open the rear door, which sent a blast of chilled air into the cabin. The troopers lined up near the opening, the first man with his foot on the edge, hands gripping the frame as he looked out into the void, hoping to see the landing zone. According to the satellite view on Gray’s smartphone application, it was a small area roughly a mile from the airport, a clearing just big enough to temper some of the danger associated with a night-time jump in tree country.

  Gray stood to the side of the door, his eyes on Freddie as he awaited the go signal. When it came, Gray slapped the first soldier on the back and watched him disappear into the darkness, closely followed by eleven other similarly clad figures.

  One after the other, they darted down through the rain towards the jungle below, and a part of Gray wanted to be among their number, but he quickly shrugged the thought aside and closed the door before taking the co-pilot seat next to Rickard.

  ‘How long can we stay up here?’ Gray asked.

  The pilot checked the fuel gauge and made a quick mental calculation. ‘We’ve got three hours’ worth,’ he said. ‘That’s enough to get us back if we set off now, but I guess that isn’t part of your plan.’

  Gray shook his head.

  ‘In that case, your men have that long to clear the airport. If they can’t do it in that time, we’re in for a hairy landing.’

  Gray was confident it wouldn’t come to that. The men he’d chosen were all experienced with a ’chute and would hardly break a sweat tabbing a mile t
o the target. That left plenty of time to scope the airstrip out and take the bad guys down. In an ideal world, they’d have had real-time satellite coverage of the airstrip to get an idea of enemy numbers and their defences, but in the SAS they’d learned to adapt to situations and make do as best they could.

  His main concern was refuelling. If they didn’t have the ability to top the plane up, they would be stuck on the ground.

  ‘Do they have fuel bowsers at the airport?’ he asked Rickard.

  ‘I was wondering the same thing myself,’ the pilot said. ‘We need to find out soon, otherwise it’ll be too late to head back.’

  That meant waiting for the men to get eyes-on wasn’t an option. Gray asked if they could do a fly-past. It wasn’t the ideal course of action, as it would let the enemy know they had company, but the alternative was leaving his men to fend for themselves.

  ‘There’s a set of bins in the locker,’ Rickard told him. ‘If we can do this without getting too close, all the better.’

  Gray rummaged through the small compartment behind the cockpit and found the binoculars, a decent set with Steiner stamped on the leather case. They were older than Gray himself, but Rickard had obviously looked after them.

  Gray returned to the cockpit and Rickard edged the nose down as he banked towards the clearing.

  ‘I’ll stay a couple of miles out. Any closer and they’ll hear us.’

  Gray put the glasses to his eyes and stared out of the window as they paralleled the runway, but all he could make out were vague, dark shapes against a black backdrop.

  ‘We need to do another run,’ he told the pilot, ‘closer this time. I can’t make anything out from this distance, and the rain isn’t helping.’

  Rickard eased the yoke to starboard and circled back, halving the distance to the target and dropping a thousand feet to give his passenger a better view. The manoeuvre used up precious minutes and fuel, but Gray wanted absolute confirmation before he would even consider bugging out and heading out of the country.