The Will Slater Series Books 1-3

by Matt Rogers

  Untouched.

  Unmoved.

  Then one of them caught the glint of steel out of the corner of his eye.

  He sucked in a sharp intake of breath and brought the AK-47 up to shoulder height in one swift motion, locking the barrel onto whatever he had found in his peripheral vision.

  It was the rear tray of a pick-up truck.

  Parked motionless on the other side of the track.

  Most of the Toyota Land Cruiser’s body was obscured by a jagged rock formation the height of a two-storey building. The other two men had yet to notice the rear wheels poking out from behind the rudimentary cover.

  The first man barked a coarse warning, seizing the attention of his comrades.

  The trio noticed the vehicle.

  Its occupants had to still be on the mountain.

  There was no other way up here.

  With both automatic rifles aimed tensely at the idle vehicle, and the third man clutching his curved dagger in a white-knuckled grip, the trio moved in on the truck.

  Step by step.

  Taking no risks.

  Leaving nothing to chance.

  Then the first man heard a footstep in the dirt, inches behind him.

  His heart rate skyrocketed.

  An arm wrapped around his throat and locked him in a grip so tight he thought his head might burst off his shoulders.

  14

  Slater had a muscular forearm wrapped around the man’s neck before the guy even sensed that anyone was in the vicinity.

  With the other hand, he jammed the barrel of the IWI Jericho 941 into the side of the tribesman’s head hard enough to cause him to audibly yelp in surprise.

  The other two tribesmen spun, reeling, seized by panic.

  ‘Down!’ Slater roared at the top of his lungs. ‘Down! Gun down!’

  The guy he had taken as a human shield had a Kalashnikov AK-47 resting in his hands, but there was nothing he could do with it at close range that Slater wouldn’t see coming well in advance.

  The only other threat was the second armed tribesman.

  The third had a traditional dagger, but it would prove useless from anything more than a couple of feet away.

  Right now, he stood facing off with the other two tribesmen from a distance of at least five feet.

  The sheer confusion that came along with the sudden high-stakes development caused the second tribesman to freeze in his tracks. He had his AK-47 aimed at the dust, and had missed the half-second of opportunity to bring it up before panic took over and he instinctively followed Slater’s demands.

  An uncomfortable, tense silence settled over the track.

  Slater could have sent a Parabellum round through each of their foreheads from a safe distance away, concealed in a shadowy rocky formation that they had passed by seconds earlier, but he had to make sure that they were the cause of the boy’s death.

  As savage and primal as the highlander tribesmen might be, Slater wasn’t about to shoot three of them dead on a hunch.

  He instantly recognised that he had the upper hand. The pure aggression in his actions had stunned the trio into muted obedience. They were probably accustomed to getting their way, known around these parts as an unpredictable, dangerous group. When someone showed them zero respect and manhandled them around, they caved.

  As most did.

  Slater twisted the warm steel of the Jericho’s barrel harder into the flesh above the tribesman’s ear. The guy squirmed, and bucked, and finally let out a helpless cry of pain.

  It was the nail in the coffin.

  ‘Down!’ Slater commanded, staring daggers across the track at the other two tribesmen. He let his eyes go wide, revealing the animalism in them.

  The savagery.

  The no-holds-barred willpower.

  It intimidated the other two men into dropping their weapons into the dirt.

  With the arm he had wrapped around the tribesman’s throat, Slater beckoned with two fingers toward himself.

  The pair of now-unarmed tribesmen got the message, and started walking over to Slater with their palms spread.

  Stepping out of reach of their sand-coated weapons.

  When he was satisfied that they were nowhere close enough to mount any kind of retaliation, he released his hold on the human shield and thrust the guy over to his comrades. The man went stumbling across the dusty track, thrown off-balance by the gradient.

  His two friends’ caught him and held him upright.

  Slater levelled the barrel of the Jericho 941 at the trio, and they froze in place.

  Right where he wanted them.

  Effectively disarmed and rendered collectively useless in under a minute.

  Standing in the middle of the trail, with no cover to dive behind or weapons to seize at.

  Slater motioned with the barrel of his gun at the corpse of the boy, resting a few dozen feet down the track.

  One of them turned and followed his gaze, noting the position of the kid.

  The guy turned back to face Slater.

  ‘You?’ Slater said, thrusting the Jericho’s barrel at the trio.

  The guy who seemed to be in charge — dressed in faded rags and sporting a wretched expression of satisfaction — looked left, then looked right. As if checking to see if there was anyone else to blame the deed on.

  Then he shrugged, nodded…

  …and smiled.

  Slater knew what he was supposed to do. Detain the three men, which would be a simple enough procedure. Drive them back down to Qasam and funnel them into Abu’s residence. Get the man to translate for him, and find out exactly why the trio had decided to enact such a savage act of violence on an innocent child.

  Then deliver them to whoever the proper authorities were.

  Suddenly, the rage came back to wash over him in waves of furious red.

  And he realised he had never done things that way.

  Unable to resist his impulses, he locked on with his aim.

  The reports of three separate gunshots tore through the mountains, resonating off smooth cliff-faces and echoing along deep chasms in the rock.

  Slater admired his handiwork for less than a second.

  Then he cursed his impulsiveness, gathered up the tribesmen’s Kalashnikov rifles, and hurled them into the back of the Toyota just a few feet away.

  15

  Slater considered the bloody arrow painted onto the rocks nothing but a challenge.

  He peeled away from the corpses — now numbering four — and continued his ascent up the mountain. Anyone who stumbled upon the scene in the meantime would no doubt be awfully confused by what they found.

  A dead child, and three bullet-riddled tribesmen.

  Slater would be back to clean up the mess later.

  Something about the arrow frustrated him to no end.

  He had to defy it.

  He knew he never would have forced answers out of any of the tribesmen. Even if he had somehow managed to breach the language barrier — with the help of Abu, perhaps — it would take little effort on the tribesmen’s part to send him on a wild goose chase, crafting lie after lie about what their true intentions were.

  Slater knew, as always, that the truth would be revealed in what lay further up the track.

  The adrenalin ebbed steadily from his veins as he made for the peak of this particular mountain. There wasn’t far to go — every now and then he would catch a glimpse through the rock formations and find himself awestruck by how far he had risen above the desert floor.

  Sand particles flicked against the dirty windscreen intermittently, kicked up by the fat off-road tyres and the wind howling through the stone on either side. Slater squinted against the bombardment, narrowing his vision on the road ahead. The Jericho rested by his side.

  Just in case.

  The trio of tribesmen could have dozens of comrades, for all he knew.

  Suddenly, his vision narrowed to a pinpoint, condensing fast enough to make his head droop with vertigo. He
rattled his skull from side-to-side and composed himself, battling to keep the Toyota on the track instead of careening through the rock formations to a hundred-foot-drop.

  Nausea.

  Dizziness.

  Unease.

  They all struck him at once. He couldn’t figure out if it was the sight of the decapitated boy that had affected him so strongly, or whether the combination of constant perspiration and intermittent meals had made him sick.

  Whatever the case, he pressed on.

  There was no alternative.

  Amidst the hazy smog of swirling dust ahead, he made out the rock formations on either side of the track falling away, opening out into some kind of flat ground. From his position in the Toyota’s stifling cabin, Slater couldn’t see anything more than that.

  It told him enough.

  He slowed down and tugged the handbrake into place, grinding the fat wheels to a stop in the middle of the trail. Roaring into open ground and engaging in vehicular warfare with a yet-unknown number of hostiles could only result in disaster.

  He wrapped the Jericho in one hand.

  Glanced briefly at the Kalashnikov AK-47 on the passenger seat.

  Shook his head and slipped out into the heat.

  He had always preferred sidearms — especially in close-range situations such as this. They suited him better. He could whip the four-inch barrel from target to target at an unbelievable pace. He knew, because he’d done it before.

  Hundreds of times.

  They all dropped like bowling pins.

  Kalashnikovs had their uses. They were reliable as all hell, and could pose an advantage when one needed to enact overwhelming force.

  Spray-and-pray, in other words.

  Slater considered himself a little more refined than that.

  He palmed the Jericho and set off at a low jog up the mountainside, keeping as quiet as he could. It was almost entirely unnecessary — the wind resonated throughout the mountaintop like a howling wraith. Nevertheless, Slater had never experienced a situation where he didn’t employ caution, so he stayed disciplined and focused.

  He stepped out into the mouth of the plateau, sweeping the barrel of the Jericho from left to right, searching methodically for any sign of resistance.

  Nothing.

  He looked right, squinting against the glare of the sun to gaze out over the Hadhraumaut Valley. At the end of the flat expanse, the ground simply fell away into nothingness. It was a sheer cliff-face that dropped hundreds of feet to the desert below. The rest of the promontory twisted into the mountainside, the ground uneven and unstable. The flat stretch trailed past a line of shadowy caves, each of which speared into the rock itself. Their mouths hung empty and foreboding.

  Slater stared at the open ground in front of the caves.

  It took him a moment to spot the encampment.

  Visually, the collection of mud brick huts were near-identical to the deserted village Slater had passed earlier. But there was something indescribable in the air, a palpable tension that cast a sinister gloom over the entire area. The hairs on his forearms stood on end and a cold chill worked its way down his spine.

  He didn’t belong here.

  Keeping the Jericho raised, Slater moved tentatively across the open ground. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was awfully exposed. At any moment he expected a gunshot to ring off the walls of the surrounding slopes.

  If the first shot hit home, he wouldn’t be around to hear the report.

  Slowly but surely, it set in that there was no-one home. The tension that he initially mistook for an ambush petered out, replaced by isolated silence. He stepped into the midst of the encampment.

  His stomach twisted at what he saw.

  Altogether, it combined to form a confusing picture — none of it bode well for Slater’s nerves. His gaze passed from food scraps to steel canisters full to the brim with water, to a collection of weaponry large enough to outfit an entire militia, to grenades and traditional curved daggers and spartan tribal garments.

  None of the individual objects inherently bothered him.

  What set him on edge was the way everything had been thrown around the camp, completely disorganised, almost abandoned. It seemed as if the entire mountain had been ditched in a hurry. There were enough general supplies and weaponry and clothing in the village to house more than a dozen tribesmen.

  Slater couldn’t imagine that the trio he’d encountered were the only people on the mountain.

  Where are the others?

  He spent a second pondering that question before something else seized his attention, right on the edge of the encampment.

  The corner of a tarpaulin sheet flapping in the wind.

  Slater quashed a brief stab of reluctance and crossed over to the sheet. The tarpaulin was draped over a section of the dusty rock behind one of the mud brick huts, hammered into the ground with inch-thick steel posts. There was no intention of keeping whatever it was covering secure — each of the edges flapped mercilessly as they were bombarded by the mountain gale.

  He crouched by the corner of the blue sheet and lifted up the edge with his free hand, peering into the murky recess underneath.

  The breath caught in his throat.

  A lump formed in his chest.

  He stared at a collection of gas masks and oxygen tanks sprawled at random across the ground.

  16

  Slater had no misconceptions as to what the presence of the objects meant.

  He had been involved in the realm of bioweapons for years — a popular pastime amongst the scum of the earth. The dangers of chemical and biological warfare posed a trickier and more significant threat than any kind of conventional weaponry. Of course, the gas masks littered across the ground underneath the tarpaulin didn’t inherently mean that foul play was afoot.

  It certainly didn’t instil confidence in Slater, though.

  He stood up, reeling. From his brief assessment, it appeared that the breathing apparatus’ had been used. Mouthpieces were detached from their holsters, the back harnesses supporting the oxygen tanks had been tightened to varying degrees, and there were flecks of dried saliva stained into the insides of some of the gas masks.

  They weren’t there as a precautionary measure.

  Something had unfolded that had required their use.

  Suddenly, the tension that Slater had felt as he stepped out onto the promontory crept back in.

  All was not as it seemed.

  He squatted in the centre of the deserted encampment and tried his best to gather his thoughts. There were a million worming around inside his brain. He recalled the times he had encountered weapons of a chemical nature — each time they seemed to carry with them more heightened stakes than the last. Technology advanced, terrorists got smarter, and weapons gained lethality.

  The thought of a bioweapon out here sent shivers down his spine.

  Despite the Yemeni sun scorching the promontory, heating the back of his neck until it grew uncomfortable…

  … inside, an icy chill worked its way through him.

  Then — sudden alertness.

  His heart rate spiked as he heard the noise. It came from deep within one of the caves, barely audible over the gale-force winds. But it pinpricked at the edge of Slater’s hearing just enough to send the barrel of his Jericho lurching in the direction of the cave.

  Some kind of clattering.

  A man-made sound.

  He lined the sights of the Jericho directly into the mouth of the cave, his eyes searching the shadows for any sign of movement. Nothing stood out to him. He stayed frozen, still as a statue, for a long half-minute. There was a pause in the wind buffeting up through the edge of the promontory, and all sound died out briefly, replaced by an eerie silence.

  Hearing nothing out of the ordinary, Slater advanced steadily toward the cave.

  Its mouth was shrouded in shadow, blocked from the sun by an overhanging rock formation. He wiped sweat off his forehead with the sleeve
of his shirt, preventing drops of perspiration from running through his eyebrows and affecting his vision.

  He stepped into the darkness.

  It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. He didn’t dare look down at his feet, even though the view was near pitch-black. The daylight leeching in through the mouth of the cave quickly fell away, only a dozen feet into the lair.

  He kept his breathing muted and his footsteps silent.

  No-one would hear him coming.

  He had worked tirelessly his entire life to disappear when it was deemed necessary.

  He would do the same now.

  The path inside the mountain curved slightly, twisting almost imperceptibly to the left. Slater followed it round, now nearly entirely swamped in darkness.

  His eyes began to adjust to the low light.

  He paused in the gloom as he made out the outlines of man-made objects.

  More guns. A collection of old-fashioned video cameras with flip screens, their battery lights softly blinking in the darkness. Scraps of food, upended plastic bottles.

  More gas masks.

  Slater’s heart began to pound and his hands turned clammy. The space between his palm and the Jericho’s grip quickly became soaked with sweat. The warm air seeped through the cave, stifling in its intensity, but that wasn’t what was causing him to overheat.

  He hadn’t been anticipating anything like this.

  At worst, he had expected a ragtag collection of infuriated tribesmen looking to unleash their bloodlust on whomever wandered into their encampment. He would have dealt with them accordingly, exacting revenge in the name of the young boy he’d barely known.

  Instead, he’d stumbled upon something far worse.

  Slater crouched by the collection of belongings and snatched up one of the video cameras. A green light blinked intermittently on its side. He flipped open the screen — still locked into place against the side of the device — and the camera automatically fired to life.

  There was nothing on the memory card.