by Matt Rogers
The raised voices floated out into the hallway, tinged with venom and blame. Maybe her mother was finally standing up for herself, putting Steve in his place.
Diana scoffed under her breath.
Like that would ever happen.
Above that, she heard commotion from down the hallway.
Coming from the stranger’s room.
Heavy footsteps.
As if he were nervous.
Diana thought about knocking on his door, asking if she could wait in his flat for a while as the tension died down in her own home, but a voice in the back of her head reminded her the dangers of being alone with strangers.
She decided to simply stay where she was, and wait for the man to re-appear.
He was bound to, at some point.
Then she would decide what to do from there.
43
1900 hours Yemen time
1700 hours London time
One hour until discharge
The dusty old pick-up truck rumbled up the steep mountainside track under the low blanket of dusk. Its sole occupant was invisible to the townspeople of Qasam, hidden in a veil of darkness behind the pair of piercing headlights that cut through the relative calm of the town.
Inside the cabin, Slater’s stomach churned.
It wasn’t the approaching chance of death that bothered him. Years ago he had come to accept his own mortality. It had been a strange shift in mindset, one that he had grappled with for some time, but when he eventually realised that the slightest change of trajectory could send a hollow-point round through his skull and bring his life to an abrupt end, it had almost carried a permanent calm along with it. He had lived each day like it was his last, because his line of work had demanded that he accept his inevitable demise.
Somehow, someway, he’d come out the other side unscathed.
The drive across the desert had given him time to think, something he’d rarely experienced over these past few days. Solitude had eluded him since he’d arrived in Qasam — there had always been something to do, some place to be, someone to confront.
There still was — but he had an hour to himself.
All to himself.
He had realised — after many attempts to skirt around the subject — that he’d come to Yemen as a method of assisted suicide. Much like how deranged civilians deliberately enticed law enforcement to gun them down — Slater had witnessed suicide by cop several times — he had entered the war-torn country expecting to bite off more than he could chew.
It had never seemed that way, but as the days dragged on it had become clear.
His career, and the way it had ended, had left him broken.
He didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. He had no family, no friends, no contacts of any kind. He had strolled into Yemen without even anticipating that he would leave.
This entire time, he had been trying to convince himself otherwise.
Now, he realised the truth.
And he realised what lay in the mountains dwarfed any of that, thrusting all his restless thoughts to the very back of his mind.
The concept of the Marburg virus truly rattled him. His hands were cold yet sweaty, his teeth chattered incessantly, and his left leg shifted restlessly against the footwell, shaking up and down like a jackhammer.
He wasn’t afraid to die in the rocky caves above Qasam.
He was afraid to fail.
He felt he couldn’t quite grasp the scale of what was set to occur.
Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe it would take footage of blood in the streets, people screaming and flailing along the sidewalks, corpses littering central London.
Maybe then he’d fully understand.
It charged him with determination, icing his veins, carrying him through Qasam with his eyes locked firmly on the road ahead.
Unwavering.
There wasn’t anything that would stop him spearing into the tribal encampment.
Whether that would result in success was anyone’s guess.
But he would attempt a war all the same.
The pick-up truck passed through the town’s limits and began the trek into the highlands. A warm coat of dim lighting that had washed through Qasam fell away, replaced by sheer darkness. Never had Slater felt so isolated. He gripped the steering wheel tight to combat his nerves and pressed into the swirling black, the headlights illuminating rocky outcrops and dark corners.
He checked the rear view mirror, glimpsing nothing but an ominous dust cloud trailing behind him.
He was on his own.
It had never been more apparent.
He wondered what kind of resistance he would face atop the mountain. Had he decimated the majority of Sayyid’s forces at al-Mansur’s mansion, or was there a hundred men waiting for any kind of interference?
Briefly, Slater considered the foolishness of his ploy.
What are you hoping to prevent?
If he killed Sayyid — and everyone stationed at the encampment — it would only serve to delay the bomber. The man wouldn’t abandon ship simply because he didn’t receive the orders from the leader himself. There were three bomblets on his person, and Slater fully expected the guy to use them.
Whoever he was.
One of the faceless millions trawling London’s sidewalks.
Slater would never find him.
He could only target what he could feasibly achieve.
That was Sayyid.
So he shut all thoughts of failure and his own uselessness out of his mind and mashed the accelerator into the footwell, giving the vehicle everything it had. It surged up the slopes, taking the rugged track in stride, passing natural lookouts sweeping over the Hadhramaut Valley.
Anyone scared of heights would have blanched and turned back long ago.
He rounded a bend in the track and noticed a steep incline arching up into the darkness. There were dozens of potholes littering the track, each worse than the last.
And something else.
A foreign object, laid across the ground, masked by loose sand.
Something Slater didn’t see until it was far too late.
Then all hell broke loose.
Both front tyres exploded simultaneously with a noise akin to a pair of gunshots, shredded to pieces by the spike strip laid across the mountain trail. Slater struggled to process what was happening — he recognised the sound, but the sheer force of the noise shocked him deeply.
The steel of the front wheels bit into the sand, screeching with a horrific whine, unprotected by the rubber tyres. The wheel leapt in Slater’s hands, shuddering against the force. He wrestled for control. The pick-up truck’s headlights dropped toward the trail floor, masking the view of what lay ahead.
Blinded, shaken, out of control, he wrestled for his own survival.
Fresh headlights flared on the trail ahead, appearing out of nowhere. An oncoming vehicle roared toward him, materialising out of the gloom like a screaming beacon. He guessed the car had been lying in wait just ahead, anticipating a new arrival.
Word must have spread of the events at al-Mansur’s mansion.
Perhaps the tribesmen stationed at the Brigadier-General’s compound had been expected to return by nightfall.
In the end, it didn’t change a thing.
The oncoming pick-up truck surged into range before Slater could act. All his thoughts were preoccupied with keeping his own vehicle on course. To his right, the trail dropped off sharply, transforming into a sheer cliff-face that descended hundreds of feet to the valley floor far below.
In a cerebral chain of events, the oncoming truck sliced to Slater’s left, shepherding him toward the edge.
He refused to budge on his trajectory.
Next a concussive blast rattled the cabin, accompanied by the horrendous groan of twisting metal. The sound only lasted a second, but Slater was coherent enough to connect the dots.
He had been rammed.
The oncoming vehicle had swerved at the last
second, crumpling one side of his hood.
Smashing his truck off the road with sheer, unadulterated force.
It was the laws of nature. Kinetic energy. Unstoppable momentum. With shredded rags for front tyres, Slater was helpless to stop it. His vehicle buckled, twisted to the right…
… and dipped straight off the trail.
44
He moved with explosive precision. Every millisecond counted.
Even as the steering wheel left his hands and the cabin began to swing toward the drop, Slater had burst into motion. He vaulted out of his seat, twisted in the air, and scrambled tooth-and-nail for the open rear window frame.
The material underneath him lurched. It dropped away. He felt the sudden tug of inertia in the pit of his stomach, pulling him down, sucking him into a gaping abyss.
Into darkness and free-fall and a grisly demise.
He sliced both palms open on the window frame, still dotted with flecks of glass from where it had shattered. The wounds didn’t even register in his mind. His entire being willed toward survival, toward that narrow window of opportunity to break free of the cabin — and certain death.
His upper body made it out through the frame as the vehicle’s front wheels plunged into open space. The truck tilted and groaned underneath him.
The rear tray began to follow suit.
Slater ripped both legs out of the cabin, one by one, and they smashed down onto the flimsy tray. He almost toppled over whilst scrambling for purchase, an error that would have killed him. He found grip with a single foot and burst off the mark, hurrying along the back of the truck.
It tilted further.
He had less than a second. The rear tray had turned into an increasingly insurmountable ramp, arching up toward flat ground.
Only the rear tyres were left on the mountainside.
In an instant they would follow the rest of the vehicle and it would plunge into a chasm.
With Slater on top of it.
He snatched at the ridge attached to the very back of the vehicle. His hands were slick with blood, but he hurled himself over the back of the tray all the same.
Into thin air.
If he had miscalculated, if the vehicle had already plunged into open space, he would have leapt to his death.
Instead, he hit the ground like a freight train, missing the edge of the mountain by inches, rolling to safety in a spray of sand and blood. The truck groaned and disappeared from sight, whisked off the trail by the forces of gravity.
Slater lay on his back in the sand, bleeding profusely from both hands, his shoulder tinged with crimson warmth as the bullet wound re-opened. He couldn’t believe what had just happened.
Then the icy fog set in.
He forgot all about the horrifying near-death experience, because it had nothing to do with the present moment. There were hostiles on this mountainside, likely armed and dangerous, hunting for Slater’s head. They wouldn’t stop until they were able to return it to their leader.
His concentration shifted to the truck screeching to a halt a hundred feet down the trail.
It had veered wildly off-course after ramming Slater’s vehicle, having sacrificed its own stability to thrust him off the edge of the cliff. Now it kicked up torrential geysers of sand as it drifted to a halt, resting sideways across the trail.
Its twin headlights — now facing off the mountain’s edge — were the only source of artificial light for miles in any direction.
The rest of the mountainside plunged instantly into darkness.
Slater rose off the ground like a man possessed, his gaze locked on the enemy vehicle. The pick-up truck had screeched to a standstill in an awkward position. To its rear, a wall of rock jutted into the night sky, blocking off any room to reverse. Straight in front of them, the trailside dipped away into nothingness. They were positioned horizontally across the track. It would take at least a ten-point-turn, moving one inch at a time, to get them back on track.
Slater would reach them before that.
Unarmed — with all his weapons sitting in the vehicle now resting at the bottom of the mountain — he set off slowly down the trail.
Taking his time.
Refusing to rush.
They would never hear him coming.
As he drew closer to the truck he was able to study the occupants who rested within. The pair were in the midst of a mad panic, leaning out each window to judge their position on the trail. They realised the extent of their situation, and began to grumble back and forth regarding what to do.
Slater couldn’t speak Arabic, but he concluded that the men had agreed to ditch the ride and make the trek up to the encampment on foot. They seemed to be almost ready to set off.
There was no stress in their tone. Merely inconvenience.
They didn’t know that Slater had made it out of the vehicle.
They didn’t know they weren’t alone on the mountainside.
The driver opened his door and began to step out of the cabin when Slater closed the distance and delivered a staggering uppercut into the underside of the guy’s jaw. With a crack of breaking bone the man slumped back against the side of his vehicle, horrified by the development. Slater wrestled the weapon out of the man’s hands — another Kalashnikov, this one a brutish, unsuppressed AK-47 — and fired it straight through the cabin.
Bullets shredded through the passenger’s upper back, catching him off-guard as he clambered out of his own side. The guy disappeared from sight in a staccato of rifle fire and mortal grunts of agony.
Despite the shattered jaw, the driver made a move to retaliate. He burst off the mark like he intended to bull-rush Slater. If Slater failed to react the man would tackle him into the sand.
He sidestepped, smashed a boot into the man’s groin, and watched the driver fall.
The wind torn from his sails.
Slater had transitioned into something darker, an entity hell-bent on stopping this madness. He didn’t even consider showing the driver mercy. The man had just rammed his immobilised truck off a cliff…
As the man slumped into the sand, clutching his mauled privates, hunching over in defeat, Slater pressed the tip of the AK-47’s barrel to the back of his skull and fired a single shot through the guy’s brain, stripping him of life in the blink of an eye.
His work complete, he turned and set off up the trail at a maddening pace.
Sprinting full-pelt.
Fury in his eyes.
Rage in his blood.
‘Tick tock,’ he muttered under his breath as he surged for the tribal encampment.
45
1930 hours Yemen time
1730 hours London time
Thirty minutes until discharge
The hollow silence permeating through the empty mansion set Abu’s nerves on edge.
He had never experienced a quiet like this before. He knew what it meant. There were dozens of people here — yet they were all corpses. He refused to turn his eyes to the bodies as he hobbled aimlessly through the giant hallways, instead opting to peer up at the decadent ceilings above his head.
They were much more pleasant to look at.
There had been no sign of further reinforcements. The storm of tribesmen that had infiltrated the compound in an attempt to protect it from Slater had failed dismally — Abu didn’t imagine that more men were on their way.
Not until the morning, when one of the Brigadier-General’s detachments paid a visit to the mansion and found it in ruin.
By then, Abu expected to be long gone.
He finished his short lap of the ground floor, still in excruciating pain, and returned to the office where al-Mansur’s body lay in a deep pool of arterial blood. The vast puddle appeared in his peripheral vision, but he didn’t dare focus on it. Instead he crossed to the only swivel chair without blood stains splattered across its seat and dropped back into it. Sweat dotted his brow, even though the chill of night had settled over the desert compound.
He
got back to work.
He left all the lights in the building switched off, letting the harsh light coming from the bank of screens bathe him in a pale blue glow. He navigated through directories and mulled over locked archives, attempting to piece together an elaborate puzzle that al-Mansur and his forces had no intention of letting outsiders decipher.
At the moment, everything was draped in a cloud of confusion. He could tangibly feel the cogs in his brain turning, struggling to decipher the cryptic files. Al-Mansur had somehow tapped into the hive mind of London’s surveillance system — and there was no evidence of how he had done so. He must have employed the best of the best, or had inside connections.
There was no way to know for sure.
The answers were buried in a brain that was currently splattered over the far wall.
It didn’t matter precisely how they had done it. What mattered was locating information that could be of use to Slater.
Briefly, Abu wondered how the strange American had fared on the mountainside.
He had never met anyone quite like Will Slater.
Abu tapped into an unnamed program embedded deep in the most isolated directories, and a strange screen flashed into existence. He cast his gaze over thousands of lines of code — processing, analysing, narrowing his eyes at the strange requests.
He couldn’t understand it.
Despite being one of the only computer technicians in the Hadhramaut Valley, Abu was the first to admit that he had a certain, unwavering skill set. He could tweak and repair almost any technical difficulty with the machinery required to run the mechanical drills and fuel pumps dotting the khat farms across the region. Those abilities were held in high regard, largely due to the fact that the drug was responsible for the employment of half of rural Yemen. He knew information regarding the sinking water table underneath Hadhramaut like the back of his hand.
Back-channels into confidential CCTV programs were an entirely different ballgame.
It should have been simple to decipher the text that lay in front of him.
