Christ, he thought, here he’d been, all his days, trying to measure up to this indifferent cypher, in whose presence he felt instantly inadequate. It was pathetic. He reflected that if he became a billionaire and he found Dawson rotting in a gutter, he’d probably start wondering why he’d never had the vision or the balls to throw away all the pressures and trappings for the free life of a tramp.
When Connor decided to put together his own outfit, harvesting some of the respect his career and abilities had sown among his peers, there was an excruciating inevitability that Dawson should turn out to be his first employer: that one bloody place above him again. It also seemed inevitable that things wouldn’t go to plan, the way you were bound to have your worst game on the rugby field the one day your girlfriend came along to watch. For that reason he should have passed on the job, spared himself the grief and waited until he had the right personnel before tendering for any business.
Nonetheless, there were bigger reasons why he couldn’t refuse, not least the huge payout that was up for grabs at a time when start-up capital would come in very handy indeed. There was also the low-risk factor – unsuspecting, unarmed civilians; isolated location; limited response options – ideal for a debut outing. (This was countered ever so slightly by the operation being criminal rather than military, but that was an issue of morality, not logistics.)
However, the most irresistible reason was, quite simply, that Dawson needed him. No matter what shine he wanted to put on it, or how patronising he would doubtless act, for once Dawson couldn’t do without Connor, and the self-satisfied bastard knew that. Since the old sheik snuffed it and the new regime turfed him out, Dawson had found himself at a bit of a loose end, having been effectively off-the-market for such a long time. So when some dodgy associate of Dawson’s threw him the floating-resort scenario (in exchange, no doubt, for a reflective slice of the proceeds), he knew his next alternative pay-packet could well be a long way off: short notice or not, he had to grasp the opportunity. And to do that, he needed the help of his old school chum, William Connor.
This morning’s fiasco had been everything he feared, presided over infuriatingly by Dawson’s practised look of laboured, pitying tolerance. However, since then, Connor had delivered a smooth and ordered operation, the pieces slotting into place seamlessly and on schedule. The set-up was necessarily more streamlined on account of the various personnel they had lost, but, if anything, he felt it was running more efficiently as a result. In the field it was often the case that the less room there was for mistakes, the less you tended to make them.
Dawson could have little reason for complaint.
Primary incursion: undetected and bang on schedule. Communications rendered inoperable, telephone links under control.
Secondary incursion: undetected and bang on schedule. Defensive rocket teams in position. Watch details deployed. Elevators and alarm systems deactivated. Even the inevitable rogue factor – a stray member of staff spotting Booth in Hotel B – had been dealt with cleanly and without raising alarm.
Assault on ballroom: hostages brought swiftly under control, no casualties, bang on schedule. The only blemish (literally) had been that bloke in the air vent puking on him, but compared to what Connor had already been soaked in that day, it wasn’t worth getting too upset about. He’d been obliged to give the guy a bit of a going over, pour encourager les autres, but decided to cut it short when that woman intervened, mainly because he didn’t want Dawson thinking he’d lost his cool.
The fact that there were still a few civvies unaccounted for at that stage was nothing to be alarmed about: they couldn’t have expected absolutely everyone to be conveniently assembled in the ballroom when they made their move. That one of the strays happened to be Hutchison was unfortunate, but hardly a crippling setback. They’d get him soon enough. Everything was under control.
Dawson’s announcement that he was going for a walk was a typical piece of pantomime. Connor had delivered on everything else, so the prick had to make a big deal about the one little detail that wasn’t quite there – yet. But it would be. Damn right it would be.
Connor decided to lead the search himself, determined that they should get a result before Dawson came back from ‘taking the air’. The pompous bastard might be wearing a ski-mask, but Connor knew he would still be able to read that can’t-you-get-anything-right expression in his eyes if Hutchison was still missing when he returned.
He put Jackson in charge of the hostages: given Acks’ earlier reservations, it was the best way of ensuring the situation in the ballroom stayed calm and stable. If the other two monkeys started fucking around with the prisoners, Jackson would rip them a new one.
Connor deployed sentries on each stairway, then divided the rest of the men into two units: one would start from the bottom, the other from the top. He reminded them that stealth was still a consideration, because if their target was several floors up, he might not have heard the gunfire and could be blissfully unaware of what was going on below. Very blissfully, if Dawson had guessed right about what Hutchison might be up to. There was even a chance, in that case, that when they overrode the doorlock system, it would bring Hutchison downstairs of his own accord, to investigate what was going on. However, realistically he might also be cowering in a cupboard, so the orders were to comb every inch.
Connor’s team worked from the top, Gaghen’s from the bottom. The computer had said Hutchison was quartered in the Orchid suite, so Connor started there. No booting-down-doors stuff: they quietly turned the handle and moved rapidly inside. The bed hadn’t been slept in – or indeed anything else. Connor looked underneath it while Dobson went through the walk-in wardrobe and Pettifer checked the terrace. Dobson climbed on a chair to remove one of the ceiling tiles, then Pettifer gave him a leg-up to investigate whether anyone was hiding in the cavity above. Still no joy. Satisfied that it was empty, Connor pulled them out and they began repeating the drill methodically, suite by suite.
They laboriously swept four of the bloody things without finding so much as a fugitive midge, all the time Connor glancing anxiously at his watch. Then he got a call from Jardine, who was posted outside the Laguna’s front entrance, to say that he’d noticed lights on in one of the rooms. Connor ordered his own men to continue their systematic search, then headed downstairs to meet Gaghen, Quinn and McIntosh on the third floor.
Jardine described the location relative to the central stairway (‘fourth balcony to the left’), so that they were sure they had the right room. The four of them moved along the corridor in near-silence, barely the clink of a belt-clip to be heard as they delicately cushioned their footfalls. Quinn and McIntosh took position either side of the prescribed door, from beyond which they could hear nothing. Gaghen looked to Connor for a signal. He gave the nod. Gaghen gripped the handle and quickly turned it, throwing the door to the wall and charging inside. His speed meant he’d gone four or five feet before they noticed that the room was in complete darkness.
Connor closed his eyes, took a long, deep breath and counted to ten before reaching for his radio.
‘Jardine, is that light still on?’
‘Yes sir. Fourth on the left from the centre. Hasn’t changed.’
‘And would that be your left looking in, or our left looking out?’
‘Ooh. Sorry. I assumed that—’
‘Shut up.’
Swiftly, silently, again, they made their way back along the corridor and took up position outside the corresponding door. Room 322. Again, Quinn and McIntosh took position either side. Again, Gaghen looked for the nod. Again, Connor gave it. Again, Gaghen gripped the handle. The next bit was different this time.
Gaghen began shuddering and trembling, like there was an earthquake and he was the only one feeling it. Connor was about to tell him it was no time for taking the piss, when he noticed the buzzing sound and the smell of burning. Gaghen’s face was contorted into a soundless scream, his eyeballs vibrating in his head.
‘Jes
us!’
Connor shouldered him, but Gaghen’s hand remained immovably clasped to the metal handle. Quinn then tried to grab him, but leaped back as the current ripped through him too. In the end, it took two of them rushing Gaghen at once to dislodge him, all three tumbling untidily to the floor in the tight corridor. Connor rolled away from the tangle and looked down. Gaghen was still jerking a little, but there was little doubt that he was dead. Connor climbed to his feet and took firm hold of his Ingram’s.
‘FUCKING BASTARD!’ he bellowed, peppering the handle with rounds until the clip was empty. Then he kicked the door with all his anger and strength, but to his further frustration, it refused to budge.
‘He’s fucking barricaded himself in,’ he spat.
Connor kicked open the next door along and stomped inside, heading straight for the balcony. Once out there, he slapped a new clip into the breech and slid the bolt, before diving across the gap to the adjacent terrace. He landed with an expert roll that took him back up to his knees, from where he opened fire on the sliding doors, aiming upwards into the ceiling inside. The glass shattered and rained down in thousands of tiny fragments, tinkling on the concrete along with his ejected shells.
He marched through the empty frame. Room 322 looked like it had been tipped on its side, with most of its contents ending up piled against the front door: mattresses, the dressing table, even the television, its flex ripped away. He could see the missing cable also, plugged into the mains at a socket two feet outside the bathroom. The wire disappeared behind the furniture blockade, where presumably it was connected to the door handle.
It certainly beat the shit out of a Do Not Disturb sign.
Connor picked the television off the pile and threw it against the wall with an accompanying scream. He had to spend his rage, had to restore focus. He’d lost one of his best men, a friend too, but the time for emotion was not now. Nonetheless, harsher tactics were definitely called for. This bastard Hutchison was smart. He knew what was going down, and he’d made it plain by killing one of Connor’s men. Well, he could play dirty too. Enough of this stealth-and-restraint shit.
He tore the offending flex from the wall and began furiously dismantling the barricade, casting its components behind him with further growls of strain and anger until the doorway was cleared.
‘Resume your search,’ he ordered Quinn and McIntosh. ‘We need Hutchison alive, but remember, the cunt doesn’t need kneecaps to be able to talk.’
‘Yes sir.’
Connor bounded down the stairs several at a time, heading back to the ballroom. A resort like this would have an extensive PA system, he reasoned. Well, it was time for an announcement. ‘Hi de fucking hi, campers. Here’s the rules of tonight’s party game. The redcoats are going to execute one hostage every five minutes until Mr Gavin Hutchison does the right thing and crawls out of the woodwork.’
In fact, the chief redcoat was going to execute the first one right away, partly to let Hutchison know this wasn’t a bluff, and partly to teach him the dangers of messing about with electricity.
He rounded the foot of the last flight and crossed the floor of the lobby. This was what he should have done the minute they realised Hutchison was missing. For a job like this, he had to think less like a soldier and more like a criminal. Never mind all this running around, the best thing was to keep it simple. You put a gun to a hostage’s head and you get what you want. What could possibly go wrong with that?
Connor unholstered his pistol, threw open the double doors dramatically and strode into the ballroom.
Unfortunately, there were no longer any hostages in it.
21:52 laguna ballroom fuck this for
Jackson looked upon his new ‘unit’ with a perverse satisfaction as they readied themselves to move the hostages out: a less likely bunch he’d never seen, but he felt more like a soldier among them than he had among the last shower. McQuade, O’Neill, McKenzie, Potter. Frocks, dress-shirts, hairspray and Uzis. They looked awkward, clumsy and scared out of their minds, but as a CO of his once said, ‘Show me a troop who’s not scared and I’ll show you a liability who doesn’t appreciate what he’s up against.’ Jackson knew they were outnumbered, outgunned and untrained, but he also knew that he’d rather fall with these people than stand with Connor’s scum. This was about more than life or death. This was about who he was and who he’d been.
He was a mercenary, a hired gun. Other people’s dirty work a speciality. Fighting fights that weren’t his, often in countries he’d barely heard of a fortnight before he was waist-deep in their bloody conflicts.
He’d always told himself he had ethics, always told himself he was on the side of the good guys. He didn’t simply fight for whoever paid the highest: he fought to establish democratic regimes, or to restore them, or to defend them. And he justified the acts he committed with the belief that he was saving the world from men far worse than himself. But in truth the sum of it all had just been a big pile of bodies. Toppling one tinpot dictator to replace him with another; putting down insurgence only for it to rise somewhere else, like air bubbles on wallpaper. He hadn’t saved the world from anybody, least of all himself.
It was long since time to grow up. That was why he’d accepted Connor’s offer in the first place: as a way out. Grab a decent chunk of change so he could find something better to do with his life, and not get sucked back into the next shithole that decided to have itself a civil war. The illegality wouldn’t bother him, he’d reckoned. After the things he’d ‘legally’ done in conflict, it was hard to imagine shedding a tear over a few spoiled businessmen getting ripped off for money that they’d claim back from their insurers anyway. But he knew now: tears would be shed over the kid Connor blew away downstairs, tears would be shed over the poor bastard Booth had taken out, and tears would be shed over however many others these trigger-happy psychos deemed expendable.
He’d looked at the two pricks guarding the ballroom with him, two ex-paramilitaries for whom punishment beatings and rubbing out rival drug dealers hadn’t proven a satisfactory replacement for the excitement of the glory days. There they were, happy as Larry, once again doing what they did best: pointing guns at unarmed victims and getting off on the power.
Carrion fowl. Men of violence who’d be fucked in a world without war.
At the start of every armed struggle there was a time when, with a heavy heart, men of conscience reasoned that they had fruitlessly exhausted their peaceful and democratic options, and had therefore no option but to take up arms in pursuit of what they saw as justice. Once the battle had been going on for twenty-odd years, however, it was difficult to imagine everyone who picked up a gun going through the same tortuous ideological maze as their forebears. Most simply grew up indoctrinated, and their only question was ‘Who do you want me to kill?’
Jackson had encountered their kind around every festering conflict on the planet, Belfast to Bosnia: vicious little bastards who’d be no-marks in a normal world, stuck doing a shit job for shit money like the poor sap they grew up next door to. But as ‘paramilitaries’ or ‘freedom fighters’ they got kudos, they got respect, and best of all, they got to run around with a rifle, shooting people, blowing things up and generally kidding on they were James Bond. Whatever those men of conscience had been seeking all those years back was now irrelevant, if it was even remembered. For the carrion fowl, this wasn’t a struggle, it was a way of life.
The so-called ‘adventurers’ were made of much the same stuff, they just grew up in a different neighbourhood. Psychopaths with little or no military training, who went travelling in search of war because there wasn’t one at home. They were poorly paid – usually the same as whatever the local grunts were getting – because their employers knew they weren’t in it for the money: they only wanted the opportunity to kill people.
But Jackson detested the carrion fowl far more, because for men who liked to call themselves soldiers, they tended to be extremely shy of a fair fight. From Omagh to Warrin
gton to Lockerbie to the Valley of the Kings, it seemed the principal criterion denoting a ‘legitimate target’ was the target’s inability to retaliate. The cunts wanted to play the game, but they didn’t fancy playing it toe-to-toe.
And now here he was, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with them, facing a room full of terrified hostages. He’d come all this way, all these years, to end up pointing a gun at some defenceless fucker’s head and saying ‘Gimme all your money’.
No ideological hair-splitting could colour this conflict: tonight he was on the side of the bad guys. And if he was one of the bad guys tonight, then maybe that was who he’d always been. Not a soldier, not a professional, just a thug who killed for coin.
Well, as Aristotle put it, ‘To do is to be’; and more to the point, as Zappa put it, ‘You are what you is’. It was time to define himself. As soon as the search teams were safely departed, he reattached the suppressor to his Nagan and called his fellow guards towards him.
‘What’s that phrase you boys use? Oh yeah. Nothing personal,’ he said, then shot both of them through the middle of the forehead.
Sorry, guys, but once you’re in the game, you’re in the game.
There were gasps of shock from the floor, and one woman began screaming.
‘Christ’s sake, shut her up or she’s gonna get us all killed,’ he said stiffly, pulling off his ski-mask. The man beside her, presumably her husband, stared back helplessly as she filled her lungs for another volley. ‘I’m on your side,’ Jackson explained, by which time the woman next to her had covered her mouth with a hand and was telling her to calm down. Jackson gave her a thumbs-up.
He then pointed at the bloke who’d fallen through the ceiling. ‘What’s your name, mate?’
One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night Page 24
