Valley of Death

by Scott Mariani

  ‘But the coordinates led us here,’ Sai said. ‘They must be right.’

  Kabir sighed. ‘The coordinates are based on one guy’s skill with compass and stars, long before we had pinpoint-accurate navigational technology. There’s little margin for error. One tiny slip on Trafford’s part and the GPS could take us half a mile off course, or more.’

  ‘So what are you saying?’ Manish asked, staring at him.

  ‘I’m saying there’s a disparity between the map and this location that I hadn’t noticed before.’

  Sai said, ‘In other words, we’re in the wrong bloody place.’

  Manish was about to say something when he suddenly froze. ‘Hear that?’

  Sai said, ‘What?’

  Now Kabir heard it, too, and turned to look in the direction of the sound.

  The approaching vehicle appeared on the ridge above the river valley, some ninety or a hundred yards to the west, the direction of the parked helicopter. Kabir instinctively didn’t like the look of it. As he watched, it tipped over the edge of the slope and started bouncing and pattering its way down the hillside towards them, throwing up a dust plume in its wake. It was moving fast. Some kind of rugged four-wheel-drive, like the Nissan Jonga jeeps the Indian Army used to use.

  ‘Who are they, boss?’ Sai asked apprehensively.

  ‘No idea. But I think we’re about to find out.’

  The jeep reached the bottom of the hillside and kept coming straight towards them, lurching and dipping over the rubble. Then it stopped, still a long way off. The terrain on the approach to the river bed was too rough even for an off-roader. The doors opened. Two men climbed out of the front. Three more climbed out of the back. All of them were clutching automatic rifles, but they definitely weren’t the Indian Army.

  ‘Dacoits!’ Manish yelped.

  Sai’s jaw dropped open. An expression of pure horror plastered his face. ‘Oh, shit.’

  Dacoits were bandits, of which there were many gangs across north-west India. They were growing bolder each year, despite the increasingly militarised and notoriously brutal efforts of the police to round them all up. Kabir had read a few days earlier that an armed gang of them had robbed a bank in Haryana. Their sudden appearance was the last thing he’d have expected out here, in the middle of the wilderness. But all the same he now cursed himself for having left his self-defence pistol at home in Delhi. His mouth went dry.

  ‘They must have seen us landing,’ Sai said in a hoarse, panicky whisper. ‘What are we going to do, boss?’ Both he and Manish were looking to their professor as though he could magically get them out of this.

  The five men were striding purposefully towards them. Spreading out now. Raising their weapons. Taking aim. Looking like they meant it.

  ‘Run,’ Kabir said. ‘Just run!’

  And then the gunshots began to crack out across the valley.

  Chapter 1

  Three weeks later

  The walls of the single-storey house were several feet thick and extremely well insulated, solidly reinforced on the outside and clad on the inside with thick, sturdy plywood. The house featured several rooms and offered spacious facilities well suited to its purpose.

  But it wasn’t a dwelling in which anybody would have wanted to live. Not even the mice that inhabited the remote compound’s various other sheds and outbuildings would have been tempted to make their nests in its walls. Not considering the activities that went on there.

  Yet, the building wasn’t empty that autumn afternoon. At the end of a narrow corridor was the main room; and in the middle of that room sat a woman on a wooden chair. She wasn’t moving. Her wrists and ankles were lashed tight and her head hung towards her knees, so that her straggly blond hair covered her face. To her right, a kidnapper in torn jeans reclined on a tattered sofa with a shotgun cradled across his lap. To her left, another of the woman’s captors stood in a corner.

  Nobody spoke. As though waiting for something to happen.

  The waiting didn’t go on long.

  The stunning boom of an explosion shattered the silence and shook the building. Heavy footsteps pounded up the corridor towards the main room. Then its door crashed violently inwards and two men burst inside. One man was slightly taller than the other, but otherwise they were indistinguishable in appearance. They were dressed from head to foot in black, bulked out by their body armour and tactical vests, and their faces were hidden behind masks and goggles. Each carried a semiautomatic pistol, same make, model and calibre, both weapons drawn from their tactical holsters, loaded and ready for action.

  The two-man assault team moved with blinding speed as they invaded the room. They ignored the hostage for the moment. Her safety was their priority, which meant dealing with her captors quickly and efficiently before either one could harm her. The taller man unhesitatingly thrust out his weapon to aim at the kidnapper in the corner and engaged him with a double-tap to the chest and a third bullet to the head, the three snapping gunshots coming so fast that they sounded like a burst from a machine gun. No human being alive could have responded, or even flinched, in time to avoid being fatally shot.

  The other man in black moved across the room to engage the kidnapper on the sofa. Shouting DROP THE WEAPON DROP THE WEAPON DROP THE WEAPON!

  The kidnapper made no move to toss the shotgun. The second assault shooter went to engage him. His finger was on the trigger. Then the room suddenly lit up with a blinding white flash and an explosion twice as loud as the munitions they’d used to breach the door blew the shooter off his feet. He sprawled on his back, unharmed but momentarily stunned. His unfired pistol went sliding across the floor.

  The room was full of acrid smoke. The kidnapper in the corner had slumped to the floor, but neither the bound hostage nor her captor on the sofa had moved at all. That was because they were the latest type of life-size, high-density foam 3D humanoid targets that were being used for live-fire hostage rescue and combat training simulations here at the Le Val Tactical Training Centre in Normandy, France. The ‘kidnappers’ had already been shot more full of holes than French Gruyère in the course of a hundred similar entry drills performed inside the killing house. So had the hostage, more than her fair share. But they’d survive to go through the whole experience another day, and many more.

  The taller of the two assault shooters made his weapon safe and clipped it back into its holster, then pulled off his mask and goggles and brushed back the thick blond lock that fell across his brow. His haircut definitely wouldn’t have passed muster, back in his SAS days. He walked over to his colleague, who was still trying to scramble to his feet.

  Ben Hope held out a gloved hand to help him up. He said, ‘Congratulations. You’re dead, your team are dead, your hostage is dead. Let’s review and start over.’

  The second man’s name was Yannick Ferreira and he was a counter-terror unit commander with the elite Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale or GIGN, here on a refresher course. He’d wanted to hone his skills with the best, and there were none better to train with than the guys at Le Val: Ben himself, his business partner Jeff Dekker, their associate Tuesday Fletcher and their hand-picked team of instructors, all ex-military, all top of their game. Ferreira was pretty good at his job too, but even skilled operators, like world-class athletes, could lose their edge now and then. It was Ben’s job to keep them on their toes.

  Ferreira said, ‘What the hell just happened?’

  Ben replied, ‘That happened.’ He pointed at the floor, where a length of thin wire lay limp across the rough boards where Ferreira had snagged it with his boot.

  ‘A tripwire?’

  ‘You must have missed it, in all the excitement,’ Ben said.

  The wire was connected to a hidden circuit behind the wall, which when broken activated the non-lethal explosive device right beneath Ferreira’s feet. Seven million candlepower and 170 decibels of stunning noise weren’t quite the same as being blown apart by a Semtex booby trap, but it certainly
got its message across.

  ‘Devil’s in the detail, Yannick,’ Ben said. ‘As we all know, our terrorist friends have no problem blowing themselves to smithereens in order to take us out with them. It can get just a little messy.’

  Ferreira shook his head sourly. ‘I can’t believe you caught me out with a damned flashbang. That was a dirty rotten trick, Ben.’

  ‘Dirty rotten tricks are what you’re paying us for,’ Ben said. ‘How about we stroll back to the house for a coffee, then we can come back and run through it again?’

  Chapter 2

  ‘Keep pouring,’ Jeff said grimly, holding out his wine glass until Ben had filled it to the brim. Jeff downed half the glass in a single gulp like a man on a mission, and smacked his lips.

  ‘I think I’ll get rat-arsed tonight,’ he declared.

  ‘Sounds like a brilliant plan,’ Tuesday said dryly. ‘Don’t expect me to carry you back to your hole after you collapse in a heap, though.’

  Another busy work day had ended, evening had fallen and the three of them were gathered around the big oak table in the farmhouse kitchen, preparing to demolish a pot of beef and carrot stew that could have fed the French Army and was simmering on the stove. Ben was seated in his usual place by the window, feeling not much less morose than Jeff despite the glass of wine at his elbow, his loyal German shepherd dog Storm curled up at his feet and one of his favourite Gauloises cigarettes between his lips.

  While he’d been working with Yannick Ferreira, Jeff and Tuesday had been putting two more of the GIGN guys through their paces on Le Val’s firing ranges. Tuesday had been a top-class military sniper before he’d come to join the gang in Normandy. His idea of fun was popping rows of cherry tomatoes at six hundred yards with his custom Remington 700 rifle, which generally upstaged and occasionally cheesed off their clients. Especially the ones with a tough-guy attitude, who for some reason didn’t expect a skinny Jamaican kid who was forever smiling and ebullient to be so deadly once he got behind a rifle.

  Ben had warned Tuesday in the past about the showing off. ‘We’re here to teach them, not embarrass them.’ Still, Ferreira’s guys hadn’t taken it too badly. After class the three trainees had driven off to the nearest town, Valognes, in search of beer and fast food to help soothe their wounded pride and prepare them for another day of humiliation ahead.

  Even Tuesday’s spirits were dampened by the gloomy atmosphere around the kitchen table. But the glumness of the three friends had nothing to do with the tribulations of their work. The theme of the dinnertime conversation had been women troubles. Tuesday, who appeared to enjoy a stress-free and uncomplicated love life largely because he was always between girlfriends, had nothing to complain about. For both Ben and Jeff, however, it was a different story.

  Ben had recently returned from an unexpectedly adventuresome trip to the American Deep South. There, in between dodging bullets and almost getting blown up and eaten by alligators, he’d met and befriended a lady police officer called Jessie Hogan. They had dinner and went to a jazz gig together, and although Jessie made it pretty obvious that she liked Ben, nothing happened between them. Ben drove back to New Orleans and boarded his flight home without so much as a kiss being exchanged.

  But that wasn’t the impression that Ben’s French girlfriend, Sandrine, had formed.

  Ben and Sandrine had been together for a few months. It wasn’t love’s young dream. Both of them had been hurt before, and it had been a somewhat cautious, reticent start to the relationship before they fell into a comfortable routine. She was a head surgeon at the hospital in Cherbourg, some kilometres away, whose punishing work schedule meant she didn’t live at Le Val and only visited now and then. It had been on one such visit, a couple of days ago, when the two of them had been hanging out in the prefabricated office building and Ben had needed to step outside for a few minutes to attend to a delivery of some items for the range complex.

  While his back was turned, as luck would have it, an email had landed on his screen: Jessie Hogan, saying what a great time she’d had with him and expressing a strong desire to see him again if he happened to swing by Clovis Parish, Louisiana any time in the future. She’d signed off with a lot of kisses.

  Sandrine hadn’t taken it too well. Ben had stepped back inside the office to be met with tears and anger. ‘So this is what you get up to on your travels, is it?’

  Calmly at first, Ben had protested his innocence. But nothing he could say could persuade her, and after a bitter quarrel and a lot of accusations, Sandrine had driven off in a rage. It was Jeff who’d stopped Ben from going after her. Jeff had been right: following a row with a car chase wasn’t such a good idea.

  Ben hadn’t been able to get through to Sandrine on the phone since, and she wasn’t responding to emails. He’d decided to give it a few days and drive up to Cherbourg. But it wasn’t looking good, and her allegations of infidelity had shaken him to the core. It would never have occurred to him not to trust her, if the situation had been reversed. Maybe he was just naïve when it came to these matters.

  ‘Women,’ Jeff said with a snort. His glass was empty again. He motioned for the bottle. Ben slid it across the table, and Jeff grabbed it and topped himself up, clearly intent on polishing off the whole lot before uncorking another. Tuesday rolled his eyes.

  ‘Come on, mate, it’s not that bad.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  Jeff’s whirlwind love affair with a pretty young primary school teacher called Chantal Mercier had come as a surprise to his friends at the time. The rugged, rough-around-the edges ex-Special Boat Service commando seemed like the last kind of guy a woman like Chantal would go for. To Ben’s even greater amazement, not long afterwards Jeff had announced that he and Chantal were getting engaged. It all seemed to be going full steam ahead. The wedding date was set for later in the year, at the nearby village church in Saint Acaire. Jeff had even been trying to learn French.

  But while Ben was in America, a long-simmering dispute between Jeff and his fiancée had finally blown up. Chantal could live with her future husband’s military past but couldn’t tolerate that he made his living by teaching people how to, in her words, ‘kill people’. After much soul-searching, she’d come to the conclusion that she couldn’t reconcile his violent and morally corrupt profession with her calling as a teacher of innocent, vulnerable little children. Chantal would have no truck with Jeff’s explanations that Le Val was a training facility devoted to teaching the good guys how to protect innocent people from the bad guys, and that all the firearms at the compound were kept strictly secure in an armoured vault, and that the place was about as morally corrupt as a Quaker convention. Adamant, she’d given him an ultimatum: if he wouldn’t give up his position at Le Val and let his partner take over his share in the business, then he could wave goodbye to the future he and she had planned together.

  Jeff had flatly refused to quit. Whereupon, true to her promise, Chantal had broken off the engagement. The dramatic collapse of their relationship had floored Jeff, and he was still extremely bitter about it. He talked about little else – and Ben got the feeling he was about to start talking about it again now.

  ‘She knew what I did when we got together,’ Jeff groaned, staring into his glass. ‘What the fuck’s wrong with her? Don’t answer that, I already know.’

  Tuesday looked at Jeff with wide eyes. ‘You do?’

  ‘Damn right I do. She’s a do-gooder, that’s what she is.’ Jeff took another gulp of wine and tipped his glass towards Ben. ‘Just like what’s-her-name. That activist chick Jude runs around with.’

  Jude was Ben’s grown-up son from a long-ago relationship, now living in Chicago with his girlfriend. Ben wouldn’t have described her as a ‘chick’, but ‘do-gooder’ was admittedly apt, as was ‘activist’.

  ‘Actually,’ Ben said, ‘things aren’t going too well there either. Jude called last night. Looks like they might be splitting, too.’

  ‘There must be something going around
,’ Tuesday said.

  Jeff grunted. ‘He should never have hooked up with her in the first place. Let me guess, she finally realised Jude isn’t enough of a soy boy commie liberal for her tastes.’

  Jeff really wasn’t in a good mood tonight.

  Ben said, ‘Not exactly. She’s become a vegan.’

  ‘Oh, please. Give me a break.’

  ‘And apparently she expects Jude to follow suit.’

  ‘What, like, and live on rice and egg noodles?’

  ‘Can’t have egg noodles,’ Tuesday said.

  ‘Why not?’ Jeff asked him.

  ‘Got egg in them,’ Tuesday said.

  ‘No kidding. So what?’

  ‘It’s exploitation of chickens. Like honey is exploitation of bees.’

  Jeff shook his head in disgust. ‘Jesus H. Christ. What is it with these food fascists? It’s like a disease. It’s spreading everywhere.’

  ‘Nah,’ Tuesday said. ‘It’s not a disease, it’s psychological. They’re stuck in a developmental phase that Freud called the oral stage. The kid learns as a baby that it can manipulate its parents’ behaviour by refusing to eat this or that. Basically, it grows up as a control freak, having learned at an early age how to get its own way and be the centre of attention all the time. From their teens they start attaching moral or ideological values to justify using food as a weapon.’

  Jeff, whose idea of using food as a weapon was restricted to mess-room grub fights and custard-pie-in-the-face comedy routines, stared at the younger man. Tuesday had a way of coming out with things out of left field, whether it was some obscure quotation, a snippet of poetry or assorted little-known facts.

  ‘Where the hell do you get all this stuff from?’ he asked, not for the first time since they’d known each other. ‘Fucking Freud?’