House of War

by Scott Mariani

  A moment later came the chorus of approaching sirens. The officers on the beach turned to look, and Ben scanned the binoculars across to see four police cars and two ambulances bouncing down the track towards them. Reinforcements had arrived. And now Ben decided he’d seen enough. He lowered the binoculars and turned to face Roth.

  ‘Okay,’ he said to the American. ‘Explanation time. Let’s have it. The whole truth, right now.’

  ‘You should be happy, man. The cops have the dope. Nazim’s getting his butt kicked big-time and we’re winning on points. Fortune’s on our side. What’s to explain?’

  ‘Not good enough, Tyler. I’m getting tired of your bullshit and secrecy. First you’re going to tell me what the hell happened here. Then you’re going to tell me how you knew, and who you really are.’

  ‘I don’t know as much as you think I do,’ Roth said, acting falsely accused and stung. ‘All I was told was there’d been a disturbance. Hey, I’m on the level, man. And you know who I am. I’m your old compadre from back in the day, right? Who else could I be?’

  ‘You’ll have to do better than that, Roth. You’ve been keeping me in the dark from the moment I turned up on your island.’

  Roth was silent for a moment. Ben was waiting for him to start talking when he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned to look, and then he saw it.

  Among the rocks of the cliff subsidence was the figure of a man. He was making his way towards them.

  Chapter 56

  Ben’s deeply instilled instinctive reaction was to snatch out his pistol to point at the unknown potential threat. But even as his hand began to reach for the weapon he could see that the man clambering up – trying to clamber up – the rocky giant’s steps from the western end of the beach wasn’t in a condition to be much of a threat to anyone.

  Roth’s explanations would have to wait a little longer. Ben sprang to his feet and began scrambling down the rocks.

  Immediately Ben could see the guy was a local, and not one of Nazim al-Kassar’s jihadists. He was maybe twenty-two or twenty-three, in jeans and a hoodie top. Spiked hair, ruddy outdoorsman’s features, broad shoulders, a lot of muscle. And a wound in his left deltoid that was bleeding profusely all over the rocks, leaving a slick trail behind him as he struggled to inch his way upwards with his one good arm. He’d managed to drag himself halfway up the face of a big craggy boulder that blocked his path, but now he was in trouble, clinging on single-handed and in danger of slipping all the way back down. From the look on his pain-contorted face he wasn’t going to be able to hang on much longer. If he fell, it was likely that the cops on the beach would notice him. That was obviously an outcome he was desperate to avoid.

  Ben reached the flat top of the boulder and reached down to grab the injured guy’s arm. He said in French, ‘You’re okay. I’ve got you.’ The guy was heavy. Solid stock, raised on milk and prime beef. With a lot of effort Ben managed to grapple and haul him up onto the boulder to safety, and out of sight of the police who were now appearing on the beach in greater numbers. Blood was leaking everywhere. Ben’s hands were red with it. He examined the gunshot wound. The bullet had gone right through the left shoulder, punching a smaller entry hole above the collar bone and a chunk of flesh ripped out where it had exited an inch from the shoulder blade. As far as Ben could tell, nothing was broken. It could have been a lot worse. But it wasn’t particularly good. He was going to need medical attention before long.

  ‘You got me,’ the young guy wheezed in resignation, too weak to put up any resistance. ‘So arrest me.’

  This time around, Ben decided it wasn’t the smart play to impersonate an officer. ‘I’m not the police. What’s your name?’

  Visibly relieved despite his pain, the young guy replied, ‘Axel. Axel Roux.’

  ‘Okay, Axel. I’m guessing you’re not one of the bad guys. Tell me who shot you and what the hell happened here.’

  Axel coughed, and the movement made him screw up his face in agony. He gasped, ‘They killed Léon and Jean-Étienne.’ Tears of more than just physical pain leaked down his ruddy cheeks. ‘They killed Maurice and Suzette, too.’

  ‘Who killed them?’

  ‘I don’t know who they are. Scouts for some kind of fucking invasion force, or something. They came in on a boat. About fifteen of the bastards. Armed with machine guns.’

  ‘There are three bodies on the beach. Two white, one black.’

  ‘The black guy, he’s one of theirs. We shot him. But they started it.’

  ‘Who’s we? How many of you?’

  ‘Seven of us, four brothers and three cousins. We live at the farm, up the hill. Maurice and Suzette were our neighbours. Those fuckers murdered them and stole their Citroën.’

  ‘And you all decided to come down here and shoot it out with them like the O.K. Corral,’ Ben said. ‘Not a wise move.’

  Axel tried to nod his head, but the pain was too much. ‘We had to do something. I think they were trying to steal a truck, to get away from the shore. That’s why they were snooping around. We got in the pickups and chased them down to the beach. We hadn’t realised there were so many of them. When we turned up they started shooting at us. Léon, he got hit first. Then Jean-Luc, he shot the black guy. Then Jean-Étienne got hit, too.’ Axel screwed his eyes shut and wiped the tears with his good hand, making blood smears on his face.

  Léon and Jean-Étienne accounted for two of the bodies on the beach, and the dead jihadist for the third. Ben listened as Axel went on:

  ‘We didn’t have a lot of ammo. Just what was in our shotguns and rifles. They kept firing and firing at us. Then I felt myself get hit too. I went down. Jean-Luc grabbed me and we ran and hid behind some rocks. We couldn’t move, they had us pinned. There was so much shooting going on, it was like a war. I don’t remember everything. I was so scared. I was feeling faint and bleeding like crazy. Thought I was gonna die. Last thing I remember is the bastards getting into our pickups and taking off.’

  From Axel’s incoherent account Ben was gleaning that three of the brothers and one cousin were still alive and out there somewhere. It sounded like Jean-Luc was the leader of the gang. Maybe the eldest brother. Ben asked, ‘Did Jean-Luc and the others go after the shooters?’

  Again, Axel tried to nod and groaned aloud at the pain in his neck and shoulder. ‘I think so. I must have been unconscious. Maybe they thought I was dead. When I woke up they were gone, and so was the C1.’ He added, ‘They’re gonna kill the bastards if they catch them.’

  Ben glanced back and saw Roth winding his way down the rocks towards them. Then he looked again at Axel’s gunshot wound. Still bleeding heavily and showing no signs of stopping. ‘You’re going to have to get to a hospital. There are two ambulances on the beach. They’ll look after you.’

  Axel tugged urgently at Ben’s sleeve with his good hand. ‘Please, dude, don’t tell them I’m here. They’ll arrest me. I skipped bail in Orléans, see? I didn’t do anything wrong but they’ll put me in jail. I don’t want to go to jail!’

  Which explained why Axel had been crawling away from the police. Axel had been a bad boy. Ben said, ‘Maybe the local morgue would suit you better.’

  The tugging caused a mobile phone to fall out of Axel’s hoodie pocket. Ben caught it before it could go tumbling down the rocks. A cheap Samsung, sticky with blood. And it was giving him an idea. ‘Do you have Jean-Luc’s number on here?’

  ‘What do you want it for?’

  ‘To talk some sense into him before he gets himself killed, too. I’m going to borrow this phone, Axel. Are you okay with that?’

  ‘Do I get it back?’

  ‘Unless we’re all dead,’ Ben said. ‘Which is a possibility, given who we’re dealing with. You’ve no idea how lucky you are. Most people don’t tangle with Nazim al-Kassar and live to tell the tale.’

  ‘Léon and Jean-Étienne weren’t so lucky,’ Axel groaned. ‘Take the phone. I don’t care if I don’t get it back.’ He clutched h
is shoulder. More blood leaked out from between his fingers.

  ‘What’s your other cousin’s name?’

  ‘Noah.’

  ‘What colour is Maurice and Suzette’s car?’

  Axel stared at him. ‘Why would you ask?’

  ‘If I’m going to go after it, I need to know what it looks like. There are an awful lot of Citroën C1s on the road.’

  ‘It’s red. With one of those fish badges on the back. The Simonots were Christians.’

  Roth had reached them. He seemed to have taken his time coming down the rocks. Maybe he’d been making more of his mystery phone calls, Ben thought. Roth squatted on the rocks a few feet away and gave Ben an inquisitive look. He asked, ‘What’s up with this guy?’

  Ben showed him the bloody phone. Switching back to English he said, ‘This is going to lead us to Nazim. We’re moving on. That little discussion we were about to have, we’ll have later.’

  ‘Whatever you say, chief. Taking him with us?’ Roth said, pointing at Axel.

  Ben shook his head. ‘He’s going to hospital.’ Which in English sounded enough like the French word ‘hôpital’ for Axel’s face to fall in dismay.

  ‘Don’t do this to me, dude! I’m barely hurt!’

  ‘Désolé, Axel. I’m not having you bleed to death on my account.’

  Ben led the way back up the rocks towards the V-cleft in the cliff. He waited until they were three-quarters of the way up before he took out his pistol and squeezed off two rounds into the bushes. The sharp reports echoed across the beach. By the time the police came running to investigate and found the injured man, Ben and Roth would be gone.

  Chapter 57

  Returning to the car, Ben rolled down the cliff path and made a discreet escape back along the narrow country lanes. They weren’t leaving a moment too soon, as the police were descending en masse upon the once sleepy village of Vaucottes that was now experiencing its bloodiest day since the Wehrmacht’s defences had collapsed in the face of the Allied invasion, and tank battalions rumbled over this picturesque landscape. More sirens were screeching and wailing from further inland, a few hundred yards from the beach, and Ben could see flashing blue lights among the scattered properties up there. It looked like they’d found the bodies of Maurice and Suzette, adding to the death toll.

  Police cars zipped by in the opposite direction as Ben sped away from Vaucottes. If it had been him, he’d have ordered every car in the vicinity to be stopped and searched. He was glad that the local police commander didn’t think the same way he did.

  He had cousin Axel’s phone in his pocket, and when they were far enough from Vaucottes to be sure they’d got away clean, he pulled over in a grassy layby, killed the motor and took the phone out. He wiped the blood off the screen, then checked the contacts menu. It held a list of names, of which four were the initials J-L, J-C, J-P and J-E. Ben reckoned that if the eldest brother was called Jean-Luc and his late sibling’s name had been Jean-Étienne, the other two were most likely Jean-something as well. Nothing like having imaginative parents.

  Ben brought up the number for J-L and held it for Roth to see. Roth knew what to do. He took out his own phone and got to work as Ben dialled the number from Axel’s phone. He put the call on speaker so Roth could hear.

  The number rang, and rang, and was on the verge of going to voicemail when the call was picked up. The sound of a hard-pushed car engine was audible in the background. In the foreground was a strained and urgent male voice saying, ‘Axel? Axel?’ Jean-Luc had probably thought that his cousin was dead.

  ‘I’m not Axel,’ Ben said. ‘But he’s alive. He’s going to be fine, Jean-Luc. And I need you to listen to me very carefully.’

  There was a stunned silence. Just the rasping engine noise and someone else’s muffled voice in the background yelling in French, ‘What’s happening? Is he okay?’ Jean-Luc yelled back at him to shut up and drive. Then asked Ben, ‘Who the fuck is this? Why are you calling on Axel’s phone?’

  ‘Think of me as your best friend in the world right now,’ Ben replied. ‘And your only chance of coming out of this alive. What you’re doing is very stupid.’

  Jean-Luc’s voice was cracking up with stress and barely audible over all the noise. ‘What the fuck are you talking about? You don’t know me.’

  ‘I know that you’re with your brothers Jean-Claude and Jean-Pierre and your cousin Noah, driving a red Citroën C1 belonging to your neighbours Maurice and Suzette Simonot, who are dead. You’re in pursuit of your own two pickup trucks, which are being driven by a gang of armed and dangerous men who will murder you all without thinking twice if you get any closer to them. I repeat, this is not a wise action. I strongly recommend that you stand down, right this minute. Am I making myself clear?’

  There was a silence on the phone. For a few seconds all Ben could hear was the background buzz of engine noise resonating around the cab of the speeding Citroën. Then: ‘Who the fuck are you?’

  ‘I’m sorry about your brother and your cousin,’ Ben said. ‘I understand what you’re feeling. I’d probably feel the same. But if I was going to do something about it, I’d do it the smart way. Not like this.’

  ‘I’ll fucking kill those bastards. Every last one of them.’

  ‘No, you won’t,’ Ben assured him. ‘You’ll end up just like Jean-Étienne and Léon. Or worse. You don’t know these people. I do.’

  While they were talking, Roth had been entering Jean-Luc’s number into a GPS mobile geolocation app and now he was staring intently at his phone as he waited to get a fix on the target. Ben was impatient to get moving. There was more muffled shouting on the line as Jean-Luc had an exchange with the others in the car with him. Ben caught the words ‘go faster’, and the driver yelling back, ‘I told you, it won’t go any fucking faster!’

  ‘Jean-Luc? Are you there? Hello?’

  ‘They’re getting away. There’s something wrong with this car. It’s overheating and losing power. I think it caught a bullet in the radiator. The temperature gauge is right in the red.’

  ‘How close are they? Are they still in sight?’

  ‘Just about,’ Jean-Luc replied. ‘But we’re gonna lose them, damn it. Who are these fuckers anyway, since you seem to know so much about them?’

  Ben replied, ‘Trust me, you don’t want to know.’

  ‘Why should I trust you? You won’t tell me who you are. How do I know you’re not one of them?’

  ‘If I’d been one of them, your cousin Axel would be lying on the beach right now with his head sliced off. Instead of being on his way to a nice comfortable hospital. And a jail cell, too, but at least he’ll be safe there.’

  ‘Are you the cops?’ Jean-Luc asked suspiciously.

  ‘No, I’m someone who wants to take these people down just as badly as you do,’ Ben said. ‘But I won’t let you get killed in the process.’

  Jean-Luc considered that point and seemed to accept it. Then he said, ‘Okay, then what’s in those drums?’

  Ben suddenly had a bad feeling. ‘Drums?’

  ‘Drums, barrels, kegs, whatever you want to call them. While they had us pinned down they grabbed all they could off the boat and loaded them into our trucks. First I thought the bastards were some kind of invasion force. Now I’m thinking it’s all about what’s inside those things. They’re drug dealers, right? Or gun runners. Shit, we’re losing them. Can’t this car go any faster?’

  Now Ben’s bad feeling was growing worse. So the police didn’t have all the fentanyl after all. With a chill in his heart he asked, ‘How many drums did they take with them?’

  ‘I wasn’t exactly counting,’ Jean-Luc said impatiently. ‘I was too busy trying to keep low behind the rocks and not get shot. As many as they could fit in the back of our trucks along with their guys. Maybe a dozen, maybe more. Shit! We’re falling right back here. Now I can’t see them at all.’

  Ben did the maths. Twelve drums, forty-five kilos apiece, was 540 kilos, nearly twelve hundred poun
ds. And if one pound of the stuff was poisonous enough to kill two hundred thousand people, Nazim still had the means to murder over two hundred and forty million of them. The entire population of France, three times over, with enough change to wipe out everyone in Luxembourg into the bargain.

  Not good. His palms felt clammy and his mouth had gone dry.

  Then Roth held up his phone for Ben to see as the GPS mobile tracker got its fix on the Citroën and flashed it up on a map with a little red inverted teardrop pinpointing its position. ‘Target acquired,’ he said with a fierce grin.

  Roth was enjoying this far too much.

  Ben was surprised by the tracking result. Now that he knew that Nazim had managed to salvage a quantity of his loot, he’d have expected the terrorists to waste no time at all in heading for Paris, so that they could press on with what remained of their plans. But Paris lay some two hundred kilometres to the south-east, heading past Rouen on the A13 motorway. Nazim was bearing almost due south and a little to the west. He was already nearly forty kilometres from Vaucottes, hustling fast as the crow flew. Sticking to the minor D-roads, but looking as though he was intending to pick up the A28 motorway further south.

  In which case, he was going nowhere near Paris at all. So what the hell was his plan?

  ‘Still there, Jean-Luc?’

  ‘I’m still here. But we’re fucked. We’ll never catch them in this shitbox.’

  ‘Hang in there, Jean-Luc. We’re on our way.’

  Ben had a lot of ground to catch up. But that was what the Alpina was made for. He was pointed in the wrong direction. He fired up the engine with a throaty blast, spun the wheels as he pulled a tight U-turn in the road and accelerated away so hard that the car fishtailed and the rev counter needle was swallowed in the red. He said to Roth, ‘You wanted to find out what two hundred miles an hour feels like? Buckle up.’