One for One (John Flynn Thrillers Book 3)

by A. J. Stewart

  Then the driver’s door flew open and a pistol muzzle was pressed against his forehead and he wondered if his partner had lost his mind.

  Gorski waited until the bus drove away. Then he crept around the rear of the minivan and waited until the girl was out of the way. He had made up his mind about how to handle it, but he knew even the best plans went to hell the moment the boots hit the ground. But this was a very simple plan with few moving parts. As the guy in the old Russian army uniform slammed the door home, Gorski moved. The guy’s hand was still on the door handle when Gorski grabbed him and pulled him back toward the rear of the van. He stuck his leg out to trip the guy and the old uniform hit the dirt.

  Then the driver started the car. It wasn’t part of the plan to mask the sound but it worked out that way. The guy in the uniform reached for a weapon under his coat. It made no difference. Gorski didn’t care if the guy was armed or not. He shot him in the head where he lay.

  The engine start made the whole thing sound like a backfire, so Gorski crouched behind the van to see if the driver came flying out of the door or not. He didn’t. The sound had confused him, or maybe he was stone cold deaf and he hadn’t heard a thing. Either way a count of un-deux-trois saw no movement.

  Gorski spun around the driver’s side of the van and moved fast. He wrenched the door open and found the driver looking the other way, so as he spun back Gorski pressed the muzzle of his Beretta 92FS against the driver’s forehead.

  “Mani,” said Gorski in his passable Italian, but the driver’s hands were already on the wheel, and he clearly wasn’t getting at a weapon anytime soon.

  “Parli Italiano?” Gorski asked.

  The driver shook his head the tiniest bit. The gun didn’t move from its spot against his skin.

  “Français?”

  Another head shake.

  “English?”

  “A little.”

  “Okay. Use your left hand to undo your seatbelt. Then get out of the car.”

  Gorski pressed harder on the Beretta to dissuade any hero moves. The driver unclipped his belt and slid out of the car. Gorski directed him to kneel but kept the gun against his head as he dropped to the dirt.

  “Where are you taking the girl?”

  The driver looked at him. Gorski saw the fear in his eyes but he wasn’t sure if what he saw was fear of Gorski, or fear of whoever the driver reported to.

  “Where?” Gorski pushed the handgun harder.

  “The buyer,” he spluttered. “The buyer agent.”

  “Where is he?”

  The guy shook his head. Gorski knew he could get the information out of him if he had the time. But time was something he didn’t have. Dawn had broken across farming country in Northern Italy, and as a species, farmers woke early. An old guy could ride by on a bicycle at any moment, and Gorski couldn’t be here when he did.

  “What happens if the buyer doesn’t like the girl?”

  “She go back.”

  “With the others?”

  He nodded.

  “And if he likes her?”

  “She fly.”

  “Where?”

  The driver shrugged. He didn’t know where the girls went and he didn’t care.

  Gorski pulled back from the guy but kept the weapon trained on his head. Then he pulled the trigger.

  He checked the ID on the driver. His name was Kuznetsov. His driver’s license was Russian. Gorski moved to the guy in the army costume. Russian again. His name was Petrov. He took Petrov’s uniform cap from the dirt, brushed it off and put it on. If he was seen by CCTV on the autostrade, he didn’t want to look like anything other than the dead man. He dragged the two bodies to the irrigation channel by the side of the road and he dumped the bodies. It wasn’t a long term solution. They would be found. But it might buy a few hours or even days, before someone noticed. Gorski figured an animal would make the discovery. A farm dog, perhaps. Gorski returned to the car and slipped into the driver’s seat. He turned to the girl. She was frozen in fear, her knees pulled up to her chest.

  Gorski spoke to her in Arabic. He told her she would be safe and that he was taking her away from the bad people. How she would define that, having seen him shoot two men, was beyond his pay grade. He told her he would take her to the other refugees. In France.

  He locked the doors so she didn’t try to jump out, and he drove away. He knew Flynn would have questions, but he also knew that he wouldn’t question Gorski’s actions, once taken. Their moral compass was more or less the same. Flynn had just always preferred a lower body count. It had resulted in a lot of mission creep over their years together. Flynn believed he could save everyone, sometimes even the bad guys. Gorski knew some guys were just bad. But he also knew that Flynn made him think more about the things that he preferred not to think about, and he made Flynn more decisive and focussed on the primary mission. They had been part of a great team for a long time. Now the team was gone, but he and his commander were together again. Hunting the bad guys once more.

  He had no doubt that the two dead men lying in the ditch by the dirt road were bad guys. They had chosen their side knowing what they were doing, knowing that young girls were being pulled from a war zone only to be trafficked like meat, to be sold to the highest bidder, to become slaves or prostitutes or both. Gorski felt no sadness for those men. They had chosen their side, and they had chosen poorly, and they had paid the price.

  C’est la vie.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Flynn followed the bus across the north of Italy. It stopped a couple of times, the drivers taking toilet and cigarette breaks. Even guys in the human trafficking business took the EU rules about break time seriously. When the bus stopped for diesel one of the drivers would fill the tank and then get back on the bus and move to a point farthest from the station concourse, where the men would have their cigarettes. Flynn stopped each time, swapping places at the wheel with Elyse. They grabbed some food and coffee outside Milan but stayed near the diesel pumps and made no attempt to interact with the bus or its passengers.

  There would be time. From Milan he figured they had a little more than four but no more than five hours until they got back to Ambérieu. That would mean at least one more break, as per the rules. Technically it might be two stops, but he figured they might stretch one of the last two legs to make the run in quicker. If they took the southerly route—the same route Flynn had driven on the way out—the last leg would be slightly longer. If they took the northerly route, around the outskirts of Geneva, Flynn suspected the second to last leg would be the longer.

  They took the northerly route. The bus didn’t stop again in Italy, and then cut away and headed into the Tunnel du Mont Blanc, an eleven kilometer tunnel underneath the mighty Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps. When they emerged from the tunnel they were in France. The bus slowly navigated the switchbacks from the tunnel exit to the motorway—the French autoroute—and after ten minutes slowed and pulled off into a large service station by the alpine green water of the River Arve.

  The bus stopped by the diesel pumps and one of the drivers got out and filled the tank for the final run into the refugee center. Then he got back on board and the other driver pulled out.

  Flynn followed the bus out onto the slip road back to the motorway, and for a moment he feared he had over calculated. He wanted the men on board to drive as far as possible back to the center. They knew the roads and the capabilities of the bus better than he did. Plus it would be less traumatic for the passengers, and Flynn knew that trauma often resulted in someone doing something stupid, which he wished to avoid. But as the bus pulled away from the service station and the chalet-like restaurant and shop attached, he feared the men were going to break with habit and not stop for their obligatory cigarette.

  Then the driver eased on the brakes, and the lights glowed, and Flynn saw the parking lot ahead, half full of semitrailer trucks on the river side, and small sedans on the motorway side. The bus continued to the end of th
e lot, far from the lights and the CCTV and the tourists making their way to and from the resorts around Chamonix.

  Flynn pulled into a spot opposite the bus. There were no cars down this far. No one liked to walk through a parking lot in the frigid mountain air when they could park two spaces from the door. Flynn got out and stretched, and Elyse followed. He directed her to take the wheel. As she slid into the seat, Flynn looked around. The snow covered peaks of the Alps glowed in the afternoon sun. It was a magical place for many. For Flynn it was a fight to push away the events that had happened here, and the choices he had made, and the people that had been lost.

  The two drivers stepped out of the large coach and closed the door. One lit up a cigarette and leaned against the bus and looked at the view of the mountains across the motorway. The other driver wandered around the front of the bus and down the other side. He was fiddling with his pants as he went.

  Flynn saw no cars or trucks coming out of the service station so he broke wide around the edge of the parking lot and kept to the line of trees on the river side. The second of the drivers was taking a nature break behind the bus. Clearly parking so far from the restaurant had its downsides. He was whistling and steam was coming up from the snow between the trees. He didn’t see Flynn until he was a couple of meters away. He gave Flynn a scowl as he fumbled to zip up his pants.

  “What do you want?” he said in French.

  Flynn said nothing. He continued moving so he was next to the bus, right below where the windows were blacked out at the side. He figured that was where the toilet was. No one could see him. The bus blocked him from the service station and the blacked out windows from anyone in the toilet on the bus.

  “I said what do you want?” scowled the driver.

  “Your bus.”

  The driver gave him a look of confusion, which was followed by no look at all as Flynn cracked the butt of his Beretta into his face. It wasn’t a driving blow. Flynn didn’t want the man dead. If that had been the case, he would have used the other end of the gun. And he didn’t expect to knock him out. There were dangers in that approach too. Too soft a blow would make the target angry, but too hard a blow might kill him. And Flynn didn’t want the driver dead. Not yet.

  The blow stunned the driver and he dropped backward into the small trees. He was moaning, and he put his hands to his face to feel the blood seeping from the bridge of his nose. Flynn dropped down in front of him and pulled a syringe from his pack, and then jabbed it into the man’s upper arm before he could respond.

  “What?” The driver came at Flynn now, with the syringe still sticking out of his arm. But his seating position gave him no leverage and no momentum, and Flynn batted him down and he fell back into the trees. He picked himself up on his elbows and then Flynn saw the head roll, as the first symptoms took hold. The man moaned again and made the motion to shout, but the sound never came out of him.

  Flynn pressed down on the man’s chest and waited. It was a race against the clock. Flynn had injected the driver with a tranquilizer he had taken from Monsieur Pepard’s barn. He had mixed a concoction of Xylazine and Telazol that he had found in the supply cabinet. Flynn knew the drugs were used in concert to knock out horses for short periods to undergo medical procedures like suturing and castration. They were prescription drugs, and Flynn suspected the farmer had kept unused bottles on hand for use on his cattle, so he wouldn’t have to bother with the expense of a vet’s visit.

  But horses were large animals and humans were comparatively not, so Flynn had mixed a small dose, such as might be used on a goat. He knew that Xylazine had even become a drug of abuse in rural communities, were it was known as the zombie drug, causing users to drift in and out of consciousness, even while standing.

  But the driver was sitting. The anesthetic properties took the pain of the pistol-whip away first. The sedation would come second. It would come quickly but not instantly. Within minutes Flynn expected the driver to be drowsy beyond being any kind of threat. Within five minutes he would be asleep.

  But his co-driver would not take five minutes to finish his cigarette. It might be two minutes at the outside. Much less if he heard the impact of the pistol-whip and the sound of his partner falling into the trees over the sound of the vehicles racing by on the adjacent motorway. The question was whether the driver would be out of it enough before his co-driver came looking. It was a close run thing.

  “What are you doing?”

  Flynn heard the voice and turned to see the co-driver near the front end of the bus.

  “I think he’s had a heart attack,” said Flynn, looking back at the man on the ground, whose head was now lolling side to side in the snow below the trees.

  “What?” said the co-driver. “Who are you?” He strode forward. Flynn waited for the man to reach the rear of the bus where the passengers couldn’t see him. He got there and lay his heavy paw on Flynn’s shoulder.

  “Who are you?” he spat.

  “My name is—”

  Flynn never got the rest out. He swiveled and pushed out and up from his crouch, and the co-driver pulled him by the coat and helped create the momentum. Flynn’s core worked overtime creating torque, as he uncoiled and his left fist came from the ground and slammed hard into the co-driver’s solar plexus. He drove the punch home, lifting the man off his feet. He was much less concerned about killing the co-driver. What it did do was drive the air out of him as if a vacuum had been created. The man was suddenly and desperately without oxygen, and his diaphragm went into panic mode. He sucked at air that he couldn’t pull into his lungs, his mouth opening and closing as if in spasm.

  He was winded, badly, but he would recover. Some faster than others. Like a head shot, it wasn’t an exact science. Every body was different so every punch landed in a slightly different place. The co-driver’s legs gave way and Flynn helped him to the ground, his back against the bus.

  Flynn jabbed him with another syringe. The man wanted to fight but his body was performing triage, and at that moment getting oxygen back into the bloodstream was deemed more important that fighting off some guy with a needle. But only just. The co-driver’s lungs began working and he gulped in air and as he did he got his faculties and his strength back.

  And then he didn’t. The sucking of air, the driving of oxygen into his bloodstream, also served to spread the drug through his body faster. He succumbed to the sedative quicker than his buddy in the trees.

  Flynn left the co-driver where he sat and flipped open the baggage hatch at the bottom of the bus. The door opened upward, again blocking the view from within above. Flynn looked inside the hold. There were duffels and garbage bags of clothes and other belongings. All the worldly possessions of the people on the bus. A large spare tire for the bus was pushed right to the back.

  He moved quickly. The tranquilizer he had used was fast acting but not long lasting. He figured he had anywhere between ten minutes and an hour before the effects wore off, and he knew that sometimes it took a long time to flush the drugs from an animal’s system, and other times the animal stood bolt upright in an instant without seemingly any after effects.

  Flynn raced over and dragged the now unconscious driver out of the trees and across the asphalt to the baggage hold. Then he pulled a plastic tie from his backpack and used it to cuff the driver’s wrists behind his back. He repeated the process on his ankles, and then wounded a strip of torn bedsheet around his head as a gag. Then patted the man down for the keys to the bus. It must not have been his shift next as Flynn found none, so he pulled the man up into the baggage hold.

  The co-driver was next. His breathing was shallow and Flynn hoped he hadn’t used too much tranquilizer. But given the other option was a 9mm to the head, he figured the guy had gotten the good end of the deal. He trussed him up, found the keys in his front pocket and then dragged him into the hold. He pulled the hatch door down and closed it, and then he raced to the front of the bus.

  Elyse was still in the car, waiting. She could
n’t see what had happened so she gave him a puzzled look as he pointed out toward the road.

  “Go,” he mouthed, pointing again. The he moved around the bus and put the key into the slot so he could operate the doors. He pressed the button and the doors gave a pneumatic hiss and then opened. Flynn stepped up into the driver’s seat and without a word, turned the key and brought the engine to life. Then he pulled away and headed out onto the autoroute.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Flynn stopped on the road outside the farm and backed the bus into the driveway. He wasn’t planning on staying long. Elyse followed him in the rental car. Flynn stopped and jumped down from the driver’s seat and closed the door, and then he moved around to the baggage hatch. He heard a series of thuds against the panel. He knew what it was. It was two hours from the service station just outside the Mont Blanc tunnel, and the tranquilizer had worn off.

  He pulled the hatch open and found one of the drivers with his feet still bound, thrusting out at the door. Flynn grabbed one of his ankles and slid him forward until he could put his feet on the ground. Then Flynn got down and flipped the guy over his shoulder and carried him like a fireman across the driveway and into the barn where he, Gorski and Elyse had slept. The guy kicked like a dolphin and got nowhere, and then he tried to bite Flynn’s ear. Flynn used the side of his head to smash the guy’s face, which kept him quiet for the few seconds it took to get into the barn. Flynn didn’t bother with a cot, instead dumping the guy in one of the empty stalls.

  The second guy he collected was actually the first—the driver with the bloodied nose. He was still only semi-conscious. Flynn dragged him out of the baggage hold and then worked the man onto one shoulder, and then pushed up out of his squat like a weightlifter. He dumped the guy in the stall next to his co-driver and then strode back out into the driveway. Elyse was waiting for him.