Rogue

by James Swallow

  ‘Report,’ he demanded.

  ‘Targets are free and mobile,’ said Vine, jerking his thumb in the direction of the fleeing vehicle.

  ‘Obviously.’

  Following him out, Khadir heard Grace give a derisive snort.

  ‘Slippery buggers,’ she added.

  Simbarashe pushed past her, yelling to his soldiers.

  ‘Get the trucks! Go after them, I want them dead!’

  His men swarmed aboard the parked technicals, dragging boxes of ammunition up with them for the mounted guns.

  ‘That’s not your choice to make, love,’ said Grace, giving the warlord an arch sniff.

  Simbarashe faltered, his anger so high that for a moment he was lost for a reply.

  Khadir holstered his pistol and summoned Cord, Grace and Vine with a flick of his wrist. He started towards the landing pad, pressing the radio microphone tab at his throat.

  ‘Start it up,’ he told the pilot. ‘It seems we need to finish this ourselves.’

  Behind the bubble canopy, the Hind’s pilot gave a terse salute, and the gunship’s rotors began to turn.

  *

  Once they were away from the compound, the landscape around the vehicle became a backdrop of layered shadows, the only illumination coming from a distended pool of white glow from the Hummer’s one remaining headlight. The cracked asphalt of the highway was a black blur, mile markers and patches of encroaching scrub flashing past alongside them to mark the motion of the road.

  Inside the vehicle, Marc smelt spent gunpowder, hot oil and human sweat. A fair amount of the latter was his, as the rush of the escape echoed through him.

  ‘I’d kill for a pair of NVGs right now,’ he muttered.

  ‘Rocket launcher would be better,’ said Lucy, reloading her rifle. ‘How many rounds left?’

  ‘Two mags remaining,’ Malte replied.

  Marc saw a flicker of light in his wing mirror and hissed, ‘They’re gaining on us.’

  Lucy turned in her seat, aiming backwards. The rear window was webbed with bullet impacts and part of it hung away from the frame, flapping in the wind.

  ‘I make two pickups, coming up fast.’

  Solomon dropped the passenger-side window and shifted around.

  ‘We cannot let them take us. My old comrade is not a forgiving man.’

  ‘Yeah, no shit.’

  The first bullets fired by their pursuers went wide, but still Marc flinched at the sound. In the bright yellow behemoth, he felt like the world’s most obvious target.

  The technicals were Toyota Land Cruisers, one a rusted white, the other a patchwork of salvaged panels. Both were bog-standard pickup trucks as common as anything in Third World countries, but their engines had been tweaked by militia mechanics for more horsepower. On the rough roads, the lighter vehicles could match the more powerful Hummer in short spurts, and that would be enough to put them in firing range.

  Shots chewed up the dirt at their heels and then Marc heard them hit the tailgate, cutting wads out of the metal frame. Caught on the pincers of two .50-calibre guns, the Hummer wouldn’t last long, and the hail of flying lead forced the others to keep their heads down, stopping them from returning fire.

  ‘Bridge up ahead,’ grunted Solomon.

  In the gloom, Marc saw the outline of a short wooden pontoon affair over a dried-out river bed, where the road narrowed to a single vehicle’s width. It was coming up fast, giving him little time to choose his next move.

  He slipped the Hummer left and directly into the path of the rust-stained pickup, stamping on the brakes to kill some of their forward momentum. The other technical howled past at speed, the patchwork vehicle’s rear gunner unable to swing his gun around fast enough to get a bead on them.

  ‘The fuck are you doing . . . ?’ Lucy yelled.

  The wide rear of the Hummer struck the front of the trailing pickup, the impact shocking through both vehicles with a shuddering crash. The gunner was momentarily unseated, the long barrel of his mounted weapon flicking up to aim at the sky.

  Marc didn’t hesitate, riding out of the collision and accelerating away again, straight towards the patchwork technical, now ahead of them as it rumbled onto the bridge.

  Rapidly running out of road width, Marc brought the Hummer up towards the other pickup’s rear quarter and executed a pit block. He’d learned the manoeuvre in MI6 field training, a tried and tested police pursuit tactic where a chaser could deal with a vehicle ahead by forcing it into an uncontrolled swerve.

  The heavier vehicle hit hard and put the patchwork truck off-kilter, spinning it as both vehicles bounced onto the bridge. Marc gave the Hummer more gas and kept up the momentum. He locked eyes with the technical’s screaming gunner as the militiaman put his weight into the gun to bring it to bear.

  The lighter pickup lost traction and rebounded off the Hummer’s cracked grille. It skidded away and dived nose-first over the edge of the bridge, a ten-metre fall that sent it down into the cracked mud.

  They rocketed off the bridge and back onto the highway, the road quality worsening the further they were from the compound. Marc felt the steering working against him, and the Hummer listed to the right.

  Tyres, he thought.

  Simbarashe had fitted his personal vehicle with run-flats, but not even those could stand up to sustained heavy weapons fire.

  ‘Coming up!’ called Lucy.

  The remaining technical was close behind, and the other gunner was back in the saddle, riding the recoil of his gun as he worked it back and forth over the rear of the Hummer. A bright bolt of tracer keened through the inside of the cabin as the shots blasted away the last of the armoured window and penetrated the framework. Rifle-toting militia shooters in the flatbed added their weapons to the screaming chorus, and bullets ricocheted around inside the rear cargo space.

  Lucy slammed the heel of her hand into the back of the driver’s seat.

  ‘They’re chewing us up!’

  Solomon tried to return fire, but it was blind shooting. If he exposed enough of himself to take aim, he would be torn apart.

  The two vehicles raced over a low rise and the Hummer accelerated into the drop. Up ahead, a small hill grew out of the landscape, momentarily filling the cracked windscreen with a wall of orange-red dirt.

  ‘Get ready!’ shouted Marc. ‘Solomon, your side!’

  The Hummer crested the hill and caught air, the engine howling as it over-revved. They slammed down hard, and for a split second the line of sight between the two vehicles was blocked.

  Marc worked the brakes, throwing the Hummer into a jackknife skid that slewed it to a stop lengthwise across the highway, presenting the passenger side of the vehicle towards the crest of the hill.

  Solomon, Lucy and Malte didn’t need to be told what to do next. As the technical came flying over the rise, they opened up as one, unloading their weapons into the Toyota.

  A spurt of crimson painted the technical’s windscreen as a bullet nicked the driver’s jugular, and the vehicle veered out of control. Concentrated fire bore down on the gunner and kicked him off the .50, seconds before the rusting pickup sank into a ditch and slammed to a halt.

  Lucy and Malte scrambled out and ran to the crashed truck, looting weapons and ammunition from the dead crew to augment their meagre stock. Marc brought the Hummer around, but he could feel it complaining with each turn of the wheel. The vehicle had been badly damaged, its frame soaking up hundreds of rounds. It wouldn’t get them much further.

  He sucked in a shuddering breath and checked himself over. Aside from the nasty shiner he’d earned in the cages, Marc’s only injuries were a few cuts from flying fragments of broken glass. He looked to Solomon.

  ‘You okay? You hit?’

  ‘We must get off this road,’ said the other man, staring out into the endless night. ‘They will find us if we remain on it.’ He jabbed a finger at the darkness. ‘Go across country.’

  Marc frowned. The Hummer was solidly built, but
he doubted it would make more than a few more kilometres.

  ‘It’s your old manor. I’ll follow your lead, but this thing isn’t going to get us far.’

  The vehicle rocked as the others climbed back in.

  ‘Next time, Dane,’ Lucy snapped, ‘a little warning before you pull that kinda stunt?’

  ‘No need to thank me.’

  Marc put the Hummer back into drive, and pointed it into the wilderness.

  *

  The Hind’s engine note rose to a high-pitched whine, and the gunship rocked on its undercarriage as the rotors spun up to take-off speed.

  Khadir climbed into the crew compartment and found his M4 carbine where he’d left it. Force of habit made him take down the weapon and double-check its readiness, as Grace followed him on board with Cord and Vine a step behind her.

  He eyed the woman.

  Did she have any inkling that her death had already been ordained by her employer?

  Khadir knew that when the moment came, he would have to execute her himself. She knew too much about their operations, and that knowledge in the hands of someone who served the highest bidder could not be tolerated.

  ‘How do we play this?’ called Vine, pitching his voice up to be heard over the roar of the engine above their heads.

  ‘Quadrant sweep pattern,’ said Khadir. ‘This aircraft has a searchlight and forward-looking infrared scanner. We track their vehicle, disable it, secure our objective.’

  ‘Secure,’ repeated Cord. ‘Just Solomon, right?’

  Khadir nodded. ‘The others are irrelevant. Be sure to recover all kills. Glovkonin will want proof that his orders have been followed.’

  Vine reached out to pull shut the drawbridge hatch in the helicopter’s flank, but at the last moment, hands grabbed the edges from outside and forced it open again.

  Now equipped with a plate carrier armour vest and a Bizon sub-machine gun on a shoulder strap, Simbarashe clambered into the Hind, his eyes wide and chemically bright.

  ‘You are going nowhere without me!’ he snarled, and with him came three more militia soldiers in similar gear.

  Khadir glared at the colonel with new disdain, wondering what he had taken to steel his courage.

  ‘Your assistance is not required,’ he replied. ‘Stay home and count your money.’

  ‘No!’ Simbarashe dropped heavily into one of the cramped cabin’s folding seats. ‘I will see this to its end!’

  Arguing the point would waste more time, and as much as Khadir wanted to throw the militia leader out onto the dirt, he had other considerations. He looked away, towards the flight crew.

  ‘Get us in the air.’

  ‘Sir.’

  The pilot saluted again and pulled on the controls.

  The reptilian silhouette of the Hind rose smoothly off the landing pad and rose up into the night, pivoting in the direction of its fleeing prey.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The Hummer started making a sound like a sack of bricks thrown into a cement mixer, and the stink of hot oil was heavy in the cabin, making Marc’s breath catch.

  The scrubland had not been kind to the vehicle, and they were barely lurching along now, forced to veer back to another rough highway or lose the whole thing down some unseen gulley.

  ‘Structure ahead,’ Malte called out from the open sunroof, where he lay across the top of the bullet-riddled frame.

  ‘Yeah, I see it.’

  The only illumination for miles in any direction was coming from a dilapidated petrol station, a low two-storey building with a square awning that extended out over a solitary gas pump on the dusty forecourt. Lights burned inside an office and what were probably a garage and a living room on the second floor.

  The Hummer rolled to a halt short of the awning, the engine dying with a pathetic splutter, and Marc knew the thing had given up the ghost. He gave the dashboard a pat.

  ‘Got us this far,’ he told it.

  The four of them decamped from the hissing, leaking vehicle and moved with weapons at the ready. Lucy and Malte took the lead, while Marc hung back. Solomon stuck close to the Hummer, pulling the black jacket tight over his shoulders.

  As far as Marc could make out, the road they were on cut through the middle of a wide, shallow valley, bordered by distant ridges that formed inky walls far beyond the glow of the petrol station’s lights. The dirt-track road ran west to east beneath the bowl of a starry night, vanishing into the distance.

  ‘They will keep coming,’ Solomon said quietly. ‘Until they know we are dead.’ He looked up to find Marc watching him. ‘They are picking us off one by one, Mr Dane.’

  ‘We need fresh horses,’ Marc countered. ‘We have a decent lead on them. How far is the airstrip from here?’

  ‘Far enough.’

  Marc knew where this was going.

  ‘Look around, man. This is not a good place to dig in.’

  ‘You fight with what you have.’ Solomon took a long, exhausted breath. He looked down at the assault rifle again and a rueful smile split his face. ‘This is an old friend. Fitting that I have one in my hands again.’

  He reached up to his collar and pulled out the silver chain that hung around his throat, fingering the object that dangled from it – the trigger from a weapon of the same type. The one he had carried as a boy soldier.

  Marc was going to say more, but then the wind down the highway brought a faint, distant sound to them, and he instinctively turned towards it.

  It was the faraway rattle of rotor blades, the noise rebounding off the ridge line. Marc leaned into the Hummer, searching the glove compartment, and came back with a pair of compact binoculars.

  Sweeping the horizon, he glimpsed a dot of light, moving and then gone as the rotor noise faded.

  ‘The gunship’s out there.’

  ‘How long until they reach us?’

  Marc shrugged. ‘Soon as their sweep brings them this way, they’ll spot this place. Could be ten minutes from now, could be an hour.’

  He pocketed the binoculars and moved to the rear of the Hummer.

  The tailgate was distorted and jammed in place, but with a swift kick Marc had it open and forced it clear. He grimaced to see that Assim’s body bag was holed in several places, from bullets that had peppered the vehicle. The indignity of it was galling, but he forced the reaction down and out of his thoughts.

  Back to the old pattern, said a voice in his head, a voice that sounded like Benjamin Harun.

  The soldier-shrink had pulled that out of Marc in one of their first meetings, unpicking his tendency to shut down and go cold in the face of an emotional shock. It had happened in his naval service, when the Lynx helicopter he crewed had crashed in the South China Sea, in MI6 when Nomad and Sam Green were killed, when his mother died in hospital . . . again and again.

  Marc always told himself that he would grieve later, box up the pain in the moment and keep his mind on the mission, but that was a lie. He kept those boxes sealed up, one after another.

  Now is not the time, he told himself. But a part of him knew it never would be.

  He put a hand on Assim’s body, the closest he would get to a farewell to his young friend, and then went back to the job at hand. Marc dragged the ammo crate out from under the webbing that secured it, and frowned as he saw that it too was pockmarked with bullet holes.

  ‘There’s a vehicle in the shop,’ said Lucy, jogging back to them from the garage. ‘A ranger jeep from the national park up the coast. Looks like it’s missing a battery, though.’ She halted as she saw the state of the ammo crate. ‘That seems bad.’

  Marc opened the lid and tilted the crate. Broken pieces of hard drive rattled around inside.

  ‘We’ve lost a few. Not all of them, though.’

  ‘That’s something.’

  ‘You may want to hold your applause,’ he replied, and told her about the gunship.

  ‘We knew they were coming,’ she said. ‘What do we do about it?’

  Marc took in
the ramshackle building.

  ‘I really do not like the idea of making a last stand in a location like this.’

  ‘It’s only a last stand if you wind up dead,’ she noted. ‘Look, we swap vehicles, we get on the move, that’s one way to go. But that helo is going to run us down no matter what. We’d just die tired.’

  ‘Lucy’s point is well made, as ever,’ Solomon said wearily. ‘I have had my fill of being the prey.’

  There was a commotion at the office door, and Malte emerged, pushing an older man and his younger companion out into the night. They were shouting at the Finn in loud Portuguese, and he clearly had no idea what they were saying.

  Marc looked the pair over, and saw the resemblance immediately.

  Father and son, he thought. This is a family business.

  Solomon walked stiffly over to the two men and intervened, waving Malte away. Marc couldn’t follow any of the conversation, but he saw Solomon switch into that same composed and collected manner he displayed in billion-dollar boardrooms. In a few moments, the dad and his son were calming down, and Marc knew Solomon was carefully talking them into walking away.

  ‘When we were on the road, did he take a hit?’ Lucy asked quietly, watching the discussion.

  ‘Would he tell us if he had?’ said Marc.

  ‘Guess not.’

  At length, the three men shook hands like old friends, and Solomon waved them off as the old guy climbed aboard a grubby trail bike, the younger man getting on the saddle behind as his passenger. The motorcycle’s engine snarled and it sped away into the night.

  Marc raised an eyebrow. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I told him where to find a better life for his son and the rest of his family.’

  Solomon left it at that, and wandered into the office.

  ‘That guy could get an army of snowmen to follow him into Hell,’ said Lucy.

  Marc gave a humourless snort. ‘What does that make us, then?’

  Malte spoke before Lucy could come up with a retort.

  ‘Found the generator,’ he said, indicating a square shape at the rear of the building.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘We can kill the power when we need to.’