Off Reservation

by Bram Connolly

  ‘Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.’ He bent down and picked up the circuit board. ‘I know what this is – I bet it’s how Matt got in.’

  JJ located the small hole at the bottom of the lock and inserted the plug attached to the wires from the circuit board. He switched on the device and the lock clicked open. He pushed the door open hard and Todd made entry in front of him, pistol drawn. Three steps inside the door he came face to face with a small man in a New York Yankees cap who had just darted out of the bathroom. Over his shoulder JJ could see a giant of a man was in the process of drowning Matt in the bath.

  The smaller guy raised his weapon, but Todd was quicker. He fired his own pistol twice, the first round smashing the guy in the chest and the second in the top of the head, but not before his adversary got off an instinctive shot himself, the bullet hitting Todd in the side of the leg and dropping the big American in the doorway, his own pistol falling out of reach as he writhed in pain.

  ‘Shit, you alright, mate?’ JJ said, looking down at Todd as he calmly stepped over his injured friend.

  ‘No, I’m not alright – I’ve just been shot, you son of a bitch.’

  The monster who’d been drowning Matt charged out of the bathroom and faced JJ head on.

  JJ levelled the pistol at him; glancing sideways he could see Matt face down in the bath, the water red with blood. He focused back on the monster. ‘Jesus, you’re a big unit, aren’t ya, champ?’

  ‘Hassan!’ the monster yelled. He spat at JJ, and palmed the weapon to one side, striking out at the same time with his other hand and hitting JJ in the face.

  JJ fired the pistol off into the wall as his grip inadvertently released on the weapon. It dropped next to him with a thump. ‘Here, hold this, Todd.’ JJ kicked the weapon behind him. ‘I’m going to have to give this guy his final grading.’ JJ moved in fast, the first punch catching his opponent on the cheek.

  The brute seemed surprised to find himself under attack, but he managed to block the second and third punches and the two men moved away from the bathroom door and into the larger room.

  ‘Get in the bathroom, Todd – Matt’s in trouble in there,’ JJ yelled without taking his eyes off his foe.

  ‘Oh, no worries, JJ. I’ll just jog in there, shall I?’ Todd dragged his limp leg behind him as he crawled towards the bathroom door holding the pistol in one hand.

  The brute came back at him. JJ put his hands up in defence and the brute punched him hard in the side of the stomach and then snuck in an uppercut under JJ’s guard, the blow rocking the Australian, who had to grab the monster on the way down to steady himself.

  Jesus, there’s no point boxing with this guy, thought JJ on the way down.

  The big man held JJ by the shirt and continued to elbow him on the top of the head on the way down. JJ grabbed the monster’s left leg and lifted it high, pushing the brute off balance, then ran him hard at the wall. The monster hopped on one foot, trying to get his feet back down, but he couldn’t quite get the platform he needed and JJ smashed him hard against the TV set, then used his own head to strike his adversary under the chin as he got to his feet.

  The brute laughed it off and nodded his respect at JJ. He took a step back and the two men faced off again. The brute feigned a punch and then kicked at JJ hard. JJ moved out the way of the kick and came in from the side. He swept the brute’s feet out from under him with a solid blow to the back of his legs and then followed him to the ground. The brute went into a half-guard as JJ used his shoulders to smother his face and neck. JJ splayed his legs and hooked them under the bed to further pin the brute down on the carpet. JJ was used to holding people like this, but never someone so powerful. The brute rolled then lifted his hips to try to create some space so that he could get out from under JJ. The Australian commando waited for him to do it again and this time he let him have the gap, then smashed his fist down into the brute’s face. He closed the hold again. JJ expected that this time the brute would make a triangle with his hand and try to get it under JJ’s arm, which was pressing down on his windpipe, but the move didn’t come. Instead, he could feel the monster moving his hand around down by his legs. Then it dawned on JJ, a little too late, what the brute was doing. His suspicions were confirmed as the cold steel entered his belly.

  ‘Shit!’ JJ rolled off him, a small dagger still in his stomach.

  The brute slowly got to his feet, smiling at JJ.

  JJ grasped the dagger and slowly pulled it out. It hurt, a lot, but he knew it wasn’t bad – however he made out it was terminal. He collapsed to one knee, wincing and gasping, and the brute walked over to him.

  ‘You fight well. You surprised me at first…your technique is very interesting. You attack to defend. I like it, I must say.’ The giant straightened himself up and loomed high over JJ. ‘But, at the end of the day, the blade is always the best defence.’ He placed his hand on JJ’s head and then removed the large knife he had killed Faisal with from his waistband. ‘When I’m finished with you, I’m going to kill your two little friends.’

  JJ coughed. ‘You’re really not that bright, are you champ?’

  ‘Fuck you.’ The brute spat the words out and lifted the knife high in the air.

  JJ thrust up with lightning speed and lodged the dagger under the brute’s chin, driving it through his mouth and up into his brain. He grabbed the large knife from the brute’s hand and spun it around, lodging it into his chest for good measure, then kicked the dying man across the room.

  ‘Fucking lightweight,’ he said.

  JJ walked back into the bathroom to find Todd and Matt sitting on the bathroom floor, both holding towels on their wounds.

  ‘Oh, yeah right, thanks for the fucking help back there, lads, no dramas.’

  ‘What?’ said Matt wincing. ‘I haven’t seen you lose a fight yet, mate. Why would this be any different?’

  JJ frowned at him. ‘Here, let me have a look at that.’ He pulled back the towel to inspect Matt’s wound. ‘Ah, That’s nothing, boss.’ JJ took Matt’s towel and placed it on his own stomach. ‘Don’t mind if I borrow this for a bit, do you?’ He looked across at Todd’s leg. ‘Oooh, that, on the other hand, might take some recovery.’

  ‘Nah, it’s not actually too bad. I’m just not sure how I’m going to explain it to work is all.’

  Suddenly the lights went out. They heard a series of small explosions and shouting coming from somewhere nearby. The sounds grew louder as the explosions from sound and flash grenades came nearer.

  JJ slowly lowered himself to the ground.

  ‘I suspect the British cavalry have arrived,’ said Matt as he grabbed another towel off the floor and placed it under his arm. He started to choke on the CS gas that was coming in through the doors and windows.

  Four guys dressed in flight suits with black gasmasks and silenced weapons made their way into the room, torch beams crossing each other as they scanned their arcs.

  ‘Get down! Get down!’ came the muffled shouts.

  I’m already down, you fucking retards, thought JJ.

  30

  ISTANBUL

  ‘And so that’s how we came to be in Faisal Khan’s hotel room.’ Matt leaned back in the chair and took the proffered glass of water from Rachel, who had entered the hotel dining room just moments before. Matt wondered who had painted the pictures that adorned the walls. There was a series of five that depicted summer sailing in the Bosphorus. They looked so peaceful. He let his mind wander back to the sight of sails on Lake Burley Griffin, back before he had been caught up in all of this, before Steph Baumer had lured him from Canberra to Italy and persuaded him to work for her.

  He looked across the dining table at Major Faruk, who was busy taking notes. Only a handful of hours earlier, this hotel had been all chaos and shouting; now the Turkish military had taken it over and were conducting a clean-up operation. The SBS guys had all been debriefed and spirited away back to the military airport. Their work done, they were almost certainly on thei
r way back to RAF Brize Norton and reconfiguring for future tasking.

  Rachel pulled up a chair next to Major Faruk and opened her small notebook. Matt extended his neck, trying to see what she was writing.

  ‘How’s your shoulder?’ she asked finally, looking up at Matt.

  ‘It feels okay, no damage. The round went straight through the armpit.’ Matt lifted his right arm over his head to demonstrate that he still had the use of it. He winced and then put his arm back down on the table.

  ‘Todd has been released from hospital,’ Rachel told him. ‘He seems to be fine, just a hole in the leg. In fact, he’ll be on a plane back to the States tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Oh, okay, so you took care of that then?’

  ‘Yes, Matt. Just cleaning up the mess.’ Rachel looked at him intently for a moment. ‘Matt, Steph Baumer isn’t in the CIA and hasn’t been since 2010 – you do know that, right?’

  ‘Uh…what?’ Matt looked at her, trying to figure out what she meant. ‘Are you talking about the deniability thing?’

  ‘No, I’m talking about the fact that she never contacted you – you made it all up. I don’t think you’re very well, Matt. Maybe you haven’t been well since Afghanistan.’ She glanced at Major Faruk, who rose out of his seat and quietly slipped out of the room. ‘I think you need to go home and get some help.’

  Matt focused on the bluest of the paintings. The artist had captured a clear sunny day; the sailing boat was the focus of the painting, and the water was clear and calm, but on the horizon there was a dark line of clouds. There was a storm brewing. The artist had flicked some little lines of white and grey on the water near the horizon to give an ominous tinge to the waves in the distance. Matt focused hard on the painting. He sensed that at any moment the sailing boat might be destroyed. He was that sailing boat.

  He turned to look at Rachel. ‘That’s what you believe, is it? That I made it all up. You’ve given up on me before we even really began.’

  ‘It’s time we both moved on, Matt. And I think you need to go and work out what’s going on in your head. I have things I need to do too, and I can see now that waiting for a future with you won’t do me any good.’

  The door to the dining room opened and one of Rachel’s intelligence staff walked in. She handed Rachel a piece of paper and then left again. Rachel read the note, her forehead creasing into a frown. Matt sensed that the contents had come as a surprise to her.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I think it must be some sort of mistake.’ She read it again and shook her head slowly. ‘Apparently, the case is a fake. There’s no plutonium in the canister; it’s just an alloy of some sort.’

  Matt nodded and smiled. He looked at the painting again and then laughed. ‘Can I ask you a question, Rachel?’ he said, as he rose from his chair. He put his hands in the pockets of his cargo pants and stood tall, shoulders back, looking every inch the commando officer that he had been.

  Rachel looked up from the note.

  ‘How did you come to learn about the case in the first place?’ Matt asked.

  ‘We were given the information through the European intelligence sharing portal; it’s a facility we use to cross-check and collaborate with NATO.’

  ‘Well, I’m not a spook, but I think I know the answer to this next question. Who in Europe sorts the information and loads it to the portal, oversees its validity and so on?’

  ‘Well, that’s the CIA…’

  As Matt strode towards the door she asked, ‘Where are you going?’

  Matt turned. ‘I’m going to go put a bullet in Steph Baumer’s brain, Rachel – something I should have done a few years ago.’

  31

  MOUNT CIMONE, ITALY

  ‘On belay, climb when ready,’ Matt called down to JJ. He felt tension on the rope and knew the big commando sergeant was making his way up to the spot where Matt had set up the anchor. Although the ascent was relatively easy, even in the dark, Matt had still opted to be tethered together. The rock was slippery in some places and a few feet of sheer face was enough to be impassable, at least to JJ.

  ‘Seriously, we couldn’t have just driven up the bloody road?’ said JJ as his head appeared next to Matt’s feet. He was breathing hard as he removed the backpack from his shoulders.

  ‘That would sort of spoil the surprise, don’t you think?’ Matt pulled in the last few feet of rope and locked it off. ‘One more pitch to go and then we can stash this gear and walk up the rest of that track that runs around the side of the facility.’

  ‘Sure, sounds like a plan.’ JJ clipped himself into the anchor that Matt had created with the large prusik cord loop and then placed his end of the rope in the figure-eight belay device before clipping it back to his harness. ‘Ready when you are, chief.’

  Matt chalked his hands and then started to climb slowly up the rock face. He smeared his toes across a small crack, the 5.11 shoes providing the grip required, and he extended his right arm up to the next ledge. He winced with pain as his injured arm took up the weight. Removing a small ‘rock on wire’ from his climbing harness, he placed the piece of metal protection into a crack in the rock and pulled hard on the wire to test its strength. With his left hand, he reached between his legs and pulled up the dynamic rope, placing it in his teeth, before getting a better grip and then clipping the rope into the carabiner attached to the curved wire. JJ released some slack and Matt moved above the protection that he had placed. He continued up the rock face for another twenty metres, placing in protection every couple of metres.

  He reached the top of the climb and looked over the crest, scanning for guards, dogs or sensors that might give the game away. There was no movement, just a gentle cold breeze that came and went every few minutes. Light was starting to prick through the clouds on the horizon and Matt could now see a little further towards the facility. The barbed-wire mesh fence was around thirty metres away across open ground that was covered in long grass; this would offer them some concealment from view.

  Matt moved back to the edge of the cliff and started to pull in the rope. He sat down and placed a piece of eleven-millimetre tape around a large rock and clipped into it. Then he placed a prusik cord around a small tree growing a few feet away. He tested the anchor. Satisfied that it would hold JJ should he fall, Matt gave three tugs on the rope. He received three tugs back and then could feel JJ starting to climb. He pulled in the slack.

  Fifteen minutes later the two of them were sitting under the small tree going through the equipment required. Matt took the Browning Hi-Power from the backpack and handed it to JJ, before taking out a second pistol of the same make and checking it.

  ‘I’m not sure these even work, mate – that bloke at the train station couldn’t get out of there fast enough once I gave him the cash for them. He seemed a lot more legit than the guys I brought the last weapon from though.’ Matt rolled his eyes as he recalled the guys who had set him up with the Walther PPK at the Bologna train station the last time he was in Italy. ‘Let’s stash this stuff here; we’ll come back for it if we need it.’

  ‘Let me grab the bolt cutters first,’ said JJ. ‘We’re going to need those.’

  Matt searched inside the backpack and located the bolt cutters. He passed them over and then stood up. ‘Let’s get moving, I want to be inside the wire before sun-up.’

  The two men half crawled towards the fence. Matt used the low ground to conceal their approach and then they moved in through a little re-entrant that gave them access under the fence. Matt stopped and checked the gap where the ground dropped away. ‘This should be monitored, wouldn’t you think?’ he said under his breath. He took a good look at it and then back at JJ, who just shrugged. They crept under it and continued in the low ground to the wall of the first white building.

  A few metres separated the three small and one larger building. The large building was obviously where the action was, judging by the two huge aerials and deep radar dish.

  Matt approached the single w
hite door on the side of the building and tested the handle. Finding it unlocked he opened it and moved inside, JJ right behind him. They found themselves in a long corridor with doors on either side. The fluorescent lights were all on.

  Matt crept down to the first door and eased it open. A pile of chairs and tables were stacked in one corner of the small office; there was no sign of recent occupancy. He closed the door again then froze, startled by a noise down the end of the corridor. He and JJ stood immobile for what felt like an eternity, but the noise didn’t come again. They moved off and checked the next room; it was as unused as the first, as was the next and the next. Then they came across a large open plan office. There were maps on the wall and writing on the whiteboard, including the date for the day’s tasks: 23 April 1969. The clock on the wall had long since stopped too.

  Matt moved cautiously back out into the corridor, JJ covering him. They continued around a corner. At the end of this smaller stretch of corridor was another office. Matt pushed open the door and cleared the room. At the far end of the office was a huge panoramic window that looked out across the mountains and over the little township of Abetone below. Matt moved to the window and gazed out over the world.

  ‘There’s no one bloody up here, is there, JJ?’

  ‘Nope,’ came the reply from the big sergeant. ‘Not a soul.’

  Matt leaned against the window and closed his eyes. ‘It’s probably for the best. I would have shot the lot of them.’

  ‘Hey, check this out, skipper.’ JJ was standing in front of a desk against the right-hand wall. Matt had glanced at it on the way in, but having established there was no threat had quickly moved on. Now he could see the TV that sat on the table. In front was a GoPro camera, plugged into the wall. A small light indicated that it was charged. ‘What the fuck?’ said Matt.

  JJ turned on the TV and then hit play on the GoPro.

  Steph Baumer’s face appeared on the screen. She was sitting at a huge frosted-glass desk in a large leather chair. The desk was in the very room where the two commandos now stood.