OPERATIVE - an action thriller: a Brill Winger Thriller (Brill Winger series Book 2)
Page 9
There were plenty of rocks on the hillside. Maybe he could make a sling he pondered as he pushed himself to catch up with the girl.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
He didn't need a sling. There would be no waiting for dark. Brill and Amanda slipped down into the gorge where Rain was hidden and found him surrounded by a group of robed men with AK's. Brill did a quick calculation in his head and practiced the sweep in his mind's eye.
If he were alone, he had enough bullets to take them all down. He could drop two with the rifle, drift left as he panned right with the pistol and take out the rest.
They would return fire, but his speed and aggression would slow them down enough that he could get most of them before the rest thought their next step through. In a firefight at this close range, seconds counted. But seconds was all he needed.
Their return fire would hit Amanda since she was next to him. He could knock her down, but that would take time, maybe a second or two that would count against him.
They might hit Rain too, and if both of his rescues were killed, then the mission would have been worthless. A waste of time.
The men stared at him as he did the calculations, unaware just how close they were to dying, and Brill raised his hands.
The shouting was muted this time, as if the men themselves were afraid of being overheard, that voices might carry in the mountains. But they aimed their rifles at Brill and Amanda and screamed in a language he didn't know.
He regretted raising his hands.
It was a sign of weakness, a sign of surrender and Brill knew he wasn't going to surrender. Never to rebels, never to anyone every again.
He dropped his right shoulder and prepared to grab his pistol. His mind never stopped working on the angles and he took two steps away from Amanda which earned him more shouts and more rifles aimed at him.
At him and not her.
He smiled and thought the men shrank back just a little when they saw his eyes.
Brill readied the draw and played it out in his head again.
A little boy's voice broke through the noise.
The goat herder stepped out from the back of the group, his shrill voice cutting through the others. The Kalashnikov looked too big in his little hands but the other men reacted to him with deference. He smiled at Brill and walked toward him, chattering excitedly.
The men let him.
"You understand this?" Brill held his left hand higher than his right, still ready to go for his weapon.
"He's the chief’s son," Amanda grinned through tears. "And he says you're his friend."
Brill dropped his hands and smiled back at the boy, earning just a slight flinch. The men shifted nervously behind the goat herder.
The boy came over and held up his fist. Brill bumped it. The boy clapped Brill on the arm and back.
"He's explaining to them that you gave him food and water, comfort on a night when he was late," Amanda said. "Custom dictates you are their guest. Did you plan this?"
"Dumb luck," Brill told her.
The men shouldered their weapons and lifted up Rain. They grabbed the gear bags and led the small group toward the far side of the mountains.
EPILOGUE
The man was using chemical weapons on his people. He had scientists like that one from Africa that Brill had killed making weapons of mass destruction. There was no honor in killing, he knew that much. But at least a bullet was discriminate when fired from the right person. Chemicals and bombs were indiscriminate and the effect it had was to kill mostly women and children.
This Syrian President was targeting women and children in an effort to terrorize rebels and rebel sympathizers. Brill knew that terrorists should be stopped, and the best way to end any terrorist activity was to remove the perpetrator from this earth.
It was the best solution for a lot of reasons, the least of which was Brill himself. He was very good at killing people. He had thought about it often on downtime from missions with the Recce’s before and in training with Barraque private contractors most recently. There were men who were trained to soldier, and some of them were trained to kill. They were efficient skilled labor. It was different for him. He was not only skilled, he was an artisan.
Maybe it was because he considered himself dead inside, strapped on a table and gone with the girl he loved at the hands of rebel forces. Maybe it was something he had always had, this deadness and lack of empathy. He didn’t remember being a psychopath growing up, he didn’t torture animals or pull the wings off flies. But he did struggle in social situations, and preferred solitude over the company of others.
A head shrinker at Barraque told him once he was a high functioning sociopath, that if the elimination of another human was the most expedient path to solve a problem, he could do it and not give it a second thought.
I could have told you that he thought as she explained it to him.
He didn’t think it was from lack of caring though. He did care, and perhaps he cared too much.
He cared that there were bad men in the world who bullied and oppressed the people around them, that politicians and corporations killed and maimed without thought to the consequences for their actions. These bad men did worse things and no one stood up for the people, no one could stop them.
A world court had been established so that atrocities couldn’t occur, yet Pol Pot happened. The genocides in Africa occurred on such a regular basis it was like the annual Wildebeest stampede across the Serengeti. In South America, in North Korea, on every continent bad men were allowed to get away with murder without fear of the consequences of their action.
Brill hated it.
He hated that the UN was a powerless organization, that The Hague was toothless, that the US would do nothing except impose sanctions and rattle their saber, all the while innocent people died.
Children died.
He watched the Presidential palace for a week and noted a pattern.
After all it’s what he was trained to do.
A maid left a window open on the second floor in the hallway. It was pushed out three inches, probably to air out a privy he supposed.
Once he located the window he noted the President walking past it on a regular basis.
That’s all he needed.
He leaned past the billowing curtain and sighted down the scope of the barrel. It was over one thousand yards away and he adjusted for wind and the drop of the bullet as gravity would impact the trajectory.
It had taken him a week to find the right room posing as a backpacking photojournalist and another day to steal a car to drive to the desert and retrieve the rifle he’d cached there. He snuck it into the room under the cover of darkness, prepaid for two more days in cash and laid in with supplies to wait.
Then he watched.
Over the narrow sight of the scope he learned every inch of the window that observation showed him.
He waited past the first day just to be sure the routine was set.
It was.
On the second day, he pulled the trigger.
Thriller
ASSET – a Brill Winger Thriller
OPERATIVE – a Brill Winger Thriller
SIDEWAYS – a Brill Winger Thriller
November 2018
CHOKEPOINT – a Brill Winger Thriller
December 2018
DECREED - a Brill Winger Thriller
December 2018
IN THE WIND - a Brill Winger Thriller
January 2019
IN THE BLACK - a Brill Winger Thriller
February 2019
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