In the middle of the afternoon, when it was almost too hot to breathe and all formal activities were suspended until the sun began to go down, Roy went on a surreptitious recce. He ambled past Munro’s trailer home a couple of times, noting the drawn blinds and the apparent lack of an air-conditioning unit. It must be like an oven in there, a sauna. How could Munro bear it?
He decided to make a third pass. Already he was formulating strategies for the mission. If Munro wouldn’t show his face, then they would just have to compromise – and improvise. They would have to smoke him out of the trailer home somehow. When the bear was in his lair, you didn’t go in to get him; you made him leave and face you in the open, on your turf rather than his.
As he approached the trailer for the third time, looking as though he was just sauntering by, he heard its suspension creak. Munro was moving around in there. Some heavy footfalls.
Then, all at once, the door was flung open.
“Who the fuck are you?”
Roy froze.
The man leaning out from the trailer home was huge and muscular, his bulk emphasised by the narrowness of the doorway. His combat fatigues strained around his upper arms and his thighs. He was unshaven, and appeared not to have showered for days. A beer bottle hung loosely from his fingers.
“I asked you a fucking question,” said Daniel Munro. “I expect a fucking answer.”
“Roy,” said Roy. “Roy Young.”
“Well, Roy, Roy Young, why the hell do you keep tramping to and fro outside? Like some motherfucking sentry?” Munro’s accent was an odd mixture, mostly mid-Atlantic but with strong Scottish-brogue overtones and a hint of something more exotic underneath.
“Getting the lie of the land, that’s all. I’ve only been here a couple of days. When I’m staying somewhere, I like to know the ins and outs of it. Especially the outs. Just in case, you know?”
Munro weighed up the explanation for plausibility. He took a swig of beer.
“Why aren’t you sitting with your feet up somewhere in the shade?” he said. “Stupid time of day to be wandering about. Asking for heatstroke.”
“Mad dogs and Englishmen,” said Roy.
Munro thought about this remark and decided it was amusing. “Heh. Yes. I’ve met enough of your countrymen to know you’re batshit, every last one of you. ‘Barking’, isn’t that what you call it? Like mad dogs. You English run into firefights that any sane soldier would back away from. It’s like you’ve all got a death wish.”
“I guess when you live on a small island, you go a bit stir crazy.”
“That’d explain it. Okay, Roy, Roy Young. You get a pass this time. But stop pissing about around my house.” Munro thumped the trailer home’s plywood side. “I don’t like it. Makes me antsy. Got that?”
AT SUNDOWN, THE Myrmidons convened in a quiet corner of the camp, behind the corrugated-iron shed that housed the latrines. The smell there wasn’t too bad, although it was hard to ignore, as were the swarms of flies it attracted.
“Tonight,” said Roy. “We go for it tonight. Midnight.”
“Doesn’t give us much time to prepare,” said Gunnvor Blomgren.
“It’s not about preparation. It’s about catching Munro with his guard down, when he’s least expecting it. I’ve seen the bloke; I had a run-in with him this afternoon. Not only is he built like a brick shithouse, he’s got sharp ears and a suspicious nature. We could leave it a day or so more, but my feeling is the longer we put it off, the more chance there is he might rumble us.”
“How?” said Gavin. “If he never comes out of that crappy old caravan of his?”
“I don’t know how. I just think he will. There’s something about him. I’ve met a few mercs. Even the dumbest of them are savvy, and Munro seems far from dumb.”
“He’s kind of a legend to all the other mercenaries,” said Jeanne. “You should hear them talking about him. He’s got this rep like he’s a goddamn superhero. The Australian guy I was chatting with yesterday...”
Roy felt an obscure pang of jealousy. He had seen Jeanne in conversation with that rugby-shouldered Aussie, who had the eyes and smile of a Hugh Jackman and a lot of the charm too, and who’d touched her on the arm more than once – just a friendly gesture, or so you might think, but such friendly gestures masked deeper intentions. There was nothing between Roy and Jeanne that gave him the right to be resentful if other men were interested in her. He hadn’t even made a move on her yet. Still, he felt a certain possessiveness, and it had been tempting almost beyond endurance to go over and tell the Australian to back off, and force him to if he didn’t of his own accord.
“He was saying how Munro’s been in the security contractor game as long as anyone can remember,” Jeanne continued. “And his thing is he’s not scared of bullets. He never ducks down under fire, just stays standing and returns it. Duncan even said” – that was the Australian’s name, Duncan – “that he once saw Munro take a round in the chest but wasn’t fazed. Almost like he wasn’t hit.”
“Was he wearing a flak vest at the time?” said Sean Wilson.
“He was.”
“There you go, then.”
“But Duncan swears the round struck him here.” Jeanne indicated her sternal notch. “Just above the collar of the vest. That’s the extraordinary thing. It should have turned Munro’s ribcage to oatmeal – should have killed him outright – but didn’t.”
“Ah, you can never tell. When the lead’s flying, no one is paying close attention. It was a ricochet, maybe. Not a direct hit.”
“All the same. Iron Dan. Sounds like he lives up to the nickname.”
“These darn raghead troops are in awe of him,” said Travis Laffoon, who came from Louisiana by way of the 82nd Airborne and a stint at a military correctional facility for insubordinate conduct and petty theft. He had a picture of Jesus tattooed on his right biceps and Satan on his left, and constantly chewed gum as though he was trying to gnaw it into submission. “Like, here’s the Prophet Mohammed” – Laffoon held a hand level with his heart – “and here’s Munro.” He held his other hand level with his nose. “If he started a religion, you can bet they’d give up Muslimism and join his instead.”
“Muslimism?” said Hans Schutkeker. “English is not my first language but I’m pretty sure that is not a word.”
“If I use it, Shitkicker, then it is,” said Laffoon. “You want to take it up with me, be my guest. I’m right here.”
“Shitkicker. Ha, so funny. Because that is a bit like how my surname sounds.”
“Yeah, it’s funny. It’s funny as goddamn hell.”
Roy jumped in before the argument degenerated to blows. Schutkeker and Laffoon were destined not to get along. The snooty German and the rowdy Bible Belter were oil and water – or, indeed, petrol and fire.
“Munro,” he said, “is the mercs’ merc. Badenhorst told us as much during our briefing. If private security contractors had Oscars, Munro’d have a downstairs toilet full of them. He’s awesome, and that’s lovely for him. Hooray. But he’s just a man, and we’ve got a bow and arrow with his name on it. Two sets of bows and arrows, actually. All we have to do is manoeuvre him into a position where our archers can get a clear shot. And here’s how we’re going to go about it...”
AND SO, AT midnight, they sneaked out of their dormitory huts. The sky was all stars, the moon a mere sliver of light balancing on one tip atop a dark far range of hills. The racket of a million cicadas and frogs made stealth almost irrelevant. The crunch of boot soles on gravelly soil and the soft clink of weapons belts paled into insignificance before the noise. You could scarcely hear yourself think.
Nonetheless Roy had advised the utmost caution. There was to be no comms. Hand signals only. Everyone had to stay within sight of at least two other Myrmidons at all times. Anyone who lost visual should retire to a safe point rather than blunder about trying to re-establish contact.
Take no chances was the motto of the night. If Munro was everything he was c
racked up to be, they needed to nail him quickly and with minimum fuss, before he had an opportunity to retaliate.
Roy led a group of the Myrmidons to Munro’s trailer home, fanning out as they approached. The archers took up positions to the right and left of the door, some ten metres away. They were Luis Rojas, from Andalusia, and Tzadok Friedman, an Israeli. Both had studied archery in their youth; Friedman had represented his country at an international level in the sport’s Young Adult division. During their training as Myrmidons, they had practised long and hard with the antique bows provided by Badenhorst. These were things of crude beauty, a far cry from the modern compound bow with its carbon fibre limbs and cradle of cables and pulleys. They were recurved, fashioned from arcs of horn fastened together by bronze collars; their strings were leather thongs. Rojas and Friedman had complained bitterly about them at first, saying they were hard to draw and keep steady. After a week or so familiarising themselves with them, however, both men had to admit, if with some reluctance, that the bows were finely balanced, accurate and surprisingly powerful.
They each went down on one knee and nocked arrows, pulling the strings back to full draw. They aimed at the trailer home door, at right angles to each other, offering a perfect crossfire. The arrows were standard aluminium alloy shafts with 300-grain spines, 125-grain broadhead tips and helical plastic fletchings. Fired correctly, they were sturdy enough to bring down a bull moose.
The rest of the Myrmidons in the group arranged themselves in a rough semicircle around the trailer home, hunkering down in shadows.
Now it was time to wait.
Somewhere over at the southern perimeter of the compound, Gavin Martin was marshalling a second, smaller team of Myrmidons. They had helped themselves to some flashbangs and fragmentation grenades from the camp’s armoury, which was not well-guarded, a prefab unit with windows that anyone with a combat knife and the inclination could jemmy open. Their goal was to make mischief. Specifically, to simulate a raid on the camp by hostile forces.
If Munro wasn’t going to leave his trailer home voluntarily, Roy had thought, then they were going to have to give him no alternative. A veteran war dog like him couldn’t – wouldn’t – ignore an apparent enemy action.
At twenty past midnight the first explosions sounded. Balloons of light burst in the night sky, followed by drumroll detonations. These were chased up with staccato crackles of gunfire.
Within moments, people were stumbling out from the nearby dormitory huts. Voices were raised. There was confusion, commotion, shouts echoing across the camp. From a distance Roy heard Alain Dupont ordering troops to grab rifles, go and take a look.
The uproar grew. Mercenaries and Somali soldiers went sprinting past the Myrmidons’ hiding places, not seeing them, too intent on responding to the attack.
From the trailer home, however, nothing. No light came on behind the blinds. The door remained shut.
Roy couldn’t believe it. Surely Munro couldn’t be sleeping through all this? He remembered the beer bottle in Munro’s hand. Could he be that drunk?
He motioned to Almaz Beshimov, the youngest of all the Myrmidons, a one-time Kyrgyz army reservist who, although still in his mid-twenties, had seen action in Chechnya, South Ossetia and Ukraine as part of Russia’s covert special forces. Roy forked fingers at his own eyes, then pointed to the trailer home door. Beshimov nodded assent and trotted forward, pistol at the ready. He sidled up to the door, reaching for the handle with his free hand.
A fist punched clean through the trailer home wall from within, emerging beside Beshimov’s head. It grabbed the Kyrgyz by the neck and yanked hard, pulling him face first into the jagged opening it had created. Three times the young man’s face was rammed against jutting spars of splintered plywood. Blood spurted from lacerated cheeks and nose. He shrieked as one of his eyeballs was gouged. A fourth and final yank, harder than all the rest, resulted in a brutal snap that silenced his cries of distress.
The fist let go and withdrew. Beshimov’s lifeless body slumped to the ground.
Then the door flew out, kicked from its hinges, and Munro dived out after it, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and jockey shorts. He had a Glock 17 Gen4 in each hand and was firing even before he hit the ground. 9mm Parabellum rounds flew in all directions, with an accuracy Roy found uncanny and terrifying. It was as though Munro knew where the Myrmidons were situated; had known in advance, while still inside the trailer home. Now he was shooting at them, and although not every bullet found its mark, he still scored a fatality and two woundings with his initial salvo.
Roy loosed off with his Browning L9A1, emptying the entire clip in Munro’s direction, but aiming high. Jeanne and Sean Wilson joined in.
“Suppressing fire!” Roy yelled. “Pin him down! Rojas, Friedman, what the hell are you waiting for?”
The archers, startled by the sudden ferocity of Munro’s attack, tried to draw a bead on him.
Munro, meanwhile, scuttled away from the gunfire on all fours, not with the frantic urgency of a man fleeing for his life, more the air of someone avoiding an irritant.
A bowstring twanged. An arrow whizzed in his direction, released by Rojas.
And Munro did the frankly impossible.
He twisted round and caught it in mid-flight. Plucked the arrow from the air as though it had been hovering there, stationary.
Then he flung it back overhand at its sender.
The arrow transfixed Rojas through the neck, spearing his windpipe. The Spaniard dropped his bow and keeled over. As he lay on his side, gargling blood, his hands groped ineffectually, trying to tug the arrow out. Then they fell limp. He spasmed. His eyes rolled up. Dead.
Roy gaped helplessly.
What Munro had just done...
“Iron Dan” wasn’t finished yet, however. He bounded over to Rojas’s body, almost faster than the eye could follow, and snatched up the bow.
“This!” he bellowed, holding the weapon aloft and looking around him imperiously. “Whoever you are – where did you get this? Who gave it to you?”
Roy slapped a fresh clip into his Browning and stepped out in plain view of Munro. The mission had gone clusterfuck. Munro had completely wrongfooted them. The man was a beast. He could punch holes through wood. He had no fear under fire. He could catch arrows in mid-air and throw them like javelins. He was as agile as a puma. He was everything the other mercs had said about him and more.
All the same, there was a chance the Myrmidons could still pull this off. Out of the corner of his eye Roy could see Friedman. The Israeli still had an arrow nocked. He was taking careful aim, aware that he had one shot only and that a miss would be tantamount to signing his own death warrant.
Roy just needed to keep Munro distracted for a few more seconds.
“Answer me!” Munro demanded. “This is Orion’s bow. I recognise it. You should not have it. You!” He jabbed the bow accusingly at Roy. “Englishman. I knew there was something not right about you. Explain yourself.”
Everything slowed to a standstill. Panic continued to reign in the camp, people hurrying to and fro, explosions and rifle reports from afar as Gavin and the other Myrmidons kept up their bogus assault and the Somalis and mercenaries rushed to mount a counteroffensive. But here, in these few square metres in front of the trailer home, as though in the eye of a hurricane, an eerie calm prevailed.
Roy levelled the gun at Munro. They were supposed to make the kill using the bows. Badenhorst had been quite insistent about that. Each and every one of their targets had to be eliminated with one of the ancient weapons.
An exception might have to be made here, however. Munro was too dangerous for the Myrmidons to rely on arrows alone. He had proved that beyond question. Roy needed to shift the paradigm somewhat.
“A gun,” said Munro, staring at the Browning with contempt. “You’re going to shoot me? Is that the plan?”
“It wasn’t,” said Roy, “but it is now.”
“Go ahead then.”
�
�As you wish,” and Roy pulled the trigger.
Four rounds smacked into Munro at point blank range, all in the chest, centre of body mass.
The impacts staggered him, but he did not go down.
More astonishingly, he was intact.
He wasn’t wearing any protection. No ballistic vest, nothing. Holes appeared in his T-shirt, but the bullets failed to perforate his flesh.
They literally bounced off him.
It was just...
Not...
Fucking...
Possible.
Next thing Roy knew, Munro had him by the throat. He hadn’t even seen the man move. He was hoisted off the ground, Munro using lifting his entire bodyweight one-handed with next to no effort, as though he were a straw effigy. Roy heard the bow being chucked to the ground and felt the Browning being wrested from his grasp. He could do nothing to prevent it. He was choking. He clung to Munro’s wrist, clutching and clawing, trying to unpick the fingers, prise the hand away. No use; the hand was locked solid, a steel pincer. Red bubbles began exploding in his vision. His ears were roaring. His chest heaved as he tried to suck in a breath that couldn’t reach his lungs. So this was how he was going to die.
Then he felt the muzzle of the Browning being ground against his temple. At the same time Munro relaxed his grip on Roy’s neck somewhat. His windpipe was still constricted, but he could just about breathe again.
“Here’s the deal,” Munro said. “You’re going to tell me who sent you; who gave you that bow. Or else I will blow your brains out. And if you won’t tell me, one of your pals will. Believe me, I will make it happen one way or another. How much do you want to live, Englishman?”
Age of Heroes Page 15