Ultimate Sanction

by Sarah Luddington

  Jacob’s eyes narrowed. “How would you know if anything has changed? You dropped off the fucking planet when you left.”

  “I didn’t leave. I was booted – remember?” I snapped. I didn’t want this conversation, there were too many factors rattling around us like a slow-moving tornado of historical facts and assumptions ready to rip into a storm strong enough to break a man’s heart and soul.

  Colour tinted Jacob’s soft skin above the thick beard. “I remember you walked when you could have fought. You left me.” His eyes blazed for a moment, bright and hot, a challenge, a thrown gauntlet of unspoken anger. “I wrote to you, emails, text messages, left phone –”

  I stared over his shoulder and tried to swallow past the lump in my throat. “186 text messages, 127 emails, 59 phone messages – most of which happened when you were drunk, 5 actual letters.”

  His palm hit my chest and I rocked back under the impact. “And you didn’t answer any of them.”

  Thoughts swirled so fast nausea rose into my gullet. The shock of seeing him after that morning and the contact we’d had with the enemy threatened to overwhelm me. “I had to ignore you. For your own good. I’m a fucking albatross, Jacob. I would have taken you down with me. Can we please get on mission and leave this shit behind?”

  Jacob shook his head, the shorn hair barely hinting at the umbra blond of his natural colouring. “We are not leaving this in the past, Mac.” He drew in a sharp breath. “But I will let it lie for now. What’s in this damned building that’s so important? The more I look around the more I see things that make me believe that attack just now wasn’t about destroying a museum.”

  He’d seen it, all the security we had in place. The CCTV, the metal detectors in front of the main doors. The armed guards, including me, the heavy barricades outside that doubled as flower beds, the thick concrete walls, heavy glass and thick metal shutters covering the vulnerable spots which even now were protecting us from the heat of the day.

  “You’re right,” I said, walking him through the large entrance. “It’s need to know only so the less people you tell about this the better. We aren’t here just to protect the museum. When the government built this place, they put in large bunkers which house the government servers. On those servers are the details of every citizen in the DRC, there is a full census and that means people’s religions and tribal groups, HIV status - everything. If those men out there get hold of that information, they will know exactly who to target for a fucking massacre reminiscent of Rwanda. On top of that are all the details of every fucking mine and government deal with trade partners. Whoever controls the information has the power. This latest spat is with a warlord who sees the value in the digital world, not just the value of what’s dug out of the ground.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah, so are you going to help? Who are you here with and how many bloody guns have you got?” I asked.

  4

  Jacob shed a layer of bristling anger. “There is a four-man team, one spook and a rupert.”

  Standard formation, except for the rupert. “Good. Where are they?”

  “I’m hoping they are back at the FOB. It’s in Bandalungwa District,” he said, mangling the foreign word.

  “What the fuck are they doing there?” I asked. Then waved my hand. “Never mind, you can’t tell me. How did you manage to get yourself separated from the others?”

  The black jeans and a black t-shirt had seen better days, combined with a black shirt open at the front, I realised we dressed the same. “The team ran into a riot. I had over-watch, I couldn’t get to them in time and I couldn’t get through the crowds, so headed to open ground.”

  “The museum,” I muttered. “Can you get in touch with your team?”

  “Sure, I switched my comms off so I couldn’t be tracked.”

  Why the hell would he be tracked? What on earth were they doing in the DRC?

  Too many threads, too many holes, too many thoughts fraying and unravelling. I had to focus on the present, not our past. Those days were gone and perhaps it was for the best because whatever haunted Jacob left me vulnerable.

  I moved away from him as he switched on his comms and reported back to his commanding officer. Peace, the long sultry days of the DRC, seemed a long way off right now and I wished for them to grace me once again.

  “Mac?” Danny called from the stairs.

  I jogged over to join him. “What’s up?”

  He stared over my shoulder at Jacob. “Who is he?”

  “A good guy. We worked together back in the day,” I said. “You can trust him.”

  Danny made a noncommittal noise in the back of his throat and focused on me. “Rachael has the generators purring once again. We have one man down with serious injuries to his face and hands. Another with a gunshot to the shoulder. He might lose his arm.”

  “Are they on the way to the hospital?” I asked. Concern twisted in my guts, these were good men and I’d lost two of them.

  Danny grasped my shoulder. “It was not your fault, Mac. They didn’t follow orders and panicked when put under pressure.”

  I tutted. “You know it doesn’t work like that, Danny. I should have provided more training. This is on me.”

  “No.” His dark eyes were hard, determined to drill it through my thick head. “They did not follow orders and your orders were clear, therefore they paid a price. This is on them, not you.”

  I grasped his thick wrist and nodded but didn’t feel the responsibility lessen its weight on my shoulders. “Do we know who attacked?”

  “It is as you feared, Mac. General Delta is closing in on the government. There will be a coup,” Danny said. “I don’t know how much longer we can stand against his troops.”

  “They aren’t troops, Danny, they are a rabble militia and we stand firm until the government sends reinforcements. Delta will have to back down. He cannot hold the city. They are just testing us.” I rested a hand on his HK MP5 and held his gaze, willing him to believe me when I didn’t believe it myself. The complex warp and weft of Congolese politics left my head reeling. Did I support the government of this vast country? No, I didn’t give a shit about politics but I did believe in protecting the information we had in this building because protecting that meant I protected the millions of people all over the DRC who didn’t want to pick up a gun.

  Danny nodded. “As you say, others will come to help us.”

  I patted his arm. “That’s it. Believe in that. You never know, they might get bored and just fuck off.”

  He managed a soft grin that didn’t reach his sad eyes. We’d had many nights drinking beer together discussing the Democratic Republic of the Congo and how it was slowly, tortuously, pulling itself apart. The DRC should be one of the richest countries in the world with its natural resources craved by China, the US and Europe, but everywhere people existed trapped in subsistence level lives and hounded by disease.

  I shook myself free of the thoughts as Jacob strode over the tiled floor of the entrance lobby. “Lawson wants to see you, Mac. He says he’ll help but he needs us back at the FOB first.”

  “Fuck,” I muttered, glancing at Danny. “Can you hold everything together here without me?”

  “How long?” Danny asked.

  “An hour?”

  His radio squawked, spitting French too fast for me track. Danny replied and I watched Jacob shift with restless energy across the floor, moving into and out of patches of sunlight, the shadows chasing him. A jackal of a man; poised and always hunting.

  Danny’s voice switching to English returned me to the present. “Men are coming, Mac. We will be safe for now.”

  I gripped his shoulder. “See, have a little faith. You’ll go home to that beautiful wife of yours tonight, kiss the heads of those wonderful children and thank God for another good day at work.”

  A heavy huffed breath out told me he didn’t believe a word, but he nodded. “That’ll only work if Chica has forgiven me for getting drunk with you a
t the weekend.”

  “Mac,” Jacob barked. “We need to go.” He glared at Danny. I didn’t like the look, the twisted expression of naked… something… I couldn’t interpret it because we’d been apart too long. I opted to change subjects.

  “We need to hide that damned rifle. Come up to my office. I’m not running around these streets with these guns. It’s asking for trouble.” I ran up the stairs, two at a time, Jacob on my heels. I lay money on his knees feeling considerably better than mine when I reached the top. We jogged down the corridor and I let us into my office.

  “Strip the HK down and put it in this,” I said, throwing a gym bag at Jacob. He caught the bag and walked over to my desk. A picture sat next to my PC. It showed the two of us, his arm draped over my shoulder as I leaned into his body. We were stood in front of a landy on a training exercise in Thailand. It had been taken just a few weeks before my life exploded and I’d been forced to leave the Regiment and, in the end, the country. It was the last time I remembered being truly happy.

  He picked up the photo and I watched his thumb caress the glass as he stared at it. “I’ve missed you, Mac.” The whisper of sound might as well have been a scream for all the effect it had on my aching heart.

  “I’ve missed you as well.”

  He turned to look at me. “Three years is a long time.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? And don’t give me any bullshit about being an albatross hanging my career. We were a team, Mac and you left me.” He jabbed a finger in my direction and his tawny eyes flashed in anger.

  How could I tell him? How could I tell him that every day since I walked out of Hereford, I’d missed his laugh, the strength of him grounding me, his scent… I closed my eyes and willed the racing thoughts and needling confession to be still and remain locked behind glass walls too thick to break.

  “I did what I thought was right by you. I’m sorry, Jacob. I never wanted to hurt you.” I closed my fist over the handle of the day-sack I held and tried to meet his gaze but failed. The lies I’d told in the lonely, soft, dark humid nights rose to hit the barriers guarding my heart. I turned away. “We should leave, while the streets are quiet.” Those lies were so much easier to manage when I didn’t have to look him in the eye, when they just circled the memories like vultures over the corpse of our friendship.

  He chose not to reply but I could see the need to defy the stupidity of my words. Instead he turned away and stripped down the sniper rifle.

  I opened the door to the gunroom and stepped into my sanctuary. Out of the long list of arms I had requisitioned when I took this job, there were two Glock 17s with several magazines filled with 9mm rounds waiting to be loaded. I also removed the HK33KA3, it featured a retractable stock and a shorter barrel than the full-sized version, I could carry it under a jacket. They were used for close protection work mostly but right now I broke it down and put it in the day-sack with its mags. I left the grenade launcher; if we were in so much trouble that I needed to use a launcher on a quick trip across the city then it might be time to call it quits and just run.

  Jacob came into the room and gave a small whistle. The tight confines meant I could feel his heat against my back, and he brushed my arm reaching for a fragmentation grenade. I smacked his hand away and tried to ignore the longing that brief contact set up in my flesh. It needed to feel more.

  “No. We aren’t blowing shit up, just going for a drive,” I snapped.

  “You’re no fun,” he muttered.

  “I’m not meant to be fun. I’m meant to be a security manager for this museum,” I said. “No blowing up my city.”

  We were far too close in this small room as I risked a glance into his face. Jacob stood shorter than me and had the wiry strength of a greyhound in his smaller frame. I resembled a bear, thick muscles not running to fat, grey hair lacing through the black I’d let grow out, so it now touched my shirt collar. Never one for facial hair I found my palms itching to touch his thick beard.

  Jacob stared at me with a steady gaze, but I couldn’t match his self-assured calm.

  “We need to go,” I growled.

  “You never told me why you left. You never explained what charges were brought or for what operation. You left me high and dry, Mac. You owe me. There wasn’t even any gossip. You just fucking vanished from my life, from all our lives.” He didn’t raise his voice, but I wanted to cringe away.

  “Let it go, Jacob. I have. It’s a new life for me here and I’m at peace with it.” Almost, almost at peace except for this, except for lying to my best friend for years.

  “Are you happy?” he asked.

  Something shifted in his voice and I managed to look into those amber eyes. “I have peace, are they not the same thing?” I asked him, wondering where he was leading me in this ever-circling conversation. “We really have to go, Jacob.”

  He dropped his eyes at last, releasing me and I found the air necessary to breathe again. Without touching I managed to move past him and into the office. The air conditioning in the room rattled making the very necessary oxygen easier to inhale without Jacob’s scent of musk and jungle sweat. I retrieved my car keys from the desk drawer, my wallet and something made me fish out my passport, stuffing it in my back pocket rather than my day-sack. I threw a bottle of water at Jacob, who caught it with barely a glance, and we left the office.

  Jacob followed me in silence, and we exited the rear of the building through a side door. Due to the uncertain perimeter we kept the Glocks up and scanned our surroundings as we left the safety of the museum. Jacob moved with me as if we’d never been separated, watching our left flank and our six while I took right and point.

  “The big Nissan,” I said. The 4x4 pickup, more dust and dents than steel, sat in the sun, still only seven paces from the doorway. I unlocked the security system from a distance, and we slipped in, Jacob continuing to scan the almost empty car park while I started the engine and pulled out. The evidence of the gun battle soon vanished in my mirror while security teams came into the area from the government forces. They didn’t prevent us from leaving. I needed to berate someone about that when I finished with Jacob and his team.

  I wove through the sparse traffic on the main road and moved into the less salubrious area of Bandalungwa District. More than eleven million people lived in this city and not all of it was as safe as the area I lived in with its private security and high walls. The battered truck didn’t stand out here, but our white faces did and so would the rest of Jacob’s team.

  “This is a strange place for an FOB,” I said. “Very residential and hard to hide.”

  “Not my choice,” he said, eyes still scanning.

  He’d closed down on me. I could feel it, see it in the tension through his shoulders. The tick in his jaw.

  The need to repair at least some of the damage I’d done by leaving made me talk, despite my almost equally strong desire to keep him at a safe distance. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have stayed for a proper goodbye.” I took my eyes off the road long enough to check he received the apology.

  “Why didn’t you say goodbye, Mac?” he asked, not accepting the apology. It left a nasty taste in my mouth.

  The lights were against me. The truck’s brakes screeched as I stopped. Women approached the vehicles selling melon and bananas, men sold watches and mobile phone cases. I kept the windows wound up, trying to maintain a quiet space.

  “How could I say goodbye to you? We’d been brothers-in-arms for 5 years, Jacob. I couldn’t…” Couldn’t what? Confess to myself that in those 5 years I’d learned more about myself than in the previous thirty-four? That I finally began to have an idea that I wasn’t the man my father beat me into being and those thoughts scared me more than any armed terrorist I’d faced. That maybe the brotherhood and friendship I shared with Jacob yearned to be something more, but I couldn’t face what that might be so when I had to leave, I didn’t just leave, I ran? Not for the first time.

  I spotted a famili
ar figure on the street, outside a café, drinking a beer. “That’s Bennet.”

  “Yep, Bennet, Shaw, Bradly, and Captain Lawson,” murmured Jacob. “So you know us, all of us. Maybe you’ll tell them why you left.”

  “Who’s the spook?” I asked, ignoring the growl.

  “Guy called Clark,” Jacob said as I drew up just beyond the café. He opened the door to the truck to leave but I caught his arm. He looked at me in surprise, the skin under my fingers going white with the pressure.

  “Tall guy, Indian looking?” I asked.

  “Yeah, though Lawson said he’s going to be a peer of the realm at some point, so we were ordered to be civilised.” Jacob frowned. “Fuck, Mac, you’ve gone white, what’s the problem?”

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, unable to hide the urgency of my question.

  “You know I can’t tell you that without talking to Lawson. He’ll tell you because he wants your help if we’re lending you a hand. Though it looks like your team now have control over the museum.”

  “Does Clark know you’ve found me?” I asked.

  Jacob relaxed back into the truck and looked at me. “What’s wrong?”

  Panic made sweat prickle over my skin where the air conditioning couldn’t win. I licked my lips and tasted it. My hands trembled but whether from the need to kill or the need to escape I couldn’t decide. The internal logic systems of my brain had been scrambled with Jacob’s arrival, now I had to deal with Clark? That didn’t –

  The truck rocked up on its front wheels as the back window shattered and fire tore through the streets of Kinshasa.

  5

  My head impacted the steering wheel. I saw Jacob twist, trying to save his face from the windscreen. Screams erupted even as bricks and concrete rained down a monsoon of human detritus over the innocents filling the street. The world faded for long seconds where all I could hear was the internal noise of my body and the shattering cacophony of the explosion. Jacob yelled something but I couldn’t hear a damned thing, and the blow to the head forced my world to tilt unnervingly to the left.