Ultimate Sanction

by Sarah Luddington

  A strong hand grabbed the back of my shirt and shook me hard. “Mac? Mac? The team’s been hit. Mac? I need you.” Jacob’s eyes were wide, and blood covered his hand where he touched his face.

  “You’ve been hurt,” I said, the words too quiet over the yelling and screaming. I reached for him, but he brushed me off and half fell out of the truck. With fingers stumbling in the simple task I managed to exit the vehicle as well and staggered into chaos. People were moving around in stunned silence or screaming in shock and pain. Blood coated dark skin, staining clothing. A young woman holding her arm in her other hand, rocked back and forth as her life drained from the wound. A child…

  I turned my head away. I couldn’t afford to register the dead and dying. The need to act, to do my job, had to take priority. Jacob lurched over the ruined remains of the café, calling for his team-mates, coughing up dust and smoke. Sirens began to bleed over the screaming, growing louder. I lifted a small child off the road and found a woman yelling for someone. She burst into tears as a mother’s arms wrapped tight about the small body, which remained silent, large eyes unfocused and dilated in shock.

  Another person, blood pouring from a head wound. A man this time. I ripped off a shirt from a dead body and pushed the wad of fabric against the head wound, lifting the man’s inert hand and ordering him to hold tight. He blinked but didn’t seem to understand anything else. I scrambled after Jacob until a sound I didn’t expect intruded.

  Concrete chipped up, slicing into my left hand and the crack of the shot penetrated the haze. More adrenaline flooded my system and cleared the tangle caused by the explosion. “Jacob! Contact! Get the fuck down,” I bellowed over every other sound. A sergeant never forgot how to bellow. Another round sliced the air and just missed my boot. “Sniper fire.”

  Jacob scrambled to my position, grabbed my arm and together we dove back towards the truck. “Who the fuck is shooting?” he asked, eyes too wild, breathing out of control.

  “Whoever wanted you and your team dead, we have to move. We’re a danger to everyone else in the area.” Another round hit the truck and glass exploded, showering another victim.

  “My team, Mac…” Jacob’s voice came out made of dust and smashed glass.

  I gripped his arm. “We have to move. We have to run. Now.”

  “My team…”

  “Dead, Jacob. We have no choice. If anyone is left alive in there the EMTs will save them, we can’t. We are – shit!” Another round killed a tyre and the truck slumped. I wouldn’t be driving home. The most urgent thing right now was retrieving the day-sacks and gym bags with the weapons in them.

  I moved with caution and opened the door of the truck, reaching inside. Keeping my head down I grabbed the bags and pulled them out. Jacob slung the day-sack over his shoulders.

  “Which way?” he asked.

  “The shooter is high, they’ll see us the moment we move.”

  “Give me the bloody HK33 and I’ll find the fucker,” growled Jacob.

  I took hold of his face. “You will die before you get across the street. Listen to me carefully. The only way we can make this right is running. We then hunt the fuckers down. I promise you. We will hunt the fuckers down. Now, we run.”

  His entire body leaned into me. “Run. We run. Regroup. Then kill.”

  “Then kill.”

  For a moment he relaxed against me and a soft breath caressed my neck. I couldn’t hold back the sharp intake of breath and shiver.

  “Mac,” he whispered.

  “Move,” I ordered.

  Time snapped back into place and he pulled away.

  I nodded. “We go to the alley.” I pointed 5 metres to our left. “I’ll give you covering fire.”

  “Moving,” he said.

  No more words. We both drew our handguns and chambered a round, the Glocks a comfort in our hands but completely useless against a sniper. I rose from behind the truck and turned to fire at my ten o’clock where I thought the shots came from. In the same moment Jacob lifted himself off the ground and raced for the alley. I released six rounds, the sniper got off two and I managed to locate their position.

  “Northwest corner of the supermarket,” I yelled.

  Jacob shouted in return, “Move.” He fired at the location.

  “Moving,” I said, acting on training I hadn’t used for 3 years but remained a part of my psyche that would never leave. The sniper made a bid for me, but the shots were wild. Jacob’s Glock barked and were not wild.

  When I hit the alley, I tugged on his shoulder and he turned his back on the chaos of the street to follow me down the darkening and narrow stinking path. We wove through the rubbish, cats and rats scattering in our bow wake. The alleyway spat us out on a residential street, and I broke right. We hurried, but didn’t run, down the street. People were reacting to the explosion. Two white men in this area of the city stood out too much, I had to move us further away.

  “We need a taxi,” I said, crossing the road and heading down a cleaner alley.

  Escape and evasion in a city like Kinshasa were not difficult. The narrow streets joining larger ones, the mass of humanity and vehicles, along with the lack of surveillance made it possible to vanish. The colour of our skin made us vulnerable but when we hit the next shopping street, and a market hardly touched by the chaos of the explosion a few streets away, I managed to buy us a couple of hats. We reached the end of the market and I flagged down a taxi while Jacob watched our six.

  “Clear?” I asked before ducking into the battered car.

  “Clear. No one is chasing us.” Jacob’s face looked grim.

  We sat beside each other in the back. Jacob’s right knee bounced, rubbing against my leg and our shoulders brushed each time we checked our surroundings. The taxi man barely seemed to register our presence but drove with a relative confidence in the general direction of my home in the Zoka District. The streets here were quiet and I asked the taxi to drop us two streets away so we could mark the traffic to make sure we weren’t followed back to my home.

  We stood in the shadows and watched the taxi vanish, then watched the vehicles passing for a few minutes and checked the pedestrians, though these were few.

  “Did you see the shooter in the end?” I asked.

  Jacob shook his head. “He knew what he was doing. I couldn’t see shit against the sun except for a dark figure.”

  “I’m surprised they missed at that distance,” I said, walking towards my home now but remaining in the shadows of the walled off gardens. The humidity and shock of the last few hours were taking their toll. I ached with the tension and my head pounded from the explosions and stress.

  Jacob grunted. “The bomb didn’t miss though, did it?”

  “You need to tell me what you were doing here. Who your team were targeting. Why you were blown to hell. I also need to know more about Clark.”

  “I should have been there, Mac. If I hadn’t run into you…”

  I gripped his arm. “Jacob, listen to me,” I pulled him around to face me, “if you’d been there you would have died as well and no one would be left to seek justice for you because I wouldn’t even have known you were in my city.”

  “Yeah, and who’s fault is that, Mac? You dropped me like a hot fucking stone.” He shook me off. “They were all I had left of my family. You certainly didn’t give a shit about me once you were out.” His amber eyes blazed a cold fury I couldn’t match or temper.

  My throat closed, halting the words I wanted to scream from the sky so he would not fail to hear my heart, but I didn’t… I never had and he twisted away from me, storming ahead in the general direction of my house. A lonely figure of sadness and grief. I followed but didn’t find a path through the maze in my head to give access to words locked in my heart.

  I didn’t even know if he’d listen to those words or smack me in the mouth for being a deviant bastard like my father had back in the day.

  Leaden feet trekked behind the broken figure. When I caught him
up at the junction we walked together, and his fingers brushed mine after a 100 metres or so making my heart swell.

  “I’m sorry, Mac. This isn’t your fault.” The words were a soft growl of sound.

  “It’s been a tough day,” I murmured, a totally inadequate statement to make under the circumstances. “Let’s get you somewhere safe, where you can sleep and clean up. It’ll help us plan the next move.”

  I stopped walking in front of my huge double gate. “This is us.” I keyed in the security code and a small half gate to one side, slid open. In we walked.

  “Wow,” Jacob said, standing and looking at my home and its front garden. Beyond the small car parking area and separate garage sat my single storey house but the reason it stopped him walking was the assault on the senses. Colour raced over the wrap around porch and the front of the house, leaving only the door and windows clear of flowers and leaves. I had two tall trees poking out from behind the roof and many smaller ones I’d planted since arriving in the city. Hound ambled out from the shady spot under the veranda and made a half-arsed attempt at barking to warn Jacob off.

  “Hound,” I called. “Friend.”

  The huge mutt huffed, turned and ambled away, thick furred tail arching over his back.

  “Hound? Original.”

  “He adopted me when I moved into the house. The previous owners left him behind when they moved, and the neighbour fed him until I bought the place a year later. I kind of feel he owns the place and I’m just living here on his sufferance. He’s company though.” I climbed up the three steps to my front door and let us into the cooler confines of the shadowy interior.

  “You live here alone?” asked Jacob. The living room opened out onto the back garden, more flowers surrounded a lawn and vegetable patch.

  “I’ve always been alone,” I said, heading for the kitchen. “Make yourself at home though.”

  “Christ, this is weird,” Jacob said, tracking me.

  “What?” I knew what I found weird. Him, in my house, like some kind of fever dream. I handed him a cold bottle of water from the fridge.

  “I just never imagined you in a house like this, with a dog and a garden.” He took his Glock from his waistband and placed it with care on the kitchen counter. “It’s all so domestic.”

  “I’m retired, it’s supposed to be domestic. I like the garden. The dog likes staring at the night sky with me and the house is…” I looked around my simple but comfortable home. “My house is trying to be a home.”

  Jacob wandered over to a wall of photos I had up and had ignored before I left the house that morning. They were mostly of my days in the army. To be honest there hadn’t been many days out of the army that were worth taking photos of or remembering. Jacob’s face from before the scarring stared back at him from most of them. He touched one or two as if refreshing his memory of our time together as well.

  “Maybe we should go outside,” I said, his unexpected presence in my home making me uncomfortable. The level of intensity, the intimacy of having him here in the flesh, his scent filling my space, his breaths loud in the silence of my sanctuary. How often had I wished to tell him where in the world I’d chosen to settle?

  “I need to call the Head Shed. I have to report my situation. The deaths…” Jacob’s voice petered off and he seemed to fold into himself. “They only needed one more reason to bump me out and I guess this is it.”

  That shocked me, Jacob had been on track to rise high in the ranks, but his lost sadness made me hold my tongue. I chose to keep things in the present. “Who knew you were in that building? Why are you here in Kinshasa? I think it’s time I had a little more information,” I said, zeroing in my concentration on my companion and the present. “Gun battles aren’t uncommon in the city, not at the moment, but an explosion like that? Something large enough to rip an entire building to pieces? That doesn’t happen.”

  What kept Jacob upright and moving with restless energy seemed to just vanish in the space of a breath. He almost collapsed onto a dining chair and rubbed his hands over his dust and blood covered face. “We are here to find a scientist. She works for Porton Down as a geneticist. Apparently, she wanted to come to the DRC to work with the mosquitoes here, they want to use them to create a weaponised virus they’re working on but won’t tell us about. I think it’s something to do with the plague or Ebola or something, but the virus is unstable in the open air so it’s not a good weapon without being ‘tweaked’. The malaria mosquito can be adapted to carry other vectors.”

  I moved into the kitchen area and began making us something to eat. “Wasn’t she under guard or something? Don’t the Porton Down lot send their people out with Paras or SBS or something?” It seemed unlikely they’d send the SAS for a long-term operation like that, but the Paratroopers were a far larger unit that could rotate platoons and the Special Boat Service did almost as much training work as active service.

  “The scientists and their staff had a small compound in the actual jungle, a long way from any habitation. They were a secret. Very few people even in Porton Down knew they were there, and they only had private security.” He screwed his face up. “Fucking cost cutting again. Rather than have the likes of us out here doing their job properly, or even training men who could do the job, they send a security firm who can’t even look after the prisons back in the UK, never mind protect a top secret mission out here.”

  Private contractors. You get what you paid for and the British Government were selling contracts to the lowest bidder.

  “An armed group came out of the jungle. Cut down the guards. Set fire to everything surrounding the labs. Killed the staff and snatched her and the other women to sell, but whether they know who and what she is we don’t know. We just had to get her back. There’s a man in the city who can contact the men we think are holding her. We needed to find him. The spook was supposed to help.”

  “Clark?” I asked.

  “Yeah, you know him?” Jacob watched me as I went about making coffee for us.

  Did I know Clark? “He’s the one who got me bumped from the Regiment.” Jacob knew nothing about the circumstances of me leaving, I’d worked hard to keep him ignorant of the entire debacle, more than ignorant, protected, I had to keep him and his career protected.

  “That’s it? I think I need more information, Mac.”

  I wanted to tell him, but where to start? It’s not like I had any concrete evidence. Clark had seen to that 3 years ago. “Several of the jobs we did at the end struck me as off. People would escape, drugs or arms shipments would go missing. We got some of the missions completed but others just broke apart. I sensed something was wrong.”

  Jacob frowned and I sat next to him with the first aid kit and a damp cloth to clean his face up. “You never said.”

  “I didn’t want you tainted by anything I uncovered. I’d have shared the story with you once I had evidence, but I wasn’t going to share a suspicion that might place you in harm’s way.”

  He captured my hand where it stroked away the dry blood and dust. “You didn’t have to protect me, Mac. I’m a big boy, always have been.” Those eyes, once so innocent were now harder, caged, but still able to captivate me.

  “You had your career to think of, being in the Regiment meant everything to you,” I said. We were close together, sat like this, one of my knees between his so I could reach his face.

  “Being with you meant more,” he said into the silence.

  6

  Confused, I pulled back, giving him the cloth to clean the wound while I fished out the oxygenated water and antiseptic. I struggled on with my theory. “There’s a cabal in MI6 and other parts of the security services, possibly other parts of the government, that have motives in either destabilising the government or making vast sums of money, I couldn’t work out which, and I couldn’t find enough evidence to go to the higher-ups. It didn’t stop them realising what I was up to though and Clark saw to it I couldn’t come after them anymore.”

 
Jacob cleaned up his face with more brutality than I’d have used. “Couldn’t the ruperts have protected you from Clark?”

  I snorted. “You know what they can be like with SIS. We are just tools to use and discard. There are always more soldiers, too few good spies and Clark is very good at his job, the oily shit.”

  “You think he’s the reason my team are dead, don’t you?” Jacob asked going still. I glanced into his face and froze with the bottle of oxygenated water halfway to his head. The coiled rage vibrating off him made me want to creep around him like a cat around a very dangerous and hungry dog. My heartbeat ticked up and I swallowed, his eyes zeroed in on the movement and I continued to hold still, I had to shift his energy away from violence.

  “How do you do that?” I asked. I tried to soften my voice, keep it low and grounded but by asking a such a strange question I forced his higher brain functions to engage which would help bring him back from the brink of violence.

  In the last 3 years something had happened to Jacob and it flipped him from the gentle soul I’d helped train into a compassionate but elite soldier, into a stone-cold killer. I’d worked with too many of those over the years.

  “Do what?” he snarled, amber eyes razor focused on me.

  “Flip so fast from one thing to another?” I asked, keeping the question purposely vague so he’d have to work to keep up with me.

  He frowned and the energy cleared between us, turned into something softer. I breathed and moved again to clean the wound. The water fizzed as it hit the blood.

  “In answer to your original question,” I said, “then yes. I think Clark is responsible and I have very little doubt the worm wasn’t in the building at the time of the explosion. He’ll be out there somewhere, and we need to find the fucker.”

  “How?” Jacob asked.

  I stood now and probed the head wound; it wasn’t too deep but could do with some stitches. “I’ve a few contacts that might be able to help but first I want us to talk to someone back home I trust to help us.”