Chris Ryan Extreme: Hard Target: Mission Three: Die Trying

by Ryan, Chris

  ‘Back at Aimée’s flat,’ Gardner said. ‘You deliberately missed your shot, didn’t you?’

  Valon nodded, his mouth emitting a guttural murmur. Some new and hidden pain was making itself heard inside his mutilated body. ‘Jesus, I… couldn’t give up my cover. They wanted… you dead. I had to make it look like… you were.’

  He examined his wounds, his mouth ajar in horror. The skin around the right eyeball had been blown away. Gardner could almost make out the connective cords at the back of his eye.

  ‘You must stop the Russians… They’re going to a rendezvous in… shit!’

  Gardner closed his eyes for a second. He’d seen a lot of trauma wounds in his time, but nothing as messed up as Valon’s. His were gopping.

  ‘Drobny, on the border,’ Valon continued, drawing in breath and choking on it like glass. ‘The church. Two o’clock. It is very important you get to the truck. Before it continues its journey and—’

  ‘And Aimée? You told me she was nabbed by the Grey Wolf. Is that a lie?’

  Valon was delirious. ‘Sotov. He has her.’ He gulped. Made a gargling noise in his throat.

  The words gnawed at Gardner’s stomach. He pushed Aimée to the back of his mind.

  ‘What’s in the truck?’ he said.

  He detected a soft, flopping sound inside the other man’s chest.

  ‘Talk to me, Klint. The fucking truck.’

  But Valon was on the brink. His breath stilled like frost in his mouth.

  Gardner watched him pass over.

  He dug out his mobile, called Land. Needed to give him the heads-up on how the drug exchange had gone fubar.

  Six rings, seven – and no fucking answer.

  An automated female voice asked him to leave a message after the bleep.

  Gardner declined. He knew that the Russians were transporting the truck and Sotov had followed directly behind it in the Lincoln. The odds on him accompanying the truck all the way to Drobny were more than reasonable.

  So that’s what you’ll do. Get to the village of Drobny in the hour. That’ll give you just under thirty minutes to intercept whatever the fuck’s in the truck. Time-wise it’s tighter than a Jock at a Poundstretcher, but since when you did roll any other way?

  He raced back towards the Nissan.

  15

  1253 hours.

  ‘That was crazy,’ Popov said, laughing, as he drove through the factory gates. The site had once been the pride of Serbian industry, building cars and motorbikes for the West. Now it was a barren pit, the machinery rusted brown, stockpiles of spare motor parts.

  ‘I mean, those Italian shitheads. They got what they had coming to them. But that Scottish guy was out of his fucking mind. Trying to run at you with a fucking knife, Aleks. I’ve never seen anything like it.’ Popov beat his palms against the wheel, shaking his head.

  ‘The Scot used to be an SAS soldier,’ Sotov said. ‘They’re taught never to give up.’

  They parked inside the excavated shell of a factory building. Sotov ordered his two surviving henchmen to leave the vehicle and perform a perimeter search. The Grey Wolf waited by the Lincoln, Popov next to him and staring in the direction of the two men.

  ‘The Englishman this morning,’ Popov said. ‘The one who died in the fire. He was SAS too?’

  Sotov nodded.

  ‘Two SAS soldiers murdered in a single day.’ He laughed, but the sound came out like he was having a seizure.

  A white Ford Transit shuttled into the factory entrance. Sotov watched the van draw up alongside the Lincoln. Two men, big as grizzly bears and equally as dumb, got out. One sported a tacky gold necklace. Bulgarians have no taste, Sotov thought. But at least they come cheap. The man with the necklace opened the Transit’s rear doors. Sotov smiled.

  The bitch was inside.

  ‘In the boot,’ Sotov ordered the Bulgarians.

  ‘Let me go!’ the girl yelled, backing deep inside the van. ‘Please!’

  Sotov watched her the way a visitor might look at a creature in the zoo. He lit a Ziganov, his nostrils venting smoke into the van. ‘Does she have a name?’

  ‘Aimée,’ said Necklace Guy.

  He liked the name. Had a nice ring to it.

  ‘My sweet Aimée, there’s no point blaming me for the situation you find yourself in. We know you were with the English soldier. We know he told you certain things.’

  Her face hardened. The Bulgarians disappeared out the front of the factory.

  ‘I believe,’ Sotov directed his gaze at Aimée, ‘his name was Joe Gardner.’

  He waited for the words to sink in. Aimée paused for a beat.

  ‘He’ll make you pay for this, he’ll—’

  ‘But he’s dead, my dear.’

  Aimée stared blankly back at Sotov. As though she didn’t understand – didn’t want to understand – the words coming out of his mouth.

  ‘The fire at your flat this morning. He was trapped inside.’ Sotov suppressed a laugh. It tried to push free at the corners of his lips. ‘Burning is a terrible way to go. The flames take a long time to kill a man. There is much suffering.’

  Tears slipped down Aimée’s cheeks. Her lips trembled.

  ‘You’re lying,’ she said, her voice breaking, weak.

  ‘I’m afraid not. No one is coming to save you, Aimée. It’s just you and me.’ Sotov leaned into the van. He pinched her teary cheek. ‘You and me,’ he whispered, Sotov reeling in his finger. A teardrop plinked on to his fingertip. He tasted it. Salty, and yet somehow sweet.

  ‘Now, the problem with the SAS,’ he went on, ‘with people like Joe Gardner, is that they don’t give up very easy. A Russian man – you beat him once, he runs like a fucking dog. Not the same with the British. Gardner can’t have been operating by himself. There must be other soldiers working with him, yes?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Come on, my sweet. You slept with Gardner; you fucking stink of sex. And a man will tell a woman anything, even his most closely guarded secrets, to get her into bed. He will have said things to you. Plans, numbers, names.’

  ‘He didn’t, I swear!’

  The cold light of day punctured Aimée’s beauty. She had a bruised eye, a bloodied nose. Some marks on her wrists. As if she’d been trapped in the van with a wild dog. Yet with a bit of work and a few days to let her wounds heal, she could be a model.

  ‘I do hope you’re not claustrophobic, my dear,’ Sotov said. ‘We’re going for a little ride.’

  The Bulgarians had returned. Necklace Guy stashed a silencer pistol into his jacket pocket. Popov glared daggers at them, but they stared ahead, small eyes rooted to the van. They grappled with the bitch. She flailed. Necklace Guy wrapped his substantial arms around her chest and transported her to the Lincoln, his bloated legs waddling from side to side.

  Popov went to the car and reached inside. Pushed a button on the dashboard. The boot yawned.

  ‘Joe’s still alive. I’m sure of it,’ Aimée said.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Sotov chuckled. ‘Of course he is. Don’t worry. Soon the reality of your situation will hit you, and you’ll talk.’

  ‘I told you, I don’t know about any plans.’

  Sotov considered the sky. ‘That’s too bad. Because if you don’t tell me what I want to know, I’ll have to do things to you. Things that will make you cry. Things that will make you wish you had never been born.’ He turned to face her. ‘Think about it now, why don’t you?’

  The Bulgarians chucked the girl in like she was a rolled-up carpet. Sotov heard a dull thump as the boot locked shut, the Lincoln rocking on its rear wheels. Her shouts seeped through the exterior, muffled and distant. Yes, she was a wild one all right. Sotov looked forward to having fun with her. It was so much more exciting when they fought back.

  ‘Thank you, Denis.’

  Popov rubbed his hands. They were smeared with blood. ‘No problem.’

  Sotov laughed with his mouth closed. ‘No, I m
ean – for everything.’

  Popov’s hands abruptly stopped. He stared at something on the ground. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand, Aleks.’

  ‘I’m afraid you do.’

  Popov suddenly became aware of the Bulgarians closing in on him. He backed off, edging closer to his shadow cast against the wall. Popov’s eyes flicked from the two men to Sotov. The Grey Wolf and his chauffeur stared at each other for a brief moment.

  ‘Why—?’ Popov’s voice was ghostly, as if his soul had already left his body.

  ‘You know why, Denis. No more games.’

  Popov was quiet. He stared at the pickaxe in Necklace Guy’s hand.

  ‘Make it slow,’ Sotov told the Bulgarian. Then he walked outside for a cigarette. Caught the squelching sound the pickaxe made as it gored Popov’s face. Sotov emerged from the factory, and the door shut on Popov’s feeble groans.

  16

  1334 hours.

  Drobny was forty-five minutes’ drive along the border with Macedonia. Gardner gunned the accelerator. The speedometer on the Nissan hit 140. The chassis felt like it was stuck together with scotch tape. A question whizzed across the pulsing surface of his brain. What’s in the truck? And another question: did John know he wasn’t going to be paid in cash?

  The road rose, then lulled, then flattened as he drove deeper into the Serbian badlands.

  Gardner had been to Drobny once before. Back in 1999, he and John Bald had been given orders to man an observation post on a hill overlooking an Orthodox church. When the militia arrived they’d rounded up every ethnic Albanian suspected of collusion with the Kosovo Liberation Army and imprisoned them inside the school. They were being held captive there, and the NATO gin merchants wanted to verify reports about ethnic cleansing. Gardner and Bald were given strict instructions not to intervene.

  They had moved in at night, tasked to recce what the head shed, in their fancy language, called ‘suspicious activity’. What the two of them found in Drobny wasn’t suspicious. It was paid-in-full murder.

  A chilly November dawn, the cold scraping Gardner’s lungs. The fourth day of their mission. Bald had shaken him awake. They’d been on a hard stag routine, each man taking the watch in four-hour turns while the other ate ration packs, rested and operated the radio.

  ‘Look, Joe,’ Bald had whispered as ten militiamen frog-marched eighty civilians into the cemetery. He’d handed the binos to Gardner and he had looked on as the civilians were lined up against the church wall.

  The sergeant counted to three. Then his men opened fire. Bald and Gardner gritted their teeth as they grimly watched the wall spatter with the guts and brains of innocent men, women and children. Smoke was still issuing from the militiamen’s overheating muzzles when Bald reported to the head shed asking for permission to engage. The request was denied.

  ‘Bloody cowards,’ Bald said on hearing the news. ‘Come on, Joe. What do you say we show these fuckers the meaning of a turkey shoot?’

  They had loaded their Colt Commandos and put rounds down on the militia. Wiped out all ten of the evil cunts, filling their bodies with so much brass they could be sure they were dead. It was a blatant breach of orders, but it had felt the right thing to do and Major Maston, if he had ever known, had let it slide. It was hard for Gardner to believe that John Bald was now dead, a no-good criminal.

  Modern-day Drobny wasn’t some sort of memorial to the massacre, more like an abandoned, lawless patch of shit that someone had forgotten to clear up. Gardner saw precious few people in the streets. The faces he did see had more lines than a Shakespeare play and the distant, glazed expressions of a people who’d lost everything. Burned-out windows stared back at him like black teeth. The roofs of most houses had caved in. Mangy dogs roaming the rutted roads, sniffing at dead birds and crushed Coca-Cola cans.

  The church, Valon had said. That’s where he told Gardner he would find the sleeper truck. Gardner felt he was colliding with the past. Ghosts everywhere, the filmy residue of nightmares he’d tried to bury at the bottom of a pint glass.

  He checked his watch. One forty-two. A little over fifteen minutes before, according to Valon, the truck would move on to a new, unknown location. You’ve got to get to the truck, he thought. Find out what the fuck’s inside. Then track down Sotov and find Aimée.

  Gardner made a few turns west then south, the village seeming to disintegrate in front of him. He came to a particularly desolate place. Shabby homes, ragtag cars, roads that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a rally course. He passed a police station fallen into disrepair, the walls swamped with graffiti denouncing Milosevic, Arkan and Karadzic. Heard something up ahead. The low rumble of an engine. He killed the Nissan.

  Land called him back. Took his fucking time, Gardner thought.

  ‘Christ, Joe,’ Land snapped, ‘where the—?’

  ‘You didn’t tell me Valon was working for you.’

  Gardner heard Land cough down the line. ‘Klint Valon’s cover was on a strictly need-to-know basis. A man like Valon walks a tightrope. With every person who knows his true identity, his position becomes increasingly perilous. I can’t afford to lose him.’

  ‘You already have,’ Gardner said.

  A pause stretched out, like rope tensing.

  ‘The meet was a colossal fuck-up,’ Gardner continued. ‘Valon’s dead. John too. The Italians tried to hijack the whole deal, take the coke and the money. Soon as they made their play, the Russians wiped the fucking floor with them. They spared no one.’

  Another pause. ‘You mean—?’

  ‘No one,’ Gardner replied flatly. ‘They killed the Italians, then they went for Bald and Valon. They’re all fucking dead.’

  Land muttered something; it came down the line as a static hiss. Three seconds of silence, then he regained his composure. ‘What about the cocaine? And the money?’

  ‘The Russians took both. But Valon said there was no money, the Russians were swapping something else for the drugs.’

  ‘And what—?’

  The line crackled and fizzed. Land’s voice distorted like a badly tuned radio station. And suddenly he was gone. Gardner tried calling him back, but his mobile couldn’t get a signal. He checked the time again. One forty-seven.

  This is it. Do – or fucking die.

  He stepped out into the street, Glock in his hand, looking for trouble.

  A couple of locals glowered at him, two knurled men with skin like worn sandpaper and greasy hair. An elderly woman trundled past, knuckle-joint nose and eyes the colour of dirty net curtains. Gardner had been on the receiving end of a million evil-eyes in Iraq and Afghanistan and he came to understand that the only language these people understood was made in a munitions factory. The men saw the Glock and swiftly looked in the other direction. No one else around to bother him.

  Forty metres ahead he clocked the sleeper truck from the rest stop. The truck was in front of the old church gates. He crept forward, his knees bent, making sure he didn’t cause any noise.

  To his nine a road peeled off between several vacant properties to the left and the ruins of a library church to the right. Thirty metres down the road Gardner noted three vehicles parked in a column. The front and rear ones were Toyota Hilux 4x4s, each with black canvas draped over the open section. The middle vehicle appeared to be a bulletproof van with blacked-out windows and a secure compartment with double doors at the back.

  Three men came into view. Two looked like guards: tan tops, dark-green trousers, black boots, AK-47 straps tight around their chests. Their faces seemed too dark and smooth to hail from this neck of the woods. The third man was chubbier, older. He had a beard thick as a clenched fist.

  The third man shouted at the guards. Gardner hid behind the police station. The guards heaved something out of the sleeper truck’s trailer. The third man was shouting at them. Gardner thought he sounded Arabic. Carrying their load as if it were an expensive piece of furniture, one man gripping it at either end, they headed west down the stree
t. Gardner followed, stopping behind a wrecked Skoda ditched next to a stone house at the eastern edge of the street. Weeds had reclaimed the car’s tyres and much of its shell. The two guards flipped open the doors of the secure van and wheezed as they placed the object on its floor.

  The doors slammed. The third man headed up the road in the opposite direction to Gardner. The two guards walked towards Gardner, but they hadn’t seen him. They were thirty metres from his position. Then twenty. One of the guards, a lanky teenager with a bumfluff moustache, then made a right and walked south down an adjacent street, out of sight. The other, a short and stocky guy with teak skin, was now ten metres away.

  Sweat percolated down Gardner’s spine.

  Five metres.

  He hoped the guy would walk straight past and continue on his patrol.

  Gardner hunkered behind the Skoda. As the guard’s shadow loomed, he caught his breath in the back of his mouth.

  The guard was now a metre beyond the Skoda.

  The shadow stopped. Hovered over Gardner.

  The guard spun around. Clocked Gardner. His mouth opened wide. Poised to sound the alarm.

  Gardner leapt to his feet and in one smooth movement fastened his arms around the guard’s neck, fixing him in a headlock. He slapped his right hand tight over the guy’s mouth. The kid with the tache was out of sight, but Gardner had to assume he’d return soon. He dragged the guard out of sight and pushed his elbows out until he could feel the rubbery tunnel of the guy’s air passage crushing from the force. The man kicked at the dirt with his feet, hands pawing at Gardner’s face. Gardner squeezed harder. Then something warm and chunky seeped through his fingers. The guy had vomited.

  Gardner didn’t let go. He held and held, squeezed and squeezed. After two minutes the legs stopped thrashing about. Gardner dragged the body to the side of the Skoda and filched a set of keys from the guy’s pocket. Checking that the coast was clear of other guards, he moved diagonally forward until he was behind the rear Hilux. The black canvas seemed to be covering some kind of a mini-gun.