Cold Warriors

by Rebecca Levene

  "Can't tell," he said to John. All the men had checked cloths wrapped around their faces, leaving only a strip of flesh visible around the eyes.

  "Then take 'em all out."

  "But what if the target's still inside the building?" Morgan tracked the figures as they milled just outside the main gate. They were all armed, AK-47s and other heavier ordnance. He and John were out of range right now, but a few shots fired, someone with the brains to figure out a trajectory, and the enemy would be swarming all over them. Best to leave it till there were fewer hostiles and a clear target.

  And yet... The more Morgan watched them, the more certain he became that that figure there, the one standing just to the left of the main body of men, was the one he was after. It was something about the way he gestured, small forceful movements of his hand that seemed to be commands. The way the others seemed to keep him permanently in the corner of their eye, turning to respond whenever he spoke. He was their leader, Morgan was sure of it.

  "Got him," he said tightly.

  "You're positive?"

  "That's the bastard." He prepared to draw the breath that he'd hold in his lungs as he fired. "There's going to be blow-back when he hits the deck. Get ready."

  "Mate, I always am."

  But Morgan wasn't listening to him any more. His mind was focused on the weapon in his hand. He felt himself pushing his consciousness out so that it extended from flesh and bone into metal: stock, barrel, trigger, the gun just another more lethal part of his body.

  Other snipers would measure wind speed and direction, carefully calculate distance to target, curvature of the earth... Morgan had been taught all that, but he didn't need it. In his mind, he could already see the bullet, curving gently up into the sky and then down again as gravity grabbed it on the long journey to its target. He felt the dry desert breeze against his cheek and automatically shifted just a millimetre to the left to compensate for it. He took one last look at the man he was going to kill, held the breath in his lungs and squeezed the trigger.

  The target stayed upright for a second, swaying. Then, one after another, his joints hinged shut, until he was lying crumpled on the ground. Morgan was too far away to hear the shouts, even in the vast silence of the desert, but he could see the sudden flurry of activity, men ducking for cover, then realising that they didn't know which direction they needed cover from.

  If he and John sat tight under their camouflage, there was a chance they wouldn't be found.

  "What are you waiting for?" John asked.

  Morgan hesitated a moment, then picked another target. Breath in, hold, and that was another man down. Then another, but now the hostiles were starting to get a bead on their position.

  One of them let out a wild burst with his AK-47 - "Spray and pray", they called it. Another of them grabbed his arm and he stopped firing. The cloth had slipped from the shooter's face in the moment of panic, and Morgan could suddenly see how young he was, even younger than Morgan. Morgan shifted his aim and took out the man beside him instead.

  But that was it. They had their own binoculars out now, and someone must have caught his muzzle flash because suddenly they were all pointing in his direction. He only had time for one more shot before they'd dived behind a pile of rocks that hid them all.

  "Now it gets lively," John said.

  "They can sit us out inside the base," Morgan said. "Wait till we run out of water."

  "No way, mate. That type don't have the patience."

  He was right. A few more minutes, and then the gates of the compound burst open and an armoured vehicle roared out. These guys weren't amateurs. They waited till the thick metal sides of the transport were shielding them from Morgan's position before they climbed on board.

  Morgan let the sniper rifle drop and pulled out his standard-issue 5.56mm as the personnel carrier barrelled over the dunes towards them. He waited for the last minute to break cover, circling low and left as John headed right - far enough apart they'd be separate targets for anything that got thrown at them, not so far they'd end up in each other's line of fire.

  One man put his head out the back of the carrier, swaying precariously as it bounced over the ground. He'd only raised his gun to waist height by the time John took him out, a nice little headshot he'd be boasting about later.

  Five more metres, and the truck skidded to a stop. But no one emerged and Morgan guessed no one wanted to be the first man out.

  In the time their hesitation gave him he sprinted round until he had a clear view into the back of the transport. They hadn't been expecting him to move so fast and he had a brief snapshot of their shocked faces before he threw in the grenade and dived for cover.

  He'd timed it so they only had a second to escape. Men leapt out, but body parts too and a fine spray of red, vivid against the prevailing gold. One of the survivors let out an undisciplined volley of bullets, maybe the same boy who'd done it earlier. Most thudded harmlessly into the sand until a last burst hit one of his comrades in the leg.

  Morgan estimated there were eight men left active, plus the driver. John was on them before they had a chance to regroup, single aimed shots heading straight where they'd do the most damage. They turned to face him and now Morgan had his chance, putting a short, controlled volley into their exposed backs.

  This was high-wire stuff. He and John were totally exposed, vulnerable to the one man who got his shit together quick enough to shoot back. Morgan's body was tight with adrenaline and the combat-fear that was hard to distinguish from exhilaration.

  He felt a brush of something soft against his leg, a spray of sand. A moment later the noise slammed into his ears and he knew someone was shooting from behind him. The driver.

  Morgan spun and dived, low and forward, straight towards and beneath the bullets. The man was grinning madly as he fired, blackened teeth bared and - absurdly - a cigarette still hanging from the corner of his mouth.

  Morgan's gun was trapped beneath him. He reached into his boot and pulled out his knife instead. It wasn't weighted for throwing but it was the only thing he had. It spun end-over-end out of his fingers as he rolled again, left this time, like a goalie gambling which way the penalty was going. The gamble paid off, the shots went right and then high into the sky as Morgan's knife entered the man's throat with a meaty thud, so deep and hard the hilt ended up flush against his chin.

  The man's finger tightened reflexively on the trigger as he convulsed and died. The bullets kept raining upward into the blank blue sky, curving and falling back to earth in a lethal hail.

  Morgan waited till the last bullet was spent, the man's back arched in a final agony, before he turned around to see how John was doing.

  There was a stain of scarlet on the leg of John's desert combats, but he was still standing and only two of the enemy were. They were circling, trying to flank him. With John weakened from blood-loss they'd probably succeed.

  Morgan ran towards them, drawing his shoulder-harness knife. He couldn't risk a shot with so much motion and John in the middle of it.

  John's bullet tunnelled through the first man's shoulder just as Morgan's knife slashed at the chest of the second. But the blade hit a rib, and the knife glanced off and out again, still moving with all the force and momentum of the blow.

  John spun round from his kill, knowing a second target was behind him. Morgan could see it was going to happen a second before it did, but he was powerless to stop it. His blade kept on moving and John kept on spinning, and at the exact moment when John's chest was level with the blade, it sank in.

  Morgan froze for a second. But this was combat and there was one more hostile still moving, wounded but not out for the count. He pulled the knife out of John's body and slashed it fiercely against the man's throat. It bit deep into the bone and stuck there as blood jetted out around it.

  Morgan stood, dazed, for a moment - until John's agonised groan brought him back to reality. Morgan dropped to his knees in the sand beside him and pressed his hand uselessly
against the sucking wound in his chest.

  John's eyes were glazed, each in-breath a wheeze through the wall of his ruined lung, each out-breath a sob of pain. He had to work his mouth three times before any sound came out of it, and then it was a dry croak. "Jesus Christ, it hurts."

  "It's okay. It's okay-" Morgan said, looking at the blood seeping out around his hand.

  "No it's fucking not," John choked.

  "Just hang in there, I'll..." But what was he going to do? "I'm sorry," Morgan whispered.

  John's mouth twisted and Morgan wasn't sure if he was trying to smile or if it was meant to be a sneer. "They warned me about you," he gasped. "Should have listened."

  He looked like he wanted to say more, but the only thing coming out of his mouth was blood. It bubbled with his breath for a moment, then slowed to a thin trickle as his heart stopped pumping beneath the fingers Morgan pressed to his chest.

  "Come on, man, come on!" Morgan lifted John's shoulders and shook him, shook him so hard that his teeth rattled. But there was no shaking the life back into him.

  When Morgan got back to base, the brass couldn't get him out of the country fast enough. He closed himself off to the accusing eyes around him, but he already knew what they thought about any soldier responsible for a blue-on-blue death.

  He was on a flight back to the UK before they'd even held John's memorial service. The coffin was empty, of course. Morgan had buried John's body under a few feet of sand. Only the bones of the men they'd killed would mark where he lay.

  They put Morgan on a civilian aircraft, cattle class. You couldn't fly a man with no official status on a military plane, it buggered up the plausible deniability. His legs were cramped in the narrow space between the seats and the man next to him twitched and snored the whole way.

  A rangy African man was waiting for him at Heathrow, holding up a hand-written sign that said "Hewitt". Morgan followed him without a word, through the dank underground car park and into his estate car. The rain was lashing down outside, smearing the windscreen with water, which almost made Morgan smile. He'd been knocking around the Middle East for so long he'd stopped believing rain like that actually happened.

  He didn't ask where the car was taking him - his MI6 handlers always chose different locations for his debriefings - just stared out of the window at the suburban landscape scrolling by outside, like the backdrop to a bargain-basement racing game. When they drove underneath tunnels or bridges his reflection stared back at him for a brief moment of darkness, but it didn't seem to be thinking about anything in particular.

  After an hour they passed into the centre of town and then out again, until they finally stopped somewhere in the joyless no-man's land between Vauxhall and Oval.

  The driver jumped out to open the door for Morgan, he nodded his thanks, and the car drove off without giving him a chance to ask where, exactly, he was supposed to go. He'd been dropped off in front of a two-storey Victorian house, so after a second he shrugged and rang the bell.

  The door opened before he'd taken his finger off the button. A dark-haired, smooth-faced man stared at him a moment, then stepped aside and gestured vaguely towards the back of the building. The whole place looked like it had been decorated in the fifties and allowed to slowly deteriorate ever since. Paisley wallpaper was peeling in the corners, red and brown like the rest of the décor.

  Phillips, the man who'd first recruited him from the army to the agency, was waiting in the long, narrow sitting room, a frown squashing his bulldog face. "You're a bloody liability, you know that, Hewitt?" he barked. He was smoking a Silk Cut, filling the room with a blue, flavourless fog. He took another drag, then stubbed it out on the carpet. The burn mark was instantly lost in the lurid crimson-and-blue floral pattern.

  Morgan pulled himself to attention. "Yes, sir."

  "You do realise you're supposed to be killing the other side?"

  Morgan's shoulders tightened. "I think it might've been in the mission briefing, yeah."

  There was a small cough of suppressed laughter. Morgan saw that there was a stranger in the room - a neat little man just the wrong side of middle-age sitting in one of the high-backed wooden chairs.

  "Don't get lippy with me, you little shit!" Phillips roared.

  "It was an accident," Morgan said, but he couldn't look Phillips in the eye.

  "So I hear. Just like that ricochet that went straight through Curtis's heart during basic. Or the supposedly defused IED that took off both of Perry's legs. Or... how did Brown die, I can't remember?"

  "A septic cut. We got back to base too late to treat the blood poisoning," Morgan said.

  "And how exactly did he get the cut?"

  Morgan didn't bother replying. They both knew that a tent peg Morgan was hammering had skidded against a rock and straight into Brown's foot. Morgan still couldn't quite believe Brown had died from it.

  "It's remarkable," Phillips said. "You're only twenty, and you've already notched up a British body count that would give any Al Qaeda operative a warm glow of satisfaction."

  "Your sister died too, didn't she?" the other man asked suddenly, just when Morgan had begun to forget he was there.

  Phillips shot him a look of irritation.

  "When you were seven, I gather," the man continued, "and you chased her into a lake. Tragic, really. And you'd already lost both your mother and father, before you were even born. There's an Oscar Wilde quote about that - I can't quite remember how it goes, can you? Something about losing one parent being unfortunate, but losing both smacking of carelessness. What a lonely little boy you must have been."

  "What is this, Trisha Goddard?" Morgan said, trying to keep his voice light.

  The man smiled a secretive little smile that made Morgan want to punch him.

  "Who the hell is he?" Morgan asked Phillips.

  "Giles here is your get-out-of-jail-free card. If it was up to me, you'd never see active duty again."

  Morgan felt his cheeks flood with a heat that was half shame, half anger.

  "I, on the other hand," Giles said, "think you're far too useful to waste. You simply need to be handled with the appropriate caution."

  "Like radioactive waste," Phillips muttered.

  Giles laughed. "Yes, very much like that. Young Morgan certainly isn't a safe person to be around - it's almost as if he emits mortality, isn't it?"

  "That's absurd," Phillips said.

  "Isn't it just."

  Phillips snorted. "No wonder they closed you lot down."

  "Temporarily," Giles said amiably. "We're back in business now - extreme solutions for a dangerous world."

  Phillips's lips pursed sourly around a fresh cigarette.

  "If you're not MI6, who are you?" Morgan asked.

  Giles shrugged. "A recently reformed department of the SIS - they used to call us the Hermetic Division, back in the day. You may consider yourself officially seconded."

  Phillips nodded when Morgan looked back at him, though he didn't look happy about it.

  Morgan didn't want to work for this smug little bastard, but it didn't look like he had a whole lot of choice. He couldn't go back to the army if the spooks decided they had no more use for him. The cover they'd created for him had seen to that: AWOL squaddies ended up in the Glasshouse in Colchester, not back on the front line.

  "If I'm working for you," he said, "what is it you want me to do?"

  Giles smiled demurely. "Oh, this and that. But unlike Mr Phillips here, I believe I can supply you with a partner even you can't kill."

  A blink of time, and Tomas was back. He was in darkness, but sound had returned, a dull thumping somewhere above him. They were still burying him, then. He must have blacked out temporarily. Panic swelled in his chest, larger than the thing that was trying to contain it.

  Don't breathe, don't breathe, you'll use up all the oxygen. It was useless, of course. If he hadn't been gasping so hard he would have been screaming. And the sounds were getting louder.

  Louder
. That meant nearer, which had to mean they were digging him up, not burying him under. Had something gone wrong with the ceremony? He heard, quite clearly now, the sound of a shovel scraping against the wood of his coffin, and he was suddenly furious.

  He'd reached a decision, the hardest one he'd ever made, and they were taking it back from him. He didn't know if he'd have the strength to put himself through this all over again.

  He was expecting darkness when they prised off the coffin lid and he winced and shielded his eyes from the sudden, unexpected light. He felt the flap of fabric against his wrist, and there was a pungent smell that wasn't quite unpleasant.

  A moment later he squeezed his eyes open. There was something wrong with his shirt. It had been fresh on that morning, but now the cuff looked dark and frayed - almost rotten. When he tore it away in disgust the rip travelled all the way down his arm. The whole thing fell off him in strips of decaying cotton.

  He pushed himself to his knees and tried to get to his feet, but his legs had cramped and he stumbled over the lip of the coffin to sprawl on the freshly dug earth. His shoulder shuddered away from the rubbery flesh of a worm as it dived back into the ground.

  Finally, he staggered to his feet and looked around. The sun was hot and high overhead, nowhere near the horizon. He frowned, disoriented and not able to make sense of it.

  The gravediggers stood in a loose ring around him. He looked at them, but he didn't recognise any of the faces, all of them young men. He understood their expressions, though: shock and revulsion. They backed away when he stepped towards them.

  "Shit," one of them said. "I didn't think... shit."

  Another one bent over, hands on his knees, and vomited.

  Could three days have passed already in that uncounted blink of time? His eyes finally found their focus and he could see that he was exactly where he'd started. The graveyard was tucked behind a long-abandoned church on the Yorkshire Moors. He could see the prickle of heather through the dry stone wall around it and smell the blossom on the warm breeze.