Deadly States (Seaforth Files by Nicholas P Clark Book 2)

by Clark, Nicholas P

  “But it does Sean; it worries me a hell of a lot. A cold-blooded killer doesn’t much care for who he kills. And I don’t want to feed your bloodlust. After all, I could be the one who you turn on if you don’t get to kill on some mission. There is a darkness inside you man, and I don’t want to be around when it next comes out.”

  “Don’t worry Barry, if I put a bullet in your head during a mission it will be because you have pulled this kind of bullshit, or because you talk far too much. Now, this game is over. You can tell your friend that he is brilliant at hide and seek. You can tell him that I am wildly impressed by his skills. You can tell him whatever the hell you like, as long as you tell him to stop firing at me.”

  Jack held the binoculars by his side. Barry raised his hand again. Jack’s binoculars shattered into a hundred pieces as the bullet tore them from his hand and scattered the devastated fragments across the road. Jack turned to a grinning Barry.

  “Well done Barry. All that you have managed to do here today is destroy a perfectly good pair of spyglasses. If we are finished then I would really like to get back to the base and have a shower. I stink even worse than you; and that is saying a lot.”

  “No Sean, we have done a lot more than that here today. I have told you that I am ontoyou. I know who and what you really are. You are like an attack dog. With the right kind of training and with the right target in your sights you would be an exceptionally useful asset to our cause. But you and I both know that no matter how hard you try, you really can’t teach an old dog new tricks. You will play us for as long as it suits you and then you will turn on us. And that’s what today was really about, Sean. I want you to know that if you do turn on us like a mad dog one day, we will be waiting. My friend out there will be keeping a very close eye on you at all times. If he so much as gets a bad feeling about anything that you do then he will put you down. Do we understand one another Sean?”

  Barry was always at his bravest and most dangerous when he had back-up. This was something that Jack was to learn later when he faced him alone. That cocky self-confidence was nowhere to be seen when he didn’t have someone watching his back. How long the sniper watched Jack while he was in Ireland he had no way of knowing. Though it was highly likely that Jack was only ever in the man’s sights on that one occasion. The sniper was much too busy to be watching Barry’s back. In the following thirty years that same sniper killed over four hundred soldiers and police officers in the South Armagh area. He was a legend within theIRA movement and the wider Republican community. The South Armagh countryside was decorated with triangular warning signs showing the black outline of a sniper where you would normally find the outline of a workman. Under the sign was the humorous, if somewhat sinister, warning, Sniper At Work. It was dark humour, but they were dark times. The last victim of the Troubles before the 1997 ceasefire, Lance Bombardier Stephen Restorick, was a victim of the sniper. Once the ceasefire arrived the sniper vanished, like the mountain mist that he so often used as cover during his escapes. He slipped in and out of Irish history without anyone truly learning his identity. Even the IRA men who let him into their organisation never really believed his back story. Men like the sniper and men like Jack had a bigger impact on how the modern Ireland was to be shaped than many of the household names. They were the true masters of destiny and their secret touch has been guiding mankind for centuries.

  As Jack waited for help to arrive back in modern day South Africa he couldn’t help but dwell on that strange day from his past. In those few short minutes in front of that sniper, Jack had learned more about Barry than he had done in two years of undercover work. Although Jack was extremely angry at the time it gave him the kind of insight that would ultimately lead to victory on a container ship in the Irish Sea as Barry vanished into the icy waters.

  There was something about the Barry from that day and the Barry from the present day that didn’t quite sit right with Jack. He tried to wrestle an answer out of the depths of his mind, but the struggle got the better of him. Annoyed with himself he let it go, and, as is often the case with such internal battles, once he had decided to let it go, the answer came to him like a bolt from the blue. It was almost as if his brain was trying to show Jack who the real boss was—you don’t tell me what to do mate, I am the one who wears the trousers in this relationship.

  The relief at finding the answer to the question that was troubling him so very much soon gave way to another concern. Barry was always at his most cocky and his most dangerous when he was being backedup. That was true on that hot summer’s day all those years before back in Ireland, and it was true of that day in South Africa. That Barry had been at his cocky best all evening meant that he had someone in the background looking out for him. That the mysterious someone hadn’t helped Barry out during that fire fight back at Jack’s house, meant that this back-up was not as effective as the American sniper from their past. That did not mean that the back-up could not do something to help Barry out of his current predicament. Jack turned to Robert. Was this guardian also operating under orders to put Jack down if he became a threat to Barry? It was a concern, but it was a concern that he was in no position to do anything about other than keep on the move to make it as hard for Barry’s unknown protector as he possibly could.

  “Move,” Jack ordered. “Where are we going?” Robert asked. The caution in Robert’s voice was in response to the agitation in Jack’s voice.

  “Down to the parking lot,” Jack said.

  “Why can’t we wait here? Surely it would be much safer for you to wait here? With only a couple of entrances to watch? Unlike the parking lot. Please Jack, don’t do something stupid now. There has been

  too much unnecessary killing tonight.”

  “Just get your arse up out of that chair and moved to the lift. Or if you prefer I can gag you, then put a bullet in each kneecap just to make certain you don’t go anywhere while I go down to the parking lot on my own. The choice really is yours. But decide now. One way or the other I’m leaving this office in the next thirty seconds.”

  “OK man, keep your hair on,” Robert said, as he got up out of the chair. “One minute you are all cool as a cucumber and the next you are waving that gun around like some kind of madman. It does not make me feel comfortable. If you keep going on like this then you will end up getting us both killed.”

  “That is what I am trying to avoid. Now get a shift on before we both end up like your friends out there.”

  Robert’s hesitation began to grate on Jack’s nerves. He pulled Robert to his feet and then he marched him across the room, past the bodies of his men, and to the lift. All the while Jack kept his gun pressed against the back of Robert’s head. Robert may have been unarmed but he was still a big guy and Jack did not fancy the prospect of taking him on in a hand to hand contest. He may have been a big, slow moving man, but there was real power in his arms, and one lucky punch would finish Jack. And besides all that, he didn’t have time to go several rounds with him even if Jack did come out on top. The ride down to the parking lot was painfully slow. For some inexplicable reason the lift stopped at every floor. Jack took cover behind Robert as the doors opened each time, and each time there was no one waiting to step inside the lift. In the panic from earlier panicked office workers may have hit buttons left, right and centre in an effort to escape. The lift was only now getting round to answering those hails.

  They eventually arrived at the parking lot. Jack pushed Robert out of the lift, and he quickly followed his hostage. If Robert was setting him up or if Barry’s back-up had arrived, then Robert would make for an impressive human shield. Jack quickly scanned the area. He had been trained to seek out anything that seemed out of place, but following the explosion and the devastation that it left behind, everything seemed out of place. His heightened senses were overwhelmed as he tried to take it all in and form a tactical plan from what he was

  observing. His mind was like a programmable machine but the raw data that was being fed into i
t was corruptedand impossible to process with any degree of accuracy.

  Water was dripping from fractured pipes in the ceiling and loose masonry periodically broke free from where it had been holding on for dear life. The once sterile, but functional grey walls and white ceiling had been pocked and pounded—a millennium’s worth of decay inflicted in a fraction of a violent second. Each piece of plaster that hit the ground induced a nervous reaction in Jack. Each sound could be the last sound that he heard before a bullet tore through his brain. At one side of the lot two exposed electrical wires were arcing. They generated an increasing hum before discharging in a brilliant flash of blue and white light. It astounded Jack that the power to the building had not been cut off by this stage. Jack had had a healthy respect for electricity ever since he was a young child and he had watched a public information film in school about the dangers of playing close to power supplies, or electrical sub-stations. In one part of the film a boy was flying a kite too close to power lines, with disastrous results. In another scene a Frisbee got stuck in a sub-station and a child went in to fetch it. The film didn’t show the child dying but the sound effects left them with no doubt as to his fate.

  Jack slowly ushered Robert over towards his car. Damn, he thought, as he looked into the vehicle. Barry had gone. Somehow he had been expecting as much. Yet for some odd reason he wasn’t entirely angry about Barry’s escape. Perhaps this was because if Barry was taken into custody and then released by Jack’s own government, then what Barry had told him earlier would be true; or it would certainly have greater legitimacy. At that moment Jack simply couldn’t take that chance. If what Barry had told him was true then where would he turn next? If the very people who he had trusted with his life for all those years turned out to be his worst enemy then his life as a spy, and possibly his life full stop, would be at an end. Even Jack with all of his skills would find it almost impossible to completely disappear, and he had tracked down many enemies of the UK to remote places where they thought they would be safe. A determined, well-funded organisation such as theirs would always get their man.

  With Barry out of sight and out of mind Jack could content him

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  self with the thought that Barry was, as usual, full of shit. That Barry was now somewhere else meant that he was, for the time being at least, no longer Jack’s concern. He had enough on his plate at that moment dealing with Robert and his men. During his career he had observed that nothing was ever quite as it seemed, and that when things started to go wrong during a mission they rarely went wrong in isolation. Someone, or something would surely move in quickly to fill the hole left by Barry. At least he wasn’t being betrayed by his own side.

  As jack was easing himself into that warm delusion the real world suddenly came back into focus with alarming speed and violence. The back window of the car exploded as a shot rang out. The sharp sound from the weapon as it discharged echoed around the walls of the parking lot, masking where it had originated. Jack pulled Robert to the ground as both men took shelter at the side of the car. Jack sighed. He had had enough of guns for one day. If he kept his head down help would soon arrive and then this whole mess would be someone else’s problem. However, waiting was not his style and whoever was firing at him probably knew, or at least suspected, that help, if only in the form of the South African police service, would soon arrive. An expression of worry spread across Robert’s face as he witnessed manic rage take control of Jack—first his eyes, then his entire face, then his body. As Jack got to his feet he struck Robert on the side of the head with his gun. Robert fell limply to the ground. Jack pointed the gun straight in front of him and he began to walk forwards, in a slow and deliberate fashion. The shooter would be expecting Jack to duck and dive. That’s what his training would have taught him—that very act of anticipation would be Jack’s advantage as there was nothing to anticipate— though it would be a very short lived advantage as the shooter quickly adapted. More glass exploded from Jack’s car and it showered his body as he walked past. With each shot taken by his attacker Jack got a better sense of where the uninvited guest was shooting from. With greater focus and clarity Jack was able to tune out the distracting echoes from the walls of the parking lot. Both men were only one unlucky shot away from death. Jack prepared to fire one last time as his finger began to squeeze the trigger of his weapon. A lump gathered in his throat—if the target found by his bullet was Barry, then Jack would feel a little let down. Barry was an emotionless murderer but the events of the

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  day had shown some signs of humanity in him. If he was now trying to kill Jack then those signs of humanity were nothing more than another diversion, another lie. Jack often wondered what men like Barry would do if they did get everything their own way—if there were no more battles to fight, or wars to win? Would they be happy to settle back into life as a normal member of society or would they always be on the lookout for new enemies to fight and new lies to tell?

  If he had been lying then that lie, as strange as it appeared, would have felt like a personal betrayal to Jack. The gun kicked back hard in Jack’s hand as the bullet exited the chamber with deadly velocity and accuracy. A lifetime of silence followed with the peace eventually being shattered as a man’s lifeless body spilled out from where he had been taking cover behind a car to fire at Jack and Robert. Jack waited for almost a minute before continuing towards the dead man.

  Jack circled the man with his gun solidly aimed at his bleeding head lest his dying act be nothing more than that. The man had come to rest on his side. Jack kicked him onto his back before quickly taking a step back. One precisely aimed shot entered the man’s chest and tore through the man’s heart. If he was feigning death then he could now relax—the act had just been made a lot easier. Jack tucked his weapon into the back of his trousers and he knelt down beside the man. A quick search of the man’s pockets turned up a hotel swipe card and a wallet. The wallet contained a SA driver’s licence and more money in notes than was sensible in such a crime-ridden city. The man’s brown eyes, black hair and pale skin gave him away. With those eyes and that hair colour in a sun-kissed country like SA, he should have been sporting a heavy tan. The pale colour of his flesh told Jack that this man spent most of his time in a much colder climate. Northern Europe, or Russia. With the sudden strategic importance of the country in the last few years, there were many countries in Europe who wanted in on the South African action, and Robert and men like him were standing in the way of that plan. Robert had no sense of business honour and he would happily go back on a deal once struck if a better deal walked in through his door a few minutes later. This was not how countries in the West were used to doing business and many of them wanted to send a very clear message to the new regime that it would not be wise to cross them with such shoddy business tactics. It wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that a country in Europe would send a hit man to take Robert out.

  And then there were the Russians. It always came back to the damn Russians. The Irish may have occupied a significant chunk of his working life, but at least he knew where he stood with them. The Irish terrorists had a very clear mission and for the most part there were some ethical lines that they would not cross—at least not without alienating a significant proportion of their support base. The Russians were still a complete mystery to him, and they had no problem crossing ethical lines if and when needed. Blowing up a car full of children on their way to school just to get at the driver of the car was not unheard of. There was even one report that came back to London which told of how they rounded up twenty anti-communist journalists and crucified them outside Moscow as a lesson to the rest of their profession. How much of such stories was true and how much was meant as a scary bedtime tale would never be known, but Jack had witnessed enough Russian led horror with his own eyes to believe that anything was possible. Three Russian soldiers fighting in the Afgan war wanted to defect. Two were captured while the other soldier made it into the mountains. He wa
tched as the KGB ordered the men stripped and tied to the tracks of a tank. The tank then slowly rolled over the men while their ordeal was filmed. That film was sold to the Russian people as evidence of what the Afghan fighters did to captured Russian troops. The escaped solider was captured by the Afghans but before they executed him he was spotted by a CIA agent. He was allowed to escape to the US and he shared what he had witnessed with the Americans. It didn’t do any good as the Russian government was never going to admit to such an horrific crime. executed as deserters anyway, so resources to use their deaths in such a gruesome fashion. When Jack had read the report from the Americans he completely re-evaluated all of the dealings that he had had with the Russians over the decades. He wondered just how many times he had come close to being used by them in some deadly publicity stunt.

  To even try to divine why they should want to kill Robert or himself, Jack knew would be a pointless exercise—not least because one part of the Russian systemwas completely at odds with the other main The soldiers would have been it seemed like a logical use of part. One part of that system may have wanted to kill him for one reason, and the other part would want him dead for an entirely different reason. That they both wanted the same thing was neither here nor there—a state within a state, and each of those states was divided

  into all manner of groups all working to their own agenda. The end of the communist system transformed one enemy into hundreds of enemies and the headaches this caused for Jack and his fellow spies were too large to contemplate fully; certainly not without inducing a mind-bending headache. What was very clear and very surprising was just how quickly and skilfully all sides and Russia had taken to the capitalist way of life. Russia became the fastest growing economy in the world and it wasn’t just because they were excellent businessmen. The Russians loved to play their games. It was like human chess with real human lives falling when the pieces were lost. That was why the Americans had such a hard time trying to fight them during the Cold War. Americans liked to kick down doors and spray all around them with bullets, whereas the Russians preferred a poisoned dart to the neck, or an apparent suicide in a seedy hotel room. Even after a lifetime playing both sides at their own game, Jack still wasn’t certain which style of gamesmanship he preferred. As for the Irish... The Irish liked to watch. They liked to follow their targets for months, or years. They liked to be close-by whenever a bomb went off, or to get involved in the fallout from an atrocity. Whenever there was Irish violence there was always a violent Irishman close-by, watching his handiwork or waiting for another opportunity to strike again. British intelligence said it was opportunistic and depraved behaviour but Jack viewed it a little differently. With the exception of a very few hardliners Jack did not meet a single IRA volunteer for whom killing came easy. Standing in the blood and guts and gore of their own explosion was in some ways courageous. In a strange kind of way it was almost as if they were taking responsibility for their actions, even if they then went on to carry out another atrocity a short time later. America liked to drop bombs and watch from a distance as entire city blocks were levelled. The power of anautomatic weapon threw their victims to one side before they moved on to the next room to repeat their actions. It was impersonal and cowardly.