by Chris Ryan
‘And then?’
‘We hatched a plan.’
‘What kind of a plan?’
‘We weren’t going to kill you. That would go against the code of ethics for operators.’
‘Spare me the fucking sermon. What was the plan?’
‘Gardner was told to slot you once you had taken care of Laxman. But we had a better idea.’ Fourie looked out of the window. A forlorn face, gazing out on a forlorn landscape. ‘We’d stop you killing Laxman and take the ID off his hands.’
Bald swallowed hard. The whisky was sticky and harsh in his throat.
‘And do what with it?’
Fourie looked at Bald in the rear-view mirror. ‘Take a wild guess.’
Bald ran a hand over his scalp. His few strands of hair were slicked with sweat and grease, and his fingers were covered in a greasy film of gunpowder. He was hanging out of his arsehole here, and now he felt a thumping in his temples again. Like hammers tapping against the sides of his head.
‘Think about it, lad,’ Fourie said, sitting up, suddenly animated, suddenly excited, suddenly talking super-fast. ‘My contacts are willing to pay fucking big money for this technology. What’s the alternative? You kill Laxman and give that cunt Cave the satisfaction of another promotion in Whitehall? They’ll only send some other cunt to kill you next. Who knows, maybe he’s got others on the case already.’
Bald watched the silhouettes hurrying towards the horizon. He stayed quiet for several seconds. Then he said, ‘How much?’
Gardner and Fourie swapped a glance. Fourie nodded.
‘Forty million,’ said Gardner.
Fourie leaned forward, pushed his head between the front two seats.
‘We’ll cut you in, lad. You’ll get a good share. Think about it. Twenty for me, because it’s my connect. Ten for you. Ten for Joe. Can’t say fairer than that. Look, I don’t know how much Cave is paying you for this job. But I’ll bet that what I’m offering blows it out of the water.’
Ten million. Double my fucking money, Bald was thinking.
‘Am I right?’ Fourie said.
But Bald was also warming to the idea of pulling a fast one on Cave. The Firm had, after all, plotted behind his back to slot him the moment he stiffed Laxman. In the world of John Bald, forgiveness ranked up there with recycling and Glee at the top of the list of pointless crap. He believed that if your enemy took an eye, you had a duty to rip both his eyes out and piss in the fucking eyeholes. He allowed a pleasing image to enter his thoughts. Cave, somewhere further down the line, once he’d lost his job due to the Laxman fuck-up, once his girlfriend had left him and his house had been repossessed. The cunt sitting behind the wheel of his car on the hard shoulder of an anonymous stretch of the M25. Weeping like a fucking kid and pressing rounds into a snub-nosed revolver.
Bald parked the image and said, ‘Who’s the buyer?’
‘A close contact of mine.’
‘Not a government?’
‘No.’
‘Forty mil is a lot of money for one man.’
‘He’s good for it. This guy is richer than Abramovich.’
‘But you won’t tell me his name.’
‘Look,’ said Fourie. ‘I just need to know, are you fucking in, or what?’
Bald thought about it for a moment longer. He didn’t like the idea of an anonymous buyer. But he liked the idea of ten million more. So he nodded at Fourie and nodded at Gardner. And they both nodded back.
‘Fuck it. I’m in.’
Easy sighs all round. The atmosphere in the Impala started to unwind. Gardner even managed an awkward smile.
‘Good man,’ Fourie said. ‘I knew you’d see the light, John.’
But Bald didn’t reply. He was canvassing the opium den again. It was a bland structure in a sea of scrubland. He noticed several other features within the unfinished perimeter. There was a stack of car tyres fifteen metres to the west of the building and the shell of a pickup deposited some twenty metres to the rear. The thought had suddenly struck Bald: what’s wrong with this picture?
He downed another mouthful of the single malt and shook off the thought. Eyed Fourie in the rear-view mirror and said, ‘So now what?’
‘You untie me. We wait. My contact said Laxman was meeting someone here. Someone high-level. A terrorist.’ Fourie craned his neck at the building, to get a better look. ‘He finishes up here, we go in, kill everyone and take the ID. Then we get the fuck out of here and head to Sirte.’
‘What’s in Sirte?’
‘My contact. Now, for fuck’s sake untie me, John.’
Bald let his silence answer for him. He went back to OP-ing the building. There was a dull thought at the back of his head, like a flint trying to strike against steel, wondering why the folk in the mosque had been so eager to bug out. But the whisky and the prospect of ten million quid drowned it out, and Bald settled into a routine of running his eyes around the opium den, then doing the same to the mosque, then the surrounding land.
He waited.
Gardner waited.
Fourie waited.
They didn’t have to wait long.
Four minutes later the heavy door was flung open and Laxman stepped out into the parched, bleached desert. He squinted and looked at the Chinese woman at his side. They started to walk towards the Cherokee.
Fourie said, ‘There he is. Untie me.’
‘Me too,’ said Gardner.
‘How about neither of you?’ said Bald. ‘Just because I’m in on your plan doesn’t mean I trust you cunt-lickers a short inch. No, you two wait here and read each other bedtime stories. I’ll take care of business.’
Bald flipped open the door and scrambled out of the Impala. Laxman had reached the Cherokee and was pacing around the vehicle to the rear, now with his back to Bald. Bald was running on muscle memory as he walked towards the Indian. His body recalled the thousands of hours of training in Hereford and the variables from the hundreds of missions he’d carried out. The kill would be quick, he knew. It had to be. He’d slot Laxman and sweep into the den, clearing the rooms. Slotting any X-rays he encountered. Then take the ID package. The building wasn’t big, two storeys, perhaps twenty metres square. If he was surgical, the whole operation could be over in two or three minutes.
Bald’s stride was fast, his breathing controlled, his nerves steady. He was now fifteen metres away from Laxman. Laxman was flipping open the driver’s door and had his back to Bald. But the woman had stopped beside the passenger door and was whirling round.
Facing Bald.
Ten pissy metres. Too late to abort. Bald raised the Makarov level with Laxman. Sighted the big target of his back. It didn’t matter if the first shot didn’t kill him. As long as it put him down, then the double-tap to his head would be one hundred per cent guaranteed to send him over to the dark side. Now Bald was six metres from Laxman and the woman. Now Laxman noticed that the woman was looking towards Bald. He followed her eyes, and his own settled on the Scot. Laxman looked vaguely surprised, like he had suddenly recalled where he left his car keys. It was the look Bald had seen in dozens of fuckers, right before he gave them the good news.
‘Hands in the fucking air,’ he said.
Laxman pulled the woman close to him. ‘Please.’ His voice was cracking like popcorn, and the thought entered Bald’s head that people always offered such shitty excuses for sparing their lives.
Bald stopped two metres from Laxman. The Indian was numb, stared dumbly at the Makarov. The woman seemed perfectly calm. She was looking at Bald, not the Makarov. No surprise or shock on her face. As if she’d been expecting this.
Bald blanked her. ‘Where is it? Give me the ID.’
Laxman didn’t seem to hear. ‘You have to help me,’ he said. ‘They’re coming.’
Bald was about to ask, who? But he didn’t need to. The earth rumbled at his six o’clock and he got the answer to his question. He knew what that sound advertised, even before he half-turned and fixed his eyes on the sam
e spot that Laxman was hypnotized by. A kilometre back. Pickup trucks. The hum of four turbo-diesel engines swelled to a rock-crunching, soil-churning swarm. He counted three vehicles. All looked like they had been through the wars. The lead pickup was a Toyota Land Cruiser. The vehicle to the rear and left was a Hilux, painted red, green and black.
Laxman said, ‘They are rebels.’
‘Thank fuck for that,’ said Bald.
‘No.’ The panic was rising in Laxman’s voice. ‘They’re going to kill all of us!’
forty-two
1516 hours.
Bald shoved Laxman and the woman towards the Impala.
‘Fucking hurry,’ he shouted at them.
Twenty metres back to the vehicle. He walked in brisk, urgent strides. The Land Cruiser and two pickups to its immediate six o’clock were heading down the road as fast as their knackered engines would allow. Not very fast.
Bald reached the Impala ahead of Laxman and the woman. He yanked open the rear passenger seat. Fourie shot him a stink-look and said, ‘What do you think you’re doing, John?’
‘Getting us out of here before the rebels tear us a fucking new one.’
‘The dust!’
Bald spun around and pointed to Laxman.
‘Where is it?’
Laxman swapped glances with the woman, then looked beyond her at the building.
‘It’s in there. I will give it to you. I swear. But you have to protect me from them,’ he said, pointing with his eyeballs to the pickups. The convoy was now two hundred and fifty metres distant. They had slowed to navigate around a corpse lying face down in the middle of the road. ‘They have orders to shoot me on sight.’
‘In and out.’ Bald said. ‘You get what we want and that’s it.’
Then he opened the front passenger door, seized Gardner’s T-shirt and dragged him out and onto the dirt. He loosened the knot in the cord enough for Gardner to wriggle his hands free and soothe his wrists.
The convoy was now sixty metres away. Six seconds until they reached Bald. Seven at most.
Bald said, ‘Where’s your flag?’
Gardner dug folded a Stars and Stripes flag from somewhere out of the Impala glove box. Some British PMCs carried American flags because a lot of Yank soldiers didn’t recognize the Union Jack. Gardner unfolded the flag in a hurry and began waving it at the convoy. But the convoy didn’t stop. It kept rumbling towards them.
Gardner ditched the flag and said, ‘Fuck this, I need a gun.’
Bald chucked him Fourie’s Sig Sauer P228 from the waistband of his jeans. He fished the spare mag out of his jeans pocket and chucked him that too. The weapon was equipped with a SIGLITE night sight, and was chambered for the 9x19mm Parabellum instead of the more powerful .40 S&W. But the pay-off was more rounds to a clip. The chrome-plated clips Fourie had been packing carried twenty rounds. That gave Gardner a total of forty rounds to play with, and evened up the odds a little.
Fourie said, ‘What about me?’
Bald said, ‘What about you?’
‘Fucking prick. You have to let me go too.’
‘Who made that rule?’
‘I can help.’ The anger was rising in Fourie’s voice.
‘I don’t trust you,’ said Bald.
‘That’s bullshit.’
‘It is what it is.’
‘What if they fucking jump me, John? How am I supposed to defend myself?’
‘Use the power of prayer.’
At forty metres the Land Cruiser’s engine toned down to a mechanical buzz. At thirty metres it pulled up at the left-hand side of the road. The two pickups further back were veiled by the dirt clouds the Land Cruiser had been snorting from its rear tyres, but they were back there somewhere, Bald knew. Figures began debussing from the lead vehicle. Three of them. All clutching AK-47s. Bald spotted a .50-cal unit mounted on the cargo bed. Two more rebels manning it.
Bald said, ‘Joe, you go with Laxman. Nab the fucking dust. The bitch stays with me.’
Gardner headed for the opium den, Laxman alongside him. Bald watched them for a moment longer, sixteen metres to the building, now thirteen, now ten. Then he lowered himself into a squat and reached into the front of the Impala and retrieved his own Type 56, from the dash. The assault rifle was already fully loaded. Kill-time was merely a selector-switch and a trigger-pull away. Bald hadn’t used a Type 56 before, but he had plenty of experience with the AK-47, and they were basically the fucking same.
The three guys at the Land Cruiser formed a line. They adopted kneeling fire stances, each man sure that there was five metres between him and the next guy. Not bad, Bald thought. Not geniuses, but these guys weren’t amateurs either. They flicked the selectors on their AKs, just like Bald did on the Type 56. Tucked the wooden stocks tight to their shoulders. Unlike Bald, who kept his weapon lowered, not wanting to panic one of these sand wankers into an accidental discharge. Nobody moved. No one fired. There was still a chance this could end without getting noisy. Bald ushered the woman around to the front of the Impala, where she would be best protected against incoming fire. Pushed her down to her knees, like she was sucking dick.
The two guys on the cargo bed of the Land Cruiser were standing at the operating end of the .50-cal, one gripping the handles, the other loading rounds into the feed tray. For a split second Bald thought they weren’t going to open fire.
Then they disappointed him.
The first rounds drilled past him. A tight grouping of three shots that pelleted the soil twelve inches from his feet. Bald reacted quickly. He dropped to one knee behind the driver’s door of the Impala and listened as two three-round bursts hammered through the bodywork and shredded the engine block. Metal clanged. Glass crinkled. A tyre offered a lung-cancered wheeze. The Chinese woman screamed. In the back seat Fourie’s head was buried in his lap. The rear window shattered, showering his hair. Bald lost count of the number of rounds being discharged.
Bald glanced over his shoulder. Gardner and Laxman had reached the opium den. The ground at their six o’clock coughed up burnt sand and hot brass as a volley of rounds slapped into it. Three rounds studded the Cherokee. Voices yelled in Arabic above the clattering gunfire. The guys in the other two pickups had finished gathering either side of the Land Cruiser, completely blocking off the road and the one exit from this clusterfuck. Bald peered out from the side of the door and quickly assessed the number of threats he was up against. He counted four guys debussing from the pickup to the left of the Land Cruiser. Another three on the right. Add that lot to the five guys at the Land Cruiser and he was facing down twelve rebels in total.
A dozen guys tooled up with AK-47s. Probably a few mortars and grenades in their arsenal too. Bald had his Type 56 and the Makarov. Gardner had the Sig, which was good for slotting targets up to a range of fifty metres but beyond that was about as effective as hurling insults.
Not good odds.
Not good at all.
On the Land Cruiser the two-man team had finished reloading the .50-cal. The guy on the left held the belt of .50 BMG cartridges at the feed tray. The guy on the right had his right hand on the trigger mechanism, his left hand propped against the rear of the weapon for support.
Another series of AK bursts shredded the air. Nine of them, in clusters of three, rap-rap-rap, spitting at and cleaving the ground around him, turning the Impala into a fucking homemade colander. Can’t run, Bald told himself. You don’t have the manpower or the firepower to perform any evasive action. Face it: you’re in the shit. The only thing you can do is keep them pinned down. Three more rounds whipped and zipped and fumed past Bald. One smacked into the side window and spider-webbed the glass four inches from his skull.
‘For fuck’s sake, lad, get me out of here,’ Fourie shouted.
‘Save your breath,’ said Bald.
‘Wait,’ said Fourie.
Bald waited.
‘I can cut you something extra,’ Fourie said. ‘A week ago I had some Libyan general literally begg
ing me to get him out of Dodge. I said I’d drive the prick to Niger.’
‘This isn’t the time for your fucking stories, Bill.’
‘Listen, you dopey cunt. The general paid me for safe passage. I’m talking forty kilos in gold bullion. You know how much forty k’s worth, John? One point three million pounds. But I didn’t drop the guy off. I told him to hide in the boot. Then I drove to the middle of the desert, emptied the gold and set the car on fire. Cunt cried his way to a fucking early grave.’ He laughed at death, did Fourie. Then he said, ‘I have the coordinates, John. Right here in my pocket. I can give them to you. More than a million quid. All yours. All I’m asking is for you to let me go.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ Bald said. Still ducking, he moved to behind the front wheel of the Impala, next to the woman. She was curled up on the ground. Bald pushed up to a three-quarters standing position so that his head, but not the rest of him, was above the vehicle. He aligned the iron sights with the two guys manning the .50-cal.
There was a truism people accepted readily about the AK-47, which was equally true for its Type 56 sister, and it was this: when it came to accuracy, its aim was about as good as a drunk guy taking a piss in a nightclub. It splashed all over the fucking place. But in Bald’s experience it wasn’t the gun that was wildly inaccurate, but people’s perceptions. With a typical grouping of AK shots, at a hundred metres there would be a maximum of four inches between the two shots farthest apart. Technically speaking, that was inaccurate. But four inches was less than the width of a human face. And if you could nail a guy’s face from a hundred metres, that made a weapon effective in Bald’s book.
He had the selector on the Type 56 switched to single-fire. Single-fire was more surgical. If you fired three shots on the hop, the second would be less accurate than the first, and the third less accurate than the second. And so on. Bald kept it stupid-simple and went for two quick but separate shots at the guys on the machine-gun.
Ca-rack.
Ca-rack.
His aim was true. The guy on the left jerked like he’d just been given the defibrillator treatment. Blood arced out of his pulverized eyeball. He turned to his mate, spraying blood into his face. His mate had just enough time to register his shock when the second round pierced the right side of his neck. A great place to hit someone, if you wanted to really fuck them up. There’s the big carotid artery to puncture there. The guy jerked and flailed and slumped across the barrel of the .50-cal. Torrents of blood gushed from his neck, slicking the barrel in a red grease. His hands spasmodically pawed at his face, slapped at his cheeks and clawed at his throat. Then he went all heavy and slack and died. Just another cunt who chose the wrong man to pick a fight with.