Thunder

by Anthony Bellaleigh

  At the moment, Shaz is midway through demonstrating her own butchery prowess on a couple of small, hapless, chicken carcasses. Her deft, yet violent, incisions betray the frustrations that I know are festering inside her. She’s had it rough since the verdict, and been subjected to endless detailed cross-examination and scrutiny. In a particularly insidious piece of media gamesmanship, the defence team have managed to spin the press stories so that she appears to be responsible for their client’s freedom. They very cleverly ran a whole sequence of stories which clearly insinuated that they, the judge, and the poor innocent jury had been left with no legitimate options for prosecution after her irresponsible actions.

  I just told her that she should have hit him harder.

  Manjeethra’s kitchen extends across the whole width of the rear of her house. I sit at her dining table, over in the corner, and flick through today’s newspaper while she preps. Though it’s not a small house, this particular room seems disproportionately large to me. I know that she has a man in her life, someone she’s been with for quite a while, but I’ve never met him and he doesn’t live here. This is her house, and one of her main reasons for choosing it was this huge culinary area – cooking is a passion of hers.

  So, like today, on her random days off, she’s taken to trying out new experimental cuisine on me. I’ve become the modern day version of a medieval food-taster for Mr. Mystery-man, whoever he is. Not that I care: I’ve only ever been able to do the basics, and Shaz’s so-called-experiments are therefore much better than anything I’d ever put together for myself.

  “I still think you should do more cooking,” she mutters as her blade slices neatly into the carcass in front of her. “You’d find it therapeutic.”

  “Too busy,” I grunt. Conversation remains difficult. The doctors say it will probably not get much better. They also think I should be cutting back on the steroids, but I’m still getting too many other peripheral benefits from them – just this morning I caught sight of my new physique in my bathroom mirror. I can hardly recognise myself.

  “Doing what?” she fires back, without taking her eyes off her vivisection.

  “Well, apart from training and archery, I’ve been practicing some of those unarmed combat techniques you’ve been showing me, and researching our little friend.”

  “Researching?”

  I turn a page of the newspaper. “Stalking’s possibly a better description.”

  This grabs her attention, and she spins round to face me. “You’ve not approached him, have you?” she asks, agitated.

  I laugh and shake my head, “Course not. I keep well clear.”

  “Hmmm,” she says and turns away. “I’ll show you some more stuff later. Like, how to track a target without getting spotted. If you want to do something like that, then it’s really important that he doesn’t get wind that you’re tailing him. They’ll bring nuisance charges against you, or a restraining order, or worse, knowing them thieving bastards, they’ll sue you for something.” The slam of carbon steel into her chopping board is, I sense, a fraction more violent than absolutely necessary to take the spindly little chicken leg off. “I wouldn’t put it past them to try to strip you of the insurance money. Or your home.”

  Now she’s got my attention. “Okay,” I rumble, feeling my anger rising. I will not permit any more violation of my battered existence. Some more of her coaching would be useful – not least, because I’m hatching a plan to put some of it to good use...

  I decide it’s best to change the subject. “What’s the board for?” I ask.

  Not far away from me, hanging from a string by the kitchen door, is an old wooden chopping board. I’ve seen it several times but, as a wall ornament, it’s not in keeping with Manjeethra’s generally very tasteful decor: it’s basically an old battered bit of wood with various chunks taken out of it.

  “Therapy,” she says.

  I don’t understand her, “What?”

  “I keep trying to tell you cookery is therapeutic, but you don’t believe me.” She trims the last piece off the fully dissected carcass, stands, and with one smooth movement and a flick of her wrist, sends the carving knife tumbling through the air.

  I watch, fascinated, as it glints past my eyes, barely inches from my face, and buries itself into the centre of the clattering wooden target. “Nice,” I grunt.

  “No,” she says. “This is nice.”

  The second blade, snatched in an instant from the rack, slams into the board barely a millimetre from the first. A tiny splinter of wood from the gap between the quivering blades springs across and onto the newspaper in front of me.

  “Show me,” I say.

  ~~~~~

  Skala Kallonis, Lesvos, Greece

  He watched as a fishing boat chugged slowly across the huge lagoon toward him. It was a simple family boat – royal blue, with yellow edgings, hand painted – and was being piloted by one of only a few villagers venturing out in this lull in the storms.

  A heavy awning flapped over the boat’s open deck like a loosely pegged tent. Stretched, as it was, over a simple metal frame, this tarpaulin afforded some scant protection from the cold and spray, but Vittalle doubted that the fisherman would venture beyond the enclosed gulf’s mouth today.

  It had been unusually cold this winter. There had even been an inch or so of snow, a few days ago. It was all melted now, but Jack still needed to light a fire every evening to keep his little villa warm.

  Jack looked out across the five kilometres of grey, washboard rippled water toward the distant, mist-shrouded shoreline. Forest covered mountains rose from this hazy horizon toward half blue, half cloud, skies as if they were hovering, suspended in midair. Perched here on his personal sofa – an old abandoned tractor tyre, that he’d manhandled down to his secluded little beach, years ago – and wrapped, as he was, in several layers of faded cotton tee-shirts and a couple of his favourite chunky-knit sweaters, he felt cosy enough.

  He wouldn’t want to be on that boat though.

  It had been weeks and, as much as it was pleasant to spend time here, he was bored. The excitement of Poland, then the distractions of his journey overland to Madrid to collect his equipment, and then onward across southern Europe to here, had soon faded away to nothing. Now there was too much time to think. Too much time to remember.

  This morning had been particularly bad.

  He’d wandered down here to try to distract himself, but the tiny village of Magdullah, straddling Highway A74 as it climbed into the mountains north of Kandahar, with its sparse line of tumbledown dwellings, continued to wash around his mind. He could see the dusty roadside erupting into hundreds of tiny fountains of angry spray, as lines of heavy calibre machine gun fire splattered down from multiple concealed fire points. He could see the screaming villagers, barking dogs, livestock, and children running in all directions. Could see them falling, as innocent as his squad, amongst the hail of metal.

  And he can see the improvised explosive devices going off...

  Despite being called to the village to help reconnect a damaged water supply, they’d actually been herded, like sheep, into a carefully calculated killing zone.

  It had been an organised and sophisticated humanitarian fiction for inhumane annihilation.

  Flames and metal spewed from all sides.

  He watched as Pete called in air support, and then collapsed, dead, with his head exploding sideways under a horizontal storm of white hot shrapnel.

  He watched the red brown soil sliding under his elbows, as he crawled along the roadside ditch, and listened as he screamed for mercy to God, to Jesus, and even to his unknown mum, while his only real family were torn to shreds around him.

  He sat there, miraculously unscathed in the sudden silence, with Mike cradled in his arms, trying to staunch the hot blood which was pumping vigorously from his best-friend’s many puncture wounds, promising to tell a young wife that his comrade’s final words had been of his love for her, with angry tears pouring down
his cheeks, as his closest and last remaining brother slipped away from him.

  He sat there in some godforsaken distant land, swearing to the heavens that he would avenge them all, and watched as his friend drifted into unconsciousness, then passed away.

  The boat chugged close as it continued onwards, and its lonely Captain raised a friendly hand in salute as he passed. Jack forced himself to lift his heavy arm, away from the ghost cradled in his lap, and returned the gesture.

  Then roughly he swiped at the dampness round his eyes, and decided he would take his battered old motorbike for a ride into town later.

  He needed company.

  ~~~~~

  Barfold

  It’s taken a long time and a remarkable number of failures to get to this point.

  A battered pig’s haunch dangles lifelessly from the wooden A-Frame I’ve built at one end of the garden. I stand as far away as I can – by the back of the house – and carefully notch the latest of my homespun creations into Vengeance.

  I’ve had to go with a steel shaft to counter balance this latest mechanical arrowhead. If I’ve finally got it right then four, initially backward facing, sprung metal barbs will snap out forwards on impact, like a star, from the sides of the tip. It could be a nasty piece of kit: streamlined enough to fly and, if it penetrates flesh, the only way to get it out will be to cut it out. Given that the fully barbs-extended radius is almost two centimetres, that would be a big hole.

  I’m not entirely sure what it will do though. I know that the arrow will expend some of its kinetic energy to release the barb trigger and, up to now, I’ve had the internal trigger spring set so stiff that the mechanism hasn’t tripped, and the arrow has ended up behaving more like a blunt medieval broad-head which, because of the still-latched barbs, hasn’t stuck in very far at all. Worse, afterwards, it’s also been easy to pull out. If this attempt doesn’t work then, despite all the effort, I might abandon this experiment – it’s starting to look like a standard carbon fibre shaft, with a sawtooth-sharpened three or four flange traditional arrowhead, is about as destructive as the two of us can get.

  With a familiar creak of pent up energy, Vengeance bends its tips toward me. Gently... gently... I hold my breath and ease the target into my sights. Nice... Now. My fingers move in a smooth fluid movement, so that the taut cord can accelerate cleanly from static, and for a microsecond I feel the backdraft from the high-modulus polyethylene filament as it sighs over my toughened fingertips.

  The heavy arrow makes a fizzing noise as the metal shaft oscillates away into the air, propelled by all of Vengeance’s colossal 313fps of kinetic energy, and it hurtles forward toward the innocent carcass.

  I’m transfixed and I watch it as it races away, arriving at the meaty target with an almighty crash.

  The whole A-Frame is picked up bodily by the suddenly horizontal hunk of ham, and I instinctively jump backwards as the whole contraption is lifted clean off the ground, and thrown back violently, into the fence a further four metres behind it.

  I wasn’t expecting that!

  It would seem that the extending barbs have translated the arrow’s forward momentum directly into the target. Hurling it backwards. Lifting the meat, and then the heavy frame!

  My distant fence panel is now sporting a big hole full of amateur carpentry and a pig’s leg.

  Goodness only knows what kind of targets this arrow will be useful for!

  I dance around like some delighted lunatic, clutching at my aching midriff, laughing my head off.

  Perfect.

  ~~~~~

  Constanta, Romania

  Two men huddled, sheltered below the great arched window which entirely dominated one side of the decadent, white stone, art nouveau Cazinoul building. The Black Sea stretched away to the east of the Romanian port of Constanta, with its waters looking very like its name as it raged under icy gale force winds. Sea spray lashed out horizontally on either side of the building, and white-topped waves fizzed away southwards along the sea wall as if they were hurrying toward the far distant Turkish city of Istanbul. During the hot summer months, tourists and courting couples would wander along the sea front and pose here for happy pictures in front of the building’s impressive façade, but today no-one was going to brave the bitter northeasterly winds blasting down from the Russian Steppes.

  “They’re not coming,” Azat Sikand muttered in Turkmen from under his damp woollen hat. His sunken eyes, narrow face and pointed nose were angled downward toward his shorter colleague.

  Murat Nagpal dragged his unseeing gaze away from the huge port complex which sprawled in front of them, and checked his watch. It was nearly fifteen minutes past eleven. Azat was right. “You have no stamina,” he said. “If you could only grow some hair, on that bald ball of solid bone that you call a head, you would be better off. The tribesmen will laugh at you, when we get back home and into the mountains.”

  Sikand growled angrily, “There are no mountains on our plains and, if they laugh, I will cut their balls off. It’s well past time. If they were coming today, they’d be here by now.”

  “I know,” Nagpal sighed. “This weather reminds me of when we were stuck in Qal-eh Wust, during service.”

  “Yeah. It’s miserable. Like most places I end up, with you. And don’t remind me of that waste of life.”

  The shorter, stocky, olive-skinned man pulled pointlessly at the already vertical collars of his greatcoat. “We needed the training. It’s done us good. We needed to know how to do this. We are the sacred champions of our people. The only ones who had the courage and commitment to do something. We will be remembered forever. We will be heroes.”

  “It was a high price to pay. Five years of pretence: serving Afghan wool-head commanders, and kowtowing to infidels.”

  “We bow to no-one, Azat. No-one. We were the smart ones. We chose to mislead the Afghans and NATO. We took their training, used their contacts, learned their lessons and secretly collected our armoury. We gained all of these things and more in those godforsaken mountains. We could not have struck our blow in the infidel capital without such learnings. We have spent much of their blood. They know of us now.” Murat Nagpal looked up into the smouldering face of his lifelong friend. Sikand had been a blunt instrument since they had been young children: tall, strong and easy to manipulate. He had proved himself time and again to be highly effective muscle. A valuable asset which supported his ambitious and imaginative mind.

  “How long do we wait?” Sikand asked miserably.

  “We can return to the apartment for today.” Nagpal made to walk away.

  “I meant, how many weeks?”

  Nagpal shrugged, “We will wait as long as necessary. There is no indication in the internet newsrooms that any harm has befallen the brothers. Remember: Sergei is smart. He will follow a long and winding path and meet us here. Of that I am certain. Better that he does that, than he inadvertently leads our enemies to us. We will benefit from being together and, more important, we do not want either of them falling into our enemies’ hands. They know too many of our secrets.”

  “And the younger one? I always said he wasn’t ready.”

  “I agree. Jeyhun is a worry.” Nagpal watched the cold waves smashing against the sea defences. “The machine is gone, so we have to assume he’s been compromised. He will have heard my message and known we were under threat, so let’s hope he’s not been captured. I suspect he hasn’t been. The British press are berating their security forces and government for letting us get away. If there was any hint that one of us had been captured, then it would be being paraded for the world to see. We should, however, make sure that he knows to make his way here. We need to leave him a message on his mobile. The ‘Icarus’ codeword. Otherwise, he might stay where he is or, worse, head for the wrong rendezvous point.”

  “Let’s do it then.” Sikand made to walk off. “From somewhere warm.”

  Nagpal stayed static, “You shall go: to Serbia.”

  “What?�
��

  “Yes, we’ll get you a rental car. It’ll be cosy enough for you, and your little brown numbskull, since you can’t tolerate the cold like a real man.” The answering expression on Azat’s face was more chilling than the freezing squall which blew behind his tense silhouette. “You can drive there, past Bucharest.”

  “That will take days!”

  “We’re not doing anything else, soldier.” Murat stepped close to him. “We cannot risk calling the cell from here. Not even from inside this country, if we can avoid it. You can drive into Serbia, find a pay-phone and call the youth. If he answers or not, it makes no difference. Say the codeword...”

  “Icarus.”

  “Yes, Icarus. Then hang up. No conversation. Then come back here. Hopefully, Sergei will be here by then. I will stay, to continue to maintain the daily visits to this meeting point.”

  “What if they both arrive while I’m away?”

  Murat smiled, “Then you won’t have to rejoin me here, every day, to assist in my vigil until they do.”

  “And the borders?”

  “The fictional identities have caused us no complications up to now. If you hit a problem at the crossing, then leave the message from the border itself and return. Draw no attention to yourself.” Murat heaved himself upright from where he’d been leaning against the wall. “I’ll use the time you’re away to procure some fresh papers. There are some excellent forgers in this city, and we have more than enough cash thanks to the generosity of all of our foolish, worldwide, internet friends. The sob-story swindle that Omid dreamed up, and posted on their ridiculous social networking sites while we were back in England was an act of genius, wasn’t it? Who would have believed that so many stupid people would give blindly to a cause they know nothing about?”

  Azat Sikand’s taut smile was, to those who didn’t know him, only moderately less hostile than his snarl, but Murat was pleased to see it reappear on his comrade’s face. “That was the one useful thing that filthy Javed did for us,” he said.