Chris Ryan Extreme: Hard Target: Mission One: Redeemer

by Chris Ryan

  Twenty minutes of scurrying through corkscrew alleys and rutted streets, and Gardner was so thirsty he could drink rat piss. Not a drop to drink since last night’s booze, his stomach cramped, stitch piercing his abs like a screwdriver. Shut out the pain.

  He glanced over his shoulder. The Messengers were no longer in sight, but their hooting and hollering carried over the rooftops.

  Falcon was fucking knackered. He’d sprinted out in front of Gardner when the gangsters started slugging rounds off at them, but the vertical streets and right-angle turns had taken the wind out of his sails. Now he was three or four metres behind him.

  ‘Which way takes us north?’ Gardner asked Falcon.

  ‘Keep going this way… the alley… it twists around,’ Falcon panted. His already slack pace was slowing Gardner down, and cutting the distance to the Messengers. Go on like this much further, Gardner told himself, and the gang will be on your arse.

  Best give them something to think about, he decided.

  As they reached the end of alley number five million, Gardner swung to the right. He leaned up against the corner and nabbed Falcon as he jogged past, pushing him behind cover.

  ‘Mate, soon as I start firing, get the fuck over the other side.’

  Falcon didn’t reply.

  ‘You OK, Rafa?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Just it’s—’ His voice trailed like dust. ‘Let’s do it.’

  ‘One—’ Gardner said.

  Gardner eased out from the corner, gripping the Browning in a double-handed stance, his right hand on the trigger, the prosthetic providing balance. His legs were shoulder-width apart to provide a stable firing platform. A Hi-Power box-mag, Gardner knew, held just thirteen rounds. The headless corpse hadn’t been carrying any spare.

  Thirteen precious rounds. Make every bullet count.

  The alley was two metres wide and ran in a direct line for seventy. Gardner saw three Messengers rush into view, the advance party. They were kitted out with AK-47s. Seventy metres, but the Browning’s maximum effective range was more like fifty.

  ‘Two—’

  The Messengers ran on. One of them unloaded a random two-round burst from the AK. He didn’t see where the shots impacted; all Gardner gave a solid shit about was that they missed. These twats were in pray-and-spray mode, not taking the time to properly adjust their aim. And that was fine by him.

  Sixty metres now.

  Just a little closer, and I’ll tell them what time of day it is.

  Fifty-five.

  With the 9mm rounds lacking the stopping power of a higher grade, full-metal-jacketed cartridge, Gardner would be relying on his shooting capabilities. Strike the guy in the right place, in the central region where his vital organs were contained, and he’d have a decent chance of dropping the fucker.

  Get it wrong and they’d be close enough to spray 7.62mm madness in his face. At fifty metres or less, even a four-year-old could maim Gardner.

  ‘Three! Fucking move!’

  His Browning was the standard cop-issue SFS (Safe-Fast-Shooting) model designed specifically for police forces who had about as much weapons training as a chef in the Senior Service. Gardner took aim at the nearest fucker. The guy was running like Usain Bolt on speed, and was now forty-five metres away from his position. Gardner pressed the safety down with his thumb, the hammer sprang back into the single-action position, and he discharged three rounds from the Browning.

  Tap-tap-tap.

  The motion was fluid and the bullets surgical.

  The first struck the kid in his left knee. Gardner had been aiming for the chest, but a knee shot was a good score. The round smashed the guy’s cruciate ligaments to shit, opening up a hole that could house a plum. Singed muscle splattered his ankle and sparkling white trainers. If he’d dreamed of being the next Ronaldinho, he was fucked now. His leg folded.

  The second shot embedded itself in his right shoulder. Impacted on the joint, his shoulder snapped loose, like a baguette broken in half. His arm bucked backwards with the force of the hit. Count the frazzled nerves and the chewed-up muscle ripped to shreds by the trajectory of the round, and he could forget about a career as Brazilian shot-put champion too.

  Watching the kid stumble, Gardner figured he must be high on crack and impervious to the trauma of his bullet wounds. He discharged round number three into his midriff. A puff of red and he finally collapsed, twelve metres from their position, AK-47 rattling against the concrete. His two mates, twenty metres behind, let off a volley of gunfire before darting into a home. Somewhere inside a woman screamed.

  Meanwhile Falcon had transitioned to the left corner of the alley and started putting down rounds with the Colt Commando. He fired in three-round bursts. The second bunch of Messengers tried to advance, saw their dead mate and changed their minds.

  Gardner kept his Browning trained on the dropped gangster. He risked a sprint forward, snatched the AK-47, the guy’s right leg twitching, and retreated to cover.

  ‘Right, we’ve bought ourselves some time,’ Gardner said. ‘Let’s fucking leg it while we’ve got the opportunity to lose them.’

  Falcon nodded vacantly.

  ‘Rafa, mate. Fucking now.’

  The rupert pointed to five brightly coloured kites soaring above the cardboard and tin roofs.

  ‘Early-warning system,’ Falcon said. ‘The outer cordon of the gang is sending a message to the leaders that BOPE’s on its way.’ He turned to Gardner. ‘The unit’s coming back.’

  He should be over the moon that his muckers are about to rock up, Gardner thought. So why does the hell does he sound about as excited as a bloke being dragged along to Ikea on a Saturday afternoon?

  ‘You want to head south and RV with your mates, go for it,’ Gardner said.

  ‘No, no,’ said Falcon, gazing north. ‘I’ll come with you. If John’s out there, I will help you find him.’

  He couldn’t quite place why, but that line didn’t sit right with Gardner.

  There was no time to argue. Three more figures appeared down the alley and Gardner and Falcon let them have it, two bursts sending the bastards scampering for cover.

  They bugged out.

  Gardner let Falcon lead the way. They skated down a couple of tight alleyways, keeping their eyes firmly locked on the ground. The concrete was studded with potholes the size of hubcaps, and plastic water pipes that snaked along the ground, leading up to blue storage units on the top of each housing block. It would be all too easy to fall and bust an ankle.

  They climbed five flights of uneven stairs with a sheer drop all the way to the bottom of the favela on one side. It was a hard slog. The old muscle memory was kicking in now, reminding him of the endurance levels he’d built up during his years in the Regiment.

  ‘Tell me,’ Gardner said, ‘what happened to Bald?’

  Falcon stopped midway up the stairs to catch his breath. ‘It’s always the same when we enter the favelas. An outer cordon of gang members set off fireworks and fly kites. That’s the signal for the inner cordon of snipers to take up positions, while a third team hides their drug stashes and money trains, unplugs any illegal satellite feeds, and so on. We roll into the favela in the caveirãos. Like the one you saw earlier.’

  They came past a road with piles of bricks stacked up outside each house. Spent cartridges around the brickwork told Gardner these were defensive positions. Whether for civilians or gang members, he wasn’t sure.

  ‘This time we made our approach and – no kites. No fireworks. This is strange, yes?’

  ‘Making you think you’ve caught them off guard,’ Gardner said. ‘Oldest trick in the book.’

  ‘Our mission was to snatch Roulette,’ Falcon continued, like he hadn’t heard Gardner. ‘The second-in-command of the Messengers of God. You know, the favela gangs, they kill people daily. OK, it’s part of life here. But Roulette, he was one sick fuck. The guy had his own little hit squad. They’d kill people, cut off their heads and sew a pig’s head to their n
eck. Or cut off their arms and legs, excavate the stomach and stick the limbs in there like a flower arrangement. I’ve seen stuff in my time, but these guys—’

  His words trailed like surf.

  ‘The streets were empty. We went deeper and deeper into the belly of Barbosa.’

  He snatched at his breath, then went on, ‘We arrived in the centre, and that’s when our trouble began. RPGs. Sniper fire. Nine- and ten-year-old boys and girls throwing Molotov cocktails at the Skulls. They’re big, you know, but you try being inside one when that happens. We went to fall back to safe ground, but they’d put up roadblocks everywhere.’

  Gardner recalled the cement posts, the old cars.

  ‘They were expecting trouble this time,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You said it yourself. The attack wasn’t the standard shit. Someone had told the Messengers they were on the way, ahead of their kite system, so they decided to change their tactics. It was an ambush, Rafa. That kind of thing takes time and planning. You can’t do it on the hoof.’

  Falcon was quiet for several seconds. ‘This is a war zone,’ he said. ‘The favelas are not slums. They are battlegrounds. A disaster such as this, it was bound to happen one day. All I care about is that two of my men are dead and the rest are missing. I just want to find whoever did this. And make them pay.’

  The stairwell coughed them up at the back of a series of homes with a spectrum of gang tags sprayed over the walls. Falcon manoeuvred down a short alley and rested at the lip, hands on his thighs. A rectangular street lay ahead, flanked by grey-brick homes stacked like Lego pieces one on top of the other.

  Gardner led the way across the street. He noticed a cream-coloured structure two hundred metres to the north, not far from the peak of the favela. Big caroba trees and khaki bushes shadowed the two-storey breeze-block building, which had whitewashed casement windows and a clay-tiled roof. Painted gates and a two-feet-tall metal fence bordered it.

  ‘The school,’ Falcon said, noticing where Gardner was looking.

  ‘No shit, there’s a school in the favela?’

  Sticking out his bottom lip, Falcon replied, ‘Government tries to integrate with the rest of the city. Schools, hospital, gyms. Even McDonald’s.’

  The building was pissing distance from the jungle.

  To Gardner’s south, Christ the Redeemer spread his soapstone arms and faced east across the Atlantic seaboard. Falcon sucked in greedy breaths beside him.

  ‘I think… we outran them,’ he said.

  Gardner didn’t reply. He was focusing on the distances. A hilly expanse of land half a mile long and a mile wide, divided the favela summit from the statue.

  ‘My Troop times forty north.’ John was in 14 Troop, the Mobility unit of D Squadron, 22 SAS. So, 560 metres north of Christ. ‘Your Troop times twenty west.’ Gardner had been in 11 Troop, D Squadron’s four-man boat team. Although they were in different troops, D Squadron had deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan and, in 2002, Sri Lanka, where they trained up the country’s elite security forces combating the Tamil Tigers.

  His Troop by twenty – that put Bald at 220 metres west. The spot where the two measurements collided was a rough sequence of ridges canopied under secondary jungle.

  ‘This is as far north as the favela goes,’ Falcon said. ‘There’s nowhere else to go.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong, mate.’

  ‘What? I don’t—’

  A clack-clack of gunfire erupted at their six.

  ‘The Messengers.’

  ‘How they fuck did they gain on us so quick?’ said Gardner.

  ‘Shortcuts. There’s dozens of ways to get around the favela. On the rooftops, under the ground—’ Falcon paused, trying to control his tremulous voice. ‘They’re going to be here very soon. There’s hundreds of kids in the gang. If they find me, they’ll skin me alive, they’ll—’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I get it. They don’t like visitors.’ Gardner flashed a devilish grin. ‘Come on, we’ve still got the run on them.’

  ‘But where to?’

  ‘The jungle.’

  They dashed across the street. Corrugated-iron sheets, a metre wide, ran diagonally along the square, connecting stacks of second- and third-storey buildings. An Isuzu pickup lay rusting thirty metres from the school gates.

  Halfway down the street, Gardner heard a crack, split down the middle with a dull thump.

  The inner cordon.

  Sniper.

  9

  1110 hours.

  Gardner took immediate action, diving behind the pickup for cover. He’d removed himself and Falcon from the line of fire but, now they were pinned down and fucking bollocks on toast. The Isuzu took a volley of 7.62mm abuse from the sniper to the east. This was different, a well-organized attack.

  His ears were shredded by the sound of metal tearing through metal. The sniper was shooting up the Isuzu in the hope that a stray bullet would ricochet off the chassis and strike one of them. There wasn’t much chance of that, but just to be sure Gardner pulled Falcon behind the rear wheel section and set himself against the front tyre. The front and back wheels on any vehicle were the best cover, as the engine parts provided a thick bulkhead.

  ‘What now?’ asked Falcon.

  ‘Your BOPE mates – where the fuck are they?’

  Falcon got on his handheld radio. ‘Twenty minutes.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Too long to hold off the Messengers,’ said Falcon, sounding panicky.

  ‘Have a little faith, Rafa.’

  The sniper had to be within three hundred metres because the crack and the thump were on top of each other, like they shared the same fucking bed. From the angle of entry of the bullets pebbledashing the Isuzu, Gardner knew the sniper had to be east. And he knew he had to take control of the situation. They had two or three minutes, max, till the sniper’s Messenger mates rocked up to the party.

  ‘Keep your eyes trained on the alley,’ he instructed Falcon, grabbing the Colt Commando by the flat-top receiver and handing over the Bulgarian knock-off AK-47 in return. At medium range the AK was about as accurate as an Internet dating profile. The Colt, on the other hand, could clip the Queen’s nose on a ten-pence piece from three hundred metres.

  ‘Any Messenger tries it on, you give them the good news.’

  ‘No, no, no.’ Falcon shook his head. ‘You don’t understand. Roulette can call on hundreds of gangsters. I can’t stop them.’

  ‘How long now before your pals come to the rescue?’

  ‘Till BOPE arrives?’ Falcon checked his watch. ‘Fifteen minutes. We can’t hold out for that long.’

  Again Gardner sensed that Falcon was in two minds about actually wanting to meet his BOPE mates. The urgency of the situation meant he had to park the thought.

  ‘Did John never tell you what they taught us in the Regiment?’

  Falcon blinked his ignorance.

  ‘No such thing as can’t, mate. We don’t do failure. Now look sharp.’

  A single shot crashed through the rear tyre. Air hissed out of the wheel.

  One minute. Two more and you’ll be overrun.

  Gardner checked his new toy. Metallic stock, MIL-STD 1913 Picatinny rail with a mounted 4x day optical scope on top. He switched the Commando to semi-automatic on the fire-control notch, clicked open the door on the Isuzu passenger side and crawled into the pickup.

  The seats had been ripped out, along with the steering wheel, gearbox and any other removable shit. He slid up to the driver-side door, facing east across the street, keeping his profile low beneath the bodywork. Gardner poked the barrel two inches out the driver’s window, his prosthetic hand locked around the barrel and the stock tucked hard into his right shoulder.

  In Baghdad, nailing snipers had been difficult. The wankers putting rounds down were armed irregulars with experience in the Republican Guard and the Iran-Iraq War, and had basic training: displacing after each shot, never using the same location twice. G
uys like Juba the sniper, who claimed over a hundred American kills, proved elusive. You needed expert counter-sniper warfare to take them down.

  Or if you were a Yank, you just lobbed about four tons of high explosive into the vicinity and let the grandma and kiddies fucking have it too.

  Another report. No muzzle flash. He was using a suppressor, Gardner realized. Maybe the sniper wasn’t as dumb as he’d hoped. Probably he had experience of slotting BOPE officers and knew exactly what to do: no need to worry about getting a direct hit on him or Falcon – just isolate them until the Messengers arrived to take care of business.

  Two minutes. Almost out of time.

  The concrete sparked as a bullet struck the ground in front of the pickup. The shooter was getting dangerously close. He was wise to the fact that Gardner was trying to isolate him.

  I see something, Gardner thought. At my three o’clock.

  An object glinted on the rooftop of a building. The glimmer came from deep within a mesh of satellite dishes and wires.

  Years of being targeted by rooftop shooters meant Gardner was able to recognize the flash instantly, the metal barrel of a long-range rifle. It broke rule number one they taught in sniper school: paint your bloody gun, so it ain’t reflecting the sun.

  Gardner exhaled, relaxing his muscles, and gazed down the telescopic sights on the Commando. The magnified image of a gangster’s head. Shaven-headed guy, skin the colour of ground coffee, lying on his stomach, dressed in jeans and a white vest. Gardner could even make out gold rings on his fingers.

  Messengers clamoured in his right ear.

  ‘They’re coming,’ Falcon said, urgent and trembling.

  Gardner shut everything out. The gaggle of voices, the rupert’s bitching, the blanketing heat and the sweat drenching his balls. He focused, then unloaded a single round.

  The sniper’s head exploded like a pumpkin, blood and chunks of skull and tissue splashing on to the rooftop. His body rolled onto its side, the exposed lower jaw facing the sky. The sniper’s gnashers were lacquered in blood. The sun drenched the rooftop, making the blood sparkle.

  Fucking take it, Gardner thought, debussing from the Isuzu. His feet had barely touched the ground when, through his peripheral vision, he glimpsed five figures at the mouth of the street, a hundred metres away.