by Andy Maslen
“Enough!” Max barked. “So. How are we going to kill this Wolfe character then?”
Unwanted Attention
Gabriel drove fast along the M3 motorway, heading for British Army headquarters at the camp known as Marlborough Lines. Mid-morning, and heading out of London, the traffic was so light as to not count as traffic at all. With the sun behind them, the driving conditions were perfect. In the distance, he spotted a small car cruising along in the middle lane. Gabriel was on the inside lane, though still doing ninety-five.
“Look at this idiot!” he said to Eli, pointing ahead with his right hand. “Completely empty motorway and he’s sitting in the middle at, what, sixty?”
“Calm down, Captain Speedfreak. He’s not hurting anyone.”
“It’s bad discipline. He should be on the inside. I mean what’s the fucking point of having three lanes if some muppet’s going to hog the middle one driving as slow as a fucking hearse!”
As Gabriel shouted this last word he swung the Ford out and overtook the little car at a shade over 100 mph. He left the overtaking manoeuvre until the last minute, so that they passed close enough to the rear and side of the car to see the various stickers plastered inside the glass. “We’ve been to Legoland.” “National Trust.” “If You Can Read This, You’re Too Close!”
Eli shrieked. Gabriel wasn’t sure if it was from fear or exhilaration.
“Whoa! OK, slow down. Now!” she shouted and slammed her palm against the dashboard.
Gabriel took his foot off the throttle and let the car slow down to eighty. His heart was racing and his right leg was jiggling.
“What the fuck just happened?” Eli said, her voice full of anger. “You could have killed that driver. And us, too, while we’re on the subject.”
Gabriel shrugged. Tried to speak in a casual tone he wasn’t feeling.
“He was being a prick. I just overtook him, that’s all.”
“No, he wasn’t! But you were! First you keep tuning out in meetings, then you practically run some little old man off the road. What’s going on?”
Gabriel realised there was a part of him that had wanted to do precisely that. To see the little silver hatchback swerve and skid, then turn over and over and over before hitting the crash barrier and bursting into flames.
Shit! What’s happening?
“Honestly? I don’t know. Look, there’s some services coming up. Let’s grab a coffee.”
He slowed down and switched on the indicator as they approached the first of the turn markers. A high-pitched, extended sound from behind made him look over his right shoulder.
The little silver hatchback, still in the middle lane, trundled past, horn blaring. Its driver, a man in his eighties wearing a tweed cap, turned to his left and put two fingers up.
Sitting with their coffees, Gabriel and Eli sat staring at each other. She broke the silence first.
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” The softness was back in her voice. No anger, no indignation. No trace, even, of the flirtatiousness he loved so much.
He took a sip of his coffee to buy time.
“I … I think it was talking to Tim about our parents. It made me think about Master Zhao. I still miss him, Eli. I mean, really miss him. Even after I left Hong Kong and went into the army, he was still there. Here!” He thumped his chest, over his heart. “Then just when I had him back in my life again, she took him away from me.”
“Sasha Beck.”
“Yes. And her bitch of a boss.”
“And you got them, Gabriel. You killed them both. You avenged his death in the best way possible.”
“But he’s still gone. Can’t you see that? They’re dead, but so is he!” He was aware his voice had risen, but he couldn’t stop himself. Didn’t want to.
Eli’s eyes flicked over his shoulder, and she pursed her lips in a shushing gesture.
Gabriel looked round. A group of well-fed people, the women in pastel hoodies and white shorts, the men in replica football shirts, were looking across at their table. At Gabriel’s fierce gaze they looked away, back to their lattes and croissants.
Eli stretched out a hand and gently placed it on top of Gabriel’s.
“Listen. You’re doing fine. You’re working, and you’re great fun to be with. But I sense such a sadness in you. Don’t let it overwhelm you. My Dad’s always quoting from the Torah and the Talmud, old Jewish proverbs, you know. When somebody dies, he likes to say, ‘Everything grows with time, except grief.’”
Gabriel didn’t pull his hand away. But it felt trapped beneath Eli’s, not comforted.
“That’s nice. And it’s fine for one instance of grief. But grief can grow, if it’s for different people. I lost friends when I was serving. We carried on fighting, and when the contact was over, we put them in their sleeping bags, as Colonel Tim Collins said, and sent them home to their loved ones. They could grieve and over time it would lessen. But what happens to me is different, don’t you see? The deaths keep mounting, Eli. Not the targets, I don’t give a fuck about them. It’s everybody else. It’s almost as if someone has it in for me.”
“God, you mean? Even though you have a Biblical name, I don’t think you’re Job.”
“I didn’t mean that. I don’t think. I’m just missing the people I’ve loved.”
Eli frowned.
“Do you miss Britta?”
Gabriel paused before answering. It was a good question. Did he miss her? And if he did, how did he miss her? He’d proposed to her, after all. But he’d also fought alongside her, in uniform and out of it.
“Taking the Fifth, are we?” Eli asked, teasingly.
“No! I was doing your question the courtesy of considering it properly before answering.” He frowned, aware of how pretentious that remark had sounded. “Yes, of course I miss her. We were close. Even before we were together, I liked being with her.”
“But you don’t miss her as a lover, do you?”
“Wow! OK, you don’t beat about the bush, do you?” What would Britta say? “Run around the bush,” probably. He smiled at the thought.
“No, I don’t. It’s not the way I was brought up. In my family we liked to talk about everything. And I mean, everything!”
“I don’t miss her … in that way. But she was … is … a friend.”
“Why don’t you call her, then?”
“She’s in Stockholm.”
Eli stared deep into his eyes and lowered her voice as if speaking to a particularly stupid child. Or a dog, perhaps.
“Gabriel. They do have telephones in Sweden now.”
He smiled. God, she was irritating.
“I meant, what would be the point? It’s not as if we could all meet up for a drink, is it?”
“Well,” she continued in her emotions-for-dummies tone, “the point would be that you could say, ‘Hi Britta, how’s it going? I miss you.’”
Gabriel withdrew his hand, but only so he could use it to cup his chin and stare at the ceiling, frowning as if in deep thought. He decided to adopt the role she’d assigned to him.
“Huh. So what you’re saying, and please correct me if I’ve got the wrong end of the stick, is that I could call her because she’s my friend and we could have, what, a chat?”
Eli closed her left eye and pointed her index finger at him, sighting along it with her other eye.
“Bullseye!”
Outside, in the car park, two rows back from Gabriel’s grey Ford, four heavily built men in jeans and navy cotton windcheaters sat in a black Mercedes SUV. The GLS 63 was huge, both inside and out, and the men had plenty of space to stretch their long legs. The car’s sculpted front and rear ends bore brand new number plates, though they bore no resemblance to those issued with the car by the dealer.
The man behind the wheel, a veteran of conflicts in the Congo, Thailand, Peru, Nicaragua, Iraq and Syria, was consulting a road atlas. He stabbed a thick finger at Junction 8 on the M3, where the A303 dual carriageway dropped southwe
st towards Andover and Salisbury.
“Once they leave the motorway, we have a green light to terminate them. Anywhere with the right cover and conditions. Traffic should be minimal. Get them off the road then make sure they’re out.”
The others nodded. Began the process of checking weapons. Slid out magazines, worked slide-release switches, looked through barrels, checked triggers. They were hard men and used to both death and its rewards. All had fought for their countries before discovering the attractive mixture of on-tap action, freedom to operate outside the laws of war, and bulging bank balances that accompanied work in the private sector.
The man in the front passenger seat jerked his chin at the front window.
“There they are.”
The driver reassembled his pistol, seated the magazine with a click, and re-holstered it under his left armpit. As the others did the same, with a pleasing set of clicks and snaps, he started the engine.
More Unwanted Attention
Junction 8 was approaching. Eli flicked on the indicator. After Gabriel’s close encounter before their stop, she’d insisted on driving for the rest of the journey. The motorway ahead was empty.
“Absence of the normal,” Gabriel said. “Quite nice for a change, don’t you think?”
She took the slip road and powered away along another empty road, up a slight incline, before swinging from outside to inside lanes round a slow, left-hand bend. Had she checked her mirror before leaving the motorway, she might have caught a glimpse of the black GLS, which was maintaining a 300-yard gap, leading a small group of cars, vans and a single articulated lorry. But she probably wouldn’t have paid it any heed.
“Yes,” she might have said in answer to Gabriel’s question. “Although there’s plenty of abnormal behind us.”
“There they go,” the driver of the GLS said.
He flicked on his own indicator and swung the big black Merc off the motorway. He wasn’t too concerned when the Ford disappeared from view around the left-hand bend. There were no turnoffs they could take, even if they wanted to, and as he knew their destination, he could always catch up.
Behind him, he listened to the metallic poetry of slides being racked on three Sig Sauer P229s. It was one of the many reasons he appreciated his employers. They didn’t skimp on equipment. Whatever he asked for, they provided it. Didn’t matter what it was. RPGs. M112 demo blocks. M16s. And demands from their side? Just one thing. Total success, every time. In his five years working for Kuznitsa, he had always met that expectation.
He rounded the bend and regained visual on the grey Ford. It was just passing the Little Chef restaurant on the left. He sped past the restaurant moments later, taking a second to glance right at the airfield dotted with light planes. It reminded him of many a jungle airstrip he’d landed at or taken off from, often in planes not dissimilar to the Beechcrafts, Pipers and Cessnas crouching on the grass now.
Eli glanced in her mirror. Then she spoke.
“Gabriel, can you see the SUV behind us?”
He started to reach for the rearview mirror. Then stopped. The move would be visible. It would be a tell.
Instead he craned his head forwards so he could look back through the door mirror. He saw a black Merc. One of the big Chelsea tractors. A GL something? Had they renamed it?
“I see it. Black Merc.”
“I’m not sure it was there before.”
“Must have been. Must’ve come off the M3.”
“I don’t remember seeing it. There was so little traffic I was on autopilot.”
“Presence of the abnormal?”
“Not sure.”
Without his needing to suggest it, Eli began increasing speed. The Merc paced them, maintaining its distance, though Gabriel suspected it wasn’t out of respect.
“Take the left. Now!”
A slip road signposted Micheldever Station and Overton loomed. A hundred yards to go.
“Shit!” Eli said, wrenching the wheel over and simultaneously hammering the brakes to scrub enough speed off to make the turn without rolling the car.
The tyres wailed in protest, and the acrid smell of burnt rubber entered the cabin through the air vents.
She flicked the wheel left and right to negotiate the S-bend before bringing the car to a shuddering halt at a T-junction.
“Right then left!” Gabriel said, keeping his voice calm and clear, despite what was happening to his gut.
A quick glance each way and she was off again.
Gabriel looked in the door mirror, though all thoughts of tells had just evaporated.
“Still behind us. OK. You any good at evasive driving?”
“I guess we’ll have to see, won’t we? More your thing than mine, but you’re there and I’m here.”
Alternately accelerating flat out and braking hard, Eli followed Gabriel’s instructions like a rally driver.
“Wait, wait, wait … LEFT!” he shouted.
Eli fed the wheel through her hands as she slewed the car into a skidding turn that had them sliding across onto the wrong side of the road. Then it righted itself under her control of the steering wheel and brake pedal, and they were off again, barrelling out of the bend and gaining speed fast.
She glanced up at the rearview mirror.
“Shit! They’re still with us. I can’t outrun them in this. Why the fuck couldn’t you still have your Maser?”
“Sasha Beck blew it to shit, in case you’d forgotten. I promise to buy something faster when I get the chance.”
“Yeah?” Eli said, her arms straight ahead of her on the wheel, right foot jammed down hard on the throttle. “I’m gonna hold you to that.”
“That Jew-bitch isn’t a bad driver,” one of the Kuznitsa operators, a Belgian, said. Racism was in his blood, although he didn’t let it affect his professional judgements. Or his financial ones. He’d fight for anyone, black, white, Jew, Christian, if the price was right. OK, not anyone. The Muslims were beyond the pale as far as he was concerned. They were all terrorists. Or would be, one day.
“Yeah, well, she’s not good enough,” the driver said. “Get ready. Impact in five …”
He thrust his boot down on the throttle pedal. Under the bonnet, the twin-turbocharged 5.5L V8 engine, tuned to within an inch of its life by its German midwives, emitted a barrel-chested roar. The four men were pushed back into their seats by the acceleration.
“This isn’t going to work,” Eli said.
Gabriel glanced at the speedo: 85 mph and climbing. He wasn’t sure of its exact top speed, but the Merc would be good for at least forty-five more than they were.
It was the last thought he had before the impact.
“One. Brace!” the driver yelled to his men.
He locked his elbows and pushed back against the thickly padded seat.
He rammed the Ford’s rear with a bang that clanged inside the Merc’s cabin, and gave the wheel a little flick to the right before correcting. Then he hit the brakes and watched.
The Ford’s rear end shimmied, then fishtailed.
He closed up again and delivered the coup de grace. Another straight-on ram to the nearside rear wheel.
The Ford spun off the road. Its front hit the barrier beyond the verge, flipped over once then slammed back onto four wheels and careered down a fifteen-foot bank of shrubs and weeds. At the bottom, it smashed through a hedge of hawthorn and disappeared into the field beyond.
He checked his mirrors. No following traffic. Good. Nice and uncomplicated. He brought the GLS to a stop on the hard shoulder and began reversing towards the spot where the Ford had gone down the bank.
“Ready? OK, out.”
The four men left the Merc and slammed the heavy doors with a series of muffled clunks . They slid and clambered down the bank, drawing their Sigs.
As the Merc rammed them, Gabriel and Eli were each reacting in their own way. Eli had braced herself against the wheel. Gabriel had crossed his arms in front of his face and gripped the rear of the
headrest.
The impact tore the steering wheel out of Eli’s grip. She was fighting to regain control, Gabriel could see that, but the car’s speed, coupled with the slam from over two tons of metal had pushed the Ford into a wild, uncontrollable fishtail. A second impact sent them into a slide, and then the car hit the Armco barrier edging the hard shoulder.
The world revolved outside the car through 360 degrees. The windscreen popped out of its frame when the car thumped back down onto all four wheels and smashed through a thin screen of young trees and into a field.
He looked right. Eli was shaking her head. A cut had opened above her left eye and she swiped at her forehead, smearing the blood.
He leaned down and released her seatbelt latch before doing the same for his own.
“Eli!” he shouted. “Come on. We have to get out.”
He pulled and shoved her up and out over the crumpled bonnet. He followed her, banging his shin painfully on the way.
They staggered away from the car. Gabriel knew that they had at best a minute before the crew from the Merc arrived to finish the job they’d started. He spotted a possible way out. A rusting spring-tooth harrow leaning against an oak tree about fifty yards off towards the centre of the field.
“There!” he said, pointing. “Go, go.”
Eli was limping, but she managed to keep up with Gabriel as he made his way to the tree, stumbling over deeply ridged tractor ruts.
“Help me work a couple of these prongs free,” he said, seizing a foot-long piece of rusted steel that ended in a right-angled hook.