Shadow Conflict

by Shadow Conflict (epub)

  It wasn’t much as far as plans went, but improvisation would have to suffice.

  A plain wooden door stood at the top of the stairs, its frame warped by time and exposure. Taking a moment to compose himself, Drake reached out, turned the handle and gently pushed the door open, moving quickly through the gap and sweeping his weapon left and right.

  As he adjusted to the poor light, it became clear that this building wasn’t part of any organized military set-up. A large, cavernous space stretched off into the darkness, the bare expanse of stone floor lacking any fixtures or fittings. Ancient walls rose up to a high vaulted ceiling, interspersed with long tapered windows that had likely once held stained glass.

  Drake was in a church.

  A disused church, judging by the water dripping from the failing roof, but a church all the same. This revelation confirmed his theory that this makeshift prison and interrogation centre had been set up in a hurry.

  Drake tensed as he felt the cell phone buzz in his pocket. Digging it out, he quickly scanned the caller display, but the number came up as withheld. Almost certainly it was the team’s commander calling for an update. He debated what to do, whether to answer in the hope of learning something useful, or simply ignore it.

  He soon decided against the former. If his adversaries were smart and organized – and he had no reason to suspect otherwise – they would have agreed password systems and duress codes in advance. Attempting to bluff through would only alert them that he had escaped. Instead he hit the reject call icon, hoping to stall them.

  He needed to finish his sweep and pull out of here quickly.

  Drake’s attention turned to the floor, where more spots of blood marked the bare stone, leading towards the far end where the pulpit had once stood. Frost had been dragged this way. Drake crept forward, following the blood trail, his eyes flitting constantly in search of anything hostile.

  The original wooden pulpit from which generations of priests had no doubt rained fire and brimstone on their congregation had long since been removed, but the main altar remained intact, accessed via a short flight of steps. Ascending these, Drake faced a small, low door set into the wall. Old wood set within a rusted metal frame. It was hanging ajar.

  Drake closed his eyes and took a breath, steeling himself for what he might find. He had no doubt that Hawkins would kill Frost if she was no longer useful, and knew there was a real chance he might find her lying cold and dead within.

  The thought of losing another of his friends was more than he could bear. His only hope was that Hawkins still saw her as valuable leverage.

  With a well-practised movement, he shoved open the door and advanced inside, staring down the Glock’s glowing night sight as he swept.

  His first reaction was one of relief that the small, low-ceilinged room beyond – likely a vestry where the priest prepared before a service – was empty. However, he did see several large bloodstains on the floor, presumably where the young woman had lain. Venturing closer, he found a bloodied dressing and several wads of used surgical gauze lying beside them. They must have cleaned and dressed her wounds here before moving her.

  As his friend downstairs had confirmed, Frost was gone.

  That was when something within him, held taut since his escape, finally snapped. Anguished, he turned and slammed his boot into the door, kicking it so hard that the old wood broke and splintered.

  He might have won freedom for himself – for now at least – but he couldn’t bring her back. That realization seemed to sap the last of his energy. He felt his legs weaken and give way as he slumped down the cold, damp wall, until he was on the floor, battered, bruised and exhausted.

  His hands were trembling, and for once it had nothing to do with the cold. He’d been able to push past it all until now, but there was no ignoring the fact he was in shit condition. The pain from his various injuries was putting his body in a state not unlike shock. It was common in soldiers after battle, when they were no longer fighting for their lives and could start to process what they’d seen and done.

  No, a voice within him said at that moment, hard and insistent and resolute. You’re not going to fall apart now. Not when you’ve come this far. A few hours ago you were naked and freezing to death in a cell; now you’re out and free, and you’ve got a chance. Don’t waste it.

  Drake snapped back into awareness then, reassessing what he’d found. As much as it pained him to have lost contact with Frost, the grisly discovery in here at least kindled a flicker of hope. They wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of patching Frost’s wounds if they intended to kill her. Wherever they’d taken her, he had to believe Frost was alive.

  But she wouldn’t be if he lingered here much longer. It was time to go.

  He was just straightening up when he felt his phone buzzing again. Whoever was trying to get through wasn’t taking no for an answer, and the lack of response was only going to arouse more suspicion.

  Deciding he had little to lose, Drake hit receive call and held the phone to his ear.

  * * *

  Seated in the back of the Land Rover Discovery as it bumped and jolted down the lonely forest track, Hawkins watched as the windscreen wipers battled vainly against formidable rain and sleet. It was only a few hours earlier he’d been roaring across the warm waters of the Mediterranean.

  ‘Moore, what’s your sitrep?’ he asked as soon as the line connected. ‘And why weren’t you answering your phone?’

  ‘He can’t hear you.’ The voice that answered wasn’t that of the operative he’d left to supervise Drake. Hawkins was silent as it sank in – Drake was no longer captive.

  ‘Ryan, well goddamn if it isn’t you!’ he said at last, recovering his poise. ‘I guess you’re more resourceful than I gave you credit for.’

  His acknowledgement was met with a brooding silence.

  ‘Nice little trick you played with the Alamo, by the way. At this rate, I’m going to need to hire more help.’ The operatives seated in the vehicle with him exchanged a few nervous glances. ‘Tell me the boys there at least put up a decent fight? Hate to think we were paying them for nothing.’

  That was enough to provoke a response. ‘What I did to them is nothing compared to what you’ve got coming.’

  There was no anger or emotion in Drake’s voice; it was as if he were speaking of some preordained, immutable fact.

  Such a threat might have chilled another man to the bone, but in Hawkins it prompted a different reaction. Drake had chosen to fight back, and Hawkins always liked it when they fought back. It made it all the more satisfying to break them down.

  ‘Buddy, I really hope you’re not wasting time shooting the breeze when you could be running for your life,’ Hawkins advised. Craning his neck, he followed the long curve of the road into the distance, where the derelict church lay less than two miles away. ‘If I get there and find you trying to turn that church into your own personal Alamo, I’ll be very disappointed.’

  Silence greeted him for a second or two, and he began to wonder whether Drake had abandoned the phone and fled. However, his adversary had one last message for him.

  ‘Remember what you said to me in that basement, about wanting the old Ryan Drake back?’

  ‘I do,’ Hawkins acknowledged.

  ‘You got what you wanted, Jason.’

  With that, the call cut out.

  Calmly replacing the phone in his pocket, Hawkins leaned back in his seat and stared thoughtfully out of the window at the darkened forest rushing past. Without prompting, the driver stomped on the accelerator, increasing speed.

  It took about 90 seconds for the two-vehicle convoy to cover the remaining mile of rough, unpaved road. Screeching to a halt about 20 yards from the church, armed operatives piled out of both cars, quickly spreading to form a perimeter. Aside from the rattle of wind and the constant patter of rain, the place was ominously quiet.

  Hawkins exited at a more leisurely pace, seeing little sense in rushing. He noted that the To
yota 4 x 4 belonging to his three-man team was sitting where they’d left it. Drake must have been smart enough to realize there was only one road in or out, and trying to steal the car would have resulted in a head-on confrontation with an armed tactical team.

  Around him, operatives glanced his way, awaiting orders. ‘Move in,’ Hawkins instructed, amused by their trepidation. ‘Secure the building.’

  Nervily holding FN P90 submachine guns, four men ventured through the main entrance, the red dots from their under-barrel laser sights piercing the darkness. The remainder of the team waited in anxious silence, the rain slowly soaking through their clothes.

  ‘Building secure,’ came the radio call about 30 seconds later. The tone of the man’s voice told Hawkins the news wasn’t good. ‘We’ve found our men. They’re in the basement.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘You’d better see for yourself, sir.’

  This ought to be good, Hawkins thought. ‘On my way.’

  Making his way inside, Hawkins descended the stairs to what had once been the crypt. He knew nothing of the building’s history, but he liked to imagine this was where the heretics and sinners of centuries gone by had been held until they found the light of God – willingly or unwillingly. He could almost picture the medieval torture devices breaking bones and tearing flesh.

  Reaching the bottom, Hawkins let out an appreciative whistle as he took in the scene, picked out by the probing beams of the assault team’s flashlights.

  Hoffmann was lying sprawled at the base of the stairs in a pool of blood, his body perforated by several gunshots to the chest and abdomen. The electric lights gleamed across the bald dome of his head.

  Parker was lying beside the overturned table, his massive body in an ungainly heap, with one of the wooden table legs embedded against the side of his maimed head. An inventive enough way to take someone out, he supposed, but that wasn’t what really caught his attention.

  Drake had found a use for the hook mounted in the ceiling. Moore was hanging from it, his hands bound by the same plastic cuffs they’d used on Drake, stripped to the waist and with blood dripping from what was left of his head. And across his exposed chest, carved in crude lettering with some kind of ragged bladed instrument, was a simple but chilling message.

  YOU’RE NEXT

  ‘Oh, Ryan, you weren’t kidding,’ Hawkins said, folding his arms and taking it in like an artist critiquing another man’s work. He shook his head in regret. ‘The things we could have done together…’

  ‘Sir, what are your orders?’ the assault team leader asked, visibly shaken. He and his team were nothing but piss-ant security contractors, easily demoralized, not the hardened soldiers Hawkins was used to leading.

  Hawkins touched the blood dripping from the lettering carved into Moore’s chest.

  ‘Blood’s still warm; he can’t have gotten far. Get some teams out into the woods and track him down. And bring in our air assets.’ The team stood rooted to the spot, still staring at the dead man hanging from the ceiling. ‘Anyone got a problem with that?’

  They couldn’t leave fast enough. As the team hurried back upstairs, the assault leader paused beside Hawkins and gestured to the two bodies. ‘What about them, sir?’

  Hawkins shrugged, unconcerned. ‘What about them? They’re not going anywhere.’

  Part Two – Evasion

  ‘It is necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.’ – Alexandre Dumas

  Chapter 12

  Drake was running, pounding through the woods as fast as his legs would carry him. His boots splashed through sodden ground – muddy earth and last season’s leaves sucking him down, branches and tangled thorns ripping at his clothes. And all the while, freezing rain lashed down.

  For the first few minutes he’d headed directly away from the church, wanting to gain maximum distance, before turning 45 degrees right and resuming his run, his course carrying him downhill into a shallow valley lined with leafless trees. When Hawkins inevitably sent men out to track him, Drake needed to put in some unpredictable changes of direction to make their job difficult.

  He was under no illusions that he could run or hide in these woods for ever, particularly if Hawkins was able to call on air assets armed with thermal imaging cameras, but he needed to be as far away as possible before the sun came up. Assuming the clock on the burner phone had been accurate before Drake discarded it, the local time was somewhere around six thirty in the morning. That meant he had less than an hour before sunrise.

  Not much time to make an escape.

  Redoubling his efforts, he pushed on, following the slope of the ground, partly because it allowed him to move faster but mostly because he was already too tired to climb. Two days of no sleep, beatings and virtual starvation, not to mention the fight to free himself, had taken a toll that was not easily fixed.

  He was cold despite his exertions. Movement was helping to keep his core temperature up, but the wet terrain had infiltrated his boots, numbing his feet.

  All in all, he was reminded very much of the escape and evasion phase he’d endured during selection for the SAS. Trekking for miles through the snow-covered Brecon Beacons in mid-January, armed with little more than an outdated map, a moth-eaten greatcoat that smelled like it had been lying in a storage depot since WW1, and a pair of boots that didn’t fit. And all the while, a larger and far better equipped hunter force had been pursuing him.

  Except this time around, there would be no fake interrogations, stern lectures and piss-taking if he was caught. Only a bullet to the head or a return to his cell. Drake couldn’t make up his mind which was worse, but he was determined to avoid both.

  He managed to cover another mile or so before his strength began to fail him. He backed up against a tree, struggling to draw breath that wouldn’t come. His lungs strained against his ribs as if the bony cage was too small to contain them. His shoulder blazed with pain from where he’d been hit by the riot gun, not to mention the countless other cuts and bruises that marked his body.

  He couldn’t keep this up much longer. Already the overcast sky was marginally brighter in the east as the sun crept up, rendering the bleak, muddy woodland in a sombre predawn light.

  That was when he heard it – the distinctive whup, whup, whup of rotor blades. Turning southwards, he caught the flashing navigation lights of a chopper about a mile distant, partially obscured by low cloud. It was moving slowly and deliberately, orbiting in concentric circles outwards from the church.

  Drake recognized a search pattern when he saw one. Given the poor visibility it was safe to assume Hawkins wouldn’t have requested air support unless the chopper was armed with infrared navigation equipment. It also meant that Drake’s warm body would stand out easily against the cold background.

  It wouldn’t take them long to find him, and hiding wasn’t an option. He could take cover and obscure himself from the air temporarily, but Hawkins would have these woods crawling with men and probably tracker dogs within hours. Sooner or later they would pick up his trail and follow it straight to him.

  The only option was to flee.

  Pushing himself off the tree, he hurried onwards, pounding down the muddy slope and almost losing his footing several times as the loose earth gave way. And all the while the chopper circled ever closer.

  Gradually he became aware of another noise: the steady, muted roar of water cascading over rocks. A river was flowing nearby, likely following the line of the valley.

  Pausing to lean against a moss-covered boulder and catch his breath, Drake spotted the white churning foam of a fast-flowing stream, no doubt swollen by the incessant rain. And, winding beside it, the distinctive black hardtop of a paved road.

  No sooner had he caught sight of this roadway than a pair of headlight beams rounded a bend in the valley off to the west, heading in his direction. But was it a civilian car, or an Agency transport filled with armed operatives? He couldn’t tell from this distance, particularly w
ith the lights shining more or less straight at him. But whatever its purpose, the vehicle was moving at a steady 40 or 50 miles an hour by his reckoning – fast enough to be driving with a destination in mind, but slow enough to avoid undue risk on the wet and treacherous road.

  A local on their way home, perhaps?

  The chopper was circling around to the north again, its spiralling course carrying it away from Drake’s position for the time being. If Drake was going to act, it would have to be now.

  He went for it, pushing towards the road even as the vehicle headed towards him. He could hear the rattling chug of an old, poorly maintained engine approaching, which gave him more hope of civilian origin.

  It was getting close. He needed to hurry if he was going to—

  The muddy ground suddenly caved beneath him and Drake slid down a steep section, unable to slow or even control his descent with nothing to hold on to. All he could do was try to balance and prevent his weight from pitching him forward, where it would be all too easy to crack his skull on a rock or tree root.

  He landed with a bump amid a pile of old branches, mud and rotting leaves. Thorns snagged his wet clothes as he fought to extricate himself, the vehicle headlights now less than a hundred yards away.

  Tearing fabric and skin, he staggered out and sprinted the last few yards to the roadway, feeling his boots make contact with solid ground.

  Drake drew the Glock and stepped out into the middle of the road, levelling his weapon at a spot slightly above the twin headlights. Brakes screeched and the vehicle swerved sideways, tyres skidding on the road. For a heart-stopping moment Drake wondered if the car might mow him down.

  The vehicle shuddered to a stop barely 10 yards from him. He saw a young, frightened face behind the wheel as he rushed towards it, weapon up and ready.

  ‘Don’t move! Hands where I can see them!’ Drake yelled, advancing.