The Bootneck

by Quentin Black

  The reverberation of heavy machine gun fire, smashing glass, and the tearing of the vehicle’s bodywork erupted.

  A crescendo of sound pounded in his ears.

  Damian flung himself out of the sedan. An articulated lorry blocked his escape to the other side of the road. He turned to his left and began to run down the side of it. His heart pounding and his back riddled in vulnerability.

  With two yards to go from cutting in behind the lorry to safety, three sledgehammer blows thudded into his back and shoulder. They flung him forward five feet onto his front as his forearms took the impact. A burst of fire shredded one of Pierre’s security as he exited the rear van. Damian, with a massive effort, rolled himself into the gap made by the now somehow static lorry and the car behind it. His back felt dished in as he dragged himself into a crouch. He took out his Smith and Wesson customised 686 revolver.

  The gunfire stopped, and Damian took his opportunity. He extended the gun and began to guide himself around the corner of the lorry. The ex-Special Forces soldier saw to his muted alarm why there had been a pause—a grenade sailed through the air and landed in the sedan. He ran for the cover of the lorry. The grenade exploded, shaking his bones and sending a ringing in his ears.

  He made out the battle scream of “MOVE!” as it pierced the air.

  His instinct screamed at him to fight back.

  He fired in the general direction before he even looked around the corner of the lorry. He picked up his aim on the now moving van. He fell to a crouch and zeroed in on the baseball-capped head along with skull face mask above the machine gun barrel. He knew it was a lost cause as he fired off three more rounds in quick succession. The head had already disappeared behind the armoured plate as the first round struck, about a fist’s width away from the opening.

  The van roared away. Damian surveyed the carnage.

  Horns blared, and people ran screaming. He waited until the van disappeared left at the cross roads 200 metres away and ran over to the sedan, already knowing what he was going to see.

  He peered inside to see the grotesque, mutilated and charred bodies of Pierre and the driver. The smell of cooked pork assaulted his nostrils.

  There was something he wasn’t expecting: Pierre’s Android phone, undamaged on the floor, opened on his emails. Damian picked it up and read the latest one, sent at twelve fifty-six from an unknown address: ‘Pick up the R21 road, further instructions will be forwarded.’ Damian immediately understood. He pocketed the phone and looked for an escape route.

  The distant sirens wailed.

  The speed of Carl’s driving pressed Connor into the seat. Symptoms of what he recognised to be adrenal-comedown coursed through him. There was a mixture of relief and endorphins. He knew the next stage would be drowsiness. He fought against it.

  He smiled recalling vittling-up Gaultier’s security team. The Frenchman was a man who made his living from war.

  Carl pulled into the beginning of a back road that began to climb. After several hundred metres, they pulled into a small alcove where a small Nissan lay parked. Carl got out and opened the boot of the car, taking out a metallic jerry can of petrol and four separate solar showers. In turn, they stripped and bagged the clothes. They used a nail brush to scrub themselves clean under the solar showers before drying themselves. They dressed in new clothes and threw the old ones and towels into the back of the van. Both completed the entire process in under five minutes apiece. Connor had confidence that a human wouldn’t smell any propellant on him—a fucking dog would though.

  Connor went into the back of the van, finding the lead encased box storing the phosphorous grenades. They’d re-applied the silicone caulk to their fingertips before the assault. Carl poured part of the can over the front compartment and the rest all over the back. He got into the driver seat of the Nissan, gunned the engine and turned the vehicle around.

  Connor lit a phosphorous grenade, launched it into the back of the van and dove into the Nissan. Carl shifted through the gears back down the hill. They could hear the firework show as all the remaining munitions began to catch alight and explode.

  Damian hid in an alleyway about half a mile from the chaos. He had called his Brussel’s Bratva contact and had sent through his GPS location.

  “Stay in place for twenty-five minutes,” was the response ending the call.

  Too risky to move now anyway he thought, especially not with three prominent tears in the back of his tweed jacket. Damian tapped in the memorised number and heard it ring. If anything happened to him now at least Makar would know who to look for.

  Makar’s digitalized English came on the line after two rings, “Report.”

  “The convoy was ambushed. One man was operating a machine gun from the back of a driven van. The Frenchman is dead. I got his phone and found a message. I think the American turned on him.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Awaiting pick up from our friends. I am around 800 metres away from the site of the ambush.”

  “Check in with me as soon as our friends have you at a safe house,” said Makar.

  Jamie sat in his study in the countryside of Surrey. It was a small room built underground and offset to the large country house that he owned. There were two projection screens built into the wall along with three computer systems, one on either side of him and one in front. That was all he needed.

  Jamie had been fascinated with computers since his childhood in the early nineties. His father, a wealthy government official and property developer had taken him on a visit to the Kennedy Space Station in Florida. Jamie was mesmerized by the technology, the missions, and the vastness of the place. One of the technicians told him, ‘In the future, any piece of information will be able to be obtained by anyone—in seconds—through a computer that almost every western household will have.’

  His father had encouraged him to watch English speaking videos to improve his grasp of the language. Watching films like ‘Hackers’, ‘Sneakers’ and ‘War Games’ compounded the young Jamie’s interest in information technology. Soon, the internet exploded, and Jamie never looked back. That was nearly twenty years ago.

  Jamie, now in his late twenties, was rich verging on wealthy and one of the best in the world at what he did. At this moment, he was sat in his fiefdom scanning police radios and checking CCTV confirming what he already knew—that the two men he’d sent had completed their mission. He estimated within fifteen minutes the initial reports would be all over the news.

  Jamie felt a creep of admiration for the pair. It was their plan, and even though they had needed his technical assistance, they’d carried out their part.

  He began to search for the online chatter that Pierre Gaultier’s death would generate.

  Connor and Carl kept scanning the crowd searching for any signs of undue interest in them. They were at the Calais terminal of the Eurostar, with the train due in a quarter of an hour. Nervous and excited chatter hummed among the people as the news of the shooting spread through their smart phones. Brussels was a mere two-hour drive away.

  This was the time when they were most susceptible to capture or being arrested; being closed in by civilians, any plain-clothed police or agent approaches would be harder to spot. They sat at opposite ends of the station. Remaining separate until they boarded the train was a tactical measure to look out for one another. It might also afford one the chance of escape if the other was detained.

  The train pulled in, and Connor made his way from the furthest side, walking past Carl to the train. A young woman sat on the far side, set down her magazine, and pulling out her phone, keyed in a memorised number.

  “Louis man, why we babysitting this joker? Coppers gonna be looking for him fam.”

  Jay was Louis’s right-hand man. Despite standing over half a foot shorter with a slim build, he’d a fearsome reputation. He sported a curly top, low fade hairstyle with a straight lined tapered beard. He wore a black leather jacket over the top of a black plunging T-shirt
, dark grey jeans ripped at the knees and grey trainers. They were stood outside the warehouse, smoking.

  “It’s favour for a friend,” replied Louis laconically, his face illuminating orange as he took a drag of his cigarette.

  “The white boy from Winterfell?”

  “He’s from up North yeh. Can’t wait until you finish Game of Thrones man.”

  “He a good friend init? Dint you say there was two of em? Two bad boys of the North.”

  “Ye man, one died in Afghan, name was Liam. Ma man’s not been the same since. They were tight.”

  “Need me to do anything for you, bruv?”

  “Nah, jus keep things smooth.”

  Connor and Carl sat on the opposite end of the carriage in view of one another. Connor felt relieved that there hadn’t been sniffer dogs at the Calais station. He knew it was unlikely that they’d be employed at the arrival station. Still, he felt a keen awareness about his person—an instinct that had developed over the years, both with the Marines and in his criminal life.

  His first foray into crime had started with shoplifting in The White Rose Centre in Leeds at eleven years of age. He and his cousin would lift mainly clothes and sometimes books. One trick was to remove a security tag and plant it on an unsuspecting shopper. As the customer would walk out, they’d set the alarm off and attract the attention of the security guards. With the guard’s attention elsewhere, they would walk past them with an array of stolen goods in their bags.

  Connor had made the leap onto stealing cars and joyriding, or ‘twocking’ (taking without consent) as the local youths called it, soon after. By fourteen, he’d joined one of his older cousins in a gang specialising in robbing warehouses. He made what would have been serious money for an average twenty-one-year-old.

  He had first kept it hidden in a small safe in his room, later putting it into a bank account he’d opened at the minimum age of sixteen. His mother thought his opening of an account admirable. She didn’t check his mail wishing to treat him as an adult and wasn’t privy to the amounts being deposited in there. However, he was aware that that amount of money was suspicious and thus invested in a security box from the bank. In it went expensive jewellery and specifically Swiss watches because he knew they didn’t lose much value over time.

  As his money increased, so did his methods of laundering it. He would always disguise his inquiries as mere curiosity before discreetly acting on any information he received. Connor couldn’t understand why his father hadn’t confronted him as surely, being the ‘Don’ of Leeds and beyond, he’d know about his excursions into crime. Maybe it was because Connor had never dealt drugs. He didn’t like the idea anyway thinking it to be boring, scummy and unromantic. Being a robber had a different air than being a drug dealer he thought, and Connor liked stealing when he was younger. He loved being part of a gang as well as the risk, and the money.

  When he was fourteen, Connor made a serious mistake. He burgled a house with his cousin in an affluent area of Leeds. He got away clean with a lot of expensive jewellery, or so he thought. Two days later, he stepped foot inside his father’s house to visit. He turned around from locking the door, he saw a flash of a fist and heard a crunching thud. He felt his brain sneezing blood after being rattled off the inside his skull. It took a few moments through the haze to realise his father had decked him. Next, the tred of his dad’s shoe pressed into his face.

  “Think it’s acceptable to steal from hard working people do you eh?”

  Connor’s heart seemed to freeze in his chest.

  “Stand up.” Connor did so, unsteadily. He’d never seen his father so angry.

  “Want to go for it?” asked his father.

  Connor wasn’t surprised at his own disinclination to fight. But he was surprised as to the reason why. It wasn’t just fear that stopped him from accepting his father’s challenge—it was the shame.

  Connor couldn’t believe what happened next. His father drove him around to the said property to be welcomed by a middle aged professional couple. His dad had visited the couple after being made aware of the burglary. Connor never found out how he knew.

  He was made to sit there while the couple told him of their humble beginnings.

  The woman had come from a council estate in Huddersfield, being one of five children. She became a social worker and then a behavioural therapist in her later years. The man told him of his being orphaned at the age of seven and put into a children’s home. It took eighteen months to get his behaviour under control before being adopted by a foster family from the Headingly area of Leeds. He described how he worked hard through college and university to become a geologist. The point was that they’d earned what they owned. They’d scrimped, saved, studied, and worked for the nice things they had. They were benefactors to various local charities, and when Connor heard one of these was his beloved boxing club, his stomach churned. He had invaded their home in the middle of the night and stole from them. Connor didn’t have to don the mask of contriteness.

  This time, he had genuinely felt shame.

  When his father demanded that Connor work the weekends for them, they had refused. Instead, they made Connor promise never to burgle people’s houses or steal their possessions again. Connor had made that promise and kept it.

  Nick sat alone in the room.

  His mind was in turmoil—surely there were some mistakes you couldn’t make amends for. In fact, his mind had been in turmoil ever since he’d agreed to help remove Bruce. He’d to try and right this wrong, but how? Connor, that closet psychopath, wasn’t going to trust him. Not unless he’d reason to.

  He heard a car outside before the engine cut out. Moments later a black youth with a snapback cap came in with a fish and chip supper. Nick made out the pistol on his hip.

  “Dis is for you,” the youth said.

  “Thank you”

  The youth unfastened Nick’s cuffs and backed away. Nick ate the supper ravenously. All he’d eaten until then was a Pot Noodle over twenty-four hours ago.

  “Can I use the toilet? I haven’t had a shit in two days,” he asked when he’d finished.

  “Err…yeh.”

  Nick stood and started for the door.

  “Wait!”

  Nick turned around, painting an expression of confusion and concern on his face.

  “What’s up?” he asked stepping towards him.

  The youth had drawn his pistol. “I have to keep you covered with this when—”

  Nick snatched the pistol barrel with one hand while palm striking the wrist. The gun was torn from the youth’s grasp. A pistol weighted backfist struck his face staggering him to one side. Nick levelled the handgun at him.

  “Throw me the keys.”

  After taking a moment to get over the shock, the youth fumbled into his pocket, and the keys sailed through the air. Nick caught them with his left hand.

  “Stand up, let’s go.”

  He had the barrel pressed into the youth’s spine and the collar was bunched into his fist. He marched him to the black BMW parked outside.

  “Get on your knees slowly.”

  Pressing the unlock button on the keys, the lights of the BMW flashed with a beep.

  “Your boss still inside?” He asked, prodding the youth with his foot. He nodded in affirmation.

  “Call him. Tell him to come outside immediately and then click the phone off. If you do anything other than that, you’ll die, understand?”

  “Yeh.”

  “Go ahead.”

  He rang the number and Nick could hear a voice answer. “Yeh fam, can you come outside right now yeh?” said the youth before clicking off.

  “Alright, lay face down.”

  When the youth was prostrate, Nick placed the pistol on the roof and held his hands palms out at shoulder height. Louis burst out of the door with his pistol levelled at him.

  “What’s the crack?” he asked, taking in the scene.

  “Well, I could have lamped this amateur across th
e temple and driven away in his car, but I didn’t.”

  Louis nodded. “OK…why didn’t you?”

  “Because I want to help.”

  Louis stared at him for a few moments and slowly lowered his handgun.

  Connor’s Android phone vibrated in his pocket, and ephedrine bolted around his insides as he read the message.

  ‘American C been spotted. British C doesn’t appear to have been detected yet.’

  A picture of a Damian Adamik along with his bio uploaded to his phone. It wasn’t good reading. Connor perused the Pole’s Special Forces career, perceived fighting skills and physical characteristics. He looked a brute of a man. Connor looked at the pictures again and in a few seconds realised this was the man who had fired at him from behind the large lorry.

  The only advantages they had now were that they were aware of Adamik and that Connor hadn’t been spotted—or it might seem like he hadn’t been. Connor had worn a bandana across his mouth and a peak baseball cap whilst he was brassing up the vehicles. He looked up and made eye contact with Carl, feeling a stab of guilt. If Carl had completed his initial task of returning Nick Flint, then he may have been free of this. Now, he was being targeted by the Russian Bratva, and the pair were returning to London. He was beginning to like Carl too.

  His phone vibrated again.

  ‘Their organisation unable produce numbers to take Am-C. DA set to take Am-C himself in London.’

  Connor looked and made eye contact with Carl. He knew what he was going to do.

  Connor had picked out Damian. The Pole was following Carl through the horde of the station crowd. Connor noted the surveillance cameras at intervals throughout the station and began to speed up—he was going to have to make his move outside the station. Connor passed the Pole and Carl, exiting through the station’s double doors.

  Halting by the cigarette bin, he swilled saliva around his gums and mouth. Swilling saliva, as well as deep, slow breathing, tricked the system into helping control adrenaline; he couldn’t afford to have his fine motor functions going haywire.