by Robert Clark
I kept moving, following the threesome while keeping an eye out for any other combatants. Corser was still out there. He was better at this stuff than me, or so I guessed. He could hold his own at least. If I opened fire, hopefully he was in a position to do the same.
I lifted the rifle and got the nearest man in my sights, rested my finger on the trigger.
And opened fire.
Nine rounds in total. Broken down into short bursts of three, just like they taught in the army. The first three cut through the camouflage and balaclava like a hot knife through warm butter. Then came a quick adjustment. Just a second. Locked the second man in my sights, and three more bullets. He had begun to react to his buddy’s change in circumstances, which meant his three little presents caught him in the chest and throat.
Another moment for adjustment. Another second ticked by. The final man had his weapon raised. Not right at me. Not yet. Three bullets sliced up through his gut and sent him down like a sack of potatoes.
The forest lit up with gunfire. I managed to get behind a tree before bullets found me. Felt them ricochetting off the bark. I edged the weapon out of cover and tried blind-firing, but the weapon was too strong and my accuracy wasn’t worth shit.
I edged out of cover and spotted three more men approaching. They knew where I was, and they knew what to do. The first stuck to the straight and narrow, weaving through the thick trees for cover.
The others pincered out and tried to flank me on both sides, which put one in my line of sight, and one with a clear shot at my back. I fired at the one I could see and watched his face split in two. Then I ran.
Bullets swarmed the air around me as I sprinted for better cover, but the angle of both gunmen made that a hard task. I used the packed forest to my advantage, darting between trees and hoping to every God out there that none of the bullets hit me.
The Gods did one better. Not sure which was chiefly responsible. Probably one of the lesser known ones with more time on his or her hands. The higher presence sent me a present.
I spotted Corser sprinting in my direction as a bullet smashed into the tree next to me. I dropped down and rolled around, looking for the shooter. I saw him coming at me, and managed to get into cover just in time. With him at my twelve o’clock, and Corser fast approaching at my seven o’clock, I knew we had to act fast.
‘Corser,’ I shouted. ‘Go left.’
I didn’t know if he’d heard me over the gunfire, but it didn’t matter. The order wasn’t meant for him. I stuck my torso out of cover with my rifle up and ready and looked for the guy. He’d done what I wanted, just in the wrong place. He switched targets from me to Corser and fired, which I’d hoped would put him nice and exposed for me. But the damn idiot did it with a big two-hundred year old tree between him and me, so my bullets just gave the massive pine tree a makeover.
A cackle of bullets to my left told me Corser had caught up. I spotted him pressed up by a tree a few yards away with his weapon held high. He caught my eye and tried to imbue some of his soldierly knowledge to me via eye movement and telepathy. Didn’t work. I shrugged at him and saw the impatience grow in his face.
‘On three, we go, got it?’ he barked.
I nodded. Counted to three in my head.
In the same second, many things happened. Corser and I leapt out of cover and fired at the guy closest to us, who just so happened to be firing at Corser. At the same time, the guy taking the centre route opened fire. A statistician would probably say we had the shittier luck, which they would probably be right about, if all you were looking at were percentages on a chalk board.
Out there in the real world, things went according to plan, give or take. The bullets of the man on the centre route smashed into the trunk of the tree I was standing next to, following a pattern that snaked steadily upwards until the weapon was firing at birds. No points to that guy. Fourth place for him.
My bullets didn’t do a world of good either, but they at least accomplished the small feat of startling the guy I was aiming for and shaking his balance enough to grant me third place and him second.
Corser took the top spot. His bullets cut straight and true through the disturbed forest and caught the guy in a neat little line from the bridge of his nose to the centre of his forehead. Dead in an instant.
But there was a reason why he got second and I got third place. His bullets didn’t miss either. I heard Corser shout and swear just before I realised the tree in front of me had turned to confetti. I spun my weapon round and fired at the last guy, and saw one of the rounds catch him in the torso. He fell over and wailed like a gull. But he would have to wait for now.
I made it to Corser and saw the extent of the damage. Blood oozed out through his fingers, which clutched his chest like a priest with a bible.
‘Son of a bitch,’ he snarled. ‘Did you get him?’
‘You got one, I got the other.’ I said, looking more at his chest than his face. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I took down two before you opened fire,’ he groaned through gritted teeth. ‘How many did you get?’
‘Five, I think.’
‘That should be all of them. I counted ten.’
The groan of the man I’d hit caught up to us. Corser looked in his direction.
‘Help me up,’ he said. ‘Let’s find who this son of a bitch is.’
I pulled the injured man to his feet and tried to weave his arm around my shoulder. He shrugged me off with a stern look and limped across to the wounded hostile.
Lying on his back, the wide eyes of the hostile had grown still. He was dead, no doubt about it. Maybe just that second. He had a hole in his chest right where his heart had once been. No coming back from that.
‘Take off that mask,’ Corser snarled.
I bent down and threw the weapon out of his grasp in case it was a ruse. Then I peeled back the balaclava.
And looked right into the cold, lifeless eyes of Carl Dawson.
Twenty-One
The Curtain Call
The walk to the nearby town took almost two hours, and gave me time to wrap my head around the gravitas of the situation. I didn’t check the other hostiles. We didn’t have the time to waste. Nor did we head back to the road. Even if the second Humvee had arrived, we couldn’t be sure who to trust. Not anymore.
Cage, while no longer unconscious, was not looking good. He seemed lost in a void. Unable to grasp his surroundings, and incapable of stringing together a sentence. He weighed down on our shoulders like a bear carcass. Whatever damage he had suffered in the ambush, I was certain the worst of it was beneath the skin.
Corser, on the other hand, was a more quantifiable level of screwed. Two bullets had caught him in the chest. One up near his left shoulder. The other lower, closer to his intestines. How he was still standing and walking and carrying his boss, I didn’t know. Having paid the price of a bullet before, I knew I would have struggled to stay conscious. Corser, it appeared, was made of stronger stuff.
But his strength waned with every passing minute. His grip on Cage lessened, which left me to pick up the slack. And by the time we descended out of the trees and could see the sleepy, snow-clad streets in the distance, I knew we were all spent.
‘There should be a clinic a few blocks from here,’ Corser breathed. His voice was weak. His skin as white as the snow beneath his feet. ‘Keep going straight till we reach the library, then turn right.’
And with that, he dropped to his knees. It took everything I had to stop Cage from dragging me down beside him.
‘On your feet, soldier,’ I groaned. ‘Cage needs you.’
‘I’m done.’ Corser looked up into my eyes, and for the first time, I saw something other than the gruff, battle-hardened sniper. I saw a man, exposed, exhausted, frightened. There was a distance to his eyes that I’d seen far too often. He wasn’t long for this world. This was his curtain call. ‘Listen to me, Stone. What happened today, it’s set things in motion. You need to get the boss back to base
as soon as possible.’ The final word was accompanied with a sharp intake of breath, and a pained look across his face.
‘I need to know what’s going on up there,’ I said. ‘Corser, what is Cece planning?’
‘She wants to show the world we mean business,’ Corser groaned. ‘The boss, he had her build a weapon, something he could use as a deterrent. Purely a defensive measure. If the ambush was her doing, and you were right… it means she’s going rogue. She could put the whole of Second Solace in jeopardy. If you’re wrong, and this is someone else, then Cage is going to need people he can trust by his side.’
‘He needs you too, Corser.’ I said, buckling under the weight of Maddox Cage. ‘He needs us both.’
‘The name’s Lee,’ said Corser, ‘and you’re in this alone now. You can handle it. You have to.’
I waited with Lee. Right to the end. He objected, of course, but I knew I wouldn’t want to leave this world alone, and as he faded away, there seemed to be some comfort in his dying eyes. The man he had thrown his chips in with, there to the very end.
In an act that left no part of me feeling good, I patted down the dead man’s pockets. I didn’t have anything on me. The AR-15 lay discarded by Carl Dawson’s corpse, and Cage’s revolver was somewhere in the woods. Lee had a wallet, which seemed a little absurd for a man who had lived in a town where the only currency going was manual labour. Even so, I took the creased set of bills tucked away inside, and placed his driver ID in his cold hand. Someone would find him eventually, and his family - if he had any - deserved to know.
I made the rest of the journey alone with Cage. Progress was slow, but it gave me time to process everything. Uncovering the identity of one of our attackers didn’t bring any kind of satisfaction, it didn’t bring solace. If anything, it made things a million times worse, because it meant that the enemy was a lot closer to home than I would like.
‘Home?’ asked the Wolf. ‘Is that what Second Solace is now?’
‘It’s a figure of speech.’
‘Then it doesn’t complicate things that much. We have a job to do. Threefold, as Agent Miles said. Find Noble, find the weapon, and kill this man.’
He looked at the mammoth of a man that drooped over my shoulder. He was barely lucid. Barely a human at this point.
‘No one would ever know,’ said the Wolf. ‘He could die right here in the snow, and you’d be one third closer to saving your wife.’
I didn’t answer him. Focused on each step. Dirt became gravel under my boots. Trees replaced by log cabins and lazy streets. Within a minute of reaching the town, someone pulled over to help. A pickup truck with shavings of wood ingrained into the tired old beast.
‘Everything okay here?’ asked the man behind the wheel, who looked about as cut and dry a lumberjack as anyone had any right of being.
‘My friend took a tumble out hunting,’ I gasped, fixing my tried and tested American accent into place. ‘He needs a doctor.’
The lumberjack got out and helped lifted Cage into the pickup bed. I got in beside him, and minutes later we pulled up alongside what passed as a clinic in these parts of Montana. A thin receptionist spotted us approaching and had already called through to the doctor by the time we made it across the threshold. She waved us through, no doubt recognising the rugged lumberjack enough to forgo any questions, and we carried Cage through to a room in the back.
The doctor was a beast of a man. Maybe a relative of Cage himself. His face was clean-shaven, making him look like a giant egg perched atop a lab coat-wearing bear. With a deep, booming voice that would be matched only by his newest patient, he ordered me and the lumberjack to put Cage up on the bed. Once satisfied Cage wasn’t going anywhere, the lumberjack bowed out with a promise to let him know if we needed anything else. I didn’t even know the guy’s name.
‘Tell me what happened here?’ asked the doctor when we were alone.
‘My buddy here, we were hiking up north of here and he had a fall,’ I said. ‘He’s been like this since. I can’t get a word out of him.’
‘Nothing to do with that explosion we heard a couple hours back?’ he asked, fixing me with the kind of stare a teacher gives an unruly student. I opened my mouth to reply, but he cut me off, ‘relax, kid. I know Maddox here. I know what’s going on up in those mountains. Been sent your people before. I know what stays off the books. So I’ll ask you again, what happened?’
I took a moment. No point in lying. Well, not entirely.
‘Our truck flipped and caught fire. I got him out before it went up in flames, but he’s not doing well.’
‘There’s always something. Let me check him over. You can wait out in the lobby. Caroline will get you a cup of coffee.’
I thanked the doctor and headed out. Caroline appeared with a cup of coffee before I’d had the chance to ask. Maybe she knew the drill too. I wondered how far I could push her hospitality. I hadn’t eaten since the night before. My body was drained. My blood sugar was in the gutter. My lips felt numb.
I spotted a bowl of wrapped sweets on the receptionist’s desk. Probably meant for patients who’d just found out they had haemorrhoids, or cancer, or just had a vial of blood extracted. I took a handful and stuffed them in my mouth one by one. I played with the wrappers. Straightened them out as neat as I could, then folded them into squares. Stacked the squares on top of each other. Neatened up the corners so they were all the same size. The Wolf paced back and forth across the reception. If he were real, he’d have worn a track in the vinyl.
‘You’re stalling,’ he said, watching me as he paced.
‘What else am I supposed to be doing?’
‘You could go in that room and stab Cage with a scalpel. It’s on the to do list.’
‘It can stay on there.’
‘Why are you so determined to make Second Solace work?’ he asked. ‘You’re here pretending like you’re one of the community while Sophie’s life is on the line.’
‘I know. I’m working on it.’
‘Are you? You’ve been an honorary citizen of Second Solace for almost four days and you haven’t gotten anywhere. No Noble. No Al-Assad. You can’t even kill a dying man.’
‘You’re starting to sound like Miles or Whyte,’ I said.
He stopped pacing and looked at me.
‘Because you’re starting to sound like Cage,’ he barked. ‘You can’t have it both ways. Either you complete your mission and destroy Second Solace, or you join it and let Sophie die, and Peter, and countless others for that matter. Corser said they have a weapon. He’s confirmed it. Al-Assad has spent months working on the damn thing. Years, maybe. Whatever it is, they’re ready to use it. You already have the blame of one terror incident pinned to your chest. You really want another?’
‘Of course not.’ I snapped.
‘Then go in there and kill Maddox Cage. Kill the damn doctor if you need to. And the receptionist. Then steal a car and go burn Second Solace to the ground.’
‘Whatever happened to you?’ I asked. ‘You used to be so detrimental, always criticising me, taunting me. This isn’t the Wolf I know.’
‘Like you said, James. Why beat the horse when you can feed it a carrot?’
‘I can’t kill Cage,’ I said. ‘Not right now. I can’t draw more attention up here.’
‘Those explosions will have done the damage more than you ever could,’ he said. ‘The cops will be on their way.’
‘Even so, they don’t know I’m here. I can’t confirm that by murdering three people. The lumberjack got a good enough look at my face. He’d ID me in an instant.’
‘Why are you trying to save him?’ he asked. ‘You can’t think he’d do the same to you.’
‘I don’t, but I think Miles and Whyte got this wrong. Just because he’s the leader, they think he’s responsible. I don’t agree with that. I think he’s blinded by the truth. He doesn’t know what’s happening in his own backyard. Whatever Cece’s got planned, he hasn’t got a damn clue.’
‘Corser said he had a weapon.’
‘Lee said he had a deterrent. A defensive measure.’
‘That’s what every country with Nuclear Arms says about theirs. And that doesn’t help the people of Hiroshima none. Nobody builds a bomb without knowing the damage it can do.’
‘Then Cage is a fool,’ I said. ‘But he’s a fool with his heart in the right place. Lee respected him. He believed in him.’
‘Corser threw you in the boot of his car for a day.’
‘Because he had to. Not because he was an arsehole. Lee saved my life, more than once. He has my respect and my trust, which means Cage has it too. I won’t kill him.’
The Wolf raised his hands like a criminal under arrest, then dropped them to his side.
‘And what about Peter?’ he asked. ‘What about your son?’
‘What about him?’ I asked.
‘How is he going to turn out with his mother dead and his father responsible for letting it happen?’
I didn’t say anything, I just bit my lip.
‘What, you don’t like me talking about him?’ the Wolf goaded. ‘Imagine what a fuck up he’ll be after years of getting bullied at school for being your son. He might not even make it that far. He might pick up a knife and fight back. Or maybe he’ll use it on himself.’
‘Shut up.’
‘Why? I’m part of you, remember? I’m only saying what you’re thinking. His life is going to turn to shit, all because James Stone betrayed him and his mother. Take what happened last year out of the equation. Your refusal to kill that man in there is putting your wife, Peter’s mother, in danger. Wherever he is, he’s waiting for her to come back, and if you carry on this way, he’s going to be waiting the rest of his life.’
‘Shut up!’ I shouted.
I leapt to my feet, but the Wolf vanished. Fleeing to the deepest, darkest corners of my brain like the coward he was. I caught sight of the receptionist sat behind her desk, looking at me in shock. I realised I’d said that last part aloud.