Chris Ryan Extreme: Hard Target: Mission One: Redeemer Read online

  Chris Ryan Extreme: Hard Target

  Mission One: Redeemer

  Also by Chris Ryan

  Chris Ryan Extreme: Hard Target

  Mission One: Redeemer

  Mission Two: The Rock

  Mission Three: Die Trying

  Mission Four: Fallout

  Non-fiction

  The One That Got Away

  Chris Ryan’s SAS Fitness Book

  Chris Ryan’s Ultimate Survival Guide

  Fight to Win

  Fiction

  Stand By, Stand By

  Zero Option

  The Kremlin Device

  Tenth Man Down

  Hit List

  The Watchman

  Land of Fire

  Greed

  The Increment

  Blackout

  Ultimate Weapon

  Strike Back

  Firefight

  Who Dares Wins

  The Kill Zone

  Chris Ryan Extreme: Hard Target

  Mission One: Redeemer

  Chris Ryan

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Coronet

  An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  1

  Copyright © Chris Ryan 2010

  The right of Chris Ryan to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9781444708530

  Hodder & Stoughton policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products and made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Contents

  Also by Chris Ryan

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  ‘There was never a good war, or a bad peace.’

  Benjamin Franklin

  1

  Stevenage, UK. 17.00 hours.

  His phone rang.

  Joe Gardner’s phone never rang. When you lived off the grid, people soon forgot you even existed.

  Not many people knew Gardner’s name any more. Few enough that he was curious to know who was reaching out to him. He looked at the screen.

  +00551171674519.

  It was a number he didn’t recognize.

  And a voice he did.

  ‘Mate, you’ve gotta help me,’ someone shouted above a clatter of gunfire. The signal was weak. ‘They’re on my fucking case. Came out of nowhere. Millions of the fuckers. It’s like vintage Baghdad.’

  ‘John? Is that you, mate? You’re breaking up.’

  ‘We’ve called for backup but no one’s arrived yet. Thumbs up bloody arses. You remember the Afghan, don’t you? Now I’m in deep shit, Joe. You’ve gotta help me out.’

  Gardner reached for his fake left hand with his good right. Afghanistan. The IED blowing up in his face. Smoke melting away, an exposed nub where his left hand was supposed to be, blood pumping out like oil from a burst pipe. John Bald it was who’d radioed in for a medevac under enemy fire. Saved Gardner’s life. He owed Bald. Big time.

  ‘Where the fuck are you?’

  A pause for breath.

  ‘John?’

  He remembered the kid next to him. Twenty-one years old, his legs ripped off at the thigh, femur bones jutting out like a couple of split baseball bats. And the pints of blood – as if he’d been washing in a forty-gallon drum topped up with the stuff.

  ‘Barbosa favela. Middle of fucking Rio de Janeiro. My location is my Troop times forty north, your Troop times twenty west from the Christ statue. Get here as soon as you can, Joe.’

  ‘Mate, what’s going—?’

  The line died.

  2

  0722 hours.

  The Cobra Hilton Plaza hotel stood tall over the rotten favelas. The room was located on the twelfth floor and looked out to the south, away from the beaches and towards a metropolis of filth and human shit laid bare.

  ‘I’m telling you, I don’t know shit,’ the guy chained to the radiator, Paulinho Nava, said.

  ‘As you already explained, my friend.’

  ‘Then why the fuck are you doing this?’

  ‘You’re beginning to piss me off.’

  ‘You’re fucking crazy,’ Nava snorted.

  Nestor Weiss pulled back the plunger, allowing the last liquid in the vial to fill into the syringe. Removing the syringe, he expelled any trapped air and gave the needle a tap.

  ‘What’s that?’

  Weiss did not reply.

  ‘When the other guys hear what you’ve done, you’ll pay in blood. Anyone who harms a BOPE officer, they’re marked for death, do you hear? Marked.’ Nava’s face was puffed up. He looked like he was suffering from a million bee stings.

  Weiss was pleased with his earlier handiwork. He didn’t throw many punches these days, but when he did, he could still beat a man real bad.

  He held out the 12.7mm hypodermic needle.

  ‘You’re looking at 100ccs of sulphuric acid. Sure you want to piss me off?’

  ‘Blind me then, you fuck.’

  ‘Oh, but this isn’t going in your eyes.’

  The bravado was gone. Nava’s veins rippled on his neck like tense rope as he tried to inch further and further away from Weiss, pressing himself up against the wall. He kicked out as Weiss came a little nearer.

  ‘Stay away from me!’

  ‘Did they teach you how to survive this in training school, my friend?’

  Nava spat on to the textured silk carpet.

  ‘Did they?’

  Shifting to the left to sidestep Nava’s flailing legs, Weiss knelt down beside him. The man’s head was slumped forward. It was all he could do to fix his eyes on the needle.

  ‘No, I didn’t think so,’ Weiss continued. ‘When it comes to death, everyone’s a first-timer.’

  ‘If this is about money, I have… I can pay you—’

  ‘You know it’s not.’

  ‘Women, then. Or boys. Fucking whatever. Shit, just name it and I’ll get it for you, I swear.’

  ‘None of these things interest me, my friend. The only thing that could keep you alive, you say you do not have.’

  Nava’s face dismantled. He would’ve cried, Weiss thought, if the BOPE commander hadn’t already wrung every tear from his body. Pleading for his miserable life. ‘I told you once – shit, a hundred times –
I don’t know where he is.’

  ‘Then there’s nothing else to talk about.’

  ‘No, no. Please no.’

  Weiss tested the syringe, squeezing a drop of acid on to the carpet. It made a sizzling noise on contact and burned its way through the fabric, all the way down to the floorboard.

  Paulinho Nava, Lieutenant Colonel of the Special Operations Police Battalion, hero of the Siege of Reis favela, thrashed about wildly as he tried to yank the radiator off with his handcuffed arms.

  All told, Weiss had killed more than six hundred men, women and children. Normally the victims seemed to accept death in their last moments, as if they were paralyzed, and Weiss was all-powerful, like a god. He got high off that feeling.

  There’s no such thing as a guy who loves killing, but then there’s no such thing as a smoker who doesn’t want to give up. Weiss still experienced guilt after each kill, still carried in his pocket a five-inch carving of the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe which he rubbed for forgiveness. But killing, he thought, is also more addictive than heroin. Many hitmen, himself included, became aggravated if they did not kill for a while.

  He shanked the needle into Nava’s chest.

  Depressing the plunger, Weiss flooded the heart muscle with corrosive acid. Nava’s head shook violently from side to side. His bronze skin glowed ruby red. He foamed at the mouth. Boiling blood oozed out of every orifice. His nose, eyes, mouth and ears. Nava clenched his jaw and grunted.

  He did what everyone did before they died, and shat his pants.

  Nava stilled. A stream of blood trickled down his ear and on to a heavily tattooed right arm. Grim Reaper on the bicep, Frank Sinatra at the elbow, a 1930s playgirl on the forearm. He seemed to laugh, did the Reaper, as the images coloured red.

  Satisfied this was dead meat, Weiss extracted the syringe, placed the cap on the needle and tucked it into his jacket pocket.

  The first time he’d employed this particular method, Weiss had been curious as to the extent of the damage caused. So he bribed a coroner to prise open the ribcage and reveal the insides. He discovered that there was nothing left. Heart, lungs, kidney, pectoral muscles, collarbone. As if someone had thrown a hand grenade inside the chest cavity.

  Weiss glanced at his shitty digital watch, and remembered it didn’t work. The clock on the wall, however, told him it was eight on a clear-eyed morning. Normally he worked as a contractor, no questions asked, doing business with the Juárez and Los Zetas cartels. They paid well. But today he was on the trail of thirty million dollars. The kind of money that could allow him to retire to the Cocos Islands, off Costa Rica. Drinking tequila on Chatham Beach. Wearing a more expensive watch, perhaps a Cartier, and having the finest pussy in all of Latin America. Weiss was tired of killing.

  You’ve a chase on your hands now, he thought, as he tore off the hygienic gloves and tucked them in the pockets of his single-breasted, mid-calf-length duster coat, black denim. Nodded at Nava’s corpse. Locked the room door and slipped the sign over the door knob. Por favor não incomodar. Do not disturb. Left the hotel and climbed into his rented BMW E90 sedan.

  Have to find him today, Gardner figured. Otherwise it’s too late.

  Well. Time to pay a visit to a man who can help.

  3

  0815 hours.

  The Little Bird’s rotary blades cut up the sky. Sunrise kicking in over Rio and Joe Gardner’s hangover was along for the ride.

  He had a beard that could strike a wet match and a nose that had more breaks in it than an American football game. Tied to a lanyard with his feet resting on the rail, he looked out at the favela two hundred metres below. Thousands of sprawling shanty huts built on top of each other, the huts fixed precariously on a rifle-green hillside, spitting distance from the financial district and high-rise apartments. To the west he could see the statue of Christ the Redeemer. Jesus didn’t seem to give a fuck about the slum next door.

  ‘Barbosa favela,’ said Leon, sitting next to him.

  Sounds like a Brazilian footballer, thought Gardner.

  ‘Not much to look at, I know.’

  ‘I grew up in Moss Side, mate. I’ve seen worse.’

  ‘You think it looks bad from up here, wait till you hit the ground.’

  The Little Bird began its rapid descent, diving sharply into the favela and ducking this way and that, turning on a sixpence. Gardner had ridden in Lynxes and Chinooks and Merlins, but the Navy crabs had no chopper as nippy as this. Now they were a hundred metres off the ground. Gardner clocked a gang of kids racing through the streets below. They were packing AK-47s and firing on an older group who fled east. BOPE had withdrawn from the favela, leaving the warring gangs to slog it out among themselves. Third World kids were getting ready for the Third World War.

  Gardner, on the other hand, was going in half-cocked. Just him and a couple of scarred knuckles for company. His first task on landing at Galeão-Antônio Carlos Jobim International Airport had been to head away from the tourist hubs of the Leblon and Ipanema. Other people ventured south. Gardner had made his way west, to the poverty-ravaged district of Santa Cruz. A thirteen-year-old boy, a street hustler in a Brazil shirt with ‘Robinho’ on the back, said he could get anything for Gardner. For two hundred reals, he agreed to supply him with a black-market Sig Sauer P226. But the café the boy told Gardner to meet at was crawling with mean-looking cops, and anyway the kid never showed.

  Inserting to a hostile environment without a gun, Gardner felt uneasy.

  ‘It’s all kicking off down there,’ he said. ‘Is this the best LZ you could find?’

  ‘You’d better believe it. The gangs are shooting at anyone who moves. There’s rumours that a couple of BOPE officers are cut off from the rest of their unit, and the kids smell blood. The surrounding streets are just too dangerous, amigo.’

  ‘Dangerous for who? You and Mr Pilot here?’

  Leon didn’t answer. Fair play. The Bird was a favour from a mate of a mate, arranged at the last moment. Twenty-four hours earlier Gardner had been sleeping in a Hertfordshire bush. Since leaving 22 SAS he’d lived off the radar, as anonymous as a man could be in a Britain up to its eyeballs in CCTV. As a consequence, he allowed himself only two connections to the outside world, a Barclays cashcard and a mobile phone. The phone was to keep in touch with old Blades. Gardner wasn’t the kind of guy who rang up and talked about his feelings or how his day had been. That wasn’t his style. And so the phone never rang.

  Until yesterday, when Bald had called him out of the blue.

  He saved your life. The frayed nerve endings in his left hand reminded Gardner of the sacrifice Bald had made. So he had emptied his current account. Used the little bread he had to book a one-way ticket to Carnival City. Figured, if nothing else, the weather had to be better than Stevenage.

  He checked his mobile. Two messages. One from his operator, welcoming him to their local network partners. The second from the Brazilian partners themselves. Some waffle in Portuguese. More messages in one day than he’d received in a year.

  ‘This Mr Bald, is he a friend of yours?’ Leon asked.

  ‘Why the fuck do you care?’

  ‘You know, those BOPE guys are fearless. They don’t give a shit. But if they get trapped by the gangs, it’s game over. The gangs skin them alive, amigo.’

  Gardner said nothing, because nothing needed saying.

  The Little Bird hovered fifty metres above the ground. The chopper had more moves than a Soho prossy, but the cramped nature of the favela made venturing any lower too risky. Before boarding his flight Gardner had visited an internet café and studied the Barbosa favela and the surrounding area on Google Earth so he wouldn’t be totally blind on the ground. But it was hard to absorb all the details, as the streets twisted and turned like a bowl of spaghetti. Barbosa favela crammed a quarter of a million people at the bottom of the food chain into an enclave the size of half a dozen Wembley stadiums. Having boned up on his history, Gardner knew that the chaotic assembly ha
d been created when veteran soldiers from the war of independence rocked up in Rio but, instead of being treated like heroes, were banished to the slums.

  Know the feeling, Gardner thought.

  The area immediately below them was obscured by a blanket of arsenic-grey smoke. Gardner could see less than nothing, but he could guess that whatever lurked behind, it wasn’t a fucking tea party. His heart hammered against his breastbone.

  Sweat treacled from Gardner’s brow on to his lips. He tasted salt, and last night’s booze from the hotel bar, where he had hooked up with his number-one drinking buddy: drink. Gardner wiped his face with the sleeve of his T-shirt.

  Leon smiled. ‘Those caipirinhas taste nice, don’t they?’

  ‘Deadly.’

  Gardner rested his feet on the side rail. He tossed a length of a coiled-up 44mm synthetic wire over the side. Then on to his right hand he slipped on a full-fingered abrasion-resistant abseiling glove. It took three attempts before he was able to do the same for his left. Mostly because the skin-tone carbon-fibre fingers didn’t want to flex.

  ‘Can you feel anything in that?’ Leon asked.

  ‘Nothing below the elbow, mate.’

  ‘That’s some real space-age shit.’

  ‘A century ago they used to give blokes like me a hook on a stick. Now I can pick up grapes with this thing.’

  With his palms facing inwards, Gardner locked his elbows and began sliding down over the side of the chopper and directly into the smoke.

  It was like plunging into a big fuck-off barbecue. Fumes flooded his lungs and nostrils. He smelled cordite and burned flesh, and tasted hot metal on his tongue. It was a million degrees in the middle.

  Fuck it, keep roping down, he told himself.

  The drop was just forty-four metres to the ground according to the Little Bird’s on-board altimeter. He wanted to scale down as quickly as possible – being suspended on the rope would leave you exposed to sniper attacks – but he had to use the friction on his gloves to control his descent. Fall too quick and you’re liable to break a leg on impact. He didn’t wrap his feet around the rope, because the leather on his Gore-Tex boots made the rope slippery.