Warlord Read online

  Also by Chris Ryan

  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

  Killing for the Company

  Osama

  Masters of War

  Hunter Killer

  Hellfire

  Deathlist

  Bad Soldier

  Shadow Kill

  Chris Ryan Extreme

  Hard Target

  Night Strike

  Most Wanted

  Silent Kill

  In the Alpha Force Series

  Survival

  Rat-Catcher

  Desert Pursuit

  Hostage

  Red Centre

  Hunted

  Blood Money

  Fault Line

  Black Gold

  Untouchable

  In the Code Red Series

  Flash Flood

  Wildfire

  Outbreak

  Vortex

  Twister

  Battleground

  In the Agent 21 Series

  Agent 21

  Reloaded

  Codebreaker

  The Wire

  Deadfall

  Under Cover

  Endgame

  Warlord

  Chris Ryan

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Coronet

  An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Chris Ryan 2017

  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 9781444783391

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Contents

  Prologue

  WEDNESDAY

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  THURSDAY

  FOUR

  FIVE

  FRIDAY

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  SATURDAY

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  SUNDAY

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  MONDAY

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TUESDAY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  WEDNESDAY

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  Sierra Madre Oriental. Mexico. 2011.

  When Mikey saw the roadblock up ahead, he knew there was going to be trouble.

  Mikey looked like your average stoner kid, fresh of out college. Shoulder-length hair. Wispy beard. Surf shorts and a Motorpsycho T-shirt. Sandals.

  But appearances can be deceptive. Mikey had never smoked a joint or snorted a line. He’d drunk a single bottle of Coors Light on his sixteenth birthday and not touched the stuff since. After this road trip through Mexico, he’d be returning home to take up his place at Virginia Theological Seminary. The first step on his path to the priesthood.

  Mikey’s friends had told him to avoid this part of Mexico. His father too. It was cartel country. Lawless. Violent. Stick to Mexico City, they said. Guanajuato. Playa del Carmen. The safe places. Mikey listened carefully to their warnings, before deciding that he would trust in his faith. In the goodness of his fellow man.

  He had, however, agreed not to travel these roads after dark. Everyone agreed that would be foolish. Even Mikey.

  Now he was beginning to wish he’d listened to what they said about daytime travel too.

  As the bus slowed down, Michael craned his neck to see through the bus windscreen. The roadblock came into clearer view. An articulated lorry, bodywork corroded and tyres burned out, lay across the road at right angles. Big white letters were graffitied across its side. Mikey could make out the word muertos and a huge letter Z. And he could see armed men sitting atop the lorry. For a moment, he wondered if they were army personnel.

  Then he looked around at his fellow travellers.

  They were all male, and all Mexican – Mikey was the only American on the bus. They were clearly poor. Their jeans were torn and their T-shirts grimy and saturated with sweat. Work clothes. One of them, sitting two seats ahead of Mikey, was making the sign of the cross. Another, several seats behind, was muttering to himself and looking at the floor.

  The bus came to a halt, but the engine continued to tick over. A passenger in the rear seat called something out in Spanish to the driver. Mikey, who could speak a little of the language, understood what he had said. ‘Go back, cabrón! Don’t stop! Can’t you see who it is?’

  Too late. Two gunmen were hammering on the entrance door with the butts of their rifles. Mikey felt his bowels go weak. The driver stumbled out of his seat and wrenched the door open. If he thought he would gain some goodwill by being compliant, he was wrong. As the two men barged their way in, one of them struck the butt of his rifle against the driver’s jaw. He collapsed, bleeding from the mouth.

  ‘Okay, pendejos!’ one of the men barked in Spanish. ‘Get out the bus.’

  Nobody moved. Mikey assumed the others were, like him, paralysed by reluctance and terror.

  The men gave it five seconds. Then, without another warning, one of them turned his back on the passengers and pulled the driver up from the dirty floor of the bus. He slammed him face forward against the windscreen. Mikey saw the driver’s head pressed sideways against the glass, his hands palm outwards on either side. The gunman raised his weapon. The barrel was no more than a foot from the driver’s head. He fired. The shocking, deafening report penetrated Mikey to the core. The driver collapsed. His brain matter, like jelly, left a thick goo on the blood-spattered windscreen. The glass had splintered at the point where the round penetrated his head and cracked into the glass. Mikey felt himself retch, and had to cover his hand with his mouth.

  ‘Get out the bus!’ the other gunman repeated.

  This time there was no hesitation. The passengers snapped to their feet and pressed their way out of the bus. Mikey included. Sandwiched between the other passengers, he got a whiff of urine. Someone had wet themselves with fear and Mikey had to try hard to stop himself doing the same. He averted his eyes as he passed the butchered body of the driver and stumbled down the steps of the bus on to the hard-baked ground outside.

  The midday sun was dazzling. The dry heat caught the back of his throat. A heat haze rose from the metal bulk of the graffitied lorry. Beyond it, he saw the mountains of the Sierra Madre, grey and rocky against the piercing blue sky. A few metres from where the bus was parked was a roadside shrine, one of many that Mikey had seen on his journey. This one was in the form of the Virgin Mary, gaudy and brightly coloured, a metre high and housed in a wooden casing with a pitched roof. From the corner of his eye he saw some of his fellow passengers making the sign of the cross. He hurriedly did the same to stop himself standing out. The gunmen lined them up against the side of the bus, shouting several at a time. Mikey couldn’t work out what they were saying. His ears were still ringing from the noise of the gunshot. But through his half-closed eyes he could see one of the men was hanging back maybe ten metres.

  He had the features of a man in early middle age: close-cropped black hair, a pencil-thin moustache and eyebrows that pointed up at the sides, as though he was constantly asking a question. While everyone else’s lips were dried and cracked, his were moist. His eyes were black, and there was a deadness to them that chilled Mikey far more than even the sight of the driver had done. He wore jeans, leather boots and a white vest that showed impressive upper arm muscles. The arms themselves were covered with tattoos. He stepped toward the line of terrified passengers, his own rifle hanging loosely from a strap around his neck. It was obvious, from the way the other gunmen got out of his way, that he was the main guy.

  The man stood two metres in front of the centre of the line. There was a moment’
s silence. Mikey was able to make out the tattoos more clearly. On one arm he saw a grotesque angel of death wearing a red military beret and pointing a gun. Beneath it, in an ornate Gothic font, the text: Z1.

  The man spoke in quiet – almost whispered – Spanish.

  ‘We’re going to play a game,’ he said.

  He turned to the nearest gunman. ‘Choose two of them,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, Z1,’ the gunman replied. He stepped toward the line of passengers, grabbed the two nearest and dragged them so they were standing in front of the roadside shrine. One of them was an older man, perhaps in his sixties, with dark leathery skin and a lean, lined face. The other was much younger – twenty, perhaps, certainly no older than Mikey himself – but not in nearly such good shape as the older man. He had a noticeable double chin, and those parts of his upper arm that were visible below his T-shirt were flabby and without definition.

  ‘The game is called, “Who will be the next hitman?” ’ the man called Z1 announced. He looked around on the ground and found two flinty stones, each about the size of a grapefruit. He gave one to the older man, one to the younger. ‘The rules are very simple,’ he said. ‘You fight in pairs. The one who survives will join us. The one who doesn’t . . . won’t.’

  He looked to the two passengers holding the stones and nodded.

  At first, neither man moved. They stood, three metres apart, and stared at the stones in their hands.

  ‘Fight, pendejos!’ one of the gunmen shouted. Mikey recognised his voice as belonging to the man who had ordered them off the bus, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the two reluctant gladiators. The younger man was trembling, licking his lips and glancing left and right, as if trying to decide whether to run. The older man was still staring at the stone in his hands. He was as still and craggy as the mountains in the distance.

  ‘Come on, man,’ he muttered. ‘I have a family. Children.’

  Z1 gave a harsh bark of laughter. ‘Good!’ he said. ‘So if you don’t put up a proper fight, we can hang them from the nearest bridge with their guts spilling out.’

  The other gunmen laughed.

  Mikey could see there were tears brimming in the older man’s eyes now. He took a tentative step forward and held up the stone so it was level with his shoulder. The younger man stepped backwards. ‘Don’t do it, señor,’ he breathed. ‘We don’t have to fight.’

  ‘Of course we have to fight,’ the older man said. ‘Don’t you understand who these people are?’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry. My family . . .’

  The older man raised the stone a little higher. With a speed that belied his age, he moved on the younger man and cracked the stone down hard on the side of his head. His victim sank to his knees, and there was an involuntary moan from the rest of the passengers. Z1 watched the proceedings with the same dead look in his eyes. The old man looked over his shoulder at him.

  ‘To the death,’ said Z1.

  Mikey averted his eyes after the second blow to the younger man’s head. But he couldn’t close his ears. He heard each of the following three cracks of stone against skull, followed by a horrible silence that could only mean one thing.

  Ten seconds passed. Mikey dared to look up again. He wished he hadn’t. The younger man was sprawled on the ground. His head was a pulp. The ground was stained a dark brown. There were spatters of blood on the statue of the Virgin. The older man was looking in disbelief at the rock in his bloodied hands. Tears were now streaming down his grizzled face.

  Z1 nodded at one of his men, who stepped over to the older man and ushered him at gunpoint toward the roadblock.

  ‘Okay, pendejos,’ Z1 said. ‘Who’s next?’

  All of the passengers, Mikey included, bowed their heads. Z1 walked slowly along the line, looking each man up and down. Bile hit the back of Mikey’s throat. He prayed hard. He tried not to catch Z1’s eye as he inspected each of the travellers. But he found it impossible. He felt giddy when he saw a small smile cross Z1’s lips.

  ‘What have we got here?’ Z1 said. ‘A yanqui?’

  Mikey backed away, but there was only half a metre between him and the bus. Z1 gave an instruction to his men. One of them approached, holding the bloodied stone that the older man had used to kill his victim.

  ‘Hold out your hand, yanqui,’ he said.

  Mikey swallowed hard. Then he shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, in hoarse, stuttering Spanish.

  Z1’s expression did not change. There was a silence.

  ‘You want to go, yanqui?’ he said.

  Mikey drew a deep, steadying breath. He nodded.

  ‘Then go,’ Z1 said. He pointed back along the road down which the bus had travelled. ‘Go back to yanqui country, where you belong.’

  Mikey edged away from him. He glanced back toward the terrified passengers and their tormentors. From the corner of his vision he noticed that already there was a fly buzzing around the head of the dead man. Nobody spoke.

  ‘Them too,’ Mikey said. ‘Let them get back on the bus. Let them leave.’

  Z1 turned to the passengers. ‘Does anybody else want to leave?’ he said. His voice was very quiet, but there was no doubt that everybody heard it.

  None of the passengers responded. They all looked at the ground. It was as if nobody had spoken.

  ‘Only you, yanqui,’ Z1 said. ‘So you should go.’

  Mikey swallowed again. His fervent, silent prayer was being answered. Maybe, if he was fast enough, he could find a member of the Federales. The Federal Police. He’d heard that members of the regular police force were routinely in the pockets of the cartels. The Federales were a breed apart: highly armed, highly trained and desperate to stamp out the cartels. Maybe, if he could alert them, he could stop this awful thing from happening.

  He turned his back on them. The road stretched northwards into the distance, the horizon shaky in the heat haze. He took several hesitant steps away from the others. There was a tingling sensation at the back of his neck. It urged him to start running.

  He had run maybe fifteen metres when he heard the report of the gun. At the same time, a thump at the back of his right knee, as though someone had kicked him there. He fell hard to the ground.

  Seconds later, the pain hit.

  Mikey had never known agony like it. Sharp, jagged pain that pierced his whole leg. He looked toward his knee and was horrified to see blood trying to pool around him, and being sucked up by the dry ground. Everything started to spin. He was aware of movement from where the others were standing. Vaguely, he could make out one of the passengers moving toward him, with Z1 following a couple of metres behind.

  Only when the passenger – a teenage boy – was standing above him did Mikey see that he was holding the bloodied stone. The statue of the Virgin wavered in the heat haze several metres beyond him.

  Mikey tried to say the word ‘please’, but instead he vomited from pain and fear. The kid with the stone swore under his breath, clearly disgusted. But then he looked toward Z1, who was standing grimly at the scene, his hands loosely holding his weapon.

  Mikey knew what was coming. He tried to scramble away, but it was useless: his leg was a heavy weight and the pain was shrieking through him. He tried to speak, to beg the guy not to do it.

  But the kid had no choice.

  He knelt down by Mikey’s side and lifted the stone.

  The first blow cracked against Mikey’s cheekbone. Mikey inhaled sharply, breathing in a lungful of dry dust through his mouth just as a burst of blood and mucus exploded from his nose. The young man muttered a word of apology under his breath. In that pain-racked instant, Mikey thought he understood why he was saying sorry. He had intended to hit Mikey further up the side of his face, at the level of his temple, because then it would be over more quickly.

  Now he rested the stone carefully against Mikey’s temple, before raising it about fifty centimetres and preparing to strike.

  Over the young man’s shoulder, Mikey saw Z1 looking down at him.

  ‘Adiós, yanqui,’ he said.

  They were the last words Mikey ever heard. The young man slammed the stone down against his skull. Somewhere, among the sickening, spinning pain, he felt the bone splinter.