Killing for the Company Read online

The goatherd joined them.

  Luke could see his face. He was in his early teens, the dark skin of his cheeks coated with bumfluff. He shouted something at the goats in a reedy voice, and made a clicking sound with his throat, but it seemed to have no effect. The goatherd shrugged, then removed a leather satchel from his shoulder and sat cross-legged on the ground. He rummaged in his satchel and pulled something out. Luke examined it through the sight of his assault rifle. It was an old cassette Walkman. The kid fitted the earphones to his head, pressed a button and continue to rummage in the satchel. This time he pulled out a rolled-up flatbread and started to eat.

  The Regiment men stayed perfectly still. Luke kept the youth’s head firmly in his sights. Now and then a goat strayed into his line of fire, but that was OK, because he knew Finn had the kid covered too.

  A groan from inside the cave. It was Amit, and the sound made Luke’s skin prickle. One of the goats looked up, but the goatherd was lost in the music. Five minutes passed while he finished his meal, unaware of the danger he was in. He licked the fingers of his right hand, removed the Walkman and stood up again. He clicked ineffectually at his goats once more. Then he turned round to peer inside the cave.

  Luke prepared to fire.

  The goatherd sniffed.

  He turned his back on the cave and looked out towards the desert. It was as if he was checking for something. Maybe Luke should nail him now, before he saw them and cried out . . .

  The goatherd looked left and right. Apparently satisfied that he was alone, he crouched down on the ground and raised the hem of his dishdash.

  That’s right, buddy, Luke thought to himself. Have yourself a good shit and then fuck off out of here.

  Luke was thankful for the stench of the animals, as it masked the waft of the kid’s turd. Neither man moved as the goatherd wiped his arse with his left hand, then stood up and allowed the dishdash to fall back down to his ankles. He shouted at the goats again, urging them away from the cave’s entrance, and started wandering off. The goats followed, but after only thirty seconds the goatherd turned and looked back towards the cave.

  Had he seen them? Or was he just checking on the two goats that were straggling?

  Two minutes later the kid was out of sight, the noise and stench of his beasts had disappeared and everything was silent.

  Luke lowered his weapon and moved over to Finn. ‘Remind me not to shake Abdul by the hand if we bump into him again.’

  Finn ignored the comment. ‘There could be more where he came from,’ he said.

  Luke nodded, then looked back into the cave. Should he tell Finn his suspicions about Amit? He decided not. His mate was bordering on insubordination as it was, and feeling mutinous. Give him a whisper of an excuse and he’d plug Amit on the spot. Luke didn’t want that to happen until he knew exactly what he was dealing with.

  He checked the time. 12.28. Five hours till sunset. When darkness came, they’d need to get on to the road and hope their luck held. And in the absence of luck, they’d have to use force.

  He couldn’t really decide if he was looking forward to nightfall, or dreading it.

  21.32 hrs.

  They were ready to go. The cave was pitch-dark, and Luke and Finn operated by means of NV. Each set had an infrared torch which lit up the cave for them but was invisible to Amit and Abu Famir, both in the back of the Toyota. The Iraqi’s frightened eyes stared blindly in the darkness and glinted in the haze of the night vision, whereas Amit’s were covered by the burka headdress that he was wearing again. A fresh saline drip was hanging from the plastic handle above the passenger door, covered with a spare hanging dishdash by way of disguise.

  Amit was shaking feverishly, his wound almost as bad as any Luke had ever seen. The flesh looked like liquidised liver, and the blood had started to congeal around it, crispy in places, thick and wobbly in others. As well as shaking, Amit was talking to himself. Through the burka it was difficult to make out what he was saying, and most of it was in a language Luke didn’t understand anyway. But he caught the name ‘Maya’ more than once, and occasionally a confused reference to Abu Famir; otherwise Amit’s words just sounded like slurred ramblings.

  Luke recced outside. Since the goatherd had gone on his way, three choppers had flown over their position. Now the night sky was mercifully cloudy: no starlight, no moon. The temperature was already dropping and there was a slight wind, which once more brought with it the distant howling of the wild desert animals. If there were any patrol vehicles in the vicinity, Luke couldn’t see them. He returned to the cave, where Finn was standing five metres from the car.

  ‘Ready?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Yeah.’

  Luke paused. ‘Look, mate,’ he said. ‘I know you don’t agree with my decisions, but the one thing that’s going to screw this up is if we’re not singing from the same hymn sheet.’

  Silence. And then Finn asked: ‘What’s the plan?’

  ‘We’ve got eighty miles of main road to cover before we can turn off. I reckon we’re looking at two hours. We only passed one static checkpoint on the way through, and that was about an hour in, so we should reach it about 11.00. Fifty-fifty they’ll just wave us through, but if not we’ll have to use force then floor it to the border. Maybe swap vehicles if we can hijack another one. You still have the crossing we used marked as a waypoint on the GPS?’

  ‘Of course.’ Finn paused. ‘We need a Plan B. If we have to get off the road and take Abu Famir across country by foot, we can’t leave his bum chum to tell anyone what we’re up to or where we’re headed. We’ll have to do him.’

  ‘All right then. Agreed. Keep your weapon at the ready. Let’s move.’

  They climbed into the Toyota, where their carbines were stashed by the front seats, and Luke started the engine. It echoed around the cave as he carefully manoeuvred out into the desert night and back along the dirt track to the road.

  They drove slowly by the light of their NV. They saw no one. After about twenty minutes on undulating ground, the main highway came into view again, vehicles passing at the rate of about one every thirty seconds. Luke pulled into the side of the road. They removed their NV and Luke double-checked his Sig, which now had a black silencer fitted to the barrel. As he manipulated the gun, he spoke to Abu Famir. ‘If anyone stops us, I’ll do the talking. Right?’

  In his rear-view mirror he saw the Iraqi’s spectacles glint in the darkness. ‘No violence,’ he said.

  ‘No fucking talking,’ Luke retorted.

  They pulled out into the main road. Like the previous night, it wasn’t very busy. About one vehicle in twenty was military, but there were sufficient civilian cars for the Toyota to be quite unremarkable.

  Luke kept a steady speed. Sixty klicks an hour. Not too fast, not too slow. As he drove, his mind turned over. He remembered the three heli flypasts while they were in the cave. Was that just a coincidence – a standard military manoeuvre in this time of heightened security? Or were they looking for someone specific? Had word of the firefight in the village sixteen hours earlier reached the authorities? They had to assume it was known that somewhere out there was a vehicle with four occupants, one of them injured. They had to assume that the checkpoint guards had been alerted.

  They’d been travelling along the main road in tense silence for some fifty minutes when Finn reached out and tuned in the car radio. Arabic music filled the car.

  ‘Fuck’s sake, Finn,’ Luke snapped. ‘Turn that shit off.’ He reached out and switched it off himself, ignoring the look Finn gave him.

  Amit groaned in the back. In the mirror Luke could see that his head had slumped and Abu Famir was looking at his burka-clad neighbour with a worried expression. ‘How far until we . . . ?’

  ‘Shut it.’

  There were lights up ahead. The checkpoint. Vehicles in front of them were slowing down.

  A blanket of silence fell over the car, ruffled only by the short, sharp breaths coming from beneath Amit’s headdress. Luke felt for
his handgun and sensed Finn doing the same. He looked ahead. On the other side of the road the barrier was down and a long line of vehicles – eight or nine in total, their headlamps dazzling in the darkness – were queuing behind it. The soldiers on duty surrounded around the frontrunner.

  ‘I’ve got three men on the other side,’ Finn reported. ‘Could be more behind the oncoming headlights.’

  Luke nodded and turned his attention to their side of the road. Here the barrier was pointing upwards, and because they weren’t dazzled by the lights of the oncoming traffic, he was able to count the troops more precisely: four guards were manning their side of the road, but they were talking and laughing.

  There were five cars between them and the checkpoint, spaced about twenty metres apart and all travelling at a respectful crawl. Directly ahead was a chunky old grey Mercedes, one of its brake lights not working. ‘Put your fucking foot down,’ Luke murmured. But none of the cars increased speed. If anything, they slowed down as they approached the checkpoint. It made sense: nobody wanted to attract any more attention to themselves than they needed to, even if they didn’t have enough gear to start a small war stashed in the boot.

  The Merc was just passing through the open barrier when Luke caught the eye of one of the guards. He looked a bit older than the others, and his expression was a little flintier. His AK was hanging diagonally across his body, but he had one hand firmly resting on the handle. He had set himself apart from his three colleagues and was paying more attention to the checkpoint.

  Luke looked away, concentrating on the road and doing what he could to appear unassuming; but his peripheral vision was focused on the guard, who was moving towards the barrier. Luke felt his blood chill. ‘Stand by,’ he muttered to Finn.

  His mate was already wielding his Sig.

  ‘Burn it,’ said Finn, his lips barely moving. ‘Just get through . . .’

  Luke accelerated slightly – not fast enough to make him look suspicious. All the while, his mind was calculating. What if the barrier went down before they reached it? Could he crash through? Probably not: the impact would take out their windscreen at the very least. They’d be blinded by glass fragments . . .

  ‘Luke, if this goes noisy we’ll have these fuckers on our tail from here to . . .’

  ‘Thanks, buddy,’ replied Luke. He trod down a bit more.

  The guard was just making to close the checkpoint when they crossed. In the mirror, Luke saw the barrier slam down and the car behind them come to a halt. The guards swarmed, but now Luke was able to speed up, and the checkpoint soon vanished into the darkness.

  Finn exhaled hard. ‘Jesus. I thought it was all about to go Tora Bora for a minute back then.’

  Luke allowed himself no such expression of relief. In the sky up ahead he could see lights. They were several klicks in the distance and they were circling.

  ‘We’re not out of the woods yet,’ he murmured.

  22.17 hrs. Distance to the border: thirty klicks.

  There was a fit of coughing from the back of the car that morphed into a strangled kind of sound. Amit slumped across the seat, falling on Abu Famir and yanking the drip down from its hanging place. Luke pulled over and opened up the bonnet as cover while Finn opened Amit’s door and pulled him up to a sitting position. He removed the burka. The wounded man’s face was deathly white; his eyes were rolling and an awful smell was coming off his body. Finn reattached the drip and slipped the headdress back on. Then he turned to Luke. ‘Trauma. Massive blood loss. The guy hasn’t got long.’

  ‘If he dies, he dies,’ Luke said flatly. ‘We can dump the body.’ He looked down the road. ‘It can’t be more than ten klicks till we turn off down towards the smugglers’ route. Bit of luck, we’ll be out of this shitty country by . . .’

  He looked up, suddenly aware of a chopper approaching from a couple of klicks away. The two men exchanged a glance.

  ‘Let’s keep moving,’ Finn said.

  ‘Roger that.’

  They took their seats again, and continued down the road.

  22.31 hrs. Distance to the border: twenty-two klicks.

  Finn had his GPS unit on his lap. ‘Two klicks till we turn . . .’

  He stopped.

  ‘What the . . . ?’ Luke groaned.

  Two hundred metres ahead, he could see a line of red brake lights; thirty seconds later they too were part of the queue. Two light-armoured military vehicles were parked up on either side of the road, and Luke counted seven armed Red Berets, three of them standing in the middle of the highway forming a temporary roadblock – newly established since the previous night – while the remaining four were searching each vehicle that passed. Not a cursory glance, either: all the occupants of each car were outside; the bonnets and the boots were raised. And as the Red Berets allowed each searched vehicle through the roadblock, only to repeat the operation on the next car, it became clear that they were stopping everyone.

  ‘What . . . what are you going to . . . ?’ Abu Famir’s voice trailed off.

  Luke and Finn didn’t reply. They just glanced at each other, nodded once and subtly readied their pistols. Luke felt for his carbine.

  Four cars to go before it was their turn to be searched.

  Three.

  From the back came a murmur. Abu Famir had closed his eyes and was muttering as if in prayer. Luke looked at the fuel gauge. Half a tank. Enough to get them across the border again? It would have to be, because once he put his foot on the accelerator, there’d be no time to stop.

  Two cars ahead of them in the queue. Ten metres between them and the nearest guard.

  The Regiment men didn’t need to speak. They knew what they had to do. Luke pulled the hammer back on his suppressed Sig and checked the mirrors. Six cars were waiting behind them: all – so far as he could tell – civilian. Each man scrambled to get his M4 ready, poised down by his leg.

  ‘No violence,’ Abu Famir repeated, but even he sounded unconvinced, as though he knew there was only one way this was going.

  One car.

  The Merc’s occupants – two elderly men – stood obediently by the vehicle while the Red Berets searched it. It took about two minutes, after which the guards nodded to the driver to get back into the car. They were walking towards the Toyota even before the car in front started moving.

  Luke wound down his window. Finn did the same.

  Strike hard, strike fast. It was the only way. If they drove through the roadblock without taking out the guards, they’d be showered from behind by a torrent of AK rounds and they wouldn’t be out of range for 400 metres. Not an option.

  Now the guards were alongside them, one on Luke’s side, one on Finn’s. They bent down at the same time to look into the car. And they never knew what hit them.

  The suppressed Sigs made the dullest, deadest of sounds as Luke and Finn shot each guard once at point-blank range in the face. The rounds entered and exited in a split second, blood spattering the two gunmen as their victims’ faces instantly dissolved into a mash. The guards crumpled to the ground. It happened so silently that the remaining Red Berets didn’t even notice what was going on until Luke and Finn had stepped out of the car and raised their M4s. But by then it was too late.

  The firefight was strangely quiet. Very few shouts from the enemy and none from the other drivers, who didn’t exit their vehicles. Just the hum of car engines and the chugging of the M4s and AKs. Finn fired bursts towards the opposite side of the road while Luke dealt with the two remaining guards on his side. They were standing about twelve metres from his position, readying their weapons at the sound of gunfire. It took him a couple of seconds to down them – single chest shots for each man – before he turned ninety degrees to add his fire to Finn’s. By now Finn had dropped three men, but there were two more standing behind a civilian vehicle, distance twenty-five metres, their weapons resting on the top of the car and ready to fire.

  ‘Go left!’ Luke shouted.

  A spark from one of the enemy
rifles, and a round hit the side of the Toyota, just forward of Finn’s door. Luke kept calm. He lined up his cross hairs with the head of the man who had fired and took the shot quickly. He knew as he squeezed the trigger that his aim was good, and he immediately switched his attention to the last guard. Finn had taken a shot but instead of hitting the final Red Beret, he’d shattered one of the windows of the car they were using as a shield. Another incoming round, inches above Luke’s head. But then he fired, and as he did so he heard a crack from Finn’s rifle at almost the same time. Impossible to say which of them had hit the last man, but one of them had.

  Nobody left the vehicles behind them as Luke and Finn jumped back into the Toyota. Abu Famir’s eyes were wide. ‘No violence . . . I gave you my instructions!’ Luke didn’t answer. He floored the pedal and the car roared away.

  ‘You cannot just kill men like that!’ Abu Famir shouted. ‘I will have you reported . . .’

  Finn looked over the back of his seat and pointed his Sig directly at Abu Famir. ‘If you don’t shut up, I’ll do you too.’

  For once the pomposity seemed knocked out of the old man.

  They sped down the highway for a minute. Luke felt the sticky blood of the guards drying on the skin of his face, but he ignored it and kept one eye on the road, one on the mirror. Nothing chasing them yet. How long before the shooting back there was reported by one of the civilian onlookers? Impossible to say. Minutes, probably.

  ‘Turning in 500 metres,’ Finn said.

  Luke nodded. Once they were off the road, they could get out the NV and drive to their covert border crossing. But when they were 100 metres from the turn-off, it became clear that it wasn’t going to be so easy.

  ‘Vehicles,’ said Finn. ‘They’re offroad – looks like border control.’ He was right. The desert off to the left – which had been all but empty the previous night – was now dotted with headlamps. To make matters worse, another chopper – or perhaps the same one – had turned up. It was hovering over their escape route, only this time it had a searchlight illuminating the road they needed to follow.