Blood and Ashes

Chapter 21

Nostalgia made me smile, but it would be a death’s-head image at best. I had on my game face and knew that even my closest friends found the sight perturbing. Rink, who’d shared many search-destroy missions with me, had found it scary, and he was a man who was normally frightened of nothing. When wearing this face I went way beyond even the red zone extolled by my combat instructor, straddling that plane lorded over by the Grim Reaper. It was my killing face.

I welcomed the rictus smile.

As well as the challenge ahead.

The fight with the two men back in Bedford Well had been driven by insecurity, and I realised now that I’d been allowing feelings of fallibility to control me for too long. The injured hand, the wounds in my leg, they’d all been excuses, and those negative concerns had made me feel — maybe even fear — for my mortality. Now there was no room for worrying about my well-being. Killing these men to save the children gave me purpose again.

The months spent recuperating had been a waste of time; all that was really needed was to jump right back on the bucking horse.

It felt good.

I moved smoothly through the woods, a mud-smeared wraith closing in on those who would harm Millie, Beth and Ryan.

Don Griffiths fired a second volley.

One engine died and the sound of doors flying open was followed by shouts of panic. Their return fire filled the woods with a staccato rap.

I hurdled over a fallen tree, kept running.

The second engine revved wildly, tyres spinning on mud, and then there was a loud screech and the impact of metal on metal.

Don’s H amp;K rattled again.

More shouts, and another assault rifle responding in kind.

The bullet-ridden sedan was abandoned in the trail, its front doors wide. Its two occupants had retreated across the road and had taken up hiding places among the trees. They fired blindly at the crest where Don was invisible to them, their rounds churning up leaves and chunks of tree-bark but little else. Don, as instructed, fired and moved, fired and moved, never giving them a location to concentrate upon.

The SUV was still trying to force its way inside the compound, the front wheels bucking and bouncing on the slick log that I’d jammed in the wire, getting nowhere fast. Those inside were too busy to shoot at Don. They could wait, I decided, and moved for the men in the trees.

I was ten feet from the first when Don laid down another volley. I dropped and the rounds cut through the foliage above me. Then, with the cessation, the man returned fire, screaming wordlessly at Don. Mind engaged, he had no idea that death was swooping in on him from behind.

My left hand clasped the man’s jaw, tugged up and back so the bald skull wedged tightly against my shoulder. I didn’t slice the throat. The man could live for too long afterwards. Granted his life would be counted in seconds, but that was enough to fight back. A stray round could kill as easily as a well-aimed one. I jammed the tip of the KA-BAR into the soft flesh under the man’s chin and drove it upwards, brutally sawing the handle back and forth. Making soup of his brain.

There wasn’t even vestigial movement in the man’s limbs as he fell at my feet.

Briefly, I thought about picking up the dropped assault rifle, but discarded the idea. Here in the woods, manoeuvrability was king. The rifle would be an encumbrance.

I dashed away, going almost to my belly as the second skinhead popped up from behind a boulder and fired towards the ridge where Don was hiding. The lack of a response from Don told me that the old man was possibly out of ammunition. Didn’t matter; once this second man was dead, the rules would change. Don would already be moving through the woods to where Millie and the kids were.

Thinking about the children listening to the distant crack of gunfire, I wondered if they were again picturing the bullet that had torn out their stepfather’s chest. For a second a bubble of my own insecurities threatened to pop in my chest. It tasted like bile in my throat and I swallowed it down. I wasn’t going there again. The way to stop the children experiencing further nightmares was to stop these men.

I crept in on the second skinhead. The smell of fear wafted off him in waves: sweat and passed wind. I could almost pity the man.

On the man’s jacket there was a stitched patch, a double lightning-bolt, like those worn by the original Schutzstaffel — Hitler’s Praetorian Guard. He deserved the same lack of mercy as his forebears had shown the thousands murdered in their extermination camps.

Perhaps it was the man’s supercharged nerves that warned him, because as I stepped close the skinhead jerked round, his rifle swinging with him. He pulled on the trigger as he moved and rounds made an arch of destruction through the woods.

At that moment, though, I was finer tuned. I lunged sideways even as I barrelled in, staying just beyond the angle of fire. The skinhead tried to track me, but my KA-BAR cut down and to the side, knocking the muzzle of the gun aside. The back stroke cut clean through his windpipe. Then I reversed the blade and jammed it down behind his left clavicle. Not as clean a kill as the first but equally final.

I kicked the corpse over on to its back, and reached this time for his gun.

Things had moved on.

The SUV had forced through the flimsy barricade and hurtled into the camp. I tracked it with the assault rifle, loosing a short burst. Rounds pockmarked the rear door in an oblique pattern but failed to stop the vehicle. I pulled the trigger again, but the magazine was empty. A quick glance at the dead body showed no sign of extra ammunition, so I simply dropped the useless weapon and raced after the SUV. As I ran the KA-BAR was exchanged for my SIG.

I vaulted through the hole in the gate, kept on running. Two hundred yards ahead the SUV came to a screeching halt and the front doors flew open. Men sprinted in opposite directions, seeking cover in the cabins on both sides of the encampment.

Preserve your bullets, I told myself. No way that I could hit them from here.

Swerving to the right, I jogged along a wooden walkway in front of a semi-collapsed storage shed, mentally figuring my chances and happy to note that I was still confident of taking out both these amateurs.

Overconfidence could kill me as quickly as the past feelings of insecurity, I reminded myself when someone lurched up in the back seat of the SUV. The first bullet shattered the rear window, but the follow-ups were aimed at me.

Bullets whizzed past, blasting holes in the storage shed and tugging at my clothing. Something so hot that it felt like the scorch of a brand laid a line across my left triceps. I knew what it was like to get shot. It was never hot like that; on the contrary it was like the poke of an icy finger. Some primal point in my brain acknowledged how close the round had come to cutting my arm in half, but just shelved it for processing later. My conscious brain screamed at me to move.

I tumbled ungracefully against the wall of the shed as more bullets churned the planks next to my feet. Splinters flew like a shower of needles. I skipped sideways, then threw myself backwards through a void only vaguely recognisable as a window. Glass tinkled around me as I fell on my back inside the shed. Above me rounds stitched a pattern of holes in the wall, causing laser-like strobes of dim light to cut through the shed.

The wooden wall, sick with mould and damp, was no barrier to the high-impact rounds of an assault rifle and it would be seconds before my attacker adjusted trajectory and fired where I’d gone through the window. I rolled away just as new shafts of light jabbed the space I’d vacated.

Coming to my feet, I raced back the way I’d come, doing the opposite to what my attacker expected. The wall behind me was split into flying chunks, and I was relieved that I’d read the man right.

Hunkering in the far corner, listening, I didn’t attempt to fire back. I was rewarded a moment later by the clunk of the SUV’s door being thrown open. I held my breath, so that my exhalations didn’t compete with the stealthy sounds of approach.

Playing possum wasn’t my usual way of dealing with armed men, but in the circumstances it served me well. Let the man think his bullets had cut me to pieces, then when he came and peered inside the window to check on his handiwork I would put a well-placed bullet in his skull.

There was the steady approach of boots in mud and I creased my finger on the trigger of the SIG.

Shadows shifted beyond the broken window.

Any second now.

I slowly exhaled even as I lifted the gun and aimed it at head height.

Then a strangled yell spoiled everything.

Don roaring in rage.

Apparently he wasn’t fully out of bullets after all, because suddenly more strobes flashed through the shed. Boots pounded along the walkway outside as the man I was a second away from killing made for cover further away.

Son of a bitch, I cursed under my breath, the tattooed man had escaped death a second time.