Blood Moon Rising (A Beatrix Rose Thriller Book 2) (15 page)

Chapter Twenty-Seven

W
ake up.”

Faik was not asleep.

There was a window in the cell they used for condemned men. It was small, barred and set high in the wall, but he was able to look out into a small parcel of sky. The city was enduring one of its daily brownouts, and most of the lights in the prison were out. As a result, it looked especially dark. There were clouds, too, oil-coloured clouds that rolled over the lightening sky like a slick. A storm was coming.

Faik opened his eyes. There was a sudden, discordant clatter as the guard dragged a metal mug back and forth across the bars of the cell. The nine other prisoners made no noise. There was no muttering and grumbling. Faik doubted whether any of them had slept, either. The truth of the day that they had dreaded was impressed onto them indelibly. They could not forget it, not even for a moment.

He had been moved from isolation last night. There were ten men in this cell. Faik was lying tight between two of them. There was only just enough space for them all to lie down together, and not enough for it to be possible to negotiate a path to the open cesspit without treading on hands and feet and waking the others. It was irrelevant, really. He opened his eyes now to aches in his body from tiredness and from lying on the bare concrete floor, and his thoughts were sluggish.

“Wake up, you dogs. A big day for you all today.”

Faik closed his eyes again. Perhaps he could wish it away.

“Get back from the door,” one of the guards ordered.

The metal scraped against the stone as the door was pushed back. The prisoners pressed themselves away from it and from the guards who now stepped inside.

“Three of you today,” one of them said. It was Donkey. He paused and turned to exchange a sneering grin with one of his
colleagues
.

He was carrying a cattle prod. He stabbed out with it three times.

“You, you and you.”

Faik was the third.

He struggled to his haunches and then tried to back away.

But there was nowhere to go.

His knees started to shake uncontrollably.

The guards rushed into the small cell. They took the first man by the arms and hauled him outside. The man was cuffed and shackled. He was too stunned to struggle.

The second man, an oil worker who had been arrested at the same time as Faik, was ready for them. He swung a punch at the first man, the blow sinking into the man’s gut, and then he threw
himself
at the other two. There was a crackle of electricity as the cattle prod was rammed into his chest. The voltage dropped him to the floor of the cell just as quickly as if he had been drilled in the head. He was still twitching as the guards pulled him outside and cuffed him.

They came back for Faik. He tried to resist, but he was smaller than they were, and he hadn’t slept or eaten properly for days. He was as weak as a kitten. They tugged him outside and cuffed him. A sack was pulled over his head, and he was manhandled down the corridor. They turned once, twice, and then a door was opened, and fresh morning air kissed his sweating skin.

“Please,” he said. “Please, don’t. I have a sister. Our parents are dead. She needs me.”

“You should have thought of that,” Donkey hissed into his ear.

The arms on either side of him were withdrawn, and unsupported, he fell to his knees.

The sack was removed.

He was in the main yard, the walls topped with coiled razor wire a short distance away from him. There was a crowd of people inside the yard. Several hundred. Prisoners, roused from their sleep to partake in a chastening spectacle. Guards, too. Some of them had cameras. The atmosphere was a strange mixture of the festive and the frightened. The prisoners knew that the condemned men could just as easily be them. The guards knew that, too. It was a chance to bolster their position. They would use the morning’s
display
to reinforce their authority.

Fear made men docile.

Faik stared. In front of the three of them, just a few paces away, was a wooden construction that had not been in place the last time that he had been given his hour of exercise in the yard. It was a raised wooden platform with a thick vertical pillar and a horizontal post forming a cross-braced T. A noose dangled from the post,
turning
gently in the breeze. There was a trapdoor beneath the noose.

As Faik watched, the trapdoor was tested: it suddenly gaped open, slamming up against the underside of the platform, revealing a long drop to the ground below.

The sky overhead was as black as pitch. There was a flicker of light in the distance and then, a second later, a monstrous blare of thunder.

Donkey took him under the arm.

“You first.”

“Please!”

The guard dragged Faik upright and heaved him over to the steps that led up to the gallows.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

T
hey slept in the canteen. Beatrix managed only a few hours, and those were fitful, assailed by her worries and fears: Isabella, the task she had set for herself and the need to complete it before her time ran out. When she eventually
abandoned
the pretence of rest, it was three in the morning. Her body spasmed with pain; it felt like she had an inch of water in her lungs, and she ached with the fatigue. She took a Zomorph, and then when that only dulled the edges of the pain, she took another. She dared not take more.

It all started now.

None of what she was planning was going to be easy, and she needed to be on her game.

Faulkner awoke a little after her. He found her outside, staring into the darkness.

“Still want to do this?” he said.

She nodded. “You know what you’re doing?”

“Yes.”

“As soon as I get him, you need to get down and get the car started. We’ll have a minute or two when they’re working out what’s hit them. It won’t last, though. As soon as someone gets them organised, we’ll be outgunned. We won’t want to be anywhere near there then.”

“I’ve got it.”

“Good.”

“Synchronise watches.” She pulled back her sleeve. “I’ve got four-fifteen.”

Faulkner adjusted his watch accordingly. “Four-fifteen, check.”

“I’ll see you in an hour and three-quarters.”

Beatrix sat in the driver’s seat of the Audi. She was parked five hundred feet away from the entrance to the prison. She dared not wait any closer than that. She watched through her binoculars as activity increased in the yard. Everything was as she remembered it from yesterday: the high fence, the gimcrack walls.

She narrowed her focus. The office block was between her and the prison. The Freelander should have been parked in a side street, out of direct sight of the prison but close enough to be started quickly when they needed it.

She had clipped the walkie-talkie onto her jacket. She thumbed the channel.

“One, Twelve. Comms check.”

There was a crackle of static, and for a moment she doubted that they were going to work.

“Twelve, One,” Faulkner said. “Copy that. I can hear you.”

“What can you see?”

“They’re getting ready. The gallows are up. There’s a small crowd. At least three hundred. Maybe four.”

“The guards?”

“Two in the watchtower with rifles. I can see fifteen in the yard. Eight of them are armed. Automatics and semi-automatics.”

“Anything else I need to know?”

“No. You still sure about this?”

“Just tell me when they bring them out.”

Beatrix had the bullpup F2000 Tactical TR on the seat next to her. She rested her hands on the steering wheel and slowly squeezed it tighter and tighter. This was the worst kind of jerry-rigged plan, thrown together too quickly with too little research. She would never have agreed to it if it had been presented to her. There were so many things that could go wrong.

The sun was rising into the sky, but it was invisible behind the thick blanket of black clouds.

“Twelve, One,” the walkie-talkie crackled. “Here we go. They’re bringing them out.”

She reached down and started the engine. “You ready?”

“On your mark.”

“You better be able to shoot straight, Faulkner. I’m going to need you.” She fed the engine revs and let off the handbrake. The car started towards the prison gates. “Here we go.”

Faulkner was pleased.

Beatrix knew what she was doing.

The unfinished office was an excellent overlook position. He would have liked to run a laser range to gauge things properly, but they hadn’t been able to get the equipment for that, and besides, he was already pretty close to the targets. He worked out a crude firing solution on the watchtower and then on the yard beyond it, and noted the details in the logbook by his side. Satisfied, he glassed the entire area, fixing the landmarks in his mind’s eye.

The rain had started to fall, and it had quickly fallen faster and faster until it was a deluge, sheeting down, a virtual torrent that made sighting much more difficult than it would have been if they had been conducting this operation yesterday.

But that was an excuse, and Faulkner dismissed it. He didn’t need excuses.

The prisoners were arranged in front of the gallows, with armed guards to the rear. They were dressed in orange prison-issue jumpsuits and had been dragged out into the rain to watch three of their number shuffled off this mortal coil. It had been planned as an instructive lesson for them. A reminder of what happened when you went up against the will of the government.

He watched the sentries in the watchtower for a moment. Two of them, both with Zastava M70 rifles, a little miserable from the rain by the looks of things, their attention distracted by the people in the yard behind their tower.

He laid the crosshairs of the rifle on one of the sentries.

His finger rested on the trigger housing.

He gauged the distance again.

Smoke was drifting out of a chimney in the prison’s roof. He used it to judge the wind: two minutes left.

He held the target in the sights, aiming for the centre mass.

He heard Beatrix’s voice over the radio.

“One, Twelve. Fire when ready.”

He waited for another deep roll of thunder, louder than his rifle. It came, rolling over the rooftops, and Faulkner exhaled and
gently
pulled straight back on the trigger. The rifle fired, the 7.62mm
bullet
punching into the sentry just right of centre. He staggered back and slumped down in the corner of the enclosed platform. The second sentry gawked at his fallen colleague, realising, too late, that he would have been better served dropping to the floor himself. Faulkner turned the rifle on him, jacked in a new round, and
hammered
the guard with a second chest shot.

“Twelve, One. Two hits. Both sentries down.”

“Anyone notice?”

“Negative.”

“I’m going in. Give them something to think about when
I get close.”

Faulkner fed a fresh round into his rifle and looked for a new target. He found one, a guard near the gallows, and held him nice and steady in the middle of the sight.

He heard the engine of the Audi as Beatrix roared down the road.

There was no need to mask this shot.

He wanted them to know.

He exhaled a half breath and pulled the trigger.

Slow and smooth.

Straight and steady.

Squeeze.

The rifle bucked against his shoulder, and the boom rang around the neighbourhood. In the scope, Faulkner watched the bullet slam into the chest of the target. He dropped to his knees and then fell to one side, his organs pulped where the bullet had exploded inside him. Faulkner used his thumb and two fingers to jack a fresh round into the chamber and swept the scope around the yard.

Chaos.

The Audi rushed at the gates, gathering pace, the engine
screaming
.

He fed another round into the rifle and sighted again.

The car smashed through the gate.

Beatrix pulled down on the handle and kicked the door open. There was pandemonium outside. One of the guards brought up his rifle and aimed it at her. The rifle cracked, but the shot went wide, missing by a fraction and thudding into one of the watchtower’s wooden struts.

Faulkner’s rifle boomed out again, and the shooter’s head splattered in a pink mist.

Another rifle fired, the shot caroming into the car’s windscreen. It shattered in a bright cascade of glass.

Two guards appeared in the doorway of the main building.
Beatrix
hit the ground and rolled, bringing up the F2000 and squeezing off two
3
-round bursts. The guards tottered as they were drilled, both stumbling back into the building.

She assessed. The yard was full of yellow dust that had been thrown up by her entrance, and there was a clamour of alarms, confused shouts from the prisoners and the panic of the guards. She focussed on the three men in orange prison jumpsuits who were restrained with shackles around their wrists and ankles.

She had anticipated that.

The walkie-talkie crackled. “Two police cars incoming,” Faulkner said. “Half a mile away, coming in fast. You need to be quick.”

“I’ve got it,” she said as she hurried around to the trunk of the Audi.

She took a pair of long-handled bolt cutters from the trunk and ran to the prisoners.

“I’m here to help you,” she called out
in
Arabic.

She had memorised Faik’s face, and she found him quickly. He was dazed and fearful, and he shied away as she reached out and took him by the elbow.

“What do you want?”

“I’m getting you out.”

She could see that she was confusing him: her perfect Arabic, her blonde hair, the fact that she was so obviously a Westerner. His hands were shaking as she slid the teeth of the cutters around the chain that connected the shackles at the ankles and, grunting with effort, closed the handles and sheared through it.

“Help us too!” said one of the others.

“They are killing us!”

Beatrix knew that she didn’t have time, but she couldn’t leave them. The Iraqis would shoot them as soon as they had reinforcements in place. She took the cutters and cleaved through their ankle shackles. It took fifteen seconds that she didn’t have, and when she was done, she was sweating from the effort, and the sirens from the police cars were almost upon them.

One of the guards had crawled behind a collection of oil drums. Beatrix hadn’t seen him. He crouched and took aim with his rifle.

She caught him in the corner of her eye.

Damn it.

The M40 boomed again and the guard was drilled in the chest. He crumpled out of sight.

“Thank you,” Beatrix said.

Faulkner’s voice crackled back to her. “You need to get out of there.”

She had taken her eye off the prisoners for a moment. They scattered. Some of them ran towards the gate, and before Beatrix could do anything to intervene, a guard who had been waiting just outside it swung out of cover and sprayed them with automatic gunfire. One of the prisoners was cut down, crumpling into the dust of the yard.

Beatrix aimed the bullpup and fired.

Her rounds went wide, peppering the concrete post and forcing the guard back into cover.

“Faulkner . . .”

The rifle boomed.

“Got him.”

Faik watched in abject terror. He ran away from her and the gate, instinctively sprinting for cover in the only place he knew he would find it.

He ran back inside the prison.

“Faik!”

Two police cars skidded to a stop outside the gate.

“They’re here.”

“He’s gone inside,” she called back.

“Rose . . .”

“I’ve got to go and get him.”

“It’s too late. Get out.”

“I’m going after him.”