Authors: Chris Ryan
His Troop by twenty – that put Bald at 220 metres west. The spot where the two measurements collided was a rough sequence of ridges canopied under secondary jungle.
‘This is as far north as the favela goes,’ Falcon said. ‘There’s nowhere else to go.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong, mate.’
‘What? I don’t—’
A
clack-clack
of gunfire erupted at their six.
‘The Messengers.’
‘How they fuck did they gain on us so quick?’ said Gardner.
‘Shortcuts. There’s dozens of ways to get around the favela. On the rooftops, under the ground—’ Falcon paused, trying to control his tremulous voice. ‘They’re going to be here very soon. There’s hundreds of kids in the gang. If they find me, they’ll skin me alive, they’ll—’
‘Yeah, yeah, I get it. They don’t like visitors.’ Gardner flashed a devilish grin. ‘Come on, we’ve still got the run on them.’
‘But where to?’
‘The jungle.’
They dashed across the street. Corrugated-iron sheets, a metre wide, ran diagonally along the square, connecting stacks of second- and third-storey buildings. An Isuzu pickup lay rusting thirty metres from the school gates.
Halfway down the street, Gardner heard a
crack
, split down the middle with a dull
thump
.
The inner cordon.
Sniper.
1110 hours.
Gardner took immediate action, diving behind the pickup for cover. He’d removed himself and Falcon from the line of fire but, now they were pinned down and fucking bollocks on toast. The Isuzu took a volley of 7.62mm abuse from the sniper to the east. This was different, a well-organized attack.
His ears were shredded by the sound of metal tearing through metal. The sniper was shooting up the Isuzu in the hope that a stray bullet would ricochet off the chassis and strike one of them. There wasn’t much chance of that, but just to be sure Gardner pulled Falcon behind the rear wheel section and set himself against the front tyre. The front and back wheels on any vehicle were the best cover, as the engine parts provided a thick bulkhead.
‘What now?’ asked Falcon.
‘Your BOPE mates – where the fuck are they?’
Falcon got on his handheld radio. ‘Twenty minutes.’
‘Shit.’
‘Too long to hold off the Messengers,’ said Falcon, sounding panicky.
‘Have a little faith, Rafa.’
The sniper had to be within three hundred metres because the
crack
and the
thump
were on top of each other, like they shared the same fucking bed. From the angle of entry of the bullets pebbledashing the Isuzu, Gardner knew the sniper had to be east. And he knew he had to take control of the situation. They had two or three minutes, max, till the sniper’s Messenger mates rocked up to the party.
‘Keep your eyes trained on the alley,’ he instructed Falcon, grabbing the Colt Commando by the flat-top receiver and handing over the Bulgarian knock-off AK-47 in return. At medium range the AK was about as accurate as an Internet dating profile. The Colt, on the other hand, could clip the Queen’s nose on a ten-pence piece from three hundred metres.
‘Any Messenger tries it on, you give them the good news.’
‘No, no, no.’ Falcon shook his head. ‘You don’t understand. Roulette can call on hundreds of gangsters. I can’t stop them.’
‘How long now before your pals come to the rescue?’
‘Till BOPE arrives?’ Falcon checked his watch. ‘Fifteen minutes. We can’t hold out for that long.’
Again Gardner sensed that Falcon was in two minds about actually wanting to meet his BOPE mates. The urgency of the situation meant he had to park the thought.
‘Did John never tell you what they taught us in the Regiment?’
Falcon blinked his ignorance.
‘No such thing as can’t, mate. We don’t do failure. Now look sharp.’
A single shot crashed through the rear tyre. Air hissed out of the wheel.
One minute. Two more and you’ll be overrun.
Gardner checked his new toy. Metallic stock, MIL-STD 1913 Picatinny rail with a mounted 4x day optical scope on top. He switched the Commando to semi-automatic on the fire-control notch, clicked open the door on the Isuzu passenger side and crawled into the pickup.
The seats had been ripped out, along with the steering wheel, gearbox and any other removable shit. He slid up to the driver-side door, facing east across the street, keeping his profile low beneath the bodywork. Gardner poked the barrel two inches out the driver’s window, his prosthetic hand locked around the barrel and the stock tucked hard into his right shoulder.
In Baghdad, nailing snipers had been difficult. The wankers putting rounds down were armed irregulars with experience in the Republican Guard and the Iran-Iraq War, and had basic training: displacing after each shot, never using the same location twice. Guys like Juba the sniper, who claimed over a hundred American kills, proved elusive. You needed expert counter-sniper warfare to take them down.
Or if you were a Yank, you just lobbed about four tons of high explosive into the vicinity and let the grandma and kiddies fucking have it too.
Another report. No muzzle flash. He was using a suppressor, Gardner realized. Maybe the sniper wasn’t as dumb as he’d hoped. Probably he had experience of slotting BOPE officers and knew exactly what to do: no need to worry about getting a direct hit on him or Falcon – just isolate them until the Messengers arrived to take care of business.
Two minutes. Almost out of time.
The concrete sparked as a bullet struck the ground in front of the pickup. The shooter was getting dangerously close. He was wise to the fact that Gardner was trying to isolate him.
I see something, Gardner thought. At my three o’clock.
An object glinted on the rooftop of a building. The glimmer came from deep within a mesh of satellite dishes and wires.
Years of being targeted by rooftop shooters meant Gardner was able to recognize the flash instantly, the metal barrel of a long-range rifle. It broke rule number one they taught in sniper school: paint your bloody gun, so it ain’t reflecting the sun.
Gardner exhaled, relaxing his muscles, and gazed down the telescopic sights on the Commando. The magnified image of a gangster’s head. Shaven-headed guy, skin the colour of ground coffee, lying on his stomach, dressed in jeans and a white vest. Gardner could even make out gold rings on his fingers.
Messengers clamoured in his right ear.
‘They’re coming,’ Falcon said, urgent and trembling.
Gardner shut everything out. The gaggle of voices, the rupert’s bitching, the blanketing heat and the sweat drenching his balls. He focused, then unloaded a single round.
The sniper’s head exploded like a pumpkin, blood and chunks of skull and tissue splashing on to the rooftop. His body rolled onto its side, the exposed lower jaw facing the sky. The sniper’s gnashers were lacquered in blood. The sun drenched the rooftop, making the blood sparkle.
Fucking take it, Gardner thought, debussing from the Isuzu. His feet had barely touched the ground when, through his peripheral vision, he glimpsed five figures at the mouth of the street, a hundred metres away.
Four of them, he was certain, were Messengers, because they wielded guns: state-of-the-art PP-2000 sub-machine-guns. Where the hell did they acquire those weapons? he briefly wondered. The thought was cut in half by Falcon discharging a three-round burst from the AK-47. Two rounds smacked into a Messenger. His grey tracksuit bottoms reddened and his mates retreated, leaving him to try and plug the hole in his mangled cock.
The third struck a man several metres to the right of the Messenger. He was middle-aged and sported a tuft of hair white as the linen shirt he wore. The bullet entered the small of his back, and the guy flopped on to his belly, spilling the contents of a plastic bag he was carrying: pack of cigarettes, loaf of bread, lemons and parsley.
‘Holy shit, Rafa. You fucking whacked a civvie.’
‘Shit,’ Falcon said, the AK-47 limp in his hand. ‘I thought he was – it looked like he had a gun. I just thought—’ His voice suddenly hardened. ‘Fuck this cunt. It’s his stupid fault. What the fuck is he doing out in the street anyway? Doesn’t he know there’s a war on? Fuck him.’
Bottle rockets screeched overhead.
‘Fireworks. My unit’s nearly here.’
‘How long?’
‘Five minutes.’
Gardner made a beeline for the school, Falcon tailing. Shake this wave of Messengers, he told himself, and you’ll be free to reach Bald. He was more certain than ever that John had been able to escape the gang, and the last thing he wanted to do was lead a horde of the fuckers to his location. Once BOPE showed, he’d peel away and continue his mission.
A bullet struck to his left, and a voice squealed.
Falcon.
There was shit all over the concrete. His left ankle was doused in blood. The Messengers were trying their luck, braving the street. Gardner turned around, gave them four rounds from the Colt and, throwing an arm around Falcon’s shoulder, helped him to hop on his good foot the final fifty metres to the school. Gardner was running on fumes, drawing on every grain of energy.
They were upon the school. The building cast a soot-coloured shadow over them. The temperature sagged from flame-grilled to plain hot. Gardner butted the padlock with the Colt stock. The lock was crude and the chain came apart with one clean blow. They went on through, Falcon yelping with every step.
‘Hang on little longer.’
Gardner gave a boot to the middle section of the door. An internal locking mechanism held the door in place, but the frame shuddered.
‘Hurry, Jesus,’ Falcon moaned.
A second kick. This time the door swung open. Gardner withdrew his support arm from Falcon, the BOPE rupert flaking out two metres inside the school on the lino floor. Spinning around to put a final burst down on the Messengers, Gardner counted ten kids, five of them armed with PP-2000s, the others with older pistols and revolvers.
He flicked the selector anti-clockwise to fully automatic, arcing the Colt horizontally across the thin line of Messengers. Bullets grazed walls, shredded a band of telephone wires. The gangsters ducked behind metre-high piles of bricks at the edges of the street. Gardner discharged eleven rounds, and got a hollow
click-click
. Shit. Out of ammo. He slammed the door shut, just as the Messengers returned fire.
‘Elevate your leg,’ he told Falcon, ‘it’ll stem some of the blood loss.’
Bullets bored into the door. Gardner fished two spare Colt mags from Falcon’s utility belt, slapped one into the mag feed and stuffed the second in the leg pouch on his combats.
Forty rounds of ammo. Gardner shattered a window pane to the right of the door, raking the glass out with the Colt’s barrel and unleashing a burst into the street. Shielded by the bricks, the Messengers were popping off rounds without aiming.
‘Five minutes is up, Rafa. Where the fuck’s BOPE?’
‘Perhaps the smoke and the gunfire are too much.’
‘Sod it. We’ve got to hope they’re on their way.’
But all that stood between the two of them and getting walloped were thirty-six bullets.
1225 hours.
Weiss guessed they’d go easy on him at first and he was right. The guy with the knuckledusters fucked him up a bit with a right uppercut that sent him flying. Cold steel cracked his jawbone so bad it felt like someone had sewn razor blades into his face. Then it was the turn of the tyre-iron guy, who served up a whupping on both his legs, turning them red raw and swollen. All things considered, not so bad. He’d suffered worse. The big pain was saved for later. He expected nothing less.
They slipped a Hessian sack over his head and tore the duster off his back. Then they escorted him through a weave of streets. The sack was dense and Weiss couldn’t see where he was going. They carted him into another house and up a creaking flight of stairs. He listened out for noises, anything that placed him somewhere specific. A TV in the background played the theme tune to
24
. He thought he heard boys shouting.
They dumped him on a chair and bound his hands behind his back with plastic cord. Someone lifted the sack off. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the light, like opening his eyes underwater in a murky swamp. He found himself looking at a broad-shouldered, shredded figure sitting opposite in big round shades, Incredible Hulk T-shirt and sandals. He was sitting backwards on a metal chair and examining one of the syringes from Weiss’s coat.
‘So, you are the one they call the Needle Man.’
‘And since there’s no Xavier,’ Weiss said, ‘that makes you, let me see… Roulette. But fuck it. The name doesn’t matter. You’re still a dead man.’
Roulette laughed in his chest. ‘That’s fucking funny. You know, your name makes a lot of tough guys shit themselves. Me, I don’t give a fuck. When Luis said you were coming here, I could hardly believe my good fortune. Tell me, what’s in this one?’
Weiss screwed up his eyes.