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  ULTIMATE SANCTION

  SHADOW OPS: BRAVO

  First Published in Great Britain 2019 by Mirador Publishing

  Copyright © 2019 by Sarah Luddington

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission of the publishers or author. Excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  First edition: 2019

  Any reference to real names and places are purely fictional and are constructs of the author. Any offence the references produce is unintentional and in no way reflects the reality of any locations or people involved.

  A copy of this work is available through the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-913264-44-4

  Mirador Publishing

  10 Greenbrook Terrace

  Taunton

  Somerset

  UK

  TA1 1UT

  Ultimate Sanction

  Shadow Ops: Bravo

  Sarah Luddington

  To my White Knight

  1

  I woke long before dawn, the sheets a tangled sweaty mess, the humidity of night pressing against my naked flesh because I’d forgotten to switch on the air conditioning again. Though the sweat might well have come from the dreams I didn’t push to remember. Memories were bad enough; I didn’t need to add to them with dreams.

  “Run,” I muttered to the empty walls. I untangled myself and rose, the darkness of Kinshasa never a complete pitch-black, unlike the nights I’d spent in the jungle over the last couple of years.

  Living alone meant I moved easily around the room without tripping over discarded clothes. I wouldn’t class myself as a neat freak but if an item had a home, not putting back in that home wasted time and energy. A habit I would never break after my 23 years in the British Army. The running gear had a home and I found it easily. I dressed in shorts and a vest, pulled on some socks and hunted down my trainers. While I dressed, I figured out which of my runs to tackle before the heat of dawn made running impossible for me.

  “Seven kilometres should do it,” I said, walking through my darkened kitchen. Light from my neighbour’s back porch shone onto a wall of picture frames and one seemed to wink at me. A magpie attraction drew me to look, even though I knew it would be a jackdaw’s beak plucking at my heartstrings again.

  The picture showed me standing next to my corporal, his arm slung over my shoulder. He looks at the camera, in full DPMs, the Disruptive Pattern Material suitable for work in the deserts of Syria. I am looking at him.

  Unable to stop the inevitable pain, I reached up to run a finger over the digital rendition of my friend while trying to ignore the expression the camera caught on my face. “Miss you.”

  I can’t help looking at the younger version of me. The unmitigated longing in my face makes it hard for me to breathe. Flashes of memory. Flashes of seeing Jacob’s long, corded limbs naked in the showers we’d shared, or rooms and tents over the years together, crowd inside my mind and make my heart beat faster.

  The growl coming from my throat is low and dangerous. I force the images back in their box, where they never manage to stay for long, turn away from the wall of pictures and grab the house keys. My only house guest, a huge mongrel dog who came with the property when I bought it, lifts his head as I leave but declines my offer of a run. Hound doesn’t run anywhere if he can avoid it. In fact, the dog doesn’t really do anything other than put his head in my lap if I sit outside in the evening.

  Forgoing the warm up, I opt for a gentle run to start, trying hard to keep my mind blank. By concentrating on each footfall, I gradually chase the ache in my heart away, put the memories back in their rigid containers, and stop thinking about the past or the future. By living in the present there is a safe numbness to my life which brings with it a sense of peace, perhaps even happiness, if you think happiness is no longer wanting something you can’t have in your life.

  The kilometres stacked up as I pounded along well-lit streets in the mega city of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I wove through the urban landscape, the roads quiet, the pavements empty, the air not exactly clean but better than it would be during the heat of the day. Summers here weren’t desert hot, but the humidity could make them feel like hell.

  I never thought I’d miss the deserts of the Middle East and Asia.

  The burn in my muscles weighed heavy for a moment and I forced myself to slow down, having picked up the pace 5km ago. Walking up a hill made sweat slide down my back and another memory took the opportunity to leap out of the dark.

  Unable to keep it pushed away, I stopped and closed my eyes for a moment indulging in the ridiculous fantasy.

  Even after 3 years I could still recall every freckle on Jacob’s face and shoulders. His soft brown eyes, pale but bright, like amber rather than something dark such as mahogany. The brown hair, always cut short, and naturally tanned skin. His hands and forearms I knew just as well, covered in fine hair, thick fingers and rough knuckles. Callouses from the hours spent on the firing range and working out in the gym. Five years we’d worked together in the Special Air Service. He’d come up from the Pathfinders, 12 years my junior and the moment he passed selection I had known I’d be unable to keep him away from my heart.

  Within weeks our commanding officers realised we were a seamless team of two and every deployment found us working side by side. On a training exercise in Saudi Arabia I’d taken a tumble down a dune. The sand, hot and fine, suffocated me as I rolled down from the crest of the hill. I dropped 30 metres, the heat of the sand burning into my face and hands as I tried to stop the roll. We carried full Bergens, webbing, complete with magazines and water rations, belts and body armour. My assault rifle, the trusted L119A2 carbine, smacked me around the face making my tactical helmet slip so the next roll had the gun’s butt hit my head. I had no control. I could hear Jacob scream my name but with a mouth full of sand I didn’t stand a chance of answering, I could hardly breathe. When I hit the bottom the extra 30kg of weight I carried, the dizziness and the heat which left me sucking more sand into my body, made it impossible to move.

  Arabian sand is like golden water. If the gods could find a way to make it look and move like water yet deny all those who needed their grace access to life by creating this mockery, then that’s what we had in the desert. A mockery of water. It covered me. A prickly, miserable sensation of clinging sandpaper.

  “Mac, shit, Mac, you okay?” Jacob’s breathless question made me realise he’d raced down the hill after me.

  “Sergeant, get your fucking arse back up this hill,” barked our captain. The sadist had decided we needed more team discipline so forced us on a 10km forced march through the desert near the camp we were using as our OP. “And, Corporal Hayes, you are docked a week’s pay for disobeying my direct order to remain in formation.”

  I watched Jacob’s eyes flash with the need to give his CO the finger. I croaked, “Don’t,” and managed to lay a hand on his arm.

  Jacob’s expression darkened. “You okay?” He took out his water bottle and helped me sit up. The rest of the team were already doing double time away from our position.

  I took a drink and watched them go. “That man is going to be the death of us,” I muttered once I’d spat the sand out.

  “Fucking rupert.”

  He was a prick, straight out of Sandhurst and must have licked some serious arse to get posted to the SAS so fast. He’d made it through our basic training, just, but the 22nd Regiment didn’t like it when people played politics, so rumours were flying that his position in the team was probationary. We loved to gossip so this man’s status as our CO meant we had little to no respect. A forced march like this in the desert wouldn’t win him
any medals from us.

  “Well, we’re going to be late back, so there’s no point in hurrying now. Might as well take it easy.” I poked Jacob in the chest. “But you shouldn’t have come after me, you prick. You could have broken your neck.”

  Jacob snorted. “Yeah, I’m going to leave you in the sun to bake. Come on, old man. Let’s get you up and make our way back to the OP at a sensible pace.”

  “He’ll dock us another week’s pay.”

  “That’s going to be a problem,” Jacob admitted.

  I looked at him and recognised the blush covering his sunburned cheeks. “What did you do this time?”

  He shrugged. “Might have found myself at a camel race when you went off to Turkey for that meeting with the Head Shed.”

  I sighed the sigh of a thousand martyrs. “Jacob…”

  “Don’t, alright, I know – I have a problem. Sorry.” He actually hung his head.

  I used his younger back and knees to push myself out of the sand. “Fella, you’re a walking disaster area. We’ve had this conversation too many times to count.”

  “I know. Sorry.”

  “You want me to take over your wages again?” I asked. We’d been working on his gambling problem for a year now. I had the feeling it masked something worse, something deeper but I couldn’t get him to talk it through. We’d gone into his bank and made arrangements for an allowance and everything over that he had to gain a signature from me. We’d cancelled the agreement a month ago, clearly that had been a mistake.

  He nodded, thoroughly ashamed of having to be rescued. “Sorry, Mac. I never want to disappoint you.”

  I gripped his shoulder, the strength in him always surprising me considering he stood a good 10cm shorter than me. “You will never disappoint me.” A wave of desire ripped through me, from nowhere, and I almost doubled over with the pain of denial that whipped up to chase it away.

  The frequency of these moments, a sickening combination of lust for him and loathing for myself, left me raw.

  I turned away from the sad puppy eyes. “Come on. Let’s go.” Rough words.

  While we walked through the shifting sand, plodding because with every step we sank into the solid water, I wrestled with the ache in my chest, the need in my groin and the fear in my head. Jacob wanted women. He’d made that clear to me over the 18 months we’d worked together. He took them home, he fucked them, he behaved like every young squaddie since the beginning of wars, but I didn’t.

  I preferred not to think about sex. I didn’t get close to the women in the clubs and bars, or the bases we worked out of all over the world. I liked women. I liked working with them, I liked being friends with them, but I didn’t need or want sex. I wasn’t very good at it and found the whole experience uncomfortable. I understood others gained a great deal of joy from the practice, but it wasn’t for me. I worked. The SAS were my family, my life, my mission. I had nothing else. I wanted nothing else.

  Jacob began to talk, he did that a lot, and I listened to the chatter about something one of the guys on base had told him about SEAL Team 7 and gradually the pain eased.

  I’d become adept at lying to him, to me, and living in a world of denial so deep I’d never see the daylight over the weight of water drowning me on a daily basis.

  “Mac?”

  I logged back into the day, the heat almost felling me as we stopped. “What?”

  “You okay?”

  I smiled at him and reached up to grip the back of his neck, the only gesture I allowed myself despite Jacob constantly rubbing against me or slinging an arm over my shoulders. “Yeah. I’m with you, so I’m bound to be alright.”

  He grinned, his teeth very white in the deepening tan of his face. “I was saying – the girls on base are going to throw a party. We’ve all been invited.”

  The idea filled me with horror, but I’d get to spend the evening shooting the shit with some of the married women and that didn’t sound so bad. The horror part would be watching some young thing throw herself at Jacob. I had visions of being his best man at the wedding, god father to his children and being their single uncle who never met ‘the one’.

  “Yeah, sounds good.”

  “You don’t have to sound quite so enthusiastic,” he said.

  “Come on, we need to keep moving. You never know, we might beat them back.”

  “Unless you plan on whipping my arse to make me move faster that’s never going to happen,” he grumbled.

  The thought of whipping his arse to make him do anything almost made me pass out the blood shifted away from my brain so fast. “Just walk, pest.” I prodded him with the carbine.

  He grinned at me and we fell into step together again, just like always. Life was good when I had Jacob at my shoulder.

  2

  Now at the top of the hill I began running again, either the dawn light produced more sweat or maybe… Perhaps… Tears made my cheeks so wet.

  When I made it home my legs were shaking with the exertion. I’d beasted the last 2km so when I stood in my heavily gated yard and panted like a dog Hound looked at me like I’d gone mad.

  “Yeah, well, one of us needs to be fit,” I told him.

  He lay the long muzzle on his huge paws and sighed at me in answer to my stupidity. He had a point. The dawn now coloured the African sky a pasty yellow as the haze of building traffic created more smog. I stripped off once inside my front door and wandered about naked, avoiding looking at any of the pictures I had up around the house.

  In the shower I moved with difficulty, the muscles stiffening. I stared in surprise at my erection, they didn’t happen often these days, and debated whether to do something with it or not. After the morning run with too many memories to handle I knew where my fantasies would go, so I ignored my cock except for a quick wash and left the shower.

  Being forty-two and an ex-special forces operative meant my body had more than its fair share of aches and pains, but I kept limber and fit, even doing yoga on a regular basis with my neighbour. It helped prevent my joints from locking and I didn’t drink much so I could keep everything under control. Keyword in my life, control. I had ruthless control over everything.

  The only time I’d lost it had been the 6 months after I’d been thrown out of the Regiment. “No, Mac, we don’t think about it.” The sound of my snarling voice startled the grey dove on the tree in my garden and it rose in a woof of feathery noise. A surge of guilt hit me.

  I pulled on a black pair of combats, a navy vest t-shirt and a loose-fitting forest green shirt over the top. I brushed my dark hair back, the grey more obvious now it was longer and brushed my collar at the back. Having shaved, eaten some fruit and toasted bread, and slugged some coffee, I left for work in the scruffier of my two trucks.

  Driving in Kinshasa was a bit like doing the National Lottery with a gun to your head. It had a lot to do with luck. Still, I made it to the national museum in good time. I went through the security gate at the rear of the building, a long and high concrete wall with razor wire at the top and CCTV on the walls pointing in and out of the perimeter. It wasn’t pretty despite the sanctioned artwork, but the general public didn’t see it from the museum.

  I parked in my marked spot. Not too far from the back of the impressive building but just far enough to make sure I didn’t feel important. I noticed the vehicles of my colleagues as I stepped into the now unpleasant heat. Something made my back prickle and years of training made me drop to the ground, as if retying my bootlaces while I scanned my surroundings. Something whispered of blood and bones in the back of my head.

  On the surface I could be in any car park, in any city, in the entire world. The new museum building was the pride of the DRC’s rejuvenation programme. The world looked at Africa and saw nothing but peasants scraping in the dirt, starving and drinking dirty water, and the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo wanted to stop all that. They wanted to be seen as a powerhouse for Africa in the 21st century. So, despite the endless cycle
of Ebola, plague, malaria and who knew what else coming out of the jungle they wanted their showy pieces of bling in the city.

  I didn’t pretend to understand politics. The motivations of governments were a mystery to me and the one time I’d tried to fight against corruption in the British Government I’d been thrown to the dogs and discarded, told not to return to England on pain of imprisonment. Here in the DRC corruption was so rife it just came with the territory and at least they were more honest about it than those I’d tangled with back in Blighty.

  The one big difference between here and home were the warring factions. In Britain we might face the IRA on occasion and the rising tide of Islamist violence, but we didn’t have warlords. We didn’t have child soldiers. We didn’t have murder squads, at least not on the mainland. Here we faced threats in ways that necessitated my employment.

  I headed up the museum’s security teams.

  There were three teams of twelve under my direct command. On rotation because we needed the building protected 24/7. We all did 4 days, 4 nights, 4 days off. I also had a team of reservists to call on if necessary. I kept them trained and disciplined. We weren’t military but since I’d taken over the post, 2 and bit more years previously, we’d become a force to be reckoned with, much to the irritation of the warlords.

  The museum held a secret. Not just the beautiful history of a magical land, but in its basement, there hummed the servers for the government. On those servers every man, woman and child had their details logged and the enemies of the government wanted that information. The smart ones knew wars couldn’t be won just by bullets, not any more. They wanted access to the real intelligence. The facts and figures of daily life in the vast country. They wanted data. Information. The new gold. Though while they were at it, getting the gold stored here would also be a bonus.