Ultimate Sanction Read online

  There hadn’t been time for Jacob and I to continue our conversation, so I still didn’t understand where he was coming from with this job, but my foolishness at least rested easy for the moment.

  Fifteen minutes after the designated time the tall woman from the club walked in and I realised there were times women could be more attractive with their clothes on rather than off. The short and almost transparent dress she’d worn in the club had turned into a cream linen suit, offsetting her rich dark skin tones.

  “Wow,” Lydia murmured.

  “Don’t you have enough trouble with Aria?” Brant muttered.

  Jacob and I exchanged glances not totally in on the comment but catching enough of the drift to understand Brant’s tolerance for the gay community in the army stretched further than most.

  The woman’s eyes focused on me and I found I wanted to take a step back as she stalked towards me.

  Gazelle on the Serengeti, meet lion – try not to get eaten.

  She pointed a long slim and very sharp looking finger at me. “You almost blew my damned cover. Who the fuck are you dick wads?”

  Brant raised an eyebrow but remained quiet. I coughed. “Sorry, but your cover just isn’t good enough to fool everyone.”

  She growled and I swear I lost a layer of skin from her glare alone. “Don’t fucking push your luck, limey.”

  Brant decided to save the rest of my skin. “Colonel Elizabeth Brant, British Military Intelligence – Unit 12. You are?”

  The woman’s eyes swept Brant up and down, for her part, Brant didn’t shift or flinch, she remained relaxed as she leaned back against the bar.

  “Miri, CIA. Working General Delta while trying to keep the fucker out of my panties,” she said, holding out her hand for Brant. “Do the British want him dead? My lot won’t let me kill him, if you do, I’m changing sides.”

  Brant chuckled. “We can always do with good operatives. Let me buy you a drink. I can promise these boys won’t try to get in your pants. They are far more interested in each other’s though I can’t promise to protect you from my young sergeant.”

  Lydia smiled and flashed her big brown eyes at Miri. “Hi.”

  Miri relaxed. “Hi, yourself.”

  “I thought testosterone was more potent than oestrogen?” Jacob muttered to me.

  “Want to share with the group, Lance Corporal Hayes?” Brant asked over her shoulder.

  “Um, no, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am,” he said.

  “Wise choice.” She turned her attention to Miri. “Why have the CIA embedded you with General Delta of all the evil bastards in the world?”

  “You may well ask. My parents were from Rwanda, it means I have the right accent in French and English, and the right skin tone and bone structure. I was born in the US though, shortly after they were taken to safety during the Hutu and Tutsi slaughter. My parents are from both, so they left before the killing started because they were already in danger. When I joined the Agency, they finally had their paws on an asset they could train to monitor the region on the ground. General Delta is dangerous and clever, he deals with the Russians and the Chinese, so – naturally – the CIA wants to know if he’s worth their bother as well. I just want to kill the bastard.”

  We all shared a long look behind Miri’s slumped back as she slugged back a vodka and tonic. “Fuck I’m tired of this shit,” she whispered.

  People who worked for the CIA were never this forthcoming – unless you counted those they’d pissed off like Sam Locke who ended up working for the Regiment and Unit 12.

  “Okay,” Brant said, drawing the word out. “What can you tell us about General Delta?”

  “I’ll give you everything I can, but I want you to promise you’ll end that fucker,” Miri said. There were tears in her eyes and I glanced at Lydia who moved to place a hand on the other woman’s arm.

  “Why don’t we go somewhere private and have a chat? I know what it is like to feel alone in-country,” Lydia said with a level of empathy I didn’t find comfortable.

  Brant’s expression was grim. “I think we need to call it a night, gentlemen. We’ll reconvene at 08:00 for breakfast. Don’t be late.”

  The English women flanked the taller American and whisked her off.

  “Do you think…?” Jacob asked, his face a dark mask.

  “I think, but don’t want to, so let’s not.” I waved at the bartender and ordered two more beers. We sat, shoulders and thighs touching, on barstools and drank in silence for a while considering Miri’s obvious sense of overwhelming grief.

  Nothing in the world would make me consider her weak for breaking in front us, I dreaded to consider what she had endured, but I wondered if she’d broken too deeply to be of use to our mission. I also recognised the cynicism in that thought.

  In the last 3 years I’d softened from the brutal man created by a life in the British Army. Jacob began the process of softening me but leaving the SAS finished it and to be honest it felt good. I liked not thinking about how to kill first and ask questions second. I enjoyed having uninterrupted sleep, apart from the nightmares, and keeping fit within my body’s limited parameters rather than trying to match men 15 years my junior.

  The men, my previous brothers-in-arms, who had died needed their justice, I knew that, but a part of me didn’t want to have to be the one who served that justice and I didn’t want to drag Jacob through it either. I glanced at his face, the coiled coyote still there inside him but at peace for the moment. The more delicate bone structure than mine looked too pronounced, he needed to eat more, and the dark shadows under his eyes spoke of many waking nights over an extended period. He wore a cloak of barely controlled violence and exhaustion so deep he didn’t even recognise it as enervation any longer.

  I placed a hand on his arm. “Hey, we should hit the road and sleep at my place.”

  Jacob blinked with heavy eyes. “Yeah.”

  I frowned. “Or we could rent a room here and just crash?”

  “Yeah. Your place would involve walking and driving,” he said and yawned. “Can we afford this place?”

  “I can,” I told him. Jacob and money were never in the same place at the same time for very long. Whenever we’d been sent on missions together the Head Shed would give me the money, not Jacob. He’d ‘lost’ more than twenty thousand dollars on one mission in Belize of all places. “Come on, we need sleep.”

  “I killed them,” he whispered as I slid off the bar stool. I froze, he stared into the fish tank behind the bar his eyes distant and a long way from the present. Only my presence kept him tethered to the world. I sat again.

  “Where?” I asked, preserving our quiet bubble. The noise of the bar itself and the rest of the hotel faded as our bubble built a thicker skin, holding our secrets safe.

  “Where else? Syria. All the world’s shit happens in Syria. And we weren’t even supposed to be there.” He ran his hand through his short hair and tugged on the beard. “I fucking hate that country. So many dead.”

  “What happened?” I asked. Jacob had killed many, many people. It’s what we did, we were soldiers, licenced killers and trained to know the difference between the enemy and the friendlies but sometimes we made mistakes and I wondered if Jacob had made one and it weighed on his soul too heavily.

  “They sent us into Baghouz,” he said.

  My heart pounded in my ears.

  “Since you left, I’ve been sent into that country more times than I can count. All because of my Arabic and I don’t look English enough to cause a problem.” He glanced at me, his expression haunted. “I don’t look English enough, Mac.”

  He didn’t look Arabic but the soft brown of his hair and eyes, the naturally swarthy skin and fine bone structure did look exotic.

  “I’d seen some sick horrors. I thought I couldn’t see any more. I thought I’d become immune to it, you know?” he asked, as if seeking something I couldn’t give – redemption, understanding, sympathy. Trying to help him now I just nodded. In many
ways, leaving when I did, I’d been saved from at least some of the worst horrors and we weren’t supposed to be in there during the early days of ISIS’s rise and virus-like contamination.

  He continued, looking at me, into me. “I was on point. It was dawn. The town stank of the dead, of sewage, of foul misery. We had to clear a small part of the town that morning, a main residential street and a square which terminated the street. Do a sweep of thirty odd houses and businesses. Every building looked like it had black freckles all over the white, many had holes in their roofs, almost no glass in the windows and several with no doors into the street. We saw no one. Not even a dog or a chicken but they’d have been eaten, I guess. Whenever the shooting stopped the women and children would leave. We’d help corral them into the trucks. They’d go to the internment camps. The black crows. They weren’t women any more, they were crows feeding on the dead, ravens, rooks… After doing a sweep of each house, making certain we weren’t going to be blown up, we were all strung out, sweaty, tense, on the edge – you know?”

  I nodded again, my throat too tight for words. If I’d been there, he would have been behind me. I would have protected him, shielded his mind from what came next.

  “The plaza at the end. A fountain, dry; trees, dead; paving stones smashed; a gibbet rose from the centre. Two bodies hung there. Two naked boys, young men. Women in black watching as four of their coven hung on the feet of the boys to weigh them down, stop them thrashing – who the fuck knows. I yelled a warning, raised my gun. One of the women turned towards me, shouted, ‘They are sodomites, this is justice in Allah’s…’” He stopped and drew in a breath made of dust and bones and blood and bullets.

  “I fired. I kept firing. I shot them all. Nine women were in that plaza killing two gay boys. I killed them, Mac.”

  I sat in silence, absorbing the information, thinking through the implications from a Regiment perspective and then from a humanitarian perspective. I finally considered how Jacob would feel. It took too long.

  Jacob shifted on the stool, threw back the beer and ordered a double whisky. The moment it hit the bar I placed a hand on his arm again and held it down.

  14

  “What you did was a war crime,” I murmured.

  “Yes.” He stared into the liquor, eyes the same colour.

  “And yet you are free.”

  “My men backed me up. Said they were armed. They almost RTUed me, instead they bumped me back to lance corporal. Sometimes I think returning to my unit or leaving the army would have been better.”

  I didn’t want to comment on that, we’d be diverted off the important topic. The one that might bring Jacob back from the edge. “Were the women armed?”

  He shrugged. “Not with assault rifles if that’s what you mean. Or do you count the rope around the boys’ necks? The knives? And yes, they had small calibre weapons among them, but they weren’t raised towards us.”

  “If you were faced with the same decision again what would you do?”

  Jacob folded in on himself and a tear slid down his cheek to vanish into the rough beard. “Christ, Mac…”

  “Tell me.”

  He glanced up at me, warring with himself to meet my gaze, the battle painful to watch. “I would do it again. After what I’ve seen there. After what I’ve experienced. They… they are evil. How can they be like that?”

  I didn’t have an answer. When I’d been in Iraq and the early days of Syria, I’d asked myself the same question, how could so many good people turn on each other? There were no answers for a simple soldier, there was just the job, but sometimes that job was just plain shit.

  I squeezed his arm. “Drink that and I’ll get us our room key from reception.”

  “Mac,” my name sounded like a plea.

  “It’s alright, Jacob. It’s going to be alright.” But as I walked out the bar, I wondered how I could fix this.

  I paid for a room for the night, a good suite with a bath, and returned to the bar. Jacob still sat on the barstool staring into the whisky but didn’t seem to have moved. I approached him with caution, highly trained men on the edge weren’t exactly predictable, and placed a hand on his back. He didn’t even blink.

  “Come on, let’s go to bed,” I said.

  The other customers stared at us as I took his hand in mine and led him through the hotel to the elevators. Even 3 days ago I wouldn’t have done it, I’d have gripped his arm instead, but that man no longer existed. This new Mac held his lover’s hand when comfort was needed. Jacob didn’t speak during the entire journey and remained mute in the suite.

  I must admit I barely glanced at the expensive and roomy interior as I sat Jacob on a white damask chair. The bathroom though warranted a moment of awe. A huge bath, with clawed feet sat in the middle of marble room. Large white towels were everywhere, and it had a separate shower big enough to wash an entire battalion of sweaty grunts.

  While the bath ran hot, I returned to Jacob. He sat with his elbows on his knees, head in his hands, rocking just a little.

  “Hey, let me get you ready for a bath,” I said.

  “I just see them, the boys. If we’d been quicker to reach the plaza they would have lived, would have loved and those women would be alive.”

  “Nothing can change what happened and it will take you many years, if ever, to come to some kind of peace with this, but you will learn to live with the grief. We all learn to live with the grief, or we leave humanity behind and turn into something else. Whether it’s the bottle or the rage, we find ways out. I’m not going to allow that to happen to you.” While I spoke, I unlaced his boots, then pulled his shirt and t-shirt off.

  “I’ve been holding it together for months, but the edges are crumbling, and I don’t know how much longer I can survive,” he whispered.

  I led him once more by the hand into the bathroom. “Take your trousers off, Jacob. We’re having a bath.”

  He blinked. “How can you look at me? I can’t look at myself.”

  “Is that why you grew the beard?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Okay then, we’ll make a decision about that another time. Right now, you need to sleep, so – get your kit off.” I tugged my clothing away from my filthy skin and threw it into the corner of the room, naked and very far from turned on, I helped Jacob step out of his jeans and into the hot water. Behind him now, I drew him down and between my legs, resting his back on my chest. The tub made it easy for us to fit and I took the expensive smelling soap into my large hands. With great care I started to wash his chest, neck, shoulders, arms. Not doing very much, just being with him. Kissing the damp hair sometimes and rubbing my cheek against it. My heart ached for him, it also burned in anger for him. The company commanders were not supposed to send in armed men with women and children still present in places like Baghouz. The Syrian Army should have cleared it, not our boys.

  I soon realised Jacob wept. I let him. I held him and murmured soft words of such tenderness they could have been born in the Arabian deserts of old. The time of mystery and magic. When Babylon thrived and magical carpets swept the sky clean. I loved this tender, broken man with all my heart and soul.

  He turned in the water and clung to me, quaking with the tears wracking his body.

  “Come on, sweet boy,” I whispered as they began to ease. “Come on. We can sleep now.”

  “I’m so sorry, Mac.”

  “I know.”

  “I never wanted to let you down. Everything I did when you left, I did to make you proud even though you weren’t there.”

  Christ, that hurt. “I’ll always be with you now.” The lump in my throat made my usual deep burred voice a bear’s growl of sound. “Let’s go to bed before we fall asleep in the bath.”

  Jacob sat forwards and I rose. He stood but on shaky legs, so I helped him out and dried him off, trying to stroke those corded muscles dry without raising the beast between my thighs. It didn’t work. Patting beads of water off Jacob’s smooth skin proved to
be one of the most stimulating experiences of my life. I traced the scar of a bullet over one hip, another from a blade of some kind, burn marks from an IED that had scarred us both when we’d collided with it in Iraq.

  He didn’t seem immune to my care either and I remembered my earlier need to taste him. My attention drifted south and stayed there, watching his cock swell, just from my presence.

  “You can take whatever you wish from me. If you can still find me… if I haven’t…” Jacob’s words were stuck but I had the feeling I knew what he asked because there were tears on his cheeks again.

  I stroked them away and raised his face to meet mine. “I will always want you.”

  I placed my lips on his, an affectionate gesture rather than passionate. He wrapped his arms around my neck and opened his mouth to deepen our intimacy. The kiss stretched out and his cock pressed against mine. He groaned and fingers tightened in my hair.

  “I need you, Mac,” he murmured when he let me up for air.

  “You have me,” I promised. I took his hand and led him into the bedroom. A vast, queen-sized bed sat in the middle of another marble room. All a bit much for me but I guessed regular soldiers weren’t their usual clients. I’m sure Russians and the Chinese businessmen loved it.

  The nerves of the previous night returned. The thought of making love to a man caused the mental scarring my father had managed to produce to gurgle and fester under the surface of my passion. As I lay Jacob on the bed under me, taking great care of him in the process, the fear grew. It reminded me of magma, bubbling just under the crust of the world, ready to erupt and destroy everything in its path. I hated it but I couldn’t squash it either.

  Jacob’s long thick fingers stroked through my hair. “What’s wrong?” The words were a gentle prod and after his confession about the women in Syria, guilt added to the toxic mixture in my head.

  “I want to make this beautiful for us, but I don’t know how.” The confession burned my tongue.