Ultimate Sanction Read online

  I thought Jacob had signed our death warrant, but he’d read Delta right, the man laughed. “You have balls of steel.”

  “More like tungsten,” Jacob said. Delta laughed again and the shift in the room went from a war footing to an amicable loathing.

  “Have your men bring the gift to the back of the club,” Delta said returning to his place on the sofa. The women either side poured their long limbs over his bulk. It made me nauseous.

  Jacob flicked me a nod and I rang through to Danny, giving nothing more than the order necessary to move the truck. I sensed his need to ask questions, but Danny knew his role and he stuck to it. Delta waved Jacob to a seat and drinks were provided for him. Lydia and I took up positions either side of his overstuffed chair and watched the men around us. At some point in the career of a killer something happens to their eyes. They go flat, almost dead, as if the weight of the lives they’ve taken steals something of the killer’s soul and drags it with them into the other world.

  I know because I’ve seen it in the mirror. These men had the same look only it went deeper even than mine. They’d seen death in a way I’d never experience, and I wondered which of them cut Clark’s face off.

  “Now I want to meet the man who can give me Boko Haram,” Jacob said.

  Delta’s brown eyes glittered in the fractured light coming from several sources around us. “Of course.”

  Something whispered in my hindbrain. I placed a hand on Jacob’s shoulder but didn’t say anything. He knew though, he could sense it as well. “Wait, General,” Jacob said. “Perhaps we could talk to this person somewhere more private?” He waved an arm around the room. “Is this really the place for us to meet with a man who lives for his Prophet?”

  We needed to reduce the potential for casualties, and we needed to keep our people safe if possible. Less people, less room for error when this went noisy.

  “You make a great many demands,” Delta stated. “Anyone would think you are not who you say you are.”

  Jacob’s body tensed further under my palm. “I think you should be careful, General. There is a limit to what I’m prepared to suffer for this negotiation. I came to you out of respect after seeing how you dealt with the Special Forces team –”

  “And I don’t think you work for the North Koreans, Lance-Corporal Hayes, but I appreciate you showing me the warehouse of weapons you stole from today and the personal delivery.” The general’s eyes flicked to mine. “And did you really think I wouldn’t know you? A thorn in my side indeed, Mister Macalister.”

  We were cornered and we knew it. Only one way out. Lydia and I drew our weapons and opened fire, moving away from Jacob to give him room and to split Delta’s forces. Chaos erupted. Women screamed, tables and their narcotic contents were overturned, chairs thrown, and guns filled the room with noise soon followed by the spray of red up walls and over the floor. The air stank of gunpowder, hot brass, blood and terror. I tuned the screaming out, made sure of each target before I pulled the trigger and my feet operated with the same coordinated instinct as the hand holding my gun.

  “Evac left,” Lydia yelled. “RV point B, held and secure.” She had contact with Brant. The others outside the building would now be fighting to draw the danger away from us.

  I glanced left and saw Lydia backing towards a door, two women behind her. A bullet’s hot trail scorched over my neck, far too close to my jugular. I dove for a sofa before the next one found its home. Another man lay behind the piece of furniture, which now sent fluff up into the air as bullets began smashing it to bits in an attempt to find me. The man’s eyes were already clouding, the huge hole in his forehead evidence of his mortality. One quick look over the top of the sofa and I saw Jacob.

  How he’d done it I didn’t know but he had Delta in a choke hold, gun to his head and he screamed over the noise. “Ceasefire or your general dies!”

  The thwump and snick of rounds began to stop, I turned, sensing something behind me and released two rounds into the centre mass of a man about to plunge a machete into my back. The hot spray of his life smacked my skin, almost burning in its sudden collision.

  “Mac?” Jacob yelled.

  “Here,” I said and rose, trying to keep a three-sixty perspective.

  “To me,” Lydia said.

  The noise of shouting voices, screaming from downstairs and whimpering from the people in our room sounded distant and otherworldly. I walked, keeping my feet close to the floor, around the dead, many taken out by their own side, and picked up another woman, dragging her towards Lydia. Something chimed as the woman moved, the room growing quieter by the moment. Jacob dragged a silent Delta to our sergeant, the gun pressed into the large man’s temple.

  “You will die for this,” Delta said, almost with a soft cooing to his deep voice. “I will skin you.”

  “Yeah, yeah. If you’d left my people alone none of this would have happened, all we wanted was the contact to BH,” Jacob said. “You did this to your people.”

  “Western Imperial –”

  “For fuck’s sake, let it go. The world dumped on you, but you’re so caught up in the hate you can’t move on,” Jacob growled. “I’m Irish, how do you think I feel?”

  I finished pulling the woman off the ground. She turned in one smooth movement, catching me by surprise as did the knife in her hand. It sliced not into me but Jacob’s upper back. He arched and screamed. The gun in his hand moving away from Delta’s temple. She yanked the blade free, turned and I put a bullet into her skull. It exploded all over us, the bone sharp as it struck my skin. I had to blink to clear my eyes of her blood and I could taste the copper burn. Delta turned to attack Jacob. Lydia began firing into the crowd again to keep them back and my gun, already raised, moved the necessary distance to release a round into Delta.

  It clicked empty. I hadn’t counted the rounds properly. I had only changed mags once.

  Delta’s eyes were feral as he lunged to take down Jacob who reeled back against the pain near his spine. I surged between them, fist already swinging, just as a large calibre round shattered the window behind Delta, about 5 metres from our location. It covered those nearest in shards deadly enough to add to the chaos. Another window imploded. My fist connected with Delta’s jaw and his head snapped back, all his attention on Jacob. Delta was younger, bigger and stronger even than me, a fact that my brain screeched even as I delivered a punch into the hard mass of his gut. It wouldn’t be enough to take him down but –

  “Drop,” Jacob bellowed. No thought, my legs folded. Delta’s retaliation against me stopped moving forwards the moment Jacob’s gun ca-cracked over my head. The hollow point rounds made light work of the flesh and bone monster at close range. The huge body crumpled over me, enemy rounds hitting it, trying to find me. The stink of the corpse made bile surge up my throat and I gagged as I struggled to keep Delta’s body between me and the bullets. More large rounds filled the room, taking out random people.

  A white hand grabbed at my arm and yanked hard. Lydia. I rose from under the pile of flesh, changed mags in the process and started firing back into the scattering crowd as we headed for escape.

  “Mac,” Jacob said the word too soft to be good news. I spared him a glance. Blood trailed from his mouth, into the beard. More stained his chest. “I’ve been hit.”

  Lydia was out the door. I turned back to the room, with Delta gone men were running from the attack, heading for the exits. I fired at two of the general’s guards, both going down and backed into Jacob, scanning the room for more targets.

  Jacob almost slumped onto my left shoulder but kept his footing and we moved with care out of the room together. Once through, I slammed it shut and picked up a fallen machete, wedging the door closed.

  “Can you keep moving?” I asked, not taking my eyes off the door. Not looking at Jacob and the blood coming out of him. Not considering the consequences of losing him. Refusing to acknowledge the reality of our situation.

  “Yeah, just,” he growled. �
�Fuck, it hurts, Mac.”

  “Okay, fella. Let’s just get out of here and back among our people,” I said keeping the screaming in my head contained for the moment. I swung around, gave my back to the door and Jacob forced his hand into the belt around my waist, keeping his body behind mine as I took point down the short hallway to the top of the stairs. I could hear screaming behind us, below us, but not in front of us so I assumed Lydia had managed to find a safe way out.

  “Stairs,” I said. “Eyes right and on our six.”

  “Roger that,” Jacob said, squeezing the words out.

  The stairwell on our right went up another layer and down at least two as I peered over the edge. I saw Lydia at the bottom, with Brant.

  “Coming to you,” I yelled over the edge.

  18

  The hard plastic of the hospital chair made my back ache. I listened to the colonel with half an ear as she justified our behaviour to her masters in England. Her plight made me sympathetic, those pricks in London, sat behind their fucking mahogany desks, would never understand what it was like out in the field. Lydia sat on the floor with a computer on her lap and a Bluetooth headset connecting her to someone far away. Danny sat beside me, his wounds long dressed, the white bandage vivid against his black skin. A few of our people were hurt during the skirmish but Jacob had the worst of it.

  “He means a lot to you, doesn’t he?” Danny asked, his voice gentle.

  I rubbed Jacob’s blood off my fingers. It flaked and drifted to the ground, the white tiles of the hospital a disturbing grey under our boots. “Yes,” I said.

  The image came again, one I’d have to learn to live with… of Jacob collapsing into my arms outside the club. Brant and Lydia rushing forwards to help lift him, then releasing more rounds to hold our position as we realised I needed to stop the bleeding before we moved any further. The women flanking our position down on one knee, Lydia holding her assault rifle to cover one-eighty of our perimeter while Brant covered the rest and called in reinforcements. I pulled my shirt off, the t-shirt underneath wet with sweat, and tried to find the largest hole…

  “Mac, what does he mean to you?” Danny asked, dragging me back to the hospital.

  I glanced at my African friend. “Are you sure you want to know?”

  Danny blinked twice before his eyes slid away from me for the first time since I’d met him. “No, Mac. I do not want to know.” He rose from his chair beside me. “I should return to my family. They will be worried.”

  My heart ached. My belly churned. My blood screamed. I would never be welcome in his home again, I could see it in his eyes. Feel it rub against my skin. Taste it in the air we shared.

  “Love is never wrong when it is consenting,” I whispered to his back.

  “It is not our way,” Danny said without turning to look at me.

  Lydia watched me, Brant stopped speaking, both women held still.

  I sighed. I had hidden myself for all my life. My father’s brutality saw to it. The army’s lack of compassion underscored it. My fear compounded it.

  “I am sorry you feel that way, my friend. I shall miss you and the family we have but Jacob is the man I love, and I always will. That cannot be wrong.”

  The tall figure of my friend grew dimmer as he pulled in the shame he felt for me and allowed it to cloud his vibrant world. I could be gay in the DRC but to be gay would be to live on the outside of humanity. I would never be accepted, and I knew my life here was over. If I returned to my job, I would find it gone. If I returned to my home for more than a visit it would be vandalised. Jacob and I could not live together here, and I knew it. I’d abandoned my men when Jacob asked for my help at the museum. There had been not one moment of hesitation for me. Danny found that hard enough to swallow but this was too much.

  “Goodbye, my friend,” he whispered and the tower of strength I’d loved as a brother, strode away from me forever.

  I caught Brant’s eye and watched a single tear roll down her cheek even as she looked away and continued to argue our case. Lydia rose from the ground and gave me a spontaneous hug. “We love you,” she murmured in my ear.

  I managed a throaty chuckle. “Thanks.”

  “Mr Macalister?” asked a uniformed woman. I rose, bones aching in a way that had nothing to do with too many hours on the go and everything to do with fear for the man I loved.

  “Yes.”

  She looked down at her notes. “You are his… brother?” she asked, glancing at the women.

  “Yes, this is my wife,” I pointed to Brant, “and this is his girlfriend.” Brant nearly choked on her tongue, Lydia managed a smile and a wave. “I work in the DRC. This was meant to be a family holiday.”

  The nurse’s eyes did not betray a single thought in her head, she just nodded. “You can see him but keep it quiet and brief.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, following.

  She took me to a ward; the floor was cleaner than the waiting area but the conditions reminiscent of a 1950s British comedy film rather than a modern facility. She opened a white curtain for me, and I saw Jacob for the first time in hours. He looked pale, drawn thin and exhausted but his eyes were open and the moment he saw me, they softened. There were no beeping machines around him, an IV trickled something into his hand, but he didn’t need to breathe with a mask and his pupils gave no signs of morphine.

  I sank onto the edge of the bed and took the hand free of the cannula. “How are you?” I whispered. The night had been long, but they were dishing out breakfast around us, so we had company in the ward.

  He smiled. “Alive. The bullet proved to be easier than the knife wound. The knife nicked a vein, so I lost too much blood but not fast enough to kill me. The bullet must have bounced off something else before entering, it shattered rather than my shoulder joint. A miracle apparently.”

  I stroked his face, longing to press my lips to his, feel his hot breath on my cheek and taste his mouth again. “You passed out in my arms. I thought…”

  I thought he’d died, right after we left the building, I thought he’d died. I screamed in agony. Danny rushed to me as I struggled to stop the bleeding, lifted Jacob, carried him with my help to the truck. We bundled in, raced to the hospital, hot tears, sweat, curses and I remember begging for my lover’s life.

  I shuddered and Jacob’s fingers tightened around my wrist. “Hey, I’m okay. I’m going to be okay. Once the doctor arrives, I’ll be discharged. They stitched me up really well. We can still go and find the scientist.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “No, Jacob. I’m out. I can’t do this. I’m not fast enough anymore. I’m too old, too slow.”

  Jacob tugged on my hand forcing me to meet his eyes. “Every time I’ve gone out there for the last 3 years I wished it was you at my back and not just because I wanted it to be you, but because you have always been the best for me to work with. You are my friend and the only choice in the field.”

  “What went wrong in that room?” I asked him. “How did it go so bad so fast?”

  “To be honest I don’t know,” Jacob said. “I think the general had been sampling his stock a little too much. Or he thought he’d catch us, get the guns from the warehouse as well, and hand us over to BH. I don’t think he ever believed I worked for Room 39. I think we’ve been had, Clark told him I wasn’t in the safe house. Clark knew you were in the museum. We’ve gone about this all wrong and it has cost the lives of too many people. We’ve been chasing shadows.”

  “What haven’t you told us?” I asked him. During the night, the moments I wasn’t reliving Jacob lying in my arms, his body more still than it ever was in sleep, I’d been piecing things together.

  His eyes slid away from mine and the lies wriggled to the surface.

  “Jacob?”

  The courage it took for him to meet my gaze warned me to guard my heart. “I… Clark… Mac, I’m sorry.”

  An out breath, a moment where my eyes closed. “Tell me everything.”

  “I d
idn’t know you’d been targeted by them. Not until you said in the car after our first visit to Delta. Clark offered me a deal. The North Koreans really do want the scientist. They are developing a weapons programme separate to their ballistic missile testing. They want to keep America’s eyes on the nuclear programme while they work on WMDs of another kind. They want this woman because she’s ‘a geneticist of true genius’, Clark’s words, who can shift the plague bacterium to target only those with specific genes and ensure it’s pneumonic rather than bubonic. She works for Porton Down because she’s looking for all of nature’s worst diseases and switching them up with a new level of genetic understanding and manipulation.”

  “What was the deal he offered, Jacob?” I asked, a cold lump of something foul in my guts which spread tendrils to my heart.

  “You,” he whispered. “I didn’t know they’d made you leave and when you told me… I… didn’t know how to… Mac, Syria fucked with my head. I… Thinking straight, making good calls, seeing the full picture, it’s really hard and I just wanted to find you. I didn’t take their money. Clark just offered me the chance to find you, to lead a mission here when he found you. He asked for me to lead the mission and although the Head Shed couldn’t allow that, they did send me. I think… now I realise the bomb went off too soon. You were supposed to be in the building as well. They want you dead too because I think members of SIS are working for Room 39, for the Koreans.”

  “You betrayed your Regiment, your country, because of me?” I asked.

  Tears welled in his eyes at my tone. “Yes. I should have told you.”

  I sat. I heard him breathing. Hard and fast. I no longer had his hand in mine. Would I have done it for him? Would I have betrayed everything to find him if I thought I could save him from something? What lies had Clark told Jacob to make him do this? And there was no way on this wide earth Jacob would sanction losing his team-mates for me.

  “You didn’t know about the bomb?”