Ultimate Sanction Page 2

  Our job was to keep them out.

  The prickling turned into a stream of almost unconscious information. I caught the movement of a young man wearing scruffy trainers and a football shirt off to my right, not the kind of kid who went to a museum or had a reason to be in the walled car park. The sense of being watched intensified, so when I reached into my back pocket for my phone, I kept low and close to my vehicle.

  The number on speed dial answered within two rings. “Mac?” asked the heavily accented French African voice.

  “Danny, I’m in the car park, you see anything on CCTV?” I asked.

  “Hang on, I’m in the office.” I heard him moving down the hallway, visualising the long slim limbs moving with his usual grace. “Um, the cameras aren’t showing anything right now.” A roll to the ‘r’ sound in ‘right’ made his accent exotic, almost a purr.

  “Something’s not right.”

  A pause. “Okay, what do you want me to do?”

  He’d learned over the weeks and months we’d worked together that my instincts were honed to vibrate like a fucking tuning fork. “Break out the assault rifles, get the men in full tactical gear, webbing, the lot. I want everyone on point. I’m going to walk through the car park now. I’d appreciate over-watch from the west side of the building.”

  “Give me 2 minutes and I’ll be on the roof,” Danny said, already moving. We kept the assault rifles and other toys locked up but both Danny, who’d served in the French Foreign Legion and myself kept sniper rifles beside our desks and a handgun in the top drawer. It never paid to be lazy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

  Unable to spend more time tying my laces I opened the door to the truck and climbed back in, on the pretext of looking for something. That crawling sensation became stronger and I half expected a shot through my windscreen. I kept slumped down in the seat and continued to keep the observational awareness of my surroundings high.

  My phone rang but I kept eyes on while I answered it. “Yep?”

  “I am in position, Mac. I see you in your rust bucket. Time to move.”

  “You see anything else? Did you check the perimeter?” I asked.

  He huffed. “I know how to do my job, Mac.”

  Duly chastised I said, “I’m going to drive closer, keep a watch on my six, see anything let me know.”

  “Sure thing, but you know the boss doesn’t like you parking in his spot.”

  “Fuck him. Stay on comms. I’m switching to an ear piece now.” I dragged the ear piece and wire from the glove compartment and plugged one into my ear, the other into the phone. “Your one o’clock, Danny. There was movement there earlier.”

  “Roger that.”

  I heard him shift his position a little to accommodate my reference. The engine turned over and duly belched into life. I drove forwards, avoiding the chicane of concrete barriers masquerading as giant plant pots. When I reached the closest parking spot to the building I stopped. My actions would tell a half competent enemy I knew I was being watched but walking the 30 metres to the back door could have resulted in a bullet, so paranoia won over bravado. I’d survived 7 years in the regular army and 15 years in the Regiment for a reason and it wasn’t all down to luck.

  The hardest part was leaving the relative safety of the truck and walking the 5 metres between me and the back door. I also needed enough time to punch in the security code.

  “Can you get one of the others to open the door for me?” I asked down the line to Danny.

  “Already on it. The door should only be open a little, from your position you cannot see it. Come on, Mac. Get your arse into the building, it’s hot up here.”

  “You wanna try it?” I muttered.

  He chuckled. “Didn’t need to, my friend. I made it to work on time.”

  I growled. I was late but the run had been necessary, talking of which, my thighs and calves ached at just the thought of having to cover any distance at speed.

  “Fucking hell,” I cursed. I opened the door to the truck again and pushed one leg out, half expecting to hear or feel a bullet hit something.

  Nothing happened.

  I debussed and closed the door to the truck. The tingle grew so strong I shivered to try and shift the feeling off my back. The phrase ‘I felt someone walk over my grave’ came to mind. Five metres. I only had to cover that much distance. Seven steps. That would see me inside the corridor to the back offices.

  If I ever had to face my execution then I had little doubt it would feel something like this. My heart raced, my palms were slick, and my stomach churned. All these reactions were familiar. I lived with fear in the field and I’d grown up with it every day of my rotten childhood, but the chemical cocktail made it hard to breathe in a calm cycle.

  “If today is your day, Mac, then face it with at least a little dignity.”

  “Said like a true Englishman,” Danny said. I heard the grin in his voice.

  “Fuck you.”

  That just made him chuckle. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, inside the door and it was shut. The light flickered on and I breathed again. No shot rang out. No screams. No violence. I’d say I felt like a fool, but I didn’t. I felt like an operative who knew how to do his bloody job.

  “I’m inside, Danny. I want the team assembled in the entrance to the front gallery,” I said.

  “On it, out.”

  The line went dead. I needed to get our comms unit in my ear so I could speak with the rest of the team. The back stairs were more comfortable for me than the staff elevator, so I worked the lactic acid build up in my thighs a bit more by sprinting up three flights. I strode into the office I shared with Danny, peered out of the window at the back of the building and checked the perimeter myself.

  Nothing. Yet still that prickle chased itself over my back. I keyed in the code to the arms store next to the office and removed my Heckler and Koch MP5 and took a sidearm, the Sig Sauer P226. I grabbed my body armour, a comms unit with throat mic and set it up while on my way down to the impromptu meeting.

  When I arrived, I found my team waiting. “Anything?” I asked Danny.

  “Rachael just called, she says the CCTV is down,” Danny stated, voice and face serious.

  I nodded my acknowledgement of his words. “Looks like it’s going to be a busy morning, gentlemen. I suggest we take our positions. We’ve done the training; we’ve faced tough odds in the last few months, so this isn’t our first dust up. Remember, you are professionals. They are not.”

  “We don’t know who, they are,” said Kol.

  “Does it matter?” I asked.

  In the early days I’d made mistakes with recruitment, the different tribal allegiances making life more complicated and then there were the different religious groups as well. Nothing in Africa seemed to be a straight line, including the fought over borders.

  Kol’s face twisted and he shrugged. As a new member of the team he still needed combat experience and I wondered if I’d chosen wisely. His finger played with the safety mechanism on the SA80A2 most of the team carried.

  “Any questions from any of you?” I asked.

  “Do we call in reinforcements now or when we have contact?” asked Kol.

  “On contact. Danny will make the call. Where are my medical officers?” I asked, knowing who they were but nodding at them when two hands went up. “Full kit in the right places?”

  “Yes, boss,” they answered together.

  I winced. I hated being called boss. Being the only white face in the building made me stand out at the best of times, never a good thing for a soldier, and it made me feel like a colonial prick most of the time. Danny had laughed when I confessed to my dislike of the term. Apparently not all white men were bad, he’d reassured me and winked.

  “Move out,” I ordered.

  3

  “Incoming!” I bellowed, ducking down behind the concrete barricade. The stonework of Kinshasa’s new museum shattered under the impact of the RPG showering those of us who
fought tooth and claw to protect its contents.

  “Fuck me,” I muttered, spitting dust out of my mouth.

  I’d opened it wide to prevent my eardrums from bursting at the moment of impact. The DRC might not be everybody’s dream retirement but a life in the Regiment made much of the world too tame. This however, this was over the fucking top.

  The impact seemed to shock the raiders, so we took advantage. “Return fire,” I ordered. Each of my men proved their mettle by rising over the barricades and releasing controlled bursts at the enemy across the small plaza from their SA80A2 personal support weapon and the constant rat-rat bright muzzle flashes of the two Minimi light machine guns. The clink of brass hitting the hot tarmac and the smell of heated metal and gunpowder made the violence seem all too familiar.

  In the 30 minutes since contact began, I’d changed magazines three times in the MP5. I had four mags left in my vest and we faced an army. It wasn’t huge but they had more than twelve men on their team. Mounted on the back of a Land Rover being used as a technical, an M2 .50 calibre barked incessantly, but the operatives didn’t seem to know what they were doing, it was going through belts far too quickly. Its noise though, that hurt more than my ears. I repeated the shake of my head to dispel the wrong smells and sights in my brain. This wasn’t the desert; this was urban fucking warfare. I needed to get the pricks down off that improvised vehicle, then we could push the rest back once the regular armed police turned up or the fucking army, which is what I’d requested 30 minutes ago.

  At the moment we were pinned down, only able to return fire when the heavy machine gun shut its fucking noise up.

  Under these circumstances we couldn’t win, but we could hold on until reinforcements arrived and that’s what we were going to do, hold on, maintain our position and prevent the bastards from coming in the front.

  A figure, white skin obvious in our surroundings, flashed through my peripheral vision. I paused, tried to locate him but lost the dark clad form in the gun smoke and small fires breaking out among the chaos. His body movements dragged at my memory, but it couldn’t be right, so I discarded the thought before it threatened to overwhelm me far more than the current firefight.

  “Medic!” screamed a man to my left. Two men from my position shifted, one of them the medic, the other his back-up. I’d trained them well and despite the mess, pride swelled inside me. These were good men at my side.

  “RPG reloading, Mac,” shouted Danny, my second.

  “Send him over the bridge if you can,” I shouted back. “I’ve no clear shot.”

  “None of us has,” he yelled back. His dark eyes were wide, but he grinned at me, teeth covered in dust.

  The dark clothed white man sprinted over open ground from my ten o’clock, rounds from the enemy AKs sending up sharp chips of pavement, missing him by whiskers as he continued towards us.

  “Cover him,” I bellowed, standing and spraying bullets until the Heckler and Koch clicked empty. I reloaded with oil slick precision and opened fire again just as the figure dived for the barricade and rolled without effort despite the long rifle in his right hand. He rose, turned, returned to me and took up position.

  “Hello, Mac.”

  Time dropped away.

  “Jacob?” I whispered. I had no time for the emotional reactions that tried to surface.

  He grabbed the front of my vest and yanked me down behind the protection. “Good to see you.”

  “What the fuck?”

  Jacob winked, lined up his Heckler and Koch 417, took a moment to find his target and despite the insanity surrounding him, dispatched the man with the RPG before he could release the rocket. Nothing remained of the man’s face when he dropped behind his comrades. I retrieved my shit from where I’d lost it a few seconds before and managed to gather everything together again despite Jacob being beside me once more in a combat zone.

  When he began picking off the raiders with the more accurate HK417 the enemy soon decided they had more important things to do than die, so they retreated. At least for the moment. In the silence that followed I stared at Jacob.

  A thick dark blond beard covered his face and a deep tan made his amber eyes turn into something otherworldly. A scar, one I’d never seen before, tracked over his left cheek and vanished into the beard and one ear now missed a tip. My guess? Some silly fucker had tried to shoot him and missed. I bet he didn’t get a second chance.

  Jacob looked good though. A thought I worked damned hard to hide even from myself. The black t-shirt and dark jeans hugged the taut, muscular frame. A coiled raptor of a man.

  “Good to see you, Mac,” he said, eyes doing their own inventory.

  “What the ever-loving fuck are you doing here?” I asked. “Did you know I was here?”

  He grinned at me again, making his eyes crinkle in the corners. “We’re in-country looking for some silly fucker and no, I didn’t know for certain you were here. Guess the gods are shining down on me because the riot made returning to the FOB almost impossible.”

  The Regiment had a forward operating base in Kinshasa? I eyed the sniper rifle. “You often run around with that thing in your pocket?”

  Jacob didn’t say anything, but he rose with the ease of youthful knees and offered me his hand. “Come on, I need a drink. Anything to wash away the dust and gunpowder.”

  I took his hand, thick fingers, a rough palm, callouses everywhere and strong. It all registered, along with the spark of skin on skin contact waking more memories than were not comfortable or necessary. He heaved me off the ground and we headed back to the museum.

  “What the hell are you doing here, Mac?” he asked. “Last I heard you were in Spain.”

  Three years ago, I had indeed been in Spain for a brief time. I’d been trying to drink away the pain of leaving the Regiment and leaving behind the one thing that meant more to me than the Regiment.

  “Spain isn’t always the best place to keep busy,” I muttered.

  Jacob touched my arm, drawing me to a halt. “I wrote to you,” he said, unable to hide his tension.

  I couldn’t meet his gaze, though the burden further tightened my shoulders. “Sorry. You’ll understand when it’s time for you to leave. I didn’t want to be a weight around your neck.” I tried a smile to ease the strain between us, forcing myself to meet his amber eyes.

  “You could never be a weight around my neck, Mac.” Those eyes were intense, disturbing in their scrutiny.

  “Mac?” yelled Danny from the doorway to the museum. “We need you in here.”

  I turned back to the building we protected, grateful for the release, and ran up the stairs. “What’s the problem?” I asked.

  “The attack has damaged the electricity network in the building and we’re struggling to keep things stable. We cannot afford a problem.” His French African accent turned his English into a lyrical dance of sound and the dust made his sweaty black skin a strange grey.

  “Shit, we need more bodies on the ground or they’ll break through with the next attack,” I muttered, running my fingers through my dark hair.

  Jacob snorted. “Why are you guarding a museum? Let ‘em in and have at it, everything in here is old stuff anyway.”

  Danny sucked air over his teeth and scowled. I punched Jacob on the arm. “Hey, I’m old and I happen to like preserving old ‘stuff’, which, you uneducated oaf, is important to the cultural history of a tormented but improving country.”

  Jacob’s beautiful eyes widened, and he grinned. “You’re not old and okay, we preserve the old stuff.”

  “We?” I asked.

  “I’m here aren’t I? Set me up with a nest and I’ll make sure the fuckers don’t come back too fast,” he said, pointing at the HK417.

  I studied him in the softer light of the interior of the museum. A vivid streak of something disturbing coloured his expression and I sensed something... off. I didn’t have time to think about it though because the lights flickered overhead. “Shit, we can’t lose the gener
ator.”

  Jacob followed my gaze. “What’s wrong with losing the electric? You’ve enough men to control the perimeter until you call in the cavalry. I’m assuming the DRC has cavalry?”

  “You better not mean that literally,” Danny muttered.

  They sized each other up. I didn’t fancy taking bets on either man; Danny had a vicious streak despite being a family man and it would match Jacob’s attitude. “We can’t lose the electric because we aren’t just protecting old ‘stuff’ as you so elegantly put it.” I turned my attention to Danny, a tough job under the circumstances. “Get hold of Rachael. She can fix just about any problem with this place. It’ll be her saving this pile of stones while we try to keep them out.”

  “What you gonna do with him?” Danny asked nodding towards Jacob.

  “Leave it with me.” I clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, he can be trusted.” Danny huffed but followed orders and began yelling for people to organise themselves to help him defend our building.

  It left me alone with Jacob. I found him studying me again. “You look… peaceful,” he said at last.

  I ignored him. Perhaps I looked peaceful to his eyes, but on the inside his appearance made me raw. I dragged him away from the front doors to the building so we could have a private word. “How many of you are there in-country?” I asked.

  “Why?” Jacob replied.

  “I need help defending this place, that’s why.” I shook my head and tried to assess his state of mind again. Three and a half years, give or take a month, had passed since I’d last seen him and something had changed. The young operator I helped train didn’t exist in those shadowed eyes and hard mouth. “Can you reach your team and request help?”

  “You left me high and dry, Mac, give me a reason why I should,” Jacob said, crossing his arms over his broad chest.

  “Why wouldn’t you? We need to protect this place and the people inside it, that’s the job, the mission, always. Protect and preserve life where we can – or has something changed in the Regiment I don’t know about?”