Age of Heroes (20 page)

“Does Arlington still have the cylinders in his possession? That I do not know. He and I have seldom communicated. He is even more of a recluse than I am.

“But if he still has them, and knows he has them, and has chosen to unstopper them...

“Well, Theo, Chase, I leave that with you.

“Perhaps we shall meet again. Perhaps not.

“In the meantime... Good luck.”

The clip ended, freezing on Gottlieb’s face and its look of what might even have been sincere concern.

Then the screen went blank again, and from the computer tower came a sudden frenzy of activity: a stuttering whir, a sudden blast from the cooling fan.
Now
the hard drive was erasing itself.

Outside the house, a police cruiser pulled up. Theo spotted it from the study window. The two officers inside looked at the partway-open gate, then one of them got on the radio. A minute later, both of them clambered out of the car, unclipping the poppers on their sidearm holsters.

By then, Theo and Chase were already skedaddling out of the house via the French windows in the lounge. They raced across the lawn, hurdled the back wall, and were soon lost from sight in the parkland beyond.

SIXTEEN

Xagar District, Somalia

“M
AKE NO MISTAKE
, this is going to be the hardest one yet,” Badenhorst had warned. “The man is no pushover. Don’t underestimate him. He will not go quietly. He will fight back. Don’t fuck it up or he will fuck
you
up.”

So far, however, Roy had seen neither hide nor hair of Daniel ‘Iron Dan’ Munro, the Myrmidons’ next target. It was two days since the bus had dropped them off at the counterinsurgency-force training camp and Badenhorst had waved them goodbye, and in all that time the man in charge of things, Munro, had been notable by his absence. Roy expected at least to see him in the commissary tent, or else bump into him wandering through the compound. Munro was around; everyone said so. But he seemed never to leave the rickety trailer home which sat parked at the northern end of the camp. He hadn’t come out to supervise the orientation of the new arrivals, or greeted them with a speech of welcome. He hadn’t been there for the first day’s backpack hike into the bush, or this morning’s live-fire exercise. He appeared content to let his second-in-command, Lieutenant Alain Dupont, formerly of the French Foreign Legion, run the show. His presence seemed more rumour than fact.

The inhabitants of the camp, Myrmidons aside, were a mix of Somali soldiers and private security contractors – mercenaries – from a range of nations. The ratio of locals to foreigners was four to one, and altogether they totalled in the low hundreds, battalion size. Ostensibly the non-Somalis were there to mentor and tutor the indigenes, preparing them to combat the Islamist extremists who were taking over increasing swathes of the region. Funding for this operation came jointly from the government in Mogadishu and a consortium of businessman backers in the United Arab Emirates who rightly equated a rise in terrorism in Somalia with an increase in pirate attacks on cargo ships passing around the Horn of Africa.

In fact, of course, the non-Somalis were there to engage the enemy just as much as the Somalis and lend some developed-world heft. And the Myrmidons blended in easily among them. They all had military backgrounds. They all had service records that could be, and had been, checked out by the politicians and businesspeople sponsoring the camp. They all, in short, fit the profile of mercenaries, and no one they met had questioned their bona fides even once. They were treated as though they belonged. The more the merrier, seemed to be the philosophy. Come join the fun.

In the middle of the afternoon, when it was almost too hot to breathe and all formal activities were suspended until the sun began to go down, Roy went on a surreptitious recce. He ambled past Munro’s trailer home a couple of times, noting the drawn blinds and the apparent lack of an air-conditioning unit. It must be like an oven in there, a sauna. How could Munro bear it?

He decided to make a third pass. Already he was formulating strategies for the mission. If Munro wouldn’t show his face, then they would just have to compromise – and improvise. They would have to smoke him out of the trailer home somehow. When the bear was in his lair, you didn’t go in to get him; you made him leave and face you in the open, on your turf rather than his.

As he approached the trailer for the third time, looking as though he was just sauntering by, he heard its suspension creak. Munro was moving around in there. Some heavy footfalls.

Then, all at once, the door was flung open.

“Who the fuck are you?”

Roy froze.

The man leaning out from the trailer home was huge and muscular, his bulk emphasised by the narrowness of the doorway. His combat fatigues strained around his upper arms and his thighs. He was unshaven, and appeared not to have showered for days. A beer bottle hung loosely from his fingers.

“I asked you a fucking question,” said Daniel Munro. “I expect a fucking answer.”

“Roy,” said Roy. “Roy Young.”

“Well, Roy, Roy Young, why the hell do you keep tramping to and fro outside? Like some motherfucking sentry?” Munro’s accent was an odd mixture, mostly mid-Atlantic but with strong Scottish-brogue overtones and a hint of something more exotic underneath.

“Getting the lie of the land, that’s all. I’ve only been here a couple of days. When I’m staying somewhere, I like to know the ins and outs of it. Especially the outs. Just in case, you know?”

Munro weighed up the explanation for plausibility. He took a swig of beer.

“Why aren’t you sitting with your feet up somewhere in the shade?” he said. “Stupid time of day to be wandering about. Asking for heatstroke.”

“Mad dogs and Englishmen,” said Roy.

Munro thought about this remark and decided it was amusing. “Heh. Yes. I’ve met enough of your countrymen to know you’re batshit, every last one of you. ‘Barking’, isn’t that what you call it? Like mad dogs. You English run into firefights that any sane soldier would back away from. It’s like you’ve all got a death wish.”

“I guess when you live on a small island, you go a bit stir crazy.”

“That’d explain it. Okay, Roy, Roy Young. You get a pass this time. But stop pissing about around my house.” Munro thumped the trailer home’s plywood side. “I don’t like it. Makes me antsy. Got that?”

A
T SUNDOWN, THE
Myrmidons convened in a quiet corner of the camp, behind the corrugated-iron shed that housed the latrines. The smell there wasn’t too bad, although it was hard to ignore, as were the swarms of flies it attracted.

“Tonight,” said Roy. “We go for it tonight. Midnight.”

“Doesn’t give us much time to prepare,” said Gunnvor Blomgren.

“It’s not about preparation. It’s about catching Munro with his guard down, when he’s least expecting it. I’ve seen the bloke; I had a run-in with him this afternoon. Not only is he built like a brick shithouse, he’s got sharp ears and a suspicious nature. We could leave it a day or so more, but my feeling is the longer we put it off, the more chance there is he might rumble us.”

“How?” said Gavin. “If he never comes out of that crappy old caravan of his?”

“I don’t know how. I just think he will. There’s something about him. I’ve met a few mercs. Even the dumbest of them are savvy, and Munro seems far from dumb.”

“He’s kind of a legend to all the other mercenaries,” said Jeanne. “You should hear them talking about him. He’s got this rep like he’s a goddamn superhero. The Australian guy I was chatting with yesterday...”

Roy felt an obscure pang of jealousy. He had seen Jeanne in conversation with that rugby-shouldered Aussie, who had the eyes and smile of a Hugh Jackman and a lot of the charm too, and who’d touched her on the arm more than once – just a friendly gesture, or so you might think, but such friendly gestures masked deeper intentions. There was nothing between Roy and Jeanne that gave him the right to be resentful if other men were interested in her. He hadn’t even made a move on her yet. Still, he felt a certain possessiveness, and it had been tempting almost beyond endurance to go over and tell the Australian to back off, and force him to if he didn’t of his own accord.

“He was saying how Munro’s been in the security contractor game as long as anyone can remember,” Jeanne continued. “And his thing is he’s not scared of bullets. He never ducks down under fire, just stays standing and returns it. Duncan even said” – that was the Australian’s name, Duncan – “that he once saw Munro take a round in the chest but wasn’t fazed. Almost like he wasn’t hit.”

“Was he wearing a flak vest at the time?” said Sean Wilson.

“He was.”

“There you go, then.”

“But Duncan swears the round struck him here.” Jeanne indicated her sternal notch. “Just above the collar of the vest. That’s the extraordinary thing. It should have turned Munro’s ribcage to oatmeal – should have killed him outright – but didn’t.”

“Ah, you can never tell. When the lead’s flying, no one is paying close attention. It was a ricochet, maybe. Not a direct hit.”

“All the same. Iron Dan. Sounds like he lives up to the nickname.”

“These darn raghead troops are in awe of him,” said Travis Laffoon, who came from Louisiana by way of the 82nd Airborne and a stint at a military correctional facility for insubordinate conduct and petty theft. He had a picture of Jesus tattooed on his right biceps and Satan on his left, and constantly chewed gum as though he was trying to gnaw it into submission. “Like, here’s the Prophet Mohammed” – Laffoon held a hand level with his heart – “and here’s Munro.” He held his other hand level with his nose. “If he started a religion, you can bet they’d give up Muslimism and join his instead.”

“Muslimism?” said Hans Schutkeker. “English is not my first language but I’m pretty sure that is not a word.”

“If I use it, Shitkicker, then it is,” said Laffoon. “You want to take it up with me, be my guest. I’m right here.”

“Shitkicker. Ha, so funny. Because that is a bit like how my surname sounds.”

“Yeah, it’s funny. It’s funny as goddamn hell.”

Roy jumped in before the argument degenerated to blows. Schutkeker and Laffoon were destined not to get along. The snooty German and the rowdy Bible Belter were oil and water – or, indeed, petrol and fire.

“Munro,” he said, “is the mercs’ merc. Badenhorst told us as much during our briefing. If private security contractors had Oscars, Munro’d have a downstairs toilet full of them. He’s awesome, and that’s lovely for him. Hooray. But he’s just a man, and we’ve got a bow and arrow with his name on it. Two sets of bows and arrows, actually. All we have to do is manoeuvre him into a position where our archers can get a clear shot. And here’s how we’re going to go about it...”

A
ND SO, AT
midnight, they sneaked out of their dormitory huts. The sky was all stars, the moon a mere sliver of light balancing on one tip atop a dark far range of hills. The racket of a million cicadas and frogs made stealth almost irrelevant. The crunch of boot soles on gravelly soil and the soft clink of weapons belts paled into insignificance before the noise. You could scarcely hear yourself think.

Nonetheless Roy had advised the utmost caution. There was to be no comms. Hand signals only. Everyone had to stay within sight of at least two other Myrmidons at all times. Anyone who lost visual should retire to a safe point rather than blunder about trying to re-establish contact.

Take no chances
was the motto of the night. If Munro was everything he was cracked up to be, they needed to nail him quickly and with minimum fuss, before he had an opportunity to retaliate.

Roy led a group of the Myrmidons to Munro’s trailer home, fanning out as they approached. The archers took up positions to the right and left of the door, some ten metres away. They were Luis Rojas, from Andalusia, and Tzadok Friedman, an Israeli. Both had studied archery in their youth; Friedman had represented his country at an international level in the sport’s Young Adult division. During their training as Myrmidons, they had practised long and hard with the antique bows provided by Badenhorst. These were things of crude beauty, a far cry from the modern compound bow with its carbon fibre limbs and cradle of cables and pulleys. They were recurved, fashioned from arcs of horn fastened together by bronze collars; their strings were leather thongs. Rojas and Friedman had complained bitterly about them at first, saying they were hard to draw and keep steady. After a week or so familiarising themselves with them, however, both men had to admit, if with some reluctance, that the bows were finely balanced, accurate and surprisingly powerful.

They each went down on one knee and nocked arrows, pulling the strings back to full draw. They aimed at the trailer home door, at right angles to each other, offering a perfect crossfire. The arrows were standard aluminium alloy shafts with 300-grain spines, 125-grain broadhead tips and helical plastic fletchings. Fired correctly, they were sturdy enough to bring down a bull moose.