Flight Path: A Wright & Tran Novel (31 page)

Kara saw Dinger move into the first bedroom on the right. The noise of the fighting stopped soon after. Dinger walked back into the hallway and moved to the front door.

Kara called, “Report.”

“Lounge room. Clear. Three down. No kids,” Chaz said.

There was a pause, as they waited for a response from the next in their reporting sequence.

Kara retransmitted, “Dan, report.”

Still no response.

“Eugene?”

No response.

Kara pointed to Dinger and then the open front door. He began to move into the darkness, but stopped at the sound of Dan’s voice, “Sorry Kara, we were being a bit quiet so we could catch the second of the Bali guys. He was hiding under a car. Anyway, we have him now.” As he finished speaking, Kara saw Dinger step back and let Eugene pass. He was carrying one Balinese man under each arm. Each time they wriggled he squeezed them in a way that reminded Kara of someone playing bagpipes. Dan strode in behind his brother. He carried the unconscious form of one of the guests over his shoulder.

“Sammi?” Kara called.

“Tien and I are in the master bedroom. We have five of the girls here. They’re terrified Kara.”

“Okay, Sammi, you stay there. The rest of us, meet in the lounge.

Jacob was sitting on the edge of a futon, bleeding heavily from his nose and ear. Chaz stood next to him holding tissues in place.

Kara surveyed the unconscious bodies on the ground. Derek Swift had sustained at least a broken nose and cheek. She couldn’t see what mess his teeth were in and she didn’t care. Anyway, in comparison to the havoc Chaz had unleashed on the other two, Swift had gotten off easy.

“You okay Chaz?” she asked.

“Never better.”

Toby and Dinger dragged the two unconscious security men into the lounge. The body of Mutt stayed in the hallway.

“We’re missing a kid and we haven’t got much time. Dan, go back to the hide, get the drugs and bring them back here. As soon as we find the kid we’ll take all the girls away, put the drugs in each villa, call the cops and withdraw out the back as they’re coming in the front. All good?”

They all nodded except Jacob. He sluggishly raised his head and looked around, “Kara?”

She knew exactly what she’d missed just as he said it.

“Where the fuck’s Tommo?”

The glass door
s
leading to the lawn were wide open. The little temple lights gave enough illumination to show Tommo wasn’t anywhere in sight.

Kara’s frustration threatened to swamp her thoughts, but she consciously forced her mind to quieten. She looked at Jacob, his ear and nose still bleeding and his face beginning to swell.

“Tien, stay with Jacob, patch him up as best you can. Sammi, can you still hear me?”

Sammi’s voice was clear in her earpiece, “Yep, go ahead.”

“You stay with the rest of the girls. Eugene, secure those two” she said pointing at the Balinese men he still held under each arm, “then join Chaz and search next door. Toby, go with Dinger and take the third villa. Dan, you and me will take the grounds and the last building. We’re looking for a thirty stone man and a scared little girl and I have to hope they’re not together. We have no time for niceties, if the doors are locked, smash them in.”

Tien took the small first aid kit she carried on her belt and began to dress Jacob’s ear.

“You okay here?” Eugene asked when he’d finished binding the hands and feet of the Balinese men with cable ties.

Tien nodded and Eugene left at a run to join Chaz.

As she wiped more blood from Jacob’s cheek, Tien looked at the still unconscious Derek Swift, on the floor to her front.

Jacob followed her gaze. “I know why he faked his suicide,” Jacob said.

“Really?” Tien asked, looking at Jacob with concern.

“When he came in tonight I told him I recognised him off the telly. He liked that. I played to it, telling him that everyone back home thought he was dead. How it had made all the papers in Suffolk and Essex. Made it sound like he was bigger than he was.”

“Let me guess, he loved it?”

“Oh yeah. So I said, how come he’d pretended to die. The room went quiet and Swift looked to Tommo.”

“What for?”

“Permission to tell me I guess. That was the first inkling I had something was wrong.”

“How’d you mean?” Tien asked,

“Well, Tommo said, yeah, you can tell him. He’s gonna be proving he’s one of us soon anyway and if he doesn’t, well then it definitely won’t matter.”

Tien finished securing the dressing to the side of Jacob’s head, then reached out and took his hand.

“I know what he meant now, but at the time the others laughed and I joined in. I had no clue what was going to happen. Swift said-” Jacob’s voice caught. He swallowed hard and took a deep breath. Tien could see a glassiness in his eyes. She squeezed his hand and waited. After another deep breath Jacob tried again.

“Swift said he’d abducted a girl in Ipswich. A schoolgirl, thirteen years old. He’d killed her after a couple of days. That’s what he said. After a couple of days. Didn’t even give her a name. He said it like he was telling an old fishing story and the rest of the men round the table just smiled and nodded and laughed. Then he said he’d dumped her body where he thought it’d never be found, but it was. He spent a few hours trying to figure out if he’d made any mistakes but he couldn’t be sure. The bastard said, you all kn-” again Jacob stopped and checked his emotions. Tien waited.

“He said, you all know what it’s like. Trying to remember if yo…” Jacob’s voice wavered and he closed his eyes. Tien leant her head on his upper arm. He breathed deeply and coughed.

After a minute, he started again, “It doesn’t matter what he said. You don’t need to hear it Tien, but it was disgusting. When they’d all stopped laughing, he said, he couldn’t be sure the police wouldn’t trace her back to him. He was only fifty-fifty if he’d get away with it, so he’d decided to run.”

Jacob leant his head down gently on top of Tien’s. “I asked him if the papers were right, had he taken all the charity money. He said, yeah, but it was alright, it wasn’t like they needed it. They were all going to die anyway.”

Tien straightened up, “He said what?”

“He said the kids didn’t need it, they were all going to die anyway. That was it for me. I’d had enough. I was about to stand up and signal for Toby or Dan or whoever was outside watching to crash the place, but that was when they brought the little girls in. Tommo dragged me forward and said that as the guest I had to choose first and they’d all watch. Then they’d welcome me to their club. It was their way of testing what he called, graduates of the Flight Path. I decided that for what he’d said, even if I only got one good punch in, it was going to be aimed at taking Swift’s head off his shoulders.”

She reached up and gently kissed his cheek, “I’m very proud of everything you’ve done Jacob. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah I’m fine, but thanks for asking.”

“Your head still sore?”

“Yeah, but it’s stopped pounding. Anyway, we can get me checked out before we go home if you want.”

“I’d like that, yes.” She tilted her head and smiled at him, holding his gaze. She felt the intensity of her heart as it pounded and the lightness of her stomach as it flipped cartwheels. She broke into a wide smile and leant her hand against his cheek. He lowered his head towards her and she waited for him to graze his lips against hers but instead he pulled back.

“Sorry,” he said, holding his hand up to his nose, which had decided to start bleeding again.

Tien giggled and raised a new dressing to his nostrils, “Gosh, is that what’s always going to happen?”

“I hope not.”

She kept her hand in place and tilted his head down. As she waited for the bleeding to stop she leant her head to touch his. They stayed like that for a little while, even after the blood had stopped and she had removed the dressing.

She stood up and looked about. “Is there no bin?”

“Probably in the kitchen,” he said.

“There’s a kitchen?”

He pointed over to the recessed gloss-white panel on the far wall. She began to move across the room.

Jacob looked casually to where she was. His eyes were blurry. He blinked and looked again. This time he focussed and recognised the hidden sliding door. A massive dump of adrenaline cleared the fog from his mind and accelerated his body up from the futon. He jumped to his feet, ignoring the renewed pounding in his head and the fresh flow of blood from his nose.

“Tien, stop! No one’s checked the kitchen,” He hurdled over the prone form of Derek Swift.

Tien’s hand was almost touching the surface of the gloss panel, feeling for the catch that she knew had to be there, but she paused at his shout.

Jacob was three steps behind her. She had taken a pace backwards, glancing over her shoulder with a look of concern on her face. The door began to slide open from the other side. Tien turned back around. Jacob smelt the unmistakeable aroma of peppermint.

“Tien!” he called as the door opened. The massive bulk of Tommo was revealed in the darkness of the kitchen.

Jacob leapt forwards and shoved Tien sideways with his shoulder. She careered into the wall as Tommo, his left hand wrapped around the mouth of a terrified little girl, loomed out of the doorway. Jacob felt a blow against his chest but his fury at all that had gone on in the past week, topped with what had just so nearly happened to Tien, brought his own right fist through in the most powerful punch he’d ever thrown.

It hit Tommo centrally on the face, smashing the big man’s nose and most of his teeth. He staggered backwards, then fell, his head striking the kitchen bench on the way down. The whole villa shuddered under the impact of his bulk. The little girl, thrown to one side, picked herself up, screamed and ran. Tien, recovering her own feet, went after her and scooped her up in the hallway. Jacob felt a pain where Tommo had hit him.

He looked down and saw the dimpled-handle of a Japanese carving knife sticking out of his chest. His shirt, bought in Marks and Spencer on the Champs Élysées, what seemed like an age ago, was turning red.

He leant his back against the wall. Glancing right he saw Tommo’s chest rising and falling, each expelled breath raising a crimson and white cloud of blood and tooth fragments. Glancing left he saw Tien, in the entrance to the hallway, her back to him, cradling and soothing the little girl. He sank slowly to the floor.

“Tien?”

ɸ

Franklyn stood by the mantelpiece, staring at the deep red of the dying fire and considering whether he should add more logs, or let it go out. The lights of the Christmas Tree illuminated the room in a way he found most pleasing. Shadows and highlights danced around in gentle ripples, reflecting off the crystal decanter and glass that sat within reach of his favoured leather, wingback armchair. It all reminded him of some Dickensian illustration. He considered which character he might be. As a younger man, he would have aspired to the fully realised ideals of the grown Pip, or the gentle good natured being that was Joe Gargery, but he wondered now, if he wasn’t Fagin. The ultimate puppet master of younger, more able hands. He glanced at the clock and turned the radio’s volume up.

“This is the BBC news at ten o’clock. Five British and two Irish men have been arrested on the holiday island of Bali, in Indonesia, on a series of alleged drug and child abuse related offences. Those detained include former East Anglian radio and television host, Derek Swift, who was previously believed to have committed suicide earlier this year. The arrests were carried out by a specialist unit of the Indonesian Police, following a tip-off that the men had allegedly abducted six under-aged girls and were holding them in a luxury villa complex.”

“The subsequent raid, which apprehended a total of nine men, including two Balinese locals, also resulted in the death of Dermot Moylin, a native of County Kerry, Ireland, who allegedly opened fire on the police when they attempted to enter one of the villas. Further searches of the complex allegedly uncovered three kilograms of cocaine with a street value of between one hundred and fifty and two hundred thousand pounds.”

“The Indonesian Minister for Law and Human Rights hailed the success of the operation as further proof of their serious, robust and never-ending efforts to crack down on child-sex offenders. He said it was due entirely to the professional actions of the police that all the children had been rescued unharmed.”

“He went on to say that, given the concurrent seizure of a major quantity of drugs, the Government would be seeking the Death Penalty for all those arrested. The men, expected to go to trial in six to nine months, have been remanded to the notorious Kerobokan Prison. The British and Irish Foreign Secretaries are expected to issue a joint appeal for sentencing clemency for their citizens.”

“In an unrelated event, the British Consulate in Bali confirmed a decorated hero of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, has been killed in an accident while scuba diving just south of the island.”

“Jacob Harrop, twenty-six from Chelmsford in Essex, a former Corporal in the Royal Air Force Regiment, was fatally injured by a malfunctioning spear gun, being carried as a precaution in the event of shark attacks. Mr Harrop was awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross, second only to the Victoria Cross, for his actions in defending Bastion Air Base during a Taliban raid in September 2012. Mr Harrop’s brother, who was also on the dive at the time of the incident and was himself a former member of the RAF Regiment, said, ‘The loss of Jacob is a tragedy, but we will remember him for the kind, loving and courageous man he was.’ The body is due to be repatriated back to the UK within the next week and the Chief of the Air Staff has confirmed that as an RAF recipient of the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross, Corporal Harrop will be buried with full military honours.”

“In European news, Dutch police have now confirmed the identity of all five men who died in a house fire outside Amst-”

Franklyn turned the set off and reached for his glass of single malt. He raised it to the dying embers.

THE END

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