Hot Zone (Major Crimes Unit Book 2) (3 page)

T
he
door opened and Sarah readied herself. She was sitting on the bed, pretending
to read a book she’d been given. Her heart was beating like a drum and she
hoped the trepidation didn’t show on her face.

It was Rat who finally entered, her most regular tormentor
and the one she had expected to see. It was strange, but she had started to
look forward to seeing his bucktoothed grin and dark, staring eyes. Rat’s was
the only face she saw for days at a time and it was sickeningly welcome against
the loneliness and isolation she’d had to endure. But tonight, Sarah intended
it to be the last time she was forced to look upon Rat’s face with
appreciation.

Rat was carrying a tray of what looked like Chinese food and
it smelt delicious. Her captors would often bring her takeaway and snack foods
rather than anything homemade. That suggested they were, at the very least,
within a town or village, maybe even a city. If she were to escape, there would
be places to go, people to plead to for help. She wouldn’t need to get far,
just out.

“I read that one,” said Rat, pointing to her book. “The one
where all the animals escape the zoo and attack people, yeah?”

Sarah eyed the cover of the novel and shrugged. “Only just
started reading it. We can start a book club when I finish. You can bring the
biscuits.”

Rat smirked. “You haven’t lost your wit, have you? Most
people are morose by now.”

“Most people don’t know what the word ‘morose’ means. You’re
not as dumb as you look, which is pretty bloody dumb.”

“As I’ve repeatedly told you, there’s more to me than meets
the eye.”

“There’s more teeth to you than meets the mouth.”

That one seemed to hurt Rat a little. As much as he claimed
indifference to her, he was starting to care. Stockholm syndrome worked both
ways. As it was documented that hostages could start to enjoy the company of
their captors, so too could captors begin to like the company of their wards.
Rat was starting to think they were odd friends. She was about to wipe that
foolish notion from his head.

“Who is keeping me captive, Rat? Tell me or I’ll kill you.”
She made one last attempt to prise a name out of Rat and to give him a chance
to do the right thing.

“Pope Francis,” he replied dryly.

“Then you can tell the Pope that I gave you fair warning.”

“Huh?”

Sarah leapt off the bed, sliding the shiv out from beneath
her pillow and swinging it towards Rat’s neck. His eyes opened wide as he
realised what was happening. She’d caught him too far off guard for him to
avoid the blade swiping through the air towards him. He snatched out at her but
was wrong-footed and couldn’t move fast enough.

He was going to die.

At the last moment, Sarah flinched and altered the direction
of her swing. She buried the shiv deep in the hollow beneath Rat’s collarbone
instead of her original target of his jugular. Much as she hated her captor,
she couldn’t say for sure that he deserved to die. His screams of agony did
enough to satiate her need for revenge, but she was forced to wrestle with the
man as he gritted his teeth and tried to grab her throat. Sarah grunted and
strained, trying to fight the man off, but even wounded he was stronger.

“Bitch!”

Sarah growled. “Say that again.”

“Bitch.”

Sarah loosed rat’s arm and grabbed the handle of the shiv,
yanking it down like a lever. The wound opened up wider and Rat mewled like a
kitten and slumped to the ground.

The shiv was narrow and thin, so came away easy as Sarah
pulled it back from Rat’s collarbone, leaving him to hiss and curse at her
feebly. She stepped over him and headed to the unlocked door, the shiv dripping
blood behind her. Before opening the door, she ran her hand over the blade and
used the blood to cover her face. She would be up against dangerous men, and
the best way to beat men in a fight was making them piss themselves before the
first punch ever got thrown. A snarling woman covered in blood was enough to
unnerve the bravest warrior.

Sarah left the room and entered a corridor. Despite the
homely adornments of her incarceration, she now found herself inside the
utilitarian hallways of some kind of factory or office building. It was the
type of place where miserable employees marched around from nine-till-five.
Currently it lay deserted. That boded well, for it meant her escape might not
yet have announced itself. Rat’s screams were loud, but they seemed to fade the
further she went down the corridor. Around the next bend she was forced to
stop. A tough-looking guy with a shaved brown pate was leaning up against the
wall and taking drags on a cigar. Against the backdrop of his black combat
fatigues, the civilised gesture seemed out of place. Sarah smeared some more
blood from her hands onto her face and put her theory into action. She
staggered around the corner, hiding the shiv behind her back while glancing
around erratically and chattering her teeth. The blood was still wet on her
face.

“Paper pictures,” she muttered. “Bits of string.”

The confused guard threw his cigar down on the floor and
stood on it, then just looked at Sarah. His dark complexion went almost white
as he tried to comprehend what he was looking at.

Sarah made it even more confusing for him. She swung her one
arm around like a jellyfish and hopped towards him. The other arm, with the
shiv, she kept tucked behind her back. “The doctor in the house isn’t dead,”
she muttered. “The teeth were not his.”

“The hell is wrong with you? W-where’s Rat?”

Sarah did a quick squat thrust then threw herself into the
wall, bashing her forehead and kicking out like a wingless fly. “Boom goes the
dynamite.”

The guard seemed to realise that he had to do something. She
wasn’t just an insane woman, she was a prisoner on the loose. He stepped
towards her and, as soon as he did, Sarah spun around and slashed his cheek
with the shiv. As he recoiled, she booted him in the nuts and followed it up
with a knee to the face as he doubled over. He was out cold.

Two down
, Sarah told herself.
How many more?

She raced down the corridor, passing through the only door
at the end and hoping it led to salvation. When she opened it and passed
through into what appeared to be a large warehouse, she was faced by a gang of
glaring men. They seemed undeterred by the blood on her face and immediately
sprinted towards her.

Sarah bolted left, heading for the nearest side of the
warehouse that had windows. Maybe she could throw herself clear through the
glass and get to safety.

The men chased after her, three of them in total.

There was a bench up ahead, piled high with what looked like
engine parts. Sarah slipped past it, waving her arms and shoving a bunch of
metal debris into the path of her pursuers. She heard a man curse as he no
doubt stumbled over one of the obstacles, but all three men continued to chase
her. As she got closer to the windows, she saw that she wouldn’t be able to
throw herself through the glass or scream for help. The frames started a good
four-feet above the ground and did not lead outside; they merely separated one
warehouse floor from the next.

There was nowhere to run.

Sarah spun around, swinging the bloody shiv.

“Put the blade down,” one of the men growled at her, an
older gentleman who had brought her food on occasion when Rat was busy, “and
we’ll be gentle.”

“Or don’t,” said a younger man with bad skin. “And we’ll
make you fucking eat it.”

Sarah wasn’t going back to her room. She was done being a
prisoner. They would have to beat her to death before she allowed them to
recapture her. Perhaps four months in captivity should have tamed her like a
canary, but it had only made her desperate like a trapped dog, and now she felt
rabid.

“You can take me down,” she said in a snarl, “but the first
one to try loses an eye. Or a testicle. That’s if you pussies have any.”

A man she had not seen before, possessing a rough beard and
scraggly grey ponytail, leapt for her then. She sent him back with a slice in
his forehead the width of a pencil.

“Damn it!”

“Who’s next?” Sarah waved the shiv menacingly.

Nobody else came at her.

She glanced around, trying to find an exit, but there were a
dozen doors leading off from the warehouse and no telling where any of them
led. Then she saw it. A fire exit. It seemed to sparkle at her like a beacon.
If she could only reach it, if she could make it outside…

Sarah broke into a sprint, taking advantage of the men’s
reluctance to grab her and their surprise at her sudden bolt. They gave chase,
but Sarah had bought herself enough of a head start to stay ahead of them. She
raced across the warehouse toward the fire door, panting and moaning in
excitement. The closer she got, the more certain she was that she was going to
make it. She was going to escape. The men at her back were bellowing at her to
stop, making her even more confident that she was going to get away. The rabbit
was escaping the yapping dogs.

Sarah threw herself against the release bar of the fire exit
and exited out into the glorious afternoon sunshine. She had hoped to find a
street full of people, but instead found herself standing in a paved courtyard
inhabited by a pair of black vans and a car she was sure she recognised. The
sleek red Jaguar e-type caught her attention long enough to stop her in her
tracks. It was a relic of her past.

From the corner of her vision Sarah saw someone step out
behind her. When she turned around to face the stranger, something struck her
hard beneath the chin. Her legs folded, vision tilted, and when she finally
managed to see straight again, she was lying on the ground looking up at a face
she knew well. A face she both loved and hated.

The stern green eyes glared down at her disapprovingly while
Sarah shook her head in disbelief.

Only one word escaped her lips. “Daddy?”

“
D
addy!” Sarah wanted to say other words but
she couldn’t. “Daddy…”

Her father looked down at her with an expression of
irritation that had defined her childhood. “Most men manage to break out within
three months,” he said, “but then…you’re not a man, are you?”

Sarah wanted to stand, but she couldn’t move from her spot
on the floor. “W-what?”

Her father offered his hand and yanked her up to her feet.
“I’ll explain everything, but get yourself cleaned up first. You look like a
savage. I heard your scars were bad, but I had no idea they were so unsightly,
especially with all that blood on your face. Come on, stop dawdling.”

Sarah followed her father and allowed herself to be ushered
back inside the warehouse, the place she had just fought so desperately to
escape. Suddenly the torment of her four-month incarceration was forgotten and
all that remained were burning questions. Had her father been keeping her
locked up? Why?

She was directed to a toilet block and told to clean herself
up and get the blood off her face. She did as she was told, feeling like a
little girl, and came back out again as quickly as she could.

“I don’t understand,” she said as her father walked her to
their next destination. The group of men who had chased her now strolled
casually behind her. The grey haired man with the thick gouge across his
forehead was chatting away merrily to one of his colleagues even as his face
dripped blood. These were hard men, the type of men her father was used to
working with. Major Stone was renowned throughout the British military as one
of the SAS’s most distinguished of distinguished men. He had seen action in
every British conflict from the Iranian embassy siege right through to the most
recent turmoil in Syria. He had spent a good portion of his life overseas or,
at the very least, encamped somewhere ready to go overseas. Truth be told,
Sarah barely knew the man.

A man staggered into the warehouse on the opposite side,
getting everyone’s attention. It was Rat, battered and bloody. He clutched the
wound on his shoulder and walked in a stoop like Quasimodo. “Bitch stabbed me,”
he shouted, slumping over one of the floor’s many tables.

Nobody seemed to care.

“Then perhaps you should have paid better attention,” said
Sarah’s father flatly.

Rat said nothing else. He remained slumped in pain until his
colleagues took him under the arms and led him away. That left Sarah alone with
her father as they continued walking through the oily warehouse.

“Who are all these men,” she asked him. “And what is this
place?”

“They are
my
men, and this place is just an old
assembly plant. I think they used to make elevator parts. What some men are
willing to call a living baffles me.”

“Don’t you care that I stabbed one of your men?”

“Of course I care. Rat should’ve done better than to let you
get the jump on him. I’ll deal with him later.”

“I meant, don’t you care that he’s injured?”

“He’ll live, but I’m sure you intended that.”

She nodded. “I don’t kill a man unless I know he deserves
it.”

“Those feminine sensibilities will get you nowhere,” he
grunted. “The man was keeping you prisoner. He didn’t deserve your mercy.”

“He wasn’t keeping me prisoner, you were. Why?”

“I’ll get to that,” he motioned towards an open office door
and led her inside the dim, windowless room. She took a seat on one side of a
gnarled wooden desk while her father sat on the other. One of his men appeared
and handed him a glass of brandy before disappearing quickly. Sarah’s father
had not changed a bit in the years since she’d last seen him.

“Why am I here?” she demanded, regaining a slither of her
courage now that she knew who was responsible for her capture. Despite her fear
of her father, she no longer felt in danger. What harm could a man mean to his
own daughter?

“Because you inserted yourself into things which did not
concern you.”

“What are you talking about? Why have you been keeping me
prisoner? Why didn’t you come see me yourself, instead of hiding behind Rat?”

“Because I needed to see how you operate under stress. I
must say I am a little disappointed it took you so long to escape. Still, you
are a woman, I suppose.”

The comment from anybody else would have summoned Sarah’s
anger, but from her father it was crippling. “I thought I was going to die,”
she said meekly. “Is that what you wanted, me to be scared for my life? You’re
supposed to be my father.”

“I
am
your father, and you are my daughter. I needed
to see if you were capable of being anything more.”

Sarah leant forward and placed her clenched fist on the
table between them. She tried to maintain eye contact with her father but
failed. She was twelve-years old again, pleading with him not to vanish for
another year, but as much as she wanted to hate him right now, she did not want
to make him mad, or make him disappear on her.

“I want answers,” she said.

“Hesbani. There’s your answer.”

Sarah flopped back in her chair, both eyebrows raising of
their own accord. “Hesbani? What about Hesbani?”

“You killed him.”

Sarah said nothing. She wasn’t sure what question to ask or
what her father was getting at.

Her father accepted the silence as permission to continue.
“Hesbani was my target. I had been tasked with bringing him home.”

Sarah bolted forwards again. “You were helping a terrorist?”

“No, you stupid girl. I was helping the Pakistani government
apprehend him. They wanted Hesbani for acts of terror he’d committed within
their borders in protest against their cooperation with the British and American
government. I had a man already embedded in Hesbani’s operation, a man you
knew…”

Sarah’s eyes stretched wide as she realised. “Hamish?”

Her father nodded gravely. “A good man. Risked his life
getting close to Hesbani. Pity you took him out.”

“Only after her tried to take out me!”

Her father laughed, a rare gesture. “I admit he had issues,
many of them aimed at you, but I wasn’t very much interested at the time. Never
did I think the two of you would cross paths. Regardless, Hamish is gone and so
is Hesbani, along with my men’s paycheque. Keeping you captive gave them some
small restitution, but not enough by far.”

Sarah shook her head in disbelief. “This was revenge?”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Sarah. My men are not a bunch of
simpering schoolgirls. We do not concern ourselves with things as petty as
revenge. You have been held captive as a test. I wanted to see if you could
escape. I was always against you joining the army, but you did it anyway and
became a captain. I had resigned myself to almost accepting your bad decisions,
especially when I heard you were unexpectedly married, but then the poor chap
died, didn’t he?”

Sarah thought about Thomas and almost let out a sob. She had
gotten so good at not thinking about him that having him brought up unexpectedly
got through her barriers and pricked at her heart.

“Then,” her father went on, “you had your own accident and
all but disappeared of the face of the earth. Licking your wounds, I assumed,
but then, lo and behold, you pop up on the ten-o-clock news, hero of the hour.
You even managed to make that ridiculous outfit, MCU, look respectable. Your
victory saved them from the brink, you know? If you’d stayed on with them, I
probably would’ve left you alone.”

Sarah was still at a loss. Every couple of seconds she would
remind herself that she was sitting in front of her father, the esteemed Major
Stone, and would find it utterly surreal. Then she would remember that he had
kidnapped her and held her hostage for four months and would get extremely
angry. “Why didn’t you leave me alone? You’ve been pretty good at that for most
of my life.”

Her father rolled his eyes. “Save the melodramatics. Some
men are meant for more than raising ungrateful children into ungrateful adults.
You have no idea the freedoms you have because of men like me. I have done more
for you away then I ever would have at home. You had your mother, so don’t act
hard done by.”

“Mum died when I was seventeen.”

“Your childhood was already over, so why would you have
needed her any longer? Anyway, I do not have you here to discuss family. You
are here because you escaped,
finally
. As much as you interfering with
Hesbani caused me great irritation, I was also impressed. It appears you do
have a certain aptitude to our line of work, and to end up working within
clandestine services, like your father, speaks of a certain family
predilection, don’t you agree? I wanted to see for myself how much of a man you
are. You certainly wear your scars well. If you cut your hair short, I wouldn’t
even know you lacked a cock.”

Sarah shifted in her seat. The thought of being anything
like her father was akin to having bugs crawl beneath her skin.
“Your men aren’t SAS, are they?” she said.
“They look more like mercenaries.”

“And mercenaries is what they are. I am no longer in the
employ of the British Army. I was tired of murdering civilians and bombing
weddings based on the merest whiff of semi-accurate Intel. Do you know how many
woman and children I have killed at the bequest of so-called Right Honourable
gentlemen? One Prime Minister after another, sending hired thugs to murder and
devastate their enemies, and for what? This woman we have in charge, Breslow,
is worst of all. Her foreign war policy is going to double the amount of young
men endangering their lives for worthless causes. All she cares about is
getting her fingers in as many pies as she can. Thought people would have
learned their lesson about putting women in charge with Thatcher. One thing I
can assure you, sweet daughter of mine, is that no war I have ever fought in
was waged for any other reason than to take what the other man has. I am a
murderer, Sarah, I cannot change that, but I can change the reasons why. My
days of taking orders from Westminster have stopped, and if I get my wish, I’ll
see the place crumble with Breslow buried beneath the rubble.”

“So now you kill for money?” said Sarah, blinking. “Is that
what you call honour?”

“It is more honourable to kill for money than the false flag
of liberation. The British Empire hasn’t liberated a single country in its
entire existence — in fact it has only ever achieved the opposite. Now the
Empire has crumbled and the Star Spangled Banner has replaced it with
intentions even less noble and greedier. I am tired of the hypocrisy, Sarah. I
fight for reasons of my own choosing now. As do my men.”

“You didn’t seem too concerned about Rat,” she said. “You
speak a good game, but you don’t seem any more caring than you ever have.”

“Rat is merely wounded. I do not weep for wounds. I am no
woman.”

“I don’t know what you are, father. Tell you the truth, I’m
tired of trying to figure it out. Am I allowed to leave here, or are you going
to lock me back up?”

“You are free to leave,” he said and she almost wept with
joy. She kept her emotions contained, though, and gave only an imperceptible
nod.

“Then I am going home.” She got up out of her seat.

“You have no home, Sarah,” Her father almost shouted it at
her. “The Army did to you what it does to every soldier. It used you up and
left you to die under the weight of your own nightmares. It sent you to war
against people guilty of no crimes other than daring to have self-interest.
Britain sends men like us to kill hundreds, in order to punish a scant few who
actually deserve it. You, Sarah, are nothing more than a worn-down cog in a
machine designed to trample poorer nations into the mud while blaming them for
trying to claw their way out of it. Don’t you want to do things on your own
terms? Don’t you ever wish you could put your skills, your experience, to a
truly good cause?”

Sarah sat back down. “What are you talking about?”

“I am talking about recruiting you. A woman can be useful in
certain situations and, as far as women go, you seem to be among the best.”

“Better than most men,” she grunted.

“Perhaps. I’m offering you a place on my team, Sarah. We
fight for causes we believe in. We pay ourselves and fund our own operations.
We do not take orders, we take jobs. If you are happy with your old life,
daughter, then leave. Go back to whatever life you think you can have with that
grotesque face of yours. Or join me and do what you’re good at.”

“And what is that?” she asked curiously.

“Killing bad guys.”