The Chop Shop (8 page)

“Well don't just
stand there, for Christ's sake. Spread out and move up,” Corporal Hill said.

The unit moved
past the tank and down the road, splitting into their two fire teams. They
hugged the buildings as they approached the wreckage, and Michael and Richard
followed. He saw the bodies clearly now, each one soaked in a pool of its own
blood. His shoe knocked shell casings.

Michael
grimaced. The smell of burning flesh crept up his nose, and Richard gagged,
pointing to the black, shrunken shape of the dead policeman manning the
vehicle's machine gun. Parts of the vehicle had melted and dripped and trickled
onto the pavement, where it dried again like splodges of concrete.

He glanced back
the other way to see the tank commander still watching them with his machine
gun and pulled back the bolt on his rifle. Shattered glass lay scattered across
the pavement and road, chinking under footsteps.

Hill's section
stacked up outside main entrance. He whispered something to the policeman on
point, and they advanced inside. Two more corpses lay slumped against the
corridor walls, battering ram and rifles by their sides, surrounded by a sea of
brass casings. Gunfire had taken chunks out of the walls. They found the four
ground floor flats empty. Corporal Hill checked up the stairs with a stick
mirror, and then waved for the others to follow. Lumps of concrete from the
walls crunched beneath their feet, and a single shell casing rolled off the
side of the stairs and struck the floor with a jingle.

Hill advanced up
the second flight of stairs. His rifle was pressed tight against his shoulder,
and he peered down the sights through his visor. Richard inhaled a slow breath.
Sweat streamed down his face.

Michael felt the
muscles twitching in his arm. He tried to stay still, but that only seemed to
make it worse. They were the last in line. A knock came from one of the rooms
above, and the section stopped, went to one knee and raised their rifles.

“Jesus, this is
going to have me a heart attack,” Richard whispered.

Michael nodded
and said nothing. Hill crept further up. He craned his neck, then looked back
at them. “It's okay, we're clear. Nothing here but bodies. Get up here
detectives. We've done our job, now you do yours, and see if you can find
anything worth taking with us.”

One by one they
entered the upstairs flats. Michael followed. He stepped over four more dead
policemen. All of them had been finished off with multiple shots through their
visors to the face.

“Last flat on
the left. Come and see this,” Hill said.

Michael
continued on into the flat. He found the corporal in the lounge, pointing up at
the ceiling. Glass and shell casings were everywhere, and the ceiling was
scorched, blackened and charred from where it had burned. A single body had
been dragged to the side, partly burned from feet to waist and filled with
bullet holes.

“Is that petrol
I smell?” Michael said.

Corporal Hill
nodded.

Michael turned
back to the door. “Nobody else but us three steps foot in here, got it?”

The policeman
outside nodded.

Richard fingered
his nose. “What happened to the ceiling? Looks like they tried to torch this
place to destroy evidence, but-”

“But they didn't
do a very good job it,” Hill finished. “Okay, let's have a quick lesson in
munitions so you might realise what you unlucky sods are getting into here.
That wrecked carrier out there was burning hot enough for the hull to melt. Do
you know what that tells us? It tells us it got hit by an anti-tank rocket. The
warhead went straight through the armour, hit the engine and lit the entire
thing up, okay?”

Richard nodded.

“Anti-tank
weapons produce a back blast,” Michael said. “At the angle required to hit the
vehicle down there, the back blast hits the same spot on the ceiling; we used
them a lot in the war. I'm surprised the shooter didn't cook themselves with
it.”

“Pretty much,”
Hill said. “I didn't know you fought in the war. Army of the Rhine? I was at
Leipzig.”

Michael nodded.
“Berlin.”

“Berlin, shit.
What a mess.”

Richard put his
rifle aside on the table and knelt down beside the corpse. “Well, either way,
this place was a total bloodbath, and it means we're dealing with an organised
group. Stark's unit must have taken them by surprise, maybe while they were
trying to clean the place out. Explains the petrol. Burn the whole building
down and there's no evidence.”

“They didn't do
a very good job of torching this place. Half a corpse cooked to a medium rare
state is a pretty piss poor attempt. Something must have put the fire out,”
Hill said.

Michael moved
into the bedroom. There was no bed, only five sleeping bags and left over
supplies spilling out of two duffel bags. He opened the bags further, and then
tipped everything out onto one of the sleeping bags. Pre-packaged needles,
surgical equipment and an assortment of medical products spilled outwards.

He held up one
of the needle packets for the others to see. “These aren't for shooting up. Is
there anything in the fridge?”

“No,” Richard
said. “Wait, there's something down the side. Somebody dropped it. Look here.”

Richard entered
the bedroom, and Hill followed. He raised his hand, holding the plastic packet
of fluid between two fingers as he dangled it in the air. “Reminds me of the
orange juice drinks my dad used to put in my packed lunch for school.”

“I wouldn't
drink it,” Hill said.

“It's got a
label on the side, but it's all numbers and serials. God knows what this stuff
is,” Richard said.

“Presumably you
inject it,” Michael said. “Bag it. There must be some place in this country
that can analyse it. You've got something stuck on your boot, Corporal.”

Hill bent down
and scraped off a chunk of white goo with a gloved finger. He held it up to the
light. “Great, it's an eyeball, or some kind of artificial one, at least. Look
like some kind of rubber. There's wires inside it.”

“It looks like a
toy,” Richard said.

“Bag that too.
We need to identify that body if we can. I'm starting to get sick of being one
step behind all these people. “

“From the looks
of things, maybe being one step behind them is the best for your health,”
Corporal Hill said. He looked out at the wrecked personnel carrier.

Michael checked
his watch; nearly time for the next shift to arrive. He rubbed his eyes and
groaned. The corridors were empty, and a discarded nutrition bar wrapper
drifted along the floor, carried forward by the wind. One of the lights buzzed
with the sound of a wasp trapped in a tin can.

The cold draft
met his flesh. He knocked on the major's door.

“Come in.”

Harris had a
pistol disassembled on his desk. He wiped the barrel with a filthy rag, as
Michael took a seat. “We need a laboratory. To be more specific, we need one
that can test the chemical packet and eyeball we found. I don't know who the
body belongs to, and I doubt we'll find out for a while, if at all.”

The major began
to reassemble the weapon. “We don't have a laboratory that can analyse what you
brought back. This country is in the dumps, and if there's a lab that can do
that kind of work, we'd have to contract it out and get Assurer to fit the
bill. I don't think they'd bite. The body can be identified if we've ever
picked the man up before, but somebody is going to have to go to the central
station and check each individual record,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “Could
be a while.”

Michael slumped
a little deeper into the chair. He chewed off the end of his thumbnail. “Then
it's a dead end, sir. Eratech will have been cleaning up since the hit, and now
they'll be a torching everything faster, if, and it's a big if, there's
actually anything left to go on. Maybe it's time to start thinking about
canning this case for something we can actually solve. Let's be honest, we
never really had much of a chance on this one from the beginning.

“It's not the first
murder case we've messed up, and it won't be the last. We're still learning.”

A moment of
silence passed. Harris inserted a magazine into the weapon, racked the slide
back and chambered a round. He pivoted away and pointed the gun at the floor,
peering through the sights.

“I'm not junking
the case. There's enough evidence to finger Eratech, but not to put any proper
heat on them. We can still work this. Think about the money. We're all going to
the wall here. Nail a high profile case like this and Assurer will be tossing a
lot more than a standard bounty your way.”

“Respectfully,
sir, a bounty requires that I be alive to spend it. These guys waxed an entire
section of heavily armed policemen. We don't even know if these other companies
had a hand in this. Maybe he pissed them all off at once. I think you're
prejudging the situation, and furthermore, sir, I believe you have a personal
stake in this that you are not telling us about.

“I've seen
multiple cases junked with a lot more evidence than this so we could be
redeployed elsewhere to plug holes in a sinking ship.”

Silence. Michael
swallowed the lump in his throat. The major stared at him, eyes narrowing as a
frown formed on his face. His lips curled downwards.

“I'd watch your
step, Detective; I extend a lot of leeway to people under my command, but don't
mistake it for having free rein in what you say. When we the last time you took
a holiday?”

“Nobody takes a
holiday down here. Take a holiday and you starve to death.”

“Sometimes they
do, if their employer deems it okay. I think you should take a holiday,
Detective. Washington is a good place to go. I'm going to send a couple of
faxes and get something sorted out. If it's cleared up top, somebody will book
you a flight to Washington, and you'll take a break, and you'll also take what
you recovered from the flat. That's all for now. Until then, don't get yourself
killed.”

Michael exited
the office in a hot sweat. He made it to the end of the corridor before
stopping against the wall. He shut his eyes, felt the beads of moisture turn to
ice and shivered.

“You look
wasted,” Samantha said.

He glanced up at
her. “Didn't see you there.”

“Yeah,” she
said, coming closer. “Things were getting pretty bad on the streets earlier. No
casualties, as if we haven't suffered enough today already, but a lot of
gunfire. I don't think its simple gang stuff; they're too well organised for
that. Terrorism? Who would bother with that these days? At least it's burnt
itself out for the evening.”

“For now,”
Michael said, nodding. “They'll have to monitor it. If the people doing this
can sustain it long enough, then we'll know for sure that they have proper
backing and aren't out just to off a few policemen. Best hope they can't.”

The buzzing
light died, and part of the corridor faded into shadow.

“Shift changes
in the minute. You got plans for the night?” Samantha said.

“Nah.”

Samantha looked
away for a moment, eyeing the darkness. She scratched her head and turned back
again. “Can we get a drink together? There's a bar not far from here. It's
pretty safe.”

It was dark
inside the bar, lit only by a few dim bulbs and the street lights outside.
Michael watched the queue of people at the bus stop. A lone smoker stood
outside the doors, dressed in a trench coat and puffing away on his cigarette
as the world went by. The floor and chairs were wood and dark with varnish,
sending an echo through the place every time somebody moved.

A waitress
placed their drinks on the table, then moved on to the next batch of customers.
Samantha had red wine, he a glass of water.

“You know it's
okay to have a little alcohol now and then, right? You're not on duty,”
Samantha said.

Michael sipped
his drink. “My health isn't that great. I got a dose of gas in the war when the
filter on my respirator wore out. I try to avoid alcohol.”

“Sorry, I'll
stop there. Forget I mentioned it.”

“It doesn't
matter. You live locally?”

“Lower Kingston.
My younger sister and our parents live in Basingstoke. It's not so bad where I
am; safe, generally. There's a small police outpost nearby, and there's always
a patrol vehicle parked outside. They use it a lot to check in and use the
phones.”

Somebody outside
sounded their car horn, and another driver retorted in kind. Heads turned
towards the shouting. Samantha sighed and rolled her eyes. Half the crowd
outside the bar crammed onto a red double-decker bus.

“I've only been
with Assurer for a year. Before that, I drifted between administrative and
office roles. It's been a decent enough place to work, safer than all the
others, at least until these bombs started going off. Now I feel sick every
time I get in my car, and a mirror on a stick doesn't make me feel much better,
know what I mean?”

“Yeah. They've
set up a task force to investigate. Beyond a certain point, it becomes more
hassle than it's worth trying to rig a car to explode, and these people will
know by now that cars being checked. It's the other places you want to be
checking now, not that it'll make you feel much better.”

Samantha downed
half her glass in one sip. She smiled. “Well, at least you're honest. You ever
hear some of the suits from Assurer speak? It's all numbers and money, never
people. They'll leave it all for the people on the front line to sort out and
sweat the details another time.”

Michael glanced
out the window. He found himself staring at those walking past, watching how
they were dressed, how they moved in their own little worlds. “That's always
the way.”

The traffic
stopped. A motorcade of black vehicles occupied the road with tinted windows,
spitting exhaust fumes as they sat idle. The smoker tossed his cigarette and
shoved his hands into his coat pockets. He removed a radio, spoke a single word
into it, and then pressed one of the buttons.

A rocket shot
from an alley across the street. It struck the lead vehicle in the engine block
and blew chunks of the frame across the street. Fire erupted as people fell to
the ground. There was a woman clutching at her bloody face, screaming and
shaking, but nobody paid her any notice.

Michael knocked
the table on its side and dragged Samantha down behind it. The smoker pulled at
the belt on his trench coat, letting it slide open to reveal the machine gun he
kept hidden underneath. He raked one of the vehicles with automatic fire, as
other gunmen emerged across the street from a shop. They opened up on the other
vehicles.

Stray rounds
shattered the windows, and one of the waitresses went down with a bloody hole
in her stomach. Michael pulled Samantha closer as the glass rained down on
them. He peeked over the table and watched a limousine window roll down. A
rifle barrel jutted out before flashing with fire.

The gunman went
down against the remains of the bar door. Somebody hit the limousine with a
40mm grenade, and then two more. Flames escaped from inside, as another gunman
climbed on top of an abandoned car, machine gun spitting belt links as he
sprayed bullets indiscriminately.

Bystanders began
to flee, managing a few steps from their hiding places before they were caught
in the crossfire. Bullets tore them up, splattering blood, brains and skull
fragments over the pavement. Part of the table blew apart in a shower of
splinters, and Samantha shrieked.

A pushchair
rolled along the pavement. The mass of corpses outside the bar stopped it dead
in its tracks. Two manicured hands clung onto the handles, severed their bloody
wrists, and the baby inside screamed. Gradually the gunfire faded. His eyes
darted between the pram and the shooter on stop of the car. Then the dead
gunman in the doorway got up again.

He let out a
groan of pain and put one hand to his chest. Michael ducked as the man cast a
glance inside the bar and staggered off down the street. The other gunmen
followed after him.

Michael started
to rise, but Samantha grabbed him by the arm. “Michael don't. Michael, you
idiot, you're going to get yourself killed,” she said.

He shook off her
grip and stepped over the dead waitress. A few pedestrians were still alive,
clutching at gunshot wounds, and a stream of blood ran down the cracks of the
pavement like a burst water main. Five gunmen sprinted down the road to the
right, weaving in and out of abandoned and destroyed cars. Michael ran after
them.

Their injured
man trailed behind them, and he looked back, saw Michael and sprayed a hail of
bullets at him with a submachine gun. Bullets pinged off the cars and concrete;
a wing mirror shattered.

Michael dove
behind the nearest vehicle. He waited for an instant, then returned fire with
his .45. Six rounds missed, but the last clipped the gunman in the kneecap and
he went down. The others stopped to return fire.

He went down on
the ground and looked under the car, and he saw the gunman getting up again.
Michael put a bullet through his foot. He leaned out from behind the car and
caught a glimpse of the others climbing into the back of their escape vehicle.

The injured
gunman was already up again and moving for the van. Michael broke cover and
sprinted forward, shooting him four more times in the back. The slide locked on
his pistol, and the gunman kept going, staggering, nearly falling, and now
slowing down. One of his cohorts leaned out the window.

The man pressed
the button on the detonator he held, and the injured gunman exploded in a flash
of fire and debris. Car windows shattered into thousands of pieces, and Michael
collapsed under the force of the blast. He heard the screech of tires as a dust
cloud washed over him. Sirens wailed in the distance, coming closer.

The dust and
smoke dissipated as quickly as it had formed. Michael rubbed his eyes and wiped
the dirt from his face. He coughed and choked on the filthy air, trying to
ignore the ringing in his ears, while irritated tears ran down his cheeks. He
blinked them away with the last traces of grit and turned around.

The motorcade
burned with the smell of charred flesh and cordite. Empty brass casings rolled
about the concrete with a gust of the wind. Samantha was standing outside the
bar, staring down at some of the bodies, and her dirty face turned pale. Blood
leaked from cuts on her palms.

“Are you okay?”
she said.

“Are you?”

She looked down
at her hands. “I'm okay.”

“I think it was
him on top of the car. The one who shot up Belton's family.”

“For certain?”

“Maybe. I'd need
a better photo to be sure, but it doesn't matter now; he's long gone. I thought
I almost had something then. They were wearing suicide vests to avoid capture.”

Samantha lifted
the screaming baby out of the pushchair. She rocked it gently, whispering to
it, but the baby only cried more. “I don't like the way things are going around
here.”

She walked
towards to one of the ambulances.

The SAM battery
had been bought from the South Africans, sitting on a tracked carriage with two
missiles mounted either side of the turret, and a radar dish spun circles on
its mast. Three teenage soldiers stood guard beside it, dressed in old DPM
camouflage and woolly hats in place for their helmets.

They carried
their rifles with bayonets locked over the barrels. Michael wondered what life
was like in the army now, or what was left of it at least. He moved on towards
the airport.

Three terminals
were still in ruins, and rubble was strewn about the car parks, long since
stripped of anything that could be sold for scrap. Cluster-munition craters
pockmarked four runways and left only two untouched. He approached the east
terminal, where five European men with skinheads lurked off to the right of the
entrance.

They wore combat
boots, muscles bulging beneath their clothes, and a group of teenage girls
waited beside them, dressed like prostitutes in low cut tops and imitation
leopard print. One of the men argued with the youngest. He held her wrist with
a vice grip, jabbing his finger at her head every time he barked another
barrage of foreign words.

She cried and
trembled, tears turning black with mascara as they washed away her make up, and
the other girls regarded her with scorn. Some of the men saw Michael watching,
and one of them came towards him, puffing away on his cigarette.

“You want to
fuck her? One hundred pound,” he said with a Balkan accent.

“She's sick. Her
hair's falling out,” Michael said.

The man flexed
his muscles. “Fuck off, you little bitch. None of your business. I can break
your neck.”

She let out a
sob, and snot trickled down her upper lip. One of the other girls shouted at
her and then slapped her twice across the face. Michael turned away and joined
the crowds going into the terminal.

Harsh lights lit
the interior, shining off polished floors, and people came up to him, offering
to sell items he had no interest in for far too much money. A single moment of
hesitation and they'd renew their sales pitch with twice as much vigour,
hounding after him as he tried to get through the crowds, and finally they'd
move onto somebody else and it would start all over again.

Beyond the
market stalls was a unit of contractors from some private military company.
They paced the terminal with a cocky swagger, sometimes taking a cut off the
merchants or deeming a young woman to be a possible security risk, so they
could march her off to be searched in private.

The self-service
terminals hadn't worked since the war. He went straight to the desk and checked
in. He was early, the planes were delayed, and he joined the crowds in one of
the waiting areas.

Plastic signs on
hung on the walls, telling him he could purchase a magazine or book to pass the
time from one of the shops that did not trade in black market goods. He'd been
there for twenty minutes when somebody sat down beside him.

“Long time no
see,” the man said.

Michael looked
up. He studied the man's face for a moment. “Really long time.”

Paul Howe gave
him a grin. “I'm glad to see somebody else from our unit is still alive these
days. I didn't think you'd be one of them, though. Last I saw, you were pretty
fucked up. Small world.”

“I saw Charlie
the other day. Small world indeed.”

“Really? That is
a surprise,” Paul said. He was dressed in a sharp business suit and smelt of
expensive aftershave. “Myself? I'm making some proper dosh working for the
bank. They're sending me to Washington for a bit to see up some stuff in one of
their offices. Working for a big company does have its perks. You?”

“I'm going to
Texas.”

“Too bad,” Paul
said. “We could've had a few drinks and trawled some of the nightclubs. I hear
they have some real hotties there, and a lot of them are desperate for a sugar
daddy or two. Lots of fun, not that I'd oblige them for more than a night or
two. Maybe some other time.”

There was a
woman waiting for him with a sign bearing his name. She was in her
mid-thirties, hair tied back in a bun and dressed in a black business suit.

“You're here to
meet me?” Michael said.

She flashed him
an amused smile. “It does seem like it, unless there's another Michael Ward on
your plane? Call me Megan. Did you make it through security okay?”

“The platoon of
Marines back there? Yeah, I got through them all right. It's a little more
efficient than what we have back home. Who are you with?”

“Who am I with?”

“What agency or
company do you work for? What's your job?”

Megan gave him
that smile again. “I'm not here in any official capacity. Look, it's best if
you don't ask questions; things will go a lot smoother that way. I can get
paid, and you can get what you came for.”

“What have I
come for?”

“They didn't
tell you? Figures. Let's just get going, this isn't the place for this kind of
discussion. Come on, my car's parked outside.”

He followed her
through Terminal A of the Reagan National airport. Private contractors escorted
a line of shackled deportees in orange boiler suits past him.

“It's a little
tense around here,” Michael said.

Megan nodded.
“We're on the verge of a second civil war here, and everyone's eyeing their
neighbours. Lots of suspicion and accusations flying around. It's not pretty.
What's wrong? You keep looking back.”

“Just trying to
avoid some guy I know from the war. He was an arsehole then, and he's still an
arsehole now. He killed a lot of people, and not all of them were soldiers.”

“Raw,” Megan
said.

They took her
car away from the airport and found a line of traffic on the main road
stretching up to the bridge, ending suddenly as though it was were blocked by
an imaginary wall.

A tank rolled
across the bridge. Baggage, spare parts and reactive armour bricks covered its
turret and hull. Another followed, and then more; infantry fighting vehicles,
trucks and humvees joined the convoy. Drivers honked their horns in support, as
the column passed them by.