The Henchmen's Book Club (4 page)

“Not every operation goes wrong,” Bill said.

“Most do,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, well maybe, but you always get some up-front money.”

“A few grand.”

“Enough to keep the wolf from the door.”

“But for how long?”

Bill thought about this and chewed on a smile. “Until the next job,” he
conceded.

“Exactly. It’s no way to earn a living,” I told him.

“Yeah, but Mark, all you need is for one of these jobs to pay out. Just
one and you’ll be sitting pretty, you’ll see,” Bill said before knocking back
the last of his pint, grabbing his stick and hobbling up to the bar for two
more bitters.

I thought about this while he was being served and came to a few
conclusions. First off, it was dangerous doing what I did for a living. The
stakes were high, but accordingly so were the rewards. The trouble was, the
whole thing was a catch-22 situation. With The Agency contracts the way they
were, we never knew what sort of jobs we were signing on for until we were on
the boat or the plane or the submarine or rocket ship. And what’s more, we never
knew what sorts of guys we were signing on to work alongside until it was too
late too. And as any given operation was only as foolproof as the most foolish
member of the company, each job was like playing a hand of poker blind.

But then, I guess this was why blind hands paid out the best.

And were played by the players who had the most to lose.

“Thanks young man, very kind of you?” Bill told some young boy-scout
bar-teen who’d brought our pints over a few minutes later. He gave the lad a
wizened old smile, just to underline his ‘kindly granddad’ credentials, then
waited for him to leave before pressing me on my plans. “So what are you going
to do? Are you going to try something else or are you going to sign up again?”

I rolled this over in my mind as I drained the first couple of inches.
Mr Smith had asked me the same question on the plane back from the island. I
hadn’t known then and I didn’t know now, though I doubt if either he or Bill
believed me.

Come to that, I’m not sure I believed myself.

Some times, there simply were no choices.

No matter what we liked to think.

5.
CAPRICORN IN ASCENT

The first thing I noticed was the pain in my neck. Something had hit me from
behind and it had hit me
hard
.

The second thing I noticed was the
headache that was splitting my skull in two. Right between the eyes it was.
Jesus, I could hardly see straight. I blinked a few times and rubbed my face
before noticing the third thing.

My gun.

Someone had incapacitated me with a blow
from behind.

But they’d left me with my gun?

What sort of brain surgeon did that?

I looked around the corridor and saw Mr
Grey, who I’d been on duty with tonight, also spread out across the deck. I
pulled myself to my feet and checked him over and found he too was alive but
unconscious, and had similarly been left to sleep it off next to his rifle.

Christ, my head!

I somehow managed not to honk over the
sleeping Mr Grey and hauled myself to my feet. I felt pretty wobbly on my pins,
like Bambi on ice after too many alcopops, but eventually I managed to steady
myself against the wall until I had my balance. My head wouldn’t stop throbbing
and I scratched my face and rubbed my neck until I realised the violent
throbbing was actually the bunker alarm. And it was then, only at this moment,
that it finally dawned on me not all was as it should’ve been with Operation
Solaris
.

Oh God, not again.

I
looked up and down the corridor for signs of intruders and saw that the steel
door at the far end was open. I approached cautiously and peered around the
corner. Four more guards littered this corridor, though these guys hadn’t been
as lucky as us judging by all the scarlet that had been splashed all up the
walls.

What the hell had happened here?

I wracked my brains and tried to think.
The last thing I remembered was talking to Mr Grey about
The Miracle of Castel di Sangro
by Joe
McGuinniss
,
which half a dozen of us had just finished. We had been due to discuss it at
our next dinner break but Mr Grey had chosen to disregard book club protocol to
tell me that he thought Joe had overstepped his brief as a writer and had
gotten too close to the Castel di Sangro team, which I thought was a valid
point, if a little fucking obvious.

The next thing I knew, I was waking up
with a splitting headache and a P45 in my pocket.

I followed a trail of death through the
winding labyrinth of corridors, past the Communications Centre, in which
everyone was also dead, and eventually came to the main operations room. And it
was here that I found Victor Soliman, our esteemed benefactor. At least, I
think it was Victor Soliman. It was a bit difficult to tell without his name
badge or skin. He’d somehow been cooked to a crisp between his enormous crystal
refractors so that only his bones and glass eye survived – which is how I
recognised him in case you’re wondering.

Scattered all around were piles of
scientists, technicians and guards, all of whom had been either shot, blown-up
or crushed under fallen beams. I checked the ceiling to make sure the roof
wasn’t about to come in and reasoned I’d missed the worst of the fun and games,
although judging by the plastique plastered everywhere, the party wasn’t
entirely over yet.

I sprinted on through, past the
destruction, past the death and past caring, following the emergency lighting
towards the surface when all of a sudden a voice stopped me in my tracks near
the thermal guidance hard-drive.

“Look out Rip, he’s got a gun!” it
yelled, and I looked up to see two guys spinning around from planting charges
around the mammoth computer system to glare at me.

“Oh nuts,” I froze.

I recognised one of the men immediately.
It was Rip Dunbar, formerly of the SEO (Special Executive Operations), a
clandestine branch of the CIA, which was odd as I’d heard he’d hung up his guns
to flog Bonsai trees somewhere. I guess he’d come out of retirement
again
. Anyway, he was the furthest away
from me and about twenty feet from his own gun, while between us was some
skinny looking Nguni, who’d obviously led Dunbar to us.

Like me, the Nguni was also holding his
rifle, and while his wasn’t actually trained on me, I was smart enough to
realise my former colleagues hadn’t all shot themselves, so slowly and very
carefully I slipped the rifle off my shoulder and set it down on the grilled
floor to show them I wasn’t interested in disturbing them at work.

The Nguni broke into an evil smile and
slipped the rifle strap from his own shoulder.

“Okay then, let’s make this more
interesting shall we?” he chuckled.

“What?”

Before I could say anything more, the Nguni
had set his rifle down and was posing in front of me like an action figure.

“Jabulani, no!” Dunbar cried and I was in
full agreement, but the Nguni wasn’t listening and grabbed a couple of six foot
sticks from a nearby pile, hanging one over his head and holding the other out
just in front of himself.

“Let’s do this the Nguni way,” he
laughed, fully sold on the idea.

“You’re can’t be serious?” was all I
could say.

The
Nguni’s
eyes darted toward the pile of sticks and he urged me to pick up a couple and
try my luck.

“Get bent!” I almost choked, damned if I
was about to fight someone with sticks, particular someone who’d been fighting
with sticks since before he could walk, but he was suddenly in show off mode
and intent on proving himself to his Yank friend.

“Watch yourself Jabulani,
Soliman’s
mercenaries are killers,” Dunbar warned him,
laughably overlooking the fact that none of his mates were dead while some
forty of mine most certainly were.

“
Argghhh
arggghhh
!” the Nguni screamed, coming at me in a blur and
making me stumble backwards over my gun. I landed painfully on my butt and at
the
Nguni’s
mercy, but the Nguni stopped just short
of me and instead simply glowered with amusement and threw one of his sticks
into my chest. “Fight!” the mentalist demanded.

Before he could molest me further, I
hurled the stick back with all of my might, straight into the bridge of the
nose and the Nguni screamed with pain. This bought me a precious few seconds
and I used them well, snatching up my rifle and machine-gunning the bastard off
to see his forefathers.

“Jabulani,
noooo
!!!”
Dunbar cried in horror.

I swung my rifle his way and offered him
the rest of the clip, but Dunbar whirled like a Dervish, and dived behind a
stack of wobbly crates. I sent another clip his way, splintering his
surroundings to matchwood and Dunbar dashed out from behind them and found
safety behind a huge reel of steel cables.

I continued to pepper his position with
my AK, dropping empty clips onto the floor and slamming home new ones, but this
was purely to keep Dunbar’s head down while I desperately wracked my brains for
ideas.

The position he’d taken up was in a
direct firing line with the exit, so I couldn’t make a dash for the surface,
while behind me only death and detonation awaited.

Worst still, Dunbar had decided to take
my recent stick fighting success to heart and called back from his shelter:
“Okay you
mother
, you just made this
personal,” which was simply astonishing. Like it was okay for him and his stick
fighting little mate to wipe out everyone I knew but the moment Team Soliman
got on the scoreboard suddenly it was personal. Unbelievable.

Once out of ammo I retreated back to the
ops room to escape Dunbar’s wrath, only to remember all the new plastique
fixtures and fittings that now decorated the place. I was caught between a rock
and a hard-head, but a burst of automatic gunfire told me Dunbar was intent on
seeing the whites of my eyes when he avenged his termite-eating buddy. This
worked in my favour.

I grabbed a fresh clip of ammo from a
dismembered torso and ran back to the corridor I’d been guarding with Mr Grey,
lock & loading as I went. Mr Grey was still flat out, oblivious to all our
worries as I leapt him in a single bound and found a loose maintenance panel in
the wall just behind where we’d been standing. This was obviously where Dunbar
and stick boy had entered and how they’d got the drop on us.

I thought about hiding inside, then
thought better of it and hid in the concealed broom cupboard a little further
on. A few seconds later Dunbar appeared at the far end and scanned the space.
He looked around, kicked the body of Mr Grey and told him to get up. Mr Grey
didn’t move, not even when Dunbar put a shot in his thigh and I realised then
that Mr Grey’s brains were probably porridge. Dunbar must’ve given him one hell
of a whack when he’d first come in. And suddenly here he was, with his back to
me, just begging to be shot.

I clicked the safety off my AK and began
to take aim when I heard Bill’s words again.

“Common sense. That’s what you’ve got to
use, your common sense,” they said and knew he was right. What was done was
done. And I’d almost fallen for the same distractions that had dazzled Dunbar
and got him hunting for me in person when he could’ve just locked the door on
the way out and triggered the plastique.

I lowered my gun, shook these daft
notions of ‘pay-back’ from my head and focussed on staying alive.

“I know you’re in here somewhere,” Dunbar
told the corridor. “Come out and show yourself you
sonovabitch
!”

In an instant, he swung and blasted what
remained of Mr Grey in half, even though he hadn’t moved so much as an eyebrow
in the last half an hour, then he swept his smoking barrel back across the
pipe-lined corridor. He moved slowly, taking his time, studying every nook,
cranny and access panel, of which there were plenty. That’s the thing about
these bases I’ve found. There
are no end
of access
panels, service ducts and maintenance hatches, all of which are usually just
large enough for a heavily armed raiding party to crawl through. One day
someone’s going to ask themselves if all these ducts are absolutely necessary,
because this is usually how the enemy gets in. Or out. Or away. Or manages to
eavesdrops on our plans on their way to the poorly defended arsenal. One day,
someone’s going to realise this and the architect responsible is going to get
fired – possibly through an electro turbine –
which’ll
be no bad thing.

For the moment though I was grateful,
because Dunbar didn’t know which of the myriad of doors, ducts and grates I was
behind, but he knew I was close because he kept talking to me as if I were a
skulking child.

“I know you want me, so come and get me.
Here I am. Just you and me. So let’s get it on.”

As tempting, if somewhat homo-erotic, as
this sounded, I was damned if I was going anywhere near him while he was in
this sort of mood and stayed quiet and let him pass without trying anything heroic.

“So, you like to play hide and seek do
you? Well okay then, let’s play, you cowardly motherfucker!” he snarled, lacing
his invitation with a few strategic insults but still to no avail. Then, as if
to underline the point, he started counting backwards from thirty as he pulled
the corridor apart. “Twenty-nine… twenty-eight… twenty-seven… twenty-six…”
panels were ripped open “… twenty-one… nineteen… eighteen…” tunnels were
scanned “… fourteen… thirteen… twelve…” crannies were poked.

Dunbar swept the corridor methodically from side-to-side,
pulling off and looking inside each service panel as he passed, though I
noticed he didn’t look inside the panel just along from my position.

The one that was
already
half-open. The one he and stick boy had entered through.

Hello, I thought. Got some booby prizes up there already have
you?

No, Dunbar walked right past it as if it
didn’t exist, and instead finished his countdown just outside my coat cupboard.

“… three… two… one.”

Dunbar braced the rifle stock into his
shoulder.

“Coming…”

His finger tightened around the trigger.

“… ready…”

His eyes narrowed.

“… or NOT!”

In that instant, he turned on a sixpence
and machine-gunned the Coke machine opposite to bits.

The machine disintegrated in a ball of
glass and sparks as he emptied his clip into its shiny neon belly until the
only noises to be heard were the crackle of circuitry and the tinkle of shell
casings as they tumbled through the steel grating walkway.
 

I was crouching just about as low as I
could, right at the bottom of the cupboard, and curled into a little ball,
though I still heard him tell the wreckage, “That was for Jabulani!” which
suited me just fine; no Doctor Pepper and crisps for a week in exchange for
that annoying little honey thief. That was a trade I could live with.

Unfortunately, Dunbar hadn’t settled the
score he thought he’d settled and his tearful manly rhetoric soon turned to
whiney cursing when he found that I wasn’t behind the lads’ snack dispenser
either.