4. Gray Retribution
Also by Alan McDermott:
Gray Justice (Tom Gray #1)
Gray Resurrection (Tom Gray #2)
Gray Redemption (Tom Gray #3)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2014 Alan McDermott
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781477823866
ISBN-10: 1477823867
Cover design by The Book Designers
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014903903
For Alana and Melissa: you’re the reason I write
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Chapter One
Monday 30 September 2013
‘Heads up. We’ve got movement to the north.’
Simon ‘Sonny’ Baines lay on the roof of the farm building and listened as the approaching band of guerrillas made a beeline for the building. Below, Len Smart, Carl Levine and Jeff Campbell took up defensive positions against the low wall that ran around the perimeter of the house. Their movement was silent in comparison to that of the attacking force, which announced its presence by crashing through the undergrowth like a herd of elephants headed for a watering hole.
The three men on the ground trained their sights on the treeline that bordered the eastern edge of the smallholding, remaining silent as they waited for the assault force to make an appearance. The noise grew louder as the attackers approached, then suddenly stopped dead.
Silence covered the area as the nocturnal orchestra took a time out. It seemed as if even the animals and insects wanted to watch the action unfold.
Len Smart slowly wiped a bead of sweat from his brow, careful not to make too quick a movement in case it was seen by the enemy. Mosquitoes danced around his head, kept at bay by the insect repellent, but their incessant buzzing told him that he wasn’t in Kansas anymore.
As if the oppressive humidity weren’t reminder enough.
Without warning, muzzle flashes lit up the edge of the forest. None of the defensive team returned fire, preferring to lull the enemy into advancing out of the trees and into the kill zone. The small-arms fire continued for a few seconds before petering out, allowing silence to return.
All remained still for over a minute, then Sonny’s voice came over the comms. ‘Got people in the grass at your ten and two. Looks like they’re trying to flank us.’
Len Smart was on the right of the trio and he saw his target a hundred yards away. Rather, he saw the top of the three-foot-tall grass sway gently as the unseen assailant crawled slowly through it. Night-vision goggles would have come in handy, but he would have to make do with the sliver of moonlight that cast a dull shine over the African plantation. Besides, there were four of them and an estimated enemy strength of around fifty, so in Smart’s mind they easily had the locals outnumbered.
‘Got him,’ he said, and Levine on the other end of the line confirmed that he also had a bead on his man.
The AK-47s opened up once more, but the three men continued to save their ammunition and keep their locations hidden. They spotted a couple of armed men advancing slowly from the trees but held their fire, preferring them to get a little closer before engaging. From the rooftop, Sonny watched the scene unfolding below him, oblivious to the wraith-like figure scaling the rear wall.
Nwankwo Okeke was clad in an ancient British Army smock and trousers, the disruptive-pattern material a throwback to the late seventies. His features, like those of the four Englishmen, were obscured by the black and tan camouflage face-paint. The exception was that underneath the disguise, his skin was the colour of night, the war paint applied more for effect than concealment.
The chatter of gunfire from the trees intensified, and the occasional grenade came arcing towards the defences. They landed pitifully short, but the noise they generated helped to mask Okeke’s approach. He reached the lip of the roof and peered over. Sonny lay five yards away with his back towards him. Okeke eased himself up on powerful forearms and quietly swung a leg over the edge. He waited, hand over his holster, but Sonny continued to focus on the battle beneath him.
Okeke eased forward, one hushed step at a time, silently drawing his nine-inch knife from its leather sheath.
Two yards.
One.
He fell on Sonny’s back and yanked his head backwards, drawing the blade across his victim’s throat. With Sonny down, Okeke made an animal call that signalled his friends below. They broke from cover at the rear of the building and raked the trio’s positions with AK-47 fire.
Smart, Levine and Campbell, all facing the other way, realised too late that they’d fallen for a feint.
They never stood a chance.
Chapter Two
Monday 30 September 2013
‘Jesus, Johnny! Where the hell did you come from?’
Sergeant Nwankwo ‘Johnny’ Okeke grinned and clapped Sonny on the back. ‘When you share a bedroom with six older brothers, you learn to tread lightly if you want to pee in the night.’
‘Well, I’m just glad you used the dull edge of your knife,’ Sonny said, rubbing his throat.
In the yard below, the other three training instructors removed the keys from their rifle attachments and slotted them into their vest control units to silence the alarms that were screaming in their ears. The rigging they wore had numerous sensors sewn into the webbing, and when hit by a beam from an enemy rifle it registered a hit. Enough hits—or a single hit in a critical area—and the alarm sounded. The only way to turn it off was to use the key from the rifle’s laser mount, and doing so rendered the gun unusable.
‘Nice spotting, Sonny,’ Smart grumbled from the ground below.
Okeke smiled down at him from the edge of the roof. ‘Don’t be so hard on him, Mister Len. You had every right to be confident, but over-confident? That is what we used against you. Perhaps next time you won’t make it so easy for us.’
Smart was stung by the remark but held his tongue. The sergeant was, after all, perfectly correct.
On arrival in Malundi, a landlocked state which had gained independence a year earlier, they’d be
en distinctly unimpressed with the recruits they’d been asked to train. The lack of discipline had been immediately apparent, and that first impression had led to them underestimate the locals.
It wasn’t a mistake they were likely to make again.
Gigs like Malundi were the staple for Minotaur Logistics, the private security firm operating out of a London office, but unless Smart and his team delivered, their reputation would be in tatters. Work soon dried up when word of shoddy performance got out.
‘Tomorrow night, it’ll be your turn to defend, Johnny. We’ll show you how it’s done.’
Okeke threw a mock salute and disappeared from view, still smiling.
‘You reckon we’re getting too old for this shit?’ Levine asked.
Smart shook his head. Like everyone else employed by the company, his team had extensive SAS backgrounds, and what they’d shown that night had been well below standard.
‘Just too complacent.’
He went into the building and pulled a bottle of water from his backpack. The liquid was warm but it still felt good as he gulped it down. The other three instructors joined him.
‘These guys are a lot more switched on than we gave them credit for,’ Sonny observed, and the others agreed.
They’d expected a comfortable couple of days, with live-fire exercises during the afternoon and assault training at night. The first part had gone as expected, with inaccurate shooting and poor ammunition management from almost every recruit. Expecting more of the same, they had allowed themselves to grow lax in the evening.
The resulting farce didn’t sit well with them.
‘I think we should introduce them to the sentinels tomorrow night,’ Levine said, and the others smiled in approval.
‘Let’s get back to base,’ Smart said. ‘I’ve got to write a report for the boss and the colonel.’
They gathered their belongings and left the building in single file, only to find that Okeke had created an ad hoc honour guard, which laughed raucously as the four instructors traipsed to their ancient Land Rover.
‘Never mind the sentinels,’ Campbell said under his breath. ‘I’m tempted to bring live ammo tomorrow.’
Smart waved Okeke over and put an arm around his shoulder. ‘I’ll give you that one, Johnny, but don’t push your luck.’ He glanced at his watch and added six hours. ‘I want everyone on the range at nine o’clock, and make sure they’ve got their game faces on.’
Chapter Three
Monday 30 September 2013
Tom Gray stared at himself in the mirror and wondered where the years had gone.
Although his fortieth birthday was a year away, he already had a few flecks of grey peppering the light brown hair on his temples, and the plastic surgery he’d gone through hadn’t done anything to make him look younger.
But then, that hadn’t been the intention.
The first round had been partly reconstructive, and partly meant to hide his identity, though he hadn’t had a say in it. The more recent sessions spent under the knife had sought to undo what James Farrar had done to him just after the explosion two years earlier.
At least his six-foot frame remained hard and fit, the result of his daily runs and his wife’s cooking.
Gray noticed a piece of fluff on his eyebrows and swatted at it, and was shocked to see half of the hairs fall into the sink. The bald area above his eye appeared bruised, and as he touched it the skin came off, revealing the bone above his eye socket. He was staring at the lump of flesh between his fingers when the door opened and his son walked in.
‘Daddy, what’s this?’
Daniel held an inhaler in his hand, a cloud of gas escaping it.
‘No! Put that down!’
He ran to his son, but with each step the boy seemed to get further away, and Gray’s legs felt as though they were battling through treacle. He reached out a despairing hand towards the child as the skin on his fingers began to bubble and blister.
He screamed.
‘Tom!’
Gray was immediately awake. His wife looked down at him, and despite the poor light he could see concern etched on her face.
‘Same dream?’ Vick asked, caressing his face.
Gray nodded. The same dream he’d been having for a year, ever since his friend Andrew Harvey had been good enough to disclose everything MI5 had on the virus Gray had been exposed to sixteen months earlier.
Initially, Gray had hoped the inhaler that terrorist Abdul Mansour dropped was leaking harmlessly, but on arrival at the hospital to be treated for his knife wounds, he’d been whisked into quarantine with no explanation. He and four armed police officers had been kept overnight, but despite a series of tests the doctors found no reason to keep them isolated. It was a few weeks later that intelligence operative Andrew Harvey had told him the truth, but only after swearing Gray to secrecy.
According to Harvey, MI5 had suspected Mansour of carrying a variant of the Ebola virus. Lab tests, however, had revealed its true nature. Gray’s relief at the time had been genuine, but the recurring dream suggested that subconsciously he wanted another son, another Daniel, and Mansour had robbed him of that possibility.
‘I wish you’d see someone,’ Vick said, but Gray once again shrugged off the idea. He didn’t see the point in spending hundreds of pounds—even though it was money he could easily afford—and opening up to a complete stranger. Talking it through with a shrink wasn’t going to solve anything as far as he was concerned.
A tiny voice broke the silence, and Gray leaped at the chance to escape the conversation before Vick could press her point. He walked through to Melissa’s room and picked up his three-month-old daughter, cradling her gently and kissing her head before laying her down on the changing mat. He was quite adept at baby ablutions, insisting on doing his fair share so that Vick could catch up on her rest. He had a new nappy on Melissa within two minutes, and after another kiss he handed her over to her mother for a feed.
The alarm clock told him it was almost five in the morning, and he had no inclination to go back to sleep.
‘I’m going for a run,’ he said, and slipped into a pair of shorts and T-shirt. After a few stretches outside the front door, he set his iPod to the start of an old, favourite rock album and headed down the driveway. As he approached the gates he hit the button on a key fob and they slowly swung open. Once through, he hit the button again and looked over his shoulder to make sure they closed after him. He jogged the three hundred yards to the main road and began the first of two circuits of the area, each one just over two miles in length.
After forty minutes he returned home and found the girls fast asleep, so he took a shower and prepared breakfast before settling down in front of his laptop. He checked his emails but found nothing that couldn’t wait until he got to the office, so he went to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office website to see if any new travel warnings had been issued. As Managing Director of Viking Security Services, which provided bodyguards and combat training, it paid to keep an eye on the troubled regions of the world.
Two cups of coffee later, he kissed the girls as they slept and crept out just before seven in the morning, the early start designed to beat the traffic on his way into London. He reached the office within thirty minutes and made a coffee before sitting at his spartan desk: only an in-tray, phone, computer and notepad on display.
Gray was halfway through answering his emails when a new one came in. The sender was one of his biggest clients, and he immediately opened it. After reading the short message twice, he sat back in his chair and covered his face with his hands.
He’d founded his company after leaving the SAS a few years earlier, and it had been growing at a phenomenal rate when he’d sold it following the death of his first wife and son. The money had been used to fund his campaign to make the government take a tougher stance with repeat offenders, but on reflection it hadn’t been the best idea he’d ever had.
For one, it led to him being severely injured, nearly
fatally, and the subsequent year had seen more than one attempt on his life. His crusade had also cost the lives of four close friends, and he might have thought their deaths worthwhile if the government had listened to any of his suggestions for reforming the judicial system. Two years on from his standoff in the Sussex countryside, the only change in sentencing guidelines had been a mandatory whole-life term for child murderers. While Gray wholeheartedly agreed with that particular change, it saddened him that career criminals were still being treated with kid gloves and getting away with community sentences.
It wasn’t something he liked to dwell on, though. Having taken his best shot, he’d long ago realised that nothing he did would change the government’s collective mind.
What did matter was seeing one of his main sources of income walking away.
His solicitor, Ryan Amos, had warned that this might happen and had cautioned Gray against buying his old company back. Given the fact that two years earlier, Gray and his associates had kidnapped five career criminals and paraded them on the internet while holding the country to ransom, Amos had thought it unlikely that household names would want to be associated with him. Gray had been labelled a terrorist by many, which was a stain not easily removed from one’s character. The fact that millions of people had supported Gray’s actions meant nothing to multinationals with wholesome images to maintain.
Gray had ignored the advice, hoping that by creating a subsidiary company he could distance himself from the spotlight, but he’d underestimated the tenacity of a tabloid reporter.
As far as the public had been concerned, Tom Gray had died during the terrorist attack instigated by Abdul Mansour, but after his brief appearance on the BBC News channel he had been inundated with requests for interviews, all of which he’d declined.
Donald Boyd hadn’t been one to take no for an answer.