Cold Warriors (2 page)

Then he kicked the stool away and dropped.

PART ONE

Altered People

CHAPTER ONE

"What we've gotta do is declare war on a temperate country."

Morgan shifted his feet in the sand, feeling sweat squelch unpleasantly between his toes, and did his best to ignore the other man.

"Or maybe even somewhere cold. Just not another fucking desert."

Morgan sighed and rolled onto his back, covering his eyes with his hand to shield them from the punishing midday sun. This place wasn't just hotter than anywhere he'd ever been, it was hotter than anywhere he'd ever imagined.

The second-rate gear they were wearing didn't help: no military-issue equipment allowed on covert ops, in case you got caught or killed. Morgan didn't find it reassuring that their MI6 handlers obviously considered both possibilities likely. Not that he'd share his worries with John. The other man had already made it clear he thought Morgan was too young to be on this mission. No need to give him more ammunition.

"Russia's cold. We used to be at war with them," he said instead, the parched air instantly snatching the moisture out of his mouth. He lifted his hand so that it was shading rather than covering his eyes, and turned them to John. "Also, we're not at war with Yemen."

"Should be," John said. "Fucking uncivilised fucking terrorists." His pock-marked face twisted in distaste. After two weeks on this job Morgan was sick of the sight of it, but there was nothing else beside sand to look at. They called it the Empty Quarter for a reason.

"It's okay for you, kiddo," John continued after a moment. "You're used to this kind of weather, coming from where you do."

"What, Lambeth?"

"You know what I mean, you black bastard. No offence, but before I was paired with you they used to send me to
classy
locations." John briefly peered through the binocs at the black dots on the horizon, then shifted back onto his side. "Plus, prior to our working partnership, I used to get access to some fanny now and again. I haven't seen a lass's face since we've been in this fucking country, let alone anything north of her Watford Gap."

"What about that girl back at base, the posh bird? She was happy to report for duty, judging by the racket coming out of your basher that night. 'Ooh, Johnny boy, you can land your Apache in my hangar any day!'"

"Fuck off, that was two months ago. I've not had a sniff of action since. My balls are so blue they're heading into the ultraviolet. I'm telling you, put me in a club and I'd be fucking fluorescing."

Morgan laughed and let his mind drift, filled with images of his childhood home, gentle hills smothered in green. Trying to refresh himself with remembered rain. "He can't stay holed up there forever," he said after a minute, more hope than prediction.

"I reckon he was never here in the first place."

"He'd better be, or we've spent a fortnight shitting in a tin can for no reason."

The stench of that, and all their other waste, was all around them. They'd buried everything under two feet of sand, but the smell had seeped free days ago. Their target might not be able to see them, snug beneath their camouflage netting, but get within thirty feet and he'd know they were there.

Of course, getting him within thirty feet was exactly the problem. Morgan thought John might be right - he was seriously beginning to doubt the quality of their intel. There was
someone
in that cluster of mud-brick buildings shivering under the heat haze, no question about it, but whether it was the man they'd been sent to kill... Still, rumour control back at base said this bastard ran a training camp that was sending recruits against the lads in Afghanistan. If that was true, it was worth a bit of discomfort to put something lead somewhere soft inside him.

"Morgan," John hissed suddenly. "Movement!"

Morgan pulled his own binocs out of his bergan and trained them on the building. It sprang into instant, sharp focus. And yeah, movement and a half. There were at least twenty people pouring out of the wooden gates.

"Damn it!" he said. "They told us he'd have five men with him max."

"Too late now," John said. "Time to see if you're more than just a pretty face." He'd already pulled out the segments of Morgan's M85 sniper rifle, carefully wrapped against the corroding sand. John's fingers, more nimble than their width suggested, freed the weapon in moments.

Morgan slotted the pieces together with practised ease. He enjoyed the sound of each segment clicking softly into place, the feel of the well-oiled stock in his hands. This was what he was good at. It was why he was here.

He rested the barrel against the sandbag in front of him and set his eye to the sight. But - "Fuck!"

"Not him?" John asked. They'd looked at the surveillance photos of their target so many times Morgan knew he'd remember the man's face for the rest of his life: the proud arch of his nose, and the eyes wide and black and a little too innocent for someone who'd done what he had. Morgan remembered every face he'd put a bullet through. They haunted his dreams. Civvies thought sniping was impersonal, but they didn't know shit.

"Can't tell," he said to John. All the men had checked cloths wrapped around their faces, leaving only a strip of flesh visible around the eyes.

"Then take 'em all out."

"But what if the target's still inside the building?" Morgan tracked the figures as they milled just outside the main gate. They were all armed, AK-47s and other heavier ordnance. He and John were out of range right now, but a few shots fired, someone with the brains to figure out a trajectory, and the enemy would be swarming all over them. Best to leave it till there were fewer hostiles and a clear target.

And yet... The more Morgan watched them, the more certain he became that that figure there, the one standing just to the left of the main body of men, was the one he was after. It was something about the way he gestured, small forceful movements of his hand that seemed to be commands. The way the others seemed to keep him permanently in the corner of their eye, turning to respond whenever he spoke. He was their leader, Morgan was sure of it.

"Got him," he said tightly.

"You're positive?"

"That's the bastard." He prepared to draw the breath that he'd hold in his lungs as he fired. "There's going to be blow-back when he hits the deck. Get ready."

"Mate, I always am."

But Morgan wasn't listening to him any more. His mind was focused on the weapon in his hand. He felt himself pushing his consciousness out so that it extended from flesh and bone into metal: stock, barrel, trigger, the gun just another more lethal part of his body.

Other snipers would measure wind speed and direction, carefully calculate distance to target, curvature of the earth... Morgan had been taught all that, but he didn't need it. In his mind, he could already see the bullet, curving gently up into the sky and then down again as gravity grabbed it on the long journey to its target. He felt the dry desert breeze against his cheek and automatically shifted just a millimetre to the left to compensate for it. He took one last look at the man he was going to kill, held the breath in his lungs and squeezed the trigger.

The target stayed upright for a second, swaying. Then, one after another, his joints hinged shut, until he was lying crumpled on the ground. Morgan was too far away to hear the shouts, even in the vast silence of the desert, but he could see the sudden flurry of activity, men ducking for cover, then realising that they didn't know which direction they needed cover
from
.

If he and John sat tight under their camouflage, there was a chance they wouldn't be found.

"What are you waiting for?" John asked.

Morgan hesitated a moment, then picked another target. Breath in, hold, and that was another man down. Then another, but now the hostiles were starting to get a bead on their position.

One of them let out a wild burst with his AK-47 - "Spray and pray", they called it. Another of them grabbed his arm and he stopped firing. The cloth had slipped from the shooter's face in the moment of panic, and Morgan could suddenly see how young he was, even younger than Morgan. Morgan shifted his aim and took out the man beside him instead.

But that was it. They had their own binoculars out now, and someone must have caught his muzzle flash because suddenly they were all pointing in his direction. He only had time for one more shot before they'd dived behind a pile of rocks that hid them all.

"Now it gets lively," John said.

"They can sit us out inside the base," Morgan said. "Wait till we run out of water."

"No way, mate. That type don't have the patience."

He was right. A few more minutes, and then the gates of the compound burst open and an armoured vehicle roared out. These guys weren't amateurs. They waited till the thick metal sides of the transport were shielding them from Morgan's position before they climbed on board.

Morgan let the sniper rifle drop and pulled out his standard-issue 5.56mm as the personnel carrier barrelled over the dunes towards them. He waited for the last minute to break cover, circling low and left as John headed right - far enough apart they'd be separate targets for anything that got thrown at them, not so far they'd end up in each other's line of fire.

One man put his head out the back of the carrier, swaying precariously as it bounced over the ground. He'd only raised his gun to waist height by the time John took him out, a nice little headshot he'd be boasting about later.

Five more metres, and the truck skidded to a stop. But no one emerged and Morgan guessed no one wanted to be the first man out.

In the time their hesitation gave him he sprinted round until he had a clear view into the back of the transport. They hadn't been expecting him to move so fast and he had a brief snapshot of their shocked faces before he threw in the grenade and dived for cover.

He'd timed it so they only had a second to escape. Men leapt out, but body parts too and a fine spray of red, vivid against the prevailing gold. One of the survivors let out an undisciplined volley of bullets, maybe the same boy who'd done it earlier. Most thudded harmlessly into the sand until a last burst hit one of his comrades in the leg.

Morgan estimated there were eight men left active, plus the driver. John was on them before they had a chance to regroup, single aimed shots heading straight where they'd do the most damage. They turned to face him and now Morgan had his chance, putting a short, controlled volley into their exposed backs.

This was high-wire stuff. He and John were totally exposed, vulnerable to the one man who got his shit together quick enough to shoot back. Morgan's body was tight with adrenaline and the combat-fear that was hard to distinguish from exhilaration.

He felt a brush of something soft against his leg, a spray of sand. A moment later the noise slammed into his ears and he knew someone was shooting from behind him. The driver.

Morgan spun and dived, low and forward, straight towards and beneath the bullets. The man was grinning madly as he fired, blackened teeth bared and - absurdly - a cigarette still hanging from the corner of his mouth.

Morgan's gun was trapped beneath him. He reached into his boot and pulled out his knife instead. It wasn't weighted for throwing but it was the only thing he had. It spun end-over-end out of his fingers as he rolled again, left this time, like a goalie gambling which way the penalty was going. The gamble paid off, the shots went right and then high into the sky as Morgan's knife entered the man's throat with a meaty thud, so deep and hard the hilt ended up flush against his chin.

The man's finger tightened reflexively on the trigger as he convulsed and died. The bullets kept raining upward into the blank blue sky, curving and falling back to earth in a lethal hail.

Morgan waited till the last bullet was spent, the man's back arched in a final agony, before he turned around to see how John was doing.

There was a stain of scarlet on the leg of John's desert combats, but he was still standing and only two of the enemy were. They were circling, trying to flank him. With John weakened from blood-loss they'd probably succeed.

Morgan ran towards them, drawing his shoulder-harness knife. He couldn't risk a shot with so much motion and John in the middle of it.

John's bullet tunnelled through the first man's shoulder just as Morgan's knife slashed at the chest of the second. But the blade hit a rib, and the knife glanced off and out again, still moving with all the force and momentum of the blow.

John spun round from his kill, knowing a second target was behind him. Morgan could see it was going to happen a second before it did, but he was powerless to stop it. His blade kept on moving and John kept on spinning, and at the exact moment when John's chest was level with the blade, it sank in.

Morgan froze for a second. But this was combat and there was one more hostile still moving, wounded but not out for the count. He pulled the knife out of John's body and slashed it fiercely against the man's throat. It bit deep into the bone and stuck there as blood jetted out around it.

Morgan stood, dazed, for a moment - until John's agonised groan brought him back to reality. Morgan dropped to his knees in the sand beside him and pressed his hand uselessly against the sucking wound in his chest.

John's eyes were glazed, each in-breath a wheeze through the wall of his ruined lung, each out-breath a sob of pain. He had to work his mouth three times before any sound came out of it, and then it was a dry croak. "Jesus Christ, it hurts."

"It's okay. It's okay-" Morgan said, looking at the blood seeping out around his hand.

"No it's fucking not," John choked.

"Just hang in there, I'll..." But what was he going to do? "I'm sorry," Morgan whispered.

John's mouth twisted and Morgan wasn't sure if he was trying to smile or if it was meant to be a sneer. "They warned me about you," he gasped. "Should have listened."

He looked like he wanted to say more, but the only thing coming out of his mouth was blood. It bubbled with his breath for a moment, then slowed to a thin trickle as his heart stopped pumping beneath the fingers Morgan pressed to his chest.