DELIVERANCE: a gripping action thriller full of suspense (4 page)

Chapter Six

Charlie is no longer in the car.

He slept for four hours exactly, and then hit the road once more. He had only been driving for ten minutes when he spotted a narrow road with an outbuilding next to it, off to his right. This had given Charlie an idea, so he turned off the highway. What he had spotted was in fact a runway, and the outbuilding a hangar. Charlie had parked the car, got out and silently approached the small tin building, swiftly encircling it, looking into each window. Then, once satisfied, he’d kicked in the front door and given the old guy inside a choice.

Fly Charlie where he wants to go, or die.

The old man agreed to fly.

Now Charlie sits in the co-pilot seat of the Cessna with the old guy sat next to him in the pilot seat. In the rear section of the plane is the fishing rod case and the box of faux hooks. Charlie left the rest of the fishing gear in the car as they had now served their purpose.

He looks down at the earth below.

‘Where are we?’ he asks.

‘Just above Dajarra,’ the old guy replies nervously. ‘About a third of the way there.’

Charlie smiles. He has just saved himself twelve hours.

‘What about fuel?’ Charlie asks.

‘I got reserves on this old girl,’ the pilot replies. ‘Plus, I know a stopover to fill up at just shy of Davenport itself.’

‘Good.’

‘You going to kill me?’ the man asks.

‘Maybe,’ Charlie replies. ‘Maybe not.’

‘That’s better than a straight yes I suppose.’

‘How long until we are there?’ Charlie asks.

‘About three hours, God allowing.’

‘You a religious man?’ Charlie asks.

‘Definitely.’

‘Then ask God to give me a reason not to kill you.’

The old pilot lapses into silence and flies on carefully.

Charlie smiles to himself as he stares out into the fading light of the early evening sky. He does not have much further to go now…

Marshall has been collected and boarded, and now sits calmly in the personnel area of the helicopter as it ferries him along the last part of his journey. He recognises the helicopter as the AS332, or Super Puma, as it’s more commonly known.

They have been in the air for about fifteen minutes, which should be about seventy-five kilometres.

250 km, or about forty minutes to go.

Marshall unbuckles his safety harness to move forward and ask the pilot what the crosswinds are like, but then decides against it. It won’t make a difference if he knows. They will arrive when they arrive. So he bows to the inevitable, and returns to his memories of the next three DVDs of Saunders. However, no sooner has he closed his eyes to envisage himself playing the next DVD when he is jolted back to the present. It takes him a second to recover from the images fading in his mind and then he turns to the co-pilot who makes a waving hand movement.

Turbulence
.

Marshall gives a thumbs up to show that he understands, and is about to drift back to his memories, when an alarm sounds. Marshall has heard the alarm twice before in his life whilst aboard an aircraft.

Missile alarm.

He immediately reaches above himself and grasps the two personnel support bars. He is not wearing his safety harness because he did not strap himself in once he sat back down.

Bad move.

The pilot will need to take evasive action, and Marshall will be thrown all around the rear bay unless he holds on. He hears the hissing sound as two countermeasure flares are deployed, and redoubles his grip on the bars above his head. The chopper suddenly banks at a forty-five degree angle and slows rapidly, which throws Marshall violently against the side of the aircraft. He takes the hit on his ribcage, but holds on. The Puma rights itself and the co-pilot turns in his seat to face Marshall a few seconds later. He makes a gesture that reminds Marshall of the hand jive from the sixties. One flat hand passing beneath the other.

A miss
.

Marshall makes a swift decision and stands up. He is almost certainly the target, not the Puma. He must therefore remove himself from the scenario in order to ensure the safety of the two pilots. He makes a hand gesture of his own towards the co-pilot, like someone straightening out an imaginary piece of string. The co-pilot nods, and passes the information to the pilot.

New drop point
.

The Puma descends sharply until it goes into a stationary hover 200ft from ground level. Marshall pulls open the side door, feeling the full force of the wind as it rushes in towards him. Next, he pulls on a cross shaped harness and secures it across his chest. Then he threads the static line which is connected to the inside of the Puma through a wheel device fixed to the front of the harness. The line is weighted, and Marshall throws it out through the open side door. He holds the top loop of the line in his hand and allows it to steady itself vertically before taking a last look at the co-pilot and nodding. The co-pilot nods back and Marshall jumps into the darkness and ignites a flare. After all, it would be a pointless gesture to leave the aircraft unless the hostiles know about it.

Meanwhile, the plane carrying Charlie and his hostage descends at a shallow angle heading towards Davenport. Charlie is wearing his seat belt restraint, but he has not let the old guy fasten his own; just in case the pilot gets any ideas about a rough landing. The old guy is sweating, but his control of the plane is rock steady as he prepares to land. From the window Charlie can see they are about six hundred feet from the ground now. The old pilot said that when they land, they will be about three or four miles from Charlie’s destination.

Sarah’s house.

Six and a half kilometres at most.

A sprinter could cover it in twenty-five minutes on a track, but this is no track. This is rough, unsteady earth, and Charlie is not a sprinter either. He is, however, very fit. He also knows that he needs to be in a reasonable condition to fire a rifle when he gets there, so he will keep to a fast walk. It should take him less than an hour.

As Marshall jumps from the helicopter he allows his training to take over.

Static line descent is a famous SAS exit from a rotary aircraft. The aircraft hovers at two hundred feet. The weighted line is one hundred and ninety feet long. The brake wheel on the front of the harness begins to slow as soon as weight is applied to it, resulting in the operative ending up at the bottom of a one hundred and ninety foot abseil ten feet above the ground.

Marshall releases the catch on the harness and takes the fall perfectly. Knees bent, rolling, with his shoulder taking most of the kinetic energy. Then he rolls fully onto his back, and completes the move by ending flat on his stomach, at which point he would draw his gun.

If he had one.

He doesn’t move for a moment, he just listens. Once the beating of the rotor blades becomes distant, there is nothing to hear but random wildlife that he doesn’t recognise. As he lies still in the dark, Marshall remembers reading about all of the dangerous animals in Australia; snakes, spiders, scorpions et cetera. He curses his perfect memory.

He is not too worried about the source of the missile that narrowly missed them. SAMs – or Surface to Air Missiles – have a range of five kilometres, or just over three miles, so the firing source could be anywhere in that radius. Bumping into them would be highly unlikely. Only an idiot would fire at an aircraft that is likely to land on top of them.

First he presses the radio-reset
button on his watch to synchronise it with local time and notices that it is just past midnight. Then he unzips a small section on the right sleeve of his windbreaker, revealing a thin panel with a small QWERTY keyboard and three inch screen.

A high resolution GPS unit.

He taps in the co-ordinates for his destination and is momentarily gutted to find he is about sixty kilometres west of Anmatjere and about forty-seven kilometres south of Davenport.

Just under thirty miles on open rugged ground still to go.

Not the best news, but not the worst either. It is completely dark now, so Marshall removes his night scope and begins to hike due north. He figures he can get there in a little over three hours if he pushes himself, but he will be exhausted when he does. Therefore, he allows himself four hours, and pushes onward towards Davenport.

Where Charlie already is.

Chapter Seven

Charlie has forced the old pilot out of the plane and tied him with electrical cable to the wing strut.

He tells the old-timer he will know if he tries to escape because of the style of knot, and that he should only try to get free if he is really sure that he can; because if Charlie returns and finds the old guy has tried, but not succeeded, he will kill him.

The pilot glances at the knot and nods solemnly.

Charlie leaves him there and hikes the short distance to Sarah’s house, which takes him just over thirty minutes. Once the house comes into view, he finds a clump of trees that look to be in an ideal position for a sniper post, but he needs to check. So first he slow-crawls to the east wall of the house. Then he steadily crawls all of the way around the perimeter, looking briefly into each window. Once satisfied that he has familiarised himself with the layout of the inside of the house, he slow-crawls back to the clump of trees.

The whole process takes him an hour.

Once he has settled into what he will now call his sniper nest, Charlie strips down and cleans the rifle in the dark; something that only a hundred people could manage without any light at all, but if there is one thing Charlie knows about, it’s guns. Once the rifle is fully reassembled, he raises the sight of the L96A1 to his right eye. He aims directly at the large patio doors to the front of the house to check that he has a clear line of sight, which he does. However, from this angle Charlie can only sight upon Sarah’s legs and backside due to her position on the sofa.

He then lowers the rifle, and waits.

Snipers can lie in wait for days on end, but Charlie doesn’t think it will take that long.

Nowhere near.

Sarah wakes up, but doesn’t move. She is on the sofa where Bruce must have dumped her before he left. She feels an ache on her leg where he has once again used his heated lions-head ring to cattle brand her. She has several of the marks over her body already. At least the house feels empty. Somehow, she can generally feel it in her gut when he’s around, even if she can’t actually see him. But he has left, for now at least, or so it would seem.

She recalls the day she reached Australia. It should have been a good day, a happy day. A day of escaping her troubles. A fresh beginning.

But it was nothing like that at all.

As she stepped off the plane feeling cramped and achy, her bright outlook lasted only a short time.

‘First time here?’ the baggage handler asked as she searched for her luggage.

‘Yes,’ Sarah replied, in a much thicker British accent than she now possesses.

‘Well, enjoy your holiday,’ the baggage handler replied cheerily to fill the conversational gap.

‘No holiday,’ Sarah corrected. ‘I’m here for keeps.’

‘Bonza! Welcome to the club!’ he exclaimed with an especially Australian drawl, although Sarah knew that this exaggerated
Australianism
was for her benefit.

She smiled at the warm greeting, but her smile was soon to fade. As she stepped from the airport into the brave new world where nobody knew her, she found a man holding a large piece of card with her name on it.

Charlie lies in his nest comfortably outside the house. He is still sighting through the patio doors, but also sweeping the perimeter at regular intervals. He recalls the unexpected phone call that brought him to this place. A voice from the past. Charlie took the assignment without question, but then he didn’t really have a choice. There was history there and he couldn’t ignore that. This would allow him to put a few ghosts to rest at the very least.

Suddenly a vehicle breaks from the darkness about half a mile away and heads towards the house. Charlie smiles and places the rifle by his side gently. Then he stands up and begins walking.

The car is eight hundred yards away and closing fast.

Charlie smiles again.

***

Although Marshall was making steady progress towards Sarah’s house, he is standing stock still, and watching the scene before him unfold.

He can barely believe his luck.

Right in front of him are three pissed idiots staggering about holding sub-standard rifles and clearly with a lot of beer in their systems. They are whooping and shooting randomly at a group of kangaroos.

Marshall wonders briefly what the collective term for kangaroos would be.

A gang?

A flock?

He has absolutely no idea, but will definitely find out somehow.

He looks through his night vision scope and notes that the animals seem oblivious to the danger. They are probably only still alive because of the amount of alcohol that the three men have consumed. As Marshall watches, two of the men fire off another two shots. He realises that they would be lucky to hit a large house considering how drunk they are.

Marshall has no time for people who kill defenceless animals for fun.

He plans his moves. Three armed targets, approximately eight feet apart in a triangular formation. They are using the static headlight beams from their four-by-four vehicle as a torch to light up the poor creatures.

Marshall loops around behind the truck to bring himself ten feet from the first target. He waits until the other two have turned to fire. Then he takes four long strides and hits the guy in the rear of the neck with the handle of his knife.

The man crumples to the floor.

The other two have not turned around, but they have moved closer together. They are now only two feet apart. Marshall starts running the ten feet towards them, and then six feet in he whistles loudly. Both men turn around to catch a brief glimpse of Marshall flying through the air towards them, before his feet connect with their faces simultaneously.

Marshall gets up rubbing his lower back, which took the brunt of his landing, and checks the three men.

All three are breathing, but nobody is moving.

He goes immediately to the four-by-four vehicle and starts the engine before checking the GPS on his sleeve.

He’s back on the move now.

Thirty miles per hour, seventeen miles to go.

Sarah has still not moved a muscle. She is lost in memories of her arrival in Australia. The day that everything changed.

When she stepped from the airport and saw her name on the board, it threw her completely.

She stopped and stared at it open mouthed.

Which is when she was noticed.

‘Sarah Whittaker?’ the man asked.

He was dressed in a fine grey wool suit, complimented by a driver’s hat.

‘Yes,’ she replied. Any other response would have been foolish after her obvious reaction to seeing her own name.

‘I will be your driver,’ the man stated.

Not a question. A statement.

‘I didn’t order a driver,’ Sarah replied calmly.

‘It was arranged for you by S.D.V.F,’ the guy responded smoothly. ‘If you would prefer to make your own way, I can leave you to it.’

‘No,’ Sarah said. ‘It’s fine. I just wasn’t expecting it.’

‘It is a good surprise, yes?’

The sound of her new employer’s name filled her with confidence. Of course they knew she was arriving, and what a lovely welcome.

‘Very good,’ she agreed, wondering what accent her driver had. Iranian?

Once in the car, she quickly realised there were no inside handles and no window buttons. The back of the car was a prison. Then things rapidly got worse.

‘You know Marshall?’ the guy asked through bullet proof glass that reminded Sarah of a New York taxi.

Sarah said nothing.

‘You were his little bitch, right?’

She remained silent.

‘Well, you belong to us now. So get used to it.’

She looked into the eyes staring back at her from the rear view mirror and felt the irony of her new employer’s name – S.D.V.F – wash over her.
Stop Domestic Violence Forever
.

This guy looked violent. Very violent indeed.

The drive took her way out past where she was supposed to be heading. She saw a couple of signs, but nothing that meant anything to her. They were on the road for almost two hours when suddenly they stopped.

It was the middle of nowhere.

For the first time during the journey, Sarah was sure she was about to die.

‘I need a piss,’ the driver said. ‘Want to come hold it for me?’

Sarah remained silent.

‘Maybe another time soon then,’ he said laughing, as he stepped from the car.

He locked the door behind him and went to relieve himself, whilst Sarah watched him through the window. He was doing the business with one hand whilst talking on the phone with the other. She couldn’t hear what was being said, but was informed when the driver returned.

‘Just spoke to the boss man,’ he told her. ‘He can’t wait to meet you.’

They began to drive again, and Sarah realised this was going to be a long day. In fact, for all she knew, it may even last the rest of her life.

Outside of the house Charlie has settled back down into his sniper nest. He walked round in small circles to get his circulation running properly before firing, as he has been trained to do. The car was about eight hundred yards away and would not have seen him. So as to be on the safe side, he left the rifle lying on the ground so that any reflection from the sighting lens would not give away his position as the car lights drew closer.

Charlie thinks of everything.

One question still remains, however: are the occupants of the car friend or foe? Charlie has to find out fast. He has no idea who else may have been called in to do the job, and he needs to be sure that these are enemies before engaging. If they are allies, he may not need to fire at all, which would piss him off immensely. But he’s here to do a job, and that must come first.

Charlie waits.

As the lights draw nearer he sees it is actually a four door off-road vehicle which stops fifteen yards from the house. The engine is cut leaving the air silent once more.

Then, nothing happens.

Nobody steps from the four-by-four. It simply sits there ticking over as the engine cools. Charlie is unable to assess the situation until the occupant – or occupants – of the truck make a move. So he continues to wait.

Charlie is good at waiting.