Flight Path: A Wright & Tran Novel (13 page)

Kara’s vision was blurred through tears, her screams muffled and choked on the fabric in her mouth. Tien turned her head to the left and looked towards her. The women locked eyes and Kara saw the saddest, most resigned expression on her friend’s face. Tien gave the slightest of shakes of her head.

Rik reached around and unfastened Tien’s jeans. He pulled them and her underwear down and off her left foot before using another long plastic tie to secure her ankle. Kara saw the plastic cut into her friend’s flesh.

When he was sure Tien was completely secured, Rik stepped over to Kara. Grabbing her chin he forced her to look up. “I will so enjoy this little gift you have given me. She looks so young, so pretty and yet she is all woman. A perfect present. You will watch what my friends and I do to her. But I have changed my mind. If you look away I will shoot your friend first.” He let her chin go and walked back to the wooden frame. Reaching to his own jeans he unfastened them and positioned the head of his erection against Tien, then looked to the rest of the men in the room.

They began to cheer and bay, save for Albert who stood against the back wall, his left hand to his bleeding nose while he masturbated with his right.

Kara watched Rik begin to press forward. She saw Tien shut her eyes and lower her head, her tears staining the old faded leather to black. As Kara’s gagged mouth fell silent, her inner voice broke and wailed for her friend.

The top panel of the half-and-half stable door ruptured inwards as a squat metal milk churn punched through the rotten wood and rusted brackets. The remnants sagged down, tottered on a decaying hinge, then dropped to the floor. Jacob kicked in the lower panel of the door so forcibly that it too separated from its hinge and flew backwards into the room, shattering against the side of the low sideboard, sending long splinters flying past Kara. Buddy, still next to her, jumped at the noise. He began to raise the suppressed pistol towards the onrushing Jacob. Kara fell onto her right shoulder, twisted onto her back, raised her bound feet and delivered a two-footed kick into the back of Buddy’s legs. He folded down and forward, the pistol firing as his body spasmed with the impact of his knees hitting the floor. The slightest ‘Pfft’ sound accompanied the bullet ripping into the linoleum just in front of Jacob’s left foot. Buddy made to adjust his aim but was woefully slow. Jacob’s stocky arms went around the man and pulled him up, turning him to the rest of the room. Kara looked to her right and saw Van, on the far side of Tien, raise his own pistol. Two more ‘Pfft’ noises sounded and two small whispers of smoke came from the Glock’s muzzle. The dull thud of rounds impacting into flesh forced Kara to look back to Jacob, but it was the shocked face of Buddy she saw. The bullets had slammed into the small, bespectacled man that Jacob was now using as a human shield.

Jacob clamped his left forearm across the dead Buddy’s throat and held him in place. His right hand grabbed the pistol before it fell and in a smooth movement he levelled the weapon and fired twice. Kara, still on her back, watched two neat holes appear on the lower left cheek of Van, whose raised gun-hand instantly went limp and whose body collapsed straight down.

Jacob let go of Buddy as Tubbs, finally reacting to the intruder in the room, made to bend for Van’s pistol. Jacob fired two rounds into the side of the fat man’s grey hair. The bending body continued to topple forward and splayed into the floor like a belly-flopping diver.

Sammi and Chaz came through the wrecked door and Kara registered Sammi’s horror at the tableau in front of her. Rik had not moved, he was still positioned behind Tien and his face hadn’t yet reacted to the shock he must have been feeling. Tien’s eyes had snapped open when the door had been smashed in and now she was screaming for Jacob to stop. Kara heard the shout and saw Jacob drop the pistol before stepping across the room to Rik. Kara tried to mirror Tien’s plea but the noise was lost in her gagged mouth. She looked to Sammi and Chaz but they were still in the doorway and not close enough to intervene.

ɸ

Jacob Anthony Harrop was twenty-six, stood five feet eleven inches and weighed fourteen stone which, according to the BMI scale, meant he was overweight. In fact there was no fat on the stocky ex-gunner. He played rugby and had always liked training in the gym with his older brother, hence he could bench press three hundred pounds easily. His chest was like a barrel, his arms were strong and for a man of his size, he was quick. Yet his natural demeanour was soft and calm, sheltering behind a shy modesty. But since watching the dockside attack on Kara and Tien from his bedroom vantage point, his anger had been gaining momentum.

On first arriving at the isolated farmhouse he had followed Sammi and Chaz’s lead. Parking on the main road, they had used the cover of hedgerows to approach the house. Sammi, monitoring the software that was homing in on the beacons fitted to Kara and Tien’s phones, reported that the two signals were located close together but that didn’t mean Kara and Tien were. Chaz had led Jacob cautiously up to the farm’s front aspect, checking the cars, the main door and the windows. They’d made their way around to the back of the house, moving slowly and crouching low to pass under a wide window, the curtain of which wasn’t fully closed. Jacob had manoeuvred to get a glimpse into the room beyond and what he saw impacted him like a physical blow.

A surging rage and intense focus swamped him. Without further recourse to Chaz or Sammi he had grabbed a rusting milk churn that lay on the ground and hurled it at the old half-split door. His actions were automatic and only now, with the fat man slumped like a beached whale, did he turn to the real target of his ire.

He discarded the pistol because it was too impersonal for the fury that was coursing through him. He looked at, but tried not to see, Tien. Beautiful and demure Tien whom he thought of as a butterfly and whom he couldn’t be near without his heart lurching and his pulse quickening. She was his ideal, his personification of perfection. Delicate, smart, strong, stunning. He could see her mouth moving but could hear nothing as his speed of movement, thought and vision sucked the energy from his other senses. His eyes settled on the man now trying to stumble away, trousers caught around his ankles. Jacob focussed on the black widow spider tattoo that sat on the man’s Adam’s apple. In two strides he closed the distance and punched with a straight right. The man tried to raise his hands in defence but the forceful blow tore through his weak palms.

Jacob felt the larynx rupture under his fist. He took one more step and caught the now unconscious man under the arms. Spinning the limp body around so that it faced away from him, he heaved it up, let it go and as the body fell to the floor, he moved his left hand under the chin and his right onto the nape of the neck. His hands acted like the restrictions of a hangman’s noose. Jacob put every ounce of his strength into the opposing up and down pressure he exerted and the noise of the vertebrae shattering was audible throughout the room.

ɸ

Kara watched the lifeless form of Rik crumple onto the floor and knew that the one good chance of finding Derek Swift had probably crumpled too. She didn’t care. She and her inner voice were cheering for the savagery that Jacob had displayed in protecting Tien. She squirmed to get purchase with her still bound hands and managed to force herself into a sitting position. Jacob was tenderly placing his jacket over Tien’s nakedness while Chaz and Sammi were moving into the room. She sensed the slightest of movements to her right before the pistol Jacob had thrown down was pressed hard against her temple. Her body was lifted up with a surprising amount of force and despite trying to resist she only succeeded in having the surreal sight of a smiling picture of Albert Einstein pass by her right eye. The tall thin youngster held her firmly and although she was much shorter than him, he ducked down until his chin was level with her shoulder. Blood from his nose dripped onto her and his now flaccid penis still hung from his open fly. Kara tried to fight him but with both legs and hands bound she had no leverage.

Sammi and Chaz had seen the movement and moved to face the threat but not before Sammi had recovered the pistol that lay to the side of the dead fat man. Kara watched her friend bring the weapon up in a double hand grip.

“Wow there fella,” Sammi said. “What are you doing? This is all over. Don’t be silly. Just drop the weapon.”

The young man’s voice was stifled by the damage to his nose. He sounded like he was suffering from a vicious head cold, but he managed to scream, “No. No. You drop your gun. You do it or I kill her. You do it now. I’ll kill her, I’ll kill her!”

Kara, gagged, bound and with a gun to her head couldn’t help but hear the laughter of her internal monologue. Sammi, Chaz, Tien and Kara had all been through the same scenarios in training. She knew what was coming next.

“Just take it easy. Let’s all just take it easy. My friend has no intention of putting her gun down mate,” Chaz said from beside Sammi.

“I’ll kill her. I’ll kill her. You put your gun down,” Albert yelled again.

“You’ve seen too many movies mate,” Chaz laughed, holding his palms down and out. “The last thing my mate here,” he pointed his thumb at the rock steady Sammi, Albert glanced at the movement, “is gonna do, is put her gun down. That way you’d have a gun and we wouldn’t. You’d probably shoot us. You’d definitely win. That’s not an outcome I want. So no, we won’t be putting our gun down.”

“I’ll kill her,” Albert shouted, the blood flow from his nose increasing with the ferocity of his pronouncements. Kara felt it splashing down on her shoulder but stayed as relaxed as she could. She watched Sammi’s eyes.

Sammi blinked slowly and looked, with her eyes only and no movement of her head, almost imperceptivity down to Kara’s left. Kara reciprocated the movement. Sammi blinked slowly, a further three times then twitched her mouth, again in a manner that went unnoticed by the increasingly anxious Albert.

Chaz continued, “You see, you won’t mate. You won’t kill her, ‘cos if you do then that’s game over. We will definitely kill you. The minute you shoot her your bargaining chip is worthless. It’s all over. She dies, then you die in the same instant. Me and my mate here,” again he gestured to Sammi with his thumb and again Albert’s eyes were drawn to the movement, “we’ll be alive and you’ll be dead. That’s not an outcome you want.”

“But she’ll be dead,” Albert shouted and as if to clear up any confusion as to who he was talking about, tapped the muzzle forcefully against Kara’s head.

“Yeah, well that’s right. But I won’t be,” said Chaz as he raised his hands to waist height in a half surrender gesture, again Albert’s eyes followed the hand movements, “and to be honest mate, that’s all I care about. Me not being dead is a good result. I’ll win and you’ll lose. But, I do have a good outcome where no one dies.” Chaz stopped.

Albert delayed answering for what seemed an age, but was only the time it took Kara to breathe twice, “What outcome?”

“You put your gun on the floor and step away and we’ll talk. No one dies. That’s a good outcome for all of us, don’t you think?” Chaz said. Kara leant the majority of her weight on her left leg.

“No fucking way. No fucking way am I putting my gun down!” The intensity of the young man’s reply caused a fresh shower of blood to fall onto Kara’s shoulder. She felt the tension surging through him as he pressed into her for cover. “You’ll fucking kill me as soon as I do that. You’ll kill me or send me to jail and they’ll kill me for what we’ve done. You can go get fucked. I’ve another outcome. Another way…”

Kara saw Sammi’s mouth twitch. She counted one blink. Chaz moved his hands up to a shoulder height surrender gesture, Sammi blinked again.

Albert continued, his voice dulled by his nose yet rising in pitch and intensity, “…I kill you cocksucker. I kill you and then your bitches and then…”

Kara felt the pressure of the muzzle leave her temple. From the periphery of her right eye she saw Albert begin to swing the pistol out in the direction of Sammi and Chaz.

“…when I’ve killed all of you I’m goin-”

Sammi blinked a third time. Kara twisted her head to the left, driving her chin as far down as possible into the crook of Albert’s left arm. A soft ‘Pfft’ accompanied a 9mm parabellum exiting Sammi’s pistol. Even with the reduced muzzle velocity due to the suppressor, the bullet crossed the intervening ten feet and entered Albert’s head a mere nine milliseconds later. Given the relative height of her target and the fact the tall young man was crouching down, Sammi had aimed for his top lip. The bullet hit his Philtrum, ripped through the rest of his upper jaw and having shredded through the surrounding muscle mass, obliterated his Medulla Oblongata. The bullet and its resultant expanding gasses caused increasing cavitation, destroying the rest of Albert’s brain stem almost instantly. The now misshapen slug, along with an accompanying mass of tissue and bone, blew an exit hole, the size of a small orange, in the back of the youth’s skull. Less than two milliseconds after the round hit him and before his frontal lobes or motor-cortex functions could react to pull the trigger of his own pistol, the glutinous mass that had been Albert’s brain impacted onto the wall just behind Kara. She straightened and looked down to the corpse at her feet.

Kara and Samm
i
wrapped Tien in their arms and huddled together on the dilapidated farmhouse’s stairs. Tien’s tears fell onto Kara’s shoulder, diluting the red of Albert’s blood. Sammi made soft ‘shushing’ noises while Kara smoothed Tien's straight black hair. There were no words. They simply sat and waited for Tien’s tears to cease.

Chaz and Jacob searched the last of the bodies, retrieving a similar set of belongings from it as they had from the previous four. A smartphone, a few Euro coins, a wallet holding some Euro notes, the normal collection of bank cards, miscellaneous other cards and a driver’s licence. All of it was set next to the four other piles atop the sideboard.

“Rik de Vries. Amberley’s Rik I presume. Not even using a pseudonym, the arrogant bastard,” Chaz said, allowing his fingers to trace over the details on the plastic licence, before reaching for the phone. “It’s got a lock screen on it, like all the rest. We’ll need software to open them.” Jacob nodded his agreement. “Although I’m not sure what good it’s going to do us?” Chaz added.

“I’m not sure either. I think we just take it all and clear out as quickly as we can.”

“Agreed. But we should probably block that up,” Chaz nodded to the gap that Jacob had stormed through only fifteen minutes before.

Jacob pushed the old couch over to the doorway and both men gathered up as much wood from the door as they could find. After a frustrating few minutes of trying to balance the remnants, they achieved a result, of sorts. “Best we can do I guess,” Chaz said, looking at the large gaps still visible.

Jacob, his eyebrows raised, pointed to a neatly coiled hose attached to a wall tap that had previously been hidden by the couch, “That’s not a good omen.”

“Guess this wasn’t the first time,” Chaz said as he looked at the hose and then back to the drain cover in the middle of the floor. Blood was already finding its own way in small rivulets and branching tributaries, trails of red seeping through the narrow grills.

“A killing room?” Jacob asked.

“Not sure, but probably. Certainly this thing,” Chaz hefted a kick at the wooden contraption, “has been well used.” He bent and released the metal clasps holding the wood in place.

“What are you planning on doing?”

“I’m going to move it out of the way. Then we can dump the bodies over to one side and use the hose. If nothing else it’ll clear the air. All I can smell is blood and cordite.”

“It came from in there.”

Both men turned at the sound of Kara’s voice. She stood between the bodies of Rik and Albert, pointing towards the door in the far corner.

Jacob stepped forward, “Where’s Tien?”

Kara put her hand on his arm to stop him, “She’s with Sammi. I just came to tell you we’re going to head back to the apartment. Tien wants to get out of here and get cleaned up. But we’ve only got the one car and I need you guys to sanitise this place, that’ll take time.”

“No problem. Do you,” Chaz paused as he manoeuvred the wooden frame around the body of the fat man, “want me to call you when we’re done? Jacob, get the door.”

“Guess so,” Kara answered. “I’ll take the stuff you’ve found on the bodies and make a start on try-”

“Umm, Kara,” Jacob interrupted, his gaze fixed on the room he had just opened the door to. “I think Tien might have to stay. You need to take a look at this.”

ɸ

Tien, her tears dried, prosthesis back in place and wearing Sammi’s jumper, sat in front of a desk that took up the whole width of the room. Twelve monitors, in groups of two, sat six to either side of one larger HDTV screen. Under the desk three tower systems gave away their power-on status by the slight whirring noises from their high-capacity fans. In the rear corner of the room, more fan noises were coming from a glass-fronted equipment rack that hosted six, plain black boxes.

“Kara, this is high-end equipment. It could take me hours to sort out what we’re looking at.”

“Okay, but it’s all we have to go on, so we’re going to have to take the time. Sammi, Chaz can you go and recover the car from the Volendam carpark?” Kara received nods of agreement.

“Can you also go past the apartment Sammi? Pick me up some clothes and some soap and shampoo? The shower upstairs here is working and I need…” Tien’s voice trailed off.

Sammi placed her hand on Tien’s shoulder, “No problems. I’ll bring clean towels too. Anything else?”

Tien shook her head.

Kara spoke to Jacob, “We need to put an overwatch in. If we have company turning up I want to know about it before they knock on the door. Until we get both our cars back here we’ll have to be prepared to use the ones outside for any quick departures. Can you look after that?”

“Yep. Comms is the only issue. Your phones are bust.”

Chaz handed his phone to Kara, “I’ll pick up the spare kit from the apartment, but take this till then.”

When they were alone, Kara looked at Tien, “I’m not going to ask stupid questions, like are you alright. I just need to know, can you function?”

Tien eased the swivel chair around and looked up. “You know you asked me that before?”

Kara held her gaze and saw the determination in her friend’s stare. She remembered a similar look, years before, when Tien had ignored doctor’s orders and come to find Kara. Tubes, trailing from the freshly amputated arm to the portable drip stand, had partially obscured her eyes, but the strength of the woman hadn’t been masked. “I know,” Kara said. “In the recovery ward of Selly Oak. Do you remember what you answered?”

Tien nodded, “Of course I can function. I’m not going to let them dictate my life.”

Kara put her hand on Tien’s shoulder, “And this time?”

“Same answer. Funnily enough, same outcome. Those responsible are dead and I’m not. I get to move on.”

Kara saw the hesitation in Tien’s eyes. “But?”

“But nothing really. I was lucky. Jacob stopped it before it became…” She struggled to find the right words.

Kara waited.

“Before it happened… really. I was lucky.”

“But?”

Tien looked away, “I knew Jacob was going to kill him and I knew he was our only chance to find Swift. I knew he wasn’t armed. I even yelled at Jacob to stop...” Tien looked back up, “But…”

Kara watched Tien’s tears begin to fall again.

“Oh Kara,” Tien sobbed and said no more.

Kara knelt and hugged her, “It’s okay Tien. It’s okay.”

After a few minutes, Tien steadied her breathing, sat back and wiped her eyes. “It isn’t Kara. It’s not okay. It was different when I lost my hand. It was the game. The rules were clear. The enemy died around us and I didn’t feel pleased. It was just the job. But this is different. I’m happy he’s dead. I shouldn’t be happy another human being is dead. That’s a most terrible sin. To wish that on him and be happy for it.”

Kara felt a rising frustration. She had never been religious. Even when she had been forced to attend some compulsory church service in school or in her early days in the Air Force, she had been a bored spectator. Intrigued more by the architecture of the buildings than the spiritual voodoo the robed-men up front were performing. She had no time for it, or them. Yet she knew Tien’s strong moral compass was kept true by her family’s faith. Every single Sunday, if Tien was in London, she would attend Mass with her parents and as many of her six siblings as were available. Knowing that still didn’t help Kara understand why Tien would feel guilty about Rik. She tried, unsuccessfully, to hide her emotion, “He was about to rape you Tien. Who knows what his friends were going to do. You’ve every right to be pleased. You ha-”

“No. I don’t. It’s not right.”

Kara stood up, “Maybe not.”

“You feel nothing bad about it, do you?” Tien asked, without criticism.

Kara shook her head, “Not a thing. He deserved it.”

Tien sniffed and sat straighter in the chair, “Well, I guess I said I can function, so we better get on with it. Eh?” She rotated the chair but Kara put her hand out and swung it back to face her.

“Tien, it’s okay to feel the way you feel. It’s what makes you, you. Don’t envy me my gaping lack of humanity.”

The smile returned to Tien’s eyes and she put her cheek down onto Kara’s hand, “Thanks. Now let’s see what these guys are up to.” She spun the chair back into place and powered up the television.

The image was of the room next door. Obviously centred on where the wooden frame had been fixed in place, it now showed the drain cover. The legs of Tubbs and Van and the right shoulder of Rik just edged into the frame. The blood, not yet hosed down as Chaz had intended, flowed steadily into the drain.

“Is that a live video feed?” Kara asked.

“Seems that way. I didn’t see any cameras mounted in there. It must be small, unobtrusive.”

Kara left the computer room and called from next door, “Direct me.”

It didn’t take many seconds for Tien to have Kara standing in the right position and looking up at the camera.

“It’s a pinhole mounted in the old ceiling coving. Weird they would have gone to that amount of trouble,” Kara said as she rejoined Tien.

“Not really, when you look here,” Tien raised a small remote and flicked the TV image from the room next door to the rooms she and Kara had been separately held in earlier. She flicked again and cycled through the upstairs bathroom, WC and bedrooms. “The whole house is wired up and you’d never know it.”

“That doesn’t bode well. What the hell have we stumbled into here.”

“We’ll know soon enough. See that?” Tien stood and took hold of a thin black cable trailing from the rear of the TV. She followed it until it entered the equipment rack in the corner.

“Uh-huh. What’s it attached to?”

“A Hard Disc Drive Recorder.” Tien followed a thinner cable back from the rack to the first of the computers under the desk. She retook her seat and flicked on the left most pair of monitors. The right screen showed an interface that was a virtual representation of a video-mixer desk. The left screen was a full format video playback display with digital counters running along the base. It showed a duplicate of what was on the bigger television screen.

“Oh dear Lord,” Tien said and reached for the appropriate mouse and keyboard.

“What is it?” Kara asked, peering forward to see what Tien had just seen.

“This is professional video editing software. I mean really professional. Top level stuff. I saw the same sort of thing at the PsyOps School once. They used it to produce cinema quality infomercials.”

“And?”

“And it’s been on record for the last forty-five minutes.” Tien used the mouse and scrolled back across the digital counter at the base of the screen. The image juddered and then a fast rewind of Kara momentarily standing in front of the camera in the adjoining room was followed by a fleeting series of images. Each one displayed for such a small amount of time that Kara’s eyes couldn’t process what she was looking at, but the overall effect was certain. Tien looked away from the screen but kept the mouse clicked.

“You can stop now,” Kara said. The still-image on screen showed Tubbs and Albert wheeling the wooden frame into place. “They meant to record it all.”

Tien glanced back at the screen, “Yeah.” Her voice was flat, toneless.

“But it recorded us killing them. Is this live streaming?”

Tien was clicking the mouse again and bringing up a series of smaller window displays. “No. Apart from the connection to the recorder, this PC has no other active connections. Not even Wi-Fi. It’s air-gapped.”

“That’s a bit strange in this day and age, surely?” Kara asked.

More windows were opening on screen as Tien said, “We used air-gapped systems in the military Kara. All the time.”

“But only for…” Kara stopped as she peered over Tien’s shoulder.

Tien made the last window full size and finished Kara’s observation, “Only for things that were highly classified. Things we didn’t want anyone to have access to. It’s the ultimate way to stop anyone hacking into your system. You just stay off the Net.”

“What is that?” Kara asked.

“It’s an archive store of edited video files.”

“But… there…” Kara stammered as her mind processed what she was looking at. “There are hundreds of them.”

“Two hundred and nine,” Tien said and double clicked on a random file, dating from January 2012.

The screen filled with an image from the room next door. Rik and Buddy were easily recognisable standing behind the wooden frame. They were talking softly, but audibly, in Dutch. Both turned towards what Kara knew was the door that led to the hallway. Rik smiled broadly and extended his right hand in a strange gesture that reminded Kara of an adult reaching out to a-

“Oh fuck no!”

ɸ