WHATEVER THE COST: A Mark Cole Thriller (5 page)

‘Turn here!’ Boom shouted suddenly. ‘Left! Left!’

Cole was caught by surprise; there seemed to be no road here at all. But still he followed Boom’s directions, and turned the wheel, edging slowly into the
dense black jungle, the huge hood of the 4x4 pushing past rubber plants and banana trees.

‘Boom,’ Cole said as he
maneuvered the big car carefully through the undergrowth, ‘if this is what you call a road, then I’d hate to see a dirt track round here.’

‘Hey
Mr. Holmes,’ Boom shot back, ‘dealers come down here with
trucks
, yeah? Great big damn
trucks!
’

Fine,
Cole thought.
Fine.
If this is it, then this is it.

And eventually, the jungle did open out into some semblance of a road – not paved, of course, but still better than the first few painful minutes.

Then suddenly, right up ahead, Cole could see more vehicles, lots of them; it was a veritable parking lot of battered jeeps, trucks and 4x4s hidden in the jungle just minutes away from Cambodia’s most popular tourist attractions.

‘This is it,’ Boom said. ‘We park car here, yes? Then you walk the rest.’

‘And you?’

‘I will point out the man, right? But I no want be seen with you, in case something bad happen, yeah? I just speak to some of the other
dealers, maybe buy myself some guns, okay? If you make mistake, maybe you destroy my business, got it?’

Cole
sat in the damp heat of the car, no relieving breeze in the dark, thick jungle, thinking. If he let Boom go, would he warn the dealer? Boom was all-too aware that Cole knew where he lived; if the dealer was warned, and Cole survived, Boom would have to know that Cole would come for him.

‘You wondering
if you can trust me, yeah?’ Boom asked. ‘What other choice you have? You no idea what this man even look like! And I like this game, I help you find pirates, remember? Like Holmes and Watson?’

Cole nodded his head. ‘Okay then,’ he said as he rolled the car to a stop behind
a big army truck, reversing back in so he could escape quickly if he had to. He could see that Boom already had his head down, so nobody would see that he’d arrived in Cole’s 4x4.

‘You’re going to start giving me a complex,’ Cole said. ‘Make me think I’m not popular.’

‘Man,’ Boom said from the foot well, ‘asking questions round here gonna make you about as popular as Pol Pot, you know?’

Cole pulled a canvas hold-all over from the backseats and unzipped it, examined the contents and gave Boom a grim smile. The old Thai gun dealer was right, of course; which
was exactly why Cole had brought along a little insurance policy from the man’s garden shed.

Just in case.

6

After
Cole had pushed past the shadowy parking lot into the well-lit market beyond, he watched Boom enter the crowd from another direction, drifting through the myriad stalls.

The sight was about as bizarre as anything Cole had ever seen – a full market, not too dissimilar in size to Siem Riep’s famous Old Market back in town; only that instead of spices and silks, there were AK-47s and rocket launchers.
Other stalls sold skewered meats, noodles and Khmer palm wine; music blared from portable speakers, the sounds of Asian pop mixed with local
Kantrum
folk music from a
pinpeat
orchestra of cymbals, xylophones and flutes. The overall impression was of a bacchanalian street party, a feast for the senses after the dense darkness of the jungle.

There seemed to be a busy trade too, hundreds of buyers and sellers swarming the narrow alleyways between the stalls, lit by bare bulbs powered by huge generators chugging away in the background, barely heard above the babble of loud bartering.

And all around was the ominous presence of the jungle, thick vegetation pressing in on the clearing from all sides, always threatening to overwhelm it all and reclaim this small piece of land for itself.

Cole watched as Boom strolled casually along one of the alleyways, shaking hands as he went, a big smile on his beaming face.

Could Cole trust him? It was a risk, but a necessary one. Boom was a gun dealer himself, but seemed excited at the prospect of helping Cole catch an internationally wanted gang of pirates. He’d probably use the story to entertain his own customers.

Cole followed at a respectable distance, not wanting anyone to see that he was watching Boom, waiting for the signal. He wasn’t the only Westerner at the market, but
there were few enough for people to notice him if he wasn’t careful.

He slowed at a stall selling grenades, feigning interest in some of the products on display as he saw Boom stop at one of the larger stands, embracing a man, no
dding his head as the man spoke – once, twice, three times.

It was him.

It was Khat Narong – Boom’s contact at the market and the man who allegedly dealt with Liang Kebangkitan.

Khat was younger than Cole would have imagined, although in the strange light from the dangling bulbs it was hard to tell. He was slim, short, and dark-skinned, his face baby smooth, hair slicked back under a camouflage baseball cap.
He wore an open black shirt, camo shorts and tennis shoes. He looked like an average street seller from Bangkok, not a man making hundreds of thousands in arms sales. But appearances could be deceptive, as Cole well knew.

He knew where Khat was now, and so turned to speak to the man shoving grenades towards him,
the enthusiastic seller asking in Khmer how many Cole wanted to buy.

‘Just looking,’ he said
in English, hands out. ‘Just looking.’

The man stopped barking at him in Khmer and switched to English
himself. ‘This no place to be just fucking looking!’ he screamed. ‘You waste my fucking time!’ He moved as if to swing a punch at Cole, but Cole could tell it was bluster and moved backwards easily. ‘That’s right!’ the man shouted again. ‘You best back away! Now go on, fuck off!’

Cole
did as he was told, and turned to look across the crowds towards Khat’s stall. He noticed that Boom was gone; probably didn’t want to be in the area when Cole turned up. Which was fair enough, Cole considered, checking the pistol in his waistband.

It could get messy.

Cole’s plan was simple – he was going to kidnap the man right in front of everyone.

When he had been held captive in that hellhole in Pakistan, he had met an Indian prisoner who had taught him the secret
marma adi
pressure point strikes of the ancient Indian art of
Kalaripayattu,
said to be the forerunner of the later martial arts of both China and Japan.

It was Cole’s skill in this art which had made him so valuable to Charles Hansard and his assassination program. Through subtle attacks to specific parts of the human body, he was able to cause a wide range of conditions in his victim – from shock, to unconscious
ness, to death, to a death which could be delayed for several hours and or even days. It was a seemingly mystical power, but one which was based on thousands of years of observation and practice within the holistic Indian health system of Ayurvedic medicine.

As a ‘contract labo
rer’ for the US government, Cole could therefore assassinate enemies of the state just by getting close enough to press or squeeze their pressure points, often without the victim even noticing. And by the time the person died, he would be long gone, the death blamed on natural causes such as stroke or heart attack.

It was hard to use such skills
in the heat of a fight, as the art required absolute precision to be effective; but when used on an unsuspecting victim, it was the assassin’s art
par excellence.

Not that Cole wanted to kill Khat; not yet, anyway.

Instead, he was going to shake the man’s hand whilst pressing into the forearm with the fingertips of his other hand; a simple yet effective attack which would render Khat immediately unconscious. Cole would then apply first aid, make a scene of it being a heart attack, and load him in the Toyota for an emergency hospital visit.

It would require confidence to pull off, but Cole knew that the scene would cause a panic – and when ignorance was mutual, confidence was King.

He edged towards the stall as Khat’s last customer moved away, smiling disarmingly towards the dealer as he approached.

Here we go
, Cole thought as he extended his hand in greeting.

It went wrong almost instantly.

Cole could see Khat’s gold fillings as he smiled widely at him; yet it wasn’t a friendly smile at all, it was the smile of a spider welcoming the fly into its trap.

And suddenly Cole realized how stupid he had been, going into such a place with no surveillance, no reconnaissance, no detailed planning; trusting a man he barely knew.

The gun which came up to press against the back of his head was held by
Boom, Cole knew that without having to look. And then Khat’s associates broke away from the stall, drawing their own weapons and forming a semi-circle around Cole.

At the head of the circle was Khat; still smiling, shirt-front open, relaxed and casual.

‘You come behind my tent and we talk, yeah?’ he called over to Cole.

Damn it.

He’d been out of the game too long, grown soft; not physically, but mentally. There was no way he would have ever trusted Boom a few years ago, no way he would have approached a foreign gun market so eagerly, with such little preparation. But he had been punishing himself for so long – making things hard for himself, intentionally putting himself in harm’s way, putting himself in dangerous situations with no thought for his physical safety – that it had become a habit.

And unfortunately, a habit like that could kill him before he ever got a chance to change it.

He looked around at Khat’s six colleagues; most carried pistols, one aimed a Soviet-era Kalashnikov, all looked like they wouldn’t hesitate for a second before they blew him away. Activity around the rest of the market seemed to have come to a complete halt; all eyes were on the group outside Khat’s tent. Even the pounding music stopped after a time, and Cole felt a deep unease. It wasn’t fear, not yet; but it was close.

‘You don’t come to my home and threaten me,’ he heard Boom whisper from behind, right in his ear.
‘Who the fuck you think you are, eh?’ Boom spat on the floor by Cole’s feet. ‘Now do as the man says and
move
.’

Cole knew that Boom was right. He had no choice; he had to move.

And in a movement so fast it left no time for anyone to react, Cole slipped his head to one side, out of the way of Boom’s gun, and fired an elbow back into the man’s body. Cole heard the crack of ribs, but ignored it as he pulled Boom’s arm over his shoulder, his own hand slipping over Boom’s where it gripped the Beretta, depressing the trigger.

He fired once, taking out the man with the AK with a shot to the chest, before swinging Boom by the arm until he ended up in front of Cole as a human shield. In the same move, Cole stripped off Boom’s hand from the gun and took full control of it himself.

Firing the Beretta, Cole took Boom’s ear in his mouth, teeth clenching down tight to secure him as Cole’s other hand slipped into his own waistband and withdrew another pistol, firing it simultaneously with the first.

He felt Boom’s body shaking, and knew his traitorous friend was being hit, doing a good job of acting as Cole’s shield; but in less than six seconds since his first move, all of Khat’s men were down and out, neat bullet holes in their chests and heads.

The crowd in shock, Khat rooted to the spot with disbelief, Cole opened his bloody mouth and dropped Boom’s bleeding, bullet-riddled body to the floor and accelerated towards his target, planting a powerful thrusting front kick right into Khat’s chest.

The gun dealer went sailing back into his tent, all the air knocked from him, and Cole followed instantly, guns raised and ready.

The small covered tent at the back of the stall was filled with crates of guns, explosives and ammunition, and Cole saw Khat groping around on the floor, struggling to get his breath back. Two men unloading crates stopped what they were doing, looked at Khat, looked at Cole, and went for their guns. Cole shot them before they had a chance to aim, then quickly raced around the tent, stuffing items into a canvas bag. He slung it over his shoulder, along with a shotgun and an AK-47, then saw Khat grabbing for a gun out of one of the crates. Cole smashed the butt of the Kalashnikov into the man’s head, knocking him unconscious.

Cole reached down and hauled the gun dealer onto his shoulders in a fireman’s carry, glad that Khat weighed so little. He knew that there would be
a commotion outside, people wanting to help Khat but scared to enter the covered tent.

Cole made some last-minute preparations,
then slipped out of the rear of the tent into another aisle of stalls. He got some odd looks as he carried Khat on his shoulders, bedecked with guns, but he knew he had time before anyone realized what was going on.

He
also knew that he couldn’t go back to the other side now, towards his car; too many people had seen him over that way, too many people would try and stop him. And so he raced away from the back of Khat’s tent, through the aisles of the maze-like market, towards the dark, forbidding jungle; one hand securing Khat to his shoulders, the other holding his AK as an effective visual deterrent.

A moment later, a huge explosion rocked the market, and Cole could see dozens – perhaps hundreds – of people diving for cover, hands over their heads. Cole didn’t even bother to look – he knew it was Khat’s tent which had blown up, having set the timers on his plastic explosives for thirty seconds.

Even from so far away, he could feel the heat on his back; and then he could hear the sound of thousands of rounds of ammunition firing at all angles, the heat from the explosives having cooked them off. As he ran awkwardly towards the edge of the clearing, he hoped he wouldn’t be shot by one of the uncontrolled stray rounds.

He had almost reached the jungle when he heard the shouts, only now audible above the
roaring explosions and the cooked-off ammunition.

There was a mixture of Khmer, Thai and Vietnamese, but the raised voices all seemed to be shouting the same thing.

Over there! He’s escaping! Catch him!

Kill him!