WHATEVER THE COST: A Mark Cole Thriller (6 page)

BOOK: WHATEVER THE COST: A Mark Cole Thriller
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7

The room was stark and bare, empty except for the form of a hooded man, kneeling on the dirt floor with his hands tied behind his back.

He was wearing a torn shirt and what looked like the trousers from a suit, almost as if he had been wrenched from his daily life and normal routine and been dragged kicking and screaming to this dank, evil cell.

Perhaps he had.

Another form entered the room then, tall and slim. This form, too, was hooded, but this hood was far more menacing than the simple rice sack placed over the man’s head; it was pure white with the end pointed, eye-holes cut out from the cloth, black nothingness beyond them.
Eyes steeped in shadow; soulless, merciless.

The figure was cloaked in the robes of an Islamic cleric, and a hand shot out quickly from the robe, yanking the hood from the prostrate man. He looked up, and some people would have
recognized him as Brad Butler, a war correspondent with CNN.

The same hand dropped the hood to the floor and took hold of the man’s hair, pulling back sharply to expose the throat, even as the other hand withdrew a long, curved, ivory-handled knife.

Butler’s screams stopped just as soon as they’d started as the figure started sawing – back and forth, back and forth – until the man’s head came off entirely, blood spraying in a bright crimson shower over the robes, the hood.

And hidden within the hood, those black pools that should have been eyes still betrayed no shred of emotion at all.

 

Within the hour,
Abd Al-Aziz Quraishi was back in his office within the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Interior in downtown Riyadh, his bloodstained robes now replaced by a clean set, ready for the day ahead.

A minor and distant member of the House of Saud, Quraishi was
Assistant Minister for Security Affairs, a role which suited his needs to absolute perfection.

Although he was a devout Muslim – and indeed believed that not many people across the whole of Islamic history could rival his religious zeal – he was also much more widely educated than most fundamentalist radicals.

As such, he very much believed in Sun Tzu’s advice in
The Art of War
, written five thousand years before –
know your enemy.

It was a mistake many of his brethren had made over the years – their strict upbringing, their blinkered approach, their ignorance of the world outside their narrow perceptions, had made them fail in their
jihad
time and time again.

But not Quraishi; he knew his enemies all too well. He had been born into one of them, the horrifically corrupt House of Saud; and he had travelled to the United States to learn more about the other, the Great Satan itself.

After joining the Saudi Royal Guard Regiment while still in his teens, Quraishi had volunteered to go to America for officer training at West Point.

And so he had willingly entered the belly of the beast, examining his foe from within; learning American military tactics firsthand, but more importantly, developing an understanding of her people.

And what he had found disgusted him. Yes, they were pleasant enough, but it was all on the surface; deep down there was simply nothing there, years of capitalism and secularity and greed and corruption eating away at the moral fiber of the nation until there was nothing left but blind automatons, slaves to the marketers and advertisers who sold the bland and mundane products of the companies who really ran the country.

His years in America had been insane, like living in a Disneyland populated entirely by spoiled children. Every day there had made him nauseous, but he had put on a façade of acceptance, shown
himself willing to adapt to American ways, pretend to be impressed with American customs. He knew it would be expected of him, and would bear fruit in the future, when he could use the relationships he would develop there.

Know your enemy.

He had known it was also expected of him by the House of Saud itself, which prided itself on its relations with America. After all, she was the main consumer of its oil, Saudi Arabia’s multi-trillion dollar industry, and – as was continuously stressed to him by the more senior members of the royal family – good relations with the US were of paramount importance to the regime’s survival.

Not that Quraishi wanted the regime to survive.

On the contrary, he was fundamentally committed to the wholesale destruction of the corrupt, West-loving House of Saud.

And he knew that with the fall of the Great Satan would also come the fall of the hated monarchy which ruled his belove
d country; the country which contained both Mecca
and
Medina, the two holiest places in the entire world, now defiled by the presence of the US military.

He ignored the fact that he was a part of that same monarchy; it was blood only, and not soul.

His soul was committed to Allah, and Allah alone.

And unlike many of his
freedom-fighting contemporaries, he was intelligent enough to see that he could use his position, his connections, to further his cause, may Allah forgive him.

H
e had used his intelligence, his knowledge of Western and Saudi governments, his worldwide connections, to create a new group, an organization of such blessed purity that it made all others pale in comparison.

Harakat al-jihad al-Islami al-jazirat al-‘arabiyah.

Arabian Islamic Jihad.

The beheading of Brad Butler had been filmed, and would be posted on the usual websites when the time was right.
When the power of his organization was ready to unleash havoc on an unsuspecting world.

His disguised appearance was absolutely necessary; he was far too well known in Saudi Arabia to show his r
eal face, or use his real voice. Vehemently opposed to the Saudi royal family, there was no way that his followers would agree to suborn themselves to someone from that same royal line, tainted as it was with western corruption. There weren’t many who would accept that Quraishi accepted the façade of his position, his public life, only to enhance the probability of success for his
real
calling in life as The Lion, feared head of the AIJ.

Quraishi was still smiling as he remembered slicing through the neck of that Western tool of propaganda, the CNN journalist Brad Butler, when an assistant knocked at his office door and brought in his cup of jasmine tea.

Quraishi thanked him, then quickly ushered him out when he heard the buzzing of his secure telephone.

‘Yes?’ he answered when the
man had left the office.

The message was good, and the smile remained on Quraishi’s face as his contact talked. An agent of Jemaah Islamiyah, a freedom fighting group within the Indonesian archipelago with who
m he had developed a good relationship over the years, the man on the phone updated Quraishi on their recent operation; stage one in The Lion’s master plan.

Yes, Quraish
i considered as he sipped quietly at his tea, all the pieces were coming together nicely.

 

8

Trying to move through jungle was an arduous physical prospect at the best of times; carrying an unconscious body on his back, an equipment satchel and assault rifle slung over his shoulder, and cradling a shotgun in his arms, meant that for Cole, it was now even harder.
Especially as he didn’t have a machete to hack his way through the thick undergrowth, and he had a mob of well-armed and dangerous gun dealers chasing him.

He tried to keep his pursuers at bay by throwing the odd hand grenade
or firing a blast from the shotgun; one advantage he had was that they would want Khat back alive, whereas he could fire at them with no such considerations.

He’d chosen the shotgun for work in the jungle as it was a weapon perfectly suited to the environment; with a relatively short range and scattershot effect, it did the maximum amount of damage at the short, dangerous distances typical of jungle combat.

Even though it was night, the air remained thick and hot, and the tall trees blocked what little light came from the moon and the stars. It was both a curse and a blessing; it made it almost impossible to see where he was going, but it would also make him a much harder target for the people following.

Cole’s heart raced as he pulled himself over ancient tree stumps and tangled vines, the exertion terribly intense. But he had fought in the jungle before, and the sickening harshness of the environment could never overwhelm him. Such feelings were
perfectly natural to Cole, who had known little else his entire life. First there had been selection, and then training, and then a lifetime of operational missions. And not one bit of it had ever been comfortable.

And in fact – despite the danger, the sharp hit of adrenalin, the pain in his straining muscles, his searing lungs,
his wildly pumping heart – he felt at home, the chase through the ferocious jungle something that was comfortingly familiar to him after being so long adrift.

Yes,
he thought happily as he turned into the dense blackness of the jungle behind him, illuminating it briefly with the muzzle flash of his shotgun, the sound of its strident bark almost deafening in the enclosed area as he unleashed another two shells at his unseen enemy.

Yes.

I’m home.

 

Cole’s heart stopped as his right foot slid down a bank, his balance gone, and he tumbled over in to the pitch black waters of the Siem Reap River.

He collected himself immediately, cursing himself for making such a mistake. But he could use the river to lose the people who relentlessly followed him; and so he moved the still-unconscious Khat into a lifeguard’s retrieval position,
one of Cole’s arms secured around his chest as he side-stroked across the muddy river.

The shouts of men came from the far side only moments later, yells and panicked splashing as they too slipped and slid into the water. Cole wondered if they’d seen him, but the soil of the bank erupted
around him just seconds later, the men emptying their assault rifles in his direction, and Cole’s question was answered with frightening certainty.

Cole thought them crazy; in the eerie jungle half-light there was no way they could guarantee missing Khat. But Cole reali
zed that the thrill of the chase, of the hunt, was upon the men now; this particular group might not even have realized who they were chasing, or why; only that there was someone who had caused trouble back at the market, and who needed to be caught. Or killed.

But the time for thinking was later, and Cole pushed Khat onto the far bank, dropped the shotgun and swung the AK off his shoulder, finger pressing the trigger as soon as his grip was secured, spraying the far side of the narrow river with powerful 7.62mm rounds. The rifle on fully-automatic fire emptied its magazine in just five seconds.

Cole had heard a cry, a scream; but pressing his advantage, he ejected the magazine, hands operating in the dark to instantly insert another and spraying the riverside once more until the gun clicked empty.

He was rewarded with cries of pain, guttural shouts, pleas for help, and knew it was time to press on back into the jungle. The men on the far side were out, but their screams would soon attract others, and then this side of the river would be swarming with them.

He turned to pick up Khat’s body, and was horrified to see an empty space where he had left him. Cole looked harder into the green-black gloom, wondering if the body was just covered in shadow, but he could make out a depression in the mud where Khat had been only moments ago.

Damn.

But the man couldn’t have gone far; Cole had spent less than half a minute firing at his pursuers.

Straining his eyes, he managed to make out a small mound of crumpled weeds, a hole of crushed vegetation which led
further into the jungle.

Leaving the empty Kalashnikov by the riverside, Cole picked
up his shotgun and entered through the imposing green wall, determined to catch his quarry and make him talk.

 

Who the hell was this guy?
Khat Narong simply couldn’t believe what had happened in the last half an hour.

First, one of his good Thai customers had come up to him and told him that a crazy foreigner was here asking questions about Liang Kebangkitan Apparently the man had come to Boom Suparat’s home and threatened him. Boom had led him here to the Angkor market – a crime Khat might ordinarily have killed him for – but had then been quick to tell Khat exactly what was going on.

Khat had told Boom to circle round and ambush the American from the rear, while six of his own men would fan out to surround him. And that’s exactly what had happened.

But what had followed was hard to understand. How had the man done that? Killed everyone so quickly, so efficiently? Six armed men – not including Boom, who had been killed by Khat’s own men – killed in just a few seconds.

Khat was a tough man; although he looked young, he was fifty-six years old and had lived through the civil war and the Khmer Rouge’s brutal extermination years, seen his mother and father shot in the head and thrown into a ditch by the roadside right in front of him. He’d served as a mercenary throughout Southeast Asia himself, then as an enforcer for a Chinese gang in the Phillipines, before realizing that there was more money to be made supplying arms rather than using them. He’d spent the last twenty years building up his business, and had been instrumental in setting up the Angkor market. Most of his big trade was done off-site and privately, but it was here that he felt most at home, the place where he could meet friends old and new. It was amazing how many lucrative deals had been secured through relationships he’d first developed here in the jungle.

Liang Kebangkitan was one of them, and Khat had cursed out loud when they’d hijacked that ship with three American crewmembers on board. Their name hadn’t been confirmed, but Khat knew it must be them; they were the only pirate group in that area capable of pulling off such a large-scale operation.

Khat had feared that the trail might lead to him; after all, he had supplied the gang with all of their weapons and equipment. Hell, even the fast Rigid Inflatable Boats they used had come from Khat.

But Khat had expected to be questioned only if Arief and his pirate gang were caught; he’d never thought that the Americans might use him to get to the gang in the first place.

But who
was
this American? He seemed to be working alone, which was strange in itself. And his swift recourse to lethal violence was not something which Khat had experienced from intelligence and law enforcement officers from that country before.

But, Khat reasoned as he pushed through the fierce, cloying vegetation of the jungle, whoever the man was, Khat was best off
very
far away from him.

 

In the grim twilight, Cole tracked the man; using his eyes when he could, stopping to feel the ground, the vegetation, when he couldn’t, using his fingers to get some physical sign of Khat’s progress through the jungle.

It was a strange situation – Cole was hunting Khat, and Khat’s friends and colleagues were hunting Cole.

Cole wondered if Khat would double back, towards his friends, but thought this might be dangerous for the man. As the incident at the riverside would have taught him, there were some men in the ‘rescue’ posse who were willing to shoot first and check who was dead later. Khat wouldn’t risk being shot by going back towards them.

Khat would therefore press on deeper into the jungle, which is what it looked like was happening; although in such a dense, claustrophobic atmosphere it was next to impossible to keep one’s sense of direction intact, especially at night. They could both be running in circles for all Cole knew.

Sounds were confusing in such an enclosed space, blocked by trees, shrubs, bushes and vines; but behind, Cole could hear shouts, the odd AK round being fired. A pistol shot here, a shotgun blast there.

And up ahead . . .

Cole could have sworn he’d just heard a
splash
.

Had he been right?
Had
they just circled round in the dark, and were now back by the river? Or was it something else?

Cautious, Cole edged forward, leading with the muzzle of his Chinese Hawk semi-automatic shotgun.

The tree line came upon him suddenly, but Cole didn’t slip this time; he just stopped and stared at the wide expanse of water in front of him. At the edge of the jungle, the moonlight was able to finally get past the trees, illuminating a perfectly straight line of water which Cole estimated as being a hundred or so meters across.

Cole knew something so straight couldn’t be natural, and reali
zed that it must be a moat, carved out of the jungle hundreds – perhaps even thousands – of years ago to protect the ancient temples beyond.

Had they arrived at Angkor Wat? But Cole was sure that the Angkor Wat moat was even wider than this.

And then he realized – this must be Angkor
Thom
, an even larger complex hidden further north in the jungle. Less tourists made it this far, but the scale of the place was supposed to be even more impressive than its more famous neighbor.

These thoughts flickered through Cole’s brain in the blink of eye; no longer than it took him to scan the moat and opposite bank with the aid of the blessed moonlight and reacquire Khat.

He was there, a vague figure in the distance, climbing out of the moat on the far side. Cole was impressed; the man must have hauled ass through the jungle to get there this far ahead of him.

Cole considered his options quickly, and reacted while he still had time.

He fired the shotgun across the moat once, then again, and finally a third time. He heard a grunt of pain in between blasts, and saw the figure of Khat stumble on the other bank in the waning moonlight.

The spread of the shotgun sh
ells’ pellets at a hundred meters could be probably be measured in yards rather than inches; and yet Cole didn’t want to kill Khat, only to slow him down.

Velocity at that distance would also be seriously reduced, and Cole knew that the pellets wouldn’t penetrate far into Khat’s body. But they would make it difficult to move, and would help Cole track him by leaving a tell-tale trail of blood.

The shotgun blasts would bring other people quickly to the moat though, and Cole knew he wouldn’t have much time left.

And so without a second
thought, Cole leapt from the jungle into the still, green-black waters of the Angkor Thom moat.

 

Khat staggered through the trees, pulling himself over vines and undergrowth, pain shooting through his legs, into his back.

The bastard had shot at him from across the moat, hit him too; although with a shotgun spread at that distance, it would have been a miracle if some of the pellets
hadn’t
hit him.

Khat remembered selling a vast quantity of those guns to a Triad gang in Macau. For fun, they’d taken a line of what they’d called ‘prisoners’ – although Khat had had no idea where they’d come from, or
how they’d offended the Triads – and then lined them up far away from the guns. Members of the gang had then fired towards them, checked for damage, and then made the line shuffle a few feet further forwards. When the prisoners finally died of their wounds, the Triads had been happy that they’d found the maximum lethal range of the weapons.

Khat seemed to remember it was about fifty yards.

He tried to forget the terrified screams that accompanied that data, however.

If it helped him make a sale, he’d found he could forget anything.

But right now, as pain raced through his battered body, he was unable to forget one terrifying fact – that he was a rat caught in a dangerous trap.

 

Cole could hear the shouts as the gun dealers reached the bank of the moat, knew that they’d be able to see him silhouetted by the moon.

He felt the slaps of water near him before he heard the shots themselves, high-velocity rounds fired towards him.

He dove instantly, at once completely immersed in the inky black of the ancient moat’s murky waters.

BOOK: WHATEVER THE COST: A Mark Cole Thriller
11.19Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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