The Henchmen's Book Club (29 page)

32.
OF CRADLES AND GRAVES

The rocks were hot, smoking even, from where the F-16s had been emptying their
undercarriages but I canoodled the jagged basalt all the same as the sky above
throbbed against tracer fire. I’d made it barely six yards before diving into
an inviting blast hole to escape the hailstorm of flak. My feet cooked and my
gloves started to smoke but at least I had a modicum of cover. And on this
beach, that was going to attract a lot of towels this morning.

“
Book Mark, Book
Mark, this is Big Cat, do you copy, over?
” my radio barked the moment our
frequencies found each other.

“
Big Cat
, this is
Book Mark
. I read you,” I told our
man on the inside. “What’s your situation, over?”

“
Puppies are safe and
I have five guns with me, but…
” the transmission broke off with a crackle,
although it wasn’t a crackle of radio static but a crackle of gunfire.

“
Big Cat,
do you
copy, over?” I asked before the response came back once more.

“… I repeat,
puppies are safe and five guns with me but we’re being hit hard, over,
”
Big Cat
said, explosions and screams
echoing over the airwaves to mirror the explosions and screams echoing all
around me on the beach.

“
Big Cat
!
Big Cat
, can you hold out?” I had to ask
several times before
Big Cat
responded.

“
Ten minutes but no
longer.
” A raking hiss almost popped the earpiece from my ear as Big Cat
roared at someone to “
Take that you
bastard!
” before leaving me with a word of advice. “
Don’t stop to read nothing, over
.”

“Understood,” I promised him, twisting the dial to dim the
fighting in my ear just as the lip of our crater began exploding with
ricochets.

At that moment, Mr Smith and Mr Capone tumbled in on top of
me, knocking me against the sides of the smoking hole I was crouching in.

“Hey, how’s it going?” Mr Smith asked, helping me to my
feet again.

“Fantastic. You?”

“Pretty sweet,” he agreed.

“Is this it?” Mr Capone wanted to know, rock chips spitting
in our faces as the ridge of our crater was raked.
 

The three of us had been on the easternmost hovercraft to
beach, maybe thirty yards from the next nearest craft, but we were pinned-down
by a suppressing force of fire from three separate gun positions. I had hoped
more guns might have been knocked out by the time we came ashore. But then
again, I had also hoped that Harry Potter might have been knocked out of book
club by the time we came to commemorate our fifth anniversary but that didn’t
look like happening either.

I guess bad things sometimes happen to bad people.

“I see the guns are still firing?” Mr Smith pointed out as
more splinters peppered our necks.

“Yeah, I thought this was going to be a cake-walk?”
complained Mr Capone.

“When has anything we’ve been involved in ever been a
cake-walk?” I asked. “Fuck me, if we were to organise an actual cake-walk, to
pick up cakes as we walked, we’d still lose three men along the way. You should
know that by now.”

“So how do you wanna play this?” Mr Smith asked. “We can’t
sit here all day.”

“No we can’t,” I agreed, mindful of the hell raging several
storeys below us. “Let’s see if some of this kit Dunbar gave us actually
works,” I said, slipping the backpack off my shoulder and pulling out one of my
flying frags.

As you’d expect, the UN had kitted us out with some of the
best weapons available. And then the US had taken us to one side and kitted us
out with some of the best weapons not available. The flying frag had been one
such under-the-counter item.

I pulled out the pin to arm the grenade and tossed it into
the air just above our position. When the frag reached the peak of its throw,
two tiny blades popped out of either side and began buzzing like bumblebee
wings to hold it in mid-air.

Mr Smith pressed a couple of buttons on a tiny accompanying
handset and a picture appeared on-screen of the landscape around our blast
hole. Some hundred yards north we could see tracer fire pouring out of a gun
slot, only to explode around our hole a nanosecond later. Mr Smith used a
joystick to steer the frag to the right, away from the stream of fire and
across the terrain until he’d taken it to within a few yards of one of the
guns. In the little screen, we saw the faces of the two-man gunnery team, grim
and determined as they unleashed a storm across our position.

Mr Smith inched the frag closer and closer, guiding it into
the foot-wide gun hole until their expressions changed to one of disbelief.

“What the fu…!” I heard them shout just as Mr Smith pressed
the fire button triggering a dull thud in the distance.

The firing around our hole immediately stopped.

“That worked,” Mr Smith admitted as I tossed the next frag
into the air. He read the pin I’d handed him and keyed the frag’s “Pin Number”
to take control of it, then began guiding it across the rocks to the next enemy
position.

“If you happen to pass Rip on the way, do see if you can
dock with his grenade belt,” I suggested, much to Mr Smith and Mr Capone’s
amusement.

Pretty soon we weren’t the only ones flying frags across
the landscape and the gunners quickly cottoned onto the danger. But the frags
were small, barely the size of King Edwards and coloured to match the terrain
so that they were virtually impossible to spot, let alone shoot.

More thuds resonated along the ridge as the guns fell
one-by-one and soon the only sounds of automatic fire were coming from us.

“That’s it, move out!” came the inevitable shout,
accompanied by a few gun-happy whoops from some of the loopier lads as we
poured from our holes and out onto the slopes.
 

The rocks were dotted with dead, both ours and those of our
Italian forebears, and I was sorry to see Mr Rousseau was amongst them. I’d
shared a cell with him for three years and in all that time we’d only had one
argument. Sure some of his habits had annoyed me, just as I’m sure some of mine
had annoyed him, but I was still sorry to see him face-down on the shingle no
matter how much the dirty bastard loved to pick his feet with my paperclip.

“
Big Cat
, we’re
coming!” I radioed without getting a reply.

Jack Tempest appeared alongside me as we ran for the ridge
and afforded me a flash of his eyebrows.

“Still with us Jones?” he honked.

“For the moment, Jack,” I replied, realising I was going to
have trouble with this one before the day was out.

Just short of the ridge were a series of newly excavated
trenches. We approached at a sprint but held off jumping in because we’d been
advised they’d been booby-trapped. Unfortunately Mr Capone couldn’t have got
the memo because that’s exactly what he did, shredding himself to suet when he
charged in like Braveheart, only to come flying out again like Rocket Man.

“What an obliging fellow!” Tempest quipped, jumping into
the same trench once the smoke had cleared.

“I can’t believe he just said that,” Mr Smith gasped, hands
on hips in outrage.

“S
hocking
isn’t it,” I
agreed, equally disappointed with XO-11
. Tempest had a lot to learn about respect. And more importantly
judging an audience. After all Mr Capone might have been a professional bad guy
but he was still a friend of ours. But more firing cut these sentiments short,
along with Mr Williams a few feet from me, and once more we were diving for
cover.

I looked over the
lip of the trench and saw
X
³
’s guys pouring out of the rocks a hundred yards north.

Our guys were
taking them on, gun-for-gun, and making a fight of it, when all of a sudden a
whirling blur came out of nowhere and ran right up the middle with the biggest
gun I’ve ever seen.

It was Rip Dunbar.

He’d somehow torn
one of the .50 cal machine guns off a hovercraft and was running riot. I had no
idea how he was even staying on his feet, let alone aiming to fire it. I doubt
whether I could’ve even lifted the enormous cannon or the ammo box that hung
beneath it, but Rip seemed as happy as a lamb in spring as he scampered from
gully to crevice, hosing
X
³
’s men off the rocks with a continuous
chugga-chugga-chug
.

Tempest popped up
beside me to watch the carnage for a moment or two. “Dumb gorilla,” was his
considered opinion before he sunk from view again.

A shaped-charge blew open the door at the far end of the
trench before Tempest, Mr Smith and I slid down the rails of the steel
staircase inside to catch those at the bottom with our sub-machine guns.

The time was 0605 hours. We’d used up a lot of minutes
getting in. I just hoped we hadn’t used up too many.

Base sirens were wailing and a sexy mechanical voice was
informing the corridors around us that security had been breached in Sector
Seven.

“We don’t like gossips around here, sweetheart,” Tempest
said, shooting the speaker off the wall.

“That should fix the problem, I’m sure they only had the
one speaker,” Mr Smith said, but Tempest ignored the jibe.

“Come on.”

Three more guards met with three more bursts of machinegun
fire as we sprinted through the sweeping corridors until we came to a
crossroads. Branching three ways, signs pointed towards the Command Centre,
Sector Six and the Submarine Dock. We opted to split up, with Mr Smith and Mr
Petrov coming with me to Sector Six, while Mr Jean and the others headed for
the Submarine Dock, leaving Tempest to pick his own path towards the Command
Centre.

“You get the kids. I’ll get Triple X,” he said locking and
loading a new clip into his MP5 with a theatrical flourish.

“Sure, if Major Dunbar doesn’t get him first,” I reminded
him. Tempest didn’t look too happy about that and dashed off without further
consideration.

“How did we get lumbered with that bloke?” Mr Petrov wanted
to know.

“
Big Cat
,
Big Cat
, this is
Book Mark
, do you copy, over?” I radioed.

A burst of static responded a few seconds later, sharp,
crackly and violent and soon I realised it wasn’t static at all – it was
bedlam.

“
I read you
,”
Big Cat
finally came back. “
Where are you?
” he pleaded, his
transmissions brief and to the point.

“Sector Seven,” I replied. “Give us directions.”

“
We’ve fallen back to
Sector Four, down as far as you can go. Stairs at Five… motherfuck…!
”

“What’s your situation, over?” I asked.

“
Two dead. RPGs.
Don’t think we can hold…
” a whoosh and a roar cut that transmission dead
before Big Cat summarised the situation with a single word. “
Hurry!
”

“We’re coming, over,” I promised him, the heat turned up
beneath my resolve.

We took off at a canter, gun-sights to the eyes, silencers
to the fore and downed two more of
X
³
’s boys along
the way.

Sector Six was almost identical to Sector Seven as far as I
could make out. Only the sector logos were painted in blue, rather than red.
Here we met more resistance, though these guys played dirty, hiding behind
doors in the corridor ahead as they waited for us to pass. Mr Smith, Mr Petrov
and myself ran straight through the ambush, opening up on their doors as we ran
past and reducing our would-be assassins to Swiss cheese before they could say
“boo”.

Normally we might not have stood a chance against such an
ambush but thanks to the US military we had an advantage over the opposition.
See, other than the guns, the frags, the body armour and hot knives they’d so
generously kitted us out with, they’d also fitted me with a new eye. One that
could see.

“We’re clear,” I said, scanning the corridor ahead for
signs of movement but finding none.

Okay it couldn’t actually see, as in see – as in
trees or horses or the faces of terrified children – but it could see all
the same because I’d only lost my eyeball in Africa, not my optical nerve. The
images were no more than colourful patterns, confusing and unintelligible at
first, like those 3D picture books that never quite caught on in the eighties,
but I’d soon got the hang of them and what they represented on the flight over.
Ultra-violet, infrared, heat signatures, even sound, I could see all of them
with a little tuning of the iris. It was just a question of fusing these images
in my mind to create a decipherable picture.

And thirty seconds earlier that picture had told me there
were four guys with hot bodies and cold guns lying in wait for us in the
corridor ahead.

I retook the point and we sprinted the last hundred yards
until we came to steel door that marked the start of Sector Five. There was
movement behind the door’s tiny window, lots of it, but Big Cat was continuing
to die inch-by-inch in my ear so we had no choice but to proceed.