Adrian Magson - Retribution

He stood for a moment, breathing in the clean air. It made a change from some bases, where the taste of aircraft fuel lay on your tongue all day long.

A brief flare of light came from No. 2 hangar, which housed three Lynx helicopters undergoing maintenance. Oakes froze, looking off to one side of the hangar. It came again. . definitely a light.

He edged closer, his approach silent on the thick grass, glancing towards the garage in case Killick was watching. He reached for his radio, then decided to leave it; he was already too close and the noise would carry.

He wanted this one to be a real surprise.

A small side door was open. As Oakes stepped inside he heard a scrape of noise echo through the hangar. He hefted his heavy rubber flashlight and moved towards the bank of switches that would illuminate the overhead lights.

He felt rather than heard the door swing to behind him, and a swish of disturbed air ran across the back of his neck.

‘Hey — come out-!’

His words were choked off as he was slammed back against the wall. His head connected sickeningly with a heating pipe, and a spray of lights burst in front of his eyes.

Oakes possessed some expertise in martial arts, and had represented his squadron in inter-service bouts, holding his own against younger men. Dazed as he was, he instinctively moved sideways and lashed out with a boot, a move designed to drop his attacker where he stood. But the man was no longer there.

He flicked on his torch, and instantly felt a sharp pain in his hand, as if he’d been electrocuted. The torch fell from nerveless fingers and hit the floor of the hangar, the bulb popping with the impact. He heard a sharp intake of breath barely four feet away, then a vice-like hand gripped his throat.

In the darkness, Oakes realized with awful certainty that whoever this man was, he was no local thief looking for what he could steal. Even as he thought it, he experienced a sharp pain in his gut, like the very worst kind of belly cramp, and his bladder gave way, flooding his pants with a hot gush of urine. Through the pain, he wondered how he was going to explain this to Killick and the others, being taken down like a novice.

Then he was sliding down the wall, the hand gone from his throat and his legs no longer holding him upright. He hit the floor in a sitting position, head lolling, his breath sliding out of him in a rush. God, he felt tired.

A beam of light stabbed through the darkness, and he saw a vague face in the background staring down at him.

‘What the fu-?’ he tried to ask, then gave up, the effort too much.

The last thing he felt as he rolled on his side was his head hitting the oil-scented concrete floor of the hangar. The last image he saw, looming overhead in the reflected torchlight, was the familiar blade of a Lynx helicopter.

Kassim slipped out of the giant hangar through a rear door and walked towards the fence where he had prepared an escape route. He slid through the gap and jogged across the fields, sticking close to a stone wall until he reached a narrow lane. He thought he heard a faint shout behind him, but it might have been his imagination.

Dealing with Oakes had been easy. But it had brought no satisfaction. The man was just a name, a person on the list. He hadn’t even been at the compound. But his instructors had been adamant: not every death would have a connection, but each was about laying a confusing trail.

He was feeling nauseous again, with frequent attacks of bile rising in his throat. He had put it down to the rigours of his travels and the intense stress he was under, but a small part of him was beginning to wonder.

Parked up against the wall near a clutch of trees was a battered Ford Fiesta collected from a dealer at a used car lot in an area called West Drayton near Heathrow airport. The man had barely spoken, merely handing him the keys and wishing him God’s protection. The car was old and tired, but it had served well enough to get him here, allowing him to stay off public transport and dictate his own pace. He jumped over the wall and climbed into the car, and drove away back towards the M4 motorway.

‘Jesus, this guy’s a fucking killing machine,’ Ken Deane muttered helplessly on the other end of the telephone. ‘Who the hell’s next?’

Harry stared out at a bus full of airport workers going off duty, and wished he had an answer. He was back at El Segundo military base for a flight to Pristina in Kosovo. He knew that the only way to move this business along was to go to the source of the problem: the compound near Mitrovica. Deane had nobody on the ground sufficiently skilled in investigative work, and Harry was the only person he could call on. It meant a long flight with no guaranteed outcome, but they had no choice. Harry wasn’t prepared to sit around waiting for the next grisly development.

‘I’ve got you on a military jet to the Slatina air base complex at Pristina International,’ Deane had explained, after Harry told him what he wanted to do. ‘It should take about ten hours.’

‘Make it two seats,’ said Harry. ‘I’m taking backup.’

‘Ferris?’

‘Yes. Is that a problem?’

‘No. I figured you had him around somewhere. Just keep him out of the limelight.’

After finishing with Bikovsky, he and Rik had been forced to spend the night in a hotel. While waiting for the flight, Harry had called Deane to see if there were any updates. It couldn’t have been much worse: the reports of yet another KFOR-associated murder, this time in England.

With regular flights between Moscow and London Heathrow, Kassim had probably walked on to a plane after his attempt on Koslov and straight off the other end, with no reason for anyone in UK immigration to detain him. The following evening a security alert at a small helicopter base in Gloucestershire had revealed a dead RAF corporal, Malcolm Oakes, also with the UN sign carved into his chest.

‘Oakes was due for a tour of the Falklands,’ said Deane. ‘He’d just finished a training course in the north of England and was on a temporary posting at the base in Gloucestershire to beef up security while they had people coming back from overseas.’

‘Didn’t he get the warning?’ Harry asked.

‘He did. Your Ministry of Defence sent out a written letter telling him to remain on the base pending developments.’ He sighed. ‘They found the envelope in his pocket. He hadn’t opened it.’

So Oakes had received the same treatment as the others. But with no close witnesses, there was little to go on and nothing significant from anywhere else, either. A woman cleaner at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport had seen a thin-faced man ‘vigorously’ washing his hands and forearms, then being sick in the toilets. It had been odd behaviour but hardly pointed towards a serial killer; go almost anywhere in Moscow and you could see people being ill following a heavy session on bootleg vodka.

The man’s description could have fitted any number of people in transit through the airport, and so far there was no camera footage available to back up the cleaner’s claims. At the helicopter base where Oakes had been murdered, a fellow guard named Killick had seen a figure hurrying from the hangar towards the perimeter fence, but had been too far away to make pursuit possible. He’d taken it to be another opportunist intruder. . until he’d discovered his colleague’s body.

‘You realize there are only four of you left, don’t you?’ Deane asked. ‘Bikovsky, Koslov, Pendry and you.’

There was silence as they contemplated what had happened, and what would happen again if Kassim wasn’t stopped. If the newspapers got a sniff, they would have a field day about the UN’s inability to protect its own against a knife-wielding maniac bent on revenge.