Matt Hilton - Blood and Ashes

Bang, bang, bang on the partition. ‘The fuck you doing in there, asshole?’

‘Just gettin’ comfortable, Dillman. That OK with you?’

‘Lie still, or I swear to God I’m gonna come in there and put a round through each of your knees. I gotta keep you alive for Gant, but he said nothin’ about you having to be in one piece.’

Vince smiled at Dillman’s bravado. The bullshitter’s words helped cover the faint squeak as he pushed open one of the doors. He slipped out of the van, then gently closed the door. Dillman wouldn’t even know that he’d escaped until he finally came out of the warm cab to check why Vince was so quiet. He guessed that could be a while.

Ensuring he stayed in a direct line with the van and out of Dillman’s view in the mirrors, he hurried away. He kept going until he was a good hundred yards distant and hidden by the drizzle before he ducked to his right and sped off at a tangent. The lack of a corresponding shout or bullet whizzing after him confirmed that Dillman was blissfully unaware of his escape.

Vince found that they hadn’t moved far from where Sonya had been killed. He followed the verge at the side of the road to where it widened out, then ran for the demolished cabin. His Ford had been shifted, sent down the embankment on the far side, and it was lying in a stream bed, on its side. Gant’s men had made it look like the Ford had been in a tragic accident, and had gone to the trouble of placing Sonya and Gant’s driver inside before they set the vehicle on fire.

Vince eyed the smouldering corpses inside and for the first time felt a genuine twinge of regret for Sonya. She was a crazy bitch, but he had to admit that there was a lot he liked about her. In a different world, maybe they could have been… No. That could never happen. He turned away, retraced his steps back to the demolished cabin.

Then he began sifting through the wreckage. When he couldn’t find what he was looking for, he followed the trail to where Sonya had ended up on the floor, and began kicking over splinters of wood. That failed to turn up what he was after, so he stood in the spot where he’d rolled the woman’s body over to retrieve her gun. Then he walked in a spiral away from her. Not as good as conducting a grid-pattern search, but it was faster. Ten yards out he saw it, and he stooped down and picked up Sonya’s cell phone. Debris on top of it had kept it dry. At first he feared that the phone was broken, but the cover and battery had merely slipped when the collision had knocked the phone out of her pocket. He clicked them back in place and was rewarded with a glowing screen as the phone rebooted. The screen saver was a picture of Vince. He was giving her the Elvis lip when she’d snapped the image, his quiff flopping over one eye.

‘You jerk,’ he said.

Then he made the call.

Nostalgia made me smile, but it would be a death’s-head image at best. I had on my game face and knew that even my closest friends found the sight perturbing. Rink, who’d shared many search-destroy missions with me, had found it scary, and he was a man who was normally frightened of nothing. When wearing this face I went way beyond even the red zone extolled by my combat instructor, straddling that plane lorded over by the Grim Reaper. It was my killing face.

I welcomed the rictus smile.

As well as the challenge ahead.

The fight with the two men back in Bedford Well had been driven by insecurity, and I realised now that I’d been allowing feelings of fallibility to control me for too long. The injured hand, the wounds in my leg, they’d all been excuses, and those negative concerns had made me feel — maybe even fear — for my mortality. Now there was no room for worrying about my well-being. Killing these men to save the children gave me purpose again.

The months spent recuperating had been a waste of time; all that was really needed was to jump right back on the bucking horse.

It felt good.

I moved smoothly through the woods, a mud-smeared wraith closing in on those who would harm Millie, Beth and Ryan.

Don Griffiths fired a second volley.

One engine died and the sound of doors flying open was followed by shouts of panic. Their return fire filled the woods with a staccato rap.

I hurdled over a fallen tree, kept running.

The second engine revved wildly, tyres spinning on mud, and then there was a loud screech and the impact of metal on metal.

Don’s H amp;K rattled again.

More shouts, and another assault rifle responding in kind.

The bullet-ridden sedan was abandoned in the trail, its front doors wide. Its two occupants had retreated across the road and had taken up hiding places among the trees. They fired blindly at the crest where Don was invisible to them, their rounds churning up leaves and chunks of tree-bark but little else. Don, as instructed, fired and moved, fired and moved, never giving them a location to concentrate upon.

The SUV was still trying to force its way inside the compound, the front wheels bucking and bouncing on the slick log that I’d jammed in the wire, getting nowhere fast. Those inside were too busy to shoot at Don. They could wait, I decided, and moved for the men in the trees.

I was ten feet from the first when Don laid down another volley. I dropped and the rounds cut through the foliage above me. Then, with the cessation, the man returned fire, screaming wordlessly at Don. Mind engaged, he had no idea that death was swooping in on him from behind.

My left hand clasped the man’s jaw, tugged up and back so the bald skull wedged tightly against my shoulder. I didn’t slice the throat. The man could live for too long afterwards. Granted his life would be counted in seconds, but that was enough to fight back. A stray round could kill as easily as a well-aimed one. I jammed the tip of the KA-BAR into the soft flesh under the man’s chin and drove it upwards, brutally sawing the handle back and forth. Making soup of his brain.

There wasn’t even vestigial movement in the man’s limbs as he fell at my feet.

Briefly, I thought about picking up the dropped assault rifle, but discarded the idea. Here in the woods, manoeuvrability was king. The rifle would be an encumbrance.

I dashed away, going almost to my belly as the second skinhead popped up from behind a boulder and fired towards the ridge where Don was hiding. The lack of a response from Don told me that the old man was possibly out of ammunition. Didn’t matter; once this second man was dead, the rules would change. Don would already be moving through the woods to where Millie and the kids were.

Thinking about the children listening to the distant crack of gunfire, I wondered if they were again picturing the bullet that had torn out their stepfather’s chest. For a second a bubble of my own insecurities threatened to pop in my chest. It tasted like bile in my throat and I swallowed it down. I wasn’t going there again. The way to stop the children experiencing further nightmares was to stop these men.

I crept in on the second skinhead. The smell of fear wafted off him in waves: sweat and passed wind. I could almost pity the man.

On the man’s jacket there was a stitched patch, a double lightning-bolt, like those worn by the original Schutzstaffel — Hitler’s Praetorian Guard. He deserved the same lack of mercy as his forebears had shown the thousands murdered in their extermination camps.

Perhaps it was the man’s supercharged nerves that warned him, because as I stepped close the skinhead jerked round, his rifle swinging with him. He pulled on the trigger as he moved and rounds made an arch of destruction through the woods.

At that moment, though, I was finer tuned. I lunged sideways even as I barrelled in, staying just beyond the angle of fire. The skinhead tried to track me, but my KA-BAR cut down and to the side, knocking the muzzle of the gun aside. The back stroke cut clean through his windpipe. Then I reversed the blade and jammed it down behind his left clavicle. Not as clean a kill as the first but equally final.