Tony Park - Silent Predator

Sannie thought Fraser was a windgat, a windbag. No matter what Tom may have done wrong, he didn’t deserve the treatment he was getting at the hands of the army guys, and neither did she. She had hated the way the smarmy major had looked her up and down. The man should have been thinking about his job, not getting into her pants. White, however, seemed like a decent oke, even though it was clear he resented having to shepherd her and Tom.

Sannie was excited. She couldn’t deny it. Despite the jealousy and penis-fighting that often occurred whenever two armed organisations got together to do a job, she was genuinely looking forward to seeing the much-vaunted SAS in action. How many people, she wondered, could say they had seen a terrorist stronghold taken down?

The tactics interested her: the placement of snipers, the methods of entry they would use. She wondered how much experience the individual soldiers had. She imagined they had fought in one or more wars — probably Afghanistan or Iraq — but she privately doubted that any of them would have entered as many buildings in pursuit of armed offenders as she had in her ten years on the job.

As a uniformed policewoman she had fired her weapon three times, wounding offenders twice. She had very nearly been killed in one of her first raids. They had been following up a tip-off about a drug dealer whose neighbours had complained about him after he killed a local boy in an argument over a lost heroin delivery. Sannie had been the junior member on the team of uniforms backing up the detectives. She had actually been outside the block of flats where the man lived, standing by the police bakkie when the raid went in. The man was living in a first-floor apartment and when the sledgehammer took his door off its hinges, the man ran through to the back bedroom and jumped over the balcony railing, landing hard on the ground not ten metres from where she was standing. The man was holding an American forty-five automatic, a canon of a gun, and he aimed it right at her chest as he dragged himself to his feet. Sannie fumbled for her own pistol, which was still holstered, and the man pulled the trigger.

Nothing.

Her partner, a sergeant approaching retirement who had been assigned to look after the new girl, was faster than she on the draw and put the dealer down with two bullets in the chest.

Sannie remembered the shock of the incident, of how she had fought off the tears all day until she had gone home and crumbled in Christo’s arms. She had thought about giving up her job, but her husband, then also still in uniform, had told her she must be blessed. She didn’t think of herself as bulletproof, but the gangster’s misfire had taught her always to be ready. She and Tom trudged up the dune behind the sergeant major.

‘Please, God,’ she said to herself, ‘let this work out okay for Tom and for Robert Greeves. Tom deserves this. He’s a good man.’

Fraser knelt in the shadows, in a depression between two dunes, and pulled his gasmask from its pouch. Around him, the other members of the main assault team were doing the same.

He did a quick communications check to make sure he could send and receive with the mask on. They would hit the house with flash-bangs — stun grenades that produced a non-lethal but sense-shattering explosion of noise and smoke — and CS, or tear gas, grenades as soon as the entrances were breached. Greeves would suffer as much as the terrorists from the shock and the chemicals but, unlike his captors, he would live.

‘All teams, this is Dagger niner, confirm you are in position.’

‘Dagger one, roger, over.’ The blocking force and snipers were ready.

‘Dagger two, roger, over,’ said the commander of the second assault team, which would enter the house through the back door. Fraser was leading the assault team that would blast its way in through the front door of the house, on the beach side, and smash the window of the room where Greeves was being held.

‘Dagger niner, this is one, over.’

Fraser tensed. He had been just about to give the order to move. ‘Dagger one, this is niner. What is it, over?’

‘We’ve got movement at the second window from the right at the rear. Shadows on the curtain, over. One X-ray. Looks like he was taking a peek, over.’

Fraser frowned. ‘Roger, one. You know the drill when the assault goes in. If you see movement and you’re not going to hit one of the assault team, then take him out. Do you understand, over?’

This was Forsythe’s first real operation, even though he had practised his role in dozens of training exercises. Fraser knew he had failed to mask the irritation in his voice, but they all knew the rules of engagement and what was expected of them.

‘Roger, niner. Dagger one, out,’ the chastised captain replied.

‘All teams, this is Dagger niner. This is it. Stand by, stand by …’

Sannie heard the scream and Tom looked at her, confirming he’d also heard the inhuman sound.

‘Bastards,’ White muttered under his breath.

There was the noise again. A high-pitched yelp followed by grunting. Surely, she thought, it couldn’t be. She shook her head. No, she was right. She’d heard that sound a thousand times before — from as far back as she could remember, growing up on the banana farm.

‘Sergeant Major,’ Sannie said, tugging on the sleeve of his black jumpsuit.

‘Not now, ma’am.’ He turned to her, his annoyance plain. ‘OC’s just about to give the word to go in.’

‘No, wait, that noise, it was…’

‘Stand by, stand by. Go!’

At Fraser’s command two men from each of the assault teams broke cover and ran, bent at the waist, to the front and rear doors. Each carried a small charge of plastic explosives covered with strong double-sided tape. They slapped the devices on the doors near the locks and activated the detonators. The method-of-entry men flattened themselves on either side of each door, and Fraser and his men, and the members of Dagger three, were on their feet and moving as the explosions shattered the balmy calm of the humid night.

Birds squawked and took to the air, but their screeches were drowned out by commands and the sound of shattering glass, closely followed by the boom of exploding stun grenades. Each bang was accompanied by a flash of blinding white light that lit the surrounding dunes. Fraser and his men had tinted lenses on their gasmasks and radio earpieces and ear defenders to protect them from the horrific sound and light show.

As they had rehearsed on the quick dry-run before they left Hoedspruit, one of Fraser’s men was kneeling with a cut-down aluminium ladder by the window to Greeves’s room. Smoke from the entry blast billowed from the opening and one of the men tossed a stun grenade inside. Fraser put a foot on the middle rung and hurled himself in as the grenade detonated.

Fraser landed, catlike, on his feet in the smoke-filled room and heard the terrible, wailing sound again. It disorientated him as he lifted his MP-5 and scanned the room with the aid of the torch fixed to the stubby barrel. ‘Robert Greeves! We are British forces come to rescue you!’ Fraser heard the rest of the team coming through behind him and the gut-thumping boom of another flash-bang going off somewhere else in the house.

Two shots were fired and someone swore from the corridor.

Fraser saw the bed through the smoke and something was writhing on it, screaming its head off.

‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ Fraser swore, and his mother would have slapped him if she’d heard him, but that was the least of his worries right now. ‘It’s a bloody…’

‘Monkey. I’m telling you, that noise we heard was a monkey,’ Sannie said as she and Tom ran, side by side, towards the gutted, smoking house, hard on the heels of the burly Warrant Officer White.