Tony Park - Silent Predator

He had been duped, and he felt stupid about it. If he had let Sannie come with him on his first recce she would have recognised the monkeys’ screams, which he had thought was Greeves being tortured, immediately. If he and Sannie had been allowed to bring the target under surveillance while they waited for the assault troops, she could have called off the raid sooner and they could have been back on the terrorists’ trail. If, if, if. They might have bought themselves another hour, but would that have been enough? Probably not.

Alfredo had no roadblocks operating after dark, so the terrorists were at least three hours ahead of them. On reasonable roads, that could be three hundred kilometres by now. The next move, unfortunately, was up to them.

‘Blood!’ Tom heard the voice from the room next to the one in which Greeves and the hapless monkey had been imprisoned. ‘Buckets of it.’

Tom walked into the room. Two black-suited troopers were shining a torch on the floor, illuminating a large bloodstain. ‘Can you move away, please.’ Tom dropped to one knee. The blood had pooled and then, judging by the adjoining smear, the body had been dragged a short distance. Using his Surefire torch, Tom focused on an imprinted pattern in the dried blood near the end of the drag mark. He guessed something fibrous — a blanket, perhaps — had been laid down, and the body rolled into it.

The trooper was wrong about the amount of blood. Not buckets — not even half a pail, in fact. Tom reckoned it was more like a pint, half a litre, give or take. It always looked like there was more of it than there was. He looked up from the floor to the walls. Nothing — no blood spattering.

‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’ one of the soldiers asked his mate.

Tom stood and swallowed hard. Although the soldier’s estimate was way out, there was too much blood for it to be from a monkey’s arm wound.

‘Sir!’ another voice called out.

‘What now?’ Fraser asked. He walked past the open door to the room in which Tom and the others stood.

Tom followed the major out into the hallway and to the kitchen. On a scratched laminate benchtop was a small grey-coloured box. ‘What’s that?’ he asked no one in particular.

‘It’s a portable video playback monitor. I’ve got one at home for my digital camera,’ the soldier who had found the device said. ‘Do you think it might be booby-trapped, boss?’

Fraser strode across the kitchen and grabbed the box. The young soldier took an involuntary pace backwards, but nothing happened.

Tom thought the trooper was right to be concerned and he was worried by the wild look in Fraser’s eyes. Was the man so incensed by their failure that he had given up caring about the possibility of injury to himself and his men — as well as ignoring all protocols about fingerprints and evidence?

Fraser flipped open the player’s screen, placed it back on the counter and pushed play.

Nick Roberts’s tortured face appeared on the camera. Tom screwed his eyes shut for a second, then forced himself to watch. Bernard had talked him through the scene he had witnessed on the tape, but nothing could have prepared Tom for the actual moving images of his former colleague’s execution.

‘Fucking animals,’ the young soldier said, staring morbidly at the little screen.

‘Who’s that?’ Fraser asked.

Tom explained and the major said, ‘Sorry.’ It sounded like he meant it. Ego and bullshit aside, Tom guessed the prickly officer had himself probably lost friends and comrades. It came as a shock to him, despite Bernard’s warning, to see the blood streaming down Nick’s face from the empty sockets where his eyes had been. He saw the pistol — small calibre, and silenced, maybe a two-two — brought close to Nick’s temple and not a man in the room didn’t flinch when the pfft sound of the muffled shot escaped from the video player’s tiny speaker.

‘Bastards,’ another of the soldiers said.

Tom felt unsteady on his feet as another face flickered onto the screen. The video, like that of Nick’s killing, was grainy and jumpy, but there was no mistaking the identity of the man who was taped as the hand of an unknown assailant — his face out of camera shot — forced him to his knees. It was Robert Greeves.

‘This is what comes of stupid attempts at escape,’ a voice said in the background.

Tom, like Fraser, craned closer to the small screen, straining to hear every word, but there was no talking. Tom heard footsteps in the corridor behind him, but was too engrossed in the image of Greeves’s face to turn around.

Greeves stared at the camera, and his look was one of despair tinged with resignation and the last flushes perhaps of an angry response made before the camera started rolling.

As with Nick, a hand holding a small-calibre silenced pistol appeared, near Greeves’s left temple. There was no statement, no threat, no warning. Just a solitary gunshot. Unlike the tape of Nick’s execution, which had ended at this point, the camera kept rolling as Greeves’s head flicked to one side. Blood pumped from the small entry wound and Tom caught a glimpse of the bulk of a man behind Greeves, and of gloved hands under the minister’s armpits. The man was holding him up for the camera as the life force poured from him. The screen went blue.

Tom forced himself to analyse what he saw, even as bile rose in the back of his throat. He swallowed hard. It would have been a two-two hollow point. The narrowed lead walls of the bullet would have split apart on impact with the skull bone. The shock wave from the blast had turned the minister’s brains to mush, and as the projectile opened up inside Greeves’s head, the fragments would have bounced around inside, ricocheting off the insides of his skull but not exiting.

That was one reason why the assassins had chosen a small-calibre round. There would be no slug to dig out of a wall, and they would have picked up the ejected cartridge case. Professionals. Cut-down AK 47s for gunfights, and the two-two for the execution. Had the killing been planned all along? The man standing behind the seated politician had been there to hold him up for the camera — to give the world’s media the shot they wanted, if they were sick enough to use it. Tom knew that once the bullet had done its work Greeves would have fallen like a puppet whose strings had been severed. There was no slow, rolling, theatrical fall to the floor like in the movies. Death was instantaneous.

‘Replay it,’ Fraser said.

Tom forced himself to watch it again. As Greeves again died on camera, Tom heard a sharp intake of air behind him.

‘Bernard!’ It was Sannie’s voice and Tom spun around to see Bernard disappearing out of the room into the corridor. It had been he and Sannie who had entered while he was watching the video.

‘He saw it?’

Sannie simply nodded. They both had the same thought, rushing from the room together with Tom narrowly beating Sannie through the doorway.

‘Bernard!’ Tom called as he ran through the house towards the smoking back door frame.

‘There he is, heading for the dunes!’ Sannie called.

Tom realised it must have been the same route Bernard had taken on his escape, running from the room where he had tried in vain to free Greeves through the house and towards the sounds and scents of the ocean. Tom caught sight of his moonlit silhouette as Bernard crested a large dune at a run.

He and Sannie chased him, but their feet were slowed by the deep, warm sand that made every step an effort. Tom had had dreams like this in which he was trying to escape from some unseen, unknown evil, but his progress was hampered by mud or sand. He wasn’t running from evil now — just trying to avert its consequences.