WHATEVER THE COST: A Mark Cole Thriller Page 6

  ‘You don’t come to my home and threaten me,’ he heard Boom whisper from behind, right in his ear. ‘Who the fuck you think you are, eh?’ Boom spat on the floor by Cole’s feet. ‘Now do as the man says and move.’

  Cole knew that Boom was right. He had no choice; he had to move.

  And in a movement so fast it left no time for anyone to react, Cole slipped his head to one side, out of the way of Boom’s gun, and fired an elbow back into the man’s body. Cole heard the crack of ribs, but ignored it as he pulled Boom’s arm over his shoulder, his own hand slipping over Boom’s where it gripped the Beretta, depressing the trigger.

  He fired once, taking out the man with the AK with a shot to the chest, before swinging Boom by the arm until he ended up in front of Cole as a human shield. In the same move, Cole stripped off Boom’s hand from the gun and took full control of it himself.

  Firing the Beretta, Cole took Boom’s ear in his mouth, teeth clenching down tight to secure him as Cole’s other hand slipped into his own waistband and withdrew another pistol, firing it simultaneously with the first.

  He felt Boom’s body shaking, and knew his traitorous friend was being hit, doing a good job of acting as Cole’s shield; but in less than six seconds since his first move, all of Khat’s men were down and out, neat bullet holes in their chests and heads.

  The crowd in shock, Khat rooted to the spot with disbelief, Cole opened his bloody mouth and dropped Boom’s bleeding, bullet-riddled body to the floor and accelerated towards his target, planting a powerful thrusting front kick right into Khat’s chest.

  The gun dealer went sailing back into his tent, all the air knocked from him, and Cole followed instantly, guns raised and ready.

  The small covered tent at the back of the stall was filled with crates of guns, explosives and ammunition, and Cole saw Khat groping around on the floor, struggling to get his breath back. Two men unloading crates stopped what they were doing, looked at Khat, looked at Cole, and went for their guns. Cole shot them before they had a chance to aim, then quickly raced around the tent, stuffing items into a canvas bag. He slung it over his shoulder, along with a shotgun and an AK-47, then saw Khat grabbing for a gun out of one of the crates. Cole smashed the butt of the Kalashnikov into the man’s head, knocking him unconscious.

  Cole reached down and hauled the gun dealer onto his shoulders in a fireman’s carry, glad that Khat weighed so little. He knew that there would be a commotion outside, people wanting to help Khat but scared to enter the covered tent.

  Cole made some last-minute preparations, then slipped out of the rear of the tent into another aisle of stalls. He got some odd looks as he carried Khat on his shoulders, bedecked with guns, but he knew he had time before anyone realized what was going on.

  He also knew that he couldn’t go back to the other side now, towards his car; too many people had seen him over that way, too many people would try and stop him. And so he raced away from the back of Khat’s tent, through the aisles of the maze-like market, towards the dark, forbidding jungle; one hand securing Khat to his shoulders, the other holding his AK as an effective visual deterrent.

  A moment later, a huge explosion rocked the market, and Cole could see dozens – perhaps hundreds – of people diving for cover, hands over their heads. Cole didn’t even bother to look – he knew it was Khat’s tent which had blown up, having set the timers on his plastic explosives for thirty seconds.

  Even from so far away, he could feel the heat on his back; and then he could hear the sound of thousands of rounds of ammunition firing at all angles, the heat from the explosives having cooked them off. As he ran awkwardly towards the edge of the clearing, he hoped he wouldn’t be shot by one of the uncontrolled stray rounds.

  He had almost reached the jungle when he heard the shouts, only now audible above the roaring explosions and the cooked-off ammunition.

  There was a mixture of Khmer, Thai and Vietnamese, but the raised voices all seemed to be shouting the same thing.

  Over there! He’s escaping! Catch him!

  Kill him!

  7

  The room was stark and bare, empty except for the form of a hooded man, kneeling on the dirt floor with his hands tied behind his back.

  He was wearing a torn shirt and what looked like the trousers from a suit, almost as if he had been wrenched from his daily life and normal routine and been dragged kicking and screaming to this dank, evil cell.

  Perhaps he had.

  Another form entered the room then, tall and slim. This form, too, was hooded, but this hood was far more menacing than the simple rice sack placed over the man’s head; it was pure white with the end pointed, eye-holes cut out from the cloth, black nothingness beyond them. Eyes steeped in shadow; soulless, merciless.

  The figure was cloaked in the robes of an Islamic cleric, and a hand shot out quickly from the robe, yanking the hood from the prostrate man. He looked up, and some people would have recognized him as Brad Butler, a war correspondent with CNN.

  The same hand dropped the hood to the floor and took hold of the man’s hair, pulling back sharply to expose the throat, even as the other hand withdrew a long, curved, ivory-handled knife.

  Butler’s screams stopped just as soon as they’d started as the figure started sawing – back and forth, back and forth – until the man’s head came off entirely, blood spraying in a bright crimson shower over the robes, the hood.

  And hidden within the hood, those black pools that should have been eyes still betrayed no shred of emotion at all.

  Within the hour, Abd Al-Aziz Quraishi was back in his office within the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Interior in downtown Riyadh, his bloodstained robes now replaced by a clean set, ready for the day ahead.

  A minor and distant member of the House of Saud, Quraishi was Assistant Minister for Security Affairs, a role which suited his needs to absolute perfection.

  Although he was a devout Muslim – and indeed believed that not many people across the whole of Islamic history could rival his religious zeal – he was also much more widely educated than most fundamentalist radicals.

  As such, he very much believed in Sun Tzu’s advice in The Art of War, written five thousand years before – know your enemy.

  It was a mistake many of his brethren had made over the years – their strict upbringing, their blinkered approach, their ignorance of the world outside their narrow perceptions, had made them fail in their jihad time and time again.

  But not Quraishi; he knew his enemies all too well. He had been born into one of them, the horrifically corrupt House of Saud; and he had travelled to the United States to learn more about the other, the Great Satan itself.

  After joining the Saudi Royal Guard Regiment while still in his teens, Quraishi had volunteered to go to America for officer training at West Point.

  And so he had willingly entered the belly of the beast, examining his foe from within; learning American military tactics firsthand, but more importantly, developing an understanding of her people.

  And what he had found disgusted him. Yes, they were pleasant enough, but it was all on the surface; deep down there was simply nothing there, years of capitalism and secularity and greed and corruption eating away at the moral fiber of the nation until there was nothing left but blind automatons, slaves to the marketers and advertisers who sold the bland and mundane products of the companies who really ran the country.

  His years in America had been insane, like living in a Disneyland populated entirely by spoiled children. Every day there had made him nauseous, but he had put on a façade of acceptance, shown himself willing to adapt to American ways, pretend to be impressed with American customs. He knew it would be expected of him, and would bear fruit in the future, when he could use the relationships he would develop there.

  Know your enemy.

  He had known it was also expected of him by the House of Saud itself, which prided itself on its relations with America. After all, she was the main consumer of its oil,
Saudi Arabia’s multi-trillion dollar industry, and – as was continuously stressed to him by the more senior members of the royal family – good relations with the US were of paramount importance to the regime’s survival.

  Not that Quraishi wanted the regime to survive.

  On the contrary, he was fundamentally committed to the wholesale destruction of the corrupt, West-loving House of Saud.

  And he knew that with the fall of the Great Satan would also come the fall of the hated monarchy which ruled his beloved country; the country which contained both Mecca and Medina, the two holiest places in the entire world, now defiled by the presence of the US military.

  He ignored the fact that he was a part of that same monarchy; it was blood only, and not soul.

  His soul was committed to Allah, and Allah alone.

  And unlike many of his freedom-fighting contemporaries, he was intelligent enough to see that he could use his position, his connections, to further his cause, may Allah forgive him.

  He had used his intelligence, his knowledge of Western and Saudi governments, his worldwide connections, to create a new group, an organization of such blessed purity that it made all others pale in comparison.

  Harakat al-jihad al-Islami al-jazirat al-‘arabiyah.

  Arabian Islamic Jihad.

  The beheading of Brad Butler had been filmed, and would be posted on the usual websites when the time was right. When the power of his organization was ready to unleash havoc on an unsuspecting world.

  His disguised appearance was absolutely necessary; he was far too well known in Saudi Arabia to show his real face, or use his real voice. Vehemently opposed to the Saudi royal family, there was no way that his followers would agree to suborn themselves to someone from that same royal line, tainted as it was with western corruption. There weren’t many who would accept that Quraishi accepted the façade of his position, his public life, only to enhance the probability of success for his real calling in life as The Lion, feared head of the AIJ.

  Quraishi was still smiling as he remembered slicing through the neck of that Western tool of propaganda, the CNN journalist Brad Butler, when an assistant knocked at his office door and brought in his cup of jasmine tea.

  Quraishi thanked him, then quickly ushered him out when he heard the buzzing of his secure telephone.

  ‘Yes?’ he answered when the man had left the office.

  The message was good, and the smile remained on Quraishi’s face as his contact talked. An agent of Jemaah Islamiyah, a freedom fighting group within the Indonesian archipelago with whom he had developed a good relationship over the years, the man on the phone updated Quraishi on their recent operation; stage one in The Lion’s master plan.

  Yes, Quraishi considered as he sipped quietly at his tea, all the pieces were coming together nicely.

  8

  Trying to move through jungle was an arduous physical prospect at the best of times; carrying an unconscious body on his back, an equipment satchel and assault rifle slung over his shoulder, and cradling a shotgun in his arms, meant that for Cole, it was now even harder. Especially as he didn’t have a machete to hack his way through the thick undergrowth, and he had a mob of well-armed and dangerous gun dealers chasing him.

  He tried to keep his pursuers at bay by throwing the odd hand grenade or firing a blast from the shotgun; one advantage he had was that they would want Khat back alive, whereas he could fire at them with no such considerations.

  He’d chosen the shotgun for work in the jungle as it was a weapon perfectly suited to the environment; with a relatively short range and scattershot effect, it did the maximum amount of damage at the short, dangerous distances typical of jungle combat.

  Even though it was night, the air remained thick and hot, and the tall trees blocked what little light came from the moon and the stars. It was both a curse and a blessing; it made it almost impossible to see where he was going, but it would also make him a much harder target for the people following.

  Cole’s heart raced as he pulled himself over ancient tree stumps and tangled vines, the exertion terribly intense. But he had fought in the jungle before, and the sickening harshness of the environment could never overwhelm him. Such feelings were perfectly natural to Cole, who had known little else his entire life. First there had been selection, and then training, and then a lifetime of operational missions. And not one bit of it had ever been comfortable.

  And in fact – despite the danger, the sharp hit of adrenalin, the pain in his straining muscles, his searing lungs, his wildly pumping heart – he felt at home, the chase through the ferocious jungle something that was comfortingly familiar to him after being so long adrift.

  Yes, he thought happily as he turned into the dense blackness of the jungle behind him, illuminating it briefly with the muzzle flash of his shotgun, the sound of its strident bark almost deafening in the enclosed area as he unleashed another two shells at his unseen enemy.

  Yes.

  I’m home.

  Cole’s heart stopped as his right foot slid down a bank, his balance gone, and he tumbled over in to the pitch black waters of the Siem Reap River.

  He collected himself immediately, cursing himself for making such a mistake. But he could use the river to lose the people who relentlessly followed him; and so he moved the still-unconscious Khat into a lifeguard’s retrieval position, one of Cole’s arms secured around his chest as he side-stroked across the muddy river.

  The shouts of men came from the far side only moments later, yells and panicked splashing as they too slipped and slid into the water. Cole wondered if they’d seen him, but the soil of the bank erupted around him just seconds later, the men emptying their assault rifles in his direction, and Cole’s question was answered with frightening certainty.

  Cole thought them crazy; in the eerie jungle half-light there was no way they could guarantee missing Khat. But Cole realized that the thrill of the chase, of the hunt, was upon the men now; this particular group might not even have realized who they were chasing, or why; only that there was someone who had caused trouble back at the market, and who needed to be caught. Or killed.

  But the time for thinking was later, and Cole pushed Khat onto the far bank, dropped the shotgun and swung the AK off his shoulder, finger pressing the trigger as soon as his grip was secured, spraying the far side of the narrow river with powerful 7.62mm rounds. The rifle on fully-automatic fire emptied its magazine in just five seconds.

  Cole had heard a cry, a scream; but pressing his advantage, he ejected the magazine, hands operating in the dark to instantly insert another and spraying the riverside once more until the gun clicked empty.

  He was rewarded with cries of pain, guttural shouts, pleas for help, and knew it was time to press on back into the jungle. The men on the far side were out, but their screams would soon attract others, and then this side of the river would be swarming with them.

  He turned to pick up Khat’s body, and was horrified to see an empty space where he had left him. Cole looked harder into the green-black gloom, wondering if the body was just covered in shadow, but he could make out a depression in the mud where Khat had been only moments ago.

  Damn.

  But the man couldn’t have gone far; Cole had spent less than half a minute firing at his pursuers.

  Straining his eyes, he managed to make out a small mound of crumpled weeds, a hole of crushed vegetation which led further into the jungle.

  Leaving the empty Kalashnikov by the riverside, Cole picked up his shotgun and entered through the imposing green wall, determined to catch his quarry and make him talk.

  Who the hell was this guy? Khat Narong simply couldn’t believe what had happened in the last half an hour.

  First, one of his good Thai customers had come up to him and told him that a crazy foreigner was here asking questions about Liang Kebangkitan Apparently the man had come to Boom Suparat’s home and threatened him. Boom had led him here to the Angkor market – a crime Khat might ordina
rily have killed him for – but had then been quick to tell Khat exactly what was going on.

  Khat had told Boom to circle round and ambush the American from the rear, while six of his own men would fan out to surround him. And that’s exactly what had happened.

  But what had followed was hard to understand. How had the man done that? Killed everyone so quickly, so efficiently? Six armed men – not including Boom, who had been killed by Khat’s own men – killed in just a few seconds.

  Khat was a tough man; although he looked young, he was fifty-six years old and had lived through the civil war and the Khmer Rouge’s brutal extermination years, seen his mother and father shot in the head and thrown into a ditch by the roadside right in front of him. He’d served as a mercenary throughout Southeast Asia himself, then as an enforcer for a Chinese gang in the Phillipines, before realizing that there was more money to be made supplying arms rather than using them. He’d spent the last twenty years building up his business, and had been instrumental in setting up the Angkor market. Most of his big trade was done off-site and privately, but it was here that he felt most at home, the place where he could meet friends old and new. It was amazing how many lucrative deals had been secured through relationships he’d first developed here in the jungle.

  Liang Kebangkitan was one of them, and Khat had cursed out loud when they’d hijacked that ship with three American crewmembers on board. Their name hadn’t been confirmed, but Khat knew it must be them; they were the only pirate group in that area capable of pulling off such a large-scale operation.

  Khat had feared that the trail might lead to him; after all, he had supplied the gang with all of their weapons and equipment. Hell, even the fast Rigid Inflatable Boats they used had come from Khat.