“It sure seems like it, doesn’t it?” he chuckled. “Come on back in, got some kit for you, let’s make these fuckwits feel all warm and welcome…”
I was only about two hundred yards out, so I was back in the barn in minutes. Bonzo was up and out with us by now, using the night-vision scope to track our visitors who were just now learning why free-wheeling downhill through a post-glacial debris-field with no lights in the pitch dark was such a bad idea. Bonzo kept up a running commentary while Andy and I kitted-up.
“They’re going to be over any second… now, and there they go, rolling down the slope, oh look, right into a trench, that looked like such fun, they’re piling out, there’s one… two… three… four… five, no wait, one’s trapped, so four of them. They’re sort of heading this way, but there’s oh, look, more trenches, they’re not having much luck out there, silly bastards, maybe a broken leg or two will teach them to come calling like civilised people…”
While Rex was keeping an eye on our guests I was strapping on a Warrior Recon SAPI plate-carrier, a lightweight chest armour vest with a ceramic trauma plate, while Andy held a new-issue Virtus helmet and Mandible-guard, something I’d seen but never been issued with, for me. He then handed me an Osprey belt and Blackhawk drop-leg tactical holster complete with Glock 17 and two clips. I stared at him and he grinned.
“What? They tried to shoot you before, they shot at Georgy, so they’re probably not coming back to play patty-cake, so stop wittering and just fucking put it on and remember, centre-mass, double-tap. These things are accurate to about fifteen yards, after that who knows, so I’m going to be levelling the playing field a little. Take these, you may need them,” as he tucked a razor-sharp American K-Bar knife into one of my vest’s webbing loops, a pair of TAC gloves with Kevlar-armoured knuckle protectors, and a handful of half-inch wide zip-ties.
He hefted a carbine and my envy-factor shot through the roof; it was an L1198A1 CQB carbine (Canadian C8 Diemaco) the UK Special Forces weapon of choice, with suppressor, LASER Illuminator/pointer, Mini Red-Dot reflex sight, and a Trijicon ACOG (advanced combat optical gunsight) telescopic sight, not the SUSAT standard optical sight; I couldn’t be sure, but I thought it could probably make the tea and predict Lotto numbers too, all it needed was a slingshot and I would probably have asked it to marry me…
I was silent in awe and deep, deep jealousy; I’d always wanted one back in the sand, not the crappy, cranky, unreliable SA-80 with the equally crappy bayonet apparently made of tinfoil and compressed snot they’d saddled us with, but the Regiment boys who’d just started carrying them wouldn’t let us crawler jockeys even touch them, let alone fire them.
“Where do you get this stuff from, Andy?” I asked him, “What the Hell do you do?”
Andy carried on checking his weapon as he talked.
“Rex and I are what they call Targeters, intelligence integrators and human ops planners with SRG; we’re part of the SIS, the secret intelligence service, but we’re not MI6 or Military Intelligence; we’re something else entirely. Sometimes we work with both agencies, but we don’t answer to them and I’m not going to talk about it here; let’s just say that right now we have an interest in these people and leave it at that. Got that?”
I nodded, not really understanding, wondering if I’d ever really known my two former crewmen at all.
“We’re going to try and capture them, right, and get the police up here and they can take them in, right?” I asked, not happy at being handed a live-fire weapon and told to use it; my army days were long over, and this was rural England, the Peak District, an officially designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, not the Panshir Valley or Dodge City.
“If you say so,” said Rex neutrally as he gave me an unreadable, one raised-eyebrow stare and handed me a Personal-Role radio and PTT headset, standard fire-team squad comms we’d all used back in the sand.
“Look LT, we need to interrogate these numbskulls when we’re done, so I promise, nothing lethal, not if we can possibly avoid it, okay? Now get your comm-link on, and remember, LT, only five-hundred metres range, so stay close,” as he keyed his mike, watching my radio-set flash the ‘comm.’ signal.
“Good, all working. We know where they’re coming from, let’s wait until they get to the perimeter and see what their intentions are. What?” he grinned at Andy’s expression, “Maybe they’re just coming in to say ‘sorry for troubling us and we’ll be on our way now,’ you never can tell. But, just in case they’re feeling all pumped-up and dangerous…’ he clipped a red-dot sight to his pistol, a suppressed Sig P226, and buffed it with his sleeve. I pointed out to him that “silencers” are actually illegal, and he shrugged.
“So is shooting at defenceless families, so we can be nice, or we can kick their arses for them; I favour option two, and if they don’t like it then fuck ’em, they started it. This isn’t the school playground, Will, I’m not Mary-fucking-Poppins, and I’m not here to play nice. Remember that Latin phrase you used to chuck around back in the sand, ‘Si vis pacem, para bellum’ If you would have peace, prepare for war?”
Rex pulled up his sleeve and it was tattooed on his inner forearm. “They brought this, not us, remember that; they want to come here and fuck with us so we’ll fuck ’em properly, end of.”
He took in my expression and grinned. “Okay, okay, we’ll hold back on the lethal force if we can, but no promises, happy now?”
Andy slid back the charging handle on his carbine, cocking the bolt, and nodded as he grinned wolfishly; they were both obviously primed and ready for this. Me, I went along with it because I had no other choice; we were in a private war, God alone knew why, and they’d given us no way out of this. These men were coming here for us, for me, they’d put my family in mortal danger, and my friends were right, this was not of our doing and we had to end it now or it would never end. Four of them against three of us, but even if they still had whatever they’d been shooting at us with back at the house, we had three massive advantages; we were trained combat veterans, we had the kind of scary American firepower they could only dream of, and we knew where they were…
“Okay LT, get buckled-up, they’re nearly at the stand-off perimeter, let’s go piggy-hunting. Jarhead’s spotting, you on the left, I’ll take the right, Jarhead will talk us in, radio-silence now, mute your handset comm-tone and just blip your mike to reply. Let’s go.”
It felt like one of the more dangerous patrols I’d made back in the day; the same sense of impending danger, the weight of the plate-carrier and ballistic plate recalling my Osprey armour back then, the feel of the TAC holster strapped around my leg, the Bowman headset pressing against the inner rim of my combat helmet, and the feel of the helmet chin-strap strapped tight under the jaw guard but no GPMG, no Minimi machine gun, not even a hated SA-80, just a handgun, two clips, and a knife.
It was a moonless, starless, overcast night and darker than a coal-mine at midnight and I was completely blind, reduced to gingerly feeling my way along and shuffling carefully along rather than risking stepping on a loose rock and going arse over kettle; that would be disastrous, the sound would instantly alert our guests to where I was.
Bonzo had the night-vision scope, and Jarhead was coaching me with the HMNVS night vision gear mounted on his helmet; all I had was his voice in my ear guiding me around the large boulders and broken piles of rock out to the perimeter we’d set, so it was pretty slow going, but we’d done this stuff before a lifetime ago, and it was coming back to me.
“Hold it there, Will; you’re 300 metres out, there’s a large boulder nine o’clock, two metres, one of them’s alone there, looks like he’s maybe carrying a sawn-off shotgun of some sort. Ease up to your left and put your hand out… there. He’s right opposite you on the other side of that boulder; hold it for just a sec, hold it… hold it… hold it, okay go!”
I slipped around the rock, feeling my way along and listening for any sound that gave his position away.
“Stop there, Will… I don’t… fucking idiot’s just put down the shotgun, he’s taking a piss against the boulder, what the fuck…? Take him out Will, he’s doing my head in, with his cock in his hand he’s gonna be easy meat. Do it.”
Now I could hear the sound of the man urinating, the splashing shockingly loud in the dead silence; I could even hear him whistling under his breath as he talked to his dick, so good, while he was concentrating on tinkling and not sprinkling his attention was elsewhere, which was all I needed. I eased up behind him and slammed my fist against the back of his head as hard as I could, my Kevlar armoured-knuckles taking all the impact.
The wet, crunching sound of his face smacking into the rock was muted by the fact I followed-through and kept my forearm on the back of his head, pressing his face hard against the rock. He folded without a sound, either dead or deeply asleep, but I took no chances and, working solely by touch, zip-cuffed his hands securely behind his back even as I mused that if he was dead, what a sad thing it was to go while you were busy going. The added Insurance of his socks jammed tightly in his mouth and a long zip-tie wrapped tightly around his head to hold the gag in place meant he was out of the game. That left three against three, good odds in anyone’s book.
The sound of Jarhead chuckling came to me.
“Will, oh Will, whatever are we going to do with you? You could have let him finish taking a piss you know; I mean really, what kind of animal are you? Now it’s all down his leg, poor guy, what is his mummy going to say…”
I blipped my PTT twice to let him know I’d heard him, and waited for him to guide me further.
“Turn left from your present position… slowly… hold it there, the other three are now on your ten o’clock, twenty metres, I think they think they’re in a skirmish line, but they’re too close together, maybe they think they’ll be able to sneak into the house via the garden if they stay bunched up. One’s got a long rifle of some sort, looks like an FN SLR, the other two have sawn-off shotguns, Bonzo is going to show them what a stupid idea that is. Large boulder two paces dead ahead, stay down, Bonzo’s making his move.”