“No thanks, I like working on old houses and going home every night with Georgy, so I’ll pass, but thanks for the offer. What about these two, him and that bloke out there, and that idiot trapped in the Nissan, what’s next?”
“Oh, they’re not going to prison, at least not if we can help it…” he grinned as he hunkered down in front of our prisoner. “No, we have somewhere a lot more… entertaining in mind. What’s your name, anyway?”
The man just glared at him, so Bonzo sighed theatrically, and pulled a K-Bar out of the back of his belt. As Bonzo leaned down our guest hawked and spat in Bonzo’s face.
“Fuck you, I’m not scared of you fuckers; I did seven years in Long Lartin, there’s nothing you can do to me, I’ll happily go back, and when I come out I’m coming right back and fucking finishing this!”
Bonzo wiped his face off, grinned, and patted him on the knee, and suddenly he had his K-Bar knife point in the pouch of skin right under his left eye, a tiny trickle of blood starting where the razor-sharp knife had just nicked the skin.
“I warned you, fucknuts, apparently you don’t listen too well; I hear Long Lartin turns out three kinds of ex-cons; dimwits, halfwits, and fuckwits; which one are you?”
“I want a solicitor, now, you can’t hold me like this; if I’ve been arrested then I’m entitled to see a solicitor…
Bonzo grinned at him and wiped the knife clean on his shirt.
“You hold on to that, sunshine, maybe it’ll keep you going. The thing is, you’re not under arrest; if we were the police then we’d have pay attention to your rights. Unfortunately for you, you don’t have any, nope, not a single one. You committed an armed assault on agents of Her Majesty’s government, members of Her Majesty’s Special Services, no less; that’s known as ‘domestic terrorism’, or treason, if we really want to push it. We do. Assaulting us was an attack on the Crown we swore to defend, and we really don’t like shit like that, it upsets us, and when we get upset, we get a little bit indiscriminate.”
He patted Kevin’s shoulder commiseratingly.
“Add to that the fact the Home Office in general and the Home Secretary in particular really, really, really doesn’t like people pulling shit like that; it annoys him, his wife was killed in a terrorist atrocity and he likes to throw the book at home-grown scumbags like you, things like whole-of-life incarceration in solitary confinement a long way from family, and friends, and daylight, just for starters. So this is what’s going to happen; you and your two mates are not going to jail, oh no; you’re not going anywhere near a nice comfy police cell or a courtroom; you’re going somewhere not very nice a long way away from anywhere and you’ll be questioned as often and for as long as we deem sufficient, in a place no one knows about, where you’ll soon be forgotten entirely… except by us, of course.”
His smiling expression didn’t waver as he spoke, in sharp contrast to the mounting horror on our prisoner’s face.
“Think about this, Kev; where you’re going there are no guards you can subvert or cultivate, no locks you can pick, no calendars, no lights, no TV, no visitors, no ping-pong tables or basket weaving, no lawyers, they just get in the way of the truth, and slop food, twelve-hundred calories a day, just enough to stop you dying of malnutrition, constant, fixed temperature of sixty degrees and no clothes, and no light for twenty-three and a half hours a day, just like our American cousins do, only they do it somewhere nice and warm, maybe tropical, like Guantanamo, or somewhere out in the desert.”
His smile was wintry now, with no trace of compassion or pity.
“We don’t have anything half as nice, Kevin, and, if by some fluke you do manage to escape, you won’t get far; if we don’t get you the bears or hypothermia will; it will actually be quite instructive to watch you try and survive naked in the Arctic; who knows, they might even let you make the attempt, you know, just to see what happens, a sort of object lesson to the other full-time losers like you we have stashed in other places.”
He stood up and unclipped the magazine from his Sig, unscrewed the suppressor, and cleared the breech before placing the handgun in a plastic cleaning tray.
“The thing is, Kevin, you’re going to answer any questions we choose to ask; you’ll offer to sell your family for a chocolate bar, a pair of socks, a blanket to cover yourself with, food that tastes like food, and you’ll never be allowed to leave; once that door closes behind you, it’s closed permanently. I bet you’re sorry for being such a pointless arsehole now, aren’t you? Too bad it’s too late. Actions have consequences Kevin, and you’re about to explore them in full. I hope you think it was worth it.”
The clatter of a helicopter overhead made Bonzo grin happily.
“Here they are, Kevin, your ride’s here, right on schedule. Enjoy it, you’ll never again see or hear anything we don’t want you to. Don’t worry, though, we’ll keep you healthy; don’t want you getting sick, after all. No, we want you to live the experience to the fullest, so we’ll keep you alive and healthy. It’s almost Zen, really; we’ll keep you alive and unharmed until you’re sick of each day that passes, each day will be exactly the same as every other day, and when you do finally go, a long, long time from now, you’ll fully understand and appreciate just how much you lost, how much you threw away, and how little you mean to us. Have a long and pointless life, Kev.”
Bonzo caught my expression and blank-faced me.
“Suck it up, Will; no-one ever accused us of being nice guys. Trash like this get to find out the hard way just who and what we are, and the price you pay for pissing us off. You want chivalrous behaviour? Then build a round table and recruit a bunch of white knights pure of heart and intent, and when you find out that doesn’t work and it all goes to shit give us a call. Good men do bad things for good reasons all the time, that’s how the real world works, and you may not like it, but that’s how it is, and it will never change. You and families like yours sleep undisturbed in their beds because people like us make sure it’s safe to do so.”
He stepped up to me and helped me unclip the plate-carrier and retrieve the Glock and TAC-holster.
“Our American colleagues have a saying: ‘The price of peace is eternal vigilance’; that’s never been more true than now; whether it’s rogue nation-states or lone groups with a grudge; if we need to, we will respond, we will teach them that our borders and our people are inviolate and we will do anything to make sure it remains that way. We took an oath to defend our country and all that it stands for, and we’ll do it any way we have to.”
God I was glad they’d never recruited me; the thought of having to think and feel like that, the cynical outlook I’d have developed, the cavalier way they could dismiss a man’s life turned me off completely. Family life and Georgy by my side, that was more than enough to make my life complete, I had no crusades left unfinished, and no battles left unfought; my war was over.
*****
A group of heavily-armed and masked soldiers with no insignias or squad badges trooped into the barn; I didn’t know who they were, but I did know what they were; they had ‘regiment’, SAS, written all over them. Andy and Rex talked with their CO which left me out of the loop, so I took the opportunity to ask Wells just why he’d said I killed his brother.
According to him, his younger brother, the intruder I’d clobbered and stashed in the hidden stairwell hadn’t adapted well to life in prison, and two years into his sentence took his own life in his cell.
“And how is that my fault, exactly?” I queried, and actually had to step back from the glare of hate he blasted at me.
“He was my little brother, I was supposed to look after him, you made sure he went to that place, he died there because of you. You killed him!”
I shook my head.
“Nope, not my circus not my monkey; you bunch of apes came to my house to rob and kill my family; you got what you deserved, and so what if your brother topped himself? His actions put him there, not mine. If he couldn’t take the consequences he should have stayed home that day and we wouldn’t be here now. You live by the sword you die by the sword. If anyone’s to blame it’s you; you came to my house to kill us, now you’re paying for it. You’re going away for good, two men are dead and another is crippled for life, and you gained nothing by it. Wherever they lock you up I hope you have just oodles of fun and a long, shitty life.”
Two of the masked soldiers covered Bonzo with more of the CQB carbines Andy had brandished earlier, confirming their identity as SAS, while he cut Wells’ bonds. They then dragged him to his feet, ignoring his begging them not to do this, his apologies, his promises to be good, his claims that he was in pain, spun him around and handcuffed him, jammed a ball-gag in his mouth, and yanked a black hood down over his head. When they drag/marched him outside, I saw two other men in custody, likewise cuffed and hooded, one on a stretcher, being bundled into an unmarked Bell 212 helicopter. Two black body-bags were also unceremoniously dumped aboard.
“What happens now, Rex?” I asked, and he nodded at the grounded helicopter.
“Those idiots are going bye-bye after a medic’s looked at their injuries. That’s it for them, they’ll no longer exist; it’s what happens when you pick the wrong fight and lose. The bodies will probably be ‘de-badged’; that means any possible way of identifying them will be removed and their remains weighted and dumped far out at sea. Other than that it’s ‘need to know’ and you don’t need to know, so change the subject, Will.”