DELIVERANCE: a gripping action thriller full of suspense (5 page)

Chapter Eight

Sarah holds her breath before she gets up to prepare for the pain. She can feel the sensation of cramp beginning in her legs, but she wants the pain. She needs the pain to push away the awful memories of her first car journey in Australia.

Her eyes snap open to dispel the images.

She was planning to make a coffee and begin a Sudoku puzzle, which always help to calm her down a little at least, but now she sees that Bruce has left her a present. He has urinated by the fridge. She exhales a long breath. She really doesn’t have the energy or inclination to deal with a puddle of piss, not right now.

Except giving up is not what has kept her alive these past three years.

No. She will get up. She will go to the bathroom and fetch the mop. She will clean the kitchen floor first. Then she will make a coffee and find her Sudoku book. She will complete a whole puzzle; one of the hard ones.

She braces her hands against the sofa and pushes herself upwards straight onto her feet, but it’s too fast. She has lost some blood from the wound on her head, and has been horizontal for a few hours. The vertigo and the cramp both turn on her and the room spins as the nausea floods through her mind. She loses her balance and falls forwards, oblivious to how lucky she has just been. Then the glass behind her shatters as a bullet zips through the space where her head was half a second before, followed by two further bullets in quick succession.

Marshall sits in the four-by-four thinking hard.

He heard the gun shots and saw the muzzle flashes, which only adds another reason to why he is currently mentally kicking the shit out of himself. The three idiots he took the truck from were all armed with rifles, and yet he didn’t take a single one with him.

He has gotten shabby.

His time out of the services is starting to show, and he begins to wonder if he will be any use to Sarah at all.

But of course, Sarah is surely already dead.

He heard the shots. Three in total. It would be some kind of miracle if she is still alive, and Marshall doesn’t believe in miracles. So he forms a new mission objective.

Vengeance for Sarah.

He pauses a moment and looks through the interior of the truck for the first time. Something he should have done the moment he took it.

More signs of his lax attitude.

He hopes to find a pistol that one of the drunken guys keeps in the vehicle for road rage situations, but there is no gun. There is a mobile phone though. He checks the battery, which is almost full and then pockets it. It may come in handy later.

Marshall turns the key, but the engine refuses to start. He tries again, and gets the same result. Then he looks at the fuel gauge. Empty.

‘Fuck.’

He exits the truck and begins to jog at a steady pace towards the house. He can see its outline now, and feels a real burst of energy.

The power of revenge.

It’s the least he can do for the girl who asked him for help.

Charlie watched with interest as three men emerged from the four-by-four and then huddled together between the vehicle and the exterior wall of the house. They seemed to be planning in quiet tones.

Friends or foes?

Charlie still couldn’t tell.

Then everything happened at once.

Sarah stirred from her resting place on the sofa and stood up. At the same time one of the men noticed her movement through a side window, drew a pistol, and fired. The other two men also fired a second behind him. The glass shattered, and Charlie watched Sarah fall to the floor.

Now he knows whose side the men are on at least.

Charlie picks up his rifle and sweeps the outside of the house. He sights down his scope at Sarah who is immobile on the floor, but breathing.

He swings the scope back to the three men who are moving towards the back of the house. They disappear around the corner, but Charlie has noted the length of their paces and he is timing them. He knows the interior of the house from his reconnoitre before he settled into the nest. He estimates they will take forty-five seconds to become visible through the large patio door in the living room. Then they will stand over Sarah and finish the job.

Charlie smiles and waits.

He counts to forty-two before the three men appear in the living room: not a miscalculation; they are simply eager to finish the job and get out. They gather around Sarah in a pyramid shape, which Charlie can clearly see from his position. They are not aiming at Sarah yet though, which puzzles him somewhat. Perhaps they need confirmation of her identity before they kill her? If so, they will need to wait until she wakes up.

Marshall stops fifteen yards from the house, and crouches down behind an off-road vehicle. He sees nothing and assumes the hostiles must have entered the house after firing from outside. He saw the muzzle flashes, and he can now see a shattered window as he peers through the four-by-four.

He feels a prickle on the back of his neck and immediately turns around, but can’t see a thing in the darkness. He turns back to the house and allows the feeling of uneasiness to pass. He needs an entry point, the most obvious being the doors. Going through the back door would mean walking past every window, yet slow-crawling would take too long. The patio door is the second option, but the enormous clear glass makes covert entry impossible. Marshall opens the driver’s door of the four-by-four and feels the seats. The driver’s seat, passenger seat and the offside rear seat are warm. The near-side rear seat is not.

Three hostiles.

He pops the boot quietly in case there is anything useful inside, but there isn’t. So with little else to do, Marshall lays on the ground and begins to crawl slowly toward the patio doors. With each forward motion he is painfully aware of just how slowly he is moving, but his training is ingrained.

Sarah wakes to see three blurred shapes gathered around her. Two white guys and a black guy.

‘Am I dead?’ she mumbles.

‘Yes,’ the black guy tells her.

‘Why now?’ she asks, noting the shattered glass all around her.

‘We just follow orders,’ he replies.

‘You don’t have to.’

The black guy swings his gun toward Sarah’s face smiling.

‘But I want to,’ he says, depressing the trigger.

The patio door suddenly shatters, and the black guy’s head explodes in a fine red mist, with his two colleagues suffering the same fate two seconds later. Sarah is left covered in blood, bone and sinew, whilst the bodies of the three men collapse to the floor all around her.

She tries to scream, but no sound emerges from her mouth.

Marshall is halfway to the perimeter wall of the house when he hears the shots. Different sounds than before, obviously from a different type of weapon. These are rifle shots for sure; three of them.

He smiles and stands up, heading towards the clump of trees that he previously evaluated as empty.

‘Stop!’ Charlie shouts at him.

Marshall stops.

‘Hammertime,’ Charlie adds, proceeding to hum the famous MC Hammer tune.

Marshall briefly dances about on the spot.

‘Thank you for coming, Charlie,’ he says as he reaches the sniper nest.

‘Anything for you, little brother,’ Charlie replies, ‘and thanks for the call from the airport with the address. It certainly saved time.’

‘What’s happening?’ Marshall asks.

‘They fired through the window, but missed. Then they decided to go in and kill her,’ Charlie replies with a shrug. ‘You asked me to make sure that sort of thing doesn’t happen.’

‘Are they all dead?’

‘Very.’

‘How many hostiles?’ Marshall asks.

‘Three.’

‘There will be more coming,’ Marshall says. ‘Is Sarah alive?’

‘Yes, but I think they wounded her with glass from the window shot earlier. You’d better get in there fast.’

‘Will do. Will you watch the place?’

‘I will stay here until you tell me to move, sir.’

‘Cut the
sir
shit right now, Charlie.’

‘Yes sir.’

Marshall smiles at him and heads inside to see if Sarah is still alive. Having Charlie here makes it more likely, but Sarah always seemed so delicate.

He steps through the now glassless patio door and looks down at the four bodies on the floor. Three headless men, and Sarah.

None of them are breathing.

Chapter Nine

Sarah is dead. Marshall sees it as soon as he enters the room. She is covered in blood, and definitely not breathing. Marshall also notes that the three men have received kill shots to the base of the skull.

Nice work Charlie.

Marshall bends down.

‘I'm sorry Sarah,’ he says softly. ‘I’m sorry that I let you down.’

Then she opens her eyes.

They are not the eyes that Marshall remembers. These eyes are hard and glazed. They do not look out of place on a face covered with blood and brains.

‘You weren’t breathing when I came in,’ he says, dumbfounded.

‘I held my breath as soon as I heard footsteps,’ Sarah replies in a slightly quivering voice. ‘Didn’t you once tell me that people are less likely to kill you if you’re already dead?’

‘Yes, but I didn’t know you were listening.’

‘I watched these men die,’ Sarah says in a flat tone. ‘Did you kill them?’

‘No,’ Marshall answers honestly. ‘Charlie did.’

‘Charlie?’ Sarah asks, looking worried. ‘Charlie is here?’

‘Charlie just saved your life, Sarah,’ Marshall soothes. ‘Anything that happened with Charlie in the past needs to be forgotten. He came here to help, and if he hadn’t been here, you would be dead now.’

Sarah stares at Marshall.

She knows all about Charlie, and why he left the army with an honourable discharge. Charlie is a killer. He loves it. It’s like a pre-programmed thing with him, and he’s good at it too, thanks to the army training. You don’t get to be an SAS sniper unless you are the best of the best, and Charlie was. Charlie’s radio call sign in the services was
God
. It was a reference to an old film called
Navy Seals
, but Charlie liked the name too.

He said it was most appropriate.

Ten months before Marshall left the services, Charlie was reassigned to regular outpost duties due to an irregularity in the results of a sight test. It was obviously a mistake, but on paper it meant that Charlie was taken off SAS sniper duty for twelve months. He was sent to various locations in the back and beyond, where he would establish a sniper nest and secure an outpost.

It was dull work for Charlie.

Sitting, waiting, watching. And if anyone arrived, they would be classed as friendly. This happened for twenty-five days straight.

Then Charlie shot one of them.

The assessment of incoming personnel was made via radio contact. The sniper would radio the outpost for confirmation. The outpost would confirm if a visit was expected and then relay a description. Simultaneously, the outpost would radio the incoming personnel to confirm their position. This would be relayed to the sniper who would confirm the position and then stand down.

Charlie’s radio was not receiving for the confirmation.

His report stated that he suffered a major radio malfunction, which stopped him from receiving the
friendly target
confirmation. The report went on to state that following the lack of confirmation, he received a faint radio
go code
to engage the target.

The diagnostic report on Charlie’s radio confirmed a circuitry malfunction. However, the chances of it happening without intervention stood at 145,000 to 1. The army was also well aware
that Charlie’s secondary unit function was electronics.

Stalemate.

The army could not point the finger at Charlie, but the evidence suggested an intentional hit upon friendly personnel.

A two-star General.

There was a heavy ongoing investigation into Charlie’s background to search for any remote terrorism links. None were forthcoming, so they forcibly offered him a choice. An honourable discharge, or a posting back to regular grunt work with an impending court martial.

Charlie took the discharge and disappeared into the civilian system.

‘We have to move,’ Marshall says. ‘We don’t have much time.’

Sarah stands, brushes fragments of skull from her waist and turns to him.

‘I’m ready,’ she says, strangely casually in the circumstances, and Marshall realises she isn’t the same girl he once knew.

Before leaving, Marshall quickly searches the pockets of the three dead men. He finds keys in the trouser pocket of the second man he searches. Then he collects all three guns from the floor and recognises them as the Herstal FNP-9; a smooth simple and accurate weapon, but an unusual choice for a mercenary. Marshall ejects the clips.

‘Shit,’ he says.

‘What is it?’ Sarah asks.

‘There is a single bullet in these clips.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means they gave each guy two bullets.’

‘Why would they do that?’

‘Because there is a second team on the way,’ Marshall explains. ‘If they couldn’t kill you with one shot, they have a final bullet for themselves.’

‘But why would they shoot themselves?’

‘Because failing in their mission would obviously incur a worse fate.’

‘Do we take the guns?’

‘One gun,’ Marshall responds. ‘Three bullets in one gun is better than three guns with just the one bullet in them.’

‘Do you know who these guys work for?’ Sarah asks.

‘Possibly.’

‘You bloody well should do,’ she replies bitterly.

Then she turns to head for the door.

‘Are you coming?’ she asks, without looking around.

Together they leave the house and Marshall leads them back to the clump of trees where Charlie is waiting.

‘Oh. Hello Charlie,’ Sarah says flatly.

‘Hello Sarah,’ Charlie replies. ‘Glad to see you’re still breathing.’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

‘No problem.’

‘Right,’ Marshall interrupts, ‘We need to get moving. We’ll worry about a destination afterwards, but for now let’s just get away from here. We can assess our options later.’

‘Well, I have a plane,’ Charlie says in a nonchalant way.

‘You have a plane?’

‘Yes. That’s what I said.’

‘I thought you were driving here?’

‘I was, little brother, but I decided to skip the boring parts. So I convinced an old guy to fly me here.’

‘And wait for you?’ Marshall asks cynically.

‘In a fashion, yes.’

‘Where is he?’

‘Four miles due west.’

Marshall glances at the four-by-four vehicle next to the house and then at his watch.

‘Okay, we’ll take their truck to cut time. Hopefully by the time the second team get here we’ll be airborne, so following our tracks won’t help them.’

‘Who are they?’ Charlie asks.

‘Later,’ Marshall says. ‘Let’s just get moving before it’s too late.’

‘It already is too late,’ Sarah interrupts.

Something has caught her attention. The men turn to see what it is. In the distant darkness can just be made out the approaching headlights. Approximately two miles away, but moving fast.

‘Into the truck right now,’ Marshall orders.