Hunters: A Trilogy (7 page)

As he waited in the smokey coldness of the little hole, whilst quietly thinking about taking his mind’s advice, Ken’s eyes caught sight of the entranceway to the SD building. He was amazed to see the front door to the building had been left wide open. The place was usually like a maximum-security prison, a person had no chance of even getting into the car park, never mind simply waltzing through the front door. Then he saw the men.

There were four of them. No, make that six...

Six men armed with AK-47s, gathered in the entranceway of the Funny House, casually standing in the sun and discussing something. Totally unaware of the ice-green eyes fixed upon them. With lots of pointing, their leader, the one doing most of the pointing, proceeded to break the men down into groups of two, sending one pair away immediately. With weapons slung across their backs, the two men began a slow and disinterested meander around the perimeter of the old building. The remaining four went inside, rattling the door shut behind them.

Ken waited, he watched, and he planned. After a long time, he finally established their routine: every hour the men would swap duties – two old ones in, two new ones out. They never went anywhere except around the outside walls of the Funny House. He was almost certain that there were only six men, and periodically all of them would be inside at the same time, probably for a meal break. The next time they left their posts to go and eat, Ken made his move.

No need for any ghostly approach methods this time, as soon as he saw the door closing, Ken scrambled out of his hole and ran like the devil across the dirt track separating him from the front door. He carried a sturdy length of two-by-four hardwood, which he’d prised loose from the smouldering door overhead; it was about three feet long and fitted his hand perfectly.

He arrived at the door like a leopard on the final leg of its stalk, sprung with coiled aggression and adrenaline. He knew which way the door opened and he knew which way the men coming out would usually go, that knowledge led him to take cover behind the low blast-wall about twenty yards away. He crouched behind the wall and waited, barely breathing. His plan was a simple one: he was simply going to beat the crap out of the first people to come past, grab their weapons and then make a plan for the second phase. It was sketchy plan at best, mostly relying on luck. But, sometimes sketchy plans come to fruition, sometimes things work out just fine. Ken got lucky.

He heard the door opening and then clatter shut again. He crouched lower as the sound of footsteps approached, they stopped and he heard the noise of a zip being undone. Fluid started spraying into the dust about two feet away from him, on the right. Ken leapt to his feet. There was only one man and he was turned away, urinating into the dust without a care in the world.

Ken broke the solid piece of wood across the back of the man’s head. The meaty ‘thwocking’ noise which accompanied the impact of his deadly blow, sounded as loud as a bass drum in the silent heat; the impact sent the snapped end of the wooden club spinning away. The target of his perfectly-aimed ferocity collapsed where he had been standing, viciously striking the concrete lip of the blast wall with his forehead on the way down. The bass drummer pushed out another beat. Ken pounced on the unconscious man and using the two-foot-long stump of his club, he struck him again, hard, on the back of the neck just below the skull. There was a cracking noise, and it wasn’t wooden. The man’s legs went into spasm. Ken dragged him behind the wall and proceeded to relieve the body of its weapons, casting his eyes furtively between the task at hand and the door.

Two minutes later, and armed with a fully loaded Kalashnikov – a copy, but of a very high quality – two spare magazines and two grenades, Ken was standing outside the entranceway of the Funny House and ready for the execution of phase two. Listening carefully, he recognised the sounds of a meal being taken, the clanking of tin plates and the odd rattle of cutlery giving rise to his assumption. He heard muffled voices and the sound of a chair scraping its legs on a stone floor. Bending down, Ken looked through the empty keyhole – the five men were seated around a table about twenty feet in front of the door. ‘Perfect…’ he thought.

He reached into his pocket and, with some relief, removed one of the grenades. Ken had never been that keen on having high-explosives next to his balls, but needs must. He leant the rifle against the wall and stepped forwards. In one smooth movement, using his left hand, he pulled the pin and opened the door. Then using his right hand in an underarm lob, he threw the grenade into the room. It bounced once and rolled directly under the table. Ken slammed the door shut and grabbed the AK. There was a shout, followed by the sound of a chair falling over, and then a loud blast. The door shuddered in its frame.

He entered the building like a maniac on speed, booting the door open and quickly darting through, ducking into cover behind some wooden crates on the left. A pall of black smoke rose above the place where the men had been seated, no sign of the table, blown to smithereens. Three of the men were on the floor; the other two were staggering away. He killed them where they stood – two shots each to the centre of the body. They went down silently. He turned to the others and pumped two rounds into each of them. Blood flew. Ken squatted, eyes flickering around the smokey room. One of the corpses farted, stomach gasses escaping its lifeless bowel muscles.

He grinned sickly, thinking: ‘Nothing ever changes, does it?’

Satisfied that the threat was gone, he decided to check the rest of the building and rose to his feet to begin a slow and methodical check of each and every room in the place. It would have been slow and methodical, if only somebody hadn’t tried to kill him. In fact, there were two of them, two more, dark-skinned Afghans. ‘No, not Afghans – these guys are bigger, darker,’ he thought.

Whatever the case, the men were heavily armed. And they were pissed off. Ken had no trouble in figuring that one out. The high velocity bullet, ripping through the wall two inches above his head gave him a head start.

He hit the deck, rolled to his left and came up firing. He’d seen them and that was their first big mistake. They should have waited, or have been better shots. The men were exiting the third room on Ken’s right. His well-placed snap-shots blasted the wall next to the front man’s face. The man stumbled backwards into his friend, his clumsy shock-reaction causing both men to trip up. Their flailing retreat sent them both stumbling back into the small room.

Ken heard them hitting the ground by the door.

Big mistake number two: plasterboard provides absolutely no protection against hurtling lead and copper. Ken steadied his aim, before proceeding to fire ten rounds in a concentric pattern on and around the area of the wall just behind the door. There is nothing quite like the sound of thudding bullets striking human flesh – it can even be discerned over the booming of a Kalashnikov’s roar within a large, echoing room. Ken heard the thuds – thwacking, meaty clumps of noise. A man screamed. He dodged to one side, dropped into a kneeling position and waited with his rifle held in the aim, eyes scanning the men’s position.

Someone coughed and then gurgled, a death rattle. He heard the sound of movement followed by a soft whimper. Ken considered lobbing his last grenade through the door, but the thought of messing about with his pockets again didn’t take his fancy. Instead, he blasted off the rest of his magazine at the room, watching as a dark spray of blood and hair erupted onto the surface of the open door. He had never been one to hesitate when it came to some trigger-pulling, and the ammo wouldn’t be a problem, either – he’d just take theirs.

Silence and cordite smoke filled the space around him. Ken’s ears were ringing but his blood was up. No need, the men were down, and down for good by the looks of things. He quietly reloaded, reaching into his thigh pocket for a fresh magazine, eyes never leaving the target area, hands automatically going through the drills. Having completed the task, he turned away from the mesmerising sight of their blood as it made a last bid to send him nuts, sliding in crazy patterns down the white surfaces of the wall and door.

Ken jogged over to the far end of the room and took cover behind a large stack of filled sandbags. They’d obviously been placed there in readiness for some hardening of the building, he didn’t care – sandbags were good when it came to stopping bullets, unlike plasterboard. After waiting a further ten minutes, sitting stone-still, eyes scanning the rest of the room, Ken rose to his feet and sidled up to the door, stepping back slightly as he neared, giving himself a wider arc of fire in case any of them proved to have more patience than he did. He looked inside – the men were both dead, blasted to hell, their insides spread all over the place.

Ken dragged them into the main hall and did a quick check of the bodies.

Not a single thing was on them. No papers, no identity, nothing. He checked the others and achieved the same results. ‘Who are these guys – why did they just attack the bunker like that, I could’ve been anybody...what the hell is going on?’ He turned and took a long stare at the stiffening corpses, then gathered some of their ammunition for a re-supply.

Ken let his eyes cast around the room one more time. There was nothing to be seen and the place was now silent, but something weird was going on, definitely it was. Like an automaton, he dragged the corpses over and rolled them into the office, before slamming the door on them and turning back to stare at the large, empty room. Then he grabbed a couple of sandbags and humped them over to the main door, sliding its bolts, top and bottom, and stacking the heavy bags of sand against it. Not permanent by any means, but enough to give him some time if there were any other enemy on their way. In a sudden burst of crystal intuition, Ken knew there wouldn’t be. He still left the door blocked, though.

An hour later and having seen no further trace of any enemy, or any other entranceways, Ken had checked the whole building. The task turned out to be far easier than he had thought it would be at first: at one stage it had been a huge single room, but the spooks had partitioned off some smaller rooms and then turned them into offices. There were only eight of these rooms and he’d quickly cleared all of them, including the one masquerading as a morgue, soon finding himself at the opposite end of the building.

Looking back towards the main door, Ken scanned the room with his eyes again, just to get his bearings, he was panting and the wound on his cheek was throbbing again. Crouching down on his haunches, back pressed against the ancient wall, he waited until he had caught his breath a bit. He wasn’t exactly sure what to do next – half of him just wanted to get out of the building. And yet he knew, because the graffiti had said it was so, that Mike was here. Deciding to stay inside and knowing there was only one way in which he’d find out, Ken relaxed slightly and looked around.

The building must have been approximately two or three hundred feet long by about half that in width, maybe slightly wider, it was hard to tell as the curvature and height of the ceilings played tricks with his eyes. He guessed that a professional archaeologist would no doubt find out all sorts of wonderful things in this flea-pit of a country, the trouble was that no-one really gave a toss these days, the last thirty years had almost been solid conflict, and by all accounts the previous centuries hadn’t been a picnic, either.

These days it was all about the money and the guns, especially the money. Ken frowned to himself. ‘It’s a complete tragedy, that’s what this whole, crazy place is, a total and utter mess!’ The thoughts waded idly through his head as he sat and watched a shaft of sunlight streaming through the door.

Then he had another thought, a bitter self-admission. ‘But, then again...I’m here making money from the back of the war, so that makes me just as guilty, I suppose?’ He stared at the room with its bloodied door. ‘Plus, there are those guys…’ The downer of post-battle shock settled like a stone in his guts. ‘I’m still at it, why can’t this lot just leave me alone? I’m sick and tired of killing people...Jesus, what a crock of shit you are, Ken!’

He never used to have thoughts like that, but as he became older, things seemed to have mellowed a touch, these days he thought more about the madness of his own life. Ken guessed it was probably down to spending half of it in cesspits like this place. It made him think all right. Lately, he seemed to be doing a lot more thinking and a whole lot less trigger-pulling. Well, except for today.

‘What a bloody mess!’ His whispered admission did nothing to help dispel the sudden dose of reality. Shaking his head, Ken hefted the rifle onto his crouching thighs and decided to sit for a while longer, just to let his thoughts try to find some reasonable sense of direction.

After about five minutes, he rose to his feet and stood listening for a few more seconds. There hadn’t been a sound for the entire time he’d been in the Funny House, except for the shooting and the death rattle. In fact, when he thought about it, there hadn’t been much noise since the storm. Just the voices in his head were all Ken had heard for the last couple of days, and they were starting to get right on his nerves. But this building felt as though it wanted to say something, or at least someone in it did. He groaned and turned away, deciding that he needed to do a more thorough check of the various offices.

He made his way toward the first one on the left by the main door, Ken had only been looking for threats when he’d carried out his initial clearance and hadn’t paid any attention to what each room held. The rooms were divided into eight in total, four on each side of the long central corridor. Starting at his end, he worked his way back and zigzagged through each room until he had cleared all eight of them, finally ending up back at the entrance door.

Each of the rooms had been almost identical in their layout, with a desk, two chairs and a small refrigerator as their only furnishings. There was a weird looking telephone on each desk, none working, and a computer monitor with keyboard and wireless mouse. There were occasional pens, a few paperclips and some other office bits and pieces lying around, but apart from that it was what the spooks would have called ‘sterile’.