The Will Slater Series Books 1-3 Page 17

  No! a voice screamed in his head. Don’t abandon the plan.

  He ignored that too.

  Still sweating, he realised he hadn’t changed his shirt. He told himself it didn’t matter — none of this mattered. Sweaty armpit stains would reveal nothing. There were a million reasons for a Londoner to be stressed.

  The largest of which rested in the backpack slung over his shoulder.

  He wasn’t sure why he had decided to throw caution to the wind in the final hour. He knew he was being irrational, but couldn’t do anything to stop it. He wanted nothing more than for the months of stress and tension and unease to come to their conclusion.

  It doesn’t matter if you do it now, he told himself.

  It will unfold all the same.

  Using a palm slick with sweat, he eased the front door of the flat open a crack and checked the corridor outside for any prying eyes.

  Empty.

  He stepped out into the hallway and shut the door behind him, breathing hard, taking in these last moments of solitude before he slipped out into the bustle of London foot traffic.

  There was a slight creak in the damp floorboards further along the corridor. It resonated through the space, barely perceptible but akin to a bomb going off in Hussein’s heightened state of awareness.

  He jolted involuntary and turned to look down the length of the corridor.

  Not quite empty.

  The little girl from one of the neighbouring flats looked up at him, almost twenty feet away, entirely innocuous but strangely observant all the same. She was positioned in front of the door that Hussein often saw her emerge from as she headed off to school each weekday, sitting with her back against the flaking plaster wall and her tiny boots resting on the shoddy rug running the length of the corridor.

  She had been crying.

  Her eyes were red and puffy. Hussein couldn’t understand how one person could elicit such emotion. It seemed like every time he saw her she was ailed by a new burden. Through the thick blanket of suppression that he’d drowned his emotions in over the years, a sliver of empathy squeezed through.

  He destroyed it as quickly as it appeared, forcing the little girl out of his thoughts.

  But it made him hesitate.

  It threw him off his game.

  The young kid smiled up at him, a warm gesture despite her foul mood. He smiled back, more to act normal rather than display genuine emotion. Internally he found himself panicking, even though the girl meant nothing in the grand scheme of things. All he had to do was walk straight past her and carry on with the plan.

  But a spanner had been thrown in his wheel, grinding his momentum to a sudden halt. He reconsidered everything, shifting from foot to foot.

  You can’t spend much time in one spot, he told himself. It looks suspicious. Make a decision.

  Begrudgingly, he went through a pre-determined set of mannerisms. He shook his head in apparent foolishness, as if scolding himself for forgetting something. He shrugged at the little girl, smiled again, and stepped straight back into his apartment.

  Breathing hard, he cursed himself under his breath.

  What are you doing, you fool?

  He dropped the backpack on the bed — exactly where it had last been resting — and opted to wait for the phone to ring. It might be hours, but he wasn’t about to let his superiors down in the final stretch. He didn’t know what had come over him to spur him into setting off early, but the appearance of the young kid had startled him back into a clinical mentality.

  He would wait.

  Another couple of hours wouldn’t hurt.

  Besides, apparently dusk was the best time to strike…

  37

  Slater burst into the grounds of the mansion with his senses thrumming, charged with a crackling energy that always came to him in the raging throes of combat.

  He shot his gaze from left to right, soaking in all the sights at once. A blurred shape in his peripheral vision seized his attention, and he swung the AK-15 around to meet a tribesman scrambling frantically for his weapon. Slater noted the grenade in the man’s left hand — he dropped it as he snatched for his rifle, letting it fall to the ground between his feet.

  The pin still rested inside the device.

  He had been in the process of removing the pin and hurling it through the open gate when Slater had charged into the compound.

  Slater capitalised on the confusion, putting two rounds into the man’s chest. He had considered targeting the head, but there was a sizeable margin for error when aiming at such a specific point. He considered himself accurate, but there was no time to miss.

  He would die if the bullets didn’t slam home.

  Thankfully, the torso provided a bulky target, and the tribesman took both bullets in his upper chest, shredding muscle and sinew and penetrating deep into vital organs. He dropped, losing all control of his limbs.

  No threat.

  Slater ducked instinctively, anticipating gunshots from anywhere. Things were moving too fast to fully process his surroundings. He eyed the cluster of battered pick-up trucks parked at random angles across the courtyard, and slid behind one of them — just in case anyone else had a beat on him.

  Numbers and patterns and sequences rolled through his mind, butting against each other in a desperate bid to seize the forefront of his thoughts. He recalled what Abu had told him.

  A few in the courtyard itself.

  A few.

  He hazarded a guess that there were two left outside the mansion. A panicked shot rang off the other side of the pick-up truck he cowered behind. Slater noted its position, ejected the half-empty magazine, and rammed a fresh one home, reloading the AK-15 in one practiced motion.

  He sprung out of cover and fired a precise volley of rounds in a dotted cluster at the last place he’d heard the nearest hostile. Time seemed to slow down — Slater analysed every inch of the robe-clad silhouette darting for cover behind an empty fountain in the centre of the courtyard, overwhelmed by the sudden explosion of pinpoint-accurate gunfire.

  Slater adjusted, re-aligned, and fired once.

  The guy had already been on the way down, so when the round laced through the soft tissue directly behind his ear and shut his lights out forever, he sprawled on his front into the fountain itself. There was no water in the centrepiece — it was nothing more than a giant concrete bowl — so the tribesman slumped unceremoniously onto the fountain floor, surrounded by loose sand and a collection of weeds.

  Slater saw the jambiyah whistling toward his head at the last second, shockingly close.

  He let his legs go slack and dropped underneath the path of the curved dagger, missing it by inches. Another half-second of hesitation and the edge of the blade would have taken the top half of his head off. Still sprawling to the ground, he shot out a hand reflexively and seized hold of the last remaining tribesman’s ankle. For some reason, the man had decided to bull rush Slater’s position, opting to use a close-quarters weapon instead of attempting to pick him off from a distance.

  The ankle pick takedown was a common staple of wrestling, taught in grappling schools across the world. It took considerable dexterity and strength to time perfectly, but it helped when one’s adversary had zero professional martial arts training whatsoever.

  Slater wrenched the man’s ankle off the ground, throwing him entirely off-balance. Before the guy could launch a second swing of the jambiyah, Slater had effectively yanked his legs out from underneath him.

  The man sprawled into the dust, landing hard enough on his back to omit an audible gasp.

  From there, it was like clockwork.

  Slater had lost his grip on the AK-15 in the scramble, but that didn’t matter. He pounced on the man like a boa constrictor, squashing him into the sand with his full bodyweight. The man panicked and rolled onto his back, intent on making his way to his feet from there.

  Just like they all did.

  Slater sliced an arm underneath his throat and locked the choke
tight, wrenching his forearm back with his other hand. Poised behind the tribesman like a human backpack, the result was inevitable. The tribesman heaved with exertion, managing to stumble upright for a split second. He had put all his effort into getting his legs underneath him, but when he made it to his feet he realised that Slater wasn’t going anywhere.

  What now? Slater thought.

  Now, the blood supply to his brain shut off. The man’s legs went limp, creating a result more disastrous than if he’d simply stayed put on the ground. The man pitched forward, losing all control of his bodily functions, and face-planted the sand hard enough to rattle his brain within its skull. Coupled with the choke hold, it put him out for the near future.

  He’d wake up later.

  Confused, disoriented, but alive.

  Slater slid off the motionless body, collected his weapon, and slunk toward the house.

  The man had got lucky.

  He would live to see another day.

  The mansion dwarfed everything else in sight, hovering in the centre of the compound like an ominous checkpoint. Slater knew that his only hope of ending the madness rested within. He had no idea what to expect. He had no idea what was waiting for him within the walls.

  He shrugged and pressed forward.

  Close-quarters carnage had always been preferable to open warfare. He favoured the madness of tight spaces. It leant greater weight on reaction speed — something he had in spades.

  He stepped up onto the porch. Despite the intense ringing in his ears, an uneasy silence had descended over the entire compound. The atmosphere was as familiar to Slater as an absence of combat. So much of his life had been spent battling to merely survive that he had learnt to control his emotions, even in the most difficult of circumstances. As a result, his veins had turned to ice by the time he crossed to the double doors, shut firmly like a warning not to enter.

  He had never obeyed warnings.

  Thinking of Abu and the family the man had waiting for him to return home, Slater set into action. He thrust a shoulder into one of the doors, hard enough to rattle the entire thing on its hinges but possessing enough restraint to keep it locked in place.

  By the time the noise of the impact had echoed into the building, creating a retaliatory wave of gunfire that shredded through the thick wood, Slater had already taken off at a sprint along the porch. He aimed for one of the broad windows running along the front of the property, all of them bolted shut.

  He had come to learn that, no matter what precautionary measures were in place, a two-hundred pound deadweight could break through all kinds of barriers.

  He took the hit across his upper back, throwing himself backwards into the window to prevent any life-threatening injuries to his face or neck.

  The windowpane detonated in a shower of glass.

  Slater followed it through, slamming down onto the floor of a disused office.

  He was inside.

  38

  Three thoughts speared through Slater as he rolled expertly to his feet inside the massive room.

  First — protect Abu.

  The computer technician had become hopelessly embroiled in this conflict without argument, and Slater was eternally grateful for his assistance. He would fight until his dying breath to ensure the man made it home safe. It had been his call to keep him in the mansion, so the burden of responsibility rested solely on his shoulders to get him out.

  Second — protect al-Mansur.

  Despite the animosity leeching through his bones towards the Brigadier-General, Slater knew the consequences of letting the man get caught in the crossfire. Al-Mansur was integral to the terror plot, and Slater doubted that he had passed full details of the operation onto any of his underlings. The bulk of the knowledge on the matter rested inside al-Mansur’s brain, and Slater needed to keep it functioning — at least until he had restrained the momentum and was able to stop and think for more than a few minutes at a time. When he had control over the situation, he would end al-Mansur’s life without hesitation.

  Third — kill everyone else in the damn building.

  Slater had given up trying to be moralistic. Leaving the tribesman he’d just choked unconscious alive had been a grave error — he would more than likely have to deal with the man further down the line. The lives of thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of people came down to what he could accomplish over the next couple of hours. It ate away at his insides, churning his gut even as he swept the room for any sign of hostiles.

  A single wrong move now wouldn’t just spell disaster for himself.

  It would spell disaster for all of London.

  Why the fuck is this happening? a voice hissed in his head as he hurried for the open doorway on the far side of the room.

  He had no idea. Al-Mansur’s motivations were as blurry as his own vision, pounding and wavering from the sheer dose of adrenalin in his veins.

  He was simply doing as he always did.

  Reacting. Rolling with the punches. Improvising.

  From the precursory glance at the space outside the office, it seemed this room opened out into the main lobby, backed by the grand staircase spiralling up toward the second and third floor.

  Wide open ground.

  Slater cursed under his breath and pressed his back against the wall right near the doorway. He hated the unknown — he would have preferred the conflict to unfold in cramped hallways, with barely any room to move. He could use elbows and knees and sheer overwhelming force to turn those types of claustrophobic skirmishes into a nightmare for anyone he came across.

  He hated high ceilings, and vast marble floors, and plenty of doorways to hide behind.

  It was like a fatally dangerous game of hide-and-seek.

  Reluctant to step out into the open, he opted to attune his hearing to the slightest disturbances in the mansion. It was difficult, given the beating his eardrums had taken over the course of the gunfighting. He settled his breathing and focused hard, squinting his gaze to narrow his focus. The rate at which his heart pounded in his chest was uncontrollable, but he could at least temporarily shut out the adrenalin.

  A noise.

  Close by.

  Uncomfortably close.

  Slater realised all at once that another breathing organism rested right around the doorway, standing opposite to him. When he became aware of the man, he could fine tune his own hearing, zoning in on the muffled, panicked breathing and the racking of a weapon’s slide.

  The guy had heard Slater crash into the office, but hadn’t possessed the courage to charge in on his own.

  Slater sensed the presence of death. It was a strange sensation — the knowledge that in the coming seconds one of them would die. He had shared it with many people in the past, and somehow always came out on top.

  He moved like a wraith, first sending a couple of rounds into the wall itself. The walls were made of polished, panelled wood, thick enough to withstand a gunshot — but that had never been the intention. The sound of two unsuppressed AK-15 rounds at close range was deafening, drowning out all other senses, making the enemy recoil inward for that split second where their world went mad.

  At that point, Slater rounded the edge of the doorway and swung the AK-15 double-handed, like a club, hard enough to break bones. The stock hit the tribesman square in the side of the head, bouncing off his skull with a noise similar to cracking open a coconut. The man went down instantly — if not dead, then flirting with the concept.

  Slater moved his limbs like whips, rearing around to scout the rest of the lobby for any signs of life.

  Too late.

  He had no time to duck back behind the doorway before he glimpsed the two stationary figures, poised in the middle of the marble floor of the entranceway like silent statues. They seemingly hadn’t moved in minutes, seeing that Slater hadn’t heard a peep from them the entire time. They must have simultaneously frozen as they heard him dive into the adjoining office, aware that it would only be a matter
of time before Slater came storming out.

  Perhaps the man he’d just killed had been a decoy all along.

  Al-Mansur stood side-by-side with the last remaining tribesman, a grizzled old man with a permanent scowl and a bulky Kalashnikov held between veiny forearms, its barrel locked rigid in the air.

  Al-Mansur had a Jericho pistol pointed at Slater’s head.

  Slater didn’t dare to bring his AK-15 around. It would take too long — a single vital second with which the two men in front of him would take the opportunity to tear him apart.

  ‘Kill me,’ he said, his voice hollow in the cavernous space.

  Al-Mansur smiled grimly and shook his head. Then he spoke, his accent thick. ‘Where is your friend?’

  Slater paused, flabbergasted. ‘You speak English?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What was all that about before?’

  ‘Gave your friend something to do. Threw you off-guard. Now where is he?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘He fled with you,’ al-Mansur said. ‘Yet he did not return.’

  Ah, Slater thought.

  The Brigadier-General had been too disoriented by the previous conflict that he hadn’t noticed Abu slink upstairs.

  He didn’t know the man was in the house.

  What advantage that posed, Slater was unsure of.

  Then he noticed the blur of movement at the top of his vision, flashing into sight on the second-floor landing. He could only see what was about to unfold due to al-Mansur’s positioning — the two men were poised in front of the grand staircase leading up to the next storey.

  A bulky shape burst into view, sprinting hard for the railing. Slater guessed that both al-Mansur and the sole tribesman were riding out waves of adrenalin — otherwise, they would have noticed the man coming. He imagined the pair didn’t see true combat often.

  It meant they had their gazes fixed firmly on Slater when Abu threw himself over the second-floor railing, hurling all caution to the wind. The man dropped unceremoniously, losing all control in the air, twisting once before falling like a two-hundred-pound dead weight onto the men standing before Slater.