The Will Slater Series Books 1-3 Page 3

  That would not be the case.

  Their tempers started to rise exponentially. The trio fed off each other, shouting obscenities at Slater, shooing him back the way he had come.

  Slater pointed at the tasrih, which had blown a few dozen feet off the trail, skittering wildly along the plain. ‘That’s mine. Go get that.’

  The three of them stared blankly at him, frankly surprised that he had even bothered to retort. Machismo dripped off them, palpable in the air. They didn’t get many opportunities to stick their chests out and parade their authority around, so now they were taking every opportunity to do so.

  None of them budged an inch.

  Slater stared at the tasrih and sighed. ‘Okay — well, that’s gone. How about you three just let me through?’

  He was met with absolute silence.

  Then the man on the left — the soldier who had first kicked off the egotistical display of dominance by snatching for his gun — strode fast at Slater, unleashing a tirade of abuse in his direction. Flecks of spit arced from the corners of his mouth.

  Up close, Slater could see the wavering of his gaze, the slight lack of spatial awareness that brought him to within half a foot of Slater’s own face. He stared past the soldier to the pair behind him, noting the similar expressions on their faces.

  They were high on khat, a drug that Slater hadn’t known existed before he stepped foot in Yemen. Over the course of his time in-country, he’d come to learn that nearly three-quarters of the population munched on the leaves, which had a similar effect to marijuana.

  With the three of them spaced out ever so slightly, Slater realised he could take them all at once.

  As that thought entered his mind, he burst off the mark in the blink of an eye.

  The soldier in his face hadn’t been prepared for anything close to what unfolded. He stood completely still as Slater shouldered straight through him, charging into his chest with enough force to send him sprawling back onto the trail. The guy’s head followed the same trajectory as his falling body, meeting the hard, crusty earth with enough force to knock him senseless.

  The back of the man’s skull whiplashed off the ground, accompanied by a hollow thud. He’d be fine in the long run, but Slater wouldn’t be surprised if he had dealt out a concussion.

  Never slowing or hesitating, he scooped up the Kalashnikov that the man had dropped and spun it around in his hands, locking a firm grip around the weapon’s barrel. He took three bounding steps into the range of the other pair and swung the rifle in one scything motion like a baseball bat, smashing the stock into the closest soldier’s ribs.

  The guy buckled, and Slater swung again into the back of his neck, hard enough to send him face-first into the dusty earth but with enough restraint to prevent lasting neurological damage.

  He twisted on the spot fast enough to catch the last man fumbling with his rifle, pawing at the safety with meaty fingers. Slater could see the confusion spreading across the man’s face as he struggled to work the tiny switch. His senses and reflexes had been dulled by the fat ball of khat residue lodged inside his left cheek.

  ‘Goddamnit,’ Slater muttered to himself as he witnessed the pathetic sight.

  He would have much rather been on his way, leaving the third guy to tend to his beaten comrades. But this man was unrelenting, determinedly trying to make his weapon operational despite his adversary staring him in the face from two feet away.

  Slater recognised the gun barrel swinging in his direction and opted to put his foot down. He would not take it easy on the man in front of him. It was an undeniable truth that if Slater hadn’t possessed the ability to act, he would have been gunned down where he stood.

  And no-one would have been any the wiser.

  He would have been buried in a hot ditch and all record of his existence would have faded away into nothingness.

  Thankfully, Will Slater lived and breathed combat.

  He shot into range, ducking underneath the Kalashnikov while the man carried on fumbling with the safety catch. He activated his glutes and hamstrings, pushing off the dusty track with enough explosive power to knock all the breath out of the man’s lungs. The point of his shoulder sunk deep into the guy’s exposed stomach, taking him off his feet.

  Together, the pair sprawled into the dirt.

  The sun had scorched the track over the course of the morning, turning the dirt impossibly hot. Slater winced as he went through the practiced motions of flattening out an inexperienced adversary. The man had zero jiu-jitsu training based off his panicked reaction, something that proved disastrous ten times out of ten when up against a black belt. He flapped around on the ground like a wounded hamster.

  Slater sliced one leg over the guy’s mid-section, sliding into a position known as full-mount. Helpless to resist, the man panicked and rolled onto his front, a natural reaction when someone was unable to buck the weight of an enemy off them.

  Instinctively turning away from the punches that would inevitably follow suit.

  It played directly into Slater’s skill set.

  He looped an arm around the man’s throat from behind, almost lackadaisical in his approach. The Kalashnikov had skittered across the track moments earlier and come to rest well out of reach, coated in dust and desert sand. With the fatal threat eliminated, now he could nullify the man underneath him.

  A rear-naked-choke took, on average, less than five seconds to choke a man into temporary unconsciousness. Cut off the blood supply to the brain and all sorts of neurological systems shut down instantly. In mixed martial arts, opponents tapped in the space of seconds to prevent unnecessary damage.

  Out here, there was no referee to pull Slater off.

  He unleashed maximum exertion, tightening a muscular forearm around the guy’s neck. It happened so fast that the man wouldn’t have realised what hit him. He struggled feebly for a brief moment, then his brain responded to the choke by shutting itself down all at once.

  He went limp.

  Slater released the hold as soon as he felt the man’s limbs turn to jelly, and slid off the unconscious mass. Within the span of a few seconds, the guy spluttered awake, staring at his surroundings with dilated pupils. It would take him a few minutes to get his bearings.

  Until then, Slater had rendered him useless.

  He was in no state to mount any kind of resistance.

  Slater kicked the three Kalashnikov rifles off the side of the track, watching them tumble down the side of a craggy valley dotted with rock formations and overgrown patches of weeds. Satisfied with where the weapons finally tumbled to a halt, well off the beaten path, he nodded to himself and strode quickly through the checkpoint.

  It would take the three policemen at least ten minutes to retrieve their weapons. By then, Slater would be long gone. He had briefly considered taking one of the rifles with him for reassurance’s sake, but it would spell nothing but disaster if he strolled into the next town wielding an automatic weapon.

  He preferred to avoid that kind of reaction.

  The trail twisted and turned ahead, weaving through a complex maze of rocky outcrops and vast sloping hills, all covered in the same barren sand and bleak stone.

  Slater took one look back at the trio of whimpering checkpoint guards lying in the dust behind him. He imagined that — even if they managed to recuperate from their injuries and fetch their weapons from the treacherous valley slope — Slater’s outburst would have intimidated them into submission.

  At least, he hoped so.

  He wouldn’t take their lives while they lay there, helpless.

  He had caused enough pain over the last ten years.

  And — despite their attitudes — none of them deserved it.

  He pressed on into the Hadhramaut Valley, letting all thoughts of the confrontation pass from his mind.

  To an inexperienced combatant, the encounter would have affected their psyche for months, plagued by the memories of a life-or-death situation in which they could ha
ve caught a stray bullet at any moment.

  To Slater, it was Tuesday.

  By the time he made it to the first bend in the road and strode purposefully out of sight of the security checkpoint, all recollections of the fight had blended into the thousands of other echoes he’d rather forget.

  5

  The road provided Slater ample time for solitude.

  Out here, at the edge of the earth, he could reflect.

  The trail turned to a blur after twenty minutes of uninterrupted hiking. Every now and then he slid a thin plastic bottle out of the back of his jeans and took a long swig from the neck, but other than keeping hydrated he had nothing else to concern himself with.

  He didn’t quite know exactly what he was doing in Yemen. It had been a simple-enough journey, crossing the border from Oman after trawling uneventfully through the neighbouring country as slow as he pleased.

  How he had ended up in Oman was a tale that he almost didn’t believe himself.

  It involved a man by the name of Jason King who used to work for the same highly-classified special-operations division as Slater. The pair had become acquainted in Corsica of all places, and since then Slater’s entire life had been flipped on its head.

  King did that to people.

  Now King had retreated to parts unknown to live out the rest of his days in privacy, and Slater was out of a job. Not long ago, he’d spent a relaxing week at a private luxury resort in Antigua in a hopeless attempt to wind down from a career of madness. That period of his life had taught him little, except for the fact that he wasn’t wired to stay in one place.

  He was a wanderer, through and through.

  And he didn’t mind wandering through the most dangerous places on the planet.

  In fact, he welcomed it.

  He shouldn’t have been expecting any less than what had resulted at the security checkpoint. The policeman who had sold him the tasrih had warned him of the confrontational nature of Northern Yemenis. Slater had sensed that the man had something against the Northerners, judging by the level of disdain in his voice when he’d described them as barbarians.

  Slater chalked the aggression of the checkpoint guards up to a mixture of boredom and a lack of foreigners, and pressed on further into the Hadhramaut Valley.

  A town appeared on the horizon, most of it shimmering through the haze of sunshine battering the desert plains from above. Slater had been expecting to come across civilisation at some point in the near future — the rudimentary map he’d perused at the beginning of the day had told him that a remote mountain town called Qasam rested past the security checkpoint he’d come through earlier.

  He made for the collection of buildings, passing a pair of khat farms on either side of the trail. The tall trees rested still in the middle of the sweeping plateau, soon to be harvested for a sizeable profit. Slater kept a lookout for any sign of life amidst the plantations, but found nothing.

  He continued.

  The rumbling of an engine behind him caused him to grimace in anticipation. He tensed up like a coiled spring and turned on his heel, ready for a fight. If the trio of checkpoint guards had piled into a vehicle and set off in pursuit of their foe, Slater would have trouble dealing with them this time.

  He had caught them off-guard initially.

  It wouldn’t happen again.

  Thankfully, the source of the noise turned out to be another beat-up Land Cruiser, lacking registration plates or a windshield. A pair of Yemeni men sat in the cabin, guiding the old truck along the winding trail towards Qasam. The vehicle rumbled past, and Slater exchanged a nod with the pair. As it trawled further along the track and reached Qasam’s limits, Slater eyed the flapping tarpaulin sheet draped across the rear tray. For a moment the tarp lifted in the wind, revealing bundles of khat lined along the metal in orderly rows.

  Slater shook his head, flabbergasted.

  From an outsider’s perspective, it seemed like the entire Yemeni economy revolved around the drug.

  Gradually, more signs of life presented themselves. The monotonous view of sweeping plains and rocky outcrops for as far as the eye could see was replaced with the odd local administration building, set apart from the rest of the mountain town.

  Slater passed by a couple of men dressed in official uniform sitting at a rickety table out the front of a broad three-storey brick building, chewing absent-mindedly on khat and talking in hushed voices as they gazed at the arid mountains all around them.

  He nodded politely to them.

  They nodded back, unable to hide their surprise at seeing a man in the region who wasn’t of Middle-Eastern origin.

  Slater continued up into the centre of Qasam. He concluded the policeman who had given him the tasrih had been making a simple generalisation when he had warned of the northerners’ hostility.

  People in this region seemed pleasant enough.

  For the most part.

  Artificial noise materialised for the first time in what felt like an eternity. Slater had become so accustomed to the quiet drone of the wind howling across the valley floor that he found himself shocked by a foreign sound. He identified it as the harsh, discordant blare of loudspeakers all across the town. He checked his watch and chalked the commotion up to one of the daily prayers that often tore through small towns such as these.

  Every single person he strode past as he made his way into Qasam stared at him unashamedly, none of them bothering to mask their shock. He could only imagine what they were thinking.

  A foreigner — out here?

  He nodded and smiled warmly at each civilian in turn, electing not to linger in one place for too long. There was plenty of commotion outside the mosque as a group of townspeople dispersed from the entrance, draped in simple clothing, many of them sporting towels hanging off their shoulders. Slater moved along and strolled slowly through streets packed with merchants and khat-sellers, listening to the hiss of meat on makeshift grilles and the braying of animals in neighbouring alleys.

  It contrasted sharply with the barren desolation of the plateau.

  Despite everything, he smiled.

  He had no place to stay, no personal belongings to speak of, nowhere in the world to be. He didn’t speak the native language, which had made communication next to impossible throughout his entire time in Yemen.

  But he wouldn’t have traded it for anything else.

  It was a welcome relief from a typical day in his life just a few short months ago.

  He appreciated the unknown.

  It was preferable to always having a task to complete, always having someone to rescue or someone that needed eliminating.

  His worries were nothing in comparison.

  He found a lookout on the outskirts of the town and opted to rest for a while, soaking in the sights for as long as he could. Despite all of Yemen’s dangers, he made sure to take the time to admire the beauty of the landscape. For as long as he could remember, he had been thrust from location to location, travelling the world in service to his country but never spending enough time in one place to truly appreciate it.

  It helped that no-one was looking to murder him out here.

  Not yet, he thought.

  The lookout consisted of a tiny gravel courtyard sandwiched between a pair of archaic residential buildings overlooking the plateau. This portion of the town was positioned atop a rocky outcrop. It provided a view of all the khat farms surrounding the mountains, as well as the valley floor stretching for thousands of miles in any direction. Behind the lookout, past Qasam, the rocky promontory rose sharply into the jagged mountains. The cliffs stretched well into the distance, an imposing backdrop.

  Slater sat down on an unoccupied bench, alone at the lookout. All the faint sounds of civilian life echoed up through the narrow laneways. After close to ten miles of travel on foot, the sweat ran freely from his pores. He let it come. Ordinarily the perspiration would cause discomfort, but comfort was something he hadn’t experienced in quite some time.


  He wasn’t sure if he liked being comfortable, anyway.

  That was no way to live.

  He turned his gaze outward, across the plateau. The policeman who had provided him with the tasrih had described the vast valleys as wadis, most of them half a mile wide and over a hundred miles long. From the outpost, Slater could almost make out the dimensions of one of the great gorges dotting the plateau. It was an impressive sight, to say the least.

  ‘Don’t get many tourists out here,’ a voice said from behind.

  English.

  Slater turned, startled, to lay eyes on the man who had stepped into the lookout.

  6

  The man appeared to be in his mid-forties, dressed in a strange combination of formal and tribal attire. Slater recognised the white futa that the majority of Yemeni civilians wore around their waists — a plain white cloth that wrapped around one’s mid-section to cover the legs, like a skirt of sorts. Yet there was a collared business shirt draped over the man’s shoulders, hanging open and unbuttoned to compensate for the intense heat. His head was wrapped in a tribal cloth and his face was surprisingly smooth, lacking the weather-beaten lines that so many civilians out here possessed.

  ‘You speak English,’ Slater stated, taken aback by the revelation. He certainly hadn’t been expecting it.

  ‘Quite well,’ the man said, nodding. ‘I am almost fluent. A rarity out here — I know.’

  ‘I guess I’m something of a rarity out here too,’ Slater said, gesturing to his skin tone.

  He wondered who had been the last African-American to wander through Qasam.

  The man across from Slater smiled warmly and clasped his hands together in front of his waist. ‘Then we have something in common, my friend. We are unique.’

  ‘Can I help you with anything?’

  The man shrugged. ‘Not particularly. My name is Abu.’

  ‘I’m Will.’

  ‘Pleasure to meet you, Will. Do you mind if I sit?’