Age of Heroes (21 page)

The rest of the Myrmidons in the group arranged themselves in a rough semicircle around the trailer home, hunkering down in shadows.

Now it was time to wait.

Somewhere over at the southern perimeter of the compound, Gavin Martin was marshalling a second, smaller team of Myrmidons. They had helped themselves to some flashbangs and fragmentation grenades from the camp’s armoury, which was not well-guarded, a prefab unit with windows that anyone with a combat knife and the inclination could jemmy open. Their goal was to make mischief. Specifically, to simulate a raid on the camp by hostile forces.

If Munro wasn’t going to leave his trailer home voluntarily, Roy had thought, then they were going to have to give him no alternative. A veteran war dog like him couldn’t – wouldn’t – ignore an apparent enemy action.

At twenty past midnight the first explosions sounded. Balloons of light burst in the night sky, followed by drumroll detonations. These were chased up with staccato crackles of gunfire.

Within moments, people were stumbling out from the nearby dormitory huts. Voices were raised. There was confusion, commotion, shouts echoing across the camp. From a distance Roy heard Alain Dupont ordering troops to grab rifles, go and take a look.

The uproar grew. Mercenaries and Somali soldiers went sprinting past the Myrmidons’ hiding places, not seeing them, too intent on responding to the attack.

From the trailer home, however, nothing. No light came on behind the blinds. The door remained shut.

Roy couldn’t believe it. Surely Munro couldn’t be sleeping through all this? He remembered the beer bottle in Munro’s hand. Could he be
that
drunk?

He motioned to Almaz Beshimov, the youngest of all the Myrmidons, a one-time Kyrgyz army reservist who, although still in his mid-twenties, had seen action in Chechnya, South Ossetia and Ukraine as part of Russia’s covert special forces. Roy forked fingers at his own eyes, then pointed to the trailer home door. Beshimov nodded assent and trotted forward, pistol at the ready. He sidled up to the door, reaching for the handle with his free hand.

A fist punched clean through the trailer home wall from within, emerging beside Beshimov’s head. It grabbed the Kyrgyz by the neck and yanked hard, pulling him face first into the jagged opening it had created. Three times the young man’s face was rammed against jutting spars of splintered plywood. Blood spurted from lacerated cheeks and nose. He shrieked as one of his eyeballs was gouged. A fourth and final yank, harder than all the rest, resulted in a brutal
snap
that silenced his cries of distress.

The fist let go and withdrew. Beshimov’s lifeless body slumped to the ground.

Then the door flew out, kicked from its hinges, and Munro dived out after it, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and jockey shorts. He had a Glock 17 Gen4 in each hand and was firing even before he hit the ground. 9mm Parabellum rounds flew in all directions, with an accuracy Roy found uncanny and terrifying. It was as though Munro knew where the Myrmidons were situated; had known in advance, while still inside the trailer home. Now he was shooting at them, and although not every bullet found its mark, he still scored a fatality and two woundings with his initial salvo.

Roy loosed off with his Browning L9A1, emptying the entire clip in Munro’s direction, but aiming high. Jeanne and Sean Wilson joined in.

“Suppressing fire!” Roy yelled. “Pin him down! Rojas, Friedman, what the hell are you waiting for?”

The archers, startled by the sudden ferocity of Munro’s attack, tried to draw a bead on him.

Munro, meanwhile, scuttled away from the gunfire on all fours, not with the frantic urgency of a man fleeing for his life, more the air of someone avoiding an irritant.

A bowstring twanged. An arrow whizzed in his direction, released by Rojas.

And Munro did the frankly impossible.

He twisted round and caught it in mid-flight. Plucked the arrow from the air as though it had been hovering there, stationary.

Then he flung it back overhand at its sender.

The arrow transfixed Rojas through the neck, spearing his windpipe. The Spaniard dropped his bow and keeled over. As he lay on his side, gargling blood, his hands groped ineffectually, trying to tug the arrow out. Then they fell limp. He spasmed. His eyes rolled up. Dead.

Roy gaped helplessly.

What Munro had just done...

“Iron Dan” wasn’t finished yet, however. He bounded over to Rojas’s body, almost faster than the eye could follow, and snatched up the bow.

“This!” he bellowed, holding the weapon aloft and looking around him imperiously. “Whoever you are – where did you get this? Who gave it to you?”

Roy slapped a fresh clip into his Browning and stepped out in plain view of Munro. The mission had gone clusterfuck. Munro had completely wrongfooted them. The man was a beast. He could punch holes through wood. He had no fear under fire. He could catch arrows in mid-air and throw them like javelins. He was as agile as a puma. He was everything the other mercs had said about him and more.

All the same, there was a chance the Myrmidons could still pull this off. Out of the corner of his eye Roy could see Friedman. The Israeli still had an arrow nocked. He was taking careful aim, aware that he had one shot only and that a miss would be tantamount to signing his own death warrant.

Roy just needed to keep Munro distracted for a few more seconds.

“Answer me!” Munro demanded. “This is Orion’s bow. I recognise it. You should not have it. You!” He jabbed the bow accusingly at Roy. “Englishman. I knew there was something not right about you. Explain yourself.”

Everything slowed to a standstill. Panic continued to reign in the camp, people hurrying to and fro, explosions and rifle reports from afar as Gavin and the other Myrmidons kept up their bogus assault and the Somalis and mercenaries rushed to mount a counteroffensive. But here, in these few square metres in front of the trailer home, as though in the eye of a hurricane, an eerie calm prevailed.

Roy levelled the gun at Munro. They were supposed to make the kill using the bows. Badenhorst had been quite insistent about that. Each and every one of their targets had to be eliminated with one of the ancient weapons.

An exception might have to be made here, however. Munro was too dangerous for the Myrmidons to rely on arrows alone. He had proved that beyond question. Roy needed to shift the paradigm somewhat.

“A gun,” said Munro, staring at the Browning with contempt. “You’re going to shoot me? Is that the plan?”

“It wasn’t,” said Roy, “but it is now.”

“Go ahead then.”

“As you wish,” and Roy pulled the trigger.

Four rounds smacked into Munro at point blank range, all in the chest, centre of body mass.

The impacts staggered him, but he did not go down.

More astonishingly, he was intact.

He wasn’t wearing
any
protection. No ballistic vest, nothing. Holes appeared in his T-shirt, but the bullets failed to perforate his flesh.

They literally bounced off him.

It was just...

Not...

Fucking...

Possible.

Next thing Roy knew, Munro had him by the throat. He hadn’t even seen the man move. He was hoisted off the ground, Munro using lifting his entire bodyweight one-handed with next to no effort, as though he were a straw effigy. Roy heard the bow being chucked to the ground and felt the Browning being wrested from his grasp. He could do nothing to prevent it. He was choking. He clung to Munro’s wrist, clutching and clawing, trying to unpick the fingers, prise the hand away. No use; the hand was locked solid, a steel pincer. Red bubbles began exploding in his vision. His ears were roaring. His chest heaved as he tried to suck in a breath that couldn’t reach his lungs. So this was how he was going to die.

Then he felt the muzzle of the Browning being ground against his temple. At the same time Munro relaxed his grip on Roy’s neck somewhat. His windpipe was still constricted, but he could just about breathe again.

“Here’s the deal,” Munro said. “You’re going to tell me who sent you; who gave you that bow. Or else I will blow your brains out. And if you won’t tell me, one of your pals will. Believe me, I will make it happen one way or another. How much do you want to live, Englishman?”

A lot. If Roy didn’t live, there would be no payout. Josie wouldn’t get to stay at the Gesundheitsklinik Rheintal. She would be jettisoned back out into the world, still fragile and now fatherless, powerless against her own dark impulses.

If he died, she died.

But then, were Roy to tell Munro what he knew, he would be sacked at the very least. Badenhorst wouldn’t hesitate; assuming the Afrikaner remained alive long enough to do so. Given how angered Munro was, he didn’t rate his employer’s chances.

Whatever he did, he was screwed.

Fortunately, as Munro shook him, Tzadok Friedman had managed to edge round to a new firing position and now had a clear shot at the side of Munro’s head. He resettled the arrow into position, balancing the shaft on his left thumb while he pulled the bowstring back with his right hand – slowly, ever so slowly, to prevent creaking. That, he thought, was what had given the game away when Rojas fired. Had to be that.

He drew a breath. Held it. Sighted along the arrow.

Exhaled.

Released.

Munro turned his head, dropped both Roy and the pistol. His hands came up.

He almost caught the arrow.

Almost.

The arrow embedded itself in his skull. It went into his cheek, its tip bursting out at the back through his parietal bone with a little spit of blood.

Munro teetered, incredulity in his eyes. He murmured words in a foreign language, the same language Anthony Peregrine had spoken when confronting the Myrmidons.

Then, like a felled sequoia, “Iron Dan” Munro toppled and went crashing to the ground.

T
HE
M
YRMIDONS WITHDREW
, using the chaos in the camp for cover. Roy was dazed and bruised from his encounter with Munro; his head felt as though it was attached to the rest of him by a slender thread. Nevertheless he helped along one of the wounded, Mayson, whom Munro had shot in the arm, while Jeanne and Friedman supported the other, Corbett, who had taken a bullet to the thigh.

They were minus Beshimov, Rojas, and one other, a Peruvian called Gutiérrez. Despite the mission being a success, it was more a rout than an orderly retreat. They stumbled across the darkened savannah, putting distance between them and the compound. Gunfire rattled intermittently along the camp’s southern edge, and parachute flares went up, shedding a wavery crimson glow over the landscape.

In time, the gunfire dwindled and died out. The camp was in ferment for the rest of the night, however. Its inhabitants scoured the scrubby desert, in jeeps and on foot with flashlights, looking for their attackers. At break of day they abandoned the search, giving it up as a lost cause. The raid had been short and sharp, and the perpetrators seemed to have vanished into the night as abruptly as they had appeared.

Gavin and his squad met up with Roy’s while the sun was just breasting the horizon. The rendezvous point was a rock outcrop some two kilometres northwest of the camp, not far from the dirt track which was the only road access in and out.

Gavin was still buzzing from the adrenaline high of launching the fake raid. It had all gone to plan. Once soldiers started mustering at the camp perimeter, the Myrmidons had simply skirted round, slipped in alongside them and merged into their ranks. Soon they were all blasting away side by side at an enemy that wasn’t there.

Sneaking out of the camp just before sun-up had, similarly, been child’s play. The discovery of Munro’s dead body had thrown everything further into disarray. Lieutenant Dupont had deduced, not entirely wrongly, that the attack from the south had been a diversion, enabling a second raiding party to infiltrate from the other direction and cut down the camp leader alongside three of the new intake. The radicals – the culprits could only be Islamist radicals – had shown an unprecedented level of nerve and ingenuity. Dupont was furious. But even with him now nominally senior officer, he couldn’t fill the vacuum left by Munro, in whose absence the camp felt rudderless and incohesive. Gavin and the others had walked out without being stopped or questioned even once.

Gavin’s exhilaration faded when he caught sight of Roy and what was left of the other group. Mayson’s arm was in a makeshift sling; Corbett had a field-dressing bandage round his thigh. Roy himself sported dramatic purple contusions on his neck.

More than that, though, Roy was seething, and after he gave a hoarse-voiced account of the hit, Gavin understood why.

“That bloke Munro,” Roy said. “He wasn’t human. Seriously, Gavin, he was not a normal human being. Not by a long shot. He was like fucking Superman. I am not kidding. And Badenhorst expected us to go after someone like that with
those?
” He flapped a hand at the two bows. “With something out of the Dark Ages? That’s taking the piss, that is. The piss is quite firmly being taken. There is stuff going on here that we’re not being told about. We’ve been lied to. This is bigger and weirder than we’ve been led to believe.”

“You’re sure you saw what you’re saying you saw?” said Gavin. “I mean, heat of battle, mate. You know it, I know it. Doesn’t always seem real.”

“It was real,” Roy insisted hotly. “Ask Jeanne, ask Friedman, any of them. They saw it too. Munro was a Terminator. Beshimov, Rojas, Gutiérrez – they didn’t stand a chance. Look at Mayson and Corbett. Look at the state of us. One man did this to us.
One man.
Badenhorst has got some explaining to do. When that bus comes...”

The bus did come, an hour later, in response to an encrypted text sent by Jeanne confirming that the mission objective had been achieved.

When the Myrmidons climbed aboard, however, Badenhorst was not there. Roy could only sit and fume as they drove back towards Kismayo. Every jolt of the bus sent a sharp pain daggering through his bruised neck muscles. Kindling for the blaze.