Beyond all Limits (4 page)

Haynes nodded to Groves, who left the barn, returning moments later with a woman. A girl really, Cole saw with disgust; she couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen.

She was gagged and had her wrists and ankles bound with duct tape, and Cole could see that she had been badly beaten; her skin was covered with welts and bruises. Her puffy eyes were so swollen that Cole wondered if she could see anything at all.

The girl was Japanese, or so it seemed; with the gag and the damage to her face it was hard to tell.

And then Cole realized that he recognized her; he didn’t know who she was, but he recognized her.

He had been in San Quentin penitentiary, and the guards had come to tell him he had a visitor. He had been surprised; nobody knew he was there. He had been escorted to the visitor’s room, but on his arrival there had been nobody on the other side of the Plexiglas partition. He had scanned the other side of the glass, seen a woman retreating rapidly from the room; she had never looked back, but from her profile Cole had seen she was Japanese.

Cole had assumed it was a mistake; maybe the girl had thought he was somebody else, and when she’d realized, had fled. He’d thought nothing else about it, his mind on other things.

But now here she was again, the same girl, beaten and broken, another captive of Haynes and Aryan Ultra.

Who was she?

Another grin spread across Haynes’ face. ‘Surprised?’ he asked. ‘Little Michiko here is how we found out about you. How’s that for betrayal, eh? But she did have some encouragement,’ he laughed. ‘Amazing what a little pain will do to someone’s loyalty, ain’t it?’

Haynes saw the pigs approaching Cole’s feet more aggressively, and motioned for his men to pull them back before he continued. ‘We saw her come visit you in San Quentin, wondered why a fuckin’ nip would come visitin’ a true-blooded Aryan like you. So we followed her, finally picked her up.
Questioned
her.’ He smiled that sick, black smile. ‘You’d have been proud of her. Really. She held out for a long time. But everyone talks in the end.’

Cole looked at the girl, barely strong enough to stand, upright only because Groves was holding her.

Confusion flooded Cole’s mind.

He had no idea who the girl was, how she knew anything about him at all, never mind the deepest, darkest secrets of his identity. So she had resisted as much as she could before telling them, and Cole was grateful. But who was she, and why did she know so much about him in the first place?

It was clear that Haynes believed that they were connected in some close way; Cole knew that she would be tortured in front of him, to get him to talk. Haynes must have thought that the sight of the girl being eaten by the pigs would cause him to give in, to tell everything he knew.

But Haynes was wrong; it wasn’t going to encourage him to talk.

On the contrary, it was enough to give him the adrenalin boost he needed, the savage impetus to
act.

2

The pain that wracked Aoki ‘Yamaguchi’ Michiko was intense; she had been beaten black and blue over the course of several days.

And now she was going to be fed to the pigs to encourage Mark Cole to talk.

Like
she
had talked.

Her head hung limply on her chest in shame.

As a member – disgraced and estranged, but still a member – of the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s largest and most feared Yakuza crime family, Aoki knew that informing was the worst possible sin, one that often resulted in the informer’s murder or forced ritual suicide.

The fact that she’d had no choice made no difference; she had failed, and it was as simple as that.

She still couldn’t believe that she had not sat down in that visitor’s room in San Quentin; after all these years of tracking Cole, delving into his past, thinking he was dead, then tracking him again, she had at last gained the chance to sit down with him and confront him once and for all.

She knew everything there was to know about Mark Cole, the ex-Navy SEAL originally called Mark Antoni Kowalski who hailed from the Polish enclave of Hamtramck, near Detroit. His early background and life with his third-generation immigrant family, his years in SEAL Team Two, then SEAL Team Six, his engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq, and on secret wars around the world, his recruitment into the highly covert Systems Research Group, his capture and imprisonment in Pakistan, his subsequent release and change of identity to Mark Cole, his years of service to the US government as a paid assassin, his betrayal by his controller Charles Hansard, the Director of National Intelligence, the brutal deaths of his wife and two small children, his reappearance months later after being presumed dead.

Aoki, having stood and watched the fires still burning at the hamlet of Kreith in Austria where his family died, where
he
was supposed to have died, had been shocked to her core when she’d seen him alive two years later on the streets of Paris.

She had resumed her search, used her formidable computer hacking skills to discover his new role in the US government as the leader of a special unit known as Force One.

She had discovered details of his latest mission, infiltrating Aryan Ultra through the US prison system, and had finally tracked him to San Quentin penitentiary.

And then – after all these years, so many false leads, so many missed opportunities – she had finally come so close to meeting him face to face; she could have sat down and finally confronted him, demanded answers from him for what he’d done.

But at the last minute she’d backed out, suddenly afraid to meet him, to look into his face, into his eyes; what would she see there? What would
he
see in
her
face?

It had been too much for her, and the whole thing had abruptly threatened to crush her, overwhelm her, drown her.

And instead of confronting him as she had dreamed of for so many years, instead she had
run.

Just one more reason, she decided, to be disgusted with herself. As a Yamaguchi, the shame was intolerable.

But, she reminded herself, she wasn’t a true Yamaguchi; she was no more a part of the criminal underworld than she was of the world of secret intelligence. She was an imposter in both arenas, forever searching for . . . what?

She didn’t know, and as she watched the pigs turn from Cole and come scuttling across the barn floor to her, she wondered if she ever would.

It had been stupid of her to be caught, she knew that now; she should have been aware of the people around her, attuned to people that might be watching her.

But she had been so focused on Cole, and then so confused after fleeing from the prison without even speaking to him, that she never noticed the men who had followed her, stalked her every move.

When they had moved in she had fought back – just as she had been trained – and had even damaged several of the hardened men; but in the end there had been too many, and she had been bound and bundled and crated off to this ranch in the Arizona desert.

The ensuing days had been the worst of her young life; beaten, burnt, drugged and abused. She had held out for as long as any human being could hope to do under such conditions, but finally she had broken and told them everything.

Logically she knew she had been left with no choice, but she couldn’t help hating herself for what she had done.

And now?

She looked across to Mark Cole, aware that this might constitute their first real meeting, almost smiling with the irony of it all.

Now?
she thought sadly.

Now they were both going to die.

The pigs were moving over towards the girl now, encouraged by Haynes’ thugs; but against all of his instincts, Cole began to wriggle his toes, trying to attract the attention of the animals, to get at least one to stay close to him. All he needed was one.

He turned his head sharply, his eyes darting over the girl’s shoulder, past Haynes and Groves to beyond the big barn doors behind them.

Everyone in the room instinctively followed his gaze; it was the oldest trick in the book, but Cole was a master and could play the game as well as anyone.

In the moment when everyone’s attention was distracted, Cole hauled up hard on the rope that held him, curling his body up high in the air until he could fasten his bare feet on the rope above his hands. Pushing with his powerful leg muscles, he jerked his bound hands upwards off the hook, turned around and landed on the barn floor, ankles, knees and hips flexing to reduce the impact.

Cole saw the men turning back to him, mouths open as they realized what he had done; weapons were already coming round towards him.

Cole immediately launched himself onto the pig which had stayed near him, jumping crab-like into its back, riding it as it reared and bucked, his hands going around its head, the rope sliding around its neck; and then Cole slipped back, his feet touching the floor, and he pulled the wildly bucking animal up in front of him, using its huge mass as a shield as he backed away.

Cole heard the pig squeal, felt it writhe and convulse in his arms as it was hit by handgun rounds; felt it shudder, push him back further as it was hit by a blast of the shotgun.

Cole was level with one of the guards now, the man’s handgun empty. As he frantically tried to reload, Cole turned and pushed the pig towards him, the huge, bloodied animal crashing through the pen door; the screaming guard was crushed beneath the pig’s broken, eviscerated body, and Cole jumped in after it.

Cole looked down, saw the handgun and the magazine lying on the floor next to the man who, barely conscious, still struggled to escape from under the crushing weight of the dead pig. Cole reached for it but then turned as if with a sixth sense, the guard with the Magnum revolver racing into the stall, gun aimed right at him.

Cole moved in a blur, leaving the handgun on the floor as his hand snaked out and grabbed a pitchfork from the wall, burying it straight through the man’s chest before he’d managed to fire even once. Blood spurted from the multiple stab wounds as the man fell helplessly to the floor.

Cole knelt down quickly, inserting the new magazine into the handgun and racking the slide, picking up the heavy revolver in the same motion before he came to his feet and opened fire at the remaining guards, both guns blasting as one.

Aoki couldn’t believe what she was seeing; it was one thing to have read about the man, another altogether to see him in action. His speed and coordination were unreal; even the Japanese masters she had trained with weren’t capable of moving like that.

But her amazement lasted only moments; she knew there were still two men with guns behind her.

Taking Cole’s cue and wasting not one more second, she stamped down hard with the heel of her shoe onto the top of Groves’ foot, digging it into the small bones with a sharp twisting action that brought a cry of pain to his lips.

At the same time, she swung her bound hands in a tight arc to her right, knocking Haynes’ arms upwards just as he fired his own weapon, the bullet hitting the roof instead of its target.

Aoki knew that it wouldn’t take long for Groves and Haynes to recover and – feeling Groves’ grip on her weaken from the unexpected blow to his foot – she launched herself forward into the barn.

She felt a whistle of warm air above her as she leapt towards the frightened pigs, heard a grunt, felt blood spattering over her back; knew that Cole had hit Groves.

She felt, rather than saw, Haynes return fire towards Cole, before he turned and ran, the barn doors banging closed behind him. She heard him screaming as he ran; not shouts of fear or pain, she realized, but
orders.

He was getting back-up, calling to the other shaven-headed Aryan Ultra soldiers who lived on the ranch; and Aoki knew that reinforcements would be at the barn within minutes, all guns blazing.

3

Whoever the girl was, Cole was impressed; she’d used the distraction to take out the two men holding her and had thrown herself clear, giving him a clear shot at Haynes and Groves.

He’d managed to put a .357 Magnum slug right through Groves’ chest, but Haynes had been quicker off the mark, keeping Cole pinned down behind the stall with fire of his own, giving him the few seconds he needed to escape.

The other men in the barn were down from Cole’s well-placed shots, and the pigs were going wild; attracted to the sight and smell of blood, excited by the sounds of gunfire and screams, they were attacking the downed AU soldiers, tusks and teeth going to work with frightening savagery.

Cole put the horrendous noise of the disemboweled victims out of his mind, assessing the situation.

Haynes was gone. Cole already had the information he needed, but if Haynes managed to escape, he would still be in a position to plan yet more atrocities against the American people, and Cole couldn’t let that happen. If there was any chance at all that he could get to Haynes, he would take it.

He turned and saw Aoki struggling to get to her feet from the dirt floor of the barn’s central aisle, worried that her wounds would make her a target for the pigs.

He spotted a saw on the wall of the stall, used it to cut the rope that secured his wrists, and ran towards the girl, taking the saw with him.

He still had no idea who she was, but he knew she had taken a beating to try and help him; the fact that she had told them about him wasn’t important, Cole knew that people couldn’t resist forever. But she had tried, and that was the main thing; he owed her for that, whoever she was.

Cole got to her, sidestepping the ravenous, feasting pigs, glad to see that they were leaving the girl alone; there were better pickings elsewhere, he supposed.

He hauled her to her feet, pulled the gag from her mouth and used the saw to separate her hands, the sharp jagged teeth cutting through the rope easily. Without a word he handed her the saw, pointed at her ankles; and without a word of her own, the girl bent down and started cutting.

Cole used the time to scout the bodies, picking up the weapons of the dead and dying men, careful to avoid the bloodied tusks of the wild pigs. He found a cell phone on one of the men and dialed 911. He would have liked more back-up, but due to the nature of Force One, he was on his own and had to rely on conventional law enforcement.

He quickly explained the situation, and knew that the local PD would send units immediately, but would also pass it up the line; an FBI SWAT team would probably be on its way within minutes, scrambled from the Phoenix field office.

But SWAT would take time to get here, which meant that Cole would have to stop Haynes himself.

Cole saw that the girl had freed herself, standing shakily, eyes watching him warily.

Ignoring the strange look on her face, he held up a submachine gun with a questioning eye. ‘You know how to use one of these?’ he asked, pleased when she nodded her head.

He threw the weapon to her, was pleased again when she caught it, opened the slide and checked for a round in the breach before slamming it home again.

He nodded at her in satisfaction. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now stay here and shoot anyone who comes in here without a police badge.’

For a moment – a long, terrible moment – Aoki was at a loss to know what to do.

It was the moment she had been waiting for – dreaming about – for years. Here she was with a loaded gun, aimed directly at the man she hated, the man she had tracked and stalked, the man she wanted with all her heart to
kill
.

But now?

Now, the urge was still there, beating wildly in her heart. But hadn’t the man just saved her? He could have left her where she was, thought only about himself, tried to save only himself. And yet he had untied her, given her the gun.

Could she now shoot the man in the back?

Her hands trembled as her finger caressed the trigger, a fraction of an inch from pumping a high-velocity stream of 9mm rounds into Cole’s unprotected spine.

The only reason she had managed to hold out so long against her barbarous torture was her desire to kill the man herself, to not let the AU thugs get to him first, so that she could at last exact her sweet revenge – both for her mother, and for herself.

But now he had saved her, and the thought of revenge no longer seemed so sweet; instead it now seemed . . . dishonorable?

Damn him!

Aoki knew she was now obligated to the man by the immutable Japanese concept of
giri
, and although she tried to banish the thought from her mind, she couldn’t ignore a lifetime of mental conditioning.

But what of her obligation to her mother? Did one cancel out the other?

She was at an impasse, unsure what to do; and then Cole was gone, charging through the barn’s double doors into the unknown beyond.

She cursed inwardly at her bad karma and, with gritted teeth, let the gun fall to her side.

Disgusted with herself, she started to consider her options.

Cole didn’t know what was going on, but for a second back in the barn he’d thought that the girl was going to shoot him in the back. There was a tingling on the back of his neck, a feeling he’d had many times before; the feeling that precipitated immediate violence, a sense honed by many years of such work. He had literally felt the girl’s
sakki
, a Japanese term meaning ‘killing intent’, leaking from her body, dripping from every pore.

And then it had been gone.

It concerned him, but there were more important things to worry about now.

As if to confirm this thought, Cole’s peripheral vision caught sight of an AU thug raising a shotgun towards him, body half-hidden behind a huge Saguaro cactus.

Cole pivoted towards the man and unleashed a blast from his own shotgun before the man had even pulled the trigger. The spray of pellets destroyed half of the cactus along with a good part of the man’s hidden torso, a gruesome plume of green and red exploding into the air around them.

Drawn by instinct alone, Cole pivoted in the opposite direction and pressed the trigger again, the blast hitting two men running towards him with pistols, shredding their bodies in an instant.

He heard the sound of an engine, saw a Dodge pick-up bursting out of the nearby garage, Haynes in the passenger seat, one of his men driving. Three more men clutched onto the rear deck, bodies bouncing as the vehicle accelerated off up the rough terrain, heading for the road. They tried to fire back at him, keep him pinned down as they helped their boss escape, but the movement of the pick-up made their shots go wild, nowhere near Cole.

Cole stopped still, shotgun to his shoulder, taking careful aim. He squeezed the trigger gently once more, the shotgun erupting; then pumped the action and shot again, then again.

The tires of the Hi Lux were hit, obliterated, and the truck started to wobble, to veer off course. The driver tried his best to control it, but it was too late; the men in the back dropped their weapons, one of the men flying out towards a stand of thirty-foot cactus plants, no longer able to hold on.

And then the truck span completely out of control and smashed straight into one of the giant cacti
,
which wavered only slightly with the impact. Steam rose from the crumpled front end of the car and Cole could see no movement inside. Slowly, he edged forwards.

The burst of automatic gunfire singed the air across Cole’s shoulder and he turned and knelt reflexively, stabilizing his fire base as he dropped the empty shotgun and unslung his Uzi submachine gun, returning fire instantly.

He saw a man drop to the ground to the side of the barn he’d left earlier, a trail of 9mm rounds running across his torn body.

It had been careless of him to leave his back exposed, Cole knew; but with Haynes on the run and nobody to help, what other options did he have? He scanned the area, eyes quartering the scene, watching for any hint of movement. He had a rough idea of how many people were here on the ranch, and he didn’t think there could be many left, if any at all. But he looked again to be sure, weapon at the ready.

Satisfied at last, he turned back to the truck, smoldering under the giant cactus.

Haynes’ ranch was right on the border of the Saguaro National Park, an expanse of the arid Sonoran Desert filled with the Saguaro cactus plants which gave the park its name. Cole knew it was one of the reasons Haynes had bought the ranch here; Groves had told him Haynes was crazy about them.

The men on the back of the truck had all been thrown clear; one lay with his neck broken, another trying to claw himself along the ground, legs twisted.

Cole stepped over him, peering around the sides into the driver’s compartment. The man who had been driving was still there, his bloodied body crushed between the steering wheel and the broken seat, the shattered windscreen bent in over his torn head.

At first Cole couldn’t see Haynes at all, but then he noticed that the passenger side of the windscreen was smashed from the inside and followed the trajectory through the window, coming round the truck to the hood.

The sight was enough to make a man sick; Haynes’ legs lay on the hood, twisted and bloodied, while his head was half-buried, half flattened, against the Saguaro cactus. It had been reduced to a bloody stump, pushed halfway backwards through his shoulders into his own body so that it looked like his body was merely an extension of the cactus itself.

Well, Cole thought, at least it was his favorite plant.

It was just a shame that the man could no longer be questioned. But, Cole reminded himself, at least he was no longer a threat; and his death was exactly in line with Force One protocol. Rehabilitation wasn’t Cole’s idea of an effective strategy for people like Haynes.

Shots came at him again, and Cole cursed himself, unable to believe he had missed
another
one of Haynes’ thugs. How many
were
there?

The 9mm rounds sprayed off the Hi-Lux right next to him and he turned, Uzi up and aimed towards the source of the gunfire.

He was about to squeeze the trigger when he stopped, seeing who it was.

The girl.

The girl was firing at him; stopping now, going to one knee to aim better, eye lined down along the top of the barrel, leveling the iron sights towards him.

And for the first time since his baptism of fire as a nineteen year old SEAL in Iran, Mark Cole froze, not knowing what he should do.

Damn!
Aoki cursed herself, her shots having missed him completely.

She had been too keen – too nervous? – and had fired on the move, shooting as she closed the distance towards him, anxious to get it over with now the decision had been made.

He had saved her, yes; but that was only part of the story. And Aoki had finally decided that the other part far outweighed the obligation she had towards him, and reverted to her original plan, her ultimate desire – to kill the man.

And yet she had rushed, and missed.

She wondered, idly, if she had missed on purpose.

Do you really want to kill him?

Yes! Yes! More than anything!

Then get a grip, get stable, aim properly.

Yes.

On one knee now, she saw her target in her sights and began to control her breathing, ready to place the kill shot.

You’re hesitating. Why?

No! I am not! I will fire, I –

And then the pain ripped through her body, and she was lying on the dirt floor, eyes looking up towards the clear blue skies of the Arizonan desert above her.

Cole approached her carefully. The gun was several feet away now, having fallen there when he had shot her in the shoulder, but he knew he couldn’t be too careful.

The girl had hesitated. Cole didn’t know why, but she didn’t fire when she could have; and that was enough for Cole to minutely adjust his own aim, going for the shoulder rather than the head or heart.

He wasn’t a man who aimed to injure; killing was a lot safer and more certain.

But there was something about the girl, and he couldn’t have brought himself to kill her. Not without knowing more.

He stood above her, watching the blood dripping from her shoulder, eyes pale and cloudy; they tried to focus on him but didn’t seem able to do so.

The hatred Cole had seen in them was gone now, replaced by . . . what?

It was something that Cole couldn’t place, and as he heard the sound of approaching sirens, he knew he had only moments left to get the answers he needed.

‘Who
are
you?’ he asked, careful to keep his gun levelled at her.

She coughed and spluttered, and Cole saw flecks of blood at her lips. ‘You bastard,’ she spat, eyes rolling in pain. ‘You shot me.’ She coughed again, then laughed, the pain causing her to cough once more. ‘I can’t believe it . . .
You
shot
me
.’ She laughed again, her eyes clearing as they bored into Cole’s. ‘You shot your own daughter.’