The congo contract alex.., p.1
The Congo Contract (Alex King Book 13), page 1
The Congo Contract
A P Bateman
Contents
Also by A P Bateman
Also by A P Bateman
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Text © A P Bateman
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, printing or otherwise, without written permission of the author.
This book is a work of fiction and any character resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Some locations may have been changed; others are fictitious.
Facebook: @authorapbateman
www.apbateman.com
Rockhopper Publishing
Also by A P Bateman
The Alex King Series
The Contract Man
Lies and Retribution
Shadows of Good Friday
The Five
Reaper
Stormbound
Breakout
From the Shadows
Rogue
The Asset
Last Man Standing
Hunter Killer
Also by A P Bateman
The Rob Stone Series
The Ares Virus
The Town
The Island
Stone Cold
Standalone Novels
Hell’s Mouth
Unforgotten
Novellas
The Perfect Murder?
Atonement
(an Alex King short story)
Further details of these titles can be found at
www.apbateman.com
Dedication
For Clair, Summer and Lewis, and their constant jokes about the
‘A P Bateman Show’
It never gets old…
Prologue
Twenty years ago
Democratic Republic of Congo
King didn’t wait for the man to stop groaning or moving, his legs twitching irritably as death slowly took hold. He wasn’t going anywhere, and the rifle he had been struggling to get hold of was out of reach. Any last-ditch attempt to avenge his brothers or his own imminent death wasn’t going to happen, no matter how much the man would want it. King wiped the blood off the blade of the knife on the man’s shoulder, before sheathing it and picking up the FN rifle. The rifle was heavy and hot from the contact. King checked the magazine and breech then bent down and pulled two more magazines from the dying man’s bandolier. The FN packed a punch in its full-fat 7.62x51mm. Heavy and cumbersome, the magazines were heavy, too. But the rifle tended to be a one shot, one kill weapon and he checked that the front and rear sights were square and undamaged before shouldering the rifle. Ahead of him there was movement in the brush. The man beside him let out a moan, and King pressed his hand over the man’s mouth, pinching his nose with his thumb and forefinger, keeping the weapon aimed at the brush. The man barely struggled and was gone inside a minute. King removed his hand from the man’s face and wrapped it around the fore end of the heavy rifle, glad to take some of the weight off his right hand and shoulder.
The jungle glade was hot and humid, dank, and dark. The sunlight broke through the fronds in the canopy in multiple beams, like spotlights on the stage. A foot appeared in one of those spotlights. It was followed by a leg and an arm and part of the body. Dark skin, beads of sweat glistening in the light. The figure froze. Twenty metres from King and unaware that he was standing in the middle of the peep-sight of the SLR. His face still out of view. King waited. A shoulder emerged from the darkness, illuminated in bright sunlight. The man’s vest was brown and torn and had probably been white once. King slowly and steadily took a knee, his entire form in the shadows. The man’s face clipped the light. Black and dripping with perspiration. The whites of his eyes, big and bright. King’s finger tightened on the trigger. There would be others for sure. Directly behind him. King had a choice. Take down the man in front of him or wait and see how many more stepped out of the brush and into the killing ground in front of him. King got his answer as another figure stepped closer to the first, and a boy soldier ducked around the second man. Ten years old if he was a day, carrying the AK-47 on a sling around his neck because the weapon was almost longer than he was tall. King kept his aim steady. The presence of the boy didn’t change a thing. He’d seen enough to know that the boy soldiers, the ‘infantry’ of the Southside Boys had been trained to be fearsome, fearless killers. Snatched from their homes then beaten and abused, made dependant on mind-altering khat, indoctrinated into an existence of pure violence, and turned into soldiers before they even reached puberty. King did not want to kill a child, but he’d seen what had happened when a grown man had hesitated, and dead was dead in his book.
He would not make the same mistake.
Behind the backs of the men in front of him several shouts drew their attention. King had known the enemy would lack discipline, but he supposed what they lacked in tactical skills, they made up for in numbers and a complete and utter fearlessness, and the khat that made them feel invincible. The mind-altering state had certainly meant that the dead man behind him had put up a fearsome fight and had been butchered by King’s blade before the inevitable loss of blood made even the invincible stop functioning. King was glad he now had the SLR in his hand. The FN, or the L1A1 as it had been known in British military service was certainly a more reassuring option than the 9mm Uzi he had ditched after running out of ammunition. Three of the Southside Boys had taken at least six rounds a piece before they had stopped moving.
The three hostiles were all looking behind them now, waiting for something. Another shout and the foliage beside them parted and two more men stepped out from cover and into the glade.
“So, what the fuck are we waiting for?” came the whisper. Not even a whisper, a barely audible hum.
King’s heart raced as he realised that he hadn’t heard the Scotsman creep up on him. He kept his aim, like he had known his mentor had been there all along. “More of them to show up,” he replied in a low murmur.
“That FN is semi-auto only and the barrel is almost long enough to poke them with from here.” Peter Stewart paused. “Too many more of them and your odds are lowering with every single swinging dick inviting themselves to the party…”
“The range lessons are over,” replied King, as he lowered the rifle. He reached for the grenade attached to his belt and eased out the ring pin with his thumb. “Don’t worry, old man. There’ll be enough meat left for you…”
There was no quiet way to release the lever, and it sprang off its half hinge and clattered into the foliage. The lead man looked over, his wide eyes white in the beams of light parted by the fronds like a child’s kaleidoscope. King silently counted, but Stewart blew their position when he dived for cover. King threw the grenade and followed Stewart into the brush, rolling around so he could lie prone with his rifle facing towards the enemy as he buried his face into the dirt and covered his head with his left hand. The concussive thud of the grenade was felt through their bodies – in the hollow of their chests and in their guts - and shrapnel, plant debris and body parts rained down around the glade. There were screams and groans, a child’s scream turning into a sob. Stewart was up and pushing through the brush, his Uzi held out in front of him in his right hand, and he had characteristically drawn his knife and had it firmly clenched, blade downwards, in his left hand. King followed, taking Stewart’s beaten path out into the clearing. The boy was sitting on his backside and was clearly dazed and confused by the concussive blast that had robbed him of both his legs. Stewart put a bullet into the boy’s forehead without hesitation and King guessed that the action both gave the child a swift end and paid a debt for one of their own. But even though their losses had been great, King felt no better for it, no sense of vengeance or justice for the bullet he put into the next man, nor the one after that.
Stewart was charging through the clearing and King couldn’t help thinking, for the second time on this mission, that his instructor and mentor taught the theories of close quarter battle procedures but forgot almost everything in the actual firefight. However, he still had one procedure down, and King could see that un
King could see that the man had taken down three more men in a volley of gunfire and with downward stabbing motions and slashes left and right with the Ka-Bar US Marine Corps knife until they had stopped moving. King fired at the men as they engaged, each shot aimed at the centre of the torso and taking a man to the jungle floor. Stewart buried his knife deep between a struggling man’s shoulder blades, dropped onto one knee and changed magazines as the man fell to his knees. King watched Stewart heave himself up using the embedded knife as a handle, then tugged it free and resumed his charge into the enemy as the man he had just killed fell forwards onto his stomach.
King took a knee and reloaded the heavy rifle, then remained in his position and fired at a group of three men. When he looked up, Stewart was no longer there and the enemy were massing to the edge of the glade, torn between fighting, and fleeing into the cover of the jungle. King cursed Stewart and got moving again. There were twenty men ahead of him, many of them boy soldiers. He was in it now. To show mercy was to die. He had been told of the things he would see in this profession, and until he had landed in Angola, he had killed just one man in his time with MI6. That man had been a rogue agent, and he had been trying to kill King at the time. He had killed before, two men in a bar fight, and that had started a chain of events that started his path with MI6 and ultimately saw him about to die in a jungle at the hands of boy soldiers high on khat and with a bloodlust in their eyes.
King dived onto his stomach, taking cover behind a dying man as he changed the magazine in the FN rifle. He was aware of his movements being painfully slow, the enemy advancing, their aim getting closer with every shot fired until dirt flicked up into his face as the bullets drew dangerously near to him. Several bullets hit the wounded man that he was taking cover behind, and he groaned and lurched then went still. King got the rifle up to his shoulder and rolled several times, much as a child would down a meadow hillside, then stopped himself when he was ten feet away from the body and on the edge of the glade. He started to fire at them, picking just the closest person to him, or the man who seemed most in control of his weapon. Gunfire erupted from behind them, and Stewart appeared from the edge of the jungle some twenty-five metres from where King had last seen him. In jungle warfare, Stewart had taught what he had casually called the ‘peek-a-boo’ technique and was using it to good effect. He disappeared again, and after a few seconds, he emerged ten metres to the right, now flanking the men after he had sprayed them with gunfire from behind. King rolled into the thick foliage, scrambled to his feet, and ran as fast as he could through the brush to mimic Stewart’s tried and tested technique. He almost stumbled into a boy of ten or eleven years, crawling through the brush. King shouldered the rifle and the boy looked up at him, his eyes fearful and his hands held up in front of his face as if they could offer protection to a 7.62mm bullet. Futile, but hopeful. King could see that the boy had lost his weapon. He must have come close to Stewart too because there was a six-inch gash running from one side of his forehead to the opposite side of his chin, just missing his eye but making up for it by putting a lateral cross over his mouth. His lips were hanging loose, and blood had turned his dirty T-shirt red. King cursed himself for hesitating. He had shown a young boy soldier mercy just two days before. Allowed him to run, scared and defeated. But at what cost? Your mistakes shape your future. King had made a costly mistake and one of their team had died. Stewart had primed them all to show no mercy, give no quarter. And the old bastard had been right all along. King had thought him wrong to play God, but there really was no other safe option. Without further hesitation he squeezed the trigger and moved on. The nightmares, drink and darkness would surely take hold of him now. He would become just like the tough Scotsman who had trained him. He had gone down the road from which there was no return, no salvation.
King pounded on, his mind in a fog, not even sure if the fight was worth the cost. He worked his way to his right, and eventually came out into the glade slightly behind the line of men, mindful to stay out of Stewart’s arc of fire. King fired the weapon for all he was worth, bracing his weight behind the mighty recoil and aiming at each man through the peep-sights. The melee lasted a few seconds and when every man was down, King could see Stewart reloading at the edge of the clearing and drawing his pistol. King changed over to his last magazine and tried to ignore the Scotsman as he worked his way through the clearing giving a bullet to the heads of both men and boys with his 9mm Browning pistol, regardless of whether they were moving and breathing, or lying quite still.
King was fighting for breath, his chest heaving. He felt unsteady on his feet and sucked in lungful after lungful of precious, dank air. He hadn’t eaten in two days and the effect was taking its toll.
“You’re forgetting to breathe in the contact,” Stewart observed. “When you were boxing, I bet you didn’t hold your breath…”
King nodded. He had done, and his trainer had always nagged at him, telling him he couldn’t always win in the first round and that breathing kept the fight in you to last the distance. He had put King up against hardened distance fighters to teach him the lesson or swapped over sparring partners after each round until he had got the message. Out here, he had done the same thing and high on adrenalin, he had probably only taken a couple of breaths throughout the entire battle.
“Hydrate,” Stewart snapped, but King noted that the man was drinking from his own hipflask and water and glucose was the last thing he’d find in there.
King sipped from his own camel pack. Water was plentiful in the jungle, and he’d soon find some more water and drop a few purifiers into it for a sickly cocktail of sterilised mud, water, and dead parasites. He sealed the drinking tube, his eyes on the bullet hole in the child’s forehead. He looked at the boy’s legless corpse, knowing that it was the grenade that had done for the boy what Stewart had finished. Without any warning, King retched and vomited next to the child’s body.
“That’s a fucking waste of good water, lad,” the Scotsman called out harshly. King wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and spat on the ground. “Must be the adrenalin, son.”
“I think so,” King lied.
“Aye…” Stewart shrugged. “The little bastard would think nothing of slicing off your own dick and shoving it down your throat, so don’t waste your tears… or the contents of your stomach… on him.”
King looked away from the body of the boy and watched as Stewart took his second swig of whisky. “There’ll be more of them coming soon,” he said.
“I’m counting on it,” the Scotsman replied. “The more the better. Let them come after us while Dimitri heads south. We need to buy them some time.”
King looked around the clearing. The bodies were strewn in a grotesque display of angles. Of splayed limbs, broken skulls and the ground had soaked red, the penetrating light through the canopy highlighting the macabre scene that he knew he would see as a snapshot in twenty years’ time. If indeed, he was lucky to live that long. But after following the crazy Scotsman, he seriously doubted that. He did not want to count the bodies, better he didn’t know. Early on, Stewart had told him never to put a number on it. That had not been possible before this mission. He knew the numbers. Both before his service and since he had signed his life away. He could have counted his death toll on one hand, and still have a couple of digits spare. And two of those souls had been unintentional. A stupid argument fuelled by alcohol and ego. But now? After just one week, he had no idea how many people he had sent to their graves. And he knew he wasn’t out of this yet.
