Page 60 of Nobody's Hero
‘Not yet.’
His first shot had to count. He had to put one of them on the ground. Make them understand that up close, their body armour was a liability, not an asset. He wanted their hearts beating faster than a hamster’s. He needed to be the only thing they were looking at. Only then would Draper have a chance of getting Margaret and Carlyle on the Gulfstream.
So Koenig kept walking towards them. SIG held at his side. Not brave, not stupid. Just doing what had to be done. They slowed down. Didn’t want him closing the distance. Their adrenaline making them jittery and erratic.
‘Aim for the pelvis!’ Draper shouted. ‘There’s no armour there, just padding!’
She was right. Koenig had hoped to get in close enough to put two rounds into the torso of the guy on his left. His bullets wouldn’t penetrate the armour, but the kinetic energy would knock him on his ass. It would feel like a circus strongman had hit him with a tiny hammer. But the pelvis was a better target. The pelvis was the basin-shaped bone that connected the spine to the legs. Pelvic trauma turned a biped into a monoped. It put you down.
Koenig stopped, pointed his SIG at the guy to his left. Aimed for his hip. He snapped off a single round. Saw a puff of blood exactly where he’d aimed. The guy spun round, then slammed into the dirt. Began thrashing about like a landed fish. He screamed. High-pitched, childlike.
Koenig moved on to the guy in the middle. Aimed for the hip again but missed. Hit him in the lower abdomen instead. The guy staggered backwards, then tripped. Ended up on his ass, legs in the air. Like an upended turtle. He tried to rock himself into a shooting position. Koenig shot him in the balls. The balls were an even better target than the pelvis. The guy dropped his weapon, clutched his groin, and gurgled something. It sounded like ‘Ah, man, not cool,’ but probably wasn’t. He then either died or lost consciousness. Didn’t matter to Koenig.
The guy to the right had seen enough. He dropped his weapon and ripped off his mask and tactical helmet. Threw his hands in the air. ‘I surrender!’ he screamed.
Koenig said, ‘Good for you,’ and shot him in the face.
He walked towards the guy he’d shot in the pelvis, aware that stuff was happening behind him. Draper was shouting for Margaret and Carlyle to get on the plane. She was also shouting someone’s name. Sounded like ‘Alan’ but could have been ‘Alain.’ The copilot. Koenig wondered if he was still cowering in the Gulfstream’s toilet.
Pelvis guy was writhing on the grass airstrip. It was clear he’d forgotten all about the Spectre he was holding. Koenig stood on his wrist anyway. He reached down and pulled off his mask. Saw a woman, not a man. There was no reason why a woman couldn’t be a mercenary asshole, but it took him aback anyway. She was about thirty-five and had hard eyes.
‘Who do you work for?’ Koenig said.
‘Go to hell!’
She had an accent he couldn’t place. TheHin ‘hell’ had been throaty and breathy. Not Russian, but that part of the world. Estonia maybe. Possibly Ukraine.
‘Last chance.’
‘Fu—’
Koenig shot her in the mouth.
He jogged over and checked on the guy he’d shot in the balls. He was unconscious. Lots of blood on the airstrip. Too much blood for him to survive. Koenig removed the guy’s mask. His face was swarthy and stubbled. His fillings were cheap. Koenig committed his face to memory, then stomped on his windpipe. No point wasting bullets.
He checked them for ID but found nothing. Lots of cash, which Koenig pocketed, but no credit or debit cards. He gathered up their Spectres. He wasn’t interested in keeping them, but he didn’t want them lying around where kids might find them.
‘Let’s get the hell out of here, Koenig!’ Draper hollered. ‘The cops are coming. I can see the blue lights.’
He looked up. Saw the lights too. At least two cars. Probably a mile away. Five minutes on these roads. He ran to the Gulf-stream. The engine had already started. The plane was vibrating with energy. Draper was waiting at the door, ready to pull up the steps.
Time to go.
Chapter 65
Koenig used his Fairbairn–Sykes to dig the bullet from the tip of his boot. If it had been a TV show, he’d have said something like ‘Get this to the lab.’ But it wasn’t a TV show, so he threw it in the trash. He knew who’d fired it.
They were already over the Atlantic. Alan the copilot had wanted to fly to the nearest commercial airport, but Draper wasn’t in the mood. She told him that he was flying them to DC, and if he quit bitching, there’d be a six-figure bonus in his next pay cheque.
The Gulfstream was a lease, but it had been retrofitted for Draper’s private intelligence company. There were three main compartments. The front was the seating area. Four luxurious leather seats, cream-coloured. Two on each side, facing each other opposite elegant teak tables. Each seat had its own oval-shaped porthole. They were flying through the night, so the shutters were down. The middle section was the intelligence hub. It was on the other side of a soundproofed door. Computers, a printer, a cabin wall-mounted TV screen, high-tech communication equipment. A narrow table. Bunch of other stuff Koenig didn’t recognise. The third section was the smallest. It contained the galley, the bathroom, a basket stretcher and defibrillator (seemed Draper’s guys occasionally got into the odd scrape), a safe and a secure equipment locker.
Margaret handed Koenig a frosty bottle of Blue Moon. ‘That was a very brave thing you did, young man,’ she said. She had paled in the last thirty minutes, and she had already been whiter than salt.
Koenig drained half the bottle. It felt good. He said, ‘I got lucky.’
‘It was more than luck,’ Carlyle said. ‘There was something unsettling about the way you walked towards those men, Ben. They had body armour and machine pistols. You had nothing, yet you didn’t seem concerned. Your calmness made them panic. What am I missing?’
‘I guess you’re not the only one with secrets,’ Draper said, taking the seat beside him. She was carrying a laptop. ‘And the Pentagon won’t commit to full body armour for the exact reason Koenig exploited. Until the mobility issues have been resolved, it isn’t combat-ready.’
