The Devil's Work Read online

  The Devil’s Work

  Dominic Adler

  All Rights Reserved

  Copyright © Dominic Adler 2015

  This edition first published in 2015 by:

  Thistle Publishing

  36 Great Smith Street

  London

  SW1P 3BU

  www.thistlepublishing.co.uk

  This one is for CM

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  EPILOGUE

  Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe

  Machiavelli: The Prince

  Author’s Note

  The troubled East African state of Zambute (pr. ZAM-BOO-TAY) is, of course, entirely fictional. If Zambute did exist, it would be at the apex of the borders between Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. Zambute has annexed a disputed slice of Somalia, bisecting that country south of Kismayo, and this coastal region is where The Devil’s Work is set. Suffice it to say I have taken significant liberties with reality. Place-names, people, politics and geographical descriptions have been designed to be notionally sympathetic to the region (Zambute is a majority Christian, Swahili-speaking country with both Kenyan and Somali cultural influences). Nonetheless, any balance between geo-political accuracy and artistic license has inevitably favoured the latter.

  DA

  London, August 2014

  PROLOGUE

  Derecik, Turkish / Iraqi border

  The bullet smashed into a tree, two metres to my left. I froze, belt buckle pressed into the dirt, sweat stinging my eyes. Crows swirled skywards from a knot of yew trees, croaking in protest. I reckoned that put the shooter just shy of three hundred metres away.

  I first heard the myth as a lance-corporal in Bosnia, a life-time ago. A Yank from an armoured recce unit told us the story over coffee and donuts, said he’d picked it up from the Intelligence guys up in Zupanja. Although it sounded like an urban legend at the time, Balkan service had a way of degrading your faith in human nature. A few years later we all deployed to hot and sandy places. I forgot all about it. Iraq confirmed my lack of faith in our species, but that’s another story for another time.

  The American was a long-service Master Sergeant called Nolan. He didn’t strike me as a man given to bullshit. He told us a story about an outfit called Die Jagd: The Hunt. Wealthy Germans, big-game hunters, paid Serb criminals big bucks to take up a sniper’s post. They’d snipe Bosnian Muslims as they ran back from getting food or going to prayers. For the Serb militias it was a win-win: some other fucker was paying to do their day job, and the hunters experienced the ultimate murder porn, slotting civvies through the scope of a Dragunov.

  It sounded too twisted to be true. But, like I said, I should have known better.

  The sun was behind me and I was in good cover: long yellow-green grass in dead ground, near a copse of gnarly blackthorn bushes. My camouflaged jumpsuit matched it well. I’d threaded grass into slits slashed in the shoulders and sleeves. I’d lost three stone for this role: head shaved and body inked with Russian prison tattoos: a wolf’s head on my arm and pentagrams across my shoulders. Orthodox crosses and stars stretched across a newly-found pectoral. Oz beasted me every day for six weeks, I’d given up booze and was as fit as I’d ever been.

  The operation to take down The Hunt had come through a BKA informer called Bernard Schmidt, a convicted people-trafficker. The Bundeskriminalamt, the German FBI, wanted nothing to do with it directly. Oh no. Maybe send them on a sensitivity awareness course, or confiscate their hunting licences. So we’d been sub-contracted to do it for them.

  “They only come together in one place for a hunt,” said Schmidt nervously, flanked by two stony-faced BKA handlers, “at the site where the kill takes place, so you won’t get them all anyplace else. They are very careful.”

  I’d seen Schmidt’s file. He’d trafficked girls, illegal immigrants and refugees. He was a sleazy bastard, with dead eyes and bad breath. He told me he was fifty, but looked older by a century or so. He was the sort of man I was usually sent to kill, but now he was my lifeline.

  “Get that?” said the BKA agent coldly. “They must all be... managed, simultaneously, no German government involvement.”

  “Then we’ll ‘manage’ them out on a hunt,” said Oz, “won’t you Cal?” Oz was my team-mate. Still recovering from a bullet wound to his arm, he was out of the active roster for another couple of months.

  The Hunt had moved on, to Eastern Turkey, where the border with Iraq is lively enough to absorb casual murder. Schmidt had been contacted to provide fresh meat, which he reported back to the BKA. The Germans even put up a reward, showing that virtue is sweeter with a briefcase of used Euros attached. Schmidt reported that The Hunt had set up a new game: They would hunt a paid volunteer who won a bounty if he crossed the playing field without getting sniped. Inevitably, these volunteers were people with serious debts to criminals, or drug addicts or other losers. It was meant to be Darwinian. It was also an opportunity.

  “They shoot up a village on day one,” said the people-trafficker during our briefing in Cologne. “That gets blamed on bandits or terrorists. The local police get paid off. Then on day two they hunt the professional target.”

  Schmidt reported The Hunt had good OPSEC, or operational security. The criminals who provided logistics and targets were compartmentalised from the guys who looked after the murder tourists. Schmidt had been tasked with providing ‘The Hare,’ the stupid fucker who agreed to be hunted. There were enough trafficked people desperate enough to do it.

  For the next hunt, I was going to be The Hare. Yeah, that’s the type of job I have. It’s not like I volunteered.

  My legend was Mikhail Susenov, a Russian ex-squaddie and drifter with a heroin habit. I was qualified: I spoke fluent Russian. I’d worked in Siberia in energy security. And I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t had my fair share of problems with recreational chemicals. I not-very-reluctantly smoked some Afghan heroin, as I knew they’d give me a blood test, and we stuck needles in my arms and feet to try and make track marks.

  Bernie flew me to Turkey on a professionally forged EU passport. I even grew to tolerate him, in the way you get used to rising damp or toothache. We stayed in a flophouse hotel, on the outskirts of Istanbul, to meet The Hunt.

  The organisers were German, apart from a guy from Marseilles called Henri. Henri was a rangy, skin-headed psychopath with a pock-marked face. He was suspicious of me from the start, asking detailed questions about the prisons I’d been in and pretending he could check. Bernie looked at me hopefully as we sat drinking and smoking. I told Henri I’d done a four-stretch at Lgov for assault. He nodded sagely, slinking off and making a show of gettin
g his mobile out. His German colleagues took over the questioning, which wasn’t as hard-core as I’d anticipated.

  They offered me a syringe to see if I’d inject, which I did. It was so good it reminded me why I’d taken that trip to The Priory.

  I was offered ten thousand Euros to be the hare on the next hunt.

  BANG. The second round was closer. The shooter had seen something, but I was lying statue-still and a stiff breeze was moving the trees like leafy puppets. I looked at the map I’d recovered from the tiny plastic tube up my arse and tried to orientate it to the ground. The map, that is, not my arse. Schmidt had agreed to hide the weapon on the plot, which as far as I could work out from the map was on top of the Yew trees where the shooter was. I’d told him not to hide it anywhere a hunter might choose as a firing position. It would be an interesting de-brief.

  I decided to wait a while, see if the shooter got bored. Good hunters are patient, and the playing field wasn’t big. To make the game more fun for the customers, and in case I loitered in one place too long, they had beaters with dogs to flush me out if I lost my bottle. I hadn’t heard them yet.

  After half an hour I saw movement near the yew trees. Amongst the foliage I saw a camouflaged figure, wearing a full ghillie suit and mask, crawl to one side and out of view. I began to inch slowly towards him, at an angle in the dead ground using the thorn bushes for cover. The hide I was looking for was ten metres away from the shooter and now two hundred from me. There was barking in the distance. These weren’t The Queensbury rules I’d been promised - maybe the hunter was bored and wanted his kill in time for dinner. I crawled forward, trying to make as much progress as I could without showing out. After another ten metres I found a shallow trench, possibly an old irrigation ditch, to my left. It ran towards the yew trees. Screened by long dry grass, this was the best luck I’d had all day, allowing me to crawl quicker, knees bloodied and raw. The elbows of my jump-suit were torn to shreds in the gravelly grey earth.

  When we’d trained for this, Oz had taught me to stalk.

  An ex-SBS commando, Oz was once an instructor on the Royal Marines sniper course. “Right, Kurdistan ain’t exactly Woodbury Common but we’ll do our best!” he’d said, loading an air rifle to punish me with if he spotted movement.

  Stalking ain’t rocket science but it is tough: you need to think exactly where you’re going to move next, in a range of inches rather than feet, and be fit enough to haul yourself for hundreds of yards in tiny, stealthy increments. I wasn’t a natural, but I’m a stubborn bastard and I threw myself into it.

  “You need to move faster!” said a voice in broken Russian through a loud-hailer, “or we send dogs.” It sounded far away, from the direction where I’d last seen the hunter.

  I figured the hide was about fifty yards away. Standing up on the brow of a hill was one of the guys I’d seen in Istanbul, wearing a dusty camouflage jacket and scanning the field through binoculars. Slung over his shoulder was a Kalashnikov.

  He couldn’t see me.

  The barking louder, I took my chances and loped forwards in a low run, like a lunatic doing a monkey impression. I dropped to my belly and crawled over the top of the ditch, towards the hill. The guy with the Kalashnikov was gone. If the hunter was where I thought he was, he was stalking in the wrong direction, but would still be able to bring his rifle to bear if he heard me. I painfully clawed forward, inches at a time, across rough ground and through thorns. I tried to tuck my bloodied hands into the cuffs of the jumpsuit so I’d be able to pick up my buried weapon. I finally made it to the yew trees, spotting the crushed foliage and disturbed earth where the hunter had crawled away. Spent brass from two .357 rounds still lay by the base of the tree.

  I looked again at the tiny map, blood from my fingers smudging the waxy paper. Schmidt said he’d buried the weapon next to a distinctive mauve and orange coloured rock, three yards from a dead yew tree. I tugged off my boot and pulled away the heel. Hidden in the sole was a thin piece of hardened plastic which I used to scrape away the earth next to the rock.

  I saw the edge of a black canvas bag when the voice threatened me again over the loudhailer. “Faster you fucking junkie! I swear we’ll put the dogs on you.”

  I heaved at the edge of the canvas, the loose earth packed round it crumbling. I got both my hands underneath and tugged with all my strength, a tool bag emerging from the ground. I unzipped it and pulled out the plastic-wrapped rifle. My hands felt like I’d been rubbing them on a cheese-grater, slippery with blood and sweat.

  Finally I ripped the weapon free. It was a compact Russian SVU-A sniper rifle with a bipod and PSO-1 scope. There were five thirty-round magazines in the bag, which I tucked into my pockets. In a separate bag was a canvas belt with a holstered Browning pistol. Less than three feet long, the SVU-A is easily hidden but the shorter barrel only gave me an effective range of four hundred metres. It would do. I assembled it quickly, slid a magazine into the housing behind the trigger group and made ready. I crawled on my belly into the firing position, the low branches of the yew tree providing cover. Opening the bipod I settled myself into the weapon.

  The Russian PSO scope is arse-about-face, the stadia marks and chevrons the wrong way round from NATO weapons, so it took me a moment to orientate myself. I peered over the top of the scope and saw the guy with the loudhailer walking across the plot, a hundred metres away, cigarette in mouth. There was no clue as to the hunter’s position. I guessed he was stalking towards my last hide.

  I lined up loudhailer guy in my sights and shot him in the chest.

  He crumpled to the ground, but I was already panning right, looking for the first hunter. I saw movement in the long grass three hundred yards away, then a dark shape. I lined it up in the scope and fired again, my bloodied finger too fast on the trigger. Startled, the hunter broke cover, a fat guy cradling a rifle. He put his hand in the air, as if a referee was going to make this stop. I squeezed the trigger again. The hunter’s head exploded like an over-ripe piece of fruit, his body flopping back into the sea of grass.

  Dogs appeared, three grey-brown blurs loping through the grass. The dog-handler, wearing green fatigues, was crouching in the trees fifty metres away from where I’d shot the hunter. I fired and he tumbled backwards into the shadows. I switched my aim to the dogs, three mutts barrelling through the grass like furry sharks. I did some time, pace and distance math in my head and squeezed off another shot. It missed. The second took out one of the animals, which disappeared in a crash of blood, teeth and fur.

  An incoming round hit the embankment to my front, sending up a geyser of dust and grit. A second zipped past my shoulder. The other two hunters had risen to the challenge. I heard the rattle of assault rifles as men began to riddle every possible piece of cover with lead. I began to crawl backwards, the SVU-A cradled in my arms and out of the dust. Another bullet smacked into the tree where I’d taken cover.

  Then the dogs were on me. They looked like pit-bulls crossed with crocodiles. Dead black eyes rolled backwards into sharp, angular heads as they attacked. The first hound sank it’s fangs into my leg, just below the knee. The second went for my neck, fetid breath and foam-flecked teeth inches away from my face. I rolled onto my back and dropped my rifle, pulling the pistol from my belt and firing at the beast as fangs sank into my shoulder. The bullet smashed into the dog’s skull, the animal scrabbling into a ball. The second was tearing my leg, crazily shaking its head from side to side. Instinctively I kicked it with my free boot, which did nothing. Waves of pain crashed through my leg as I sat up and rammed the muzzle of the 9mm into the side of the dog’s head. I pulled the trigger five or six times before the creature died.

  Holstering the pistol, I staggered to my feet and picked up my rifle. I had puncture wounds in my shoulder, blood oozing slowly from the bite. My leg, from calf to knee, was bleeding freely from multiple injuries. I tore off the bottom of my jumpsuit and bound the wound as best I could. Crawling away from the yew trees, I headed back toward
s the irrigation trench.

  The Frenchman, Henri, was creeping along the top of the trench, an AK tucked into his shoulder. I aimed and fired a hundred metre sense of direction shot. It hit him in the arm and he fell out of sight. Rolling into cover behind a pile of weed-covered rubble, I waited. He crept back the way he’d come. I whistled. Henri’s face turned towards me, centred in my sights. I fired, his head evaporating into a red mist.

  I scrambled on my belly towards the trench, leg burning with pain. I lay on my back, rifle cradled in my arms as I looked up. The sun burned in the midday sky and I heard movement through the grass. Rolling onto my belly I put the bipod on the lip of the trench. I could see the last two hunt organisers, but not the hunters, walking towards me with their AKs ready. I sank back into the trench, put my rifle down and slid a new magazine into my pistol.

  They were less than five metres away.

  I counted to three and stood up, firing the Browning and hitting the first guy in the belly. I hurled myself back down again. My target swore in German and fell sideways as I heard the crack of the first huntsman’s rifle. The bullet hit the baked mud wall of the trench behind me. The other shooters were on the ball, and now knew my position.

  “Get in the trench or you’re next!” I shouted in English. I put my hand over the top and let off three rounds with the pistol.

  “OK!” gibbered a terrified voice, a man scrambling down into the trench in a cloud of dust and grit. He was in his forties, paunchy with a red baseball cap and a deep suntan. There was no sign of his AK. “What the fuck is going on?”

  “Payback,” I said quietly, “it’s usually about payback.” I aimed the pistol at him and smiled. “Now strip.”

  “Huh?”

  “I said strip. We’re swapping clothes.” I unzipped my jumpsuit to the waist and tugged off my boots.

  “No way,” he said.