Last Man Standing Read online

  Last Man Standing

  By

  A P Bateman

  Text © A P Bateman

  2020

  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

  2020

  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

  The Rob Stone Series

  The Ares Virus

  The Town

  The Island

  Standalone Novels

  Hell’s Mouth

  Unforgotten

  Short Stories

  A Single Nail

  The Perfect Murder?

  Atonement

  Further details of these titles can be found at

  www.apbateman.com

  For Clair and her unwavering support and patience throughout.

  Thank you.

  For Summer and Lewis – you can achieve anything.

  “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”

  Friedrich W. Nietzsche

  1

  Afghanistan

  King adjusted the scope. There was a heat haze disrupting his view of the Taliban leader some seven-hundred metres away. The rocky terrain was white and beige and yellow, and the man wrapped in black robes with the distinctive pakol upon his head stood out, eerily so in the shimmering heat.

  “Don’t go getting trigger happy on me just yet,” the Scotsman whispered. “Observe, evaluate and report until further orders.”

  “Not even got one in the breech.”

  “More fool you.”

  “Okay, I lied.”

  “Good. I thought I’d taught you better than that.”

  “Why are you here, old man?”

  “Someone has to look after the kids.”

  “Nice,” King replied, switching up the magnification. “He’s looking pleased with himself.”

  “Got a new goat to fuck, I suspect.” Stewart paused. “Or another wife.”

  “My money is on the goat.”

  Stewart adjusted his spotting scope. “Aye, aye, what have we got here then?”

  Both men watched as a convoy of Taliwagons bumped and slewed into the village, dust plumes far behind them. The ubiquitous white Toyota pickups that had fought the might of the allied armies and been the workhorse of the Middle East throughout various campaigns and conflicts. The lead vehicle had a Soviet era 12.7mm heavy machine gun mounted in the flatbed on a bipod made from scaffold poles, while numerous fighters armed with Kalashnikovs and rocket propelled grenade launchers (RPGs) filled the beds of the other three vehicles.

  “Mincer on the lead vehicle,” King said of the heavy machine gun. “Locked and loaded.”

  “Check.”

  “Six RPGs, twelve longs,” he said, counting the rifles.

  “Everyone has a long out here,” Stewart said quietly. “They give their babies a Kalashnikov as a christening present.”

  “Something very wrong with that sentence, boss.”

  Stewart shrugged. “Or whatever they do out here to wet the baby’s head.”

  King smiled, wound the magnification back a touch to increase the wide-angle view. “Oh shit! They have prisoners. Allied soldiers!”

  “Where?”

  “Rear vehicle. Six men. Three IC1s, two IC2s and one IC3.” King adjusted the scope to zoom in but consequently lost his wide angle. Wide angle kept you more informed. “Two French uniforms, two US Navy SEALs, one US marine and a US pilot.”

  “Fuck…”

  King watched the scene as Stewart switched on the radio set. He scrambled around on his stomach, then rolled off the ledge behind them into the pine needles and almost into the bush they had been using to hide their kit. He knelt up to feed out the antenna. They had checked and the position was safe, with enough elevation and enough drop off to sit and get a brew on, stretch, take a dump into a plastic bag or eat some rations while the other kept their eye on the scope, their finger near the trigger of the Accuracy International .308 rifle.

  “It’s turning into a side show,” said King. “There are some women coming out holding knives.”

  “Well, that’s that then. They’re done for.”

  King was reminded of the last two stanzas of the poem, The Young British Soldier by Rudyard Kipling.

  If your officer’s dead and the sergeants look white,

  Remember it’s ruin to run from a fight:

  So, take open order, lie down, and sit tight,

  And wait for supports like a soldier.

  Wait, wait, wait like a soldier . . .

  When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,

  And the women come out to cut up what remains,

  Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

  An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

  Go, go, go like a soldier,

  Go, go, go like a soldier,

  Go, go, go like a soldier,

  So-oldier of the Queen!

  King got it now. He’d always thought it trite that a poem should advocate suicide, that the barrack room geniality of the British squaddie had influenced Kipling perhaps more than it should have. A little like reality television today, where the people become anything but real once they have garnered some attention and camera time. But since he’d been out here, he could see that those long-forgotten soldiers had a point. King had known that the Afghan women were cruel, but as he watched the men holding them back, the terrified soldiers on their knees in the dirt, their hands tethered behind their backs, he could see – almost feel – what those men must have been feeling. Pure unadulterated terror at the hands of women who wanted to start with their manhood and flail the skin clean off their bodies before they died. Before they begged to die.

  A burst of gunfire erupted – King had seen this before and knew it was the Afghans’ way to let the chatter of an assault rifle act like a loudhailer - and the women dispersed and regrouped a few metres further back as the man they had been sent to observe addressed the village, a large straight-bladed knife in his hand. King knew it to be a pesh-kabz and it had probably seen time in the Khyber Pass against those same British soldiers Kipling had dedicated his poem to back in 1890.

  Stewart was on the net. He raised his voice a little to reach King, but they had lain up for ten days and conversed in nothing more than whispers that it seemed difficult for him to break the habit. “There’s an SAS patrol two hundred kilometres south of us with air support waiting in the next valley.”

  “Forget it!” King snapped. “The old fucker is sharpening his knife…” He paused, watching a cage being pushed through the dirt. The villagers gathered around the cage and the leader picked out a white soldier in a French uniform. He was set upon at once and dragged into the cage. King could see through the scope that the man was screaming, but from their distance the air remained eerily silent. “We have to move,” he said.

  Stewart shook his head. “French special forces are sixty klicks west, but they have gone dark…” He
paused. “Sounds like they’ve got problems of their own.”

  “We need to move. Those men are as good as dead down there.”

  “We’re going nowhere,” snapped Stewart. “A chopper can pick up part of a SEAL team operating in the Hindu Kush and get them here inside forty minutes,” Stewart added, ignoring King’s observation.

  “No good.”

  “If we give them a mercy shot a piece, then we’re compromised…”

  “Then if we’re going to be compromised, we might as well try to do something,” King replied.

  “Or…”

  “Or what?”

  “Or we take five, have a brew and see what the lay of the land is afterwards,” Stewart said with a shrug. “No break in the chain of intel, no compromised position and a hundred klick tab through hostile territory to get to a cold extraction. We just sit tight, do our job and go home.”

  “And leave six dead allied soldiers behind.”

  “But we’re not soldiers, Son. We’re a different bag altogether.”

  “What about our consciences?”

  “I told you to ditch that years ago.” The Scotsman paused. “You can’t have a conscience in this game, Son.”

  “If that chopper can get here inside forty minutes having diverted to pick up a team of SEAL operators, then it can get here in less than twenty to extract five prisoners and a couple of agents compromised as a result of saving them…”

  “Alex, wait…”

  “Make the call…”

  King snatched up his bandolier and his M4 assault rifle and took off down the slope.

  “Alex… shit!” Stewart shook his head and called in for an extraction. He snatched up the map and called in the coordinates on the southern end of the village, then packed away the radio set and shouldered both King’s and his own bergen. “That’s right, let the old man do all the fucking work and carry your bloody bag…” He snatched up the rifle, ignored the spotting scope and set off after King, who was now two hundred metres further down the slope and sprinting hard over the rocky terrain.

  King came to rest at the remains of a bombed-out mud hut. He had seen .50 calibre bullets bounce off these sun-baked constructions, so it was good cover and because of the commotion in the village, he remained unseen by the gathering crowd some one-hundred and fifty metres distant. He turned around and waited for Stewart to catch up, red faced and panting from the heat and exertion of the run, but the man did alright for someone in their mid-fifties who barely touched a vegetable and often had a measure of Scotch for breakfast.

  “Get behind the rifle and nail that bastard!” King said sharply as Stewart dropped down behind the wall. “Then take out the guy on the mincer. Where’s the chopper coming in?”

  “Two klicks South. It’ll be a bloody miracle if we make it. You really are a twat, Son.” Stewart unslung his M4 and made it ready before propping it up against the wall. He rested the sniper rifle on top of the wall and dropped the two bergens on the ground. “We’ll be needing those because our brief has changed. MI6 are not part of any extraction here, because we’re not here, remember?”

  “Figures.”

  “So, let’s get these idiots out of here if we can, and hope we make it to tomorrow morning at least.”

  King nodded, taking out another magazine for his rifle. “We can always beg for a ride,” he said. He was going in hot and would keep the first magazine for his ammo change tucked under his right armpit for a quick drop and swap. After that, well, that was far enough planning ahead. Nothing much worked to plan past the first gunshot anyway. “You smoke the Taliban warlord and get that mincer out of commission.”

  “Yes sir! Yer cheeky wee cock…” Stewart wrapped the sling around his left shoulder and elbow, pulled it tightly across his chest so that the tension would hold his aim firm, and sighted on the man in black, a foot taller than his men, the knife-come-sword in his right hand. “Shit, we’re too late…”

  King watched the knife come down and the soldier fell. The knife went up and came down, repeated the gory task again and again as a man split one of the men in two down the middle. A fountain of blood had sprayed the braying women who had got too close in their eagerness, but it subsided as quickly as it had erupted. King charged out from behind the wall, darted to his right to keep the crowd’s backs to him and get out of Stewart’s line of sight. He heard the savage report of the gunshot behind him and the Taliban leader fell out of sight. King was running hard, heard the second shot, and then a third. The man on the 12.7mm machine gun went down, and as King closed the gap by half, a fourth shot spun the weapon around on its mounting. A .308 bullet at this range was enough to twist the frame of the weapon and put it out of commission, especially if Stewart had managed to strike the action and working parts.

  A flame ignited and burned fiercely, and to King’s horror he realised that the soldier inside the cage had been set alight. The scream was gut-wrenching, and the form of the soldier shook the bars in vain. King shouldered the M4 and fired a double tap into the burning solider. It was all he could do, and he figured he’d have wanted the same in that position. He switched his aim to the villagers. Anybody with a gun in their hand. When he got into the mix, he shot anybody remotely near a weapon, the women included. He dropped the empty magazine, slotted in the spare and smacked the palm of his left hand on the bolt release button, chambering the first round. A woman had picked up the Taliban leader’s knife and was setting about separating one of the prisoner’s head from his neck. King shot her, but too late to save the soldier, who was lying on his side, bleeding out with his hands bound behind his back. By now, Stewart was in the mix also, having ditched the sniper rifle, but he had slung his M4 over his shoulder on its sling, and was using his Sig P225 pistol in his left hand and slashing anyone in his way with his razor sharp Kukri in his right. King saw him leave the blade between a man’s shoulder blades, calmly change his pistol’s magazine, then retrieve the blade and set back to work.

  King grabbed one of the prisoners and dragged him back behind the corner of a building. He took down a man firing his AK47 at him, then darted forwards again, dragged a second man back, then took a knee and used the building as cover as he laid down enough covering fire for Stewart to work his way back to him.

  “Woo-hoo! We’re in it now, Son! Fucking fantastic!” Stewart was high on adrenalin and lost in the moment. He was covered in blood and King doubted any of it was his own. He set about slicing the bindings off the men, then tossed one of them his pistol, sheathed his blade and shouldered his rifle. “Have some of this Taliwankers!” He sprayed the square with fully automatic gunfire with no regard to the injured or unarmed. Or age. He changed over magazines, selected semi-automatic and calmly put a bullet in anyone who hadn’t made it to cover.

  King pulled him back behind the corner of the building, but Stewart was like a dog that had got the scent. Primal, uncontrollable. “Boss!” King shouted, cuffing him around the head. “Exfil, South side!” King checked the compass he had fastened to the frame of his rifle with cable ties. He chopped his hand through the air decisively, indicating the direction with enough vigour that nobody could be in doubt of where they were heading. One of the men looked at him. He was black and his eyes were wide and white with fear. He wore the fatigues of a Navy SEAL and his insignia was that of warrant officer. His name tag read COLE. J.

  “Thank you, brother…” Cole managed. He had tears in his eyes, and like the other two men had lost control of his bladder during the ordeal. Close enough to smell the blood and see how it ends.

  King said nothing. He simply grabbed the man by his shoulder and pulled him to his feet and broke cover. King led the line. He fired at movement, bullets whizzing past his head or hitting the dirt at his feet. Stewart returned fire, but he was doing so from his hip, helping one of the men who had taken a bullet to his knee. The man with Stewart’s pistol fired back at a group who had taken cover behind one of the pickups. King picked up the pace, just fifty metres to go un
til they reached the bombed-out building. One of the prisoners went down. King pulled him to his feet and threw him over his shoulder and pressed on, changing magazines and all the time finding too many targets to engage with.

  Stewart was back in the game. The Latino soldier he had been helping was laying still on the ground. He’d retrieved his pistol and had engaged the enemy with both weapons, simultaneously. King had seen the man teach such things on the range, and he’d later discounted it himself, but it was working for him. He just needed a rocking soundtrack and perhaps a cigar to chomp on as he did it.

  They reached the remains of the building and King hastily changed to a full magazine, then reloaded his pistol. He checked himself for gunshot wounds, his adrenalin level off the charts and likely, he would not feel pain until it was too late. Two prisoners had made it. Cole, who was a Navy SEAL and the US pilot slung over King’s shoulder. The man was groaning and bleeding down King’s back. Stewart was cursing that he was down to his last magazine. He picked up the sniper rifle and rummaged through his bergen for the box of Swedish match grade .308 ammunition. He tipped the ten rounds into his hand and pocketed five of them before reloading the rifle.

  “Let’s do some damage limitation,” Stewart said calmly and eased out to the side of the wall. He fired, worked the bolt, and fired again. Ducking down, he edged past them and peered out from the other side of the wall. He aimed at the third pickup truck and fired again. Fuel was leaking from the tank, but away from the burning cage. “That’s the fuel tanks hit. Now, get a flare in there and light ‘em up!” King dug through his bergen. He pulled out the plastic bags of excrement they had been planning to take back with them and tossed them aside, no point worrying about leaving a trace now, and retrieved the flare. “Take your time, Son. Let the fuel get among them, give them a good soaking…” Stewart eased himself out and fired another shot, taking down a Taliban fighter who was trying to flank them. “That ought to do it…”

  King took a breath and rolled onto his side. He unwound the tape and struck the base of the tube. The orange flare fizzed across the square and smacked into the grille of the third vehicle in line. It bounced off and spun around on the ground like a Catherine wheel that had come off its mounting. King watched, transfixed, but suddenly remembering that he now was exposed. He shuffled back behind the cover of the wall as a bullet pinged off the rocks next to him. The fuel ignited and burned fiercely. King could tell it had been diesel by the less extreme ignition, but the flare burned at a high enough temperature to get the job done quickly and the men lying under the vehicles for cover were soon ablaze. There were screams and as they broke cover and headed for the wadi for safety, King caught sight of people burning and struggling to escape the fire which had consumed the vehicles and was spreading towards huts crammed full of hay and straw. From his experience in Afghanistan he suspected the huts would have weapons and ammunition caches secreted within and did not want to be within a thousand metres of the place if they went up.