Rogue (Alex King Book 9), page 1
Rogue
By
A P Bateman
Text © A P Bateman
2019
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
2019
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
The Rob Stone Series
The Ares Virus
The Town
The Island
Standalone Novel
Hell’s Mouth
Short Stories
A Single Nail
The Perfect Murder?
Atonement
Further details for these titles can be found at
www.apbateman.com
For Mum and Dad
x
Chapter One
Part One
Foundations
February 1991
Kuwait
He looked at the gold bars, glistening in the torchlight, the glow shining up into the face of the Iraqi intelligence officer. He could see the reflection of the glowing bars in the man’s eyes. Outside the tent, the air was cool. Inside, it was hot. Or at least he was perspiring, having beaten the man half to death. Enough to build up a good sweat and work his lungs like a cardio session in the gym on the pads or heavy bag.
“And there’s more?”
The Iraqi nodded feebly. The simple act of moving his head was enough to make the man wince. Blood had started to clot at his nostrils. There was a pale fluid trailing from the man’s right ear. Either he’d perforated his eardrum or Standing had fractured the man’s skull. Most probably both. As a final act of degradation, the man had lost control of his bladder and bowels as he had been kicked repeatedly in the stomach and groin and had soiled himself, much to everyone’s disdain.
“Major, we don’t have much time,” a short, stocky sergeant stepped into the tent, talking freely in the company of Major Willard Standing, his battlefield commanding officer, and the Captain at his side. “Artillery support is still on schedule, six minutes. We’d best get our asses clear while we can.”
Standing nodded. “Very well, Sergeant. Get the men saddled up,” he said, dismissing him. He turned to the tall, thin Captain beside him and dropped a Leatherman onto the folding table. “Get his hands undone.”
The Captain nodded, opened the serrated blade and cut the plastic cable ties securing the Iraqi’s hands behind his back. He stepped backwards a pace, drew the M9 service pistol and covered the bedraggled looking intelligence officer while Major Standing slid the map across the table.
“Mark it,” he said. “If you prove that you know the location of three-hundred-million-dollars of Kuwaiti owned gold, and where it is being taken to, then it will help your case. In fact, it will make you a free man.” He dropped a stubby pencil onto the map, looking earnestly at the man he had earlier beaten and kicked and degraded. “Do it now, before the CIA is involved, and I can protect you.”
The man looked at the briefcase on the table. It contained just three bars, padded and held in place by rolls of cloth. Each bar weighed 400 troy ounces, or 438.9oz or 12.4 kg. The folding table was the type popular with decorators for wall papering, and it had bowed considerably under the weight of the briefcase and its contents. Not twenty miles north of them, there were one-thousand seven hundred bars with the same glow, the same value and they could be had for the price of Iraqi blood.
The Iraqi marked the map with a cross. His hands shook as he made the mark. He had told them everything he knew, but the cross consolidated it. Made it final. There was something in the man’s expression, the way his shoulders sagged, and the air left his heaving lungs. The truth had left him as breath leaves the body. He wasn’t lying. He had given up his secret, and with it everything he had. There was no future for this pathetic wretch, kneeling and bleeding on the ground. He was a traitor. He could never return to Baghdad and would have to pray to Allah that the men in front of him would be as good as their word.
Standing smiled. He folded the map, placed it in his pocket and snapped the lid down on the briefcase. He checked his watch. They had time. But only if they moved now. They had all the equipment and cover they could need. He nodded at the Captain, and pulled the case off the table, the handle straining under the weight. He did not look back. Not even when he was outside the tent and heard the single gunshot from behind him. He walked across the sand and rocks to his Humvee and heaved the case inside. When he looked back at the tent, the Captain was making his way outside, securing the 9mm pistol in his belt holster.
They had made their move and the clock was ticking.
Chapter Two
They were a US armoured unit and they had met little resistance until now. The Republican Guard had dug in well, and no amount of aerial bombardment had been able to shift them. Further south, Major Standing’s unit had swept through, sending prisoners back to the lines with all the trust and fallibility of a game of paintball. The mission was to drive forward and not lose momentum. The rear forces would take the procession of prisoners and process them, but for Standing he was in it for medals and promotion and he could see that the bedraggled and beaten soldiers were nothing more than poorly trained, poorly educated and poorly equipped young men who wanted nothing more than to return home and herd goats and sit about smoking.
This Republican Guard unit, however, was different. They were meant to be Iraq’s best of the best, and despite hearing news of a beleaguered force giving next to little fight after forty two days of constant aerial bombardment, these men had dug in and were letting nothing get in their way for an honourable and earned journey into Paradise. Standing had sent the Abrams tanks in an arrow tip formation and they had come under fire from rocket propelled grenades almost at once. Not generally a problem for the Abrams, but one lucky rocket had torn off a track and now the attack had faltered as a tank coming to the damaged vehicle’s assistance had driven over two anti-tank mines and there were casualties, fire and a lot of smoke. Mobile guns pummelled the Iraqi forces, and a sniper was getting busy keeping their heads down as he sent in tracer rounds for the fifty calibre machine guns to follow. But the Iraqis had a good idea of the range now, and the smoke was clouding the Americans’ view more so than the Iraqi’s. Russian-supplied 88mm mortars were raining down on the tanks, as well as the machine gun position eight hundred metres to the east and the fire support position some two-thousand metres distant south and west.
Standing watched through the field glasses. He had already made the call. Back in Saudi Arabia, the aerial mission control was now in the loop, so he would have to move fast. He had recalled the tanks and the flanking armoured vehicles. There wouldn’t be time to take prisoners, and due to the information they had, it would only work against them if they did. He checked his watch, then checked the sky. The two A-10 Warthogs flew in low, out of the sun. Bombs first. Then as the Iraqi position smoked and flamed, they climbed high, turned fast and set about releasing hell from their 20mm Gatling guns. A weird whirring noise that was over before it truly began. He had wanted to see these incredible planes in action, and it was looking to be an anti-climax. Another climb, another tight turn and the next burst was longer. Every tenth round was a tracer to light the way, every third round was depleted uranium and could penetrate any known armour – even that of a nuclear reactor – and he guessed there were incendiary rounds in the mix, too. When the dust settled, the A-10s were gone, flying low and south.
Major Standing gave the order and the Abrams tanks fired continuously for the next fifteen minutes, right up to the Iraqi’s position, while the .50 calibre machine guns rattled away on top of the armoured vehicles and approaching Humvees, taking out everything that moved. A group of men had fled to the northeast. Standing sent a team of infantry after them in Humvees. He ordered no survivors. His men had trained all their careers for this and had practised for more than three months in the desert. They were fired up and would not let him down.
Standing got out of his Humvee and took the map out of his pocket, drawing his nickel plated .45 Colt. A present from General Norman Schwarzkopf. They had attended Westpoint together and the General had seemed to take exception that Standing was still only a Major. The pistol had arrived the next day with a note that said before this war was over, his old friend would be a Colonel. Standing had to hunt down some .45 ACP ammunition for the pistol, which had been replaced years earlier, but was still much loved by the seasoned NCOs and senior officers for its accuracy and reliability. The US and NATO forces may have adopted 9mm, but Delta Force were still using the old pistols instead of the military designated M9, or what was otherwise known as the Beretta 92f. Standing had a renewed vigour. A gift from the man himself, a promotion on the horizon and this new ‘gift’ given to him by the Iraqi intelligence officer. Kuwaiti gold stolen by Iraqi soldiers, sanctioned by Saddam in
Chapter Three
The trucks had been loaded and the convoy set off west. Two Abrams tanks took point. The two damaged tanks had been rigged with explosive charges and destroyed. Under no circumstances was the technology of the battlefield leviathans to get into the enemies’ hands. Much of the Iraqi hardware had come from China and Russia, and the United States would not be sending back templates to allow their designs to take a ten-year technological leap.
They left the MSR, or main supply route, a well-made tarmac road with oil and gas pipelines running alongside, as well as fibreoptic communications protected in thinner piping. The desert did not lend itself to telegraph poles because of the soft sand, and the gas, oil, electric and communications supply had been hit easily in the conflict. Teams of contractors were already setting out with military protection to get Kuwait City back online and Iraqi soldiers walked dejectedly along the road towards military checkpoints where they would await processing. It would seem there were other military commanders out there, who like Major Willard Standing, had taken the fight forward and left the prisoners for the rear echelons. Except for the last battle. That had been different. That had not been studied and trained for at Westpoint. Standing was surprised how comfortable he felt with it. As he bounced along the rough scrubland, away from the MSR and switching north, he felt nothing for the few desperate and terrified men the two A-10s and the final barrage of fire his tanks had unleashed, had left breathing. Ten men in all. Pulled out, ordered to kneel and shot in the head. Two of the men had taken flight but had been gunned down by a dozen trigger-happy grunts bored with training and desperate to get ‘blooded’ before they returned home. The war was over three days after it had officially begun with the ground invasion. The Iraqi soldiers had been pummelled for forty-two days and nights. When the bombing had stopped, they had surrendered, but for a few pockets of resistance. Like the men tasked with guarding Saddam’s gold.
It had been a simple sell. Or should have been. As a unit, they take the gold. Three hundred million dollars. They hide it, then when the time was right, they return. As a unit. Kuwait would be free from Iraqi occupation and after a year or two, they would get it out of the country. A simple sell.
Except…
Standing looked at the man driving him, then back at the track in front of them. The trucks and tanks and Humvees ahead had carved out a path for them to follow. The rest of the tanks travelled at the rear. He glanced at his watch then picked up the radio.
“Right about here,” he said. He had taken the Iraqi set and rigged another in the lead vehicle. Half the Western military were monitoring the channels. No call signs, nothing that could incriminate them.
“Check.”
Standing put the receiver down. He did not look at the man beside him. Could not trust him now. It had only taken a few objectors to turn the tide. Brothers in arms turned against each other as sense of duty and lust for riches divided them. Seven objectors in all. Seven men who pointed out that the United States did not execute prisoners, and that they were in an elite armoured unit, that could trace its heritage back to the Battle of the Bulge, and that they were not petty thieves. Those seven men had been dispatched as swiftly as the Iraqi prisoners. The man beside him now, a corporal and designated driver, had shown what side he was on, and the ruthlessness in which he had stepped up and changed the status quo had shown Standing just how fragile the chain of command and structure of hierarchy really was. With the gold on peoples’ minds, Standing knew how pirates might once have felt. How vulnerable the captain of the ship was to the whim of the crew. As a career officer, he had never witnessed bloodlust before, and as a man from a privileged background, he had not realised how quickly money, or at least the promise of it could turn a man. What had started out as a musing after capturing an Iraqi Intelligence officer, had quickly escalated into an international coup. He already had to write to seven families and inform them their loved ones would not be returning home. How many more? He had just heard about a blue on blue with British forces. An SAS reconnaissance patrol torn apart by warthogs like the two he had called in to break the Republican Guard. The ground war was meant to be a mopping up affair, the world was not expecting large numbers of allied soldiers to be sent home in rubber bags.
The convoy stopped and formed a circle around the lead trucks. Standing got out without a word to the driver, who followed, taking the M16 A2 rifle with him.
“Secure the vehicle, Private,” Standing ordered.
“Fuck that, brother. We’re God damned partners, now…” The man barged past Standing and headed for the three trucks.
Standing watched the man go, saw the other men gathering around and forming a loading party. Or unloading, as the case would be. Standing realised he had lost control. He would have to play this carefully. He knew officers got ‘fragged’ in Vietnam and he would have to make damned sure that would not be the case here. When soldiers came under fire, the last thing they ever wanted to do was get up and move forward. Vietnam had a high turnover of officers who arrived fresh off the boat, eager to get that promotion. Ordering their men to charge, when the men in question were quite happy ducking down and taking each day as a day off their tour. Sooner or later someone would shoot the officer rather than get themselves killed. A fragmentation grenade would then be placed under the officer’s body and that was it. No body left for MPs to see that the poor guy had been shot in the back. In Vietnam getting ‘fragged’ was as big a risk to an officer in a hot zone as the enemy was.
Standing watched as the men unloaded the crates, dividing themselves into unloaders and diggers. Shirts came off, water was passed around and nobody seemed concerned that seven fellow soldiers had been left at a destroyed command post among the Iraqi bodies. Standing drew his pistol, the comforting chequered walnut grip feeling good in his hand. He looked across at his Captain. The man looked back at him, the gleeful grin of a man caught dreaming returned to him. Standing had lost command. Now, if he wasn’t careful, he could lose far more than the gold, too.
chapter Four
Standing watched the last of the sand being shovelled on top of the wooden crates. The desert had a hard crust of grit and tiny stones, but the deeper it had been dug, the softer the sand had become until it looked like a day at the beach. He had re-established command by organising a group of men to scrape the top crust back into place, then gathering the men together and mapping the area with landmarks and GPS coordinates. He turned it over to the Captain to give the orders to return to the scene of the crime and get the Republican Guard outpost organised, the bodies of their fallen comrades squared away, tagged and put into body bags. Before the ground war had started, he had dreaded the death of his men, the letters he would have to write, the bodies sent back – the first time in any significant number since the US had pulled out of Saigon. Twenty-five years of skirmishes, but no out and out war for America. He had seen wooden coffins and bundles of American flags back at base in anticipation for the ground war. Now, he had contributed to the American losses, and from what he had been hearing his unit had suffered the worst. How was that for ironic?
The convoy returned, and like settlers in the days of the Western expansion, they surrounded the area with vehicles just as their ancestors had with covered wagons and taken up firing points against the Indians. Standing ordered the Iraqi vehicle hulks be dragged to the outside of the circle, what hardware remained. He told the men that they could fool retreating Republican Guard units from the south. They did as they were ordered, the semblance of command had been restored, but he could see that the men were changed. Something in their demeanour. People would say that it was because they had seen combat, and now had the ‘thousand-yard stare’, but he knew it was more than that. They had engaged the enemy from a distance and if it hadn’t been for the A-10 warthogs, then they may well have taken prisoners. The only close-up killing had been the Iraqis who had fled, and their own comrades when their interests had not aligned. No, the expressions on the men’s faces was not that of soldiers who had now experienced combat, but of men who had crossed the line and sold their souls. There was no going back.
