The Family Cleaner, page 1
THE FAMILY CLEANER
IAN MCBRIDE
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
THE FAMILY CLEANER
First edition. May 24, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 Ian McBride.
Written by Ian McBride.
Also by Ian McBride
The Chinese Doll
The Family Cleaner
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Also By Ian McBride
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
Epilogue
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Also By Ian McBride
To Ellie and Lachlan
Prologue
Afghanistan, June 2014
The raging Afghanistan sun had passed its peak for the day but still baked everything below. David lay prostrate in a ditch, hearing nothing but a painful ringing in his ears. The pressure on his chest was so heavy it felt like his ribs were touching his spine. The sky, so clear and blue five minutes beforehand, was now brown, clouds of grit being blown around in pulsating gusts.
What the fuck was that?
His Secure Personal Radio microphone, dislodged by successive explosions, now dangled near his chin. He pushed up on one elbow and grabbed it.
“Jake, you okay?” Even that small task was painful.
No answer.
He pinched his nose and blew hard to try to clear the ringing in his ears. He called again. No luck. The loud ringing blocked out everything.
“Jake,” he repeated. Nothing.
He rolled over and inched himself up to the rim of the ditch he had been hiding in when Jake first screamed “Incoming!” in his earpiece, seconds before the impact.
Jake and David had been tracking a Taliban squad for five hours and waited for them to set up camp for the evening, before calling in an air attack.
David had been on this tour, his first, for three months, part of a team of stalkers. Their role was to track Taliban squads, then point the US helicopter gunships in their direction. It wasn’t what he had hoped he would be doing when he became a specialist sniper, but it was what the Army decided he had to do.
Jake had taken David under his wing from day one.
He peeked over the rim and saw the top of Jake’s helmet inches away. He clutched at Jake’s shoulder straps and braced to drag his friend into his ditch. He yanked hard and fell backwards. Jake’s armless torso lay on his chest, dead eyes staring into his. He pushed him away, rolled over and vomited into the sand, then timidly reached over and retrieved his friend, cradling the remains in his lap. He looked back over the rim, wondering where the rest of him was.
An arm draped over a rock. He couldn’t tell if it was left or right, as if that mattered.
The ditch Jake had been in was now a huge crater, smouldering pieces of metal strewn here and there. Dark brown stains leached into the sand from jagged pieces of Jake’s flesh scattered on the ground.
David looked back at Jake and gently wiped specks of dirt from his cheek, gasping reflexively when he realised he had been holding his breath.
He felt a whump, whump, whump as a chopper landed nearby and he squinted as its rotors blew up sand, stinging his face. The acid burn of vomit filled the back of his throat.
He tore his stare away from Jake and looked up at three silhouetted figures standing at the edge of the ditch. He held up what was left of Jake with both hands, like a small boy making an offering, as if to say, “Look what I found.”
Three US Marines, one appeared to be a medic, stared at the blood-soaked vision.
The medic slid into the ditch. “Y’all don’t need to be holdin’ him, buddy,” he said, then tried to retrieve Jake’s remains from David’s grasp. David clutched at first, then yielded up his friend to the stranger. The medic tossed Jake’s remains over the lip of the ditch and started checking David.
“He’s good to go,” the medic said to the other marines.
The other two grabbed David, one gloved hand under each arm, and dragged him unceremoniously to the chopper. Through the swirling dirt, he stared, gape-mouthed as the medic gathered up pieces of Jake and tipped them into a black body bag like garbage.
They strapped David into a canvas seat, and he felt a thud as the body bag landed next to him. He looked dumbly at the ‘bag of Jake’, imagining his friend's face staring into the blackness.
The medic looked across and shook David’s arm. He yelled something as the engine roared. Startled, David indicated with his hands that he couldn’t hear anything.
David sat mutely staring at a sign stencilled on the back of the pilot’s headrest that said “DO NOT REMOVE” as the medic poked and prodded him and asked him unanswered questions.
They landed twenty minutes later, the ringing in his ears still muffled everything. He watched as the medic talked with a stern-looking doctor in green scrubs. Their lips moved but he could hear nothing.
The following day he was evacuated to Germany where he spent three weeks before returning to Lavarack Barracks Hospital in Townsville, Australia. The ringing persisted, albeit at a much-reduced level, and his hearing was restored, but every time he closed his eyes he saw Jake resting on his lap.
Chapter 1
Lavarack Barracks, Townsville, April 2015
David Carter was tall, muscular and a skilled marksman, almost perfect material for Special Air Services except his education let him down. Maybe if he hadn’t been orphaned as a nine-year-old and shipped off to his aunt and uncle who didn’t care about what sort of education he got, who knows? As it was, he was a sniper in the Australian Army and until the accident that forced him back to Townsville on medical grounds, he had been comfortable where life had landed him. David’s poor schooling record meant his entry into the Army was a struggle, but that just made him even more determined to succeed.
It had been nine months since David’s repatriation. His impatience to recommence active duty made him belligerent. His anger at the senseless killing of his friend had him raging against the stupidity, as he saw it, of placing skilled snipers in the line of fire.
“David, I need you to appreciate something,” Captain Narine, his psychologist, said. “What you’ve shared about your life convinces me that you are not an angry young man. Your fellow soldiers and officers have told me that you are quiet, thoughtful and focused, a little wilful at times, but anger is not part of your make-up.”
He hadn’t told her everything about his childhood or she may not have drawn the same conclusion.
“Who says?”
“Well, Corporal Parkinson, for one. He called to ask after you and he shared his views with me.”
David had very few people whose opinions he valued. His friend Pav from his teenage years, Siobhan Welling, his childhood psychologist, and Parko. Corporal “Parko” Parkinson had his back a few times when he clashed with authority and had assumed David as a special case after hearing the story of his life.
She waited then said, “So where is this anger coming from?”
“Jake was my friend. and those fuckin’ Yanks blew him to pieces.” His chair fell backwards as he stood.
“David, please sit. I see you’re upset. I’m just trying to help.”
David usually responded to her questions with grunts and the occasional monosyllabic “yes” or “no”. It wasn’t just in his make-up to “share”. But he was intrigued by the Captain. She was part Indian, beautiful and gentle, which he appreciated. There hadn’t been much of that in his life.
His reluctance to share was also born out of his want to appear to be strong in front of her. If he was honest he fancied her. Ethics aside, the Captain would never have been willing to return the favour, indeed, none of the men in camp would be able to earn her attention.
“David, I accept it’s no comfort but accidents do happen in war zones.”
“I am not so mad at the Yanks, to be honest. But why the Army puts trained snipers in the firing line, it’s just stupid. We aren’t cannon fodder, we deal in precision and remote targets. Being up close like that is just stupid.” He bit down hard to suppress his anger.
She waited for the moment to pass.
“What happens when you get angry like you just did? How do you feel?”
She waited for a response. None came.
“How are you sleeping?”
He shrugged. “So, so.”
He didn’t tell her about the times when he sensed the whump, whump, whump of the chopper blades beating in his head, the feeling that he had lost
One of the many traits David had developed through childhood was to shut his mouth and dig deep, and not show the rest of the world how he was suffering.
Each session, as Captain Narine probed, David responded just enough to keep her at bay and, more importantly, to allow her to tick the right boxes. If she thought he had PTSD he would never get back to Afghanistan.
He worked hard to convince her that he was okay, spending hours in the library studying everything he could about his condition. He soon worked out how he needed to respond to the psychologist.
His best day since being dragged out of that ditch, covered in Jake’s blood, was the day he received his orders to ship back to Afghanistan.
Afghanistan, Tarin Kowt, June 2015
Today was David’s twenty-fourth birthday, and there was nowhere else he wanted to be. Being a sniper suited him; mostly working alone without the complication of relying on others. Just go where he was told, point, and occasionally shoot.
After the disastrous events that had killed Jake, an inquiry led to a change in operating procedures. They no longer sent out snipers to track and target the Taliban. The precision strike they had called in was imprecise, and Jake’s life had been sacrificed to friendly fire. It wasn’t the first time it had occurred, but hopefully, it would be the last.
His birthday coincided with his first outing since returning and he and another sniper, Stu, were providing cover for Special Operations Engineers as they cleared Improvised Explosive Devices. He surveyed the area through his scope, occasionally flicking back to watch the SOEs move turtle-like as they defused several IEDs in a hamlet near base camp.
A large drop of sweat ran down David’s forehead and along his nose, dropping onto the parched ground, he looked down and watched it disappear in an instant. He pushed the camouflage netting aside and wiped his brow with the back of his glove. They had been at this for six hours and he was looking forward to a long shower and a change of clothes. Did nothing change in this country, just heat and dirt?
Up, down, left, right — he roved his scope across the dry, desolate surrounds.
The scene reminded him of the station in West Australia where he spent three years growing from boy to man. The heat. The treeless land stretched as far as the eye could see. Least there are no black flies here, thank Christ.
Bored, his mind wandered and he thought about Pav and wondered what he would be up to right now. He smiled as he imagined Pav arguing with their old station boss and his dragon of a wife. He wondered why Pav even stayed on, doing the same mindless work and chasing cattle around for an ungrateful boss.
“Two hostiles on your two o’clock,” he heard in his earpiece.
He snapped back to the present and shook his head to refocus. He wiped more sweat from his forehead and looked across the rim of his lay to where Stu was prone, head peeking over the edge.
“I see them, Stu,” he said, as he watched two locals bobbing up and down, negotiating their way to where the SOEs were going about their work.
His heart began to race. He sensed the familiar whump, whump, whump of his imaginary chopper. He gagged and spat out the taste of vomit. He flung himself onto his back and stared at the blinding sun, panting as he tried to push away the vision of Stu’s severed head staring blankly at him.
“Fuck!” he said.
He waited for the billowing dust. None came. He breathed slowly and then realised there was no chopper. He shook his head to try and clear the vision.
“Dave, Dave!”
Slow breaths, slow breaths. In for eight, out for eight ... in for eight, out for eight ...
He felt the sensations subside.
“Dave, what’s up?” Stu said.
He rolled back over and reset his position.
“Nothing. I got some shit in my eyes, this fucking sand.”
Refocused, he tracked the two hostiles as they moved, slipping in behind scruffy bushes, heading towards the outer buildings of the hamlet and the SOEs.
David clutched the mike switch on his Secure Personal Radio. “Lieutenant, two hostiles are out back of you and working their way in. Permission to engage?”
“Hold, Carter. They might just be from this village.”
“They are armed, sir.”
“Hold.”
“Sir, they will have cover in about thirty seconds, and we will not be able to see them.”
“I said ‘hold’,” the lieutenant yelled back.
David ripped his earpiece out in disgust. “Why the fuck have us here watching if we can’t shoot when we see trouble?” He yelled out to Stu.
One of the hostiles stood, reached into his clothing and pulled his arm back as if to throw something over the building that separated him from the SOEs.
David fired, and his silenced SR98 spat out a round and took down the hostile.
He replaced his earpiece. “One hostile down, the other is running, sir.”
“I ordered you not to fire.”
“Sir, he was about to throw a grenade into your group.”
The SOEs hesitated as they listened to the exchange.
“Keep going,” Lieutenant Brown called to his team.
They finished their work, gathered their gear and made their way to the prone figure of the dead Afghani, arriving just before David and Stu.
“So where is this grenade and his weapon, Carter?” Lieutenant Brown said sarcastically, “Or were you just making an excuse to fire?”
Brown was shorter than everyone in the troop. There was a joke going around that he’d worn three pairs of socks to make the height limit. Unlike most of those in the unit, Brown was a recent arrival straight out of officer training. He had fair skin, prematurely thinning blond hair, small shoulders and unfortunately for him, just the hint of a lisp. He also had, very quickly, established himself as an utter bastard.
He walked over and pushed his face up into David’s. “Well?”
David braced, took a deep breath, and looked down at Brown. He said nothing as he walked over to the body which he nudged with his boot, rolling it over. He kicked around in the dirt. “Well, he has an ammo belt. Maybe the other one grabbed the weapon and the grenade. He looked like he was about to chuck something, didn’t he, Stu?”
“Sorry, Dave, I was watching the right flank. I just looked around when you fired.”
Brown said, “Right, we’ll deal with this back at base.” He turned to his second in command. “Sergeant, take some video of the scene and let’s get out of here before the villagers get it in their minds to retaliate.”
David walked past the lieutenant who said, “This is the end for you, Carter. You failed to follow engagement orders before and got away with it. This time I’ll see you don’t.”
David took a slow breath and coughed out a “fuck you”.
“What was that?”
“Nothing, sir, just clearing my throat.”
The soldiers nearby snickered and rolled their eyes. Stu whispered, “You seriously want to get yourself in the shit Dave, don’t you?”
“Ya could have backed me up, Stu. It wouldn’t have hurt if you just nodded. Not as if there was anyone to know any better.”
“I didn’t see it, Dave.”
“What, and ya couldn’t tell a porky to help me out?”
Stu shook his head.
“My last partner would have. It’s what you do.”
“Your last partner is dead, Dave.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing, just saying you can’t know what he would have done.”
“I know he wouldn’t have let me hang out to dry like you just did.”
David took a step towards Stu, who backed away.
As the soldiers retreated, villagers who had been hiding gathered around the body, yelling and shaking their fists at the retreating soldiers.
