Killing for the Company

the road. He was looking frantically left and right and didn’t appear to know what was happening.

His ignorance didn’t last for long.

Luke sensed movement on the balcony and looked over just in time to see his target topple over the railings. He seemed to fall through the air for an eternity, before hitting the ground with a crunch that was audible from the Land Cruiser on the other side of the road.

The kid stopped in his tracks.

He stared at the fallen man.

He turned round to look at the silent, retreating crowd, the nearest members of which had retreated to a distance of thirty-five metres.

And then he ran after them. His arms and legs were flailing and ungainly, but he bolted like a hare, just as the crowd realised what was happening. They parted to let him through, but their silence ebbed away, to be replaced by a low muttering, which quickly grew to something more sinister as they started to advance again.

‘Shit!’ Luke cried. First blood had been drawn. Some of the crowd had seen the dead man. It would be only seconds before the rest of them understood what had happened. And then the unit’s only option was to fight.

He turned to the guys in the vehicle and pointed through the front windscreen towards the dilapidated building with the scorch marks on the frontage, which was now fifteen metres from their position. ‘We need to head in there!’ he shouted. ‘It’s a defensible position.’

Fozzie nodded.

‘Finn, Russ, cover me. I’ll get Stratton inside first.’

The two men didn’t hesitate. Russ kicked the passenger door open and started firing towards the crowd, his weapon resonating in unison with Finn’s. Again they aimed above the heads of the mob, now advancing once more. They slowed down, but how long for, and how long until they returned fire, it was impossible to say.

Luke grabbed Stratton and pulled him forcibly from the 4 x 4. His clothes were soaked in sweat. As Russ and Finn laid down another burst of rounds, Luke yanked him towards the building. The doorway was wooden and looked solid, although its yellow paint was peeling. Luke kicked it with his right foot but it didn’t budge, so he took a couple of steps back and aimed his 53 at the lock. A quick burst and the wood splintered and cracked. Another kick and it was open.

Not before time. The mob was now just twenty metres from the vehicle. Russ and Finn, who were still next to their respective passenger doors while Fozzie remained in the front, continued to fire warning bursts, but these were no longer sufficient to hold them back. If they grew any closer, the unit would have to start killing people. Then it could only go one of two ways: a retreat, or a massacre…

Luke thrust himself into the building, his weapon pointing up then down as he checked if it was occupied. No sign of anyone. He exited again. ‘Get in!’ he bellowed at Stratton, who was staring wide- eyed at the stand-off. When he didn’t move, Luke grabbed hold of him again and sent him flying through the door with such force that he fell heavily to the ground the moment he was inside.

But Luke wasn’t much concerned with Stratton. All of a sudden his attention was elsewhere.

It was Finn who made the first kill. A round from one of the Palestinian AKs had just ricocheted off the Land Cruiser’s armoured chassis. Finn lowered his weapon so that, instead of pointing above the heads of the mob, it was aimed directly at them. As he fired, he panned from left to right; and although the burst from his 53 didn’t last much more than a second, it was brutally effective. The front line of the crowd crumpled like toy soldiers knocked over by a child. There was a heavy groan from the mob, with one man offering up a horrific counterpoint: he had clearly taken a round that had failed to kill him, and was screaming uncontrollably.

Luke ignored the shrieking. He ignored the sudden line of dead, torn bodies. He had noticed something else and he had almost no time at all to deal with it.

‘Get away from the vehicle!’ he screamed at his mates as he raised his weapon. ‘GET AWAY FROM THE FUCKING VEHICLE!’ But he saw Fozzie was still behind the wheel and the others were pinned down..

Twenty metres away was the guy with the RPG launcher. He had reappeared at the front of the smaller mob, the simple tube of his weapon raised up on his right-hand shoulder and with the curved and pointed shape of a fresh grenade clearly visible at the end of the spout.

Luke stood in the doorway of the building, pressed the butt of the 53 into his shoulder and searched his sights for the shooter. His senses seemed to slow everything down.

The crowd, whose noise had waned, grew louder.

The air was suddenly filled with the renewed chugging of Finn’s 53 as he slaughtered a fresh wave of Palestinians. He had ignored Luke’s warning to get the hell away from the Land Cruiser — perhaps he hadn’t heard it — but hadn’t clocked the RPG either.

It was up to Luke to lock on to the target. The cross hairs hovered over the shooter’s chest.

Both men fired at the same time.

The single shot from Luke’s weapon cracked in the air at precisely the same time as the RPG fizzed towards the unit’s vehicle. The shooter went down, but it was too late.

The projectile hurtled with absolute accuracy towards his companions. The Land Cruiser was tough, but it wasn’t tough enough to withstand that. The grenade crashed through the windscreen. It was inside the vehicle when it detonated.

The explosion was brief, but it was powerful. It sent a shock wave emanating from the 4 x 4 that threw Luke a metre backwards into the building. He fell heavily on his left shoulder, but was able to look back out through the doorway just in time to see the carnage.

Fozzie couldn’t have known what hit him. There was no doubt that the blood and gore that spattered the remaining windows as the RPG’s shrapnel peppered them from inside was his. Russ and Finn were less lucky. As they were both standing at the open rear passenger doors, the shrapnel that emerged from the openings darted into the backs of their bodies in the fraction of a second before they were thrown forward, away from the vehicle. Luke saw Russ’s body flying though the air on the other side of the Land Cruiser; Finn landed on his front no more than three metres from where Luke was lying. Blood was pissing from the back of his neck; his clothes were scorched and burned away; and although there was insufficient life left in him to scream, his body twitched and shuddered like someone was passing an electric current through him. It didn’t take a genius to tell he was fucked.

That all three of them were fucked.

A huge roar erupted from the crowd, and several celebratory AK rounds were fired, both up into the air and towards the vehicle. Luke knew there was nothing he could do for the rest of his unit now. He gave himself a couple of seconds to regroup. It was just him and Stratton now. Him, Stratton and the mob. They were surrounding the Land Cruiser, stripping the dead men of their weapons. Luke reckoned it was thirty seconds before the braver ones among them would follow him and Stratton into the structure where they had taken cover. It was as dilapidated inside as out, pungent with the soot-soaked smell of a previous fire. The bare brick walls were crumbling, but from the right-hand side of a hallway a narrow wooden staircase led all the way up the building and it still seemed to be sound. Stratton had shrunk into the shadows just beyond the staircase. His face was pale and he looked rather small, almost childlike. Luke grabbed his arm.

‘Up,’ he barked, and when Stratton hesitated, he just pushed him so that he stumbled up the stairs. He looked back through the door. No sign of the mob, but he could hear them. They were getting louder.

‘UP!’

Stratton started scrambling up the stairs. It was very dark here and precarious too because the banisters had mostly been burned away and there was a sheer drop to the ground floor. Every ten steps or so, Stratton stumbled; but each time he fell, Luke was there to pick him up by the scruff of his neck and urge him on.

They were three storeys high before he heard the sound of voices echoing up the stairwell. Sharp voices, barking instructions. Stratton stopped and looked behind him, to be rewarded with another push from Luke. As the older man scrambled further up the stairs, Luke aimed his weapon down the stairwell and fired a short burst. The sound echoed all over the building and for a moment the voices ceased. It wouldn’t be for long, Luke knew. The crowd had a taste for blood.

They were coming.