Decisive
A Gabriel Series Novella
David Hickson
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Keep Reading
Author’s Note
Also by David Hickson
About the Author
One
I woke dripping with sweat.
It was hot. The thin cotton sheet clung to me as I twisted to see the time. Three a.m.
I sat up and perched on the edge of the narrow bed with its thin mattress. Rubbed my bad shoulder. It took me another moment to remember where I was: Africa, north of the equator, in the heart of the western bulge. Ouagadougou, such a pretty name for such an ugly city. Capital of the landlocked country of Burkina Faso, where it was summer and even now, in the darkest hour of the night, the stale, hot air made a sauna of my poky hotel room.
I found a cigarette and grabbed the bottle of whisky from beside the bed. I poured myself a drink, and stood at the open window, hoping for a breeze to break the heat of the African night.
I knew what had woken me – the mission that lay ahead. The thing I needed to do. And the fact I had to show them I could still do it. Had to prove those mind doctors wrong, throw their warnings of my failure back in their faces.
And I had to do that despite having endured years of one of the toughest military trainings in the world, and having survived years in the British Special Forces. Not that my squad had been particularly special; certainly the things we did were not always so special.
No, my training was not the problem. It was what had happened long after the training, starting with that moment in the forest in Uganda, the moment my life had unexpectedly been turned upside down. At least that was how the psychologists described it, in the papers explaining my discharge. There are moments in your life that cannot be reversed, the man with the tight mouth had told me. Moments that cannot be taken back. Some damage cannot be undone, he had said. There were some things I would not be able to do again.
But I was convinced they were wrong. I could do this, I knew I could.
The whisky was sharp on my tongue; it burned a trail down my throat. I sucked on the cigarette. I had time before the morning meeting. Time to think it through again. Time to remember the reasons I was here. Time to make the decision.
That was what my friend Brian would always call it: ‘The Decision’ with a capital D. He would rest a heavy hand on my shoulder and ask in his broad Yorkshire accent, “When do you make the Decision?”
“What decision?” I would say.
“You know what decision. The decision to kill.”
In my memory his eyes are dark and troubled. Like he needs to know the answer to his question.
“That’s easy,” I say. “A fraction of a second before I pull the trigger. You know that. We trained together.” Then I add, “Just a fraction sooner than you,” because that is our joke, although it isn’t true that I pull faster than him.
I smile at Brian.
Brian doesn’t smile back. He shakes his head.
“You got that wrong,” he says. “You don’t make the decision. That’s the point. We don’t decide to kill. Some suit makes the decision for us. We are not soldiers, Gabriel. We are hired killers. That’s all we are, and our souls will burn in hell for it.”
I often think about that question that Brian asked. Sometimes I see the blades of the chopper appear for a moment over his shoulder, a noisy blur. Then a patch of cloud rushes in and hides the chopper from my sight. I’m falling through cloud, which is not a good thing. We jumped from high because of the weather and we’re falling to the forest below. It feels as if I’ve been falling for too long, and the ground is rushing up to me.
Brian’s eyes hold mine.
“Don’t pull,” he says. “Don’t pull. Just fall to your death.”
But of course Brian didn’t ask that question as we were dropping into the site of the plane wreck. And he never told me not to pull. It wasn’t my death we were falling towards. No, he had asked me the question earlier, when our backs were pressed against the cold hull of the chopper as our pilot cursed the weather and took us in low; only a couple of hundred feet above the forest, less when the cloud blinded him and a mountain slope loomed up suddenly to snatch us out of the sky.
Or had Brian asked about the decision even earlier than that? While we were strapping our packs, checking the magazines, racking the kill switches?
Yes, earlier … much earlier. Because in the chopper he asked about Robyn.
Asked me whether she had spoken to me.
She hadn’t.
Brian smiled at that, a reluctant smile. As if there was something he did not want to say.
“What would she have said to me?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “There’s nothing to say.”
Another smile, not reluctant this one. Always the joker, the big, blustery best friend from Yorkshire, with his broad grin and kind brown eyes.
“Something about your wedding?” I asked.
“Shouldn’t have mentioned it,” he said. “Get your mind off my fiancée, you bastard. You need to focus.”
Which was true. I needed to focus. We all did. African Defence Force terrorists were active in the Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That was the forest below us, where a passenger plane had gone down and we needed to find survivors.
But taking my mind off Robyn is something I struggle to do. She has dark eyes which are always laughing, and she looks at me as if she knows I am fighting my attraction to her.
As Brian’s eyes smile at me across the cabin, I wonder whether he can see it in my face.
Does he
