FIRST CASUALTY
The fourth Gabriel Wolfe thriller
ANDY MASLEN
I dedicate this book to my parents.
Copyright © 2016 Andy Maslen
Published by
Tyton Press, an imprint of
Sunfish Ltd
PO Box 2107
Salisbury SP2 2BW
T: 0844 502 2061
www.andymaslen.com
The right of Andy Maslen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Requests for permission should be addressed to the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover illustration copyright © Darren Bennett
Cover design by DKB Creative
Author photograph for the print edition © Kin Ho
Edited by Tom Bromley
Formatted by Polgarus Studio
ALSO BY ANDY MASLEN
The Gabriel Wolfe series
Trigger Point
Reversal of Fortune (short story)
Blind Impact
Condor
Acknowledgements
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the people who supported me and helped me while I wrote this book. As well as the members of my Readers’ Group and Inner Circle, who are too numerous to thank individually, I would like to single out the following kind/talented/patient souls:
Clare Allen
Jason Anderson
Marina Anderson
Alison Barclay
Giles Bassett
Darren Bennett
Tom Bromley
Valerie Bush
Mark Dawson
Mike Dempsey
Gina Gough
Kin Ho
Jo Kelly
Michelle Lowery
Tom Pinnock
Rob Richardson
Nick Warren
Thank you all.
Andy Maslen
Salisbury, October 2016
Table of Contents
ALSO BY ANDY MASLEN
Acknowledgements
1 Firefight
2 Packing List
3 A Long-Delayed Meeting
4 PTSD
5 Shining Armour
6 Number Ten
7 Mission Parameters
8 Tooling Up
9 DU Rounds
10 Additional Support
11 Quid Pro Quo
12 Breaking and Entering
13 Briefing Britta
14 Mozambique
15 A Driving Job
16 Death in Harare
17 A Creeping Doubt
18 A Phone Call
19 Company
20 A Fashion for Killing
21 The Second Ambush
22 Plan B
23 Let’s Play Some Rock and Roll
24 Killshot
25 A Childhood Story
26 Infiltration Complete
27 A Bird’s-Eye View
28 “You’re All Out of Moments”
29 The Third Ambush
30 Extracted
31 Repentance
32 Truth and Reconciliation
33 Pillow Talk
34 Paying His Respects
35 A Test of Character
36 Appointment with Counsel
37 Antisocial Climber
38 The Absence of Evidence
39 Not Alone, After All
40 A Girl’s Best Friend
41 Shift Work
42 Big Game Hunting
43 Rooftop Safari
44 Within Striking Distance
45 Confrontation
46 The Third Copy
47 A Trip East
48 Reunion
49 Family plot
50 The Golden Dragon
51 How to Kill a Snake
52 Hello Again, Darling
53 Gabriel Wolfe is Dead
54 The Wizard Works His Magic
55 Proof Positive
56 Day Trip
57 Tactical Campus
58 The Debt Collector
59 Reckoning
60 With Interest
61 Speak Truth to Power
62 Nemesis
63 One Last Roll of the Dice
64 Return to Mozambique
65 Here Comes a Chopper . . .
66 Finding Calvary
67 A Cold Land
68 Family and Friends Only
About the Author
Want to know more?
Sample: FURY
“In war, truth is the first casualty.”
Aeschylus
1
Firefight
A FOREST. NORTHWESTERN MOZAMBIQUE – 27 DECEMBER
GABRIEL Wolfe looked down at the bloody bullet wound in his right thigh.
“Britta! I’m hit!” he shouted.
Britta Falskog whirled round, still firing her SA80 assault rifle in five-round bursts over the top of the fallen tree she was using for cover.
“I’m coming. Can you move?”
“Not sure. Hurts like fuck.”
“Hold on.”
Britta ducked down, rested the SA80 against the rough bark of the tree, and unclipped her two remaining grenades from her belt: a white phosphor and a high explosive. Holding one in each hand, she pulled the pins out with her teeth, let the springs fly, then counted to two and lobbed them into the path of the incoming fighters.
Three seconds elapsed, during which she grabbed her rifle and crawled over to Gabriel, who had cut away his trouser leg and was staunching the bleeding with a QuikClot sponge he’d pulled from his medical kit.
With loud bangs a half-second apart, the two grenades exploded. There were screams from the enemy fighters as the shrapnel hit them. The white phosphor was worse, exploding outward in a cloud of burning chemicals that stuck to the skin and kept burning all the way down to the bone.
Britta pulled her pistol and popped up again, firing into the small clearing where the enemy fighters had fallen. None returned fire. Their AK-47s lay on the ground near their owners, who were maimed, burning, bleeding or all three. She vaulted the log and rushed towards them, killing each man in turn with a double-tap to the head.
Now she ran back to Gabriel. His face was white and his lips were drawn back from his teeth.
“Help me with the field dressing,” he said, grunting rather than speaking.
Britta unravelled the bandage and wound it tight round his thigh, holding the QuikClot sponge in place against the wound. He drew in a sharp breath through his clenched teeth. She checked the other side of his leg.
“No exit wound. Round’s still in there. Fuck!”
“We need to go,” he said. “Get me up.”
Britta shouldered her SA80, bending to grab his arms and pull him to his feet. He pulled upwards and transferred his weight to his good leg. Gingerly, he put some weight on the right and almost collapsed, biting back a scream as the pain intensified. Blood squelched out round the edges of the clotting sponge and through the dressing, running over the pale skin of his leg and into his boot.
In the distance, they could hear shouts and gunfire. More fighte
rs. More Kalashnikovs. More machetes. More trouble.
With Britta supporting him, Gabriel was able to limp along. Their progress was agonisingly slow. The undergrowth was thick and Britta had to slash at it with her parang every few steps to clear a path he could negotiate. Even with the razor-sharp blade, it was sluggish going, and the enemy fighters were getting closer.
“Wait,” Gabriel said, pulling Britta to a stop. “We won’t outrun them. Not with me like this. I’ll hold them down and you go. Whatever happens, Don can pull you out.”
Her blue eyes flashed. “Fuck you, Wolfe! I’m not leaving you. We’ll fight these fuckers off, then I’m getting you out of here or we’ll go down together. OK?”
Gabriel nodded, his mouth set in a grim line of determination and pain. “Over there,” he said, and pointed to a clump of tree ferns with fat brown trunks covered in scales of tough, hairy bark.
Britta half-dragged, half-carried him to the ferns and they flopped behind them, backs to the trunks.
With a grunt of effort, he unshouldered his own SA80 and pulled back the cocking lever.
“How are you for ammunition?”
She patted the bandolier that ran diagonally across her chest. “Got three clips. Thirty rounds. How about you?”
“Five. Plus whatever’s in the mag.”
“We’ve got maybe ninety rounds between us then. SIG?”
“Two full mags and a handful loaded.”
“I’ve got one spare, one just loaded. MP5?”
“Out. Dumped it.”
“Me too.”
“It’s going to be tight.”
Britta swiped the back of her hand across her high forehead then pulled the plait of copper-red hair straight out from the back of her head. “When was it ever not?”
A burst of automatic fire shredded the foliage of the ferns as somebody opened up with an AK-47.
Britta and Gabriel rolled away from each other onto their bellies and shimmied sideways along the ground like crabs, taking up firing positions on each side of the clump of ferns.
“Come out, British cowards. Die like men,” a voice called from about thirty yards away. Its owner sounded like he was laughing. “Or we can come and get you. You can eat your own balls while we watch, if you like.”
“British?” Britta mouthed at Gabriel.
“Balls?” he mouthed back, grinning despite his wound as adrenaline neutralised the worst of the pain.
Gabriel looked into Britta’s eyes and she nodded. An old, familiar signal.
The man who’d issued the threat went down with half his head missing as a three-round burst from Gabriel’s SA80 hit him in the face. Three other militiamen rushed forward, AKs held at their hips, set to full auto and spraying bullets at Gabriel and Britta.
Britta hit the leftmost man in the groin, doubling him over and leaving him screaming in the mud. The centre and right-hand men swerved, only to be caught by a long burst from Gabriel. The burst took them both in the torso, tearing great holes through their bodies, smashing and liquefying internal organs before exiting from their backs in showers of blood, bone and tissue.
Gabriel was starting to believe they might, just, get out of the unholy shitstorm they’d got themselves into. But then a sound he hated almost more than any other shattered the calm that had descended: a booming, thudding, and very, very loud, automatic weapon had opened up from way back beyond their last position.
A “Dushka”.
The DShK heavy machine gun, Soviet-manufactured, didn’t kill you so much as obliterate you. Its makers had designed it to take out materiel rather than people, and its 12.7 mm calibre rounds would put a football-sized hole through anything softer than armour plating.
Whoever was behind the Dushka had them pinned down and was methodically chopping away at the tree ferns. Huge umbrellas of leaves tumbled from the tops of the ferns and fell to cover Britta and Gabriel. As the Dushka’s rounds crashed into the trunks, they tore out lumps of wood that fragmented into lethal shards sharper than the best tactical knives.
“Switch to single-shot!” Gabriel shouted.
Britta nodded again and Gabriel knew she understood: if they were to stand any chance against the remaining fighters advancing on them, they had to take out the Dushka.
Gabriel knew Britta was the better shot of the two of them, and had completed a sniper course in her Swedish Special Forces training. He could see her listening hard, trying to pin down the position of the heavy machine gun. Gabriel peered through the broken fern fronds, trying to identify the firing path of the rounds still smashing into the trees in front of him.
They both reached the same conclusion. The shooter was off to their right, two o’clock. Probably standing in the bed of a pickup, Gabriel thought. A Toyota Hilux, or a Land Cruiser if they had a bit more cash. That would put his head about ten feet off the ground, and his torso and the Dushka maybe two feet below that.
Gabriel closed one eye and sighted down the SA80’s barrel, aligning the iron sights on an imaginary machine gunner. He tightened his finger on the trigger and squeezed, slowly and steadily as his gunnery instructors in the SAS had taught him, until the rifle almost seemed to fire itself. The 5.56 mm round tore into the trees. The Dushka kept firing, pouring red-hot, copper-jacketed lead into the rapidly diminishing cover hiding Gabriel and Britta.
Now Britta began firing, too. She was systematic. One round high, one low, one to the left, one to the right. The Dushka kept firing.
Then it stopped. Gabriel’s heart leapt. She’d done it! The super-Swede had actually taken out a Dushka that was completely invisible.
The roar of the heavy machine gun was replaced with taunts.
“Come out, pussies!” one voice called, a high-pitched giggle following the words.
“We’re going to fuck you up bad, man. Yes we are,” called another, deeper voice.
“Take your heads into Maputo and go bowling,” yelled a third.
Then the Dushka started up again, only now its deep, bass roar was joined by the excitable chatter of three AK-47s being fired in unison and in full expectation of a quick victory. The shooters burned through their magazines in a matter of seconds and had to stop to reload.
In the gap, Britta squeezed off another six rounds in quick succession. There was a scream. One more down.
But the enemy were still firing, even though they’d lost a man.
There was a slashing rustle ahead of the tree ferns. Someone had cut their way through the undergrowth into the small clearing. Gabriel risked a look. A tall, grinning man stood there, machete in his left hand, Kalashnikov held by the pistol grip in his right. Gold teeth glinted across the front of his mouth. A single round from Gabriel’s Glock put him out of action, his heart smashed by the 9 mm Parabellum round that left a gaping exit wound big enough to put a fist into.
“How’re you doing?” he whispered to Britta. She didn’t reply.
He looked over.
Britta Falskog was lying on her back. Her eyes were closed. Blood was running down her forehead, obscuring the freckles that spattered her face like caramel-coloured snowflakes.
Gabriel crawled over to her and pulled up her right eyelid. The eye was rolled back in its socket. He bent to her chest and listened for a heartbeat. Couldn’t hear one. Put his ear to her nose. No breath either.
“Britta!” he whispered hoarsely. “Come on!”
He knelt astride her and began thumping her chest. Not the interlaced fingers of TV medical dramas. These were full-power punches that would crack ribs. He leaned forward, pinched her nose and covered her mouth with his own before blowing fiercely into her, trying to put breath back into her lungs.
“Too late, my friend,” a voice said from above him.
He looked up into a brown face, cut with dozens of V-shaped scars on both cheeks. The man grinned, revealing a double
row of gold incisors. Then he drew a pistol.
2
Packing List
ONE MONTH EARLIER – 27 NOVEMBER
“THIS is straight from the horse’s teeth?” Britta Falskog asked.
The line was crackling with static and her voice kept wobbling as if she were underwater, but Gabriel heard her well enough.
“It’s ‘mouth’ not ‘teeth’ and yes it is. I just came home straight from Downing Street. Barbara Sutherland as good as said I can go back to Mozambique to retrieve Smudge’s remains, assuming I can find him.”
“Couldn’t you just go on your own, as a private citizen?”
“Of course I could. But then I’d have no logistical support, no back-up if things got hairy, and most important of all, no access to military records. How would I find out where we’d been extracted from? No, this is much better. I’m going to find him, Britta.”
“Oh, Gabriel, that is such a result.”
“I know. It’s just an in-principle ‘yes’ at the moment. I need to talk to Don, see what the deal is with equipment and support.”
He took a sip from the glass of chilled Meursault on the kitchen counter, savouring the taste – flint and peach – as it rolled down his throat.
“So you’re in Salisbury now, yes?”
“For the foreseeable future. I haven’t got any projects coming up and I really need a break. I was thinking of seeing that guy Fariyah Crace recommended, Richard Austin.”
“Fariyah. She’s your shrink, right?”
“That’s right. She said he’s done a ton of work with PTSD sufferers.”
“Wow! You’re happy to say it. That’s a big change.”
Another sip, larger this time.
“It is. But I can feel it. You know? I can feel there’s a chance to put things right. For Smudge. For me, too.”
“I wish I could be there.”