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  The shots fired, Zena had already turned her gun towards Jack and Alex. So had the two Mossad men standing on the larger boat right behind her.

  “Now which of you two wants the next bullet,” she asked coldly.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Alex had sensed that it was coming, but that didn’t make their situation any better.

  “It’s the document, isn’t it,” he said, looking up at Zena.

  She nodded.

  “I was on the team from the start to make sure you retrieved the document, and then to make sure you died on the way home. Nobody can see that document and stay alive. You must have realised that as soon as you read it.”

  “Nice work,” said Alex bitterly.

  She smiled. “We’re not here to make conversation. Who wants the first bullet?”

  Jack looked at Alex, then Zena, then back at Alex again.

  The two men had only worked together for a few hours. But they had built up enough of an understanding to be able to communicate with just an exchange of glances. The message was clear enough. They were both dead men within a few seconds anyway. There was nothing to be lost by making a fight of it.

  “I’ll take it,” said Jack. “I always wanted to see what the next life was like.”

  Maybe he’s not so dumb after all, thought Alex. He’s guessed I’ve got a gun ready.

  Zena turned her Browning towards Jack. Just fifteen feet separated them across the boat. For a women with her kind of training, that was point blank range. She raised the gun so that it was aiming straight at his forehead. As she concentrated, Alex moved his right hand from his inside his sweatshirt, pressing on the trigger of the handgun in the same swift movement. One then two bullets pumped into the women, both hitting her in the ribcage. Even before the first bullet struck her, she’d fired her own gun, sending a bullet straight towards Jack. But the noise and the suddenness of Alex’s attack had done just enough to disturb the accuracy of the shot, and the round disappeared harmlessly somewhere into the Mediterranean.

  She fell backwards, and splashed into the water.

  On the second vessel, the two Mossad men had opened up with a burst of fire from the Uzis. Round after round were smashing into the boat, sending a hail of splinters and ricocheting rounds spitting into the air.

  Both Alex and Jack dived for the floor of the boat. Alex grabbed The Colonel’s still warm corpse, and pulled it over them. Blood was dripping from his wounds, seeping into their clothes, but the body made a makeshift shield, absorbing the bullets that collided with it. “Get the bloody engine started,” hissed Alex. “I’ll hold them….”

  A wave rose up. The boat crashed forwards, and as the prow of the vessel rose up, they were temporarily shielded from the gunfire. Alex dived out from the under The Colonel, and thrust his handgun out in front of him. One of the reasons the Browning was such a popular weapon with armies around the world was because its clip held thirteen rounds rather than the standard six or eight. In a tight corner, it could deliver a longer burst of continuous fire. And that was precisely what Alex needed right now. As the vessel crashed down on the other side of the wave, the two Mossad guys were clearly in his sites. Alex squeezed the trigger, and pumped round after round straight towards them. It was wild, uncoordinated fire, and with both vessels bouncing in the increasingly choppy seas, there was little chance of actually hitting them. But for a few brief seconds, it forced them to take cover.

  And to stop shooting.

  In those split seconds, Jack had enough time to start the engine.

  The Honda outboard roared to life, and with a sudden surge of power, the boat turned around and disappeared into the darkness of the Mediterranean.

  The last of the rounds fired, and the clip empty, Alex put away the gun. On the deck of the other vessel, the firing started up again. But they had already put a hundred yards between them and were moving further and further away with every second.

  “Welcome to Unit Five,” said Alex, looking across at Jack. “You just survived your first mission.”

  “Christ,” muttered Jack. He wiped the salty spray kicking up from the waves they were crashing through. “I don’t know how I am going to live through a year of this.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The lights of HMS Stanley were clearly visible just a few hundred yards away. Jack steered the boat towards it, and a few minutes later they were alongside the massive hull of the battleship, climbing up the ladder that one of the sailors had dropped down the side of the ship.

  Alex tucked the sheaf of documents under his sweatshirt and started to climb on board. They knew the co-ordinates of the ship, and even in the darkness it hadn’t been that hard to find with a compass. They Colonel’s body had been tossed into the sea. They knew that Zena had been placed on the mission to eliminate them. Greenway’s plan right from the start had been for them to retrieve the document, assassinate The Colonel, and then be killed by the Mossad. That way the entire record of the government’s past dealing with The Colonel would be wiped from the record forever. Alex had guessed as much when the cruise missile had gone into The Compound, which was why he’d been ready to retaliate when Zena had turned her gun on them. It was a set-up right from the start, he thought bitterly. And we walked straight into it.

  He pulled himself onto the deck, and looked forward. Greenway and Harford were walking straight towards them.

  Alex smiled.

  He’d thought about making a run for it. Unit Five wanted him dead, of that much he was certain. But there weren’t going to kill him right here on the HMS Stanley, not with a couple of hundred Royal Navy sailors to witness it. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life on the run. So long as he could convince them he hadn’t read the document, he should be okay.

  At least until the next mission.

  “Here,” said Alex as Greenway stood next to him. He produced the sheaf of documents, wrapped up in a waterproof pouch. “The Colonel is dead. And here are the documents. I’d say everything went according to plan….”

  Greenway took the documents.

  She was looking between Alex and Jack, her eyes questioning.

  “Did you….”

  “No,” said Alex firmly. “We haven’t read them.”

  “Good,” she answered crisply. “De-brief in twenty minutes.”

  “Hell, no,” said Jack. “We’re getting some rest now.”

  He looked across at Alex and grinned.

  The two men started to walk towards their quarters.

  “What the hell was in document?” asked Jack.

  Alex opened the door on the room, and lay back on the bunk bed exhausted. “You don’t want to know,” he said. “I don’t reckon anyone can read it and live.”

  Black Ops: El Dorado

  Matt Lynn

  Author’s Note

  Black Ops: Libya is the second in a new series of short thrillers designed as a cross between journalism and fiction. Each Black Ops story will be ripped straight from the headlines and written and published as events unfold. This story is inspired by reports in late 2011 that drugs cartels in Columbia were switching from cocaine cultivation to illegal gold mining but of course is entirely fictitious. No resemblance is intended to any real person. Readers who enjoy this story might like to try my longer e-books, ‘Death Force’, ‘Fire Force’, ‘Shadow Force’ and ‘Ice Force’.

  - Matt Lynn, August, 2011

  Chapter One

  Alex Marden killed the engine on the boat. It was one-forty-five in the morning, the sea was calm, and only a light, warm breeze was drifting across the Caribbean.

  “Ready,” he asked, glancing across at Jack Rogan.

  Rogan looked towards the radar screen. The vessel they’d been tracking for the last five nautical miles was now just a thousand metres ahead of them. Close enough for them to steal up on it in a dinghy. “Sure this is going to work?”

  Alex grinned. The truth was, he wasn’t sure. On his SAS training courses, he’d been
taught that if you approached a moving vessel in its slipstream – right at the point where the engine kicked up a swell in the water – you were effectively invisible. It was the naval equipment of flying under the radar. Your opponent could neither see nor hear you.

  Or so it had been explained to him by the guys from the Special Boat Squadron.

  But he hadn’t done it himself.

  And that meant it was just theory.

  “I’m sure,” he replied crisply.

  “Then let’s do this,” said Jack. “And let’s hope to God that by morning we’re sitting on one of the Caribbean beaches with a glass of rum in one hand and blonde in the other.”

  “Brunette.”

  “Suit yourself pal.”

  “And a whisky to drink.”

  “Christ, there’s no pleasing some people.”

  Jack lowered the dark grey dinghy into the water. It was equipped with a Honda outboard engine, a pair of paddles to take them through the last few yards to the target, and all the weaponry they would need for the assault. A Bushmaster sniper rifle, Riegel night-vision goggles, a pair of SA-80 automatic rifles, a Browning Hi-Power pistol, one case of plastic explosives, and a collection of ropes and grappling hooks. Enough for a small war, reckoned Jack as he checked the equipment was safely secured to the side of the craft, and the ammunition waterproofed. Which is lucky. Because that is what we are about to kick off.

  “What’s keeping you man?” he snapped, looking up at Alex.

  Alex checked the location of their target one more time, then swung down into the dinghy. Jack had already kicked the outboard engine into life as Alex hit the deck

  “I thought Navy Seals did this kind of stuff all the time,” he said, looking around at Jack.

  “We’d drop in from a chopper,” grunted Jack. “We wouldn’t sneak up from behind.”

  He chuckled roughly to himself. “I guess that’s a British speciality.”

  Alex’s head was already down, and his hair was getting blown back in the wind. They were bouncing straight into the waves, and although the seas were far from rough tonight, in a vessel this size you felt the impact of each one. Some clouds were drifting across the sky, obscuring the half moon, and as it disappeared the sea suddenly felt very dark. Alex scanned the water ahead, but there was still no sign of their target. “How long?” he asked, looking back at Jack.

  “They are doing ten knots, maximum, we’re doing twenty. We’ll be on them in five minutes.”

  The mission was to intercept a cargo boat carrying cocaine from Columbia across the Caribbean and up to the United States. Unit Five, the top-secret NATO black-ops team for which Alex and Jack both worked, had been tracking the operation for weeks. The drugs were manufactured by a vicious warlord called Carlos Bilado, a rising power within Columbia’s infamous narcotics industry, carried by truck down to the sea, loaded onto the boat, then ferried across to the Florida coastline.

  The vessel could have been intercepted by the state or federal patrols that policed those waters.

  But Unit Five didn’t want that.

  They wanted to hit then out here in the ocean.

  Where there were no rules, no questions, and no reports to be written up afterwards.

  “Ready,” hissed Jack.

  He turned down the power on the Honda outboard, keeping it running, but reducing the noise to a minimum. Alex and Jack were tasked with storming the boat, and eliminating the crew. No prisoners, no survivors, those were the orders, and they would be obeyed to the letter. It was brutal work, more like being an executioner than a soldier reflected Alex. But that was the way Unit Five worked. It took the most desperate men NATO could find and gave them the most dangerous, difficult jobs. The work of the damned, thought Alex with a grim smile.

  “One minute, then I kill the engine.”

  The dinghy was powering forward, and already rocking in the swell of the vessel up ahead. It shape was just about visible through the spray kicked up from the waves all around them. Alex pulled the night-vision goggles over his face, and suddenly, in luminous green shades of light, he could see the target clearly. A medium-sized cargo vessel, about eighty feet long, the kind you’d see in any working port. It had a loading winch at the back, and bridge at the front. He could pick-up the shape and the heat from its engine on the screen in front of his eyes, but not much else. He searched for signs of a look-out but couldn’t see one. It was almost two in the morning, and even at this time of the night, a professionally run ship should have look-outs both stern and aft. Certainly with ten or twenty million dollars of cocaine stashed in the hold. But he couldn’t see one.

  Unprofessional.

  Maybe this will be easier than we expected.

  Let’s hope to hell it is.

  At two hundred yards, he could see something moving. A blob of red sliding across his screen. It took a moment for Alex to work out what it was, then he realised. Some guy having a cigarette on deck.

  Stupid, he thought.

  You might as well wear a target saying shoot me.

  “Wait until we’re fifty metres out,” growled Jack.

  Alex picked up the Bushmaster. The plan was for one man to fire at the guard on deck, whilst the second steered them close to the engines, so that they could storm the deck and deal with the men down below.

  “Steady her,” he muttered towards Jack.

  He held the gun tight to his shoulder. The dinghy was heading into the centre of the wake, where the turbulence of the water would drown out the noise of its engines as effectively as the silencer on a pistol. Water was spraying up on all sides and the craft bounced into the churning waves, soaking Alex’s face. He spat the salty liquid back into the sea. As looked up towards the ship, the red blob was pacing around in a tight circle, the cigarette still dangling from its lips.

  “Close enough,” hissed Jack. “Drop the bastard.”

  The Bushmaster was a high-precision sniper rifle, one of the best in the world, but even the most skilled of marksman would be challenged by the task of making an accurate shot from a dingy that was bouncing around in the wake of a powerful cargo engine. Alex trained the sights on the target, so that the first bullet would strike him in the chest. Shooting to the head was more deadly, but the chest was the bigger target, and he couldn’t take the chance of missing. If the crew was alerted to the attack before they were on board, they had no chance of successfully completing the assault. He steadied himself, waited for a moment when the dinghy stopped rocking, held his breath, then fired.

  The rifle kicked back against his shoulder as the bullet raced through the night sky. A wave hit the side of the dinghy, and Alex struggled to stay upright. As he looked up towards the deck, he could see the blob was down. But whether he was dead or just injured, he had no way of knowing.

  Hurt, anyway, and out of the fight. That was all that counted.

  “You shouldn’t smoke, pal,” muttered Alex. “Bad for your health. I’d never have seen you if it wasn’t for the ciggie in your mouth.”

  The roar of the propellers was deafening as they drew close to the stern of the ship, and the smell of diesel filled the air, choking Alex’s lungs. On either side of them waves six or seven feet high were rising up, splashing cascades of angry white water over both men.

  “Turn it around,” snapped Alex.

  They were just twenty feet from the propellers now. The dinghy was getting sucked towards them: any closer, and it would rip up the vessel, tossing both men into the water where they would be dragged onto the propellers and sliced to pieces like food in a mixer. The boarding technique involved turning the boat around, and blasting its engine up to full power, so that it kept you in position just a few yards from the stern.

  “Ready,” said Jack, as the manoeuvre was completed.

  Alex took a grabbling hook, and lunged forwards, throwing it up to the side of the boat. It locked into position. Behind him, Jack had thrown an aluminium ladder up. They’d agreed that Alex would go first, but Jack h
ad already shunted him out of the way, and was clambering along the metal frame. “What the hell are you waiting for?” he growled as he pushed forwards.

  Ditching the Bushmaster – they’d be no need for a high-precision rifle in the close-quarters fighting that lay ahead of them – Alex grabbed his SA-80 and started to climb. The ladder was rocking as the dinghy bounced up and down, but Jack had already pulled himself onto the deck, and was holding it steady. Alex kicked back with his heels and scrambled over the few remaining yards, and jumped down onto the deck.

  “Quiet,” hissed Jack. “You don’t want to wake up the whole boat.”

  Alex looked forward. The deck measured seventy feet up towards the bridge, with a lifeboat on the port side. Beside it, he could see a body lying crumpled on the ground, blood trickling from the side of his chest, and although he never liked to see a man down unless it was completely necessary, he couldn’t help but take some professional pride in the deadly accuracy of the shot he had fired from the dinghy.

  “The bridge,” said Jack, waving him forward.

  Alex gripped the SA-80, checked its mag was in place, and started to walk forwards. A light was on in the main cabin. Unit Five intelligence calculated there would be eight or nine men on board, but they’d never been right about anything before, and there was no point in expecting them to start now. Jack was walking up towards the window of the bridge, signalling to Alex to take a position outside its metal door. He placed his hand on its handle, waiting. Through the window, Jack opened up with a burst of rapid fire from his assault rife, smashing through the glass and delivering a lethal volley of fire straight into the two men inside. In the same instant, Alex flung open the door, dropped to his knees, and squeezed the trigger on his SA-80. There was no time to assess the situation, or even take aim. Just put as much lead into the room as quickly as possible. And hope that no emerged from the chaos alive.