Vendetta

by Nick Oldham

Overview

George never meant to kill the thief – he was just defending his shop from the jacked up kids trying to rob him. Break the kid's jaw maybe, but not kill him. Later the doorbell rings and in revenge the gang swarm into George's house, beat him senseless, rape his wife, tie them up and set fire to them.

It isn't long before Jimmy Vickers, George's son, is on the trail of the gang who murdered his parents, exacting his own kind of chillingly brutal justice. Jimmy is an interrogation specialist for the military in Afghanistan who knows more than he should. With the police closing in and his own regiment also determined to stop him, the body count mounts up. Jimmy creates a media frenzy - London's first vigilante of the 21st Century - but will his devastating course of action spell the end for the woman he loves?

Product Details

BN ID:	2940148871781
Publisher:	Caffeine Nights Publishing
Publication date:	11/27/2013
Sold by:	Draft2Digital
Format:	eBook
File size:	531 KB

About the Author

Nick Oldham was born in April 1956 in a house in the tiny village of Belthorn up on the bleak Lancashire moors high above Blackburn. After spending a depressing year working in a bank, he joined Lancashire Constabulary at the age of nineteen in 1975 and served in many operational postings around the county. Most of his service was spent in uniform, but the final ten years were spent as a trainer and a manager in police training. He retired in 2005 at the rank of inspector.

Nick had always fancied being a writer – mainly because he thought that a writer’s lifestyle would suit him (and blame Ian Fleming here, for spending the first few months of each year writing the Bond books in Jamaica). He began writing seriously  in the early 1980’s having some success with short stories, and winning a competition for which the first prize was lunch with his literary hero, Dick Francis. After a few more years of trying – and failing - to get a novel published, Nick eventually found success with A Time for Justice which was to become the first in a series of novels featuring DCI Henry Christie which now stands at twenty books.

He now writes full time and lives on the outskirts of Preston with his partner, Belinda and occasionally gets the chance to write on a beach.

Read an Excerpt

PROLOGUE

CAMP BASTION, AFGHANISTAN.

Jimmy Vickers checked and loaded his Sig Sauer P226 pistol, then slid it into the holster on his right hip. He picked up his mug of steaming hot tea and walked across to the door of his office, yawning, rolling his shoulders.
He was ready for home. Just a few more days and he and his gear would be climbing aboard the C17 Transporter plane and once the always hair-raising take off had been accomplished, he would settle himself down, let his body become simpatico with the powerful drum of the aircraft engines and he would probably have the deepest, longest sleep he’d managed in the past six months. When he awoke he would be back in England. Home.
However, there was still work to be done out here. Another few days to go, and this was the first of them as he stood at 3.05am, rubbing his face, lounging by the door at the top of the short flight of wooden steps of his raised, prefabricated office, once again taking in the hum of life that was Camp Bastion. A city on its own, built by Royal Engineers from nothing in the unforgiving terrain of Afghanistan in Helmand Province. It now operated twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, without fail, and had been doing so for over six years.
Jimmy sipped his tea. It was strong and sweet and tasted amazing, probably the most appreciated drink consumed by the British Army. A pint or two of lager at the finish of a long, dusty op was good, necessary, but tea was the mainstay, a complex make up of chemicals that had a calming yet revitalising effect on the human body.
Ask any mum. As he took another sip, Jimmy thought of his own doting mother. He was eager to see her again and be overwhelmed by her chatter that was like being fired at by a Gatling gun, but which Jimmy loved and could endure for hours. Like most soldiers out here, what kept him going was the knowledge that back home there was something solid, people back there who cared and thought of him every hour. And he was eagerly anticipating a pint with his dad down at The Wolf.
Then, of course, there was Morgan … Jimmy frowned, sipped some more of his tea and looked across the glowing cupola of unnatural light in the desert that was Bastion, his home for many months. Once again, he found himself in awe of the ‘can-do’ attitude of the British Army which, in spite of facing constant cutbacks, staff reductions and, obviously, the enemy, still ‘did’.
Built in 2006, Bastion was four miles long, two miles wide, in a remote desert area northwest of Lashkar Gah, which was the capital of Helmand Province. Helmand, a name now well known by viewers of the TV news in the UK as an area where, tragically, too many young soldiers had died while serving their country in what appeared to be a fruitless, unwinnable war against the Taliban.
Jimmy Vickers could quote every known fact about Bastion, including that it was supposed to be the safest place in Afghanistan – but that had been proved woefully wrong in September 2012, when the camp was attacked by fifteen Taliban fighters, dressed in US Army uniforms, when two US marines were killed and some aircraft were destroyed. The Taliban had also admitted that one of their targets had been Prince Harry, who was serving in Afghanistan at the time.
Jimmy had been involved in a brutal four hour firefight with the attackers, during which fourteen of the insurgents were killed and a fifteenth injured and captured.
After two days of intensive interrogation by Jimmy, the prisoner revealed that a further attack on Bastion was already underway. A combined strike force of British and US Special Forces ambushed a group of Taliban fighters near Lashkar Gah and slotted every one of them, leaving twenty dead, their blood seeping into the sand.
That had been one of Jimmy’s finest moments – and his Colonel, a gruff bear of a man named Leach, cynically passed on thanks from the highest level of the UK government for his work in ‘extracting’ the information from the injured man that had ultimately saved many lives of the coalition forces. The memory of his right forefinger probing into the man’s gunshot wound in his bicep, just above his right elbow, searching out sheared nerve endings, squeezing them hard and hearing the man’s blood-curdling screams for mercy would linger with Jimmy for many a year.
Since then, security at Bastion had been re-thought and re-worked. But Jimmy knew that no fortress was impregnable, especially against an enemy as dedicated and cunning as the Taliban.
He flicked the dregs of his first brew of the day onto the gritty ground and stepped back into his office, where the temperature reading inside was a bearable twenty-two degrees. Later that day it would soar to forty-five. Not the hottest it had ever been, but still fucking hot.
He was due to go out on patrol later that day – airlifted by Chinook helicopter to an area forty miles north-east of Bastion, where Intel was that a village had become an Al-Qaeda hideout. This was Intel that Jimmy had put together from a number of sources, and he wanted to be there on the ground to check its veracity – and be part of the op to flush them out if they were there.
He wasn’t due to leave for another two hours. What he wanted to do in the meantime was analyse some further Intel and satellite photographs that had just come in about the area. It was his intention to be a shiny-arsed desk jockey for an hour before prepping himself for the off.
He sat down and unfolded a large-scale map of the area, cross-checking references on his laptop and enlarging the satellite images, his eyes squinting thoughtfully at them.
It all looked pretty sound to Jimmy, who was eager to get moving and get it over with. This was probably his last deployment before home, unless something untoward happened.
He leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head, let the office chair tilt and crossed his ankles on the desk.
‘Jeez, so it is feckin’ true,’ came the coarse Scottish accent of Mickey Burton, one of Jimmy’s colleagues in the very specialist department in which he worked. ‘You really are a lazy-arsed DJ. Always feckin’ suspected it.’
Jimmy turned and gazed sceptically at Burton standing in the office door. Burton had become one of his closest friends over the years. He was a big brute of a man – on the outside. He could be brash and nasty unless he was dealt with correctly and to Jimmy’s knowledge, only two people had that skill: Jimmy himself and Colonel Leach. However, underneath that veneer, Burton had a sharp, calculating brain which made him a great gatherer and analyst of information and intelligence – and a cold-blooded interrogator of persons he suspected had killed, or knew of others who had killed or planned to kill, British soldiers.
‘It’s my dream to have an office like this,’ Jimmy said.
‘And lo-and-behold, yer fecking dream has come true,’ Burton said.
‘I kinda really thought up the top of the Pineapple in London, though.’
‘Ahhh – doin’ what? Ye’d feckin’ hate it, Jim me lad.’
‘I know, I know … but a guy can dream, ey?’
Burton was kitted out in his full combat gear, desert fatigues. He was joining a squad of Duke of Lancaster Regiment boys due to set out on patrol in about half an hour. Jimmy could hear voices outside as they prepared for a walk which could either be the most boring hot day of their lives, or the worst. Jimmy hoped the former. Boring was good. The DLR lads were to be accompanied by a unit of ten Afghan soldiers who had been training with them and were proving their worth nicely, thank you.
Jimmy had not been involved in vetting the Afghans, but he was aware the reports about this particular unit were positive. They had stepped up to the mark during several clashes with insurgents and done their share of killing. It looked as though they were going to be okay, which to be fair, the majority of them were.
Unless, as Jimmy warned constantly about such soldiers, they were playing the long game.
He remained deeply suspicious of all home-grown troops, but realised the necessity of training them up alongside British and US Army personnel. He tried to keep an open mind and not judge them too harshly, because the good ones, by joining forces with the coalition, put themselves and their families under intense pressure and danger.
It was not unknown for an Afghan soldier to return home on leave to discover his family, even his whole village, had been murdered, the buildings razed to the ground by the Taliban.
Not easy, Jimmy conceded.
That day, Burton was going along with them to see what Intel he could glean from a nearby village that had been a hotbed of Taliban activity recently. The patrol was scheduled for somewhere in the region of six hours in the boiling sun. A tough, dehydrating day – and always the possibility that one or more of them would come back by helicopter in a body bag.
‘Seems they’ve come for me,’ Burton said, glancing out of the office, seeing the DLR patrol mustering.
‘Hey, remember – look left, ’cos they drive on the right,’ Jimmy said. Their little warning ritual meaning ‘watch your back’. Burton crossed over to Jimmy, swept his feet off the desk, and they shook hands as Jimmy rocked forward. Burton turned and left the office, bawling as he stepped onto the threshold, ‘Now me feckin’ little lovelies, your hero is amongst you.’
Jimmy grinned, sat forward.
A moment later he heard the devout shout, ‘Allahu Akhbar’ – God is great.
And the first shot was fired as the long game culminated that morning.
Jimmy’s head spun at the first dull ‘thuck’ of an SLR rifle being fired. And then the world slowed right down, even though everything was really happening at a million miles per hour.
At the door, Mickey Burton’s head exploded. Jimmy was convinced he saw the round enter the top of his friend’s head and remove a quarter of his skull cap and the left side of his face. Burton staggered backwards, arms flailing. He crashed and tipped over one of the office chairs.
Jimmy dropped behind his desk as four rounds smashed through the thin prefab walls. He rolled across the floor, drawing his Sig as he went, coming up onto one knee by Burton’s body. Incredibly, Jimmy saw that Mickey’s chest was still rising and falling.
More gunfire. More shouts of alarm.
Jimmy forward-rolled to the office door, bobbed his head out and saw mayhem, but his quick eyes and brain read everything instantly.
Five Taliban infiltrators, masquerading as loyal soldiers of the Afghan army who had successfully ingratiated themselves deep to lull the British into a false sense of security, were unloading their weapons into the unsuspecting DLR lads and members of the Afghan Army. Three Brits fell as Jimmy watched, others dived for cover, returning fire. Screams, shouts, running, bodies everywhere, weapons being discharged. Chaos.
Jimmy swore.
One of the Taliban fell, clutching his chest.
Another dropped to one knee, bringing up his rifle and beading on the back of a running DLR soldier.
Jimmy shot him before he fired, catching him just below his ear, effectively removing the back of his neck. He fell, and the Brit soldier dived into cover, unhurt.
Another Taliban swung towards Jimmy, a machine pistol in his hands, firing as he rotated, smashing holes into the wall of the office building. Jimmy leapt out of the door, launched himself off the top step, hit the ground and rolled, firing as he went, catching him in the right shoulder, spinning him back as the joint exploded sickeningly.
Jimmy came up on both knees.
Other soldiers were pouring onto the scene, trying to make sense of it.
But the two remaining Taliban were about to conclude their suicide mission. They stood back to back and ripped their tunics open, revealing the bombs strapped to their waists. Then they turned to face and embrace each other and screamed simultaneously, ‘Allahu Akhbar’ in what looked like a pre-planned, rehearsed move.
Jimmy saw what was coming.
He yelled a warning, then scrambled for the prefab and threw himself underneath it as the bombs detonated. The blast was deafening and the force of it flung Jimmy along the ground. His hearing went, his vision blurred and the force of it felt like ten people had kicked him in the side, at the same time as hurling buckets of pebble-dashing over him.
But he was alive and although his head swam and felt like he was holding it in a fish tank, he didn’t allow himself to linger and recover. He was a soldier – and knew he had to move. He dragged himself from under the cabin, unsteady on his feet, his brain swirling, but still knowing exactly what had happened. In the rising dust and debris and in a crater made by the blast, he saw that the lower halves of the two Taliban suicide bombers were actually intact. Their upper halves, from the waist up, had been completely obliterated by the explosion. Further away he saw two more bodies and more soldiers running onto the scene.
Jimmy knew then it was all over. Now it was a case of saving lives.
And Mickey Burton had still been breathing despite the horrendous head wound.
He stood swaying, slightly off balance, his ears pounding. He looked at the front of his office and saw that it had been destroyed, the front wall blown away, nothing but matchsticks, dust and papers. He could not see his desk, but he knew that Burton was underneath the debris. He rushed up the steps and began scraping the mess away with his bare hands, digging through until he uncovered the top half of Burton’s body now caked in grit and sand.
Jimmy knelt down by his friend.
And God – he was still breathing, although the round had passed through the side of his head and removed a chunk of skull, out of which oozed his brain, a grey-red mushy mess.
‘You tough fucker,’ Jimmy said, easing his fingers of his right hand under the back of Burton’s head. ‘Medic!’ he yelled. ‘Fuckin’ medic.’ He leaned forwards and gently brushed the dust and grit away from Burton’s face with his free hand, aware suddenly of the sensation of holding Burton’s brain in the palm of his right hand, warm, wet, soft. Burton’s eyes were open. ‘C’mon you Scottish twat, you fuckin’ stay with me, you fuckin’ stay with me.’ Jimmy twisted and shouted, ‘Medic’ again, then back to Burton he whispered, ‘You fuckin’ stay with me, got that?’
Burton’s eyes seemed to focus on Jimmy’s face. Then they milked over and became sightless and his chest heaved for the last time.
Leach had to pull Jimmy away. He was still screaming for the medics and applying CPR to him when the Colonel rushed up behind him and saw what was happening.
‘Vickers, Vickers, he’s dead man, dead,’ Leach said, hauling Jimmy up under the armpits and dragging him away from the body to let in a medical crew. ‘He’s dead, James … you gotta let him go, man,’ Leach said.
Jimmy looked down at his blood-soaked hands and arms.

***

Two hours later, he walked numbly into Leach’s office and sat down opposite his boss, who regarded him thoughtfully.
Leach could see some psychological cracks in Jimmy, but there wasn’t the time to address these now – or ever, maybe. For the moment, there was business to be done.
‘The Taliban you shot in the shoulder … still alive, being treated in the hospital as we speak.’
Jimmy raised his eyes.
‘He and his fellow Taliban fooled us for a long, long time – and because of that, six good British soldiers and two loyal Afghan servicemen have been murdered in cold blood today.’
Jimmy said nothing, but inside, something surged.
‘At present there are over two hundred Afghan soldiers billeted with us at Bastion and the fear is that more infiltrators will be among them. I want you to speak to the injured man and extract any information he has about those others embedded. We think there’s a good chance he has this knowledge.’
A light came on in Jimmy’s eyes, a reaction noted by Leach.
‘I appreciate what you’ve just been through, Vickers, but although time is of the essence, I do need you to maintain some objectivity in your task … so channel your emotions into that and use any methods you have at your disposal. I don’t need to tell you, you know the limits.’
Jimmy nodded, started to rise from the chair.
‘And just for the record, I, too, am devastated by what happened to Mickey Burton. He was a good soldier, a valuable member of this team and a good friend.’
‘Amen,’ Jimmy thought.

***

Jimmy Vickers could not differentiate between the sources of the pounding. Was it in his head, or was it the rifle butts smashing at the door of the hospital store room? Was it the blood pulsating through his temples or the crashing of the feet of the soldiers trying to kick down the door?
Whichever, he would never know.
What was for certain was that he had dragged the injured Taliban from his hospital bed, the drip stands crashing around him as the needles were ripped out of his veins, blood spitting everywhere, the blood pressure and heartbeat monitors dragged off their stands as Jimmy tore the pads off the man’s chest and then, not even hearing the petrified screaming of the nurses and the shouted orders of the doctors, Jimmy had physically dragged him down a corridor and into a store room which he locked from the inside, and then barricaded himself in – with his prisoner.
As an opener, Jimmy had turned on the frightened man, pulled the dressing off the shoulder wound and inserted his right thumb deep into the bullet hole, through flesh and muscle, grinding the end of it on the shoulder socket, finding the nerves, making the man shriek.
‘Talk to me, you fucker, talk to me,’ Jimmy growled.
And he did.
The next certain thing was that before the soldiers managed to burst through the door and clamber over the barricade, their weapons aimed at Jimmy, the Taliban lay dead at his feet.
But the pounding, pulsating noise continued.

***

Jimmy woke with a start, cradling his head, allowing the noise to subside. He opened his eyes, looked around his cell. Swinging his legs out, he sat up on the metal framed camp bed.
‘Shit,’ he breathed and walked over to the toilet, scooping out some water from the bowl and dousing himself. He was steaming hot and sweat poured from him.
It was his second week in custody, and the preliminary hearing before his elders and betters was due to take place later today. Despite the manoeuvrings and influence of Colonel Leach, Jimmy’s future was very much in the balance, because what had happened to the Taliban warrior had happened in public, and his unit was struggling to control things because other people – doctors, nurses, orderlies, other soldiers – were involved.
Jimmy had lost it through grief, taken it one step too far, and now too many people were in the loop, nit picking, demanding answers, asking questions, and it was becoming an embarrassing bureaucratic nightmare – and because of all that, Jimmy had clammed up, said nothing, refused to divulge anything the Taliban had admitted to him.
He heard the key turn in the cell door.
It opened; Colonel Leach stood there, his frame virtually filling the door. This was the man who had been Jimmy’s father figure and mentor, who had developed Jimmy’s skills and character and was also ruthless in their use.
Jimmy knew it was only 4am. He didn’t have a watch, but the rhythms of Camp Bastion were ingrained in him and he could tell the time just from the feel of the day.
‘Boss?’ Jimmy said, frowning. Leach had been to see him numerous times over the past two weeks – but never at four in the morning.
The dark expression on Leach’s normally implacable countenance told Jimmy this was not one of those routine visits.

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