Constanta
“Nothing.” Murat Nagpal sat back from the laptop.
Sikand shook his head angrily, “How much longer?” Murat knew Azat had never been one for patience, for planning, for care.
“My brother will come,” a clean-shaven and much recovered Sergei Ebrahimi muttered across the small internet cafe’s grimy table.
Nagpal wasn’t so sure but this wasn’t the best place or time for speculating. “There is no indication that anything has befallen him. We have been static, and undisturbed, in this location for some time. The stupid infidels do not know where we are. They have lost us.
“We are reasonably comfortable here. Frustrating though it might be, we will wait for our comrade to rejoin us. One more week, then we’ll review.”
“He will come,” Sergei insisted.
Azat glared at the younger man and Murat knew what that look meant. He’d seen it before. He needed to find something to keep his soldier busy, and he needed to find it soon. Otherwise, he suspected, he’d likely wake up one morning and find his resources even more depleted.
If the younger Ebrahimi was gone, then he could ill afford to lose the older one as well.
~~~~~
‘The Barn’, near Göd, Hungary
Jack slammed his magazine home and raised the fully reassembled Browning toward Nick. But Nick was already facing him, standing in a perfect firing position: side on, gun extended toward Jack’s face, the other hand steadying his forearm. “Nice,” he said, and lowered his own weapon.
Nick had elected, from the wide cache of weapons available, to train using an L9A1 Browning, the same choice as Jack, and he had enjoyed watching his new comrade learning, the hard way, to avoid getting his hand bitten by its hammer. Jack knew there was another military-spec one in the cache, whose burr hammer would be less prone to nibbling viciously at the flap of flesh between thumb and forefinger. Given today’s impressive display of disassembly and reassembly, he’d root it out for him. It’d have a lighter trigger pull too.
They were standing in the middle of a sizeable barn which, in turn, stood next to a broad patch of woodland a few kilometres into the countryside to the east of Göd. From the outside, the barn appeared innocuous, ramshackle even. Just another abandoned shed in a field. Inside was a different matter. A separate, secure, internal shell had been constructed and the interior was equipped for training including weights-machines, fighting mats, punchbags, straw-men, equipment maintenance tools, and a workbench. The forest outside concealed a hidden hatch to a small buried concrete bunker. Jack hated having to go into it, but the lure of the location’s comprehensive arsenal, hidden therein, helped him muster sufficient motivation to bully past his phobia. Handguns and personal weapons were permitted at the apartment. Everything else stayed here until needed.
“Looks like you’re buying then,” Nick rumbled.
Even for a bulky bloke his voice was surprisingly deep. He spoke only in fragments, almost coughing the words out, and Jack couldn’t help but visualise a nightclub bouncer he’d once found himself befriending near the barracks in Tidworth. It wasn’t a job Jack would fancy: being a bouncer at a nightclub frequented by soldiers... Not the easiest job in the world...
“What next?” Nick interrupted his thoughts.
Jack hadn’t been sure how he’d react to having another agent assigned to him. He’d been on his own for a long time. He didn’t really welcome having to take, even small, responsibility for another soul. Not again.
Fortunately, Nick appeared to be as f*cked-up as he was.
One more, super fast, beer in that tiny backstreet bar – Jack hadn’t wanted to linger, or draw attention to his dislike of enclosures – had somehow morphed into a five a.m. stumbling ramble back to the flat and a complete loss of much of the next day to sledgehammer hangovers. The intervening days had been more professional, though the nights had become an unbroken sequence of friendly alcohol consumption sessions. He’d missed having social company. Nick didn’t say much, but what he did say made it clear he was going to be trustworthy if they found themselves in a corner. Call it chemistry or something, but Jack liked him.
More than that, Nick had a lot of skill. Jack had been roundly battered when they’d first tried unarmed combat, and the student had rapidly become the master of the floor mats. His hand-eye coordination was spectacular and Jack had watched, awestruck, when Nick had collected his pack from the railway station left-luggage lockups and unpacked both his stiletto-rig and, even more impressive, Vengeance.
The composite bow had looked like some random Meccano kit when Nick had peeled back the soft bundle on the apartment’s wooden kitchen table. He’d then watched the big man’s hands deftly assemble one of the most complexly beautiful killing devices he’d ever seen.
“Does it work?” he’d foolishly asked at the time.
“I’ll make some arrows and show you,” Nick had replied.
“Make?”
“In pieces it’s transportable,” Nick explained. “Arrows aren’t so easy. They can draw too much attention.”
A few hours in the barn, at the workbench, had yielded several steel-shafted arrows. A few minutes in the woods saw these violently impaled into three plump pigeons – two of which were on the wing – and a few hours later the carrion were sat on a plate in front of him.
Yep. His new buddy could cook too.
The local burger shops would be struggling to replace his trade.
“Come on, buddy,” he said to his waiting partner. “Let’s go and find you a better gun.”
~~~~~
Constanta
Azat Sikand stormed into the flat and slammed the door behind him. “We can’t keep this up much longer,” he stormed. “It’s time to get out of this shit-hole, and go home!”
Murat Nagpal sat impassive, on one of the old battered chairs, amongst the litter of the small derelict flat. He knew that they had to move on at some point. He also knew that they couldn’t go home. Not for a while. The heathen Turkmen political leadership were still kowtowing to the infidels. Friends there had privately confirmed that they were still subject to intense scrutiny from the security forces. Going home would prove disastrous.
Ebrahimi jumped up from his threadbare mattress. “You go, Azat!” he shouted. “I’m sick of the sight of you! Leave me. I’ll wait.”
Sikand struck like a coiled viper, grabbing the young man by the throat with one arm and propelling him backward across the room until he slammed into the mildewed wall with such force that a lump of damp plaster broke loose and tumbled to the floor from above Sergei’s shoulder.
“Enough!” Nagpal barked.
Sikand raised his other fist.
“Enough!” he repeated. “Stand down, soldier!”
Sikand turned his head and Murat felt the force of his furious glare across the space.
“Stand down, Azat,” he said carefully. “I’ve got a job for you.”
“You can stick your job up an old-goat’s butt-hole. I want out of here.”
“We can’t abandon Jeyhun,” Sergei protested from the wall.
Nagpal waited patiently until Sikand reluctantly let go of the younger man. “Good,” he said in response to the momentary armistice. “The boy may well have forgotten the alternative meeting place, or perhaps failed to get the Icarus message? Sergei can stay with me so we can keep watch, and continue to alternate our daily visits to the Cazinoul building. Azat, I want you to go to the original rendezvous. Check in with our friends there. Make sure they are behaving. If the boy is there, then collect him and return here.”
“I’ll go,” said Sergei.
“No,” Murat asserted. “Azat will go. His Hungarian is better than yours and he needs a change of scenery. We cannot continue to monitor Cazinoul without being able to swap the duty between more than one of us. The sea front is becoming busier as the weather improves, but it will be some months until crowds build up to a point which would allow us to blend in easily with them.”
Sikand frowned angrily, “We’d better not still be here in summer.”
“We won’t be,” Murat continued. “But, until then, we must remain cautious.”
Sikand stepped back and walked ignorantly onto Ebrahimi’s mattress, grabbed the young man’s rucksack, and emptied it roughly onto the floor at his feet.
“Hey!” yelled Sergei.
“Your pack is better than mine,” the tall thug growled. “Want to try to stop me?”
Murat said nothing. Best to let Azat satisfy his petty need for small victory and dominance. What difference does a backpack make anyway?
~~~~~