Bullet Naked

Chris Page

Description

On the Pakistan border an American spy drone is brought down and captured. A heavily scarred young jihadist is sent to England to fly it into a special and important target and is picked up by the cameras at Heathrow. Mossad send a female agent to work with Albie on tracing the drone. She already has a bullet lodged just one millimetre from her spine that can't be removed, only treated.Two other jihadists are in England, one as a diversion and the other, a leader with his family, to bomb an equally important... and royal... target.Albie is involved in a massive shoot out at one target but no one knows about the other one.The country will be in flames if either succeeds.

Sujets

• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 14 juillet 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785382451
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
BULLET NAKED
By
Chris Page



Publisher Information
Bullet Naked
Published in 2015
by Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happening.
Copyright © 2015 Chris Page
The right of Chris Page to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.



Quote
‘The Duke returned from the wars today and did pleasure me in his top boots.’
Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, 1660-1744 - the wife of John Churchill 1st Duke of Marlborough and noted general



Albie Cork - The Life So Far
Name: Albert Cork. It would have been Albert Finney Cork because his mother liked the actor but his father was jealous and they had a row in the maternity hospital and compromised on plain Albert. He didn’t mind, nobody called him that anyway, apart from his mum when she was mad at him, which was all the time before his parents moved to Australia, where later they were executed by Japanese assassins looking to get at him.
Born: 31 October 1973. A Halloween baby and a Scorpio.
Education: Left school at sixteen a frustrated virgin with bugger-all qualifications and a love of football.
Family: One younger sister, Debbie, who moved to Australia with his now dead parents when he was seventeen. He stayed in a bedsit in Tottenham, chased girls and drank a lot of beer. Now lives in Ealing, London.
Work record: From age sixteen to twenty-three many menial jobs, all poorly paid. Then he joined the army.
Married: Twice, aged twenty-three and thirty-nine. No kids. The first one was a disaster, divorced after two years. His second wife was killed by an assassin’s bomb meant for him.
Military career: A disposal bombhead with fourteen years in an EODC (Explosive Ordnance Disposal Company). Double row of pips and associated gongs including the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross, gained in Iraq. Was a WO1 (Warrant Officer Class 1) when he was invalided out. Holder of high-status Russian medal presented by President Putin.
Income: Meagre army pension and monthly salary from current job with SO13 in bomb-based counter-terrorism.
Languages spoken: Epithet-laden laconic English laced with military banality.
Hobbies: Sex, Tottenham Hotspur FC, sex, Tottenham Hotspur FC, more sex.
Pet hates: Sexual abstinence after long periods in war zones without any female contact.
Physical disability: Only has one leg - a distinct disadvantage with his main hobby.
Height: 5ft 11in/1.83m.
Weight: 176lb/80kg (without prosthetic).
Profile: Albert ‘Albie’ Cork certainly doesn’t consider himself disabled. Embarrassed maybe and inconvenienced perhaps by having to remove his prosthetic for sex with a new lover for the first time...but that has never stopped him.
If it takes losing a leg above the knee to an IED in Afghanistan, having no luck with long-term girlfriends and being hunted by a string of sinister, unknown professional killers to become a modern hero, then Albie is one. If it doesn’t, then he’s just another flawed ex-soldier in counter-terrorism with a vigilante approach and an over-abundance of lustful genes who attracts a great deal of unwanted attention from the bad guys.
You choose - he’s too intent on getting his good leg over, seeking those who would place bombs in and around London and staying alive to waste any time thinking about it.



Prologue
They had sewn his lips together with a camel hide thong, a leather bootlace that criss-crossed his mouth in a crude zigzag of stitching. He had passed out when the huge saddler’s needle was forced through his upper lip for the first hole in a brutal downward stab, four of them holding him down and clamping his head as the sewer held his top lip out. Before that he had lived in their world, been of them, accompanied their best people throughout the grooming and training process of young suicide bombers, been saluted and treated as a hero among them, waved onwards with dark-eyed nodded commands from the leader of the faithful.
He’d told himself he was avenging the life and death of his father and was a fierce devotee of the aims of the small Middle Eastern jihadist group called the Dagger of God he’d been sworn into at the age of sixteen. He’d told himself that the cause was his life and he would happily sacrifice his life for its aims. He’d told himself that he wasn’t a terrorist but a freedom fighter in God’s employ. He’d told himself lots of things, but none of them mattered now because they were hurting him beyond his ability to endure.
When he’d regained consciousness his entire face was on fire with an unbearable pain and he couldn’t open his mouth. Denied an outlet, his terrified screams died in his throat. Panic seized his mind and constricted his breathing until a calm voice he knew well spoke from beyond the bright lights telling him to breathe slowly through his nose. He could see the crudely knotted ends of the thong sticking out an inch on either side of his searing lips, lips which were pushed out in an overemphasised purse by the tightly sewn leather as if he was about to kiss someone through a mesh, honour them through an act of greeting and shared companionship. Blood streamed down his naked chest and dripped into his lap.
Alternately losing consciousness and coming round as buckets of cold water were thrown over his head; he’d gradually begun to get a hold on what was going on. He was sitting in a chair, naked with his hands tied behind his back, his chin on his blood-soaked chest. Voices he knew and had worked with talked casually above him about what they were going to do next - use the blunt saddler’s needle to sew his eyelids open, his tongue to his cheek, his nostrils together, maybe start on his genitals. Or just leave him in the desert with his lips sewn and legs and arms tied. That was the fate of traitors to the cause. The worst act against them anyone could commit was betrayal, and the death of the traitor was constricted only by the power of their inventive minds and the way they had dealt with it before.
Dehydration and panic, they’d screamed in his pained face, would kill him very quickly in the desert, probably even before the sun had the chance to wring out all the moisture from his naked, pierced flesh and a scavenging scorpion found his swollen balls with its fatal sting.
They thought he had talked to the wrong people, given away their future plans. He hadn’t. He wouldn’t talk. He was a true son of the Dagger of God brotherhood and a warrior for the cause and would never betray them or his father’s memory that way. He lived for the cause, and now he was going to die for it in shame. Something was wrong, but he couldn’t tell them because of his sewn lips, and the fact that he just didn’t know.
Then, abruptly, there had been shouting, something outside his understanding had happened, and after a long harangue between the four of them they’d untied him, cut the thong at the centre of his lips and roughly pulled out the bits of leather to either side, with any lip flesh that adhered to them. As his blood once more spurted he lost consciousness again with the pain. When he came round they had dressed him in clean white clothes and bathed the horrendous bloody holes in his lips. Just in time, they’d told him, the news had come in. The whole thing had been a cleverly worked lie in order to make them question and kill their own... by those conniving bastards at Mossad, Israel’s much-vaunted intelligence agency.
He hadn’t been able to acknowledge or thank them for releasing him because his swollen and bruised lips wouldn’t let him, but he could think. He did a lot of that in the following weeks as his facial scars healed. In doing so he swore to himself that his vengeance would never be constrained by personal weakness or lack of effort and that when their time came it would make his torture at the hands of his own people a walk in the park by comparison. Until that point, and unlike many of his fellow jihadist fighters, he hadn’t been a deeply religious man: serving the cause in the name of his father had been enough for him - that was his religion. Now he had an entirely different and all-consuming passion that had only one satisfactory outcome for him: revenge against the Israeli agency and all the other infidel governments that had caused this, in the pursuit of which he would happily die.
And if ever his resolve weakened or his malice threatened to dissipate, all he had to do was look at his hideously scarred mouth in a mirror.



One
The rusty Second World War 550-pounder lay at a crazy angle. Dropped in sticks of six from wave after wave of Dornier, Junkers and Heinkel bombers across fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombing raids from 7 September 1940, the bombs had pimpled the London Docks and surrounding areas with any number of craters and set ablaze and demolished hundreds of warehouse buildings. And still, seventy-three years later, an occasional unexploded example would be found buried nose-down deep in the soft grey mud that skirted the Thames Estuary, in this case by that most efficient of unearthing behemoths the bright yellow fore-and-aft bucket version of the JCB, at a site just outside the Barking Freightliner Terminal on the north bank of th