Killing for the Company

‘Leave it there and get back to where you were.’ O’Donoghue did as he was told. Luke forced the ambassador towards the exit. ‘I’m taking him outside. If I see the door open, I’ll kill him.’ He released the man, then grabbed the keys, opened the door and pushed him through it. Two seconds later he had locked his Regiment mates in the ops room.

It was twilight now. The floodlights were already lit, bathing the camp — which was as busy as ever — in their fluorescent glow. Luke immediately saw three choppers coming in to land. An open-topped truck with at least thirty IDF troops in the back was trundling past the Regiment buildings.

‘This is an outrage,’ the ambassador spat.

Luke didn’t reply. He just raised his Sig and brought it crashing down on the ambassador’s neck. The man fell, unconscious, to the ground.

And then Luke ran.

He didn’t have more than a minute, he estimated, before O’Donoghue and the others broke their way out of the ops office; and they’d be on the blower, raising the alarm right now. He ran into the crowded central area of the base and tried to get the geography of the whole place straight in his head. To get to the exit meant going through the main centre of operations, back past the F-16 hangar and then north. It was a couple of klicks, though, across open ground, and from memory there were two armed Israeli soldiers at the barrier. If he was going to stand a chance of getting out of the base before the whole place was locked down, he needed a vehicle. But first he needed something to keep all the soldiers crawling around the base occupied, otherwise O’Donoghue and Dawson would have every last fucker looking for him.

The canteen was twenty-five metres to his right, a low prefab building with wide double doors that were currently shut. There was nobody immediately outside — it was too early to scran up yet — and Luke sprinted over to it and tried the door. It was unlocked, so he disappeared inside.

The dining area of the canteen was about twenty metres by twenty, with rows of long tables and benches. Although Luke could smell cooking, the dining area was empty. At the far end was a serving hatch about four metres wide, and to its right was a closed door. Luke headed towards the door, which turned out to be locked and couldn’t be opened from this side without a key. But the serving hatch had a metal roller blind in front of it and this had been left partly open. He climbed through the hatch into the kitchen before pulling the blind down behind him and checking the door. From the inside, it opened fine.

The kitchen was about half the size of the dining area. Along the far wall there was a bank of catering ovens with huge stainless steel pots of food bubbling away; on either side of the room there were long metal worktops with hot-water urns, racks of knives and large toasters; and in the middle of the room there was a large food preparation island. In the far left-hand corner was an open door. There was nobody else in the kitchen, but Luke could hear voices from outside.

He grabbed a seven-inch boning knife — sharp and flexible — from the worktop and headed for the door. There were two men standing out the back, five metres from the door, dressed in food-stained white overalls, each of them smoking a cigarette as they chatted quietly. They didn’t see Luke approach until he was pulling the door shut. One of them shouted out, but by then the Yale-type door lock had fastened shut. Luke rammed the tip of the boning knife into the lock, then yanked the handle down at a ninety-degree angle. The tempered-steel blade snapped, leaving the tip in the lock. Nobody would be opening that door in a hurry.

He ran back to the ovens and extinguished the hobs before looking around. He knew what he wanted to achieve. All he needed was the tools to do it. A gas pipe entered in the middle of the back wall at a height of about 1.5 metres and ran down the wall to the rear of the ovens. Good. Looking back to the central island, he saw a heavy cleaver. He grabbed it, then scanned the kitchen for a final piece of equipment.

He saw a copy of the Jerusalem Post sitting on a metal trolley. He picked it up before taking the meat cleaver and slamming it into the gas pipe.

The pipe dented, but didn’t break. Luke whacked it again and the dent grew bigger. It was the third strike that split it, and a sudden rush of gas hissed loudly into the kitchen.

Back at the central island he helped himself to another long chef’s knife before moving over to one of the large toasters along the side worktop. He loosened a couple of pages from the newspaper, stuffed them into the toaster and pushed down the lever.

Thirty seconds before they caught fire, he reckoned. Thirty seconds to get the fuck out of there.

Luke hurried towards the door that led into the dining area. He quickly let himself out, shut the door behind him and disabled it with the knife. And then he ran.