ONE BULLET TOO MANY a gripping action-packed thriller (Johnny Silver Thriller Book 3) Read online

  ONE BULLET TOO MANY

  A gripping action-packed thriller

  PAUL BENNETT

  Johnny Silver Thriller 3

  Revised edition 2020

  Joffe Books, London

  © Paul Bennett

  First published in Great Britain 2015

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The spelling used is British English except where fidelity to the author’s rendering of accent or dialect supersedes this. The right of Paul Bennett to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  ALSO BY PAUL BENNETT

  A SELECTION OF BOOKS YOU MAY ENJOY

  Those who kill for pleasure are sadists. Those who kill for money are professionals. Those who kill for both are MERCENARIES.

  War Dogs

  Keith Cory-Jones

  ‘Not all of us.’

  Johnny Silver

  PROLOGUE

  Zimbabwe, Summer of 2000

  WE WERE DRIVING in convoy, heading south along a dusty track that someone had ambitiously labelled a road on the map. The job didn’t need all five of us, but we wanted to stick together. We had just completed a contract in the Balkans which had left a nasty taste in our mouths. We had been hired to end a dispute between what turned out to be two warlords, both as bad as each other. Having worked for one and given him a big advantage, we decided to join the other side and make things even again. We weren’t just an ordinary bunch of mercenaries. We had morals. Money wasn’t the only goal, but if we could earn some and keep a clear conscience at the same time, then that was all right by us. After all, you have to be able to look in the mirror each day and not be ashamed by what you see staring back at you.

  I, Johnny Silver, leader of our group, was sitting beside Red, the half-Comanche Texan with jet-black hair blowing in the wind. He was driving a veteran Jeep that we hoped would last until we had crossed the border and were safely in South Africa. We had drawn lots for who would sit next to him and I had lost. Red’s driving style was to have either the accelerator or brake pressed down hard onto the floor. He thought he was the best driver in the world and we knew he was the worst.

  To the rear were blond-haired and baby-faced Pieter, the South African, and Stanislav the Pole, Stan the Man, Stan the Plan, our tactician and list-maker. When something needed doing, Stan came into his own – every detail had to be perfect for Stan. They were in a black Mercedes with our client, and his wife and son in the back. In the middle of the convoy was Bull, the Jamaican. He was coaxing an old truck, filled with the couple’s most treasured possessions, to stay in between us and not become isolated and, therefore, unprotected.

  Our client, Gunter Van Smidt, was a wealthy tobacco farmer in Masvingo province. Was being the operative word. Under the Mugabe regime, the white people were being forced out. It wasn’t a peaceful transition: those who were not prepared to leave willingly and yield to a communist style of ownership were persuaded at gunpoint. It was go or be killed. Van Smidt had hung on as long as he could, hoping that the United Nations might step in and restore order. The best they were willing to do was impose sanctions on the Mugabe government. Now, with the natives arming themselves with Kalashnikovs courtesy of the Soviets, it was time for the family to call it a day, to flee and settle in South Africa.

  We had been travelling since dawn and still had around 150 miles to go before we reached the border. On this sort of ‘road’, and bearing in mind the state of the truck, it would take us another five hours to complete the journey. The scenery was mostly veldt, some of it natural, some caused by deforestation, nearly all of it brown and dry from the continuing drought. There were fields of tobacco and maize, much of it rotting where the new owners hadn’t quite got the hang of farming and the constant work that it involved. Every ten miles or so was a small village, mud huts on either side of the track we were travelling on. I could see one approaching in the distance.

  A dog shot out of one of the huts and scampered across our path. Red slowed to let it get out of the way. Suddenly, an old woman with a walking stick stepped right in front of us. Red slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting her. She looked across at us and smiled.

  I don’t know what it was that alerted me, something unconscious like a small movement in one of the huts maybe, but it just didn’t smell right. Instinctively, I shouted at Red.

  ‘Back, back, get us back. Go!’

  He was slamming the gear stick into reverse when the first bullets were fired. It was an ambush. We were caught in the crossfire. As the Jeep shot backwards, Red’s foot right down to the floor, the first bullets hit us, sinking into the metal chassis. There was a cloud of dust coming from our wheels which helped to obscure us from the snipers. A hundred yards at high speed and Red brought the Jeep to a screaming halt. Behind us, the truck and the Mercedes stopped, too. Red and I grabbed our weapons and jumped out and ran to the back of the convoy. The five of us regrouped at the rear of the truck, hidden from view from those in the village. They looked at me for orders.

  ‘We can’t go round – the land is too rutted for the truck. The only thing to do is to take out the snipers.’

  ‘How many do you reckon?’ Bull asked.

  ‘Two,’ said Red.

  ‘Too many bullets,’ I said. ‘I make it three. Two on the left and one on the right. Pieter, you stay here and guard the Smidts. Stan, get in the truck and give us cover. Bull, you and I go to the left; Red, you take the right.’

  We turned our attention momentarily to our weapons. I checked that the Browning Hi-Power pistol was fully loaded and pushed it back in the holster on my belt. I took the Uzi in both hands and prepared for the assault. Both Red and Bull had AK47s – I’d never liked the Kalashnikovs because of the tendency to jam if not thoroughly treated with loving care. A seasoned campaigner loaded only twenty-seven bullets instead of the full twenty-eight that the magazine could hold – the last chamber empty to let all the dust and dirt sink to the bottom. Even then, give me the shorter, lighter Uzi any day.

  Stan got into the truck and took it slowly forwards while keeping as low as possible in the cab. Bull, Red and I tucked ourselves at the back, waiting for the right time to break cover. As we cleared the first of the huts that formed the village, we jumped off, sprinted left and right and crouched down. Stan took the truck backwards to safety.

  Bull and I worke
d our way along the village, kicking in doors and peering around them, our rifles at the ready. We heard a burst of fire coming from the other side of the road, and hoped that Red had got his man rather than the other way around.

  We found our bushwhackers. They were both in the same hut. Stupid. They should have split up to increase the angle of fire on our convoy and to make it more difficult to get caught by a counter-attack. They were looking out of two windows, alerted by the shots that had rung out and expecting any danger to be in front of them. They spun round. We fired before they could react. At that distance a Kalashnikov can cut a man in half. Bull’s target wasn’t a pretty sight; mine was merely dead. We walked across to them and turned them over with our feet, still with rifles aimed at their hearts. It was an unnecessary precaution born of habit. I looked at Bull and shook my head, saddened to the core.

  ‘Hell!’ he said, staring down. ‘What are they doing fighting wars?’

  ‘Can’t be more than fifteen years old,’ I said. ‘Should be in school, not mounting an ambush. How can they have so much hate at such a young age?’

  ‘Must be the parents,’ he said. ‘I hope we come across them. They don’t deserve to live.’

  What you need to know about Bull is that he stands at six foot six, has a shaved head, is as black as ebony and his muscles rippled like a storm on the Atlantic. And, in his time, like the rest of us, had seen a lot of stuff you wanted to forget. He wasn’t one to get emotional easily.

  We walked back towards the truck. As Red emerged, I could see tears in his eyes.

  ‘Were yours…?’ he began.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Just kids playing cowboys and Indians.’

  ‘And they chose the wrong people as Indians,’ Bull said.

  ‘Let’s get the hell out of here,’ I said. ‘Get this job finished.’

  ‘Then we might be able to forget,’ Red said.

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘The image will haunt us for a long while. Makes a mockery of the old saying that only the good die young.’

  ‘Can’t turn back the clock,’ Bull said. ‘Life has to go on.’

  Deep inside him, I knew he was as affected as Red and me by the incident. Even Red’s hands were shaking as we neared the Jeep.

  ‘You drive,’ he said to me. ‘Got some thinking to do.’

  A few hours later, we dropped off Mr Smidt and his family and their possessions in the safety of South Africa. He offered us a bonus for killing the threats against them. None of us had the heart to take it. They had a new life before them; we merely had painful memories. We needed the break even more now.

  And what did we learn from this? What was the moral? Expect the unexpected? No, too clichéd. Sentimental, maybe, but how about think hard about what you teach your children? Their first lesson may turn out to be their last. You shouldn’t force your children to follow a path. Teach them right and wrong – that’s enough. Then they’ll always know what way to go. The straight path rather than the crooked.

  I don’t think any of us slept that night. I kept wondering who it was that had said ‘only the good die young’. These boys weren’t good, but they were playing a glorified game of war with live ammunition. A game where there was no shaking hands and going on your way afterwards. Maybe it should be ‘only the bad die young’. Hell, I couldn’t work it out. Can you?

  CHAPTER ONE

  The island of St Jude, Caribbean, the present day

  A LOT HAD happened since the five of us had last met as a group in Texas to fight greed and prejudice. Anna and I were due to be married the next day and were waiting for our guests to arrive. They were booked into the five-star hotel that constituted pretty much all of the domestic product of the island. Anna was now six months pregnant and looking radiant. She was from Chechnya and had the classic bone structure of an Eastern European, and her face and body were bronzed by the sun. Her hair glinted with shades of blonde. Sometimes I would just stand there and stare at her, wondering just what I had done to be such a lucky man. It was to be our first child and we had built a new dwelling to house the soon-to-be three of us. It was just a simple bungalow, no glass in the windows so that it benefitted from the cooling effects of the light breeze that came from the sea, two bedrooms, a kitchen and bathroom. It was sited a hundred yards along the beach from the bar, which we ran and which gave the guests something a bit more native and with more colour than the sanitised facilities of the hotel.

  Bull was to be my best man. He had a boat and ran fishing trips – the hotel guests regularly saw marlin fishing as one of the main attractions of staying on the island. That and the tranquillity – can’t get enough tranquillity if one has been a mercenary.

  Bull’s wife, Mai Ling – an extraordinarily pretty woman whose roots were half Chinese and half African – would be maid of honour, or so I was told. I was short of knowledge in the marriage department so went along happily with what Anna decided was appropriate protocol.

  Tonight, we would all assemble for a beach barbecue and celebrate our last night as single people. I wasn’t quite sure how my mother would take to such informality, but hoped that a few rum punches and the convivial atmosphere of old friends and relations would see her entering into the mood. Maybe Uncle Gus, my biological father, would jolly her along – he was good at making people happy.

  I was behind the bar, having served some cocktails to an American couple, when Bull walked over from his boat, limping slightly where he had been hamstrung by the Russians. My souvenir of that encounter was six bullets in the shoulder where they had ripped out much of the muscle. We made a fine pair.

  ‘Tomorrow then,’ he said.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Big step,’ he said.

  ‘Reckon so.’

  ‘Any anxieties?’

  ‘Apart from everything, no.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Because it’s my job to help you overcome them.’

  ‘And you’re doing a pretty good job. Before you arrived I had my nervousness under control.’

  ‘Glad to be of service.’ He smiled. ‘Thirsty work being a best man. Beer would be good.’

  I took two bottles of beer from the fridge, opened them and passed one to him. I held the frosted bottle to my forehead to enjoy the coolness it brought, then took a sip.

  ‘Lot of things can go wrong,’ he said. ‘I made a long list.’

  ‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘What do you mean “maybe”?’

  ‘That’s what you always say when we’re in a tight spot. Maybe if we do such and such people will stop trying to kill us.’

  ‘So it’s payback time?’

  He grinned at me. ‘Every last bit of it.’

  ‘I hate to ask this, but have you got the ring?’

  ‘No, I threw it overboard to see if the fishes would bite.’ He paused. ‘Course I got the ring.’ He took a long draught of his beer and nodded to himself with satisfaction. ‘Relax, Johnny,’ he said. ‘Everything’s organized down to the last detail.’

  ‘Would Stan be happy with the arrangements?’

  ‘Even Stan would.’

  ‘Good enough for me, then.’

  ‘Wonder what they’ve been up to?’ he said. ‘Pieter’s predictable – he’ll have been chasing skirt, or fending them off if what he says about his rich widow clients on safari is true.’

  Pieter had got us into more fights than I cared to remember. He was an inveterate womaniser. A man’s got to have some hobby, I suppose.

  ‘Stan will have been building business at his hotel on some unpronounceable Polish lake,’ I said. ‘The whole thing will run like clockwork.’

  ‘And Red will be getting his ranch in working order, if he hasn’t sold up and taken the money and run.’

  ‘He won’t have sold up,’ I said confidently. ‘He’s like all of us. The time for fighting other people’s battles is over. The only thing to do is find a good woman and settle down. Hang up your gun-belt for g
ood.’

  ‘Still got that Browning taped under the bar counter?’

  ‘Still got that shotgun hidden in the engine compartment of your boat?’ I countered.

  ‘Old habits die hard,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t make them bad, though.’

  ‘Pays to be careful.’

  ‘Reckon so.’

  Gus, who arrived by helicopter with my mother – owning a merchant bank has its privileges – was the first to arrive for the beach party. This is complicated, but stick with me while I try to explain about Gus and me. Gus (full name Giuseppe Gordini) is technically my uncle – that is, he’s the brother of the man (Alfredo Gordini) on my birth certificate as my father. But actually Gus is my biological father, although this secret is only known by Gus, my mother and myself. So, one half of me is American. My mother is English. The maternal line is Jewish and the paternal, Italian-American, side of the family is Catholic – makes for a pretty messed up childhood. I told you it was complicated. I get my dark hair and colouring from Gus, along with his easy-going outlook on life. From my mother I get an intelligent and enquiring mind, a tall, lean figure, and a certain quality – if it can be called that – of stubbornness. When I think of Alfredo and my two brothers by him, Roberto and Carlo, I think I got the best of the genetic pool. Ah, but where do I get the eyes, the eyes of a mercenary – cold, dark pools that promise death? Maybe they were nurture rather than nature.

  Today Gus – what we English would call a dapper dresser – was wearing a pair of navy blue slacks and a crisp, white short-sleeved shirt. His long silver hair had been cut since I had last seen him in Amsterdam and now just touched his ears. His brown eyes shone brightly. He smiled broadly and gave me a big hug.

  ‘Thought you might need some help,’ he said.

  ‘Always welcome,’ I said. ‘Good to see you again. Been too long.’