Above and Beyond
Chapter 22
Sue settled in well at El Campo, she made it perfectly clear that at the moment she was more than happy to be away from her old home, ‘it still reminds me of Shaun, but by the time we move there next summer I doubt if I will recognise the place’.
David had come up with some half decent ideas on how to fortify it, ‘and shall I ‘do’ Alice’s place at the same time?, it is much cheaper to buy RPG proof glass in bulk’ he had said, only half-jokingly, as she had let me into a little secret, she had wanted to do a major refurbishment on the place for a while, but was waiting to make sure that Shaun would not be returning first.
Whilst we waited for the paperwork to be ‘fast tracked’ through the courts Sue started to integrate herself into the local community, and she was a natural, it was nice to see. She was a genuine caring sharing sort of person, ‘and Sheila really liked her’, although it was yet another nightmare for David, but at least it was not the old David. The hunt for Shaun and Franklin had done him the power of good, as had Caroline and his holiday in Canada (‘how come we landed in the USA, but didn’t have to go through Canadian customs to get here?’ she had asked Charlie – ‘juste de la chance, je suppose’ he replied – ‘qué’ she said, and left it at that) and he was also becoming quite the little Master Mariner with their new boat. Caroline had finally settled on a Contessa 32, as it had a remote greaser for the stern tube and more windows: no contest.
Once a week, when we were at home, Sue started to do her thing with the local W.I., she had been an active member in the UK so she wanted to continue in Spain. The local coven was organised almost totally by ex-pats, but benefitted the local community as a whole, and Sue was not too proud to get her hands dirty (although she was now in designer jeans) so she readily volunteered to deliver food parcels to the needy, although she hated all the ‘fuss’ that David (and I) insisted on. In exasperation we had listed all the things that had happened around me, so in the end she finally, if not a tad reluctantly, agreed, although ‘if push came to shove’ both she and I could afford to pay for it all to be hand delivered from Harrods, but it was her ‘feel good factor’. On her regular route was a dear sweet old lady, who they all enjoyed delivering to, she was a ‘needy’ sole if there was ever one, and she ticked all the boxes that were needed to be ticked to receive the weekly hamper, except one, it was the ‘savings’ box. Where she had ticked ‘none’, she should have ticked ‘loads’, she was arguably the richest ‘con-person’ in the Province, with aspirations of moving into the kidnapping and blackmail market.
Carmen lived in an old ‘Apartamento’ block, for tax, benefits, and food parcel purposes, (but the rest of the time in a grand villa) her motto being ‘if I don’t claim it then some needy person might end up with it’, and was surrounded by her dysfunctional family, so when Sue first started visiting she did not think ‘food – thank you very much’ she saw an ‘opportunity to diversify’. Her son Raoul had the apartment opposite hers and they devised a cunning plan, which had to be postponed twice because of a dastardly surprise cruise that I had the audacity to plan for my beloveds’ birthday, but she thought ‘third time lucky’ when she saw Sue arriving in the parking lot below, and she signalled Raoul and his partners in crime to get ready. The first part of their plan was to separate the majority of Sue’s minders from Sue, and in the ancient block this turned out to be relatively easy. Once Sue had passed her in the narrow corridor, Raoul’s second best’est girlfriend blocked the corridor with here pram, complete with baby, and for added effect she jabbed it with a pin.
Sue glanced back and saw the commotion behind her, but thought that the woman was coping well with the poor child, but as the box that she was carrying was getting quite heavy (and the squawking brat was starting to give her an headache) she carried on for a few more steps and made to enter the apartment of the ‘dear sweet old lady’, but the door slammed closed shut in her face. From behind, a large hood was pulled over her head and she was dragged bodily backwards into the apartment opposite. The minders behind her saw what was happening to their charge so they ‘subdued the suspect’ (poleaxed his spare girlfriend on the spot), then hurdled the pram, but by the time they arrived at the apartment doors they were already too late, Raoul’s mothers plan had worked to perfection as the door slammed shut a milli-second before they arrived.
People should really stick to what they are good at, because from then on their plan went south, because when the flimsy door slammed shut three bullet holes appeared in it. One of the problems with flimsy doors is that they are flimsy, and do not slow bullets down very much. The first bullet that exited it hit the first minder in his right shoulder, the second bullet got the second minder in his left shoulder (they were shoulder to shoulder) and the third bullet missed everybody in the passageway, but went through Raoul’s mother’s equally flimsy door, and got her just above her right ear. Because of the very gradual reduction of the projectiles speed it unfortunately didn’t kill her outright, it took her three seconds, and I say unfortunately because in that time she pushed the knife that she was holding at the leading security minders chest, with the clear intention of killing him – stone dead. Since his arrival in the apartment (and after quickly being subdued by Carmen and her kitchen knife) Norman started mentally going through the ‘minders manual’ and had just arrived at page five, the bit about how to kill a very nice little old lady – without actually hurting her, and was just about to put paragraph six, line three into effect when the hole appeared in her flimsy door and the bullet entered her head, and Carmen pushed the knife towards his heart. He thought ‘gotcha – I’m wearing my stab vest’, and then he thought again ‘oops it was too hot this morning so I left it off, in strict violation of standing order 37.95, sub section D’, and he died.
David got the call a few seconds later but didn’t call the police, he didn’t want them cluttering up the place whilst he put plan ‘K’ (for kidnap) into action.
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When I first arrived at El Campo one of the first decisions that Paul made me take was in relation to the ‘bomb dump’, did I want to keep it?, and after a split seconds thought about the state of the world I said ‘dump it, it was so ugly’. Which he did, BUT LATER, as an excavation machine was excavating away for my new golf course its bucket bumped into something solid, very solid. Paul and I led the charge (well we ambled across) to find out what the mysterious find was. It was a sub-terrainian room, quite a large sub-terrainian room, and it was surrounded by very thick reinforced concrete, top, bottom, sides and one end-wall. In the other-end wall we found a very large and extremely rusty armoured door, with an even rustier padlock on it, and in Pauls’ humble opinion it looked like a mudslide of sorts had partially blocked the entrance to the door, and the rest had then been filled in, totally burying it, ‘it was most likely empty, and at the time that the Base was closing down, so it wasn’t worth them digging the entrance out’.
‘Thank you for your humble opinion, Paul’ I said, and then I said,’ can’t we just cover it back up and pretend that it’s not there?
‘Certainly we can’ he said, and we turned to go back, it was time for lunch, BUT Charlie had to put in his two-penneth, ‘I haven’t blown up anything for an absolute age, can I have a go on the door?
‘Why?’ I asked, Charlie didn’t usually volunteer for anything.
‘I’m intrigued’ he said ‘why padlock an empty store?’
I didn’t know that Charlie had any words like ‘intrigued’ in his vocabulary, ‘chaos and mayhem’ yes, but not intrigued, so as a reward I said ‘OK, but don’t break any windows with the blast’.
Just as I was starting on my sponge pudding and custard David came up to me and said ‘Charlie’s in, and he says that he has found something ‘interesting’ (another big word – perhaps he’d had a dictionary for Christmas?)
Charlie was ever so slightly disappointed that no explosives were needed, one good hit with a sledge hammer and the lock disintegrated, but the hinges on t
he door were another thing altogether, so he ‘borrowed’ the excavator, its driver having gone off for his lunch as well. Attaching some chains he revved it up and charged away. It was a close thing but the door gave way first in the battle of the titans, just before the Titan mk3 excavator lost its rear end, but it would never be the same again. Charlie ventured inside, shone his trusty torch around and called David.
We - David and I, entered, and the first thing that I noticed was that the room wasn’t damp or musty; ‘it must have been only just below, below the ground’, I thought.
The first things that David noticed were the crates of heavy machineguns and loads of boxes of ammunition.
We finally came to a consensus (that’s my word. not Charlie’s) that this had been a ‘ready use’ store in case of civil unrest, but then the personnel ‘in the know’ had been relocated as the shutdown of the base grew imminent, and it had just been forgotten about.
They had a heyday, David and Charlie, not only had the store been hermetically sealed, but so were all the heavy weapons (and a few lighter ones to). It didn’t take them long to find out that they had a find of apocalyptic proportions (both David’s words), but what to do with them, what they should do of course was to notify the authorities and let them take care of the find, but David thought that he could offer them a better home, in that little secret room at the arse-end of Lady S (Charlie’s words, not his), and once it was almost empty he turned the store into his own ‘ready use’ store, just in case of his emergencies.
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Training, training, and more training was the way to keep David happy, but unfortunately not all his trainees agreed with him, until today. They descended on the store from every direction and within fifty minutes he was looking up Sues skirt (‘thank god it wasn’t Tuesday’ I thought when he told me later), he wasn’t a pervert, he was using a very high tech piece of technology from his store, it scanned through the thin floors of the old apartment block with ease. On a wider scan he determined that there were only three people in the apartment, Sue, who was sat on a chair which had been placed against a wall, Raoul, who was pacing about and shouting at his mobile, surely even he must eventually realise that his mother was indisposed, and finally an unidentified person, who was stood against the opposite wall from Sue. They were also wired for sound so he knew that Sue was very calm, her breathing was even, Raoul was unstable, and the third guy (it was a male voice) was obviously the ‘heavy’.
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As Sue went to follow Norman into that nice Carmen’s apartment (although Sheila didn’t like her one little bit) the door slammed in her face, everything went black and she was dragged backwards into the opposite apartment. She heard the door slam and then three shots rang out right next to her. She heard muffled screams from the other side of the door and then silence. It was time to remember her training; she judged where her assailant was, took a step back and then flung her head back, David said it would hurt, and it did, but when she dragged the bag off of her head and turned around Raoul was out cold, blood pouring from a broken nose, but unfortunately there was the wrong end of a very large gun looking at her, time to remember another lesson, and she raised her hands in the air. The owner of the gun (whose name was Roderigo she later found out) glanced down at Raoul, sneered at him and signalled her to sit in an old arm-chair against the wall, and then he duct-taped her arms and feet to the chair, ‘don’t fight this if he has a gun, especially if he has already used it, but slightly bend your hands and ankles ‘like so’. Roderigo then rang a number on his smart phone (‘pity he wasn’t’, she thought) and she heard a faint ringing from across the corridor, but both phones ‘rang out’. He tried twice more, and the same thing happened as before, except that the final time there was no ringing, then Raoul started to regain consciousness. After staunching the flow of blood from his nose, using a shirt that was lying on the floor, he stood up and slapped her, so she played the female card and started to cry, ‘it confuses them, and they cannot interrogate you if you are sobbing, but unfortunately they might hit you again to shut you up’, he didn’t, ‘he was going to be the unstable one’ she thought. Raoul then repeated what Roderigo had done with his phone, but without the ringing in the distance, and Sue was pleased, they were not only wasting time, but obviously their plan had gone to pot, with no back-up. They then had a nice shouting match with each other, to waste yet more time, and then finally Raoul took charge and sent Roderigo over to the wall to watch over her from a distance, and then she relaxed a little as she thought that there may have been something ‘sexual’ in some of Rodrigo’s ranting’s ‘so no provocative moves, no eye contact’. Raoul came and stood in front of her and started ranting at her in fluent Spanish, and eventually learned another valuable lesson in life, ‘if you kidnap a foreigner, and you intend to communicate with them, then make sure that at least one of your gang speaks their language’. Sue was at the ‘Spanglish’ stage of her lessons with Caroline and she genuinely missed 99% of what he ranted, so the look of confusion on her face was genuine. He eventually realised this and went over to confer with his accomplice again.
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‘BLAST said David’, he had had three green lights. Surrounding the ‘pipe’ were four pads, each sending up a very intense scan of one particular area in the room above, roughly half a meter square, and Raoul had just stepped out of it, but hopefully he would soon be back in front of Sue. The two had a quick conference and Roderigo had an idea, and it must have been ‘give her a phone and let her speak to her boyfriend, he can most likely speak Spanish’. Raoul removed the tape that bound one hand, but left the other one firmly secured and handed her the phone, pointed at it and said ‘Su novio’. She knew the word for ‘boyfriend’ and was about to say that ‘he is my fiancé, not my boyfriend’, but skipped it as she received an urgent message from Sheila, ‘don’t move from the chair’.
She gingerly took the phone from him, sat back and started to press some buttons, any buttons, and Raoul took a pace back and waited for her to make the call.
Her ‘really really special friend’ then contacted her and said ‘close your eyes and don’t open them until you are out of the room’, and David thought ‘four greens’.
The military use depleted uranium in, among other things, their armour-piercing rounds in tank and aircraft ammunition, and of course mere civilians cannot get that material for that purpose, they can use it as trim weights in aircraft (it is extremely heavy for its size) and a few other mundane things but definitely not in weapons, so as the fourth light came on it automatically sent a signal to the pneumatic discharger to send a projectile up the tube (which had been secured between the floor and a specific point on the ceiling) and it penetrated the polystyrene ceiling tiles and a smidging of plaster. It then went through a thin layer of terracotta, through a void, through another layer of terracotta, and then the floor tiles of the apartment above (missing the reinforced concrete beams as it went – although they would not have been much of a problem), and the manufacturer said later that the ‘spike’ had performed better than they had ever expected ‘you did use the type 3E spike didn’t you?’
‘Something like that’ David had replied, with his fingers crossed.
What he didn’t tell the manufacturers was that the ‘spike’ type 3E (Modified) continued on its journey up between Raoul’s legs, entered his anus (definitely not Charlie’s word) dead centre, continued up close to his spine, speared his larynx, entered his brain and exited the top of his skull a split second after starting on its journey. The tip then stopped dead in its tracks one foot (30.48cm) above him, nobody wanted the spike to go on and hit something hard and then ricochet off and hurt someone, now did they?
At the same time two sections of wall, either side of Sue dissolved and two black, dust covered figures stood in their place, and they sent two brief streams of lead into Rodrigo, and before he hit the wall behind him the hinges on the flimsy door disappeared and Carlos rushe
d in and covered Sue. Once certain that the situation was under control he freed her other arm and feet and then led her out of the room: Sue didn’t open her eyes until she was safely in my arms, which was a good thing as it took Carlos two weeks to get the picture of Raoul stood ‘hanging’ there, out of his mind, just long enough for him to get some sleep.
Thirty minutes later the ‘Police Local’ finally responded to a 112 call and found three bodies and loads of claret, but after a thorough investigation, that lasted nearly half an hour, it was put down as a ‘domestic’.
Norman unfortunately was involved in a RTA (road traffic accident) a short while later, and his next of kin received a very handsome ‘death in service’ grant, and the two minders with bullet holes in them were treated by my Doctora (Doc Martin) Matrinez Goña as gardening accidents, and the owners of the holes, and their families spent a very nice convalescent period in a resort of their choice. David’s only comment was ‘a message well sent to any other wannabe kidnappers’. Sue took the whole experience surprisingly well, which she graciously put down to her training (David) and support network (God and Sheila). Whatever it was, within a few days she was ‘as right as rain’, but agreed that from now on if she wanted her ‘feel good factor’ to feel good, then it would have to be from within the confines of the W.I. office; no more field trips.
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