The Henchmen's Book Club Read online

  THE

  HENCHMEN’S

  BOOK CLUB

  Danny King

  e.8

  1.

  TO READ OR DIE

  “Well I thought it was bollocks,” said Mr Cooper, stunning no one. This was Mr Cooper’s assessment of everything: films, music, museums, exhibitions or roller coasters. In fact, if you’d thought of it, spent five years developing it, registered patents to protect it, trademarks and copyrights, then employed a team of highly skilled and dedicated professionals to put it all together, Mr Cooper would take one look at it and dismiss it as bollocks without breaking his train of thought.

  In this case we were talking about a book.

  “It didn’t make sense. I mean one minute he’s walking around being an adult, the next he’s a kid again. I didn’t know what was going on. And what was all that stuff with his missus? She was all over the place an’ all. One chapter she’s a girl, the next she’s a woman. And he’s married to her? I couldn’t follow a bleeding word of it.”

  “Yeah well, there was something of a clue in the title, Mr Cooper,” Mr Chang pointed out.

  Mr Cooper looked at the cover of the book and rolled his face.

  “The Time Traveler’s Wife. Bit obvious isn’t it?” he reckoned.

  There was no reasoning with Mr Cooper when he was in this sort of mood; his mind was made up and there was nothing I, nor anyone else, could do about it. Some people were just like this. Some people felt uncomfortable about leaving themselves open to new experiences so they slammed the door shut at the first sign of the unfamiliar and wedged a chair under the handle in case they inadvertently found themselves liking Sense and Sensibility or Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

  “Well what about everybody else? Did anyone like it?” I asked the assembled lads.

  “Yeah, I liked it a lot,” said Mr Smith. “It was a really clever and romantic story. And I liked how it came full circle and how all the strands connected to other strands. I mean, Henry and Clare’s story wasn’t like a traditional story that unfolded bit by bit, but more a foggy whole that gradually came into sharp focus as the book went on. I thought it was beautiful. Really really lovely.”

  “Yeah, and I liked the stuff where he was a kid,” Mr Chang agreed. “When he goes back in time and shows himself the ropes and tutors himself about his life to come. That was good.”

  “I thought there could’ve been more of that stuff to be honest,” Mr Petrov said. “I liked the time travelling chapters the best but they got less and less as the book went on. It became more about his relationship with Clare rather than about him going back in time, which I thought was the most interesting stuff.”

  “No, his relationship with Clare was the whole story,” Mr Chang disagreed. “The time travel aspect merely set what is basically an old fashioned love story against a… a… a… supernatural backdrop.”

  “Well I just liked the time travel stuff,” Mr Petrov maintained. “I thought there could’ve been more of it. He talked about other trips he’d been on and said he sometimes went back and forwards fifty years into the past and the future so I would’ve liked to have seen more of those chapters and less of the ones with him and Clare washing the dishes.”

  “Man, you’ve got no soul,” Mr Smith told him.

  “Hey, I didn’t say I didn’t like it. I thought it was great, but who watches Jurassic Park for the kids?” Mr Petrov said.

  “Who doesn’t?” Mr Schultz chuckled, rubbing his hands together and beaming broadly to remind me of the company I was keeping.

  “Bottom line, it was a page turner…” Mr Chang started before his beeper interrupted him. “Oh damn, I’ve got to go,” he frowned, looking around for his stuff.

  “Okay, well before we all dash off, let’s take a vote on it. What marks are we giving it?” I asked.

  “Out of five?” Mr Smith asked. “Five,” he shrugged.

  “What’s the highest, five or nothing?” Mr Chang double-checked before committing.

  “Five of course. Who’s going to base a series of scoring on nothing being the highest?” I pointed out, imagining Mr Chang in Blockbusters with half a dozen 0/5 turkeys under his arm.

  “I’ll give it four and a half then.”

  “No halves. They make it harder to tot up the final scores.”

  “Alright then five.”

  “Mr Schultz?”

  “Four, but mostly for the gay wanking stuff,” he winked, making sure we all knew what page his copy would flop open to if dropped.

  “Mr Petrov?”

  “Four. But it would’ve got a five if there’d been more about the time travelling, like if he’d gone back to the stone age and had a look around then.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be Doctor Who,” I reminded him. “Mr Cooper?”

  “Nothing. It was bollocks,” he grunted.

  “Hey you can’t give it nothing, that’s just stupid,” Mr Chang objected.

  “I can give it what I want, it’s my score, if I wanna give it nothing, I’ll give it nothing,” Mr Cooper insisted, standing up to meet Mr Chang’s challenge.

  “But you’re going to drag all our scores down with your protest zero,” Mr Petrov fumed.

  “Then you should’ve picked a better book, shouldn’t you!” Mr Cooper glared, giving us a glimpse into what this was really all about, namely our collective and unanimous veto against his suggestion, Vinnie: My Life by Vinnie Jones.

  “He is entitled,” it pained me to confirm, although I mentally put aside a big fat zero for Mr Cooper’s next nomination, even if it was my own autobiography.

  The room settled down and all eyes turned to me.

  “Five,” I shrugged, upping my own score by a point to redress the injustice.

  “Oh, you fucker!” Mr Cooper spat.

  “Which gives The Time Traveler’s Wife and provisional total of… about three point eight out of five,” I declared doing the maths on a scrap of paper. “Well done Mr Chang, good suggestion.”

  Mr Chang looked suitably pleased with himself, then slipped his mag belt over his arm and reached for his Beretta Model 12.

  All at once my own beeper burst into song, quickly followed by the beepers of Mr Cooper, Mr Smith, Mr Petrov and Mr Schultz.

  “Hang on a minute, what is this?” I baulked, looking around at the equally anxious faces of my fellow readers.

  “Let’s go!” Mr Cooper said, grabbing his webbing and SPAS 12 as the rest of us tore into our equipment, pulling on our Kevlar and lock & loading our weapons. My own choice of weapon was the Austrian-made AUG 9 Para. It was converted from the Steyr AUG assault rifle, so it’s a lot more accurate than most other 9-mm sub-machine guns. And this job had been good because we’d been allowed to pick our own weapons. I hated those jobs where they forced you carry around whatever guns they wanted you to carry just for the aesthetic beauty of seeing fifty blokes all lined up in matching orange boiler suits with crappy M16s.

  “Come on!” Mr Chang said, kicking open the door of the Pump House and charging out into the jungle.

  “Wait,” I shouted after him. “Hold up!”

  Me and the others followed hard on Mr Chang’s heels, out of our unofficial book club HQ and up the hill towards the main bunker network. As soon as we were outside we heard the explosions: great big booming blasts and accompanying cracks that were coming from the direction of the command structure and Doctor Thalassocrat’s Tidal Generator.

  Through the blasts I could also make out the crackle of gunfire and agonised screams, so I tried to reach the Command Centre on my radio, but there was no response.

  “What are you doing? Come on!” Mr Cooper barked at me when he saw me slowing up.

  “Wait!” I insisted. “We don’t e
ven know what we’re running into.”

  “Trouble,” growled Mr Schultz, snapping back the shoulder stock on his M203 theatrically, like a big idiot. “And it’s going to get its ass kicked.”

  He, Mr Cooper and Mr Petrov ran on after Mr Chang, leaving me to urge caution to Mr Smith.

  “Just be careful mate. If this place has been overrun already then there ain’t no point sprinting into a hail of bullets.”

  “I agree,” Mr Smith nodded, “but we’d better make a show of it if we don’t want to get chiselled for our dough.” And with that Mr Smith ran off up the hill and towards the sounds of disaster.

  I made sure my Kevlar was firmly done up before following, reaching the crest of the rise after five minutes of huffing and puffing through the vegetation. There I found Mr Smith, Mr Schultz, Mr Petrov and Mr Cooper, but there was no sign of Mr Chang, though I didn’t notice this at first in light of the sight that greeted us. From the crest of the hill we could see the whole of the island and down towards the eastern coastline I spotted the command structure – or at least what was left of it. The shiny steel and glass tower that had previously dominated the tree line was now a twisted smoking heap on the jungle floor. Enormous balls of flames billowed into the air as each of the tower’s twenty-two condenser units blasted into the next. And way down on the coastline itself, the once dominating Tidal Generator was completely gone, lost to the deep forever.

  “Oh dear,” Mr Smith clucked. “Looks like we’re out of work again guys.”

  “But how?” Mr Schultz asked, apoplectic.

  The answer jetted over our heads a second later; Jack Tempest, agent XO-11 of the British Secret Service, ripped away in Doctor Thalassocrat’s escape rocket with that old bike he’d come ashore with the previous day. To add insult to injury, as he was passing overhead, Tempest clocked us and gave us his best shit-eating salute before disappearing out into the big wide blue of the Pacific Ocean.

  “What a wanker!” Mr Cooper said, voicing all our thoughts for us.

  “Come on, let’s at least see if there’s anything we can salvage.”

  Jack Tempest was Britain’s most decorated Executive Officer and a right royal pain in the arse to boot. He was forever landing in other people’s ointment and ruining everything for everyone. And some of these jobs had taken a lot of time and effort to set up. I’d been on two outings he’d scuppered in the past, though my friend Mr Rodríguez had been on four. Imagine that? Four jobs? I mean it wasn’t like we didn’t have mortgages to pay but no one worried about that, did they? At least the British government didn’t. I’d already borrowed twenty grand off Linda’s folks just to stay afloat and I’d promised them I’d be able to pay it back by the end of the year – with interest. Now that had gone for a Burton too.

  Fucking XO-11.

  I couldn’t even understand how it had come to this. We’d had him. We’d had him banged to rights. Mr Chang and I had personally caught him on the Tidal Generator, found the explosives he’d been planting and taken him to see Doctor Thalassocrat.

  “Well done men, excellent work,” we’d been congratulated at the time. “Sweep the entire island and make sure Tempest didn’t have company,” which we’d done, finding that little blonde side kick of his with the tiny arse and distracting cleavage hiding down by the docks. We couldn’t have done any more.

  By the time we’d gone off duty, Jack Tempest and his squeeze had been sealed inside Thalassocrat’s main water pipe, bracing themselves for a quick swim through the turbines, which is what Thalassocrat had been dying to do to someone for ages, the horrible bastard. Yet here we were a few hours later, with our base in bits and our boss nowhere to be seen – just an ominous red cloud of chum floating in the bay five hundred yards away, driving the seagulls potty.

  Worse than that we then found Mr Chang. He was lying a hundred yards away from the rocket launch pad with his head torn open and a look of total surprise frozen onto his face. But then what had he expected tearing off like that in the direction of gunfire without a clue as to what he was running into? It was so pointless. Such a waste.

  “Are we still counting his score?” Mr Cooper asked.

  “Yes we are, you nasty git.”

  “Just a thought.”

  I went through Mr Chang’s pockets and found his Agency ID card before cautiously pressing on.

  We couldn’t get anywhere near the command structure, it was too much of an inferno, so me, Mr Petrov and Mr Smith rounded up what was left of the men while Mr Cooper and Mr Schultz checked out the boats. The first one blew up the moment Mr Cooper started the engine, erasing him and his zero from the face of the Earth, while Mr Schultz was a bit more cautious, locating the pack of C4 connected to the second boat’s ignition, only to take out the entire dock when he rested his rifle against the wrong rubber ring.

  “Christ almighty!” I cried as the shock wave knocked us onto our faces. Bits of boat and berth rained back down as me and Mr Petrov dived into a nearby cave for cover.

  “Tempest has booby-trapped this whole fucking island,” Mr Petrov said and this was further confirmed when one of our fellow survivors, Mr Fedorov, picked up a watch he’d spotted in the wash and paid for the lapse dearly. I raced down to the beach when I’d heard his screams and could barely bring myself to look at what I found there.

  “Oh God, help!” he was choking as blood poured into the sands from a broken stump that used to be his arm. “Help, please help. Please. I want to go home. I want to go home,” he said over and over again in Russian.

  I did everything I could to try and stem the bleeding, tying a tourniquet around his elbow and giving him morphine to ease his pain but Mr Fedorov soon lost consciousness and drifted off into a sleep from which he’d never awake. Poor old Fedorov, I’d really liked that guy. He used to tell brilliant jokes, even in English, though I could never remember them afterwards to tell anyone else. Mr Fedorov stored them up like a computer though and often had the whole mess in stitches. The only joke of his I could remember was this one: What has eight legs, four wings and gives ugly Americans heart attacks? KFC’s Bargain Bucket.

  I thought about this joke as I tucked Mr Fedorov’s ID card into my pocket but now it just made me sad, so I took my jacket off, laid it across Mr Fedorov’s face and headed down the southern shoreline where Mr Smith and the others were waiting.

  “Did you send the signal?” I asked Captain Campbell, the highest-ranking surviving officer, when I got there.

  “Yeah,” Captain Campbell confirmed with a glower, and so that was that. The Agency would come and pick us up – hopefully before the UN, or worse still, the US got here – and we’d live to fight another day. We wouldn’t get paid because The Agency would keep our entire signing on fees to pay for the service but at least we’d be spared a prolonged vacation water-boarding in Guantanamo Bay, or wherever it was they did that from these days. Not that this brought much comfort to many, not after spending six months in this Godforsaken dot in the ocean, putting up with Mosquitoes, lice, crabs, jelly fish, Thalassocrat’s tantrums and bloody Vinnie Jones’s highs and lows courtesy of Mr Cooper. Some things could never compensate a man enough for that.

  “Where were you guys?” Captain Campbell asked, almost accusingly.

  “Off duty. Where were you?” I asked right back in case he felt like pointing the finger.

  “You weren’t in the barracks,” Captain Campbell worked out for himself, seeing as the barracks were no longer standing. “What were you doing? Drinking or something?”

  “No actually, we were reading,” Mr Smith answered for me when he saw I was getting ready to stick one on Thalassocrat’s chief tea boy.

  “Reading? Jesus!” Captain Campbell sneered, pulling a face but saying no more on the subject.

  We sat on the sands under the baking hot sun for a few more minutes, checking our weapons and the horizon for the rescue plane before Mr Ali broke the silence just behind me.

  “What were you reading?” he asked. “Anything g
ood?”

  2.

  FROM THE PACIFIC WITH EMPTY POCKETS

  The extraction team arrive three hours later. A big Beriev Be-200 swooped low over the island dropping dinghies and life jackets into the water and landing a quarter of a mile out to sea. Most of us swam out to the dinghies, but Captain Campbell had to take charge of one of them and go back for the guys who were either too wounded to make it on their own or bleeding too heavily to swim in these infested waters.

  Captain Takahashi was at the door to help us on board, meaning it was station Japan that had been dispatched to pick us up.

  “Hey boys, no joy?” he guessed as he helped each of us on board. “Never mind, we got hot drinks and cold beer for you on the plane. Just make yourselves comfortable and leave everything to my crew.”

  Captain Takahashi had picked me up before and he remembered me when he ran my Agency ID card through the scanner.

  “Ah, I get you before, in Siberia wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, I remember. Thank you for picking us up Captain,” I replied, as it never hurt to kiss the arse of someone who had the power to kick you out over the middle of the Pacific.

  “You not having a good run, no?” Captain Takahashi deduced.

  “It seems not Captain,” I sighed, accepting his hand and climbing aboard.

  “Well we take good care of you today, you hear? Captain Takahashi number one friend to boys in trouble,” Captain Takahashi reassured me, handing me back my card and pointing me in the direction of one of his saucy oriental attendants. “You go with her and just take it easy my friend, okay?”

  “Okay,” I agreed, receiving a little bow from the beautiful porcelain girl in front of me. I made to head back to the seats but the girl stood her ground in front of me.

  “Excuse me, but I will take that now please,” she said, dropping her eyes to the AUG 9 slung over my back to remind me this job was over.

  “Oh yes, sorry,” I said, slipping the gun off my shoulder and handing it to her. She removed the clip, ejected the chambered round and stowed the rifle in a locker at the front with the rest of the boys’ weapons. I handed over my Glock 21, Taser, Mace, field knife and brass knuckles too before I was passed back to another equally beautiful attendant and shown to my seat.