Torpedo

Book 9: The Gabriel Wolfe Thrillers

by Andy Maslen

Genres: Military Thrillers; Vigilante Thrillers

Synopsis

"You shouldn't have killed my friend, Max..." Gabriel Wolfe is back in action in a three-way clash between a drug cartel, a triad and the Russian Mafiya. When he hired an assassin to kill Gabriel, Russian crime boss Max Novgorodsky made a big mistake. The assassin’s bullet missed Gabriel but took the life of one of his closest and dearest friends. Now the former SAS member has one thing on his mind. Vengeance. Heads, you lose Halfway round the world, Colombian cartel boss Martin Ruiz sits down in a Japanese tea house to be served by his favourite geisha. But only one of them will leave in one piece. The cartel are engaged in a bloody turf war with the White Koi triad. The stakes are sky-high: control of a global drug trafficking route. Tails, I win Gabriel's partner is Eli Schochat. She’s a real badass with an IDF and Mossad background. Together, they travel to Saint Petersburg, then a diamond mine in the far east of Russia. Gabriel's skills extend from unarmed combat to knife-fighting and automatic weapons. From espionage to covert surveillance. Foreign languages to hypnosis. He'll need them all on this single-minded pursuit of justice for his dead friend. "I want to go to prison" Gabriel’s plan is simple. Novgorodsky’s organisation – Kuznitsa, “the Forge” – recruits its muscle from one of the worst penal colonies in Russia. Gabriel aims to get inside. The three opposing forces, with Gabriel caught in the crossfire, come together at Max’s country house outside Moscow in an explosive climax. If you like your action intense As a Department operative, Gabriel is expected to play by the rules - even if they're written by an off-books outfit run by his former CO. But this is no Department mission. This is personal. And there's only one rule. Keep going until Max is dead, or you are. BUY YOUR COPY OF TORPEDO NOW

Release date: July 1, 2019

Publisher: Tyton Press

Print pages: 422

Sample

Chapter 1

 

ALDEBURGH, SUFFOLK, ENGLAND

 

My name is Gabriel Wolfe. Death walks in my footsteps. The further I travel in this life, the more Death enjoys himself. Sometimes, if I keep very still, I can hear the soft pad of his stinking, bloody feet as he dogs my trail.

 

I was a soldier for thirteen years – in the Paras and then the SAS. After a short, peaceful stint in civvy street, I started killing people for a living again. As a government troubleshooter.

 

My problem is, however much trouble I shoot for the Queen, I always seem to bring down a whole heap more onto my own, uncrowned, head.

 

I don’t begrudge Her Majesty the imbalance in our fortunes. Nobody forced me to accept my former CO Don Webster’s offer to join his “jolly band of cutthroats.” I re-entered service as an operative for The Department willingly. In fact, I was filled with a sense of excitement. It was good to be back in action. Helping CEOs negotiate takeovers – my former job – was eating away at my soul.

 

What’s consuming me now is my own ability to kill those dearest to me, as surely as a metastasising cancer cell. And I have come to believe that whereas you might dodge the incoming fire from the Big C with a dose of radiation, chemo or plain old luck, contact with me is one hundred percent fatal.

 

I can sleep. I’ve always been able to sleep, even when my PTSD was at its worst. But my dreams are populated with people I loved. Love, I mean.

My best friend from Salisbury, Julia Angell. My former comrades in The Regiment: Smudge, Dusty and Daisy. My mentor and the man who raised me after my parents ran out of patience, Master Zhao. All dead. All gone. All because of me.

 

And now, Britta Falskog. The woman I proposed to just a couple of years ago, who had just told me and Eli that she was engaged again, to a teacher from Uppsala. Britta did a dangerous job, just like I do. Just like Eli does. Counter-terror isn’t exactly risk free, even in social democratic Sweden. But she wasn’t killed doing her job. She was killed – murdered – because she got between a hitman’s bullet and its intended target. Yours truly, once again.

 

It was a beautiful day. The sun was streaming down onto the beach just south of my home in Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast. We could smell salt and ozone in the air. One minute she was laughing, the next she was dead. Falling away from me, half of her head missing.

 

As I sat beside her, I looked down into her sightless eyes. I wondered why my ex-fiancée wouldn’t answer me. Shock, obviously. I tried again.

 

“Britta! Wake up,” I said.

 

Her lips didn’t move.

 

The whop-whop of the air ambulance’s rotor blades distracted me. I stroked her right cheek with the backs of my fingers. Her head rolled to the left, spilling more brain matter onto the beach pebbles. I shook my head. That’s not good, is what I thought. I picked up the soft piece of tissue and gently replaced it inside her shattered skull.

 

From beside me, I heard a voice. A woman’s voice. Eli! That’s it, I thought. I’d gone down to the beach with Eli and Britta. For a walk. They were laughing. Then Britta fell.

 

Reality was knocking, but I didn’t want to meet it. If I opened the door, I’d have to acknowledge the truth. And I wasn’t ready for that. I squeezed my eyes shut. I started to hum. That didn’t work, so I started singing instead. Louder and louder. The national anthem.

 

“God save our gracious Queen! Long live our noble Queen! God save the Queen! Send her victorious, happy and glorious, long to reign over us, GOD SAVE THE QUEEN!”

 

By the end I was shouting. Shouting, and weeping. It didn’t work. I knew what had happened. Reality won. It always does.

 

Eli bent over me and hugged me to her chest. Her scent, of lemon and sandalwood, replaced the smell of the sea.

 

“The chopper’s here,” she said.

 

Her voice so full of compassion I wanted to scream at her.

 

“No! Leave me here!”

 

“Come on, get up. We need to let the paramedics take her now,” she said. “And you’ve been shot. You need surgery.”

 

As docile as a newly trained puppy, I stood, hauling myself to my feet on Eli’s arm. She drew me back a few paces, and together we watched as the two green-uniformed paramedics, a man and a woman, slid Britta into a black plastic body bag and zipped her in snug. The man brought out a smaller bag and sank to his knees. He began collecting the parts of Britta’s skull and brains that the hitman’s bullet had splattered over the pebbles.

 

I remember very little of the helicopter ride to Ipswich Hospital. They gave me some high-octane painkiller – morphine, I assume – and the next thing I recall with any clarity is sitting up in bed the following morning, my shoulder bandaged and hurting like a bastard, with Eli sitting at my bedside, holding my other hand.

 

“Take me home now, please,” I said to Eli. 

 

They discharged me with strict instructions from the trauma surgeon that I should rest the arm for a minimum of six weeks, although it hadn’t turned out to be as bad as everyone thought. Then I left with a paper bag full of painkillers and antibiotics.

 

The next day, we went for a walk. Just down Slaughden Road. Nowhere near the beach. I saw someone coming, recognised the look. A detective. I pointed at her.

 

“Tell her to come to the house if she wants to talk to me.”

 

Eli unhooked her arm and went to speak to the cop. She nodded then walked back towards me with Eli. As we neared the house, I found I was struggling to breathe. I closed my eyes. But that didn’t help. I saw Britta, my freckled “super-Swede” laughing, revealing her gappy teeth. In happier times.

 

“Stop!” I hissed to Eli. “I can’t breathe.”

 

“Yes, you can. Look at me, Gabriel. Look at me!” she said. Ordered, really.

 

I complied, focusing on her grey-green eyes, noticing how the very outer rim of each iris was darker. The iron band around my chest released its grip. I gulped down air. The drowning sensation receded like the waves shushing in and out over the shingle. I knew what would happen next. I’d been there before. Questions. Statements. More questions. Raised eyebrows when the subject of my profession came up. Trips to a police station. Sour-tasting coffee.

 

We went inside and the cop began asking questions. Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? Any idea? Can you? Did you? Were you? I gave her the answers I felt able to. Noncommittal, packed full of incontrovertibly true details that would prove utterly useless.

 

After a while, she left.

 

And then, from somewhere deep down, way beyond where my conscious mind lives, an ancient, primal emotion gathered itself and forced its way upwards. Like magma racing through a fissure in the earth’s crust before erupting and wiping out whole towns.

 

A desire for vengeance.

 

Gabriel Wolfe folded the sheet of paper into three and slid the narrow rectangle inside a thick, ridged envelope. This he placed in the top drawer of the desk in his study overlooking the beach. His teeth were hurting, and it was with a conscious effort that he unclenched his jaws.

 

He looked at his watch – 7.05 a.m. – then levered himself out of the battered old wood and leather swivel chair. He showered and dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, careful to ease the stretchy fabric over the dressing on his injured shoulder, then padded downstairs in his bare feet.