Murray Programmed To Kill

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4835-5091-6
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 230 Seiten

This is a story about four Vietnam Veterans who though they have long since left the army remain close friends. During their army training they made a pact to support each other for life, promising to come to the aid of each should their lives or those of their families ever be in danger. Many years later one of their number asks the other three to honour that pact when his life is threatened and his family kidnapped by a crooked lawyer and his underworld associates.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Murray, David J.

Leseproben

1 The cyclist was caught completely by surprise. The van had suddenly veered to its left knocking him to the ground. It had been a deliberate act by the van driver. As he struggled to entangle himself from the bike, the cyclist was set upon by three men who had jumped out of the van the moment it had stopped, immediately after hitting him. A fourth man opened the vehicles side door and the other three bundled the somewhat dazed cyclist and his damaged bike, into the van. The whole incident was over in seconds and as there was no passers bye at the time, went completely unnoticed. Once in the van, the protesting cyclist was flung onto a seat and ordered to stay put or be shot. Two of his assailants had Glock hand guns pointing directly at him. The cyclist, still a little dazed, the consequence of his head having struck the van’s front bumper bar during the collision, complied, all be it under protest. The third man hadn’t bothered drawing his hand gun from the holster that was visible and positioned under his left arm. “What the hell is going on, who are your guys?” asked the bewildered cyclist. “You stirred up the wrong guy mate” was the answer from one of the three. “What guy? What the fuck are you talking about?” “Just shut up or we’ll do it here and now” was the abrupt reply. “Do what?” “Pull the fucking trigger, now shut up.” The cyclist assessed the situation. One thing was certain, mistaken identity as was most certainly the case, or not, he knew he was in deep shit. These guys weren’t going to listen to anything he had to say. They were heading out towards West Head, a secluded area of rather dense bushland, where he was going to be shot and his body dumped. It would probably be weeks before a bushwalker stumbled across it. He estimated that they would reach their destination within the next fifteen or twenty minutes so there was precious little time to waste. The driver wouldn’t be a problem so long as the vehicle was moving. Of real concern were the two men with pistols in their hands. The men themselves, though all big and well-muscled, obviously gym junkies in their younger days, weren’t the issue, it was the two guns, safeties off, that could prove tricky. The van was configured so that two seats were positioned near the rear, one facing the front and the other the passenger’s side thus creating an L shape. On the seat facing the driver’s rear, sat the two men with weapons drawn. The third man sat directly behind the driver on the seat facing the left hand side of the vehicle with the cyclist beside him and close to the other two men. As The vehicle made a left hand turn off the main road and headed down a dirt service track into the bush proper the cyclist decided it was time to act. Without the slightest warning, he grabbed the man sitting to his right and with a degree of strength that completely belied his appearance and so caught all in the vehicle by surprise, flung him at the man with the gun positioned immediately to his left. The man on the left responded by discharging two shots in quick succession killing, not the cyclist but the man whom the cyclist had so surprisingly wrenched from his seat. With the dead man now lying across the man to his left, the cyclist retrieved the revolver from the holster under the dead man’s left arm and shot the man to his right. He then shot the man immediately to his left who was still struggling to free himself from the man he had just shot. The driver, who had stopped the vehicle during the commotion and was in the process of drawing his weapon, was the next to go. The whole incident took less than a minute and in its aftermath the cyclist was aware of an eerie quiet that seemed to descend on the scene. The vehicle had progressed about five hundred meters down the bush track, a service road which probably wasn’t used more than once a week, and then only by rangers when they needed to bring in supplies to one of their work huts. In the front of the vehicle on the passenger seat was a rather large brief case which when opened contained a significant sum of money, all in denominations of $50 notes. The cyclist picked up one bundle and quickly counted the number of notes. There were apparently fifty in each bundle and it appeared that there were twenty such bundles, $50,000 in all. That’ll come in handy he thought and a slight grin crossed his face. Beside the briefcase was a large brown envelope inside which was a photo of the cyclist and basic dossier on one David Mainwaring. The photo was a recent one, taken about a week ago, as he sat reading the Sydney Morning Herald over a coffee at Gloria Jeans in Narrabeen. So the four had been hired to kill him, but why? And who wanted him dead? David searched each of the dead men for clues, collected their wallets, weapons and spare ammunition all of which went into the brief case which he took with him on leaving the van. Once outside the vehicle he lifted the bonnet broke the fuel line that ran from the petrol pump and let the leaking fluid soak a piece of shirt, which he had torn off one of the corpses. He then removed the petrol cap from the fuel tank and replaced it with the petrol soaked piece of cloth. A moment later he lit the rag with a cigarette lighter taken from one of the dead men and briefcase in hand, headed up the track at speed. He’d put about forty meters between himself and the van before the explosion occurred. Judging from its size and the intensity of the fire it generated, David figured the fuel tank must have been near full. He waited a few minutes before returning to the vehicle which was still burning furiously and looked like it would continue to do so for some time to come. The only way these bodies were going to be identified would be by their dental records. A crematorium would be battling to do a better job than this inferno. His bike, an alloy racer, had already been reduced to a compound of melted metal, rubber and little else, so there would be nothing to tie him to the incident when the police eventually found their way to the burnt out vehicle. He had quite a walk ahead of him, one which would be slow going as he would need to keep away from the road. The last thing he wanted was for anyone to be able to place him at, or near the scene of the fire. He travelled parallel to the road about forty meters into the bush. To the average Joe the going would have been quite difficult as there was no track and the undergrowth was, on occasion, dense. But David was no ordinary Joe. It had been forty years since his service in South Vietnam where officially he’d served as a gunner driver attached to 106 Battery, 4th Field Regiment. There had however been an unofficial side to his war service. One that only a handful of high ranking officers, to this day, knew about. For some reason this incident had brought memories of that period of his life, flooding back. Making his way through dense bushland, unnoticed, was a breeze for him, even so many years after his army service. In fact this whole incident was child’s play when he considered what he’d had to endure on numerous occasions back in 1967. He’d been ‘called up’ after winning the now infamous National Service lottery. A system where by all the birth dates of twenty year olds were placed in a barrel and those whose dates were selected at random were forced to undergo two years military training. Failure to comply meant a prison term. It was a truly unfair system and of course highly discriminative. David had been called up in what was known as the third intake and began basic training at Kapooka, an army base near the town of Wagga Wagga in early February of 1966. During basic training, which lasted ten weeks, he had been flagged as an exceptionally gifted recruit. His ability with weapons was amazing. Whether it was a submachine gun, a rifle or a machine gun it was as though he couldn’t miss his target. His strength and fitness levels were in another league when compared to his peers. At the time the military hierarchy had been on the lookout for any exceptional recruits with a view to seconding them to a Special Forces unit specifically formed for the Vietnam campaign. This wasn’t anything new to the Australian Military. Special covert units had been formed during most of the conflicts Australian troops had been engaged in. In fact the elite Special Air Service had its origins in such units. So when the politicians decided to send conscripts to fight in Vietnam the army brass decided to form a special elite unit comprised of exceptionally gifted conscripts. Only four were chosen from David’s intake, three of whom had undergone training at Singleton. David had been the only recruit chosen from Kapooka. In point of fact the group comprising David Mainwaring, Peter Golding, John Sidler and Geoffrey Newberry, were the first to be selected and as it turned out they were also the last. As National Servicemen began dying in the jungles of Vietnam, the military brass, as a direct result of pressure from their political masters, had decided to return to the practice of training only regular soldiers for the highly dangerous covert missions behind enemy lines. When offered the chance David had jumped at it. He had not volunteered to join the Army but he had to serve out his two years, so why not do so in an area he would enjoy. There had been one condition attached to the job. He had been sworn to secrecy and had signed a document that guaranteed he would never disclose to anyone, any aspect of his work as a Special Forces operative. Immediately he had completed his ten weeks basic training he had been...