Fire Force(5)

Three

STEVE LOOKED DOWN AT THE first two cards.

Tens. At least they aren’t sodding eights, he told himself. Abago had set the rules very clearly. One hand each. Five cards. The best hand won. You couldn’t discard any cards, you couldn’t ask for any more - and Ian was out of the game.

It would just come down to the cards fate dealt them.

Steve glanced up at the girl with the deck in her hands. Her fingers were delicate and nimble as she caressed the pack, flicked it open, and shuffled. A smile played in her soft dark eyes: they were as fresh and innocent as the sand on the beach a few hundred yards from here. She had yet to be brutalised by her surroundings. She placed one more card on the table next to each man. Steve looked up at Abago. The man wiped the sweat from his brow then smiled, baring his teeth in the wild grin of a born predator.

Steve looked at his card.

A seven. Sod it. Two tens and a seven. It wasn’t much of a hand so far.

‘Another card,’ he said to the girl.

She placed one carefully in front of Abago, then tossed one towards Steve. He could see one of the soldiers, his fingers twitching on the trigger of his AK-47, glance from man to man.

A Queen.

Two tens, a seven and a Queen.

Abago wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘The last card,’ he said roughly.

The cards were placed on the table, face down. Three of the soldiers had jabbed cigarettes into their mouths, creating a dense cloud of smoke around the table that was filling Steve’s eyes and lungs. He waited a moment before picking up the card. Sod you, Ollie Hall, he thought to himself. Why the hell did you have to accept a suicidal contract to break a man out of Broken Ridge? And why the hell did you have to screw it up so badly that your mates had to come and break you out? If it costs me a hand, I’ll kill you with the one I’ve got left.

Abago had already picked up his card, holding the full deck in front of him.

Steve picked up his card, slotting it carefully next to the other four. Then he permitted himself a brief tense smile.

‘Let’s see what you’ve got,’ he said, looking straight at Abago.

The Commandant laid his hand flat on the table. Two Kings, a six, a four and a nine.

Steve paused for a fraction of a second, then put his hand down. ‘Three tens,’ he said firmly. He watched the Commandant’s eyes flick down to the cards. ‘I’ll go and collect the bloke you’ve got locked up now . . .’

‘Not so fast,’ grunted Abago.

The soldiers stepped an inch forwards. You could see the sweat on their fingers as they held on tight to the triggers. One of them was spitting his still-burning cigarette onto the floor.

‘A bet’s a bet,’ said Ian, an edge to his voice.

Abago grabbed the gold coins and thrust them greedily into his pocket. ‘You can have your white man,’ he said. ‘He’s too ugly even for this jail.’

Steve stood straight up. ‘Then let’s get him.’

Abago led the way. From the front of the bar, they walked a few yards along the dusty track, then straight through the front gate that led into the heart of the jail. Broken Ridge consisted of a single, crumbling block of concrete, two storeys high but with another two floors of cells sunk into the foundations. There were only a few windows, and they were blocked by thick metal bars. Beyond the building, thirty metres of scrubland reached up towards the high barbed-wire fence. Behind were two buildings made of corrugated iron: a barracks for the guards and soldiers and a cookhouse, from which a foul smell of boiled maize and gristle drifted on the night air. Two soldiers saluted as Abago stumped past them, glancing only cursorily at the two white men walking behind him.

‘Ready?’ whispered Steve.

‘Ready,’ said Ian, his voice terse.

They stepped through the gates. Steve didn’t like jails, never had done. There was a guy he knew from his time in the SAS who’d got involved with a bunch of bank robbers and ended up spending eight years in Wandsworth nick. Steve had been to see him a couple of times and his blood had chilled every time he stepped through the doors. There was something about being caged up year after year that struck him as more punishing than any torture he could imagine. And that was a British jail. This place was like a slice of hell itself, dug up from out of the ground and delivered to the surface. You could hear the wind whistling in off the Atlantic, and the trees creaking down on the beach, and as you stepped towards it, it seemed as if the building itself was groaning in pain. There was a terrible stench drifting out of the place, the smell of bodies packed together, and you could hear the piercing howl of a man dying coming from somewhere deep inside. As you stepped into the main building, there was a long corridor, and in a couple of places, weak light bulbs. Along it was a series of locked doors. If there were people inside, it was impossible to tell. The doors were made from steel, with no windows. At the end of the corridor, one staircase led upwards, another down.