Free Deadfall: Agent 21 by Chris Ryan Page B

– Zak vaguely remembered their faces from the images Malcolm hadaccessed on his computer screen – were dead, but he’d half been expecting that.
    He wasn’t, though, prepared for how gruesome they would look.
    They’d both been shot in the back of the head. Each had a chunk of skull missing, and a hideous exit wound on their foreheads. Zak was aware of a buzzing sound, and realized that, even in the darkness, there were insects buzzing around the sticky, open wounds. He recoiled from that noise as much as from the sight.
    But it was not the head wounds that made his blood turn to ice. It was the cuts on the corpses’ faces. Each man had a fresh slash reaching from the edge of their lips, across their cheeks and up to their ears.
    Just like the boys who had abducted Zak that morning.
    ‘Looks like someone’s left a calling card,’ Raf breathed, before switching off the torch so they didn’t have to look at that gruesome sight a second longer.

PART TWO

7
SMILER
    Dawn is noisy in the jungle.
    Eighty kilometres, as the crow flies, from the landing strip, a group of twenty boys – none of them older than fifteen, some as young as nine – sat in a circle listening to the sound of the rainforest waking up. They were a strangely dressed bunch. Some wore black vests and baggy red trousers. Others had plain khaki shirts, or camouflage jackets, or sleeveless jackets with pouches along the front. Four or five wore long links of bullets around their necks, like scarves. One or two had green metal helmets. Rather more had red, black or blue bandanas wrapped round their foreheads.
    All of them carried guns.
    Every second, the screech of a different bird echoed from a different direction. The trees surrounding them shook as those birds, animals andreptiles that had taken shelter in their branches started to move. Behind it all was a white noise of buzzing as insects rose in great clouds to meet the morning.
    And a young boy screamed so loudly that it almost drowned out all these other sounds.
    He was kneeling by the fire in the centre of the circle, with his hands tied firmly behind his back. The fire itself was covered with green leaves and grasses. It was there not for heat or light, but to emit massive clouds of smoke to repel mosquitoes. It was only half successful. A pall of smoke certainly hung thickly around this small clearing, and all the boys blinked heavily to keep their smarting eyes moist and smoke-free. But the mosquitoes swarmed anyway – over their hands and feet. Also over their faces, though they seemed to avoid the scar tissue that led from the corner of each boy’s mouth, up across the cheek and to the earlobe.
    Nobody seemed bothered by the mosquitoes, though. The boy in the centre was already too busy screaming and whimpering to pay them any mind. And those sitting in the circle were watching him closely with enjoyment.
    There was an older man too, standing in front of the young boy. He had a viciously sharp, broad-bladed knife in his right hand.
    ‘Shush,’ he said loudly.
    The boy stopped shouting, but he could not stop a series of sobs escaping his lips.
    ‘Shush, shush, shush,’ the man repeated, this time in a much quieter voice. ‘You should not be shouting. You should be thanking us. After all, you
begged
us for this opportunity.’
    It was true. The young boy
had
begged these people to let him join them.
    His name was Kofi, but for as long as he could remember, everyone had called him Smiler. When he was five years old, a young English woman had come to live in their village for two months. She had also taught Kofi English, and he knew he now spoke it far better than most of the other villagers; his parents had hoped speaking English well would lead to chances in life for him. And it was the English woman who had given him the name Smiler because he always seemed to have a grin on his face. She was now long forgotten, but the name had stuck, even though most of the villagers didn’t know