Free Exit Wounds by Aaron Fisher

what the quality and magnify it to see the individual hairs on a man’s neck at forty miles away. Sadly this was not the reality.
    Even though in a way it was a step back, Tony added a subtle gaussian blur, softening the edges of the individual pixels so that edges of the picture themselves would take priority. If he blurred it too much he would lose all quality, but with not enough he would still be left with what resembled a badly tiled floor.
    Tony decided to change his strategy. He reset the zoomed image to its original state and duplicated it so that he had two copies, one on top of the other. Then re-adding the gaussian blur to the top layer, he gave it a soft overlay effect so that he kept the images detail but didn’t have the fragmented pixels.
    It took only a few moments for the computer to render the effects Tony had chosen for the photograph, and when it did he realised that his work had paid off a lot more than he had hoped. Flipping the image upside down, it became clear the dark mark on the back of the suspect’s hand wasn’t a bruise, it was a tattoo. It was blue, indistinct and faded; lacking the skill of a professional, but despite this Tony could see clearly the emblem of a bloody dagger flanked on either side by wings.
    An Abandoned Warehouse, Cardiff Bay
     
    Making sure not to make eye contact with anyone but also not to look away too obviously, Paul Russell had picked up one of the crates and pushed it on to the back of one of the vans, then picked up another crate from the truck that was being unloaded and carried it with him all the way to the back of the room. No one had paid him any attention as they hastily carried on with their own work. The first of the doors had been locked and Paul fought the urge to look around to see if anyone had seen his mistake, quickly moving to the next one.
    On the other side, Paul found himself at the start of a long corridor. There were doors on the left every fifty metres or so and whilst there was a slight turn about a hundred or so down, Paul got the impression that the corridor probably ran through the entire length of the terraced warehouses.
    Paul had to admit it was a relief to be able to drop the heavy crate down. The first one hadn’t been anyone near as heavy. Determined to find out what he had been carrying, Paul looked around for something to ply the wooden lid off. A bit of metal skirting hung from the wall behind him. Paul tore it off and forced one end in the gap between the lid and the crate edge. As he pushed it underneath and put his weight down on the opposite end the cover began to lift.
    The skirting snapped off in Paul’s hands before he could get it fully open. He swore and struggled to tear off another piece of the metal. This time the skirting held, and the lid popped free of the crate.
    Casting the metal bar aside, Paul pushed the crates lid to the floor. He reached inside and drew out a handful before letting the contents fall through his fingers back into the crate.
    Bullets. 7.62x39mm rifle cartridges. Standard ammunition for an AK-47 assault rifle.
    The crate was filled to the brim. It didn’t take a genius to guess what was in the first crate.
    Drugs for guns.
    It wasn’t exactly a new idea. Russian gangsters had been smuggling in heroin to Britain from Afghanistan and paying for it with guns since before the war had even began. Russian arms dealers met with Taliban drug lords on the old Afghan-Soviet border. The drugs would end up on Britain’s streets whilst the guns went straight to the Taliban front line. One kilogram of heroin could buy around thirty AK-47 assault rifles at the bazaars where they traded.
    British Special Forces arrested or killed drugs smugglers they could link to the insurgency, but the bulk of the I.S.A.F. (International Security Assistance Force) was still handicapped by its mandate. Their directive didn’t include counter-narcotics operations, unless they could be linked to the insurgency.
    Paul held on