Payback by Graham Lancaster Page A

digger, and he ducked down quickly, cursing his sloppiness. The taller of the two guards nodded in his direction, clearly thinking he had seen some movement over there, and both men changed direction to march quickly towards him.
    All Ferez’s bored cockiness quickly evaporated, as in a panic he tried to calm himself and remember his tradecraft training from Fort Monckton. Damn. Damn! It was all going wrong. His career was surely now humiliatingly over, falling at the very first, very low hurdle. And these men were, he knew, armed and usually drunk by now. His career was not the only thing on the line...
    They were now less than thirty metres away, their flashlight still on the digger. He had unforgivably marooned himself there, with no line of escape. In desperation, he took a stone and lobbed it high to the men’s right. In the few seconds it bought as they turned to look, he shimmied up into the digger bucket, suspended four metres in the air. But the men barely paused, and continued on towards him. They looked around the machine, checking it over carefully, the light flooding and picking it out from every angle.
    ‘ Climb up and look in the bucket,’ the shorter, more senior man ordered the other in guttural Portuguese.
    There came sounds of someone getting on to the body of the machine, then pausing as he figured how best to mount the digger arm that thrust Ferez skyward, like a sacrificial offering. Ferez himself was not armed. Not just for routine surveillance. Not in a friendly EU neighbour state.
    Then the arm began to sway, as the man started to climb up to check out the bucket. Young Ferez was by now shaking too, in fear of what he would have to do. He had no doubt that he could easily take out the climbing man, making the most of the element of surprise, and using the lethal unarmed combat head blows he had been taught. If, if he had the stomach to deliver them. Under pressure, he was certainly finding out about himself, as they warned he would. But even if he did now act out a text-book attack on the first one, the man below would be a very different proposition...
    Then there was a shudder and a loud expletive rang out, as the man lost his footing and fell, crashing down on to the engine cover. Unhurt but still cursing, he jumped to the ground next to his partner. ‘There’s a better way,’ he said.
    He picked up a heavy piece of concrete and threw it two-handed high in the air above the bucket. Ferez saw it frozen in the light above him for a millisecond, before it began hurtling down at him. As it did he smashed the night-sight hard, two-handed into the bucket-base beneath him, creating a loud metallic bang, just as the lump of angular concrete plunged silently into his chest. Somehow he stifled the groan in his throat as his ribs broke. Dizzy with agony, close to passing out, his ears oddly became doubly sensitive, and at last he heard them laughing, and pushing the empty trolley back to the lab.
    He waited a quarter of an hour before gingerly easing himself down, breathing shallowly and in excruciating pain. But he had to check out what the men had been doing. Why had they needed to be so secretive about dumping trash in a site their company owned?
    Climbing down into the foundation pit proved harder than anticipated, given his injury. It was over three metres deep and he worried about being able to climb back out. Once in, though, his task was easy. The man had made only a half-hearted job of covering the sack over—but he soon realised why they had both been smoking. The stench of rotting flesh was over-powering. The two men had just been behaving exactly like the burial men working the plague pits of seventeenth-century London, with their aromatic clay pipes, scented ’kerchiefs and pockets full of posies. It was obviously the remains of a butchered lab animal. Something large. A big ape. Or a pig.
    Taking out a pencil torch he tore open the sack.
    The eyes of the dismembered head were still open,