War Criminals, Gavin Smith [best novels for beginners .txt] 📗

had found Resnick’s ‘flotilla’. Four boats a bit bigger than the Bastards’ own and a handful of other smaller and individual watercraft. They had been tied off to branches sticking out over the river. None of the legionnaires were looking at the boats, however. They weren’t even considering how much bigger Resnick’s force obviously was compared to theirs. All their attention was focused on the ‘breadcrumb’.

‘It’s called canoeing,’ Corenbloom said.

Someone had nailed what Miska assumed was a member of Triple S (elite) to a tree trunk. He had been stripped to the waist. Had two gunshot wounds to his chest, close range, judging by the powder burns, and another close range V-shaped wound in his head. Miska had seen it before as well. It wasn’t just an execution. The close range, the upper forehead, the exposed brain matter, it was designed to mutilate the body. The corpse’s hand was pointing north.

She glanced at Corenbloom. ‘Grig?’ she asked. He nodded. It seemed the Ultra was showing the way.

‘Kaneda, Hogg, I want you on the banks, check the tracks, I want to know how many Waders and which way they went. Go careful, Resnick’s the kind of asshole who’d leave booby traps behind.’ Hogg nodded, and both he and Kaneda leapt off the boat and onto the muddy bank.

‘Mass, move the boat upstream, find a place to tether it, and then you and Hemi get the Waders ready. I want the rest of you on watch,’ she told them. People started to move.

Another half-naked member of Triple S (elite) had been nailed to a tree. He had two gunshot wounds to the chest and one in the head. It was called Failure Drill and a lot of special operation forces units taught it. Her dad taught it to the Legion. What her dad didn’t teach was to claw the bodies afterwards. This corpse was pointing north as well. Miska knew that a lot of the Leopard and Crocodile Society members had implanted claws in their fingers so she assumed this was Gunhir. She glanced over at Corenbloom in the other Wader a little way off. He was looking up at the body.

Both the Waders were stood in a pool about halfway up a stepped waterfall. The going had been slow and uncomfortable. The hydraulic systems were anything but smooth, and without anything resembling a sensor system finding a solid footing was more luck than judgement. They had almost gone over more than once, and one of the legs had plunged into a sinkhole that had come close to taking them under. Nyukuti had been bounced out of the cupola, though he’d managed to hold on to the side. It was a more interesting journey than even Miska liked. The rain, or rather the sky waterfalls, were an added misery. The Waders’ cupolas were waterproof but that meant they held water inside as well. Each of the Waders had a pump but they just weren’t quite up to the job. As a result the Waders were slowly filling with water, to the point that Miska was starting to consider bailing. Not that they had any receptacles big enough to make such an activity worthwhile.

All of them were wearing their rain ponchos but it didn’t matter how advanced the materials were, their wicking properties, whether they were designed to ‘breathe’, somehow the rain was finding its way inside. Miska was wet and cold, and even her normally upbeat mood was taking a beating.

She knew the other seven legionnaires were less than happy too. Kaneda and Hogg had found tracks suggesting that twelve other Waders had gone north. With a minimum of four people to a Wader, that meant they were looking at as many as forty-eight enemy combatants, if not more, the majority of whom had special forces training and experience. Miska had tried to reassure them that they were just going to have a look, that if the opposition was too much they would turn back. They hadn’t seemed very reassured and if Miska was honest she wasn’t going to look, she wanted Resnick dead.

‘Boss?’ Mass asked.

‘We keep going,’ she told him.

Mass started swearing at the Wader as it lurched forward.

It seemed that the mangrove swampland was a series of broad waterlogged terraces underneath the jungle canopy. They had come to a broad open area at the top of the stepped waterfalls they had just negotiated. The water was no longer turquoise up here. It was a white/grey colour and full of floating tree debris brought down by the torrential rainfall. Some of it was big enough to threaten the telescoped legs of the Waders.

They had found another corpse pointing north. Half-naked, he had been very extensively beaten to death. Miska had seen victims of mob violence that looked less beaten. His torso looked like a solid mass of bloodied bruise, his face a pulped, unrecognisable mess, and he’d been scalped.

Hemi brought his Wader up close to Mass’s. Miska looked across at Corenbloom.

‘Kaczmar?’ Miska asked.

Corenbloom nodded.

‘The scalping’s new,’ he added.

She just nodded, there wasn’t much else to say.

‘Keep some distance between the Waders!’ she called. ‘Mass, follow the arrow.’

‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ Mass muttered, shaking his head.

Everyone’s got a line they don’t want to cross, Miska thought.

She glanced around at Hogg on the heavy machine gun. He looked less than pleased as well. Nyukuti, on the grenade machine gun, was just looking up at the body thoughtfully as the Wader set off on its lurching way again. She could only see the back of Raff’s head on the twin SAW mount at the back of the Wader.

‘Well that’s perfectly fucking horrible,’ Hogg muttered behind her.

Miska hadn’t been watching ahead, like she should have been. She kept seeing movement in her peripheral vision. It didn’t track with the kind of movement that she would expect from people trying to be sneaky, nor did it seem like boats or archaic mechs. Instead the movement seemed to be coming from the trees. But she could not be