The Debt Collectors War Read online

  THE DEBT COLLECTORS WAR

  Tess Mackenzie

  Copyright 2014 Tess Mackenzie

  Smashwords Edition

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 1

  Ellie was somewhere in Central Asia when she heard her daughter had been murdered. Died was what the email said, but it was murdered as far as she could see.

  It was a cold dusty day and the wind was coming down icy and hard from mountains that may have been the Hindu Kush. She was on the roof of the old stone fort, watching the local hajjis resent her, and resisting the temptation to shoot a few just to stop them staring. She was dirty and cold and tired, and she hadn’t slept properly in a week, and if she never saw a beard or a hijab again in her life it wouldn’t be too soon.

  The hajjis watched, like they always watched, standing and squatting and dusty. Ellie glanced at them now and then, so they knew she was watching, because they’d kill you if you turned your back. She ignored them otherwise, as best as she could. She looked at the mountains, at the snow and stones and the barren cluttered rockeries that passed for fields in this part of the world. She looked at goats and dogs. She’d always thought hajjis hated dogs but there seemed to be a lot around.

  She was trying to connect a tablet through a satellite phone to the world. A signal was only possible on the roof, so she was checking her email while she was up here watching the hajjis. It was something to do while she waited for trouble to begin.

  The fort was small, a few rooms inside, really a house with no windows and very thick walls. It was cold in winter and stuffy in summer and dark all day through. A dingy little outpost of the world on the borders of anything that mattered. It sat away from the village, up a slight hill, overlooking the only road in or out. There had probably been a fortress up here for three or four thousand years, Ellie thought, and people like her had probably sat up there all that time, staring down at the locals.

  Ellie’s company had been running this base for twenty years, and it had been government military special ops before that, back when the military had special ops, before governments went bankrupt, before wars were all outsourced to people like Ellie.

  They were supposed to be hunting high-value targets. Targets fleeing major conventional ops further north. High-value targets didn’t come this way, though, up dead-end valleys into lawless tribal areas. So Ellie’s team sat, and waited for rumors, and went and dragged out of family homes men who always turned out to be the cousin of the person everyone wanted. It was pointless activity, in a pointless war, but this had been going on so long hardly anyone noticed any more.

  The phone finally beeped and warbled and said it was connected. Ellie looked down, tapped the tablet’s screen, and told it to check for new messages.

  Usually there was nothing. More pointless orders that no-one was going to follow or pointless intelligence updates about people who didn’t exist doing outrageous things in villages that had been bombed into the stone age twenty years before.

  Today it was a message from their corporate head office in the Shanghai Trade Zone. The server was in Shanghai, and the registered address probably was too, but the staff were, like Ellie, lost somewhere in the vastness of an unforgiving world.

  The message was from William, the manager who thought he was Ellie’s supervisor. He said he was sorry.

  She looked at the message, not understanding.

  Word had come in from Australia, William said. The company had been asked to pass this on to Ellie.

  She kept reading. The message from Australia said her daughter was dead of a drug overdose and the funeral was in three days.

  Ellie looked at the screen and didn’t know what to think.

  The kid was dead. The kid she hadn’t seen in five or six years, in long enough she had to stop and think exactly how long it had been. The kid she’d left with her parents pretty much as soon as it was born, and ignored for the rest of its life. The kid she’d cut out of her life, because a few years in her world had taught her to think that way.

  The kid was dead. Her daughter was dead.

  She sat there and tried to decide if she was upset or not. She wasn’t really sure what she felt.

  After a while, Miguel, one of her team, came up onto the roof. He aimed his weapon at the hajjis and shouted, “Stop eyeballing me you hand-shit-wiping goat-fuckers.”

  The hajjis moved away, avoiding looking up at the roof. Miguel always shouted, and once or twice had shot towards passing hajjis, and as far as Ellie could tell the locals had decided it was better to be safe than sorry when they were dealing with a large, hairy kafir. They always moved when he shouted at them.

  Miguel leaned against the roof’s parapet, able to see over, but low enough a sniper wouldn’t have a clear view of him. He looked over at the tablet.

  “Anything?” he said.

  Ellie turned the tablet around, pushed it over so he could see. He took it and read, read again. “Who’s Naomi?” he said.

  “My kid.”

  “You’ve got a kid?”

  Ellie nodded.

  “And she’s dead?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Fuck,” he said. “Ellie, that’s fucking awful.”

  Ellie sat there for a moment. “Yeah.”

  Miguel leaned towards the trapdoor that was their access to the roof, and shouted down into the fort, “Sam, get the fuck up here.”

  Then he sat and looked at Ellie.

  “That’s really shit,” he said.

  “I know.”

  He glanced at the trapdoor, like he was hoping Sameh was climbing up. She wasn’t, so he read some more. “Drugs?”

  “Yeah, apparently.” Ellie said. “That’s what they think.”

  Miguel nodded. “What’re you going to do?”

  Ellie thought about that for a while. How much she should care, and if she should care at all.

  “Kill the guy who sold it to her, I guess. Then come back here.”

  Miguel was peering at her, worried. “Are you okay, dude?” he said. “You seem, kind of off.”

  They all got used to combat fatigue here, and good at spotting it in others. You couldn’t necessarily do much, but you could notice and stop that person before they offed a family of hajjis for even less reason than usual. Not that anyone really cared, but it got expensive paying out all the blood-price bills.

  “I don’t know,” Ellie said.

  She felt odd, slightly empty. She knew it was shock, the first step to something worse, but she didn’t know how to stop herself. She knew it was happening, though, which was a start. She was just too tired to think.

  “I’m all right,” Ellie said. “I didn’t really know her.”

  “But you’re going to kill the guy who sold her the drugs.”

  “Yeah.”

  Miguel nodded. “You’ve been here too long, dude.”

  He stood up and shot at one of the hajjis who was lurking too close. The bullet pinged off the ground next to the man, and the man ran away. The rest of the hajjis ducked for a moment, and then went back to what they were doing. Miguel generally only shot once if he was going to, and most of the time, Ellie thought, the hajjis knew he aimed to miss.

  “Probably,” Ellie said quietly. “Probably I have.”

  You got a little strange, out here on your own, the only one not wearing sacks or wailing
to god five times a day. Who you used to be emptied out, in a way, just wasn’t there any more, and you picked up bits and pieces from everyone around you instead. Your team, but the hajjis too. All the search teams this far out got a bit aggro about pride and honor. They squabbled with each other and killed passers-by for slights they didn’t care about ten minutes later, and all head office could do to stop it was rotate them all around so they didn’t spent too long in the worst of the places.

  Some people, like Ellie, refused to rotate, because they got bored anywhere else. So they got a little strange instead.

  Ellie didn’t mind being strange. You lost what you had been, but you found something else to put in its place. You started to see the hajjis weren’t all bad, that some of their ideas made sense. They treated women like shit, but they were nice to their kids, and Ellie treated them like shit back so she supposed that evened out. Although she was nice to their kids. They didn’t like dogs, but they didn’t like liars or cowards either. They were kind of stupid, but these were redneck hajjis, backwoods hajjis, so it wasn’t like she was seeing them at their best, really. And they had their pride, and she could see how pride helped when all you had otherwise was stones and goats and thousand-year-old houses with floors made of dirt.

  She’d probably been out here too long, and was picking up too much from the local hajjis, but that didn’t mean their ideas weren’t right, and that she wasn’t going to end the guy who’d caused all this. She was a bad mother, and had taken off and abandoned Naomi and never bothered much about her, but this was different. This was pride and family, and you didn’t need to be a hajji to know that mattered.

  *

  Sameh, Ellie’s girlfriend and the team’s translator, climbed up through the trapdoor and pointed her rifle at the hajjis. The hajjis scattered, got into cover without waiting, because they were all terrified of her. She was an Iraqi whose family had got out of Iraq when she was young, at the same time the West had, the first time, back a generation ago. She’d gone to school in Europe, then gone back to the MidEast because she didn’t know anything else. She wasn’t happy anywhere else. Not really. She’d come onto the team as a translator, and fallen in love with Ellie, and followed along with Ellie ever since. She was European enough to speak proper English, but Iraqi enough she thought all the hajjis were trying to harm her because she was a traitor and apostate. So she got in first, and scared the shit out of them. She shot at people without warning, just for being too close to her, and spread rumors about herself among the local hajji farmers. That she was a witch, a devil, a djinn. That she ate children and cut men’s penises off and used them to pleasure herself. The hajjis believed it. Ellie thought most of it was bluster, that deep down inside Sameh was a little bit broken and quite often scared and dealt with it this way. Sameh killed people because she was jumpy and paranoid as much as because she was a psychopath, but she was a psychopath too. They all were, out here at the end of the world.

  “What’s up,” Sameh said, looking down into the street.

  Miguel pointed to the tablet, and Ellie pushed it over. Sameh left her hand on Ellie’s shoulder while she read.

  “Who’s Naomi?” Sameh said.

  “My kid.”

  “You’ve got a kid?”

  “Don’t start.”

  Sameh looked at her, then just said, “Shit.” She knelt down beside Ellie, and hugged her, and kept holding on like one of them might slip away if she didn’t. Maybe it was the right thing to do. Ellie felt herself coming back in, felt more real again, more there.

  Sameh was still holding her rifle. Past Sameh’s shoulder, Ellie noticed it was pointed towards Miguel. Ellie moved it slightly, and didn’t think Sameh noticed. She moved it because Sameh’s safety would be off, because Sameh’s safety was always off, and she probably had her finger near the trigger, too, because she always let her finger slip sideways and start to curl when she was worried and not thinking clearly. When she was actually trying to kill someone, she was fine. She knew exactly where her finger was. The rest of the time, she was careless. She’d shot a lot of walls and doors over the years, had sent a lot of bullets a mile off into nowhere because she tripped or slipped or got startled and jumped. Making sure Sameh’s rifle wasn’t pointing at anyone who mattered, or anything a round would ricochet off, was a full-time job for Ellie.

  Ellie decided she must be feeling better if she was noticing things like that.

  “Are you okay?” Sameh whispered, then, “Why didn’t you tell me you had a kid?”

  “Why didn’t you ask?”

  Sameh smiled, and sniffed, and Ellie realized she was crying. Sameh never cried. She killed people instead. So she said.

  “Hey,” Ellie said, worried. “It’s okay. I hardly knew her.”

  “How the fuck do you have a kid?”

  “Man,” Ellie said. “Penis. Sperm. The usual.”

  Miguel and Sameh both looked at her like they were really worried, then looked at each other.

  “Hey,” Sameh said. “It’s okay.”

  “I’m fine. I didn’t know her. I gave her up when she was a baby and I haven’t seen her in years.”

  “But still,” Sameh said. “Shit.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you angry?” Sameh said.

  Ellie thought about that. Maybe she’d been around Sameh and the hajjis too much lately, but she was. “Yeah.”

  “Sad?”

  Ellie shrugged.

  “What are you going to do?” Sameh said.

  “Kill the guy,” Miguel said.

  “What guy?”

  “The guy who sold the kid the drugs,” Miguel said. “She’s going to kill him, she says.”

  Sameh thought about that. “Yeah, that makes sense.”

  “Fuck,” Miguel said. “Not you too.”

  “What?” Sameh said. “It does.”

  Miguel looked at her. “Don’t be an asshole.”

  “Don’t be a fuckhead,” Sameh said. “You fuckhead.”

  Miguel glared at her.

  They were about to start squabbling again, Ellie decided. They squabbled a lot, and right now she couldn’t be bothered. She stood up and aimed her rifle at the first hajji she saw. An old woman, as harmless as old women ever were here, so not at all because she probably stirred up half the trouble that went on at night, but Ellie still wasn’t ready to end her just for the sake of it, so she looked for someone else. A young man, probably an insurgent by night, walking a bit fast towards the mosque. She put a bullet through his leg.

  She sat back down.

  Sameh and Miguel were both quiet, watching her. There was screaming and sobbing from down in the road.

  “Habibi,” Sameh said. “You’ve never done that before.”

  “I know.”

  “You generally complain when we do,” Sameh said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you feeling okay?”

  “I need to go,” Ellie said.

  “Okay.”

  “I need to go home. To the funeral.”

  “Yeah,” Sameh said. “Of course. Want me to come with?”

  Ellie looked at her, surprised. “You would?”

  “Of course. We’re sisters. And I love you and shit, that too.”

  “I’m going to kill a guy in a proper country.”

  Sameh shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “Cops and shit. It’s against the law.”

  “Yeah,” Sameh said. “But it’s a drug dealer. It’s not like it’s a real person, is it?”

  “The cops might not think so,” Ellie said.

  “Cops won’t try as hard, I’ll bet.”

  Ellie looked at her, thinking.

  Sameh stood up and glanced over the side of the roof. Ellie did too. The village was quiet. The hajjis knew Sameh was up there and something was going on with the kafirs. They had all gone to ground, were well out of sight. Sameh looked around for a moment, then sat back down.

  “Thanks,” Ellie said, after a while. “
For that. For coming too.”

  “You’d do it for me,” Sameh said.

  “Yeah,” Ellie said. “You know what? I would.”

  Sameh grinned for a while, and Miguel watched them both.

  Then Sameh said, “I love you,” and kissed Ellie, and for once didn’t punch Miguel first and tell him she’d shoot him in the balls if she saw a twitch in his pants while she did.

  *

  Sameh wanted Ellie to go back downstairs, to their room, to calm down. To calm down, and so Sameh could make sure Ellie was okay in private. Ellie said no, that she had to organize getting home. She knew what Sameh was trying to do, had been with her three years and knew her better than most people in the world, but it didn’t need doing. She tried to say so, but Sameh wouldn’t listen.

  Sameh was convinced she was the hard one, that Ellie needed looking after, and Ellie was always hiding how she felt. Right now she probably didn’t want to think that Ellie was a monster who didn’t care enough about her own daughter to actually cry.

  Ellie wasn’t sure if she ought to cry or not. She was upset, though.

  She wrote an email back to William and said she needed time off, a week or more, depending on the transport. She wrote up the action reports she’d been putting off for days, the houses they’d checked and intel they’d been fed and which of it Ellie thought was lies. She attached those to the email, and added that Miguel knew where they’d been and where was still hot. She checked the schedules of aircraft movement and tried to work out a way back to the world, but before she could finish that, William phoned her, and broke her data connection, and then wasted twelve dollars a minute asking if she was all right. He said he’d organize the travel home, and not to worry about anything, and it could all wait until she was back.

  She was glad, in a way, not having to worry about details. “Thanks, mate,” she said.

  He said she was one of their best team leaders, the only one willing to go this far out and stay in-country this long, and they needed her. They needed her with her head in the game.