The Child Taker & Slow Burn by Conrad Jones

tree. “Hello, where are you?” He spoke gently, so as not to frighten the infant. The cries suddenly became louder and the female shouted for help too. Karl could not make any sense of it. They sounded as if they were right in front of him but he couldn’t see anything. He fumbled in the darkness and his hand touched something hard. His fingers felt blindly around the rectangular object and he nearly dropped it in fright when the infant’s cries screamed louder still from the box. It vibrated slightly as the cries reverberated through the trees. Karl realised what it was and he gazed open-mouthed at the wireless speaker. The female’s voice cried out again. The sound drifted through the trees and across the still waters of the lake, and it was all the more eerie now that he knew it was a hoax.
    “Why would anyone play a stupid, good for nothing trick like that,” Karl whispered to himself in the darkness. It was a warm, still evening but a cold shiver ran down his spine and he was suddenly very, very, frightened indeed.

Chapter Six
    The Souk
     
    Tank watched the sentry in the doorway of the souk as the helicopter approached their airspace. Curiosity got the better of him and the Somali reluctantly stepped from the shelter of the doorway into the blazing sunshine; he scoured the cloudless sky for any sight of the enemy aircraft. He was wearing ill-fitting khaki clothes, mirrored sunglasses and a baseball cap, which appeared to be standard issue for the many militias in Mogadishu. Tank guessed him to be around sixteen or seventeen, if he was a day. Raised voices could be heard from inside the souk as the helicopter flew nearby, and a burst of machinegun fire came from within the walls somewhere. The sentry peered skywards and turned around through three hundred and sixty degrees. Tank pointed two fingers at the sentry and one of his men responded by firing two, soft nosed nine millimetre bullets from a suppressed Glock. The fat shells punched holes the size of walnuts through the back of the sentry’s skull. His face was virtually ripped clean off as the flattened ammunition exited through his forehead. The sentry hit the dust with a dull thud and a pool of blood began to leak into the sand. Tank waved a hand and the unit moved silently towards the doorway.
    The walls of the souk were made from handcrafted bricks the colour and texture of sand. The doorway was low and narrow and it was fitted with a thick wooden door. The door was grey in colour and the wood was warped and cracked with age. There was a rusted keyhole next to the frame on the left of the door but no handle was fitted to the outside. It was obviously designed to open from the inside only. A burst of gunfire erupted nearby, and half a dozen other weapons soon joined it. The task force men couldn’t see who was firing skywards but it was obvious that they were in the vicinity of the souk. Tank stepped into the doorway, knelt down, and placed his eye to the keyhole. There was nothing to be seen except a spider’s web. He stepped back and nodded to his number four. Number four moved swiftly and within seconds had fitted a small plastic explosive charge to the keyhole. The unit split, two men each side of the doorway, and they ducked low against the sandy brick wall. Number four counted down with a gloved hand, four, three, two, one, and then the crack of a small controlled explosion joined the cacophony of machinegun fire. It appeared that the small explosion had gone unnoticed by the militiamen inside the old market place as the gunfire didn’t falter.
    The wooden door split into three triangular pieces. Tank ducked under the low frame and broke through the splintered pieces. He moved inside to the left, into what looked like a dusty storeroom. His colleagues broke right and took up defensive shooting positions. The room was empty except for a small wooden desk in the centre. It was the type of desk a child would use at school in the sixties. The lid