Bloodshot--The Official Movie Novelization Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  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 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Epilogue

  Into The Fire

  THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELIZATION

  NOVELIZATION BY GAVIN SMITH

  BASED UPON THE MOTION PICTURE SCREENPLAY

  WRITTEN BY JEFF WADLOW AND ERIC HEISSERER

  AND DIRECTED BY DAVID S. F. WILSON

  TITAN BOOKS

  BLOODSHOT – THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELIZATION

  Print edition ISBN: 9781789093087

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781789093094

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  www.titanbooks.com

  First edition: February 2020

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2020 CTMG. All Rights Reserved.

  BLOODSHOT is a registered trademark of Valiant Entertainment LLC.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  CHAPTER 1

  There were two Ray Garrisons. One of them worried about his mortgage, took pride in his ’64 Ford Mustang convertible, despaired over the Warriors and, most importantly, loved his wife. That Ray Garrison only sometimes thought about the bodies he left on the ground. Operationally, when action was imminent the first Ray Garrison got locked in a box and the second Ray Garrison came out to play, and he was a stone-cold, pipe-hitting professional.

  And so, it was the second Ray Garrison who leaned casually against the alley wall in downtown Mombasa, concealed by deep shadow, watching a stray dog trot through puddles left by the previous night’s rain. Sweat prickled his skin even this early in the day, as the hot sun lanced down between the crumbling buildings crowding in overhead. It felt like he was always being tasked to go somewhere hot for jobs like these. Except for Afghanistan. It was cold up in the mountains there. Iraq had been hot, but not humid like here in Mombasa.

  A mural caught his eye: a blindfolded woman, a tear running from her eye. Washing hung overhead, and the cramped alleyway was littered with crates of empty bottles, plastic tubs full of water, hanging fruit, even a stripped-out car. He suspected that the nice middle-class folks back home would see the alley as being strewn with trash. Garrison had been around enough to know it was just life. People lived here and chances were they were going to be woken today by the sound of gunfire. It probably wouldn’t be the first time. Mombasa had its problems with crime. They had heard gunfire before. Crime or black ops, a bullet was a bullet.

  Noticing movement from one of the windows, Garrison shifted slightly, readying his weapon, but it was just a young boy looking out into the alleyway. Garrison was far enough back in the shadows and knew he couldn’t be seen. He willed the boy to go away. Hoped he knew enough to keep his head down when the bullets inevitably started flying. These days, wars weren’t fought how they used to be. Now it was all urban combat: fighting close-quarter battles in built-up areas. CQB seemed to have been his life for the last fourteen years since he signed up on September 12th. No matter how careful you were it had its cost in collateral damage. Such considerations were something for the first Ray Garrison to worry about. Right here, right now, he had to secure the objective, keep himself and his people safe. And get home to Gina. He locked down that thought. That was a Ray Garrison One thought, and out here it would get him killed.

  The little boy had gone from the window.

  “Echo Five in position.” He heard Victor’s quietly spoken words over his tac radio.

  “Spartan One in position,” Daniels, the other elite Marine Raider with Garrison, said over the radio. Both were Tier One special forces operators, like himself.

  “Check your corners,” Echo Five said. The message wasn’t meant for Garrison. He was watching a door in the wall of the dilapidated two-story tenement building opposite his position. Despite the peeling blue paint, and the criss-cross pattern, the door looked surprisingly solid. He was cursing the speed with which this ad hoc rescue operation had been flung together. They had not had time to plan properly, which had, in turn, meant that important things, like breaching charges, had been forgotten. Still, the ground outside the door was littered with cigarette butts. He was going to get the bad guys to open the door for him. It was only a matter of time before one of the tangos, one of the targets, would need a smoke.

  A dog barked deeper in the alley. Probably the same dog he’d seen earlier. Garrison’s eyes flicked toward it. Nothing.

  The door opened. Garrison suppressed a smile. A man leaned out, big, white and pale enough that he couldn’t have been in Kenya long. He was wearing a T-shirt, BDU pants and combat boots, a bandanna wrapped tightly around his head. This was practically the uniform of the wannabe paramilitary thug. His assault rifle was slung over his back in precisely the way that would get him killed if a firefight kicked off right now. Amateur hour. This time Garrison did smile. Taking down amateurs was easier than dealing with someone who knew what they were doing. The only real problem amateurs presented was that they could be unpredictable.

  The gunman took a long drag on his cigarette and looked down the alley to see the dog snuffling around on the floor next to a discarded tire. Then, apparently satisfied, he disappeared back into the building, letting the door slowly swing closed behind him. Didn’t look hard enough, pal, Garrison thought as he stepped out of the shadow and into the bright, hot, early morning African sun. M4A1 carbine at his shoulder, ready, Garrison moved across the alleyway. For a big man he was very qu
iet. He reached the door just before it clicked shut. He heard shouting inside the building: Russian accents. He could probably try and guess what the mission was about, who these Russians were, but if Marine Special Operations Command had wanted him to know, they would have told him. His job was to prosecute the target. Nothing more, nothing less.

  “Contact, building two, ground floor,” Garrison told the rest of his fireteam over the tac radio. Both Victor and Daniels were good men, solid marines. Garrison had served with them for more than five years. They’d been in some dark places together. Their worst day had seen the three of them trapped in a karez, a kind of underground irrigation tunnel, in the tribal region of Pakistan, hunted by Al Qaeda fighters. Ray had been convinced that they were going to die that day. That mission had been hell. This job, in contrast, would be much easier.

  Focus, he told himself.

  Time to improvise. Ray knocked on the door before pulling back against the wall.

  It got real quiet.

  Gunfire violated the silence of the Mombasa dawn. Lead tore through flimsy wood at supersonic speed, chewing holes in the door.

  Sometimes Garrison thought the familiar chatter of AK-47s was the ambient soundtrack of his life. Stray bullets flew past where he was hunkered against the stonework and impacted the wall opposite creating puffs of powdered brick. They were firing blind. Just as he thought: amateur hour.

  “Echo, Spartan, close in.”

  “Roger. En route.”

  “Sixty seconds.”

  Garrison paid the comms chatter little heed. He had confidence that the rest of his team knew their job.

  The shooting stopped when the gunmen had blazed through all thirty rounds in each of their magazines. It would take an experienced marine just over a second to reload an assault rifle; these guys, a bit longer.

  Garrison removed a flashbang grenade from a pouch on his tac gear. He pulled the pin, let the spoon pop but kept hold of it, cooking it, counting. At the very last moment he flung it through the hole the blind fire had made in the door. The grenade detonated in midair, bright phosphorescent light leaking through Garrison’s closed eyes, concussive thunder temporarily deafening him. Taking less than a moment to recover Garrison swung round and advanced through the perforated door, M4 at his shoulder again.

  Situational awareness: some kind of large open storage area, collapsible chairs around a fire pit to keep away the chills of the cool African night, the early morning sunlight streaming down through the skylights, illuminating motes of dust in the air and the two stunned gunmen staggering around, their assault rifles empty.

  The recoil from the M4 was somehow comforting as the weapon’s collapsible stock punched back into his shoulder. Two short efficient bursts, the muzzle flash lighting up the storage area, and the bullets caught the gunmen center mass. He kept moving, stepping over their bodies. Checking the area, the M4 twitching left, right. He noted crates filled with taped-up packages, probably drugs. Not his problem.

  There was a flight of stairs just to the right of the door connected to a second-story walkway that ran around the storage area. That was a threat: the walkway would make an excellent elevated firing position. Garrison had his weapon up as he circled round, looking for movement. Nothing.

  Satisfied the area was clear he made his way, quickly and quietly, up the stairs and onto the walkway.

  A loosely held AK-47 appeared in an adjoining doorway as a third gunman fired blindly, spraying bullets. Garrison didn’t stop as holes appeared in the wall all around him. A stray round caught him in the shoulder. He grunted in pain, grimaced, but it was clean, through the meat, he knew the difference. Unpredictable amateurs, he thought as he suppressed the pain. He got an angle on the shooter, squeezed off another three-round burst and another body hit the floor.

  Moving quickly, legs bent, providing a stable platform for his weapon, trying to ignore the pain in his shoulder, the blood trickling down under his body armor, Garrison was round the corner and into a ratty-looking apartment. Slashes of light shone through the gaps in the boarded-up window revealing peeling paint and plaster, exposed cinder block, an ancient-looking cathode-ray-tube TV and a fourth gunman. He held a pump-action shotgun leveled at the hostage. The hostage was a blond man in his mid-forties, an American, the mission objective. The mission objective looked terrified.

  “Drop your gun!” the man with the shotgun all but screamed.

  Garrison’s eyes flicked left and right, imperceptibly, checking his periphery. Then he held up his hand as if to say, “Okay, okay...” as he eased the M4 down, and then took his helmet off in a bid to look less threatening, laying it on a crate pushed up against the wall.

  “On our way!” Echo Five told him over comms. Garrison could hear the typewriter-chatter of suppressed gunfire as the rest of the fireteam closed in. It was written all over the face of the man with the shotgun; he knew what was about to happen to him.

  “Tell me what you want,” Garrison said to distract him, play for time.

  “Helicopter! Now!” It was a fantasy and everyone in the room knew it.

  “Nearly there...” Spartan One told him.

  Garrison could hear heavy boots on the stairs, which meant the man with the shotgun could as well. The gunman had the barrel of his weapon pressed hard against the mission objective’s head, the trigger already partially depressed. Another ounce or two of pressure and their mission objective would be a red stain on the wall. The hostage looked as though he was ready to expire from fear before the buckshot even ripped his skull open like an egg.

  “And tell them to back off!” the man with the shotgun demanded.

  “Alpha One, stand down, sitrep stable,” Garrison told the rest of the fireteam over the tac radio, and then to the man with the shotgun: “See? No problem. Now. You want a helicopter, I need a phone.”

  The man with the shotgun stared at him. Garrison could see hope and plain ole’ common sense warring in the gunman’s eyes. He wasn’t dealing with fanatics here. Few people genuinely wanted to die, and in Garrison’s experience the desperate would cling onto the slightest chance of life like it was a burning life raft.

  “There!” The man nodded toward the corner of the room as hope won the war. Garrison glanced into the corner of the room toward a bench table with some dirty plates and empty beer bottles on it.

  “Where?” he asked, just a touch of confusion in his voice.

  The man with the shotgun took his weapon off the hostage and pointed into the corner of the room. Amateur hour.

  “Th—”

  Garrison’s sidearm had already cleared its drop holster by the time the gunman realized his mistake and swung his shotgun back toward Garrison. Too late. Garrison fired twice. The muzzle flash from the shotgun filled his vision. He felt the impact on the ballistic plate of his body armor then heat in his side as buckshot tore through flesh. He staggered and then went down. The rest of the fireteam hit the room like gangbusters. His side felt wet. As his vision blurred and sounds started to fade he wondered if this would be the GSW that finally killed him. The last thing he saw was the shit-scared-looking target package. The package was alive though. So, there was that...

  CHAPTER 2

  Garrison wasn’t dead. Not unless the cargo bay of a C-17 Globemaster III was heaven, or more likely hell for some of the things that Ray Garrison Two had done. He’d passed out, their corpsman had patched him up, the rest of Alpha One had given him shit for getting shot, again. Life rolled on, however, this time anyway. It had left Garrison wondering just how many more times bullets could pass through his flesh before one took, permanently. Just recently the operational tempo had stepped up from busy to crazy.

  The ramp came down. The California sunlight flooded in and with it came the, mercifully dry, heat. Garrison stepped down onto the runway at the Marine Corps’ Air Station at Camp Pendleton. It wasn’t quite home but he’d been here often enough to feel a familiar sense of relief that he had made it back again. He nodded to the rest o
f the team as the still shaky mission objective was escorted away. Victor and Daniels were doing him a solid by looking after the hostage. They knew who he had waiting. He searched the heat haze, looking for her. Now it was time for the second Ray Garrison to go back in the box and for the devoted, loving husband to be let out.

  He found her. He took off his BDU jacket and lifted his bag, wincing from the wound in his side and his shoulder, and then he was striding across the hot asphalt toward her. The only way he could square the violence, the horror, the blood in the sand, and the pain of what he did with the time he spent with his smart, tough, kind, and endlessly patient wife, Gina Garrison, was to keep both worlds completely separate. Totally compartmentalized. Sometimes, late at night, when the memories of the things he had seen plagued him, it wasn’t so easy. Now, with her so close, Gina was the only thing that really mattered.

  Gina wore a short lace dress that Garrison had always liked, and her long, wavy blonde hair blew in the warm Californian wind. Leaning against the ’64 Mustang convertible she looked like a ’60s It girl pinup, effortlessly beautiful. He dropped his bag.

  “You’re late,” he told her.

  “You’re early,” she said grinning and then they were in each other’s arms. Garrison lifted her up and she wrapped her legs around him. They held each other so tightly there was almost a desperation to it. No words required. Only now that the other Garrison was in the box did he truly feel the ache of how much he missed her when he was away completing a mission.

  * * *

  The sun burned gold where the sky met the sea as the Mustang raced along a near-empty stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway. They were just north of Ragged Point, with the woods and the mountains of the Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park on their right. The water of the Pacific was the color of liquid metal as it lapped against the cliffs far below but Garrison didn’t care about that. He was watching his wife as she put the aging muscle car through its paces, working the stick like a pro, hair blowing in the warm wind.

  “Where do you wanna go?” she asked, not taking her eyes off the road. “The mountains? The desert?”