Scorpion Trail

by Geoffrey Archer

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Geoffrey Archer

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Alex Crawford has been out of M15 and the combat zone for twenty years, but now fate has thrust him back into the front line. Though he is an aid worker, the secret service minders who have protected him for so long have reactivated him: they want information about the man who perpetrated a massacre in a Muslim village in Bosnia.

  His target is the most ruthless killer in the whole war zone: Milan Pravic, codename the Scorpion. And the only eyewitness to the massacre is a twelve-year-old girl whom Pravic will do anything to silence . . .

  About the Author

  Geoffrey Archer is the former Defence and Diplomatic Correspondent for ITN’s award-winning News at Ten television programme. His work as a frontline broadcaster has provided him with the deep background for his thrillers – the bestselling Shadowhunter, Scorpion Trail, Eagletrap and Java Spider. A keen traveller, he now writes full time and lives with his wife and family in Surrey.

  Also by Geoffrey Archer

  SKY DANCER

  SHADOW HUNTER

  EAGLE TRAP

  JAVA SPIDER

  FIRE HAWK

  THE LUCIFER NETWORK

  THE BURMA LEGACY

  DARK ANGEL

  Scorpion Trail

  Geoffrey Archer

  To Eva, Alison

  and James

  ‘My father hath chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.’

  1 Kings Ch. 12, V. II.

  One

  Sunday 13th March

  Scotland

  THE BREEZE FLICKED at the collar of his coat. The Highland airstrip was little more than a grass field with a windsock. A single-engined Cessna stood in front of a club house. Sheep grazed beyond the perimeter fence.

  The foreboding that gripped Alex was irrational and sudden.

  The risks hadn’t worried him before. This sport was safe. Statistics proved it. So why the sense of panic, the feeling that some thread binding his world together had suddenly snapped?

  The club secretary was used to dealing with worried parents. He’d claimed that the Sky Trainer ’chutes had been used two million times and never failed. Then he’d shown Alex last month’s beginners alighting on the grass as if they were gulls.

  ‘You see? Nothing to worry about.’

  However, as the pilot strode towards the little Cessna, followed by the instructor and three orange-suited students, Alex had to fight the urge to shout ‘stop!’

  Jodie, last to board, turned to wave. Trying to reassure himself, or his stepfather?

  Still time to stop him. He could run forward and . . .

  Hysteria, that’s what they would put it down to. They’d restrain him gently, take him to the club house and settle him with a cup of tea so the boy could get on with his life.

  Alex tried a grin but couldn’t move his muscles. Arms like lead, legs like jelly, tongue puffy and useless. Couldn’t speak if he tried. Just that sense of disaster sweeping in like a squall.

  The boy had wanted to jump since the age of fifteen. Seen it on television, the floating figure in bright, flapping nylon. The goggled grin at the camera. And the swoop away from the lens as the chute jerked the body, jigging and jangling, feet braced for contact with the earth.

  The power, the freedom, the sheer sense of joy. God knows, there hadn’t been too much of that in Jodie’s young life.

  His mother was overprotective, but she had her reasons. She’d blanched when he’d revealed his ambition.

  ‘Never, Jodie. Never, never!’ she’d begged.

  But ‘never’ is a word you can’t say to a man, and the boy was over eighteen now. Nineteen, even. He had asked Alex for the parachuting course as a birthday present.

  Kirsty hadn’t spoken that morning. Just stood by the big picture window looking across at the Firth, watching the scurrying clouds and the blurs of rain on the water. Not spoken, because the words, if she’d voiced them, would have been pleas for a change of heart that had already been rejected.

  Alex knew what she feared. That history would repeat itself. That she would lose her only child the same way she had lost his father.

  ‘He’ll be fine, Kay. Just fine. You’ll see.’

  His steady, brown eyes gave her the warm look he used to soothe women’s worries, his soft voice tinted with the Lowlands inflection he’d adopted years ago as a disguise.

  He stood behind her, held her shoulders and brushed his lips against her hair. He could feel the tension shooting through his fingers. He took away his hands.

  ‘Jodie has to choose, Kay. You can’t control his life for ever.’

  He saw her tremble, and a tear mark her cheek like a scar.

  ‘Okay, Alex?’

  The prompting was from Jodie standing in the doorway, fearful that his escape from the maternal arm lock might yet fail.

  ‘We’d better get a move on, Alex.’

  Always called him by his first name. Never ‘Dad’, although Alex was the only ‘father’ Jodie had ever known. Kirsty had wanted it that way, out of respect for the dead.

  They drove north over the toll bridge, the morning sun to their right struggling through the clouds and silhouetting the trapezoid ironwork of the rail link across the Forth.

  Alex had never been to Scotland before events propelled him there in the 1970s. This was a simpler, more conservative community than he was used to, but he’d wanted nothing else, so long as it hid him from the men who sought to kill him.

  He had grown the beard immediately, a full set, but clipped short. The simplest of masks. The job at the radar factory, the minders had arranged. All part of the back-scratching world of Defence, they’d told him. He’d be safe here. No one need ever know his past.

  The hard part was being alone. Not used to it. He had always had women in his life, sometimes more than one at a time. Not just for the sex. He needed women to blather with, to lean on. Yet how could he share his life, when his recent past was so dark a secret?

  Then he met Kirsty and saw the glimmer of a solution to his dilemma.

  It was the firm’s Christmas dance. She’d been invited by one of the staff to make up numbers at their table.

  ‘The girl’s had a tragic bereavement,’ the friend confided. ‘We felt it time to get her out and about again.’

  Married just three years, her husband had been killed in a blizzard in the Cairngorms. Many an experienced climber had died that winter. He’d left her a widow with a nine-month-old baby.

  Everything about Dermot, everything about her short marriage to him, Kirsty had locked inside her mind pledging never to forget. The memories were like a sealed room in an old castle; she denied access to ev
eryone. Never talked about Dermot, and couldn’t bear others to.

  She was a pretty girl. Soft, wavy hair, scrubbed cheeks and blue eyes that glistened with never-distant tears. Alex’s heart went out to her.

  He began a gentle courtship, hinting that he’d also suffered a tragedy too painful to talk about. As the months slipped by and they became closer, the understanding grew that they both had parts of their lives which must remain private.

  ‘You think she’ll cope?’ Jodie asked, as they passed the underemployed Rosyth dockyard to the left of the bridge. ‘Maybe I’m being a bit selfish.’

  ‘Course she’ll cope,’ Alex answered, slowing to pass an accident at the junction with the motorway. ‘She has to get used to you doing your own thing. Anyway, when you’re away at Aberdeen she has no idea what you’re up to. It’s just a pity she has to know about this particular happening.’

  ‘You’re right there!’ Jodie nodded. University had been a merciful escape from the over-protection at home.

  ‘I tell you, when you get back tonight, give her a big hug and tell her how great it was. Look, she’s terrified because of what happened to your dad. It’s understandable, for heaven’s sake. But it’s something she’s got to get through. This jump today could even help.’

  ‘Shock therapy for nervous mothers! I don’t think so somehow.’

  The rain was holding off. The day before, the instructor had said the weather would have to be appalling to stop the jump. Alex turned off the motorway and pointed the car towards the Ochil Hills.

  ‘Are you nervous?’ he asked the boy.

  A moment’s pause.

  ‘Shit scared,’ Jodie laughed.

  ‘Think how I’ll feel, bloody watching you!’

  He thought of Kirsty, wondering if she was still standing by that window, staring at the sky.

  Theirs had been a marriage of convenience, but a good one. She had needed a man, to support her and her child. He had needed a woman, to share his bed and to help hide him from the predators. Affection and respect was what they’d had, rather than passion and love. A formula that had lasted nearly eighteen years.

  It hadn’t been easy at first, fighting his way past her first husband’s ghost. It took months of wooing before she could even smile without a feeling of guilt. Months more before she let him make love to her.

  They’d been out walking in the dunes near North Berwick, just the two of them. Jodie was being baby-sat by her mother. A bright, crystal-clear day in early summer. They’d rested in a clearing in the woods. No one else about. No chance of being surprised. Alex slipped his hand under the soft cotton of her tee-shirt, fingertips finding her nipples already hard.

  Then she locked her mouth to his and unleashed the hunger that had been building inside her for weeks. She pulled him into her, climaxing quickly.

  Afterwards, as they lay on their backs, she had cried. Sobs of grief at her final acknowledgement that Dermot was dead.

  As Alex swung the car through the gates onto the small airfield, a Cessna pulled away from the flightline, bumping over the grass towards the strip. To their right was the club house and hangar and a small square of hard standing for cars.

  ‘There’s Claire,’ Jodie said. He wound down the window and gave her a ‘thumbs up’. There were as many young women as men on the course.

  ‘What are all these girls trying to prove?’ Alex wondered aloud.

  ‘You mean they should all be at home, making babies,’ Jodie retorted. ‘Come on, Alex! It’s a challenge. A big thrill. There’s no difference for men or women.’

  ‘I reckon it’s a substitute for sex, myself.’

  ‘Shows how little you know!’

  Claire was walking across to them as Alex switched off the engine. She had a pretty smile.

  ‘You could do okay with her, if you play your cards right,’ Alex teased.

  ‘Piss off!’ Jodie reckoned he was already well on the way. Chatted her up in the pub last night, after the day of theory lessons at the club.

  Next to them was a Range Rover with two large Labradors steaming up the windows in the back.

  ‘So, what are you going to do, Alex?’ Jodie was out of the car. ‘It’ll be a couple of hours before they take us up.’

  ‘Don’t know. May wander off for an hour. I’ve got the “Sunday’s” in the car, so I won’t be bored.’

  ‘See you later, then.’

  Jodie strode towards the club hangar. Claire touched him on the arm and they went inside together.

  There were more parents there, settling down to make a day of it. Mums as well as Dads in most cases. A pity Kirsty hadn’t come. Might have done her good to see other families coping.

  Another lone father nodded him a greeting, wanting to talk. No, thought Alex. One of his golden rules: avoid social contact. He smiled briefly, then got purposefully back into the car and re-started the engine.

  He took the main road for a mile, then turned up a narrow lane. Another mile and he was on the crest of a ridge with a view over the airfield. He parked in a gateway and as soon as the engine cut heard the bleating of sheep from the field beyond.

  He wound down the window, pulled a pack of Bensons from the pocket of his Barbour and lit up. He didn’t smoke much these days; it was banned in the office and Kirsty objected at home.

  Golden rules. That’s what he’d lived by for twenty years. Had to, so the minders had told him. The terrorists had friends everywhere. One incautious word and they could be on to him. And we wouldn’t want that, would we, Mister Crawford?

  Crawford. MI5 had chosen that name for him. Jarvis was the one he’d been born with. Alexander Jarvis.

  They had given him the framework of a new life. Birth certificate, passport, all falsified in the name of Her Majesty. Even a driving licence, once he had settled his address.

  Add the rest yourself, they’d said. Keep it simple; make up a new past to replace the one that could kill. No mixing of fact and fiction. Invent it, fix it in your head until you believe it’s true, and stick to it.

  And never ever reveal the truth, even to those you make love with.

  Rules. He’d made some up himself. Told his neighbours he was obsessed by tyre pressures – an excuse to check under his car for bombs.

  Some rules he never revealed. Superstitions. Little things he had to do if the good fairies were to keep him safe. Little things like putting his left sock on before the right. There was the daft, childish ‘tide’ game too.

  Every Saturday, unless the weather was atrocious, he would drive to the Yellow Craig beach west of North Berwick, for a run on the sands. His marketing job at the radar factory near Edinburgh was tedious; that beach, with its huge, wide sky was freedom. Freedom from drudgery, freedom from fear. Freedom to imagine what his life might have been like if it hadn’t been for that balls-up in Belfast.

  He would run near to the water’s edge where the sand was firmer, keeping close to the creaming froth of the waves, but never, ever letting the water touch him. If it did, he told himself, the Belfast gunmen who had his name on their ‘touts’ list, would find him.

  Silly superstitions, but in the part of his mind he had to keep private, they mattered.

  From the distant hillside, Alex watched the little plane creep across the airfield and lift into the air. Shafts of sunlight bathed the valley in patches of green gold. Rain streaked a hill to his right. Sunday traffic crawled on the road running south to Stirling. So peaceful. So safe.

  ‘Christ! It’s been twenty bloody years,’ he breathed.

  He’d just passed the anniversary of his escape from Ulster strapped into the back of a Hercules. You’d have thought they’d have forgotten him by now, but not according to the MI5 man he phoned once a month. The IRA still handed old photos of him to new boys going active on the mainland.

  He slipped on a pair of half-moon reading specs and browsed the newspapers. His bushy brows bunched into a frown. Always did when he concentrated.

  Front pages filled
with pictures from hell. The blackened corpse of a child burned alive in a Bosnian village.

  Massacre of the Innocents – his two papers shared the same stark headline.

  The Sunday Times reported over forty killed in a single village called Tulici. Moslems, this time. Bosnians, Croats, Serbs – the divisions were confusing. They’d all been Yugoslavs once, in a place people went to for holidays. And now they were killing each other.

  It depressed him just to read about it.

  He picked up Scotland on Sunday. On the front page, a local tragedy. Pictures of a tear-stained Edinburgh mother. Her thirteen-year-old girl had disappeared. Suggestions the child had been seen with prostitutes.

  Sad world, he thought. He folded the papers, tossed them onto the back seat and slipped his glasses back into their case. Better take some exercise. He opened the door, got out and locked it out of habit.

  He was average height, a little under six foot, with straight, dark brown hair and a sportsman’s build. Under the thornproof coat, so stiffly waxed it was like armour, he wore brown cords and a navy pullover. This was how he liked to dress; the business suit he wore on weekdays always felt wrong.

  He stuck to the road, striding along the edge of the fields, walking for twenty minutes, his mind on Kirsty and the boy.

  Jodie.

  ‘Christ almighty!’

  He stopped in his tracks. His stepson’s face had suddenly appeared in his mind, sharp and clear as a flash photo. It was the boy’s expression. A look in his eyes that wasn’t Jodie at all. Terror. Abject terror.

  The image was gone again. He shook his head to try to recall it, but couldn’t. Most odd. Like a burst of clairvoyance.

  No believer in such phenomena, it unsettled him none the less. He stared across at the airfield, then marched to the car and headed back.

  The fear he’d seen in Jodie’s eyes spread in him like an infection. His heart beat unnaturally fast. He told himself to stop being daft, to rationalize this irrational sensation. Nerves – parachuting was risky and Jodie was about to do it. That’s all it was.

  But that wasn’t all. He began to experience more weird sensations, as if he wasn’t alone in the car. A feeling that Kirsty was there. He glanced behind.