by A P Bateman
“I’m with you,” Marnie agreed. “But it’s also unclear whether serving soldiers are there as well on a clandestine attachment. This could end up getting extremely messy diplomatically.”
Rashid raised his hands in despair. “What the hell am I meant to do? King’s in play now! We have to stick to the plan!”
“I’m all too aware of that!” Caroline snapped. “But Marnie’s right and those two men are simply too unpredictable to put Alex’s life, and the operation at risk.”
“So, what do you suggest?” he asked, still perplexed. “Go to the CIA and say, ‘we had an idea, but it’s not worked out and please can we have our agent back?’”
“Of course not!”
“Then what?”
“Cut them loose,” she said.
“Just like that?”
“It might not be such a bad idea,” said Marnie. “Ramsay and I could take a role on the fringe, perhaps observation and communications, and Caroline can get up to speed with one of those bloody great cannons.”
Caroline nodded. “The other men seem decent. I can do it,” she said. “Ditch the possibility of the lethal loads being too readily used, drive those two idiots to the airport. Pay them off. Give them their fifty-grand and tell them no hard feelings.”
“I’m with Caroline,” said Marnie. “Two rotten apples can ruin the entire barrel.”
“Okay,” Rashid relented. It was one of those moments where a great weight was lifted at the merest hint of a solution. He could hone Caroline’s skills in the few remaining days. Her training in Army Intelligence had taken her through six-weeks of basic infantry training, and she had also done the small-arms course that had been put together by SAS instructors for MI5 officers working on attachments abroad. She had also proven herself in the field. “I’ll do it now,” he said.
“I’ll go to town and get the funds wired,” Marnie said. “I can draw them within the hour. The sight of cold, hard cash will make your job easier.” She tipped her cold coffee onto the ground as she walked back to the cabin.
Caroline exhaled deeply. “God, I don’t know how Alex got himself into this.”
“I know,” Rashid agreed. “I tried to talk him out of it. I even made it difficult for him when I came down to Cornwall and put him through that marksman test.”
“He just can’t resist a challenge,” she said quietly.
Rashid shook his head. “Is it that, or is it just a case of unfinished business?”
Chapter Twenty-One
Rashid watched the big man eat. In a country renowned for its food and the size of its citizen’s expanding waistlines, Big Dave really could take them to school. Rashid had chosen fried chicken and salad. He was washing it down with Coke, his concession being that he had been burning calories with all the training. The man-mountain had two plates in front of him. One full of breaded fried shrimp and fries. What he would have called scampi in a pub back home. The second plate was loaded with three hotdogs. A New Yorker with mustard and ketchup, a weird white coloured hotdog Rashid had never seen before, topped with burned onions, and a Chicago – a beast of a thing topped with onions, pickles, celery salt, peppers and mustard, and all wrapped up in a poppyseed bun. Next to his plates was a full condiment rack that had been all but emptied across the trencherman’s buffet in front of him. Dave had also worked his way through three refills of various sodas. Rashid smiled, estimating the man at seventeen or eighteen stone and six-four. He doubted his muscle-clad frame contained a shred of fat. “I appreciate you coming,” he said.
“No bother,” said Big Dave. “Glad to see them gone, to be honest. Two divisive. Good to get off the reservation and have some decent scran for a change.”
Rashid watched the man digging into the loaded hotdog. “Yeah, I can that you’ve been missing out.”
Dave shrugged. “Never know when the meal you’re eating will be your last.”
Rashid said nothing. He knew there was plenty of truth in that statement. He ate some chicken, drank some cola. He was glad he had got rid of Yates and Macintosh.
Marnie had collected the wired money and Rashid had given the two men the news they were surplus to requirements. He hadn’t dressed it up, simply ordered them to leave their weapons and equipment, take only what they had brought with them, and had Big Dave act as driver. Both men seemed embarrassed rather than angry, and Rashid had made it clear from the start that they would have their bounty in cash at the airport with no hard feelings, but it was about gelling as a team, and they simply didn’t. The drive had taken a little over an hour to the airport and the two former SAS soldiers had simply skulked off into the crowd. Dave had said he was hungry, and Rashid felt a huge relief that it had gone well and could go a lunch that didn’t include tinned meat, cheese in a can and long-life sliced white bread. “I think we will work better without them.”
Big Dave shrugged. “Those women from box didn’t like them much.”
Rashid nodded. He hadn’t mentioned that it was an MI5 operation to the men, but they had all been around the block enough to know. Rashid had also referred to MI5
as box before he had joined, too. Going back to the Security Service’s wartime address of PO Box 500. If it had stuck after seventy-odd years, it always would. “Those women, as you say, are critical to the mission. Marnie…”
“Who you’re shagging…” Big Dave interrupted.
That’s an aside.”
Dave shrugged. “And that King bloke is with the blonde.”
“They’re engaged.”
The man-mountain shrugged and swallowed a mouthful of who knew what. All Rashid knew was it was either deep fried or meat-based. “Cosy.”
“It works.”
Big Dave didn’t appear to care less. “What are their roles?”
“Marnie is tech. She knows just about everything there is to know about computers and networks and bypassing technical security.” He did not elaborate further, but Marnie had been a first-class technician at GCHQ and was poached by MI5 when she worked with them on a task. She jumped at the chance and preferred to be in London than semi-rural Cheltenham.
“And the blonde?”
“She’s a field agent,” replied Rashid. “She’s pretty handy in all scenarios.”
Big Dave nodded and finished his mouthful. There appeared to be no slowing down his appetite. “So, she’ll be stepping up now the chuckle brothers have shipped
out.”
“That’s the plan.” Rashid had finished his chicken and couldn’t be bothered with the rest of the salad. He washed it down with the cola and surveyed Big Dave’s empty plates. He took out his wallet and thumbed out forty-dollars. Big Dave looked at him, his stare boring into him. Rashid felt uncomfortable, cocked his head and frowned. “What’s wrong?”
“What about pudding?”
“Seriously?”
“Always.”
“Well, they call it dessert. Pudding is custard out here. Or chocolate mousse, I think.”
“You’re shitting me?”
“Nope. But, really? After two meals?”
“I’ve had one meal, but they just don’t have big enough plates.”
“Even in America three hotdogs doesn’t constitute as a side dish.” “
“Well, Taff said you were picking up expenses on top,” he said. “So, I guess you can take it up with him if you’re going to get all cheap on me.”
Rashid smiled. “So, do you know Taff well?”
“I knew him in the regiment, never served with him, but he seemed okay. Shame about what happened up in Tora Bora.”
Rashid had been there. Fighting in caves and leaving the Taliban with no opportunity of escape. It was a joint operation with US Navy SEALs, Delta Force and the British SAS, and it had been bloody and brutal, fought with knives and bayonets and determination. Taff had stepped on an IED in the mouth of a cave and tunnel complex. Time had stood still for Rashid and the men who had gathered around the twisted and broken body of their Sergeant. The m
en had rallied round and thrown everything at treating the casualty, to the annoyance of their American counterparts who were leaving their injured and pushing forward with the objective. Rashid reasoned that there was no escape for the Taliban, that they were cornered and as a joint operation they had the advantage and could afford to regroup and take the caves later. He managed to get Taff evacuated on a helicopter before returning to the fight, where multiple American casualties were stacking up. Rashid’s troop turned to medics and saved more than twenty US soldiers that day. When SEAL and Delta forces were depleted and ineffective, the SAS continued to fight on alone for five more days, joined for the last three days by members of the British SBS – the Royal Navy’s special forces counterparts. Rashid earned the DSO, or distinguished service order, Britain’s second highest medal for valour. He had tossed the medal in a drawer and not looked at it since. The price of pride too heavy for him to bear. “It was a lottery out there,” said Rashid. “Worse towards the end. There were IEDs everywhere.”
Big Dave nodded. “I was being taxied by the Royal Anglians when someone stopped up ahead because they thought a kid had been involved in a hit and run. Turned out insurgents had killed the kid, scooped out his insides and packed him with two T55 tank shells and buried the command wire.” He looked up as the waitress approached and said, “Hi, love, two of the battered and deep-fried cheesecakes, please.” He looked back at Rashid and shrugged. “Never gonna beat fuckers like that. Not truly. They’ll always be there, and we won’t beat them by chucking a billion bullets on them or raining missiles from the sky. They’re welcome to it out there. Bloody shithole.”
“What happened to the Royal Anglians?” Rashid asked, still thinking about the Tora Bora and a boy’s body on the side of an anonymous dusty road.
“Three dead, another three with a few fewer limbs, two more broken up and too many to count who got damaged inside.”
Rashid nodded, knowing that many casualties of war had injuries you couldn’t see. PTSD and mental health were every bit as debilitating as loss of limbs. He’d once talked to King about PTSD and depression and King had told him not to be so bloody self-indulgent. Have a beer and get on with it. But King was a relic, and Rashid supposed King dealt with it by shoving it all aside. He assumed one day it would overload and had told King so, but King responded that he probably wouldn’t live long enough to reach that day. Maybe not even to the objective of this operation. The thought made him uneasy and he thumbed out another twenty to include a tip and stood up. “I need some air,” he said. “Don’t take too long over your cakes.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
The guards had beaten him, and they had humiliated him. They had forced him at gunpoint to empty his toilet bucket with his hands, then lick the shit off his fingers. They had defecated on his food and they had urinated on him as he had finally succumbed to sleep. The beatings carried on for two weeks, and when he had not weakened to their interrogations, the fake executions and the starvation, they had cut him slowly with dirty knives and still he had not talked. Only when they covered him in petrol and paraded a gas lighter had he given in and told them what they wanted to know. Peter Stewart had told him how long to hold out, and if he did as the tough Scotsman said – played it to the letter – then they would believe everything he said. They would not question his story, and that was what they had been counting on. King had taken everything they had thrown at him. The fuel and the flame were to be his limit, and only because he had held off for so long, would they truly have known they had broken him. But they had broken nothing. They had played into his hands and when Stewart and the Israeli special forces had stormed the camp, King had shot his kneeling captors through their heads without a second thought. The operation had retrieved a stolen Soviet stock weapons grade uranium from Hezbollah and his duress under torture had given the Israeli commandos time to find him, and time to organise an assault. It had needed a volunteer, a special kind of person to take the abuse and hold out. And here he was again…
King swung his legs off the solid concrete bunk and sat up, staring at the walls. He had been through hell once before. And now he was back for more. But he had learned something at the hands of his Arab torturers. He had learned how much pain and mental abuse he could take. And after a while, he even liked it. The test of it. The competition. Who would break first? Who would have the guile to ramp it up another level? King had given the Americans some information but had shut down quickly at torture. These were not the ragtag terrorists he faced ten years ago. These were people from a civilised world, and although ruthless and driven, they had different morals and sensibilities. Not that he would ever underestimate them, but he had been in the intelligence game long enough, worked with enough allies to know that the West were different to the East. He had allowed enough for the similarities between them, common interests and values. He spoke of names they knew, operations the United States had been involved with. And then, when the water boarding started, he shut down completely. Only when they had fed and watered him, given him some rest, had he gone ahead with his cover story, and finally with his trump card. That he could prove he had not been involved in the previous shootings, and that he had taken the shots at the plexiglass, stopping before it shattered in order to miss the Congressman and retain his MI6 deep cover working to infiltrate an Islamic extremist terrorist cell. Now they had to check through proper and open channels. Now they had a new line of investigation. Now they had the chance of an agent from a friendly nation being in their custardy and the potential for a political and diplomatic backlash. But they would also meet closed doors, dead ends. King knew enough about MI6 to back-up his story, but MI6 would never officially sanction such an act. He could hide behind the legend of being a black-ops agent, working for a department that did not officially exist. And the agency behind this unofficial prison, this secret gulag would understand that. MI6 could deny Alex King and this operation as much as they liked, but they simply wouldn’t be believed.
The flap in the cell door opened and a guard ordered him to back up to the door. King complied, and the guard asked for him to bunch his fists and put his arms behind his back. He felt the cold steel of the cuffs and the flap closed and the steel door opened.
“You are prisoner three-eight-one-four-B. It says so on the front and back of your jumpsuit,” the man paused as he pulled King around and walked him through the doorway
and down a long, narrow corridor of concrete and natural stone. The corridor was hewed from rock, which to King looked like granite. There was a steep gradient and they were heading downhill. King got the impression they were deep underground. The rock was semi-smooth, with drill holes all over where dynamite had broken out the larger pieces at some time. Maybe in the goldrush. “You will not look directly into a guard’s eyes. You will not address any guard as anything but Sir, understand?”
King nodded and said, “Sir.” He humoured him, but he felt he was making progress here and wanted to see what was at the end of the tunnel.
“You will be allowed in general population for two hours a day. You will take your three hots in general population for a duration of no longer than thirty-minutes. Do
you understand?”
“Yes.”
King felt a dig in his spine. The guard used the end of a baton. King stumbled, turned out of reflex. Two more guards flanked the monotone guard. King hadn’t been aware of their presence before now. He lowered his eyes from the guard’s and said, “Sir.”
The guards were dressed in military fatigues with a desert camouflage pattern. There were no names or insignia anywhere to denote rank, unit or an individual’s identity. They all looked the same with buzz cuts and tattoos. King could see from their faces that the men were battle hardened. They would have done tours of the sandbox for sure. He turned back the way they had been walking. The guard shoved him forwards and they continued down the corridor.
“You will notice two yellow lines on the floor. You treat it like an American
road. You will walk on the line closest to the wall at all times. We are heading downhill; the
wall is on your right.” The guard was monotone, as if he were reading from a sheet and had read it too many times before. “When you return, it will be uphill, with the wall on your right. Do you understand?”
“Sir.”
“You will be assigned a cell. You will be responsible for that cell. You will keep that cell clean and respectable. You will share with one other inmate. Do you understand?”
“Sir.”
“Any questions?”
“When can I make a phone call and see my lawyer?”
The guard brought his baton down on King’s shoulder and he crashed down onto the hard floor, his face contorted as he writhed in pain. “Oh, you’re in for a fun time
in here…” The guard looked down at him and the two escorts grinned. “Your life is over. You don’t get a call and you don’t get legal representation. You belong to the US of A now!”
One of the other guards grinned and added, “You want to off a politician then go back home, there are more than a few of yours that need culling.”
King forgot the pain, concentrated on his reaction. This was school playground stuff. Silly taunts and bully boy antics. It didn’t bother him, not after what he had been
through back in Washington, and a decade ago in Palestine. He could take their jabs and punches and kicks. He could take their lack of intelligence and integrity. He needed to get out of confinement and get into general population and what he did now would decide the course he was to take. “Yes, Sir,” he said without eye contact. He got back to his feet and turned his back on them. He waited. Either it would be a shove, or the men would have their blood up and want a bit of violent interlude. They seemed low-ranking, so hopefully they wouldn’t go too far. He felt the push and remained silent as they walked the fifty-metres or so to the steel door at the end of the corridor. King could already hear the hum of voices, of shouts and of clatter. He braved himself. He had been in prison a long time ago. Another lifetime. And as he breathed deeply to steady himself, he wondered why in God’s name he had taken such a risk to be here.