Rogue

by James Swallow

  Grace stepped out of the vehicle, holding a digital video camera in her hand, and the flashlight beam washed over her. The guard hesitated; she wore dark, non-reflective tactical gear instead of the utility camos he expected.

  He reached for the radio mike clipped to his shoulder, but Vine was already out and standing on the pickup’s running board. He put a single round from his M4 through the guard’s chest and sent him sprawling into the dust, the long sound suppressor on the carbine flattening the noise of the shot.

  Satisfied she had captured the act on video, Grace moved to the pickup’s flatbed and unpacked the two camera drones. Each one came to life in a buzzing whirr of black rotors and they shot vertically into the air, finding a vantage point overhead.

  Grace clipped her camera to her tactical vest, drew her silenced Glock and crossed to where the injured guard lay writhing in pain. She finished him with a close-range shot through the forehead, before lifting the gate. Cord rolled the pickup forward and she climbed back inside. The drones hummed by, capturing everything they did.

  ‘Who’s flying those?’ muttered Vine, as he closed the rear cab door, sliding back into his seat.

  Grace didn’t answer him, staring back down the approach road into the darkness.

  ‘You’re sure they’ll come?’ said Cord.

  ‘They’re already on the way,’ she told him. ‘I made sure of that.’

  She didn’t bother to explain about the message she had received twenty minutes earlier, from a contact observing RAF Akrotiri, describing an unmarked van hurtling out of the base at a high rate of speed.

  Cord gave a nod and aimed the pickup towards the dark shape of the old terminal building. Headlights from another vehicle glittered in the distance.

  *

  The road rumbled beneath the wheels as Suresh pushed the vehicle as fast as he dared, guiding the high-sided transport through the sparse traffic on the northbound highway.

  Marc shot a look into the cab, watching the lights along the road flash past.

  ‘How far?’ he asked.

  ‘Fifteen minutes away,’ said the driver. ‘I can’t push it any more than this.’

  ‘Right.’

  Marc turned away, moving back into the rear compartment. The interior of the Fiat Ducato was half-minibus, half-troop carrier, with mil-spec gear racked on the walls and low benches for the OpTeam members to sit on. The members of Paladin were in their operational gear as Farrier moved among them, checking equipment and getting them ready.

  Regis had stayed behind with the rest of the Rubicon team, having reluctantly given up her seat to Lucy. Lane, seated next to Marc’s partner, had not given either of them the courtesy of a look since they left the RAF base. The big guy, Pearce, rounded out their numbers.

  Marc moved down the van, tugging on his armour vest to pull it into a more comfortable position. He tapped the wireless headset looped over his ear and spoke to the air.

  ‘Radio check. Ari, do you copy?’

  ‘Reading you,’ came the reply. ‘Five by five. Assim says the sat-comm net is coming into sync. We should have London in the loop in a moment, over.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ grumbled Lane, hearing the same through her headset. ‘We’re gonna have Welles playing armchair general, aren’t we?’

  ‘Keep the conversation on task,’ said Farrier, giving her a warning look.

  He handed her an M4 rifle from one of the racks, and she deliberately lost herself in checking over the weapon. Farrier gave another of the carbines to Pearce, who did the same, and Marc waited, expecting the same.

  Farrier made no move to arm them, and Marc frowned.

  ‘What about us?’

  ‘Let’s hold off on giving you live weapons for the moment,’ he replied, then changed tack before Marc could protest. ‘You’re positive about this location?’

  ‘I’m sure,’ Marc said firmly. ‘And I’m sure Six have their own people double-checking our numbers as we speak, so if you want to wait . . .’

  ‘Just bloody tell us,’ snapped Lane.

  Marc had Assim’s projector gadget linked up to a digital tablet, and he used it to throw a video map onto the ceiling of the van.

  ‘The co-ordinates in Grace’s coded emails match up to this area.’

  The map zoomed into an area in the middle of the island, right in the thickest part of the UN buffer zone.

  ‘How’d you get this?’ said Pearce, squinting at the image.

  ‘Rubicon code-breaking software combined with email traffic captures from GCHQ, via MI6,’ explained Marc. ‘A minor miracle of teamwork.’

  ‘Dark net comms aren’t as secure as everyone thinks,’ noted Farrier. ‘Good for us. Bad for her.’

  Marc went on. ‘The meet is taking place at Nicosia Airport. It’s a former civilian airfield now turned over to the United Nations peacekeepers in-country. There’s an outpost there, a few helicopters on station. A token force.’

  Lane held up a hand. ‘Are you taking the piss? You expect us to believe that Echo-One is conducting an arms deal in the middle of a military base?’

  ‘That’s a pretty ballsy move,’ said Pearce.

  ‘It’s what she was trained to do,’ Marc retorted. Once again, he had almost said her name before he caught himself. ‘Hide in plain sight.’ He pulled other data into the projection. ‘The broker she’s been dealing with has known connections to rogue elements in the Argentinian military, and guess which South American country happens to be providing a large portion of the UN forces in Cyprus right now?’

  ‘Grace’s dark net contact is using his Argie army pals to move his wares.’ Farrier rubbed his chin. ‘Yeah, it does line up. Do we know what she’s buying?’

  Assim had only been able to pull partial fragments of the ‘shopping list’ included with the intercepted communications, and Marc threw them up to the projected screen from the tablet with flicks of his wrist.

  ‘Magnetic breaching charges. Portable satellite navigation jammer. Intrusion kit for industrial automation.’ He looked down the list as the van jolted across highway lanes and onto a minor road. ‘Also, cold-water wetsuits, military-grade. A lot of marine-hardened gear.’

  ‘That’s the kind of kit you’d need to take a ship at sea,’ offered Lane, her earlier tone fading as she shifted into mission mode. ‘Cruise liner, oil tanker, whatever.’ Suddenly, the acerbic MI6 officer was taking him seriously. ‘That’s her endgame, is it?’

  ‘We can ask her when she’s caught,’ said Farrier.

  ‘Am the only one getting a lot of stink off this intel?’ Lucy had been silent through the rapid-fire conversation, but now she spoke up, addressing her question straight to Marc. ‘I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but MI6 have been tracking this woman for months now and got nowhere. Then suddenly it’s Christmas, and we have her dead-on?’ Lucy leaned forward in her seat. ‘She already suckered in you people once and killed half your team. What if this is the same play?’

  ‘We have considered that, Keyes.’

  The voice of Victor Welles grated through their headsets, drawing a wince from everyone. His words were coming in via satellite transmission from Hub White, the operations command room in the lower levels of Vauxhall Cross, but the crisp digital signal made it sound like he was in the van with them.

  ‘Those concerns have gone through our intelligence analysts at GCHQ, and the validity of the data had been determined,’ he went on. ‘It’s good enough to be actionable.’

  ‘You mean, good enough that you’re willing to risk our lives on it,’ said Lucy.

  ‘Echo-One is on the run,’ said Welles, his tone turning flinty. ‘We were close in Oslo, we rattled her cage. This intel capture is proof of that. Six applied the pressure and she slipped up. We’ve forced her to move up her timetable. She’s on the back foot, and we’re going to take full advantage of that.’

  ‘You are very certain for a man thousands of miles away from where the action is.’ Ari Silber was still looped into the communicati
ons net, and he threw in a comment with wry disdain.

  ‘Get that civilian off the channel,’ said Welles, giving the order to someone back at Hub White, and Ari’s connection was abruptly terminated. ‘Now pay close attention. The JIC have given this sortie the green light, with certain caveats. We can’t simply have a covert strike team roll up to a United Nations military base, and ask to be let in. And given the urgency of this matter, going through proper channels will be a prohibitively lengthy process.’

  Welles laid out the operational parameters in short, blunt terms: they were to remain beyond the Nicosia perimeter and observe Echo-One’s movements, then move in and secure her when she was outside the buffer zone.

  ‘And what about her contact?’ said Farrier. ‘It may be one of the UN deployment.’

  ‘That’s above your pay grade. You have your orders, Paladin. Proceed. Hub White, standing by.’

  The line crackled as Welles fell silent again.

  ‘That’s bullshit—’

  ‘He’s wrong—’

  Both Marc and Lane started speaking at once, muting their headsets so only the team in the van would hear.

  Farrier silenced them both with a look.

  ‘I’m not running a democracy here. This is what we’re doing. Tracey, hand out the night vision gear. Marc, check our ETA.’ When he hesitated, the older man’s eyes hardened. ‘You wanted in on this tonight, so you’re going to follow my orders, clear?’

  ‘Clear,’ said Marc.

  He switched off the projector and moved forward to the driver’s cab, riding down the frustration that crackled through him.

  *

  ‘Blimey, what did you lot do to him?’

  Farrier sat heavily in the seat next to Lucy and spoke to her in low, weary tones.

  ‘What did I do?’ she repeated. ‘To Dane?’

  ‘When I recruited Marc, he was a good soldier . . . sailor . . . you know. Did his bit, didn’t kick off about it. But a couple of years in the private sector and he’s ready to push back on everything.’

  She glared at him, trying to see through to what the other man really meant.

  ‘Yeah, well, your past coming back to bite you in the ass kinda pisses some people off.’ Lucy spoke quietly, so their conversation would not carry. ‘He thinks a lot of you, and you’re taking advantage of that.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘We both know he shouldn’t be part of this operation!’ She spat the words back at Farrier. ‘He’s emotionally compromised. That makes him a liability.’

  ‘I thought you and him were tight.’

  ‘We are,’ she insisted, ‘that’s why I’m looking out for my friend. More than you’re doing.’

  A flash of anger glittered in Farrier’s eyes, then faded.

  ‘You were an army officer. You know how it is to be in command of people. Sometimes you have to give orders that aren’t in people’s best interests, for the good of the job.’

  ‘That’s what you’re doing? Manipulating him?’

  ‘I’m making the most of his skills,’ Farrier replied. ‘Say what you like, but Marc got us next to Grace, or Sam or whoever the hell she is, in days. We’ve been on her for months and got nothing, as you so delicately put it.’ He looked away. ‘Yeah, he’s a friend. And so were the officers we lost in Oslo. That’s five families I had to lie to in their death letters, making up the usual crap about training accidents. All because of that woman. So if I have to put my mate through some grief to get my hands on her, I’m doing it.’

  Lucy didn’t have a reply to that. She knew if their roles were reversed, she would have made the same choices.

  ‘He’s different now,’ Farrier repeated, glancing up at the cab. ‘I mean, Marc always wore everything close to the surface. That’s why he wasn’t cut out to run assets and lie to them every day, or get buried in NOC missions. He wants a clear-cut fight.’

  ‘This job ain’t great for that,’ Lucy admitted. ‘Way too much grey.’

  Farrier gave a slow nod. ‘You are not wrong.’

  *

  Suresh put the van behind a stand of scrubland and the group deployed into the warm evening. The metallic rattle of cicadas filled the gloom, sounding off from the trees around them as they moved to a low rise overlooking the disused airport runway.

  Marc squinted into a light-intensifying monocular, scanning the area until he located the old terminal building. A low, three-storey rectangle flanked by two skeletal towers, the structure was dark. The monocular turned everything into a lunar landscape of white and grey, and through it he could make out the remains of the airport’s name in a handful of dead neon letters.

  ‘I see an aircraft down there,’ said Pearce, from close by. He was observing the same area through a set of bulky night vision goggles. ‘Looks like . . . a passenger jet? Is that the getaway?’

  ‘Don’t sweat it, it’s just a shell,’ Marc told him, spotting the gutted, rusting fuselage of an old Trident airliner. ‘That thing hasn’t flown since 1974.’

  ‘Hub White, Paladin One.’ Marc heard Farrier behind him. ‘We have the location in sight and we are seeing zero, repeat, zero movement.’

  ‘Copy, Paladin One.’ The voice belonged to Talia Patel, and Marc visualised her half a world away in the Hub White command room, watching them through the eye of a satellite orbiting far overhead. Getting an RAF Reaper ISTAR drone over the operational area was out of the question. ‘Maintain reconnaissance posture.’

  ‘Copy,’ said Farrier.

  ‘Can’t see bugger all from here,’ said Lane. There was nothing approximating high ground for miles in any direction, and it was making everyone edgy. ‘Suresh, what do you see?’

  Marc looked around. The driver was on top of the blacked-out Ducato, flat along the roof, with his M4’s night scope pulled to his eye.

  ‘I can see a guard post from here. No movement.’ He put down the weapon. ‘That seem right to you? Should at least be some bootneck on patrol over there.’

  Farrier and Lane exchanged a look that communicated a multitude of questions.

  ‘Go take a shufti. Quiet, like.’

  ‘I’m a ghost, me.’

  Lane patted Pearce on the shoulder and beckoned him to her. The two of them set off at a jog and disappeared into the bushes.

  ‘Is this bat country?’

  Lucy’s question came out of nowhere, and Marc wasn’t sure how to answer.

  ‘Is that, like, US army slang for something?’

  ‘No, dumbass, I actually mean are there bats here?’ She pointed towards the airstrip. ‘Because something is flitting around over there.’

  Marc strained to listen, but the endless chorus of the cicadas made it nearly impossible to pick out any other sounds. He returned to the monocular and panned up the length of one of the towers. At the top, he could see the silver dishes of the old, broken floodlights that had once drenched the aircraft apron with illumination.

  A black shape crossed his line of sight, blotting out everything for a split second.

  ‘Shit!’ He recoiled, as if the shadowy thing was about to grab him. ‘Okay, yeah. Bats.’

  ‘Movement,’ Suresh called down from the roof of the van. ‘I have two Land Cruisers on the road behind the terminal, coming up from the main camp. Looks like blue hats in both of them.’

  Marc refocused in the direction of the building in time to see the white Toyota jeeps moving up along the line of the old runway.

  ‘A patrol?’

  ‘They’re not in a hurry,’ said Farrier, peering through his scope.

  Lucy drummed her fingers on the dirt. Marc could tell she was uncomfortable being out here without a rifle in her hands. Then she stiffened.

  ‘In the terminal, I saw something. North-west corner.’

  The headset in Marc’s ear crackled.

  ‘All call signs, Paladin Three.’ Lane’s voice was quiet and wary. ‘Guard post in sight. Going in for a closer look.’

  All through the drive out
here, Marc’s mind was set on a single thought: that Sam Green was somewhere under this same night sky, on a path he couldn’t guess at, making choices that he couldn’t understand. The need to find her and face her, to get some sort of answer, was overwhelming.

  But now a creeping dread was rolling in on him, cold like a winter fog.

  The Land Cruisers had halted by a blocky shape tucked in against the side of the terminal building, and through the monocular Marc made out a solider as he climbed out to investigate. A flashlight flared into searing white brilliance, illuminating a third UN vehicle, a pickup apparently abandoned by the wayside. Other soldiers exited the vehicles, looking around in all directions. Their body language communicated uncertainty and caution.

  ‘Paladin Four . . .’ Pearce’s voice came over the radio net, clear and grave. ‘Found the guard. He’s dead. Belly shot and a close-range finisher through the nut.’

  ‘Three confirms,’ said Lane. ‘Gate’s wide open. What’s the call, boss?’

  Marc was still processing this new information when a series of flickers blinked briefly in the windows of the terminal building. The soldiers out by the vehicles spun and danced as high-velocity rounds tore through them. A split second later the dull cracks of the gunshots reached them on the low ridge.

  ‘Oh, shit.’ Lucy leapt to her feet. ‘What the hell are they doing?’

  Marc turned and found Farrier, his old friend’s face etched with shock.

  ‘John, call it in!’

  ‘Hub White, Paladin One,’ said Farrier, in a dead voice. ‘Observing shots fired. UN troops . . . down. Unknown hostiles inside base perimeter, over.’

  ‘Copy.’ Patel took a moment to respond. ‘Stand by . . . Situation is, uh, fluid.’

  But Lucy was already sprinting to the van.

  ‘Keyes, what are you doing?’ Farrier called after her.

  Suresh jumped down from the roof of the van, in time to see her hauling a pair of guns from the weapons racks. She threw Marc another of the M4 carbines, having selected an SR-25 marksman rifle for herself.

  ‘No!’ Farrier raised his hands. ‘Stand down!’

  A distant cry sounded out to them across the airstrip, followed by another harsh clatter of rounds.