Rogue

by James Swallow

  ‘Boss, more shooting over here!’ said Lane.

  Marc met Farrier’s gaze.

  ‘We’re not going to stand around and do nothing, are we?’

  ‘We don’t know the situation . . .’ The other man trailed off, unable to muster the conviction for his own denial. ‘Ah, hell.’

  ‘Yeah, that sounds enough like an order,’ said Marc, rocking off his feet and into a run. Lucy was already with him as he skidded down the rise and over the dirt road marking the outer edge of the airport perimeter.

  ‘Paladin, move in.’ Farrier’s voice came over the comm net. ‘And don’t make me regret this.’

  EIGHT

  They moved quickly across the highway and through the derelict airport’s unguarded entrance, Lucy and Marc and the members of Paladin advancing by the numbers.

  The MI6 team were cautious but not slow, and Lucy recognised the signs of a well-trained unit in action. All of them had to be thinking the same thing – they had been caught off guard back in Norway and were wary of making the same mistake again.

  This woman – Grace or Samantha or whoever the hell she was now – had shown herself adept at leading her pursuers into traps, and that thought preyed on Lucy’s mind. As they moved past the rusted hulk of the abandoned airliner, she chanced a peep through the sight atop her rifle, searching for signs of movement.

  This felt like an ambush in waiting, and sometimes the only way to break through a trap was to trigger it.

  Lucy didn’t like dancing to someone else’s tune, but the alternative was to do nothing and let good soldiers die. That was not going to happen on her watch.

  More sporadic gunfire crackled in the middle distance, closer to the dark bulk of the main terminal building. Everyone drew down, reacting instinctively, but the shots were not coming in their direction.

  At her side, Marc had a low-light monocular raised to his eyes.

  ‘I saw something by the east side of the building,’ he noted. ‘Shadows. Nothing definite.’

  Lucy gave him a level look and spoke quietly. ‘If she’s here—’

  ‘What?’ His reply was short and sharp. ‘I know what you’re going to say.’

  She asked the question anyway, to get it out of her head.

  ‘If you have to take a shot, you can’t hesitate.’

  ‘The mission is to capture Grace alive,’ insisted Marc. Every time he used that name, it sounded forced.

  ‘From what I’ve seen, I don’t reckon she’ll give you the option, Dane.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  Lucy put her hand on his arm as he made to walk on, halting him.

  ‘You need to be ready for it. You read me?’

  Marc pulled away without answering and kept moving.

  Up ahead, Suresh was crouched low, pawing at something on the cracked concrete.

  ‘Fresh brass here,’ he said, gathering up a couple of shell casings.

  ‘Give it over,’ said Farrier, and Suresh tossed a shiny cartridge to the other man. Farrier rolled it between his gloved fingers. ‘5.56 NATO round,’ he pronounced.

  ‘The Argentinians use a bigger calibre for their rifles,’ said Marc, nodding at the Stoner that Lucy carried. ‘7.62, same as that.’

  ‘The intruders are carrying M4 carbines like we are,’ offered Lane. ‘I recognise the sound.’

  ‘Likely,’ agreed Farrier. ‘All right, break into pairs and push up. We’ll sweep the building room by room.’ He pointed towards the UN vehicles still idling by the front of the terminal. ‘Suresh and Pearce, check out the trucks. Lane, you’re with me. Keyes, you take Dane and go in through the west side. Everyone stay on comms, stay keen.’

  Off a chorus of nods, the team split apart and set off, each pair breaking into a fast jog.

  It might have been hours after nightfall, but the air was humid, and Lucy found her breathing becoming laboured as they closed in on the building. She grimaced and pushed past the sensation of tightness at the bottom of her chest. The scarring on her lungs was healing, but too damned slow for her liking. She felt a step behind, she felt unfit, and it annoyed her.

  ‘You okay?’ Marc was sizing her up.

  Damn him for being observant, she thought.

  ‘What’s that?’

  She covered his question with one of her own. Near the wall, a body lay slumped in the shadows.

  Marc closed in, dropping to kneel by the corpse.

  ‘He took two in the chest, one in the head.’ He couldn’t keep the sickened tone from his voice. ‘Tight grouping.’

  ‘That’s an execution kill, like the guard by the gate,’ said Lucy. The dead soldier’s rifle lay nearby, the safety catch still set. ‘What do you think? Grace made her deal with these guys and then double-crossed them?’

  ‘Wouldn’t they have been face to face, then? But the entry wounds are from the back, at range.’ Marc shook his head. ‘This doesn’t track.’

  ‘What do you think happened?’

  He took a long moment before he answered. ‘This poor sod was blindsided. I’m willing to bet they all were.’

  As Marc stood up, the radio crackled.

  ‘Paladin One, entering building.’

  ‘Two, entering building.’ Lane echoed Farrier’s words. ‘Stinks in here.’

  ‘Okay, moving inside,’ reported Lucy, beckoning Marc to follow. But suddenly he was twisting on the spot, bringing up his M4 to aim into the sky.

  ‘Did you hear that?’

  ‘Hear what?’

  ‘Not bats,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘Something else.’

  There was only the low hum of the wind over the cracked asphalt.

  ‘Come on,’ Lucy snapped. She wanted this over and done with. ‘We need to move.’

  At length, Marc gave a reluctant nod and followed her into the desolate terminal.

  *

  ‘Paladin One, entering building.’

  Regis acknowledged Farrier’s words with a nod, but said nothing. From behind her, Ari watched the prickly English woman study a satellite photo of Nicosia Airport, tracing the shape of the terminal building with her finger.

  ‘Two, entering building. Stinks in here.’

  ‘Okay, moving inside.’

  Ari heard Lane and Lucy over the net, and then turned back to Regis.

  ‘You’re going to have to explain to your people back in London what is going on,’ he told her.

  Hub White had gone uncharacteristically silent as soon as Farrier committed to entering the grounds of the UN base, and the pilot wondered what kind of conversation was going on at MI6 headquarters at this moment. Nothing good, he imagined.

  ‘We’re here to monitor, not to stick our oar in,’ Regis replied, without looking up. ‘At this point, we’re doing damage control.’

  Ari frowned. In the old days, he had a reputation in the IAF for going off-book, and every time it happened, he paid for it. The only thing that had kept him flying was the fact he was very good at it, and even then his latitude had run out after a while. He wasn’t sure how much rope MI6 were willing to give its people, but he was betting it wasn’t much.

  They’re silent because they’re covering their backsides, he thought, establishing deniability if this goes balagan.

  He looked away, finding Assim craning over his laptop. The Saudi kid’s hands were a blur as he typed a mile a minute, eyes glazed as he lost himself in the glowing screen, his expression distant. Ari knew that look: the younger man was on to something, and it wasn’t good.

  Careful to make sure Regis didn’t notice, Ari pretended to get another bottle of water, using the motion as an excuse to move closer to the hacker.

  ‘So something’s off,’ he said in a low voice that didn’t carry.

  Assim reacted with a start, so engrossed in his work he hadn’t been aware of the pilot approaching him.

  ‘Oh . . . uh . . . yes.’ He blinked. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Experience,’ Ari said dryly.

  Assim accepte
d that with a wary nod. ‘I kept going over the intel we have in my head, and I don’t trust it. It’s too patchy.’

  ‘Huh.’ Ari’s lip curled in a wry smirk. ‘Son, this team makes a habit of patchy. For us, patchy is where we work, or hadn’t you noticed by now?’

  ‘Everything we have has been last second, quick-sharp,’ Assim insisted. ‘No time to double-check it. The man that Grace is supposed to be meeting, the dealer?’ The hacker prodded an image on his monitor. ‘I looked into his background, and all the data I can access seems to point one way.’

  Ari saw his instincts being proven right, but said nothing, encouraging the younger man with a nod.

  ‘The dealer is not here,’ said Assim. ‘Not in Cyprus. And if that’s true, then what exactly is Grace doing at Nicosia in the middle of the night?’

  Assim explained that the guy, a man who used the alias Nix from the mythic shape-changing creature of the same name, was currently registered as being under house arrest in Mexico City, guarded around the clock by agents of the Federal Police.

  ‘And you’re telling us this now?’ Ari turned to see Regis standing behind them, arms folded and glowering. ‘Your timing leaves a lot to be desired.’

  Assim coloured slightly. ‘I . . . uh . . . was waiting to hear back from . . . From a contact on the dark net. She’s not exactly on the side of the angels, so it’s difficult to get hold of her.’

  ‘So our target is meeting with some go-between then,’ said Ari. ‘Nix may not be there in the flesh, but he can still deal from half a world away, right?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Regis insisted, and swore under her breath. ‘I think this is another bloody set-up!’

  She rushed back to the sat-comm rig set up in the hanger and grabbed the handset. Ari trailed after her.

  ‘How are you so sure?’ he asked.

  Across the way, Malte had been drawn by the raised voices, and the dour Finn looked grim.

  ‘British intelligence has a whole file on Nix,’ Regis shot back, as she stabbed a key code into the handset. ‘He’s old school. He runs a solid reputation by being on site for his deals. If he ain’t here, something else is going on at that base.’

  Malte looked in Assim’s direction. ‘False flag?’ he offered.

  Assim chewed his lip. ‘It could be.’

  ‘Hub White, this is Akrotiri.’ Regis spoke into the radio, her words coming clipped and quick. ‘Loop us back into the general net, we have new intel, likely critical, over.’

  ‘Akrotiri, maintain comms discretion.’ Ari recognised the voice of the man called Welles. His patronising tone carried across the miles from London. ‘Pass your data through channels. Hub White is currently assessing the situation on the ground, over.’

  Regis turned off-mike for a moment, her tolerance for the man evaporating.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake . . .’

  ‘Say again, over?’

  ‘Loop us in!’ Regis snarled. ‘I’m not making a fucking request!’

  *

  The heavy air inside the abandoned terminal building held the rank stink of decades-old mould and bird droppings. Marc took a sour whiff of it and began breathing through his mouth.

  His boots crunched on a layer of blown-in organic debris and fallen flecks of concrete from the ceiling overhead, making it hard to move silently. A splash of white glow from the headlights of one of the parked trucks partly illuminated the main hall through the terminal, but the rest of the space fell to pitch-black shadows, so he pulled his night-vision goggles down over his eyes.

  Turned monochrome by the NVGs, the building’s interior took on a dead, skeletal atmosphere. The walls and structures were straight lines and right angles, the only circular shapes the faintly glowing light wells in the roof. Back in the day, this through-way would have been thronging with passengers, but now it was empty.

  Here and there, broken bilingual signs stuck out over stripped-out alcoves and vacant kiosks. High up on the walls, long-forgotten billboards advertised brands that had gone out of business before Marc was born, others draped with the shreds of sun-bleached, rain-ruined posters for holiday destinations.

  The place gave Marc the creeps, but not in a haunted-house way, more in the last-human-alive sense. It felt post-apocalyptic in here, like a piece of the modern world had died and he was walking around inside the corpse.

  The bleak thought made him scowl and he shook it off. He kept his M4 pulled close to his shoulder, his head on a swivel as he advanced.

  On the far side of the hall, Lucy was keeping pace. She pointed to the far end of the space, where a set of wide, rusting stairs rose up to the crumbling mezzanine level, the gesture giving the order: That way.

  He nodded, taking point, moderating his breathing. They were halfway along the hall when two rifle shots sounded from deeper in the building, the reports attenuated by the concrete walls. There was a half-second pause and then a third discharge, and Marc’s mind immediately snapped back to the dead man he had found outside. The murdered Argentinian soldier with the triple shot in him, one-two through the torso and then three to make sure.

  ‘All call signs, report if you have contact.’

  Farrier whispered the question over the radio, but no one replied. Whoever was shooting, it wasn’t one of the MI6 OpTeam.

  But Marc’s attention was suddenly elsewhere, as he caught the sound of footsteps scraping on the departure hall’s torn and ruined carpets.

  A figure moved out of the remnants of what had once been a coffee shop, stepping into Lucy’s path. It was another UN soldier, a junior officer, his face rendered into a pale sketch by the NVGs.

  He was brandishing a pistol and he jabbed it in Lucy’s direction, calling out in Spanish, demanding she drop her weapon. His voice carried, echoing off the walls.

  Lucy let her rifle fall to hang on its two-point sling, raising her hands and flipping up her low-light goggles to make eye contact. The officer caught sight of Marc and flicked between the pair of them, the pistol’s muzzle moving back and forth in nervous jerks. Marc aimed his M4 at the ground and kept still.

  Any sudden movement could set this bloke off, and the soldier clearly thought the two of them were part of the group shooting up his base.

  Lucy tried to explain it to him, keeping her tone even and clear, but he wasn’t having any of it. The officer started shouting, and he came out into the hall, calling for his men.

  Marc was the only one wearing NVGs, and so he was the only one who saw a thread of green laser light blink into being, drawing a twinkling line through the air to connect the soldier with the shadows up on the mezzanine.

  ‘Shooter above!’

  He bellowed the warning and spun about, trying to aim upwards, but the fearful soldier saw him move and opened fire in his direction.

  The pistol shots went wide, burying themselves in the crumbling plaster of the walls, and whoever was the cold hand on the weapon in the gallery fired one-two-three into the Argentinian, marching the bullets up his belly, his chest, his throat.

  Lucy was already returning fire out of cover, her SR-25 blasting chunks from rain-bloated wood and grimy glass panels. Marc saw the shooter flinch back and heard boots thudding away over the floor above.

  ‘Sound off!’ Farrier’s voice crackled over the comm net.

  ‘Contact, departure hall, single shooter!’ called Lucy. ‘Am pursuing.’ She threw Marc a look, jabbing a finger towards the mezzanine. ‘Check this guy, I’m going after that asshole.’

  ‘Copy that.’

  Marc sprinted to the injured soldier’s side as Lucy took the stairs two at a time, banging up into the darkness. He slung his rifle and pulled at the medical pack on his tactical vest, dropping into a crouch.

  The young officer’s chest was rising and falling in jerky stutters. Blood, black as ink through the night-scope, came out of his mouth in wet gasps. The rifle rounds that hit him had cut straight through his lungs and heart, leaving mortal wounds that would end him
before any help could arrive.

  ‘Rossi?’

  Marc read the man’s surname off the tape on his fatigues, and the soldier tried to nod. Marc felt sick and hollow as he realised there was nothing he could do for the man, the damage to him so lethal that none of the anti-trauma kit in the med-pack would be of any help. The soldier grabbed his hand and squeezed it.

  ‘I’m sorry, mate,’ Marc told him, the words catching in his throat. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  In the next moment, Rossi’s grip slackened and his breathing fluttered into nothing.

  ‘Fuck!’

  Marc let go of the dead man’s hand and dragged himself back to his feet. Being so close to such a swift and violent end churned up a mass of old memories and suppressed fears, enough that it took a physical effort for him to tamp them down.

  And that was when Marc caught the sound again, the same hornet-buzz at the top of his hearing, the same noise that had drawn his attention earlier, outside on the runway apron.

  Moving slowly so as not to spook it, he angled his head until he was looking straight up at a splayed metallic shape beneath four spinning micro-rotors.

  The drone was hovering high and well out of his reach, drifting beneath one of the light wells. The glow from the moonlight outside threw enough shadow to make it distinct, even through the filthy, grime-encrusted glass.

  It was watching him.

  A dozen questions crowded into his thoughts, but he pushed them aside. Marc knew from the UAV’s design that it wasn’t something MI6-issue, and he was fairly certain that the United Nations didn’t employ this kind of hardware in their day-to-day operations.

  So it belongs to Grace, he thought, and that means I want it.

  Marc squared his stance, making it look natural, planting his feet firmly as he tightened his grip on his carbine. He would only get one chance to bring down the drone, and as good as he was, he wasn’t as keen-eyed a sharpshooter as Lucy Keyes. He would need to try something different.

  Now!

  Marc twisted, bringing up the M4 to aim into the light well – not at the drone, but at the grimy glass dome above it. Whoever was running the UAV remotely took a second too long to react, and in that brief instant Marc fired off a burst of rounds. The glass above shattered and came down in a glittering shower of thick shards, striking the drone and sending it spinning to the ground.