Storm Crow

by Jeff Gulvin

  ‘Who was he with?’ Swann asked. ‘Louis, ask him who he was with?’

  ‘It is all right, my friend. I speak English.’

  ‘Good,’ Swann said. ‘Who was he with—do you remember?’

  ‘Of course.’ The waiter smiled then. ‘Beautiful girl. Very beautiful girl.’

  ‘Could you describe her?’

  ‘Oh, yes. He comes here quite a lot, always with the same girl. Dark hair, short.’

  Swann peered at him for a moment. He had expected it to be long and blonde. ‘If I got an artist down here, could you describe her to him in detail?’

  The man looked puzzled and Byrne translated for him. He nodded his head vigorously. ‘I’ve seen her many times. I know what she looks like. Monsieur Salvesen—he always eat here with her when he is in Paris.’

  Swann called Mercier, who said he would arrange for someone to come down right away. Byrne explained it to the maître d’, who looked at his watch, shrugged his shoulders and nodded. They left him then and took a cab to the hotel from where Salvesen had made the booking. On the way, Swann phoned Webb at the Yard.

  ‘What’s going on back there?’ he asked him.

  ‘Diagnostics are in. Entry team couldn’t do anything about the booby traps. They’re crawling about in NVGs.’

  ‘Have you spoken to Caroline?’

  ‘Not recently. They’ll be all right, Flash. There’s a two women to two kids ratio.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘Have you come up with anything?’

  ‘Possibly. Salvesen had dinner with a woman. The waiter at the restaurant says he’s seen her before. Yves’s getting an E-fit done for me. Tell the old man I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

  ‘Shouldn’t worry about it, mate. Not much for you to do over here. Not much for any of us to do till EOD get this sorted.’

  ‘How bad’s the contamination?’

  ‘So far? Not too bad. Dirty room mostly.’

  Swann rang off and he and Byrne went into the hotel. It was elegant and privately owned, boasting the historic patronage of Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. They spoke with the manager in his office behind reception.

  ‘I know Monsieur Salvesen well,’ the manager told them. ‘He always stays here when he visits Paris.’

  ‘On his own?’

  ‘Oui.’

  ‘The last time,’ Swann asked him. ‘On his own then?’

  ‘Oui.’

  ‘He went out to dinner. Did he come back on his own?’

  The manager looked at him then out of partially downcast eyes.

  ‘You need to tell us,’ Swann said. ‘We’re police officers, remember. This is an international investigation, and we have the backing of the French police.’

  The manager twisted his mouth at the corners. ‘I have to be careful. You understand?’

  ‘We do understand. But it’s important. Was he here on his own?’

  The manager shook his head. ‘He came back to the hotel with a girl the last time he was here. They went up to his room together. He tried to be discreet, but she was there in the morning when the cleaners went in.’

  Swann looked closely at him. ‘Would you know her if you saw her again?’

  The manager shook his head. ‘Moi? Non. The cleaner. Perhaps, yes.’

  ‘I’m getting a picture made,’ Swann said, ‘a drawing. When is this cleaner working?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning.’

  ‘I’ll need to see her as soon as I have the picture. Can she make herself available?’

  ‘I will see to it, monsieur.’

  Jakob Salvesen stared at the hole in the floor of his courtroom and his face began to boil.

  ‘Get after him,’ he bellowed. ‘Get after him now. Kill him. Do you hear me? Kill him.’

  Harrison could not hear him. He was scampering along the concrete pipe in darkness, unarmed, and men with guns were breathing down his neck. Soon he would hear shots, the sound would be deafening, the first man into the hole would loose off shots. He had to make the bend in the pipe before then or lie flat on his belly and pray. He heard the shot ring out, and lay down against the concrete, hands over his ears. He could see the bob of the flashlight behind him. Bullets zinged off the walls. And then the years rolled back, thirty long years, enough time to forget. He had forgotten, banished that time to the far reaches of memory.

  Halfway through his second tour, still barely nineteen years old, the youngest Rat in the division. They were called out from Rocket City. A unit of grunts had been pinned down by tunnel fire deep in the Iron Triangle.

  He went into the tunnel as point man, with Ray Martinez behind him, and was lowered down the shaft in a Swiss saddle, with a flashlight and gun in his hands. He wasn’t scared and looking back, maybe that’s what should have worried him the most. Being lowered into a shaft was the most dangerous thing the point man could do, save come up through the trap door to change levels. Harrison wasn’t bothered, he had his gun ready and he dropped, crouched and held his fire. He signalled above and set off at a crawl. The tunnel had been hit by shellfire and the earth was loose, damp and muddy. Behind him, Martinez was twenty feet back. Harrison would do the first two levels and then give up the point. He crawled low, holding the flashlight way above his head on a piece of bent wire.

  He moved forward and stopped. Sixth sense. He hadn’t even seen it: a punji stake mantrap, sharpened bamboo spikes pointing up at you from a pit in the tunnel floor. So far he had managed to avoid them; others had not been so lucky and ended up impaled on a dozen razor-sharp poles. He shone his light and recoiled. There were two black snakes intertwined in the spikes below him. He looked back to Martinez. ‘Mantrap, Ray,’ he hissed. ‘Motherfucking snakes in it.’

  Martinez hated snakes more than any of them. Harrison hated them, but it was how the spiders crawled on his back that really got to him.

  ‘Johnny.’ A voice soft and singsong, coming out of the darkness. ‘Wanna fuck with me, Johnny.’

  Harrison froze, the breath dying in his throat. Instantly, he shut off his flashlight. The voice, calling his name so close. It was not his name, they called them all Johnny. The underage hookers called them Johnny. But it was his name, his mom called him Johnny and his little sister. For a second, he was back on the big lake fishing the ice with his grandpa.

  Martinez heard it too. Harrison looked back, trying to pick out his face in the darkness.

  ‘Keep coming, Johnny.’ Thin voice through the darkness. ‘Keep coming, Johnny. I got something for you.’

  It sounded almost American, but it was not. He knew it was not—it was VC: he had an AK47 and he knew these tunnels like the back of his hand. A fear gripped him then like he had never experienced; the darkness and the voice. He could not see. Shutting off the flashlight darkened the eyes, so sight for a while was impossible, globs of black and grey dancing before your pupils. He tightened the grip on his gun.

  ‘I’m going to kill you, Johnny.’

  He fired; one-two-three, a pause; four-five-six. He was empty. You never ever emptied your gun underground. Fire three, swap guns behind you and fire three more. The second man reloads. Harrison was out. The VC knew he was out. He threw himself flat against the earth and felt something damp crawl across his face. Behind him, Martinez opened the flashlight and fired three.

  ‘Back up, JB. Back up now. We’ll blow the fucking hole.’

  Harrison crawled back beyond Martinez, dragging his useless pistol with him.

  On the surface nobody said anything, but it did not matter. He knew and they knew. He sat on his own, smoking a Marlboro and staring blankly into the steaming vegetation. Another team went down the hole, crossed the punji stake mantrap and killed the VC. Then they blew the hole. That was his last mission. He was shipped out and went to Saigon and got drunk. It was there he got the tattoo, no longer a Tunnel Rat.

  And now he was underground again, crawling for his life, fleeing the flashlights and the guns, tearing up that hole just as fast as he could
. He was beyond the bend, the voice thin and cruel like a chill wind in his head. Memories from thirty years ago. They were coming for him; Jesse Tate’s voice yelling out at him through the darkness. He just crawled and hoped, round the bend with only fifty yards to the culvert. Outside the culvert was daylight. Fear, tangible; he could smell it in his own sweat. He crawled on. Another deafening shot, the boom of Jesse’s 454. The shell ricocheted off the concrete walls and he felt the rush of air by his head.

  He made it to the culvert and fiddled frantically with the catch, the beam from the flashlight behind him. Head first, he dropped down into the drainage pipe and water splashed over his arms and his face. On hands and knees again, crawling through three inches of water, he could see the weakening day through the portal and felt the crisp air on his face. Outside, he straightened up, and sprinted a few yards away from the trees. He could already hear somebody at the exit. Behind him, the compound was in turmoil, every hand on the ranch scrambling into vehicles. Already two trucks were racing round the perimeter fence. A shot rang out, pinging off rock just to the left of him, and he knew the guard in the goon tower could see him.

  He needed to move, get out of here, disappear into the boonies where they could not see him. But he had no cam’ gear, no gilly suit. He was unarmed and they would pick him off like a duck sitting on water. The culvert. He got to it and hefted a large hunk of rock from the pile just at the edge. Here he was camouflaged from the goon tower by the trees, but the engines of the trucks drew closer. He stood above the culvert and waited. A hand extended from under the corrugated iron, a right hand, black gun gripped in it. Harrison felt blood rushing as he lifted the rock.’ Then he saw the back of Wingo’s head.

  ‘Motherfucker.’ Harrison crashed the stone on to the back of that skull and was instantly spattered with blood. Wingo died there and then. Harrison flared his nostrils and spat, then he grabbed the pistol and took off up the hill. The body would hold them for a little while at least.

  Salmons and Richards took the results of their swabbing and the PINS analysis, together with the X-rays, down to the incident control point. Major Hewitt had summoned the assistance of Webb and Cregan, given their knowledge of Storm Crow handiwork. Webb was already suited and an army truck drove into the Broadway and picked him up from Scotland Yard. He had seen the city quiet before, deserted even, but never like this. The night was around him and the clouds were low and steaming. Everything was as it should be: the height of the buildings, the road signs and the matt black of the tarmac. There was no bomb damage, no debris. Previously, when he had seen it so quiet, it was in the wake of St Mary Axe or Canary Wharf. But this quiet was different—ghostlike, a terrible, terrible emptiness.

  The gathering in the underpass had grown larger. Cregan was on his way in from Shepherd’s Bush where he and the other Expos had remained on standby. Hewitt, Salmons and Richards were already looking over the freshly developed X-ray pictures. Webb glanced at the scientists from Porton Down. They had the swab samples and the first results of the spectroscopy analysis that Richards had taken, and were working on persistency qualities there and then.

  Hewitt had the pictures set out on the table, and the render safe team of Wilson and Johnson were looking at the passive infrared layout and wiring. Cregan sat down next to them. ‘Like a wild woman’s knitting,’ he muttered. ‘TPUs are the same, Webby.’

  Webb nodded, and, feeling in his respirator bag, he produced one of the grey and black boxes they had recovered from Queen’s House Mews a year ago. He pointed out the twin black plastic screw terminals and the light-emitting diode sitting between them. On the side was the ten-position decade switch and the Plastia LCD clock with the mini-alarm setting on the face.

  ‘Two integrated circuits,’ he said. ‘Two transistors, miniature six-volt relay and PP3 battery connectors. Time delay—three minutes to ten days.’ He looked through his mask at Wilson and rotated the thumbwheel on the digital decade switch through zero to nine. ‘Pick how many days you want,’ he said, ‘then set the alarm. Simple. Trouble is, we don’t know what it’s set to.’

  Wilson studied the circuitry in detail, trying to figure out where and how to disarm it safely when the time came. The X-ray images were not definitive, but they gave them sufficient data to formulate a plan. Time was against them already, and every second they spent here was precious. He could see the power supply was from four car batteries: the PP3 relay nowhere near sufficient for thirty-five mortars. Between the source and the TPUs was a secondary circuit linked to a mercury tilt switch. Wilson rasped breath through his mask. ‘Bastard knows how to make things difficult, doesn’t he.’ If they got their render safe procedure just the slightest bit wrong and knocked that switch out of line, the mercury bubble would shift and complete the circuit. He shook his head and tried to follow the X-ray negatives with a rubber-gloved finger. The TPUs fed the detonators via the cluster of wiring that entered the wooden box through holes at the back.

  ‘Booby traps we can do from the outside,’ Johnson said. ‘Look, Tug. See what I mean? There’s no collapsing circuit.’

  Wilson nodded. ‘Needs to be at box level, though. We can’t stand up.’

  Next to him, Salmons was making drawings for them to take back upstairs. Wilson had to figure out which wire was which once they were inside the box.

  ‘You might want to drill a little hole first, Tug,’ Salmons suggested. ‘Here, maybe.’ He pointed to the front of the box about halfway down, low enough not to disturb the microswitches, but high enough to avoid the wiring and TPUs. ‘Put a fibre-optic torch in, so you can see what you’re doing.’

  Wilson nodded, exhaling a short breath. ‘We’ll do the booby traps first,’ he said. ‘At least that way we can move around in there without having to crawl.’

  ‘Buck-eye’s still up there,’ Salmons told him. ‘Don’t go any higher than the boom.’

  Wilson looked once more at the X-rays. ‘The pipes are half filled with liquid. What about PINS?’

  Richards shook his head. ‘I only had time to test four of them. We’re still waiting for the results.’

  ‘It’s the same as Northumberland,’ Webb said. ‘You’ll have two ounces of conical-shaped Semtex and an Iraco detonator in each piece of pipe.’ He looked again at the pictures. ‘You’ve also got secondary wiring in the bottom, just to be going on with.’

  ‘Fuck it.’ Wilson said and stood up. ‘We could sit here all night. We’ll get on with the booby traps.’

  ‘We’ll study the pictures for you, Tug,’ Hewitt told him. ‘See if we can work out an answer. When we do, we’ll radio up.’

  ‘We’ll have to get the box open anyway,’ Wilson said. ‘I can’t figure the wiring from these. I’ll end up cutting the wrong ones. And I plan to live a bit longer.’

  Swann and Byrne had a late snack in the hotel. Merrier had called and told them that the E-fit man was finished at the restaurant, and the maître d’ had been moaning at the lateness of the hour.

  ‘You from Washington originally, Louis?’ Swann asked Byrne as he pushed away his plate.

  ‘Texas.’

  ‘Never been there. Disneyland in LA once, with the kids, but that’s my lot.’

  ‘It’s hot and dry and big,’ Byrne said. ‘I started in Dallas as a street agent, then did some tours overseas as assistant leg-att before going to headquarters.’

  ‘You still got family down there—Texas, I mean?’

  ‘Mom and Dad. My sister teaches politics at Berkeley.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  Byrne looked away. ‘Older brother. He’s a helicopter pilot in the Navy. Apple of my daddy’s eye. Always was, I guess.’

  ‘Your sister younger than you?’

  ‘Eleven months.’ Byrne sipped more wine. ‘She never let me forget that it wasn’t even a year. Used to really piss me off. She always learned quicker than me, got dressed quicker, that kinda stuff. Funny the things that bother you as a kid.’

  ‘You’ve done pretty well.’r />
  ‘My old man hates the Feds. Blamed us for Waco.’

  ‘Religious, is he?’

  ‘Seventh Day Adventist.’

  ‘Like the Branch Davidians?’

  Byrne nodded.

  ‘That must’ve been strange.’

  ‘Oh, he didn’t believe the stuff that Koresh was into. Was kinda funny, though. Him and me, I mean.’ He toyed with a fork. ‘What about you?’

  ‘My dad was a copper like me. Retired now. Old school.’

  ‘The Met?’

  ‘Flying Squad. Sergeant under Slipper in the sixties.’

  ‘Jack Slipper?’

  ‘Yeah. He never stops talking about it. The Great Train Robbery was the best thing that ever happened to him.’

  ‘At least you’ve got something in common.’

  They moved through to the bar. Neither of them had any intention of sleeping and there was a plane back to Southampton at 6 a.m. ‘A couple of the guys on the floor told me you and Webb like to climb,’ Byrne said to him. Swann swirled the ice in his whisky.

  ‘We do a bit, now and again.’

  ‘Just rock, or snow and ice?’

  ‘Both,’ he said, holding his eye. ‘I don’t do so much snow and ice any more.’

  Jesse Tate came loping through the trees and Harrison ducked behind a rock, breathing hard. Drake followed Jesse and behind him Slusher and Tyler Oldfield. They all had rifles except Jesse, who carried his Casull in his right hand. He stopped and squinted into the fading sunlight. Harrison looked for more cover, higher up. Somehow he had to work his way back up to the saddle and cut a path to Dugger’s Canyon. That was two draws back of here, with maybe fifty to a hundred yards between himself and his pursuers. He checked the clip in Wingo’s gun, and tried to remember how many shots had been fired in the tunnel. Wingo, as the first man after him, would’ve fired them. But then he had heard the Casull. If he could just divert them long enough to get to his keep hide, he would have all the firepower he needed. Jesse was some distance below him, but the hillside was naked, scarred here and there at the top with late snow. Harrison needed cover. His heart beat faster and he could see Jesse and the others strung out in a line now, cutting their way across the lowest flanks of the hill. Looking back up, he followed the line of fir and aspen that crept up through the draw to the right of the saddle, some five hundred yards above.