“What’s the point?” Nat said dully. “We know it is.”
“We don’t know anything, Nat. Don’t write him off, remember?”
Nat turned away from both of them. “We need to press on. Move—”
“Nat. Over here!”
Chris’s exclamation broke through Nat’s haze of hopelessness. With Marc and Wedge guarding the way ahead, he slipped back into the tunnel to where Chris crouched, shining his favourite hand torch on a patch of ground that was considerably less dusty than the rest of the tunnel floor. He handed the torch to Nat and felt around. “Anyone got a hook blade in their kit?”
Two penknives were passed to Chris. The first snapped, but he found purchase with the second and the concealed hatch cracked open. Bobs and Wedge helped heave it the rest of the way and another steep drop was revealed.
Nat and Wedge lay down and cautiously swept torches around the blackness below. They saw nothing. “Kill the lights,” Nat said.
Darkness fell like an iron curtain, then Nat saw it, the faint beam of light in the distance. “There.” He pointed. “There’s something there.”
“I’ll go,” Wedge said.
Nat shook his head. “No. Wait here.”
He sprang forward before anyone could protest, trusting his men to cover him as he lowered himself down. The drop was more than two metres; his ankles jarred on impact with the hard ground. He rolled and raised his weapon, tracking the shadows and edging closer to the light, a beam that seemed to warm him with every step.
I found the sun. Nat felt dizzy and crept toward the daylight, feeling bolder as it grew brighter, until his shins hit hard stone steps. He crawled up them, inch by inch, until his hands found a large rock shielding a steel grate. Nat eased both aside and stepped out into the sun. At his feet lapped the Shatt al-Arab River, and in the distance lay the desert Basra’s Bedouin tribes called home.
Beyond that, he saw absolutely nothing.
Seventeen
The first thing Connor became aware of was the fresh, bracing chill that was unique to being by water. Or on it. The sloshing sound of the river came next, and then voices . . . Iraqi voices, conversing in low tones about tides and the moonlight.
Oh, fuck. Fragments of his last moments of consciousness floated back to him. The tunnel, Echo-4, Dick . . . Oh God, Dick. Sticky, metallic warmth dripped into his mouth even as the image of blood spurting from Dick’s skull hit him full force, bringing with it a devastating blast of pain to his temple.
Someone groaned. A hand clamped over his mouth. It took him a moment to realise that the slurred noise had escaped his own lips.
“No sound. You make no sound or we kill.”
Connor didn’t need telling twice. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to focus on something—anything—except the hammer inside his head.
Think. He went back to the beginning, recalling the discovery of the tunnel and the weapons stashed below ground. Faces blurred. He searched for Nat, before he remembered Nat hadn’t been there.
An ache in his heart briefly overcame the pain in his head. Dick was dead, of that he was certain, but where was Nat? Was he dead too? As hard as Connor tried, he couldn’t remember.
The possibility kept Connor occupied until the strange rocking motion he’d assumed was his own sketchy consciousness gradually ceased. The hand clamped on his mouth disappeared and new hands grabbed him under his arms, heaving him along. His legs trailed through cool water. The sensation was oddly pleasant until he reached dry land and sharp gravel scraped his skin.
Another low cry escaped him. A steel-capped boot kicked him in the ribs, once, twice, three times.
“Quiet, or we kill.”
Connor fought the urge to retch, gasping. More boots kicked him until one hit his head and everything went black again.
The next time he came to, after strange dreams of rumbling vehicles and crunching gravel, he sensed he was indoors and not alone. He kept his eyes closed, hoping whoever it was breathing nearby hadn’t noticed him wake.
But luck wasn’t on his side today. Fingers and thumbs pried his eyes open. A gaze so dark it was almost black stared back at him.
“Hello, Connor.”
Shit. They knew his name. Connor tried to reach for his wallet as the well-groomed Arab face solidified, but his arms didn’t move. His hands were tied behind his back, bound so tight he’d lost sensation in his thumbs.
“Look at me, Connor.”
Connor blinked. He hadn’t noticed the Arab man releasing his eyelids. “Where am I?”
A hand connected with the side of his head. The blow wasn’t hard, but it took Connor by surprise. He rolled with it and found himself facedown on a dusty stone floor. He inhaled and choked, spluttering saliva down his chin until strong hands grasped him and turned him over.
“Now, now, Connor. Don’t make a mess of yourself.”
“Why did you hit me?”
The Arab man raised his hand. Connor flinched. The man smiled. “To teach you the rules. You don’t speak unless I tell you to. Do you understand, Connor?”
Connor nodded and dropped his gaze, trying to recall the short interrogation session he’d sat in on back in Hereford. Grey man. Play the grey man. Make yourself unremarkable. For a moment it didn’t seem a tall ask, given that he was bloodied and bound on the floor, but his sharp-eyed companion had other ideas.
“Do you know who I am, Connor?”
“No. Should I?”
“Perhaps, if the unit you have been observing are who I think they are. The infamous Charlie-3, eh? Am I right?”
Connor said nothing. The man smiled. “A long time ago, my brothers and I travelled to Baghdad to get the identification papers we needed to become full citizens of the country we called our home. We were turned away. Do you know why, Connor?”
“No. Why?”
The man struck him again. “Don’t ask questions. I will tell you anything I want you to know.”
Connor waited for the man to continue.
“We were turned away,” the man went on, “because, they told us, we were not Iraqis, and so had no right to papers saying we were. Papers that would allow us to travel freely, educate ourselves, get married, and register the births of our children. We were Bedouin, you see. Nomads. In the eyes of our government, we were stateless.”
Connor swallowed hard. Tiny puzzle pieces appeared in his head, but his mind was too foggy to make sense of them.
The man got up from his crouch on the ground and walked a few paces. “We returned to the desert not long after, for fear they would arrest us for not having the papers they refused to give us. When we left, our father had been grazing our cattle not far from here. We returned to find him dead, our herd stolen by the city authorities and sold for slaughter. From that point on, we not only had no home, we had no family either.”
Connor held his breath as the man faced him. The tiny clicks had multiplied and gained clarity. Flashbacks of the briefing room on the Kuwaiti FOB blurred in and out of his mind. Same as every Bedouin. He had no papers. Nat’s voice sounded clear as day, but the man spoke again before Connor could reconcile once more with the fact that Nat wasn’t there.
“We left Iraq after that, fleeing to our Shiite brothers in Iran and beyond. That is the thing about us Muslims, Connor. We find new brothers everywhere we go. New brothers who teach us new ways, a new purpose for the lives our country had told us were worthless. It was many years before we thought to come home.”
“So why did you?”
The man leered in the murky light of what Connor realised for the first time was a small, cramped room with a tiny window, his hand raised and mocking, though he made no move to punish Connor for speaking out of turn. “Our country changed. Your people came and we thought, perhaps, you would allow the Bedouin to roam the deserts once more, but it did not happen. We were arrested by the Americans for the same offense as our government before them. I spent two years in a Basra prison before I made my escape again.”
>
“But you’re still here.”
“Yes, yes, I am, Connor. My brothers and I have watched the white man flounder in our country, and we think it is time for him to know who we are. Thousands of our tribe have died at the hands of whites and Arabs alike, but we can kill one white man for the same impact of a hundred Arabs. They will see us, they will hear us, and they will know who we are, like you do, Connor. I ask you a second time, do you know who I am?”
“Yes. You’re Abdullah Behrouz.”
Eighteen
Jimblobseven. Jimblobseven. Jimblobseven . . . Nat woke with a jump. It usually took a moment for his surroundings to jar into place, but not today. He sat up and made eye contact with Marc, who he’d left on stag duty, watching over the shallow shelter they’d dug for themselves in the desert.
Marc nodded. “Nothing to see here. Go back to sleep.”
As if. Nat leaned across Wedge and swiped his pouch of dodgy Iraqi tobacco. He rolled a fag and lit up, blowing the smoke beneath the beige-coloured tarp they were using to blend into the sand as the others slept on, clearly worn out by the gruelling trek it had taken to get to this point.
And what point was that? Nat had forced himself to sleep a few hours ago believing he knew, but now, in the blistering light of day, he wasn’t so sure. After they’d surfaced from the tunnel and searched the immediate area, they’d returned to the palace to rest and gather supplies for a longer operation, fleshing out every avenue of intelligence they could think of and planning their next move.
They’d hit the skies just eight hours later, hitching a ride on a Chinook. Not long after, they’d touched down on the opposite side of the river they’d searched the day before and tabbed west across the desert, following Behrouz’s known MO and the only fresh vehicle tracks close to the riverbed, hoping against hope they weren’t chasing a red herring.
“Stop overthinking it,” Marc said.
Nat glanced up. “Not overthinking anything.”
“Liar. You’re fretting that we should’ve gone east, or north, or south . . . anywhere ’cept the way we came.”
“I’m not fretting. It was the right decision. Behrouz took his last two hostages across the river and into the desert. The desert is west, the vehicle tracks are west, so we’re heading bloody west.”
Nat didn’t add that none of Behrouz’s hostages had survived the desert long enough to get sunburn. He didn’t need to. Marc knew, like they all did, that they only had a day or so before their rescue effort became a recovery mission.
“What are you going to do with Connor’s laptop?”
“Hmm?”
Marc kept his gaze on the horizon. “I saw you take it from his stuff.”
“I wanted to get to it before anyone else got their grubby mitts on it.”
“Why?”
Now there was a question. Nat had grabbed the laptop with little conscious thought, desperate to feel connected to Connor again, but on reflection there were a cacophony of reasons why he didn’t want the laptop falling into anyone’s hands but his. Because, though he’d scrutinised every article Connor had published, he suspected Connor had written far more than he’d let Nat read.
“You know why,” Nat said gruffly. “We need to sanitise his hard drive before we hand his shit back to his mother.”
“He’s not dead, Nat. And even if he was, all his stuff goes to his sister, Jenna.”
Nat wondered how the hell Marc knew that and he didn’t, but the moment to bicker over semantics passed, so Nat lay in the sun, counting the minutes, until it was time to press on.
Early afternoon found them holed up on the outskirts of a deserted hamlet. They’d taken a risk by dashing across the open ground in broad daylight, and were now debating how far they should push their luck.
For the first time in as long as Nat could remember, the Iraqi weather seemed about to change. The sky had turned ominously dark. Perhaps they were about to see rain.
Bobs seconded his thoughts. “Fuck me. It’s greyer than a headmaster’s nut sack out here.”
Wedge held his hand out and caught the delicate mist. “Shame it ain’t chilly. Sweating my balls off is doing my head in.”
“It’s going to fuck us up too,” Chris said. “Tyre tracks lead all the way up that road, but they won’t last if this rain turns real.”
Nat chanced a glance around the rocky sand dune sheltering the team, following the tracks until they disappeared into the distance. “We need to get in there.”
“Not yet,” Marc said. “We don’t know how deserted this place really is. Creeping around in daylight is a bad idea.”
In theory, Marc was right, but with the hours ticking by like a metronome in Nat’s heart, and the rain threatening to wash their precious tracks away, they had to push on. “Chris, radio in. Tell them we’ve got vehicle tracks we need to follow up.”
Chris pulled the radio off his back and transmitted the message. The response came in moments. Command had given them the go-ahead, albeit with a warning to proceed with caution.
“Chris and Marc, wait here. Wedge, Bobs, you’re with me.”
No one argued, despite Marc’s scowl. Nat, Wedge, and Bobs left the others behind and crept into the dilapidated hamlet. The rain started to fall in earnest as they moved up the suburbs’ only road, zigzagging between the tumbledown stone huts. Most of the buildings were clearly derelict—no windows or doors, walls crumbling—but a few remained intact.
Nat skirted around those, following tyre marks in the dust even as they began to fade. The tracks took a sharp left turn. Nat froze. The shift was abrupt enough to make him think it had been taken in a hurry, like someone had wanted to ditch something as soon as humanely possible.
Ditch. Nat swallowed the panic the word provoked. If Connor’s captors had already killed him, precedent dictated that his body would be left where it would be found . . . found and publicised, and as far as Nat knew, no videos or photos had been sent to Al Jazeera just yet. No broken body dragged through the streets or hung from the city walls.
No. Connor was alive. He had to be.
Rage boiled in Nat’s veins, entwining with the deep-rooted fear that was fast becoming the only thing keeping him upright.
Wedge darted across the path and hunkered down by a low wall. He followed Nat’s gaze and nodded, weapon raised.
Nat sensed Bobs on his six and took his cue. He edged forward, tracking the tyre marks into a corner of the hamlet that had clearly seen the worst of a Western bombing raid. Craters made the ground uneven. Nat sidestepped one, his gaze still fixed on the tracks, until they suddenly stopped and a battered Toyota Land Cruiser came into view.
Fuck! Nat dropped to the ground, scanning every possible point for signs of life. He found none, but he’d learned long ago that silence meant nothing, that it was the hidden eyes that could hurt you most.
He raised his hand, signalling for Wedge and Bobs to stop, then pointed back the way they’d come.
They backtracked until they came to the sharp turn. Nat crouched and considered the vehicle they’d seen. It was old and rusty, and scarred by bullets. There was no doubt it had seen some action. The building it was parked beside had proved of interest too. The exterior was as battered as everything else in the hamlet, but the dark shutters shielding the windows, if there were any, were new.
“We need to get round the back,” Bobs muttered. “See if there’s another way in.”
Nat retrieved the area map from his belt kit. The hamlet was marked, but lacking in detail. They needed satellite pictures, recent ones, which they didn’t have. Damn it. Nat’s gut told him they’d crept up on something important, and they didn’t have time to wait for command to radio them up-to-date information.
Fuck it. “Wait here. I’m going to loop round.”
“Like fuck you are,” Wedge said. “At least, not on your own. You go left, I’ll go right. Hopefully we’ll meet in the middle without getting slotted.”
Nat and Wedge moved out while
Bobs stayed put. Wedge disappeared around the corner, heading blind into a place where no one would hear him shout for help until it was far too late. Nat fought the urge to call him back. His men had jumped into the search for Connor with almost as much drive as Nat. He’d never forgive himself if it cost them their lives.
He raised his weapon and slunk round the left-hand side of the building, senses on hyperalert. The scent of frying onions cooking on a gas stove reached him. Could be shepherds . . . but it felt unlikely. He’d never met one who carried much more than smelly cheese and dried dates.
The side of the building was unremarkable. Nat checked for the obvious clues—cigarette butts and other debris, footprints, disturbed ground—but nothing jumped out. He reached the back and froze. Voices. He listened hard, but as good as his Arabic was, he could decipher nothing. Then a low groan made his hair stand on end. The quiet cry was muffled by the stone walls, but the pain in it was unmistakable.
Nat held his breath, wishing he could mute his thundering heart. For an unending moment he heard only his own blood roaring in his ears, but then the sound came again, raspy and desperate, until it was cut off by a dull thud.
Cold laughter came next, followed by another thud, a groan, and the rattle of chains. Nat swallowed the bile pooling in his mouth. Connor or not, someone inside the hut was in deep fucking trouble.
Movement in his peripheral vision caught his eye. Wedge. He’d made it around the right-hand side unscathed and was pointing behind him, signalling that it was time to pull back.
Nat didn’t move. Wedge mouthed now and pointed again. Nat held firm a moment longer, then, reluctantly, turned and slunk silently back the way he’d come.
Back at the sharp turn, Wedge greeted him with a relieved fist bump. “We need to skin out. This place is hot.”
“What did you see?” Bobs asked.
“Men and guns. Nat?”
“They’re holding someone,” Nat said. “We need to get in there.”
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