Napoleon's Gold: A Jack Starling Adventure

by Guy Roberts

  Brice looked across the room resentfully. Amid the revels, he had been mentally composing a memo for the Prime Minister, designed to properly outline the challenges in COBRA that he had managed to overcome, while also making clear that those challenges were not his fault. The note of questioning in Highgrove’s voice was distinctly unwelcome.

  ‘What is it now?’ Brice’s voice was a rumble of wary aggravation as he moved to her side.

  ‘Asterix One, Sir.’ Highgrove’s face was creased in concern as she stared at her monitor, fingers darting across the keyboard to check and double-check the situation.

  ‘What about them?’ A nervous tic appeared unnoticed in the corner of Brice’s lips. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘They should have reported into the Embassy fifteen minutes ago.’ Highgrove explained. ‘But there’s no sign of them and they’re not reporting in.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Brice felt his stomach give a slow somersault. Silence spread out from the two of them like an artic wind.

  Highgrove’s fingers clattered busily for a moment.

  ‘Hang on,’ her frown deepened markedly. ‘Two members of the team have arrived at Paris Site B, saying the team was ordered to relocate there on command of Asterix Alpha.’

  ‘What?’ Brice stared at her uncomprehendingly.

  Highgrove scanned the incoming situation report, eyes widening in surprise.

  ‘Asterix Alpha, the head of the team. He told the team to relocate at Site B, then drove off with Jack Starling in the back of the team car. Those weren’t his orders...’

  ‘What?’ Brice’s eyes began to bulge from his sockets. ‘What is going on?’

  ‘Sir,’ Highgrove’s voice was tense. ‘The GPS locator in that car is no longer responding and the telephone signal we were receiving from Sir Johnathon’s cell phone has been switched off… Asterix Alpha is off the grid,’

  Highgrove looked up at Brice in confusion. ‘We’ve just lost Jack Starling.’

  2300 hrs (2200 hrs GMT), 17 June 2015, A2 Autoroute, North Eastern France.

  GR 50.349583, 3.580588

  Jack pulled the worn, paint-spattered sheets closer around his shivering body, massaging his wrists, where bright red grooves from the tightly-knotted ropes could still be seen indented into his flesh. The Renault was racing along a freeway, windscreen wipers struggling in vain against the assault of rainwater hammering down through the storm. The driver kept a concerned eye on Jack’s frame even as he pushed the Renault van through the traffic like a fish swimming upstream.

  ‘James Watts.’ Jack whispered in amazement. ‘It’s good to see you again, Sparky.’ The driver risked a guarded smile, pleased to see his passenger was recovering.

  ‘Back from the dead, hey?’ Watts smiled down at the exhausted fighter. ‘Jack Frost himself. You always were a cool customer.’

  A ghost of a chuckle from Jack quickly descended into a fit of coughing and he huddled himself deeper into the blankets surrounding him. He felt distinctly unheroic. ‘It’s been a while. Afghanistan in ’03, right?’

  Sparky’s eyes returned to the road and he shifted awkwardly, clearly uncomfortable at Jack’s comment.

  ‘Yep.’ The word was dragged from him after a long silence. ‘Afghanistan in ’03.’ Jack stayed mute, harbouring his reserves.

  ‘Look, I…’ Sparky tried to start again. ‘What we did to you was wrong.’ He blurted out the words to escape Jack’s silence. ‘We should have tried to rescue you, but Whitehall said no. People started dying in ambushes, informants were executed in their own villages, but Whitehall said we had to leave you be. Some of the troopers blamed you. No one was allowed to talk about it, people were transferred, demoted. You didn’t have any family we could talk to – just your brother, the spook. We couldn’t do anything.’ Sparky realised he was whining and cut himself short.

  ‘I was stuck in a hole for five years. And you tell me you couldn’t do anything?’ Jack’s voice was low and harsh, but he was more tired than angry. For more than a decade he had kept the sense of injustice burning in his heart like a furnace, fanning and fuelling it with a daily boost of bitterness and anger. He had spent so long clad in resentment, smug and miserable, drifting from bar to bar across the USA like a leaf blown by an aimless wind. But suddenly he could feel that self-indulgence sliding away, like a thick layer of skin peeling away from his heart – and as it was going, he realised it had not been a suit of armour but a suit of lead, dragging him down and stopping him from ever reclaiming his own life and moving on from the horrors and misery which had defined his past. Jack took a big sigh, shutting his eyes as he felt a new calm descend over him, like a great warm wave that washed away the detritus of wasted years.

  ‘It’s all right, Sparky,’ he spoke at last. ‘Afghanistan wasn’t your fault… it was a long time ago. We’ve all got to move on.’

  ‘Well,’ Sparky replied after a pause, ‘maybe. But I want to make things right before I move on.’

  ‘That’s good.’ Jack pushed his exhausted lips into a smile. With the rage and bitterness expelled, he was feeling better and better. ‘But tell me, what brought you to a freezer in Paris?’

  ‘Of all the freezers in all the kitchens of the world, right Frosty?’ Sparky grinned, keeping his eyes on the road. ‘I’ve been Asterix Alpha – Executive Officer – for our Paris special action team for the last three years. It’s been pretty quiet – everyone worrying about Russia, I suppose, but then things got busy a couple of days ago. We got a heads up on Pierre Deschamps – some shady criminal that everyone owes favours to – and last night we got a warning that you might be in the neighbourhood. About an hour ago we got an action callout – someone in London wanted a top priority snatch and grab based on an electronic signature.’

  ‘So you knew it was me?’

  Sparky glanced across. ‘COBRA said it was the cell-phone signal for Johnathon Fairchild, if you can believe it, but I had a hunch it was you. The bird in London giving me the orders sounded cool as a cucumber, but there was some heavy stuff going on in the background, someone getting a right bullocking – and with that level of shit hitting the fan, I just knew Jack Starling would be involved somehow.’

  ‘So how did you find me?’ Jack asked. ‘What was the electronic signature?’ Sparky smiled and gestured to the van’s glove box. Jack opened it carefully, to find a mess of parking vouchers, a battered road map of Paris and what looked like an old Playboy magazine. Beneath it all was Cleo’s handbag. Jack reached in and pulled out a solid black cell phone. He smiled in recognition.

  ‘Johnathon Fairchild’s personal cell phone,’ Jack explained. ‘We took it off him at gunpoint in London two nights ago.’ Jack shook her head in admiration at Cleo’s quick thinking. ‘She must have managed to slip the batteries back into it after Deschamps locked me in the freezer at his town house. Putting the batteries back into the phone would be enough for it to be found by COBRA, whether it was turned on or not.’

  Sparky whistled a low note of impressed surprise.

  ‘Sounds like a useful dame,’ he admitted.

  ‘A lady,’ Jack corrected him. ‘Damn clever one too. She’s as wrapped up in this as I am, except that Deschamps still has his hands on her, somewhere in Paris.’

  ‘Sounds pretty clever to think of a trick like the phone at a time like that.’ Sparky was impressed. ‘You really had your balls on the line.’

  ‘It worked.’ Jack grinned, then frowned for a moment. ‘Is the phone on now? Are we being tracked?’

  ‘Ah.’ Sparky turned back to the roadway. ‘Well…’

  Jack stayed calm, waiting for Sparky to explain at his own pace.

  ‘COBRA said the signal was from Johnathon Fairchild, but we were briefed that you might turn up instead – and if that happened, we were to get both of you back to the British Embassy ASAP – grab you and anyone else and crash through the Embassy front door if needed – total priority instructions.’

  ‘But instead we’re on a freeway, some dis
tance from Paris, I’m guessing.’ Jack looked across at Sparky. The driver kept his eyes on the road ahead.

  ‘What they did to you in Afghanistan wasn’t right,’ he spoke eventually. ‘It’s been on my conscience ever since, and when I got the call from COBRA this afternoon and realised you might be involved…I don’t know,’ he shrugged. ‘When we found you in that freezer I just snapped… I knew it was a chance to set things right between us… so I sent the rest of the team off to the secondary base, turned off the GPS in the truck and that phone and got driving out of Paris as fast as I could.’

  ‘You’ll get shafted for this,’ Jack warned, touched that his old comrade had made such a decision.

  Sparky gave a carefree smile – a rare grin for a man who had just thrown away his career. There was a companionable silence for a few minutes.

  ‘So, Sparky.’ Jack eventually spoke. ‘I don’t want to be ungrateful, but we need to turn around and go back. Deschamps is in Paris and I have to find him.’

  ‘Nope...’ Sparky grinned. ‘COBRA sent out another signal just before we found you. Deschamps was seen at Gard du Nord getting into a carriage bound for Brussels with two other people. I put two and two together and used my initiative,’ there was a grin on his face at the word, ‘and here we are, driving toward Brussels ourselves.’

  Jack felt his pulse begin to race with renewed excitement. Deschamps had not vanished after all – if anything, the advantage was with Jack once again.

  ‘Is Cleo with him?’ Jack asked.

  ‘I think so,’ Sparky nodded. ‘The report said that another man and a woman – in a wheelchair – were with Deschamps as he was getting into his private carriage. Might be your Cleo.’

  ‘I hope so,’ Jack was relieved. Cleo had to be alive – Deschamps would not risk killing her until he had the gold in his hands. ‘So how do we get her back?’ Jack frowned. ‘Do we drive to Brussels and ambush them as they’re getting off the train?’

  ‘Nope,’ Sparky shook his head. ‘I’ll do you one better. I think the best thing to do is to snatch the girl from the train itself.’

  ‘The train?’ Jack looked across as Sparky in confusion. ‘How? And why?’

  ‘Well, whatever Deschamps is up to,’ Sparky was frowning in concentration, ‘the report from COBRA warned that he was powerful – well connected in Paris and across Europe. You go up against him in a city, he’ll have every advantage on his side – the cops, the crims, the whole lot. He might even have a welcoming committee of cops and robbers waiting for him at the station. Going up against that simply won’t work.’

  ‘Ok…’ Jack nodded, ‘then what?’

  ‘Well,’ Sparky threw him an appraising glance. ‘Meeting him in a city is a no go… but if you can catch him on his own – on a train, in the countryside – then that’s a different matter, right? Then it’s just you and him… no criminals, no cops.’

  Me and him, Jack thought, and Reynard... A cold, cold smile slowly spread across his face. Bingo.

  ‘So it’s got to be on the train.’ Sparky concluded. ‘If you’re up to it?’

  ‘I am,’ Jack nodded curtly. ‘But how can we find him?’

  ‘Ahh, easy.’ Sparky smiled confidently. He tapped a little computer screen two inches wide that was attached to the dashboard by a suction cup. A Google-Maps-style display filled the screen, with two dots – one red, one blue – in close proximity.

  ‘The red dot is the train’s GPS, the blue dot is us,’ Sparky explained. ‘Don’t worry, we’re not traceable – not even London can find us at the moment.’

  ‘But we’re ahead of the train?’ Jack asked, frowning as he made sense of the little display.

  ‘Too right,’ Sparky smiled, ‘I thought you used to be an SAS man! First rule of an ambush is to be where they’re going, not where they are! We’re going to cut them off at the pass - there’s a spot I know just past Clabecq – about thirty clicks out of Brussels. The train will be going slow and we should be able to pull up alongside long enough for you to get a grip on the thing.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Go in, get the girl, bring her out.’ Sparky smiled. Jack hoped it could be that simple. ‘Anyway,’ Sparky continued, ‘it’s not like we’ve got much of a choice. It won’t be long before London realises I’ve gone AWOL and then who knows what they’ll send against us.’

  Jack smiled. ‘I appreciate this, Sparky. I always knew you were a rule-breaking son of a bitch.’

  ‘Well, mate,’ Sparky looked at him doubtfully, ‘getting there is the easy part. You need to get yourself together for a fight.’

  Jack looked across at him. ‘Already?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Sparky nodded. ‘You’ve been asleep for a good hour, getting your strength back after the freezer. We’re about five miles from Clabecq now. If I were you, I would be in the back finding some irons for the firefight.’

  Jack felt his spirits sink for a moment for a moment. Every part of his body was aching – from kicks and bruises, the stab wounds in his shoulder and, above all, a sheer, mind-numbing exhaustion which doused every limb with heaviness. But as Sparky said, it was time to roll. This was the only way he could get Cleo out of Deschamps’ hands. If the golden tablet was there too, then so much the better. Steeling himself, Jack clambered out the nest of warm sheets and into the back of the racing van. He paused for a moment, impressed by the variety of weapons hanging on the walls of the van – each weapon a pinnacle of form and function, each one able to spray death with overwhelming precision and reliability. The van hit a bump in the road and the weapons rattled slightly in their racks.

  ‘Are you ok back there?’ Sparky yelled. ‘We’re getting close – the window isn’t very big for this you know!’

  Jack smiled, moving quickly. A bulletproof vest hung from one peg and Jack quickly slipped into it, tightening the straps until it moulded to his torso like a second skin. It had been ten years since he had last needed to wear any kind of body armour and the differences between the bulky military vests of the past and this skin-hugging Special Forces gear was impressive. Most of it seemed to be woven of some special brand of Kevlar, but he felt the solid shape of a steel plate when he tapped a fist against his chest. Although it left his limbs and head exposed, the torso-hugging jacket was the most he would risk in a situation where agility and stealth was paramount. Weapons were the next matter for careful consideration. He had already seen one choice, an SA80, the same assault rifle Dusty had been firing in the Masonic Grand Hall. Jack rested a hand on it for a moment – every British trooper trained with the SA80, but it was too cumbersome for combat in the confined space of a train carriage. The last thing Jack wanted was a weapon too long to fit around corners. Jack reluctantly lifted his fingers from the weapon and instead plucked down a Bizon PP-2000 – one of the newest Russian submachine guns and already standard issue for Russian Special Forces groups. It was perfect for close combat – small, reliable and packing a lethal punch. Next to it was a matching combat harness. He slipped it on and felt the stout shapes of the four Bizon magazines nestled against his hips. He also saw Big Tom’s Enforcer, the heavy hand-held battering ram, sitting nonchalantly at the back of the van. Some instinct made him pull the heavy metal tube out of its clip and swing it onto his back. It had a comforting weight which settled against him in a no-nonsense manner. Finally, he slipped a tiny Beretta Tomcat into his waistband at the base of his spine. The semi-automatic pistol packed a small but powerful .32 calibre seven-shot magazine. The Tomcat was enough to fit into his hand, but strong enough to give a vital edge if needed.

  ‘All set?’ Sparky asked as Jack leaned forward to watch their progress.

  Jack nodded, his face tight. Sparky threw a quick glance at Jack’s face and smiled in recognition.

  ‘Jack Frost is back,’ Sparky declared, ‘someone is about to get hurt.’ He turned his eyes back to the road.

  Jack stayed focused. ‘Tell me when it’s time,’ he said quietly.

  He began to go
into himself, to work his way through his body, tensing each muscle one by one, feeling the strength of his bones and sinews, letting himself prepare for the moment of action. The van slowed for a moment as Sparky guided it off the freeway. They were suddenly in a dark Belgian town, the street lights obscured by sheeting rain. Trees on either side of the roadway whipped back and forth in the winds of the storm. Sparky turned right into a car park and slid gracefully into a parking spot next to a train station.

  ‘The train should be coming through soon.’ Sparky’s voice was tight. He left the van idling but turned the headlights off. Cloaked in darkness, the two of them waited. There was a dull hammering of rain on the roof of the Renault and Jack shut his eyes calmly, breathing in and out with slow deliberation.

  ‘If this doesn’t work…’ Sparky’s voice was suddenly croaky and filled with doubt.

  ‘Relax,’ Jack spoke softly, with the hint of a smile in his voice. He had served with Sparky in tight situations in the 90s – and now he remembered Sparky’s own pre-battle behaviour – spoken worries about what would happen if everything went wrong. It was an annoying habit, but Sparky’s courage and competence under fire had always won the day. Jack understood and forgave his pre-fight jitters. ‘If it doesn’t work,’ Jack declared, ‘then I’ll be dead. Let London know about Deschamps – that’ll be the only thing that matters.’

  ‘What about me?’ Sparky asked.

  ‘Dishonourable discharge, possible jail time for assisting a wanted fugitive. But no more than a year or two behind bars, if that. They’d much rather you just hush up and be forgotten.’

  ‘Ah.’ Sparky sounded unimpressed.

  ‘Cheer up.’ Jack smiled. ‘Open a horrible little British pub somewhere in the States and they’ll be happy to leave you alone. You can get old and fat dating American cocktail waitresses. They all love a British accent over there.’

  ‘Oh? Oh!’ Sparky suddenly sounded considerably revived. He was about to ask a follow up question when the little screen over the dashboard beeped. He revved the car engine in preparation. ‘Train should be coming through in fifteen seconds.’ His voice was clipped and professional, the steering wheel gripped firmly in both hands.