by Andy Maslen
As the helicopter ascended and wheeled away to the north, Gabriel decided it was time to change the odds. He sighted through the precision optics of the scope mounted on the Sako and squeezed the trigger.
His shot was dead on target. The bullet penetrated the MG5’s receiver, smashing the sophisticated mechanical parts inside and rendering the powerful weapon impotent. As it swung right from the force of the impact the stranger had to let go or have his wrist broken. He dropped into a crouch, but not before Gabriel had taken a good look at his enemy.
The man was old to be a fighter, in his early sixties at least, Gabriel estimated. His silver hair was cut short and his eyes were heavily lined at the corners.
As Gabriel crept closer, hugging his body to the ground, the man pulled out a phone and spoke briefly. Then he drew a pistol, a Glock, aimed in Gabriel’s direction and fired, twice, into the bracken. The shots were nowhere near him. If the man’s aim had been even close, Gabriel would have dropped him with another round from the rifle.
Then the man stood upright and shouted.
“Gabriel Wolfe, I know that’s you with the rifle. Nice shooting, by the way.” His upper-class accent jarred with the black tactical outfit he wore. “You think you’ve won, because you’ve managed to fool that woman into betraying herself. But I’m afraid I can’t let that stand. You see, there are powerful people whose interests I protect who want you out of the way.” Gabriel manoeuvred clear of a frond of bracken and laid the cross-hairs of the sight over the man’s right eye. “Before you pull the trigger, let me ask you something. Are you really going to kill me without knowing the first thing about me? Like you killed Philip Agambe?”
Gabriel watched the man through the scope. Nodded. And smiled.
A clump of moorland vegetation had just risen to its feet behind the man. It pushed the muzzle of a Glock 19 hard against the back of the man’s head then immediately stepped back.
“Drop your weapon,” the clump said. “Or I’ll drop you.”
The man complied, and raised his hands above his head.
Gabriel broke cover and raced over to join Britta.
“Sutherland?” he asked.
“Cable ties.”
He turned to face the man. “Who are you?”
“Why don’t you call me David?” the man said.
“Who are these people you’re working for?”
He smiled. “I’m afraid that would be telling. Something I am not prepared to do.”
His next move caught Gabriel and Britta by surprise.
He spun, fast, dropping to a crouch and kicking out at Britta’s right knee. She buckled with a scream of pain, and as she brought her gun arm up again he smashed his knuckles down onto her wrist and broke her grip on the pistol, before clawing her across the eyes.
Then his hand was closing round the butt, ripping it out of her hand and swinging it round to aim at Gabriel.
Gabriel closed in, pushing himself to get inside the man’s reach, and slammed the heel of his right hand under the man’s chin. The clack as his jaws snapped closed was clearly audible.
Now Gabriel grabbed the Glock’s barrel and pushed it out wide to the left.
Britta was still down, hands over her eyes, moaning with pain, helpless.
The noise of rotor blades made Gabriel look up, a big mistake. The next moment he felt an explosion of pain as the man hammered his other fist into Gabriel’s throat. Choking, he staggered back, regrouping.
The chopper was landing now, rotor blades whop-whopping at deafening volume.
His gun arm free again, the man was levelling the Glock, aiming straight at Gabriel’s face.
There was a look of cold triumph on his face. The crinkled blue eyes and the smile stealing over his face said it all. I win. You lose.
Then the eyes opened wide and the mouth dropped open, allowing a thin stream of dark red blood to emerge, sliding over his lower lip and down his chin.
The Glock fell from his outstretched hand and landed with a soft rustle in the bracken.
He collapsed to his knees and fell forwards onto his face.
Britta was standing behind him, squinting through half-closed eyes. Her right hand dangled at her side.
Protruding from the back of the man’s neck was the hilt of a knife. Not a single millimetre of the blade was visible.
Gabriel turned round, bent and retrieved the Sako. Working the bolt and bringing it up to his shoulder in one, fluid movement, he aimed at the chopper, whose pilot, seeing the action on the ground, had clearly just decided to leave and had throttled forward, producing a whine of increased thrust from the engine.
The skids were only just kissing the bracken as the .338 Lapua Magnum round tore into the fuselage just below the main rotor mast. With a shrieking explosion, the gears, turbine rotors and the engine itself disintegrated. The rotor blades canted crazily to one side before the tip of one blade dug into the soft ground and snapped with a bang.
Gabriel pushed Britta to the ground, drawing a scream as her injured wrist hit the earth. The air above them was filled with shrapnel as the other three rotor blades fractured. The helicopter settled back down with a crashing thump, black smoke coiling up from the engine, rear rotor spinning down to a standstill.
With the chopper disabled, its rotors crumpled like the wings of a squashed insect, Gabriel bent to retrieve the Glock and ran towards the cabin, where he could see the pilot frantically trying to free himself from his flight harness. He wrenched the door open and stuck the pistol into the man’s face.
“Enough!” He shouted. “It’s over.”
64
Return to Mozambique
SIX floors above the swarming pedestrians, in a small apartment on Ko Shing Street, Hong Kong, a young computer genius by the name of Wūshī clicked on an email in his inbox. He nodded as he reviewed the names of the encrypted files attached.
“Sweet!” he whispered.
He uploaded the files to a secure server he maintained, set up a distribution list, and encrypted the release software. No timer, but an instant SEND if he received a code word by text, email or instant message.
*
Five thousand miles to the west, in the basement of a Stockholm house owned by twenty-five-year-old IT teacher Matteo Falskog, a similar procedure was taking place.
*
In the office of a small terraced family home in Peckham, southeast London, the widow of an SAS trooper was sitting at her computer. She was making her own careful preparations should she ever need to release the recording sent to her by Gabriel, as well as the digital scans of the dossier she held on Barbara Sutherland, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
*
Two days after the recording had been distributed, Gabriel arrived in Maputo, traveling on the fake passport provided by Mr Fang, who’d refused several attempts by Gabriel to pay for the work that had clearly gone into producing the document. After checking in at a hotel – The Excelsior – he called Darryl and arranged to meet at a downtown bar.
From the street, Montebello had appeared to be just another of hundreds of urban bars he’d seen in his lifetime. A double-width frontage between offices and shops. But it hid a secret. A garden, visible from the interior of the bar. Gabriel carried a gin and tonic into the miniature urban Eden.
It wasn’t huge, maybe forty or fifty feet square, and mostly paved, but it was lush with vegetation. Fruit trees, flowering vines, huge glazed pots overflowing with trailing geraniums in saturated shades of crimson and coral, and a blowsy bougainvillea, smothered in cerise-pink flowers. The perfume was a heady blend of sweet and spicy that made Gabriel smile for no reason he could fathom. In the centre of the paved area was a small, raised pool with a cascade of more glazed pots above it mounted in a copper framework, delivering a never-ending stream of bubbling, splashing water onto the heads of the goldfish that swam close to the surface.
The space was crowded with tables set with mosaic
tiles; all were occupied. Gabriel scanned the area, looking for Darryl.
“Hey! Gabriel. Over here. I got us a nice corner table.”
Darryl was standing at the far end of the garden. He wore another lurid Hawaiian shirt, this one featuring World War II warplanes, their camouflaged noses painted with snarling shark-mouths. His Southern tones cut through the chatter, causing a few other drinkers to turn their heads. Moments later, the two men were shaking hands before sitting down and clinking glasses.
“You said you had to abort your mission,” Darryl said.
“We did. We were attacked. Twice. First, by some private contractor types in a Humvee. Then by a warlord, or his gang at any rate. The Zambian air force pulled us out, with a little help from your countrymen, for which many thanks, by the way.”
“Nothing to do with me, but I’ll take the thanks on behalf of Uncle Sam.” He tilted his glass at Gabriel before taking on pull on the golden brown liquid. “Then what?”
Well, then the shit really hit the fan.
“Well, we decided discretion was the better part of valour. We left.”
“But you’re back now.”
“I am. Look, I’ll be honest with you. I could really use some help. You said you’d been involved with the US Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency?”
“Yes, I did.” Darryl drained his drink, letting the ice cubes click against his front teeth.
“I made a promise to my friend’s widow and her daughter to bring their man back to them and I intend to carry it out.”
Darryl scratched the stubble on his cheek. “On the record? There’s nothing I can do for you. I haven’t heard from Don in a while, so to me you’re just Joe Schmo from Kokomo. Off the record, I got a lot of respect for what y’all are doing. Let me go and get us some more drinks and you can tell me what’s on your shopping list.”
Gabriel finished his gin and tonic and handed the empty tumbler to Darryl, who squeezed his way between the other tables. With surprising grace for a man carrying as much surplus weight as he did, Gabriel thought.
When Darryl returned – “G and T for you, old boy, eh what? Rum and Coke for me,” – Gabriel laid out his requirements for his second trip up-country.
“I need a vehicle. Four-wheel drive, obviously. GPS. Spare gas. Rations and bottled water. Medical kit. Some kind of sealable plastic bags. A decent knife. Water purification tablets. Sleeping bag. And, although I’m not expecting any trouble this time, a sidearm and rifle.”
“That’s it? You don’t want a couple Hellfires? What I heard, one shook up those dudes who sprung it on you last time you were here, with that pretty little redhead.”
“Yeah, and maybe throw in a handful of Claymores while we’re at it.”
“Why stop at anti-personnel mines? How ’bout I throw in a drone or two?”
“Or get me a Bradley and I’ll just go in a straight line all the way. Just hop out at the other end.”
Darryl laughed, then took a long pull on his rum and Coke. He leaned back, expansive now.
“Tell you what. I’ll make a call, get you a fucking Apache. Why drive when you can fly?”
Gabriel laughed too, enjoying the slobby American’s company and easy humour. Then he noticed Darryl wasn’t smiling any more.
“Darryl? What’s the matter?”
The man’s brow was furrowed with deep lines. Then he grinned.
65
Here Comes a Chopper . . .
FLYING in helicopters had been a regular part of Gabriel’s life during his Army service days. It was two days after his conversation with Darryl at Montebello and now the two men sat, strapped in side by side, as the pilot and crew of a fully loaded Apache Gunship made their final flight preparations.
“I have to ask,” he said, leaning close to Darryl. “How on earth did you swing this? Doesn’t it cost a shitload of money to put one of these birds into the air?”
“Damn straight. You’re looking at lots of zeroes. Thing is, I play poker once a month with a group of guys working down here and one them is a Colonel in AFRICOM. That’s the United States Africa Command. He owes me a lot of money and I traded it for a favour.”
“Thank you. Which doesn’t sound like enough, but, really, that means a lot.”
Further conversation became impossible as the big helicopter’s rotor blades started turning, chopping the air into turbulent currents that howled and swirled around its fuselage.
Darryl gave Gabriel the thumbs up and then bent his head to his chest. Gabriel couldn’t think of anything better to do so he, too, closed his eyes. He felt the Apache bank left as it climbed away from the ground to begin the flight to the GPS reference Gabriel had sent to the pilot from his phone. He found the vibrations thrumming through his chest oddly soothing, and his eyes grew heavy.
The bump when the chopper landed jolted Gabriel awake. But something was wrong. Terribly wrong. Beside him, head dangling to the right, Darryl was dead, his throat gaping, blood soaking the front of his camouflage jacket. Both hands were pinned to his thighs with machetes. Up front, he could see red splashes on the Plexiglas windscreen, which was starred and cracked, pocked with bullet holes. The pilot and co-pilot had been shot. Their bodies lolled sideways, flight helmets touching, and smashed open like eggs where large-calibre rounds had penetrated the thin plastic shells.
He punched the release button at his waist, but it was jammed. The four-point harness held him in place like a baby in a pushchair. He wrenched his body round in an attempt to reach the knife he’d strapped to his calf but his fingers fell agonisingly short. Then he heard men laughing beyond the open door in front of him.
A muscular brown hand grabbed hold of the side of the doorway and hauled its owner on board. The man wore a bright yellow Adidas T-shirt with the distinctive three stripes running down each sleeve to the point where they ended at massive biceps. He carried a chrome-plated, Desert Eagle semi-automatic pistol.
“Oho, what have we got here? Captain Wolfe. Did you come back for more punishment? That can be arranged you know. But first we have to release you from your harness, yes?”
He pulled the slide back, racking a .50 calibre hollow-point round as thick as a man’s finger into the chamber.
Gabriel was struggling, writhing in the nylon webbing, but it seemed to be tightening, constricting around his ribs like a python.
“Goodbye, Captain Wolfe,” the man said with a grin displaying a double row of gold teeth.
Then he pulled the trigger.
Gabriel screamed as the hollow-point hit the release button on his harness and ploughed into his guts.
A hand was shaking him violently. He jerked his head up. The Apache was just setting down in a treeless area of forest.
“Gabriel, man? Wake up. You were having the mother of all nightmares. They heard you from up front, through their cans.”
Gabriel was hyperventilating. His pulse was thumping painfully in his neck. He wiped away the greasy slick of sweat that had covered his face and exposed neck.
“Oh, Jesus! Sorry. That was a bad one.”
Darryl’s forehead crinkled and he pursed his lips.
“You seeing someone for that?” he said.
“What, nightmares?”
“No, not nightmares. You know damn well what I’m talking about. I’ve seen it in plenty of our guys. I ain’t going to say it if you don’t want me to.”
Gabriel shook his head.
“No, it’s OK. And, yes, I am seeing someone about it. But I’m so close to finding Smudge this time, I guess it all just came flooding out.”
“That’s what you called him, huh?”
“Yeah. We all had nicknames. Before I was the boss they called me Wolfie. Not very original, I know.”
“Never mind original, it’s what bonds us. Man’s got a nickname from his comrades, he feels part of something bigger, you know. I’ve never seen combat, just gone along afterwards to recover our MIAs, but my old man did. Vietnam. Two tours. Got three Purple Hearts,
and a Silver Star for taking out a Viet Cong machine gun nest. His name was Dwight but they called him ‘Yogi’. Know why?”
Gabriel shrugged. “Tell me.”
“You ever hear of a baseball player called Yogi Berra?”
“No, sorry.”
“Fucking Limeys. Bet you would have if he’d played cricket, don’t you know.” Darryl whipped out his cod upper-class British accent for this last sally before continuing. “Man was, like, the greatest. Amazing hitter. But what he did better’n anyone was catch. My Dad was on patrol down in the jungle one day, and this kid, maybe eleven or twelve, runs out onto the path about twenty feet away and lobs a grenade at him and his men. My Dad drops his M16 and damn if he doesn’t catch the grenade. No time to think, he just throws it back at the spot where the kid vanished into the bushes. Grenade goes off and a foot comes flying over their heads and gets stuck in a tree. After that, they always called him Yogi.” He shook his head and sighed. “It’s the bonds that matter between fighting men. What do you say we get out and get it on, start looking for Smudge?”
Gabriel nodded. Five minutes later, having agreed with the pilot they’d check in every ten minutes by radio, he and Darryl walked away from the Apache. They headed for the village where that last, disastrous skirmish with the People’s Army for the Liberation of Mozambique had taken place. Both men wore general purpose camouflage fatigues and brown army boots. Both carried Beretta M9 semi-automatic pistols in holsters on their right hips, and both had freshly oiled M4 carbines slung across their backs.
The village, when they reached it, had the dilapidated look of abandoned human settlements everywhere, whether in an African forest or a Florida subdivision after the debt-burdened residents have upped sticks and left. Tin-roofed shacks sagged drunkenly, their corrugated roofs rusty and spattered with greyish-white bird droppings. The paths between the buildings, once swept clean every morning, were now barely discernible tracks of grass. No feet had pounded the red earth into a flat, dusty surface for years. Lying against a collapsing mud wall was a cracked terracotta pot that might once have been used for cooking. Its black glaze had weathered to a matt finish and then scabbed off in flakes, revealing the red-brown clay beneath.