“Christ, Mac, what the fuck do you think –”
I glared at him. “I had the right to ask.”
He settled, but only because being angry physically hurt. “You going to tell the colonel?”
“Am I going to tell Unit 12 that you’ve fucked up? That you led us into a meeting with General Delta, one of the most dangerous men on the planet without giving us all the int you had on the situation? No. I’m not going to tell her but so help me, Hayes, you fuck up like this again and I’ll shoot you.”
“I’m sorry –”
“Save it. I’m too bloody angry right now to accept it.”
Jacob snapped his mouth shut.
“How do we fix this because I’m not letting the woman stay with Boko Haram and she’s not going to North Korea either. Who else in the DRC knows the Koreans want her? Who else did Clark have contact with? What leads do you have because we just shot the only person I know who could have found her?”
“I don’t know, Mac,” he said.
I wanted to shake him, growl at him and even punch him in the face for this stupidity, but hadn’t I done exactly the same thing? I’d lied to him for years about all the information I’d collected on Clark. Isn’t this what men like Clark did? Divide those who were close and keep them separated for as long as possible until they could be wiped from the board. Clark probably had plans for Jacob, who’d have made the grade for becoming an officer once he’d straightened his head out over Syria. The only thing tying Jacob down was me, a man Clark wanted off the planet, so they decided to take me, Jacob and the rest of my old team down.
Commotion on the ward, Brant’s voice echoing down the long room disturbing other patients. I rose and opened the curtain. “There you are,” she said, striding towards us. “Lydia’s found something, time to stop lollygagging, Lance Corporal,” she told Jacob, “we have a scientist to catch.”
I glanced at Jacob. “I don’t understand… How?”
“It’s called having friends in low places. Aria has come through and along with another tech whizz at my command, the three of them think they have her location. The deal has already been done, gentlemen and we need to get going because we have to be in Vladivostok in 2 days.”
19
Everything moved with dizzying speed and military precision. Which meant Brant took over our lives and issued orders as if she were fighting Rommel in North Africa. By the end of the day we were on a plane from Kinshasa to Paris Charles de Gaulle, then on to Moscow – where we had to keep our heads down because Brant and the Russians weren’t on friendly terms right now, and on to Vladivostok on the far eastern Russian coast. A place I’d never been before.
Jacob spent most of the time asleep until we were over Siberia. Aeroflot didn’t fill me with confidence so sleeping consisted of a light doze until we hit some turbulence and I gripped the armrests as if they would save my life. The night pressed on the small windows of the plane, the lights were low, and the plane’s staff were resting between trips up and down the aisles selling vodka and cigarettes.
“You are angry with me,” Jacob whispered in the darkness of the night. The others slept. He shifted in his seat again, his arm and shoulder free of a sling but sitting for hours on planes and rushing through terminals couldn’t be easy on his wounds.
“Yes,” I admitted, though it pained me to say so.
“Why?” Jacob asked. His fingers stroked the inside of my thigh and I trembled, desperate for more of his touch.
“I shot a woman in the head, Jacob, because she threatened you and we should never have been in that room. All those women. Congolese, Rwandan, Nigerian, desperate women trying to earn money from bad men to send it back to their families. How many of those girls had babies in Kinshasa? Those children will be swallowed whole by the world and spat out with no one to care for them. I’ve seen their future. It is filled with violence and hate until the world burns in their hearts and turns it to ash, a black coal in their chests incapable of anything good.”
I knew this wasn’t Jacob’s doing. To be fair Delta had more enemies than friends and he didn’t have the zealot energy of the fundamentalist Islamic or Christian groups fighting in the jungles far from Kinshasa, at least for the moment.
My frustration rose with Jacob because I had a target. He drew the poison of my futile attempts to help the people of the Congo, my sad efforts of the last 2 years to help a corrupt government stay in power because they were better than the alternative. The information they had on their citizens, all that technology which could have saved hundreds of lives if they’d built hospitals instead of a room full of servers, I kept it all safe so they could remain in power and try to prevent at least some of the deaths from civil war.
And now Danny knew I was gay. I would lose my job. My visa. My home. My dog. It would become impossible for me to remain in Kinshasa for any length of time and yet I wished I’d had more of an impact than some insignificant footnote in an accountant’s ledger when he made a note of my wages every week. I had not saved one life and that day our actions had cost so many more, the impact would be felt by every family.
Something wet landed on my clenched fist. “I am sorry.”
Jacob wept and my heart ached for him. How could I think he didn’t consider the implications of his actions today, or yesterday, or the week before he found me again?
I reached for him, flicking the armrest up and drew him against my chest. “I am sorry, my love,” I whispered as he clung to me. “I am sorry. I shouldn’t blame you.” I whispered the terrible truth of Danny’s rejection of our love. It mirrored my father’s hate too closely and tainted the bright light being with Jacob shed on the dark corners of my life. I whispered the grief I held in my heart for the Congo and all its sad beauty, stained by blood, violence and greed both at home and abroad.
“Mac, what you did for those men in the museum will save their lives. They have a level of professional training and skill they would never have had without you. Those men are a disciplined fighting force and that will be passed down. You made a difference,” he said, his voice low but urgent.
“I guess it’s all I can hope for,” I said.
He drew circles on my palm, each movement of his finger went in a direct line to my cock, making me shift in my seat. “Did you mean what you said in the hospital? About being too old to fight?”
I closed my fingers over his to stop him moving them. “Yes. I don’t have the heart for it, the hunger. I’m tired of the death, the violence, the speed with which everything happens. The decisions. Other than the fights we had to protect the museum, life in the DRC had been quiet for me.”
“But you can’t go back?” half statement, half question.
I shook my head. “Apparently, I’m gay.”
He chuckled and we kissed. “Then we live somewhere we are accepted.”
“That excludes a lot of the world,” I said.
“How about sheep farming in Australia?” he asked.
“You know much about sheep?”
“What’s to know? It can’t be that hard, they’re everywhere in Wales.” It’s where I grew up even if I didn’t have the accent.
I flicked the end of his nose. “Cheeky bastard. And you have a career, Jacob.”
He shrugged. “Don’t want to do it any more, not without you.”
“I can live in Hereford.”
He snorted. “Yeah, you’d go down a storm with the other Regiment wives and girlfriends.”
A good point and realistically how the hell would I survive in Hereford? Not like the city needed any more ex-Regiment guys hanging about being useless on civvy street.
“We talked about running a bar once,” I said, thinking back to our previous lives.
He lay his head on my shoulder. “Lot of work.”
“Lot of late nights.”
“Early mornings…”
“Tearoom on the Devon coast?” I suggested.
He laughed. “Cream teas to old dears who will love u
s because we’re the only gays in the village?”
“Bacon sandwiches and cream teas.”
Jacob sighed. “We’re never going to have the money to buy somewhere in Devon.”
I kissed the top of his head. “We’ll figure something out. Let’s find the Dr Frankenstein of the insect world and maybe something will fall into place afterwards.”
“I love you, I missed you every day and I’m sorry I fucked up.”
“It’s okay and I love you as well,” I whispered.
As he slept again, leaning into me, one leg thrown over my thigh and our hands joined I couldn’t help but marvel at how things had changed in the last week. I’d lost the world I’d created in the DRC, nothing could change that, and I might not like the homophobia, but I couldn’t fight it. However, the things I’d found in exchange were nothing short of miraculous. This physical intimacy, at my age, electrified every fibre in my body. It terrified me but a thousand other words I’d need to describe its beauty flowed through and around me. The shadows of fear about my sexuality, which I’d been living with for so long, had diminished to the point of utter insignificance under the glare of Jacob’s desire. I held the future in my hands, one I hardly dared to dream could be real.
The only obstacle to my future lay in saving the Bug Lady from the North Koreans. There would be guns, possibly bombs, and doubtless more dead bodies, but in all this I had one driving force, protect Jacob. It might seem daft, he could do his job after all, but I really wanted us to have a future together and getting us through unharmed had to be high on my list of priorities.
I’d seen it, several times, during my service in the army. A married man who has a child is suddenly unable to go into the field the way he used to and second guesses himself to the point he becomes dangerous. I’d never understood, not really. I’d never had to care for someone. I just followed orders, did the best I could, tried to save those in my squad but it was me, the unmarried man with no family, who went on point most often. I had nothing to lose.
Now though, with Jacob’s pulse beating against my thumb where I rubbed his wrist and his heat soaking into my tired body, I knew I had the world to lose and the fear in my guts made it hard to breathe.
Every covert operation in the Regiment layered fear under the determination every soldier had to get the job done. I’d stared it down more than once. That bowel loosening, sweat inducing, foul tasting sense of terror, but this fear was different. An insidious whispering of all the bad shit I’d ever seen inflicted onto a human being could be done to my Jacob. How the hell was I supposed to function with this terror gripping my heart and guts?
“I have no fucking idea,” I whispered aloud and tried to find some sleep.
“This looks like an apocalypse just happened and no one thought to mention it to the people who live here,” Jacob said from the back of the minivan we’d hired at the airport.
Though minivan made you think of children and school runs with perky gym bunny mums. This van looked, and smelt, like it had been reborn after an argument with a scrap yard about where it belonged. The van decided it shouldn’t be scrapped. The rest of the world outside Vladivostok would have condemned it to a dignified death. Here it blended right in, but maybe that was because it was hard to see through the fog of pollution shrouding the Soviet city.
“It’s nicer further north, the modern Russia is less…” Brant waved a hand at the brutal Soviet world outside.
Once upon a time there’d been a fishing village here belonging to the Chinese Empire, now the Russian Federation had finished what the Soviet Union had started. The place was an industrial warzone. There might well be beauty in it somewhere, but I couldn’t see it as I drove. Even the poorest quarters of Kinshasa had more green. There were huge Soviet housing blocks, admittedly with space between them, but nothing green had the good grace to make its presence known. Maybe it was the time of year but from the smell of the air I doubted it.
“I’ve booked us into the Zhemchuzhina,” Lydia said.
“Easy for you to say,” I muttered. Her Russian was considerably better than mine.
She ignored me. “It’s only three stars but gets good reviews.”
“Trip Advisor?” Jacob asked. “I only like to stay if it gets good reviews.”
“Idiot,” she said. “I’m afraid we’ve booked in as couples and definitely the more traditional kind.”
“I always wondered what it would be like to be married,” I said.
“Play your cards right and you’ll find out,” Jacob announced from the back.
The van jerked in a way that made the steering column shudder in my hands as I stared in the rear-view mirror. Jacob laughed. “You look like you’re going to pass out.”
“Lance Corporal!” Brant barked. “Not the time.”
“Sorry, ma’am.”
“If you’re going to propose you do it properly. Trust me, my husband fucked it up and I’ve never let him forget it,” she admitted.
“What happened?” Lydia asked.
“Need to know, Sergeant, need to know.”
Something electric and modern beeped in the back. “I have a location for the Bug Lady,” Lydia said.
“Please stop calling her that,” Brant pleaded. “Her name is Dilras Begum and she is the leading academic in her field.”
“Yes, ma’am,” replied Lydia, distracted by her phone. “The Leer jet has just entered Russian airspace and requested to land at Vladivostok airport in 3 hours.”
I glanced in the rear-view mirror at Lydia. “You’ve hacked the local airport control panel, haven’t you?”
Lydia grinned. “I can neither confirm nor deny such an event might have taken place and it wasn’t me, governor.”
“We have 3 hours to come up with a plan and weapons,” Brant said. “We’ll also need another vehicle and I need to send a report to Whitehall about where we are with the mission.”
“Is that wise, ma’am? We don’t know who to trust and if Room 39 do have Ms Begum then we shouldn’t alert them to our presence,” Jacob said.
“There are still people I trust at MI6, Lance Corporal. Though you are right, we should be cautious, as much as it pains me to say so.” She rubbed her eyes and I studied her for a moment while we waited for the lights to change on a junction. Elizabeth Brant had a way of wearing her responsibilities well. They didn’t bow her shoulders or make her feet heavy but right now you could see it dragging at her heart and soul. Fighting people you should be able to trust, figuring out the movements of an unseen enemy couldn’t be easy for her, and it wasn’t a task I ever wanted.
“I have a weapons’ stash we can use,” Lydia said.
“I take it we’ll be owing Aria some more favours?” Brant asked with weary acceptance.
“Money this time, ma’am. The unfortunate truth is, she’s better at her job.”
“She’s not better at her job, Sergeant, she’s merely able to sidestep all the rules and laws we have to abide by. A fact I’m rather grateful for right now,” Brant said.
“So, we’ll get another vehicle and find the weapons?” Jacob clarified.
“You and Lydia can do that, I need Mac with me for the moment,” Brant said.
I glanced at Jacob who shrugged. The thought of us separating made the nest of worms in my guts stir like an insecure teenager, but needs must, and we had to stop Bug Lady from reaching North Korea.
When we reached the hotel, we checked in, swapped room keys so Jacob and I were sharing, Brant and Lydia in the room next door. We all showered and changed, still maintaining practical but civilian clothing, and reconvened in Brant’s room. Jacob left with Lydia, promising to find a car capable of more energetic driving than the minivan.
20
“We need a plan, Mac,” Brant said when the others left.
I glanced at the door. “Shouldn’t they be involved?”
“We have more experience and we have too few resources to waste time.” She had a point.
Sitti
ng side by side Brant pulled up the images of the airport and surrounding roads. “The Leer is due in…” she checked her watch, “two hours thirty-nine minutes. Suggestions, Sergeant?”
I studied the map. “How are they going to get her out of Russia and into North Korea? There’s the access using the Friendship railway bridge, over the Tumen River. That’s likely to be monitored too closely and the risk of moving an uncooperative female safely is too high. They could put her in a boat and motor over the river but again, too visible, even at night and if they know we’re after her then time is against them. They aren’t going to want to test two borders by going further north-west into Russia, crossing into China and then down into the Korean peninsula.” I pulled the satellite imagery out so we could look at the wider geography of the region. “Coming from South Korea would be beyond stupid. We all have too many eyes-on for them to get away with that.”
Brant moved the image around and narrowed it back onto our current location. “There are cargo holds, Sergeant. Room 39 have a great many resources. Smuggling goods is what they do.”
“I just don’t think they’ll have the time to organise it well. I think they’re going to want her out of reach fast. If the Russians or Chinese catch wind of what they’re up to they’ll lose Ms Begum. I don’t think either of their allies will want them to have the kind of skills she’s able to give them.”
“It’s not like they can drive her across,” Brant said.
A thought hit me. “Bugger, of course. There’s only one sure-fire way of moving her quickly and with relative ease. A helicopter, ma’am. If they have a Leer jet, they have a hel.”
“Why would they leave the airport if they have a hel?” Brant asked. “And if they don’t leave the airport, we can’t get to her. We’re good, Mac, but I don’t want to start a war with Russia because we’ve had live contact in an airport.”
“They have to leave the airport because of flight plans. It’s much harder to track a hel that’s not going to need air traffic control’s permission to take off. They stay low, close to the ground, then the sea and job done, she vanishes into a black hole we’ll never get her out of, and the world will have to start worrying about weaponised bugs on top of everything else.”
Ultimate Sanction Page 16