by Danny King
“Repressurising,” a metallic voice told my left ear.
After a few moments I felt something on my arms and legs but I couldn’t see what it was. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t see at first, but then someone tapped the button on the side of my helmet and my visor tint cleared.
Mr Jean helped unwrap me from the bracket while Mr Vasiliev and Mr Kovács did what they could to prise Mr Smith away. Eventually we trusted the floor enough to relinquish our grips, then shook off our helmets and followed the others forward to the FSO seats.
There were five spares.
“Bogeys closing at eighty miles,” the captain announced. “It’s going to be close.”
My ears were popping and head swimming as the Tupolev climbed towards the stars. All at once a proximity claxon filled the cabin, so we strapped ourselves in and braced ourselves for the worst, but this day had thrown all it had to throw at us. A sudden confirmation chime eased all our fears and won a well-earned round of applause from everyone on-board.
“Radar signal scrambled,” the Captain told us over the intercom. “You can relax now gentlemen, the jets can’t find us.”
We continued our bearing north-by-north-west for a few more miles before tipping east to roll the sun around to the other side of the plane.
Mission accomplished. We were on our way home.
“Thanks for coming to get me,” Mr Smith said, stretching a hand across the seat between us.
“No problem,” I replied, taking and shaking it. “Thanks for Mozambique.”
Mr Smith thought on that and a pensive expression spread across his face as he looked across at the other empty FSO seats. “You know, we should take care of each other,” he said. “This job’s dangerous enough as it is without giving up so easily on each other.”
“You hear me arguing?” I replied.
“I’m serious,” Mr Smith insisted.
And I could see he was. Nobody liked losing colleagues. It was never nice. Take today for example, we’d lost Mr Clarke, Mr Passey, Mr Hodgson, Mr Raj and Mr Lee. That’s a lot for one morning. Some of them I knew. Some of them I didn’t. But they were all good guys. At least they’d died on operation, and a successful one at that. This wasn’t always the case. We’d all lost colleagues unnecessarily through either carelessness, neglect or sadism. Mr Smith himself had been lost, but I’d not given up on him and gone out on a limb to bring him back. This was unheard of in a business where the big picture was everything. Unless of course, you were the guy who’d laid it all on and employed us in the first place, then your own private quarters couldn’t be packed with enough escape pods and parachutes to help you live to laugh another day. This morning’s events had shaken something awake inside Mr Smith. He was a working man. A contract man. A professional. He took orders, followed orders and obeyed orders. I’d never known him to speak out of turn in all the times I’d worked with him, but Mr Smith wasn’t a happy bunny today. And while it was true that he had just fallen twenty-odd-thousand feet to a certain terrible death only a few minutes earlier, there was still more to it than just that.
A determination.
Mr Smith had a determination in his normally automotive eyes.
The only time I’d ever seen anything like it in him before was when he talked about the books he loved.
And occasionally, the kids he loved too.
“Okay then,” I quietly agreed, shaking his hand for a second time in as many minutes.
I wasn’t altogether clear as to what we’d just agreed, but I knew we’d agreed something. I just never knew the scale of it.
Or just how many lives it would eventually come to affect.
23.
A LOYALTY FROM BETRAYAL
Oddly, when we got back to Greenland, we found that not everyone was ecstatic about Mr Smith’s miraculous escape.
Griffin Marvel sent the monorail for us the moment we touched down. Stupidly, we thought it was to congratulate us on a job well done so we all climbed in with buoyant smiles and rattled through the rabbit warren of caves until we reached the Command Centre.
“I ought to have you all killed this instant!” he screamed at the fifteen of us, prompting us to unbow our heads when we realised we weren’t getting any medals today. “Every last Goddamn one of you!”
Captain Ackerman, the Tupolev’s pilot, asked if there was a problem.
“A problem? A problem you say?” Marvel almost melted down. “Yes there’s a fucking problem,” he confirmed. “I go to all this expense, all this risk and all this trouble to pull off one of the most audacious skyjackings of all time, only to have you cretins jeopardise everything by launching a fucking search and rescue operation in the middle of it!”
I saw where Marvel’s fury was focussed and tightened my screws accordingly. Like the CSMK missile, I can make myself virtually invisible when need be and began wiggling my toes inside my boots to drift out of the firing line.
“But Mr Marvel,” the Captain tried, “we succeeded in every respect. It was a triumph of ingenuity.”
“There was nothing in my ingenuity about stopping to catch every careless fool who couldn’t keep on his feet!” he roared, spurring my migration behind and around the back of Mr Vasiliev by a few more millimetres per second. I’d just got level with his ear-line when Mr Vasiliev noticed I was very, very slowly leaving the building and began to join me in my slide south.
“But Your Grace, it just shows what a spectacularly inspired plan it was then, that we achieved all our aims and still had time to save our fallen comrade,” the Captain soft-soaped.
“Which comrade? You mean this comrade?” Marvel shouted, whipping a semi-automatic out from behind his back and shooting Mr Kovács between the eyes without so much as a second’s thought. “You allowed the carrier groups’ interceptors to close in on you for almost five precious minutes to save that fool, did you?”
No one felt the need to point out to Griffin Marvel that he’d just fired the wrong FSO, least of all Mr Smith, and we shrank as a group as Marvel’s own personal body-guarding detachment poured in to the Command Centre from every door to surround us on all sides. Obviously we’d been required to relinquish our guns before boarding the monorail and found ourselves staring down the barrel of Marvel’s Omega Unit armed with nothing more than fluff and regrets.
“Dr Frengers, step away from them if you will,” Marvel told our jet-hopping scientist who’d been cowering amongst us with miserable resignation. Dr Frengers seized the lifeline and excused himself from our party, only too pleased to distance himself from the tar bucket, but Marvel stopped him before he got more than a stride or two away and held out a hand.
“If you please, Dr Frengers?”
The Doctor dug into his zipper pocket and made a present of a little circuit board he’d extracted from the missile. Marvel looked it over with satisfaction, then shot Dr Frengers through the glasses to dump him across Mr Kovács.
That was when we knew we were all dead.
I’d been in situations like this before and what I’ve never understood is why nobody ever does anything about it. Marvel’s Omega Unit stood around watching Dr Frengers hit the floor and none of them emptied their guns into Marvel despite there being the distinct possibility they’d too end up cluttering up the place before this day was out. Because loyalty’s a one-way street in this game, with often nothing more than broken promises, trap doors and piranha tanks waiting when it came to pay the men who’d done the actual grafting.
Of course this wasn’t always the case, otherwise we’d have to be a right bunch of mugs to keep signing up, but every now and again we did encounter a rogue psychopath who got his kicks from firing his own staff. And every time this happened, almost everyone else stood idle. I include myself in this by the way. It always came as something of a surprise whenever it happened, I’ll say that in my defence, but more than that, each time it happened, I somehow managed to convince myself that the person it happened to had somehow deserved it, because the
implications of them not having deserved it were far too great for me to contemplate. So like a zebra on the Serengeti who’d survived yet another lion hunt, I would go about my business and continue nibbling the grass, simply thankful that it was someone other than me who was being picked over by the pack.
“But Mr Marvel,” Captain Ackerman was pleading, “I implore you to…” but we never got to hear what Captain Ackerman wanted from Marvel. If it was to be shot in the head before he could put his side of the story across he got his wish.
“You were flying the plane. You were the one who turned off the scrambler,” Marvel screamed at Ackerman’s corpse, before waving his hands in distain and holstering his gun. “Take the rest of them away. I’ll deal with them later,” he snapped. “And somebody clear up this mess!”
If there’s one rule I’ve tried to live my life by it’s never get taken away to be dealt with later. If you’re going to get killed try to get it done and dusted in the first few minutes because no good ever came of giving disgruntled sadists a few hours to ponder the problem at their leisure.
I made a grab for the nearest Omega monkey’s weapon but I was hopelessly outnumbered and a shoulder stock to the back of the neck put paid to my plans and ensured come the entertainments that Griffin Marvel took a special interest in the FSO with the eye patch and disappointing attitude.
I felt the pain from the blow when I came to. It had sunk in through the back of my head to settle behind my eyes so I could tell I’d probably been out for about fifteen minutes or so.
I pushed myself up off the hard wooden bench and saw that we’d been put in one of the large detention suites. Eleven faces stared at me from around the room; the other FSOs, our three reservists / assistants, the Tupolev’s co-pilot and navigator, and the Chariots’ chief technician, who’d been with us on the Tupolev during the mission. It seemed like such a waste to be throwing away talent like this, particularly the technical lads, but Griffin Marvel no longer cared. He’d got what he wanted, the CSMK circuitry. We were merely the box it had come in.
Mr Smith looked down at me.
“Glad you came?” he asked.
A quick inspection of the cell revealed no air conditioning panels to slide off, no sewers to crawl through and no bars to hacksaw. There were no windows, full stop.
There was only one way in and one way out; a heavy steel door with a flap at the bottom for sliding food through – if so desired. They didn’t. There was no handle on this side of the door either, just a flat plate to indicate where the mechanism was.
I wondered if my explosive eye would pack enough of a punch to blow it open. It contained about 50g of semtex, so I reasoned it might just. Which made it even more of a shame that I’d worn my GPS tracking eye then.
We spent a while discussing tactics, what we’d do when they came for us, and how we’d fight them off, but this was really just an exercise in keeping our spirits up and we all knew it. Well, all except for Lieutenant Copeland, the navigator, who fell for every word of it and came away with a level of confidence in our chances that our own mothers would’ve found hard to match. He was going to have the hardest of falls.
I prepared myself to meet my maker by picking over the bones of my life to see which particular mistakes had brought me here, while Mr Smith spent the time talking about his kids. It was clear he really loved them, four-year-old Ben and seven-year-old Kirsty, just as it became clear they were both sleeping beneath headstones. I finally figured this out when I realised that neither of them had aged in all the time I’d known him. It also explained his workaholic attitude to Affiliation.
“You didn’t kill them, did you?” I tentatively asked, wondering if this was how he’d come to be in prison in the first place and how he’d come to the attention of The Agency.
“No,” he told me, “but I killed the men who did.”
After another four hours, the metal door finally cracked open and we braced ourselves for the worst. But to my continuing surprise our time had still not come. Rather, another prisoner was pushed in to join us. I recognised him immediately and wondered if my problems could get any worse.
It was Rip Dunbar.
“Hhuuuurgh!” Rip grunted, as he was dumped on the cold hard tiles. His body was bloodied and his long hair greasy. “You fucking sonsabitches! Go fuck your mothers, you mothers!” he yelled at the guards, throwing himself at the door as it closed behind him. He collided with locked steel and pounded it with his tree-trunk arms for the next thirty seconds or so until we all got the general idea, then he flexed his pecks and turned his rippling intelligence on us.
“The same goes for all you mothers. Who wants a piece of me?”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but we’re prisoners too,” Mr Smith said, tapping the metaphorical blackboard.
Dunbar scowled at Mr Smith and told him to “Stay out of my way,” before dumping himself off to one side to bench squat the evening away.
After thirty minutes of the noisiest exercise I’ve ever heard, Dunbar’s top clung to him as if he’d won a Miss Wet T-shirt competition. The rest of us were faring little better with rivers of tears clogging our eyes in light of the stench now filling the cell.
Mr Vasiliev, who was the nearest to Dunbar, was the first to crack and pleaded with him to lay off for the love of God, but if anything Dunbar just punished his body even harder, all appeals falling on deaf ears.
That was until he laid eyes on me.
“You!”
“Oh crap.”
Dunbar flew across the cell and chased me around in circles, over benches and scattering bodies until he was finally able to trap me in a corner. Ten fat, sweaty fingers wrapped themselves around my throat and a second later my back hit the wall.
“We’ve got a score to settle,” he growled, his face contorted in a mass of rage and unrequited man-love.
“What score?” I gasped.
“Jabulani, you killed him,” Dunbar reminded me. “He was my friend.”
“Well so what? You killed plenty of mine that day too,” I coughed, doing all I could to tear his fingers from my windpipe. “You don’t hear me complaining about that though, do you?”
“Brother, your friends were scum,” Dunbar sympathised.
“Yeah, and we’re also all around you, Einstein,” Mr Smith pointed out, as the rest of the cell rose to their feet and surrounded the SEO gorilla.
Dunbar lunged back to chop down Mr Smith with his leg, but Mr Smith had foreseen this and it was Lieutenant Copeland who copped a solar plexus full of combat boot instead. But Dunbar wasn’t done; he twisted and kicked the unfortunate Lieutenant this way and that before booting him into touch against the far wall and swinging me around to use as a human shield.
“Get back, all of you, I mean it, I’ll break his neck you mothers!”
“Take a pill, punchy,” Mr Smith suggested. “Are you so short of people to fight that you can’t wait to go WWWF on everyone in here when our enemies are out there?” Mr Smith pointed at the steel door, staying Dunbar’s hand. “We’re all under sentence of death, so settling scores and comparing cocks with you is the least of our concerns.”
“You’re under sentence of death?”
“Yeah, even him,” Mr Smith confirmed, pointing at me.
“Why?”
“For disobeying orders,” Mr Smith simplified.
Dunbar’s arm continued to flex around my neck as this information rattled around between his ears before his grip finally eased. “Couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy,” he retorted, hurling me to the floor and taking my place on the bench.
I rolled over, rubbing my neck and chewing my lip as I picked myself up, and found a space between Mr Vasiliev and our Tech Chief. All the time Dunbar glared at me with menace dressing his face.
“What happened to your eye?” he snarled. “Did I do that?”
I told him he had, figuring he might deduct it from the bill if I looked miserable enough about it, and sure enough Dunbar gri
nned at the thought.
“Good,” he grunted.
“That’s a point, what have you got in today?” Mr Smith asked me.
“Nothing useful.”
“Nothing we can use?”
“I would have mentioned it before if I had,” I told him.
“What’s he talking about?” Dunbar asked.
There was no point lying at this stage so I told Dunbar about my false eye.
“You’ve got explosives in your eye?” Dunbar asked.
“No, not today,” I repeated.
“Well what have you got then?” he pressed.
“A GPS tracker. I thought I might need it if I went down in the Atlantic,” I explained.
Dunbar stood, reanimated after barely a minute of taking it easy. “You’ve got a GPS in your eye? Here? With you now?” he snapped.
“Jesus, what now!” someone asked, but Dunbar was already on top of me, slapping the back of my head to try to get it out.
“..kin’ get off me!” I complained and was able to shove him away long enough to pull my own eye. “Here.”
Dunbar snatched it from me without saying thanks and examined it closely. After a few moments he asked if it could be reprogrammed to send a signal.
“A message? No it’s not got that capability.”
“Not a message, an ID code. Can it be reprogrammed to send a six-lettered ID code?”
“Er…” I erred, but the Tech Chief was already on his feet and poking his nose in.
“It should be possible, theoretically,” he speculated.
Dunbar shoved the eye in his hand and told him to make it. “SEO767. Send it out.”
“Well, it’s not as simple as that…” the Tech Chief tried, but Dunbar wasn’t interested in what was possible and what was theory. The Tech Chief had stood up and got his hopes up and so that was good enough for Dunbar.