by Danny King
Security personnel and UNICEF staff watched in dismay as this alien aircraft, with ugly crossed Tarantula legs liveried on its side, rose into a crimson sky. Several guards opened fire but were quickly wrestled to the ground by the others who realised what it was carrying.
The helicopter turned south, casually dipping its nose and moseying away to head out over the Mediterranean.
A few miles away, French and Italian Air Forces were scrambling birds into the sky to make after the Black Hawk and radar and spy satellites were following its every move, but the Black Hawk was in no rush. It didn’t want to lose its pursuers or drop off the map. Quite the contrary in fact. It wanted to be followed. It wanted to be seen. It wanted the world to take notice of what was about to happen.
Ten miles out to sea, the door slid open and Habib Touré, the seventeen-year-old middle son of the President of Mali, was pushed out. He screamed as he fell, dropping a thousand feet to within touching distance of the waves, before a tiny parachute opened. It cushioned his fall as he crashed into the water and the life vest tied around his shoulders automatically inflated to take him back to the surface but the message was clear – get too close and the next one leaves the helicopter au naturelle.
The pursuing helicopters dutifully backed off and after an hour’s uninterrupted flight, the Black Hawk reached its final destination.
One hundred and fifty miles south of St-Tropez and seventy miles west of Corsica, a scragg of weathered rock jutted out of the sea. Unlike most Mediterranean islands, Île de Roc boasted no sandy beaches or raucous nightclubs, just a few old pillboxes and broken antennas left over from its time as an Italian observation post during World War Two. Abandoned in 1947, the tiny island had been forgotten by all but nesting gulls for almost sixty years until a lease had been taken out two years earlier. The paperwork said it was to become a marine research centre, but if this was the case it was to be the most heavily fortified marine research centre in the world.
The rocks parted as the Black Hawk settled on its plateau. The sides fell away and the basalt flat sank, sucking the helicopter into the island as the pilot killed the engine.
French and Italian pilots circled overhead reporting back all they saw until a cluster of sea-to-air missiles erupted from the water, chasing them through the skies and silencing them one-by-one.
And as the final few scraps of debris rained down, the rocks closed over the Black Hawk’s blades, protecting the helicopter from reprisals and sealing the children inside, so that once again Île de Roc looked barren and lifeless.
“I see, yes, that’s certainly a tricky one. Those poor kids,” I agreed. “So what’s in it for me?”
“You don’t give up, do you, Jones?” Tempest snorted. “Here we are talking about the lives of thirty innocent children and all you’re concerned about is what’s in it for you.”
“What’s your point?” I double-checked.
“I told you, Tempest, he’s scum. And scum like him only think of themselves,” Dunbar growled from the wings.
“Hey, ladies, I’m here until I croak and it’s a seller’s market so let’s talk windfalls,” I said.
“You’re not getting out of here,” Tempest reiterated.
“Then neither are those kids,” I reminded him, which wasn’t a very nice thing to say but I refer you to my indictment sheet.
So why me? Why had Tempest and Dunbar come to see me? What did I have to do with this sorry mess?
The Italians had tried to assault the island. Twenty-four COMSUBIN frogmen had approached by submarine and swam the last mile under cover of darkness. They’d barely hauled themselves out of the water when the guns had opened up. In less than three minutes they’d been torn to pieces, partly due to the fact that there was no cover on Île de Roc, and partly due to the fact that the island’s defenders had been planning for just such an assault for more than two years. Some of the guns were automated while others were manned but all were mercilessly effective. Only seven frogmen made it back into the water and only three of them back to the sub. The assault could not have proved more catastrophic. And not just for the military failure. But because now there was a penalty to pay. Though it wouldn’t be the Italians who’d have to pay it.
At just eighteen-years-old, George Wilson was the eldest child to have attended the summit. The son of the New Zealand Prime Minister, he was intelligent and bright, popular and sporty; just how all good Kiwis should be. He was also wearing four pounds of high explosives in a vest around his waist. Again, just how all good Kiwis should be.
George was pushed out of a concealed steel entrance just below the helipad and the door slammed shut behind him. It soon became clear to the watching spy satellites that George was following orders, because he moved away from the entrance and climbed up onto the salty rocks until he was standing on a ridge just above the helipad. He unravelled a white banner along the rocks, on which was written a single word.
POENA
George then disappeared.
“What’s poena?”
“It means penalty, or punishment, in Latin,” Tempest told me. “It was a reprisal for the raid.”
“Why not blow up the Italian kid?”
“This is more divisive. Half the nations are already at each other’s throats so when the nephew of the Russian President can be publicly executed in retaliation for a botched American rescue mission, that’s the sort of nightmare scenario that gets the rest of the world ducking under the table.”
“Hey fuck you, Tempest!” Dunbar suddenly snapped. “If anyone’s gonna botch a rescue mission it’ll be you fucking tea-humping Limeys. We bailed you out of every war you’ve ever fought in so don’t talk to me about botching rescue missions, mother fucker, because you’re the fucking pussies.”
“See what I mean?” Tempest said.
“Yes I see. It’s a dilemma,” I agreed. “Which brings us back to a dilemma of my own, namely, what’s in it for me?”
“Motherfucker!”
Actually, I think I misled you earlier when I said that X3 had made no demands, because he had. But it wasn’t for riches or power or recognition or real estate, it was purely personal. In exchange for the safe return of the children, he asked for one thing and one thing only; that thirty of the most prominent intelligence agents currently operating be handed over to him for summary execution. This was punishment for the death of Sun Dju, who it turned out had been his fuck buddy as well as his personal bodyguard. They had thirty-six hours. Failure to comply would result in the pitter-patter of tiny shell casing every half hour until the island was messy with kids.
Now X3 wasn’t just going to let the UN quickly groom a load of tramps for the exchange. He had a list of names all drawn up and this list was like a who’s who of international super-spies; top ranking XOs, undercover SEOs, expert computer hackers, deep cover moles. Basically, everyone who’d ever got in the way of a half-decent operation in the past.
So if the leaders of the remaining twenty-nine countries ever wanted to see their cherubs again, it was a case of asking (or if you were China, ordering) their best agents to do the honourable thing and offer themselves up for sacrifice.
Answers on a postcard if you can guess two of the names on this list? Winners will receive an all-expenses paid trip to sunny Île de Roc.
“Oh,” I finally got, fluffy tingles warming my innards in the most delightful way. “Awkward.”
“Yes, isn’t it,” Tempest agreed.
“So when are you off?”
“We’re not,” Tempest replied.
“Why not?”
“Why not? Because Triple X would never live up to his end. He’d simply kill us and either make more demands or kill the children anyway. We’d be playing right into his hands,” Tempest reckoned.
“But if you could get reassurances…”
“We’ve had plenty of reassurances but they’re not worth the paper they’re written on. The man’s a maniac. There’s no telling what he’s capable of.”
“But surely if you could somehow arrange it so that you did the exchange one at a time, so that you could all take your turns as…”
“How about I stick my boots up your fucking ass one at a time?” Dunbar suggested, obviously not keen to explore the strategy further.
I allowed a smile to flash across my lips then asked for one of Tempest’s cigarettes. He dillied up without a crack, telling me my stock had risen a few points, so I tried again with a question that was at the forefront of my mind.
“So, what’s in it for me?”
Tempest pushed back in his chair and glared at me through a haze of cigarette smoke.
“Okay then, Jones, let’s talk.”
You know what, I still don’t think I’ve explained my part in all of this yet, have I? What I was doing here? What did Tempest and Dunbar want with me? Well it was a strange quirk of fate that dealt me a hand at this table. And one that surprised me as much as it had surprised Tempest and Dunbar.
It was book club.
For a couple of years now, various agencies around the world had been receiving intelligence that Affiliates were reading. Surveillance photographs, seized property, bugged conversations, etc. They were just tiny snippets of information, insignificant pieces of a greater puzzle, and for a long long time, most agencies didn’t even realise there was a puzzle here to be completed. After all, it was only Affiliates reading. Big deal. So what? The nature of our work meant that most Affiliates spent long hours sitting around in trucks, guarding corridors or manning work stations before the inevitable balloon went up. This could be boring work at the best of times, so it was only natural that we should try to pass the time somehow. But, little by little, a pattern began to emerge from all of this unrealised intelligence that didn’t add up; that many of the Affiliates were reading the same books. On different jobs. For different employers. On different continents? Time and time again the same titles would crop up. And they weren’t always best sellers or Richard & Judy’s must-reads either. Some odd and unexpected books were being carried through jungles and deserts of this big wide dangerous world of ours.
The Aristocrat by Ernst Weiss
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka
Bodies by Jed Mercurio
The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham
Code breakers began logging our reading lists to see if there were any sorts of signals to be found within the titles. After all, how was it possible that three different Affiliates, working on three different plans of global domination, in three different countries, could all be reading Monty: His Part in My Victory by Spike Milligan? It didn’t make any sense.
Finally, some clever clog somewhere figured it out; that the Affiliates must be talking to each other. Back channels had to be open. Recommendations were being swapped. Gossip exchanged.
Even now, the various intelligence agencies didn’t realise the full significance of what they’d stumbled upon because regardless of what the connotations might be, they were still only books, weren’t they? But they listened in anyway, and began to ask questions about our book club when interrogating captured Affiliates, because as everyone knows, there are often juicy nuggets of information to be found amongst the back channels, but what they actually found was more startling than they’d ever expected. This book club of ours had a rigid structure. There was a hierarchy to it. There were rules. And most extraordinary of all there was loyalty. Affiliates were saving each others’ lives and tipping each other off when they became aware of double-dealings. Most staggering of all, this was often at the expense of our own employers and it was with shock and awe that the authorities discovered several plans had even come apart at the seams thanks directly to book club intervention.
The planned Wall Street gas attack had been one such job. Thirty guys in breathing apparatus and bio-suits had been set to walk canisters of a sleep agent into the New York Stock Exchange to obliterate all evidence of the insider deal of the century. Unfortunately billionaire financier, Miles Hawthorne, who’d been the brains behind the operation, had made the mistake of ordering his equipment through Grevelink Systems, a black market supplier of stolen military hardware. So when an engineer at Grevelink was ordered to fill the canisters with the deadly nerve gas sarin and not the supposed sleep agent the Affiliates thought they’d be carrying – and more shockingly fix all but two of the bio-breathers to make sure they failed after five minutes – he logged onto his favourite website and shared this treachery with his friends. SEO and the CIA had always known Miles Hawthorne was dirty. They knew he was fraudulent. And they knew his greed knew no bounds. But what they could never figure out was why, two days before his company bought out one of oldest banks in America, he opened the doors of his private jet and jumped out along with his chief accountant.
The case had remained a mystery for almost a year until a dying Affiliate on a different job told a Spanish CNI officer the truth; that greed had finally caught up with the billionaire. And that a stowaway with a gas mask, a parachute and a pipette full of Hawthorne’s own double-crossing medicine had taken that flight too.
Now this was a revelation, the CNI decided.
More had to be found out about this mysterious book club.
More had to be known.
Investigations started in earnest.
Lines were drawn.
Books were read.
Even The Kenneth Williams Diaries.
In the months that followed, a complex web of loyalties and links were sketched across Ops tables the world over. Usernames were discovered. Scoring trends charted. Lines of communication uncovered. This club was bigger than they’d ever imagined. And they’d only scratched the surface.
So they dug deeper. They eavesdropped on communications. They cross-referenced intel. And they co-operated with rival intelligence agencies until names began to emerge.
Snowman.
Tech Boy.
Page Turner.
Shotgun.
Big Cat.
The agencies learned the usernames and monitored communications. And the more they monitored, the more one username kept popping up over all others.
Book Mark.
This was the organisation’s founding father. This was the person at the club’s heart. If there was anyone with influence over all the others, it was he.
But where was he? He’d not been heard of in almost three years. He’d simply disappeared off the map.
“Mark Jones.”
“What?”
“You’re Book Mark,” Tempest said. “Book – Mark.”
“So what? Give yourself a bun if you like.”
“It’s not a very clever username, is it?” he pondered.
“I didn’t realise it had to be,” I said, before reaching into his silver case for another of his cigarettes.
“Er, not that one,” Tempest said when I picked out the cigarette at the very end of the case. “It’s got a thing in it… look, just not that one, okay?”
“So what I want to know is how you got out of that pipe,” I said catching Tempest off-guard.
“What pipe?” Tempest pretended.
“Don’t give me that. You know what pipe. Thalassocrat’s pipe. How did you get out of it?”
“That would be telling,” Tempest cheesed.
“Yes it would. That’s why I asked.”
“Trade secret,” he winked.
“Oh but it’s okay if I tell you all about my secret organisation and call in a load of favours to get you and Mighty Joe Young to slip ashore though, is it?”
Tempest thought about this then checked over his shoulder to see if Dunbar was within earshot. Better than that, he’d left the room to get a cup of coffee so I told Tempest to use the opportunity and make with the story.
“Magnetic belt,” he simply said.
“What?”
“My belt buckle, it’s magnetic,” he
repeated, standing up to show me his silver belt buckle. “It contains a powerful electro-magnet that can be switched on and off at any time.”
“So?”
“So when Thalassocrat put me in the pipe, I activated the magnet to clamp myself to the inside of the tube so that I didn’t get sucked through the blades when he started the turbines,” he said, demonstrating by clicking a switch and sucking himself onto the table.
“How did you breathe?” I asked.
“Now that really is a secret,” he insisted, trying to sit down but finding himself stuck to the table.
“Just tell me, fuckwipe,” I said, taking my inspiration from Rip, before doing an impression of a child who’d just been shot in the head. My twitching and pleading for mummy to take the pain away appalled Tempest, as it was meant to, but it had the desired effect.
“I’ve had an implant.”
“An implant?”
“A tiny canister of compressed air, just above the windpipe. All XO officers have it done. It’s about the size of a double A battery, but it means we can stay submerged for up to eight minutes if we control our breathing,” he said, wiggling the switch on his belt when he found he was still stuck to the table.
“Bullshit!”
“It’s the truth.”
“Then what about old big tits? How did she breathe?” I said referring to the girl he’d come ashore with.
Tempest smiled. “She shared my air,” he told me, before elaborating unnecessarily. “I kept her alive with my kiss.”
“God give me strength,” I groaned, finally wishing I’d never asked.
Tempest chuckled when he saw my disdain then carried on trying to deactivate his magnetic belt. It was at this moment that Dunbar walked back in and clocked Tempest struggling to distance his trousers from the table.
“Holy shit!” he gawped. “I thought they were joking when they told me you’d fuck a table if you could.”
When Jack was all done, the three of us sat down together and thrashed out the finer points of our deal.
“Twenty years, that’s the best we can offer,” Tempest insisted.
“For fuck’s sake!”