by Danny King
A little forward planning, as Bill always said, goes a long way.
It paid to protect The Agency. If you kept your word to them, they’d keep their word to you and pick you up from pretty much any extraction point, anywhere in the world, within twelve hours of you placing the call. All you had to do was keep your mouth shut, send the signal and make it over the wall.
Tempest gave us one of his Sunday best salutes from the beach but I needed both hands to hang on as we ripped across the surf so I wasn’t able to reply. Not that I’m sure I would’ve anyway. Saluting people you didn’t need to salute is just one short step away from saluting flags. And the day I started doing that was the day I stopped trying to blow up large chunks of the world. Or at least, stopped guarding the corridors and vending machines of people who sought to do that sort of thing.
Not for me. No sir. I had bills to pay.
“Book Mark, Book Mark, this is Flying Tiger, do you copy, over?” the radio crackled in my ear.
“Flying Tiger, this is Book Mark, we read you loud and clear and we are ready for pick up, over,” I radioed back.
“Copy Book Mark, coming in now. Keep that throttle open, over,” Flying Tiger confirmed.
We were thundering across the waves at full pelt when the seaplane’s shadow crept across us. It was barely thirty feet above our heads and slowing to descend in front of the hovercraft. The rear bay doors were open and two leggy stewardesses stood either side of the ramp to guide our approach.
A surge of spray soaked Mr Smith as the plane dipped its belly in the water but he just wiped his face and gunned the accelerator to take us up the ramp. Sunlight turned to darkness as we entered the plane, hitting the catchment net strung across the hold to stop us from crashing straight on through to the cockpit.
Mr Smith killed the engines as the girls retracted the ramp and all at once we were tilting backwards as the plane left the water again. He’d barely skimmed the surface for fifteen seconds.
“Hold on boys, it’s going to be a bumpy one,” came a familiar voice over the speakers. The Agency had many pilots on its books but only one with such a killer-looking crew. “Don’t think the Americans are buying your story,” Captain Takahashi laughed.
A boom from the portside rocked the galley as something exploded just short of our wing but the Takahashi’s stewardesses didn’t look too concerned as they buckled themselves in. They were the human face of the good Captain’s unshakable belief in his own abilities and he banked and rolled across the sky, dodging the flak and flying through a corridor of starbursting decoys to lose a swarm of angry sidewinders.
“Walk in the park,” Captain Takahashi confidently declared. “There’s merlot and sandwiches once we reach cruising altitude. And the film we will be showing today is The Jane Austen Book Club. Gentlemen, welcome back to The Agency.”
We turned south for Algeria, for the nearest base, where we would no doubt spend the next four weeks debriefing the men in suits as to the events of the last three years. How we’d explain half of it was anybody’s guess. I could hardly explain half of it to myself, let alone anyone else. How we’d been banged to rights, brushed under life’s carpet and left to rot in the deepest, darkest hole in Christendom. And yet how an innocuous little reading group started a few years earlier had conspired to set in motion a chain of events that would eventually throw us the most unlikeliest of lifelines?
Try telling that one with a straight face.
Whichever way it came out, one thing was clear, we’d been given the mother of all second chances and no mistake. Or was this my third chance by now? Or my fourth? Or fifth? I wasn’t sure. I’d lost count after I’d ducked that nuke back in Mozambique. All I knew was that I was alive and free once again. Free – and not to be trifled with.
Our book club might’ve started out as just that, a book club, for reading, for passing the time, for fun, but it had become so much more than that now, snowballing to unimagined conclusions, beyond the sum of its parts.
We were no longer little old ants. We were one, beyond the law, beyond our employees and beyond even The Agency. We were unity. Strength in numbers.
Yet so many more of our numbers were still rotting away in McCarthy. And Yinchuan. And Severnaya Zemlya. And half a dozen other secret facilities dotted around the windier corners of the globe.
And that wouldn’t do.
Oh no, that wouldn’t do at all.
So we’d debrief The Agency. We’d put them in the picture and come clean about the vine that had crept through their organisation. We’d even offer them a pact. After all it’s good to make alliances. If nothing else, the four hundred active members of book club had proved that. But when all was said and done, we’d be the ones calling the shots from now on. We were simply too powerful not to be.
And this was important because we had things to do.
And wrongs to right.
And nothing was going to stand in our way. Not even The Agency. Not any more.
Because I was Book Mark – the founding father and undisputed number one of book club.
And now I was out, there was going to be hell to pay.
###
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
BOOKS
The Burglar Diaries
The Bank Robber Diaries
The Hitman Diaries
The Pornographer Diaries
Milo’s Marauders
Milo’s Run
School for Scumbags
Blue Collar
More Burglar Diaries
Infidelity for Beginners
The Executioners
The Monster Man of Horror House
The No.1 Zombie Detective Agency
A Four-King Cracker
TELEVISION
Thieves Like Us (2007)
FILM
Wild Bill (2012)
STAGE
The Pornographer Diaries: the play
Killera Dienasgramata (Latvia)
He Who Would Valiant Be
Danny King was born in Slough in 1969 and later grew up in Hampshire. He has worked as a hod carrier, a supermarket shelf stacker, a painter & decorator, a postman and a magazine editor and today uses this rich smörgåsbord of experiences to dodge all of the above. He lives in Chichester with wife, Jeannie and two children and divides his time between writing and wondering what to write about. For details of his other books or to order a printed copy of Henchmen, go to dannykingbooks.com.
TYPOS
If you enjoyed this book, please consider posting a review for it as every mention helps. Several reviews have appeared on Amazon.co.uk noting that the book contains a number of spelling errors. Most of these have now been corrected, but if you spot any others and can remember where they are, please email me via my website and I'll update the file and add your name to the Acknowledgements. How's that? – DK
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks to John Williams, David Matalon, Nate Pedersen, Clive Andrews, Robin King, Michael King and Andrew Crockett, not to mention of course Jeannie, for getting behind this book and giving me the belief to put it out. Lastly, a special thanks to my grammar henchmen, Jon Evans, for emailing me such a comprehensive list of typos he should have his name on the front cover, let alone here, and to Burt Arkin, for spotting one that even Jon Evans missed (see Jon, hard isn’t it?). My thanks and humble apologies in equal measures.
FOR KATIE
Our beautiful daughter
with all our love X
###