by Gary Haynes
Proctor reached the crest of a sinuous sand ridge with the woman by his side, the man’s hand grasping her upper arm. It was then that Tom made out the sound of a powerful outboard motor. Proctor was making his escape. If they passed over the ridge, she’d be gone for good. He guessed it was a contingency plan, which had been activated once it was obvious that the hamlet was under assault. He knew he had to act, too. The effective range of the MP5 was two hundred metres, he recalled vaguely. It fired nine hundred and fifty rounds a minute. He hoped that with a lot of luck, he’d only need one.
Still kneeling in the sand, he raised the weapon, extended the retractable butt, and pressed his eye against the reflex sight, aiming for the middle of Proctor’s shoulder blades. His actions were pure muscle memory now, his brain unable to cope with the hormone burst. As he squeezed the trigger he winced and coughed up blood at the crucial moment. The MP5 jerked in his hands and, for a second, his vision was clouded as he squinted involuntarily.
By the time he looked back, they’d both disappeared from view. He cursed himself again. He couldn’t tell if he’d hit him.
Tom’s eyelids became heavy; his head lopped forward. But he forced himself to stand up and, wavering from side to side, lurched towards the ridge, taking advantage of a late dopamine dump. The soft sand would have been heavy going for an able man, but with the disability imposed by the wound Tom was reduced to crawling up the slope on his hands and knees, sweat dripping from his creased-up face. He stopped halfway and manoeuvred the MP5 onto his back after it had fallen forward. He spat something that tasted like bile, his lungs heaving. He glanced back, seeing the dotted trail his blood had made before moving on again.
As he got to the top of the sand ridge his vision was blurred. He pulled the strap around his torso, his arms barely able to hold onto the MP5 as he raised it. As he staggered up his legs felt as if the muscles had turned to gel, and the bleeding from the entry wound had increased significantly. About three metres down the gradual incline of the windward slope, the woman was lying face up, her eyes covered by cloth, her mouth gagged. For a moment, he wondered if he had killed her by mistake, his shot so skewed by his involuntary cough that the weapon had veered to the right. But then he saw Proctor, the back of his thigh seeping blood from a centimetre-wide entry hole in his cotton pants. The man started groaning.
“Put … your hands … behind your head,” Tom said, his voice guttural and slurred.
Proctor just moaned. Tom knew the seriousness of a leg shot. Most people bled out quickly. Proctor wouldn’t be any different. But his adversary was tough, probably ex-military, he thought.
He sidestepped down the slope, every movement making him wince with pain. When he was a metre from Proctor, the man rolled, growling like an angry dog as his thigh touched the firm sand. Tom caught a glimpse of the flash of steel as Proctor’s arm snaked out. He recognized the knife instantly. A Ka-Bar, a favourite of British Special Forces. With his back to the sand, Proctor was holding it against the woman’s throat. Tom inched forward. Proctor’s eyes were bloodshot and filled with hate.
“Drop it,” Tom said, aiming the MP5.
Proctor looked shocked when he registered Tom’s face. Tom figured he’d thought that Major Durrani had killed him. But then Proctor grinned insanely.
“I’ll bleed her like a pig,” he said.
Tom heard the woman’s breath quicken. It had to be her, he thought. It was then that he realized that the firing had stopped at the hamlet. At the same time he heard the spluttering sound from the outboard. Allowing himself to glance up, he saw the speedboat ticking over in the shallows, three dark-skinned men sitting in it.
“It’s … over,” he said, struggling to keep the extended butt of the weapon tucked into his shoulder.
Proctor screamed and jerked his arm away. Seeing that the woman had stabbed what looked like a nail into the man’s forearm, close to the elbow joint, Tom sank to his knees involuntarily, one eyelid closing over, the MP5 falling into his lap. Vaguely, he watched her scramble up, still gagged and blindfolded, and, teetering back and forth, she moved away from her kidnapper.
Tom tried to call out, but his words didn’t leave his mouth. Run up the slope. Just run.
But Proctor wasn’t done, either. He pushed himself up with his free hand and twisted his body in the direction of the woman, who’d only managed to hobble a couple of metres away. He swivelled the knife, manoeuvring it deftly between his thumb and forefinger. Pulling his arm back, he readied himself to throw it at her exposed back, a macabre smile breaking on his face, revealing nicotine-stained teeth.
Finding a last modicum of strength, Tom used his left hand to raise the muzzle as his right forefinger squeezed the trigger.
There was a short burst.
Then he collapsed sideways.
106.
When he managed to open one of his eyes, he saw the knife lying on the sand, a few shafts of moonlight glinting off the blade. Proctor’s prostrate body lay a few inches from it. The Englishman’s big, shaved head was facing him, blood oozing from the lips.
Tom eased himself up, the pain making his head spin as the wound seemed to widen. The woman was nowhere in sight. He heard the boat’s powerful outboard engine roar away. For a few seconds, he thought the worst. But then he heard her weeping and realized she was lying on the other side of Proctor’s corpse. The trauma had gotten to her at last; that and physical exhaustion, the result of lack of food and sleep, he guessed.
He sensed movement behind him and, grimacing, turned his head around as best he could. Nathan and three operatives were barrelling down the slope towards him.
“Is it her?” Nathan called out.
Unwrapping the MP5’s strap from his hands, Tom crawled around the dead body, dragging his legs behind him. She was curled up on the sand, her facial features still obscured. It had to be her, he thought. But he had to be sure.
“Your middle … name, ma’am?” he asked.
She struggled to pull the tight blindfold from her eyes. Then the gag was removed. He recognized her.
“It’s Gertrude. My middle name is Gertrude,” she said, faintly.
As Nathan reached him Tom nodded his head a fraction.
Nathan spoke into his cheek mic. “Affirmative ID,” he said. “Phoenix is safe.”
Lying on a poncho liner, Tom heard a muffled explosion and glimpsed a flash of white about two miles out at sea. Standing over him, Nathan said that the escaping speedboat had just been hit by a Hellcat missile fired by a Reaper drone. A few seconds later, the suppressed sound of fast-approaching helicopters could be heard faintly offshore. Tom looked past Nathan, but, with their navigation lights switched off, the inward MH-60 Black Hawks resembled two massive hornets as they travelled low to the water from the west.
After Nathan had shielded him from the mini-sandstorm blown up by the rotor wash, Tom saw a crew chief from the Special Operations Aviation Regiment appear from the side door of one of the Black Hawks, wearing night-vision goggles. He stood beside a skinny guy with a blacked-out face, who was scanning the beach with his M-240B machine gun. The crew chief called Nathan over, informing him exactly how his men should proceed. Navy SEALs were respected throughout the military, but this was his gunship.
As Tom and the secretary were carried towards the fuselage of the rear helicopter, he heard other explosions coming from the hamlet, knowing the operators had just blown up the fighters’ weapons and vehicles.
Nathan came up beside him once more, patted his forearm gently.
“Your men take their snaps back there?” Tom asked, remembering that the Delta assaulters had done so for evidence at the fort in the Kurram Valley.
“For a civilian, you know too much. But the guys wanted me to say that you got a night of hard drinking to look forward to when you’re up to it.”
“Sounds good,” Tom said, nodding. “Kali?”
“He’ll live. Thanks to you, dude.”
Within a couple of minutes, they w
ere safely in the air.
He looked over at her. Although it was dark, the only light emanating from the illuminated dashboard in the exposed cockpit, he could see her body lying strapped to a stretcher pushed against the side of the cabin. She was wrapped in blankets, her eyes closed, her breathing shallow but not erratic. A medic was crouching down by her side and had set up a drip-feed.
As he lowered a respirator to her nose and mouth she resisted him, flinging her head from side to side.
“Tom,” she said, desperately.
He stretched his hand over towards her.
“It’s all right, ma’am. We’re going home.”
After getting berated by another medic for that, he felt the morphine take effect as he saw his own respirator being lowered to his face.
He breathed deeply, anxious for the ordeal to be over. But as he closed his eyes the pitiable faces of the dead came to him. He shivered.
Their eyes were hollow, their expressions reproachful.
107.
Back at Camp Lemonnier, Tom lay in a steel bed in the Navy Expeditionary Medical Field Hospital, a cream-coloured, single-storey building, surrounded by raised concrete walkways. The room was painted white, with square-shaped fluorescent lights and an AC vent in the low-level ceiling. Apart from a piece of abstract art on the wall and a large pot containing a branched yucca plant, the space was stark and minimalist. A Navy surgeon had just left, after saying that the X-rays had shown that the bullet had missed the major organs. He’d be flown back to the States to recuperate.
The door opened and Tom heard footsteps stop halfway across the room.
“Don’t tell me. They weren’t my X-rays,” he said, jokingly.
The person didn’t answer.
“Who’s there?” he said, struggling to raise his head.
A man in a straw fedora walked over to a table where a bowl of fruit lay, his hands stuck in the pockets of his white-linen pants. He picked up an apple and turned face-on, tossing the apple in his hand.
Tom frowned, his eyes narrowing. When he recognized the face, he stopped breathing and his body tensed, a sense of the surreal overtaking him temporarily. He saw a ghost standing before him. But a ghost with a beating heart and a name.
Dan Crane.
“The jarheads call this place CLUville, due to the Containerized Living Units and the link with France. Smart, huh?” he said, his tone rasping.
“What the hell’s going on?” Tom asked.
“Guess I’m just hard to kill.”
Then Crane explained that a source had informed the CIA that the ISI were going to kill him in Ta’if. A radical group within the House of Saud called the Brothers of Faith had been up to no good, and the pro-Western king had been persuaded that the operative who’d been sent to murder him there should be replaced. Crane’s death was staged for the benefit of the ISI. He had worn a ballistic vest when he’d been shot at with blanks. But his sports bag had been lined with bulletproof shields just in case. A shot of adrenalin had stopped the risk of a heart attack.
“Though I was sweating like a dog walking past a Korean restaurant. And not just from the heat, either,” he added.
“I don’t get it,” Tom said, resisting the urge to scratch the stitches on his forehead.
“Perception, Tom. As I told you back at the Ariana, everything is perception.”
Tom stared hard at Crane. “You gave Khan to Hasni. Are you denying that? Denying you got paid for it?”
“Don’t get your blood pressure up there, Tom. And, no, I ain’t denying it. But he got paid for telling us where Lyric was in Karachi, and then by the ISI for telling them that we were on the way. Khan was playing both sides. That’s why he gave you Hasni’s son.” Crane looked a little distant. “There’s nothing double agents like more than the vulnerability of their employers. I guess he knew you wouldn’t kill Mahmood, but he wanted to show Hasni just how vulnerable he was. Hasni played along in the game, made out like Khan wasn’t one of theirs. Besides, Hasni wanted revenge for his son. There are certain unwritten rules, even for spooks. You and Khan broke one of them. So, yeah, I turned him over to Hasni, just as Birch said. I had to play along, too. Hence my visit to a bank in Ta’if.”
Tom couldn’t quite take it all in, said, “Birch didn’t trust me?”
“Everybody trusts you. It wasn’t a matter of trust. Until Hasni and a terrorist called Mullah Kakar were taken out, it wasn’t safe to tell anyone the truth. We were just beaten to it. Ordered by the Saudi ambassador to Pakistan.” Crane glanced at his watch. “But he died just over six hours ago back in Yemen. Hit by a drone strike as he was escaping from you and the SEALs. I guess he never knew his masters sent him to his death. I think you should know that Peter Swiss is dead, too, Tom. The corruptibility of money, huh.”
“Was it just the money?” Tom asked, regaining some of his composure.
“We believe that that was the primary motive. For Swiss at least. But by the time the feds have finished crawling over ADC, it won’t be worth a dime.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Tom asked.
“I didn’t want you getting the wrong idea about me if we bumped into each other in the future. Besides, a man like you got a right to know the truth sooner rather than later,” he said. “You did good, Tom. I’ll bet good money that the Iranians will agree to back off. They were barked at for an hour after we thought the Leopards had taken Lyric, that they were involved, too. It was made very clear to them what we’d do. After that, they realized we weren’t done in the region, despite two wars. It won’t take much to persuade them that the same will happen if they invade southern Pakistan, you ask me. But if you hadn’t rescued Lyric, alotta people would have died, that’s for certain. Leopards, Iranians … Our own.”
Tom sighed. “What about the Pakistanis?”
“The president has agreed to a five-billion-dollar arms package to assist them with the ongoing threat to their national security, and the security of the region in general. Politics, Tom. Now I gotta leave ya. Say hi to the general when you see him.”
To Tom it was a double shock. Not only the appearance of the man whom Birch had said had been killed just a day earlier, but also by the fact that he clearly knew his father.
“How come you two know each other?”
“Your father didn’t always sit behind a desk,” Crane said.
“I said how do you know him?”
“Before I joined the CIA I was in military intelligence. He was my boss,” Crane said. “You see, Tom, your father kept a promise, too.”
Tom thought about that for a moment. “Did he get you outta Beirut?” he asked.
Crane grinned, took a bite of the apple and walked towards the door. After five steps, he stopped, but didn’t turn around.
“If it weren’t for your father, I would never have let you go over the border, let alone everything else you’ve been up to. But as it is, well, that was a good move. You live in a state of honour, Tom,” he said. “And that’s a damn fine thing. You ever get fed up with the bureaucracy at the State Department, look me up.”
Epilogue
The small Louisiana cemetery was shaded by oak trees, their fat trunks clothed in damp lichen. The air was humid, filled with the songs of waterthrush and blue jays. Tom came here when he could, but his grandma tended his mother’s grave lovingly every Sunday afternoon after church, polishing the brass surround latticework and washing down the marble headstone. The general had never been here before. He bent forward now and placed a bunch of white roses at the base of the headstone; her favourites, Tom had said when they’d stopped at a florist’s a hundred metres from the entrance.
The inscription read simply:
In Loving Memory of Melissa Dupree
Who Died in Tragic Circumstances
Rest in Peace in the Arms of The Lord
1950-1988
“I’m sorry for what I did,” the general said. “I’d like you to forgive me.”
Tom looked down at
his mother’s grave. “It’s me who should be asking forgiveness.”
“I don’t know what that means, and, I tell ya, I don’t wanna know. Whatever you did or didn’t do, you were just a kid.” He put his hand on Tom’s forearm. “We’ll make some regular time for each other, Tom. That much I know.”
They turned and began to walk away from the simple gravestones, along a flint-ridden path edged with low iron railings. Here, the older graves of the rich lay a few metres back. Moss-stained, stone sarcophagi decorated with angels and laurels. Untended now, the dead no longer even a memory. Tom thought about all those who had sacrificed their lives, although Lester had survived, due to a surgeon’s expertise. When they’d met up in a bar in DC, he’d thought his friend appeared to have lost ten pounds or more. But Lester had spent the time joking and saying how fine the nurses were. As for the secretary, her wounds were mainly superficial, at least the physical ones, and she was recovering with her family at Camp David for security reasons. Tom had been asked to visit, but as yet he hadn’t. He would, soon enough, though; he knew that.
Twenty minutes later, the general drove them to a small town thirty miles or so from Baton Rouge. The main street was bordered by two-storey buildings, mostly unkempt retail stores with timber-frame accommodation above. Tom’s grandparents lived in a detached bungalow set back about twenty-five metres from the road. They passed the old whitewashed church with a green-tiled, pitch roof where Tom had sung in the choir as a boy. Nearby, surrounded by short grass, a huge bell was still on a brick plinth. The bell was going to hang in a larger church, but the church hadn’t moved on any more than the town had.
As the general parked the Buick Tom asked his father to give him a minute. He got out and walked up a stone path, feeling the sticky heat of a Louisiana afternoon start to encroach on his body. He saw his grandma sitting on the porch in a wooden chair. Her grey hair was up in a bun and she wore a plain beige dress. He hadn’t told his grandparents specifically what he did for a living, other than saying he worked for the State Department. He hadn’t wanted to worry them. She smiled and waved as she always did, getting up and stepping forward to give him a hug.