The Break Line

by James Brabazon

  SOURCE EVALUATION

  E—Untested source

  INTELLIGENCE EVALUATION

  —Cannot be judged

  HANDLING CODE

  —No further dissemination: refer to the originator. Special handling requirements imposed by the officer who authorized collection.

  The identity of the officer who authorized collection was classified, so gauging their ability to assess the credibility of the source was impossible. So went the blindfolded circle jerk of the Secret Intelligence Service.

  There was something disconcerting about the black-and-white photo of the two men Mason had produced. I stared at it hard, trying to see into it. The way the older man stood, the crook of his arm at salute, the unsmiling countenance of Proshunin: the scene left me in the queasy grip of a sensation somewhere between déjà vu and disbelief.

  Partial identification of a target wasn’t unusual. Nazzar’s disquiet was. He’d seemed agitated, probably a result of being left genuinely in the dark while Mason and King circled each other. Mason was in charge, and cautiously so. It was a lot of effort and risk for an outcome that could, on the face of it, be much more easily achieved with a cruise missile strike—with or without the US on board.

  One thing was for sure: the Sierra Leone Army wasn’t up for the job. Despite nearly two decades of being trained by the British, they’d had their eye wiped by the rebels at Musala: the company sent to secure the town had been annihilated. There were no reported survivors, no witnesses to the battle had escaped and both cell phone towers had been knocked out. The entire civilian population was missing.

  The only account of what happened was from “John,” an unknown bystander—a pastor, possibly—who’d got caught up in the massacre. Before his phone went dead, he’d telephoned a woman in Makeni during the attack itself and left a voice mail—which GCHQ had intercepted, hacked and erased, and which Rhodes had uploaded to my cell phone. I pressed play and turned up the volume. Ten seconds of reference tone was followed by the crisp, clear cries for help of a man in deep distress.

  “Sista, Sista qushe? Na yu brudda John. Sista? Den de na ton; den de kill all man. Le God save we o sista. Den de all sai. People den de try fo run but den nor able. We don fashin. De deble den don mek we fashin, Sista. Na Satan. Satan de na ya. Na ein. A able see am. Ay mi God wey de heavin. Den de eat we soul. De deble don cam fo we. Satan don cam for eat we. Run Sista. Run. You need fo run—”

  The recording terminated abruptly.

  I picked out a dog-eared sheet of foolscap from Rhodes’s folder and read the typed English translation:

  “Sister? Sister, hello? It’s John, your brother. Sister? They’re in the town—they’re killing everyone. God save us, Sister. They’re everywhere. The people are trying to run, but they can’t. We’re trapped. The devils have trapped us, Sister. It’s Satan. Satan is here. It’s him. I can see him. Oh my God in heaven. They are eating our souls. The devil has come for us. Satan has come to eat us. Run, Sister. Run. You must run—”

  At the end Rhodes had added a note in her own, spidery handwriting: “Transmission authenticated. Assume Musala CIVPOP eliminated. Proceed with extreme caution.” Whoever John was, he hadn’t made it out alive. No one had.

  One thing bothered me more than anything else, more even than the unnerving language and the palpable horror of what John described. It wasn’t what was on the recording, but what wasn’t: gunfire. The Russians were masters of running psyops and pseudo operations. Whatever they’d pulled in Musala had apparently wreaked havoc on their victims’ minds as well, presumably, as on their bodies—and, it seemed, without a shot being fired. There were many seams of fear to tap in Sierra Leone. The terror in John’s voice suggested they’d struck gold.

  I wiped the audio file and gathered up the papers. They’d be retrieved from the hotel safe after I’d checked out. I stubbed out the cigarette, switched my phone to silent and lay down in the dark.

  I doubted King knew what the rebels’ true objective was, or what the Russians’ involvement really amounted to, despite his delight in an evening-long opportunity to burnish the bright, shining lie of his born-to-the-manor authority. Perhaps Mason didn’t know, either. Perhaps Captain Rhodes knew more than I’d given her credit for, though Nazzar wrote her off as “just some bloody numpty” when I’d quizzed him in the corridor on our separate ways to and from the bathroom. I’d asked him to find out who she was anyway.

  Once upon a time, as Frank might say, “perhaps” had been irrelevant; but after Caracas I wanted to know. And I knew, too, that was the beginning of the end. Killing people in cold blood without question because I was ordered to might have made me a “legally sane psychopath”; killing people when I thought I knew they were innocent made me, at best, a sociopath—a sociopath who followed orders. History hadn’t judged that sort too well.

  Frank had been right about one thing: my “kind,” as he put it, were much misunderstood. Not least by him. Being good at making sheer bloody mayhem was one thing, but sheer bloody murder was another, even for Max McLean. The most enduring thread of humanity I had left to hang on to was wrapped around not any sense of doing my duty, but the certainty that the people I killed were bad people: their guilt served to expiate mine.

  But there I was. Alone and unforgiven.

  I left home when I turned sixteen and lived in rooms empty of morality ever since: one hotel suite after another, plotting one death after another. As time passed in the army, I’d felt better and better about killing. I didn’t like it—but I grew accustomed to it, and then, inexorably, fell in love with the idea and the strength of it. After my first kill—snatched from nearly a mile away across the wet slate roofs of West Belfast—the younger recruits at Raven Hill began to idolize me. And suddenly I was no longer a grieving child, but a king. It had taken Colonel Ellard years to nurture our talents without making us sadists. What the act of killing paid us, he banked to the army’s credit.

  Once Frank had said that my father would have been proud of me. For what? Pulling the trigger? Following an order blindly? Proud of me for protecting, for serving, for doing the jobs no one else would do, like some fucked-up Irish Dirty Harry? But Frank hadn’t known my father.

  It was twenty-six years since my father’s plane had been shot down by the Cubans over southern Africa. A brilliant soldier, scientist and mind lost in a blast of smoke and shrapnel in Angola’s bright blue sky on my birthday. When she heard the news, my mother walked into the lake behind our house with stones in her pockets.

  And me, I ran.

  By the time I arrived at Browning Barracks in Aldershot with a forged letter of consent, no one knew who I was—and I had no idea where I was going.

  What would that tall blond reed of a man who never once raised his voice, or struck or humiliated me the way weak men do to wreck their sons, have been more proud of: obedience or insubordination; duty or survival? I took in the tools of my trade, the whisky glass and the pistol. We were supposed to be the Unknown, not the unconscionable. That gentle Adam had raised a Cain. Frank Knight saw that all right, and knew I would, as he put it, “do well” as his willing executioner.

  Ellard had impressed upon us in no uncertain terms that there would come a point in each of our lives when the pressure of the job would bring the roof in. “The question,” he said, “is which side of the break line will you be on?” I thought of Ana María, the disappointment etched on Frank’s face during my dressing-down in Caracas and the look of relief on King’s face when he saw I was still at the coalface. Perhaps letting her live presaged my own collapse.

  But you knew, I tried to keep reassuring myself. You knew. Whoever she was, she was not the person I’d been briefed to believe Frank said she was. I lay there going round in half-conscious circles until my phone buzzed.

  Frank.

  The message read:

  The quick Red Fox jumped over the lazy brown dogs.
>
  It looked like Ana María had made it out. Havana most probably. Better the devil you know.

  Are you in doghouse? I asked.

  Heading kennelward soonest, came his reply.

  No one at the briefing had mentioned Frank. And someone always mentioned Frank. He and King were tight. I typed:

  Russian advice?

  This time it took a full five minutes for his response to come through. As the Valium pulled me into a downward spiral of empty dreams, the rattle of the phone against the bedside table brought me to just long enough to read his answer:

  Go see Sonny Boy.

  6

  “That’s right, sir. And your belt, sir. And the shoes. Any papers, tissues, tickets in your pockets?”

  I gave the security guard a curt shake of the head and stepped into the scanner: hands up; legs apart; staring ahead. With a double swish the sensor passed around me. I caught sight of the edge of the LCD display panel as I stepped out again: green. I got dressed, stuck a sticky-backed name label to my shirt breast and followed a male nurse out of the thin Norfolk sunlight trickling into visitor reception. We headed through the lobby doors into a gray warren of seemingly endless corridors, stretching to desolate, fluorescent-lit infinities.

  From outside, the building looked entirely ignorable. Inside, orderlies slipped gurneys silently along polished linoleum that reflected the green-tinged lights above. Here and there, black-clad security men: all private contractors; no serving military in uniform; no weapons in view; nothing to worry about. I could hear my breath as we walked, but not our footsteps. My shoes were locked in a numbered cabinet along with my ID card and pistol. Instead, the nurse and I wore soft rubber clogs. It was like cave diving with no oxygen.

  “It disturbs them, some of them, if they hear footsteps. They think you’re coming to get them.” The nurse spoke without looking at me, without turning his head at all; his voice was monotone and matter-of-fact.

  “Or rescue them,” I said.

  We glided left and right in silence into the heart of the facility for a thousand meters, and then stopped abruptly. The nurse punched in a five-digit code on a pad next to a solid gray door and pushed hard. The rush of air the opening door brought with it carried a hint of Dixie jazz and the strong smell of peppermint. A woman in her mid-forties in an ill-fitting business suit sat hunched over a laptop at a desk at the far end of the room. I walked the ten paces toward her, and she stood, hand outstretched. I took it, shook it and turned around. The nurse had already gone.

  “Mr. McLean?”

  “Max, please, Dr. . . . ?”

  “Crossman. Tina Crossman. And I’m not a doctor. Not clever or patient enough for that by half.” She motioned to one of the plastic chairs orbiting her desk. Please, sit.”

  A half-eaten chicken breast and a clump of broccoli languished on a paper plate beside her laptop. A plastic knife and fork floated on the congealed gravy skin next to them. I sat down and opened my palms toward her.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb your lunch. I—”

  She cut me off with her outstretched hand again, this time offering the torn end of a packet of Polos. I raised my palms a little higher and smiled no thank you.

  “I’m afraid it’s what passes for dessert around here.” She loosened a mint from the packet with her thumbnail and put it on her tongue as if she were taking Communion.

  “I’m here to see Sonny—I mean Sergeant Mayne.”

  Crossman bit down hard and crunched her way through the mint, losing herself in her laptop. The jazz faded away.

  “Sorry, that’s better. Bloody thing has a mind of its own. Yes, Mayne. Sergeant Martin Mayne.” She looked at me quizzically and hooked a strand of graying black hair behind her ear. “How can I help you with Sergeant Mayne?”

  “I’m his friend.”

  She looked at me blankly.

  “Friend? I see. I’m his counselor, by the way.” There was a long pause. “And . . . ?”

  “And I’m here to see him. To visit him.” Her mouth opened slightly as if to speak a word she decided to hold on to instead. “They told you I was coming?”

  She turned the packet of mints over between her thumb and forefinger. Her mouth opened and closed again before she spoke.

  “Yes, Mr. McLean, they did.” Her eyes flitted between mine and the computer screen. “Full visiting rights. Which is unusual.” She sat back, deeper into her chair, adjusted her jacket and looked straight at me. “In fact,” she continued, “you’ll be Sergeant Mayne’s first visitor since he arrived last month.”

  It was a five-minute walk to see Sonny Boy. Since entering the one-story maze of the Brinton Facility, I’d walked one and a half kilometers and seen fewer than a dozen people. I’d heard almost nothing. But I’d learned a lot from Crossman on the way to his room. Sonny Boy had been admitted after a twenty-one-day stint at the Royal Free Hospital in London. He was apparently suffering from severe delusional psychosis triggered by an acute post-traumatic stress reaction. Crossman didn’t mention any physical ailments. What exactly triggered the reaction Crossman either didn’t know or wouldn’t tell.

  “Fear, Mr. McLean,” was all she would say when I quizzed her, “absolute mortal fear.”

  Which was strange, because Sonny Boy wasn’t the sort to scare easy: every inch the gentle Irish giant, he’d been in the army for eighteen years, fifteen of them in the SAS—first in D-Squadron with Jack Nazzar, and then with him again in the Wing and E-Squadron. I’d known him half that time. He’d been supporting the Unknown’s missions for a year before I found out he’d been given a DSO after his fourth deployment to Afghanistan. The citation remained classified, but it was said D-Squadron’s Air Troop owed him their lives—Jack Nazzar included. He was an exceptional shot, and so gifted with explosives it was a perpetual relief he’d joined our army and not the Irish Republicans’.

  Military psychiatric cases are handled by the private hospitals of the Priory Group. Brinton wasn’t even a hospital. It was, according to Crossman, a “research facility.” Sonny Boy was neither a patient nor a prisoner. He was a subject. Crossman and I stood in the antechamber to his room, flanked by two guards in black uniforms. Yellow-handled Tasers tethered to their belts were holstered by their sides. They, and an electric security door, stood between me and Sonny Boy. Crossman rolled her shoulders and spoke while looking up at the closed-circuit TV cameras perched above the door.

  “Martin is prone to bouts of excitement, Mr. McLean—bouts of excitement that can provoke unpredictable responses.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as strong physical reactions. I’d ask you to be brief, Mr. McLean, and not to discuss any of the details of his last, er, deployment. He gets very nervous about that. Very agitated.” Crossman turned to the guard on her left and nodded. The guard entered a series of digits on a keypad on the wall between them.

  “You mean in Russia, Counselor?”

  “No, Mr. McLean.” She turned and tapped the second part of the passcode into the keypad. The door slid open, revealing a vestibule, a second door with a transparent panel, and beyond it a single bed supporting Sonny Boy’s tracksuit-clad bulk. I stepped forward, and the main door began to close behind me. “Not Russia. Your friend here was evacuated from Sierra Leone.”

  Soldiers don’t impress me. They get paid to do a job. Either they do it well, or they don’t. And Special Forces aren’t superheroes. They shit, piss, bleed and grouse like everyone else—including the Queen they serve. But Sonny Boy? He wasn’t a soldier. He was a fucking legend. And there he was, sat like Buddha in a soft-furnished hell, hand rolling a pinch of tobacco. He looked straight through me toward the closing door.

  “Long time, Max.”

  “Long time, Sonny. How you been keeping?”

  “Aw, you know . . .” He looked left and right quickly, dropped the half-finished cigarette int
o the ashtray and put his crooked trigger finger to his lips. “Shh.”

  He eased himself off the bed and stood an arm’s length in front of me: six foot six and two hundred and fifty pounds of soft-spoken, stone-cold killer. Then, at a half crouch, he loped toward the far left-hand end of the room. He pointed at me, put his finger to his lips again and stood there, stock-still, with one ear pressed against the beige wall. A full minute passed. I shifted my weight, but he held up his hand as if stopping traffic at a checkpoint. Another minute. And another—Sonny Boy unmoving, listening.

  “You’re all right,” he blurted out, finally. “It’s grand. They’ve gone. Ha! How’ve I been keeping? Christ, Max, you wouldn’t fuckin’ believe it if I told you. You wouldn’t believe it for a moment!” He sighed and laughed and sat back down on the bed, hard. “Sure, you wouldn’t believe a single word of it. But there you go.” He looked down at the floor. We grew up a country mile and a world apart in County Wicklow. His accent echoed my own childhood brogue, which had been softened in the army.

  I inched toward the bed.

  “Believe what, Sonny? What’s up?”

  Without warning, a deep, trembling sob spluttered out of him, followed by an awful keening so forceful it made me recoil. He looked up. Tears blurred his eyes. His teeth were clenched, the muscles in his jaw bulging. I put my hand out to him, fingers first, as if I were seducing a wary dog. He said, did, nothing. I put my hand on his shoulder. He flinched.

  “Hey, Sonny,” I whispered. “It’s OK. I’m here. It’s grand.” I sat next to him, slowly, deliberately lowering myself onto the bed next to him. His hands had fallen into his lap. Tears were falling on them. I took his pistol hand in mine and held it gently. “It’s all right now. It’s all right.”

  Sonny Boy half turned to me. His lips were trembling, his jaw slackened.

  “You wouldn’t fuckin’ believe it, Max,” he sobbed, trying to compose himself.

  “Believe what, Sonny? Do you want to tell me about it?” Nothing. “We don’t have to talk. Hey, remember that time in Kabul when—”