The Break Line

by James Brabazon

  Sonny Boy had given me a location, a time and even the range.

  “God bless Mrs. Mayne,” I said under my breath. “May the Lord have mercy on her wicked son.”

  I looked up at Juliet. Daylight in the room behind expanded and contracted, creating a brief burning red halo around her head. There was a soft snick of wood on wood as the outer door clicked open and shut in the breeze. She smiled at me, and I smiled back, slowly reaching behind me. Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. The short silencer of the SIG cleared the back of my jeans. I brought the barrel round and up, the bead of the sight splitting her eyes. She sat unblinking, staring at me, the smile still playing at her lips. That’s how I remember her best, caught between love and fear.

  I always know when I’ve hit the target, when I’m going to hit the target. I’m tied to the bullet even before the cordite flares or the trigger is squeezed. The round left the muzzle with a gentle phutt, and went in through the left eye. The full metal jacket hit the brain, scooping up the spongy organ in a spreading shock wave, emptying it out the back of the cranium. The air filled with a fine spray of blood and brain fluid, and the metallic chime of the spent cartridge case bouncing off the concrete floor.

  I stood up. Roberts didn’t move. Juliet’s expression hadn’t changed. Behind her lay stretched out the corpse of a white man in civilian clothes, still clutching a pistol.

  “We need to leave now. Right now. We shouldn’t be here. Get dressed, both of you. Juliet, pack a bag. You’re not coming back.” They both stood up and took in the scene. Juliet went to speak, but no words came out. “Move now. There’s no time.” They moved to the door slowly, eyes flitting between each other and the body. “Just step over him. We need to go now-now. Like now, now, now.”

  Juliet’s almost naked body vanished into the living room.

  I squatted down and ran my hands over the corpse: no sign of life, no other weapons, no wallet, no ID, nothing at all. Whoever he was, he was a professional: surgical gloves on both hands, one of them still wrapped around the butt of a silenced Tokarev—whoever the intended target was, he was expecting them to be wearing body armor. Target or targets. If Micky had been aboveboard, the whole block would have been locked down and a Delta team would already have been on the roof. If it wasn’t the Americans, I wanted to know who was trying to kill us.

  In the main room I could hear Juliet frantically opening and emptying drawers. Roberts was rooted to the spot, struggling, I supposed, to take it all in. I opened the knife and cut through the dead man’s clothes. First the belt, then down the trouser legs and up the torso and along the arms of the shirt. Within seconds the cadaver was naked. Well worked out, no birthmarks, no scars . . . but high up under the inside of the right arm, just above the armpit, one tattoo: a tiny black scorpion. It looked like I’d just disobeyed orders. For me, there are no misses. Only consequences.

  “What the fuck is that?” Roberts had found his voice again.

  “Forty-fifth Spetsnaz.”

  “What the fuck is that?”

  “Russian Special Forces. It’s their regimental insignia. Idiots. They just can’t resist it.”

  “Great, so now the fucking Russians are trying to kill you.”

  “I hate to break this to you, man, but they’re trying to kill us. Which is why we have to leave. Now. So for the love of God, would you put some fucking jeans on?”

  “Where are we going?” Roberts looked stunned again. He swayed on his feet. I led him into the living room. Submission, not rebellion. His temples leached sweat. His eyes exuded confusion. I hadn’t known where to go. But when Roberts asked if the men in the photograph were mercenaries, he’d given me my answer.

  “We’re going to see Ezra.”

  15

  I went into the light first. Sand, sea, palms and rolling heat. No one on the beach. The air felt hot and heavy. I had my day bag; Juliet carried an overfilled duffel bag; Roberts clutched a packet of cigarettes and the padlocked rifle bag I’d left with him after our trip to Kabala. We looked nothing if not suspicious. Roberts took the wheel and fired up the old patchwork Nissan. I got in the front next to him. Juliet lay down on the backseat with her bag.

  We pulled away. There were cars and trucks and poda-podas on the narrow road: deliveries to restaurants, people going to work at the hotels. A gaggle of schoolchildren in starched white shirts and polished black shoes that shone bright enough to put a guardsman to shame skipped along beside us.

  “Your cook, the one with the missing eye. When does she come to work?”

  “Eleven o’clock,” Juliet piped up from the backseat.

  “Can you reach her? Tell her she has the rest of the week off.” Juliet dialed the number and shortly began explaining the cook’s unscheduled holiday in Krio. Roberts navigated the thin stream of traffic and children and headed north to the end of the peninsula. There was only one road in and out at either end. At its southern base, the spit of land that Roberts’s bar and my hotel perched on joined Freetown proper. At the northern tip, the city was reachable only by the Aberdeen Road bridge, which spanned the neck of the creek like a thousand-foot concrete noose.

  “Where’s Ezra’s place?”

  “Near. Wilkinson Road. Other side of the creek, but we have to go around. We drove past it the other day. Just past Cockerill air base.”

  “Office or house?”

  “Both. I’ll call him.”

  “No, the phones aren’t clean. Leave it.”

  We turned east at a huge, dusty traffic circle onto Cape Road. A motorbike slipped in behind us, coming from the Barmoi Hotel. Black guy riding it, messy Afro, blue jeans and a dirty white T-shirt. No helmet, day sack, 180 pounds. It was the same guy Roberts had been chatting up hookers with in Makeni.

  “Fuck it! Motorbike, twenty meters behind you.”

  “Got it.”

  “Watch his hands. Juliet?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Get small. Lie down flat and get small.”

  “You want me to gun it, man? I’ll gun it.” Roberts was coming back to life.

  “OK. But not too hard.” Juliet balled up in the footwell behind us. Roberts nudged the Nissan up to thirty-five, forty. “Distance?”

  “Ten meters?”

  I looked in my wing mirror.

  “I make it eight. Seven. Closing. OK, go to fifty.”

  “Can’t. Junction coming up. Got to turn onto Aberdeen here.”

  “Is it a circle, a roundabout?”

  “Yeah.”

  “OK, hit it as fast as you can. Go wide.”

  Forty-five miles an hour along Cape Road in an old Nissan is like a hundred and forty-five in a Jag down O’Connell Street. Push-bikes, children, fruit sellers, even a street preacher—his exhortation to prayer engulfed by our slipstream—sped past us in a blur of juddering heat. Roberts dropped down into third and took the junction at forty. The motorbike stayed with us. Second gear. We curved right onto Aberdeen Road. Back up to third. The reek of burning clutch oil filled the car.

  “Distance?”

  “He’s right on us. I can’t shake him.”

  “Stay with it.”

  Fifty, sixty. Still the motorbike stayed on our bumper.

  “OK. When I say, hit the brakes fucking hard.” I checked the wing mirror. The rider was coming up on the inside—my side—one hand on the bars, the other reaching behind his back. “Now.”

  Roberts stood on the brake pedal and heaved the hand brake. I braced against the dash. The Nissan pulled left into the curb. Metal ground into metal. Smoke plumed off the tires. Glass smashed. Muscle and bone cracked against the roof, the windscreen, the metaled road. I was out the door, rolling in the dust by the side of the road. I came up and fired twice into the white T-shirt of the rider—now on his knees on the tarmacadam. He lurched to the right, pistol still in hand, firing blindly as he tried to stan
d. His left arm was open at the elbow from impact. His jeans torn. I fired once more into the rib cage. He fell, facedown. I came up on him fast and put the barrel of the SIG into the nape of his neck and fired again. Cars stopped. Children ran. Men backed away, hands up. Blood spread out from under the fallen rider.

  Juliet’s face was at the window of the stalled Nissan.

  Roberts turned the engine over, and over. Nothing. “Engine’s flooded.”

  I spun on my heels, gun up, scanning sight lines, looking for trouble. Scared faces. The sun. Houses. Shops. Trees. Dust.

  “OK, out. Get out. Roberts, grab my bag.” Juliet struggled with her own duffel bag.

  “Leave it. Get out now. Go!”

  I ran to the nearest car. A red Toyota with blacked-out windows, the door already open, engine still running. SIG at hip height, I reached in and pulled the driver out. A young man in a sharp suit. He scuttled off, head low, hands up. As it dawned on the people who’d stopped to look what was really going on, they, too, ran for cover. The war might have ended in 2001, but in Freetown people still knew when to hang around and when to split.

  “You drive.” We bundled in and took up the same positions we’d had in the Nissan. Roberts bumped the Toyota over the wheel of the smashed-up scooter, edged around an abandoned delivery truck and continued east toward the bridge. Spetsnaz and their military intelligence partners in the GRU were extremely effective at the best of times, and they’d had months to prepare their area of operations. Our cover was blown wide open. They were onto us, and onto us hard. They got to miss as many times as they liked. I’d get to miss only once.

  “This ain’t right, Max. No traffic. Something’s up.”

  “OK, slow it down. Juliet, get your head down. Right down.”

  There was no oncoming traffic. As we approached the bridge, the sea closed in on either side of the road. Two cops stood in the center of our lane, waving down the trickle of cars ahead of us. Behind them, a poda-poda minibus taxi cut sideways across the road, blocking the entry to the bridge and all oncoming traffic. A small crowd gathered, remonstrating among themselves and with the cops by turn.

  “OK, dead slow.” A man was working on the tires of the minibus, all of which appeared to be flat. A nightclub sprawled off to our left. Behind it was a long building with a flat roof. To our right, a tall, unmarked building threw a long shadow over the road. Beyond it lay the bridge and creek itself. “It’s not safe. We need to turn back, but we can’t do a U-turn here.” Roberts had slowed the car to a crawl. The cops waved us down.

  “Unsafe how? More men on bikes?” Roberts craned his neck around. “You’re the worst fucking fare I ever had, Max.”

  “No. Listen carefully. Pull up in front of the cops, but wide, center of the road. Make sure it’s clear behind; then gun it in reverse. Hard and fast as you can. When you hit thirty, drop the clutch, punch the foot brake and turn the wheel a quarter to the left all at the same time. You’ll spin one-eighty. Then bomb it south. We need to get off the peninsula.”

  “Fuck, OK. I did something like this on the Old Kent Road once. Let’s hope the tires stay on this time.”

  “Don’t stop for more than three seconds.”

  We drew to a halt. Roberts looked at me, and then in the mirror. I counted under my breath.

  One thousand.

  The Toyota’s gears went from second to neutral to reverse.

  Two thousand.

  Movement behind me. I turned a fraction.

  “Head down!”

  Three—the cops lurched away from us as the car leaped backward—thousand.

  Tic. Tic. Tic.

  “What’s that?” Buried in the rear passenger footwell, Juliet’s voice was urgent and muffled. Like the sound of the rounds punching through the Toyota’s soft steel skin, it sounded strangely distant, unreal.

  “We’re being shot at.” Then to Roberts: “Keep her steady. . . .” We hit thirty. War in reverse. The downed scooter flashed past, but the dead rider was nowhere to be seen; a street kid was pouring gasoline on the dark stain where he’d bled out onto the highway; the crowd no longer cowed—staring, mouthing, pointing. It was as if we were tied to a huge length of elastic that had shot us out to the bridge and was now pulling us back inland through time.

  Tic. Tic. Tic.

  We’d taken a dozen rounds within seconds. Silver-edged holes opened up like wild punctuation marks in the hood. The shooter was aiming for the engine block. Then we lost window glass on the passenger side. The shots were coming from the flat roof. The Toyota’s blacked-out windows saved us. If we’d been in the Nissan, we’d have been dead already.

  A moment of silence.

  Then the windscreen caved in with a pop and a smash. Hot wet air and the roar of the engine rushed through the open cavity of the Toyota. Roberts flinched but held fast.

  “OK, spin her.”

  Roberts spun the car perfectly on its axis. It had taken me two days at Leconfield to learn how to do that. He was a natural. We stopped for a second. Jagged holes appeared in the rear window glass.

  “Go, go, go.”

  Roberts ripped racing changes through the gears, right foot flat on the floor, revs off the clock as he punched the Toyota out of second and into third. His face was a study of extreme concentration: furrowed brow, and just the faintest suggestion of a smile at the corner of his mouth. After all the emotion in the house, he’d recovered his cool with the determination of someone who’d lost almost, but not quite, everything.

  “Is anyone hit?”

  “No, I’m OK.”

  “Juliet?”

  No response.

  “Juliet?” I shouted loud above the engine, and turned around.

  “Juliet, baby . . .” Roberts craned his neck around, too. We’d hit seventy. Roberts had his Ray-Bans on. With no windscreen it would have been impossible to see at that speed without them. The peninsula was a blur. Sand, bugs and grit were sucked in through the opening where the windscreen had been, and stung my face.

  “Just drive. I’m on it.”

  SIG in hand, I clambered onto the backseat. Roberts braked hard into the junction with Cape Road, which threw me forward, on top of her. I recovered, and lifted her head. Blood spilled from her mouth. I hauled her up onto the backseat and then lost my balance again as Roberts threw a left onto the Lumley Beach Road. We were heading south now, with the sea and Roberts’s bar to our right. It was a tight space to work in. I got her up onto the seat, stretched out on her side. I’d turned myself around so I was facing backward.

  Her T-shirt was soaked, the face of President Koroma dyed scarlet. But with blood from where? Her mouth was open. Blood but no blockage. I dug my thumbnail into her earlobe. She opened her eyes: unfocused, confused. In the slipstream vortex at the back of the car, it was almost impossible to assess her vital signs. I clamped my fingers to her carotid artery and pressed my ear to her lips. Racing pulse; shallow, rapid breathing. I started a primary survey. Head and neck first. Then under her T-shirt. My palms slid over her breasts. They were wet. I looked at my hands. Dark red. I ripped the president’s face in two, cleaving the T-shirt from the neck down, and found where the bullet had gone in, high up on her right breast, through the pectoral muscle. I put my hands behind her back and ran my open palms down her spine, up her flanks, under her arms. Nothing. No exit wound.

  “It’s OK,” I mouthed to her. “You’ll be OK.” But she couldn’t hold my gaze and grimaced with pain, fighting against my hands.

  Roberts looked over his shoulder again.

  “Is it bad?” he shouted.

  I didn’t answer.

  Then: “I need my bag.” It was hard to be heard in the back above the noise of the road. “Bag!” I roared. “I need my bag!”

  Roberts leaned forward and scooped my day bag off the floor with his right hand. It was heavy with ammunitio
n and cash, and he swerved as he struggled to get it clear of the front passenger headrest. It fell down beside me as I ran my hands down her legs, across her stomach. No other obvious wounds. I took out the trauma kit from the front pocket of the bag. As she breathed in, air went into her chest cavity through the hole in her chest. The more it filled with air, the more it pushed her collapsing lung into her heart. Likely result if untreated: imminent cardiac arrest.

  I pulled the flat, round packet of the chest seal out of the kit, tore it open and peeled off the backing. Blood oozed from the wound. I wiped it with my left forearm, and placed the sticky plastic valve over her breast. The wound was sealed; air hissed out of the valve as she drew breath and exhaled. No more air could get back in through the wound. She blinked at me. Bloodied spittle bubbled at the corners of what almost looked like a smile. I put my palm to her cheek and cupped her face. There was no way of telling where the bullet had ended up inside her. Maybe she would survive. Maybe she was dying.

  “Roadblock!” Roberts stood on the brakes again. I braced against the backseat. We’d hit the southern end of the peninsula, just as the road bends inland. Dead ahead, a jumble of cars and poda-podas facing every which way cut the road. Roberts had pulled up fifty meters short. To our right, the Atlantic burned electric blue beyond the white scum lapping at the shore. To our left, trees, tennis courts and open green fields.

  “What’s that?” I tapped on the passenger-side window with the barrel of the SIG.

  “Golf course.”

  “Can we cut through to the city?”

  “Maybe. Depends how high the creek is.”

  Roberts was shaking. His words came out fast, unsteady. The red roof of the clubhouse was visible through the trees just behind us. We were completely exposed, and there was only one exit.

  “Let’s do it.” In front of us two black guys emerged, one from either side of the tangle of vehicles that blocked the road. They were bent low and moving with cautious determination, the barrels of their AKs up and on us. “Go, go, go, go, go.”