The Break Line

by James Brabazon

  As the roadblock receded through the aperture of the blown-out windscreen, they dropped to a crouch, firing in tandem. The air filled first with the crackle of incoming rounds, and then the tic-zing-ping-smash of high-velocity steel and copper tearing up the Toyota. The passenger-side rear tire popped. Cubes of window glass blew into our faces. A lump of rubber tore off the top of the steering wheel. Roberts’s hands jumped up to his face and back to the wheel. He dug his chin down and thrust his head forward as if bracing against a hailstorm.

  “Faster,” I shouted. “Go faster.” Roberts clenched his jaw. You can’t order someone not to be scared. And not even a lifetime of training will predict how someone will react under fire. Roberts was keeping it together, terrified but fortified by a near-lethal dose of adrenaline.

  Juliet was slumped in the back, lying on her good side. From between the seats I squeezed a shot at the shooter on my right. He fell, the AK still firing on automatic, barrel arcing skyward. I swung the silenced SIG forty degrees to the left, tight to the side of Roberts’s shoulder. An AK round passed between us, ripping a track through his skin, grazing my right knuckle.

  “Fuck! My arm.”

  He pulled the wheel left in pain, the back end of the Toyota careering toward the trees just by the golf club entrance, and I lost sight of the target.

  “Straighten up. Get her in the entrance. It’s fine. You’re fine.”

  “Fine as fuck!”

  Roberts corrected the car and whipped us round hard into the entrance, boot first. As we curved around, the second shooter came into clear vision again, sprinting toward us. I hit him twice in the chest, and he fell forward, sprawling in the dust. Roberts brought us to, nose pointing toward the links, and gunned the engine. Oil sprayed out of the holes that peppered the hood; the chassis lurched, hobbled by the wrecked rear tire.

  “This is going to be short and nasty,” Roberts snarled as he dropped the clutch. We bucked forward. He was right. The Toyota bucked and wheezed as we took off past the clubhouse and followed a dirt track that cut the green in half. Golfers stood in twos and threes, club-stuffed bags to hand, rattled by the noise of the firefight. Some pointed in disbelief; one shouted angrily in Krio; another had stopped his swing midway, still doubled over, club suspended aloft.

  “How long have we got? I mean the oil.” We’d hit a crossroads in the track Roberts was grinding along.

  “Not long. Ezra’s place is dead ahead, over the creek. We can go straight, but we might not be able to cross. Or we can go around, but she might not make it.” Roberts patted the scarred dashboard of the Toyota as if he were consoling a tiring horse.

  “Go straight. No time.”

  Roberts glanced back at Juliet.

  “She gonna be OK?”

  “She is OK,” I said, not knowing if I was lying. She was conscious, but unspeaking. “But she needs to get to hospital urgently.” After three hundred meters the track petered out between two sand bunkers. “Drive over the green. Keep going.”

  Halfway across the fairway, the Toyota sputtered out with a hacking, oil-choked cough. I got out first, gun up. The trio playing an early-morning round in the coolest part of the day went from anger at having their game interrupted to caution when they saw my pistol. Roberts climbed out next. Blood stained the ripped football top at his shoulder, but the wound was superficial. In unison the golfers backed up toward the trees.

  “We need to get her out and into cover. I’ll carry her. You carry my big bag, and check the rear. OK?” Roberts nodded. I slung the day bag and reached in for Juliet. Her eyes focused and she managed to help herself out a little. She was caked in blood.

  “This is going to hurt, OK?” She grunted her consent. I switched the SIG to my left hand, bent down and picked her up, fireman-style, over my right shoulder. She exhaled hard but didn’t cry out. “Let’s go.”

  I led. Roberts followed, scanning the track behind us. The golfers watched, silently. A hundred meters and we were into the trees. Fifty more and we were at the edge of the creek. The air was heavy with the stench of human excrement. I turned to Roberts.

  “There’s a slum on the other side.”

  “How deep is it?”

  “Haven’t got a Scooby.”

  I looked back through the trees. No one. If I were following me, I’d wait for me to break cover. The creek was a hundred meters across—first there was a muddy sandbar to cross; then a wide island, dotted with scrub; and then, by the look of it, a final fifty-meter stretch across mud and water to the slum on the other side. Taller buildings on Wilkinson Road rose up behind the tin roofs of the shantytown. Juliet lay unmoving over my shoulder.

  “You go first. If anyone starts shooting, just run and find Ezra. And don’t look back.” Roberts didn’t look convinced. Neither of us knew if Ezra was even in the country, never mind at home. Roberts was holding his wounded shoulder, shivering with the shock of what was happening to him. “I’ll look after her. I promise. Come on.”

  We stepped out into the thick green-brown slime. Roberts first, me following, hard on his heels. We were almost at the end of Aberdeen Creek. We were in luck. It was low tide and navigable. But as we reached the center of the creek, the staccato snap, crackle and pop of incoming AK fire piped up behind us. Little plumes of sand and water erupted around us.

  “Run! Go!”

  Roberts hesitated, arms up—half in surrender, half protecting his head. Then he ran—full pelt through the mud and shit and low-tide scum toward the slum and the city. I was completely exposed. I dropped and turned. Juliet came down hard with me. A rise in the island we’d just crossed gave us a foot of cover. I aimed for the muzzle flash in the trees, fifty meters to the right. The firing paused, then resumed in single aimed shots. Whoever was on the right end of that Kalashnikov was well trained. I returned fire left-handed. The shooting stopped, and we were up again. I ran, charging through the filthy water, zigzagging toward the nearest house.

  More shots, from multiple shooters. A round clipped my thigh; another grazed Juliet’s back, beside my ear. I dropped again by the edge of the channel. Four men in fatigues twenty meters apart were laying down suppressing fire for a fifth man circling to my left in a simple but effective fire-and-maneuver assault. I squirmed down into the mud, legs in the water. Juliet was balled up under me—her pale skin and red hair dulled by creek slime. Her eyes were closed, but her throat fluttered. She was hanging on. We were being strafed accurately and intensively: a dozen shots placed within a hand’s width of my head spewed up more sand spray.

  For a fraction of a second, I felt cold Irish lake water on my hands; saw hard European sunlight on pale, submerged skin, the last glint in her eyes, my mother’s eyes, pleading.

  This is it, my boy.

  I got the SIG up right-handed and put two rounds into the shooter on the far right. He dropped. Then the thud of a grenade exploding in the mud. Grit blew into my eyes, mouth. My head reeled, ears popped, nose bled. I turned toward the chitter-chatter report of the second shooter and fired blind. His AK fell silent. I turned farther, blinking hard, shaking the creek sludge and memories. Head shot. Third man down. Last round in the breech. I ejected the empty magazine. The fourth shooter was prone now, buried in scrub, firing high, keeping me down. But the guy circling us was on us. No time to reload. I rolled and fired as he dodged. The last round smashed into his left shoulder. I dropped the SIG, twisted hard, up and over Juliet. He staggered and fired, but he couldn’t control it and the AK pulled high right. Rounds sprayed the mud between me and Juliet.

  I went up fast, body under the muzzle, hands on the barrel, pushing it high. Straight kick to left knee. Right hand up. Closed-fist punch to his left jaw. His mouth open, sour breath in my face, eyes wild. I pushed through, hand opening, palm coming down on the top of the AK stock. I pulled down hard and pushed up with my left. The AK arced from ten to two o’clock, rotating on its axis. I pulled
back hard. The front sight caught and ripped his ear. Shooter disarmed. He stood paralyzed, chest heaving, sweat in his eyes. Jab to face with muzzle. Pistol grip down. Charge weapon. Fire. Two rounds to the chest. Shooter down. Drop.

  I lay there covering Juliet, prone, getting small in the sand. Scan. The fifth shooter was moving, firing again. I was up. Six meters and closing. But something wasn’t right. The rifle was too light. I fired. The round hit him, went through him. He looked surprised, but didn’t drop. I pulled the trigger again. No sound. No recoil. No ammo. Empty.

  I dropped just before he fired, and then with a single, brilliant, clear crack, his face imploded behind a veil of bright red mist. I lay next to Juliet and looked at the sun and then into the silhouettes bearing down on us. It was Roberts. Next to him stood a man with a crooked smile on his face, and an AK in his hand.

  “Max,” panted Roberts, “this is Ezra.”

  16

  Ezra set down a couple of cokes and a bunch of small red bananas on the table. An electric fan stirred the heat. Outside, boots drilled and stamped. Inside, the room was filled with the high-pitched whine of blast-damaged eardrums. I was filthy, bleeding and ravenous.

  We’d left the city immediately in the back of a private ambulance that the Israeli had conjured up from a side street in the slum. We’d driven up into the hills near Regent, not far, I guessed, from Micky’s villa. I worked on stabilizing Juliet with his kit as we climbed east, Ezra shaking off questions with terse monosyllables at the checkpoints that were springing up across town. After forty minutes we emerged not at a hospital or a private house, but in a police barracks. “The training school for the Special Security Division,” Ezra had informed me as we disembarked. With evident pride, he told me that the whole enterprise was funded by Israel, not the British, and was commanded by him. Roberts’s arm had been bandaged. Juliet had been carried away at the double to the clinic by men wearing black fatigues and smart red berets.

  “He’s good,” Ezra said. “Toufiq. The surgeon. From Beirut. It’s a long time he and I work together.” He was looking at Roberts. Roberts was staring at the door. Elsewhere on the compound Juliet was having her chest opened up. “There are no promises. God willing, she will live. But she needs time.” In the way some Israelis shape English sounds, his accent was guttural, almost French, and he littered his sentences with Hebrew words. “And you”—he looked at me—“what do you need?”

  “A plane,” I replied. “A Cessna. A 172.” I reached inside the day bag and pulled out the bundles of dollars. “That’s eighty grand.”

  “When?”

  “Today.”

  “OK.” Ezra shrugged. “Will I get it back again?” I shrugged. “What else?” he asked. I looked at Roberts.

  “He’s not coming with me.”

  “About this you are one hundred percent correct.” He smiled his crooked smile. “There is no possibility whatsoever I will allow him, or her, to go anywhere with you. They are safe here with me. No one will touch them.” There wasn’t even a flicker of irony in his speech. “This”—he opened his palms wide and looked from side to side, to make it clear it was his whole operation he was talking about, and not just the room we sat in—“is the president’s personal project, paid for by the Knesset. It’s as safe here as Tel Aviv.” I raised an eyebrow. “OK,” he conceded, “safer.”

  “Maybe this time don’t look after him by shooting him,” I suggested.

  “About that”—Ezra smiled—“I make no promises. Whatever works, eh?”

  “Roberts said you worked with the Americans after the war. They’re not”—I chose my words carefully—“onside.” Ezra stared at me. His eyelids drooped over his irises. One moment he looked like he was about to explode; the next, as if he were half-asleep. It was too late for talking around it. “OK, to be clear, yesterday an American tried to kill me,” I confessed. “Micky Montague. He was with the CDC.”

  “That fuck? Ta’aseh li tova! No, Micky is not CDC. Or whatever that other shtuyot aid agency is.”

  “USAID?”

  “Ken, that one. Micky is CIA. Sure barur. Trust me on that.”

  “Did you kill Micky?” Roberts snapped his eyes away from the door. I tilted my head in affirmation.

  “He tried to kill me. But here’s the thing: I shot a Yank spook—and it’s Spetsnaz and a bunch of local boyos that come after us.”

  Roberts coughed.

  “Those boyos nearly buried us, bruv.”

  It was a fair point. I’d been replaying the chase in my mind during the drive from the creek slum to the barracks. Juliet and Roberts had slowed me down, forced bad choices on me. But I needed Roberts. Left to my own devices, I reassured myself, I wouldn’t have allowed any of the shooters to leave the woods alive. But lose Juliet, and I’d have lost Roberts. I told myself I needed them both. And then I checked myself. No, I didn’t. I didn’t need Juliet alive; I just wanted her to survive. I wanted Ana María to survive, too. But you can’t always get what you want.

  “Spetsnaz? Ulai. You are certain about this?”

  “The black guys, no. They were all in uniform, old Sierra Leone Army kit.”

  “Rebels?” Roberts asked. “From Kabala?”

  “Maybe. They were well trained—that’s for sure. But the shooter who came to the house? He had a tattoo, you know, their scorpion.” Now I said it out loud, it sounded less convincing. I didn’t mention that we knew Colonel Proshunin had been on station.

  “Max, how many tattoos do you have?” Ezra asked.

  “None.”

  “Me as well—I don’t have any. It would look good, eh? Israeli Defense Forces right here.” He traced his right index finger down his left forearm. “Or maybe here?” This time he drew his finger across his throat.

  “OK, well, I killed a Yank and someone wants me to think Spetsnaz is after us.”

  “This I agree with.” Ezra shrugged again. “But so what? They are with God now. It does not matter who they are, or how good they are. You know this. I know this. It matters only how good you are, eh?” He took a folded newspaper from his field-jacket pocket. “This guy . . . I don’t think he was good enough.” Ezra handed me the paper. It was that morning’s edition of the Awoko newspaper. The headline: “Cholera in Kabala, Musala: Citizens Told to Stay Calm, Remain Indoors. UN to Take Action.”

  “Turn it over,” Ezra said. “Under the fold.”

  Underneath the leader, Awoko ran a story titled “Murder in Makeni.” A British diplomat visiting the Makeni area had been found dead by his car on the road back to Freetown. The hack who penned it concluded the embassy man had been “mown down by brigands” and his valuables “looted.” A Faces of Death–style photograph of the corpse lying flat on its back adorned the lower right quarter of the page. White man, fifties, slight build, weak jaw. Utterly ignorable. Absolutely MI6. His bloodied white shirt was riddled with bullet holes. His face was serene and untouched, save for one neatly drilled entry wound in the center of his forehead.

  I’d been wondering who next. Though I couldn’t know for sure, he was almost certainly the Official—an MI6 officer openly declared to the Sierra Leone government by our government—who’d “collected” the photograph of Colonel Proshunin and the target outside the school in Makeni. Most likely he’d taken it from Global Assistance Committee volunteer Marie Margai by killing her and stealing her camera. Maybe killing her had been part of the plan. Maybe he’d panicked. Maybe Micky had held his hand. Maybe London had told him to. Now he’d been taken out, too—and in Makeni, where Micky had just come back from.

  Maybe, maybe, maybe. But the way I saw it, there was one fact: me aside, Roberts and Juliet were the last loose ends left in-country.

  All bets were off.

  “This cholera shtuyot. This is to do with you?”

  “No, it isn’t. And it’s not cholera. Or Ebola. But there’s someone making shit
up north and we’d like them to stop. Permanently.”

  “Ah, it’s ‘we’ now, eh? Mazel tov. It looks like they are helping you a lot, this ‘we.’ Maybe they will find you your Cessna?” The crooked smile was back. There was nothing to say that wasn’t untrue and unkind to everyone in London who’d put me here. Myself especially. “Do you have a plan?”

  “No.” I looked at the pips on his shoulder. “I don’t know shit about strategy, Colonel. But I do know that no plan survives contact with the enemy. Especially when you don’t know who the enemy is.”

  “Bediyuk.” He nodded, grinning. “In Israel we say ‘No plan survives contact with an officer,’ so it is just as well I don’t have one, either, eh?”

  Ezra raked the bundles of hundred-dollar bills off the table and made to leave. “I will go and check on your woman now.” He was speaking to Roberts but looking at me. “Do you need anything else?” he continued. Roberts went to answer. I spoke first.

  “Yeah. A clean phone, a Thuraya.”

  “OK.”

  “And an emergency beacon if you have one, that works off Iridium sats.”

  “Ken. But careful, eh? With this you will light up the jungle like the menorah. They will see you from fucking Mars, my friend.”

  “Yup, that’s the idea. And some det cord in case I need to clear a landing site for a casevac. Oh, and there’s one other thing.”

  “Betach. Anything.”

  “Some clean fatigues. I smell like shit.”

  “Ken, this I also agree with one hundred percent.”

  Ezra left with the cash. Roberts and I sat alone. The room was stuffy, stifling even. Outside, Ezra barked orders first in Hebrew, then in Krio.

  I sat and scrolled through Micky’s local phone. I’d given up on his iPhone—if the NSA struggled to get into them, I didn’t stand a chance. The names and numbers were all unremarkable: a mixture of neutral first names and acronyms, Sierra Leonean and international mobiles. All except one: the contact VX had a London landline and an extension, 309.