The Break Line

by James Brabazon

  VX: a particularly nasty nerve agent. Hardly remarkable for someone from the Centers for Disease Control to have that in his phone. Or maybe V Cross—Vauxhall Cross. He wouldn’t be the first CIA operative to have a contact number for MI6 HQ.

  Fuck it. Roll the dice. I pressed the green key and listened.

  “Embankment.” The voice was crisp, clean, confident. I pretended I couldn’t hear.

  “Hello? Is that Embankment?” I said in my best American accent.

  “Yes. Embankment. What extension do you require?” Matter-of-fact. Almost impatient.

  “Three-oh-nine.”

  Pause.

  “Connecting you now. Stand by.” I looked up and realized I was holding my breath. Roberts shrugged his shoulders at me as if to say What the fuck? I put my index finger to my lip and frowned.

  “Three-oh-nine.” A second voice confirmed the transfer. Softer this time—a secretary, not a gatekeeper. I exhaled, slowly.

  “This is Montague.” I kept up the accent.

  “Connecting you now.”

  Pause.

  “Mason.”

  I hung up and removed the battery from the phone.

  “Fuck.”

  “You OK?” Roberts asked.

  “Yeah. No. I don’t know.”

  “Is it safe, to call out?”

  “Fuck no! But it’ll keep the boys and girls in Cheltenham busy.”

  “OK, whatever. Mate, I can’t work out if you really know what you’re doing or if you’re just making it up as you go along.”

  “Fifty-fifty. How you bearing up?”

  He slumped forward in the battered old armchair he’d pulled up to the table and wiped the sweat from his face.

  “Yeah, I’m OK. If she’s OK, I’m OK. Thank you, for what you did back there. I mean, fuck you for what you did back there. But thank you, too, you know?”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. And then, pointing at the phone: “That was bad news. I . . . er . . .” May as well say it, I thought. “I don’t know if I’ll be coming back.”

  He looked aghast and then smiled quickly.

  “Well, I’m not going to fucking kiss you good-bye, you cunt.” We both laughed, and for a moment I saw a flicker of the Roberts that had met me at the heliport only four days before.

  “Ditch your phone. Ezra will give you a bunch of SIMs with sequential numbers. If I call you, burn the SIM afterward. I’ll call on the next number the next time. Got it?” He said he did, so I took a pen out of my trouser pocket and scrawled Jack Nazzar’s cell phone number on the newspaper Ezra had left with us.

  “This number belongs to a grumpy old Jock. He’s the only person I trust.” I thought about that for a moment and saw Commander Frank Knight in my mind’s eye dressing me down in Caracas. “The only person. He’ll help you. Don’t mention any names. None. Forget any names you’ve heard from me. Just tell him that all work and no play makes him a dull boy. He’ll lead you from there.” Roberts ripped the corner of the paper off and tucked it into his jeans ticket pocket. Then he took his bracelet off. The black, red, gold and green beads clicked against the little metal lion with its missing foot. He handed it to me.

  “For luck,” he said. Worry and fatigue were etched into his face. I put the bracelet on. He smiled weakly, and we lapsed into embarrassed silence. Then I remembered Micky’s Glock. I reloaded the little pistol and passed it to him, grip first.

  “For luck,” I said. “It’s a double action. Six rounds, plus one up the spout.”

  “Double what?” Roberts turned it over to inspect it and squinted along the barrel.

  “Just pull the trigger. Put it in your pocket. You’ll know when to use it.” He tucked it away and cleared his throat.

  “What are you going to do when you get to Karabunda?”

  I realized I’d been thinking about little else for days, and with no clear answer. I’d told Ezra the truth: there was no plan. And there never had been. But the solution was suddenly clear. I replied spontaneously, knowing exactly what was to be done. It was as if the thought had always been there, waiting to be spoken.

  “Precisely,” I said, “what Sonny Boy told me to do.”

  17

  She was old and tired, but she had everything I needed. MY day bag was on the copilot’s seat, my rifle bag in the passenger cabin behind.

  There was no ground crew as such—just a couple of pissed-off locals to help wheel her off her back-field plot and run the refuel. It was the hottest part of the day, an hour before sunset. No one wanted to be working.

  There was no tower to radio, no clearance to obtain. There was no commercial-aircraft tracking equipment that worked anywhere in the country—not even at Lungi International Airport. That favored me as much as it did the Russians, who Captain Rhodes said had been flying heavy equipment and men up to Karabunda apparently unnoticed by anyone except us for months.

  The weather I got from the web: west wind at eight knots; visibility twenty-three kilometers; high-level clouds; temperature twenty-eight; dew point twenty-three. There was zero percent chance of rain: March was dry and searing hot. The route I’d already got from Roberts: I’d be flying VFR all the way—retracing our car journey north from the air, following the road to Kabala, and then due north to Musala and the rebels’ operating base. As well as the paper chart, I’d saved the digital maps off-line on my phone and punched into the GPS the coordinates of the only possible drop zone I could identify from the satellite imagery. I had two days of phone battery at the outside, not that there was any signal. The satellite phone would be my lifeline.

  I opened up the throttle a quarter inch, rechecked that the propeller area was clear, started the ignition and adjusted to a thousand revs a minute. Old and tired maybe, but she hummed like a dream. I engaged the autopilot, pushed the controls against it to check it and then disconnected. The familiar beep rang out. All good. I ran through the pre-takeoff checks by rote, double-checking each one, set the flaps and released the parking brake.

  The Cessna taxied into position, and I gave Ezra the thumbs-up. He saluted and took a step back. Eighty grand aside, one day he’d be calling this favor in, with interest. Full throttle. The runway pulled me along like a long black line reeling in a metal fish and then spat me up into a gentle climb above the deep green waterways that wound their way inland from Tagrin Bay. The long shadows of early evening dissolved into clear blue sky. I banked around and headed for the corrugated star of Waterloo town to the southwest—its rusty roofs and glinting windscreens beacons astride the ridge the road hugged before turning northeast to Makeni. I climbed to six thousand feet and held her there, out of the effective range of most ground fire, and engaged the autopilot. I trusted Ezra because I had no choice. If he wanted to have me shot down, there was no safe altitude to climb to.

  It was just over two hundred miles to Karabunda. I took off at eighteen ten exactly. That would mean boots on the ground at around nineteen hundred. It was too risky to come in during daylight, and suicidal to come in at night without infrared. Dusk was the only option, and still a poor one at that. This close to the equator, I would have a ten-to-fifteen-minute window of last light once I reached the target.

  It hadn’t been safe to go back to the Mammy Yoko Hotel. Most of my equipment, including the BGAN, had been out of reach from the moment Micky bled out. In my mind I went through the kit I did have, such as it was:

  rifle system and ammo

  SIG, silencer, ammo and a tactical holster from Ezra

  detonation cord

  mobile and satellite phones—charged, no chargers

  paper chart, knife, compass, gaffer tape

  nearly twenty-five thousand US dollars in cash

  emergency beacon—also from Ezra—watch, medical kit

  filtering water bottle, full

  Canadian passport, GPS, two M
REs and a packet of smokes

  I closed my eyes, and conjured Sonny Boy from the depths of my memory.

  * * *

  • • •

  CODE ZULU: WE used it as slang for situations where the only course of action was to annihilate everything and everyone. It was the nuclear option that left no survivors, like the defeat the Zulus themselves had inflicted on the British at the Battle of Isandlwana. As Sonny Boy liked to say in front of the recruits in the mess hall at Raven Hill loudly and often, “Didn’t those African boys with their spears and their shields hand those English boys with their rifles and their big guns their bloody arses, Max?”

  Given that Sonny Boy was six-six and once knocked out the British Army’s heavyweight boxing champion while the opening bell was still ringing, I liked to agree with him. When Sonny Boy started on his Zulu rants, I was definitely more Irish than Anglo. If he hadn’t been out of his mind in Brinton, I’d have been hard-pressed to bring him down.

  Only one person I knew had actually ever put the Code into practice: Sonny Boy himself. Before he made sergeant, Sonny was sold out by his local guides during an anti-narco operation in Colombia. Of the four men in his squad, two were killed and another—a young trooper who’d not long passed selection—was severely wounded. As far as Sonny Boy was concerned, the entire village was complicit. What was meant to be an operation against the Norte del Valle Cartel became a paramilitary operation against him, personally.

  Out of options and with no escape route, he did what no soldier wants to do, but anyone who wants their mates to survive would do if they could.

  Colonel Ellard oversaw the board of inquiry. When they asked me what I’d seen when I finally got close enough to extract them both, I hesitated. It was hard to find the words.

  Hauling the wounded private across those broad Wicklow shoulders of his, Sonny Boy had blasted his way first out of the village and then out of the valley. He killed everything in his path for twenty miles. At first with a rifle and grenades, then with his pistol, then with a knife and finally with his bare hands: men, women, children—everything and everyone that stood in his way. Like a real-life incarnation of my boyhood hero, the legendary Irish warrior Cú Chulainn, Sonny Boy was gripped by a battle warp-spasm. Consumed by bloodlust, he ripped the life out of anyone within reach. It wasn’t until I’d got him into the chopper that he even realized he’d been shot: thirteen times, including straight through both legs.

  So I explained Sonny Boy’s escape to Ellard the only way I could, the only way he would understand it. I said, simply, “Code Zulu, sir.”

  Ellard promoted him and deployed him to fight pirates in Somalia. General King pondered the things “that might be achieved with a hundred men like that, what?” and then ordered the hearing’s records destroyed. The following month the Americans claimed victory over the Norte del Valle Cartel. As for Sonny Boy, I don’t think he ever really recovered. He never spoke again to the trooper whose life he saved. And he never thanked me for rescuing either of them.

  I thought about what Juliet had said about Sonny’s last good-bye. I have contemplated suicide many times, but I have never considered ending my life. And here I was, sitting above that darkening expanse of jungle stretching northeast to the Loma Mountains, about to attempt what, exactly? For the uncounted thousandth time, I saw the pale, frail face of my mother wreathed in floating blond locks; blue eyes fixed skyward, piercing the clear, cold lake water. Sometimes taking your own life—or giving it up—seems like the only rational act for anyone bereft of mind, or of love.

  The truth was that Sonny Boy had already got to the edge a long time before he went to West Africa. It wasn’t just Colombia. It was the sum total of where we came from, what we did every day and the eventual realization for each of us that there was nowhere left to go. If you have to kill your soul to survive, then there’s nowhere left to run to, and nothing left to run for. Fear: it was the be-all and end-all of everything we did. But whatever had sent Sonny Boy mad hadn’t just scared him; it had terrorized him into utter madness.

  Whether our feet were on the ground or not, all of us Unknowns at Raven Hill were like those proverbial men plummeting from the top of a skyscraper, each reassuring the others as they passed first the hundredth, then the fiftieth, then the twentieth floor: So far, so good; so far, so good; so far, so good. Of course it’s not the fall that kills you. It’s the landing. Sonny Boy fell off the edge in Karabunda and landed at my feet in the observation ward in Brinton. He’d gone back up north to do something, to fight for something, and he’d done it alone. I just had to figure out what, and figure it out fast. Major General King and Frank Knight weren’t going to help me, and David Mason looked like he had a tighter connection to Langley than to Raven Hill.

  * * *

  • • •

  EIGHTEEN FIFTY. I overflew the killing ground outside Kabala. Nothing moved. It was time to go off the edge myself. I spiraled up above prying eyes to fourteen thousand feet and adjusted the flight path to northeast. I set the airspeed to eighty knots. Cabin temperature dropped. The air thinned, but at that altitude I didn’t need oxygen. I shuffled over into the copilot’s seat and slid it back to give myself room. The SIG was holstered on my thigh. I strapped the day bag to my chest. The rifle bag was fastened underneath it, crossways. Then I put on the parachute, a skydiver’s sport rig from Ezra, over the old jumpsuit he’d thrown into the deal. I lashed the GPS tight to the inside of my left forearm and switched it on. Musala passed beneath the winking red of the port wing tip, clinging to the southern bank of the Mong River.

  I double-checked the autopilot. Judging by the amount of fuel left, she’d come down in deep bush over the border in Guinea, somewhere to the west of Marela. I unlatched the passenger door and pulled the D ring. The door came away with a powerful blast of freezing-cold air. Pressure imbalance rocked the little Cessna momentarily, but the autopilot held her, and she settled down.

  Nineteen fifteen. I stepped out onto the wheel strut and held the aft edge of the open door. Somewhere below in the last glimmer of daylight, Karabunda passed to the west. I dropped and released. The silk carried me silently above the savannah. Ten thousand feet. The Cessna carried on, wing tips blinking into the distance, vanishing into the last dregs of the day. Five thousand feet. I watched for movement, half expecting the hills to spit out bright arcs of tracer. But none came, and the GPS brought me straight over the drop zone. One thousand feet. What I lost in the visibility of a long descent, I gained in accuracy and silence. But if the drop zone was hot, I’d be dead before I landed.

  Five hundred feet. The horizon suddenly rose fast, and the rank-smelling hot hum of the woodland floor rushed up to meet me. I pulled hard right over a dark patch between the trees as the last of the day bled out of the sky. I squinted hard into the gloom and saw nothing, no one.

  And then my boots hit the ground.

  18

  Pitch-black silence. I checked my watch. Three o’clock in the morning. The bugs, birds, moths, monkeys, had all finally fallen quiet. It was a simultaneous cessation, a miracle of woodland wild places everywhere. Suddenly the night-creature catechism ends, and absolute quiet descends. In two hours the monkeys would rouse themselves, and the cacophony would begin again. An hour after that, first light would fall through the open canopy. Sunrise was at seven. I shifted onto my side, three feet above the ground, suspended in a strip of parachute silk slung between two trees. It was a small luxury, but any fool can be uncomfortable. Sleep in the field is priceless; anywhere off the floor is a necessity.

  I’d come down sixteen kilometers northeast of the camp, and just five hundred meters south of the tenth parallel—the absurdly straight line that formed Sierra Leone’s northern border with Guinea. Wherever the Cessna had ended up, I hadn’t heard the crash. Although the rebels had been raiding north in February before turning their attention south, the Guineans didn’t have the manpower to
police their own frontier. It could be days—months, even—before the wreck was found, if it ever was. The line on the map that separated Sierra Leone from Guinea was simply that: a cartographic expression that bore no relation to reality on the ground. The savannah and the hills stretched on regardless, unencumbered by the limitations of language and nationality.

  I’d neither seen nor heard anyone. It was a harsh, sparsely inhabited place. Almost no one went up there; even fewer people cared who did. The only line on the map that interested me was the one made by the Mong River. It came across the border a few hundred meters to the west and meandered due south nearly all the way to the camp. It would be hard going, but following the Mong would be like sprinting down a racetrack compared with slogging across hill country.

  I made the most of the peace and quiet and went back to sleep. No dreams between the trees. I knew exactly where I was.

  It would take all day to cover the ground to the camp. No night movement. No walking in the open. No official communications with London. Not yet, anyway. No one knew where I was, and I wanted to keep it that way for now. The very best that could be said of my briefing by MI6 and Captain Rhodes was that it had been woefully inadequate. Nothing new there, then.

  At worst, though, something was wrong—not just on the ground, but in London itself. No one had mentioned that Micky or the CIA was involved, or that Sonny Boy had recced my trip; no one had mentioned that everyone connected with the mission had already been killed—like Marie Margai—or was about to be—like Six’s man in Freetown. He hadn’t lasted a day longer than my first trip up north—killed, judging by the squeaky-clean tires on the Mercedes in Makeni, just after dropping off my rifle in the DJ Motel’s parking lot. It looked like whoever was cutting the links out of the chain was equally determined to bury me, too.