The Break Line

by James Brabazon

  London had gone to lengths to impress upon me that because the Americans weren’t involved, there was no high-spec satellite imagery or tracking available. That might have been true, but I wasn’t going to take any chances until I’d worked out who was trying to punch my ticket, and why. It was time to go off-piste, stay dark, keep tight under cover and remind myself that when I told Roberts that Jack Nazzar was the only person I trusted, I’d meant it.

  I was here to do a job that Nazzar had signed off on, albeit grudgingly. That was good enough for me. And the job wasn’t yet done. A Russian scientist playing war games with a proxy army? God knew I’d killed for less than that. But if it was murder Frank wanted, that’s what he’d get—at a time and place of my choosing.

  It was seven a.m. and cool under the trees—when I tested the rifle, it needed to be as near as possible to the same temperature as it would be when I took the actual shot. While I waited for the air to warm, I cut out a square of the parachute silk and then squatted down and went for a crap away from the drop zone. I buried my shit along with the parachute rig and jumpsuit. Then I took my mefloquine, wolfed down cold the main meal from one of the combat rations Ezra had given me—beef stew, which looked remarkably similar to what I’d just disposed of—and kept the other snacks for later. As Colonel Ellard had told us, In war, take every opportunity to empty your bowels and fill your stomach.

  I checked and holstered the SIG and unzipped the padded case that housed my rifle. I rechecked each piece of the sniper system: rifle, scope, bolt, magazines, cartridges, bipod, moderator and range finder. No damage. Everything had survived the jump. I assembled the rifle and inserted a fully charged ten-round magazine. It was my rifle, my scope. If I’d understood Sonny Boy’s message correctly, I’d be taking the shot at three hundred meters. The huts were approximately six meters apart. Judging by the height and gait of the target, he’d likely clear that in six seconds at a straight walk. For a sniper, six seconds is like six years, and three hundred meters extremely close. But I couldn’t afford any margin of error.

  Folded neatly into the pocket from which I’d extracted one of the magazines was a sheet of fifty-centimeter-square target paper. I opened it up. In the center was a twenty-five-millimeter diamond patch to zero in on. I measured out a hundred meters with the range finder and staked the target in position with two spits of deadwood. I walked back to my position, stopped still, closed my eyes and listened.

  Nothing human stirred.

  I opened my eyes. Slowly I circled three-sixty, trying to see, not just to look.

  Again, nothing.

  I lay prone, steadied the rifle with the bipod and chambered a round. I set the scope magnification to times seven—the optimum magnification for the human eye—and focused it carefully so the crosshairs stood out sharply against the dull background of the target.

  I took two deep breaths to oxygenate my blood and then exhaled slowly, ensuring my point of aim.

  Pause. Hold. Fire.

  The moderator dulled the rifle’s report to a dull crack. Deadened further still by the trees, the shot would hopefully be unnoticeable to anyone not close enough to be seen in my perimeter check. The bullet tore the paper open twenty millimeters left of the center mark and embedded itself into the forest floor. I paused, listened, looked and fired again. The round clipped the same hole, fractionally above. The third shot passed cleanly through the second hole.

  I adjusted the deflection drum two clicks to the right and repeated the test. The first shot tore a hole at the center mark, and the two shots that followed went through that same hole.

  Weapon zeroed.

  While I waited for the barrel to cool, I measured out three hundred meters of clear ground—which, owing to the erratic pattern the trees grew in, was hard to achieve—and lay prone again, before adjusting the scope’s elevation drum according to the table supplied by Rhodes.

  I fired again.

  The three rounds grouped around the center—the first a couple of millimeters higher than the subsequent two, which followed each other through the same, expanding hole.

  I knew the rifle well. At that range the difference a cold bore would make to the first shot was negligible. More important was the difference a clean bore could make. The nine shots I’d already fired would make sure those that followed were at least consistent.

  I was making too much noise to test any ranges other than the one I thought I needed. I dialed the scope magnification down to times three and set the sights to four hundred meters so that any nasty surprises on the way could be snatched accurately and quickly: set up like that, a shot aimed to the center of the chest would strike a target between the base of the neck and the groin from a hundred to six hundred meters away. I chambered the remaining round and changed magazines: twenty-one rounds left.

  I was good to go bar one final check.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE RINGING TONE ended abruptly with a terse Glaswegian “Aye?”

  “Good morning, Sergeant Major.”

  The line was silent. Then: “You’ve got a fuckin’ nerve, son.”

  “Nice to hear from you, too.”

  “This isnae your Office phone. Secure?”

  “Not anymore, it isn’t. But we should be good for now.”

  “So, tell me . . .” Nazzar and I spoke at once, and then both stayed silent, each of us waiting for the other to speak first. I had to get the business with Sonny Boy out in the open. For all his gruff Scots stoicism, I knew that Jack Nazzar would have been rocked by Sonny’s death. So I continued.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” I said. “I know and I’m sorry. But he went for me hard, Jack, wild hard. I had no choice. None. You have to believe that. You’d have done the same.”

  Long pause. And then, finally, Nazzar spoke, the hard edge of his tone blunted.

  “No, I wouldnae. Sonny Boy was better than me, Max. It would have been me put in a box, and that’s the truth of it.”

  “Yeah, well. Maybe. He was at the end of his tether, Jack. Properly mad.”

  “Aye, so I hear.”

  “I’m sorry. I did what I had to, to stop him. But I thought he might make it, you know?”

  There was a long pause.

  “He was alive?” Nazzar asked.

  “Yeah, there was a crash team working on him. It looked touch and go.”

  “Ye sure about that?”

  “Of course I’m bloody sure. When do you think he died?”

  Nazzar coughed.

  “In the room. Mason said he died in the room. Max, are you sure?”

  “Sure as sure.”

  “Well, that’s news. Mason said you snapped his neck in the fight.”

  I stopped pacing and stood still. The phone suddenly seemed very heavy, as if the burden Nazzar was imparting weighed down the actual handset.

  “No, I didn’t. I stopped short. Jack?”

  “Aye?”

  “It’s on film. The whole thing was on CCTV. Multiple cameras, probably.”

  “I’ll just go and ask Mason for a live-action replay, then, shall I? Sounds like a typical Six fuckup to me. No one knows anything; everyone gets everything wrong.”

  “No, Jack. Listen.” I paused. I needed to be cautious—even with Nazzar. Especially with Nazzar. My word against Mason’s wasn’t good enough. If Nazzar was going to be kept onside, he’d need details to persuade him. The stakes were too high for him to take anything I said for granted. “Things here aren’t, uh, as briefed, either,” I continued. “There’s some weird shit going down. It’s not like any insurgency I’ve ever seen, and everyone connected to this op is being taken out. One after the other.” Nazzar grunted. “Sonny was working with the Yanks—a Yank, anyway—a CIA agent going by the name of Micky Montague. His cover was CDC.”

  “CDC? Their disease agency? No
w, that is interesting. That numpty captain at the briefing, Rhodes.”

  “What about her?”

  “I checked her out. She’s no SRR, or at least, she wisnae. Until last December she was a Tanky, in Falcon Squadron. That’s CBRN. But she wisnae at Warminster. She was stationed at Porton Down. An’ where d’ye think her last secondment was before being farmed out to Mason for this little shindig?” I told him I had no idea. Chemical and biological warfare wasn’t exactly my specialty. “Brinton,” he said, a note of triumph rising in his voice.

  “Doing what?”

  “No way of finding that out without tripping a bloody great wire, son. And call me old-fashioned, but neither of us wants anything going bang down there.”

  Porton Down was the site of the British government’s most secret research facility. Run by an executive agency of the Ministry of Defense, it was so impenetrable that even the secretary of state admitted he didn’t—couldn’t—know exactly what research was conducted there. It looked like Rhodes wasn’t the numpty Nazzar had thought she was, after all.

  I opened my mouth to speak. I wanted to tell Nazzar that Micky had Mason’s number in his cell phone. But what you don’t know, you can’t tell—on purpose or by accident.

  There was only one other thing I really needed to know.

  “Jack?”

  “Aye?”

  “Did you know Sonny Boy did my recce?”

  The line echoed and clicked, stubble and material rubbed against the mouthpiece at Jack’s end. Silence and then the noise of traffic and a car door slamming. He was moving to somewhere he couldn’t be overheard.

  “Aye. I did. An’ if I’d known then what I know now, I’d never have agreed to you going. Sonny was supposed to be your spotter. You were supposed to do this together, as a team. But he went a long way off target. The Yanks got him to Conakry; we took him from there. The debrief was a fuckin’ shambles, just a load of bloody mick gibberish about monsters and men. The Office ran it from there, and the job was redesignated UKN only.”

  “What sort of nonsense? Anything useful?”

  “Ach, no. Just mad ramblings. I’ve got to go. Keep the heid son, an’ gie it laldy. You finish it there, and we’ll sort the rest together back in Blighty. And, Max?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t fuckin’ miss, ya Paddy bastard.”

  I signed off with an ironic Éirinn go brách! and hung up.

  * * *

  • • •

  HILLS LIKE GIANT green knuckles rippled across the border into Guinea. I headed west, under the cover of the canopy, and found the green-brown waters of the Mong River slipping south toward Musala. High above me, the silhouette of an eagle turned a long, languid arc in the morning air. Flanking the banks of the Mong ran an unbroken line of trees. The canopy was low and patchy. I clung to its shade and cover and headed first southwest and then due south. In places the stream narrowed, choked by cataracts of river rubble or deadfall. Tumbled trees made makeshift bridges. No one had navigated it this far north for many months.

  Maps didn’t record the names of any nearby settlements, but satellite imagery clearly showed a village ten klicks from the drop zone, on the far bank of the river: a ragged knot of maybe thirty houses, some with metal roofs, congregating around a path that headed southeast over the river by way of a concrete bridge. I came up on the area cautiously, the first sign of it an abandoned smallholding spread out on the opposite bank. Nothing was cultivated there now; no one worked the land. Then the river made a fifty-meter semicircular bulge north like a green pimple. I stayed on the inside, my side, under the trees. A hundred meters to my left, the path cut across the bush. And two hundred meters northwest, at the apex of the pimple, the huts and houses of the village spread out under the rapidly rising sun.

  I squatted down and shouldered the rifle. The scope brought the southern spread of the village into focus. Except it wasn’t habitable anymore. Doors had been twisted off their hinges, windows blown out, roofs caved in. Bullet holes scarred the wall of the most substantial building in view—which, from the flagless pole in front, looked like it had been a police station or an army post. Opposite, the mosque stood burned out like a charred skull; blackened windows gaped like empty eye sockets.

  In the streets brightly colored cloths lay strewn about. Empty plastic water packets, tin cans and a child’s bicycle caught the glint of the sun. There was no one there: no guards, no corpses. I scanned the perimeter. No graves, either. This war was like a locust. It consumed everything. Even the dead.

  A clump of trees blocked my sight line, so I edged around farther.

  Seventy-five meters or so from where the track crossed the river, the bridge came into view through the trees. On it stood the single figure of what I took to be a rebel soldier. Five-seven, a hundred and fifty pounds. Camouflage fatigues torn, stockless AK strapped across his back. He faced north, looking upstream, rocking back and forth on his heels. I brought him up in the scope and increased magnification to eight times. His Afro was crazy—ragged and laced with strips of red material. Deep cuts crisscrossed his exposed chest. Sweat ran freely down his face, clinging to his beard. No radio. No ammo pouches. No insignia. On his right side hung a machete, fixed to his belt by a twist of blue nylon cord.

  I studied his face and adjusted elevation to zero. He was looking across me, so I could see only one eye and two-thirds of his face. But what I could see was enough: he was either deranged or damaged. His gaze was fixed, unblinking, his mouth caught between a smile and a grimace. And all the time rocking: back and forth, back and forth. Drugs, possibly. Or battle trauma.

  I scanned the village again. Nothing. No smoke in the air, no dust. Birds rose and fell across the damaged roofs. Nothing startled them. A pair of monkeys picked their way through the trash. I returned to the rebel. If I stayed under the trees and kept going, I’d pass within a few meters of him, at which point I’d have to break cover. If I went around him across open ground, the Man in the Moon would be able to see me, never mind a military satellite. If he fired a shot, it would be heard by anyone not deep in the woods. I settled the crosshairs sixty millimeters above his right temple. His eyes remained fixed on the river. But what he was looking at was impossible to say. His arms hung limp at his sides.

  Back he rocked; forward he rocked.

  I tracked his listlessness through the scope.

  Back he rocked.

  The faintest whisper of wind came from upstream, cooling the sweat on the back of my neck.

  Forward he rocked.

  First pressure.

  He tilted onto the ball of his foot as far as he could without overbalancing.

  The wind picked up. His chin lifted, head snapped straight toward me. He froze, looking directly at me, up on his toes, eyes sharp, focused. His head lifted higher, as if he was sniffing the air. I’d framed him through the narrowest aperture of leaves and branches. There was no way he could see me.

  I shot him between the eyes. He lurched, spun and toppled into the river. The gunshot was quiet enough not to spook the monkeys, and he was close enough to the water not to make a splash that could be heard over their endless chatter. The sluggish current dragged him under the bridge. He didn’t emerge downstream. I reset the scope to four hundred meters. Still nothing in the village moved.

  I pressed on.

  The terrain was rocky. Sparse stretches of barren land spread out—islands engulfed by an ocean of small, densely growing trees. I walked close to the bank under the protection of pockets of gallery forests that sprang up tall in the wet conditions, looking, listening, at times stopping and waiting. There was no sign that anyone strayed off the paths. The Fulah and Mandingo up here were not like the indigenous Limba, who herded the other tribes’ cattle and managed their plantations. Roberts assured me with pride that his tribe moved through the forest like fish in water. Even in the remotest p
arts of Sierra Leone, Roberts had told me on our long drive north, the forest was something other tribes feared, avoided and treated with extreme caution. It was a place of spirits and magic and darkness. “Once upon a time,” he said, “white ghouls like you emerged from it and stole our children.”

  When the bank was too overgrown to navigate, I waded into the water, watchful for crocodiles. The sun climbed. I began to sweat, and stink. Maybe the rebel sentinel had smelled me? But still the forest along the riverbank reeked more than I did. Each footfall released a pungent tang of decay. If he could smell anything through that, he was superhuman. I had been silent, too, and there had been no sound behind me—that was for sure. What’s more, the metal of the rifle was dulled matte green to prevent reflection; the scope glass was shielded by a lens shade and honeycomb.

  But he’d known I was there, that someone or something was there. No question. A second later, he’d have been moving toward me. It was hard not to be unnerved. I kept on keeping on, silent and slow, moving from shadow to shadow.

  Every hour I stopped to drink, filling my drinking bottle with river water. It tasted muddy, but the filter built into the cap made it safe. Green monkeys chattered and whooped in the trees, diving from branch to branch overhead. Where I could see that the river doubled back on itself, and where the canopy thinned out completely, I cut across land, clambering over roots and creepers, through the veil of dense secondary scrub that formed a dusty emerald scum between the trees.

  It was hard going.

  By noon I’d covered ten kilometers as the crow flies, and walked nearly fifteen. After the rebel on the bridge, I’d not seen another soul. The base at Karabunda lay just three klicks to the west. Yet there was no sign of any patrols or perimeter security, or any further evidence of rebel activity. When the sun passed the meridian, it would be time to leave the river and cut inland. I needed to find my position, Sonny’s position, in daylight. I slowed my breathing and looked and listened: still nothing but the sights and sounds and smells of the forest. But the forest can be deceptive. Sound morphs, deadens, twists between the tree trunks; a man standing still can be as invisible at five feet as a sniper in a city at a thousand meters; an entire platoon can pass within spitting distance of an unsuspecting sentry, unnoticed. The jungle is a weapon. If you fight it, however you fight it, you will lose; turn it to your advantage, and it’s unbeatable. But never forget that you don’t own it. The forest makes an unpredictable ally.