The Devil's Work

by Dominic Adler

  ESCAPED CHINESE CUSTODY / NOW WITH FZA GEN ABASI / SEARCH FOR MM CONTINUES

  The satellite radio Brodie had given me was still in my assault pack. I keyed the handset and tried to raise any of the SIS call-signs, but heard only static. I found myself drifting asleep, despite the injuries I’d sustained. The rear seats of the Land Rover felt like a feather bed, and after swallowing a handful of painkillers I dozed.

  The General’s bellowing into his walkie-talkie woke me, followed by the whoosh of rockets. Oz and Alex crouched outside the open passenger doors of the Land Rover. We were parked in a row of trees next to the road, skeins of orange sand swirling about our feet.

  “It’s OK Cal,” said Oz, looking at the stains seeping through the dressings on my leg, “try and sleep, mate. It’s just a crap air-raid.”

  Bytchakov’s shoulders went up and down as he chuckled. “Jeez, you can buy better air-raids than this at Wal-Mart.”

  I rubbed my eyes, “is everything OK?”

  “Yes,” Abasi replied from behind a pair of binoculars. “The air force is desperate. We’ve already destroyed their ground attack squadron at Quaani, now they send children flying old crates.”

  Above us, two slow-moving aircraft jinked and dodged glittering streams of tracer. I could see ordnance pods under their wings, but to me they looked like bombed-up training aircraft rather than proper warplanes. The rebels were whooping as their truck-mounted, multi-barrelled cannons spat fire, forcing the little turbo-prop aircraft higher. Other men prepared shoulder-launched AA missiles.

  “Why are they bothering?” I said, accepting the binoculars the driver offered me.

  “Aziz,” shrugged Abasi. “He is not a military commander. He always presses an attack, whatever the cost. He is probably on the radio to the pilots himself, threatening them with death if they are not victorious.”

  I watched as two coils of tracer tracked towards the lower of the two aircraft, which trailed dark smoke and fell from the sky like a dead bird. There was more cheering as it exploded. The second plane dropped two bombs, which fell harmlessly out of view, then turned lazily towards Marsajir, to the Northwest.

  Our rag-tag convoy crawled west, along the pot-holed Marsajir highway. The road was pocked with craters and littered with abandoned vehicles and corpses. Going was slow, the scouts at the front of the convoy stopping to check for mines and cluster bomb munitions on the road. The sun shone high, the horizon shimmering like jelly.

  We passed a clutch of burnt-out APCs smouldering by the side of the road, the corpses of Presidential Commandos splayed obscenely next to them. A troop of vultures tore at the bodies, their faces dyed red with gore. Trees burned and smouldered where they’d been struck with phosphorous grenades.

  “This was our ambush,” said General Abasi proudly.

  Alex shook his head, “those must be the healthiest vultures I ever saw.”

  “Wait until we take Marsajir,” Abasi smiled. “The vultures will get even fatter.”

  We arrived in Hagadifi two hours later, a shanty town of rickety shacks bunched around a dusty marketplace. Perched on a low plateau, it overlooked a sludge-coloured river. Townsfolk looked on as we drove through, some waving, others running indoors.

  The General slapped his hand on the dashboard, the vehicle halting by a grubby general store. The rebels of the FZA dismounted their vehicles and immediately started smoking, drinking from their water bottles and wandering around the fly-blown market. The stalls were selling cigarettes, animal carcasses, weapons and straggly-looking vegetables.

  General Abasi leaned on the bonnet of his command vehicle and lit a cigarette. He signalled for one of his men to come forward. “This is Captain Ismael,” he said, pointing at the rebel we’d met earlier. “His English is excellent, he has lived in Britain. I will make him your liaison while you are our guests.”

  Ismael nodded. “I’m out of Leyton,” he grinned. “So, basically, this is a holiday.”

  “Thanks,” I laughed, offering my hand to Ismael. “I take it you do something different at home?”

  Ismael laughed. “I’m a special needs teacher in Hackney. Seriously, this is a vacation. I was born here. My old man was into opposition politics, back in the 1980s. I decided it was time to come home, make him proud of me.”

  “I’m sure he will, Captain,” I replied.

  “Call me Tony,” he nodded. “Wait here and I’ll see if there’s any news about Murray and the rest of your group.” He said something in Swahili to a young rebel and strode away.

  I mumbled my thanks and I took a cup of coffee from a young woman who’d appeared with a tray of drinks. The coffee was hot and sweet. I gulped it down and motioned for another, giving her a ten dollar bill from my escape fund. Eyes-wide, she hurried away with the cash.

  “Cal, shouldn’t we just get the fuck out of here?” asked Oz.

  “We need to find Murray and the others,” I replied.

  “They might have made it back,” said Alex, smacking his lips as he drained a third cup of coffee. Ten dollars bought you a lot of coffee in Zambute.

  “I can’t get the others on the sat radio,” I replied. “We have to assume they’re missing and still in Zambute, else the mission fails.”

  We all stood and shared a grim silence. None of us wanted to fail, leave men in-country. Besides, failure on The Firm was never an option. And if I wanted to take advantage of what Isaac Samuels had told me, a few days and a lifetime ago, I had to succeed.

  “I agree, Cal, we need to see it through,” said Oz finally. He lowered his voice to a whisper, “but what happens when Abasi finds out that MI6 are bugging out of Zambute and his covert support dries up?”

  “Well I ain’t telling him,” Bytchakov replied. “Are you?”

  We trudged off wearily through the market, the locals eyeing us suspiciously. After five minutes we reached an abandoned building, a limp red and yellow Zambutan flag on the roof. The building looked Italianate, with crumbling balconies and peeling stucco. A sign in English declared it was The Hagadifi hotel. It had been plastered by artillery fire, windows broken, the ugly concrete façade pitted by shrapnel. We trooped past a burnt-out taxi, into the lobby. We dropped our kit and crashed out on dusty sofas.

  I pulled up my trouser leg and redressed my bite injuries, Alex producing a first aid kit and a tetanus booster. Ismael appeared with a carrier bag of nuts, hard rolls and palm-fruit. We ate ravenously, washing the food down with mineral water.

  “We’ve got reports from the locals,” said Ismael. “The locals saw a chopper heading north last night. It was flying very low, on the outskirts of town. They think it was damaged.”

  “What did it look like?” I asked, following him outside.

  “Orange,” smiled Ismael, “and painted like a tiger.”

  “That’s the one,” said Oz. “But why north? It’s the wrong direction.”

  I asked Ismael if we could see a map. He nodded and spread one out on the sofa. Hagadifi was some sixty miles due west of Quaani, and over a hundred miles north of the Kenyan border.

  “The maximum range for a fully-loaded Super-Puma would be nearly five hundred miles,” said Alex. He was an ex-heliborne assault specialist, and I trusted his judgement. “I’d guess your route in would have been two hundred-fifty, to evade radar and come in by sea.”

  “Yeah,” Oz added, “plus Idris was doing some tactical flying. That burns off fuel.”

  “Sure, the math ain’t exact,” Bytchakov nodded, “but by the time they flew evasively another sixty miles here… I’d say they would only have a range of another one-fifty, tops.”

  “Mel said the heli was damaged when he radioed the general,” I replied, studying the map. Due north of Hagadifi was nothing but scorched desert, punctuated by low hills and dried-out river beds.

  “Let’s settle on a hundred,” the American shrugged. “Idris’ priority would be to land somewhere safe, where he could refuel.”

  Ismael traced a finger across the map. �
��In which case, he ain’t got much choice. There’s Tano Makaa, which is government-controlled. Then there’s Buur Xuuq, which I would say was a better prospect if you were on the run.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s a manganese mine,” said Ismael. “The Chinese run it and they use choppers up there to move engineers and equipment. There’s a heli-pad, I’ve seen it myself.”

  There wasn’t much else to go on. I’d had no SIGINT from Marcus and no radio contact. “I need to speak to the General,” I said.

  Ismael nodded, “he wants to help Colonel Murray. He’s agreed for me to take twenty men to escort you, anywhere you need to go.”

  I looked at Oz and Alex. “We need to agree on this,” I said. The operation had gone seriously off-track. I wanted the men to buy into my plan.

  “We don’t have a choice,” said Oz.

  “We need to move soon,” said Ismael. “Aziz’s 21st Brigade was to our northeast two days ago. They know we use Hagadifi to resupply, we can’t hang around.”

  Four vehicles pulled up outside the hotel, weather-beaten pick-ups and a Russian jeep. The jeep was a vintage GAZ, festooned with tow ropes, jerry cans and loops of rotting camouflage netting. Mounted on the back was a 120mm WOMBAT recoilless rifle. Rifling through my pockets, I found my prismatic compass. Oz and Alex collected the weapons we’d found at the air base and resupplied with ammunition, grenades and water. I still had emergency rations in my pack, which I broke out between us.

  We were mounting up when an excitable kid wearing shorts and a camouflaged tee-shirt ran through the market, waving his Kalashnikov in the air. He shouted in Swahili, older men trying to calm him down.

  “What’s he saying?” I asked Ismael.

  “That kid is a scout,” he replied. “We send them out on motorbikes. He’s saying that they’ve seen government soldiers to the northeast with tanks.”

  “Which direction are we going?” I said “to get to the mine?”

  “Northeast,” Ismael replied.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Our convoy crept north, under brilliant blue skies. The men in the front vehicle stopped to change a flat tyre, other rebels stopping to have a smoke and brew coffee. Ismael’s truck was fitted with a short-wave radio, used to speak with the kids on motorbikes scouting ahead of us.

  In my pocket the satellite phone trilled.

  “Who is it?” said Oz.

  “Hold on,” I replied. I slid out of the GAZ jeep and walked into the shade of a gnarly palm tree.

  “Having a good war?” said Marcus. “To say the brass at SIS is worried would be understatement of the year. The shredders are working overtime.”

  “This is a clusterfuck,” I grunted.

  “An overly-generous assessment,” he sighed. “I need the CORACLE team out of Zambute now. Where are they?”

  I explained about our plan to travel to the manganese mine, and our capture by the Chinese.

  Marcus listened carefully. I could hear the scratching of pen on paper in the background. “I’ve a couple of observations. First, the plan to capture Chinese electronic warfare equipment was never authorised.”

  “Who tried to push it through?”

  “Duclair and Easter,” he replied. “The source of the intelligence was never corroborated. Their department head wasn’t prepared to run with the operation.”

  “So they piggy-backed it onto Murray’s rescue attempt anyway?”

  “It’s a possibility,” he replied.

  “Maybe Easter wanted to try and recover some credibility by stealing the Chinese comms kit and decided to go off-policy?”

  “And perhaps she cooked it up with her Chinese handlers?” he replied. “Don’t make excuses for the woman, Cal.”

  He was right. That’s exactly what I was doing. The more I knew about Easter, the more I liked her. Going off policy like, if that’s what she’d done, took balls as far as I was concerned.

  “Secondly,” he continued, “we’ve been listening in on the Chinese. They haven’t a bloody clue why a PLA Special Forces unit is fighting in southern Zambute. They’re as worried about it as we are.”

  “Zhang Ki said he’d been attacked by rebels. He said he was within his ROEs,” I replied. “Is there any update on the location of our helicopter?”

  “I’m waiting on it,” he said. “GPS appears to be switched off. I’ll keep checking, but I think it’s fair to say my access to surveillance assets is diminishing. This job is toxic - arses are being well-and-truly covered.”

  “Jesus, Marcus, what’s going on?”

  “I was rather hoping you could help me with that. Crack on, I’ll be in touch.”

  He ended the call and I returned to our vehicle.

  “Why the sneaking off?” said Oz.

  “I’ve called in a favour,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  I sighed, narrowing my eyes against the sun. “I’ve got a contact in SIS,” I said finally. I was too tired to lie, and Oz deserved to know.

  “What the fuck? You know the rules.”

  “Screw the bloody rules,” I growled. “And while we’re at it, screw The Firm.”

  “OK, call in Fallen Eagle,” Oz scowled, “because if you don’t get me killed here, you’ll get me killed back home.”

  I put a hand on Oz’s shoulder, felt him flinch. “You’re the bravest bastard I’ve ever met, but you need to stop trusting the bloody Firm. I’ll call Fallen Eagle when there’s genuinely no hope. At the moment, there still is.” I felt a tremble in my body, hand twitching. I pulled it away from Oz in case he felt it.

  Bytchakov looked at us both, weighing up the options. “What can this SIS guy do for us?”

  “He’s trying to track the Puma,” I said, itching to tell the truth about my mission to unmask the rogue agent.

  “OK,” he shrugged, “that’s somethin’ calling in Fallen Eagle can’t do. Anyhow, calling it in might not make any difference.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “When I was in Trieste, one of the teams went to Kazakhstan on a search-and-destroy operation, for the CIA. I was working logistics back then, waiting for an assignment.”

  “It sounds a different set-up from the UK,” said Oz.

  “Yeah, I guess it was. In Trieste there’s a dude who runs three teams, like a coordinator. It ain’t like here: out there you meet the guy occasionally. Anyhow, the guys in Kazakhstan were near the Chinese border. I don’t know the operational details, but they called Fallen Eagle. I was with the coordinator when it came in.”

  I took a gulp of cold water. “What happened?”

  “Gerhard, the coordinator, said he’d passed the message up the chain of command. The nearest assistance was from the CIA in Uzbekistan, and they couldn’t get there in time. Three full syndicates were lost, nine guys.” Alex shook his head and grimaced. “So all I’m sayin’ is that a Fallen Eagle ain’t a guarantee. It’s a roll of the dice.”

  Ismael strode over to us, tapping his watch. “We need to move.”

  “Fine,” I replied, looking at the others.

  “Is there a problem?” said the rebel Captain.

  “No,” said Oz sharply, “let’s get on with it.”

  We continued north, crossing dusty, drought-parched plains. Now and then a rocky escarpment or scrubby copse of trees broke up the moonscape. Occasionally we passed the bleached bones of an animal, or a burnt-out truck.

  “Wow,” said Bytchakov, “this place is a karmic vortex. It makes Helmand Province feel like Woodstock.”

  It almost was dusk when the signal to halt came. The highway split in front of us, a new metalled road heading north. A rectangular hoarding, in Swahili, Arabic and English, boasted:

  Welcome to the Buur Xuuq Highway

  A gift from the People’s Republic of China

  Ismael hopped out of his vehicle and stretched like a cat. “This road was built with slave labour, paid for with stolen aid dollars,” he grumbled. �
�The mine is part-owned by the Chinese Government. We raid it now and then, so the army have a guard force on site. This bit of Zambute sits on top of the biggest Manganese deposit in East Africa.”

  A kid on a motorcycle appeared. He got off and saluted Ismael, who patted the kid on the head and gave him a cigarette. They chatted for a few moments, Ismael’s face splitting into a grin. “The boy thinks he saw your helicopter, the tiger-painted one. It crash-landed near the mine.”

  The scout begged for another cigarette, received the rest of the packet and returned to his Yamaha.

  “Who needs spy satellites when you’ve got a kid with a nicotine habit?” said Oz.

  I turned to Ismael. “OK, how many government troops?”

  “Maybe fifteen,” he said confidently. “No more than twenty. When we attack, follow my vehicle. If you get the chance, flank them. My men will go for the guard bunker and take the soldiers hostage. Sometimes they surrender or even join us.”

  “Sounds like a regular thing,” I replied.

  “We raid this place for diesel now and then. We either bribe the guards or attack, it depends if the Chinese are there.”

  “What did you do back in England?”

  “I worked with problem kids,” he replied.

  “You should manage our team,” Oz shrugged, slapping him on the shoulder.

  The field radio squawked, a chattering voice leaking from it.

  “The scout reports ten or eleven soldiers at the mine,” said Ismael. He barked orders in Swahili, the rebels busying themselves with mortars and rockets. The weapon-laden technicals started forming up near the road leading to Buur Xuuq. Behind him a team of rebels were setting up a towed 160mm mortar, neatly stacking bombs and equipment along the side of the road.

  “M-66, Israeli mortars,” said Ismael. “Very good artillery, we can shoot nine thousand metres with this baby.”

  We re-mounted the jeep, following the technicals up into the hills along the shiny new road. A hundred metres from the top we dismounted and sorted out our kit. It was getting dark, the sky mauve and blue. Oz handed me his night-vision binoculars. Half a mile away I saw the Buur Xuuq mine, lit by harsh white light. A cluster of low prefabricated buildings nestled in a dip in the ground, overlooked by a whitewashed two-story building, covered with a wall of sandbags. To the east was the depot, a covered area marking the fuel point. A row of trucks were parked by more prefabs, boiler-suited men standing around smoking.