Dark Asset

by Adrian Magson

  ‘How far off are we from the RV?’ I queried, and sipped some water.

  Masse shook himself and checked the GPS on his cell phone. He seemed to be having trouble finding it, but eventually he said, ‘Fifty kilometres. Why aren’t we moving?’ He was still showing signs of fatigue, even listlessness, and beyond answering a direct question had offered no ideas about how we should proceed from here on. That was fine by me as long as he didn’t abandon hope altogether and become a dead weight on my hands. Dead weights were hard work.

  ‘We’ll wait here for a while and let them get ahead. You get some sleep and I’ll keep watch from up there.’ I nodded towards the outcrop.

  He seemed happy with that and sat back with his eyes closed. By the time I got out of the pickup he was asleep, snoring gently. I climbed the outcrop again, dragging the tarp and some sticks with me, and made a rough bivouac to shelter from the sun. I wasn’t going to be up here too long, but I would need the protection unless I wanted to bake my brains. The tarp would also help break up my outline if any vehicles came by.

  I was lucky; none did. In fact, as roads went this one was strangely empty. It set me thinking about illegal roadblocks, and military checkpoints in the hunt for bandits and insurgents. Either one would slow traffic to a standstill as soon as news got out.

  My original idea was to find somewhere to dig in until nightfall, then move closer to the RV ready for morning. It was as close as I had come to a definitive plan, preferring to play things as they came and prepare for the unexpected.

  Which was a good thing. As I chewed over the merits of moving now or leaving it a while, I heard a number of faint cracks way off in the distance. I checked the road to the north through the binoculars, but there was dead ground out there and I couldn’t see anything to explain the noises. But there was no mistaking what I’d heard.

  Gunfire.

  I gave it an hour before deciding to risk moving again. Whatever lay ahead would have to be faced sooner or later; geographically there was no way round it. The terrain off the road was impossible, with deep gullies and fissures running in every direction. Where there weren’t rocks there was sand and shale. A military-grade dune buggy might have made it, but not this pickup, which would shake to pieces around us in minutes. Added to that was the need to keep going. It was already too hot and unlikely to cool down for a few hours, and at least on the move there would be some movement in the air. We might also find a better spot to lay up than this stretch of sun-blasted scrubland. I packed up my makeshift bivouac and hoofed it back to the pickup.

  Masse woke up and stared at me groggily. ‘What is it – are they back?’

  ‘No. I think they might have been hanging around waiting for us to show up and ran into trouble.’ I started the engine while describing what I’d heard. Three or four single shots, then a brief volley and a couple more singles. Then silence. I figured Ratchman’s crew must have driven off a little way, then stopped to see if we popped out of hiding. It probably didn’t matter to them if they were wrong and we’d gone on ahead, because they were in good vehicles and could catch us up anytime they wanted. But instead they’d found trouble waiting for them along the road – most likely in the shape of an illegal roadblock. If so they had answered in the only way that they knew how – by blasting their way through.

  I bumped back onto the road and checked the rear-view mirror for anything coming up behind us. A large 10-wheeler charging along with its pedal-to-the-metal right now would have been useful, as we could have let it go by to act as a battering ram against any illegal stoppages. But the road from the south was clear. I moved forward at a steady rate, ready to drive off the road and grab the AK if we saw a threat up ahead.

  Sure enough, as we topped a rise I spotted a line of old car tyres across the road. Lying nearby were three bodies dressed in combat uniforms. When we got closer it was clear that in spite of the uniforms they were not government troops; the clothes were filthy and ragged and they wore sandals on their feet, and the weapons were strictly hand-me-downs bought cheaply on the open market.

  I drove round the end of the tyres, which were linked together by ropes, following a double set of tyre tracks in the softer ground and a scattering of shell casings where the two SUVs had fought back. The dead men had each been hit by several shots, their weapons dropped where they had fallen. An ancient Mitsubishi pickup with a broken axle stood just off the road, which had probably been the reason for staging the roadblock. Of all the vehicles they could have stopped to make forced take-overs, they had tangled with the wrong ones.

  ‘Bandits,’ said Masse unnecessarily, eyeing the bodies with cold indifference. ‘Like vultures. They stop traffic and demand money. Most people pay because they have no choice. Sometimes they kill, anyway.’ He didn’t need to say the rest: that some didn’t pay because they didn’t want to and had the means to resist.

  I continued driving. Twenty minutes later we saw a line of large trucks approaching from around a long bend in the road ahead. They were heavy 10-wheelers, riding on skirt-like clouds of dark exhaust smoke and holding the centre line. They were loaded high and covered with roped tarpaulins, each truck with a couple of armed men sitting on top of the cab.

  I slowed and found a safe spot to ease off the road. Masse was dark enough in the interior of the pickup to pass without comment as long as the drivers didn’t stop for a chat. If they dropped their speed too much, however, they would spot my paler skin immediately, so I pulled the keffiyeh around my face as a precaution.

  They didn’t even take their foot off the gas, but blew past like thunder, causing the load on the back of the pickup to shake and peppering the bodywork with grit, stones and choking diesel fumes. The men on top of the trucks had their faces shielded from the dust and wind by shawls or keffiyehs, but none of them waved or acknowledged our presence. For all the lack of reaction we could have been invisible. Even so, I knew they were watching us carefully and it was soon clear why: each truck carried an International Red Cross flag and sticker. Carrying food supplies and aid equipment, all saleable on the black market, they would rate as a prime target for bandits driving around in pickups just like ours.

  The last of the big vehicles went by and was closely followed by a line of smaller trucks, pickups and a couple of old cars. I figured these had tagged along for the protection, as limited as it was, in the hopes of getting through to their destination. I waited for a lull in the flow, then pulled back on the road and moved round the long bend ahead. It seemed to mark a point where the landscape finally began to change. Instead of rocks, shale, scrappy trees and endless scrubland, the colours now began to assume a subtle shade of something almost approaching green. In the distance I saw a darker area divided into ordered squares, with vegetation around the edges, and I looked at Masse and asked what it was.

  ‘The Shebelle river,’ he explained. ‘It comes from Ethiopia through Somalia. This is one of the good agricultural areas in the country. The river brings life to many … and death also. The floods are very bad when they come. Many people live too close to the water. Sometimes they are swept away.’

  The idea of so much casual death and destruction seemed not to bother him, and he soon put his head back and closed his eyes. I let him be; maybe he really had been out here too long and had become immune to the ease with which lives were lost, either by natural or man-made events. He wasn’t much good as a lookout right now, anyway, and I preferred to rely on my own eyes and instincts.

  Several times I was forced to slow down and pull off the road, spotting vehicles by the side of the road ahead. A couple were pale SUVs, but they turned out to be harmless government vehicles belonging to the local administrative regional offices. It made for a fractured drive, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

  We stopped briefly at a roadside stall, where Masse bought fruit and a litre bottle of juice and made enquiries about whether some aid colleagues in a couple of pale SUVs had passed this way.

  ‘Thirty minutes
ago,’ he told me, climbing back in. ‘Seven men. The stallholder said they looked more like soldiers than aid workers. They bought supplies, too, then drove off very fast.’ He opened the bottle of juice and took a deep swig, then dropped it on the floor by his side. When he belched I caught the sickly smell of sugar overlaid with something else.

  ‘What is that, alaq?’ I asked. Alcohol is illegal in Somalia. But I’d heard that the locals make an illicit substance with pure alcohol smuggled across the border from Ethiopia and mixed with fruit juice to disguise it from police.

  He shrugged, reading my mind. ‘It’s not as bad as people say. It has a kick, that’s all. You want some?’

  I shook my head. If I wanted to poison myself I could think of quicker substances to pour down my throat. But having Masse using it was a worry, and I wondered at his mental state.

  We ate as we moved, Masse sipping from his bottle and refusing any water. I tried to warn him off the juice a couple of times, but he ignored me, claiming it had no effect on him. In the end I gave up and focussed instead on thinking about Ratchman’s crew. If they were only thirty minutes ahead of us, it meant they’d been in no hurry before encountering the roadblock. Since then they must have figured we were in front and would catch up with us in their faster vehicles. Just as long as they didn’t have doubts and decided to wait for us to pop up in their rear-view mirrors.

  It was time to get off the road. The closer we got to the RV, the more likely Ratchman would become suspicious about not catching up with us and to begin asking questions about pickups of people along this road. If he did that, it wouldn’t take long for him to come to the conclusion that there hadn’t been any, and that we must be behind him.

  I looked across at Masse to see if he was helping with looking for a place, but he was almost out of it and struggling to keep his eyes open, his head lolling from side to side as we moved along the undulating road surface.

  I decided to talk, to keep him connected. ‘I got the names of two of the men up ahead,’ I said. He didn’t respond, but turned his head my way and stared at me as if I was speaking a foreign language. ‘Ratchman is the leader, and his number two is a guy named Morales. They have history in business with Lunnberg. I don’t know the others, though.’

  He mumbled something I didn’t catch, so I said, ‘Say again?’

  ‘McBride. His name was McBride.’ It took me a second or two to realise that he was speaking in French, and I wondered if I’d heard him correctly. He spoke once more before going back to sleep, and giggled as if enjoying a joke. It was enough to make my skin crawl. ‘He didn’t see it coming. I pricked him and he went pop.’

  I’ve spent many nights in bivouacs with companions or colleagues I didn’t particularly like, but never with one whom, drunk or not, had just confessed to murder. That kind of admission doesn’t make for an easy sleep. The only thing in my favour was that the level in the bottle of juice Masse had bought had gone down a long way and he was soon out of it and snoring like a hog.

  Finding somewhere to hide in an apparently empty landscape is not as simple as it might seem. The pickup wasn’t small enough to conceal behind the occasional tree, which made us visible to anybody driving along the road unless we took off into the back-country and risked coming to grief with a burst tyre or worse. I also wanted to be close enough to the RV to make a quick run to the airstrip before dawn ready for Marten to fly in and pick us up and get back out again as fast as possible.

  The solution came by chance about ten miles short of the airstrip. It was a dried-up bend in the Shebelle river, where a landslide had created a diversion in the water flow, leaving a shallow gulley with a sun-baked crust thick enough to take the pickup’s weight. It was less than a quarter-mile off the road, giving us the opportunity of a fast exit if we needed it, so I parked up and left Masse using the tarp again to create a bivouac, while I carefully wiped out any traces of our passing in the soft earth visible from passing traffic.

  Sleeping wasn’t going to come easy, so I told Masse I was going walk-about to check the area for signs of life and took the AK and the SIG. He was asleep under the tarp before I’d gone twenty yards.

  ‘He’d been stripped clean of any ID … I have no idea who he was.’

  Walking was a welcome distraction and allowed me to give free reign to the thoughts that came crowding in over and over. I needed to go over what had happened over the past few days and figure out what I was going to do about it. If it hadn’t been just the liquor talking, Masse had just admitted to killing Lunnberg’s man, McBride. That meant he hadn’t left the building and gone into the city at all, but had managed to get close enough to the American to get him to lower his guard, then used his knife. It made what he’d told me about finding him already dead a pack of lies and had me questioning what else he’d lied about. For one McBride must have been carrying some ID other than the barcode, maybe a billfold or passport. Perhaps McBride had figured he was only going straight in and out again, so carrying ID wasn’t likely to be a problem. Then he’d run into Masse.

  Trashing McBride’s face had been a cold-blooded and deliberate act to confuse me or anyone else who happened along. They were about the same size and my expectation was that I would be meeting Masse. Finding a white, dead body of a similar size but unrecognisable would be enough to make me assume he’d run into trouble.

  And it had worked.

  That led on to something else, too; such as how Ratchman and his team had found me in the hotel in Djibouti. I’d put it down to chance or good intelligence, but maybe they’d had an inside track. Like Masse.

  It was possible that he’d gone rogue … or had simply lost the plot and saw everything as a threat and reacted accordingly. Like the way he’d killed Ahmed; it had been without remorse or explanation. You don’t kill in this business unless you or an asset are facing explicit danger. If Masse could do it so casually, it set me wondering why he hadn’t put me out of the picture, too. The only explanation I could think of was that he needed me to get him and the hard drive safely out of the country. We were already up against it with Ratchman and his team chasing us, but Masse’s chances of fighting them off by himself would be close to nil.

  Whatever his reasoning, out here wasn’t the place to go into it. I needed to get him back across the border with the hard drive; explanations could come later.

  I circled in a wide sweep, keeping the location of the bivouac a hundred yards off over my shoulder. The ground was rough, but manageable, with a mix of rocks, shale and bushes. We were close enough to the road to hear the occasional hum of passing traffic, but that only lasted until darkness fell. After that, nothing moved. Night-time travel without heavily armed guards was too full of danger from bandits or other predators looking for easy targets.

  I made three tours of the area, stopping at random to take in a little water and eat a couple of the bananas Masse had bought at the roadside stall. It wasn’t a great diet but I didn’t exactly feel up to anything more complicated, even if I’d had it. There’s always a point in an assignment when you just want to bring it to a close and get out of the field; when you want to sign it off as job done. But that’s when you can face the maximum danger; when you allow your defences to drop and fail to remain alert to a possible threat.

  Lucky for me I was in a good position to see movement when it came.

  I’d just checked my watch and saw it was nearly 03.00. Sunrise would come anywhere between 05.45 and 06.00, which meant I wanted to be on the move by just before 05.00 to give us time to make the RV before daylight and scope out the land. As I looked up to check the sky, I saw the outline of a figure coming along the edge of the riverbed.

  He was bent double and carrying a rifle.

  I slid down into the bottom of the dried bed where I was out of sight, and waited. I hadn’t been able to see any great detail, but I figured a man with a rifle creeping up on our position in the middle of the night hadn’t just dropped by to say hi.

  I heard the scu
ff of footsteps and froze. The sound hadn’t come from where I’d spotted the newcomer, but from above my head. Had he crossed to my side or was there more than one? Then the first man appeared. He was still on the far side of the riverbed and heading straight towards the bivouac. He evidently couldn’t see me in the shadows, but was focussed on where he was treading.

  I turned and looked up. For a second I couldn’t see anything. Had the other man gone by me? If so that put him dangerously close to Masse. Then a vague shape appeared against the stars, and he was standing directly above me – so close I could hear him breathing and smell his body odour. He was also armed and staring out over the surrounding area.

  Then he looked down.

  He made a small sound of surprise and began to swing his gun towards me. I dropped the AK and lunged upwards, grabbing his ankles and pulling him off-balance as hard as I could. He gave a yelp and crashed down alongside me in a shower of sand, and I followed up with a punch to the side of his head to keep him quiet.

  He was hurt, but he wasn’t down or out – and he was strong. He lashed out with his rifle, which he’d kept hold of. It bounced off my shoulder in a wave of pain, then he threw it aside and came at me with a glimmer of something shiny in his hand.

  My gut contracted instinctively. Knives are not as easy to defend against as some so-called experts like to say, especially in poor light and on uneven ground. So forget all the balletic counters you see in the movies. Most untrained knife carriers use a wild slashing motion in a close-up tussle because the adrenalin is high and they’ve never been taught anything more refined. That makes them very difficult to stop or grab hold of without taking some serious cuts to the hands and arms, or worse.

  The AK was out of reach and I knew he’d be on me the moment I moved, so I felt for the SIG. If I had to shoot him that was the way it would have to go. But the SIG had fallen to the ground somewhere, so I reached down and grabbed a handful of sand and stones, and threw them in his face. I followed that up with a kick which sent up another spray. He flailed around with his free hand, spitting out sand and came at me like a windmill, grunting each time he slashed the air with the knife. As I dodged back my foot sank into a hollow. I went over backwards and rolled, picking up more dirt and hurling it at him.