Strike Back

by Chris Ryan

  The blackness was total. Porter knew this was inevitable. If they were going to the place they had hidden Katie Dartmouth, then they had to be certain he had no idea where they had taken him. If he knew where she was, they would have to kill him, of that there could be no doubt. Even if they were planning to kill him – and he suspected they were – they would still go through the blindfold routine. If they didn’t, he’d know he was a dead man, and they’d surely save up that piece of information for later. A condemned man is always a nuisance: he knows he has nothing to lose, and that makes him dangerous. So, whatever the plan, the blindfold was unavoidable.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he said.

  Silence.

  He could hear only the hum of the engine, and the rumble of the tyres against the rough tarmac.

  ‘How long will it take?’ said Porter.

  Again, silence. He could feel the Toyota turning first left, then right. Whether they were travelling north, south, east or west, he no longer had any idea. No doubt that was the intention.

  ‘I said, how long will it take?’

  Silence.

  OK, thought Porter. Don’t talk if you don’t want to. Just take me to Hassad.

  FIFTEEN

  The Toyota kept ploughing on over harder and harder terrain. Porter had long since lost track of what time it was. Two, maybe three hours they had been driving. It was hard to keep up, as it was to keep tabs on your direction when a blindfold was strapped over your eyes: lose that most basic of the senses, and the others seem to go as well.

  How far have we gone? Porter tried to calculate. Sixty, perhaps seventy miles. But in which direction it was impossible to tell.

  The roads had been getting rougher as time moved on. He wasn’t even sure they were still on a road at all. At a guess, Porter reckoned they had been driving north, but he couldn’t be certain. They might well have crossed into Syria by now. Neither of the men up front had uttered a single word the whole time, and Porter had long since given up trying to talk to them. They didn’t even talk to each other.

  Suddenly, he felt the Toyota judder to a halt. Porter didn’t react. It had stopped several times in the past couple of hours as it encountered some obstacle on the road, but each time it quickly restarted. This was different. The engine had been turned off. He could hear doors opening. Somewhere in the distance – outside the car – he could hear voices.

  ‘Get out.’

  From the tone of the voice, Porter could tell it was the taller man speaking.

  He levered himself out of the back seat, and swung his legs down onto the ground. Still unable to see anything, he knocked his head against the roof of the car, and he could feel a dull ache where a bruise might be starting to form. He kept on moving, until he was standing, he guessed, just next to the car.

  ‘Where are we?’ said Porter.

  ‘Stay quiet,’ barked the man.

  His tone was harsh and cruel, but there was a hint of amusement in it as well.

  Then, a silence.

  Porter could sense there were people around him. He couldn’t see anyone because of the blindfold. He couldn’t hear anyone any more either: if they were there, they were keeping quiet. But he could sense them all the same. There was a body heat in the air all around him. There was a charged, tense atmosphere that you could smell in the air. There are plenty of guys here, he told himself. And probably all of them want to kill me.

  ‘Why won’t you answer me?’ he said.

  ‘Just move,’ hissed the taller man.

  ‘I can’t bloody see anything.’

  Suddenly a hand was gripping his shoulder. It squeezed tight, and he could feel the muscled fingers digging hard into his flesh. ‘Just move.’

  ‘Not until you take my blindfold off.’

  Porter dug his heels into the ground. The man was still holding on to his shoulder. Stand my ground, Porter thought. We have to start this right. Once they start treating me like a prisoner rather than a negotiator, then I’m done for.

  The grip on his shoulder started to relax.

  ‘You’re not allowed to see the outside of the building,’ said the taller man. ‘It is too dangerous for us. You must understand this. Now, allow me to take you inside. Then we can remove the blindfold.’

  ‘And bring Hassad to see me?’

  ‘You will meet the man you have come to see, yes.’

  Porter started walking. The taller man was guiding him. Underneath, he could tell the ground was soft and sandy. Maybe they were out in the Syrian Desert somewhere. He could sense men all around him, and caught a couple of whispers, but no one was talking out loud. Within a few seconds, they had gone inside some kind of doorway. It was warm – he could sense the temperature change instantly – and he was being led along a corridor. He tried counting the paces: without being able to see anything, it was the only way of getting a sense of the size of the place. Thirty, he reckoned, which made the corridor only about twenty metres long. He started to be steered down a staircase. Ten, fifteen, twenty steps, he counted. That meant they were only one floor down, probably in a basement. Another corridor. This time they walked only about five metres. Then they stopped, and the man let go of his shoulder.

  ‘Can we lose the bloody blindfold now?’ snapped Porter.

  He could hear his voice echoing around the cramped corridor: from the time it took his voice to bounce back from the walls, he reckoned it was just a short corridor, and at most a couple of rooms.

  There was no reply.

  Porter could hear the sound of a key being turned in a lock. Then a bolt being shifted back. Next, there was a sudden shove against him, and he was bundled into the room.

  ‘Getting your fucking hands off me,’ he snarled.

  Another shove. This time Porter could feel four pairs of hands pushing him forwards. They were strong: the skin on the hands was gnarled and tough, like the sole of an old boot, and the muscles behind them were toned and fit. The force of the blow took Porter by surprise and he stumbled. His hands were flailing out desperately – the blindfold meant he still couldn’t see anything – and that made it even harder for him to regain his balance. His feet were already wobbling beneath him as the next thump hit him in the middle of the spine. A ripple of pain tore through him. A boot was crashing into his ankles. He could feel himself starting to fall. His arms reached out to grab hold of something, but there was nothing there apart from thin air. He was hurtling towards the ground. There was a moment of sheer terror as he realised he had no idea what he was falling towards: it could be hard stone, it might be shards of glass, they could have tossed him into a well to drown him. In a brief instant, he could remember his instructors in the Regiment telling him that one of the ways the Iraqis tortured their prisoners was to blindfold them, then push them downstairs, because the terror of falling without knowing where you were going was more than most men could bear. I can see their point, he thought grimly. He had thrown his arms around his face to protect it. In the next instant, his body was crashing into the ground. There was something soft and damp on the surface of the floor. Straw, maybe. And beneath that stone. He could feel some bruising on his knees and around his ribs where he had taken the worst impact of the fall, but apart from that he was intact. Nothing broken: he’d have felt the pain by now if a bone had snapped. He felt around. Whether the two men were still standing in the doorway, he had no idea.

  ‘Where the fuck is Hassad?’ he growled.

  Silence.

  He could hear one of the men breathing. And he could hear his own voice echoing around the tiny room.

  ‘I’m supposed to be his bloody guest,’ shouted Porter. ‘Why the fuck are you treating me like this?’

  Porter started to lift himself up from the floor. His hands were reaching up to the back of his head to untie the blindfold. But the knots were strong, and it was taking a moment to unpick them. He started to stand up – and as he did so, the door slammed shut. He could hear the turning of the key in the lock. And then h
e could hear the sound of metal scratching against metal as the bolt was pushed into place.

  He pushed himself up against the door, slamming his fists against it. ‘Take me to see Hassad,’ he shouted.

  The words echoed around the room, taunting him like a hundred different mocking voices.

  But the only response was the tread of four sets of boots walking away along the corridor. And then a laugh.

  ‘Fuck it,’ he muttered.

  For a moment, Porter just rested against the side of the door. He was catching his breath. And, more importantly, trying to catch his thoughts as well.

  What the hell have they done to me?

  Why have they brought me here?

  He started to unpick the knots on the blindfold. It was slow and frustrating, but at least it gave him something to do. It stopped the questions raging through his head: Where have they brought me? Why are they treating me like this? Has it all gone wrong already? Slowly the blindfold came free. He unwrapped the black cloth from his face, and threw it to the floor.

  ‘Shit,’ he said. Maybe I was better off not being able to see anything.

  The cell measured ten feet by fifteen. Up by the doorway, there was enough room for Porter to stand up, but the ceiling sloped away fast, so that by the other end it was no more than four feet high. There was a slit window at the far end of the room, measuring no more than a foot across, to a depth of six inches. It looked out onto a wall, and had bars across it. Outside, it was dark already, but the moon was shining, and a few weak glimmers of light were managing to trickle through the tiny window. It took Porter a few seconds to adjust his eyes. For what? he wondered. There was some straw tossed across the rough stone floor, but it must have been here for at least a year, Porter reckoned, because it was damp and sodden with dirt. He knelt down to where he had fallen from the doorway. There was some smeared blood on the floor, but he could tell it wasn’t his: it was caked crimson and dry, so it must have been at least a day or two old. Next to it there was a human tooth, with some dried blood caked around its torn root, which looked if it had fallen from a man’s mouth during a beating. Porter kicked it away with the toe of his boot, then explored the rest of the cell. There was some writing on the wall but all of it was in Arabic: some of the letters looked like they had been scratched into the walls with a man’s fingernails. In one corner was the only object of any sort in the room, a metal bucket with a vile, putrid smell rising out of it. The bucket was half filled with water, and there was a human turd floating on its scummy surface.

  So much for the legendary Arab hospitality, thought Porter bitterly.

  He leant back against the wall. He felt exhausted. As he looked into the darkness, he tried to take stock of what had just happened. He had thought for the last couple of days about what he would do when he got here, about how he would handle the kidnappers, and how he would handle Hassad. But he’d hadn’t expected to be thrown straight into a prison.

  Whatever was about to happen next, it wasn’t going to be good. There was no point in kidding himself about that.

  Maybe I’ve miscalculated, he thought. Who knows who we killed on that mission all those years ago? A dozen or more Hezbollah guys had been taken out on that job. We weren’t even counting. It could have been somebody’s father or brother. They might well have been looking for revenge all this time. After all, nobody clings on to a grudge like an Arab. And nobody is ever more determined to take their vengeance in blood.

  Maybe Hassad just said I could come out here so that he could kill me.

  And who could blame him?

  There’s unfinished business between us and he probably knows it.

  Perhaps this is how it ends. A short, brutal fight in a dark cell. And then a knife to the throat.

  Porter sat down on the straw, resting his back against the wall. The clouds had obscured the moon, and the cell was plunged into near total darkness. Up above, Porter could hear a couple of vehicles move around, and then he heard a couple of shouts. One of the commands appeared to be in English, but Porter reckoned he must have misheard. Soon, it fell completely silent. He had no idea what time it was – the Firm hadn’t supplied him with a watch and it was years since he’d owned one himself – but he guessed it must be at least midnight. Friday morning already, he told himself. Tomorrow night Katie Dartmouth will have been executed. And they can toss her into whatever grave they have already dug for me.

  Peering into the darkness, Porter decided that he didn’t mind dying that much, just so long as it was quick and painless. If he was being honest with himself, he’d died a long time ago. The moment that Hassad had come back from unconsciousness and shot my mates, my life was over. There was nothing worth living for after that. I was just punching out the hours at the factory, until the foreman called the whistle on my time.

  But now at least I’ve done something for Sandy, he thought.

  And regrets? Christ, where would you even start? But right at the top of the list would be not killing the Hassad bastard.

  He could hear the turning of the key in the lock. Porter’s muscles tensed as soon as he heard the mechanism start to move. He could hear the rusty, scratchy bolt being thrown back. And then the door started to open.

  Porter stood up.

  A man was walking into the room. He must have weighed at least three hundred pounds, but like a sumo wrestler, it was strong, meaty flesh, as much muscle as flab. He was wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt. His face was pudgy and mean, dark-coloured, and with tiny eyes and a small nose like a pig’s.

  And in his hand, he was carrying a strip of thick, black hosepipe.

  Porter instinctively stepped backwards.

  ‘Where the hell is Hassad?’ he snapped.

  The man said nothing.

  ‘We had a deal,’ said Porter, the anger evident in every syllable.

  The man was cradling the hosepipe in the palm of his fist.

  ‘I spoke to Hassad, and he told me to meet him here,’ Porter shouted. ‘He gave me his word, soldier to soldier. I saved the bastard’s life once. Doesn’t that mean a sodding thing to you people?’

  The man took another step forward. His eyes were staring straight into Porter, and there was something about his expression that made Porter nervous. He’d seen it dozens of times before on drunks tooled up and high on the prospect of violence.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ said Porter.

  ‘Your worst nightmare,’ replied the man. He spoke in cold, slow English, with a heavy Middle Eastern accent.

  He cracked the hosepipe. It lashed through the air, smashing into the side of Porter’s chest. The plastic snapped into his shirt and then into his skin with the force of a hailstorm of bullets. Porter screamed out in pain: a howl of agony that started somewhere deep inside his lungs, and erupted through his mouth with the force of a volcano. As he did so, he was staggering backwards, but his head was cracking against the narrow, sloping ceiling. ‘Get the fuck away from me,’ Porter shouted.

  The hosepipe cracked through the air once again. Instinctively, Porter raised his hands to protect himself but it was no good. It smashed past his hands, and laced itself around his chest, neck and throat. The force of the impact rocked him back, crashing his head once more against the low ceiling. He could feel his eyes dancing and his brain spinning. The blows were emptying all the air out of his lungs, and sending a bolt of pain stabbing through him.

  Underneath him, Porter could feel his knees buckling. He was reaching out for something to hold on to but there was nothing there.

  The whip crashed down once more.

  ‘Who the fuck …’ mumbled Porter, hardly even able to breathe.

  But the words died on his lips.

  He had already lost consciousness.

  SIXTEEN

  Porter opened first one eye, then the other.

  He was half awake, half asleep, and in that dreamlike state he could barely remember what had happened to him. His throat was parched dry, and his stomach
felt as if it was only slowly recovering from a violent sickness. He could recall the outlines of his mission, arriving in Beirut, travelling halfway across the Lebanon, and then being met by the men who were supposed to take him to meet Hassad.

  And then he remembered where it had all gone wrong, and suddenly he woke up completely.

  ‘Shit,’ he muttered.

  He could hear the fear and dread in his own voice.

  Porter was strapped to a chair, and the chair itself appeared to be nailed into the floor. There were ropes around his chest, his arms and his legs, making it impossible for him to do more than twitch a few muscles. They must have come in during the night to strap me up, he told himself grimly. To make sure that I couldn’t cause any trouble when I came round from the beating.

  But why?

  A few pale glimmers of light were sneaking through the tiny window of the cell. It must be morning, Porter told himself, although he had no way of knowing for sure what time it was or even which day.

  The door started to creak open. Porter followed it with his eyes, and found it impossible to suppress a glimmer of hope that it might be Hassad. Disappointment, he knew, was inevitable. As the door swung completely open, the same fat bastard who had whipped him into unconsciousness last night stepped slowly into the room. Same black clothes. Same pudgy face. And the same streak of pure violence running through his eyes.

  Porter looked straight at him, and he could feel every muscle in his body tensing in anger, but he resolved to remain silent.

  The man took two paces forward, so that his imposing bulk was just five feet away from the chair to which Porter was strapped.