by Andrew Brown
He was contemplating returning to his room when a hand gripped his shoulder. Gabriel looked down at a loop of blond hairs running along a thick forearm. Jannie. The South African laughed at Justine’s antics on the dance floor and ordered vodka for everyone. Gabriel’s eyes watered from the burn of the alcohol, but as soon as he placed the empty glass on the table, it was followed by a shooter of tequila. The alcohol exploded in his mouth, only to be replaced by another glass. So the evening progressed. With each round he protested, waving his hand to Rasta, yet the more he flapped his hand, tears trickling down his cheeks, the greater the hilarity around him. Jannie was soon joined by two young Sudanese women, one dressed in a skintight black dress that ended abruptly just below her hips, the other in faux-leather trousers and a loose white top. Their lips gleamed red and pink as they purred around Jannie, letting him stroke their thighs and touch their necks. Monica and Abbey, Gabriel was informed.
Jannie cupped Monica’s breasts in his large hands. ‘You horny little thing,’ he slurred. ‘Whad’ya been up to with your little titties, my girl?’ He could hardly be heard above the thump of the music blasting out of the speakers, but Monica gave him a long kiss on the lips in answer, letting her fingertips brush affectionately over the scar on his neck. Gabriel watched, half-repulsed, but aroused in spite of himself.
‘Your pussy still so tight, hey darling?’
Abbey laughed manically while Jannie made wolf-howling impersonations.
Monica sidled up to Gabriel. ‘Hi baby, what’s your name? I’ve got no panties on. You want to feel?’
For a moment, Gabriel experienced the heady release of pure lust, as the prospect of carnal excitement flashed through his mind. His heart rate sped up in reaction, making him feel momentarily sober. Then his eye caught the next cap of tequila waiting for him. His empty shot glasses were piled in a wet stain on the bar counter. Beside them was a tumbler of whisky, still half-full, the ice melting slowly. Jannie took a small sip, all the while watching him with a little smile on his lips. Gabriel had been drinking alone.
Before he could protest, Monica was pushing her pudenda up against his knee. Abbey joined her and slipped her hand up his other thigh, creeping like some many-legged creature towards its lair.
‘We’re going naked hang-gliding tomorrow morning.’ Jannie winked. ‘Off Jebel Hill. Join us.’ The slur seemed to have left him now.
‘Oh yes, you must come!’ Monica squealed with delight. ‘I promise, no panties. No panties.’
Jannie put his hands to his crotch and flapped them while making some obscene noise with his lips. Monica laughed, falling forward and draping herself across Gabriel’s torso, her hot skin dampening his shirt as she rubbed her breasts on his chest and murmured in his ear. She smelt of cheap soap and sweat. As Abbey’s hand reached its destination, Gabriel became frozen by loathing and allure. It was unbearably animalistic, yet exquisite. Jannie grinned and returned to his slow whisky. No one else was paying them any attention, dancing and drinking and shouting.
No one would know, Gabriel thought, emboldened. This place is untethered. He’d never been with a prostitute, never cheated on Jane. What did all that matter, in this place where insobriety replaced self-reflection? His sudden anger towards Jane only increased his desire to take his body’s impulses to their thrusting conclusion.
‘Come baby, take us to your bed.’ The women seemed to read his mind. ‘We’ll give you the best time ever.’
They had him cornered, hyenas circling their defeated prey, tongues slobbering lasciviously. Gabriel looked around for rescuing, suddenly cowardly. Justine was nowhere to be seen. Rasta just raised his eyebrows and started collecting the empty glasses. He was drunk and in trouble, Gabriel realised now. And he had been beguiled into hedonism, restraint abandoned for the allure of the sybaritic. The room felt like a pressure cooker and he needed to escape.
Monica pouted as she slid her hand slowly down his cheek. Then she freed him for a second, leaning towards the bar to pick up a bottle of water. Gabriel slipped off his seat, brushed Abbey’s intrusive hand away, and dived forward into the crowd. His hands pushed out in front of him like a swimmer. Clammy bodies wiped against him as he slid his way, eel-like, through the throng. He thought he heard a squeal of protest behind him but did not slow until he had burrowed across the dance floor. He squeezed out the other side into the relatively cooler air and stumbled down the narrow path between the banana trees to his room.
He locked the door from the inside and left the light off, scared that they would find him. He dared not go outside to shower. So he lay on his bed, dirty and glistening. You coward, he thought as he listened to the party continue into the early hours of the morning.
Chapter 10
FILTON, SOUTH-WEST ENGLAND
Bartholomew mulled over the implications of Ms Easter’s report for a further day, and when Richards requested a meeting again, he relented. They would see Ms Easter at BAE Filton the following day, he confirmed with the junior officer. It was a pointless exercise, he knew, but he hoped it would pacify Richards, at least for a while. And it would provide a factual basis for his inevitable decision to authorise the recovery of the fragment.
The two men travelled separately to London before taking a vehicle out of the ministry vehicle pool and heading for Filton. There was a suppressed excitement about Richards. Though his facial features and inflection had limited scope for change, Bartholomew sensed heightened anticipation in his silent travelling companion.
On the outskirts of Filton, they passed the decommissioned hangars, once the pride of the BAE Airbus programme, now easing into dereliction. The entire airfield had been closed due to financial constraints, BAE’s plea that the ministry of defence consider taking over the facility falling on unsympathetic ears. The research building had a modern edifice, but inside evidence of neglect was pervasive, the waiting-room chairs scuffed on the arms, the floor unpolished and the reading magazines dating back at least a year. After a brief wait, they were shown into the nondescript meeting rooms, situated close to the reception and public toilets, presumably to discourage guests from venturing too far into the murky interior of British Aerospace. As was his habit, Bartholomew made a mental note of the location of the men’s room.
A tray of glasses and a fresh jug of water, complete with lemon slices and mint sprigs, were positioned in the centre of the table. Ms Easter had opted for a more demur but somehow coquettish look for the meeting and wore a shorter skirt which revealed her fetchingly athletic legs. A rather prim handshake for the air marshal, the hint of a smile for Richards.
‘Let’s get right down to business,’ Bartholomew started even as he took his seat. He wasn’t willing to be drawn into any informal chats with the civilian.
‘Ms Easter, we need your analysis to help us make some important decisions,’ he said, before adding: ‘In part, of course. And please remember that these are military decisions that don’t concern you.’
Short skirt aside, Bartholomew felt an unnatural irritation towards her, the confident looks, the precision-engineered hair, the legs.
‘So, what we are interested in is how reliable … or rather the degree of certainty which we can place on your analysis and findings,’ he concluded.
‘Thank you, Air Marshal,’ Ms Easter said, clearing her throat as if about to launch into a prepared speech. Bartholomew wanted to groan out loud, anticipating a tedious attempt to impress. But her summary was concise and highlighted only the key elements of her report. Frank Richards followed attentively, making notes and interrupting to ask questions with as much deference as the burly man could muster. Ms Easter responded to him professionally, though perhaps with too much lingering eye contact. Richards’s notion of flirtation appeared to be limited to flexing his jaw muscle.
Ms Easter’s explanation of her conclusions only confirmed what Bartholomew already knew: it was all theoretical and the data backing it up was unreliable given all the variables, but the probabilities favoured t
he control-panel theory. And, ultimately, would he take the chance? The anxiety of failing to act, and waiting, would always outweigh the risk of an intervention, and knowing. They needed to go in quietly, using third-party operatives rather than British personnel, someone to whom they could disavow any connection if the operation went wrong. They might have to go to the blast site, question villagers, pay a few bribes and retrieve whatever it was that had been flung out of the blast zone. Hopefully, no one there understood its significance. They could destroy it there and then, rather than taking the risk of trying to bring it back.
An underground intervention to resolve the disastrous fallout from a covert strike … The very idea made Bartholomew queasy. He knew that his stress was severely impacting on his health. His appetite had disappeared in the past few days and his intestines felt knotted. Lilly kept producing her staple meat-and-potato dinners and he heard her tutting to herself as she scraped the platefuls of uneaten food into the compost bin each night. He needed to jettison the Reaper Project, sever his sordid connection with Hussein and then enjoy the last few years before retiring with his dignity and pension intact. But the Corfu property remained a millstone and he knew Hussein wouldn’t leave him alone until the helicopter deal had been finalised. Maurice kept warning him that his blood pressure had risen again. Bartholomew had himself felt the flutter of an arrhythmia at times, but he kept this alarming history from his doctor. And his intestinal flare-ups were becoming intolerable. Maurice termed it ‘irritable bowel syndrome’, which belittled the hot-poker feeling that inserted itself into his lower intestine on a regular basis. ‘Bloody enraged bowel syndrome’ seemed more apt. He wondered if Maurice thought he was a hypochondriac. Then his GP had subjected him to yet another examination, lights being shone into his nether regions as he crouched over in abject humiliation. And still he avoided seeing the specialist.
‘So, based on these hypothetical impact trajectories,’ Ms Easter concluded, ‘I think that one can state with confidence that a portion of the side casing in front of the rear stabilising fin has probably detached and been jettisoned at 65 degrees to the trajectory of the warhead itself upon ignition, thereby escaping the heat of the self-destructing core and remaining intact. The apparent size, the regular shape of the piece and the probable point of origin lead me to conclude with some confidence that the fragment seen on the footage is in fact the rear access panel cover of the Hellfire missile.’
Richards nodded in affirmation, despite the fact that this very statement already appeared in the conclusion of the report. And despite the fact that this was the death knell for the Reaper Project. He was being naive, seeing the situation as a challenging battlefield mishap rather than the career-ending catastrophe that it actually was. Richards was still authorised to fly as a pilot, though it had been a while since he had flown operationally, but the man was essentially a soldier whose experience emanated from an uncomplicated world of action and response, protected from the realities of defence indecision, the paucity of reliable intelligence, the inescapable influence of money over the military machine. There was no thrill for Bartholomew: he knew only too well how MI5 would love to uncover a scandal at home involving the ministry and the procurement of weapons for foreign governments. It would embarrass MI6, not to mention the current minister of defence, and show the internal agency to be the only one committed to ‘cleaning Britain up’.
‘Confidence is the one thing lacking in this entire enterprise, Ms Easter,’ Bartholomew retorted, rousing himself from his internal reverie. ‘But thank you for your work. We’ll take it into account when we make our decisions. And, please, I trust I don’t need to remind you of your upgraded security clearance and the sensitivity of this matter. Good day.’
Bartholomew was in no mood for extended goodbyes and was through the door and on his way down the marbled steps before Richards was out of his chair. The tall man came striding up behind him, his expression serious.
‘Air Marshal, we may still require Ms Easter’s skills. Shouldn’t we consider keeping her on, as part of the team?’
‘Captain, there’s no team here. There’s you and me and an unholy fuck-up somewhere on the other side of the goddamn planet. Just because Ms Easter has nice legs doesn’t mean that we’re going to compromise our position further by dragging some civilian on board to help us make what are exclusively military decisions.’ Bartholomew had stopped to address this speech to his junior officer, but now walked off again, pushing through the heavy glass doors into the blustery wind outside.
‘Fine. As you wish, Air Marshal,’ Richards replied.
The air outside was cold, leaves and grit clattering around their legs. Bartholomew continued to talk as he strode towards the car, almost shouting to be heard above the wind: ‘So, we have a “high degree” of confidence from Ms Easter that there is an identifiable piece of British Reaper missile lurking around a target site somewhere in Africa. What else do we have?’
‘Not good news.’ Richards stopped, but Bartholomew kept walking, keen to get out of the wind. Richards appeared again by his side. ‘We’ll talk in the car, sir.’
The confines of the car weren’t conducive to conversation, both men staring forward out of the fogged windscreen at the Filton litter that swirled past. The car rocked on its wheels as the weather deteriorated, the squalls ripping through the parking lot.
‘Christ, I wish this wind would stop. Makes me so bloody grumpy.’
Wisely, Richards did not respond to this comment.
‘So spit it out, what’s “not good news” now?’ Bartholomew said. ‘I don’t see how this cock-up can get any worse.’
‘The target had a daughter, sir. She’s turned up at the UN offices in Juba – that’s the capital of South Sudan, sir – and made some accusations about the strike. We have a source in the office there, but our operative wasn’t present when the accusations were made, so the detail is vague. It appears that she’s been trying to get the UN military to investigate further. We’ve managed to squash the request.’
Bartholomew was a little surprised to hear that there had been an intervention without his personal involvement, but he let it go, asking instead: ‘Did she indicate any knowledge of the Reaper UAV?’
‘No, there’s been no mention of any drone strike at this stage. She may think it was a helicopter strike. Which would point towards north Sudan military …’ Richards paused, mulling over his next statement. ‘We had our operative in Juba search her temporary residence, with no results. She doesn’t appear to have any knowledge of the Hellfire missile, the Reaper or the metal fragment. Or of its importance. She doesn’t seem to know much. Just really questions at this stage.’
She might know little, but Captain Frank Richards was alarmingly well informed, Bartholomew thought. For the first time he considered his junior officer with both respect and suspicion. Was his Group Captain running rogue behind his back? It wouldn’t be the first time a covert operation had been hijacked by ambitious pretenders to the throne.
Bartholomew started the car. His stomach was beginning to hurt again, a low throbbing somewhere internal, below his belly button. He would make an appointment when he got back to the base. He knew he couldn’t hold off on it any longer.
‘One last thing, sir.’
Bartholomew let the car idle and glared at Richards, allowing his resentment to show openly. ‘Why am I only hearing these revelations now, Captain?’
Richards didn’t appear to feel the need to answer this question, simply giving a little shrug of his broad shoulders before continuing: ‘There was a collateral casualty on the strike.’
‘There’re always collaterals in these strikes. Ask the Israelis or the Americans. Just the one?’
‘The target’s niece. A six-year-old. She ran out to the target as the Hellfire was released. I thought you should know.’
Bartholomew felt his rage surge. He was being treated as if he were some geriatric, too infirm to receive all the distressing news in one help
ing, instead dished out in putrid samples during the course of a parking-lot conversation. You fucking upstart, he thought sourly.
But, still, a child casualty was never good. Same age as his grandniece, he realised, imagining little Sarah playing on her swing, suddenly obliterated by searing heat and smoke.
Chapter 11
JUBA, SOUTH SUDAN
Morning brought only regret. Not just because Gabriel’s head pounded, his forehead slick with sweat, and not just because nausea threatened to break into open retching at any moment, but also because of the blurred sense of things said and done, things which he could not undo or unsay.
The bar area was deserted, the ashtrays still full of butts and ash. Spilt bottles of beer lay on the ground, and the smell of alcohol mixed with the pungent stink of the surrounding city added to Gabriel’s queasiness. To his surprise, Rasta was already behind the bar, bottles clinking as he packed the fridges with fresh beer. Ready for the next session, Gabriel thought, rubbing his throbbing temples.
‘You ran away,’ Rasta laughed, putting a bottle of cold water in front of him. ‘The ladies made you scared.’
Gabriel drained the cool water and tried to make light of the evening’s events. ‘You were supposed to protect me, Rasta!’
‘But you looked happy, my friend. A little happiness in this place … most do not run away from that.’
There was truth in that: for a while Gabriel had abandoned himself to a kind of euphoria. Why had he not let it continue, why did he hold himself back so?
Rasta saw Gabriel’s furtive look across the dining area. ‘Don’t worry,’ he chortled. ‘You’re safe. They are like river rats; they only come out when it’s dark.’