Bad Soldier

by Chris Ryan

  Danny gave the captain a dark look. ‘I think I can guarantee that,’ he said, before giving him a brief nod and running across the deck to join the others in the Wildcat.

  Four

  Calais, northern France, the same night.

  A solitary figure stood twenty metres from the side of the main road into Calais. His eyes were half closed against the bright headlamps of the lorries trundling into the port town, interspersed with the occasional smaller car. On the other side of the road was a high fence protecting the railway line. A heavy freight train was trundling noisily past. He wondered if the passengers in the road vehicles could see him standing here, alone. If so, he could well imagine what unfavourable things they would be thinking and saying about him. But he didn’t care. He knew what he was running from, and that anyone would do the same in his circumstances.

  His real name was Yusuf, but on his journey across Europe he had changed it so it sounded more Western: Joseph. Joe for short. He had first heard that name three months ago on the southern coast of Greece, fresh from the overcrowded old boat that had deposited him there – scared and hungry, but alive. It was amazing how much friendlier people were when you gave them a name that didn’t sound Muslim. Now Yusuf was so used to it that he’d even started thinking of himself as Joe.

  Joe was tall, thin and lanky. As boys, his friends had always prided themselves on being strong and tough. Joe never was. He had a pronounced Adam’s apple and his dark hair fell in a centre parting. He wore an old pair of thick glasses that his mother had always said made him look very intelligent. He couldn’t see without them, but they were scuffed, scratched and held together with bits of tape. He dreaded the day they broke. Joe could steal most things he needed, but a pair of prescription glasses would be impossible for a fifteen-year-old impoverished migrant to get hold of.

  It was a cold night, and Joe shivered. He looked to his right. Thirty metres away, set back from the road, a glowing fire burned in an old metal dustbin, with flames licking up from the rim. The silhouettes of several other people were huddled round the fire, but Joe kept his distance, just as he had ever since arriving in Greece. He knew that most migrants making their way across Europe towards the UK preferred to travel in groups. It was safer, they said, and they had more chance of making it if they could help each other. But Joe didn’t agree. He had seen the way people looked at these ragtag groups of foreigners, first in Greece, then in the Balkans, and all the way across northern Italy, Switzerland and now France. He had seen the hatred and mistrust in their eyes. By himself, he could be invisible. And he could move quickly, stowing away in the back of articulated lorries as they trundled across the continent and over borders. On his own, Joe had been able to move freely and easily.

  This final border, however, between France and the UK, was more problematic. Hundreds of migrants had congregated here. High wire fences prevented them from accessing the railway lines that led under the sea – though they didn’t stop people from trying. Armed police and soldiers patrolled the port, and lorries were meticulously searched. Joe knew it would take all his ingenuity to get into the UK.

  ‘Hey!’ one of the figures around the fire called. Joe started. ‘It’s OK, you can come and get warm.’ The man spoke in English, but with an accent. Joe, who had learned the language with no trouble at school back in Syria before the war, looked nervously from left to right. He wanted to stay apart from the other migrants, but he was very cold. Reluctantly, he approached.

  The people standing round the fire – four men, three women – were a mixture of nationalities. Middle Eastern and Eritrean, Joe thought. That seemed to be the mix here in Calais. One of them handed him a bottle of some clear liquid. Joe gingerly took a sip, then coughed violently as he handed it back. There were a few laughs as he screwed up his face in disgust. But then he felt the harsh alcohol warming him from within, and he muttered some words of thanks.

  ‘Where are you from?’ asked the man who had beckoned him over. He had reverted to Arabic now.

  Joe hesitated. He hadn’t discussed his journey with anyone, and he didn’t want to. But the fire was warm, and he was afraid that if he didn’t engage, they’d send him away. ‘Syria,’ he said. ‘Aleppo.’

  A few of the migrants made a clicking sound in the back of their throats: an acknowledgement that Aleppo was not a good place to be.

  ‘How are you going to get across?’ another man asked. He looked in the direction of the port.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Joe said. This was not entirely true.

  ‘You want to be careful,’ said one of the women. She wore a red headscarf and her face was pinched and lined. She suddenly started coughing rather violently, and took a moment to get her breath back. ‘Two of us have died in the last three days. One boy, about your age, from Afghanistan – he got on to the Eurotunnel yesterday, but was run over by a train. It dragged him along for 400 metres, ripped his body to shreds. They only knew who he was because he had his real name on a fake passport.’

  A few of the others nodded their agreement that this was a true story.

  ‘And two days before that,’ said a second woman, ‘an Eritrean man got into the back of a lorry. He must have dislodged some of the pallets inside, because when the lorry started off, they toppled over and crushed him to death.’

  There was more muttering. The group huddled a little closer to the fire. The woman with the red headscarf was looking intently at Joe. There was an expression of pity in her eyes. ‘Family?’ she asked.

  ‘Dead,’ Joe said.

  ‘In Syria? Because of the bombs?’

  Joe looked at his feet. ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘Not because of the bombs.’ He looked up again and stuck out his chin aggressively. ‘Daesh,’ he said.

  As he uttered the word, he cursed inwardly. Daesh was a nickname for the group that called themselves Islamic State. It was a nickname they hated, and Joe didn’t know where the sympathies of these migrants lay.

  He needn’t have worried. A couple of the migrants spat on the ground. Others muttered swear words. There was clearly no love for Daesh in this little group. Joe relaxed a little.

  ‘What happened?’ one of the women asked. Joe felt his expression hardening. He hadn’t told anybody what had befallen his mum and dad. It seemed too private, somehow. Not that he hadn’t relived that awful day a thousand times in his mind. Several times a day, he saw his father’s body, hanging from a tree with a black hood over his head. And he saw his mother, bloodied and beaten, being forced to do obscene things with the Daesh fighters. The memory made Joe’s stomach boil with nausea and impotent fury. He saw the face of a man who had stood nearby their apartment block. He had a scar running the entire width of his neck, as if his grin had slipped down his face. When his men were finished with Joe’s mother, it had been he who had shot her in the head. And it had been under his command that Joe had been taken away, and put to work . . .

  But that was not a story he was going to share here. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. He knew they wouldn’t push him any further. Everyone who ended up here had horrors in their past that they didn’t want to talk about.

  The migrants fell silent for a couple of minutes and rubbed their hands warm by the fire. The woman with the headscarf started coughing again. It sounded very bad, as though she had an infection on her chest. ‘Some of us were thinking of Finland,’ she said breathlessly when the cough had subsided. ‘If we can get there.’ She stared at Joe again across the fire. ‘You could come with us,’ she said. ‘It’s safer in groups. And look, you’re so thin, there’s nothing to you . . .’

  Joe shook his head. ‘No thanks,’ he said. ‘I . . . I prefer to stay alone. And anyway, there is somebody in the UK that I need to see.’

  ‘You have family there?’ Everyone round the fire seemed suddenly much more interested in him.

  ‘No,’ Joe told them quickly. ‘Not family. Just . . . just this guy.’

  The interest waned as quickly as it had risen. But Joe f
elt like he’d said too much. In any case, he had just felt a few drops of rain. He had been expecting this, having seen a weather report in a discarded newspaper that morning that said that a front of low pressure would be moving north-west from the Mediterranean. He put his hands in his pockets, hunched his shoulders and stepped away from the fire. He started walking along the road. As a car passed, its headlamps cast not only Joe’s shadow, but also a second one: somebody was following him. He stopped and turned. The woman with the red headscarf was a couple of metres behind him. She looked concerned.

  ‘Where are you going to stay tonight?’ she asked.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Joe said.

  ‘You must be careful if you’re thinking of trying to cross. I wasn’t joking. People die trying to do it. And they’re searching the back of every lorry . . .’

  Joe smiled at her as the rain started to fall harder. ‘I have a plan,’ he said. ‘I think it will work.’ But he wasn’t sure if she heard him, because as he spoke she started coughing again. A terrible, hacking sound. The woman needed medical care, but that was obviously impossible. Joe fished around in his pocket. He pulled out a small pack of paracetamol that he had stolen from a shop in northern Italy. There were only four tablets left, but they might make the woman feel a little bit better. He stepped up to her and pressed the packet into her hands. ‘You should stay warm,’ he said. ‘Stay out of the rain. Go back to the fire at least. Don’t worry about me. I won’t do anything stupid.’

  The woman looked up into his eyes, but didn’t argue. With a slight bow, she clasped the tablets to her chest, then turned and started to walk back to the fire. Joe continued along the road, but stopped again when he heard the woman’s voice calling. ‘Young man!’

  Joe turned. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I hope you find what you’re looking for,’ she said.

  Joe inclined his head. ‘Me too,’ he said under his breath. ‘Me too.’

  Sending Santa and Rudolph back to the UK was out of the question. Everyone in the unit – or what remained of it – understood that. As soon as the prisoners set foot on British soil they’d be lawyered up, given medical care, fed, watered, the works. It would take the spooks weeks to get anything out of them. By which time, it could be too late. The headshed hadn’t even instructed Danny and his unit to conduct the questioning. No. These two were about to be the recipients of what was delicately known in the trade as ‘enhanced’ interrogation.

  Santa and Rudolph were in for a long night.

  Whether they knew this or not, they were utterly compliant. Fear was a good motivator. Hooded, and with their wrists and ankles bound, they lay face down and silent on the floor of the Wildcat. A strong smell of urine wafted up from where they lay. One, or maybe both, had evidently pissed themselves.

  The unit were silent too. The events of the night had obviously shaken them up. Danny found himself reliving certain moments. The kid with the rotting feet. Tony’s near miss, Caitlin standing up to him, and the look of absolute hatred on his face when he heard that the headshed had reassigned him . . .

  Flight time to Malta: fifty minutes. It was pitch black outside. The pilot was flying low over the waves, with no external lights but with the aid of a night-vision headset. The lights of the coastline came into view through the window of the Wildcat, but quickly disappeared as the chopper headed further inland. Hammond had told them that they were delivering their targets to an interrogation centre. Such places were unlikely to be situated in built-up areas. Danny didn’t know what kind of under-the-table dealings had been done between the British and the Maltese government to allow them to fly in under the radar like this, and he didn’t much care. He wanted to be back home. The sooner they delivered the two scumbags in the hoods to the creeps who were going to torture the hell out of them for whatever intel they had, the better.

  There were no lights or sign of habitation as the chopper finally started to lose height. The conditions outside hadn’t improved much. The helicopter shakily set down in the middle of the darkness. Caitlin kicked open the door and a wave of rain hammered into the interior. It made no difference to Danny, who was still damp and cold after their stint on the ship. He cut the cable ties binding the prisoners’ ankles, then grabbed one of them – he wasn’t sure which was which – and pulled him roughly from the aircraft, leaving Spud to deal with his mate. The prisoner stumbled as Danny dragged him away from the downdraught, Caitlin at his side, Spud following.

  Once they were twenty metres from the aircraft, Danny stopped and tried to get his bearings. They seemed to have landed on a flat patch of rough ground at the foot of a steep hill. He detached his torch from the rack of his rifle and shone it up the hillside. It lit up a high wire fence, with razor wire at the top and sturdy uprights every twenty feet. To his nine o’clock, also at the foot of the hill but further along, was a low building – single-storey, and small. Little more than a hut. As Danny shone his torch in that direction, a second flashlight appeared outside the building, and Danny could just make out the silhouette of the figure holding it.

  The rain suddenly intensified. Still dragging his prisoner, Danny led the others towards the figure. When they were five metres away, the figure turned and walked through an open door into the building. They followed him in, out of the rain.

  By the light of his torch, Danny saw that the inside of the building was empty, except for a staircase along the left-hand wall, leading downwards. He directed his torch towards the figure, who had now lowered his. He was wearing a hooded raincoat, which was dripping on to the stone floor. Danny couldn’t see much of his face.

  ‘Penfold,’ the man introduced himself in a thin, reedy voice. ‘MI6. Are these the prisoners?’

  Danny resisted the urge to give a sarcastic response, and was glad that Spud managed to hold his tongue too. He just nodded.

  ‘Follow me, please,’ Penfold said. He walked across the room to the staircase and started walking down.

  All of a sudden Danny’s prisoner, who had been so accommodating up till now, started to struggle. Danny jabbed an elbow just below his ribs. He doubled over, coughing violently. Danny pulled him down the steps, making sure he didn’t fall. No point in him breaking any bones just yet.

  There was a steel door at the bottom of the stairs. The man who had introduced himself as Penfold unlocked it at three points before opening it up. Danny squinted. The corridor beyond was brightly lit by flickering, fluorescent strips along the ceiling. On either side were identical steel doors with rivets, and at the far end a further door, guarded by two men in civvies, but with handguns holstered to their hips. Penfold shuffled down the corridor in front of Danny and the others, dripping water from his raincoat as he went. ‘Technically speaking,’ he said, without looking back at them, ‘this place doesn’t exist. You’ll need to forget about it once you’ve left.’

  ‘What was it originally?’ Danny asked. He sensed it was an old building that had been reassigned to its new purpose.

  Penfold frowned, as if he didn’t like being asked the question. ‘Bomb shelter,’ he said reluctantly. ‘Second World War.’ He reached the armed guards. ‘It’s OK, you can let our guests through.’

  One of the guards unlocked the door. The sodden party shuffled through.

  They found themselves in a large, hexagonal room. The ceiling and floor were constructed from grey, stained concrete. At regular intervals around the edge were six separate rooms, each of them a good fifteen metres deep. The rooms all had a sturdy door and a toughened glass window, about three metres by two, so that it was possible to see inside. Each room had a couple of industrial-looking spotlights set about three metres from the front, pointing towards the back walls. Danny understood why. With the spotlights shining in the eyes of the room’s occupants, anyone standing behind them would be unidentifiable.

  One of the rooms contained what looked like a basic dentist’s chair. A rubber hose was coiled snake-like next to it. Danny instantly knew that it was a waterboarding faci
lity. The room next to it was empty, except for a three-metre length of chain attached to the far concrete wall, with what looked like a leather dog collar at the other end. A third room contained a chair similar to the waterboarding room, but instead of the hose there was a trolley laden with surgical instruments in sterilised, sealed packages. The remaining three rooms appeared to be empty, but Danny instantly observed that they all had a drain grate in the centre, and a tap on the far wall. There were dark stains on the floor of each room, and the whole area had a faint smell of antiseptic. A further door led out of the hexagonal room, and in the middle of the room was a table with four chairs. A set of headphones lay on the table, with a long lead plugged into an audio jack on the floor.

  Penfold pulled back the hood of his raincoat and unzipped it. For the first time, Danny got a proper look at him. He was completely bald, but not old – mid-thirties, maybe. He wore a pair of round glasses and was very clean-shaven, although his skin was red and blotchy with razor burn. He reminded Danny of a tyrannical twat of a science teacher who’d made his life hell as a kid. Danny took an instant dislike to him. Penfold laid his wet coat on the table, then walked over to two of the empty rooms and opened them up. ‘You can put them in here,’ he said. ‘This one’s the cold room – we can get it down to just below freezing. This one’s the noise room – sound-insulated, but bloody noisy inside. Soon gets them talking.’

  ‘And if it doesn’t?’ Danny asked.

  Penfold gave him a thin smile, and his eyes flickered over to the other rooms. ‘Inside, please,’ he said.

  Danny and Spud dragged their guys to the open doors and pushed them carelessly inside. Both of them stumbled and tripped. Penfold had their doors closed and locked within seconds, then beckoned Danny, Spud and Caitlin to the far door. Danny glanced back at the prisoners. They were both on their knees, their hooded heads bowed.

  ‘The doctors are on their way,’ Penfold said as they left the hexagonal room and entered what was obviously a storage area with racks of shelves along the walls. ‘They’ll check them over in the next half hour.’