by Andy McNab
I watched him swallow a mouthful, waiting for the inevitable.
‘I can help, Nick. I know that place inside out. I know how to get to the fucker – and to that bitch. Take me with you.’
‘Mate, you know you’d just be a pain in the arse. You’ve got half a fucking steel factory hanging off your leg, so you’re not exactly going to be climbing walls and jumping fences, are you?’
His tone was urgent again, but low: ‘I could give you real-time shit on the ground. It could save your ass, man, and hers. I know these people. I know that fucking casa like the back of my hand.’
I shook my head. ‘Three problems. First, you walk like you’re a crab on stilts. Second, what if you’re recognized? That would put all three of us in the shit. And, third, you’ve got a problem that needs some attention …’ I reached across and tapped his head. ‘We don’t want to make it any worse than it is already, do we? Flashbacks and all that shit messing with the inside of your head once you’re back down there. The two of them would be in spitting distance. Don’t you think that would fuck you up a bit?’
‘I can handle it, man. I gotta grip this shit, you know that. Maybe if I come down with you, maybe if—’
I held up a hand. ‘I do need your help. Real-time int? Yes, please.’ I pointed at the phone on the table. ‘I need you on one of these things, twenty-four/seven. I need you every step of the way. But let’s keep Mission Control up here, mate, where you can stay out of trouble, not down south.’
I was about to sit back when he gripped my shoulder and his eyes bored into mine. Energized became desperate again. ‘We fucked up. We should have drilled that bitch in ‘ninety-three.’
‘That wasn’t the task, was it? No one knew then.’
‘It’s not just about us, Nick. Liseth is pushing that fucking son of hers to the top. You know what that means? It means a narco state on my fucking doorstep. Our kids are gonna suffer, man. And not just our kids. Their kids too. We gotta stop ’em.’
We both knew the future leadership of Mexico wasn’t the only reason he wanted them dead.
‘Mate, it won’t stop the nightmares, the paranoia, the meth – or get your family back. Nor will going in-country and exposing yourself to all the physical triggers. For what? So you can try to face your fears, tackle the demons? You really want to take that risk? A couple of dead bodies and a tray of tacos is gonna do fuck-all for you, mate. You need time, care and therapy to turn the page. I don’t know much, but I know about this shit.’
I watched him sip water with a shaking hand and stare out of the window.
After a few moments he turned back to me. ‘You’ve got to kill them, Nick. You’ve got to kill them both.’
19
I picked up my mobile and moved my chair round to his side of the table. As I did so, I caught a glimpse of the two teenagers sitting opposite each other, thumbing their smartphones in silence by the window.
I leaned closer to his shoulder. ‘Listen, mate. I’ve been lifted myself a couple of times, and I was a PoW in the Gulf. I know what it’s like. I know about the pain.’
I rolled up my right sleeve to show him the pattern of dog-bite puncture marks that decorated my arm. ‘I’ve even had some of that shit. I may not know much …’ I got half a smile out of him as I knuckled my head … ‘but I’ve learned something from it all.’ I let the cuff fall back to my wrist. ‘I bet when you were captured there was nothing you could do about preventing the physical pain. Am I right? They could do whatever they wanted to do to you and you could do fuck-all about it …’
He nodded. I could see his mind ticking over and some of those images coming back into his head.
‘That’s right, mate. Even the leg.’ Through his jeans, I tapped the composite where it cupped the stump. ‘There was fuck-all you could do about it. You got fucked over, and you had no control.’
He nodded again.
‘But you aren’t living the pain any more. That’s all in the past. Nobody’s taking a mallet to your head. No one’s spraying rounds into you. No one’s burning, biting or doing whatever the fuck they did to you. That’s no longer happening.’ I tapped my temple again. ‘It’s just this fucking thing refusing to let go, that’s all. Just your head. The physical shit has gone, mate. They have gone. Liseth and the Pilgrim can’t hurt you any more. You can only hurt yourself now, and the people close to you. The people who love you, the people you love.’
I tapped my iPhone screen and passed it over.
Dino took it. His eyes bounced between the read-out and me as the last drop of rain dribbled down the side of his face. I’d been Googling therapists.
‘Mate, no one needs to know about this apart from you. Contact one of these fuckers. There’s thousands of them.’
Dino handed me back the mobile with a look of sadness. ‘Those thousands cost thousands, Nick.’
I thrust the screen at him, held it no more than an inch from his nose. ‘Bollocks. I counted six of these fuckers in Alexandria alone. They won’t be the overpriced wankers who see you twice a week and then tell you your mum fucked up your potty training. I bet there were shed-loads of people – civilians, military, who cares? – who needed help after the nine/eleven hit on the Pentagon. They wouldn’t have wanted anyone to know they had problems, but I bet they decided it was money well spent.’
I put the mobile back on the table, screen up. ‘So here’s the deal. You promise to get help. I’ll go and lift Katya, and try to find out what the fuck this is all about.’
He steepled his fingers in front of his nose and took a couple of deep breaths. Then he nodded and pointed to the phone. ‘I’ll be on one of those things, twenty-four/seven. I’ll be there for you, man. Every step of the way.’
I picked up my brew and stood. ‘We need to sort out comms, that sort of shit, but I’ll do that as soon as I get a flight. And I’m going to need a whole lot more detail about the casa. I’ll call you when I’m on the road, OK?’
He nodded like a lunatic. Then his face clouded again. ‘I think it’s her, Nick. I think Katya is there. But there’s something you should know …’
He grasped the neck of his bottle like he was going to strangle the fucker.
‘She seems to have the freedom of the place. We’ve only got partial imagery, but she may not be a prisoner.’
I put a hand on his shoulder. ‘I don’t know what’s going on with her, mate, and to be honest, I’m not sure I care. But Anna and our boy are under threat, and Katya’s the one with the answers.’
I paused. ‘Last night, when you were back there, you mumbled a whole bunch of numbers. Were you trying to remember something? A code maybe?’
He went very still.
‘Like I said, man, they’ve got their own escape route. The tunnel goes from inside the house – from inside the kitchen – to the hangar where they keep the chopper. Steel door both ends. Only Liseth and Peregrino know the access code. They don’t even trust the guy in charge of security with it.’
‘Just in case he helps himself to their grab bags.’
He nodded. ‘The money must be in there somewhere. Miguel had to turn his back each time she tapped the numbers into the keypad. But she didn’t worry about us dogs – as long as we stayed on our leashes and didn’t shit on her floor.’
I had one last question before I hit the road. ‘What would have happened if I hadn’t remembered the range?’
He put his water bottle carefully on the table. ‘We wouldn’t be here, man.’ Then he noticed the name scribbled on my cup and smiled a real big one, the kind of smile I hadn’t seen on his face since he was all cock and no brain a couple of lifetimes ago.
‘Perry?’
I smiled right back. ‘The lad even got the short version wrong. You sure our kids’ futures are worth saving?’
PART SEVEN
1
Acapulco, Mexico
6 September 2011
14.25 hrs
It was only a short twenty-dollar ride into Acapulco,
fixed in advance, but it seemed to take hours to make distance between each of the bright blue traffic signs counting down the kilometres from General Juan N. Álvarez International Airport to El Centro.
My head was roasting in the back seat. The rip-off sun-gigs I’d bought on the way to Dino’s slithered from side to side as I tried to escape the rays the curved rear window focused on my neck. It was a really dry heat here, not at all like Hong Kong, but the back of my sweat-soaked shirt was already clinging to the worn-out PVC of the twenty-year-old cab upholstery.
Power and telephone lines hung low and lazily from their poles, feeding the houses and the megastores each side of the dual carriageway. I could have been in any one of the Moscow suburbs Anna was so fond of – had it not been for the sunshine and the Spanish road signs, and the fact that I was surrounded by Nissans, American Ford pick-ups the size of troop carriers, and more VW Beetles than you could shake a stick at.
Volkswagen had been spewing them off the local production lines for years, and white V-Bugs with blue wheel arches were Acapulco’s taxi of choice. The one I was melting in had a modification that hadn’t been factory-fitted: the windshield was coated with a layer of greasy dead-bug juice that made it almost impossible to see the road ahead. The driver had been trying to dislodge it ever since he’d picked me up from the terminal rank, but without screen-wash to back them up, the wipers had simply spread the problem more evenly.
Acapulco was one of Mexico’s oldest and best-known beach resorts. It had really come into its own in the fifties as a getaway for the Hollywood élite. Clark Gable and Elizabeth Taylor were almost considered residents, and Frank Sinatra was so taken with the place he couldn’t stop crooning all that ‘Come Fly With Me’ shit. Then Elvis invited us to share the Fun in Acapulco in 1963, and John Wayne bought every hotel he could lay his hands on and imported palm trees for the tourists to sit under.
The funny thing was, Elvis never actually came here: all of his scenes were shot in Hollywood. But that didn’t seem to matter. Big chunks of America wanted to come down Mexico way and have a touch of the good life, and Acapulco boomed. Within thirty years the place was no longer a hideaway for the rich and famous, and started to look more like Benidorm.
And thanks to its location, sandwiched between the world’s biggest drug producers in the south and its biggest consumers in the north, it had long since sold its visitors – and its inhabitants – a different kind of dream. These days Narcopulco was more famous for what happened in the shadows than the sunshine.
Travelling to Acapulco is extremely dangerous [the online travel sites warned me], and is strongly discouraged as the city has been taken over by violent drug cartels. The Mexican government has little control over large parts of the city; Acapulco is effectively a war zone. Bear in mind that by travelling in Acapulco you are putting yourself at serious risk of being robbed, raped, kidnapped or murdered (foreigners are normally beheaded when killed). Law enforcement officers and local authorities collude with criminals and will not help in case of trouble. Needless to say threats are unpredictable and the situation is volatile.
A few holidaymakers still made the trip to the beach, but they were locals and mostly from Mexico City, about four hours inland along a motorway that hadn’t been there ten years ago. The nation’s capital was a nightmare too, so maybe death on an expensively hired sun-lounger was more fun than it was in your own backyard.
I moved my head again. On the opposite carriageway, three police technicals with machine-guns mounted on their rear flatbeds were barging through the traffic. The only difference between these pick-ups and the Taliban’s was the word POLICIA stencilled across their dark blue or black paintwork, and the fact that the guys manning the weapons were in black or combat fatigues, their faces covered with black balaclavas instead of shemags. It must have been as dangerous for Dino to crash into these fuckers as it was being banged up at the casa.
John Wayne’s palm trees were still there in force, but they now lined the meridian between the dual-carriageways. The bottom third of their trunks was whitewashed, bouncing the sunlight in all directions.
The future of Acapulco’s tourist industry didn’t look nearly as bright and shiny. Every hotel had a vacancy sign – and that just applied to the ones that were open. Many of them hadn’t even been finished. Their builders had given up a long time ago. Multi-storey chunks of concrete littered the place, stained by the elements, with hardly a crane breaking the skyline above them.
The tourist shops selling designer goods their visitors could buy much more cheaply at home had given up the ghost as well. Every third or fourth store-front was boarded up. Even from this distance I could see unopened mail piled up on the other side of their grimy glass doors.
The traffic ground to a complete halt and the driver gave a groan of frustration. Even if my Spanish had been up to it, I was too knackered to ask questions.
I’d had an eight-hour stopover after the flight from DC to Phoenix, during which I’d read all I could about Acapulco – after downloading it from the world’s most expensive Internet connection in the Sky Harbor terminal. I’d called Dino to fill in the gaps, then memorized all the routes from the city towards the casa. It had been covered by cloud on Google Maps. That’s par for the course with government locations, so it looked like either Peregrino already had the right connections in high places or he had put a gun to a few heads.
The more I stored inside mine, the less I had to carry about with me and the lower my chances were of being compromised. I’d ditched the downloads as soon as I’d read them, then hit the airport shops for a couple of odds and sods I thought I’d need for the job. They were safely stored in the bag on the seat beside me.
The one thing I couldn’t quite ditch was the white noise still bouncing around inside my head.
They’ve taken her to Mexico …
I’d understood Sophie’s words, the bruises on Katya’s face and the signs that she’d left her Moscow apartment in one fuck of a hurry to mean the Pilgrim had taken Katya against her will.
But now I had the DEA’s interpretation.
She seems to have the freedom of the place … Dino had warned me. She may not be a prisoner …
All I knew for sure was that they couldn’t both be right.
2
A rash of technicals started to appear on my side of the carriageway too, not barging their way through the traffic but parked up at the roadside, blue lights blinking rather weakly in the blinding light.
Hooded operators manned the weapons; black-clad figures in Kevlar helmets with M4 assault rifles dangling off their body armour ran around getting sweaty. They were channelling three lanes of traffic into one, the fast lane on the left, and I soon saw why. Two bodies lay at the side of the road, as if they were car-crash casualties. But there hadn’t been an accident. There was no wreckage. I was pretty certain they’d been pushed off the graffiti-covered pedestrian walkway above us.
One of the bodies was in his mid-sixties, peppered with gunshot wounds in the chest and abdomen. It was hard to tell the age of the other because it was headless but, judging by the stonewashed jeans and on-trend Nikes, he’d been younger. Blood congealed in big pools around them.
A small crowd had gathered on the walkway, but most of the locals carried on moving, chatting into their mobiles or tucking into their snacks. A couple of guys in suits, sun-gigs and cowboy hats, with badges hanging from their necks, looked down at the bodies. Even their clouds of cigarette smoke couldn’t conceal their boredom.
The traffic began moving again and we carried on towards what I knew was going to be Costera Miguel Alemán, a six-lane thoroughfare that hugged the curve of the bay. The locals just called it the Costera. We were heading for the Zona Dorada, the Golden Zone, home of the best nightlife and beaches. Or that was what the Hotel El Tropicano website had told me.
Surrounded by beautiful tropical gardens, right in the center of the Acapulco Dorado [it boasted], a pretty property of two floo
rs is elevated throughout the day. [Fuck knew what that meant.] It counts with two colorful restaurants open throughout the day, as well as with a piano bar of amused atmosphere and warm service. [All in all, apparently] Hotel El Tropicano is an excellent option for one familiar vacation, very near of the beach and the main entretainment centers of the bay. Their comfortable facilities and beautiful gardens will offer you tranquillity to spends unforgettable days. Our personnel is highly qualified to make your vacations an unforgettable ones. Came with your family and enjoy this paradise.
I didn’t think Anna and our son would be rushing to join me there anytime soon.
Both sides of the Costera were lined with apartments, bars and hotels, infested with lunatics trying to jump the traffic to reach the beach a block away. Every intersection offered a glimpse of sea and sand.
We hit a roundabout and the driver diced with death as he tried to accelerate through a gap. I looked at the closely cropped oval mound at its centre, fringed with palm trees, and wondered if this was where Liseth’s husband number two had given his last public appearance. Or what was left of him – it sounded as if most of his head had been splattered across a wall somewhere else.
The driver muttered something and pointed. We’d arrived. El Tropicano could have been the Spanish for ‘faded glory’. Its whitewashed walls and arches were straight out of a spaghetti western. A swarm of V-Bugs buzzed alongside it, ready to sting anybody who ventured out.
I expected us to drive through the main arch but the driver obviously thought he’d done his job in getting me that far. He stopped with the rest of his mates and shouted something about the traffic behind us, leaving me to fight my way out through the front passenger door. I dropped him his twenty USD, and was immediately approached by three guys in bleached polo shirts.
‘What you need, Señor? Women?’