Days of the Dead

by David Monnery

  ‘Christ,’ Stoneham said, ‘are we supposed to bring them out with us?’

  Greaves sighed. ‘If you can. I think that’s another decision that can only be taken when the time comes. As far as Her Majesty’s Government is concerned the important thing is to get in and out without leaving any British fingerprints, and as far as I’m concerned the number-one priority is getting you all back in one piece. Working within those parameters…’ He shrugged. ‘But to get back to where we were. Shepreth – that’s the MI6 man – will have the primary responsibility for grabbing the records and taking care of Bazua; you will take out the boats and assist him in whatever other ways are necessary. Is that clear?’ he asked, thinking it was anything but.

  The objectives were diverse, the chain of command confused, and there’d be no chance of a rescue if things went badly wrong.

  But if the men in front of him shared his doubts, there was no sign of it on their faces. All four of them had an expectant gleam in their eyes, like kids who’d been promised an adventure in the woods.

  ‘We’ll clarify as we go along,’ Wynwood said.

  On Providencia the days were passing slowly. Shepreth and Carmen were seeing a lot of each other – it seemed safer to pretend that they were strangers enjoying a holiday romance than unattached loners with no apparent agenda, and if Shepreth had had his wish they would have been doing more than pretending. In Cartagena he had begun to hope that she reciprocated some of his feelings, but since their return to the island she had retreated back inside herself. Shepreth hoped it was the proximity of her sister rather than second thoughts about him which had caused the change.

  He had not tried to keep her in the dark about the imminent operation, telling himself that she would be needed to reassure the women once they were released. Which might well be true, but it wasn’t the real reason he was wilfully ignoring every security regulation in the book. He was emotionally involved, and pleased about it. He had a personal stake, and he liked it that way. He couldn’t see any reason why his professional obligations should come into conflict with his personal loyalties but if they did then he’d follow his conscience. And if that cost him his job, then the hell with it. He wanted Carmen, but that was only the half of it. He wanted to feel better about himself.

  For her part, Carmen was only too aware of Shepreth’s more basic urges, and at times the temptation to respond was almost irresistible. But she didn’t let herself. It would have been more than a betrayal of her sister – it would have been wrong for her and Shepreth too. She liked him, and she could already imagine falling in love with him, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that jumping into bed with him in the middle of all this would cause either or both of them to emotionally short-circuit.

  When it was over…well, then she’d be more ready to trust her own feelings and to believe that his interest was more than an awkward blend of lust and sympathy. In the meantime she tried not to let herself think about what might be going on in the house on the other side of the island, and not to let impatience rule her days.

  She was not the only one eager for action. Docherty was once good at waiting, but age had made him more impatient, and he missed his wife. He liked both Shepreth and Carmen, but apart from hurried meetings in the hotel room, he had no contact with them. He liked Providencia, but he’d finished his book and the three tapes he’d bought for the Walkman were wearing out. He’d walked just about every path on the island by the Tuesday, and he’d never been one for just lying on a beach.

  When Shepreth delivered the news of the SAS team’s imminent arrival he breathed a deep sigh of relief, but later that evening he noticed that the age-old mix of fear and excitement had acquired a new ingredient – guilt. He had always thought that there had to be things worth risking his life for, but the older he got the fewer they seemed to be, and he wasn’t completely sure that Angel Bazua was one of them.

  Or that Isabel would think he was.

  11

  Providencia was a small island, making secret meetings hard to arrange. If the four of them were seen gathering in one of the more secluded spots then suspicions were likely to be aroused, and on balance Docherty reckoned that a meeting in one of the small settlements, in full view of the locals, carried the lesser risk. So he and Shepreth first ‘bumped into each other’ in the bar of an Aguadulce hotel, then ‘just happened to wind up in conversation’ with two fellow-countrymen who had just arrived from San José.

  Joss Wynwood and Terry Stoneham both looked fit, Docherty thought. In fact, almost too fit for the travellers they were supposed to be. He had met them both before, but they were from a later SAS generation, and he didn’t know either of them that well. He had spent more time with Stoneham, particularly in the days following the Samarkand hijack business, but he was also well aware of Wynwood’s reputation and pleased to see that the Welshman had been chosen to lead the SAS team.

  After about ten minutes of innocent male chatter about football, women and the local beer, Wynwood quietly wondered whether this might not be the best place to talk.

  Docherty took one last look round the room. There didn’t seem to be anyone in earshot, and in any case the people they most needed to worry about would have a hard job understanding English, particularly the Welsh and Scottish versions spoken by Wynwood and himself. And talking here would certainly look potentially less suspicious than hiding in a hotel room or wandering down to the beach together in the dark. ‘Aye,’ he decided. ‘Why not?’

  ‘The other two will be here tomorrow,’ Wynwood told Docherty and Shepreth. ‘Blackman and McCall – do you know them?’

  Docherty shook his head.

  ‘They’re full of bullshit, but I’m told they’re reliable when it counts,’ Wynwood said. ‘Terry and I will hire a boat in the morning and go for a ride. After dark we’ll be picking up the you-know-what, which we’ll need to stash somehow – I don’t fancy leaving the stuff in the boat for twenty-four hours.’

  Docherty thought for a moment. ‘On the hill above the target,’ he suggested. ‘We can dig a scrape in the trees.’

  ‘Sounds good. Have you taken a look at the seaward side yet?’

  ‘I have,’ Shepreth said. ‘We took one of the tour boats which circle the island. It kept much further out from the shore in that sector, but I got a reasonably good look through the glasses. There were a couple of men on the dock with SMGs – Uzis, I think – but they didn’t look like they were expecting trouble. The wire fence follows the shoreline by the way, just inside the trees, and there’s a gate by the dock.’

  ‘Electrified, I presume,’ Wynwood said.

  ‘Nope,’ Docherty told him.

  ‘Christ, they’re making it easy for us.’

  Docherty shrugged. ‘Not many people break into prisons,’ he said.

  ‘I suppose not,’ Wynwood muttered. ‘What’s our best estimate of enemy strength?’

  ‘We don’t really have one,’ Docherty admitted. ‘There’s no way of seeing right into the compound, and however many people there are in there, they never seem to leave. Carmen watched the place for two days. She saw four officers visit, but nobody else went in or out.’

  ‘Sounds like a social club,’ Wynwood commented.

  ‘It is one.’

  ‘Sounds like a brothel,’ Stoneham observed.

  ‘It’s that too,’ Docherty said, ‘only I don’t think the women are getting paid. One of them’s Carmen’s sister, by the way.’

  ‘Ah,’ Wynwood said. That hadn’t been in the briefing.

  ‘That’s why she’s here,’ Docherty explained. ‘What are your orders about the women? What are the rules of engagement, come to that?’

  Wynwood smiled. ‘I don’t think there are any.’ He looked at Shepreth. ‘But MI6 is supposed to be taking out Comrade Bazua.’

  ‘Are they indeed?’ Docherty asked.

  ‘If possible,’ Shepreth said curtly. ‘The records are more important. Without them, Bazua’s days will be numbered in any case
.’

  ‘And the women?’ Docherty asked again.

  ‘We’ll take ’em with us if we can,’ Wynwood said. ‘If there’s twenty of them, they won’t all fit in the boat.’

  ‘Carmen will have to come in with us,’ Shepreth said. ‘She’ll be able to reassure the other women, and we may need help from them.’

  Wynwood grimaced. ‘Makes sense,’ he agreed.

  ‘You were complaining that it sounded too easy,’ Docherty reminded him.

  Next morning Wynwood and Stoneham walked down to the dock in Aguadulce and took their time picking out a boat for hire. Since it was the low season the choice wasn’t great, but there was one sturdy-looking eight-metre boat which looked more than adequate. It was fitted out for deep-sea fishing and reminded Wynwood of Humphrey Bogart’s boat in To Have and Have Not. Now all he had to do was train Stoneham to walk like Walter Brennan and find himself a Lauren Bacall.

  Not that he needed one. For a few seconds he let Sarah swim round his mind, and could hardly believe how much he missed her.

  Stoneham, meanwhile, was negotiating with the boat’s owner, an English-speaking West Indian sporting a Boston Red Sox baseball cap. He was initially reluctant to let them have the boat without a chaperone, but once Wynwood had demonstrated that he could handle the boat, knew what a reef was and was prepared to pay twice what the boat was worth for a week’s hire, the objections seemed to melt away. ‘But no drugs!’ was his parting shot. ‘Just girls,’ Wynwood agreed. ‘And a small arsenal,’ Stoneham added under his breath.

  They spent the morning circling the island at a leisurely pace, getting used to the boat and stopping on two occasions to make use of the snorkelling equipment they had also hired. It was the second time in a year that Wynwood had enjoyed the beauties of the reef – in the previous autumn he had honeymooned on the similarly named island of Providenciales in the Turks and Caicos Islands, where his old SAS comrade Worrell Franklin ran a clinic with his Gambian wife.

  Soon after two they passed the target’s dock for the second time, and as on the previous occasion there were two men on guard. This time they were both smoking, and Wynwood was sure he could detect the smell of marijuana across the water. The dope was probably a first line of defence against the Latino pop which was pouring from their boom box, but if things got really bad they could always shoot themselves with the Uzis that were leaning against one of the concrete capstans.

  Half an hour later the two SAS men docked the boat at Santa Isabel and washed down a delicious lunch of fresh lobsters with tolerable local beer. Stoneham leaned back in his chair, belched and announced that a soldier’s life was sometimes hard to bear.

  Wynwood was glad his companion had cheered up – on the flight from RAF Brize Norton he had seemed almost suicidal.

  They got back to the boat with about three hours of daylight remaining, and Wynwood steered them away from the island on a north-north-west heading. An hour and a half later they reached the prearranged spot. Stoneham decided to try his hand with a fishing rod, something he had never tried before, and after a while he realized why. Wynwood collected a beer from their cooler and watched the sun going down over the empty sea, thinking about Sarah and how lucky he was.

  ‘Nice place,’ Bonnie McCall said, surveying the activity on Avenida Colombia. He and Blackie Blackman were sitting on the wall between the beach and the road, watching the ebb and flow of San Andrés Town’s night-life. The other side of the Avenida was lined with busy hotels, and the smell of frying fish made Blackie feel almost nostalgic for Blackpool.

  ‘Pity we can’t make the most of it,’ he said, as their eyes swivelled to follow two nubile locals. One of the girls said something in Spanish, the other glanced over her shoulder, and both giggled.

  ‘We promised the boss we’d be good,’ Bonnie said in a tone of mock anguish.

  Neither man said anything for a couple of minutes; they just sat there listening to the swish of the waves behind them and the confused rhythms of competing discos further up the road.

  ‘It’s all a bit unreal, isn’t it?’ Blackie said after a while.

  ‘Yeah. I was just thinking that I should have told my folks we were off on a jaunt. I didn’t want them to worry, but if I don’t beat the clock they’re going to get a hell of a shock.’

  ‘Nah,’ Bonnie said. ‘What’s the point of worrying them and then giving them a shock?’

  ‘Yeah, maybe.’

  ‘Yeah, well. So should we have another pint, do you think?’

  Blackie shook his head. ‘No, let’s be really good. I’ve got a feeling we may be needing all our brain cells tomorrow.’

  It was two minutes to eight when Wynwood heard the plane in the distance, and soon he could see it – a growing black speck in the star-filled sky to the north. It was a Cessna of the type most frequently used by drug smugglers, and had been chosen for that very reason. Why should the American operatives in their AWACS and satellite-tracking rooms take more than a passing interest in a smuggler’s plane heading south towards Colombia?

  The Cessna was almost overhead now, and first one, then a second, parachute appeared, pale white in the moonlight, drifting slowly down. The first of the crates hit the water with a mute splash some two hundred metres away, the second moments later not half that distance from the boat. Stoneham engaged the engine and began chugging towards it.

  A few minutes later both crates had been manhandled on to the deck. The two men disengaged the parachute lines, knotted the material around rocks Wynwood had collected for that purpose on the beach at Santa Isabel, and threw them overboard. They then turned their attention to the crates’ contents. Inside the first, tightly wrapped in waterproof oilskin sacks, were six Heckler & Koch MP5SD silenced sub-machine-guns and a supply of C3 plastic explosive with detonators, fuses and electronic timing devices. Inside the other, similarly wrapped, were six Browning High Power 9mm pistols, two PRC 319 satellite radios, six Davies CT100 microphone/receiver sets, six lightweight Bristol Type 18 armoured jackets, six pairs of Passive Night Goggles (PNGs), one nightscope, a dozen stun grenades and a flotation bladder with a small bottle of carbon dioxide.

  ‘Where’s the Chieftain tank?’ Stoneham asked.

  ‘They always forget something,’ Wynwood muttered. ‘You start sorting this lot out while I get us headed in the right direction.’

  Stoneham unwrapped everything and started sorting it into two piles. In one he placed two of the MP5s, handguns, CT100 sets, armoured jackets, half the explosives and one of the PRC 319s. This pile was then carefully rewrapped in the waterproof oilskins and attached to the flotation bladder. He then turned to the other pile, packing everything but the PRC 319 into the bergen backpacks which had previously held their clothes and personal effects. That done, he took over the helm, leaving Wynwood free to align the satellite radio’s antennae and type the single word ‘received’ on the miniature keyboard. A little while later he received an equally terse reply from Grand Cayman, nearly six hundred kilometres to the north: ‘acknowledged’.

  For the next hour they sat mostly in silence, watching the hump-shaped island slowly loom larger. There were a few clouds in the western sky now, but the almost full moon hung suspended among the stars to the east. Passing the scattered lights of Santa Isabel and Pueblo Viejo to port, they moved in towards the island’s western coastline a kilometre or so to the north of the target’s dock. A torch blinked twice on the rocky shore, and for a moment Wynwood found himself wondering how many boats had surreptitiously edged their way in towards Caribbean shores over the past five hundred years.

  Docherty and Shepreth, both knee deep in the gentle swell, took charge of the loaded bergens and vanished back into the darkness as Stoneham headed the boat back out towards the open sea. After drawing a wide semicircle around Bazua’s dock he headed the boat in towards another cove that they had scouted earlier that day. This one was surrounded by mangroves, and after inflating the flotation bladder with carbon dioxide Wynwood clambered do
wn into the water and attached it to a convenient root. The buoyancy had been calculated just right for the weight, holding the bundle a foot or so beneath the surface.

  He climbed wearily back on board and Stoneham headed down the coast to Aguadulce, where, to his surprise, the boat’s owner seemed to be waiting for them. As they pulled in to the dock he walked to and fro, apparently checking the boat for signs of major damage. Finding none, he seemed reassured. ‘Catch anything?’ he asked, as Wynwood leapt out to tie her up.

  ‘Threw ’em back,’ the Welshman replied.

  By this time Docherty and Shepreth had reached the hiding-place on the hill. They had felt exposed walking down the road, but only two cars had passed them, both driven by local West Indians. The second had stopped to offer them a lift, exhaling ganja fumes through his wide smile.

  Docherty had dug the scrape earlier that day, so now all they needed to do was drop in the bergens and cover everything with the already made roof of cut branches and large leaves. ‘You go first,’ he told Shepreth when they were done. The MI6 man nodded and slipped off through the trees. He had a knack of moving quietly, the Scot thought.

  The slight sounds faded away, leaving only the breeze in the foliage above, the occasional chirp of a night bird, and the sound of his own heart. Way above him the upper branches of the trees were swathed in the light of the moon.

  He squatted on his haunches, remembering the desert mountains of Oman, the bare hills of southern Argentina, the snow-filled valleys of central Bosnia. What a life, he thought. He wouldn’t have swapped it for the world.