‘What in God’s name …?’
‘We need to surprise them, stop them getting to the American woman.’ His companion looked blankly at him. ‘You understand nothing. We have to kill them here otherwise there’s no chance of making it to the border. Get the car out of sight.’
He got out and walked back to the road to check if they could be seen. No sign of a moon, the clouds hung low and motionless over the fields.
The driver joined him. ‘I’ve messaged our location to Ahmed.’ He jerked a finger towards the baker. ‘What do we do with the old fool?’
The man from the Zarqa refugee camp sniffed the cold air and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. ‘Who cares? If he makes any noise, shoot him.’
MAFRAQ AIRBASE, JORDAN
They had made his plane circle in high winds for more than half an hour and Manson was visibly angry.
A Jordanian colonel, in black fatigues, greeted him at the foot of the steps and led him to a single-storey complex.
Looking back, Manson noted that the runway lights had already been switched off and that the airfield, iced-in and deserted, was virtually in darkness.
Only a handful of bulbs were burning in the briefing room – he didn’t know if it was because the place was a dump or they’d switched them off intentionally.
It didn’t matter. He’d take charge the way he always did. Someone had to make the fucking decisions when everyone else ran for cover.
To him it was a business meeting. Nothing more. The business, just a few miles across the border and into Syria. All to do with logistics and interventions, cordons and corridors.
And yet for a moment he felt curiously exposed in front of them, a long way from the numbered corridors of Whitehall and their comforting blanket of deniability.
He left the life and death stuff till the end; then told them in slow, almost ponderous phrases, what he wanted – and what he couldn’t accept. On a screen behind him, they flashed up a black and white picture – grainy and enlarged – with the unmarked, oval face of a young woman, shrouded by wavy black hair and sporting, he told them, a chipped front tooth.
Whatever happened that night, she would not be leaving the area. The tatty little town of Ramtha, of minimal importance to a largely indifferent world, was to be the final, irrevocable stop on her journey.
‘Do not misunderstand me on this. My orders have been verified and confirmed – and the subject is now closed.’
He looked across at the colonel. There was no sign that he had heard or registered anything at all.
Manson stood for a second in silence, then raised his eyebrows at the dark shapes in front of him. ‘Questions?’
For miles around, it seemed, there was absolute silence.
FOUR KILOMETRES FROM JORDAN/SYRIA BORDER
Half the schoolteacher’s house had been destroyed. Two rooms, one on top of the other lay open to the elements, their brick walls torn apart by the sheer force of a blast. A wooden beam hung crazily from a shattered ceiling. Shreds of blue wallpaper fluttered in the wind.
They discovered him sheltering by the kitchen stove. Mai could see the head bowed in submission, a thick woollen scarf wound around his neck, but when she spoke to him the eyes seemed bright and alert.
‘Why wouldn’t I help you? The war has taken from me most of what I loved. And now, like everyone else, I’m ready to die. I have nothing more to lose.’
‘You could have gone to Jordan when it was open to the refugees. You’re only a kilometre or two from the border.’
‘Maybe. But I’m too old to start anything new. Besides—’ he grinned – ‘you can go for me. I’d be happy to know that you got away from all this …’ His right hand gestured vaguely towards the world outside. ‘Perhaps you’ll send me a postcard.’
They helped Mai onto a makeshift bed, supported by packing cases and wrapped their coats around her. A single candle flickered in the draft from the window.
Lubna brought her water and a painkiller.
‘How do I look?’ Mai whispered.
‘You look as you are.’ The girl tried to pull away. ‘You look tired.’ She opened the box of pills that the doctor had given her. ‘Three left. That’s all. Enough for twelve hours. Then we’ll need more.’
Mai let go of her and sank back onto a cushion. She knew what ‘needing more’ meant. It meant that the girl had learned very early how to lie, how to deliver bad news; what you were supposed to say when the words, like everything else, were running out.
For a moment she thought of writing to Harry, while she still could – just a line or two that would help him to let it all go. Let her go.
He would want a conclusion. Harry, with his ordered thoughts. Beginnings, middles and ends. So Harry.
But perhaps it was better to say nothing. No aftershocks from the grave. No final, unexpected words to haunt and torment him in the years to come.
Life should always end quickly. Only the jolt of finality made it bearable.
She shut her eyes and tried to think around the pain, to push it to the edges.
The teacher brought her a cup of water.
A thought struck her. ‘Where did you study?’ she asked him.
‘Beirut.’ A half-smile at the memory of it.
‘What did you learn there?’
‘Learn?’ The teacher shook his head and reached out to touch her arm. He tried to smile and the old eyes roamed around the semi-darkness of the kitchen and the anxious faces. ‘I didn’t learn anything,’ he said quietly.
Youssef drove. His hands wet from excitement on the steering wheel, his shirt drenched in sweat. The commander told him the truck had belonged to the Americans. ‘Built for someone important from the CIA, strong as …’
But he never finished the sentence.
Youssef heard the shots before he saw the attackers – two maybe more, grey, faceless shapes, caught in the truck’s headlights, firing straight at them with semi-automatics from ten or fifteen metres.
His instant reflex was to stop the truck. Any moment he’d be dead. The gunmen had surprise and overwhelming firepower. There was nothing to be done.
But in a second, he could hear the commander laughing, as the bullets ricocheted harmlessly off the bulletproof windscreen, clanging on the steel bonnet.
‘Drive brother, drive …’ The commander punched his arm and in a lazy, almost casual fashion, lowered his side window and sprayed the men with a machine pistol. They fell instantly by the side of the road.
Youssef rolled the pickup a few yards on and then stopped. The commander got out and fired two more shots at each of the bodies.
Back in the vehicle, he was still smiling.
‘You see! God is looking after us, my brother.’ He tapped the window. ‘Bulletproof glass! Drive on. We’ve got work to finish.’
THE LAST DAY
AL-TURO – JORDAN/SYRIA BORDER
Sam had broken the glass and forced the door of an old shack, full of agricultural machines, and a pungent smell of oil and chemicals.
It was close to the brow of the hill – around 500 yards, she reckoned, from the nominal border.
They had concealed the car behind a hedgerow, but it wouldn’t provide much cover – not if they were still there at dawn, not if anyone was looking for them.
Margo sat on a wooden bench, letting the cold sink in, relying on it to fight the tiredness.
She pulled out the automatic, slammed the magazine into the grip and checked the safety catch. As Sam watched her, she screwed on the silencer and laid the gun carefully on the floor.
For a moment she wondered what her parents would make of the scene in front of her. Bizarre beyond belief. Light years outside anything they could imagine. Their daughter with a weapon and lethal intentions.
She shut her eyes and tried to think of other things. She imagined walking through the house where she had grown up. The floorboards still creaked in the places she had trodden as a teenager, tiptoeing back home in the early hours of
the morning, trying so hard not to wake Mum and Dad.
The dog she had grown up with didn’t bark, just snuffled in the darkness, lying on his mat under the stairs. His tail thumped against the wall.
On the first floor she glanced into their bedroom – both parents were asleep. Some intermittent snoring, Dad restless, half-covered by the duvet, Mum deeply comatose with the covers wrapped tight around her.
The light from the streetlamps sent shadows across the room, odd shapes that made her think they had moved the furniture. But it was still the same.
She touched a bedside table, moved onto the glass door handle and then the great ‘throne’ – a carved mahogany monster that had somehow survived generations of Mum’s family to sit, in rather diminished circumstances, on the landing of a semi-detached, four-bedroom house, off the Finchley Road.
She touched it too and the wood was cold just as it always had been. Even in summer.
In that moment she too heard the shooting, way out in the distance across the dark, frozen countryside of Syria, with its moving, seething armies of ghosts.
Ahmed heard the shots and sprinted for the cover of the gully. Three hundred metres across the farmland and he caught a glint of light on the road ahead. It had to be the contact’s car.
They didn’t greet each other. The contact was shown the text message. He nodded, pushed the car into gear and headed away from the border.
An empty road, back into the darkness of Syria.
When Ahmed had called him, it hadn’t occurred to the contact not to come. He didn’t know the extent of the danger ahead, but assumed simply that there would be violence along the way and he would encounter people who would wish him harm. Not a subject to dwell on. It was a daily business and he had grown used to it. Whatever you did in Syria, the odds were lousy.
He threw a quick glance at Ahmed. ‘Are we expected?’
‘Maybe.’
‘How many of them?’
‘I’ve no idea. We’ll do what we can.’
The contact said nothing for the next kilometre. In the past he had been silent in Ahmed’s company, intimidated by the man’s coldness. But tonight, for some reason, his curiosity seemed to boil over.
His eyes swivelled towards Ahmed, his voice no louder than a whisper. ‘Why do you do this, my friend? I want to know.’ He pointed a finger at his head. ‘Me? – I’ve got nowhere to go. My wife who hates me is here, and all the rest of her insufferable family … I can’t just leave them …’ He was silent for a moment. ‘But you don’t have to stay … this war’s insane … beyond anything we could imagine. You could go now, this minute … turn the car round, disappear …’
He had half expected Ahmed to hit him, but the man’s face showed no reaction.
‘I’m a fighter. That’s all. I don’t know anything else …’ The words, barely audible above the noise of the engine.
‘But you don’t believe …?’
‘No … I don’t believe – not in anything. You’re right, I could get out of here, but the world is full of wars – so wherever I went there’d be a battle. I might as well stay and fight here.’
The contact nodded and drove on. He was pleased to have had an answer and faintly gratified to learn that the rest of the world was as suicidally destructive as Syria.
It struck him that this was the first remotely personal exchange he had ever had with Ahmed. And, in all likelihood, the last.
There were six men in black, fanned out over a mile along the border, black balaclavas and fatigues. He hadn’t looked at their faces, wouldn’t have learned anything if he had. They’d absorbed the orders and would process them in their own way.
And when it came down to it, he knew that his briefing would count for very little. This wasn’t a unit that would bother too much with details. There’d be no time and no light for proper identification. Not much incentive to think and wonder. They would shoot at anyone who came their way.
Manson heard the gunfire in the distance – but could see no movement beyond the puffs of mist.
He climbed back into the army Land Rover. The colonel who’d greeted him passed him a plastic mug of tea. From the dashboard, the radio spat intermittent static at them.
He was glad the final phase had started. Hated waiting around, second-guessing himself and everyone else. The border was now a killing zone.
Margo Lane would know that too.
Sam replaced the infra-red binoculars in his pocket and turned away from the broken window. ‘We should get out there.’
She shook her head. ‘In a little while. Best view over the terrain from here. I’m only waiting for the American woman. Nobody else matters.’
Sam went back to the window.
He wondered if he should tell her about the movement that he had seen just before the shooting – the faintest, blurry impression of two figures, crouched for a second in the no-man’s-land and then lost in the undergrowth.
Had he imagined it? He dismissed the question.
He had no imagination. Never had a use for it. Always reckoned it would impede his judgment and cloud it with emotion.
Instead he trusted his senses, nurtured and honed over decades.
So he had a good idea what he had seen. And an even better idea what lay behind it.
Someone else had arrived to finish the job. British or American – or another interested party. It made no difference.
He looked across at Margo, but said nothing. Whatever happened, the whole enterprise had to end tonight.
Mai knew what she had heard – a brief gun battle and then the final shots of the executioner into the back of the victims’ head.
Just to make certain.
The double tap, as the soldiers called it.
She sat up, retrieved the pistol from her jacket, then turned and looked around the kitchen.
They were watching her in silence. Lubna, the baker’s wife, the old schoolteacher – her tiny team of helpers, waiting for advice, instructions – or some words of comfort.
But there was no fear in the faces. No sense of alarm.
‘Somewhere I have a rifle …’ The schoolteacher opened a cabinet and began rummaging inside.
She smiled at them and stretched out a hand to Lubna. ‘You are the best people I ever met. I’m sorry I brought you to this. Please … I shouldn’t even ask you this … but please forgive me.’
‘There’s nothing to forgive,’ whispered the baker’s wife. ‘God brought you here and gave us the chance to do something good. Something useful.’ She smiled. ‘That hasn’t happened in a long time.’
Mai looked at each of them in turn. Whatever took place, she knew they wouldn’t leave her. Their eyes were calm, infused with kindness.
But now they were saying goodbye.
‘Turn off the lights and stay in the car.’
They had stopped just in front of the bodies.
Ahmed got out and stood listening for a moment. The wind had dropped. He hadn’t expected the damp stillness that had settled over the area.
He knelt down on the track, extracted a small flashlight and turned the corpses face up.
For a second, he didn’t recognize them. Their expressions, angry and rigid in life, were now relaxed, almost benign. The cheeks still warm.
From their pockets he removed the mobile phones and threw their weapons into the darkness.
‘Who were they?’ The contact re-started the engine.
‘They came from Zarqa.’
‘You knew them?’
‘You ask too many questions. How far is the schoolteacher’s place?’
‘Half a kilometre – no more.’
‘Then we go on foot. Turn the car round and lock it.’
The contact did as he was told.
Ahmed looked him up and down. ‘You’re ready?’
‘Of course.’ The man was shaking. ‘It’s not the first …’
But Ahmed had turned away and was already sprinting, head down along the rough farmland trac
k. He wouldn’t have chosen the contact to go with him. The man was capricious, emotional. Killer one minute, spoilt child the next. But there hadn’t been anyone else. You took your decisions as best you could – and then you lived and died with them.
She heard the sounds way before the others. She had been trained to listen and assess. Trained to plan for all the worst eventualities. And now they had arrived. But she couldn’t locate the plan, couldn’t clear her head to find it.
They had gathered around her on the makeshift bed, the schoolteacher with his old rifle, rusty and unusable, pointing at the floor; Lubna, eyes tight shut, biting into her lower lip, the baker’s wife holding her hand.
Mai held the gun and felt her own hand tremble – not from fear, but from the pain that rushed at her from all directions. She could no longer feel her legs, and didn’t know if she could aim straight through the haze that had descended into the kitchen. For the first time, the coldness seemed to lie deep inside her, spreading out across her abdomen and into her chest.
It won’t stop now, she thought. It’ll go all the way and take me with it.
Perhaps she had closed her eyes for a second but when she focussed again, she could see the two figures standing in the doorway.
She tried to stretch out the gun but in that moment she couldn’t lift it.
Sam looked at the message on his mobile.
‘We’ve found the Russian’s car …’
Margo snapped. ‘What do you mean we – who’s we?’
He made a face. ‘Colleague of mine. Trailed us from Amman.’
‘Now you tell me.’
Sam threw up his arms. ‘What? What’s the matter? You’re one person trying to do this on your own. God knows why. So I thought, maybe a little insurance …’ His voice trailed away. ‘Jesus, you Brits amaze me.’
Margo shut her eyes, ran a hand through her hair. ‘How far away is the car?’
‘Very close. Seems likely they’ll come this way. Maybe right past us.’
She took a deep breath. ‘If there’s trouble …’
‘There will be trouble.’ Sam shrugged. ‘Seems there are others out there tonight. I saw two people a while back – could have been a border patrol but I don’t think so. Looked like they were digging in.’
Fatal Ally Page 24