Top Hook

by Gordon Kent

  Oh, shit, he thought. They’re coming here.

  He had expected that Shreed would have a local agent to watch his back. But not truckloads.

  Pakistani army setting up an outpost? The Indians, invading?

  Three vehicles pulled into the rubble-strewn square with a roar and a shriek of brakes. Men jumped down from the first two; one man, taller than the rest and older, shouted orders. They had stubby machine pistols; two had sniper rifles, another man a heavy radio. They were dressed in a complex camouflage pattern he had never seen, and one of them started arguing with the older man as soon as they got off the trucks.

  Dukas looked at their faces in the moonlight and listened to their language with a sinking feeling in his gut. He thought of Sally sitting at her computer. “Chinese Checkers—it was such a funny name for him to pick.”

  The soldiers in the square weren’t Pakistani or Indian. They were Chinese.

  He dug out his cellphone.

  Kashmor, Pakistan 1430 GMT (1830L) Monday.

  Harry had pulled the Toyota in between two international relief agency trucks. The traffic jam that blocked their four-by-four looked endless in both directions. Vehicles from the north were fleeing the fighting, and the refugees already had the blank, slack look of refugees everywhere. Vehicles from the south were taking aid and military supplies to the war zone.

  “Let me do the talking,” Harry said.

  “Shouldn’t we have kept Kamil? Do you speak the language?”

  “I speak Arabic. Kamil is a hill man—he’d just make trouble, now. These guys will speak Urdu or Baluch. Anyway, somebody will speak English, and I’ll stick out a lot less if I do, too. The guys in the truck ahead are Canadian.”

  “When did you learn Arabic?”

  “Last couple of years.”

  “Probably important in your business, now.”

  “I learned it to read the Koran.” He looked at Alan with a wry grin. “I converted to Islam.”

  They pulled forward a few feet and stopped again. One of the Canadians hopped out of the truck ahead, pissed by the side of the road, and strolled up to Harry’s window. He was a tall, heavy man, his face burned red by the sun. A hardass.

  “Who you guys with?”

  Harry pulled a business card out of his pocket.

  “I’m Harry O’Neill. I run a private security firm.”

  “Oh, sure. Doesn’t everybody?” He came well up the side of the Toyota. “Who do you really work for? And why’d you cut into our convoy?”

  “I really do run a private security firm. Mostly, I work for the UN.”

  “Look, I don’t really care who you work for, okay? I just want to know that you aren’t running drugs. That could get us stopped for hours, okay?”

  “No drugs. Who you with?”

  “IRC. We got about twenty trucks.”

  “You know this checkpoint?”

  “It’s new. I’ve only made this run twice, but there’s never been a check before the desert.”

  “I do work for the IRC in Mombasa.”

  “Yeah?” The man looked disbelieving, but interested. “You can prove it, eh?”

  “Yeah, but why should I?”

  “Because if you don’t want me to point you out to the

  checkpoint, I want to know, okay? I’m not losing four hours here because some drug dealer decided to use me as cover.”

  Harry smiled and pulled out his phone. The truck ahead rolled forward and Harry nudged the Toyota along a few more feet. The checkpoint became visible to the north. To the east, a passenger train moved slowly into the desert. The big Canadian kept pace on foot.

  “Call your headquarters and ask if they know Ethos Security. Call the United Nations High Council for Refugees, if you know the number. I’d give it to you, but you wouldn’t trust me.”

  Somebody was shouting at the Canadian from the truck ahead. He looked them both over and shrugged.

  “No time. I won’t tell them you’re part of our convoy, but if they don’t ask, I won’t say different.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Alan looked over at Harry. “Are we screwed?”

  “Just let me do the talking.”

  The truck ahead rolled into the checkpoint. Soldiers raised the canvas in the back with their rifles, but the inspection was perfunctory and the truck was halted less than a minute.

  Harry rolled the Toyota forward and halted next to the officer.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Islamabad.”

  “This highway is closed except for required traffic.”

  “I understand that, sir.”

  “Are you with the Red Cross?” Asked with deceptive mildness, the question made Alan cringe inwardly. This was not an ignorant man.

  “I provide security for UNHCR sites.”

  “You are American?”

  “I live in Dubai.”

  “Really? You don’t have a newspaper, do you?”

  “I don’t. You want to know about the cricket?”

  The officer nodded, his whole demeanor changed. Dubai had been a right answer. So had the word “cricket.”

  “It was a very close game, but Inzamam-ul-Haq attacked the Australian bowling and in the end Pakistan won by ten runs.”

  “Allah ahkbar! The game was starting when we were sent here.”

  Harry handed over a UN passport. Where had Harry come up with a UN passport?

  “Do you need something to read?” Harry burrowed in his bag and pulled out a thick yellow book. The cover said “Wisden.” The officer took it with reverence—the bible of international cricket.

  “This year’s!”

  “I have another. Take it.”

  The man held it on his palm, weighing his duty to look at Alan’s passport against the book.

  “Drive carefully. The desert road is full of refugees.”

  “Good luck to Pakistan. I hope they make the final.”

  “Inshallah. Go on, please.”

  Alan breathed again, and the Toyota rolled forward. He didn’t even notice the last cars of the passenger train passing beyond Harry’s window. Aboard the train, a man raised his head from the computer on his dinner table to glance at the endless traffic jam. It was George Shreed.

  Shreed glanced up from his screen because a flash of light distracted him, but his thoughts were far away. The screen showed the encrypted commands that would begin the drain of Chinese intelligence money from their secure accounts in Hong Kong and Malaysia. He thought that when he showed Chen the empty bank accounts, Chen would defect to save his skin—what old East German hands called an “induced defection.” And if he didn’t, Shreed would shoot him. He thought Chen would more likely defect.

  He would have in his pocket the first high-level Chinese intelligence in American history. China’s intelligence service would be bankrupt and impotent. China would be caught in the middle of a public attempt at military adventurism, and she would have to back down on CNN. Shreed could see the ships turning away in his mind’s eye. They wouldn’t raise their heads out of the middle kingdom for a generation.

  And then?

  And then America would have no enemies with any power for a generation, and he would have been proven right. That would be his triumph. Even if he never went back, even if he never made it back, it would be his triumph. They would talk about him for generation after generation. Teach his great coup at the Ranch. He would be a legend.

  Or a piece of shit, you egotistical bastard. He grinned at his reflection in the train window. But, like all grins, it faded. For the cynic, there is no triumph, even in triumph. What were you expecting, God’s finger to come down from the sky and tickle you under the chin? Still, he was glad that he hadn’t been able to get to Belgrade, unable to kill Chen. This was going to be better, no matter how it ended.

  He waited until the signal on his laptop indicated that he had a strong link to the Web. Then he put a finger on the key that would start the process, and, to his astonishment,
the finger was trembling. So long getting here—so much effort— He thought of Janey. Had she forgiven him?

  He pressed the Send button, sat back, and sipped his coffee.

  His project had begun its final phase.

  I’m so lonely, baby.

  I’m so lonely I could…

  Jolcut 1830 GMT (2230L).

  The village at the top of the ridge above her appeared deserted. It reminded Anna of the hilltop village where she had spent her childhood, except that her village had had ancient stone walls and the graceful line of an aqueduct sweeping away to much less dramatic mountains. But her village had had much the same smell, and it was the smell that awakened her feelings: cedarwood fires, the perfume of strong spices, the dung of goats and sheep and horses.

  She did not look like a daughter of this village, or of the one where she had been born, for that matter. She was dressed in ancient jeans and a flannel shirt, and her bright hair was covered in a local wool hat. Over the flannel shirt she wore the shell of an ancient army coat, and over both she wore a loose black cotton robe, unbelted, and a heavy internal frame pack on her back. She looked like any of the Western students who came to the mountains seeking enlightenment and a good climb.

  She had no intention of walking up the road to the village. She knew that Shreed wouldn’t play fair, but this time she intended to be early and be ahead. He had given her signals, alternates, routes—all irrelevant in her present mood. George Shreed, whether deserving or not, had become the archetype of every human being who had ever used her.

  She had been on her own—without a protector, without an owner—for three weeks. To preserve her freedom, she had killed, betrayed, stolen, lied, and kept her bed empty. She raised her head, looked at the village on the height, and smiled her feral smile. By one simple act of revenge against a man who had tried repeatedly to kill her, she would win security and, just maybe, some friends. Alan Craik would know that she was something…she didn’t like that thought much and didn’t follow it.

  The scree at the bottom of the slope was the hardest part of the climb up the hill. She had to move around boulders through the shards of other rocks, with the weight on her back making movement difficult. Once free of the rubble field, she was able to move up the steep western slope with more speed and confidence. The moonlight made stark shadows among the rocks, lighting handholds and footholds in the lateral outcrops that made the west slope look like giant steps climbing into the moon.

  After half an hour, she pulled herself over an outcrop and rested, panting, with her pack braced against the next ledge. A stronger smell of goat registered through her fatigue. There were goat droppings here on the outcrop; she was sitting in a tiny trail that led up to her left around the hill. When she stood, her sandal-clad feet could follow the gritty sand and gravel mix that marked the path by feel. She became cautious, expecting a sentry or a night herder.

  Anna stopped. In a village without electricity, the last rays of the sun usually marked the end of the day, but the silence from above her was too total. She missed the sounds of animals, the occasional bang of a pot, the little night noises that proclaimed the health of a village. It was not yet late. In the time she had been on the slope, not a baby had cried, not a single couple had engaged in a late-night shouting match. Perhaps Pakistanis were quieter than her own people, but she felt uneasy.

  More than a hundred feet below her, she caught a movement in her peripheral vision. When she turned her head, she thought for some moments that she was watching an animal, but as she squatted in the trail, the movement resolved into two man-shapes moving warily. The moon provided her with a gleam of metal—a gun. Shreed’s people.

  With muscle-aching care, she wriggled out of her pack, heedless of the old goat droppings in the trail. It took her more than a minute, and she cursed the American notion of “quick release.” Lighter by fifty pounds, she unzipped the top pocket of the pack and extracted a Walther pistol, fitted a clip into the butt, and winced at the click as it slid home. She slipped the pistol into the waistband of her jeans, rolled on her stomach, and got a drink from the water pack strapped to the pack frame. The men were still there. They seemed to be examining the base of the scree where she had started her climb. That was not a good sign.

  The silencer and the second clip for the Walther P88 had slipped from the top pocket all the way to the bottom of the pack, and she thought that she must sound like an avalanche as she wormed her arm through the clothes looking for them. She put them in a pocket with her cellphone, took another drink of water, and started crawling up the trail.

  Anna was the descendant of a hundred generations of practiced hill thieves. Childhood play for both sexes had involved hours of just this sort of pastime; crawling up a track covered in goat shit to surprise one of her brothers. They were all dead, but their arts lived in her, and she wriggled along like a snake, ten yards at a time until she reached the edge of the plateau, where centuries of feet had cut a path in the final outcrop of rock. She leaned against the rock and raised her head above it, her heart crashing against her chest, rivers of sweat and grime running down between her breasts and down her back. Her head came up by inches, until one eye could just see over the lip.

  The ground between her and the first square building appeared empty. She waited, motionless, for more than a minute. Stillness was how she had always caught her brothers. Patience. The patience that had enabled her to hide inside herself for five years as a prostitute in Riyadh and Dubai.

  While she was motionless at the top of the ridge, it came to her forcefully that she would kill George Shreed. Up until that point it was an idea, an ambition. Now it was her sole focus. She had endured things that had destroyed other women. She could endure more to be free. She crouched, filthy from the crawl, at the top of a hill with enemies behind her and ahead and thought, This is life. I will succeed or fail by my own hands.

  She began to crawl across a patch of open ground. She made it to the edge of the first building unseen, close to the base of a trash heap that served several houses. It wasn’t bad, after the goats; at the moment it smelled of lemons. She crawled around the rubbish with care, the soft base of the mulch muffling her movements completely. When she thought she might have a sight line into the village, she raised her head again with great care. She was between an outbuilding, probably a set of stalls for animals, and two houses at the western edge of the village. She guessed that the gray moonlit puzzle ahead represented a little maze of alleys, every window shuttered against the dark. The village sloped down from where she lay, and she thought she could see a minaret against the moonlight. Its base was hidden by another shape, and it took her seconds to realize that there was some sort of tower rising between her and the minaret. High in the tower, a single light burned, either a candle or a kerosene lamp. It seemed to be the only light in the village.

  She rose slowly to her feet and flattened herself against the second house, then crabwalked along the wall of the building until she reached the alley. She moved her head out at waist height and looked both ways. Again she was patient.

  A man’s boots sounded on a stone. He did not bother much with stealth—a villager? He moved quickly, almost violently along the alley until he reached the intersection so close that she could have slapped his back. He looked confident. He also looked Chinese.

  His attention was on a building across the alley, a low, square building with a flat roof and the sort of decorative wall that often meant a roof garden in an Asian village. After a moment’s hesitation, he stepped forward, leaped, and caught the wall with his hands. With muscular grace, he used his arms to pull his weight up and then swung his hips over the wall to land on the roof. It was the maneuver of an athlete.

  The athlete had a sniper rifle on his back.

  She listened. He had moved to the other corner of the roof, the one facing the rest of the village. The roof was high, and with the slight slope of the village, it probably afforded a view right to the base of the tower.
The sniper was not there to watch the approaches to the village. He was there to cover the mosque.

  What a viper Shreed was. He had sold her to the Chinese.

  Anna took a long time over her options, and she shivered a little with the cool air and the sweat. Her retreat was blocked. If they had followed her trail up, they would be almost at the top by now.

  If she had seen three of them, there must be at least a squad, perhaps a platoon. The sniper had had the muscles and agility of a hard man, a paratrooper or a commando. She needed a place. Would they search the houses if she didn’t show up at Shreed’s meeting place?

  The sniper had a good spot. He was probably lying down, his rifle already set up, waiting for the action to begin. From the noise, he was fiddling with something. A tool? And he almost certainly had a radio. But who would call him? As she reckoned the odds, the sniper had the virtue of immediate action and comparative safety. He had a good rifle, too, a weapon she could use. He was the devil she knew. She drew the heavy silencer from her breast pocket and screwed it on the barrel, easing the threads back and forth to get a perfect fit as Efremov had taught her. Then she ejected the clip into her palm, easing the clip past the catch to muffle its sharp metallic noise. Then she wiped the sweat from her face and reversed the operation, inserting the other, the whisperload bullets from the stall in Dushanbe—subsonic bullets that made a silencer really effective. The clip still made a tiny click as it seated home, and again she waited, utterly silent, immobile.

  She moved her head out into the alley again, this time at a different height, and waited, counting slowly to one hundred. Nothing moved but the man on the roof, who was making little metallic sounds. Now, too, she could hear the animal noises that had been hidden by the last rock outcrop on the hill. Up here, the village sounded more alive, although the human noises were still absent. Every mother must be huddled in a cellar with her children gathered round her as the foreign soldiers prowled the village.