by Matthew Dunn
She sighed as she reread the paper. “The United Nations man must be breaking rules.”
“That’s what my teacher told me. She said I wasn’t to care and should have no fear. She said he was a good man. Would find me a good home. Would give me a new life.”
His mother went to her son and hugged him. “My Safa. Is this what you want?”
Safa looked at his mom’s face, and tears ran down his face. “I don’t know, Mama. I am scared.”
This was her final act of strength. The last opportunity for her to save at least one member of her family. She pointed north. “Over the border are people whose grandparents faced these kinds of situations when they were your age. They came from Russia, Germany, France, other places. They didn’t know what lay ahead. But they knew what lay behind. They had no choice.” She didn’t add that, as a result, their sons and grandsons should have known better than to do what they were doing to this small strip of land and its population. “But it worked out well for them. They became scholars, businessmen, soldiers, had families, and now they have smiles on their faces and bellies that are full. You must go.”
Safa’s voice was wavering as he asked, “What if he’s a bad man?”
His mother stroked a frail finger against her son’s hair. “My experience of people in the United Nations is that they can be naïve but never bad. But if this man turns out to be bad, you run.” She smiled. “And even that won’t be so bad because you’ll be running in a land of fat bellies.” She managed to smile. “When everything else is stripped away, it all comes down to food and water. But only you can decide what to do.”
Safa went to his father’s side. “Papa, Papa? What should I do? Must I leave you?”
His father looked at him, resignation and illness so evident. “We must leave you, my dear boy.”
“But, Papa . . .”
“You have no choice.”
Safa placed his head on his father’s chest. “How could they do this to you, to us, to everyone here?”
His father stroked his son’s hair. “They didn’t do something. Our neighboring country did nothing. There is a difference.”
“It still makes them bad.”
His father’s voice was soothing as he replied, “No, no. If that were true, then we would all be bad. Charities we ignore, famines elsewhere in the world, disasters, wars, abuse—we can’t solve them all. Does that make us murderers? I think not.”
Safa wept. “The Israelis starve us.”
“And some of us hurt them back. Evil lurks on both sides of the borders. But it isn’t and cannot be pervasive.”
Safa held his hand, it was limp and felt wrong. “Mama—Papa isn’t moving.”
His mother nodded, resignation flowing over her, a feeling that death had exited one body and was drifting across the room to devour her. She had no need to move to her son’s side. This moment had been coming for so long. It was inevitable. There was no heartache; that had happened ages ago. Since then it had just been about managing the situation, and logistics, including disposing of the body in a way that didn’t add to the already disease-ridden melting pot of the Jabalia refugee camp. Burning corpses was usually the only way. Even then, one couldn’t be sure that airborne bacteria and viruses wouldn’t flee charred flesh and attack any nearby mourners.
“He has told you what you should do,” was all she could say. She grabbed a pencil and put her signature on the bottom of the paper. “When do you go?”
“Tomorrow. I must meet him at the school. My teacher also needs to sign some forms. He will then take me to a boat. He told me to pack light.”
“Pack? You have nothing to pack.”
Safa went back to his mother and cuddled her. “Mama, please cook me stewed beef and garbanzo beans tonight.”
His mother didn’t have food. Couldn’t. “We can pretend, okay?”
“Sure, Mama.” He held her. “That will be delicious.” His tears were unstoppable. “Delicious, Mama.”
CHAPTER THREE
Soil clung to the CIA officer’s perspiring skin after he inadvertently rubbed the back of his aching hand against his forehead. Roger Koenig’s sweat made some of the grime enter his eyes, and he had to blink fast to clear them. He grabbed his pickax, swung it over his head, and slammed it into the ground. Three other men were close to him, all natives of Iran’s southwestern city of Shiraz, whose outskirts were ten miles north of their current location. They, too, were using shovels and pickaxes to dig, lanterns around the hole being the sole source of light in the pitch-dark night. Their grunts and the noise of their tools striking earth were the only sounds they could hear in the featureless and deserted rural location.
Reza was the twenty-nine-year-old son of a watchmaker who was by his side. He said, “I’ve hit something.”
They all immediately stopped digging.
Roger lay flat on his stomach and placed his hand in the hole, which was seven feet long, four feet wide, and three feet deep. The CIA officer had to stretch to touch the bottom. There was no doubt Reza was right. They’d reached something that was metal. Thank God. Roger had previously shuddered at the idea they might find rotting mahogany that would reveal what was inside if they tried to remove the item. He didn’t want that image in his head. It would be wrong.
Roger got to his feet and looked at the watchmaker. “Masoud. Very carefully.”
Masoud nodded and placed a hand on his other son, “Firouz will clear the surface. We’ll excavate around the box.”
They got back to work, this time making smaller indentations with their tools so as not to inadvertently damage the box. It took them nearly an hour to uncover it completely and allow enough space for them to stand next to the container. One man at each corner, they slowly lifted the heavy box that was as long as Roger was tall, and placed it next to the hole.
Breathing fast, Roger grabbed a rag and wiped his face and hands. “Okay. Let’s move. Box in the truck first. Then all equipment.”
Masoud asked, “Do we refill the hole?”
“No time for that.”
They drove nearly four hundred kilometers through the night, Reza at the wheel and where possible his foot to the floor because they were all desperate to reach the southern port of Bandar-e ‘Abbâs before daybreak. They made it with one hour to spare, Reza avoiding the main roads as he expertly navigated his way through the medium-sized city until they reached the shores of the Persian Gulf. Boats of all shapes and sizes were moored alongside jetties and harbor walls. Most of them were motorized cargo vessels, some were powerful speedboats. All of them were the type of craft that would have gotten them away from Iran and its naval patrols in quick time. But they were too obvious. Instead, Roger had decided they needed to escape in something that no fugitives in their right minds would use.
That vessel was now in front of them. A traditional dhow that had one big white sail but no motor.
Reza parked the truck. “Fast, fast.” He stayed in the vehicle as the other men ran to the back of the truck, grabbed the metal container, and carried it quickly along a jetty and onto the boat. Reza was driving away as they lowered the box onto the deck. His destination was Shiraz where he’d put the truck in a secure garage and leave it locked in there until he was sure that it wasn’t being looked for by Iranian police or the country’s more insidious security agencies.
Roger was a former member of SEAL Team 6 who had proficiency with most types of seafaring vessels. That experience enabled him to help Masoud and Firouz prepare the dhow to sail. It took them only two minutes to get the vessel moving. Roger was of no use now aside from scouring their surroundings as his Iranian assets steered the vessel and made adjustments to its rigging. He did so for one hour as they crossed the Strait of Hormuz, and even as they exited Iranian waters unchallenged, he continued his vigil as they approached the United Arab Emirates and followed its shore
s until they entered Dubai’s creek.
The CIA officer only let himself relax when they reached the inner part of the creek, where the majority of boats docked and unloaded their cargos.
The early-morning sun and balmy air soothed his weary face; there were noises of birds and men and vessels, but they were quiet, as if the creatures were half-asleep and respectful that others nearby were still in deep slumber. Roger wondered when he’d next sleep. Not for a while, he concluded.
He placed a hand on the metal box. It had taken him three years to identify its location, and he’d done so using his own money during downtime, when he wasn’t deployed by the CIA, and sometimes vacation time, when he should have been with his family. He’d sacrificed a lot to locate and extract the container by tasking his Iranian sources, bribing officials, analyzing old CIA reports, talking to former Iranian intelligence officers turned CIA assets, and by putting his boots on Iranian ground and making his own inquiries. Many times he could have been captured and killed if anyone had established his objective. And if that had happened, the CIA would have rightly disavowed him because it, too, had no idea what he was doing.
His biggest fear now was that the thing in the box was not what he thought it was. After he took it to the American consulate in Dubai and it was flown back to the States, tests would be done on its contents. Then he’d find out if his efforts now and during the preceding years had been worth the sacrifice.
He dearly hoped so.
Because the box was his gift to a British MI6 officer who’d saved his life countless times.
A man who deserved some peace of mind in his otherwise mangled life.
A comrade.
A true friend called Will Cochrane.
CHAPTER FOUR
For the last few months, Britain’s MI6 and its American equivalent, the CIA, believed that I’d been sitting at home doing nothing. MI6 occasionally checked up on me, but it had always given me advance notice of its visits, meaning I could make sure I was at my South London pad when the service’s Welfare Department came knocking. Tonight, the agencies probably thought I was going out for a few beers to drown my sorrows. After all, tomorrow was officially my last day as an employed field operative of Western Intelligence because during my last mission, a malevolent U.S. senator revealed my identity to the world’s media, I tore apart Washington, D.C., to get answers, and the joint U.S.-U.K. task force I worked for was shut down.
My employers told me I’d become a loose cannon without portfolio and added that I should be grateful that they were giving me four months on full pay to allow me to idle and decompress after nine years of near-constant deployment. And I was told to use that time to learn how to integrate into normal society. Trouble was, I don’t do decompression or integration well, and though I’ve enough sorrows to fill up a hundred lives, I rarely feel the need to drown them.
Instead, they are prone to drowning me if I stay still for too long.
So, I’d been busy. Secretly busy.
Traveling to different parts of the world; obtaining weapons, and other equipment, and secreting them in dead-letter boxes within the major cities; meeting my foreign assets and telling them that one day I might still have a use for them; and tying up loose ends. Only two people knew what I’d been up to: my former bosses Alistair McCulloch and Patrick Bolte from MI6 and the CIA, respectively. They’d helped me where they could with cash, and information, and covered my ass when needed. But even they didn’t know that tonight I wasn’t propping up a bar in London and instead was in Hong Kong, walking through the Temple Street Night Market.
It was a tying-up-loose-ends evening.
I was observing a Chinese woman who’s a highly prized intelligence operative who’d spent her entire career combating the West. I was behind her, disguised as a seaman onshore for a night out after twelve months on a tanker. She was unaware of me and the threat I posed. Around us were hundreds of tourists and locals, haggling with the multitude of vendors who’d crammed central Kowloon’s most popular bazaar with stalls selling counterfeit goods, clothes, noodles, and still-twitching bottom-feeding sea life. People were shouting, calling out to each other, opera was being sung by troupes busking for a few dollars outside stinking public toilets, and junkies were arguing with old men as they faced each other over games of Chinese chess. Few people would hear a woman scream in pain if someone killed her on the street, and no one would care if they heard such a noise. There was too much sensory overload to notice anything odd in this bustling and bruising place: people banging into each other; a heavy rain descending from the late-summer night sky; vast banners with Cantonese characters overhanging the street and flapping loudly in the wind; glowing Chinese lanterns suspended in the air; the smell of crustaceans, soy sauce, and burning incense; and swathes of dazzling neon light around each stall.
But there were also big chunks of darkness on the street, and that was where most people moved, their eyes transfixed by the areas of brilliant glow, like flies that were attracted to illuminated and electrified death traps.
Street-canny prostitutes chose to work the low-rise tenements behind the stalls. This was a place where they could do their business and men could come and pay them and go without being noticed.
It was also an excellent place to visit death on unwitting victims.
I increased speed as the woman picked up her pace, then stopped as my target perused a stall containing fake silks that were cotton and powdered rhino horn that was actually a lethal combination of ground stone, fiberglass, and bamboo root. I watched the target to see if this was a deliberate stop to catch sight of me.
Woman moved; I moved.
I had a knife on me. It was the best weapon for tonight because my target would be taking no chances and would almost certainly be carrying a silenced pistol or blade.
We were getting close to my kill zone.
The woman checked her watch, gave a physical gesture of annoyance, and turned toward me.
Shit!
I was a mere ten feet away from her, alongside lots of men, women, kids, and crackheads. Maybe if the woman looked at me, she’d think I had a bloodlust. I didn’t. I had a job to do, and right now it was one that would take the woman completely by surprise.
But she didn’t spot me amid the throngs of people ahead of her. She was preoccupied, had clearly lost track of time, and used her cell phone to call her husband. Her partner took the brunt of her annoyance as she instructed him to get his car started and pick her up in five minutes or she’d stick something sharp in his gullet.
That wasn’t going to happen.
Not if another man had his way.
For he wanted to stick his knife into her gullet.
And I was here to stop him dead.
My target walked fast toward the woman, his blade exposed. I rushed at the large Chinese man, grabbed his chin from behind, and plunged my blade into his throat. As he slumped to the ground, the Chinese woman’s shock was amplified when she saw my face.
I walked past her, muttering, “Your cover’s blown. Get out of China. Time to retire to somewhere safe.”
The Chinese intelligence officer knew me well. Years ago, I’d turned her into an MI6 asset so that she could spy on her countrymen. Recently, I’d learned that her colleagues had discovered her treachery and tonight were deploying one of their best assassins to punish her. No way was I going to let that happen to such a courageous woman.
She opened her mouth to speak to me.
I didn’t stop and, within seconds, had vanished into the night.
And in ninety minutes I’d use an alias passport to fly back to London.
No one would know that tonight an English killer had been in China and that his real name was Will Cochrane.
CHAPTER FIVE
The reason Admiral Tobias Mason no longer wore a naval uniform was because five yea
rs ago, he’d reached a stage in his career where he’d felt embarrassed by how he looked. He’d spent thirty-four years on water, half of them captaining U.S. warships of mass destruction and frequently being the ultimate power in several thousand square miles of ocean. The problem with this was it gave him too many medals on his uniform. While inspecting his massed naval ranks on a sunny parade ground five years ago, the medals made him think he looked like a throwback military dictator.
Mason hated the idea of looking like a dictator because he was by nature a nonconformist individual who didn’t like uniforms. In many ways he was the antithesis of a military man; the only reason he’d run away to sea as an adolescent was because his brain craved adventure. Nevertheless, his superiors in the navy quickly recognized his superb intellect and passion for unconventional tactics. They promoted him and kept telling him that one day he’d be an admiral. Mason didn’t like the flattery because he could never jettison his nonconformist mind-set, and nor did he wish to. His idol was the nineteenth-century British admiral Lord Thomas Cochrane, a man who’d been a maverick throughout his career yet could conjure naval strategies that were brilliant and often improvised. Cochrane tore the rulebook up and won. But he was still made to dress like a clown.