by Chris Ryan
‘Nothing, fella,’ Tully said. ‘Just a storage facility.’
Porter nodded. ‘Wait here. Me and Jock will drop those fuckers while they’re still inside. Cover us.’
‘Roger that, fellas.’
Porter said, ‘Let’s move, Jock.’
They crept forward across the open ground, advancing cautiously towards the storage shed directly ahead of them, parallel to the farmhouse. Porter trapped his breath in his throat and pushed the fire selector up to the middle setting. Full auto. He kept his weapon raised, the heel of the AK-47’s mahogany stock tucked against the pocket of his right shoulder. Bald moved forward at his three o’clock. The Russians were still talking with raised voices inside the shed. Whatever they’re looking for, they haven’t found it yet, Porter thought. He edged closer. They were fifteen metres from the shed door. Now fourteen metres. Thirteen.
The crashing noises suddenly stopped. So did the voices.
The door flew open.
Spray-Tan stepped outside first. Nilis was a step behind him. Both men were gripping their SLR assault rifles. Spray-Tan clutched a Maglite torch in his left hand. Nilis was holding a satellite phone, similar to the one that Porter and Bald had been given. They were both following the arc of the torch beams as they moved outside the shed and pivoted towards the rear of the compound. The Maglite killed their natural night vision. Which meant they didn’t see Porter and Bald twelve metres to the south. Not until it was too late.
Bald dropped to a kneeling stance and fired first. His AK-47 barked twice. Two rounds thudded into Spray-Tan’s upper back. He jerked wildly as the bullets punched through his body. In the next half-second Bald fired another two-round burst at the Russian. The bullets caught him on the half-turn, ripping into his torso. Spray-Tan grunted and dropped.
In the same motion, Nilis spun towards Bald and Porter, firing a three-round burst in their general direction. Two bullets missed Porter, zipping past his neck. The third round smashed into his left shoulder. He felt a hot pain explode inside the joint. Like someone sinking their teeth into the bone. Nilis shaped to let off another burst. Porter buried the pain, placed the iron sights on Nilis’s torso and depressed the trigger. The muzzle flash lit up the ground, like the flash of a million paparazzi cameras. Two rounds thumped into the Russian’s intestines. The third struck lower, nailing him in the groin. Nilis gasped, stumbled backwards, and landed on the ground next to Spray-Tan. Howling in agony as he cupped a hand to his shredded balls.
Porter sprinted forward. He stopped in front of Nilis. Pointed the AK-47 at the Russian’s forehead. Nilis looked up at him, eyes blinking, his teeth stained with blood. The guy was a fucking mess. His belly was stitched with bullets. Blood stained his safari shorts, slicking out of the gaps between his fingers. His eyes focused on the black mouth of the AK-47. He started shaking his head at Porter.
‘No,’ he gasped. ‘Don’t—’
Porter fired twice, blasting the Russian at point-blank range. Nilis flinched as the rounds pulverised his skull. Then he went still.
Fuck him, thought Porter.
It’s over.
Bald moved forward and nodded at Porter’s shoulder. ‘You’re fucking bleeding.’
‘Just a flesh wound,’ Porter replied, grinning through the pain. ‘Nothing a dressing and a few painkillers won’t sort out.’ He clamped a hand to his shoulder and pointed to the bodies. ‘Grab his sat phone. We can call it in to Hawkridge.’
Bald reached down and picked up the unit Nilis had dropped. It was a Russian-manufactured military handset. Bigger than the slick Motorola device they had been using. A smaller display flashed up a line of Cyrillic characters. Porter stood up, shoved the phone in his back pocket.
Then he heard the moaning.
It came from the east. Porter hadn’t heard the noise before. He had been concentrating fully on the Russians. The din they had been making as they turned the storage shed upside down, the constant whir of the generator in the background. But now, in the still quiet of the dark, he heard the moan clearly. He looked across his right shoulder, towards the source of the sound. It was coming from the direction of the orphanage. From inside the main building, Porter realised. Bald heard it too. He frowned.
‘The fuck is that?’
Porter didn’t reply. He gave his back to the dead Russians and beat a quick path towards the orphanage on the eastern side of the compound. In the periphery of his vision he saw Tully hurrying over to the open manhole to help Soames climb out from the drainage tunnel. Porter ignored them and moved across the playground, Bald hurrying after him.
I don’t know what the Russians were after. But it’s got something to do with whatever is lurking on the other side of that door, thought Porter.
I’m going to find out what it is.
The moaning sound grew louder as they approached the front porch. From the outside the orphanage looked well-maintained. The salmon-coloured paint on the walls was spotless. The shingle tiles on the roof showed no signs of wear or tear. Probably run on a generous budget, Porter figured. Maybe the orphanage was funded by the diamond mine owners. Maybe that was a condition for doing business in a shithole like Sierra Leone. You could take whatever you liked out of the earth, so long as you fronted the cash for an orphanage or two.
He stepped up onto the sun-bleached planking and approached the front door. Then Porter stopped again. He could hear the diesel-engine burr of the generator, the sound of his own breathing. The sound of the child moaning. It was definitely coming from the other side of that door.
He reached down and tested the handle. Locked. Porter took two steps back and shaped to take a run at the door. Bald manoeuvred to the left, his AK-47 pointed at the entryway, ready to neutralise any threat that might be waiting on the far side. Then Porter strode forward and kicked the door in, slamming the heel of his boot into the mid-section. The door crashed inward and bounced back off the inside wall. Porter spread his palms, stopping the door from rebounding shut. He stood in the entrance for a moment, searching for any movement or threat.
Nothing.
Then he stepped inside.
TWENTY-FIVE
2028 hours.
A corridor extended in front of Bald and Porter for fifteen metres. There were doors on either side of the corridor. Porter counted five in total. Two on each side of the corridor. A fifth at the far end. Office to the left of the entryway, with a dining area to the right. The décor looked like it had been lifted straight out of a seventies sitcom. The walls were fake wood panelling. The carpet was orange, and layered with colourful patterned rugs. Everything was well maintained. Every surface was spotless. The air had the clinical, antiseptic smell of a hospital ward.
Porter kept his AK-47 raised as he swept into the office. There was an oak desk with a chair behind it. Set of keys on the desk. Children’s drawings on the wall behind, the kind of primary-coloured scribblings that a proud parent might stick to the front of the fridge. Chintzy sofa pushed up against the wall, the cushions sagging in the middle. The Russians had already cleared the room out. The filing cabinets in one corner of the office had been emptied, the drawers ripped out and the contents tossed onto the floor. Next to the sofa Porter noticed a bank of monitors. Each screen displayed a lumpy black-and-white image with a time and date stamp in the top left corner. Like CCTV cameras, relaying live feeds from the grounds around the orphanage.
What kind of orphanage runs such a tight security operation?
He stepped back from the office. Turned to the right and peered into the dining room. Empty. The moaning sound was coming from further down the corridor, he realised. He beat a path towards the nearest door on the left, the cries increasing in volume and multiplying in number. More than one child. Porter stopped in front of the door. Twisted the knob. The door was locked. He swept past Bald, retraced his steps into the front office and snatched up the set of keys from the desk. Hurried back down the corridor, and tried the first key in the lock. He struck gold with the thi
rd key on the chain. The latch clicked. Porter yanked the door open.
The room looked like a dormitory, he thought. Or a holding cell. Bunk beds were pushed up against the walls. Linoleum floor. Metal bars on the solitary window. A single fluorescent light overhead.
Then he saw the boys.
They rushed forwards from their bunks as soon as the door cracked open. Porter counted twelve of them. Most of the kids looked roughly the same age as the child soldiers that Porter and Bald had seen in the jungle. Except these children weren’t sporting over-developed biceps. They were all painfully thin and dressed in tattered rags or frayed shorts. Some of the kids were whimpering. Others made strange inhuman sounds. There was a bucket in one corner of the room overflowing with piss. Piles of festering shit in another corner.
How long have they been locked up in here?
The kids flooded past the two Blades in the corridor and scurried towards the front door in a mass panic. One of the boys moved slower than the rest. He approached Porter, hugging a frayed teddy bear close to his chest. The boy stared up at him with deadened eyes. He looked to be around nine or ten years old, Porter figured. He had pinkish scars on both ankles and wrists, and his arms covered with burn marks. Like someone had been using him as an ashtray. His ribs protruded above his swollen belly. The boy opened his mouth and spoke in a tongue Porter didn’t understand. Some kind of local dialect. Probably from one of the villages, probably spoken by a few hundred people total. The kid saw the look of confusion on Porter’s face and tried again, pointing down the corridor. Towards the door at the far end.
‘Kid’s trying to tell us something,’ Bald said.
Porter moved down the corridor, a sick feeling of dread brewing inside his chest. He stopped in front of the next room along and tried the keys in the lock until he found the right one. A dozen more kids flooded out of the girls’ dormitory, making the same despairing moans as the boys. Their pink dresses stained with blood and dirt, their lips smeared with bright-red lipstick, eyelids coloured with glittery blue eyeshadow. Like some grotesque parody of a child beauty pageant.
Porter continued to the end of the corridor. He swung open the door at the far end. It led directly through to the annex. Bathroom and bedroom to the right, both modestly furnished. Kitchen to the left. Bright yellow walls, dark wood cabinets. Directly ahead was an open doorway leading into a wide living room, roughly the same size as the dormitories. It was dark inside the room. Porter stopped just inside and fumbled for the light switch. Found it, flipped it up. Three overhead chrome pendant lights switched on, bathing the room in a warm orange glow. The room had the same dated look as the front office. There was a vintage oval teak coffee table in the middle of the room with three chintzy sofas arranged round it in a semi-circle. A couple of armchairs. All the furniture was covered in clear plastic wrap. Bottle of water and paper cups on the coffee table, an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. A bottle of expensive vodka.
Half a dozen cocktail glasses, filled to the brim with bright blue pills.
‘Viagra,’ said Bald.
Porter lifted his eyes from the cocktail glasses. There were dark crusted splodges on the carpet, he noticed with a quickening in his guts. More patches on the walls. Then he realised what the patches were.
Dried blood.
Bald said, ‘What happened here?’
Porter said nothing. His mind was reeling. His shoulder wound throbbed. Nausea tickled the back of his throat. He stepped outside the living room. Made his way back to the bedroom and glanced inside. There was a wardrobe with a sliding glass door, a single bed and a bedside cabinet with a lava lamp on it. The floor was bare except for a patchwork wool rug between the wardrobe and the bed. The bed looked newly-made, the pillow unruffled. Like nobody had slept in there for a while. Porter stepped back out of the bedroom and scratched his head. Trying to make sense of it all.
Then he saw the cables.
A big bunch of them ran along the kitchen floor. The cables were black, thick as anacondas. They looped up to the window and fed outside, running through the long grass to the smaller outlying building to the rear of the compound. Bald had noticed them too. He furrowed his brow.
‘What’s in there?’
Porter shrugged. ‘Let’s have a look.’
There was a door at the rear of the kitchen leading outside. Porter and Bald stepped out onto a patch of bare ground behind the orphanage. Outlying building at their twelve o’clock, twenty metres north of the annexe. What looked like a building site five metres to the east at their three o’clock. Porter guessed the owners were expanding their operations. The foundations had been laid for a new block, roughly the same size as the existing annex. A load of equipment lay around the kitchen door. A cement mixer, bricks, bags of cement. Porter and Bald moved past the building site and beat a path towards the outlying building. It was about a quarter the size of the orphanage, Porter figured. It looked shabbier than the main building. Like an afterthought. The walls were bare concrete. The corrugated tin roof was coated in about an inch of rust. Power cables trailed from the generator shed to the building.
No windows, Porter noticed.
As he approached the door he remembered something Tannon had told him back at the hotel. Something that had been knocking around inside his head ever since. When she had mentioned the heavy security presence guarding the mine.
Soames is hiding something, Tannon had said.
Something big.
There was a security camera fitted above the door. The door itself was a solid-looking thing secured with a flimsy padlock. Porter took two paces towards the door and hefted up the AK-47. Then he brought down the buttstock of the rifle down against the padlock in a rapid motion, smashing apart the rusted metal bolt and ripping the shackle loose from the latch. Porter planted his hand against the door and shoved it open. He heard footsteps pounding across the open ground at his back. He glanced behind. Soames and Tully were charging across the compound towards Bald and Porter. They were twenty metres from the manhole cover now. Twenty metres from the two Blades. Soames shouted at them to step away from the door, his voice carrying crisply across the darkness.
Porter ignored him and stepped inside.
Bald followed.
They entered a wide, low-ceilinged room dimly illuminated by banks of glowing screens. There were bits of machinery and components everywhere. Keyboards, mice, external disk drives. Like a computer shop selling off its stock. Miles of wire. A spaghetti tangle of cables ran from the backs of dozens of tower units to the power sockets. Computer fans whirred. Screensavers flickered on the monitors. The room was furnace-hot. A result of housing a serious amount of computer equipment in a building with no natural ventilation or windows. This place must be what the Russians were after, Porter told himself.
There was a CD burner on the desk next to one of the computers, plus a stack of discs. Porter browsed through them. All the discs were marked with dates scrawled across the aluminium surface in marker pen. The most recent ones were several weeks old. He picked up one of the CDs, punched the eject button on the tower. Placed the disc on the tray and shut it. The CD drive beeped and whirred. Porter nudged the mouse to make the screensaver disappear. Then a media player panel appeared at the bottom of the screen.
Outside the building he could hear Soames shouting at him, ordering him not to touch anything. Porter blocked out his old CO’s voice, hovered the arrow icon over the Play button and left-clicked the mouse.
A black-and-white image filled the screen.
The guest suite in the annexe. Dated six weeks ago.
Three boys were running around the room. They were naked, and around the same age as the kids Porter had seen in the dorm rooms. They were being chased by two older white men with cobwebbed hair. The old men were also naked. They pursued the boys round and round the sofas, saggy flesh hanging from their outstretched arms, faces grinning. Like they were playing some depraved playground game. The image quality wasn’t great, but
Porter vaguely recognised one of the guys from Sky News. The Tory MP with the wire-framed glasses.
The other guy was a retired army general.
The general chased one of the boys around the coffee table, caught up with him and then let himself fall on top of the boy, tickling his ribs. The boy wriggled and laughed. Like any normal dad playing with his son. Except the man and the boy were both naked. The Tory MP took no notice. He was focused on the two other boys. Hunting down his prey. Then the general suddenly stopped tickling the kid. He wrapped his arms around the youth’s waist and pinned him to the floor. Pressing down on the kid’s slender frame with his considerable weight. There was no audio, but Porter could see the kid’s mouth widening into a scream, his arms and legs flailing as he kicked out at the old man.
Seconds passed. The boy stopped struggling.
The general kissed the child on the mouth.
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Bald. ‘Jesus fucking Christ.’
Porter heard footsteps. He looked up at the entrance. Soames stood in the doorway, exuding a strange calm. Tully stood behind him, watching Porter and Bald steadily. Porter’s eyes wandered back to Soames as the latter took a slow step into the room.
‘What the fuck is this place?’ Porter demanded.
‘I like to think of it as a private retreat,’ Soames replied. ‘Somewhere discreet, where certain individuals are free to indulge their fantasies, free of the moralising constraints of Western society.’
Porter shook his head. His throat tightened with anger. ‘You’re protecting a bunch of kiddie fiddlers?’
‘That’s one way of putting it, I suppose. The individuals who frequent this orphanage are pillars of the Establishment. Men who work at the highest levels of Westminster, the civil service and the military. We provide them with a secure, discreet environment where they can do as they please. No questions asked.’
The blunt admission startled Porter. My old CO is operating a paedophile ring, in the middle of the jungle. He clenched his fists. His knuckles whitening, the nails digging into the palm of his hand. He wanted to punch Soames so hard his teeth would shatter.