Night Strike

by Chris Ryan

  ‘Yeah, that’s it. Come on, big boy. More. I want you to fucking choke me.’

  Bald squeezed harder. Her skin blued.

  Then she started beating with her fists at his hands and her eyes were almost popping out of her skull and she was retching and kicking at him with all her strength. Bald released his grip from her neck. She had new bruises either side of her throat, deep and dark, like he had pressed his fingers into a piece of bruised fruit. She crawled out of bed and nursed her neck. Said, ‘Jesus, that fucking hurts. You asshole.’

  Bald looked at her quizzically.

  ‘But you said you wanted it.’

  ‘God, that really fucking hurt,’ Rachel said. She stumbled out of the bed and took her clutch bag and disappeared into the bathroom. Locked the door behind her. Women confused the shit out of Bald at the best of times, but Rachel’s flip-out had him scratching his head. He pulled the duvet over his balls and listened to the noises coming from the bathroom. Running water. Probably washing off some of the blood. Something in the trash can caught Bald’s attention. Amid the empty wrappers and tissues there was a vial. The kind of thing a doctor prescribes. It struck Bald as odd.

  He scooped the vial out of the trash and inspected the label on the front. Then his guts did somersaults. He suddenly understood why Rachel hadn’t been drunk in the bar last night, even while she matched him drink for drink, shot for shot.

  The vial contained ephedrine.

  The bathroom door unlocked. Bald quickly dumped the vial in the trash can. Rachel hovered in the bathroom doorway. Her face caught the fluorescent bathroom light. Strands of her blonde hair were glowing white-hot, like flames peeling off the surface of the sun. The light picked out Bald’s handiwork: every bruise and welt, every cut and graze.

  There was a gun in her hand. A pistol. A Browning Hi-Power. A weapon Bald was instantly familiar with, because for a long time it had been Regiment-issue. But the Browning wasn’t so popular in America. It wasn’t the kind of firearm you could pick up in your local Wal-Mart or gun show. It was more of a specialist, collector’s piece. Part of him wondered where Rachel had managed to acquire the Browning. The other part of him went limp at the waist and wondered if she had the strength to pull the fucking trigger. He hoped not.

  Rachel said, ‘Get up.’

  Bald stayed put. ‘Stop pointing that fucking thing at me.’

  ‘I’m not playing games, John.’

  She cocked the hammer.

  Said, ‘I’ll ask you one last time. If you like your balls, you’ll get up.’

  Bald liked his balls. Bald stood up.

  Then she warily shuffled closer to Bald, the Browning trembling in her hand, her lips copycatting. The discomfort at walking was written deep into her face. Into the frown bunched up on the bridge of her nose, and the delicate wincing noises that escaped from the corners of her badly swollen mouth.

  She stopped a metre short of Bald. Hand extended, the Browning barrel tip was less than half that distance to Bald’s forehead. A simple slip of the finger, a little too much pressure. That’s all it would take.

  Bald said, ‘Can we fuck now?’

  She smiled at him through the blood and the bruises.

  ‘No. I’m going to kill you, baby. Just like you killed Laxman.’

  thirty-three

  Hilton St Petersburg Carillon Park Hotel, St Petersburg, Florida, USA. 2239 hours.

  Rachel Kravets sniffed blood. It bubbled under her nostrils. One was bigger than the other. Not a natural disfigurement, but one that John Bald had moulded into her face with the clenched knuckles of his right hand.

  She cocked the Browning Hi-Power. Springs and coils and all sorts of pistol machinery made metallic clicking noises. Bald stayed absolutely still. The way Rachel handled the gun told him she was an amateur, despite working for the CIA. Maybe Agency cutbacks meant field agents didn’t get time on the ranges any more. But an amateur with a weapon to your head is a bad thing.

  For a slippery second Bald had figured that Rachel’s stunt was all part of the game. Of the fantasy that she’d ditch the Browning and get down on her knees and start giving him the BJ from heaven. But the second greased Bald with a surprise. Rachel’s eyes were fixed on the TV, where the local Fox News affiliate was reporting on the shooting incident in Ghetto Central, Clearwater. A far too excited and happy reporter gave the lowdown on what they described as a gangland shooting. They listed four dead gangbangers, complete with photo IDs. Bald had been too far away to recall the faces of the guys he shot, but the police seem to have got the basic facts straight enough.

  Then Rachel screwed up her face at the screen. Her eyes slowly returned to Bald.

  She said, ‘What happened to Laxman’s body?’

  Confession time. Bald had been hoping he could get away with the lie, at least for long enough to jump Rachel. But the report had driven a train through his story.

  ‘There is no body,’ he said.

  Rachel dug out a face that Bald had seen on too many women down the years. Black with anger and looking at him like he was dirt. Like he’d just admitted to smashing her best friend behind her back.

  ‘There’s no body, because I didn’t kill Laxman. He got away.’

  Rachel’s expression unwrapped like a crumpled ball of paper and turned straight and pale and vacant. She lowered the gun. Then she warily edged across the room, scooped up her iPhone from the desk and called a number. Bald could make out the voice of Danny Cave, coughing and warbling down the line from London. Almost four o’clock in the morning UK time. Rachel took the call out to the corridor, telling Bald, ‘Wait here.’

  Five minutes later Rachel returned. Colour had drifted back onto her face and she had an uneven smile. Like one side of her was trying to smile and the other wasn’t putting in the effort. She held the face and said, ‘Cave says you have to fly to Libya.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘He says you have to track down Shylam Laxman and finish the mission.’

  ‘Fuck off twice.’

  ‘He says you do this or you can wave goodbye to your freedom and your pay cheque.’

  Bald realized he had no choice but to agree. Someone had you by the balls, either you did what they wanted or they squeezed tight until they burst.

  ‘Oh, and another thing. You’ll like this, baby. Cave says I’m coming with. The Agency wants their own set of eyes on the ground on this one.’

  Bald nodded absently, then said, ‘You were just playing back there, right? With the pistol?’

  Rachel smiled sweetly at him. ‘Sure, baby. I was playing.’

  thirty-four

  Tunisia–Libya border. 0639 hours.

  The first thing Bald saw in Libya was a plume of smoke. It slow-motioned down a bombed-out two-lane stretch of asphalt. Could have been a kilometre; could as easily have been two, or twenty. There were no other features against which to judge the distance of such an object. Just a basin of finely ground sand and a limitless sky. Bald gripped the wheel of the Land Rover Defender 90 as it hopped and pitched and lurched over a million craters and divots – the legacy of NATO air strikes – the 2.4-litre diesel engine grrring like a cornered dog.

  The smoke plume spiralled lazily into the sky. Bald was doing a hundred kilometres per hour but he didn’t seem to be getting any nearer. It remained stubbornly suspended on the horizon. Always out of reach.

  Rachel was cursing at her iPhone in the front passenger seat. She had a pashmina shawl scarf wrapped around her head to cover up her hair. The Arab Spring gangs were ready for democracy, but not the exposed female form which still caused them problems.

  He said, ‘Any luck reaching Cave?’

  ‘Still no signal.’

  ‘Typical for the Firm. They spend millions on lampshades, but then they go and give you a phone that can’t get a fucking signal.’

  Rachel attempted a smile, then quickly retracted it, her sore face paining her to move. ‘I’ll keep trying. His message said it was important.’
<
br />   ‘It’ll have to wait,’ said Bald.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We’ve got company.’

  Insects on the horizon. Four of them. No bigger than cockroaches. Heat flourished off the asphalt and blurred their outlines. They came from the same direction as the smoke plume. From where Bald was sitting he couldn’t yet see their faces. One hundred metres from your enemy, you can make out distinguishing features such as noses and hair. At three hundred metres, you can tell whether a guy is white or black, whether he’s broad in the shoulders or heavy in the gut. At six hundred metres, all you get is a roughly human smudge. Bald counted four shapes and concluded they were six hundred metres distant. They were on foot, but next to them was a vehicle. Likely a Toyota Hilux. Mid-nineties edition. There was a large object mounted on the rear bed. Thing was shaped like an oversized party popper.

  ‘Who are they?’ Rachel said.

  ‘Rebels or loyalists. It’s a fifty-fifty call.’

  ‘What do we do?’

  ‘If it’s the rebels, we’ll be fine.’

  ‘And if it’s the loyalists?’

  ‘We fucking leg it.’

  The insects grew as Bald kept the Defender at a steady hundred per and steered towards them. Three hundred metres. They were static and arranged across the road, blocking traffic in both directions. A checkpoint.

  Two hundred metres. Now he could see their clothes. The band around his chest began to loosen. The guys were wearing beige and dark T-shirts and stonewashed jeans and trainers that had been white in a previous life.

  ‘Definitely rebels,’ said Bald.

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘They’re not in uniform. They look like they’re going to Magaluf.’

  She worked her brow into a frown and said, ‘What’s Magaluf?’

  ‘It’s a place where Brits go to get drunk and fight and shag.’

  ‘Oh, right. Because you guys don’t do enough of that in your own country.’

  Her quip helped slacken the tension a little. At a hundred metres the rebel faces coloured in and the rifles each man was holding took on the distinct, lethal outlines of AK-47 assault rifles.

  At fifty metres Bald wound the Defender down to thirty-five k per, to indicate to the guys that he didn’t plan on smashing through the checkpoint. But they raised their AK-47s at the vehicle.

  The Hilux’s bodywork was spotted with rust but the colours striped around it were clearly visible. Bands of red, green and black. The colours of the new Libyan flag under the National Transitional Council. The windscreen was starred and the roof had a dent in it like a crushed drink can.

  Forty metres now and Bald was able to put a name to the party popper mounted on the cargo bed. It was a UB-32 57mm rocket launcher. An air-to-ground weapon normally fitted to Soviet SU-20 fighter planes and helicopters and capable of firing thirty-two unguided rockets at ground targets. It was pointing skywards at forty-five degrees.

  At thirty metres Bald made out the features of the four men. They all wore the same tense, animated look. They could smell victory in the air but they were too green and high on adrenaline to appreciate, as he did, that the peace would be more difficult than the war. One guy was older than the rest, in his late thirties or early forties. Black hair matted and greased, eyes beginning to show the strain. Barrel chest, arms like slabs of beef. He didn’t possess an AK. Just a holstered pistol, his right hand resting loosely on the exposed grip. He had a beard that looked like something a cat had coughed up. Former army, Bald figured. Probably the leader of this ragtag crew.

  Then Beard stepped forward, held up his palm at Bald. Stop. Bald brought the Land Rover to a halt fifteen metres from Beard and his buddies. He kept the engine ticking. He felt his delt and lat muscles stiffen and contort, like metal twisting around metal.

  The smoke on the horizon slimmed to a thread.

  Beard held his ground.

  Bald removed his hands from the wheel and leaned across and pulled out a Union Jack flag from the glove box. The flag would alert the freedom fighters that Bald and Rachel were friendlies and not hostiles.

  Then he saw a wave of colour in his rear-view mirror. White. The edges were all out of focus. It drew along the road at a good speed, eighty or ninety k per, sunlight rebounding off the bodywork. A flag flew at mast from the antenna. Rebel colours. At a hundred metres Bald could see a .50-calibre heavy machine-gun mounted on the rear cab, a couple of weedy guys manning it. At fifty he could make out the overlapping ovals of the Toyota badge. It was screwed to a grille big enough to roast a pig on. At a distance of forty metres the Land Cruiser ground to a halt and three guys, dressed in the same get-up as the crew at the Hilux, armed likewise with AK-47s, debussed.

  Bald realized he was surrounded.

  Then Beard strode purposefully across the asphalt and closed the fifteen-metre divide to one. In the same quick-draw motion he whipped out the pistol from his holster. Bald was close enough to see the fine, individual details on the weapon. It had a short barrel and a polished wooden grip and a run of slanted grooves at the base of the barrel arranged in a //////////// pattern.

  Makarov semi-automatic.

  There was a pause of near silence. The engine ticked. Bald felt his heart ticking inside his chest too. He was conscious of several angry voices shouting in Arabic at his twelve o’clock.

  ‘Hands in the air,’ Beard said.

  Bald ditched the flag and told Rachel, ‘Do as he says. No sudden movements.’ Beard and his buddies were hopped up, looked like the kind of soldiers who were trigger-happy. Bald didn’t plan on doing anything that would give them reason to open fire.

  Spent brass glinted on the asphalt. The other three guys from the Hilux were walking steadily towards them. AK-47s still raised, stocks tucked into their shoulders, dark eyes peering down iron sights.

  Beard looked at Bald. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Scotland.’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘America,’ said Rachel.

  Beard’s men stopped ten metres from Bald and Rachel. He acknowledged them and waved to the guys still inside the Land Cruiser. Then he said, ‘Step out of the car.’

  Bald said, ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’

  Beard sneered. ‘I know exactly what I’m doing.’

  Bald delicately moved his left hand down to the door latch. Or as delicately as is possible for a guy who peaked out at six-three and weighed fourteen and a half stone. He tugged on the latch. The door gave a sigh as it released. He pushed it open and swivelled around ninety degrees so his legs were hanging over the edge of the vehicle, then he eased himself off the seat and dropped to the ground. Rachel followed moments later, equally slowly.

  The heat quickly made itself felt. Now Beard was prodding the Makarov at Bald’s chest. Spit flew out of his mouth as he said, ‘This way! This way!’

  He was pointing at the desert.

  Bald said, ‘This is a big fucking mistake.’

  ‘No, my friend,’ said Beard. ‘The mistake you make is invading my fucking country.’

  There was no point putting up a fight. There was even less point trying to run for it. Four freedom fighters at the Hilux and another five at the Land Cruiser. Six guys packing AK-47s. Two guys behind a machine-gun with rounds so big and powerful they could sever a fucking limb with one quick blast.

  They were marched off the road. The ground was dusty and loose. The heat wriggled its way into Bald’s trainers and singed the undersides of his feet. They walked across the desert. Bald glanced across his shoulder. The Land Rover had shrunk to the size of a remote-controlled car.

  They stopped, finally. Bald didn’t know how far they had come. Far enough that the road was a lizard’s tail on the horizon, thin and curled.

  Beard had the Makarov by his side and said, ‘Who first?’

  Bald said nothing.

  Rachel said nothing.

  Then Beard thrust the tip of the Makarov against the side of Bald’s temple. A circle of co
ld on his sunburnt flesh. Bald kept his eyes on Beard. On his index finger, tensing around the trigger.

  ‘You die first,’ Beard told him.

  thirty-five

  0701 hours.

  ‘They’re watching me,’ Bald said. ‘If you do something stupid, they won’t be fucking happy.’

  Beard hit the pause button on his trigger finger. ‘Who is watching?’ he demanded.

  Bald sensed a seed of doubt and said, ‘NATO, you fucking idiot. I’m here to help you.’

  ‘Liar! You are both spies.’

  Bald rolled his eyes for effect. ‘For fuck’s sake. I’ve got orders from the top brass at NATO to come here. They told me you guys needed my help.’

  ‘Help?’

  ‘Training. Explosives. Counter-sniper tactics. How to kill people. That’s my game.’

  ‘No one told us you would come.’

  ‘We’re here now. Deal with it.’ Bald concentrated on giving a world-class performance in bullshit. The more convinced you looked of your lies, the more likely you were to get away with it. He eyefucked Beard and did his best to look pissed off.

  Beard shifted his feet uneasily.

  ‘What about her?’ he nodded at Rachel.

  ‘Human rights observer,’ Bald said before Rachel could open her mouth. ‘She’s here to make sure I don’t do anything stupid.’

  Bald had heard all the rumours about the CIA rendering hundreds of Libyan dissidents in the paranoia-fuelled years after the Twin Towers came down. Half the fucking NTC leadership had spent time flying Torture Class on a Gulfstream. Everyone in the private security gig knew it, and Bald figured that revealing that Rachel worked for the Agency wasn’t likely to go down well with Beard and his mates.

  Beard shook his head. ‘We don’t need help. This is our fight.’

  ‘Then why would they fucking send me?’ said Bald. He could see the Makarov faltering in Beard’s hand. ‘Your fucking war, not mine. You’ve still got about a hundred fucking towns ready to bring out the bunting for the Gaddafi-welcome-home party. It’ll take you months and cost thousands of your men to secure them all, but fuck it.’