Fire Hawk

by Geoffrey Archer

  Up in his bedroom, unmasked and a very long way from home, he’d felt the first shiver of panic. He’d locked himself in the bathroom and hidden behind the shower curtain to avoid covert lenses. Inside the envelope he’d found a single sheet of lined note-paper. On it, two sentences of four words each.

  Beware of Salah Khalil. He is Saddam’s man.

  The name had meant nothing to him. Two messages passed to him; one written, one verbal, one about a man, one about a plague. No obvious connection between the two.

  He’d memorised the words on the note, then burned it, flushing the ash down the drain. Common sense had told him this was a trap – the Mukhabarat feeding him phoney intelligence in the hope of catching him passing it to London. Yet his guts had told him something else, that the messenger had been risking his neck to speak to him. That the man was in fear of his life. With no time in which to think, he’d concluded the warnings could be genuine, and since the danger from anthrax weapons was so great, the tip-off, however vague, had to be passed on fast. Direct communication with London was impossible. No phone was safe. But he’d remembered the German businessman who’d given him the newspaper, remembered he was heading home via Amman that evening.

  He’d set to work fast, squatting on the loo seat and searching the newspaper for the crossword. Filling in blanks in its matrix, he’d scrawled K-H-A-L-I-L S-U-S-P-E-C-T and B-W A-T-T-A-C-K A-L-E-R-T – there’d been no time for code. Then he’d buried a phone number on the small ads page. Not the direct line for his controller at SIS – too risky if the German were to be stopped by the Mukhabarat – but a personal number, someone whose reaction to the message would be as instinctive as his.

  Chrissie Kessler, his lover until three months ago.

  Downstairs, the German had had the taxi door open when Sam found him.

  ‘Your paper. You wanted it back,’ he’d declared, willing the man to understand. In a whisper he’d added, ‘Look inside. Later, not now. Ring the number on page six. It’s London. Ask for Chrissie. Read her the crossword. Please.’

  Not wavering for a moment, the German had climbed into the taxi and driven off.

  Three minutes later, back in the hotel lobby, Packer had been arrested. The Mukhabarat had seen everything. A trap after all. Two men had hustled him to a car, one of them with shiny black hair and a Saddam moustache. And now, God knew how many days later, here he was, strapped to a stretcher in the back of some truck that smelled of piss, heading for whatever fate they’d decided on. He was helpless. On his own. They could do what they liked with him – and they would.

  The bumping of the wheels that had been causing him such discomfort ended suddenly. The truck’s tyres began humming on smooth tarmac. There was no more stopping for lights or crossroads. They were on some highway now. He forced himself to concentrate, to make an intelligent guess at what was happening. He knew what the pattern was. Foreigners arrested in the past had been interrogated in police cells, then moved after a farce of a trial to the main prison at Abu Ghraib, west of the city. Abu Ghraib. A place of misery and executions. His heart turned over again. Did they give prisoners fair warning when they were about to kill them, or did they just string them up?

  In the days that had followed his arrest, the worst part for him had been the isolation. Not knowing what was happening or why. No comfort call from the Red Cross. No diplomatic visit from the Russians who looked after British interests in Baghdad. It was as if the outside world had forgotten he even existed. He knew that once caught, a spy must expect to be disowned by his own people, but the reality of it had been hard to stomach.

  At first they’d questioned him without physical violence. His interrogator who’d spoken in a plummy English accent acquired, he guessed, at a British staff college several years back, had demanded he confess to spying and name his contacts. But he’d denied everything, maintaining he truly was Terry Malone, an exhibition contractor. Then after a couple of days the atmosphere had changed. They’d begun to rough him up. Instead of the catch-all about spying, the interrogator, whom he’d nicknamed ‘Sandhurst’, had posed a different question: what was it the middle-aged informant had whispered to him in the Rashid Hotel lobby?

  The switch of question had thrown him. Why were they asking it if the informant had simply been acting on Mukhabarat orders – and he must have been, he’d reasoned, because he knew his real name. Only a counter-intelligence service could have broken his cover, and he had no clue how. He’d begun to wonder if the tip-off man had gone further than his Mukhabarat masters had intended and revealed a secret in that fear-laden whisper. He’d bluffed it out with his questioner, pretending the informant had simply exhorted him to read the letter then destroy it. The interrogator’s response had been brutal. Concentrating first on the small of his back, the blows had knocked the air from his lungs. But he’d told them nothing. In later sessions they’d used sticks on his shins and glowing cigarettes on his chest. But he’d still said not a word about anthrax.

  Between beatings they’d returned him to his cell and deprived him of sleep and nourishment. How often the cycle had been repeated he didn’t know. He’d lost sense of time and place, floating on a cushion of pain, kept alive by his certainty that to admit anything at all would mean certain death. As his strength had faded, two questions had circled unanswered in his head. How the hell had the Iraqis broken his cover? And had they received his message in London – had Chrissie ever been given it and had she passed it on?

  Confirmation that the thin-faced informant must have exceeded his instructions had arrived soon after. They’d been interrogating Packer again, punctuating their questions with blows to his feet. Then suddenly they’d stopped, dragging him to another room and whipping the hood off. Dangling in front of him was a corpse, naked like himself. The anthrax messenger had been suspended from a rope by hands bound behind his back. His arms were half wrenched from their sockets, his eyes were cataract white, his belly black from the beating that had ruptured his innards.

  ‘This will happen to you, Packer,’ Sandhurst had hissed from behind his head. ‘Unless you tell me what he told you.’

  Back in the interrogation room his captors had forgotten to replace the hood at first. For the first time since his arrest he could see his surroundings. The room was some sort of store, large and bare, its windows blacked-out with cardboard. And for the first time too he had seen the faces of his tormentors.

  Sandhurst, he’d finally realised, was the creature with the Saddam moustache who’d arrested him at the Rashid, dressed now in a dark green uniform which bore no insignia. The guard who’d carried out the beatings on Sandhurst’s orders had been the second man at the arrest.

  And there’d been a third person in the room, a man whose presence he’d been unaware of until then. A commanding figure sitting a few feet away from the others, motionless and silent, eyeing him with a brooding intensity, his dog-like face leathery and lined, his hair and mournful moustache a distinguished sandy-grey. This was the man in charge. The man who controlled his fate. For several seconds he’d felt the intensity of his gaze, the commanding presence. This sand-blasted figure was a veritable Saladin of a man. And it was him, this one, he’d decided, who was so desperate to discover what the messenger had whispered to him.

  Suddenly the Labrador eyes had turned angry, the man’s chisel chin jerking forward involuntarily. He’d shouted at his subordinates. He’d been seen by the prisoner and didn’t want to be. The hood had been jammed back on.

  Then, two days ago, Packer had had the feeling they were giving up, that he’d defeated them. Yesterday there’d been no interrogation session at all and they’d let him sleep out his exhaustion. At the end of the day they’d disconnected his arm from the heating pipe to which he’d been shackled, moved him from the stinking toilet of a cell whose vile, shit-caked confines he’d defined through touch on day one of his incarceration, then never again, and hosed him down with icy water. After that they’d let him eat something that tasted like fo
od instead of sewage, and given him a room with a bed instead of a stone floor. He’d felt absurdly relieved. Almost euphoric.

  This morning, however, when his guard told him he was being moved, his fear had returned. Something new was in store and they wouldn’t say what. A show trial perhaps? Some travesty of a court process? A spy hearing for which there was only ever one sentence in Iraq?

  It was hot in the back of the truck now. The tyres had hummed for what seemed like hours. If it was Abu Ghraib they were heading for, they should surely have arrived already. But if not Abu Ghraib, where else? The road they were on sounded smooth and felt straight. The only route from the capital that he knew personally was the motorway to Jordan. With no flights, all commercial visitors to Iraq had to take the ten-hour drive from Amman. But there were other main roads from Baghdad – north, south and east. They could be taking him anywhere.

  If you lucky this finish quick for you. At that moment the guard’s words had only one meaning for him. Death. The noose over the head, the tightening at the throat, the floor dropping away. He ordered himself not to think about it.

  From time to time during the past days he’d felt intense, bitter anger at his masters at SIS for failing to get him out of there. What were they doing in London? There’d been nothing from the world he knew. Not a word. And Chrissie – surely to God she would have moved heaven and earth for him.

  From time to time, too, he’d ruminated on what madness it was that had made him want to be a spy in the first place. A thirst for excitement had been one motive, and as he lay there in his own filth in the bare cell it had seemed a damned stupid one. But there’d been more to it than that – a fundamental belief that the dissemblers of this world needed sorting out and that he should be one of those to do it. For now, however, the dissemblers had won. He was their prisoner.

  Suddenly the truck slowed down, bumping onto the rough verge and coming to a juddering halt. The sun had turned the rear of the vehicle into an oven. Sam’s throat felt parched. He heard the flap being unlaced and someone climbing into the back.

  ‘What’s going on?’ He felt panicky again. ‘What’s happening?’

  He imagined a pistol being put to his head. His arms were untied and he was jerked up into a sitting position.

  ‘We have stopped to urinate, Packer. That is all.’ Sandhurst’s mellow tones. It surprised him the interrogator was still with him. ‘We don’t want you making a mess of our vehicle.’

  Why was Sandhurst here? Interrogators weren’t normally involved in transporting prisoners around the country.

  ‘Then take this damn hood off so I can see what I’m doing.’

  ‘You’re not allowed to see. You’re a spy, Packer.’

  Gingerly, Sam felt for the edge of the platform and swung his legs over. When his feet hit the ground he yelped with pain. Hands gripped him and he was marched a few paces.

  ‘This will do.’ Sandhurst’s voice again. ‘You can do it here. What is it you call it in the Navy? Pumping ship?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  The Navy . . . How did this man know so much about him?

  Packer fumbled with the unfamiliar buttons of the trousers given to him to wear that morning. Unable to see what he was doing, the flow didn’t come easily. Behind him on the road he heard the swish of heavy vehicles passing, confirming they were on a main highway. And from the strength of the sun above he guessed it was midday or later. Must have dozed a little in the truck.

  After he had buttoned up, the hands were back on his elbows, spinning him round and steering him to the truck.

  ‘Look,’ he protested gently, ‘for the love of God, can’t you tell me where we’re going?’

  ‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ Sandhurst snapped, shoving him against the tailboard so he could feel the ledge. ‘Get in. There’s some water in a bottle if you want it.’

  ‘What about food? I’ve had nothing.’

  ‘Oh, really? Haven’t you heard?’ Sandhurst mocked. ‘There’s a food shortage in Iraq. UN sanctions, you know.’

  Sam eased his backside onto the tailboard and swung his legs up. His shins burned horribly. He edged backwards until he found the stretcher again. A plastic water bottle was pressed into his hands. He unscrewed the top and raised the rim to his lips. The water was warm and unpleasant, but he drank gratefully. He heard breathing. His hearing, made more sensitive by his inability to see, told him it was the guard beside him rather than Sandhurst.

  ‘What’s going to happen to me?’ he whispered. ‘You can tell me.’ Between the beatings this man had shown a degree of kindness to him in the past few days.

  ‘Tch!’

  Sam held out the bottle.

  ‘No. You must drink more. You get dehydrate.’

  He felt he’d had enough, but took several more swigs.

  ‘Where are we going, friend? Tell me.’

  ‘Tch, tch,’ the Iraqi repeated, taking the bottle and pushing Sam down onto the stretcher. He retied his arms. ‘You are spy. Soon finish for you.’

  God! That word ‘finish’ was like a bell tolling.

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘This night. All finish for you,’ the guard whispered, then scurried away.

  Tonight. Within hours. The ambiguity of the words tortured him. He tensed his arms, testing the strength of the ties. No chance of escape. He heard the canvas flaps being fastened, then the cab doors banging shut. The engine coughed back into life and they began to move again.

  As the tyres picked up speed on the highway, his mind filled with the image of a face. The face of the woman whom he’d entrusted with his life. A face framed by silky chestnut hair and dominated by cool grey eyes.

  Chrissie.

  It had been a whim to put her phone number in the German’s newspaper. An instinctive act, stemming from a belief that she still cared for him. She’d been Christine White when they first met, although she’d used a different surname as her cover. Christine Kessler now, the wife of a department head at MI6. Ironically it had been here in Iraq their affair had begun, six years ago. With Iraq’s army massing on the border with Kuwait, Western intelligence had been short of agents in place. Newly transferred to the Intelligence Service from the Royal Navy, he’d been despatched to Baghdad as an extra on a trade mission. A few days later the Iraqi army had invaded Kuwait, and when the West threatened retaliation most foreigners in Iraq, including himself, had been rounded up as hostages.

  He’d been told before his mission that there was another MI6 agent in Baghdad, but not her name. A woman whose cover job was with a British company running a construction contract. He knew that she’d been told about him too. At the hotel where most of the Britons were being held by the Iraqi security services, they’d identified one another through a process of elimination.

  She’d attracted him instantly. Physically at least. From the crown of her red-brown hair to the immaculately pedicured toes peeping from a pair of slingback sandals, she’d oozed style and sensuality. Her character had grated at first – she’d tried to pull rank because she’d worked for the Intelligence Service longer than him. But the antipathy hadn’t lasted. Thrown together by confinement to the hotel, their relationship had become close and equal.

  But not intimate at first, not until the Iraqi announcement that the foreigners were to be used as human shields against American bombers. Then a change had come about in her. The fear spreading through the hostages that they would all be killed had gripped her with an irrational intensity. She’d kept her cool in public, but alone with him in the privacy of his room she’d gone to pieces. She’d shared his bed that night and he’d done what he’d wanted to do since first clapping eyes on her. The next day, when the hostages had been shipped off to be held at strategic targets, Sam had been separated from her. Only at Christmas when they were repatriated to Britain had they met again. Only then had she told him that she was engaged to be married. To Martin Kessler, a senior official at SIS.

  He’d ex
pected that to be the end of the matter – a sexual interlude in a moment of crisis – but the bond forged in Baghdad was not to be broken so easily. A few months after her wedding she’d contacted him again, inviting herself to his apartment one Sunday afternoon. Within minutes of walking through the door she’d told him her marriage had been a terrible mistake. That her husband lacked bedroom skills and seemed disinclined to acquire any.

  She’d made no secret of the purpose of her visit. Her directness had disarmed him. He wasn’t used to women declaring so openly that they wanted sex, particularly women who attracted him as much as Chrissie. Despite qualms about what he was getting into, he’d obliged her, because when she’d unbuttoned her shirt in his living room that Sunday afternoon, the reasons for doing so had seemed infinitely more appealing than those against. Their affair had lasted for over five years on and off, until three months ago, when she’d announced her ‘final and irreversible’ decision to commit herself to her husband. No good reason given. At least, none that had made sense to him.

  The truck hit a pothole suddenly, shooting pain through his bruised back.

  How stupid. How incredibly ill-judged, he realised now, to have sent his message to a woman who’d rejected him. Phoned through to the home she shared with the man he’d cuckolded, a man who could by definition be no friend of his, a man high up in MI6 who had the power to decide that a spy whose cover was blown in Iraq should be left to rot there.

  ‘Stupid,’ he mouthed to himself. ‘Fucking stupid.’

  Despair engulfed him. He was utterly alone – and he felt it.