Were they compromised? the Major asked. The warrant officer shrugged and the master sergeant raised his eyebrows. They had no answers. Should they go – when the transport arrived – to the nearest airport and take a flight for Russia? Could they handle going forward? That was strategy. The warrant officer and the master sergeant did tactics, not strategy and the long-term consequences of a decision. Neither would commit. The man who’d blocked Ruslan from reopening the door to the men’s room when the woman had gone close to the Gecko: what nationality was he? British – from one of the security and intelligence agencies. Why did a British agency have an interest in the Major? Why? Then, understanding. So long ago. Not possible after so many years. Would they remember it? The Major said he could. The warrant officer remembered the problem with the chain, and needing the knife. The master sergeant remembered that they had opened the secure case, when they had freed it, and it had been empty. They all remembered: that it had been for nothing. The agent had not received the paperwork of the deal for a shipment downstream on the Danube. It was so long ago . . .
The Major scraped the side of his nose with his finger stump – and decided.
‘He didn’t know the detail of our movement into Spain.’
The Gecko had not, it was agreed.
‘We’ll go, but with care.’
Again agreed.
The rewards would be huge. And they were worth millions, yet were hunkered in a hut hit by the wind, sand on the floor and— A horn blasted. There were three vehicles. They were greeted but had no common language, and there were guns. Two of the drivers pissed close to the hut, and they left the door to flap. They headed for their next meeting. Then they would plan the crossing from northern Africa to southern Europe. They were driven away on a dirt road.
Winnie spoke to her chief quietly, without details: he would not have wanted it differently.
His back was covered because no one could prove he had known what was planned – with what he had colluded. Dawson’s message, sent from Madrid, stated merely, ‘Efforts continue with a view to attracting the support of the Spanish authorities in the matter of bringing Russian citizen Petar Alexander Borsonov to justice.’ Nor did she confirm to her chief that Caro Watson was now in the air, with her escort, flying from Dakar to Paris, having lost contact with a prime prosecution witness, should Borsonov be arrested and go before extradition proceedings. Nor did she discuss with him options for protection of her forward team in view of the considerable arsenal available to the property owner, Pavel Ivanov. Her chief had the wit to interpret ‘efforts continue’, ‘lost contact’ and ‘options for protection’ himself. Winnie Monks was a protégée of his and a loose cannon. He would not have doubted that she possessed the attributes to cover her own back. She wished him well and promised to keep him fully informed of developments.
She went back into the operations area, Dottie’s creation, and dumped the phone, took her coat from the peg, and announced they were ready for tourism – all of them.
Kenny drove.
They went through the built-up zone, skirted the new banking area, where Dottie remarked on the profitability of money-laundering in hard times, the governor’s residence where a soldier stood guard, and past the dockyard.
A sign told them they could go no higher than Jews’ Gate: Kenny ignored it. More signs ordered that O’Hara’s Battery was off limits, also ignored.
A man in a uniform came to demand they leave. Winnie Monks gazed out along the coastline of the Costa del Sol. There were mountains in the haze with steep cliffs, and at the bottom of one was Villa Paradiso.
At the café, she sent Kenny to buy a single packet of salt and vinegar crisps. Apes, big and small, sat hunched and scratching or swinging off the roof.
She opened the packet and threw down some crisps. They hurried over. A sign said not to feed them. One was heavy and muscled, and came close to her. She threw more crisps closer to her feet.
Dottie said, ‘I don’t think that’s very sensible, Boss.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘No, Boss.’
‘Well, Dottie, on the Richter scale of “sensible”, chucking potato crisps at a Barbary ape doesn’t really register against what we’re doing down the coast.’
‘I was just saying—’
‘Don’t say anything about what is and what is not sensible.’
‘Yes, Boss.’
She tipped the rest of the packet on to the pavement and they drove back down the hill. She wondered how far the lumbering C-130 transporter, the Hercules, had travelled, and whether what was ‘lost’ in the cargo manifest could ever warrant the label ‘sensible’.
Xavier had a lunch date. They had met at a seminar in Salzburg three years before. He had been a policeman, then an intelligence officer, and now was working again with the police. She was a lecturer in criminology, attached to the law faculty of the University of Cádiz. He lacked the rank to attract attention and felt himself peripheral to speeches and workshop huddles, and she had no uniform in her wardrobe.
There had been a few emails, but contact had lapsed. He’d called, then fielded the inevitable queries. ‘Where are you, Xav? What brings you to the Costa? How long are you here?’ All deflected. But Xavier could do lunch the next day. She had lectures in the morning, a tutorial in the afternoon – it would be so difficult. He hit the quiet bit where she expected him to say that he would drive to Cádiz, take her for a sandwich or a salad in the staff canteen and drink some mineral water with her. He said he was in Marbella, that he would buy her lunch, but no further away than Puerto Banus. She said she’d come. A bright girl, pretty: she hadn’t asked him again what he was doing there and how long he’d be staying.
He felt good.
The contact, the voice and the gentle accent had lifted him. The hotel was already a cage. He came downstairs in the morning, wandered through the garden, was allocated a table for one in the dining room and had a spare breakfast while other guests heaped their plates. He walked a bit more, down the main drag of Marbella, Avenida Ricardo Soriano, and back along the Paseo Maritimo then returned to his room. He’d be there for the rest of the day, with a sandwich and a soft drink, and avoid tourists.
He felt better than good.
His phone rang. He heard Snapper out. Xavier – formerly an ‘undercover’, one of the valued men of his old force – respected the photographer. He listened to a man with a reputation for calm resourcefulness. Snapper, however, was rambling and repetitive, his report punctuated by obscenities and gasps for breath – attempts to regain self-control. Xavier sensed a deep apprehension that bordered on fear. Snapper had described how they’d run the hose through the chipper to flush it, then said he was ‘not too happy with the way it’s going’. Xavier had answered soothingly, ‘Wouldn’t have thought you could be.’ He had been on operations where the wheels had come off, knew how the cancer of doubt crept in. He didn’t think, yet, that the wheels were off but they were loose.
There were weapons, hoods to use them, and a man had been murdered. That had not been in the script written for Snapper and his team – and he had little regard for the muscle Winnie Monks had given him. Xavier rarely hesitated in endorsing a decision of the Boss’s, but Sparky was broken goods. He knew the signs.
And there were Jonno and Posie. He had been close enough outside the mini-mart to hear Jonno thank the Serbs for the gift of the beer. There had been no hostility, no suspicion, and the boy was a liability. The wheels were wobbling. In the garden behind Thames House, within range of the river, it had seemed a good plan, with a high chance of success, and no one had doubted Winnie Monks. Xavier was uncertain which was the greater hazard to the operation: Jonno or Sparky.
‘I went into the Parachute Regiment, thought it would be about as tough as it gets, reckoned if I could hack it I was made. Plenty of people had backed me, given me the chance, and believed in me.’
Jonno had a chair in the hall, beside the table on which he accumulated the post for G
eoff and Fran Walsh. Sparky was on the bottom step, talking softly.
‘I had the beret given me in ninety-nine, thought I was the dog’s bollocks, and I’d done well. A year later – two jumps done – they were sending guys off on specialisation courses. You could do signals, anti-tank stuff or mortars, but I was the clever fucker who put a name down for sniping. I already had a marksman’s certificate. It seemed a good idea, and would mean status, respect . . . I don’t know how, but word got around that I had a conviction, had served a prison sentence, and it set me apart.’
Posie was upstairs with the others. Loy had been down once and stepped awkwardly over Sparky. Jonno had wondered if Posie would cook something for them.
‘On the sniping, which we did in the Brecons, I was second in our course. Five more passed and thirteen failed. Our Sunray said I was now one of the most important, influential soldiers in the battalion. I was nearly twenty and starting to believe in myself.’
Jonno could see he was fragile. There had been a reference to the Boss, a woman, who would have known how fragile he was, but he realised that a special trust had been placed in him. The man unburdened himself and Jonno listened.
‘I’d done the training. I could shoot whenever I wanted to. I was excused the basic slog of other kids in my intake and was out on hills and moors, or in the broken buildings we used for urban-warfare scenarios. I had my rifle and my sight, and a spotter who was the best friend I ever had. It wrecked me.’
The man shook, and Jonno held him. He couldn’t fathom why the Boss had sent Sparky and what use he might be.
12
‘We went to Iraq. You’ll not have been there, Jonno.’
He had not been anywhere, before the Villa Paraiso. Nothing in his life had equated with where he was now. He felt gratitude that a man as locked down as Sparky had chosen him as a shoulder, an ear; and was sad that the former soldier was in need of something to lean against and someone to hear him.
‘We thought there would be rose petals chucked at us, and big crowds cheering us. We were in the east, along the A6 highway. Do you know that Brit newspaper hacks were shouting, “Foul!” because they reckoned the Yanks had kept all the choice bits, where the action was, for themselves, and that we were on the sidelines? Fat chance of that. All the ragheads were short of was artillery and missiles. Every day we were in big fire fights. Our Sunray said that a sniper was pretty much worth a platoon of thirty squaddies. I lived on rooftops, was on the move, did what I was trained to do – was an awkward bastard. My top spotter didn’t get the plane with me. He’d broken his ankle on the exercises, bought himself out of the army and gone to his family farm. I went through two or three spotters, and always found fault. Killing came to be a habit.’
Jonno had nowhere better to be, and nothing much to do. He’d slept well, had half reckoned Posie would come back in the night, – but she hadn’t. The cat had been with him, curled near his stomach, but had gone out at first light when Jonno had stirred. There had been singing in the night, and shouting from the Villa del Aguila.
He and Posie had circled each other in the kitchen, giving way at the sink and the toaster, and beside the fridge. Loy had been at the door, watching them, and had carried the tray upstairs. Later she’d done more washing: she’d put his socks, underwear and Sparky’s soiled T-shirt into the machine, then hung them out on the line. Snapper’s and Loy’s stuff was inside, hooked over the shower rail. Jonno had called Málaga International, explained about their tickets, asked whether they could quit earlier than the reservation. He’d been told to call again in the morning. Now he and Sparky were in the same place as before, at the bottom of the stairs.
‘I was shooting at up to half a mile, and they’d given me a stripe, lance corporal. I could shoot anybody I wanted. I’d call back in, give a PID – that’s Positive Identification – and the answer would come back that I was “cleared to engage”. Then I’d blow some bastard away – young or old, armed or unarmed. If my spotter didn’t like it he could go back to flogging his guts out on foot patrol or digging latrines, so they didn’t flap their mouths. Some of the ones I wasted were old and unarmed but they had that strut of authority. Within half a mile of me a raghead’s walk was enough to send him to Paradise or back to his shit-heap home. I took some out because it was a difficult shot.’
He didn’t think it necessary to make small-talk. It wasn’t relevant that he’d been nervous about leaving home for the first time to go to college, or that he hadn’t slept well on the night before his finals had kicked off. This man had done so much that was beyond any horizon that Jonno knew, but he needed Jonno’s grip to counter his trembling.
‘I used to keep count – like kids playing schoolboy soccer. They can tell you how many goals they’ve had. I could tell you about them all, the ones where the wind deflection made it difficult, or the heat haze had to be allowed for because of atmosphere density. I was the king, and no one in Bravo Company cared who I killed or why. We hated every last one of them, and the more I slotted the better. And I came home.’
Jonno had done a good bullshit story to the girl at Málaga International: he had a sick relative at home. She’d suggested that an email from the UK consulate would help an emergency application. He’d call her the next day, and the consulate would not be involved.
Sparky’s voice was faster, breathier. ‘I was the killer and had some stature. It was known that not all my PIDs fitted the bill but nobody lost sleep over it. It was a great sight, seeing a man keel over, sort of crumple, like the strength in his legs was cut. There was a girl, Patricia – well, Patsy – and her brother was a corporal in our mortar platoon. She had a job in a bank and moved in with me. I used to gel my hair, what there was of it, and it stood up like I’d been shocked. That was the start of “Sparky”, and it stuck when I had the lot off. All I wanted to do was get back to sniping. I had to wait two years.’
Loy came down with the tray, looked at Sparky, betrayed nothing.
‘I had a new spotter when we went to Helmand, Bent – his name was George Bentley. About an hour after we’d arrived it was pretty plain that Helmand and Iraq, al-Amarah, were in different leagues. It was killing for a purpose, which was to stay alive. The more Bent called the targets and I whacked them, the more the rest of the company disliked us.’
Loy had started to wash up.
‘He was the best guy I ever had, Bent. Never used two words if one would do the job. Sun didn’t worry him, nor the cold, never bellyached about the food. The unit in there before us didn’t do sniping and the Tommys – Tommy Taliban, with me? – had become casual. I shot guys who were laying command wires, handing out weapons, briefing foot-soldiers, the ones who went off for a crap behind a bush, or were using goat-herding as cover for dicking on us – that’s learning our movement patterns, the routines. Nobody loved us. One morning I dropped a commander. It was a hell of a shot, and everything went mental.’
In the bathroom, Loy took the now dry clothes from the shower rail.
‘Each time I’d fired and hit, they’d retaliate. They had heavy machine-guns and mortars, and good enough fieldcraft to come close and use the RPGs. Our guys thought that them getting it was down to me, because I aggravated them, and I’d tell them to fuck off and do their own job. I was accused of putting the lives of the unit at greater risk, of only being interested in making a name of myself. We had IEDs all round the positions.’
Loy had folded his own clothes and Snapper’s. He came over and dumped Sparky’s in his lap. Jonno thought they reckoned upstairs that the man tasked to protect them had copped out.
‘We had casualties, a couple in boxes going home, four with wounds, and I was blamed. My sniping had done it. Open hostility to me and Bent, and too many IEDs to be cleared. I kept hitting the bastards. I’d go and hunker with Bent on top of a hill, look down, do the PID and shoot. Look into their faces, see their eyes, do an evaluation, like tossing a coin for life or death. I’d kept the count going and we were four days from
handing over the territory . . . We were coming back in one evening, half-light, and a section had gone out to meet us and bring us past maize fields. It happened.’
Jonno held tight to a hand.
‘There was a flash and a hell of a noise. Everybody was shouting and some were screaming. I was at the back because no one wanted to be close to me, but Bent was ahead. He died. Another guy was nineteen and he died too. Two more were injured. One had lost his sight and his right arm would go, the other his lower legs. I’d fired once that day and had wasted a hairy bastard I reckoned was dicking. I never fired again.’
Jonno folded Sparky’s clothes neatly.
‘I was responsible. If I hadn’t been “celeb-chasing”, they said, Tommy’s reaction wouldn’t have been so in our faces. You see, Jonno, squaddies aren’t only interested in winning but also in the quiet life, and getting home with their tackle still in place. The padre must have heard because he found me the first time I was in bits. He said it wasn’t my fault, I’d done nothing to blame myself for . . . What did he know? I came home with Bent. I did Wootton Bassett, and old men shook my hand because I still wore the kit from Helmand. What did they know? I was wrecked.’
Jonno gave the clothes to Sparky, eased himself up, then went into the kitchen – the draining-board was spotless from Loy’s efforts – and out into the garden. He didn’t know what he could have said. The quiet hit him. The singing and shouting were long over.
It was the third pint of water that Pavel Ivanov had drunk. Through the night, he had drunk beer, then brandy – a bottle to himself – and enough neat vodka to flatten him . . . he reached the bed because Marko and Alex had carried him there. His head hurt.
He stood on the paving stones at the back of the villa where he could see up the garden and beyond the wood hut – and the chipper parked nearby – to the face of the mountain that lowered above him.
The Outsiders Page 25