by Will Jordan
Reaching down, she took his hand and placed it against her chest. He felt the beating of her heart, the strong and steady pulse of life. ‘I’m alive now because I killed him. I’m not ashamed of this, and I do not ask for forgiveness. I did what I had to do to survive, just as you did.’
Drake’s own heart was pounding as hard as hers. He had never spoken to anyone about what happened, never shared his grief or his guilt, never let it out. But here, at last, he had found someone who understood, who had felt what he did, who knew the same pain.
‘We are both soldiers, Drake. No matter what they tried to make us, we are soldiers, and we do what we must to survive. That is the life we chose for ourselves.’
She understood, and she accepted. Without condoning or condemning, she accepted him for who he was and what he’d done.
She understood.
Still clutching his hand, she moved it slowly lower until it was cupping the soft swell of her breast. She was still staring at him in the flickering firelight, her lips slightly parted, breathing a little faster. But there was something else in her eyes now, something primal, something compelling and entrancing.
Always the soldier, she was challenging him, trying to provoke him.
‘No,’ he rasped, pulling his hand away. ‘We’re not doing this.’
But she wouldn’t let go of his wrist. She had it clamped in a vice-like grip.
‘You want me, Drake. I know you do.’
As always, she was right about him. He had wanted her this whole time, even if he’d never consciously acknowledged it. But now there was no denying it. Now he wanted her with such all-consuming ferocity that it left him breathless.
‘Not like this,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Let go of me.’ Trying in vain to pull his hand free, he finally lost patience and shoved her in the chest, knocking her backward.
She rounded on him, her eyes blazing.
‘Are you afraid of me?’ she taunted. Before he could reply, she had delivered a stinging slap that left his ears ringing and his cheek burning.
‘Is that it? Are you a coward, Drake?’
She drew back her arm to slap him again, but this time he caught her by the wrist, and suddenly she was in his arms, her body pressed against him. Her mouth found his, hesitant at first as if the act was unfamiliar to her, then harder and firmer as her need grew more intense.
He could feel the strong beating of her heart, the hot life coursing through her veins. Holding her close, feeling the warmth of her body against his own, he wanted her, needed her with a desperate urgency he’d never known.
He couldn’t help what happened next. Sensation and instinct had taken over, driving rational thoughts aside. Exerting her strength, Anya pushed him backward onto the sandy ground and straddled him, her hands tearing at his shirt. His body responded in kind, and he felt his own need rise almost instantly.
Grasping the light fabric of her T-shirt, he pulled it quickly off, exposing her full breasts. Anya stifled a gasp as his tongue ran over a nipple contracted by the cold air, and pressed herself against him, running her hands through his hair.
As they kissed again, his hands ran up and down her back, tracing the curve of her spine, her shoulder blades, the firm muscles tightening and releasing. And criss-crossing it all, the faint indentations of scar tissue. He felt no hesitation, no hint of embarrassment or revulsion. They were part of her, testimony to the life she had lived, for good or ill. He accepted them as he accepted everything about her.
Drake was no longer thinking about what he was doing. He perceived what happened next as a series of moments, viewed as if through the eyes of another. He saw himself push her over onto her back, saw the hunger and need in her eyes. He saw himself yank her boots off while she fumbled to undo her belt. Her trousers came away a moment later and he threw them aside, eager, desperate to rejoin her.
In a heartbeat he was on top of her, forceful and unrestrained. There was no hint of fear in her eyes as she lay naked beneath him, her heart racing, blood pumping through her veins. She wanted it as much as he did, and she was ready for him.
We are both soldiers, Drake. No matter what they tried to make us, we are soldiers, and we do what we must to survive. That is the life we chose for ourselves.
Her breath was coming faster with each thrust as she matched his movements with equal force, giving herself as completely as Drake gave himself. Her fingers raked his back, drawing blood, feeling the powerful muscles clench and release with each movement.
He accepted her as she had accepted him, and in the dancing shadows of the fire, they came together the only way they knew. Pleasure and pain, joy and grief, hope and fear mingled together and rose to an unbearable crescendo as their cries mingled together and were lost amidst the endless desert.
Chapter 62
DRAKE LAY BY the fire with the woman pressed up against him, her head resting in the hollow of his shoulder, her long blonde hair in tangled disarray. Her body was warm in the cool night air, her breathing slow and regular, but he didn’t think she was sleeping.
He wondered if she ever truly slept.
His hand idly traced a path across her shoulder, from the firm deltoid muscle to the hardness of ribs, and finally to the rounded swell of her breast. He noted with a slight feeling of arousal how the skin was thinner and softer there; such a strange contrast of unyielding strength and tender vulnerability combined in one body. He heard an intake of breath as his finger brushed a nipple, feeling it harden under his touch.
She stirred, raised her head to look at him, her normally pale blue eyes shimmering in the firelight. She didn’t smile, but there was a sensuous glimmer in her gaze that he had never seen before.
She sighed and looked up at the sky and overhead, at the thousands of tiny points of light glimmering in the darkness.
‘It is beautiful here, isn’t it?’ she said quietly, speaking with the hushed reverence of a pilgrim visiting a holy place. ‘When I was a child, my mother once took me outside at night. She pointed up at the sky and told me that the moon and the sun were husband and wife, and the stars were their daughters.’ She smiled with faint longing. ‘One of the few memories I have of her.
‘She still believed in the old ways. The stories of gods and goddesses, demons and spirits of the old world. All the women in her family had learned them, passed down from mother to daughter. She said that one day I would teach them to my own children.’ He heard a faint sigh. ‘Things did not work out quite the way she expected.’
His hand traced the scars on her back, old wounds from old battles.
‘That was where I got my name in the Agency. Maras, the goddess of war and death. I think it was Cain’s way of showing respect, paying tribute to my heritage. But … it was not a name I would have chosen.’
Letting go of her, Drake sat up and ran a hand through his dishevelled hair, unwilling to meet her questioning stare. ‘I’m sorry.’
She frowned. ‘For what?’
He gestured at the clothes that lay scattered around them. ‘For this. For using you like that. For hurting you. I didn’t mean for it to happen.’
It had been rough and fast. Not tender lovemaking, but a sudden, violent act and explosive release. Now that the moment had passed, he was ashamed of his loss of control.
Drake had needs as much as any man, but they had never taken over him as completely as they had tonight. He despised men who couldn’t control themselves, who used sexual desire as an excuse for hurting women. Now it had happened to him, and he hated himself for it.
Anya sat up, not bothering to cover herself, and grabbed him by the arms, gripping so hard that it hurt.
‘Do you think I’m so weak and fragile that you have to touch me gently in case I break?’ she demanded, visibly angry. ‘I can take just as much as you can, and I wasn’t afraid of you. I wanted you tonight – all of you, good or bad. Don’t you understand that? I didn’t want you to hold back.’
‘But not like this,’ he protested.
‘Not after … what happened to you.’
‘This was nothing like that,’ she shot back. ‘Believe me, I’ve lived long enough to know the difference. Do you think I would have let you do that to me? It happened because I wanted it, and so did you.’
Drake said nothing to that, because there was nothing to say. She was right, and he knew it.
His expression softened as he looked at her, naked and defiant before him, oblivious to the chill night air. Never in his life had he encountered a woman like Anya. She could endure any hardship, face any danger, overcome any enemy.
She was dangerous and fearless, cold and passionate, beautiful and terrible. She was all of these things, and more.
‘All right,’ he conceded reluctantly. ‘Where do we go from here?’
She smiled and stood up. ‘The first thing I’m going to do is put some clothes on. It’s cold,’ she said, reaching for her T-shirt.
‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘I know what you meant.’ She glanced at the sky in the east. It looked the same as any other patch of sky, but she was apparently able to discern some meaning from it. ‘It will be dawn in a few hours. You look like you need sleep more than I do. I’ll stand watch and wake you when it’s time to go.’
She was herself again. The barriers and armour were back up.
Pulling her trousers back on, she returned to the other side of the fire and sat down next to the weapon she had dismantled, as if nothing had happened. Drake watched as she reassembled the assault rifle with practised ease, careful to keep her eyes from meeting his.
It would be futile to try to talk to her. Pulling his own clothes back on, Drake crawled into the back seat of the Hilux and closed his eyes. She was right – he was exhausted, but sleep was long in coming.
Chapter 63
HE WAS AWOKEN in the grey half-light of dawn, cold and stiff and uncomfortable. And yet, despite the cold and discomfort, he felt more rested than he had after many a night in a warm bed.
Anya, naturally, was already awake and ready to leave. Breakfast was nothing but a bottle of water that Hussam must have stowed aboard the vehicle, then they were off again, heading north across the desert with the sun just peeking above the eastern horizon.
They crossed the border into Iraq about an hour after sunrise, though the only reason they knew this was because the Magellan said so. There was no signpost, no fence or physical boundary of any kind to mark the transition from Saudi Arabia to Iraq; just endless swathes of desert that seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon.
The terrain was rocky and undulating, forcing them to take a winding route around sand dunes and steep canyons that was both frustrating and time-consuming. Still, after about 5 miles the ground evened out, allowing them to pick up the pace a little.
Buried beneath the drifting sands of Iraq were vast reserves of oil conservatively estimated at more than 140 billion barrels, the second largest in the world, but most of these fields were concentrated in the south and north-east of the country. The western half of Iraq was, by contrast, vast and mostly empty desert, devoid of strategic or commercial value.
As a result, they encountered no other vehicles during this time. No military installations, no checkpoints, no observation posts, nothing.
The only sign of humanity came when they cruised past a small group of men on camels, swathed in robes and headscarves. They were Bedouin, the nomadic tribesmen who lived in the deserts where few others could survive. The invasion and the ongoing war in Iraq probably meant nothing to them – their way of life had carried on unbroken for hundreds of years, and would likely continue to do so for hundreds more.
Sitting in the passenger seat, Drake tensed and relaxed his right hand, wincing as the stiff muscles protested. It had been paining him since he’d woken up, no doubt due to the cold night.
‘That hand bothers you,’ Anya remarked without turning round. It was her first real attempt at communication all day.
‘It’s stiff sometimes in the morning,’ he explained. ‘It’s nothing.’
‘You injured it?’
He nodded. ‘In a fight. A long time ago.’
‘What kind of fight?’
For some reason, he felt himself blush. ‘A boxing match.’
‘You were a prizefighter?’
‘Is that so hard to believe?’ he asked, feeling slighted.
She gave him a dubious look. ‘I took you for an intelligent man.’
‘Jesus, you sound like my mother,’ he couldn’t help retorting. ‘Anyway, you’re hardly in a position to criticise me for fighting.’
She shrugged. ‘Killing for duty or ideology is one thing. Beating a man unconscious for money is another.’ She looked over at him. ‘Anyway, this fight of yours. What happened?’
Drake sighed, thinking back to that night. ‘Well, as unlikely as it might seem, I was a pretty decent prospect in my day. I turned professional after a year or so, won my first eight fights by knockout, and soon people started taking notice. Then I got talked into fighting some old piece of shit club fighter. A big old brawler; you know the sort. He would have been a real threat ten years earlier, but by the time I ran into him, he was slow and out of shape. He was only out to make some money before he retired, and I was happy to send him on his way. I knocked him down sixty seconds into the first round. He got up, so I knocked him down in the second. And he got up again.
‘No matter what I did, no matter how many times I hit him, the stupid bastard just wouldn’t stay down. He was fighting as if his life depended on it.’ He shook his head, still struggling to accept it. ‘I broke both my hands trying to knock him out.’
He looked down, slowly tensing his hand into a fist. Just for a moment, he felt the power that had once been there, heard the roar of the crowd cheering him on.
‘It was six months before I was cleared to fight again.’
‘But you did not go back?’
He shook his head. ‘I’d moved on. I wasn’t making any money sitting on my arse waiting for my licence to get renewed, so I’d had to find a job. I suppose I lost the edge in those six months, and you don’t get it back easily.’
‘You mean your pride took a beating.’
‘I didn’t feel like starting all over again, working my way up through shitty club fights for fifty-quid purses,’ he replied with more heat than he’d intended. ‘Bit of a fucking climb-down when you were on the brink of a title shot.’
She’d pushed his buttons, and she knew it. ‘Well, at least you learned something from that fight.’
‘Yeah? What’s that?’
She offered a wry half-smile that he’d come to know all too well. ‘Just because someone is old, doesn’t mean they can’t hurt you.’
‘This is them right here,’ Frost said, indicating the slightly fuzzy CCTV image of a woman with blonde hair and a man walking into an electrical retailer. ‘They went in at 14.07, and they came out again eight minutes later. You can see the package Drake’s carrying.’
The young woman looked drawn and haggard, as well she might. She had been up most of the night trawling through surveillance footage yet again, searching for clues on where Drake and Anya might have stopped to buy a GPS system.
At last her perseverance had paid off, and she’d found them entering a store within the airport terminal itself.
Dietrich exhaled, impressed by her sheer, bloody-minded determination. It was a shame she was such a prickly little bitch. ‘Good work, Frost.’
‘Stop it, I’m getting all misty eyed.’
He laid a congratulatory hand on her shoulder, forgetting it had been dislocated only hours before. His gesture elicited a sharp gasp of pain, and an angry glare.
‘Sorry,’ he amended, turning to Rahul. ‘We need the manager of that store. I want to know the serial number of the unit he sold them.’
Once they had that, they could contact the manufacturer, find out the specific frequency that the unit operated on and use it to triangulate a position.
It was perfect. The GPS system would be doing exactly what it was designed to do, except it wouldn’t just be telling Drake and Anya where they were.
The Saudi man nodded, already reaching for his phone.
Chapter 64
‘THIS IS IT,’ Drake said, checking their latitude and longitude on the Magellan for the third time.
Had the GPS unit not assured him that they were in the right location, he would have had his doubts. They were in a rocky, unremarkable stretch of desert at the base of a low rounded hill. The village of Ash Shabakah lay a mile or so to the north-west, hidden from view by the hill.
Bringing the Hilux to a stop, Anya killed the engine, picked up her AK and stepped out. Drake was by her side a moment later.
It was early evening, with the sun now well past its zenith and drifting lazily down towards the western horizon. It was still brutally hot though, the dry dusty air searing their throats with each breath.
‘You’re sure this is the place?’ Drake asked, scanning the rocky ground around them. He was beginning to wonder if Anya’s contact had sent them off on a wild goose chase.
‘It is the location he gave me.’
‘So where is he?’
Ignoring him, Anya crept forward with her assault rifle at the ready, keeping herself low. She had only gone a dozen paces before she stopped and knelt down to examine the ground ahead.
‘Tracks,’ she said without looking up. ‘Recent. A man, average height, wearing civilian shoes. He walks with a limp.’
‘Now you’re just showing off.’
She shrugged. ‘I am telling you what I see.’
Drake wasn’t about to argue. Tracking was a skill he’d learned because his profession had once required it, but he’d never had much aptitude for it. Those who could read the subtle clues to be found in a footprint, the differences in weight distribution, stride length and wear patterns were a breed apart as far as he was concerned.