by Chris Ryan
‘The doctors are on their way,’ Penfold said as they left the hexagonal room and entered what was obviously a storage area with racks of shelves along the walls. ‘They’ll check them over in the next half hour.’
‘What’s the point?’ Spud growled.
Penfold looked at him over his shoulder, obviously rather surprised at the question. ‘To establish,’ he said, ‘how much interrogation they can take. I was told there would be four of you.’
‘Change of plan,’ Danny said.
Penfold inclined his head. ‘Er, please don’t touch anything,’ he said. Spud had wandered over to one of the racks and was examining something closely. He turned round, holding it up. Danny’s eyes widened. It looked like some kind of sex toy.
‘Seriously?’ Spud said. ‘I know it must get lonely here, but—’
‘It’s not for recreational use,’ Penfold said. His lips had gone rather thin, like a disapproving teacher. ‘It’s an interrogation tool . . .’
But Spud had already put the object back on the shelf and was now reading some sticky labels that had been attached to the shelves. ‘Rectal feeding . . . rectal rehydration . . .’ He turned back to look at Penfold with an expression of great distaste. ‘What’s wrong with just hitting the fuckers?’
‘Different subjects react in different ways,’ Penfold said prissily. ‘It’s important that we have a wide range of techniques available to us.’
‘Including shoving dildos up their arses? Whatever floats your boat, mucker.’
‘What are you?’ Penfold asked. ‘The terrorist’s friend?’
A sudden, heavy silence. All three members of the unit gave Penfold a contemptuous stare. Spud started to pace towards him.
‘Leave it, Spud,’ Danny said quietly. Spud stopped and took a deep breath, clearly calming himself down.
The terrorist’s friend. If only Penfold knew the truth. But Danny thought he understood why his mate was having a go. Spud had seen the inside of one torture facility too many over the course of his career. It was hardly surprising that he had opinions about what was acceptable and what wasn’t.
‘You’ll be wanting something to eat,’ Penfold said abruptly as he led them out of the storage room and into a kitchen area. There was a sink, a fridge and a microwave. Penfold pointed at the fridge. ‘There’s food in there. Help yourselves. I’ve received instructions that you’re to be present at the interrogation. It’s not something I would usually recommend, but . . .’ His voice trailed off. ‘I’ll return when we’re ready for you.’
Penfold nodded at them, wiped a few beads of sweat from his forehead and left the room.
Joe was pleased that it was raining hard. True, he was soaked to the skin. True, he was shivering with the cold. But he had been waiting for the rain, because he knew this was his best time to strike.
And he knew this, because he had been watching.
In the five days he had been loitering around the outskirts of Calais, Joe had witnessed several attempts to get across the border. He had made two observations. Firstly, when his fellow migrants tried to get over the high wire fences on to the freight or passenger train lines, they always did so in groups of six or seven, sometimes more. It made it easy for the police and soldiers guarding the area to spot them. Once he had seen this happen a few times, Joe had decided that he would continue his strategy of remaining solitary. A single person attempting to breach the lines would be far less obvious.
His second observation was this: nobody ever tried to scale the fences when it was raining. The migrants and the authorities had fallen into a routine. If the weather was fine, they would engage in their little game of catch. When it was foul they would take shelter. Joe had spent many hours standing in the driving rain, watching the weak points of the fence. During those times he had not seen a single attempt, nor a single guard on patrol.
Joe knew that he was brighter than most people. But he was surprised that nobody else had put two and two together.
He was two miles from the centre of Paris, standing on the litter-strewn verge of the dual carriageway road, about 200 metres from a bleak Ibis hotel. On the other side of the road was the main freight train line. He found it hard to see, because droplets of rain were collecting on his damaged glasses. The vehicles on the road were blurs of light as they passed, but that was OK. All he had to do was wait for a gap, then scramble across to the central reservation. And he didn’t have to wait long at this time of night: a couple of minutes and he was running across, keeping his head low and focussing hard on not tripping up, because he was the kind of kid who tripped when he ran. At the central reservation he waited another minute for a gap in the traffic, before sprinting to the far side.
Here he stopped and wiped his glasses. Rain trickled down the back of his neck, and he only had a few seconds of clear vision before the lenses were wet again. But it was enough to get the lie of the land between his position and the fence that marked the boundary of the railway track: fifty metres of rough grassland. He bowed his head again, and sprinted through the driving rain up to the fence.
He was out of breath by now, but he knew he couldn’t stop. The fence was twenty feet high, and topped by razor wire. There was no way Joe could scale it. He had neither the skill nor the strength. But he did have in his rucksack a small pair of hand-held wire clippers, which he had stolen from the back of one of the lorries in which he’d hitched an unofficial lift in northern Greece. He lay flat on the sodden ground to keep a low profile, and got to work on the wire fence. The links were difficult to snip, and his hands slipped badly on the handle of the wire cutters, which dug painfully into his hands. But after five minutes of hard work, he had cut a line about half a metre in length along the bottom of the fence. He reckoned that would be enough.
He shoved his rucksack through the hole first, then wormed his body into the gap. The wire was sharp where he had cut it. It hurt the back of his head, and ripped his trousers slightly, but that was OK. He was through. And just in time, because a train was approaching, its headlamps blindingly bright as they cut through the thick, rain-filled air. Having watched this section of railway carefully, Joe knew that it would stop at this location, presumably while some signalling issue was dealt with up ahead. Sometimes it stayed a minute, sometimes five. And ordinarily there would be guards patrolling the track while the train was stationary.
But not tonight. Not in this rain.
The train was deafeningly loud as it approached. Joe would have known just from the sound that it was a freight train: that low, rumbling, relentlessly mechanical noise. He crouched low again, curled up in a ball, camouflaged – he hoped – amid the grass. He could sense the bright lights of the headlamps even with his eyes screwed shut, and as the train screeched to a high-pitched halt, the sound seemed to go right through him, leaving him breathless.
Silence. He wiped his glasses and looked up. The train was thirty metres from where he lay and the carriages – open-topped, skip-shaped freight units – looked much bigger now that he was closer up than they had done from the far side of the main road. He felt a moment of doubt, but quickly mastered it. Pushing himself up to his feet, and checking left and right to the best of his ability that nobody was patrolling, he sprinted across the open ground towards the freight train. It seemed to loom threateningly over him as he approached. As Joe drew up alongside one of the carriages, he wiped his glasses for a third time and examined the side. There was a metal ladder fixed to the carriage. Its bottom rung was three metres off the ground – higher than Joe had estimated from a distance. He felt himself panicking that he wouldn’t be able to reach it. Take deep breaths, he told himself. You haven’t got time to panic. The train could leave any second . . .
He moved along to the ladder, bent his knees and jumped. His fingertips just brushed the bottom rung, but slipped off it. He cursed under his breath and tried again. This time he didn’t even reach the bottom rung, and he fell in a painful heap on the floor.
There was a g
reat hissing sound from the freight train. Did that mean it was about to move? Joe stood up. He took a deep breath and jumped for a third time. His left hand slipped off the rung again, but he just managed to grab hold with his right hand. He felt his other three limbs flailing pathetically, but got control of himself and grabbed the rung with his left hand too.
Joe wasn’t strong, and months of travel had weakened him further. It took everything he had to pull himself slowly up four rungs of the ladder until his feet were no longer hanging helplessly in mid-air. His muscles burned, and when the train hissed again his sense of panic went into overdrive. He scrambled quickly up the remainder of the ladder and peered nervously over the top edge of the freight carriage. The one thing he didn’t know was what this train was carrying. Would it be safe for him to stow away among its contents?
He peered through the darkness, and a sense of relief swelled up over him. It was gravel. A great, coarse, wet pile of it, filled to about half a metre below the brim of the container. Joe swung his legs over the edge and landed inelegantly. His glasses fell from his face and he spent a few seconds scrabbling around in the gravel. When he found them, however, he didn’t put them back on his face, but instead stowed them carefully inside his rucksack. Then he started scooping out a hollow in the gravel. It took him thirty seconds to make one deep enough to cover up his rucksack, before he started digging himself into the gravel. Just because there was nobody checking the train at this location, security might be tighter when they grew closer to the border. It was important that he stayed hidden.
Within seconds, Joe’s clothes and skin were caked in wet gravel. It was much more difficult for him to cover himself than he had imagined, but at least he was semi-hidden. He just hoped it would be enough.
A third hiss from the freight train. Two seconds later, Joe felt it move. He shivered. The wet gravel was extracting any remnants of warmth from his body. His plan was far more gruelling and uncomfortable than he had thought it would be.
But as the train gathered speed, Joe consoled himself with one thought. It didn’t matter how cold he was, nor how ill it made him. It didn’t matter how dangerous his situation, or how likely it was that he would be captured. It didn’t even matter if he was killed. Whatever the future brought, it would be better than what had happened in the past.
And when you have only one aim in life, as Joe did, there is nothing you won’t suffer to make it happen.
Five
‘I can’t believe that fucker Tony tried to plug me.’
It was the third time Spud had said this in the past ten minutes. And as on each previous occasion, Danny and Caitlin said nothing, because there was nothing to say.
They sat with trays of heated microwave lasagne in front of them. Danny’s was half-eaten. He didn’t have the stomach for it. Spud had barely touched his food, but Caitlin had wolfed hers down.
‘Hungry?’ Spud said. He sounded slightly aggressive.
Caitlin gave him a cool look. ‘I need some tucker. Got a problem with that?’
‘Oh nothing. In fact, I’m really looking forward to witnessing a bit of . . . what was it? Rectal feeding? Whatever the fuck that is. Really sharpens the old appetite.’
‘They’ll cark it before morning anyway,’ Caitlin said matter-of-factly. ‘Nobody’s going to let them live after going to the trouble of getting Tony to kill all those migrants.’ She seemed quite sure that this was what had happened, and if she was upset at her sudden break-up with Tony, she didn’t show it. ‘They need to get the information out of them somehow.’ She gave Spud a shrewd look. ‘If you’ve got a problem with this kind of thing, get out of the game.’
Spud’s cheek twitched awkwardly. ‘I’m just saying,’ he said, bristling like a child losing an argument, ‘you’ve got to be pretty keen on your job to come and work in the arse end of nowhere like this for months on end. I don’t mind a bit of interrogation. It’s when the interrogators start to enjoy it that I get a bad taste in my mouth.’
What was it Hammond had said? Keep a close eye on Spud. He’s been at the receiving end of more than his fair share of field interrogations. The military shrink flagged it up before I put him back on ops. Danny knew he had to watch his mate.
Caitlin, however, gave a callous little shrug. ‘I just hope that Penfold drongo gets something worth knowing out of them,’ she said. ‘I’d hate to have gone through all this for chicken feed.’
Danny was about to reply, but the sound of someone clearing their throat at the doorway stopped him. Penfold was standing there, and clearly had been for a few seconds. Having heard what Caitlin had called him, his cheeks were slightly flushed. ‘We’re ready for you,’ he said. ‘Come this way.’
Caitlin showed no hint of embarrassment as she stood up and strode towards him. Danny and Spud followed. It was an indication of how shaken up he was that there was no sign of a smirk on Spud’s face. The old Spud would have found a situation like that hilarious. ‘You don’t have to watch, mucker,’ Danny said quietly.
Spud just gave him a dead-eyed look. ‘What are you talking about?’ he muttered. He followed Caitlin out of the room.
‘Spud.’
Spud looked back at him.
‘We leave them to it. Even if we don’t like what we see.’
Spud sniffed. ‘Course,’ he said.
Danny watched him go, concern nagging at him. Spud was unfocussed, and had been ever since the incident on the ship. Danny didn’t blame him, but he didn’t like it either.
Penfold led them back into the hexagonal interrogation room. There were three more people in here now. One of them wore a white coat and carried a clipboard. A doctor, Danny surmised. A second man was very young – barely in his twenties – and looked Middle Eastern. Danny had him down as a translator. A third guy was broad-shouldered, with a shaved head and a cracked front tooth that gave him a brutish expression. The muscle. He looked at Danny, Spud and Caitlin with an undisguised frown as they entered.
‘Put these on,’ Penfold said, passing round a handful of black balaclavas to everyone in the room. They all pulled them on – even Penfold himself, whose glasses formed a slight bulge under the black material. The translator looked particularly uncomfortable as he pulled his balaclava on.
‘Try not to get in the way, please,’ Penfold told them. He received three flinty stares from the unit’s eyeholes in return. ‘OK, Birchill, bring him out.’
Danny, Spud and Caitlin moved to the edge of the room. The guy with the cracked tooth – Birchill was obviously his name, or anyway the name he preferred to use in this place – walked to the cell containing one of the targets, opened it up and disappeared inside. He emerged a few seconds later, dragging a thin, naked, shivering man with a bruised torso and shrunken genitals. Santa, the taller and darker of the two prisoners. He was still hooded but his ankles and wrists had been untied. His body was very lean. Small muscles, but well defined. A bit of a six-pack. Birchill removed the hood as a blast of cold air came from Santa’s cell. Penfold and his team had obviously been making life as uncomfortable as possible for their guests.
Santa’s dark face looked crazy with fear. All the arrogance visible in the photograph of him was now absent. His eyes were rolling in his head. His whole body was shaking. As Birchill dragged him by one arm towards one of the other chambers, Danny could see a stain of brown on the back of his thigh – a remnant of where his bowels had loosened out of terror. Santa was pathetically trying to cover his genitals with the palm of his free hand. He shouted a couple of words in Arabic that Danny didn’t recognise. The translator stepped over to the man with the clipboard and muttered something. The man with the clipboard made a note, while Santa was bundled into the room that had the chain attached to the wall, and the dog collar at one end.
‘Seriously?’ Spud said quietly, his voice slightly muffled by the balaclava. ‘Walling? Why not just waterboard him? Get it over with?’
Spud sounded disgusted, and Danny silently agreed with him. It wasn�
��t that he felt a moment’s real sympathy for the two IS suspects. It was just that there were more efficient ways to interrogate them, and he couldn’t help feeling that what was about to happen had something to do with the sick enjoyment of Penfold and his team. He glanced at Spud. His mate’s eyes were slightly narrowed. Even Caitlin, who had sounded so matter-of-fact in the other room, now looked a little doubtful.
‘Our methods are effective,’ Penfold stated. ‘You don’t need to worry about that.’ He stepped into the chamber and switched on the spotlights. The prisoner squinted hard. ‘Birchill,’ Penfold told the broad-shouldered man, ‘go ahead. You know the drill. Two minutes to start with.’
He looked over at the others and nodded at them to indicate that they could enter the interrogation room. They filed in, along with the translator and the guy in the white coat. They stood behind the spotlights, their arms crossed.
Santa was struggling violently – he had stopped trying to cover his genitals and was attempting to hit Birchill. It was futile. Birchill was easily strong enough to hold on to him with one hand and slip the dog collar over his neck with the other. He tightened it, like a belt. Santa’s hands instantly shot up to his neck as he tried to rip the collar off. He started to shout loudly in Arabic. Birchill grabbed both his wrists, yanked them behind his back and bound them together again with a set of plasticuffs. The translator started speaking in a flat monotone. ‘You’ve got the wrong guy . . . you’ve got the wrong guy . . . please . . . let me go . . . let me go . . . you’ve got the wrong guy . . .’
On the far side of the chamber Birchill had grabbed Santa’s collared neck in one big hand. With a sudden, brutal thrust, he slammed the prisoner hard against the concrete wall. Santa’s knees buckled with the impact. As he collapsed, the chain grew taut. His eyes bulged as his neck was throttled by the hanging, and he stuck his tongue gruesomely out.
Birchill let him hang like that for no more than a second before yanking him up again. The chain grew slack. The prisoner shouted something. The interpreter said, impassively: ‘Not again.’