by Andy McNab
A third figure stepped out of the hatch, and he wasn’t fucking about either. He pointed the muzzle of his suppressed weapon at Jesper’s centre mass. I’d been wondering about the complete absence of hostiles in the olive grove. Now I knew the reason why.
Jesper walked back towards me, his hands linked behind his neck, obscuring the second hostile. His head wound was still leaking and blood dripped from another couple of gashes in his cheek onto his shirt. They’d obviously tried to persuade him to talk, but the glance he gave Shaky told me which of them had given away the RV.
I sensed Ella tensing herself, preparing for her second runner of the evening. Surrender wasn’t on her agenda.
A heavily accented Middle European voice came from behind Jesper’s left shoulder. ‘Tell the girl that if she tries to escape again, we will shoot you and both of your friends.’
Ella didn’t need Jesper to pass on the message. It was already loud and clear.
Jesper’s captor instructed him to lie face down beside the wagon, hands behind his back. That was when I got my first really good look at him. I’d never seen him without his niqab, but I’d have recognized those ugly little boot-button eyes anywhere. I guessed his mate in the wagon was Heavy Breather.
He told Ella to sit down and put her hands on her head, then threw a couple of plasticuffs onto Jesper’s back and motioned me towards them with the muzzle of his Llama. ‘Wrists. Tight.’
I knelt over Jesper and messed around with the ties for a moment, hoping Niqab would make the mistake of coming within reach. He didn’t. He’d underestimated the opposition once tonight. He wasn’t going to do it again.
‘Tighter.’
When the cuff had begun to bite into Jesper’s flesh I was told to lie alongside him. The tarmac was still warm from the day’s sun, but it could have been cold enough to freeze my bollocks off for all I cared.
Shaky was hauled out of the Seat by Heavy Breather and put on plasticuff duty. The boy was shitting himself. Even in the shadow of the wagon I could see rings of sweat beneath his armpits as he stood over Ella. He was trembling so badly it took him two or three attempts to engage the plastic tongue into the teeth of her clasp and draw it through.
When her wrists were secure, it was my turn.
Shaky was a bit quicker with the cuff this time. Niqab kept an eagle eye on the process, but never came close enough for me to have a crack at him.
Heavy Breather manhandled Ella into the passenger seat and got back in behind her. I got the strong impression that he had a score to settle. She’d made him look like a dickhead a couple of hours ago, and any chance he got to hurt her from now on, he’d take.
16
Once both doors had banged shut, Niqab told me and Jesper to get to our feet and walk towards the clump of trees behind the GS. We were directed to a bare trunk a metre inside the treeline and ordered to stand either side of it. Shaky looped another plasticuff around our ankles, then Niqab lobbed a roll of gaffer tape at him and told him to wrap us in it, back to back, starting with our mouths.
As he peeled off the first six inches and raised it to my cheek, Shaky gave me an agonized look. I knew he wasn’t just thinking about the two of us: he was flapping big-time about how the rest of his day was going to pan out.
Shaky circled the tree, binding the two of us in a spiral of tape. Niqab motioned for him to step back when he reached our waists. He finally came so close to me I could smell his last couple of meals, and turned up the wattage in those shiny boot-button eyes. Then he punched me hard in the gut and kneed me in the bollocks.
I couldn’t bend an inch, either to protect myself from further attack or bring up my knees to stop him doing it again. I tried to suck as much air as I could through my nostrils, and did my best to ignore the pain that kicked off precisely where he’d connected and then spread fiercely, down my legs and up to my throat. A stream of hot bile threatened to invade my nose and mouth, but I somehow managed to force it back.
Shaky carried on with the job. By the time he’d reached our ankles he’d used most of the roll and we weren’t going anywhere fast. But at least we could breathe, and I was pretty sure they weren’t going to go to this much trouble, then put a round into us.
I could no longer focus on Niqab, but sensed that he was now well pleased with his evening’s work. And as my nerve endings gradually settled back into position, I consoled myself with the thought that, if he and Heavy Breather were close mates of the Leathermen and Sniper One, I’d got off very lightly.
Shaky’s final task was to whip the GS’s keys out of the ignition and destroy the valves on both tyres. When he’d finished, Niqab escorted him to the Seat, gave him the plasticuff treatment and bundled him into the boot.
Two more doors slammed and seconds later the wagon pulled a U and headed back towards the main.
Jesper gave a grunt and we both tried to twist and wrench our way out of our gaffer-tape cocoon. But Shaky had done his job far too well. It looked like we were going to have to rely on the lads in the diamond-patterned pullovers to get us out of the shit. I hoped they weren’t settling in for the night.
17
Santa Cristina, Otura
Thursday, 9 February
01.30 hrs
The golfers at the Santa Cristina finally stumbled out of the bar at one thirty in the morning. Finding a Brit and a Swede tied to a tree at the edge of their car park was a bit of a bonus.
The lads were still pissing themselves with laughter after they’d unpeeled us, and we joined in the hilarity. They assumed we were the hapless victims of a stag-party stunt, and we played right along with it. We all agreed that, when you’re in the right mood, there’s nothing funnier than having your mates bind you from head to foot in gaffer tape and let the air out of your tyres.
As soon as the golfing team had gone I called the hire car company to report the theft of the Leon. They were pretty relaxed. The local police had already found it abandoned on the main to Jaén.
We left the Santa Cristina and hot-wired the first wagon we came to without an immobilizer. Jesper drove me back to the campsite. We agreed that he’d head for Jaén and try to pick up Ella’s trail. Wherever they were taking her, we reckoned that it would probably be by road. Getting onto a plane or a train without her raising the alarm would be impossible. She’d already shown them what she was made of.
A roll-on roll-off ferry would work, if they drugged and hid her, but we both reckoned they’d go overland. Niqab and Heavy Breather weren’t going to garrotte her and dump her body, or they would have done it by now. I was pretty sure she was more valuable as a hostage. Whoever had her could stop Sam telling the truth about the CQB Rooms.
I didn’t have time for a wild-goose chase across southern Spain. My best chance of getting Ella and Sam off the hook was to ambush Jack Grant while he was still in Cyprus – which meant taking the first plane I could out of Málaga.
Jesper asked me a couple more questions before he made for the autovía. ‘How many times have these Serbs got close to you?’
‘Six.’
I knew what was coming.
‘So why have they not taken the opportunity to kill you?’
‘The first two times, I killed them instead. The next three they were interrupted. Then they decided to tape me to a Swede. Maybe they thought that was enough punishment.’
A cab pulled up at the front entrance to the campsite at pretty much the same time Jesper left. The passenger door burst open and Shaky stumbled across the gravel. He didn’t know whether to be in deep mourning for our friend or just plain relieved that he wasn’t lying in a ditch with a bullet in his head.
He jabbered away in a mixture of Spanish and English. From what I could make out, the Madre de Dios had smiled upon him in her infinite kindness and Niqab and Heavy Breather had dumped him by the roadside on the northern edge of Granada, cut the plasticuff off his ankles but not off his wrists, then left him to it.
I didn’t hold out much hope that the Mad
re de Dios would be as kind to Ella. She’d have been transferred to some kind of van with room to keep her out of sight every time her captors needed to cross a frontier.
Shaky drove me to the Villa Oniria to pick up my kit, then back down to Málaga. He probably thought it was the only way he could be sure of getting rid of me. He denied it big-time, but before dropping me off in the outskirts he said he wouldn’t mind if we didn’t come back to the campsite later in the spring.
I told him not to worry about the deposit. He could use it to buy some new furniture.
Then I took a cab to the airport and caught the next Lufthansa flight to Larnaca, with a brief stopover at Frankfurt.
PART ELEVEN
1
Larnaca, Cyprus
Friday, 10 February
02.40 hrs
The posters promised that the Cyprus Girl Guides Association and the Limassol Majorettes would be rehearsing hard for their parade on Sunday week, and the Limassol Antique Cars Club would be preparing to drive around the city ‘in carnival mood’, but right now the Larnaca airport arrivals hall wasn’t exactly a thrill a minute.
It was well before first light and the lads at Passport Control were in zombie mode. The only action around there came from the baggage carousel and the mop squad.
The tourist invasion for next week’s Limassol Carnival was still about thirty-six hours away, but the world’s biggest supply of cab drivers was already milling around outside the Customs gate and keen to have my business. I responded with a smile and a shake of the head. I needed the flexibility of a hire car.
My Spanish experience didn’t set the alarm bells ringing at the desk, so I was on the main to Limassol in an underpowered Suzuki jeep by three fifteen. One of the things I liked about this place was that they still drove on the left. And it was a good time to make the journey: there wasn’t a lobster-coloured Brit on a quad bike in sight.
This stretch of coastline ran for about a hundred and fifty Ks, from Larnaca Bay to Paphos. It had worked hard to become a tourist Mecca since the Turks invaded in 1974, but Cyprus remained a broken land. The skeletal remains of whole villages were still caught in the UN-controlled buffer zone that separated north from south. You didn’t need to get up close to the Green Line to see the scars, though. They ran through every Cypriot’s heart.
Their island’s long and volatile history of invasion and annexation stemmed mostly from its location at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, forty-three miles from the Turkish coast, which made it the perfect jumping-off point for any major power in the mood for further expansion.
The Assyrians had had a crack at it, and so had the Egyptians, the Persians, the Romans and the Ottomans. And though the ’seventy-four gangfuck was always cast as a little local difficulty between two tribes who’d been enemies since the dawn of time, it had had much more to do with the American determination to fill a vacuum before the Russians filled it first.
And the Brits hadn’t covered themselves with glory at that point either. They’d sat and watched from the security of their coastal bases as the place had gone up in flames. Greek Cypriots from the north were evicted from homes their families had lived in for ever, and Turkish Cypriots from the south suffered a similar fate. There were still two thousand officially on the missing list nearly forty years later.
RAF Akrotiri was a couple of hundred miles closer to Bastion than it was to Brize Norton, so it wasn’t just the Club 18–30 beaches and 340 days of sunshine per year that made it the ideal R&R point for returning troops.
As well as providing one end of the air bridge to and from Afghan, it was also a major Mediterranean search-and-rescue centre, operating 24/7, with nearly a thousand permanent staff. I’d spent some time there on my way back from Gulf War One, and despite the friction of partition, I could think of worse places to keep an ex-soldier away from the dole queue.
The closer you got to Limassol, the more you felt like you were wandering into a Mediterranean version of Miami. The place was huge, and the seafront was lined with high-rises – hotels, offices and apartment blocks – busily elbowing aside the more colourful relics of its rich and complex past. As I drove in towards the marina, I could see the McDonald’s Golden Arch and the red and white TGI Friday’s strip lighting up the skyline.
This might have been the clubbing capital of the eastern Med, but Bob had told me that for him it was strictly weekends only. The rest of the time he was tucked up in bed with a cup of cocoa by ten thirty so, no, he wouldn’t be around to welcome me.
He had given me the name of a taverna that opened early enough for us to hook up for a brew before he went to work. I turned right, away from the palm-tree-lined avenue that ran alongside the beach, past the Agia Napa cathedral, and into the maze of one-way streets that surrounded the Old Town. I parked up at the edge of a deserted square, wound the seat back and got my head down for the couple of hours or so that remained until first light.
2
It wasn’t long after sun-up, but the covered fruit and vegetable market was already bustling with activity. It reminded me a bit of the old East End markets that I used to wander past as a kid when I’d bunked off school, but with the outrageous rainbow-coloured produce you could only ever grow in a land of perpetual sunshine.
The artisans’ stores were starting to open too: clothes were being hung out on rails and tables loaded with the kind of souvenirs you’d wonder why you’d bought when you got home.
I found my way to the pedestrian street that led to Bob’s taverna, a bunch of freshly scrubbed wooden tables and cream parasols gathered by a faded blue door. The buildings were mostly no more than two or three storeys high here, some bare stone, some rendered, with delicate wrought-iron balconies jutting out over the pavement.
I was ushered to a seat by a waiter with the kind of moustache I’d only ever seen in the Go Compare commercials. I ordered a big frothy coffee. I quite liked the local concoction, but you had to be in the mood for a cup of something that was half sugar and half something that looked like the stuff I’d had swirling around my bollocks in the Devil’s Neckinger, and I wanted a brew I could linger over.
Bob appeared from around a corner a hundred down and raised a hand as he walked towards me. I hadn’t seen him for half a decade, but he hadn’t changed much. Having traded in his uniform for a Hawaiian shirt, he looked even more like Barry Manilow than Barry Manilow did, these days. We’d always called him Mandy when we were young squaddies, but now wasn’t the time to remind him of that.
He took the chair opposite me. The waiter greeted him like an old friend and he ordered himself the usual, which turned out to be a mug of builders’ tea and a fried-egg sandwich. I got the feeling this was his local canteen. I refuelled my brew and asked for a pig roll and we waffled on in catch-up mode.
Bob looked at his watch. I noticed a slight clenching of his jaw muscles. Either he was going to burst into song, or he wasn’t a totally happy bunny.
‘I don’t know what this is all about, Nick, but I’d say Grant is on a very high wire and trying not to look down. He talks the talk, but it’s not difficult to spot that there’s a whole lot of bad shit going on in his head.’
‘Afghan can do that to a guy.’
He gave me a look that said he didn’t have time for any more fucking about.
I put down my brew. ‘Bob, I don’t know him. And I don’t know exactly what he’s got to hide. That’s why I’m here. That’s what I need to find out. I’ve got one dead mate on my hands and two live ones I owe big-time, and I’m pretty sure Jack Grant holds the key to the mess they’re in.’
He nodded. ‘OK. So I caught up with him as soon as he came out of the Starlifter. He didn’t want to stay on the base for a nanosecond longer than he had to. I told him he could have the spare room in my apartment for a couple of nights. He almost bit my hand off.’
He unclipped a biro from his shirt pocket, wrote an address on a serviette and slid it across the table. ‘It’s on the first floor. I�
�m not entertaining much at the moment, and I thought we might need to keep an eye on him. Upwards of a hundred and fifty thousand people live in this slice of Paradise, and that doesn’t include the tourists – so there are plenty of places you can lose yourself if you want to.’
‘Does anyone else know he’s there?’
‘Sure. I put out an all-stations alert.’ Bob looked at me like I was a complete lunatic. ‘What do you think?’
‘Sorry. How many entrances and exits?’
‘Just the one, if you don’t count the upstairs balcony.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘I don’t have another spare set of keys, I’m afraid. You’ll have to use the legendary Stone charm to talk your way in. He won’t be expecting you.’ He gave me a Manilow-size grin. ‘Try not to destroy the door. It’s an old one, painted red, and I’ve got to like it. Also, it would really piss off the landlord.’
He stood up and reached for his wallet.
I waved it away, and thanked him for playing a blinder.
3
We agreed that we’d connect later, when he’d finished at the base. I told him I’d be sure to pay for any damage. His expression said he wasn’t sure if I was kidding. I wasn’t sure myself.
I finished my brew as I watched him walk away.
Bob’s apartment was half a K to the north of the taverna, and a few streets to the west. I left my bomber jacket in the boot of the Suzuki, bought a straw hat, a white linen shirt and a pair of sun-gigs from a nearby shop, then wandered up there.
The rendering on the front of Bob’s building was a faded mustard yellow and in need of some running repairs, but his balcony was immaculate: a metal table and two canvas director’s chairs stood between a couple of terracotta pots that trailed bougainvillaea through the wrought-iron railing.