by Jack Hayes
A magazine-sized hunk of glass sliced deep into the foam.
Blake checked the underside. The shard hadn’t penetrated the sponge. He padded himself down, searching for signs of blood.
Nothing.
Mac’s lips moved.
“What?” Blake asked.
“What?” Mac replied.
Blake saw his friend’s lips move but heard only a high-pitched tinnitus whine. He watched as Mac also padded himself down checking for blood.
Blake stood.
The scene was apocalyptic.
Rubble was strewn everywhere. The Dubai Mall fountain bubbled apologetically over chunks of concrete and plaster. Kaskhar’s building was missing all but the lowest two floors, its contorted walls smoking like a coal-fired power station.
The air was thick with the taste of vaporised masonry.
The buzzing in his ears slowly cleared as Blake walked forward to the window over the diamond glistening floor and surveyed the devastation. It seemed to be snowing as ash flittered on the breeze.
“Well, that’s that, then” Mac said. “We’ll be at war with Iran by the end of the week.”
“You mean Rasoul won?” Blake was surprised.
Mac’s eyes tracked across the debris.
“We can’t hush this up. It demands a response.”
“You can’t play it out as the conspiracy it was?”
“A war with Iran was always inevitable,” Mac sighed heavily. With the adrenaline gone, he suddenly looked extremely tired. “I’d hoped we’d suppress this incident enough that we could put another conflict in the region off for two, three, maybe even four years. I don’t think that will be possible now.”
“What about Ron?”
“Ron?” Mac replied. “Well, apart from his boozing, whoring and dubious taste in tobacco, I personally like the man. He’s witty, charming and urbane – for an American.”
“You’re not going to retaliate against him?”
Mac straightened his suit and tie. He was morphing from Mac the friend back into Mac the Baron and High Court judge.
“One does not retaliate against ones allies, unless one wishes to end up friendless and alone,” he said, the sternness returning to his timbre. “It’s not how the ‘Great Game’ of international politics is played. Ron’s actions were a symptom, not the disease. He was merely a tool of Connors’ expansive foreign policy.”
“And unfortunately, they’ve achieved their ends,” Blake added, “this time.”
“Right,” Mac said. “But there will be a next. And another after that. We are now familiar with the lengths to which Connors will go. Next time he will find it much more difficult to pull a stunt like this one. MI6 will step in earlier and stop the plot cold.”
Blake smiled.
“When a man stumbles, look to see if the hand that pushed him was British.”
Mac looked askance.
“I’m not familiar with that particular homily,” Mac said. “Come, let us check up on the doctor and your friend Asp downstairs.”
They stepped with care not to slip across the sparkling crystals that littered the tiles towards the staircase.
“I heard it for the first time earlier today,” Blake replied. “It’s taken a while for its truth to sink in.”
“Speaking of earlier today,” Mac said delicately, “what happened to the puzzle box?”
“The puzzle box?” Blake replied. “We gave it to Aarez in exchange for Asp’s family.”
“Her majesty’s government is most eager to retrieve it. Where do you think we might send our request for its return?”
“That I can’t help you with,” Blake shrugged.
“I see,” Mac said. “Then let me put it another way: where are you intending to go next, after leaving here?”
“I thought I might retrieve my P90 from your cloakroom, borrow a few items of equipment from your men and then, take a brief drive out into the desert.”
“You know where Aarez is and you plan to go after him alone?”
“He’s really pissed me off,” Blake replied, his voice hushed. “You know, he ordered a hit against my cat?”
“Indeed?” Mac arched his eyebrows in mock surprise. “Well, there are some things a gentleman simply cannot let lie.”
59
It was mid-afternoon and the sun was already on the downward arc of its long descent to the horizon when Blake climbed out of the Audi into a hollow between two large dunes. The dunes intersected at a battleship-sized rocky outcrop that appeared to be sailing across the desert waves.
Blake loved this part of the Northern Emirates.
For any Westerner expecting movie visions of the Middle East, the Empty Quarter with its endless, rolling, blonde sterility fulfilled their expectations of the region. But for a different taste of beauty, the place to travel was the northern tip – Mussandam, Madha, Ras Al Khaimah and Fujairah – where russet mountains rose from nowhere out of cinnamon sands.
The rocks and desert here were a mixture of dark reds, oranges and chestnuts. They were at their best at sunset, when sky and soil merged into a single entity.
Blake bent down and picked up a handful of dust between his fingers.
“Damn it,” he berated himself. “If I hadn’t listened to Ron I might have found this place yesterday.”
It was the same sand he’d seen embedded in the car belonging to the Russian mobsters so many hours ago.
He tossed it aside in disgust.
The P90 felt like a trusted comrade in arms as it dangled from his shoulder. He’d traded in his PSS pistol for a German-made SIG P226. Mac had ordered one of his underlings to remove it from his shoulder holster and hand it over to Blake.
It told Blake everything he needed to know about Mac’s entourage. It was the favoured pistol of the Special Air Service.
Blake took from the car’s back seat a rucksack full of kit he’d managed to get with Mac’s assistance. He removed a pair of binoculars from the bag before slinging it over his shoulders. He then locked the car and trudged up the dune and lay at its peak.
Bringing the binoculars to his face he could see Aarez’s complex.
It was enormous.
The layout reminded Blake of a Mexican hacienda. There was a large, Californian-styled mansion that glowered over a smaller network of buildings that included a dilapidated barn, a five-car garage and a well maintained two storey building that Blake took to be the falconry. There were also the characteristic cages he recognised as the latest Emirati fad: a miniature zoo.
Blake sighed.
These were a common attachment for the Emirati elite – even endangered species could be obtained for the right price, often from the notorious Sharjah Pet Market.
Fancy a leopard?
They could be bought almost as easily as a kitten.
Blake approached the complex from the side. Between him and the bird mews, the natural landscape stretched for more than a mile, filled with camel pens and, nearest to him, a small set of cattle sheds.
He had seen a similar layout used at a camel milking facility in another part of the country. There was a newly fashionable movement to revive the region's taste for milk from local animals, extending to its use in chocolate, yoghurt and cheese.
Blake smirked.
The cheese was sold under the brand-name “Camelbert”.
Blake had to move more than half a kilometre from his current position, crossing the desert, to reach the high concrete wall, scale it, and then navigate his way through the farm for a further couple of kilometres to get to the main buildings.
He’d certainly picked the long way in.
That had been a necessity.
Although there was a trade off in terms of time and effort in attacking from this direction – by now Aarez would know that the bombing of the Burj Khalifa had failed and would likely be preparing to flee the country.
However, it had to be this way; a frontal assault would likely be suicide.
Blake moved
his binoculars across the property.
He counted five patrolling farm hands. All were armed. At the main network of buildings he expected more. If Blake was unlucky, Aarez might also have rounded up the last handful of surviving Russian mobsters.
If they were as fat and sloppy as the two he’d met in his house, his task might be manageable. If they were ex-Spetznaz comrades of Milanovich, they’d be able to pick off a moving target with a sniper rifle at a distance of one mile.
Hence, the necessity in parking so far away.
Blake had been lying on the sand for less than five minutes. Already his throat was parched and his tongue began to swell in his mouth. He opened the rucksack and took a few swigs of water. Next, he checked his clothing. He’d bought a new set of trousers, a tee-shirt and a shirt in shades of brown from an outlet mall on route. They provided a meagre measure of camouflage.
In an ideal world, he’d want a full gillie suit to stalk a nest like this: the time trade off didn’t permit such extravagance.
He put his water back in the haversack and began crawling towards the concrete perimeter.
***
It took an hour to make it to the magnolia painted wall. Although the distance hadn’t been large, traversing the loose grained sand took enormous effort and, combined with the ridiculous heat, made it sweaty work.
Blake could already feel the light, prickling sting as the skin of his face, neck and hands turned lobster pink with sunburn.
He took a small length of rope from the bag and tossed a grappling hook up to the top of the concrete. With a metallic chink, it landed home. He pulled the cord to ensure it held fast and climbed into the farm.
Once over the wall, his feet landed hard on the rockier soil.
Clever.
Aarez had picked some kind of atoll in the desert as the site of his getaway.
Although the air was filled with the sound of camels as they chewed their feed, there was no sign of people. Blake hastily made for the back of the milking facility.
“No milking today for you,” Blake thought, as his eyes weaved among the ungulates, looking for any armed henchmen positioned in the animal pens.
No-one.
His gaze then followed the line of the walls looking for the next patrol.
One Somali man was heading out toward the building. Slapped lazily across the henchman’s arm was one of the more popular exports of the Czech Republic to the Middle East: a Skorpion submachine gun. He’d arrive beside Blake in a couple of minutes. Blake moved into the shadowy plant and eased between the machinery.
Plastic tentacles and giant humming pumps made the corrugated-iron roofed building look as though it would be at home as the set of a low-budget science fiction film. Of course, the crew would have to be able to stomach the stench of dung that radiated from every corner.
Blake lowered his rucksack silently to the floor and reached into his back pocket for a Sebenza – a military grade folding knife. He locked its blade into place and crouched behind a low ledge, waiting for the guard to draw near.
In the shadows, after so long in the ridiculous heat, Blake suddenly felt cold. A shiver ran across his shoulders. A copper taste began to fill his mouth. He knew this sinister feeling, it growled from his past with the gaping maw of an advancing tiger.
He hadn’t liked it then.
Now, he liked it even less.
A pea-sized throbbing in his neck, reverberating by his windpipe, was joined by a slow rising drumming in his ears. The adrenaline-fuelled ‘devil’s tattoo’ of the assassin.
Footsteps. Drawing closer.
Shooting someone, that was one thing. It wasn’t easy, to be sure, but done once, then twice and the mental disassociation between gun and death – especially in the heat of battle or where self-defence was justifiable – it became just a thing you did: like fingertips burned too many times, the mind became numb to the sensation.
The brain could do powerful things with rationalization.
But with a knife?
In an assault that was in no way related to self-preservation?
That was different.
“Be still. It’s thinking like this that gets people killed.”
The boots on gravel grew louder.
“Slow,” he breathed silently. “Slow, slow down.”
The guard moved past, so close that the scent of his body odour briefly overpowered the smell of shit from the floor and walls.
With a flash of the knife, Blake’s hand gripped over the Somali’s mouth. Blade, ribs, thrust in, thrust up, twist, pull, yank. And again. Out, in, stab, turn.
Withdraw.
The gawping body of the young man dropped the machine gun and eyes wide, rolled dead, staring in endless damnation at Blake.
Blake swiftly moved away from his fallen foe.
As he ducked and wiped the blood from his knife, the afternoon sun glinted across the gentle patterns of the Sebenza’s blade.
He pushed the unpleasant memories aside.
“Damascus steel,” he said, the sound of his voice quietening screams of the past. “They call the organic patterning Damascus steel after its original homeland in Syria. Almost fitting. If only it weren’t a few thousand miles off.”
He kicked sand over the bloodstains on the ground and dragged the body back into the gloomy dairy.
60
Blake followed the fence of the camel pen in a crouching run, using it for soft cover from any potential snipers on the roof or balcony of the main house. Every hundred metres he checked the locations of the guards. By murdering one, he’d created a large enough gap in their surveillance sweep that he had been able to get within a few hundred yards of the barn and falconry buildings without having to kill anyone else.
Unfortunately, a twist in the layout was combining with the guard ahead being a little slow on his rounds. It placed Blake in danger of being seen if he kept up his current pace.
He hopped the shoulder high fence and moved along the inside of the camel pen. He sneaked in close to one of the animals and patted its back. As it began to meander away from this stranger in its corral, he used its bulk as a shield.
From here, he had a better view of the complex.
For a football pitch-sized area in front of the mansion, the natural rock of the region was hidden by a verdant European garden. It abruptly ended for no apparent reason and the rest of the area stood on stony gravel.
A tarmac strip ran almost to the grassed area before turning abruptly and leading to the garage. The road was cheaply laid straight onto the rock. In places it had already begun to crack and show the first signs of potholes.
A loud caw.
Blake pointed his P90 directly at the spot of the noise.
Two birds ran across the lawn.
Peacocks.
“Weirdo,” Blake thought. “Who needs peacocks on their lawn?”
It all smacked of opulence gone wrong – as though a visionary, or at the very least a show-off, had run out of money halfway through his plan.
He cautiously followed the camel closer to the barn.
Finding Aarez's lair had been simpler than he'd expected.
It required a simple cross-check: properties capable of supporting a falconry, in an area of the UAE with red soil, within two hours drive of the hostage exchange site, that were owned by either the Al Calandria family, Fedor Milanovich or Rasoul Kaskhar.
The search yielded a single result.
Blake stepped in closer to the camel, which let out a typical guttural burst of protest. He flicked the assault rifle to semi-automatic – one bullet for every pull of the trigger.
Blake felt a flicker at his arm, the swish of a camel’s tail.
He looked down just in time to see a splatter of red emerge from the camel’s belly. It expanded before his brain could even register: then burst through with a plate sized hole.
The beast let out another gurn.
Crack. Thump.
“Shit,” he thought and sprinted fo
r the barn.
In seconds he was near enough to the walls to see the woodworm holes in each individual plank. The sniper was somewhere in the main hacienda and loosed two speculative rounds into the building. The sun-baked lumber offered all the resistance of paper. Without seeing Blake, though, there was little chance the sniper would hit his target.
More of a problem were the perimeter guards, alerted to his presence, who were doubtless closing on his position. A sniper might not hit him through the wood, but raking fire from two Skorpions increased the odds significantly.
Blake shifted along the barn.
A Somali appeared at the end of the wall, scanning his gun through the camels.
Blake fired.
Two shots.
He advanced.
Two more shots.
The gunman was dead.
Another Somali ran along the line of fencing Blake had so carefully navigated from the milking shed. He fired a volley from his Skorpion. It was far too high, rattling the top rafters of the barn.
Blake looked at the man’s face.
He could see the fear on the Somali’s features.
Blake didn’t want to kill him. It was a little known rule of warfare that emerged because of a study by Brigadier General Marshall: in the midst of war only 15-20% of soldiers ever fired their guns. Of those that did, an even smaller number actually fired at the enemy – many preferred simply to shoot straight up into the air until they had been brutalised fully by repeated combat experience.
It wasn’t cowardice. Those same men would face greater danger rescuing fallen comrades or even charging enemy positions without shooting. It was the strength of a human’s innate desire not to take another’s life.
Less than 5% would shoot on a first engagement directly at the enemy. Of those that did, the study found many to be psychologically unstable before they’d even reached the battlefield.
And they were trained soldiers, not farm hands with weapons thrust in their hands.
“Put the gun down,” Blake said.
The man continued walking forward.