The Operative s-3

by Falconer, Duncan

  ‘You can use it in the States.’

  ‘I know. I’ll take it with me in case of emergencies until I can sort something out over there,’ she said.

  Stratton punched in his name starting with three ‘A’s and followed by his number. ‘My number’s at the top of your phone list. You call me if you need anything. Any time of the day or night. Okay?’

  ‘I will.’

  He stared at her, unable to hide his sadness. ‘I’m gonna go, then … I’ll call round tomorrow.’

  ‘I want to leave first thing in the morning,’ Sally said, wiping her hands and coming over to him. ‘Dawn if I can get Josh to wake up that early.’

  Stratton looked into her tired, reddened eyes, the pain clearly etched in them. He placed his arms around her and they held on to each other in silence for a moment before he released her and stepped back.

  ‘Let me know when you get there,’ he said.

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I?’ she replied, unable to hold his gaze as firmly as she would have liked.

  Stratton walked out of the room and a few seconds later the front door closed.

  Sally watched him through the kitchen window as he headed down the gravel path and wondered when or even if she would ever see him again. ‘If ’ seemed like a strange notion but she could not help thinking it.

  Stratton drove directly to the sergeants’ mess in Poole Camp, which was crowded with practically every current member of the service who was not on operational duty and even more retired hands who, although many of the old and bold did not personally know Jack, had turned up to pay their respects. He spent an hour chatting to various people and before slipping out cornered his Squadron Commander to ask for two weeks’ leave, effective immediately. Under normal circumstances the operations officer would have had to be consulted in case there was anything that had come up on the boards. But considering that the request came from Stratton – bearing in mind, too, the circumstances, and the fact that he was owed several weeks’ leave from his previous two operations – the OC granted it.

  Stratton returned to his cottage in Lytchett Matravers on the outskirts of Poole and the following morning packed a bag and drove his Jeep to the ferry terminal in Poole Harbour where he caught a boat to Cherbourg. He had planned nothing more than a drive across Europe. Where, he cared not. East sounded appealing, across France, Germany, perhaps the Czech Republic, then down into Austria, and perhaps further still.

  But he would reach as far as Salzburg in Austria when a cry for help would send him tearing six thousand miles west to face a conflict he could never have imagined.

  5

  Sally stepped out of the Bradley Terminal at LAX, Los Angeles International Airport, pushing a trolley loaded with baggage, Josh holding on to the side, and headed for the shuttle stop where transport would take them to the car-hire depot. Half an hour later she was sitting behind the wheel of a Cherokee 4x4, acquainting herself with the controls.

  It was late in the afternoon. Because of the distance from LAX to her cousin’s house near Sacramento – according to the lady at the car-hire place, a good six to eight hours’ drive north, depending on whether she took the scenic coastal route or the freeway – she decided to spend the night in LA. An early start the following morning would also avoid the heavy late-afternoon freeway crush of traffic heading out of the city. Sally had been recommended to find a hotel in Marina Del Rey which was only a few miles from the airport and a safe area, or Santa Monica a few miles further up the coast where there was a large British population and an English pub. Sally found no attraction in an English connection but she decided to head in that direction anyway since the map indicated that the freeway north to Sacramento started near Santa Monica: she could hop right on it and avoid getting entangled in the traffic hassles of the city.

  Unfortunately, a combination of heavy traffic and her un -familiarity with left-hand driving caused Sally to miss several turns. Fifteen minutes later she was lost. However, she was confident that Santa Monica was not far away. A street sign indicated that she was on Sepulveda Boulevard which was marked on the map as a major road. But although it passed close to Santa Monica after it became Lincoln Boulevard it appeared to run north and south for miles and she was unclear about precisely where she was on it. She could calculate west by using the sun, having had Jack explain it often enough when they’d been on camping trips, so she decided to head that way until she hit the ocean. It seemed straightforward enough.

  She waited for a gap in the traffic, pulled across the road and headed down a side street.

  The houses immediately became shoddy, the streets dirty and the population predomin-antly Latino and black. As Sally passed a group of youths one of them shouted something and ran into the street, waving for her to stop. She accelerated past and watched him in her rear-view mirror as he made what appeared to be an obscene gesture. An uncomfortable feeling washed through her but there was nothing for it but to press on to the beach, which she hoped was not far away. A quick glance over her shoulder revealed Josh playing with some toys on the back seat.

  ‘You tired, Josh?’

  ‘Yes,’ he nodded while assisting one of his Action Men to wrestle with a small tiger.

  ‘We’ll be at a hotel soon,’ she said, although as she drove on there was no sign of the neighbourhood improving. She assured herself that the beach would be a completely different kettle of fish once she found it. No doubt it would be developed and bustling, just as in the television programmes on LA she had seen.

  Sally crossed an intersection and passed a block of predominantly wooden bungalows with cracked paintwork and old shingle roofs. The buildings were even more dilapidated than those on the previous street. The number of tramps or homeless-looking people also seemed to increase and as she came to the end of the street she passed a long row of what could only be described as makeshift kennels on the sidewalk. Built of debris, driftwood and plastic sheets, they were inhabited by humans, not animals. It was as if she had travelled back in time to the Depression.

  A boy suddenly ran out onto the road up ahead, followed by others, forcing Sally to brake suddenly. But she didn’t stop completely and steered around them as they banged on her window and shouted in guttural Spanish. Josh looked up, suddenly uneasy.

  She came to a T-junction and stopped to look both ways. Neither direction showed much promise so she turned north, looking for the next road heading west. Every block was penetrated by dirty, rubbish-filled alleyways. As she arrived at a small intersection she took the left turn, hoping that the sea would soon come into view. But the ground rose sharply as the road headed uphill. The quality of the houses improved slightly but they all had security gates, as well as bars on the lower windows. Some had barbed wire along the tops of their outer walls. It seemed as though every person she passed, none of them white, looked at her suspiciously. This made Sally conscious of the fact that she was a lone white woman in a nice car and obviously in the wrong place.

  Cars were parked on both sides of the street, most of them in a run-down condition. This was not the LA that she had seen on TV – it was closer to a shanty town in a Johannesburg suburb.

  As Sally came to the crest of the hill she could see that several cars were double-parked, making the street barely wide enough for one vehicle to pass along. She slowed to navigate between the cars when suddenly a sedan shot backwards out of an alleyway and reversed along the street towards her. She braked hard.

  The sedan screeched to a stop yards in front of her and a large man in a leather jacket jumped out of the passenger side, ran over to a shorter man walking along the pavement and started to beat the living daylights out of him.

  Sally could not believe what she was seeing.

  ‘Where’s the fuckin’ money, asshole?’ the big man yelled as he kicked the other who had dropped to the ground to protect himself from the vicious blows of the thug’s fists.

  Sally looked arou
nd at the road behind. She considered reversing back down the hill but did not trust her driving skills with a left-hand-drive vehicle. Her anguish increased and, feeling helpless and scared, she pushed the centre of her steering wheel and gave a blast of her horn.

  The man doing the beating paused while holding on to the collar of his near-unconscious victim whose face was by now bleeding badly. He looked at Sally with a murderous glint in his eyes. ‘Leka! Take care a’ that bitch,’ he shouted.

  The sedan’s reversing lights were still on. To Sally’s shock it suddenly accelerated backwards and hit her car hard enough to make her fly forward and bang her chin on the steering wheel, stalling her vehicle.

  Josh started to cry and call out for her, increasing her anxiety. Then the driver’s door opened and Leka climbed out. He was a large man, dark-skinned though not Latino. His features were more Slavic or Eastern European.

  As Leka reached her car, Sally quickly hit the central locking system, securing the doors. She watched the man as he moved with relaxed ease, wearing a malicious expression that she found immediately frightening. As he reached her door he slammed the side of her vehicle with his hand and then ripped off a wing mirror.

  ‘Move the fucking car, bitch!’ he shouted.

  Sally’s panic rocketed and she tried to start the car as Josh cried behind her. ‘It’s okay, Josh,’ she said. She turned the key in the ignition and the starter motor turned over. But the engine failed to come to life.

  Leka banged on her window as if he was trying to break in. ‘I said move it, bitch!’ he shouted.

  Sally’s efforts to start the car became desperate as she turned the key repeatedly without luck.

  The man yanked hard on the door handle and then violently kicked the car, incensed at being denied entry. ‘Move the fucken’ car, bitch!’ he yelled again as though her efforts were not enough.

  The man beating his victim unconscious on the sidewalk stepped back, and straightened his shirt and jacket, as if he had finished for the time being. ‘Next time I cut your legs and arms off, you understand? You got twenty-four hours, then we don’t talk no more,’ he said. The brute was as tall as his friend Leka but broader. He appeared to come from the same part of the world.

  Sally looked around, hoping for help. Although there were a handful of people looking on with interest, none of them appeared to want to come any closer.

  Sally pushed on the horn once again and this time held it down.

  ‘Turn that off!’ Leka yelled venomously. ‘Turn it off!’ he repeated, kicking out at the car again. Then something in the man snapped. He walked between the parked cars to a pile of rubbish on the sidewalk, picked up a large chunk of concrete and came back with it.

  Sally released the horn to try and start the car once again but the engine was dead. Leka raised the concrete slab above his head and brought it crashing down onto the windscreen, cracking it so that it crazed in all directions. Sally screamed and leaned on the horn once more.

  Leka raised the slab and brought it down again, this time shattering the windscreen completely and showering Sally with glass. Desperate and beside herself with fear she grabbed her handbag and fumbled inside. She found her phone and struggled to hold it steady while she hit the keys.

  Leka reached inside the car and grabbed hungrily for her like a wild beast. ‘Come ’ere, you fucken’ bitch!’ he yelled as he clutched a piece of Sally’s clothing which tore as she pulled back.

  Stratton was asleep in his hotel room when he heard his mobile phone chirping in the pocket of his jacket, which hung across the back of a chair by the bed. He looked at the window and saw that it was dark outside. Then he reached for his jacket and pulled it onto the bed. He took the phone out of the pocket and when he saw the name on the phone’s screen he hit the receive button swiftly. What he heard sent a chill through his entire body. A woman was screaming hysterically and in the background he could hear a man’s voice shouting.

  ‘Sally! Sally!’ he shouted as he leaped out of bed. But it was evident that Sally no longer had the phone and was probably fighting for her life.

  Sally had dropped the phone and was scrambling over the back of the driver’s seat to protect her son. But Leka was already halfway in through the destroyed windscreen and reaching for her with his long, powerful arms. He caught hold of her ankle and yanked her back with brutish force, ripping her grip from the back of the seat as he pulled her towards him. He grabbed her by the hair with his other hand and with the same awful violence kept dragging her back, twisting her painfully so that she was now on her back halfway out through the windscreen and feeling as if her spine was about to break. She could no longer scream, the position of her body making it difficult even to breathe.

  ‘You still wanna fuck with me?’ Leka shouted, sliding down off the hood and dragging her to the side of the shattered wind-screen, his face close to hers. The other thug walked over calmly and joined his partner to look down on Sally’s contorted face. ‘What you wanna do with her, Ardian?’ Leka asked. Obviously his friend was the dominant one of the two. ‘Shall we fuck her, or fuck her?’ He laughed at his sophisticated use of the language that was not his mother tongue.

  ‘Bitches don’t get outta line,’ Ardian said coldly. He brought his fist up into the back of Sally’s neck with such force that something snapped. She went limp in Leka’s arms and he released her.

  Sally remained still, dangling awkwardly halfway out of the windscreen, facing the sky and gurgling gently.

  ‘Guess we fucked her,’ Leka said, smirking.

  ‘Guess we did,’ Ardian agreed. The two men looked along the street. The handful of youths who had remained at a distance to watch turned to head away, some of them moving at a run. The two men were neither fazed nor panicked by what they had done. They walked calmly back to their car, climbed in, and drove slowly away.

  Josh was covering himself and crying in the back seat. He looked up once it had gone quiet to see that they were alone. He stood up, climbed over the seat, and looked at his mother. ‘Mummy,’ he sobbed. But she did not move. He took hold of her leg and shook it. ‘Mummy!’ She remained still. Josh wrapped his arms around her and continued to sob heavily and inconsolably.

  6

  Stratton impatiently paced the small waiting area at the end of the corridor that led back to the entrance to the Santa Monica Police Department. A few yards away a line of people waited outside a glass window built into a wall behind which a police officer stood dealing with enquiries. Stratton checked his watch and tried to calm his growing frustration that threatened to turn into uncontrollable anger. It had been twenty minutes since the desk officer had told him that a detective would be down to see him in a few minutes since the officer himself knew nothing about Sally or Josh.

  Stratton had no doubt that the call had been from Sally but he had not been able to get a reply from her phone since. Sally’s parents had given him her cousin’s number though Stratton had not said why he needed it so urgently. The cousin in Sacramento had not seen or heard from Sally and did not expect to until the following day. Stratton had been unable to contain himself and had caught the first available flight that morning. From the second he’d put down the phone in the hotel room in Salzburg everything had been done with maximum haste. The flight had been unbearably long and he had called Sally’s number a dozen times, using the on-board payphone. Stratton was usually a patient man but now that he was finally in LA and, he hoped, within reach of finding out what had happened to her the waiting was starting to get to him.

  A door halfway along the corridor opened and a portly man in civilian clothes stepped through, holding a file. He walked to the waiting area, stopped short of Stratton and looked around. ‘Is there a John Stratton here?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m Stratton.’

  The man, in his forties, was without doubt a cop: he looked as though he had been in the job for most of his life. He glanced at Stratton over the rims of his glasses, weighing him up. ‘How can I help yo
u, sir?’

  Stratton held his frustration at bay. He had pain stakingly explained every detail of his concerns to the desk officer and now this guy was acting as if he knew nothing. ‘I’m looking for a woman named Sally Penton and her son, Josh. I believe she was in some kind of trouble and she may be hurt.’

  ‘And where are you from, sir?’

  ‘England.’

  ‘And how long have you been here in the United States?’

  ‘I flew in today.’

  ‘You can prove that?’

  Stratton dug into his pocket and pulled out his UK passport. The stub of his boarding pass was inside it and he handed both items to the officer, who inspected each page. ‘They also took my fingerprints and photograph at Immigration.’

  The officer ignored him until he got to the end of the passport and compared Stratton’s photograph with the man himself. ‘Are you a relative of this woman, sir?’

  ‘No. She’s a close friend.’

  ‘Why do you think she’s been in some kind of trouble?’

  ‘She called me on my phone. She was screaming. It sounded like a scuffle, a fight, then all I could hear was crying which I think was Josh, her son.’

  ‘She called you at your home?’

  ‘My mobile phone.’

  ‘What’s the number of your phone?’

  Stratton dug it out of his pocket, hit a key, and showed the face to the officer who took it and wrote the number in the file. ‘Do you know anything about her?’ Stratton asked.

  ‘And you flew in from England, you said?’

  ‘No. Austria.’

  ‘You got here pretty quick.’

  ‘There’s a nine-hour time difference between Central Europe and the USA’s West Coast. Look, do you know anything?’

  The officer removed his glasses and squeezed the bridge of his nose with his fingers as if he was tired. ‘I’m afraid your friend …’ He paused to check the name on the file. ‘Your friend Sally Penton is dead.’