by Leigh Barker
Aberto came back, and Harry ordered tomatoes on toast with an Italian name for two to start, and for main course, fettuccine carbonara, once again for two, as Harvey was out of it. He was going to order the same wine the Date had, Chateau Margaux 95, because it sounded good, but then he saw the price and ordered a bottle of used house white. But hey, Harvey wouldn’t notice in his present state.
Then the game was afoot. The Date excused himself and headed for the toilet. Harvey got up quickly, rattling the glasses on the table, and sat down again to check the fine print on the menu, but nobody noticed, or more accurately, Margaret didn’t notice, so he stood up again, slowly, and sidled over to the toilet door, where he lurked.
Mario came out of the kitchen, gave Harvey a puzzled look, and swung over to where he was standing. “You would like a drink?”
Harvey stared at him for several seconds. “Why would I want to have a drink, standing outside the toilet?”
“I do not know, sir,” Mario said, “tonight is very confusing.” He mumbled something under his breath and continued on his mission to deliver pasta to one of the tables, but continued to cast suspicious glances at Harvey, who was still lurking.
“Oh, sorry,” the Date said, coming out of the washroom and almost colliding with Harvey.
“That’s perfectly all right,” Harvey said, making no attempt to get out of his way. “You’re with that woman over there, aren’t you?” He indicated Margaret’s bare back, and the Date nodded, but gave him a questioning look. “You should know that fellow over there…” He pointed at Harry. “Is a private detective who appears to be watching you and your woman friend. I believe he has one of those… what do they call them?” He frowned deeply. “A hidden camera. Yes, I am sure I saw him fiddling with a hidden camera behind a menu.”
The Date stared first at Harry, then at Margaret, his mouth making O shapes.
“I do hope you don’t mind your face being all over the tabloids tomorrow, connecting you to that… that woman.”
He clearly did and began looking around as if there might also be a television crew on hand to capture him and… that woman. The colour drained from the poor man’s face as he warred with his desire to flee, against his sense of chivalry. Desire won, and he fled, snatching up his coat from Margaret’s chair, but careful to keep his face turned from Harry and his hidden camera. He headed for the door, stopped, and strode back across the restaurant to stand in front of Harry’s table with his hands on his hips, all macho.
“You should be ashamed of yourself! You’re a disgrace, man. This is no way to make a living.”
Not bad as introductions go, but the closing was better. He started to leave, but his anger got in the way. “You should be flogged!” he said through gritted teeth.
Harry stopped reading the label of the bottle of recycled wine and looked up slowly. “Are you speaking to me?” he said softly.
“Yes, I’m bloody well speaking to you!” the Date snapped.
“I’m sorry,” Harry said in the same soft voice, “I don’t speak English.”
The Date’s mouth was moving, but no words were coming out. His face screwed up as he tried to compute what the man had just said, failed, and spun on his heels and stamped out, without even glancing at Margaret.
Harvey returned to the table, clearly very pleased with himself and at the outcome of his plan, while Harry gave him a long, slow look of rebuke.
Harvey watched Margaret speaking to Mario, who nodded and went back to the bar. Harvey winked at Harry as she asked to relocate to his table. He nodded towards Margaret standing up slowly and coming over.
“Margaret,” Harvey said, standing. “What a surprise. I didn’t know you still used our restaurant.” He smiled and pointed at a vacant chair at their table. “Please, join us.” He looked past her. “Your friend seems to have remembered important business.”
Margaret smiled and was about to speak when Mario returned, gave her a slip of paper, and walked away, but kept watching, as pretty well everyone in the restaurant was now doing. “No, thank you, Harvey,” she said with a smile, “but please, have this on me.”
She dropped the paper on the table, said goodnight to Mario and Harry, and walked out with dignity, and a cute ass.
Harry picked up the paper, chuckled, and handed it to Harvey. Aberto passed with a silver ice bucket, stopped, and stared at the now vacant table.
“Bloody hell!” Harvey said, holding the bill like it was burning his fingers. “What were they drinking?”
Harry’s reflexes had been honed by years of combat training and real firefights, so for him, to think was to act. He stood up, tapped Aberto on the shoulder, took the bottle of wine out of the ice bucket, and put it on his table next to the recycled house white in a single fluent move. Aberto looked from one to the other, gave up, and went back to the kitchen, mumbling something in Italian.
Mario came over and stood with an air of irritation that his magnifico restaurant should be the scene of such a… well, a scene. He was going to tell them, to explain to them that such behaviour is not—
Harry patted his arm and got his attention. “Got a doggy bag?”
Mario was way past confused by now, but of course he was, he was in a domestic feud.
“You know?” Harry said, waggling the bill between his thumb and finger at the stunned man. “A bag for the grub we… Dad is paying for.”
Mario wanted to say something, but the silence in the restaurant was too deafening. “I do not know… sir… but I will ask,” he said stiffly and walked away. “Tonight is very confusing,” he repeated to himself, and his shoulders sagged.
28
When not on an op, everyone called Ethan ‘Spike’ because of his long hair. It was almost like humour. Others called him something else, but those that do, do, those that can’t, teach — and those who are too stupid to do either, throw rocks and hope nobody notices they’re crap.
He was muttering quietly as he read the contents of the folder that had magicked itself onto the desk they’d allocated him at his new and hopefully temporary posting to Navy Seal HQ in Virginia. It transpired that his experience in that damned village was vital to military intelligence, may God bless them all. He swore, and it turned out his Arabic vocabulary was far wider than just business use.
A red folder was always bad news, and this one seemed redder than usual. He closed it and tossed it across the desk. Shit, every crappy assignment that comes down the tube. Wasn’t it enough that he’d got the intel on the chemical attack? No, of course not. And what a cluster-fuck that turned out to be. The navy had sent in one of their drones, a Silver Fox, to take air samples and check for chemical residue before the marines could go in and get the bodies of their comrades, and they lost it. How the hell do you lose a sensor drone? He read on. There was some sort of radio interference, and it just vanished, but not before it told them the place was clear, the chemical weapon having died of boredom, or some such shit. Losing a drone in a war zone was seriously embarrassing, but not too much, if you don’t tell anyone.
So the question was, who’d stolen it? And the answer, even a five-year-old could have worked out, was the Taliban leader who’d waxed their asses. Now he was supposed to go get the son of a bitch. He picked up the file and read his name, even though it was committed to memory. Lupus, they called him — The Wolf. Now why was that? Well, that was because they liked to give these guys grandiose names, so it could be bigged up when they caught him. Problem was, nobody could catch this one, yet here they go, passing the buck down the chain of command and saying, “Go get him.” Outstanding.
He rolled his chair back, got up, and walked to the window overlooking the scrub brush and the Potomac River beyond the car park, and let his mind do its thing. Every fact he’d read or heard about Lupus was stored in his human filing cabinet, catalogued, indexed and on-line. Not a free gift from God, it was just like the rest of his skills, down to discipline, hard work and practice. The men under his command looked to
him to keep them alive, and he did his damndest to do just that. He thought about Al and Eddie and shook his head sadly. “Well, you did a great job there,” he said to the tired face reflected in the window.
He forced his attention back to the job at hand. Mohammed Rahman Ali, AKA Lupus, forty-four years old, born into a rich and influential family in Riyadh. But he’d tossed the good life to go out and kill Americans, and he was real good at it. He’d first surfaced with the bombing of the US embassies in Tanzania and Nairobi, and followed those with a list of atrocities right up to Nine Eleven.
Ethan tapped the windowsill with his fingers and thought about tactics. Lupus was shrewd; he had to be to have stayed ahead of the game for so long, so he wasn’t going to put his head in a noose just because Ethan asked him nicely. There had to be a way to tempt him out into the open. The memory of the world-class terrorist just letting that Brit go seriously troubled him. Anything that was outside an enemy’s normal MO troubled him. Nothing to be done about that right now, though, but it would come back, he was sure of that.
Somewhere, somebody knew something, and he had all his contacts in all the federal agencies beating the bushes in the hope that something would jump up, though he knew that when it came down to it, it would be the same as always. An accident, a fluke, an error of judgement. Okay, he could wait for the fluke, or he could find a way to flush him out, which was easier to say than to do. He tapped his fingers on the windowsill and went round the loop again.
The door opened, and Leroy Lee entered. He was generally known as Bruce for two reasons, one being obvious and the other being his love of martial arts and winning the regimental cage-fighting champion three years in succession, which was no mean feat, considering the opposition. He hadn’t knocked, he didn’t salute, and he didn’t wait to speak, which would have driven a regular NCO into a fit of apoplexy, but this team worked on mutual respect, and it worked well, without all that crap. “News, boss,” he said and waited for Ethan to respond. He’d be waiting a long time. “Lupus has been spotted.”
“Where?” Ethan said and strode back to his desk.
“Right where you left him,” Bruce answered with no hint of criticism. “In Afghanistan, right outside Musa Qala. And don’t we remember that shithole.”
And Ethan did remember it, it being almost the last place any of them would remember. Intel said fifteen to twenty Taliban had been seen in the village, stirring up trouble, and Ethan’s team had been sent in to neutralise them and grab couple of warm ones if possible. Intel was wrong, and they’d walked into a Taliban Red Square-type parade. Jesus! They got out of there with their tails so far between their legs, they were tickling their noses. Ethan had called in an air strike, which had successfully wrecked the market, shot up the buildings, set fire to everything flammable, and not hit a single Taliban, who had probably gone home to watch American football on television.
He headed for the door, leaving Bruce looking at the papers on his desk. He stopped and glanced back. “I thought I’d go to ops,” he said with a thick topping of sarcasm. “Would you care to come along?”
Bruce jumped and strode after him, as if he was going to do that anyway.
Lieutenant Commander Jerome Patton — unsurprisingly known as George — like his namesake was a ferocious and brilliant leader, whose men would have followed him to the grave. A lean, hungry-looking man in his mid-thirties, his colouring and bones clearly advertised his Nordic ancestry, while his uniform showed him to be a Navy Seal, and he knew that pretty much made him the best of the best of the best, a fact never knowingly understated. Except Patton, and every member of his team, knew that the best of them was Navy Seal Team 6, who’d taken out Bin Laden and avenged the death of three thousand Americans in the Twin Towers. That more than twenty of these boys were lost when the helicopter was shot down by Taliban rocket fire was a loss felt by every member of Special Forces. The finest soldiers in the world, trained to the peak of perfection, taken out by a man’s finger on a button. The anger burned so deep, Patton put it out of his mind and focused on the mission.
He checked his watch in the dark cabin of the Chinook, looked up at his number two sitting opposite, and nodded once. Senior Chief Nate Wilson could have been a professional basketball player, but let that slide so that he could serve his country in the most direct way possible. Yeah, of course, the promoters had told him the story of how being a rich and famous player would serve his country by giving the poor black kids from his neighbourhood a role model to follow out of poverty. If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit, it’s probably bullshit. He joined the navy and fast-tracked to the Seals when his intelligence and phenomenal fitness were recognised, and from then on, it was a steady climb up through the ranks.
Nate looked around the darkened cabin at the twenty-five other Seals leaning back and trying to sleep or staring absently into space and rehearsing the mission they had practiced only briefly. They would do just fine, just as in other covert missions he had led them on. He knew there was a chance, a very real chance that some of them wouldn’t be coming back, but that’s the risk in war. Still, you’d think they would look a bit worried, wouldn’t you? He smiled, not the Seals’ style.
Patton went over the mission briefing for the hundredth time, and he’d go over it again in the next half hour before they reached their destination. It seemed straightforward enough. The helo would drop them at the LZ five klicks from the camp, and from there, they would double-time the rest of the way, overcome any resistance, grab the target, and get out without getting dead or captured. The satellite and drone surveillance photos had told him the strength of the opposition, which put them at a little over five to one against — so the odds were in the Seals’ favour. There was a perimeter of sorts, but these rag-heads would be sleeping or screwing goats, or whatever it was they do when they’re not blowing up women and kids, so that wouldn’t be too much trouble. He knew that was just his bravado playing down the risk of what they were expected to do. These rag-heads, as he called them with a twinge of guilt, were not going to be the usual fanatical amateurs who got their throats cut while they were taking a leak or praying to Allah on their hands and knees instead of doing what the hell they were supposed to be doing. No, these men would have been chosen by Lupus, and that was a guy who’d been around the block a few times, had skills and intelligence, and the scalps of many Americans to prove it. So be careful, son, the voice in his head said quietly.
The Chinook touched down on the lee side of a hill away from the camp, and the team spread out and set up a defensive perimeter, while the swirling dust followed the helicopter out across the sand. Nobody spoke, and there was none of the “Move it! Go!” bullshit from the movies, they simply spread out and set off at a steady mile-devouring jog towards the camp and their target.
Ethan watched the ghost-images on the huge screen as the geo-stationary satellite relayed the position of every man in the team back to ops. The infrared images were overlaid on a map of the target zone showing the terrain and the distance to the camp.
Also in the room were the squadron commander, a couple of intelligence officers and some guys in suits that would have CIA as their designer labels. He wished he could be there on the ground instead of sipping coffee in the comfortable Virginian base, seven thousand miles from the action, but right now that action was running real-time like an episode of 24 right in front of his eyes.
He watched the team covering the ground to the camp at a steady six miles an hour, fast enough to get them there with limited exposure to the locals, but easy enough so they could still fight when they got where they were going. Truth is, they could have run that distance flat out and still kicked ass when they arrived, but in any fight, there are so many unknowns, so many imponderables that you control the ones you can, and handle the ones you can’t. The pace they could control.
Patton stopped on the ridge a hundred metres or so from the camp perimeter and waited for the men to fan out on either side. A few mo
ments later, the tail-enders caught up, and the rearguard took up defensive positions facing the way they’d come. Okay, everything was ready. He checked his G-Shock and watched the second hand glide towards twelve. Still nobody had spoken or made any sound, but no one even thought about that, it being the least that was expected. Two a.m. dead. He stood and moved forward over the ridge at a quick walk towards the fence posts silhouetted against the moonlit sky, posts that would support the barbed wire and mark the area where IEDs and regular mines would probably have been laid for idiots to step on.
When the team was within twenty metres, they flipped down their helmet-mounted enhanced night vision goggles and followed the five explosive technicians, who went ahead and scanned for the telltale scars and indentations in the sand. The insurgents didn’t really expect anyone to be dumb enough to approach the camp so hadn’t worked too hard on hiding the trips, but the disposal technicians took their time, assuming that what they saw was less than what there was to see.
The platoon crept forward in the shadow of the hill where the camp had been established so the lookouts could see far out into the desert — in daylight. The disposal team stopped at the two strands of wire hung between the posts and checked them carefully for little surprises. There was no sound, no clinking of gear or radio chatter, no thumbs up or any of that crap. The wire was clear, and the techies clipped it quietly and placed it on the ground, while the rest of the team moved past them like ghosts.
Patton and Nate switched on the helmet cameras in the night vision goggles to feed live infrared images up to the satellite and back to ops, and went forward slightly ahead of the team.
Ethan saw two mini screens appear above the map and the ghostly infrared smudges of the seals. The screens showed green images of scrub trees and orange thermal images of the rest of the team, rows of oil drums that were supposed to be cover, and a scattering of stone buildings in front of a mud-brick compound. Their objective.