Breakout

by A P Bateman

  Tommy-Lee smiled mirthlessly. “You’re not fazed by this?”

  King shrugged. “No, I wouldn’t say that. I just appear unflappably calm and sarcastic when I’m scared.”

  Tommy-Lee shook his head. “I’m Johnson.”

  “Special Agent Johnson, of the Johnsons of Quantico?”

  “No relation.”

  “So, your name’s not really Lynch?”

  “Wrong department. You know Mister Lynch?”

  “I’ve met many men called Lynch. None of them who they said they were,” said King. “So, you’re not a Johnson from the FBI or a Lynch from the CIA,” he mused. “Do you guys use your real names in the NSA, you’re really called Johnson?”

  “You seem to have forgotten how this works,” said Johnson.

  King shook his head. “Look, you’re on two stars at best. The pork and beans wasn’t half bad. Get rid of the cuffs, get me a pillow to fluff and you’re back in with a shout.”

  “I could have you shot,” said Johnson. “There’s enough hill-billies working here who would jump at the chance to put a bullet in the head of a man who has committed terror offences on US soil.”

  “I thought you had a special man for that?” King grinned. “The Navy SEAL.”

  “You know he was a SEAL, how?” Johnson asked incredulously.

  “The tattoo on his left forearm.”

  “You were being beaten up at the time, I’m surprised you noticed.”

  “I notice things,” said King. “And I don’t think they were beating me up. But if two of your guys can be taken down by a man with his hands behind his back, well maybe your operation isn’t all that.”

  “Maybe Cole should have a try?” Johnson smirked. “I don’t think he’d have any problems killing you if I told him to.”

  “That’s the thing, isn’t it? The country you’ve become. Zero tolerance to matters you don’t fully understand. A tough, some would say heartless stand on immigration, yet you are a country of immigrants…”

  “We kicked your asses out of here two-hundred and fifty-years ago!”

  “Did you?” King asked. “Or were political and trade factors enough for Britain to throw in their hand. Who else would they have traded with? Common language, new and untapped resources, and a country that needed stable treaties. Why bite the hand that feeds?”

  “You seriously think that?” Johnson scoffed, visibly irked.

  “Name a single battle you won after Yorktown and between the four years when Cornwallis surrendered.”

  “What?” Johnson asked incredulously. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Was it a tactical failure not to foresee French ships cutting off and counter-attacking the British, or was Cornwallis merely following orders? This was America’s deciding battle and it took less than ninety British. Bit strange, that. Given that the British had been outnumbered by three to one for the entire war and often drove the Colonialists to retreating because of the British soldiers’ ability to keep marching towards what appeared to be certain death.”

  “So, you’re saying you threw the war?”

  King smiled. “I doubt it. But it’s not a stretch to think that Cornwallis was following an agenda. Orders, so to speak.”

  “Thanks for the history lesson,” Johnson said offhandedly. “Allow me to give you one. World War Two.”

  “Undoubtedly,” said King.

  “So, was your spiel about Cornwallis a euphemism?”

  “In what way?”

  “That things are not always as they seem,” said Johnson.

  “Where am I?”

  “No comment.”

  “I’m figuring South Dakota. Or Wyoming. Somewhere in the mid-West.”

  “No comment.”

  “Not a high-security prison, although I’m sure this installation is escape-proof, but more like a secret prison. Somewhere that doesn’t exist. Not on any map, at least.”

  “No comment.”

  “So, the National Security Agency runs this place? The Secret Service backed off back in Washington, so you have a higher clearance, which is difficult to imagine, given the Secret Service’s remit.”

  “No comment,” Johnson smiled wryly.

  “I suppose that was a private jet I flew here in? Registered to a company off shore, funded entirely by dirty money?”

  “You seem remarkably well informed,” Johnson said. “Or think you are.”

  King shrugged. “I doubt this is NSA either. My bet is that this is a recent venture, funded by an amalgamation of US intelligence and law enforcement agencies, overseen by a newly conceived agency pulling money, resources and personnel from the darker corners of other agencies. Where the CIA, the FBI, the Secret Service and the NSA, hell, all the wings of the military, do their dirty work. And with a direct line to a controversial President who has little regard for immigration or human rights.”

  “You don’t have anything like that in Britain?”

  King noted that Johnson hadn’t used the no comment line. Progress. “No, we generally go by the book.”

  “From the mouth of an assassin?”

  “It’s a thick and complex book,” said King. “And we don’t let many people read it.”

  “We dug about,” Johnson said. “There were a few things our inside friends at MI6 found out about you.”

  “I’m sure,” said King. “Good to know the old service is as watertight as ever.”

  “You didn’t so much leave under a cloud, you simply disappeared. At a time when the entire service was restructured. A series of accidents claimed the top three people in SIS. Strange that you should disappear around the same time, don’t you think?”

  “Well, in my line of work, there was very little job security.”

  “There was more,” Johnson said. “It was claimed you worked in Northern Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.”

  “All the holiday hotspots. Check out my TripAdvisor account. Still, better than this dump, though.”

  “You killed high-value ISIS and Al Qaeda targets at long range with a rifle.”

  “No comment,” King smirked. He’d killed more than this man would ever know, and certainly closer than with a rifle. He could hear his target’s breath at times, feel the life leave their bodies as he twisted his blade.

  “So how come you missed the Congressman?”

  “I underestimated the shield,” King said matter-of-factly. “I thought the first two rounds would break it. And then he was moving, and Secret Service agents were on him. At that distance, well, it isn’t like knocking down ducks at a shooting gallery.”

  “I don’t think you simply underestimated that shield.”

  “No?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  King shrugged. “So, why would I take the shot?”

  Johnson stared at him coldly, the thinnest smile on his dry lips. “Why indeed?”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The man did not return to the cell. His blanket was gone, as was the thin excuse for a mattress. King knew he had called them, he simply had to wait to see what approach they would try next.

  Using the single toilet had taken on a whole new meaning of low, now that King knew there was a camera above him somewhere recording his every move. As degradation went, it was bad enough not to have paper to use or a sink to wash in, now he felt the subject of voyeurism. He had to remind himself of his training and what his sensibilities meant in the grand scheme of things. What mattered, and what didn’t. He remembered how women from MI5 acted as interrogators on his escape and evasion exercises with the SAS. How they sniggered at the size of his shrunken penis as he shivered naked in front of them - frozen, hungry, exhausted and disorientated. It meant nothing. He’d ended up marrying one of them, so she couldn’t have been put off by what she had seen. It had been nothing more than power-play and designed to weaken his resolve. What did he care now if some guy watched him squat on a toilet? Everybody did it every day. His sensibilities meant nothing, and he ignored it now altogether.<
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  Breakfast had been a sort of porridge made with water. He had eaten it without hesitation, knowing he needed to maintain his strength and weight. As he had chewed on the bland, rubbery substance, he had heard talk of showers today. He looked forward to that, but he’d been in prison before and knew that the first time in the showers was the last chance to prove himself. He would do what he had to do.

  With the camera above him, King did not want to show whoever was watching him that he was keeping fit. Instead, he used a complex muscle separating system, tensing individual muscles and releasing in time with his breathing. He worked on sets and reps, alternating each side. He counted, estimating that he had worked his muscles for an hour. He aimed to do these three times a day. He stretched, making it more of a show of boredom. The process did nothing for cardiovascular exercise, but his muscles were still toned and firm after so long in confined spaces with no exercise.

  An alarm sounded just once, and King swung his legs over the bed and onto the floor. He told himself he would not become submissive or institutionalised but he simply needed to leave his cell and get on with why he was here. If indeed, here was the place.

  The door opened mechanically, and King could hear a series of metallic clunks down the corridor. He walked to the door and looked both ways. Other prisoners had done the same. The alarm sounded a second time and each man left their cell. King turned right and walked along the yellow line. Men on the other side of the corridor crossed over and joined the orderly queue. By the time King had made his way down to the end of the corridor there was little more than a metre between each man. The door opened, and the men fanned out into an open chasm that had been carved out of the rock. Arc lights had been fixed into the ceiling fifty-feet above his head and an open viewing window had been made, with enough room for two guards to cover the room with a shotgun and an M4 carbine. The cave was two-hundred feet or so across. The guards could make mincemeat of them, especially when both doors closed, which they did right now.

  King estimated three-hundred men. Did that tie in with his designated number? Probably, given that some would die under interrogation, others may have entered the penal system, but he doubted that, and others no doubt found a nine-millimetre bullet and a shallow grave somewhere in the Great Plains, as Johnson had outlined as something he could look forward to if he failed to cooperate. Maybe this was Cole’s sole purpose, but he doubted that. The man would be Johnson’s go-to guy. Either way, his own prison number meant a lot of men had passed through here, and he doubted they were anything other than fertiliser out on the Great Plains.

  King walked slowly around the cave. He watched for groups, the hierarchy. Many of the men were bearded and had peeled off into clusters to pray. Muslim men, ISIS fighters or domestic terrorists. King didn’t care what group they were, they were all as bad as each other. Deciding between Al Qaeda, ISIS and Boko Haram was like trying to decide which venereal disease was preferable. He could see the killers amongst the men, and he could see those who had been caught up and swept along for the ride. Cannon fodder for the ISIS commanders. Disaffected youths sent to carry out the threats of the men preaching behind the firing lines.

  As he walked, it was evident that all eyes were on him and he knew it would only be a matter of time before someone tested the water. In an attempt to blend in, he sought out other white males, but soon realised this was America’s dumping bin for Islamic terrorists. A few heavily muscled and tattooed white men with large beards had congregated near the door on the other side of the cave. They looked like white supremacists or motorcycle gangs, and King wondered if they were militia who had declared independent status in the mountains of Wyoming or Montana. Such acts were to declare war on Washington and groups had been dealt with harshly in the past and many attempts to serve warrants had resulted in tragic standoffs and sieges that had ended in slaughter. Many women and children had died in those sieges and only went to increase the hate. It mirrored Middle-East problems, but in the American heartland. He sized the men up, deciding there was no preferable option in this room. He was in a class of one.

  “Oh, what a quandary you are in?” King turned around and looked at the man standing before him. “You have no friends, no allies in here. You see the Arabs and the Asians, and the Persians and you know you will find no friends there. Not when they find out who you are and what you have done to their brothers. You see the Nazi scum bikers and know you will fool nobody. They will not accept you, and together they will kill you. Or rape you. Perhaps both? You are a tough and resourceful man, but numbers are numbers and when a man goes down to a large group, the training and the strength and the resourcefulness pales into insignificance. Numbers are everything. Like an army of ants that can overwhelm and devour the largest of snakes. The venom and the speed and the agility of the snake means nothing to a million ants. And so it is, in this room.”

  King could see the man had lost weight and looked like he had aged a decade since he had seen him last, less than two years ago on the same day he had proposed to Caroline on a Majorcan beach. The man was a former Russian Spetsnaz General, a retired KGB officer who served with the FSB. An old-school warrior who served under the banner of the USSR, and later with Russia as a federation.

  “I’d like to say you look well, Zukovsky,” King paused. “But you look like shit.”

  “I look better than my son, you bastard!”

  “He was trying to kill me. Shit happens.”

  “But not, I fear, does a coincidence of this magnitude.”

  King started to walk. He glanced up at the window, saw that the two guards were chatting, weapons relaxed. “I see you fell foul of the CIA.”

  Zukovsky dry spat and said, “Your department was bad enough!”

  “But this is a whole new ball game.”

  Zukovsky stopped walking and shook his head. “They dehumanise you here,” he said quietly. “And they have executed prisoners. Many prisoners…”

  “Coming from a former KGB officer, you don’t mean to say the Americans are really the bad guys, do you?” he grinned.

  “Everyone is bad,” the Russian said sardonically. “There are no good guys left.”

  “Coming from the man who attempted to annihilate millions of people with a nuclear device, I think you had better dump the world-weary attitude and think about karma. Maybe what goes around, comes around and it all caught up with you. And in time, too.”

  “How’s that blonde?” he asked, as he started walking again, this time towards the group of white supremacists.

  “Well.”

  “She killed my lover.”

  “You had a bad taste in lovers,” King said quietly.

  “But a horrible way to go, would you not agree?”

  King thought of the woman, gasping for breath as the skin burned off her face, the heat closing her throat and suffocating her slowly. “I couldn’t give a shit,” he said.

  Zukovsky stared at him, his cheeks hollowed out and the life in his eyes offering no intensity, merely perpetual sadness. “I will not give you what you want. Whatever you are here for, under whatever premise, I will die here rather than help you. I will gladly die today, I would be happy going to my death safe in the comforting knowledge that you would be stuck here forever.”

  “And they say time heals,” King chided. “I’ll tell Caroline not to expect a Christmas card.”

  “You are a comedian, no?”

  King shrugged. “A little humour tends to get me through.”

  “I will give you nothing,” Zukovsky said adamantly.

  “What makes you think I want you to give me something?”

  Zukovsky regarded him curiously, his lips breaking into the semblance of a smile. “I tried to destroy your pathetic little country once before…”

  “You failed. I was there.”

  “So, I told MI5 and MI6 everything about the weapon, my contacts, the extremists.” Zukovsky stepped out of the way of a group of young, feral-looking men with menacing eyes
and stubborn, jutting jaws. King thought they looked Pakistani. He thought briefly of Rashid, hoped he and the rest of the team were on track.

  King shrugged. “And you told the CIA when we handed you over to them. And I bet you’ve told whoever runs this place all about it, too.” King was aware how the Americans had screwed over the British government. MI5 had handed Zukovsky over to the CIA for questioning. Concerned that his attempted attack on UK soil could be, or was planned to be repeated in the USA, they wanted Zukovsky to fill in the blanks. They had merely kept him and denied any knowledge of the clandestine handover. He was in their system, under the radar and intelligence pointed to the Americans operating a secret prison. In the shadowy world of intelligence, the suspicion was common knowledge. Using hearsay and analytical data, combined with solid intelligence gathering, and MI5 had confirmed the ball park area. The rest was now up to King. He was going to get their asset back.

  The Russian’s smile emboldened. “So, in that case, you are here about something else.”

  King smiled, was about to say something, but Zukovsky shoved him into the group of white supremacists and darted away. King sprawled into the biggest of them and all hell broke loose. King rolled away, got to his feet as the man-mountain came at him like a three-hundred-pound gorilla. Except that he was closer to three-fifty and at least six-five. King was sure that if the man wanted to, he could kill a gorilla for breakfast. The man swung hard but missed. King backed away, saw that three more of the group had broken ranks and were flanking him.

  “I’m sorry,” King said. “I was pushed.” He looked around for Zukovsky, but the Russian had fled and mingled into the crowd, which was now gathering around them. Nothing happened here, so everybody enjoyed a good fight.

  “No,” the gorilla said. “Now, you’re going to be pushed.”

  He lunged forwards and King darted to his left. The man swung a backfist and King ducked as it sailed over his head. He stepped inside the man’s guard and jabbed his index finger into the man’s eye. He stopped short of a proper job and didn’t hook or sweep behind the eyeball, simply wetted his finger up to the knuckle and gave the man something to think about.