Decisive
A Gabriel Series Novella
David Hickson
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Keep Reading
Author’s Note
Also by David Hickson
About the Author
One
I woke dripping with sweat.
It was hot. The thin cotton sheet clung to me as I twisted to see the time. Three a.m.
I sat up and perched on the edge of the narrow bed with its thin mattress. Rubbed my bad shoulder. It took me another moment to remember where I was: Africa, north of the equator, in the heart of the western bulge. Ouagadougou, such a pretty name for such an ugly city. Capital of the landlocked country of Burkina Faso, where it was summer and even now, in the darkest hour of the night, the stale, hot air made a sauna of my poky hotel room.
I found a cigarette and grabbed the bottle of whisky from beside the bed. I poured myself a drink, and stood at the open window, hoping for a breeze to break the heat of the African night.
I knew what had woken me – the mission that lay ahead. The thing I needed to do. And the fact I had to show them I could still do it. Had to prove those mind doctors wrong, throw their warnings of my failure back in their faces.
And I had to do that despite having endured years of one of the toughest military trainings in the world, and having survived years in the British Special Forces. Not that my squad had been particularly special; certainly the things we did were not always so special.
No, my training was not the problem. It was what had happened long after the training, starting with that moment in the forest in Uganda, the moment my life had unexpectedly been turned upside down. At least that was how the psychologists described it, in the papers explaining my discharge. There are moments in your life that cannot be reversed, the man with the tight mouth had told me. Moments that cannot be taken back. Some damage cannot be undone, he had said. There were some things I would not be able to do again.
But I was convinced they were wrong. I could do this, I knew I could.
The whisky was sharp on my tongue; it burned a trail down my throat. I sucked on the cigarette. I had time before the morning meeting. Time to think it through again. Time to remember the reasons I was here. Time to make the decision.
That was what my friend Brian would always call it: ‘The Decision’ with a capital D. He would rest a heavy hand on my shoulder and ask in his broad Yorkshire accent, “When do you make the Decision?”
“What decision?” I would say.
“You know what decision. The decision to kill.”
In my memory his eyes are dark and troubled. Like he needs to know the answer to his question.
“That’s easy,” I say. “A fraction of a second before I pull the trigger. You know that. We trained together.” Then I add, “Just a fraction sooner than you,” because that is our joke, although it isn’t true that I pull faster than him.
I smile at Brian.
Brian doesn’t smile back. He shakes his head.
“You got that wrong,” he says. “You don’t make the decision. That’s the point. We don’t decide to kill. Some suit makes the decision for us. We are not soldiers, Gabriel. We are hired killers. That’s all we are, and our souls will burn in hell for it.”
I often think about that question that Brian asked. Sometimes I see the blades of the chopper appear for a moment over his shoulder, a noisy blur. Then a patch of cloud rushes in and hides the chopper from my sight. I’m falling through cloud, which is not a good thing. We jumped from high because of the weather and we’re falling to the forest below. It feels as if I’ve been falling for too long, and the ground is rushing up to me.
Brian’s eyes hold mine.
“Don’t pull,” he says. “Don’t pull. Just fall to your death.”
But of course Brian didn’t ask that question as we were dropping into the site of the plane wreck. And he never told me not to pull. It wasn’t my death we were falling towards. No, he had asked me the question earlier, when our backs were pressed against the cold hull of the chopper as our pilot cursed the weather and took us in low; only a couple of hundred feet above the forest, less when the cloud blinded him and a mountain slope loomed up suddenly to snatch us out of the sky.
Or had Brian asked about the decision even earlier than that? While we were strapping our packs, checking the magazines, racking the kill switches?
Yes, earlier … much earlier. Because in the chopper he asked about Robyn.
Asked me whether she had spoken to me.
She hadn’t.
Brian smiled at that, a reluctant smile. As if there was something he did not want to say.
“What would she have said to me?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “There’s nothing to say.”
Another smile, not reluctant this one. Always the joker, the big, blustery best friend from Yorkshire, with his broad grin and kind brown eyes.
“Something about your wedding?” I asked.
“Shouldn’t have mentioned it,” he said. “Get your mind off my fiancée, you bastard. You need to focus.”
Which was true. I needed to focus. We all did. African Defence Force terrorists were active in the Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That was the forest below us, where a passenger plane had gone down and we needed to find survivors.
But taking my mind off Robyn is something I struggle to do. She has dark eyes which are always laughing, and she looks at me as if she knows I am fighting my attraction to her.
As Brian’s eyes smile at me across the cabin, I wonder whether he can see it in my face.
Does he know how I feel about his fiancée? How I fight against that feeling?
I smile back. More of a grimace probably, given the circumstances. And the pilot calls that we are approaching the drop zone. Or the crash zone.
Captain Chandler opens the door when the pilot gives the signal. We peer out at the sporadic glimpses of green that flash through gaps in the cloud beneath us, hanging from our straps as the pilot swings back and forth in a rough grid pattern.
It is a prelude to disaster: the door of the helicopter open, the whirring blades, the low cloud cover. Searching for a scene of destruction and death.
Five-thirty a.m. My time was up. I would make the decision later. There would be time; these operations are often like that – a slow fuse that keeps seeming to fizzle out, and then just when you go to relight it the primer detonates and it is too late. As long as I made the decision before that happened, it would be okay.
Right now I needed to prepare for the task ahead of me. The physical preparation; the mental preparation could wait. I had to get moving, do the things I needed to do.
For this day in Ouagadougou I would wear a suit, not a uniform, because I was a businessman. That is what an arms dealer calls himself surely? A businessman, certainly not a soldier. At any rate: a pale linen suit, open-necked shirt, expensive watch and polished boots for the dusty roads. A handkerchief to wipe them clean for the meetings – and to wipe off the blood, should it come to that.
I was in Burkina Faso as a South African arms dealer doing business in West Africa. It was a part I looked forward to playing: being South African. My mother had been an Afrikaner, and although my real passport said I was British, I found myself identifying more often with my mother’s people, particularly since that helicopter ride into the Ugandan forest.
I had left the UK in an attempt to rebuild my life shortly after that Ugandan business, and had only recently
started working with a small department of South African state security, although I knew they would deny employing me if anything went wrong. Just as the British had denied everything I had done for them, apart from the series of failed psychological evaluations at the end of my military career.
The South Africans had been the only people willing to employ me after all that. And they had taken me on for a different kind of work. No more jumping out of aeroplanes into terrorist-infested forests. A nice steady desk job. But then my skills at the things I had been trained to do had encouraged them to think I might be the right man for this job. And I wanted to prove to them that I was the right man. Because killing was the one thing I could do well, despite everything the psychologists said.
I dressed, packed my spare set of clothes into the briefcase. No weapon because I couldn’t have flown into the country with a weapon. Then I shoved the memory of that helicopter ride and the forest we dropped into as far back in my mind as it would go.
I needed to prepare for the task ahead.
There was a man I needed to kill.
Two
The sun was struggling over the horizon as I walked across the patch of dead grass beside the swimming pool. It was doing its best to brighten up the muddy browns of this African city where everything had the dull orange sheen of the dust blown on the Harmattan wind from the Sahara desert.
I was the first of the hotel guests to arrive at the grandiose, high-ceilinged breakfast area. A single staff member was laying out an unappetising array of pastries on the buffet table, together with fresh fruit, soft butter, smelly cheese and cold meats. Hot meals were only served after seven a.m. when the rest of the kitchen staff had arrived. Public transport in the city was restricted to curfew hours because of the terrorist threats.
I sat at a table in the corner and drank the brown liquid from the flask labelled as coffee, although it did not taste much like coffee. The ceiling fans swung lazily around, as the dusty windows gradually brightened.
The kitchen staff arrived after six-thirty, fearing for their lives; who wasn’t frightened to go near a hotel popular with foreigners? The recent attack on the Splendid Hotel in which twenty-nine people were killed was still fresh in everyone’s mind.
I sipped my coffee and watched the early guests brave the buffet table. And wondered why the ceiling fans did nothing to alleviate the heat.
The person I was to meet in the breakfast hall arrived on time. I recognised him from the photographs in my briefing folder, but even if I hadn’t, I would have known him for what he was. A government pencil pusher who described himself as a presidential aide. I was surprised to see that he had a companion: younger, and female. They helped themselves to the buffet and took a table in the middle of the breakfast hall, then glanced about anxiously without actually looking at anything. Low-level politicians playing at subterfuge. I stood and raised a hand. The woman noticed me. I beckoned them over.
The man was a few inches over six foot. His big chest, heavily muscled arms and small head made him look like an exaggerated figure from a superhero cartoon. Dressed in a black suit with a black tie, like he was on his way to a funeral. He had an envious look in his eyes. A clammy grip over the breakfast table.
“My name is Alassane,” he said. “But call me Alex. It is much easier for foreigners.” He spoke in the perfect French of the Burkinabé, the people of Burkina Faso.
“I’m sure I could manage Alassane,” I said, in my imperfect French.
Alassane introduced the woman with him as Bibata. Also dressed in black for the funeral. Where Alassane was hard, Bibata was soft, made up of curves. Not that she was fat; her curvaceous figure could have been described as voluptuous, but she was all business today in her black suit. She had a liveliness in her eyes, perhaps a sense of humour. She gave a small smile to acknowledge her introduction, then glanced anxiously around. Maybe she too was remembering the recent terror attack by the jihadists from Mali.
“Bibata is here as my assistant,” said Alassane, lest I get confused about the hierarchy.
I smiled to show him how pleased that made me feel. We took our seats at the table. Alassane looked as if he wished we had been given special words to exchange to confirm our identities to each other. But there was no need for that. I was here as a businessman. He was a presidential aide. The businessman and the presidential aide were having a business meeting. That was on the itinerary long before they substituted me for the real businessman. There was no need for secret words.
“We were not told what to call you,” complained Alassane.
“What would you have called the man you were expecting to meet?” I said.
“Mr Johnson,” said Alassane.
“Mr Johnson it is then,” I said. My real name was Gabriel, Ben Gabriel, but it was better that nobody here knew that. The British, with typical irony, had always called me ‘Angel’. By a strange coincidence, the arms dealer was called ‘Angel’ Johnson by his colleagues, probably in reference to his role in bringing death to so many. But it was better to stick to plain ‘Mr Johnson’ for today.
“We were pleased the South Africans could help,” said Alassane, and he gave another anxious glance around the room, although there was nobody near enough to hear us.
“Of course,” I said.
“But your accent is not South African.”
“I served with the British.”
“Served? You were a soldier?”
“I was.”
“What is a British soldier doing in Africa?”
“I’ve been asking myself that question for years.”
Alassane nodded and wiped his brow. The ceiling fans were still doing nothing to alleviate the heat.
“Foreigners have a thing for Africa,” he said, as if it was something that bothered him.
“It’s the warm weather,” I said.
Alassane gazed at me as if trying to decide whether I was being disrespectful. But he hadn’t finished complaining, so he said, “The arms dealer is a South African.”
“But this is his first visit to Burkina Faso,” I pointed out. “Nobody has met him.”
Alassane nodded and wiped his brow again.
“You look like him,” said Bibata. “They got that right.”
“Hair dye,” I said.
“And the real Mr Johnson will not pick up the phone and ask to reschedule?” asked Alassane.
“He will not,” I said. I did not think it was necessary to point out that dead people don’t make phone calls.
“You have been briefed?” asked Alassane. “About how this is going to work.”
“Partial briefing,” I said. “You will need to fill me in on the details.”
That was not true, but it was what Alassane expected because partial briefing was the way the South Africans did all these jobs. Too many of their operatives had been captured before fulfilling their tasks in the many countries across Africa that the South Africans liked to poke their fingers into. If I failed and was forced to share what knowledge I had, there would be little I could tell. I would present my false papers, show my dyed hair, and provide the typed itinerary supplied by the efficient presidential aide. Alassane was sliding a newly typed itinerary across the table towards me.
“Been a few changes,” he said, and swallowed as if the mere act of talking about it made him nervous. “Mr Johnson is here at the invitation of General Kanazoe. There has been extensive correspondence between the two of them. This has been provided to you?”
“It has,” I said.
“Then you know that Mr Johnson is an arms dealer. You understand arms?”
“I do.”
Alassane turned suddenly to look around the dining room, as if he might catch someone eavesdropping. His glance lingered for a moment on two businessmen from Mali, sitting in silence at the other end of the room. Then he turned back to me.
“You will discuss arms with the general. You know enough about ‘weapons’ to convince him?” he insisted, using the Eng
lish word in case the French ‘armes’ had confused me.
“I know which way to point most of them.” I said.
Alassane did not share my sense of humour.
“Mr Johnson will inspect the country’s current military capacity, in an informal manner. You understand what I mean by this?”
“No red carpet,” I said. “It’s all very low key.”
Alassane nodded. Another glance at the two businessmen from Mali, whose silence seemed to disturb him.
“You will inspect armoured cars and discuss them later this morning, in the private meeting with the general.”
He fell silent for a moment. The meeting with the general was the reason for my presence here today, and the thought of what would happen at that meeting was enough to make him pause.
“What can you tell me about the general?” I asked, keeping my tone casual.
Alassane swallowed. “I am to give you the full details later. That is what they said.”
“Of course,” I said, and smiled.
Silence descended upon our table. Bibata poked at her bowl of sliced fruit.
I looked at the newly typed itinerary. Our breakfast meeting was described as an ‘orientation of the honoured guest by the presidential aide’. We had twenty minutes to fill, and the thought of sitting here in awkward silence prompted me to attempt some conversation.
“We are doing the orientation?” I asked.
Alassane shrugged his huge shoulders and then hunched forward over his untouched cup of coffee.
“We would have been explaining some background to Mr Johnson,” he said. “If you were the real Mr Johnson.”
“Why don’t you provide me with some background, anyway?” I said and took a companionable sip of the nasty brown liquid in my coffee cup.
Decisive Page 1
