Little Sister (A James Palatine Novel)

by Giles O'Bryen

  ‘Check these documents, Sergeant.’

  The sergeant stepped forward, his face sour with contempt. The other soldier still stood in the doorway. So long as he stayed there, James and Salif were pinned down.

  Anton flipped impatiently through the papers beneath the sergeant’s nose, pointed to a random paragraph of legalese, then looked up and summoned the soldier by the door with a gesture full of peremptory authority. Just then, someone yelled from within the barrack room. The soldier carried the crate inside, then re-emerged and started across the concrete apron towards Anton. He’d pulled on a shirt and was trying to button it as he walked.

  Anton stared at the soldier coming towards him, thrusting his head forward, making him feel the force of his superior rank. James signed to Salif: Stay here, wait. Mikhail revved the Land Cruiser’s engine, then threw open his door and hopped out. The sergeant looked up.

  ‘Read!’ Anton barked, and rapped the bonnet with his fist.

  The sergeant turned quickly back to the documents. Mikhail strolled round behind him. The approaching soldier was fifteen yards away. Anton shouted at him to hurry up. The soldier didn’t hear James move up from the corner, coming fast and low.

  James hooked one arm round the soldier’s neck and squeezed, trapping the shout in his throat. The sergeant spun round. Too late. Mikhail’s powerful hands clamped his windpipe.

  James seized the soldier’s wrist and drove it up between his shoulder blades. There was brute strength in him, and for a second or two his free arm battered at James’s stomach. But he didn’t really want to fight. James hustled him behind the Land Cruiser, worked him off balance and threw him down against the front wheel. He clubbed him unconscious and tied him up. Anton and Mikhail had the sergeant down and disarmed beside him.

  The door to the barrack room slammed shut.

  ‘They’ve seen us,’ said James.

  He beckoned to Salif, then got the sergeant to his feet and held the P99 to his head.

  ‘Salif here wants to cut your liver out,’ he said in French. ‘He wants you to watch him eat it. So do what I tell you, OK?’

  James marched him over to the barrack room door, one arm hooked round his neck, the other pressing the P99 into his side. There was silence from within and they’d turned out the lights. It was a fair bet they’d armed themselves and taken cover. The door was steel plate with shielded hinges. It was, after all, a fort.

  ‘Tell them to turn on the light.’

  The sergeant shouted in Arabic.

  ‘You OK, sir?’ came the response.

  ‘Turn on the light, donkey dick! You want to get me killed?’

  James thought that question was a mistake, and he drove the barrel of the P99 into the sergeant’s armpit. He yelped in alarm. A few seconds later the light came on.

  ‘Tell them to put their weapons on the table and lie on the floor.’

  The sergeant did so. There was silence. Salif stepped in close, pulled up the man’s lip and tapped his front tooth with the tip of his knife. The man’s eyes swivelled down. Salif jabbed his gum and a trickle of blood ran down over his teeth.

  ‘I don’t think they heard you,’ said James.

  The sergeant screamed at his men. The panic in his voice must have impressed them. They heard movement behind the steel door.

  ‘Order one of them to open up,’ James said. ‘Use his name. Say you’ll be coming in first.’

  The sergeant nominated a man called Walid for the task. There were protests from within. Salif twirled his knife in the vicinity of the sergeant’s left eye and the protests were answered with an explosion of curses. They heard bolts being pulled back. Mikhail grabbed the handle and pulled it open. James hustled the sergeant up to the door and fired three rounds into the ceiling.

  ‘Stay down!’

  Four M16s on the table, the soldiers lying on the floor. James bundled the sergeant inside. Anton and Mikhail moved in behind him and stood over the prone men, guns drawn.

  Salif brushed past James, then turned and drove his fist into the sergeant’s ribcage. The man stiffened in his arms. Salif was leaning in, whispering something into the sergeant’s ear. James felt the slight body being forced up, then Salif pulled his fist away and he saw the knife, slimed with blood. The sergeant coughed and exhaled. James released him and he slid down to the floor.

  ‘No speak insults to Sahrawi man,’ said Salif, wiping his knife on the dead sergeant’s shirt.

  ‘I’ll certainly bear that in mind,’ said Anton, surveying the foetid room. ‘This looks like the point of no return.’

  ‘Go with Salif and tie them up outside the storeroom,’ said James. ‘Mikhail, get Benoit and the MINURSO boys.’

  The soldiers stared slack-jawed. Nothing in their numbingly tedious lives had prepared them for the sight of their boss being knifed in the arms of a MINURSO officer. On Salif’s orders, they picked up their boss’s dead body and filed meekly out of the barrack room.

  The storeroom yielded a French-made TDA 81mm mortar and an RPG-7 launcher with a collection of boosters and warheads. There were two cases of old Russian-made RGD-5 hand grenades, and a stack of M16 rounds to go with the soldiers’ rifles. They started to load up the Land Cruiser, then Benoit arrived and James asked him to prepare food for them. Looking faintly aggrieved at being assigned such a menial role, he picked tins from the storeroom shelves and carried them to the barrack room stove.

  ‘Mikhail, reckon you can put that bulldozer through the wall?’

  It took Mikhail forty minutes to get the machine fuelled up and running, but the fortification did not look capable of withstanding the ensuing assault for long. Anton lounged against the wall of the fort, listening to the din of the labouring engine and the crunch of rubble on the steel scoop of the bulldozer as it pounded away at the wall. The uniform had put him in a good mood, and he found that he rather liked being out here on the fringes of the world, under the desert sky. He lit a cigarette and blew ragged swirls of tobacco smoke up towards the stars. Unlike Mikhail, whose loyalty rendered all other considerations irrelevant, Anton remained sensitive to the absurdity of their situation: somehow, he had placed himself entirely at the disposal of this stunningly arrogant Englishman who they’d found hitch-hiking at the side of the road and had now declared war on the Moroccan Army. Those clean blue eyes of his that look so trustworthy, Anton thought, are actually the eyes of a lunatic. Still, the payback for fighting his war for him – while rescuing Nikolai, of course, though it was a mystery how those two had become one and the same thing – was the story he would have to tell when he got back to Kiev. He could think of at least three very lovely girls who would find it irresistible.

  The bulldozer’s engine died, its final cough echoing away across the vast silence. Mikhail came trudging over, a six-feet-wide gap in the wall behind him. The sight of his friend knocked Anton out of his reverie. He threw away his cigarette, ashamed that Mikhail might guess he was indulging in a heroic fantasy with sex as its happy conclusion. Micky might not say much, but that didn’t make him stupid.

  ‘You look like a fucking movie star,’ said Mikhail pleasantly, wiping a layer of dust-caked sweat from his face.

  ‘I am a fucking movie star,’ said Anton. ‘Quite literally.’

  They set off to the fort, where they found James dozing on a bunk while Benoit boiled rice and heated a can of mutton ragout.

  ‘It’s just like home,’ said Anton. ‘What’s on TV?’

  James forced open a steel cabinet and found the money taken from them the night before, along with a map that purported to show the location of the mined areas in the vicinity of the fort. The map looked as if it had been drawn by someone who knew he was never going to have to use it, and incorporated vaguely defined areas of cross-hatching and a number of hand-drawn skulls. He decided it would be safer to use the bulldozer as an ad hoc minesweeper. Mikhail would drive – because he insisted and because Anton said that dodging landmines was the sort of thing Micky did for fun. Sal
if would ride beside him and keep him on course. While experimenting with the operation of the bulldozer, the two of them had struck up a comradely relationship based on a liberal exchange of instructions and advice that neither could understand.

  They locked their prisoners in the storeroom, then lined up their vehicles on the far side of the wall. Mikhail engaged gear and the bulldozer jolted forward. The Mercedes followed, with Benoit driving. James and Anton brought up the rear in the Land Cruiser.

  They ran without lights for a few hundred yards – a pointless precaution, as it turned out, because the noise of the scoop rumbling over the desert floor could have been heard in Timbuktu. The cacophony was unbearable to listen to, like someone shouting in a crumbling mineshaft. We should carry on in the cars, James decided. Salif knows the way and this business with the bulldozer is absurd. He’d just thought the word absurd when a violent clang sheered off into the darkness ahead. A stone cracked against their radiator grille. Lumps of earth and rock rattled down onto the roof. James got out and walked the few yards to the bulldozer. The explosion had poked a bell-shaped dent in the left-hand side of the scoop.

  ‘Think we should change course?’

  Salif was peering into the night. ‘You follow me and Micky,’ he said, as if James needed to be discouraged from haring off across the minefield in a Land Cruiser packed with explosives.

  The convoy ground ponderously east. Hitting a mine meant they must be off track. It would be hard to regain the safe corridor now, even if they knew where it was. Ten minutes, maybe five miles an hour, not yet half way. James felt sure they’d hit another bomb soon, and every jolt made the muscles in his groin contract. If I were a soldier, he thought, I’d be sitting on my helmet.

  The bulldozer blundered on. The scoop screeched over a patch of rock, and the front of the vehicle reared up like a toy in a sandpit. Mikhail had to reverse the left-hand track to swing it back on course. Behind the bulldozer, the Mercedes hit a rampart of loose shale and started sliding sideways.

  They saw the scoop of the bulldozer flip upwards a split-second before the second blast. Something heavy thumped against their windscreen and they both ducked. Rocks pummelled the roof, then silence, broken only by the tinny clatter of the vehicles’ engines. This time, Mikhail didn’t bother to stop. The bulldozer picked up speed and lumbered along behind the dim, yellowish beams of its headlights. At last they saw it trundle up a short slope and tip forward onto the road. The Mercedes laboured after it, then stopped half way up, wheels skidding in the sand. James brought the Land Cruiser’s bull bars to bear and shunted it to safety.

  He got out and went over to the Mercedes. ‘Good work, Benoit.’

  The boy swallowed hard, but he looked elated.

  ‘Micky here is worried about his bulldozer,’ said Anton. ‘I think he’d like to take it home.’

  ‘Get it back off the road,’ said James. ‘Salif, can you find the Parker Hale?’

  They watched Mikhail park the bulldozer. He put the ignition key in the breast pocket of his shirt, then started back to the road.

  ‘Follow the tracks, for fuck’s sake!’ Anton shouted.

  Mikhail stopped. ‘It’s just a few steps.’

  ‘A few steps in a minefield.’

  ‘Fuck it,’ said Mikhail, and carried on. They watched as he marched stolidly over the booby-trapped sand. Salif came back with the Parker Hale and handed it to James. He was thrilled by the display of bravado: ‘Micky no care!’ he announced proudly.

  Mikhail stepped back on to the road.

  ‘Boom,’ he said, and gave a jump.

  ‘That’s what passes for a joke in Bulgaria,’ said Anton.

  They’d been toiling along the dirt road for just over three hours when Salif told Benoit to slow down so he could study the way ahead. Twice he got out and walked a short way into the desert. At the third stop, he beckoned to James and pointed to a broad track marked by a line of rocks.

  ‘Road to Polisario compound.’

  ‘OK, let’s get the artillery in position.’

  They drove on for ten minutes until Salif found a second, rougher track. Benoit guided the Mercedes gingerly off the main road, and they lurched east for half a mile until they came to a depression barely concealed by a line of wizened bushes. They were close to the compound now – a corona of light half a mile to the east. There was a two-way radio in the Land Cruiser and James gave one of the handsets to Salif.

  ‘I’ll get Colonel Sulamani to call you. If you haven’t seen or heard from us by midday, you’re on your own.’

  Salif nodded.

  ‘How can I prove to Colonel Sulamani that you’re with us?’

  Salif thought for a moment. ‘He save my life at Nouakchott. Hurt in leg, here.’ He tapped his left thigh. ‘Colonel Sulamani carry me back.’

  They slung the RPG launcher under the Land Cruiser – it was not a weapon usually associated with UN peacekeeping missions – and stowed the grenades in the spare tyre compartment. The Parker Hale and M16s went into a steel locker in the rear. They checked the IDs they’d taken from the MINURSO men – they would do, so long as no one inspected them closely.

  ‘If we can get in and out without a shot being fired, we will,’ said James. ‘This is not a revenge mission. We get my device and your friend Nikolai and his sister, that’s it, we’re happy.’ He didn’t mention Sarah, since they didn’t know anything about her.

  ‘So the little arsenal we’ve brought along with us, that’s just in case?’ said Anton, the scepticism adding a sing-song quality to his deadpan Scottish burr.

  Chapter Twenty

  The MINURSO Land Cruiser was two hundred yards from the main gates, and the three guards on duty had heard them coming. By the time they’d picked up their rifles and elected one of their number to go and address the MINURSO officer scowling at them from the passenger seat, the Land Cruiser’s bull bars were two inches from the barrier, its wing-mounted mini-flags shuddering to the tune of the idling diesel.

  The officer’s uniformed arm, replete with captain’s stripes and insignia of both MINURSO and the Finnish Army, rested on the window frame. He did not look over when the blue-overalled guard reached his window, but passed out a wad of documents and said:

  ‘Captain Jay Laakso, MINURSO. I have urgent business with Colonel Nejib Sulamani of the SADR Army. Which you may know as the Polisario.’

  The guard took hold of the papers reluctantly. He wanted to look as if he knew just what to do with such items, where to check for names and stamps and signatures, but he did not. He started to unfold the one on top, but he hadn’t slung his rifle properly and when he moved his free hand it fell from his shoulder, the strap jogged his arm and he dropped the papers on the ground. Now the MINURSO officer did look at him, lips pursed. The guard knelt to gather up the papers, but one of them was caught by a dusty breeze and tumbled off down the track, and he was forced to scurry after it.

  Anton sighed heavily and beckoned at the guard. He took the documents back, then held them up one by one.

  ‘Identities. One, two, three. Letters of authority from the UN, the Moroccan Interior Ministry and the SADR government. MINURSO mission statement for distribution to anyone who wishes to read it. When I said urgent business, I meant that I did not wish to sit around explaining protocol to the grunt at the gate. Understand?’

  The guard did not understand. He looked over his shoulder. His fellow guards were sniggering at the sight of their comrade dropping his weapon in front of a MINURSO officer. Mikhail was playing his trick with the engine, increasing the revs by imperceptible degrees so that the big diesel clattered impatiently and released a smell of hot oil.

  Anton jabbed his finger at the large building ahead of them. ‘Colonel Sulamani, now!’

  The guard was too browbeaten to think of doing anything other than follow the MINURSO officer’s order. He gestured angrily at the other guards to raise the barrier. The Land Cruiser accelerated into the compound.

  ‘We seem
to have ended up in an industrial estate,’ said Anton, as they drove towards the large building ahead. They passed James’s guest wing behind its coil of razor wire and rounded the north-west corner.

  ‘Pull up to the main doors.’

  James leapt out, ran up and stood to one side, while Anton followed at a leisurely pace. They marched into the entrance hall, and Anton shouted:

  ‘Captain Jay Laakso of MINURSO, to see Colonel Sulamani!’

  Claude Zender heard the shout.

  MINURSO, here? Why? Laakso was one of the Finnish contingent – Zender’s contact at the MINURSO base in Laayoune had reported that Laakso was unimaginative, by which he meant unlikely to take a bribe. He opened the shutter a crack and saw their vehicle. For MINURSO to turn up unannounced was unprecedented. He should have paid closer attention to the bleatings from London. And the whispers round Marrakech: al Hamra was unusually active, apparently, and had met with, among other people, Nigel de la Mere of MI6. Things were moving faster than he’d anticipated.

  He snapped his briefcase shut and stepped out of his office, turned left, walked down to the end of the passage and entered a cloakroom. There was a door in the left-hand wall, which he opened just far enough to see out. When he was sure there were no MINURSO soldiers about, he walked quickly across the concrete yard to the barracks, found Commander Djouhroub’s room, knocked and entered.

  ‘Good morning, Commander.’

  Djouhroub sat up in his bed and stared. He had the weight and girth of a bullock. And the smell, thought Claude Zender.

  ‘A delegation from MINURSO has arrived. I’m going to Marrakech to find out what they’re up to. Farouk will drive me. You must keep them in the compound until you hear from me.’