First Casualty (The Gabriel Wolfe Thrillers Book 4)

by Andy Maslen

  “Perfect,” she said.

  “You guys have all you need in the way of firepower? I have some bits and pieces at the Embassy in Maputo – that’s my base – but we can get anything you need through unofficial channels.”

  Gabriel smiled as he thought of the assault rifles, semi-automatic pistols, sub-machine guns, explosives and the DU rounds padlocked into their bags back at the hotel. “We’re covered.”

  “Well, if you guys decide you’re under-resourced in that department, just let Ol’ Darryl know.” He slid his card across the table to Gabriel. “I have a wide range of very interesting friends here in Mozambique.”

  “We will, I promise.”

  Darryl looked at them both in turn. “You going to recover one of your boys? That’s what Don told me.”

  Gabriel took a swig of his beer. Wiped the foam from his top lip. “That’s the plan. Just not sure what there’ll be left for us to find. It was over four years ago.”

  Darryl leaned back in his plastic lawn chair. His belly stretched the lurid fabric of his shirt tight. “Takes a lot of character to go back for one of your own. Before I had this job, I was working with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, spending millions of dollars and probably as many hours searching for and recovering the remains of American soldiers lost in battle. Still 82,000 service members unaccounted for.” He paused to swat away a fly that had landed on the rim of his beer glass. “I was mostly on Vietnam MIAs, but we were still tracking down men from World War Two and Korea, plus Iraq and Afghanistan. Sometimes we’d get lucky and find a grave. More often than not, we’d be happy with a couple of finger bones. A set of dog tags was enough to close a file, though. Stay optimistic, OK?”

  The following morning, Gabriel and Britta loaded the Land Rover and were out on the main road leaving Beira at 0620. After a few miles heading northwest, Gabriel turned off the road and began driving west, towards the border with Zimbabwe. Britta turned in her seat.

  “What are you doing?” Britta pointed back at the concrete motorway they’d just left. “Muanza’s that way.”

  “We’re not going to Muanza. Not straight away.”

  “What? Why?”

  Gabriel ran his fingers through his hair.

  “Because we – I – have another job to do first.”

  “What do you mean another job? I thought we were here to find Smudge?”

  Gabriel braked and pulled to the side of the red earth road. He turned off the ignition.

  “When Barbara Sutherland approved this trip, she told me I had to earn her permission, more or less.”

  “Earn it how, Gabriel? Why are you talking in riddles?”

  “There’s a corrupt politician in Zimbabwe. The man’s name is Philip Agambe. He’s Minister of Finance. According to Barbara, he’s funneling cash to an Islamic terror group that’s been hitting our troops. They killed some British nurses, too. She wants him put out of action.”

  Britta wiped the sweat from her forehead.

  “Jesus! What happened to due process? She’s got you assassinating a legitimately elected foreign politician, now?”

  “It’s not that simple. You’re making it black and white when you know what we do is shades of grey.”

  “Maybe what you do is. But in Sweden, we follow rules. We’re democrats. Even now, in MI5, we’re acting against terrorists, not government ministers.”

  “Is this the Sweden where you were conducting eugenics experiments into the seventies? Sterilising people with learning difficulties, to purify the Swedish bloodline?”

  Gabriel knew he’d gone too far as soon as he said it. Blood flared in Britta’s cheeks and she glared at him.

  “Don’t use Swedish history to distract me from the facts, Wolfe. Yes, we did some bad things. Like every country. But I’m talking about right now and right here. Are you seriously telling me you’re going to cross the border into Zimbabwe and kill an elected politician on orders from Barbara Sutherland?”

  Gabriel saw Smudge’s ruined face, smashed by a round from a Kalashnikov. Smudge’s broken body, crucified on a tree with machetes through both palms. Heard the thwock-thwock from the helicopter’s rotor blades, drowning out thought as it took Gabriel and the two surviving members of his patrol to safety.

  Gabriel nodded. “That’s the price for recovering Smudge and I’m paying it. I’m not asking you to help. We’ll find a cheap hotel and you can stay there or do some sightseeing. I don’t care.”

  He twisted the key in the ignition and floored the throttle. Gritty, red dust spurted from under the Land Rover’s tyres as it lurched back onto the road and continued heading towards the border.

  *

  Nine hours later, they arrived on the outskirts of Harare. Hard-packed, red-earth side roads led away from the concrete main street. The houses were small and neat, built mainly from red brick and occasionally rendered with white or yellow plaster. The remainder of the journey to the Zimbabwean capital had passed mostly in silence, even when a shimmering pink flock of flamingos buzzed them as they drove past a lake, and a joke about Darryl’s shirt might have lightened the mood.

  As they drove onwards looking for a hotel, the sun dropped below the horizon, leaving deep orange fingers streaking across the sky. In the light from the street lamps the red earth of the hard-packed pavements looked a dark purple. Away to the east, an electrical storm was turning the sky pink with lightning, and distant booms of thunder rolled across the plain towards the city. They found a hotel opposite a small park, checked in and made their way up to the room. It was small, perfectly square, clean, and functional. A modernist print on the wall above the bed showed a big cat of some kind chasing down an antelope.

  Britta checked out the bathroom. “It’ll do,” she said, with a sniff, then went to open the window. Happy-sounding guitar music, to a fast, off-beat rhythm, drifted up from a club somewhere, accompanied by a smell they’d noticed everywhere they drove in Harare: grilling meat.

  Sitting on the bed, her hands dangling between her knees, Britta spoke for the first time since their argument on the road.

  “Do you have a plan, then?”

  Gabriel stopped unpacking the weapons, laying one of the Glocks on the desk, and went to sit next to her.

  “Mugging gone wrong. I’m going to follow him home from the Parliament building and take him on the street. Make it look like a local job. The Government here isn’t too keen on the British so it can’t have even a whiff of foreign involvement. I’m thinking I stage the scene so the local police can make all the right deductions.”

  “You can’t use any of this, then,” she said, sweeping her arm around in a semicircle that took in the wall, where the SA80s were leaning, and the desk, where the Glock and some of the ammunition lay. “So how are you going to manage it?”

  Gabriel rose from the bed and went over to his kitbag. He reached inside and withdrew a slim brass and steel rectangle about five inches long, holding it out in front of him where Britta could see it. Letting one side of it free from his grip, he flicked the butterfly knife’s handle out with a deft twirling movement, then spun it in a circle before catching it in his palm and snapping it shut to clamp the blade in place.

  “Shit! Where the fuck did you learn to do that? Those things are banned everywhere.” Britta grinned, threw her head back and let rip, filling the dingy room with her laughter. “Oh my God. You’re here to take out a Government minister and I’m worrying about the legality of your knife. Fucking hell, Falskog, you need to get a grip.”

  Gabriel smiled too, but there was a tautness in it that he could feel from the inside.

  “I’m not proud of this, Britta. Even if he is a bad one. He’s married and has a child. She’s sixteen, according to his dossier. But he’s financing terrorism and the murder of British civilians, let alone soldiers. I’m under orders, so it’s going to happen and then we can go and find Smudge. Don’t forget that’s why we’re here at all.”

  15

  A Driving Job
>
  Leaving Britta in the hotel, Gabriel walked into the centre of Harare down an arrow-straight, six-lane boulevard. It was a Monday, and in a couple of hours, Parliament would be in session. The buildings around him were mostly one- or two-storey, modern concrete and red-brick constructions. Below his feet was more hard-packed red earth. In the distance, he could see the glass and steel towers of Harare’s business district, through this was still low-rise compared to the City of London.

  As he waited to cross the road among a group of men dressed for business in short-sleeved white shirts and ties, and carrying briefcases, a white Metro Bus roared past. It was full and Gabriel caught a glimpse of bright headscarves in green and yellow, purple and gold, and red and white.

  According to intel supplied by Don via the satellite phone, Philip Agambe would be addressing a defence spending committee at 11.00 a.m. Then he’d exit the Parliament building at noon for a meeting with the director of the Zimbabwean National Bank.

  By 10.00 a.m. he’d reached the Parliament building and was conducting a close target recce – a CTR – looking for the spot where ministerial cars waited for their passengers. It took three-quarters of a circuit of the building, a two-storey, cream-coloured modernist block, before he found it on the southeast corner of Nelson Mandela Avenue and Third Street. A covered car park was designated, “Government Cars Only” on a blue-and-white metal sign.

  Gabriel sat with his back to the blank wall of a copy shop, “Closed for holiday”, across the street and watched for half an hour as drivers came and went with their VIP cargoes. A huge pink-flowered shrub growing in a square of earth cut out of the pavement was drenching the air with its sweet, heady perfume. He sneezed a couple of times. Some of the drivers, with nothing to do and nobody to drive were playing cards at a rickety folding table in the shade. Others polished the big black Mercedes S-Class saloons. But which one was Philip Agambe’s?

  Out of the corner of his eye, Gabriel noticed a pair of teenaged boys loafing against a wall a couple of hundred feet down the block. He strolled down the street towards them. As he approached, they kicked off from the wall and turned to face him. They were lean and tall – taller than him. Both had hair cropped short with intricate designs razored in by the barber. One wore gold-framed glasses, and had a squint. The other had the high cheekbones and direct gaze of a model. They watched Gabriel come closer, narrowing their eyes, hands held loosely at their sides.

  “Hey, boys,” he said. “I need some help. A favour. A five-dollar favour.”

  “What do you want?” the squinting boy asked.

  “I need to know which car over there is Philip Agambe’s.”

  “The fuck’s Philip Agambe?”

  “Government minister. Very powerful man.”

  “Fuck them, man. They all on the take.”

  “Like I said, I need to know which car’s his.”

  They looked at each other. Then cheekbones spoke.

  “Sounds like a ten-dollar favour.”

  “Seven.”

  “Nine.”

  “Eight.”

  “Deal.”

  The boy spat on his hand and grinned, offering it to Gabriel, who spat on his own and seized the teenager’s hand in a grip just powerful enough to encourage him to behave himself.

  “Just go over there and say you have a message for Philip Agambe’s driver. Tell him he’s wanted round the front. Say a security guard sent you to fetch him.”

  The boy nodded, then jerked his head in the direction of the car park.

  “Come on, Slim.”

  As they wandered back up the street, Gabriel following forty feet behind them, hands in his pockets, looking around him as he walked.

  In they went to the covered car park and stopped at the card table. Gabriel could see them pointing out of the car park, not at him, thankfully. One of the men gestured towards the interior. Philip Agambe’s driver must have been one of the polishers. The boys ambled inside until the gloom swallowed them. Out came a man in the regulation black uniform and peaked cap and walked off towards the corner of the block.

  The boys followed, jogging back towards Gabriel. They stopped as they drew level.

  “Job done,” Slim said, smiling.

  “Where’s the car?”

  “Right in the back. By the Coke machine.”

  Gabriel handed over eight dollars, which disappeared into the boy’s pocket. “Thanks.”

  They turned and ran off, laughing and high-fiving. No doubt congratulating themselves on having bilked some journalist out of enough US currency to start a small business.

  Gabriel set off in pursuit of the driver, pulling on a pair of black leather gloves and a full-face, black silk mask with gauze patches over the eye holes. He jammed a long-peaked, beige baseball cap over the mask. Keeping to the shadows in the lee of the Parliament building, he caught up with his target, as planned, at the entrance to an alley that led into the interior of the block.

  He tapped the man on the shoulder and, as he turned, produced the butterfly knife with a whickering flourish. Holding the point close to the terrified driver’s face, he shoved him, not roughly, but with enough force to ensure compliance, into the mouth of the alley. The man’s eyes were wide, and his deep brown skin had taken on a greyish cast.

  “What do you want?” he stuttered. “I have no money on me.”

  “Give me your car keys, boy, and I might decide to let you live,” Gabriel said. The mask muffled his voice, which he deepened and let slide in a lazy Afrikaans drawl.

  The man nodded, thrust his hand into his right-hand trouser pocket and pulled out the chunky black plastic fob emblazoned with a silver Mercedes logo.

  Gabriel curled his fist around the key.

  “Turn around,” he said.

  “Please don’t kill me!” the man said, his voice quiet and trembling.

  Gabriel punched hard into the space just below the notch at the back of the driver’s skull. A neurosurgeon would call the spot the basal ganglion. Gabriel’s unarmed combat instructors in the SAS called it the “off-switch”. As his knuckles compressed the thick bundle of nerve fibres, the man dropped to his knees. He would be unconscious for a good hour or two. Long enough.

  Gabriel removed the man’s jacket and collected his peaked cap from where it had rolled under a garbage bin, swapping it for his own. He dragged him out of sight behind the bin and laid him in the recovery position. Before leaving, he tucked two twenty-dollar bills into the man’s shirt pocket.

  The chauffeur who emerged from the mouth of the alley kept the peak of his cap pulled well down over his forehead. The jacket looked too big for him, which it was, having been cut for a man at least four inches taller than Gabriel. It wouldn’t matter once he was behind the wheel but it draped baggily across his shoulders as he walked back towards the parking garage. Nor did it match the navy blue chinos he was wearing.

  Reaching the entrance to the garage, Gabriel sauntered in past the card players. They looked up and one called out to him.

  “Hey! Where’s Future?”

  “I don’t know, man. I’m just the relief driver,” he said, maintaining the Afrikaans accent. “That his car over there?” Gabriel pointed at the Merc sitting by a vending machine.

  “That’s the one,” the man said already losing interest and focusing on the cards in his hand once more.

  After letting his eyes adjust to the gloom inside the parking garage, Gabriel walked over to the S-Class and blipped the fob. Settling himself behind the wheel, he checked his watch. He still had an hour to wait before he needed to be out front with the motor running. He set an alarm on his phone for five to twelve, then pulled the peak down on the cap and reclined the seat. It had begun to rain. Within seconds, the water on the street was an inch deep as the torrential downpour filled the drains and overflowed across the road. To the soothing background noise of the raindrops splattering off the hard concrete surfaces beyond the exit, Gabriel Wolfe closed his eyes.

  *


  . . . the noise of the rain intensified, drumming on the roof of the Mercedes, making sleep impossible. But how? The Merc was under cover. Gabriel sat up in the driver’s seat to find himself in a traffic jam on the main drag through the centre of Harare. All around him, car horns were honking, angry drivers were swearing through rolled-down windows, and traffic police screamed at them, flapping their white-gloved hands in a semaphore of despair. As he watched, the gloves began changing colour as fat, red raindrops hit them, splotching the pristine white cotton with scarlet flowers. The blood poured down from bloated clouds the colour of corpses: green, sickly yellow and black. Gabriel tried to get out, but the cars on each side were jammed up hard against the sides of the Merc and the door would only open a couple of inches.

  His eyes flicked up to the rearview mirror. What he saw there made him cry out in alarm, an incoherent, choking attempt to call for help. He looked in the door mirror, at a figure making his way slowly but surely along the column of stalled vehicles.

  Staggering between the stationary taxis, trucks, cars and buses, dragging himself forward on their roofs or door handles, using the machetes embedded in his palms to gain purchase on the slippery steel and plastic panels, was Smudge.

  “Boss!” he called out. “You’re in the wrong place. Come and get me. Now!”

  He shouted the last word and Gabriel watched as Smudge’s teeth flew from his ruined mouth like bullets.

  Gabriel looked up.

  There was a sunroof.

  He searched frantically on the centre console for the control. There! A simple white icon on a black button. He jabbed at it with his thumb and unclipped his seatbelt. All around him, the drivers of the surrounding vehicles had turned to watch him trying to escape. Their skull-like faces split open in grins of sharp, white teeth, and they laughed as he scrambled up towards the widening rectangle of sky above him.

  Half-in, half-out of the car, Gabriel turned around to watch as his former Trooper dragged himself closer and closer. Smudge was only three cars back now, and his voice had taken on a pleading tone. A smell of burnt meat drifted on the wind.