by Andy Maslen
“You know how our patrol was ambushed in Mozambique the day we lost Smudge?”
“Sure. You were overrun. The place was supposed to be clean.”
“Sutherland passed classified military intel about our mission to Robert Hamilton, Gordian’s CEO. He gave it to N’Tolo’s gang of terrorists. Sutherland and Hamilton were trying to protect a scheme to take over a diamond field. That’s what N’Tolo’s plans were all about.”
There was a pause, during which Gabriel could Britta breathing.
“I’m sorry.”
He frowned. “What for?”
“For not believing you before. When you suspected her the first time. For pushing you into danger just for hard proof.”
“You didn’t push me anywhere, darling. I had to go to Hong Kong. Everything else happened because I made it happen.”
“You’re going to kill Hamilton.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes. I am.”
“What about Sutherland?”
“I saw the original documents in Hong Kong. But I only have scans and digital copies. It could be argued they were faked by terrorists trying to blacken her name. I’m going to draw her out into the open and find a way to get her to incriminate herself.”
“Be careful, then. Den spik som sticker ut blir slagen.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s a Swedish proverb. The nail that sticks out gets struck.”
“True. But Lyckan står den djärve bi.”
“What? You learned Swedish in Hong Kong, too?”
“No. Just that one phrase. For you. If I am bold, maybe Fortune will favour me.”
“I hope so, Wolfe. You need all the luck you can get.”
Gabriel hung up then called Don on his mobile number, unsure whether it would even ring. Would he just get a “this number has been suspended” message? He did not.
“Hello, Old Sport. Thought you’d never call. What’s going on with you?”
Gabriel sketched in the details he’d just given Britta.
“And how are you after your little adventure in Africa?”
“Better now I know you’re still in the frame. I thought you’d been canned, or thrown into the Tower. Or worse.”
Don chuckled. “I was beginning to wonder myself. I heard you went looking for me in Essex.”
“I did. The guys on the gate said they’d never heard of you.”
“I know. Sorry. Just a bit of the general subterfuge. I’ve temporarily suspended The Department’s operations. At least in terms of formal facilities and missions. I suppose you could say I’m working from home. I believe that’s the current parlance. I still have my guys on standby, but we’re all keeping our heads down.”
“Can I ask something, Don? You seemed really out of sorts last time we spoke. What was the matter?”
“I have been under a certain amount of pressure from a nasty individual going by the name of David Brown. He behaves like a spook, but I have a feeling he’s part of something,” he paused, “cross-departmental, shall we call it? I think we all know who’s pulling Brown’s strings. Which brings us to the main problem. Our mutual friend in SW1.”
“I have a plan for dealing with that particular individual. But I need some help getting to the States. Fast.”
“What can I do to help Old Sport?”
Gabriel explained.
At nine the following morning, Gabriel was zipping himself into the olive-green folds of a flight overall. It was noon, and he was standing on the apron at the Empire Test Pilots’ School at MOD Boscombe Down, Wiltshire, just a few miles from his cottage.
“I need to get to the US as fast as possible,” he’d said to Don. “Any chance of a ride in a fast jet?”
“Only two-seaters I know of in this country are the SAAB Gripens at the ETPS. You won’t even have to find a hotel . . .”
“Ready to go then?” the pilot asked, a smile playing over his fair-skinned face, dotted here and there with pale freckles. He’d introduced himself as Flight Lieutenant Craig Hendricks.
Gabriel nodded. “How long will it take?”
“We’ll be flying between Mach One and Mach Two. I’ve got a midflight refuel booked with a Vickers VC10 from 101 Squadron RAF. We’ll be there in three hours.”
“There” was York Airport in Pennsylvania, ten miles from Tactical Campus in Shiloh. Allowing for the time difference, Gabriel had calculated he’d be touching down in Pennsylvania at eight a.m. local time. Plenty of time to equip himself for what he had planned.
Gabriel strapped himself into the co-pilot’s seat behind Craig, who was conducting his pre-flight cabin checks. The cockpit was narrow. Gabriel’s fears were restricted to spiders, but had he suffered from claustrophobia, he would have been popping tranquilisers by the handful. His shoulders were separated from the cold wind slicing across the airfield by nothing more than a few inches of pressurised air, and then the inner and outer skins of the airframe and whatever avionics were sandwiched between them. He pulled the strap adjuster tight until he felt he couldn’t move in his seat then leaned back, flipped the polarising visor down on his flight helmet, and waited.
He heard Craig’s voice, and the air traffic controller’s, through his in-helmet comms.
“Roger, Tower. Golf Alpha Hotel One Niner Three taxiing to takeoff.”
“OK, Golf Alpha Hotel One Niner Three. Proceed at your own discretion. You’re cleared for takeoff. Over and out.”
“Roger, Tower. Thank you. Over and out.”
Gabriel felt, rather than heard the Volvo RM12 turbofan engines spin up, the vibrations thrumming inside his chest. Then he did hear it, as Craig pushed the throttle lever forward and set the Gripen moving along the apron towards the end of the runway. The roar was still muted by the sound insulation inside his helmet, but there was an insistence and urgency to the rumble in his ears that promised something spectacular.
As they reached the end of the runway, Craig’s voice crackled in his headset.
“OK, Gabriel. I don’t how fast that car of yours accelerates, but I promise you, this is going to be fun. Hold on!”
Gabriel could hear the smile in the young man’s voice and readied himself, clenching his stomach muscles and pushing his helmet back against the headrest. He glanced to his left, then right, at the rolling Wiltshire countryside, bleak and grey at this time of year. Ghostly green reflections of the flight instruments curved over his head on the Plexiglas canopy. Then, while his eyes were upturned, Craig pushed the throttle all the way forward.
The muted roar Gabriel had almost grown used to increased in volume and violence, to a screaming bellow. He felt his internal organs compress as the Gripen accelerated past six hundred miles per hour. Craig maintained a running commentary as the jet surged into the air at an angle so sharp Gabriel’s perceptions of gravity, direction and his own bodily position in the plane simply vanished.
“Tower, this is Golf Alpha Hotel One Niner Three. On a bearing two-seven-seven, airspeed nine hundred miles per hour, climbing to twenty thousand feet. See you tomorrow. Over and out.”
“Golf Alpha Hotel One Niner Three from Tower. Roger that. Bring doughnuts. Over and out.”
“Gabriel? I didn’t ask. Ever been in a fast-jet before?”
“No. I did a bit of work with a couple of Typhoon pilots a while back, but this is my first flight. Only choppers and C130-Js before this, and the odd light plane.”
“Typhoons? Lovely planes. I’ve flown a couple. Like ice skating in your bare feet till you get used to it.”
“So I’ve heard. You said we’d be flying between Mach One and Mach Two. How fast are we going now?”
“Now? Just subsonic. We have to reach thirty thousand feet before we go supersonic or we’ll run through too much fuel. Look down, that’s the Bristol Channel. Once we’re over the Atlantic I’ll light the afterburners. That’ll be fun.” Moments later, it seemed, Gabriel was looking down at a dull, petrol-blue sea. “OK, Gabriel. Hold onto your breakfast.”
What happened next made the takeoff feel like pushing a family saloon car through the gears. As the afterburners sucked in the exhaust gases and re-combusted them to provide extra thrust, the Gripen didn’t so much accelerate as snap into the future. Gabriel could feel his eyeballs being squashed into their sockets and his lungs trying to leave his back through the gaps between his ribs. Breathing the faintly plasticky air through the oxygen mask became a struggle and points of light danced at the edge of his vision.
Suddenly, the pressure eased off, as if an elephant had tired of sitting on his chest and jumped up. He inhaled in a gasp.
“Fuck!” was all he could say.
“Indeed. Did you like it?”
“It was . . . brilliant, actually. But,” he added hurriedly, “that will do me for a while.”
Craig laughed, an oddly robotic sound as the comms clipped the higher frequencies and smoothed out the volume. “Don’t worry, that’s it for a while now. I’ll give you a prod when we’re about to refuel. It’s fun to watch. But I’m afraid it’s just a glorified taxi-ride for an hour and a bit now.”
Craig knew what he was talking about. The clouds closed in and he took the plane higher until they broke through into glorious sunlit air. The sun glinted off the silver of the wings and made Gabriel squint, but once he’d admired the mountainous landscape of cumulus clouds for a few minutes the flight became as monotonous as any commercial trip on a Boeing 777 or Airbus 380.
Eighty-nine minutes later, as Gabriel was running through the next steps in his campaign, Craig’s voice in the intercom made him jump.
“Gabriel? If you look over to starboard, you’ll see our tanker.”
Gabriel holstered the pistol in his mind and turned his head to the right. Flying ahead and above them was a dark-grey Vickers VC10. Trailing from the rear of the converted airliner’s fuselage was a refuelling hose, tipped with a conical drogue basket. The hose snaked out to seventy feet, and Gabriel wondered how anyone could possibly engage the cone to receive the aviation fuel they needed to stay in the air. He wanted to ask, but felt he should keep quiet. He needn’t have bothered.
“We’re going to ease up behind mother and stick our refuelling probe into the drogue. Then I flick a switch and she dumps three tonnes of pressurised aviation fuel right into our tank. OK, here we go. Tanker from Golf Alpha Hotel One Niner Three. Ready to engage, over.”
“Golf Alpha Hotel One Niner Three, clear to engage. Over.”
“Roger that, over.”
Craig flew in close behind the VC10. Craning round the pilot’s helmet, Gabriel could see the drogue basket growing bigger in the windscreen as Craig closed the gap.
Twenty feet.
Fifteen.
Twelve.
Ten.
Seven.
Five.
There was a muffled clunk as the refuelling probe and the drogue interlocked and formed an airtight seal. For the next three minutes, Craig held the Gripen steady behind the VC10. There was another clunk, and the refuelling hose dropped away and began retracting into the VC10’s fuselage.
“All done,” Craig said. “Tanker from Golf Alpha Hotel One Niner Three. Thanks, mum. Going to pat my back like usual? Over.”
“Very droll, Golf Alpha Hotel One Niner Three. Have a good trip. Over and out.”
“Thanks. You too. Over and out. Right,” Craig said, to Gabriel this time. “Next stop, York, Pennsylvania.”
*
Standing on the tarmac at York Airport, at eight a.m. local time, Gabriel shook hands with Craig.
“Thanks for the ride. I’ll see you later, all being well.”
Craig smiled. “Hope it goes well. Whatever it is.”
Gabriel nodded. “Me too. Better get rid of this first, I suppose.”
He unzipped the flight suit and shrugged his way out of it, then handed it, folded in half, to Craig, who slung it over his arm.
He walked away from the plane towards the terminal building. Don had arranged a security detail to escort Gabriel through the airport. He could see them now, waiting for him at the small, one-storey, glass and brick building: two fit-looking guys in identical navy overcoats over black two-piece suits, white shirts and dark ties. One navy, one burgundy, he saw, when he was close enough.
His own outfit was less severe: black trousers, dark grey running shoes with violet stripes, dark green sweatshirt and a dark brown leather biker jacket. Just the sort of thing a runner for an international hitwoman – assassin, he corrected himself – would wear. A runner with no idea of what sort of temperatures Pennsylvania could plummet to in February he reflected, determining to buy a coat before anything else.
His escorts introduced themselves with perfunctory greetings and the minimum amount of information consistent with explaining procedure.
“Johnson,” Navy Tie said. He was tall and blond, with a mountainous build, his craggy features bearing a watchful expression.
“Baylesford,” Burgundy Tie said. Also tall, also blond, but slim and gangling. Left eye, a startlingly bright blue, not perfectly coordinated with the right, so his gaze seemed unfixed. “This way, please. Passport?” He held out his hand, palm uppermost.
Gabriel handed over his passport.
The two men turned in unison and marched him off to the double doors of the terminal building. It was hard not to feel like a prisoner as they strode up to the single immigration officer, sitting in a small glass cubicle and looking bored.
Baylesford leaned over and muttered a few words into the guard’s ear. Showed the passport. Got it stamped. Straightened and returned it to Gabriel. All three men walked through into the open area of the building where executives, military personnel and a few families milled about, buying coffees and newspapers, checking phones and looking for the people they were meeting, either frowning or smiling, depending on whether they’d found them or not.
Baylesford stopped and placed a hand on Gabriel’s forearm to slow him.
“Call me when you’re ready to go. We’ll send a car.” He handed Gabriel a card, which he slid into his wallet alongside those belonging to Don, Fariyah Crace, Mr Fang, Darryl Burroughs and Tatyana Garin.
Johnson spoke, handing Gabriel a sheet of paper, folded in half. “Take this. It’s a four-eighty-four, ten-fifty: temporary Federal law enforcement accreditation. It’ll get you what you need.”
Baylesford and Johnson left without another word, and Gabriel headed outside to find a taxi.
57
Tactical Campus
DOWNTOWN York, Pennsylvania, like many American towns, offered the visitor as many retail diversions as she – or he – could think of. The food choices alone would choke a whale: burgers, tacos, burritos, pizzas, lobster rolls, hot dogs, gyros, frozen yoghurt and ice cream, even in February, plus buckets of fizzy drinks and pints of hot, sweet, milky coffee.
Gabriel bought a hot dog from a cart outside a department store and washed it down with a can of Coke before entering the shop. Ten minutes later, he emerged clad in a thick woollen overcoat belted round his waist, and a fur-lined trapper hat, the flaps, mercifully, covering his ears just in time to stop them breaking off. Black leather gloves, stitched with three radiating lines on the backs, brought warmth back into his fingers.
For his next purchase, he headed for East Market Street. The store, Falcon Sporting Goods, was double-fronted. The display window to the left of the door was filled with brightly-coloured balls for basketball, soccer, America football, softball and baseball. Someone with an eye for merchandising had arranged them so they appeared to be spilling from a giant, golden conch shell – a sporting horn of plenty.
The window to the right held Gabriel’s attention. Behind a steel grille were arrayed enough small arms to equip an SAS platoon. Semi-automatic pistols rubbed shoulders with assault rifles, hunting rifles and shotguns. There were crossbows, slingshots and longbows, too, should the customer be in more of an old-school state of mind. A hand-lettered sign behind the weapons stated:
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br /> HOME DEFENSE – HUNTING – COLLECTORS – COMPETITION
In-store Range – Shoot Before You Buy
Inside the shop, which was doing a slow but steady trade, to judge from the beeping of several tills, a sign pointed the way to the gun counter. The owners were maintaining the interior of their establishment at a temperature that made Gabriel sweat inside the heavy coat, so he loosened the belt and undid the buttons. He threaded his way between a couple of toned and tanned soccer moms buying boots for their daughters.
Behind the counter, a slab of thick glass scratched and pitted from the merchandise, Gabriel guessed, stood a muscular man wearing a forest-green polo shirt with the shop’s logo – a falcon perched on a pistol – stitched onto the left side. He wore his grey hair in a military buzz cut, and his rolled-up sleeves revealed thick forearms, covered in dense, black hair through which tattoos that could have been regimental badges showed, in faded shades of navy and crimson.
He looked up from a shooting magazine as Gabriel approached and flashed a smile, though Gabriel noticed his muscle tone tighten by a fraction and the way he let his his hands drop out of sight behind the stainless steel back wall of the counter display.
In the seconds it took Gabriel to reach the counter, he noticed the professional summing-up the man performed, gaze alighting first on Gabriel’s eyes before dropping to his coat, his hands and back to his eyes.
As if receiving the message Gabriel was beaming him through his open expression and smile – That’s right, I’m a regular citizen, not a crazy – the man relaxed visibly, replaced his hands on the counter and allowed his smile to reflect genuine good humour.
“Yes, sir. What are you looking for?”
Gabriel looked beyond the man’s left shoulder at the display of rifles mounted behind another steel grille. What I’d really like is one of those. Then down at the handguns displayed in angled ranks beneath the glass.
“A semi-automatic pistol. With a suppressor. Nine-millimetre. SIG Sauer P226 for choice. But anything reliable.”
