by Andy Maslen
“This where it happened?” Darryl said.
“The chief’s place was that one over there,” Gabriel said, pointing to a larger, but still ruined house on the edge of the central clearing. “That’s where we took out N’Tolo. He’d brought a few guys with him for protection and we dealt with them, but when we came out, the place was swarming with his men.” And our own Defence Secretary betrayed us for a handful of fucking diamonds.
“So which way did you guys go?”
Gabriel paused. Looked around. Closed his eyes. Willing the memories of that day to come back and yet terrified that they would . . .
Small arms fire.
Five-round bursts from the M16s.
Full-auto fire from the AKs.
Hot brass and cordite.
Sweat.
Fear.
“They hit Smudge!”
“We need those plans, Smudge. Get them back.”
“On it, Boss.”
Smudge stumbles. He’s taken a round in the back. He flings the case containing N’Tolo’s plans to Gabriel.
Then another hits him. Back of the head.
Blood. Brain. Bone.
“Put down area fire! Drive them back!”
Exfil, still firing, to the extract point.
Gabriel opened his eyes. “The extract point was northwest from here. I remember looking down from the chopper. The tree where they . . . where they took him, it was behind the chief’s house somewhere.”
“Come on, then. Let’s go find your boy.”
They strode through the abandoned settlement, reached the chief’s house and skirted it on the right. The forest beyond was dense and green, and alive with birds, whose calls and songs would have entranced Gabriel in any other circumstances. Now they were a distraction. Swatting away biting flies, the two men picked their way between the trees, lifting their boots high to avoid tripping in the tangled undergrowth that swarmed and coiled around their feet.
Gabriel staggered, catching his right boot on a vine as thick as a python. He freed his boot and stood again. Then his eyes widened and he extended his right arm, the index finger pointing.
66
Finding Calvary
BROKEN by tree branches into alternating bands of gold and dark green, sunshine lit up a clearing.
Standing in its centre was a single, fat-trunked baobab.
Two low branches extended out from the trunk about six feet above the forest floor.
Gabriel pushed through the few trees remaining between him and the baobab. This was the place. This was the tree those murderous bastards had pinned Smudge to through his hands. He clenched his fists and ground his teeth as he looked at those branches spread like arms, as if to say, “Don’t blame me. I wanted no part of it. They crucified him on me. I had no choice”.
And there, stuck into the wood, all the way through the bark and the cambium beneath, were two rusted steel machetes. Wasps and termites must have eaten away the wooden handles years ago, leaving the narrow tangs and those deep-bellied blades in the flesh of the tree. But of Smudge, there was no sign. No finger bones dangling from the blades, no bones at all. Gabriel fell to his knees in front of the tree and scraped at the bare ground with his hands, scrabbling through the hard surface to the softer earth, splitting nails, cutting his fingertips. He was swearing under his breath – a constant stream of the vilest curses he could conjure – and sweating profusely.
Then Darryl bent and laid a hand on his back, between the shoulder blades.
“Gabriel. You need to step back. We need to think.”
Gabriel jumped to his feet, about-turned, marched away from the tree for eight or ten feet, Darryl following, and drew his Beretta.
He spun round, thumbed off the safety and started shooting.
The noise as the 9 mm bullets left the barrel was deafening. Darryl stood back and watched as Gabriel unloaded all sixteen rounds into the tree. Wood chips and needle-pointed splinters flew in all directions, one catching Gabriel on the left cheek and opening a cut.
“Fuck you!” he yelled. “Fuck you all!” Then he hurled the empty M9 at the smoking tree.
“Feel better now?” Darryl asked in a dry tone, brushing bits of bark from the front of his jacket.
Gabriel nodded, then went to retrieve his pistol, slammed home a fresh magazine and holstered it, safety on again. “Sorry. I think I was expecting find a skeleton pinned up there, or even just his hands. But there’s nothing.”
Darryl shook his head. “There’s never nothing. If you can find the site of a soldier’s death, you can find something. Probably what happened was, scavengers took him. The bigger elements get taken by hyenas, maybe even leopards or lions. Then you got your jackals and wild dogs. Vultures, too. Finally you got smaller birds, and the damn flies and beetles will get in on the act. But they don’t eat metal, OK? So his dog tags should be around here somewhere. Maybe a couple of bones the hyenas and vultures missed. We need to search the immediate environment.”
Gabriel swiped a palm across his forehead. “I understand. Good. What are we looking for?”
“Somewhere a scavenger might have hidden a trophy. Maybe a watercourse where stuff could have gotten washed away. What were your tags like?”
“Two metal discs in rubber silencers. Green nylon cord, although we used plug chains too.”
“None of that’s edible and it’s not going to corrode either. So let’s grid this. You go to the left of the tree, I’ll go to the right. We’ll start with a ten-yard square each. You walk over it in one-foot wide paths, north-south first, then east-west. Something we learned from crime-scene investigators.”
Head down, Gabriel began to pace the virtual grid he’d overlaid on the ground. It took forty-five minutes and by the end he had discovered nothing. He called across to Darryl.
“Anything?”
“No. You?”
“No.” Gabriel looked back at the tree as he said this and changed his mind. “Did you say watercourse?”
Darryl came over to join him. “Yeah, I did. Why? You see one?”
“I’m not sure. Look over there.” He was shading his eyes and pointing at a sweeping curve of smooth, cracked mud beyond the tree. “Could that be a stream-bed do you think?”
“Let’s go and find out.”
Boots crunching on dry leaves and twigs, the two men made their way to the curve of mud, which had a concave surface like a shallow gutter. The sun had dried it to a hard, crisp finish, patterned with ripples and cracked like dry skin under a magnifying glass. Flecks of translucent mica glittered on the surface like diamonds.
“Yes indeed, my friend. That is a dry stream-bed. Look at the direction of the ripples. It was flowing that way,” Darryl said, looking towards the tree line. “Come on, we’ll follow it along. Grab a stick and start breaking open the surface. Maybe we’ll get lucky. Like a couple of old-time prospectors, y’know?”
Armed with branches cut from nearby trees, they began smashing the top layer of the mud as it meandered downstream from the baobab tree. The first ten or fifteen times Gabriel struck the hard-baked surface, it cracked open to reveal nothing more than a slightly darker, crumblier version of the same soil. No metal, no bone, no fabric.
Swearing, he brought the branch back over his head then crashed it down into a mosaic of rippled crust in a circular wash, where a rock had diverted the now dried-up stream. Gasping with the effort and wiping dust from his eyes, he peered down. And gasped. Something glinted at him from the red earth. A crescent of dull silver-grey metal.
Gabriel let out a yelp of delight. “Found them! I’ve found them. His discs.”
As Darryl knelt by him and watched silently, Gabriel picked away the polygonal fragments of crust and uncovered the discs, still seated in their black rubber silencers and attached to their nylon cord and half-buried in the softer soil. The stainless steel was dull and pitted but otherwise intact. Gabriel picked them free with his index finger and held them up, blowing the dust away. He read out t
he sparse text, ignoring the eight-digit service number:
O POS
SMITH
MA
CE
“That your boy?” Darryl asked.
Gabriel brushed at his eyes, where tears had spilled over onto his cheeks, running through the dust like this stream must once have done.
“That’s him. Michael Anthony Smith. We found him.” Gabriel looped the cord around his own neck and tucked the discs inside his shirt. “Oh, Jesus, we found him, Darryl.” Gabriel was smiling. He leant over and clapped Darryl on his meaty shoulder.
Darryl was smiling too. “That’s fantastic. Well done. Now, there may be some bones ’round here too. It’s possible something carried him this far. Keep looking downstream and maybe back up a ways, too.”
Still on their knees, they began a fingertip search in the stream bed. This time it was Darryl’s turn to shout.
“Got something!”
Gabriel ran back and squatted beside Darryl, who was raking back some of the mud, exposing a small white knob of bone. “What is it?”
“Hold on and I’ll tell you.” Darryl flicked away a few more fragments of dried mud and prised the bone free with the tip of his knife. He held it up. “Vertebra. Cervical. C3 or C4 I’d guess.”
“You can tell by looking?”
Darryl nodded, still scrutinising the vertebra. “They trained us pretty well in skeletal anatomy. Had archaeologists, pathologists, anthropologists, every kind of ‘ologist’ you can imagine.”
Over the next two hours, the two men scraped away the entire surface of the stream-bed, but found no further bones.
Straightening and leaning back to ease the muscles in his back, Gabriel spotted a vulture wheeling in lazy circles against a bank of low, white clouds. Did you take him? Did you leave me anything else?
He looked back to where Darryl was dragging the point of his knife through the mud, and then beyond. A second baobab tree stood sentry about seventy yards from the first. At the base of its swollen trunk was a black oval. At first Gabriel thought it must be a shadow, but then, realising there were no objects close by that could create such an inky, sharp-edged shape, he walked closer to get a better look.
What he had at first taken to be a shadow was actually a hole. Maybe it had been hollowed out by some burrowing rodent or insect colony. As he got closer, he broke into a run. He heard Darryl shouting to him but ignored him and kept going, skidding to stop and dropping to his knees in front of the tree. He was reaching towards the hole when Darryl’s shout stopped him.
“Gabriel, wait!” The American came lumbering over, too out of shape to sprint. He was sweating heavily in the camouflage fatigues, dark stains under his arms and in the centre of his chest. “Could be any damn thing in there waiting to bite you. Some pretty bad critters in Mozambique. Snakes, spiders, scorpions, every-fucking-thing.”
Looking around, Gabriel grabbed a stick and poked it into the hole, stirring it around in the leaf mould within for good measure.
Both men waited, ready to jump back if something venomous and pissed-off appeared. Nothing. No giant spiders or angry cobras. No gang of killer bees or monster centipedes.
Gabriel drew a breath then stretched his arm out and pushed his hand into the hole.
He felt around in the rotted leaves and powdery wood fragments chewed up by whatever had made the hole. Then his fingers touched something hard, smooth and curved, right at the back of the hole. He explored the surface, placing his palm over it and feeling all around it with his fingers.
“Oh, my God. I think I’ve found him, Darryl.”
He pushed his fingers underneath the object, found a grip in its ridged underside, and pulled, gently. With a soft shushing, the object came free of the leaf mould. Gabriel sat back on his heels and brought it out into the sunlight.
Held in Gabriel’s cupped hands was a skull. The lower jaw was missing. The rear surface was cracked and splintered, with a circular hole distorted by sharp-edged triangular gaps high on the crown. There was no other damage. The top teeth were all there, some of the molars filled with blackened amalgam, and the eye sockets and nasal cavity were intact.
Gabriel looked around, half-expecting to see a brown-skinned man in SAS camo waving from the treeline, but there was nothing. Just birds singing, and the sun hot on his face. He brushed the flakes of leaf and dried wood fragments from the bone and sat, staring into the empty eye sockets.
He bent his head until his forehead touched the skull and closed his eyes.
67
A Cold Land
THIRTY hours later, Gabriel stepped out into the arrivals lounge at Heathrow. Darryl had promised to get Smudge’s skull and identity discs back in a diplomatic bag to the US Embassy in London. Bored-looking drivers held placards in front of their chests, scanning the emerging passengers for the people they’d been hired to take to hotels, offices and meeting rooms. Nobody waited for Gabriel. He stopped at an ATM, then walked out of the warm terminal building into the February air.
A freezing wind bit into his cheeks, blowing sharp flecks of sleet into his eyes. Someone a few places ahead of him in the taxi queue was smoking, and the acrid smell of the cigarette smoke caught in his nose and made him sneeze.
A middle-aged woman next to him, bundled up in a purple padded coat and wearing a white, fake-fur hat, turned and looked at him. Then frowned.
“You don’t want to walk about without a coat, love. You’ll catch your death.”
Then she turned back. Eventually a taxi drew level with Gabriel and the driver lugged his bags around to the back and loaded them into the boot.
“Where to, guv?”
“Salisbury, please.”
The man frowned. “That’s going to cost, I’m afraid. Two hundred.”
“It’s fine.”
Gabriel closed his eyes as soon as the taxi pulled away and slept for the entire journey. He woke when the driver asked him for his address. It was nine in the evening. He gave it and, twenty minutes later, walked in through the front door of his cottage. Post had piled up on the mat and he stepped over it, heading for the kitchen.
His answer phone told him he had fifteen messages. He ignored it. He retrieved a bottle of Tanqueray and a handful of ice from the freezer, clinked the cubes into a cut-glass tumbler and poured a couple of inches of gin over them. He emptied a tin of Schweppes tonic on top, then took a long pull on the drink before sitting at the kitchen table.
There were people he needed to speak to, but right now he needed to sleep. He sent a single text, to Britta.
Found him. Back at home. Going to bed. Speak tomorrow. X
He took the gin and tonic upstairs and drank it in bed, reading an old copy of The Pickwick Papers until Dickens’s characters began blurring into one another.
The next morning, Gabriel shopped for food and returned to the cottage carrying a bag full of bacon, sausages, eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes, tea, coffee, milk, bread and marmalade. He made what his old Regimental Sergeant Major would have called “a proper breakfast” and spent the next thirty minutes eating, drinking tea and listening to jazz on the radio. Breakfast finished, he called the US Embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square. After bouncing around the automated call-response system, he found himself talking to a pleasant-sounding female voice that he hoped belonged to a flesh-and-blood human.
“Thank you for calling the American Embassy. This is Melissa. How may I help you today?” She delivered this mini-speech in a singsong voice, the accent somewhere on the East Coast.
“Yes. My name is Gabriel Wolfe. I believe one of your overseas . . .” What? Spooks? Facilitators? Operatives? “staff members couriered something to you for me to collect. I have a reference if you’d like it?”
“Yes, of course, sir. Please go ahead.”
“It’s Darryl Burroughs and reference DB/MIA/GB/717.”
“Please hold.”
Gabriel stared at the rain streaking the kitchen window and the bedraggled garden beyond. Seconds t
icked by and he started taking bets against himself on which of a pair of raindrops would reach the bottom of the pane first. The tinny Muzak playing on a twenty-second loop was beginning to grate when Melissa came back on the line.
“Sir? Yes. I have a package in our mailroom marked for your attention. You can come at any time during our operating hours, which are eight-thirty a.m. until five-thirty p.m. Please bring two forms of ID including at least one with a photograph. Is there anything else I can do for you today?”
“No, thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”
“Have a nice day.”
Gabriel doubted he would, although the next call at least would be a pleasant one.
“Oh, thank, God,” Britta said when she answered her phone. “You could have called last night, you know. I didn’t sleep a blink.”
“I’m sorry. Just done in, I’m afraid.”
“So where have you been? What’s going on?”
Gabriel laughed. “Slow down. The good news is, yes, we found Smudge. I have his ID discs here, and a neck bone. We found his skull, too and I have to collect it from the US Embassy.” As he spoke, he fingered the discs, the stamped information about Smudge’s name, number, blood type and religion still ingrained here and there with particles of red soil.
“Wait, we? You had a partner?”
“Darryl Burroughs. Remember him?”
“With his Neanderthal attitude to women and that horrible shirt, how could I forget?”
“He came through for me. We flew up there in an Apache. Remember he used to work recovering MIAs for the US Government? He knew all kinds of practical techniques. He’s one of the good guys.”
