Dying Breath (Cobra Book 2)

by Blake Banner

  “Good, that will give me an excuse to nose around without drawing too much attention.”

  “Exactly, and if you’re sympathetic to Muslims, you may actually get a little friendly support.”

  “Have we any friends out there?”

  He nodded, then shrugged. “We have a chap who can fix you up with hardware. But aside from that I don’t think you need any help. It should be straightforward, Harry. Locate and destroy.”

  “What about the lab?”

  The colonel answered. “At the moment, the lab is no concern of yours. The only reason the lab should concern you is if Li and Dizhou stay there, rather than in Casablanca. The most likely scenario is that they will stay at a hotel and visit the office and the lab. So there is no need for you to go anywhere near the lab. We don’t want a repeat of New York.”

  I frowned. “We don’t want to know what’s in there?”

  “Yes, we do, but right now that’s not your job. Your job is to take out the targets. If that changes I’ll let you know.”

  I glanced at the brigadier and he blinked twice. For a man who never blinks that is a significant message. I nodded.

  “Sure, understood.”

  He said, “As to Gutermann, Goldbloom, Browne and the European delegation, we need to study the intelligence and analyze it. Then I’ll let you know.”

  “What about this hardware supplier? I’m going to need weapons.”

  “We have a man out there. Make a list of what you need, give it to me this afternoon and I’ll pass it on.”

  “Yeah? What kind of stuff can he get?”

  “Most things.”

  I smiled at my bacon. When an ex-commanding officer of the SAS tells you an arms supplier can get you most things, you know he means the supplier probably can’t get you a thermonuclear device. The colonel was watching me with hard eyes and asked:

  “What are you likely to need? You’re taking out two men. You need a gun.”

  I mopped the egg off my plate with a piece of bread and smiled at her like I meant it.

  “You see, Colonel Harris, that’s why you’re an administrator, and I’m carrying out the hit.”

  I wiped my mouth with the white linen napkin, dropped it beside my plate and stood. I looked at Buddy Byrd and said, “I’ll see you later, sir.”

  I crossed the lawn and went in search of the gym.

  Chapter Eight

  We touched down in Casablanca at nine AM, I spent twenty minutes collecting my car, which was unfortunately a Mercedes, slung my luggage in the trunk and took the N11 into town. The road, such as it was, snaked through surprisingly green fields, where men and asses labored side by side under an unforgiving sky inhabited by a jealous, unforgiving god. Even in that comparatively lush area, the dust was pervasive and the heat, at that time of the morning, was becoming oppressive.

  Casablanca is for me, much like Morocco, a place of constant and consistent disappointment. It is not, and probably never was, the iconic place depicted in the movie with Bogart and Bergman. Today it is just like a thousand other cities across the Mediterranean, with broad streets flanked by identikit apartment blocks five and seven stories high: vast and luxurious for the small elite, cramped and with paper-thin walls for the immense, impoverished populace. Both united in the conviction that somehow, all the ills of their country are caused by the West under the evil leadership of the United States; and that Allah will eventually lead them to a glorious victory over the Great Shaitan, and all their ills will be converted into blessings.

  The N11 became the N1 and I followed the Route D’el Jadida onto Boulevard Brahim Roudani. With the soft top down and the sun and the breeze on my face, I could almost kid myself I was in the south of France. But this place was like Lyon, or Bordeaux, with all the joy and fun sucked out of it. It had the French colonial architecture, the graceful, tree-lined streets, but where the French, the Spanish or the Italians—let’s face it, anyone on the north shore of the Mediterranean—would have had the pavements sprawling with terraced cafés and restaurants, the most exciting thing Brahim Roudani had to offer was an abundance of cell phone shops and tea shops selling cakes so sticky they were best used for trapping flies.

  I eventually came to the Boulevard Moulay Hassan I, where I made an illegal U-turn and pulled into the Hyatt Regency and handed my bags and my car over to a couple of kids in burgundy uniforms who looked like they should still be at school.

  My room was large and comfortable, and unremarkable. It had a panoramic view of the intersection of the Boulevard Hassan I and the Avenue des FAR, with the old clock tower overlooking the hooting, honking chaos.

  I had known I was going to arrive in the morning, so I’d made a point of sleeping for most of the flight, in order to beat the jet lag. I had a quick shower to wash the long flight out of my muscles, changed into a cream linen suit and stepped out into the bright sunshine: an American abroad, taking a walk in the city.

  We had learned from May Ling that Heilong Li and Yang Dizhou had several times mentioned an office in Casablanca from which they conducted the administrative business related to the lab out in the desert. She knew it was close to the port and, as far as she could recall, it was called something like, “Rosh New-ah.” Half an hour with a map of the port area of Casablanca produced a small street that connected Avenue de l’Ambassadeur Ben Aicha with Rue de l’Ocean. It was called Roche Noir. It was confusing at first because Roche Noir was an arrondissement of Casablanca. Turned out it was a small street as well.

  That street was about two miles from the hotel. An enjoyable stroll after so many hours cooped up in airplanes. I wandered down the Avenue de l’Armee Royale as far as the Place Zallaga, taking photographs like a real tourist. Then I continued up Avenue Pasteur, stopped for coffee and very sticky cakes, and moved on to the Avenue de L’Ambassadeur Ben Aicha, where I started to become interested in the little side streets on my left, like they were cute and quaint and the sort of thing we didn’t have back home.

  Finally I came to Rue Roche Noir and stood on the corner looking, as though the architecture was special. It wasn’t. Like pretty much everything else I had seen that morning, despite the fact that it was sitting on the shores of the Atlantic, it was standard, post ’60s Mediterranean apartment blocks and office blocks, and could have been anywhere from Malaga to Haifa.

  There wasn’t much to see on the street, a bank and a couple of apartment blocks at the near end and a large, walled yard at the far end on the left, with a few shacks and tumbledown buildings contained inside it.

  I entered the street and continued my stroll toward the port, scanning the walls for security cameras. The only ones I saw were on the walled yard, angled in from either side above a large, solid steel red gate, big enough to allow a large truck through. It bore the legend, “TRANS ARABIAN TRANSPORTATION CO SL.”

  The buildings opposite were the kind of thing you’d expect in a rundown, semi-industrial quarter: a mechanic’s garage, a builder’s yard, a guy making wooden furniture out of a small, dark shop that smelt richly of pine. I passed them all with interest, and noted at the same time that there were no fresh tire tracks in the abundant dust that had accumulated around the Trans Arabian Transportation Company’s gate.

  On the Rue de l’Ocean I turned left and walked past the north wall of the site. There I saw a smaller door, also red steel, with another CCTV camera angled over it. A glance at the lock told me it was clean and not rusted. A glance at the bottom of the door and the sidewalk told me it was in use and frequently transited.

  I turned back and returned to the Rue Roche Noir. There was no other building on the street that had the slightest possibility of being Heilong Li’s offices in Casablanca. There was the Banque Populaire on the corner of Avenue de l’Ambassadeur Ben Aicha, which was not a realistic possibility, and aside from that it was either a one-man car mechanic’s operation, a one-man carpentry shop, a builders’ yard where the office was barely big enough to hold the accounts ledger, a one-man plumbi
ng shop or a hairdresser’s.

  If Heilong Li had his offices in this street, they were at the Trans Arabian Transport Company.

  I made my way back to Avenue de l’Ambassadeur Ben Aicha and turned south and west, the way I had come. I pulled out my cell and called the brigadier on a secure number.

  “Yes, what have you got?”

  “The Trans Arabian Transportation Company, SL.”

  “A little unoriginal.”

  “Yeah, that was my first thought too. It’s the only business on the street that is likely to be a cover for their operation. You got anyone here in Casablanca who might know something about them?”

  “Maybe, we have a contact in the Police National Judiciaire, if we ask nicely they might be willing to help. I’ll talk to him and get back to you. Anything else?”

  “Yeah, I’m going to go and take a look at the lab. But I don’t want to do that till I have my weapons. Did you get the OK from your man yet?”

  “Yes. Allée des Jardines and Boulevard Moulay Slimane, it’s on the beach. You’ll find a big empty lot, and just beyond it, heading east, a dilapidated villa surrounded by a high wall. He has date palms in his garden. There is an electronic gate with an intercom. I’ll give him a call and tell him to expect you today. When you buzz on the intercom you tell him you are looking for M. Gilbert Gordon. He will tell you there is nobody of that name there. You ask him if he knows where you can find him and he will ask you to wait a moment. Then he’ll come and open the gate to you.”

  “Seriously? Will Q be there to give me a laser pen?”

  “It’s tried and tested, Harry, and it saves lives. No laser pens, only the stuff you asked for.”

  I made my way back to the hotel. Had another shower, changed my clothes again and had the boy bring my car around. My stomach was telling me it was lunchtime, but my stomach was going to have to wait. I was not going to be able to relax until I had a P226 under my arm and a Fairbairn and Sykes tucked in my boot.

  The North African heat had been building through the morning and despite the Atlantic breeze, it felt like a hundred easy in the shade. I put the soft top down, tried to imagine I was driving an Aston Martin, and roared down the Avenue de l’Armée Royale. It took me pretty much all the way along the route I had just made on foot, and then beyond. I drove past the Rue Roche Noir and kept going until snatches of beach started to appear on my left, broken up by large warehouses and the kind of ugliness only governments who don’t give a damn know how to create.

  Then there was a small patch, a brief flash, of what was left of old Casablanca, a jumbled hive of white walls, flat roofs, domes, winding, narrow streets and steps, swarming with people and improvised markets. A glimpse of a way of life all but dead, ill-equipped and unable to survive against the relentless, standardizing drive of globalism. A drive that set a universal standard of living by quantifying quality of life.

  It soon passed and faded in my rearview mirror. A few minutes after that the warehouses were replaced by houses with walled gardens and lawns, and then it was there: a broad expanse of dirt, a hundred yards square, with the beach beyond. And just past it, the house the brigadier had described.

  Palms and eucalyptus trees rose above a white wall maybe eight or ten feet tall, and among the trees, red gabled roofs and a domed copula. I drove past it, made a U-turn and pulled up in front of the house.

  The intercom outside his steel gate had an incorporated camera that lit up blue when I pressed the call button. It bleeped for fifteen seconds and then a deep, lazy voice said, “Allah is great. Who is it?”

  He said it in English so I figured he already knew it was me.

  “I’m looking for Gilbert Gordon.”

  “I am sorry, you are mistaken. There is no Gilbert Gordon living here.”

  “You know where I can find him?”

  “Maybe. Wait. You have come by car?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Maybe you want to put something in the boot. I will open the gate to the carport. You can reverse in.”

  Twelve or fifteen feet from where I was standing was a large, double gate with spikes on top. It clunked suddenly and started to roll open. I returned to the Merc, put it in reverse and, spinning the wheel to full lock, I backed the car through the double gates, down a path with dense subtropical gardens either side, and into the dark maw of an underground garage.

  There, inside, by the door, I could see a heavy, dark, bearded man in slippers who was standing holding a remote control. And as my nose slipped through and my trunk was sucked into the shadows of the garage, the gates started to close again, shutting out the street and the world beyond.

  The gates clanged shut and the guy with the beard started to beckon me back farther. Lights flickered and flooded the garage space with stark neon on bare concrete. Against the far wall, maybe twenty or thirty feet away, in my mirror, I could see a Range Rover, a Mercedes AMG GT Coupe, and an Audi A5 Coupe. I figured weapons trading was thriving in North Africa.

  The garage door started to roll down, the guy raised his hand to signal me to stop and I killed the engine and climbed out. He approached me with a big grin, a big belly and his big hand stretched out in front of him.

  “Good afternoon my dear friend, I am Ali ben Mohammed. It is a great pleasure for me to make your acquaintance. Any friend of Buddy’s is a brother to me. I am at your service.”

  I took his hand and we shook. “Sure. Likewise. Good to meet you. You got something for me, Ali?”

  “Oh, yes!” He gave me a look like a kid who’s been practicing a magic trick and is about to perform it for his favorite uncle. “I definitely have something very special for you.”

  He beckoned me over to the Range Rover and I now saw that beside it was a small stack of cartons, some small and some large. As he walked he spoke.

  “Buddy and I go back a long way. His father and mine met during Suez. Tragic. Britain had to leave, to make room for America and Israel, what can you do…? Here we have it. Please inspect it with care.”

  We hunkered down and he handed me a large shoebox. Inside it was a holstered Sig Sauer P226 with an extended magazine. My personal favorite handgun. He grinned at me as I looked it over.

  “No such thing as too much ammo. Am I right?”

  “You’re right.”

  The next box was larger and contained a Heckler and Kotch 416, one of the two best assault rifles you can get. It came with four thirty-round magazines.

  “Because,” he said, wagging his finger at me, “sometimes you just haven’t got the time to refill, but with a hundred and twenty rounds, we must hope God will have blessed you with victory before you are out of ammunition!”

  He said this as he handed me another shoebox. This one contained the Fairbairn and Sykes fighting knife, which I immediately strapped to my calf. He was still talking.

  “Of course, in Europe and America it is hard to find weapons such as these. Here I am afraid it is all too easy, if you have the right connections. Here…” He handed me another box, slightly over three foot square. “It is the bow. Take down, as you requested, sixty-five pounds draw weight at thirty-one inches, and twelve wooden arrows, goose fletched with razor-sharp broadheads.” He made a face and nodded, shrugging at the same time. “Death is almost instant, and largely painless.”

  I nodded while I examined the bow and the arrows. They were good and I packed them back in the box.

  “And now,” he said, “something a little special. This is EPX 1.”

  I nodded. “I know it.”

  “It has been around since 2015, but has not been used much. Its sensitivity to impact and friction are about the same as C4 or Semtex, but it has a significantly higher detonation velocity than any other plastic explosive. You wanted twenty pounds of C4; I have taken the liberty of procuring ten kilos of EPX 1. You will use it in the same way, but you will get…,” he paused and giggled like a child, “more boom for your bang.”

  I smiled. “That’s good. It’s funny. W
hat about detonators?”

  “You have here a dozen remote detonators which work with a mobile telephone, a cell phone to you. You have also half a dozen micro trackers which will connect with your laptop or your cell via the internet.” He grinned. “It looks, my friend, as though you are going to have a great deal of fun. My heart aches with memories of the many good times I shared with Buddy. If I can help you in any way, you know where to find me.”

  I thanked him and refused his offer of coffee and a little something a little stronger. We put the goods in the trunk of the Merc and he opened the garage door and the gates for me. I pulled out and turned onto Avenue Moulay Slimane again, headed east.

  Chapter Nine

  I didn’t go back to the hotel. What I had in the trunk was too hot and I needed to get it somewhere safe fast. Fast meant before anyone noticed me, before I came to anybody’s attention. I had been in Casablanca just a few hours. So far only Ali ben Mohammed had actually noticed me. To everybody else I was just another anonymous Westerner in a fancy car. But by this afternoon there would be at least one police officer, in addition to Amin, who would be aware of me and my presence, and the list would steadily grow. As a rule of thumb, it is best not to have cops aware of you when the trunk of your car is packed with lethal ordnance. I needed the Heckler and Koch and the EPX 1 to be safely hidden before any more people started to become aware of my presence.

  So I took the A7 south out of Casablanca, stopping on the way to buy a spade, and floored the pedal from the A5 interchange, past the airport, past Berrechid and Settat, where I started to climb into arid highlands, and hit a hundred and ten and a hundred and twenty miles per hour through land that was increasingly made up of dunes of red, yellow gray and black sand. Until I came at last to the exit for Ben Guerir and the R206. I followed that, through harsh, scorching desert for another twenty miles where, after about ten minutes, I came to a broad valley, and within it, the tiny village of Aracha. Aracha was about all there was in it, for as far as the eye could see.