by Ryan, Chris
The radio station in Belgrade. The shadows, and the bodies.
‘Golan says the suitcase bomb is due to detonate at eight o’clock tonight, yes?’ Land continued. ‘So that leaves us with a shade over four hours to get you on-site and deactivate it. You’re the best man for the job, Joe.’
‘What about Aimée? She doesn’t deserve to die.’
‘She won’t. Soon as Golan calls his informant she’ll be granted a stay of execution.’
Gardner sighed. Each passing minute revealed strange new pains along the crescent of his chest. This one last step. Then it’s over.
For ever.
‘Just make sure you get Aimée away from the fucking Russians,’ he said.
‘You worry about your job, old boy, and I’ll worry about mine,’ Land replied, then hung up.
‘OK,’ Gardner told Golan. ‘You’ll get your safe passage. But first you give us Sotov’s location.’
‘How do I know you won’t backtrack on your promise after finding her?’
‘If Aimée is where you say she is, you’ll be sent home. You have my word.’
Golan chewed on it for several seconds.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘We have a deal.’
The word spiked Gardner’s stomach. The nausea returned.
‘Get a fucking move on,’ he said to Golan.
They made their way down the aisle and out of the church. The sun had packed its bags and pissed off, replaced by a continuous grey curtain that seethed rain. Puddles plopped with raindrops in the pitted streets. Gardner felt the rain on his head, cool and refreshing. He let Golan walk in front as they passed around the side of the church.
The rain washed wet heat into Gardner’s mouth. He tasted salt on his tongue; felt his stomach unstitching again. He’d asked a lot of his body the past seven days. There wasn’t much left in the tank.
He stopped dead in his tracks.
The sky blackened. Steel-grey clouds seemed to oscillate like the vibrations of heavy machinery. Gardner peered into the distance. A fleet of eight UH-60 Black Hawks surfaced on the horizon, their four main rotor blades flickering above the long main profiles of the choppers. They were small as distant birds. The vibrating intensified and the Black Hawks grew and grew until they blocked out the clouds. Two of them hovered over a clearing to the south of the church, a field that had perhaps once belonged to a farm but now stood neglected. The wild grass and weeds parted like waves, shimmering as the two helicopters began their descent.
The choppers set down. Soldiers immediately debussed from both Black Hawks. Six men raced over to Golan and dragged him to the chopper to the right. Last I’ll ever see of that cunt, thought Gardner.
Two men approached Gardner from the other Black Hawk. The nearest man offered his hand. A face Gardner didn’t recognize, but the cold stare and grizzled expression told Gardner that he had yomped up the Pen-y-Fan mountain more than once in his life.
‘Let’s go,’ the man said. He had a Brummie accent thick as old boots, bulbous nose, brown eyes and ears that were doing a good impression of cauliflower buds. Gardner approached the Black Hawk with the two men, climbed inside and strapped himself into a seat. The second guy sat opposite him. Gardner studied him. He was scraggy, with a curly black beard that covered his jaw like webbing. His face had the hard lines and gritty texture of a man who lived his life in hard terrain. His muscles were toned rather than large. Gardner noted the CAR-15 Colt Commando assault rifle between his legs, the Benelli shotgun and spare 5.56x45mm NATO ammo clips on the spare passenger seat.
‘Name’s Weston,’ said the Brummie as the Black Hawk lifted off. It was a bumpy ride and Gardner felt his guts lurch. ‘This is Dooley,’ the pilot said, nodding at the bearded guy.
‘Gardner. You lads are Regiment?’
‘Twenty-three SAS, G Squadron,’ replied Dooley. The whirr of the rotor blades, like rolling thunder, meant he had to shout to be heard. ‘I’m told you used to be a Blade?’
‘Discharged two years ago.’
Dooley glanced at the nub where Gardner’s fake hand used to be.
‘Fucking hard luck, mate,’ he said in a Cockney accent. He grinned, revealing the worst teeth in Britain. A lot of Regiment lads sported awful gnashers, a result of months spent in the field with only basic hygiene. ‘But you’re back on the frontline now.’
Gardner’s heart pulsed. He felt the tension winding up in his spine as his body overdosed on adrenalin.
‘You picked a bad day for it.’
Too fucking right. Gardner kept the thought to himself.
They flew on to Istanbul.
19
1930 hours.
The Bosporus Bridge lit up like a glowstick across the sea. On the European side, glass-fronted towers clustered together in the Levent financial quarter. Sleek, shiny wet pebbles that looked down on the other side of the bridge. The Asian side was a tapestry of shabby mosques, slum dwellings and rickety roads.
The size of the city left Gardner breathless. It seemed to unfold into the horizon.
No time to enjoy the view. He ran his right hand over the newly attached prosthetic limb attached to his left arm. An on-board medic had patched up Gardner’s wounds and fitted him with a temporary limb, but it lacked the nerve-sensors and control of his old hand. Nothing more than a fancy-looking club.
At a cruising speed of 150 knots, equivalent to 173 mph, the Black Hawk had taken a little over two and a half hours to clear the 650 kilometres to Istanbul, flying at an altitude of 8,000 metres.
Seven thirty-four and Gardner was first to rappel down from the Black Hawk, using a Marlow rope connected to a figure-eight descender to slow his fall. He couldn’t fast-rope, not while he was essentially one-handed – he’d slam into the ground at speed and fuck his legs up.
His stomach muscles cramped on the drop. Twenty-four hours ago his V-neck shirt had been pristine white. Now it was grubby, black and brown-red. It chafed against his chest.
He dropped on to Camlica Hill, the highest point in Istanbul. Touched down on a clipped grass plain criss-crossed with several walking paths and hemmed in by pine forests and beds of tulips. A smattering of tea gardens and restaurants stood empty, cleared by the army to provide a suitable LZ. The hill stood some 250 metres above sea level and afforded Gardner an excellent view of the Bosporus Bridge in the distance.
Dooley and Weston were next to touch down. The Black Hawk scuttled away into the skyline. A man approached Gardner. From his Turkish military colours, Gardner placed him as an NCO. Narrow black eyes, pallid lips and bronzed skin. Gardner couldn’t make up his mind which bits of him hailed from the Mediterranean and which had fallen off Genghis Khan’s family tree.
‘Colonel Deniz Sahin, Ozel Jandarma Komando,’ said the Colonel, referring to the elite Turkish Special Forces unit. He didn’t offer his hand. ‘You’re the Brits who are going to stop the bomb?’
‘Something like that,’ Gardner replied. He got the impression that Colonel Sahin wasn’t exactly thrilled about a bunch of foreigners coming to save the day.
‘Do your fucking job, Englishmen. Then get out of my country.’
Sahin waved Gardner, Dooley and Weston towards a waiting army Jeep.
‘Get in,’ Sahin said. ‘The convoy is almost at the bridge. My men have set up an ambush. We will take care of the Iranians. When we have finished annihilating the enemy, we’ll give you a signal to come forward and disarm the bomb.’ Sahin glared at all three men. ‘You are not to take part in the engagement unless I give permission.’
‘We understand,’ Weston said. Fair play, Gardner thought. This was Sahin’s turf. He’d feel exactly the same if a bunch of Turkish operators rocked up in London in the middle of a crisis.
Weston and Dooley sat in the back of the Jeep. Gardner rode shotgun alongside Sahin. They raced out of Camlica Hill and skidded through the chaotic traffic linking the sideroads to the four-lane O-1 motorway, which ran across the bridge and continued on the Asian side of the city.
> The Jeep shuddered as Sahin cut up a motorbike. The Bosporus Bridge loomed, its huge zigzagging steel cables spanning the river. A bottleneck of traffic had formed on the bridge, and any other day and Gardner would have stopped to admire the stylish towers brightly lit in shades of purple, green and red at intervals along its fifteen-hundred-metre length.
‘We’ve shut down the toll-booth computers,’ Sahin explained. ‘To stop anyone getting through.’
Gardner spotted the van, in the outside lane, a hundred metres from the bridge itself. Identical silver Toyota Hiluxes were positioned to its immediate front and rear. It was the convoy from Drobny.
‘Our assault team is ready,’ Sahin said.
No more needed to be said. Hard men getting ready to do a hard job. They didn’t have time for fucking dinner-party conversation.
A clock on the Jeep dashboard read 19.45. A little further on and Sahin slammed on the brakes, stopping the Jeep fifty metres from the convoy. Traffic, clogged thicker than a smoker’s arteries, prevented them from getting any closer.
‘Wait for the signal,’ Sahin said.
Gardner snatched at his breath. His right hand was shaking.
Seven forty-eight.
A shot cracked. A tyre burst.
‘That’s it!’
At the signal, Sahin flew out of the car, M16 assault rifle in his hands. Up ahead the doors on a lorry sixty metres ahead of the furthest Toyota Hilux swung open and dozens of Turkish soldiers and attack dogs poured out. More sprang out from nearby cars and vans. Must have been a hundred in total. Enough firepower to start a fucking war, Gardner was thinking as he looked on.
Sahin was twenty-five metres from the convoy when the shooter in the first Hilux returned fire. The NCO hit the ground, bullets cracking the tarmac around him. More shots rang out. Electric ca-racks of sniper fire filled the air. Gardner counted sixteen Turkish snipers based on the rooftops of the flanking apartment blocks. They rained down rounds, their bullets streaking the Hilux. A soldier on a loudspeaker ordered civilians to remain in their cars, but most didn’t listen and legged it. Amateur mistake, Gardner thought. They should have sealed off the road a couple of kilometres in either direction, made sure no innocents got zapped in the crossfire.
Another ca-rack and this one hit the jackpot. The shooter gasped as a round put a hole through his throat the size of a two-pence coin.
Meanwhile two figures emerged from the rear Hilux. Thirty Turkish soldiers beat a path towards them. They worked in a fire-and-move formation in pairs, one man putting rounds down while the other shifted forward. Faced with a continuous stream of bullets, the two men who’d debussed from the Hilux didn’t stand a fucking chance. The Turks slotted them both at close range, fifteen metres. The second guy took so many rounds in his guts that his legs were severed from his torso.
Mahmoud Reza was the last to emerge, from the van between the Hiluxes. He looked more emaciated than ever, and his thick beard glistened with the blood of his fallen comrades. Clutching an Uzi, he sprayed rounds at the soldiers in a wild arc, forcing them to take cover behind the rear Hilux. Stray rounds struck a middle-aged woman in a white suit as she fled from her Ford Focus. The poor woman didn’t make a sound. Just crumbled in the middle of the road. Her right leg trembled. Then it stopped.
Reza made a run for it, heading for the bridge. Sahin lined up the retreating Iranian from a distance of fifty metres and unloaded four rounds into his back. Reza dropped. The Komando containment team, thirty men decked out in fireproof riot gear, surrounded Reza. Ten or more attack dogs snarled on their leashes.
Sahin motioned to Gardner and his mates to hurry up.
Climbing out of the Jeep, Gardner moved towards the van. Spent cartridges littered the road twenty-five metres from both the front and rear Hilux. The windows were starred, the rubber on the tyres peeled off the rims. He saw two dead guys at the back of the rear vehicle. Their heads were obliterated, brain matter speckled along the greasy tarmac in a starburst pattern.
‘Good fucking work,’ he said, impressed.
‘They got what they deserved,’ Sahin said coldly.
Gardner glanced over Sahin’s shoulder and saw the attack dogs hungrily biting off flaps of flesh from Reza’s corpse.
Turning back to Sahin, he said, ‘I thought you were best friends with the Iranians these days?’
Sahin shook his head, tucked his thumbs between his utility belt and his army-issue combats. ‘We don’t trust anybody.’
Gardner eyed the van. Swore he could hear the faint tick-tock of a timer device. His muscles were sapped of energy. He bit his bottom lip, drier than a fig leaf, and tried to shut out the background noise.
‘Got the hazmat suit?’ he asked Weston.
Dooley sprinted to the Jeep. Returned with a Level A reflective suit. He helped ease Gardner into it, then slipped the glove over his right hand. Popped an earpiece into his right ear and put the helmet over his head.
‘Toolbox?’ Gardner’s breath steamed on the helmet visor.
Dooley handed him a metal box. Gardner gripped its handle.
‘Good luck,’ Dooley said.
Gardner turned and took the long walk towards the van. The suit constricted his movements and after forty metres he’d worked up a sweat that poured down his forehead and on to his eyelids. The heat and discomfort seemed to reflect the grinding in his skull.
You’ve got one shot at this, he told himself. Get it wrong, Istanbul gets vapourized.
He tried not to think about what would happen if the nuke detonated. The first explosion was the conventional one. That would fry him, turn him to dust. The explosion would in turn activate a neutron trigger, a small disc of highly radioactive material that would cause widespread damage with a death toll of anything between thirty and fifty thousand. And that wouldn’t be the end of it. A nuclear cloud would drift across the fallout zone, endangering hundreds of thousands of people with exposure to massively high doses of radiation poisoning.
Gardner stopped at the van. He looked towards the Bosporus, dark and slick as a whale’s back. Might be the last thing you ever see, he thought.
Static crackled in his right ear.
‘Joe, can you hear me?’ Land said.
‘Loud and clear.’
‘This is a three-way line with Lieutenant Steve White. Steve’s an engineer on the Trident submarine the HSM Vigilant. He’s going to talk you through the disarming process.’
‘Don’t worry about a thing, mate,’ White said in an accent so Welsh you could bottle it and sell it as Taff Valley water. ‘This is a bloody tough gig, but Leo here tells me you’ve got demolitions experience, so you’ve got the basic skill set in place. It’s just a matter of guiding you through the interesting bit.’
‘I’ll be fine, mate. Let’s get this over with and then we can share a pint in Hereford. First round’s on me.’
The doors of the van were open. Gardner placed the toolbox just inside on its floor. He prised it open and removed a torch. The van lit up like a cave. Placing his right hand on the floor, he slid up into the van.
Inside, the heat rose again. Gardner felt his clothes clinging to his legs and torso. He was soaked through.
Once again an image of the radio station flashed across the surface of his mind. The way the building toppled, the smoke plume billowing into the bright blue sky, a dozen small fires breaking out among the mountain of concrete and steel, slab and cable. All that death, all of it unseen in the fury of the explosion. He thought about how the nuke would be like that – except a million times bigger.
‘Can you see the top of the device?’ White asked him.
‘Looking at it now.’
‘What’s the timer say?’
Gardner angled his head. The LCD display was a blur through the steam and sweat. ‘Zero-zero-three.’ Three fucking minutes.
‘OKaaay,’ said White. He sounded like he was talking more to himself than Gardner. ‘This type of nuke should be battery-operated. You should see a
red or black cable connecting the timer to the battery attached to the side of the actual nuke.’
‘I see it,’ Gardner said. ‘It’s a red wire.’ The glossy wire was a quarter of an inch thick and ran from the timer to the canvas box strapped to the back of the nuke.
‘I’m going to need you to cut that wire.’
Gardner fumbled inside the toolbox for the wire cutters. He secured the wire between its teeth.
‘But…’ – White’s voice was rushed, unsteady – ‘before you cut it. These types of nuke aren’t highly evolved, but the Soviets liked to booby-trap their devices.’
Fuck! Gardner thought. He held the cutters in place, his hand a second away from plunging Istanbul into a nuclear holocaust.
‘I want you to look down the back of the device,’ White said.
‘What am I looking for?’
‘Something beneath the battery. It will have been concealed from view.’
Gardner ran his eyes up and down the battery. He was feeling dizzy. The heat, the exhaustion, the dehydration – a perfect physiological storm. Spittle collected at the corners of his mouth. He thought about that cold pint in Hereford.
He found a small black box taped to the underside of the battery. Gardner described it to White, who said, ‘Here’s what you’ve got to do – what’s the timer read, Joe?’
‘One minute.’
‘Plenty, plenty of time.’ White’s voice sounded artificially calm. ‘You need to cut the booby-trap.’
Gardner paused with the wire cutters. He didn’t want any more nasty surprises from White. ‘And then?’
‘Once the trap is cut, it will automatically short-circuit the timer. There’s nothing you can do to prevent that. Soon as you cut the booby-trap, you’ll have about three seconds to cut the red wire.’
’What do you mean, “about three seconds”?’
‘Well, it depends how efficiently the lads have wired the trap.’
Thirty seconds.
