Rattlesnake

by Andy Maslen

  “Bingo!” she murmured. “Just call me Goldilocks.” Then, for the mic, “Subject appears to have been shot with a 9mm round. Lack of gross deformation of the sternum indicates round was a full metal jacket.”

  4

  Promises

  TERRI-Ann Calder packed her books and her students’ assignments into her tote bag and left school for the week. She loved her job at the University of Texas at San Antonio almost as much as her husband. “More!” she’d joke with him, if he was tardy taking the trash out.

  Outside, on her way to the staff parking lot, one of her students called out to her.

  “Hey, Mrs Calder? You gonna be supporting us tomorrow? We’re playing Texas State.”

  She smiled and called back to the student, a tall black kid with his hair cut short, bulked up under his bright orange UTSA basketball jersey.

  “You bet! I’ll bring my husband too. He’s back tonight. We’ll make a day of it.”

  “You promise?”

  She laughed.

  “I promise! Go Roadrunners!”

  Still smiling, she climbed into her car, a three-year-old VW Jetta, white to deflect the sun’s heat, switched on the ignition, cranked up the air and hit play on the stereo. With George Strait singing “I Cross My Heart,” she pulled out onto the road and headed for home. Vincent had been away for a week, and she was looking forward to snuggling up with him on the sofa with a bottle of wine and a movie. Then a long, delicious night in bed with the man she’d married at seventeen and still loved like a giddy schoolgirl.

  After changing into a simple white cotton dress that showed off her figure, she laid the table for two. She placed tall, red candles in the sterling silver candlesticks her mother and father had given them as a wedding present. In the kitchen, she tied on an apron and tended to the meal she was cooking: rack of lamb, new potatoes and French beans.

  At ten to seven, she opened a bottle of Californian merlot, poured herself a glass and lit the candles.

  At half-past seven, she called Vincent’s cell phone. It went straight to voicemail.

  “Hey, honey. Everything OK? I’ve got dinner waiting for you, and I picked up something special for dessert. From Victoria’s Secret.”

  Vincent’s plane would have gotten in at three thirty that afternoon. She went online and checked the airline’s site. Then the airport. The plane had landed on schedule.

  A little flicker of anxiety ignited in the pit of her stomach then escaped to race around her bloodstream. She took a swig of the merlot and called Vincent’s secretary on her cell.

  “Hey, Kristin. It’s Terri-Ann. Did Vincent make his flight OK?”

  “Oh, hi, Terri-Ann. I guess so. He didn’t come in to work this morning, but I just assumed he finished up with Clark yesterday and then went straight from his hotel to the airport. Why? He’s not home yet?”

  “No. I’m kinda worried. The flight landed fine, but he’s not here.”

  “Look, honey, he probably stopped off on the way home to buy you flowers or a gift or something. You know what he’s like. Such a romantic.” She sighed. “I should be so lucky.”

  “OK, thanks, Kristin. I gotta go.”

  At eleven, Terri-Ann called the San Antonio Police Department. The officer who answered the phone told Terri-Ann not to worry and to call again in the morning if her husband hadn’t appeared by then.

  The weekend passed in a fever of worry. Terri-Ann called her father, a retired two-star general in the US Fifth Army, and they spent the two days together at her house, praying, calling the SAPD and everyone they could think of, and drinking. He returned home on Sunday evening, leaving Terri-Ann to try and get some sleep before the week ahead. Vincent hadn’t returned by the morning, so she called the English department’s secretaries and explained she wouldn’t be coming in that day. She was reaching for the phone to call the SAPD again when it rang, making her jump. She answered it and found herself speaking to a woman who identified herself as Detective Casamayor. The detective asked her to come in to Police Headquarters.

  “Is it about Vinnie? About Vincent?” Terri-Ann asked.

  “It would be better if you could come in, Mrs Calder.”

  Terri-Ann arrived at Police Headquarters at ten. She presented herself at the reception desk and asked for Detective Casamayor.

  Five minutes later, a tall woman with pale-coffee-coloured skin and a heart-shaped face approached Terri-Ann’s chair. She bent down and spoke in a quiet voice.

  “Mrs Calder?”

  “Yes,” Terri-Ann said. “Are you Detective Casamayor?”

  “I am. Please call me Val, though. It’s short for Valentina.”

  Terri-Ann’s heart fluttered in her ribcage. Why was this police officer being so friendly? Somehow, maybe it was a wife’s intuition, she knew Vincent was dead.

  “Val, has something happened to Vincent?”

  Val put a hand on Terri-Ann’s shoulder.

  “Why don’t you come with me? We just need to pass through Security.”

  Sitting opposite each other in a room furnished with a pale-blue sofa and two matching armchairs, the two women stared at each other. Terri-Ann’s face was taut, pale. Val’s was softer, but creased with worry lines.

  “Mrs Calder, I’m afraid I have bad news. On Friday, a Texas State Trooper out of Midland found a body in the Chihuahuan Desert. We got the preliminary DNA results back a half hour ago. They were a match to the information held in your husband’s service record. I am so sorry for your loss.”

  Terri-Ann heard the detective’s voice echoing around inside her head.

  “That was too quick. For DNA results. You guys never have enough money for rush jobs, everybody knows that.”

  “Normally, that’s right. But they found a tattoo. The Marine Corps badge and a service number. So they contacted the Corps. After that, they fast-tracked the DNA test. The Corps came back with your husband’s service number, and it all matched. I’m really sorry.”

  After the funeral guests had all left, Terri-Ann poured herself another glass of wine and slumped in Vincent’s battered old La-Z-Boy. Now the tears did come. As she cried, and drank, she thought of a man she hadn’t spoken to for five years. A British guy Vincent had brought home for dinner one time on leave, and a barbecue later that same week. She knew his name. She knew he was Special Forces, like Vinnie. And she knew that he and her husband had taken a blood oath to investigate if either of them should die anywhere except in bed.

  She pulled out her cell phone and sent a text.

  5

  Return to Active Duty

  HONG KONG

  GABRIEL Wolfe completed his early morning meditation. It was six thirty. His focus returned to an external reality from an internal landscape in which thoughts were observed but allowed to pass like boats scudding across the water of Victoria Harbour. He had been kneeling, sitting back on his heels with his toes bent, for half an hour. The pain had long since subsided and now, as he leant forwards to rest his forehead on the soft moss of the lawn, blood, and feeling, rushed back into the compressed tissues of his toes. With a soft, extended sigh, he allowed the surge of sensation to wash through his body, making no other sounds.

  He picked up his phone, whose alarm had just ended his meditation, swiped the screen and read the text again.

  Vinnie’s gone. Remember your promise? T.

  Vinnie was Vincent Calder. A Delta Force soldier Gabriel had got to know on a joint operation between British and American forces. The two men had bonded over a shared love of cars. Late sixties muscle in Vinnie’s case, Italian supercars in Gabriel’s.

  Vinnie had invited Gabriel to spend a few days with him and his wife Terri-Ann at their place in China Grove, San Antonio, in Texas. During a drunken dinner, Gabriel and Vinnie had made a pact that, if either man died anywhere other than his own bed, the survivor would investigate. If it was on an operation, military records would confirm what happened and that would be the end of that. If something happened in civvy street, wel
l, that would be another story. They’d sealed the deal by cutting the balls of their right thumbs with the razor-sharp edge of Vinnie’s tactical knife and mixing their blood in a death squeeze, staring into each other’s eyes until they broke apart laughing and reaching for beers.

  Gabriel showered and dressed in a white shirt and navy linen suit, slipping his feet into tobacco-brown boat shoes. Scragging his fingers through his short, black hair, he walked into the kitchen and boiled water for coffee. While he waited for the kettle to whistle, he wandered back out into the garden and looked down the hillside at the harbour.

  He’d been living in Hong Kong for a year. In the house of his former mentor, surrogate father and, he had realised belatedly, best friend, Zhao Xi. Dead at the hand of Sasha Beck, an assassin sent to kill him by an old enemy of Gabriel’s. Gabriel had inherited Zhao’s house and property, including a valuable collection of jade.

  The June sky was overcast, and the grey clouds matched Gabriel’s mood. Another friend lost. Another death. But at least this one couldn’t be laid at Gabriel’s door. A year earlier, he’d watched helplessly as Beck had systematically murdered the people closest to him. Gabriel had felt then that he was death incarnate, a danger to anyone and anything who got too close to him. He’d tracked down and killed Beck and her client, but in the aftermath, his fiancée, Swedish Special Forces agent Britta Falskog, had announced she was returning to Sweden and a new job in counter terror, breaking off the engagement.

  Yet, despite the feeling of loss, something speared through the leaden clouds of Gabriel’s mind. A sharp-edged sunbeam that said, “lock and load.” The life of an independently wealthy expat, practising martial arts and studying Chinese art and culture, had begun to pall, and the prospect of helping Vinnie’s widow find the truth about her husband’s death had ignited something in Gabriel that had been missing for too long. A sense of purpose. A mission. Duty.

  He checked his watch. Furrowing his brow, he calculated the time difference.

  “OK, San Antonio is about thirteen hours behind us,” he said to a sparrow that had landed on a stone bird bath in a corner of the lawn. “So if it’s 7.30 a.m. here, it’s 6.30 p.m. there.”

  He called Terri-Ann.

  Gabriel listened to the clicks, hisses and spectral silences as cell towers, fibre optics and copper cables routed the call.

  “Hello?” A woman’s voice. Suspicious. Rightly so: no caller ID.

  “Terri-Ann?”

  “Yes. Who is this, please?”

  “It’s Gabriel. I got your text.”

  He heard Terri-Ann sigh, a deep shuddering sound that spoke eloquently of her grief.

  “Oh, thank God, Gabriel. Where are you? Can you come?”

  “Of course I can. I’m in Hong Kong, so I need to sort out flights. I’ll be with you in a couple of days. What happened?”

  She laughed, a cracked, mirthless sound that raised the hairs on his arms despite the June heat.

  “What happened? Well, that’s a good question. I’ve spoken to a detective. She said it looks like Vinnie was dropped into the desert.”

  Gabriel frowned.

  “Sorry to ask, Terri-Ann, but do you mean he was dumped? From a car? Or what?”

  “Oh, definitely what?” she answered in a tone dripping in bitter sarcasm. “They said, judging from the damage to his bones, he was dropped from the air.”

  Gabriel had a sudden vivid flashback. A conversation with a CIA agent who’d gleefully recalled throwing Al Qaeda operatives out of helicopters in Afghanistan once they’d given up whatever intelligence they had. He shook his head to dispel the image.

  “Are you still in China Grove?” he asked.

  “No. We moved to Helotes a few years back, when—”

  The line dropped as she spoke and Gabriel interrupted.

  “Say again? Hello-what?”

  “It’s spelled H-E-L-O-T-E-S, but you pronounce it heh-LO-tess, or you do unless you want the locals to make fun of you. I’ll text you our address. Come soon, Gabriel. And thank you. Text me your flight details and when you land, I’ll pick you up.”

  They ended the call, and Gabriel went inside to find a flight. A patriot, he settled on a British Airways route with two connections – at London Heathrow and Dallas/Fort Worth. He called the airline’s local office and booked a seat for the following day, a Friday, departing at 6.55 a.m. Thanks to the international dateline, he’d touch down in San Antonio at 8.00 p.m. the same day. He texted the flight details to Terri-Ann.

  Since arriving a year earlier, he hadn’t left the former colony. Zhao Xi’s house had felt comfortable from the moment he’d taken possession, despite the memory of his mentor’s death in his own dojo. Perhaps it was because Gabriel had spent so much of his childhood here. In the bedroom, he leaned on the window sill and looked through the open window at the view down to Victoria Harbour. The waves reflected bright splinters of sunlight as pleasure boats and commercial vessels plied their way across the blue-green water. He sighed, knowing the tranquillity he had found here was to be fleeting after all. Yet deep in his gut thrummed that pull towards action that animates many fighting men. He felt it as a physical sensation that called to him through every nerve in his body. He turned from the window and lifted a couple of suitcases down from the wardrobe.

  He had no idea how long he’d be gone, nor the kind of work he’d be involved in. Texas in June? He guessed it would be hot. He remembered the sweltering August barbecue at Vinnie and Terri-Ann’s place where the guests had drunk the couple’s refrigerator dry, and Gabriel and another ex-Marine buddy of Vinnie’s had walked half a mile to a liquor store to buy more. In went two lightweight suits, one navy-blue linen, one a silver-grey, two-piece in cool wool. Dress shirts and ties followed. Casual stuff next, plus running gear.

  He pulled out a small steel trunk from under the wood-framed bed and popped the catches. Inside, laid out on a folded sheet of grey canvas, were a SIG Sauer P226 semi-automatic pistol, a flick knife, a knuckleduster and a box of 9mm ammunition. He caressed the SIG’s barrel. Ideally, he’d have wanted it with him, but the practicalities of getting it through customs made that an impossibility. He could always call in a favour from Don Webster, his boss at a British Government security agency called The Department, but he didn’t want to speak to Don, fearing he’d be dragged back into government work. A recent mission had ended with Gabriel’s killing an innocent man – a Zimbabwean politician – on the orders of the PM, and he had no desire to repeat the mistake. But then he remembered where he was going: Texas. He smiled and spoke aloud.

  “Surely there’ll be some kind soul who’ll sell me a gun.”

  With his bags packed, he went downstairs and poured himself a drink. He’d become fond of Japanese whisky since tasting it for the first time in his lawyer’s office, and had amassed a small collection of his own. He uncapped a bottle of Suntory Kakubin White Label and poured a generous measure into a plain glass tumbler.

  He took the glass into the garden and sat back in a teak steamer chair, taking a pull on the smoky spirit and leaning his head on a cotton-covered cushion. The whisky was warming rather than fiery, and as it worked its way down his throat and into his stomach, he closed his eyes and let his thoughts drift back to the first time he’d met Vincent “Vinnie” Calder.

  6

  Beirut Beach Party

  BEIRUT, FEBRUARY 2001

  COLONEL Steve Proudfoot was addressing his team: twenty men from the British Army’s 1 Para Battle Group; a sixteen-man troop from F Sabre Squadron of 22 SAS; and, on loan from the US Joint Special Operations Command, six Delta Force operators. Altogether, forty-two battle-hardened soldiers. Proudfoot was a veteran of the first Gulf War, among other conflicts. His steel-grey hair was cropped tight to his skull, emphasising his sharp cheekbones and dramatic, ice-blue eyes.

  The location was a beach resort in Beirut. Hezbollah fighters had driven a pair of Toyota 4x4s into the lobby of the hotel, jumped out and started shooting, killing everyone
on the ground floor before seizing hostages and barricading themselves into a suite on the seventeenth floor. They’d begun issuing demands almost immediately, of which the main one was the release of thirty men detained by Israeli Defense Force fighters in a raid on a compound on Israel’s border with Lebanon. To show they were serious, they had murdered three American tourists and thrown their mutilated bodies off the roof. Other atrocities had followed.

  “The hotel has been isolated. No traffic in or out, vehicular or pedestrian. We’ve cut the telecoms and all TV and radio feeds. No internet, no satellite phones, nothing. The whole place is dark. Thanks to our colleagues in US military intelligence, we have eyes on the terrorists – infrared imaging of the entire group. And,” this time the head inclined towards the scruffy-looking SAS fighters, “thanks to the boys from Hereford, audio too.”

  A hand went up. A young captain in the Parachute Regiment.

  “Yes, Captain Wolfe.”

  “How many enemy fighters, sir?”

  “Ten.”

  “Any kids?”

  “No, thank God. Adult males, the lot of them.”

  Another hand. One of the SAS men.

  “Yes, Trooper Cheaney, isn’t it?”

  “Yes sir. What’s the deal with prisoners?”

  “The hostages, you mean?”

  “No, sir. I mean, are we supposed to be taking the terrorists alive?”

  Proudfoot paused before answering. He swept his eyes across the group of soldiers gathered before him.

  “When they stormed the hotel, they raped and tortured five of the female staff. That was before they started in on the guests. You’ve seen the pictures of their bodies after they threw them from the top floor. Four of the remaining hostages are women, and thankfully, so far, they’ve been unmolested. So to answer your question, Trooper Cheaney, no, you are not required to take prisoners. In fact,” he lowered his voice to a measured growl, while still projecting it to the back of the room, “your orders are quite specific on this matter. I want the hostages all alive.” A beat. “And the terrorists all dead.”