by Andy Maslen
Their feet were blown off by the .50 calibre rounds. Screaming, they threw down their weapons.
“Stop shooting! We surrender!” one cried out.
Gabriel reversed out from under the car, noticing as he stood that they’d chosen a Chevy Suburban. Rounding the slab-sided car, he came face-to-face with the men Orton had sent to kill him. They were white-faced with the agony of their smashed lower limbs. Blood was jetting from the shredded arteries and pooling between them.
They were going to die out here. No time for battlefield first aid. Orton would be here soon.
Gabriel shot them both through the head. Quick. Clean. Better than bleeding out.
He opened the tailgate and dragged the bodies inside, then climbed into the driver’s seat.
On his way back to the hangar, he pulled up, stuck the transmission in Park and repeated the process with the other two bodies.
He parked the Suburban beside the hangar, got out and went behind the wall.
“Just one to go,” Terri-Ann said, her face grim.
“You need us to help with Orton?” JJ asked, leaning the Smith & Wesson against the wall.
Gabriel shook his head.
“He’s going to come out just to check they’ve done his dirty work. I know it. His kind like to gloat. Leave him to me. We stick to the plan.”
“You’re the boss.”
A distant roar made all three of them look up, shading their eyes.
The jet passed over the base at about five thousand feet. Then banked to starboard, beginning its approach.
“He’s here,” Terri-Ann said.
59
Fair Exchange is no Robbery
“BACK in position,” Gabriel said. Terri-Ann and JJ returned to the cover of the hangar wall. Gabriel sat with his back to it, the briefcase by his left hip, and waited. On its first high pass over the base, the jet had left an arrow-straight contrail. As it returned on a landing path, the white stroke across the blue sky was already drifting and splitting, gaining a feathery edge. A breeze had picked up, blowing west to east, and a lone tumbleweed skipped and bobbled across the runway.
The roar as the jet came in to land reminded Gabriel of other airfields he’d known: defending, retaking or destroying. He waited for the plane to taxi up to the hangar. It shimmered in the heat haze boiling off the hot concrete, and at times its undercarriage vanished so that it appeared to be hovering.
Gabriel got to his feet as Orton taxied towards him, bringing the plane to a stop twenty-five feet away. With a pneumatic hiss, the Plexiglas cockpit canopy opened and pivoted back on its hinges. Let’s see how you handle the unexpected, Gabriel thought.
Orton was wearing an olive-green flight suit. He climbed out onto the wing and, without a pilot access stand or even a ladder, displayed considerable athletic abilities to drop to the ground without breaking an ankle.
“Where are my men?” Orton asked, looking around.
“They’re dead.”
“My, my. What an advertisement for the SAS you are.”
“Who dares, etcetera. Nice plane, by the way. F-15?”
“Strike Eagle. Now …”
Orton drew a pistol from a pocket in his flight suit. A compact nine by the look of it. Gabriel couldn’t immediately identify it; there was so little that wasn’t covered by Orton’s hand.
“… tell me why I shouldn’t just kill you and take the briefcase.”
Instead of answering, Gabriel held the case out in front of him.
“Take it, then.”
The gesture was a signal.
From her vantage point at the western end of the hangar, Terri-Ann fired a single shot. It kicked up chips of concrete three feet to Orton’s right. JJ, at the eastern end, fired a three-round burst to Orton’s left.
Orton lowered the pistol.
“What a disappointment. You brought reinforcements. Not such an advertisement for the SAS after all.”
Gabriel shrugged.
“We always used to work on a nine-to-one principle. Three-to-one is practically giving it away. I’ll take the gun, please.”
Orton took the pistol by the barrel and handed it over. Gabriel identified it: A Steyr C9-A1. Then Orton pointed at the briefcase by Gabriel’s feet.
“That it?”
“Yes.”
“Mind if I have a look?”
“Where’s my money? Don’t tell me you didn’t bring it. A man like you always has a plan B.”
Orton widened his mouth into a smile. Gabriel saw nothing behind his eyes.
“You can’t blame me for trying to save myself a million dollars. It’s in the cockpit. Is it OK if I go and get it?”
“Go ahead. But be careful. If you pop up with anything except the money, one of my friends will put a bullet in your skull.”
Orton held his hands wide.
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
He turned and strolled back to the jet, hands in his flight suit pockets, whistling, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
Gabriel looked over his shoulder, right then left. Terri-Ann and JJ each gave him a thumbs-up. He turned back to see Orton beckoning him over.
“Little help here,” Orton called.
Gabriel walked back to the hangar, leaned over and retrieved the stepladder he’d unloaded from the Ram earlier. He took it to Orton then jogged back to his original position.
As Gabriel watched, Orton dropped a large, khaki holdall to the ground then dismounted from the wing using the ladder.
Facing Gabriel again, he held out the holdall by its strap.
“It’s all there. You can count it if you want.”
Gabriel took the holdall. He put it down and pulled the heavy brass zipper. Inside, roughly stacked, were bundles of hundred-dollar bills. He rooted through the bundles and pulled one out from halfway down. Running the side of his thumb along the edges of the bills, he riffled through the stack. It was about a third of an inch thick.
“How many per bundle?” he asked.
“A hundred. That’s ten thousand dollars you’re holding in your hand, my friend. There are ninety-nine more in there.”
“There’d better be. You’re an easy man to find, Orton.”
“Ooh, scary threats!” Orton replied, rolling his eyes and waggling his hands in surrender.
“Before I show the evidence, I want to know one thing. Why did you kill Vinnie?”
Orton’s eyes widened.
“Christie lied to you. He was always such a naughty boy. He put the bullet in your friend, not me.”
Gabriel realised this was what had been niggling since Christie gave up his information in the killing field. The gun had been, what had JJ called it? A blue-flag weapon. Issued to the Federal Government. Yes, Christie could have lent it to Orton to kill Vinnie, but that didn’t square with Gabriel’s impression of the man.
“Why?”
“Vinnie got too close to the truth about Project ROSS. He had to go. There were hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, maybe billions. Oh, and by the way, don’t think of coming back for more money after this. You’re complicit now. Blackmailing me puts you in a very dubious position morally, let alone legally.”
“Don’t worry,” Gabriel growled, playing his role to the hilt. “I get my million, you get your evidence and I disappear. Forever. I’ve had my eye on a nice little bar in Thailand for a while now. The young lady who owns it and I have an understanding. The money will seal the deal.”
“On which subject, I think it’s about time I saw what’s inside that case, don’t you?”
“Knock yourself out.”
Gabriel pushed the case towards Orton with the toe of his right boot. It toppled over sideways with a thump. Orton squatted in front of it and popped the catches.
He lifted the lid.
And inside the lining, a three-phase current-supply relay woke up and changed state from dormant to activated.
Orton took a smartphone out from the case and looked up at Gabriel.
&nb
sp; “Security?”
“One-five-one-three-seven.”
Orton tapped in the code, launched the sound player app Gabriel had placed on the first screen and tapped the Play icon. The voices were tinny in the open air, but the words were clear enough. Christie incriminating Orton in Vinnie’s murder and the unbelievably wicked rationale of Project ROSS. Orton pocketed the phone. He lifted a stack of printed papers from the case, each covered in dense paragraphs of curling, wriggling characters.
“They’re all in Khmer. What the fuck am I supposed to deduce from this?”
“How should I know? They’re Marie-Louise Hubert’s records. From day one. Every email, every meeting minute, every payment. I guess she thought Khmer was a good enough code. Get yourself a translator.”
“How do I know you haven’t kept copies?”
“You don’t. And maybe I have, anyway. Like an insurance policy, you know? I get run off the road in Bangkok or knifed outside my bar, all that shit gets released onto the web. If I were you, I’d be more worried about the CIA.”
Orton snorted.
“Huh. They have far more to lose than I do, believe me. They’ll bury this thing so deep, finding the second shooter on the grassy knoll would look like child’s play in comparison. So, are we done here?”
Gabriel smiled and extended his right hand.
“Yes. We’re finished.”
They shook, then Orton toed the lid of the briefcase closed and bent to press the catches home.
And inside the lining, the three-phase switch moved from activated to armed. Current passed through its logic gates and reached the digital timer, which began counting down from three minutes.
Without a backwards look, Orton strode off, swinging the case by his side. Gabriel walked back to the hangar and climbed through the nearest aperture. He looked left and right. Terri-Ann and JJ were still in position, rifles aimed at the F-15. He turned to watch.
Orton was on the F-15’s wing again. He kicked the ladder away. Then he was climbing into the cockpit and Gabriel imagined him stowing the briefcase in the cramped space before settling into his seat and fastening his harness. He watched Orton don his flight helmet then lean forwards. The cockpit canopy descended.
Next the two turbofans spun up. Pinkish-blue cones of flame leapt from the rear of the jets and the plane taxied off towards the end of the runway.
Gabriel checked his watch. Two minutes and ten seconds had elapsed.
With a roar from the jets as Orton opened the throttles, the F-15 moved away, gathering speed.
Thirty seconds after that, the nose lifted and with a scream, the plane took off. Orton took it into an almost vertical climb.
The sun glinted off the F-15’s silver paint. They’d originally been supplied to the US Air Force in grey. Gabriel assumed Orton had arranged to have it resprayed the way rich men change the colour of their cars.
Orton levelled out and banked to the east. He was singing again.
“Somewhere, over the rainbow, skies are—”
He stopped. He’d just handed over a million dollars in exchange for a cheap attaché case filled with paper covered with Khmer text and a burner with a copy of a recording. To an ex-SAS operator. Whose friend he, Clark Orton, had murdered. What kind of a deal was that?
He looked down at the case, which was jammed against his left thigh. He thought back to an Iraqi businessman whose Bentley had exploded on an empty stretch of highway outside Baghdad. He’d used a briefcase bomb that day. Money on show and a frame packed with C-4.
“Shit!”
He reached down and to his right and yanked the yellow firing handle for the ejection seat.
60
Life Goes On
SQUINTING, Gabriel watched as Orton levelled out and banked to the east. The jet became merely a silver point in the sky.
He checked his watch.
Two minutes and fifty-five seconds.
Gabriel counted down.
“Five, four, three, say goodnight, Gracie.”
Inside the briefcase, the timer’s digits hit zero just as Orton’s fingers closed around the ejection seat’s handle.
The current passed through the final gate and into the electric matches.
And the plastic explosive detonated instantaneously.
The briefcase, the jet itself and its murderous pilot disappeared in a starburst of exploding plastique and aviation fuel.
Gabriel watched and listened as the roaring orange fireball competed briefly with the sun before burning out. In its place, it left a white star of smoke trails as the larger pieces of burning debris began their descent.
Beside him, Terri-Ann reached for his hand and squeezed hard. He looked at her and smiled. JJ stood to her left. She was holding his hand, too. Gabriel looked over the top of her head at JJ and nodded, once. JJ nodded back. Mission completed.
Gabriel climbed into the Suburban and drove to the middle of the formation of abandoned B-52s, looking for the C-130 with the ramp down. He drove up into its eerily empty interior and switched off the engine. He opened the rear door before walking back down the ramp and over to the hangar.
Terri-Ann was sitting behind the wheel of the Ram, engine running, air conditioning blowing cold air into the cab. JJ was sitting beside her.
“Hope you don’t mind me calling shotgun,” he said over his shoulder, as Gabriel buckled in to one of the rear seats.
“No problem. You need the legroom more than me.”
JJ laughed and suddenly all three of them were howling. Gabriel’s remark wasn’t really funny, but it triggered the emotional release they all needed.
Back at Terri-Ann’s house, she took three beers from the fridge, opened them and handed one each to JJ and Gabriel. She held hers up and they clinked the necks together.
“Thanks, Gabriel,” she said.
“To Vinnie,” he replied.
“To Vinnie,” she and JJ said in unison.
Later that evening, after more beers, steaks, and wine, Terri-Ann fetched the canvas holdall and put it beside the coffee table. She unzipped it and pulled the sides apart. Without speaking, she took out the bundles of notes and stacked them in a block, ten long by two wide by five high.
“A hundred bundles, each worth ten thousand dollars. That’s a million.”
“What’re you going to do with it, Terri-Ann?” JJ asked.
“Well, I’m not keeping it. It’s blood money and I don’t want it. Vinnie’s life insurance paid out and I have my job, so I don’t need it either. I need to think about it for a while.”
“How about you, Gabriel?” JJ asked. “You going back to Hong Kong?”
Gabriel took a sip of his wine and ran a hand through his hair.
“I’m not sure. I was just killing time out there for a year. I think it’s time I moved on. I think it’s time I went back to work.”
“Yep,” Terri-Ann began, “that ol’ bronco throws you off, you gotta climb straight back into the saddle, else y’all ain’t never gonna git on a horse again.” Her Annie Oakley accent set them all off again, and it was many minutes before the laughter died away and they could carry on reminiscing about Vinnie.
Unlike Vinnie Calder, Clark Orton made landfall in more than one location. The blast reduced him to thousands of pieces, none bigger than a baseball, many smaller than the nine-millimetre round he had fired into Vinnie’s chest. Most simply burnt up in the intense heat of the explosion.
Those flesh and bone fragments which survived the fire rained down to litter the Chihuahuan Desert over a three-mile radius, scattered by the wind across the territories of several mountain lions and at least one pack of coyotes.
Picking up the scent of blood, black and turkey vultures left their thermals to claim their share of the bounty.
As always, the blow flies arrived first.
61
Back in the Saddle
THE time was 9.05 p.m., and Visna Chey had just got back to his office. He booted up the PC and logged in to Tom Bo
h’s current account, expecting to see the usual, perilous four-figure balance.
“That can’t be right,” he said.
He looked away from the screen and rubbed his eyes. Then looked back again. The amount he thought he’d just seen hadn’t changed. The charity now had a balance of one million, two thousand, seven hundred and eighty-five dollars. His heart was racing and he felt cold all over despite the clammy heat of the day. He felt the way he did whenever he had to give a speech to visiting western donors. Nervous, short of breath, as if the earth might open up and swallow him. It made no sense.
As he sat, rigid in his chair, the email program woke up and a bell sounded. You have mail. A single email sat waiting for him in the inbox.
From: Terri-Ann Calder
Subject: Donation
He clicked on the subject line to open the message. As he read, the anxiety faded, and he began to smile.
Dear Mr Chey,
You don’t know me, but you knew my husband, Vinnie.
Vinnie was killed because of what he found out about certain people and organisations in Cambodia.
I recently came into some money that I neither need nor want.
Please spend it on the children you look after.
Vinnie would have liked that.
Your friend,
Terri-Ann Calder
While Visna was reading Terri-Ann’s email, the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had just convened in meeting room SVC-221 in the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, DC. Its chairman, Senator John Charles Donaldson III, motioned their first guest of the morning to sit facing the committee members’ table. Outwardly, Donaldson appeared his usual well-groomed self. The model of a successful businessman-turned-US-senator. Inside, his stomach was jumping. If the email he’d received earlier that morning from the Cambodian journalist was genuine, he was about to hit the headlines. Big time.
