Liberation day

by Andy McNab

  I kept the phone in my bloodstained hand as Goatee stirred again. “Please tell my wife…please call her.”

  I thought about lying to him to make him feel better. Then I thought about Hubba-Hubba’s charred hand reaching through the wrought-iron gate. I turned to face him again in the darkness. “Fuck you.”

  He didn’t reply, just coughed up even more blood than I had and started to breathe very quickly and shallowly. I forced myself up on my ass to relieve some of the chest pain, and felt myself breathing out of rhythm. I cupped my hands over my nose and mouth.

  Another vehicle roared up the hill and I checked traser. It was eight-twenty-seven.

  I slid my way down again, and lay next to Goatee.

  All I could do was wait now, try to control my breathing, and hope that we were going to get picked up before both of us were dead.

  56

  A nother vehicle swept down the hill, but this time slowed as it neared the entrance to the track.

  Whoever it was came to a complete halt, with his engine turning over. I heard the high-pitched whine of the vehicle backing up; then a mixture of red and white light swept across the bank of garbage bags beside us. There was just a second’s silence before the doors swung open. There was something about their echo that made me think van, not car. It must be them. Then the crunch of footsteps headed my way as red light now fought its way past the collapsed chain barrier.

  I didn’t move a muscle. Maybe it was just somebody about to do some late-night garbage dumping. If it was Thackery, he’d know where to find us: I didn’t want to spook him, in case he and his pal were armed. I wanted to get into the back of that van in one piece.

  Goatee stirred, and I leaned over and cupped my hand over his mouth. I realized that I still had the phone in my other, and slipped it into the pocket of my jeans.

  Two silhouettes appeared in front of the gentle red glow, weapons already drawn down, and picked their way through the garbage. The one on the right saw us first. “Shit! We’ve got two!”

  The other one closed in and gave Goatee a kick. I didn’t know whether he was looking for a reaction, or if it was just for the hell of it.

  The hawallada responded with a dull moan and curled up even more. I didn’t want any of that: I didn’t know if my rib cage could take it. I looked up and kept my voice very low. “He’s the one you’re here for. He’s got a gunshot wound to the abdomen.”

  The shadow leaned toward me.

  “I’m the one who delivered him. The man—”

  The punch flattened my nose against my face. My eyes watered, and white stars flashed inside my head. I lay there, just trying to get my breath back, as a hand ran over my body, checking for weapons. The phone was found and confiscated.

  The other did the same to Goatee, then they both picked him up and carried him by his arms and legs to the van, beyond the bushes. I hoped they were going to come back for me, but just in case, I struggled up onto my hands and knees and started to follow.

  My route was paved with rusty cans and broken glass.

  I got to the track as the two shadows reappeared. I held up my hands, taking the pain in my chest. “I’m one of you,” I gasped. “I need to get to the ship.”

  They closed in and I got a very thick New York growl in my left ear. “Shut the fuck up.” Hands gripped me and half-lifted, half-dragged me into the back of the van. The pain was unbearable but I wasn’t complaining. One of the shadows got in with us and the door closed. In the gentle red glow from the rear lights, I could see him ripping apart the Velcro fastenings on a trauma pack. As we started to move, he turned on the interior light and I saw Thackery’s face at last.

  He completely ignored me, concentrating on Goatee in the mix of white and red light from the rear units exposed in the back as we bounced our way back to the road.

  He was wearing much the same gear as he had in Cap 3000. I tugged at his jeans. “It’s me. Cap 3000, remember? The brush contact, the color was blue. It’s me….”

  He ripped open the plastic wrapper of a field dressing with his teeth.

  “Do you recognize me?”

  He nodded. “You okay?” He sounded like one of Dolly Parton’s backup group.

  “Not sure.” I dribbled some blood down the front of my sweatshirt, as if to show him what I meant. We headed steeply downhill and encountered the first of the hairpins.

  Thackery held the dressing in place over Goatee’s gut, and manhandled him over to look for the exit wound. Not finding one, he started to wrap a bandage aggressively around the hawallada’s stomach. “What the fuck’s going on here, my friend? Some buttons got pressed and we were told to do the pickup quick as we could.”

  The driver hit the brakes. Thackery held Goatee in place and I put my hands on the floor of the van to steady myself as we took another sharp right-hander, and I lost some more of the now drying top layer of skin from my palms. “There’s been a fuck-up. I need your help.”

  He continued bandaging, checking Goatee’s tongue wasn’t blocking his airway. “Hey, man, I don’t know what this is about, and I don’t want to know. We know nothing, we just do what we do.”

  More red light bled into the white as the driver hit the brakes for the next hairpin.

  “I need you to go to the port at Vauban.”

  “All we do is pick up and drop off, man. Don’t even have comms with the guys down the hill.”

  “Look, the men who killed the rest of my team—they’ve got the money, they’ve got the boat. We have to stop them, or all this has been for nothing. They don’t know it yet, but the guys down the hill need to know where it is. That’s why I’m here, that’s why you got the fastball for an early pickup. We need your help, there just isn’t time!”

  He finished dressing the injury and stared at me intently.

  I explained about the Ninth of May. “I need to know if it’s still there. If not, bang on other boats, wave our weapons around, shout—do whatever we need to do to find out what’s happened to it.”

  He hesitated, and got back to checking Goatee. “How do I contact you?”

  “You got a cell?”

  He nodded. “In the front.”

  “Keep mine, and I’ll take yours. Find out what’s happening in Vauban, then call your own phone.”

  He nodded and slid back the hatch on the bulkhead. “Hey, Greg, we have a situation here. We have to kick ass in Antibes after the drop-off.”

  I looked through the hatch as we continued downhill. We’d already crossed the main drag, and were heading into Villefranche. People were out and about, restaurants were open, neon was flashing.

  Then, to our left, I saw the warship, still lit up like a Christmas tree in the center of the bay.

  Thackery’s phone was passed back and the hatch closed. He turned it on before handing it to me.

  Greg banged on the bulkhead and Thackery said, “We’re here.”

  The vehicle came to a halt, then moved on another ten or fifteen yards before stopping again. An American voice echoed outside, “Lights.” Thackery opened the rear door and disappeared left as the last of the fluorescent strip lights flickered on along a wall. We were in a stone building with a high terra-cotta roof; I couldn’t see anybody, but there were more American voices around the van as they closed in on Thackery.

  “We got two guys.”

  Thackery didn’t fuck around. “The one in the sweatshirt covered in tar is one of ours. He’s injured. He needs to talk to whoever is in command here. There’s more going down, he’ll explain. The other guy, the pickup, has a gunshot wound to the abdomen. Looking pretty bad. Look, we gotta go, he’ll explain.”

  A radio crackled and a slick East Coast voice started relaying the information to the ship. Three or four people appeared at the back of the van, led by a black woman with Venus Williams hair, and a sheet of paper in her left hand. She was dressed as if she’d stepped straight from a Gap window, apart from the Glock .45 on her right hip.

  “Your name?” She wa
s from the South, too.

  “Nick Scott.”

  “What did you deliver yesterday?”

  “A man, Gumaa…Gumaa something. Guy in a blue suit.”

  “What’s the next authentication color?”

  I didn’t want to fuck this up. I tried to get my brain in gear. Blue was the brush contact, and red was the Nice e-mail.

  “White, it’s white.”

  “Okay.”

  She moved out of the way as Goatee got lifted out by two men in jeans and safari jackets with pockets full of shiny scissors and other medical supplies.

  She reappeared, and I saw that the paper she held was a printout of my Scott passport photograph. “You okay?”

  “You in command?”

  “No. He’s on board. He knows you’re here.”

  One of the safari jackets cut in. “Has he been drugged?”

  I shook my head and looked back at the woman. “I need to get over there.”

  It was pointless talking to her. I didn’t know how far down the food chain she was, and to relay stuff just wastes time—which was something we didn’t have.

  As soon as Goatee had been lowered onto a stretcher, a young guy got a line into his arm and attached to a bag of fluid. Two others tended the gut wound.

  Venus held out her arm to me. “Can you move?”

  I nodded and eased myself down onto the concrete, clutching Thackery’s cell phone to my chest in a vain attempt to ease the pain.

  I could see now that we were in a boathouse. A gray Navy launch with a hard top was waiting at a jetty. The place echoed with low but urgent voices and the sound of feet on concrete as the stretcher was taken on board.

  Venus put her arm around my waist to help me to the launch, but it wasn’t the kind of help I needed. I could almost hear my ribs grating against each other. “It’s okay,” I gasped. “I’ll sort myself out.”

  There was a shout from somewhere behind me. “Lights!”

  We were thrown into darkness as a set of well-oiled shutters was lifted and the van backed out. The shutters came down again and the neon flickered back to life.

  Keeping my back as straight as I could, I hobbled toward the launch. Venus went to lock up and sort things out. No one was remotely concerned about my condition. It was Goatee they were here for.

  I pressed a button on Thackery’s phone to illuminate the display. The signal strength was fives.

  I stumbled aboard like an old man and sat on a hard plastic bench while Goatee got the five-star treatment. He had an oxygen mask on now, and was having more trauma care than a major RTA (road traffic accident).

  We were ready to go. Venus hit the switch again as another set of shutters opened seaward.

  The launch started up, smothering me with diesel fumes, then backing out into the bay as soon as she’d jumped on board.

  As we gathered speed, the line of restaurant lights along the quay receded. I went back to staring at the phone screen, willing the signal to stay strong, and hoping that Thackery and Greg weren’t screaming toward Antibes at warp speed, risking a crash or getting pulled over by the police.

  57

  T he side of the warship loomed high above us. A rectangle of red light glowed at us from the top of a gangway, about six or seven yards above the waterline. At the bottom of it two shadows stood ready to receive the launch. Two black and businesslike RIBs (rigid inflatable boats), each with two huge outboards, bobbed up and down on the swell beside them.

  The launch’s props powered down, and we came slowly alongside. The two guys grabbed our side rails. They were dressed in dry bags and black woolly hats, and had rolled-up life preservers around their necks. Venus got to her feet as they pulled us alongside. “Come with me.” She nodded down at the stretcher. “Where he’s headed, you don’t want to go.”

  I left Goatee to his fate, and made my way up the gangway behind her. I was feeling weak and nauseous, and salt water gave the good news to my hands as I tried to get a grip on the guardrail.

  Wrapping my arms around my chest like a cold child, I stepped into the red glow. There was a gentle hum of radio traffic, and murmured exchanges among the dozen or so bodies crouched in the small, steel-encased holding bay. They were all in dry bags, unzipped to let in some air. Next to each man, a Protect helmet, the sort canoeists wear, rested on top of a black nylon harness, holding magazines for the 10mm version of the Heckler & Koch MP5. All wore leg holsters with .45 Glocks. The red light was to protect their night vision; something was going to happen out there in the dark and, by the look of things, it was going to happen soon.

  One of the bodies stood and spoke quietly to the woman. Her name wasn’t Venus, it was Nisha.

  Then he turned back to the group. “White light, people. White light.”

  Everybody closed their eyes and covered them with their hands as he threw the lock on a bulkhead door and pushed down the handle. White light poured in from the hallway, drowning the red. I followed Nisha; as the door closed, we stood blinking in a hallway lined with some sort of imitation wood veneer. There was complete silence, except for the gentle hum of air-conditioning from the ducts above us. Our rubber soles squeaked on the highly polished linoleum tiles as I followed Nisha along the hallway, expecting a squad of imperial storm troopers to appear at any moment.

  I kept unwrapping an arm, checking the phone. The signal bars suddenly disappeared. “Stop!”

  She spun around. “What’s the problem?”

  “I can’t go any farther.” I started to turn back toward the red room. “I haven’t got a signal. The two guys in the van, they’re heading to Antibes—there’s a boat, we need to know where it is. I need a signal.”

  “You talking Ninth of May?”

  I nodded.

  “We got it. Left Vauban a couple hours ago.”

  “You’re already tracking it?”

  “We’ll hit it just as soon as it crosses the line into international waters.” She turned back the way we were heading. “Come on. Someone is waiting to talk to you.”

  We came to another veneer-covered steel door, with a stainless-steel entry system alongside it. She tapped in a code, there was a gentle buzz, and she pulled it open for me.

  Banks of radar and computer screens glowed at us from three sides of the room. This had to be the ops center. Maybe a dozen people, all dressed in civilian clothes, talked quietly into radios and to each other as they studied the screens.

  The room was small, maybe five yards by five, with wires ducttaped to the floor and wall; this wasn’t a permanent fixture. A large command desk dominated the center of the space. A gray-headed forty-something in a green polo shirt stood by it, poring over charts, mapping, and photography with two more serious-looking heads. All three grasped mugs of steaming brew, and none of them looked up.

  As Nisha and I approached, I could make out satellite images of Vauban and BSM, and then an enlargement of my passport picture.

  Grayhead finally acknowledged our presence. He raised a pale, overworked, acne-scarred face.

  Nisha moved over to one of the computer screens. “You in command?” I asked.

  He gave me the once-over. “You okay?”

  I shrugged.

  He nodded in the direction of Nisha, who was now holding a phone. “I wouldn’t keep him waiting.”

  “Who?”

  He didn’t answer, but I didn’t really need him to. As he turned and told someone to get me a medic, I dragged myself over to Nisha, eased myself down into a padded swivel chair, but couldn’t stop another spasm of coughing. Stuff came up, but there was nowhere to spit it, so I pulled out the neck of my sweatshirt and used the inside. I wiped my mouth on my sleeve before taking the phone. I put the cell phone on the desktop; there were two signal bars on the display.

  “Nick?” It was George. “Where are the—”

  “The collectors? They’re dead. It’s not them on the boat, I reckon it’s—”

  “Stop. I need two things right now. One: where’s the
rest of the team?”

  “Both dead. The police will have the bodies by now….”

  “You sure they’re dead?”

  I took a long, slow, painful breath. “I watched one die, and heard the other.”

  “Good. Were you part of the incident in L’Ariane?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good, we can contain that.” I heard him turn away from the mouthpiece and speak to the people around him. This was a deniable operation: they were making sure every track that could lead to us had been blocked. Lotfi and Hubba-Hubba were no longer assets. They’d been written off George’s balance sheet.

  I could hear murmurs of approval from the voices around George as he finished passing on the great news.

  “Okay. Two: is the device still on board? Our people are going to intercept.”

  “Listen, George, it’s not the collectors on board. I just told you, they’re dead. It’s the source and Ramsay. They got the team and the collectors killed, and they’ve taken the money.”

  “We know, son, we found out yesterday. They won’t get to keep it for long.”

  We found out yesterday? They knew? Why the fuck hadn’t we known?

  “What? We could have done things differently…the other two could still be alive.”

  “I keep telling you, son, I don’t tell even God everything. Now, is the goddamned device still in position? They don’t know it exists yet—they need to know if it’s still there.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “What’s happening? You lifting them?”

  “All we want is the money.”

  “You’re just letting them go? They got our guys killed—”

  “Okay, son, this is how it goes down. It’s over. They go free, we get the money, we get the hawalladas, you get a medic, and a good night’s sleep.”

  “My team is dead, George. You’re letting the fuckers go?”

  He didn’t even pause to draw breath. “I have other plans for those two. Don’t mess up on me now. You have everything to lose, and nothing to back up with.”