Assassin

by Tom Cain

  ‘You don’t get it, do you?’ Tyzack shouted, returning to a point beyond Carver’s reach. His mask of sophisticated, gentlemanly civility had slipped and all the years of suppressed rage and resentment were seeping out like the pus from a septic wound. ‘I’m in charge now. Not you. Me. So you do what I say, right now…

  or I leave you here for the duration, without anything, until you’re too thirsty, too hungry, too bloody knackered to stand it any more and you’d rather be dead. Now do you get it?’

  ‘Kill me,’ said Carver, matter-of-factly. ‘Kill me now.’

  Tyzack smiled. ‘Giving up so soon? Really? What is it, want the easy way out?’

  ‘No. I’m just thinking of your welfare. You’d better kill me now, because if you don’t, I’m going to hunt you down and tear you limb from limb… you worthless, gutless, psychopathic piece of shit.’

  Tyzack let the words sink in, and then he laughed again. ‘Well done, defiant to the end! But how are you going to hunt me down if you’re dead on the end of a rubber rope? How does that work? Do yourself a favour…’ Tyzack had walked round behind the metal table while he was talking and shifted it fractionally towards Carver. ‘… See if you can reach it now.’

  Carver had no choice. His only hope of staying alive long enough to find a way to beat Tyzack was to do as he said. So he got up and stepped gingerly towards the table until he felt the pulling on his neck. Then he stood with one foot in front of the other, the front leg slightly bent at the knee to brace him, took a deep breath, and leaned forward, hands outstretched.

  He pushed his head and shoulders forward till the pressure on his throat was so strong he felt as though his windpipe and larynx would be crushed. He stretched his arms till they were almost pulled from their sockets. He held his breath until his chest felt close to bursting and sparks danced before his eyes. But still his fingertips were nowhere near the top of the water bottle.

  He stepped back and crouched, bent over, hands on his knees, desperately dragging air down into his lungs.

  ‘I don’t think you’re really trying,’ said Tyzack with an exaggerated air of disappointment. ‘I believe you need some encouragement. An incentive, so to speak.’

  He walked away to the wall of the barn. Carver raised his eyes and noticed something else, lying on the floor: a thin, flexible bamboo cane, five or six feet long. Tyzack picked it up. He strode back towards Carver and stood calmly as Carver turned to face him. Then Tyzack lunged his left foot forwards so far that he was almost down on one knee and brought his right arm round in a fast, low, whipping motion.

  The cane lashed into Carver’s legs, just below the knee. He screamed in pain, lost his footing and then the screams were transformed to retching gasps as he fought against the cord and the collar pulling yet again at his unprotected neck.

  Tyzack stood up straight and almost danced round Carver, as agile as a boxer. The next lash of the cane ripped into his lower back, the excruciating agony of a blow to the kidneys made even worse by the knife-tear that it reopened.

  Carver screamed again… and again as a third strike of the cane cut into his shoulders.

  ‘Try again,’ said Tyzack, quite calmly, almost encouragingly. ‘See if you can reach the bottle.’

  Carver tried.

  He pulled and choked and strained every muscle, while Tyzack flayed his back with the cane: once, twice, half a dozen more times.

  Still he could not reach the bottle.

  Finally Tyzack lowered the cane.

  Both men were breathing heavily now, a sheen of sweat glistening on their faces and soaking their shirts.

  ‘I think we’ve established that it’s still not close enough. I’ll make it a little easier for you,’ Tyzack panted.

  He shifted the table forward another few inches. Then he gave a sudden exhalation of breath, as if something had just occurred to him. ‘Who’s a silly boy?’ he said. ‘I almost let you get away with it. Can’t have a cap on the bottle, can we? That way, you’d only have to pull it off the table once, pull it towards you and keep it at your feet. Can’t have the choccies in a box, same reason.’

  He unscrewed the top of the water bottle and threw it away. He also detached the white plastic carrying handle. Finally he emptied the box of Japp bars on to the table.

  ‘Knock the bottle off now, and you’ll be in serious trouble,’ Tyzack observed. He picked up the cane. ‘Now, let’s try again.’

  It took barely ten minutes. But it felt like a lifetime of pain beyond anything Carver had ever known, an eternity of craving as he begged for breath, living on the very edge of unconsciousness, the blood and sweat mingling and stinging as his back became a pulpy intersection of cuts and welts etched and slashed across his skin. He pissed himself at some point, he didn’t know when. But finally the table had been moved to a point where he could – just, if he went beyond the point where his body was telling him it was about to black out, into a new realm of agony – reach the water, and the chocolate bars, and even lift the lid of the chemical toilet.

  ‘You’ll be able to pee,’ said Tyzack, who seemed strangely calmed by his physical exertion, his tensions temporarily released. ‘You won’t be sitting down on it, though, sadly, so it could get a touch Bobby Sands in here, if you catch my drift. Still, I’m glad we got that sorted. Now, why don’t you sit down?’

  Tyzack winced as he saw Carver’s reaction to the contact between his flayed skin and the chair back. ‘Oh, that’s got to hurt,’ he sympathized. ‘Can’t be helped though, eh? So… let’s have a little talk.’

  The sting of Damon Tyzack’s hand slapping against his cheek cut through the fog of pain that was clouding Carver’s mind.

  ‘Wake up,’ Tyzack insisted. ‘We’re going to chat, talk about old times. Ironic, though, isn’t it?’

  ‘Isn’t what?’ Carver mumbled.

  ‘Me dragging you from the water. I mean, the helicopter, the ship – there’s a certain symmetry to it all. The only difference is, I’m in charge now.’

  Carver forced himself to straighten his whipped and bleeding back and look Tyzack in the eye. ‘I never wanted to take you. Didn’t think you were up to it. Trench disagreed. He denied it, but the truth is he’d got a soft spot for you because of your father…’

  ‘I really don’t think we need to talk about him.’

  ‘Maybe, but he was ten times the soldier you’ll ever be.’

  This time, when Tyzack hit Carver, it wasn’t just a slap.

  Carver spat the blood from his mouth. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said. ‘But the fact remains, I didn’t want you. Trench did. Afterwards, of course, he admitted I was right.’

  ‘Oh really, is that so? Well, I tell you what, since you’re so keen to tell your side of the story, why don’t you do that? And then we’ll examine the evidence, compare it with my account, and see who’s telling the truth…’

  56

  Back then he was not yet known as Carver. He was still Paul Jackson, the name given to him by his adoptive parents. His friends and brother officers in the Special Boat Squadron, the waterborne arm of British Special Forces, used his nickname, Pablo. So did Quentin Trench, Carver’s commanding officer.

  ‘Pablo, I want you to take Damon Tyzack along with you as your second-in-command on the Maid of Dumfries job,’ he’d said one evening at SBS headquarters in Poole while they were in the officers’ mess, drinking their after-dinner coffees.

  ‘Are you sure that’s wise?’ Carver replied. ‘He’s never had a job like this before.’

  ‘Well, he’s got to start somewhere. This should be a pretty straightforward operation. Tyzack’s fully trained for it. And you’re just the man to make sure he doesn’t let himself or anyone else down.’

  Carver stuck to his guns. ‘You know how I feel about him. It’s a character issue. I don’t trust him to react the right way under pressure. Don’t think the other men do, either. He’s not well liked.’

  ‘Well then, it’s a good thing this is a military unit, no
t a bloody popularity contest,’ Trench snapped. ‘Your reservations about Second Lieutenant Tyzack’s character were noted during the selection course. But so were the rest of his results, and they were superb. His powers of endurance are remarkable. He’s a first-rate swimmer-canoeist, his marksmanship is outstanding and he breezed through all the technical, tactical and theoretical aspects of the course. Scored rather better than you did when you first got here, as a matter of fact.’

  That was a cheap shot and Trench knew it. ‘Look,’ he continued, trying to smooth things over, ‘I know there are other issues. I served under Tyzack’s father, best commanding officer I’ve ever known. But I’m sure you don’t think I would favour a man just because I knew his dad…’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Good. Take Tyzack. Give him some responsibility. Let’s see how he handles it.’

  Three days later, Carver and Tyzack were both among the six men seated in the cabin of a Westland Sea King helicopter, flying low over the black waters of the Bay of Biscay. The wind was blowing about fourteen or fifteen knots: a good breeze, but no more than that, with the waves no worse than choppy. Rain was falling steadily, just enough for the clouds to obscure a waning crescent moon. Somewhere up ahead was the Maid of Dumfries, a 72-foot trawler, rigged for tuna-fishing. According to the intelligence, passed on to the SBS from the brains at MI6 who had come up with the idea for the operation, there were no fish in her hold. Instead, the Maid of Dumfries carried a far more valuable cargo: an estimated three tons of cocaine, with a street value in the region of forty million pounds.

  ‘ETA, two minutes,’ the pilot announced, and the aircrewman standing by the sliding door in the flank of the chopper yanked it open, letting in a blast of cold, wet air. He signalled Carver to move into position. A heavy hemp rope about two inches thick hung from the roof of the cabin and fell to the floor where it sat in thirty feet of coils. Carver grabbed hold of the rope and held it as he leaned out of the opening and peered forward into the darkness.

  Then he saw it, the stern light of the Maid of Dumfries.

  The trawler was cruising normally, heading north-east at around ten knots. A boat this size could be handled by a crew of three and it didn’t look as if any of them were aware of the Sea King sneaking up behind them, the clattering din of its approach masked by the sound of the ship’s own engine, or blown away on the wind. Well, that was about to change.

  The Maid of Dumfries had its superstructure and bridge in the middle of the boat, with gantries fore and aft for hauling nets aboard, and only a few bare, flat patches on the decks on which Carver and his men could land. But the gantries were relatively low, less than twenty feet high, and the wind was still benign. The helicopter hovered over the stern at forty feet, keeping pace with the trawler, but out of harm’s way. The green light went on above the door. Carver threw the rope out of the opening, watched it hit the deck below, then stepped out into the void.

  He descended the standard SBS way, as fast as possible, using only a pair of heavy leather gloves as brakes. As soon as his feet hit the deck, he moved forward, away from the rope, knowing that Tyzack was only seconds behind him.

  Even while he was still on the rope, Carver had seen the doors opening on the ship down below: one at the rear of the bridge, above a set of metal steps that led down to the deck; a second at deck level, on the far side of the yellow-painted superstructure. Carver was targeting the bridge.

  As he moved forward towards it, a man emerged at the top of the steps, carrying a gun. He looked towards Carver and the men descending like black-clad wraiths from the helicopter that now loomed over half the length of the boat.

  Carver tried to shout over the noise of the engines, the rotors and the wind, ‘Put down your weapon, now!’ But before the words were out of his mouth, the man – acting out of courage, desperation or sheer blind panic – had started firing, his shots spraying randomly as he tried to keep his balance while his ship moved beneath him.

  Carver did not hesitate. The moment his hands had let go the rope, he had torn off his gloves and reached for the Heckler and Koch MP5 strapped across his chest. A flashlight was attached to the barrel of the gun. Now Carver swung it to his shoulder, let the light pick out his target and fired a three-round burst that hit the drug-runner full in the chest, sending him back a couple of staggered paces before the boat pitched up into an oncoming wave, and sent him falling down the stairs.

  His body came to a halt just above the deck, held by a boot that had caught in one of the steps. The dead man’s forehead was bumping into the bottom step with every movement of the Maid of Dumfries. For some reason that steady, repetitive impact seemed more disturbing to Carver than the three gaping exit wounds his bullets had ripped from the corpse’s back.

  Carver forced his concentration back to the matter in hand.

  To his left, on the far side of the deck, he saw Tyzack raise his own MP5 and fire. Tyzack flashed him a quick OK with his thumb and forefinger. A second man was down.

  Carver nodded in acknowledgement and gestured to Tyzack to keep moving. Then he turned to the men behind him and started signalling more orders, his hands moving like a tic-tac man at a racecourse betting stall.

  The six men now split into three pairs. Carver took one man and moved to secure the bridge and take control of the vessel. Tyzack and his back-up were tasked to enter the superstructure to clear the cabins and engine-room. The final pair would secure the holds and start the search for the drugs that were the justification for the entire operation.

  When Carver and the man behind him reached the bridge, it was deserted, the boat moving forward on automatic pilot. So where was the third crewman?

  The question had no sooner crossed Carver’s mind than it was answered by a burst of gunfire from the cabin below. The last echoes died away. Then there was another short, sudden blast of firing. Then silence.

  ‘Stay here,’ Carver said to his partner. ‘Keep an eye out. Make sure we don’t bump into anything.’

  Then he went back out of the bridge, stepped over the dead body now lying on the deck at the foot of the steps, and made his way towards the sound of the guns.

  57

  ‘Very interesting,’ said Tyzack. He was standing a couple of paces from Carver, looking down on him. He’d adopted the attitude of a QC cross-examining a witness. Carver wondered how long he’d been dreaming of this moment, working on his delivery, polishing up his questions.

  ‘So you admit that Trench knew that I had superior military skill to you?’ Tyzack went on.

  ‘That was his opinion, yes. You were good under training conditions. I always felt combat would be a different matter.’

  ‘And yet, when we landed on that boat, we advanced together and both of us took out our designated targets.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And those were certainly combat conditions.’

  Carver nodded. ‘Yes, you were doing a good job at that point.’

  ‘It was my first kill, you know. Do you remember your first kill?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you enjoy it?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘Really?’ said Tyzack. ‘I thought it was an amazing moment. I’d heard all about that sort of thing, of course. Growing up in my family, I could hardly avoid it. But it’s a bit like sex, isn’t it? Until you’ve actually done it, you really have no idea…’

  ‘If you say so.’

  Tyzack ignored him. ‘I can still see the way the rounds hit their target. There was much more blood than I expected. I’d allowed for the wounds going in, you see, but not for the mess coming out the far side. The poor chap I hit, his body sort of rippled with the impact; it was the most extraordinary sight, filled me with absolute, pure pleasure. But you say it wasn’t the same for you?’

  ‘No.’ Carver leaned back a fraction and the open wounds on his back touched the frame of the chair. He gasped with pain.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Tyzack with exaggerated conce
rn. ‘Painful, is it? Well, concentrate on what you’re saying, why don’t you? Take your mind off it. Tell you what, I’ll give you a little drink just to wet your throat. I really can’t say fairer than that.’

  Tyzack walked across to the table and poured a dribble of water into the bottom of the paper cup. He gave it to Carver, who gulped it down in one swallow.

  ‘There,’ said Tyzack, ‘we’ve got a little system going, water for talk. So let’s talk some more. Answer me this: if you hate killing so much, why do you keep doing it?’

  Carver smiled wearily. Tyzack was not best pleased.

  ‘Did I say something funny? I wasn’t aware that I’d been trying to amuse.’

  ‘No,’ said Carver, shaking his head. ‘I’ve just heard that one before.’

  He thought back to a clinic by the shore of Lake Geneva and the sessions he’d had there. Carver’s mind had been torn apart by unendurable trauma. A psychiatrist called Karlheinze Geisel had helped to put it back together. He’d harped on about Carver’s deadly profession, too. So Carver gave Tyzack the same answer he’d given the shrink.

  ‘I do it because it’s the thing I can do. I look on it as a curse, for what it’s worth. I wish I had another saleable talent. And if you want to know how I justify it, I’ll tell you. The people I take out have got it coming. The world is a better place for them not being there.’

  ‘Not always, it isn’t,’ said Tyzack, a teasing smile playing around the corners of his mouth. ‘Dear old Percy Wake told me how you once killed a certain well-known woman in Paris. That was hardly a service to mankind. And all those poor people at the hotel last night. Did they have it coming?’

  ‘No, they didn’t. But both those times, I was set up, and you know it.’

  ‘Oh, I see. They were unintentional killings?’