I scanned the huts again. The light at ground level was failing. And then I realized. Of course he hadn’t just left the photograph for me; he’d taken it for me. He knew this was my job, and that I would finish whatever it was that he had started if he wasn’t able to. A month later, and they laid Sonny in his grave while I lay on his mark. There would be no three-shot salute fired over his casket, which was already covered with Mason’s lies. Instead there would be one shot fired by me, a silent memorial at dawn. My only hope was that it would be true.
* * *
• • •
EIGHTEEN HUNDRED.
Fifteen hours remaining until H hour at zero nine hundred. A veil of frenetic black wings swept across the hills in perfect silhouette as hundreds of fruit bats dived and whirled toward their roosts high up in the tallest treetops, searing the darkening sky with their metallic screech-song. Carefully, I laid out in front of me a square of silk I’d cut from the parachute so no dust would be kicked up by the shot to signal my position. I settled the rifle. Serenaded by the distant hum of the generator and the twitchy throb of the crickets, I let my muscles relax into the ground. I emptied my mind and waited for the reckoning.
20
A bright gibbous moon hung over the trees. It shed a white gloom that killed the stars and settled on the crest of the hill rearing up behind the huts where the target was supposed to emerge in the morning. Heat seeped from the earth. Insects swarmed. My hands, eyelids, lips, neck, and ears fed ants and mosquitoes and all the company of that stinging, seething hell that thrives on the forest floor.
I didn’t move. I didn’t sleep. I had no night optics, no thermal imaging. I didn’t need them. I focused my attention on the huts, or rather the clump of trees surrounding them, and waited. There are tricks and techniques to keep alert. But my problem had always been getting to sleep when the job was done, not staying awake during it. Some snipers chew coffee grounds, others tobacco. Before I settled down, I slipped under my tongue a pebble plucked from the ground. It kept my throat moist, and my thoughts anchored.
Seventy-two hours on the gun is the maximum most snipers working alone can manage. Extremes of weather and wildlife can reduce that to a day, or less. Keeping still and staying silent and awake are not the main challenges. Staying focused is. Looking down a scope continuously is supremely, perfectly, disorienting. It eats into your mind and clouds your judgment. It feels like it begins to erode your very soul. Eventually the hallucinations take over. In the early days of the Troubles, Colonel Ellard once spent seven days on the gun, trapped in a house in Derry—a visceral reminder, perhaps, of his confinement in Arigna’s shallow coal seams. He could neither walk nor speak afterward. It took him a month to recover.
Fifteen hours was a luxury.
The moon climbed, banded by drifts of cloud gathering over the high ground. The earth cooled. A light breeze shimmied toward me, shaking night music out of the trees, rattling the grasses woven into my clothes this way and that.
At ground level, between the trees, it was perfect night: utter, impenetrable blackness. To compensate, my brain lit in my eyes stars and sparks that flared and died in the riflescope. I tried to reach through them with my mind, imagining the target, the distance, the scale. I recalled the photograph Sonny Boy had left for me, and then expelled it from memory. When dawn came, I needed to see what was there, not what I thought should be there. Both eyes open, lying prone on the gun, I recalled and considered each piece of the mission’s puzzle I’d gathered so far.
Nazzar: decent, loyal, misled by command. Rhodes: unknown, professional and with a worrying connection to chemical and biological warfare—which potentially linked her to Micky Montague, a CIA agent posing as a scientist with the Centers for Disease Control.
Careful, I warned myself. Not necessarily posing. Being CDC and being CIA were not mutually exclusive. It didn’t mean he didn’t have a sense of humor, either. VX—the name of the nerve agent—stands for Virulent Agent X: the most perfect description of Mason you could hope to coin.
And as for David Mason: if Nazzar was telling the truth—which he did, to a fault—then it looked like Mason had lied about how Sonny had died and pinned it on me. Whether Nazzar believed me was another matter. So Mason, possibly with Rhodes’s help, was running an operation with Micky, which they needed Sonny Boy to execute. Nazzar was misled and co-opted. Sonny Boy freaked out, went rogue and in the process prepared the ground for me. But what made him freak out? And did King know that he and Micky—presumably on Mason’s orders—were trying to cut a deal with the Russians? If he did, why deploy me? Maybe the deal went bad. Maybe Mason was off-piste and covering his tracks.
A lot of unknown unknowns, as Americans like to say when they’re looking for a clever way to cover up a cock-up. The irony of an Unknown operative contemplating his own mission’s unknowns wasn’t lost on me.
There was another unknown, too: Commander Frank Knight. Absent from the briefing, absent from this job. But Frank was never absent. He was omnipresent. Had he sent me to see Sonny Boy to warn me . . . or to frame me? There was only ever one game Frank played: his own. Genies, Russians, mystery white men and irregular irregulars . . . even a failed hit on a Russian diplomat’s wife in Caracas: these were all known unknowns—but only to me. I didn’t know what they meant, but someone sure as hell did. And that someone was sure to be Frank.
* * *
• • •
HOURS PASSED. AND then at the center of my vision—silently, without warning—light spilled on the ground between the huts. I blinked hard and refocused. A dirty orange glow spread out, thrown at first by one, and then two, then three and finally four burning torches, each one lit off another until they formed an illuminated square between and behind the two rondels.
Figures of men hidden by mad metal masks of weird elephant caricatures held the firebrands aloft. In their midst another figure emerged, a tall dancer slipping in and out of the torchlight, a pirate’s cutlass in one hand, and what looked like an animal-hair fly whisk in the other. Masked in red cloth, and crowned with dark feathers, the dancer’s grotesque facial features were picked out in white shells that glinted like shards of bone erupting through a bloodred wound. In the center of its forehead, one dirty-white eye looked out unblinking into the darkness. It was monstrous. Sonny Boy’s rantings seemed suddenly more insightful than insane.
My ears filled with the rhythmic thump-thump, thump-thump of my heart echoing hard in my head. The beating ebbed with the breeze and washed back over me. Only then did I realize that my heart was pumping in perfect time with the rise and fall of a beating drum hidden from sight by the trees or the huts. It was a big, bold beat—hollow, rich and resonant, as if pounded out of a cavernous tree trunk, and counterpointed by wild, syncopated rhythms made from the clattering of metal on metal, which skittered and chimed in sync with the rise and fall of the shadows cast by the masked men.
And then four more men emerged, unmasked, sweat drenched, bearing a prisoner between them into the torchlit square. Tied facedown by the wrists and ankles to a bamboo cross, their captive writhed and shuddered beneath the hide of a hyena. His face craned toward the forest. I could see then that his mouth was stopped by a wad of dark cloth. For a moment he leered into my rifle lens with wide, rolling eyes before staring back at the earth again.
Details in the nighttime firelight were elusive, diminished further by the narrow aperture of the scope. But through the rifle glass, facts emerged with crystal clarity: the range was exactly three hundred meters; the line of fire was unimpeded; and the captive was unquestionably a white man. Not only that, he was unquestionably a soldier. Early twenties, a hundred and sixty pounds, gym-honed body, close-cropped hair: one hundred percent squaddie. If I hadn’t been told that the area was crawling with Russians, maybe I’d have guessed he was an American. Or a Brit. Or maybe I wouldn’t have guessed at all. Perhaps I was just seeing what I wanted, or e
xpected, to see, but his round face, fair hair, bony brow, all screamed “Slav” to me. I strained my eye into the scope. If he had a scorpion tattoo, it was impossible to pick it out.
The four crossbearers stopped and hauled the bamboo frame upright, facing me. The prisoner couldn’t support his head, which lolled back and forth as the cross jerked to a stop. Nostrils flared, Adam’s apple working hard as he retched against the cloth, he looked more bestial than human. The red-masked master of ceremonies paced sideways to face him, his robed back turned to my scope. My heartbeat slowed and fell out of time with the beat of the drum. My finger felt contact with the trigger. My breathing deepened. I began to prepare to fire, even though there was no shot to take.
Not yet.
The drumming quickened, reaching a mad, polyrhythmic crescendo. The one-eyed dancer dropped the cutlass to the ground and, twitching, held the fly whisk aloft. The metal-masked men swayed and jolted, swayed and jolted, over and over, expressing with their bodies a refrain I couldn’t untangle in the music. An eerie ululating mingled with the clashing, crashing of the beat and then broke high and free—though whether it came from the elephant men, their master or the unseen drummers, I couldn’t say.
And then silence.
The torchbearers stood still, and the light settled. The four men holding the cross bowed their heads. But the red-masked man shuffled in the dust still, moving carefully around the dropped cutlass in slow, methodical steps. The black plumes above his head pitched and yawed; held aloft, the fly whisk dipped and flicked. And then with his left arm, the grotesque dancer reached behind him and dipped his hand into a pouch tied to the back of his belt. He stooped slightly and then extended the arm out again with a flourish, pulsing forward four times, until his outstretched palm pressed against the prisoner’s chest. Down came the fly whisk, four times in total, across the captive’s head and shoulders. Every muscle taut, straining in the torchlight against his bonds, the prisoner threw his head back and roared a cloth-muffled scream into the void. And then he collapsed, hanging limp from his bonds, spent. Slowly, the red dancer withdrew his left palm. Stuck to the prisoner’s chest—just above the heart—was a white badge, a cowrie shell perhaps, or piece of bone. It looked like the Cyclops eye sported by his tormentor. Without warning, the dancer struck the prisoner across the face, so that he revived and looked up and into the white-bone grimace of the red mask. Reaching out once more, the dancer removed the cloth from the captive’s mouth and spoke loudly in a language I didn’t recognize.
And then, more quietly, he spoke again. The breeze carried the words to me with eerie clarity: “Vy svoboden.” You are free.
The prisoner’s eyes focused and then filled with tears. His jaw worked. The breeze died, and I couldn’t hear his reply, but I could lip-read it through the riflescope in the torchlight.
“Blagodaryu,” he said. He was thanking his captor in Russian for releasing him.
The four torchbearers remained still as the men who’d borne him raised their heads and then cut the young man loose. The red-masked dancer picked up his cutlass and held it and the fly whisk aloft. His hands and forearms were daubed with mud or paint. The hem of his red garb dropped all the way to the ground. But there was something unnerving in his gait, the way he held himself, the way he moved.
I felt I knew him, as if there was something familiar about this whole scene—an echo of a long-lost memory. And then I realized: strip away the ceremony and the crazy getup and standing there was the physical double of the mystery white man in the photographs. That was it. It had to be.
My finger took first pressure.
I felt I was right. But my feelings had been getting me into trouble recently. There was no way to know. And what I needed now, what the mission needed, was facts, not guesses. I relaxed my finger, and the one-eyed dancer paced off between the huts and out of view. The freed man, his guards and the elephant-masked torchbearers followed, so that before long the scene was deserted and the only light that fell into my reticule dropped from the rising moon.
My heartbeat returned to its natural rhythm. I rolled the stone under my tongue and swallowed hard. There were ten hours to wait. I relaxed back into the ground and locked my gaze into the milky black of the forest night. Behind the scope an image flickered of Ana María, laughing as we knocked our glasses together for the first time; and then of my mother, looking out over Dublin Bay. I tried to bring my father’s face to mind, but I blinked again and all the images dissolved.
There was only darkness. Sonny Boy’s monsters were gone. And in the morning there was killing to be done.
21
At first it feels the time will never come. You fret because you want it all to happen so that it will be over and you will know what has happened. Then the time draws near. Suddenly it seems too soon and you fret again, because now you want time to stretch. You aren’t ready. You need more time. And then when you remember there is nothing left to prepare for, the last minutes expand into eons. You relax and wait. And then, as if without warning, it’s happening. The clocks rush and then stop dead. The minutes, hours—days, maybe—of waiting and watching evaporate. In an instant it’s you and your target and it always has been. The crosshairs settle with a force of inevitability so profound it’s unnoticeable: like drawing breath, the shot is not a climax but a certainty, an unremarkable revolution in the rhythm of everything you are, and all that you have become.
Which is to say, a killer.
* * *
• • •
THE SUN ROSE quickly, as if escaping the chitter-chatter of the monkeys chasing it through the trees and up over the hills. The huts and the trees and the clearing looked different in the morning light than they had in the dusk and then in the glow of the torchlight. The images overlapped, merged, dissipated. I gently tensed and relaxed my muscles one last time, starting at my neck and rolling down my body to my feet, and then back again. The crosshairs sat in between the two huts. There was nothing in my peripheral vision. And no sign where the dancers last night might have gone to, nor where the white man and his band of soldiers might appear from.
There was no line of sight through the trees left or right of the huts, and the limited satellite imagery I’d seen didn’t show any barracks, tents or base of any description. If the Chinese had put up any buildings while they scratched around for minerals, there were none left to be seen. All that I could make out was a thin hunter’s path about ten meters behind the beaten-earth square where Sonny Boy had photographed the gathering weeks previously. Perhaps the weird scenes enacted there last night would mean the parade was canceled. Perhaps Sonny Boy had photographed a one-off event. Perhaps my target was smoking a Stolichnaya cigarette over his morning coffee in Moscow. There was another possibility, too, and one devastating if true: if Mason was tying off loose ends after a failed and unauthorized bid to strike a deal with the Russians, perhaps I was the target.
Insect bites swelled and blistered around my wrists, ankles. Ants sank their mandibles into my neck. Sweat broke across my back. And then the timbre of the savannah changed, so slight at first it might have been the breeze shifting the grasses threaded around my head. The humming I’d picked up the evening before had resumed. It was a generator for sure, far off or buried. The monkeys stopped. A flurry of yellow birds took off in fright from the boughs above the hut on the left. And then one by one the soldiers emerged from it. A dozen Africans and Europeans dressed in a mixed bag of European army surplus fatigues and civvies. The whites had all the charm of a Moscow bar brawl waiting to happen; the blacks looked like they’d dressed up as caricatures of a rebel army—bandannas, juju charms and amulets and the usual showing of Disney T-shirts, awkwardly out of place among the guns and ammo: Pocahontas stood dead center, cradling a PKM machine gun and crisscrossed by two belts of 7.62 that fed it. Little Chinese hand grenades hung from their webbing, machetes from their belts.
They looked like
ragtag comic-book rebels, but they were snappy and well drilled. All the soldiers moved together as one integrated unit without trying to do so. They were professionals, and they’d clearly been in one another’s company for a while. To the enemy, or from a satellite, they’d look like local troops supported by white mercenaries. But up close they were one hundred percent Spetsnaz.
They stood at ease. The breeze picked up. The generator continued to pulse; soldiers’ boots shuffled on the beaten earth. But that’s all the sound there was. Twelve armed men could not have walked through the trees to my left unseen and unheard. Twelve armed men could not have been contained within the walls of the thatched rondel—this morning, overnight or ever. It was too small, and they were too many. No. There was only one place both the troops this morning and the motley crew last night could have come from: a tunnel beneath the hut. The same place the generator was housed, too, most likely.
I’d asked Roberts what the terrain was like when we’d looked at the photo Sonny Boy had hidden in the locket.
“Hot. Riddled with caves. It’s a million miles from anywhere,” he’d replied.
I’d taken on board the first bit and the last bit. But it was the caves that were key. That’s why there was no trace of the earlier Chinese exploration, and why there was so little trace of anything aboveground, then: it was all buried. I was on top of them.
I understood, too, why London needed a sniper. Depending how deep the caves went, even a bunker-buster might not penetrate them. Killing people in caves is notoriously difficult. That had been learned the hard way at Tora Bora. It would have been useful if London had briefed me on the lay of the land. Spies and their secrets. My career had been like playing a twenty-three-year game of Murder in the Dark with Frank. I never knew whether he couldn’t or wouldn’t remove the blindfold, and because of that, I never knew if he was driven by duty or friendship. I tacked between those two poles, lost in a sea of blood of my own spilling.
The Break Line Page 18
