Dark Asset

by Adrian Magson

  I noticed Masse’s English was getting a little ragged and figured he was stressed and tired. It was a worry because I needed him to be on top of his game if we were to get out of this. I looked behind us and saw there were now two sets of lights.

  They weren’t giving up.

  After a dozen rings Marten came on sounding throaty, as if he’d just rolled out of bed. ‘Jesus, Masse, what do you want? You any idea how late it is?’ He’d clearly been expecting to hear Masse’s voice, so I held the phone out towards the Frenchman, who understood what I wanted right away.

  ‘Marten, mon pote!’ he shouted over the noise of the engine. ‘Talk to my friend Marc, will you? We need your help. Only I’m a little busy right now.’

  He nodded and I took the phone away and turned on the hands free so Masse could hear him.

  ‘You brought me in last night,’ I reminded Marten, ‘and arranged a car.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, I remember. The Yank. I didn’t know you and Masse was buddies. What the hell have you two got yourselves into down there? That Masse’s normally ready for a long chat, so I figure you must be in a spot of bother.’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘Well, no surprise. Would it be anything to do with a couple of guys came by to see me late yesterday? Nice fellas, named Ratch and Dom. They put a bullet through my picture of Mandela and threatened to do nasty stuff to my wife and kid if I didn’t tell them where Masse had gone.’

  ‘Think yourself lucky – they usually aim for the head.’

  ‘That’s what the skinny greaser said. Sorry … that’s not politically correct but who gives a shit, right? A Latino with a squinty look about him, anyway.’

  ‘I know him. We met.’ Snake-Eyes. Otherwise known as Dom or Domenic. He and Ratchman obviously liked travelling as a pair.

  ‘So what can I do for you?’

  When I told him he went quiet for a few seconds. I let him think it over; it probably wasn’t every day he got asked to risk life and living for a couple of people he didn’t know that well.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘About forty minutes north-west out of Mogadishu.’ I checked the screen to make sure that Masse had GPS and said, ‘Just a second.’ I clicked on the GPS finder and read out the coordinates.

  Another long pause, then he came back. ‘Holy shit, man, that’s not good. You’re a long way from a decent landing site. Can you make it back to the airstrip where I dropped you?’

  ‘No. Turning back from here is not an option.’

  ‘Right, don’t ask. I get it. OK, there’s a place I know about a hundred-and-forty Ks, maybe a little more, from your location. It’s by the Shebelle River up by Dinlaabe. Masse’ll know it well enough. It’s used by hunters and a few others I’ve taken in there from time to time. The road up there is shit but that’s Somalia for you. But I got to tell you, man, there’s a problem with my plane.’

  ‘What sort of problem?’

  ‘When I got back after dropping you off I nearly went in nose first. The tail assembly’s already stripped down and the mechanic found a problem with the rudder cables. He should have the spares tomorrow morning and should only take a few hours tomorrow to fix. But it means you’ll have to lie low until first light the day after. Can you do that?’

  It was a setback but I couldn’t see a way round it. I looked at Masse to see if he had an opinion or whether he thought Marten was spinning a tale to get more money out of us. But he merely looked back and said, ‘We can do that.’

  I’d have had more confidence in him if he’d tried a little harder to look like he believed it.

  I relayed the answer to Marten.

  ‘Great. There’s something else. Before I say yes, I need a couple of guarantees from you or Masse. Solid ones, right? Nothing that’s going to fade the moment you run into serious shit.’

  ‘Go on.’ As if the shit we were in wasn’t serious enough already.

  ‘This is like, bad territory where you’re headed. Apart from the various clans who hate each other’s guts, there’s al-fucking-Shabaab and bandits all over the place. Throw in the Somali Government forces and African Union, all chasing the others around every rock and tree like dogs on heat, and I have to say you got yourselves in a bad situation. I usually fly over that shit, not land right in the middle of it.’

  ‘Can you do it or not? If you can’t, say so.’

  ‘Hey, man, of course I can do it, no worries. Just sayin’ that’s all. Sure, they’ll see me coming for miles, and if we get stuck on the ground longer than five minutes we’re all dead, know what I mean? But yeah … it’s do-able.’

  Do-able. It’s a nice word full of maybes. But it was as good as we were going to get. ‘Good. What sort of guarantees do you want?’

  ‘If I lose the plane, I’m done. Like, for good. I owe a bundle on it. So that’s one thing – the easiest. But I’ve got a family to look after, too. If I get chopped I want them taken care of. Can you promise me that?’

  I thought it over. There was nothing else for it and it was no use bluffing. ‘I can’t but I know a man who can. I’ll have to call you back. But first give me the co-ordinates for this airstrip; we’ll make for it anyway and figure something out later.’ One thing was certain: we couldn’t just hang around where we were.

  He gave me the numbers and I signed off and looked across at Masse. He’d heard pretty much all of it and wasn’t looking happy, but resigned.

  ‘Nous sommes foutus,’ he muttered, in that peculiarly Gallic way when a Frenchman thinks he’s out of options. ‘We are screwed. I cannot promise Marten any of that stuff – my superiors will never go for it.’

  ‘Not even for possession of the hard drive?’

  ‘You are joking.’ He made a hoarse noise in his throat. He seemed to have trouble getting his thoughts out, but when he did it was in a rush. ‘You think Petrus is going to take this back to Paris? Not immediately. He will talk to Lunnberg first, I guarantee it. And the moment the colonel has our location he will send over a drone and baff – all his problems will disappear in one hit. You, me and the hard drive, vaporisé.’

  I didn’t like to admit it but he was right. The moment Lunnberg got a fix on our location we’d be sitting ducks for an air strike. And if he could get his hands on a drone – and I wasn’t betting against it – neither we nor anybody else would see or hear it coming. For Lunnberg it would be a clean kill with nothing sticking to his hands. If anybody did find the evidence, it would be palmed off as an accident, or a missile gone astray.

  ‘How about this airfield Marten mentioned?’ I wanted to focus on the positive rather than what might happen; allowing Masse to wallow wouldn’t help us get out of this situation.

  ‘Yes. I think I know it. I’ve been there once … but it’s a long way from here.’

  ‘It’s our only choice, then.’ I got out my phone and dialled Tom Vale. He wasn’t going to be pleased because I guessed he’d be in bed, but we were running out of options. I got patched through a duty officer in London, who asked a couple of questions to verify that I wasn’t a bored teenager with a spy complex, and heard him rattling a computer keyboard in the background before suggesting I wait. Thirty long seconds later Vale came on, his voice crystal clear.

  ‘Marc. You keep strange hours. I take it this is related to what you told Angela Pryce?’ Considering the time of night he sounded surprisingly chipper.

  ‘It is.’ I told him where we were and what we were carrying, and how we were hoping to get out of the country. I talked fast because there was a danger we’d lose the signal and I needed his cooperation. Thankfully he was accustomed to urgent messages and didn’t waste time asking pointless questions.

  ‘Leave it with me. I’ll have my chaps look up this Marten character and make sure he’s covered all ways. Tell him he’ll be receiving a call. As for your … current situation, I can’t promise boots on the ground or any of that useful stuff, but I’ll have somebody at the Djibouti end casting a watchful eye on Marten’s f
amily. Is this hard drive worth it?’

  ‘I haven’t seen it, but there are people on the dark side who think so.’

  ‘Then I think that’s good enough. Good luck.’

  I thanked him and used Masse’s phone again. Marten answered immediately and I said, ‘You’ve got your guarantees. You’ll be getting a call with the details.’

  ‘A call. Where from?’ He sounded sceptical, which was no surprise. He’d probably had enough stress in the last forty-eight hours to last him a lifetime.

  ‘The source is London. A man named Tom Vale. You might like to let him know where your wife and daughter live so they can provide cover, just in case.’

  ‘Christ, man – Marc, is it? You’re not spinning a line, are you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sweet. That’s a lot of juice you got there. Call me impressed.’

  ‘Just keep it to yourself. Are we on?’

  ‘Damn right, my friend.’ He laughed. ‘See you at first light day after tomorrow. Only don’t be late because this is gonna be a fast pickup with no stops for coffee or a braai, you understand me?’

  I told him I understood and switched off, and signalled Masse to put his foot down. I checked behind us. The lights were still there and making no attempt to hide. It led to a question that had been bothering me. ‘How did they get here from Djibouti?’

  Masse shrugged. ‘Chinook, probably. I thought I heard one in the distance before I got to the hotel. They had to bring their own transport and a Chinook would have swallowed them easily.’

  If that was correct it was an indication of the amount of pull Lunnberg possessed. He’d been able to call up one of the US military’s heavy-lift beasts, and they didn’t come from a rental company by the hour. I wondered how high he’d had to go to get it signed off. It reinforced Masse’s earlier opinion that if Lunnberg wanted to call up a Reaper and drop a missile on our heads, he’d be able to do that, too.

  An hour later we made a fast stop-and-change-over. Masse soon fell asleep and began snoring. I noticed his cell phone on the seat beside him and picked it up. Call me nosy but it helped while away the time. I flicked through the numbers dialled list. It wasn’t easy to do, given the road we were following, but it was too good a chance to miss. When in doubt, find out. And right now all sorts of doubts were crowding my mind demanding to be settled.

  Most of the numbers listed included a name or abbreviated indicator, such as ‘cab, ‘hair’, ‘teeth’, along with four restaurants and a couple of Paris numbers without names which I figured were either family or other private callers. But among them was a number that had been called several times over the past couple of days. It had no identifier, so I figured it was either a security issue and Masse hadn’t wanted to use it, or he knew the number so well he didn’t need reminding.

  Either way, it was a detail worth checking out.

  Masse stirred in his seat and looked out through the windscreen. I dropped the phone by my side to conceal the light and waited. He stared without comment for a minute, then his eyes closed again and his head lolled back against the window. I gave it a count of ten to see if he’d stir again, then checked the screen and memorised the number before switching it off and dropping the phone on the floor by the side of his seat.

  Another hour on and the lights behind us had disappeared. They’d either dropped back to give themselves room to plan an attack or were in a fold in the terrain. What I was pretty certain of was that they hadn’t given up and gone home.

  I shook Masse awake and suggested he get ready to take the wheel again. My eyes were scratchy with tiredness and the layer of dust being stirred up inside the car by the air-con system. I needed some sleep, even if only for a few minutes. Work in this business for long and you soon get in the habit of taking sleep when you can get it.

  We made another lightning-fast stop without showing our brake lights, and Masse got quickly back up to speed again. After a couple of minutes he got fidgety and began checking his pockets, slapping his sides and chest with his hand and muttering to himself.

  ‘You got a problem?’ I asked.

  ‘My phone,’ he confirmed, digging his hand into the back of the passenger seat behind me, then feeling down the side by the transmission bulge, each move threatening to wreck our chances of going any further every time he took his eyes off the road. ‘I had it here … you know I did. I’ll have to stop.’ To prove it, he began to slow down.

  ‘Forget it. We don’t have time. Keep going and I’ll look for it.’ I made a show of checking all around my seat and running my hands across the floor, then found his phone and held it up. He snatched it off me and put it away like it was his favourite rabbit’s foot, and I wondered why he’d got so worked up.

  ‘Sorry. My mistake.’ He threw me a sharp look and I guessed my play-acting had sounded convincing enough to show him I had no idea where his phone had been.

  For good measure I leaned across and tapped the fuel display. I had no way of knowing whether me checking through his calls list might have activated an indicator that it had been used since I’d spoken to Marten, but the less he thought about it the better. ‘We’re down to half a tank. Did you say you’ve got some spare?’

  ‘Yes. In the back.’ He peered at the gauge. ‘I’m sure we’re good for another thirty minutes on this tank, maybe longer.’ He turned and looked back at the darkness behind us. ‘We seem to have lost our followers. We can stop soon and refill.’

  Refill. It sounded so mundane, so ordinary. Stop, get out, stretch and fill the tank. Like being on a freeway and seeing a BJ bar and grill coming up. Only out here there was nothing like that and the guys we had somewhere on our tail out in the dark would be waiting for the tell-tale flash of our brake lights to know they were in with a chance.

  Even as I processed the thought, I heard a bang and the glass by my head shattered and dissolved into a million pieces.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I kicked back instinctively in my seat and reached for the SIG while Masse swore loudly and stamped on the gas, making the engine whine in protest. I checked to the rear, but couldn’t see any lights. I couldn’t see how the two vehicles could have caught up so quickly without us spotting them. Then I noticed a neat hole in the window on Masse’s side, which gave me a possible trajectory. The shot must have come from somewhere off to our right flank.

  ‘Are there any other roads out there?’ I asked, pointing that way.

  He shook his head. ‘Roads, no. Nothing but scrub and dead ground … maybe the odd track used by herders and traders.’ He looked in the mirror and came to the same conclusion as me. ‘It can’t be the Americans … probably bandits or the military.’

  Given the choice I was happy to settle for bandits. They would be less disciplined and less heavily armed, and easier to deal with. Government or African Union forces, on the other hand, would opt for bringing a lot of firepower down on us if they thought we were up to no good. But since whoever it was out there had already opened fire, it didn’t look as if they were going to stop us first and ask questions anyway.

  I brushed the broken glass off my clothes and used the SIG to knock out the remains of the window, then tried to figure out where the shot had come from. It was difficult getting my bearings because the road here was particularly rough and the pickup was bouncing around on its mushy springs like a half-filled water bed. And although there were a million stars in the sky and no cloud cover, what light there was threw up too many dense patches of shadow to make out anything with clarity. It would have been clearer sticking my head under water in a pool.

  Then I heard another shot, and saw a flash out in the dark, followed by twin car lights flicking on a couple of hundred yards away. They were too low to the ground and too small to be a military truck, so I figured I’d got my wish. Bandits.

  Moments later the lights were coming in our direction on a converging course. Whoever they were must have been camped by the side of a track and had seen us coming from a long way off.
All they’d had to do was wait to make sure we weren’t a heavily-armed army truck that could pound them into dust if they tried stopping it, before deciding to send us a warning shot to stop us and see what we were carrying. That hadn’t worked so now they were coming in to take a closer look.

  I was proved right moments later when we flashed by a narrow turning with the oncoming vehicle lighting us up from barely a hundred yards away. A couple of wild shots came our way but nothing touched us, and I guessed the track they were on was too rough for accurate shooting. But it would only be a matter of time before they got behind us on better ground and got lucky. If they did that, we were done for. If they didn’t finish us off, Ratchman and his men certainly would.

  We had a couple of options, neither of them great. We could both keep on running and hope the bandits didn’t catch us, which seemed unlikely if they knew the roads well; or we could stop and fight. But the second option meant taking on an unknown force, all the time knowing that the SUVs were going to catch up anytime soon to join in the fun. It would be too good to hope that the two sides would leave us alone and take each other on, but there are times when even the most hopeless scenario seems worth consideration.

  Masse was coaxing as much speed from the pickup as he could get, and for the moment it seemed to have taken his mind off his phone. I picked up the AK and checked the magazine, which was full, and put some thought into how I was going to do this. I would only get one chance to get this right, otherwise we were both going to be put through the mincer.

  Surprisingly, the lights of the new arrival had started to fall behind, and I figured they must be driving a sub-standard vehicle and had relied too heavily on surprise or fear to make us stop. That gave us a slight edge and I told Masse to keep going as fast as he dared.

  ‘Until when?’ he demanded, his eyes wide in the muted glow from the dashboard lights. ‘We cannot outrun them for ever – not in this terrain.’