Seven Day Hero

by J. T. Brannan

  The huge vessel loomed closer, and in the cold breeze, Guerre could feel the massive rush of displaced air as it prepared to dock.

  His men would board the boat immediately. Not one person would leave until the matter had been sorted out to his complete satisfaction.

  Finishing his second cup of coffee, Tom Gordon was noticeably less relaxed than he had been twenty minutes ago.

  ‘What the Hell do they mean we’re going to have to wait in our vehicles?’ he complained bitterly. The announcement had been made just minutes before, asking for the passengers’ patience. They were told to remain in their cars until further notice, although the electronic voice failed to give a valid reason for such a request. ‘What’s going on?’ Gordon continued in protest. ‘We’re just a hundred bloody metres from France, and they start delaying us now? What the Hell’s going on?’

  Irene could see that her husband was working himself up into one of his episodes, and decided to try and calm him down a little. ‘I’m sure it won’t be long, Tom. It could be anything. Maybe the roads out of the port need to be cleared because of the snow?’

  Her husband snorted. ‘So why won’t they tell us? No, it’s something more serious than that, believe me. Something’s definitely wrong, that’s for sure.’

  He sat and contemplated the situation silently for a few moments, before snapping upright. ‘It’s a bomb,’ he said with conviction. ‘I’ll bet there’s a bloody bomb on board!’

  The cold air hit Cole in the face with a solid blow, and it took him a few moments to regain his senses. He peered out at the French coastline, the dim landscape lit up intermittently by the bright lights of the port city.

  From his precarious position, balanced on the top of the massive anchor chain that had only minutes before dropped with a deafening crash through the ship’s large hawse hole into the sea below, he concentrated on regaining his night vision.

  Eventually, he was able to make things out clearly. The huge chain stretched down some forty feet below him to the dark waters of the French Channel. It was on a blind-side from the main port buildings, and Cole thought the area of coastline to the West of the massive port complex was probably about a half mile away.

  He picked his time carefully, waiting for the boat to slow its rocking enough until he could manoeuvre out of the hawse hole all the way onto the chain. The bare metal was freezing, but at the same time slick and slippery with oil and seaweed.

  The last time he’d climbed such a chain, at least he’d had good equipment for the job, including rubberized gloves. Right now, he had nothing more than strips of cloth wrapped tightly around his hands to protect them against frostbite. It would have been easier just to dive in from a height, but Cole knew that there might be people watching from up on deck. A big white splash against an otherwise dark sea might just attract the wrong kind of attention.

  And so slowly, laboriously, Cole lowered himself down the colossal anchor chain, gigantic link by gigantic link. It took five agonizing minutes, but as he finally slipped into the near freezing water where the chain met the sea, he was confident that he had done so completely unobserved.

  Hasdell’s worst fears were confirmed when the first two bodies were carried off the ferry, rolled down one of the ramps and towards the medical centre, a ring of orderlies surrounding each stretcher.

  The gendarmerie had already boarded the docked boat, and Hasdell reluctantly ordered one of his men to go and check the bodies in the medical centre, as he settled down to watch the sorry spectacle unfold through the large window of the arrivals lounge.

  ‘See? I told you!’ Tom Gordon hissed under his breath to his wife as he watched the French police move from car to car, carefully checking documents and thoroughly searching each vehicle. ‘They’re looking for a bomb!’

  Irene, until now convinced her husband had lost his mind, was now starting to come round to his way of thinking. Maybe there was a bomb? Thank goodness the children weren’t there!

  She noticed her husband’s grip on the wheel tighten as two policemen approached their car.

  ‘Good morning,’ Capitan Guerre said politely but firmly as Gordon lowered his window. ‘May I see your documents please?’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Gordon muttered as he started to fumble through his pockets.

  Guerre looked at the Englishman disdainfully as the other officer moved to the rear of the vehicle. ‘Do you mind if my colleague checks the bags?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure, sure,’ Gordon said, popping the boot release. A moment later he had all of his documents – passports, ID cards, boarding passes, tickets – and handed them over to Guerre, who snatched them away and started examining them in minute detail.

  Gordon watched in his rear view mirror as the other policeman started sifting through their belongings, hauling one suitcase out of the boot onto the floor. The bloody French!, he thought bitterly. No respect for other people!

  Guerre finally seemed satisfied with the Gordon’s documents and handed them back. ‘Thank you,’ he said, before his attention was caught by his colleague, who was signalling urgently at him.

  Tom and Irene Gordon’s hearts almost stopped together just one second later, when the French police chief’s semiautomatic handgun appeared in his hands, pointing directly into the cabin. ‘Stay where you are!’ he screamed at the two holidaymakers. ‘Put your hands on the dashboard! Now!’

  Shaking with fear and adrenaline, husband and wife slowly put their hands on the car’s dashboard, too scared to even breathe, let alone speak. They stared straight ahead, eyes wide.

  Guerre gestured for his colleague to come up front and cover them, and he moved to the rear of the vehicle once he was happy the couple were being watched. He rounded the bumper and stared into the large hatchback boot. The lifeless eyes of two more corpses, hidden underneath the English couple’s luggage, stared out at him from the back of the vehicle, as if taunting him.

  Merde!, he cursed silently. Four dead bodies. How could things get any worse?

  Half an hour later, Hasdell was still watching from the arrivals lounge. Brown had reported back from the medical centre, and Hasdell wasn’t surprised at the news. The dead men were John Terry and David Bose, two of the British agents onboard.

  The next two stretchers to emerge down the ramp from the boat caused barely a flicker of interest. Hasdell already knew the other two agents would be dead.

  Moments later, he saw a middle-aged couple, seemingly petrified with fear and confusion, being led by armed police off the ferry and into a waiting security van.

  There was no point waiting any longer, Hasdell knew. They’d failed, and Cole had escaped again. He almost envied the dead agents. At least they wouldn’t have to explain themselves to Hansard.

  Cole pulled himself onto the shores of mainland France just as the first rays of dawn started to cast their dreary light over the muggy bank.

  Getting cold and wet was starting to become too much of a habit, Cole decided as he stretched out his freezing and exhausted body. The respite was short-lived; he knew he had to get moving, and find some more dry clothes.

  But, he thought with some satisfaction as he made his way up the slope towards a nearby block of buildings, he was safe, at least for now.

  27

  ‘Something was wrong with Bill right from the start,’ Drake explained to his two visitors. ‘He was just nervous as Hell. And Bill wasn’t a nervous man, not that I ever noticed, and I’m a pretty good judge of these things.’

  Arnold nodded his head; he had no doubts about Drake’s judgement of such qualities. ‘Any indication as to what was making him so agitated?’

  ‘Not really. It was strange really – on the one hand, he was telling me how important it all was, how I had to keep security even better than usual, how I couldn’t tell anyone, you know the score. And yet the next minute he seemed like he didn’t really want to be there, like he didn’t really want to be involved with the whole thing. Now that was very odd for Bill.
He normally loved the job.’

  ‘Did you ask him about it?’ Moses interjected.

  ‘We knew each other,’ Drake answered, ‘but we weren’t close friends by any means. More like business partners really. He was uneasy, but I didn’t feel the need to pry. He came to me with an official CIA request, and if he wasn’t happy about it, what could I do? You know what we do here; it makes a lot of people uneasy.’

  ‘But you still took the job on,’ Arnold said matter-of-factly.

  ‘Hey, I just told you – that’s what we do, the entire reason for our existence here. Feelings don’t come into it, simple as that. If they did, we wouldn’t get much work done, believe me.’

  Nice, thought Arnold, although he didn’t voice his opinion. It was apparent that Drake had a certain detachment from his work that, whilst distasteful to the IA investigator, was doubtlessly often necessary.

  ‘But Bill was your only contact with the Agency on this particular job,’ Moses probed.

  ‘Yes, my only contact. To minimize exposure, we only ever deal with one person, who acts as liaison for the operation.’ Drake paused, considering the matter. ‘I can see what you gentlemen are trying to drive at,’ he said at length. ‘Now that the situation is all out in the open, you want to see if you can put the blame squarely on the shoulders of poor old Bill, yes? We don’t really want to hear that he had official authorization, do we? No, Bill gives us a nice little scapegoat for the media to get their teeth into, probably keep the ERA wolves from the door, yes? Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you gents, but Bill wasn’t working alone. Somebody ordered him to bring those men here.’

  Drake’s words hung in the air, and silence settled in the room for several long moments.

  Arnold cleared his throat and spoke first. ‘Okay, first of all let me say that my partner and myself are not here to blame Bill. Whoever comes after us, who knows? Politically, it’s obviously going to be expedient to blame one man, we all realize that. But we are here to find out the truth of the matter, and report that to our superiors. It is, of course, up to them to decide what to do with that information, if anything. But as my colleague said at the start of this meeting, we’re here to find out the truth, however unpalatable that may be. So, Mr Drake,’ Arnold continued, looking across the desk into the dark pools of the man’s eyes, ‘do you know who gave Bill the order?’

  Drake contemplated the wall opposite him for what seemed like several minutes to the two agents, but was in reality merely seconds. ‘I can’t be sure, I’m afraid. It’s pure speculation; you guys might call it a ‘hunch’.

  ‘When he first came to me with the details of the men he wanted to be trained, and the type of training he wanted them to undergo, I could tell it was Bill’s op. He planned and orchestrated it, no question about that. But the order to carry out such a mission came from someone else.

  ‘Bill kept on saying ‘He wants this’, or ‘He said that’. At the time, I assumed he was referring to Dorrell. I didn’t give it too much thought, to be honest. We don’t ask too many questions here, yes? It was only when I watched the attack on the news, and realized it was the same men we’d trained, that got me thinking. The whole thing bothered me, yes?’

  Moses adjusted himself in his seat. It had taken a while to get the man talking, but once he started, he didn’t seem keen on stopping.

  ‘Now don’t get me wrong,’ the Major continued, ‘I’m no saint, I know we do things like this more often than people think. I even kind of liked the idea – you know, break up ERA before it even got started, blame China; the whole thing was planned well, and would have been good for America, yes? But, and here’s the thing – I know that’s not official policy. The President would never authorize such an attack, and neither would Dorrell. Hell, nobody with any official authority over Bill would have anything to do with such a stunt.

  ‘You see, my position here gives me an insight into our country’s truly secret wars; I know what gets approved and what doesn’t. And this wouldn’t have, it’s as simple as that. Why?’ he asked, although both Moses and Arnold knew better than to reply; Drake would surely answer himself.

  ‘Risk versus reward,’ he replied to his own question. ‘Let’s say the mission went well, without a hitch, the perfect operation. Well, what then? ERA never gets formed, the world blames China, and America remains the world’s only superpower. That would be the reward, the maintenance of the status quo. The risk? ERA forms anyway, the conflict goes nuclear, and everyone loses from that. Or else, our role gets discovered, and the entire world turns against us – well, even more than it has already, I mean. And that’s the point. The danger of ERA simply doesn’t necessitate such action, especially considering the potentially catastrophic consequences of failure. And anyway, it looks to me as if our involvement was supposed to be revealed, right from the start.’

  Arnold moved to ask a question, but Drake stopped him. ‘Think about it. I have, it’s all I’ve been doing for the last few days. First of all, someone informed the security services – not early enough to stop the attack, but with enough time to capture the attackers. To be fair, the men fought to avoid capture, and were for the most part incinerated, leaving only DNA evidence. So why the body left in the hotel room? It seems apparent to me that the only reason this would happen is to give the authorities somewhere to start looking. It was surely only a matter of time before that man was identified – initially as Chinese, but eventually as an illegal US alien. I ask again, why was he left there?’

  Drake let the two men sitting across the desk from him contemplate the situation he was presenting them with. ‘And we cannot escape the fact that the missiles missed the target. Now I don’t know how much you two gentlemen know about the SA17 Grail, but let me assure you that if the laser designator is on the target, those missiles do not miss. Ever.’

  ‘Maybe the laser wasn’t aimed right,’ Moses offered half-heartedly.

  ‘No. Infrared analysis of the tapes shows that the beam was positioned directly on Danko’s limousine. The missiles were programmed to miss, simple as that.’

  ‘Why would the attackers want the operation to fail?’ Arnold asked immediately.

  ‘The attackers would have carried out the operation in good faith. They wouldn’t have known they were to fail, which explains the valiant effort of the men on the ground, after the missiles missed. No,’ Drake continued, leaning back in his chair, ‘whoever ordered the mission in the first place wanted it to fail, so that ERA would still be formed, and we would eventually get the blame.’

  ‘But why?’ Moses persisted.

  ‘Why indeed?’ Drake answered. ‘But might I suggest that perhaps the mission, far from being a product of the US government, was in fact part of an elaborate plan against us? In which case, Bill was merely being used, possibly by an unfriendly foreign nation.’

  Moses and Arnold looked at one another, thinking the same thing. Blackmail? What did Crozier have in his past that an enemy could use to make him work against his own country?

  ‘For the answers you need,’ Drake said as he stood, indicating that the meeting was about to draw to a close, ‘I would suggest you speak again to Sam Hitchens, Bill’s bodyguard and driver. The man who controlled Bill must have met with him at various times. Sam might remember something that could point you in the right direction.’

  He held out his hand to both men, shaking with them firmly in turn. ‘Good luck with your investigation, gentlemen. Let me know what you manage to find out.’

  28

  Nothing was ever perfect, Hansard considered as he put the phone down. The meetings this morning had gone well; the President’s speech had held no unpleasant surprises; Gregory was being seen more and more as the invaluable bridge between ERA and America; and he felt sure that the afternoon’s transatlantic conference would be a success.

  In fact, things had been going altogether too well, which was why he wasn’t entirely surprised to hear that Cole had escaped the net yet again. How lucky could one
man be? wondered Hansard, although he knew that it wasn’t luck. The simple fact was that Mark Cole was one of the best there was. He was certainly the best that Hansard himself had ever worked with personally.

  Hansard sat at the big desk in his office on the seventh floor of the old Admiralty building at Whitehall that had become the unofficial Headquarters for the European JIC. The whole place was altogether too small for its current purpose, but the situation was only supposed to be temporary; a purpose-built JIC centre was in the process of being constructed, out in a quiet area of the Wiltshire countryside. It horrified the French – some others as well, but none so much as the French – that the European Headquarters for Intelligence was to be in England, but Gregory had made a persuasive case to the European parliament, and the edict had been accepted.

  As Hansard stared at the mass of paperwork spread out in front of him, reports and case files that all seemed to need his immediate attention, he felt the pulse throb in his temple. He sighed, and pulled a bottle from the veneered drinks cabinet next to him, pouring himself a stiff measure. As he sank back into his upholstered leather chair and poured half of the rich, hot liquid down his throat, his mind started to drift back many years, to his first meeting with Mark Cole.

  It was early during the second Iraq war, in 2003. Hansard had been working for the Secret Intelligence Service at the time, having transferred from the Army’s Intelligence Corps as a Lieutenant Colonel back in 1996. His parent unit had actually been the Coldstream Guards, as had been his father’s, and his grandfather’s before him, but circumstance had conspired against the third generation.

  Hansard was the product of a wealthy family, and came from old money, but that family had always taken the protection of the nation seriously. His father had been killed in action in Vietnam whilst fighting alongside the Americans, on secondment to the Special Air Service, which had been one of the few British units to take part in that conflict. Noel Hansard had only been eight years old at the time, but by 1975 he had passed out of Eton, Cambridge, and ultimately Sandhurst as a Second Lieutenant, keen to honour the memory of his heroic father.