by Will Jordan
‘That how you define good, huh?’ Keegan quipped.
‘Big words, John,’ she bit back. ‘Thought you rednecks were still learning how to read and write.’
The older man flashed a grin. ‘Must’ve been a child prodigy.’
Their route took them past an outdoor seating area overlooking the infamous Kryptos sculpture. Appearing as four large metal plates engraved with a seemingly meaningless stream of letters, Kryptos had been an object of fascination for code breakers and conspiracy theorists since it was unveiled nearly twenty years earlier. The code on three of the plates had since been broken, but the fourth remained stubbornly unsolved.
Even today, Drake knew that people within the Agency liked to hang out around it, particularly the intelligence analysts who made a living breaking codes and sought to test their mental prowess. He had never understood the fascination himself. Breaking codes for bragging rights made about as much sense to him as jumping into an empty swimming pool. Still, each to their own.
Passing through the automatic doors that led to the north tower, he and his companions found the nearest elevator and rode it up to the fifth floor, Drake ignoring the curious glance from the young man in a sharp business suit who got in at the second floor. Langley was a shirt-and-tie kind of place, but unfortunately Drake wasn’t a shirt-and-tie kind of man, especially not tonight. If Breckenridge wanted him here so urgently, he would have to take him as he came – in this case clad in cargo pants, a casual shirt and trainers that had seen better days.
Frost didn’t take kindly to the disapproving look either. She had been in a foul mood since finding out that her planned evening of drinking and relaxation had been whisked away and replaced with a high-priority briefing with a man nobody liked.
‘Something wrong, pal?’ she challenged, staring right at him.
She was spoiling for a fight, and the young man sensed it. Saying nothing, he glanced away and suddenly became very interested in checking his cufflinks.
Smart guy, Drake thought.
Conference room 1 was first in line as they stepped out on the fifth floor. It was a big, plush room reserved for top brass and high-level briefings, partly because it looked impressive but mostly because it was totally secure from any form of surveillance. The fact that the meeting was being held there told Drake a lot more than Breckenridge’s ambiguous phone call.
It was in this very room, over a year ago, that he had first been handed the mission to break into a Siberian prison and rescue a woman identified only by her code name Maras. It had seemed like a simple objective at the time; only later had he discovered how wrong he’d been.
Drake hadn’t been back here since. Normally his orders and debriefings were handled in one of the many smaller, more utilitarian rooms downstairs which were more suited to the unobtrusive nature of his work.
Access to the room was controlled by a swipe-card terminal next to the door. Drake’s personal access card would have been cleared in advance, so all he had to do was swipe it through the reader, punch in his PIN, and he was good to go.
There was a single beep and a crisp click as the lock disengaged. As always, everything worked flawlessly here. Here we go, he thought.
As the door swung open, he couldn’t help comparing the room before him to the one vividly imprinted on his memory.
The place hadn’t changed much in the past year. Same long conference table topped with a single unbroken length of polished mahogany that probably cost more than he made in a year. Same high-backed leather chairs, same expensive silver coffee set. Same majestic view over Langley’s garden-centre grounds, the dense woodland beyond and the muddy sweep of the Potomac about half a mile away.
In fact, the only thing different about the room was the occupant. Instead of Dan Franklin and Marcus Cain, the former director of Special Activities Division, this time he was greeted by the fleshy, unsmiling face of George Breckenridge.
In his early fifties, greying and overweight in a way that suggested he’d never really been in shape, Breckenridge looked exactly like what he was – a guy who’d been shining seats with his not-inconsiderable arse since leaving college. God only knew what strip-lighted back-room office Franklin had dug this guy up from, but it wasn’t a place Drake was keen to visit.
He knew little about Breckenridge, because theirs was not the kind of relationship that encouraged the exchange of personal information, but he knew one thing – his volume of admin and paperwork had more than doubled since Breckenridge took over the Shepherd programme.
It was hard to say how much Breckenridge knew of Drake’s past exploits, or indeed whether he’d been brought in specifically to keep an eye on him and ensure he didn’t cause further trouble. Either way, Drake had resolved to keep him at arm’s length and tell him as little as possible.
‘Drake. Good of you to join us.’ There was no thought of calling Drake by his first name; Breckenridge wasn’t that sort of man. He barely even acknowledged Keegan and Frost.
He eyed Drake’s casual clothes with unveiled disdain. His own dark blue business suit looked as though it had been pressed that very morning.
In response, Drake gave a dismissive shrug. ‘You wanted me here as soon as, George. Well, you’ve got me.’ He always called his boss George because he knew it pissed him off, and that made Drake feel just a little better. ‘So what’s this about?’
Breckenridge said nothing to that. Instead, he reached for the speaker phone in the centre of the table and punched in a couple of buttons. The dial tone sounded three times before it was answered.
‘Yeah?’ a familiar voice asked, sounding tired and strung out.
‘It’s Breckenridge, sir.’ He sounded like a schoolboy talking to the headmaster. ‘They’re here.’
In a moment, the voice changed, becoming more focused and authoritative. ‘Good. I’ll be right along.’
The phone clicked off, leaving the two men standing on opposite sides of the table in an awkward silence. Neither was willing to sit down, as if it would be seen as a sign of weakness.
Frost had no such compunction, and immediately helped herself to a chair, tilting it back as far as it would go. Keegan followed suit a moment later.
Drake occupied himself staring over Breckenridge’s shoulder, watching a red sports car cruising along the road on the far side of the Potomac. He hoped the driver was having a better evening than him.
At last the doors buzzed and clicked open, and Drake turned to greet his old friend.
Dan Franklin had been an infantryman once upon a time. He and Drake had served in the same composite task force in Afghanistan, until a roadside bomb put an end to his military career and very nearly his life. The old shrapnel wounds had left him with ongoing back pain that worsened after long periods of inactivity.
But as the director strode into the room, Drake paused a beat, taken aback by the change in his friend. Franklin had just turned forty, yet he looked many years older. His forehead was etched with deep worry lines, and there was a visible tension in his posture, as if he carried a heavy weight on his shoulders. The burden of responsibility was, it seemed, not an easy one to bear.
Franklin glanced at Drake, and for a moment he saw a glimmer of warmth in the older man’s eyes. Franklin’s right arm moved a little as if to shake hands, but he quickly thought better of it and turned away, making for the far end of the conference table. He was almost able to make it seem as if the gesture had never happened. Almost, but not quite.
‘Good to see you again, Ryan,’ he said, though his words were as stiff and formal as his posture. ‘How have you been?’
‘Can’t complain,’ Drake replied, wondering how long it had been since they’d last spoken. He certainly hadn’t seen much of the man since his promotion last year, which he supposed wasn’t surprising. The Shepherd teams were just a small gear in the complex machine that was Special Activities Division.
That seemed to satisfy Franklin. He gestured to the chairs running the length of t
he table. ‘Please, have a seat.’ He glanced at Frost and Keegan with a raised eyebrow. ‘I see your team’s ahead of you.’
‘We don’t stand on ceremony in this unit, sir,’ Frost replied innocently. ‘That’s the way Ryan trained us.’
Drake shot her a sharp glance as he helped himself to a chair, but said nothing. Now wasn’t the time for petty reprimands.
‘I was just bringing Mr Drake up to speed, sir,’ Breckenridge said.
Franklin gave a curt nod that made him look exactly like what he was – a senior executive impatient with trivialities. ‘Then don’t let me stop you.’
Breckenridge coughed, clearing his throat, and turned his attention to the wireless keyboard in front of him. A few keystrokes and mouse clicks were enough to bring up an image on the big flat-screen television at the far end of the room.
The image was a personnel photograph of a man in his mid-fifties. With a greying beard, dishevelled hair, strong and severe features, and a nose that looked as if it had been broken at least once before, he was a serious-looking customer. The hard, penetrating look in his eyes told Drake that the man was a field operative.
‘This is Hal Mitchell, one of our case officers based in Afghanistan,’ Breckenridge began. ‘He’s been with the Agency nearly twenty-five years now, and he’s an expert in that theatre. A good man.’
Drake would take his word on that one. ‘Smashing. So what’s the problem?’
Breckenridge shot him an impatient glance, as if he was a magician whose trick had been spoiled at the crucial moment. ‘About twelve hours ago, Mitchell boarded a Black Hawk chopper heading for one of our firebases about fifty miles east of Kabul. He never made it back.’
He brought up another image, this one showing the charred and blackened remains of what might once have been a helicopter airframe. Drake could only assume the fuel tanks had gone up, because the entire thing looked as if it had been blasted apart from the inside. The metal skeleton was warped and twisted by the extreme heat.
‘His chopper was brought down by some kind of surface-to-air missile while en route to Bagram,’ Breckenridge went on. ‘By the time a search-and-rescue team arrived on site, well, there wasn’t much left to recover. Five men were killed in the attack – the pilots, plus three army passengers.’
‘What about Mitchell, sir?’ Frost asked. Something about the way she said ‘sir’ held a note of contempt – a fact that was not lost on Breckenridge.
He looked at her for a few moments, seemingly on the verge of rebuking her, then thought better of it. ‘About an hour ago, we received this.’
A couple of mouse clicks, and the display changed as a video file started to play. Drake once again found himself looking at Hal Mitchell, only this time he was looking very different from his file photo.
This time the man was duct-taped to a crude wooden chair, his mouth gagged, his clothes ripped and torn and stained with blood, from injuries sustained either in the crash or afterwards. His head lolled to one side, his eyes barely open, one of them blackened and swelling shut.
Drake felt his stomach churn. He had seen videos like this before, and could guess where this one was heading.
The camera, shaky and clearly manipulated by an amateur, zoomed out a little to show Mitchell’s surroundings. He was in a room of some kind. There was a bare brick wall behind him, the mortar crumbling, the stones cracked and stained in places by yellow mould. Electric light was coming from an off-camera source, though it flickered from time to time as if the bulb was about to give out.
Another man walked into view. Dressed in loose flowing trousers, a heavy, worn-looking camouflage jacket and ancient webbing that looked as if it had been pilfered from a dead Russian twenty years earlier, it didn’t take a genius to work out that he was an insurgent. He was tall and lean, and even the thick jacket couldn’t mask his spare frame.
He was an older man, his skin leathery and lined from years of sun and wind, his heavy brows and thick beard greying. Drake could have sworn he recognised him but immediately discounted the possibility. There was no way the man he was thinking of could be on this video.
‘You know now what we can do,’ he began, his voice deep and heavily accented. ‘None of your men are safe from us. Not on the ground, not in the cities, and not in the air. We can strike anywhere we wish, at any time. Nothing can stop us, because we are Allah’s holy warriors. Everywhere we go, we will root out traitors, unbelievers and spies.’
At this, he gestured to Mitchell.
‘You send men like this to our country to turn our own people against us, to ask the faithful to betray their brothers. And you dare to call us terrorists?’
Reaching into his heavy camouflage jacket, he withdrew an automatic pistol. Drake couldn’t be sure, but it looked like a Browning 9mm; a reliable old semiautomatic that had been around since the 1930s.
But there was another thing Drake noticed as he pulled the jacket aside to draw the weapon. The last two fingers of the man’s hand were missing. In that instant, he felt as though a knife had been driven into his stomach.
He knew this man.
Without hesitation, the insurgent aimed the gun downwards and calmly squeezed the trigger. There was a flash, a sharp crack, and suddenly Mitchell was no longer semi-conscious. His body went rigid and he strained against his bonds, screaming into his gag, his eyes wide with agony. A crimson stain was now spreading out across the left leg of his trousers.
‘Fuck …’ Frost said under her breath, shaking her head.
Drake ignored her, concentrating instead on the video.
The gag muffled Mitchell’s cries, but the gunman was forced to raise his voice to be heard when he spoke again.
‘You are illegally holding dozens of our brothers captive inside the Parwan Detention Facility. You will release these prisoners, make a public statement condemning the illegal torture and interrogation of innocent men, and shut down the facility for ever. If you do this, your man will be returned to you unharmed. Well, more or less.’ With malicious glee, he pressed the barrel of his pistol into the bullet wound on Mitchell’s leg, prompting another agonised groan. ‘If you do not comply by midday on August 14th, we will execute this spy and shoot down more of your aircraft. And believe me when I say our next target will be … bigger.’
A moment later, the screen was replaced by a blur of movement as the camera operator turned the device on its side to power it down, then at last the feed went blank.
Silence reigned for several seconds as each of them digested what they had seen and heard, though Drake was quick to break it.
‘Tell me that isn’t who I think it is, Dan.’ The initial shock of his discovery was rapidly giving way to anger.
Franklin shook his head. ‘Facial recognition confirmed it. It’s him, Ryan.’
Frost glanced at the two men. ‘What’s the deal here? Who is this asshole?’
‘His name’s Kourash Anwari. We believe he’s former Mujahideen,’ Franklin explained. ‘He fought against the Soviets back in the eighties, then formed his own militia group during the civil war that followed. Mercenaries, basically. They pretty much dropped off our radar once the Taliban came to power. It was only after we invaded in 2001 that he appeared again, this time working for the insurgents.’
‘The Taliban hiring mercs now?’ Keegan asked.
‘We do. Why shouldn’t they?’ Franklin shrugged. ‘It’s a case of supply and demand, really. Now that al-Qaeda’s on the ropes, there’s a big market for trained men ready to fight.’
The CIA, along with various other military and intelligence agencies, had been quietly eliminating many of al-Qaeda’s senior leaders over the past seven years, more or less crippling their higher command structure. As a result, al-Qaeda had to all intents and purposes ceased to exist as a coherent organisation. These days it was a fictitious blanket term used only by the news media.
The reality was far more complex, and ever changing. Factions and splinter groups were on the rise, m
ade up either of lower-level al-Qaeda commanders, former Mujahideen who had once fought alongside the West against the Soviets, or new groups eager to join the global jihad. Freed from any form of centralised command or control, and able to indulge their wildest excesses, these groups were rapidly becoming a nightmare for Western intelligence agencies.
‘We eventually caught up with him near the Pakistan border. We sent in a strike team to take him down.’ Franklin glanced over at Drake, who had remained silent throughout this discussion. ‘Ryan led the team. He’s also the reason the guy’s missing a couple of fingers.’
Finally Drake looked up. ‘And now he’s free and shooting down helicopters,’ he said, his tone faintly accusing. ‘Care to explain why, Dan?’
Franklin cleared his throat and looked down at the folder in front of him. ‘Anwari was being held in one of our … facilities in the east of the country.’
He was referring to a Black Site, Drake knew. Such facilities were scattered all across Afghanistan, and usually served as secure locations where terrorist suspects could be held without trial, interrogated and tortured without official accountability. Since nobody knew they existed, human rights laws could be effectively disregarded there.
‘Apparently the facility was attacked in a coordinated night raid. In the confusion, Anwari and several others managed to get out.’
Drake shook his head, hardly believing what he was hearing. He had risked his life to take that piece of shit out of the game for ever, and now here he was, back to his winning ways.
‘That was last year. Since then, Anwari has reconstituted his militia group and started a guerrilla war against us. They’ve staged at least a dozen bombings in and around Kabul, plus sniper and RPG attacks. Now it seems they’re moving up in the world, literally. Shooting down aircraft is a whole new ball game.’
Air superiority was one of the few advantages that ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) enjoyed over the insurgents. If they lost control of the air, the war in Afghanistan was quickly going to turn into the second Vietnam that everyone had always feared it would.
