Fire Hawk

by Geoffrey Archer

  ‘How did I get here?’ he asked, testing them. The haze was beginning to clear.

  ‘They drugged you with something,’ Mowbray hedged. He indicated the Arab and added, ‘This man’s a Jordanian doctor.’ Then his eyes narrowed so Sam would understand to be careful about what he said in his presence. ‘He wants to examine you.’

  ‘Yes, my friend. If you don’t mind.’ The doctor’s voice was flat and dispassionate. ‘Do you have any pains?’

  Who wouldn’t have pains, after what you lot have done to me? Sam wanted to say, but he held his tongue, badly wanting to believe that he truly was free.

  ‘Back’s sore,’ he answered carefully, ‘and my shins feel as if they’ve been worked on with a potato peeler.’

  ‘Of course. You’ve been seriously maltreated. But inside? Any internal pain?’ The doctor prodded Sam’s chest and stomach with the tips of his fingers. ‘Does this hurt?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. All right. Try to sit up, Mister Packer. I want you to drink some water.’

  You and me both, thought Sam. Glancing from face to face, still searching for some definitive confirmation that what was happening was real, he let them lever him upright and reposition the pillows behind him. Then he reached out a hand for the glass being offered, but it slipped through his jelly-like fingers.

  ‘Let me,’ said the doctor, holding it against his lips.

  Sam took a huge slug and choked, the water sticking to the sides of his throat.

  ‘Slowly. Just a little,’ the doctor urged.

  Sam sipped more cautiously. This time the liquid descended, his body absorbing it like blotting paper.

  He looked down at himself. Someone had undressed him, apart from white underpants that he didn’t recognise as belonging to him. His bare chest was a rainbow of bruises and burns.

  ‘Let me feel your back.’ The doctor pushed gently in the region of his kidneys.

  ‘Ouch!’

  ‘Yes. Very tender, I think.’

  ‘Fucking painful, actually.’

  ‘Yes. It will be so for several days. There is serious bruising here.’

  Sam looked beyond the two men, noticing rabbits on the wallpaper, furry toys heaped in a corner. A computer on a small desk. This was a child’s bedroom.

  ‘Where is this?’ he asked.

  ‘My place,’ Mowbray explained. ‘My home in Amman. Jenny, my daughter – it’s her room, but she’s away at school. In Somerset.’

  ‘Where in Somerset?’

  ‘Frome.’

  The way Mowbray had answered straight away, the way everything in this room apart from the medic was so utterly English, Sam suddenly knew it was right. Knew that at last he could drop his guard.

  ‘Chri–ist!’ His mouth twitched. His eyes began to fill. ‘Christ.’ He gulped. ‘Sorry . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Mowbray took his hand and held it like he would a child’s. ‘Let it out, old man. You must’ve been through hell.’

  Sam pulled his hand back. He disliked being touched in any personal way by men. He pressed both hands to his face to try to get its muscles under control.

  ‘Well, I’ll be buggered.’ His face split into a smile. ‘I thought I was dead, you know that? Thought you’d all given up on me. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.’

  ‘It’s all right, old man,’ Mowbray reassured him, new-mannishly. ‘You can do both if you like.’

  Suddenly Sam himself grabbed Mowbray’s hand and shook it. Then he shook the doctor’s too. ‘Thank you. Thank you both,’ he mouthed, lost for any other words.

  Mowbray chuckled matily.

  Sam looked around him again, blinking back tears and relishing the cosy normality of the room. Daylight glowed through a little curtained window and was brightening by the minute. No iron bars across it, no blindfolds or chains. And two faces with smiles on them. From somewhere outside he heard the wail of a muezzin. Dawn.

  ‘Thank Christ!’ he wheezed. ‘I mean Allah,’ he joked lamely.

  Mowbray laughed with unnatural vigour. ‘The first words of the hostage after his release!’

  Sam frowned at the word ‘hostage’. Was that what he’d been? He drank some more water, his brain building up revs.

  ‘I can’t begin to tell you how this feels.’ He tried a grin. ‘How did this . . . this miracle come about?’

  Mowbray didn’t answer, but turned to the doctor and asked, ‘Will he be okay now?’

  ‘Nothing obviously wrong with him, but he should have a proper examination. X-rays. He should rest for twenty-four hours. And in a day or two get someone to change those dressings I put on his legs.’

  ‘Of course. He’ll get a thorough check when he’s back in London.’

  Mowbray shook the doctor’s hand and the Arab leaned towards Sam. ‘You are most welcome in Jordan,’ he breathed formally. Then he left. They heard his feet on the stairs and the front door closing.

  They were alone now, and Sam saw the bonhomie drain from Mowbray’s eyes as he became a single-minded Six man again.

  ‘Okay. Now we can talk,’ Mowbray began. ‘Just needed the quack to confirm you were still alive. And I have to tell you we weren’t at all sure when we first clapped eyes on you.’

  Sam leaned back against the propped up pillow and rested his head. He felt absurdly weak.

  ‘You’re not the only one,’ he whispered. ‘When that bloody needle went into my arm I thought I was on my way to Saint Peter.’

  ‘Ah. So they did give you an injection.’ Mowbray pulled up a pink-painted nursery chair, swung it round next to the bed and straddled it, clasping his hands together and resting his elbows on the back. ‘Presumably did it so you wouldn’t make trouble at the border if the thing went for a ball of chalk.’

  ‘What thing? What happened? You’re saying there was a deal?’

  ‘A swap happened. You for that man Salah Khalil you sent the signal about.’

  ‘What?’ He’d thought Khalil a fiction. ‘But swaps are Cold War stuff. Six doesn’t work like that these days.’

  ‘The chap had fled Baghdad,’ Mowbray explained. ‘With a load of Saddam’s money, by the sound of it. Turned up in London offering his services and asking for asylum. We didn’t like the look of him much anyway and when your warning came through that he was suspect, it sort of clinched it.’

  ‘But London negotiated? With the Mukhabarat?’ Sam was aghast.

  ‘Wouldn’t normally. But SIS wanted you out of there very badly. Just as badly as the Iraqis wanted Khalil back. Presumably now they’ve got him they’ll blow his brains out.’

  Sam stared at Mowbray. Was that what his arrest and torture had been about? All that horror just because the Iraqis needed a British hostage to swap for a thief? Not that simple. It couldn’t be.

  ‘Now look, there’s not much time.’ Mowbray spoke briskly. ‘They’re waiting in London. Waiting for the report of my debrief. I’ll have to trot across to the embassy in a minute to send it. They desperately want to know what the other part of your message meant. “BW attack alert”. Biological warfare, yes?’

  ‘Yes. Anthrax. I’d been given a tip-off that anthrax warheads had been slipped out of Iraq. To be used in an attack.’

  ‘Christ! Used where? And when?’

  ‘That’s the trouble. I don’t know.’ He saw Mowbray’s face fall. ‘A man came up to me in the hotel in Baghdad. An Iraqi. Scared witless. The bugger addressed me by my real name. They knew who I was, Quentin.’

  ‘Yes. So we gathered.’ Mowbray sucked in his cheeks. ‘We’d better come back to that.’

  ‘Not down to me, that one,’ Sam insisted. ‘Everything I did was watertight.’

  ‘Of course,’ Mowbray replied neutrally. ‘Anyway, tell me about this man at the hotel.’

  ‘He shoved a letter in my hand. When I opened it a few minutes later it contained the warning about Khalil, nothing else.’

  ‘Nothing about anthrax?’

  ‘Not in the note. The man whispered
that warning.’

  ‘What, exactly?’

  ‘Anthrax warheads taken out of Iraq and soon to be used. Just that. Nothing more. Then he ran off.’

  Sam felt giddy all of a sudden. He put his hands to his head.

  ‘Drink some more water,’ suggested Mowbray, holding up the glass for him. ‘When did you last eat anything?’

  ‘Don’t remember. But I could certainly do with something.’

  ‘Yes of course. Look, my wife’s away in England, the maid doesn’t come on a Sunday and I’m not much use in the culinary department,’ he explained uncomfortably. ‘But I could open a tin of fruit. Give you a bowl of cornflakes with it. Boil an egg if you like. Sorry, it’s not exactly—’

  ‘It’s perfect,’ Sam assured him.

  Mowbray made to stand up, but Sam stopped him.

  ‘But in a minute. Let me finish. That man in the hotel – he must have been a Mukhabarat stooge if the whole point of the game was to arrange a swap. The note he gave me, the warning to beware of Salah Khalil – it’s obvious now that they wanted me to pass it up the line. To make London think Khalil was an agent of Saddam, not a defector, so we’d be keen to get rid of him.’

  ‘That’s pretty clear.’

  ‘But the warning about the anthrax warheads – I’m sure that wasn’t part of the Mukhabarat plan. For some reason – don’t ask me why – the guy was operating on his own on that one.’

  ‘You think? Makes little sense,’ Mowbray countered. ‘Why should a police stooge know anything about the Iraqi biological warfare programme?’

  ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense, but I’m sure I’m right about this.’

  ‘Why? Why so adamant?’

  ‘Because the Mukhabarat tortured him too, Quentin. They were so bloody desperate to get him to reveal what he’d whispered to me that they beat him to death.’

  ‘How d’you know that?’

  ‘I saw the body.’

  ‘Ah.’ Mowbray frowned with concentration. ‘But how do you know that’s what they were trying to get out of him?’

  ‘Because it’s why they did this.’ Sam pointed down to his bandaged shins. ‘Trying to get me to reveal what the man said.’

  ‘I see.’ Mowbray became thoughtful. ‘But they didn’t succeed.’

  ‘I think not. Not with me certainly. I tried to convince them that what the guy had whispered was of no consequence whatsoever.’ He frowned. ‘And I must have convinced them. If they’d thought I knew where and when the anthrax was to be used, then presumably they wouldn’t have let me out.’

  ‘You’re assuming the security men who held you also knew about the plans for an anthrax attack?’

  ‘Well . . . yes.’

  Mowbray’s elbows were still on the back of the nursery chair. He tapped his fingers together.

  ‘Interesting. I’ll think about that while I sort you something to eat.’

  He got up. As he was leaving the room, Sam told him not to bother with the egg.

  The more Packer thought about what had happened the more he realised how little he understood. But his mind was beginning to work again. The drug’s after-effects were lifting fast.

  Mowbray returned with a wooden tray. ‘Best I can do in the circs,’ he apologised.

  ‘You’ve done me proud.’ Seeing the bowl of tinned fruit salad reminded him of wardroom meals in the Navy. Not top of his food favourites, but this morning it tasted good.

  ‘Going back to your theory,’ Mowbray pressed him. ‘What motive would the man have for telling you about the anthrax?’

  ‘Because he wanted us to prevent the attack happening. Knew what was planned and didn’t want the deaths on his conscience. That’s a guess. I don’t know.’

  ‘A philanthropic act? Assuming rather a lot, aren’t you?’

  ‘Gut instinct, that’s all.’

  ‘I’m not sure they’ll go for that in London,’ Mowbray warned him. ‘If the man was just a stooge for the security people, how on earth could he have access to top-secret info on the BW programme?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  There’d be long faces in London when he got home. Severe disappointment at the paucity of the intelligence he’d garnered.

  ‘No,’ Mowbray insisted. ‘That informant must have been under orders to tell you about the anthrax as well as give you the letter. Extra bait to make us want to go for the deal.’

  ‘Then why beat the shit out of him? And me.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What are you saying, Quentin? We’re going to ignore the warning because we don’t think it’s true?’

  ‘Not ignore, no. Don’t worry. The prospect of anthrax being released in the London Underground or the New York subway is so horrific, any hint of an imminent threat’s going to be taken extremely seriously. It’s already been passed on to the Americans and the Israelis, for what it’s worth.’

  Sam rested against the pillows for a moment. He was thinking about Chrissie now. She hadn’t let him down. But the logistics of his release still puzzled him.

  ‘Who made the first move about getting me out?’ he asked. ‘Us or the Mukhabarat?’

  ‘They did. But actually Sam, it wasn’t the Mukh.’ Mowbray’s eyebrows bunched. ‘Seems to have been some other security organisation that we haven’t been able to identify yet. Saddam has plenty of them, as you know. To tell the truth we’re not exactly sure who we’ve been dealing with.’

  Sam stared in astonishment. ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Well, the first I knew about any of this was a phone call, out of the blue, from a man describing himself as Colonel Omar of Iraqi counter-intelligence – a cover name, I presumed. I mean, that alone was a shock. I never have direct contact with Saddam’s security people. He said they’d arrested a British spy in Baghdad called Packer and that he would be tried and executed. Then he came straight out with the offer to swap you for Khalil. A quick deal with no publicity, he said. Told me he would ring again in a couple of days for a response. Now, I knew of your presence in Baghdad because London had briefed me, so I rang the Rashid Hotel and they confirmed that “Terry Malone” hadn’t used his room for two nights.’

  ‘But London agreed to the deal? Just like that?’

  ‘No. They were highly suspicious. Didn’t want to touch it. You see, it wasn’t for another couple of days that your German friend remembered to phone your message through. Only after they got your cryptic warning about a BW attack did the Firm start taking things seriously.’

  ‘I see.’ What if the German had never remembered? Would he still be in Baghdad?

  ‘Colonel Omar rang me every other day. Always on a satellite phone, judging by the echo. Wouldn’t give me a number to call him back on. Odd man.’ Mowbray’s thin lips curved in a faint smile. ‘Had the sort of plummy voice you’d expect in an officers’ mess in Wiltshire.’

  ‘Good God!’ Sam sat up with a jolt. ‘But that must’ve been Sandhurst. He was my interrogator.’

  ‘Really?’ Mowbray’s eyes popped.

  ‘And the same bloke was in charge of transporting me to the border.’

  ‘Extraordinary. Sounds almost like a one-man operation,’ Mowbray murmured, deeply perplexed. ‘There were others I take it?’

  ‘Three of them altogether that I was aware of, plus the messenger. Sandhurst and one other less senior man arrested me and worked me over in the interrogation room. The same two took me to the border. I was blindfolded, so there could have been others involved, but I don’t think so.’

  ‘And the third man?’

  ‘Saw him for just a couple of minutes when they forgot to cover my eyes after they’d shown me what they’d done to the messenger. An older man. Greying hair and moustache. I got the clear impression he was in charge.’

  ‘I see.’ Mowbray stood up from the chair and crossed to the window, half-opening the curtains. A hazy dawn light had turned the flat-roofed Amman skyline into a mass of pink cubes. ‘You say they knew from the start th
at you worked for SIS?’ he checked, without turning his head. ‘Could that just have been a good guess?’

  ‘They knew my real name, Quentin. They’d need to be world champions at guessing to have worked that one out.’

  Mowbray sat down again. He seemed to be puzzling over what to tell London.

  ‘How did they break your cover, d’you think?’ he asked with a casualness that wasn’t entirely natural.

  ‘I have no idea.’ Sam fixed Mowbray in the eyes. ‘But I’m determined to find out.’

  ‘So is London,’ Mowbray warned. ‘There’ve been mutterings already that you might have let something slip over a drink or three.’

  ‘They can mutter till their teeth fall out, it wasn’t me,’ Sam snapped.

  ‘Yes, but in their minds the alternative’s pretty frightening, you see. If the Iraqis knew about you because of some higher level security breach, then what other areas of SIS business might Saddam also have an inside track on?’

  ‘Well, they’d better start looking,’ Sam growled, sickened to be under suspicion from his own side after what he’d been through. He ran his fingers through his thick hair. He felt greasy and sweaty. Defiled.

  Mowbray shifted uncomfortably. ‘Look, will you be okay on your own for a couple of hours? I’ve got to go to the embassy to talk with London. If you want more to eat and drink, raid the fridge.’

  ‘I’ll be fine. By the way, what’s the date? I’ve lost track of time.’

  ‘Twenty-ninth of September. It’s a Sunday. They had you for about ten days.’

  And they were still beating the life out of him three days ago, while making final plans for the swap. He was right about the anthrax warning, he was sure of it. The messenger hadn’t been ordered to tell him.

  Suddenly Mowbray sat up dead straight and cocked his head like a heron listening for fish. He’d heard a car pull up outside. He stood up and peered through the window.

  ‘Damn.’ He made for the door. ‘Excuse me a moment.’

  Sam eased himself into a sitting position, realising he was still hungry. A plate of bacon and eggs and a mug of tea would do wonders. He began to look around for his clothes but couldn’t see any.

  He heard voices downstairs – Mowbray saying ‘bad idea’ and ‘asked you not to come’. The second voice was little more than a murmur, but it sounded like a woman’s.