Fire Hawk

by Geoffrey Archer

  At first the captain hadn’t believed his story of working for SIS, depriving him of his pistol and keeping him under guard in the wardroom while checks were made through the ship’s secure satellite link with the Ministry of Defence. It was four in the morning before the dust had settled and a circuit was patched through to the duty officer at Vauxhall Cross.

  This morning HMS Devonshire had sailed from Odessa with the rest of the NATO flotilla at six a.m. The joint exercise with the Ukrainians was over. Once the frigate was well clear of the harbour, Sam had made his way to the quarterdeck at the stern and stood beside the sonar winch, holding Figgis’s PSM pistol in his fist. He’d found it hard to grasp the fact that he’d actually used this gun. Killed one man, injured another, possibly fatally. Without the gun he himself would be dead by now, of that he was certain. But he didn’t need it any longer, and it would be best for him and for Gerald Figgis if it were never found. He’d tossed the weapon into the scar of foam the Devonshire was carving into the smooth grey surface of the Black Sea.

  Then, for several minutes, he’d remained there by the rail, clutching the cassette of Dima Grimov’s horrific home video. It was evidence. The only proof that existed of Chrissie’s treachery. Yet what it contained was vile, scenes more obscene than the worst pornography. Above all it had shown a Chrissie he’d never known, one that he wanted no one else to see. With a wide swing of his arm he’d sent the tape spinning into the foam.

  Two hours later, well beyond Ukraine’s territorial waters, HMS Devonshire’s captain had obtained clearance for her helicopter to fly the two hundred miles to the Turkish metropolis, claiming that its passenger was in need of urgent medical attention back in England.

  The helicopter settled firmly onto the landing pad of Istanbul airport and shut down. Sam undid his straps and the crewman directed him out. Once on the tarmac he removed his bone dome, dry-suit and life-jacket and looked across the field to the airport passenger terminal. His onward flight to London was in two hours’ time, just before midday. Supposed to be a car to take him over there, but it wasn’t here yet.

  He’d found it hard talking to the anonymous duty officer in London a few hours ago. Particularly hard to tell the British Secret Intelligence Service that one of its agents had betrayed friends and country for a bag of cash, when the agent in question had been his own lover. Hard, too, to explain with cold detachment how he’d found himself killing the man who’d murdered her.

  He’d kept it as clinical as he could and to the point. Just the bare facts. The issue of whether MI6’s own Deputy Controller of Global Risks had been the source of Chrissie’s knowledge about his being dispatched to Baghdad could wait. Of more immediate concern to him had been the fate of Oksana Koslova. Rybkin had her name and address. If the Voroninskaya sought revenge for the death of Dima Grimov, it was conceivable she might become a victim. He’d asked that Figgis make plans to get her out – if that’s what she wanted. From everything she’d said to him he guessed it would be.

  It was adrenalin that had kept him going through the night, but by now it had burned off. He was dropping with exhaustion. During the helicopter flight across the Black Sea he’d kept nodding off, but the image of Chrissie’s terrified face being impaled by the funnel kept jerking him awake again. The shock of seeing her death and of discovering her base nature had been fermenting in his gut. He burned with anger now, anger at Grimov and Rybkin for their grotesque cruelty, at her for being so contemptuous of all those who’d trusted her, and at himself for having been so totally taken in.

  The crewman touched him on the arm and pointed off to their left. A fuelling bowser was drawing up to replenish the tanks of the helicopter and in its wake was the car that was to take him to the passenger terminal.

  London, 4.30 p.m.

  Duncan Waddell listened, his face devoid of expression.

  ‘Didn’t bring the videotape back with you, I suppose?’ he asked when Sam had finished.

  ‘No.’ Despite Waddell’s reproachful look he was glad he’d dumped it.

  They were meeting in the Isleworth flat.

  ‘Totally and utterly fucking horrific,’ Waddell growled, shaking his head. ‘To tell the truth it’s hard to believe that such a good-looking woman could be so diabolically devious.’ Then he smacked himself on the forehead. ‘What am I saying? She only deceived her own bloody husband for five long years!’

  He looked quizzically at Sam, slightly embarrassed by what he’d just said. After all, she’d fooled him too.

  ‘Has it occurred to you to think about how she knew?’ Sam asked acidly.

  ‘About you being in Baghdad, you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘First question that came into my head when I heard about your report to the duty officer.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I began to wonder when it was that you last saw her.’

  ‘What the hell does that mean?’

  ‘It’s just that Martin Kessler thinks it was rather more recently than either you or she made out. Thinks it was well after your relationship with her was officially over. A few days before you went to Baghdad, in fact.’

  ‘What? Kessler thinks I told her? What a load of bollocks!’

  ‘Well he’s quite adamant it wasn’t him.’

  ‘He bloody would be.’

  Waddell looked thoughtful.

  ‘For the record, when did you last see her before Baghdad?’

  ‘June.’

  The terrier face had a closed look about it now. ‘Leave it with me, will you?’

  Sam felt under suspicion again. ‘As long as you understand that she didn’t hear about Baghdad from me.’

  ‘I hear what you say,’ Waddell mouthed. ‘It is a pity you didn’t bring that tape back . . . Anyway, let’s move on to other things. We’ve arranged a visa for this Oksana Koslova woman – if she wants to take it up when she gets back to Kiev. Her brother will certainly be glad of her company here. He speaks no English. Nor does his wife.’

  ‘Are they miserable?’

  ‘He is. But his wife and daughter spend most of their time wandering round the shops with their mouths open.’

  ‘What about the Hawk drone?’ Sam asked. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘We don’t know. But it looks as if what Rybkin told you could be right. The SBU got onto us a couple of hours ago. We’d asked them for a list of container movements out of ports in the Odessa region. There weren’t many shipments on the dates in question and they’ve all been verified except for one box, a container of fruit and vegetable juice – supposedly – being sent back to Haifa because its contents had gone off. It left Ilychevsk twelve days ago for Piraeus. Has to be in Israel by now, according to the shippers. Shin Beth are peddling like billy-oh to track it down. They’re considering putting the civilian population in gas masks. And the defence forces are drawing up plans for an air-strike on Baghdad.’

  Sam narrowed his eyes. There was a niggle in the back of his mind, a suspicion they were being duped. He couldn’t explain why, other than that every time he’d met Rybkin he’d been deceived. Just because he’d been holding a gun to the man’s head this time didn’t mean he’d turned straight.

  ‘Rybkin is not to be trusted,’ he cautioned.

  ‘Dead right,’ Waddell concurred, ‘but as I said, there’s other evidence to support his line. We’re hopeful the Israelis will come up with the goods, but in the meantime we’re keeping an open mind. The attack could be anywhere. Riyadh, New York, London even. I think for the next few days it’s best you keep out of sight, just in case Hamdan is still around – we’ve found no trace unfortunately. You can stay here. There’s a divan in the room next door and we’ve stocked the fridge with food.’

  ‘Very thoughtful of you. But no. Home is where I want to be now. I like my own bed. There’s a police station down the road – you can tell them to keep an eye open around my place.’

  Waddell looked disappointed but not entirely surprised.

  Sam stood up
. ‘If you do get word from Israel, one way or the other, I wouldn’t mind a call. Just to set my mind at rest.’

  ‘Of course.’ Waddell stood up too. ‘You’ll want to be on your way. Must be exhausted. I told the car to wait, just in case you refused our hospitality.’

  On the drive back to Barnes sleep began to engulf him. The debrief with Waddell had been something of a watershed, a lifting of responsibility from his shoulders. The grownups had taken over again.

  There was, however, one issue that he was going to have to resolve before long. Because it was clear the SIS establishment was closing ranks around one of its own.

  Martin Kessler.

  12 noon EST

  Washington DC

  Dean Burgess picked his way through the open-plan general office of the Counter-Terrorism Center, up on the top floor of the FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue.

  ‘Going out?’ The question came from the pushy, raven-haired woman who occupied the pen next to his.

  ‘Just for a half hour.’

  ‘Like some company?’

  ‘I got things to do, Jess. But thanks for the offer.’

  She beamed a smile that said any time, and waved him on his way. Jess Bissett was one of the more attractive of his fellow special agents in the Counter-Terrorism Center, a nuclear weapons specialist. But she was a voracious divorcee and she scared the hell out of him.

  He took the elevator to the ground floor, sharing it as far as the second with his immediate boss in the department, Ive Stobal, a long-server in the FBI with the physique of a basketball player. Burgess left the building by the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance, heading for the deli he’d discovered soon after his move from New York and which suited his needs for a bag lunch.

  Since his return to Washington from Iraq at the beginning of the week he’d been urging Stobal and the other seniors in the department to treat the threat of an anthrax attack with deadly seriousness, but he’d come up against an insularity he hadn’t realised existed before. A feeling that since the threat had not been detected and processed by an American intelligence agency it shouldn’t be given total credence. It wasn’t until Tuesday morning, when the British revealed that a Ukrainian UAV had been procured as the attack platform, that the department began reacting seriously.

  The line at the deli was six deep – a five-minute wait, no more. Burgess was conservative in his lunch-time tastes. Chicken and mayo on rye, every time. It was a warm October day. The slash of sky that appeared between the blocks down here by the Federal Triangle was a hazy blue.

  News about the VR-6 Hawk on Tuesday had prompted a special conference at the FBI chaired by its hands-on director. A recent presidential directive had given the Bureau lead role in investigating terrorism in the USA, but the counter-terrorism team was still being built up. Suddenly they seemed to be facing a real threat, an anthrax attack that could be directed anywhere in the USA.

  If the terrorists were importing the drone in a shipping container it could enter the country through any one of half a dozen Atlantic ports between Houston and New York. No more than five per cent of arriving containers were spot-checked by US Customs in normal circumstances, Burgess had learned. Spreading the net wide would devour manpower. And if the Iraqis were being helped in the USA by Russian-émigré organised crime, that was a beast the FBI had been finding even tougher to crack than the Cosa Nostra. Some 350,000 former citizens of the Soviet Union now lived in the USA. Efforts to discover which of them might have links with the Voroninskaya Mafiya in Odessa had made little progress.

  This morning, however, the feeling that the crisis they faced might develop the unstoppability of a tornado had been eased by the reports suggesting it was Israel that was the intended target. Hence Burgess felt it okay to lunch outside the J. Edgar Hoover building today. It was the first time he’d done so that week. He was a natural ‘brown bagger’, preferring to eat on the move rather than line up for a table in the eighth-floor cafeteria.

  ‘Black pepper?’ He’d reached the head of the line. The Hispanic behind the counter had her thick black hair covered by a white baseball cap labelled ‘Bett’s Eats’.

  ‘Sure.’

  He paid for the sandwich and a can of soda then set off down 9th Street towards the open spaces of the Mall. He needed this break from the office. Needed room to think, so he could try to straighten his life out.

  He’d not been home to Westchester County since returning to the USA – one more misdemeanour for Carole to put on her list. Burgess well understood how hard it was for wives when husbands couldn’t explain their reasons for ignoring them. But what concerned him was not the marital chafing every FBI agent faced, but the fact that Carole seemed bent on turning a little bit of friction into outright war.

  Yes, she would come to Washington soon, she’d told him, but not to find a home and schools for the family to move to, which is what he wanted. She would be here on Saturday, along with tens of thousands of other American wives, children and their husbands, to attend the Pledge for the Family gathering that would end with a candlelit vigil in front of the Washington Monument. She wanted Dean there too, pledging himself in front of God and a host of witnesses to the care of her, Patty and Dean Jr. She wanted him to make the same commitment to his family that he’d made to the Bureau. Not more of a commitment – she wasn’t being unrealistic – but certainly not less.

  When he’d explained he couldn’t make it to the Pledge rally because a crisis had blown up, she’d begun yelling down the phone. Watch out, she’d said. On Saturday morning before the rally, she would be on that pavement outside the J. Edgar Hoover Building, holding a placard saying Give me back my husband, FBI.

  And Burgess knew she meant it. He knew too that with her Jamie Lee Curtis looks and feisty manner, she’d soon get attention from media crews looking for early coverage. She could well end up on the evening news shows, while he became the butt of jokes. A game for her in which she would have won a round, but a coffin nail for his career and for their marriage.

  Burgess crossed over Constitution Avenue when the lights turned green, glancing at the dome of the National Museum of Natural History to his right, then walked on down 9th Street until he reached the grass of the Mall. He’d been hoping to find some place to sit, but all the benches were taken and the grass was damp because there’d been a heavy shower an hour ago. He unwrapped his sandwich and began to eat while turning to his left and walking towards the Capitol.

  It had become clear to him in the last couple of days that either he or Carole was going to have to give way, or their marriage would be over. Either she must agree to move south to DC, or else he was going to have to ask to be reassigned to his old New York posting on compassionate grounds. But that would wrap his career in a concrete vest, which was something he couldn’t take.

  So, logically, it was Carole who was going to have to knuckle down and move her butt. The trouble was he was far from sure she would.

  Everywhere he looked on the broad lawns running between here and the Capitol he saw couples. Kids fresh from campus in crisply pressed shirts, locking into their first relationships funded by salary checks, and couples in their thirties and forties who’d never made it to the altar, or who were starting again – or cheating. All of them bonding because their hormones and their instincts told them to.

  Sometimes Burgess wondered if he had a deficiency in that department. He’d found Carole when he was sixteen and that had been it. She was exactly what he wanted. No teenage expectation of finding something better round the corner, no compulsion after marriage to bolster his ego with casual conquests. No overpowering sex need that couldn’t be discreetly satisfied on his own if Carole wasn’t around. Yes, he wanted her and the kids to be there for him, needed them to be there like he needed all four walls of his house to stay in place. But he wasn’t sure he had the fire in his guts to fight for it if it couldn’t be on his own terms.

  He stopped in his tracks, shocked by the conclusion he’d just reach
ed. Was he truly telling himself he was ready to sacrifice his marriage for his job?

  ‘Aw, heck!’

  That wasn’t right. He didn’t have to choose. Marriage and career could both be made to work.

  He began to climb the steps leading up to the west face of the Senate. A kite was being flown by a tall thin man with long black hair standing halfway up. Nearer the top were three or four oddballs holding VHF radios to their ears, monitoring the air traffic talk-back of flights passing by on their way into National airport.

  Burgess turned and looked back down the length of the Mall. Carole would be here on Saturday – and Patty and Dean Jr – hallelujah-ing with a bunch of born-again Jesus freaks in front of the Washington Monument. And she wanted him in among them.

  ‘Okay, hon,’ he mouthed.

  Now that the anthrax was heading for Israel and not the USA, maybe he could find the time for it. If it bought him some peace, then a little hypocrisy was a price he was happy to pay.

  He checked his watch. Time to get back to the Bureau. He cast a last curious glance at the plane spotters with the scanners, wondering what sort of vicarious pleasure they got from it. Most were young, but one guy was a little older than the others. He wore a long raincoat. Odd, thought Burgess. Must be cooking inside it on a day as warm as this.

  The man noticed him looking and turned away.

  A craggy face, Burgess noted. Like the head of a big dog, the top of which was covered by an English-looking cap.

  40

  Friday, 11 October

  London

  SAM AWOKE SUDDENLY from a deep sleep. He stared up at the plain white ceiling for several seconds before grasping that he was in his own bed in his own flat in Barnes.

  The phone was ringing. It was that which had woken

  The phone was ringing. It was that which had woken him. He stumbled to the kitchen to answer it, glancing at the wall clock. Ten minutes to ten. Hadn’t slept this late for an age.