Nomad

by James Swallow

  “Yes…” said the other man. “Right.”

  “No!” Marc shouted, surging to his feet, the headset falling away. “We can’t just leave!”

  “They are dead, Marc. The mission is blown.” Leon said the words in a flat, toneless voice. “You know the fall-back routine as well as I do. In the event of critical mission failure, extract to primary rendezvous and await further instructions.”

  He was shaking his head. “We can’t,” he repeated.

  Owen rounded on him. “Think, man! The whole town probably heard that explosion! Fire and police will be here in minutes, and if we get caught…” He let the statement hang.

  Marc blinked, feeling things spiraling away from him, out of his control. Owen was right. He had a brief vision of the three of them locked up in DCRI custody, trying to explain away why MI6 were at the site of a terrorist attack. If they were arrested, no help from Vauxhall Cross would be forthcoming.

  “Get us out of here,” ordered Leon.

  Marc looked away, still struggling to process the chain of events. “No,” he repeated. “We can’t leave them behind.”

  “Leave who?” Leon grabbed Marc’s arm, and the old man’s bony fingers were like iron rods. “We are all that is left. Get a grip, boy.” He frowned, a moment of emotion returning to his face. “Look, I know you care about Samantha, but—”

  The sound of her name was like a shock to his system, and Marc savagely tore himself from Leon’s grip. “We have to be sure!” he shouted, shoving the other man away from him. Pushed on by anger and fear, Marc threw himself at the rear doors and shouldered them open, leaping down to the wharf. He sprinted away, vanishing into the smoke.

  “What the hell does he think he’s doing?” called Owen. “Never leave the van, that’s the only fucking rule we never break!”

  Leon sagged against the console, and pulled his glasses from his face. “Two minutes. Just give him two minutes.”

  * * *

  The gunman rose slowly from behind the cover of the ventilator unit on the roof of the warehouse, coming up from a crouch as falling fragments of hull metal clattered down around him. The hot stink of burning diesel washed across the fading night and he advanced warily, pulling down the bulky gun bag on his shoulder.

  Reaching the edge of the roof, he crouched and tugged at the heavy zippers on the bag. The gunman paused, sparing a glance over at the burning ship.

  His orders had been very specific. Allow the targets to board; wait for the trap to be triggered; clean up any stragglers.

  The weapon in the bag resembled a thickset assault rifle with a muzzle like a drain pipe and a broad ammunition carousel. Colombian Army-issue, the RBG-6 was a multiple grenade launcher, capable of firing off 40mm grenade shells like bullets from a six-shooter. The gunman snapped open the carousel and fed high explosive rounds into the empty chambers, before bringing the weapon to his shoulder. Against the shimmers from the fires, he caught sight of something moving and turned to track it.

  * * *

  A wall of heat assailed Marc as he sprinted out across the dock, and he gulped in a lungful of smoky, thick air that made him cough. The inferno from the Palomino’s death throes hurled coils of flame into the pre-dawn sky, blanketing the area with low, black cloud.

  He was halfway to the edge of the dock before the heat ripped the speed right out of him, beating him back from the blazing ruin. Marc slowed, belatedly realizing that in his headlong rush he had left the truck without a radio or a weapon.

  “Stupid,” he muttered, shielding his face with his arm. “What the hell am I doing?” Marc staggered to a halt.

  Leon’s words were tolling in his thoughts like a bell, over and over. They are dead. They are dead. They are dead.

  A pall of grim certainty settled over him, robbing him of all momentum. The old man was right. He had to go back to the vehicle.

  They had to get away—but he couldn’t make his legs move, couldn’t turn around. It didn’t seem real. She couldn’t just be gone. Marc could not make himself believe it.

  “Sam!” All the anger and fear and panic exploded out of him in a single cry.

  Across the span of the dock, he saw the remnants of the metal gangway strewn nearby, and on the concrete, a ragged heap in the shape of a body.

  For a moment, Marc thought it was just the dance of the fires making the shadows jump, but he saw movement.

  Then he was running again, ignoring the stinging in his throat and lungs.

  * * *

  All the cloying, punishing heat from the fires went away when he found her. For a split second, it was as if he had been swallowed up by a wave of frigid, polar cold. The color drained from his cheeks as she struggled to look up at him, the whites of her eyes stained red where the capillaries had ruptured. Her pretty face was covered with a mask of blood and dirt.

  He remembered the tracker display; she had been on the side of the Palomino closest to the dock. When the explosion was triggered, she might have tried to make it to the gangway, hoping to flee the conflagration only to be picked up by the shockwave and hurled brutally down to the dock.

  Sam resembled a shop window dummy after a fire, blackened and smoldering. He bent and gathered her up in his arms, shouldering her weight. She gave a weak, hollow moan of agony and her head lolled forward.

  “I’ve got you,” Marc told her. “Come on!”

  She could barely walk, and he half-carried, half-dragged her across the dock, through the mess of debris. Sam felt strangely light against him, as if she had been hollowed out. Marc had the stink of burned hair and plastic in his nostrils, and she cried with every step, pulling on his jacket with her one uninjured hand. Her other arm hung limp and useless at her side.

  Sam gasped something and stumbled. Marc couldn’t keep his balance and she slipped away, dragging him down with her. The two of them collapsed against an overturned cargo container. He landed badly on his haunches and looked down. Marc’s hands were wet with dark arterial blood.

  “Oh no.” His throat went dry. “Sam. Sam, please, we have to get you to a doctor.”

  Without warning, she grabbed his collar in her fist and savagely pulled herself toward him. “Stop,” she said thickly. A foam of pink spittle gathered at the corner of her mouth. Something inside her was broken and bleeding. “Listen.” It took all her effort to focus on him. “Listen to me.”

  “Sam…”

  “They are dead,” she gasped, the effort of the words costing her. “Set-up. Killed us, Marc. Must have … Known we were getting close.”

  He didn’t understand what she meant. “Close to what?”

  “Traitor. At the Cross.”

  “In the Service?” said Marc, aghast at the suggestion.

  “In bed with…” Sam choked. “With those Combine bastards.” She stiffened and bit down on the pain, glaring at him. “You listen to me. Nash, Rix … We were on to something. Off-grid. We were … putting it together.”

  “You never said anything…” He trailed off.

  “Rix wanted … played close.” She took an agonized breath. “I trust you. Wasn’t that, Marc. I’m sorry.”

  “Who is it?” he demanded.

  “Not sure. But got … some proof.” Marc felt her hand slackening. “Camden Market. Remember?” Unbidden, a pained smile split Sam’s features, her eyes brimming with tears. “I loved it in Camden.”

  “I remember,” he told her, and a jagged dart of regret twisted in his gut. Marc pulled her closer. “Come on! This isn’t done yet…”

  He fell silent as he touched her stomach. Her clothes were soaked through with crimson.

  “Careful,” Sam gasped. “Careful who you trust.” She shuddered against him. “Sorry. Sorry.”

  With a surge of effort, Marc pulled Sam on to his shoulder, raising her into a fireman’s carry. “Stay with me!” he barked.

  His legs felt like they were made of lead, but Marc forced himself forward. In the distance there were the sounds of police sirens approachi
ng.

  Ahead of him, an empty cargo container threw out fat orange sparks as it skidded sideways across the concrete, bulldozed aside by the flat prow of the truck. He glimpsed Owen at the wheel, the Welshman’s face filled with near-panic as he flashed the headlights and stamped on the brakes.

  The boxy Renault juddered into a turn, the rear end skidding out toward Marc. The back doors flapped open, promising escape and safety.

  “We’re going, Sam!” he told her.

  Marc couldn’t be certain, but it sounded like she said something back to him. In that moment he paused and caught the sound of a hollow double report on the wind, from somewhere overhead.

  He looked up to see a pair of fist-sized shells describing downward arcs from the roof of the nearest warehouse. The first hit the ground on the far side of the vehicle, exploding on impact, and the second smashed through the thin roof of the cargo bed, detonating inside the Renault.

  The truck left the ground and flipped over, coming apart from within in a secondary firestorm. Leon and Owen were consumed in the fireball, but Marc never saw it happen. The blast tore Sam’s limp body from his grasp and threw the pair of them back across the dock, both spinning wildly into the oil-choked water below.

  Marc caught a glimpse of a figure silhouetted atop the warehouse roof as he tumbled away, but the fire lashed at him, blotting it out; and then he was striking the churn of the Bassin de Mardyck canal.

  The stinging impact of the water ripped the breath from his lungs and Marc twisted, a froth of bubbles wreathing his head. Patches of burning oil on the surface of the channel gave the murk an infernal cast. He saw Sam drifting in the dimness, her body falling away from him. Blood swirled around her in a black haze, like slow smoke.

  He reached for her, their fingertips meeting briefly, but she didn’t respond. Her face turned in the wake of the motion and Sam’s eyes stared blankly back at him.

  He screamed out in defiance and grief, the last breath in his lungs lost in the act. His chest burning, Marc desperately tried to swim after her, but she was fading into the gloom, receding faster than he could follow.

  The currents took Sam from him and dragged her down.

  * * *

  Dull daylight attenuated by smoke cast long pools of shadow around the edges of the warehouse as the sun slowly advanced up from the horizon. In the cold illumination of the morning, the building looked empty and menacing.

  Part of the shadows in the alley in front of the entrance broke off and moved swiftly across to the heavy wooden doors, there resolving into a figure that followed the wall to the lock mechanism, which was concealed inside a welded steel security box.

  Marc reached inside for the combination padlock that had been there the night before and found it gone. He pawed at it blankly, for a moment not understanding what he was looking at.

  He blinked, frowning. Ever since he had dragged himself out of the harbor channel, it had been as if he had surrendered control of his actions, as if some internal autopilot was driving him. He was running on pure reaction now, barely thinking, his mind ceded to instinct.

  The missing lock didn’t make sense. The post-operation schedule was that Nomad would regroup and return to the warehouse. Once there, the unit would secure their gear, then disperse and exfiltrate from France along individual transit routes set up by Hub White. Succeed or fail, that was how the procedure went. Even if it was only one man coming back, even if the mission had been blown wide open …

  Marc halted, breathing hard. The grim nature of his circumstances pressed down on him like a great weight, and it threatened to crush him. He sensed raw panic out there on the edges of his thoughts, ready to come in and engulf all reason if he let it. All his training, from the Navy to the OpTeams and everything in between, none of it had prepared him for this, to be a sole survivor. Marc Dane had been part of a team for so long, it was almost impossible to imagine himself outside of that metric.

  But now everything had been torn away. His safe zone, his squad mates, all gone. Marc looked up as the first few drops of rain began to fall around him, and a sense of isolation chilled him.

  The missing lock … That was a warning sign. Someone had been here. He knew that he should keep on walking, find a route away from the docks and out of Dunkirk—but to where?

  * * *

  Inside, the collapsible benches, work lamps and generator were where they had been left, but with only the weak, watery sunshine the warehouse interior was steeped in shadow. Motes of dust kicked up by his arrival drifted through shafts of daylight, reminding him of the play of the murk in the dock canal. He pushed the thought away, still feeling the cold and damp of his clothes against his flesh.

  Marc threaded his way through the lines of tall support pillars holding up the iron roof and approached the benches warily, looking for the cases the OpTeam had left in place before departing for the sortie. The cases were exfiltration kits. Inside were new number plates for the Renault and rolls of plastic film sporting massive self-adhesive logos that could be applied to the truck’s bodywork to change its appearance. There were also kits for each of Nomad’s team members, fresh clothes and temporary identity packs—so-called “snap covers,” made up of passports, credit cards, even pocket litter like ticket stubs and gum wrappers. Once the mission was over, they would slip into these short-term legends, blend in and vanish.

  All the cases were open, their contents missing.

  That made no sense. Who could have known that we were here? Marc glanced at his wrist. The dial of his dive watch was smeared with dirt, but the works were undamaged. No more than two hours had passed since the explosion at the docks.

  In the event of a catastrophic mission failure, there were plans in place to sanitize all traces of an operation—especially in a situation like the Palomino raid, where discovery could instigate a major diplomatic incident—but Marc could not believe that the security services had put such things into motion so swiftly.

  If not them, then who?

  A metal folding chair lay on its side next to the benches and Marc stooped to right it. He fell into the seat and ran his hands over his face and through his hair. He felt cold deep in his core, a holdover from the shock and the water still seeping through his clothes, his shoes.

  The panic was there again, coming close, darkening everything like the passage of a storm cloud before the sun. Marc shook his head, pushing the sensation back with a physical action. It would have been easy to give in to it, to release—but he had been trained for this. He was the last one left, and it could not end with him.

  I need answers.

  He opened his eyes, and saw something in the depths of the shadows, out by the vehicle doors. He blinked and looked again, for a moment certain that the fatigue and the stress of the last few hours were playing tricks on him.

  There was a dark-colored four-door Fiat parked close to the wall, tucked in so that it wouldn’t be immediately apparent to anyone entering the warehouse. The car had most definitely not been there when the OpTeam had left.

  Marc rose slowly to his feet, and now the chill running through him was of a different stripe. Every muscle in his body was screaming at him to run, to get the hell out of there. He could hear Leon and Owen in his thoughts, both of them chiding him for ignoring operational rules. You should have run. You should have run and not looked back.

  He walked to the car, slow and careful, breathing through an open mouth to keep his silence, straining hard to hear the sounds of the derelict space around him. The warehouse gave up nothing, and peering into the shadows was fruitless.

  On the bonnet of the black Fiat was a heavy gear bag made of dark nylon, lying there as if it had been discarded by someone with more important issues to address. The bag was military spec, the same style as the kit carried by Sam, Rix and the rest. Marc threw a wary glance over his shoulder and reached for it, drawing open the zipper. Held inside under folding Velcro straps was a grenade launcher. He remembered the sound—

&nbs
p; A hollow double report on the wind, from somewhere overhead.

  As his fingers touched the frame of the weapon, from behind him Marc heard the very clear, very distinct sound of footsteps.

  “Do not be stupid.” The words came with the hard edges of German-taught English. “Raise your hands.”

  * * *

  The gunman stepped out from behind the pillar, aiming the Sig Sauer semi-automatic at a spot directly between the British agent’s shoulder blades. The lengthy silencer attached to the muzzle of the weapon doubled its length, and it did not waver.

  With exaggerated care, the agent put up his arms. He could see him staring into the windscreen of the Fiat, attempting to get a view of the gunman though the reflection in the glass.

  “Hey, I didn’t steal anything,” he said, playing dumb in passable French. “I was just looking for a place to crash.”

  The gunman advanced until he was a few feet from the other man. “Do not lie to me. I will ask the questions. If you move, I will kill you. If you lie, I will kill you.” There was a faint line of damp footmarks across the dusty concrete of the warehouse floor, left by the agent’s ruined shoes. He gave off a musky, stale odor, like a wet dog. “You escaped from the canal. Who is with you?” asked the gunman.

  “I can’t help you,” came the reply, in English this time. He seemed too tired to keep up the pretense.

  The gunman paused, considering how best to proceed. After the destruction of the ship and the obliteration of the vehicle, he had believed his job to be complete. The surveillance of the staging area was little more than a formality, something a less thorough operative might not have bothered with; but the gunman had a methodical manner that bordered on the pathological.

  Escaping the scrutiny of the Sûreté through the chaotic arrival of the emergency services had been simple. Police cars were the first on site at the wharf, and in those precious few minutes while they were still evaluating the situation, he had reversed the non-reflective jacket he wore to reveal a passable copy of a midnight blue Police Nationale coat. In the turmoil it was enough. He wasn’t challenged as he made his way out to where the Fiat was hidden.