Nomad

by James Swallow

  “For the moment, let’s move on to a different concern.” Welles threw a glance at his pad. “His escape route. The vehicle, the woman. Let’s talk about them.”

  Talia had given image captures from the embassy’s exterior security cameras a priority run through every available database, and now she manipulated one of the screens to bring up a ladder of images. “We’re working on getting traffic camera footage from the police in Rome, but the Italian secret service are dragging their heels. They said, and I quote: ‘The Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Democratica expect complete disclosure of the situation in order to facilitate full cooperation.’ They’re making a lot of noise about what they see as a terrorist incident in their capital.”

  “We’re telling them it was a hoax,” said Lane. “They’re not buying it.”

  Talia went on. “Without street footage, we can’t lock down where the vehicle went after leaving the area, but our teams in image analysis have some facts about the car itself.” She showed them a computer model of the dark-colored Toyota RAV4. “Based on the weight distribution and axle height, the car was fitted with bulletproofing and other modifications. There’s also evidence that they launched some kind of surveillance drone.”

  “Show us the woman,” said Welles.

  Off a nod from Royce, Talia brought up a different image, this one a blurry still of a dark face peering out of an open car door.

  “Facial mapping gave us a good hit,” she explained. “We found a seventy-one percent probability match.”

  “Who is Dane’s new friend?” Welles studied the still, taken just as Marc had vaulted toward the waiting SUV.

  “When I ran her through the NATO force records database, we came across this.” The picture of the woman was replaced by a different image; the same face but younger, somehow harder. In the second photograph she was dressed in the sand-and-brown shades of a United States Army desert camo uniform.

  “Lucille Roshanne Keyes,” said Welles, reading out the name appended to the file. “Says there she was in the logistics corps.”

  “That’s American shorthand for special forces,” noted Farrier.

  “Why would the cousins want to grab Dane?” said Royce.

  “We don’t think they did.” Talia shook her head. “Keyes isn’t with the Americans any more, at least as far as we can tell.” She put up a different file, and this one was an arrest warrant. “Full details are classified, but there was an incident that resulted in Keyes being dishonorably discharged and convicted of criminal conduct. She was sentenced by a closed military court and remanded to the Naval Consolidated Brig in Miramar, Florida. Information on what she did and the terms of her punishment are redacted.”

  Welles pointed at the screen. “She can’t be in a military prison and a Rome backstreet at the same time.”

  “We have fragmentary reports about an escape four years ago from Miramar,” Talia went on. “Keyes’s details appear on a fugitive watch list very shortly afterward. I’ll need to reach out to the US Department of Defense or the CIA if we want hard data.”

  Royce shook his head. “Don’t do that unless we have absolutely no other option. The last thing we want is the Langley boys getting involved in this. Sir Oliver would hang the lot of us.”

  “Still time for that,” Welles retorted. “So we have a former US spec ops shooter, possibly still being run by the Americans but more likely selling herself to the highest bidder, acting as taxi driver for a rogue British intelligence officer. Who wants to be the one to break news of this delightful development to the director and the JIC?” No one spoke, and so he turned his glare on Farrier. “You listen to me. I want you on the next RAF transport back to Brize Norton, is that clear?”

  Farrier looked to Royce for support, but the other man just shook his head. “There will need to be a more thorough debriefing,” Royce said.

  Talia saw Farrier’s stony expression slip for a moment, before it hardened once again. “All right.”

  “Lane, you handle things there. Lean on the locals, get that camera footage,” Welles told her. “We need to know where Keyes took him, if they’re still in Italy or not … Get it done.”

  “Yes, sir.” Lane gave a nod and the screens went dark.

  Welles rounded on Royce. “A redacted file. You know what that suggests, Donald? This Keyes woman did something so unpleasant that her commanders wanted her buried alive.” He drew in a sharp breath through his teeth. “That’s our phantom sniper. And I wouldn’t be surprised if she was there in Dunkirk to kill Dane’s team mates as well.”

  “You don’t know that—” Royce began, but there was no strength behind the denial.

  “Open your eyes!” Welles barked, startling Talia. “You think I’m trying to shaft you because of the checkered history between us? Well, let me make this crystal clear.” He leaned in. “As much as I dislike you, I will bring Marc Dane to book because I believe he’s responsible for killing British servicemen and betraying his oath to the crown, not because I want to knock off K Section. Now, you either get on side with me and fix the holes in your leaky ship, or you’ll go down with him.”

  He pushed past Talia and out of Hub White, his assistant trailing silently behind him.

  She turned to Royce, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze. “Sir, I…”

  “Just find him, Talia,” he said bleakly. “Before he can cause any more problems.”

  * * *

  The road degraded with every mile they traveled, losing the asphalt and then the dust and gravel until it was only the most basic suggestion of an actual track.

  A sun-faded Yeni Gün sign, the colors bleached away into nothing, rattled gently in the dry winds by the entrance to the orphanage compound.

  There was no movement around the discolored walls, and Lucy turned the Land Rover about in a slow crawl, the tires crunching on the desiccated earth. She scanned the windows, black squares punched through the sides of the silent blockhouses, looking for threats.

  As the grumble of the engine died, Marc heard the moan of the steady breeze, and the desolate cluster of buildings seemed like the loneliest place on Earth.

  “Stay alert,” said Lucy, reaching down into the wheel well to grab her backpack. “We don’t know what we’re gonna find here.” She reached inside and her hand came back with the compact shape of an MP7 submachine gun. She cocked it with a snap of the receiver, and handed Marc a walkie-talkie. “Just in case,” she added.

  Marc followed her out of the Land Rover, slipping out of the door with his bag over one shoulder. He had the Glock ready, close to his chest and his finger resting on the trigger guard. He felt acutely aware of every tiny detail around them, the crumbling rocks beneath his boots, the heavy heat of the late afternoon sun, the weight of the loaded gun.

  Lucy called out something in a language that sounded like Arabic and then again in English. “Anyone here? Show your face.” No answer came back to them, and she moved off.

  Marc kept with her, glancing at the razor-wire fences. All that was needed to hammer home the ghost town nature of the compound were some rolling tumbleweeds. They approached a covered quad near two long, low huts. Thick tent cloth kept the whole area in shade, and it snapped as the wind passed over it. Marc paused in the shadow and peered up at the underside of the material, noticing the strange metallic weave. “That’s thermal baffling up there. Designed to reflect heat. Russians used it during the Cold War to fake out spy satellites with infrared cameras.”

  “Whoever ran this place was taking precautions,” Lucy noted. Her manner had shifted from the attitude she displayed on the ride up here. Her dash of the brash was replaced by something cooler, more professional. She pointed at one of the dusty pre-fabricated huts. “Let’s take a look.”

  The outbuildings were repurposed Quonset huts, Second World War vintage, curves of rusting galvanized steel vibrating with the heat of the day. A musty odor hit him as he entered, sparking unpleasant recall of sweaty changing rooms in the comprehensi
ve school where he had spent his early teens. Ranks of bed frames stood in lines all the way to the far wall.

  “This is where the kids slept, I guess…” said Lucy. “Beds are too short for adults.”

  Marc fell into a crouch and used his phone to snap a couple of pictures. “Scrape marks on the floor.” He pointed them out. “No dust on the frames, so they must have been used recently.”

  “The hallmarks of an evacuation,” she said, looking around. “Move on. The main building next, I reckon.”

  They crossed the covered quad and headed toward the only two-story building in the compound. Marc thought he saw something more than just shadows in the lee of one of the support poles, a dark, rust-brown patch on the sandy ground, but he didn’t draw attention to it. He followed Lucy’s silent hand gestures to stack up either side of the front door and slowly ease it open.

  The door was already hanging loose, and it gave a sullen creak as it came the rest of the way. Marc braced himself, imagining that there could be some angry thug with an assault rifle waiting within, but there was no hail of bullets, no sudden report of fire.

  The building was as dead as the rest of the orphanage, dark where the shadows fell deep, lit only by shafts of sunshine that caught motes of dust as they advanced down the main corridor. The first room they came to had towers of wooden cubby-holes on either side of the door, and Lucy used her booted foot to kick it open. Over her shoulder, Marc glimpsed an almost empty space with a few scattered cushions in one corner and a thick red carpet on the floor, the color worn pink by years of feet and hands upon it.

  “Classroom,” he suggested.

  Lucy scowled, seemingly reluctant to enter, and she peeled back the headscarf she was wearing to set it around her neck and shoulders. “Prayer room,” she corrected.

  Marc drifted across the corridor to the next door, which opened on to a windowless space with reinforced walls. Empty rows of shelving filled every available corner, and the scent of machine oil was soaked into the brickwork. The shine of brass caught his eye and he plucked a lone bullet from where it had fallen to the floor. It was a live 7.62 round, the ammunition of choice for the venerable Kalashnikov assault rifle. “They missed one,” he said, placing it on the shelf, standing alone like a tiny, tall-hatted sentry. “What kind of orphanage has an armory?”

  She didn’t answer him, instead pointing with the MP7. “Anything we can use will probably be on the upper floor. We need actionable intel.”

  Marc followed her back out and then up the creaking stairs, wondering if this expedition would bear fruit.

  He thought again about Rix’s words on the Palomino, in those moments before the ship had been consumed in fire. Rix had said there were children on the ship, and Marc couldn’t help trying to connect that with the lead that had brought them here, thousands of miles away, to a place that was supposed to care for lost youths and war orphans. If the New Day charity was cover for a partnership between the Combine and Al Sayf, then it was singularly callous one.

  On the upper floor, there was the heavy trace of burned paper in the air. Low on one wall, Marc saw a scrawl of writing in hasty calligraphic script, scratched into the peeling paint across the brickwork. “Kilroy Was Here,” he said aloud, guessing at the significance of the tiny act of defiance.

  “It’s a name,” Lucy told him. “Halil. It means ‘good friend.’”

  “You read Arabic as well, then?”

  “I’ve got a lot of talents,” she replied. “Trigger-puller is just my best one.” Lucy pointed across the hall. “Check this out.”

  Marc followed her into another room, and inside the stench of dead fires was thick, the roughness of the soot collecting at the back of his throat. Along one side of the room, a desk had been piled high with papers and set alight, left to burn until all that remained were ashen piles that retained some ghost of their original shape. Battered filing cabinets sat with their drawers hanging open, emptied of anything that might have been useful.

  Lucy stopped suddenly and dropped to her haunches, shouldering her MP7 on a bungee sling so she could have both hands free.

  “Problem?” said Marc.

  “Look-see,” she replied, pointing.

  Marc peered at the floor and made out a thin line of fishing wire suspended at ankle-height. “Oh bollocks,” he breathed, as he followed it to its end. Hidden in the debris was a roughly egg-shaped object Marc recognized as a Soviet RGD-5 anti-personnel fragmentation grenade. The part of his memory that belonged to his techie soul—the bit of him that was the legacy of a bookish child who could name a hundred kinds of dinosaur or recognize all the variants of a Spitfire—dutifully reeled off the specs of the device in a way that wasn’t at all comforting. Most notably, he remembered that the Russian grenade had a timer that could easily be set to anything from twelve to zero seconds.

  “Yeah,” agreed Lucy. “Stay back…”

  “No, I got this,” he said, pulling a folding multi-tool from his belt. Without waiting, Marc moved in and severed the line. In a few moments, he had made the booby-trap safe.

  “Huh,” she said, and there was something new in her eyes, something that could have been respect. “You’re good for something.”

  * * *

  Grunewald looked up as the hatch banged open and the Englishman that the jihadis called Tommy strode in. His thuggish glower swept the compartment and found the mercenary. “Well?” he demanded. “What have we got?”

  “See for yourself,” said Grunewald. What had once been one of the Santa Cruz’s smaller cargo bays had been converted into a makeshift operations room with video monitors and a military communications rig. A blurry ten-second loop of footage, black-and-white imagery shot from great altitude, showed a sparse landscape and a cluster of buildings.

  Teape, who sat before the workstation, pointed a long finger at the bottom of the screen. “There.” The video loop ended and started again, and where the American indicated, a light-colored rectangle moved into the frame and performed a slow circle. “Mid-size vehicle,” he noted. “Two people get out.” Ellis stood watching off to one side.

  “Where’s this come from?” demanded the Englishman.

  “Camera time leased off one of the Indian government’s ‘weather’ satellites,” Grunewald sniffed.

  “That could be anyone down there,” Ellis spoke up.

  “It’s him,” said Tommy, nodding to himself. “Yeah. No other fucker is going to grind up miles of dirt road to that shit-hole without good reason. He took the bait.”

  “What bait?” said Ellis.

  Tommy answered without looking at him. “The problem with clever bastards is, they like being clever. So you give them something that makes them feel smarter than you, they’re at it like a rat up a drainpipe.” He leaned in and tap-tapped one of the moving dots on the screen, as if he could speak to the person it represented through the gesture. “You hear that, mate? We led you there, you little prick.”

  “We lost direct video a couple of minutes ago,” said Grunewald.

  The Englishman ran a hand over his chin, rasping at the stubble there. “Khadir’s boys left booby-traps, might have done the job for us … But best to make sure. Belt and braces.” He pointed at another monitor, which showed a tactical map of the area off the Turkish coastline. “The Yanks are still out there, right?”

  Grunewald nodded. “But we won’t have access for much longer. If we are going to use them as an asset, we have to do it soon.”

  Tommy grinned wolfishly. “Well, then. Better let them have some.”

  “Proceed,” said Grunewald, placing a hand on Teape’s shoulder. The American nodded, and typed in a pre-designated communications code into the keyboard in front of him.

  Hundreds of kilometers to the east, a task force from the United States Navy’s Sixth Fleet out of Naples lay on station. The flotilla sat in a staggered row across a small corner of the Mediterranean, almost following the sword-tip line of Cyprus’s Cape Apostolos Andreas, toward the edge
s of Syrian territorial waters. The US Navy’s mission brief in the area was defined to the rest of the world as “tactical presence,” a very visible deterrent to the belligerent forces of ISIL in the local theater and a way of rattling America’s sabers at nearby Russian military assets. There were also other facets to the operation that were less perceptible to global observers.

  One of them was designated as Tasking Element Argonaut, a rapid-reaction mission that could be deployed within minutes from the task force’s main aircraft carrier. Argonaut’s objective was simple and direct—to use fast, stealthy UCAV drones to take out sites designated as terrorist training camps or other “targets of opportunity.” Battle planners in the US Navy, kept out of the evolving drone war by the dominance of the USAF, had been only too happy to secure their future budgets by taking on the mission, showing that sea-based unmanned combat aircraft could do the job just as well.

  It was no coincidence that assets managed by the Combine were also embedded in the command and control pipeline of Argonaut. Under the guise of orders direct from Washington, signed off on by military chiefs sympathetic to Combine interests, it only took a few short moments for Teape to contact the flotilla and impersonate a naval officer halfway across the world.

  “Stormline. Action order,” announced Teape, speaking into a headset microphone, using the carrier’s radio ID code. “Tasking Element Argonaut, expedite immediate. Deployment confirmation is—” He paused to peer at a slip of paper on the folding table before him. “Romeo Nine Seven Kilo Two Zebra Lima. How copy?” The value of that string of letters and numbers was measured in the ghostly coin of the Combine’s power and influence.

  There was a crackle of static, and then a voice responded. “Good copy, code matches, Stormline confirms. Deployment under way. Stand by.”

  Grunewald smiled thinly. Somewhere out in the Med, a robot aircraft was being hustled to a deck elevator, and within ten minutes it would be airborne. He glanced at another screen, where the details of a “strike package” were displayed. This was the pre-programmed mission for the UCAV, a series of waypoints and direction markers now being uploaded to the Navy drone. The strike had been planned months ago, as just one more constituent of a larger plan, as another method of erasing a loose end left behind by the collaboration with Al Sayf. The mercenary glanced at Tommy. It had been the Englishman’s idea to delay the use of the drone after the problem with the technician Dane had blown up, to use it now and, as he put it, kill two birds with one stone.