by James Phelan
Off the machine he caught his breath, stretched out against the wall. He went into the bathroom, a big room decked out in marble and gold fittings. He took a piss in the toilet, looking through the open window at boats cruising down the waterway outside. This waterfront double-storey house reminded him of the Spanish-style mansions of LA. Whitewashed walls and terracotta-tiled roof and floors. This was his favourite of their safe houses in Lagos; this would definitely be his exclusive residence when they settled into power. Yeah, he could run things out of this location real good. It was close to the CBD and all the oil contacts that he’d soon be running the economy with.
In the basin he washed the sweat off his hands, then dried them off and zipped open a leather satchel. He pulled out a vial of human growth hormone. Inserted a sterile syringe into the rubber top, filled it, tapped out the air bubbles. He didn’t need a tourniquet, his veins were thick cords that wrapped around his muscles. He injected, tossed the spent syringe, took a big drink of water from a glass, then left the bathroom with a towel over his shoulders, heading downstairs.
He was almost at ground level when his maid opened the front door. It was Boris, already cleared through the security gate. He had an awkward Russian name that started with a B and had mostly consonants in it, so Mendes went with Boris to piss him off. The arrogance this Russian wore with his pimped-out eighties suits was a joke.
“Mr Mendes,” Boris said, extending a hand.
Mendes bypassed the offered hand, and walked into his ground-floor study.
“Shut the door, Boris.”
The stupid Russian closed the study door behind him.
“Mr Mendes—”
“Save it, you fucking useless Russian,” Mendes said. He towelled the sweat off his face, and sat in the leather chair behind the big old desk. “You lost a courier.”
“Yes, we—”
“No fucking we about this, you ignorant fucking pig!” Mendes said.
The Russian’s face turned as if he were going to start raging, but he had the sense not to.
“What security did you have on the courier?”
The Russian looked to his feet.
“That’s right, you stupid fuck.” Mendes was cool. “You’ve made a lot of cheddar out of me, and you cut corners to make even more. You are fucking useless. Five years in the FSB? You have no idea what it means to be a professional. You don’t belong in this brotherhood of mine.”
“I will—”
“Spare me,” Mendes said. “You’d better hope the tracking still works on that case. Locate it. Bring it back. It’s embarrassing to me if you don’t. You hear me, Boris?”
“Yes, boss.”
“Take all your guys, get it back for me,” Mendes said. He leaned down to reach under his desk, nice and slow. Boris’s eyes went wide. Mendes produced a bottle of water from a bar-fridge. Started drinking it. “Helicopters, boats, whatever it takes. Track it, get it back. And in future, if your two-million-dollar-a-month courier service gets compromised, it’s back to Kazakhstan, or wherever the fuck a piece of shit like you has come from.”
Boris was about to fire back, but before he could blink Mendes was over the desk and had him pinned up against the bookcase, Boris’s own pistol pushed up hard under the Russian’s chin.
“This is just business, my Russian friend,” Mendes said. He took the pistol’s aim down, inspected the gun. “This is a good gun. Beretta ninety-two—9 mm. Served my country’s armed forces well. I want you to be like this gun, Boris. Reliable. Simple, not flashy, there to do a job and do it well. That’s what I need from you, okay?”
Boris nodded.
“Good,” Mendes said. He released the Russian, safetied the pistol and put it back into Boris’s holster. “Otherwise, I have no use for you. No bloody use for you. I will not have this conversation again.”
20
NEW YORK CITY
Gammaldi sat at the island bench in the kitchen of Fox’s apartment, reading the New York Post.
“How’d you get there and back already?” It was lunchtime but Gammaldi was munching away at a breakfast burrito.
“GSR helicopter with Tas,” Fox said. “Where’d you get that? Looks like road kill.”
“Street vendor,” Gammaldi said, finishing off his food. “You did all that and I just woke up? You packed for tonight’s flight?”
“Yep, I’ll meet you at the airport,” Fox said. “I’m gonna get in a bit of Parkour before I leave.”
He ground some coffee beans. Noticed his hands shaking as he set out two cups.
“So this is what nearly twenty grand a month gets you in SoHo,” Gammaldi said. “About five thousand square feet of empty, boring space.”
“And three bedrooms, two bathrooms, fifteen-foot-high loft ceilings, a fireplace, a private balcony, central air, polished timber floors and a laundry room,” Fox said.
“And you need three bedrooms because…” Gammaldi said.
“Not to mention the ornate pressed-metal ceiling, exposed beams, columns—”
“And you need columns for…”
Gammaldi dumped his soggy burrito wrapper in the bin; hesitated at the sight of pills and bottles of booze there. He and Fox looked at each other and not a word needed to be spoken. Gammaldi respected what Fox had just done, and he would give him his full support. Period.
“You should put a half-pipe in here, you got the room,” Gammaldi said, turning the topic like he always managed to do so well. He took a seat back at the island bench, flicked through the Post and waited for his coffee.
“I don’t skateboard,” Fox said, working the espresso machine. The little Gaggia had travelled around the world with him over the past couple of years. It was his one constant piece of furniture.
“You slay at Tony Hawk on the PS3. I reckon some of those skills would translate,” Gammaldi said, sage-like. He noticed some kitchen appliance catalogues on the island bench.
“Over-easy, and don’t scrimp on the bacon,” Gammaldi said, flicking through the appliance catalogue.
“Dude, you know the stove’s out of action,” Fox countered. He put a couple of boxes of cereal and a carton of milk in front of his friend.
“A Smeg oven, really?” Gammaldi said, still flicking through the kitchen brochure. “You should go Miele. Those things go from zero to four hundred in, like, ten seconds. And they have a rotisserie, you can fit a whole lamb in there.”
“How have I ever survived without a rotisserie?” Fox said. He passed over Gammaldi’s coffee, then put out a bowl of fruit salad.
Gammaldi set into a bowl of cereal and milk, spilling milk all over the countertop in the process. He totally bypassed the fruit.
“You need bigger bowls,” Gammaldi said around a mouthful of Fruit Loops.
“Why don’t you slow down there a little, Augustus Gloop, or you might get sucked up into a pipe,” Fox said. He sat at the bench and settled into The New York Times. “Seriously, dude, one day you’re gonna end up in a fructose coma.”
Gammaldi just looked puzzled and kept eating. Fox ate his fruit and drank coffee.
“How about them Sox, huh?” Gammaldi said. “Curse of the Bambino.”
Fox looked up from his paper to eye his friend sceptically.
“Do you even know what you’re saying?” Fox waited, but his beefy friend just went back to eating. “Did the Celtics win last night?”
“No, they got totally smashed.”
“’Kay, when I say ‘Did they win?’ you can just say yes or no.”
“They got pretty well smashed.”
“What the hell is with you today?”
“Read that your rendition story is gonna be a movie,” Gammaldi said, through more crunching of cereal. “Hugh Jackman to play you.”
“And Nicole Kidman to play you and your eyebrows,” Fox said, not the least bit interested. “Where’d you read that crap, Perez?”
“Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollyw
ood—”
“Shit,” Fox said. “I was joking, I thought at least you had a decent source, douche bag.”
Fox went back to his paper.
“What about that girl from The New Yorker?” Gammaldi asked. “Judy? Jemima?”
“Jane.”
“Yeah, that’s it. Jane. Plain Jane.”
“What about her?”
“Well, she seems nice.”
“I don’t have time for girls right now.”
“What, are you dead?”
“I’ve been kinda busy.”
“Too busy for women?”
“We’re a generation of men raised by women,” Fox said. “I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer I need right now.”
Gammaldi surrendered his attention back to his food.
“Movie would be cool, though…”
“Jesus, Al,” Fox said. He folded the paper and went to the Gaggia to make a couple more coffees. Beans were grinding. “I’m so not interested in that. I’m on a fucking journey, I’m on a walkabout. A lot of people think ambition or success, and they think dollars. You, you think of movies made of my life. My measure of success is to get underneath all that.”
“Says the guy with a Jasper Johns and a Casimir Malevich hanging in his office,” Gammaldi said. “Not to mention this big empty apartment.”
“They’re from Wallace’s collection,” Fox said. “You’ve got one of his Lichtensteins hanging.”
“I ain’t the one being all high and mighty,” Gammaldi said. “And I ain’t the one renouncing women. This is New York, man, live a little.”
Fox handed over a fresh coffee.
“All right,” Fox said. “All I’m saying is that all this, it doesn’t define me. It’s what I’m doing with myself every day. That’s why I’ve decided no more booze, no more drugs. This is it, I’m gonna see what I can do at full speed. Make a difference to something, somewhere, however small. At the end of the fucking day, that’s the only thing you’re going to carry with you when you die.”
Fox dedicated the afternoon to getting some more exercise in, to clear his mind, sharpen his movements.
he’d first come across Parkour when Gammaldi had shown him a YouTube video of a Parkour game of tag. Two young guys in Russia, chasing one another over and through abandoned buildings. Fox looked into the art further, watching some of Parkour founder David Belle’s achievements. It was out of this world. The guy moved around city buildings like he was a monkey, leaping from one to the other, free-climbing walls with unbelievable speed, moving with grace and agility like he was a cross between a gymnast and a ballerina. Belle’s aim was simple: to show Parkour to the world and make people understand what it is to really move.
So, Fox investigated the NY scene, and sure enough there were several clubs around Manhattan and the surrounds. he’d still been living in DUMBO when he joined up with the local chapter, and he continued to go there some three months later. He found that Parkour had changed the way he approached most things in life. As he trained to overcome what at first seemed almost insurmountable obstacles, so he applied that to his work. To tackle everything with that same ethos. To forge his own path. Make his own way. To show others the way.
He went to the big warehouse on Old Fulton Street in DUMBO. They leased the whole floor, some eight hundred square metres of space, obstacles everywhere. Obstacles like you’d never seen. This was a training room for the ultimate real-world obstacle course: a modern city. This was designed to work every major movement of Parkour, so that when confronted with the outside world you could surmount whatever lay before you. And you’d do it fast. Faster than an observer would think humanly possible.
Parkour, or l’art du déplacement, was exercise of a different kind. Cutting edge, yet primal. This was as hard and fun as movement could get, inside or outside of a building, an urban or rural environment. As such, Parkour was different for all participants. While there were many standard moves proven to be the most efficient, everyone in the world moved in a different way. And that was one of the beauties of Parkour. It was as individual as it was practical. But at the end of the day, one thing was always constant: Parkour was all about moving in the fastest and most efficient way in an emergency situation.
About ten guys and a couple of chicks were in the room. The guys were known as traceurs, the women as traceuses. All wore form-fitting gym gear, most were in bare feet. K-Swiss made special Parkour shoes. Fox stuck with the Geox’s he had on. Light, flexible, good grip. Mats were assembled at varying heights, from on the floor to on top of wooden structures six feet from the floor. Gymnastics equipment, horses and bars, were being used like you’d never seen. Traceurs and traceuses were somersaulting off them and using the dismount momentum to then run up the walls, jumping, rolling, climbing their way around the room. They traversed a path that was judged in a snap decision at the time to be the best way through. Each time refining, improving, moving the route even faster.
“This is Parkour!” yelled Spike, the instructor. He was berating a couple of newbies who’d been showing off. Young punks who’d look more at home on skateboards. “Every activity is designed to move you from point A to B and back again with the greatest efficiency and swiftness possible! You want to do Free Running, you want to show off, get the fuck out of my building! Get the fuck away from Parkour!”
“Hey, Spike,” Lachlan said. They shook hands, ’hood style.
“Lach,” Spike said. No one really knew much about Spike other than he lived Parkour. He was Polish-American, wiry, tough as nails. “You believe these kids? They watch Casino Royale and think this is a sport where they can show off their air-time. This isn’t Free Running, you pieces of shit!”
The kids hung their heads, sulked over to a corner.
“Shoulder strong?” Spike asked.
“Yep, all good,” Fox said, stretching out. The dull pain was still there, from the tissue around the pin that had held his collarbone while it had set. “Nice new track.”
“Yeah—watch this traceuse go through the motions … see that passement?” Spike said, his eyes following a young woman somersaulting her way over some gymnastics horses, landing in a run, then turn-vaulting over a six-foot wall. “Whoa! I think I will marry her.”
Fox was a natural at Parkour, with his tall, lean, muscular frame, his quick reflexes, good balance and sharp eye. He was a quick, clear thinker, and he had soon discovered that this extreme sport, this art form, cleared that thinking even further. It sharpened more than his reflexes and worked more than his muscles. It was a total mind and body experience. If you were not present and in the moment, you fell ten, twenty, thirty metres and busted limbs. Land on your head or neck or back and you’re fucked. If you’re not on your game, you fumble the easiest of gap jumps—say, pouncing from a static roof to land on a hand-rail of an overpass—you feel it. You miss that tencentimetre landing zone of a hand-rail and catch it just with the tips of your shoes, you might lose your teeth on the way down. The rush that came with mastering a new movement equated to an excitement that made him feel like a kid again. This was so new and different as to be exciting even when doing the same motions over and over again, each time refining the details to move faster from point A to B and back again.
That’s why this centre proved invaluable for Fox. He could make his mistakes in here, in a controlled environment, under constant observation and evaluation of instructors and his peers. There were many, in this city and around the world, who didn’t agree with this side of Parkour. So-called purists who took it as nothing other than street art. But the pros knew that training made the difference. Work out the moves, then go outside, where the surfaces were slippery, dusty, greasy, unstable, unforgiving.
“You know what?” Spike said. He moved to tag Fox.
The game was on.
21
COOPERATIVE SECURITY LOCATION, DAKAR, SENEGAL
A CSL was the US military term for thei
r forward facilities for contingency access to remote parts of the world, in this case a speck on the African continent. Made up of an airstrip and some fuel storages, CSL Dakar was one of several such ‘lily pads’ in western Africa. It was currently undergoing expansion construction by a Navy Seabee battalion to convert the location to a reinforced Forward Operating Site under the new entity of AFRICOM.
The ten V-22 Ospreys lined the side of the dusty airstrip. The fuel trucks had done their work, now mechanics followed the pilots around the aircraft in the final preparations before takeoff. Three massive C-17s were flying somewhere overhead, due in to land soon, carrying the rest of the squadron’s gear as cargo.
Captain Garth Nix didn’t like the Osprey, and he wasn’t alone. His troop of the parent company—or squadron, as the cavalry referred to it—was a force of some one hundred and twenty-two men split into three platoons. They were designated 1st Squadron, 71st Cavalry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team ‘Warrior.’ They were the lead element of 10th Mountain Division, which was to be inserted into Sudan over the next three days. They were an RSTA squadron, specialists in Reconnaissance, Surveillance and Target Acquisition. Good on the ground, at home when inserted deep in hostile territory and evading overwhelming odds. And, the fact was, they didn’t like flying in Air Force aircraft that had so little operational mileage under its belt. They felt more at home in the Chinooks that these craft were destined to replace. Sure, the Osprey had greater range and speed, and in theory they were a better aircraft. But it was the newness of them. Nix had been in Operation Anaconda in the Shahikot Valley, where Chinooks had proved both sides of the air insertion argument—both as effective modes of transport, and as prime targets for enemy RPG and heavy machine-gun fire. The tilt-rotor Ospreys looked awesome, and the whole world had oohed and ahhed at them when they filled the screen in the 2006 Transformers movie. They were hybrids that bridged the gap between helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. Yet still, in Nix’s mind, they remained just that—good in theory—and it would be some time before they proved their effectiveness in operational circumstances. He knew that most of his troops, even the hard-nosed sergeants, prayed before takeoff and landing.
