The Hostage s-1

by Duncan Falconer

  Suddenly arms grabbed him and he was rolled on to his front. A hand pulled him up by his hair, another grabbed his collar, choking him, while another grabbed one of his arms. He was dragged forward in this position, his toes scraping along the road, taking the skin off to the bone.

  He reached the back of the van, its doors open. He was raised quickly up and inside, then dropped into something, a trunk, or large box. He looked at the blurred faces above him, but only for an instant before a lid came crashing down inches from his face and it went black. There were more bangs in quick succession as doors were shut, and then the vehicle’s engine started up.

  Spinks lay, rocking, in a dark, confined space once again. His shoulder started to burn as if it were on fire. He let out a moan, then a cry for help. All he could hear was the engine and the whine from the axle beneath him. It was his worst nightmare come true. Every operative’s worst nightmare.The unthinkable was happening to him. He was the one. It did not seem possible, even as he lay there. They had talked about it, the recruits together, during breaks in training, or at night in their beds, and sometimes at the bar in the camp after a few beers. It was like a ghoulish fairytale, the kind of horror that could only happen to someone else.

  Spinks started to cry. His life flashed in front of him, with plenty of time to see the details. Life was not so meaningless, even the old days, the boring pointless days of his youth. He wanted to live. And he would, for quite some time he expected. But every second of that would be horror. The stories of what they did to captives were unthinkable. If they could slowly torture to death one of their own, what would they do to him, a British spy, a hated undercover man?

  Tears rolled off his face into his ears. His chest shook with painful heaves as his fear took hold. He scratched the top of his coffin. His nails broke. He didn’t care. He scratched and pushed with his feet as he cried. But it was no good. His coffin was too strong. He gave up the effort and just cried. He wallowed in his nightmare for a few moments more, and then even that was too exhausting to maintain. He eventually lay there, quietly, listening to his breathing above the sound of the engine. He moved a hand to touch the burning pain below his shoulder. It was wet. He felt under his shirt and found a small tender hole in his flesh. Images of his run and fall came back to him. He could see the scene more clearly now than when it happened. He was in Dungannon. They were still in the North. Then he remembered his ace.

  Despite the intense pain in his chest, Spinks twisted himself in the confined space so that he could manoeuvre his arm down into his underpants and between his fatty legs. He reached under his balls to where it had moved and felt its hard plastic edge. Brennan had thoroughly searched for it but had stopped short of Spinks’s most dank nether regions. Had it remained where Spinks originally placed it, loosely in the front of his undies, Brennan might have found it when he pulled them down. He gripped the miniature transponder in his fingertips and carefully pulled it out.

  Chapter 4

  The Gazelle left Lough Neagh behind and headed south-west for the border. It climbed just high enough to pass over a line of high-tension power cables then dropped majestically to rooftop height again, still going flat out. The pilot was concentrating too hard now to be distracted by the rollicking he had received from the thug beside him and Camelot’s commanding officer. He was doing what he had been trained to do for all those months in Germany not more than a year ago. Fast and low. He was good at it too. Had Stratton not been so rude and perhaps stroked him a little he might not have been so wet about it. He decided to show this brute a thing or two about flying.

  Stratton checked the map even though he knew the area well. After following the M1 for a short distance they cut a line for Aughnacloy, leaving Dungannon a few miles to the right of them.

  ‘Give me five hundred feet,’ Stratton ordered. The pilot mumbled something that sounded like ‘five hundred’ and complied, adjusting the pitch just a little and the framework shuddered and the thud of the rotor-blades deepened as they took a larger bite out of the air. The increased g-force was perceptible as the slender craft ascended then levelled out.

  ‘That’s the border, along there,’ Stratton informed the pilot, making sure he knew exactly where they were.

  ‘I’m aware exactly where the border is,’ the pilot replied curtly.

  I’ll bet he is, thought Stratton. Air Corp pilots from his unit had inadvertently crossed it on a number of occasions. One idiot had even flown to the town of Monaghan, ten miles inside the Republic, thinking it was the Northern Irish town of Armagh. He actually landed on the heli-pad of the police station and climbed out and waved at some officers before he realised he was very much in the wrong place. Since that day pilots were warned their careers would be over if they so much as skimmed the border.

  The pilot turned well before the frontier and cruised north-west and parallel with it. Stratton could see a combined army and police checkpoint forming below on the main road to Monaghan. It was the smaller roads that worried him. He made out an army foot patrol heading across fields toward the border. For the umpteenth time he checked the signal tracking device attached to the craft’s control panel in front of the co-pilot seat. Where the hell was Spinks’s marker?

  Spinks held the small device in front of his face. He could not see it, but it helped him, memory wise, to locate the small switch on its side. He had tested it that morning, as he always did prior to heading out on to the ground, before he positioned it in the best hiding place he could think of. He was often reminded of its existence when the corner of the device dug into his testis and required an immediate adjustment. Otherwise he usually forgot about it. It was just another piece of equipment operatives carried and only a last-resort device in the event of the improbable. He could forgive it for all the discomfort it had given him in the past three years because that bastard who shot him had not found it. Now his only prayer was that it actually worked.

  He clicked up the tiny switch with his nail. A pinheadsized LED light blinked in the darkness. It was working, apparently. He rested it on his chest and exhaled heavily, and as he did so a sharp pain shot through his chest and shoulder to remind him of his injury. ‘I’ve been shot,’ he said to himself, as if fully realising it for the first time. ‘I’ve been fucking shot and kidnapped, shot and kidnapped!’

  Stratton saw the red light flash the instant it came on. A burst of excitement raced through him as he tuned the tracker. All the lights on the panel began to flicker as it warmed to the signal. A gradient of tiny bead-sized lights indicated the signal strength was low but readable, and a single larger one at the bottom of the panel indicated it was behind them.

  ‘Turn around,’ he said quickly to the pilot. The pilot responded and banked the Gazelle steeply one eighty degrees. ‘Whisky one, I have a signal. I repeat I have a signal towards yellow four.’

  The words conveyed the rush of excitement straight into the operations room and the tension rose sharply. Mike beat Graham to the handset and snatched it up. ‘Roger, whisky one, towards yellow four. All stations, towards yellow four. Stay off the net unless it’s an emergency, out.’

  The intelligence team hurried in from the int cell just to watch. That’s all they could do now.

  The phone rang. Graham picked it up. ‘Ops,’ he said quickly and listened to the voice the other end. ‘It’s Bill Lawton,’ he said to Mike.

  Mike was engrossed in the map and allocated a small part of his concentration to the call. ‘What has the Gardaí said?’ he asked.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ Graham said into the phone. Bill had and rattled off an answer. ‘He said they’re sending as many people to the border opposite Aughnacloy as they can spare,’ Graham relayed.

  ‘What about London?’ Mike said as Graham aimed the phone at him, then back to his own ear for the reply.

  ‘The boss took care of that,’ Graham said into the phone.

  ‘He hasn’t heard anything, as in Bill hasn’t heard anything,’ he said to Mike. ‘Bi
ll thinks they’re going to leave it up to us.’

  ‘That means they don’t have a clue what to do,’ Mike said. ‘Fine. Anything else?’

  Graham listened for a moment. ‘Okay,’ he said and put the phone back into its cradle. ‘No. He’ll be on the end of this phone if and when he’s needed, and he said good luck.’

  ‘Save it for Spinks,’ Mike muttered as he started pacing a small area, keeping his eyes on the map but not really seeing it now. His ears, and just about everyone else’s eyes, were glued to the speaker on the wall. It was all up to Stratton now.

  Aggy stood outside her wrecked car in the field listening to the transmissions. She and Ed were more or less forgotten about and unless they called up on the radio with a problem it would remain that way until this was all over. Ed was in the car smoking a roll-up. He was his old, calm self again and already spouting suggestions as to how and what the ops room should be doing. Then she heard the Gazelle and her thoughts left everyone else.

  She walked further out into the field, hoping to see it beyond the trees across the road. It sounded close. When the Gazelle did come into view it was further south along the wood than she expected, the direction and distance of the sound deceiving as always. It was about half a mile away, black against the sky and going like a rocket. She’d heard his voice over the radio and knew he was in it. Perhaps he would see her. It would pass across her front, maybe a bit closer than it was now. He would know where she was and that she was all right. Then she wondered who she thought she was kidding. He wouldn’t be thinking about her, let alone worrying if she was in one piece. It was too much to expect he might even glance in her direction. There was no way of knowing what was on that man’s mind no matter what the situation. Often she caught him looking at her but never once had she seen anything in his eyes that gave her encouragement. A hint of desire or even a thin smile would be nice, but there was never anything remotely like interest, it was just as if he happened to be staring in her direction.

  At that moment his only thoughts would be of what he loved most and did best. She wasn’t worried about him nor did she fear for him, not even slightly. Her feelings about him might well be confused but she was sure of one thing: there was hope for Spinks while he was up there. Stratton gave everyone that kind of feeling. When he was part of your team, on an op, when his calm, strong voice came over the radio, you knew you were on a winning team. She wondered if it was nothing more than simple hero worship she felt for him. She would follow him into hell itself if that were where they had to go. He was larger than life and there was no one else she had ever met who made her feel that way.

  Stratton stared unblinking at the direction indicator as the light went to the right, then flickered to the top, then to the left. He spewed instructions to the pilot, trying to keep the top button lit, which meant the signal was dead ahead. ‘Left a bit, left . . . straight. Don’t go any lower. Stay at five hundred. Left a little more. Straight.’

  He checked his map. A line drawn through their location and in their exact direction went above the border, but only just. That meant Spinks was still in the North. He glanced over his right shoulder at a field half a mile away. Near the edge, just beyond the skirt of the wood, was a car a few yards from the road, in a field. A figure was standing alone beside the car, looking up at the helicopter. He watched for a moment longer then went back to the transponder receiver.

  Brennan sat in the front of the van beside Sean at the wheel. They were out of the town, in the countryside. Two other men were in the back, sitting on the trunk, which was the only other object in the van. They were middle-aged, red-faced, weathered, as if they had spent their entire lives digging roads in the open air. The van pulled to a stop at a crossroads.

  ‘Straight over,’ said Brennan.

  ‘I know where I’m going,’ said Sean, aware he was playing with fire. Any backchat to Brennan was to take your soul in your hands. Sean wasn’t even sure why he had said anything other than it was his nature to be outspoken and arrogant. Perhaps the danger had got his blood up and he was feeling like a fight. Brennan wasn’t the only one capable of a bit of madness, especially behind the wheel of a vehicle.

  ‘I don’t give a fock what you know. Just do as I say, when I say it and without lip,’ Brennan barked. ‘This isn’t a focken test to see if you know your way around. If we were walking through your focken house I’d still be telling you where to go. Lippy focken bastard.’

  Brennan was aware he was not as cool as he normally was on a job. He had done a lot worse than this, but he felt more nervous than he could remember. His eyes were everywhere, inside every passing car, in the air, beyond the hedgerows. Every mile closer to the border increased his unease as well as his excitement. But his fear of failing was greater than his fear of battle. That was engraved on his soul from a lesson he learned early in life. He was sixteen when he did his first kneecapping but he had to wait until he was twenty-one before he could carry out his first execution. It was on his birthday and he’d had a few drinks, not that he needed any such courage. The boyos had arranged it as a surprise coming-of-age party.The victim was a sixteen-year-old Protestant they had pulled off the street and driven to a remote rural spot. The teenager was the son of a prominent member of the Ulster Volunteer Force, who was earmarked for persecution and then death.

  Brennan would never forget it. Not because it was his first kill but because it wasn’t. He bungled the task, even though he did everything as he had been instructed. He had placed the barrel of the gun in the centre of the boy’s forehead, pulled back the hammer, looked into the boy’s eyes, uttered some farewell piss-taking comment, and slowly squeezed the trigger. Brennan had not been instructed to make such a meal of the pre-shoot chat. Lengthening the agony of his victim with his tormenting banter was a torture he decided on only at that moment. When he pulled the trigger, the gun fired, and the explosion sent the bullet through the boy’s head and out the other side. The feeling Brennan experienced the second the bullet boomed from the barrel amazed him. He felt like a god. When he pulled the pistol away from the boy’s skull he was fascinated by the wisp of smoke coming out of the entry point. Brennan remembered rubbing up some of the black powder burn around the hole with his finger and dabbing it on to the end of the boy’s nose as he said to him, ‘Rest in peace.’ Brennan and his friends then left the boy twitching in the grass and went back to the pub.

  But the boy wasn’t dead. The lad was discovered a few hours later by a farmer walking his dog and rushed to hospital. The doctors couldn’t understand how he had survived such a wound, let alone with all of his faculties until they discovered the bullet had been fired at such an angle that it had travelled inside the skull along the bone precisely in the crease that separates the two halves of the brain, and missed the cerebral cortex before popping out the back. Brennan was ridiculed, but it was a lesson he vowed never to repeat.

  There was one thing that niggled Brennan about this particular kidnapping, an edge he had not experienced before. He had worked against the Paras, the Marines, the RUC’s Special Branch and had had a brush or two with the SAS, but he’d never come up against Pinks before, although he knew all about them.They made him more nervous than all the other Brit units. The SAS were bad enough but the Pinks were different. If you were going to be ambushed in the middle of a job it would likely be the SAS and every Republican soldier knew that if they walked into an SAS ambush it was pretty much over, and definitely so if there were no RUC around to make sure they didn’t finish you off if you were wounded. The SAS were murdering bastards and carried handcuffs just for show. But the Pinks were worse for one important reason: they were in a unique position to play the game with a different set of rules to all the others - their own rules.

  Pinks took the law into their own hands. That or they were under the command of some bastard in MI5 or 6 who gave the orders. It wouldn’t have been directed from the Brit government. The IRA had long since scared that lot into abandoning any kind of u
nofficial revenge killings.The politicians no longer had the backbone for that kind of game, especially now that they were part of the European Union. The only Brit unit that could plan and carry out an execution independent of any authority, with a high degree of confidence that they would not be discovered, were the Pinks. What made this all the more dangerous for Brennan was not so much that the Pinks could carry out a murder but that it seemed they were only too willing to risk illegally utilising the technology and resources of the Brit army to do so. They worked in a minefield, between the IRA and their own government.An autonomous execution squad. He knew that not all the Pinks were up to playing this high-staked game and that those who did risked their careers. But the fact remained, if you bloodied a Pink it wasn’t over just because you got away with it. You were a marked man for as long as there was one of them around willing to take revenge, and they had a lot of resources at hand to track you down. And Brennan had one of them in a box in the back of the van! Kidnapping one was the greatest wrong you could do them and they would want revenge. Brennan was not over the border yet and could breathe easier only when he was, and even then, afterwards, he would not be safe.

  Fuck ’em, he said to himself.This was war. Brennan could handle it.The immediate problem was getting this one home and to the interrogators. If the RUC or army stopped them they could have a bit of a fight if there was the opportunity, and if it looked like Brennan might not win, all he had to do was give it up. The worst that would happen was jail. But if the Pinks got to them before they passed over the border that was a different story. It would be a fight to the end for someone. That made it the most exciting game he had played yet, and Brennan was up for it. If he beat them, if he got one of them home alive, he would be a legend in his own lifetime. He looked around at the two men in the back.