by Joe Craig
The destroyer was charging through the swell of the ocean towards the shore. She estimated the rate at over 30 knots. And at the sharp point in the front of the ship flew a bright Union Jack flag.
The British are coming, the girl thought, fear creeping into her joints.
She looked to her left, down the coastline, and adjusted the triangulation of the rangefinder. From here she had the perfect view of the only buildings for several kilometres. A couple of heavily marked tracks scarred the sands to the south and led to parallel lines of high fences. Within that was a complex of low buildings, connected to a dozen vast warehouses that backed on to the water. And there were two concrete towers supporting crude look-out stations, both topped by sun-bleached flags of red, white and blue – the French Tricolore.
Despite the distance, the girl could also make out human figures around the outer fence. Were they running? Yes. That’s when she knew for sure.
Mutam-ul-it was preparing for an attack.
So should we, she thought, steeling herself. Time to raise the alarm.
07 FEAR, PAIN AND A RED BEARD
Jimmy had been on the move for hours. The terrain was rugged and the air was thin. He could hear his brain assessing the surroundings. He had to be over 3000 metres up, he guessed. Above the snowline. That put him somewhere on one of the highest peaks, in the centre of the mountain range. But however difficult it was, he had to keep moving if he was going to stay alive. And there was the constant fear at the back of his mind, driving him on – the British attack on France. He had to stop it.
By now the agony that shot through his body with every step had mutated in his mind into some kind of reassurance. It told him he was still alive. That he was still moving. His legs felt so heavy that his feet dragged along the ground as he walked.
He travelled in a dead straight line, but the going was getting steeper. At least the fog had cleared a little so he could see his route further ahead. In the crash he’d slid a long way down the slope and he was paying for that now, always having to march against the gradient. Every few minutes he came to what looked like an impassable rock face, but his body seemed to relish the challenge. Despite the onset of frostbite and the cracked ribs, Jimmy free-climbed as if he’d been born a mountaineer. The hooks of shoehorn he’d fixed to his soles served as makeshift crampons.
With his eyes squinting against the elements and his body straining to keep his basic systems going, Jimmy fought on. But the real torment was in his mind. The whiteness that surrounded him seemed to reach into his brain to plant fear and worry, but most of all anger.
As he heaved himself up the cliff face, he thought back to the very first night that NJ7 had come for him. From that moment, almost everybody he trusted had betrayed him. He had believed Miss Bennett to be his form teacher and he’d even gone to her for protection. She had turned out to be the one woman who most wanted Jimmy dead. He felt a bitter laugh scratch at his throat.
But it had happened again and again. Eva’s parents had pretended to protect him, then betrayed him to NJ7. Colonel Keays had fooled Jimmy with the promise of CIA refuge. Jimmy’s stomach turned over when he thought of his own gullibility. How had he trusted any of these people? He had even convinced himself to use his assassin skills to work for Keays.
Never again, Jimmy thought. He told himself that if he made it across the Pyrenees to see Uno Stovorsky – or any other agent of the French Secret Service – he would beware every word that was said.
Trust your instinct, he urged himself. But in his heart he knew that even his instinct was untrustworthy. Sometimes it was the human part of him acting out of fear, or loyalty, or emotion. Sometimes it was the assassin in him, spurring him on towards self-defence, survival and violence. Perhaps even murder.
How could he know which instincts to trust and which to resist?
Around him, the light was fading. When darkness fell Jimmy knew the temperature would plummet even further. But there was no time to dig shelter for the night and rest. He had to keep going. There was a battle coming.
The largest destroyer in the British Navy dropped anchor 16 kilometres off the coast of Western Sahara. The waves pounded against the iron, but to the commanders and crew of HMS Enforcer the conditions were irrelevant. Two hundred and fifty men and women in pristine white or navy uniforms moved through the vessel with such precision and efficiency they were like parts of a single machine.
In no time the Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles were primed. The targets were locked into the guidance system. Everything was perfect. Nobody needed to say a word.
Except one.
The front section of the central mast contained the command centre – a triangular room with a low ceiling and a door at each corner. This was the brain of the ship. The longest wall, the base of the triangle, was a huge window that looked out over the front of the vessel. All along it, at hip level, was the control desk. From here, the senior officers and their staff made all their decisions and issued their orders.
But one man was completely out of place. He was wearing a suit and a life-jacket and was at least 50 centimetres shorter than everybody else. Compared to their naval steel, he was made of pie pastry.
“Remember,” he said, his voice quivering, “we can’t—”
He was cut off by a glance from Lieutenant-Commander Luke Love. Love’s expression was harder than the iron of the ship’s hull. The sunlight coming through the glass picked out the proud gold braid on the upper part of his sleeve – two stripes with a single loop.
“A single misplaced explosion…” the other man whispered, so intimidated by Lt Cdr Love’s glare that he could hardly speak. “It’s such a delicate environment, that’s all. And we don’t really know what safety systems Mutam-ul-it has in place. You know, for the…”
“Don’t worry, Dr Giesel,” Love replied calmly. “We know enough.” His voice was strangely cheerful, but deep and serious at the same time. Like an experienced headmaster. “Your report told us which specific buildings to hit and which to avoid,” he explained. “The place will remain fully operational and almost all in one piece, ready for your team to take over.”
The muscles round the officer’s mouth creased into a grim smile. Then he lay his hand on the number pad of the control desk in front of him and punched in an eight-digit code.
“Right,” he declared under his breath. “Time to nationalise this hellhole.”
Even the walls of the town of Tlon showed the troubled history of the state of Western Sahara. Almost a century of graffiti was layered on top of itself. The oldest protested against the rule of the Spanish, from the time when they had colonised the country. It was no longer visible under the blurred mess, but since then there had been plenty of other people to complain about: the Moroccans (Western Sahara’s neighbours to the north), the Americans (first for them being there, then for them leaving), a dozen different football teams (from the time when the politics were so complicated even the locals didn’t know who to protest about) and, most recently, the French.
Every building bore the marks of unrest and instability. Cracks ran through the stone walls and holes in the roofs had been covered with ragged, sun-bleached tarpaulin to keep the heat out. These days the cracks and holes couldn’t be fixed, even though they let the rats in, because they were conduits for the cables of the rudimentary electricity and telephone systems. They were also used for signalling.
A series of flashes reflected the sunlight from the low roof of a house. Nobody would have noticed the dark figure hidden under the tarpaulin. Five hundred metres away the signal was acknowledged with another flash, then repeated at a new angle. It was acknowledged again, a little further away this time, towards the centre of town.
The rooftops of Tlon glittered with rapid flashes. There were sounds too, on top of the normal bustle in the labyrinth of narrow streets. Across the town, telephones rang once, stopped, then rang again before being picked up. But no words were spoken – there were only sequences of taps a
nd breaths.
In the small central market there was a sudden eruption of squawking. A boy ducked under one of the stalls, disturbing a small chicken coop on his way through. He sprinted across the street, hidden in the cloud of dust he kicked up. He slipped past a market stall selling bootleg DVDs and burst into the building opposite – three storeys, almost completely masked by a huge Coca-Cola billboard.
Inside was a bare room, dark except for the horizontal stripes of light cutting through the shutters, making the floorboards look like a zebra-skin rug. There was another door at the back, partially concealed by a stained red curtain.
In front of it stood a young guard with a machine gun across his chest and a silver rod where his left leg should have been. In the darkness that was almost all that was visible, until he recognised the boy and smiled, revealing three rounded, pearly teeth.
The boy didn’t smile back.
“Mutam-ul-it,” he gasped, trying to catch his breath.
The guard’s smile vanished. He nodded and knocked on the door behind him. It flew open immediately. In the doorway stood a broad man, silhouetted against the harsh light of the bare bulb inside his room.
A European observer might have noticed this man’s wild red beard, deep-set blue eyes and the explosion of orange hair on his head. But to everybody in this town he could be identified simply as ‘the white man’. Certainly nobody paid any attention to the thin black tie worn loosely around his neck, or to his slender-lapelled suit – black, dusty and worn at the elbows. Who here would even notice that on one lapel was a short, green stripe?
When this man spoke it was in grammatically perfect Hassaniya Arabic, but with a strong northern English accent.
“I told you this would happen,” he announced, waving the boy away. He turned to his guard. “Go get the trucks. Now.”
08 BIRDS IN FLIGHT
At last Jimmy could feel the temperature creeping up a couple of degrees. The sun was rising – not that he could see it with the fog still so thick. He’d made it through the night. But the white world around him seemed to close in. Then it started spinning.
If I stop I’ll die, he told himself. But the voice was faint, as if something inside him was still shouting, but he had lost the ability to hear it. Keep walking, it continued, so feebly it was quieter than a thought. Then came echoes of the phrases he had repeated to himself over and over thousands of times since he started his trek: Find Uno Stovorsky. Warn France. But they were confused and lost beneath the wind.
Then even that noise stopped. Jimmy no longer knew where he was or where he was going. For a second it even felt like his thoughts were completely detached from his body. All the pain floated from his limbs…
No, he heard. Find Stovorsky… France… But the words didn’t mean anything any more.
A light pierced his eyes. Something silver and glimmering. It seemed to pull Jimmy towards it. He was overwhelmed by the sensation that this was the most wonderful thing he had ever seen. The surrounding whiteness flickered from grey to blue to black. Is it night again? Jimmy wondered.
It was his last thought before his head hit the snow.
“Birds in flight, sir,” came a voice through Lt Cdr Love’s intercom. “The launch was clean.”
Dr Giesel ran his hands nervously up and down the front of his life-jacket, then straightened his tie.
“They’re definitely on target?” he whispered. “Because if they’re even slightly off—”
“This is the British Navy,” Love cut in. “We don’t do ‘slightly off’.” He kept his gaze straight ahead at the clutch of buildings on the horizon. The Tomahawk missiles twinkled above them. There was a glint of pride in his eye. But when he caught sight of the other man’s concern his expression softened. “The missiles are guided by GPS,” he explained, “and the targets can’t move. They’re buildings. Not people.”
Dr Giesel was satisfied for a second, until fear crept into his face again.
“What’s up?” Love asked. “Worried about killing a few Frenchmen?”
Dr Giesel’s mouth fell open in horror. How could this man be so flippant? Didn’t he realise he was effectively starting a war?
“Don’t worry,” chuckled Love. “Much as I would have loved to blow up some Frenchmen, we’ve got a live satellite feed that shows us they started evacuating as soon as they spotted us on the horizon. Our missiles will take about ninety seconds to reach them. That’s more than enough time for whoever’s left in there to clear out. Then the place is ours.” He winked and turned back to wait for the explosions. “It’s almost too easy, isn’t it?”
The intercom crackled into life again. “The last French truck has left the site, sir. The place is deserted.”
Love turned to Dr Giesel and gestured as if to say, ‘I told you.’
“Send the satellite feed up to my monitor,” he ordered, into the intercom.
A second later, one of the screens on Love’s control desk switched from a graphical display to a pin-sharp satellite image of the coast 16 kilometres ahead. The sand was a beautiful reddish-orange, but it was blemished by groups of square white buildings and criss-crossed by tracks. Then there were six much larger rectangular buildings lined up next to the water. They would have been overwhelming on the ground, but here they were reduced to knots of pixels. And racing away towards the edges of the screen were dozens of small black squares.
For a few seconds everybody on the bridge stood in silence, while French jeeps and trucks fled the compound. It was like watching germs squirming under a microscope. Some of them twisted and turned as if they didn’t know where to go. This was no orderly retreat, thought Dr Giesel.
In contrast, the atmosphere on the Enforcer was totally calm.
“Only a few people in the world have ever seen these images,” said Love softly. “You won’t find this place on Google, that’s for sure. And only a handful know what really goes on here.” He looked round at Dr Giesel. “Soon you’ll be the one in charge.”
Suddenly the screen went white. Dr Giesel’s eyes jumped from the monitor on the control desk to the horizon. Two towers of black smoke erupted into the sky. After a split-second they were lit up with orange flames. Then came the sound – two deep booms that shook the floor. Dr Giesel placed a hand on the control desk to steady himself, but noticed that he was the only person affected.
“Better prepare your team,” Love announced, so casually it was as if he had asked what was for dinner. “Mutam-ul-it will be under your control in no time.”
Dr Giesel was terrified to see what damage had been done, but at the same time he couldn’t look away. The smoke finally cleared enough for the ground to be visible again on the satellite feed. In the exact spots where there had been two white squares there were now two black patches, each surrounded by a ring of fire in the footprint of the destroyed buildings. The precision was incredible. But then the doctor noticed something at the edge of the screen.
“What’s that?” He nervously leaned forwards and laid a finger on the monitor. The black dots that had been rushing away from the compound were now rushing in every possible direction. Some had stopped completely, but after a few seconds they turned around and went back the way they came.
Lt Cdr Love peered at the screen. “What’s going on?” he barked into the intercom. “Don’t the French know how to evacuate? What are they doing heading back in?”
There was a pause, then a crackle. “It doesn’t appear to be the French, sir.”
“What?”
“It’s another force.”
“Another force?” There was confusion from everybody on the bridge.
“That’s right,” confirmed the voice on the intercom. “They appear to be taking over the French vehicles and…”
“I can see what they appear to be doing!” raged Love. “Why are they doing it? And how are we going to stop them?” He spun round to each of his officers in turn. Every one wore a blank stare.
“Well?” he bellowed. “Who the
hell are these people?”
* * *
One second Mutam-ul-it was there; the next it had vanished in a plume of black smoke. Hot ash rained down around the girl, then hailstones formed out of the sand that had been melted together by the explosion.
The girl buried her face in the sand and covered the back of her head. But she didn’t have time to hesitate. She had waited as long as she could remember for this and she knew that the dozens of people waiting around her were going through exactly the same rush of disbelief, joy and dread. Some were much older than her, a few were even younger, but they were all looking to her for leadership.
For a moment she felt a surge of pride. Her father would never have believed that any woman could be in charge, let alone a sixteen-year-old girl – even his own daughter. Impossible. But no one in her parents’ generation had trained as hard or studied strategy as widely as she had.
Then her pride was overwhelmed by sadness. So few of her parents’ generation had survived. She forced away that thought. It was time to move. It was time to prove why the others were glad to be led by her.
She raised her head and checked that the fighters immediately around her were watching. Then she lifted her arm and signalled, indicating which teams were to head for which vehicles, exactly as she’d been trained. Time to run.
The signal was passed down the line and they acted on her command. As a single unit, they rose from behind the mound and charged towards the chaos. They were a silent force among the panic. Everywhere were French shouts, engines roaring and the din of the fires raging at Mutam-ul-it. But the unit ran in silence.
And none was faster than her. Her black hair flew behind her like a rebel flag. Before she had time to be afraid, she tumbled deliberately into the path of an open-top French jeep.
It swerved to avoid her, but came so close she reached up and caught the bumper. Sand mixed with exhaust fumes seemed to get inside her skin. She strained her arms to keep hold of the jeep. Though she was slim, her biceps bulged. It was as if every fibre of her body was muscle and passion. Just like training, she told herself, trying to ignore the darts of terror in her heart. She clawed her way up the back of the vehicle until she could reach the tread next to the rear wheels.
