‘And a woman of few words, I see,’ Jana commented.
Hands, but not her arms though, Gideon was thinking. There was no Latin-style expansiveness in the woman’s gestures. In fact she kept her upper arms close to her body, while both hands circled, or one waved thoughtfully or emphasised a point.
As if confirming Gideon’s observation, Jana flipped her hand questioningly away from her chin.
‘Okay, how about this,’ she said. ‘Who sent you?’
‘Specifically - I have no idea,’ Gideon said. ‘Truly,’ she added, in response to an expectant look.
‘I don’t understand. How can you not know?’
‘We’re retrieval agents,’ Gideon shrugged. ‘You know, government sanctioned re-abductors.’
‘You’re kidding,’ Jana laughed, and then registered surprise. ‘So our government…’ Jana began, then changed tack. ‘Was I really your, um, what did you call me?’
‘My PO. And yeah.’ Gideon’s tone implied of course, although her curiosity was nudged again by the fact that Dr Rossi seemed clueless about her own status, whatever it was.
‘This is too weird,’ Jana said to herself. ‘And our government actually sent you?’
‘Requested our services, would be more accurate.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘We’re a non-government organisation, so we mostly do private work. In your case, however, who but the government could organise all this?’ Gideon raised her chin slightly to indicate their surroundings.
‘I don’t know,’ Jana shrugged. ‘Murdoch or Packer or Lane,’ she suggested. ‘I mean, Alan Wagner seemed to think he was important enough for someone to rescue.’
‘Who’s Alan Wagner?’
‘You know, the TV journo from This Week, The World.’ When Gideon looked unenlightened, Jana twirled her right hand, and added, ‘The fuckwit you saved me from.’
‘Oh him. Wouldn’t know him if he fell at my feet,’ Gideon said, tucking her white T-shirt into her jeans. ‘And you really don’t know why you? Or who would?’
‘No,’ Jana said emphatically, because the only person who came to mind, wouldn’t.
‘Do you want me to find out?’
‘I could take a wild guess,’ Jana was saying absently, ‘but that’s all it would be. On top of which,’ she shook her head, ‘highly unlikely.’
Gideon frowned at the woman’s irritating need for superfluous chatter. ‘It’s a limited offer, Doc.’
‘What? Oh, yes. Could you?’ she smiled. ‘And for heaven’s sake, stop with the Doc and Dr Rossi nonsense. Please, call me Jana.’
‘Sure,’ Gideon agreed. ‘If you head back to the debriefing room now, I’ll check this out for you.’
Bugger. ‘Do I have to?’
Yes. And enough now. Gideon pointed to her earlobe. ‘Clearance, remember.’
‘But,’ Jana frowned.
‘What?’
‘I wanted to talk to you about, um, about what happened on the island.’
‘Oh. Yeah, sorry.’ Gideon cocked her head. ‘That’s actually why I wanted to see you; to talk before Agent Brand started his debrief. Are you okay? I mean, did that guy hurt you before I came back?’
‘No,’ Jana said hurriedly. ‘Well, not really. No, he didn’t. But he would have. So I wanted to thank you,’ she held up a hand when Gideon shrugged, ‘and, um, verify that you did in fact kill him.’
‘Why? You want to go back and make sure he’s dead?’ Gideon asked, puzzled.
‘No,’ Jana raised her hands. ‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘Oh,’ Gideon said, remembering that a civilian might actually be concerned about a bloke, even a bad guy, being taken out like that.
‘Yes, I shot him. He’s very dead. Coop could have taken him out with a T-dart, but I,’ she hesitated, and rubbed the back of her neck. Dr Rossi’s frown was prompting her to elaborate - again. ‘It’s a dart from a long-range weapon, a bit like a stun gun, that’s designed to incapacitate not kill. But I only had the real deal. So it was the rebel with my gun, or you with his knife.’
Jana nodded.
‘Are you okay with that?’
‘Oh yes,’ Jana nodded again. ‘With the me not being dead part, I mean. The other will take a bit of getting used to.’
‘Don’t lose any sleep over him Doc. Jana. He would have raped you. Then he would have killed you.’
Jana’s skin crawled, but she smiled. ‘I know. And again, I thank you.’
Gideon shrugged. ‘I’ve already apprised Agent Brand of the incident, so we don’t expect you to talk about it in front of your annoying ex-roommate.’
‘That’s a relief.’
Easy Spur Ranch, Carthage, Texas
Tuesday 6.10 am
Jesse-Jay Bagget looked at his dumb-fuck pseudo-stepbrother and decided this may indeed be the best way to go about things. If Kero wanted to drive the truck so much, then he could. He could drive it straight in, make his point and that’d be the end of it. Either way, the Colonel would be way pleased, and Jesse-Jay would’ve shown his delegating skills. The timing would be better for him and the other thing too.
And even if shit-for-brains Kero screwed the first part up, which was so possible, well then - as long as he screwed it up proper - then it’d be no great loss.
Jesse-Jay checked his watch for the umpteenth time since rising and eating breakfast in the dark. Once the boys arrived and the stock was loaded, the drive to Dallas would take a bit over three hours. That’d put them midtown about mid morning. Perfect. The city would be open for business, the Colonel would make his call, and the deal would be done.
Jesse-Jay saw the orange fog-lights reflecting all spooky-like off what was left of the misty morning, and then the small convoy crested the rise on the road at the border of his land.
He hit the Star Brigade icon to save Level 8 of his Global WarTek game and switched off his TekBox. It was time for the real game to begin.
‘Wake up Kero,’ he said, slapping the guy on the chest. ‘We got important company. The Colonel’s here.’
Tokyo, Japan
Tuesday 8.20 pm
Scott had squeezed behind 11 noodle-eaters arrayed along the inside counter, avoided a knife-waving chef and his ‘you no go that way’ and collided with a kid hauling a box of fish - and he was still about 20 feet from the back door which had just slammed shut in front of him. He apologised in several languages - none of them Japanese - to the two old women still startled by the previous invader of their back room, then wrenched open the door and threw himself into a badly lit laneway.
There was no sign of Kaisha. There was a faulty flickering light; of course. Scott swore in frustration.
So, it’s dark. He waited.
Light, dark, light. And it’s confined, dark, light and cluttered and dark.
Scott turned away from the nearest dead-end and headed for the only obvious way out.
Man! Forget the bald gaijin on blades. Sumo-sized Yakuza dudes are gonna get you here, you moron.
And then, 50 feet from the neon-lit safety of a crowded wet Tokyo street, they did just that.
A strong hand grabbed him by the scruff of his suede jacket and yanked him backwards through a doorway, into the very dark, and onto his arse.
Chapter Nine
Kingston Club, London
Tuesday 12.10 pm
This is exactly what I’m talking about,’ Edward ‘Teddy’ Drake announced waving at the muted television. ‘This situation in the Pacific is a perfect example of how a truly international, highly-mobile armed force, given the right mandate, could be deployed to rescue hostages or take out insurgents.’
The breaking news banner: Laui Island, 36 hostages, 9th day, PRA rebels, high-level meeting in New Zealand was streaming across the bottom of the screen. The attention of Britain’s new Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee had been caught by the promo for an impending live update.
Drake turned to his companions in the Club’s Tudor Roo
m. ‘A multinational force with international jurisdiction could deal with specific terrorist threats like that one, wherever they occur.’
‘You mean like NATO?’ Ministerial Advisor Peter Ebrey said.
‘No. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is not really much use in the South Pacific, Peter.’
‘He said like NATO, Teddy, and you know bloody well what he means,’ said Richard Thorpe.
As head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, better known as MI6, Thorpe was technically Edward Drake’s subordinate, but there no disrespect in his tone. The two men had been friends for 30 years - in as much as spies from rival departments could ever make that claim. Besides, here in the exclusive Kingston Club, position held no sway, especially a position that was only a week old. And while both Thorpe and Drake had been contenders, the latter’s confirmation as JIC Chairman had been a forgone conclusion. He’d been ‘acting’ in the top job since his predecessor’s strange and untimely death.
‘But who would actually sign up for this international force?’
‘Any country, you know, that we approve. Oh, now here’s an idea,’ Drake said. ‘This force could be open for direct recruitment.’
‘Isn’t that how the French Foreign Legion works?’ said Adam Lyall, the only American in the group. ‘Great idea, Teddy, let’s train jilted criminals to fight terrorists.’
Drake smiled and shook his head at the visiting US Deputy Secretary of State. ‘I meant direct recruitment from other armed forces, not straight off the street, Adam.’
‘So, back to Peter’s question,’ Lyall said. ‘Who would agree to have their own jurisdiction trampled by an armed force that could arbitrarily cross borders on the pretext of routing out a few terrorists?’
‘You Americans do that kind of trampling all the time,’ Thorpe said and allowed himself a brief laugh.
‘Well yeah,’ Lyall agreed, ‘but, just like you guys, we cross those borders in secret, at night. And we try to do it without noticeably compromising anyone’s sovereignty or hurting anyone’s damn feelings.’
‘What about the United Nations?’ It was Ebrey again.
Lyall and Thorpe exchanged amused glances. ‘He is young,’ Thorpe observed.
Ebrey ignored the dig, ‘I just don’t get why you’re trying to reinvent the wheel.’
‘You are aware that we’re just shooting the breeze here, Peter?’ Thorpe said.
‘Speak for yourself, Richard. I’m serious about this,’ Drake stated. ‘Ever since those Titan Guards luckily, but accidentally, saved the Australian, Indian and Canadian Prime Ministers from being snipered at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting last year, I’ve been mulling over the creation of an international kind of SAS troop or police force.’
‘But why create a new army,’ Ebrey said. ‘Isn’t that what the UN peacekeeping forces already do?’
‘Only in their wet dreams,’ Drake said. ‘Sending little packs of soldiers to stand around in foreign trouble spots and not engage the enemy, unless it lobs a grenade at their feet, is not what I’m talking about. Peacekeepers are only useful after the fact. What’s more, as you well know, UN forces only get convened from whichever country wants to volunteer a couple of soldiers for duty in that place, at that time, for that mission.’
A derisive snort accompanied Lyall’s cigar smoke. ‘That’s assuming the UN can make up its collective mind to do anything at all.’
‘Forget the UN,’ Drake insisted. ‘I’m not talking about keeping the peace. I mean, how can you keep something that simply doesn’t exist in a war zone? And, as we all know, terrorists do not confine their acts to war zones. What I’m talking about here is instant action, perhaps even pre-emptive ball-busting.’
Drake’s companions laughed; partly because his fighting words matched neither his placid tone nor his chubby school-boy appearance, but mostly because they were at odds with his usual position.
‘Since when are you in favour of the guns-blazing form of diplomacy?’ Thorpe asked.
‘Despite malicious rumours to the contrary,’ Drake said, acknowledging their reaction with good humour, ‘every now and then I do get the urge to take the fight to their front door.’
‘You Teddy?’ Thorpe mocked. ‘You’ve always been fervidly opposed to any overseas commitment.’
‘And I will forever argue against wasting our troops, en masse, overseas if it compromises our domestic safety,’ Drake said. ‘But imagine having a small, specifically-trained force that could be aimed at the heart of the problem, one that could be dispatched to cut off the head of that damn regenerating serpent whenever, or wherever, it emerges from its bolt hole.’
‘Now who’s dreaming,’ Thorpe remarked. ‘You’d never get that level of international cooperation.’
‘Isn’t it time we worked to change that, instead of assuming it’s impossible?’ Drake said. ‘I tell you, my friends, our own bureaucracy is the greatest unintentional ally these terrorists have. While we sit twiddling our proverbials, they’re out there ready to blow theirs clean off just to get the job done. We don’t have a chance against them until we can find a way to play their game. Isn’t that so Adam?’
As much as Lyall agreed with the idea, it was too soon to go too public against his own Commander in Chief’s sorry alternative. So, resisting the urge to concur with Drake’s apparently-sudden innovative solution to fighting terrorism, he trotted out his usual, ‘I’ve been saying for years we need a dedicated force to deal with those bastards.’
‘But that is not what your boss is advocating, is it?’ Thorpe baited the lanky Virginian. ‘Tell us again what the POTUS will be putting to the PM tomorrow?’
‘Dick,’ Lyall said, ‘you know perfectly well that Garner is still flogging that dead-horse of his. He’s got a new name for it, but it’s the same massive and unwieldy concept of a full-time but high-rotation Coalition army - to be headed by us, naturally.’
‘Which is why it won’t happen,’ Ebrey said. ‘We’re over agreeing to everything your big guy wants.’
Lyall nodded. ‘Problem is, my guy doesn’t seem to get it that no one - especially in the already-free world - likes being told what to do by someone who just thinks he knows best.’
‘On top of which,’ Thorpe said, ‘having thousands of troops holed-up in permanent forts located only in the world’s so-called hot spots is akin to offering them up for terrorist target practice. Meanwhile, in the real world, the bastards will simply attack everywhere there are no troops.’
‘Hey, why not start with those Titan Guards,’ Lyall suggested. ‘A British-American company employing the best ex-enlisted from Australia, Canada and South Africa, means they’re already multinational. They proved their, I suppose you’d call it honour, by acting decisively and beyond the call of money when they saved those Prime Ministers in Delhi last June, which I gather they did, just because they could. That in itself was amazing for a bunch of mercenaries. Let’s turn them into your army.’
‘Now you are being ridiculous,’ Thorpe said, nodding thanks to the waiter who’d arrived with fresh drinks. ‘Those ex-soldiers - ex being the operative word - are no different to the countless other security firms that have been operating in Iraq over the last too-many years. Granted many of those private armies, personal protection firms, special-forces units and spies for hire - like Acorn, Carrington, Black-water, Aegis, Greystone, HarkerFleet and the Titan Guards - have been doing the work no one else can, or wants to do. But so many others like them, or unlike them, have been working under the radar in Iraq, and in Afghanistan and the Gulf States, running drugs, selling arms, and getting very rich.’
‘Yes, yes; they’ve been doing the same in Morocco, Somalia, Central America, Colombia, you name it,’ Drake said, distracted by a new image on the BBC World channel. ‘That’s why we’d need to start our Inter-Force from scratch.’
‘Inter-Force, Teddy? You’ve even named it,’ Ebrey noted.
‘Can we have the sound up on the tele please,
Robert?’ Drake asked the waiter. ‘And the lunch menu.’
The much touted live hostage update involved a split-screen showing a correspondent on a beach, somewhere, and the TV anchor in a studio somewhere else. The reporter was talking about the ongoing discussions in Wellington while waving pointlessly at the dark Pacific horizon, allegedly in the direction of Laui Island where ‘the PLA was still holding 36 hostages’.
Oh yeah, thought US Deputy Secretary of State Lyall, who knew otherwise. So much for the latest news. He, and the one man in the room he’d told about Kelman and the scheduled SEAL raid on Laui, knew that as of two hours ago the situation on that tiny spec in the Pacific Ocean would have to be quite different to the ‘no end in sight’ claimed by the reporter.
Adam Lyall also knew that the fallout from that mission would change everything, though not exactly in the way he’d imagined.
Chapter Ten
HMAS Harris, Pacific Ocean
Tuesday 11.30 pm
‘Can you describe this foreign soldier?’
‘They were all bloody foreign,’ Alan said. ‘It was a Polynesian Island, not a Barrier Reef resort.’
‘The stray foreigner - amongst the locals,’ Jana stressed, ‘was a white guy with cropped red hair. He was maybe six-two and wearing neat black fatigues, but not an army-type uniform. It looked more like SWAT gear.’
‘I didn’t see anyone,’ Alan stated.
‘You were too busy asserting your - self, Alan.’
Alan glared at Jana before turning back to the studious-looking ASIS agent, John Brand. ‘I did hear Ifran talking just before we entered but when we did, the guy was alone.’
Agent Brand nodded. ‘Tell me about the equipment.’
‘Let me think. He had a TV, a video recorder with the Sky News tape he wanted us to watch, a laptop.’ Alan waggled his head, as if trying to shake more information loose, then shrugged.
Jana wondered, and not for the first time, how a person as unobservant as Alan had ever got beyond copyboy, let alone become host of a top current affairs show.
‘There were several laptops,’ she corrected, hesitating as the cabin door opened to admit Commander Gideon. Brand took no notice of her entrance and Alan didn’t notice she had, so Jana continued.
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