Aggressor ns-8

by Andy McNab

  Bastard couldn’t help himself. ‘Hey, I only told you what I’d been told myself.’ He gave a deep, frustrated sigh. ‘I’m not the decision-maker here. I’m like you guys; I’m a worker bee — a worker bee who just wants to get the fuck out of here.’

  I’d promised myself to stay out of this, but my blood was starting to boil. ‘Worker bee, my arse. You’re a fucking maggot. You feed off situations like this, and leave the real worker bees to pay the price.’ I changed down to take a bend. ‘Remember Anthony, the Brit you slapped around at Waco?’

  He went quiet for a moment. The rain was now hammering so hard on the Pajero’s roof it sounded like we were trapped inside a snare drum, but I could almost hear his mind whirring. ‘Anthony? Anthony who? I don’t remember slapping any Brit at Waco.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’ My eyes were fixed on the mud-covered gravel ahead. The Pajero was starting to slip and slide, and I had to fight the wheel to correct it. ‘He designed the gas you used, but shouldn’t have, remember? He committed suicide about a year afterwards. He couldn’t live with the guilt.’

  ‘Oh, that Anthony…’ Bastard ran an index finger over his moustache. ‘Sure I remember him… fucking Limey fag. He shouldn’t have been there. Never send a boy to do a man’s job…’

  I swung the Pajero up a track that suddenly opened up to the left. We bucked over the pipeline towards a stretch of trees.

  I shouted back at Charlie. ‘Let’s see if this arsehole’s bollocks are as big as his mouth.’

  I braked hard at the treeline, killed the ignition and shoved Bastard towards the passenger door. ‘Get the fuck out! Now!’

  I swivelled in my seat, leaned back against my door and kicked at him with both feet as he scrabbled for the handle. ‘I was there, I was with Anthony. I saw the whole fucking thing…’ I kicked him again as his door swung open and he slithered out into the mud.

  He picked himself off the ground, his face a mask of fear and indignation. ‘It wasn’t me who gave the order. That was way above my pay scale.’

  I followed him out while Charlie rummaged in the back of the wagon.

  ‘I thought you’d got the message about that worker bee shit,’ I yelled through the rain. ‘None of those kids stood a chance, and you enjoyed every fucking minute!’

  ‘Bingo!’ Charlie gave me the thumbs-up, slammed the rear door and headed for the Pajero’s bonnet.

  ‘Wait until I’ve climbed aboard him.’ I brought my pistol up. ‘I’m going to have this fucker.’

  Bastard backed away until he was pressing against the front wing. ‘Hey, I knew it wasn’t right. I knew it was wrong to kill those people.’ He raised his hands, half pleading, half trying to make me keep my distance. ‘Those were American citizens… my own people…’ He pointed at me. ‘Our people.’

  ‘Down! In the mud! Now!’

  He slid down the side of the vehicle and slumped against the wheel. The rain kicked up the puddles all around him. We were both soaked to the skin. My sleeve weighed heavily on my arm as I raised my pistol to his head.

  ‘Who are you working for?’ My first kick caught him square in the ribs. ‘Who gave the order to drop Charlie?’ My second disappeared into the mountain of flesh that spilled over his waistband. ‘What’s in those documents? What the fuck happened at the house?’

  Charlie had released the bonnet and was now standing on the other side of him.

  Bastard heaved air into his lungs and his face tilted up towards me, eyes screwed up against the rain. ‘What you gonna do, son? Pull that trigger? Fuck you, then. Just get on with it. ‘

  Charlie shook his head, then leaned down and clipped one of the Pajero’s jump leads onto the roll of fat above Bastard’s collar and held the second against his ear.

  Bastard screamed and his whole body shuddered. He collapsed like a rag doll, legs splayed out in the mud.

  The jump lead was still clamped to his neck. Charlie handed me the other and slid into the driver’s seat.

  I gave Bastard another kick, just because I wanted to.

  Charlie fired up the ignition, and gave the pedal a squeeze.

  Bastard said nothing, just lay there whimpering, listening to the steady throb of the Pajero’s engine, staring down at the mud. He was starting to get the message.

  8

  ‘Look at me.’

  He kept his eyes down.

  I jammed my clip against the top of his ear.

  He squealed, arched his back and collapsed again.

  I leaned over him. ‘Look at me…’

  He stayed where he was, but this time his eyes came up to meet mine. Rain streamed off my chin and onto his face.

  ‘This is very simple.’ I waved the jump lead in his face. ‘You talk, and I keep this away from you.’

  He jerked his head to dislodge the crocodile clip from his neck, but it stayed right where it was.

  I kicked his hand away as he tried to reach up and grab it.

  When he started to talk, I could hardly hear him above the sound of the rain. ‘It was a simple operation that got fucked up. We just needed those papers, no hassle, everything clean.’ He scrabbled in the mud and hauled himself back up against the wheel. ‘It’s out of my hands now. That’s why I was getting out of this shithole.’ He stared into the trees.

  I moved the clip back into his line of sight, and held it no more than a centimetre away from his nose. ‘You’re not answering the questions. Who the fuck are you working for? Who are these powerful friends of yours you said can make things happen?’

  ‘The politicos, man. Same old story. The guys Bazgadze was gunning for. That’s why they wanted what was in his safe. That’s all I know.’ He glanced up at me. ‘And all I wanna know.’

  ‘You still with the Bureau? Is this some covert FBI fuckabout we’ve been sucked into here?’

  He shook his head slowly and his gaze dropped back towards the mud. ‘Those fuckers spat me out four years ago. Chewed me up and spat me out, with just enough of an annuity to buy myself a cigar every Fourth of July. Why do you think I ended up in this goddam shithole?’

  I wasn’t buying the sympathy card, and brought the clip a fraction closer to let him know.

  ‘I was in the job thirty years, and for what? Jack shit, man. So when these guys step in and offer me a retirement plan—’

  ‘What happened at the house?’

  ‘The guys I work for, there are six of them, OK? Partnership for Peace isn’t high on their list of priorities; well, partnership gets their vote, but peace can go take a dump. They want to keep things exactly the way they are. US dollars are flying in by the planeload, and a lot of them get diverted their way. They pay the militants to threaten the pipeline, just to keep things on the boil. Nothing bad, nothing physical — just the occasional firework display. Nobody gets hurt. It’s just good, old-fashioned commerce. I’m just there to—’

  ‘Yeah, we know,’ Charlie said. ‘You’re just there to smooth the way…’

  Bastard looked up at him and risked a smile.

  I kicked him. ‘Get on with it.’

  He slid his legs up as close to his chest as his gut would allow. ‘This Bazgadze guy, he’d been getting more and more of a problem. The whole sainthood thing wasn’t good for business. And neither was getting found out just before Bush arrives to rally the troops for the war on terror. So the plan was, steal the papers, find out what he knows. Lean on the guy. Warn him off…’

  He raised a hand to the jump lead still clamped onto his neck. ‘Can I take this thing off? I’m fucking helping you here.’

  I shook my head. ‘You’re helping yourself. That still doesn’t explain what happened at the house, or at the cemetery. Who the fuck were those guys?’

  ‘Bazgadze wasn’t any more popular with the militants than he was with my politicos. There’s this fuck, Akaki, he runs them. He just couldn’t wait. If Bazgadze had proof he was on the take, he wanted him dead. He’s a fucking psycho, he’s out of control. It’s not the way to deal with guys li
ke Bazgadze — he’s a fucking god around here.

  It’s gotta be subtle.’

  ‘What, like you?’

  The rain was so hard it felt like a madman with a staple gun was attacking the back of my neck.

  Charlie wasn’t happy — and not just with Bastard’s explanation. ‘We better start getting a move on.’ He pointed beyond the trees, where mud and loose debris were breaking away from the side of the hill and gravity was doing the rest. ‘The road’s taking a pounding.’

  I kicked Bastard to his feet.

  ‘So what happens now?’ he said.

  ‘What happens now is you shut the fuck up, or we connect those jump leads to your bollocks. You’re coming with us, and later on, when we’re in Turkey and out of this shit, you’re going to call a few of your high-powered mates. We’re going to make a little deal, and this time you’re going to be the broker.’

  9

  The curtain of water in front of us was now so solid I had to slow the Pajero to a crawl.

  The noise was horrendous. We’d had to open all the windows, to try to deal with the condensation from our soaking clothes. The heater was going full blast, but it didn’t stand a chance.

  Bastard was trying without success to shift some of the mud off his clothes and skin. He looked like he’d just crawled out of the black lagoon. He paused mid-scrape and had a crack at getting back into the good lads’ club. ‘Hey, Nick, believe me, I’m sorry about that Anthony guy. I’m sorry about the whole goddam thing. It was a really heavy time.’

  ‘But it didn’t have to be, did it?’

  Bastard fidgeted some more. ‘It wasn’t like that. Just think what would have happened if Koresh and his buddies had gotten away with giving the finger to the ATF. Law and order would’ve lost all credibility. A thing like that couldn’t go unpunished. Anarchy, lawlessness — gotta be nipped in the bud, or you end up like this shithole.’

  Rain crashed onto the car like breaking waves. The wipers were on full power, and still I couldn’t see a thing.

  Charlie had arranged himself across the back seat, weapon tucked under his arse, legs draped over the carry-on. It was one of those airtight, fireproof, everything-proof aluminium things that come with a lifetime guarantee and a thousand-dollar price tag.

  I got to thinking about what Bastard had said when he was plugged into the mains, and it didn’t stack up. When it came to being fucked over, I was the world’s leading expert, and the smart money didn’t say anything like Bastard wanted us to think it did. There was something a whole lot more serious going on here than a little light spring-cleaning before the US President arrived.

  I kept an eye on the pipeline scar to our left; more often than not, now, it was the only way of telling we were still on the road. The river had burst its banks an hour or two ago, and raged along the bottom of the gradient to our right.

  Bastard glanced over his shoulder and leaned towards me, as if he had a secret to share with his best mate. ‘Nick, listen. What about you and me making a deal? Let me go with the papers and tapes when we get to Borjomi; I’ll call my guys, see to it you’re off the wanted list, and make everything cool once you two get into Turkey. We’ve had enough of this shit, don’t you think?’

  He nodded at Charlie, whose head was wobbling from side to side as I bounced the wagon along the track.

  ‘Just tell him I got out for a dump and made a run for it. Hey, how’s he to know…’

  Things weren’t looking good out there. Brown slurry cascaded off the high ground to our left, carrying rocks and broken branches across our path.

  Bastard wasn’t giving up. ‘You and me, Nick, we’re both really in deep shit. We’re singing off the same hymn sheet here.’

  ‘Why don’t we start with Swan Lake, lad?’ Charlie sparked up from the back. ‘We’ll hum it, you go jump in it.’

  I glanced in the rear-view. He’d turned onto his side, knees bunched up, and was chuckling quietly to himself. ‘You’ve got two problems with your plan, Fat Boy. One’ — he tapped the top pocket of his jacket — ‘it’s all in here. Two, running isn’t exactly your strong suit. You couldn’t even bend over to run a bath, for fuck’s sake.’

  There wasn’t time to laugh.

  Ariver of mud ten metres wide sluiced off the hill and hit the wagon broadside, pushing us to where the road fell away to the river below.

  I swung the wheel to steer us into the skid, but nothing happened.

  ‘Charlie, out the wagon!’

  The mudslide gathered weight and momentum, and started to spill in through the open windows.

  I grabbed the edge of the roof and hauled myself out of the gap.

  Bastard was sliding his fat arse towards the passenger door. He could look after himself.

  The Pajero was beginning to tip. I wrestled the rear door open and dragged Charlie clear by the shoulders.

  He tumbled out on top of me as the vehicle slewed another couple of metres, then finally succumbed to the sheer weight of mud and cart-wheeled down towards the river.

  A dozen or so metres away, Bastard struggled to get himself upright.

  Charlie blinked as the rain lashed his mud-caked face.

  ‘Papers and tape?’

  Charlie tapped his pocket and nodded.

  We both heard a sound like an approaching train.

  I looked up, but before I could shout a warning the knee-high surge of mud and debris had gathered Bastard up and swept him over the edge.

  PART TEN

  1

  The Pajero had landed upside down at the river’s edge, five or six metres below us, doors open, windscreen smashed. It bucked and wallowed as water the colour of chocolate pounded against the wreckage. Any second now it would be snatched away and hurled downstream.

  Bastard hadn’t been any luckier. The river at this point was around thirty metres wide, and I watched as he floundered, went under, and bobbed up again about halfway across, almost indistinguishable from all the other lumps of debris swirling downstream.

  I started ripping off my jacket.

  Charlie rolled his eyes. ‘Nothing we can do, lad. Fuck him. Anyway, we got Crazy Dave.’

  I shook my head. Later, Bastard could die a slow and painful death, as far as I was concerned, but right now he was here, and Crazy Dave was a million miles away. ‘He’s our route out of this shit! He’s got the contacts; he can get us over the border.’

  There was nothing Charlie could do to help. His ankle was fucked, and the rest of him was falling apart. This one was down to me. I pulled my shirt out of my trousers and half jumped, half tumbled down the slope towards the maelstrom.

  The water surged past at a fearsome pace, carrying all before it. Huge branches crashed over the rocks ahead of me.

  There was a screech of tearing metal as the Pajero finally lost its grip and thundered downstream. I watched it for about a hundred metres, until the river bent sharply to the left and it disappeared.

  And that was where I spotted him. The force of the current had carved out the subsoil for a ten-metre stretch along the far bank, exposing a latticework of tree-roots that gleamed white against the mud, like the ribs of a putrefying corpse. Bastard had his arm hooked through one of them.

  He didn’t stand the slightest chance of hauling himself up and out of the mud, let alone over the edge of the bank. There was no way I’d be able to either, and I hadn’t spent a lifetime on the Big Mac diet.

  I could see he was yelling at me big-time, but I couldn’t hear a thing above the roar of the water.

  I scanned the stretch of river between us. He must have fetched up where he was after being catapulted into it midstream. I’d need to enter the water much further up if I was going to have a chance of hitting the bank before I was swept in the wake of the Pajero, and on around the bend.

  I scrambled over the mud thirty or forty metres upstream, past the jagged skeleton of a small wooden footbridge that had been unable to withstand the force of the flood.

  I plunged i
n up to my calves and pushed on, fighting the freezing current until I was up to my waist and the sheer weight of the deluge whipped my legs from under me. I kicked and thrashed, but might as well not have bothered. Nothing I could do would stop me going under.

  I went with the flow until my lungs threatened to burst and I started taking on water through my nose and mouth, then somehow managed to kick myself back to the surface.

  My head spun and my eyes were streaming, but I caught sight of him again as I fought for breath. Like me, he was struggling to keep his head up, clinging to the tree root for dear life.

  The water took me under again and I was suddenly more concerned about sucking in air than getting to the other side.

  I wrestled my way to the surface once more, and saw that I was now almost at the far side. I could let the current do the rest.

  Seconds later, my fingers closed around Bastard’s tree root.

  He was cold, disoriented, frightened. He grabbed me, desperate to stay afloat, but only succeeded in pulling me under.

  I kicked and jerked my way back up, fighting to keep my grip on the root as the current tore at my legs.

  ‘No!’ I kicked out at him. ‘Compose yourself, for fuck’s sake! Stop!’ Down at this level, the roar of water was deafening.

  I jackknifed away from him, trying to keep him at arm’s length. I knew he was panicking big-time, and there was no way I wanted us to head to the bottom of this vortex together.

  The bank was steeper than I’d thought. There was a chance I could heave myself out, but it would take a crane to lift him clear.

  ‘We’ve got to swim back across! I’ll help you, but no grabbing… We won’t make it if you fucking lose it, OK?’

  He stared at me with glazed eyes, his teeth chattering with cold. ‘I can’t swim.’

  For fuck’s sake.

  I scanned the boiling surface of the water on either side of us. The trunk of a pine tree had lodged itself against a rockslide just short of the bend in the river. Its roots faced slightly upstream, creating a V-shaped breakwater. The aluminium rectangle of Bastard’s carry-on glinted among the debris bobbing in the slower-moving water at its centre.