by Dawson, Mark
He wrapped his fingers around the bars and started to rattle the door.
The guard rose from his chair. “Get back, boy,” he said.
“I’m not a criminal. They shot my mother!”
He shook the door again, the metal clanking loudly.
The guard reversed his shotgun and drove the butt, hard, against Faik’s fingers. His right hand flashed with sudden pain, and he let go of the bars.
The guard spun the shotgun again and pointed it at him. “Sit down, boy,” he said with naked menace. “You don’t want the same thing to happen to you, do you?”
Chapter Fifteen
The restaurant was rudimentary. They took a table near the window with a view across a parched lawn to the concrete blocks that had been deployed to stop car bombers from getting too close to the main building. The hotel was inhabited by plenty of Westerners, and it would have been a fine prize for the insurgents. Private guards, armed with automatic rifles, were stationed outside. Beatrix watched them for a moment and was not impressed. It would have been a simple thing to get past them.
To the left was the river, where motorboats and fishing skiffs churned through the sluggish brown silt. There was a freighter that had turned turtle off the main dock and bullet-marked buildings on the foreshore were reminders that this was until recently a city at war.
They waited for the waiter to bring them their menus.
“What’s your story?” Beatrix asked him.
“What? Before the Group?”
“Sure.”
“Special Boat Service.”
“And before that?”
“Just a grunt. Did my time, here and there. Nothing special.”
“You must have something. You made Special Forces.”
“Must have gotten lucky.”
False modesty. She ignored it. “What have you done so far for Pope?”
“Nothing. I’ve been training for six months. This is the first thing.”
Beatrix had realised that he was green, but there was green and then there was green. She wasn’t interested in babysitting a rookie.
Faulkner must have read her concern.
“I know what I’m doing,” he said, a little indignantly.
“I’m sure you do,” she said, although she knew from experience that a career in Special Forces and a career in Group Fifteen were very different things. The former did not adequately prepare for the latter. It provided minimum baselines for physical and tactical capabilities, but active service in the Group required a certain mental state, an ethical flexibility, that came only with experience. It was something that was absorbed, the way that radiation seeped into the bones, slowly mutating the cells until the agent became something else entirely. It was a contamination. Faulkner, young and used only to stark blacks and whites, would not yet have been exposed to enough of it. She would have to remember that.
He was looking at her curiously. “What happened in Russia?”
“How much do you know?”
“I know half the Group were killed.”
She nodded.
“And that you were involved.”
She looked at him, as he was looking at her, and she nodded again. “Group Fifteen had a serious problem with vermin. An infestation. The man who was Control before Pope was the worst of all. He tried to kill me. He killed my husband and kidnapped my child. He tried to kill the agent who was Number One after me, too.”
“John Milton?”
“That’s right. You’ve heard of him?”
He gaped. “Of course I have. He’s a legend.”
Beatrix smiled. Green and starry-eyed.
“How many did he send?”
“He sent six to take us out. We sent six back in body bags. I expect Pope is working hard to replace them.”
“He didn’t say very much. I knew something had happened, but it’s not like what I’m used to. There’s no banter. I haven’t even met any of the other agents.”
“And you won’t, or at least not very often. You work alone most of the time.”
The waiter appeared with their menus. There was an ex-pat in the kitchen, but he was hamstrung by the selection of ingredients that were available to him. They ordered steak and chips, and when the food came, Beatrix found she was very hungry.
She set about her steak. “I need equipment,” she said between mouthfuls.
“The Group has a quartermaster operating out of Basra. He’ll get you whatever you need. We’ll go first thing tomorrow.”
“And then?”
“I thought we could take a drive out to Rumaila. Take a look around.”
They ate in silence for a moment.
“Do you want to tell me what your plan is?” he asked her.
“What do you want to know?”
“I don’t even know exactly what you’re here to do.”
“Two things.”
“I know what I’m here to do: get Mackenzie West out of Iraq.”
“That’s the first thing. What do you know?”
“Just what Pope told me: that he wants to go public about the way Manage Risk are behaving with the locals. And that we want him to do that so he can cause them a headache.”
“That’s right.”
“But that’s Pope’s agenda, isn’t it? The government’s? What are you here for? The second thing?”
“The vermin problem.”
“There’s a rat here?”
She nodded. “A particularly nasty one. A man who works for Manage Risk. Bryan Duffy. He and I have unfinished business. I need to be alone with him for five minutes.”
“The kind of meeting where two people go in and one person comes out?”
“You’ve got the idea.”
“Alright, then. That’s all I need to know.”
“You’ve got no problem with that?”
“I wouldn’t be in the Group if I did, would I?”
“No,” Beatrix said. “You wouldn’t.”
Let’s see, she thought. Let’s see if you still feel that way when it’s time.
“Which order do you want to go after them?”
“I don’t think it makes much difference. Duffy knows I’m coming.”
“So what’s first?”
“Let’s have a look around tomorrow. I might get an idea.”
They had a drink after their meal, and then Beatrix excused herself and said that she needed to rest. Faulkner stayed at the table, finishing his beer. He paid the check, stood and, making sure that she had gone up to her room and wasn’t waiting in reception, went outside to the parking lot. He got into his Freelander and drove the short distance into downtown Basra.
He parked on the Corniche al-Basra, near the Lion of Babylon square. The area was busy with people, and traffic rolled alongside, impatient horns sounding. The buildings nearby were pocked with bullet holes, and there were deep, untidy piles of rubble all about. The street lamps overhead flickered on and off, casting intermittent puddles of light down onto the sidewalk.
The passenger door opened and Captain Michael Pope slid into the seat. He was wearing a white dishdasha, a long Iraqi robe that reached down to his ankles. A scarf was pulled up over his mouth and nose. He pulled the scarf down.
“Good evening, sir,” Faulkner said.
“How did it go?”
“Fine. I picked her up and brought her across.”
“How is she?”
“Combative.”
“I know that, Twelve,” Pope said impatiently. “Physically?”
Faulkner was puzzled. “She looks alright. Why?”
“You don’t think she looks ill?”
“She’s thin,” he said, “but ill? I don’t know. Can’t say I noticed.”
“Keep it in mind,” Pope said. “You’re going to
spend time with her. More than I have. Something’s not right and I can’t put my finger on it. And if I’m right, I need to know about it. Alright?”
“Yes, sir.”
He shifted, the robe tightening so that Faulkner could see the shape of a holstered weapon beneath his armpit. “What’s your plan for tomorrow?”
“I’m going to get her equipped, and then we’re going to go and have a look at the oil field. If I can persuade her to go after your man first, I will.”
Pope nodded his approval. “Keep her focussed on that. Promising that she would get him out was the only way I could have this cleared. I cannot afford for this to go wrong.”
“I understand, sir.”
Pope pulled the scarf up around his mouth again.
“Keep me on top of everything and if you need me, call. But no one else can know I’m here. As far as SIS is concerned, I’m in London.”
“Yes, sir.”
He opened the door and disappeared into the busy night.
Chapter Sixteen
Beatrix managed a broken night’s sleep and finally gave up the pretence at six. She rose, showered in the lukewarm dribble that was the best the hotel could manage and dressed in a white sleeveless T-shirt, black pants and black boots. She collected her Oakleys from the dresser and went down to the restaurant, where she had fruit and toast for breakfast, washing down two Zomorphs with a glass of tepid orange juice.
Faulkner joined her as she was flipping through an out-of-date copy of the Herald-Tribune.
“Ready?”
She nodded.
He drove her to downtown Basra. They stopped at a money changer and swapped some of her dollars for Iraqi dinars. They continued to a tailor’s workshop, and he told her that she was expected. Faulkner drove off to take care of the paperwork for their drive to the oilfield, and she went inside. A man was working with a large bolt of fabric, measuring it out and then using a pair of long-bladed scissors to shear off the amount that he needed.
She cleared her throat.
He looked up. “Miss Rose?”
“Yes.”
“Number Twelve said you were coming.”
“What’s your name?”
“That doesn’t matter, does it?”
“No,” she said. “Just that the quality of your merchandise is as good as it needs to be.”
“Then you need not worry. It is.”
Beatrix knew that the Group had quartermasters positioned around the world. They assimilated themselves into local society and surfaced only when called upon to kit out agents when they were in the field. She had met plenty of them during her career, but it had been years since she was active, and so it was no surprise that this man was new to her. He led her into a smaller room at the back of the workshop. There were finished suits hung on hooks on the wall and a large canvas bag on a table.
He unzipped it and took out an FN F2000 Tactical TR compact assault rifle. Beatrix picked it up and hefted it. It was a gas-operated, fully automatic and ambidextrous bullpup rifle, equipped with both an optical sight and an under-slung lightweight 40mm grenade launcher. She field-stripped the weapon down to its component parts and inspected each of them carefully. She reassembled it again.
“You won’t get much smaller or more mobile than that,” the quartermaster said.
“Ammunition?”
He took ten 30-round magazines and five grenades from the bag and put them on the table. “It is good?”
“Very good. Secondary weapon?”
“There you have a choice.”
He laid out a Glock 17 and a Sig Sauer P226 Tactical. Both were 9mm pistols, and both had been fitted with custom suppressors. The quartermaster took out magazines for each weapon and laid them out. Beatrix took the Sig and broke it down, quickly pleased with it. It was almost box fresh. The Glock looked as if it had seen more action, and when she broke it down, she confirmed it. The parts were worn and in need of attention. The Sig was the better bet.
“And the rest?”
He retrieved a set of head-mounted LUCIE night vision goggles, six M84 flash-bang grenades and two canteen pouches for carrying them, a length of Cordex detcord, a No. 6 plain detonator, a small amount of C4, a roll of double-sided tape, binoculars, a handheld GPS unit with spare batteries and a combat first aid kit.
“Is that everything you need?”
“This is good,” she said. “There’s one other thing.”
“Yes, please, what is it?”
“I need a small GPS tracker and a receiver.”
“I have a commercial model. Quite reliable.” He went over to a cupboard and took out a small black box that was about the same size as a cigarette lighter. It had a peel-away adhesive strip on one side. “It works with a smartphone.”
“Do you have one?”
“Of course.” He took a white box from a shelf, opened it and took out an older model iPhone. “This is unregistered. The tracker app is already installed.”
“That’s fine.” She replaced the phone in the box and added it to the other items. “Thank you.”
Beatrix hoisted the bag of equipment over her shoulder and went outside onto the street. This part of the city was heaving with new money. Oil money. The road was wide, almost a boulevard, and had been cleared of the rubbish and rubble that scarred so many others. Instead of bomb craters and decades of putrid refuse were new cars and touts hawking trinkets. There were garish new shop fronts selling everything from Turkish shawls and Gulf fragrances to Lebanese sweets. Photograph shops displayed photos of chubby babies. Cigarettes, carbonated drinks, fruit, bolts of cloth and cans of petrol were piled in tottering heaps across the pavements. Neon lights were everywhere, and the streets were thronged with shoppers. Restaurants had posters offering strangely coloured kebabs.
There was a shop selling colourful veils and gowns next to the tailor’s. She stopped inside and bought an abaya, a dark cloak which was worn over the clothing and obscured its wearer from the top of the head to the ground. The synthetic fibre was lightened with colourful embroidery and handfuls of sequins. Beatrix was not interested in its decorative effect. It offered anonymity, and that was a gift that she suspected might be useful before she was through.
She saw the Freelander. Faulkner pulled out of the frenetic traffic and parked alongside.
“Get what you needed?”
She nodded, dumped the bag in the back and climbed up into the front.
“Want to have a look around town?”
She nodded, then sat back and looked out of the windows as Faulkner drove them out of the city. Basra’s buildings reminded her of the old Soviet style of architecture, with boxy and uninspiring construction arranged in careful order. The Russians had pumped money into the country in the seventies, and this was their lasting legacy. The buildings could have been in Finland or Warsaw, save that the plain concrete walls were stained a dirty yellow by years of exposure to the sand and the dust. A few apartment blocks were enlivened by touches designed to elicit local custom, some of them even sporting Assyrian-style bas-relief etched onto the walls. But most were utilitarian and functional, with rusting air-conditioning units breaking up the straight lines.
The streets were busy with life. Taxis nudged and edged into the never-ending flow of traffic, their orange bonnets and boots dinged and dented from numerous collisions. Youngsters hauled wonky carts that were piled high with sacks of grain. A donkey staggered beneath the weight of the baskets of coke that had been balanced across his back. They saw a flock of sheep grazing on the sun-blasted grass of a roundabout, oblivious to the clatter of traffic that circulated around them.
“Let’s go out to the oilfield,” she said.
Authorisation was needed to get out to the oilfields to the southwest of the city. There had been numerous attacks on the facility by insurgents, and now that Manage Risk were enga
ged in providing security, it was vice tight. Faulkner had arranged the fake clearance; the papers were made out in Beatrix’s name. The documents had been slid into in a plastic sleeve and placed on the dash.
They were halfway to the oilfield’s administrative buildings in Energy City when they passed a large armoured vehicle parked at the side of the road. They were twenty feet beyond it when Beatrix heard the throaty roar of its big three-hundred-horsepower diesel engine turning over. She watched in the mirror as it rolled onto the road and started after them. There was a sign on the front, in both English and Arabic, that threatened “lethal force” if traffic got too close or didn’t move out of the way. It sounded its horn, and the soldier in the roof turret waved for them to pull over.
“Here we go,” Faulkner said anxiously, looking in the mirror.
It was a Grizzly armoured personnel carrier, a big infantry carrier designed for urban combat. The steel armour was painted jet black and angled into a V-shape to deflect explosive blast waves. There were multiple gun ports and a ring-mount roof turret with a soldier standing behind a 12.7mm machine gun. It was a beast of a vehicle, fast and almost impregnable. The Manage Risk logo, a Roman legionnaire’s helmet before two crossed gladii, had been affixed to the flanks.
“What do they want?”
“Take it easy,” Beatrix said.
“We’ve got gear in this car we won’t be able to explain.”
“I know we do. Pull over.”
Faulkner slowed and parked at the side of the road. They were adjacent to an enormous nodding donkey that squeaked loudly every time the big head dipped down and back up again.
The hatch in the Grizzly’s flank opened, and two private soldiers stepped out. They were dressed all in black, and both wore wraparound shades that obscured their eyes. They were equipped with M4 carbines, and they toted them as they approached, one on either side of the jeep.
“If they search . . .” he began quietly.
“They won’t,” she interrupted. “Leave it to me.”
The soldier on Faulkner’s side of the jeep spoke first. “Where are you going?”
