Undersea Prison

by Duncan Falconer

  Stratton looked up at the guards around the balcony who were watching with the curiosity of those conducting a potentially entertaining experiment. He saw Gann, who’d been looking at the Afghans, shift his gaze to the thugs at Stratton’s table. Stratton watched the one thug exchange glances with Gann and look directly at him. A warning bell went off in his head. Something was about to happen and it would appear that Stratton had a part to play in it.

  The Afghans picked up their trays and eating utensils and for the most part kept their dark eyes fixed ahead, though one or two glanced uncomfortably at the Westerners.

  Stratton had lost interest in the thugs for the moment as he searched for the focus of his mission. He had studied photographs of Durrani, courtesy of the CIA after the British SIS had requested copies, but he knew from long experience how difficult it was to identify a person from a photograph. The good news in this instance was that the photo was a recent one. Durrani’s hair was bushy, his beard uncropped. The problem was that nearly all the Afghans were sporting similar styles.

  Stratton scanned each man down the line, stopping at the second-to-last one coming through the door. Stratton was positive that it was Durrani. Because of the prison uniform the man was wearing he could not see any of the listed VDMs (Visual Distinguishing Marks) since they were all on Durrani’s torso. The small incision in his lower abdomen would be the ultimate proof. Stratton went back along the line of faces just to make sure and by the time he reached the end he was certain his original man was Durrani.

  There was something exciting, even exhilarating about being so close to his quarry. This was the first stage in the target-information-gathering phase. Durrani was alive and well and in the prison.

  A packet of food flew from somewhere and landed on the wall above the line of Afghans.

  ‘Shit!’ Hamlin cursed. ‘I know how this is gonna end up.’

  ‘We should move back and stay out of it,’ Stratton said, taking hold of the older man’s arm.

  ‘There’s nowhere you can escape what they’re gonna do to us now.’

  Stratton had no idea what the old man meant as they got to their feet.

  A chair sailed across the room towards the Afghans. The two thugs at Stratton’s table stood up. Both men appeared to be more interested in Stratton than they were in the Afghans.

  Stratton and Hamlin headed for a far wall as the shouting and missile-throwing intensified. The Afghans closed ranks and retaliated by launching anything to hand at the front line of aggressors. One of them chucked a tray like a frisbee, striking an inmate in the face and giving him a bloody injury. It was the starting signal that set the Western prisoners going and a group of them hurled themselves at the Afghans. The clash was brutal and fists and feet swung violently.

  The two thugs did not join the mêlée, taking advantage of the disturbance to close in on Stratton. He moved away from Hamlin, looking around for a weapon to replace the plastic fork in his hand.

  Hamlin moved into a corner and slid down it until he was sitting on his heels. He put his hands over his head as if the building was about to fall on him and waited for what he believed to be inevitable.

  The thugs split up to come at Stratton from different angles. Having failed to find a weapon he raised his fists in a boxer’s stance, shuffling back. His right hand was cocked close to his chest with the thumb towards his opponents, concealing the end of the plastic fork protruding from the back of his fist. Working on the principle that it was generally a good idea to take out the biggest danger first he manoeuvred himself closer to the larger thug. The other thug then showed signs of wanting to engage first when he picked up a plastic chair.

  As the men closed in the thug with the chair launched it. Stratton did not duck low enough and a leg struck the side of his head. The larger thug took advantage of the distraction and made his move.

  Stratton was nothing if not decisive when it came time to attack and he did not hesitate. The thug came in quickly and swung at him with a powerful haymaker. Stratton ducked nimbly underneath it, stepped to one side of the big man and released his cocked fist. But instead of punching straight he swung it in a tight arc and plunged the end of the fork into the man’s eye - which exploded in a spurt of retinal fluid, followed by a geyser of blood.

  The thug let out a scream as his knees buckled. The second thug was already on top of Stratton and grabbed his collar as his other hand followed up with a blow. Stratton threw his arm over the top of the extended arm of the thug who had a hold of him, bringing it down the other side and up again in between them. The action straightened the thug’s arm by applying pressure to his elbow. Stratton continued the move, standing on tiptoe, and his momentum snapped the joint. The second thug’s howl rose above the general cacophony. At the same time Stratton swung his other hand with the plastic fork in it high and then down onto the corner of the man’s neck, driving the prongs of the fork deep into the flesh. The broken elbow had done the job but the follow-up certainly added to the thug’s agony. He dropped to the floor, screaming.

  Stratton looked up to see the guards on the balcony stepping through the airlock doors that closed behind them. Hamlin was still sitting on the floor with his head in his hands.

  The battle was in full swing. Some of the Afghans tried to stay together while others who had been dragged away from their colleagues were receiving a hiding.

  The balcony was now void of guards and Stratton had the distinct feeling something ominous was about to happen. But at the same time it was a great opportunity to get closer to his target.

  He saw Durrani and another Afghan scurry behind the counter. He headed towards them, pushing his way through the mêlée while fending off blows. He leaped over the counter, dropped to his knees on the other side and found himself facing Durrani an arm’s length away. There was not a trace of fear in the man’s eyes. Durrani’s colleague was busy fighting behind him, clutching at the throat of a man who was doing the same to him. Durrani stared at Stratton, years of battle experience etched into his brain.

  He lunged at Stratton who moved deftly aside while at the same time slamming his forearm against the Afghan’s throat and forcing him against the side of the counter and down. Durrani was trapped and grabbed Stratton’s arm in an effort to release the choke hold. Stratton replaced his arm with his knee, pinning the Afghan even more firmly. He took advantage of the moment, not to strike another blow but to confirm what he most needed to know. He raised Durrani’s shirt and pulled down his trousers to expose the scar. It was still pink, the cut itself ugly due to it healing without stitches.

  Durrani was momentarily confused.

  Stratton looked into his eyes and for a second they weighed each other up. ‘Durrani?’ he asked.

  Durrani was suddenly horrified. This man was not here to beat him. He wanted his treasure. More alarming was that he knew exactly where to look for it. With a combination of rage and desperation Durrani mustered every ounce of strength he possessed and threw Stratton off him. Stratton fell onto his back and the Afghan was on him like a wolf. He grappled for Stratton’s throat, driven not just to defend himself but to destroy this man who knew his precious secret.

  Stratton was momentarily overpowered by the force of Durrani’s attack and struggled to twist out of his grip.

  As Durrani fought to cut off Stratton’s air he was suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of giddiness. The face of the man around whose neck his hands were tightening started to blur. Stratton punched up an arm and pushed his fingers into Durrani’s larynx but as he did so he too felt horribly dizzy. His eyes went in and out of focus and he struggled to breathe.

  They were not the only two experiencing such difficulties. The riot had suddenly ceased with everyone in the room down on the floor and fighting to breathe. A man screamed as another lurched to his feet, staggered across the room as if blind and fell down hard onto his face.

  Stratton fought to hold on to consciousness but his brain felt as though it was being squeezed like a
sponge. All he could do was lie still and concentrate on breathing. A few seconds later his mind drifted into unconsciousness.

  Chapter 11

  Mandrick was at his desk going through a list of emails while Hank Palmerston sat on the other side of the room nursing a cup of coffee and scowling to himself. His head jerked up at the sound of a buzzer. Mandrick glanced at the monitor on his desk and pushed a button on his remote.The door to the office hissed and clunked as it swung inwards and Gann stepped into the room.

  Hank’s eyes narrowed as he stared at the senior guard whom he disliked intensely.

  ‘You wanted to see me,’ Gann said, looking confident despite knowing why he had been summoned.

  ‘You’re either a total dumb-fuck,’ Hank said, putting down his coffee,‘or . . . nah. There ain’t any other explanation. You are a dumb-fuck.’

  Gann’s barely visible reaction was a subtle tightening of his jaw. Having always been employed by aggressive hard-ass men physically inferior to him, controlling himself was something he’d had plenty of opportunity to practise. Gann knew his place in the pecking order and calmed his intense desire to attack the man. Maybe one day, when this was all over and if by chance he happened to bump into Hank somewhere, he’d tear him apart. But for the time being he could not. Hank was a senior CIA field operative and that was reason enough to allow the prick to walk all over him.

  ‘Anyone wanna hear my reasonin’?’ Gann asked.

  Hank’s face broke into a smirk of stupefied disbelief. ‘It’s got reasoning,’ he said to Mandrick. ‘Go on. Please do go on. I’ve got to hear why one of my Talibutts is dead with a broken neck, two of ’em are blinded, one has a broken back and may never walk again and three of ’em have been so badly beaten in the head that I might as well send ’em back home for all the good they are to me now. And all while a federal prison inspector is crawling around the goddamn place. Do tell.’

  Gann’s expression suggested he conceded that the number of casualties was excessive. Otherwise, he remained confident of his actions. ‘I think that Charon guy is a federal agent.’

  Hank looked at Mandrick for an explanation. Mandrick raised his eyebrows in denial.

  ‘I ain’t as stupid as you think I am,’ Gann said. ‘I figured out there was a fed agent on the ferry myself. Why else would we have to kill everyone? But now I think the only guy to escape the ferry was the only one who shoulda died.’

  Hank’s jaw clenched. ‘You mixed my Talibutts with the regular prisoners knowing it would cause a riot because you think there’s a fed in the building? You know something . . .’ he said, pausing to control himself, ‘you’re so fuckin’ dumb I’m irritated just by the sight of you.’

  Gann wondered just how problematic it really would be to kill a CIA agent. ‘I didn’t suspect it so much before the riot.’

  Hank’s brow furrowed.

  ‘I always suspected there was something strange about the guy,’ Gann went on. ‘Right from when I first met ’im. Even before the accident. There was somethin’ about him, the way he was always lookin’ at people and things, but not in a normal way.’

  Hank squared up to Gann who was a head taller and much broader. ‘I don’t give a damn if J. Edgar fuckin’ Hoover himself turned up for lunch . . . Federal agent my ass.You must think I’m as stupid as you are. I know why you want to kill Charon. He’s the only person who can finger you for the ferry sabotage.’

  Gann smirked. Hank was completely right, up until the fight in the galley. ‘So I guess you’re not interested to know if one of my inmates is interested in one of yours?’ Gann looked smug.

  Hank squinted at the oversized guard. ‘What’re you talking about?’

  ‘Like I said. Charon is a motherfuckin’ spy. He ain’t here to do time. He’s here for one of your Talibutts. I got proof, too,’ he said, producing a mini-CD from his breast pocket. ‘Take a look at it. It’s from one of the cameras in the galley.’

  Hank took the CD, eyeing Gann suspiciously, placed it in a slot on the panel and hit the play button. Mandrick got up from his seat and walked around the desk to get a closer look.

  An image of the galley looking down from above flickered onto one of the monitors.

  ‘This is just before it went off,’ Gann said, moving to the monitor to point things out. ‘While everyone else is movin’ towards the Talibutts, Charon and his cellmate Hamlin move back. They don’t want any of the action. Now, my boys move in . . .’

  ‘Your boys?’ Hank interrupted.

  ‘My job - orders from your boss, as I understand it - was to take out the people in that ferry and it ain’t done until Charon is history.’

  Hank’s expression tightened. He glanced at Mandrick, wondering if he was in on this. Mandrick remained poker-faced.

  ‘Now look at this. Charon here wastes my guys in just two moves. He didn’t learn that in the joint . . . Then he starts to move back to safety. Remember, he don’t want any part of this fight. But then he sees somethin’ and in a second he’s the other side of the room and on top of one of the Talibutts. But take a look at this. He ain’t there for the fightin’. He even says somethin’ to the guy. Whatever it is, the guy gets mad and then the depressurisation got to ’em.’

  Hank was not entirely convinced and replayed the last segment of the recording.

  ‘I don’t know what he’s doin’,’ Gann said. ‘But I know when something stinks - and that guy stinks.’

  Hank freeze-framed on a close-up of the Afghan.

  ‘The Talibutt’s name is Durrani,’ Gann offered. He could see that he had scored with the video.

  Mandrick remembered the name as the one Hank had given to him earlier when he’d asked him to carry out a pre-interrogation softening-up. He stared at the side of Hank’s head, wondering what was going on inside it.

  Hank knew it was Durrani the moment he saw him on the monitor. The Afghan was the reason for his present visit. He pondered the various permutations of the situation, unable to make anything out of it at that moment. But the observations, if accurate, certainly gave food for thought. Cogwheels of possibility began to turn and click as an intelligence with twenty-two years of experience in the business filed the information in readiness for any future connections.

  Hank had spent the last ten years specialising in interrogation and information-extrapolation techniques with Asian and Middle Eastern Muslim subjects. He began his Agency career in Pakistan near the end of the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, spending much of those early days operating out of an office in the US embassy in Islamabad. For most of that period he liaised with the Saudi Arabian and Pakistani intelligence services in their combined efforts to finance, supply and train the Afghan mujahideen in order to oust the Russians. Then, when the Communist grip on Russia finally collapsed along with the Berlin Wall, Hank was already taking seriously the new danger shaping up to take its place in the form of Islamic fundamentalism. He was in Langley when Mir Aimal Kasi gunned down five CIA staff as they waited at the checkpoint to drive into the CIA headquarters. A month later in New York Ramzi Yousef parked a vehicle on level B-2 of the World Trade Center and detonated a bomb that killed six people in a cafeteria above. The two young men, both of Pakistani origin, neither of whom knew that the other existed, casually left the country on flights to Pakistan hours after their attack.

  Hank moved to Afghanistan to begin the overseas hunt for them. He also got involved in several operations intended to kill or kidnap a dangerous upstart called Osama bin Laden. He lived through the formative days of the great jihad against America that eventually led to the successful destruction of the Twin Towers. He remained in Afghanistan to welcome the first American troops and followed them into Kabul to set up the Agency’s new offices. Hank played his part in the defeat of the Taliban only to then suffer the indignity of their subsequent reorganisation with the help of many of his ‘old friends’ in the Saudi Arabian and Pakistani intelligence services who had their own agendas that were far removed from his.

/>   With the rise of the Iraqi insurgency after the US-LED invasion of that country Hank was assigned to aid in the setting-up of information-gathering cells around the world. But following the constant media attacks against Guantánamo Bay and the subsequent witch-hunt by many countries against CIA interrogation centres within their borders, he was grateful for a chance to take a key development role in what could only be described as a bizarre and audacious undertaking. Not only did Styx eventually open for business but it ended up yielding high-quality information while attracting the minimum possible outside scrutiny.When it came to security, media curiosity, eavesdropping and covert investigations, a prison beneath the surface of the ocean was like having one on the Moon. It was almost perfect . . . almost, but not quite.

  Hank had never been under any illusion that Styx would last for ever. But he thought it would at least survive for a decade or two and, with luck, perhaps even see the Agency through to the end of the jihad. Now, after only two years, organisational cracks were starting to form in the administrative structure of the little oceanic citadel that he’d had such high hopes for. The FBI was trying to investigate the CIA interrogations as well as the so-called mining infractions by the host corporation. The media had become equally keen to report on anything to do with the prison.The White House was afraid of what the FBI and the media might find. And the only thing holding it all together outside the Agency was the greed of a handful of civilians who ran the place.The key, with them at least, was to ensure that their greed was not completely sated. Rumours that the mine was drying up did not help matters at all. Quite the reverse, in fact. He was in danger of losing the only glue holding it all together.

  But it wasn’t over yet. Not by a long shot. Not if Hank could help it. ‘I want you to listen to me carefully, ’ he said to Gann. ‘Nothing else happens to anyone in this prison unless I say so. Is that clear?’