by Andy Maslen
“I’m guessing rocket designers.”
“Damn straight!”
They ordered steaks and French fries, and continued talking over their lunch.
“Tell me about Kazakhstan,” Gabriel said, as he sliced off another piece of the 21-day aged sirloin that was falling apart under his knife.
“We need a new launch site. Their government is really working hard to pull in western investment. They don’t care whether you’re setting up a drug manufacturing plant, a branch office for a bank, or a chain of language schools. Generous grants, tax breaks, minimal red tape. Compared to what you have to go through to even get to talk to the right civil servant in Europe,” he wrinkled his nose, “well it’s kind of a no-brainer. But it’s also a pretty lawless place. Armed bandits literally riding around on horseback with Kalashnikovs, demanding protection money, bribes, whatever. So, I need someone with me who’ll have my back.”
He reached down and pulled a thick, brown envelope from the black, leather briefcase at his side. “Everything you need is in there. Full workup on SBOE, our operations, key staff, and my itinerary over in Kazakhstan.”
The lunch ended with the two men agreeing with a smile and a handshake that Gabriel would take the job and meet Carl at Heathrow Airport two days later.
Walking towards Trafalgar Square, Gabriel called Britta.
“Hej! What’s up?”
“Nothing. Just wanted to hear your voice. Also, I just got a new client. He bought me lunch at the Ritz, no less.”
“The Ritz, eh? Very swanky. What’s he like?”
“Really nice. Following his childhood dream to send rockets into space. He wants me to go to Kazakhstan with him for protection. We really got on.”
“Ooh, fancy restaurants then a trip abroad together. You are having a bromance!”
Gabriel laughed. He loved being teased by Britta.
“No! But OK, it’s not often I have a client whom I genuinely like.”
“Well, make the most of it, lover boy. Maybe your next job will be for a corporate sleaze bag. Or shooting up terrorists for Don.”
Erin was standing at the picture window of her Fifth Avenue apartment. She looked down at the trees in Central Park. They were coming into leaf, pale-green and deep-red pom-poms stuck into the ground that made the park look like an architect’s model. A white porcelain mug of coffee steamed in her hand, and she smiled as the aroma – strong, nutty and dark – brought back a memory of drinking coffee at her father’s dining table, planning together. The smile disappeared as quickly as it had arrived, replaced by downturned lips clamped together.
As the yellow cabs streamed along the street beneath her, she drained her coffee and set the mug down with a clink on the glass-topped side table to her left. Oh, he would pay. He would pay with everything he had. But in instalments. She was in no hurry to collect on the debt in full.
A Cold Country
KAZAKHSTAN
ON landing at Karagandy International Airport, they were met by a swarthy, stubble-cheeked man whom Carl introduced merely as “my go-to guy here.” Despite the sun, the air was bitterly cold, and their fur-lined parkas and thick, woollen trousers were only just up to the job of preventing their freezing to death. The spring sunlight was strong, and both men wore Ray-Bans to cut the glare.
They drove to a warehouse on a bleak, Soviet-era industrial estate, where the go-to guy produced what appeared to be a brand-new SIG Sauer SIG516 assault rifle.
“You know gun?” go-to guy asked Gabriel.
“This gun? Or guns in general?”
The man frowned. “This gun.”
“Never used one. But I know AR-type rifles. I used to shoot M16s.”
The man nodded his approval. “OK. All same except this one semi-auto. Chambered for 5.56mm NATO rounds, yes?” He handed it to Gabriel. “Passed NATO Over the Beach test. Very fine weapon.”
The man also brought out a spare thirty-round STANAG magazine, and a box of 500 rounds of ammunition.
“What about the pistols?” Carl asked.
“Yes, is coming.” Go-to guy turned and retreated into the open door of the warehouse, emerging a few minutes later with two Czech-made CZ 75 pistols.
Gabriel frowned at the mismatch between state-of-the-art, American, semi-auto rifles and these serviceable but dated pistols. He hefted one in his hand, turning it this way and that, then turned away and aimed at a sign on the far side of the road.
“Is fine combat pistol. Chambered for 9mm Parabellum.”
Gabriel nodded. “Ammunition?”
Go-to guy handed over another heavy carton.
“So, we good to go?” Carl asked Gabriel, stuffing his pistol into the side pocket of his parka.
“Do you need to pay?”
“All done on account.”
Go-to guy took them for a short walk to a small hangar. Inside the sliding doors loomed a huge, angular, silver SUV.
“Wow! Look at that. What the hell is it?” Carl asked as they approached the side of the vehicle.
“It’s a Lamborghini LM002,” Gabriel said.
Go-to-guy nodded his head. “Very good truck. Not fast as Ferrari, but maybe keep you safer.” He grinned, showing strong, yellow teeth like a horse’s.
Gabriel smiled back. No sense upsetting the man who’d just supplied your gear. Then he turned to Carl. “Ferruccio Lamborghini started out making tractors before getting the notion to go up against Ferrari. This was his attempt to crack the military market.”
“So you ever use one of these in combat?”
Gabriel shook his head. “Our pinkies were Land Rovers. The Saudis and the Libyans had some, though. And places like this.”
“Wait a minute,” Carl said, smiling. “What did you just say? ‘Pinkies’?”
Gabriel laughed. “In the desert, we started off painting them pink. It was excellent for camouflage. We ended up going back to traditional camo, but the name stuck.”
Inside the four-wheel-drive, with the heater turned up full, the cab gradually filled with diesel-scented hot air, and they slung their parkas into the back seats.
“There it is,” Carl said, pointing to a spot off to the west of the single-track road that ploughed on in an arrow-straight line through the unchanging landscape of low scrub, hard-baked earth, and the odd patch of thin, scrappy grassland. Carl was using a handheld GPS. Gabriel had already identified it as a military-spec device. He’d used them himself in theatres of war from the Horn of Africa to the Gulf. They were easy enough to get hold of if you knew the right people, or visited the right places. Which, as he’d recently learned, included the fathomless depths of the dark web, that part of the internet where drugs, guns, people, data and technology were available to the highest bidder. Gabriel swung the four-by-four off the road, and they jounced and bumbled across the rough ground for half a mile before he brought the four-by-four to a stop.
They had come to rest in the centre of a vast plain. In the far distance, Gabriel could see mountains, their peaks white against the clear, blue sky.
They left the warmth of the Lamborghini’s cab for the icy blast of a wind that was blowing, uninterrupted, all the way down from the Russian steppe and the Arctic Circle beyond that. Above them, Gabriel caught the faint and plaintive cry of a bird of prey. He looked up, shading his eyes. High above them was the bird, just a tiny black shape. He had no idea what species of raptor might find a living out here – eagles, vultures, buzzards, kites? It was big, he could tell that. His scrutiny was ended by Carl.
“Hey, Gabriel. Come on. I didn’t bring you out here to go bird watching. Stay focused OK? This is bandit country.”
Gabriel turned through a full circle. Not a building, a pylon, a tree or even a bush more than knee height as far as he could see in all directions. He nodded.
“Sorry. You’re right. We’re clear, though.”
“All the same, go get your weapons.”
Not guns? Weapons? Odd choice of words for a banker-turned-space-entrepre
neur.
Gabriel walked round the back of the truck and opened the tailgate.
With Carl wandering around kicking at stones, then stopping to peer at the horizon, Gabriel stood guard by the four-by-four, cradling the SIG in the crook of his arm. He caught a movement in the corner of his eye. He turned. Way ahead on the road, a couple of miles from their position, he could see a plume of dust drifting off to the south. Too big for a single vehicle, it was throwing up the classic shape of a convoy moving at speed.
Company
GABRIEL called out.
“Hey! Carl. We need to move. We have company.”
Carl turned to look in the direction of Gabriel’s pointing finger.
“Do you think it’s trouble? Could be a trucker or something?”
“Out here? It’s hardly a motorway, is it? It runs between the arse-end of Astana and the middle of bloody nowhere. Look, you hired me to protect you. Well, I’m telling you we need to go. Now!”
Carl trotted back to the Lamborghini, and they climbed in. Gabriel fired up the engine and slammed the unwieldy vehicle into first, spinning the tyres in the loose, gritty surface as he slewed round in a circle and shot away from the launch site. He looked up at the rearview mirror. The plume was still there, but it wasn’t closing, or not fast. He kept his foot down hard on the accelerator and rammed the truck up through its gears until he maxed out the speed at just over seventy.
He looked across at Carl. The man seemed unbothered by the possibility that the bandits he’d spoken of now seemed to be on his tail.
“You all right?” he asked.
“Hey, we’ve got guns, right? You’re ex-SAS, which is why I hired you. So keep driving.” He looked down at the side mirror. “They’re not gaining. Must be in some shitty Soviet truck or something.”
It was true. Their pursuers, if that’s what they were, weren’t gaining. Gabriel’s heart rate, which had jumped to ninety, slowly returned to sixty, above his normal resting rate but comfortable enough. He checked the mirror again. The plume of dust was drifting further south and had decreased in size even as it climbed into the air.
“Maybe they were trucks after all,” Gabriel said. “Sorry. Just a little twitchy.”
“Don’t apologise, man. That’s what I’m paying you for, isn’t it? To be twitchy on my account? Let’s head back to Astana, grab a beer. The site’s perfect anyway. I checked it out on Google Earth, but you have to see the ground with your own eyes, know what I’m saying? Substrate looked good. No settlements, so no people to whine about noise or anything. Why don’t you tell me about your military service while we’re driving? It’s a couple hours and there’s no radio in this thing.”
“What do you want to know? I don’t really make a habit of going over old missions.”
Carl shook his head. “I didn’t mean that. I’m not some weekend warrior with a subscription to Soldier of Fortune and a garage full of assault rifles. But, I mean, the life. Your buddies. You must have made some good friends in the Army.”
Gabriel thought back to his time in the Paras. Hundreds of jumps all over the world, some for training, some in anger. Comrades he’d fought alongside. Parades, medals, life on base, deployments to Belfast, the Gulf, secondments to struggling states in Africa and Latin America to train their own ragtag armies of conscripts and dope-fuddled regulars. And then of his time in the SAS. The patrol he’d led. A tight group of four men who’d saved each other’s lives on more than one occasion, as they were depriving others of theirs. He’d lost one man, buried him just a few weeks earlier after retrieving his remains – skull, a single vertebra and identity discs – from Mozambique. Of the two others, one, Trooper Damon ‘Daisy’ Cheaney, had lost an arm to a .50 calibre round and left the regiment. The other, Corporal Ben ‘Dusty’ Rhodes, was still a serving member of the armed forces, though he’d rotated out of the Regiment and was now back with the Paras himself.
“I did make some good friends, you’re right.” Now I come to think about it, apart from Daisy and Dusty, I’m not sure there are any other men I’d really call my friends.
“They were guys in your squad?”
“Patrol, yes. Ben and Damon. I saw them recently.” At Smudge’s funeral.
“You guys close?”
“I guess so. We don’t go out for beers every week. Live too far apart for that. But we keep in touch. Regimental dinners. Occasional nights out in London, you know the kind of thing.”
Carl nodded, staring out through the windscreen. Then he peered at his side mirror again.
“Speaking of friends, I think we’re on our own again.”
“I know. They disappeared about ten minutes ago.”
“You have many friends who aren’t military? I know a few guys back home who are kind of loners. I mean they might be married but they pretty much keep to themselves.”
“Not many. I used to have a dog and met a friend for walks.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yes. Julia. We call her ‘Angell by name, demon by nature.’ Fight arranger in the movies. She punches hard. She says it’s because she likes me.” Gabriel smiled as he thought of his friend in the village with the hazel eyes and the salty laugh. The friend who’d had to text him the news of Seamus’s death while he’d been away in the US.
“Tough lady, huh? So is there someone special? A lady who maybe doesn’t punch you?”
“I just got engaged, actually.”
“Wow! Good for you.” Carl turned in his seat and clapped Gabriel on the right shoulder. “Me? I’m single. You know, I have female company from time to time, but the business pretty much sucks up all my time. So what’s she like?”
“Britta? God, what to say. Well, she’s Swedish. Works in government.” MI5 in fact, but you don’t need to know that. “Funny, direct like all Swedes, good company.”
“Looker?”
Gabriel nodded. “Red hair, nice figure. And she’s got this smile that just, you know, does something.”
“I know what you mean. I used to date a girl from Minnesota. Linda. Lot of Swedes and Norwegians immigrated there. Had this long, blonde hair and this unpronounceable surname. Like, I don’t know, Berda-langs-something, some crazy Scandinavian name anyway. What’s your fiancée’s name? Hope it’s easier to say than Linda’s.”
“It’s Falskog. Nothing too complicated.”
“Good news is, she’ll be Wolfe soon, so you won’t have to worry.”
“I’m not sure she will. And I don’t worry. Languages are my thing.”
“Hey, you want something to eat? I got coffee and some rolls when we gassed up in Astana. They’re in back.”
Gabriel realised he was hungry. And a break from Carl’s cheery conversation would be good, too.
“Sure. Let’s stop.” He brought the LM002 to a halt by the side of the road, even though, since their brush with the convoy, they’d seen not a single vehicle, or living thing, come to that.
With the cab filling with steam from the hot coffee from Carl’s flask, and chewy bread rolls stuffed with smoked ham filling his belly, Gabriel spoke.
“So, Carl, tell me about you. What do you do when you’re not conquering space?”
Carl took a gulp of coffee and swallowed hard on the mouthful of roll he’d been chewing noisily.
“Me? Not much to tell. Like I said,” he scratched at his nose, “I made some money in finance. Selling CDOs, know what they are?”
Gabriel did, but decided to feign ignorance. He shook his head as he chewed the delicious smoky ham. “No,” he said.
“Collateralised debt obligations. Just money-jargon for a kind of bet on whether some poor fool with no visible means of support is going to pay his mortgage every month. You package them up and buy and sell them like shares, only to other banks and some rich investors. I made a pile and cashed out before I burned out. Started SBOE because that was my thing. Now we launch satellites for other folks with deep enough pockets. The big media outfits, governments. You know. Those childhood
passions, they stay with you. Buried maybe, for a while, but they never go away. How about you? What were you into when you were a kid?”
“Fighting, mostly. I was what you would probably call a disruptive influence. I took an air gun into school once and shot pigeons off the roof.”
Carl barked out a laugh. “Jesus! You get into trouble for a stunt like that?”
“Expelled. It wasn’t the first time. Or the last.”
“But you must have turned things around? I mean, we did our background checks on you. Sandhurst, all that British officer training shit they put you through. Where did you find the self-discipline?”
“I didn’t. Not exactly. My parents handed me over to a friend of theirs. He brought me up. Taught me how to respect myself, and others.”
“Sounds like a hell of a guy.”
In the face of Carl’s relentless enthusiasm, Gabriel told him about Zhao Xi. Carl shook his head from time to time, as Gabriel explained some of the things he could achieve with the skills he’d acquired from Master Zhao, finishing with, “I sure could have used a guy like him when I was growing up.”
They finished the coffee and the rolls, and then Carl took a turn at the wheel, speeding back towards Astana with the four-by-four’s V12 engine roaring.
Absence of the Normal
WAITING for the lift at the hotel, Carl turned to speak.
“I have some calls to make, but then what say we head out and find somewhere to eat?”
“Sounds good. It was a long day. Did you learn what you were hoping to?”
“Oh, yes. Everything looked real good out there. Apart from your little freak-out about the bandits.” Carl grinned and put air quotes around the final word and Gabriel reflected inwardly that it was Carl himself who’d hired a personal bodyguard because of his own fear of just such an eventuality. Never mind. The money’s OK. And it’s only for a week or so, then you can be back with Britta.
