Authors: Gary Haynes
Tom got parallel to the far left-hand edge of the track and, as he turned around, radioed to Lester to move. With that an eruption of small-arms fire came from the beach, and people began shouting and screaming. Tom knew that the mutually beneficial little truce between the SDF and local Somalis had just broken down.
As Lester was about to stand up, he saw the muzzle of an assault rifle sticking out about three inches from behind a ramshackle building that looked like a small grain store. He knew he had two choices: either lift his radio and warn Tom, or fire in the hope that he took out the threat. He squeezed the trigger a split second later, aiming for a spot eighteen inches back. The high-velocity round hit the stone and mud with a dull thud, but the sound of the discharge reverberated around the alley like an echo in a canyon.
Keeping his eye fixed to the scope, he watched Tom sink, spin and aim at the building. His friend’s actions, Lester knew, were the result of a controlled adrenalin dump and years of repetitive drills, which had trained his brain to react rather than go into panic mode.
He checked the roofs, the entrances to the side alley, rolled, snaked around and checked behind him. Satisfied he sprang up and sprinted towards Tom.
When he got to the far edge of the building he saw Tom crouching in the earth, the fingers of his right hand checking the neck pulse of the gunman, who looked like a young man, with a short beard and bloodshot eyes. He was wearing a white dishdasha, his head bare. The weapon was a couple of feet away. His legs were trembling like the haunches of a dog in winter. The round had hit the Somali in the left-hand ribcage and would have punctured his lungs.
He gurgled blood and died.
Lester watched Tom ease himself up.
“Thanks, man,” he said.
“He’s dead,” Lester said. “We gotta run for it.”
They stepped back to the track, seeing a small crowd of men moving down it at a fast walking pace, with an array of weapons in their hands from sticks to MI6s. Lester raised his rifle, but he felt Tom’s hand on the barrel, lowering it.
A shot rang out and pinged through the night air to their right before impacting a wooden barrel and causing a flurry of splinters as it passed through it.
Lester yanked Tom by the arm and dragged him behind the building where the dead Somali lay.
“What’s wrong with you, Tom? I gotta slap ya again?”
Tom gritted his teeth. “No more killing. We get beyond the village, we can call in the Black Hawk. And if you slap me again, I’ll break your nose.”
Damn right, Lester thought.
They were crouched now shoulder to shoulder beneath the hull of the beached oil tanker. Tom had said that the Somalis could track them in the semi-desert and that they could outrun them, too. But he’d added that the locals were built for endurance rather than sprints so he and Lester had raced to the edge of the village and on for another five hundred yards.
Behind a thorny bush, they’d taken off their hiking boots and put on their headdresses, which they’d planned on using in the desert, and had doubled back beyond the eastern edge of the village to the beach. Tom had hoped that it would be the last place they’d look for them.
Muslims buried their dead within twenty-four hours but, looking over at the crater and the savaged stretch of beach about it, Tom knew that there was nothing left of Ibrahim and his wife to be buried. But what corpses had been left after the firefight with the SDF had been removed already.
“I’ll go up top,” Lester said, shouldering his sniper rifle. “In case any of those skinny mothers gets smart.”
Tom didn’t reply. He turned and looked out at the Indian Ocean, as black as oil, the gentle waves lapping on the shoreline ten feet away. The sound was hypnotic, he thought. Further up the villagers’ fishing boats had been replaced by narrow speedboats, with powerful outboard motors. They’d dragged them up to the end of the beach and had camouflaged them with long rushes and hacked scrub. They’d been far enough away to have escaped the blast from the missile, and he guessed that the Somalis had seen that as a blessing. He wondered when and why they had traded fishing for piracy.
He took out the satphone from his cargo pocket and sent another encrypted message, requesting that the Black Hawk pick them up in two hours’ time. He and Lester would travel up the shoreline after the village had bedded down again, the waves masking their footprints. The inbuilt GPS in the satphone would pinpoint their position.
Five Days Later
Tom’s part-time gardener was called Gerry Fowler, a sprightly seventy-year-old, with the leathery, reddened skin of a man who had worked the land for most of his life. While he kept the lawns trim, his wife of forty-eighty years, Helen, did some housekeeping for the man she called the son she’d never had.
Gerry had always liked that. He knew that Tom worked for the State Department but he didn’t discuss his work, and rather than employing him and Helen for ostentatious reasons, he knew he did so for practical ones. He could go away for weeks at a time, and even when he was in DC, he often stayed in his townhouse in Columbia Heights.
It was nine in the morning, the orange sun brushing over the nearby hills. Gerry had gotten a text message from Tom the day before, stating that he’d be arriving home at about midday, and that he’d be grateful if he and Helen could come over before he got back. Helen had baked Tom blueberry muffins as a coming home present, his favourites.
Gerry was kneeling on the grass, using a trowel to dig over the earth in borders, thinking that he’d do another hour’s work before he had a coffee with Helen. If he was lucky, he thought, he might even get her to give him one of the muffins. It was then he heard his wife’s scream coming from inside the farmhouse.
He stood up unsteadily, dropped the trowel and ran towards the backdoor that Helen had kept open to help air the place, she’d said. He was breathing hard when he reached the conservatory. Passing by Tom’s indoor bonsai trees, he almost stumbled into the kitchen. He called out her name but there was no answer. He wondered if she’d fallen. He’d noticed her getting frailer in the last two years, but there had been real fear in her voice. It wasn’t a scream he’d expected to hear if she’d simply slipped over.
Gerry heard a muted sobbing sound coming from the ground-floor study area. He rushed through the kitchen, beneath the archway and froze.
Helen was sitting in the armchair, just beyond the fish tank, her mouth taped, her wrists and ankles bound with rope. Beneath her grey hair, her blue eyes were spilling tears. The sunlight was catching the silver cross she always wore around her neck as if it was a mirror. She was shaking her head but he moved through the doorway anyway, not knowing what else to do.
As soon as he stepped beyond the open door, he was thrown to the carpet, jarring his head. A second later, he felt an immense weight on his back pinning him to the floor. His right kidney was punched and an agonizing pain rippled through him. He groaned, fought back the urge to vomit. It had been all a blur.
“No, don’t do this,” he said, putting out a hand tentatively towards his wife.
Three of his fingers were grabbed and jerked back. He heard the cracks as they were snapped like dry wood, a paralyzing pain reaching up to his shoulder.
“Wait, wait,” he murmured.
A boot kicked him in the temple and he almost passed out. He was flipped over and he felt thumbs digging into his windpipe at the base of his throat. He choked and moaned, struggling to breathe.
He was yanked up and heaved towards the fish tank. His head was thrust in. He spat, blinked. He tried to free himself, but it was futile. Powerful hands forced his crown and neck down, as a knee was stabbed into his thigh. His head wasn’t fully submerged as yet but he shook, as in a fit.
He felt the force on his head increase, the water lap at his nape. Helen’s muffled voice faded, like the deep tones from a prayer bell. He tried to hold his breath. But overwhelmed by panic, he breathed out, grimacing. He thrashed about, but his arms seemed drained of strength. He strained to hold his head up and twist it, but his neck was weak and the force simply increased. Then a disabling fear swamped his body.
I’m going to drown, he thought.
As he swallowed the first two inhalations of water, he sensed them flow down to his lungs. The pressure was immense, as if his body was being pressed between two metal plates. He thought his sternum and spine would splinter. He imagined his eyes rolling.
His last thought was of Helen: Don’t hurt my Helen.
Then it was like floating in a dream, as he felt unconsciousness begin to take hold of him. It was oddly pleasurable.
A release.
Helen sobbed inconsolably beneath the masking tape. She looked up as her husband’s murderer approached her.
“Bath time,” he said.
Tom and Lester had been picked up by the stealth UH-60 Black Hawk and, after disembarking at Camp Lemonnier, had been flown back to the States. They’d spent three days being debriefed by Homeland Security and the CIA, including Crane. Afterwards, Tom had picked up his Buick from the Langley long-term lot he’d left it in and, after saying his goodbyes to Lester, had driven back to his farmhouse for a mandatory two weeks’ vacation.
The general’s funeral was due to take place in two days’ time. Lester had said that he’d take him for a Vietnamese lunch afterwards and they’d share a bottle of Jack. FPCON BRAVO had been discontinued and, if Ibrahim had lived, he would have become toxic in two days’ time.
Tom arrived at the farmhouse just after 15:00, knowing that Gerry and Helen would have left hours ago. After opening the front door, he walked past the study area, where the door had been left ajar. By the time he’d gotten to the opposite doorframe, he’d drawn his SIG and, ducking down now, he pressed himself against the pale-blue wall, even though the room had been empty.
He strained to hear the slightest sound, and when it came he knew it had come from his second-floor bedroom. The faintest shuffle, that he knew hadn’t been the result of the old house settling, or something other than a human source. He knew every sound the house made, knew the sound of someone shifting their weight as he knew the sound of his own voice.
Two choices instantly formed in his mind: walk up the stairs as if nothing had happened or wait until what he considered to be an intruder to make his move. Two seconds later, he eased himself up and began to walk towards the staircase, his SIG cupped in his hands.
The floorboards creaked beneath the light brown carpet, and he knew every creak and which one would come next. He knew that the loudest was the second stair from the top, and that if anyone who didn’t know the house had walked up his stairs they would know that now, too. If it was someone who was looking to do him deadly harm with a firearm, they would wait to hear that creak and know that in a couple of seconds he would appear from behind the wall and place his feet on the landing. The best position to assault or shoot at him would be from his bedroom that led off the corridor to the left, where the other sound had come from.
Five steps to go, Tom thought, just five.
As he got to the second stair from the top and heard the loud creak, he threw himself forwards, swivelling to the left as he did so. He started firing from lowdown before he hit the wood, the SIG bucking again and again, the brass casings flying out over and over. But all he saw was a shadow, and all he heard was the shattering of glass. There was no window in his line of fire so he knew that someone had just thrown a chair or other large object through it, and that meant they were on the run.
Rather than go the way they’d gone, Tom decided to go back down the stairs and out through the conservatory door, just to the right of the bedroom window above. But then he smelt something, although it was only faint. It was a smell that he was familiar with. It was the smell of a decomposing corpse.
He moved quickly down the corridor, following the morbid odour. He got to the bathroom door at the end of the corridor and opened the door. He saw Gerry and Helen lying together in the bath. Rigor mortis had already set in and the bodies had started to bloat.
He gagged.
As Tom got to the kitchen, he saw a man running towards the hawthorn hedge at the end of the lawn through the conservatory window opposite. He could run after him and maybe lose him, or… He turned and kicked away the throw rug on the kitchen floor. He knelt and prized out the piece of false concrete that revealed the trapdoor.
He lifted the hinge and pulled out the oily cloth which covered his Heckler & Koch MP5 9mm submachine mounted with a daytime 4x24 telescopic sight. He unwrapped the cloth and, instinctively, pulled out the curved steel magazine from the well. Satisfied, he chambered a round and headed out, blocking out all thoughts other than that of the murderer.
When he reached the hedge, Tom crouched down. He did his best to peer through the undergrowth, wondering if the murder was waiting for him on the other side. Apart from letting off half a clip he quickly realized he didn’t have an option at this stage, so he rushed through, scratching his face on a thorn.
There was a ploughed cornfield beyond, with a wooden shack in the far corner. There was no sign of anyone.
He hunkered down. The periphery was nothing but open fields dotted with a few copses of elm trees. He figured that the murderer had headed for the shack, but he couldn’t be sure. He inched forwards, checking the ground for footprints. He soon saw them, a straight line of caved in furrows leading diagonally to the shack. If he just raced ahead, he would be in open ground, woefully exposed. But he had to risk it, he concluded.
He sprang up and ran off, zigzagging all the way to the shack, his finger on the trigger of the MP5, which he aimed from the hip. He controlled his breathing as he put his back to a corrugated sheet resting against the shack and took a couple of seconds to calm himself.
There was no door on his side, so he inched towards the corner listening intently. The sun was strong, and he felt sweat bead on his forehead. He gritted his teeth and rushed out, the submachine gun raised. He ran round the other side of the shack. He saw the man racing across the open landscape that sloped gently down to the Potomac, where the waters were shaded by a line on birch trees on the far bank.