Bad Soldier: Danny Black Thriller 4 (9 page)

BOOK: Bad Soldier: Danny Black Thriller 4
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There were no lights or sign of habitation as the chopper finally started to lose height. The conditions outside hadn’t improved much. The helicopter shakily set down in the middle of the darkness. Caitlin kicked open the door and a wave of rain hammered into the interior. It made no difference to Danny, who was still damp and cold after their stint on the ship. He cut the cable ties binding the prisoners’ ankles, then grabbed one of them – he wasn’t sure which was which – and pulled him roughly from the aircraft, leaving Spud to deal with his mate. The prisoner stumbled as Danny dragged him away from the downdraught, Caitlin at his side, Spud following.

Once they were twenty metres from the aircraft, Danny stopped and tried to get his bearings. They seemed to have landed on a flat patch of rough ground at the foot of a steep hill. He detached his torch from the rack of his rifle and shone it up the hillside. It lit up a high wire fence, with razor wire at the top and sturdy uprights every twenty feet. To his nine o’clock, also at the foot of the hill but further along, was a low building – single-storey, and small. Little more than a hut. As Danny shone his torch in that direction, a second flashlight appeared outside the building, and Danny could just make out the silhouette of the figure holding it.

The rain suddenly intensified. Still dragging his prisoner, Danny led the others towards the figure. When they were five metres away, the figure turned and walked through an open door into the building. They followed him in, out of the rain.

By the light of his torch, Danny saw that the inside of the building was empty, except for a staircase along the left-hand wall, leading downwards. He directed his torch towards the figure, who had now lowered his. He was wearing a hooded raincoat, which was dripping on to the stone floor. Danny couldn’t see much of his face.

‘Penfold,’ the man introduced himself in a thin, reedy voice. ‘MI6. Are these the prisoners?’

Danny resisted the urge to give a sarcastic response, and was glad that Spud managed to hold his tongue too. He just nodded.

‘Follow me, please,’ Penfold said. He walked across the room to the staircase and started walking down.

All of a sudden Danny’s prisoner, who had been so accommodating up till now, started to struggle. Danny jabbed an elbow just below his ribs. He doubled over, coughing violently. Danny pulled him down the steps, making sure he didn’t fall. No point in him breaking any bones just yet.

There was a steel door at the bottom of the stairs. The man who had introduced himself as Penfold unlocked it at three points before opening it up. Danny squinted. The corridor beyond was brightly lit by flickering, fluorescent strips along the ceiling. On either side were identical steel doors with rivets, and at the far end a further door, guarded by two men in civvies, but with handguns holstered to their hips. Penfold shuffled down the corridor in front of Danny and the others, dripping water from his raincoat as he went. ‘Technically speaking,’ he said, without looking back at them, ‘this place doesn’t exist. You’ll need to forget about it once you’ve left.’

‘What was it originally?’ Danny asked. He sensed it was an old building that had been reassigned to its new purpose.

Penfold frowned, as if he didn’t like being asked the question. ‘Bomb shelter,’ he said reluctantly. ‘Second World War.’ He reached the armed guards. ‘It’s OK, you can let our guests through.’

One of the guards unlocked the door. The sodden party shuffled through.

They found themselves in a large, hexagonal room. The ceiling and floor were constructed from grey, stained concrete. At regular intervals around the edge were six separate rooms, each of them a good fifteen metres deep. The rooms all had a sturdy door and a toughened glass window, about three metres by two, so that it was possible to see inside. Each room had a couple of industrial-looking spotlights set about three metres from the front, pointing towards the back walls. Danny understood why. With the spotlights shining in the eyes of the room’s occupants, anyone standing behind them would be unidentifiable.

One of the rooms contained what looked like a basic dentist’s chair. A rubber hose was coiled snake-like next to it. Danny instantly knew that it was a waterboarding facility. The room next to it was empty, except for a three-metre length of chain attached to the far concrete wall, with what looked like a leather dog collar at the other end. A third room contained a chair similar to the waterboarding room, but instead of the hose there was a trolley laden with surgical instruments in sterilised, sealed packages. The remaining three rooms appeared to be empty, but Danny instantly observed that they all had a drain grate in the centre, and a tap on the far wall. There were dark stains on the floor of each room, and the whole area had a faint smell of antiseptic. A further door led out of the hexagonal room, and in the middle of the room was a table with four chairs. A set of headphones lay on the table, with a long lead plugged into an audio jack on the floor.

Penfold pulled back the hood of his raincoat and unzipped it. For the first time, Danny got a proper look at him. He was completely bald, but not old – mid-thirties, maybe. He wore a pair of round glasses and was very clean-shaven, although his skin was red and blotchy with razor burn. He reminded Danny of a tyrannical twat of a science teacher who’d made his life hell as a kid. Danny took an instant dislike to him. Penfold laid his wet coat on the table, then walked over to two of the empty rooms and opened them up. ‘You can put them in here,’ he said. ‘This one’s the cold room – we can get it down to just below freezing. This one’s the noise room – sound-insulated, but bloody noisy inside. Soon gets them talking.’

‘And if it doesn’t?’ Danny asked.

Penfold gave him a thin smile, and his eyes flickered over to the other rooms. ‘Inside, please,’ he said.

Danny and Spud dragged their guys to the open doors and pushed them carelessly inside. Both of them stumbled and tripped. Penfold had their doors closed and locked within seconds, then beckoned Danny, Spud and Caitlin to the far door. Danny glanced back at the prisoners. They were both on their knees, their hooded heads bowed.

‘The doctors are on their way,’ Penfold said as they left the hexagonal room and entered what was obviously a storage area with racks of shelves along the walls. ‘They’ll check them over in the next half hour.’

‘What’s the point?’ Spud growled.

Penfold looked at him over his shoulder, obviously rather surprised at the question. ‘To establish,’ he said, ‘how much interrogation they can take. I was told there would be four of you.’

‘Change of plan,’ Danny said.

Penfold inclined his head. ‘Er, please don’t touch anything,’ he said. Spud had wandered over to one of the racks and was examining something closely. He turned round, holding it up. Danny’s eyes widened. It looked like some kind of sex toy.

‘Seriously?’ Spud said. ‘I know it must get lonely here, but—’

‘It’s not for
recreational
use,’ Penfold said. His lips had gone rather thin, like a disapproving teacher. ‘It’s an interrogation tool . . .’

But Spud had already put the object back on the shelf and was now reading some sticky labels that had been attached to the shelves. ‘Rectal feeding . . . rectal rehydration . . .’ He turned back to look at Penfold with an expression of great distaste. ‘What’s wrong with just hitting the fuckers?’

‘Different subjects react in different ways,’ Penfold said prissily. ‘It’s important that we have a wide range of techniques available to us.’

‘Including shoving dildos up their arses? Whatever floats your boat, mucker.’

‘What are you?’ Penfold asked. ‘The terrorist’s friend?’

A sudden, heavy silence. All three members of the unit gave Penfold a contemptuous stare. Spud started to pace towards him.

‘Leave it, Spud,’ Danny said quietly. Spud stopped and took a deep breath, clearly calming himself down.

The terrorist’s friend. If only Penfold knew the truth. But Danny thought he understood why his mate was having a go. Spud had seen the inside of one torture facility too many over the course of his career. It was hardly surprising that he had opinions about what was acceptable and what wasn’t.

‘You’ll be wanting something to eat,’ Penfold said abruptly as he led them out of the storage room and into a kitchen area. There was a sink, a fridge and a microwave. Penfold pointed at the fridge. ‘There’s food in there. Help yourselves. I’ve received instructions that you’re to be present at the interrogation. It’s not something I would usually recommend, but . . .’ His voice trailed off. ‘I’ll return when we’re ready for you.’

Penfold nodded at them, wiped a few beads of sweat from his forehead and left the room.

 

Joe was pleased that it was raining hard. True, he was soaked to the skin. True, he was shivering with the cold. But he had been waiting for the rain, because he knew this was his best time to strike.

And he knew this, because he had been watching.

In the five days he had been loitering around the outskirts of Calais, Joe had witnessed several attempts to get across the border. He had made two observations. Firstly, when his fellow migrants tried to get over the high wire fences on to the freight or passenger train lines, they always did so in groups of six or seven, sometimes more. It made it easy for the police and soldiers guarding the area to spot them. Once he had seen this happen a few times, Joe had decided that he would continue his strategy of remaining solitary. A single person attempting to breach the lines would be far less obvious.

His second observation was this: nobody ever tried to scale the fences when it was raining. The migrants and the authorities had fallen into a routine. If the weather was fine, they would engage in their little game of catch. When it was foul they would take shelter. Joe had spent many hours standing in the driving rain, watching the weak points of the fence. During those times he had not seen a single attempt, nor a single guard on patrol.

Joe knew that he was brighter than most people. But he was surprised that nobody else had put two and two together.

He was two miles from the centre of Paris, standing on the litter-strewn verge of the dual carriageway road, about 200 metres from a bleak Ibis hotel. On the other side of the road was the main freight train line. He found it hard to see, because droplets of rain were collecting on his damaged glasses. The vehicles on the road were blurs of light as they passed, but that was OK. All he had to do was wait for a gap, then scramble across to the central reservation. And he didn’t have to wait long at this time of night: a couple of minutes and he was running across, keeping his head low and focussing hard on not tripping up, because he was the kind of kid who tripped when he ran. At the central reservation he waited another minute for a gap in the traffic, before sprinting to the far side.

Here he stopped and wiped his glasses. Rain trickled down the back of his neck, and he only had a few seconds of clear vision before the lenses were wet again. But it was enough to get the lie of the land between his position and the fence that marked the boundary of the railway track: fifty metres of rough grassland. He bowed his head again, and sprinted through the driving rain up to the fence.

He was out of breath by now, but he knew he couldn’t stop. The fence was twenty feet high, and topped by razor wire. There was no way Joe could scale it. He had neither the skill nor the strength. But he
did
have in his rucksack a small pair of hand-held wire clippers, which he had stolen from the back of one of the lorries in which he’d hitched an unofficial lift in northern Greece. He lay flat on the sodden ground to keep a low profile, and got to work on the wire fence. The links were difficult to snip, and his hands slipped badly on the handle of the wire cutters, which dug painfully into his hands. But after five minutes of hard work, he had cut a line about half a metre in length along the bottom of the fence. He reckoned that would be enough.

He shoved his rucksack through the hole first, then wormed his body into the gap. The wire was sharp where he had cut it. It hurt the back of his head, and ripped his trousers slightly, but that was OK. He was through. And just in time, because a train was approaching, its headlamps blindingly bright as they cut through the thick, rain-filled air. Having watched this section of railway carefully, Joe knew that it would stop at this location, presumably while some signalling issue was dealt with up ahead. Sometimes it stayed a minute, sometimes five. And ordinarily there would be guards patrolling the track while the train was stationary.

But not tonight. Not in this rain.

The train was deafeningly loud as it approached. Joe would have known just from the sound that it was a freight train: that low, rumbling, relentlessly mechanical noise. He crouched low again, curled up in a ball, camouflaged – he hoped – amid the grass. He could sense the bright lights of the headlamps even with his eyes screwed shut, and as the train screeched to a high-pitched halt, the sound seemed to go right through him, leaving him breathless.

Silence. He wiped his glasses and looked up. The train was thirty metres from where he lay and the carriages – open-topped, skip-shaped freight units – looked much bigger now that he was closer up than they had done from the far side of the main road. He felt a moment of doubt, but quickly mastered it. Pushing himself up to his feet, and checking left and right to the best of his ability that nobody was patrolling, he sprinted across the open ground towards the freight train. It seemed to loom threateningly over him as he approached. As Joe drew up alongside one of the carriages, he wiped his glasses for a third time and examined the side. There was a metal ladder fixed to the carriage. Its bottom rung was three metres off the ground – higher than Joe had estimated from a distance. He felt himself panicking that he wouldn’t be able to reach it.
Take deep breaths
, he told himself.
You haven’t got time to panic. The train could leave any second 
. . .

BOOK: Bad Soldier: Danny Black Thriller 4
13.73Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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