Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) (41 page)

Luke had to resist the urge to move away from the display on the table. One slip-up, and his mission would be over before it had begun. He watched as the chemist completed the demonstration.

‘The needles fit like so into the syringe. All you need to do is draw out the liquid so that it fills the needle, point it away from you and give it a squirt. Then you detach the syringe and leave the needle in place.’ He saw Luke’s expression. ‘I know what you’re thinking. Surely I need to press down on the syringe to inject it, right? Well, no. This stuff is so potent that to work it just needs to break through the epidermal layer – sorry, puncture the skin. Until then it’s held inside the needle by surface tension. When that’s broken and the needle enters the subcutaneous tissue, hey presto, it’s check-out time for your man. Want to have a practice?’

‘Not really, no,’ said Luke. ‘I imagine the same applies if I or our agent sticks themselves by mistake?’

‘It does, and we’ve taken that into account.’ The chemist lifted the base of the box to reveal a further phial and syringe. ‘Under here you’ll find the antidote. Naloxone. But I really wouldn’t advise going down that route if you can avoid it. It, um, hasn’t always been a hundred per cent successful.’

‘Thanks,’ said Luke, as the two chemists packed away the contents and presented him with the green box. ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

THE WARMTH OF
the Florida afternoon wrapped itself round him the moment Luke stepped out of the terminal building. Late afternoon, still twenty-six degrees, and he could just make out the high-rise skyline of the city shimmering in the heat haze. After nearly ten hours cooped up in the plane, he took a deep breath of the balmy air. This was a pleasant change from the wet winds and single-digit temperatures of London in early November.

‘Welcome to Tampa. You’ve just missed the tail-end of hurricane season,’ said the man from Langley, who had met him off his flight.

Their conversation had dried up on the short, straight drive along Route 589, then the 600, from the international airport to the South Tampa Peninsula that ended in a high-security gatepost and a sign saying simply ‘MacDill Airforce Base’.

Through security and driving along the North Boundary Boulevard with the windows down, Luke felt a moist breeze blowing in off Hillsborough Bay. He ducked as something large and unseen roared very low overhead.

‘Ah, don’t worry about those,’ said his escort, breaking his silence at last. ‘That’ll be the KC-135s comin’ in to land. Air-to-air refuelling tankers. Gotta bear in mind, this is first and foremost an airforce base.’

And a lot of other things too, Luke noticed, as they passed a
pair of large red-roofed buildings with a sign announcing the headquarters of Centcom, US Central Command, the division of the US military that runs all its operations from the Middle East and beyond, into Afghanistan and Central Asia. He wondered how much thought had gone into that, as they drove past a road signposted ‘Centcom Avenue’. They pulled up at the officers’ quarters and the escort checked Luke in for the night. Clean bedding, a washbasin and a wardrobe. Frugal but functional – Elise would probably approve. He had once made the mortal mistake of telling her about some five-star suite he had been put up in on an assignment in Dubai. ‘That’s it,’ she had told him. ‘You’re bloody well taking me with you next time.’

American breakfasts, Luke reflected, are one of life’s guilty pleasures. You know they can be spectacularly bad for you, all those deliciously crisp rashers of oak-smoked bacon saturated in cooking fat, jam with every ounce of natural goodness purged out of it, waffles piled high with the bottle of maple syrup within easy reach. Yet it all tasted so good.

He had taken his tray and sat down at a crowded table in the Special Ops canteen, wedged between large men with bushy beards, bunching, load-carrying shoulders and straggly hair. Most, he noticed, had crows’ feet around the eyes and the thin white tan lines below the temples that came from wearing wraparound shades on operations in hot countries. They didn’t talk much, not even to each other. The man next to him reached over and silently passed him the salt and pepper without being asked. One look at the men told Luke they had spent an unhealthy amount of time in the most dangerous corners of Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia, seeing and doing things they could probably never talk about.

‘Luke Carlton?’ A large figure loomed above him. ‘Todd Miller.’ He flashed a perfect white smile and held out a tanned hand the size of a joint of gammon. ‘Glad you got in all right. I’m the mission commander. Hey, no rush, take your time. I’ll run you over to the briefing room when you’re done. Then you can meet the team.’

‘Cheers,’ said Luke, wiping his mouth with a paper napkin and rising to his feet. ‘I’m good to go, thanks. Let’s head off now.’ The guy was huge. Probably a college quarterback in his younger days. Luke wondered what had driven him to join this death-or-glory outfit. Patriotism? Ambition? A passion for extreme sports? If it had been ten or fifteen years earlier he would have put it down to the 9/11 effect, all those thousands of outraged young Americans signing up to serve their country as best they could in the wake of the worst terrorist attack it had ever known. But Todd Miller looked too young for that – he would still have been at school when the Twin Towers fell.

There were fourteen of them in the briefing room, keeping themselves to the edges by the framed pictures, sipping coffee – black, no sugar, Luke felt sure – talking quietly. It was a mixed bag, just as Khan had said. Part CIA, part JSOC Special Ops, only two women, probably from Langley. An unusual insignia on the wall caught his eye: a large blue, red and yellow emblem featuring a spear surrounded by what appeared to be flames. Emblazoned across the top were two words,
Molon Labe
.

‘It’s Ancient Greek,’ said Miller, handing Luke a coffee. ‘
Molon Labe
means “Come and take them.” It’s our motto here at Special Operations Command. It’s supposed to be what King Leonidas said to the Persians when they demanded his three hundred men lay down their weapons at Thermopylae.’

‘Nice one,’ said Luke. ‘A sort of ancient version of “Fuck you”?’

‘You got it,’ replied Miller, giving him a firm slap on the back.

A short, squat man with ginger sideburns came into the briefing room and clapped his hands just once. ‘OK, listen up,’ he announced. ‘Captain Miller’s gonna start the briefing.’ No uniform but everyone seemed to know who he was. Luke put him down as the unit warrant officer. Everyone took their places as Todd Miller stood by the wall screen at the far end of the room. He was dressed, as most of the men were, in beige cargo trousers with capacious pockets, dark brown mountain boots, a skin-tight polo shirt and a baseball cap with the brim curved over,
shielding his eyes. Miller signalled for the first image to come up on the screen and Luke nearly sent his coffee hurtling across the table.

It was Nelson García, El Pobrecito to his people, and someone had helpfully labelled him ‘Principal Player’. Well, of course they’d all need to see what he looked like, but still . . . Looking across the room now into those cruel, sadistic eyes and remembering what the bastard had done to him, and what he had nearly had done to him, sent a chill down Luke’s spine. He thought back to those hours in the Chop House where García’s thugs had been preparing to lop off his limbs, one by one. Christ, was he insane to have taken on this mission? Undoubtedly. And to think that Angela had offered him an out – what, only yesterday? But it was a bit late to change his mind now.

Miller had stopped talking and the image on the screen suddenly changed. A headshot of a Hispanic girl appeared. Early twenties. Lightly tanned face framed by a neat bob of dark hair, haloed by a beam of sunlight against a whitewashed wall. She looked almost beatific. Luke couldn’t help but smile as he heard the rumble of approval come from the assembled men.

‘Valentina Gómez, ladies and gentlemen,’ said Miller, tapping the screen with a telescopic aerial snapped off a discarded transistor radio. ‘Our asset in theatre. And, note, she is a friendly. This lady is a UK intel asset. I say again, she is a friendly intel asset.’ Luke looked down at the thin A4-sized classified file he had brought with him and riffled through it until he found what he was looking for. Vauxhall Cross’s blurred file photo of Tradewind did not do her justice. Benton’s skills as an agent-runner had clearly not extended to photography.

‘The Brits have codenamed her Tradewind,’ continued Miller, ‘so we’ll use the same nomenclature. She’s co-located with the principal player who frequently moves location, mostly in Antioquia province, here.’ Valentina’s face vanished to be replaced by a satellite map of Colombia that zoomed in on a province north-west of Bogotá. ‘She has no means of contacting London unless she leaves the estate and visits her folks in the village,’ said Miller.
‘The last transmission she made was just forty-eight hours ago. It was marked “Top Urgent” and alerted her controllers in London that García is packing up and preparing to ship out in the next few days. She thinks it’s to Panama. We have no means of contacting her but we do know she’s with her family right now. And they live . . . here.’ The satellite image tracked smoothly across the terrain and zoomed in on a row of basic houses. It did not escape Luke’s attention that US optics were a whole lot slicker than the ones he was used to back home.

‘I have a question, Chief.’ It was one of the JSOC guys. He had stopped chewing gum just long enough to ask his question. ‘Any reason we don’t just call in a drone strike and flatten the place? Save us all a lot of trouble.’

‘Hoo-ar,’ echoed someone next to him, and the two knocked fists with an audible clunk of bone on bone.

‘There are plenty of good reasons,’ replied Miller, ‘and I’ll let our British guest here address them. Mr Carlton?’

Luke grimaced. ‘Mr Carlton’ reminded him of all those PT instructors on the All Arms Commando course in Devon, their ‘Mr’ dripping with sarcasm. He put down his coffee and got to his feet, nodding his thanks to Miller. ‘Morning, everyone,’ he began. ‘As some of you may know, we have a very delicate situation in play over in the UK right now. A CT situation.’ He noticed the CIA guys from Langley all looked down at their coffee. They knew. ‘The action we’re undertaking in Colombia has to be finessed so we can achieve a specific aim.’ Oh, for God’s sake, he was starting to sound like a management consultant.

‘OK, let me put it another way. There are two reasons we can’t use a drone. One is that it would likely take out Tradewind along with the target. And the other is that we don’t know where García is right now. She is the only asset we have inside his inner circle. She’s the one with access to him, so that means . . .’ Luke sensed from looking round the room that they had all got it, but he completed his sentence anyway ‘. . . we have to get to her village, hand over the goods, give her a crash course in how to use them and then she has to execute the task, the first chance she gets. Todd?’

Miller thanked him and took over. The briefing moved to logistics, routes in and out, extraction plans, call signs, back-up contingencies. ‘So to sum up,’ he concluded, ‘wheels up at thirteen hundred hours. Four hours’ flight time into the base at Medellín. Insertion by road. In position by nineteen hundred hours local. Any questions?’

As the meeting broke up Luke saw a man and a woman making their way towards him, waiting patiently for their chance to squeeze past some of the hulking Special Ops men. They were civilians, he guessed. They didn’t have the military mannerisms of the others in the room.

‘Hi, there!’ the woman said brightly, when they reached him. ‘We’re from OTS.’ She looked at him expectantly.

‘OTS?’

‘You know, OTS. The Office of Technical Service. Part of DS and T?’

Luke looked from one to the other blankly. Was this a test? ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m not familiar with that. I thought you were from Langley.’

‘Oh, we are,’ she replied. ‘We work at the Directorate of Science and Technology. We do the gizmos for the Agency.’

‘Ah,’ said Luke. Why hadn’t someone told him? Once again he had the feeling he was being sent into action without the full knowledge set.

‘We’d like to show you something,’ said the woman, ‘something you’ll need to hand on to Tradewind. If now is convenient for you?’ She and her companion pulled up chairs next to his. The man still hadn’t said a word, but now he reached into the satchel he was carrying and silently placed a woman’s compact on the table. He flipped it open to reveal a circular mirror and flat powder puff.

‘Looks kinda normal, right?’ remarked the woman. ‘But you’ll see we’ve made some modifications.’ She peeled back the powder puff and put it to one side on the table. Beneath it, inside the compact, lay a tiny keyboard and a miniature eyeliner pencil, sharpened at one end to a fine point.

‘It’s a communicator.’ The man broke his silence. ‘It’s only short-range – about ten kilometres max – but it does the job. The SIGINT guy on your team will be able to pick up her messages on his receiver. You tap the keys using this,’ he indicated the sharp end of the eyeliner pencil, ‘and it’s powered by a tiny lithium battery at the back here.’

Luke was lucky enough to have good eyesight but he had no idea if Valentina would be able to cope with such a tiny keyboard. ‘What if she can’t make out the keys? If they’re too small for her?’

‘We’ve taken care of that,’ said the woman. ‘If you look at the mirror you’ll see it’s magnifying. Oh, and all the keys are printed in reverse so they show up the right way in the mirror.’

‘Not bad,’ said Luke.

‘Yeah, we think so too,’ she replied, with a smile. As they got up to leave, she added, ‘Just one thing: it is super-fragile so no hard landings, huh?’

‘Roger that,’ said Luke, and tucked it into his breast pocket.

Back in his room in the officers’ quarters, Luke took out the green plastic Travellers’ First Aid box and snapped it open. He took a long look at the needles that would inject the poison into the man who was wreaking such havoc in Britain. Now would be the moment to look forward to García’s end. But Luke felt nothing. He just needed to be sure he knew exactly what to tell Valentina when he showed her what to do. He snapped the box shut, lay back on his bed and phoned Elise.