Sacrifice (8 page)

McKnight brought them to a halt at the edge of the debris field and killed the engine. Hauling his door open, Drake stepped out, his boots crunching on the dry rocky ground.

The heat seemed to have grown more intense as the sun rose towards its zenith, the feeling amplified by their sudden exit from the air-conditioned vehicle. Drake checked his watch – 10:46.

His thoughts were interrupted when he noticed one of the Horizon security men coming their way, presumably the leader of the protection detail.

He was a big guy, not so much tall as broad. He couldn’t have been more than 5 foot 10, yet Drake guessed his weight at perhaps 220, maybe 230 pounds of solid muscle. He had the look of a rugby player: short and stocky, rugged and powerful.

His head was covered with a sweat-stained bandanna, his deeply lined face darkened by several days’ growth. He looked to be in his late forties, and judging by the confidence in his stride, he was no stranger to places like Afghanistan.

‘My name’s Vermaak,’ he began. ‘I’m in charge here.’

Drake was surprised by his heavy South African accent, though perhaps he shouldn’t have been. A lot of their operatives had drifted into mercenary work after the end of apartheid. Vermaak looked as if he belonged to that generation.

‘Ryan Drake, CIA,’ he replied, shaking hands with him. The man’s grip was strong enough to crush boulders.

Drake’s accent prompted a raised eyebrow. ‘I didn’t know the boys at Langley employed foreigners.’

‘They’re an equal opportunities sort of place. Just like Horizon, I imagine,’ Drake added with a pointed look at the South African.

The older man grinned. ‘Fair enough. So what can I do for you, Mr Drake?’

‘We’re here to survey the crash site.’

Vermaak glanced at the rest of the group and frowned. ‘The army forensics guys already surveyed the whole site. I know, because I spent four hours sat on my arse waiting for them to get it done.’

‘I understand that. But we have to make our own assessment.’

‘We have orders to destroy the wreck and pull out before nightfall.’ To emphasise his point, Vermaak pointed towards the ruined chopper.

Fixed to the crumpled forward bulkhead was a cylindrical steel container the size of a small beer keg. The distinctive yellow wires trailing from the top made its purpose obvious. No doubt it was filled with high explosive – enough to vaporise the chopper and prevent anything valuable falling into the wrong hands.

‘Our orders come from the Director of National Intelligence, and they supersede yours.’ Drake glanced up at the sky. ‘Anyway, you’ve got at least eight hours until sunset. That’s more than enough time for us to finish up here.’

Vermaak said nothing for a few moments. Clearly he didn’t like what he was hearing, but neither could he ignore Drake’s authority. It was rather like poker, and Drake held all the aces in this case.

Finally he shrugged. ‘Fine. Do what you have to. But come sundown, my men and I pull out. Do we understand each other, Mr Drake?’

Drake nodded, unperturbed by his hostile tone. He
hadn’t come here looking for a new best friend; he had come to get results.

‘Perfectly.’

As Vermaak strode away to confer with two of his men, Drake turned to his own two teammates. ‘John, I want you to take a look around. See if you can find any evidence of the people who did this. Boot prints, vehicle tracks … whatever.’

In addition to his skills as a sniper, the man was an outstanding tracker, able to discern meaning from something as insignificant as a scuff mark on the ground or a few bent blades of grass. If there was anything in the vicinity worth finding, Drake felt certain he would find it.

‘On it, buddy,’ Keegan replied, already moving.

‘Sam, you’re with me. Let’s get to work.’

‘Wow, real garden spot,’ Frost remarked to herself as she surveyed Mitchell’s office.

His place of work was a modest, unremarkable little office, perhaps 10 feet square, with a small window overlooking a parking lot. One desk, metal framed, with a wood laminate coating marked by coffee rings, faced the window. On it sat a dusty computer with an old-fashioned CRT monitor and a cheap inkjet printer.

Scattered across the desk was the usual office paraphernalia, none of which sparked much interest, while a couple of filing cabinets were set against the wall.

And that was it. All things considered, it was a bland, clinical working space that looked barely used. The only hint of personality was a framed photograph sitting on the edge of the desk. Mitchell, several years younger and with more hair, plus what Frost assumed to be Mrs Mitchell. They were standing together at a beach somewhere, his arm around her shoulder, smiling and relaxed.

Frost glanced away, thinking it best not to get too involved. Settling herself at the desk, she fired up the computer and waited for it to start up, drumming her fingers impatiently on the cheap wood-veneer desk as the seconds dragged on.

‘Jesus, their IT people should be shot,’ she said.

Realising the computer would take a while to boot up, she crossed the room to the nearest of the two filing cabinets. At least she could make a start on Mitchell’s paper trail, she thought, reaching for the first drawer.

The drawer moved half an inch, then came to a halt, jammed on its runner. She pulled again, to little effect.

‘You picked the wrong day, and the wrong girl,’ the young woman said, gripping the drawer tighter and gritting her teeth, just allowing the frustration to build. ‘Come on, you son of a bitch.’

One hard yank was enough to free up the jammed runner, and the drawer shot open with a grating rasp.

Peering inside, she frowned in confusion. ‘What the fuck?’

With Vermaak and his security team standing a short distance away, Drake and McKnight picked their way through the mangled remains of the Black Hawk chopper. Both had donned surgical gloves for handling any wreckage they came across, partly to avoid disturbing the scene further but mostly for their own protection. Choppers were filled with all kinds of toxic fuels and chemicals.

‘That’s where the missile impacted,’ McKnight said, indicating the mangled engine pod overhead.

‘That’s what the army forensics team concluded,’ Drake agreed. He had read their preliminary report on the flight out. ‘An RPG impact against the outer armour.’

The RPG-7, or rocket-propelled grenade, was a Soviet-made anti-armour rocket dating back to the early 1960s. Simple, reliable and capable of punching through 12 inches of high-density armour, they had been the bane of tank crews for nearly half a century. Close to 10 million of the
things had been made, with tens of thousands ending up in the hands of militias, terrorists and insurgents.

It was easy to see why the army forensics team saw the RPG as the most likely culprit. However, it seemed McKnight didn’t agree. ‘It wasn’t an RPG round. It was a guided missile.’

That was a bold claim to make, considering she had been here all of five minutes. ‘What makes you so sure?’

She glanced at him, a faint smile on her lips. He was testing her, and she knew it. ‘The RPG is an anti-tank weapon. It’s designed to take out slow-moving targets from close range, not fast aircraft hundreds of feet in the air. A Black Hawk’s standard cruising speed is a hundred and fifty knots. It’s about twenty metres long and five metres high, right?’

Drake shrugged. He wasn’t exactly an aircraft buff. ‘If you say so.’

‘I do. The US Army did a hit evaluation of the RPG-7 a few years back. The chances of hitting a slow-moving target from two hundred metres were less than fifty per cent. Factor in the relative velocity and the increased range, and you’re talking about a hit probability of less than one per cent. Bad odds by anyone’s standards.’

‘Maybe they were lucky,’ he suggested. Just because the odds were against something, didn’t mean it couldn’t happen.

Turning her attention back to the wrecked chopper, McKnight pointed at the engine pod again. ‘Look at it. The blast pattern’s all wrong. RPGs are designed to penetrate armour with a high-pressure jet of gas and liquid metal. In the demolitions trade, we call it brisance. But whatever the name, it should have crumpled the engine pod like a giant fist and burned a hole right through it. That didn’t happen here. It’s been shredded,
as if some kind of fragmentation device exploded nearby. Like a missile with a proximity fuse.’

‘RPGs come with frag rounds,’ Drake reminded her. Though intended as an anti-tank weapon, they had been adapted over the years to a number of different purposes, from laying smokescreens to anti-personnel strikes.

McKnight said nothing to this. Moving closer, she knelt down beside the chopper, reached out and pulled open a small hatch. The mechanism was stiff, having been either damaged in the crash or deformed by the resultant fireball, but with some effort she was able to free it up.

The small compartment within held an empty metal rack, clearly designed to hold a number of small objects.

‘Flares,’ she explained. ‘Standard countermeasure against guided missiles. They’ve been used up. The pilot must have deployed them to try to lose whatever warhead was tracking him.’ She glanced up at him. ‘Still don’t believe me?’

‘All right. If it wasn’t an RPG, what do you think did this?’ Drake asked, amused at how easily she had dismantled his theory.

Again she shrugged. ‘Hard to say. It would have to be some kind of man-portable device, probably heat-seeking since it struck the engine pod. Maybe a Russian SA-18 or even a Chinese FN6. The SA-18 wouldn’t be too hard to get hold of if you have cash and friends in the right places. Russians aren’t exactly shy about selling weapons under the table.’ She reached up to flick a lock of dark hair out of her eyes. ‘I want to have a look inside.’

Taking a breath, Drake followed her, having to pick his way carefully past the blackened remains of what had once been a door-mounted minigun. The formidable six-barrelled weapon was still pointing skywards, though
its breech mechanism and ammunition feed had been blasted apart when the rounds inside cooked off.

Inside the burned-out compartment, the smell of melted plastic and other chemicals was overpowering. Even now, the stench lingered in the air, stinging his nose and making his eyes water. Wherever he stood, his boots left greasy prints on the soot-covered steel deck.

McKnight pointed to a blasted-out section of metal plating around the rotor shaft. ‘Check this out. The explosion travelled down through the shaft and ruptured the bulkhead here. We think one of the passengers was in front of the bulkhead when it gave way. There were bits of him all over the cabin.’

The bodies, or what was left of them, had of course been removed for repatriation back to the States, but for a moment Drake fancied he could smell something beneath the burned plastic and charred metal – the sickening stench of scorched human flesh.

McKnight pointed to a couple of areas where the deck had warped and deformed from the extreme heat. ‘Look. It was hot enough to soften the airframe.’

‘So the fuel tanks ruptured at some point after the chopper crash-landed,’ Drake reasoned. ‘It couldn’t have happened too quickly, otherwise they never would have had time to kidnap Mitchell.’

‘It wasn’t aviation fuel that did this,’ McKnight said, deep in thought as she looked around. ‘The burning is too localised. You can see it.’ She pointed to the areas of warped decking. ‘There were two or three ignition points.’

Struck by an idea, she hurried back outside to the metal briefcase that served as her portable forensics lab. Selecting a chemical swab held inside a clear plastic tube, she ducked back inside the chopper, knelt down beside
one of the areas of melted decking and carefully drew the swab across it.

Replacing it in the tube, she watched it intently. It took only a few moments for the swab to turn bright purple.

‘Interesting,’ she said quietly.

Drake leaned closer, intrigued by what she’d found. ‘Care to explain?’

Her vivid hazel eyes focused on him. ‘Barium nitrate. The cabin’s coated with it.’

‘Okay,’ he agreed, sounding vague. ‘What does that mean?’

‘Barium nitrate is one of the key elements of incendiary grenades. Combine it with thermite and it produces a hotter flame that burns longer and has a lower ignition point. It’s our standard anti-materiel weapon.’

Incendiary grenades had been in use by most armies since the Second World War. They had even been employed to disable German coastal artillery during the Normandy landings, their intense heat fusing the breech mechanism into a solid mass of metal.

But why would insurgents have used it? Thermite grenades were specialised pieces of equipment, and not easy to come by. Anyway, destroying an aircraft that had already been rendered immobile was nonsensical – it was no threat. It would have made more sense to strip it of valuable equipment and weapons.

The answer was as obvious as it was baffling. ‘They were trying to cover their tracks,’ he said. ‘They didn’t want us to know what they were doing.’

Glancing around, he spotted something on the forward bulkhead. He had seen it not long after entering, but hadn’t consciously acknowledged it amidst the chaos of the chopper wreck. Only now did he examine it more closely.

It was a small circular hole about half an inch in diameter. Reaching out, he touched it gently with his gloved hand. The metal had deformed inwards, giving way beneath the impact of a high-speed projectile.

‘Small arms fire,’ he said. ‘They were shooting in here.’

McKnight was by his side within moments, leaning forward to examine the damage. Her arm brushed against his, and instinctively he moved aside to allow her better access. His body remembered the brief contact though.

‘Looks like a 7.62mm round to me,’ she said after running her finger around it. ‘Fired from a high angle judging by the entry point.’

Drake’s mind assembled the facts and reached its inevitable conclusion. ‘An execution. One round, right between the eyes. Which means at least some of the crew survived the crash, but our friends executed them.’

‘And yet they kept Mitchell alive,’ she added. ‘That makes no sense. More hostages would have meant more leverage.’