The Henchmen's Book Club (2 page)

“Oh God, help!” he was choking as blood
poured into the sands from a broken stump that used to be his arm. “Help,
please help. Please. I want to go home. I want to go home,” he said over and
over again in Russian.

I did everything I could to try and stem
the bleeding, tying a tourniquet around his elbow and giving him morphine to
ease his pain but Mr Fedorov soon lost consciousness and drifted off into a
sleep from which he’d never awake. Poor old Fedorov, I’d really liked that guy.
He used to tell brilliant jokes, even in English, though I could never remember
them afterwards to tell anyone else. Mr Fedorov stored them up like a computer
though and often had the whole mess in stitches. The only joke of his I could
remember was this one: What has eight legs, four wings and gives ugly Americans
heart attacks? KFC’s Bargain Bucket.

I thought about this joke as I tucked Mr
Fedorov’s ID card into my pocket but now it just made me sad, so I took my
jacket off, laid it across Mr Fedorov’s face and headed down the southern
shoreline where Mr Smith and the others were waiting.

“Did you send the signal?” I asked
Captain Campbell, the highest-ranking surviving officer, when I got there.

“Yeah,” Captain Campbell confirmed with a
glower, and so that was that. The Agency would come and pick us up –
hopefully before the UN, or worse still, the US got here – and we’d live
to fight another day. We wouldn’t get paid because The Agency would keep our
entire signing on fees to pay for the service but at least we’d be spared a
prolonged vacation water-boarding in Guantanamo Bay, or wherever it was they
did that from these days. Not that this brought much comfort to many, not after
spending six months in this Godforsaken dot in the ocean, putting up with
Mosquitoes, lice, crabs, jelly fish, Thalassocrat’s tantrums and bloody Vinnie
Jones’s highs and lows courtesy of Mr Cooper. Some things could never
compensate a man enough for that.

“Where were you guys?” Captain Campbell
asked, almost accusingly.

“Off duty. Where were you?” I asked right
back in case he felt like pointing the finger.

“You weren’t in the barracks,” Captain
Campbell worked out for himself, seeing as the barracks were no longer
standing. “What were you doing? Drinking or something?”

“No actually, we were reading,” Mr Smith
answered for me when he saw I was getting ready to stick one on Thalassocrat’s
chief tea boy.

“Reading? Jesus!” Captain Campbell
sneered, pulling a face but saying no more on the subject.

We sat on the sands under the baking hot
sun for a few more minutes, checking our weapons and the horizon for the rescue
plane before Mr Ali broke the silence just behind me.

“What were you reading?” he asked.
“Anything good?”

2.
FROM THE PACIFIC WITH EMPTY POCKETS

The extraction team arrive three hours later. A big Beriev Be-200 swooped low
over the island dropping dinghies and life jackets into the water and landing a
quarter of a mile out to sea. Most of us swam out to the dinghies, but Captain
Campbell had to take charge of one of them and go back for the guys who were either
too wounded to make it on their own or bleeding too heavily to swim in these
infested waters.

Captain Takahashi was at the door to help
us on board, meaning it was station Japan that had been dispatched to pick us
up.

“Hey boys, no joy?” he guessed as he
helped each of us on board. “Never mind, we got hot drinks and cold beer for
you on the plane. Just make yourselves comfortable and leave everything to my
crew.”

Captain Takahashi had picked me up before
and he remembered me when he ran my Agency ID card through the scanner.

“Ah, I get you before, in Siberia wasn’t
it?”

“Yes, I remember. Thank you for picking
us up Captain,” I replied, as it never hurt to kiss the arse of someone who had
the power to kick you out over the middle of the Pacific.

“You not having a good run, no?” Captain
Takahashi deduced.

“It seems not Captain,” I sighed,
accepting his hand and climbing aboard.

“Well we take good care of you today, you
hear? Captain Takahashi number one friend to boys in trouble,” Captain
Takahashi reassured me, handing me back my card and pointing me in the
direction of one of his saucy oriental attendants. “You go with her and just
take it easy my friend, okay?”

“Okay,” I agreed, receiving a little bow
from the beautiful porcelain girl in front of me. I made to head back to the
seats but the girl stood her ground in front of me.

“Excuse me, but I will take that now
please,” she said, dropping her eyes to the AUG 9 slung over my back to remind
me this job was over.

“Oh
yes, sorry,” I said, slipping the gun off my shoulder and handing it to her.
She removed the clip, ejected the chambered round and stowed the rifle in a
locker at the front with the rest of the boys’ weapons. I handed over my Glock
21, Taser, Mace, field knife and brass knuckles too before I was passed back to
another equally beautiful attendant and shown to my seat.

“We
hope you enjoy your flight. If there is anything you require today, please let
us know,” she said, handing me a complimentary packet of peanuts and a
miniature bottle of Japanese whisky, before returning to the front of the
aircraft.

Oh
yes, Captain Takahashi and his famously sexy flight attendants. He was well
known for them the business over, which is probably why he got so many jobs now
that I come to think of it. But I wouldn’t have dared try it on with any of his
girls, not without a parachute. Takahashi’s attendants were strictly for show
only.

Well,
not quite.

You see, not all of the people who’d been
employed by Doctor Thalassocrat were on The Agency’s books. Some of them came
from other outfits, some were long time associates known to Thalassocrat
personally, while others worked freelance – like the lab technicians for
example.

These were the guys who really came a
cropper on this job.

Three
lab technicians survived the inferno and swam out to the plane with the rest of
us. One of them was stupid enough to try using a dead Agency guy’s ID to get on
board the plane and the same pretty girl who’d taken and stored my weapon a
moment earlier now drew her own and shot him straight between the eyes without
so much as a bow. There was always one, wasn’t there? On every pick-up, there
was always one.

The attendant slipped her weapon out of
sight again and carried on disarming the boys as they came aboard with a smile
and a bow as if she’d done no more than have a quiet word with an unruly
passenger, but no one was left in any doubt as to the perils of trying it on
with Captain Takahashi. The other technicians were wise enough identify
themselves up front as not being on The Agency’s books and had to agree to
recompense The Agency for their passage home. They are expensive tickets at two
million dollars a seat but preferable to option B.

As for the boys with rival outfits, they
were in a slightly more fortunate position in that their bills got sent
directly to their own agencies. If their outfits had standing agreements with
The Agency, that was. If not, then they too were advised to have a few million
air miles going spare or a rubber dinghy and arms like Popeye.

Captain Takahashi’s co-pilot popped his
head out of the cockpit and barked something at the Captain in Japanese. I
couldn’t understand the words but body language is the same the world over,
particularly the body language of someone who’d just seen the Old Bill closing
fast on the radar. Captain Takahashi barked something back at him and the
co-pilot disappeared to start the engines as Captain Takahashi finished
dragging the rest of the survivors on board.

Captain Campbell and the worst of the
injured men were last to be pulled on board. One of them, another Russian I
just about recognised as Mr Andreev, was in a terrible state. I really couldn’t
see him lasting the journey, but Captain Takahashi took the time to get him
onboard all the same because he held an Agency card. A few of the more
unscrupulous blokes I’ve worked for would’ve just put two in his head and left
him for the sharks, but Captain Takahashi didn’t even contemplate it despite
his co-pilot’s running commentary over the intercom. He eased him through the
door, then slammed it shut the moment Mr Andreev’s ankles were over the
threshold and shouted at his co-pilot to step on it.

Two of Captain Takahashi’s girls laid on
top of Mr Andreev to stop him from plummeting down the aisles, while the rest
of us were slammed back into our seats as the plane accelerated across the
water. Captain Takahashi wasn’t the sort of bloke to let a take-off stop him
from wandering around his own plane though and he fought his way forward until
he was behind his seat and flipping buttons alongside his co-pilot.

The first of these pinged a seatbelt sign
on over all of our heads advising us that we were in for a bumpy take-off
– as if we didn’t know – while rest started deploying flares and
smoke from the rear of the plane.

“Looks like it’s going to be a close
one,” Mr Petrov said in the seat alongside of
me and a moment
later we left the water and banked hard right.

All sorts of alarms started screaming in
the cockpit up front and Captain Takahashi responded by pumping chaff and
flares out of the back to tell us Mr Petrov was more right than he knew. Above
the din of the engines I heard a whoosh as the first missile ploughed through
the chaff and missed our tail by a whisker, and suddenly we were banking hard
left. The plane was at a virtual right angle as Captain Takahashi dodged and
weaved all over the sky and from the port side window I could suddenly see our
pursuers; three warships, stretched out across ten miles of open ocean and
closing in to mop up Tempest’s mess. While we’d been in the water we’d been
sheltered by the island, but as soon as we’d taken off we’d announced ourselves
to their radar.

Captain Takahashi now dove toward the sea
hard and levelled off barely fifty feet from the waves, only to then sweep north.
All around me faces and knuckles were almost opaque with fear, all except those
of Captain Takahashi’s girls, who looked like they were having another mundane
day at the office.

A stream of white-hot tracer fire
suddenly lit up the skies around us as our pursuers realised they were getting
nowhere with their Sea Sparrows but a little more dodging and weaving and we
were across the horizon and out of range. More Sparrows were launched after us,
but Captain Takahashi’s bird was jam-packed with the latest radar deflecting
technology and after two more minutes of aerial dodge ball, he flicked off the
seat-belt sign and announced that this afternoon’s in-flight movie would be
The Time Bandits
.

Eighteen
of us survived Thalassocrat’s job. Nineteen if you want to count the lab
technician who’d got himself shot trying to sneak on board, but only eighteen
of us made it onto the plane, lived through the take off and managed to last an
hour of
The
Time Bandits
before it was turned off by popular demand. It isn’t a
bad film, I’ve seen it before, but no one was in the mood to watch Snow White’s
mates running around history after we’d lost our wages – particularly the
two surviving lab technicians who were near inconsolable at the thought of
having to sell their houses, belongings and spare kidneys to pay for their
flights home.

But you know what, eighteen wasn’t bad.

I’ve been on jobs where hardly anyone
made it through to the other side. That Siberian job that Captain Takahashi had
picked me up from being a case in point. Only four of us had survived that one,
which was probably why Captain Takahashi remembered me. He came back to my seat
during the flight and talked to me some more about that day.

“You worked with that fella with the
funny name, didn’t you? In Siberia? What was his name again?”

“Polonius Crump.”

“Yes, that it,
Polonipus Crumb
,” the Captain laughed, shaking his head and urging
his girls to laugh along too. Some smiled politely, though the others just
regarded me with cautious indifference. “Funny name him. Funny.”

And a funny end he met too, old Polonius.
He’d had some potty notion about knocking the Earth off its axis by a dozen
degrees to melt the polar ice caps and bring the Equator further north to
transform the frozen tundras into rich fertile land – while sinking every
other square inch of rich fertile land under a few billion gallons of freshly
unfrozen sea water, you understand. Of course he didn’t have a clue, he didn’t.
Even the lads on the job didn’t think he could do it, but he was a nice enough
bloke and paid well – in Russian gold no less. And if by some miracle he
did manage to pull it off… well, I’d rather be sunning myself with old Polonius
on the new Arctic Riviera than standing on my roof in Sussex wondering where
all this bloody water had come from.

But no, I don’t need to tell that you he
didn’t manage it. Russian agents backed by Spetsnaz commandos brought the whole
place crashing down around our ears while we were testing his stupid
defridgerator (*patent pending). Polonius himself took a tumble into a
temporarily defrosted lake trying to flee on his snowmobile, so that when the
ice set again he was frozen inside a big block of it like something out of a
Tom & Jerry
cartoon. Apparently, I
didn’t see it myself, but the Russians cut him out and carted him off as a
souvenir.

“Funny,” Captain Takahashi smiled again,
squeezing my shoulder and heading back to the front check if Mr Andreev wanted
The Time Bandits
back on.

Yeah hilarious. I’d ended up with moths
fluttering out of my pockets on that job too.

A little while later Mr Smith came over
and sat with me.

“So Jones, what are you going to do when
you get back?” he asked.

I rubbed my face and opened another
little bottle of Japanese whisky. “I don’t know,” I shrugged. I hadn’t met Mr
Smith before this job but we’d got on well and become firm friends. He was an
American while I’m British so it’s natural for people who shared a common
language to eat their sandwiches on the same table of any international
canteen, though it wasn’t just a language thing. Mr Chang for example, had been
a lovely bloke, as had been Mr Fedorov, while I could’ve happily watched Mr
Cooper getting blown up, and then revived, and blown up again all day long, so
it was more than just a language I shared with Mr Smith. We shared a sense of
humanity too. And in a profession predominated by killers and psychopaths that
was a rare old thing.

“Are you going to re-register with The
Agency?” he asked, cracking open a half bottle of Okinawan Merlot.

“I don’t know,” I said, and I didn’t. I
didn’t want to. Tempest might’ve had nine lives but I only had the one and I
was rather attached to it. But then again what choice did I have? This job was
supposed to have paid off my mortgage, settled my debts, gold-plated the farm
and left me enough so that I never had to look at another price tag again.

If things had worked out.

Damn Tempest.

Damn Thalassocrat.

“I’m going to,” Mr Smith said. “I’ve got
to go and see my kids first, but as soon as I’m done I’m heading over to Cody to
put my name on the list again. Even if it’s a long termer, I don’t care, I’ll
do it.”

Long term contracts, middle term
contracts and short term contracts. These were what we signed up for, with
scant few other details available. Due to the generally secretive nature of the
work we did, the employers cherry-picked their workforce, not the other way
around, which makes sense if you think about it. No point tipping off MI6 or
the CIA about what you’re up to with a card in the front window advertising for
dinner ladies with space station experience. All we got to know was the length
of the contracts and how much they paid. Short term contracts were usually
anything between a month to a year, middle term contracts between a year to
five years, while long term contracts could conceivably last the rest of your
life. But then again, so could any of these contracts, so suck the bullets out
of that if you please. Personally, I only ever signed up for short to middle
term contracts. I had plans, namely finishing off my farmhouse and filling its
wardrobes with Italian suits, so I didn’t want to see out my days tunnelling
towards the Earth’s core in a silicone plastic bubble twenty thousand feet
beneath the Azores (unless the perks were exceptional).