The Henchmen's Book Club (20 page)

“Mother, this is FSO One, we have the
tube. Bring forward the dentist,” Mr Smith told the Tupolev, then muted his mic
and looked at me. “Who comes up with these stupid names, that’s what I want to
know?”

I grinned through my visor then headed
back to help with the winch. Chariot Twelve had joined us with two hundred
yards of steel cable spooled around its rear. We anchored the Chariot, then
threw the cable buoy out of the back and unspooled it until it reached the
Tupolev.

At this point, the Tupolev’s side door
opened and the cable was attached and a rather reluctant scientist hooked on
the end. A tiny motorised trolley whisked him over and we pulled him inside,
unclipped him and pushed him in the direction of the missile. He scurried
forward with his ratchets and screwdrivers and spent the next five minutes
picking his way through the missile’s nose cone before finding the circuit
board he was looking for.

“Got it,” he announced, departing once
more to leave Mr Smith to plant a packet of C4. Mr Woo and Mr Vasiliev now fell
back and we reattached the scientist to the cable and pushed him back out over
the ocean.

“Mother, he has the chess board,” Mr
Smith told the Tupolev, and we watched the scientist whizz back to the Tupolev
and a cluster of arms drag him inside before the cable was cut free.

“Delivered,” the Tupolev confirmed. “FSOs
you are cleared to exit.”

This wasn’t exactly something we needed
prompting about. All five of us had spent the scientist’s journey time hastily
cutting our anchor wires and shoving our Chariots onto the exit ramp, and so we
were all set to go the moment the order was given.

Unfortunately, as is so often the way
with these things, we’d dropped our guard right at the death and a burst of
automatic fire ripped into Mr Woo, throwing him backwards into Mr Smith and
knocking them both off the tail board.

Mr Vasiliev and Mr Jean immediately
dropped and returned fire, but I’d already pushed my Chariot over the side and
jumped out to follow it.

“Leader down! Leader down,” I heard in my
ear, along with a load of other garbled radio traffic as Chariots Three and
Twelve fought to exit the plane. I was away and clear. I’d completed my mission
and was now on to collect a very hefty pay packet. All I had to do was make it
back to the Tupolev and dock.

There was just one thing stopping me from
doing that.

“Leader down!”

My boosters roared to life after falling
a thousand feet and I threw the stick forwards, plunging my Chariot nose-first
towards the ocean.

Mr Smith was barely visible. A tiny black
dot amongst an undulating backdrop of shadows and surf, but he quickly grew in
form as I rocketed past him at four-hundred-miles-per-hour.

He didn’t see me at first. I just cut
past him in a blur, but then slowed and circled until I could get to within ten
feet of him, but even then he still didn’t react. I guess this was a difficult
time for him and he was probably fixated on other things right now, so I
steered as close as I dared and called out to him over the radio to “look left!
Look left!” but he didn’t respond.

I fired off my reserve missiles, emptied
my mounted 9-mm machine gun and even beeped my horn to try to get Mr Smith’s
attention, but still he didn’t look.

Barely five thousand feet below us now
was the water and I knew we’d feel it on our ankles all too soon if I didn’t
fire my boosters, but I couldn’t leave without Mr Smith. I wouldn’t be alive
and still borrowing books if it hadn’t been for him. I’d be just a shadow on a
charred corner of Africa without his warning. I owed it to him to try until the
very last, but if he was determined to see what the Gulf Stream felt like, then
I’m afraid he was on his own and good luck to him.

See, the trick to saving someone where
they’re falling is much like the trick to saving someone when they’re drowning;
you need them to know they’re being saved so that they can co-operate with you.
You can’t just grab them without them knowing it, because chances are they’re
panicking and lashing out, and if they catch you a cropper in their death
throes, then they’re likely to knock you out, spelling problems for you both.
So plucking someone from certain death has to be done delicately.

I continued to call Mr Smith’s name as we
plunged towards the Atlantic but all I got for my troubles were whirling arms
and legs, and cries of unadulterated histrionics.

I took a deep breath, composed myself for
one final go, turned my mic up full volume and spoke to him as calmly as I
could.
 

“Okay Mr Smith, you win, we’ll read
It’s Not About The Bike
next, if you
just look left! Do it now!
Do it now!
Look left.”

At last, this got through to him,
probably because it was such a preposterously trifling concession to win in
such horrifying circumstances, and Mr Smith’s visor finally turned my way. I
beckoned him towards me as the Atlantic did the same and Mr Smith kicked, threw
and shaped himself until I felt his arms wrap around my waist.

I fired my boosters without waiting for
him to get comfy and the kick almost dislodged us both, but we slowed our drop
and circled above the waves at just a few hundred feet until our momentum once
more took us up.

“Mother! Mother! This is Chariot Five.
Sound off beckon. I repeat, sound off beckon, I have FSO leader,” I radioed in,
as we rocketed back towards where we’d just come from.

After a torturous wait to see if they’d
respond, a homing signal finally lit up an LED light on my instrument panel, so
I locked onto it and twisted back the throttle to singe Mr Smith’s ankles.

“Be advised Chariot Five, bogeys at three
hundred miles. You have four minutes to rendezvous. We can’t give you more than
that,” the Tupolev told me.

“We’ll be there,” I confirmed, hoping
against hope that I was right, because I seriously doubted I had enough fuel to
make it back to Petworth.

We shot up into the sky crouching low on
the Chariot to reduce the drag and eventually saw the Tupolev way off in the
distance above us. They’d risen to thirty thousand feet and increased their
speed to four-hundred knots, so docking was going to require some care.

“Mother, we have you. Approaching from
six o’clock. Make ready,” I radioed in, and sure enough a glint from their
undercarriage told me the bomb bay doors were opening.

“Chariot Five, we have you. Nice and
steady now, welcome home.”

“Thank you,” someone muttered in my ear
and I realised to my surprise that it had actually been me.

A vacant bracket descended from the bomb
bay and willed us towards it. I took the Chariot up into position, almost to
within touching distance, but then the machine shuddered beneath me. An
electronic beeping laughed at us as my engines finally announced they were down
to just fumes, and all at once we began sinking again.

“For fuck’s sake!” I cursed, but my
Chariot had spent its load.

I had one chance to get on board, so I
punched my buckle to unclip my harness and gunned what was left of the
throttle, throwing us headfirst into the bracket.

“Jump!” I shouted as we crashed metal
against metal.

We threw ourselves at the black steel and
wrapped whatever we could around anything solid. Arms, legs and chins all clung
onto the outstretch frame as my Chariot tumbled into a spin and fell away
beneath us.

Our colleagues saw what was happening and
immediately retracted the bracket, pulling me and Mr Smith up into the belly of
the Tupolev, as the plane banked to turn north. Sirens and warning beacons
flashed as the bomb bay doors crept closed in our wake and the light thinned to
a narrow streak before eventually it all went black.

“Repressurising,” a metallic voice told
my left ear.

After a few moments I felt something on
my arms and legs but I couldn’t see what it was. I couldn’t understand why I
couldn’t see at first, but then someone tapped the button on the side of my
helmet and my visor tint cleared.

Mr Jean helped unwrap me from the bracket
while Mr Vasiliev and Mr Kovács did what they could to prise Mr Smith away.
Eventually we trusted the floor enough to relinquish our grips, then shook off
our helmets and followed the others forward to the FSO seats.

There were five spares.

“Bogeys closing at eighty miles,” the
captain announced. “It’s going to be close.”

My ears were popping and head swimming as
the Tupolev climbed towards the stars. All at once a proximity claxon filled
the cabin, so we strapped ourselves in and braced ourselves for the worst, but
this day had thrown all it had to throw at us. A sudden confirmation chime eased
all our fears and won a well-earned round of applause from everyone on-board.

“Radar signal scrambled,” the Captain
told us over the intercom. “You can relax now gentlemen, the jets can’t find
us.”

We continued our bearing
north-by-north-west for a few more miles before tipping east to roll the sun
around to the other side of the plane.

Mission accomplished. We were on our way
home.

“Thanks for coming to get me,” Mr Smith
said, stretching a hand across the seat between us.

“No problem,” I replied, taking and
shaking it. “Thanks for Mozambique.”

Mr Smith thought on that and a pensive
expression spread across his face as he looked across at the other empty FSO
seats. “You know, we
should
take care
of each other,” he said. “This job’s dangerous enough as it is without giving
up so easily on each other.”

“You hear me arguing?” I replied.

“I’m serious,” Mr Smith insisted.

And I could see he was. Nobody liked
losing colleagues. It was never nice. Take today for example, we’d lost Mr
Clarke, Mr Passey, Mr Hodgson, Mr Raj and Mr Lee. That’s a lot for one morning.
Some of them I knew. Some of them I didn’t. But they were all good guys. At
least they’d died on operation, and a successful one at that. This wasn’t
always the case. We’d all lost colleagues unnecessarily through either
carelessness, neglect or sadism. Mr Smith himself had been lost, but I’d not
given up on him and gone out on a limb to bring him back. This was unheard of
in a business where the big picture was everything. Unless of course, you were the
guy who’d laid it all on and employed us in the first place, then your own
private quarters couldn’t be packed with enough escape pods and parachutes to
help you live to laugh another day. This morning’s events had shaken something
awake inside Mr Smith. He was a working man. A contract man. A professional. He
took orders, followed orders and obeyed orders. I’d never known him to speak
out of turn in all the times I’d worked with him, but Mr Smith wasn’t a happy
bunny today. And while it was true that he had just fallen twenty-odd-thousand
feet to a certain terrible death only a few minutes earlier, there was still
more to it than just that.

A determination.

Mr Smith had a determination in his
normally automotive eyes.

The only time I’d ever seen anything like
it in him before was when he talked about the books he loved.

And occasionally, the kids he loved too.

“Okay then,” I quietly agreed, shaking
his hand for a second time in as many minutes.

I wasn’t altogether clear as to what we’d
just agreed, but I knew we’d agreed something. I just never knew the scale of
it.

Or just how many lives it would
eventually come to affect.

23.
A LOYALTY FROM BETRAYAL

Oddly, when we got back to Greenland, we found that not everyone was ecstatic
about Mr Smith’s miraculous escape.

Griffin Marvel sent the monorail for us
the moment we touched down. Stupidly, we thought it was to congratulate us on a
job well done so we all climbed in with buoyant smiles and rattled through the
rabbit warren of caves until we reached the Command Centre.

“I ought to have you all killed this
instant!” he screamed at the fifteen of us, prompting us to unbow our heads
when we realised we weren’t getting any medals today. “Every last Goddamn one
of you!”

Captain Ackerman, the Tupolev’s pilot,
asked if there was a problem.

“A problem? A problem you say?” Marvel
almost melted down. “Yes there’s a fucking problem,” he confirmed. “I go to all
this expense, all this risk and all this trouble to pull off one of the most
audacious skyjackings of all time, only to have you cretins jeopardise
everything by launching a fucking search and rescue operation in the middle of
it!”

I saw where Marvel’s fury was focussed
and tightened my screws accordingly. Like the CSMK missile, I can make myself
virtually invisible when need be and began wiggling my toes inside my boots to
drift out of the firing line.

“But Mr Marvel,” the Captain tried, “we
succeeded in every respect. It was a triumph of ingenuity.”

“There was nothing in my ingenuity about
stopping to catch every careless fool who couldn’t keep on his feet!” he
roared, spurring my migration behind and around the back of Mr Vasiliev by a
few more millimetres per second. I’d just got level with his ear-line when Mr
Vasiliev noticed I was very, very slowly leaving the building and began to join
me in my slide south.

“But Your Grace, it just shows what a
spectacularly inspired plan it was then, that we achieved all our aims and
still had time to save our fallen comrade,” the Captain soft-soaped.

“Which comrade? You mean this comrade?”
Marvel shouted, whipping a semi-automatic out from behind his back and shooting
Mr Kovács between the eyes without so much as a second’s thought. “You allowed
the carrier groups’ interceptors to close in on you for almost five precious
minutes to save that fool, did you?”

No one felt the need to point out to
Griffin Marvel that he’d just fired the wrong FSO, least of all Mr Smith, and
we shrank as a group as Marvel’s own personal body-guarding detachment poured
in to the Command Centre from every door to surround us on all sides. Obviously
we’d been required to relinquish our guns before boarding the monorail and
found ourselves staring down the barrel of Marvel’s Omega Unit armed with
nothing more than fluff and regrets.

“Dr Frengers, step away from them if you
will,” Marvel told our jet-hopping scientist who’d been cowering amongst us
with miserable resignation. Dr Frengers seized the lifeline and excused himself
from our party, only too pleased to distance himself from the tar bucket, but
Marvel stopped him before he got more than a stride or two away and held out a
hand.

“If you please, Dr Frengers?”

The Doctor dug into his zipper pocket and
made a present of a little circuit board he’d extracted from the missile.
Marvel looked it over with satisfaction, then shot Dr Frengers through the
glasses to dump him across Mr Kovács.

That was when we knew we were all dead.

I’d been in situations like this before
and what I’ve never understood is why nobody ever does anything about it.
Marvel’s Omega Unit stood around watching Dr Frengers hit the floor and none of
them emptied their guns into Marvel despite there being the distinct
possibility they’d too end up cluttering up the place before this day was out.
Because loyalty’s a one-way street in this game, with often nothing more than
broken promises, trap doors and piranha tanks waiting when it came to pay the
men who’d done the actual grafting.

Of course this wasn’t always the case,
otherwise we’d have to be a right bunch of mugs to keep signing up, but every
now and again we did encounter a rogue psychopath who got his kicks from firing
his own staff. And every time this happened, almost everyone else stood idle. I
include myself in this by the way. It always came as something of a surprise
whenever it happened, I’ll say that in my defence, but more than that, each
time it happened, I somehow managed to convince myself that the person it
happened to had somehow deserved it, because the implications of them not
having deserved it were far too great for me to contemplate. So like a zebra on
the Serengeti who’d survived yet another lion hunt, I would go about my
business and continue nibbling the grass, simply thankful that it was someone
other than me who was being picked over by the pack.
 

“But Mr Marvel,” Captain Ackerman was
pleading, “I implore you to…” but we never got to hear what Captain Ackerman
wanted from Marvel. If it was to be shot in the head before he could put his
side of the story across he got his wish.

“You were flying the plane. You were the
one who turned off the scrambler,” Marvel screamed at Ackerman’s corpse, before
waving his hands in distain and holstering his gun. “Take the rest of them
away. I’ll deal with them later,” he snapped. “And somebody clear up this mess!”

If there’s one rule I’ve tried to live my
life by it’s never get taken away to be dealt with later. If you’re going to
get killed try to get it done and dusted in the first few minutes because no
good ever came of giving disgruntled sadists a few hours to ponder the problem
at their leisure.

I made a grab for the nearest Omega
monkey’s weapon but I was hopelessly outnumbered and a shoulder stock to the
back of the neck put paid to my plans and ensured come the entertainments that
Griffin Marvel took a special interest in the FSO with the eye patch and
disappointing attitude.

I
felt the pain from the blow when I came to. It had sunk in through the back of
my head to settle behind my eyes so I could tell I’d probably been out for
about fifteen minutes or so.

I pushed myself up off the hard wooden
bench and saw that we’d been put in one of the large detention suites. Eleven
faces stared at me from around the room; the other FSOs, our three reservists /
assistants, the Tupolev’s co-pilot and navigator, and the Chariots’ chief
technician, who’d been with us on the Tupolev during the mission. It seemed
like such a waste to be throwing away talent like this, particularly the
technical lads, but Griffin Marvel no longer cared. He’d got what he wanted,
the CSMK circuitry. We were merely the box it had come in.

Mr Smith looked down at me.

“Glad you came?” he asked.

A quick inspection of the cell revealed
no air conditioning panels to slide off, no sewers to crawl through and no bars
to hacksaw. There were no windows, full stop.

There was only one way in and one way
out; a heavy steel door with a flap at the bottom for sliding food through
– if so desired. They didn’t. There was no handle on this side of the
door either, just a flat plate to indicate where the mechanism was.

I wondered if my explosive eye would pack
enough of a punch to blow it open. It contained about 50g of semtex, so I
reasoned it might just. Which made it even more of a shame that I’d worn my GPS
tracking eye then.

We spent a while discussing tactics, what
we’d do when they came for us, and how we’d fight them off, but this was really
just an exercise in keeping our spirits up and we all knew it. Well, all except
for Lieutenant Copeland, the navigator, who fell for every word of it and came
away with a level of confidence in our chances that our own mothers would’ve
found hard to match. He was going to have the hardest of falls.

I prepared myself to meet my maker by
picking over the bones of my life to see which particular mistakes had brought
me here, while Mr Smith spent the time talking about his kids. It was clear he
really loved them, four-year-old Ben and seven-year-old Kirsty, just as it
became clear they were both sleeping beneath headstones. I finally figured this
out when I realised that neither of them had aged in all the time I’d known
him. It also explained his workaholic attitude to Affiliation.

“You didn’t kill them, did you?” I
tentatively asked, wondering if this was how he’d come to be in prison in the
first place and how he’d come to the attention of The Agency.

“No,” he told me, “but I killed the men
who did.”

After another four hours, the metal door
finally cracked open and we braced ourselves for the worst. But to my
continuing surprise our time had still not come. Rather, another prisoner was
pushed in to join us. I recognised him immediately and wondered if my problems
could get any worse.

It was Rip Dunbar.

“Hhuuuurgh!” Rip grunted, as he was
dumped on the cold hard tiles. His body was bloodied and his long hair greasy.
“You fucking
sonsabitches
! Go fuck
your mothers, you
mothers
!” he yelled
at the guards, throwing himself at the door as it closed behind him. He
collided with locked steel and pounded it with his tree-trunk arms for the next
thirty seconds or so until we all got the general idea, then he flexed his
pecks and turned his rippling intelligence on us.

“The same goes for all you
mothers
. Who wants a piece of me?”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but
we’re prisoners too,” Mr Smith said, tapping the metaphorical blackboard.

Dunbar scowled at Mr Smith and told him
to “Stay out of my way,” before dumping himself off to one side to bench squat
the evening away.

After thirty minutes of the noisiest
exercise I’ve ever heard, Dunbar’s top clung to him as if he’d won a Miss Wet
T-shirt competition. The rest of us were faring little better with rivers of
tears clogging our eyes in light of the stench now filling the cell.

Mr Vasiliev, who was the nearest to
Dunbar, was the first to crack and pleaded with him to lay off for the love of
God, but if anything Dunbar just punished his body even harder, all appeals
falling on deaf ears.

That was until he laid eyes on me.

“You!”

“Oh crap.”

Dunbar flew across the cell and chased me
around in circles, over benches and scattering bodies until he was finally able
to trap me in a corner. Ten fat, sweaty fingers wrapped themselves around my
throat and a second later my back hit the wall.

“We’ve got a score to settle,” he
growled, his face contorted in a mass of rage and unrequited man-love.

“What score?” I gasped.

“Jabulani, you killed him,” Dunbar
reminded me. “He was my friend.”

“Well so what? You killed plenty of mine
that day too,” I coughed, doing all I could to tear his fingers from my
windpipe. “You don’t hear me complaining about that though, do you?”

“Brother, your friends were scum,” Dunbar
sympathised.

“Yeah, and we’re also all around you,
Einstein
,” Mr Smith pointed out, as the
rest of the cell rose to their feet and surrounded the SEO gorilla.

Dunbar lunged back to chop down Mr Smith
with his leg, but Mr Smith had foreseen this and it was Lieutenant Copeland who
copped a solar plexus full of combat boot instead. But Dunbar wasn’t done; he
twisted and kicked the unfortunate Lieutenant this way and that before booting
him into touch against the far wall and swinging me around to use as a human
shield.

“Get back, all of you, I mean it, I’ll
break his neck you
mothers
!”

“Take a pill,
punchy
,” Mr Smith suggested. “Are you so short of people to fight
that you can’t wait to go WWWF on everyone in here when our enemies are out
there?” Mr Smith pointed at the steel door, staying Dunbar’s hand. “We’re all
under sentence of death, so settling scores and comparing cocks with you is the
least of our concerns.”

“You’re under sentence of death?”

“Yeah, even him,” Mr Smith confirmed,
pointing at me.

“Why?”

“For disobeying orders,” Mr Smith
simplified.

Dunbar’s arm continued to flex around my
neck as this information rattled around between his ears before his grip
finally eased. “Couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy,” he retorted, hurling
me to the floor and taking my place on the bench.

I rolled over, rubbing my neck and
chewing my lip as I picked myself up, and found a space between Mr Vasiliev and
our Tech Chief. All the time Dunbar glared at me with menace dressing his face.

“What happened to your eye?” he snarled.
“Did I do that?”

I told him he had, figuring he might
deduct it from the bill if I looked miserable enough about it, and sure enough
Dunbar grinned at the thought.

“Good,” he grunted.

“That’s a point, what have you got in
today?” Mr Smith asked me.

“Nothing useful.”

“Nothing we can use?”

“I would have mentioned it before if I
had,” I told him.

“What’s he talking about?” Dunbar asked.