The Protector (4 page)

Mallory placed the butt of the weapon against his shoulder as the noise stopped. When it started again Mallory leaned forward onto one knee, both of his eyes open and looking down the length of the rifle, the pad of his index finger resting lightly on the trigger.

Something came into view below the end of the barrel and he dropped the front sight enough to see the shadowy outline of a goat. The animal continued out of the alley, oblivious to Mallory’s presence, and ambled towards the hut where it stopped in the entrance.

Mallory and the goat stared at each other as if each of them was waiting to see who would make the first move. Mallory exhaled slowly in relief and as he lowered the rifle the goat turned on its hooves and trotted away, flustered that its planned rest in the cover of the shed had been thwarted.

Mallory felt suddenly exhausted by yet another shot of adrenalin and he realised that his hands were shaking. The fear of being stuck in a place where anyone who saw him would kill him or alert others who could was getting to him.The million dollars and the comforts it could buy gave him no pleasure at that moment and he wished the damned Tornado pilot had not been shot down.

He leaned back as Mac’s last words in the chopper popped into his head - something about a rendezvous with death - and wondered why the man had brought it up at such a moment.

Mallory closed his eyes, let his ears monitor the outside and waited in silence as darkness fell. Eventually he could hardly see the spot where the goat had first appeared.

He crept outside quietly, carrying the box, leaving the empty magazines and the sandbag behind. There were no street lights and only a handful of the houses had lights inside, faint orangey-yellow glows from kerosene lamps. The southern sky was a dull orange, silhouetting the rooftops as if a large fire was burning, but it could also have been the lights of the US military base around Baghdad airport. Mallory considered walking in that direction. It was not more than thirty kilometres away and he could cover the ground by the morning. But that would mean heading through the middle of Fallujah - or going around its perimeter, since he was near the northern edge of the town. Either way, it was not a good idea. He could end up a victim of either side.

Mallory looped the line attached to the box over his head, got to his feet and headed across the waste ground, keeping his distance from the dark, silent, dried-mud dwellings.

His foot throbbed but Mallory ignored it. This was the final phase of his operation, with luck, and he hoped sincerely that the next time he fell asleep would be in the safety of his camp. His basic plan was to make his way out of the town and find a deserted patch of ground large enough for a helicopter to land on and where he could establish communications and activate his beacon. From what he could remember of the terrain, a mile or so should see him well north of the town and in farmland. The moon had not yet shown itself and there was a slight breeze.The temperature had dropped, making conditions as good as he could expect, for which he was thankful. If he needed to run he would have to dump the money but that was part of the deal he had made with himself.

Ten minutes later, moving carefully and then only after frequent pauses to look and listen, Mallory came to a low wall and went to ground as much to rest as to check the route ahead. An inspection over the wall revealed that he was at the boundary of a cemetery. It was difficult to tell how large it was: the awkward, tilted headstones and ragged flags moving gently on poles filled the view.

Mallory lifted the box over the wall and crouched on the other side. The box was a complete pain, not just its weight and awkwardness but the metallic noise it made every time it touched something solid, a sound that carried a long way on the night air.

The cemetery seemed an ideal place to cross as the odds on meeting anyone there at such a late hour were slim. However, there was a risk of being silhouetted due to the lack of background and tall structures: the majority of the graves were bordered by low concrete rectangular frames, and he would have to keep low.

Mallory set off among the graves at a crouch but after several metres he lost his footing and the box scraped loudly against a gravestone. He lay flat and took a moment to listen, worried not only that he had been heard but also that the accident had every chance of being repeated. The graves were close together and it was so dark that stumbling as he walked in such an awkward way was unavoidable.

Then Mallory had a thought. The cemetery could be the ideal location to hide his booty. He had originally planned to bury the box somewhere near his pick-up point simply because if it was quiet enough to serve that purpose it would also be an ideal spot to dig a hole. But the bigger problem at the moment was getting to that location undetected.

He put down the box and sat on the edge of a grave to give the matter some serious thought. Burying the money inside a grave might work - but then, there was a chance that it could be visited in the near future and the freshly turned earth would attract suspicion. Mallory looked down at the narrow path he had been following between the graves and it struck him as actually a highly unlikely place to dig a new grave. Therefore it just might be the perfect place to bury something so that it would not be discovered.

Mallory pushed a finger into the earth. It wasn’t too firm. He placed the ammunition box on a grave, set his rifle against it, removed his penknife from its pouch, opened it and shoved the blade into the soil. It sank in easily. He carved out a rectangle slightly larger than the box and began to scrape away the topsoil, placing it in a pile to one side.

Mallory was soon frustrated with the small amount of earth he was shifting and he searched around for a better digging implement. A can with a couple of plastic flowers in it was resting on a nearby headstone. He put the flowers to one side and used the tin as a shovel. Several minutes later he’d dug a substantial hole. He compared its depth with the height of the box. Ideally the top needed to be at least a foot below the surface. After a pause to look around and listen he pressed on.

A minute later Mallory had dug a considerably deeper hole, although now stones began to obstruct his efforts. He discarded the can and pulled the stones out by hand, decided he’d gone deep enough, picked up the box and lowered it inside. It lay at a slant, its highest point nine inches from the top, which Mallory reckoned was good enough. He dragged the loose soil back into the hole with his hands.When he had created a slight mound he got to his feet and, stamping as hard as he dared, used his weight to level it off. Then he spread the remaining soil around, depositing the stones further away.

As a final touch he shuffled up and down the path, trying to obscure any traces of his efforts on the surface for several metres in both directions. It was difficult to tell in the darkness how successful this operation had been and he would never know until the day he came back to retrieve the box. And God only knew when - or if - that day would come.

Mallory put the plastic flowers back in the can, placed it back on the headstone, wiped his hands on his thighs and removed his GPS from its pouch on his belt. As he turned it on he covered the small glowing screen and scanned around while he waited for the device to acquire the local satellites. A screen message eventually indicated this had been achieved and was followed by a display showing his position in latitude and longitude. He hit the ‘man overboard’ button and went through the menu to select the ‘save’ option. It asked him to provide a name and he paused to consider the request. He wanted something memorable but not obvious to anyone who might come across it and as he considered several possible names the word
rendezvous
popped into his head. He counted the letters on his fingers, ten being the maximum number of characters he could use, and since the word fitted perfectly he punched them in and saved it to the memory chip before turning off the instrument. He placed it back in its pouch, picked up his weapon and, after a final check around, headed between the graves towards the northern boundary wall, feeling relieved at having rid himself of his main burden.

Mallory saw a tarmac road on the other side of some waste ground beyond the low wall that marked the northern edge of the cemetery and took a moment to watch and listen. The only sounds were distant
booms
from the direction of Baghdad accompanied by flashes of light but ahead was total blackness. He climbed over the wall and moved down a slight incline and onto the waste ground, looking left and right as he dodged across the narrow road before picking up speed on reaching the other side. He carried on without slowing down and covered several hundred metres before he stopped and lay down near what appeared to be a motorway running across his way ahead. He remembered a major artery north of the town, a road that ran from Baghdad to the Jordanian border, and then the sound of a distant vehicle reached his ears and he looked east to see a pair of flickering headlights in the distance.

Mallory’s first thought was that it could be a coalition vehicle - but that was not necessarily good news. This was a war zone, at night, and alert and often nervous fingers were constantly poised on triggers, their owners ready to shoot at anything remotely suspicious. A lone figure in the darkness might invite an attack before any recognition was attempted. On the other hand, it would be unusual for a military vehicle to travel alone in a hostile environment and Mallory elected to remain where he was, hugging the ground until it passed.

The dark shape behind the bright headlights gradually took on a form that was distinctly civilian and Mallory watched it as it drove on by and out of sight.

The motorway had two lanes either side of a meridian flanked by crash barriers and it would take Mallory a few seconds to cross. A thought struck him that the road might be watched. Still, the car had driven along unmolested. The other side of the road was in complete darkness and this was, he hoped, the final obstacle. Luck had remained with him so far and he needed it to stick around a little longer.

Mallory got to his feet, moved forward at a crouch and raised his injured foot over the first of the knee-high crash barriers. Pain shot through him as the edge of the tarmac dug into his wound but he did not falter. It then suddenly occurred to him that if troops were watching they would have night-vision aids and the AK47 with its uniquely curved magazine was unlike any weapon carried by coalition forces. They might allow a car to pass but a man with a gun would be an irresistible target. He held the weapon close to his body to remove it from his silhouette, ran to the meridian, climbed the double set of barriers, and hurried across the final stretch of tarmac, over the last barrier and down a sandy bank. Mallory did not slow and ran across a stretch of open ground, still feeling exposed and vulnerable, towards what looked like an earthwork that in the darkness appeared to be further away than it actually was. He was soon upon it, scrambling up a short incline where he dropped over the other side and found himself in a dry ditch. He moved along the earthwork for several metres before crawling back up and looking in the direction he had come from to see if he had been pursued: anyone following would be silhouetted by the glowing horizon beyond Fallujah. But there was no sign of movement and he slid down to the bottom of the ditch, scrambled up the other side and ran on across another flat open space.

A black scar appeared in front of him that did not quite look like a road and as he drew closer it became a railway line that he had forgotten about. Mallory crossed the rails and pressed on into the darkness, his breathing becoming laboured, his dry mouth aching, his foot throbbing wildly. But the promise of freedom pushed him on, with every step making the prospect more of a reality.

Mallory passed through a line of bushes and found himself on the edge of what appeared to be an open area. He dropped to his knees beside a bush, utterly exhausted, and gulped in air through his sandpaper mouth. He could not remember ever being as exhausted: his only truly comparable experience had been during his commando course when he had run with a thirty-foot telegraph pole from Woodbury Common to the Lympstone camp, a six-mile race, sixty men, six poles, ten men on each.With two miles to go and despite his pole being down to just four men they were in the lead by a couple of hundred metres. But then, with under a mile to go, the man beside him dropped out, unable to keep up the pace and Mallory was left with the end of the pole to carry on his own. He began to see stars, almost collapsing under the physical stress and might have done so had he not seen the tops of the rugby posts that were the finishing line beyond some hedgerows a few hundred metres ahead. Those days seemed as far away as his early childhood at that moment.

Mallory decided the location would do and he pulled his SARBE from its pouch, took hold of a bright-orange cord on its side and pulled it, releasing a pin that activated the device. There was no sound and the only indication that the beacon was transmitting was a small flashing LED light.The transmitted signal would include his GPS position as well as his pre-programmed identity. He laid the Kalashnikov on the ground beside him and waited for the voice of the rescue crew informing him that his signal had been received and that they were on their way.

Mallory was supremely confident that he would be picked up some time that night. If there was one thing he had experience of it was the Air Sea Rescue teams. As long as his SARBE was working, and they rarely failed, he was as good as home. Most passing aircraft, or an AWACS if one was in the area, which was likely, would be able to pick up the signal. The information would be passed on to the relevant operations room and the rescue mission would be set in motion.

An hour passed before the voice of a pilot brought Mallory’s SARBE to life. He almost jumped when he heard it. He pressed the ‘send’ button and was horrified when he could not talk. His mouth, without a trace of saliva, could not form an intelligible word. It took what seemed an age before the pilot finally understood and informed him that they would be with him in approximately ten minutes.