Aggressor (12 page)

Ulm searched for a way out of the minefield. ‘Look, let's drop the formalities,' he said, extending his hand. ‘It's Elliot.'

Shabanov shook it. ‘Roman Makhmadzhanovich,' he said.

Ulm flinched.

‘Roman is enough,' the Russian said. ‘Makhmadzhanovich was my father's name. It means son of Mohammed. The last trace of my ancestry.'

They started back towards the airliner. ‘I wanted to extend the same courtesy when you were with us at Ryazan,' Shabanov began. ‘But you saw how it was there. There were many people looking over my shoulder. This protocol is too adventurous for some of my countrymen.'

The Lenin Komsomol Higher Airborne Command School was still vivid in Ulm's mind. Nor had he shed the ignominy of shooting the wrong target at the nearby training ground. Shabanov had shown no danger of shooting women or children during his stay so far at Kirtland. From the minibus, Ulm had even seen Shabanov shepherd an elderly woman to the aircraft's escape chute.

Shabanov gazed at the 727 fuselage. ‘Our spetsialnoye naznacheniye - our Spetsnaz special purpose forces - could not have done this.' He pointed at the blackened doors of the aircraft.

Ulm suddenly pictured the life-sized cut-out of woman and child. Was Shabanov just saying that to make him feel better? The Russian was as much a diplomat as he was a soldier.

There was a shout from the minibus, Ulm's mobile communications wagon. The 1725th's intelligence officer, Captain Charlie Doyle, was beckoning them from the open door. Ulm sprinted over, followed closely by Shabanov.

‘It's USSOCOM, sir. General McDonald's about to come on the line. Wants to talk to you personally.'

Ulm hid his surprise and took the receiver. General James L. McDonald was Commander-in-Chief of US Special Operations Command. Serious shit.

He gave Doyle a signal to distract Shabanov, get him away from the phone. He was still wondering what the general wanted with him, when the man himself came through via the satellite communications link.

Two minutes later Ulm replaced the phone on the hook.

Doyle left Shabanov to watch the sun set over the New Mexico scrub. He found his boss in a state of visible excitement.

‘From that look on your face, I'd say something pretty big must be going down.'

‘You could just be right, Charlie. I've got to get my ass up to Washington as if my life depended on it. A C-21's coming into Kirtland in an hour and I'm on it.

‘A Learjet?' Doyle could not contain his surprise. ‘The 1725th must be going up in the world. What happened to that shitbox Beech they used to send? Someone must want to talk bad. So things are getting busy around here at last.' He jabbed a finger at Shabanov. ‘What do I do with him while you're gone?'

‘That's the weirdest thing,' Ulm said. ‘The general told me he's coming along for the ride. He gets dropped at the Soviet Embassy and I go on to-'

‘Where?'

‘I don't know. I guess I'm just going to have to find out when I get there.'

The wind was up and it was raining heavily when Girling swung his Alfa Romeo into the drive of Rigden Court. The gravel scrunched under the tyres. It was a sound he associated with a world in which he had never felt particularly at ease.

His parents' house loomed tall in the moving beams of the headlights. He could not understand why his father should want to have retired to a place of such mammoth pretension. His mother, he knew, would have been happy with a small cottage somewhere in Dorset. But his father's decree was absolute and his mother accepted it meekly.

Girling turned off the ignition and listened to the rain drumming on the roof. He pulled up his collar and ran across the last few yards of open ground to the front door. Once inside, the flagstones in the hall rang out with the sound of his footsteps.

He rounded the corner to find his father fixing himself a gin from the large drinks cupboard beneath the stairs. He looked up and said hello as if Girling had just come in from a walk around the garden.

‘Your mother's putting the child to bed. Help yourself, won't you.'

His father walked back into the drawing-room, leaving Girling to hang his jacket by the other water-proofs in the hall.

His mother stopped reading to Alia when she heard Girling's footsteps at the top of the stairs. She appeared outside the door and greeted him with a fleeting kiss. He had never been so struck by his mother's fragility. Her skin looked almost translucent.

‘She's sleepy,' his mother said. ‘But insisted on staying awake. I'll leave you to chat to her.'

It was a large room for a small child, but his mother had done her best to make it warm and cosy.

Alia's face peeked out from the sheets. Her eyelids flickered and she smiled drowsily when she saw him.

He bent down and kissed her on the forehead.

‘When am I going home?' she asked.

He brushed a lock of hair from her eyes. ‘Soon, sweetheart.'

‘What's the matter, Daddy?'

‘Nothing. Everything's fine,' he said.

‘Then why can't I come home now?'

‘Because...' His fingers scurried up the blanket like a spider and tickled her under the chin. She giggled, but he could tell it was simply to please him.

‘Don't you like it here?'

‘Oh, yes,' she replied. ‘Except for all the walks. Grandpa loves walks. Why doesn't he use a car like everybody else?'

They both laughed.

They talked a little about what she had been doing since she arrived. She enjoyed feeding carrots and apples to the horses at the end of the garden and she had made friends with some of the children who lived in the village. As she spoke, her eyelids would droop, then snap open in her determination to keep him there for as long as possible.

Finally she turned onto her side, her face away from him, and he watched over her until he thought she was asleep.

He turned off the light, kissed her on the top of the head and tiptoed to the door.

‘Please get better, Daddy.'

The words, barely audible, made him stop before he reached the door. He turned to answer, but the tempo of her breathing told him she had been talking in her sleep.

His parents were seated at the dinner table when he came downstairs.

As they ate, the chink of cutlery was only interrupted occasionally by conversation. It was a familiar pattern. His mother would enquire awkwardly about the women in his life; his father would make observations about the sorry state of the world. The two would be quite separate. It was at such times that he wondered how they had stayed together.

‘I'd like you to look after Alia a little longer,' Girling announced suddenly.

‘I thought you were taking her back with you tomorrow morning,' his father said.

‘Things have changed, Pa. It's difficult right now. I'm heavily involved in this hijacking business.'

‘You're back on current affairs?' his father exclaimed. ‘Why, that's the best news I've heard in years, Tom. I never could understand why you buried yourself in all that science and technology nonsense. I always said it was kids' stuff.'

His mother took a sip of water. She looked as if she were going to faint. ‘I hope you won't be going back out there, dear. We were horrified to see what happened to all those poor people on the television the other night.'

‘I'm not going anywhere,' he said. ‘I'm only doing this because my editor needs some extra help right now.' Girling turned to his father. ‘Then I'll be going back to the kids' stuff.'

His father put down his knife and fork and stared at him angrily from across the table. ‘You should be making your way back up the ladder. It's time you were on a proper newspaper again.'

‘I've told you before, Pa. I'm quite happy doing what I'm doing. For the moment.'

‘Happy? You wrote damned well when you were on
The Times
. You got right under the skin of the Middle East. Everybody said so. We were so proud of you.'

His mother tried to change the subject. ‘Why can't you take Alia home with you, Tom? You know we love having her here, but she's been missing you terribly.'

‘I think she's safer here with you right now.'

‘You're not in any kind of trouble are you?' she asked.

He smiled. ‘No, Ma.'

She wasn't convinced. ‘It's Mona, isn't it?'

Girling said nothing. He looked straight ahead at one of the family portraits on the wall. ‘You have to forget, Tom,' she whispered. There were tears in her eyes.

‘I can't,' he said simply.

‘Of course you can,' his father said. ‘It's all in the mind.'

‘I'm only too well aware of that, Pa.'

‘Then discipline yourself, laddie.'

Girling felt his skin prickle. He looked his father straight in the eye. ‘I can't forgive them for what they did, Pa. Could you?'

His father shook his head. ‘It's a savage part of the world. Always was, always will be. It was a risk you took when you decided to live there.'

Girling knew that this was as close as his father came to asking why his only son had not married an English rose.

‘You've got to forge a new life for yourself,' his father said. ‘If only for the girl's sake.'

He saw his mother nodding hopefully.

Girling made his excuses shortly after dinner. He pretended that he was needed in the office early the following morning. It was better that he made the journey back to London that night.

Before he left he crept up to Alia's room. He replaced some of the blankets that had fallen off the bed, making sure that he did not wake her when he tucked them in.

It began with the watch.

The colonel stared at it intently. It showed a little after midnight. Through the silence he could hear the second hand moving across the face of the dial.

A cicada began to sing its lone hymn to Christmas week. He wondered how it was that this cicada sounded the same as the ones back home, thousands of miles away. And then he thought of his wife and kids, tucked up in their beds; dreaming, perhaps, of Peace and Goodwill Towards Men.

His ears strained beyond the noise of the tree cricket for a new sound, the aircraft sound, his signal, but he heard nothing, except for the distant song of a late-night reveller, wandering home after an early shot of the Christmas spirit. There would be no more parties in this neck of the woods that year; not if he and his countrymen had anything to do with it.

The heat was stifling. Insects stung his flesh as he lay well down in the long grass. He did not scratch because he did not want anything to interrupt the other noises of the night. Noises that had legitimate cause to be there.

Where was the aircraft? It was already two minutes late. Hell of a laid-back way to start a war.

The noise started as a distant drone. At first, he thought it was another tropical insect, lumbering through the air above him. But he recognized the pitch of the Allisons and roused himself into action.

As the colonel stood, so did the others, rising up like sleepwalkers from makeshift beds in the long grass. The black cream on their faces made them almost invisible.

The platoon stole across the edge of Torrijos Inter-national Airport, each of the sixteen men seeking out the target, he had been assigned in the briefing.

The colonel saw his aircraft loom out of the darkness. He froze, scouting the gloom with his portable thermal imager for guards. He couldn't see any. The PDF had to be asleep, he thought, or drunk.

The officer slid under the wing of the Dassault Falcon and paused, listening intently. He heard nothing but the steadily increasing drone of the AC-130 Spectre.

The aircraft on the ground was the personal trans-port of the country's self-styled ‘Maximum Leader'. They had seen precisely three troops of Panama's Defense Forces since their silent vigil began.

It had been a peach so far.

The colonel spared a thought for the small task force of SEALs to the west who had been briefed to destroy the private jet kept on permanent alert at Paitilla Airport, a stone's throw from the General's HQ, the Commandancia. The aircraft here was Noriega's back-up. Washington wanted to be sure that, for the General, there really was no escape.

He hoped the Navy was having it as easy.

He clipped the Selectable Strike Beacon, the SSB - a small device hardly bigger than his car stereo system - to the wing of the Falcon, switched it on and stole back through the night to the scene of their watch.

The AC-130 was close now. He imagined the crew's excitement the moment the signal from the beacon lit up the display on the instrument panel in the flight deck. The co-ordinates would be fed into the targeting computer, the guns double-checked, before they split the peace of the night above Panama City.

He did a head-count. His sixteen men were accounted for. Time to be leaving.

His deputy nudged him and pointed. Across the airfield there was movement. He raised the imager to his face and saw the column of troops moving forward across the concrete.

‘PDF,' his deputy whispered, and smiled, his white teeth stark against the night. They would walk right into it.

The column was almost upon the cluster of private aircraft now primed with their SSBs. Above them, the drone of the AC-130 rose to a crescendo.

The cranked edge to the helmets of the men in the lead contingent made him look again. The troops were amongst the aircraft now, prowling beneath them, weaving through undercarriages, checking for... what? They couldn't be PDF, because they, too, appeared to be searching... for guards. He took another look at that helmet and felt his blood run cold, because he knew then that this was a US Army detachment in the wrong place at the wrong time.

He opened his mouth to shout the warning a second before the first aircraft blew up.

The 105mm shells rained down from the AC-130, patrolling unseen in a tight circle two thousand feet above them. The colonel ran across the grass and grabbed the radio operator. He pointed to the carnage, then to the sky, shouting his order above the din of explosions. The operator understood, frantically working every frequency to raise the crew of the Spectre, but without success.