An Enemy Within (4 page)

Smiling at his reflection, he felt pleased with himself. He hadn’t expected such a successful start to his grand plan. The intelligence for the raid on the insurgents’ camp had been relatively easy to collate and pass on to the major. The Predator UAV had hovered undetected, its spotter camera recording the encampment’s activities in fine detail. The joyous outcome was he’d bagged himself a hero in double-quick time. If he could pull off this trick, he was confident his career would be fast-tracked further. He’d already heard from the White House that his efforts would not go unrewarded if the endgame was judged a success.

Focussing on the contents of the bookcase, he ran his eye along the titles of a neatly-stacked row of hard-backs, mainly classics. He reached out for one, Tom Paine’s
Rights of Man
, a work he had never read.

The slim volume, light in his hands, was the same as all the other books on the shelf, a dummy. Its gold-coloured inner edging had been lined to look like pages, but was merely a vacuous piece of cheap plastic designed purely for show.

3

Alexandra Stead pulled her international travelling bag from under the bed and unlocked the clasp.

It was a present from her parents five years ago – her twenty-fifth birthday. But it had lain unused for months and dust billowed into the air causing her to sneeze. She reached for a handkerchief already damp with tears. Hesitant, she began to pack, her sniffs drowned by the cacophony of honking yellow cabs in the Manhattan street below her apartment.

Should she go to Iraq? She knew she must. What little work she’d taken on these past weeks hardly paid the bills. And with another large mortgage payment to make soon, her overdraft was in danger of meltdown. But the concept still filled her with dread.

This guy, Kowolski, wanted only one photographer to cover the Donald Rumsfeld trip to Basra and Baghdad, a top freelance like her who could, as he put it, ‘operate under pressure’. So she should have felt flattered to be chosen.

‘Your pictures will be syndicated across America – just think of that,’ Kowolski said when booking her on the high-praise recommendation of a magazine editor he knew.

In truth, Alex’s war pictures had gained coast-to-coast coverage many times, so accepting Kowolski’s offer was a case of needs be; money first, fame later. Besides, although the US Defense Secretary was flying into a war zone, the job itself would be straightforward enough. And that was just about as much as she could cope with right now.

Alex had never felt so low. In the months since the end of an affair with a married man, she’d been full of self-recrimination and it had dragged her down as surely as a dead-weight on a
body in a river. Things might have been a little easier had there been someone else to blame. But there was only herself.

Pity had turned to loathing, frustration to anger. A whole mix of feelings magnified to manic proportions, usually by the first glass of wine from the second bottle she was drinking most nights. Taking the best part of the day to try and figure out why she felt so down, the cycle would begin again each evening. She knew it had to stop – but it was getting harder. The sides of a pit seemed all the more slippery when you dug it yourself.

Her sleep was being disrupted with frightening regularity, too. The disturbing legacy of her last job abroad in Afghanistan left her with decisions she couldn’t find the courage to face.

Letting out a deep, shuddering, sigh, she opened a drawer, took out a couple of shirts and folded them neatly into the bag. She picked up the black beret she’d worn on that fateful day in Kandahar, which brought memories flooding back. She’d been one of the first photographers to land in the province after the defeat of the Taliban. Even the most liberated media outlets had baulked at some of her pictures. To see how the Afghan tribal fighters had treated their Taliban enemy was triple X-rated stuff.

It also raised the question of what she was trying to achieve by recording such hardcore scenes. Her answer always used to be the same; to portray the truth – however horrific. Her passionate, obsessive fight against war seemed to know no bounds.

Her best friend once asked her, ‘Why do you do it, Alex? Being so anti-war and all?’

‘Everyone’s got a voice. Some don’t use it. I just hope my work shouts a lot louder,’ she said.

But Alex had come to realise the cost of such high principle was now proving emotionally expensive. Doubts about her future as a war photographer surfaced uppermost in her mind.

Once, it had seemed so simple. Inspired by the countless books of iconic photographs on her bookshelf, the transition from staffer on a New York glossy to freelance war
photographer proved seamless. She packed her bags – and off she went. No thought of danger, her belief in the pictures she produced and the shows she got outweighed everything else. Her own personal crusade.

Now, she faced the ultimate impasse that many of her battle-hardened colleagues had warned about: the loss of nerve. A contributory factor lay in that very honesty she aimed to portray. Writers, she knew, often stretched the truth and got away with it. Alex wondered if stretching the acceptability of the truth had reached snapping point with the magazines and newspapers she worked for.

She knew she must come to the junction before much longer: to turn left or right?

As her mind wandered, she found herself gripping the beret tightly and when she looked down, her hands were shaking.

Flavours of her bad dream flashed by like a familiar taste. Shivering, she let the beret drop to the floor. Memory rampant, it overruled her attempts to shut them out. She was drowning in a sea of corpses, frantic for air. Pinned down by grotesque lifeless arms and legs, the same suffocating scenario replayed – a bloodied arm splayed across her throat, heavy and choking. Relief only ever came at the last minute – a sudden petrified consciousness that always left her drained, sitting up in bed, bathed in sweat and gasping for breath.

Her phone rang. She went into the living room, quickly trying to compose herself. Answering it, she tried to sound as bright as possible. But the voice of her ex-lover, Richard Northwood, destroyed her calm in an instant.

‘Richard,’ she croaked. ‘I thought we agreed we wouldn’t…’

‘We did, so I’m sorry for the call. This is business,’ he said without trace of emotion. ‘I hear you’re off to Iraq with Mr Rumsfeld. There’s something you could do for me and the department – for old time’s sake.’

A growing sense of shock consumed her. Her hand reached for the top button of her shirt. He was asking her to do
what?
Twisting the button hard, it soon fell off in her trembling fingers.

‘I don’t believe it – you’re asking me to spy for the CIA?’

‘We prefer to call it intelligence gathering, Alex. The situation out there is fast-changing. It’s only weeks since we dropped the first bomb and the rats and mice have scurried off to their little hidey holes. We need to know where they are – and when they’re likely to come out to play.’

‘But you’ve got your agents out there?’

‘Of course. We’ve got a fully-staffed bureau in Baghdad reporting to me here at Langley.’

‘So you’ve been promoted? Well, congratulations.’ Then, through clenched teeth, ‘I’m sure your wife will be very pleased – you always said she wanted you to go far.’

Although Alex had never met his wife, it was clear she was the driving force behind his ambition. Pregnant with their third child, she’d turned him off. Alex turned him on, he’d said. Her off-beat way, such an opposite to his conventional lifestyle, had enthralled him. And, like a fool, she’d fallen for all of it.

He ignored the jibe. ‘Listen, Alex, you know damn well journalists can find themselves picking up bits and pieces – sometimes it’s all we need to complete the jigsaw.’

Alex desperately wanted to ask him if he knew how much heartbreak he’d caused her, tell him how much she’d wanted to hear his voice again. She’d rehearsed the scenario a hundred times since they’d split. But not like this. The words just wouldn’t come.

‘I… I don’t know,’ she said, lying to him that there was somebody at the door, and hanging up.

Traipsing over to the seat near the window, she gazed up into a cool grey sky. Confusion reigned. She’d spent the last several months hoping he’d call. Now he had, and she hated him – and for what he’d asked. But if he’d turned up at her door and told her he still wanted her, would she have loved him for it?

Winner or loser? Which side of that fine divide was she on?

Angry now, she flung a few more things in her bag hoping Iraq could straighten her out, get her back on track.

All the time, fearing it wouldn’t.

*  *  *

Kowolski noted the change in the drone of the engines of the MC-130 Combat Talon aircraft, guessed they were almost in Basra.

He shifted, mightily relieved the flight from Kuwait was a relatively short one. How the troops managed for hours in these claustrophobic double-facing rows of canvas-webbed seats was anybody’s guess. He supposed comfort never figured on the agenda for their normal occupants, Special Operations Forces. Some of them were acting as minders now, dressed in black and sitting silently, knee to knee, hardly moving.

He wondered how their prize cargo was faring. This was a million miles away from a soft office chair in Washington. He glanced along the row. Donald Rumsfeld, co-architect of the invasion, sat at the front end, gesticulating and talking loudly to be heard above the deep resounding roar of the four turbo props. His aides hung on every word.

Kowolski thought the man sitting opposite the Secretary must be feeling pretty pleased, too. Flying a senior politician into the battle zone only six weeks after the first strike was quite an accomplishment for Lt General David McKiernan, commander of the allied ground-force invasion.

He tried to catch the eye of the woman opposite, Alex Stead. Just my type, he said to himself. Just his type? If he were honest with himself, they were all his type.

Slim, Kowolski saw a flash of liveliness about her. Athletic, she looked more springbok than gazelle. Okay, she didn’t have model looks, and her fair hair, pulled back and half-hidden under a black beret, was too short for him and quite plain. With her khaki combat trousers and boots, he thought she could almost pass for one of their special-ops minders. But there was
something about her eyes, a penetrating grey-green, the sort a man noticed.

He stretched.
Damn seats
. Leaning his squat frame as far forward as he dared, their knees touched.

‘In or out?’

‘Pardon me?’ she asked, feigning innocence, but drawing back.
Damn
, he thought. Did I leer just then? ‘Your legs, my knees,’ he whispered.

‘I usually keep my legs closed,’ she clipped, those eyes flashing.

He felt the cold shoulder with a vengeance. For the next few minutes he could tell she was pretending to be interested in a geeky White House guy sitting next to her who, he overheard saying, built model aeroplanes.
Model aeroplanes, for Christ’s sake!

The captain’s voice over the tannoy told them they would be landing at Basra in five minutes. It was a calm, matter-of-fact, drawl of a Texan. Yet it made Kowolski immediately stiffen.

He knew the captain and his augmented crew – co-pilot, two navigators, two flight engineers and two loadsmen – would now be on full alert. The thought of it made him feel quite ill.

Despite its high-tech missile and radar warning systems, this lumbering giant was at its most susceptible when coming in to land at a 150 knots. That was why he felt beads of sweat suddenly break out on his forehead, caught himself swallowing hard, gripping his seat until his knuckles turned white.

He visualised the pilot pointing the big beast downwards while a flight engineer’s hands hovered over the control that would activate a chaff and flare dispenser to send a shooting-star barrage of diverting flak. Just in case anyone down there happened be pointing a SAM missile their way.

For several minutes Kowolski’s stomach matched the gyration of the aircraft. His self-preservation sensors screamed full alert. Alex watched him, curious. The brashness had suddenly vanished. Now he wore a strange mask with darting eyes and a
set jaw. Had she been a touch closer to him, she would have heard him grinding his teeth.

Alex took pride that her profession had honed her observational skills to a fine degree. Being acutely aware of a subject’s demeanour was now almost second nature. Responding to it quickly meant the difference between a good picture and a great one. Studying Kowolski at this moment, she wished she’d had a camera in her hands.

Eventually, they touched down to an almost perfect landing. Kowolski felt a lightness sweep over him as he unbuckled his seatbelt, giving Alex a baleful glare. He was not used to the brush-off. If not for him, she wouldn’t even be on this goddam trip, he thought.

He told himself to remind her of that fact before long. Not too sternly because he had another job for her after this. One that would be far more important.

Yawning, he stretched his arms in the air, an act of nonchalance so overplayed it didn’t fool Alex as she returned his gaze. What a jerk, she thought. A few seconds ago she was ready to feel sorry for him, watching him squirm in his seat. Everyone had a monkey on their back of one sort or another.

Consulting his clipboard for the umpteenth time, Kowolski squinted at it, hesitant of taking out his new glasses. Alex peered over his shoulder.

‘What have we got?’ she said.

He briskly put the clipboard under his arm. ‘A meeting with the British top brass – Seventh Brigade, First Armoured Division. They’ve got Basra under control now and our esteemed visitor wants to relay his thanks. You’re allowed into the briefings to capture the mood so you’ll have to be on your best – no getting in the way.’

Alex offered him her camera case. ‘Maybe you’d like to do the job yourself?’

‘Okay, okay,’ he said impatiently, his hands up in surrender. While waiting for the plane to unload, he considered Baghdad,
their next destination. If all went well, he would seize the opportunity to implement the next step of Northwood’s grand plan for Lieutenant Matt McDermott, soon to be feted as his country’s latest hero.