Candleburn (30 page)

00:00:36

“This may just work,” Blake said, hope flickering in his voice.

The
building took on the appearance of an expensive coffee as the froth piled higher and continued to voraciously expand.

00:00:30

The helicopter began to turn and tilt forward. The hammock was released to reduce drag as the Chinook flew away. They had little time to get out of the blast radius and land – even a minimal explosion could generate enough turbulence to rip the blades from the rotors.

00:00:15

The foam continued to build in size.

“I
hope this is going to work,” Blake thought.

He
grabbed two large cushions and handed one to Mac.

“What’s...?”

00:00:10

“To
cover your head,” Blake said. “If those windows do go...”

“Eleanor
isn’t going to like that I stayed to watch this...”

00:00:05

“Please, God... work,” Blake thought.

00:00:00

The first explosion rocked the floor. The windows bowed visibly in. The top blew off the mountain of froth, sending foam scattering into the air.

“This
isn’t going to work,” Blake said.

“Now
is not the time...”

Mac’s
sentence was cut short. The second blast was stupendous. The foam vanished – obliterated from existence – the ground shook, earthquake strong, and chunks of concrete, hurled from some mighty catapult rocketed in all directions.

Mac
and Blake ducked.

Giant,
streaming, knife-edged shards of glass streaked in all directions.

“Shit,
shit, shit...”

Even
as his lips moved and he heard his voice, Blake was so viscerally part of the all-seeming oneness of the exploding shockwave – he could feel it forcibly shaking through his internal organs – that he couldn’t be sure if it was him saying the words.

And
then, it was over.

Blake’s
body was trembling.

He
couldn’t lift from his knees. For the first time in his life, he truly understood the words ‘shell shocked’. His fingers wouldn’t release the pillow clasped firmly to his head. He looked at Mac. The Scot’s eyes, bush-baby wide stared back at him.

Lips
parted, eyebrows raised in dumb surprise, Blake couldn’t be sure which of them started it but they began laughing.

Long
and hard and deep.

They
laughed until their ribs ached.

Mac
raised a finger and pointed to Blake’s head. Blake’s fingers finally responded to his commands, the power of laughter lifting the spell of fear. He looked at the top of the thick cushion.

A
magazine-sized hunk of glass sliced deep into the foam.

Blake
checked the underside. The shard hadn’t penetrated the sponge. He padded himself down, searching for signs of blood.

Nothing.

Mac’s lips moved.

“What?”
Blake asked.

“What?”
Mac replied.

Blake
saw his friend’s lips move but heard only a high-pitched tinnitus whine. He watched as Mac also padded himself down checking for blood.

Blake
stood.

The
scene was apocalyptic.

Rubble
was strewn everywhere. The Dubai Mall fountain bubbled apologetically over chunks of concrete and plaster. Kaskhar’s building was missing all but the lowest two floors, its contorted walls smoking like a coal-fired power station.

The
air was thick with the taste of vaporised masonry.

The
buzzing in his ears slowly cleared as Blake walked forward to the window over the diamond glistening floor and surveyed the devastation. It seemed to be snowing as ash flittered on the breeze.

“Well,
that’s that, then” Mac said. “We’ll be at war with Iran by the end of the week.”

“You
mean Rasoul won?” Blake was surprised.

Mac’s
eyes tracked across the debris.

“We
can’t hush this up. It demands a response.”

“You
can’t play it out as the conspiracy it was?”

“A war with Iran was always inevitable,” Mac sighed heavily. With the adrenaline gone, he suddenly looked extremely tired. “I’d hoped we’d suppress this incident enough that we could put another conflict in the region off for two, three, maybe even four years. I don’t think that will be possible now.”

“What
about Ron?”

“Ron?”
Mac replied. “Well, apart from his boozing, whoring and dubious taste in tobacco, I personally like the man. He’s witty, charming and urbane – for an American.”

“You’re
not going to retaliate against him?”

Mac
straightened his suit and tie. He was morphing from Mac the friend back into Mac the Baron and High Court judge.

“One
does not retaliate against ones allies, unless one wishes to end up friendless and alone,” he said, the sternness returning to his timbre. “It’s not how the ‘Great Game’ of international politics is played. Ron’s actions were a symptom, not the disease. He was merely a tool of Connors’ expansive foreign policy.”

“And
unfortunately, they’ve achieved their ends,” Blake added, “this time.”

“Right,”
Mac said. “But there will be a next. And another after that. We are now familiar with the lengths to which Connors will go. Next time he will find it much more difficult to pull a stunt like this one. MI6 will step in earlier and stop the plot cold.”

Blake
smiled.

“When
a man stumbles, look to see if the hand that pushed him was British.”

Mac
looked askance.

“I’m
not familiar with that particular homily,” Mac said. “Come, let us check up on the doctor and your friend Asp downstairs.”

They
stepped with care not to slip across the sparkling crystals that littered the tiles towards the staircase.

“I
heard it for the first time earlier today,” Blake replied. “It’s taken a while for its truth to sink in.”

“Speaking
of earlier today,” Mac said delicately, “what happened to the puzzle box?”

“The
puzzle box?” Blake replied. “We gave it to Aarez in exchange for Asp’s family.”

“Her
majesty’s government is most eager to retrieve it. Where do you think we might send our request for its return?”

“That
I can’t help you with,” Blake shrugged.

“I
see,” Mac said. “Then let me put it another way: where are you intending to go next, after leaving here?”

“I
thought I might retrieve my P90 from your cloakroom, borrow a few items of equipment from your men and then, take a brief drive out into the desert.”

“You
know where Aarez is and you plan to go after him alone?”

“He’s
really pissed me off,” Blake replied, his voice hushed. “You know, he ordered a hit against my cat?”

“Indeed?”
Mac arched his eyebrows in mock surprise. “Well, there are some things a gentleman simply cannot let lie.”

59

It was mid-afternoon and the sun was already on the downward arc of its long descent to the horizon when Blake climbed out of the Audi into a hollow between two large dunes. The dunes intersected at a battleship-sized rocky outcrop that appeared to be sailing across the desert waves.

Blake
loved this part of the Northern Emirates.

For
any Westerner expecting movie visions of the Middle East, the Empty Quarter with its endless, rolling, blonde sterility fulfilled their expectations of the region. But for a different taste of beauty, the place to travel was the northern tip – Mussandam, Madha, Ras Al Khaimah and Fujairah – where russet mountains rose from nowhere out of cinnamon sands.

The
rocks and desert here were a mixture of dark reds, oranges and chestnuts. They were at their best at sunset, when sky and soil merged into a single entity.

Blake
bent down and picked up a handful of dust between his fingers.

“Damn
it,” he berated himself. “If I hadn’t listened to Ron I might have found this place yesterday.”

It
was the same sand he’d seen embedded in the car belonging to the Russian mobsters so many hours ago.

He
tossed it aside in disgust.

The
P90 felt like a trusted comrade in arms as it dangled from his shoulder. He’d traded in his PSS pistol for a German-made SIG P226. Mac had ordered one of his underlings to remove it from his shoulder holster and hand it over to Blake.

It
told Blake everything he needed to know about Mac’s entourage. It was the favoured pistol of the Special Air Service.

Blake
took from the car’s back seat a rucksack full of kit he’d managed to get with Mac’s assistance. He removed a pair of binoculars from the bag before slinging it over his shoulders. He then locked the car and trudged up the dune and lay at its peak.

Bringing
the binoculars to his face he could see Aarez’s complex.

It
was enormous.

The
layout reminded Blake of a Mexican hacienda. There was a large, Californian-styled mansion that glowered over a smaller network of buildings that included a dilapidated barn, a five-car garage and a well maintained two storey building that Blake took to be the falconry. There were also the characteristic cages he recognised as the latest Emirati fad: a miniature zoo.

Blake
sighed.

These
were a common attachment for the Emirati elite – even endangered species could be obtained for the right price, often from the notorious Sharjah Pet Market.

Fancy
a leopard?

They
could be bought almost as easily as a kitten.

Blake
approached the complex from the side. Between him and the bird mews, the natural landscape stretched for more than a mile, filled with camel pens and, nearest to him, a small set of cattle sheds.

He
had seen a similar layout used at a camel milking facility in another part of the country. There was a newly fashionable movement to revive the region's taste for milk from local animals, extending to its use in chocolate, yoghurt and cheese.

Blake
smirked.

The
cheese was sold under the brand-name “Camelbert”.

Blake
had to move more than half a kilometre from his current position, crossing the desert, to reach the high concrete wall, scale it, and then navigate his way through the farm for a further couple of kilometres to get to the main buildings.

He’d
certainly picked the long way in.

That
had been a necessity.

Although
there was a trade off in terms of time and effort in attacking from this direction – by now Aarez would know that the bombing of the Burj Khalifa had failed and would likely be preparing to flee the country.

However, it had to be this way; a
frontal assault would likely be suicide.

Blake
moved his binoculars across the property.

He
counted five patrolling farm hands. All were armed. At the main network of buildings he expected more. If Blake was unlucky, Aarez might also have rounded up the last handful of surviving Russian mobsters.

If
they were as fat and sloppy as the two he’d met in his house, his task might be manageable. If they were ex-Spetznaz comrades of Milanovich, they’d be able to pick off a moving target with a sniper rifle at a distance of one mile.

Hence,
the necessity in parking so far away.

Blake
had been lying on the sand for less than five minutes. Already his throat was parched and his tongue began to swell in his mouth. He opened the rucksack and took a few swigs of water. Next, he checked his clothing. He’d bought a new set of trousers, a tee-shirt and a shirt in shades of brown from an outlet mall on route. They provided a meagre measure of camouflage.

In
an ideal world, he’d want a full gillie suit to stalk a nest like this: the time trade off didn’t permit such extravagance.

He
put his water back in the haversack and began crawling towards the concrete perimeter.

***

It took an hour to make it to the magnolia painted wall. Although the distance hadn’t been large, traversing the loose grained sand took enormous effort and, combined with the ridiculous heat, made it sweaty work.

Blake
could already feel the light, prickling sting as the skin of his face, neck and hands turned lobster pink with sunburn.

He
took a small length of rope from the bag and tossed a grappling hook up to the top of the concrete. With a metallic chink, it landed home. He pulled the cord to ensure it held fast and climbed into the farm.

Once
over the wall, his feet landed hard on the rockier soil.

Clever.

Aarez
had picked some kind of atoll in the desert as the site of his getaway.

Although
the air was filled with the sound of camels as they chewed their feed, there was no sign of people. Blake hastily made for the back of the milking facility.

“No
milking today for you,” Blake thought, as his eyes weaved among the ungulates, looking for any armed henchmen positioned in the animal pens.

No-one.

His gaze then followed the line of the walls looking for the next patrol.

One
Somali man was heading out toward the building. Slapped lazily across the henchman’s arm was one of the more popular exports of the Czech Republic to the Middle East: a Skorpion submachine gun. He’d arrive beside Blake in a couple of minutes. Blake moved into the shadowy plant and eased between the machinery.

Plastic
tentacles and giant humming pumps made the corrugated-iron roofed building look as though it would be at home as the set of a low-budget science fiction film. Of course, the crew would have to be able to stomach the stench of dung that radiated from every corner.

Blake
lowered his rucksack silently to the floor and reached into his back pocket for a Sebenza – a military grade folding knife. He locked its blade into place and crouched behind a low ledge, waiting for the guard to draw near.

In
the shadows, after so long in the ridiculous heat, Blake suddenly felt cold. A shiver ran across his shoulders. A copper taste began to fill his mouth. He knew this sinister feeling, it growled from his past with the gaping maw of an advancing tiger.

He
hadn’t liked it then.

Now,
he liked it even less.

A
pea-sized throbbing in his neck, reverberating by his windpipe, was joined by a slow rising drumming in his ears. The adrenaline-fuelled ‘devil’s tattoo’ of the assassin.

Footsteps.
Drawing closer.

Shooting
someone, that was one thing. It wasn’t easy, to be sure, but done once, then twice and the mental disassociation between gun and death – especially in the heat of battle or where self-defence was justifiable – it became just a thing you did: like fingertips burned too many times, the mind became numb to the sensation.

The
brain could do powerful things with rationalization.

But
with a knife?

In
an assault that was in no way related to self-preservation?

That
was different.

“Be still. It’s thinking like this that gets people killed.”

The
boots on gravel grew louder.

“Slow,”
he breathed silently. “Slow, slow down.”

The
guard moved past, so close that the scent of his body odour briefly overpowered the smell of shit from the floor and walls.

With
a flash of the knife, Blake’s hand gripped over the Somali’s mouth. Blade, ribs, thrust in, thrust up, twist, pull, yank. And again. Out, in, stab, turn.

Withdraw.

The gawping body of the young man dropped the machine gun and eyes wide, rolled dead, staring in endless damnation at Blake.

Blake
swiftly moved away from his fallen foe.

As
he ducked and wiped the blood from his knife, the afternoon sun glinted across the gentle patterns of the Sebenza’s blade.

He
pushed the unpleasant memories aside.

“Damascus
steel,” he said, the sound of his voice quietening screams of the past. “They call the organic patterning Damascus steel after its original homeland in Syria. Almost fitting. If only it weren’t a few thousand miles off.”

He
kicked sand over the bloodstains on the ground and dragged the body back into the gloomy dairy.