Die Trying (10 page)

The sergeant counted to three. Then his men opened fire. Bald and Gardner gritted their teeth as they grimly watched the wall spatter with the guts and brains of innocent men, women and children. Smoke was still issuing from the militiamen’s overheating muzzles when Bald reported to the head shed asking for permission to engage. The request was denied.

‘Bloody cowards,’ Bald said on hearing the news. ‘Come on, Joe. What do you say we show these fuckers the meaning of a turkey shoot?’

They had loaded their Colt Commandos and put rounds down on the militia. Wiped out all ten of the evil cunts, filling their bodies with so much brass they could be sure they were dead. It was a blatant breach of orders, but it had felt the right thing to do and Major Maston, if he had ever known, had let it slide. It was hard for Gardner to believe that John Bald was now dead, a no-good criminal.

Modern-day Drobny wasn’t some sort of memorial to the massacre, more like an abandoned, lawless patch of shit that someone had forgotten to clear up. Gardner saw precious few people in the streets. The faces he did see had more lines than a Shakespeare play and the distant, glazed expressions of a people who’d lost everything. Burned-out windows stared back at him like black teeth. The roofs of most houses had caved in. Mangy dogs roaming the rutted roads, sniffing at dead birds and crushed Coca-Cola cans.

The church, Valon had said. That’s where he told Gardner he would find the sleeper truck. Gardner felt he was colliding with the past. Ghosts everywhere, the filmy residue of nightmares he’d tried to bury at the bottom of a pint glass.

He checked his watch. One forty-two. A little over fifteen minutes before, according to Valon, the truck would move on to a new, unknown location. You’ve got to get to the truck, he thought. Find out what the fuck’s inside. Then track down Sotov and find Aimée.

Gardner made a few turns west then south, the village seeming to disintegrate in front of him. He came to a particularly desolate place. Shabby homes, ragtag cars, roads that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a rally course. He passed a police station fallen into disrepair, the walls swamped with graffiti denouncing Milosevic, Arkan and Karadzic. Heard something up ahead. The low rumble of an engine. He killed the Nissan.

Land called him back. Took his fucking time, Gardner thought.

‘Christ, Joe,’ Land snapped, ‘where the—?’

‘You didn’t tell me Valon was working for you.’

Gardner heard Land cough down the line. ‘Klint Valon’s cover was on a strictly need-to-know basis. A man like Valon walks a tightrope. With every person who knows his true identity, his position becomes increasingly perilous. I can’t afford to lose him.’

‘You already have,’ Gardner said.

A pause stretched out, like rope tensing.

‘The meet was a colossal fuck-up,’ Gardner continued. ‘Valon’s dead. John too. The Italians tried to hijack the whole deal, take the coke and the money. Soon as they made their play, the Russians wiped the fucking floor with them. They spared no one.’

Another pause. ‘You mean—?’

‘No one,’ Gardner replied flatly. ‘They killed the Italians, then they went for Bald and Valon. They’re all fucking dead.’

Land muttered something; it came down the line as a static hiss. Three seconds of silence, then he regained his composure. ‘What about the cocaine? And the money?’

‘The Russians took both. But Valon said there was no money, the Russians were swapping something else for the drugs.’

‘And what—?’

The line crackled and fizzed. Land’s voice distorted like a badly tuned radio station. And suddenly he was gone. Gardner tried calling him back, but his mobile couldn’t get a signal. He checked the time again. One forty-seven.

This is it. Do – or fucking die.

He stepped out into the street, Glock in his hand, looking for trouble.

A couple of locals glowered at him, two knurled men with skin like worn sandpaper and greasy hair. An elderly woman trundled past, knuckle-joint nose and eyes the colour of dirty net curtains. Gardner had been on the receiving end of a million evil-eyes in Iraq and Afghanistan and he came to understand that the only language these people understood was made in a munitions factory. The men saw the Glock and swiftly looked in the other direction. No one else around to bother him.

Forty metres ahead he clocked the sleeper truck from the rest stop. The truck was in front of the old church gates. He crept forward, his knees bent, making sure he didn’t cause any noise.

To his nine a road peeled off between several vacant properties to the left and the ruins of a library church to the right. Thirty metres down the road Gardner noted three vehicles parked in a column. The front and rear ones were Toyota Hilux 4x4s, each with black canvas draped over the open section. The middle vehicle appeared to be a bulletproof van with blacked-out windows and a secure compartment with double doors at the back.

Three men came into view. Two looked like guards: tan tops, dark-green trousers, black boots, AK-47 straps tight around their chests. Their faces seemed too dark and smooth to hail from this neck of the woods. The third man was chubbier, older. He had a beard thick as a clenched fist.

The third man shouted at the guards. Gardner hid behind the police station. The guards heaved something out of the sleeper truck’s trailer. The third man was shouting at them. Gardner thought he sounded Arabic. Carrying their load as if it were an expensive piece of furniture, one man gripping it at either end, they headed west down the street. Gardner followed, stopping behind a wrecked Skoda ditched next to a stone house at the eastern edge of the street. Weeds had reclaimed the car’s tyres and much of its shell. The two guards flipped open the doors of the secure van and wheezed as they placed the object on its floor.

The doors slammed. The third man headed up the road in the opposite direction to Gardner. The two guards walked towards Gardner, but they hadn’t seen him. They were thirty metres from his position. Then twenty. One of the guards, a lanky teenager with a bumfluff moustache, then made a right and walked south down an adjacent street, out of sight. The other, a short and stocky guy with teak skin, was now ten metres away.

Sweat percolated down Gardner’s spine.

Five metres.

He hoped the guy would walk straight past and continue on his patrol.

Gardner hunkered behind the Skoda. As the guard’s shadow loomed, he caught his breath in the back of his mouth.

The guard was now a metre beyond the Skoda.

The shadow stopped. Hovered over Gardner.

The guard spun around. Clocked Gardner. His mouth opened wide. Poised to sound the alarm.

Gardner leapt to his feet and in one smooth movement fastened his arms around the guard’s neck, fixing him in a headlock. He slapped his right hand tight over the guy’s mouth. The kid with the tache was out of sight, but Gardner had to assume he’d return soon. He dragged the guard out of sight and pushed his elbows out until he could feel the rubbery tunnel of the guy’s air passage crushing from the force. The man kicked at the dirt with his feet, hands pawing at Gardner’s face. Gardner squeezed harder. Then something warm and chunky seeped through his fingers. The guy had vomited.

Gardner didn’t let go. He held and held, squeezed and squeezed. After two minutes the legs stopped thrashing about. Gardner dragged the body to the side of the Skoda and filched a set of keys from the guy’s pocket. Checking that the coast was clear of other guards, he moved diagonally forward until he was behind the rear Hilux. The black canvas seemed to be covering some kind of a mini-gun.

Peering over the pickup, Gardner scanned the streets to his nine, six and one o’clock. A guard was patrolling away from him to the left. Twenty metres away now, Gardner broke out from behind the Hilux and scrambled towards the van. Reached it in eight quick strides. He inserted the key in the lock. A red light glared above the locking mechanism. He heard the shifting of cogs within. Then the light turned green, and the doors at the rear were open.

A single object was lying on the floor of the van. It was half a metre tall and half as wide and its cylindrical shape reminded Gardner of a forty-gallon drum. Sealed inside a protective camouflaged case, it looked like the kind of thing a guy could carry as a backpack. A rectangular grey box was strapped to the object’s waist. Between loose rope ends at the top of the object, Gardner noted a battery cell, an LCD display and a key-operated panel.

Jesus fucking Christ, he whispered to himself.

He had seen pictures of this thing before. It was a miniature armed warhead – what they called a suitcase or backpack nuke – modelled on the Special Atomic Demolition Munitions system developed by the US and the Soviets at the height of the Cold War. Devices of this kind were designed to be parachuted into Soviet territory if the Russians ever invaded the West. They had, Gardner knew, a yield equivalent to several kilotons of TNT, and packed enough radioactive uranium to make Chernobyl look like fucking Disneyland.

Jesus, John, Gardner thought. What the fuck were you going to do with a backpack nuke?

Cold spread across Gardner’s back. Then he realized it was coming from a muzzle tip digging into the top of his spinal column.

‘Drop the weapon.’

Gardner released the Glock from his hand.

‘So finally you arrived,’ a voice said. ‘That is good. Now I can do what I couldn’t do before.’

Gardner didn’t turn around. He knew who was holding the gun to his neck. Could tell by the way his voice jolted and jarred, an accent that sounded like no other.

Shai Golan.

1418 hours.

‘I knew you would come,’ Golan said as he jabbed Gardner with the tip of his pistol.

‘Don’t tell me,’ Gardner said. ‘You’re a mind-reader as well as a cunt.’

‘Instinct,’ Golan answered, ignoring the jibe. ‘You strike me as the type of man who cannot resist the big prize. This way,’ he said, tilting his head towards the church. ‘And please, no noise. If you alert the guards, they’ll only kill us both. Neither of us wants that now, do we?’

Gardner didn’t respond. The coast was clear. Golan led him through the imposing wooden doors of the church. The building was empty and retained little of its former splendour. The pews were layered in decades-thick dust, the altar was naked and muddy light filtered through the cracks in the stained-glass windows.

‘Bald’s dead,’ Gardner’s voice echoed.

‘I know.’

Golan was behind him, but Gardner could feel the Israeli’s finger tugging back on the trigger. He imagined the gases primed to flood the chamber and propel the hollow-cased bullet out of the muzzle and into his head.

‘Now you’ve seen the bomb, I will have to kill you,’ said Golan.

‘You can’t kill me,’ Gardner said. He felt the pressure of the muzzle, as if it was drilling through to his brain.

‘Give me one good reason.’

‘Right now, there’s a dozen other MI6 agents in this area alone. Many more in Belgrade. If you kill me, they’ll fucking hunt you down like a dog.’

Golan didn’t reply.

He believes me, Gardner thought. I’ve bought myself some time—

He felt a shockwave of pain as Golan bashed the pistol butt against his temple. Gardner dropped to his knees, screams inside his head.

‘Son of a bitch!’

‘On your feet,’ Golan said. ‘This way.’

Gardner stood. His hair was sticky and warm.

He staggered into a dim room behind the altar, eight metres by six. The room was sparsely furnished: a wooden table on the left, a bricked-up fireplace at the far wall, a small statue of the Virgin Mary on the mantelpiece. A wooden chair in the middle of the room, a length of parachute cord on the floor by the chair legs.

Gardner went to open his mouth, then felt a boot connect with the small of his back. Golan grabbed him by the arms, dragged his knackered body to the chair, then bound his arms behind his back with the nylon cord. He stood in front of Gardner, wiping the lenses of his glasses with his shirt sleeve.

‘Those fucking idiots at MI6’ – he spat out the last word like mouthwash – ‘are they aware of the nuclear weapon too? Or is their so-called intelligence as inadequate as ever?’

‘You knew about the nuke?’ Gardner’s mouth was dry as sawdust.

‘Of course. Since the very beginning.’

The upper part of Gardner’s chest was tight like a belt. His head suddenly felt heavy as Golan approached the table. On it Gardner could see a number of implements. Screwdrivers, hammers, scalpels, ice-picks, crocodile clips. Golan inspected them.

‘You’re fucking insane,’ Gardner said.

‘Insanity means to be illogical,’ Golan replied. ‘But I’m perfectly logical.’

He picked up a scalpel, examined its sharp blade in the harsh light.

‘So, how about you begin by telling me where these agent friends of yours are?’

‘Fuck you!’

‘If you knew who I worked for, you wouldn’t say that.’

‘You’re not Mossad, I know that much.’

‘I work for a special division of Mossad that is secret even to the rest of the organization. Our codename is Shiloh. We draw out men from Mossad’s Collections and Research Departments. Only the top men and women are recruited. They have to be willing to kill, poison, maim and terrorize the enemies of Israel. No one is aware of our activities,’ he said, by now laughing heartily, ‘especially not MI6.’