In Cold Blood (18 page)

It was a miracle that she hadn’t been hit and an even bigger miracle that the car was still running.

Her luck couldn’t last.

THE PILOT and sensor operator of the MQ-9 Reaper were sitting in a trailer at Creech Air Force base, in the middle of the Nevada desert. The drone was flying well beneath the Hawk, at a little over ten thousand feet, and had just completed a run over the town for the second time after its bombs had destroyed the house where the hostages had been held. The pilot was responsible for deploying the Reaper’s weapons and he had done so reluctantly. There were Americans in that building. His only solace had been the certainty that he had given the poor bastards a swifter end than the one that would have awaited them otherwise.

The news that most of them had somehow managed to escape had filled him with relief.

The Reaper team had followed the Hawk’s co-ordinates and now they had a visual on the three vehicles that were running out of town.

The operator of the Hawk opened the channel. “Sentinel to Hammer. Are you seeing this?”

“Copy that, Sentinel,” said the sensor operator. “Three possible targets, designated targets one through three. I am eyes on the first vehicle.”

The woman stared at the feed from the Reaper’s high powered cameras but it was too dark to make out any detail.

“Target one appears to be driven by one individual. Targets two and three appear to be armed pick-up trucks. There are 12.7mm calibre machine guns mounted in the flat beds, multiple passengers, all appear armed. Definitely hostile.”

“Copy that, Hammer. Sentinel is going to try and get a better look.”

The Mission Intelligence Controller was in the booth behind them. “Confirm weapons load-out,” she said.

The pilot checked his screen. “I’ve got four missiles.”

“Copy that.”

The sensor operator relayed what she could see. “Target one is the lead vehicle. White sedan. It is three hundred and fifty feet ahead of Target Two. Target Two is a black pickup. Target three is a red pickup, thirty feet behind Target two.”

Mission Control was aboard the
Tortuga
. “This is Mission Control to Sentinel. What have you got on the lead car?”

“Sentinel to Mission Control. Stand by.”

The Reaper pilot slipped his finger up his joystick to rest on the red launch trigger. “Permission to engage hostiles.”

The MIC toggled her radio. “Creech to Mission Control,” she said. “Permission to engage?”

MICHAEL POPE was in the
Tortuga’s
mission control room. There were four screens hung from the wall and each showed a different feed. One each from the Reaper and the Hawk and two from the satellites. He squinted at the Hawk’s feed but the picture was grainy and disfigured by artefacts. He couldn’t make the details out.

“I can’t see a bloody thing,” Pope growled at no-one in particular. “The pilot needs to focus.”

Lieutenant Commander McMahon gripped the edge of the table.

Neither him nor Pope could do any more than they were doing.

But if Beatrix was in any of those cars, then she was quickly running out of time.

The blinding flashes from the JDAMs had been visible from the ship and had heralded a bitter reaction from the crew. The terrorists might have been taken out, but the mission was still a failure. The sudden appearance of the hostages, with no time to spare, had rejuvenated the mood. Pope had explained what must have happened in the house. He said that their liberation could only have been Rose’s doing and a short radio message from the Mark V confirmed it: Captain Thomas said that they had been rescued by a blonde haired woman. Pope had appealed to McMahon to send one of the boats back for her, but McMahon had turned him down. Pope wasn’t surprised. The beach was hot and there was no way that the SEALs could wait for her. Besides, Captain Thomas had also reported that he had watched her run back into Barawe.

If he could only have told her that he was going to be here, aboard the ship she would have been taken to, perhaps she would have made a different decision.

He cursed Stone afresh.

White tracer suddenly streaked across all four screens.

“What are they doing?” McMahon said.

The comms link that included all the participants in the raid was audible through the control room’s speakers and the Reaper’s sensor operator cursed. “Target two is firing on target one. Shit, target three is firing, too. Repeat, target one is being fired at. The white sedan appears to be running from targets two and three.”

At that precise moment the sedan swerved off the road. It went sideways, slewing to a stop. The passenger side door opened and a figure got out and huddled down in the inadequate cover offered by the car’s wing.

The driver looked up at the sky.

The Global Hawk’s infra-red cameras got a better view of the driver. It was dark, the view was brief and only partially clear, but Pope knew it was Beatrix.

“That’s her,” Pope said quickly.

McMahon spoke into the mic. “Roger, Hammer, this is Mission Control. Intent is to destroy targets two and three and their personnel. Weapons free, Hammer. Weapons free.”

“Copy that,” the Reaper pilot said. “Spinning up weapon on target three. Launch checklist. MTS autotrack?”

“Established,” replied the sensor operator.

“Laser?”

“Armed.”

“Fire the laser.”

“Lasing.”

“We’re within range and we have a lock. Three, two, one,
rifle
.”

Pope paused, watching the screen.

“Three, two, one,
impact
.”

BEATRIX PRESSED herself against the punctured wing of the car. A volley of rounds had pierced the metal and shredded the front tyres. The car had spun out of control and it had been all she could do to prevent it from rolling over as it left the road.

It was a false victory.

She was stranded now, with nowhere to run, and the Technicals were racing towards her.

She touched her hand to her face. Her fingertips came back stained with blood.

The steady whining in her ears was worse.

She braced for the strafing that she knew was about to come. She had failed. She had only revenged herself on two of them. All she could hope for was that they would spare her daughter.

She reached into the car. The MP-5 had fallen into the footwell. She collected it.

No sense in delaying the inevitable.

The Technicals were slowing.

They stopped, twenty feet away. Cautious.

She had the MP-5 out of sight, below the hood. If she was going to go out, she would take as many of them with her as she could.

She stood.

She raised the submachine gun and fired, a tight burst that rattled into the bodywork of the nearest pickup.

The machine gun roared back at her, an elephant as to an ant.

Something glinted overhead.

She saw a streak of light flash down from the sky.

Fuck.

Beatrix dropped to her knees, wrapped her arms over her head and prayed.

There was a terrific eruption.

The explosion was close enough to the back of the Lada to lift it from its rear wheels. It crashed back down hard enough to shatter the axle.

A second later, the flaming remains of the first pickup crashed to earth, upside down, fifteen feet where it had been standing. A wheel crashed against the roof of the wrecked Lada and bounced away into the desert. Fragments of metal pitter-pattered onto the dirt around her.

Beatrix crouched down in the shelter of the Lada and then risked a glance over the hood.

The second Technical had been too close and had been flipped onto its side by the brutal energy of the explosion. Its wheels continued to spin and its engine howled, impotent now. The machine gun had snapped from its mount and had been scattered to the side. The men in the back of the pickup had been flung away from by the impact of the crash. Some of them were unmoving. Others were groggily pushing themselves to their hands and knees.

The driver’s side door was pressed against the ground. A leg kicked through the passenger window and the driver hauled himself out.

She heard a weak voice. “
Sa’adni!
”

Help me.

The driver was still trying to drag himself away from the shattered cab when the second Hellfire missile streaked down from the heavens.

Incoming.

Beatrix covered her head again as the explosion cast reds and oranges across the brightening sky.

THE ZIGGURAT that housed the Secret Intelligence Service was completed in 1994, the same year that MI6 had been officially acknowledged for the first time. It was a vast building, almost 300,000 square feet, and was constructed in bombproof, man-made, ochre granite. Ten floors rose step by step into the London skyline, including the executive suite on the top floor where Benjamin Stone had his offices. There were another six below ground, too, housing command centres, laboratories and a workshop. Tourists gaped at it from the river boats that plied the Thames, their credulous interest fanned by cockney geezers who made all the obvious links to James Bond and Le Carré. They said it was influenced by ancient Persian architecture and that the people who worked there referred to it as ‘Babylon-on-Thames.’

Pope had taken a circuitous route along the river. He walked slowly, allowing his thoughts to flash across the last couple of days, and the assessment he would be asked to deliver. He had been helicoptered from the
Tortuga
to Dadaab and had flown back from there to RAF Northolt, touching down twelve hours ago. He had slept on the flight, but it had been fitful and unsatisfying, even with the comfort of the Gulfstream. The government car had picked him up and delivered him back to the anonymous offices where Group Fifteen did their business.

He turned away from the river and turned again onto the Albert Embankment, following the pavement at the edge of the building, watching the fountains bubbling behind an iron fence and before the bombproof walls. People who worked here called their employer, ‘The Firm.’ The only department more secretive than this was the one that Pope commanded. That didn’t make him feel any better as he turned in and approached the wide steel doors with the armed guards behind them and the phalanx of CCTV cameras swivelling overhead. This was the organisation that John Milton had defied and it had chased him to the ends of the earth.

Police armed with Heckler & Koch submachine guns watched new arrivals with wary interest. Pope passed through a row of six, time-locked security doors, stacked like the eggs of a giant insect. The queue shuffled forwards. When it was Pope’s turn to enter, he stepped into one of the booths, swiped his security card and stooped down to the iris scanner. The laser flashed across his eye, left to right and then right to left, and, satisfied, the security program opened the inner door for him. He stepped forward into the narrow capsule, the outer door closed behind him, the sensor in the floor confirmed that he was the only occupant, and the inner door slid open.

The inner lobby reminded Pope of the interior of a flashy, but soulless, hotel. Soft fluorescent light from recessed sconces in the vaulted ceiling sparkled on an ivory marble floor. The walls were slate and matt grey. Two giant columns dominated the hall, each containing banks of elevators. Leather benches were furnished around the circumference of the columns and natural light filtered down from an atrium that opened, through a tall light well, to the iron sky above.

Pope reached the desk.

“Your name, sir?”

“Captain Michael Pope.”

The man ran his finger down the monitor in front of him, found his name and printed out a visitor’s pass. He attached it to a lanyard and handed it to him.

“Take the lift to the eighth floor, sir. An aide will be waiting for you there.”

POPE WAS met in the elevator lobby by an aide he recognised from a previous visit.

“Good afternoon, sir,” the man said.

“Good afternoon.”

“‘Sir Benjamin is waiting for you.”

Pope followed the aide. The hive of corridors was unmarked and the doors labelled with seemingly meaningless acronyms. The bare workspaces were all open plan, the space carved into anonymous cubicles, the officers who inhabited each of them working at their screens with urgent concentration. They processed information, collated files, planned operations, liaised with foreign intelligence networks and provided support to the men and women in the field, including the agents under Pope’s command. They continued on, passing server rooms shielded to prevent eavesdropping (Pope had heard that some of them, the particularly important ones, were encased within a foot of lead) and reached a second, secure lobby with just a single elevator. They entered the waiting car and ascended the remaining distance to the executive floor.

The intercom buzzed discreetly, the doors opened and Pope followed the aide out into the vestibule beyond.

It was quiet up here. Pope turned left out of the doors and padded behind the man across deeply piled carpet, all the way to the chrome and brushed glass door that led to the offices of Sir Benjamin Stone and his staff.

The aide opened the door and showed Pope through to the last room on the right.

When Pope came in through the door, Stone was sitting at his wide desk, speaking to someone with the aid of a Bluetooth headset that seemed awkward and out of place on his head. He made an impatient gesture towards the chair on the other side of the desk and Pope walked over and sat down. The conversation seemed important. Pope caught references to the situation in Somalia, and Stone raised his hand and extended two fingers to indicate how long he thought it would last before it was finished.

Pope smiled patiently and looked around. The room was furnished in the same style as the entrance on the ground floor: with the expensive minimalism of a high end business hotel. The furniture was Scandinavian, brusquely utilitarian, and there was little concession to personality or to the humanity of its occupant. The windows had a green tint and were triple-glazed to protect against laser and radio frequency flooding.