Authors: JT Brannan
STOP AT NOTHING: 'Mark Cole is Bond's US cousin mixed with the balls out action and killing edge of Jason Bourne' Parmenion Books (19 page)
At 12:10, Cragg was starting to be concerned. Where were they? Why hadn’t they come out?
He really didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to give away his presence, but what if there was a back way out that they’d decided to use? He could be sat here wasting precious time.
Eventually, Cragg radioed Albright again, and was given the order to check it out. Once he’d had the decision made for him, Cragg acted quickly. He moved straight through the front door, ignoring the waitress who wanted to escort him to a table, and entered the female bathroom. Nothing. He checked it from top to bottom, and then moved to the male bathroom. Again, nothing.
Coming back into the corridor, he rounded the corner and saw the service door.
Oh no
. This really wasn’t what he wanted.
Despite the dread of what he might find – or
not
find – he raced to the door and opened it, spilling out into a narrow alleyway. He ran one way down the alley, then the other. Once again – nothing. No sign of the Coles whatsoever.
As he picked up his radio to give Albright the bad news, he never even considered the dull metal fire door opposite him.
Albright didn’t bother racing into the café to assist Cragg.
His shoulders sagged in defeat; he didn’t even have it in him to shout at the man. The fact was, they’d lost. They’d lost, and now he had to tell Hansard.
As he pulled out his cell phone, he wondered about the words he would use.
He rolled his neck, the faint cracks relieving some of the tension from his body.
It would have to be Cragg’s fault, of course.
Cole’s memory of the boat’s layout was mercifully intact. Although the ferries he’d trained on whilst on joint exercise with the British SBS were somewhat older models, he was pleased to see that the internal superstructure of the new vessels was similar enough to make no real difference.
After hiding the two bodies, Cole had managed to access the service area through the hatchway near to the stairwell. Since then, he had descended another two levels until he was now at the lowest point in the ship.
He had successfully avoided contact with the ship’s crew, giving the kitchens and engine rooms a wide berth. The circuitous route had taken a bit of extra time, but was worth it for the lack of trouble he’d run into.
He worked his way through a tiny passageway – really only designed for an electrical cart to run along but just big enough for Cole to squeeze into – and tried to hurry towards the rear of the boat. He could feel the engines slowing, and knew he didn’t have much time left.
The clean-up crews started working the moment the passengers began to head downstairs, and Diego Marquez had just been informed that he’d have to do Sections 1a
and
b today. Another guy would normally do 1b, but Diego’s supervisor had said that the man had been taken ill, and so he would have to clean both.
It never ceased to amaze Diego how filthy people could be. To a certain extent he had become desensitized to it, but he could never quite understand how such a short journey could result in so much mess. The ferry journey lasted barely three hours, but in that time the two thousand passengers never failed to turn the beautiful, sparkling clean ship into a bombsite.
After working for three years on the same boat, Diego had managed to get himself a decent area. It was in a relatively tidy area near the jewellery boutique, mercilessly separate from both restaurants and toilets. Toilets were always the worst on sea voyages, and Diego was almost ecstatic when he’d been transferred to Section 1a.
But now he’d have to go through it again, and he wasn’t pleased by the prospect. The toilets in Section 1b were invariably clogged up and overflowing. It wasn’t going to be a pleasant job, and so Diego made the decision to get it out of the way first.
Entering the bathroom, the smell was the same as always – repugnant. He scanned the room quickly and was agreeably surprised to see that there was only one pool of vomit on the floor. The place was filthy underfoot, but at least it just seemed to be general dirt and slush from the hundreds of pairs of boots, shoes and trainers that would have trawled through the place over the last few hours.
The locked cubicle door to his right caught his attention next.
Strange
, he thought. All the passengers should have returned to their vehicles by now. He approached the door and knocked on the wooden front. There was no reply.
He bent down, careful not to get too close to the floor even with his gloves on, and saw a pair of legs, trousers pulled round the ankles. He thought back, and remembered that such a sight wasn’t actually all that strange – a lot of passengers would get so drunk that they’d fall asleep on the toilet, and have to be woken by the clean-up crews. Some would need medical assistance.
He sighed, and banged on the door louder. He really didn’t want to have to go in there if he could possibly help it. It was never nice to have to drag a sleepy, uncooperative drunk out of a cubicle. There was still no answer, and so he banged again on the door, shouting this time for good measure. Still nothing.
He rolled his eyes up to the sky and muttered a curse under his breath as he pulled a small coin out of his overall pocket. Inserting the coin edgewise into the screw-head on the outside of the lock, he twisted it clockwise. The action caused the lock to unbolt, and he pushed the door open.
His eyes went wide, and his breath caught in his throat as he became frozen to the spot. He had never seen
this
before, that was for sure.
The cold air hit Cole in the face with a solid blow, and it took him a few moments to regain his senses. He peered out at the French coastline, the dim landscape lit up intermittently by the bright lights of the port city.
From his precarious position, balanced on the top of the massive anchor chain that had only minutes before dropped with a deafening crash through the ship’s large hawse hole into the sea below, he concentrated on regaining his night vision.
Eventually, he was able to make things out clearly. The huge chain stretched down some forty feet below him to the dark waters of the French Channel. It was on a blind-side from the main port buildings, and Cole thought the area of coastline to the West of the massive port complex was probably about a half mile away.
He picked his time carefully, waiting for the boat to slow its rocking enough until he could manoeuvre out of the hawse hole all the way onto the chain. The bare metal was freezing, but at the same time slick and slippery with oil and seaweed.
The last time he’d climbed such a chain, at least he’d had good equipment for the job, including rubberized gloves. Right now, he had nothing more than strips of cloth wrapped tightly around his hands to protect them against frostbite. It would have been easier just to dive in from a height, but Cole knew that there might be people watching from up on deck. A big white splash against an otherwise dark sea might just attract the wrong kind of attention.
And so slowly, laboriously, Cole lowered himself down the colossal anchor chain, gigantic link by gigantic link. It took five agonizing minutes, but as he finally slipped into the near freezing water where the chain met the sea, he was confident that he had done so completely unobserved.
Cole pulled himself onto the shores of mainland France just as the first rays of dawn started to cast their dreary light over the muggy bank.
Getting cold and wet was starting to become too much of a habit, Cole decided as he stretched out his freezing and exhausted body. The respite was short-lived; he knew he had to get moving, and find some
more
dry clothes.
But, he thought with some satisfaction as he made his way up the slope towards a nearby block of buildings, he was safe, at least for now.
Nothing was ever perfect, Hansard considered as he put the phone down. The meetings this morning had gone well; things were being downplayed now between Russia and China, which was exactly how he wanted it for now. He didn’t want President Danko’s anger to subside completely, but nor did he want any sort of physical confrontation to erupt. For the time being at least, the requisite balance was being kept perfectly.
In fact, things had been going altogether
too
well, which was why he wasn’t entirely surprised to hear that Cole had escaped the net yet again.
How lucky could one man be?
wondered Hansard, although he knew that it wasn’t luck. The simple fact was that Mark Cole was one of the best there was. He was certainly the best that Hansard himself had ever worked with personally.
Hansard sat at the big desk in his office, staring at the mass of paperwork spread out in front of him, reports and case files that all seemed to need his immediate attention, and felt the pulse throb in his temple. He sighed, and pulled a bottle from the veneered drinks cabinet next to him, pouring himself a stiff measure. As he sank back into his upholstered leather chair and poured half of the rich, hot liquid down his throat, his mind started to drift back many years, to his first meeting with Mark Cole.
It was early during the second Iraq war, in 2003. Hansard had been Head of the DIA’s Department X at the time, having transferred to military intelligence from the US Navy back in 1984. The Navy had been his parent unit in the same way as it had been for his father, and his grandfather before him, but circumstance had conspired against the third generation.
Hansard was the product of a wealthy family, and came from old money, but that family had always taken the protection of the nation seriously. His father had been killed in action in the Gulf of Suez in 1956. Charles Hansard had only been eight years old at the time, but by 1971 he had passed out of Harvard Law School and then the Annapolis Naval Academy as an Ensign, keen to honour the memory of his heroic father.
He had an early taste of intelligence work when he had been seconded as the Naval attaché to the Pentagon in 1980, and he had witnessed the disastrous Operation Eagle Claw first hand. President Carter’s attempt to resolve the Iran hostage crisis had resulted in a catalogue of errors and the unnecessary loss of many lives.
Hansard had realized three things that day. The first was that America had at its disposal some of the best special forces operators in the world. The second was that there was a very poor link between the intelligence services and the military, and this simple error was the primary reason for the operation’s failure. The third thing he had realized was that he could do better – he could see how links needed to be forged between the intelligence and military communities, and started to make plans and report his findings up the chain of command.
His secondment eventually came to an end, and he resumed his normal duties within the Navy. But in the back of his mind was always that experience in the Pentagon control room, watching as brave Americans died due to a lack of cross-service cohesion, and the feeling that he could improve things.
He got his chance to move back into the intelligence community soon after. As Captain of his first command, Hansard’s naval destroyer was sent to support the US invasion of Grenada in 1983. A freak explosion on deck occurred soon after his arrival there, and Hansard had left the bridge to rescue three of his crewmembers who were left burning on the top deck. A yard arm had then collapsed from the intense heat, and had partially crushed his left leg. Hansard had even then dragged one of his sailors out of the flames using just his arms, before he himself was rescued by his Chief.
Hansard had been awarded the Navy Cross for his bravery, and the surgeons back in Bethesda had managed to save the leg, but the impact had left him with a permanent limp, and no longer fit for active duty on board a naval vessel. He still had the burning desire to serve his country though, raging through him stronger than ever.
His superior officers recognized his sharp intellect, and his analytical and strategic abilities, and after reviewing his own personal request, had recommended that he be transferred to the Defence Intelligence Agency after his recuperation.
By the time of the first Gulf War, Hansard had already proven himself more than capable of operating within the shadowy confines of the intelligence underworld. A certain degree of ruthlessness displayed during his early work against the Contras in Nicaragua and the Columbian drug cartels had led to his involvement with the infamous Intelligence Support Activity, a body later disbanded after accusations of financial mismanagement. During his time there, Hansard had learnt a great deal about how such units operated, what the potential pitfalls to such work were, and how mistakes could be avoided in the future.
His successful involvement in covert operations soon led to his becoming the DIA’s key liaison with the military’s special forces units. For the next few years he assisted their operations across the globe, until he was made Head of Department X shortly before Iraq invaded Kuwait in the early 1990s.
Hansard also took command of the DIA’s own paramilitary force, known by the codename Grey Fox. The unit’s aim was to carry out covert missions for the government that were too sensitive for normal special forces troops. Tasks involved the kidnapping of foreign agents, penetration of unfriendly governments, sabotage, blackmail and, of course, assassination. Hansard had been aware of the program since its inception, and had worked with some of the men previously, always impressed with their sheer professionalism. Command of such a unit was his dream job and, once he took the reins, it was made even more successful.
Awareness of the cell was one of the major problems Hansard faced, as it was something of an open secret within the armed services. Some of the jobs that Hansard had planned, and his small unit of handpicked men had carried out, were becoming almost legendary. The problem manifested itself in the late ‘90s, when newspapers started to get wind of it, and accusations started flying about another government ‘hit squad’.
Hansard knew the best policy was containment, and so quickly and quietly disbanded his beloved unit. A cooling off period was decided upon, and Hansard’s employers wanted to know what their man wanted to do during the hiatus; his impact and unrivalled success ensured that he would get any posting he asked for. They were surprised when Hansard had asked to join the Joint Military Intelligence College as a Group Mentor. But strings were pulled, and in the January of 1999, Hansard left for the key post at JMIC.
The college was a finishing school of sorts, for the top people within the military and intelligence communities. Established in 1961, it had initially been known as the Defence Intelligence School, and years after Hansard had been there it was again renamed as the National Defence Intelligence College. It offered programs at both the graduate and undergraduate level, and some of the top people within the United States government had passed through the school over the years.
Hansard had known this fact all too well, and he had used the three years he was there to lay down the groundwork for his ultimate goal; you could never start planning for something too early, he knew.
Upon his return to DIA headquarters, he resumed his role as Head of DX, and set about creating a new covert action cell. This time, rather than inheriting an existing unit as he had before, he had carte blanche to create a new unit from the ground up. This he did with typical attention to detail, spending time over every little thing, from the selection of the men and women themselves, to the computers he wanted for the intelligence headquarters. The result was the Systems Research Group.
He kept the cell small, with a headquarters of half a dozen experts, and twelve field teams of four operatives. These men and women were seconded from their parent units in utmost secrecy, and the number of people who were even aware of the existence of the SRG was less than a hundred – unheard of for such an operation.
Selection of the right personnel was absolutely key, Hansard knew. He only wanted the best, most reliable people; soldiers with plenty of combat experience. Luckily for him, US special forces were never light in that particular department. He didn’t hold open selections due to security considerations, but what he did do was obtain the service records of the members of America’s various special forces units, and read through them one by one. From these reports, which numbered in the thousands, he requested two hundred people for interview. Of these, he knew he would accept only twenty-five percent.
Mark Kowalski had been the eighth name on his list.
