Torchwood: The Men Who Sold The World (12 page)

‘Do what?’

‘Have an idea. Look, I worked with these guys for a good few years. I know how Gleason’s mind works, and he sure as hell isn’t going to just sit on his hands for a few days and then issue his demands. There’ll be more fatalities. We know that nobody’s going to just roll over and pay him because he freaked out a few holidaymakers. He knows the standing order: we don’t give in to terrorism. So he’ll keep pushing until he thinks we have no choice. Gleason gets off on it. You saw him in Havana, he’d do this even if he wasn’t after money.’

‘So?’

‘So he kept saying that he’d take the fight to “them”,’ insisted Shaeffer. ‘If you wanted to attack the heart of America where would you aim for?’

‘The capital, you’d go to Washington.’

‘Exactly. But Gleason’s still experimenting with this stuff, he didn’t get to finish in Cuba.’ Shaeffer paused for a moment, remembering the sight of what had become of Mills, that half-wasted creature reaching for him as it dragged itself up the stairs. ‘He needs to know he can control it,’ he continued. ‘He needs to perfect it.’

‘So he needs somewhere to hole up,’ Rex murmured. ‘OK, where?’

‘Mulroney has a place in Colorado. I don’t know
precisely where, he played it close to his chest. Never really talked about it. I got the impression it was a bolthole, you know? Somewhere to run if life got too dangerous or he finally went too far.’

‘You talk like he was always planning on doing this?’

‘I think he probably was. Gleason and Mulroney have always been tight, there’s the rest of the unit and them. And they’ve never been what you would call perfect soldiers. They liked it too much. Liked what the power gave them.’

‘Liked the enemy’s fear.’

Shaeffer nodded. ‘It’s part of it, we all know that, play up to it too. You want to scare the enemy. That’s how you control them, how you beat them. You hear stories, like all that stuff in Vietnam, where troops would take over villages, set themselves up as king for a day. A lot of that is bull, the sort of stuff people spread when they want to give the army a bad name. It’s easy to hate the man with a rifle in his hands, easy to think the worst of him. But sometimes it happened. Of course it did. People got a taste of power and it went to their heads.’

‘And Gleason and Mulroney were like that?’

‘Definitely. And they had an eye on profit too. Looting happens all the time, stuff just lies there, spoils of war, but Gleason and Mulroney weren’t just opportunists. Sometimes they would plan around it. You know how much smuggling there is in Afghanistan, the Russian families get rich there through heroin. We were sometimes sent in to bust up a deal or wipe out a plant. There was a
lot of money floating around places like that and I think Gleason and Mulroney took their fair share of it.’

‘And you?’

Shaeffer shook his head. ‘I wasn’t perfect. I took plenty of booze and smokes over the years, but I wouldn’t touch drug money. Besides, if there was a chance of that sort of thing, we’d always be kept at a safe distance. Like I say, Gleason and Mulroney were tight.’

‘So you’re saying he had this place as somewhere to run to in his retirement?’

‘Yeah, which means there won’t be an official record of it. The man’s not stupid, you don’t run off to somewhere the government knows about. It must be off the beaten track, somewhere he could spend the rest of his days without getting caught.’

‘And it’s in Colorado… You don’t have any more idea than that?’

‘Gleason once joked about him running off to God’s garden. Whether that was a clue or not I don’t know.’

‘God’s garden?’

Shaeffer nodded.

‘Garden of the Gods is a national park in Colorado,’ said Rex. ‘You didn’t know that?’

Shaeffer shrugged. ‘Why the hell should I? Ask me about geography in the Middle East, I might have a chance, but I can’t say I’ve watched much Discovery Channel the last few years.’

Rex fell silent, fiddling with his phone. He brought up a web window and searched for the
Garden of the Gods national park. He couldn’t quite believe he was considering this. Though maybe he could get away with a short stopover on the way back to Washington?

‘You know, we can do this,’ said Shaeffer eventually. ‘A couple of days below the radar, you seriously think you can’t cover that?’

‘What’s made you so eager to help all of a sudden?’ Rex asked. ‘Back in Cuba, you couldn’t wait to get as far away from Gleason as possible.’

‘Then I found out what my government has in mind for me. Right now I have a better chance on the road with you.’

‘If that’s true,’ said Rex, ‘then you really are screwed.’

‘So, we going to do this?’

Rex smiled. ‘Why the hell not?’

Mr Wynter sat in the private dining room of the Corazon Restaurant and patiently sipped at a glass of water. He looked out of the window at Ford’s Theatre directly opposite. They were advertising a musical called
By George!
that promised to bring the illustrious history of George Washington to the stage as a ‘madcap, musical romp’. Mr Wynter wondered if he had time to pop over and assassinate the artistic director before his employer arrived. Sadly not, he thought, as the door opened and a nondescript man walked in. His suit was off the rail, his overcoat thinning at the elbows, his briefcase worn at the corners. This was a man who didn’t seem remotely important. Which was as it should be when you’re one of the most powerful men in the country.

He shook Mr Wynter’s hand and offered him a broad smile. ‘Been a while,’ he said.

‘Indeed,’ Mr Wynter agreed. ‘I was beginning to think you’d managed to find a way to get along without me.’

‘Never a chance of that I’m afraid,’ the man replied. ‘You can’t run a country without breaking some heads.’

Mr Wynter laughed politely.

‘I ordered the set menu,’ the man said. ‘I hope that’s all right?’

‘Fine, I’m sure.’

‘It’s very good. The chef knows his business.’

‘And here was I thinking you chose the place because you were trying to make a point.’ Mr Wynter nodded towards the theatre.

‘Oh.’ The man smiled, as if the location had only just occurred to him. ‘I see what you mean. I dare say if Lincoln had been watching a “madcap musical”, he may have welcomed the bullet.’

‘In my experience nobody ever does.’

‘No? Well I dare say you would know. I can’t say I’ve been in that position.’

‘No, you prefer to pull the trigger several states away.’

‘Naturally. It improves my aim no end.’

‘
Sic Semper Tyrannis
,’ said Mr Wynter.

‘Hmm?’

‘Thus always to tyrants,’ Mr Wynter translated. ‘It’s what Booth was reported to say just after he’d shot Lincoln.’

The other man smiled. ‘We tyrants have always had a bad press.’

The waiter entered carrying two plates of shrimp salad. For a few minutes both men ate, Mr Wynter delicately forking mouthfuls of crab meat and shrimp.

‘You know,’ said Mr Wynter’s employer, placing
his cutlery across his half-finished plate, ‘I was reading an article about shrimp. It’s put me off. Apparently they congregate around sewage pipes. It’s where they breed.’

Me and the shrimp both, thought Mr Wynter.

The main course was hanger steak. The meat bled on their white plates.

‘So what do you think will happen now?’ asked Mr Wynter’s employer, finally referring to the business in hand.

Mr Wynter chewed at his steak slowly. He found he suffered bad indigestion otherwise. ‘I think Colonel Gleason is going to kill a lot more people before he is stopped.’

His employer nodded. ‘We’re inclined to agree. Such a pity you weren’t able to deal with him in Cuba.’

Mr Wynter had been waiting for this. His failure was not something either of them were used to discussing.

‘I spent last night looking at red-hot satellite photos of Havana in flames,’ his employer continued. ‘I was almost tempted to have them framed.’

‘The weaponry in question was impressive.’

‘So I hear. We’ve asked for more details from the Brits.’

‘How are they taking the loss of their people?’

‘I think they’re more concerned we might stop our cheque.’

They finished their steak and waited on the dessert, a plate of beignets drizzled with Greek honey.

‘I can’t resist sweet things,’ said Mr Wynter’s employer. ‘My wife tells me my cholesterol will kill me one day.’

‘Something surely will,’ Mr Wynter replied, brushing icing sugar from his fingers.

Gleason was dreaming of the dust. That first time in Iraq.

The desert had changed him, as it had so many people. The sand beneath your feet, the open sky that glowed so red at night you swore it was on fire.

The horrors were always there. The threat of gas attack, the promise of the Republican Guard, the rattle of the chain guns. But, for all that, Gleason had found peace. Marching invisible, relying on GPS because the sandstorms were so thick you couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead. The distant crump of shells so soft and remote they could have been signals from another world. It was a soft world, a world for dreaming in as your hot hands wiped sweat on the metal of your weapon and the feeling of that solidity pressed against your belly was all that stopped you floating away for ever.

Gleason often thought of the death of Major Rider.

Rider had been his commanding officer on that slow walk towards Kuwait. A gentle soldier, one of the old breed fostered in peacetime. Rider talked about ‘preventative measures’ and ‘respect for the enemy’; he bemoaned the failure of ‘diplomatic solutions’. Gleason had considered him unfit for his rank. If you don’t want dirty hands, don’t go to war. He followed Rider under sufferance. He followed because of orders not respect.

‘The man shits himself at shadows,’ he had said one night, huddled with the boys under a tent roof, listening to carpet bombing in the distance. ‘If we ever meet the Republican Guard, he’ll be on his knees before they even draw a target.’

‘The sand doesn’t suit him,’ said a young New Yorker Gleason had talked to a few times, Patrick Mulroney. ‘It’s just somewhere he used to lose golf balls.’

There was a ripple of laughter at that. But not from Gleason. He thought it was too true to be funny. He hated marching behind a man like that.

February of 1991, they were on the move just north of Basra.

The weather was cool for once, overcast with a threat of rain and as they marched out past the ruins it was as if a whole world had rolled over and died in the night. The remains of Iraqi vehicles formed a chain into the desert. Bombed-out tanks. Armoured vehicles spit open and smoking. From a distance, the dead convoy looked like the spine of a dinosaur revealed by the wind blowing back the sand.

Up close, the smell of death was more recent. The vehicles were not empty. Pieces of soldiers draped where the explosions left them. Half-cooked but blackened, like bad barbecue meat seared in the white-hot flash of the coalition’s righteous fire. People left to smoulder and crackle.

As they made their way past the dead convoy, the sandstorm descended and they had to rely on GPS and the crackle of radios. They couldn’t see more than a few feet to either side of them. The world had gone away and they were marching alone.

The first bark of gunfire had everyone in a panic. Nobody could tell where it had come from and they were frightened to fire back in case they hit their own.

Rider shouted for them to find cover, and Gleason went on the move, the sound of blood pounding in his head as he ran through the sand to the safety of an upturned jeep. It was like running underwater. He felt sealed off and numb. There was the sharp crack of rifle fire, tinny and lifeless, not the spectacular gunfire of movies but the real handclaps of hot metal flying through the air on the hunt for something to stop it.

‘Keep to the rear,’ he shouted into his radio. ‘Stay behind the convoy, anything on the other side’s a target.’

But the targets didn’t come.

They returned fire anyway, hoping for a lucky shot.

The enemy raked the convoy with 30mm rounds and it sounded like a factory. The remorseless
clang of riveting. The pounding bells of metal on metal.

If one of those hits you, it’ll leave a hole, Gleason thought. One you’ll be able to put your whole damn hand in.

‘Return fire!’ he shouted, wondering where the hell his commanding officer was. Wondering if Rider had run off and left them in this invisible war.

‘Major Rider?’ he asked his radio. ‘Are you receiving me, sir?’

There was no reply but static, the crackle of open airwaves that reminded him of eggs frying in hot oil. That empty crackle could mean anything, it could mean that they were dead, they were gone, swallowed whole by the static and the dust and now it’s just you. Here in the desert. Gun in your hands.

There was another burst of gunfire, and Gleason caught a glimpse of muzzle flare, no more than a few feet away. He took the shot, firing quickly before he had chance to lose the target. There was the flat sound of his rounds meeting a body out there in the dust, finding their home, burrowing out of sight.

There was more fire from his left. It was one of his own because his radio squawked and someone started crowing over their kill. Two down, but how many more?

There was silence for a while. Every moment fat with expectation. Every moment bearing the potential of renewed fire, of that one bullet that might kill you, the one that will turn the lights out
and make the world as you know it just stop.

Gleason began to think it might be over. That it was just a couple of stray conscripts, lost and afraid out here in the storm.

He made his way out from behind the jeep and ran slowly along the convoy for a few hundred yards, listening out for anything but the strain and creak of his own pack, of the gentle thud of his boots in the sand.

He stopped behind the curled track of a tank and listened.

There was a noise. The soft crackle of the radio. That pop of eggs in the skillet.

He moved towards it, his side of the convoy, further out into the whiteout of the storm.