Hard Rain

Forty-eight

The moonless night was cold in the wind chill, merely cool out of it. High cloud eliminated the starlight, making the night thick and black. Occasional coughs from Nile crocodiles and the slap of fish clearing the water punctuated the low burble from our exhaust as we hugged the shore. An hour and a half till first light.

Two members of the fire team gave me a nod as they passed, heading below to get their equipment. Mallet followed. By now, the cordon would be in place. There was nothing to do but wait.

I yawned. Masters and I had checked our weapons a couple of times already — Tokarevs with three spare mags apiece, and AK-47 carbines also with fifteen spare mags, all of Chinese origin for ease of later misidentification by local authorities. Aimpoint Comp sights compatible with our night-vision devices completed our weapons ensemble. I couldn’t get comfortable in the CIA-issue body armour. It was tight, especially across that rib. I lowered the NVD, turned on the sight and aimed the weapon at the shoreline. Movement. There — a massive croc hauling itself up over the rocks and then settling onto its broad belly. The Aimpoint sight was a quality item. I turned everything off, sat on the gunwale and listened to the night.

With the lights off and without the night vision, all I could see of Masters was the vague glow of the white CIA lettering across her back and the narrow green strip on her black Kevlar helmet. The boat captain cut the motor a hundred yards out from our designated position and we slid across the water in silence, the drag slowly washing off our speed. We inched around a spit of land and the anchor went down without a splash. I turned on the electrics and trained the sight on the barge. Tawal was up. The guy was an early riser. He was waving something about, leaning out over the water. A huge shape suddenly reared up out of the blackness and then fell back.

‘Must be breakfast time,’ said Masters, taking in the same show. ‘He likes to feed the wildlife, remember?’

I remembered Cain telling us.

‘You’d think he’d put some clothes on, though, wouldn’t you? Crocs might take the wrong item.’

I looked harder. Tawal was wearing some kind of loose dressing gown, completely open at the front. He was erect. A woman appeared from out of a doorway, also in some kind of dressing gown. She let it fall off her and beneath it she was naked. Lucky Tawal. From what I could see, the woman had a hell body. She kissed Tawal on the shoulder and then went back inside, swinging her ass at him. ‘Honey, come back to bed,’ I said. ‘You might catch something out here.’

‘Or something might catch you,’ Masters added.

Tawal must have heard us. He followed the girl back inside.

‘Do we know anything about her?’ I asked.

‘Not that I’ve seen,’ said Masters. ‘But Tawal’s worth a few hundred mill. Gotta have a little black book.’

‘Crazy if he doesn’t,’ I said. Everything went quiet on board the barge, though I counted seven heavily armed security guys. Four of them were smoking, begging to be shot. ‘With everything that has happened, I haven’t asked you… you still getting out?’

The boat rocked a little, unexpectedly, enough that I had to change my footing.

‘KMAG YO-YO,’ Masters replied.

‘Did you get that from Block?’ I asked.

‘Kiss my ass, guys, you’re on your own? A military chat room, actually.’

‘Any idea what you’re going to do?’

‘I still haven’t made up my mind — not completely. Being a special agent was something I always wanted to do. Starting a new life was not something I ever seriously considered before Richard, but now that’s over…’ She shrugged.

‘Then what could you do if you left?’

‘Well, I’ve spoken to my sister and we’ve talked about me joining her in the West Indies, to work on my all-over tan while I learn how to scuba-dive. Then perhaps I’d get my instructor’s ticket and teach other people for a while. Vin, if I leave… I’ve been thinking… Come with me.’

I thought about it for a moment. Could I? ‘Maybe I will.’

She scoffed. ‘Maybe you should. But you wouldn’t. You like locking people up too much to quit.’

Hmm… perhaps, perhaps not. Scuba diving with Anna anywhere sounded more attractive than another stretch busting heads in the OSI or CIA, or whomever it was we were working for. I wasn’t too keen on the thought of there being no Anna Masters in my life. Maybe it was time I left too, got out while the party was still going strong. And left with the hottest babe on the dance floor on my arm.

‘And then when I got bored, I’d go back to school.’

I snapped out of it. ‘School?’

‘To study law.’

‘No way. Law?’

‘Yes, way. You know I believe in the system. I’ve experienced law enforcement from this side. Maybe I could do some good at the other end of the process. Who knows, one day I could even come up against Richard and kick his damn — What’s that? Can you hear that? Are they Pave Hawks?’

The thump of helicopter rotors reached my ears at the same instant. It couldn’t be the MH-60s. They hadn’t been summoned. Something had gone wrong. I moved to the other side of the boat.

The familiar thump-thump was getting louder, closer. I could hear them, but couldn’t see them. I flipped down the NVD, and aimed the scope in the direction of the sound. Mallet appeared from behind the wheelhouse, obviously also wondering who, what, where, why and a bunch of other goddamn questions besides. Goddard was behind him.

And then I noticed Mallet had a pistol in his hand. It was a Chinese Type 67. We weren’t issued silenced weapons. He raised it. The two-handed grip. Anna had her back to him. What are you doing? He held the weapon’s muzzle an inch from the base of her skull. A silenced pistol…

Mallet hadn’t seen me. I didn’t think about it. I fired point-blank into the side of his face. His jawbone separated from his head, taking his NVD with it. The rest of him slid over the side of the boat. Gone. Just like that.

‘Jesus Christ!’ Masters shouted, spinning around.

Goddard came out shooting. Phut, phut, phut… Another Type 67. They didn’t issue us with silenced weapons. The pistol jumped in his hands. A round slammed into the ceramic plate protecting Masters’ front, then another — panic shots — the force of the hits sending her sprawling backwards onto the deck. A third round zinged off a winch beside Masters’ head as she rolled onto her side.

I dropped to a knee, fired into Goddard’s legs as he stepped forward and past me — a three-round burst. The slugs sawed his boot off at the ankle. Overbalanced and half falling, he took another step, onto the shattered bone stump, and stumbled. A burst of fire, this one from Masters, caught him in the throat as he fell and cored it. He slumped to the deck with a soft thud. Anna was on her back again, breathing hard, frozen, smoke curling from her AK’s flash suppressor.

The chopper roared low across the water a hundred yards to our right. It wasn’t one of ours. It looked civilian, a Bell 412. I could see armed personnel sitting in the open doorway, legs dangling over the side.

‘You okay?’ I yelled at Masters.

‘I’m okay, I’m okay,’ she replied. She got back on her feet, reaching for the railing. ‘Shit, that hurt.’

‘Welcome to my world. What the fuck’s going down here?’

‘You tell me.’

The helo flared in a hover over the barge as a gun battle erupted on the shoreline behind it.

‘The cordon’s being attacked from the rear,’ I said.

Ropes dropped from the aircraft along with the rain of machine-gun fire. Tracers told me that Tawal’s security force was returning the fire, though it was sporadic. Most of his twenty-man security detail must have been taken out from a distance by sharpshooters on the bird.

‘Our boat driver’s dead, and the radio’s smashed,’ Masters called out behind me from the wheelhouse. I had a feeling that below decks would look like a slaughterhouse, which explained the odd shift in the boat’s balance I’d felt earlier. Mallet and Goddard would have taken out whoever was down there first before coming up to whack us. Masters was incredibly lucky that my weapon was raised and in the firing position and that Mallet had just blundered into my sights. My thumb must have snicked the safety off without asking my brain’s permission — I didn’t remember doing it.

Our engine burst into life. Masters had decided we were going to charge right on in there. The throttle surged and the screw bit, launching us forward and ripping the anchor from the silted bottom. I braced myself against the wheelhouse, the helo and the barge filling the Aimpoint’s lens and getting larger. Machine-gun fire spat from the side of the helo and chewed up the prow of our boat, flailing me with wood splinters. Masters spun the wheel and brought us on a course parallel to the barge and the shoreline. I noticed the other CIA boat was on the move, coming in. I wondered who was controlling it, whether they had a Mallet and Goddard on board.

Tawal appeared on the deck of his barge, hands on his head, pushed along by two gunmen. He was still wearing his coat. The attacking force had complete control of the vessel. The machine gun in the Bell gave us another burst and a cluster of geysers erupted just beyond our stern. Whoever was firing it didn’t know how to lead a moving target, not that I was going to complain about it. What was going on here? The gunfire had diminished to the point where I heard just the occasional shot. An explosion flared green in the scope and the mast holding the barge’s navigation lights, comms and radar aloft toppled, allowing the helicopter to settle on the roof of what was the main cabin. The attacking force was getting ready to leave.

I refocused on Tawal. He was being made to step up on the side rail of the barge. The two gunmen behind him had a hold of the back of his coat. It seemed to me they were making him lean forward, way out over the edge of the barge like he was on a trapeze. I could hear a lot of shouting going on over the noise of our boat and the chopper, but couldn’t see too much detail.

A black shape the size of a tree trunk reared up out of the water and Tawal was gone. My mouth was open.

‘You see that?’ Masters called out. ‘They just fed the guy to the crocs!’

I started firing into the side of the helo. The machine gun in its side door returned the compliment, and .50-calibre slugs smashed into our hull below the waterline and raked us from the bow all the way to the stern. The assault force climbed aboard the aircraft and it lifted off, a well-oiled operation. Whoever these folks were, they knew what they were doing. They also knew what the CIA was doing.

The helo altered direction and Masters brought the boat around to intercept it. I wasn’t sure this was such a good idea, given their firepower, but it provided a better view into the side of the aircraft. I emptied the remains of the magazine at it, but to no apparent effect. A few of the men that I could see ripped off their NVGs and helmet — only, one of them wasn’t a man. Yafa. The 412 banked around the spit of land, hovered there for thirty seconds and then climbed away.

Dawn wasn’t pretty down by the lake. Large black birds circled high overhead as we picked through the disaster. The woman we’d seen getting impatient and naked with Tawal was of Middle Eastern origin, maybe twenty-three and drop-dead gorgeous. Now she was just dead, a bullet through her left eye.

Masters had run our boat up on the shore. The .50-cal rounds did a lot of damage and we were taking water. Down in the hold, as we’d feared, Mallet and Goddard had dispatched the three CIA sharpshooters, sending them off on the big sleep. Masters and I were cuffed to the wheelhouse for an hour while the mess was sorted out and the senior agents on the scene came to grips with our story — that Mallet and Goddard were working both sides of the fence and that we’d killed them in self-defence after they’d slaughtered the agents below decks and came gunning for us. The silenced weapon in Goddard’s rigor-mortised fingers, in addition to the 7.62 millimetre slugs prised from the wood behind the sharpshooters’ heads, backed our version. But even after we were released, the suspicion still clung to us and soaked up the agents’ anger and frustration. Goddard’s remains were bagged together with his boot, his foot still laced into it.

‘I don’t think Mallet and Goddard liked you very much, Vin,’ said Masters as an agent zipped up the bag.

‘What makes you say that? I was nothing but helpful — charming, even.’

‘They didn’t have to show their hand. There was no need to kill us. Putting a bullet in you must have been something they wanted badly.’

‘Gee, I can’t think why,’ I said.

A gunshot rang out and a large croc retreated into the water. A couple of agents kept an eye on the lake’s edge from the safety of the barge. The last thing the CIA needed now was for an agent to end up an essential food group.

‘After they whacked us, Goddard and Mallet were going to RV with the helo round the corner,’ I went on. ‘Must have been why it stopped there in the hover. I think it wasn’t just me they wanted dead, and it wasn’t just Goddard and Mallet who wanted to do the killing. You saw who was on that Bell.’

‘I saw.’ Masters screwed a black ball cap down on her head. ‘I hate Monday mornings. I’m going to go help out. You?’ She climbed up on the gunwale and jumped down onto the mud before I could give her an answer.

None of Tawal’s people had survived. All twenty were shot dead. Amongst our blocking force on-shore, there was one dead and six wounded, one of them seriously. They’d been surprised, out-gunned and outmanoeuvred. After the shock of the initial assault, they’d at least had the good sense to keep their heads down.

Stringer arrived in a chartered helicopter an hour after sunrise to take in the scene and supervise the clean-up. We didn’t talk. He was wrong about there being no one on the inside — he knew it, we knew it, and we knew he knew it. What we wanted to know was whether he was involved in it. How could Mallet and Goddard operate without him being involved in it? Nevertheless, he was there assisting in the evacuation of the casualties, loading them into the Pave Hawks. The op was an unmitigated disaster. As far as Stringer’s future in the CIA was concerned, a crystal ball wasn’t needed to figure he wouldn’t have one.

There was some confusion about what to do with Tawal’s dead. We didn’t have the resources to spirit them away, not in northern Sudan. So rather than leave them to the vultures, we set Tawal’s barge ablaze along with our boats and cremated them.

As we lifted off on the last shuttle heading back to Abu Simbel, on the Egyptian side of the border, I saw a familiar long white coat. It was Tawal’s dressing gown, lying up on the bank a couple of hundred yards from the barge, stained with silt. The dressing gown suddenly took off when we flew overhead, making for the water, the snout of a massive croc buried deep in its sleeve.