Strike Back

TWELVE

Porter adjusted the sound on the TV set. Sky News was sticking to its round-the-clock coverage of the Katie Dartmouth story, and so were CNN and BBC News. He flicked through the other channels: there was a celebrity show on ITV, a detective programme on BBC, and a rerun of Friends on Channel 4, but it was so long now since Porter had had a TV set he no longer had much idea what was on, or what he liked to watch.

He propped his head back on the pillow, and went back to Sky. There wasn’t much new for them to say. It was Wednesday evening now, and Katie had been captured late on Sunday night. There was some fresh footage that had been released of her captivity. All you could see was a woman tied to a stake. Her arms and legs were both bound, and there were three hooded and armed men standing behind her. As the camera zoomed in closer, you could see the cuts and bruises on her cheeks. A gag was stuffed crudely into her mouth, but her eyes were exposed. And as the camera tracked towards them, you could see the despair that had overwhelmed her.

‘Shit,’ muttered Porter. In less than twenty-four hours I’m going to be there as well.

On the news, the Liberal Democrat leader had called today for troops to be brought home from Iraq, and even the Conservatives were calling for a debate. Sky switched to some footage from Prime Minister’s Questions at the House of Commons earlier that day. The PM had looked rattled as he repeated his earlier line that everything humanly possible was being done to secure Katie Dartmouth’s release, but that they could not negotiate directly on the kidnappers’ main demand. ‘All I say to people is this,’ he repeated, the strain showing in his face. ‘There can be no turning back, nor can there be any surrendering to the forces of terror.’ The words, however, were met by a stony silence from his own side of the house, and by barracking from the opposition.

On the viewers’ poll, Sky was reporting that 72 per cent of people wanted British troops taken out of Iraq if there was a chance that it might save Katie’s life. They switched briefly to the launch of a new government initiative to encourage more teenagers to go to the gym. Their political editor came on the screen to dismiss it as an ‘eye-catching initiative, designed to deflect attention from the kidnapping story’, and within minutes Sky had gone back to the Katie Dartmouth saga. The website showing pictures of Katie’s captivity had already received twenty million visitors from around the world. In Trafalgar Square, the ‘Vigil for Katie’s Release’ had grown overnight, and the police now estimated there were five thousand people camping out overnight in the square, and they had pledged to remain there until the PM started negotiating directly for Katie Dartmouth’s release. The Sky reporter started interviewing one of them, pointing out that the forecast was for sweeping rains and gales across London tonight. ‘We don’t care,’ said a young woman dressed in a blue overcoat. ‘We’re staying here until the war is finished, and Katie Dartmouth is brought back from the Lebanon alive.’

Then the coverage switched to some breaking news. Sir Elton John had just announced that he was recording a special version of ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’ with reworked lyrics, designed to appeal for Katie’s release. The song was being recorded tomorrow, and would be available as a download on iTunes by Friday morning. Already there were predictions that it would eclipse the massive sales of his reworked version of ‘Candle in the Wind’ composed for Princess Diana’s funeral.

Christ, thought Porter to himself. The whole country is going nuts. And I’m the only man with any chance of bringing it back to its senses.

There was a knock on the door. Porter glanced up. Danni was coming into the room, with her bag of medical kit under her arm. He had already dimmed the lights in his small bedroom, so the room was mainly lit by the glow of the TV screen. He killed the sound, and looked back up towards her, noticing the way the fuzzy light from the tube caught the blonde streaks dyed into her hair, creating a golden glow around her shapely face. ‘My medicine,’ he said with a smile.

She nodded, kneeling down beside him. ‘Roll up your sleeves,’ she said.

Porter planted his feet on the floor. He was wearing just a sweatshirt and black jeans, and he pushed up the sleeve on his left arm to expose the bare flesh underneath. Danni had already taken a swab of cotton wool, and was smearing some disinfectant across the skin. Porter closed his eyes as the needle pierced him, wondering if he was about to be put to sleep: he didn’t mind injections too much, but didn’t like to watch them. ‘All done,’ she said, within a fraction of a second.

‘There’s another kind of medicine I need,’ said Porter. ‘The kind you find in a bottle.’

‘You’re going tomorrow,’ said Danni.

Porter nodded.

‘To where Katie Dartmouth is being held?’

‘That’s why I need a drink.’

Danni flashed a smile. ‘Christ, I’d need a drink too if I was going there,’ she said. She reached in her bag, pulling out a half-bottle of white wine. ‘This do?’

Porter reached for the bottle. It was one of the Australian whites you buy at Tesco to take home with you when you pick up a ready-meal on the way home from work. It wasn’t what he usually liked to drink, but right now he was desperate for anything. This was the first alcohol he’d seen since he’d set foot in the place thirty-six hours ago, and he wasn’t about to turn it down. ‘Care to join me?’

Danni shrugged. ‘OK,’ she said.

Porter unscrewed the cap, pouring the wine into two tumblers he’d grabbed from the washbasin. He took a sip, allowing a moment for the alcohol to hit his bloodstream. It was hard for him to remember the last time he’d gone this long without a drink. Living on the streets, he was almost always too short of cash to put a roof over his head, and often too short to get anything to eat either. But he always found money for a drink.

‘What happened to you?’ asked Danni.

She took a sip of the wine, and sat down just a few feet from him on the end of his bed. As she crossed her legs, Porter noticed the seam of her black tights, running up the side of her shapely legs, and disappearing into the tempting folds of her crisp white skirt. Suddenly, he was aware she was noticing the way he was casting his eyes up her legs, and snapped them away. Stop kidding yourself, he reminded himself. She can’t be more than twenty-four or — five. Young enough to be your daughter. And let’s face it, mate, even the women your own age aren’t interested in you. Don’t even think about the young ones.

‘I had some bad breaks, that’s all,’ said Porter.

Danni shook her head, tossing aside her blonde hair as she did so. ‘That’s rubbish,’ she said. ‘You were Regiment once. The best of the best —’

‘How’d you know that?’ said Porter.

Danni laughed, taking another sip of wine. ‘This is a very small place,’ she said. ‘And nobody gossips like an office full of spies. This lot love to know what everybody else is up to.’

Maybe that’s why someone tried to kill me, thought Porter. Maybe word leaked out somehow. Maybe it got through to some al-Qaeda or Hezbollah guys in London, and they wanted to take me out before I had a chance to get out to Lebanon.

‘You have to be tough to get in, don’t you?’ said Danni. ‘I thought there were special tests?’

Porter could feel his mind flicking back almost two decades. There were special tests all right. He’d spent weeks of his life tabbing through the Brecon Beacons, with a deadweight on his back, and with the Welsh rain lashing into his face. He’d done the rock climbing, and the abseiling, learnt how to fly a plane and drive a tank, and he’d done enough hours running around the killing house to last a man several lifetimes. He’d watched men die as well: two guys had bought it on the selection courses he’d been on, good lads both of them who just wanted to prove they could hack it, but who must have been cold in their graves for almost twenty years now. And for what? A few years taking orders from some jumped-up public schoolboys, before they toss you back on the scrapheap, and walk straight past you on the street when you ask them to help you out with the price of a beer.

‘Because you were in a bad way when you came in here,’ said Danni. ‘I mean, I thought Regiment guys could get good jobs in industry. Or go out to Iraq, and earn two or three grand a week in security.’

Not me, thought Porter. I flunked it. And once you’ve done that, there is no way back.

‘I had …’ Porter paused, taking a sip of the wine, already wondering if she might have something stronger tucked away in her handbag. What was it I had exactly? he wondered? Why couldn’t I get back into the world again? Maybe if I’d been able to figure out an answer to that I wouldn’t have been searching around at the bottom of so many beer glasses all my life. ‘I was out in the Lebanon. A long time ago. I was going in with my unit to get a hostage out, but I fucked it up.’

‘Go on,’ she whispered.

He looked up at Danni, his expression solid and strong. He held up his left hand. ‘That’s how I lost these,’ he said, nodding towards the missing fingers. ‘But that wasn’t the worst of it. I lost three guys from my unit, good men. It was my fault, you see. My own sodding fault. They’d have lived if I hadn’t …’

Porter stopped talking, leaving the sentence hanging between them. It felt strange to be talking about it. He’d tried to discuss it with Diana, but that was years ago, soon after he came back, but she was so preoccupied with the baby she’d hadn’t had any time to listen to him, and pretty soon he found it easier just to have another drink and forget about it. Since then, he’d never spoken about it to anyone. He just brooded on it himself, burying the story deeper and deeper within himself, until it was as much a part of him as the blood running through his veins.

‘If you hadn’t what …?’

He shrugged, emptied the wine glass into the back of his throat, and refilled it from the bottle. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘It matters to me.’

‘I let a kid live, and then he killed my three mates.’

Danni edged forward on the bed, so that there was only a couple of feet separating them. ‘And you think going back there will fix it for you?’ she said.

She was looking straight at him, her bright blue eyes alive with curiosity, with a hunger for knowledge that Porter found puzzling. ‘I sure as hell hope so,’ said Porter with a shrug.

She edged another few inches closer. With her left hand, she was brushing a lock of hair away from her face, and her right hand was resting on the top of the bed. Slowly, she uncrossed and then crossed her legs again, and Porter was struggling to keep his eyes away from her. She was so close to him that Porter couldn’t escape the heady smell of the perfume splashed across her body.

‘I hope so too,’ she said softly, leaving her lips slightly parted, and her eyes half closed as she completed the sentence, ‘because it’s a bloody brave thing to do.’

Porter’s hand edged forwards on the bed, so that it was just inches from hers. Christ, she’s coming on to me, he told himself. Unless the signs have changed completely in the years since I last tried it on with a girl, I could be in with a chance here. He could feel his heart thumping. He wanted her, of course. She was blonde, and buxom, and dressed in a white, crisply starched nurse’s uniform: what man wouldn’t want her in his bed. But when you live out on the streets, he reminded himself, you stop even thinking about women. They aren’t on your radar screen. Christ, I’m buggered if I even know what to do any more.

‘Not that brave,’ said Porter, his tone turning weaker.

‘I think you’re plenty brave,’ she said. ‘And strong …’

Her hand was almost touching his now. Porter let his right hand stretch out, his fingers creeping across the bedding, until slowly they reached hers. He could feel the warmth of her skin against his, and as he looked up at her face, her eyes were still half closed and her lips still parted a fraction. He moved closer towards her, gripping her hand in his, and suddenly her eyes opened wide, and she looked straight at him and smiled. ‘Kiss me,’ she said slowly.

Porter leant into the kiss, and in the next instant could feel her tongue lashing into his. The embrace was passionate and urgent, as if they were both painfully aware of how little time there was. He could taste the wine on her lips as he flicked his tongue against hers, and her breath was warm against his skin. He could feel her breasts thrusting into his chest, and even through her lace bra, he could feel her nipples stiffening. Porter ran his hand down towards her legs, making impact just above the knee. Small gasps of pleasure started to moan from her lips as he ran his hand slowly up the side of her thigh, until it was nestling in the warmth of her crotch. Danni’s own hands were roaming across Porter’s chest, tugging at his sweatshirt. She rolled onto her side, and then suddenly was underneath him, pulling him down into the warmth of her body. ‘Fuck me,’ she muttered, her voice husky and harsh. ‘Fuck me right now.’

Porter pulled away her tunic, and buried his face in her chest. His tongue was lashing against her nipples, enjoying the way her large breasts rose and swelled under his touch. As he did so, her hands were busy unbuckling his trousers. In the next moment, Danni had turned him over, stripping the last of his clothes off him, then making him wait a few tantalising moments as she slowly peeled away her dress and tights, leaving just her lace knickers for him to feast his eyes upon. Jesus, thought Porter, as he lay back on the bed and watched her head disappearing towards his groin, girls have learnt a new trick or two since the last time I did this.

The sex was hot and frantic, over in a matter of minutes, but no less satisfying for that. Porter had worried briefly about someone coming in, but the door was bolted. When they finished, they lay wrapped in each other’s arms, and for a second Porter found himself wondering about the security cameras he felt certain they had installed in the room. Sod it, he thought with a wry smile. They can watch if they want to. I might even buy a copy of the tape from them.

Danni lay on the side of the bed, her body still vibrating with pleasure. She looked up into his eyes, then planted another kiss on the side of his cheek. ‘They don’t think you’re coming back, you know,’ she said.

‘What?’

He could feel her hands tickling his chest, and couldn’t help himself from smiling. It was so long since he’d been with a woman — there had been one brief girlfriend when he managed to hold down a job for three whole months quite soon after Diana threw him out of the house but since then nothing — that he’d forgotten how good it felt to have someone’s arms around you. It made him feel alive again, pushing away the demons that raged inside his mind: already he was wondering about when he might see her again.

‘They were talking about it, I heard them,’ said Danni. ‘Layla and some of the other case officers.’

‘What did they say exactly?’

‘They reckon there isn’t much you can do,’ said Danni. ‘This Hassad guy, they reckon he’s a ruthless bastard, and whatever you offer him, he won’t accept it. He’ll kill Katie Dartmouth just like he said he would, and then … well, it’s not going to leave you in much of a position, is it?’

Her eyes flickered up tenderly towards Porter’s.

Porter remained impassive. ‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said firmly. ‘Whether I can get her out or not …’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Hell, I don’t know. It’s worth trying, that’s all I know.’

‘Aren’t you scared?’

‘Of a few ragheads? Fuck, no. They run around screaming to Allah and all that bollocks, but you put in a bullet into them and they fall over pretty quick.’

‘But … of dying?’ asked Danni.

Porter paused. He’d thought about that sometimes over the last few years. When you lived out on the streets, you got used to the idea you weren’t going to reach a ripe old age. ‘Dying isn’t so bad,’ he said. ‘There are worse things that can happen to man. Trust me, I’ve been there.’

Slowly, Danni climbed on top of him, grinding her crotch into his groin. There was a wicked, lustful smile playing across her smudged red lipstick. ‘I want to fuck you one more time before you go,’ she said.