Strike Back

EIGHTEEN

The drive took two hours, but it seemed like much longer. The Unimog was at least five or six years old, Porter reckoned, and its suspension had taken a hammering from the rough dirt tracks it had spent its life driving along. There were six of them in total: Hassad, the four men who had survived the firefight, plus Porter. Hassad sat in the front, along with the driver, while Porter was squeezed into the back with the other blokes. The wounded man was brave enough, but every jolt and bump in the road was tearing up the wound in his chest, and he was moaning with pain through most of the trip.

Where they were going, Porter had no idea, and he judged it better not to ask. He reckoned they were travelling somewhere through the Lebanese and Syrian borderlands, but the driver was keeping to the dirt tracks, steering away from anything that looked like a main road, so Porter never got a chance to look at a road sign that might help him establish his bearings. From time to time, he could see the lights of a small village, but even if the track they were on went through it, the driver veered off, and pushed the vehicle cross-country until they could connect with the track on the other side of the village. Whether he was doing it because they didn’t want to be seen, or because they didn’t want Porter to see where he was going, he couldn’t tell. A bit of both maybe, he decided. After driving for an hour, they put a blindfold on him, so after that, Porter had even less idea where they were going.

Porter had tried to talk to Hassad when the Unimog had pulled away from its hiding place, but he told him to be quiet. His men had to rest. He handed around some pitta breads, spread with some kind of chickpea mixture, and they all swigged on the same bottle of water. He was grateful for the food even though it didn’t taste of much. Then the other blokes in the back went to sleep. As the vehicle powered forward, Porter couldn’t get any rest. He was trying to think, to straighten out in his own mind what had just happened, and what he needed to do next. He had no idea who had captured him, or why they wanted him dead. If it wasn’t Hassad, then someone must have leaked where he was, and what mission he was on. And that could only be someone back at the Firm.

By the time the Unimog came to a halt, even Porter was fighting off sleep, struggling to keep himself alert. He judged that it must be nine or ten at night. Only twenty-three hours or so until the deadline set for Katie Dartmouth’s execution. And probably my own as well, he reflected.

To Porter, their destination looked like a disused mine. The Mercedes had turned off the track, and down a steep, rough slope that led inside a massive crater. There was a roadblock across the track leading into it, manned by three armed men, and even though they knew Hassad they still checked the vehicle before letting it pass. Taking their security seriously, Porter noted. This place is hard enough to get into. It will be even harder to get out again.

Around him, he could see some tall cranes, and a long conveyor belt led along the length of the crater towards an old, abandoned processing plant. A metal mine, thought Porter. Maybe copper or zinc. The crater must have measured two hundred yards, by a hundred: perhaps they started with an open-cast mine and then went underground, because there were doorways dotted around the crater that looked as if they led down into mineshafts. A perfect place to keep a hostage. Discreet, easy to defend, and virtually impossible to escape from. Even if I did manage to get Katie loose, how would I ever get her out of here?

‘Wait here,’ said Hassad, as they all climbed out of the Unimog.

Porter stood for a moment next to the vehicle. The wounded man was already being taken towards one of the mineshafts, but the other men stayed behind next to Porter, all of them cradling their AK-47s in their chests. Porter was sure he could smell some wild flowers in the night air, and there was a musty, metallic aroma that came from the piles of broken ore scattered around the crater. Copper, Porter reckoned. He’d had a mate who’d been a plumber once, and whenever you met the bloke for drink, he always had the same smell of burnt copper clinging to his skin after a day’s work.

Hassad had returned to the vehicle and was looking straight at Porter. ‘Are you here to kill us?’

Porter didn’t so much as blink. ‘We just want a discussion.’

‘Then come,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk inside.’

Porter followed him across the crater. It was a walk of about thirty metres to the mineshaft, and they completed it in silence. As he walked, Porter was trying to make a mental recce of the layout of the place. Alongside the Mercedes, there were two other vehicles: a small Skoda Felicia, and a big Honda CR-V that had a couple of dents in its side. Close by, he saw a small, diesel-powered electricity generator that was obviously powering the place. He’d already seen a few men go in and out of the mineshaft, so he calculated there must be a whole platoon of Hezbollah fighters here. How many? I’m probably about to find out.

Hassad pushed open the doorway. The entrance to the mine opened up into a small, low room, with a single electric lamp at one side. The walls were composed of a sandy, stained rock, cut into deep grooves where the mineshaft had been sunk. Directly in front of them was a metal cage lift. Hassad slung the wire door open, and instructed Porter to step inside before he followed and pulled the lever. The lift started to drop: Porter judged they’d descended at least twenty-five or thirty metres into the ground before the lift came to a juddering halt.

As Porter stepped out, he could see a corridor leading into the interior of the abandoned quarry. Single-bulb electric lights were slung up on the low ceiling every twenty metres, but they did no more than cast a pale, murky light through the space. Hassad unhooked a gas lamp from the wall, turning up its light, and then starting to descend a rickety flight of wooden steps. Porter counted thirty steps down, twisting through a narrow channel carved into the rock. Glimpses of the copper could just about be seen in the walls. At the bottom, the space widened out into a cave, with six different tunnels leading off in different directions. In the centre, there was some broken and rusty machinery that must once have been used to cut out the ore and lift it up to the surface, but from the state of it Porter guessed it must have been years since the mine was worked. Some water was dripping through the roof. Hassad took the first tunnel, a sharp left from the bottom of the staircase.

The passageway was narrow, no more than four feet across, and only six feet high: it had been carved out of the rock to ferry the miners deep into the ground, and there was no room for more than one man to pass at the same time. One bloke with an assault rifle could hold this place against an army of men, Porter reflected grimly. They had chosen it with care. Even if the British did find out where Katie Dartmouth was being held, they could send in a whole battalion and still not have much chance of getting her out.

Not alive anyway.

Hassad led him into a small room. It measured ten feet by six, there was a straw bed in one corner, and some coffee was brewing on a stove made from hot bricks. There was a sweet, sticky smell to the air that Porter found nauseating. In one corner, there was a lamp, but there was a cloth thrown across it, as if Hassad didn’t like the light too much. He poured some coffee into two small white cups, and handed one to Porter. ‘So now we can talk,’ he said flatly.

Porter took a hit of the coffee. It was thick and black, with a sludge of grounds at the bottom. He could feel it hitting his veins, washing aside some the exhaustion that had afflicted him since he’d touched down in this country. He had thought about this moment for the last few days, but now it was here, he realised you couldn’t plan a deal like this one. Sometimes a man had to be guided by his wits and his instincts alone. If they weren’t good enough to get him through, then it was no use imagining anything else would.

‘You know who they were, don’t you?’

‘Who?’ said Hassad.

‘The bastards who took me.’

Hassad drained the last of his coffee and grabbed a handful of cashew nuts from a bowl next to the coffee pot. In the semi-darkness of the room, you could hardly see the deformity around his mouth. You could see the tiredness, however. This was a man who spent his life living underground, and only emerged blinking into the daylight for the occasional fierce firefight.

‘I went to the café to find you,’ said Hassad. ‘It was as I had arranged it. When I arrived, you weren’t there, but I spoke to the barman, and he said that you had been led away by two men.’

‘They had the password.’

‘Then you were betrayed,’ said Hassad. ‘The British can’t be trusted. That won’t come as news to anyone down here.’

‘Who says it wasn’t one of your people who betrayed me?’ said Porter. ‘There could be plenty of people who didn’t want me to come here.’

‘Everyone here is loyal to me, and loyal to the cause,’ said Hassad. ‘There are no traitors within Hezbollah.’ A thin smile twisted up his deformed mouth. ‘Betrayal is a British speciality.’

‘The bastards who took me looked like Arabs to me.’

‘They are, but they work for a company called Connaught Security Services,’ said Hassad. There was no emotion in his voice. Porter realised he was in the company of a soldier: a man who killed people when he had to, but who always respected his enemy.

‘It’s a British private security firm, with offices throughout the Middle East. They are in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and out here as well. They work for whoever pays them. Mining companies, oil companies, airlines. And the British government as well when it suits them.’

But why the hell did they take me? Porter asked himself. Who were they working for?

‘We have contacts inside their organisation, which was how we found out that they had taken you, and where,’ said Hassad. ‘Once we knew that, we had no choice but to come and get you. Three of my men died, however.’ He looked sternly at Porter. ‘Your life doesn’t come cheap, Mr Porter. Now it is time to tell me why you are here.’

‘To bring Katie Dartmouth home,’ said Porter.

Hassad listened to the statement without a flicker of reaction.

‘You have details, I suppose, of your government’s willingness to bring its troops home from Iraq,’ he said flatly. ‘We have already said the woman will be released so long as this one simple condition is met.’

Porter took a step forward. ‘Is she here?’

Hassad nodded.

‘I want to see her.’

There was a flicker of doubt across Hassad’s face, but then the twisted mouth turned up into a smile.

‘Of course,’ he replied.

He started to walk from the room. Porter followed him, out into the corridor, and back along to the main meeting point at the bottom of the staircase. Hassad took another tunnel. It stretched for thirty metres, although Porter quickly realised the lamp wasn’t powerful enough to illuminate it to the end. They had walked for ten metres along its length when Hassad suddenly stopped. Right in front of him there was a solid steel door built into the side of the rock. Two men were standing outside, both of them dressed in black, and with AK-47s strapped to their chests. Hassad nodded to them, and they nodded back, but neither of them spoke. Hassad pushed the door open, then stepped inside. ‘This way,’ he said, glancing back.

Porter started to follow. The pictures of Katie Dartmouth broadcast over the Internet and TV in the days after her captivity had been burned into his memory. But this was different. This was real life.

Hassad extinguished the gas lamp: an electric line had been fed down here from the generator above, and there were two lamps illuminating the room, making it far brighter than anywhere else in the mine. The room was a decent size, significantly larger than Hassad’s own room, or any of the other spaces Porter had seen cut into the rock. It was at least fifteen feet deep and twenty wide. The walls were squarer than they were elsewhere, and the room felt dry: there was none of the metallic dampness that filled the rest of the mine. There was a smell of sweat and excrement, like walking past an open sewer. In one corner, there was a webcam fixed to a wooden tripod: Hassad switched it off as soon as they stepped inside. But although the room was probably better than he expected, Katie Dartmouth herself looked far worse. As Porter looked at her, he could feel his heart sinking within his chest. What kind of barbarians could do this to an innocent woman? What kind of political point could possibly be worth this kind of suffering? How low into the pits of cruelty can a man sink that he would make another human being endure this amount of humiliation and pain?

He could feel the anger flowing through his veins. If you didn’t deserve to die for what you did to me sixteen years ago, then you’ve certainly put the ink on your own death warrant with what you are doing right here and right now. No man capable of inflicting that kind of misery can complain about the grisly death that justly awaits him.

Katie was tied to a stake, exactly as she had been depicted on television — though at least the gag had been removed. It was a thick wooden pole, stripped of its bark, and dug deep into the ground. Her hands were strapped behind her back, held in place with thick leather bindings, and her feet and her chest were lashed to the stake as well. It was impossible for her to move a muscle from her neck downwards. She was wearing the clothes she had been captured in, but by now they were stained and filthy. Her blouse was ripped, and there was a gash running down the side of her blue jeans. No one had unstrapped her to allow her to go to the toilet, so it was obvious she had no choice but to soil herself where she was. A vile stench was rising up from her stake, and around her feet it was possible to see small piles of human waste. It was her face that looked the worst, though. Her eyes were bloodshot and wasted, with a dark, hollow look to them, and the skin across her face was already dry, stretched and caked with sweat, dirt and blood. There was a cut across one cheekbone, which had dried into an ugly scar, but with some blood still seeping from the wound. And her hair was matted, thick with sweat, and was starting to form itself into ugly clumps that would soon fall clean away from her head.

The pretty young television star who was filling a thousand newspaper front pages back in Britain was long gone. Instead, her place was taken by a haggard, beaten person, who was already closer to a corpse than a woman.

How long exactly she had been tied to this stake, it was impossible for Porter to tell. Probably since they took the poor girl late on Sunday night. That made five continuous nights now. It would be virtually impossible for her to get any sleep, nor did it look as if they had been feeding her. There was a jug of water on a table next to her, but there was no way she could reach it with her arms bound behind her back. The closer you looked at her, Porter realised, the more of a miracle it was that she had survived this long. Another day, and the bastards probably wouldn’t need to chop her head off. She’d be dead already.

They might not have tortured her — not yet anyway — Porter told himself, but that made no difference. They were treating her worse than any animal.

Her eyes rolled towards his, the eyeballs moving slowly in their sockets. Porter had seen eyes like that before. There were plenty of junkies out on the streets, and they all had dilated pupils and eyeballs they were incapable of moving properly. It was one of the ways of spotting them, and Porter was always quick to steer clear of the crackheads sleeping rough on the streets: they were violent and dangerous, and usually so out of their heads they would attack you for no reason. Her eyes were exactly the same: slow, empty, full of pain, and devoid of any hope. But it wasn’t any kind of drug that had made her like that. It was the bastard standing right next to him.

Porter clenched his fists. It would take a man of iron self-discipline not to land a punch on Hassad’s face right now. And he had never been a man who had counted self-control among whatever qualities he might possess.

It was clear Katie Dartmouth was finding it hard to focus. Her mouth was immobile, and her face was too caked in blood and sweat for any sort of expression to be read into it. But you could see from her eyes she was confused and terrified. The last few days had taught her to greet every new moment with dread and loathing, and this one was no different. She was looking at Porter, struggling to focus, and yet as she did so, she seemed to flinch. ‘Are you …?’

She was struggling to speak, but it sounded more like the strangled cry of a dying animal than any noise a human might make. Again, Porter could feel a wave of anger welling up inside him. Her lips were so dry, and her throat so weak that it was clearly painful for her even to finish the sentence. ‘Are you …?’ she started again, this time trying to move her head upwards slightly so that she could see him properly.

‘I’m English, yes,’ said Porter, looking straight at her.

For the first time it was possible to see something other than despair in her eyes. Not hope exactly, Porter realised. That would be putting it too strongly. But there was some strength there that he hadn’t seen when he’d first walked in: a sign that she might be able to struggle through the next few hours at least.

‘Who …?’

Suddenly she started to cough violently. Her whole body had become badly dehydrated over the last few days and as she started to speak, her throat seized up. Porter could see the shame and humiliation in her eyes as the saliva started to dribble down the front of her mouth. Without being able to lift either of her hands, there was nothing she could do to stop it.

‘Who are you?’ she said finally when she managed to bring the coughing under control.

‘I’m the best news you’ve had since you got here,’ said Porter.

It looked as if she was attempting a smile, but her face was too weak for the muscles to respond. ‘I … I …’

The coughing started up again: a vicious hacking sound that appeared to throttle her, and caused teardrops to start forming around her strained and tired eyes.

‘Give her some bloody water,’ snapped Porter.

Hassad remained immobile, neither saying nor doing anything.

‘Fuck it, man, she’ll be bloody dead by tomorrow morning,’ growled Porter.

He walked over to the jug of water, picked it up and poured some into the tin cup next to it. Then he stood next to Katie, holding the back of her head in his hand. The stench was vile, worse than anything he had ever experienced even while he was sleeping rough. Anyone who has ever been homeless has developed a strong stomach, but Porter was struggling to keep himself from vomiting. He pushed the cup up to her lips, holding her head in position to give her any chance of drinking it. Her throat was so dry that at first the water just washed over her lips, the way a heavy rainfall will wash over the land, but eventually she was able to swallow some of the water, gulping it down greedily. When the cup was empty, Porter turned round to refill it from the jug. But Hassad was now holding it. ‘Here, let me,’ he said contemptuously.

He filled the tin cup, and held it up to Katie’s mouth. The first hit of water had started to strengthen her, and she was better able to drink this time: as soon as the cup was at her mouth, she drank down its entire contents in two swift gulps, with hardly a single drop spilling out over her face. ‘We need to get you looking alive for the camera,’ said Hassad. ‘That way it will be all the more shocking when your head is severed from these shoulders for all the viewers watching back at home.’

‘You can’t execute her,’ snapped Porter.

‘I can and I will,’ said Hassad.

‘Who sent you?’ said Katie, her eyes darting nervously from Porter to Hassad.

‘Nobody sent me,’ said Porter. ‘I came of my own accord.’

‘For …’ She started to cough again, and it took her nearly a minute to bring it under control. ‘For what?’

‘I might be able to get you out of here.’

Her head moved slightly from side to side. It was no more than a flick of the neck, and maybe she was just trying to stretch the few muscles she had been left in control of. But Porter could see something else in her expression. She didn’t believe him. Even worse, she didn’t want to believe him. He’d seen the same looks sometimes in the faces of guys dossing down in the street. They’d given up all hope. They no longer reckoned they could do anything for themselves, nor would anyone else be able to rescue them. They were just waiting to die. And the sooner their lives ended, the better.

‘Just wait and see,’ muttered Porter, as Hassad took hold of his shoulder, and guided him back towards the door.

But she had already closed her eyes.

Hassad looked back at her. ‘One more night of suffering, and then your ordeal will be over,’ he said softly.

I’ll get you away from these bastards, Porter said to himself. Or I’ll sure as hell die trying.