The Watchman

Fifty-Three

I re-joined the others, who looked full of questions but said nothing. I sent Madar off a short way with my AK minus the magazine, to keep an eye out through the scope for Musa’s men. He didn’t need to hear any of this. Then I squatted down so we could talk.

I kept it simple. I told them my name, that I’d been sub-contracted by an officer in SIS to keep an eye on them, and that once I’d heard what Musa intended for them, I’d had no choice but to bust them out.

‘You can’t talk to anyone about me or what I’ve just told you,’ I added.

‘Who says?’ Pryce sounded bullish.

‘Orders from the man who hired me. You’ll be fully briefed when you get home.’

They didn’t say much to that. I suppose hearing that their backs had been covered all along, on the grounds that one of their colleagues thought the mission was a bust, was a little hard to take in. Unfortunately Pryce didn’t want to let it go. I could see she’d been working through the possibilities. ‘If it was somebody in SIS … there’s only one man it could have been,’ she murmured. ‘Tom Vale?’

‘Yes.’

She tossed her head. ‘What the bloody hell did he think he was doing? He thought I needed babysitting, is that it?’ She turned on Tober. ‘I know that’s the only reason you were sent along, to hold my hand. But this?’ Her eyes were bright sparks in an angry face. She had recovered well from the exit and the forced march, and I figured that one day she would make a very good senior intelligence officer. Right now, though, she was midway between being relieved to have escaped with her head and pissed for having been, as she seemed to feel, doubted by a colleague.

Tober did the right thing: he looked right through her and said nothing. She was being unfair and she probably knew it, but getting into a fight over it was pointless.

‘Vale will likely lose his job when it gets out,’ I said. ‘So you should go easy on him. Of course, you have every right to be sour at the guy for not wanting to see your life get tossed away on a dead-end operation … but you’d be wrong. He made the right call.’

She clamped her mouth shut at that, and I hoped that was the end of it. It didn’t last long.

‘Why do you do this work?’

‘It’s what I’m good at.’ She could have asked Tober the same question and got a similar answer. He gave me a look and a raised eyebrow but said nothing. Wise man.

She didn’t have an answer to that and turned her head away, then came straight back.

‘Who else do you work for? You’re American, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. And I work for anybody within reason. Not terrorists, though; I draw the line at that.’ By the look on her face I doubted she believed me. The world’s full of cynics.

‘You’re a mercenary.’

I rode that one easily enough. There was a time when it would have been an easy label to pin on somebody — a not-so-veiled insult. Coming from Pryce it sounded petty. I couldn’t figure out why she was so hostile, and wondered if it was anything to do with me being an outsider.

‘We all work for money,’ I told her. ‘Me, you, Tober here — and Vale. But some people have the luxury of being able to dress it up in things like duty, honour or patriotism.’

She recoiled a little at that, and I noticed Tober grinning in the background. The bastard was enjoying this.

‘Like me, you mean?’ Her eyes flashed with righteous anger. ‘I don’t make any apologies for being patriotic.’

‘Nor should you. But don’t get carried away with thinking that makes you better than anybody else, or because your boss is the British government. And —’ I held up a hand as she looked ready to fly back at me, but kept my voice low — ‘don’t forget it was you who came here to sit down and talk with terrorists and pirates. Those same people were plotting to take off your head.’

It was a low blow and not a particularly valid point, but I was tired and irritated by her snitty manner.

Tober nodded in approval, then put his head down and closed his eyes. The soldier’s prime maxim: when you can’t do anything, sleep; because you never know when you might get the next opportunity.

We sat and waited, alone with our thoughts, until I heard the familiar buzz of Piet’s Daisy circling round from the north-west. He needed to see us clearly enough to get an ID, so he knew he wasn’t flying into a trap. I told Tober to keep us covered and stepped out into the open with Pryce and Madar close behind.

I waited. I could hear the engine but couldn’t see him. He was coming in low to avoid being spotted by Musa’s men, but it meant the engine noise was dispersed over a wide area. I realized that there was a chance of him flying right over without seeing us.

Then Madar stepped up and whipped off his shirt, and began waving it frantically in the air.

I think he was just excited at the prospect of seeing an airplane. But it worked.

Seconds later Daisy appeared, the engine howling as Piet cleared the tops of a bunch of trees, scaring up a raggedy group of crows in protest. He banked sharply, his bush-trained eyes probably spotting Madar’s shirt immediately, and set down on a clear stretch of ground about three hundred metres away.