Текст книги "Ghosts"

Автор книги: Mark Dawson

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PART FOUR

HONG KONG

Chapter Twenty-Two

Hong Kong tended to enjoy dry winters; the guidebooks all suggested that December was one of the better times to visit, with pleasant temperatures and dry days. As the Airbus descended from thirty thousand feet, however, it passed through a deep carpet of cloud that became progressively darker and angrier until it was almost pitch black outside the windows. The rain, as they sank into it, was a deluge, a torrential flood that had hammered on the city for three days and showed no sign of abating. The pilot came over the intercom and did his best to reassure his passengers that, although they were in for a bumpy landing, it was not unusual for Chep Lap Kok. His words did not go very far and, as the plane started to be buffeted by powerful gusts of wind and the rain sheeted against the windows, several passengers closed their eyes and clasped their hands and prayed to whatever deity they thought would protect them. Milton had been to Hong Kong six times before and had been there long enough ago to remember the old airport, Kai Tak, where jumbos seemingly aimed at the ramshackle apartments blocks before banking at the last minute to line up for the approach to the runway. In comparison, a bit of nasty weather at Chek Lap Kok was nothing to get too worked up about.

The details of the new facility resolved from out of the rain-lashed murk: the reclaimed land, the hangars, the servicing areas, the jumbos lined up at the terminal building and then the runway, demarcated by arrays of red and yellow lights. The plane bumped as it descended, the rear wheels screeched as they bit into the asphalt, the front wheel followed, the flaps popped open and the engines squealed as the plane’s headlong rush was arrested.

Milton packed away the book he had been reading and allowed his thoughts to wander a little. Beatrix Rose: that was a name he hadn’t heard for many years. She had disappeared after the botched operation to assassinate DOLLAR and SNOW; or, as he knew now, Pascha Shcherbatov and Anastasia Ivanovna Semenko. There had been nothing from Control that might have explained her absence but that, in itself, was not unusual. Group operations were typically one or two member jobs and, even where Milton had been paired with another, it was usually a different agent each time. Group Fifteen was carefully segmented so that each agent was independent of all the others. It was their own form of the cut-out that had shielded the agents who worked with Mamotchka; should one of them be captured, it would not matter how badly they were tortured since they would not know anything about the other members of the Group. Everyone breaks eventually during torture; it is a simple matter of biology. But you cannot reveal details that you do not know.

Milton knew a little more about Beatrix because she had presided over his selection and training but, even then, his knowledge was limited. He did not know very much about her private or professional lives, where she lived, what she had done before she joined the Group. He did not know her politics, her likes or dislikes, anything that might allow him to dab a little colour on the empty tracing of her personality. He did know that she was a brilliant agent, terrifyingly clear in her focus and relentless when she had been given a target. Of all of the men and women he had worked with during his career with Group Fifteen, Beatrix Rose, who would always be Number One in his eyes, was the most impressive by far.

He realised now, as he remembered her, that he had never really given the question of her disappearance much thought save her luck must have run out during a job. That happened. But now that he knew that she was alive, and hiding in a place like this, he began to wonder. He had experience of Control’s ruthlessness. He had form for seeking to terminate his top agent when he lost his trust in them. It did not seem so far fetched, especially given what Shcherbatov had told him, that he had done the same to her.

He looked out at the multitude of lights that twinkled amid the throbbing power of the storm. Finding a person in a city like this, an abundance of millions crammed onto an island that was much too small for them, was going to be difficult. He hoped that the leads that Shcherbatov had uncovered were enough.

The plane drew up to the gate and the pilot extinguished the Fasten Seat Belts sign. Across the aisle, Anna stood up and muscled her carry-on luggage down from the overhead bin.

“Here we are,” Anna said.

“Here we are.”

Their passports recorded them as Mr. and Mrs. Roberts. For the purposes of their cover story, they were a couple from London in Hong Kong for a vacation. Milton had questioned whether Anna’s accent would raise suspicion but she modulated it effortlessly: the light southwestern twang that she used while in America had been superseded by a more guttural Russian inflection while they were in Moscow and now that, in turn, had been replaced by a flatness that could very easily have located her in the English Home Counties. She was an excellent chameleon.

They followed the snake of passengers down the aisle and disembarked onto the air bridge. As the corridor widened, Anna moved alongside him and slipped her hand in his. Milton did not resist.

* * *

They made it through immigration with no issues and took a cab to the city centre. Anna asked their driver for the Landmark Mandarin and he piloted them through the drenched streets, the tail lights of the cars ahead of them smeared as stripes of red against the sodden asphalt. Milton looked out of the window, reminding himself of the city: everything was tight and cramped, the skyscrapers jostling each other shoulder to shoulder, the buildings sheathed in black glass. They reflected the vast neon signs that flicked between advertisements: a pretty Asian girl, all perfect skin and red lips and gleaming teeth, selling insurance; an SUV, too bulky for these choked roads; confectionary and instant noodles and gambling websites and catwalk models and more cars and online catalogues. The streets were crammed and hectic.

The Mandarin was an expensive, luxury hotel. The reception was neat and functional and the girl behind the desk processed their reservation with good-natured efficiency. Only as they exited the elevator on the fifteenth floor did Milton pause to consider their sleeping arrangements. They were husband and wife; their cover demanded that they share the same room.

Anna approached the door and slid the card key into the reader. She must have detected his unease and, pausing in the doorway, she put a hand on his arm. “It’s a twin room,” she said, standing aside so that he could see into the large room. “Our cover need not extend any further than this.” She left her hand across his bicep and he knew what she was leaving unsaid: unless you want it to.

“This will be fine,” he said.

Milton stepped inside, and, unable to suppress the caution that had been drilled into him over the course of a decade, hundreds of nights spent in identikit rooms like this in countries where the local spooks made it a matter of routine to bug arriving travellers, he made a quick examination: the large en suite with a bath and shower; the twin beds; the large LCD screen on the bureau; the telephone beside the bed. He went back to the start and made a more detailed check. He dropped to his knees and checked under the beds, then he took out a dime from his pocket and used it to unscrew the plug sockets. He took the bulbs from the lights and dismantled the telephone handset. He opened the closet, lifted the television from the bureau and shut it away. It took him ten minutes to satisfy himself that everything was as it should be. Anna watched him quietly, saying nothing.

Milton wheeled his bag to the furthest bed, stood by the window and looked out. The window was high up and the view was impressive. The swarm of people in the street below hurried about their business, their umbrellas like tiny black mushrooms. The skyscrapers bristled, utilitarian and graceless, the tops muffled by low clouds. Lightning forked the sky and, seconds later, the answering boom of thunder rattled the glass in the window.

Seven million people, Milton thought.

He sat down on the edge of the bed, unable to ignore the fatigue that had sunk into his muscles and bones.

Seven million.

The sheer weight of the number pressed down on him oppressively. He had to find one person amid the mad tumult. That person, for all he knew, had been hiding in the city for ten years; hiding successfully, too, which was more than he could say for himself. Control and the Group had located him in just six months and the Russians had found him again soon after that. Beatrix Rose was better than he was. If she didn’t want to be found, Milton wouldn’t find her.

“When will you start?” Anna asked him.

Milton assessed his reserves of energy. The dream had exhausted him, as it always did, and the task could wait another day.

“Tomorrow,” he said.

He took off his shoes and shirt and went through into the bathroom. He closed the door, undressed and stood beneath the shower for twenty minutes, scrubbing the hot water into his scalp. He dried himself and pulled on the dressing gown embossed with the hotel’s logo. He stood before the mirror and regarded himself carefully. He did not inspect himself because of vanity, although pride would have been warranted if he was so inclined. He did so because he was an artisan; his body was his tool and his discipline demanded that it was always in good condition. The horizontal scar on his face seemed to have faded a little, as if blanched by the chill of Moscow, and the tattoo across his shoulders and back was more obvious now that his tan had faded almost completely.

He opened the door and went back into the bedroom. Anna had undressed, her clothes folded neatly on top of her suitcase. She was in bed, her chest rising and falling with the shallow susurration of her breath. Milton watched her sleeping: the long red hair; the full lips; the vulnerable, exposed neck; the slim body with the shape of her breasts perfectly obvious beneath the thin cotton sheet; the curve of her hip; the long legs; the porcelain white, ice-pale, skin. He wondered, for a moment, whether he could allow himself the luxury of accepting her unspoken and yet obvious offer.

No, he decided.

He could not.

He crossed the room quietly, removed the dressing gown and slid between the cool sheets of the other bed. He closed his eyes, listening to the hum of the air-conditioning and the exhalations of her breath.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Milton couldn’t sleep. His mind was turning this way and that and there was nothing that he could do to settle it. He got up and made his way quietly across the room to the chair where he had piled his clothes. He took them into the bathroom and dressed, took one of the keycards from the writing desk, left the room and took the elevator down to the lobby. There was a small business centre just away from the main desk with a couple of Macs, a fax machine and a printer. One of the computers was occupied and so Milton sat down next to the other one, opened the web browser and navigated to Google. He found the information he wanted, closed the browser down, cleared the history and went outside. It was still hot and humid, steam issuing from air vents and from the grates in the street. There was a taxi rank next to the hotel and he nodded to the driver of the one at the front of the queue; he nudged his car forwards and Milton got inside.

“Where to, sir?”

“Connaught Road West,” Milton said. “Sai Ying Pun.”

“Yes, sir.”

It was midnight. Milton had not been particularly surprised that there was an English speaking meeting, even at this hour. Hong Kong was a twenty-four hour city, after all, and being a drunk was a twenty-four hour problem. It was a closed meeting, which meant that only those in the fellowship were able to attend, and its title was Humble in HK. Milton had not been to a meeting for weeks and he knew that he made himself more vulnerable to the dream every extra day he missed. That, in turn, made him more vulnerable to the temptation of taking a first drink and everything he had learned in the months he had spent in the Rooms, all the way through South America and in San Francisco, made one thing perfectly clear: he would not stop at the first drink.

Connaught Road was a flyover that passed through an unlovely area of town in the Central district. Tall office buildings were to the left and a stretch of park was to the right. The driver exited the flyover and looped back around so that he could get to the maze of roads that ran beneath it. Po Fung Mansion was a three storey building with a shuttered takeaway on the ground floor. It was constructed from concrete and its walls were adorned with air conditioning units, a metal balustrade that prevented a drop from the first floor balcony and a collection of unhealthy looking pot plants. Traffic hummed across the flyover and the three-lane road beneath it. It was busy, smokey and noisy, and the three young men loitering outside the entrance to the nearby bar glared dolefully at Milton as he stepped out of the car. He paid the man and the taxi drove off. The men kept looking; Milton ignored them. He saw the familiar sign blowing in the breeze, attached with a piece of string to the door handle: two blue As, within a triangle, within a circle.

He crossed the street, opened the door and went up to the third floor. The meeting had just started: the secretary had welcomed the group and was about to lead them in the Serenity Prayer. He smiled at Milton and indicated an empty seat in the front row. Milton felt self-conscious as he picked his way towards it and sat down gratefully.

The secretary recited the prayer: “God, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

He continued with the familiar preamble and introduced the member who had been asked to read from the Big Book. Milton closed his eyes and listened, gratefully aware that the tension and worry was seeping out of him.

The reader finished and closed the book.

“Do we have any new members tonight?” the secretary asked.

No-one raised their hand.

“Any visitors?”

There was no point in staying silent; they all knew he was fresh at the meeting. “My name is John and I’m an alcoholic,” he said. “I’m from London.”

The others returned the greeting, welcoming him.

The secretary introduced the speaker. The man’s name was Chuck. He was corpulent: he dressed in a white shirt and beige trousers and he talked in a lazy American drawl. He didn’t discuss his background in depth, but Milton gathered that he was stationed in the city on behalf of an American corporation. His story was about the things he had done as a younger man; he did not specify exactly what they were, fencing around the subject even in light of the injunction that members should not fear honesty, but it was obvious that something had happened with his family and that it still caused him great shame. Milton closed his eyes again and allowed the man’s words to wash over him. The precise content of the story was not important (it involved a series of domestic faults that this man had to regret) and it could not have been more different to the bloody crimes that that haunted Milton’s dreams. The point of a good share was to find the similarities and not the differences, and Milton understood the man’s disgrace, his insecurity, and the fear that he would never be able to atone for his sins. Those were the universal similarities that bonded all of them together; the details didn’t matter.

Chuck finished and the secretary opened the floor. There was a long pause and, smiling, the secretary turned to Milton. “How about our visitor?” he said. “Care to share back?”

Milton cleared his throat. “Thank you for your share,” he said. The man acknowledged him with a duck of his head and, for a moment, Milton wondered whether he had said enough. He remembered the advice of his first sponsor, the man who had taken him under his wing at the first meeting he had attended in London: you had to share, he had advised him. It was the only way to draw the sting of the toxic thoughts that would inevitably lead to drink. The others were waiting to see if he was going to continue; he cleared his throat and went on. “I’m not from Hong Kong. Just here on business, stopping for a couple of days and then moving on, but I really needed a meeting tonight. I’m very grateful to have found it.”

“And we’re glad you did too,” said the secretary.

“I don’t really know what I want to talk about. I suppose it is partly about gratitude. I’m grateful to you for being here, I’m grateful to the fellowship for giving me the tools that I need to quieten my mind and I’m grateful that my life has been returned to me. I have a lot of things in my past to regret and this has been the only thing I have ever found that gives me peace. Saying that, I haven’t been to a meeting for days. It’s the longest I’ve been without one throughout my sobriety and I don’t mind admitting that it has shown me that I’m very far from being cured. I’ve been struggling with memories from my past and with the temptation to drink so that I can forget them. I couldn’t sleep tonight and I was close to going into the hotel bar and ordering a gin. If this meeting hadn’t been here, maybe that’s what I would have done. But it was, and I didn’t, and after listening to your story I know that I won’t drink, at least not tonight. Day by day, right? That’s what we say. We just take it a day at a time.” He paused again. He felt better, the stress that had twisted in his shoulders dissipating with every word. “Well,” he said. “That’s it. Thank you. I think that’s what I wanted to say.”

It was one in the morning when the meeting finished and the others explained that they usually went for noodles at a late night restaurant that was around the corner. Milton thanked them for the offer but politely declined. He wanted to have a little time to himself. The hotel was on the other side of the island.

He decided that he would walk.

Chapter Twenty-Four

His thoughts reached back; years ago, although it still felt like yesterday. He would usually do anything to think of something else because the memory was the foundation for the dream. As he walked along the harbour front he allowed himself to remember.

Milton and Pope were in the middle of the desert. It was blisteringly hot, the air quivering so that it looked as if they were gazing through the water in an aquarium, and he could still remember the woozy dizziness of being broiled in the sun for so long. It was Iraq, at the start of the invasion, and their eight-man SAS patrol was deep behind Saddam’s lines. There was some suggestion that the madman was readying his army to fling scuds tipped with nerve gas into Israel and the patrol’s instructions were to set up observation posts, find the launchers and disable them.

A Chinook had dropped them and a second patrol, together with their Land Rovers and eighty-pound Bergens, into the desert between Baghdad and northwestern Iraq. They had been given a wide swathe of territory to patrol. They found one launcher within the first three days; they had killed the crew, slapped a pound of plastique on the fuel tank and blown the equipment to high heaven. They ranged north after that, travelling at night and hiding out during the day, and eventually they had picked up the scent of another crew.

They had tracked them to a village fifty clicks east of Al Qa’im. It was a small settlement dependent on goat herding, just a collection of huts set around a tiny madrasa. The soldiers were elite, Republican Guard, and they were smart. Their launcher was an old Soviet R-11 and they had driven it right into the middle of the settlement, parking next to the school and obscuring the vehicle beneath a camo net. The thinking was obvious: if they were discovered, surely the Americans would think twice about launching a missile into the middle of a civilian area, much less at a target that was next to a school?

They had found an escarpment five hundred feet to the west of the village and settled in to reconnoitre. They would wait where they were until either one of two things had happened: either the launcher abandoned its hiding place and moved out, in which case they would take it down with a LAW missile once it was out of range of the village, or, if it stayed where it was, they would wait until sunset to go in and take out the crew. Those options, as far as Milton was concerned, were the only ones that would remove the risk of civilian casualties.

He used the HF radio to send an update to command and then settled down to wait.

He watched the village through the scope of his rifle. Further away, just visible on the fuzzy hills in the distance, he could see the battered old 4x4s that had transported the goat herders to their animals and the indistinct shape of the men and their goats. Closer, within the village, the crew of the launcher had set up a canvas screen and were dozing beneath it, sheltering from the sun. He breathed slow and easy, placing each member of the crew in the middle of the reticule one after the other. Five hundred yards was nothing. He would have been able to slot one or maybe even two of them before they even knew what was going on, but it would be neater at night, and he did not want to frighten the children. He nudged the scope away from them, observing the women as they went to and from the small river that ran through the centre of the settlement, carrying buckets of water back to their huts. He nudged it to the right, watching the five youngsters in the madrasa. They had been allowed outside to play and run off some steam. They had a yard, bordered by a low chickenwire fence, and they were kicking a football about. Milton watched them for a while. A couple of the boys were wearing football strips, Barcelona and Manchester United, and the cheap plastic ball that they were kicking around jerked and swerved in the gentle breeze. If they knew what the scud launcher was, and the danger it represented, they did not display it in their behaviour. They were just kids having fun. The light sound of their laughter carried up to Milton on that same wind; innocent, oblivious to the chaos that was gathering on the borders of their country that would, within days, obliterate everything in its way in a mad dash to Baghdad.

Pope and the others were out of sight on the other side of the escarpment. They had raised their own small sun screen and were sheltering beneath it. Milton felt the sweat on his back, on the back of his legs, on his scalp. He felt the wooziness in his head and reached down for his jerrycan; the water was warm but he gulped down two mouthfuls, closing his eyes to savour the sensation before replacing the cap and putting it back in the Bergen. The small amount that was left had to last him all day. He scrubbed the sweat out of his eyes with the back of his hand and stared through the scope again.

He knew the sound the instant he heard it. A low, rumbling groan, still ten miles out. He put down his rifle and grabbed his field glasses, scanning the haze where the mountains met the deep blue of the sky. The engine grew louder and he swung left and right until he saw it: a black dot that was coming in low and fast. He centred the dot in the glasses and watched it, hoping that it was something other than what he knew it to be. The jet was a little more than a thousand feet up, running fast, and, as it neared and separated from out of the haze, he started to make out the details: the stubby nose; the weapons pylons on the wings bristling with missiles and the big, onion-shaped bombs; the greedy air intakes three quarters of the way down the fuselage; the wide, split fins of the tail. Milton knew exactly what it was and why it was here: an A-10 Warthog, a tank buster, sent to take out the launcher.

He fumbled for the radio, opened the channel to command and reported that he had a visual of an incoming jet, repeating that the target they had discovered was surrounded by civilians and that the jet needed to abort. There was a delay, and then static, and then, through the hiss and pop, the forward air controller told him to stand down. Milton cursed at her and opened a wide channel, identifying himself and hailing the pilot.

There was the squawk of more static and then the pilot’s voice, enveloped by the sound of his engines: “Manilla Hotel, this is POPOV35. I’ve got a canal that runs north/south. There’s a small village, and there’s a launcher under camo in the middle.”

He hadn’t heard Milton or had been told to ignore him.

Forward air control responded: “Roger that POPOV35. Clear to engage.”

“Roger that, Manilla Hotel. POPOV35 is rolling in.”

Milton threw his rifle down and sprinted for the village.

What happened next was unclear and, in the years that had passed since then, he had dreamt it so many times and in so many different ways that it was difficult to separate the truth from his fevered imaginings of it. He was running, as fast as he could, losing his footing in the deep sand and tumbling down the slope to the desert below, his boots scrambling for purchase and his hands sinking into the sand and dust and then he was up again and running hard. The Hog was a couple of miles away now, the engines louder even though the pilot had throttled back so that he could take his time. Milton ran, his boots sinking into the sand, the effort of freeing them so that he could take another step making his thighs and his calves burn. Sweat poured from his face as if it were a squeezed sponge. He made the outskirts of the village and screamed out that they needed to get away, to run, an old crone who was emptying out a pot of dirty water looking at him with alarm but staying right where she was. He ignored her, aiming for the madrasa. He was a hundred yards away and he yelled out his warning again. The Iraqis heard him, stumbling up to their feet and reaching for their rifles before they registered the noise of the jet, realised what it portended, and ran.

Milton ran past them in the opposite direction.

The children had stopped playing now. They were looking at him in confusion. Their ball rolled gently in the wind, bumping up against the side of the yard fence. One of the boys had trotted over to get it and he was closest to Milton. He was five or six.

Milton would always remember his big, brown eyes.

He screamed at them in Arabic to run.

The confusion on the boy’s face would stay with him for the rest of his life.

Too late.

Much, much too late.

Milton looked up at the pale underbelly of the Hog as it boomed overhead, a thousand yards above; the wing pylons were empty. It had dropped its bomb three hundred yards earlier and now half a ton of high explosives fell in a neat and graceful and perfectly judged parabola that terminated at the launcher. Milton couldn’t remembered what came first: the blinding flash of white light or the roar that deafened him. The blast picked him up and tossed him back twenty feet in the direction that he had arrived. The scorching hot pressure wave rolled over him, and then the wave of debris: the remains of the wooden huts, shards of metal from the launcher, the storm of grit and pebbles. He had been dropped on his back and as he opened his eyes he thought that he must have been blinded. The swirling cloud of black fumes was parted by the wind, revealing the same perfectly clear sky overhead. Debris was still falling from the sky around him. Pieces of cloth fluttered down, soaked in blood. The mushroom cloud unfurled overhead. He could smell the explosives. He could smell burning flesh. He rolled and pushed himself onto his knees. A wave of pain swept over him and he had to fight to prevent himself from fainting. He looked around: no launcher, no huts, no madrasa. No children. He looked away to his right, to the skidded splashes of red across the dun brown, and to the ribbons of bloodied flesh that had been strung from the branches of a nearby, newly leafless tree, as if left there to dry in the sun. He looked down at his chest. His shirt was bloodied. He dabbed his fingers down the centre of his sternum, further down his ribcage, to the start of his belly. He felt the rough edge of the shrapnel that had lodged just above his navel.

He didn’t remember very much of what had happened after that. Pope said later that he and the others in the Unit had been disturbed by the approach of the Hog and had seen him running into the village. They saw the bomb detonate and had found him on the lip of a deep crater where the launcher and the madrasa had been. He was slipping in and out of consciousness. They dragged him away. The explosion had painted the sky with a column of smoke fifteen hundred feet high and they knew that if any Iraqi units were nearby they would be sent to investigate. Pope carried him back to the Land Rover and they drove for ten miles until they found an abandoned shack where they had stopped. They had radioed for emergency medivac on their way out of the village but there had been ground-to-air activity and the rotor-heads were proceeding cautiously; they preferred to wait until darkness. None of the other men in the patrol thought Milton would make it. He was delirious and remembered nothing. Pope tended the wound as best he could. He told him afterwards that he was sure that he would bleed out, that there was nothing he could do to stop it, but, he had stayed with him, pressing a compress around the shrapnel until his hands were covered in Milton’s blood and, somehow, he had staunched the flow. An American army Blackhawk was sent to exfiltrate them, guided in by a tactical beacon, and it delivered Milton to the forward operating base in Saudi. He was in theatre almost as soon as the wheels touched down.