Fire Hawk (41 page)

Under normal circumstances a gun would be the most suitable tool for the business he had in mind in this country, but it was a difficult object to travel with. Instead, in his heavy Samsonite briefcase were two nine-inch Sabatier kitchen knives still wrapped in the green
and gold bag of the Knightsbridge store where he'd bought them an hour ago.

He'd been shaken by what had happened in Iraq since he left. Shaken, but heartened too by the knowledge that two of his closest co-conspirators had honoured the pledges they'd all made some three months ago. Since learning of their deaths he'd thought constantly of that evening when the four of them at the heart of the affair had sat together in the untidy kitchen of his Baghdad apartment. Curtains tightly closed, a candle in a jam jar for light and a photograph of his dead wife on the fat-spattered wall above the cooker, they'd each placed a bunched fist down on the cheap plastic-laminate surface of the table, knuckles touching, and sworn to die by their own hands if they had to rather than reveal what they'd agreed that night to undertake. After taking the oath they'd raised up their fists, still pressed together like the hub of a wheel, and held them over the candle so the flame would forge their resolve with its fire.

And now two of the others
were
dead: his late wife's brother Dr Husayn Shenassi, a brilliant scientist and a paragon of kindness, and Major Omar Hasan, his adjutant during the 1991 war, who'd been at his side as they'd picked through their regiment's corpses west of Basra after a decimating raid by B-52s. Dead now, lives taken by their own hands to preserve the secrecy of their conspiracy. But in the choice of who was to die from that original quartet, God had been kind. Husayn and Omar and the handful of men involved with them back in Baghdad had had roles essential only to the development of the plan they'd hatched. The two survivors of that inner council, himself and Sadoun, another major from his regiment, were the ones who'd reserved for themselves the responsibility for its final implementation.

Hamdan remembered again the resolve they'd all felt
at that candle-lit session in his flat. The resolve to rid their nation of its psychopathic leader.

During the early years of Saddam's rule, all of them had taken pride in seeing their country grow in prosperity and stature under his tutelage. All had condoned his brutal methods as being little worse than those of men who'd preceded him. But then, as Saddam's war with Iran dragged on, they'd despaired of the waste in wealth and young men that their leader's megalomania was bringing about.

Then finally, with that ill-judged gamble in Kuwait, they'd watched the devastation of their country being made total.

Hamdan remembered their anguish in the spring of 1991 as he and his defeated fellow officers waited with hope in their hearts for the Americans to sweep up from the south and eradicate their leader.
They
would not have resisted. Few Iraqis would have done. But the Americans never came, declaring it was for the Iraqi people themselves to remove Saddam Hussein, not them.

And the Iraqi people had tried. Tens of thousands of corpses bore witness to how
hard
they'd tried. For their sake, and for the sake of generations to come, it was time for desperate measures to make their sacrifice bear fruit. To think the unthinkable.

A warning bleeped and the commuter train's doors slid shut. Hamdan's heart was pounding. He had no clearly thought-out plan today, just the goal of preserving his secret at any price. With so much blood already shed, a little more would be no burden on his conscience.

As the train clattered over the points on its way from the terminus, he looked out over the bleak south London landscape of sooty brick terraces and drab office towers. There was little beauty surrounding the people living here, he thought to himself, but there
was
freedom.
Freedom from fear and from tyranny. Only those who were deprived of that freedom could know its true value.

The culmination of his scheme was still some days away, days of risk in which his desperate plan could be brought to nothing by men who knew too much.

There were two in London who posed just such a risk. The first he'd tracked down yesterday – a fellow countryman who'd been involved in their plans in a minor role, but who'd feared the very fate Hamdan had in mind for him and had fled to London where he thought he would be safe. He'd found this man too easily yesterday, stumbling across him by accident in a crowded west London street. The man had seen him, recognised him and escaped. But he wouldn't for long.

Now it was the turn of the second target, a man who'd looked him in the eye just once. Someone who'd pretended not to know his secret but
had
known it. A person he'd wanted to eliminate then, but couldn't if he was to secure the return of Salah Khalil. But now Sam Packer had to die – because he'd seen the face of Naif Hamdan. One man among the ranks of the intelligence agencies massing against him able to pick him out from a crowd was one man too many. And Packer, he'd learned in a discomfiting warning from the Ukrainians, had come dangerously close to the truth in Cyprus. He was a man with a terrier mind, Rybkin had said, a man who lacked caution. A man without the sense to leave things alone that didn't concern him.

The Iraqi stared through the window as the streets beside the track became leafier on their journey west. His eyes were unblinking and determined. Doubt and compassion had become unwanted baggage in his life. He knew all about feelings, but knew too they couldn't be allowed to stand in the way of an action that would change the course of history. If only the men he was
seeking could see things from his point of view they would well understand why their lives must end.

Determined as he was, it worried him that he would have to do it with a knife. Killing that way was a skill he'd never had to practise. Using his pistol to finish off the half-dead Iranian boys who'd tried to storm his regiment's berms in 1987, their eyes and tongues bursting with mustard blisters – that had been easy enough. And ending the agony of some of his own soldiers in the spring of 1991, their flesh shredded by shrapnel and hanging from their bones – that had been an act of brotherhood made almost simple by the distancing mechanism of a trigger and black powder. But to plunge in a knife, to feel its point break skin and bone and slice down through muscle in its search for an artery, was an act he dreaded.

The train slowed for a station. He read the sign.

Barnes.

He got out. The mournful moustache was gone from his face. With his newly clean-shaven upper lip, a mid-weight, grey worsted suit under a light raincoat and a Samsonite briefcase in his hand, he could have passed for a salesman.

He'd studied an
A-Z of London
and had memorised the route from the station to the address Rybkin had supplied him with.

Ten minutes' walk should see him there.

Monday morning had passed quickly for Sam. To the bank for a wad of dollars, to a travel agent for the air ticket and to the Ukrainian Embassy for his visa. Now, at midday, the black taxi that had brought him from Kensington dropped him outside the front door to the mansion block. He hurried inside, not looking left or right, concentrating totally on the task ahead. Whatever outrage was being planned by Colonel Hamdan and his
Ukrainian helpers, the time they had in which to prevent it was fast running out.

There was another good reason for his single-minded concentration on his mission: it stopped him thinking about Chrissie.

He slung a suitcase on the bed and put in clothes for three or four days. A quick in and out was how Waddell had described the mission, but life was only that simple in the never-never land of desk men.

There'd been one phone message on the machine yesterday evening after he'd returned from the Banstead Lodge – from Tom Wallace, checking that he had returned
Backgammon
to the Hamble. He'd rung his co-owner and spun some yarn as to why the boat was in Guernsey. Wallace had called him a ‘walking disaster area'.

The flight was at two. One of the Firm's cars was due any minute. He dressed in a light check suit, chose an Italian silk tie, then made sure of his ticket, money and passport for the umpteenth time.

The door buzzer sounded. Everything electrical off, he grabbed the grey raincoat from the hook in the hall, locked the front door and descended to the road.

The driver reached for his case. ‘Take that for you, sir?'

‘Thanks.' Sam had the briefcase in his other hand and the coat over his free arm.

The car was parked in a road at the side of the mansion block. He opened the rear door and slung his briefcase and raincoat onto the seat. Then, as he watched the driver put the suitcase in the boot, he removed his jacket so it wouldn't crease.

He became conscious of quickening footsteps to his left. A glance revealed a tall raincoated man approaching, incongruously wearing dark glasses despite the greyness of the day and with a Kangol cap pulled down hard on
his head. The man bore down on him with increasing speed, gripping a large manila envelope.

Sam froze, certain the man had some desperate purpose and it was to do with
him.
He stared at the leathery face with its hair and eyes so carefully concealed. The man was clean-shaven. A prominent chin.

Fear took hold of him. The figure was five paces away and closing fast. His chin jutted forward as if in an involuntary spasm.

Seen that before, thought Sam. Bloody seen it before!

The hand holding the envelope jerked up, its fingers gripping the corner like they would a dagger.

‘Hey!' The yell dried in Sam's throat. He knew who this was now. Christ, he knew!

Right arm up to protect himself, he balled his left hand into a fist.

Suddenly, from somewhere close, came the whoop of a police siren. Startled, the assailant faltered. Sam began to step back. The envelope slashed down in a sweeping arc, its corner catching his sleeve. Then his heel caught on a paving stone. He lost his balance and fell.

‘Shit!'

The man hovered over him, raising his arm to slash again, but the siren wail alarmed him. He shot a glance back up the road as a police car darted past at the junction. Sam scuttled back. Cursing, the assailant began to run off.

‘
Hamdan!
' Sam yelled after him, his heart racing.

The driver slammed the boot shut. ‘What's up, sir?' The lid had obscured his view of what had happened.

‘Bastard's got a knife,' Sam hissed, picking himself up. He sprinted off in pursuit.

Hamdan turned at the corner of a short alley leading to the high street. He saw Sam closing the gap and hurled his heavy briefcase at him. It spun through the air like a
discus. Unable to swerve in time, the bag caught Sam on the shins.

‘Fuck!' he howled, buckling with the pain shooting through his barely healing legs. He tripped over the case and fell heavily to the ground. ‘Fucking bastard!'

‘You all right sir?' The SIS driver had caught up with him.

‘Get down the alley. After him!'

As the driver jogged off, Sam staggered to his feet. The pain in his damaged shins was excruciating. He hobbled to the corner of the footpath and saw the driver at the far end looking both ways along the high street, scratching his head.

‘Fuck!'

It
was
Hamdan. No moustache now, but the same dog-like face that had watched his torture in Baghdad. The same nervous tic. Hamdan was here. In London. He grabbed the briefcase and opened it. Empty.

He needed to alert his people. As he hurried back to the car with its secure phone, he looked down at his sleeve. There was a small nick in the shirt stained with blood where the knife had caught him. He undid the cuff to look. It was just a scratch.

Waddell wasn't around when he rang Vauxhall Cross. He spoke to a duty officer, giving as good a description of the Iraqi as he could muster.

‘Get the police in on it. This man's dangerous. Very dangerous,' Sam insisted, his heart still thumping.

As he hung up, the driver slipped back behind the wheel.

‘Lost him, sir. Sorry. There's a mass of people on the high street. Want we go look in the car?'

‘Yes.'

The high street was narrow and blocked by slow-moving traffic. They moved along it scanning the pavements, but it was pointless. Hamdan could have hopped into
a taxi, darted down a side road or buried himself in a shop.

‘Fuck this. Get me back to the flat,' Sam ordered, angry with himself for letting Hamdan outwit him. ‘I need to clean up and get another shirt.'

Gingerly he fingered his shins, hoping they weren't bleeding again. He could only spare a few minutes to get straight or he'd be late for the flight.

But
why
was Hamdan in London? Why risk so much to try to kill him?

Because he was getting close, that was why – far too close to the heart of the matter for Hamdan to be confident his plot could still be carried out.

THE NIGHT-TIME CITY
stretched out beneath him as the Airbus made its final approach to Kiev's Boryspil airport. Its web of orange street lamps was dissected by the broad, black snake of the river Dnipro. He caught a glint of gold from the onion domes of the floodlit Lavra monastery perched high above the water, and the occasional sparking flash from ill-connecting tram poles. The old town of Kiev was a fine-looking city, he remembered from a year ago. But the organisation that had tried to kill him in London – would they be one jump ahead of him? Waiting for him here?

The wheels touched and the aircraft taxied in past a row of engineless Aeroflot jets cannibalised for spares. The airport building was dimly lit, several of its neon tubes malfunctioning. The two booths where border guards checked passports glowed brightly, however, their glare luring the arriving passengers as if they were fish. Beyond, in the small baggage hall with its single working belt, nervous Ukrainians from a previous flight queued at customs, struggling with cardboard boxes of electrical goods they'd bought abroad, pale-faced with anxiety about the duties or bribes they would have to pay to get them into the country.