Survival (4 page)

Jimmy had been on the move for hours. The terrain
was rugged and the air was thin. He could hear his
brain assessing the surroundings. He had to be over
3000 metres up, he guessed. Above the snowline.
That put him somewhere on one of the highest peaks,
in the centre of the mountain range. But however
difficult it was, he had to keep moving if he was going
to stay alive. And there was the constant fear at the
back of his mind, driving him on – the British attack on
France. He had to stop it.

By now the agony that shot through his body with
every step had mutated in his mind into some kind of
reassurance. It told him he was still alive. That he was
still moving. His legs felt so heavy that his feet dragged
along the ground as he walked.

He travelled in a dead straight line, but the going was
getting steeper. At least the fog had cleared a little so
he could see his route further ahead. In the crash he’d
slid a long way down the slope and he was paying for
that now, always having to march against the gradient.
Every few minutes he came to what looked like an
impassable rock face, but his body seemed to relish the
challenge. Despite the onset of frostbite and the
cracked ribs, Jimmy free-climbed as if he’d been born a
mountaineer. The hooks of shoehorn he’d fixed to his
soles served as makeshift crampons.

With his eyes squinting against the elements and his
body straining to keep his basic systems going, Jimmy
fought on. But the real torment was in his mind. The
whiteness that surrounded him seemed to reach into
his brain to plant fear and worry, but most of all anger.

As he heaved himself up the cliff face, he thought back
to the very first night that NJ7 had come for him. From
that moment, almost everybody he trusted had betrayed
him. He had believed Miss Bennett to be his form teacher
and he’d even gone to her for protection. She had turned
out to be the one woman who most wanted Jimmy dead.
He felt a bitter laugh scratch at his throat.

But it had happened again and again. Eva’s parents
had pretended to protect him, then betrayed him to
NJ7. Colonel Keays had fooled Jimmy with the promise
of CIA refuge. Jimmy’s stomach turned over when he
thought of his own gullibility. How had he trusted any of
these people? He had even convinced himself to use his
assassin skills to work for Keays.

Never again
, Jimmy thought. He told himself that if
he made it across the Pyrenees to see Uno Stovorsky –
or any other agent of the French Secret Service – he
would beware every word that was said.

Trust your instinct
, he urged himself. But in his heart
he knew that even his instinct was untrustworthy.
Sometimes it was the human part of him acting out of
fear, or loyalty, or emotion. Sometimes it was the
assassin in him, spurring him on towards self-defence,
survival and violence. Perhaps even murder.

How could he know which instincts to trust and
which to resist?

Around him, the light was fading. When darkness fell
Jimmy knew the temperature would plummet even further.
But there was no time to dig shelter for the night and rest.
He had to keep going. There was a battle coming.

The largest destroyer in the British Navy dropped anchor
16 kilometres off the coast of Western Sahara. The waves
pounded against the iron, but to the commanders and
crew of
HMS Enforcer
the conditions were irrelevant. Two
hundred and fifty men and women in pristine white or navy
uniforms moved through the vessel with such precision and
efficiency they were like parts of a single machine.

In no time the Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles were
primed. The targets were locked into the guidance system.
Everything was perfect. Nobody needed to say a word.

Except one.

The front section of the central mast contained the
command centre – a triangular room with a low ceiling
and a door at each corner. This was the brain of the
ship. The longest wall, the base of the triangle, was a
huge window that looked out over the front of the
vessel. All along it, at hip level, was the control desk.
From here, the senior officers and their staff made all
their decisions and issued their orders.

But one man was completely out of place. He was
wearing a suit and a life-jacket and was at least 50
centimetres shorter than everybody else. Compared to
their naval steel, he was made of pie pastry.

“Remember,” he said, his voice quivering, “we can’t—”

He was cut off by a glance from Lieutenant-Commander
Luke Love. Love’s expression was harder than the iron of
the ship’s hull. The sunlight coming through the glass
picked out the proud gold braid on the upper part of his
sleeve – two stripes with a single loop.

“A single misplaced explosion…” the other man
whispered, so intimidated by Lt Cdr Love’s glare that he
could hardly speak. “It’s such a delicate environment,
that’s all. And we don’t really know what safety systems
Mutam-ul-it has in place. You know, for the…”

“Don’t worry, Dr Giesel,” Love replied calmly. “We
know enough.” His voice was strangely cheerful, but
deep and serious at the same time. Like an experienced
headmaster. “Your report told us which specific
buildings to hit and which to avoid,” he explained. “The
place will remain fully operational and almost all in one
piece, ready for your team to take over.”

The muscles round the officer’s mouth creased into
a grim smile. Then he lay his hand on the number pad
of the control desk in front of him and punched in an
eight-digit code.

“Right,” he declared under his breath. “Time to
nationalise this hellhole.”

Even the walls of the town of Tlon showed the troubled
history of the state of Western Sahara. Almost a
century of graffiti was layered on top of itself. The
oldest protested against the rule of the Spanish, from
the time when they had colonised the country. It was
no longer visible under the blurred mess, but since
then there had been plenty of other people to complain
about: the Moroccans (Western Sahara’s neighbours
to the north), the Americans (first for them being
there, then for them leaving), a dozen different football
teams (from the time when the politics were so
complicated even the locals didn’t know who to protest
about) and, most recently, the French.

Every building bore the marks of unrest and
instability. Cracks ran through the stone walls and holes
in the roofs had been covered with ragged, sun-
bleached tarpaulin to keep the heat out. These days the
cracks and holes couldn’t be fixed, even though they let
the rats in, because they were conduits for the cables
of the rudimentary electricity and telephone systems.
They were also used for signalling.

A series of flashes reflected the sunlight from the low
roof of a house. Nobody would have noticed the dark
figure hidden under the tarpaulin. Five hundred metres
away the signal was acknowledged with another flash,
then repeated at a new angle. It was acknowledged again,
a little further away this time, towards the centre of town.

The rooftops of Tlon glittered with rapid flashes.
There were sounds too, on top of the normal bustle in
the labyrinth of narrow streets. Across the town,
telephones rang once, stopped, then rang again before
being picked up. But no words were spoken – there
were only sequences of taps and breaths.

In the small central market there was a sudden
eruption of squawking. A boy ducked under one of the
stalls, disturbing a small chicken coop on his way
through. He sprinted across the street, hidden in the
cloud of dust he kicked up. He slipped past a market
stall selling bootleg DVDs and burst into the building
opposite – three storeys, almost completely masked by
a huge Coca-Cola billboard.

Inside was a bare room, dark except for the
horizontal stripes of light cutting through the shutters,
making the floorboards look like a zebra-skin rug. There
was another door at the back, partially concealed by
a stained red curtain.

In front of it stood a young guard with a machine gun
across his chest and a silver rod where his left leg
should have been. In the darkness that was almost all
that was visible, until he recognised the boy and smiled,
revealing three rounded, pearly teeth.

The boy didn’t smile back.

“Mutam-ul-it,” he gasped, trying to catch his breath.

The guard’s smile vanished. He nodded and knocked
on the door behind him. It flew open immediately. In the
doorway stood a broad man, silhouetted against the
harsh light of the bare bulb inside his room.

A European observer might have noticed this man’s
wild red beard, deep-set blue eyes and the explosion of
orange hair on his head. But to everybody in this town he
could be identified simply as ‘the white man’. Certainly
nobody paid any attention to the thin black tie worn
loosely around his neck, or to his slender-lapelled suit –
black, dusty and worn at the elbows. Who here would
even notice that on one lapel was a short, green stripe?

When this man spoke it was in grammatically
perfect Hassaniya Arabic, but with a strong northern
English accent.

“I told you this would happen,” he announced, waving
the boy away. He turned to his guard. “Go get the
trucks. Now.”

At last Jimmy could feel the temperature creeping up a
couple of degrees. The sun was rising – not that he
could see it with the fog still so thick. He’d made it
through the night. But the white world around him
seemed to close in. Then it started spinning.

If I stop I’ll die
, he told himself. But the voice was faint, as
if something inside him was still shouting, but he had lost the
ability to hear it.
Keep walking
, it continued, so feebly it was
quieter than a thought. Then came echoes of the phrases
he had repeated to himself over and over thousands of
times since he started his trek:
Find Uno Stovorsky
.
Warn
France
. But they were confused and lost beneath the wind.

Then even that noise stopped. Jimmy no longer knew
where he was or where he was going. For a second it
even felt like his thoughts were completely detached
from his body. All the pain floated from his limbs…

No
, he heard.
Find Stovorsky… France
… But the
words didn’t mean anything any more.

A light pierced his eyes. Something silver and
glimmering. It seemed to pull Jimmy towards it. He was
overwhelmed by the sensation that this was the most
wonderful thing he had ever seen. The surrounding
whiteness flickered from grey to blue to black.
Is it night
again?
Jimmy wondered.

It was his last thought before his head hit the snow.

“
Birds in flight, sir
,” came a voice through Lt Cdr Love’s
intercom. “
The launch was clean
.”

Dr Giesel ran his hands nervously up and down the
front of his life-jacket, then straightened his tie.

“They’re definitely on target?” he whispered.
“Because if they’re even slightly off—”

“This is the British Navy,” Love cut in. “We don’t
do
‘slightly off’.” He kept his gaze straight ahead at the
clutch of buildings on the horizon. The Tomahawk
missiles twinkled above them. There was a glint of pride
in his eye. But when he caught sight of the other man’s
concern his expression softened. “The missiles are
guided by GPS,” he explained, “and the targets can’t
move. They’re buildings. Not people.”

Dr Giesel was satisfied for a second, until fear crept
into his face again.

“What’s up?” Love asked. “Worried about killing a
few Frenchmen?”

Dr Giesel’s mouth fell open in horror. How could
this man be so flippant? Didn’t he realise he was
effectively starting a war?

“Don’t worry,” chuckled Love. “Much as I would
have loved to blow up some Frenchmen, we’ve got a
live satellite feed that shows us they started
evacuating as soon as they spotted us on the horizon.
Our missiles will take about ninety seconds to reach
them. That’s more than enough time for whoever’s left
in there to clear out. Then the place is ours.” He
winked and turned back to wait for the explosions. “It’s
almost too easy, isn’t it?”

The intercom crackled into life again. “
The last French
truck has left the site, sir. The place is deserted
.”

Love turned to Dr Giesel and gestured as if to say,
‘I told you.’

“Send the satellite feed up to my monitor,” he
ordered, into the intercom.

A second later, one of the screens on Love’s
control desk switched from a graphical display to a
pin-sharp satellite image of the coast 16 kilometres
ahead. The sand was a beautiful reddish-orange, but it
was blemished by groups of square white buildings
and criss-crossed by tracks. Then there were six
much larger rectangular buildings lined up next to the
water. They would have been overwhelming on the
ground, but here they were reduced to knots of pixels.
And racing away towards the edges of the screen
were dozens of small black squares.

For a few seconds everybody on the bridge stood in
silence, while French jeeps and trucks fled the
compound. It was like watching germs squirming under
a microscope. Some of them twisted and turned as if
they didn’t know where to go. This was no orderly
retreat, thought Dr Giesel.

In contrast, the atmosphere on the
Enforcer
was
totally calm.

“Only a few people in the world have ever seen these
images,” said Love softly. “You won’t find this place on
Google, that’s for sure. And only a handful know what
really goes on here.” He looked round at Dr Giesel.
“Soon you’ll be the one in charge.”

Suddenly the screen went white. Dr Giesel’s eyes
jumped from the monitor on the control desk to the
horizon. Two towers of black smoke erupted into the
sky. After a split-second they were lit up with orange
flames. Then came the sound – two deep booms that
shook the floor. Dr Giesel placed a hand on the control
desk to steady himself, but noticed that he was the
only person affected.

“Better prepare your team,” Love announced, so
casually it was as if he had asked what was for dinner.
“Mutam-ul-it will be under your control in no time.”

Dr Giesel was terrified to see what damage had been
done, but at the same time he couldn’t look away. The
smoke finally cleared enough for the ground to be visible
again on the satellite feed. In the exact spots where
there had been two white squares there were now two
black patches, each surrounded by a ring of fire in the
footprint of the destroyed buildings. The precision was
incredible. But then the doctor noticed something at the
edge of the screen.

“What’s that?” He nervously leaned forwards and
laid a finger on the monitor. The black dots that had
been rushing away from the compound were now
rushing in every possible direction. Some had stopped
completely, but after a few seconds they turned around
and went back the way they came.

Lt Cdr Love peered at the screen. “What’s going on?”
he barked into the intercom. “Don’t the French know
how to evacuate? What are they doing heading back in?”

There was a pause, then a crackle. “
It doesn’t
appear to be the French, sir
.”

“What?”

“
It’s another force
.”

“Another force?” There was confusion from
everybody on the bridge.

“
That’s right
,” confirmed the voice on the intercom.
“
They appear to be taking over the French vehicles
and
…”

“I can see what they appear to be doing!” raged Love.
“Why are they doing it? And how are we going to stop
them?” He spun round to each of his officers in turn.
Every one wore a blank stare.

“Well?” he bellowed. “Who the hell are these people?”

* * *

One second Mutam-ul-it was there; the next it had
vanished in a plume of black smoke. Hot ash rained
down around the girl, then hailstones formed out of the
sand that had been melted together by the explosion.

The girl buried her face in the sand and covered the
back of her head. But she didn’t have time to hesitate.
She had waited as long as she could remember for this
and she knew that the dozens of people waiting around
her were going through exactly the same rush of
disbelief, joy and dread. Some were much older than
her, a few were even younger, but they were all looking
to her for leadership.

For a moment she felt a surge of pride. Her father
would never have believed that any woman could be in
charge, let alone a sixteen-year-old girl – even his own
daughter. Impossible. But no one in her parents’
generation had trained as hard or studied strategy as
widely as she had.

Then her pride was overwhelmed by sadness. So few
of her parents’ generation had survived. She forced
away that thought. It was time to move. It was time to
prove why the others were glad to be led by her.

She raised her head and checked that the fighters
immediately around her were watching. Then she lifted her
arm and signalled, indicating which teams were to head for
which vehicles, exactly as she’d been trained. Time to run.

The signal was passed down the line and they acted
on her command. As a single unit, they rose from
behind the mound and charged towards the chaos.
They were a silent force among the panic. Everywhere
were French shouts, engines roaring and the din of the
fires raging at Mutam-ul-it. But the unit ran in silence.

And none was faster than her. Her black hair flew
behind her like a rebel flag. Before she had time to be
afraid, she tumbled deliberately into the path of an
open-top French jeep.

It swerved to avoid her, but came so close she
reached up and caught the bumper. Sand mixed with
exhaust fumes seemed to get inside her skin. She
strained her arms to keep hold of the jeep. Though she
was slim, her biceps bulged. It was as if every fibre of
her body was muscle and passion.
Just like training
, she
told herself, trying to ignore the darts of terror in her
heart. She clawed her way up the back of the vehicle
until she could reach the tread next to the rear wheels.

Inside were two huge soldiers in desert camouflage.
But she took them by surprise. She punched the base
of her palm into the nose of the passenger. Blood
exploded all over the cab. Now she had a firm footing
on the running board and she grabbed the blood-
spattered man by the shoulders. He was unconscious,
which made him all the more useful as a battering ram.

She forced the soldier’s head into the face of the
driver. He scrabbled for a sidearm, but the girl stabbed
her elbow into his shoulder with perfect aim. She struck
the sternoclavicular ligament with such power she
heard the bone beneath it shatter. The man cried out in
pain and the gun dropped from his hand, while the jeep
veered across the sand, out of control.

She was desperate to grab the wheel, but first she
had to reach for the door handle and push the soldiers
out of the jeep one by one. She couldn’t believe the
adrenaline inside her. Her hands were shaking.

At last she took control of the jeep. She could feel
tears itching to come out, but she swallowed the fright
and steered the vehicle round to point straight back at
Mutam-ul-it.

Through the thick smog she could make out everything
she needed to know. Her teams had sent a shockwave
through the French retreat. Their soldiers were reduced
to escaping on foot. Some lay down, defeated; others
tried to sprint away, flailing and staggering over the
sands. Their jeeps were now hers. And every one of them
was hurtling back towards Mutam-ul-it.

With a smile, she slammed her foot down on the
accelerator.

HMS Enforcer
was suddenly frantic. Crew scurried in
and out of the command centre, handing print-outs to
each other, poring over charts and conducting
muttered conversations. Dr Giesel couldn’t keep track
of what was going on. His breath was suddenly short
and he had to sit down.

“
We think it’s the local rebel force, sir
,” came the
voice through the intercom, much less assured that it
had been only minutes before.

“You
think
?” Lieutenant-Commander Love’s face had
turned red with fury. He strode up and down in front of
the window. “Who trained them?” he bellowed. “How
can they do this?”

He removed his cap to reveal a head of brown hair
shaved aggressively short. He furiously massaged his
scalp, then ordered, “Arm two more missiles.”

Dr Giesel sprang up from his seat at the back of
the command centre and rushed towards the
Lieutenant-Commander.

“Sir,” he panted, “we can’t do that.” Love spun round
and glared with the look of the devil. Despite that, Dr
Giesel insisted, “We don’t have another safe target.”

“We can’t have these people going in and occupying
the place,” Love replied, his voice resounding about
the command centre. Giesel’s response was less
decisive, but immediate.

“We don’t know which other buildings—”

“So we’ll hit the same places again.”

“But the heat from the explosions…” The two men
faced off against each other, but Dr Giesel knew his
subject. He wasn’t going to be shouted down. “It’s
already risky. Another blast could—”

“What is this – a negotiation?”

Love slammed his cap back on his head and rushed
back to his control desk. He jammed his thumb into
the keypad with such anger it threatened to split the
plastic cover.

“No!” Giesel shouted. Love ignored him. Giesel took a
deep breath and threw himself at the control desk. Love
swatted him away without even looking up and pressed
the final digit.

Giesel heaved himself to his feet and stared out of
the control centre window, aghast. A second later, two
missiles soared into the air.

“Right,” announced Lt Cdr Love, mopping his face
with a handkerchief. “Get your team on board the
chopper. We’re sending you in.”

“We can’t.”

“What?” Love scowled as if he was trying to shoot
lasers out of his eyes straight into Dr Giesel’s forehead.

“I tried to warn you,” Giesel said quietly. “Sir.” He
deliberately emphasised the word. “My report
recommended that Mutam-ul-it would remain stable if
you hit those two specific targets.”

“We did hit those targets!” roared Love. “And we’ll hit
them again!”

“But my calculations were based on a single strike.
The heat from two explosions will throw everything off.”

Love froze. Giesel waited for his message to sink in,
but it didn’t look like the man was listening any more.

“Do you understand now?” Giesel asked, as gently as
he could. “After those missiles hit, the whole place
could be unstable. There’s no way we can go in.”

Lt Cdr Love turned away and rested his hands on the
control desk. His head hung between his shoulders, hiding
his face. Then he coughed and scratched at his collar.

“Signal Command,” he whispered to nobody in
particular. “Tell them we have a problem.”