The Avatari (15 page)

‘You’ve operated in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which is where we might be headed. And you have a reputation for being good to have around in a tight spot.’

‘You’re expecting trouble?’

‘Could be,’ Ashton replied and then, after a pause, ‘yes.’

‘What’s the deal?’ The young man looked away as he asked the question.

Ashton had anticipated this. ‘Fifty thousand dollars. Half now, half when this is over. All other expenses paid.’

There was a silence.

Then Peter said expressionlessly, ‘That’s good money.’

Ashton needed to know if they were going to have him on the team. ‘Look, each of us – Susan, me and, to some extent, Duggy – has a link to this, ah, incredible story. You, on the other hand, have no biases. Now that you’ve heard the story, what do you think? Are we onto something?’

‘Frankly, I don’t know what to believe,’ Peter said, looking him in the eye. ‘But then,
you
do. Enough to come all the way here to get me. That’s what’s important to me. I come for hire, Colonel.’

Ashton nodded. That was fair, he thought. ‘Well,’ he asked Peter, ‘are you in or not?’

The young man took his time, looking across the river and gazing into the distance. Then he replied softly, ‘It sounds like it’s going to be a lot of fun, Colonel, and believe me, I would love to get out. But I’ll have to pass. Anywhere in Africa – no problem. However, I’ve had a small run-in with Uncle Sam. But then, you’ve heard of that, haven’t you?’

Ashton had.

* * *

It was after the Falklands. Peter was training the Colombians. All above board. Light machine guns, mortars and the like for their police, to be paid for by Uncle Sam from drug enforcement funds. They were setting up a small training centre at Medellín, when Walowski, the local CIA guy from the US Embassy, a big, slightly out-of-shape operative who smiled a lot, approached him. He wanted Peter to use his influence on his local girlfriend, a schoolteacher called Maria Peres, to set up a meeting with her brother. It turned out that this brother, Simon Peres, was the local Zorro, taking on the drug cartels and running an outfit on the Panama border that the Agency was quite interested in, especially if it would enable them to get Noriega out of Panama. The deal was that the CIA would try and establish Simon.

Peter checked this one out with Shannon O’Reilly who told him to play along and be careful. Other than that, there wasn’t much he got by way of advice from O’Reilly, especially where the Agency was concerned. Peter, Maria and Walowski went up into the hills and waited out in an abandoned house on the fringe of a village that Simon was rumoured to frequent. They had let out the word and spent two days there, but Simon Peres didn’t bite. On the evening of the third day, as Peter returned from a walk through the village and pushed open the front door, a man grabbed him and put a gun roughly to his ear.

‘Easy,
amigo
,’ the stranger rasped, ‘nice and easy.’ Then he pulled out the handgun from Peter’s waistband. ‘No need for this, eh?’ he went on. ‘Maybe we work this out and nobody gets hurt?
Comprende
?’

Peter was shoved onto a chair. Seated opposite him was Walowski. The operative was smoking a joint and its sweetish odour filled the room.
So this is the game
, Peter thought.
Walowski
is on the payroll of the drug cartels and they want to take out Simon
Peres. The Panama stuff is just so much shit.

‘The bitch isn’t telling, Peter,’ Walowski said with a chuckle. ‘So we thought we’d go for some affirmative action.’

Peter turned his head, following the direction of the operative’s gaze to the room where he and Maria used to sleep. Maria lay naked on the bed, bound hand and foot. She had been gagged with her own bra which was tied over her mouth. She was a small, pretty girl, but now her face was a mess. They had worked her over and she was moaning into her gag, her swollen eyes fixed on him.

‘What’s all this, Walowski?’ he asked, gesturing in the direction of the two men.

One was still pointing a gun at Peter, while the other made a big show of pulling up his trousers and winked at him.

‘Just covering all bases, Peter. Figured I needed a mite more than what Uncle Sam intends to give me.’ Walowski laughed, shaking uncontrollably as the joint hit him. He suddenly stopped laughing and squinted, piggy-eyed, at Peter. ‘Don’t play dumb with me, you son of a bitch!’ he growled. ‘Are you in or not?’

‘Sure,’ Peter said, trying to sound nonchalant, ‘
she
doesn’t mean anything to me, boss.’

‘Good guy!’ Walowski giggled again. ‘You don’t have much choice, though, not with Uncle Kalashnikov winking at you.’ Again, the laugh. ‘You want a go at the
puta
?’

‘No,’ Peter said, managing to keep his breath even. ‘You could give me a drag, though.’

He could tell Walowski was really high or he wouldn’t have handed him the joint. The other two men were drug mafia shit, fat slobs who presumed their guns were omnipotent. Peter leaned over and accepted the joint. Then standing up, he threw his head back and took a long drag. He rolled his eyes and appeared to sway.

The gunman chuckled. ‘Kicks like a she-devil, eh?’ He laughed some more. ‘Not the regular shit. This is pure Colombian Gold,
amigo
!’

Peter flicked the lighted joint into the eyes of the gunman who yelled, pitching backwards over a chair while letting off a long burst of gunfire into the ceiling. Without pausing, Peter wheeled and kicked the other man, who hadn’t yet got his trousers on, in the testicles. He went down, groaning, and writhed on the floor in pain. With his left hand, Peter unhurriedly pulled his knife from his boot and, in one well-calculated move, threw himself across the room at the first man who had been trying to get up. As they rolled on the floor, Peter buried his knife into the man’s armpit. He knew he could have killed him, but Peter didn’t want that. Not yet. By the time Walowski got up shakily from his chair, both his goons were incapacitated and moaning in pain. The CIA operative found himself staring down the barrel of a Kalashnikov.

‘You wouldn’t dare!’ he hissed at Peter, moving towards him.

Peter flicked the change lever, took aim and fired a single shot into the man’s crotch. Walowski fell to the ground, clutching his abdomen, his hands unable to staunch the blood.

‘You’ll never get away,’ Walowski whispered to him through clenched teeth.

‘You’ll never know,’ Peter said evenly.

Leaving Walowski writhing on the mud floor, he approached each of the other men in turn, kicking them into position, until they were face up. Then he took careful aim, pumping a bullet into each one with the same precision and in the same part of the body that he had shot Walowski. It would have been quite apparent to an onlooker that he was in no hurry.

Peter then went and untied Maria, holding her in his arms and whispering to her comfortingly, ‘Don’t worry, baby, it’s going to be all right.’

‘No, Peter,’ she replied hoarsely, ‘
nunca sera lo mismo
. It will never be the same.’

He had no reply to that. He covered her with a sheet and went into the kitchen where he put water on to heat. Then he bathed Maria with the warm water. He applied butter from the kitchen as a salve on the cigarette burns on her thighs. Peter then carried her to where the men lay on the mud floor. She looked at them and cringed, a cry escaping her lips as she struggled to get away, but he held her until she calmed down.

‘Don’t be afraid; this will be good for you,’ he told her with grim conviction.

It was something they didn’t tell you at church; dishing out retribution was a swifter and more effective healer than time.

He made her sit on a chair and sat on the floor beside her, putting one hand on her knee. The shock from the bullets Peter had fired was starting to wear off and the first screams of the men were beginning to pierce the air.

‘I’ll give you any amount you want!’ Walowski begged him raggedly between hoarse groans. ‘We’ll forget this ever happened. Just get me to a doctor! Please!’

Peter stared down at him silently, his face registering no emotion. The men continued to scream, until they passed out from the pain and the loss of blood. Maria and Peter remained seated, quietly waiting for them to die. When it was over, Maria turned to hug him, her face buried in his shirt.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘
Me has devuelto mi vida
; you have given me my life back.’

But Peter knew she would never again be the cheerful and carefree primary school teacher he had known.

He gave her some money and quickly got out of the country, eventually finding his way back to the States. He called Shannon O’Reilly to tell him what had happened. There wasn’t much the other man could do. The Agency wasn’t likely to believe Peter’s version. Shannon was sorry to lose him and sent him more money than he was really owed. He also sent him the contact number of a man in Jo’burg.

* * *

‘Do you have your old British passport, the one they gave you for the Falklands?’ Ashton asked him.

‘The one which identifies me as Jeremy Glass? Sure. But it needs to be renewed and I don’t see that happening.’

‘I think I can manage that,’ Ashton told him.

‘Here?’

‘At the consulate in Livingstone.’

‘You can swing that?’

‘I know someone, who knows someone else,’ Ashton explained.

He didn’t think it necessary to tell Peter that his cousin was a joint secretary in the Foreign Office.

Peter whistled, looking impressed.

‘Do I get to keep it – I mean after we are finished?’

‘I guess so.’

‘Then I’m your man, Colonel!’ Peter told him, a broad grin on his face as he leaned forward and clasped Ashton’s hand.

‘How soon can you wind up?’

‘Not a problem. Carlos and Aida will handle the place while I’m gone. I need to get out of the bush, but must be back by end September. I need to meet up with the BOSS.’

Ashton scratched his head. That would be cutting it fine. But he knew that if Peter had a contract with the South African Bureau of State Security, it was a commitment he wouldn’t be able to get out of easily.

‘I guess that will be all right,’ he said.

Just after the equinox
, he thought to himself.

Peter nodded.

‘How do we get out?’ Ashton asked.

‘We wait for the supply plane, which,’ Peter looked at his watch and said, ‘should come in two days from now.’ He got up. ‘Till then, Colonel, you’re my guest. Let’s see if we can shoot us some wild boar for supper.’

CHAPTER 9

The Story of Markos the Ongud

1294 CE

They were lost – had been for the last four days. Markos had to concede the truth, although it had taken him four long, hard days to do so. As the men moved through a narrow, winding valley, following a dry riverbed, he told himself that had they been on course, they would have been at the Nestorian caravanserai by now.

But evidently, they had taken a wrong turn. There were no maps; they looked to the sun for guidance by day and, at night, followed the few stars they could sight in the bleak, cloudy skies above. Out in the desert, before they entered the valley, he had made out the blue silhouette of the Kunlun Mountains to the north and the dull black outline of the Karakoram to the south and assumed they were still on course. But now there were no landmarks by which they could mark their progress and they were compelled to follow the twists and turns of the valley till its mouth.

The other members of his group were all Buryatis who did not appear unduly perturbed. Looking at those men, Markos thought it would not surprise him if Death itself were afraid of them. They belonged to a Jhagun, a squadron of hundred men from the imperial guard, which had been detached at the bridge by the Great Khan himself to act as his escort. They spoke little among themselves; to him, they addressed not a word. He despised them, as he did all other soldiers, for their crudeness and lack of learning. He could not bring himself to eat the dried and salted meat they seemed to relish, washing it down heartily with the foul-tasting
airag
– fermented mare’s milk. At the end of the day, he would cook his own simple meal of rice and dried beans, which he carried in a silk bag tied to another containing his meagre belongings that he had slung over the blankets spread over his saddle. But his supplies were running low and he dreaded the day he might have to eat what his cavalry escort did.

It was after the Lichun in February that his journey had begun with the Great Khan at Dadu, the great capital, now named Khanbalik in honour of Kublai. It was a strange quirk of fate that he, Markos, an Ongud, a member of the Turkish tribe that lived on the banks of the Yellow River, should be among the chosen few to be part of the momentous events. Perhaps they would shape the destiny of the world, but most definitely, they would shape the destiny of the empire which stretched from the Sea of Japan to the Black Sea. Markos’s thoughts did not extend to such things, however, for he was a simple priest, forty years of age, with no family or home to call his own. He had knowledge of many languages and had travelled far and wide, but his worldly possessions simply amounted to what he could carry slung over his saddle. He did know why he had been chosen for the task; he was a Nestorian Christian, of the same faith as Kublai’s powerful and influential mother, Sorkaktani. He had also accompanied his mentor, Sauma, almost twenty years ago, on their journey to Jerusalem, armed with a
paiza
from the Great Khan himself.

‘He does look like me, does he not?’ the Great Khan had remarked with some humour to Nambui, his Buddhist wife, and to Markos, indicating the drugged and now-dying man stretched out on the royal bed in the inner chamber.

Brooding on the emperor’s departure for the unknown, neither had chosen to respond, but Nambui, whose silent tears glistened on her round pink face, had let out a muffled sob. In an unusual display of emotion, the Great Khan had approached his wife and embraced her. Breaking away from the conventions that bound her, she had hugged him back tightly, despite the presence of Markos, the only other person in the inner chamber. It was with some effort that the Great Khan had managed to pull away, after tenderly kissing her forehead. They both knew they would never see each other again, not in this life. Then she and Markos had gently guided the Great Khan towards the secret passage connected to the tunnels that led all the way under the walls and ended in an exit at the base of a hill, two
li
from the city. As he followed the Khan, Markos had glanced over his shoulder and observed Nambui pulling the covers up over the dying man’s face.
No one will ever know
, he thought.
It is beyond
the ordinary man’s wildest imagination.