Agent 21: Reloaded: Book 2 (6 page)

It was in this room that Zak took his lessons, and he’d learned a lot more here than he ever did in school. Now they were standing round a circular wooden table. Lying on the table was a black tube, about a metre long. Next to it was a canvas fishing-tackle bag. Gabs picked up the tube and removed a lid at the end. From inside she pulled three sections of a fishing rod, which she slotted together.

‘Er, Gabs,’ Zak said. ‘Not many fish in here. Probably best till we get outside.’

‘Observant, isn’t he?’ Gabs murmured as she opened up the canvas fishing bag and removed a chunky black reel.

‘Amazing,’ Raf agreed. ‘No wonder you picked him out, Michael.’

‘It’s like sharing a house with Sherlock Holmes …’

‘Or James Bond …’

‘All right,’ Michael said like a stern schoolmaster. ‘That’ll do. We haven’t got much time. The
Mercantile
docks in Angola in three days’ time. Zak needs to be in-country by then. He’s booked on a flight from Heathrow tomorrow.’

Gabs fitted the reel to the rod and handed it to Zak.

‘I guess someone will
eventually
get round to telling me why we’re putting a fishing rod together,’ he said.

Gabs’s face grew more serious. ‘Check out the reel,’ she said. Zak examined it a bit more closely. At first glance it looked quite ordinary: a spindle, transparent fishing twine. It only took him a few seconds, though, to locate a small switch on the underside. Zak flicked it. There was a whirring sound and the front and back ends of the reel’s barrel opened up like a camera shutter.

‘Hidden scope,’ Gabs said. ‘In-built camera. Night-sight capability.’ She pointed at the canvas fishing bag. ‘There’s a selection of telescopic lenses in there. You’ll be able to conduct surveillance discreetly using this.’ She sighed. ‘Michael,
really
, it wouldn’t be difficult for Raf and me to be inserted along with Zak. We can easily come up with a cover story.’

But Michael shook his head. ‘I need you somewhere else.’

Zak removed the reel from the rod and walked over to the window. He didn’t like the idea that Raf and Gabs wouldn’t be with him, but he didn’t want it to show in his face. He held the sight up to his right eye.

‘Adjust the focus by turning the spool.’ Gabs’s voice was soft and just behind him. Zak did so and a distant portion of sea became sharp and clear.

‘Neat,’ he murmured. ‘Does it catch fish too?’

‘Course it does. We like to think of everything, you know. But I get the feeling you won’t have much time for that.’

‘Come on,’ Michael said a bit impatiently. ‘We need to go down to the basement. There’s a lot to get through.’

The basement of St Peter’s House was given over to an indoor firing range. It was here that Zak had learned the difference between an Uzi and an MP5, between a Browning semi-automatic and a 1911 45, between an AK-47 and an M16. And it was here that he’d spent more hours than he could count learning to fire them. Today, though, Raf had a new firearm to add to the list. It was a very strange-looking weapon. It had five barrels, each the same length as a normal handgun but a lot more bulky. The handle was about twice the size of an ordinary gun.

‘Heckler and Koch P11,’ Raf explained once they were standing by the firing range. ‘Underwater pistol. Ordinary rounds are no good underwater. Not accurate. Short range. This fires ten-centimetre steel darts instead – five of them, one in each barrel. Effective underwater range about fifteen metres. Effective range above water, double that.’

Zak took the weapon. It was heavy – more than a kilo, he reckoned. He aimed it down the firing range and squeezed the trigger. The dart that shot from the weapon looked like a miniature rocket, with fins and a sharp, pointed end. At the end of the firing range was the silhouette of a man. The dart entered the shape in the centre of its forehead. When he lowered his arm and turned back to the others, he could see that Michael was faintly amused. ‘Yes, well …’ the older man murmured. ‘Hopefully it won’t come to that. But if it does …’

Zak handed the gun back to Raf.

‘The port of Lobambo has a long pier,’ Michael explained. ‘There’ll be one of these weapons fixed to the underside, along with other equipment you might need.’

‘Such as?’

‘A Draeger rebreather and a swim board.’

‘What are they?’

‘Specialized diving equipment,’ said Raf. ‘The kind of stuff the SBS use all the time.’

‘SBS?’ Zak asked.

‘Special Boat Service.’

‘Their motto,’ Michael interrupted, ‘is “Not by Strength, by Guile”. Something for us all to remember, I would say.’ He looked sharply at Zak, who felt like he’d just been told something important, but he didn’t know what.

Raf coughed a bit uncomfortably. ‘The rebreather allows you to swim close to the surface of the water without any air bubbles appearing,’ he explained after a few seconds. ‘If you want to approach a vessel without being seen, that’s what you use. The swim board has an illuminated compass. It means you can keep an accurate direction when you’re underwater.’

‘You’ll also find the explosive device that you need to plant on the vessel once you’ve ID’d the Black Wolf personnel,’ Michael continued. ‘It’ll be housed in a waterproof flight case.’

‘Hope nobody finds this stuff,’ Zak said.

‘It’ll be well camouflaged. Nobody will find it unless they’re looking for it. Which they won’t be. Your briefing pack contains pictures of the Black Wolf members. You need to memorize them before you leave the country, along with Jason Cole’s personal details, of course. Do you have your phone?’

Zak nodded and pulled his iPhone from his back pocket. Michael had given him this at the beginning
of his first operation. He had used it to capture and upload evidence. Since then he’d hardly used it. It wasn’t like he had a whole bunch of people he could phone up for a chat.

‘You’ll find schematics of the
Mercantile
already uploaded onto it,’ Michael said. ‘Our intelligence says there’s only a very small crew on board, so staying hidden should be straightforward. Use the schematics to guide yourself towards the engine room. That’s where you need to plant the device.’

Zak thought back to the devastation of HMS
Vanguard
. Michael was right: if you wanted to cause some damage, the engine room was the place to start.

Michael looked at his watch. ‘Fourteen hundred hours,’ he said. ‘A helicopter will be here in twenty minutes to take us to the mainland. Do you have any questions, Zak?’

Did he have any questions? Of course he did. Like, wasn’t this all happening too quickly? What was so important that Raf and Gabs couldn’t be on standby to help him like last time? Why hadn’t they given him more time to prepare? And wasn’t it madness anyway, sending someone like him into a hostile part of the world to carry out such a sensitive operation?

But these were questions there was no point asking. This was his life now. This was what he had chosen. And besides, what was the point of all this
training if he never had a chance to put it into action?

‘No,’ he replied. ‘No questions.’

Michael nodded. ‘I’ll continue your briefing on the chopper,’ he said. ‘Let’s get ready to go.’

6

IN-COUNTRY

Tuesday, 09.00 hrs GMT

‘BRITISH AIRWAYS DEPARTURE
BA912 to Luanda, now boarding at Gate Three.’

Luanda. Capital of Angola. It seemed a million miles from where he was now.

Zak stood outside Boots on the ground floor of Heathrow Terminal Five. The chopper from St Peter’s Crag had touched down at the London heliport near Battersea at six the previous evening. Zak had shaken Michael and Raf by the hand and given Gabs – who was clearly very anxious – a hug. Then, his hair still blowing in the downdraught of the chopper’s rotary blades, he’d climbed into a waiting Mercedes, fishing gear in hand. The windows were tinted black and the driver didn’t say a word as he drove him to the Holiday Inn on the outskirts of the airport.

Zak’s bags were packed and ready for him in his
room. He had no idea who had prepared the single rucksack, but he remembered Michael’s words on the chopper.
You’ll find clothes, Angolan currency and a passport in Jason Cole’s name
. Sure enough, he found all three. Jay had been around. His dog-eared passport had stamps from the United States, Sweden, Italy – though none from any African country. But Zak already knew this information from the briefing pack Michael had given him. He’d only ‘met’ Jay the previous day, but already he felt he knew him well. He’d chucked the passport onto the rucksack, then lain on the bed and looked through his briefing documents once more, paying special attention to two photographs.

One of these photographs had showed a swarthy-looking man with thick black eyebrows that met in the middle of his forehead. His neck had the thickness of someone who was used to bodybuilding.
Name, Antonio Acosta
, Michael had told him.
Born and raised in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. There’s a rumour that he murdered his own brother when he was thirteen. We now believe he’s a Black Wolf general. Formerly a gun for hire guarding drug boats against piracy in international waters. Not a job for the faint-hearted, if you take my meaning
.

Acosta was a distinctive-looking man. Easy to recognize. Zak had put the photo to one side and
pulled out the second. This showed a man with a shaved head and a line of piercings along his left eyebrow. They made it look swollen and sore.
Surname, Karlovic. First name unknown. Georgian national. Understood to have links with a terrorist group who call themselves the Patriots of Georgia. Recruited to Black Wolf for his prowess with car bombs and other IEDs
.

Nice couple, Zak thought. Just about deserve each other.

We can’t be sure who else will be on board the
Mercantile,
but a positive ID of these two men will be enough. Put it this way: if Antonio Acosta and Karlovic are on board, the rest of the crew aren’t very likely to be sweet old pensioners
.

Zak walked away from Boots and followed the sign to the gate, half expecting a tap on the shoulder from airport security, even though his fake documentation had got him this far without so much as a raised eyebrow. Thirty minutes later, however, flight BA912 was taking off. It juddered and rattled through the cloud cover, before settling smoothly into its cruising altitude.

Flight time to Luanda, eight hours twenty-five minutes. Zak took his iPod from his pocket and fitted the earbuds. He was only pretending to listen to music, though. He didn’t want to be disturbed by the middle-aged businessman sitting next to him as he
cleared his head and thought his way through the details of the mission.

The flight passed quickly. It was nearly five p.m. local time when Zak emerged onto the tarmac at Luanda airport. The heat was intense and it was so humid that his skin was moist within seconds as he walked with the other passengers towards the terminal building. It looked like construction work had been going on here, but it had clearly stalled. There were no workmen on the scaffolding; pallets of building blocks lay abandoned. Half an hour later he had collected his rucksack and fishing gear and was standing in the small but busy arrivals hall. Flight announcements in Portuguese echoed from the public address system, but Zak was concentrating on the memory of Michael’s briefing.
You’ll be collected at the airport by a young man called Marcus. Long hair, black beard, mid-twenties. He’s the youth group’s team leader in Angola. He’ll meet you in-country and escort you to Lobambo. Remember, Zak, he thinks Jason Cole is just another volunteer. Don’t do anything to stop him thinking that
.

What
? Zak had thought.
Like blowing up a merchant vessel in a small fishing village
? But he’d kept quiet.

Marcus was standing in the arrivals hall. He wore pale canvas trousers, a red and white tie-dyed shirt and
his hair was tied back in a short ponytail. He held an oblong of cardboard scrawled with the name Jason Cole. Standing next to him was a girl, perhaps three years older than Zak. She had short hair, halfway between red and ginger, and rather small eyes that blinked almost constantly.

‘Marcus?’ Zak held out his hand once he was standing in front of the young man with the beard.

The young man smiled and shook Zak’s hand. ‘You must be Jason.’

‘Call me Jay,’ Zak replied automatically. ‘Everyone does.’

‘Good to meet you, Jay.’ Marcus turned to the girl. ‘This is Bea. She’s only been with us forty-eight hours. Thought you two new bugs might like to get to know each other.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Bea.’ Zak offered her his hand.

The girl shook hands briskly. ‘Welcome to Angola, Jason. Is that all the luggage you have? Really? Well, I hope you’ve brought everything you need – it’s not like you can just nip out to the shops in Lobambo, you know. Now then, have you put your passport somewhere safe? You
really
don’t want to go losing that, do you, and I know what you boys are like. Now it’s very hot outside, so I hope you’ve had plenty of water to drink. And do you need the lavatory? It’s a
long drive, you know, and Marcus, we really ought to get going, because we
don’t
want to be travelling at night …’ She turned on her heel and started marching towards the exit.

‘Forty-eight hours, you say,’ Zak observed, suppressing a smile as he watched her go.

‘Er, yeah,’ said Marcus. ‘Forty-eight hours.’ He scratched his head and looked a bit apologetic. ‘Lovely girl. Bit of a … bit of a chatterbox, but I’m sure you’ll get on like a … like a … The truck’s just outside.’

Marcus’s vehicle was an old Land Rover. It was parked right in front of the terminal building and was by far the fanciest vehicle there. All the other cars, parked up in no particular order by the side of the wide, dusty road, were old saloons covered in rust and dents. Four Angolan kids about Zak’s age were hanging around the Land Rover. When they saw the trio approach they all ran up to them, shouting. One of them tried to pull Zak’s fishing gear away and carry it to the car. But Zak wasn’t letting go of
that
for anyone. The kids soon realized they weren’t going to earn any money, and they quickly disappeared.