Bad Soldier: Danny Black Thriller 4 (8 page)

Caitlin was staring at Danny. ‘Remind me never to get on your bad side,’ she said.

‘He had it coming,’ Danny said.

‘Did he sink that migrant boat?’

‘I don’t know. The headshed stonewalled me.’

‘You want to watch him, Danny. I know what he’s like. He’ll go off like a frog in a sock next time he sees you.’

‘I can deal with Tony,’ Danny said. He looked over to where the two prisoners were laid out on the floor. ‘Let’s move them to the Wildcat,’ he said. ‘The headshed wants us off the ship as soon as.’

Spud and Caitlin did the honours, pulling the two targets up to their feet. One of them said something in muffled Arabic. Spud jabbed him in the stomach with his elbow, just hard enough to wind him. The man doubled over, but didn’t speak again as Spud and Caitlin dragged them out of the room, following Danny towards, and then up, the metal staircase.

There was no sign of Tony on deck, which was still clear of regular naval crew. The lights of the Wildcat were beaming, and Danny could see the shapes of the flight crew in the cockpit, ready to leave. The captain was standing to one side of the landing deck, his wet hair blowing in the wind. Danny strode up to him. ‘We’re leaving one of our guys with you,’ he shouted over the noise of the helicopter’s rotors, which were just starting up.

The captain nodded. ‘We’ve just had a communication to say there’s a chopper on its way from Sigonella to pick him up.’

‘A word of advice,’ Danny shouted. ‘Don’t let any of your men rub him up the wrong way.’

‘Noted,’ the captain replied. He held out one hand. ‘I owe you an apology. Whitehall explained what happened to that boat. Explosives on board. A bad business.’ He looked across the deck to where Spud and Caitlin were bundling Santa and Rudolph into the Wildcat. ‘I don’t know where you’re taking those two, but I hope they get what’s coming to them.’

Danny gave the captain a dark look. ‘I think I can guarantee that,’ he said, before giving him a brief nod and running across the deck to join the others in the Wildcat.

Four

Calais, northern France, the same night.

A solitary figure stood twenty metres from the side of the main road into Calais. His eyes were half closed against the bright headlamps of the lorries trundling into the port town, interspersed with the occasional smaller car. On the other side of the road was a high fence protecting the railway line. A heavy freight train was trundling noisily past. He wondered if the passengers in the road vehicles could see him standing here, alone. If so, he could well imagine what unfavourable things they would be thinking and saying about him. But he didn’t care. He knew what he was running from, and that anyone would do the same in his circumstances.

His real name was Yusuf, but on his journey across Europe he had changed it so it sounded more Western: Joseph. Joe for short. He had first heard that name three months ago on the southern coast of Greece, fresh from the overcrowded old boat that had deposited him there – scared and hungry, but alive. It was amazing how much friendlier people were when you gave them a name that didn’t sound Muslim. Now Yusuf was so used to it that he’d even started thinking of himself as Joe.

Joe was tall, thin and lanky. As boys, his friends had always prided themselves on being strong and tough. Joe never was. He had a pronounced Adam’s apple and his dark hair fell in a centre parting. He wore an old pair of thick glasses that his mother had always said made him look very intelligent. He couldn’t see without them, but they were scuffed, scratched and held together with bits of tape. He dreaded the day they broke. Joe could steal most things he needed, but a pair of prescription glasses would be impossible for a fifteen-year-old impoverished migrant to get hold of.

It was a cold night, and Joe shivered. He looked to his right. Thirty metres away, set back from the road, a glowing fire burned in an old metal dustbin, with flames licking up from the rim. The silhouettes of several other people were huddled round the fire, but Joe kept his distance, just as he had ever since arriving in Greece. He knew that most migrants making their way across Europe towards the UK preferred to travel in groups. It was safer, they said, and they had more chance of making it if they could help each other. But Joe didn’t agree. He had seen the way people looked at these ragtag groups of foreigners, first in Greece, then in the Balkans, and all the way across northern Italy, Switzerland and now France. He had seen the hatred and mistrust in their eyes. By himself, he could be invisible. And he could move quickly, stowing away in the back of articulated lorries as they trundled across the continent and over borders. On his own, Joe had been able to move freely and easily.

This final border, however, between France and the UK, was more problematic. Hundreds of migrants had congregated here. High wire fences prevented them from accessing the railway lines that led under the sea – though they didn’t stop people from trying. Armed police and soldiers patrolled the port, and lorries were meticulously searched. Joe knew it would take all his ingenuity to get into the UK.

‘Hey!’ one of the figures around the fire called. Joe started. ‘It’s OK, you can come and get warm.’ The man spoke in English, but with an accent. Joe, who had learned the language with no trouble at school back in Syria before the war, looked nervously from left to right. He wanted to stay apart from the other migrants, but he
was
very cold. Reluctantly, he approached.

The people standing round the fire – four men, three women – were a mixture of nationalities. Middle Eastern and Eritrean, Joe thought. That seemed to be the mix here in Calais. One of them handed him a bottle of some clear liquid. Joe gingerly took a sip, then coughed violently as he handed it back. There were a few laughs as he screwed up his face in disgust. But then he felt the harsh alcohol warming him from within, and he muttered some words of thanks.

‘Where are you from?’ asked the man who had beckoned him over. He had reverted to Arabic now.

Joe hesitated. He hadn’t discussed his journey with anyone, and he didn’t want to. But the fire was warm, and he was afraid that if he didn’t engage, they’d send him away. ‘Syria,’ he said. ‘Aleppo.’

A few of the migrants made a clicking sound in the back of their throats: an acknowledgement that Aleppo was not a good place to be.

‘How are you going to get across?’ another man asked. He looked in the direction of the port.

‘I don’t know,’ Joe said. This was not entirely true.

‘You want to be careful,’ said one of the women. She wore a red headscarf and her face was pinched and lined. She suddenly started coughing rather violently, and took a moment to get her breath back. ‘Two of us have died in the last three days. One boy, about your age, from Afghanistan – he got on to the Eurotunnel yesterday, but was run over by a train. It dragged him along for 400 metres, ripped his body to shreds. They only knew who he was because he had his real name on a fake passport.’

A few of the others nodded their agreement that this was a true story.

‘And two days before that,’ said a second woman, ‘an Eritrean man got into the back of a lorry. He must have dislodged some of the pallets inside, because when the lorry started off, they toppled over and crushed him to death.’

There was more muttering. The group huddled a little closer to the fire. The woman with the red headscarf was looking intently at Joe. There was an expression of pity in her eyes. ‘Family?’ she asked.

‘Dead,’ Joe said.

‘In Syria? Because of the bombs?’

Joe looked at his feet. ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘Not because of the bombs.’ He looked up again and stuck out his chin aggressively. ‘Daesh,’ he said.

As he uttered the word, he cursed inwardly. Daesh was a nickname for the group that called themselves Islamic State. It was a nickname they hated, and Joe didn’t know where the sympathies of these migrants lay.

He needn’t have worried. A couple of the migrants spat on the ground. Others muttered swear words. There was clearly no love for Daesh in this little group. Joe relaxed a little.

‘What happened?’ one of the women asked. Joe felt his expression hardening. He hadn’t told anybody what had befallen his mum and dad. It seemed too private, somehow. Not that he hadn’t relived that awful day a thousand times in his mind. Several times a day, he saw his father’s body, hanging from a tree with a black hood over his head. And he saw his mother, bloodied and beaten, being forced to do obscene things with the Daesh fighters. The memory made Joe’s stomach boil with nausea and impotent fury. He saw the face of a man who had stood nearby their apartment block. He had a scar running the entire width of his neck, as if his grin had slipped down his face. When his men were finished with Joe’s mother, it had been he who had shot her in the head. And it had been under his command that Joe had been taken away, and put to work . . .

But that was not a story he was going to share here. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. He knew they wouldn’t push him any further. Everyone who ended up here had horrors in their past that they didn’t want to talk about.

The migrants fell silent for a couple of minutes and rubbed their hands warm by the fire. The woman with the headscarf started coughing again. It sounded very bad, as though she had an infection on her chest. ‘Some of us were thinking of Finland,’ she said breathlessly when the cough had subsided. ‘If we can get there.’ She stared at Joe again across the fire. ‘You could come with us,’ she said. ‘It’s safer in groups. And look, you’re so thin, there’s nothing to you . . .’

Joe shook his head. ‘No thanks,’ he said. ‘I . . . I prefer to stay alone. And anyway, there is somebody in the UK that I need to see.’

‘You have family there?’ Everyone round the fire seemed suddenly much more interested in him.

‘No,’ Joe told them quickly. ‘Not family. Just . . . just this guy.’

The interest waned as quickly as it had risen. But Joe felt like he’d said too much. In any case, he had just felt a few drops of rain. He had been expecting this, having seen a weather report in a discarded newspaper that morning that said that a front of low pressure would be moving north-west from the Mediterranean. He put his hands in his pockets, hunched his shoulders and stepped away from the fire. He started walking along the road. As a car passed, its headlamps cast not only Joe’s shadow, but also a second one: somebody was following him. He stopped and turned. The woman with the red headscarf was a couple of metres behind him. She looked concerned.

‘Where are you going to stay tonight?’ she asked.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Joe said.

‘You must be careful if you’re thinking of trying to cross. I wasn’t joking. People die trying to do it. And they’re searching the back of every lorry . . .’

Joe smiled at her as the rain started to fall harder. ‘I have a plan,’ he said. ‘I think it will work.’ But he wasn’t sure if she heard him, because as he spoke she started coughing again. A terrible, hacking sound. The woman needed medical care, but that was obviously impossible. Joe fished around in his pocket. He pulled out a small pack of paracetamol that he had stolen from a shop in northern Italy. There were only four tablets left, but they might make the woman feel a little bit better. He stepped up to her and pressed the packet into her hands. ‘You should stay warm,’ he said. ‘Stay out of the rain. Go back to the fire at least. Don’t worry about me. I won’t do anything stupid.’

The woman looked up into his eyes, but didn’t argue. With a slight bow, she clasped the tablets to her chest, then turned and started to walk back to the fire. Joe continued along the road, but stopped again when he heard the woman’s voice calling. ‘Young man!’

Joe turned. ‘Yes?’

‘I hope you find what you’re looking for,’ she said.

Joe inclined his head. ‘Me too,’ he said under his breath. ‘Me too.’

Sending Santa and Rudolph back to the UK was out of the question. Everyone in the unit – or what remained of it – understood that. As soon as the prisoners set foot on British soil they’d be lawyered up, given medical care, fed, watered, the works. It would take the spooks weeks to get anything out of them. By which time, it could be too late. The headshed hadn’t even instructed Danny and his unit to conduct the questioning. No. These two were about to be the recipients of what was delicately known in the trade as ‘enhanced’ interrogation.

Santa and Rudolph were in for a long night.

Whether they knew this or not, they were utterly compliant. Fear was a good motivator. Hooded, and with their wrists and ankles bound, they lay face down and silent on the floor of the Wildcat. A strong smell of urine wafted up from where they lay. One, or maybe both, had evidently pissed themselves.

The unit were silent too. The events of the night had obviously shaken them up. Danny found himself reliving certain moments. The kid with the rotting feet. Tony’s near miss, Caitlin standing up to him, and the look of absolute hatred on his face when he heard that the headshed had reassigned him . . .

Flight time to Malta: fifty minutes. It was pitch black outside. The pilot was flying low over the waves, with no external lights but with the aid of a night-vision headset. The lights of the coastline came into view through the window of the Wildcat, but quickly disappeared as the chopper headed further inland. Hammond had told them that they were delivering their targets to an interrogation centre. Such places were unlikely to be situated in built-up areas. Danny didn’t know what kind of under-the-table dealings had been done between the British and the Maltese government to allow them to fly in under the radar like this, and he didn’t much care. He wanted to be back home. The sooner they delivered the two scumbags in the hoods to the creeps who were going to torture the hell out of them for whatever intel they had, the better.