Authors: Alan McDermott
Grant watched the proceedings but had no
idea what was being said, the words spitting out like automatic weapon
fire. Bong gestured with his arm and the hostage who had been cradling
the casualty was suddenly dragged away, and his own screams began to drown out
those of the woman Grant assumed to be his wife or girlfriend. He was
kicking and screaming as they pulled him clear, and Grant suddenly knew what
was coming. He grabbed Vick and cradled her head into his chest just as
Bong lowered his rifle and ended the woman’s pain with a single shot to the
head. Her partner collapsed in tears, howling with grief, and Bong was
clearly not in the mood to put up with it. He pointed the rifle at the man and
barked out more instructions, but the heartbroken hostage either wasn't
listening or didn't care. His cries continued for a moment as he stared
at his loved one, then stopped as rage moved to the top of the emotional
table. His face contorted and he clambered to his feet, anger etched on
his face. Bong shouted at him to back off and raised his rifle to
reinforce the threat, but the man kept coming, fists clenching as he
approached. Another warning, but the advance continued, the man cursing
venomously as he moved nearer.
"Bahala Ka!"
Suit yourself.
The rifle spat one more time and the man
collapsed in mid-stride. Abel Guzman came over and began remonstrating
with Bong, who stood his ground and argued back, vehemently defending his
actions. Everyone stopped what they were doing to watch the
confrontation, which escalated when Guzman pushed Bong in the chest and he
stumbled backwards, losing his footing on a tree root and splashing into the
river. Apoplectic, he jumped up and ran for Abel, grabbing him round the
throat and pinning him to a tree. Guzman tried to prise him off but Bong
had too firm a grip, so he fumbled for a weapon as his face began to turn
scarlet. He reached towards his bolo but Bong swung a knee up, deflecting
his hand away from the handle of the knife. With his last remaining
strength he tried to claw at Bong's face but his reach was half an inch short
and his life ebbed away moments later.
Bong let him drop and spat on the corpse
before cursing in deep, deep Tagalog. He turned and looked at his men,
daring any to challenge him for the leadership, but none seemed in the mood,
even though they were brandishing weapons.
Their tacit approval accepted, he gave
orders to pack up while he himself took the cell phones from the fallen leaders
and claimed their tent as his own.
Grant was once again tied to Halton, and
was thankful that his companion had managed to dress himself once more, though
his sarcasm hadn’t deserted him. “Just another day in paradise.”
“And it’s about to get a lot worse with
Bong in charge,” Moore said. He turned to Grant. “Thanks. If
you hadn’t moved me, I’d hate to think what would have happened.”
“Don’t mention it. Just make sure
you take cover next time the bullets start flying.”
“That wasn’t your first time in a
gunfight, was it?” Vick asked.
“What do you mean?” Grant replied, but
he was already aware of what she was implying. When the firefight had
started, all of the hostages – and a couple of their captors – had frozen,
dropping where they were. He had been the only one to seek
protection. His army training had kicked in once more and while it may
have saved his life again it was beginning to get noticed. If Vick and
Robert could spot it, it wouldn’t be long before one of the guards did, and
that would make him dangerous in their eyes.
“I mean you knew how to react when they
started shooting at us.”
“Self-preservation, I guess,” Grant shrugged,
trying to play down the incident, but Vick wasn't ready to accept such a weak
response.
“If it was self-preservation, why didn't
you just look after yourself? Why did you drag Rob and I behind the
tree?”
“I suppose I wasn't really thinking
straight,” he said, knowing it wasn't far from the truth. Thankfully her
questions stopped when they were ordered to get up and prepare to move out.
Lined up in pairs, they were given the
bodies of the dead to carry and the formation moved off once more. Grant
had the feet end of the hammock over his right shoulder and Eddie Moore,
walking in front of him alongside Vick, carried the head end. For a man
who had been used to carrying sixty-pound packs into battle it was still a bit
of a struggle for Grant, especially in his stocking feet, but Moore was in shit
state already without having this additional burden literally thrown on his
shoulder.
Twenty minutes into the march, Moore had
already stopped twice for a short rest and to change his grip, and Bong wasn't
best pleased at the pace being set. He told one of his subordinates to take
over on point and came back down the line to see what was causing the hold up.
“Pick it up!” he shouted at Moore, who
had dropped his end of the hammock so that he could massage his shoulder.
Grant laid his end on the floor and told
Bong to let him have a rest. “Can't you see he's in no condition to carry
this kind of weight?”
Bong advanced towards him menacingly,
despite the height disadvantage. Grant, having learned a lesson less than
half an hour earlier, adopted a submissive posture rather than standing up to
the man. It didn't prevent him getting a whack on the back with the flat
edge of a bolo, but it helped to keep up the pretence.
Bong was readying himself to deliver
another blow when one of the phones in his pocket chirped.
He dug it out and stabbed the Connect
button.
“
Ano
?”
What?
He spoke for a couple of minutes, then
ended the call with a simple “
Sige
.”
Okay
.
“We are taking a boat ride,” he announced
to the prisoners, and after a brief scan round to get his bearings he resumed
point duty, leading them downhill towards sea level.
“Do they often move you from island to
island?” Grant asked Moore as they once again picked up their load.
“No, we've always been here.”
Grant considered the implications.
The AFP were on this island, which meant that if he could get away from the Abu
Sayyaf he would have someone he could turn to. The next island, wherever
it may be, might not contain any friendly forces at all, which meant escape
would need to entail slipping away from his captors
and
stealing a boat
and
crossing an ocean. If he was going to end this any time soon, he would have to
do it before they were loaded onto the boat.
Through a gap in the trees he saw the
Sulu Sea in the distance and estimated that it would be a couple of days at
their current pace before they reached the coast. Not much time, but it
was all the time he had to come up with a plan.
* * *
James Farrar toyed with the phone as he
considered the best way to word his message to Grant. When he called the
cell phone he was certain it would be answered by one of the Abu Sayyaf, so he
would demand to speak to Grant to make sure he was still alive and well.
Two things that bothered him were that the message would have to be concise,
and that their conversation might be on speakerphone.
The message he wanted to get across was
that no money was going to be paid and that Baines and Smart were on their way
to get him out, but how to say that in a way that only Grant would
understand? He got up and made himself a cup of coffee, all the time
trying to formulate a couple of short sentences that would carry the
message.
It was almost an hour later that he
picked up the phone and dialled Grant’s number.
“It’s James Farrar,” he said as soon as
the connection was made. “I want to speak to Sam.”
“Do you have the money?” Bong asked.
“We're putting it together but it will
take a few days. In the meantime I want to speak to Sam. I want to
be sure he’s still alive.”
A moment later he heard Grant’s
voice. “James, have you —”
Bong snatched the phone away. “You
have heard his voice. Call me in three days to arrange the transfer.”
"I want to speak to him, let him
know that everything is okay.”
There was silence for a moment.
“You give me the message, I will pass it on,” Bong said.
Farrar had expected as much.
“Can't you just put me on speakerphone? He must be terrified and will
want to hear a friendly voice."
He heard mumbling as Bong tried to find
the setting on the unfamiliar phone, but eventually he was instructed to relay
his message.
“Sam, it's James. I hope you’re
bearing up under the pressure. I have asked a specialist company to
handle the transfer. They are called Baines and Smart and they deal with
hostage situations all the time, so I thought it best to let them do things
their way. It might be a little expensive but I'm sure you understand.”
“Yes, James, I understand.”
Bong took the phone off speaker.
“You have passed on your message,” he said. “Call me in three days with
the arrangements.”
“Wait, I have instructions from Baines
and Smart. They want me to call every eight hours to ensure he is still
alive.”
“No,” was the simple reply.
“Then they won't make the transfer,”
Farrar said. “I'm not about to send more people in there so you can take
them hostage, too. Either you let Baines and Smart handle it and follow
their instructions, or the deal is off and you get nothing.”
Farrar held the phone to his ear,
praying the bluff wasn't called, and the interminable silence was eventually
broken. “I will call you once a day at three o'clock in the afternoon.”
The phone went dead in his hands and
Farrar realised he'd been holding his breath waiting for the response. Exhaling
loudly, he went to the kitchen, uncorked a bottle of red wine and grabbed a
glass, then settled on the sofa.
So, Grant's phone would be active every
day at three in the afternoon, which should give Baines and Smart the
opportunity to pinpoint his location, and hopefully Grant got the message that
help was on its way: the last thing he wanted was the sonofabitch ruining his
plan by escaping before the others arrived. There was always the chance
that the man holding the phone might split off from the others but there was
nothing he could do about that, and he wasn't one for worrying about things
beyond his control.
After polishing off half of the wine he
headed for bed, making a mental note of the equipment he would need to source
in the morning. They would need weapons, a device to track him with, and
some form of communications, both for the mission and to report in to
him. Happy in the knowledge that he could have everything he needed
delivered to the office he set the alarm for five and climbed into bed.
* * *
Grant pondered the message Farrar had
sent him and kept coming back to the same conclusion: Sonny and Len were going
to attempt a rescue mission.
While it was good news in one respect,
he would have much preferred Farrar to stump up the cash. His friends
were more than capable of pulling it off, especially if he was able to assist
them somehow, but there was always the chance of a hostage or two getting hit
in the melee. Paying the ransom was by far the best option, and the money
could always be replaced, probably within a year the way the company was
performing.
He pushed the thought aside.
Focus, he told himself. Sonny and Len were probably already on their way, which
meant they would be arriving in the Philippines in the next twenty-four
hours. Adding time for a briefing and the trip down to Basilan, he
reckoned they could be on the island by Wednesday morning. Unfortunately
he and the others would reach the shoreline at roughly the same time, which
meant his friends would end up scouring the wrong island for him.
He gave himself two priorities, the
first of which was to slow their progress somehow. The second was to get his
hands on a weapon.
Chapter 6
Tuesday 17th
April 2012
Simon “Sonny” Baines was shaken awake as
turbulence tossed the Boeing 777-200 violently around the skies. Next to
him, Len Smart was reading a detective mystery on his Kindle, oblivious to the
chaos around him. It wasn’t until an overhead locker broke open and
disgorged its contents into the aisle that he tore himself away from the
gripping story.
His watch told him that they were still
six hours from Manila, having left Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport an eternity
earlier. The flight from Heathrow had been a short hop and after a
three-hour stopover they had climbed aboard. An hour into the flight
they’d had breakfast, which Sonny topped off with a scotch before falling into
a deep sleep. Smart envied him the ability to sleep on planes, something
he had never been able to master. A freezing hillside in the middle of
winter was no problem, but not an airplane seat. It didn’t matter if it
was a civilian airliner or a military transport, he just couldn’t nod off, no
matter how tired he was.
“Do you think Tom will be joining us on
the pickup?” he asked Sonny.
“He’s got a new name now,” his friend
reminded him in a low voice.
“Yeah, right. It’s hard to get
used to the idea after knowing him as Tom for ten years. I wonder what
name he’s chosen.”
“I guess we’ll find out soon
enough. What are you reading?”
“
Black Beast
by R. S. Guthrie.”
“Any good?”
“Brilliant,” Smart said, and promptly
turned his attention back to the Kindle. Sonny shoved a pair of
headphones over his ears and scanned the channels on the in-flight
entertainment console, settling for an episode of Mr. Bean, but as the plane
cruised over central Asia he quickly lost all interest in the show.
Instead he recalled the last time he had seen Tom. It had been in the
ruins of the old pottery factory that had been transformed from fortress to
rubble in an instant during the attack by Abdul Mansour and his men.
Tom's plan to reform the justice system had been audacious, and had almost
succeeded. It also nearly cost him his life.
It would be good to see his old friend
again, Sonny thought, and closed his eyes to sleep away the rest of the flight.
It seemed just moments later when Len
woke him. “We’ll be landing in fifteen minutes,” Smart said, stowing his
Kindle in his rucksack. Sonny paid a quick visit to the toilet and then
stopped by the galley to chat up the stewardesses. Despite being in his
mid-thirties he looked ten years younger, and hadn’t seemed to age a day since
joining the SAS as one of their youngest recruits. The name Sonny soon
stuck, and he used his boyish good looks at every available opportunity, with
varying degrees of success. On this occasion he struck out and resumed
his seat, staring out of the window as they approached Ninoy Aquino
International Airport. After touching down they made their way through
immigration and picked up their luggage, a suitcase each packed with items most
of which they were never likely to use. It was just easier to throw some
jeans and T-shirts into a case than explain why they were arriving for a
holiday without a change of clothes.
As promised they were met at the
exit. A Filipino in a white shirt and black trousers held up a card with
their names as they fought through the crowd of taxi drivers looking for a
chance to charge unsuspecting foreigners ten times the normal fare. Len
and Sonny introduced themselves and were led out into the sunshine, and the
first thing that hit them was the smell, an odour which seemed to be a
combination of sewage and rotting food. As they walked to the pickup area
the heat added to their woes, and they were thankful when they climbed into the
air-conditioned SUV.
It took close to an hour to get the
three miles to their destination, near the British Embassy in Makati.
Manila has some of the most congested roads in the world, despite government
efforts to keep the traffic flowing. Vehicle number plates end with a
number, and each day two of those numbers were banned from the road.
Despite this measure, journeys were most often made at a steady crawl at best.
Along the way they had to contend with a variety of ancient trucks, buses and
cars, and now and again they would spot a brand new vehicle that seemed very
out of place. At each set of traffic lights their transport was assaulted by
vendors or beggars, often seven-year-old girls carrying a baby and dressed in
rags, holding out a hand in the hope of a dollar or two.
The SUV pulled into an underground car
park below a thirty-storey office block. The driver opened the door for
them, then led them to an elevator which took them to the seventeenth
floor. The door at the end of the corridor proclaimed the office to
belong to Knight Logistics Management, and they were shown into the reception
where a lady in her fifties asked them to take a seat. A few moments
later a connecting door opened and Farrar ushered them into his office,
pointing towards a sofa as he sat on the corner of his desk. They dumped
their luggage and took a seat.
“Gentlemen, thank you for coming at such
short notice,” he said. The pleasantries out of the way, he laid out the
details of the mission. “Sam Grant has been kidnapped by Abu Sayyaf, a
Muslim terrorist group operating in the southern Philippine islands. I
want you to get him out.”
“Who’s Sam Grant?” Smart asked.
“Ah, sorry, I forgot you didn’t
know. Sam Grant is the name Tom Gray goes by these days.” He paused
to let the news sink in, pleased to see that it had come as something of a
shock. If they'd recognised the name it would surely mean they'd been in
contact with him, something he'd strictly forbidden.
I guess that answers the question: 'Is
Tom coming with us?' Len thought. “How did he get kidnapped?” he asked.
“I don't know all the details,” Farrar
admitted, “but whatever happened, I'm beginning to wonder if he's up to the job
he's been chosen for.”
“Tom still has what it takes,” Sonny
said quickly. “If he was kidnapped it was because he knew that trying to
fight his way out was a waste of time, but he'll be working on an escape, I
guarantee it.”
“Does he know we're coming?” Len asked,
changing the subject in an attempt to diffuse the tension creeping into the
room.
Farrar shared the message he'd relayed
the previous evening, and they agreed that in all likeliness, Tom knew a rescue
was going to be attempted.
“You said you'd have some equipment for
us,” Len said, and Farrar walked over to a closet and retrieved a long sports
holdall. Inside they found two Heckler & Koch MP5SD suppressed
sub-machine gun, a pair of Beretta M9 pistols and two American M4 Carbine
rifles with under slung M203 grenade launchers. In addition there were
ammunition, night vision goggles, a smart phone and a communication set
comprising throat microphone and earpiece.
“These comm units use 2048 bit
encryption and flash-burst the messages, so they’re very hard to intercept or
decrypt.” Flash-bursting meant compressing the whole message into a tiny
blob of data and sending it when the user finished talking, so rather than
anyone being able to hear their real-time conversation, any eavesdroppers would
simply hear a millisecond burst of static.
“The phone will give your current
location as well as the location of Sam's phone.” He opened an
application on the phone and they saw a map of the Philippines, with a green
dot flashing over their current location in Manila and a red cross on one of
the southern islands. The map lacked topography, showing just the land
masses as brown to the sea’s blue. A scale on the right hand side of the
screen showed the distance between the two locations..
“How up to date is Tom's location?” Len
asked.
“Sam's location,” Farrar said,
emphasising the new name, “will be real-time just as long as his phone is
turned on. Abu Sayyaf have agreed to call me at three in the afternoon
each day, so we know it will be updated at least once every twenty-four hours.”
He used his thumb and forefinger to
expand the image with the red cross and hit a symbol at the top of the screen,
which showed a dot-to-dot red trail. “These are Sam's movements since
they first made contact with me. It looks like they traversed the high
ground and are heading towards the coast.”
“Do we know the enemy
strength? Numbers, weapons, anything at all?”
“Nothing whatsoever. You'll be
going in blind with just a cross on a map as your guide. Is there a
problem with that?”
Smart and Baines looked at each other
and had the same thought: this was a clusterfuck waiting to happen.
“What is it with people's perception of
the SAS?” Sonny asked. “Why does everyone think we're invincible super
heroes? We only get the job done because we do our homework and know what
we're facing, not by jumping in with our eyes closed and nothing but a mean
expression and a huge set of balls.”
There was no animosity in his
voice. A touch of sarcasm, perhaps, but no animosity. Farrar,
however, chose to take it completely the wrong way.
“I'm beginning to wonder if anyone from
your beloved regiment is capable of conducting a real mission these days,” he
said, eyes directed towards Sonny. “In case you didn't know, I called you
as soon as I found out that he'd been kidnapped. That was only
twenty-eight hours ago, and considering we don't have any assets down there,
and given the fact that I haven't been able to have a private conversation with
him to get any first hand intel, it is impossible to know anything about what
you will be facing. But then, you'd know that if you were smart.”
“He's Smart,” Sonny said, pointing to
Len, “I'm pragmatic, and this has nothing to do with being capable of
conducting a real mission, this is about the seven Ps: Proper Prior Planning
Prevents Piss Poor Performance.”
Len put a hand on his friend's arm to
calm him down. “We've been in worse situations,” he said to Sonny, then
turned to Farrar. “We'll do it, but the price just went up. Thirty
thousand on completion. Each.”
“Twenty,” Farrar countered.
“Twenty five.”
“Done. There's a plane waiting to
fly you to Zamboanga but you'll have to make your own way from there. My
driver will take you back to the airport and show you through the diplomatic
channel so you'll avoid having to check in the bag. My secretary will
provide you with the necessary passes.”
He stood and ushered them out of his
office, handing Sonny the bag after they'd collected their own luggage, and as
promised there were two name badges waiting for them on the secretary's desk,
each complete with a recent photo.
“My number is programmed into that
phone, which uses satellite rather than 3G, so you should have a signal
wherever you are,” Farrar said. “I'll keep you updated if there are any
developments.”
The driver was waiting in the hallway to
take them back to the car park.
“I would have done it for the original
five grand,” Sonny said to Len as they walked towards the elevator.
“For Tom, I would have done it for
nothing,” Len replied.
* * *
When he was alone in his office Farrar
checked his watch and calculated the time it would take them to arrive on
Basilan and make their way into the jungle. The ideal scenario was for
them to be within sight of Grant before he gave their location away, but unless
they fed him regular updates he doubted he would get to know when they were
close enough. He decided to wait until Bong called him tomorrow for his
three o'clock conversation with Grant and break the news then. He would
then have the location and could guide them in to what would surely be an
ambush.
It wasn't as if they were likely to
manage a rescue in the meantime, not with the ammunition he'd supplied.
Any soldier with as much time on the range as the SAS had would be able to tell
if all of the explosive propellant had been removed from a bullet, so the
powder in the rounds he'd given them had been replaced with plain old
sand. Figuring that they would have no reason to fire their weapons until
they got into a battle with Abu Sayyaf, he had no concerns about them
discovering his little subterfuge until it was too late. The only thing
that could scupper his plans was if they found Grant as soon as they landed on
the island, but if the AFP and U.S. special forces had trouble locating anyone
from Abu Sayyaf, he was damn sure a couple of ex-soldiers — no matter how good
they once were — would find it a struggle to locate them.
With Baines, Smart and Grant out of the
way he could then turn his attention to the two remaining conspirators, Carl
Levine and Jeff Campbell. They would demand some kind of explanation as
to why their friends had disappeared, which was the reason he'd videotaped the
conversation they'd just had. That would keep them quiet for a while,
giving him the chance to put together a plan to eliminate them and close down
the operation. After that he would finally be free to return home to
England and be rid of this terrible climate once and for all.