Authors: Alan McDermott
“But who would want to kill you?” she
persisted.
It was a conversation he didn't want to
have, but she had to know the danger she had stumbled into, a danger greater
than her current situation.
“Think about it. The government
announced my death to the whole world. How happy do you think they'd be
if you proved they had lied, eh? They know where I am right now, and if
you ever mention my name and link me to this place they will know you are
telling the truth. Oh, they'll dismiss you as a crackpot, saying it was post
traumatic stress disorder or something similar brought on by your ordeal, but
they won't risk someone believing you and reigniting the fire.”
“They wouldn't do that,” she
insisted. “That only happens in books and films, not real life. The
British government doesn't murder its own people.”
“Don't be so naïve. Government as
a whole might not sanction it, but individuals will do all they can to hold on
to their power. If anything threatens their position they will do all
they can to eliminate the danger.”
“Then why did you agree to the name
change?”
“I didn't agree, not at the time.
I only found out about it when I woke from a coma two months after the attack,
and by then the choice was either to accept the new life or go back to sleep
permanently. They even performed plastic surgery to make me look even
less like Tom Gray. I'm banished from the U.K., I can't contact anyone
from my past, and I didn't get a real say in any of it. If they can do
that to someone who had such a high public profile, they wouldn't hesitate to
silence someone who — and I mean no disrespect — they’ve never heard of.”
“But I don't understand. Why keep
you alive if you are such a thorn in their side?”
“That was one of my first questions, and
it seems some friends of mine had them over a barrel. I don't know the
full details, but they negotiated a deal whereby I get a new life and the
government's lies aren't exposed. I guess it would have been easy enough
to get rid of me, but to silence my eight friends too would have been a red
flag to the conspiracy theorists.”
“I see,” Vick said. “That's gotta
suck.”
“As I said, I didn't have a
choice. And if we don't get out of here sharpish it's going to suck a
whole lot more.”
“What's your plan?”
“Not a plan, as such. A couple of
friends are on their way to get me and we just need to be ready when they get
here.”
“Baines and Smart! I knew those names
were familiar! They were part of your team last year, weren't they?”
“That's right, and hopefully they'll be
here sometime tomorrow. When it all kicks off you need to do exactly as I
say, you understand?”
Vick nodded and Grant reminded her to
tell no-one, but she wasn’t going to let it lie.
“I’m a writer, Tom, and this is absolute
gold. I can’t just pretend I don’t know about the story of the century.”
“Just leave it,” Grant said, throwing
her a look and signalling the end of the conversation. A few minutes
later his guard arrived with the handcuffs and he settled down to another night
of broken sleep.
Chapter 9
Thursday 19th
April 2012
While Grant’s sleep was disturbed by the
constant feeding of the indigenous insects, Abdul Mansour was kept awake by the
gnawing sensation that comes from being one step away from total recall.
The fact that he couldn’t put a name to
the face had weighed heavily on him, and with it came a sense of
foreboding. He wasn’t a superstitious man, but he trusted his instincts,
and right now they told him that there was something dangerous about this man.
These thoughts troubled him throughout
his morning prayers and continued as he ate his breakfast, and once he’d
finished he decided that the best thing to do would be to rid himself of the
man, just to be on the safe side. However, having made that decision he
found himself reluctant to go through with it.
Looking over at Grant, he knew he was so
close to the truth, yet it was always a few inches from his grasp. If he
killed the man and then subsequently made the connection it would be too late
to do anything about it, yet his head said the man had to go.
After another hour of going round in
circles he opted to settle the matter once and for all.
“Brother,” he said to Abu Assaf, “the
prisoner, Sam Grant, troubles me deeply. I feel it is not safe to keep
him alive.”
“Troubles you? In what way?”
“I don’t know,” Mansour had to admit,
“but it would be safer for all of us if he was no longer with us.”
Assaf shrugged and called over one of
his men. “Bong, take Grant into the jungle and dispose of him. Do
it quietly.”
Bong Manalo nodded and went to find a
couple of helpers, and together they approached the group of prisoners.
Having already finished their breakfast, the hostages were lounging around in
anticipation of the inevitable daily march through the jungle.
Bong stood over Grant and ordered his
compatriots to remove the tether attaching him to Halton.
“Get up,” Bong said, “you’re coming with
us.”
Grant did so, warily. “Where are
we going?” he asked.
“For a walk.”
Grant looked down at Halton, who averted
his eyes and dropped his gaze to the ground. The simple gesture told
Grant all he needed to know: This was one of those walks Vick had told
him about, where four go out but just three come back.
He thought quickly and decided not to
make a fuss here, not with a few dozen armed men to deal with. Instead he
would go quietly and take his chance with his three escorts. Two of them
carried their brand new M16 rifles while Bong was holding his bolo and had a
pistol tucked into a hip holster. For his own part, Grant could feel the
shiv up against his right calf and knew the time to use it was drawing close.
As they walked towards the edge of the
clearing, Vick returned from her visit to the toilet in time to see Grant being
led away. When she asked Halton what was going on she got the same
response he’d given Grant and she immediately chased after the small group.
“No!”
She was quickly grabbed from behind and
dragged back to the group of hostages, but she managed to scream one more time
before a hand across the mouth silenced her and a bolo appeared at her throat.
“If you make another sound you will take
a walk as well. Do you understand?”
With tears running down her face she
nodded, never taking her eyes off Grant’s back as he finally left the clearing
and was led down a track and out of sight.
* * *
After grabbing a couple of hours sleep
each — one napping while the other took watch — Sonny and Len set off back down
the mountain in search of their friend. They retraced their route from
the previous night for about a kilometre before peeling off to the right
towards another hill. The sensible thing for Abu Sayyaf to do would be to
seek the high ground and that was where Sonny and Len expected to find them,
though as the landscape undulated relentlessly it was hit and miss as to which
hill they should target.
An hour into their trek, Sonny wasn’t sure
if the sound he’d heard had been a woman’s distant scream or just another of
the animal sounds that continually assaulted the ears. The noise had come
from his left and he looked back to see if Len had heard it, too. His
friend indicated the direction the sound had come from and that told him that
it wasn’t his imagination.
Sonny took the lead and upped the pace
slightly, balancing speed with the need to remain undetected. The origin of
the sound he’d heard would be around a click-and-a-half away, he figured, which
meant close to the top of the hill they were now approaching. Once within
sight of the summit he slowed the pace and Len closed the formation, the pair
inching closer while scanning the bush ahead for signs of movement.
Sonny’s hand went up and Len froze,
following the direction of Sonny’s finger as he indicated two figures
approaching fifty yards ahead. They both recognised their friend from the
videos they’d been shown, and they guessed the man holding the long knife was
his captor. Moments later two armed men came into view and the four
continued their slow march towards the bottom of the hill. As the men
passed, Sonny and Len gave them a thirty-second start before moving onto their
tail.
They followed for another hundred yards
before their targets stopped and Grant was shoved onto his knees. The two
armed men moved aside to give the man with the knife some room, their rifles
hanging loosely by their sides, muzzles pointing towards the ground.
Sonny indicated these two and showed
which one he intended to take out, leaving the other to Len. They would
then both concentrate on the man with the knife.
With his target in his sights, Sonny
applied pressure to the trigger until the firing pin was released to send the
round on its way.
Nothing.
A click, but nothing more. He
quickly cleared what he assumed was a misfire and took aim again, but once more
he got nothing more than a click as the firing pin hit the dud bullet.
Len had been waiting for him to take the
first shot, taking that as the signal to take out his own target, and when he
heard Sonny clearing his weapon for a second time he looked over to see what
the problem was. All he got in response was a shrug and a finger to
indicate one more attempt. Len nodded and took aim again but the shot he
was waiting for never came.
Another glance over and he saw that
Sonny had abandoned the silenced MP5 and was now readying his M4 Carbine.
Sonny indicated that Len should try to take out the armed men and he would
support him if things got loud.
Accepting the lead role, Len got a bead
on the target farthest from him, exhaled and took the shot.
Click.
“What the fuck..?”
One weapon misfiring was unusual, but
two just never happened. They’d stripped the guns down the previous
evening and all of the moving parts were in perfect working order, which left
just the ammunition. He ejected the next cartridge in the breach and used
his knife to pry the round from the casing, expecting black powder to pour
out. Instead he ended up with a tiny pile of sand in the palm of his
hand.
He could hear their friend’s voice
through the half-dozen trees separating them and knew time was running
out. Inching sideways, he crept towards Sonny and told him what he’d
found.
“Is all the ammo the same?” Baines
whispered.
“Not sure.”
To answer his own question, Baines
ejected a round from his own M4 and prised the bullet free, revealing yet more
powdery sand.
“This was done deliberate,” Baines
said. “The question is: why?”
“No time for that now,” Len said,
discarding all of his weapons except for his knife. “We’ll have to go
hand-to-hand.”
Baines put a hand on his shoulder.
“What about playing rabbit?”
Len considered it for a moment, then
nodded and made to get up. Baines grabbed his arm and pulled him back
down.
“Rabbits are young and fit, not old, fat
and bald,” he said to Len. “Let me be the bunny, you catch them as they
follow me.”
“Cheeky sod,” Len said, but had to
concede that he’d put on a few pounds in the last year, and while he was not
exactly bald, his hairline had been receding since just after puberty and there
was nothing he could do about it. Sonny often joked that he looked more like
a managing director than a soldier, but then occasionally he thought Sonny was
a
pillock
, which evened things out.
Len crawled back from their vantage
point to seek a decent hiding place, and after finding a tree trunk wide enough
to hide his frame he indicated which direction Baines should run and got into
position.
* * *
Grant marched slowly down the hill with
his two armed escorts behind him and Bong leading the way. After a couple
of hundred yards Bong stopped and one of the guards put a hand on his shoulder
and forced him onto his knees. Grant didn’t offer any resistance as he’d
anticipated the action and saw it as the chance to grab his shiv from his
sock. With his hand on the shank he sat facing his executioner.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said,
glancing over at the two armed guards who had moved off to the right-hand side
of the track. They were at ease, their guns pointing to the ground, but
they could bring them up and have him in their sights within a second.
“The money is on its way, why don’t you just wait for it and let me go?”
Bong remained impassive. “I have
my instructions.”
No emotion, just the simple
acknowledgement that taking this life would mean no more to him than taking out
the garbage or mowing the lawn.
“Why don’t you come with me, all three
of you? You could share the money between you. You won’t have to
live in the jungle anymore and no-one will tell you what to do.” He added
just the right amount of panic to his voice, letting them believe to the end
that he was a man with no fight in him.
“I don’t care about money. All I
care about is a free Muslim nation, and Allah will provide that.”
“Then why kidnap me if you don't want
the money?”
Bong sighed like a parent trying to
explain the workings of the internal-combustion engine to a
three-year-old. “The money we made from you was supposed to help our
cause, but now we have more than enough.”
Grant looked over at the other
guards. “What about you two? Wouldn't you like a million dollars
between you?”
“They don't speak English,” Bong
said. “And even if they did, their loyalties lie with Allah. Now,
have you anything else to say?”
“Yes. That man in your group, the
foreigner: he's going to get you all killed. Believe me, I recognise him
from the television and he was responsible for an atrocity in England last
year. He recruited thirty local men and got them all killed while he got
away.”
Bong let out a snort of derision.
“You think I fear death? No! It is coming to all of us and I will
embrace mine so that I can finally fulfil my duty to Allah!”
He looked at his bolo and ran a finger
along the sharp edge. “You should embrace yours, too.”
As Bong took a step forward, Grant
prepared himself. The bolo was hanging at Bong's side now, and he would
have barely a second to get in close enough to use the shiv before his enemy
had time to pull it back and counter the strike. Still, a second was a
long time when the target was oblivious to the threat you posed. At
least, that is what his training had taught him.
One more step...
A shout of pain pierced the jungle and
all four of them looked towards the source of the noise in time to see a
uniformed figure stumbling away from them. Grant recognised the gait and
immediately knew that it was a diversion, one which his captors were falling
for. The two guards immediately began firing as the retreating shape
blended into the surrounding jungle, and a moment later they were off in
chase. Bong raised his bolo, pointing at his two compatriots.
“Stop! Let him go!”
As he took a step towards them, Grant
saw the chance and struck. He sprung up onto his feet and threw his left
shoulder into Bong's armpit, lifting him off his feet, while his right hand
came round and plunged the point of the stick into the Filipino’s neck.
His momentum carried them for a couple of steps before he tripped on a tree
root and they collapsed in a heap. Grant lay on the arm holding the bolo
while he grabbed for the pistol in Bong's holster. He met no resistance:
Bong was too busy dealing with the damage to his throat to bother about
anything else.
With the pistol in his hand Grant
swivelled towards the other two targets, flicking the safety off as he brought
the weapon round in anticipation of them bearing down on him. He was
surprised to see that they hadn't even noticed his attack, intent as they were
on chasing their prey through the jungle.
He looked back down at Bong, who was
clutching at the wound in his neck. He figured that the terrorist might
survive if he got help quickly, and that wasn't something he wanted to happen.
“Live by the sword, die by the sword,”
he whispered, and brought the bolo down hard, the sharp blade severing a few of
Bong's fingers on its way to embedding itself in his spinal column. With one down
and two to go, he set off in pursuit of the remaining threats. They were
about twenty yards ahead, still pausing and firing every few steps, and he made
up the ground quickly. He was within ten yards and had one of them in his
sights when the leader passed a tree and an arm flashed out, catching him in
the throat, sending both man and rifle clattering to the ground. The
second terrorist stopped too, stunned at what he'd seen. He then saw a
uniformed figure appear from behind the tree, stooping down to collect the
weapon on the jungle floor. Raising his own rifle, he got the stranger in
his sights and his finger began to squeeze the trigger.
Len saw the rifle being aimed at him and
grabbed for the weapon at his feet, expecting to get the bad news any
second. When the double-tap came he tensed for the impact, but none
came. Instead, the remaining terrorist collapsed like a sack of
bricks. As he went down Len saw Sam Grant standing a few yards beyond the
body.
“I see the timing's still there,” he said,
and gave his old friend a huge embrace. Sonny came jogging back through
the jungle.
“Typical. I’m the one that gets
shot at and Len gets all the hugs.”
He ignored the look he got from Smart
and instead grasped Grant's hand and slapped him on the shoulder in a more
macho welcome. “Good to see you, Tom,” he said.
“It's Sam now.”
“Yeah, Farrar told us. It's going
to be hard to get used to calling you Sam after all these years.”
“We can discuss that later. Right
now we have to get moving. There's a couple of hundred heavily-armed
terrorists about half a click from here and all that shooting will bring them
down on top of us.”
While Sonny and Len collected the
weapons and ammunition from the fallen, Grant trotted back to Bong and went
through the dead man's pockets looking for more ammunition. He found a
spare clip, along with the mobile phone the Filipino had taken from him.
When he rejoined the others, Sonny led them back in the direction of their LUP
on the adjacent hill.
They moved quickly, desperate to put as
much distance between themselves and anyone following. After a kilometre
they stopped for a two-minute breather and checked their tail to see if anyone
had latched on to it, but there was no sign of a pursuit.
“While I'm glad to see you guys, what
the hell made you decide to turn up at a firefight without any weapons?”
“We had weapons, more than enough to do
the job,” Len said. “Trouble was, the ammo Farrar gave us was no good.”
“What do you mean by 'no good'?”
Sonny removed the projectile from one of
the 9mm MP5 rounds and handed the cartridge over to Grant, who immediately
recognised the problem. “Are they all like this?”
“All the ones we've tried have been, and
I can't see it being an accident.”
Grant let the sand trickle through his
fingers. “The question is: why? Why send you all the way here and
then give you duff kit?”
“It looks like he didn't want the rescue
to succeed,” Len offered.
“Possible, but then he could have just
left you two at home and refused to pay a ransom. It doesn't make sense.”
“Maybe he was just sold some dodgy
ammo,” Sonny said.
“Possible, but I doubt it.”
“Then let’s go and ask him,” Len said to
Grant. He was about to get up when he spotted the red dot moving up from
Sam's shoulder to his temple.
“We've got company,” he said, and turned
slowly to look in the direction of the laser sights.
“Let me see those hands. NOW!”
The good news was that the voice was
American. The bad news, they realised, was that they had a whole lot of
explaining to do.
The trio got to their feet, hands in the
air.
“Walk towards me, slowly.”
They did as instructed and six figures
emerged from the bushes, their camouflage having worked a treat. Five of
them were Filipinos, while the sixth stood a foot taller.
“What the hell are you doing running
around the jungle armed to the teeth?” the tall man asked as he approached,
weapon still trained on them. When he got no answer he instructed his men
to gather up the weapons and frisk their prisoners. The quick body
searched produced two knives, a couple of 5.56mm magazines and their mobile
phones and comms gear.
After a quick conversation in his radio
the leader of the group motioned with his gun. “Okay, get moving.”
“Where are you taking us?” Grant asked.
“Our base is just a few clicks from
here. My boss wants to ask you a few questions.”
* * *
At the first sound of gunfire Assaf had
sent his aide and a dozen men to investigate, and they returned twenty minutes
later.
“They are dead, all three of them.
The prisoner is gone.”