Strike Back (25 page)

He could feel the anger flowing through his veins. If you didn’t deserve to die for what you did to me sixteen years ago, then you’ve certainly put the ink on your own death warrant with what you are doing right here and right now. No man capable of inflicting that kind of misery can complain about the grisly death that justly awaits him.

Katie was tied to a stake, exactly as she had been depicted on television – though at least the gag had been removed. It was a thick wooden pole, stripped of its bark, and dug deep into the ground. Her hands were strapped behind her back, held in place with thick leather bindings, and her feet and her chest were lashed to the stake as well. It was impossible for her to move a muscle from her neck downwards. She was wearing the clothes she had been captured in, but by now they were stained and filthy. Her blouse was ripped, and there was a gash running down the side of her blue jeans. No one had unstrapped her to allow her to go to the toilet, so it was obvious she had no choice but to soil herself where she was. A vile stench was rising up from her stake, and around her feet it was possible to see small piles of human waste. It was her face that looked the worst, though. Her eyes were bloodshot and wasted, with a dark, hollow look to them, and the skin across her face was already dry, stretched and caked with sweat, dirt and blood. There was a cut across one cheekbone, which had dried into an ugly scar, but with some blood still seeping from the wound. And her hair was matted, thick with sweat, and was starting to form itself into ugly clumps that would soon fall clean away from her head.

The pretty young television star who was filling a
thousand newspaper front pages back in Britain was long gone. Instead, her place was taken by a haggard, beaten person, who was already closer to a corpse than a woman.

How long exactly she had been tied to this stake, it was impossible for Porter to tell. Probably since they took the poor girl late on Sunday night. That made five continuous nights now. It would be virtually impossible for her to get any sleep, nor did it look as if they had been feeding her. There was a jug of water on a table next to her, but there was no way she could reach it with her arms bound behind her back. The closer you looked at her, Porter realised, the more of a miracle it was that she had survived this long. Another day, and the bastards probably wouldn’t need to chop her head off. She’d be dead already.

They might not have tortured her – not yet anyway – Porter told himself, but that made no difference. They were treating her worse than any animal.

Her eyes rolled towards his, the eyeballs moving slowly in their sockets. Porter had seen eyes like that before. There were plenty of junkies out on the streets, and they all had dilated pupils and eyeballs they were incapable of moving properly. It was one of the ways of spotting them, and Porter was always quick to steer clear of the crackheads sleeping rough on the streets: they were violent and dangerous, and usually so out of their heads they would attack you for no reason. Her eyes were exactly the same: slow, empty, full of pain, and devoid of any hope. But it wasn’t any kind of drug that had made her like that. It was the bastard standing right next to him.

Porter clenched his fists. It would take a man of iron self-discipline not to land a punch on Hassad’s face right now. And he had never been a man who had counted self-control among whatever qualities he might possess.

It was clear Katie Dartmouth was finding it hard to focus. Her mouth was immobile, and her face was too caked in
blood and sweat for any sort of expression to be read into it. But you could see from her eyes she was confused and terrified. The last few days had taught her to greet every new moment with dread and loathing, and this one was no different. She was looking at Porter, struggling to focus, and yet as she did so, she seemed to flinch. ‘Are you …?’

She was struggling to speak, but it sounded more like the strangled cry of a dying animal than any noise a human might make. Again, Porter could feel a wave of anger welling up inside him. Her lips were so dry, and her throat so weak that it was clearly painful for her even to finish the sentence. ‘Are you … ?’ she started again, this time trying to move her head upwards slightly so that she could see him properly.

‘I’m English, yes,’ said Porter, looking straight at her.

For the first time it was possible to see something other than despair in her eyes. Not hope exactly, Porter realised. That would be putting it too strongly. But there was some strength there that he hadn’t seen when he’d first walked in: a sign that she might be able to struggle through the next few hours at least.

‘Who … ?’

Suddenly she started to cough violently. Her whole body had become badly dehydrated over the last few days and as she started to speak, her throat seized up. Porter could see the shame and humiliation in her eyes as the saliva started to dribble down the front of her mouth. Without being able to lift either of her hands, there was nothing she could do to stop it.

‘Who are you?’ she said finally when she managed to bring the coughing under control.

‘I’m the best news you’ve had since you got here,’ said Porter.

It looked as if she was attempting a smile, but her face was too weak for the muscles to respond. ‘I … I …’

The coughing started up again: a vicious hacking sound
that appeared to throttle her, and caused teardrops to start forming around her strained and tired eyes.

‘Give her some bloody water,’ snapped Porter.

Hassad remained immobile, neither saying nor doing anything.

‘Fuck it, man, she’ll be bloody dead by tomorrow morning,’ growled Porter.

He walked over to the jug of water, picked it up and poured some into the tin cup next to it. Then he stood next to Katie, holding the back of her head in his hand. The stench was vile, worse than anything he had ever experienced even while he was sleeping rough. Anyone who has ever been homeless has developed a strong stomach, but Porter was struggling to keep himself from vomiting. He pushed the cup up to her lips, holding her head in position to give her any chance of drinking it. Her throat was so dry that at first the water just washed over her lips, the way a heavy rainfall will wash over the land, but eventually she was able to swallow some of the water, gulping it down greedily. When the cup was empty, Porter turned round to refill it from the jug. But Hassad was now holding it. ‘Here, let me,’ he said contemptuously.

He filled the tin cup, and held it up to Katie’s mouth. The first hit of water had started to strengthen her, and she was better able to drink this time: as soon as the cup was at her mouth, she drank down its entire contents in two swift gulps, with hardly a single drop spilling out over her face. ‘We need to get you looking alive for the camera,’ said Hassad. ‘That way it will be all the more shocking when your head is severed from these shoulders for all the viewers watching back at home.’

‘You can’t execute her,’ snapped Porter.

‘I can and I will,’ said Hassad.

‘Who sent you?’ said Katie, her eyes darting nervously from Porter to Hassad.

‘Nobody sent me,’ said Porter. ‘I came of my own accord.’

‘For …’ She started to cough again, and it took her nearly a minute to bring it under control. ‘For what?’

‘I might be able to get you out of here.’

Her head moved slightly from side to side. It was no more than a flick of the neck, and maybe she was just trying to stretch the few muscles she had been left in control of. But Porter could see something else in her expression. She didn’t believe him. Even worse, she didn’t want to believe him. He’d seen the same looks sometimes in the faces of guys dossing down in the street. They’d given up all hope. They no longer reckoned they could do anything for themselves, nor would anyone else be able to rescue them. They were just waiting to die. And the sooner their lives ended, the better.

‘Just wait and see,’ muttered Porter, as Hassad took hold of his shoulder, and guided him back towards the door.

But she had already closed her eyes.

Hassad looked back at her. ‘One more night of suffering, and then your ordeal will be over,’ he said softly.

I’ll get you away from these bastards, Porter said to himself.
Or I’ll sure as hell die trying.

Porter walked alongside Hassad through the narrow, dank corridor. He knew the memory of what he had just seen would remain with him for the rest of his life – all twenty hours of it. The woman tied to that stake was nothing like the young, tough, resourceful woman who was being talked about every night on the television back at home. She had been boiled down to nothing more than a skeleton with some skin and veins wrapped around it.

The bastards had only had her for five days. And they’d already drained every ounce of spirit and resistance out of her.

Porter knew he had to stay calm. Inside he was raging, but he knew he had to conceal that from Hassad. To show even the slightest trace of emotion would be a mistake. He had to make Hassad believe that he was here as a negotiator. He had to convince the man there was something he could do for him, some deal he could offer, that would persuade him to at least postpone the execution for a few days. If nothing else, maybe he could get them to cut her down from that stake, and let her get a few hours’ rest.

But what? They had discussed it back at the Firm, and apart from releasing the prisoner in Guantànamo Bay nothing they had suggested sounded very convincing. Sometime in the next few hours, he realised, he would have to make the toughest call of his life so far. Shall I try and negotiate? Or should I just concentrate on breaking Katie out with my bare hands?

But what the hell can I do? Just one man against maybe dozens of them?

It was just a short walk back to the main junction where the staircase down from the lift shaft ended. Hezbollah had obviously chosen this part of the mine as their main base. How far the mine extended, there was no way of telling for sure: from the surface it looked like it had once been a pretty big operation, so it could go on for miles and miles. Even if only a tiny fraction of it was occupied, Hassad and his men would know the entire layout, and would almost certainly have booby-trapped the rest of the place to deal with any potential intruders. Even if by some miracle I knew exactly where we were, and I managed to transmit the location back to London, the Regiment would find this place tough to break into.

Porter was surveying the territory as he walked, making sure he knew every inch of the ground, and committed every face to his memory. The same two guards had still been standing mute outside Katie’s door, but he reckoned there must be a shift change, probably three times a day: in any well-organised army, eight hours was the maximum sentry duty you could expect a man to perform before he started getting tired and careless, and Hassad’s mob looked pretty professional to Porter. He made a mental note to see if he could figure out the time of the shift change: there might be a few seconds in which there was a chance to sneak into Katie’s room unnoticed. As they walked into the main meeting point of the tunnels, Porter took note of another pair of heavily armed men standing guard at the bottom of the staircase. In total, Porter reckoned he had seen between fifteen and twenty different guys since they had arrived here, including the blokes they’d driven with in the Mercedes. As a rough rule of thumb, he calculated there could well be double that: some men would be sleeping, some would just be in different parts of the mine, some would up on guard
duty above ground. That meant there could be anything up to forty Hezbollah fighters down here.

Forty to one, thought Porter grimly. That’s just suicide.

Hassad steered him towards the third tunnel leading away from the main meeting place. Like the corridor in which Katie was incarcerated, it stretched back about thirty yards, except at the end this one dropped into what looked like a deep crevice the mining company must have cut into the rock. This must be where some of the men kip down, Porter reckoned. There were a few small rooms leading off the corridor, each one with three or four straw beds on the damp ground. Electric lamps illuminated part of the way, but some of them had been turned off, probably to save power. He saw a few men sitting around in each room. Some of them were cleaning their guns, or repacking the ammunition in their belts. One or two were reading or writing letters. The rest were just staring into space. Same as soldiers anywhere, thought Porter. They were trying to get as much rest as they could before the next firestorm kicked off.

‘This will be your room,’ said Hassad. ‘So long as you are our guest, then you can stay here.’

How long are they expecting me to stay here? Porter wondered. Their plan is to kill Katie tomorrow evening. Maybe I’m the next hostage after they’ve finished with her.

He pushed open the door. It was no more than a cave: a space where the miners had blasted into the rock years ago. It was four metres deep and about three metres wide. Hassad knelt down to switch on an electric lamp, which filled the space with a pale, golden light. There was a straw bed and a bucket in the corner with some water in it. From the smell of the place, some men had been kipping down here pretty recently, but they seemed to have cleared out. ‘Wash,’ said Hassad. ‘We will eat in twenty minutes, and then we will get some rest.’ He smiled to himself. ‘Tomorrow, after all, is a pretty big day for us.’

Porter turned to face him. The last time they had been this close was seventeen years ago when he had been about to plunge a knife into the man’s neck. ‘Let me take her place,’ he said.