Games Traitors Play. Jon Stock

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘This lousy cowshed’s just got a sheet for a roof.’ He had little confidence in his plan, but he had to try something. He owed it to his daughter. ‘Do exactly as I say, and pray to your God.’

       6

      Marchant knew as soon as the man pulled into the petrol station that he was going in for an upgrade. The bike had made it five miles out of Marrakech on the R203, across the dry plains south of the city, but it was now starting to struggle. His own Mobylette was suffering too, and the frosted mountains were looming, floating on the horizon in the evening light. But it wasn’t the scenery that interested Marchant: it was the group of touring motorbikes that had stopped to refuel at the station. His mind was beginning to think like a thief’s. He pulled up two hundred yards short of the garage, bought a bottle of mineral water from a roadside stall, and drank deeply, watching the dusty forecourt.

      There were at least ten bikes, powerful tourers laden down with carriers covered in ferry stickers and English flags. Marchant knew from his three months in Marrakech that Morocco was a popular ‘raid’ for British bikers. He had seen them rumbling into town on their way to the Atlas Mountains, where the roads were good and the passes were among the highest in Africa.

      The riders, bulked out in their padded leathers, had crowded around one bike. It was set apart from the others, next to a support Land Rover Defender. A man was lying on the ground beside the back wheel. The bike seemed to have a mechanical problem of some sort, and the group was deep in discussion, talking animatedly with two local guides. The other bikes were unattended. If the keys were in the ignition, it would be easy for the man to set off on one of them. But he drove past the bikes, past the petrol pumps, and parked his moped on the far side of the forecourt shop. He then walked around the back of the building, out of sight.

      What was he doing? Marchant kept watching as he slipped the lid back onto the plastic bottle of water. Moments later, the man reappeared, helmeted and riding a powerful touring bike. As if making a token check for traffic, he looked back down the dusty road in Marchant’s direction – was he taunting him? – and was gone, roaring off towards Asni and the mountains.

      Marchant felt sick. He was about to lose his man. He also knew that he was right, that Salim Dhar was up there somewhere in the High Atlas. And that made his stomach tighten so much that he wanted to throw up. The only good thing was that none of the bikers had clocked the man as he had driven off. In Marchant’s experience, bikers usually checked out each other’s hardware, but they were too preoccupied with their own broken machine.

      Marchant remounted his Mobylette and rode up to the garage. He switched the engine off before he turned into the forecourt, and freewheeled silently for the last twenty yards. He passed the first two bikes, checking the ignitions. Neither had a key. But the third, a BMW GS Adventure, did. Marchant parked up beyond it and glanced once in the direction of the group. It was then that he realised that the man on the ground was not trying to mend the bike. He was the focus of the group’s attention, and he was lying very still. The bikers were too far away for Marchant to hear what they were saying, but he thought he heard someone mention a doctor.

      Ignoring an instinctive urge to go over and help, Marchant switched quickly from his moped to the tourer, turned the ignition and felt the 1150cc engine rumble into life beneath him. Without looking up, he moved off the forecourt, joined the main road, and accelerated slowly away from the garage, heading for Mount Toubkal, the highest peak on the horizon.

       7

      James Spiro had not enjoyed his job with the CIA since he had been moved to Head of Clandestine, Europe. It was a promotion, and should have been rewarding, a few comfortable years in London before he returned to Virginia for greater things. But he hadn’t counted on Salim Dhar proving so elusive. Ever since he had slipped through the net in India, Dhar had been Spiro’s biggest headache. He would wake at night, sheets drenched in sweat, seeing his President take the bullet that had somehow missed him in Delhi. His in-tray was full of daily requests from the Pentagon, the White House, the media, all wanting to know where Dhar was and why he hadn’t been eliminated. And in his darkest moments, he couldn’t stop thinking of Leila, the woman who had died instead of the President, the woman he had slept with only hours before.

      Spiro knew his career hung in the balance, which was why he was now back on home soil, coordinating the Agency’s biggest manhunt since the search for Osama bin Laden after 9/11. There had been dozens of credible sightings of Dhar around the world, each one proving false, each one ratcheting up the pressure on Spiro to find him. The collateral damage from drone strikes hadn’t helped his cause. The last one, in Pakistan, based on an ISI tip-off, had killed thirty civilians, mostly women and children.

      And what were America’s greatest allies doing to help? Diddly shit. London’s relationship with Dhar was ‘delicate’, according to Marcus Fielding. Dubious, more like. Daniel Marchant, the one person who might be able to find Dhar, was on vacation in North Africa, if such a thing was possible, eating too much couscous in Marrakech. If it had been up to Spiro, Marchant would have been strapped back onto the waterboard, telling them all he knew about Dhar, rather than being allowed to wander around Morocco’s souks as if nothing had happened.

      Now, though, the end seemed finally in sight. It was always going to be only a matter of time until Dhar made a mistake.

      ‘Run me those coordinates again,’ he said to the operator next to him. He was standing in the ‘cockpit’, a hot and crowded trailer, also known as a mobile Ground Control Station, in a quiet corner of Creech US Air Force Base, Nevada. In front of him, two operatives were seated in high-backed chairs, each monitoring a bank of screens. One was a pilot with 42 Attack Squadron, a seasoned officer in his forties who used to fly F-16 fighter jets but was now directing MQ-9 Reapers, the most advanced hunter/killer drones in the world. The other was his sensor operator, a woman no older than twenty-five who controlled the Reaper’s multi-spectral targeting suite.

      Spiro had spent a lot of his time at Creech in recent weeks, too much for his liking. And he had eaten too many Taco Bells in Las Vegas, thirty-five miles south-east. Creech used to be a bare-bones facility, a rocky outpost in the desert, but now it resembled a building site. New hangars were going up all the time around the main airstrip, which had once been used for landing practice by pilots from the nearby Nellis Air Force Base. Spiro found it hard to believe that such a bleak, uninhabited place represented the future of aerial combat. But he guessed that was the point: the USAF’s first squadron of Reapers was unmanned.

      The pilot in front of him read out the coordinates. Dhar’s voice had been traced to a remote location in North Waziristan, on the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Fort Meade had done a good job for once. Someone had been listening in real time, and not just to Pakistani generals having sex. This was the big one, and there was a palpable sense of excitement in the cockpit, even from the base commander. He had stepped into the trailer when news spread across the base that Salim Dhar might be about to be taken down. It would be a big moment for the commander. His unit, 432 Air Expeditionary Wing, had stood up at Creech in 2007 to spearhead the global war on terror, and he needed a result. Spiro knew the commander blamed the CIA for the recent spate of bad publicity. The last strike in Pakistan had brought relations between the Agency and the USAF to a new low.

      ‘I think we have our man,’ Spiro said, turning to the commander.

      ‘We need to do this by the book,’ he replied. ‘You know that.’

      ‘Of course. And the book says we take Dhar out. We have an 80 per cent confidence threshold.’

      ‘Are СКАЧАТЬ