After an almost seven-hour flight, the man who’d checked on the secretary stepped out of the military transport plane they’d travelled in from Abu Dhabi. It was a grey day, the rain coming down in sheets, a westerly wind cutting in from the coast. On the French Air Force base tarmac runway, he oversaw the coffin being taken from the cargo bay and lifted by four men into the back of a dark-blue Citroën van. The secretary would be driven to a remote location in Normandy, northern France. One of the last places on earth that the US intelligence community would be likely to look for her.
He walked over to two French Air Force officers, spoke with them and handed over a package, same as he’d done at Air Base 104 Al Dhafra. Half then, half on successful delivery. The officers weren’t habitually corrupt, but they’d taken the bribe just the same. They’d been told that the corpse in the coffin was that of a French national, the son of a wealthy Paris businessman, who’d died in a prison cell in UAE after being found with drugs in his suitcase. The businessman hadn’t wanted any bad publicity, and had asked that his son be brought home this way in order to avoid it. It wasn’t a great story, and the officers were putting their careers on the line, but it had worked.
The payment made, he got into the front passenger seat of the van, glancing at the two SUVs parked waiting behind. The team were all ex-French Foreign Legion or former European Special Forces’ soldiers: six French nationals, three French-speaking Belgians and a couple of Brits. The little cortège pulled away, heading west.
One of the Belgians asked him a question, using his name. He threatened to break his neck for being so unprofessional. The Belgian had called him Proctor. As far as the British and Americans were concerned, he’d died in the Hindu Kush, and he wanted it kept that way.
He’d been a model soldier. His old mates would’ve never believed he was capable of murdering his spotter, Mike Rowe, whom he had shot in the back of the head with a sniper rifle. Although they’d been promised half of the million-dollar reward put up by the US government if they killed Mullah Kakar, he’d already been offered ten times that in pounds sterling for his role in the treachery. After over a decade of war, he’d realized that adrenalin rushes wouldn’t compensate for an early death or blown-off limbs. Proctor now planned to spend a long retirement on a beach so remote that it barely showed up on a map.