Frank Davis had watched the arrival of the Chinese tourists with concern. Several elements of their cover were lacking: they didn’t have a guide, they weren’t taking photographs and their bags were too large. Moreover, they were wary but comfortable – and this was bandit country. Hostile environment training was written over every movement. And then the shooting began.
Davis’s GPS showed Jake was in the guardhouse. That meant he was pinned. Soon the Chinese would take the plateau along with anything they found up there – and this was not something Davis could allow. The agent smiled coldly as he unzipped his backpack and saw oiled metal inside. Before being recruited to MI6 as part of the so-called ‘Increment’ of ex-forces personnel, Davis had been an SAS sniper. In Afghanistan and Iraq he had come to take great pleasure in the game of ending other peoples’ lives. Losing Guilherme was a setback, but at heart he was a lone wolf – it felt good to be operating by himself again. Now the only cock-ups to worry about were his own.
He loaded five rounds into the L115A3 Accuracy International sniper rifle and snapped its stock into position. Next he screwed in the weapon’s noise suppressor, admiring the finesse of its thread as it turned. The British-made weapon was considered the finest sniper rifle in existence. In Afghanistan he’d made a kill at more than a kilometre with this puppy, sending the bullet high into the sky and watching as it plummeted to earth to decapitate its target. Now he was at a twentieth of that range: it would be a doddle.
The machine-gunner was positioned some distance from the others on the rooftop of a mud hut. He was using tracer fire to direct the bombardment, every fourth bullet laced with phosphorus, and it was strangely beautiful to watch the glowing bullets ricochet in all directions before the straight line of their travel became a curve with the tug of gravity. But tracer rounds were always a double-edged sword, as they betrayed the machine gun’s exact location. Davis peered down the telescopic sight. The gunner’s head bobbed above the lip of the hut every few seconds, distorted by the heat coming off the weapon. Davis didn’t open fire. The Chinese deployment might be careless, but they were packing some serious firepower. Once he’d committed he had to be sure of killing every last one of the motherfuckers. A bit of shock and awe was in order. Davis smiled again as he retrieved an M79 grenade launcher. It resembled an oversized sawn-off shotgun, like something a cartoon character would carry. He broke the weapon and inserted a mini-artillery shell into the breech. Now he was ready.
Davis took a moment to become calm, breathing deeply, allowing himself to settle into what the British Army calls the ‘Condor Moment’. The sensation is of soaring: watching the battlefield from upon high, a waking dream imbued with laser-like focus. Most soldiers experience it in combat, brought on by training, adrenaline and knowledge of the possibility of death.
One hell of a feeling.
Davis took aim with the blooper and pulled the trigger. The projectile fizzed across the barren terrain at seventy-five metres a second, hitting the first climber between the shoulder blades as he reached for the guardhouse. The explosion propelled bits of the agent over a wide radius and a ball of fire rolled up the cliff, morphing from orange to red and then chemical black. His accomplices clung to the rock as the shockwave rushed down. Already Davis had the rifle pressed to his cheek. And he was firing repeatedly. The machine-gunner’s skull vanished in a cloud of red. The second climber was shot in the neck, the third through his heart. One after the other they peeled away from the cliff, spinning through the air and hitting the ground with a ‘thunk’. Davis’s movements were languid as he selected the next target. He was mildly disturbed to find he had an erection.
*
The flight of the grenade shell was just visible in the air, like a rocket at a daytime fireworks display. Jenny traced the line of sparks to its point of origin. Even before she peered through her goggles she knew it would be Davis. For once in her life she didn’t know what to do. This was not the MI6 she knew: the organization had spent decades trying to dispel the myth it was some sort of a paramilitary group, permitted to kill and maim at will. The MI6 of Ian Fleming was pure fiction, or so she had thought. Certainly in all her service she had never heard of lethal force being deployed by an officer – and now this carnage was unfolding before her eyes. Even as she watched, another coil of smoke shivered through the air. The grenade hit the Chinese Jeep, which was racked by a double conflagration. First the high explosive shell lifted it into the air. There followed a secondary blast as the petrol tank ignited, jerking the vehicle onto a new flight-path. The agents sheltering behind the car were riddled with shrapnel. The mangled Jeep crashed to earth. A pair of human torches fled across the sand; Davis finished them off with the sniper rifle. And with that the slaughter was over.
A pall of smoke and silence fell across the landscape.
Jenny let her head fall into her arms. Once again she heard her father urging her to consider a career in the City; her ex-fiancé’s pleas for a family; Angela’s orders to return to Nottingham. But this had all been her choice. She had made an appointment to be here.
Jenny couldn’t have returned to work as though Axum never happened. She didn’t want to be involved in a road accident or spontaneously decide to throw herself under a tube. As she saw it, the choice was stark: nail Charlie Waits to the wall or live in fear.
She could have posted Davis’s boasts straight to Newsnight. Yet that wasn’t sufficient. Waterboarding would enrage the left, but it was old hat and Waits might survive the scandal. All this death had been unleashed because of his fixation with the Disciplina Etrusca: that was what needed to be exposed. But if she began talking about Etruscan soothsayers they would paint her as deranged. She didn’t have enough evidence – no journalist would give her the time of day.
Except one: Jake could be an ally.
Jenny glanced at her scanner. The reporter had survived the bombardment – the blue dot was on the move again, tracking across the plateau and away from the church. Davis must have spotted it too, for he broke from cover, dashing towards the cliff. He had abandoned the sniper rifle for an automatic pistol.
He’s going to kill Jake too.
Jenny glanced in the direction of her four-by-four, hidden by a dip in the terrain. It was do or die time. She looked at the scanner, recoiled, looked at it again.
Jake had disappeared.