Carter stayed angry for the short drive back to his rental apartment in north-eastern Santiago. Home. For the next few hours, at least. His pad was on the fifth floor of a whitewashed block, a fifteen-minute stroll from the British embassy. One of the older buildings in an area of aggressive development. The district was chock-full of gleaming skyscrapers, chain hotels and sushi restaurants. The grand nineteenth-century homes, run-down bars and high-rises were disappearing, slowly submerged beneath the steel-and-glass tide of progress. The same story the world over. The old giving way to the new.
I know the feeling, Carter thought.
Ten o’clock at night on a Thursday in early April. The streets were quiet. At this hour, the temperature was somewhere in the low single digits, and the few pedestrians were wrapped up in more layers than a wedding cake. Carter steered the Land Cruiser down the blacktopped ramp at the side of the residential block, dumped the wagon in the underground car park and climbed the stairs to the fifth floor.
Carter had nothing to do but wait for the call from the embassy. Ten o’clock in Santiago was one in the morning in the UK. Langton would stay at the barbecue for a while, trying to patch things up with General Vargas before making the call to the Hereford duty officer. There would be a brief discussion with the head shed. Concerns would be aired. Conduct called into question. Following which he would be summoned to the embassy. There would be a brief formal conversation with the military attaché. Someone would hand Carter a ticket for the next available flight back home. He doubted anyone would miss him.
At least I won’t have to spend another day working with Fabian Vargas, Carter consoled himself.
He couldn’t sleep, so he fetched a bottle of ice-cold Escudo from the fridge, cracked it open and dropped into the black leather armchair in front of the TV. State of the art, twenty years ago. He snatched up the remote and channel-hopped, sipped his beer.
He was pissed off at Langton, at the Regiment. At the general.
But most of all, Carter was angry with himself.
He’d fucked up. A useless kid with a drug addiction and an attitude problem had needled him. Big deal. Any sensible soldier would have kept his mouth shut, but Carter had lost his cool.
Again.
His career was already in trouble.
Now it’s in the bloody gutter.
He flicked through the channels until he found one of the news networks. Carter didn’t speak Spanish, but he picked up the basic thrust of the report from the footage. There had been a meeting at the White House between POTUS and the British and Australian prime ministers. The three men were shown standing on a stage, grinning in front of the cameras and looking pleased with themselves. Some sort of major summit.
Carter recalled skim-reading an article about it on his newsfeed a few days ago. A new military alliance. To counter Chinese aggression in the region, it was said. Although none of the partners had mentioned China specifically, their intentions were obvious.
Good luck with that. It’ll take more than a few nuclear-powered subs to rattle Beijing.
The report cut to a clip of the US president standing behind a lectern as he fielded questions from the media. A pair of advisers stood either side of their frail-looking commander-in-chief. A stern-faced man in a dark suit and a patterned silk necktie, and a slim red-headed woman wearing a bright blue jacket and a pair of matching trousers.
Carter had never seen the woman before, but he recognised the serious-looking guy in the necktie instantly. He was tall and slim and thin-lipped, with side-parted silvery hair and hard blue eyes so cold they were practically cryogenic. The man looked to be fifty or thereabouts, but he had the honed physique of someone twenty years younger, and the stiff bearing of a one-time military man.
That’s him, thought Carter. That’s the bloke I met.
Bill Ramsey, the former director of the CIA.
One of the president’s closest confidants.
The same man who had hung the Medal of Honor around Carter’s neck.
Carter cast his mind back to that day. Four months after the siege in Mali. The small ceremony in a side room in the Capitol. No photographers, no press. Just Carter, Ramsey and a few other US dignitaries. Ramsey had shaken his hand, looked him in the eye and in his slow Southern drawl he’d said that the American people owed him a great debt of gratitude for his actions.
‘The President won’t forget what you did, son,’ Ramsey had told him. ‘You can be damn sure of that. You’ve got yourself a friend for life right there. Count on it.’
Carter had been a man on the up. Or so it seemed. But then Brathwaite had done his best to destroy his career. Things had gone downhill for him ever since.
On the TV, the news had moved on to the other major international stories. A migrant caravan was slowly making its way north to the US border. There was a short segment on the famine in Afghanistan. Loggers were aggressively deforesting the Amazon. Inflation had hit a new twenty-year high. Carter drank his ice-cold beer and watched the world going up in flames.
He finished his drink. Grabbed another and tore it open, numbing the anger.
Ninety minutes later, his phone buzzed.
Carter dug out his Regiment-issue handset and glanced at the caller’s name glowing on the screen.
Peter Treadwell. The embassy’s military attaché.
Treadwell acted as the liaison for the Chilean SF training contract. Once a week Carter attended a meeting with the guy at his office at the British embassy to brief him on the training programme. Treadwell had even popped down to the camp on a couple of occasions to watch Carter putting the recruits through their paces.
As soon as he saw Treadwell’s name flash up, Carter knew it was bad news.
Twelve minutes past midnight. Less than three hours since he’d stormed out of the mansion. Christ, he thought. Langton has moved fast. He must have reached out to Hereford as soon as I’d driven away. The guy must really want me off the job.
He skated a finger across the screen. Clamped the phone to his ear and said, ‘Yes?’
‘Jamie, this is Peter,’ the attaché said, pointlessly. He spoke in a rich plummy accent, but not as posh as Langton. One of the lesser public schools. A grade or two below him in the social order. ‘Listen, I’ll get straight to it. We need you to come in.’
Even over the phone, Carter could sense the cold anger in Treadwell’s voice.
Here it comes. The end of my life in the Regiment.
Terminated by a coked-up idiot with a crap haircut and a general with a fetish for Pinochet souvenirs.
He said, ‘When?’
Treadwell said, curtly, ‘Right now.’
‘Send a car. I’ll be ready.’
A contemptuous snort came down the line. ‘I’m not sending you anything, you thick bastard. Not after the stunt you pulled earlier tonight. You’ve got legs, haven’t you? Bloody well use them.’
Treadwell liked to think he was funny. Carter just thought he was a cunt.
He was about to kill the call when Treadwell said, ‘One more thing.’
‘Aye?’
‘Bring your bags and documents with you. Packed and ready to go. Understood?’
Carter was about to ask why, but he already knew the answer.
I’m on the way home.
One-way ticket.
‘I’ll be there in twenty,’ he said.
‘Fine. Don’t keep us waiting.’
Treadwell clicked off. Carter listened to the dead air for a beat. Us, Treadwell had said. Therefore not just the attaché. He wondered who else would be sitting in on the meeting. The ambassador, presumably. He’d want to gloat over the wreckage of Carter’s SAS career. Maybe the communicator from MI6, ready to hand him his boarding pass.
He was out of the Regiment. No question. The head shed frowned on Blades who caused diplomatic shitstorms, and they didn’t get much worse than battering the son of a general in the middle of a Whitehall charm offensive. He was gone.
Carter had no family waiting for him back home. He’d married young. Too young, in hindsight. Alex had caught his eye on a night out in Hereford not long after he’d passed Selection. Six months later, they had married. But things had quickly gone south. Afghanistan had done things to Carter’s head. It put shit in there he simply couldn’t get out again. When he came back home, he was a closed book. All the bad stuff had been buried in the blackest recesses of his mind. In the darkest moments, he turned to drink. Alex had told him to seek help, but he wasn’t interested.
‘You’re like a different person, these days,’ she had said, and she was right. They had limped along for a while before finally separating. Divorce had followed soon after. Now he could barely afford the monthly alimony payments.
Carter lived by himself, in a modest house a couple of kilometres outside Credenhill. In the mornings, when he wasn’t at the camp, he went on long walks. In the evenings, he read.
‘You must get lonely,’ one ex-girlfriend had said. Carter didn’t feel that way. Outside of training, he was comfortable in his own company. He had few friends. Nothing to keep him tied to Hereford. No reason to stick around. That had advantages.
Perhaps he’d try his luck in America after he’d left the SAS. He had contacts at Langley, in Delta and the SEALs. He had a Medal of Honor and a thumbs-up from the president himself. There would be opportunities over there, he figured.
Anything’s got to be better than this shite.
He spent several minutes packing his very few possessions into his waxed canvas holdall: toiletries, civilian clothing, his stack of military history titles. Carter always took a few books with him whenever he went on ops. He was currently reading works on Stalingrad, D-Day, the Napoleonic Wars.
Years ago, while on a training exercise, he’d seen a veteran Blade engrossed in a history of Ancient Greek warfare. Carter had been puzzled. He’d asked the guy, a gruff Brummie, why he was reading that stuff.
‘I’m a soldier,’ the Brummie had replied matter-of-factly. ‘Killing is my profession. Why wouldn’t I take an interest in it?’
Which had seemed like a good answer. Ever since, Carter had made an effort to bone up on his history whenever he had some downtime.
I’ll have plenty of that from now on.
Three minutes later, he checked out of his apartment for the last time.