Crisis (Luke Carlton 1)

In the dank undergrowth of the Colombian jungle, a body is found.

A man in his forties. He’s been stabbed in the chest but most of the blood has come from where his ear once was. In his pockets are a stained notebook and a British passport. That much the local police know. What they don’t know is that Jeremy Benton worked for the British Secret Intelligence Service. That his murder will trigger a crisis. And that soon all hell is going to break loose . . .

MI6 need someone on the scene who can sort out this mess, and quickly. And so Luke Carlton – ex-Special Boat Service commando, now under short-term contract to the SIS – steps out of a plane in Bogotá and into a world of trouble. Hunted down, captured, tortured and on the run from one of South America’s most powerful and ruthless drugs cartels, Luke begins to unravel the coils of a plot targeting everything that he holds dear. And now it’s a life-or-death race against time to prevent a disaster on a terrifying scale.

Drawing on his years of real-life experience reporting on security matters, BBC journalist Frank Gardner’s debut novel combines up-to-the-minute insider knowledge and fly-on-the-wall insights with heart-in-mouth excitement.

Fast-paced and furiously entertaining,
Crisis
is a thriller for the twenty-first century.

BUTTERFLIES. SUNLIGHT AND
butterflies. That was what he remembered. Dappled patterns on tropical foliage, bird calls from high up in the tree canopy, and so many butterflies. Really big ones. As big as a man’s hand and blue as a gem. Dazzling, dancing, beckoning him to follow. Come with us, they seemed to say, and you’ll be safe.

In convoy they drove out that morning, the families of the oil company senior executives, singing on their way to the annual corporate picnic. Last year, it was a private beach near Cartagena, and this year a country club on the very edge of the jungle. Beside drooping vines there were trestle tables laden with food, baseball for the grown-ups, a makeshift jungle gym for the kids. And Luke Carlton, just turned ten, was bored to tears. Inquisitive and adventurous, the games did nothing for him. He watched, scowling and grumpy, as the CEO stood on an upturned crate. He was American, jowly and gregarious, with a big belly-laugh and a lime-green polo shirt that struggled to contain his ballooning waistline. He was making some sort of speech in slow, halting Spanish with a terrible accent. Luke reckoned he and his classmates could speak better Spanish than that.

Luke picked his moment. Unseen, he slipped away from the group and darted into the forest, following the butterflies. With every step, he expected to hear his name called and the sound of
running footsteps followed by a sharp rebuke, but it never came. The path veered left and he took it, arrived at a fork and turned right. The butterflies were everywhere, folding their gossamer wings as they alighted. They were his friends – they had to be: why else would they be showing him the way? More than once he stopped and held up his hands for them to land on. He smiled when one fluttered onto his nose and another onto his blond hair, which his mother had brushed only that morning.

He should probably be heading home, he thought, and began to backtrack down the path. But there, blocking his way, was a large fallen log. He didn’t recognize it. At his feet a trail of chestnut-coloured ants swarmed across the track.

Soon the path gave out altogether and there, hanging off his bare leg, was a leech. Slimy, black as a slug, gorging on his blood. He tried to flick it off with his thumb and forefinger but it was stuck fast to his flesh. Luke shrugged. It didn’t occur to him that he was lost, just that he’d be in trouble with his parents when he got back.

At that moment he saw that he was not alone. There were three of them, standing silent and watching. Never in his wildest dreams had Luke seen anyone who looked like that. Their faces were painted a vivid purple, their scalps shaven smooth, and each had some black object inserted into his lower lip. Round their necks they wore strings of animal teeth. Or were they bones? He couldn’t tell. The men were small and wiry, naked but for the filthy cloths around their waists. Two carried long, curved bows; the third clutched a blowpipe. Their language was strange, all rasps and clicks, definitely not the Spanish they were teaching him at school. One moved, an arm slowly extending. Were they going to shoot him? Rooted to the spot, Luke wondered what it was like to be hit by an arrow. Did you die straight away, or slowly? Would it hurt? Were they – were they going to eat him? But now they were making a sign to him, gesturing – they wanted him to follow them.

They walked for hours. With clicks and grunts they urged him on, offering swigs of brackish water from the gourds at their
waists. And then through the tangle of forest vines he could see a clearing, a dozen round thatched huts, smoky fires, barefoot children, the discarded carcass of a monkey. He caught his breath. A jeep from his father’s company, with the familiar brown-and-yellow logo, stood between the huts. He ran to the door and yanked it open. ‘Dad!’ But a woman he didn’t know was sitting in the driver’s seat, her eyes red and sad. ‘
Mi chico
,’ she said to him and held out her arms.

He stood his ground. ‘Where’s my mum and dad?’ he demanded. ‘I want my mum and dad!’

‘Your mother and father . . . There has been a terrible, terrible accident on the road. All day they looked for you, and when they tell them you are found they came at once. They were driving so very fast. They could not wait to see you, they did not see the truck. Oh, Luke, we are so, so sorry.’

A butterfly fluttered close to his face. He slapped it away. ‘You’re lying!’ he shouted. ‘Where are they? I want to see my mum and dad!’ But she shook her head and her eyes welled with tears, though his were still dry. ‘They are gone, Luke
.
Your parents are gone. They are in Heaven now. May God look after you.’

FIRST CAME THE
antennae. Brown, swivelling, twitching. Then the shiny armour-plated body, emerging from the dark recesses of the drains. Jeremy Benton watched with disgust as the first cockroach of the night crawled out from his hotel sink. This place was a dump and he couldn’t wait to leave it. Forty-seven years old, hair thinning, mortgage worries mounting. Alone in a Colombian hotel room, trying to focus on the job instead of fretting about his bank balance, while the ceiling fan turned lazy circles and the sweat rolled down his fleshy neck and soaked his fraying collar.

The insect grew bolder, probing the grime-encrusted porcelain, foraging and tasting. In one impulsive movement, Benton launched himself off the bed and struck with a rolled-up magazine. ‘Got you!’ He missed and the roach shot back into the drains. He sat down heavily, already out of breath. He looked at his watch. It was time. He reached under his jacket and felt the cold, metallic shape of the Browning 9mm automatic. Not the weapon he had asked for – this model had a date stamp on it that was even older than him – but it was all they’d had at short notice in the embassy armoury. They had even made him sign out every single one of the thirteen rounds that had come with it. He had put in his time on the range this year – you had to if you expected to keep your firearms licence in the Service – but he hoped he wouldn’t need
the pistol. If he was honest with himself, Benton knew he wasn’t cut out for the heavy stuff. If he was really honest, he would say he was scared shitless.

Jeremy Benton had been offered the usual ‘security envelope’ for tonight’s job, a close-protection detail of SAS troopers disguised, not always convincingly, as civilians. It was a toss-up between personal safety and raising profile, so Benton had gone for a compromise. The security detail had dropped him off at the hotel, then melted away. This operation, he had told London, was so sensitive, so secret, it had to be kept low profile. He needed to be alone.

Dusk falls quickly on the Pacific coast of Colombia and it was not yet seven o’clock when he slipped out of his hotel in the dark. To Benton, Tumaco by night had an intangible, brooding malevolence. Maybe it was its proximity to the dangerous border with Ecuador, or perhaps the resentful looks cast at him by some of the ninety thousand impoverished townspeople, mostly of African descent, who stared out from darkened doorways with nothing to do and nowhere to go. There were still huge disparities of wealth in this country. In Bogotá you could mix with millionaires and dine in the finest restaurants, but down here on the coast, the Afro-Colombians were close to the bottom of the economic pile.

And always there was the dank, fetid smell that rose from the rotting shanty huts on stilts, perched above the mud banks where crabs competed for space with rats. Only one industry counted down here: the white stuff, in all its stages – paste, powder and leaf – and how to get as much as possible smuggled across the border or out to sea. Gone were the days of the once seemingly invincible cartels, the Montoyas and the Norte del Valle. The world’s most infamous drug kingpin, Pablo Escobar, was long dead and buried. In twenty-first-century Colombia the cocaine cartels and traffickers, the
narcotraficantes
, had fragmented into numerous smaller cartels or criminal
bandas
, harder to catch and just as ruthless. But the Colombian government, with help from the Americans and the British, had been steadily taking them
down, one by one, going after the structures, the family leaders, the organizers. You didn’t stay long at the top in this business – two years at most – before you ended your days bunkered in a flat with six mobile phones in front of you, waiting for the door to come crashing in.