Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) (48 page)

‘It’s Carl Mayne, director of Ops. We haven’t met – at least, not face to face.’

Here we go, thought Luke. Flight home, cattle class, and thanks for the work you’ve done but we won’t be needing your services any more, Mr Carlton. ‘He’s gone,’ said Luke abruptly. He might as well get it out there straight away. ‘García’s taken off. Possibly to Panama. We did everything—’

‘I know,’ interrupted Mayne. ‘Langley already told us. Don’t beat yourself up, it couldn’t be helped. Listen, there’s been a development. The mission’s still on.’

‘It is?’

Todd Miller was looking at him questioningly so Luke mouthed: ‘SIS in London.’ Miller nodded and went back to studying an illuminated, rolling map on his handset. It was now close to 0330 hours, and most of the other passengers in the minivan were asleep.

‘Yes,’ continued Mayne. ‘You need to listen very carefully. NSA have been in contact and they’ve passed something to us through GCHQ. Seems they intercepted a call on a satphone a few hours ago.’ Luke hunched forward, trying to shut out the noise of the journey so he could listen.

‘NSA managed to geolocate it to an unregistered airstrip north of where you just were and voice-matched it to one of the known players. Alfonso Suarez. I believe he oversees all of García’s security. Anyway, he made a second call mid-flight. They’re still in the air now and we’re tracking them.’

Luke felt like he’d been given a new lease of life. ‘So they’re heading north to Panama?’ he asked. ‘Can we intercept them?’

‘Opposite direction. They’re heading south, towards the tripartite border, the point where Colombia, Peru and Ecuador all meet. I’ve got it on the screen in front of me now. They’re just about coming up to the equator as we speak.’

‘Well, we’re totally good to go here,’ said Luke. ‘What’s the plan?’

At that moment there was a screech of tyres and Luke felt the seatbelt bite hard into his shoulder as the vehicle braked sharply and swerved to avoid a goat that had wandered onto the road. It stared dumbly back at them.

‘Motherfocka!’ shouted someone in the back. ‘Next time run it over, why don’t you?’

‘Just the hazards of driving at night in this country,’ said Luke, into his phone.

‘Colourful language,’ said Mayne. ‘Now listen, we’re still going for a takedown of García but we can’t do it without the full cooperation of the Colombians. We’re setting up now for them to take you in to wherever García’s plane puts down.’

‘Even into Peru or Ecuador?’ questioned Luke. ‘You mean a cross-border op?’

‘That would be deniable!’ snapped Mayne, then added, in a more conciliatory tone, ‘It’s been done before, mind you. In 2008. The Colombians took out the FARC number two and seized a whole load of insurgent laptops. Some incriminating stuff on there and we helped them sort through it, so they owe us one. Hold on, someone’s telling me something . . .’

Luke strained to catch what was being said in London as they passed through a town where salsa music was spilling out onto the street from an all-night bar. Other people, thought Luke. Normal people, just going about their daily lives. Then Mayne was back. It would be coming up to nine in the morning in London, he realized. No wonder the man sounded so fresh.

‘So here’s what’s happening,’ said Mayne. ‘You should get back to the airbase at Medellín around first light.’

But Luke was distracted. Over in his seat Todd Miller was on the phone, clearly trying to get his attention. When Luke looked straight at him, Miller gave him an emphatic thumbs-up. So he was getting the good news at the same time.

‘There’ll be a plane waiting to take you and the team down to a place called Puerto Leguízamo,’ continued Carl Mayne. ‘It’s a Colombian naval base on the river, slap bang on the equator. That’s your launch point. We’ll have more info for you when you get there. Miller’s being told the same thing now. Stay in touch.’ Mayne rang off.

Luke was running short on sleep and had had little chance to shake off his jetlag from London. But none of that seemed to matter now. They were back in the game. A tightly wound ball of tension inside him seemed to dissipate and for the first time since he’d left Florida his thoughts turned to Elise. It felt good to know that while he was hot on the trail of the bad guys in South America his girlfriend would be heading off to work about now. He imagined her in their Battersea flat, making the bed, checking herself in the mirror and heading out of the door. Perhaps she had slept in one of his T-shirts.

ELISE MAYHEW WAS
despondent. She was still wearing the clothes they had kidnapped her in, a navy-blue business skirt and sheer tights. She was dressed for her real life, working in a West End art gallery, valuing paintings, negotiating sales, putting together catalogues and exhibitions. Yet she was bound to a chair in a bare, windowless basement, begging to be taken to the lavatory next door, her every move observed by a woman with a violent, unpredictable temper.

Linda had provided her with precious little sustenance since her capture: a plastic bottle of tap water, a packet of savoury biscuits and a single apple. Whether this was designed to weaken her or whether it was just out of laziness, Elise wasn’t sure. But she certainly wasn’t going to repeat the mistake of asking again for something more substantial: last time, her guardian and tormentor had flown into a rage, leaving the room in a rush then returning with something in her hand. It had looked like a primitive mobile phone and, for a moment, Elise had thought she was going to be ordered to call someone. But the object had two metallic prongs. No sooner had Elise worked out what it was than Linda jabbed it into her thigh. There was a crackling sound and a searing red-hot jolt of pain tore through her as she jerked backwards in the chair, letting out a high-pitched scream as the electric charge pulsed through her body. Never had Elise
experienced pain like it. And now the woman was holding the electric cattle prod in front of her face, waving it from side to side. ‘You eat what I give to you,’ she hissed. ‘You don’t ask.’

In the evening they arrived to move her again, Linda and two of the men who had snatched her in Battersea. She was making a careful note of their features now. One was a little overweight, with a florid, blotchy nose and receding hair. Every time she saw him he was wearing the same tan jacket with the grease stain and the tear in the sleeve. Maybe Ana María wasn’t paying them very much. The other was short and wiry, but he had striking blue eyes, unusual for a Latino. His face had a bronzed glow, and in other circumstances she might almost have thought him good-looking. Elise guessed he had been on a late-autumn holiday or had recently arrived from South America. The men were careful not to address each other by name in front of her but she once overheard Linda call him León. She would remember that name.

It was her third journey as a captive and this time she sensed she was in a car, not a van. Wordlessly, they had thrown a blanket over her head, then forced her down into the back of the vehicle behind the front seats. Linda had sat practically on top of her and, just to make a point, she had briefly switched on the electric prod so Elise could hear the terrible static crackle, just in case she had any ideas of trying to make a run for it.

When they stopped, some forty-five minutes later, and brought her out of the vehicle, her head still covered, she knew they had left the city behind. The air was cooler, fresher, and she could hear the distant rush of traffic from somewhere over the horizon. They guided her down a flight of wooden steps into a cellar, sat her on a wooden crate, removed the cover from her head and left her alone with the door locked. Her arms remained bound behind her back.

Elise fought rising despair. What was it that her
sensei
, her karate instructor, used to tell her? ‘The greater the wind, the stronger the tree’; ‘Engage your mind and body’; ‘Focus on mastering your
internal environment.’ That had all sounded so eminently clever, so full of Eastern wisdom in the clean and ordered confines of the
dojo
. But somehow she couldn’t bring herself to apply it to her present situation. What would Luke do? Did he know of her predicament? The worst of it was, she had no idea if the police were even aware that she was missing.

THERE WAS SOMETHING
not right, Luke reckoned, about a place that called itself a port when it was at least five hundred kilometres from the nearest ocean. Puerto Leguízamo was a riverside port on the Rio Putumayo, right on the border with Peru. He had looked it up on Google Maps on his phone, waiting, with the rest of the Special Ops team, at the Medellín airbase for their Colombian Airforce flight south. Switching his phone to Google Earth, he stared down at a sea of green: the Amazon rainforest. A mud-brown river coiled across the page and an interactive hyperlink indicated their destination, the Base Naval, the Colombian military’s remote outpost just two hundred metres from the Peruvian border. He scrolled westwards and there, barely fifty kilometres distant, was Ecuador and the tripartite junction of the three countries. From the short time he had spent at Vauxhall Cross, Luke knew this was serious bandit country, a place where weapons, drugs, money and people criss-crossed borders illegally, blending into the jungle or hiding themselves among the impoverished communities that eked out a living on the banks of the rivers. He scrolled eastwards, following the course of the Rio Putumayo deep into Brazil, until it joined forces with the mighty Rio Amazonas at Manaus, over sixteen hundred kilometres away. It made him realize just how vast this jungle was, and how it dwarfed the tiny base they were heading to.

As they filed onto the C130 transport plane, Luke reached into his breast pocket and took out a pair of yellow foam earplugs for the night flight. He never went on operations without them. Strapped into his seat, he and most of the rest of the team were asleep even before the four-engined transport plane soared into the night sky above the twinkling lights of Medellín.

The Colombian Navy’s base at Puerto Leguízamo felt curiously like home to Luke. Not proper home, of course; not like his and Elise’s flat in Battersea, or the bleak Northumberland farm where he had passed his teens. No, more like what he remembered from his Colombian childhood: the heat, the humidity, the smell of lush vegetation, fresh with rainwater, and flies turning lazy circles about his head. It also reminded him of the SBS base back at Poole. There was the main camp, with the accommodation blocks, the parade ground, helipad, armoury and offices, the equivalent of North Camp on the Dorset coast. Then there was the boatyard, not quite the well-oiled ship-shape operation they ran down at Poole, known as the Hard, with all the immaculately maintained RIBs and other assorted assault craft, but a boatyard all the same. The difference was that here in Colombia, the mission was operational 24/7. The bad guys were out there in that jungle and swamp, just across the river, day in, day out. And he knew this because Carl Mayne had told him so. García and his senior lieutenants had landed just a couple of hours ahead of them. The net was closing.

Two hours after dawn broke Luke stood with the rest of the team on the quayside of the naval-base boatyard, trying to hear what was being said over the deafening screech of parrots in the trees above them. He stood with his legs braced slightly apart and his sleeves rolled up, watching. The Colombian Marines had a new weapon in their armoury and their commanding officer was extolling its virtues. ‘
Este equipamiento es innovador!
’ he announced proudly, pausing for the interpreter to translate. ‘He says, “This equipment is a game-changer.” ’

Luke and the Americans looked from the officer to the
machines behind him, parked up on the sloping mud of the jetty, ready to be deployed.

‘The Griffon 2000 assault hovercraft has changed the nature of our operations,’ continued the Colombian colonel. ‘In the dry season, which we’re coming into, it allows us to pursue our enemies across the mudbanks and reach places we could not reach before. There is no hiding place now for the
narcoterroristas.
Gentlemen, we are pleased to offer you our help.’

Luke was back in his element: an ex-commando dropped into a jungle naval base, looking down at these giant beasts of the river. The assault hovercraft were just over eleven metres long with a single massive turbofan at the back. Painted a dark grey-green, they each had a powerful .50-calibre machine-gun mounted on top, while their rear canopies bristled with antennae.

‘It has a top speed of thirty-five knots,’ added the Colombian officer, ‘and it can carry fourteen fully equipped Marines. These craft just arrived here from Britain!’

The hovercraft, Luke knew, were just one element of a complex plan they would need to put together to close in on García and finish him. They would require input from the NSA to fix his exact location, then maps had to be drawn up, insertion routes chosen, forming-up points, radio frequencies, a medevac plan. They were walking into the briefing hut when Luke’s mobile vibrated again in his pocket. He thought about ignoring it but saw it was from Angela, in Vauxhall Cross.

‘Give me two minutes and I’ll catch you up,’ he called out to Todd Miller.

‘You got it.’ The American’s giant frame towered over the Colombian officers beside him.

Luke stopped beneath the spreading branches of some tropical flowering fruit tree. The parrots had dispersed and he had no difficulty in hearing Angela’s voice cutting crisply across the eight thousand kilometres that separated them. ‘I hesitate to ring you at this time,’ she said. ‘I know you’re right in the middle of things.’

Oh, God, don’t tell me they’re calling it off.

‘But there’s something you need to know.’ Her voice sounded unusually strained.

‘Go on,’ he said.

‘It’s Elise. ‘She . . . she’s been kidnapped . . . by García’s people. I’m not supposed to tell you but I believe you have a right to know.’

For several seconds he didn’t say a word.

‘Luke? Are you still there?’

He was silent at first, but the questions were crowding in thick and fast. ‘I’m still here,’ he said eventually. ‘When did this happen? And where? Have they said what they want?’