Jimmy Coates: Survival

Despite the distance, the girl could also make out human figures around the outer fence. Were they running? Yes. That’s when she knew for sure.

Mutam-ul-it was preparing for an attack.

So should we, she thought, steeling herself. Time to raise the alarm.

07 FEAR, PAIN AND A RED BEARD

Jimmy had been on the move for hours. The terrain was rugged and the air was thin. He could hear his brain assessing the surroundings. He had to be over 3000 metres up, he guessed. Above the snowline. That put him somewhere on one of the highest peaks, in the centre of the mountain range. But however difficult it was, he had to keep moving if he was going to stay alive. And there was the constant fear at the back of his mind, driving him on – the British attack on France. He had to stop it.

By now the agony that shot through his body with every step had mutated in his mind into some kind of reassurance. It told him he was still alive. That he was still moving. His legs felt so heavy that his feet dragged along the ground as he walked.

He travelled in a dead straight line, but the going was getting steeper. At least the fog had cleared a little so he could see his route further ahead. In the crash he’d slid a long way down the slope and he was paying for that now, always having to march against the gradient. Every few minutes he came to what looked like an impassable rock face, but his body seemed to relish the challenge. Despite the onset of frostbite and the cracked ribs, Jimmy free-climbed as if he’d been born a mountaineer. The hooks of shoehorn he’d fixed to his soles served as makeshift crampons.

With his eyes squinting against the elements and his body straining to keep his basic systems going, Jimmy fought on. But the real torment was in his mind. The whiteness that surrounded him seemed to reach into his brain to plant fear and worry, but most of all anger.

As he heaved himself up the cliff face, he thought back to the very first night that NJ7 had come for him. From that moment, almost everybody he trusted had betrayed him. He had believed Miss Bennett to be his form teacher and he’d even gone to her for protection. She had turned out to be the one woman who most wanted Jimmy dead. He felt a bitter laugh scratch at his throat.

But it had happened again and again. Eva’s parents had pretended to protect him, then betrayed him to NJ7. Colonel Keays had fooled Jimmy with the promise of CIA refuge. Jimmy’s stomach turned over when he thought of his own gullibility. How had he trusted any of these people? He had even convinced himself to use his assassin skills to work for Keays.

Never again, Jimmy thought. He told himself that if he made it across the Pyrenees to see Uno Stovorsky – or any other agent of the French Secret Service – he would beware every word that was said.

Trust your instinct, he urged himself. But in his heart he knew that even his instinct was untrustworthy. Sometimes it was the human part of him acting out of fear, or loyalty, or emotion. Sometimes it was the assassin in him, spurring him on towards self-defence, survival and violence. Perhaps even murder.

How could he know which instincts to trust and which to resist?

Around him, the light was fading. When darkness fell Jimmy knew the temperature would plummet even further. But there was no time to dig shelter for the night and rest. He had to keep going. There was a battle coming.

The largest destroyer in the British Navy dropped anchor 16 kilometres off the coast of Western Sahara. The waves pounded against the iron, but to the commanders and crew of HMS Enforcer the conditions were irrelevant. Two hundred and fifty men and women in pristine white or navy uniforms moved through the vessel with such precision and efficiency they were like parts of a single machine.

In no time the Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles were primed. The targets were locked into the guidance system. Everything was perfect. Nobody needed to say a word.

Except one.

The front section of the central mast contained the command centre – a triangular room with a low ceiling and a door at each corner. This was the brain of the ship. The longest wall, the base of the triangle, was a huge window that looked out over the front of the vessel. All along it, at hip level, was the control desk. From here, the senior officers and their staff made all their decisions and issued their orders.

But one man was completely out of place. He was wearing a suit and a life-jacket and was at least 50 centimetres shorter than everybody else. Compared to their naval steel, he was made of pie pastry.

“Remember,” he said, his voice quivering, “we can’t—”

He was cut off by a glance from Lieutenant-Commander Luke Love. Love’s expression was harder than the iron of the ship’s hull. The sunlight coming through the glass picked out the proud gold braid on the upper part of his sleeve – two stripes with a single loop.

“A single misplaced explosion…” the other man whispered, so intimidated by Lt Cdr Love’s glare that he could hardly speak. “It’s such a delicate environment, that’s all. And we don’t really know what safety systems Mutam-ul-it has in place. You know, for the…”

“Don’t worry, Dr Giesel,” Love replied calmly. “We know enough.” His voice was strangely cheerful, but deep and serious at the same time. Like an experienced headmaster. “Your report told us which specific buildings to hit and which to avoid,” he explained. “The place will remain fully operational and almost all in one piece, ready for your team to take over.”

The muscles round the officer’s mouth creased into a grim smile. Then he lay his hand on the number pad of the control desk in front of him and punched in an eight-digit code.

“Right,” he declared under his breath. “Time to nationalise this hellhole.”

Even the walls of the town of Tlon showed the troubled history of the state of Western Sahara. Almost a century of graffiti was layered on top of itself. The oldest protested against the rule of the Spanish, from the time when they had colonised the country. It was no longer visible under the blurred mess, but since then there had been plenty of other people to complain about: the Moroccans (Western Sahara’s neighbours to the north), the Americans (first for them being there, then for them leaving), a dozen different football teams (from the time when the politics were so complicated even the locals didn’t know who to protest about) and, most recently, the French.

Every building bore the marks of unrest and instability. Cracks ran through the stone walls and holes in the roofs had been covered with ragged, sun-bleached tarpaulin to keep the heat out. These days the cracks and holes couldn’t be fixed, even though they let the rats in, because they were conduits for the cables of the rudimentary electricity and telephone systems. They were also used for signalling.

A series of flashes reflected the sunlight from the low roof of a house. Nobody would have noticed the dark figure hidden under the tarpaulin. Five hundred metres away the signal was acknowledged with another flash, then repeated at a new angle. It was acknowledged again, a little further away this time, towards the centre of town.

The rooftops of Tlon glittered with rapid flashes. There were sounds too, on top of the normal bustle in the labyrinth of narrow streets. Across the town, telephones rang once, stopped, then rang again before being picked up. But no words were spoken – there were only sequences of taps and breaths.

In the small central market there was a sudden eruption of squawking. A boy ducked under one of the stalls, disturbing a small chicken coop on his way through. He sprinted across the street, hidden in the cloud of dust he kicked up. He slipped past a market stall selling bootleg DVDs and burst into the building opposite – three storeys, almost completely masked by a huge Coca-Cola billboard.

Inside was a bare room, dark except for the horizontal stripes of light cutting through the shutters, making the floorboards look like a zebra-skin rug. There was another door at the back, partially concealed by a stained red curtain.

In front of it stood a young guard with a machine gun across his chest and a silver rod where his left leg should have been. In the darkness that was almost all that was visible, until he recognised the boy and smiled, revealing three rounded, pearly teeth.

The boy didn’t smile back.

“Mutam-ul-it,” he gasped, trying to catch his breath.

The guard’s smile vanished. He nodded and knocked on the door behind him. It flew open immediately. In the doorway stood a broad man, silhouetted against the harsh light of the bare bulb inside his room.

A European observer might have noticed this man’s wild red beard, deep-set blue eyes and the explosion of orange hair on his head. But to everybody in this town he could be identified simply as ‘the white man’. Certainly nobody paid any attention to the thin black tie worn loosely around his neck, or to his slender-lapelled suit – black, dusty and worn at the elbows. Who here would even notice that on one lapel was a short, green stripe?

When this man spoke it was in grammatically perfect Hassaniya Arabic, but with a strong northern English accent.

“I told you this would happen,” he announced, waving the boy away. He turned to his guard. “Go get the trucks. Now.”

08 BIRDS IN FLIGHT

At last Jimmy could feel the temperature creeping up a couple of degrees. The sun was rising – not that he could see it with the fog still so thick. He’d made it through the night. But the white world around him seemed to close in. Then it started spinning.

If I stop I’ll die, he told himself. But the voice was faint, as if something inside him was still shouting, but he had lost the ability to hear it. Keep walking, it continued, so feebly it was quieter than a thought. Then came echoes of the phrases he had repeated to himself over and over thousands of times since he started his trek: Find Uno Stovorsky. WarnFrance. But they were confused and lost beneath the wind.

Then even that noise stopped. Jimmy no longer knew where he was or where he was going. For a second it even felt like his thoughts were completely detached from his body. All the pain floated from his limbs…

No, he heard. Find Stovorsky… France… But the words didn’t mean anything any more.

A light pierced his eyes. Something silver and glimmering. It seemed to pull Jimmy towards it. He was overwhelmed by the sensation that this was the most wonderful thing he had ever seen. The surrounding whiteness flickered from grey to blue to black. Is it night again? Jimmy wondered.

It was his last thought before his head hit the snow.

“Birds in flight, sir,” came a voice through Lt Cdr Love’s intercom. “The launch was clean.”

Dr Giesel ran his hands nervously up and down the front of his life-jacket, then straightened his tie.

“They’re definitely on target?” he whispered. “Because if they’re even slightly off—”

“This is the British Navy,” Love cut in. “We don’t do ‘slightly off’.” He kept his gaze straight ahead at the clutch of buildings on the horizon. The Tomahawk missiles twinkled above them. There was a glint of pride in his eye. But when he caught sight of the other man’s concern his expression softened. “The missiles are guided by GPS,” he explained, “and the targets can’t move. They’re buildings. Not people.”

Dr Giesel was satisfied for a second, until fear crept into his face again.