Beneath the Ice (29 page)

‘
Qui êtes-vous
. . .’ she managed to say, but her speech was slow and groggy. A trail of saliva ran down her chin and on to her neck as the agent roughly jerked her head round so that she was facing the picture of Bear held directly in front of her.

‘When did you last see this woman?’ Bates asked, enunciating each word slowly.

‘
Je ne . . . comprends pas
,’ the woman panted, still blinking unsteadily. ‘No . . . English.’

‘I think you understand just fine,’ Bates retorted. On the drive over to the market square, he had sifted through her possessions and discovered that the second mobile phone she had been carrying, which was presumably hers, was set to English as the primary language. He’d also found her Congolese passport.

‘You speak good English, don’t you, Inés?’

Hearing her name, the woman raised her soft brown eyes to meet his. Bates stared into her face, realising that, despite her young age, her looks had already begun to fade. Crystal meth had etched premature lines around her eyes, while the attention of the street gangs had long-since robbed her of any trace of innocence. Bates was sure that she would be well used to physical abuse and getting information out of her that way might take some time. Better to try other means.

Holding the image a little higher, he moved closer to her. ‘I’ll give you a thousand rand if you tell me everything you know about this woman.’

Inés’ eyes widened at the mention of money. It was less than eighty pounds, but to her it was food for a month. For that much she would have betrayed anyone she could think of, let alone that bitch of a woman who had stuck her with a skewer. As Bates reached into his jeans, pulling out a wad of sweaty notes, her hand went to her side involuntarily, feeling for the wound that Bear had inflicted. It still hurt like hell whenever she moved.

Counting out the blue one-hundred-rand notes, Bates watched her fear slowly turn to suspicion. Her eyes followed his every move, as if the slightest distraction might in some way annul the offer.

‘Yours if you tell me,’ he said, pressing the notes into her open hand.

Inés hesitated a moment longer, then she started to speak.

‘I met her in the market place. By the
Tshisa
stand,’ she said, her voice surprisingly soft and melodious. ‘We got talking because she’s from the Congo – like me. But then this gang came along and wanted to catch her. I tried to warn her, but the twenty-eights were too fast.’

She paused, lowering her eyes dolefully. Bates followed her every move, already suspecting he was only hearing half-truths. ‘So what happened then?’

‘There was gunfire and everybody started running from the market. The white men got taken down. Just like that.’

‘To the woman. What happened to the woman?’

‘In all the confusion, she ran and managed to make it a little way down one of the back streets and hide.’

‘And?’

‘They found her,’ Inés answered matter-of-factly. Her gaze lowered as she remembered the sound of the taxicab’s door sliding back, then the rush of the gang members as they charged past her towards the ramshackle hut where their quarry had been hiding. The tall woman had been so close to getting away, but by chance one of their men on the street had heard her whispering into her mobile phone and had kicked open the door.

Inés had watched as they set upon their prize like dogs, pulling, dragging, kicking her back towards the vehicle. She remembered how viciously the woman had fought, lashing out with the skewer she had been holding and jabbing it straight into the neck of the first assailant. There was a bright spray of blood, before the man made a horrible gurgling sound and collapsed on to his knees. As the others in the gang tried to pin her down, the woman had scratched, bitten and screamed like a wild animal.

In the last few seconds, Inés had seen the woman desperately search for help. Her eyes had switched from side to side along the alleyway, but nobody was about to risk their own skin by intervening. In the end, they had bundled her into the waiting taxi, leaving only the mobile phone she had been using, lying in the mud.

Inés looked up, but this time a cocky smile edged at the corner of her lips.

‘Give me another thousand and I’ll tell you where she is.’

Bates didn’t appear to have heard. Then, with a sudden crack, he smashed his elbow into the top of her chest. The blow drove all the wind out of Inés’ lungs and she reeled forward, gasping in shock. He waited without speaking while the other agents in the car simply stared ahead impassively, the stick and carrot routine all too familiar.

Checking his watch, Bates waited for the prisoner to recover enough to be able to hear him. Then he addressed her again.

‘You were going to tell me where she’d been taken.’

Inés nodded hesitantly, her whole body curling in on itself.

‘Just up ahead,’ she stammered, still wheezing for air. ‘There’s a . . . big house on the edge of the square. Everyone knows it. That’s where . . . the gang keep the women before shipping them on.’

Bates nodded, signalling to the driver of the Range Rover to continue. Just as they were about to move off, the Mamba drew level and the sergeant poked his head out of the window.

‘Delta team reports a crowd gathering in the north-east corner, sir,’ he said.

Bates turned in his seat. Not too far away he could see trails of acrid smoke rising into the air. The inhabitants were starting to burn tyres, sealing them in with a ring of fire and smoke.

‘Check our exits and get Delta and Alpha teams to hold them off until we’re ready to move,’ he ordered. ‘We’ve got one more call to make.’

THICK, CHOKING SMOKE
wafted across Nyanga’s market square. Through the gaps in it, Bates could see movement as hundreds of people prepared themselves for battle. There was chanting and weapons were brandished high in the air. These ranged from simple
pangas
and gardening knives to fully automatic AK-47s.

Behind the seething ebb and flow of people, taxicabs arrived from the neighbouring townships. As the news had spread that the military were out in force on the streets, they had raced across town, packed with an assortment of pistols and ammunition. As the vehicles drew to a halt, the contents were quickly handed out to the children, who in turn ferried them to their elder siblings and fathers on the front line.

The chanting grew louder, becoming more unified and coherent. For the briefest of moments, the various tribes inhabiting Nyanga had put aside their festering animosities and now stood side by side in the face of this sudden attack. Excitement grew, stoked to fever pitch by the elders. Already rocks were being hurled through the wall of smoke in the vague direction of the soldiers. They rolled out across no-man’s-land, as if preparing the ground for the onset of blood.

Bates watched as Alpha and Delta teams took up positions on the opposite side to the crowd. He needed them to hold off the mob for at least another twenty minutes while he focused on finding Bear. But with each minute that passed, he could see the crowd’s confidence growing. Already they vastly outnumbered the soldiers and now they edged closer, step by step.

Turning his attention to his own men, Bates watched them shuffle along the road using the Mamba’s rear cabin for cover. As they came within fifty metres of the house that Inés had mentioned, a long, raking burst of machine-gun fire suddenly rose to greet them. The bullets thudded into the muddy street before tracing left and finding their target. They ricocheted off the high bull bars of the Mamba before smacking into the front windscreen and splintering the toughened glass.

‘Contact front!’ shouted the sergeant. Instantly the lead soldiers widened their stance and opened up with their R4 rifles in response.

‘Shit!’ Bates screamed, grabbing the radio from the dashboard of the car. ‘Sergeant, do
not
return fire! Repeat: do
not
return fire. I want the suspect alive. Only fire once inside the building and in line of sight.’

There was a silence, the sergeant clearly bemused by such a command.

‘Do you copy, Sergeant?’ Bates barked. It was the first time the others inside the car had seen him so animated. They watched as he craned his whole body through the gap between the front seats, fighting against the restrictive padding of his bulletproof vest.

‘Drive the Mamba through the front wall of the house,’ he ordered. ‘Then go room by room.’

‘Yes, sir.’

He watched as the order was relayed and a plume of diesel smoke belched out from the Mamba’s exhausts as it changed gear and sped forward. Behind it the soldiers broke into a full sprint as they tried to keep under cover and follow in its wake. There was another burst of gunfire from inside the house, but this time it was panicked and sporadic. The occupants had already guessed the vehicle’s intent and were running for cover as it surged towards them like the prow of a mighty ship.

The Mamba ploughed into the rickety wall of the house, reducing the doorway to rubble and dragging down the entire front section of the roof. Bates cursed again, the driver having come in too hard, and wondered whether they would soon be digging Bear’s body out from the wreckage. There was a brief lull while the sergeant ordered two-man fire teams to take position on either side of the house in case anyone tried to escape.

Towards the rear of the building a chair was tossed through a window, sending fragments of glass bursting into the sunlight. Two skinny men followed, but only managed to get two or three paces clear before they were cut down in a storm of gunfire. At such close range, their bodies jerked and twitched as chunks of flesh were ripped from their torsos. The macabre dance continued for several seconds before they collapsed lifeless to the ground in a pile of broken limbs.

The Mamba then reversed, allowing the rest of the unit to swarm inside the house.

‘I want her alive!’ Bates screamed into the radio, but there was no response. They heard the muffled clatter of gunfire, then an interminable silence. The seconds dragged on and on, with Bates trying to see through the sweat running into his eyes. Finally, the sergeant’s voice drifted over the radio signalling the all clear.

Bates leapt out of the Range Rover, so close behind the grab team he was almost tripping on their heels. They stepped through the gaping hole in the front wall to find the inner rooms clogged with masonry dust and the smell of cordite. Moving further, Bates could see a television in the far corner of the room. It was still on, with a half-drunk can of Coke lying spilt to one side.

They were funnelled upstairs and on to a narrow landing where a figure was sitting upright, slumped against the wall and clutching its stomach. It took Bates several seconds to realise that the man was already dead. He then noticed the sergeant gesticulating towards one of the rear bedrooms. As Bates moved past him he stared into the man’s face, desperately hoping for a hint of what he would find, but the layer of dust had made the sergeant’s expression entirely unreadable.

Bates stumbled on, his momentum bringing him deep inside the room. Rubbish bags had been taped against the single window, blotting out all but a thin sliver of light, but still he could see a woman lying naked on a bed. Her wrists had been bound to the metal bedposts with cheap gardening wire which had cut deep into her skin, leaving small circular stains of blood on the filthy mattress underneath. She was lying twisted to one side with her short-cut hair clinging to her face.

Bates inched closer but, from the woman’s short hair, realised almost immediately that this wasn’t Bear.

‘Found her like that,’ the sergeant said, hovering just behind him. ‘God knows what those bastards did to her before she died. Fucking animals.’

Bates stared into the lifeless brown eyes of the woman on the bed. She was young, little more than a teenager.

‘Shit,’ he whispered, shaking his head. He stood up and moved towards the door. ‘Cut her free and get her out of here.’

The sergeant nodded grimly, when from somewhere further along the corridor, they heard a shout.

‘Got another one!’

Bates stumbled forward, barely daring to hope. He pressed down the corridor towards the front of the house, where the soldier was clearing bricks away from a door. As soon as Bates entered the room, he recognised Bear. Again the gang had used wire, this time to tie her to a chair. Her body was hunched over in the seat, with her hair spilling into her eyes.

Bates stood still, feeling as though his feet were rooted to the floor. He finally understood what it was about the image of Bear that had so unsettled him on the flight over. It was that hair. The long black hair spilling over her face looked exactly the same as an operative he had lost in the Yemen all those years ago. Bear and she had been different in almost every other way, but each of them had long jet black hair that always seemed to fall in strands across their cheeks. He had been the one to find his agent in a backstreet in Sana’a, a single bullet through her throat.

He shook his head, trying to drive the terrible image from his mind. A second passed before he managed to regain his breath enough to speak.

‘Out,’ he said. Still coughing from the hanging dust, the soldier stepped outside the room. Bates crouched lower, moving slowly so as not to startle her.

‘Bear,’ he whispered, ‘it’s over. We’ve come to get you out.’

She didn’t respond. Only her eyes moved as they scanned his face. She looked wired from adrenalin and fear, and it took several seconds before a spark of recognition passed across her face. ‘Kieran?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, reaching past the pistol on his belt to a small leather pouch. Taking a Leatherman multi-tool inside and jamming the pliers over the wire coiled into her wrists, he freed her arms. The wounds looked to be weeping and sore, but there was nothing else to be done until they got safely back to the military base.

As he helped Bear to her feet, a strange sense of relief washed over him. Although her clothes were ripped and dusty, they hadn’t been stripped from her. There was a chance the gang hadn’t got that far with her.