Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) (49 page)

‘It was two days ago, in Battersea, near your flat,’ said Angela. ‘The Met are handling it.’

‘What the hell does that mean?’

‘It means they’re working as fast as they can to get her back. Look . . . the people who’ve got her, they want to trade. You for her.’ She let that sink in, then added, ‘Obviously it’s out of the question.’

A figure appeared in the doorway. It was Todd Miller, and he was growing impatient. ‘Hey, Carlton. Time to wrap up the romantic phone call. I need you fully focussed here.’

IN A SPARSE
basement room beneath an ordinary house, in a quiet residential cul-de-sac near the junction of the M3 and M25, Elise Mayhew was undergoing a metamorphosis. Suddenly, inexplicably, she no longer felt afraid – not of Linda or of the South Americans who kept bundling her in and out of the backs of vehicles to move her from one hiding place to the next. She was still alive, still largely unharmed, and she had reached a conclusion: she was going to get through this in one piece. In fact, she was going to do more than that. She was going to escape.

Ana María might be an accomplished poker player but she wasn’t the only one who could put on an act. Each time Linda had come into the room to check on her or escort her to the bathroom, Elise had taken care to cultivate an air of weakness, helplessness and despair. With bogus tears welling in her eyes, she had pleaded with Linda to untie her bonds. ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she gasped, pointing to the locked door, ‘and you still have the key.’ Eventually Linda had agreed. ‘Give me your shoes,’ she had ordered, almost as an afterthought.

Alone in the basement, once Linda had left, Elise resolved to wake up her aching limbs. With no one around to watch her, she began some basic stretching exercises. At first it was a tremendous effort – the last two days had taken a lot out of her – but she persevered. Twice, she went to the door to listen in case
anyone was coming. Silence. She moved back into the centre of the room, savouring the simple pleasure of walking after all the hours she had spent tied to a chair. She seemed to have been abandoned, which was infinitely preferable, she reflected, to having to cope with Linda and her electric cattle prod. Now she felt light on her feet, alert and alive. And then she heard the key turn in the door.

After that things could have gone either way. Elise could have sat down on the crate in the middle of the room, apparently weak and despondent, cowed into submission by the bleakness of her situation. But when the door opened and Linda walked in, unaccompanied, something clicked in her head. It was as if a voice were saying to her, You’re only going to get one chance, and this is it. Take it.

And it was true: Linda had clearly changed her mind about untying her prisoner because she was holding the electric prod in one hand and a length of cord in the other. ‘Sit down,’ she snarled.

Elise moved towards the crate, judging the distance between herself and the other woman. Three metres, two metres, one metre . . . When Linda was within range Elise erupted into an explosive
mae geri jodan
, a devastating karate front kick that caught the Colombian woman completely off-guard. It was as if all the pent-up terror Elise had experienced since the moment they had snatched her was concentrated in that single controlled kick. Back in the training
dojo,
Elise was capable of landing a kick to the head of a man as tall as her, if not taller, but Linda was a good fifteen centimetres shorter and her head made an easy target. The hard heel of her right foot caught Linda right beneath the chin, knocking it upwards and snapping it backwards with a sickening crunch that shocked even Elise. The Colombian collapsed onto the floor, motionless. She was out cold. Elise braced herself for the next person to come through the door, but no one followed. It seemed they were alone in the house.

So, what now? Elise stood there, balanced on the balls of her feet, breathing heavily, heart racing. Her instinct was to run outside and wave down the first car she encountered. But what about
Linda? These people already knew where she and Luke lived, and where she worked. They were bound to be back.

Elise stood over the Colombian, legs poised, fists clenched, ready to put her back on the floor if she made a move. Linda’s eyes opened but she wasn’t moving. At all.

‘
No puedo moverme
,’ she murmured, a note of rising panic in her voice. ‘I can’t move.’

A trick? Elise kicked the woman’s leg, not hard but enough to hurt, testing her reaction. It was unresponsive. Elise reached down and shook her arm, expecting that at any moment Linda would grab her. But she didn’t. She lay there, slack and listless, repeating over and over that she couldn’t move.

It took several seconds for the enormity of what had happened to register with Elise. Had her kick knocked the woman’s head back with such force it had ruptured her spinal column? If her nervous system was now disconnected from the neck down, then that meant that Linda must have lost control of nearly all her body.

Elise was in turmoil. In all her years of practising
Shotokan
karate she had never hurt anyone like this. It was one thing to knock the woman down so she could escape, quite another to condemn a fellow human being to a largely lifeless body. Despite everything that Linda had done to her, Elise felt a surge of guilt, remorse and even pity. She bent down so her face was close to the stricken Colombian’s and patted her shoulder gently. ‘Someone,’ she told her, ‘will be back to help you.’

And now she needed to get away from this place before anyone returned. If the narcos came through the door and found this scene she dreaded to think what they would do to her. Elise moved quickly, out through the door of the basement, quietly up the steps, pushed open another door and felt cool November air. It was getting dark – or was it getting light? She couldn’t tell. It seemed to be between day and night. There was a short stretch of open ground between her and the cover offered by the nearest hedge. She looked around, saw no one and sprinted to it, barefoot. She crouched, her body hard up against waxy laurel leaves, her breath coming in short gasps. She waited to see if anyone was in pursuit. No. She was free.

‘I MUST APOLOGIZE,’
said the Colombian Special Forces colonel. He spoke in a strong American accent. ‘These pictures are not so clear.’ They were sitting round a briefing table in the shed, the corrugated-iron-roofed shack on the sprawling Amazon naval base at Puerto Leguizamo where his unit planned their offensive operations against criminal traffickers running guns, drugs, people and money on this tense stretch of Colombia’s southern border.

‘These were taken at oh six hundred this morning. On an overflight by one of our surveillance planes.’ He was handing round a sheaf of freshly laminated A4-sized photographs to the US team from MacDill and to a number of his own subordinates. Luke was doing his best to focus. This was important. No, it was more than that: it was crucial. This should be the op that finished García once and for all. Yet inside he was seething. And desperately worried about Elise. In the short time between ending his phone call with Angela and walking into the briefing shed he had abandoned the idea of flying home to search for her. He could do nothing in London that the police weren’t already doing. In any case, his mission was here and he needed to see it through.

He held the aerial surveillance photograph in his hand. As far as he could see, it showed little more than cloud and jungle canopy, a blur of greens and greys that made him think of something a struggling French impressionist might have knocked out on a bad day.

‘If you look carefully, gentlemen,’ continued the Colombian officer, ‘you will see the objective on the left at the bottom of the frame, right on the riverbank, past the ox-bow bend. Thanks to our friends at Langley . . .’ he paused to smile at the two CIA men in their beige fishing jackets and expensive designer spectacles ‘. . . we have the exact coordinates from the SIGINT intercepts. So, that is the ranch. That is our objective.’

Luke stared at the photograph. In Special Forces he had spent a fair bit of time on satellite and image interpretation. IMINT, they called it. He had even done a course on it at the Defence Intelligence and Security Centre at Chicksands in Bedfordshire. But he was damned if he could make out any useful detail. ‘Any video?’ he asked. ‘Any moving pictures from ground level?’

‘It’s coming,’ replied the colonel, looking around to see who had spoken. ‘Matter of fact, it’s being filmed right now. We got two local guys going past in a canoe. Fishermen. At least, that’s what they look like. Don’t worry, we’ll get the video to your team ASAP.’

Todd Miller stood up and thanked the Colombian colonel, who stepped neatly aside to give him room.

‘OK, gentlemen, time is pressing. The J2 intel is that García and his party touched down on the Ecuadorian side of the border at precisely . . .’ He stopped to check his watch. ‘Four hours ago.’ He held up four fingers. ‘The good news is that he thinks he’s safe over there. So, the predictive intel assessment is that he’s going to stay put. Which means we’ve got him cornered, like a rat in a box.’

Privately, Luke did not share his optimism. As the only person in the room to have come face to face with Nelson García – and live to tell – he thought it unwise to underestimate the man’s ability to wriggle away and pop up somewhere else. García was a survivor, and finishing him off was like dealing with an ever-mutating virus.

‘Let’s move this on,’ said Miller, in his Texan drawl. He walked over to the whiteboard, marked up with coloured arrows, circles and acronyms. He was about to say something important when he was interrupted by a cacophony from above. The parrots were back in their tree above the briefing shed, announcing their
return with a cacophony of squawking and trilling. Miller simply raised his voice a notch until they calmed down. ‘OK. What we’re mounting tonight is a combined US–Colombian operation,’ he shouted, above the birds. ‘And, Colonel, we’re truly grateful for your cooperation in this matter, especially given the sensitivity of crossing borders.’

‘Don’t mention it.’ The Colombian grinned.

‘This operation,’ continued Miller, ‘has been designated highly classified and has been given the codename Operación Anaconda.’ He looked across at the Americans, sitting mostly on the left of the room. ‘That’s Op Anaconda for you folks from Stateside.’ There were a few grunts of acknowledgement but people were dead tired: quite a few of the team from MacDill were rubbing their eyes and stifling yawns and Luke was doing the same. They had been travelling almost non-stop for twenty-four hours since leaving the base in Florida. In an ideal world, they would rest up, plan the op, carry out rehearsals and go in, firing on all cylinders, in a few days’ time. But they didn’t have that luxury. García had to be found, fixed and eliminated. Now. Washington and London were in total agreement there.

‘We will deploy in three teams,’ announced Miller, speaking in a normal voice now the parrots had settled down. ‘First in will be the cut-off group, the screen. This will be inserted covertly, tonight, here . . .’ He indicated a point marked on the whiteboard and everyone leaned forward to get a better view. ‘They’ll be dropped in two kilometres south of the objective, then proceed on foot to go firm at a point approximately three hundred metres from the ranch.’

The Texan gauged his audience’s reaction, then continued.

‘The second group, comprising the main force, will deploy along the River Putumayo, then up the San Miguel tributary into Ecuador.’ Some vigorous gum-chewing was going on among the Special Ops guys as he said this. Yet their faces betrayed nothing. If anyone in that room was nervous, they were not showing it.

‘The main force will be mounted in the Griffons, the assault hovercraft,’ continued Miller. ‘Their task will be to carry out a
full-frontal assault on the ranch. We expect some pushback from the narcos, but not a lot. They don’t have the firepower and they’ll be hoping to get away. Which is where the cut-off group comes in.’ He made a slicing motion with his hand towards one of his own team. ‘Captain Dietermeyer? This will be your tasking.’

‘Boss.’

‘Your mission is to capture Nelson García alive and let Luke Carlton here interrogate him. The Brits have a lot at stake in this. He is not – I repeat – he is not to be allowed to get away. Questions?’

‘Reserve force?’ asked someone at the front, an operator with a broad, flat face framed by a ginger beard. For a second, he reminded Luke of Henry VIII.

‘I was just coming to that,’ replied Miller. ‘The third group is our reserve force, positioned just here.’ Again he pointed to the sketch map on the whiteboard. ‘Our Colombian partners have a helicopter landing site on their side of the border. Medevac will be based there, in case we run into problems.’

Problems.
Luke recognized that word as a euphemism for a whole world of pain, like getting ambushed almost before the op had started, or finding that the people you’re after have twice the firepower you expected. Deep in thought, he chewed the inside of his cheek and watched Todd Miller take a swig from a canteen on the table then swat away a fly.

‘OK,’ Miller went on. ‘Aviation. As from midnight tonight we’ll have one of the new AC130J Ghostriders flying in close air support out of Tres Esquinas airbase north-west of here. Think airborne artillery, folks. Those things carry a 105mm cannon. That’s enough to ruin the narcos’ entire day.’

Miller stopped talking and suddenly punched his arm through the air. He looked as if he was taking a swing at an invisible opponent. In fact, he was checking his watch. ‘Local time now is ten fifteen hours. Next briefing will be back here at sixteen hundred hours. Before then I suggest you get your heads down. And remember,’ he faced the Americans, ‘the only easy day was . . . ?’

‘Yesterday!’ they chorused, knocked fists and filed out into the suffocating heat of an Amazon morning.

LESS THAN A
hundred and fifty kilometres away upriver, Nelson García, billionaire, transcontinental cocaine trafficker, was not enjoying his new life across the border in Ecuador. For him, the euphoria of their night flight to safety out of Colombia had quickly worn off. Now everything about these temporary jungle quarters that Suarez had chosen for them was starting to annoy him. The third-rate food, the dank, close climate, the incessant mosquitoes. It was as if they were conspiring to spoil his mood. Already he missed the cool hills of the Colombian highlands, his horses and his women.