Redemption
Contents
About the Book
Ryan Drake is a man who finds people who don’t want to be found. Once a soldier in the British Army, he now works for the CIA as a ‘shepherd’ – an elite investigation team that finds and brings home missing agents. But his latest mission – to free a prisoner codenamed Maras from a maximum security prison and bring her back to US soil within forty-eight hours – is more dangerous than anything he and his team have attempted before.
Despite the risks, the team successfully completes their mission, but for Drake the real danger has only just begun. Faced with a terrible threat, he is forced to go on the run with Maras – a veteran agent scarred by years of brutal imprisonment.
Hunted by his former comrades and those willing to do anything to protect a deadly secret, Drake is left with no choice but to trust a dangerous woman he barely knows. For he has only one chance to save those he loves and time is running out…
About the Author
While studying for a degree in IT, Will Jordan worked a number of part time jobs, one of which was as an extra in television and feature films. Cast as a World War Two soldier, he was put through military bootcamp and taught to handle and fire weapons in preparation for the role. The experience piqued his interest in military history, and encouraged him to learn more about conflicts past and present. Having always enjoyed writing, he used this research as the basis for his first thriller, supplementing it with visits to weapon ranges in America and eastern Europe to gain first-hand knowledge of modern weaponry. He lives in Fife with his wife and son, and is currently writing the second novel in the Ryan Drake series.
Redemption
WILL JORDAN
For Bill; a father and a friend
.
Prologue
Iraq, 13 May 2007
This is how it ends.
Lying there with one hand loosely pressed against the bullet wound in his stomach, he was alone. His strength was exhausted, his reserves gone, his blood staining the dusty ground. A trail of it led a short distance away, mute testimony to the desperate, feeble crawl he had managed before his vision swam and he collapsed.
He could go no further. There was nothing left to do but lie here and wait for the end.
A faint breeze sighed past him, stirring the warm evening air and depositing tiny particles of wind-blown sand across his arms and chest. How long would it take to cover his body when he died? Would he ever be found?
Staring at the vast azure sky stretching out into infinity above him, he found his eyes drawn to the contrail of some high-flying aircraft, straight as an arrow. Around him, the sun’s last light reflected off the desert dunes, setting them ablaze with colour.
It was a good place to die.
Men like him were destined never to see old age, or
to
die peacefully in their sleep surrounded by family. They had chosen a different life, and there would be no reward for them.
You know your problem, Ryan? You’re a good man
.
Had she been right?
Could he look back on his life honestly and say he’d been a good man? He had made mistakes, done things he wished he could undo, and yet his final act had been one of trust and compassion.
That was the reason he was lying here, bleeding to death. That was his final reward.
A low, rhythmic thumping was drowning out the sigh of the wind. The pounding of his heartbeat in his ears, slowly fading as his lifeblood flowed out between his fingers. He might have slowed the bleeding, but he couldn’t stop it. Nothing could.
He was dying.
You know your problem, Ryan? You’re a good man
.
However he had lived, he knew in that moment that he would die as a good man. And that had to count for something.
A faint smiled touched his face as the thudding grew louder. He closed his eyes, surrendering to the growing darkness that filled the world around him.
Part One
Liberation
Confront them with annihilation, and they will then survive; plunge them into a deadly situation, and they will then live. When people fall into danger, they are then able to strive for victory
.
Sun Tzu’s
The Art of War
Chapter 1
Seven days earlier, Mosul, Iraq
‘COME ON! GET
out of the way!’ Nassar Alawi growled, honking his horn in frustration.
His efforts did nothing to hurry along the rusty, dilapidated white saloon in front of him, its rattling exhaust spewing grey exhaust fumes as the driver revved the engine. Like Alawi, he was trying in vain to fight through the narrow streets and thronging crowds.
They were approaching one of the many open-air markets that dotted the city, and traffic was always heavy there. Ancient stone buildings festooned with satellite dishes and drying laundry leaned precariously inward as if they might collapse at any moment.
Alawi leaned back in his seat and ran his forearm across his brow. He was hot and uncomfortable, his open shirt already damp with sweat. The van’s air conditioner hadn’t worked in years, and rolling down the windows meant allowing in the relentless wind-blown sand, the fumes of other cars struggling to run on cheap gasoline, the reek of animal shit and countless other unsavoury odours.
He was a builder and electrician by trade; a source of great pride for both him and his family most of his adult life. A skilled job, a trade to be proud of. Now there was
even
greater demand for his services, both in Mosul and many of the surrounding towns. Everything that had been bombed and destroyed in the chaos of the invasion had to be painstakingly rebuilt.
A man like him could make a fortune in just a few years. Enough to provide for his wife and for his two young sons until they became men and followed in his footsteps, enough to live in comfort, enough to escape the grinding poverty that his peers endured.
If only he could get where he needed to be!
He honked his horn again, and at last a gap began to open up. The beaten-up white saloon started to trundle forwards, exhaust rattling. He stepped on the accelerator as well, eager to keep their momentum going.
Relieved to be on the move again, he reached for the packet of cigarettes lying on the passenger seat, tapped one out and held it to his lips as he fished his lighter out of his pocket.
Maybe today wouldn’t be so bad after all, he thought as he clicked the lighter.
The sudden flash of light up ahead was so unexpected that he didn’t even have time to react to it. The cigarette fell from his mouth as the white car in front disappeared, consumed along with everything else by an expanding wall of orange flame that rushed forward to meet him.
Central Intelligence Agency Field Ops Centre, Baghdad, Iraq
‘This had better be good,’ operations chief Steven Kaminsky grumbled as he strode from his office, doing his best to ignore the painful twinge in the small of his back. A compressed disc from a high-school football injury, the pain came and went, though in recent years
it
seemed to be coming more frequently and with greater intensity.
All things considered, today was a bad day, and judging by the urgent summons that had just come through to his desk, it wasn’t likely to get better.
With computer terminals crammed into virtually every available one of its 5,000 square feet of floor space, the Pit, as it was known, was reminiscent of NASA’s mission control centre. The comparison was an appropriate one, because in many ways it served a similar function. The computers in this room allowed their operators to control a fleet of twenty unmanned Predator drones deployed throughout the country.
The place was bustling with activity, and judging by the concerned looks and urgent tones, the news was not good.
‘Somebody talk to me!’
He was joined within moments by Pete Faulkner, the floor officer, and the man responsible for the day-to-day running of the twenty control suites in the Pit. Faulkner was only in his forties, but with his overhanging beer gut, perpetually furrowed brow and thinning grey hair, he looked at least ten years older. He was always tired, always out of breath, always sweating.
‘We’ve got a problem,’ he said, wasting no time on preliminaries.
Kaminsky made a face. ‘So I heard. What’s going on?’
Faulkner gestured over to terminal 6, where most of the anxious-looking technicians were gathered. The flat-screen monitors that should have been transmitting feeds from the Predator’s on-board cameras and instrumentation were blank, as though there was nothing going on.
‘Three minutes ago we lost contact with one of our drones over Mosul,’ he explained as they strode over. ‘Data feeds, telemetry, the works.’
Kaminsky frowned. ‘Has it been shot down?’
Faulkner shook his head. ‘It was orbiting at ten thousand feet. The only thing that could shoot it down from that altitude is a surface-to-air missile, and we had no threat warnings before we lost contact.’
‘Equipment failure?’
‘It’s possible,’ Faulkner admitted. ‘But unlikely. Unless it was a catastrophic engine failure, we’d have seen some sign before we lost the feeds. Make a hole here, gentlemen!’
The junior technicians clustered around the terminal parted like the Red Sea, giving them a clear path to a young man working over one of the few remaining monitors still up and running.
Terminal 6 and its associated drone were his responsibility. He knew he had done nothing wrong, but if something happened to the multi-million-dollar aircraft, the blame would fall on his head first.
‘Anything, Hastings?’ Kaminsky asked.
Hastings shook his head without looking up from the screen. ‘I can’t find anything wrong, sir. Engines, instrumentation, on board computers … everything was good right up until we lost contact. It’s like it just … vanished.’