The Henchmen's Book Club (31 page)

“Don’t look darling,” I told the PM’s daughter, pulling her
face into my chest, but this was one death she was determined to see, fighting free
to glare at
X
³
as he exploded under his polycarbonate
dome like an egg in a microwave.

“Okay, we can go now,” the little girl said, taking me by
the hand and leading me up the stairs and back to the surface.

Inevitably, Tempest had his own pithy take on
X
³
’s passing.

“I don’t know where he gets his energy from?” he quipped,
looking about the stairwell for giggles but finding none, not even from the
kids.

“Why did that man just say that?” the PM’s little girl
asked.

“I don’t know, darling,” I said. “But don’t stare, it’ll
only encourage him.”

34.
LIVING FOR DAYLIGHT

We made our way up top and did a revised head count. We’d lost another five
guys in
the
attack but luckily three of those guys had been
X
³
’s own men. Less
fortuitous had been the loss of both Mr Woo and Mr Choe. One had been North
Korean while the other had been South Korean, though I’d never been able to
remember which was which. I don’t suppose it mattered now. It certainly hadn’t
to them. They’d both been wanted on both sides of the thirty-eighth parallel
for multiple crimes against their respective states and neither of them had
ever wished to return to either the peninsula so I guess they got their wish in
the end.

As we emerged into the glow of a new day, Dunbar and
Tempest were arguing over who’d killed
X
³
but Dunbar
broke off when he received a radio flash from fleet telling him an unidentified
aircraft had just violated the exclusion zone and was heading straight for us.

“Kilo Two, Kilo
Two, you are in restricted airspace and will be fired upon if you do not turn
back,”
we could hear fleet’s air controllers ordering.
“Kilo Two, do you copy, over?”
But Kilo
Two ignored their warnings and continued racing for
Île de Roc
.

“What now?” Tempest sighed.

“Okay everyone back inside. Move it!” Dunbar barked,
snatching up the .50 cal he’d been playing with earlier and urging the kids
back underground.

“It’s okay Major, it’s cool, they’re with us,” I reassured
him, pointing to the horizon to show him the broad-winged dot flying low out of
the rising sun.

“What?” Dunbar said, but I didn’t get the chance to explain
fully because, at that moment, Mr Smith laid his fellow countryman out with a
shoulder stock to the back of the neck. They might be hard to kill these
gung-ho heroes but they’re usually a piece of piss to knock out.

“Idiot,” Mr Smith concluded.

Tempest saw this and snapped into action but he was
surrounded on all sides and carrying a gun that was fitted with a blue-on-blue
chip, whereas we’d ditched our MP5s in favour of the AKs and Bullpups we’d
picked off
X
³
’s dead.

“Careful Jack, we don’t want to kill you but we will,” I
warned him, slowing Tempest as he twisted and turned in ever-decreasing circles
before realising we had him cold. He threw down his gun and made a great show
of it, putting up his hands and glaring at me as I radioed fleet.

“Fleet, this is mobile assault, stay your missiles, over. I
repeat, stay your missiles.”

“I knew we couldn’t trust you, Jones,” Tempest scowled.

“Relax,” Mr Smith told him, pulling Tempest’s hands off his
head and urging him to chill. “You’ll live longer.”

“Mobile assault,
who is this? Identify yourself, over,”
fleet responded.

“Fleet, this is Jones. Stay your missile. We have the
situation under control. Over.”

“Specialist
Jones, we have Marines in transit. You are ordered to take the puppies below
and await their arrival, over?”

“Fleet, I’m not going to tell you again, stay your
missiles, turn back your Marines, and do not attempt to impede Kilo Two in its
flight or there will be consequences. Over,” I warned them in no uncertain
terms.

There was a short pause while they picked the bones out of
that one before asking;

“Specialist
Jones, what are your intentions, over?”

“Our intentions are to get off this island, over.”

“Our intentions,
Jones? Over.”

“I have sixteen surviving Specialists with me, and we’re
all boarding that plane, over.”

A new voice now came on the radio.

“Specialist
Jones, this is Vice Admiral Buck Hendershot of the United States Sixth Fleet.
We have a three-strong carrier battle group with a hundred and eighty planes,
twelve destroyers and sixteen cruisers and we would strongly advise you to
rethink your intentions. Over.”

“And we have the kids,” I reminded him. “Now stay your
fucking missiles. I won’t tell you again. This is Jones. Over and out.”

Tempest grabbed my arm as I turned to head down to the
beach.

“We had a deal.”

“Oh yeah, and
I’m
sure
you would’ve lived up to your end once we’d all been safely tucked up
in McCarthy again,” I hawed to show him what I thought of that, “but we decided
to make our own arrangements, just in case there was any confusion over the
small print.”

“What sort of a man are you?” he demanded.

“A very tired one,” I replied, nodding to my left.

Tempest looked over and saw Mr Bolaji parking all the
children in a defensive trench before legging it down the beach to pile into
one of the hovercraft landers along with the rest of the chaps.

“You’re not taking the kids with you?” Tempest blinked.

“Hey, we’re not even going to kill them,” I said, causing
one of Affiliates who was passing to laugh. “Help yourself, they’re all yours.
Just do us a favour and don’t tell the Admiral for fifteen minutes, okay?”

“This is a bluff?”

“Jack, we’re not the bad guys. We just occasionally work
for them,” I explained.

Tempest’s eyebrows twitched as he got a slight erection at
the thought of being left alone to take all the glory, then nodded and told me
to go.

“Before fleet gets here. I’ll give you a fifteen-minute
head start. I won’t try to stop you.”

“Promise?”

“Scouts honour,” Tempest said, saluting me Benny Hill-style
with two fingers to his brow.

I smiled at that and held out a hand. Tempest shook it and
wished me the best of luck.

“You too Jack. Maybe I’ll see you around,” I told him.

“Somehow, I don’t doubt it,” he chuckled.

A
big seaplane pitched past overhead at
that point, banking just above the crashing waves to circle back for its final
approach.

“Just one thing, Jones?” Tempest said, stopping me as Mr
Smith got the hovercraft engines roaring to life. “How did you do it? How did
you arrange all of this?”

That was a good and fair question, but I’ve been in this
game long enough to know that you should never stand around giving good and
fair explanations when you should be jumping on hovercrafts or flushing XO
agents through turbines. Much better to leave them guessing.

“I’ll drop you a postcard,” I simply said, before jumping
into the hovercraft as it spun around in the surf.

“Okay, let’s go!” Mr Bolaji shouted when he’d pulled me on
board, and a moment later we were falling into our seats as Mr Smith slammed
down the accelerator to take us out to sea.

If Jack Tempest had ever read
The Client
by John Grisham, he might have known that one of the
main characters (I won’t say which in case you haven’t read it) jumps on a
plane at the end of the book and heads off to start a new life. This had been
our
Fourth Protocol
, our pre-arranged
signal to
Pops
back in Arundel to
alert the extraction team to come and get us. The number of stars I’d awarded
it and the comments I’d posted had simply explained the hows, wheres and whens.

A little forward planning, as Bill always said, goes a long
way.

It paid to protect The Agency. If you kept your word to
them, they’d keep their word to you and pick you up from pretty much any
extraction point, anywhere in the world, within twelve hours of you placing the
call. All you had to do was keep your mouth shut, send the signal and make it
over the wall.

Tempest gave us one of his Sunday best salutes from the
beach but I needed both hands to hang on as we ripped across the surf so I
wasn’t able to reply. Not that I’m sure I would’ve anyway. Saluting people you
didn’t need to salute is just one short step away from saluting flags. And the
day I started doing that was the day I stopped trying to blow up large chunks
of the world. Or at least, stopped guarding the corridors and vending machines
of people who sought to do that sort of thing.

Not for me. No sir. I had bills to pay.

“Book Mark, Book
Mark, this is Flying Tiger, do you copy, over?”
the radio
crackled in my ear.

“
Flying Tiger
,
this is
Book Mark
, we read you loud
and clear and we are ready for pick up, over,” I radioed back.

“Copy Book Mark,
coming in now. Keep that throttle open, over,”
Flying Tiger
confirmed.

We were thundering across the waves at full pelt when the
seaplane’s shadow crept across us. It was barely thirty feet above our heads
and slowing to descend in front of the hovercraft. The rear bay doors were open
and two leggy stewardesses stood either side of the ramp to guide our approach.

A surge of spray soaked Mr Smith as the plane dipped its
belly in the water but he just wiped his face and gunned the accelerator to
take us up the ramp. Sunlight turned to darkness as we entered the plane,
hitting the catchment net strung across the hold to stop us from crashing
straight on through to the cockpit.

Mr Smith killed the engines as the girls retracted the ramp
and all at once we were tilting backwards as the plane left the water again.
He’d barely skimmed the surface for fifteen seconds.

“Hold on boys, it’s going to be a bumpy one,” came a
familiar voice over the speakers. The Agency had many pilots on its books but
only one with such a killer-looking crew. “Don’t think the Americans are buying
your story,” Captain Takahashi laughed.

A boom from the portside rocked the galley as something
exploded just short of our wing but the Takahashi’s stewardesses didn’t look
too concerned as they buckled themselves in. They were the human face of the
good Captain’s unshakable belief in his own abilities and he banked and rolled
across the sky, dodging the flak and flying through a corridor of starbursting
decoys to lose a swarm of angry
sidewinders
.

“Walk in the park,” Captain Takahashi confidently declared.
“There’s merlot and sandwiches once we reach cruising altitude. And the film we
will be showing today is
The Jane Austen
Book Club
. Gentlemen, welcome back to The Agency.”

We turned south for Algeria, for the nearest base, where we
would no doubt spend the next four weeks debriefing the men in suits as to the
events of the last three years. How we’d explain half of it was anybody’s
guess. I could hardly explain half of it to myself, let alone anyone else. How
we’d been banged to rights, brushed under life’s carpet and left to rot in the
deepest, darkest hole in Christendom. And yet how an innocuous little reading
group started a few years earlier had conspired to set in motion a chain of
events that would eventually throw us the most unlikeliest of lifelines?

Try telling that one with a straight face.

Whichever way it came out, one thing was clear, we’d been
given the mother of all second chances and no mistake. Or was this my third
chance by now? Or my fourth? Or fifth? I wasn’t sure. I’d lost count after I’d
ducked that nuke back in Mozambique. All I knew was that I was alive and free
once again. Free – and not to be trifled with.

Our book club might’ve started out as just that, a book
club, for reading, for passing the time, for fun, but it had become so much
more than that now, snowballing to unimagined conclusions, beyond the sum of
its parts.

We were no longer little old ants. We were one, beyond the
law, beyond our employees and beyond even The Agency. We were unity. Strength
in numbers.

Yet so many more of our numbers were still rotting away in
McCarthy. And Yinchuan. And Severnaya Zemlya. And half a dozen other secret
facilities dotted around the windier corners of the globe.

And that wouldn’t do.

Oh no, that wouldn’t do at all.

So we’d debrief The Agency. We’d put them in the picture
and come clean about the vine that had crept through their organisation. We’d
even offer them a pact. After all it’s good to make alliances. If nothing else,
the four hundred active members of book club had proved that. But when all was
said and done, we’d be the ones calling the shots from now on. We were simply
too powerful not to be.

And this was important because we had things to do.

And wrongs to right.

And nothing was going to stand in our way. Not even The
Agency. Not any more.

Because I was Book Mark – the founding father and
undisputed number one of book club.

And now I was out, there was going to be hell to pay.

###