The Outlaw (20 page)

"I'm closing check-in," said the clerk. "Do you want these boarding passes or not?"

"No," said Jake.

"Yes," said his father firmly.

Kas's lower lip was trembling. "Yakuuba said he had to be back home by tomorrow morning. He's going to lead the Predator straight to his camp. There are forty teenagers at that camp, Dad. We have to warn them."

"Honestly," said Mr. Knight, "I fail to see—"

"Tell me this, Dad," said Jake. "Does Burkina Faso have the Hellfire missile in its artillery?"

"Certainly not."

"What if Britain were requested to donate a missile?"

"Thankfully, we are not in the habit of donating missiles."

"Not even to destroy a known terrorist training camp?"

Mr. Knight stared at his son for a long time before shaking his head. "I'm not going to have this conversation with you, Jake. If anything like that were going to happen, I would be the first to know about it."

"Are you sure?" said Jake. "You've been sheltering a wanted terrorist in your embassy all afternoon. Dexter thinks you've gone soft in the head, and the Foreign Office probably agrees with him."

"How dare you!"

"I'm sorry, Dad, but we've got to warn Yakuuba. The Ministry of Defense is sending a Predator to obliterate his camp."

Mr. Knight took the boarding passes from the airline clerk and pressed them into Jake's hand. "You are upset," he said, "and you have every reason to be. You have been through more this week than anyone could expect you to cope with. You need calm and rest, and you will get those things with Aunt Rosemary."

"But Dad—"

"Not another word, Jake. Say goodbye to your mother."

If Mr. Knight felt even a twinge of unease, he was not showing it. It was pointless to persist. Jake took the boarding passes and shouldered his backpack.

"Bye, Mum," he said, hugging her. Then he held out his arms and hugged his father. "Bye, Dad."

"Take care, son," said his father.

"Isn't this cozy?" said Kas. "Forgive me if I don't join the hug fest, won't you? I think the hypocrisy would suffocate me."

"Goodbye, princess," said Mr. Knight. "I'm sorry you're hurting."

"It's all relative," said Kas. "I'd be hurting even more if I had a Hellfire missile dropped on my head." She turned away, picked up her hand luggage, and half walked, half ran toward Departures. Jake hurried to catch up.

Kas was furious. "I can't believe you bottled it," she said. "It looked like you were standing up to him and then suddenly you just gave up."

"He wasn't buying it," said Jake. "I could have talked till my tongue fell off—it wouldn't have done any good."

They went through passport control and security and on into an air-conditioned departure lounge. There was no point sitting down—people were already lining up at the departure gate with their passports and boarding cards ready for inspection. Jake and Kas joined the back of the line.

"And what's with the hugging?" said Kas. "I haven't seen you hug Dad since you were, like, four years old."

"You're right," said Jake. "But this time there was a very good reason for hugging." He took his right hand out of his pocket and jangled the keys to his father's motorcycle.

Kas's eyes widened. "Who do you think you are, the Artful Dodger? What are you going to do with those?"

"Isn't it obvious? I'm going to go and warn Yakuuba. If I take the Dakar, I might even beat him back to the camp."

"You're not serious."

"Never been more serious in my life."

"But you've never driven Dad's bike."

"I've watched how Dad does it," said Jake. "I've got a pretty good idea of the controls."

"You don't know where the camp is."

"Yes, I do. Remember how I charged my phone in that grass hut?"

"Yes, but there was no signal."

"No phone signal," corrected Jake. "But the GPS worked just fine."

"You got a fix!" cried Kas.

"And memorized it, just in case. Friends of the Poor: fourteen degrees twenty-one minutes sixteen seconds north, one degree fifty-eight five west."

"I suppose you think you're clever," said Kas.

"Above average, yes."

"And you're seriously planning to take Dad's bike and ride it back up north?"

"Thought I might."

Kas looked at him, and for the first time in ages there was admiration in her eyes. "You know what you are?" she said.

"What?"

"You're an outlaw."

The
passengers for flight 938 to London had their passports checked and their boarding cards swiped. Then they were herded aboard a shuttle bus, which would take them the short distance to the waiting plane.

Jake and his sister sat at the back of the bus. Jake's palms were sweating. It was not too late to abandon his madcap plan. If he chose to, he could simply hand Dad's bike keys to an airline official, get on the plane, and be back in England in time for breakfast. He thought of Aunt Rosemary's ivy-covered country cottage and he could almost smell the sizzling bacon.

Then he thought of Yakuuba, and his resolve returned. Here at last was the opportunity to go on an adventure that meant something, an adventure that wasn't all about himself.

He borrowed Kas's phone and rang his father.

"Hello, princess."

"Dad, it's me," said Jake.

"Hello, son, are you on the plane?" Mr. Knight sounded frazzled. There was a definite lost-keys wildness about his voice.

"Almost—we're on the shuttle bus. Kas wanted to say sorry about before. She didn't mean to be horrible."

"Tell her it's fine. Tell her not to worry about it."

"Dad, are you okay? You sound weird."

"I'm all right," said Mr. Knight, "but I have lost my bike keys. I must have dropped them somewhere."

"Where are you?"

"I'm by the bike. Your mum already left in the car."

"Now that you mention it," said Jake, "I think I might have heard some keys fall. I didn't think anything of it at the time."

"Really?" His father's voice was full of hope. "Where was that, Jake?"

"Near the check-in desk," said Jake, wincing as he said it. He tried to tell himself that this was for the best, but still it lingered—the sour, metallic taste of a deliberate lie.

"I'll go and have a look. Thank you, son—I'm glad you called."

Jake hung up and gave Kas her phone. The shuttle bus had stopped. Passengers were streaming off the bus and up the steps of the waiting airplane.

"I guess this is it," said Kas. "See you around."

"Don't hug me," whispered Jake. "People will think it's weird if they see us saying goodbye here."

"I wasn't going to hug you," said Kas. She stuck out her tongue, jumped off the bus, and started toward the plane.

Jake waited at the back of the bus and watched his little sister hurry up the steps.
Go for it,
he murmured.

At the top of the steps, Kas stopped dead. "I can't do it," she sobbed. "I can't go in there." She was shaking and crying and flapping her hands in front of her face.

The flight attendants at the door of the plane hurried toward Kas, and one of them put a hand on her shoulder. The travelers on the steps below shuffled restlessly and craned their necks to see what the holdup was. With everybody's eyes on his sister's theatrics, Jake hopped off the bus and began to edge backward away from the plane.

Kas was bent over double and clinging tight to the handrails. "I'm scared of flying, innit!" she cried.

A flight attendant was cooing in her ear, trying to move her to one side and let the other passengers through.

But Kas was not ready to be moved aside just yet. "I'm going to throw up!" she shouted, and the flight attendant sprang back out of range.

Nice one, Kas,
thought Jake as he melted into the night.
That was the perfect diversion.
He turned and sprinted across the tarmac, grateful for the cover of darkness, taking the shortest route toward the perimeter fence.

It was a chainlink fence, which Jake was not used to. As he ran, he tried to imagine the dynamics of this new surface and how it would affect his wall run. He neared the fence, shortened his stride, and focused on the thin metal bar along the top. He took off powerfully on his right foot and planted his left at chest height. The chainlink mesh was springier than any wall, and Jake used the spring to give extra power to his upward launch.

It worked. He grabbed the horizontal bar, swung himself up and over, slithered down the other side, and landed in an undignified heap on the edge of the parking lot. There was no sign of his father, who must still be in the check-in hall searching for his lost keys.

Half crouching, Jake ran across the parking lot. The Dakar seemed even bigger than he remembered it. It was a monster.

The helmet was in a compartment behind the fuel tank. He put it on and straddled the bike. He could just about reach the gears and the foot brake with his left foot, but he could only touch the ground by leaning the bike slightly to one side. He kick-started the engine, and it rumbled into life.
First gear, open the throttle, let the clutch out slowly.
The bike shot forward.

He rode a quick practice lap of the parking lot to get a feel for gear changes and cornering, then burst out onto the main road. He did not yet feel in control, but that was something he was getting used to. Feeling in control was something he had left behind in England.

The huge Fespaco traffic circle was gridlocked during the daytime, but at night it was clear. Jake braked gently and leaned into the bend. The traffic circle swung him around and spat him out onto Avenue Kwame Nkrumah, epicenter of Ouagadougou nightlife. Hotels, clubs, and restaurants flashed past in a blur of neon. Jake turned left through Place de la Révolution and plunged on into Tampui, one of the poorest districts of Ouagadougou.

Jake gunned the throttle hard. Forty kilometers per hour, read the speedometer, then fifty, sixty, seventy. He changed up through the gears, his heart lightened by the dizzying bliss of speed. Eighty, ninety, one hundred ... Circular huts with thatched roofs flashed past in his headlight. Adrenaline buzzed in his veins.

As he left the city lights behind, Jake leaned forward and plugged the coordinates of the camp into his father's GPS unit. This was the Djibo road, and if all went well, he would reach his destination by sunrise.

High
in the sky, red kites greeted the dawn with joyous whoops and whistles. As the sun rose over the Chiltern Hills, it illuminated the sweeping fields, dramatic chalk ridges, beech woods, and quaint villages of southeast England.

One such village was Walter's Ash, a sleepy community with a church, a pub, and a cricket field. To the east of the village was Harry's Home of Rest for Retired Horses, one hundred twenty acres of lush pasture. To the west was a very different enclosure, carpeted not with grass but with concrete, and surrounded not by low wooden fences but by high electrified barricades. Armed guards and Belgian shepherd sentry dogs patrolled the perimeter.

This was Strike Command, operational hub of the Royal Air Force, and at its heart was a nuclear bunker housing four top-secret installations. Most secret of all was the PGCS cockpit—Predator Ground Control System. In a dark, air-conditioned room, two enormous swivel chairs faced an array of glowing monitors and consoles. One chair was marked "Pilot," the other "Sensor."

Sensor operator Shaun Marshall shifted in his chair and took a long swig from a sickly energy drink. In the dead of night his emergency pager had summoned him to Strike Command PGCS, and he had been here ever since. A terrorist training camp had been located on the edge of the Sahara Desert, and Predator 107 had been dispatched to deal with it.
Deal with it,
he mouthed, and the corner of his mouth twitched upward. His superiors used such quaint euphemisms.

He glanced across at his colleague in the Pilot chair, the impish Susie Cray. No one could accuse Susie of being quaint. She had been piloting Predators for ten years and was under no illusions about what her job entailed. "Blitz it," "smash it," "smoke it," "flatten it"—in matters of destruction Susie Cray was a human thesaurus. Technically, however, the act of destruction belonged not to Pilot but to Sensor. Tonight, as always, the finger on the red button was his.

Susie caught his eye and smirked. "Looks like Target One has taken pity on you, Sensor," she said. "He must have heard what a terrible shot you are. Why else would he hide in a marquee with an enormous red cross painted on the roof?"

Shaun chuckled and looked back at his screens. Three wide-screen monitors at eye level showed a full-motion video image of the camp below, with the target marquee clearly visible in the center. Below that were three smaller screens: radar, laser designation, and the view from the nose cam. The job of a sensor operator was to control these cameras, fire the laser designator and missiles, and communicate with the intelligence specialists of MI6.

Target 1, the terrorist with the GPS tag, had arrived at the desert camp more than an hour ago. He had entered the marquee, and since then nothing more had been seen of him. Shaun had used a satellite datalink to upload video of the camp to Bluebird, the MI6 operative in charge of the operation. Now the Predator was in "standby mode," waiting for a decision as to whether or not they were indeed looking at a terrorist camp.

"What's that?" said Susie, eagle-eyed as ever. "Unidentified vehicle entering camp to the south."

"Sensor copies," replied Shaun. "Large motorcycle on the move and approaching target marquee. One rider, unidentified. Motorcycle stopping outside marquee. Rider dismounting. Rider entering marquee."

"It's only five thirty in the morning," drawled Susie. "Bit early for visitors."

A blue light flashed on Shaun's console, signaling an incoming communication. He pressed a button next to the flashing light and spoke into his headset microphone. "This is Sensor 107, receiving."

"Sensor 107, this is Bluebird," said a posh male voice. "Positive ID on the Predator 107 reconnaissance pictures. London confirms that your location is a training camp for terrorists, over."