Nomad Page 2

  He opened his eyes. Behind the rush of the blast noise came a shrieking machine chorus of honking horns and bleating sirens as every car alarm within a mile radius went off at once. In the cool evening air there was no breeze to stir the motion of the pillar of smoke that spiraled upward. It hung like a great black dagger pointing into the heart of the ruin.

  He waited, straining to hear, and was rewarded by a long, low rumble that resonated in his chest, blotting out the chatter of the people on the avenue below, as they struggled to understand what had just happened. A second, larger dust cloud projected itself into the air as the stricken building collapsed. Jadeed couldn’t see the station house from where he sat, but he could see the mark its demise left behind.

  “Broad dispersal,” noted Khadir, with clinical focus. “There are fires.”

  Jadeed wondered exactly how his superior was seeing that. A spy satellite or a drone, perhaps? He absently looked up into the darkening sky. “The gas lines will—” he began, but before he could fully voice his thought, the dull concussion of a secondary detonation joined the unfolding chaos. New streamers of smoke rose with the main plume, illuminated from within by gas-fueled fires.

  Jadeed rose from his chair, gathering up the phone and binoculars.

  “I am satisfied,” said the voice in his ear. “The sample meets with my approval.” The last words sounded like they were being directed at someone else.

  “I am leaving now,” Jadeed replied, but when he looked down at the smartphone, the display was static, the waveform signal a flat line, the countdown frozen at zero. The phone went into his pocket, clattering against his prayer beads.

  He took the small case containing everything he needed from where it lay on the bed, securing the compact Beretta 84F pistol sitting next to it in a hip holster, which was concealed by the cut of his clothes.

  In all the noise and confusion, the sound of the Hilton’s fire alarm shrilled away unnoticed as he left the hotel through the emergency exit, and threaded away between the people pointing and gawping at the column of smoke.

  TWO

  The interior of the warehouse was filled with sharp-edged shadows cast by skeletal yellow work lamps, surrounding a line of collapsible benches at the rear of a Renault truck. The vehicle was painted forest green, and it sat inert with the rear doors hanging open. Figures in black clothing moved around it, a ready sense of urgency in their motions.

  Marc Dane blew out a breath and turned away from watching them, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jacket, walking in a slow circle in the semi-darkness. The pre-dawn air was cold and damp, and he could smell the salt and rust of the nearby seaport. Through the grimy windows it was possible to make out the sodium-bright glow of the Dunkirk docks and the square hills of cargo containers along the lines of the wharves.

  Marc was wound tight with energy, already regretting the cocktail of coarse instant coffee and Red Bull that had been his morning eye-opener. Inside the jacket, his fingers drummed as he tried to find a quiet spot in his thoughts. It took effort.

  It was like this on every sortie, and every time he thought that the next time he would be free of the unease. But it hadn’t happened yet, and the corner of his lip pulled up in a crooked smile as he considered that it probably never would. Marc’s left hand went to his unruly shock of dishwater blond hair and ran through it. He had a face that was young for a man in his late thirties, pale with it, and the dark clothes he wore made him seem rail-thin.

  He took another long breath and spotted Leon climbing into the back of the truck. Leon Taub was old enough to be Marc’s father, but he was still fit and sharp-witted. Behind a pair of thick glasses perched on an unlovely nose, there was an intelligence that had not been dulled by forty years of covert operations in darkened buildings, wet alleyways and harm’s way. Taub saw him looking and gave a wan salute with the plastic coffee cup in his hand, disappearing inside the vehicle. Owen Davis followed the older man up into the truck; Davis’s face was set in the continual grimace that was his default expression. Marc watched the dour Welshman survey the preparation area around the truck with a sour, judgmental air, and looked away.

  The remainder of the team—the tactical element—were gathered together near the benches, and Marc picked up their dry laughter and the metallic sounds of weapons being made ready. Like Marc, Leon and Owen, the others were all dressed in dark colors, but unlike his military-surplus jacket and nondescript jeans, they wore black outfits of heavy rip-stop materials and leather tactical boots. They sported vests studded with gear pouches, armor inserts, encrypted radio rigs and holsters. The group resembled an armed response team from some law enforcement bureau, but none of their kit sported agency sigils, rank patches or any kind of identification. Their equipment was an eclectic mix sourced from manufacturers all over the world, nothing bearing a tell-tale serial number that could be traced if it were to fall into the wrong hands.

  None of them carried the same primary weapon; the members of the group were variously armed with Heckler & Koch submachine guns, Mossberg tactical shotguns or carbine variants of the workhorse Colt M4 assault rifle. The only common denominator was the cylindrical suppressor fitted to every firearm, enough to smother any muzzle flash and reduce the sound of gunshots to a gruff cough.

  Marc’s own duty sidearm—a Glock 17 semi-automatic—was lying unloaded in the back of the truck, along with a custom-built laptop computer, remote surveillance console and the rest of the tools of his trade. His operational role, a job that headquarters euphemistically designated as “forward mission specialist,” meant that he wasn’t expected to use a gun—but it was a requirement for all field-rated personnel to have some form of protection. Still, carrying the pistol on a mission always made Marc feel as if he was inviting trouble.

  Out in the real world, where normal people lived and worked, the group assembled in this vacant French warehouse did not exist. Marc Dane’s world, with its guns and its secrets, was a dark parallel reality existing alongside it, hidden in the long shadows.

  It was nearly two years since he had joined Operations Team Seven, call sign “Nomad,” one of ten rapid-reaction units run under the covert aegis of the British Secret Intelligence Service. Long months since the head-hunters had come, after his tour ended with the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm. Months of intensive training, and counter-terrorism and counter-espionage operations. Months of being a ghost to the real world. Marc Dane had dropped off the face of the earth, and this was where he found himself.

  He pulled at the cuff of his jacket to peer at the battered Cabot dive watch on his wrist, Marc’s sole remaining connection to his naval service. An hour at most before sunrise. He nodded to himself and tried without success to shake off the last of the tension, which despite his best efforts had gathered in a knot at the base of his neck.

  “Told you to switch to decaf,” said a voice from the shadows.

  He turned as she approached. Samantha Green was a head shorter than Marc’s six foot two inches, but she had a way about her that made it seem like it was you that had to look up to her. She grinned at him from under the peak of a dark ballistic mesh baseball cap. Even with streaks of night camo on her face, her looks were striking. “I’m cool,” he told her.

  “Oh, you wish that was true,” Sam replied, not unkindly. She let her hands rest on the MP7A1 submachine gun hanging at her waist, sizing him up. “Don’t sweat it. We’ve done this a hundred times before.” She nodded toward the rest of the tactical squad. “Boss knows what he’s doing.”

  The man she indicated caught her look and nodded back. Gavin Rix was Nomad’s mission commander on the ground, a decorated former Special Air Service sergeant, a stocky and well-muscled soldier with a boxer’s craggy features and a shaven head. He gave them both a thumbs up and a smile that was almost fatherly.

  “Yeah.” Marc meant that to sound convincing, but failed. “Just, y’know … Be careful.”

  Sam gave a mock-pout. “Oh, that’s sweet.” She cocke
d her head. “Would you feel better if I gave you a cuddle?”

  “I don’t know.” Despite himself, Marc laughed. Sam could always bring that out of him. “Do you want to see?”

  Her brown eyes flashed. “Keep it professional.” She started to walk away.

  “I think we’re past that point,” Marc added, in a low voice.

  Sam stopped and looked back at him. She had that expression again, the one he could never read. “Job on,” she said. “Job off. Don’t mix them up.”

  “Sam…” Marc frowned, groping for the right thing to say. “I get it, but—”

  “Job on,” she repeated, all the warmth suddenly gone from her expression.

  The long night in Tunisia that had found them alone the first time had been months ago, but Marc still didn’t know where he stood with her. Fraternising within a unit wasn’t supposed to happen, but if Rix or the others knew something was going on, they didn’t say.

  Sam was all about the moment, the rush of the now, and that was attractive to him. He knew that in the army she had served two tours as an explosives ordinance and demolitions specialist. She liked the taste of adrenaline.

  But Marc had no map with her. Sometimes he thought he had a read on the woman, in those moments when she was almost like a normal person, like someone with a real life. But then that cavalier streak of hers kicked in and he was left wondering. It seemed like the only thing Sam was ever honest about, ever serious about, was the mission.

  Part of him knew he should let it drop, but Marc was stubborn, even as he could see her manner cooling toward him. “Sam—” he began.

  “Sammy!” The moment snapped as one of the men from the tactical squad strode over, calling out her name. Iain Nash was the unit’s second-in-command, and he had the kind of swagger in his walk that Marc always connected with the tough kids he’d avoided as a teenager, growing up on a council housing estate in South London. Nash gave him a dismissive nod. He had a gaunt face framed by dark hair and a stubbled chin. There was a whipcord look to him, a manner that seemed coiled too tight for a covert operations specialist. But Nash was an accomplished operator, drawn, like Sam, from the British Army, cherry-picked by men in the upper echelons of the security services.

  Along with Rob Bell, who had been a copper with the Metropolitan Police’s CO19 firearms division, and a former Royal Marine named Bill Marshall, Nash filled out the part of OpTeam Seven that dealt with the sharp end of their assignments. Marc, Leon and Owen were their information and on-site support crew, what Rix called the blokes in the van as opposed to the blokes with the guns.

  “Need a word,” Nash told Sam, and raised an eyebrow in Marc’s direction. “Tick tock,” he added, watching him. “Better get your toy box working, yeah? Almost kick-off.”

  “Right,” Marc nodded after a moment, accepting the implied dismissal, and he began a slow walk back toward the truck. He heard the mutter of a low, guarded conversation strike up between Nash and Sam the moment his back was turned, and frowned.

  Marc wasn’t a fool, and so far he wasn’t allowing his feelings for Sam—whatever the hell those were—to get in the way of the job, no matter what she might have thought. But there was something going on with the tactical operators that was being kept from the rest of the unit. This wasn’t the first time Marc had seen Sam or Nash or Rix take a moment for a conversation away from prying ears, and none of them appeared to have any intention of explaining why.

  He thought about Rix’s definitions. The blokes in the van and the blokes with the guns. There was always going to be a gap between the support team and the strike element, that was a fact of life in this kind of group dynamic. They didn’t tend to drink with each other after the fact, didn’t cross over that much beyond the needs of the job, but Marc felt the distance more keenly than he wanted to admit.

  He could have been one of them. The MI6 recruiters had offered him the chance to apply for field officer status in the OpTeam program, but he had let it pass. All this time afterward, and still he wasn’t sure what had stopped him. He had said no, chosen to play it safe and not to take the risk.

  Marc looked back at Sam as he climbed into the truck. She was nodding intently at something Nash was saying, and didn’t seem to notice him.

  * * *

  Talia Patel had not slept in the past sixteen hours, but she would be damned if she was going to let that show on her face. Stealing a yawn inside the confines of the empty elevator, she pulled at the rumpled silk blouse under her Prada jacket, standing straight as the door opened.

  Exiting on the operations floor, she crossed through the security checkpoint, touching the smartcard in her hand on the RFID scanner in the wall. The armed guard at the monitor waved her through and she walked as quickly as decorum would allow toward the room designated as Hub White.

  Branching off every fifty feet along the length of the corridor were doors with digital displays hanging at eye level. Some were dark, others lit with text showing that the rooms beyond were Secured or on Standby, and in some cases in a state of Lockdown. If you ignored the guard with the gun, the unremarkable look of the place resembled the same kind of business space that existed in dozens of office blocks all across the city of London; but this corridor was two hundred feet beneath those streets, deep in the sublevels below Albert Embankment and the glass and stone of Number 85, Vauxhall Cross. This was the factory floor of MI6, Great Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, where the task of ensuring a nation’s security went on around the clock.

  Despite the early hour, the building was busy. The work at MI6 did not follow the usual rules, something that Talia had come to learn the hard way as senior intelligence analyst for K Section, the command-and-control division in charge of field actions for the OpTeam program. She hesitated, discreetly checking her reflection on the surface of the book-sized digital pad she was carrying. Her sharp but not unattractive features were framed by straight black hair hanging to shoulder-length, and she had hazel eyes in a tawny face. Talia was satisfied; she looked professional, and above all, awake.

  At the door to Hub White she gestured once more with the smartcard, this time following up with a four-digit day code on an input keypad, and the magnetic locks opened with a quiet thud. Talia entered, passing through a second sound-deadening door before she found herself on the raised gallery that ringed the busy operations center. In a nod toward the classic design of a theater, the gallery was nicknamed “the circle” while the level three steps down was “the stalls,” an open space lined with digital map desks, communications panels and computer monitors. Above it hung large screens layered with signal feeds from dozens of data sources. The size of a tennis court, this small nerve center equipped K Section to run an active mission anywhere in the world.

  At present, every system in Hub White was directed toward the Port of Dunkirk across the English Channel, all monitor stations filled, all screens active. Talia stepped down into the stalls, catching sight of a weather map of the French coastline. It had been a cold, moonless night, and the nearest front of rain clouds wouldn’t arrive over the coast until at least mid-morning.

  She found Donald Royce at the map table, the flat display resembling a desk strewn with documents—only here, the “papers” were actually virtual panels that could be moved around and manipulated by touch. Royce was engrossed in one of the panes of data. Her superior was average height and slight with it, soft in his features but possessed of a focus that could be directed like a laser when circumstances demanded. He was Eton-educated, betrayed as such by his meticulous Middle-English manners, and there was a dogged kind of intensity to him that Talia found intimidating at times.

  He looked up, peering across his frameless spectacles. “You’re cutting it fine.”

  “Sorry, sir,” she replied. “I wanted to make sure we had the most recent hourly reports from Signals.” Talia handed him the data tablet.

  “Thorough as ever,” he said, paging through the report with sweeps of his index finger, skim
ming the content with a practiced eye. The reports from the all-seeing information specialists at the GCHQ facility in Cheltenham were as exacting as ever. “Anything here we need to worry about?”

  She shook her head. “Not a peep. Nomad’s presence remains unnoticed, as far as we can tell.”

  “Good to know.” He handed the tablet back and peered at the map screen.

  Talia glanced at the mission clock on the wall, two displays showing Greenwich Mean Time and the local hour in Dunkirk. They were less than ten minutes away from the point where OpTeam Seven would be given their final go or no-go command.

  Royce steepled his fingers, studying a still of the Palomino, a freighter of Turkish origins, flying a Dutch flag. It had been docked at the port for the last twelve hours, and the picture showed it lying high against its moorings. Nothing of any bulk had been loaded on or off the vessel in that time, not even fuel and provisions.

  “We are certain, aren’t we?” Royce asked, in a subdued voice that only Talia heard.

  “You saw the capture from GCHQ yourself, sir,” she reminded him. “Cellular trace from a known arms dealer. Along with signals intelligence from the web and our other sources, we have probable cause to commit.” She was business-like about her reply, but both of them understood the import of what was about to happen. This would not be bloodless. Those sort of missions were not what the OpTeams were used for.

  “We have to be sure,” he continued. “Because if … Because when the French get wind of this, we will truly be knee deep in the merde.”

  “The DCRI are being monitored,” she noted, indicating a junior analyst working a keyboard. The analyst had one job only—to continually sift the communications feeds of France’s domestic security service in real-time, looking for any indication that the Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur were aware of the covert operation taking place in their backyard.