All Fall Down (Max Mclean, Band 2) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James Brabazon is an author, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. Based in the UK, he has traveled to more than seventy countries, investigating, filming, and directing in the world's most hostile environments. He is the author of All Fall Down, The Break Line, and the international bestseller My Friend the Mercenary, a memoir recounting his experiences of the Liberian civil war and the Equatorial Guinea coup plot. He divides his time between homes in London and on the south coast of England.

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1

Monday, January 8, 2018

It was an easy kill.

He was trapped, hemmed in by the Atlantic and the wild country of Donegal. No road. No telephone. Nowhere to run.

On the seventh night I pulled the plug on the skiff tied up on the beach by his cottage. I settled into a gully a hundred and fifty meters from the front door and waited, a black shadow dripping rainwater in a muddy ditch. The moon was hidden by banks of cloud that rolled in across the ocean from Iceland. Thick, fast squalls cut visibility and drowned out everything except the waves ripping up the bay.

The tide had turned. Conditions were perfect.

He was alone. He went nowhere, did nothing, saw no one. He was scared. Or stupid. Or both. I didn't know who he was or what he'd done, but at seventy-five, he'd either forgotten how to run or didn't think he had to anymore. Maybe he just wasn't thinking at all. Desperate men live only in the present. That much I did know. For ten months I'd anticipated nothing beyond sunset. Since I was sixteen I'd seen no farther than the end of a barrel. The future was another country explored one day at a time. Interred in his thatched stone casket, he was waiting for someone or something. But whatever he was expecting, he wasn't expecting me.

HeÕd already been inside for two days before I arrived. I watched the house for a week from a holiday park across the bay. Our lives ground down to the same rhythm.

Each morning he rose at seven thirty.

He lit an oil lamp and kept the windows covered. Candle grease smeared the panes. Only the faintest of shadows cast on the age-browned curtains allowed me to track him from the living room to the bedroom and back again. No smoke leaked from the chimney. The rooms would be damp and cold and half-heated by Calor gas. There was no electricity. If he cooked at all, it would have been in the living room. There were only two proper rooms, and a wooden washhouse tacked on the back-an ancient extension, perhaps once an elderly relative's bedroom. Maybe it covered a wellhead. Maybe he drank his whisky neat. Either way, he'd need to resupply before long.

At dusk he lit the lamp again.

He extinguished it at ten.

And rose at seven thirty.

Moss grew on the roof. Weeds tangled the kitchen garden. Garden trash was piled against the back door. The cottage was desolate but not derelict-one of the few surviving remnants of a lost landscape of thatched poverty. Americans thought they were quaint. I thought they were more like millstones than monuments, tying us to a past that had got us where, exactly?

Here. Exactly.

I flexed my palm around the grip of the semiautomatic and focused on the rain-roar berating the headland.

The nearest house was five hundred meters to the northeast. It had been empty for a year-an unwanted holiday home languishing in negative equity. The track to its front door wound off to the main road four hundred meters farther on. Seven hundred meters to the southeast, a couple from Birmingham gazed out over Ulster in the midst of their retirement. Good luck with that. Drongawn Lough lay due south. Everywhere else was just rough sea or sodden turf.

I spent twelve hours in the gully. Out of habit I clicked a little pebble I'd picked off the beach against the back of my teeth. I didn't need it: the rainwater kept my throat moist and my head clear.

It was a two-man job. But, as usual, I was flying solo: the details-and the consequences-were on me alone. While I'd snatched moments of sleep, a night-vision camera picked out in electric green the whitewashed walls of his self-imposed prison.

A weeklong reconnaissance was just enough to establish a pattern of life, and short enough not to cause suspicion by hanging around. The target was secluded; no bystanders in the way and none to threaten the operation. The holiday park owners were glad to take a week's rent out of season and asked no questions. If it blew up, there were only two people at risk: me and him.

Colonel Ellard-who'd drilled me hard when I was a new recruit-had been fond of reminding me that the enemy has a vote. "He won't do what you expect him to just because you want him to." That was day two of training and a lifetime ago. But Ellard would have agreed there was no point figuring out what this target's plan was. He'd made a choice, and he was going to have to live with it, however briefly. The fact that he'd chosen to come here, now, was the only certainty, the only fact to consider. I assumed he was armed and the doors might be rigged. But only one of us was going to leave the cottage, and on the current balance of probabilities that was going to be me. "Surprise," concluded the colonel, "neutralizes ignorance. Briefly."

But Ellard didn't send me on jobs. Commander Frank Knight did. And Frank had been clear about two things: the kill had to be verified and the cottage had to be swept. I didn't know what, exactly, I was looking for. And neither, I suspected, did Frank.

This was a rare target of opportunity-the sort I hardly ever dealt with. No prep, no briefing, no one in Whitehall pretending they couldn't remember my name-just another bloody love letter from Frank to his dagger man. Maybe it was personal. Maybe I should have asked. But questions had got me into a lot of trouble in the past. For better or worse, if I was in it again, I was in it for good.

No ifs. No buts. No questions.

Zero six thirty.

Dirt fouled my black kit, my face filthy with bog grime. I left the balaclava rolled in my pocket. There was only a dead man to see me, after all. The inside edges of the tiny window frames, which in an hour would glow gold with lamplight, were still solid black: ancient beams as tough as prison bars. I could no more get in through them than he could get out of them.

I press-checked the SIG-a silenced .45. Ten rounds in the magazine and one up the spout. I'd chosen custom-made semi-wadcutters: thick lead rounds with a flat nose and no jacket, handloaded into spent brass picked up in Derry twenty years ago. Whoever got the blame for this would already be enjoying his Good Friday amnesty.

Zero seven hundred.

The sky lightened over the limestone ridges that cut between the cottage and the village at Cashel Glebe. People would be stirring: children dressing for school; farmers already at their herds. The glare of car headlights flickered on the low cloud over the lough.

In the past I'd liked these last moments, cherished them, even, for their clarity, their sense of purpose: before the green light the world drew into focus. At first I had imagined it a trick of the riflescope. But I found the same simplicity of vision glinted off a knife blade, too, or gleamed on the tight wire of a garrotte.

Now I just went over the exfil details step by step, over and over. I turned the job around and upside down and shook it until it shed its secrets. Any idiot can get in anywhere on earth. The trick is getting out again.

He might have trapped himself, but he'd given me an exit. It was two and a half klicks to the jetty at Altaheeran on the west side of the lough mouth. I'd run the skiff down on the flood tide and then pull hard across to the opposite shore. No need for an outboard. If she sank, I'd swim to the quay. I'd left a Kia rental and a change of clothes there and was wearing a base layer of neoprene skins. It was too risky to head toward Belfast...