Fearless ; The Smoke Child Read online

  “So, the deal is that I’m in trouble, Rachel.”

  “Well, if you weren’t before, you are now,” she chuckled, trying to break the mood. Trying to connect. “But, hey. Everyone’s in trouble sometime or other.”

  “The thing is, I screwed up. I made a mistake in Afghanistan, and now someone wants me dead.”

  “A lot of people screw up, especially during a war,” said Rachel, as she considered all the possibilities. “It doesn’t mean they can’t get a second chance.”

  Time was slowing down, or maybe her thoughts were speeding up. It amounted to the same thing. She wondered whether he was suffering from some form of paranoia, maybe bought on by post-traumatic stress. That wouldn’t be good.

  “But you know, trouble comes and goes. Maybe you can ride this thing out?”

  She was reaching.

  “Not really,” said the guy at the end of the phone. “I lost some money for a bunch of pretty serious guys.”

  “David, how can this be making sense to you? How can it be worth killing yourself for cash? I mean, how much are we talking about?”

  Rachel had an iPhone full of experts, including plenty of financial advisors. This could be a quick fix before the news after all. But she needed him to give her a steer.

  “Did you lose some money to these guys in a poker game or something? How much are we talking about? A grand? Two?” she pushed for an answer. Time was tight.

  He took a deep breath and used his arms to shuffle himself further over the edge of the building.

  “Three hundred million US dollars, give or take.”

  Three hundred million?

  Rachel White looked at the clock and recalculated her strategy, allowing for the fact that David Barr was evidently insane. Three minutes forty-five seconds to go.

  Chapter Ten

  Ground Floor Lobby, Marriot Hotel, Los Angeles.

  “Sweet dreams are made of this, Who am I to disagree?

  I’ve traveled the world and the seven seas.

  Everybody’s looking for Something.”

  - Eurythmics, Sweet Dreams.

  The man in the black jacket crossed the hotel lobby as quickly as he could without running. Even so, he was conspicuous. Over seven feet tall, broad and muscular, he had a square jaw and a foreboding presence. He didn’t look entirely comfortable in civilian company.

  He went straight for the elevator, which he had to stoop to enter. He was no Samaritan, but he had a life to save. There were things which David Barr needed to tell him before he could be allowed to kill himself. They had waited thirteen months to find him, and now Tyler needed to get to the roof, quickly.

  Chapter Eleven

  KLA AM NewsTalk Studios, Downtown Los Angeles. December 2010.

  “The Lights are getting dim; will I pay for who I’ve been?”

  - Tori Amos, Happy Phantom

  Rachel had decided to ride the call out until the news, and then record the rest of it after the show. Her producer was already setting another studio up for recording so they could hit the news on time and then continue the conversation ready to play out at the start of tomorrow’s show. Good plan.

  “David, how can anyone owe three hundred million dollars?”

  He exhaled without answering. He couldn’t answer that question without doing serious damage to the reputation of the army and to his country. Corrupt officials, stolen cash and friendly fire? The press would have a field day. And nobody would believe him.

  “Do you have a family?” asked the woman at the end of his mobile phone.

  From the inside pocket of his new jacket, Barr pulled the photograph of the auburn-haired woman and the girl in the green dress. He traced the contours of their faces with the tip of his finger back with them for a minute. A last minute.

  Two minutes, fifty-nine seconds to go.

  Before he could answer the question, he saw something moving on the opposite side of the roof. As he turned, a tall guy in a black coat came fast through the shadows towards him. Tyler. His weapon was already trained on him, his hand steady and his eyes cold.

  Barr knew that Tyler worked on impulse and that he wasn’t always smart. Barr’s trained eye could make out the weapon in Tyler's hand and saw that the safety was off. Tyler hadn’t come to talk. He'd been hunting Barr for one reason: to convince him to give up the money which he didn’t have. Convince him any way he could. But he was too late.

  Barr had made his decision thirteen months ago. Nothing was more important than the two women in the photograph in his right hand. He had spent thirteen months alone, wondering how his daughter had grown, thirteen months wondering whether his wife had given up on him. Thirteen months staying away, to keep Tyler away. And now it would end, and they would be safe. They would be safe soon, because the huge man was only ten paces away.

  Ninety seconds to go.

  The studio was tense now. Rachel didn’t feel like she had the call under control. By now she should have nailed him, but he didn’t fit the model. Suddenly she knew that this guy might actually do it, and about four hundred thousand listeners would hear him do it. And blame her. Focus, for Christ’s sake.

  “David, why did you call me, if you’ve already decided to jump?”

  Barr felt sorry for her. Who knows what happens to a radio host who lets someone die on their show? Probably good for publicity. Probably bad for the soul.

  “Ma’am, I’m afraid there’s not enough time to explain.”

  He started to shift his weight further over the edge of the building. The pain from the bitumen cuts in his palm kept him focused, and a rush of night air blew around his neck, which felt super-sensitive since he had buzz-cut his hair. It was a long way down, and his body was exhibiting all the signs of fear, his pupils were wide, his hearing acute, his heart rate was up and his breathing was fast. But David Barr was a soldier, and he knew how to operate under pressure.

  The woman on the other end of the phone was reasoning with him, but the time for talking had passed. Tyler's arrival was a comfort to Barr, because Barr knew he would witness his final moment and no doubt report back to General Lang. He had no more energy for running. No more energy for hiding. If Tyler hadn’t shown up to see him die, Barr was certain he would have heard it on the radio or seen it on the TV news. It's not every day a guy kills himself live on air. Barr had the whole thing locked down because he’d only get to do this once. If his family were going to live, Tyler had to see him die.

  Tyler was closing in, breaking into a run. The moment had come. As the soldier leaned forward, he took one last deep breath of Californian air and pushed against the ledge with his right hand. He fell from the building and into the night.

  Chapter Twelve

  Birmingham, England. January 2010.

  “I've been watching your world from afar,

  I've been trying to be where you are.

  And I've been secretly falling apart, unseen.”

  – Aqualung, Strange and Beautiful.

  Daud had spent the morning studying. These days he was spending more and more time on his own, partly because his brother was on the other side of the world and partly because he was sick of talking to other people about him.

  “Any word from Ajmal?” people would ask. Daud knew that they were just fishing for gossip. His blood would boil at their soft words and their kind eyes and their vicious hearts.

  In his darkest moments, Daud wished Ajmal was dead. Then he’d have a body to mourn. Then he would know his brother was at peace. After all, they couldn’t hurt him once he was dead. And the questions and the gossip could die with him, too.

  But in his heart, Daud didn’t really want his brother to be dead. What he really wanted was to bring him home, nurse him better, calm his soul, and then find out what he had been doing in Afghanistan. The boy he grew up with, the boy he knew better than anyone else. The man he didn’t know at all, apparently.

  Since the day he was born, it had been in the stars that Daud would be a pillar of his
community. He was the oldest son of an oldest son. Someone to look up to, a role model. He should have been a role model to his younger brother, Ajmal. But now Ajmal was beyond his reach. Beyond anyone’s help. More and more, Daud’s soul felt angry and his heart felt clouded.

  This must be how it goes thought Daud. The heart searches for healing, but when the world grows cruel, it settles for revenge instead.

  It was Friday and Daud was standing at the entrance to the mosque with a bucket in his hand, collecting money from the people as they streamed out after prayers. He was collecting for poor families in Pakistan who had recently been devastated by flooding and disease. When he wasn’t at work, Daud had busied himself by collecting money for good causes and organizing aid trucks for his appeal. It was good to be busy. Good to be helpful.

  Since the news about Ajmal though, he noticed people had found it harder to meet his eye, and that after prayers several people found it easier to talk to his bucket than to him. Pretty much everyone asked the bucket how the aid effort was going; several asked the bucket whether there was any news about Ajmal. Nobody asked Daud about himself or the rest of his family. They didn’t even ask the bucket about that. Vicious hearts.

  So Daud kept his eyes to the ground and his thoughts to himself and as he shook his bucket, his heart began to dwell on revenge.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Fifty Second Floor, Marriot Hotel, Los Angeles.

  “Is something wrong?” she said. Well of course there is. “You're still alive,” she said. Oh, and do I deserve to be? – Pearl Jam, Alive.

  Things hadn’t gone to plan for David Barr. He hadn’t accounted for the blood which had been spilling from the bitumen cuts in his right hand. It had slowly congealed into an oily mess on the wall next to him as he had been talking to the radio host. As he had made his final push off the wall, his palm had slipped in the blood and for a second, he had lost momentum. It had been enough time for Tyler to reach him.

  Barr’s neck had jolted backwards as he stopped mid-air. Tyler's huge hand had clamped down on his forearm. Mentally, Barr counted the five seconds it should have taken him to die. But he was still alive, caught in Tyler's grip, only half a floor nearer to his destiny.

  Tyler looked down at him, checking that he’d got the right person. Just in case there was another one-legged man trying to jump off the other side of the same roof. Tyler’s hand was rough and dry, and his grip dug into Barr’s arm. Barr felt his skin stretching, complaining, and the rest of his body trying to break away from the snare.

  Between them, the men had two free hands. Barr was using his left hand to grip his mobile phone. He could hear Rachel White’s tinny voice calling his name from the earpiece. Tyler was still holding his Beretta M9 in his right hand.

  As Barr watched, Tyler put down the gun and pulled him higher, back up towards the ledge. He might not have been the smartest guy, but he had impressive strength. He used his free hand to grapple with the buckle on Barr’s watch. Barr did not understand what the man was doing until he pulled the watch up over his hand, threw it across the roof, and began examining Barr's wrist intently.

  Fifty-three seconds to go.

  Then Barr understood. The man clutching his forearm was looking for a tattoo, because he was looking for Fearless. And as he hung in the air, Barr realized that Tyler thought he was Fearless. But Fearless was a ghost; he had arrived in Kandahar with no paperwork, no story, and no real name. Then he had disappeared in a puff of black smoke, presumed dead, along with three hundred million dollars. An idea started to form in David Barr’s head. A glimpse of survival. Not for himself, but for his family.

  When Tyler saw the bare skin on Barr’s wrist he grabbed at the dog tags around his neck, checked the name, and let go. For a brief second, Barr’s eyes were level with the small ledge that he had been sitting on a moment ago, and he stole one last glance at the blood-smeared photograph of his wife and daughter.

  As Barr felt the metal chain of his dog tags snap behind his neck, gravity did its worst. He plunged downwards and his stomach slammed into his chest, but he used all of his strength to pull his mobile phone to his mouth.

  In the studio, Rachel White had been listening to the sounds of scrabbling and scuffling and was hopeful that the LAPD had arrived on the scene and grabbed the guy before he could jump. But now suddenly, the sounds at the end of the phone had changed. Wind was whistling into the mouthpiece and she had a dreadful feeling in the pit of her stomach. Then clearly, she and her audience had heard him speak. He wasn’t shouting exactly, but it was horribly clear that he was calling out as he fell.

  “Charlie Lockhart is Fearless!”

  Barr started to repeat his message, just to be sure, but halfway through the sentence there was a sick, heavy thud and the line cut dead. The mobile phone hadn’t survived the fall any more than David Barr had. High above, Tyler was already moving off the roof. Barr didn’t have the tattoo. But Tyler had a new target.

  Eleven seconds to go.

  The volume monitors in front of Rachel White fell to zero and the shock of what had just happened hung in the air in the studio. There was silence, and she had no desire to break it. She felt heavy; Every tiny movement was an effort. She half-heartedly pushed the news fader up and waited for the bulletin to save her.

  Across town, a huddle of basketball fans and cops had formed at the foot of the hotel. In the middle, broken on the paving slabs, darkening blood was already finding its way through the torn lining of Barr’s new Prada suit. The heavy second hand in the studio slammed into the top of the hour. Inevitably.

  And Captain David Barr was dead.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Main Gate, Kandahar Airfield. NOVEMBER, 2009.

  “What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here.”

  – Radiohead, Creep.

  Kandahar Air Field centered around a weird cream-colored terminal that dated back to the nineteen sixties. Back then it might have looked space-age, but by the time the ISAF forces took control of it, it looked strikingly bizarre, with its round domes and curved stilts that stuck out like the legs of a giant sun-bleached spider. As the war raged around it, it retained its ornate green plastic sign, which read: “Welcome to Kandahar Airport.”

  There was a large square building to one side of the space age spider, which once served as a passenger terminal. On the airfield, people referred to the place as TLS, the Taliban’s Last Stand. Some archways around the sides of the building showed signs of damage, and there were bullet holes in the cream facade.

  Now it was the nerve center for the ISAF military base, and hundreds of thick black communication wires and power lines emanated from it, so that the giant bleached spider looked like it was sat in the middle of a giant black web. Brown humvees buzzed around it like flies, kicking up dust as twenty thousand Western personnel went about their business.

  It was late afternoon when the convoy from Quetta reached Kandahar. The worst of the midday sun was gone, which was good because Lockhart figured he’d be sitting in the cab with his engine off soon, and that would mean no air conditioning. But there was still plenty of time to go through the laborious task of getting through the main gate before darkness fell.

  The trucks in front of Lockhart had stopped. Slowly, they were making their way through the security systems at the front gates. The ISAF forces called it the sink. The waiting place where explosives or contraband could sink through their hiding place and be sniffed out by the dogs.

  At the front of the queue, the trucks panned out into six lanes, each one separated by a three-meter blast wall made of sand and sack cloth and metal mesh. Until a truck was passed as safe by the guards, it would stay quarantined between the thick sand dividers.

  The guards, mostly soldiers from the Afghan National Army, would check the cargo, the cabs, and the chassis of the vehicles. Sometimes, they would ‘sweat’ the drivers, taking them off to one side for an hour or more, just to see how they reacted. Then they would send in the do
gs, after any explosive or contraband had had a chance to seep through its hiding place.

  The result was a long queue and slow progress. Security on the base was paramount, and there was no fast-tracking. No nodding and winking. Everyone got stopped, and everyone got checked.

  *

  Just after six pm, Lockhart drove through the outer gate and into the US control of Kandahar Air Field. He didn’t know much about the place, except for Ajmal’s description; there were twenty thousand ISAF troops here, hundreds of aircraft, robust security, and a chance to buy Western food.

  The camp blended into its environment; the blast walls were made of sand and matched the dusty ground. The gray concrete walls were of the same hue as the natural terrain, and most of the military vehicles were colored to blend in, as were their drivers’ uniforms.

  The whole place looked temporary, but impressive. A testament to man’s ability to take a strip of desert where the temperatures reached forty degrees in the shade, and turn it into a hospitable place within a matter of weeks. Nothing was dug in, nothing felt rooted. Lockhart imagined that the place could be gone almost as quickly as it had arrived should there be an appetite to leave. Bits would be packed up on low-loaders and moved on to the world’s next conquest. What was left could blow away on the wind and return to the dust.

  Lockhart hit the front of the queue and watched carefully to see what the guards would ask him to do. An Afghan in a dark green uniform, a makeshift dust mask, and Ray-Bans indicated that he should drive into one of the bomb-proof bays. He pointed the way with his AK-47. Lockhart guessed that the ANA soldier had been working in the sun all day, because he didn’t look as alert as he should.

  Even behind his Ray-Bans, Lockhart could see that the soldier wasn’t giving him proper eye contact, not evaluating him properly. He clunked the truck into first gear and began to move slowly forward.