A Hostile State by Adrian Magson (reading eggs books txt) 📗

now I knew what else had clunked against the table leg back at the Mansion Café. It made me wonder what she’d have done if the soldiers back at the roadblock had insisted on searching the jeep. Probably sweet-talked them about being lost or maybe gone all nuclear and blown them away. She was turning into a bundle of surprises.

I walked away back up the slope a little to regain my night-vision and listen to the night. If anyone did turn up uninvited I didn’t want to get caught out. It wasn’t just myself I had to think about, either; Isobel was as much my responsibility as I was hers. It’s what you do in the field – you watch each other’s back.

A scrape of sound nearby me had me turning with the Kahr levelled and ready to shoot. Isobel was twenty yards away, her white clothing barely visible in what little ambient light there was. She didn’t appear to be the least put out at having me pointing a gun at her head. She was carrying her rucksack.

‘I cleared out what little food I thought would be useful,’ she explained, and extracted what turned out to be a mixture of biscuits, dried fruit, local goats’ cheese and bottles of water. ‘I didn’t see the point in letting everything go to waste.’ She looked around. ‘Everything quiet?’

‘Nobody here but us. Not even any scorpions.’

We sat on the ground and ate. It was almost serene apart from the occasional bird call and the hiss of the breeze, and should have seemed intimate, an ordinary picnic, the kind of thing you do with family or friends – although here and now it was neither intimate nor ordinary.

‘Why were you in Aarsal?’ I asked, to break the silence. ‘Seems a little out of the way of anything strategic.’

She nodded and flicked a piece of date stalk away. ‘I know. Some bright spark analyst deep in the bowels of SIS with a bunch of university degrees and zero experience on the ground decided that monitoring an area so near the Syrian border would provide useful information on the movements of cross-border insurgents, refugees and government forces.’

‘And has it?’

‘Hell, no. I’ve seen graveyards with more excitement. Maybe that’s why they decided to pull me out – that and budget constraints.’ She gave me an oblique look. ‘My orders referred to you as an asset. From the way Vale spoke of you, I’m guessing you’re not on the US government’s regular payroll.’

I shook my head. ‘It’s been a long time since I was on anybody’s regular payroll.’

The truth was I preferred being free to take work or reject it. It meant I wasn’t bound by someone else’s idea of duty or their desire to score points on a promotions ladder. I didn’t turn down many assignments unless I was already tied up on something else, but the time would surely come when it would be wiser to step back from a job that I could see promised no chance of a good outcome. Analysts with bright ideas and no field experience existed in both Washington and London, and were to be viewed with caution.

After we’d finished eating Isobel held up her phone and announced it was time to contact her controller for information. I had to do the same, and after checking our location, texted the three-word locator to Callahan and signed off. If he wanted to talk he would get back to me, but there was no reason to waste air time unless it was important.

With that done I made my way further up the slope for a hundred yards or so and sat on the ground in the lee of a large boulder, from where I could watch the area towards the track and beyond. I was looking for a hint of dust; even in poor light it carried a faint luminescence and would be the first sign in this kind of landscape of anyone approaching. But aside from the faintest sighing of a breeze sweeping the area and a couple of birds passing overhead, I was alone.

I hadn’t asked Isobel how exactly we were going to exit the area, but I guess I’d know soon enough once she received confirmation from whoever was running this op. If Callahan was in on the strategy I figured he’d have a close eye on things, but I had no doubts that SIS’s involvement would run smoothly enough. They had years of experience running personnel around the Middle East, and they’d know all the wrinkles. For now it was sit and wait and watch the horizon.

After a while I began to pick up a distant droning sound off to the east. Was that a helicopter or a ground-based vehicle? It was too faint to tell. I couldn’t see any lights but there was a lot of dead ground out there with hills to blank them out. If trouble was coming it could be ten miles off or just over the next piece of mountainside. Night-time plays havoc with sound, spreading it like jam on bread. You know a sound is there but precision is not an option until the source gets closer and identifiable.

Leave it too late and it could be right on top of you before you know it.

I heard another noise, this one much closer among the trees. Somebody was moving, the soft scrape of a careless footfall, a foot nudging a rock, a shuffling sound cut off suddenly by a hiss. I eased off the safety and waited. If the person knew we were here they had an advantage. The question was, how many were out there and were we already surrounded?

Then a figure appeared out of the blackness walking across my front about eighty yards off but not looking my way. I had the gun up ready to squeeze off a couple of shots when I hesitated. Whoever it was had come dressed in sombre clothing, the detail almost swallowed up by the