‘Is he okay?’ asked the Major.
‘They carried him in and he wasn’t moving, but if he was dead they’d have left him in the trunk.’
‘That’s reassuring,’ said the Major, coldly.
‘I’ll text you the co-ordinates but you should keep your distance. He’s still in Dora and Westerners stick out there.’
‘We’ll hang back,’ said the Major.
‘We’re going to bring the plane in for refuelling now,’ said Yokely. ‘Everything seems quiet and I’d rather be up there with a full tank. We’ll be down for about two hours. The transmitter’s still working fine so we’ll know if they move him. I’m getting our NSA guys here to monitor the tracker through the Iraqi phone service.’
‘Any sign of him moving, let me know,’ said the Major. He ended the call, then rang Armstrong to brief him on what the American had said. Armstrong was parked half a mile away in another Land Cruiser with Shortt, Bosch and Haschka.
‘Why doesn’t he have two of those things up?’ asked O’Brien from the back seat when the Major finished his call. He had a KitKat, which he broke into two. He offered half to Gannon, who shook his head. Muller grabbed for it but O’Brien grinned and moved it out of his reach.
‘We’re lucky to have the one, Martin,’ said the Major. ‘They cost over four million dollars each, the ground station is another ten, and they need a ground crew of three working on it full time when it’s in the air. Yokely’s doing it on the quiet because the Yanks wouldn’t want to put that amount of resources into one missing Brit.’
‘He’s a generous guy,’ said O’Brien, popping the last piece of KitKat into his mouth.
‘He’ll want his pound of flesh at some point,’ said the Major, ‘but we need him. We could follow the transmitters using the regular Iraqi phone network but the Predator gives us a visual, too.’
‘I hope he’s okay,’ said Muller.
‘You and me both,’ said the Major.
Shepherd tasted blood in his mouth, turned his head and spat it out, then regretted it because the result was smeared across the inside of the hood. His head was throbbing, the pain was made worse because he was lying on his back. He rolled on to his right side and felt a searing pain in his skull. He took several deep breaths, then lay still and listened. He could hear nothing, not even street noise. He was lying on hard ground, possibly concrete. His wrists were bound behind his back and he had lost all feeling in his fingers. He brought his knees up, then tried to roll over to get up. The strength had gone from his legs and he fell back.
He lay gasping for breath, then heard a door open and footsteps walking across the floor. Hands gripped his shoulders and turned him. Someone pulled up the hood and thrust a plastic bottle towards his mouth. Shepherd drank. It was lukewarm water. The man held the bottle to Shepherd’s lips until he spluttered, then took it away and pulled down the hood. He turned Shepherd around, then pushed him back until he was against the wall. They’d taken off his body armour.
‘Sit,’ said the man.
Shepherd had the feeling he was the tall man with glasses, the one who’d pulled the gun. He slid down the wall and sat with his back to it, his knees against his chest. ‘I need to urinate,’ said Shepherd.
‘What?’ said the man.
‘I need to pee. To piss.’
‘Wet your pants,’ said the man. ‘I am not untying your hands.’
‘Who are you?’
Something hit Shepherd on the side of the head, a hand maybe. The man had slapped him, hard. ‘I will ask questions, not you,’ said the man.
‘Okay,’ said Shepherd, his ears ringing. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘What is your name?’
‘Peter Simpson,’ said Shepherd. It was the name in the passport and on the credit cards in his wallet.
‘Where are you from?’
‘Manchester,’ said Shepherd.
‘What are you doing in Baghdad?’
‘I work for a security company,’ said Shepherd.
Shepherd heard paper rustling and realised that the man was flicking through his passport.
‘How long have you been in Iraq?’
‘I arrived yesterday.’
The man chuckled. ‘You are in deep shit, Mr Peter Simpson,’ he said. Shepherd felt the man slap his boots. ‘Timberland?’ asked the man.
Shepherd nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘What size?’ asked the man.
‘They’re on the move,’ said Nichols, nodding at the LCD screen and its real-time view of the house where Shepherd had been kept for the previous twelve hours. Yokely got up from the camp-bed he was lying on and went to stand at the other man’s shoulder. It was night and they were looking at the infrared image from the Predator.
Three figures were moving from the house to the car. The one in the middle was stumbling, held by the other two. ‘He’s walking,’ said Nichols.
Yokely nodded. ‘They must be passing him up the food chain,’ he said. He called the Major’s mobile. ‘They’re moving him now,’ Yokely told him.
‘Is he okay?’
‘He’s walking. They’re putting him in the car.’
‘Excellent,’ said the Major.
‘I’ll let you know which direction once they head off.’ Yokely put his phone away. ‘How’s it going, Phillip?’ he asked the pilot.
‘Hunky-dory,’ said Howell, who was sipping coffee from a chipped white mug. He had been piloting the Predator for more than sixteen hours and had only been able to take his eyes off the screens for the two hours when the drone was on the airfield being refuelled and serviced.
‘Fuel?’
Howell flicked his eyes to the gauge and calculated in his head. ‘Fifteen hours or so.’
Yokely looked at the GPS display. The cursor was blinking steadily. He smiled to himself. So far, so good.
‘I can’t breathe in there,’ said Shepherd, as the two men pushed him into the boot of the car.
‘What?’ said one of the men. It wasn’t the man who’d spoken to him inside – this voice was deeper and gruffer.
‘The exhaust’s leaking,’ said Shepherd. ‘The fumes will kill me.’
‘Hold your breath,’ said the man, and laughed. He grabbed Shepherd’s shirt collar and pushed him towards the boot.
‘If you kill me, I’m not worth anything,’ said Shepherd, quickly. ‘I kept passing out before and I could easily die in there.’
The two men talked to each other in Arabic, arguing. Shepherd heard footsteps as the third of his captors approached, then the voice of the man who’d interrogated him inside.
The man put his face close to Shepherd’s head. ‘What is the problem?’ he said.
‘The exhaust is leaking,’ said Shepherd. ‘The boot gets full of fumes. I kept passing out last time.’
‘You want to travel first class, is that it?’ The man said something to the others, who laughed.
Shepherd opened his mouth but before he could say anything something hard smashed against the side of his head.
Nichols winced. ‘That’s got to have hurt,’ he said. ‘Why did they do it?’
‘Because they’re tough, mean motherfuckers,’ said Yokely.
‘They’ve got him bound and hooded. Hitting him is overkill,’ said Slater.
‘No one said they were nice people,’ said Yokely.
They watched as two of the men put the unconscious Shepherd into the boot while the third got into the driving seat. They slammed the boot shut, then one slid into the passenger seat while the other held back to shut the gates behind them. There was no other traffic in the road.
Howell moved the joystick and put the drone into a lazy left-hand turn. Slater moved his control to keep the car in the centre of the screen. There wasn’t much traffic about so he had no problem following the vehicle, but it still required his full attention.
Yokely pulled up a chair. He moved his head frequently to keep an eye on both screens – the infrared camera view and the GPS monitor.
‘When are you going to move in?’ asked Howell.
‘That’ll be Spider’s call,’ said Yokely.
‘He’d better not leave it too late,’ said Howell.
‘I hear you,’ said Yokely.
When Shepherd came to he was still in the boot. His head ached and he couldn’t feel his hands. The car was driving fast and the road seemed smooth. His mouth was bone-dry and it hurt to swallow. The exhaust smell was overpowering and he rolled over again so that his mouth was close to the boot’s lock. The combination of the hood and the fumes was making him drowsy and he fought to stay awake. ‘Please, God, don’t let me die like this…’ he whispered.