Читать книгу State Of Honour - Gary Haynes - Страница 12

Tom sat in the front passenger seat of the third MSD SUV, feeling agitated. The convoy was doing a steady sixty-five along the eight-lane highway leading from the embassy, police outriders front and rear. They were ten minutes behind schedule. The secretary had had to take an urgent call from the president on a secure landline. Sitting directly behind Tom, the safest place from a protective viewpoint, she discussed the speech she’d give to the army generals at Parliament House right after her visit to the hospital. The speech writer had a retro moustache and a servile tone, a skinny guy whom Tom considered a hindrance.

After they’d agreed on the final changes, the secretary said, “The president wants the visit to the hospital cut to twenty minutes tops.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Tom replied.

“That means no press questions.”

“Understood.”

“He mentioned the threat.”

Tom turned around in his seat. “If the agreed procedure is followed, your exposure will be minimal, ma’am.”

She nodded, slowly.

Tom double-checked that her seat belt was fastened securely, that the doors were locked and the windows closed. He ran through the various evacuation scenarios, depending on the nature of the attack and which vehicles might be taken out. She’d be plunged into the footwell. The driver would employ a full bootlegger’s turn or resort to ramming. They played out like video games in his head, priming him for a potential en-route ambush.

Next, he tested his push-to-talk, or PTT, radio. The PTT button was inline and ran between the radio connection and the earpiece. It could be used either via the button or as a voice-activated unit, providing a handsfree facility. The destinations they’d be travelling to today had codenames. The hospital’s codename was Cradle. He used them to communicate with his team, checking their radios were functioning in the process. Satisfied, he focused on the pre-planned arrival procedure. He’d alight first, opening the passenger door. The agents in the vehicle behind would form an open-box formation around her as she entered the building.

Check.

The Faisal Children’s Hospital was a few miles from the Saudi-Pak Tower, a contemporary landmark known for its Islamic tile work. Nineteen floors high, the tower was visible from the tinted windows of the SUV. Tom worried that the hospital was outside the so-called Blue Area, the commercial centre of Islamabad. Together with a couple of his team, he’d walked the route the day before, liaising with a group of ISI operatives, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, the main Pakistan security service.

The lead operative had been called Awan. He was a beefy six-footer with leathery skin, who wore a sombre suit and black necktie.

“The road has been checked for IEDs. The hospital is clean, at least in terms of bombs,” he said, his wide face breaking into a crooked grin.

“What about all these people?” Tom asked.

“This isn’t the West. If they do not work, they do not eat.”

The street and those surrounding it lacked the Blue Area’s greenery and modern architecture. The hospital abutted run-down buildings on either side. Brick-built retail stores with whitewashed residential accommodation above. Opposite, bland concrete apartment and office blocks rose three storeys to flat roofs. They cast an unbroken shadow over a line of flimsy stalls, selling reams of brightly coloured cloth, second-hand cellphones, fruit and vegetables and halal meat on hooks.

“I don’t like it,” Tom said.

“Then tell her not to come,” Awan replied, shrugging.

Ignoring him, Tom said, “Your men ready for tomorrow?”

“As I told you on the phone, apart from yourselves, ten armed operatives will mix with the crowd. There will be fifty-two policemen. On the roofs, a team of snipers.” He pointed up to the sky. “And a police helicopter with elite commandos onboard.”

“Have the hospital staff been screened?”

“They were screened when they were employed. They’re all well-educated Punjabis. Our problems come from frontier hills people. Shia illiterates.”

Tom pinched his nose. “The main exposure is when the secretary leaves. A two-minute delay while she does her goodbyes to the official line-up,” he said, knowing that a couple of Grey Eagle drones would be monitoring the scene from above.

“Everything will be okay, Mr Dupree.”

Tom had wished he could’ve believed him.

He stood half a metre behind the secretary now, just to the right of her shoulder, his sense of unease unabated. The walls of the hospital ward were painted an insipid yellow. It was cramped with twenty small beds a fraction more than a body-width apart. If it had AC, it had been turned off. The competing smells of disinfectant and stale sweat were equally pungent. He figured the authorities were intent on making the experience both unpleasant and memorable.

A bearded doctor, with black bags hanging in folds like a bloodhound’s, explained to the secretary in detail the nature of each of the children’s injuries and what could and could not be done. Tom thought he looked like a coke addict, or a guy who drank a bottle of Jack a day, but put his jaded appearance down to a dedicated man who didn’t sleep much. He watched the secretary listen attentively, and speak with each child in turn via a government interpreter before moving sullenly to the last bed.

The undefined nature of the threat had left Tom feeling even more paranoid than he would’ve been normally in such circumstances. Beside the bed, a young female nurse with exquisite feline-like eyes, and a mouth so naturally generous that no amount of collagen could replicate it, checked a saline drip. Tom slid over to her and eased a ballpoint pen from her hip pocket stealthily, placing it onto a window sill just out of her reach. Two separate attempts on the life of President Ford had been by women who’d looked like grade-school teachers, and a pen was as deadly as a stiletto. His antennae were up.

“The Leopards have no regard for human life,” the doctor said. “Young or old. No matter.”

The bed was occupied by a small boy who was almost completely cocooned in bandages. With his wide-eyed stare and lack of visible skin, he resembled a fragile hybrid. The secretary bent over the bed and said a few words. As she went to touch him the doctor spoke.

“Please no. Ninety per cent burns.” He shook his head to emphasize that death was certain.

The secretary lowered her hand, looked close to tears but managed a closed-mouth smile. Tom fought the urge to wince.

“Excuse me, ma’am, but we’re due at Parliament House in thirty minutes,” a female aide said, bending towards the secretary.

Her thick red hair accentuated the paleness of her skin. She looked like a size zero, and what little make-up she wore had been applied with calligraphic precision.

“I visited a hospital just like this one in Iraq eight years ago,” the secretary said to her quietly, without turning around. “The only difference being the bombs were ours. But the children looked just the same. This can be an ugly world, Miss Hanson; please don’t add to the negativity with insensitive remarks.”

Tom glanced at the aide. She was flushed with embarrassment, her beauty suddenly diminished.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t worry, the TV cameras won’t pick that up,” the secretary replied, turning towards three news teams.

One was local, SAMAA TV, the other two from the States. There were half a dozen more in the corridor. Apart from the local crew, the teams had drawn lots. There just wasn’t enough room on the ward.

The secretary shook the doctor’s hand, thanking him and praising his work. She waved to the nurses and children, some of whom smiled and waved back, while others just carried on looking vaguely bemused. Tom retained his position, readying himself for the obstacle course that would no doubt occur in the corridors leading to the hospital lobby.

Once that had been overcome, she would shake hands with the security-vetted group and give a short statement to the news hounds. He would call up the tactical support team and usher her inside an SUV fitted with run-flat tyres. The windshields were made of glass-clad polycarbonate, which were both bullet-resistant and prevented glass fragments from showering inward. But the windows were constructed from layers of a laminated material known as one-way bulletproof glass. This prevented rounds from entering the vehicle, while at the same time allowing agents to fire out of it, as the unique combination of absorptive and flexible qualities of the layers responded accordingly. It was as safe a civilian vehicle as science could create.

But it was best practice to have the SUVs close to the exit point, parallel, in fact. In this instance they would block the view for the TV crews and the crowds, and Tom now knew that the secretary’s visit was essentially a PR exercise, despite her sincerity. He told himself it would be fine.

That done, he would breathe easily for a second or two before the whole routine would begin again.

This, at least, was his plan.