TWENTY FIVE
Sometime later, Archer blinked his eyes open and instantly winced.
His head hurt.
He was in a dark room somewhere. Alone.
It was almost pitch black, but a chink of light creeping under the door allowed him some visibility.
He blinked, looking round, trying to clear his head and figure out what had happened. And where he was.
Am I still in the interrogation room?
Looking down, he saw in the dim light that he was still in his dark blue overalls and white t-shirt.
He tried to move, but realised his feet had been duct taped to the chair.
And his hands were similarly bound behind his back.
Moments later, he heard footsteps outside the door and then a key jangle as it slid into the lock.
Then he remembered what had happened back at the station.
The door was pushed open and a man stepped into the room, Archer squinting from the sudden light. When his eyes adjusted, he looked past the man into the room beyond, but couldn't see anyone else out there. The man shut the door, and the room was dark again.
They were alone.
'You're awake,' the man said, same kind of accent as the man called Wulf. 'Good.'
Archer had re-gathered his senses and started thinking fast, assessing his situation. The binds around his hands and feet were tight. He was all alone.
He was in seriously deep shit.
'Do you know who we are?' the man asked, just a voice in the darkness, his accent rolling the r of are.
Pause.
'Yes.'
'Good. That will save me some time.'
The man flicked a switch on the wall and a light bulb above Archer flickered on. He blinked from the sudden light, then looked across the room.
He saw the dark, hard-faced man from King's apartment building, the one he had bumped shoulders with.
The man read the look of recognition across Archer's face and smiled.
'Remember me?'
Archer didn't respond, but glanced down at the man's hands instead.
He was grasping something in his right fist.
A long, wickedly-sharp knife, the edge of the blade serrated.
'Here's how this will work,' the man said. 'I'm going to ask you a question. I'll only ask you this one time. But if you don't answer it, I will hurt you. I will inflict pain like you have never experienced. Before long you will be begging me to kill you. And I promise you, you'll tell me everything I want to know. Do you understand?'
Arched didn't respond. In the harsh light, he saw the man's mouth crease into a smile.
'I also suggest you start giving me some answers before the rest of my team returns,' he continued. 'Luckily for you, they've gone to pick up our last man from the airport and then kill Corporal Fletcher. But they will be back soon. And for your sake, you don't want to still be holding information from me when they return.'
Archer stared up at the man.
'Here is my question, ' the man said. 'Tim Cobb and his family were not at your police station, or at his home. Where is he?'
Archer looked up at him.
He said nothing.
'Do you remember what I just told you?' the man said.
Archer didn't react.
The man stepped forward.
'Typical. This normally happens. Men like you start out tough. They end up like children, soon enough.' The man walked forward, then stopped, putting his hands on his knees, his harsh face inches from Archer's. 'Look at you. You are quite something. You’re a handsome man. But too pretty to be a soldier.'
The man leaned forward closer, looking into Archer's eyes, his dark hair slicked back, his nose like a beak over his stubbled sneer.
'As you can tell, I was never attractive. Women never lusted after me. But I guess they all like you. You must be - what’s the saying- beating them off with a stick. That makes me jealous. So I'm going to make you as ugly as me. I'm going to take that face of yours and cut it off.'
The man reached forward and grabbed Archer's chin, who bucked and twisted away.
'Hold still,' the man said.
He grabbed the knife and pulled back Archer's hair and started to cut from the centre of his brow across the top of his hairline, a long jagged cut to the right. Archer roared in pain as he felt the blade slice into his skin, cutting across the top of his hairline. The soldier had a strong grip and Archer tried moving, but he felt the knife cutting open his head, unable to move, tied to the chair. Eventually he managed to twist himself out of the man's grip, his head burning. Blood poured down his face, into his eye, and started leaking to the floor, his head and face feeling like it was on fire, the red staining his white t-shirt and navy blue overalls.
The man with the knife stepped back, looking at his helpless captive.
'That's a start,' he said. 'I feel better already. But I'm not going to do it all at once. I'm going to take it a piece at a time until you tell me where Cobb is. And if you don't tell me, I'm going to cut your entire face off.'
Archer looked up at him, blood pouring down his face, blind from the blood in one eye. Some of it had gathered in his mouth and he spat at the beak-nosed man with the knife.
The guy didn't react.
'Oh, I forgot to tell you,' he said. 'You're not the only person from your station here. There is a woman next door waiting for me. She is beautiful. Dark hair, dark eyes. I'm going to go talk to her. Or I might just skip the talking and do something else with her. These walls are thin. You’ll be able to hear. But I'll be back soon.'
He paused. Archer blinked, feeling the hot sting of blood running down the side of his face and his neck. He could feel the cut on the top of his forehead, and it burned and throbbed intensely as blood flowed from the jagged wound.
'You know, I lost my girlfriend and my son that night. Both of them were in the first hut the two sons of bitches attacked. They were the first ones to be killed.’
He paused.
‘Do you have a wife, or a girlfriend? A woman you care for?'
Archer looked at the ground, blood pouring into his eyes and dripping onto his lap. Hard as he tried to ignore the man, an image of Katic flickered into his mind, like a television screen with bad reception catching a signal.
He saw her dark hair and brown eyes, smiling at him.
She looked beautiful.
'I want you to think of her,' the man said. 'And know that you're never going to see her again. That's a promise from me. Because I just changed my mind. When I come back, I'm going to take your eyes out. And after the woman next door tells me where Cobb is, I'm going to cut your throat, from ear to ear. Then we'll see if you are still so pretty, you piece of shit.'
The man spat at Archer, then turned and walked towards the door, switching off the light.
Archer was left all alone in the dark, blood dripping down his face and soaking his t-shirt, half-blinded.
Tied up and alone.
'Where the hell are they?' Chalky shouted to the re-gathered team in the ops room back on the second floor of the ARU’s headquarters. 'They'll kill them!'
Most of the squad had gathered up there, but without Archer, Cobb and Nikki. They were three of the core members and the room felt empty. Unused to combat situations, the remaining members of the tech team were still shell-shocked and traumatised. They were used to the safe and secure confines of the building, but the headquarters had already been attacked twice in one day. With the captive gone, as well as Archer and Nikki taken hostage, the mood in the room was dark. They were running on emergency power and the lights were still dimmed. In the low light and in Cobb's absence, Chalky was desperately trying to get the team going and thinking straight.
'C'mon! Someone think of something,' Chalky shouted.
He turned to the members of the tech team, all of them sitting in their chairs.
'Do you have access to traffic cameras?'
'Of course,' one of them said.
'Then find the white van that left here and tail it. We need to know where they took them. Do it now! If we wait, Archer and Nikki will die!'
The tech team turned and started tapping away on their computers, glad for something to do to help. Fox and Porter stood there in silence, both of them still covered in Jackson's blood, as Chalky paced back and forth. His normally jovial demeanour was gone, his face hard and his brow furrowed with anxiety. He’d seen the kind of men they were dealing with here. He’d heard Wulf’s threats to Archer, watching them through the glass of the viewing room downstairs.
And he knew if they didn't find them soon that Nikki and his best friend would die.
Across the city, in a dark car speeding through south-west London towards Heathrow, the commander of the Panthers thought about the young officer who had tried to interrogate him. He had been telling the boy the truth. Since he could remember, everyone had called him Wulf.
He had been named Ibrahim as a baby, but his nickname had stuck as a child. Nicknames in his squad and in the KLA were common, especially using names of animals due to the time they spent living out on the plains and in the valleys. Sometimes the naming was apt, other times it was because of mannerisms or physical appearance. Bug was named because of the scarring on his face and torso. A Serb phosphorous grenade had gone off right by his ear and had scorched that side of his face to leave scaly burns and webs of scarring. Flea, the best sniper in the KLA, was named because of his disproportionally small head. Worm because of his tall and lanky build and the way he crawled across the ground when out in the field. And Spider because of the tattoos on his body. He had two large black-widows inked on his elbows, the webs spreading all the way up his arms.
Wulf had been born in Albania, but had moved to Kosovo as a four year old boy. It was a humble place to grow up - farming country, tough land and cold weather. He had matured early, forced to fend for himself. He remembered the first time he killed a man. The thief was trying to steal some cattle from his grandparent's farm, in the middle of the night. With no time to alert his grandfather, Wulf had taken his .22 rifle, loaded it and shot the man through the forehead from his bedroom window. By the time he was nineteen, he was an integral part of the Black Panthers, the Special Forces team that carried out the toughest of assignments for the KLA. By the time he was twenty two, he was leading them, Spider his second in command. When the war broke out, he and his team had been ordered by the KLA command to bring the fight to the Serbs, to take back what was theirs. They operated in the Drenica valley, mostly at night, roaming in the darkness and shadows as they hunted the Serbs, often not returning to the main KLA camp for weeks at a time. During the war they had inflicted hundreds of fatalities on the enemy, but Wulf had never lost a single man, something he took immense pride in. The only real casualty had been to Bug when that grenade went off. But he had survived. These were his men, his sons, his brothers. He would die in an instant for them, and he knew they would do the exact same for him.
Before long, the war had started to swing in the KLA’s favour. They had support from NATO and they had hammered the Serbs, pushing them back towards Belgrade. Wulf and his team were a big reason why the KLA offensive was so successful, and word had quickly spread, their legend and reputation growing not only on their side but with the enemy. However, Wulf wasn’t a stupid man. He knew the war wouldn’t last forever, that he and his men couldn’t spend the rest of their lives out there on the plains, hunting down Serbs and being paid close to nothing by the army command. Kosovo was not an area of wealth. There was nothing to steal, and no one to bribe, and as their offensive had started pushing the Serbs back, Wulf had wracked his brains trying to think of a way he could ensure his men were sufficiently compensated for all their efforts in the war.
And one day, in December 1998, he had found it.
Or more correctly, it found him.
He and his team had just returned from four days out in the field, performing hit and run raids on Serb outposts and camps, and Wulf had seen the headlights of a car approaching them on the dust track that led to their makeshift camp. He had raised a bazooka to his shoulder, ready to fire if the vehicle came any closer, but the driver had stopped eighty yards away so as not to draw fire. A man in a white doctor’s coat had stepped out then began walking over to the camp, his hands in the air, making a point that he wasn’t a threat. Seven sub-machine guns and a bazooka pointed at him, the small man had moved into their camp and approached Wulf, asking him to take a walk with him.
He had a proposition for him.
Once the man was frisked and checked for weapons, Wulf had lowered the bazooka and grabbing his Kalashnikov, turned and walked with the small man, dwarfing him as they strolled side-by-side away from the camp and out of earshot.
The doctor began the conversation by explaining who he was. A University graduate who had been fired from his job when the war had started, due to being Albanian. He had retreated into Kosovo and been left broke and out of work. With the war breaking out around him his prospects were bleak. However, he said that being fired from his job was the best thing that could have happened to him. In any country, war changes everyday rules and common practices, he’d said. Nations fall apart and are restructured when conflicts were resolved, like Nazi Germany after the Second World War. But in that period of confusion and lack of structure, there is the potential for significant money to be made. Amongst so much violence and atrocity, the police and the government were distracted. Illegal activity could flourish, like dry earth under a monsoon, soaking up profit and collateral like dry soil sucked up water.
The doctor had explained that the war would be over soon, looking at Wulf through his spectacles. Order would be restored, and the opportunity for illegal earnings would become far more difficult. The doctor was looking to the future, much like Wulf, and told him of a new trade he had just entered into, one that was already earning him fabulous amounts of money.
Organ harvesting.
Smuggling drugs, weapons and women were common practices all over Eastern Europe, the doctor had told him. They had been for years. One could make a handsome living selling any of the three, but the cash return would never be substantial given the increasing competition out there.
But apparently, the rarest of things to be traded were healthy human organs. Hearts, kidneys, livers and lungs, to be exact. Pure, living, pulsing, fleshy gold. Bags of rare blood types were going at thousands of US dollars each, and a full set of healthy human organs were going at close to fifty. The small doctor explained that he was running a trade with smugglers back in Albania. He would supply the organs, iced and packaged, and the smugglers would then traffick the coolers out of the country through the airport in the capital city, Tirana. The boxes would travel as hidden cargo through to the Ataturk International Airport, in Istanbul, Turkey. All the appropriate workers at each airport had been bribed so seizure of the coolers wasn’t an issue, and from Istanbul the organs would then be transported out and shipped across Eastern Europe to the highest bidder.
The amount of money available was crazy, the doctor told him. $45,000 per body, at least, usually more. All that money just for one plastic cooler.
The doctor said that he and the smugglers had been doing this for almost three months, but had recently run into some problems. Namely, supply and demand. The operation couldn’t flow without healthy bodies to harvest. Basically, what he needed from Wulf was to not kill every enemy combatant he and his men engaged out on the plains. The doctor needed hostages, prisoners of war, people who figured they would be held for ransom and returned at a later date after negotiation. In return for the capture and delivery, the doctor said he was willing to give Wulf a ten per cent cut. Four and a half thousand US dollars per captive. Wulf had considered the offer, but like any shrewd businessman, he knew it couldn’t run without his help. They had settled on his cut being twenty five per cent. Over $11,000 per body.
Once they returned to camp, Wulf had gathered up his men, informing them of the proposed deal and asking what they thought. He emphasised how the war wouldn’t last forever, that they needed to think of the future. Given their faith in him as a leader, the whole team had agreed on the plan straight away. He had turned to the doctor and said they had a deal. Once delivery arrangements and locations had been agreed, the two men shook hands and the doctor had got in his car and driven off. Once he was gone, the eight man team sitting around a fire, a discussion began concerning the acquisition of the bodies to be harvested. Spider had then come up with a great idea.
Why try to capture the enemy during a gunfight when you could just kidnap them instead?
The deal with the doctor and the traffickers had started working perfectly. Given that the Panthers were away from the main KLA camp for weeks at a time, no one back at command usually had any idea what they were up to or even where they were. They had gone deep into Serb territory, targeting the rural areas towards Bosnia and a town near the border called Priboj. The late-night covert entry-and-kidnap raids were always followed by a meeting on a dirt road with two smugglers sent by the doctor, both dressed as KLA soldiers. They told the hostages they were being taken to a detainee camp in northern Albania, and from there an exchange and ransom would be arranged with the Serbian government in Belgrade.
However, the captives were taken to a long, secluded house near the border instead. Once they arrived, their hands bound, they were shepherded out of the vehicle and then executed with a single bullet to the head, no one around to hear the gunshot or see the bodies fall. Meanwhile, the doctor was inside the house, preparing for surgery, and hours later a fresh set of organs would be bagged, tagged and iced, already on their way to the airport in Tirana, the body of the host buried on the journey in an unmarked grave that no one would ever find. Sometimes there was also a request for blood, so some of the bodies were drained by the doctor and the blood bagged and sealed. Before long the profits had started to come back to Wulf and his men, and they were handsome to say the least.
The trafficking had continued successfully for months, Wulf becoming wealthier and wealthier as each body was delivered to the doctor and harvested, the money deposited into an offshore bank account. Wulf wasn’t a greedy man and kept his men fully informed about the exact amount of money they were making, promising to divide it up when the war was over, giving each man a foundation from which to buy a home or set up a new life. Through January and most of February, they had snatched and traded a hundred and fifteen of the enemy, mostly men but sometimes women and children, the entire family set. Once his men got a taste for it, they had wanted to keep up the supply of bodies and the cash return and so the rules were loosened slightly. They had been forced a few times to kidnap people from their own side, not something Wulf was proud of, but he had to look at the bigger picture and their futures.
But then everything had changed.
It happened the night the two US marines and the British army soldier had arrived at the camp holding their families in March 1999.
Wulf and his team had just been returning from a late night trade on the road with the two smugglers disguised as KLA. The radio on Spider’s uniform had suddenly started squawking, a guard at the camp where the women and children were based saying that they were under attack by three men, all of them NATO soldiers. Once Spider had raced back to camp and told Wulf, the entire team had piled into their cars and roared across the valley. They’d seen a NATO Humvee up ahead, coming from the camp and on its way along the dirt track. Bug had stepped out and hit it first time with a bazooka, the rocket whooshing through the night and hitting the reinforced metal plate on the side of the truck, smashing it over with a large explosion.
They had moved in and captured the three men inside, binding their hands and feet. Wulf had sent Crow and Grub to the township and the two men had returned devastated, confirming that everyone there had been killed. The squad had then proceeded to stamp, punch and beat the trio of murderers, kicking them in the face and pistol-whipping them. Every member of the squad had wanted to kill all three of them there and then, disembowel and crucify them, leave them nailed to trees with their intestines hanging out. But Wulf had ordered no. He’d said that was too quick a death. He wanted their deaths and pain to last weeks, months.
So he and his men had taken the murderers to their camp and thrown them into one the huts. Then the next night they started on one of them, taking away a piece of him at a time, the man screaming like a girl, the men laughing as they removed his toes one by one, a different one each night. They left them gathered in a pile there on the earth, letting the guy get a good look at the pile every night before they took another one.
But then disaster had struck. The three men had been rescued. Wulf still couldn’t believe it had happened, how it had been done, right under their noses in the night.
Soon after, he and his team were arrested by Serbian police. The chief of security at the Ataturk airport had been tipped off about the smuggling, and had contacted the Serbian police who had ambushed the doctor at the house and Wulf and his men at one of their roadside trades. They had walked right into the trap, and an entire division of armed police sprung on them, taking them completely unawares. The game was up.
They were taken back to Belgrade, imprisoned and put on trial and charged for war-crimes. Ethnic cleansing, kidnap, murder, and organ harvesting. Once the KLA heard about it, they officially expelled them, turning their backs and forgetting all the hard work the Panthers had done for the Army in the war. The Serbian government were similarly outraged by the conspiracy, and were desperate to keep the harvesting a secret from the rest of the world, so the entire squad were sent away for life to Ferri, the darkest, most remote prison in the country, a place that wasn't on any map and that virtually no one knew about. A man didn’t go to Ferri to serve time for his crimes. He went there to die.
Back in the car speeding through London, the thought of the far away prison made him shudder and Wulf brought his attention back to the present, looking out of the window at the road and the area around them. He and three of his men were on their way in two stolen 4x4s to the airport to pick up Flea, who would have just landed from Dulles, Washington DC. Once they had him, they would make a stop at the hospice on the way back, kill Fletcher, then head to the safe-house and see what Worm had got out of the prisoners before executing them both.
Spider was behind the wheel beside Wulf in the lead car, driving fast, just as he had out on the plains all those years ago. They pulled around a roundabout and moved up the ramp towards the Arrivals lane of Heathrow Terminal Five, golden streetlights breaking up the shadows either side of the road. As they pulled around the corner at the top of the ramp, Wulf saw Flea standing there outside the Arrivals hall, waiting, a token bag over his shoulder. Spider drove forward and the vehicle pulled to a momentary halt. Flea walked over and pulled open the door, climbing into the back. The moment he shut the door, Spider put his foot down and the vehicle sped off back into the night.