Redemption Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One: Liberation

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Part Two: Deception

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Part Three: Confrontation

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Part Four: Resurrection

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Ryan Drake is a man who finds people who don’t want to be found. Once a soldier in the British Army, he now works for the CIA as a ‘shepherd’ – an elite investigation team that finds and brings home missing agents. But his latest mission – to free a prisoner codenamed Maras from a maximum security prison and bring her back to US soil within forty-eight hours – is more dangerous than anything he and his team have attempted before.

  Despite the risks, the team successfully completes their mission, but for Drake the real danger has only just begun. Faced with a terrible threat, he is forced to go on the run with Maras – a veteran agent scarred by years of brutal imprisonment.

  Hunted by his former comrades and those willing to do anything to protect a deadly secret, Drake is left with no choice but to trust a dangerous woman he barely knows. For he has only one chance to save those he loves and time is running out…

  About the Author

  While studying for a degree in IT, Will Jordan worked a number of part time jobs, one of which was as an extra in television and feature films. Cast as a World War Two soldier, he was put through military bootcamp and taught to handle and fire weapons in preparation for the role. The experience piqued his interest in military history, and encouraged him to learn more about conflicts past and present. Having always enjoyed writing, he used this research as the basis for his first thriller, supplementing it with visits to weapon ranges in America and eastern Europe to gain first-hand knowledge of modern weaponry. He lives in Fife with his wife and son, and is currently writing the second novel in the Ryan Drake series.

  Redemption

  WILL JORDAN

  For Bill; a father and a friend.

  Prologue

  Iraq, 13 May 2007

  This is how it ends.

  Lying there with one hand loosely pressed against the bullet wound in his stomach, he was alone. His strength was exhausted, his reserves gone, his blood staining the dusty ground. A trail of it led a short distance away, mute testimony to the desperate, feeble crawl he had managed before his vision swam and he collapsed.

  He could go no further. There was nothing left to do but lie here and wait for the end.

  A faint breeze sighed past him, stirring the warm evening air and depositing tiny particles of wind-blown sand across his arms and chest. How long would it take to cover his body when he died? Would he ever be found?

  Staring at the vast azure sky stretching out into infinity above him, he found his eyes drawn to the contrail of some high-flying aircraft, straight as an arrow. Around him, the sun’s last light reflected off the desert dunes, setting them ablaze with colour.

  It was a good place to die.

  Men like him were destined never to see old age, or to die peacefully in their sleep surrounded by family. They had chosen a different life, and there would be no reward for them.

  You know your problem, Ryan? You’re a good man.

  Had she been right?

  Could he look back on his life honestly and say he’d been a good man? He had made mistakes, done things he wished he could undo, and yet his final act had been one of trust and compassion.

  That was the reason he was lying here, bleeding to death. That was his final reward.

  A low, rhythmic thumping was drowning out the sigh of the wind. The pounding of his heartbeat in his ears, slowly fading as his lifeblood flowed out between his fingers. He might have slowed the bleeding, but he couldn’t stop it. Nothing could.

  He was dying.

  You know your problem, Ryan? You’re a good man.

  However he had lived, he knew in that moment that he would die as a good man. And that had to count for something.

  A faint smiled touched his face as the thudding grew louder. He closed his eyes, surrendering to the growing darkness that filled the world around him.

  Part One

  Liberation

  Confront them with annihilation, and they will then survive; plunge them into a deadly situation, and they will then live. When people fall into danger, they are then able to strive for victory.

  Sun Tzu’s The Art of War

  Chapter 1

  Seven days earlier, Mosul, Iraq

  ‘COME ON! GET out of the way!’ Nassar Alawi growled, honking his horn in frustration.

  His efforts did nothing to hurry along the rusty, dilapidated white saloon in front of him, its rattling exhaust spewing grey exhaust fumes as the driver revved the engine. Like Alawi, he was trying in vain to fight through the narrow streets and thronging crowds.

  They were approaching one of the many open-air markets that dotted the city, and traffic was always heavy there. Ancient stone buildings festooned with satellite dishes and drying laundry leaned precariously inward as if they might collapse at any moment.

  Alawi leaned back in his seat and ran his forearm across his brow. He was hot and uncomfortable, his open shirt already damp with sweat. The van’s air conditioner hadn’t worked in years, and rolling down the windows meant allowing in the relentless wind-blown sand, the fumes of other cars struggling to run on cheap gasoline, the reek of animal shit and countless other unsavoury odours.

  He was a builder and electrician by trade; a source of great pride for both him and his family most of his adult life. A skilled job, a trade to be proud of. Now there was even greater demand for his serv
ices, both in Mosul and many of the surrounding towns. Everything that had been bombed and destroyed in the chaos of the invasion had to be painstakingly rebuilt.

  A man like him could make a fortune in just a few years. Enough to provide for his wife and for his two young sons until they became men and followed in his footsteps, enough to live in comfort, enough to escape the grinding poverty that his peers endured.

  If only he could get where he needed to be!

  He honked his horn again, and at last a gap began to open up. The beaten-up white saloon started to trundle forwards, exhaust rattling. He stepped on the accelerator as well, eager to keep their momentum going.

  Relieved to be on the move again, he reached for the packet of cigarettes lying on the passenger seat, tapped one out and held it to his lips as he fished his lighter out of his pocket.

  Maybe today wouldn’t be so bad after all, he thought as he clicked the lighter.

  The sudden flash of light up ahead was so unexpected that he didn’t even have time to react to it. The cigarette fell from his mouth as the white car in front disappeared, consumed along with everything else by an expanding wall of orange flame that rushed forward to meet him.

  Central Intelligence Agency Field Ops Centre, Baghdad, Iraq

  ‘This had better be good,’ operations chief Steven Kaminsky grumbled as he strode from his office, doing his best to ignore the painful twinge in the small of his back. A compressed disc from a high-school football injury, the pain came and went, though in recent years it seemed to be coming more frequently and with greater intensity.

  All things considered, today was a bad day, and judging by the urgent summons that had just come through to his desk, it wasn’t likely to get better.

  With computer terminals crammed into virtually every available one of its 5,000 square feet of floor space, the Pit, as it was known, was reminiscent of NASA’s mission control centre. The comparison was an appropriate one, because in many ways it served a similar function. The computers in this room allowed their operators to control a fleet of twenty unmanned Predator drones deployed throughout the country.

  The place was bustling with activity, and judging by the concerned looks and urgent tones, the news was not good.

  ‘Somebody talk to me!’

  He was joined within moments by Pete Faulkner, the floor officer, and the man responsible for the day-to-day running of the twenty control suites in the Pit. Faulkner was only in his forties, but with his overhanging beer gut, perpetually furrowed brow and thinning grey hair, he looked at least ten years older. He was always tired, always out of breath, always sweating.

  ‘We’ve got a problem,’ he said, wasting no time on preliminaries.

  Kaminsky made a face. ‘So I heard. What’s going on?’

  Faulkner gestured over to terminal 6, where most of the anxious-looking technicians were gathered. The flat-screen monitors that should have been transmitting feeds from the Predator’s on-board cameras and instrumentation were blank, as though there was nothing going on.

  ‘Three minutes ago we lost contact with one of our drones over Mosul,’ he explained as they strode over. ‘Data feeds, telemetry, the works.’

  Kaminsky frowned. ‘Has it been shot down?’

  Faulkner shook his head. ‘It was orbiting at ten thousand feet. The only thing that could shoot it down from that altitude is a surface-to-air missile, and we had no threat warnings before we lost contact.’

  ‘Equipment failure?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Faulkner admitted. ‘But unlikely. Unless it was a catastrophic engine failure, we’d have seen some sign before we lost the feeds. Make a hole here, gentlemen!’

  The junior technicians clustered around the terminal parted like the Red Sea, giving them a clear path to a young man working over one of the few remaining monitors still up and running.

  Terminal 6 and its associated drone were his responsibility. He knew he had done nothing wrong, but if something happened to the multi-million-dollar aircraft, the blame would fall on his head first.

  ‘Anything, Hastings?’ Kaminsky asked.

  Hastings shook his head without looking up from the screen. ‘I can’t find anything wrong, sir. Engines, instrumentation, on board computers … everything was good right up until we lost contact. It’s like it just … vanished.’

  ‘So if it’s still in the air, it’s flying without direct control.’ Kaminsky glanced at Faulkner. ‘Contact air traffic control. Find out if it’s still airborne.’

  Shit, I hope it’s not over a populated area, he thought. The drone might have been an unmanned aircraft, but it was still an aircraft with engines and on-board reserves of fuel, not to mention any munitions it might have been carrying. Plenty of things to go boom if it crashed in the middle of a town.

  ‘If it loses incoming control, it’ll revert to its automated flight programme,’ Faulkner assured him.

  That wasn’t much comfort.

  ‘Maybe it’s a problem at our end?’ Kaminsky suggested.

  ‘The other drones are fine. If it was a problem with our uplink, we’d have lost control of everything.’

  Kaminsky opened his mouth to reply, but before he could say anything, the monitors around him suddenly flickered back into life as the data feeds resumed, telemetry readings once again reporting the status of an aircraft hundreds of miles away.

  Faulkner glanced at the technician. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Nothing, sir. It just came back all of a sudden.’

  Cursing under his breath, Kaminsky reached into his pocket and put on a pair of reading glasses, leaning closer to the screens to take a look for himself. Now in his early fifties, he needed glasses more than he cared to admit.

  ‘Get me a full system diagnostic, now,’ he ordered, his eyes darting across the various screens. Altitude, heading, airspeed, engine temperature, fuel pressure … All of it looked fine.

  Such was his concern for the technical status of the aircraft, he almost didn’t notice the feed coming in from the downward-looking nose cameras. Designed for battlefield observation and intelligence gathering, the high-resolution digital cameras could zoom in close enough to pick out individual facial features from 10,000 feet.

  Now, however, they were focused on an urban area of some kind. Characteristic of the ancient cities that dotted Iraq, it was a maze of narrow streets, walled courtyards and old sandstone buildings.

  It was a scene of utter chaos.

  One of the buildings had taken a direct hit, blasting out an entire wall and collapsing part of the roof. Smoke and flames billowed from the ruined structure, rescue crews and fire fighters trying to fight their way through the destruction and search for survivors. And everywhere, scattered on the streets around the building, lay the motionless forms of the dead.

  ‘Sir.’

  Tearing his eyes away, Kaminsky looked at Hastings. The young man was pale, a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead. He looked as if he was about to be sick.

  ‘What is it?’

  Hastings swallowed hard. ‘All three Hellfire missiles have been deployed.’

  Shock and disbelief were reflected in the eyes of every person in the room. Nobody uttered a word.

  With slow, deliberate care, Kaminsky removed his reading glasses and turned to his subordinate. ‘Pete, better call Langley right now.’

  Chapter 2

  Washington DC, 7 May 2007

  IT WAS A damp, cool Sunday morning in the capital, with a low fog lingering over the muddy waters of the Potomac. Summer days in Maryland were hot and humid, but the mornings often started out chill and misty.

  A lone jogger shuffled along beneath the dripping leaves, following a muddy track that wound through Anacostia Park. To a casual observer he would have seemed perfectly unremarkable: mid-thirties, medium build, standing an inch or so above 6 foot. His short dark hair was damp with sweat, his face downturned, his eyes on the ground ahead.

  Just another anonymous bureaucrat, just another DC of
fice worker trying to stave off the beer gut and high blood pressure. The sort of man one might pass in the street and forget within moments.

  But for those who cared to look beyond the obvious, a different picture emerged. Though tired, he moved with sure, confident strides, maintaining a steady ground-covering pace that would be familiar to soldiers the world over.

  And those eyes, which seemed loosely fixed on the muddy ground ahead, would often flick left and right, quickly taking in his surroundings, maintaining constant awareness of his situation.

  Those who knew what to look for would see he was no office worker.

  Trying to ignore the burning in his lungs and the ache in his legs, Ryan Drake glanced at his watch, noting the time and comparing it with the familiar landmarks around him. He’d jogged this route so many times that he knew exactly where he should be at any given time, and he wasn’t there today.

  He was falling behind.

  ‘Shit,’ he said under his breath, pushing his body to even greater efforts to try to make up for lost time. He didn’t care about the fatigue that clawed at him, didn’t care about the thumping of his heart or the burning in his muscles. None of that mattered. He plodded on with single-minded determination.

  He’d read somewhere that running was supposed to release endorphins and other feel-good chemicals in the brain. That had yet to happen for him, though. Maybe his brain wasn’t wired that way.

  In any case, the usual result of his morning forays was that he came home exhausted, sweaty and often soaked by a sudden rain shower. The damp climate in DC almost made his childhood home in England seem tropical by comparison.

  Leaving the quiet parkland behind, his route took him straight down Maryland Avenue towards the towering dome of the US Capitol building. Almost all of the roads in DC converged on this one structure, like the spokes of a gigantic wheel. As long as you could see it, it was almost impossible to get lost in the city.

  At 5.30 on a Sunday morning there wasn’t much traffic on the streets; just delivery trucks out making the rounds and a few poor souls heading to work in some office or government ministry. Most were bleary eyed and clutching cups of coffee as though their lives depended on it.

  He sympathised.