Page 246 of The Black Trilogy

The driver of the decrepit taxi hunched over the wheel, listening to crackly pop songs the whole way to Homs. Occasionally he sang too. I should have brought those earplugs from Black’s along.

“Home, sweet home,” Logan muttered as the car pulled up outside the dilapidated apartment sourced by the local CIA station chief.

I wafted exhaust smoke away as I pulled my kit out of the trunk. “This is luxury. It’s got a roof and everything.”

Plus two lumpy mattresses, a hotplate I wouldn’t have dared to turn on even if the electricity worked, and a whole variety of insects. If it flew, climbed, crawled, or scuttled, there was a specimen. An entomologist’s dream.

“Look on the bright side,” Logan said. “If we get hungry, we can fry them on the windowsill.”

No, there was no air conditioning either.

We dumped the bags inside, careful to keep anything valuable with us. The rusty padlock on the door wouldn’t keep anyone out. The sun beat down on us as we stepped into a war zone just feet from the front door. No matter how many denials the government issued, there was no mistaking the reality.

A tiny child ran up to me, hand out. I placed a few of the livres syrienne I’d brought for the purpose in his palm, which only attracted more kids. I hated places like this. The West could donate pound after pound, dollar after dollar, but aid seldom got to where it was needed most. Handing out notes on a street corner made me feel better for an all-too-brief moment, but it was like trying to stop a leaking reservoir with my thumb. Pockets empty, I backed away with the mission on my mind. Helping to cut the legs off the so-called-leaders who’d brought this country to its knees was the biggest way I could make a difference.

Those youngsters might have tugged at my heartstrings, but the older ones got to me more. A twelve-year-old boy walked past with an AK-47 slung over his chest, pausing to look at me with dead eyes. Just one of thousands who’d lost their humanity.

Time to go to work, Emmy.

The base we were investigating lay four kilometres outside town. When we set out at dusk a couple of days after we arrived, I’d changed into a loose-fitting abaya, complete with veil and gloves. Logan walked alongside me, acting as my mahram, the male guardian who accompanied many ladies in the area. Our first two trips out there had been uneventful, preliminary excursions to see the lie of the land.

Tonight, we hunkered down at the boundary as we prepared to test their security. We’d seen roving patrols walking the fence line, but what else did they have?

As midnight passed, I threw a handful of stones at the chain-link fence then stuck my fingers in my ears as a siren wailed. A jeep pulled up and five guards leapt out, guns drawn. They spent several frantic minutes running up and down the fence line before their movements slowed.

“Lashai,” the leader muttered. Nothing.

The group piled back into the vehicle again and took off back to the cluster of buildings in the distance. Reality TV and coffee beckoned, no doubt. Lucky people. My mouth watered at the thought of the latter.

The second time the alarm sounded, they rushed out again, still alert, but they didn’t look around quite so hard. The third and fourth times, they left their weapons in the jeep, and I heard their muttered curses from my hiding place behind an abandoned car. That was the last we saw of them, and the eighth time I threw the stones, the alarm remained silent. Obviously, they’d come to the conclusion the system had malfunctioned and shut it off.

Perfect.

I beckoned Logan forward from the derelict building thirty feet behind me, and together we hopped over the fence. Sticking close, we crept towards the main part of the base. Only my eyes showed from under my niqab, my freshly dyed black hair hidden away. Dressed as I was, I blended into the background, almost invisible. I could have been the cook, the cleaner, the shadow you weren’t quite sure existed.

As well as being deadly in all the right ways, Logan easily passed for native. A few days in the sun gave him a tan to make an Essex girl jealous, and he’d spent enough time in Syria to adopt the colloquial Arabic spoken by the locals. We’d liberated his Syrian military uniform from an unlocked car two days ago, and I’d traded food in return for his machine gun with a little girl who couldn’t have been more than ten. The AK-47 wasn’t in the best nick, but it still worked—we’d taken it for a quick test run in the desert. Nobody around here batted an eyelid at the noise anymore. Gunfire was engrained in daily life.

Keeping alert for signs of the enemy, we combed through the base, slowly and carefully, a section each night. When we got back to the apartment, we’d use our satellite phone to send the photos we took back home, hundreds of them. That base housed a lot of interesting stuff.

The fence alarm was still down on the fifth night. Clearly, maintenance crews had been on the list of government cuts. We snuck past the buildings we’d already checked, along a dusty track, and stumbled across the underground weapons facility. Quite literally. I almost tripped over the emergency exit, a trap door set in concrete alongside a ramshackle warehouse.

“Good going,” Logan whispered once we’d shimmed the padlock and opened the hatch. “Do you want to go first, or shall I?”

“I’ll go.”

Lead from the front, that’s what Black taught me.

The extra guards didn’t present us with too much of a problem, but the sprawling maze of tunnels meant we didn’t find Jed and Phillip until our seventh night of trying. I’d nearly given up by then, convinced they must be dead, their bodies either buried or left in the desert for the birds to pick at.

Which might have been the better option. When we found them, I almost wished we hadn’t.

The two dingy cells, each no more than ten feet square, festered at the end of a darkened passage far away from the main storage area. Probably so the soldiers wouldn’t be disturbed by the prisoners’ screams.

I opened one door, and Logan took the other.

I got Phillip. And the only reason I knew I got Phillip was because when Jed limped into the room, his arm over Logan’s shoulder, he slumped forward and choked out a string of profanities.

Words weren’t enough. Words would never be enough.

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