Free State of Honour by Gary Haynes Page A

shoulder holster and weighing it in his hand. “Now that barrel alone is five inches, but it’s a .45 ACP and is fitted with these here low-profile night-sights,” he went on, fingering the back of the gun where the sights were mounted in rounded dovetails. “And it’s only a four-pound trigger pull. I got it in 10mm, too, and that’ll take a man’s head clean off.”
    “A good piece,” Tom said. “But mine allows an easy draw.”
    “You wanna hold it?”
    “I’m fine.”
    “Suit yourself,” Crane said, holstering it. He took out a slim cigar from his jacket pocket, lit it with a gold lighter. “You smoke, Tom?”
    Tom shook his head. He looked at Crane. He took a long pull on the cigar before puffing little smoke rings out of the open window. He was a strange kind of guy.

16.
    Twenty minutes later, Tom was feeling frustrated that nothing positive seemed to be happening. He found himself at another intelligence briefing in another secure conference room, although the security had been ratcheted up several notches. He’d had to show a laminated badge to a Marine outside the shockproof door, who’d checked his name off on a clipboard list, and had noticed that the plaster had been replaced by lead-lined walls to eradicate the threat from electronic listening devices.
    Crane and Deputy Director Houseman were present, together with half a dozen CIA analysts, a couple of high-ranking US Army officers, and a lieutenant in the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, or Delta Force, called Mark Sawyer. He was a troop commander in B Squadron, a six-foot blond with a boyish nose and neat little ears, eyes the colour of cornflower.
    B Squadron contained seventy-five operators split into three troops, which were in turn made up of teams of five. It was stationed at Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina. The Delta Force squadrons, together with SEAL Team 6, made up the direct action and reconnaissance element of the tier-one Special Missions Unit of the US Armed Forces. Sawyer’s troop was on standby on the off chance something happened in the next day or two. They’d been training Afghan Special Forces as part of the US commitment to assisting the country’s security services following the official withdrawal, which Tom felt was the only piece of good luck that had happened so far.
    Like the façade, the interior of the Ariana wasn’t exactly five star, but it had modern facilities and was clean. Apart from the flat-screens and the ubiquitous blue tiles, the basement conference room had a large moulded-plastic table and chairs. It was lit by fluorescent strips, which had added a clinical aspect to what had started as a frosty meeting. Tom knew it was the way when different departments with ultimately competing budgets had to get something done together, the continuing US debt crisis just making that dynamic more acute. But gradually everyone put aside their differences and concentrated on the clear-cut task of getting the secretary home safely, although they had nothing material to go on as yet.
    After they had decided that gathering intel from Pakistani assets and sources was their best bet, the door opened and a young Special Forces officer with red hair came into the room without knocking, his face flush with excitement.
    “You better have a real interesting thing to say, captain,” a broken-nosed colonel said.
    “I’m sorry, sir. But we’ve located Lyric,” he said, his arms barely able to refrain from punching the air.
    “The GPS,” the colonel said, excitedly.
    Everyone in the room now knew what Tom had always known. Apart from the tracking devices hidden in her specially made jewellery – her necklace and ring – she’d agreed to have one implanted under the skin of her upper left arm. But due to its sensitive location, it wasn’t large or sophisticated enough to prevent jamming.
    “Yeah, our techs designed them,” Crane said, preferring to lean against the beige wall rather than sit at