Matthew Dunn - Slingshot

He placed kindling, coal, and a log in the fireplace, and after lighting the fuel he rubbed his cold hands close to the flames, then entered the kitchen and emptied the contents of the bag onto a tiny breakfast table. A pheasant, bacon lardons, sprigs of sage, celery, shallots, and hedgehog mushrooms, all purchased at Borough Market. He expertly deboned and panfried the meat, chopped and sauteed the vegetables, then transferred the food to a casserole pot, added cream and calvados, and put the dish into the oven.

The food was more than he needed, but that didn’t matter. What mattered to Will was that he was trying to make his life different.

Alistair was right. As an adult, Will had always been alone-during his five years as a special operator within the French Foreign Legion’s elite Groupement des Commandos Parachutistes, in which time he’d been frequently requisitioned by the DGSE for black operations; during his undergraduate degree at Cambridge University; during the brutal twelve-month MI6 Spartan Program, and during the subsequent eight years of near-constant deployment as an intelligence officer within the Spartan Section. He had no woman in his life and, for the most part, his encounters with women had always been brief because he was constantly terrified that his work would endanger them. Three women who had meant something to him had proven his fear correct, because they had been killed. One of them was his mother; two of them were women he believed he could have married. Friendships also eluded him, because he felt dislocated from the normal world and didn’t know how to act with ordinary people. Roger Koenig was the only person who came close to being a friend, but even he was more a brother-in-arms.

Will wasn’t stupid. On the contrary, he was highly intelligent and knew that his isolated existence was a result of the work that he did and the man that he’d become. A man who hated seeing innocents in danger, a man who had spent his entire adult life sacrificing himself to protect others, a man whose humanity had somehow remained completely intact yet was hidden beneath a battered, armored shell.

However, despite his fear of the potential consequences, he still fantasized about finding someone he could love and who could make him smile.

But he doubted that could happen. Not anymore. So he’d made a decision to change what he did have some control over. A new home filled with things that he’d collected over the years but had never displayed, cooking a good meal, listening to music he loved, doing anything to take his mind off the one thing he hated.

The loneliness.

He ran a bath, stripped out of his clothes, poured the remainder of the calvados into a tumbler, and eased his muscular and scarred body into the hot water. Taking a sip of the liquor, he closed his eyes.

Segovia’s music was easily audible in the bathroom, but it no longer registered with Will.

What did register was that brave men had died in Gdansk because he had failed.

All of the Spartan Section was present in the large, damp basement of a residential house in Vienna’s old town. The Austrian safe house was officially the property of MI6, though there were no records of it in any of the service’s files. Its rent was paid for in cash out of Alistair’s budget and only the section knew of its existence.

During the daytime, the area around the property would draw tourists wishing to walk along the narrow cobbled streets and through the hidden courtyards to see the Gothic architecture of Saint Stephen’s Cathedral, the imposing Hofburg Palace, and the stables for the renowned Lipizzaner stallions; to buy confectionery, watches, perfumes, and tobacco in the Kohlmarkt; to watch pleasure cruisers and cargo boats sail along the Danube, and to stand in Heroes Square and be told by guides that this is where Adolf Hitler announced that Austria would be annexed to Nazi Germany.

But there were no tourists around the safe house now. It was 2:00 A.M., minus eight degrees Celsius, the ground thick with snow, with more of it pouring out of the sky.

The poorly lit basement gained extra light from a couple of oil lamps and a camping stove that was busy brewing a pot of coffee. Will Cochrane was leaning against the rear corner of the room, his arms folded. Beside him was the section, listening to Alistair and Patrick. The coheads were talking fast. Will was not listening to them. He was studying the team.

Roger Koenig. The CIA SOG team leader of the section’s paramilitary unit. He’d worked with Will on two missions and had proven to be an excellent operator and leader. The former DEVGRU SEAL’s tall and sinewy frame was motionless, his face totally focused, his professionalism evident in his posture. Roger’s forefathers had all been warriors: a grandfather who’d earned the Iron Cross as a paratrooper in Germany’s elite First Fallschirmjager Division during World War II, and a father and uncles who’d served in Vietnam with the Australian SAS and the top-secret U.S. MACV-SOG. Roger had killed hundreds of men and had done none of it for God or country. He believed in duty to the man by your side. But he was also an occasional languages teacher at his children’s school, liked to think of himself as a gardener even though he was lousy at it, was devoted to his wife, a silly and fabulous father, and had a mischievous streak. Will could see that the family man’s eyes were twinkling and he wondered what Roger was secretly thinking as he listened to the senior CIA and MI6 officers give their briefing.

Laith Dia. The other CIA SOG officer. The black man sat on the floor, leaning against a wall, smoking a cigarette, and looked totally disinterested, though Will knew that he would be digesting every word spoken and would be thinking very fast. Laith was the size of a high school quarterback, though Will preferred to think of him as the ideal lead for Shakespeare’s Othello . Which was not wholly inappropriate, because Laith had never played football and instead had excelled in school plays. He had been alongside Roger and Will during their last two missions and had suffered agonizing injuries during both. The jet-haired former Delta Force operative was divorced and had two children whom he adored, was one of the fittest men Will had ever met despite smoking two packs a day, was fearless, smart, irreverent, gentle, and a very effective killer.

Mark Oates and Adam Tark were here. The men were no longer part of the Qs, having signed the papers and been officially transferred to the section.

Mark was sitting with one leg resting on the other, flexing his fingers. No doubt he’d been to hundreds of briefings given by senior intelligence and Special Forces commanders, though Will wondered if he’d ever been briefed in a place like this. Will had read his file. Mark had served all over the world with the SBS, typically deep behind enemy lines, in most covert and overt theaters of war that had involved the West during his service in Special Forces. His time in the Qs had given him enhanced training in espionage tradecraft, including surveillance and business cover deployments, and he had achieved several notable citations for the complex and highly risky operations he’d led and supported. He was a widower, his wife having died of pneumonia a year ago, and saved every spare penny from his government salary to send his two daughters through university.

Adam was leaning forward, one hand gripping his mug of black coffee, the other rubbing his disfigured face. Will had read in the files that Adam had received the injury in Afghanistan while protecting a village from a Taliban attack. The village’s men were all away, helping a U.S. Marine unit do a reconnaissance in the mountains, and the only people left to protect the women, children, and elders in the settlement were five inexperienced young marines. Adam and three other SAS men were four miles away when the attack on the village commenced. The SAS patrol was itself engaged in a fierce firefight with another Taliban group, but when they received news of the attack on the village, Adam broke away, ran on foot to the village, took command of the marines, told the women to fetch them any remaining rifles, lined the weapons up along a waist-high wall on the roof of the biggest building in the village, and told the marines that they had to make the Taliban think they were facing one hundred men. For two hours, Adam sprinted back and forth along the wall, picking up rifles and firing them before moving to a new position and repeating the same drill. He carried on doing this even after a mortar shell exploded near him and ripped half his face off. It was only after the Taliban were defeated that he collapsed and had to receive emergency treatment from the marines.