Chapter Thirty-four

NOT LONG AFTER our eight agents had stepped on to the jetty, the revellers started to arrive in force. It was one party you didn’t want to be late for.

The vast majority of them parked near the bluff and used specially installed ropes and ladders to climb down to the ruins. The chicks had their handbags and cells slung around their necks, skirts hoisted halfway up their asses, doing their best to maintain their grip and dignity. Of course, there was already a guy stationed below with a spotlight, picking out the most sensational underwear for the entertainment of those who had already arrived. Judging by the frequent bursts of wild cheering, a surprising number of women went out clubbing wearing no panties at all.

Every few minutes some young guy would dispense with the slow climb, grab a rope and launch himself into space. I figured that most of the amateur abseilers were smokehounds. In my experience, they were usually the ones too stoned to care much about personal safety. At least half a dozen times I saw them brush the cliff, land hard on the rocks, then high-five each other before firing up another blunt. And they say drugs don’t cause brain damage.

The idea for the Rave at Bodrum – and the huge profits it generated – belonged to a German backpacker. He had washed up in Bodrum and, hearing about the ruins, had driven a scooter out at night to photograph the moon through the Door to Nowhere. Somewhere in his chaotic past, though, he had spent two years studying oceanography in America before dropping out, and he remembered enough to realize that a couple of times a year the ruins would be far less spectacular – a king high tide would submerge most of them.

But that meant there would also be a king low tide and far more of the old city would be revealed. For a start, the wide marble platform would be out of the water. He stared at it and thought: what a great dance floor that would make.

Two months later, after he had examined the tide charts and used a scuba set to dive and check his measurements, he and several buddies parked generator trucks on the bluff, ran cables for a light show down the cliff and moored barges with half-stacks of speakers just offshore. They cut holes through the fence, anchored ladders and ropes to concrete tripods so that the customers could get down and stationed a gorilla at every one to collect the door charge.

People were happy to pay. Where else in the world could you party in the middle of the ocean by starlight, get high surrounded by classic ruins and dance on the grave of twenty thousand people? Partygoers said it was the best dance party they had ever known.

The night I saw it, the annual Bodrum rave was huge and even more extraordinary. By then, there were ten barges with speakers anchored inside an arc of rocks, protected from the swell. On the largest of them, standing on a scaffold platform like the ringmaster at some futuristic circus, was a DJ known far and wide as Chemical Ali. Guys in the rocks used smoke machines to send what looked like a supernatural fog out across the water – the Door to Nowhere appeared to float on a cloud. Only then did they launch the banks of lasers and strobes.

In the middle of this maelstrom, a group of security guys grabbed a steel walkway and ran it out from the base of the cliff to the newly emerged marble platform with its four broken pillars. As the music grew in a crescendo, so loud you could almost touch it, the first of the partygoers, led by a dozen tall fashionistas, crossed the walkway and stepped on to an area nobody had walked on for two thousand years. Or at least not since the previous year’s event.

With the driving music, the towers of lights and lasers, the gyrating silhouettes on the dance floor, the smoke casting a pallor on the ruins and the Door to Nowhere suspended, ethereal and mysterious, above the water, it made it easy to believe that, if the dead were going to rise from the grave, it would be on a night like that.

Well, one of the walking dead did show up – though he didn’t realize it yet. He arrived on one of the scores of huge cruisers, nosing its way through the fog and mooring just outside the arc of barges.

As it bobbed among other mega-yachts, The Division's shooters, spotters and safety men were all at their posts. After alighting from their boat they had sent the decent little cruiser to wait in the darkness offshore, adjusted their earbud headphones and lapel mics and watched the crowd grow in size and confusion. Satisfied nobody had marked them, they melted into the masses, split apart and made their way to their predetermined positions.

The key man was a thirty-four-year-old black guy, one of the funniest and smartest people you could ever hope to meet. Like all of us when we joined the outfit, he had taken another name – in his case he had called himself McKinley Waters, in tribute to ‘Muddy’ Waters, the great Delta bluesman. Anyone who ever saw Mack, as we knew him, play slide guitar and sing ‘Midnight Special’ had to wonder why he was wasting his time in the intelligence business.

Mack was the primary shooter, stationed in a little hollow near the lip of the cliff, his rifle already assembled and hidden in the darkness next to him, swigging from a bottle of Jack that contained iced tea, looking for all the world like some dude getting loaded and waiting for the crowd to clear before he made his way down.

Further along the clifftop, in the shadows under a cluster of stunted trees, was the back-up shooter – a prick by the name of Greenburg, the sort of guy who made no secret he was gonna marry rich. He was hanging out with two others, looking like a group of white buddies trying to decide whether to pay the money and take the drop over the cliff or not. In reality, the other guys were spotters: apart from locating Finlay, their job was to warn the men, whose entire attention would be focused on shooting, if danger approached from somewhere outside their field of vision.

I was on the bluff next to the rented van. By accident, I had the best view and could see all the team at their stations. Hence, I saw the excitement ripple through them when Finlay turned up on time: in another few minutes he would be well and truly going through the Door to Nowhere.

His security team, all ex-KGB guys, emerged on to the recreation deck at the back of the boat and, binoculars raised, scanned the cliff side, the small beach and the dance platform.

Only when they gave the all-clear did anyone appear from inside: it was a group of young women, dressed to kill in Chanel and Gucci. They waited on deck while a speedboat was launched to deposit them directly on the dance floor.

I saw Mack put his bottle of Jack down and slide his hand into the darkness. I knew that he was expecting Finlay to emerge to kiss his four companions goodbye and he was going to be ready. The two spotters, worried about an advancing cloud of smoke, wandered away from Greenburg to make sure that they had a clear view. A safety guy came through the car park and headed towards the fence, ready to take everybody’s back. I heard, through my earpiece, our three guys partying down by the water – a third shooter, another safety guy and a guy riding shotgun in case it got into a firefight with Finlay’s goons – talking to Control. He was out on the boat that had delivered the team, getting an update from everybody except me. We all sensed that we were on the launch pad, ready to shoot.

The thing that none of us knew was that a group of men on another boat, its running lights out, were also taking a keen interest in everything that was happening on shore. Masked by the eddies of smoke and the looming bulk of the big cruisers, their modest boat was, to all practical purposes, invisible. And yet the men on board had a stunningly good view: they were all equipped with military-grade night-vision goggles.

The glasses had been supplied by Finlay’s head of security, who didn’t think the Bodrum trip was any way to run a railroad. To improve protection he had enlisted a group of hard men – freelancers, but among the best in the business – to travel independently to Bodrum. They were briefed by phone, a container of equipment was waiting for them when they arrived and they cooled their heels for two days before being told to get on board a boat he had organized. It was that boat which was anchored just offshore.

In the darkness, the freelancers saw Finlay emerge from the bulletproof glass of the sitting room and approach the young women. We saw him from the cliff side too. Mack let the target take two steps – just to make sure the goons next to him couldn’t haul him back inside in time if a second bullet was needed. He had his finger on the trigger when the spotter nearest to him called a warning.

Another cloud of smoke was about to obscure his aim. Greenburg had seen it too and got to one knee, getting ready in case he had to take the shot. But Mack glanced at the cloud, figured he had time, aimed fast and fired. Nobody even marked the sharp crack of the discharge, thanks to the pounding music. The bullet hit Finlay but it was hurried and what had been intended to punch a large hole in his forehead and shatter his brain had hit him lower.

He fell to the deck with a chunk of his throat splattered over the Gucci dress behind him. He was still alive, writhing, but Mack’s vision was obscured by the smoke and he couldn’t take the second shot. One of the spotters spoke urgently into his mic, telling Greenburg to hit him again.

The security guys on board were in chaos but the men on the back-up boat had heard Finlay scream through their own earpieces as he went down and they were scanning the cliffs with their night-vision goggles. One of them saw Greenburg on his knee raising his weapon and yelled in Croatian …

A sniper next to him panned fast, locked on to Greenburg and pulled. Greenburg – his own finger about to squeeze – took the round in his chest and fell, thrashing. I was closest and, knowing he was still alive, I sprinted towards him.

It was breaking all the rules – the priority was the mission, not the safety of the team – and I was supposed to wait for Control to shout an order. But Greenburg was lying on exposed ground and would be shot again and dead in seconds if somebody didn’t get him into cover.

Nobody knew where the hostiles were firing from, but Mack saw the danger instantly: if somebody at sea could target Greenburg, they could hit me. Screaming a warning, believing he was still obscured by the smoke, he crouched low and ran hard to intercept me and pull me to the ground. He liked me, we both worshipped in the house of blues and I think that played a part, but so did the fact that he was naturally a courageous man.

Halfway towards me the breeze ripped a hole in the smoke and the guys on the boat were very good – two bullets hit Mack just above the kidneys. But for the grace of God, it would have been me.

He dropped his rifle and went down screaming. I wheeled, got to him fast, threw my body over his and rolled with him – gunshots blasting the crumbling soil all around us – until we tumbled into the safety of a small depression. Partygoers were screaming – finally realizing that two men were shot and badly wounded – but they had no clue what was really happening, or where the shooters were located, and that made their panic even more acute.

Control had no such difficulty in pinpointing the source: he had been pacing the deck of the little cruiser when he caught sight of what he recognized as a muzzle flash through the smoke and shadows. When The Division had set out that morning, he’d had the good sense to throw on board a set of flashing blue-and-red lights, and he slammed them on the roof of the cabin and told the skipper to hit it.

The mercenaries on the back-up craft saw the fast-approaching boat with its flashing lights and immediately jumped to the logical, but incorrect, conclusion. In four different languages they yelled at the wheelman to plunge into the logjam of spectator craft, in the hope of losing themselves. They knew that, in a fair race, they wouldn’t have a chance, and the last thing any of them needed was a shoot-out with the Turkish cops.

Their boat skimmed between other boats and passed so close to two of them that it shaved paint from their hulls. The screams from their occupants told Control that the unidentified boat had fled, so he ordered the skipper to turn and head for Finlay’s mega-cruiser.

In the confusion, the flash bar allowed him to get so close to the back of the big boat he could see Finlay lying in a pool of blood. A couple of the women and a distraught crew member, believing that Control was a cop, screamed at him to get an ambulance or a Medevac chopper fast, but Control knew from the way Finlay was spasming and the big hole in his neck that they had done their job: he was in the last stages of bleeding out. He turned to his skipper and told him to get the hell out, and it was only as the supposed cop boat departed that the security chief realized he had just been face to face with the man who had ordered the hit. He didn’t care by then – his meal ticket had just been cancelled and he was already working out how to cross the frontier before the Turks took him into a room and told him to grab his ankles because the party had only just started.

Control had been listening to the reports from everybody on shore and, as his boat roared across the water, satisfied that the mission had been accomplished, he ordered the men at the base of the cliff to head fast for the jetty, where he would pick them up in three minutes. He then ordered me to go to the back-up plan.

The two spotters had heard it all, and they grabbed Greenburg under the arms and dragged him to the van. He was already dead – the bullet to his chest had fragmented when it hit his ribs and the splinters took out so much of his heart and lungs he never really had a chance.

In the shallow hollow I had done what I could to stop Mack’s bleeding. He was a well-built guy, but somehow I managed to throw him over my shoulder and get him into the passenger seat of the van. I laid the seat back, grabbed my jacket and bound it round his waist to try to further stem the loss of blood. He was still conscious and he saw the tag inside the jacket. ‘Barneys? ’ he said. ‘What sort of fucking bluesman shops at Barneys? ’

We laughed, but we both knew he didn’t have a chance if we didn’t get him medical help soon. I swung behind the wheel and hit the gas, fishtailing through the parking lot, sending revellers scattering, while the spotter directly behind me was already on his cell, speaking to Control on what we all hoped was a sufficiently secure line.

As I turned hard on to the blacktop, the spotter hung up and told me I was to drop him and his buddy at the marina in Bodrum, as planned. They had to get out before everything went into lockdown: Turkey was a proud country and the Turks wouldn’t react well to people being executed under their noses. The spotters would take Greenburg’s body on board with them while I got Mack to the doctor who was on standby. Hopefully, he would stabilize the wounds and buy time for a stealth chopper from the US Mediterranean Fleet to come in low over the coast and extract us both. The chopper, with a doctor and two medical specialists on board, was already being scrambled and, once it had picked us up, it would head for the fleet’s aircraft carrier, where there were operating theatres and a full surgical team.

Mack had a chance, and I drove even faster. It was a wild ride, and I don’t think anyone in a mini-van shaped like a brick had ever covered the distance any quicker. We arrived at the marina and, in a stroke of good fortune, found it virtually deserted – it was Saturday night, and all the boats were either partying at the ruins or moored near Bodrum’s scores of beach-front restaurants.

I backed along the dock, helped the spotters transfer Greenburg’s body on board and then got back behind the wheel. We had a bad road in front of us and a world of trouble behind.