Liberation Day by Andy McNab Read Free Book Online Page B

there hadn’t been a day when he didn’t come into her conversation. I still tended to cut away from stuff like this, but the way she saw it, he’d been her husband for fifteen years and dead for only a little over one.
    In the whole of my life as a Special Forces soldier, and later, as a “K” working on deniable operations for the Intelligence Service, I’d always tried to turn my back on the guilt, remorse, and self-doubt that always followed a job; what was done was done. But watching her trying to deal with it moved me more than I’d thought possible.
    I’d been sent to Panama in September 2000 to coerce a local drugs racketeer into helping the West. Carrie and Aaron had been my local contacts; they’d been environmental scientists running a research station near the Colombian border, and on the CIA payroll as low-level intelligence gatherers. I was staying at their house when the racketeer’s boys came looking for me, and Aaron had paid the price.
    There hadn’t been many days since when I didn’t wonder if there’d been something more I could have done to save him.
    There was another photograph of Carrie taken in her mother’s kitchen at Marblehead. She was cooking clam chowder. Just to one side of her was a framed black-and-white portrait of her with her father, George, a handsome, square-jawed all-American in a uniform, probably taken in the early sixties.
    I gazed at the one of her standing outside her college. Carrie had been encouraging me to give the place a try; I’d always loved medieval history, and had been reading quite a lot about the Crusades lately. I’d told her I wasn’t sure the whole mature-student thing was me, working in Starbucks, being bossed by an eighteen-year-old manager. I hadn’t quite gotten around to telling her that my formal education had ended when I was fifteen, so the college was unlikely to take me on as a janitor, let alone enroll me in one of its courses.
    I guessed there was quite a lot of stuff, one way or another, that I hadn’t told Carrie. There was my trip to Algeria, for a start. It wasn’t the job itself; I wouldn’t have said a word about that anyway. It was the fact that I’d promised her I’d never get involved in dirty work again. The carrot George had dangled in front of me was irresistible; with American citizenship papers in my pocket, I’d be free to work at whatever I wanted. But I wasn’t sure Carrie would appreciate the method behind the madness.
    The story I’d told her was that I’d been offered three weeks’ work escorting thrill-seekers into Egypt. After the 9/11 attacks, tourism to the Middle East had all but dried up, and the few travelers still brave enough to go wanted guides. Carrie agreed it was a good idea for me to make some money before I started the long process of applying for citizenship. Until that happened, all I could do were menial jobs, so money would be tight. I hadn’t a clue how I was going to explain to her why my citizenship had come through so fast, but I’d cross that bridge when I came to it. I sat and looked out at the dull gray day as ice-covered trees zoomed past along the side of the track and vehicles in the distance with cold engines tailed exhaust fumes behind them. It wasn’t a good start to us being together, but it was done now. I should just look to the future.
    After two days of moseying around, ninety feet below the Mediterranean, following the North African coastline, we’d finally made it back into Alexandria. The weather had closed in as predicted about ten hours after we got on board, not that we knew, so far below water. A Chrysler MPV was waiting at the dockside; somebody took my bergen, and that was the last I saw of it. For the next week I just had to wait in a hotel room in Cairo while the head I’d brought back was confirmed as Zeralda’s. If not, we might have been sent back to get the correct one.
    I still didn’t know why I’d been asked to bring back Zeralda’s head and I