Games Traitors Play Read Online Free PDF

flesh out the shapes. You had to impose upon them known patterns of human behaviour. Two years earlier, she had averted a friendly-fire attack when she realised that the four targets on an Afghanistan hillside, thought to be insurgents, were doing press-ups. She had never seen the Taleban working out, and assumed, rightly, that they were US soldiers.
    The shapes in front of her now, clustered together inside a hut on a mountainside in North Waziristan, were not normal, even allowing for the local atmospheric conditions, which were making the images less clear than she would have liked. She isolated the feed from the thermal infra-red camera, which detected heat emitted from objects, and then fused it again with the image-intensified images. She had seen Taleban leaders talking many times before, and they never stood so close. When they sat, they formed circles. These people had created something else: a glowing crucifix to warn off the Reaper.

8
    Marchant pulled off the dusty track and parked the BMW behind a cluster of coarse bushes, out of sight. It was almost dark and he could see the headlights of a lorry coming down over the Tizi’n’Test pass in the far distance. He wished he had been able to steal a scrambler rather than a tourer, as the BMW had struggled with the rough terrain. They had left the main road, and followed an increasingly remote and bumpy track for the past half-hour, Marchant keeping at least a mile between them. The man he was pursuing had stopped here a few minutes earlier and parked his bike on the other side of the track, without bothering to hide it. He was in a hurry, and had already disappeared on foot, following a steep path that zigzagged up through windblown juniper-berry trees that clung to the hillside.
    Marchant set off up the path, confident that he had left enough time between them not to be seen. He thought he was fit from his running and his abstemious life in Marrakech, but the mountains were soon sucking the thin air from his lungs. Occasionally, as he crested another false ridge, he saw his man in front of him, at least five hundred yards ahead, covering the ground with the ease of a mountain goat. Whenever he turned, Marchant pressed himself flat against the dry earth, feeling his chest rise and fall as he tried to keep his breathing quiet.
    It was after forty minutes of climbing that he heard the first cries on the wind. The mountains around here were farmed by Berber goatherds, who called out to each other across the valleys as they followed their animals. Sometimes they sang bitter songs about arrogant Berbers who had travelled abroad and returned with enough money to build ugly modern houses on the hillside. But tonight they seemed to be singing of something else. Marchant struggled with the dialect, but he could pick up enough to detect the agitation and fear in their voices. Had his man come up here to give his coded message to the goatherds, who would pass it on from man to man across the mountains, until eventually it reached Dhar? It would be in keeping with the primitive means of communication used so far.
    Marchant listened again to the Berbers’ agitated calls as a goat stumbled out of the gloaming next to him and moved off down the hillside. Something had disturbed the peace of the mountains. The man he had been following had stopped now. His hands were cupped around his mouth and he was calling out into the dying light. The wind was in the wrong direction for Marchant to hear, but the man’s body language said enough. He had sunk to his knees with exhaustion. Had he come with a warning? Was it that he was too late? Then he heard him cry out again. The swirling wind carried the sound down the hillside to Marchant. There was panic in his voice, and they weren’t Berber words this time.
    â€˜ Nye strelai! ’ he shouted. ‘ Nye strelai! ’
    Moments later, a short burst of automatic gunfire rang out, echoing through the mountains, and the