Driven (3 page)

I
t was vivid – so vivid. It always was. Cold – freezing, blustering air. He could feel it cut his skin – could hear it whistling all around him.

Then came the blinding lights. Thunderous – body-shaking – sounds. Screaming people. People dying.
His
lights, his sounds. His doing.

The scream of ground-attack aircraft – four Tornado – howling into the valley below. Condensation clouds and vortices flowed along their wings – as they rolled and skimmed between the craggy mountains – flying between the narrow valley walls towards the tented camp. Seconds later there was a series of brilliant flashes and explosions. The tented camp on the hillside plateau, the suspension bridge, were destroyed, collapsing down into the furious river hundreds of feet below. The air strike was working – the Taliban resupply caravan, strung out for several miles along the pass, was strafed. Taken out. Only a handful of surviving Afghans attempting to flee, desperately trying to scramble away up the steep sides of the valley.

The aircraft and their noise soon faded into the distance.

Then a different sound.

A deep thumping beat – echoing, bouncing off the mountains – the unmistakable thump of helicopter blades. He could even feel them now. Only one kind of aircraft made that sound: the awesome double-rotored Chinook. Three dark, sinister shapes swooped in along the Pakistani valley, noses up, looking to put down. Snow and sand swirled up as they hovered above the small plateau and remnants of the Taliban’s camp. Doors opened. Sticks of the 506th Infantry Regiment – part of the 101st Airborne Division – debussed, fanned out and laid down fire at the fleeing Afghans.

The Screaming Eagles set about taking the valley floor.

Now his mission was over, extraction by helicopter had to be a
whole lot quicker and easier than his planned two-hundred-mile yomp down through the foothills.

He felt his hands rising above his head. He gingerly broke cover – indicating his presence to the US fighting patrol.

No!
he screamed, as if to try and stop it all – now that he knew what was coming.

It was no use.

He felt he was looking down on himself, from somewhere above. A figure dressed in native Afghan clothes – with twenty days of beard and rank body smell – was approaching the US soldiers. Shouting heatedly, four of the Americans kept him covered – rifles aimed directly at his head and chest – while the figure, as he now saw himself, was cajoled and manhandled down off the mountain side.

He heard the first of the deep southern accents. The 506th company commander didn’t buy his identity, role – as a Forward Air Controller – or even his dog tags, dismissing such “props” as to-be-expected fakes, with a tone of do-you-think-we-were-born-yesterday. He then saw himself roughly hooded, bound, and thrown up and onto the floor of a Chinook.

W
ater – now there was water – gushing water. He fought to breathe. Cold water filling his mouth, hitting the back of his throat, flowing up his nose. He started to choke. He coughed violently. Couldn’t clear it.

How and why? The water stopped. The coughing was all-consuming. He still couldn’t breathe properly. He was gasping. Gagging.

T
hat southern accent came back to haunt him: ‘You look Taliban. You talk Taliban. You were picked up near a Taliban patrol. Mister, if something looks like an elephant, moves like an elephant, and shits like an elephant – hey, it’s probably an elephant.’

Water gushed again. Then came the horrific cycle: water, gasping, barked questions, protest; water, gasping, barked questions, protest. How long was this going to go on?

M
att Straker lurched bolt upright. His heart pounding, thumping in his chest, neck and ears. His chest was also heaving, heavily and quickly, his breath rasping through his nose, mouth and teeth.

Why did he keep reliving this? Why the fuck couldn’t he shake it off?

Any torture was bad – bad enough. But his torture seemed worse.

Tortured by his own side.

The intelligence-equivalent of friendly fire.

Cretinous stupidity.

He opened his eyes.

Darkness. Looking into the blackness, he saw a hint of light bleeding round the edges of the curtains – it was plainly night time. Over the throbbing in his ears, he couldn’t hear anything. Straker breathed in hard, held his breath, trying to hear better. Nothing. There seemed to be nothing to hear. If anything, he thought he detected a low gentle hum – the hum of a building asleep. His breathing started again, back up to rapid.

Straker’s circumstances and location began to dawn on him. He looked across at the glow from the electric alarm clock by his bed. Three forty-two a.m.

Fuck
.

His heart still pounded. Angrily, he threw back the covers, and became aware of the dampness of the sheets. Swinging his legs over the side of the bed to stand up, he felt the cooling effect from even that limited movement – confirmation that he was covered in sweat. As he stood up, cold beads of moisture rolled down his temples, chest, onto his flanks from under his arms, and into the small of his back.

Still in the dark, Straker walked across the large high-ceilinged room, making for the tall curtains, and heaved them apart. Fiddling with the ornate Charles III latches and handle, he opened the heavy glass-panelled double doors, and let himself out onto the balcony.

The night air was surprisingly warm – much warmer than the air conditioning inside had been. A gentle breeze blew into his face and
across his chest, coming off the vast dark void of the Mediterranean, which stretched away into the night beyond the darkened roofs of Monte-Carlo below him. Fiercely gripping the wrought-iron railings of the balcony with both hands, Straker continued to breathe deeply, trying to calm himself down.

The principality was quiet. Sound asleep.

Lights, mainly on the outside of buildings and along the streets, were burning – the more distant ones seeming to flicker in the humidity. Traffic could be heard, but was so slight he could even hear individual cars in different directions at the same time. Gradually, his heart rate and breathing began to slow.

Straker knew comrades had returned from active tours with limbs and faculties missing, and continued to suffer physical disability and pain. He knew he was lucky. Even so, his experiences and subsequent trauma had not been without their painful consequences. They had cost him his career – even his marriage.

Civvy Street should have signified a new beginning, particularly his recruitment by Quartech. Working for its Competition Intelligence and Security team looked like filling a large part of the gap left after resigning his commission in the Royal Marines. His new role was certainly stimulating – it demanded imagination, intelligence, resourcefulness, persistence and the taking of calculated risks. Contributing further to this sense of recovery, Straker’s first assignment for Dominic Quartano – salvaging a multi-billion-pound weapons contract with a Middle Eastern state – had been a triumph. So, fuck it, why the regression now? Why tonight?

Standing on the balcony overlooking dark and sleeping Monte-Carlo, he tried to make sense of the episode. In therapy, he had been encouraged not to see each episode as a flashback to the original emotional scarring – but to see any such reversion being triggered by more recent troubles. Straker went through his encounters, conversations, experiences and feelings of the previous day, as he had been taught.

What, then, had caused this?

He could only conclude one thing.

This relapse
had
to have been tripped subconsciously by the mention, yesterday, of someone’s name.

Charlotte – “Charlie” – Grant.

S
traker found it impossible to get back to sleep that morning. Rarely, if ever after such an episode, could he do so. He knew that, invariably, his only solace under this torment was to purge his soul through the pain of physical exertion. At half-past four in the morning he found himself – like so many times before – out in the darkness, trying to run off the disturbance in solitude. This time, it just happened to be along the streets and across the hillsides of Monte-Carlo.

As they went, this attack had been a bad one. Despite the energy expended in his two-hour run, its effects completely suppressed his appetite.

Not having any interest in breakfast, Straker dragged himself down to the harbour, still fighting to regain his composure – barely even noticing the Riviera paradise all around him.

As arranged, Backhouse was waiting for him at the main entrance to the paddock. Engagement with the race engineer was Straker’s first proper distraction following the episode.

Walking along the waterfront on the western side of the harbour, they passed down the line of the teams’ massive and jaw-droppingly expensive motor homes and mobile headquarters. Ptarmigan’s own – an articulated eighteen wheeler with extendable sides and smoked-glass windows – was dressed overall in the team’s brilliant turquoise livery.

Punching a code into the security key pad, its door hissed open; Backhouse led Straker up and into Ptarmigan’s mobile command centre – equipped as high-tech as a moveable platform could allow. The team set-up was impressive. Straker was relieved it was all so engrossing. His mood began to change significantly for the first time that morning.

Everything in the motor home was striking – it was decked out
in rosewood, chrome and glass, with pale turquoise-coloured leather seating, edged with navy blue piping. Down one side, a row of eight turquoise-liveried team members sat at a bench-like desk that ran the full length of the truck. Each member wore a set of Ptarmigan-branded headphones and sat at a console, with a keyboard and bank of plasma screens in front and above them. It looked to Straker like a – small-scale – cross between Mission Control and a City dealing floor. A meeting table ran down the other side of the truck, surrounded by a curved bench.

‘Let me introduce you to Oliver Treadwell, Ptarmigan’s Strategy Director, who’ll run through what’s going on,’ Backhouse said. Treadwell was in his thirties, slightly shorter than Straker’s six two, and had a mop of blond hair. Straker moved forward to shake hands.

‘For the race on Sunday, we have the prat perch – our command centre – on the pit wall,’ said the Strategy Director in a noticeable Australian burr. ‘But this set-up, in here, is our eyes and ears on the track and pit lane in the build-up to the race. We collect all the data and information we need to decide our drivers’ race strategy – the number of pit stops, what kind of tyres to use, and when.’

Straker’s eyes ran over the array of screens. CCTV pictures from the Ptarmigan cars were displayed, along with various digital channels from the sport’s commercial rights holder.

‘These guys here,’ Treadwell indicated, bracketing them with outstretched arms, ‘are watching all the telemetry from both our cars on these screens. We can measure, remotely via on-board sensors, upwards of two hundred and fifty aspects of the car – temperature, pressures, loading, etc. – and all this real-time data can be called up instantly via our touch-screen menu system.’

‘So who’s that?’ asked Straker, pointing to a face shown on a video conferencing screen with whom one of the team was clearly conversing.

‘That’s the factory back at Shenington, in Oxfordshire. All the data we collect is simultaneously fired back there and fed into a
simulator. We then extrapolate all the discernable trends on the cars while they’re racing to see what effects they could have. Those findings, too, help us adjust our strategies and, hopefully, afford us better reliability and performance.’

Treadwell used his arms again. ‘These two guys are monitoring the weather. Rain’s our biggest concern, although we’re hopefully looking okay this weekend. Even so, atmospheric pressure, temperature, humidity and wind speed all have a huge influence on the workings of the cars. So, we monitor the weather closely and adjust our set-up accordingly.

‘And here,’ said Treadwell walking further down the row of consoles to the far end, ‘is our Intel headquarters. All the teams keep an eye on what the other teams are up to. These guys are trying to work out the strategies – number of pit stops – the other teams will adopt for the race, while over here,’ he said pointing with splayed fingers at a bank of recorders, ‘we aim to collect every bit of VT footage of all the other cars and their crews – filmed by ourselves or captured from the official broadcaster, whether external or on-board. We then collate, scrutinize and analyse everything we can. Assessments will be made of any unexpected components – or actions by drivers or crews – that we notice, any of which might give away an innovation they might have made. We also record the engine noise of every car for analysis, and listen for anything unusual. And then, when we do come across something interesting, we brief our director of the relevant aspect – engines, gearbox, brakes, fuel, tyres, aerodynamics, pit crew, strategy – showing them what we’ve found.’

‘All
very
sportsmanlike.’

‘Yeah!’ said Treadwell with an exaggerated tone of Australian. ‘Everyone does it, though, so I guess it’s a level playing field.’

‘Anything interesting come up recently?’

‘Kind of. We think Massarella’s diffuser is non-compliant. We’ve written to them about it this morning – and are waiting to hear back.’

T
hat evening Straker was invited by Quartano to join the Ptarmigan Team in hosting Dr Chen of Mandarin Telecom at a gala dinner held in the Casino in Monte-Carlo. Although not officially connected with motor racing, this was now
the
annual charity fixture of the Monaco Grand Prix weekend, attended by everyone who was anyone in Formula One.

Dressed in black tie, the Quartech party alighted in front of the institution which first put the principality on the map. What greeted them outside the Casino seemed more like a night of film-industry awards than a fund-raiser. Red carpet ran from the kerb to the main entrance. Banks of photographers were corralled down one side, while television cameras and glamorous TV presenters were gushing down the other.

Once inside, and between the marble columns of the baroque atrium, they were met by the official receiving line and presented to His Serene Highness. Quartano conversed with the Prince and introduced Dr Chen, Nazar and Straker. After a polite but formal welcome, they moved on down the line.

Quartano then introduced his party to the President of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile – FIA – the international governing body of motor sport and the organization that set the “Formula”. Straker thought Bo Mirabelli, the Marquis of San Marino, one of the most patrician and distinguished looking men he had ever met. Mid-sixties with wise, piercing blue eyes, and swept-back hair off his round forehead, he had the appearance of a 1950s Hollywood star. But looks weren’t Bo San Marino’s only appeal. Famed for his charm, he greeted Dr Chen and Straker as if they were long-lost friends, investing their conversation with that rare gift of making it seem the most important moment of the evening.

After Bo San Marino, Quartano introduced them to the other power axis in motor racing – the boss of the commercial rights holder and, therefore, the controller of the multi-billion-dollars-a-year Formula One revenues. As head of the recently formed Motor Racing Promotions Limited, Joss MacRae was, indirectly, the successor to
the legendary Bernie Ecclestone. By way of a briefing beforehand, Nazar told Straker that MacRae had been a former PR director with two of the teams in the paddock. He had taken over as the Tsar of Formula One, having been lauded for breaking the key Asian markets – India and China – in the early noughties. Nazar was not so generous in crediting MacRae with such achievement. He attributed the breakthrough in Asia to have been more down to necessity – down to Formula One’s desperation at losing the bulk of its revenue from the then impending Europe-wide ban on tobacco advertizing.

Straker was also told that MacRae had been involved with a Finnish rally driver. Nobody knew he was gay until news broke over the internet, despite – but probably because of – the superinjunction MacRae had taken out in the UK. Straker did not take to him at all. MacRae was all over Dr Chen and Nazar to the point of being obsequious, but there was none of the genuine warmth of San Marino, while, he, Straker – an unknown – was barely acknowledged.

Twenty minutes later the five hundred guests were invited through into the majestic setting for dinner – the Salon de l’Europe. There, they were surrounded by onyx columns, endless gilding, and were dazzled by the eight – vast – Bohemian crystal chandeliers.

On the way to their table, the Quartech party encountered the bosses of two other teams. The first was the Earl of Lambourn, owner of Lambourn Grand Prix.

‘Dom, my dear fellow,’ said Lambourn to Quartano genuinely. ‘Wonderful to see you.’

Straker instantly warmed to Lambourn – and detected an authentic friendship between him, Quartano and Nazar.

Straker had read countless articles on Lord Lambourn over the years. The British press seemed obsessed with him, probably because he was the very last of a dying breed – the dashing, playboy aristocrat – able, through the good luck of birth, to indulge his passion for cars, speed and women. He was tall, slim, with a full head of well-groomed hair and had the easy manner and effortless conversation of a natural host. Suave was definitely the word. Lambourn offered
his hand with a gentle bow, saying: ‘Dr Chen, I’m delighted to meet you. Thank you, sir, for gracing our sport, should you decide to do so. Ptarmigan is one of the finest marques in motor racing. I hope you enjoy a successful association, and that Formula One serves to grow your brand around the world.’

Dr Chen, somewhat thrown by Lambourn’s lack of competitiveness – particularly as one of his drivers was leading the Drivers’ Championship – gave a slightly confused smile indicating, perhaps, that he did not quite understand the English.

Moving on through the dining room Quartano encountered another team principal. He introduced his party to the Afrikaner Eugene Van Der Vaal, team boss of Massarella.

Dr Chen shook hands.

‘You don’t want to be wasting your money on Ptarmigan,’ said Van Der Vaal without levity, his guttural Boerish accent giving his comments a barbed and abrasive edge.

Straker likened Van Der Vaal, with his closely-shaved head and broad physique, to a rugby prop forward. His brutish expression added to the look. Word had it that he never smiled – let alone laughed – unless it was at someone else’s expense.

‘Britain is old world,’ said Van Der Vaal. ‘Tired, complacent and of the past.’

Straker was getting a first-hand feel for why the team bosses might have been referred to en masse as “the Piranha Club”. Quartano’s composure, however, did not waver for a second. ‘That’s very interesting,’ he said to the Massarella man. Turning to his guest, he said: ‘And yet, Dr Chen, isn’t it strange that all of Mr Van Der Vaal’s key team members – Massarella’s COO, designer, and both race engineers – happen to be British.’

Dr Chen’s face broke into a smile. This, perhaps, was a bit more like it. ‘We Chinese, Mr Valley, have an old saying for someone who says one thing … and does another…’

It was Quartano’s, Nazar’s, and Straker’s turn to smile.

R
eaching their table, Straker and Quartano were left alone for a moment while Nazar escorted Dr Chen to find a lavatory. The tycoon, certain they could not be overheard, turned and asked discreetly: ‘How are you holding up, Matt?’

Straker shook his head. ‘Fine,’ he said dismissively.

Quartano looked at him carefully, almost intently.

Straker found himself turning away. ‘Incidentally,’ he said, looking back towards one of their encounters on the way in, ‘talking of Massarella – Ollie Treadwell said he had written to them this morning about their diffuser. What does
writing to
mean, exactly?’

Quartano smiled and raised an eyebrow, inhaling deeply. ‘This is a funny – and I mean funny-peculiar – sport. It’s best to remember that, in reality, Matt, F1’s more or less – no, I’d say largely – about rules. The interpretation of rules.’

‘Largely?’

‘Without the rules – or the
Formula
– a Grand Prix car could easily do over three hundred miles an hour and pull so much G-force round the corners that the drivers would actually black out. Modern cars are not primarily limited by physics or the laws of nature. They’re limited by arbitrary, man-made rules. Interpretation of those rules, therefore, is everything.’

‘Doesn’t that make the limits rather subjective?’

‘Oh, completely. Because of this, a number of teams have signed the equivalent of non-aggression pacts. Massarella’s signed one with nearly every team, including Ptarmigan. If either party believes the other is pushing the rules for unfair advantage, these agreements are meant to encourage resolution of a dispute between themselves – bilaterally – before anyone runs off to the FIA to bad mouth the other in public.’

‘Do they do any good?’

‘Hardly. They’re like signing an NDA – they’re more about declaring an intent than a legal bond.’

‘How many times do they get exercised?’

‘Between us and the other teams – never.’

‘So what’s with Massarella’s diffuser? Why’ve we thought it significant?’

‘No idea. And I’d be quite sure it isn’t. If it
is
, then, what the hell, the FIA stewards in Parc Fermé will pick it up.’

‘So why bother
write
to them at all?’

Quartano’s lived-in face broke into a contended, mischievous smile. ‘Massarella never stop whingeing, sniping and causing trouble. We use their stupid pact to yank their chain from time to time.’