Blackout - By Tom Barber Page 0,35

men sitting across from each other.

‘Do we have any information on them?’ Cobb asked.

Jackson shook his head. 'Nothing. I contacted my man in Belgrade on the way here. He's saying the Serbian government are denying any knowledge of a jailbreak. They’re claiming the men don't even exist. And their story checks out. These guys have no records left, no identification. None of them have used their real names in years, and no one knows who or where they are.'

‘No files?’

‘Nothing.’

Cobb swore, then thought of something.

‘But wait a minute,’ he said. ‘How the hell do they know anything about us? No one knew who we were. That was the whole point of the operation. You and I were here in London, for God's sake.’

Jackson shrugged.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, turning and poking a finger at the television. ‘But someone’s been talking to them, Tim. Because they’ve tracked us all down.’

He paused.

'And that means you and I are next on that list.'

At the command post across town, the big man in the darkness was still watching the two television screens with interest. He saw a new Breaking News report of a second suicide on a bank by the Thames and nodded. Good. Like any man of honour, Grub did what was expected of him.

He had known Grub since he was a boy. They had grown up together, and he was sad that the man had been forced to kill himself. But he had let himself and every other man in the team down. In a unit like theirs, such failure always came at a price. But the big man in the darkness had another bond with his now dead colleague. They had served time as cell mates together in the prison known as Ferri.

Or in English, ‘The Pit’.

Fifteen years. Fifteen years he and his seven men had been held there, in the filth and the grime, surrounded by death and fear, a hundred miles from anywhere and with no hope of escape, left to rot. The prison at full capacity held three hundred inmates, all of them forgotten men. Every day was a battle just to stay alive. Prisoners around them were dying every day from dysentery or some other disease, their bodies often left in their cells for days before the guards bothered to remove them, the smell unforgettable, the constant stench of death unavoidable. It was freezing cold in winter and as hot as a furnace in summer. Every man in that prison was sent there to die, and with most of the inmates that was exactly what happened. But in the midst of the total despair around them, the leader of the eight-man group had somehow kept his team going.

Stay alive, he’d said. Hold on to whatever will stop you from giving up. Every morning you wake up is another night you survived.

Another day closer to when we will escape.

And another day closer to when we get even.

Over the years they had tried to come up with an escape plan. For a host of different reasons, none had been feasible. Other inmates had tried, but none of them were ever returned to their cells. They were taken into the exercise area in the middle of the dark cell block and shot in the head, the guards leaving the body there for a couple of days for the other inmates to see. They got the message. Any attempt at an escape would only end one way, your body left on that patch of ground to be picked at by the birds. A man only ever had one chance to break out of Ferri.

The place was remote and well-guarded and the prisoners were deliberately kept malnourished and weakened to reduce the chance of any form of resistance. It had broken most of the other inmates. The majority of them died. And the ones who managed to stay alive often went insane. It had almost broken the man sitting there in the dark command post. Most mornings they would wake up and find another inmate being dragged from his cell, a length of fabric tied around his neck in a makeshift rope, his body quickly disposed of. Another man who gave up. The option of suicide was always there, and they would all be lying if they said the thought hadn’t crossed each of their minds.

But finally, just over three months ago, they had escaped. From his cell the leader had co-ordinated a mass riot. It had taken time and patience, but