The Kill Zone by Chris Ryan

Author:Chris Ryan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

3 JULY

14

07.30 hrs, local time.

The sun was already fierce and Siobhan Byrne was wet with sweat.

She had arrived in Djibouti just after nine the previous evening. On the plane from Paris she had locked herself in the toilet the moment the seatbelt lights had gone off. There she had inserted her brown contact lenses and smeared her face with fake tan that she’d bought at Charles de Gaulle and decanted into a small pot to get round the safety restrictions. By the time she’d got to Djibouti her eyes and skin were dark.

The airport was practically deserted, and the first thing she’d done was walk up to the Daallo Airlines counter. She knew from her research that this was the only airline operating to Somalia. The man at the desk was elderly, his curly hair short and grey. He wore thick spectacles and, to Siobhan’s surprise, a Manchester United football shirt. He spoke no English, but they managed to converse using Siobhan’s schoolgirl French. ‘Le vol prochain à Mogadishu?’

The man had raised an eyebrow at her. ‘Vous y allez toute seule?’

She nodded. ‘Oui.’

‘Ça n’est pas une bonne idée.’ Not a good idea? Siobhan was getting tired of people telling her that. ‘Le vol prochain?’ she repeated.

It was with apparent reluctance that the man had sold her a ticket on the flight that left the following day, and his reaction had given Siobhan an uneasy feeling that lasted long after she had checked into a hotel in the European quarter of Djibouti City. Not one of the big-name places. If someone came looking for her, they’d try the Sheraton first, then work their way downwards. The place she had researched while she waited for her connecting flight back in Paris was something more modest. Unassuming. The building looked faintly colonial, with balconies and colonnades. It had the air of a place that was once desirable, but its splendour had faded. The beige exterior paint was peeling away and the arched wooden window frames were rotten. Siobhan wasn’t used to Africa. She wasn’t used to the shanties and the run-down vehicles and the strange looks, not all of them friendly. She wasn’t used to the heat or the smells – a strange mixture of sewers festering in the heat, exhaust fumes and grilled meat from roadside stalls. And although the inside of her hotel was clean enough, the streets outside were filthy and rubbish-strewn.

As her taxi driver had driven her through some poor-looking places on the way to the European quarter, she found herself wishing that her handgun was in her jacket, not hidden behind the panels of her bath thousands of miles away.

Siobhan spent the night recovering from her journey on an uncomfortable bed underneath a circular ceiling fan that did little to keep her cool. Sleep had been impossible. Her mind had whirred as incessantly as the fans, and the recklessness of her actions surprised even her. In Belfast, this journey had seemed her only serious option; Jack’s objections had sounded like the words of a coward.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.