Ultimatum by Frank Gardner

Author:Frank Gardner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2018-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 46

South Tehran suburbs

GEOFFREY CHAPLIN COULDN’T move. He was in pain, he was in shock, and he was terrified. Britain’s Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs lay helpless on the hard metal floor of a moving van, slumped in the spot where they had dragged and deposited him earlier. He was gagged, blindfolded, his hands bound behind his back with plasticuffs. After years of moving through life in a protected ministerial bubble, he was now completely defenceless.

The shock of capture, back there in the Isfahan bazaar, was still raw. While he tried hard not to, he couldn’t help replaying those last terrifying minutes over and over in his head. What had become of his team? Oh, God. Craig Dunne was dead. He had watched it happen with his own eyes, that man standing over him with the pistol, execution-style. And Sara? He remembered seeing her struck, but then what? Was she a captive too? Bound, gagged and humiliated like him, being driven away by masked men in the back of some lurching van?

The one thing he wasn’t thinking of was escape. Geoffrey Chaplin had no military experience. Instead, years of parliamentary lunches and endless sedentary meetings in Westminster had left him decidedly overweight and out of shape. On the cusp of his sixty-second birthday, he had already been told by his doctor that he needed to reduce his cholesterol and take more exercise. He also needed a stronger pair of glasses. Geoffrey Chaplin was in no position to put up a fight or make a run for it. He knew his best chance of getting through this in one piece was to cooperate and do exactly as his abductors demanded. There would be others, surely, working frantically on his release.

And now he desperately needed to pee. He grunted as loudly as he could through the cloth gag around his mouth but, with all the noise and movement, nobody heard him. They seemed to be travelling at speed, turning sharply to left and right, accelerating then braking abruptly. Every turn meant more pain, his head banging into something hard and metallic, the plasticuffs biting into the chafed flesh of his wrists. And he felt car-sick. He wondered what would happen if he threw up into his gag. Would he end up choking on his own vomit? What a dreadful way to go – and what a pitiful end that would be to his thirty-two-year political career.

A sudden screech of brakes and he felt himself sliding briefly, helplessly across the metal floor of the van, then crashing into some other hard object. They had stopped. Oh, God, what now? Was this about to be his execution? Who were these people, for Christ’s sake? He could hear the van’s rear door being yanked open, letting in a flood of daylight that he sensed from behind his blindfold. It must still be late afternoon, then. Chaplin could hear several voices all talking at once in hushed tones. Then hands were grabbing him and he was being half pulled, half lifted out of the back of the van.

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.