Fear Incorporated Read online

  FEAR

  INCORPORATED

  By

  Hervey Copeland

  Copyright © Hervey Copeland 2020

  The moral right of Hervey Copeland to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents act 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication is to be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is coincidental

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  ME

  A couple of years ago an American missionary was killed by locals while walking ashore on North Sentinel Island, a small outcrop in the Indian Ocean halfway between India and Myanmar. The inhabitants, who are well known for their aggressiveness towards outsiders, cut him down with a barrage of arrows and spears, killing the poor soul less than a minute after he got out of his kayak. They then buried him in the sand and retreated back into the forest that covers the interior of the place. The entire thing was witnessed by local Indian fishermen, whom the missionary had paid to transport him to the island.

  Reading the newspaper articles about the unfortunate event brought back a lot of memories for me, because ten years earlier I went ashore on that very same beach. The only difference was that I did so during a cloudy night, and needless to say, I didn’t get caught.

  All together, I spent seven days on the island, and I got to see a whole lot more than the beach. Some of it I wish I could un-see, but unfortunately it will remain with me until the day I close my eyes for the final time.

  But before I get into what happened, let me give you a little bit of background info. My name is Michael Huddersfield, and from 1992 to 2010 I was employed by a shadowy corporation called ‘Fear Inc’. It’s a group that has been around since the 1950s and whose sole purpose is to provide exceptional thrills for its members. The way this is achieved is by sending their ‘employees’ to hotspots all over the globe. The employees are always unarmed and only equipped with a camera and minimal food rations. The members then get to see how they fare and bets are placed on whether the ‘employee’ will make it out of the hotspot alive or not. At the end of each day, the members are presented with a video report shot by the employee at the scene, enabling them to follow the progress and get an idea of whether they’ll lose or win their bets.

  Then seven days after the employee entered the hotspot, he or she is allowed to leave and make their way back to safety. If they are successful in this endeavour, and trust me that’s not always the case, they’re given a one hundred thousand dollar completion fee.

  Does this concept sound tempting, and does it sound like something you’d want to try your hand at? If it does, you’ll have to find one of their recruiters and persuade him that you’re a worthy candidate. Personally, I didn’t have to go looking for one, the recruiter approached me.

  I was in a bar in Manaus in the northern part of Brazil, after having spent a month assisting the rebels in Suriname in their attempts to overthrow the ruling president. I was well into my third beer when a sombre looking Dutch guy sat down on the stool next to me at the bar.

  “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in making some serious money,” he said in a broken English accent a few moments after the bartender had passed him an ice cold bottle of Heineken.

  I looked at him for a few moments, my eyebrows raised. He was tall and skinny, and had that sun kissed look that Northern Europeans often get after a few days in a tropical environment. He was dressed in an expensive looking polo shirt and white shorts that almost reached down to his knees, and he had brown, expensive looking leather sandals on his feet.

  The first thought that ran through my mind was that he was having me on. Either that or he was working for some drug cartel and wanted me to smuggle something that would result in a lengthy prison sentence when things went belly up. And considering that I had no intention of spending any time in a Brazilian prison, I shook my head.

  “No thanks, not interested mate,” I said, and went back to sipping on my beer.

  From the corner of my eye I could see the guy grab his wallet and remove something from it. He then slid it across the bar in my direction. I looked down at it, and saw that it was a business card. The name on it said Dirk van der Clerk, and there was a phone number and a post office box address printed below it.

  “I realise that my offer is highly unusual,” the guy said after I picked up the card and looked at it. “But nevertheless, it is a genuine offer.”

  He took another swig from the bottle and wiped the beer from his top lip with the back of his hand.

  “Tell you what. Give your friend Danny a call. He knows who I am, and he knows that I’m a man of my word. Then if you’re still interested give me a call and we can discuss the details.” He then took one last sip of the Heineken, stood up and left.

  That was my first encounter with a representative from Fear Inc. A month later I had earned my first one hundred thousand dollar completion fee in war ravished Sierra Leone. I had operated in that country before, but never without a weapon, and never on my own.

  I’m not going to go into any details about what I did there, suffice to say it was a hair raising experience, and that I was very close to losing my life on several occasions. But somehow I managed to get out of there in one piece, and I have been able to replicate that feat ever since. As the saying goes, practice makes perfect.

  Looking back on it all, I’m still amazed that I have managed to stay alive for as long as I have, considering that the average life expectancy of a Fear Inc. employee is only a year and a half. I lasted for more than eighteen years, and unlike most of my colleagues, I was able to hand in my resignation and walk away from it all with a hefty bank balance.

  Why did I succeed where others failed? I guess it’s all due to my background in the armed forces. I was seventeen and a half when I joined the British Royal Marines, and I ended up serving in that regiment for five years, including stints in Northern Ireland and two very cold and miserable months in the Falkland Islands during the war with Argentina.

  At the end of my fifth year I tried out for the SBS ‘The special boat service’, an elite regiment similar to the SAS. I was able to pass selection and spent the next seven years there, going on quite a few missions to Northern Ireland and a handful to Africa. I can’t go into too much detail, as the missions are classified. But rest assured, it gave me the hands on experience I needed to make it for as long as I did with Fear Inc.

  After leaving the SBS, I spent three years working as a military consultant, or as it is more commonly referred to, a mercenary. And that’s when I ran into Dirk in that bar in Brazil and started my career as an employee of Fear Inc.

  The things I’ve seen could easily fill several dozen books, and who knows, maybe one day I will sit down and write about all the things I experienced during my time in the organisation. But for now, I will only describe what happened on two assignments. Two is more than enough to give you an idea of what being an employee of Fear Inc. is all about. And besides, I hate to repeat myself. The first story I’m going to tell is about what took place on North Sentinel Island, and the second one is about what happened when I spent a week in Grozny, Chechnya during the very bloody and very dirty war with Russia.

  North Sentinel Island

  The year was 2008 and I was on board a two hundred foot luxurious yacht that belonged to the c
orporation. I had spent nearly twenty hours flying, the first leg from London to Bangkok, then from Bangkok to the international airport in Port Blair on the South Andaman Island in the Bay of Bengal.

  The last leg of the journey was only an hour and a half, but by that stage I’d had enough of flying and couldn’t wait to arrive at my destination. Hence the first thing I did after I was picked up from the airport and had settled into my cabin was to throw myself down on the bed and get some sleep. I certainly needed it, and I knew I wasn’t going to get much of it for the next week.

  When I opened my eyes six hours later, I could feel the yacht rocking gently from side to side, and I knew that we were on our way to our destination, North Sentinel Island. I spent a few minutes looking up at the ceiling before I got up, splashed some water on my face and picked up the phone next to the bed.

  “I’m up,” was all I said and put the receiver back in the cradle again. A minute later there was a soft rap on the door and a young Asian female appeared.

  “Please follow me sir,” was all she said. I did what I was told and was escorted to the lounge on the upper deck, where two men were seated in a very comfortable looking leather couch.

  “Hey Mike, good to see you again,” Dirk said in his broken English and gestured for me to sit down in one of the chairs.

  “I take it you had a pleasant flight?”

  “Well, you know what it’s like,” I said. “After an hour you start to get bored, and after ten you start to go bonkers.”

  Dirk let out a polite laugh and nodded. Then he took a sip from the glass in his hand.

  “How are you feeling? Are you nervous about going ashore?”

  I lifted my hand and rubbed the tip of my nose with my fingers. The question was rather pointless, given the tremendous and very obvious danger that the mission represented. No one had ever set foot on that island and lived to tell the tale. They had all been killed, and the few first hand witness accounts that had come from people onboard boats just off the island, had described the horrendous screaming coming from the hapless victims. In some cases this had gone on for several minutes.

  “I would be lying if I was saying that I wasn’t feeling slightly nervous,” I replied.

  Dirk nodded.

  “It’s always good to be apprehensive. That’s what keeps you on your toes and ultimately alive. Without any fear, you get cocky and overconfident, and then ...”

  Dirk quickly drew a finger across his throat and grinned.

  “Ok, the setup is the same as always,” the guy next to Dirk said in a deep southern accent. He was in his late fifties, muscular and had the face of a seasoned poker player.

  “You got the head cam, the usual communication gear and food rations that should last you for a week. Get as much footage of the natives as you can, and get as close to them as possible. We’ll stay in touch and give you instructions twice a day. Any questions?”

  I shook my head. After nearly sixteen years in the game, I knew how it worked and what was expected of me. And seven hours later I leaned back from my spot on top of the tubular hull of the Zodiac and momentarily disappeared below the surface of the dark, tropical ocean. The island was half a mile away, and if everything went according to plan, I would make landfall in just under thirty minutes.

  As I got back up to the surface, I gave the guys in the boat the thumbs up and watched as they turned the Zodiac around and disappeared toward the yacht, which was just a tiny dot in the distance. Then I let myself sink under the surface again and began swimming toward the shore.

  The island covers an area of roughly twenty three square miles - slightly smaller than Manhattan - and is mostly covered in trees, apart from a narrow section of sand that stretches around the outer perimeter of the island.

  It’s strictly illegal to visit the place, and the Indian authorities have set up a three mile exclusion zone around the island. Not that anyone in their right mind would want to pay the place a visit. The people who live there have no contact with the outside world, and they will kill anyone who set foot on their land without exception. And it was this inhospitable place that would be my home away from home for the next seven days. If luck was on my side, I would live to tell the tale. If not, well I wasn’t too keen to think about that.

  I entered the lagoon on the western side twenty minutes later and remained in the water for another ten minutes, making sure that no one was keeping an eye on the beach. I had already left my aqualung, weight belt, diving mask and flippers on the sandy surface just beyond the entrance of the lagoon. If I needed to get out of there in a hurry, I could jump in the water, swim out there, hook on the gear and make my escape.

  Once I was confident that there weren’t anyone around, I quickly went ashore on a rocky section of the beach. Walking on the sand was out of the question, as it would have left footprints and would have been akin to announcing my arrival with a loud flashbang.

  In my right hand was my diving knife, which I was clutching tightly and was more than ready to use if someone were to come rushing at me from among the trees. Thankfully no one did, and I slipped into the forest and began making my way toward the centre of the island. I was nervous, and the adrenaline was flowing freely through my system as it always did when I was out on highly dangerous assignments. I was under no illusions as to what would happen if I got caught.

  I’ve seen numerous people executed and tortured to death up close. Once during a mission in the Congo, I was less than forty yards away when rebels rammed a sharp stake up the arse of a government soldier and drove it through his throat. They then stuck the thing in the dirt and left the poor sod there for everyone to see.

  But on that first night, I didn’t see any of the natives, which was a good thing, because I had a lot of things to do, such as finding a good hiding spot and setting up camp.

  Luckily the vegetation on the island is very dense. There are bushes and shrubbery pretty much everywhere you look, and they make for perfect cover. The place I eventually chose was located on a ridge covered in thick bushes, which in addition to offering me ample cover also provided me with a good vantage point. From my new position I had a three hundred and sixty degree view of my surroundings, and I would notice straight away if someone tried to sneak up on me.

  After I had everything set up, I radioed back to the yacht, letting them know that I was in position and safe. Then I simply closed my eyes and slept until the sun rose in the east the following morning.

  The first sighting occurred towards the afternoon the following day. I had been making my way very slowly toward the east side of the island, and been at it for a good four hours, when I all of a sudden heard faint voices up ahead. I immediately stopped and took cover behind a tree and sat completely still, my heart pumping furiously in my chest.

  I knew that I was as close to invisible as it is possible to get. I was dressed in a dark green camouflage suit, had a matching coloured bush hat on my head and my face was completely covered in dark paint. I had everything I needed to blend into the natural landscape. But still the fear I was experiencing was raw and very real. No matter how many times you’ve been in similar situations, you simply cannot control your emotions when death is lurking just around the corner.

  I probably spent a good ten minutes behind that tree, focusing on the voices. They weren’t getting any louder or fading away, and I correctly assumed that it had to come from some type of settlement. As I was preparing myself mentally to push on, I automatically reached for the sheath I had strapped to my leg, and very slowly pulled out my diving knife. Then I took a few deep breaths and slid out from behind the tree and began moving toward the voices.

  There were about a dozen of them sitting on big logs that had been arranged in a horseshoe like shape. A little further away two females were sitting in front of a lean-to, preparing food. I could see a few huts made from sticks and what looked like palm fronds. The huts were sturdy looking things and shaped like pyramids, and I estimated that they could easily h
ouse up to half a dozen people at a time.

  Apart from the two women preparing the food, who were wearing some sort of straw necklaces, they were all completely naked. Their skin was as black as the night itself, and I realised that it would be very tricky to spot them during the evening without the aid of the night vision goggles. I would have to be very careful from here on.

  From my position behind some bushes about fifty yards away, I could see spears, bows and arrows, and what looked like scythes leaning up against the huts. And for a brief second I found myself thinking that these were the weapons that they would use against me if they ever discovered me. The thought sent a shiver down my spine, and I quickly brushed it aside.

  There was no need to focus on things that hadn’t happened yet, and for the time being I was safe. They seemed completely unaware that I was spying on them.

  Very slowly and with a shaking hand, I pressed the record button on the head cam and began recording the scene before me.

  Later that evening after I had returned to my shelter, I remember thinking to myself that this mission would be a fairly easy one. All I had to do was to sneak up on the tribe once or twice a day for the remainder of my stay, make a few recordings and then leave the same way I had arrived at the end of the seven day period. Unfortunately, that turned out not to be the case. And the remainder of my stay was everything but easy-peasy, and on quite a few occasions, I was very close to getting spotted.

  The following morning was when everything started to go downhill. I was still inside my shelter, when I heard a faint voice coming from the earpiece that was attached to the front of my suit. I grabbed it and quickly stuck it in my ear. Receiving instructions about what to do was fairly common, so I wasn’t overly surprised to hear Dirk’s voice.