Operation Certain Death

by Kim Hughes

  THIRTEEN

  Crowley Hall Academy for Girls was a Victorian red-brick anomaly on the edge of a village of thatch, whitewash and Bath stone. Riley steered the Passat through the open gates of the school and headed for the top end of the car park, well away from the Bentley Bentaygas, Range Rovers and Porsche Panameras and the other vanity marques of the parents. Ruby had made it clear that the VW Passat was so far below the salt it wasn’t even in the dining room. No doubt she would have preferred him to have used a car-pool Audi or BMW, but this visit didn’t carry even a whiff of official business. It was ‘The Heap’, as Ruby called it, or nothing. So, he tucked it away in a gravelled bay, shielded by a line of sapling from the pitying gaze of his betters. As he turned it off the dash gave him a warning beep. Low fuel. He would have to fill up on the way to Willow Grange.

  The plan was to spend the night in that local country house hotel – separate rooms for him and Izzy/Ruby, obviously – to give them time together and Izzy a break before driving Ruby back down to Padstow. Ruby would no doubt prefer to be driven to Willow Grange in Izzy’s Mercedes A Class than The Heap.

  Riley wasn’t worried about owning a flash car. Given an ATO’s peripatetic life he had never felt the need to own any vehicle. The VW, though, had a sentimental connection – it had been Nick’s, given to him by TJ to sell. But rather than get involved in the shark pool of Autotrader or ‘We Buy Any Car’ (they’d have probably added ‘except that one’ on inspecting the Passat), he had paid TJ a few hundred over the odds and kept it. Nick had mainly used it for his fishing trips with mates when on leave, which explained the lingering piscine smell even a deep-clean valet had failed to shift.

  It was six weeks since he had seen Ruby – they talked or WhatsApped every few days, but it wasn’t the same as actually being in a room with her – and he felt the urge to hold her close after what he had witnessed at Nottingham. All those grieving parents, sons and daughters. It could easily have been Ruby grieving, of course. Better that way round though, if one of them had to go.

  As Riley stepped out of The Heap, he felt the air ripple around him and box his ears. He looked up at the black shape in the sky and felt the past reach out and drag him into its clammy embrace.

  It was the key sound of modern warfare. The thrum of rotor blades slicing through the air. The otherwise clean chop-chop of an Apache came with a multi-layered whine, as if the twin engines were competing with each other, the upper register painful even to the distant observer. The Black Hawk was softer, muffled, as if it was stroking rather than beating the air, and all the more sinister for it. But to Riley it would always be the deep whup-whup of the fat blades of a Chinook that brought back the sights, smells and sensations of Afghan.

  Sometimes the sound of a Chinook signalled relief – we are getting out of here or there’s a MERT on the way for the wounded. At other times the great beast descending onto the designated Helicopter Landing Site and opening its great maw was a thing of dread. It’s only a hop of a few kilometres, but sometimes Terry Taliban likes to lob a few Stingers or Blowpipes our way. Then it would be a sickeningly twisty flight as the chopper pilot made sure he never flew straight and level for more than a few seconds. Like the scariest theme park ride ever. Every trip in and out of Camp Bastion was like that.

  The helicopter he was looking at was not a military model. It was police. What it was doing hovering over the edge of a Cotswold village he had no idea. Looking for Barbour rustlers, perhaps. Or, possibly, watching the back of the ex-PM who lived not too far away. It was when Riley finally looked down to lock the car that he spotted the vet nearby, frozen to the spot, head back, a pair of hedge-clippers held loosely in his right hand.

  Some react to loud noises, others to the smell of petrol or a figure in a window that might be a sniper. All vets had their combat Madeleines, memory-triggers that catapulted them back to the front line. With Riley it was smells – blood, dust, sand, even particular brands of cigarettes sometimes. With this guy, it was obviously choppers.

  The former soldier was standing close to the hedge he had been trimming. He was slack-jawed and shaking and even a layman like Riley could tell he was having an episode of some description.

  Riley walked over and stood next to him, following his gaze into the sky, wondering what he was seeing. It wasn’t the cloud-flecked pale blue sky of the Cotswolds, that was for sure.

  He examined his new companion from the corner of his eye. Maybe a dozen years older than Riley, although it was hard to say given the sickly pallor of his skin. Plenty of grey in the hair and the beard. He was dressed in green coveralls and wellies. As they touched shoulders, Riley could feel the man was vibrating like a frightened guinea pig.

  The helicopter finally had enough, it shifted to nose down and headed south. The gardener gave a long, ragged sigh. Riley felt him relax.

  Then his phone buzzed. He looked at it. Izzy. Where are you?

  I’ve hit some turbulence, he replied, then pocketed the device.

  ‘Iraq?’ Riley finally asked the vet.

  A nod. ‘First go-round,’ came the reply, uttered in a Brummie accent. ‘Tanks.’ He closed his eyes for a second, remembering.

  Riley knew he couldn’t just leave an old soldier. Without someone to talk him down, he might have a full-blown episode. Someone who knew. And Ruby would understand. ‘You know anywhere we can get a quick brew?’ asked Riley. ‘I’m parched.’

  * * *

  The day after the detonation in Sillitoe Circus, the bomb-maker was in a large DIY warehouse on the outer suburbs of North London. And he was enjoying himself. It was as if God had designed a Paradise for bomb-makers. He stood before a wall – a whole wall – of pliers and crimpers and wire strippers and snips and grippers. Silverline, Irwin, Stanley, MegaValue, Draper. And such an array of colours. He smiled wryly when he thought of the ancient equipment he had once had to use.

  Further along there were whole drums of cables and wires of multiple thickness and resistance. In the aisles sat great bins of nuts and bolts. And bay after bay of fixings. He lifted a huge plastic bag of nails and weighed it in his hands. Then he saw the price. Robbery. Worse than the bandits at the Arkahri bazaar. Still, with such pieces of metal – the lethal shower of nuts, bolts, nails and screws known as Kabul Confetti – he could create something truly terrible to behold.

  And then there were the components for the switch. What a choice. A switch that would activate the detonator could be made from a lawn sprinkler timer, a movement sensor from a home security kit, a central heating control panel, an egg timer, the many devices for turning room lights off and on. There was even an automatic food dispenser for pets that he could harness. The options were almost overwhelming.

  It was true, the place was not so useful when it came to the raw ingredients of the main charge. There was fertiliser, but not of the sort he recognised, not the type he needed. His preferred mixture was ANFO – ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. Neither seemed to be on offer in this vast, shiny emporium. Failing that he would opt for the more unstable triacetone triperoxide, which could certainly be created from chemicals available in such a store as this. Still, he reminded himself, he had no need of such homemade propellants. Not with his new, unexpected source from his new ‘associates’. And at $500 a kilo, the price was something of a bargain.

  He wondered if his accomplices had actually planted his bomb yet. He would have to switch on the news when he got home. Show the boy what a strike from a soldier of Allah looked like. It was a while since his skills had been tested. The last bomb he had created before this recent one had been at home. A marketplace. Sixty dead, many more injured. He had seen the aftermath, the burnt-out stalls, the twisted skeletons of cars, the sandals, the singed kids’ toys, the stubborn bloodstains. It had given him pause. And his wife.

  Were those people really our enemy? she had asked. The Military Commission, the body that selected the targets, think so, he had answered. Now, there was talk of a ceasefire. After all this ti
me? After all this death? Which is why he had decided to shift his attention, to focus on those who had done him harm. Who had ruined his life, his family, his children. Had taken his beloved Benesh from him.

  This time, for once, he had a personal stake in the bombs he was building, equity in the people who would die.

  Only God would know whether it was the right decision. Should he just let it go? Turn his back on all bombs. But he knew he couldn’t do that. Not yet. There was blood to pay for. When he had shared his vision with the local cleric, the man had told one of his baffling tales.

  ‘One very hot day, Nasrudin was relaxing in the shade of a walnut tree. After a while he pondered the huge pumpkins growing on vines nearby and the small walnuts growing on a towering tree.

  ‘“Sometimes I just cannot understand the ways of God,” he thought. “Why on earth does he let tiny walnuts grow on such a majestic tree and enormous pumpkins on those delicate vines!” Just then a walnut fell from the tree and smacked Nasrudin square on top of his head. He got up at once and lifted his hands to the heavens in supplication.

  ‘“Oh my God! Forgive me for my questioning ways! You are the one who is all-wise. Where would I be now if pumpkins grew on trees?”’

  What does that mean? he had asked the cleric. Like most of them, he spoke in riddles, the truth within the parable harder to pin down than a Schokari sand racer snake.

  The cleric took his time answering. Follow your heart, because that is where God tells you what to do. Do not ask too many questions. And don’t sit under walnut trees.

  ‘Can I help you, sir?’

  He turned to see a young man in blue overalls.

  ‘Just looking,’ he said.

  The boy smiled. ‘Let me know if you need anything.’

  ‘I will. Thank you.’

  He watched the lad walk off. From his features he reckoned he was Pakistani. Perhaps his ancestral home was not far from where he himself had been born, close to the Pak-Afghan border. A place with no electricity, no mobile phone signal and just one road in and out. He had taken that road one day and hardly ever been back. Weddings. Funerals. Nursing his sick son.

  He saw the store assistant glance back at him, as if he had felt his gaze on him. He quickly selected a pair of pliers and went to pay. The girl at the check-out was wearing a hijab. He was impressed. He would return to this place. He paid in cash and hurried home, partly because he was worried about the boy, whom he had left in front of the TV, but also not wanting to miss the next feed from the drone which, he calculated, should be within the hour. He smiled to himself as he thought: Let’s see how good this ATO Riley really is.

  * * *

  Riley followed the former soldier to a wooden pavilion behind the main school building, where he put on a kettle and rinsed a couple of mugs. Milk was found in a small fridge under a table loaded with grubby hockey gear. It was amazing, Riley thought, how the wooden building smelled exactly like every other school pavilion he had ever been in. Rank and damp.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ the soldier said, as he handed one of the mugs over. The shakes were still there, but they had settled down to a mere tremor. ‘Happens now and then. Brain freeze.’

  ‘I know the feeling. I’ve been there,’ Riley said. It wasn’t quite true, but everyone who had been to those wars had ended up in some place they’d rather not return to. He held out a hand. ‘Dom Riley.’

  The tank man wiped his palm on his coveralls before he accepted it. ‘Andy Chambers. What’s your story?’

  Riley didn’t need to ask what he meant. ‘Northern Ireland. Afghan. Then Northern Ireland again.’ He had missed out a short-term secondment to the Special Boat Service to qualify for over-water parachute drops, essential preparation, so he had been assured, for dealing with IEDs on maritime installations such as oil rigs. Much as he had enjoyed the SBS boys, the actual jumps over rough seas was an experience he’d prefer to forget. He had also omitted it because only tossers talked about their Special Forces deployments.

  ‘You still in?’ Chambers asked.

  For now, he thought. ‘Yeah. ATO.’

  His eyes widened slightly. ‘The bomb boys.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘We always thought you lot were mad.’ He coughed a little. It sounded painful. ‘Although that’s rich coming from me.’ He smiled to show neglected teeth in need of a good scale and polish. ‘One of the teachers here knows my brother. Got me the groundsman job. I was homeless before that. Down and very out.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘NAPS.’

  The Nerve Agent Pre-treatment Set. Riley had never indulged, mainly because chemical and biological weapons weren’t the issue in Afghanistan that they had been in Saddam’s Iraq. NAPS was meant to help prepare the body for attack by nerve agents. It also gave you the shits, nausea and dizziness. Not ideal for bomb disposal. They had offered Riley anthrax and other jabs when he deployed, but, having heard enough about Gulf War Syndrome to put him off, he passed.

  ‘Then I had the chronic fatigues. Couldn’t carry on in the army. Couldn’t hold down a job neither. Had a baby. Heart defect. Wife blamed the army, me, NAPS. I smoked too much weed, moved on to stronger stuff… lost it.’ He supped his tea. ‘Thought about topping myself.’

  It wasn’t exactly a surprising revelation. The army claimed that suicide rates among vets was no higher than the general population. But until the support packages of 2018, it did not collect stats in a systematic manner, and it was not mandatory to notify the MoD if a suicide had served in the armed forces. More importantly, the data it did collect was from coroners – those dealing with the dead. Nobody kept count of the number of suicide attempts that failed, either among vets or civilians. But Riley had been at a formal dinner where the speaker was from Veterans United Against Suicide and the anecdotal evidence suggested that, among ex-service people, the numbers of both those who tried and those that succeeded in taking their own lives was considerably in excess of the percentage for non-vets.

  Riley tried to remember what had happened in the First Gulf War. He could only recall one tank campaign, but he tried it anyway. ‘Were you at the Battle of Norfolk?’

  Chambers smiled, pleased. ‘Didn’t think anyone remembered that one.’

  ‘You destroyed three hundred Iraqi tanks, didn’t you?’

  He winked. ‘Not personally, like. Yeah, we did okay.’ There was pride in the voice now.

  ‘But you’re sorted now?’

  He nodded. ‘Landed on my feet. Except when those bloody choppers come over.’

  Riley’s phone vibrated in his pocket again. It felt like it was doing so with a particular impatience, although he knew that was impossible. Where the fuck are you? It’s started.

  ‘Sorry, I gotta go, Andy.’

  ‘I’ll be okay,’ Chambers said, ‘Thanks for stopping. And… you know.’

  ‘We old soldiers got to stick together, eh? I’ll drop by for another brew next time.’

  ‘You got a kid here, then?’

  ‘Yes. Thirteen-year-old.’

  Chambers rubbed thumb and forefinger together in the universal sign for stacks of cash. ‘You must be doing all right then.’

  ‘That,’ Riley said as he stood, ‘is a matter of opinion.’

  FOURTEEN

  Kate Muraski took the call in the office she shared with Lee Robards, Rosanna Chessyre and Deepika Chopra, none of whom ever looked as if they could do with a good night’s sleep. She didn’t like having to speak out loud on the phone in front of the others. Even when they pretended to be engrossed in their own work, they were earwigging. She would prefer an office of her own, but that would be a long time coming, if at all.

  She picked up the secure landline and gave her full name.

  ‘And it is Jamal Malik here. BDC, at your service, Miss Muraski,’ came the jokingly formal reply.

  ‘Jamal, how are you?’

  He gave a distinctly informal snort of disgust. ‘Overworked. And in all weekend.’
r />   ‘Well, double time tomorrow.’

  A rueful laugh came down the line, the various scrambling devices making it sound like an echo. ‘I wish. Time-and-a-half if I’m lucky.’

  ‘What have you got for me?’

  The Bomb Data Centre was where all the intelligence gathered from every bomb or IED in every conflict was stored. The US had its own equivalent, the Central Explosive Index, and the information was usually shared between the two. It was protocol, though, that the prime distributor of Intel and lead investigator was the country most affected by the incident being investigated. As there was no US dimension to the Nottingham bomb – or, at least, not that they had yet discovered – the BDC was Muraski’s point of contact.

  ‘Okay, this bloke you have been badgering me about. The romantically named Bravo-900.’

  She almost held her breath. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nothing linking him to Nottingham.’

  Shit, shit, shit. ‘You sure?’ There was near silence on the line, just a low hum and clicks of the machines that made it secure. ‘Sorry, of course you are.’

  ‘Of course I am. But I didn’t say there was no DNA recovered at the scene.’

  ‘Jamal, I’m really tired. I’m about to go home, kick off my shoes, drink some red wine straight from the bottle, go face down on the sofa and sleep the sleep of the dead.’ This was a fiction.

  ‘Sounds good. Apart from the wine.’

  ‘Well, that’s the bit I am particularly looking forward to.’ Jamal had been in the same year as her at the same university, studying biochemistry, back when she was Kate Murray. They had subsequently met at a seminar on handling bomb data and she recalled him, back when he certainly wasn’t averse to a drink or a toke. He claimed not to have recognised her. But the gleam in his eye suggested he was just being polite and choosing to forget her year-two party-girl reputation. ‘Now gimme.’