by Chris Ryan
Also by Chris Ryan
Non-fiction
The One That Got Away
Chris Ryan’s SAS Fitness Book
Chris Ryan’s Ultimate Survival Guide
Fight to Win
Safe
Fiction
Stand By, Stand By
Zero Option
The Kremlin Device
Tenth Man Down
Hit List
The Watchman
Land of Fire
Greed
The Increment
Blackout
Ultimate Weapon
Strike Back
Firefight
Who Dares Wins
The Kill Zone
Killing for the Company
Osama
In the Danny Black Series
Masters of War
Hunter Killer
Hellfire
Bad Soldier
Warlord
In the Strikeback Series
Deathlist
Shadow Kill
Global Strike
Chris Ryan Extreme
Hard Target
Night Strike
Most Wanted
Silent Kill
Former SAS corporal and the only man to escape death or capture during the Bravo Two Zero operation in the 1991 Gulf War, Chris Ryan turned to writing thrillers to tell the stories the Official Secrets Act stops him putting in his non-fiction. His novels have gone on to inspire the Sky One series Strike Back.
Born near Newcastle in 1961, Chris Ryan joined the SAS in 1984. During his ten years there he was involved in overt and covert operations and was also sniper team commander of the anti-terrorist team. During the Gulf War, Chris Ryan was the only member of an eight-man unit to escape from Iraq, where three colleagues were killed and four captured. It was the longest escape and evasion in the history of the SAS. For this he was awarded the Military Medal.
He wrote about his experiences in the bestseller The One That Got Away, which was adapted for screen, and since then has written three other works of non-fiction, over twenty bestselling novels and a series of childrens' books.
Red Strike
A Strike Back Novel
Chris Ryan
www.hodder.co.uk
First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Coronet
An Imprint of Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Chris Ryan 2019
The right of Chris Ryan to be identified as the Author of the
Work has been asserted by him in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be
otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that
in which it is published and without a similar condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance
to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
eBook ISBN 9781444784114
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
www.hodder.co.uk
Contents
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
ONE
Six minutes past two in the afternoon. A quiet Thursday in early March. Detective Sergeant Dave McKinnon was sitting in the sparsely furnished living room, sipping his fourth brew of the day, watching Judge Rinder on the crappy TV. Around him sat the three other officers drawn from the South West Region Protected Persons Unit.
The four of them were holed up in a secluded stone-built cottage, deep in the wilds of the Lake District, surrounded by a sprawl of farmland, densely wooded copses and craggy fells. About as far from humanity as it was possible to get in England. The nearest home was a mile away; the closest village was a ten-minute drive on a potholed country road. It was the kind of area that rich southerners paid a small fortune to stay in.
The building had once been a holiday home, owned by a family from Bristol, purchased by the government and transferred to the National Crime Agency. The NCA owned hundreds of similar properties up and down the country, used as safe houses as and when needed. McKinnon himself had stayed in at least thirty of them. They were all of a type: isolated, tidy, in good physical condition with no major maintenance work to be done. The entertainment options were limited, and this place was no different. There was a shelf of paperback thrillers by Alistair MacLean and Jack Higgins, a rack of mid-nineties DVDs and an Internet connection about as reliable as TV guide horoscope.
They were officially in the middle of nowhere.
Which made several kinds of sense, on an operational level. Because of the man they had been ordered to protect.
Nikolai Ivanovich Volkov was a high-value target. Much higher than anyone else McKinnon had dealt with in his career.
Nine weeks had passed since the former double agent had been found slumped outside the public toilets in a park in Swindon, arms jerking wildly, mouth foaming. The story had quickly hit the news. Ex-Russian spy critically ill after being exposed to deadly nerve agent. Three other people had been admitted to hospital in the hours after the attack, including the French jogger and off-duty doctor who had first arrived on the scene. Dozens of police and medical staff had been treated for symptoms of infection. Teams of counter-terrorism officers and Porton Down scientists had swarmed over the park, dressed in hazmat suits, gathering evidence. A week later the British Government had gone public, accusing the Kremlin of carrying out the hit.
The story had dominated the news cycle ever since.
Conspiracy theories circulated on Twitter. Russian diplomats were expelled from various European capitals. Sanctions were discussed. Threats made.
There was speculation that the Russians had targeted Volkov in revenge for defecting to the UK, several years before.
But McKinnon didn’t give a crap about any of that.
My only job is to protect Volkov until he’s sorted out with a new life.
Which would not be for a while yet, McKinnon knew. He’d worked dozens of cases since transferring to Protected Persons: witnesses to revenge killings: foot soldiers who’d turned grass against local crime bosses. Giving someone a new identity – a new life – was a complicated business these days, even in relatively simple cases. There was a whole mountain of paperwork to be completed. Bank accounts had to be set up. Passports arranged. Cover stories established. Social media accounts populated.
For a high-profile case lik
e Volkov, it could take several more weeks until he was ready to be permanently relocated. He would probably have to change his appearance, move abroad. To the US or Canada, perhaps. Some backwater town, far from the big cities. Somewhere he was less likely to be recognised.
Eleven days had passed since they had taken the Russian to the safe house. The last time McKinnon had checked in with regional headquarters he had been told that it might be another two months before anything was sorted.
Which suited McKinnon just fine.
Two teams had been assigned to safeguard Volkov, rotating on a weekly basis. McKinnon and his guys were on their fourth day of their first rotation and nicely settled into their routine. In the mornings they fixed brews, checked the weather, called in to their regional HQ and made supply runs to the village. In the afternoons they chilled. Watching TV, chatting with their families on the secure line. A couple of the guys passed the time catching up on their homework for the courses they were taking in their spare time. At night they rigged the alarms and checked the doors and windows were securely locked. Other than that, there was nothing for them to worry about.
No paperwork. No morning briefings. No one looking over your shoulder.
It doesn’t get much easier than this.
Even the guy they were protecting was easy to deal with.
In McKinnon’s experience the people going into witness protection were a pain in the arse. Most of them were known to the police already as criminals, or closely associated with them. They tended to be ungrateful towards the officers looking after them, or openly hostile. Many of them believed that going into protective custody was some sort of get-rich-quick scheme. They figured that testifying against their former business partners or bosses entitled them to a shiny new car and house, a six-figure reward. But that wasn’t how the service worked. When someone went into witness protection there was no big pot of gold waiting for them on the other side. They were given the same income, the same lifestyle as they’d had before.
Some people just couldn’t accept that.
Volkov wasn’t one of them. The guy hadn’t kicked up a fuss when they’d moved him. All he did was ask a few harmless questions about the guns they were carrying, where they were stored, how many rounds they were permitted to carry. Which was understandable, McKinnon guessed. Volkov was an ex-spy, after all. He probably had a professional curiosity about such things.
The Russian sometimes moaned about the British weather or the side effects from the cocktail of the drugs he had to take. Otherwise he kept to himself. Which was just fine by McKinnon.
More time for the rest of us to chill. Besides, he thought, there’s nothing to worry about.
Their location was a closely guarded secret. Aside from their liaison officer and their CO, only a handful of senior figures in the National Crime Agency and Whitehall knew where Volkov was being held.
We’re not in any danger here.
Then he heard the rumble of an approaching motor, and everything changed.
The sound was distant at first. A faint growl, piercing the quiet of the English countryside. Then it swelled to an incessant thrum. Above the roar of the engine McKinnon heard the soft crunch of gravel as the vehicle pulled up in the front driveway.
‘Who the fuck is that?’ the officer opposite McKinnon asked.
McKinnon glanced at his mucker. Steve Flowers was a shaven-headed Brummie with a thickset physique, halfway between muscular and overweight. He’d transferred to the unit at the same time as McKinnon, and the two of them had instantly hit it off, keeping each other’s spirits up during the long periods of downtime while on duty. In front of him on the rustic wooden dining table was a hefty textbook. Tree Surgery for Beginners. Homework for a course Flowers had enrolled on at the local adult college. He was six months from early retirement and planned to go into the tree-hacking trade as soon as he left the force. Like the rest of the team, Flowers was dressed in plain civvies, with his standard-issue Glock 17 pistol holstered to his belt.
McKinnon didn’t reply. Instead he turned to the computer monitor set up at the opposite end of the dining table. The number of security cameras installed at the safe house had been deliberately kept to a minimum. Too much obvious surveillance and the building would have stood out like a fake tit. A single camera overlooked the front of the property, discreetly installed inside a Yale siren mounted to the exterior brickwork. The camera wirelessly fed a live stream to the computer monitor, allowing the guys to monitor anyone approaching the house.
The image quality was impressive. Especially to an old guy like McKinnon. Back when he’d started out the resolution had been so poor that faces looked like a jumble of Tetris blocks. But the clarity on this camera was striking. As good as anything shot on an iPhone. A single-lane path led from the front drive to the main road, a hundred metres to the east. The path had originally been a dirt track but at some point the previous owners had paved it over. Now it was riddled with cracks and potholes.
McKinnon could see the two dark-green Land Rover Discovery SUVs belonging to the team, parked up to the left of the driveway, ten metres away from the entrance to the house. At the edge of the driveway, twenty metres away from the house, a commercial delivery van had parked up.
The van was a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter. McKinnon could tell from the three-pointed metal star fixed to the grille. A distinctive purple corporate logo was splashed down the side of the van, with the name of the company below. McKinnon recognised the name as one of the big delivery firms. His kids were forever ordering crap online. He’d seen such vans pull up outside his house more than once.
He looked on as the driver debussed from the front cab. A stocky guy in knee-length cargo shorts and an ill-fitting polo T-shirt with the company logo embroidered on the breast pocket, like the crest on a football kit. The driver hooked round to the back of the van and returned a few moments later carrying a parcel the approximate size of a shoebox. Then he beat a path towards the front door.
Flowers frowned at the screen. ‘What the fuck is he doing? We ain’t expecting anything.’
‘Must be for you,’ another officer said. ‘It’s that sex doll you ordered.’
Flowers glared at the guy who’d spoken. A slender, slightly built bloke, youthful looking, with short neat hair. Joe Bentley was the youngest member of the team, recently transferred from the Met’s counter-terrorism unit. He had a lot of enthusiasm for the job, but in McKinnon’s opinion he treated the witnesses with far too much respect. Sympathising with them, rather than putting them in their place. As if they were decent upstanding members of society, not criminal scum.
‘Piss off, you cocky bastard,’ Flowers said. ‘I get plenty of action as it is.’
‘Reading books about trees?’ Bentley laughed. ‘Bound to impress the ladies, that.’
‘At least this is practical stuff, son. Hands on. Not that a city tosser like you would know the first thing about nature.’
‘Says the bloke who lives in a third-floor flat in Salisbury town centre.’
‘Twat.’
The doorbell chimed.
The officers looked round at one another. All of them waiting for someone else to volunteer to answer the door.
Finally, the fourth officer spoke up. ‘Someone should get that, like.’
McKinnon glanced at the guy. Pete Jagielka was tall and lanky, with deep-set eyes and a thick Scouse accent. He was also a lazy bastard. Jagielka didn’t lift a finger unless it was absolutely necessary, never volunteering to make a brew or cook dinner for the rest of the team. Instead he spent long hours slouched in front of the TV, reading the red tops or playing games on his phone. McKinnon strongly suspected that Jagielka had transferred to the PPU because he thought it was a doss.
‘Fuck it, then. I’ll get it,’ McKinnon said.
‘Is there problem?’ Volkov asked, glancing away from the TV.
McKinnon looked at the guy. The Russian was about eighty pounds lighter than the snaps that had done the round
s on BBC News. Gone were the round cheeks and the drinker’s nose. Now his sixty-something face was drawn and horribly pockmarked, his skin jaundice-yellow. There was a V-shaped scar an inch below his Adam’s apple that McKinnon assumed was from some kind of invasive surgery. He wore a Charles Tyrwhitt green-and-white striped shirt and a pair of beige cotton chinos, both of which looked about three sizes too big. Volkov had been permitted to return to his house after leaving hospital to pack a few personal items but none of his existing clothes fitted his gaunt frame. The Russian had cut an extra notch on his belt just to stop his trousers from falling down.
‘Nothing for you to worry about,’ McKinnon snapped, already irritated at having to deal with this unwanted intrusion.
‘Who is it?’ asked Volkov.
‘Nobody. Just some driver. Stay put and keep away from the front door.’
He turned and ducked out of the living room, marching down the hallway towards the front door. He breezed past the dining room and the solid wooden gun cabinet with their long weapons locked inside: four Sig Sauer MCX carbines with sixteen-inch barrels, chambered for the 5.56 x 45mm NATO round. Twelve twenty-round clips were secured in a separate compartment, with their Kevlar bulletproof vests stored in a smaller cabinet to the left. Strictly speaking the team should have kept the longs less than an arm’s length away at all times. But it was less hassle to keep them locked up and really, who was going to know any different?
To the left of the hallway was the kitchen. Next to the kitchen was a small study that had been converted into a strong room. Every safe house had one: reinforced door, constructed from high-grade steel and designed to blend in with the rest of the house. Concrete-lined walls gridded with steel rods, strong enough to withstand small-arms fire or intense heat from an explosion. Medical supplies, secure phone line. The room was about as secure as a vault at a national bank.
McKinnon stopped just before he reached the end of the hallway, remembering the Glock 17 holstered to his waist. He untucked his plaid shirt from his jeans, making sure the material concealed the pistol. Then he opened the front door.
