by Andy McNab
An SUV pulled up carrying a family of four. Mum told the kids to hurry up or they wouldn't get good seats upstairs. Dad told them there was no rush, they had reservations. Mum told them to hurry up anyway.
I climbed out of the Merc and stretched. I scanned the car deck like I was looking for a friend. I couldn't see any obvious threat; no vanload of heavies in bomber jackets, no biker keeping his helmet on.
People squeezed between vehicles as they made their way towards the stairs either side. I got back in the Merc, as if I was waiting for the rush to die down. I tidied a couple of duvets on the passenger seat next to me, and a couple of bottles of wine I'd rescued from the kitchen table as I left the cottage.
The last car was on board and the ramp had gone up. The final trickle of passengers had made their way to the stairs. The crew would soon be doing a check to make sure no one had stayed behind.
I gathered the duvets and bottles and got out. I put the bottles on the deck then went and lifted the tailgate. I made as if to throw the duvets in, but bent down and pushed them under the chassis instead. I closed the tailgate again and blipped the key fob. I went back round to the driver's door, and looked around. No crew watching. I bent to pick up the bottles and rolled under the truck alongside me.
I hadn't bought my ticket with cash or practised any sort of tradecraft. I continued to act as if I didn't know the device had been planted. I kept everything overt, to try and bring whoever was responsible back to the car.
Who the fuck was it? Only three people in the world knew what 'Leptis' meant: Colonel Lynn, the Libyan spook who'd coined it and me. Unless . . . shit . . . Lynn may have mentioned it in a report, which meant it was sitting in a file. Anyone at the Firm with the appropriate level of clearance would have had access to it.
Whoever they were, I really wanted them to find me now. I wanted to be picked up. I wanted some fucker to come and have another go.
I reached under the Merc and grabbed the duvets. I wriggled to get one of them under me, and pulled the other over the top. The steel plates of the deck were freezing cold, and the air temperature wasn't much better. I kept the wine bottles within reach. They were the only weapons I had.
30
When the ship cast off and began to move with the swell, I felt for a moment like I was back in the cargo hold of the Bahiti. I just hoped this wasn't fate coming full circle and propelling me towards a hot date with a length of det cord.
1987 had been a good year for Lynn and me, but a terrible one for PIRA. In February, Sinn Fein had fielded twenty-seven candidates in the Irish general election but they'd only managed to scrape about a thousand votes each. It showed how out of touch PIRA were. Few people in the south gave a toss about reunification with Northern Ireland; they were far more concerned with other issues like unemployment and the crippling level of taxation. Ordinary people really did believe that London and Dublin could work together to bring about a long-term solution to the troubles.
PIRA and Sinn Fein were in danger of being marginalized, and must have decided they needed a morale booster. Their knee-jerk reaction was the murder, on Saturday 25 April, of Lord Justice Maurice Gibson, one of the province's most senior judges. I saw the celebrations first-hand in PIRA's illegal drinking dens that weekend. I even had a few pints myself as I hung around. The players loved what had happened. Not only had they got rid of one of their worst enemies, but recriminations were flying left, right and centre between London and Dublin. The Anglo-Irish accord, which had done so much to undermine PIRA's power base, was now in question itself.
Barely had the hangovers receded when, two weeks later, PIRA suffered its biggest loss in a single action since 1921. On 8 May, at Loughgall in County Armagh, the Regiment ambushed and killed eight of PIRA's East Tyrone Brigade while they were attempting to bomb a police station. I was there, and I knew that we'd been acting on a tip-off from an undisclosed but highly placed source.
PIRA was reeling. From a force of 1,000 hardcore players in 1980, its strength had already been cut to fewer than 250, of which only fifty or so were members of active service units. Our successes had cut this down to forty, which meant that the operation at Loughgall wiped out one-fifth of PIRA's hardliners at a stroke. If this carried on, the remaining members of PIRA would soon be able to share the same taxi. A couple more tip-offs and they might be history.
Loughgall was followed by a disastrous showing by Sinn Fein in the British General Election. The Catholic vote was switching to the moderate SDLP. Then, in October, during Sinn Fein's annual conference in Dublin, Spanish forces seized a small freighter called the Bahiti in the Med, and Colonel Gaddafi's early Christmas present to PIRA.
The humiliation was complete. No wonder PIRA wanted revenge, and some sort of publicity coup to show people like Gaddafi and those Irish-Americans who contributed to Noraid that they hadn't completely lost their grip.
On 11 November, Remembrance Day, PIRA planted a 30lb bomb with a timer device at the town memorial in Enniskillen in County Fermanagh. I arrived on the scene soon afterwards and saw the carnage with my own eyes. Eleven civilians lay dead in the mountain of rubble and twisted steel, and more than sixty were seriously injured.
Outrage at the atrocity was instant and worldwide. In Dublin, thousands lined up to sign a book of condolence. In Moscow, not a place well known for its community care, the Tass news agency denounced what it called 'barbaric murders'. Even Gaddafi disowned them. But worst of all for PIRA, even the Irish-Americans appeared to have had enough.
They'd fucked up big-time. They'd thought the bombing would be hailed as a victory in their struggle against an occupying power, but all it had done was show them up for what they really were. It might be one thing to kill 'legitimate' targets like judges, policemen and members of the security forces – but murdering innocent civilians while they were honouring their dead at a Remembrance Day service?
PIRA's very existence was at stake, leaving the field wide open for the UDA and other Protestant paramilitaries to have the drugs rackets to themselves. There were no sectarian divides when it came to money – just normal competition and greed. PIRA and the UDA used to get together on a regular basis to carve up the drug, prostitution and extortion rackets, even to discuss demarcation lines for different taxi firms and sites for gaming machines. They had the infrastructure, the knowledge and the weapons to be major players in the world of crime. With cooperation from other terror organizations throughout the world, the possibilities were endless.
And that was why people like Richard Isham had taken a brisk pace forward and announced they were turning from the gun to the ballot box.
31
The boat was docking and I still had no definitive answers. No one had come for me or even checked the car. I'd been hoping they would; I'd been hoping I could jump someone and beat a few answers out of them.
As things stood, the only thing I knew more or less for certain was that it could be any one of three groups of people who were after me: PIRA, the Firm or the Mujahideen. They were the only people, as far as I knew, who used Chinese pigtails in their IEDs. The Muj could be ticked off the list straightaway. Even in mountainous Donegal, a carload of Bin Laden lookalikes would be just a little bit conspicuous.
The Firm have phenomenal electronic firepower at their beck and call. Using the Echelon system, GCHQ could capture radio and satellite communications, mobile phone calls, emails and other data streams nearly anywhere in the world. Was that how they'd tracked me to the house, by pinging my mobile phone? If so, it was lucky I spoke to Dom on the landline or they'd know where I was right now.
Would they have taken innocent lives just to get to me? Yes. They'd killed Pete to try and get to Dom. They wouldn't care; it would just look like an attempt by RIRA – the Real IRA, resurgent elements of PIRA hardliners who refused to buy into the peace process – to kill an ex-member of the SAS and put themselves on the map.
I had no contacts, let alone friends, on the inside at Vauxhall Cross. No offi
cial points of contact, no mates I could turn to. Even my old contacts in the RUC (now PSNI) or Irish Special Branch couldn't help me if the Firm was involved. The Firm trumped every other card in the pack.
This message from Leptis . . . Maybe it wasn't Lynn trying to help or 'having the answers'. Maybe he'd simply been roped in to channel me to his home, the next killing ground?
I would have to assume the worst – that Lynn was being coerced – and act accordingly. But first, I would have to find him.
It was ten years since I'd last seen him. An ex-spook like him would hardly be in the phone directory or have a Facebook page, and I didn't have him on speed dial.
PART THREE
32
I drove off the ferry and into Holyhead. I parked up near the first internet café I could find and paid for an hour.
If they were following me they'd soon find out where I was heading. I checked the windows and there was still nothing obvious to tell me anyone out there walking the streets, sitting in a parked car or just mincing about window-shopping had a trigger on me. Maybe they didn't have to now: they'd just lift me at Lynn's place, once I'd found out where it was.
My first port of call was obvious: I tried a site that searched the telephone directory. I didn't know Lynn's first name, but had to insert at least an initial. It was going to be a laborious process. I started with A Lynn and Norfolk as the location, and got over a hundred results straightaway – just for the site's free directory enquiries listings. There were many more listings on the electoral roll and birth, marriage and death records, but you had to pay to view them. This wasn't going to work. I could plough through a couple of thousand free listings, and still not have a result. He could be ex-directory.
The only clue I had to a more specific location came from our twenty-year-old conversation at the Tripoli docks, and what he had told me in his office ten years ago, when he was forced into early retirement after a deniable job he'd sent me to do in America had gone very wrong, and his head had rolled.
After the Tripoli job, Colonel Lynn came back to the UK and acted as liaison between the MoD and SIS. He'd sent me to Washington to deal with a renegade operator, and I had. But others, mostly Americans, got caught in the crossfire, and since this all happened inside the White House, I wasn't exactly flavour of the month. Since then he'd treated me as if he was a bank manager and I was asking for a bigger overdraft, trying hard to be nice but never quite managing to conceal his disdain. I didn't mind. I'd been used to that kind of shit since I was a kid. As long as he didn't expect me to look up to him with reverence.
I still remembered asking to be put on the fulltime payroll, permanent cadre as a K, a deniable operator. His words stung in my memory.
'After your total lack of judgement, do you really think that you would ever be considered for permanent cadre?' His face flushed. It was the first time I'd ever seen him angry. 'Think yourself lucky you are still on retainer. Do you really think that you would be considered for work after you –' his voice got louder and his right index finger stabbed the air more vigorously with every point – 'one, disobey my direct order to kill that damned woman. Two, actually believe her preposterous story and assist her assassination attempt in the White House. God, man, your judgement was no better than a love-struck schoolboy's. Do you really think a woman like that would be interested in you?'
He couldn't contain himself. It was as if I'd touched a raw nerve.
'And to put the tin lid on it, you used a member of the American Secret Service to get you in there . . . who then gets shot! Do you know the havoc you have caused, not only in the US but here? Careers have been ruined because of you. The answer is no. Not now, not ever.'
That was when I realized this wasn't just about me, and it wasn't early retirement at the end of his tour next year. He'd been given the push. He had been running the Ks, the deniable operators, at the time, and someone had had to pay. People like Lynn could be replaced; people like me were more difficult to blow out, if only for financial reasons. The government had invested several million in my training as a Special Air Service soldier. They wanted to get their money's worth out of me even after I got out. It must have killed him to know that I was the one who'd fucked up, but he was the one to carry the can – probably as part of the deal to appease the Americans.
I didn't feel sorry for him for long. The Intelligence Branch, the top tier in the Firm's food chain, looks after its own. Even if one of the IB has been given the sack for such gross misconduct as fiddling with kids and getting blackmailed for it, he or she goes into a feeder system where they get work somewhere in the City or in a sports organization. That ticks two boxes: it keeps tabs on them, but also it keeps them sweet, and, more importantly, quiet. Me? Once I was no longer useful, I wouldn't be so lucky. Maybe this really was my time.
At that last meeting he told me what his future held. He didn't need to become a share dealer or the chair of the Sack Race UK Committee. He had the family mushroom farm. He'd talked, too, about sailing and Norfolk, and opening your window and smelling the sea. His farm couldn't be more than a mile inland.
I Googled 'Norfolk+mushrooms', got 33,000 results, changed the search to 'Norfolk+sailing' and up popped about thirty sailing clubs. I tried phoning one from my mobile. Fuck it, if they had my number they would be following anyway. They might as well know where I was going. If this didn't draw them out nothing would. I only got voicemail. Of course – these would just be little set-ups; there wouldn't be anyone around to answer.
One club said it was in the homeland of Admiral Nelson, and I remembered he'd mentioned a pub called the Hero. I Googled it. It was in a place called Burnham Overy Staithe, about halfway along the top edge of Norfolk.
I started to punch in the pub's number then thought better of it. Lynn would be expecting me – why else would he have sent the message? But what if I was wrong and the Firm wasn't after me? Charging around the village asking questions could be a mistake – this was backwoods country, where blood was thicker than water and neighbours were actually neighbourly.
No matter; if the pub landlord couldn't tell me where he lived, Google Earth might be able to.
I went back and zoomed in on the area. The whole north coast was a patchwork of farmland. And what did a mushroom farm look like when it was at home? I didn't have a clue, but Mr Google did. He told me: 'A mushroom farm would consist of a number of environmentally controlled growing sheds and because the conditions are fully controlled, high temperatures are not a problem. A pack-house and cold store are also required along with offices and staff facilities. An area of concrete and a pasteurization room would be required for the production of compost.'
I went back to Google Earth and the overview of Burnham Overy Staithe. I moved the cursor left and right, up and down from the centre of the village, and finally found what I was looking for: a line of three large, low-level outbuildings, with a large farmhouse, some smaller sheds and a couple of cars. The farm sat in a triangle of land, bordered on all three sides by B roads. I noted the lat and long, and the road names.
I got back in the car and headed northeast towards Manchester. From there, I'd drive cross-country, southeast to King's Lynn. I'd then hit the North Sea, and turn right.
33
One question bugged me all the way to Manchester. If the Leptis message was from Lynn, how could he be sure I'd find him? Maybe he had faith in my tradecraft skills. It had only taken me half an hour in the internet café and I was on my way. So would he be expecting me? Maybe he was lulling me into a false sense of security, making me think I was making the running, when all the time he was channelling me into the killing ground.
What if the detonator battery had been dead because it was meant to be? I wasn't sure where that thought got me, but it didn't matter. Lynn would soon be telling all I needed to know.
It took me five hours of driving at, or under, the speed limit so I didn't get pulled over, but eventually I was in amongst the flat, endlessly boring fiel
ds of Cambridgeshire. Rain fell in a constant shower. The road was elevated in places and there were dykes either side, waterways draining the fenland, and miles and miles of jet black earth growing spuds or carrots or whatever.
