Soft Target 04 - The 18th Brigade

by Conrad Jones

  Rashid was frightened and alone. His legal advisors had told him to stay low until the media storm surrounding the death of his young wife had subsided. The furore which had followed his alleged arm supplies to Afghan Taliban rebels during the week prior to her death seemed to be forgotten for the moment. There had been shock initially, followed by page after page of his life story, and a myriad of different speculative versions of who had attacked his vehicle, killing his wife by mistake. The last few days all the articles had been full of speculation as to his whereabouts. He had been in hiding since the arms deals hit the press, and he hadn’t left his mountain hideaway since. The chest freezers were running low on supplies, as was his supply of powdered milk. Rashid had broken protocol once already this week by calling his handler, but desperate situations called for desperate measures. He looked out over the Irish Sea and watched huge foaming breakers crashing into the base of the North Stack, while he dialled. The mobile he`d dialled clicked straight onto voice mail, which informed him that its owner was in a meeting, and advised him to leave a message. He turned sharply and tossed the handset across a low coffee table, which was stood on a thick goat`s skin rug near the panoramic windows. He had been told that help would be on its way, and that he would be protected no matter what the press said. The longer nothing happened the more vulnerable he felt, but he was trapped. The government had his passport and he was now so well recognised as an international arms dealer that there were no friendly countries left for him to hide in.

  The fact that his wife had been murdered hadn’t properly sunk in yet. She was twenty years his junior, the daughter of an Afghan warlord who had offered her hand and arranged the marriage as a gift to his arms supplier. Rashid had accepted the offer of marriage to keep the fiery Afghan chief sweet as much as anything; although only fourteen she had been stunning as a teenager. Their marriage had been little more than a charade. She didn’t enjoy sex, and he found nothing in common with her, after all she was uneducated, little travelled and had no ambition beyond bearing children. Within a year or two it became obvious that there was a medical hurdle stopping them from conceiving, and Rashid grew fond of her as a companion. She in turn became nothing more than his housekeeper, cooking and cleaning, washing and ironing. Despite the lack of real romance they enjoyed their relationship and complemented each other. He cared for her wellbeing in a paternal way, and he now felt like he had lost a daughter, guilt plagued his dreams, and the violent manner of her death haunted his waking moments.

  Rashid had spent virtually all his life dealing in death. Selling state of the art weapons had made him a billionaire, as well as advancing the global Jihad that he`d once embraced unquestionably. In recent years he had seen the death and destruction created by the weapons he sold in a different light. The countries of Islam were still stuck in the dark ages, despite the billions of pounds in oil revenue that had been generated by crude oil production. The phenomenal wealth that had been gleaned was being corralled by the ruling elite of the countries, and nothing was changing at grass roots. The majority of practicing Muslims were still not seeing the benefits of decades of oil production. The masses were easier to control when they were hungry and impoverished.

  Rashid could see no significant improvement in the quality of life for millions of his kin, until the pointless wars and ancient tribal conflicts were put to bed for good. His weapons were being used by Muslims to kill other Muslims. Doubts had begun to rattle his soul, challenging his beliefs and torturing his soul. He set up his financial institution as a means to leave the arms business behind him, but he soon realised that if he retired someone else would set up in his place. There would be no end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan unless the key protagonists were removed from the equation.

  Rashid knew them all. He didn’t just know them; he knew where they operated, where they lived, who supplied them with food, and more importantly where their militias hid. It wasn’t a huge leap of faith to progress from where his conscience was at, to arrive where he`d ended up. He walked into the kitchenette and looked across the harbour in the distance, and as his thoughts floated around his mind the telephone rang. He almost fell over as he stumbled toward the coffee table, and the goatskin slid on the wooden flooring.

  “Hello,” he said breathlessly, hoping that the caller had some news for him.

  “Rashid?” the caller asked.

  “Yes, who is this?”

  “You were told not to call this number Rashid.”

  “Yes, I know, and I`m very sorry but no one has been in touch. I was getting worried. I need to bury my wife, and I need protection,” Rashid rambled. Just hearing another human voice was a comfort.

  “Your handler is dealing with everything, you are being watched, and protection is on the way, but you will not necessarily know that they are there Mr Ahmed, you`ll be contacted later today, do not use this number again Rashid, is that clear?”

  “Yes, sorry, what about my wife?”

  The telephone connection was cut and static filled the line. Rashid shook his fist at the silent handset and gritted his teeth with anger. He cursed the caller and his family, and then redialled the number that he had been told not to call. The number switched directly to the voice mail box again, and again it declared itself full.

  “You fucking bastard!” he shouted at the telephone and thought about hurling the handset across the room, just to teach it a lesson, but he realised that it was his only means of communication with the outside world. There was no mobile signal this far up the mountain, and nor was there any internet or broadband.

  He thought about what the caller had said.

  “I might not know that they are here,” he whispered to himself as he crossed to the window.

  Rashid looked across the fern covered headlands. There was thick knee high foliage for as far as the eye could see, broken only by the odd rocky knoll or giant grey boulder. There were plenty of hiding places for trained operatives to conceal themselves, but he would much rather see his protectors if they were really there. There was nothing obvious.

  He thought about how protection would have arrived, when no one knew that he was here. If they did know, then how did they know where he was? Paranoia gripped him. Rashid had spent a life time trying to be invisible, and thinking that he was good at it too. Surveillance techniques had progressed at a frightening rate of knots over the past decade. Cameras and microphones could be planted at will, and they were almost undetectable to the untrained eye. He ran to the kitchen window. The outhouses looked locked and all appeared normal. There were two quad bikes parked inside the lean-to garage, just as usual. Low clouds were rolling in over the mountain top, moving imperceptibly down the slopes toward the house. Fog and sea mist descended quickly on the Welsh mountains claiming the lives of thousands of unprepared climbers who became unable to navigate, and suddenly the perilous cliffs and ravines were death traps. Rashid swore under his breath, knowing that the descending fog would make him a captive in his own home, until it drifted off again.

  Rashid stood under the light fitting in the kitchen and studied it carefully, looking for evidence of hidden fibre optics, but there was nothing untoward. He repeated the process with every light on the upper floor to no avail. Every picture on the walls, every vase, and every pug socket could potentially be a spy in his hideout. Rashid didn’t know why it bothered him if he was being watched by them covertly, but it did. He rushed around the upper floor searching behind every photograph and beneath every ornament, and perspiration began to form on his forehead as he dashed about like a human whirlwind hunting for covert devices.

  If he was under surveillance then he could see no evidence of that. When he walked back into the living room there were two men standing at the top of the stairs. They both had shaved heads and were wearing black combat trousers, and dark bomber jackets. One of the men had a clear plastic earpiece, with a coiled communication cable which ran behind his ear, and down into his collar. Both men had telltale bulges
in their jackets, indicating that they were carrying concealed weapons in shoulder holsters. They stood rigid and expressionless staring at him. His mind raced looking for answers.

  `How did they get in? `

  `How did they know that he was here? `

  `Were they here to kill him or protect him? `

  Rashid froze, frightened for his life like a rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming articulated lorry. There was a small logo emblazoned on the right arm of each man`s jacket, `Brigade Security`.

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  The Bunker

  The atmosphere outside the meeting room was frosty to say the least. Tank looked around the room and mentally made notes on who was familiar and who he didn’t recognise. There appeared to be a very unusual mix of conventional law enforcement officers, and intelligence service personnel. Usually the two didn’t meet, as public order units and civil law enforcement rarely had dealings with covert operations and counter terrorist units. He couldn’t remember seeing so many senior uniformed officers in the same place as MI5 and MI6 directors.

  The two key intelligence agencies rarely communicated with the Terrorist Task Force, until they had expended all their other options. The taskforce wasn’t in the public domain. Tank and his team were usually the final violent solution to an unsolvable problem. The waiting area looked like a modern hotel foyer, white walls and lots of chrome and glass. Access to the waiting area was gained via a bank of three lifts which descended from various ports in the city above. The elevators beeped the arrival of new guests every couple of minutes, some familiar and some not so familiar. At the far end of the room was a thick plate glass wall, which had a revolving door set in its centre. The door led to a wide road cut through the sandstone bedrock deep beneath the city centre. The tunnel`s stone walls were red and grained with a kaleidoscope of colour formed by the minerals that were embedded deep into the sedimentary rocks.

  The tunnel branched off in three different directions, heading to the listening posts, and military facilities situated in the subterranean command centre. Army jeeps pulled up several times dropping of senior military brass, most of them were well known to Tank, but there was one American general that he didn’t recognise. His thoughts were interrupted by a loud buzzer, signalling that the meeting was about to begin. He ambled through the entrance door and skirted the edge of the room avoiding unnecessary conversation with anyone. There was a folded tent card with his name written on it by hand, `Tankersley` had been spelt incorrectly, and both he and the Major had been accredited wrongly with belonging to military counter terrorist units. This meeting was all wrong, and he knew that he wasn’t going to enjoy it one little bit.

  “Good afternoon everyone, we have called a meeting of the joint emergency agencies, which is the first of its kind, and it will be chaired by the Mister of Defence, Janet Walsh,” a government aide introduced the meeting`s chairperson.

  “Thank you. We are here today because we are facing a very complicated situation, one which involves every single agency in the room,” Janet Wash began in a no nonsense manner.

  She had worked her way through the political jungle, firstly as a junior back bencher, a minister`s private secretary. She eventually attained the role of cabinet member in her own right. Eighteen successful months in the education department, cleaning house financially, and cutting deficits had earned her the very senior post of Minister of Defence.

  “I want to call your attention to the recent events that occurred in Warrington, and I want the Chief Constable of the Cheshire police force to take us through the facts as we understand them. Please keep a very open mind and listen to the details carefully, we`ll keep all questions until the end.”

  A tall slim police chief stood up and cleared his throat with a gentle cough, his hand in front of his mouth as he did so. Tank thought that he looked nervous. His uniform was pristine, and his chest was adorned with a rainbow of commendation ribbons. He picked up a remote and a curved digital screen sprang to life. The screen turned deep blue and then a picture appeared with a subtitled description beneath it.

  “This is a set of crime scene photographs taken at a public house in Locking Stumps, a suburb of Warrington, where two men were attacked and tortured, one of them losing a hand. During the aftermath a young woman employed at the pub was shot and killed by stray bullets,” the chief explained. The pictures flashed by; there was a narrow path which ran between houses. It was lined with high bushes. The picture changed again to the image of the pub itself cordoned off by yellow crime scene tape. The crime scene pictures were followed by shots of the injuries inflicted, almost as an afterthought.

  “Our investigation so far indicate clearly that this was a well planned, unprovoked attack on the 18th Brigade security company,” the police chief seemed to be uncomfortable with his own explanation somehow. He coughed again as if the words had stuck in his throat, and he blushed.

  “At the same time approximately four miles away a fire bomb was planted at the town centre branch of Blackstallion bank,” he changed the images on the screen to illustrate his commentary. Pictures of the burnt out Volkswagen, and the smouldering ruins of the bank flicked onto the screen.

  “We have deduced that the firebomb was a rouse to activate the bank`s alarm, and draw the owner of the business, Rashid Ahmed into the path of a improvised roadside device.”

  A mug shot of Rashid appeared followed by a picture of the buckled Porsche. Thankfully there were no shots of his wife in the vehicle, or from the autopsy. He continued his presentation.

  “At this moment in time all we know about the roadside bomb is that it was made by a munitions expert, but we don’t have any suspects, and we are ruling out any link between the Brigade incident, and the bomb,” he lowered his gaze as he spoke, so as not to make eye contact with anyone. Tank was certain that he had been primed about what he could say and gagged about what he couldn’t. The faces around the table concurred with his instincts. The room was full of people that could spot a liar from one hundred yards away.

  The police chief took his seat and handed the remote to a second uniformed officer. Tank recognised him as the uniformed chief from the Manchester division. He stood and mumbled a brief introduction.

  “Following the incidents in Warrington we have investigated a shooting in an area of Canal Street, were a Somali immigrant was found shot through the head, and dumped in a skip behind a bar which is protected by Brigade security. We have no evidence of Brigade involvement, and there are two suspects in custody at present who are not linked to their organisation.”

  There were several confused glances exchanged across the table. There didn’t seem to be any consistent thread running through the meeting so far, except how little evidence there was that the Brigade was involved in anything. Tank could smell a rat already.

  “Twenty four hours after the attack at the Turf and Feather there was a gun battle at the Salford Towers. We can only speculate about the incident. All of the information that we have gleaned is from eye witnesses fleeing the building in darkness. We know that one black man was involved possibly a Somali gang member, but we don’t know which gang. He was crucified to a wall outside of a drug den. One white male was shot and killed by a weapon that we can`t find. There was no identification on the dead man and at present we cannot identify any of them because the whole building went up in flames.” He shuffled his feet and looked as uncomfortable as his companion had before him.

  “The dead Somali men found outside were known to the police, but the white man is not. The 18th Brigade is denying that they he was either a member of their organisation, or employed by them. The flat had been fortified to prevent easy access, and we think this was part of a local drug conflict,” he flushed bright red.

  The room remained completely silent as the police chief took his seat next to his well decorated colleague, who was still looking down and avoiding eye contact. Tank wondered what all the fuss was about. This wasn’t the first cover up th
at he had witnessed, however it was one of the most glaringly obvious. The Minister shuffled her papers and looked a little disappointed with proceedings so far.

  “So gentlemen, you all want to know why you are here,” she began, “well there are several very important reasons.”

  She stood up and walked to the plate glass wall, keeping her back to the audience, all eyes were following her.

  “Forensics found a small amount of the explosive Semtex in the remnants of the roadside bomb at Westbrook. It had been used purely as a detonator, but it matches samples belonging to a stolen batch which we think was about six kilos in weight,” she explained. The military men in the room appeared to be aware of the missing explosives as Tank could see that there was no surprise in their eyes.

  “The explosives were stolen from the Pirbright training facility six months ago, and we are informed by our colleagues in the intelligence services that the explosives found their way into the hands of extremist right wing organisations, however there has been no evidence of that until now,” she turned and addressed the meeting face on. The men from MI5 nodded in agreement, silently supporting her information.