by Andy Maslen
He breathed in and re-centred the cross-hairs on the woman’s forehead. High, unlined. So clear in the precision-ground optics he could see a mole above her right eyebrow. I’m doing this for you, Alina. I’m sorry.
He breathed out. Squeezed his finger on the trigger, taking it to half-pressure. Three-point-seven pounds. Calibrated to his specific requirements by the armourer.
His heart beat once. He prayed for forgiveness.
It beat again. He felt the gold Star of David tremble against his chest. He tightened his finger.
Behind him, he heard the spotter’s boots scrape on the concrete but ignored it, filtering out all sound.
‘Put the rifle down, Dov,’ the spotter said.
He released the trigger.
‘What?’
Pressure from something hard on his skull, just behind his left ear, told him all he needed to know.
‘OK, OK!’ he said, taking both hands off the rifle.
‘Now stand up.’
He turned and his eyes widened. Where he had expected to see one man, two now stood. One aimed a pistol at his chest.
‘I thought you wanted me to kill her,’ he said.
‘Oh, I did. Tell you that, I mean. And as far as the world is concerned, you did.’
‘So you’re saying freedom of speech is another institution we should be proud of, boss?’ Gabriel asked.
‘In one. Personally, I find firebrands of any political persuasion about as welcome as a boil on the bum, as I think you know,’ he said, looking meaningfully at Christine, who chuckled. ‘But you take the rough with the smooth. Let them speak out. Keep them where we can see them, that’s my take on it.’
Gabriel sipped his champagne. The boss was wise. Gabriel had learned more from him than any man except Zhao Xi, his mentor and surrogate father growing up in Hong Kong. He pulled Eli closer and put his arm around her shoulders. He looked sideways at her and smiled.
In the stillness between two heartbeats, when the muscle deep in his chest was momentarily still, and his body existed only as a support system for the digit curled around the short curved length of steel, he fired.
He saw her head explode in a pink spray. Nodded once. Started thinking about extraction and exfiltration.
Eli jolted upright so fast she spilled her drink.
‘Oh, fuck!’ she shouted.
Gabriel stared at the TV screen. The coach had stopped moving. The horses were rearing in their harnesses, forelegs flailing empty air. The soundtrack was screams, shouts and the panicky voice of the BBC’s royal correspondent trying to be heard over the chaos. But it was the scene inside the carriage that held his attention.
The princess sprawled across her husband’s lap. The top of her head was gone. The dress, so recently a virginal white, was now besmirched, its bodice scarlet from throat to waist. Carty was screaming for help, his face spattered with stuff that resembled pink porridge. Two men were climbing into the carriage, one already stripping off his jacket and throwing it over the mess.
Gabriel swallowed, felt his vision closing in to a black pinpoint, and the scene before faded. He was lost to a memory so painful it still caused him to wake screaming in the night, drenched in sweat and trembling so violently Eli was unable to hold him still.
The beach.
Britta.
The shot from behind them.
Her head exploding.
Toppling, falling away from him.
The second shot, ripping into his shoulder.
The screaming.
He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them, gulped air down and drained his glass. Nobody had noticed. Everyone in the room was watching the pictures on the screen.
Gabriel looked at Don. The older man was bolt upright, staring intently at the screen, unaware that his wife was clutching his left arm. Gabriel knew what he was doing because, free now of the flashback’s grip, he was doing it himself. Analysing. Looking beyond the horror, the blood, looking into the picture. Searching for details.
The devastation to the princess’s head said large-calibre weapon. The choice of target said professional marksman. The bullet could be retrieved. It would be embedded in the coach’s bodywork or the road surface. Nobody else had been shot. This was no spree killer. This was an assassination.
A hit.
Don’s mobile had been ringing continuously since the moment the princess’s lifeless body had slid sideways across her stricken husband’s lap. As soon as one call ended, another began.
In thirty minutes he’d spoken to the heads of MI5, MI6, the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command and a civil servant working within 10 Downing Street.
While they waited for him to be free to brief them, Gabriel, Eli and Christine could only do what the rest of the country was doing, and stare at the TV.
As the gut-churning few seconds were replayed from angle after angle, commentators tried to offer words of comfort. Military experts were wheeled out to make pronouncements about the likely calibre and type of weapon used by the assassin. And journalists, particularly the men, made great play of using weapons terminology with which they clearly had only passing acquaintance.
‘What do you think, boss?’ Gabriel asked Don, after he’d ended his latest call.
Don stroked the side of his nose, making his distinctive ‘Hmm, mm-hmm’ as he formulated his reply.
‘We all receive a weekly briefing of the various unsavoury groups crawling around in the silt of the body politic,’ he said. ‘Rightists, leftists, Islamists, white supremacists, Irish republicans, anarchists. KOA pop up from time to time but they’re a fringe group. About thirty members, if memory serves.’
‘You saw the banner, boss,’ Eli protested.
‘Yes, I did. And that’s all I did see. A banner. Admittedly a very professional and lurid banner,’ he added. ‘But a few square metres of printed vinyl do not a terror group make.’
‘You going to defend their right to free speech?’ Gabriel asked.
‘Afraid so, Old Sport. I’m sorry, Eli, whoever put a sniper onto a tall building with a high-powered rifle, it wasn’t them. I’d stake my reputation on it.’
‘Well who, then?’
‘That’s rather the question, isn’t it?’
‘Anything for us?’
Don shook his head.
‘Five and Six are already squabbling for jurisdiction with Counter Terrorism and Special Branch. They’ve convened a COBRA committee so no doubt they’ll hash out a command structure. We, however, are not required.’
5
KGALAGADI TRANSFRONTIER PARK, BOTSWANA
Nick Acheson, colonel of the Parachute Regiment, and his men stood in the clearing to which Eustace, head still bandaged, had led them. As soon as he’d received the message from the Anti-Poaching Unit, Acheson had swung into action.
He’d called his oppo at the SAS in Hereford and asked for immediate assistance. Within half an hour the regiment’s unmarked, matte olive-green Hercules C-130K had taken off with Acheson and sixteen SAS members on board, heading for Botswana.
There being no convenient airport nearby, the SAS men and their guest parachuted in, steering their rectangular ram-air chutes in a tight formation so they landed within a quarter mile of each other in the bush. Along with the men and their kit, the Hercules had also dropped two specially adapted Land Rovers, each mounted with a pair of ferociously effective L7A2 General Purpose Machine Guns.
Under the command of a thirty-four-year-old captain sporting a piratical red beard, the eight SAS men, together with thirty members of the Botswana Defence Force, established a perimeter around the clearing.
The Landies were circling the clearing beyond the on-foot perimeter, bearing, in addition to the gunners, a driver and two more heavily armed fighters. Any poachers coming within range could expect to be either captured or killed without mercy.
Acheson looked down at a depression in the earth, its outline demarcated by animal footprints. The earth in the centre was stained a deeper re
d and scraped out somewhat. Beyond it, the skin-draped skeletons of the dead elephants looked like badly erected tents.
Eustace pointed at the vaguely man-shaped space.
‘I am sorry, Sir.’
Acheson shook his head.
‘And you didn’t find any remains at all?’
Eustace shook his head.
‘No, Sir. We searched, but human remains, they are easier to carry than elephant bones,’ he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the skeletonised elephant carcass. ‘That is why the elephant is still there. Lions, hyenas, leopards, jackals, plus all the birds of prey – they take away everything. Hyenas crack marrow bones. Strong jaws.’
A shout went up. Acheson turned towards the source. A SAS man came running with a set of identity discs.
‘Sir, I found these over by the trees. Caught on a thorn bush,’ he said as he handed them over.
Acheson took the proffered discs, still in the green rubber rings that prevented them from chinking together. He turned them over on his palm and learned he was holding possibly the only remaining evidence of Corporal Steven ‘Stevo’ Wallingham’s tour of duty in Botswana. He pocketed them and snapped the press stud closed.
‘Right, I want the whole area searched. We had three guys out here and there were two APU guys as well,’ he said. ‘If possible, I want two more ID discs for our lads and something to prove Moses and Virtue were here, too.’
The SAS man nodded and returned to his squad to brief them.
Over the next three and a half hours, the SAS and the Botswanan soldiers meticulously searched the clearing and a hundred-yard-diameter circle outside it. Sometimes they crouched to rake their fingertips through trampled undergrowth. Others stretched to pluck things free of the thorny branches of acacias. Eventually they retrieved a small trove of items that could be returned to base and matched to their deceased owners.
A battered, steel-cased Timex watch with a red, white and blue woven nylon strap; the property, according to its engraved back, of Moses Haunda.
The bullet-starred back-half of a human skull that would have to be sent to a DNA lab to establish its identity.
An elephant-hair bracelet consisting of several wiry black strands with a copper ring adjuster that Eustace recognised as belonging to Virtue.
A pitted and gouged femur, the ball-joint cracked off.
A second set of ID discs that had belonged to Private Stewart ‘Stewie’ Pearce-Edwards.
Several small scraps of camouflage fabric, on one of which remained the corner of a name tape bearing the letters RTER. Acheson made this deduction for himself: Private Robert Carter.
And a handful of small pieces of bone that might have been human, or animal, all of which, along with the skull and the femur, would be analysed for DNA.
Once Acheson was sure they had enough evidence to take away from the site of the massacre, he called a halt to proceedings and gathered the men around him in a wide semi-circle.
‘I want to thank you for coming here and helping to retrieve the remains of your brothers in arms, and the brave Botswana Defence Force men whom they were training,’ he said, looking at Eustace as he mentioned the man’s slaughtered colleagues. Eustace nodded back. ‘They were doing good here, combatting an illegal trade conducted by ruthless criminals. We will hold the paras’ funerals in England and although I am sure you men,’ he nodded at the SAS contingent, ‘need to be going, I will stay for the funerals here.’
Eustace touched the colonel on the arm.
‘Excuse me, Colonel. Please may I say some words?’
‘Of course, please go ahead,’ Acheson replied.
Eustace smiled and half-turned so he was facing the semi-circle of tired men, their faces coated in a greasy mixture of sweat and red dust.
‘Moses and Virtue were my friends. We went to school together,’ he began. ‘Rob and Stewie and Stevo came to help us, thanks to the kindness and friendship of Colonel Acheson. They were my friends too, and friends to Botswana and our elephants. Please, I would like us to pray for them.’
In front of him, the troopers and soldiers bowed their heads and clasped their hands in varying attitudes of prayer. Acheson followed suit, listening as the Botswanan’s mellifluous voice soothed his burning soul, just for a minute or two.
‘Heavenly Father. Please, we beg you, shepherd into Heaven the souls of our dear friends Moses Haunda, Virtue Jonathan, Stevo Wallingham, Rob Carter and Stewie Pearce-Edwards,’ he intoned. ‘Let them always have clear water to drink, sweet honey and tender meat to eat, and the sun on their backs. Send them our love and our gratitude for laying down their lives. Tell them we will find their killers and avenge their deaths with great wrath. Amen.’
The chorus of amens floated upwards into the African sky. Acheson added a silent prayer of his own: ‘Let me be successful in finding those bastards, Lord. Amen.’
6
LONDON
Smiling beneath the skilfully applied makeup, and sweating lightly under the TV lights, Joe Tammerlane waited to be introduced by Becca Price, Wake Up, Britain!’s glamorous host.
Beneath his immaculately tailored suit, he could feel his heart thrumming with anticipation. Not anxiety, instead a heightened sense of reality. He looked at her while tuning out her excitable gabble and smiling that famous smile. He could see the downy hairs on her upper lip. The weave of the multicoloured threads in her skirt. A tremulous flutter of the skin on the side of her neck where the veins ran.
He sensed his moment was approaching. The moment when everything would change. He tuned back in.
‘Our next guest is a man who, until recently, was mainly of interest to the political commentators,’ she was saying. ‘Then, on that tragic day last week, when the nation was celebrating the latest royal wedding, he tackled the terrorist who killed poor Princess Alexandra. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Joe Tammerlane.’
The studio audience burst into what sounded to Tammerlane like genuinely spontaneous applause. A couple of the men whistled loudly, and he could see one older woman dabbing her eyes with a tissue.
He lowered the volume on his smile and composed his features into a suitably sober expression, part-acknowledgement of his unbidden heroism, part-sadness that he hadn’t been able to act in time to save the princess.
Becca turned to him. He caught the hiss as her nylon-clad legs rubbed together.
‘Joe Tammerlane. You killed the man who had just assassinated Princess Alexandra and might well have gone on to murder Thad Carty. How did you do it?’
‘Can I just say, Becca, before I answer your question, that as leader of Freedom and Fairness, I want your viewers to know that I stand with them in mourning this beautiful young woman.’
Becca nodded her head, furrowing her brow.
‘Of course. I think we all do.’
‘I know I have been vilified by parts of the mainstream media for my views on the monarchy, but at the end of the day, what we saw was the senseless murder of a young woman on her wedding day.’
‘And how did you stop her killer?’ she prompted.
‘Actually, purely by accident. I was supposed to be in the congregation as a party leader, but my train was delayed. I hoped I could reach the castle quicker by using the back roads and that’s how I happened to be running past the old fire station.’
‘And you saw the shooter?’
‘I did. I don’t know why, but I looked up as I ran past and I saw what I instantly recognised as a gun barrel sticking out of the top floor.’
‘Most people would call the police. What made you decide to tackle him yourself?’
He ran a hand over his hair and shrugged.
‘Honestly? I don’t know. I guess sometimes you just act without weighing up the risks to your own safety. I ran for the tower and started climbing.’
‘What was the scene when you reached the floor where the gunman was? We know he’d already killed a police markswoman, Sarah Furey.’
He
swallowed before speaking, glancing out at the studio audience and finding the eyes of the crying woman. She nodded at him and he offered a small, sympathetic smile in return.
‘I heard the shot as I was on the final flight of steps. I think I knew, deep down, who the target was. There was all that hate speech from far right terror groups. I knew it would be the princess, or her husband.’
‘Was there a struggle?’
He nodded.
‘He was leaning over the parapet, looking through binoculars. I honestly think he was so wrapped up in what he’d just done he didn’t hear me. I saw a pistol tucked into the back of his waistband and I just grabbed it.’
‘Then what happened? Is that when he hit you?’
Tammerlane fingered the wound on his cheekbone and winced. He’d asked the makeup artist to leave it visible.
‘We both had our hands on the gun, and for a moment he gained the upper hand. He sort of jerked it at my face and the barrel caught me. But I managed to get it off him and somehow, instinct I guess, I pointed it at him and pulled the trigger.’
Throughout his recounting of the story, he’d paid close attention to her body language and facial expression. Behind the professional ‘concerned’ face he detected nothing that suggested even a shred of doubt. Good. That’s as it should be.
‘And you were arrested, is that right?’
‘Not quite. I called the emergency services once I realised he was dead and the police asked me, as was their duty, to go with them to Windsor police station to be interviewed.’
‘Were you offered a lawyer?’
‘I was, again, as was perfectly proper for them to do. I declined.’
‘Why?’
‘Why?’ he repeated, smiling. ‘I hadn’t done anything wrong. I didn’t see the need. If you’ll forgive me for referring to a plank of my party’s policy, unlike the old fashioned socialists in Labour and their innate distrust of the state law enforcement agencies, we are totally behind them. I always say, old-school socialists are anti-police, right up to the moment their house in Islington gets burgled.’
