Carpenter came down from the threes with his bottle of Highland Spring. He ignored Shepherd and went to stand by the barred door.
'They know who did it?' asked Shepherd.
Barnes shook his head. 'It's in the Evening Standard. Stabbed in the chest and had his throat cut. Police are appealing for witnesses, blah, blah, blah.'
Shepherd frowned. Stabbed in the chest and a cut throat? It sounded like two assailants, but if it had been a mugging and there were two of them there'd have been no need for that degree of violence.
Amelia came out of the bubble and unlocked the door to the secure corridor. She checked the eight names of the men on the gym list, then escorted them down the secure corridor. Shepherd walked with Barnes, who wouldn't stop talking, but that was fine. Shepherd let the words wash over him. Carpenter brought up the rear of the group. Shepherd didn't turn to look at him but he could feel the man's eyes boring into his back.
As soon as they'd been checked in, Shepherd went over to a treadmill and started running. Carpenter appeared at his side and stabbed the stop button. Shepherd slowed to a halt. Carpenter leaned close to him. 'You heard what happened to Rathbone, yeah?'
'That was you?'
'What the fuck do you think? Time's running out, Shepherd. You get me out of here or your kid gets the same.'
Shepherd glared at Carpenter. 'It's in hand.'
'It'd better be,' said Carpenter. He jabbed at the treadmill's start button and walked away as Shepherd started running again.
Moira banged on the door with the flat of her hand. 'Moira, please,' said her husband. He was sitting on the floor with his back to the wall. 'You'll just annoy them.' Liam was sitting next to him, his head against his grandfather's shoulder.
'Liam needs food,' said Moira, 'and water. And we need to be able to use a toilet.' She glanced at the red plastic bucket and toilet roll in the far corner of the basement. 'We're not using that.' She banged on the door again. 'You out there! Come here!'
'Moira, they've got guns.'
She ignored him and continued to bang on the door. She stopped when she heard footsteps on the other side of the door.
'Now what?' said a muffled voice.
'We need food,' Moira shouted. 'My grandson's hungry.'
'I'm all right, Gran,' said Liam.
'Stand away from the door,' said the voice. Moira did as she was told and they heard the sound of bolts being drawn back. The door opened. Despite his mask she knew it was the man with the gleaming white teeth. She didn't understand why they were bothering to hide their faces because she'd seen them when they'd walked up the garden path with Tom. She didn't have the best memory for faces but she'd never forget those two men after what they'd done. They'd called her a bitch in her own house and waved a gun in her face, bundled them into the back of a van and made them pull hoods over their heads, terrorised young Liam and threatened to shoot them all if they didn't do as they were told.
'What do you want?' said the man.
'I want you to let us go, but I suppose that's out of the question, so I want food and something to drink, and I want to use the loo. A real loo, not that bucket.'
'We'll bring you food later.' He was holding his pistol and pointed it at the bucket. 'Use that or keep your fucking legs crossed.'
'How dare you speak to me like that?' said Moira.
The man pushed her in the chest. She gasped and staggered backwards.
'Don't you hit my gran!' shouted Liam. He rushed across the basement and kicked the man in the shins. The man lashed out with his foot and caught Liam in the groin. He screamed and fell to the concrete floor.
Tom pushed himself to his feet and walked over to the man, his hands bunching into fists. 'There's no need for that,' he said. 'Hitting women and children, you should be ashamed of yourself.'
The man raised the gun and slashed it across Tom's head. He grunted and dropped to his knees, then fell sideways next to the wall, blood trickling down his cheek.
Moira screamed and knelt down beside him. 'You've killed him!' Liam was crying, his knees drawn up to his chest.
'He's not dead!' yelled the man. 'But carry on the way you are and you fucking well will be. This isn't a fucking game. If I get a phone call telling me to put a bullet in your heads, then that's what I'll do. You are this close to being dead.'
Tom put a hand to his head and groaned. 'Thank God,' said Moira. She leaned over and held Liam's hand. 'It's okay, Liam. It's okay.'
The man bent down and poked her in the back with the gun. 'No, it's not okay. It's as far from okay as you can get. Now, shut up or I'll give you what I gave your fucking husband.' He jabbed her with the gun again, spat at her, then stamped out and bolted the door.
Tears ran down Moira's face as she comforted Liam. She stared at the door and, for the first time in her life, she wished another person dead.
Shepherd pulled on his yellow sash and joined the queue of prisoners waiting to go into the visiting room. The Welsh officer who'd originally escorted him from reception to the remand wing was patting down prisoners. Shepherd smelt garlic on the man's breath as he carried out the search. He figured that few prisoners would be trying to smuggle anything out of the prison, the contraband would all be coming in.
His visitor was already seated. He was a big man with a strong chin, wide shoulders and a nose that looked as if it had been broken at least once. He was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses and kept his head down as Shepherd walked to the table. He waited until Shepherd had sat down before he said anything. Then he leaned across the table so that his mouth was only a few inches away from Shepherd's ear. 'Fuck me, Spider, I always knew you'd come to a bad end, but I never thought you'd end up behind bars.'
'Thanks for coming, Major,' Shepherd murmured.
'Do you want to fill me in on what the hell you're doing in here?' said Gannon.
Shepherd looked around the visitors' room. One prison officer was at the far end of the room but he seemed more interested in two married couples who were kissing as if their lives depended on it. The Welsh guard was still patting down arrivals at the door. Keeping his voice low, Shepherd told Gannon everything. The robbery. The new assignment. Gerald Carpenter. Sue's death. And Liam's kidnapping.
Gannon listened in silence, his face tightening as he learned of Sue's accident, eyes hardening as Shepherd told him what had happened to his son. When he had finished, Gannon gave a soft whistle. 'You've packed a lot into the last few weeks,' he said. 'I'm sorry about Sue. No one told the Regiment.'
'No one outside my team knows. There won't even be a funeral until after this is all over.'
'And who knows about Liam?'
'You, me and Carpenter.'
'What is it you want, Spider?' asked Gannon.
'I want to get out of here.'
The SAS major nodded slowly. 'Consider it done,' he said.
Gannon slotted the slide cartridge into the projector while Martin O'Brien poured coffee from a pewter pot into five dainty cups. O'Brien was in his late thirties, broad-shouldered, and he'd put on a few pounds since he'd last served with the major. He was now doing close-protection work with World Bank executives, and two years of lunches in expensive restaurants and overnighters in five-star hotels had taken a toll on his waistline.
O'Brien handed cups of coffee to Geordie Mitchell and Billy Armstrong. Mitchell and Armstrong had left the Regiment a decade ago, but were still trim and fit. Mitchell ran ten kilometres a day with a rucksack filled with housebricks, and Armstrong swam two miles in the sea every morning. Mitchell was doing something shady out in the Far East, and Armstrong ran survival courses down in Cornwall. Mitchell sipped his coffee. He grimaced as it hit a bad tooth. He had a mouthful of crowns, half of them gold. Armstrong ran a hand through his receding hair and stretched out his long legs.
Gannon looked at his Rolex Submariner. Only one member of the group was absent but he wasn't surprised: Jimbo Shortt was a notoriously bad timekeeper. He knew more about tele-and radio com
munications than anyone else Gannon had met so he would be invaluable for what he had planned. All four knew Shepherd well and had agreed to drop everything when Gannon had told them of his predicament. Shortt had the furthest to come: he was teaching close-quarter combat techniques to Ukrainian SWAT teams but had promised to get on the next flight to the UK.
Armstrong drained his cup and stood up to help himself to more. Gannon knew the men would have preferred mugs, but room service in the hotel just off Piccadilly had supplied cups and saucers more suitable for a lady's knitting circle than a group of military men brought together for a tactical briefing.
'Two sugars in mine, Billy,' said Shortt, as he strode in. He was a stocky five feet nine with a sweeping Mexican moustache. He shook hands with Gannon. 'Sorry I'm late, boss. Traffic.'
Gannon smiled, but said nothing. Shortt always had an excuse, but considering that just twenty-four hours earlier he had been in the Ukraine, Gannon reckoned he had nothing to complain about.
Armstrong handed Shortt some coffee and the two men took their seats. Gannon dimmed the lights and switched on the projector. He hadn't bothered with a screen: the wall above the television set was pristine white. A satellite shot of four cross-shaped buildings surrounded by a wall came into focus as he fiddled with the lens. 'Her Majesty's Prison Shelton,' he said. 'Same design as the better-known Belmarsh in south London. You all know why we're here, and you all know what we've got to do, so there's no need for a sit-rep. The fact that you're all here means you're up for it, so I'm going to run through the operation from start to finish.'
'Who else is in on this?' asked Armstrong.
'Just you,' said Gannon. 'After this briefing I'll have no further involvement, not because I wouldn't give my eye-teeth to be with you but we can't afford to have any official connection to whatever happens. You guys are all--'
'Expendable?' said O'Brien, with a grin. He tore open a Mars bar and took a bite.
'No longer on the Regimental payroll, is what I was going to say, Martin. But, in your case, expendable will do.'
'I don't want to sound negative,' said Mitchell, 'but even I can count, and I make it four of us. That's one brick against a maximum security prison containing how many guards?'
'A full complement of a hundred and sixty during daytime hours. About fifty at night. But none are armed.'
Mitchell frowned apologetically. 'And again, without raining on anyone's parade, aren't these places designed to withstand pretty much anything?'
Gannon smiled. 'That's the whole point, Geordie. Prisons are designed to keep people in. And they make a bloody good job of it. But there's one thing they're not designed for, and that's what we're going to take advantage of.'
The four men exchanged confused looks, wondering what the major wanted them to do.
Gannon grinned. He pressed the switch in his hand and another slide flashed on to the wall: a photograph of the main entrance of the prison taken through a long lens. 'Now, if you ladies would allow me to continue with the briefing, I'll take questions later.'
The four men settled back in their chairs and listened as Gannon outlined what he wanted them to do.
Martin O'Brien and Geordie Mitchell arrived in Belfast on the afternoon ferry but they waited until it was dark before driving their green Range Rover out of the city and to the west on the M1. O'Brien drove slowly, then left the M1 at Lisburn, checked that he wasn't being followed and headed for Armagh.
The churchyard was exactly as he remembered it, bordered by a shoulder-high stone wall festooned with ivy, the grass well tended and the gravestones weathered by centuries of Irish wind and rain. There was a noticeboard at the entrance, detailing times of services and a phone number on which the priest could be reached, twenty-four hours a day. O'Brien smiled when he saw it was a mobile number: there was something amusing about a priest using new technology to keep in touch with his flock.
There was a half-moon overhead and a relatively clear sky: enough light to see by. O'Brien nodded at Mitchell and pushed open the wooden gate. It creaked like a rheumatic joint. The church was in darkness, the nearest house a hundred yards down the road. The two men had sat in the Range Rover for thirty minutes until they were satisfied that no one was in the vicinity, no late-night lovers or insomniac dog-walkers to stumble across them as they moved aside the two-hundred-year-old gravestone and dug into the hard earth with their spades.
They worked in silence and were both breathing heavily when they uncovered the first package. It was wrapped in polythene and O'Brien slowly peeled it back to reveal an oily cloth package. Inside he found a Chinese automatic pistol, with rust on the handgrips. He showed it to Mitchell, then put it aside and picked up a bigger package, almost three feet long, handed it to Mitchell and pulled out another. Both contained Hungarian 7.62mm AKM-63 automatic rifles, copies of the Soviet AK-47, with plastic socks and handgrips. 'These'll do,' said Mitchell. The weapons were serviceable but, more importantly, they looked the part.
O'Brien used his spade to lever more polythene-wrapped parcels out of the soil. One contained ammunition for the AKM-63s. Another contained half a dozen Second World War revolvers. He wouldn't want to risk live firing those.
The arms cache had been put together by the Real IRA in the late nineties. The organisation was poorly funded in comparison with the Provisionals and they had a tendency to buy whatever weaponry was offered to them. Most of the consignment buried in the graveyard had come from a Bosnian gangster, who had travelled from Sarajevo to Belfast to arrange the shipment. Special Branch had the man under surveillance from the moment he'd landed on British soil and MI6 had followed the shipment from a warehouse outside Sarajevo to a beach on the south coast of Ireland, from where it had been driven up to Belfast. Unbelievably, MI6 had lost the truck in Belfast and the consignment had vanished.
O'Brien had been working undercover in West Belfast and had penetrated a Real IRA cell that had been authorised to withdraw a number of weapons from the cache to use in a building-society robbery. He and three terrorists had removed several handguns. O'Brien hadn't passed on details of the cache to his handler. It had been a flagrant breach of procedure, but he had seen too many cock-ups to put his life on the line by revealing what he'd seen. If his bosses had decided to go in and neutralise the arms, it wouldn't have taken the Real IRA high command long to work out where the information had come from.
O'Brien was supposed to have driven the getaway car for the three robbers, but there'd been a change of plan at the last minute and he had been told that his services wouldn't be required. The raid had ended in disaster - not through action by the security services but a road accident. The replacement driver had gone through a red light on the way to the building society and a bus had side-swiped the car. The petrol tank had exploded and all four were killed. The following day the Real IRA executive who had organised the purchase of the arms had been assassinated by a Unionist death squad, and O'Brien realised that he was the only man left who knew the location of the arms. It was a secret he'd kept even after leaving the army. The only person he'd ever told was Gannon, and the major had recommended he kept the information to himself. Until now.
O'Brien unwrapped another package: a Polish Onyx short assault rifle with a folding stock and two curved thirty-round magazines. The gun was a copy of the Russian-made AKS-74U submachine-gun, capable of firing 725 rounds a minute. An excellent bit of kit. 'I'll have this,' he said.
Mitchell picked up a small package and opened it: a Polish Radom, a heavy 9mm pistol. 'Why would they buy this crap?' he asked.
'Beggars can't be choosers,' said O'Brien. He pulled apart another small package, and whistled softly. It was a brand new SIG-Sauer P-228, a compact Swiss pistol with a thirteen-round magazine.
'I'll have that,' said Mitchell, reaching for it.
'My arse you will,' said O'Brien. 'Finders keepers. Anyway, you and Billy are using the AKMs.'
They worked through the cache. The prize was at the bottom: a wooden box
the size of a small suitcase that had been wrapped in a dozen black rubbish bags. O'Brien grinned. 'Bullseye,' he said.
Jimbo Shortt paid off his black cab, then headed west along the King's Road, checking reflections in shop windows before crossing the street and heading back the way he'd come, checking for tails. When he was sure he wasn't being followed he crossed the road and headed for a black door between an antiques shop and a hairdresser's. To the right was a small brass plaque inscribed 'Alex Knight Security', a bell button and a speaker grille.
Shortt pressed the button and was buzzed in. He headed up a narrow flight of stairs. A striking brunette had the door at the top open for him. 'Jimbo, I didn't know you were in London,' she said, giving him a peck on the cheek.
'Flying visit, Sarah,' he said. 'Is he in?'
'Ready and waiting for you,' she said.
Alex Knight was sitting behind a pile of electronic equipment and a stack of manuals. The walls of his office were lined with metal shelving stacked with boxes and more manuals. There was a single chair on Shortt's side of the desk but it was piled high with unopened Federal Express packets.
'Can I interest you in a sat-phone scrambler, Jimbo?' asked Knight. 'State-of-the-art from Taiwan. I can do you a deal.'
'Not this time, Alex.'
Knight came round from behind his desk and several inches of bony wrist protruded from his dark blue blazer when he stuck out his hand to shake Shortt's. He was tall and gangly, with square-framed black spectacles perched high on his nose.
'So, what can I do you for?' he asked.
'Scanner that'll key me in to police frequencies,' said Shortt.
'Ask me something difficult,' said Knight. 'You can buy them at Argos.'
Shortt chuckled. The sort of equipment Knight sold was most definitely not available on the high street. 'This'll do the trick,' he said, pulling a box off a shelf and examining the label. It was a model he hadn't seen before. 'And I need a mobile-phone jammer. A biggie.'
'Illegal in this country, of course,' said Knight.
Hard Landing Page 33
