Street Soldier

by Andy McNab

  The man wore a sports jacket with an open collar. Not what he had been wearing the last time they met, but what the hell.

  ‘These . . . individuals,’ said Franklin, ‘are from MI5. They have asked specifically to meet you.’

  He pushed back his chair and went to stand beside Adams, feet apart, arms crossed. The two civvies took the two seats opposite Sean. Adams closed the door again but remained standing.

  And Sean’s stomach heaved as he looked at the man. He wanted to throw up his guts over the table. This was a million times worse than getting nicked. The last time he had seen this guy, this MI5 spook, he had seemed so . . . harmless.

  ‘Hello again, Private,’ the man said. ‘A couple of weeks ago we met in a farmyard and you gave me a package full of illicit unfired ammunition. The package had your fingerprints and DNA all over the outside. Both of these are of course on the National Criminal Database due to your past. And I have just visually ID’d you – so I hope it’s fairly clear that any kind of denial will get you nowhere. So why not tell us about these missing rifles?’

  Chapter 24

  ‘He’s in shock,’ said the spook woman when Sean hadn’t spoken for a few seconds.

  The fact was, he couldn’t speak. His mouth was desert dry.

  ‘Take as much time as you need, Private.’ She looked up at Franklin. ‘There’s no need for you or the sergeant to remain.’

  It was a clear dismissal. Adams didn’t budge, merely glanced at the lieutenant. Franklin’s crossed arms might have crossed a little more tightly. ‘That’s kind of you, but we’ll stay.’

  Her mouth tightened. ‘It wasn’t a request.’

  ‘Then I have nothing to decline.’

  ‘I could make it an order.’

  ‘You could. And if it came to me via a superior officer who you could actually persuade to order me to abandon one of my men, I would have no choice but to obey.’

  Oh, go on, just piss off! Sean thought bitterly. He didn’t want any more witnesses to his humiliation than strictly necessary. Least of all Adams.

  Because he was screwed, and he knew it. If he had thought a few months in prison were bad, what would he get now?

  And it was his fault. Totally, utterly his own stupid fault. He could have walked when he found out the truth, but no. He’d stayed.

  You stupid, stupid idiot, Harker. You’ve done this to yourself.

  The woman dismissed the point with a slight nod, and turned her attention back to Sean, one eyebrow raised a little as she waited for him to speak.

  ‘I . . . I . . . I don’t know anything,’ he said. He could hear how pathetic the bluster sounded, but then he remembered the one thing he had left. Yeah, he thought fiercely. Pride. I’m not just a crook. I was doing this to protect people. Where were you when Clarky got slotted?

  The man spook folded his fingers together and regarded Sean over the top of them. ‘If we wanted to arrest you, Private, we wouldn’t be bothering with this talk. As I said, your prints were on the outside of the package. That means you had nothing to do with wrapping the goods. The fingerprints inside belong to one Joshua Heaton, now a corporal in your unit, sent down when he was a teenager, five years ago, for breaking and entering, also with a record of aggravated assault and inciting racial hatred.’

  Sean fought to keep his face impassive as a chill spread down his spine. Heaton had only admitted to one of those three crimes.

  ‘When we met, you were driving a Daewoo Matiz with fake plates, but the colour and model match a car previously registered to one Mrs Daphne Heaton of Leyton. Corporal Heaton’s mother. Do you see how things are falling into place?’

  Sean forced his breathing to steady. ‘Why aren’t you asking Corporal Heaton all this?’ he said.

  The man’s gaze was unblinking. ‘Because we’re asking you.’

  Still Sean kept quiet. He hadn’t lied when he told Heaton he’d never grassed, and he wasn’t going to start now.

  ‘You’re a loyal friend, Private Harker. Do you think Corporal Heaton will repay this loyalty? That he’ll go down without dragging you with him?’

  ‘Of course, he’s been a good friend to you too, hasn’t he?’ the woman said softly. ‘He’s shown you the time of your life. He’s given you tasters – just tasters – of a life you could never afford on your salary. Cool gear. Fast car. Nice digs. Did you enjoy your night with the girl?’

  Shit – how long had these people been watching him? She had exactly described what happened. Had they even had a camera in Heaton’s spare room?

  ‘You already know so much,’ he said bitterly, ‘you don’t need me to tell you anything.’

  ‘We didn’t know.’

  Sean frowned, despite himself. ‘Then how—?’

  ‘The word is “grooming”, Private. It’s not just something paedophiles do on social media. And yours is a textbook case.’

  Sean snorted. ‘That’s bollocks. OK, yeah, I stayed over at Corporal Heaton’s, and there was a girl. She was his girlfriend’s mate and I was invited along for company.’

  ‘His girlfriend’s mate,’ the man repeated with a faint smile. ‘So the corporal has a girlfriend. Talks about her all the time, I bet. Sees her every weekend. Never off the phone to her. Tell me, is there a single picture of her anywhere in his flat? Anywhere at all?’

  It had never occurred to Sean to check, but now the man mentioned it . . . No. He couldn’t remember a photo anywhere.

  ‘We have access to his phone records, you know. I can confirm that the only woman he has dialled on a private number in the last month was his mother. However, a week before you and I first met, he dialled an escort agency in Andover that specializes in . . . well, escorts with added duties. We’ve checked their rates, and the amount that appears on his credit card after that call matches what would be needed for a double hiring.’

  Sean didn’t blink, but it was hitting him like a very slow thump in the guts – one that just kept on coming. Oh. My. God.

  Groomed.

  The . . . bastard!

  Heaton had even asked which one was Debs. Sean had assumed it was a joke . . .

  Sean would kill him. Sean would walk out of this room right now and actually kill him. He felt sick.

  And he knew his mask had slipped. The hate that churned inside him right now was impossible to put a blank face on, and they had clocked it. He had as good as confessed, without saying a word.

  ‘I . . .’ He had to force his dry mouth to say the words. ‘I think I need a lawyer.’

  The woman spook winced as if he had farted in polite company. ‘I really don’t think you do. A lawyer will force us to do this by the book, which will inevitably end in your conviction and imprisonment in a place where you’ll have quite a reputation as the man who helped supply terrorists with weapons.’

  Sean shot her a sharp glance when she said ‘terrorists’, but he kept quiet and she kept going.

  ‘Not one I’d like myself, but there you go. It will be something to keep you warm and happy for the next thirty years.’

  ‘Whereas,’ the man contributed, ‘doing without the lawyer and cooperating with us, using the skills and training you already have as a soldier will possibly – possibly – mean no prison at all.’

  Sean dragged his eyes away from him for a moment, stared at the wall, the ceiling, out of the window. He couldn’t run. So it was either get a lawyer or work against Heaton. Of course, he didn’t actually have the money for a lawyer. But would that matter?

  He glared at them from under his brows, but it was merely a mask to disguise the feeling of all hope draining away. Whatever happened, he wasn’t going to leave this room a free man. Face it, they knew about the rifles; they weren’t going to let that go.

  He switched his gaze to the floor. ‘It . . . it wasn’t to supply terrorists,’ he muttered. That was the one shred of comfort he could hold onto. And maybe a good brief in court could get him less than thirty years if he stuck to it.

  ‘And of all th
e lies Corporal Heaton has told you, that’s the one true thing, is it?’

  Sean stared at him. ‘Yes. Course it’s true. He’s a serving soldier, for fucksake! What would he be doing with terrorists?’

  ‘Just tell us where the rifles are, Private.’

  The final shreds of Sean’s pride crept away to die. ‘He said the client had collected them,’ he muttered, still looking at the floor. He was now officially grassing, and he couldn’t find a single toss to give. ‘I can tell you where they were. If that helps.’

  ‘Go on.’

  And so Sean described how the op had gone down: the observation, switching rifles with dummies, hiding them under the bush. The spooks remained expressionless while he spilled. Sean didn’t dare turn his head to meet the glare coming from Adams. He could feel it frying the side of his face.

  ‘Quite the criminal mastermind, is Corporal Heaton,’ the man murmured when he had finished.

  ‘So . . . you going to pull him in?’ Sean asked hopefully.

  But the spook just looked at his watch. ‘Any more and we’ll be over-running.’

  The woman looked at her own watch and concurred. Then back at Sean. ‘The sole reason for this entire charade, Private Harker, all the interviewing-the-platoon claptrap, was to let us spend time with you alone. There was no other way we could do that on base without being observed. And if we spend any more time now, the others will start to wonder why your interview is taking so long. So here is what you will do – and remember, you are still cooperating. This evening you will find a reason to go into town. You will tell your friends you are calling a taxi. You will leave the base at precisely nineteen hundred hours . . .’

  The gatehouse was still festooned with warning tape, somewhere between the end of demolition and the start of rebuilding. It had double the number of armed guards, and a hand-operated traffic barrier. Sean stepped through the pedestrian barrier, and out of the camp, dead on 19:00.

  Oh, arsing hell, be on time, don’t make me have to talk to people . . .

  The excuse had been easy – his mum’s birthday was coming up, shit, he was always forgetting . . . He had done his bit. Now they just had to do theirs.

  At 19:00 and ten seconds a hybrid Prius swished up, with the name of a taxi firm displayed by a light on the roof. The driver wore a flat cap and a casual pea jacket. ‘Ride for name of Harker?’ he called, not to Sean but to the guards, in an accent that was pure Wiltshire.

  The guards merely indicated where Sean waited, in civvies, hunched up and trying to be invisible to anyone who might want a friendly chat. Like any muckers who suddenly thought it was a good idea to share a ride into town.

  Sean trotted over to the taxi and climbed in the back. The driver eased the car away from the kerb to head into town. Sean hadn’t been in an electric car before, and even now he took time to think that it sucked. At slow speeds the Prius ran off its battery and barely made a sound.

  ‘Hello, Private.’ The voice was now accentless – as posh as it had been before. The man didn’t turn round, but their eyes met briefly in the rear-view mirror, before he looked back at the road to concentrate on steering.

  ‘Where we going?’ Sean asked.

  The driver signalled to turn onto the main road. The engine cut in as the car picked up speed. ‘To carry on where we left off,’ he said.

  The last instruction the spooks had given Franklin was to issue Sean with duties that kept him well away from Heaton for the rest of the day. Which unfortunately meant that Sean had to work under Adams’s gaze instead. To everyone else, Adams was his usual self – an affable tower of integrity and discipline. But Sean was aware that whenever the sergeant’s eyes rested on him, they were dark and blank, and he was definitely excluded from the banter.

  The feeling of isolation continued in the taxi. Apart from the opening words when he’d got in, the spook said nothing.

  They headed along back roads into Andover, where they pulled up in a small car park beneath some trees, next to a much more respectable Audi saloon. The other driver’s window whirred down as they drew up. The woman spook behind the wheel gave Sean a cool nod. The man spook twisted round in his seat so that he could see both of them, and pressed buttons to make the taxi’s passenger side windows slide down. Now the three of them could have a conversation.

  ‘First,’ the woman said, as though the intervening hours hadn’t happened and they were just continuing where they had left off, ‘let us tell you why we’re not immediately picking up Corporal Heaton. If all we wanted was to clamp down on his operation, we could do it in five minutes. But Heaton has the same flaw as most criminal masterminds, which is that he actually isn’t one. He’ll sell to anyone. He sold to us, and that is how we found you. But there is an even bigger fish who we suspect is Heaton’s main customer. This individual plus the equipment provided by Heaton could lead to big, big trouble. That’s who we’re looking to stop – and if we shut Heaton down, our man will just go somewhere else for the goods.’

  The man opened up the glove compartment and slid a photo out of a folder, which he passed to Sean. Sean glanced down, and there was Rich. The shot must have been captured by a hidden camera. He was looking off to one side with no idea he was being snapped, and there was a blurred crowd all around him.

  They looked at him expectantly.

  ‘Yeah, calls himself Rich,’ Sean said. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘His name is unimportant,’ the woman told him, ‘and if you knew it, there’s a danger you would inadvertently use it in his or Heaton’s hearing. Rich will do. And just in case you continue to harbour delusions that he is some harmless eccentric with a few right-wing views – we have every reason to believe he is involved in a group that has been carrying out a number of terrorist strikes over the last few years that are made to look like IS.’

  Sean frowned, thinking back to his first impression of Rich. A wealthy tosser with wealthy friends, but surely all talk, no action – or so he’d thought. Just one more way he had been taken in by their sick act.

  ‘How do you do that?’

  ‘Oh, it’s surprisingly easy. First, you need your genuine event. Say, a car bomb, an honour killing – it doesn’t even need to happen, just to be discovered. Next, for every genuine IS supporter there are ten kids whose commitment to jihad extends as far as tweeting Death to the West and then getting on with their GCSE revision. They’re very easy to frame. Documents are planted, fake computer trails are laid right up to their doorstep, links are forged with genuine IS individuals who are safely out of the country and beyond our reach, and who aren’t going to deny it because the publicity is too precious. Presto – a previously undiscovered terrorist cell. Imagine what that does for public confidence.’

  ‘But if you know this—’ Sean began.

  ‘Most of the time we can catch it,’ the woman agreed. ‘But it only takes one or two to slip through – and even if we manage to spot the faked evidence, the fact is, these genuine events are happening and the public is taking notice. The cumulative effect is the same. A climate of fear is created.’

  ‘At first,’ the man said, ‘Rich faked evidence for events that were nothing to do with him. A house fire that killed the head teacher of a school run jointly by the local church and the local mosque, the brakes failing on a minibus carrying protesters to an anti-war parade – these were genuine accidents that had nothing to do with IS, but he successfully planted the idea in the minds of the media that there was more to them.’

  ‘At first?’ Sean repeated nervously. So the guy was a shit, but he hadn’t hurt anyone. But if that was ‘at first’ . . .

  `Then he went further and started causing the incidents himself. So far, we believe we can link Rich to a car bomb planted – and discovered – in a vehicle belonging to a prominent human rights lawyer exiled from Syria. A gun attack on a man and a woman who had committed the crime of living together without being married. One lived, the other did not – a note pinned to the body said that they had been bre
aking holy law.’

  Sean felt himself begin to shudder as the list went on. He’d thought the guy was just a harmless tosser – but he was an actual psycho.

  ‘Incendiary devices placed in a couple of restaurants, one of which caused deaths. A suicide bombing aimed at a school – thankfully the bomb went off too soon. Do you see the pattern?’

  Sean clenched his fists to stop the shaking.

  ‘He’s getting worse,’ he said heavily.

  ‘Much worse. Of course, this is all a lot for one man to handle, which is why he delegates jobs to his subordinates. Like the attack on the camp that killed Private Clark.’

  Sean sat up sharply. ‘That’s bollocks! Those were soldiers who died! He’s a wanker, but he’s pro-Brit! Why’d he want to hit our own soldiers? Why’d he want to hit Clarky?’

  ‘She’ – the woman held up one finger – ‘was black’ – a second finger. ‘That’s two reasons someone like Rich would say she had no place in the British Army. But as we say, he delegates. Can you think of anyone else who had a problem with Clark’s gender and race?’

  Sean could. For a moment, as the one inevitable name came to mind, it seemed like the whole world stopped and ice ran through his veins. Then: ‘No. No!’ He began to shake his head, pushing himself back in his seat as though they were offering him Clark’s dead, charred head to hold. ‘No! No fucking way! Heaton? No!’

  ‘I told you we had access to his phone records,’ the man said quietly, not blinking, not taking his eyes off Sean’s. ‘He was on his phone seconds before the attack. He dialled a number for a cheap pay-as-you-go handset. The connection was made and immediately went dead, simultaneously with the explosion. As I’m sure you’re aware, bombs can be detonated by phone – you just use a handset as the power source for the detonator. And as I’m sure you’re also aware, Corporal Heaton is very proficient with electronics.’

  ‘No!’ Sean gasped. If he had been shocked when they told him how he had been set up with Rachel, now he just wanted to hurl.

  ‘So you see, Private,’ said the woman, ‘terrorists aren’t all Middle Easterners cutting off heads and radicalizing our teenagers. They come in all shapes and sizes. Back to Rich. Perhaps he spun you a story about using those rifles for defence. Perhaps, in his own head, it is defence – of the way of life he thinks we should all have. However, they will end up being used on innocent civilians whose only crime is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.’