Silent Weapon

by Andy McNab

  Sean just nodded in the direction of the anomaly.

  Until then, he had only seen the top of the guy’s head. Now he was walking through a small gap in the crowd. Sean caught a glimpse of a black hoodie over a wiry body. The guy was wearing a small backpack.

  Adams had once been in the gangs, and the instinct was still in him. He put into words what Sean was feeling.

  ‘Everyone’s gathered around to watch and he’s strolling casually away.’

  ‘People can just walk, Sergeant.’

  ‘Sure they can, but that isn’t just walking. It’s proceeding.’

  And Sean noticed another thing. No cooler box, but still …

  ‘He’s the same size and shape as Ste …’ he said.

  Chapter 31

  Friday 4 August, 05:15 BST

  Adams came alert like a cat spotting something small crawling across the room.

  ‘You say? So where’s he been hiding all this time? Not his flat.’

  ‘He’s lost the cooler box,’ Sean said after thinking for a moment. He had last seen Ste five hours ago. That was plenty of time to get well away from the estate, so something had kept him here. ‘Maybe he had to package up the contents in a special way for that rucksack. Then sterilize wherever he went. Get rid of forensics.’

  ‘Get orders, communicate with his muckers …’ Adams continued the line of thought. ‘Or just plain wait for an opportunity when everyone was distracted … Maybe someone should ask him …’

  They both shot a look at the ranks of police and emergency services, and read each other’s mind.

  ‘We’re nearer,’ Sean said.

  ‘He’ll just get away if we take our eyes off to report him.’

  ‘And he’ll just run the moment he thinks someone’s on to him.’

  ‘Looks like it’s you and me, Fusilier.’

  They casually climbed to their feet. No one in the emergency services clocked them, and Mitra was still arguing with the ambulance guys.

  They drifted towards the edge of the square.

  ‘Just try not to cough on anyone,’ Adams said.

  ‘Permission to cough on the suspect, Sergeant?’

  ‘If he’s our man, Fusilier, you have my permission to French-kiss him.’

  The suspect was heading away from West Square and towards the low-level apartments.

  They let him keep about thirty metres ahead as they walked down what was officially a ‘boulevard’ – a wide concrete alleyway with flowerbeds down the middle and split-level maisonettes on either side.

  They slowly stepped up their speed – until Adams suddenly put a hand across Sean’s chest to slow him down a little. He gestured at the ground, and Sean saw what had almost given them away. The streetlights were still on, and they cast faint shadows that were almost long enough to overtake the walker. If Ste looked down, he’d know he was being followed. At the moment he seemed to have no idea they were there: he still had his hood up, and – never mind how cool it looks in Jedi Academy – doing that cuts off fifty per cent of your peripheral vision. Sean had learned that at a very early age, and still had the scar just above his hairline to prove it.

  Adams held up his hand, all his fingers extended. Then he started to count down from five. Sean clenched his fists and raised himself onto the tips of his toes, ready to spring forward when the count reached zero. They would close the space between themselves and the guy in a couple of seconds, and it would all be over before he could go for any kind of weapon.

  But as they reached three, the man was passing a side alley off the boulevard. He suddenly ducked left and pelted away.

  ‘Shit!’

  Without a break, the two were after him. There was no point pretending now. Their feet slapped on the concrete slabs. The guy risked a glance back, which was stupid of him. You can’t run at top speed if you’re looking backwards, and the action and the flow of air made his hood fall back. Sean recognized the profile – and the shiner. Yup, it was Ste.

  Who suddenly vanished altogether.

  ‘Bollocks!’ They skidded to a halt, and Sean made them backtrack a few paces. He had forgotten this. Every pair of units had a narrow pathway between them, the walls so tight that, walking along, his shoulders brushed against them. It was some Council Tax dodge to classify the apartments as semis rather than terraced, or something like that.

  The distant sound of running echoed back at them, and they could see Ste’s silhouette getting smaller and smaller ahead. He had a good lead, and they were both too well built to run at speed down a narrow gap like that.

  ‘Run down to the end,’ Sean ordered, gesturing to the side. ‘Turn left, take the third left again. The third.’

  Adams stared at him through the twilight, but then just bowed to local knowledge. ‘Understood.’ He ran off, twice as fast as before.

  Sean was already heading the other way.

  Sean and Adams and Ste were taking three different directions, but they were all now heading for the same point. Ste wouldn’t be able to run as fast down that passage as in the open, but he was running in a straight line to get there, while Adams and Sean had to run round three sides of a rectangle. So they needed that extra speed.

  The passage that Ste had taken cut across two more boulevards and ended at the third. In theory he could turn left or right into any of them. But Sean knew he wouldn’t. The first was decorated with flowerbeds in raised concrete squares that made it impossible to run down safely at speed. The second was currently being re-laid, so the concrete slabs were up and it was a lethal mix of cracked stone and sandy pits.

  So the third boulevard it was.

  Sean tore right into the west end of the third boulevard, just in time to catch the dark figure breaking for it in an easterly direction, and then skidding to a halt as Adams appeared at the far end. Ste turned, ran the other way, and saw Sean charging at him.

  For a moment he crouched, caught in indecision. It meant that he lost important seconds as they got closer. Then he fumbled at his waist below his hoodie. Sean and Adams both recognized the body language and stepped up their pace.

  He was tugging at something in his waistband and making jerking movements with his elbow. The gun tucked down inside his belt must have got caught – probably the front sight snagging on his trousers.

  Sean and Adams were metres away.

  Ste ripped the gun free, staggered, looked from one to the other, and must have thought Sean was marginally closer: that was the direction in which he pointed the gun.

  Sean’s vision zoomed in on the small black circle at the end of the barrel. He was too committed to feel fear or to swerve. It was do or die – an expression he had never really understood until now. The one thing he couldn’t do was duck aside or back off. And if Ste killed him – well, Adams would get him a second later, and Sean would be spared a long, slow, painful Lassa-fever death.

  He let out a roar – the yell they had all been taught in bayonet training. It gave you a psychological boost to spur you onwards, as well as making your enemy freeze and stop in their tracks – just before you jammed six inches of steel into their guts. Sean saw the gun flash in the shaking hand, heard the single shot, felt something pluck his right bicep with a light touch, somewhere between a red-hot poker and an icicle.

  And then Sean cannoned into Ste and they flew backwards, Sean’s arms locking them together, just in time for Adams to hit them from behind, equally hard. Ste, caught in the middle, let out a bellow of pain and crumpled. The gun hit the ground with a metal clatter. Adams dragged him up again to deliver a final knockout blow to his terrified face.

  They stared at each other, panting, bent over with hands on knees.

  Adams switched his gaze to Sean’s arm. ‘You’re hit.’

  ‘Yeah?’ He didn’t feel hit. He just felt that weird burning. He was still too high on adrenalin to care. He cocked his right arm to look at it, and winced. ‘OK …’

  It could have been a lot worse. The round had skimmed his skin,
just below the end of his short sleeve. There was a red, jagged gash that was slowly weeping fluid. It didn’t look much more than a graze, but he dimly knew that it was going to hurt, a lot.

  ‘Piece of piss.’ Adams straightened up and took Sean’s arm with a light touch that didn’t go with his words. He rotated it gently, examining it from all angles. ‘I’ve seen people more wounded by an unkind remark. Get a bandage on it and it’ll be fine. Don’t touch it – infection. Now, give me a hand? Let’s see what we have.’

  Between them they rolled Ste over – Sean’s arm was starting to throb now – and Adams released the backpack. He delved cautiously into it.

  ‘Feels cold …’ He pulled out a package. ‘Because …’

  It was a blood pack, strapped between a pair of freezer blocks with elastic bands.

  There were more. Adams counted them out one by one: ‘… four, five, six. How much blood do you think they squeezed out of the girls in the time available? Shit, no wonder Zara was feeling so crap. Even if they gave equal amounts and allowed for recovery, they would be down to five or six pints each. A lot more than an armful.’

  Sean was starting to feel more and more light-headed. Maybe some of it was down to the satisfaction of getting Ste. And adrenalin crash. And exhaustion. Fuck – how long was it now since he’d been able to just stop? And when was it going to end?

  Adams took it in at a glance. ‘Sit,’ he ordered, and Sean gratefully dropped down onto the ground, watching the plumes of smoke from Gladstone, picked out in streaks of pink and red and orange by the rising sun. It was close on dawn. Shit, where had the time gone?

  ‘I’m just the newcomer to this mission, Fusilier. You may have the pleasure of calling this in.’

  ‘Thanks, Sergeant. That’s Harker …’

  He gave it a few seconds, and tried again. ‘That’s Harker?’ He frowned, puzzled, at Adams.

  The sergeant shrugged. ‘Dave and Mitra have probably stood down. Radios all packed away. They think it’s all over.’

  ‘Lazy tossers.’

  Sean tried to reach for the phone in his right pocket, and found that his arm had seized up, though it still wasn’t doing anything more than weep a little. He reached across his body and clumsily pulled out his phone with his left hand. It was only then that he realized a text had come in without him noticing. He had been too busy with other things.

  bet ur still in bed lazybones i got

  2gether with shaz&jen&were at

  the shard now watching the sun

  come up over the city its beautiful

  ‘Glad for you, Mum.’

  He wondered whether he should call her, or just let her pick up the news. Shit, he’d have to call her. Once she knew what had been going on here, she’d be worried sick. And she didn’t deserve that. And when was he going to tell her – if ever – that he’d never come home for any kind of holiday? How about never?

  But he also had a job to do first. He dialled up Dave’s number and pressed CALL.

  Chapter 32

  Monday 28 August, 08:30 BST

  ‘Well, fuck me, look who it isn’t!’

  Ravi Mitra stood outside the briefing room, wearing military T-shirt and MTP trousers, like Sean. Shit, it felt good. After three weeks in the isolation ward, wearing civvies and watching wall-to-wall daytime fucking TV and eating food pushed at him through a little airlock, it had been like putting his skin back on. He had stopped off at barracks just long enough to kit up for the day, and then it was off to the briefing to rejoin the lads.

  Mitra winked. ‘Good to have you back, Stenders. So you’re all clear?’

  ‘Footloose and Lassa free,’ Sean said solemnly. ‘But the unprotected sex is still off, Kama Sutra.’

  ‘Well, shit. And I was saving myself and everything.’ Mitra pushed the door open. ‘Guess who?’

  The lads welcomed him back the only way they could. As Sean stood in the doorway, the platoon started coughing, very loudly and pointedly.

  He held up a finger from each hand to encompass the whole room. ‘And swivel!’ he shouted.

  Then he couldn’t suppress the grin any longer. He pulled back a chair and plonked his arse down next to Chewie West. They bumped knuckles, and then quickly came to attention as Lieutenant Franklin and Sergeant Adams entered the room, together with an officer Sean didn’t know.

  No one coughed for Adams, fresh out of the isolation unit next to Sean. No one would have dared, even if he wasn’t flanked by a pair of Ruperts. The glint in his eye challenged them to try it.

  ‘As you were.’ Franklin stood at ease at the front, and acknowledged Sean with a nod. ‘Welcome back, Fusilier.’

  ‘Good to be here, sir.’

  Franklin carried on addressing the rest of the room, giving them the sitrep on things Sean had only heard about second hand for the last three weeks. Well, there was no better way to catch up than to dive in at the deep end. For the first time since they had parted company in Lagos the platoon was together again—

  Except, of course, that it wasn’t. Sean’s mind was picking out the absences in the room. For all his good intentions, it was hard to concentrate. He’d had all that time in isolation to process it in his mind, but he had known that being back on base would bring it home.

  Shitey Bright was dead. Sean had missed his funeral.

  Joe Wolston was alive and still in Headley Court, according to the last report. Getting the help and healing he needed for mind and body – maybe coming back, maybe not. Still too soon to say. Still, Sean knew there were openings for disabled veterans. Quartermaster, and the like. He hoped Wolston would take one of them if the army decided on an honourable discharge. Or would it just be too painful for him, being surrounded by active soldiers but unable to be part of it?

  Maybe it would have been better for Wolston to call it quits when he got back from Afghanistan, Sean often thought, rather than put his head down and keep going, ending his career on a covert op of questionable success …

  In one respect, the op had succeeded – because the plot had failed. Sean had been told that the blood in Ste’s backpack, strapped to the freezer blocks, was the amount the experts calculated the girls could have given in the time available. So there was none still AWOL. No secret stashes of contaminated blood to be put into other volunteers.

  But in other respects …

  All Sean knew for sure was that the op had produced two dead civilian females and one live male. He had no idea if Ste was giving MI5 anything, and MI5 wouldn’t be telling Sean if he was. He knew that Ste would not be seeing the light of day for a long time, but there was still Fayez, and Jaz, and Omar, aka Clarkson, and the completely different pair of gunmen who had held up the air traffic controller and got the flight diverted to Southend.

  Whichever way you looked at it, the people behind Bright’s death – people who thought it would be a good idea to flood the country they lived in with a deadly tropical disease – were still at liberty.

  Had the operation produced int that could track them down? Sean knew he’d probably never know.

  He was glad it wasn’t the final marker on his own career.

  He suddenly realized that the other Rupert, the stranger – a captain – was speaking. Sean had missed the intro. He forced himself to pay attention just as the guy said:

  ‘… and so it is my job now to brief you on the basics of radicalization …’

  The fuck! Sean quickly wiped the look of dismay off his face, but he knew Adams had clocked it, even if no one else had. Their eyes met for a fraction of a second, and Sean sat up a little straighter. Maybe he would learn something. Before the operation started he’d had a quickie intro to radicalization from Dave; he’d had a lot of time to think about it since – and practical experience of all the theory the captain was handing out now. But there were still gaps. He still didn’t have an answer to the question he had put to Emma: How the fuck did you end up like this?

  ‘It is a mistake to think that religion will necessari
ly be a factor …’

  OK, so the captain was giving them what Sean had already got from Dave. He thought back to the plane. If he’d been told that there were two terrorists on board, then he might well have picked Okwute and someone like him. Not the girls. And even after Dave’s briefing, even after he had all the right info in his head, he’d still got it badly wrong with Emma. And nearly died as a result.

  Anyone would have said Emma and Zara had better prospects than the teenage car thief a couple of years older than them who lived in the flat opposite. Sean wondered what would have happened if whoever first got hold of them, whoever helped them take that tiny first step on the path, had got hold of him instead.

  He liked to think he would have told them to piss off. But would he have recognized that first small step for what it was?

  His old gang mates Copper and Matt hadn’t.

  Sean had been out of it, first in the YOI, then in the army, when they got radicalized. It had been by right wingers, white supremacists, not Muslims – but the starting conditions had been identical. Result: one dead, one in jail for a very long time, ringleaders still not caught. There were people out there recruiting for whatever cause, and somehow places like Littern Mills were feeding the demand for whoever wanted it.

  ‘So just remember this, gentlemen.’ The captain was winding up. ‘If anyone starts being simplistic about radicalization – if they say it’s all down to Muslims, or immigrants, or any one group that is slightly different from any other – ignore them. Newspapers, social media, politicians, even superior officers – ignore them. They’re wrong. Radicalization does not fit into neat pigeonholes. It is everywhere and it can strike anywhere. Be aware, and never be afraid to challenge it.’ A last smile. ‘I think I’ve engendered the right level of paranoia in your men, Lieutenant Franklin. Thank you for your time.’

  The room came to attention as he marched out, and Franklin took over with details of that afternoon’s exercise. Sean looked forward to putting his body through some hard paces again and not having to use his mind. Maybe one day he’d even get that holiday in Tenerife.