by Andy McNab
39
‘TOM MUST HAVE taken quite a shine to you, my dear,’ his mother had said to Delphine, as she passed the vegetables that evening. ‘He has never brought any of his girlfriends home before. You must be a good influence on him. We’re still hoping he’ll come to his senses one day, settle down and take over the estate, or at least find a more suitable job. With his father’s contacts in the City—’ She broke off as she became aware of Tom glowering at her. ‘Yes, I’m talking about you, darling,’ she said. ‘I was just saying that you could have had your pick of jobs and professions.’
‘This is ancient history, Mother.’ Tom gave Delphine a look that said he’d known bringing her was a mistake. ‘Do we really have to cover this ground every time I visit? I’m a soldier, and I do it not because I’m forced to or because my parents want me to –’ his wide eyes challenged her ‘– but because I want to. I like to fight. Why don't people understand? It’s just as valid a profession as medicine or the law. I’m afraid you need to get used to it.’
‘Profession?’ She focused on Tom so completely it was as if no one else was in the room. ‘It’s not a profession.’ She changed her tone to one of concern. ‘Tom, you kill people.’
‘When it’s necessary. But, Mother, I’m not a psychopath. I don’t kill people for kicks. Surely you understand that.’
She shrugged as if she did, but that it was beside the point. Her tone went back to disappointed. ‘If you really needed to join the army, you could have taken a commission. But look at you, you’re not even an officer.’ She gave a brittle smile, as if it had been meant as a joke, but Delphine had heard the edge in her voice.
‘I’m not an officer because I don’t want to be an officer. I’m happy where I am.’
Tom had been a disappointment to his parents; Delphine understood that now. They’d placed a silver spoon in his mouth when he was born, he’d told her. The spoon the family’s great-great-great-grandfather had taken from the Duke of Wellington’s field dining-table the night after his victory at Waterloo. The spoon all Buckinghams had sucked ever since. Tom had been the first to spit it out.
She discovered that Tom’s two younger brothers had kept firmly on the family’s pre-ordained trajectory. One was still at Eton, the other up at Oxford. Both had stunning futures ahead of them; that was the way their parents had mapped things out. Tom knew that they wouldn’t have much choice in the matter.
‘Mother, I keep explaining to you that I like my life as it is. Why can’t you understand that, and be happy?’
She had no words to give back because she wasn’t happy. It was as if Tom had deliberately joined the army as a squaddie to spite her.
He looked like he knew where this was going so just moved onto the next part of the drama that they played out every time he came home. No wonder he never brought any women back.
Tom’s father studied his glass of claret as if he was looking for the ray of light that touched the spirit in the bottom. He obviously knew it was time to keep quiet and his head down.
Not only had Tom disappointed his parents by joining the army as a squaddie, he’d told Delphine in the pub one night, he’d joined the Rifles, an infantry regiment. He was consigning himself, in his father’s view, to a lifetime of wet, cold and hunger. His parents couldn’t even hide their regret at his passing-out parade. When mothers from housing estates in Leeds, Manchester, London and Glasgow had cried as they’d watched their little boys turn into young men, Tom’s mother had joined in. But hers, he had told Delphine, were tears of sorrow. Where had she gone so wrong? Tom had had everything. Why settle for less than the best he could be? Why waste his life playing soldiers?
He sat there as his mother continued to look as if she was sucking a particularly sour lemon. Delphine read Tom’s expression. Should he try to explain to her yet again, it said, and to his father, who shared the same disappointment but let his wife do the talking? He’d told Delphine he’d been saying exactly the same thing for the past twelve years. Even when he’d passed Selection there had been no message of congratulation. They still couldn’t understand his lack of ambition. Why waste his time in the trenches? People with his privileged upbringing had much better things to do.
‘Mother, everyone I know in Hereford is there on merit, not because their father was something in the City or their mother owns half of Worcestershire. I like that.’
His mother leaned over the table towards him, her face full of compassion. ‘But, darling, we worry about you keeping safe. We were worried sick at the state of you.’ She reached out and gently touched his scar.
‘Mother, I got that at a Fight Night in Hereford. Nothing to do with my work.’
She took a breath, frustration perhaps getting the better of her as she tried to find the words that would show Delphine she was a good mother. But Tom was too quick for her. ‘Mother, everything is fine. Sometimes, when the adrenalin’s pumping, you don’t really notice it. It’s OK, really it is. People tend to be more frightened of the idea of fighting, in Afghanistan or on a Fight Night, than of the reality. It’s just that you don’t know about things like that, and there’s no reason why you should.
‘In a few years I might start doing something even you can approve of, but this is my life for now, and though I don’t expect you to like or understand it, I do expect you to respect my decision.’
There was a long silence while Tom’s mother stared at him, as if she were trying to understand why her son had become such a stranger to her.
Delphine broke the silence. ‘I understand.’
Tom let that sink in before his hand reached out to hers. ‘Thank you.’
What she didn’t say was that to her the conversation could just as easily have been about Tom having an undesirable lover. She was French, after all, not British all the way back to Alfred the Great like his mother had probably always planned. She now understood Tom better than ever. She loved him; probably had from the first week they had met. She also respected him, but she now knew more than ever that he had a powerful and seductive mistress with whom, if this relationship ever came to anything, she would be competing.
Tom’s mother turned back to Delphine, trying hard to hide her anger and sadness. Her expression said that she had lost her son; she’d known it would happen one day, but wished it had been to an English rose of her choosing.
‘I’m sorry, my dear.’ She made an effort to widen her smile. ‘How rude we are, monopolizing the conversation with domestic chit-chat when we have a guest at our table. Now, do tell me all about yourself. You come from Nice, I believe? Such a beautiful city. We were there ourselves just a couple of months ago, staying at the Negresco. My grandmother used to winter there.’
As Delphine started to talk about her home and her family, she tried to ignore Tom, who was visible over his mother’s shoulder. He was miming being hanged, with his head on one side and his tongue lolling out of his mouth.
His father, meanwhile, had been tasting the wine, pouring a little into his glass, sniffing its bouquet, then sipping it and rolling it appreciatively around his mouth. As he looked up, he followed Delphine’s gaze and rapped the base of his glass on the table. ‘Tom, for God’s sake, stop playing the fool. If you want something useful to do, you can pour Delphine a glass of this wine.
‘It’s a burgundy,’ he said to Delphine, as Tom filled her glass and she sipped. ‘As I always say, France for the wine, Italy for the coffee—’
‘Ukraine for the prostitutes?’ Tom interrupted.
His father almost choked on his wine.
‘What?’
‘Sorry, Mother.’ Tom had a mischievous gleam in his eye that had probably always spelled trouble. ‘If I were an officer I wouldn’t be making jokes like that, now would I?’
Delphine spluttered into her glass as Tom’s father turned an even more impressive shade of puce.
‘No, you would not!’
‘I mean, if I were an officer, I would have said Mayfair.’
4
0
CLEMENTS WAS OUT of his civil-service power suit and in his weekend casuals: beige slacks and a blue V-neck. He’d been standing in the queue in the Pimlico branch of Marks & Spencer, the same place he’d bought his off-duty uniform, when he got the call.
He hadn’t liked the way the cashier had looked at him as she rang up his items: a pasta meal for one, a small salad, an individual chocolate pudding, and a bottle of passable claret. The look she gave him, hovering somewhere between sympathy and downright pity, made him feel as if he was wearing a badge on his chest reading: ‘Sad loser who lives alone. No wife, no friends.’ How was it, he asked himself, for the thousandth time in his life, that he could be so confident, so decisive, so abrasive, even around the most powerful politicians and civil-service mandarins, yet became so flustered and self-conscious when confronted by any mildly attractive woman, even a check-out operator in a supermarket?
He kept his eyes on the card-reader as he paid the bill, anxious to avoid eye contact, and it was almost a relief when his phone buzzed and he stepped away from the till to answer it.
‘Where? . . . How long ago? . . . All right, I’m on my way.’ He snatched his carrier bag, his confidence returned now. He took a cab home instead of doing the ten-minute walk. He needed to put a suit back on and dress the way he was born to.
Clements was almost excited at the thought of confronting the home secretary. Laszlo should have been killed in Hampstead, and for reasons she didn’t need to know. While she had been at her red-brick university, probably studying philosophy and dreaming of a Brave New World, Clements had been trying to keep the present one from collapsing.
He felt pretty damned superior right now; even more so than usual. He gave the taxi driver a three-pound tip after he’d been dropped at his modest Westminster flat near Horseferry Magistrates’ Court. Clements and his kind remained the backbone of this country, and this Laszlo débâcle was yet another example of why the home secretary should have listened to his advice without him having to give her all the ins and outs.
If she stopped deluding herself that she ran the Home Office, Laszlo would now be dead – and dead people couldn’t talk. By now the French might very well have captured him, and if so he would appear before the ICC – and then this government of bright new things would be begging for Clements’s help. Which, of course, as a public servant, he would give freely.
As he placed his key in the Yale lock, he couldn’t help smiling in anticipation of the meeting ahead.
41
USING THE STOLEN master-key, Laszlo had moved directly from the toilet and let himself into the employees’ break room at the end of Coach Eight. Out of sight, he had helped himself to a cup of coffee and a couple of biscuits while he waited for the train to enter the tunnel. His mobile beeped with a text. He put down his cup.
they know you are on the train. exit now
Even without looking out of the window, Laszlo knew from the angle of the floor and the whoosh as they ran through a deep cutting that the Eurostar had reached the outskirts of Folkestone and was about to plunge beneath the Channel. His fingers flew across the keypad as he texted a reply.
Impossible
He waited a few seconds for the confirmation that the message had been sent, then switched to a new SIM card. He rebooted his phone, made a call and reverted to Russian. ‘I’ve been flagged.’
There was a momentary pause while Sambor digested the information. ‘OK. Where are you now?’
‘About to enter the tunnel.’
‘Keep safe, brother. We’re on our way.’
42
SAMBOR PUT HIS van into gear and signalled to pull out into the queue of traffic waiting to drive onto the UK-bound HGV Shuttle.
Two identical white vans pulled out behind him. On the far side of the tracks beyond the steel chain-link fence that divided the north- and southbound lines, he could see the sign greeting arrivals: ‘Bienvenue à Coquelles, Pas-de-Calais’. As he approached the Eurotunnel barriers, a British Customs officer stepped in front of the van and signalled to him to pull out of the queue into an inspection area. As he did so, the two white vans behind him followed suit.
Sambor cut the engine and got out. He still had hair and lots of it, dark brown and thick. His chest and shoulders were covered with a tatty black leather jacket. Over one shoulder he wore a battered nylon ‘desert tan’ Blackhawk Special Forces-issue grab bag. They were essentially padded laptop bags, but after some great marketing they were now an essential part of any soldier’s kit. They’d become all the rage with the military since the Afghan war.
There was something damaged about Sambor, and it ran deeper than a face that wasn’t as good-looking, after years of conflict, as it had once been. A nose broken in some long-ago brawl and never reset gave him an even more intimidating air than he’d had when he was younger. Even now, without a beard, he was still a monster – which was why he was always picked out in any security check. Normally he had to be hidden from the real world, but today exposure was needed.
The Customs officer walked to the back of the van and gestured to the doors. ‘Open up, please.’
Stone-faced, Sambor strolled after him and unlocked the doors. As he swung one of them open, he seized the collar of the Customs officer’s jacket, lifted and hurled him into the back. The unfortunate man crash-landed on the floor, and the colour drained from his face as he looked up at a dozen heavily armed men lining the benches on each side of him.
They all wore the same look of morbid curiosity as one of their number looped a wire garrotte over his head and jerked it tight. Fingers scrabbling in vain at his throat, thrashing and struggling, as his heels drummed a tattoo on the ridged metal beneath him, he was dead in less than a minute.
As he breathed his last, another of the insurgents rifled his pockets and stole his security card. He handed it to Sambor, who calmly closed the rear doors again and, with a nod to the two drivers behind him, got back into the cab and drove off.
The other Customs officers continued to work around them; none had noticed the disappearance of their colleague, and no one moved to halt the small convoy as it drove out of the inspection area.
So what if they had? Sambor thought. This was a rolling start-line: the fight had begun the moment they had got into the back of the wagons. These men had fought alongside Laszlo and Sambor for many, many years. To them, Laszlo was not a war criminal: he was an honourable man, a hero, a leader to whom they wanted to demonstrate their loyalty as payback for the guilt they could never escape. The only thing that was going to stop them was a round through the head.
Sambor stopped again at an automatic barrier at the far side of the security zone and used the dead officer’s card to access the service road that led to the tracks on the southbound side. The three vans climbed the ramp and came to a halt on the bridge above the track.
Each van was packed with at least a dozen men, armed with a mixture of automatic rifles and light machine-guns for when the situation went noisy; suppressed sub-machine-guns until it did; grenades and a variety of ropes, NVGs (night vision goggles) and fire-fighters’ oxygen sets attached by bungee cords to 50cm-wide, old-school, plain wooden skateboards with plastic wheels and braces.
They were prepared physically and mentally for war. They’d all had at least nine lives, and had the burns, the dents, the bullet holes and the knife wounds to prove it. They waited, not caring about the gathering police presence. If you didn’t fear dying, you didn’t fear anything or anyone.
An HGV Shuttle approached on the tracks below them, beginning to accelerate as it pulled away from the platforms. One by one the insurgents climbed onto the parapet and, keeping clear of the power cables, they jumped. Each landed with a thud on the roof of the container cage and rolled to break his fall. A few seconds after the last was safely in position, the Shuttle, still accelerating, careered into the mouth of the tunnel.
The abrupt transition from cold, autumnal air to the warm, humid atmosphere in the tun
nel caused a layer of condensation to form immediately on the skin of the wagons. Blown back by the rush of air from the slipstream, the spray lashed Sambor and his men, stinging their eyes.
Temporarily blinded, one rubbed at his face, and in doing so moved his arm and the weapon he carried too close to the power lines. There was a blinding blue flash and a whiff of ozone as the high-voltage current arced across the gap and fried him in an instant. His smouldering body tumbled from the roof of his container, smashed against the concrete wall and rebounded into the side of the cage before dropping to the ground alongside the tracks.
The train was now building up speed. Though he and his men were still hanging onto the top of the cages, Sambor showed no emotion as he counted down the seconds on his watch, then shouted back at his team.
At once, two men extracted cans of kerosene from their backpacks and began pouring it through the thick metal latticework onto the cab of the truck it housed. One popped a distress flare and dropped it into the spreading kerosene. It ignited at once. Thick grey smoke began belching through the bars and was whipped away by the slipstream.
Within seconds sensors in the Shuttle and the tunnel wall detected the heat and smoke. Warning signals flashed to the Eurostar control centre, lighting up the digital control board and deafening the staff with the clamour of alarms as the sprinkler system kicked in.
The chef de trains took no more than a moment to reach the decision to stop all traffic, close both lines and dispatch the fire trucks at the Calais emergency response depot into the service tunnel that ran between the north- and southbound tracks. The fire that had shut down the complex for weeks had been four years ago now, but its memory was still fresh. If this proved to be a false alarm or a fault in the sensors, a few hundred passengers would suffer no worse inconvenience than a short delay. If it was a genuine blaze, every passing second of inactivity only increased the risk of a catastrophe.
