Recovering Commando Box Set

by Finn Óg

  To the extreme left another twosome was running red hot headed for a large, warm vehicle.

  If he strained, he could just about make out the tiniest heat signature on the water about a mile from shore. There I am, he reckoned, huddling deeper into the hull, hoping to chill himself further.

  All the hotspots were now in vehicles, gone. What the hell is going on, he wondered?

  The first the opso knew something was wrong was when two unidentified men in polo shirts and chinos came to take him away.

  He wanted to ask where they were going but he knew “Not far,” was the only likely response, so he stayed silent and appraised the men: no firearms, no weapons of any kind, fit, mature, confident.

  He was invited to take a back seat in a black Mercedes Vito van with electric sliding doors. One of the polo shirts climbed in beside him and they journeyed for two full minutes to the Loughside compound. MI5 Headquarters – why?

  The opso was brought into a pleasant enough holding room not far from the door. The tables were the same as in any office but there were no screens and no phones. He sat for a long while until a man in red trousers and an expensive shirt padded in. He was early sixties, the opso reckoned, overconfident and immediately loathsome.

  “We need to share some information,” he began.

  “Do we now?” said the opso, every chip of his Birkenhead accent spitting sarcasm.

  “I have information about Libby and you have information I require.”

  “Oh?” said the opso, suppressing his alarm.

  “We need to know who Libby went to meet.”

  “When?”

  “After you and she met, against regulation, I might add, at the military police holding centre.”

  “Who she went to meet?” The opso attempted to find out how much this man knew.

  “Don’t fucking fuck with me, you Scouse scumbag!” the man suddenly exploded. He drove back his chair and stood roaring at the opso. “Answer every question I ask and I shall tell you what has happened Libby!”

  The opso had been through it many times with condescending seniors. It no longer riled him as it once had.

  “I suggest you sit your flabby arsehole down,” said the opso, “or you will leave with nuthin’, and I will be in exactly the same position I was in when I arrived.”

  The superior leaned over the opso and with gritted teeth said, “Who was Libby on her way to meet, and why?”

  “Well, if you don’t know that, you need a better operations officer. Did you not place her under surveillance? You look like you’ve been sittin’ at a desk too long pushin’ pencils, podge mate.”

  The superior couldn’t contain his anger. “Of course we monitored her!”

  “Then what are you askin’ me—?” the opso began but stopped. The man was asking because she hadn’t arrived.

  “She worked for me. I need to know what she was working on.”

  But the two men were now on different tracks.

  “What’s happened?” the opso’s calm had deserted him. “Where is she?”

  “Tell me where she was going and why. Then I shall give you the information we have.”

  “The information we have? The information we have? Has she disappeared or wha’?”

  “Who was she going to meet?”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean no?”

  “You tell me what happened, then we might talk. But, no, I’m not talking till then.”

  “You are in a very precarious position. You are looking at a serious stretch – a prison term, loss of career, loss of status. I can help.”

  “You’ll never help the likes of me – I’m too convenient for you. You’ll blame me for letting that bloody bomb sit when it was probably you who wanted it that way. If you’re Libby’s boss, then you’re to blame, so you’re not going to help me in any way at all.” The opso was stubborn in his resignation. He had no doubt of his fate, he had nothing to lose, nothing to win.

  The superior stared hard at him. “Did Libby know who was taking out the X-rays?”

  The opso simply smiled back at the superior, who took the smirk as it was intended.

  “Was she going to meet their killer?”

  The opso said nothing.

  “What agency did the killer work for?”

  The opso actually snorted at that. “You know absolutely nuthin’, do ye? And you’re meant to be the intelligence wing.”

  “Why was he killing the dissidents?” The superior sounded more and more desperate.

  The opso leaned forward at his desk and whispered at his soft-shoed interrogator. “You think I just came up the Mersey in a bubble? Fuck you. Fuck the games you play. Fuck the agency you work for. And fuck your pompous bloody attitude.”

  The superior stood up. This line of inquiry was closed. “Libby’s dead,” he said, and left the room.

  Sam debated whether to bring the heli back to the boat. Would that tell the DET where he was operating from? Were the DET still monitoring the copse at all? He couldn’t work out what was going on. They appeared to have left – but why? Had the heli’s presence spooked them? Had they decided to put their own drone into action instead?

  His time was up and he triggered the Hornet’s return to its cradle. If the DET was deploying an aerial platform, he had a tight window to get out of there. He glanced at the monitor to make sure there was enough juice in the battery to make the flight when he noticed two more heat signatures on the edge of the forest. Sam tapped the device back into manual and slipped under the tarpaulin again, willing his body temperature down and huddling into the hull once more. Had the ops returned?

  The two bodies muddled slowly as if in conversation as they walked. Sam looked at the monitor – 5 a.m., no time for a morning stroll. Could it be?

  His hopes rose a little when the pair reached the copse, stopped and began gesticulating towards one another. Sam could just make out the first daylight through a crack in the tarpaulin, so he sent the heli a little closer to take a look. The bodies were handing things between themselves, not fighting – more of an exchange.

  Sam went as close as he dared, turning the heli’s tail to the rising sun. There was no doubting it, Sam was looking at Mr and Mrs Gillen in the dawn.

  He hit the repatriate button, urging the little bird back to its perch as fast as possible.

  The superior hadn’t got what he wanted from the opso, but he wasn’t sure it mattered. He looked at the internal base CCTV from north DET and noted Libby’s interaction with three technical staff. He could interrogate them, for sure, but with Libby now dead was there any need for further personal exposure? He did, after all, still have his most important asset in the dissident group.

  He couldn’t afford anyone else finding whatever Libby had found. If she had discovered information that could exonerate the opso, that wouldn’t do at all. The superior had chosen his fall guy and that was that.

  The CCTV footage showed Libby spending four hours in one wing of the building. Whatever she’d found in there had to be destroyed. The superior decided to follow old tracks. He lifted his phone and placed an order for an extremely hot accidental fire in the old building at north DET.

  Sam struggled to rub heat into his hands to get the lunch box secured. The deliberately tied granny knots, careful that no forensics could suggest the involvement of a sailor.

  The device looked simple enough in its rudimentary circuitry. It came with its own phone, its own battery and even appeared watertight. The trick was to get it lifted into place.

  Sam switched helicopters for the one with the fuller battery life and attached the thin rope from it to the food takeaway box. Then he sat back and thumbed the joystick to engage the blades, pushing it further and further, but all the little device could manage was a low hover. He swore. One gust of wind between the boat and the copse ashore could land the whole thing in the lough. He would have to deploy both helicopters, one of which was short on power. The other danger was that they could
easily be drawn together by the weight of the weapon, their blades meshing and plucking the whole device out of the sky.

  He lashed a second fixing to the device, praying that a dead man in Donegal had known what he was doing with explosives and electronics. Then he switched the remote panel to dual control and tried to fly the helis separately but simultaneously, about two feet apart. Up the device went, dangling precariously between two machines that hadn’t been designed to carry anything. Still, they flew, drawing horribly close together on occasion, until Sam could see them no more except through the display on his remote.

  They covered the mile stretch of water in less than a minute and Sam opted to let them down as soon as he saw grass. He knew he couldn’t be far from the Gillens, but he had no idea what the range of the device was – assuming it worked at all.

  Then he watched as a boot appeared and for the second time the heli was lifted and stared at. Gillen, straight down the barrel, with his wife in the background.

  Sam fumbled for the phone as the heli was dropped and the boot flashed into frame before it crushed the expensive little article. He dialled the only number on the Nokia, held it to his ear but didn’t hear it ring. Instead he heard an explosion – a beautiful and satisfying detonation – like a bale of bricks being dropped from a crane on a construction site.

  He flipped the tarpaulin and stared at the shore. There were no flames; there was no movement.

  Loud bangs before 6 a.m. were unusual and Sam couldn’t afford an inspection. He ripped the cord of the outboard, hauled in his anchor and headed for where he’d abandoned his van. As he motored, he smashed the Nokia and the heli remote to pieces with the anchor and bit by bit deposited them into the lough at intervals.

  The Donegal man had known what he was doing, Sam thought, taking a certain pleasure from the fact that the bomb makers’ own phones had been the ones used to target the man who had commissioned the devices. The wiring had been straightforward in the end – the tables in the feed shed had provided a tutorial of sorts. Sam settled on a job hopefully complete, and an unconfirmed kill.

  It wasn’t the colonel who called the superior, it was the director of special forces. He wasn’t amused.

  “So, to be clear,” he began, “you have embroiled my staff in a series of incomparable fuck-ups, you have requested the deployment of various special reconnaissance units – for which you really ought to have accounted to the chief constable, by the way, you have then, for reasons unknown, chosen to monitor those units while deployed, only to have your own staff and assets neutralised. Does that about sum it up?”

  The superior sighed. “That is indeed how it may look, major general, but I am honestly as baffled as you are as to what, or who, was watching the whole thing. The drone in question was not mine.”

  “Six? Are we to believe that MI6 is watching MI5?”

  “Maybe the Irish—” floundered the superior.

  “Let’s not turn a debacle into a pantomime. The Irish would have no interest, let alone capacity, to conduct such activity. I think you ought to put your house in order.”

  “Understood,” was all the superior could think to say.

  “Gillen,” said the general, “I assume he was of value and that his death in some twisted way contributed to you burning down a military building?”

  The superior grunted. He would never acknowledge such a statement.

  “Well, so long as the wife survives – clinging on, I understand – you will have your work cut out for you. I trust, given what we now know, that you shall not endeavour to implicate us in this sordid affair?”

  “No, major general.”

  “Oh-kay, then,” he said, chipper and assured. “I very much hope never to speak to you again.”

  The phone was cradled. The superior reached for a bottle and a glass.

  Sam drove sensibly; speed could draw unwanted attention. Nonetheless, he was desperate to see Isla now that the job was done. He surfed the radio stations as he went, but all he could get was a headline on a bulletin that may or may not relate to him.

  “A man has died and a woman’s been injured in an incident in the Craigavon area. The woman was transferred to Belfast’s Royal Victoria Hospital where she is believed to be in a critical condition. There are no further details.”

  If that’s them, I’ll settle for that, thought Sam, until a different commotion grabbed his attention. On the road ahead, normally a narrow passageway to the boatyard and a few coastal walks, was a stream of police incident tape. He drew into the side of the road and walked to the cordon. A uniformed policewoman complete with flak jacket approached him.

  “Road’s closed, I’m afraid, sir. You’ll have to turn around.”

  “But I live down there,” he said. “What’s happened?”

  He could see blood on the road in front, a forensic tent and two scenes-of-crime bods crouching in white telly-tubby suits with blue feet and hands.

  “We weren’t aware of any dwellings on this road, sir?”

  “I live on a boat, just down there. At a pontoon.”

  “Do you have any other means of approaching it?” The young officer looked a little confused.

  “Not unless I swim.”

  “Wait there, please,” she said, thumbing the transmitter on the mic at her lapel. As she turned a black people carrier pulled up and a close-cropped suit emerged from the passenger seat.

  Not good, thought Sam, as he noted the circular pin on his lapel, which told those in the know that he was armed. He was light on his feet and acted like he owned the place. He marched past Sam and lifted the tape, flipping open a wallet and showing it to the cop whose eyes opened in surprise. The suit turned quickly to glance at Sam, giving him a curious coating. Looking at the cop, he nodded his head towards Sam.

  “Local resident,” she explained.

  The suit carried on and paused to peer at the blood on the road, then he walked over to have a chat with the SOCOs.

  The cop returned. “You’ll have to make the rest of the way on foot, sir, I’m afraid.”

  “What happened?”

  “Road traffic accident,” she said.

  “Then why is it being treated like a crime scene, and why are there intelligence personnel here?”

  “I can’t give you any information, I’m sorry, sir.”

  Sam knew by the man’s mannerisms that this was a background bloke, a fixer, a tidier-upper. He was accustomed to obedience and had probably seen messy situations before. His self-assuredness brought with it the air of command.

  Sam turned to robocop. “Look, I’m a local. Has someone from this area been killed?”

  “I really can’t—”

  “You can tell me if local people are involved, surely?”

  “Ok, sir, if you leave now and reverse your van to a convenient place off the road, I can confirm that nobody local has been injured or involved in any way.”

  Which, for Sam, was more worrying. He immediately prepared for the worst, running through the possibilities. If the spooks are here, it’s likely because whoever is dead was coming to meet me. If someone not local is dead, and the spooks are interested, it’s most likely to be the opso because he’s the only one who knows I’m here. Why would someone kill the opso? Would he not have seen someone following him? Maybe they were here to whack me and needed the opso to identify me – to lead them to me?

  Maybe, maybe, maybe. But it felt plausible. Maybe they were waiting for him on the boat, but unlikely. They’d have assumed the opso was en route to a discreet meet, in a remote location, wouldn’t they? Maybe they don’t even know about the boat. Unless …

  “There wasn’t a child here, was there?” he spurted in panic.

  “Sir, you need to turn back.”

  “I have a daughter. Was there a child involved?”

  “No, sir.”

  “How about a woman from Dublin – Sinead?”

  “Sinead what?”

  Sam’s heart sank. Why would Sinead have co
me back without Isla? He’d been out of touch for a few days. Was everything ok with Isla? “Is it a woman with black hair, tall?”

  “I can’t confirm the gender of anyone involved, sir.”

  “Can you tell me if a woman was involved?”

  “If there was a woman involved, what would be your relationship to her?” the cop inquired, inscrutable.

  Sam’s head reeled. “She’s … my girlfriend.”

  The cop held up a palm and turned away again to speak into the radio. Sam strained to hear what she was saying but it was muffled and the response was delivered directly into the cop’s ear.

  She turned back. “What colour of hair and eyes does your girlfriend have?”

  “Black, and greeny-brown.”

  The cop walked to the scenes-of-crime officers but addressed the spook, who turned to appraise Sam once more before looking away. It took too long for her to return to the cordon.

  “Sir, I can tell you that nobody involved here had that eye colour or black hair.”

  “And nobody from Dublin?”

  “Sir, I am not able to—”

  “Do you know if there was anyone from Dublin?”

  “No, sir, we don’t believe there was anyone from Dublin. Now you really must—”

  “I’m away. Thank you. Thanks.”

  Sam left as directed, then parked up in an old farm laneway and waited. He gave it a while then walked to the shore and swam to the boat, listening by the hull for any movement inside. After fifteen minutes of freezing his nuts off, he was satisfied there was nobody aboard and climbed the bathing ladder.

  Inside, he found his phone and called Sinead, but Sinead knew who he’d want to hear.