‘Yeah, but it’s a hell of a coincidence that they send someone to kill me now, a couple of days after I get back from Amsterdam. And just after Smit’s money has gone into my account.’
‘I’m not arguing with you. I’m just saying, we don’t know for sure.’
‘Well, with the greatest of respect, we need to find out PDQ because if it was the Russians who put out the contract on me, what’s to stop them sending someone else?’
Button nodded. ‘You’re right, I’ll put out some feelers.’
‘I’m serious, Charlie. I was lucky today. I might not be so lucky next time. I’m going to have to move out.’
‘No argument there,’ she said. ‘I’ll get something fixed up. Now, let’s think this through. If it is the Russians, they must know that there’s a plot to kill Putin. And they can’t have plucked your name from the ether. Assuming that they were sent to kill The Dane, that could only have been because they connected you to Smit.’
‘So if they know about Smit, presumably they also know about Max Jansen.’
‘In which case, the easiest way would be to take Jansen out of the picture. No client, no payment, no contract.’ Button wrinkled her nose. ‘That would be the simplest option, I suppose. Rather than taking out anyone who accepts the contract. That’d be a never-ending job.’
‘Maybe they know about Smit but don’t know who he’s acting for.’
‘You’re suggesting that MI5 knows something that the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service doesn’t?’ she said. ‘Unlikely.’
Shepherd knew that she was right. ‘I suppose it depends on how good their Dutch sources are.’
‘As I said, I’ll put out some feelers,’ said Button. ‘My worry is that if we ask the Russians too many questions, they’ll put two and two together.’
‘Maybe that’s no bad thing,’ said Shepherd. ‘If they don’t know already, maybe tipping them off means they’ll just cancel Putin’s visit.’
‘I think they would prefer it if the Dutch authorities put Smit away.’
‘In a Dutch prison? Aren’t they like hotels? Cable TV and weekends with the families?’
‘I’m not going to argue prison conditions with you,’ she said, standing up. ‘You’re going to have to leave this flat, obviously. Tonight. Anything you can’t carry we’ll have moved for you. The flat you used in Hampstead is still there and we’ve kept the John Whitehill, freelance journalist, legend up and running. Credit cards, driving licence, everything is still current.’
‘I’ll miss the river view,’ said Shepherd.
Button ignored his attempt at humour. ‘Now, what do you want to do protection-wise? I can put a team on you, if you want. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to my favourite officer.’
‘I bet you say that to all your people.’
Button smiled sweetly. ‘I do actually. But in your case, I mean it.’
‘I’ll be okay,’ said Shepherd. ‘Just find out what the hell is going on.’
Saturday night was cold and frosty. It was 3 a.m. when Zelda and Harper left their hotel in a green Mercedes SUV. They had ordered flasks of coffee and a dozen sandwiches from room service because there’d be no refreshments on offer at the firing range. Harper was happy enough to let Zelda drive. She and Hansfree had been busy over the previous forty-eight hours and had been able to provide Harper with almost everything he could possibly need. They had produced a mass of information about the range and its test-firing procedures, from the details of the unit carrying out the firing to the number and frequency of guard patrols around the perimeter of the range, and had even found out the name of the range’s safety officer. The two Billys and Maggie May had also been hard at work, travelling the chosen approach route, checking lines of sight from the observation post and following the various escape routes detailed in the BRIXMIS reports, in case Harper and the New IRA men were compromised as they observed the firing. Harper’s original plan had been to watch the firing from the road but with the information Zelda and Hansfree had come up with, he figured he could get the IRA men much closer to the action.
They picked up O’Brien and Walsh from their hotel. They were accompanied by a single bodyguard, a big man in a heavy overcoat and a fur hat with ear flaps on his head.
‘Who’s that?’ asked Harper, winding down his window.
‘Just one of the boys,’ said O’Brien.
‘Why’s he here?’
‘What’s the problem? There’s plenty of room.’
‘I’m not happy about dealing with people I don’t know,’ said Harper.
‘His name’s Joe and he’s part of my security team.’
‘Is he carrying?’
‘A gun? How would he get a gun?’
‘You won’t mind if I check for myself, then,’ said Harper. He climbed out and patted him down, paying particular attention to the man’s armpits and waist, then bending down and checking for an ankle holster. The man was clean.
‘Happy?’ asked O’Brien.
‘I am now, yes,’ said Harper. He got back into the front passenger seat while the three IRA men climbed into the back.
There was minimal conversation with O’Brien and Walsh as they drove south-west out of the city. They muttered among themselves and O’Brien responded to Harper’s occasional attempts to start a conversation with his customary monosyllables. About ninety minutes after they left the hotel, Zelda was driving along the autobahn a few miles west of Magdeburg, while Harper was reading a large-scale map and counting down the autobahn distance markers. On spotting what he was looking for, he told Zelda to turn off on to a barely discernible track down the embankment. They then drove very slowly and without lights along a series of dirt and grass tracks across heathland and through oak woodlands and scrub birch, avoiding any roads and circling around any signs of habitation. Occasionally when the track was too difficult to follow from the car, Harper got out and went ahead of the SUV, guiding it on foot.
Eventually he signalled to Zelda to stop in the middle of a small copse of silver birch trees and high-growing shrubs and heather. Harper made a careful check of the immediate area, then nodded to himself. Hansfree, Billy Big, Billy Whisper and Maggie May had done a very thorough job and found the perfect position, where the trees would give them cover from the air, and the surrounding shrubs would shield them from any prying eyes on the ground.
It was still dark outside. Harper grabbed a flashlight, left Zelda and the New IRA men in the vehicle and disappeared to make a thorough check of the surrounding area. He returned forty-five minutes later, got back into the SUV and quietly closed the door.
‘Well?’ O’Brien said, still limiting his conversation to words of one syllable.
Harper smiled. ‘All good,’ he said. ‘We’re a few hundred metres from the range firing point. There are a couple of sentries mooching about, but they’re not straying far from the cosy stove in their guardhouse and everywhere else looks pretty quiet. So, there’s nothing to be done until the firing starts in a couple of hours. I suggest that we all try to relax and get some rest.’
‘Relax? Rest?’ Walsh said. ‘How the hell are we expected to do that? We’re in the middle of a goddam German army base. If we’re spotted, we’re done.’
‘Your friend seems a little tense and overwhelmed by it all,’ Harper said to O’Brien, his voice affable. ‘Technically speaking,’ he went on, ‘we’re not actually in the middle of a goddam German army base, we’re seventy or eighty metres outside the perimeter fence of a firing range.’ He paused. ‘If that helps at all.’
Harper was dozing when he was jerked awake by a voice bellowing from a tannoy on the range. ‘Achtung! Achtung!’ Harper yawned and stretched, then glanced at his watch. It showed the time as six fifteen. The dawn light was beginning to strengthen and for the first time they could see what lay around them. To either side was heathland and scrub, punctuated by more scattered copses and clumps of trees. Although the view ahead of them was partly blocked by the trees and sh
rubs that were giving them cover, they could see that these thinned out rapidly. Beyond the perimeter fence, they gave way to a vast plain, criss-crossed with dirt tracks that were rutted by the tyre marks of heavy vehicles and the tracks of tanks. Shell craters also scarred the plains almost as far as the eye could see, each one marked by a corona of sandy soil flung out by the blast. There were smashed buildings and vehicles that had been used as targets, which stood gaunt and derelict at intervals, the ground around them scorched and blackened by fire.
Closer to them was the range firing point, with just behind it a massive concrete blockhouse. At a more respectful distance there was a cluster of other low concrete buildings, including the guardhouse where two sentries stood huddled against the cold, stamping their feet and blowing on their hands. Behind the guardhouse there was a tall concrete observation tower, rising five storeys high, like the lift shaft of some never-built apartment block. A rough wooden building, like a birdwatchers’ hide, had been erected on top, presumably to give the watchers some shelter from the elements.
Harper turned to survey the three men in the back seat. Pale and unshaven, none of them was a pretty sight. ‘I’ve got some coffee and sandwiches,’ he told them, opening his bag and passing one of the flasks into the back. ‘We’ve got three quarters of an hour before the test firing, which is scheduled for seven o’clock. If you need to stretch your legs or take a piss, now is your moment, but stay close to the car out of sight and don’t slam the doors as you get in or out, or we’ll have half the Bundeswehr round our ears before you can say a Hail Mary.’
He passed Zelda a coffee, poured himself one and demolished a cheese sandwich in three bites. ‘Zelda,’ he said, as the metallic voice began echoing from the tannoy again, ‘translate everything they’re saying, will you, so that we can all keep up with the commentary?’
When he’d finished his coffee, Harper asked Zelda to open the sunroof on the vehicle. ‘Is it not cold enough already, without that?’ O’Brien said.
Harper shrugged. ‘We’ll get a much better view of the rocket being launched if we sit on the roof. We’ll not all fit but there’ll be room enough for me and you.’ He clambered out through the sunroof and O’Brien followed him. He sat down gingerly on the roof and almost fell off it in shock as he raised his gaze and saw how close they were to the Bundeswehr troops preparing the range for the test firing. Harper heard the click of the door as Walsh got out of the car and stood next to it, peering through the bushes towards the range.
Harper and O’Brien watched intently as the Germans prepared to fire the rocket. Harper was just as interested as the Irishman. He’d fired off plenty of RPGs and Milan missiles in his time, and had even seen the impact of Katyushas at close to first hand, but he’d never actually seen one launched before.
They saw a couple of Bundeswehr soldiers using a mechanical sweeper to brush the firing point clear of litter and debris from previous firings. An officer strutted out to inspect the area then gave a curt nod, and heavy, armoured steel blast walls began to rise out of the concrete, raised hydraulically around the firing point to shield the watchers from the ferocious blast of the rocket’s thruster as it ignited.
A strange-looking hybrid vehicle then emerged from a concrete shelter at the far end of the range buildings and was driven slowly towards the firing point.
‘That’s a Stalin’s organ,’ Harper whispered to O’Brien. ‘A BM-21 Grad rocket launcher on a Ural-375 six by six chassis. Just imagine them raining down on the Square Mile of the City of London instead.’
O’Brien’s face creased into a smile and he moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue, like a snake tasting the air, looking for prey.
‘Best of all,’ Harper added, revelling in his role as weapons super salesman, ‘as you saw in the demonstration that Zelda laid on at Finsterwalde, you don’t need a launch vehicle to fire them, just a battery, a control box and a launch ramp that you can even improvise from a length of metal gutter or a couple of steel rails.’
As the BM-21 approached the concrete firing position, a second truck came into view, following close behind the first and carrying what Harper and O’Brien could clearly see was a Katyusha rocket, painted in disruptive pattern camouflage, but otherwise identical to the one they had seen at Finsterwalde airbase. After much to-ing and fro-ing amid clouds of diesel smoke and bellowed orders reverberating from the tannoy, the launch vehicle was finally reversed into position to the satisfaction of the range officer, with the rear of the firing tubes a few feet from the steel blast walls.
A few minutes later, two soldiers dressed in Bundeswehr camouflaged uniforms and supervised by a junior officer, began removing the rocket from the cradle holding it on the back of the support truck. They loaded it at once into one of the central rocket barrels on the BM-21 and the officer plugged in the electrical connections. Still watching intently from their hide, Harper, O’Brien and Walsh could hear the familiar high-pitched whine, rapidly building to a piercing howl. Less nerve shredding than in the close confines of the hardened aircraft shelter, it was nonetheless still a frightening sound.
The soldiers and the officer made some final checks and then after more shouted orders relayed over the tannoy, they and all the other range personnel took cover in the concrete blockhouse. After a final check round the guard posts surrounding the range, the metallic voice booming from the tannoy began the firing countdown.
‘Funf! Vier! Drei! Zwei! Eins! Feuer!’ At the command ‘Feuer! - Fire!’ a wisp of flame came flickering from the tail of the rocket, immediately followed by a cloud of dark-grey smoke and a searing tongue of flame. An instant later, with a deafening bang, the rocket left the barrel and disappeared down the range with a terrifying howling sound.
Seconds later they could see in the distance a huge volcanic-looking eruption, a boiling cloud of angry red flame, black smoke, clods of flying earth and lumps of shattered rock as the warhead impacted and exploded in the target area. This was followed by the sound of a faint bang and a pressure wave that tossed the tree branches and leaf litter around and raised small dust devils from the dirt on the range. As the smoke from the blast cleared and the debris came spattering down for a quarter of a mile in all directions, they could see that the Katyusha had blown a huge, smoking crater in the ground while the shrapnel from the blast had gouged deep, vivid, black furrows into the surrounding dun-coloured grassland.
Everyone watching from the SUV had been transfixed by the speed, power and ferocity of what they had just witnessed.
‘Feck me!’ O’Brien said at last. ‘I’ve seen explosions enough in my time, but I’ve never seen anything like that before.’
‘And that was only one Katyusha,’ Harper said. ‘Just imagine the impact if you fired all forty tubes at once.’ He took a sideways glance at O’Brien. ‘But that would take rather more millions than perhaps even your American friend could afford.’
Before O’Brien could answer, there was a sudden torrent of shouting from the tannoy.
‘Quick, get in, we’ve been spotted,’ Zelda shouted.
Harper looked away from the site where the rocket had impacted and caught sight of Walsh who had moved away from the SUV to find a better vantage point. Carried away by the excitement of the rocket launch, he had then wandered out into the open at the edge of the copse of trees, placing himself in full view of the command post.
As O’Brien scrambled over the roof of the SUV and dropped back through the sunroof into the back seat, Harper jumped down on the driver’s side and opened the door.
‘Move over, Zelda,’ he said. ‘I’ll drive.’ He slid into the driving seat as the New IRA bodyguard got into the back seat behind him.
Walsh, ashen-faced with fear, came running back through the trees and reached the rear door on the passenger side. He jerked at the handle and clambered into the back seat just as a Bundeswehr truck appeared, driving fast towards them along a track leading from the range. Without a second’s hesitation, Harper gunned the engi
ne, span the wheel and drove flat out, head-on towards the truck in a nerve-jangling game of ‘chicken’. At the last possible split second, he rammed on the brakes and ended up bonnet to bonnet within a couple of feet of the army vehicle. He whipped the Makarov out of his shoulder holster, leaned out of the window and using his left hand, took aim and shot out one of the tyres and the radiator on the truck.
As troops armed with rifles began to spill from the back of the truck, Harper slammed the SUV into reverse gear, stomped on the accelerator and reversed away from them for a hundred yards, then jammed on the SUV’s handbrake, slewing it into a high-speed U-turn. He then floored the accelerator while the car was still turning and drove hell for leather away from the range area, bouncing and bucketing over the tracks they had crept along the night before. Only when they had hit the autobahn and put another twenty kilometres between themselves and the Letzlinger Heide range did Harper reduce his speed.
He glanced at the others in the rear-view mirror. O’Brien was chewing gum as he stared ahead, a vein pulsing in his temple. Walsh was once more hunched, pale-faced and silent, and though his face looked impassive, Harper could hear the fast, nervous drum of his fingertips on the armrest. Even Zelda, normally stolid and phlegmatic whatever the circumstances, looked shaken.
‘If those soldiers had fired, we would all have been killed,’ she said as she caught his eye.
‘Relax, there was never any danger of that,’ Harper said. ‘Peacetime soldiers only carry their weapons loaded when they’re firing their weapons on the ranges, and they weren’t firing rifles today, just a Katyusha. They have to get a senior officer’s permission to load and fire and by the time they had done that, even if permission was granted, we would have been long gone.’
A couple of hours later they were in a decrepit café in a rundown area of Magdeburg. As soon as they had carried their cups of grey, thin-looking coffee to a table away from the counter, Harper rounded on the American.
‘You put us all in jeopardy with that stupid stunt you pulled. I told you to stay close to the car and keep out of sight, and what did you do? You wandered out into the open like a dumb American tourist gawking at Buckingham Palace on a Sunday stroll round the sights of London.’ He looked around the table, eyeballing each of them in turn. ‘I told you all before that there can be only one boss and that is me. You do as I say or take the consequences.’ He turned back to the American. ‘Your money saved you this time, but bodyguard or no bodyguard, it won’t save you the next time you screw up like that.’
Black Ops: The 12th Spider Shepherd Thriller Page 27
