Line of Fire:

by Andy McNab

  I watched Jack take the cigarette and hold it between his fingers. ‘Probably, but are you all in?’

  Rio shrugged as the other two turned and headed for the door. Gabe pulled out his disposable. ‘Yeah, mate. Course we’re in. SNS. Who cares who the fuck wins?’

  Rio had come up with a thought that I took as a yes. ‘Only if we call him the Falcon. Owl sounds a bit Harry Potter, know what I mean?’

  I ignored him. If I didn’t, the Falcon would get a life just to annoy me.

  I’d been hoping for a little more excitement out of them but I’d take what I was given. It was enough.

  17

  The pavements outside Notting Hill tube station were rammed with tourists studying their smartphones, then looking around for the blue door from the Hugh Grant movie. It was about a mile away, on Portobello Road, so good luck with that one. I eased my way through them and started along the main drag towards Hyde Park and my RV with the Owl.

  I twisted my fingers around the slim, coin-sized aluminium disc in the right-hand pocket of my leather bomber jacket. It contained more high-tech than was used on the Apollo missions. It wasn’t going to take me to the moon, though: it was going to help me find the Owl and be able to grip him if things didn’t go to plan.

  It was a comfortable feeling, playing with the sliver of light alloy I’d bought at a CeX store as soon as I reached London. The days of improvisation had gone. There was so much technology out there to choose from, just a couple of clicks away, and this little guy, I hoped, would save what would otherwise have meant days, maybe weeks, of slog. There was still stuff that had to be done hands-on, of course, or the tech wouldn’t get to where it was needed. Smart TVs could be used as listening devices but it wasn’t like the Owl could just flick a switch to make that happen. A team would still need to make entry, attack the TV and insert a device for any surveillance to work. Rio had made sure Jack’s flat-screen wasn’t connected online by turning the thing off. He wouldn’t have needed to do that in his own house because his TV was steam-driven from the Red Cross furniture shop. Many high-tech attacks were hands-on first so their countermeasures had to be the same. With hairs or bits of cocktail stick for tell-tales, there were no countermeasures beyond the skill of checking something before you opened it, using the Mark 1 Eyeball. Other than that, the only way to protect was not to own anything that could go online, and if you did, never to take it out of its box.

  I minced along the road. As I approached the meeting place, it didn’t bother me that the Owl might be having me followed, ensuring that it was safe for him to make contact with me. I was doing exactly what we had agreed in the call. I’d phoned him as soon as Gabe had dropped me off at Pangbourne after his cigarette break with Jack. The other three were staying at the barn until I called them with the outcome. I would then head back and wait out with the rest of them to see what the Owl decided.

  I had Rio’s safe phone, and the others had Gabe’s. Once I knew what was going on, so would they.

  When I’d called the Owl, he was his normal plastic cheery self, and even more so when I said I wanted to meet.

  Why he’d specified this particular place, I had no idea. On the upside, it was just a couple of hundred from the tube station, and it was starting to spit with rain.

  I approached Café Diana. It was near Kensington Palace and made famous because the People’s Princess had popped in once for a cup of coffee and a sticky bun, like an ordinary person, when the world’s press just happened to be waiting outside to capture the moment.

  I entered the shrine.

  18

  Press cuttings and pictures of her plastered the walls. A couple of tourists sat with cameras in front of them on the table, cross-checking it all with the menu to see if they could have what she’d been having. Three workmen in high-vis jackets and dusty boots, the leather of the toecaps worn away to show the safety steel, were tucking into tea and toast. The remaining occupants were the same lot you saw in any café offering free Wi-Fi, their laptops and phones plugged into the new banks of electric sockets.

  I took a four-seater in the corner and a young woman with curly jet-black hair came over for my order, the pocket of her apron bulging with notepads and a card reader.

  ‘Scrambled egg on toast and a large tea, please.’

  ‘Would you care for white bread or wholemeal?’ Her English was perfect, but with an East European accent.

  ‘Whichever’s bigger.’

  As she disappeared, my thoughts went back to the Owl. Ever since I’d first seen him, he’d waffled and weaved like a politician. All part of his job, I supposed, whatever that was.

  I thought, too, about the problem he had with us. The information I had dangling around my neck in my memory stick was so dangerous to an already fractious relationship between the East and the West that the Owl was right to try to control it in whatever way he could.

  But even aside from the minor detail that he would rather have us four survivors very dead to clean up the mess, I sort of liked him. His friend-next-door approach worked on me. Maybe it was just different from what I’d come up against over the years. I wasn’t sure, but I wasn’t going to agonize about it.

  My tea arrived in a basic white mug with the teabag still in it and a little jug of milk, just the way Diana would have liked it. I took out my mobile and attached another purchase from CeX, a thumb-drive and earphones, while getting into my brew.

  A few minutes later the food came. I grabbed the tomato sauce bottle. I hadn’t had time to start squeezing when I heard a familiar voice.

  ‘London rain, eh? Cats and dogs.’

  I looked up to see Sam – at least, that was how he’d introduced himself to me the first time we’d met. But to me it was the Owl who was busy wrestling off his coat. He was like a driver caught in a narrow country lane, trying to reverse and getting the gears mixed up, putting the handbrake on when he shouldn’t and ending up stalled. He finally managed to get his hand out of a sleeve so he could shake mine.

  ‘Jeez, it’s good to see you, Nick.’

  The Owl’s face was still baby smooth and without a hint of bristle, but he’d put on some weight. His neck was gripped by a light-blue shirt done all the way up, and the top two buttons above the V-neck of his jumper were straining to keep the cotton together. Life was clearly good, but it was making him look like a middle-aged mattress salesman rather than whatever he really was. But it was his big round face that had given him his name, especially those wide-apart dark brown eyes. Maybe that was why his nose looked too small.

  He glanced around the walls, stage-struck. ‘I love this place.’

  He draped his coat on the back of a chair and sat down next to it. It was a three-quarter-length number with a thin fleece lining under a nylon shell, just the sort a mattress salesman would buy from Marks & Sparks because it was practical for this time of year: light yet protective, as the sleeve tag would no doubt have said when he’d bought it. Most importantly for my purposes, it had inside pockets. I could see a zip-up one at chest level among the folds of material. Further down, a slip of fleece would hold a mobile, but it was long and slim, designed for a Nokia in 2002.

  He patted his light brown short-back-and-sides-with-side-parting, as if to clear off the rain. He looked at me, then at the walls again. ‘The Queen of Hearts. Did you ever meet her, Nick?’

  I shook my head, then thought, Why not? He had a big shock coming his way, so I might as well start on a good note. ‘Just the once, when I was in the Regiment. See that picture?’ I nodded at the framed shots of her with shiny mid-length princessy hair. ‘That was when she arrived in Hereford. And that one?’ I pointed further along to where she had a fashion-leading shorter cut. ‘That was when she left. You’re going to love this …

  ‘She came down to Hereford with her husband, for familiarization with our methods, so if the shit hit the fan for them they’d know what to expect when the lads came screaming through the wall to rescue them.’

  The w
aitress appeared and the Owl ordered a flat white.

  She looked at me like I was his carer and she needed a translation.

  ‘He’s after regular black coffee with milk. Maybe a jug like the tea, so he can add his own, and hot if you’ve got it.’

  She gave me a smile of pity, and left. When she came back, she’d probably ask me if he took sugar.

  ‘So, the hair, Nick? I have to know about the hair.’

  ‘Diana was in a room and we threw in a couple of flashbangs. There was a sudden smell of burnt hair and our army pensions didn’t look too healthy.’

  The Owl was a picture of concern.

  ‘The only lasting damage was to her hair, which was badly singed. The next day, Diana was sporting a new hairdo that the whole world copied.’

  The Owl was still smiling as he watched me take the memory stick from round my neck and shove it into the thumb-drive. I passed my phone across the table with one hand and presented the connected earphones with the other. ‘Glad you like that story. Don’t think you’re going to like this one.’

  The Owl held his hands up and away as if the mobile was toxic, but friendly toxic – he still had a big moon-faced smile. ‘Jeez, Nick. Hey, no need for any more stories, all’s good this end. No harm will ever come to you and the guys. I just need to know you’ll always be on my side, that’s all.’

  If there was going to be harm done, he wouldn’t be the one who was doing it. He wasn’t the sort to do the dirty work – he didn’t have it in him. I thought of him as living alone, surrounded by jam jars he was too weak to open by himself. His superpowers, I knew, were tucked away in his head. His body was just for getting that brain of his from one place to another to tell people to do shit. He didn’t need strength: he had power.

  I smiled back. After all, I wanted something from him. ‘Of course it’s good your end, mate, because we’re on your side. You leave us alone, we leave you alone. But just so we really do understand each other, I’ll say it one more time: if anyone gets dead, gets missing, or gets fucked up, all the information we have will be exposed. Every single name, event, location. Until then, we will control it responsibly. You don’t have to worry, unless you give us a reason to worry.’

  I waited to see his reaction and there was none, just that constant smile as he left the space between us empty. He waited for me to fill the void and I was willing to do so.

  ‘Mate, again, to be very clear. Who we know, what we know, where it happened and when, the int’ll be out there for everyone to see if at any time you or anyone else tries to fuck us over. Think of it as mutually assured destruction.’

  The Owl didn’t even acknowledge that. He just kept smiling and over-concentrating on the icons hanging on the walls around him. His default facial expression was a smile straight out of the fast-food guide to customer care, and I admired him for the way he appeared to breeze through drama as if he was just in a muddle. Smile, be friendly to people, but always consider how you’re going to kill them: that’s a skill. But it wasn’t going to stop me.

  ‘Even you can’t hide a torpedoed ship, can you?’

  At last he brought his Owl eyes down to me. ‘So here’s the thing, Nick. I’m good with you and the guys keeping what you know. I trust you. I trust the guys. We’re all singing from the same sheet, am I right?’

  I’d had eye-to-eye with him on more than one occasion and still didn’t have a clue what that sheet was. His job description seemed to be made up on the fly.

  ‘But there are others, Nick.’ He turned his head and looked through the café window, like he expected them to ambush us from the pavement. ‘The big kahunas. Dudes at the top table. They won’t get what you’re saying. They don’t know you like I do, Nick. They don’t know the guys. Their priority will be to make sure this never gets to see the light of day. You see where I’m going with this, Nick? I can’t help you out with these guys. They’re a law unto themselves.’

  There wasn’t much I could do but shrug. ‘Mate, not my problem, I have no control of that. You need to convince all of them, your side, their side, anyone who’ll listen, that we’re good lads. There’s no way we’re going to be gobbing off about this shit – unless, of course, anyone comes for us.’

  I lifted the earphones once more and offered them up.

  He knew exactly what he was about to see. ‘You making sure I know what you’ve got? That it isn’t a bluff?’

  He didn’t need a reply, just a video show.

  ‘Go on, you can press. I don’t want to go to the pictures – I’ve already seen it.’

  He kept his smile on and pressed play as I got back to my eggs.

  ‘My name is Nick Stone,’ the haggard face with bloodshot eyes and six days of growth would be telling him. ‘I am an ex-serviceman of the British Army, and they can verify my identity. I am recording this on the twentieth of April 2016. I am recording this because, in the event of my death, I want the following facts, and therefore the identity of my probable killer and the reason for my death, to be known.

  ‘I met the person we only knew as Sam on a Scandinavian Airlines flight from Oslo to Longyearbyen on the tenth of April 2016. I don’t know Sam’s last name, but it can be obtained from his association with a man called Munnelly, who was also on that flight. More about him later.

  ‘I then flew north to Barnero ice station located at approximately eighty-nine degrees north with Jack Cauldwell’s expedition. Jack is one of us four survivors and all three will also give their account of events after mine. Our names will be on the manifest. Once we got on the ice, three guides were waiting for us. They’d been provided by Jack’s father.’

  What the haggard face didn’t add was that the expedition was about more than skiing to the North Pole, dragging the pulks. It was to give the lives of five disabled ex-servicemen a purpose, to make them feel they weren’t on the scrap-heap: they were still in the game.

  I had said the same to the three survivors in Jack’s barn. Nothing had changed, and that was one of the prime reasons I was there now.

  19

  The high-vis lads must have received a bollocking on the fattest one’s mobile about getting back to work because their table suddenly looked like a scene from the Mary Celeste.

  I got back to my breakfast of tomato sauce with scrambled egg underneath as the Owl kept up his perma-smile and continued to watch the film show.

  He was about two minutes into the recording, so I knew what the haggard face was telling him now. That the team had set out north, with two of the guides placing monitors in the ice to measure climate change for an environmental pressure group – or so we’d thought. But it wasn’t long before we were attacked by a heliborne team led by the Owl’s mate Munnelly. Two of the guides, who were in control of the monitors, were executed and the monitors recovered by Munnelly’s team. The rest of us were lifted onto the Lisandro, a US research ice-breaker, at gunpoint – and that was when the truth had come out.

  It was all about the new Great Game, the new power play now that climate change had the ice melting, opening up access to the seabed and its vast mineral wealth. On top of that, the new sea-lanes cut thousands of miles off traditional routes, and the big players wanted control. The monitors were advanced Russian surveying devices, technology that was years ahead of anything the US had: they would predict sooner and with more certainty than ever before where and when the ice would start to disappear and the US wanted them. It was as simple as that.

  That was when it really got fucked up. The Russians had to deny the US their technology and torpedoed the ship while the team and I were still aboard.

  I took a long swig of hot tea while the Owl maintained his smile, just watched and listened.

  The rest of our eight-pulk team were killed at different stages as we tried to escape.

  I studied the Owl’s face, because I knew the haggard one he was looking at was about to announce the one inescapable fact that would sink his own personal ship.

  The Owl pressed hold and
he stared across the table at me.

  ‘The Lisandro?’

  He was where I thought he was. ‘Yes. It sank at latitude 89.4235, longitude 87.1141. It’s in the vid and I’m sure it’s still at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, unless some scrap dealer has got wind of what happened.’

  He looked like he was about to say something, but then he thought better of it. His jaw hardened, as much as good living would let it, and a podgy finger pressed play. Then, almost at once, he pressed hold again.

  ‘Nick.’ He pursed his lips. ‘We had ourselves a situation. But, as you know, stuff happens.’

  Stuff certainly did happen.

  ‘You’ve got to remember the Russians respond very differently to problems. Russians, eh? What can you do?’ He shrugged, like he was slagging off his mother-in-law, then raised his hands to the ceiling. ‘Crazy world, crazy war, but there you have it.

  ‘My job was, and still is, to pour oil on troubled waters. American waters, Russian waters, anywhere I see ripples. I clean things up before the world finds out, and if it does find out, I pour even more. Anything to stop our so-called leaders going to war with each other.’

  I’d think another time about how that might work. If I couldn’t influence or change something, why care or worry?

  ‘You four survivors presented a problem, Nick. You raised the possibility that others might have survived when the Lisandro went down. Witnesses we didn’t know about and couldn’t control, when all we wanted to do was ensure that this little incident was forgotten … for ever. Is it, Nick? What do you say?’

  I wasn’t about to answer with anything he hadn’t already heard from me. ‘We just want to get our lives back and that’s why I’m here.’

  There was a smile and a friendly wink. ‘And your digital witness here is a guarantee, right?’

  I didn’t have to answer but I wanted to anyway. ‘Some would call it blackmail. I call it survival. Same meat, different gravy. We need protection from you, don’t we? Crazy world, crazy war.’