Line of Fire:

by Andy McNab

  ‘So we waited for Yulia here to be picked up, and followed. Then we saw all that shit happen when the heli came in and, fuck it, it was time. So in we came. I think we’re up for a bonus, don’t you?’

  Gabe had other things on his mind. ‘What about that woman in the van? What’s the score there?’

  I shrugged. ‘Wrong place, mate, wrong time.’

  Rio hadn’t given up. ‘Nick, not only have I saved the world today, but it’s twice now that I’ve saved your arse. And I don’t even get a thank-you, do I?’

  Gabe turned to him. ‘What about one for me too? You’d be lying there with the rest of them if it weren’t for me and that fucking cricket bat. I don’t even like the poncy English game.’

  Rio did what he did best when it came to Gabe: he ignored him.

  ‘Nick, we saved civilization as we know it. You think I’ll get a knighthood as well as that bonus? The women would love it, know what I mean?’

  We broke into the car park and I looked back. ‘Let’s find out what Yulia knows before we start emailing the Palace. Remember, we might be in as much shit as she is.’ I checked to see if any reaction was coming from her. It wasn’t.

  I could hear the mumbles of a radio as we neared the Beamer. ‘I’ll take the front. She goes between you two – and, Rio, cover your face or at least your hair. Around here you’re one big fucking VDM.’ I opened the boot. ‘A weapon each in the footwell. Check the mags – there’s spares.’

  Gabe was off on one. ‘You telling us weapons drills now? Fucking Jedi Blade Channel shite. You’d be lying there with the rest of them if it wasn’t for us.’

  Jack had swivelled in his seat to watch the weapons come aboard. ‘Not for you. You need to drive.’ I tapped the roof with a forefinger. ‘This is the biggest weapon we’ve got.’ It could give us distance from danger, protection if we were in danger, and actually be used as a weapon of last resort. But there was something else. I didn’t trust the snide. I wanted him driving and in a position where he’d fuck himself up if he tried to do anything to us. I didn’t want anyone or anything aiding the Owl. I had to make sure I controlled Jack and, therefore, as much as I could, control our futures. We had probably stopped Phoenix’s phase two happening – for now, anyway. But the phase two in our lives was just about to start. I didn’t want it, but here it was anyway.

  We buckled up, like good citizens, and I hit the satnav to check the routes north. The Hartland Heritage Coast was about twenty-five miles away. The map was a mass of green with not many place names dotted about. I pointed. ‘That’s where we’re going. Plenty of cover to hide up until we sort out what we’re going to do once she tells us exactly what, where and when.’ This time Yulia did look up. ‘And once she’s done all that, we can decide what to do next. But, first, we need to find a place to do it.’

  Jack put the Beamer into reverse, and we were soon rumbling out of the car park. ‘Keep to the speed limit,’ I reminded him. ‘No violations. And you two in the back, you need to keep your eyes open up top,’ I pointed skywards, ‘while me and Yulia sort out how we’re all going to spend the rest of our lives.’

  53

  The Beamer took us down narrow lanes, high hedges closing in either side, branches slapping against the metalwork. Whether Yulia liked it or not, it was information time.

  I turned and pushed myself between the two front seats. ‘Yulia, look at me.’ I gave her a smile. It was good to start friendly, even if it didn’t end that way. After what she had witnessed, I wanted to make her feel we were capable of being good lads, too.

  ‘You’ve heard everything. You know we’re not handing you over yet to that guy on the phone, not until we know what you know.’ It was pointless checking she’d understood. Anyway, I’d find out soon enough. ‘We need you to tell us everything you’ve been doing here, why you’ve been doing it, and what happens next.’ I paused, but not for her to reply. I wanted it to sink in rather than release tears, but they started to roll down her cheeks anyway.

  ‘And the reason we need you to tell us is because we have to protect ourselves. You see, what we’re doing here – capturing you, taking you to that guy on the other end of the mobile – it’s too important a job for people like us to do. We’re way down the food chain. Yulia?’

  She wasn’t looking. She might not have been listening.

  ‘Yulia, look at me.’

  She finally lifted her head enough for me to catch the tops of her eyes. It was clear she’d been listening very carefully indeed.

  ‘That makes us suspicious. It makes us worried about our futures. As you should be. And that’s where your incentive comes in to talk to us. If you tell us what we’re involved with, if you help us, we’ll try to help you, because I think you’re also way down the food chain. We’re all little people.’

  Gabe watched the sky for helicopters but Rio looked down at her knowingly. ‘Yuli, he’s given you the aim, the incentive, and the reason why. Textbook. What more do you need? Worked on me when I was in. Got me doing all sorts of shit.’ He smiled. ‘Mate, like he said, we’re just busy little bees, trying to make sure we don’t get squashed. You understand that, don’t you?’

  Yulia understood every word. Her bottom lip trembled and her head dropped. Soon tears were soaking into the hair that touched her cheeks. ‘What will happen to me?’

  She was playing at it, turning the situation to her advantage, making it about her not us. But that was okay – for now, anyway.

  I twisted from my waist to lean forward and get in closer. My voice was gentler, more soothing now Rio had done his bit.

  ‘It’s all good, Yulia.’ I thought of the way Phoenix had calmed her down, not that she’d needed it, but I wanted to go through the motions for a quicker result. ‘All is good. You’ve just got to help us first, okay?’

  All I got in return was a series of sniffs. ‘Yulia, look up. Look up.’

  Rio was about to impart another pearl of wisdom but I shook my head. It wasn’t going to help: she had her own game plan.

  ‘Yulia, it’s okay. Look up, get some air.’ It sort of worked. Her head lifted slowly, and a wrist came up to wipe her nose and clear some snot off a tear-soaked lip.

  ‘You okay?’

  She nodded under the mop.

  ‘Okay, then, listen to what I have to say. You’ve found Nigella, so when is Nigella going to get blown up, destroyed? When do they plan to come back to attack?’

  Her eyes widened, and her hands came up to her chest, like she was having a heart attack. ‘No, no, no – I’m not a terrorist! I’m not blowing up Nigella! The man, the Owl, tell him I’m not a terrorist. Not a terrorist. I’m not blowing up any lines, no lines.’

  Gabe came down from out of the sky and elbowed her in the side. ‘Shut the fuck up. You hear me? Shut up.’ He turned to me. ‘She say Nigella? You say she found Nigella?’

  I nodded. ‘Found the cable.’

  Gabe shook his head. ‘Nigella is no fucking cable. It’s a bigger problem than that.’ He gave Yulia another elbow, trying to get a response. ‘Oi, fuckhead.’

  Yulia’s tears stopped falling and her face stopped its wobbles. She cleared the hair from her face and her eyes filled with self-pity. Now there was nothing but cold fear. Gabe was good at creating that in people This, at last, was the real Yulia.

  ‘I wasn’t blowing anything up. I’m just—’

  Playing softly was over. ‘Shut the fuck up.’ I turned to Gabe. ‘Nigella?’

  He leant forward as if to exclude Yulia. ‘It’s not a cable. It’s a GCHQ operational name. It’s technology that covertly attacks the cables, sucking up all the internet traffic, sucking up all that data. Every bit of internet traffic running below us here, GCHQ have access to. The whole world’s internet traffic, Nick, and this fucking thing here is trying to attack it.’

  Yulia couldn’t control herself. ‘Please, I wasn’t here to destroy any line, or destroy Nigella, just to find it. I was being made to hack into it, to hack into the UK’s ha
ck. That’s all, I swear. I wasn’t here to destroy but—’

  Gabe wasn’t listening to anything the geek had to say. ‘WikiLeaks, Nick. Remember Snowden? That fucker dumped thousands of pages of information about this shit. No one knew about what was happening until—’

  I raised a hand. ‘In a minute, mate.’ I turned back to Yulia. ‘Stop grovelling, it doesn’t suit you. Just nod, or shake your head. Is he right? Nigella isn’t cables. It’s GCHQ technology, sucking up the data flowing through them.’ I pointed across to Gabe. ‘Well, is he right?’

  Yulia nodded. ‘Not a line.’

  ‘And you were here to find it and then you were going to hack into it?’

  She nodded again.

  ‘Have you hacked into Nigella yet?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘So phase two was coming back to hack into Nigella and not to blow up any cables?’

  She nodded once more, but couldn’t help herself. ‘Please believe me. My job was just to hack into the tech flow, the data, not to hurt anyone. I was—’

  Gabe took an exaggerated breath and put a finger over Yulia’s mouth. ‘Shut it.’ He was very calm, which must have come across as even more sinister. ‘Shut it or I’m going to shut it for you.’ He turned his attention to me. This was important to him. ‘Snowden, right?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Fucking traitor. He leaked about Nigella in 2014. I’m going to say it again so we all understand: Nigella is the ops name for the technical attack. GCHQ hoovers up everything that zaps around the world online. They sift through it, and share useful stuff with the American intelligence services. And that fucker’s put lives at risk. I hope the Americans get hold of him and give him the electric chair.’

  I turned back to Yulia, but my eyes took in Jack. I wanted to check his reaction to the word ‘traitor’.

  ‘Yulia, were you going to hack into Nigella to stop it, corrupt it, mess about with the information, turn it into disinformation, or just join in, sucking stuff up?’

  ‘They want to capture the same data as GCHQ without them being aware the data’s being intercepted.’

  ‘Who are they? Belarus? KGB?’

  She knew what was coming next.

  ‘The Russians? FSB?’

  Her hands covered her eyes, like she couldn’t face reality, and she gave a slow nod. ‘But they are not going to blow it up. I was going to write the code to give access. That is all, I promise.’

  Scenarios flashed through my head of the ways that that data could help Russia do what it did around the world. The markets, trade negotiations, weapons procurement, not to mention their expansion into Ukraine, whatever they had planned next, and, of course, Syria. All politicians pirate-smiled, it was part of the job description, but knowing what the opposition were really thinking and doing? That would be a game-changer for Putin and a nightmare for us.

  Rio looked down from the sky and didn’t have any sympathy for her at all. ‘Shut up with all the begs. They don’t work here, mate. You got caught, you were out of your league, so accept it and get a grip of yourself. This is embarrassing.’

  The tears stopped. Maybe I had given her too long at playing the frightened schoolgirl. But now we knew, and that was all that mattered.

  Yulia was back to the woman I had seen in the van. ‘What will happen to me now?’

  Jack adjusted himself in the driver’s seat. ‘We’re here.’

  I put a hand on Yulia’s shoulder. ‘There’s more to come, so no more bullshit tears. Help us and that will help you.’

  I turned back to the windscreen and had a look at the larger scale map on the satnav. It was now all about finding a place to hide the car, and a place to hide us.

  54

  It was my turn on stag. I was lying under the tree canopy, on top of a folded-up tent we were using as insulation from the ground. A few feet away from me, in the real world, on the other side of the trees, the sun poked through the clouds every few minutes, but it never penetrated the gloom of the LUP. It was cold, and would get even colder after last light.

  I bit into a coconut-flavoured power bar. When Rio had grabbed the weapons from the VW he’d also taken what he could of the water and bars. It had been hours since I’d eaten, like all the rest of them stretched out behind me in, or half in, their sleeping bags, each on top of a purple roll-mat and the second blue spread-out tent.

  I looked downhill from our dip in the hillside into the valley. The Beamer was parked seventy or eighty metres below us, in a copse of trees just off the small tarmac road. It would be found if somebody walked past, but there was no reason for anyone to be doing that. There wasn’t a track; the area was a dead end. And if people did find it, so what? There was nothing we could do about it.

  The lying-up point was as high as we could make it without cutting the skyline. We were hidden from the ground and the air, but the spot wasn’t perfect. I’d have preferred to be fifty feet underground with the world’s supply of surveillance around us. We had weapons, though, and we had an escape route, and we weren’t going to be there for long, now that Yulia had explained all. Rio’s facts of life had soon made her see it was pointless continuing with the scared schoolgirl act. Apart from anything else, she had grown up in a country where even a rumour of terrorism meant arrest, torture and disappearance, no matter what the truth was. Her misconception of what would happen to her here had certainly helped her focus.

  There had been a lot of waffle from her over the last four hours. She had detached herself from the Wolves, and we believed her. She was a geek, not an operator.

  She was tough, but I wasn’t sure she was mentally unscathed. This life wasn’t on her job spec. Maybe that had helped me believe her. She was there for the ride, she said, the gig, the challenge, the excitement. What it seemed to boil down to was making the best of a bad situation, because when the FSB had come knocking at the door it wasn’t as if a hacker like her could tell them to fuck off. But excitement had morphed into shit hitting the fan, and that was when she’d understood she was out of her depth. She’d said she felt good about being with the Wolves to start with – ‘playing with the big boys’ – but when it had gone wrong she was flailing. Rio was right. She was the same as us. We were all out of our league.

  I wanted somebody on stag at all times so even if everybody else was awake and talking, there would always be one tasked with protecting the rest and, of course, keeping an eye on Yulia. Just like the rest of the planet, she was capable of changing her mind. There were enough sleeping bags and roll-mats to go round, because the one on stag would not be using any of that. He had to have the hardness of the ground and the cold to remind him he had a job to do. And, at the moment, that was me.

  This Cornish operation, Yulia explained, had stemmed from the 2014 WikiLeaks dump. Included in the thousands of leaked documents was the state secret that GCHQ routinely tapped into the world’s internet traffic in an operation called Nigella, and Snowden had posted that Nigella was based at Skewjack Farm. That was where we’d seen Phoenix’s team take their first pictures of the road surface, hoping to ID any manhole covers that might indicate where Nigella was. Rio and Gabe had checked out what they were up to while Jack and I had carried on following the VW camper van.

  ‘We were only covering the bases,’ Yulia had said. ‘I never thought Skewjack Farm was likely, because the landing station company that owned it wouldn’t allow it. They weren’t “access partners” – they weren’t colluding with GCHQ. They would have lost all their business if it was known they were helping your spooks to pore over their customers’ secrets.’

  Yulia reckoned that Nigella would be located at the landing station bungalow down the road at Trethewey, because Cable & Wireless owned it, and Snowden had exposed them as ‘access partners’. On top of that, FSB had shown her photographs that suggested the bungalow had had a big security upgrade after the Snowden leak. But even if she was right, she went on, she couldn’t just walk into the building and make access to Nigella
to enable FSB to access the same data as GCHQ, and do it in such a way that it would never be discovered.

  ‘Hence the interest in the manhole covers and especially the covers at the war memorials?’ I asked. It suddenly made sense why they were new and revamped. A war memorial was brilliant cover. Locals would notice if people began digging up or interfering with a site that many would consider sacred. ‘That was what you were doing, going round the area, checking where Nigella could be accessed?’

  She nodded. ‘And we found it. They were the ones with a primary cover and a secondary steel plate beneath. We’d found Nigella.’

  ‘What was the plan from then?’

  ‘Just to leave them alone, go home and figure out how to gain access. And when I’d done that and access had been gained, FSB would know exactly what the UK and the USA knew.’

  I couldn’t work out which was the worst fuck-up-the-world option I’d heard in the last twenty-four hours. Gabe’s destruction of the cables, and a world that immediately folded in on itself? Or Yulia’s Nigella option that would have the same effect but take longer? I had to go with Gabe’s option as it would at least get the pain over and done with.

  As if on cue I heard the click of Gabe’s lighter inside his sleeping bag, a sound I’d been brought up on from the age of sixteen. Squaddies would go to any lengths to get a drag, and to keep the smoke undetected. I wasn’t concerned about Gabe – it wasn’t as if we were on hard routine, and at least he was trying to capture the smoke in his bag.

  I looked back at the other two. Jack and Rio were crowding out Yulia to make sure she didn’t have any ideas as they all sat or lay on the roll-mats. Jack opened the pack Gabe had thrown him and sat up, cigarette in one hand, lighter and a handful of sleeping bag in the other to keep it up to his chest. He took a lungful and leant down, his head now inside the bag, almost in synch with Gabe. When they lifted their heads, it looked like they were floating out of their bags on a cloud in some kind of stage show.