Carver

by Tom Cain

  Just before the lane reached the church Gryffud came to a gate. Beyond it the semi-derelict shells of some old farm buildings stood around a yard, hidden by thick, overgrown hedges from the casual view of any passers-by. The camper van turned off the lane into the old farmyard. Bumping and shaking over the rutted ground, it passed through a gaping hole in the walls of a roofless old barn. As the van entered the barn, moving at little more than a crawl, Smethurst was looking at a GPS location finder, about the size of a stopwatch.

  ‘Forward about five metres,’ he said, his eyes fixed to the flickering digits on the readout. ‘Left a bit … stop … wait a second.’

  Smethurst took another look at the GPS, which also doubled as a compass.

  ‘Right, we’re on the right spot,’ he said. ‘But we need to line the van up three more degrees to the north-west. Just reverse a fraction, then go forward again, right hand down.’

  Gryffud did as he was told.

  ‘Bollocks!’ Smethurst hissed to himself. ‘That was one degree too much. Try it again, but this time left hand down. Only a fraction, though. That’s all we need.’

  The van shifted. Smethurst cursed again, and delivered an even more precise set of instructions. Gryffud did his best to follow them to the last millimetre. Finally Smethurst was satisfied. ‘That’ll do,’ he said. He set the timer to go off in four hours. When that was done he turned to Brynmor Gryffud and said, ‘Right, Taff, time to go.’ It was now 6.41 a.m.

  The two men walked out of the farmyard and turned right, back up the lane towards the Angle Road, a distance of about one and a half miles. They walked at a good, hard pace, aiming to arrive at seven o’clock exactly. They had been standing by the roadside for less than a minute when a BMW pulled up next to them. The driver’s window lowered to reveal Uschi Kremer’s smiling face.

  ‘Hello, boys! Fancy meeting you here!’ she said.

  38

  * * *

  Cardiff Gate Services, M4, Wales

  AT THAT EXACT same moment, Carver, too, was hitching a ride. He’d woken at 6.15 a.m. and pulled open the window to see a grey, but dry morning. He’d showered, dressed and had a full English breakfast before heading out into the car park a minute before seven. The Audi was waiting for him. He tapped on the passenger window and it slid down to reveal the lightly tanned face of a man in his early thirties, whose cheerful smile and upper-class accent were in sharp contrast to the steely look in his eyes. Carver knew that look. He saw it in the mirror on a regular basis. The only difference was that his eyes were green and his stare – when he chose to use it – was, if anything, even steelier and colder than the one now appraising him.

  ‘You Tyrrell?’ Carver asked.

  ‘Ah, you must be Jenkins.’

  ‘That’s right, Andy Jenkins.’

  ‘Then you’d better climb aboard.’

  Carver got in the back of the car. He was dimly aware of suppressed laughter from the massive, shadowy figure in the driver’s seat.

  ‘Something amusing you?’ Tyrrell asked.

  ‘Bollocks he’s called Andy Jenkins, boss,’ the driver replied in a South London voice. ‘His name is Pablo Jackson … isn’t it?’

  Carver laughed. ‘Not for a while … How are you, Snoopy?’

  ‘That’ll be Company Sergeant Major Schultz to you, boss. I’m a warrant officer these days. Gone up in the world.’

  ‘You know each other?’ Tyrrell asked, his curiosity piqued in particular by Schultz calling the newcomer ‘boss’, the special forces equivalent to ‘sir’.

  ‘You could say that,’ Carver replied. ‘We served together, a long time ago.’

  ‘He’s one of us, boss,’ Schultz told Tyrrell. ‘And one of the best, too.’

  39

  * * *

  Carn Drum Farm

  DEIRDRE BULL WAS not dead. Not quite. She opened her eyes, emerging from unconscious oblivion to a skull-splitting headache and an overwhelming desire to be sick. It took a second or two to register further sources of agony from her shoulder, her left arm, her ribs and her right leg. Neither the arm nor the leg would move. She propped herself up on her right arm, gasping with the pain that this simple movement sent shooting through her body, and saw jagged fragments of bone poking through the bright nylon arm of her cagoule and the dark-stained denim of her jeans. She almost fainted, slumping back to the ground again. Then she remembered: her phone. She fumbled in her pocket for the little handset, lost her grip on it as she pulled it out of the cagoule, and felt the panic rise in her as her hand fumbled blindly across the ground before touching the phone again. She held it up to her face so that she could see what she was doing, and then with her one working thumb tapped out the three digits 9 … 9 … 9.

  ‘Help me,’ she whimpered. ‘Please help me. I’ve been shot. I’m hurt really badly. And the others … I think … I think …’ But before she could complete the sentence she had fallen unconscious again.

  It took a combined force of police and volunteers from the Brecon Mountain Rescue Team the best part of three hours to locate Deirdre Bull. By that time the carnage at Carn Drum farmhouse had been discovered. Deirdre herself was in a critical condition. She had multiple fractures, and although the bullets that had hit her had miraculously avoided doing any damage to her heart or lungs, there was a strong chance of internal organ damage caused by her fall. She had lost a great deal of blood, and was slipping in and out of consciousness. Just as she was loaded into the rescue helicopter that was going to take her away to hospital she gripped the arm of the paramedic nearest to her, stared him right in the eye and hissed, ‘The attack … You’ve got to stop the attack!’

  40

  * * *

  RAF Northolt, Hillingdon, West London

  AT 8.30 A.M. a dozen individuals began to assemble for a flight that would carry them some two hundred and forty miles due west and last an hour and forty minutes.

  The PM had banned any Cabinet members from the conference, for the simple reason that he did not want any possible pretenders to his position attracting the publicity it would bring. Nevertheless, there was still an impressive Whitehall turnout. The Home Office, Ministry of Defence and Department of Energy and Climate Change each sent a minister. The Director of Special Forces, who was overall commander of the SAS and SBS, attended, as did senior officers from MI5 and Scotland Yard. As keen as ever to maintain its green credentials, the government had also reserved VIP seats for a representative from Greenpeace and a professor from Imperial College, London, whose special subject was the long-term effects of man-made environmental disasters. Last, but by no means least in their own minds, came Nicholas Orwell, the EU Energy Minister Manuela Pedrosa, and Kurt Mynholt, the second most senior diplomat at the US Embassy in London, whose Senior Foreign Service rank was equivalent to that of a three-star general.

  That made eleven passengers. The twelfth was Nikki Wilkins, a twenty-nine-year-old Cabinet Office representative, selected on the grounds of competence, intelligence, people skills and – though no one dared suggest this openly – fresh-faced good looks that made any man, no matter how powerful, just that bit more eager to please her. Wilkins’s job was very simple: she had to corral her high-powered passengers on to the choppers, and make sure they had been given all the tea, coffee and biscuits they required and were happy with their seats. Then she had to get them all off again at the far end, in the gaze of the cameras, looking like confident, purposeful men and women who were ready to protect the nation against terrorist threats to its fuel and power supplies.

  In short, Nikki Wilkins was both a hostess and a minder. Or as her boss had told her, ‘You’ll be matron.’

  Right now, though, she wished she were an octopus.

  She was doing her best to herd the VIPs on to the two helicopters. She would be in the first craft along with the British government ministers, Nicholas Orwell and the EU politician; the members of the group, in other words, who had the strongest desire to be seen by the TV cameras. Those who were
happier to remain anonymous would travel in the second helicopter, attracting far less attention at the rear of the VIP party.

  As the choppers fired up their engines the noise was so deafening that she was forced to direct everyone by hand gestures. Unfortunately, Wilkins’s right hand was occupied holding her phone close to her ear as she talked to her increasingly frantic colleagues already at their destination. But she could not hear a word that was spoken to her without clamping her hand over her other ear. Frantically, she tried to alternate increasingly desperate waves at the milling VIPs with five-second bursts of telephone conversation, with the result that no one, least of all Nikki Wilkins herself, had any clue at all about what the hell was going on.

  Her situation was a microcosm of the whole operation. It was as if an orchestra was trying to improvise an entire symphony without a proper score, let alone a single rehearsal. At the site of the meeting itself, local police had only just arrived to set up a security perimeter. A couple of the TV vans, one from the BBC and the other from Channel Four News, had become detached from the convoy of vehicles making its way west, and were now hopelessly lost. No one seemed to know what was more important: maintaining security, in which case the TV people could not be told where to go, or gaining maximum publicity, in which case they had to know.

  Calls bounced back and forth between Whitehall and the officials who were already in position at the site of the energy security meeting. Finally someone, somewhere made a decision. ‘Rosconway … Just tell them to put the word Rosconway into their satnavs and take it from there.’

  41

  * * *

  Rosconway

  CARVER, TYRRELL AND Schultz arrived at the refinery a few minutes after the helicopters had left Northolt. Along the way Carver had learned a bit more about Major Rod Tyrrell, to give him his full rank and name, or ‘Rodders’, as he was known to his men. He and Schultz had served together in Iraq, Afghanistan and a smattering of other trouble spots. They were two tough, experienced fighting men and they talked to one another with an ease that downplayed, but never entirely ignored, the difference in their ranks. It was obvious to Carver that Tyrrell had earned Schultz’s complete respect. The battle-hardened sergeant major was well over six feet tall, with biceps like boiled hams and the gnarled, bulldog features of a rugby front-row forward. He had precisely zero patience for weakness, incompetence or bullshit of any kind. So if he was impressed by a la-di-da ‘Rupert’ – as the men referred to their officers – that was all Carver needed to know.

  ‘What a shambles,’ Schultz said disgustedly, as they drove past a minimal, painfully inadequate security check into a car park filled with randomly placed vehicles. People were milling around in various stages of aimlessness, confusion and phone-clutching panic, while security men wearing high-visibility yellow tabards over their black uniform jackets tried desperately to impose some kind of order.

  ‘An absolute clusterfuck,’ Tyrrell agreed. ‘But look on the bright side. If the good guys haven’t had enough time to get organized, then neither have the bad guys.’

  Schultz laughed. ‘You always were a logical bastard, boss.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Tyrrell murmured, casting a sharp, narrow-eyed look at the pandemonium. ‘Let’s just hope that I’m also right.’

  42

  * * *

  WILLIE HOLLOWAY NEEDED this like a hole in the head. It was tough enough being the operations manager at the National Petroleum refinery on any normal day, let alone this one. He ran an in stallation that was supplied by gigantic supertankers that had to be guided up the waters of Milford Haven without running down any of the scores of yachts and pleasure craft that flitted to and fro throughout the summer months, apparently oblivious to the leviathans passing between them like elephants through ants. The massive ships were filled with cargoes of crude oil that were an environmental disaster just waiting to happen. Virtually every stage of every process undertaken at the refinery itself produced substances that were capable of poisoning human beings, blowing them to smithereens or both. The finished products were then stored in giant tanks that were potentially some of the biggest Molotov cocktails in the world.

  Now this had been dumped on him. Barely sixteen hours had passed since head office had called Holloway to say that his refinery had been given the huge honour of hosting an instant conference on the risks of terrorist attacks. That meant he had to cope with more than a hundred people arriving on some magical bloody mystery tour. He knew what they’d be like – a bunch of puffed-up ponces, all convinced that they should be allowed to go wherever they wanted and do whatever they wished – none of them with any experience at all of the oil industry. It was his responsibility to get them all through the day without compromising their safety, or the refinery’s. And just to make matters worse, everything he did would be noted and judged by the senior executives from UK headquarters, who would be National Petroleum’s official corporate representatives at the event.

  At least he’d finally been given some outside help. Three casually dressed men had introduced themselves to him as envoys from the Ministry of Defence. Two carried military identity cards that gave their names as Sergeant Tom Croft and Major Hugh Gould, without specifying the unit to which they belonged. The third introduced himself as Andy Jenkins and said he was a civilian advisor.

  Willie Holloway had no doubt at all that all three names were false. He had spent enough years working in oil-rich parts of the world that were a lot less pleasant than this corner of the Pembrokeshire coastline to know special forces when he saw them. And he wasn’t going to turn down their offer of help.

  ‘Delighted to be of assistance,’ said Rod Tyrrell after Holloway had shaken his hand. ‘Let’s take a look at a plan of this place. See how we can get through this without too much risk of total disaster.’

  Carver said nothing. Until further notice he planned to keep his eyes and ears open and his mouth very firmly closed.

  43

  * * *

  Carn Drum Farm

  IN LONDON, THE Metropolitan Police have a dedicated Counter Terrorism Command, designated SO15, which deals with threats to the capital city. The Dyfed-Powys police, however, are not so well-equipped to fight the forces of terror. Why should they be? Their patch, which covers a great swathe of south-western and central Wales, has one of the lowest crime-rates in the entire UK. Back in the seventies, outraged Welsh nationalists set fire to the occasional English-owned holiday cottage, but since then, the area has been notable for its lack of antisocial behaviour. So the slaughter at Carn Drum Farm was totally outside the experience of any of the officers who first attended the scene of the crime. They searched the entire property for bodies, but once it was clear that these were all confined to the farmhouse and its immediate surroundings, little attention was paid to the outbuildings, so no one initially realized what the inhabitants of the farm had been up to during their stay in the country. In any event, there was no one whose training or professional experience would have equipped them to detect an improvised bomb factory.

  To make matters worse, the force, which includes Pembrokeshire, was already stretched to the limit providing officers to police the unscheduled, unplanned event at the Rosconway refinery. The Chief Constable and a number of senior officers had also decided to attend the event. So when reports of the terrible events at this isolated hill farm first started arriving at the force HQ in Carmarthen, their significance was by no means clear. Were the deaths the result of a burglary that had spiralled into deadly violence? Was this some kind of cult mass suicide? No one knew, and since it can take days, if not weeks, to process the results of forensic examinations of violent crime scenes, especially ones as complex and large-scale as this appeared to be, there was as yet no evidence at all to suggest any terrorist aspect to the crime.

  Nor did Deirdre Bull’s warning cause any alarm bells to ring. When she begged the paramedic, ‘You’ve got to stop the attack!’ he just nodded reassuringly.

  Then, as she slump
ed back on to her stretcher, he turned to a colleague and said, ‘Bit late for that.’ He naturally assumed she was referring to the attack on the farmhouse. What other attack could there possibly be?

  44

  * * *

  Rosconway

  WILLIE HOLLOWAY’S PROBLEM, as he explained to Tyrrell, Schultz and Carver, was that just when he had the greatest need for totally watertight security around the refinery, he actually had less capacity than usual to provide it. The four men were in Holloway’s office on the second floor of one of the bland, low-rise administrative blocks from which the plant was managed. A series of ground-floor conference rooms had been hurriedly commandeered to act as the working venues for the participants at the morning’s conference and the reporters who were covering the event.

  ‘Half my lads have become car park attendants,’ Holloway grumbled. ‘They’re all standing at the gates, checking IDs and getting everyone spaces.’

  ‘What about the local police?’ asked Tyrrell.

  ‘They’ve set up roadblocks. Nothing’s got closer than a mile to here since about eight this morning. As soon as it got light we were out patrolling the fields around the plant.’