Boy soldier bs-1

by Andy McNab

  Benny swallowed a mouthful of tea. 'What's that mean, then?'

  'There's no place like home,' said Dean, turning over a burger on the griddle.

  'True. Very true,' said Benny. His friend nodded and they bit into their sandwiches and turned to watch the traffic go by.

  Elena had been true to her word. She'd helped, mainly with cash. After Joey had taken his share, much of her remaining money went into funding the escape and the setting up of the new business.

  And business was booming. Elena was already getting her cash back, paid through various banks directly into her building society account.

  Frankie glanced over at Dean as he refilled the brown sauce bottle on the countertop. He'd seen that distant look many times over the past six months. 'You'll see her again one day,' he said.

  'So you keep telling me,' answered Dean. 'But when?'

  Frankie turned away; they'd had this discussion before. 'When it's safe.'

  The two builders came back to the counter as they finished their sandwiches. 'Two more of these, Dean. You are one great cook.'

  Dean smiled and tossed more bacon onto the griddle. As it sizzled and spat he whispered to himself, 'No hay ningun lugar como el hogar.'

  *

  It was a warm day in London. George Fincham was, as always, in his office early, drinking coffee from his favourite bone-china cup and gazing out of the window, downriver.

  There was a knock on the door. 'Come.'

  Marcie Deveraux entered, looking as elegant as ever, her face showing no sign of the extensive dental work she'd had since her encounter with Fergus Watts.

  She was holding a single sheet of paper. 'Watts and the boy, sir, there's been a possible sighting.'

  Fincham remained calm, but he felt his heart quicken. The coffee cup trembled slightly in his hand. 'Where?'

  Deveraux slid the sheet of paper across the desk. 'Spain.'

  THE END

  Some time later… Danny stared at the printed sheet and sighed with irritation. 'Look, what's the point in learning this stuff?'

  'Because some day we might depend on it. If we can't communicate, we can't operate efficiently. So you need to learn to tap out at least five words a minute.'

  Danny laughed. 'Five words! There's mobiles, and e-mails, and MSN, and satellite phones – we can talk for hours. But you've got me learning dots and stupid dashes just so I can send five words in a minute in Morse code. Big deal!'

  Fergus wasn't smiling. 'If you spent a bit less time taking the piss and a bit more doing as you're told, you'd make things a lot easier for both of us,' he snarled. 'Those five words could mean the difference between life and death. It works, Danny, always has and always will. Modern technology can let you down, even if you're lucky enough to have it, which we're not.'

  'Yeah, but-'

  'Just shut up and listen. I was on a job in the Middle East when the sat phone I was using got soaked in a flash flood. That was it, end of sat phone, almost end of me. It was Morse code that got me out in one piece.'

  He picked up a pencil and pulled a sheet of paper from Danny's notepad. 'We'll need a couple of code words.'

  'Code words? Why?'

  'Questions,' sighed Fergus, 'always questions. If ever we do make contact using Morse I'll start with my code word, and that's all I'll give you until you come back with your word. That way we'll be certain we're talking to each other, and no one else.' 'So what are they then, these code words?'

  Fergus began writing down the Morse code, groups of dots and dashes, each short series representing a single letter. -….-.-. -…-.

  'That's my word,' he said. 'Now yours, and I'll keep it short.' -…-.-.

  'So what's it mean?' asked Danny as his grandfather passed the paper to him.

  Fergus put down the pencil and sat back. 'Work it out,' he said. 'And then remember it.' www.boy-soldier.co.uk Read an extract from the next thrilling adventure in the Boy Soldier sequence:

  ANDY

  McNAB and ROBERT RIGBY

  PAYBACK

  1

  Big Ben struck midday as he walked through Parliament Square. The spring sun was warm, almost hot, but he kept his brand-new puffa jacket zipped up to the neck. A police car siren sounded, and he turned to watch the driver skilfully manoeuvre his vehicle through the snarl of traffic and on towards Westminster Bridge.

  He was feeling slightly apprehensive, but at the same time elated. At last he was about to do something meaningful, something significant. Waiting at the pedestrian crossing, he smiled and gently squeezed the few twists of green garden twine nestling in the palm of his right hand. For comfort.

  As the traffic lights turned to red and the green man flashed on, he crossed with the rest of the crowd waiting at the kerbside. Japanese tourists walked with their camcorders at arm's length, watching their screens while filming the imposing, magnificent buildings. Motorbike couriers revved their engines, impatient for the lights to change.

  He joined the queue outside St Stephen's Entrance, the public access point to the Houses of Parliament. Armed police watched impassively as the line of visitors slowly shuffled towards the wide entrance doors leading to the X-ray machine and the metal detector blocking the corridor about fifteen metres inside the building.

  Ahead of him was a small group of young women, some with babies in carriers strapped to their fronts, brandishing leaflets warning of the health hazards created by a newly opened landfill site and chatting animatedly about the imminent meeting with their local MP.

  The queue was in a suntrap, and tiny beads of sweat dotted his upper lip, but still he kept his chunky Gap jacket zipped up. He looked smart: his hair was neatly combed, his trousers were immaculately pressed and his black shoes still shone with newness.

  A thin trickle of sweat ran down the side of his head as he turned and smiled politely at a group of pensioners who were beginning to line up behind him. The women wore their best dresses and light coats and the men were in blazers, their old regimental insignias sewn onto the breast pocket and their highly polished medals hanging proudly above.

  'You here for the tour too?' asked one of the men, fishing out a letter of invitation from his blazer pocket and unfolding it to reveal the embossed letterhead reading: HOUSE OF COMMONS.

  'No,' he answered softly.

  'How old are you, son?' said the man.

  'Seventeen.'

  The man nodded his admiration. 'Well, it's good to see a youngster with an interest in politics,' he said. 'Makes a nice change these days.'

  'Oh, yes,' he replied, his fingers caressing the twine in his hand. 'I'm very interested in politics.'

  He turned back as the queue moved closer to the large doors opening onto the grand corridor, where statues of statesmen through the ages lined both sides. Reporters and visitors were showing their credentials for entering the public areas before placing briefcases and bags on the X-ray machine and then stepping through the detector.

  The group of young women was stopped by a white-shirted security guard and asked about the purpose of their visit. They named their MP and showed their letter of invitation and were allowed to move into the corridor towards the security checks.

  The new shoes were pinching slightly, chafing his heels, but nothing could stop his joy as he stepped over the ancient threshold of Parliament, where a security guard was waiting to question him. 'And what business do you have here today, sir?'

  He smiled at the security guard and whispered a single word: 'Martyrdom.'

  The guard leaned closer. 'Sorry, sir, what name was that?'

  He didn't reply, but pulled sharply at the twine that ran up his arm. St Stephen's Entrance erupted in a hail of flying glass, shattered statues and broken bodies.

  2

  BLOODY CARNAGE

  The two-word headline was plastered across a photograph filling the entire front and back pages of the Sun.

  The graphic picture showed a bewildered and blood-soaked female survivor being helped away from the dus
t and debris of the shattered St Stephen's Entrance by an ashen-faced government minister. They were stepping over the twisted body of one of the victims. The minister's eyes bulged in disbelief; his jacket hung in shreds; one end of the bloodied bandage wrapped around his head dangled down to his shoulder.

  Eight further pages were devoted solely to what the newspaper was calling 'the Parliament Bomb Outrage'.

  There were photos of fallen masonry, shattered glass, buckled ironwork, the decapitated head of a stone statue, a single shiny black shoe. Heavily armed police officers were pictured manning hastily erected barriers, paramedics rushed towards ambulances with laden stretchers, an exhausted firefighter leaned against a wall with tears streaming down his face, white-suited scene-of-crime officers searched for forensic evidence amidst the chaos and confusion.

  There were photos of survivors and photos of the dead. Bodies lying in the dust. Rows of zipped-up body bags.

  In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, television and radio news bulletins had suggested the death toll could reach between a hundred and fifty and two hundred, but in the hours that followed, the number of confirmed dead was put at sixty-four. More were still listed as missing and many more were fighting for their lives in hospital.

  The suicide bomber had been quickly identified: his student railcard was found five metres from the spot where the bomb had exploded. But the discovery of the railcard, far from explaining the outrage, just added to the mystery. For Zeenan Khan had been no international terrorist or 'sleeper' smuggled in from a terrorist hotbed like Afghanistan or the Middle East to await the order to strike from his masters.

  Zeenan had been a seventeen-year-old A-level student from north London, and although he was of Pakistani origin and a Muslim, he had been born and bred in England. He was English. An Arsenal scarf hung over his bed and on the bedroom walls were posters torn from Loaded magazine.

  His devastated family were said to be too distressed to speak to the press and had gone into hiding, but they were described by neighbours as being 'not political' and 'proud to be British'.

  There were photos of Zeenan in his school uniform. His headmaster was quoted as being 'shocked and struggling to believe that the bomber could really have been the level-headed student who obtained eight excellent GCSEs and had been working hard for his A levels'.

  Somehow all the newspapers had managed to find a family portrait: mum, dad, three kids – Zeenan the eldest – all smiling, happy, proud.

  He was 'just a normal boy', said a neighbour who refused to be named. 'A quiet lad,' said another. 'Kept himself to himself, but very polite and never in any trouble.'

  Politicians, community and religious leaders were quoted. Everyone appealed for calm.

  But for all the background information, comments and quotes, two vital questions remained unanswered: how had a seventeen-year-old schoolboy made, or obtained, an explosive device reckoned to be identical to those used by extremists in places like Jerusalem and Baghdad? And why had Zeenan Khan, a boy with everything to live for, chosen to step willingly into oblivion? News of the bombing was dominating newspaper headlines and television news reports around the world. At a roadside between Badajoz and Huelva in southern Spain two builders, Londoners in their twenties, were drinking tea and reading a copy of the Sun printed in Madrid that morning.

  'It's unbelievable,' said Paul as he scanned the pages. 'It says here he had at least seven kilos of explosives strapped to him. What's the world coming to when kids no older than young Dean there are blowing themselves to pieces?'

  'But they're not like Dean, are they?' boomed his mate Benny, who sounded as though he should be selling fruit and veg off an East End barrow. 'They're different, these Muslims. It's a different mentality, a different attitude to life and death. We'll never understand it.'

  The two builders were customers at a tea bar by the side of the sun-baked road. It was not quite like the mobile cafes and burger bars seen at roadsides back in Britain. This was a more casual set-up. A canvas awning sheltered a couple of trestle tables from the blistering Spanish sun. On the tables were propane gas-powered griddles, hotplates and an urn. Two Union flags drooped limply from extensions to the poles holding up the awning.

  Paul and Benny, and anyone else who asked, knew the owner by the name of Frankie, a fifty-something Englishman. Frankie was helped out at the tea bar by his young nephew Dean, who was on his gap year.

  That was the story. It was far from the truth.

  Every evening, when business was over, Frankie and Dean would load the mobile tea bar into the back of their second-hand Toyota pick-up truck and carry out routine anti-surveillance drills as they drove back to their small rented house in the town of Valverde del Camino. The route back to the house was quiet and little used, but Frankie stuck to all speed limits and regularly checked his mirrors, taking a mental note of vehicles following for any length of time. A few kilometres before the town he would pull over to the side of the road so that following vehicles were committed to passing. Once they got back to town, they would make a further check to see if any such vehicle was still being driven around or parked up anywhere near the house.

  Accommodation had been easy to find: they had cash, the landlord wanted tenants and he wasn't bothered about inconveniences like references. Only when they had returned to the security of the white-walled house could Frankie and Dean revert to their true identities – Fergus Watts and his grandson Danny.

  It was six months since they had last seen England, a long six months, especially for Danny. Six months in which answering to his assumed name had become second nature; six months in which the constant fear of ambush or attack had gradually subsided; six months in which he had got used to living an anonymous life; six months in which he had dreamed of returning home every single day.

  But that was impossible – for now, at least.

  For now, they had to wait. And watch. And take the same precautions Fergus had learned during his years in the SAS. For now, they would live a lie as Frankie and Dean. They would cook and make endless mugs of tea and coffee while listening to other people's conversations. About football. About the weather. About terrorist attacks in the heart of London.

  'The thing is, Paul, the world's changed since nine/eleven,' said Benny, continuing the heated discussion with his friend. 'Terrorism has taken on a new dimension. Look at those other suicide bombers – you know, those Chechen Black Widows: they're not just prepared to die for their cause, they want to die for it. It's a holy thing for them – it's a… a…' He was floundering for the right word.

  'A jihad,' said Frankie, looking up from the hotplate.

  'That's it, that's the word,' said Benny. 'Jihad.' He looked at Frankie. 'What d'you reckon about all this then, Frankie?'

  'Don't ask me,' said Frankie, going back to his hotplate. 'I just cook.'

  'But you got to have an opinion,' snapped Paul, slamming his empty tea mug down on the trestle table. 'I think it's disgusting. Worse than that, it's inhuman. It's murder, cold-blooded murder. They should round the lot of 'em up and shoot 'em.'

  Dean placed the lid of the urn back in position and glared at the young builder. 'You mean murder them?'

  Paul returned the angry stare for a moment, and then glanced over at his mate before smiling at Dean. 'Yeah, you're right. Be like sinking to their level, wouldn't it? And we're more civilized than that. Give us another tea, Dean.'

  Before Dean could pick up the empty mug, the builder's mobile phone rang. He took it from a pocket in his cut-off jeans, mumbled a quick 'Hello' and walked away from the tables to continue his conversation.

  'Don't mind him,' said Benny to Dean. 'He gets a bit steamed up about these things.'

  Dean saw Frankie flash him a look that said, Leave it. He just nodded to Benny and said nothing.

  Benny laughed. That'll be his girlfriend, giving him grief about being over here. I'd better have another tea. She keeps him on that phone for hours.'

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