Boy Soldier

by Andy McNab

  Danny sat in one of the armchairs. It didn't match the sofa – none of the furniture in the room matched. 'I don't have a choice. I can't afford university and I can't stay here. I'll have to get a job and somewhere to live.'

  'But Dave would let you stay.'

  'He can't. I'm seventeen, over age for this place if I give up school.'

  He got up from the chair and moved over to the tall sash window that looked directly out onto the street. One of the panes had a crack in one corner; it had been there ever since Danny moved in. He traced a finger over the crack and gazed out through the window. 'He's out there somewhere, Elena, and he's got no idea what he's done to me.'

  The evening sun dipped behind the houses on the opposite side of the road and the room was instantly filled with shadows. Danny turned back to face Elena. 'I'm gonna find him.'

  Elena had been picking at a loose thread on one arm of the sofa. She stopped and stared at Danny. 'Your granddad? But you said—'

  'I know what I said, but you're right, I do want to know about him. I'm gonna find him and make him see how he's ruined my life.'

  'Yeah, like how, Danny?'

  Danny thought for a moment and then shrugged. 'You're the genius. You tell me.'

  3

  It was a good spot for a roadside burger bar. A busy spur from the main London-to-Southend arterial road, it was used by huge numbers of vans and lorries streaming in and out of the light industrial and residential sprawl of south-east Essex.

  White-van and lorry drivers were Frankie's main customers. He got the occasional suited company rep pulling in for a secret egg and bacon sandwich with tomato ketchup. 'My wife wouldn't be very pleased if she saw me eating this,' they'd say with a guilty smile. 'She likes me to have muesli. Bloody rabbit food. Hope you can keep a secret.'

  Frankie kept many secrets.

  The lay-by was potholed but wide and deep, with plenty of parking space for the biggest trucks. The landscape was flat and treeless, so drivers could spot the pull-in café, with its Union Jack flying above, from at least half a mile away in both directions.

  Business was good, and for regulars in a rush there was a mobile phone number painted on the side of the van. They could call in advance with their order and their ETA and then collect their takeaway and be back on the road in a matter of minutes.

  But most customers liked to stop for a leisurely cuppa and a chat with Frankie. Two regulars, Reg and Terry, painters working on a factory unit in Benfleet, had arrived for their usual full breakfast baps and strong teas. Bacon, sausages and burgers were already sizzling on the hotplate.

  Reg dropped his third spoonful of sugar into the steaming mug of tea. 'I dunno how you do this all day, Frankie,' he said, stirring the brown, milky tea vigorously without spilling a drop. 'Don't you ever get bored? You know, stuck all day in a six-by-four tin can with nothing to do but watch the cars go by?'

  Frankie cracked an egg onto the hotplate. 'I have plenty to do,' he said, reaching for another egg. 'This stuff doesn't cook itself. And I read the papers and listen to the radio. You get to learn a lot doing a job like this.'

  Terry slurped tea from his mug. 'Yeah, fair enough, but – and don't get me wrong 'cos I love your cooking – but the smell of fried food all day would drive me round the bend. It clings to you, don't it?'

  Frankie cracked the second egg onto the hotplate. 'You mean like the way the smell of paint clings to you?'

  Reg laughed, and pulled a copy of the Sun from a deep pocket in his overalls. 'He's got a point there, Terry, a very good point. He stinks of fry-ups, we stink of top coat.'

  He turned to page three and studied the photograph for a few moments. 'No, I could handle the smell, no problem. What would get me would be being stuck in this little van for hour after hour. Be like being in a prison cell.'

  The eggs were almost cooked and Frankie turned away to spread butter on the baps. This, a prison cell? They had no idea. A prison cell was a dark, window-less concrete cube, three paces long by five wide and crammed with twelve other prisoners. The burger bar was heaven compared to all that. You could open the door and step outside. You could look out and see the road and the grass verge and the houses in the distance. You could listen to the radio. And you could talk to people.

  Frankie had acquired his new identity three years earlier, soon after he'd finally made it back to England. It had taken a long time to get back, a full nine months after he'd led the breakout from the Colombian prison.

  First he had to cross the two hundred and fifty miles of jungle to the Colombian border with Panama. It took three months and he used all his skills to evade capture, living off what he could trap or pick.

  In Panama he stowed away on a Japanese cargo ship as it went through the canal towards the Atlantic Ocean. He hid amongst three thousand new cars, ate only food waiting to be thrown overboard and jumped ship when the vessel docked in Turkey six weeks later. Then he hitchhiked or hid in trucks until he reached France. He finally entered England along with seven illegal immigrants hiding under the cross-Channel train.

  Essex seemed as good a place as any to settle. It was teeming with people too busy with their own lives to worry about one more ordinary, anonymous-looking bloke with a limp.

  He did odd jobs to begin with, casual work for cash, no questions asked. He kept every penny he earned, but when he did start to spend, he spent wisely. A new National Insurance number bought in a pub cost him just fifty quid. That was when he became Frank Wilson. Changing his name and living as another person was something he was used to from his years on covert operations in the Regiment. The rule was: always have a first name starting with the same letter as your real name. It helped you remember.

  Frankie always dealt in cash; there was no bank account or credit cards to help trace him. He'd started in a bedsit, but since buying the second-hand burger bar his finances had quickly improved. Now he rented an old cottage, pretty dilapidated but very private. And that was all he wanted. Privacy. To be left alone.

  Frankie placed the two full breakfast baps on the counter. 'There we are, gentlemen. Help yourself to sauce. And enjoy.'

  4

  The website straplines spewed out the story in graphic and horrifying detail:

  SAS HERO TURNS TRAITOR . . . Fergus Watts, the former SAS hero . . .

  WHAT MAKES A HERO TURN TRAITOR? . . .

  Highly decorated SAS man, Fergus Watts . . .

  And it got even worse:

  BRITS WHO BETRAYED THEIR COUNTRY . . .

  Philby, Blunt, . . . Watts . . .

  There were more. Many more.

  Danny and Elena were online in the quiet room, using Elena's precious laptop. 'If what your granddad did is so terrible, we're bound to find something about it on the Internet,' she'd said to Danny. She simply typed 'Fergus Watts SAS' into Google and the details began to emerge.

  They scrolled through the websites and got most of the information through old newspaper stories going back eight years. And they didn't make good reading, even though the Fergus Watts story started so well.

  He'd been an excellent soldier and was eventually 'badged' into the SAS. He did tours of Northern Ireland at the height of the conflict, and in the first Gulf War was decorated for his work behind enemy lines. He rose to the rank of Warrant Officer and could have got out at the age of forty, but the Regiment was his life and he chose to stay on.

  As they delved deeper into the life and history of Fergus Watts, Danny kept reminding himself that this shadowy figure was not just some anonymous stranger, but his own father's father. They were flesh and blood. Family.

  Every new fact was a revelation. Fergus Watts's special skill was explosives. He had a natural flair for languages, particularly Spanish. It was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle without the box cover to guide the way.

  The SAS man's skills led him to Colombia and the war against the FARC drugs barons. His ongoing mission had been to lead patrols deep into the rainforest, to seek and destroy drug man
ufacturing plants. Danny tried to imagine the jungle, the heat, the heroic battles.

  But then hero turned villain. Fergus Watts vanished and soon after it was discovered he'd gone over to FARC, purely for the money.

  'It's true,' said Danny as they scrolled on to another page. 'It's exactly like the guy at my RCB said, he betrayed the Regiment and his country.'

  A long in-depth article from a correspondent in Colombia said that the manufacture and export of cocaine to the USA and Europe was a multi-billion-dollar business, and that in selling his skills and taking the FARC 'blood money', Watts shared the responsibility for the deaths of thousands of young drug users.

  'He's no better than a murderer,' said Danny angrily. 'A mass murderer.'

  The newspaper stories revealed that the traitor had eventually been captured after a gun battle between his small band of FARC guerrillas and Colombian soldiers. Watts had taken a bullet in the thigh during the fighting and was later tried and thrown into a Colombian prison to rot.

  After the trial and jail sentence, the name Fergus Watts disappeared from the newspapers for over four years, but then there was a dramatic return to the headlines:

  SAS TRAITOR MASTERMINDS

  MASS PRISON BREAKOUT

  Since the breakout Watts had never been seen, or heard of, again.

  'He's here,' said Danny. 'He's in England.'

  'You can't know that,' said Elena. 'He might still be in Colombia – he might even be dead.'

  'Yeah? So who was it made the enquiry about me? It had to be him, there's no one else, and I'm gonna find him. I'll phone the SAS to start with and see what they can tell me.'

  'Danny, it's a secret regiment. What you gonna do, ring one-one-eight and ask to be put through?'

  Danny was in no mood to be corrected. 'Yeah, all right,' he snapped, 'it was a stupid idea. So what do I do?'

  Normally, Elena would have snapped back, but she knew Danny was devastated by what he'd learned about his grandfather. 'Try some other army numbers – they must be listed in the phone book. And maybe you should make the calls in the garden. We don't want anyone else knowing about this. I'll see if I can find anything online. But if we do find him, what then? Really?'

  'I'll turn him in,' said Danny, picking up the phone directory. 'I want him to suffer the way he's made other people suffer.'

  The garden at Foxcroft was like the quiet room, hardly ever used. There was nothing wrong with it; it was beautiful, if you liked flowers and plants that trailed in and out of trellises fixed to the high brick wall completely enclosing the garden. But as most of the residents of Foxcroft couldn't tell a rose from a stick of rhubarb, they generally stayed away.

  And that suited Jane Brooker, who tended the garden almost as lovingly as she looked after the kids in her care. The garden was Jane's escape from the stresses and strains of life at Foxcroft. She needed it.

  It was almost like being in the countryside. Only the constant thunder of traffic snaking its way to and from the centre of the city and the jagged broken glass cemented into the coping on top of the crumbling brick wall gave away the fact that the garden was in a busy and sometimes dangerous district.

  Dave the Rave often joked that the broken glass was there to keep the Foxcroft kids in rather than keep unwanted visitors out. But it wasn't like that. Foxcroft had been burgled many times – not that there was much worth stealing.

  The garden was deserted when Danny arrived with his mobile and the phone directory. He sat on a wooden bench and started to look up numbers. He tried the local recruitment office, the Army Pensions Office and even the National Army Museum. No joy.

  While Danny was on the phone, Elena went back to the online search engine. She punched in 'SAS' and was rewarded with a list of sites ranging from Scandinavian Airlines to Surfers Against Sewage.

  'Idiot,' said Elena to herself. 'Use your brain, Elena, be specific.' She typed in 'Special Air Services Regiment'. There were pages and pages dedicated to the Regiment. Most were tribute sites run by wannabe warriors or SAS anoraks.

  But Elena worked quickly online, swiftly deciding which sites could be discounted and which needed checking out. Eventually she logged onto the SAS Association, an organization for ex-members of the Regiment.

  'Nice one,' she said, making a note of the contact phone number. She shut down the computer and hurried out to the garden.

  Danny got through to the SAS Association and after a few brief words was put on hold. He paced impatiently up and down a small patch of grass between two flowerbeds and glanced over at Elena. She had taken his place on the garden bench and was staring at an unopened blue airmail letter she held in both hands. The envelope was addressed to her and bore an unusual stamp.

  'Aren't you gonna open that?'

  Before Elena could answer, the phone line crackled and a woman's voice came on: 'You did say S. Watts, caller?'

  Danny sighed. 'No, F. F for Fergus.'

  'And you say he left the Regiment about ten years ago?'

  'Something like that. I think he'd be about fifty-two or -three now.'

  'Just one moment, caller, I'll check again. You do realize that if he is listed I can't give you an address or number?'

  'He's my granddad. I just want to know if he's still alive.'

  The woman sounded sympathetic. 'Oh, dear, that's a shame. Putting you on hold, then.'

  She was back in less than a minute. 'We do have a Watts, but he's much more recent. Wrong generation completely. They don't all join the association when they leave, you know. Some just seem to . . . disappear.'

  'Oh great,' said Danny. 'Now what do I do?'

  It was a question that he didn't expect to have answered, but the woman obviously wanted to help. 'Did you say you were calling from London?'

  'Yeah, and I'm running out of credit on my mobile.'

  'Well, you could try the Victory Club. A lot of the old and bold go there. Someone might remember him.' It wasn't much, but it was a lead. 'Thanks, thanks a lot,' said Danny. 'Bye.' He went over to the bench and sat next to Elena. The envelope was still unopened. 'From your dad?'

  Elena didn't sound happy. 'Who else do I know in Nigeria?'

  'Don't you want to know what it says?'

  'I already know. He's realized the money my mum saved is there for me now, and he wants it. Money's the only thing he's ever been interested in.'

  Since turning sixteen, Elena had been allowed to use the money her mum had left her. So far, she had delved into the savings only once, to buy her laptop plus the hardware needed to turn the Foxcroft broadband connection into a hot zone. It meant she could use her machine wire-free anywhere in the building. Elena already had her future mapped out. After university she planned to become a computer scientist, so her state-of-the-art laptop was no toy, it was an investment.

  Danny reached over and checked out the stamp on the letter. 'Read it. Maybe you're wrong, and at least you've got someone who wants to be in contact.'

  Elena hesitated. She'd been disappointed by her father so many times before. The single birthday card she'd received over the past eight years was tucked away at the back of a desk drawer in her room, along with the one letter he'd written to her mum asking for money. He'd even got Elena's age wrong on the card. But now this. She handed the envelope to Danny. 'You read it.'

  'Me?'

  'I've been doing things for you for hours, it's your turn to do something for me. If he mentions the money once, just once, I want you to tell me. Then I can tear it up and throw it away.'