The Hostage
( Stratton - 1 )
Duncan Falconer
When an undercover operation monitoring the Real IRA goes horrifically wrong, British Intelligence turns to the one man who can get their agent out: Stratton, an SBS operative with a lethal reputation. It’s a dangerous race against time—if the Real IRA get to the Republic before Stratton gets to the Real IRA, his colleague is as good as dead. But the battle in the Northern Ireland borders is just the beginning. For there can only be one way the Real IRA knew about the British agent—someone inside MI5 is tipping them off.
The Hostage Duncan Falconer
To Adele
Chapter 1
Spinks lay in darkness in the boot of a car eating a cheese sandwich, his chewing and swallowing amplified in the confined, metallic space. He was scruffy, long-haired, unshaven and malodorous. He paused to pick his nose, an enjoyable habit he did not necessarily reserve for private moments such as this, and rolled it until it was dry enough to flick off. He took another bite of the sandwich and continued to chew thoughtfully, blinking in the darkness.
This was the second time he had spent the day in the boot of a car and it was, so far at least, nowhere near as memorable as the first. That was four months earlier, in the middle of summer, and one of the most horrifying days in his twenty-nine years. He was not a particularly large man but whoever had chosen the car that day had given scant thought to his size altogether; they had concentrated solely on the objective and not at all on Spinks’s comfort. They could be forgiven to some extent since the whole affair was a hitherto untried experiment and all too hurriedly executed, and Spinks had absolutely no idea what he was getting himself into. He had felt claustrophobic the second the boot was slammed shut and everything went pitch black. It was only when the car trundled through the security chicane and over the sleeping policemen at the main gate to the camp that it occurred to him he should have put something spongy on the bare metal floor to lie on.
The twenty or so mile drive, mostly along country roads, was painful in the dark and cramped space and he spread himself like a starfish in an effort to stop rolling about, but that grew tiring after a while. He imagined all kinds of horrors in the event of a collision, specifically a rear-ender. When the journey ended he thought the worst was over but it had only just begun. What almost killed Spinks was as much a surprise to him as it was to everyone else involved.
His task had been to video the main gate of the Crossmaglen Rangers’ Gaelic Football Club on a bright Sunday afternoon as the team prepared to play Dromintree. Crossmaglen is a small town virtually encircled by the border with most of its roads heading directly into the Republic, and certain IRA members of interest who resided in the South were rumoured to be attending the match. It had been a very hot day and the sun’s rays gradually warmed the car’s metal skin. By early afternoon the inside was like an oven. Spinks later compared it to a prison sweatbox, only his was much smaller, completely without ventilation and prisoners were at least spared a battering journey inside the box over miles of bad road prior to their being baked. He almost passed out with the combination of heat and deteriorating air quality. No one realised how much he had suffered until the car was driven away on completion of the job and the boot opened. Spinks was lying there, dehydrated and hyperventilating, but nevertheless, to his credit, he had stoically completed his task.
On this occasion it was a much bigger boot and he had tailored in an old mattress sponge to lie on. He could roll from one shoulder on to the other if he shuffled around although he still could not stretch out his legs. But more importantly it was now autumn. The previous experience had taught him that one could dress against the cold inside a freezer but there was nothing one could do to keep cool inside a baking oven.
Spinks’s excessive body odour was due to the fact he hardly ever washed himself and his clothes even less. He claimed his lack of hygiene was a necessary part of the job. ‘If you’re gonna be one of ’em, go all the way’ was his excuse. It was true that many of the rural indigenous types they operated against made personal cleanliness a low priority, but Spinks was quite alone in his level of dedication. The rewards for his extreme standards for ‘blending in’ were tasks such as this one, the important criterion as far as his colleagues were concerned was that he worked alone.
He placed an eye in the thin shaft of daylight coming through a small hole in the clear plastic cover of the reverse light where the bulb and socket had been removed. He checked his watch by its tiny light. Six hours he had been here already. The driver had dropped off the vehicle in the middle of the night to avoid being seen, knowing nothing would happen till late morning. It was all part of the necessary security measures, but lying in darkness, with nothing to focus on other than keeping as still and quiet as possible, made it difficult for Spinks to stay awake. He found various ways to amuse himself but these were limited. Farting was one of his pastimes - silent ones of course. He would hold them in for as long as he could, building up their pressure, then expelling them as slowly as possible, without a pause, timing how long he could stretch out the evacuation. Lying in his own stink afterwards was a strange source of amusement to him. He maintained it was unhealthy to hold in farts anyway, even in company, and admitted to enjoying the smell. He believed everyone liked the smell of their own farts and only complained about other people’s.
He stuffed the rest of the sandwich into his mouth and checked through the spy-hole. He felt around in the darkness for his water bottle as he munched. It did not appear to be where he had placed it by his shoulder. He found his MPK5 short-barrelled sub-machine-gun, with its magazine loaded and ready to fire. Beside it was the stun grenade he always liked to carry. The grenade was not standard issue but having seen them demonstrated by the SAS during a room assault entry while in training he stole one thinking it might be a useful piece of equipment to carry. His 9mm Browning semi-automatic pistol rested under the beam of daylight so that he would know where to grab it if he saw trouble coming.
He extended his search for the water bottle towards his feet and felt it in the lower corner. It must have bounced there during the drive. He strained in the confined space, stretching as best he could, his face pressing hard up against the lid of the boot, until his fingertips finally took hold of the bottle. He pulled it to his chest and took a short breather after the effort. He was overweight and out of shape, which did not bother him in the slightest. When he wasn’t on an assignment Spinks stayed in his pit of a caravan listening to Country and Western CDs or sleeping, and if he was not there he could be found in the cookhouse fixing a snack or in the small bar the detachment ran for themselves in their secret camp, sipping on a pint of bitter, which he liked to share with the detachment’s alcoholic Labrador, Jenkins.
Before unscrewing the top of the water bottle he took a few seconds to estimate how full his bladder was. His last piss was before climbing inside the boot, over six hours ago. He could sense a little pressure there. A drink might put his bladder over the top. Peeing his pants was not a major issue for Spinks. It would not be the first time he lay in his own urine for hours on end. There was something he found pleasant about the sensation of warm pee spreading around his crotch area. He took a good swig, dribbling on himself in the awkward position, and swilled his mouth to rinse the sandwich down. As he swallowed he placed an eye back into the beam of light to look outside once again and what he saw nearly made him choke. He dropped the bottle, letting the water spill, and scrambled to find the communication prestel that hung out of his sleeve on its wire. He had to summon every effort to stifle a cough so he could whisper into the collar of his jacket where the tiny microphone was stitched.
‘Four two Charlie,’ he begun, but had to stop to c
lear his throat again. ‘Four two Charlie, he’s coming out. I say again, O’Farroll is coming out.’
Spinks kept his eye to the hole with unblinking concentration. From where he was parked he was perfectly positioned to see the front door of the church and the people coming out of it. The church was a solitary, squat, grey construction on the edge of a quiet country road a good mile from the nearest town. All the buildings in this undulating, rambling part of County Tyrone a few miles west of Lough Neagh were grey, or so they seemed. Even the rich countryside that surrounded them had a grey tint. Perhaps it was the dark skies. It rained a lot this time of year.
The church didn’t look big enough to hold more than fifty people but then not that many turned out on Sunday mornings these days.Two men in warm three-quarter-length business coats over their Sunday best suits walked out of the entrance, past the tilted, unreadable gravestones and through an opening in the squat stone wall that ran along the side of the road. They stopped to chat while the rest of the congregation, mostly older people, headed to their cars parked on the grass verges.
‘O’Farroll and one unknown male static on main outside the obvious having a chat,’ Spinks whispered.
A strange noise came from his hidden wireless earpiece deep inside his ear, like a garbled human voice underwater. After a second the words became clear. It was the secure communications system that chopped up the sender’s transmission and then sent it through the airwaves all jumbled up to be un-jumbled at the receiver’s end. It was said the most sophisticated code-breaking computers would take a month to piece together just one sentence.
‘One three kilo, roger that,’ said a female voice in answer to Spinks’s message.
Spinks kept an unblinking watch on the two men.
The female voice was that of Agatha, who preferred to be called Aggy even though she didn’t like either name. In fact, anyone calling her Agatha would generally be ignored, unless that person was a senior officer, of course. Neither name was her real one though. No operators used their real names in case they were ever captured and tortured. It seemed odd to have a truncation of a false name but she hadn’t known she would need a secret identity until the day she arrived at the clandestine selection camp. It was all so top secret. Only during that initial processing when her bags and clothes were confiscated and she was stripped and searched did they ask her for a cover name that she would use from that moment on, before she met any of the other recruits, whose identities were also secret, and then for the rest of her time as an undercover operative. If she passed the gruelling four-month selection process, that is. The impatient intelligence officer had given her seconds to come up with a name and she quickly chose Agatha because it was the name of a favourite aunt and then immediately decided she didn’t like it. By then it was too late. He had recorded it and gone into the next room where another recruit was being stripped and identity checked. It was Agatha, or Aggy, from that moment on.
Aggy was pretty and in her early twenties. Her face, specifically her eyes, was distinctly feline but everything else about her, her mannerisms and clothes, was masculine. She didn’t own a dress and always slouched in an unladylike way; a foot up on her seat or hung over the armrest. Her hands were nearly always in her trouser pockets and she could hardly stand still without leaning on anything close enough that could support her. During selection she kept her hair short and was known as the kid because she was like a pretty young boy. After arriving at the detachment her nickname, behind her back, was much less kind and threw into question her sexual preferences. Considering the profession she had chosen, what she went through to get selected, and what she was required to do, her tomboy qualities were as much an advantage as they were a disadvantage. She was expected to be as tough as any man, do a job that was at one time considered to be exclusively male, but do it as a woman. She was taught and tested as if she were a man, treated with the same level of harshness and brutality one expected of an undercover operative on a selection course famed for its toughness, without any respect for her less robust physique. Then at the end of it she was asked to cultivate her feminine side and was sent out to do the same job as the men but looking and acting like a woman. Her marked failure in the feminine department might have drawn more criticism from some of the hard-line operatives if she did not have such a pretty face. Women were recruited into the job because of a specific need for female undercover operatives; there was no point having one that looked like a man. In fact, many regarded it as manifestly dangerous.
Aggy sat in her dark brown Audi four-door in baggy jeans and black ski-jacket with her trainers up on the dash either side of the steering wheel. The car was tucked into a clearing in a small Scots pine wood just off the road a couple of miles from the church. Beside her was Ed, the crusty, worn-out operative who had dropped off Spinks early that morning. They were waiting for Spinks to cover the meeting, tell them his task was complete and that the church area was clear so that Ed could go back and pick him up. Aggy would drive up the road, drop off Ed a few hundred yards from the church, out of sight of persons or habitats, then he would walk up the road alone, pick up the car with Spinks inside and drive it back to the detachment headquarters.
It was one of those typical ‘long wait’ jobs and Aggy was peeved with it, not because of the job per se but with the team selection - or to be precise, Ed. The cover for a male and female operative waiting in a secluded area in a car was usually of the romantic nature. If anyone should happen past they could kiss and cuddle to avoid suspicion: car sex was a very common pastime in Northern Ireland. Ed could not have looked more unlikely as her boyfriend and on close inspection their little off-the-road tryst would have convinced few that they were anything remotely close to passionate about each other. He was gaunt with a potbelly, had a scruffy hombre moustache, and chain-smoked Woodbine roll-ups, a habit since he was thirteen that no doubt contributed to his dried and haggard face, which looked much older than his forty years. Ed abhorred any form of physical training. The last time he ran anywhere was on his selection course eighteen years previously.
As if the differences between him and Aggy were not great enough she found him to be the most boring and obnoxious moaner she had ever met. Out of those eighteen years in the military he had been in the actual field as an operative for six of them. The other twelve had been spent in various administrative posts in the Intelligence Corps, his parent unit. Ed had achieved the rank of sergeant simply because of his seniority in years. It had nothing to do with his abilities, which were limited. In fact, his move through the ranks could be solely attributed to the undercover unit: since he was often away he was assessed in absentia and because of the nature of his ‘special work’ his upgrade was a generous one. He was not a hinge-pin of the unit but as a dinosaur he did have his uses. He was the oldest operative on the books and one of the few who could quite naturally spend hours in a boozy, smoke-filled working man’s bar and blend in unnoticed. Unfortunately for Aggy, Ed saw himself as quite the sage and keeper of the undercover wisdom and he never let any of the ‘young pups’, as he referred to her generation of operatives, forget about all the years he had under his belt.
Ed was as peeved with this particular assignment as Aggy. He was one of the main complainers about women operatives and it did not help matters that he was referred to by other operatives during this particular partnership as the paedophile. This no doubt contributed to his reluctance to cuddle her when the situation required it. They had been forced to embrace three times since arriving just after four a.m. Ed was unshaved, stunk of cigarettes, his moustache was wet with the coffee he continually sipped from his flask, and he held her like she had an infectious rash. One of their cuddles lasted a gruesome fifteen minutes because of a horny couple that had turned up in two cars for an early morning shag.
‘They probably think I’m a bloody homosexual,’ he moaned as he held her. He offered his standard complaint more than once that day. ‘Weren’t any women when I first started this job eig
hteen years ago,’ he would say in his thick Yorkshire accent. ‘We made do wi’ wigs when we ’ad to . . . Any’ow, I don’t know any bloody women ooh sit in a car with their bloody feet up on the dashboard.’
Aggy would simply roll her eyes. It was pointless to even try to argue with him. Spinks’s communication was therefore a welcome sign that the task was nearly over and they could dump each other.
‘I confirm O’Farroll and one unknown male,’ Spinks whispered into his lapel, O’Farroll being the older man. He pushed a button fitted into the rear light module.The shutter of a camera, built into another light, silently clicked, capturing O’Farroll in the wide-frame shot talking with the stranger, and the film rolled on to the next frame. The other man was undoubtedly inferior in rank to O’Farroll, who was the Real IRA’s quartermaster and second in command of the War Council. That was a fair assumption since all of the RIRA godfathers were known and it was unlikely a new and superior one would have arrived on the scene without military intelligence finding out.
The stranger laughed at a comment O’Farroll made and then did something that unnerved Spinks. He looked directly towards the rear of Spinks’s car for what he felt was a little too long. Every undercover operative had a well-developed sense of paranoia, which they have to learn to control. The two men looked relaxed and jocular as if just passing the time of day, but Spinks, an experienced watcher of people, sensed a definite edge between them.
A few minutes later the stranger did it again. His eyes wandered away from O’Farroll to snatch a glance directly at the back of Spinks’s car. Spinks took another photograph and stared at the stranger, trying to think of anything he could possibly be looking at. A car then pulled up and stopped in the road, blocking Spinks’s view of the two men. It stayed for half a minute, its engine running, and when it drove away O’Farroll had gone, leaving the stranger by himself in the road. The man paused for a moment, sliding his hands into his coat pockets. Then as he turned to move away, once again he looked directly towards Spinks before moving out of sight.
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