PLEDGE OF HONOR: A Mark Cole Thriller

by J. T. Brannan

  ‘Yes, and we all know how well that was perceived,’ Abrams fired back.

  It was true, Vinson had to admit; Obama was widely criticized for not attending the ‘rally of national unity’ led by the French president, Francois Hollande, after the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine that often poked fun at the Prophet Muhammed and was therefore seen as blasphemous. Seventeen people were killed by two home-grown Islamic terrorists, and over forty world leaders gathered with President Hollande just a few days later in a city-wide protest march.

  Barrack Obama’s credibility was called into question when he sent an envoy in his place, the US ambassador to France, and Vinson knew that Abrams would obviously be reluctant to follow the same path.

  ‘I understand that,’ Vinson said, undeterred. ‘But the fact is that security arrangements are so hard to make in such a short space of time, as I’m sure Dennis has already pointed out.’

  Dennis O’Hare was the Director of the Secret Service, the agency responsible for protecting the president, and Vinson knew that the man generally required as much time as possible to take care of security for presidential visits. Whereas many heads of state were happy to allow the country being visited to provide most of the protection, the US protocol was that the Secret Service always took primacy when it came to the president, no matter where in the world she might be going. Either the country in question accepted that, or the president didn’t go.

  ‘He has pointed it out, yes,’ Abrams confirmed, ‘and I understand the problems, and the reticence you all feel about it. But the bottom line is that I have to worry about international political relations, and the impact they have on the US. You have to worry about how to do that safely.’

  ‘So you’re going?’

  ‘If there’s a gathering of world leaders to show support for the United Kingdom, then yes – I’m definitely going.’

  ‘Okay then,’ Vinson said with a sigh, imagining what a headache this was going to cause for O’Hare and his people, ‘please keep me in the loop as regards O’Hare’s plans. I’ll contact Mark and give him the heads-up, maybe he’ll be able to assess the situation there, give us more of an idea how safe it is.’

  ‘Do it,’ Abrams agreed. ‘I’ll still have to go, you’ll just have more information so that you can manage the visit better.’

  ‘Yes ma’am,’ Vinson said. ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Good morning,’ Abrams replied, and the line went dead, leaving Vinson to ponder his next course of action, and how they were going to protect the president on the other side of the world, with what was probably less than a week’s notice.

  Still, he reflected, what was life without a challenge?

  13

  It was only when Cole had seen East Lane Primary School for the first time, with his own eyes, that the horror of what had happened finally sank in.

  The school – which at this time of day should have been filled with happy, energetic children running down the halls, playing in the grounds, learning in the classrooms – was still and lifeless, like one of the gutted buildings from a city firebombed during World War II.

  There were plenty of people there, going about their business of photographing the crime scene and collecting forensic evidence, but they did so in almost absolute silence, as if to speak would be disrespectful to the dead; and in the dark gloom of the rainy November day, the place was like a haunted house from a ‘fifties horror movie.

  As Cole was given a tour of the corridors and the classrooms, a shiver ran up and down his spine; dried blood was everywhere, rusty brown on the walls, the floor, the chairs, desks, white boards, computers.

  Everywhere.

  The fact that most of it was the blood of innocent children – evidenced by the chalk outlines, many of which were far too small to be adults – chilled him even more.

  Cranshaw and Morgan were waiting for him outside, despite the rain; they’d been through here before, and had no real desire to see it all again. Cole didn’t blame them in the slightest.

  Cole was a man used to violence, a man who had visited his fair share on other people; but this was unlike anything he had seen before, something truly grotesque and obscene.

  As he passed through the school, he imagined how the killers had done it, their angles of entry, their methods of attack.

  He tried to imagine what had been in the killers’ minds, how they could have turned themselves off to what they were doing, how they could have looked those terrified kids in the eyes and still been able to pull the trigger.

  People would probably ask the same questions of him, he understood; on occasions too numerous to even count, he had been on the other side – the man pulling the trigger, numb to the pain he was inflicting.

  He had never targeted children though, not once in his entire life; never would, either. It was one thing to kill a man – or even a woman – who was a threat to national security, people who themselves had killed others, or people who were about to; it was another thing entirely to take a young, innocent life and expunge it without mercy, without regret.

  But as Cole wandered the death-filled corridors, he wondered if he truly was that different to the men who had done this. Hadn’t many of the people he had killed had younger brothers and sisters? Children of their own? How many kids had Cole left fatherless or motherless, how many had he sent to orphanages, how many minds had he affected with depression, regret and sorrow? How many young lives had he unwittingly destroyed over the years?

  He shook his head.

  No.

  What he did was for the greater good, to protect the innocent from people like Karam, Massoud and Nasrallah.

  But, his mind rebelled, isn’t that just how these killers would have justified themselves?

  Aren’t you just the same as them?

  He passed through the half-destroyed auditorium, damaged by automatic gunfire and grenade blasts; took in the dozens of small chalk outlines sketched across the blood-stained wooden floor; passed out of the shattered windows into the courtyard beyond, saw the killing field where more innocent children been cut down, saw the crater where the RPG round had hit.

  He felt sick to his stomach.

  Was he the same as them?

  He didn’t know.

  All he did know was that it was a question for another day, when this mission was over.

  But what if he found that others were responsible, that there were yet more people behind the three killers?

  Would he make their children orphans?

  Yes, he answered himself as he surveyed the devastating carnage of the courtyard.

  Whether that made him like the terrorist killers or not, he could not change who he was.

  Anyone who was involved in this operation was already dead.

  They just didn’t know it yet.

  Half an hour later, Cole was ensconced in the staff room watching security footage of the attacks. Someone had given him a cup of coffee from the principal’s office but – though the aromas had been tempting earlier – now that the video was playing, he hadn’t taken a sip of it.

  If the sight of the chalk outlines, the bullet-riddled walls and the blood-soaked floors had sickened him, then the feeds from the school’s security cameras chilled him to the very bone. He’d seen photographs of the terrorists – both alive and dead – but seeing them stalk the corridors of the elementary school was something else again.

  There were no feeds from the classrooms, just from the corridors and auditorium, but it was enough; it was more than enough.

  He watched as Ibrahim Nasrallah entered a hallway near the staff room – bumping into a teaching assistant who the notes indicated was called Ben Yance – and then strode off toward the first classroom.

  Yance bravely followed him, and the cameras picked up flashes of gunfire from inside the classroom before Nasrallah exited alone – the notes explained that Yance had been killed – rifle up as he kicked in the door to the next classroom and the same ro
utine was repeated; flashes from gunfire, then the reappearance of the killer into the corridor.

  One more classroom, no flashes this time; the kids had already been fleeing into the courtyard outside.

  They must have thought they were escaping, maybe thought they were going to get away from it all; little did they know that they were being funneled into the true killing ground outside.

  Another video feed showed the mayhem inside the auditorium, how Aabid Karam – the same man who had executed the police officer outside the school – burst into the assembly, his automatic rifle firing into the crowd of children before he was tackled by two teachers. Karam defended himself with what looked like a curved dagger, before producing a grenade and pulling the pin.

  But then another woman had grabbed the man’s fallen rifle and shot him with it; and then the grenade had fallen to the ground, obliterating that entire area. The rest of the scene was filled with the survivors struggling to make their way out of the broken, shattered auditorium.

  There was no feed from the carnage which occurred outside, the launch of the RPG-7 by Nasrallah, the use of the belt-fed Zastava machine gun that must have cut the fleeing children and teachers down like flies, and Cole was not unhappy about that. He had seen more than enough, both for his own mental health, and in order to draw his conclusions.

  ‘There’s no way these people just picked up these weapons and operated like this,’ Cole said, finally taking a sip of his now-cold coffee. ‘They operated too professionally, too precisely. They must have had military training, or at least training of a paramilitary or guerilla nature. It’s in their manner, the way they move, the confident way they handle those weapons.

  ‘We don’t have footage, but eye witness reports – as well as what the notes here say about the weapon itself – indicate that Massoud had no problems operating that Zastava. And machine guns aren’t particularly easy weapons to handle, believe me; even loading them can be a real son of a bitch if you don’t know what you’re doing, and that’s under classroom conditions. These guys were in the field, operating under pressure, and I mean real pressure.’

  ‘You almost sound as if you admire them,’ Morgan commented.

  Cole didn’t like the Englishwoman’s judgmental tone, and turned to her. ‘Understanding the level of training needed to carry out actions like these under the pressure of actual operational conditions is just that, Liz – understanding. It’s very far from admiration.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Morgan said. ‘I didn’t mean anything by it.’

  ‘Hey,’ Cranshaw said, ‘we’re all probably a little bit put out by what we’ve seen this morning, right? It’s perfectly normal, so let’s just forget about it and move on.’

  ‘Okay,’ Cole said. ‘One of the men – Karam, the same guy that killed the cop outside – used a dagger too, took two people out with it, and that sort of thing is also not the usual kind of skill-set a normal civilian has. Using any sort of Kalash on single-shot is also pretty rare for untrained guys, they don’t typically fire single, aimed shots, they just whack it straight onto full-auto and hope for the best. Spray and pray, we call it back home, it’s the mark of an untrained person. And yet here, Karam killed the cop with aimed shots, and Nasrallah killed the teaching assistant with a single shot to the chest.

  ‘Massoud was also firing the machine gun in bursts of what witnesses think was one or two seconds, that’s three to twelve rounds at a time. Now that’s definitely a trained skill, an amateur would just let it go wild. But you’re taught to fire in bursts, not only to keep the fire accurate, but also to make sure the barrel doesn’t overheat and blow up right in your face. It might not be a problem for some modern weapons, but for something designed by the Soviets back in the sixties, and then copied by a Balkans arms manufacturer twenty years later, overheating would be a genuine concern.’

  ‘You sound as if you know what you’re talking about, I’ll give you that,’ Cranshaw said.

  ‘I’m something of an expert in this area,’ Cole said, ‘that’s why I’m here. They didn’t just send me because I aced international diplomacy.’

  ‘Right,’ Morgan said with a smile. ‘So where do we start digging?’

  ‘Put a high priority on checking out their travel over the past few years, dig as deep as you can. I guarantee that they will have been out of the UK for several weeks – perhaps even months – at some stage, maybe not all at the same time, but definitely all at some point. Typical camp locations are Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Libya, though I’m sure they’ll have traveled through other counties to try and cover their tracks. But the information will be out there somewhere, and I’ll get our agencies to start looking into it too.’

  ‘Anything else?’ Cranshaw asked.

  ‘The weapons,’ Cole answered straight away. ‘If we can find out where they came from, that’s another thing we can use to pinpoint the people behind this.’

  ‘You really are convinced this wasn’t a lone wolf attack, aren’t you?’ Morgan asked.

  ‘Aren’t you?’ Cole responded, eyebrow raised.

  ‘I’m afraid to say,’ Morgan said with a half-smile, although the thought obviously disturbed her a great deal, ‘that I’m rapidly becoming convinced you’re right.’

  14

  It was well after midday by the time Cole and the two British agents left the school, heading out to see the spot where Karam had killed the police officer before they would follow the route taken by Massoud toward the synagogue.

  ‘Liz?’ a woman with the forensics team asked as Morgan walked out of the school grounds. ‘Is that you?’ She stood up from where she’d been kneeling, looking for evidence on the wet concrete, and smiled. ‘It is you, isn’t it? You look different.’

  ‘It’s me,’ Morgan confirmed with a forced smile. ‘How are you?’

  Cranshaw turned to Cole as the two woman made small talk. ‘She gets that all the time,’ he whispered. ‘People always talking about her looks, one way or the other. Must drive her insane. I don’t blame that girl asking her though, she does look a little different lately. Don’t know what she’s done, but – if possible – she’s even prettier than she was before.’

  Morgan finally disengaged herself from the other woman, and strode over to them, face dark. ‘Another bloody bitch asking me where I got my facelift done.’ She shook her head. ‘Why don’t they mind their own damned business?’

  ‘I’m hungry,’ Cranshaw said, changing the subject as he pulled his coat collar up against the chill. Cole noted that the crowds were thinning out slightly, probably either gone for lunch themselves, or else put off by the weather. The areas beyond the barricades were still heaving with demonstrators though, many of them with umbrellas. ‘Missed breakfast this morning, and it’s starting to catch up with me.’

  ‘Why don’t we take a break?’ Morgan suggested. ‘Go and grab a bite to eat, then carry on when we’re all feeling a bit more fresh?’

  Cole wanted to keep working, but recognized that people generally worked better when they were well fed, so conceded the point. ‘Sounds like a good idea,’ he said. ‘Anywhere good close by?’

  ‘There’s only one place open to be fair, Cranshaw said. ‘Almost everyone wanted to close today, as a sign of respect, national day of mourning and all that. We had to convince a local sandwich shop to stay open to feed all of us lot, otherwise there’d have been about a hundred very hungry and upset police officers stomping about the place. The owner must be laughing his arse off now, probably the busiest day of the year.’

  ‘Probably,’ Cole said with a smile, before his attention was suddenly distracted by something in the crowd.

  They were on East Lane, the main road closed to traffic and the crowd barriers set up on the other sidewalk. He could see where officers still attended to the area where the police officer had been executed, chalk outline and blood-red halo visible despite the weather; but this wasn’t what he had noticed.

  It was further away,
beyond the barricade.

  He looked again, eyes sweeping left and right up and down the sidewalk.

  It had been movement that he had seen, something slightly out of synch with the other members of the crowd, something that had caught the attention of his subconscious, his reptilian hindbrain.

  He scanned as he walked, not wishing to stop and stare and give whatever – whoever – he had seen any warning, so that they wouldn’t think to disguise the pattern of movement that Cole had seen.

  And there it was again, and his conscious brain recognized it this time; a man, walking behind the barricades.

  He was about forty-five years old, average height and build, fit for his age; western clothing and clean-shaven but unmistakably South Asian, and Cole pegged him as being from Pakistan. Some people – his military brethren among them – thought that everyone from South Asia, the Middle East or Persian Gulf looked the same, classified them simply as ‘Arabs’ or ‘Muslims’ when they were being polite, less savory terms when they were not. But it wasn’t true, and anyone who had spent the considerable time that Cole had in that area of the world was able to differentiate the different nationalities with relative ease.

  But it wasn’t the man’s country of origin that had caught Cole’s attention – the protestors, demonstrators and other assorted onlookers were a diverse group, covering pretty much the whole spectrum of global ethnicity. Rather, it was how he moved in relation to the others, the things that appeared to take his interest, the level of his concentration in comparison to the people around him.

  The rest of the people standing behind the barricades were chanting, protesting against terrorism, venting their rage at what had happened, their energies all directed the same way. The man, however, seemed apart somehow, his own energies directed elsewhere.

  But where?

  And why?

  It wasn’t something that Cole could put his finger on straight away, but after a few moments consideration – and a few moments of observation, albeit peripherally, not wanting to look straight at the man and raise his danger antenna – he realized what it was.