by Andy McNab
‘A world full of dead medal winners?’
She gave me an old-fashioned look. ‘You’re smarter than that, Bag O’Shite. I mean a world in which people confronted by the most testing of circumstances teach the rest of us how to behave, a world where generosity of spirit is the keynote.’
I wasn’t as smart as she seemed to think I was, but I liked her take on courage. I didn’t really believe it, but I liked it.
That exchange ran through my mind as I sat in the Skoda not far from Denmark Hill, with eyes on the small but perfectly formed semi she shared with two Persian cats. The house had been empty when I arrived, but I’d seen breakfast stuff on the table by the window in her kitchen/diner and her bicycle was missing, so I reckoned she hadn’t disappeared for a weekend in the country. And if she had, so what? I’d just wait out.
Cornell’s Professor James Maas coined the term ‘power nap’ in the nineties, but every squaddie since the dawn of time has known that getting your head down for anywhere between six and thirty minutes gives you optimum battery recharge without the disadvantage of sleep inertia. The trick is not to get caught doing it on stag.
I wasn’t sure whether the sudden shift in the air molecules inside the car had woken me, or the coldness of the muzzle against the soft skin below my ear. Either way, I needed to sharpen up my act. I’d messed around with my body clock a fair amount in the last week or so, but that was no excuse: it was the story of my life.
I stole a glance in the rear-view, but whoever was behind me had taken care to stay in the blind spot. I eased my right palm in the direction of the pistol grip.
‘Raise both hands very slowly and place them on top of your steering wheel. Do not make any attempt to reach for the Browning beneath your thigh.’
The voice was low, but crisp and authoritative. I did exactly what it told me to.
4
‘I know you can’t teach old dogs new tricks, Bag O’Shite, but when you can’t even get the old tricks right any more, I’d say it’s time to start looking for alternative employment.’
Maggie removed the mouth of her Coke bottle from my neck.
‘Let’s do us both a favour and get you off the streets. Fancy a brew? You look as though you could use a shot or two of caffeine. Unless you’d prefer to stay out here and say a few Hail Marys instead.’ She gestured at the rosary beads swinging gently from the rear-view.
I replaced the Browning in my waistband and exited Father Gerard’s wagon. ‘I thought you’d never ask, Moneypenny. As long as it’s proper builders’ tea. I don’t want any of that fruit-flavoured shit you posh birds go for.’
Maggie had a hint of grey around the temples but looked as good as she had in Derry. She squeezed my arm as she steered me across the street. ‘Don’t worry, Stone. Your secret’s safe with me.’
We went a couple of paces further.
‘Nice car, by the way …’ She could no longer stop herself snorting with laughter.
The cats weren’t in any hurry to make me feel at home. Maybe they’d seen me asleep at the wheel as well. The expression in their cool green eyes made it clear that, as far as they were concerned, my stay was very, very temporary.
Maggie’s place was filled with fascinating stuff. Leather-bound books spilled off her shelves. Her walls were covered with antique prints of mosques and deserts and men who looked like Lawrence of Arabia. A curved Omani ceremonial dagger with a jewelled silver hilt hung beside a framed service sheet from the ceremony at Westminster Abbey commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Victoria Cross. When I leaned in closer I saw that the surviving recipients had signed it for her.
She flicked on the kettle and dug around in the fridge. ‘I’m afraid I can’t stretch to spicy chicken kebabs without a bit of warning, but a club sandwich wouldn’t be out of the question.’
I helped her clear the breakfast things from the table I’d pinged earlier and sat down.
She ate with the precision she brought to everything else I’d seen her do. I wolfed my plateful of food, got some of the brew down my neck and spent a minute or two fiddling with the handle of my mug.
When I looked up, Maggie was giving me the same eyebrow treatment that Grace Nichol had when I was trying to convince her that my visit to Ella’s surgery was a complete coincidence.
She wiped her mouth with a linen napkin. ‘So what’s up, Stone? Social calls never used to be your thing, did they? Unless you were looking for a shag or a boys’ night out.’
I guessed I’d always been pretty transparent to clever women, and perhaps not so clever ones as well. The thought occurred to me that Anna would have liked Maggie as much as I did, and it was one of the things that made me smile.
I gave her a boiled-down version of my quest. It wasn’t quite the truth, but it wasn’t packed with outright lies either. And I didn’t feel the need to tell her what had happened to me and Trev over the border.
Maggie remembered Harry from one of those boys’ nights out in H, but hadn’t made the connection between him and Sam. I kicked off by admitting that I hadn’t kept as much of an eye on the boy as I should have done, for Harry’s sake, and was doing my best to make up for that now.
‘I know the PTSD label is being slapped on every veteran these days, but the more I hear about what these three kids went through on that last tour of Afghan, the more it seems like that’s what we’re talking about here. You know about Chris Matlock?’
She nodded sadly. ‘They’re not spreading it about, obviously, but Mickey Chastain told me.’
‘Sounds like the Kajaki scars ran deeper than anyone realized. I can’t help wondering whether Guy’s death tipped Sam and Scott right over the edge. I’ve read the citation, but those things only ever give us the headlines …’
She recharged the teapot and spent a moment or two deciding where to begin.
‘An int source on the ground told them that there was a humongous subterranean arms cache in a fortified Taliban position north of Koshtay. RPGs, SAM-7s, IEDs, anti-tank rounds, the lot. As you know, they’d stop at nothing to take out an Apache or a Chinook, and there was enough there to decimate an entire squadron.
‘The ordnance was too deep for a surgical strike from the air, so Guy Chastain was tasked with locating and destroying it, with a 40 Commando platoon in support. He selected two other boys in black to go with him.’
‘Sam Callard and Scott Braxton …’
Maggie dipped her head. ‘The target was an old frontier post …’ She told me the plan had been to approach it from the river, with an Apache two-ship from 656 Squadron providing top cover. A two-hundred-metre stretch of open ground on a fairly sharp incline separated the first line of defence – a metre-thick mud and stone wall – from the water. The Apaches’ first task was to blow a hole in it, then give the fort itself the same treatment.
The good news was that the helis’ scanning equipment had picked up the heat-signatures of a fairly tight defending force – twenty or twenty-five bodies max. The bad news came later. The network of tunnels beneath the Taliban position didn’t only contain arms and ammunition. There were another hundred or more insurgents down there too, waiting for our people to land in their laps.
5
The initial insertion took far longer than anyone had bargained for, and shortly after they’d given each of the walls a dose of Hellfire, the helis had had to lift off back to Bastion with some kind of malfunction. The invading force were without top cover for no more than twenty minutes, but twenty minutes is time enough for the Mother of all Clusterfucks.
Sam and Scott were first through the inner breach, which meant that they had a ringside seat as the Taliban they hadn’t known about began to emerge from their wormholes. They called in a contact report to the marines behind them. All well and good, but it meant that our lads were on their own in there, counting the nanoseconds before they’d need to call on Father Mart to administer Last Rites.
Guy wasn’t going to let that happen. He led a 40 Commando detachment
through the first wall and told them to spread out left and right, hosing down the enemy as they went. Then he extracted his mates under covering fire.
Maggie needed a breather at this point too. I wasn’t surprised. She described the action like she was there. She stood up and took a turn around the workbench. I took another swig of my brew and waited for her to continue.
Eventually she came back and sat down beside me.
I gave her a gentle nudge. ‘It’s what happened next that I’m not at all clear about.’
She gave a deep sigh and looked away. When she turned back I could see tears in her eyes. ‘Guy didn’t just save their lives. He remained determined to complete the mission. And he did.’
I shut up now. She really didn’t need me on her case.
‘The drone footage tells us it was five metres or so from the inner wall to the entrance that led to the cache, through a building that looked like a small bunker, and down a thirty-foot shaft. After they’d discovered the scale of the enemy defence, there was only going to be one way to destroy it. And that was the way Guy chose.’
It must have been a bit like the shell from the Bismarck that had sunk HMS Hood in 1941: straight down the funnel and into the magazine, with only three survivors. Except it wasn’t a shell, it was an SAS captain taking a nosedive with an HE grenade in each hand.
Fuck knows how he made it to the cover of the bunker. Maggie said the drone footage became pretty surreal after he’d got Sam and Scott off the hook, and looked more like a Schwarzenegger movie than real-life.
The silence in her kitchen was so thick at that point you could have cut it with a knife. Even the cats had caught the vibe and stopped complaining about my invasion of their personal space.
I had the feeling that the same thought was crossing both our minds: that the line dividing a truly selfless, heroic sacrifice and the last desperate act of a man who can’t live with the legacy of a previous mission was sometimes incredibly thin.
6
It took a while for Maggie to sort herself out.
She disappeared to the bathroom to blow her nose and, by the sound of it, to splash her face. She looked like shit when she came back, but her eyes had stopped leaking by the time she’d pulled a bottle of wine from the fridge.
We waffled on about the Det and which joints used to do the best pizzas and kebabs in Derry. I asked her why we hadn’t ever quite got it together – whether she had a rule about not shagging guys she was working with. She laughed and told me, no, she had a rule about not shagging guys whose sideburns were bigger than their IQ. Fair one. I knew I’d been pushing my luck.
She told me about a few of her NGO experiences in Sudan, Sierra Leone and Palestine, and some VC stuff I hadn’t heard.
Eric Wilson’s story was one of her favourites. He had been awarded the medal posthumously in 1940 for defending a hill in Somaliland for forty-eight hours after failing to hear the signal to withdraw. When the Italians finally overran his position all they found was a pile of dead bodies – a handful of soldiers from the local Camel Corps, their British officer and his pet terrier. Then one of them discovered that the officer was still breathing. Two months later, after a spell at an enemy field hospital, Captain Wilson was spotted in a PoW camp in Eritrea, and lived on very happily for a further sixty-eight years.
I refilled both our glasses, even though I hadn’t attacked mine as hard as she’d attacked hers.
‘You mentioned Mickey Chastain …’ We’d never been on first-name terms, so it came out sounding a bit bone. ‘How’s he coping?’
‘He’s devastated, of course. Guy was their only child. But incredibly proud too, and I guess that’s what keeps him going when he’s not being the world’s policeman. I’ve spent quite a bit of time with him on this statue business.’
I paused. ‘I’m not sure about the statue. But maybe that’s because I’d spend every minute of every day tracking down the men who killed my son, rather than trying to turn him into a museum exhibit.’
‘I completely understand why he’s so determined to push it through, despite getting so much stick from the old guard.’ She frowned. ‘But I’ve got to admit, I’m in two minds too. The VCs are a special breed. I’m in no doubt about that. And yet, as Queen Victoria said, “All my soldiers are brave.”’
I’d always thought that was a very nice thing to say, even though it was complete bollocks. Some soldiers are brave. Some aren’t. And some are complete shitheads. Just like everyone else on the planet.
We both looked down into our glasses. I mentioned the CQB mess, and wondered how far she thought DSF and his crew would be prepared to go to keep it under wraps.
She didn’t have to give it much thought. ‘Their default position is to keep secret things secret, needless to say, now more than ever, as far as the new regime is concerned. And as the different elements of the security services find themselves in competition with each other for a share of the dwindling defence budget, every visible sign of weakness is a really big issue.’
‘So?’
‘So I’d say that they’d do whatever it takes.’
I didn’t ask whether she thought that might include sending a gun for hire across the Black Mountains to drop an ex-member of the Regiment.
I stayed long enough to watch her finish the wine, then the cats got their wish.
She gave me a quick kiss on my cheek before I opened the front door. ‘So … what next, Bag O’Shite?’
‘I reckon I need to get your mate Mickey onside. Harry’s boy could use some help from the grown-ups.’
‘I think you’ll find he’s gone to sort out Syria. So good luck there …’
PART SIX
1
Tower Bridge, London
Monday, 30 January
09.00 hrs
Astra had only been in business for a little over a decade, but it was already up there with the big boys. With shiny glass and steel offices in the City of London, Washington, Hong Kong, Dubai, San Francisco, Mexico City, Sydney and probably Beijing, for all I knew, they covered every part of the waterfront, from BGing to cyber security, and boasted a list of government contracts that must have really pissed off the competition.
When Chastain had finally binned the military, mostly as a protest against the MoD’s failure to give due care to the physically and psychologically wounded members of his regiment – but more than likely with a helping hand between his shoulder-blades – he’d hooked up with a mate from the State Department. The maverick tendencies that had hampered his progress on the inside became a positive advantage at a ‘safe’ distance, and there wasn’t a door the two of them couldn’t open in the Anglo-American Military-Industrial Complex.
Risk mitigation was the name of their game, and raw courage their stock in trade, so I guessed that Guy’s VC wasn’t going to do them any harm at all. Even if it was only half a step away from a kamikaze mission, it would supply Astra with all the right kind of headlines for years to come.
I called their London office on the first of my new Nokias from a concrete bench overlooking the Thames by Tower Bridge, and asked to be put through to the colonel. Maggie hadn’t been wrong: an alarmingly crisp and efficient executive assistant told me that he was currently away on business, but expected back towards the end of the week. Could I leave my name and number? I told her it wasn’t urgent, and I’d get back to him later.
I sparked up the other one, my hotline to Father Mart, and the message icon flashed almost immediately. It was clearly going to take him a bit of time to master the art of predictive text, but he’d managed to send two sets of contact details: the major in charge of the Article 32 investigation, and Sam’s defence counsel.
I decided to give the major a miss. There was no way the court-martial staffers would invite me in for a cosy chat. But I needed to connect with Sam’s barrister. I swapped Nokias again, rang his number and told the clerk who picked up that my name was Nick Jones, and Father Martyn had encouraged me to call. We fixed an ap
pointment at his Inner Temple chambers for later in the afternoon, ‘after Mr Blackwood has concluded his day in court’.
I wandered over to the parapet and watched the froth riding on the dark currents as they swirled beneath me. HMS Belfast sat at anchor to my half-left, and the Tower of London stood to attention straight ahead, surrounded by cranes tasked with filling every spare inch of space around it with riverside apartments for offshore investors who didn’t care about the view.
I wasn’t far from the point where the headless torso of a Nigerian kid had been spotted floating in the water shortly after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. The police had never nailed his killers, even though they found out exactly where the little boy had come from, and the route he’d taken from Benin City, via Hamburg, to London. They also knew he’d been sliced up in Lewisham as a sacrificial offering to a Yoruban river god, whose protection was needed for a monster people- and drug-trafficking operation.
They’d released the photos of the victim – bright eyes, bemused smile – quite recently. Since becoming a dad myself I’d found that kind of image increasingly difficult to delete from the data base inside my head.
I’d got a room at the back of the Premier Inn on Tower Bridge Road. It had a car park of its own, but I liked to keep my options open, so left the Skoda in the underground complex at Butler’s Wharf.
This part of Bermondsey had been my adventure playground as a kid. I’d lived in a council block thrown up after the war on the Tabard Estate, about ten minutes west of Tower Bridge Road, between Guy’s Hospital and the Elephant and Castle.
Demolition was the Luftwaffe’s favourite job, so there had been plenty of vacant sites around there when I was growing up, and it was still a maze of newly restored, half-built and terminally dilapidated buildings. It was a pig’s breakfast of a place, and I loved every inch of it.
