Zero Option gs-2

by Chris Ryan

  'I know,' he said. 'Beethoven wrote three different overtures for his opera Fidelio. Couldn't decide which to use. There's one called Leonora number three. Great stuff. Come on, now. If the guy's into that, he can't be all bad.'

  'He is,' I insisted. 'He's shit from head to toe.'

  It's surprising what three hours' sleep can do for you, especially if you're running on adrenalin. When I finally got my head down in my room in the sergeants' mess it was nearly four o'clock, and once again I felt I was back at the beginning of the nightmare, on the first night after the kidnap.

  But come seven o'clock, and a good breakfast, I felt a new man.

  By 0745 the cast from the night before had reassembled in the incident room. The CO kicked off with, 'light then, Geordie, what have you got for us?'

  I'd already jotted down a few headings in my notebook, in the hope of making things reasonably clear, but I was glad to find that one of the int office's gofers was present with his laptop to make a proper written record.

  'Mission,' I began. 'The mission is obviously to recover the hostages held by the Provisional IRA. To give Special Branch and the other security forces more time, we propose to simulate our willingness to carry out a shoot on the Prime Minister at Chequers…'

  I ran through place, date and time as if this were a normal operation, and then listed the steps that I expected to take:

  1. Contact PIP, A, agree to carry out shoot.

  2. Peceive instructions for collecting weapon.

  3. Collect weapon.

  4. Move up to Forward Mounting Base in vicinity of target location.

  5. Test-fire and zero weapon.

  6. Negotiate with PIRA to set final R.V site for exchange of Farrell and hostages. Deal will be that Farrell will authorise release of hostages by mobile phone soon as he sees the target is down.

  7. Make Farrell arrange escape from P,V site: helicopter to be hired by PIPA.

  8. Carry out early-morning shoot as detailed, in Farrell's presence.

  9. Fly out of target area. Land at intermediate IV, switch to vehicle, drive to final PV.

  10. Exchange prisoners.

  11. Security forces follow up tracking devices, recapture Farrell and accomplices.

  The CO was at his sharpest, challenging each point as I brought it up, probing for weaknesses in the plan and scouting for problems.

  'What have you got in mind for an FMB?' he demanded.

  'We need another holiday cottage. The one we're in now has been perfect for down here, but it's going to be too far from the job. We need something on the edge of the Chilterns, within a few miles of Chequers.

  Not too close.'

  'Not so easy up there,' he said. 'We don't have any tame house-owners in that area.'

  After a pause he asked, 'What's the point of zeroing the rifle, if you're not trying to hit the target anyway?'

  'Farrell will insist on it. He'll want to come with us when we do it — he's that sort of guy, very practical.'

  'Where will you do it, then?'

  'Depends where our safe house is. When we know where we've landed, we can pick an out-of the-way spot in the country and go out there with a target at first light. I've been looking at the map: there are plenty of big, deserted valleys up there.'

  The CO had adopted his favourite thinking attitude, forehead in hands, ears sticking out well to either side, and elbows on the desk. 'The PIRA will know when the shoot's going to take place,' he said. 'On the morning, they may send dickers to stake out the park.'

  'I thought of that. We're going to need back-up on site. There's a farm just behind Point D. Here.' I twisted the map round so that the Boss could see it fight way up. 'Brockwell Farm. It would be ideal if we could get some of the lads in there under cover of darkness the night before. Then, if Farrell did try to do a runner, or if anyone tried to lift him, we'd still be covered…'

  Mac, the ops officer, was his usual sarcastic self. 'Of course, all this may be so much moonshine,' he said. 'If SB find the hostages first you can forget all this fancy caper.'

  'Christi' I exclaimed. 'If that happened, nobody would be happier than me. I'd be over the bloody moon. If I never saw Farrell again — if I didn't have to go back and meet the bastard again now — I'd be chuffed to bollocks.'

  So it went on. The CO was pretty sceptical at first, but, as usual, he fancied having a go at something outrageous. When I left camp at 0830, I had his permission to carry on planning for the time being, and the promise that once again he would take things to the highest level in Whitehall.

  Back at the cottage, I gave Farrell short shrift. When he asked where I'd been I told him to mind his own business. Then I brought out the PIRA orders. While I read out the main points, he listened with a variety of expressions passing across his face. Sometimes he looked amused, sometimes contemptuous, sometimes interested — but he never seemed particularly surprised.

  'Last night you told me this was all shit,' he said.

  'At first I thought it was.'

  'But now you'll go along with it?'

  'Have to,' I replied. 'I don't see I've any alternative.

  I've drawn the zero option.'

  'The boyos have changed their minds, then.'

  'What about?'

  'The plan for the shoot. They were going to have it in London. This looks more like business. Better than trying to drop a mortar into the garden of Number Ten Downing Street, anyway.'

  'What have you fellows got against the Prime Minister?el demanded. 'He seems a harmless enough guy to me.'

  'Harmless!' Farrell nearly shouted. 'Harmless, begod!

  He's the head of the British Government, is he not? It's him who's the architect of repression in Northern Ireland. The number of murders that fucker's got on his hands — Holy Mary, they can never be avenged. A bullet's too good for him!'

  'If we hack this,' I said, 'and the shoot goes down, I don't want your people crowing about how they got an SAS man to do their dirty work for them. You get me?'

  Farrell nodded.

  'The Regiment would deny it anyway,' I told him.

  'They'd rubbish any story that came out. But publicity's the last thing I want.'

  'Don't kid yourself,' said Farrell scornfully. 'If the job gets done, the PIRA will claim a major success. They're not going to give the credit to some prat in the Brit FORCES

  'All right, then. Find out our RV for collecting the weapon. We need to go for that tonight.'

  Using my mobile, he went through to Belfast and started one of his usual hectoring exchanges. The prospect of action seemed to have put new life into him; he was half-way back to his former aggressive self, as though he were taking charge of the whole operation.

  The upshot of the conversation was that we would get our instructions for the pick-up through an intermediary in Ulster. We were not to call the PIRA on the mainland any more — we were only to ring Belfast.

  'They're getting jumpy,' I said to Whinger when we were alone in the kitchen.

  'Don't blame them,' he answered. 'I am too.'

  'This fucker Farrell,' I said. 'He's starting to give me the shits. I've got a horrible feeling that he's invincible, and that somehow he'll get the better of us in the end.'

  'Come on, Geordie,' said Whinger. 'Pigs might fly.'

  From exposure to countless previous Whingerisms I knew that meant 'Never say die', so I just said, 'Good on yer, mate,' and put an extra spoonful of sugar into my tea.

  As I sipped the piping-hot drink, I couldn't stop thinking about an account I'd read in a magazine of the murder of Grigory Rasputin, the peasant monk who bewitched the Russian royal family in the years before revolution. Rasputin had an amazing hold over the Empress, Alexandra. Some people said he was secretly screwing her, others that he was the only person who could comfort her son Alexei, who was mortally ill.

  Anyway, when the army officers tried to murder the monk they found they couldn't do it. First they gave him enough potassium cyanide to kill an elephant, an
d it had practically no effect. Then they shot him through the heart with a revolver from point-blank range, and still the bastard wouldn't die. One moment he was stretched out on the flag-stones of the palace like a corpse, the next he was up, roaring, and attacking them with his hands, so violently that he tore an epaulette offone of their tunics.

  When he staggered to his feet and ran out through the courtyard towards the street, they couldn't believe it.

  Again they gunned him down, and finally they dumped his trussed body into the river through a hole in the ice.

  But the performance had left them shattered. They thought their victim was the devil incarnate, and they were terrified he'd return to haunt them.

  Stupid as it sounds, I was beginning to feel that Farrell was another 1Kasputin, an evil and indestructible force. The magazine article had carried pictures of the peasant, with his wild black beard and staring eyes. I started to think I could see likenesses in Farrell's swarthy features, and I felt I was in the grip of some malign influence, which was driving events forward in a way I couldn't cl)ntrol. It was easy to believe that, whatever I did, I would never get the better of him…

  Deep down, of course, I knew I was suffering from cumulative lack of sleep and letting my imagination run away with me. And the best way to control my anxieties was to concentrate on the practical details of the task ahead.

  When we went back through to Belfast I took over the call myself, so that I could make sure I understood everything properly. With a man dictating and myself checking back, I wrote down a grid reference for the transit hide somewhere in Oxfordshire, and a series of detailed instructions: a road junction, a lane, woods, fields, paths, a clearing on the edge of the forest, an old well with a cast-iron water pump. On paper, the notes meant practically nothing, and I could only hope they'd relate accurately to features on the ground.

  At the end the contact said, 'That's all. The weapon is there, and can be collected any time after dark tonight.'

  THIRTEEN

  Tony and I set out at two o'clock, leaving the rest of the team to guard Farrell, close down the cottage and move up-country to whatever FMB the head-shed managed to arrange. As we drove off in the Granada, I felt a terrific relief at being away from the grotty presence of our prisoner. The man had wanted to come with us to ' collect the weapon, sure enough, but I told him we could manage the pick-up on our own.

  As we headed east, my mind spun with conflicting possibilities, and in an attempt to clear my head I bounced some of them off Tony.

  'I'm trying to puzzle out what the PIRA's state of mind is,' I began. 'They're so bloody devious, you can never be sure what they're up to.

  'One thing we do know is that they want the Prime Minister dead. That's obvious. Also obvious: they want us to do their dirty work for them. But what do they reckon my intentions are? I suppose they think I'm so shit-scared of losing Tim that I'm simply going to do the shoot on their behalf. But what do they imagine I'll do after it's gone down? Bugger off?. Disappear? Perhaps they think I'll just be able to keep my head down and nobody will find out who did it.'

  'Maybe you should tell Farrell you've got a passage booked back to Colombia,' Tony suggested. 'Let him know you've fixed yourself up with a slot there, and give the impression you're going to quit Britain immediately, taking the family with you.'

  'Thanks a lot! It's still possible the PIRA have no intention of handing over the hostages, whatever we do. Maybe they don't intend I should get away at all. If they stake out Point D at Chequers, they could drop us immediately after the shoot.'

  'Possible,' Tony agreed. 'But unlikely. They've been to the place. They've seen it. They know it's heaving with security. You let one round off there and the park will be like an anthill. They'd never make it out. The thought should keep them away.'

  'Yeah — but if they lay on the chopper, like we've suggested…'

  I drove in silence for a few minutes, then said, 'They must trust me to some extent. After all, they're letting us get our hands on one of their most valuable weapons.'

  'We haven't got the damn thing yet. They could be staking out the pick-up site right now, planning to hit us when we show up.'

  'I know.' I turned and grinned at him. 'That's why we've got the MP5s.'

  I drove on, heading up the M4 for Reading. The site of the transit hide had been described as the side of a wood, up in the hill country near the village of Nettlebed, maybe fifteen miles overland from Chequers. The PIRA guy had described the cache as an old well on the site of a former cottage.. I was tempted to do a daylight drive-past, get a feel for the area — but I ruled it out on the grounds that if any dickers were about a passing car would be bound to alert them.

  In Reading our first port of call was a general bookshop, where we bought a copy of the local 1:25,000 map. That showed some detail, but what we really needed was the relevant sheet of the six-inchestothe-mile Ordnance Survey, and we ran one to ground in a specialist map shop in London Road. Thus armed, we stoked up with some good spaghetti in an Italian restaurant, and pored over the maps while we drank our coffee.

  'Roman coin hoard found here, 1953,' Tony read out, twisting the map at an angle.

  'Is that right? Near where we're heading?'

  'Not far off.'

  'They'll have to add another line to the next edition,'

  I said. 'Barrett Fifty sniper rifle found here, 2002.'

  The site of the transit hide was easy enough to identify within a hundred yards or so, even though we couldn't pinpoint it. The PIRA guy had said the old well was on the southern edge of a small, triangular wood called Kate's Copse, which had its apex pointing north and its base running east and west. We found the wood all right, but we couldn't tell how far along the half-mile base the well would be.

  The route given us by the PIRA would bring us in along a lane which ran one field away from the northern point of the wood. If we took that road we could park within a couple of hundred yards of our objective. I checked the route through, turn by turn, against the map, and saw that the description was painstakingly accurate: go south off the main drag on unsigned side road, three cottages on corner; 500 yards, farm on right; 500 yards, sewage works on right, ninety-degree turn left; 700 yards straight, then deciduous wood on right; 200 yards on, grass ride on right. Leave car here…

  The more I looked at it, the less I fancied it. If dickers were out that was where they'd be: watching that lane, anywhere between the main road and the site. With the motivation of the PIRA so uncertain, my instinct was to keep well clear.

  'Look at this,' I said. 'Kate's Copse is on the brow of the hill. But there's another track here, to the south of it, along the bottom of this valley. We can park down here and walk up over. Then, if anyone's watching the top lane, they'll miss us.'

  'I'm with you,' Tony agreed. 'It's not much farther.

  Better all round.'

  Back in the car, I called Whinger's mobile. The first time it didn't connect, and I assumed that he was on the move in some low-lying area. When I tried again five minutes later he came on, patchily, but clear enough to say that they were on their way to a new safe house 'with ten miles of target', with an ETA of 2000 hours.

  I didn't want to ask the place's precise location because I knew Farrell would be listening to the conversation, so I told Whinger I'd call again when they'd arrived.

  The evening was dim and murky. No rain was falling but there was heavy cloud cover, and I could see that darkness was going to fall early. All the same, we had an hour in hand, and I'd been planning to stop in a quiet lane so that we could get in a few minutes' kip. But by the time we cleared the northern outskirts of 1Leading the old adrenalin was running again, and I felt too hepped up to be sleepy.

  'Tell you what,' I said, 'I don't want to count any chickens, but we've got time to recce a site for the test- shoot tomorrow. Let's take another look.'

  I pulled off the road on to a patch of earth under some big beeches, and we'd hardly started scrutinising th
e map again when Tony pointed with his forefinger and said, 'Hey! Whaddaya know? A genuine rifle range, all ready for us.'

  Sure enough, in a remote, wooded valley a few miles east of our site, the 1:25,000 map showed a narrow rectangular opening in the forest, nearly half a mile long, marked white among the green, and bearing the legend 'Rifle Range'.

  'I don't believe it,' I said. 'If it's like the map shows, it's got everything: six or seven hundred yard sight-line and a remote location, no houses for miles. Let's go for it. You drive, though. Those little roads could be private tracks; if we get stopped, you do the talking. We'll be American tourists, lost in the great British jungle.'

  'What do I do?' said Tony in mock alarm. 'Act dumb?'

  'Act yourself,' I told him, 'and that'll fool anybody.'

  He gave me a look as we changed places.

  Twenty minutes later, we left the main road and dived down a spectacularly steep lane. At the bottom the ground flattened out, but soon the road swung left- handed into the beginning of the secluded valley. We passed a pair of cottages on our right, then a farm on our left. Beyond the farm the surface suddenly deteriorated from tarmac into pitted gravel, and a hand-painted notice, black on white, proclaimed it a,P, lvArE P, OAD.

  'Thought so,' I said. 'Keep going.'

  We crawled on, lurching through potholes, with steep grass fields lifting away on either hand. A few minutes later we passed the remains of some ancient building on our left, walls smothered with ivy, standing back from the road.

  'Jesus!' Tony exclaimed. 'It's the ruins of a church.

  This place is getting spooky.'

  Soon we were into the woods, which turned out to be dense beech, with branches hanging over the lane and turning it into a tunnel. In there the light was already so dim that I instinctively glanced at my watch to make sure we weren't running out of time. In fact we were fine, and I could see from the map that we were almost at our objective.

  'lkound this next corner, it'll be on our right,' I said.

  'I'll believe it when we see it.'

  But see it we did. Tony swung left, and after a couple of hundred yards we came upon an opening in the trees on our right, with a red and white barrier pole across it.