by Chris Ryan
Choppers circled the grey skies overhead. The Regiment had deployed its two Augusta helicopters as soon as word reached the head shed of the bombing. They were joined by a Eurocopter 145 in blue-and-yellow police livery. For the past thirty minutes the three birds had been scouring the Brecons by air, searching for any sign of the escaped gunmen. It was a pointless exercise, Porter knew. You don’t just plan an attack that sophisticated without also having a watertight escape plan. By now the gunmen were probably long gone.
‘Training Wing’s being stood down,’ the Regimental Major, Pete Maston, said. ‘With immediate effect. Whatever’s left of it.’
Bald sniffed and looked away. Porter said nothing. He just stared out across the carnage. The rest of Sabre Squadron had rocked up a few minutes earlier. The other guys were helping out in any way they could. Some were sorting out food and temporary shelter to treat the wounded. Others were assisting in the recovery of the bodies. Or bits of bodies, Porter reminded himself grimly. With the Regiment CO having to brief the Prime Minister, Maston had been detailed to sort out the mess in the Brecons.
‘I said Training Wing’s being stood down,’ Maston said.
‘Heard you the first time, boss,’ said Porter. ‘But if it’s all the same, I’d rather stay on duty. I’m not abandoning my muckers.’
Maston looked him hard in the eye. ‘That’s not a request, Porter. That’s a bloody order. Stand down now.’ He glanced at Bald. ‘Both of you.’
‘And do what?’ Bald growled. Rage boiled behind his eyes. ‘Sit around with our dicks in our hands while we wait for the cops to catch whoever did this? That’s a load of bollocks. We should be out there hunting these cunts down.’
Maston sighed wearily. ‘Look, don’t blame yourselves for what happened. There was nothing more you could have done. Either of you. Christ, you got two of the bastards. That’s something, at least.’
Maston was trying to put a spin on it. Bald looked away from the Sergeant Major as he replied. ‘It wasn’t enough, boss. We should have dropped every last one of those pricks.’
‘What about Vowden?’ Porter asked.
Maston lowered his head. ‘Didn’t make it. Died of his injuries up on the Fan.’
‘How many dead is that, total?’
‘Fifty-two. Another three aren’t expected to make it. That’s not including the civvies who were shot over at the reservoir. And the housekepeer’s body the police found inside the Storey Arms.’ He paused. ‘That reminds me. The police will want a statement from you two in due course.’
‘Whatever,’ said Bald. ‘The Old Bill must have me on speed dial by now.’
Porter looked back towards the police as they methodically combed through the crime scene. It was going to take ages to sort through it all, he realised. Months to compile the evidence. Even longer to build a case and bring the attackers to justice. They were looking at years before they had the perpetrators in silver bracelets. Perhaps never. Porter clamped his eyes shut. All he could think about was getting revenge over the men who had killed his mates.
‘There’s nothing more you can do here,’ Maston said after a long pause. ‘Go home. You too, Jock. I’ll be in touch with any developments.’
Porter nodded.
Said nothing.
If we had just got there a few seconds earlier, we could have stopped it.
That was the bottom line, thought Porter. Six gunmen had killed over fifty British soldiers. They’d executed Regiment men in cold blood, right in front of Porter’s eyes. And three of the killers had managed to get away.
I should have stopped them, the voice at the back of Porter’s head told him as he trudged alongside Bald towards the army car waiting to ferry them back to Stirling Lines. If only I’d been quicker down that mountain setting. If only I’d stopped the ramblers from getting to the Storey Arms, then Terry Monk and Stubbs and the rest of the lads would still be alive. If only. A hollow feeling ran through Porter just then. Once again, he’d failed his muckers when they needed him the most. Bald must have seen the look of despair in his eyes because he placed a hand on his mucker’s shoulder and looked him hard in the eye.
‘We’ll get them,’ said Bald. ‘Mark my words, mate. We’ll find the fuckers who did this, and we’ll make them pay.’ He looked back to the ambo and gritted his teeth. ‘Whoever did this is gonna regret the day they took us on.’
EIGHTEEN
Whitehall, London.
The next day. 1759 hours.
Cecilia Lakes, the recently-promoted Assistant Chief and Director of Operations and Intelligence at SIS, had done well for herself. It had taken her the best part of twenty years, but the daughter of the former head of the Civil Service had finally escaped her father’s shadow. Lakes was now one of the most powerful women in the country, the second-in-command at MI6. She reminded herself of this fact as she quick-walked down the flight of stairs leading to the basement beneath the Cabinet Office. She had faced many challenges in her life. She had dealt with Provo terrorists, Russian oligarchs and Colombian drug barons. Not to mention the old boys’ network at MI6 that resented having to work with a woman smarter than most of them put together. Now she was having to deal with the biggest crisis of her life. Lakes was going to need to call on all of her experience to get through it.
She tried to compose herself as she strode down the bland corridor leading towards Cabinet Office Briefing Room A. There were in fact a dozen COBRA rooms. Most were cramped back rooms the size of broom cupboards, each assigned to a dedicated government department to allow them to get live int in the middle of COBRA briefings. One room was used by the intelligence services. Another belonged to the Home Office, a third to the Army. And so on. Lakes knew the layout well. It had practically been her second home in the hours since the attack in south Wales. There had been COBRA briefings every hour since news of the attack. Everything had moved very fast. The general threat level had been raised to amber. The army placed on high alert. All major ports and airports put on standby, with officials checking who was leaving the country. Separately, another team was back at Vauxhall, checking the whereabouts of every person of interest to the security services. Meanwhile, the National Crime Squad detectives were sifting through the masses of evidence at the crime scene, cataloguing every fragment of shrapnel and searching through thousands of hours of CCTV footage. It had been a frenzy of activity, and Lakes had only slept four hours in the past two days. And now she’d been called in for another COBRA pre-meeting.
She entered the room at the far end of the corridor. The main COBRA briefing room didn’t look much like a place where matters of national security were discussed. It looked more like a conference room in a dingy lawyer’s office. There was a long table in the middle with twenty cheap seats huddled around it. Dim panel lights coloured everything sickly yellow. The walls were the colour of mustard. There were boxes of files stacked either side of the table, and telephone cables running all over the place.
Five men were sitting around the table.
The man at the far end of the table was Osbert Bell, the Home Secretary. He was a slender man with long manicured hands and a smooth complexion. Next to him sat a dour-looking man with jowly cheeks and a face ready to work itself into a scowl at the slightest provocation. He sipped tea from a chipped West Bromwich Albion coffee mug. Dudley Granger was the Downing Street press officer, and he wielded an unusual amount of power over the Prime Minister. To the right of Granger was Michael Sutter, the Chief of the Defence Staff. Next to Sutter sat Lake’s boss, Sir Alan Pettigrove, the Director-General of MI6. Next to Pettigrove there was a man Lakes didn’t recognise. He was younger than the rest, with a baby face, and he wore a pair of thick horn-rimmed glasses. He smiled briefly at Lakes as she took her seat.
‘Right on time,’ Osbert Bell said. His voice was so smooth you could have broken out the Pimms and played croquet on it. He gestured to the other faces seated around the table. ‘I’m sure you’re familiar with everyone here, Miss Lakes. Except
perhaps Clarence Hawkridge. He’s our Director of Counter-terrorism Operations over at Thames House.’
Lakes nodded at Hawkridge then slid into the chair, wondering why this pre-meet had been called. All the major defence and security chiefs in one place. And no one else from the cabinet, Lakes noticed.
She had no time to idly speculate. Bell cleared his throat and stared down the barrel of his long nose at her. ‘Before we begin, I assume there have been no further developments since we last convened?’
Lakes glanced at her boss, then shook her head. ‘Nothing so far, Home Secretary. But we’re working on it. There’s a lot of ground to cover, as you can imagine.’
Bell nodded. ‘We still don’t have confirmed identities on the bodies we recovered from the scene?’
‘Not yet, Home Secretary. We’ve run their fingerprints through our systems. No matches. As we suspected, the passports and driving licences they were carrying are faked. Interpol and the NSA are cross-referencing their profiles with their own databases. But we’re not hopeful.’
‘That leaves us with the tattoos,’ Hawkridge cut in.
‘Tattoos?’ Granger enquired.
Bell smiled at Lakes. ‘Perhaps you’d care to bring Dudley up to speed.’
‘Both gunmen had the same tattoo,’ Lakes said, looking to Granger. ‘A red cross pattée.’
‘It’s been used by various orders down the centuries,’ Hawkridge added. ‘The Teutonic Knights, the Crusaders, and so on. Indeed, the Germans borrowed the style for the Iron Cross.’
‘How the hell does that help us?’ Granger muttered.
Lakes cleared her throat. ‘It could be that the tattoo means something. Maybe the gunmen belong to some kind of a group. Like the mark of a gang? Or it could mean nothing at all. Maybe the shooters just got the same tattoo for a joke.’
‘Do we know of any terrorist groups using this pattée cross today?’
‘To the best of our knowledge, no,’ said Hawkridge. ‘But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, of course. It could belong to some new fringe organisation that hasn’t shown up in our radar yet. It’s a possibility.’
Granger looked unimpressed. ‘Is that all we have? A bloody tattoo that may or may not belong to a group that may or may not exist?’
‘There is something else,’ Bell added. ‘Perhaps you’d care to explain, Miss Lakes.’
Granger looked at her. So did everyone else at the table. ‘Well?’
‘We have a positive ID on one of the gunmen who escaped.’
‘How?’
‘We got lucky. Someone flagged him up. He’s on our watch list.’
‘One of the gunmen was known to us?’
Pettigrove stepped in now. ‘Thousands of people are known to us, Dudley. The watch list changes all the time. Some people are added, others drop off. We can’t track all of them, all of the time. The man in question dropped off a while ago.’
‘How many people know about this?’
‘No one outside this room,’ Hawkridge said. ‘We’re not saying anything publicly, of course, other than the number of casualties and the involvement of British armed forces personnel.’
‘And we’d very much like to keep it that way,’ Granger said. ‘As far as the PM’s concerned, the less information the redtops have the better on this one.’
‘For operational reasons, of course,’ Bell chipped in. ‘We don’t want the people who did this to know that we’re on to them.’ His lips curled up at the edges as he glanced around the room. ‘Do we, chaps?’
Lakes flashed a quizzical look at her boss. Sir Alan said nothing. Bell removed his glasses and rubbed his tired eyes.
‘Let us speak frankly,’ he continued. ‘This attack was unprecedented. We can all agree on that. Terrorist attacks are to be expected once every so often, of course. One of the perils of being a free society. One can’t stop them all, sadly. But a couple of swarthy Arab types killing a few civilians with their home-made bombs is something we can absorb. They present no great threat. But this . . . this attack is different. The people who did this were sending a message to us.’ He dug out a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his spectacle lenses. ‘Wouldn’t you agree, Miss Lakes?’
It was more of a statement than a question. Everyone stared intently at Lakes. She swallowed hard and nodded. ‘It certainly appears that way, Home Secretary.’
Bell paused. He put his glasses back on, looked to Granger as if seeking permission. Then he looked back to Lakes. Said, ‘Then, in that case, perhaps it’s time we sent a message of our own.’
He let the last sentence hang in the air for a beat. Lakes sat very still as Granger leaned forward and spoke. He was thumbing a coin in his right hand. One of those coins they handed out in Alcoholics Anonymous to celebrate another year of sobriety. Lakes recognised it, because her father used to keep a set in a desk drawer in his bedroom. He’d managed to collect twenty-eight such coins before he took his own life.
‘Let’s cut to the chase, gentlemen,’ said Granger. ‘Politically, the attack’s a fucking disaster. Fifty-five of our best young servicemen killed, right on our bloody doorstep. Losing our brave boys abroad is unfortunate, but, well . . . It’s not the same. We expect a few casualties when we’re fighting in some godforsaken shithole in the Middle East. But an attack here, in Britain? It’s unheard of. The Prime Minister looks weak. We all look fucking weak.’
Granger paused as he swung his dead-eyed gaze across the room. Everyone visibly squirmed. Christ, this guy’s got a lot of clout, Lakes thought. No one else could speak in that tone to the intelligence chiefs and get away with it.
‘Dudley is correct, of course,’ Sutter put in, cautiously looking at Granger. ‘I understand that our friends across the pond are starting to question the value of our relationship. They’re openly wondering whether 22 SAS can be relied upon any more, if they’re not even safe in their own back yard.’
Lakes nodded, grasping the point. It was the world’s worst-kept secret that the Yanks found Britain useful for two reasons: GCHQ, and the SAS. And one of them had just suffered the deadliest attack in its history.
Now it was Bell’s turn to speak. He shifted in his chair, like maybe he was sitting on a pile of broken glass. ‘We’ve spoken with the PM. He’s keen to explore the possibility of alternative action.’
Lakes cleared her throat. ‘Alternative action?’
Bell nodded again. ‘It’s our understanding that a full investigation could take months. Years, even. It took over a decade to bring the Lockerbie bombers to trial. We don’t have that long in this situation. We need action now.’ He stared hard at Lakes. ‘We need these men gone.’
Lakes swallowed. Her throat suddenly felt very hot and heavy. Granger watched her, drumming his fingers on the table. ‘You want us to find the men who carried out the attack?’
‘And take them out,’ Bell added uncomfortably. ‘Using whatever means necessary.’
‘By “take them out”, you mean—’
‘Kill,’ Bell cut her off. ‘We want you to kill the men who did this. All of them.’ He gestured to Pettigrove. ‘Sir Alan assures me you’re the perfect person for the job.’
Lakes looked quickly to her boss. He smiled weakly, then hack-coughed.
‘There must be a layer between us, of course,’ Granger cut in moodily as he scribbled on an A4 pad in front of him. A pair of tits, Lakes noted with a slight measure of disgust. ‘Plausible deniability. That’s the buzz word for this operation.’
‘Of course,’ Lakes said. ‘I understand.’ Thinking, There’s more layers on this thing than a Hollywood pre-nup.
Hawkridge said, ‘I’ll have a list drawn up. Hereford men who fit the criteria.’
Bell nodded busily. ‘Fine. But I don’t need to know the details.’ He looked around the table to underline his point. ‘Michael will keep me informed on the big picture. As for the details, that’s up to you lot to sort out. We don’t want to know. We don’t even want to know that we don’t kno
w. Am I clear?’
Lakes nodded curtly at the Home Secretary. Typical Whitehall buck-passing. Osbert Bell was a master of washing his hands of responsibility whilst simultaneously taking all the credit.
‘Yes, Home Secretary,’ she said.
‘Good.’ Bell promptly stood up and straightened his back, signalling the end of the briefing. He paused and looked around the room. ‘It goes without saying that this conversation never happened.’
‘Naturally,’ said Hawkridge.
‘I leave the planning details to you,’ Bell added, looking at Hawkridge and Lakes in turn. ‘Clarence here will work with you on the particulars. He’s good at this sort of thing. Now, if that’s everything, gentlemen?’
No one had any questions. The men in suits slid out of their chairs and made for the door, each of them wearing grim faces. Lakes turned to follow them but then Bell moved towards her, intercepting her before she could reach the door.
‘A quick word, Miss Lakes. If you wouldn’t mind.’
Lakes stood by the door. Bell waited until everyone else had stepped outside. Then he closed the door behind them. He paced around the table, tutting and shaking his head.
‘Damned terrible news about Alan.’
‘News?’ Lakes asked, not following.
Bell feigned ignorance. ‘Haven’t you heard? Poor bugger’s got the cancer. Started out in the liver, now it’s spread to his lungs and brain. He’s refused chemo, the stubborn old fool. Doctors have given him three months to live. Absolutely tragedy.’ Bell stared at the floor, sounding about as genuine as a four-pound note. ‘I imagine this must be hard for you.’
