Dangerous Cargo

by Stewart Clyde

  As Stirling made his way down the walkway he saw another fire team. They stood guarding the crew. Crewmen sat crosslegged facing the bulkhead with their hands zip-tied behind their backs. They were mostly Filipino and Bangladeshi, and more than likely, nothing to do with any terrorist groups, but they were treated like POWs, just in case. Stirling could see them shaking in the cold.

  “Hey, friendlies coming through,” Stirling said to the soldier in front of him.

  “Roger,” he said over his shoulder and then shouted through the open door, “friendlies coming through!”

  “Who is this?” Stirling asked the soldier.

  “It’s Dylan, boss,” he replied.

  “Get these boys a blanket, these prisoners are freezing. They’re only in their bloody underwear.”

  “Roger.”

  Stirling moved past and the rest of the fire team followed. He heard the radio static in his ear and each team reported their progress. Stirling checked his watch, nearly twenty minutes since he’d fast roped onto the deck. The ship was secure, cleared through and under the control of the security forces. Stirling saw the Sea King helicopters hovering above the ship and unloading Special Branch agents and bomb disposal. HM Customs were boarding and a skeleton naval crew would take control of the vessel.

  The Special Forces part of the operation was over.

  “Think they’ll find anything, boss?” Jock asked as the disembarked.

  “No idea,” Stirling said, “but even if they do, I doubt we will hear about it. Nothing good could come from acknowledging that al-Queda managed to sneak a chemical weapon into the English Channel.”

  Matty nodded.

  “Too right. It’ll get swept under the rug. Use it as disinformation,” he said.

  The UK Special Forces soldiers made their way off the vessel and caught a lift with the HMS Sutherland back to Poole. As the boys de-kitted and squared their gear away, the Sergeant Major walked around the camp waving a piece of paper and slapping people on the back.

  “A message straight from the Prime Minister,” he said, “bloody good job ’n all. Great work, lads. As far as anyone is concerned the mission was a resounding success. Debrief in thirty minutes!”

  Spinks spotted Stirling as he unpacked his gear.

  “Where are you headed?” Spinks asked.

  “Armoury,” Stirling said.

  “I’ll walk with you.”

  Stirling made safe, again, and he and the CSM walked over to the armoury. There was a short queue of a few blokes chatting and signing weapons back in. Spinks pulled Stirling away from them and said, “I heard about the little tussle with Digger and the suicide vest.”

  “Oh, it was Digger, was it?”

  “I’m glad you were there. Could have been a hell of a lot worse than it was. Good job,” he said and slapped Stirling lightly on the chest with the Prime Minister’s letter of congratulations.

  “Thanks Spinks,” Stirling said.

  “How’re you feeling?”

  Stirling thought for a moment and shook his head, “good, bit tired.”

  It was deflating after a high intensity operation, all the adrenaline, noise, the rush was gone in a moment and the comedown lasted for a few days.

  “Yeah, well, I have some more good news for you.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Stirling knew what was coming, and he saw the flicker in Spinks’ eyes.

  “I have your deployment orders. You’re on a flight out of this wet and cold,” Spinks said.

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Christmas Day?”

  Spinks nodded and shrugged.

  “Fucking hell.”

  “For Queen and country,” Spinks said, “they need you out there. Sounds like it’s Tora Bora round two.”

  “Roger. I’ll get myself squared away.”

  “You’ll be back before you know it. Merry Christmas!” Spinks said over his shoulder as he walked away.

  “Merry bloody Christmas to me,” Stirling said.

  Chapter Ten

  Richmond-upon-Thames, London

  * * *

  Gerry Soames poured the brown-syrup coloured Macallan twenty-five year old single malt from a crystal decanter into a matching tumbler and went to sit on his sofa. The room was lit by one shaded lamp in the corner. His television was tuned into the BBC World Service. They were reporting on the successful apprehension of the terrorist vessel, and that the cargo ship had been given the all clear, nothing suspicious was found.

  There was a pile of files and notepaper on the coffee table in front of him.

  The cordless telephone rang and he answered.

  “Soames,” he said and took a sip of the peaty-musty smooth Scotch.

  “Just a quick status update on Ceto, Gerry,” Sir William said.

  “Hello, sir.”

  “Hello.”

  “They have a hell of a job cleaning up that ship, but it is secure,” Sir William said, “Massive explosive device found. Enough pesticide in the hold to spray over half of London, and blow it to hell. Bastards. Captain claims to know nothing about it. Two dead terrorists. Interrogations happening now.”

  Gerry pursed his lips and closed his eyes. He felt the relief wash over him, and the apprehension drift away.

  “You’ve done a hell of a job here, Gerry” Sir William said, “I’ll be recommending you for a Distinguished Service Order. It’ll never come out, what we found, what was done to save the nation. But, you deserve some recognition.”

  “That won’t be necessary, Sir. I only played a small part. We have our friends in MOSSAD and UKSF to thank.”

  “Nonsense. I wanted to call and say … ‘well done’. A plot thwarted and another success for British Intelligence, to add to your long list.”

  Gerry was quiet.

  “I want you to start running agents again, Gerry. We need someone with your experience. And if you can’t be in the field, we can damn well use your management. Think about it?”

  “Alright.”

  Sir William hung up and Gerry tossed the phone on the sofa. He picked up the open personnel file with both hands. A picture of Stirling Hunt’s boyish face, deadpan and with close cropped hair, looked back at him. Soames held the file in one hand and took another sip of his Scotch. He licked his top lip and felt the burn and fragrance of the malt. He put the file down and switched the television off with a remote control. He studied the file and was deep in thought.

  Northern Afghanistan

  * * *

  Stirling sat in camouflage fatigues in the back of the transport aircraft. The plane was bare, loud and cold. The Royal Airforce flight touched down with a thud and the pilot braked hard and the engines revved. Stirling stepped out the back.

  He could see his breath and the air was crisp and clear and his face was pale from the long British winter, the sun glinted low and shone off the metal and outbuildings around him. A soldier with a thick scraggly beard and wraparound sunglasses waited at the side of a green army Land Rover.

  “Captain Hunt?” the waiting soldier called.

  Stirling nodded, “that’s me, yeah.”

  “Welcome to Bagram,” the soldier said, “I’m Baz, welcome to the troop.”

  Baz grabbed Stirling’s bergen and lobbed it on his shoulder and then in the back of the vehicle.

  “You’re just in time too, we’re on a strike op tonight … Come on.”

  Blood Feud

  A Stirling Hunt thriller

  Published by Hunt Press in 2020.

  Copyright © Stewart Clyde 2020.

  The moral right of Stewart Clyde to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him, in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  First published in 2020 by Hunt Press.

  First pub
lished in Great Britain.

  All characters are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter One

  Matadi, Angola

  * * *

  The plastic explosive lay next to him on the front seat, neatly bundled in pink happy birthday wrapping paper. Stirling rested his bush hat on top of it, and drew up to a line of cars and buses waiting at the border to cross into the Congo. He gave the package no thought. It was perfectly obvious, which made it perfectly safe. The short-bonnet truck vibrated and rattled and his hands shook as he lit a cigarette. He wound down the window and felt the mid-morning heat settle around the truck.

  A drop of sweat ran to the tip of his nose. It had been hot since sunrise and was getting hotter. The exchange was scheduled for before dawn, but he’d gotten a puncture and had spent hours by the side of a dark road fighting to get the wheel off.

  He tapped the ash out of the window and saw a group of children running towards him with hands outstretched and wide smiles.

  “Sweets, sweets!” they chorused.

  Stirling smiled and spoke in Swahili to them.

  “I have sweets for you, if you can get me across the border faster.”

  They looked at one another and then the tallest boy stepped forward in a torn brown shirt and red shorts.

  “Me, I know who can help you,” he said.

  “Okay. Go and get them then.”

  “No, first sweets!”

  Stirling leaned down, pulled out some lollies from a packet and dished them out to happy faces. The kids pushed forward and swarmed around, yelling with hands outstretched to grab the sweets as they fell. The tallest boy stuck a sucker in his mouth and ran barefoot away from the truck.

  The kids played and danced next to the front tyre while Stirling took a long drag on his cigarette and shifted his weight on the sticky brown leather seat. He looked down the line of cars to the Angolan customs in their blue uniforms. They weren’t inspecting much of anything. Stirling had chosen this border crossing because it was hot and crowded at this time of day, and he thought the guards would be lethargic. Angolan customs were nonchalant, and even more relaxed if they were bribed. It didn’t normally take much.

  He sat alone in the truck and the diesel engine chuntered hypnotically. It was sweltering. Stirling felt the rivulets of sweat slide down his back, and it reminded him of being in the back of a chopper over the mountains of Afghanistan. He closed his eyes and shook his head when the flashback came to snap himself out of it and stay in the present, but it was no use.

  In his head, he was back there, and felt vertigo as the helicopter careened, flying fast and low, eighty feet off the ground. It dipped and shook, and Stirling stared dead ahead as the noise and vibrations rattled up his spine. It was hot, and in body armour, like sitting under a blanket in the sun. The inside was spartan. Cracked cyalume sticks gave the hull a radiation green glow and the deck was covered in grease and sand. The taste of aviation fuel sat at the back of his throat.

  The men around him were wedged together on the floor. Their bodies sagged as they relaxed their muscles against the weight of the gear. No one spoke. Even if they had, the zshh-zshh-zshh of the rotor-blades drowned out any sound.

  He snapped himself back with a big breath in, and realised his heart was pounding. Stirling concentrated on his breathing and loosened his grip on the steering wheel, and colour flowed back to his white knuckles. He could feel the spring under the seat pressing into his backside and his old wounds ached. He wriggled to find some relief. He’d spent months in pain on his back in a hospital bed, unable to move, uncomfortable and sore.

  And there he was once again, on his back in the intensive care ward, while a crisp white nurses’ uniform leaned over his bed and whispered, “Wake up, sailor, we don’t want you to die.”

  She murmured something else, but there was a dinner bell ringing next to his ear and he couldn’t make it out clearly. He reached out to pull her closer and his hands clutched at empty air.

  It was the first thing he remembered after getting knocked unconscious during the battle. Like a bolt latching, he opened his eyes and looked at the nurse standing there. She smiled at him.

  “Where am I?”

  “You’re back home now. Try not to move, darling. You’re in Queen Elizabeth Hospital. You were shot,” she said and straightened the bedsheet.

  “Oh.”

  “You were shot trying to save another soldier, do you remember? You have a severe concussion and you’ve been in an induced coma for some time.”

  He touched the side of his face. His head was wrapped and eye covered over with bandages. He tried to remember. The ringing in his ears sounded like the helicopters in-bound. He caught snippets, moment of events, like a dream. He remembered the explosion, and the injured trooper on his shoulder. He remembered running, and how, after a thousand yards he’d slowed and stumbled. The casevac helicopter kicking up dust, like it was the surface of the moon, and running head down, his face against the gusting sand.

  A crewman had run out to meet them. He’d shouted, but Stirling couldn’t hear him over the wind and rotors and his own breathing. He’d sprinted hard, and his stomach squeezed and released as the soldier bounced up and down. And, he remembered the feeling of getting hit in the back with a sledgehammer. The punch from the bullets knocking him forward, and how he'd put his arm out and tucked in his chin to break the fall, like a boxer stepping into a punch, his face hit the dry riverbed with the weight of the trooper on his neck.

  “What happened to him?” he asked the nurse, and winced at the pain.

  “You saved his life. He’s in a room down the corridor.”

  “Do you remember what happened?” she asked.

  “I remember getting hit – where’d they get me?”

  “Well, you were quite lucky, your body armour took most of the rounds. But your pelvis is cracked, that’s why you’re so sore. Not to worry, we will look after you.”

  He spent the next few months recovering from the bullet wounds and later, he was moved to a Defence Rehabilitation Centre and given a sparse single quarter with a single bed covered in a bright blue duvet. The room had rough grey industrial carpet with laminate furniture, a desk, wardrobe and wash basin in the room. He sat on the edge of the bed and read a letter from his grandmother, while tough coil springs from the old mattress pressed into his wounds. He read:

  Dear Stirling,

  My move is: Nf3

  We missed you at Gramps’s funeral. I am so glad you are recovering well ...

  There was a chess board on the desk and he moved the Knight. He’d been playing, via correspondence, with his grandmother since the hospital. She thought it would help with his recovery and critical faculty, and she was right. There was a knock and the door swung open. Stirling looked up from the board and moved to stand, pushing himself up from the bed.

  “Hello, Colonel,” Stirling said.

  “Sit, please,” Colonel Rob said. He was a stocky man, shorter than Stirling, with pale freckled skin. He wore the sand coloured beret. He had been ginger once, but the hair on his temples was thinning and grey. He had a thick neck and pale blue eyes that stared at you like he was trying to make out a shape in the dark.

  “That was a hell of a thing you did out there, Hunt.”

  “Thank you, Colonel.”

  “I wanted to drop by and see you, see how you were doing.”

  “I am going well, Colonel, stronger every day.”

  “Good man.”

  The Colonel pulled the desk chair out and sat down. Stirling sat back on the bed.

  “Have you thought about what you will do, Hunt?”

  “Sir?”

  There was a pause.

  “After your rehab. Did you have a job in mind?”

  “Back to the Regiment?” Stirling offered hopefully.

/>   The Colonel shook his head. Stirling looked down quickly and back up at the Colonel. He opened his mouth to speak, but closed it again. The Colonel leaned forward.

  “If it was up to me, you would stay in the Regiment,” he said softly.

  Stirling’s eyes darted over the Colonel’s face.

  “Come and see me when you are mobile, I will make sure you get something interesting at Forces Command.”

  “An office job?”

  “You’ve had your time in the field, Captain Hunt. You were incredibly effective and you’re a hell of an operator. One of the best. But it’s time to be effective somewhere else now.”

  “Thank you, sir. But, you know that isn’t me.”

  “You look frustrated, Hunt.”

  He felt frustrated. The only thing keeping him sane and enduring the inane was the thought of getting back on the front line. They sat and looked at one another for a moment.

  “Let me try again,” the Colonel said. “In my experience there are only a few reasons people join up. One, they need the money and have no prospects. Two, for some like myself, it’s expected. A family trade. Third, the glory hunters who fight for Queen and country. Which one are you? What’s driving you Hunt?”

  Stirling thought a moment.

  “My father was a Selous Scout and fought in the Bush War against the communists.”

  “Rhodesia,” the Colonel said, stone faced.

  “Yes.”

  “So, a family trade. What does he think about all of this?”

  “I don’t know, Colonel. My parents were killed before I was sent away, to England.”

  They sat in silence again. Stirling wondered if this man knew that he’d watched his father bleed to death when he was a boy. Or that they had found his mother’s mutilated body, charred and disfigured in a nearby dump.