by A P Bateman
The Asset
By
A P Bateman
Text © A P Bateman
2020
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, printing or otherwise, without written permission of the author.
This book is a work of fiction and any character resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Some locations may have been changed; others are fictitious.
Facebook: @authorapbateman
www.apbateman.com
Rockhopper Publishing
2020
The Alex King Series
The Contract Man
Lies and Retribution
Shadows of Good Friday
The Five
Reaper
Stormbound
Breakout
From the Shadows
Rogue
The Rob Stone Series
The Ares Virus
The Town
The Island
Standalone Novels
Hell’s Mouth
Unforgotten
Short Stories
A Single Nail
The Perfect Murder?
Atonement
Further details of these titles can be found at
www.apbateman.com
This book was written almost entirely during the 2020 Coronavirus lockdown, starting in April and reaching the end of the first draft at the beginning of July. A time of uncertainty and frustration for many, if not all of us. As a key worker, my wife worked harder than ever and I was left battling with this story between home schooling my son (being woefully under prepared for just how difficult a ten-year-old’s maths can be!) and generally stressed that the words were not getting down – black on white – as quickly or as regularly as I hoped. So, I’d like to thank my family for their patience. It’s not easy living with a writer, much less one with less time, nowhere to find peace and quiet and who is spending half their time Googling maths equations and asking his thirteen-year-old daughter for help.
I’d also like to thank my readers. Yes, you. Thank you for reading my other books and encouraging me to write. The fact people buy my work is not lost on me every day, and I hope to give my readers a reason to keep reading my stories.
1
There was no more than three metres between her and the man directly in front of her, and ten more between her and the man directly beyond the first. The third man was twenty-five metres away, but he had an AK2000 assault rifle in his hands and that more than changed the game. She had fallen onto her side, the grenade knocking her clean off her feet. Again, she thought how crazy it was for her to be here. No back-up and an ill-conceived plan at best, but she was fully committed and so tantalisingly close to her objective, to get to the man she loved, that she couldn’t afford to weaken at the thought of being injured or outnumbered. Because outnumbered she may well be, but outclassed, she was not. The concussive shock of the explosion had reverberated inside her, feeling as if her insides had been shaken loose. She had lost her baseball cap, her mousey-blonde hair spilling out and cascading around her shoulders. Slowly, she got back to her feet, turning to see the man now standing in front of her. His 9mm Sig Sauer pistol aimed at her, his eyes blinking disbelievingly and the expression upon his face telling it all. A woman. Unexpected and at odds with the Albanians and the grisly scene he had just witnessed.
She held up both her hands, but as she straightened, she feinted a stumble. The man momentarily forgot himself, leaned forwards to assist her. Maybe he’d been brought up right. A long time ago. Before his chosen career path. Before the Russian mafia had eaten at his soul. Showing respect to women, instilled into him by his sisters, his mother, his grandmother. It was all Caroline needed and she faked another stumble, looking up and making sure that he now stood directly in front of the man with the AK2000. He was, so she drew the small but heavy Makarov pistol from her back pocket and shot him in the throat. He hadn’t even begun his slump to the ground when she took another step forward and steadied her aim. When the man fell, she already had the vee and pin sight aimed at the man with the assault rifle twenty metres distant. She fired a single well-aimed shot at the man’s forehead, then double tapped centre mass as he went down. Dropping to one knee she twisted to her right and fired three rounds in quick succession at the man in between, and adjacent to, the two bodies. He had been pulled in by the sight of her being a woman and putting up such resistance to their pursuit, and hadn’t known it was she who had fired until he had seen the second man drop to the forest floor, and by the time he managed to fire back at her, he had already been hit by two of the punchy 9.2mm bullets, but his own bullet went desperately wide of his target and the next three went high and wide as he fell to the ground and the pistol flailed wildly in the air.
Caroline stood back a few paces and shuffled to her left. She did not want to be where the men had last seen her when his comrades had fallen. She had not yet confirmed that he was dead, and she did not want to be there if he managed to steel his resolve and fire wildly. She dropped the magazine, slotted another in place, but did not work the weapon’s slide. She could count, after all. Now she was nine up. She aimed between the three bodies, rubbing her stomach gently, comfortingly with her left hand. She had grazed herself on the ground and could feel splinters and pine needles and wood bark on her skin. She was shaking, the adrenalin subsiding after such a peak of endorphins and the exertion of running up the slope and sprinting down the other side.
One of the men was still moving. Her compassion told her to walk over to him, kick his weapon aside and walk away. Let him die in peace or give him time to be recovered by the rest of his team. But she’d seen what he had done. He was a ruthless killer and would offer her no quarter if their situations had been reversed. Besides, she had been with King too long now, and her instincts had been honed through training, if not osmosis from working - and living - with such a man. There were too many variables involved in such an act. Too many things to consider and counter. She was outnumbered, after all. She aimed and fired, and the man’s head rocked, then he rested still. The brutal action could well have saved her life and the lives of her friends and acknowledging the fact made her feel nothing for what she had just done. They would have done worse to her, once they had gotten over the fact that she was a woman. Undoubtedly, they would have soon taken advantage of that fact, considering who these men were and who they worked for. They deserved no mercy, and least of all from her. And, as she picked her way through the forest floor, she just prayed she was still in time. Prayed that the man she loved was still alive.
2
Six Months Earlier,
Thames House, London
“I want a man who will take this on and run with it…”
Amherst put his coffee down on the blotter on his mahogany desk and leaned back in his chair. He looked at the police commander and smiled wryly. “What you want is a man who will do this to the letter of the law. Someone who will work with the local police, perhaps with Interpol, build a case and along with the cooperation of the relevant country, have their day in court. But what you need, is a man who will get this done at any cost. Because getting these people into court in these countries will be nigh-on impossible and an exercise in futility.” He paused. “You’re firefighting. You have no chance of stopping these shipments, perhaps you will intercept a few, but on the whole, you’re King Canute trying to hold back the tide. Your budget is down, domestic issues and the fallout from a collective worldwide health pandemic has left you pared to the bone. You simply cannot cope with the influx of organised
crime from foreign shores.” He shrugged and looked at Simon Mereweather. His number two, second in command of MI5. “Can we do this? Can we hustle in on a job traditionally more suited to those shits across the river?”
Mereweather nodded. “MI6 have their hands full with Russian problems. And this, although with a Russian angle, is crime and domestic, not governmental and political. The SVR and FSB are playing enough games to keep MI6 busy overseas. We’d be doing the SIS a favour by taking this on.” He paused, inspecting a fingernail before looking at the SO15 commander. “We can help stem the flow, hold back the tide, so to speak. We can’t have crates of automatic weapons on British streets, so I think it’s in everybody’s interest to cut it off at the source.”
Commander Robinson nodded. “How will this work?” he asked cautiously.
Mereweather looked across at Neil Ramsay. He was operations manager, sometimes referred to as a liaison officer during missions. “What is your operational readiness for something like this?”
Ramsay was a quiet, somewhat terse man. His previous team had often joked that he was on the autistic spectrum. Certainly not Rain Man, but he needed all his ducks to line up in a row. There were distinct advantages to Neil Ramsay’s ‘condition’, although not a man of action, he could see flaws in any plan and could often negotiate a solution several moves before others could see it. He tended to see the bigger picture, and the one beyond that also. “Rashid is good to go. Dave Lomu still won’t come over fulltime and officially on the books, but maybe that’s what we need for a task like this. The mercenary option doesn’t look to be a bad option from where I see it.”
“No mercenaries,” said the commander. “We need the right kind of people. What has this Dave Lomu chap done, anyway?”
“That’s better you don’t know,” Mereweather replied, giving the man a knowing smile. “He’s a heavy hitter. If you want Russian mafia and an Albanian gang taken down, then he’s definitely a man you want doing your bidding.”
The commander nodded. “And this Rashid fellow?”
“Pakistani immigrant. Came here as a baby. He’s a Muslim, not devout as far as I can make out. He was the youngest officer of Pakistani descent in the British army, went on to become a captain in the SAS. Did his officer training at Sandhurst, but as he was already a member of the Special Air Service, he was in the regiment for life, and not just the four years officers from other regiments can mandatorily serve. His speciality, if you call it that, is with a sniper rifle. He made one of the top ten distance kills on record. Two thousand, four hundred metres in Afghanistan. He took out a Taliban commander that the yanks and the frogs couldn’t get to.” Amherst paused. “He’s the right man for this job.”
The SO15 commander frowned. “He sounds like an assassin.”
Simon Mereweather shrugged. “You’re losing the fight against illegal weapons coming in. And you’re certainly behind the crystal meth wave. It’s a bloody tsunami, to be frank. And it only relies on meth cooks and chemicals. There’s no chain to be broken like bringing in cocaine, opium, or heroin. It’s a straight up chemical concoction, and Russia produces all the chemicals needed with an unlimited reservoir of resources. The only thing you can fight is the suppliers. And if you strike hard enough, you’ll cut the source entirely. People aren’t in a hurry to die, no matter how much money is involved.”
The police commander shook his head, perplexed. “If we can stop the flood of weapons and drugs, just for a few months, then we can get a foot hold and start pushing back.”
Amherst nodded. “You need breathing space. We all do. That’s why it was a godsend having all those ISIS fighters in one place in Iraq, and later in Syria. When the military war on terrorism was at its height, we could get back to hunting down the terror cells at home. The soldiers and drones and tank shells thinned out the numbers for us and the ideologists all went out to the desert to spill their own blood.”
The commander took a sip of coffee and placed it back down on the table between himself and Simon Mereweather. “I feel this snowballing, somewhat,” he commented nervously. “I came to ask if our budgets and joint interests could align in some way to cut these threats at the source, and now I feel that your answer would be simply be to eliminate the threat, rather than help police it.”
“Well, there’s nothing simple about it,” Mereweather interjected. “In fact, be under no illusion that to venture onto their turf, to Albania and to Russia, and destroy what mafia families and brotherhoods have taken generations to build, or what former KGB spies have done to get to the top of the pile and the body count in doing so, will be a damned sight more difficult to take down than to attempt to police it.” He paused. “And you wouldn’t get far policing it, either. Interpol have tried. One of our operatives did two secondments with Interpol to fight female trafficking for the sex industry. All she got for her trouble was heartache and misery and a handful of saved souls, when hundreds got through and were never seen nor heard of again.”
Ramsay leaned forwards, his hand held up in much the same manner as one would summon a waiter’s attention. “If I may just say…”
Amherst nodded. “Go on, Neil.”
Ramsay looked at the commander and said, “What I think needs making clear, is that we are not thinking about sending Rashid off with a sniper rifle and other agents kitted up for a level of Call of Duty.” He smiled and looked around, but nobody seemed to share his humour, nor knowledge of gaming. Unperturbed, he said, “It’s more of a game. A long game. But a game, nonetheless. It would take months to set in motion. But the long and the short of it would be intelligence gathering, classroom-based scenario building, field training in clandestine techniques and surveillance and then on the ground surveillance in the enemy’s territory. From there, we’d work on getting close to the enemy. Infiltrating the organisations or setting those organisations up.”
“Putting people in with them!” the commander exclaimed. “That would be a suicide mission!”
“We didn’t say it would be easy,” Amherst commented sardonically.
“You didn’t say it would be impossible either,” the commander retorted.
“It’s not impossible; it’s just difficult. But we can do it,” Ramsay said. “Or at least, we can orchestrate something that gains trust. And then when we have trust, we make our move. It will take time for me to plan, but I already have the bare bones inside my head. Gabriel Manigault first committed it to writing, back in the early nineteenth century, but you will no doubt be familiar with the saying… the enemy of my enemy, is my friend… that’s what we do. We take two beasts, and we set them against each other.”
“But that’s ludicrous,” the commander said incredulously.
Neil Ramsay shook his head. “One of our agents did it before. I know he can do it again.”
3
Cornwall
King had run along the beach from the rocky crag to the point where the tide was now too high and had created the small bay, that turned into a five-mile stretch of beach at anything below half-tide. He estimated that six circuits of this smaller bay equated to two miles, but he had lost count long ago and moved onto the seven boulders he had arranged in size order before he had started running his circuits. He picked up the smallest and started with twenty-five arm curls, then dropped it onto the shingle beach and bent down for the second and started twenty-five overhead presses. He had the whole workout planned from benchless presses, squats and clean and jerks. Five repetitions of these would then culminate in what he called the Sisyphus challenge. Rolling a huge boulder around his workout area until he could do it no more. Like the story in Greek mythology where Sisyphus, the King of Corinth is eternally damned to roll a boulder up a hill in the depths of Hades. Exhausted, drenched in perspiration, he would always finish up his workout with an icy dip in the sea. But now, as he watched the two suited gentlemen trudge along in the thick shingle towards him, he could see that it was over. He bent down and picked up the small backpack, retrieved the
snub nosed .38 revolver and tucked it into his tracksuit pocket. To his right, nearer the cliff, a large boulder the size of a large van was embedded in the shingle and served as a perfect barricade. King edged nearer and watched both men hesitate. Tactically, King was all over them. No bullets could penetrate the rock, and the men were exposed in the open. King had a barricade, an escape route towards more boulders at the cliff base, and because of the shape of the boulder, he could also climb higher, lay over the top and have the high ground. Now it was over to them to make the first move. A part of him missed this. A part of him needed to feel under threat, so he could rise above it, channel it and take the offensive. Because being on the offensive made him feel alive.
The two men trudged on, but nervously so. King watched, then the familiarity hit him. Their outlines, their movements, their build. He was incredulous, had made his feelings clear last year. By the time he could make out their features, he could see the difference in the quality and cut of their suits. Ramsay’s came from Marks & Spencer and Simon Mereweather’s from Savile Row. King knew of the outfitters in question and was aware that would not only cost most people two month’s salary, but the man had several of them for all seasons and occasions.
King did not fear either of the men, but he backed up to the boulder and studied the ground behind him. Thankfully, he did not see anybody flanking him and felt relieved. Not because of the lack of hostile threat, but for the fact he once considered these men to be his friends. With the passing of both time and political agenda, he hoped he still could.
The two men stopped walking when King stepped back out from behind the boulder. Mereweather nodded to him and said, “Hello, Alex.”
