The Phoenix Series Box Set 3

by Ted Tayler

  “We’ll hit our target properties in Manchester at two o’clock, in teams of four,” said Phoenix, “there are to be no prisoners. If any of the three strike teams lose the element of surprise and meet stiff resistance, they will call for immediate back-up. Team Four, you will be on standby at the lay-by marked on your map. The travel time from there to each of the properties is the same, six minutes give or take a minute. Remember, no member of our teams must be left behind. Let’s move into position. Contact me when you arrive. This late at night, traffic won’t be an issue. Any questions? OK, let’s roll.”

  Two ex-SAS men transferred their kit to Rusty’s van and joined him and Phoenix inside. One by one, the vans headed out towards Manchester, into what Phoenix had termed the Bent Triangle.

  They took up their positions among the sleeping residents of Beswick, Hulme, and Cheetham Hill. The occasional vehicle still occupied the roads, and several shiftless pedestrians lingered on the pavements. No major city ever truly sleeps.

  Phoenix had received the check-in messages from Teams Two and Three. Team Four then confirmed they have parked up, ready to respond at a moment’s notice.

  “Now, we wait,” said Phoenix. “Drug dealers don’t keep sensible hours, but at two o’clock they’ll either be tucked up in bed or relaxing after arriving home. Synchronise your watches, on my count… it’s now, one fifteen. We strike at two.”

  They had waited. Phoenix didn’t know what the others were thinking in the silence inside the four vans, but he was going over his plans yet again. Planning was everything. If you imagined every single step of the mission, then prepared detailed methods on how to react, you would always succeed.

  That was his mantra. Those thought processes had never failed him. He could still see the folders in the metal filing cabinet underground in Shaw Park Mines. He had completed those at eighteen years of age, just married, with a tiny daughter, and full of anger at the world.

  “Twenty-eight years,” he said.

  “Sorry?” asked Rusty.

  “What, did I say that out loud? I was just realising how long I’ve been at this game, in one form or other.”

  The two agents in the back seats shared a look. Phoenix had as much experience of taking out the bad guys as they had added together, and they thought they were battle-hardened.

  Phoenix passed his final message to the other team leaders.

  “Check your weapons. Balaclavas and night-vision goggles on. Good hunting.”

  Rusty led the way. He had parked twenty yards from the target house in Hulme. The residential street, busy from morning to night in the daytime, was eerily quiet. The houses they passed as they made their approach varied in character. Some were little more than a dumping ground for rubbish, with scrap cars elevated on bricks, discarded children’s toys, dog turds, broken bottles, cans, and fast-food outlet packaging.

  Here and there, stood properties occupied by older residents. Their patch of garden at the front tended with loving care, the windows of their pristine homes sparkling clean and unbroken. Phoenix recognised the signs. He’d lived on an estate just like this. They were fighting a losing battle, but they kept struggling. They resembled that single daisy, desperate to survive, thrusting its way through a cow-pat for a glimpse of the sun in a cloudless sky.

  The intelligence gathered over the previous weeks told them number forty-seven was the home of the Whitman family. Father and head of the gang Billy, forty-two years old, had been a familiar face in local law courts since he nicked the emblems from the grills of luxury cars aged fourteen.

  The switch from violent crime to peddling drugs occurred in his mid-twenties. At the time he was separated, with two sons, Ben and Ken. His wife had got lonely while he was in Strangeways prison for the third, or fourth time. Billy heard on the grapevine the path to his front door was getting worn with the frequent footfall.

  The boys followed their injured mother to Salford soon after he left prison. They lived with her, and a series of blokes until they were teenagers. As soon as they reached school-leaving age, and the authorities didn’t have to chase after them for not attending any longer, they moved back in with their Dad.

  Ben and Ken were now twenty-one and nineteen. His two sons followed their father’s career path, collecting a proud collection of ASBO’s before they were old enough to vote. The Whitman’s were fully paid-up members of the organised group of criminals operating in the Bent Triangle. In the communities where they plied their evil trade people associated the Whitman name with violence, fear, and misery.

  The side-door to number forty-seven had been identified as the best point of entry. A black shadow emerged from the rear of the house. Rusty set to work on the lock.

  Phoenix watched the second hand on his watch as it flicked its way to the top. When it read two o’clock, he nodded. The door opened. The two local agents moved through the kitchen, guns raised, ready to fire. The rooms on the ground floor were cleared. Phoenix and Rusty slipped inside the house to join in the action.

  Rusty stood poised at the bottom of the stairs. Each step could be a potential alarm. One creaking stair would awaken the three men sleeping in the bedrooms. It was inevitable they had weapons close to hand. The first-floor layout had been in the data passed to each of them for scrutiny. He inched his way upwards. Phoenix and the others followed.

  Rusty trod on a squeaky toy.

  The first three attackers forgot any element of surprise. Phoenix and Rusty charged into the bedrooms assigned to them and struck. The Whitman’s struggled to wake up, a bedside light switched on in one of the front bedrooms. Phoenix heard someone scrabbling around inside the back bedroom. The sound of a window opening. The double-tap of the fatal shots had come in perfect unison.

  Billy Whitman clambered out of bed naked and wielded a machete when he was killed by Rusty. Ben turned the light on to see what had woken him from a drunken stupor. He didn’t have time to think of reaching for the handgun on the bedside cabinet. One bullet to the chest and a second to the skull left him with a permanent look of surprise to carry into whatever hell awaited him.

  Phoenix crashed into the back bedroom to find Ken throwing bags out of the window, and was perched on the sill, preparing to launch himself onto the shed roof.

  “Going somewhere?” Phoenix growled. Ken was hit twice in the side under the armpit as he pitched forward. When Phoenix reached the window, he saw Ken’s body spread-eagled on the patio.

  “All accounted for,” said Phoenix.

  “I’ll bring the van to the door,” said Rusty. “Get any hoard of drugs and cash visible collected, then load it and the bodies into the back,”

  Team Two reported in from Cheetham Hill. Four gang members dead. The agents had stored the bodies in the van but abandoned the hunt for drugs and cash. The burst of activity attracted the attention of nosy neighbours.

  Beswick had been a different story. Team Three encountered seven people at the bungalow they raided. Intelligence indicated five males would be present, in their mid to late twenties, and from the Indian sub-continent. The agents smashed their way in and took out two men sleeping on the floor in the lounge. The other three young men emerged from a bedroom and tried to shoot their way out. One Olympus agent was killed in the firefight, another hit in the shoulder.

  Team Four were on the spot in six minutes. They discovered the three remaining agents had completed the mission, but they had a problem. One of the young men invited his grandparents to stay. They were in the main bedroom. The two gang members in the lounge gave up their beds for the elderly couple. Team Three team leader wanted to know what to do with them.

  “We’ve tidied up the gear from the house, and the bodies, Phoenix,” he said. “I need to get out of here fast. Do I leave these two?”

  “I don’t think we’ve got a choice,” said Phoenix, “this mission was supposed to leave no one in either house. Our own dead and wounded need to be removed along with the gang members. Head for the safe house as planned. Take t
hem with you alive for now.”

  “Problem?” asked Rusty as they pulled away from number forty-seven.

  Lights came on in several neighbouring houses, but nobody was brave enough to stick their heads outside. Hulme was not a stranger to the odd bit of gunfire. The dark clothing might deter them for a while longer. If they mistook the agents for the police, fine. The police didn’t attract an audience around here either.

  “An old Indian couple staying with their drug-dealing grandson? Who could have foreseen that?”

  Phoenix was annoyed. He didn’t appreciate his best-laid plans being derailed.

  Rusty left his friend to work through his options. The drive to the safe-house would take an hour. They made for Barnston, a village in the centre of the Wirral Peninsula, and a detached property with one and a half acres of land attached. They would park the vans in the large barns at the rear of the property, a distance from the narrow lane that threaded its way across the countryside.

  Phoenix considered what to do. The plan had been to store the bodies overnight, then he and Rusty would drive south to Bath in the morning, leaving the local teams to dispose of them. There was room to spare out on Thurstaston Common. He waited until morning. He would call Athena first thing for a decision. If she needed to refer the matter to Zeus, it meant delaying their return for a few hours. Phoenix knew he couldn’t ask any of the others to do the job; if that was the outcome. He must dispose of them; innocent or not.

  Phoenix heard the others talking about how the mission went, and the colleague they lost. The guy with the injured shoulder had been patched up with a field dressing. He was a tough nut. He agreed to wait until morning before one of his mates drove him to a friendly former army doctor for treatment.

  “Where the heck did that squeaky toy come from?” asked Rusty, “there was no intel of the Whitmans’ having a dog.”

  “They did own Pit Bull Terriers, but they were destroyed last year,” said the Team Four team leader. “No excuse though, we should have flagged it up as a possibility.”

  “Sounds as if your action went smoothly?” Rusty asked the guys from Team Two.

  “It was fine,” said one agent, “they didn’t grasp what was happening until I started firing. By then, it was too late.”

  “The trouble came from the proximity of the other houses in the cul-de-sac,” added another. “We had an audience when we carried the bodies out to the van. You should have seen what we left behind us. There was a family-size suitcase crammed full of heroin. We never had time to do a proper search. I’ll bet there was more upstairs, and there must have been more cash too.”

  “I found a plastic supermarket bag stuffed full of notes by the side of a sofa,” said his Team Leader. “But it was the high-end electrical gear they owned I wanted to put in the van. It looked such a modest home on the outside, but the plasma TV’s, laptops, and music systems told a different story. They lived in luxury.”

  “Not any longer,” said Phoenix.

  He turned to the Team Three leader and his men.

  “Do you want to talk us through it?”

  The Team Leader took a big breath.

  “Sam led from the front, as usual. I provided cover as he dealt with the two sleeping on the floor. Lenny joined Sam inside. James and I watched them move forward to the two bedrooms. Our reconnaissance told us to expect five men. The gunshots alerted the others. It became a shit-storm in seconds. I called Team Four in straight away. Sam was on the left, and Lenny on the right moving to the main bedroom. The door opened slowly, and instead of three young thugs running out, they met an eighty-year-old Indian bloke in a night-shirt, with his wife in her dressing-gown and slippers hanging onto his arm. Then the second bedroom door burst open, and three of the buggers came out firing. Sam was on that side and directly in their line of fire. He ran towards them firing at will. He took one of them out, but he got hit half a dozen times. Sam died before he hit the carpet. Lenny got hit in the shoulder but wasn’t hurt enough to be out of the game. His covering fire allowed James and me to cross the lounge to get shots off at the last two standing. It was over in the blink of an eye. Our back-up arrived in minutes. The rest you know.”

  “My fault,” said Phoenix, ruing the loss of yet another good agent. “I should have arranged for Giles Burke to supply drones equipped to count how many heat sources there were in each of the houses.”

  Nobody slept well that night.

  Phoenix called Athena at dawn.

  “Sorry to call so early,” he said, “but we have a problem.”

  “Are you OK?”

  “I’m fine. We lost a good man last night though. It was a mess. There were two unexpected guests in the Beswick house, and we now have two octogenarians we don’t know how to handle. They don’t speak any English, and their grandson’s body is in the back of a van along with the others in one of the outbuildings.”

  “What do you suggest we do?” she asked, still half asleep.

  “The reason we removed the bodies was to reduce the evidence the Grid and the police had available. We cleaned up as best we could in the time available. The police will find enough blood to identify the twelve gang members. Sam, the agent who died, won’t be on their radar. The British Army will have his records, but there’s no reason for them to follow that route. When a dozen members of a major drugs gang disappear without a trace I imagine the police breathe a sigh of relief, rather than mount a nationwide manhunt, don’t you? The removal of as much of the drugs and cash as we could manage points the finger at rival gangs. The Grid will seek revenge. We need to be vigilant. When they make a move on a gang up here, we’ll hit hard again. If there are casualties on both their sides, so be it.”

  “You haven’t told me what you think we should do with the old couple.”

  “That’s because I don’t bloody know,” said Phoenix. “I can’t pull the trigger on two innocent people. The gang members who died tonight deserved everything they got.”

  “Let the local agents cope with the dispersal of corpses across the Wirral countryside over the next few days as planned. You and Rusty can return to Larcombe Manor with our unscheduled guests. We’ll leave them in Henry’s capable hands. If anyone can persuade them to forget what they witnessed, he can. If that proves impossible, perhaps we’ll fly them back home.”

  “What, to Derby?”

  “Oh, I thought they were on holiday or something,” said Athena.

  “We checked the old lady’s handbag; Rusty found her library card. He’d never seen one.”

  “At least you haven’t lost your sense of humour. I can’t wait to get you home. Thank goodness you’re both safe.”

  “I wasn’t joking,” said Phoenix, “we’ll be back by ten o’clock. Warn Henry to expect his new arrivals. Apologies for disrupting his weekend.”

  Phoenix was disturbed from his memories as Rusty arrived for their afternoon session.

  “Penny for them, Phoenix,” he said, joining him at the table in the orangery overlooking the lawns,

  “I replayed the events of the night in the Bent Triangle earlier in the month,” Phoenix replied. “Sam’s funeral has taken place. His family received a cover story they could swallow. Lenny’s on the mend. He’ll be back on active duty in no time.”

  “It was almost the perfect mission,” sighed Rusty, “losing Sam was a real blow. He was a hero. As for the old couple, well, I don’t think we could have done much else as it turned out.”

  Phoenix wouldn’t forget that drive back from the Wirral to Bath in a hurry. They secured their prisoners in the van, to be on the safe side, and Rusty headed for the motorway.

  They endured four hours of abuse in Punjabi as the old man and woman shouted and screamed at them. Phoenix had no idea what language they spoke, but Rusty recognised the occasional swear word. He said it was the first thing a squaddie picked up in any foreign tongue he came across.

  Henry stood waiting for them when they got back to HQ, He and an escort took the pair to the
interrogation suite in the ice-house. A thorough search made an unexpected discovery. The old man wore a body belt under his loose clothing. The pouches contained nine kilos of heroin. When the contents of his wife’s handbag were tipped out onto a table, something made Henry take a closer look. The handbag had a false bottom. Inside was a seven-inch blade, a kirpan.

  That news gave Rusty and Phoenix a jolt. They thanked their lucky stars they tied the couple up before they drove south.

  Henry interrogated them for several hours. Giles carried out background checks in Derby. Far from being innocent bystanders, the couple took four trips a year for the past three years back to Mohali. They weighed more on the return journeys than when they left, and not from a surfeit of good food.

  Henry reported his findings to Athena at the following day’s morning meeting. She gave the order to proceed with their removal. Henry reminded her that the coppicing in the woods at the far edges of the estate had yielded a significant amount of cut wood.

  “We completed our forestry management cycle at the end of March. There’s ample wood to build two pyres. We can cremate their bodies to comply with their Hindu heritage, and I’ll arrange for the all-male burial party to scatter their ashes in the stream that runs past the pet cemetery. It’s not the Ganges, and it’s far better than they deserve.”

  Athena had been grim-faced when she replied. “Waste not; want not.”

  Phoenix and Rusty had been on the south coast that morning on another mission against the Grid. There was no rest in the fight against evil.

  CHAPTER 5

  Phoenix and Rusty spent the rest of Friday afternoon in the orangery. There was no more talk of the Jagpals. The mission to the Bent Triangle was now a closed book. Rusty knew better than to remind his best friend despite his meticulous planning, mistakes occurred.