Black Ops

by Chris Ryan

  Another thought occurred to him. It wasn’t easy to kill an SAS man. The vigilance and situational awareness that kept them alive on the job soon became second nature. If you wanted to kill a Regiment guy, you needed to think like a Regiment guy. And who was more likely to do that than somebody who had been under the tutelage of an SAS training team?

  Danny’s mobile rang and he started. He pulled out his phone. Number withheld. He answered it as cautiously as always.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘It’s me.’ Danny recognised the voice of Ray Hammond, the ops officer.

  ‘Ray, what the fuck, it’s nearly midnight?’

  ‘Then you’d better get your beauty sleep. I want you in here at 06.30 tomorrow.’

  ‘What for?’ Danny asked. But he’d have to wait to find out. The telephone line was dead.

  Danny had a broken night. Mutilated SAS men populated his dreams, along with a tough, wiry young Muslim soldier who repeatedly introduced himself but whose name Danny couldn’t quite catch. He got up at 04.30 and went for a run, pounding the slushy pavements of Hereford by lamplight, trying to clear his head. Maybe that would ease back into his memory the name that eluded him. But it was no good. It was tantalisingly close, but still just out of reach.

  Danny was back at HQ by 06.00. He could tell, as soon as the MoD policeman at the gate let him into the base, that something was happening. Three black Mercedes with tinted windows were parked up outside the main building. They practically smelled of top brass. High-ranking army personnel, perhaps. Maybe MI6. He called through to Ray Hammond. Ray came to fetch him, and led him deep into the heart of the building, towards the secure central area that was known as the Kremlin.

  ‘What’s this all about, Ray?’

  ‘You’ll find out.’

  ‘Who’s in on the meet?’

  But they were passing through a set of double doors and a clerk with an armful of files was coming the other way, so Hammond kept quiet. Only a few paces later, they were outside a secure briefing room. Hammond knocked. A male voice from inside said: ‘Come!’

  They entered. There were three other men in the briefing room. Danny recognised the CO Mike Williamson, of course. He was wearing standard military camouflage, as he always did around camp. Williamson was that rare thing: a Rupert who was well liked among the men. He had a handsome, leathery face with a pale scar on his chin. It was a face that spoke of many years working – and fighting – in deserts, jungles and other tough climates. He spoke to the guys with respect, and he earned that respect back. Danny always thought he seemed a little uncomfortable in the office. Williamson always struck him as a man more suited to the battlefield. He sat at a large table, ignoring the cup of coffee in front of him. Two older men sat either side of him. They were familiar, but Danny couldn’t quite place them. The table was covered with folders and iPads. It might be early, but this meeting had obviously been going on for a while.

  The CO stood up, walked round to Danny and shook his hand. ‘At ease,’ the CO said. ‘Have a seat. Thanks, Ray. We’ll take it from here.’

  As Danny sat down he saw Ray Hammond’s expression, scowling at his dismissal. But Hammond knew better than to argue, and left the room.

  ‘Danny Black,’ the CO continued. ‘Meet George Attwood, Director Special Forces, and Alan Sturrock, Chief of SIS.’

  Danny nodded at the two men. Like Williamson, Attwood had the lined, leathery face of a soldier who had spent years in hot countries. Danny noticed that he had a disfigurement between the thumb and forefinger on his right hand, and recognised it as an old bullet wound. His hair was grey and bushy, his eyes sparkling blue. A handome bastard, but steely.

  Sturrock, the MI6 guy, was the opposite. Pale, gaunt, with sunken, yellowing eyes and thinning black hair. He had the complexion of a man who rarely saw the sun. His suit was immaculately cut – Danny could tell it was expensive – and he wore his blue tie in an Oxford knot. He looked more like a guest at a society wedding than the head of MI6. His hands were in front of him, fingertips together, and Danny noticed that they were well manicured. Danny remembered seeing him on TV, asserting that the modern security services were open, inclusive and entirely above board. He’d been very convincing. But that was part of a spy’s job, of course. To convince.

  ‘You’re probably wondering why we called you in,’ the

  CO said.

  Danny didn’t answer immediately. He thought of Ben Bullock, Liam Armitage and Ollie Moorhouse. He thought of the old guest house in Dartmoor, and the young Muslim man sitting on his bed, thanking him for the meagre gift of two Mars bars. And unbidden, a name dropped into his head.

  ‘I think you’ve called me in to talk about Ibrahim Khan,’

  he said.

  3

  The three men looked at each other. They were plainly surprised. Unnerved, even. It was Sturrock, the chief of MI6, who broke the silence. He gave the impression of a man choosing his words carefully. ‘What exactly do you know,’ he said, ‘about Ibrahim Khan?’ His accent made Jacob Rees-Mogg sound like Danny Dyer.

  ‘I know five years ago he was holed up in a safe house with Bullock, Armitage and Moorhouse. They were providing a training package for him and they were treating him like shit. At least Bullock and Armitage were. Fast forward five years, the three SAS men end up dead within a few weeks of each other. Something’s got to link them all. I saw the way Bullock spoke to Khan. Threatening to feed him bacon sandwiches, the usual shit. Armitage would have done the same as Bullock. Moorhouse was different, but maybe he got tarred with the same brush. Call it a hunch, but I reckon Ibrahim Khan’s the link. It’s not easy to overpower and kill a Regiment guy. Unless you’ve been trained up by one, of course. I think he killed them.’

  Danny’s accusation hung in the air. He had the impression that the three older men were uncertain about who should speak next. In the end, it was the CO. ‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘and you’re wrong. We also believe that Khan was responsible for these murders, but not for the reasons you think. What we’re about to tell you doesn’t leave this room, Danny. You’re bound by the Official Secrets Act and . . .’

  ‘I get it, boss,’ Danny said.

  The CO nodded, then turned to Sturrock. ‘Alan?’ he said.

  ‘Are you sure this is our man?’ Sturrock said.

  ‘He’s the only remaining person in the Regiment, past or present, who saw Khan alongside Bullock, Armitage and Moorhouse,’ the CO said.

  ‘Is that really such an advantage? There must be others who can recognise him, and we can brief people perfectly well with photographic material . . .’

  ‘He’s our guy,’ said Attwood. It was the first time the Director Special Forces had spoken. His voice was deep and authoritative. His words brought Sturrock’s argument to a swift conclusion, but Danny could tell from the way Sturrock flinched, almost imperceptibly, that there was tension between these two. He reckoned neither of them would want to admit that the other had any kind of authority over him.

  ‘Very well,’ Sturrock said. ‘If you’re certain.’ He put his hand in his pocket and withdrew a small plastic bottle. For a moment, Danny couldn’t work out what it was. Then he realised. The guy was applying hand cream. He squeezed a little dollop into one palm, then vigorously rubbed it in. There was an awkward silence, broken only by the slight squelch of the moisturised skin. Williamson and Attwood stared straight ahead, as if too embarrassed to acknowledge what this dandy of a spook was doing.

  Sturrock put his bottle of moisturiser back in his pocket and cleared his throat. ‘Ibrahim Khan,’ he said. ‘Son of second-generation Iraqi parents. Father an engineer, mother a health worker. Khan himself was a straight-A student at school, expected to go to university to read modern languages. He applied to join the British Army instead. Passed into 1 Para at the age of nineteen.’

  ‘Bloody good little soldier,’ Attwood interrupted, to Sturrock’s visible annoyance. ‘We had him earmarked for the Special Forces Support Group almost fr
om day one.’

  Danny had a lot of respect for the SFSG. They were a skilled unit of operators, taken from the Paras, the Royal Marines and the RAF Regiment, who had supported the SAS and the SBS on operations since the mid-2000s, by cordoning off areas where the guys were operating, or providing extra firepower and personnel where necessary.

  ‘He was the first British Muslim to join the support group,’ Attwood continued. ‘Worth his weight in gold in Helmand, working with the Afghan commandos against the Taliban. Fought as hard as any of the white guys, and it’s amazing what one brown face in a British unit can do to help gain the Afghans’ trust.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Sturrock. He was clearly peeved that Attwood had taken over the talking.

  ‘Khan made a bit of a name for himself in the SFSG,’ Attwood said. ‘So we headhunted him for the Special Reconnaissance Regiment.’

  ‘I never saw him around,’ Danny said. The Special Reconnaissance Regiment was a covert team of special forces personnel who specialised in surveillance and reconnaissance operations that was once the remit of the SAS. They evolved from 14 Intelligence Company, the surveillance unit that supported the Regiment in Northern Ireland, and were based alongside the SAS at RAF Credenhill. If Khan had been one of them, Danny would have encountered him eventually.

  ‘That’s because . . .’ Attwood started to say. But Sturrock interrupted him. ‘George,’ he said, smiling blandly but not looking directly at the DSF. ‘I know I’m always giving you fellows boring things to do out in the field, but in this instance, I think it’s best that I do the talking, don’t you?’

  Attwood looked like he was going to argue. But in the end, he just inclined his head and said: ‘We’re in an office, Alan. More your domain than mine.’

  Sturrock gave a thin-lipped, humourless smile at the implied criticism. His hand went for the moisturiser in his pocket, but he seemed to check himself and pressed his fingertips together again. ‘It makes perfect sense,’ he said to Danny, ‘that you never saw Khan around. His recruitment into the SRR was part of a longer game. He spent very little time with the unit itself. When you met him at that safe house in Dartmoor, he was receiving a higher level of training from the SAS, not usually available to the SRR. Khan’s ethnicity and high level of ability meant he was too good a prospect to waste. That’s what Bullock, Armitage and Moorhouse were doing. It was part of an operation codenamed MISFIT. Once Khan’s training was complete, we orchestrated the next stage in the MISFIT plan. Namely: we kicked him out of the SRR.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For goodness sake, man, I’m getting to that. The pretext for Ibrahim Khan’s dismissal was that he’d been found in possession of extremist literature. It meant he failed the vetting process and was out on his ear. He moved to London and started attending a mosque in Harlesden that we knew to be a recruiting ground for various Islamist cells.’ Sturrock sniffed, then glanced at Attwood and the CO. He was plainly reluctant to divulge what needed to be said next, but neither of his colleagues helped him out. Attwood pinched the bridge of his nose before continuing. ‘We have a Saudi mole in MI6.’

  Danny’s surprise must have registered on his face. ‘Exactly,’ Sturrock said. ‘You are now one of only a handful of people who know that information, and if it leaks you’ll be the first person we drag in to question. Understood?’

  Danny replied with a small shrug.

  ‘The mole is a low-level intelligence analyst and we’ve known about him from the very beginning. Nothing of any importance passes his desk, and it occasionally suits our purposes to feed him some misinformation that we’d like to pass the Saudis’ way. Like it or not, they’re still one of the biggest funders of Islamist activity in the UK. We gave our mole the nugget that Khan had been expelled from the SRR for suspected radicalisation, then we sat back and waited. It took about three months, but he got the tap on the shoulder just as we were expecting him to. He was just too tempting a prospect. There was the usual flirtation. Khan pretended not to be interested at first, his new friends at the mosque refused to take no for an answer. Long story short, he agreed to attend an IS training camp in Syria. After that, he was a shoo-in. IS had a British special forces-trained operator on their books, or so they thought. In reality, Khan was passing weapons-grade intelligence back to London. It’s no exaggeration to say that Ibrahim Khan was our most fruitful embedded agent of the last thirty years. We estimate that the MISFIT intelligence prevented eight major atrocities on British soil, and in large part led to the downfall of IS’s operations in the Middle East.’

  ‘Right. I thought IS were pretty much dead in the water anyway.’

  ‘By no means. It’s true they’ve been largely eradicated from Iraq, and their positions have been weakened in Syria. Some of their members have splintered into separate Islamist groups. But they’re still an active force, disparate but regrouping, and a substantial threat, both to the West and to the ordinary people of the Middle East. We ignore them at our peril. If they have been weakened, however, we have MISFIT to thank to a very great extent.’

  Sturrock sounded extremely pleased with himself. He frowned when Attwood said: ‘We have MISFIT to thank for some almighty fuck-ups, too.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sturrock said, closing his eyes. ‘Yes, quite.’ He seemed to gather his thoughts. ‘About six months ago, Ibrahim Khan dropped off the radar. He failed to show at a scheduled meeting with his SIS handler and we received none of the prearranged warning signals to indicate that he was compromised. We discussed inserting a special forces team to extract him, but drone footage indicated his last known location in Syria was deserted.’

  ‘Basically, we didn’t have a bloody clue where he was,’ Attwood said.

  ‘We put out feelers, of course,’ Sturrock continued, ‘but for his own safety we couldn’t be too overt about it. Snippets of chatter started to come back. It soon became abundantly clear to us that he’d flipped.’

  Danny frowned. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘If IS had worked out he was a double, why not send him back to his handler with false intel for us?’

  ‘We asked ourselves the same question. It may be that Khan’s loyalties gradually aligned with IS without them learning that he was a British agent. More likely, they’re just not sophisticated enough to employ their new asset against us. Most IS members are brutal, nasty and extreme, but they’re not too bright. It would appeal to their world view to despatch their new convert to take revenge on the very people who trained him up in the first place.’

  Sturrock opened a file in front of him and withdrew a sheaf of A4 photographs which he laid out on the table in front of Danny. He didn’t have to ask what they were. Bullock, Armitage and Moorhouse looked different in death, but they were still recognisable. Even Danny, who was used to scenes of blood and gristle, avoided looking at the single picture of Moorhouse’s genitals surrounded by a patch of blood-soaked carpet. ‘The Ghanaian scene of crime evidence is a bit ropey,’ Sturrock said. He was right. The pictures of Armitage with his fingers laid out on his chest were more blurry and slapdash than the others. ‘But the Dubai and Florida authorities did a good job. The Palm Beach Police Department even found DNA evidence of Khan’s presence at the crime scene. A pubic hair, believe it or not. You could say we’ve got him by the short and curlies.’ He smiled, and glanced at Attwood and the CO for confirmation that his joke was a good one. It was not forthcoming. He cleared his throat again.

  ‘How many other SAS men knew about Khan’s training package?’ Danny asked.

  ‘One,’ Attwood replied. ‘You.’ He smiled at Danny’s refusal to show any response. ‘Don’t worry. We don’t actually think you’re a target. The real question is: who else was involved in Operation MISFIT?’

  Danny looked at the MI6 chief, as if to say: him, for a start.

  ‘Actually, no,’ Sturrock said. ‘Perfectly proper that I shouldn’t know his name, of course,’ he said quickly, as if to dispel the idea that this might indicate a lack of authority. ‘I was aware of
the MISFIT intelligence and I discussed it at the highest level. But I was rightly kept away from the day-to-day handling of the agent. I wasn’t even aware of his name until a couple of days ago. Rule number one of running a deeply embedded agent is that the fewer people who know his or her identity, the better. In this instance, only six individuals were fully indoctrinated into MISFIT. Bullock, Armitage, Moorhouse and three others.’

  ‘These three others,’ Danny said. ‘How’s their health?’

  ‘Precarious,’ the Director Special Forces said. ‘That’s where you come in.’

  Danny felt his spirits deflate. ‘A bodyguarding job?’ he said. ‘That’s what this is?’ He appealed to the CO. ‘Boss, I . . .’

  ‘Relax, Black. It’s not that.’

  ‘We have men – and women, for that matter – guarding the three remaining targets,’ Attwood said. ‘But it’s not a long-term solution. If we’re to guarantee their safety, we need to deal with the threat itself. That means finding Ibrahim Khan, and eliminating him.’

  The three men gave Danny a level gaze. ‘I’ll need a team,’ Danny said.

  The DSF shook his head. ‘No team, Black. You know how quickly rumours spread around this place. We can’t be sure Khan doesn’t still have eyes and ears in the SFSG or the SRR. Maybe that was how he caught up with Bullock, Armitage and Moorhouse. This whole operation needs to be kept tight. Make no mistake: Ibrahim Khan is perhaps the most important British operative of recent times. We need to keep information about the MISFIT fiasco under wraps.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Sturrock. ‘If word about it leaks, it’ll be a massive embarrassment for MI6 and Whitehall.’

  The DSF held up one finger, as if to stop Danny from interrupting. ‘I don’t expect you to care about that. There’s another reason word of this conversation can’t leave the room. The more people know, the more potential targets we create for Khan. Bottom line, Black: it’s you against him. We know your record. We think that of all our assets, you’re best suited to the job.’