Black Ops

by Chris Ryan

  There was now only one guard between her and the colonel. Just a few minutes and they would be face to face.

  Danny followed the CO into his office, a sparse room with a few framed pictures on the wall of Williamson with various assorted bigwigs. The CO put his phone on speaker and placed it on his desk. ‘You’re on with Black,’ he announced.

  Danny didn’t expect any word of apology from Sturrock, and he didn’t get it. Just a terse update. ‘My people are making contact with the close-protection teams now.’

  Silence.

  Then . . .

  ‘Fuck . . .’

  ‘What is it?’ the CO demanded.

  ‘The lines are down to the safe house.’

  ‘What about the colonel’s CP?’ Danny demanded.

  ‘We can’t raise them. Their phones are switching to voicemail.’

  ‘All three?’

  ‘All three.’

  A moment of silence.

  ‘You’ve made a pig’s ear of this situation . . .’ Sturrock started to say.

  The CO leaned over and killed the call in mid-sentence. He looked at Danny. ‘Well?’

  ‘She’ll target the colonel first,’ Danny said.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because her kid’s with Christina. She’ll do her last and then try to get away with the boy.’

  ‘She’s insane if she thinks she can do that.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Danny said. ‘But everything’s gone the way she wants it so far. I think she’s got something else up her sleeve.’

  ‘You know her best,’ the CO said. ‘What do you need?’

  ‘Get a team out to the colonel’s place. Scramble the chopper from London to Christina’s safe house.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  As far as Danny was concerned, he’d already answered that question. From here, he could be at the colonel’s house in an hour, the safe house in ninety minutes. If he wanted to catch up with Bethany White . . .

  ‘I’m going to the safe house. Boss, I’ve got to move.’

  The CO nodded. He put his hands in his pockets and removed a set of keys. ‘Take my car.’ He opened a drawer in his desk, withdrew a Sig 9mm handgun and handed it over, then gave Danny his phone.

  Danny turned to leave. But before he reached the door he looked back at the CO. ‘Boss, MI6 are covering something up. They need to tell us what’s really going on.’

  ‘I’ll get on to the DSF,’ Williamson said. ‘He has more clout.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Black?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘She killed three of our guys. Make sure you find her.’

  ‘I will,’ Danny said, and he left the room.

  21

  Colonel Henry Bishop put another log on the fire. He took his empty whisky glass from the mantelpiece and walked across the drawing room to the drinks trolley. There was a flash of lightning and it must have caused a power surge because all the lights in the room went dim for a fraction of a second, and the Goldberg Variations faded momentarily. He thought, in that instant of darkness and silence, that he could see lights through the windows that looked out on to the front of the house. Car headlights, or was he imagining it?

  The lights in the drawing room lit up again. Bach returned. As the colonel staggered towards the windows there was another crack of thunder and, as if somebody had turned on a switch, a torrential downpour of rain started. It was so loud it drowned out the music. The colonel peered through the window and could barely see more than a couple of metres. There was no glow of headlights, however. He had probably imagined it. He looked disconsolately into his empty tumbler and turned back to the drinks cabinet again.

  It was early in the evening, so he was still indulging in the pretence of small measures. He poured himself a couple of fingers of Scotch, turned up the music, then returned to his comfortable armchair by the fire, took a sip, closed his eyes and let the Goldberg wash over him. Whisky and Bach truly were the only things that kept him sane.

  How long he sat like that, he couldn’t have said. A couple of minutes, perhaps? He was on the third Variation when he heard the door creak open and he immediately felt his temper rising. Those bloody close-protection people had no sense of personal space. ‘Can’t you bloody knock before you enter?’ he growled. ‘How many times do I have to tell you?’

  ‘Do you speak to all your girls like that?’ said a voice.

  A female voice.

  The colonel spluttered, opened his eyes and stood up. He felt a moment of semi-drunken dizziness and had to grab the back of the armchair to steady himself as he looked at the figure in the doorway. She was very wet. Her hair was dripping on to the carpet. The colonel was confused. He recognised her, but not entirely. Then he twigged. ‘You’ve dyed your hair,’ he said.

  Bethany White raised one hand to her hair. ‘Do you like it?’ she said. ‘Last time I was here, you said you preferred brunettes.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘You did,’ said Bethany, and she smiled at him in a way no woman had smiled at him for many years. Through the fog of booze and anxiety, he detected an unfamiliar stirring of desire. ‘May I come in? I have some good news for you.’

  ‘Those bloody close-protection people should have let me know you were here,’ the colonel said.

  ‘They recognised me,’ Bethany said. ‘And anyway, you won’t be needing them any more.’ She smiled again. ‘They found him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They found Ibrahim Khan. He was holed up in a filthy little flat in south London. He’s on remand in Belmarsh as we speak.’

  It was only in that moment that the colonel fully appreciated the stress he’d been under. The sleepless nights. The constant worry. All that fell away in an instant. He exhaled a profound sigh of relief. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Well, well, well. Thank the Lord for that. May the powers that be throw away the fucking key. I think this calls for a drink, don’t you?’

  ‘I think it calls for more than that,’ said Bethany, and the colonel had to clench his free hand to hide that it was shaking with the little thrill that just darted through him. She really was a fine-looking woman. The brown hair suited her, and he liked the way it clung to the side of her face because it was wet.

  ‘What will it be, my dear?’ he said. ‘I might have some sherry somewhere . . .’

  ‘I’ll have what you’re having,’ she said, and stepped a little further into the room.

  The Director Special Forces marched through the anonymous corridors of the MI6 building in Vauxhall.

  He’d been here to discuss the continued deployment of the SAS in a training role to the Kenyan government. When the call came through from Hereford, he excused himself from the meeting. And when Mike Williamson filled him in, he headed straight to the fourth floor where Sturrock’s office was situated. He barged past three secretaries, who all wittered that he really mustn’t enter unannounced, and a guard who knew better than to challenge the DSF, to find Sturrock sitting behind his desk, staring across the river through the floor-to-ceiling windows on the far side of his office. An electric storm was flashing over the London skyline. When Sturrock turned in his swivel chair, the DSF saw his face was as white as the lightning.

  The two men looked at each other across the office. ‘I have two SAS teams in transit,’ the DSF said. ‘One is heading to Colonel Bishop’s house, one is heading to the safe house. So far this clusterfuck has cost me three men. Either you tell me what the hell’s been going on, or the next conversation I have is with the PM.’

  Sturrock stared at him. ‘It’s complicated,’ he said.

  ‘I’m smart,’ said the DSF. ‘Try me.’

  The rain was relentless. Visibility through the windscreen of the CO’s BMW, no more than five metres. Danny’s urge was to floor it, but to do that risked colliding with an unseen obstacle up ahead, or coming off the road. He was aware, but only vaguely, of pedestrians on either side sprinting to get out of the rain. He kept his atten
tion on the road.

  The colonel handed Bethany half a tumbler of Scotch. They were standing by the fire. She downed the drink in one and closed her eyes as the warmth from the spirit spread through her torso. ‘That’s good,’ she said, and she opened her eyes.

  The colonel was a truly pathetic presence. He reeked of stale alcohol, for a start, and his mixture of sexual nervousness and anticipation was evident in the way he kept licking his glistening pink lips, and by the film of sweat on his forehead. His face, already red from the booze, was now truly flushed with anticipation. ‘I . . . I was a bit of a pig, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Last time you were here, I mean. This damn Khan situation was getting to me a trifle, I won’t deny it. Shouldn’t have said that thing about you being a, you know, a dyke. Hope I didn’t offend.’

  ‘It takes more than that,’ she said, ‘to offend me. You’re a brave man, Colonel. We girls like that. Sometimes we even club together to show our appreciation. Do you understand what I’m talking about?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the colonel. ‘Yes, I think I might.’ He licked his glistening lips even more enthusiastically than before.

  ‘Aren’t you hot in that jacket?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ said the colonel. ‘Yes, a little.’

  ‘Why don’t you take it off?’

  The whisky glass jangled against the mantelpiece as the colonel put it down nervously. He wriggled his way out of his tweed jacket and slung it over the back of his armchair. ‘Perhaps, uh . . . Perhaps you’d like to . . . uh . . .’ He made an airy gesture to indicate that she should do the same.

  Bethany giggled. ‘You’re a naughty boy, Colonel. I never would have suspected it of you.’ She stepped one pace closer to him and gently placed the tip of her left forefinger on his forehead. Then she brushed it slowly down the centre of his face, down his ruddy nose, over his moist lips, across his chin and down his Adam’s apple, which wriggled under his podgy skin as he swallowed. She continued to the top button of his shirt, deftly undid it, then moved down to the next. She was acutely, horribly aware of the bulge under his trousers. She felt as if every cell in her body was recoiling from it. That bulge was far more offensive to her than the butchered corpses lying in her wake. But she continued to undo his shirt nonetheless.

  Ibrahim had been naked when they killed him, so she wanted the colonel to be naked too. It was more humiliating that way and he was, after all, a big man. Better to get him to strip quickly and voluntarily than struggle with his corpse after she’d finished with him.

  It was as if Sturrock couldn’t bear to look the DSF in the eye as he spoke. He spun round in his chair again and looked back over the stormy London skyline. The DSF could clearly see his reflection in the window, however. His expression was haunted.

  ‘MISFIT was our best intelligence source since 9/11,’ he said. ‘There’s no question about that. Some of us wondered how long it could possibly last. More than once, we thought he might be close to exposure and we’d have to engage our extraction procedures. Pull him out of Syria, give him a new identity and a decent pension and make sure he lived a long and happy life. And we’d have done it. No question. We do look after our people, you know. We’re not monsters.’ As he said this, he clenched his left hand into a tight fist and put it momentarily to his forehead. ‘We’re not monsters,’ he repeated, as if to persuade himself of that fact.

  Sturrock paused, cleared his throat, then carried on speaking.

  ‘Six months ago, a little longer perhaps, the MISFIT source provided some solid gold intelligence. There was to be a meeting of high-value IS targets. Local commanders, decision-makers, and four or five top dogs high up on both our watch list and the Americans’ – people we had difficulty locating at the best of times, let alone having them all in one place at the same time. They were congregating to discuss the fall of their damn caliphate, and to establish ways of reinvigorating it by upping their terror campaign against the West. It was too good an opportunity to pass up. There were fifteen targets in all, and if we could take them out in one hit, there was a high probability we’d deal Daesh in Syria a near-fatal blow. It was discussed at the highest level and the decision was made, rightly, that such an outcome would dramatically decrease the security threat level in the UK.’

  Unbidden, Sturrock spun round again. ‘I don’t think you understand,’ he said, his voice dripping with accusation. ‘Our people uncover threats from these bastards in the UK three or four times a week. Ninety per cent of these threats originate in Syria and Afghanistan. To take out fifteen Daesh commanders would . . .’

  ‘I get it,’ the DSF said, choosing not to remind Sturrock that half of the threats he’d just referenced were dealt with by his men.

  Sturrock frowned. ‘It was discussed at the highest level,’ he repeated. He plainly wanted the buck to be passed further up the hierarchy. ‘Number Ten was fully aware.’

  ‘Aware of what?’ the DSF said.

  Sturrock looked at him as if he was an idiot. ‘Of the air strike,’ he said.

  The colonel’s shirt was off. He wore a yellowing vest underneath it. It smelt musty but went some way to camouflaging his paunch. The skin on his arms was pasty. Greying hair protruded unpleasantly from his armpits. It occurred to Bethany that everything about this man was different from Ibrahim. She remembered his lean, muscular arms and flat, smooth torso. She remembered the way he used to hold her, confidently and safely. And for a moment, just a moment, she let her mask slip as the injustice hit her: that her Ibrahim should be dead, and this foul excuse for a human should still be alive.

  ‘What is it?’ the colonel asked.

  And instantly, the mask returned. She fixed him with her most seductive gaze, reached out, and started to unbuckle his trousers.

  That kept him quiet.

  ‘So you took out a target with fifteen Daesh commanders,’ the DSF said. ‘What’s the problem with that?’

  ‘It’s more complicated,’ Sturrock said, and he scowled.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘For a start, we didn’t carry out the air strike.’

  ‘The Americans?’

  ‘No,’ said Sturrock. ‘The Russians.’

  The DSF widened his eyes. ‘Last time I checked, we weren’t really on speaking terms with them.’

  ‘Of course we bloody well aren’t. They’re poisoning people in the bloody provinces. But they also have an FSB agent embedded in the service. We know who he is and from time to time it suits our purposes to leak information back to the Russians. It was far too politically difficult for us to launch a strike from Syrian airspace, but the Russians were in bed with the regime and we knew they wouldn’t be able to resist. They had the precise time, they had the exact coordinates of the meeting. All we had to do was sit back and wait for them to do our work for us.’

  ‘It sounds like a perfect strategy. What’s the problem?’

  ‘The problem?’ Sturrock replied. He removed his moisturiser from his pocket and rubbed a little into his hands. ‘The problem,’ he said, ‘was the children.’

  His trousers were round his ankles now. He was kicking off his shoes and stepping out of them. He wore Y-fronts, baggy enough to contain his excitement. Bethany raised her right arm and gently took hold of his chin. He was breathing heavily. She could feel his hot, whisky-soaked breath on her face. And now he was down to his underwear, she could drop her pretence. She wrinkled her nose and turned her face away in disgust.

  It was then that the colonel appeared to twig that all was not as it seemed.

  He looked down at her hand. It was still holding his chin. He appeared to notice something he hadn’t seen before. He grabbed her hand and looked at it. There, between her thumb and her first finger, was a smear of red. It was unmistakably blood.

  ‘What the bloody hell’s going on?’ the colonel said. He staggered back, bumping into his armchair. The bulge in his Y-fronts had deflated. Bethany made an extravagant show of noticing this and looked at him with a grumpily kittenish expression. />
  ‘Don’t you love me any more?’ she said.

  ‘Where’s my close-protection team?’ the colonel demanded. He bent down to grab his trousers, but Bethany placed one foot on them before he was able to. He stood up again. ‘Where the bloody hell are you?’ he shouted. ‘Why did you let this woman in without checking with me first?’

  Bethany put a hand to one ear. ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘I’m not certain they can hear you.’

  He stared at her.

  Then he ran.

  ‘What children?’

  Sturrock turned again to look back over the London skyline. ‘The Daesh personnel were meeting in a school,’ he said. His voice cracked as he spoke. ‘An infant school. Thirty children under the age of ten. It’s a common strategy of theirs. Whenever several high-value targets congregate, they do it at a civilian target. They know it’s unlikely to prevent an air strike from the Syrian regime or their allies, but Western powers are more reluctant to accept collateral damage. Agent MISFIT knew we were unlikely to order a direct hit on a school. He had another plan. He was known to some of the targets. His calculation was that, once they’d congregated, he’d be able to gain access to their private meeting and . . .’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘Eliminate them. Single-handedly.’

  ‘That risked blowing his cover,’ the DSF said.

  ‘Indeed,’ Sturrock replied, ‘if he was unsuccessful. But he wanted out anyway. He was offering to make this his last job.’

  ‘One guy against fifteen?’

  ‘Our assessment,’ Sturrock said, ‘was that he was . . . unlikely to succeed. We elected to proceed with our original plan.’

  ‘Did you tell him you were going to do that?’

  Sturrock didn’t immediately answer. When he did, his voice was very quiet. ‘It was discussed at the highest level,’ he said.