Sarah stared at the figures on the screen.
UK TERRORIST ATTACKS, MAY 2014
Clitheroe: 40 fatalities (6 children), 86 injured
Aborfield: 36 fatalities (2 children), 47 injured
Dartmouth: 94 fatalities (19 children), 119 injured
Studley: 12 fatalities (2 children), 4 injured
— Total deceased: 182 (29 children)
“Okay,” she said. “I’m in.”
READY FOR ANYTHING
Everybody took a seat at the conference table. Dr Bennett had been recalled from the infirmary and didn’t look happy about it. According to Palu, the American woman was an expert in bio-terrorism and profiling, as well as medicine.
Bradley had been asked to collect his things and leave. As his duty had expired, they could no longer share classified information with him. That didn’t sit well with Sarah. She knew that resigning from active service was a long-winded affair, and had no doubt been in the works for weeks before she’d arrived, but without the option of replacing Bradley, it seemed wasteful to let him go. Palu had said he needed all the help he could get.
Palu’s tablet hadn’t stopped beeping since they’d looked at the statistics on screen. Every message the man received made him tenser, until he had started to resemble a coiled spring. Sarah almost felt sorry for him. He may have been in charge of MCU, but it was clear that he was a mutt with many masters.
“Prime Minister Breslow has just given a speech from Downing Street,” Palu informed them. “She’s halted the exit-strategy for Afghanistan, and is even reinforcing the number of troops in the region. She’s keen to display Britain’s strength. A request for aid has been made to President Conrad.”
Howard huffed. “The yanks won’t go for it. The American people are tired of war. Conrad will leave us hanging, I guarantee it. Loyalty is a one-way street with the Americans. They think helping out in World War II earned them enough brownie points to last a century.”
“That’s a little unfair,” Bradley said, entering from the back of the room with his things. “The Americans have aided us countless times.”
“Really?” said Howard. “So where are they now? MCU was supposed to be a joint enterprise, but it’s been over a year since they made any contribution to our cause.”
“They gave you me,” Dr Bennett said, aggrieved. “That’s hardly nothing.”
He rolled his eyes. “You were a token gesture. The US closed their own MCU facilities and their funding has dropped through the floor.”
Bennett folded her arms. When she spoke this time, her tone was angry and her accent stronger. “Do not refer to me as a token. I’m the most qualified person in this whole damned facility. Believe me, I’d sooner be back home if y’all have no further need of my services.”
“You are highly valued,” Palu said. “Now more than ever.”
Dr Bennett nodded at the Director, apparently satisfied.
“What’s the deal here?” Sarah butted in. “I mean, why is this place so abandoned? Why is there only a skeleton crew inside a place that must have cost millions? There was only a single guy guarding the entrance, for Christ’s sake.”
“They’re closing us down, Captain,” Palu said. Not this minute, not this month, but the writing is on the wall. After 9/11 the CIA, FBI, Police, Interpol, MI5 & 6, Scotland Yard, and the Army… they were all given huge additional funding and free-reign. It was messy, to say the least. The MCU was supposed to bring things together, to stop the in-fighting and bring cohesion to the US and UK counter-intelligence operations.”
Sarah’s eyes narrowed. “So, what happened?”
“The economy happened. The other agencies resented our funding and held back their Intel, repeatedly refusing to co-operate. The MCU has become benign and costly. In the last six years we have been scaled back by nine-tenths and have been stripped of most of our authority. Most of our Intel, we get from our contacts within the other agencies. We live off their scraps, where the initial plan was for MCU to be at the centre of everything. Regardless, we still do everything we can to help protect this country.”
“So why the hell are you letting Bradley go?” Sarah asked, nodding to the kid.
“I made the decision to leave, Captain,” Bradley said, lingering by the exit.
Sarah didn’t care. “Having a member of an already undermanned team quitting is bullshit.”
“It’s already done,” said Palu.
“Then undo it. You want my help, then Bradley stays. The more able bodies you have, the better. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Fine,” muttered Palu. “Bradley, your resignation is hereby denied. You are to return to work immediately until such time that the current crisis is resolved. Sarah, you too are operating on a limited mandate. We will discuss your role here in greater depth once we deal with the current situation.”
“Whoop-de-do.”
Bradley took a seat back at the table, looking nervous but committed.
Howard rolled his head on his shoulders and let out a sigh. “So,” he said, “what do we have?”
“Not much,” Palu said. “The Army has bomb specialists going through each location as we speak. It looks like more suicide vests from early witness reports. The Upper Ferry was the target in Dartmouth; a local pub in Studley; and in Arborfield a supermarket was hit. I’m getting statements for all three attacks and CCTV footage from the pub in Studley.”
Sarah frowned. “You did all that from your phone?”
Palu nodded. “It’s a mobile satlink with a proprietary operating system. We’ve been scaled back, but I can still access the Government’s internal systems. Anything the police or other UK agencies have, I can get. We even have limited access to the FBI and CIA. Our biggest asset, however, is our liaison Downing Street.”
Sarah was actually impressed. Most of what she’d seen of the MCU had been pretty pitiful, but it was quickly gaining her respect. “Do we have any files on Jeffrey Blanchfield?” she asked. “We need to know if he had any connections to known terrorist groups.”
“Maybe he was part of Al-Qaeda’s over-60 cell,” Dr Bennett quipped.
“Maybe,” said Sarah, acting as if she hadn’t noticed the American woman’s sarcasm and giving back some of her own by mocking her Georgian accent. “There’s a fine chance this here attack was connected to today’s commotion. If it is, then old Jeffrey has a done rubbed shoulders with some mighty bad people.”
Dr Bennett scowled.
“I agree,” said Bradley, oblivious to the cold war going on between the two women. “We need to know if there’s a link between Sunday’s attack and today’s. I’ll get on it right now.” He pulled a wafer-thin laptop out of his satchel and immediately began typing away on it.
“Get me the CCTV footage for the pub in Studley as well,” Palu said. “Apparently there’s clear footage of the suicide bomber.”
Something on Howard beeped. “There’s been another video,” he said, looking at his phone. “Released on the Internet, this time. It already has a million hits on ClipShare.”
“They must be angry that we kept their first video secret,” Dr Bennett said. “They want to make sure they get credit this time.”
Sarah sighed. “Now they can claim the Government kept the cause of Sunday’s attack secret. It’s a good way to sow even more discord.”
“Put the video on the big screen, Howard,” Palu instructed. “It’s the only thing we have to work with for the moment.”
This time, the three men in the video were not wearing headscarves. They wore red bandanas over their mouths instead. Each was also wearing matching army fatigues. Sarah couldn’t be sure, but the uniforms looked like British Army, issued in the eighties perhaps. Her father had worn something similar during the Falkland’s conflict.
In the background of the video was a single desk holding a dusty old lamp. There was nothing else to see except brick wall and an unidentified light source overhead. It swung and tilted slightly as if a ceiling bulb we
re swinging to-and-fro.
The man at the front of the shot began his speech, his voice gravely and thick beneath his bandana. His eyes were a deep brown and soulless. “People of the UK, today begins your reckoning. Your villages burn like the ones set aflame by your own government. The time for you to taste your own medicine has come. Your trinkets and idols will be taken from you, death and misery left in their place. You will suffer, as innocent people around the world have suffered under your country’s amoral boot heel for centuries. We are watching your soldiers, your agents, and your murderers-for-hire all around the world. Every time they take a life, we will take more, that is our pledge. The four villages set ablaze are payback for a decade of murder in Afghanistan. You kill, we kill. Remove your soldiers and the killing will stop. Have your Prime Minister renounce Britain’s imperialistic past and it’s greed-soaked present, and we will disband. Until that time, we are humanity’s army, fighting for the future. Shab Bekheir will show you the way. Sometimes death is the only way to ensure life.”
There was silence in the room for several minutes while they all let things sink in.
Palu’s phone beeping broke the silence. “The Prime Minister has just responded to the most recent tape,” he told them. “She promises the terrorist’s actions will not go unanswered and that Great Britain does not bend to threats.” He shook his head wearily. “The media are in uproar, warning against a war on UK soil. They’ve caught wind of the first tape being suppressed and are citing the Government’s incompetence as the reason three more attacks were allowed to happen.”
“There’s going to be panic,” Bradley said in a strained voice.
“I need to contact Homeland,” Dr Bennett said, standing up to leave the room. “See if President Conrad is going to make a statement of support.”
Bradley zapped something over to the television screen. It was the black and white CCTV feed from the pub in Studley. It showed a middle-aged woman wearing a long black cardigan. She’d just entered the bar area of a typical bistro pub and was looking around casually. It was a place more eatery than boozer – the money was in the grub these days. It made a strange target for a terrorist attack.
“What are we looking at, Bradley?” Howard asked.
“This is CCTV video footage taken from the Barley Mow pub in Studley,” he explained. “The local police have cleaned up the image as best they can and cut the footage down to the two minutes before the explosion. We have everything except sound.”
The woman in the video wandered into the middle of the pub’s dining area. A few seconds later, she ripped open her cardigan and shouted something. The video’s resolution was too low to make out what was around her waist, but it was pretty obvious from the frightened screams of the victims. The bomb vest exploded and the CCTV feed ended.
Everybody in the conference room groaned, even Sarah.
“An initial background has been compiled,” said Howard. “The bomber’s name was Caroline Pugh. She was white, middle-aged, and worked a full-time job as a legal secretary. I’m working on getting a deeper background, but so far she doesn’t appear to be a typical terrorist either.”
“What is a typical terrorist?” Sarah asked.
Howard sighed. “You know what I mean. I’m not being racist, just realistic. At the very least, you would expect a terrorist to be from another country or part of a group with an agenda. Jeffrey Blanchfield and Caroline Pugh were average UK citizens. It doesn’t make any sense. How do they connect to Shab Bekhier and the man in the videotape?”
“I don’t know,” Sarah admitted. “But I know who the man in the videotape is.”
Everyone stared at her. Bradley stopped typing.
Sarah thought about the man she’d just watched onscreen. She hadn’t been positive of his identity until he’d spoken his final words: Sometimes only death can ensure life. ”The man in the tape is Wazir Hesbani,” she said. “I’d know his face anywhere, because he’s the man who took mine.”
AFGHANISTAN, 2008
Sarah blinked. She took a deep breath, but instead of oxygen she got smoke and fumes. A rising pressure in her head threatened to split her skull and she realised she was upside down, hanging by her seatbelt.
Everything came rushing back. The woman, the watermelons, Miller ripped apart by an explosion, and then white light followed by utter darkness.
Had they hit an IED?
Sarah craned her neck and glanced around inside the Land Rover. She saw shapes in the darkness. “Hamish. Hamish? Anyone? Sound off.”
There was nothing, just silence and smoke. Sarah was lucky to be alive. She needed to know which of her men were still breathing and get them the hell out of there.
She pulled out the small flick-blade she kept on her belt. She wished it was a machete, but it would have to do. With it she began sawing at the strap around her waist, gritting her teeth as she did so. There was a white hot burning in her left thigh, but in the darkness she couldn’t see the cause.
Voices.
For a moment, Sarah thought that one of her squad had awoken, but then she realised the voices were coming from further away. After what had happened, the approaching strangers were more likely enemies than friends. Why do they hate us so much?
Sarah ground her teeth and swore through pursed lips. She sawed harder at the seatbelt and had to blink as either sweat or blood filled her eyes. Her face throbbed almost as badly as her leg and she remembered her reflection in the Snatch’s visor. There had been an open wound beneath her left eye, halfway down her cheek.
“Hamish…anybody? If you’re breathing, now is the time to look lively.”
Silence.
“Damn it!” Sarah had sliced halfway through her belt now, but the voices outside were getting closer. She had only minutes before they were right on top of her.
The nylon seatbelt held itself together by one last measly thread. Finally, it snapped, and Sarah slipped free. Her head hit the roof panel of the Land Rover and her teeth clacked together, but she shook away the stars immediately.
The voices were right on top of her now.
Sarah snapped into action. Her training and instincts made her focus on the task at hand and not the pain and fear. There would be time to cry later. She slipped her hand down to her waist and slid her sidearm out of its holster — a SIG Sauer L105A1 9mm — and thumbed the safety off.
One last time, she shouted out. “Hamish! Hamish, are you awake?”
Still no answer. She thought she heard a shuffling behind her, but there was no time to investigate. She straightened out her legs and shuffled towards the opening where the Snatch’s windscreen used to be. Bits of glass and jagged stones dug into her shins and elbows as she crawled, but she moved quickly. Even now she could hear the strangers outside chattering to one another and kicking up sand as they rushed towards her.
Sarah rolled onto her side and clutched her SIG, ready to start popping shots at whoever looked like they deserved it most. She clawed her way through the last of the broken windscreen and made it out onto the dusty road. The heat was on her back immediately.
She spotted the body of one of her men. It might have been Hamish, for he hadn’t been in the driver’s seat when she came to. He was lying on his back, one arm missing and his face completely gone. Sarah was glad he was dead, instead of screaming in agony and begging for his mother. One of Hamish’s biggest fears was finding himself in a wheelchair or a hospice bed. He would rather have lost his life than his legs.
Sarah dragged herself to her feet just in time to meet the approaching crowd. She raised her SIG and prepared to pull the trigger. Her burning legs wobbled beneath her and blood ran down her face, but her hands were still as stone.
There were children in the crowd, with wide brown eyes and gawping mouths. Their innocence was still intact — it was clear on their frightened faces — but that innocence was fading fast, about to be washed away by the blood of Sarah and her squad. It was how children were baptised out here in the desert
. They were about to witness an execution, and in that moment Sarah finally understood: you couldn’t stop violence with violence, and you couldn’t teach children with bloodshed.
A man stepped out of the crowd, putting a hand up in front of him as he approached Sarah. “Please, we not here to hurt you. You are British, no?”
Sarah nodded. She realised that her hands were no longer still and that her arm and aim were shaking. “Y-you speak English?”
The man nodded and smiled. “I studied at your Oxford University. Economics, yes?”
“I need to get back to Camp Bastion,” Sarah said. “If you’re friendly, let me go on my way.”
“Your Camp Bastion is sixty miles away. The sun is hot, your face and leg are bleeding. You will not make it there.”
Sarah glanced down at her leg and saw the top of a twisted nail sticking out of her thigh. It must have come from the IED. She was lucky it hadn’t entered her skull.
Seeing the cause of the pain in her leg seemed to make it hurt worse, as if she could feel the nail clawing its way into her muscle. The stranger was right: she would never make it back to camp by foot, but what were her options?
“Give me a car,” she said. “It will be returned later along with a reward for your assistance.”
The young man looked at her like she was a confused child. “We have nothing. You think we have car? You think we believe in British reward? You offer only death and suffering to people of this village. If we help you, Taliban kill us. We help Taliban, British kill us. You are not our friends and you do not offer reward. Only Allah can provide justice for our actions. We all get what is deserved.”
“If you don’t help me, I’ll die. Will Allah provide you justice for murder?”
The man continued smiling at her like she was a child. There was something predatory about the way he was looking at her. “Sometimes death is the only way to ensure life,” he said.
Soft Target (Major Crimes Unit Book 2) Page 6