The Chinaman

by Stephen Leather

  The man at the table began to turn but before he could bring his gun up Ginge hit him with four rounds. Joker took out the man on the couch before he even turned round and he died without knowing what had hit him.

  Joker stepped into the room first, followed by Ginge, and Jacko and Bunny dropped down behind them. The girl began to stand up but Ginge pushed her back down. ‘You fucking Brit bastard!’ she screamed, and Ginge slapped her so hard that she was almost knocked out of the chair. A thin dribble of blood ran down her chin. Her eyes blazed and she stood up, her hands hooked like claws, and she lashed out at Ginge’s eyes. He swayed backwards, easily avoiding her attack, and prodded her in the stomach with the barrel of his gun. She doubled up, gasping for breath and retching, and Ginge threw her back into the chair.

  ‘Stay where you are you fucking bitch or you’re dead!’ he warned. He kept the gun trained on her while Joker moved along the hall, stepping over the bodies of the two men, checking the kitchen, bathroom and three bedrooms. Jacko and Bunny moved behind him. They were a well co-ordinated team, they’d spent hundreds of hours training together in the killing house at Hereford, breathing in lead fumes and smoke as they pumped round after round into cardboard cut-outs of Russian storm-troopers. Compared with the killing house, this was a breeze.

  ‘Clear,’ said Joker when he was satisfied.

  ‘You have the girl?’ the Colonel’s voice asked.

  ‘Secured,’ said Ginge.

  The Oriental groaned, murmured something in a language none of the men could understand, and then went still, blood seeping from between his lips, his chest a mess of mangled flesh and pieces of ribcage.

  The three SAS men joined Ginge in the lounge. Jacko and Bunny checked the bodies while Joker began to search the room, quickly and efficiently. He found the Semtex in a cupboard below a bookcase in the lounge, along with some detonators and several electric clocks. In a walk-in cupboard in the hall, by the front door, he found an empty box that once contained a laptop computer. Inside the box was an instruction manual, still sealed in its polythene wrapping, and pieces of plastic-coated wire. He took it into the lounge and threw it at the girl’s feet.

  ‘What’s this?’ he shouted. ‘Is this the next bomb, you Irish whore?’ His words came out in short, staccato bursts like bullets from his MP5.

  The Bombmaker wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, smearing the blood across her lips like a manic clown’s make-up. ‘Fuck off,’ she said. ‘And I’m Scottish you ignorant bastard.’ Joker stamped on her instep and she screamed in pain. As she bent down to rub her foot Joker slammed his fist into her face and she hurtled back into the chair. Tears streamed down her cheeks and she covered her face with her hands. Ginge grabbed her hair and yanked her head back.

  Joker put his face up close so that she could smell his breath. ‘Listen you bitch. We’ve killed your friends and unless you talk to me you can join them.’

  He nodded at Ginge and he dragged her by the hair over to where Fisher lay face down in a pool of his own blood. Ginge threw her on top of the body and rubbed her face in the blood. Joker walked over and kicked her in the back, over her kidney where he knew the pain would be excruciating.

  ‘Get her on her knees,’ Joker said, and Ginge hoisted her up by her hair. Joker stood in front of her and levelled the gun at her mouth.

  She shook her head from side to side. ‘You’re too late,’ she whispered.

  ‘Stand to the side,’ Joker said to Ginge. ‘I’m going to blow her fucking head off.’ Ginge moved from behind her and Bunny and Jacko went to stand by the window.

  ‘There’s nobody who’ll know that you didn’t die when we stormed the flat,’ he told her menacingly. ‘There are no witnesses. This isn’t going to be another Gibraltar.’

  ‘You’re too late,’ she said. ‘It’s set to go off in less than five minutes. They won’t be able to land in time.’

  ‘A plane?’

  ‘No shit, Sherlock.’ She cleared her throat and spat down on the floor, not to insult him but because her mouth was filling up with blood and saliva.

  ‘Which plane?’

  She was talking now, because she figured that whatever she told him it wouldn’t make a difference. She wanted him to know, and to know that there was nothing he could do to stop it. She told him it was a special flight to Rome, that a journalist called Ian Wood was carrying the bomb, and that everybody on board the flight was as good as dead. She began to laugh sourly until Joker hit her on the side of her head with his gun as Ginge began relaying the information to the Colonel.

  Woody was on his fourth whisky when the ‘fasten seat-belt’ light went on and the front of the plane dipped down.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking. There is some turbulence ahead and we are descending to avoid it. Please make sure your seat is upright and your seat-belt is fastened.’

  Woody frowned. He’d flown often enough to know that the normal procedure was to fly over bad weather, not under it. He fastened his seat-belt and sipped his whisky. Better to drink it rather than to take the risk of spilling it, he decided.

  ‘Would passenger Ian Wood please make himself known to the cabin crew,’ said the captain. Woody didn’t realise at first that it was his name that had been called, but he heard it when the message was repeated. The plane had gone into a steep descent and the stewardesses were briskly moving down the aisles checking that seats were upright and passengers strapped in. Woody could also see that they were scanning the passengers to see if anyone was reacting to the final announcement. He waved to a pretty blonde stewardess. She came over, eyebrows raised.

  ‘I’m Ian Wood,’ he said. The woman in the seat next to him was openly listening, curious to know what he’d done.

  ‘Mr Wood, do you have any baggage in the hold?’ the stewardess asked briskly. Woody could tell from her tone that something was very badly wrong, so he answered immediately, suppressing his first instinct to make a joke.

  ‘No,’ he said. There was a cold feeling of dread in his stomach.

  ‘Could you give me all the cabin baggage you have, please,’ she said. She was smiling but he could tell that it was an act to put him at his ease and get his cooperation, the girl was frightened shitless. So was Woody.

  ‘Oh God,’ he moaned, and reached between his legs to pick up his bag.

  The bomb exploded.

  Joker and Ginge kept Maggie covered as they waited for instructions from the Colonel. They had made her lie face down on the bloodstained carpet next to Fisher, with her hands clasped behind her neck. She had a good body, thought Joker. Good legs, firm arse, just the way he liked a woman to be. He looked at his watch.

  The Colonel’s voice spoke in his left ear. ‘The plane has gone down. We assume with all lives lost. Operation is discontinued. No loose ends. I repeat, no loose ends.’

  Joker looked across at Ginge to see if he had heard. Ginge nodded and made a small motion with his MP5, his way of saying that Joker could do the honours. Joker fired once into her back, just over where her heart was.

  She didn’t die straightaway, they never did. In books they often said that people who were shot died before they hit the ground. It never happened that way, Joker knew. Joker had killed people in Belfast, in the Falklands, in the Middle East, and once in Spain, and he’d yet to see anyone die straightaway, no matter where they were shot. If the bullet went through the heart or the lungs then the brain kept sending out messages for up to a minute or so before their eyes glazed over and they finally died. If they were shot in the head and the brains were splattered over the floor, then the heart continued to pump and the limbs twitch for a while until they realised that it was all over. That’s what it was like in real life. Not many people knew the difference between death in books and movies and death in real life. But Joker knew.

  When the bullet tore through her back and punched a ragged hole in her chest, her arms flailed out and she grunted. Some time after that she died in a pool of blood, he
r arms and legs drumming against the floor, saliva dripping from her mouth and panic in her eyes. Joker didn’t stand over her and watch while she died, he stood with his back to her, looking out over the river as he waited for the banging and wheezing to stop. Slow deaths always embarrassed him.

  Jon Simpson stayed late in his office so that he could see the second editions before going home. His own paper wasn’t printed for another seventy-two hours but he wanted to see how the dailies treated the bombing of the jet and the SAS operation against the IRA bombers. News of the bombings had broken too late for the papers to do much in their first editions, though most had managed to get in a few pars.

  A copy boy came through the double doors with a stack of papers under his arm and dropped them on to the desk. Simpson separated the tabloids from the broadsheets and went through them first: the Sun, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, the Daily Star and Today. They all had pictures of the wreckage in the sea, and the head-shots of the active service unit. They had all used the girl Bombmaker’s photograph big on their front pages because that was the obvious one to go for, and both the Express and the Mail had used Woody’s picture on the front along with the story of how he’d been duped into carrying the bomb.

  Yeah, Simpson thought, that’s how he’d do it. The bombing, the betrayal, the SAS operation on the front, along with the girl’s picture. Inside, backgrounders on the bombing campaign and the SAS, biogs of the bombers and lots of political reaction. A great story, just a pity that it hadn’t happened on a Saturday night. The two pictures of Woody looked up at Simpson. Simpson shook his head sadly. ‘Well, Woody, you finally made the front page,’ he said to himself. He gathered the papers up and took them home to read in detail.

  The call to attend the meeting in Whitehall came as Bromley was reading the morning papers at his breakfast table. The bombing of the jet was on the front of every paper, along with a graphic account of the SAS operation against the bombers in Wapping. From the amount of detail in the reports it was obvious that Ministry of Defence press officers had been hard at work pushing the Government line. There was no mention of The Chinaman in any of the stories. His life, and death, would remain a secret for ever. Another basic fact missing from all of the stories was how the authorities had managed to locate the active service unit. Intelligence, was the nearest thing to an explanation. The press officers knew exactly how to handle the Press, to spoonfeed them with more information than they could handle so that they’d forget to ask the basic questions.

  He put his jacket on, kissed his wife on the cheek and went out to the garage to check the underside of his car. He peered through the driver’s window to check that the onboard detection device showed that his car hadn’t been tampered with and when he was satisfied he took several steps backwards and clicked a small remote-control device that started the car automatically. Only when he was satisfied that his car was safe did he unlock the door and get in. The safety precautions were second nature to him, and had been long before the car-bomb deaths of Airey Neave and Ian Gow.

  The early morning phone call meant that he’d have to completely reschedule his day, but a call from the Co-ordinator of Intelligence and Security took precedence over everything else. The Co-ordinator answered to only two higher authorities – the Prime Minister and the Permanent Secretaries Committee on the Intelligence Services. His main role in life was to ensure that all the different intelligence agencies worked together, an uphill struggle at the best of times.

  Bromley was one of the last to arrive at the conference room and he eased himself into an empty chair. The room was almost filled by a long, oval table of highly polished mahogany around which sat many familiar faces, several of whom nodded to Bromley. The room itself was typical Whitehall, an ornate fireplace, a smattering of respectable oil paintings in gilded frames and fussy patterned carpets. The man who stood at the head of the table was also typical Whitehall, pin-stripe suit, crisp white shirt, dark-blue tie, neatly combed hair that was greying at the temples, ramrod-straight back behind which were clasped hands with immaculately manicured nails. The Co-ordinator was a career civil servant for whom the fight against terrorism was merely a stepping stone to the knighthood that he regarded as his birthright, but he was every bit as committed to the task as the men who sat waiting for him to speak. They represented, Bromley knew, the cream of the country’s anti-terrorism agencies, though he was somewhat surprised to see that there were no heads present, they were all number twos or personal assistants to the chiefs. They were all grim-faced, most had lost colleagues or friends on the doomed flight. He recognised representatives from MI5 and MI6, the Defence Intelligence Staff, several members of his own Anti-Terrorist Branch, and there were men he didn’t know. Some were high-ranking police officers, others were men with military haircuts and bearing who he guessed were SAS or SBS.

  There were no name-cards identifying those present, nor was there any writing equipment on the table – just a few crystal jugs of water and upturned glasses. There were, he noticed ruefully, no ashtrays.

  One or two latecomers filed through the double doors leading to the room, smiling apologies at the Co-ordinator. As they took their places two men in dark suits went out, closing the doors behind them.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said the Co-ordinator, ‘thank you for coming. Let me say first that no notes are to be taken of this meeting, and it must not be the subject of any memos or written reports. You should also not record this meeting in your diaries. This meeting never took place. Is that understood?’

  He waited for all the men to nod acceptance.

  ‘Thank you. This is by way of a briefing for the various security and intelligence services, and for those police authorities which will be affected by what I am about to tell you. You are free to verbally brief your superiors on the nature of this meeting, but there is to be no down-the-line transfer of the information. This, as you will appreciate when I have finished, is on a need-to-know basis. And those with a need to know are a very, very select group.’

  He had the undivided attention of every man in the room now. There was no fidgeting, no coughing, no one looked anywhere except at the face of the Co-ordinator.

  ‘You will all have heard about the horrifying events of yesterday evening. Tragic, absolutely tragic. It did, however, bring about the demise of the active service unit which has been behind the recent atrocities, and for that we are all grateful to Special Branch and to the SAS.’ He nodded to representatives of both organisations, including Bromley.

  ‘As you know, one hundred and thirty-six people died in yesterday’s plane crash. That includes twelve children and three nuns, as well as the Members of Parliament and civil servants who were on the flight. The public backlash against the IRA has already started. Not just in the Press, though obviously all the newspapers are clamouring for something to be done, including the normal misguided calls for the return of the death penalty. It goes beyond that. This time there is a groundswell of public opinion against the IRA, a feeling that something should be done, that something must be done.’

  He paused again, looking round the table at the men who were hanging on his every word. ‘Gentlemen, we have here a window of opportunity. Our experts tell us that the reaction against the terrorists will be at fever pitch for the next ten days, possibly two weeks. When the IRA hits a soft target, or kills innocent bystanders, they normally follow quickly with a highly visible attack on a legitimate target. It restores their credibility, as it were. Public opinion is notoriously fickle, but this time they have gone too far. Now, we around this table know that it was a rogue IRA active service unit responsible for the bombing campaign, that in fact it had not been sanctioned by Belfast or Dublin. That information has been kept from the Press. So far as the public is concerned it was an official IRA operation.

  ‘The decision was taken late last night, at the highest level, to take positive action against senior members of the IRA and Sinn Fein. Over the next seven days the top eche
lons of the organisation will be eliminated, at a time when public opinion will be totally, one hundred per cent, against them. That is the window of opportunity I spoke about. Anything we do now, right now, will have the unqualified backing of the public. This is not, I repeat not, a shoot-to-kill policy. It is a shoot-to-kill operation. A one-off. We have drawn up a list of the twenty-five men, and women, who we see as being the key members of the IRA, without whom we feel the organisation would no longer be a viable terrorist force. A combined, and highly secret, task-force of SAS and SBS operatives will move against them. Wherever possible it will be made to seem like an accident, a car crash, a drugs overdose, a fall downstairs, but if it cannot be done tidily it will be a straight-forward assassination made to look as if it is the work of Protestant extremists. Once the operation is over, the IRA will no longer be an effective threat. Then we can take them on using more legitimate methods, including the formation of a new Anti-Terrorist Task-Force, a single national task-force to counter terrorism. That, however, will be the subject of further meetings later this month. Now, are there any questions?’

  Most of the men sitting around the table seemed stunned, though Bromley knew that they would all wholeheartedly support the plan put forward by the Co-ordinator. Most of them had privately been pushing for such a policy for many years, determined that the only way to defeat the IRA was to match their ferocity.