by Andy Maslen
Chapter 17
The following morning, Gabriel called the number on the slim wafer of white card tucked into his wallet. After a couple of rings, the phone was answered.
“Don Webster.”
“Don. It’s Gabriel. I want to find out what happened to the pilot I was rooming with at Audley Grange. Somehow I’ve developed this feeling my stay there wasn’t just part of the Army’s aftercare service. Am I right?”
There was a pause, during which Gabriel could hear his old boss breathing slowly through his nose, mumbling a characteristic “hmm-mm-hmm” as he marshalled his thoughts.
“Confession time. I’ve had my eye on you for a while for a bit of freelance work. I was going to make contact anyway, then you had your little incident outside the NPG and, well, it seemed like I could help you and me at the same time.”
Gabriel’s stomach flipped like he was about to ask a girl for a date, or jump out of a plane for a HALO – a high altitude, low opening parachute infiltration. It was a while since he’d felt it: the signal his body sent him when there was action in the wind.
“What kind of freelance work?”
“Well, I heard on the grapevine you were setting up in business for yourself as a security consultant. I’m running a discreet little department that works on sensitive cross-border security operations.”
“What, Mission Impossible, you mean?” Gabriel thought he was going to laugh or get a bollocking, one or the other. In the event, Webster showed his hand.
“Let’s cut all the Ministry bullshit about discretion and sensitivity. There are some really evil bastards out there, and they’re either too clever, too connected or too well-protected for the regular cops-and-robbers brigade to get close to them. Drug cartels, traffickers, off-grid militias, common-or-garden terrorists, you know the type. I have the thoroughly enjoyable job of bringing them to justice. And note, I say ‘to justice’ not ‘into custody’. I have a pretty open brief and some amazingly powerful friends of my own.”
“Sorry, Don, the work?”
“Oh, yes, forgive me. I don't often get to tell people about what I do. Crapping on about ‘a job in government admin’ makes me want to cry into my drink sometimes. Let’s play a quick word association game. Ready?”
“Ready.”
“Chechens.”
“Moscow theatre siege.”
“Good man. Yes, eight hundred and fifty hostages taken in a Moscow theatre in October 2002, by fifty tooled-up Chechens. Russian Special Forces gassed them with an aerosolised version of Fentanyl or a derivative, then shot the lot.”
“What’s Fentanyl?”
“Pray you never need to find out. It’s a powerful opiate. Related to morphine. Our guys with their legs blown off by IEDS? More often than not, the medics will shoot them full of it. The gas killed a hundred and thirty hostages too, unfortunately. Trouble is, as well as killing pain, it depresses respiratory function. They fell over in positions where their airways were constricted and simply suffocated. After Moscow, there was the Beslan school massacre in September 2004. The numbers were even worse. Eleven hundred hostages, including nearly eight hundred kids, of whom three hundred and eighty-five were killed.”
“Jesus!” Gabriel said, trying not to visualise nearly four hundred dead civilians.
“Jesus indeed. Basically, you’ve got your standard separatist-cum-freedom-fighters-cum-psycho-bloody-terrorists, depending on where your sympathies lie. Think IRA without the charm. There’s a bunch of them, we think, meddling in Dreyer’s R&D operation. We found out too late to save the pilots, but we’re all over it like a rash now. Now add in a power-hungry ex-KGB oligarch called Oleg Abramov who’s trying to buy the Gulliver technology to sell to Ukraine – still with me?”
“Just about.”
“. . . and you have the mother of all geopolitical clusterfucks, pardon my French. Into which I and my jolly band of cutthroats will jump with both ballet slippers, stop the Chechens and their friends at Dreyer Pharma killing any more British pilots, prevent Abramov getting his mucky paws on the drug, and generally keep the world spinning more or less evenly on its axis. And I’d like you to help.”
“Well, as long as that’s all, I’m in.”
Webster laughed, a warm, relaxed sound that made Gabriel suddenly long to be back in uniform. “I hoped you’d say that.”
“But one question. If you know that these Chechens are in bed with Dreyer Pharma, why not just send in Special Branch or MI5 to arrest them all and shut down the trial?”
“Good question. We could do that, but the trouble is the drug was performing amazingly well in the clinical trials and the ground-based test phases. We need the edge that Gulliver will deliver for Typhoon pilots. So we want Dreyer going full steam ahead on the final stages of development, just not with whatever hold the Chechens have over them. Plus, we wouldn’t be entirely averse to Abramov brokering a deal with the Ukrainians. Strictly between us, of course, but the PM would be delighted if they could give the Russians a bit of a bloody nose, get them to wind their necks in. All this Russian self-confidence and empire-building is bad for business.”
“So, you want me to, do what, exactly?”
“Come and see me tomorrow. I work out of a military base, can’t stand all those stuffed shirts in Whitehall. Head for MOD Rothford in Essex. Go to the main gate and say you’re there to see me. They’ll direct you. By the way, you still driving that Italian knicker-loosener?”
“The Maserati? Yes. Why?”
“Nothing. Just old man envy.”
Gabriel laughed. “OK, so what time do you want me?”
“Get here as soon as you can, we’ve a lot to get through.”
Chapter 18
Staring out of his window, James Bryant thought back to the meeting he’d had with Dreyer’s Head of R&D four months earlier. Jill had ushered in Dr Arjun Pandatta to discuss a new team of scientists he was hiring to work on Project Gulliver. They had the missing piece of the puzzle, Pandatta said.
The scientists had delivered. Or so it had appeared. Everything went perfectly on the ground-level and low-fly tests. Until that poor pilot went crazy in a Typhoon and flew it into the ground. It was a miracle the second man had survived his own crash. Now Bryant was in shit so deep he couldn't see how he was ever going to get out.
The view across the landscaped grounds of the business park, and on to the Berkshire countryside beyond, would normally afford him some serenity amid the pressures of running a global pharmaceuticals company. But on this particular afternoon, it did nothing to release the tension compressing his rib cage. He’d received another call. And another package.
The caller was the same man who’d made contact the first time.
“The MOD inquiry is over. You did well. Farnborough is only a couple of weeks away now. Do nothing, say nothing to anyone. Let the demonstration flight go ahead as planned . . . with Gulliver. I will know if you have cheated, and I will delight in bringing the lives of your womenfolk to an end. You will receive another package very soon. Pay close attention to its contents and think about their implications. Goodbye, Mr Bryant.”
The outer envelope and inner box were identical to the first package. He’d opened it with trembling fingers. There was no videotape this time. Just a small folded parcel of white cotton, like something torn from a sheet. He’d eased the corners apart with his fingertips and spread the three-inch square of fabric open like a flower to be pressed.
Nestled in the centre of the cotton was a piece of flesh. Not large – perhaps half an inch on the cut edge. It was an earlobe. His daughter’s earlobe. He knew this because it bore a jewelled, silver hoop that matched the one in his desk drawer.
Chapter 19
Gabriel was up, showered, shaved and dressed by six-thirty. No suit for his meeting with Don; jeans, white shirt and a navy V-necked jumper with his driving shoes would be fine for the man’s no-standing-on-ceremony style. Back in the Regiment, they’d all chosen their own uniforms. As long
as they conformed broadly to military ideas of appropriate dress, they were free to select any and all items according to their own personal taste. Some of the guys had adopted piratical touches like bandanas and cutoff jackets. Others bought stuff in the US, off their Delta Force counterparts, or on the grey market all soldiers knew how to tap into. Extra ammunition belts were a popular item. So were additional personal weapons, from butterfly knives to coils of piano wire. Anything obviously flashy or customised was simultaneously admired and derided with the exclamation, “Very Gucci, mate”.
At seven o’clock, Gabriel pulled out onto the main road and pointed the Maserati’s wide-mouthed grille north, aiming for the A303 and then the M3 and M25 motorways that would take him round London and then onto the M11 due east towards Rothford, in the Essex countryside. His stomach was filled with butterflies, flittering around and trying to escape, and for once, he didn’t quell the restless insects with breathing exercises or focused meditation techniques. He let them fly, enjoying the anticipation of action. It felt good to be on his way to see his old CO again. Good to be going after the bad guys again. He drove fast, but more-or-less legally for four and a half hours, stopping twice for coffee, and pulled up at the main gate of MOD Rothford at 11.03 a.m.
There were two soldiers in standard camouflage chatting at the door of the gatehouse, SA-80 assault rifles held diagonally across their bodies. One looked like he could stand to lose a few pounds, Gabriel reflected, as he brought the car to a stop and killed the engine. As the slimmer of the two soldiers walked towards the car, he got out to stretch his legs and to meet the guy. An old habit, but he always liked to meet people eye-to-eye. That proved difficult as he was five foot nine, and the man walking towards him looked like he’d been eating three Weetabix for his breakfast since he was a boy and had forgotten to stop growing.
“You here to see Colonel Webster, Sir?”
“Yes, that’s right. Good call.”
“Wasn’t really too hard, Sir.” The man’s sun-weathered face cracked into a grin. “He told us you drove a flash Italian motor and to be honest, we don’t really get that kind of vehicle through these gates.”
After getting his mugshot taken by a civilian security guard working the computer in the gatehouse, and a pass issued, Gabriel came back outside to get directions to Don Webster’s office. Then he was back behind the wheel and thumbing the engine start button. The soldiers called out to him to “give it some”, so he obliged with a few blats of the big engine, startling a murder of crows out of a tree growing on the camp perimeter, and gaining a thumbs-up from the two guards before he nosed the car forward, over the clunking steel teeth of the one-way traffic treadles.
No matter where in the world he’d traveled, there was something about military bases that rendered them all the same. Architecture, he mused, signs in military abbreviations, or maybe it was the chain-link fencing one kept glimpsing through trees or bushes. He rolled along at the specified twenty miles per hour – no sense pissing off the MPs or making a show of his ostentatiously expensive car among the four- or five-year-old Fords, Nissans and Fiats clustered in the mess and barracks car parks.
Ahead, he saw the sign he was looking for: Admin Offices – Spec. Ops. He turned into the side road that led towards the centre of the base from the perimeter road. Montgomery Drive, it was called, a tribute to one of Britain’s military geniuses and, Gabriel thought, another shortarse like himself. He nosed the car into a visitor’s parking slot and got out of the car for the second time.
Ask a civilian what sort of sounds you’d hear on an army base and they’d probably say, “gunfire”, “shouting” or “boots”. They’d no doubt be surprised to stand next to Gabriel and hear nothing. There was occasional chattering of a pair of magpies high in a beech tree, but mainly just silence. The shooting and shouting happened far away from where any random civilian delivering bread or coming to interview the CO would stray. He locked the car and turned to walk into the building and track down Don. He needn’t have worried. The man himself was striding towards him, smiling broadly, hand extended.
“Hello, Old Sport. Good to see you up on your feet. Come on, I’ve got a lot to tell you. We’ll get a brew on, too. Though I have to confess, I have a secretary now, so no cooking fires in the middle of the carpet.”
They shook hands, and Gabriel felt himself relax another notch as he grasped his former commanding officer’s dry, hard palm in his own.
He followed Don down a blue-carpeted corridor lined with office doors labelled with an alphabet soup of initials, the doors bracketing large-scale photographs in aluminium frames. In one, a British soldier in desert camouflage was preparing to fire an RPG – a rocket-propelled grenade – while hundreds of large-calibre brass cartridges rained down on him from an unseen source, probably a helicopter firing its mini-gun. The cartridges were frozen in mid-air, captured by a superfast shutter speed, so that it appeared to the observer that they could have reached out and plucked one from the swarm. In another, a blue Ford Sierra saloon was caught at the moment when a bomb underneath it was detonated by a remote-controlled robot. The windows were bulging, cracks already widening into fissures all over the glass. Doors and roof were bursting outwards, tearing into lethal shards of razor-edged pressed steel. This one was for demonstration purposes. Gabriel had sat in others just like it in Belfast, observing suspected terrorists in ill-lit neighbourhoods and wondering whether a sharp-eyed teenager was about to blow their cover and call down a shitstorm of local aggression onto him and his patrol.
Don interrupted his scrutiny of the photo.
“Here we are. Home sweet home. For my sins.”
The door sign read, OC – Spec. Ops. D. Webster.
“No ‘Colonel’ Don? The lads on the gate seemed to think you were still in harness.”
“Oh, for PR reasons we find the rank works better, but strictly speaking I’m just a lowly Mister these days. Don’t even get to run about with a shooter. Just a desk jockey.”
“How does that suit you?”
“Come in and I’ll tell you,” Don said with a warm smile, the crows’ feet round his eyes deepening to small crevasses.
*
As he took in the office, Gabriel let out an involuntary whistle of appreciation. It was big and, by Army standards, sumptuously appointed. A long rectangle big enough for a solid-looking wooden desk and chair, two chairs for visitors facing it, plus a leather sofa with a couple of matching armchairs, and a coffee table. Then there was the connecting door that led to another office – the secretary’s, Gabriel assumed. The walls were hung with a variety of prints and photographs. The centrepiece, hanging behind Don’s desk, was a large square photograph of Don shaking hands with the Queen, who was smiling broadly as if she’d just heard a good joke. Perhaps she had. Don was grinning at her and the way his eyes were twinkling suggested to Gabriel that he may well have shared one of his legendary ‘bombs’ with Her Majesty.
Gabriel pointed to the photo.
“She seems to be in a good mood.”
Don turned to look. “She was. We’d just helped her out with a mucky little bit of family business. One of her idiot nephews had managed to get himself into a scrape with some very well-connected Arab gentlemen in an Abu Dhabi nightclub, and we had to exfiltrate him pronto. That was taken at a private party a week later. She’s got a wicked sense of humour, too. Told me the filthiest joke I’ve ever heard. Coffee?”
“Please.”
Don walked to the connecting door where a woman with fans of smile lines round her eyes, and bejewelled spectacles dangling from a gold-coloured chain round her neck was talking to a female sergeant. The young, black NCO snapped to attention as she saw Don. Clearly, his lack of official rank or uniform was no impediment to a level of respect normally only accorded to serving officers or top ministers.
“Sorry to interrupt, Sue,” he said to the smiley woman. “When you’ve a moment, do you think you could rustle up some refreshments for us. Coffee and maybe
some biscuits if you can scrounge any?”
“Of course, Don,” she said. “Chocolate digestives all right?”
“Magic, thanks. As you were, Sergeant,” he said to the other woman. “I’m a civilian, remember? You stand any straighter and you’ll snap something important.”
She stood easy again, but the set of her shoulders told Gabriel she’d enjoyed the subtle praise from a man she’d have read about if she’d ever picked up a book about the Regiment.
Don closed the door and gestured for Gabriel to sit opposite him at the desk. He looked steadily at him for a couple of seconds.
“Thanks for coming to see me. I wasn’t sure you were going to call, you know.”
“But then you’d have called me, wouldn’t you?”
“I would, yes. So you saw through my kind offer to get you help?”
“It was something Annie said. About how quickly you turned up at St Thomas’ after I was admitted. It seemed much too quick. And what you told her about watching out for ex-servicemen going gaga. There are thousands of us. Tens of thousands. That’s just too big a number for me to get personal service.”
“You’re not just an ex-squaddie though, are you? You’re ex-Regiment. I was your CO. You were decorated for conspicuous gallantry.”
Gabriel thought back to the medal ceremony. He’d been awarded the Military Cross after he disabled a Russian T-55 tank that was preparing to obliterate a dozen or more civilians in Bosnia. The PM’s hand had been sweaty and warm. Gabriel had smiled and mouthed the appropriate pleasantries, then stuck the medal in its box at the back of his wardrobe and never taken it out again. He’d lost friends on that mission. Any one of them would have done what he’d done. It was a team effort. But the public needed their heroes, and the Army needed its ways of motivating its people. So. Medals.