Nick Stone 1 - Remote Control.

by Andy McNab

  Everybody was in place. Alpha would be in the control room with the senior policeman, people from the Foreign Office, people from the Home Office, you name it, every man and his dog would be there, everybody wanting to put in their two cents' worth, everybody with their own concerns. We could only hope that Simmonds would be looking after ours.

  I'd met the Secret Intelligence Service desk officer for Northern Ireland only a couple of days earlier, but he certainly seemed to be running our side of the show. His voice had the sort of confidence that was shaped on the playing fields of Eton, and he measured his words slowly, like a big-time attorney with the meter running.

  We wanted the decision made now. But I knew there would be a big debate going on in the ops room; you'd probably have to cut your way through the cigarette smoke with a knife. Our liaison officer would be listening to us on his radio and explaining everything that we were doing, confirming that the team was in position. At crunch time, it was the police, not us, who'd decide that we go in. Once it was handed over to the military, K.ev would control the team.

  The frustration was unendurable. I just wanted to get this over.

  By now Farrell was leaning against the driver's door, the two men standing and facing her. If I hadn't known differently I'd have said they were trying to chat her up. I couldn't hear what they were saying but their faces showed no sign of stress, and now and then I could hear laughter above the traffic noise. Savage even got out a packet of mints and passed them round.

  I was still giving a running commentary when Alpha came back on the net.

  "Hello, all call signs, all call signs, I have control, I have control. Golf, acknowledge."

  Kev acknowledged. The police had handed over; it was Kev's show now.

  The targets started to move away from the vehicle, so I pushed the button four times.

  Golf came back: "Stand by, stand by!"

  That was it; we were off.

  I let them walk toward the main square, and then I got up. I knew we wouldn't lift them here. There were far too many people around. For all we knew, the players might want to go out in a blaze of glory and start dropping the civilians, take them hostage, or, even worse, go into kamikaze mode and detonate the device.

  Alpha came back on the net.

  "Hello, all call signs, all call signs cancel, cancel, cancel! I do not have control! Cancel!

  Golf, acknowledge."

  At once I heard Kev's not-so-formal reply: "What the fuck's going on? Tell me what's going on?"

  "Wait .. . wait ..." Alpha sounded under pressure.

  There were voices in the background.

  "All stations, all stations, the police need another ID, they need to be sure.

  Golf, acknowledge."

  What do they want, introductions?

  "Hi, I'm Danny, bomber and murderer, I enjoy traveling and working with children."

  We were in danger of losing them if we didn't act soon.

  Alpha came back: "All stations, ATO is moving to check the vehicle. Delta, we need that confirmation." The ATO is the ammunitions technical officer.

  I acknowledged. There was obviously some sweating going on in the ops room. The boss was getting a hard time from the police; it sounded like a chimpanzees' tea party in there.

  The terrorist team would be crossing the border within minutes. Once they were on the other side, they could detonate the bomb with immunity.

  I was now on the other side of the road, and wanted at least to get

  parallel to them so I could see their faces again. I had to reconfirm the players, then stick with them.

  More activity on the net. I could hear the tension in Alpha's voice now, telephone lines ringing, people milling about.

  Kev cut in: "Fuck the ops room, let's keep on top of them until someone somewhere makes a fucking decision. Lima and Zulu, can you get forward?"

  Zulu came on the net for himself and Lima, very much out of breath: "Zulu and Lima, we... we can do that."

  "Roger that, move up, tell me when you're there."

  Kev wanted them beyond the health center. They were running hard to get ahead of the targets; they didn't care who saw them as long as the players didn't. But we still hadn't got control.

  Kev came back on the net: "Alpha, this is Golf. You need to get your finger out now we're going to lose them. What do you want us to do?"

  "Golf, wait, wait.. " I could still hear noise in the background: lots of talking, more telephones ringing, people shouting instructions.

  Everything went quiet.

  "Wait... wait..."

  All I could hear now was the background noise of Alpha on my radio, plus my pulse pounding in my head. Then, at last, the voice of Simmonds very clear, a voice you wouldn't argue with. I heard him say to Alpha, "Tell the ground commander he can continue " "All call signs, this is Alpha. I have control. I have control.

  Golf, acknowledge."

  Kev got on the net, and instead of acknowledging, said, "Thank God for that. All call signs, if they get as far as the airport, we'll lift them there. If not on my word, on my word. Zulu and Lima, how's it going?"

  They came back on the net.

  "That's us static at the junction. We can take." They were at the intersection of Main Street and Smith Dorrien Avenue, the main approach road to the crossing into Spain. The players were moving toward them.

  I could lift off soon. I'd done the job I'd been brought here to do. I prepared myself for the han dover.

  But then they stopped.

  Fuck.

  "Stop, stop, stop!" I said.

  "That's Bravo One, Two and Echo One static."

  Everybody was closing in. Come on, let's lift them here and now.

  Savage split from the other two and headed back the way they'd come, toward the town center. It was all going to rat shit. We had two groups to control now, and we didn't know who had the detonation device.

  Kev arrived to back me. On the net, I could hear the other two players being followed toward the border by the rest of the team as I moved in to take Savage. He turned left down an alleyway.

  I was just about to get on the net when I heard a police siren, followed by gunfire behind me.

  At the same instant Euan came on the net: "Contact!

  Contact!"

  Then more shots.

  Kev and I looked at each other. What the fuck was going on? We ran around the corner. Savage had heard the shots, too, and turned back toward us. Even at this distance I could see his eyes, big as plates and jerking like he was having a seizure.

  There was a female pedestrian between us. Kev shouted, "Stop, security forces! Stop!"

  With his left hand, he had to push the woman over to the side and bang her against the wall to keep her out of the way.

  She was going down, blood pouring from her head. At least she wouldn't get up and become a target.

  She began screaming. We had Kev hollering and screaming at Savage, and all the people in the area were starting to scream. It was turning into a gang fuck.

  Kev flicked back the right side of his sport jacket to reach the pancake holster over his kidneys. We always put a bit of weight in a pocket a full magis good to help the jacket flick back out of the way.

  But I wasn't really looking at Kev; I was looking at Savage. I could see his hand moving to the right side of his jacket. He wasn't some knuckle-dragging moron from the backstreets. The moment he saw us, he knew the score. It was decision time.

  Kev drew his pistol, brought it up, and prepared to fire.

  Nothing.

  "Stoppage! Fuck, Nick, fuck, fuck!"

  Trying to clear his weapon, he dropped on one knee to make himself a smaller target.

  That was when everything seemed to go into slow motion.

  Savage and I had eye-to-eye. He knew what I was going to do; he could have stopped, he could have put his hands up.

  My bomber jacket was held together with Velcro, so at times like this I could just pull it apart and draw m
y pistol.

  The only way a weapon can be drawn and used quickly is by breaking the whole movement into stages. Stage one, I kept looking at the target. With my left hand I grabbed a fistful of bomber jacket and pulled it as hard as I could toward my chest. The Velcro ripped apart.

  At the same time I was sucking in my stomach and sticking out my chest to make the pistol grip easy to access. You get only one chance.

  We still had eye contact. He started to shout, but I didn't hear. There was too much other shouting going on, from everyone on the street and the earpiece in my head.

  Stage two, I pushed the web of my right hand down onto the pistol grip. If I got this wrong, I wouldn't be able to aim correctly: I would miss and die. As I felt my web push against the pistol grip, my lower three fingers gripped hard around it.

  My index finger was outside the trigger guard, parallel with the barrel. I didn't want to pull the trigger early and kill my self. Savage was still looking, still shouting.

  Savage's hand was nearly at his pocket.

  Stage three, I drew my weapon, in the same movement taking the safety catch off with my thumb.

  Our eyes were still locked. I saw that Savage knew he had lost. There was just a curling of the lips. He knew he was going to die.

  As my pistol came out I flicked it parallel with the ground.

  No time to extend my arms and get into a stable firing position.

  Stage four, my left hand was still pulling my jacket out of the way and the pistol was now just by my belt buckle. There was no need to look at it; I knew where it was and what it was pointing at. I kept my eyes on the target, and his never left mine. I pulled the trigger.

  The weapon report seemed to bring everything back into real time. The first round hit him. I didn't know where I didn't need to. His eyes told me all I wanted to know.

  I kept on firing. There is no such thing as overkill. If he could move, he could detonate the bomb. If it took a whole magazine to be sure I'd stopped the threat, then that was what I'd fire. As Savage hit the ground I could no longer see his hands. He was curled up in a ball, holding his stomach. I moved forward and fired two shots at the head. He was no longer a threat.

  Kev ran over and was searching inside Savage's coat.

  "It's not here," he said.

  "No weapon, no firing device."

  I looked down at Kev as he wiped the blood off his hands onto Savage's jeans.

  "One of the others must have had it," he said.

  "I didn't hear the car go up, did you?"

  In all the confusion I couldn't be sure.

  I stood over them both. Kev's mother came from southern Spain; he looked like a local: jet black hair, about five feet ten inches, and the world's bluest eyes. His wife reckoned he was a dead ringer for Mel Gibson, which he scoffed at but secretly liked. Right now his face was a picture; he knew he owed me one. I wanted to say, "It's OK, these things happen," but it just didn't seem like the time. Instead I said, "Fucking hell, Brown, what do you expect if you have a name the same color as shit?"

  As I spoke we put our safety catches on, and Kev and I swapped weapons.

  "I'm glad I won't be at any inquest." I grinned at Kev.

  "You'd better start getting your shit together."

  He smiled as he got on the radio and started to send a situation report. It was all right for him and the others, but Euan and I shouldn't have been here. We had to vanish before the police arrived. We had been flown in from doing undercover work in Northern Ireland with Fourteen Intelligence Group;

  it was illegal for its members to operate anywhere else. If either of us were caught in Gibraltar, there would be a shit storm.

  The ops room at HMS Rooke was about fifteen minutes away on foot. I tucked Kev's weapon inside my jeans and started walking fast.

  The mood was subdued aboard the C-130 as it lifted from the tarmac at 11 p.m. that night.

  Spanish police had found PIRA's car bomb in an under ground parking garage in Marbella, thirty miles away, across the Spanish border; 145 pounds of Semtex high explosive and an unattached timing device preset at 11:20 a.m." the time the Gibraltar guard-changing ceremony ended and the soldiers dispersed in the square. The white Renault had been a blocking vehicle after all.

  When Simmonds came over. Pat said, "As far as we knew, they had the means to detonate a bomb big enough to separate Gibraltar from the mainland. All it would have taken was one press of a button. If there's going to be an inquest, fuck it.

  Better to be tried by twelve, I say, than carried by six."

  Deafened suddenly by the roar of the C-130's engines, I glanced at Kev, Pat, Euan and tried to forget what I was going back to. A house isn't a home when there are no pictures on the walls.

  Back when we were in the Persian Gulf, Pat had a battle cry: "All for one and one for all." We'd laughed when he used it, but he was right on target. Any one of us would put his life on the line for the others. I cracked a smile; with these guys around me, who needed family? Without a doubt, I thought, this was as good as it was ever going to get.

  NINE YEARS LATER

  If you work for the British intelligence service (also known as the Firm) and get formally summoned to a meeting at their headquarters building on the south bank of the River Thames at Vauxhall, there are three levels of interview. First is the one with coffee and cookies, which means they're going to give you a pat on the head. Next down the food chain is the more businesslike coffee but no cookies, which means they're not asking but telling you to follow orders. And finally there's no cookies, and no coffee, either, which basically means that you're in deep shit. Since leaving the SAS in 1993 and working on deniable operations, I'd had a number at every level, and I wasn't expecting a nice frothy cappuccino this particular Monday. In fact I was quite worried, because things hadn't been going too well.

  As I emerged from the subway station at Vauxhall the omens weren't exactly with me, either. The March sky was dull and overcast, preparing itself for the Easter holiday; my path was blocked by roadworks, and a burst from a jackhammer sounded like the crack of a firing squad. Vauxhall Cross, home of what the press call MI6 but which is actually the Secret Intelligence Service, is about a mile upstream from the Houses of Parliament. Bizarrely shaped like a beige and black pyramid that's had its top cut off, with staged levels, large towers on either side, and a terrace bar overlooking the river, it needs only a few swirls of neon and you'd swear it was a casino. It wouldn't look out of place in Las Vegas. I missed Century House, the old HQ building near Waterloo station. It might have been 1960s ugly, square with

  IS

  loads of glass, net curtains, and antennae, and not so handy to the subway, but it was much less pretentious.

  Opposite Vauxhall Cross and about two hundred yards across the wide arterial road is an elevated section of railway line, and beneath that are arches that have been turned into shops, two of which have been knocked through to make a massive motorcycle shop. I was early, so I popped in and fantasized about which Ducati I was going to buy when I got a pay raise--which wasn't going to be today. What the hell, the way my luck was going I'd probably go and kill myself on it.

  I'd fucked up severely. I'd been sent to Saudi to encourage, then train, some Northern Iraqi Kurds to kill three leading members of the Ba'ath party; the hope was that the assassinations would heat everything up and help dismantle the regime in Baghdad.

  The first part of my task was to take delivery in Saudi of some former Eastern bloc weapons that had been smuggled in--Russian Draganov sniper weapons, a couple of Makharov pistols, and two AK assault rifles, the

  parachute version with a folding stock. All serial numbers had been erased to make them deniable.

  For maximum chaos, the plan was to get the Kurds to make three hits at exactly the same time in and around Baghdad.

  One was going to be a close-quarters shoot, using the Makharovs.

  The idea was for the two boys to walk up to the family house, knock on the door, take
on whatever threat presented itself, make entry into the house, zap the target, and run.

  The second was going to be a sniper option. The target saw himself as a big-time fitness freak; he'd come out and have a little jog around a track, all of about four hundred yards. He emerged from his house every day in a lime green, fluffy velour tracksuit, did one lap, and that was his training for the day. The boys were going to hit him just as he started to sweat and slow down--which by the look of him would be after about a hundred yards. I would be on this one to coordinate the hit so that both fired at once.