Warlord: An Alex Hawke Novel

by Ted Bell

  As Churchill once said, it wasn’t the beginning of the end, but at least it was the end of the beginning.

  SIXTY

  BALMORAL CASTLE, SCOTLAND

  A LONE MAN WALKED THROUGH THE DEEP and dusky Scottish wood. The forest floor was mossy and springy under his feet. It was early evening and he walked slowly beneath towering dark giants with massive limbs; he walked with a thoughtful gait, not stealthy, but somewhat self-consciously, almost as if he were being watched. He was, of course, but he was a recognizable figure on the property and so posed no threat. He wore his wool stocking cap low on his brow, hiding his predatory smile and his dark, shining eyes.

  There were countless tiny security cameras nesting like small black birds in the trees above; and everywhere there were, too, unseen heat, sound, and movement sensors scattered throughout the property. His heart was pounding against his rib cage hard enough to splinter bones, but he was quite sure even the most sophisticated sensors couldn’t pick up a heartbeat.

  He was singing softly to his unseen audience as he walked, singing the words of Scotland’s favorite son, Robbie Burns.

  Gin a body meet a body

  Comin’ thro’ the rye

  Gin a body kiss a body

  Need a body cry?

  Yet a’ the lads they smile at me

  When comin’ thro’ the rye!

  In the gloaming, a purple stillness fell over the trackless forests, the moors, and the placid rivers of the Balmoral estates. He walked on among the black trunks of magnificent specimen trees, many of them centuries old, some of them even planted by Prince Albert himself. He savored every step of this journey.

  He had waited a lifetime for this night and this moment in time. As a small boy, he had foreseen this. All of his life, no matter what the dim and distant future held, a final reckoning was coming.

  His heart quickened as he saw faint light ahead, deep in the woods. He slowed his pace now. He was approaching a small two-story lodge from whence came the light in the forest. It was built of rough-hewn logs, beneath a lichen-covered slate roof; smoke was curling from stone chimneys at either end. It looked like any one of dozens of such cabins and lodges, built over the centuries on the estate.

  But this particular structure was quite unlike all those others. This unlikely spot was the nerve center of Balmoral Security Operations, home of Balmoral’s state-of-the-art PIDS: the Perimeter Intrusion Detection System. It was run by SO15, now officially called the Counter Terrorism Command. This was a recently merged version of the old Special Branch, established in 1883, and the much newer Anti-Terrorist Branch, both divisions of Scotland Yard.

  Working closely with agents of Lord Malmsey, the director general of MI5, the detectives stationed here on the property were responsible for the safety and protection of Her Majesty the Queen and all members of the Royal Family in residence at Balmoral Castle for summer holiday.

  And here in this cottage a four-man team worked round the clock. They manned a formidable surveillance operation that ensured that there were no breaches of the security perimeter protecting the Queen and her family. It was a full-time job and, to their credit, no one had ever penetrated their fail-safe systems.

  Smith well knew Balmoral was the Queen’s favorite place on earth. As had it been her mother’s and grandmother’s before her. It held a special place in Her Majesty’s heart because here alone did she feel completely secure. At a safe remove from the world, she could jounce along the miles of rutted roads at the wheel of her battered Range Rover, left in peace to do as she wished, surrounded by her horses, her beloved Corgis, and of course her family. They had weathered many storms in the decade prior, but now at last it seemed tranquillity had settled in for good.

  And Smith had long ago decided that it would be this haven, this paradise bequeathed to her by her ancestor Queen Victoria, where he would pay the Windsor family one final and terrible visit.

  IN THE AUTUMN OF 1842, Queen Victoria, and her new husband, Prince Albert, paid their first visit to Scotland. They were so struck with the majestic beauty of the Highlands, they resolved to return again and again. For years, Victoria and Albert always depended on the kindness of friends who would graciously open their castles and estates to the enormously popular Royal couple.

  Meanwhile, the Queen’s physician, Sir James Clark, had recently been the guest of Sir Robert Gordon at his small castle, Balmoral, which lay to the east of the Grampian Mountains just beside the river Dee. Queen Victoria received many glowing reports from Sir James, not only about the magnificent scenery, but about the air, which he described as having “an unusual dryness and purity.”

  By 1848, Sir Robert Gordon had died, and the lease was for sale. Queen Victoria snapped it up, and so it was that in the autumn of that year, she and Prince Albert arrived to take possession of a property that they had never seen. They were not disappointed. In her diary that first evening, when the house was still all around her, the Queen described a “pretty little castle in the old Scottish style, surrounded by beautiful wooded hills.”

  “It is so calm and so solitary,” she wrote, “it does one good as one gazes around; and the pure mountain air is most refreshing. All seems to breathe freedom and peace, and to make one forget the world and its sad turmoils. The scenery all around is the finest I have seen anywhere. You can walk forever and the wildness and solitariness of everything is so delightful, so refreshing. And the local people are so good and so kind and so simple.”

  TODAY, THE QUEEN’S PRIVATE ESTATES, owned by the Crown, extend to just over fifty thousand acres, with sporting privileges leased on a further twelve thousand acres. The majority of the land is heather-clad hill-ground overlying granite. More fertile land lies along the south bank of the river Dee and is used for farming and forestry. The ground on the property is dramatic. It rises very steeply in parts, up to the top of the Lochnagar massif, which, at almost four thousand feet, dominates the entire area.

  Every August and September, Her Royal Majesty Queen Elizabeth, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Prince of Wales, his wife, and his two heirs, Wills and Harry, abandon London and take up residence for a peaceful month or so at Balmoral Castle. There the Royal Family are able to escape the glare of the public eye and enjoy walkabouts, shooting, stalking the great fourteen-point bucks that roamed the moors. There was also boating and fishing on Loch Muick, a name the Queen was said to dislike intensely because it meant “pigs.”

  Charles had awoken that bright morning with a fine sense of anticipation. His wife, the Duchess of Cornwall, known here in Scotland as the Duchess of Rothesay, was not present. She was in London with her own son Tom, Charles’s godson, who had suddenly taken ill. But both of the Prince of Wales’s boys were home on leave from the military; and all looked forward to a magnificent day out in the country air with close friends and family.

  Today was a very special day, the historic Glorious Twelfth. The Twelfth of August, celebrated each year, marks the opening of the shooting season for red grouse throughout the United Kingdom. As Prince Charles had a number of friends who were keen shots, it was his habit to invite them to Balmoral for a day out on the moors, shooting the driven birds. Afterward they would celebrate with a great game feast that evening with all members of the Royal Family and their guests in attendance. Even now, the kitchen staff was putting final touches on the evening’s grand banquet.

  SMITH WAS ABOUT A HUNDRED FEET from the cottage when he suddenly staggered and clenched his chest in agony. Stricken, he put a hand out to brace himself against a tree. After only a few moments, he made his way with difficulty to the side entrance.

  Smith mounted the stone steps and rapped on the weathered wooden door. His face set in a rictus of pain, he was clutching desperately at his chest, breathing heavily, pounding again upon the heavily secured door.

  “Yes, sir?” a Special Branch detective said, opening the door slightly and regarding him carefully in the dim light. “You all right, sir? Don’t look well at all, I’m afraid
.”

  “John. Dear old John. I say. Can…can you help me please. I—I think I may be having a bloody heart attack. There’s a good fellow . . .” With that he pitched forward through the door and the man inside caught him in his arms. The three other officers manning the complex were staring at him, openmouthed, as he removed the leather satchel that hung by a strap from his shoulder and let it drop to the floor.

  “Good lord, sir, steady on! We’ll get on to the house physician immediately!”

  He groaned in pain and the man called John stretched him out on the floor, before heading back to the console and the emergency telephone. “Won’t be a moment, sir. Doc’s always on call. Be here in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, he will.”

  “That won’t be at all necessary I’m afraid,” Smith said in a suddenly strong voice.

  All four spun around to see Smith on his feet, breathing normally, with a long-barreled .357 magnum revolver pointed in their direction.

  “All of you, put your hands in the air where I can see them. Out of your chairs. Now! Everyone together in the center of the room. Turn and form a line, facing the wall.”

  They stared in horror at the large-caliber pistol in the man’s hand, affixed with a silencer. They had no choice but to comply, not even a split second to send out a silent alarm. They simply did what he said.

  “Noses to the wall, hands behind your backs,” he said calmly, quickly binding them all with plastic cuffs. “Good. Now, how many of you are on duty in this facility at the moment? Anyone sleeping upstairs?”

  “Just the four of us,” the man named John said, furious anger rising in his voice. How could he have been so stupid? He had been trained never to open that door to anyone, not under any circumstances.

  “You will never get away with whatever you have in mind, you know. You have no bloody idea what you’re up against,” John said.

  “Really? Now how would you know that? In truth, I know exactly what I’m up against. Which means I’ve no further use for you lot. Except for you, John. Please step away from your colleagues and sit on the floor, back against the wall.”

  “Oh, God, no, please don’t—”

  Smith stepped up to each of the three remaining men in turn and put a bullet in the back of each skull without a word. He looked at his watch and moved to the console, looking at the monitors mounted above. He quickly located the one he wanted, a screen that displayed views of the main entrance to the estate from many angles. As he watched, a large delivery van rolled to a stop outside the black wrought-iron gates.

  THE LORRY, EVEN HERE IN THE HIGHLANDS of Scotland, was instantly recognizable. It bore the trademark of Harrods, the world-famous department store in Knightsbridge. You would see vans from the emporium often enough on the roads in Aberdeenshire. On the A93 between Braemar and Crathie, and on the secondary roads hereabouts, up from London, usually delivering treasures from around the world to the area’s great country houses.

  The van was painted in Harrods signature livery, a shade called “Harrods Green,” a bespoke color that most closely resembled a metallic army green, and featured the familiar handwritten script, Harrods, in gold leaf on both sides and the rear.

  Harrods, as it happened, was owned by the father of Dodi al Fayed, the Egyptian playboy who had courted and then died in a car crash in Paris with the Princess of Wales. In a famous trial, Mohamed al Fayed had publicly and vociferously blamed the death of his son and Diana on the Royal Family and MI6. He had lost.

  That this particular van now stood waiting at the gates of the Royals’ most sacrosanct of hideaways presented not a small bit of delicious irony for the always ironic Smith. The wolf, in sheep’s clothing, was once more at the door.

  Smith located the master control that opened the main gate. He hit the marked button and the big black gates swung open. The green van rolled inside the estate proper and the gates quickly closed behind it. Instead of proceeding along the main road to the castle, the driver veered off to the left, taking a narrow lane through the thick woods that came to an end at the Security HQ car park. There were a number of other vehicles, mostly open trucks with four-wheel drive for getting about the property in any weather.

  Smith was outside waiting anxiously when the truck finally appeared out of the darkness and pulled into a spot next to a pair of mud-spattered Land Rover Defenders. He smiled at the sight of the satellite video dish now being raised atop the truck’s roof. Inside the van were all the electronics necessary to broadcast live television throughout the U.K. from this remote location.

  The driver’s door swung open and out climbed his old friend from school days back home, a lanky chap dressed in a Harrods delivery uniform. His name was Hurri Singh. He’d been one of the most highly decorated heroes in the Pak Army, and one of the few men on earth he completely trusted. They embraced warmly, clapping each other on the back.

  “No problems on the way up from London, I trust?” Smith said.

  “None at all.”

  The two walked to the rear of the van and Singh opened the padlocks that sealed the double doors. He swung them open to reveal thirty heavily armed men, ten in civilian clothes, ten in perfect copies of Balmoral security uniforms, and ten commandos in full camo. They were seated along benches opposite each other.

  Their eyes were eager; they were aggressive young men recruited from the poorer, more radical Muslim neighborhoods of London, all screened for intelligence, courage, and religious fervor. Once identified, they’d then been sent to the mountains of northwest Pakistan. There, under the aegis of Sheik Abu al-Rashad, in a terror camp operated out of the bunker at Wazizabad, they’d been through six months of heavy military/terror training.

  One of Abu al-Rashad’s most trusted veteran commando officers, a graduate of Sandhurst, had supervised these U.K. fighters during the preparation for this Balmoral operation, going so far as to construct a mock-up of the castle’s interiors. His name was Colonel Abu Zazi. The burly, bearded desert fighter climbed down out of the truck and embraced Smith.

  It was Zazi who would lead the critical phase of the attack.

  The storming of Balmoral Castle.

  SIXTY-ONE

  ALL THIRTY OF THE YOUNG HOMEGROWN U.K. terrorists gathered around Smith at the main control console, listening carefully to his every word. No one paid the slightest attention to the three bloodied corpses crumpled against the rear wall. Although the fighters were barely out of their teens, they were all about focus. Tonight would be the realization of all their months of training in the mountains of Pakistan. And, finally, vengeance for the deprivations and humiliations heaped upon their families since arriving in the United Kingdom decades earlier. Not to mention the daily murder of their brothers by invaders in the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

  It had fallen to these boys, these angry children of Islam, to deliver a blow of unprecedented magnitude against the infidels and their supreme rulers.

  Ten of the young fighters were dressed in photographically precise reproductions of the Balmoral Security Forces uniform, right down to the buttons. They would be first to take action and Smith addressed them as a group.

  “As you well know, your first objective will be to neutralize the Balmoral security guards and the Raytheon PIDS surveillance system of electronic fencing and sensors. Ten Balmoral security guards are all currently at their posts throughout the forests surrounding the castle. Ten monitoring stations, each not much larger than a small garage, are all linked directly to this command center. At the Wazizabad camp, you were provided with maps of the Balmoral estate, indicating the location of each station and its designated number. They have the maps, Colonel Zazi?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. When I give the order, you ten will proceed to your assigned stations in the vehicles outside, clear?”

  “Clear, sir,” they all replied in their oddly unaccented English.

  “Do not deviate from your assigned routes through the woods. Each station is equipped with TV mon
itors displaying live feeds from the many closed-circuit cameras in every guard’s assigned sector. In addition, as you know, they constantly monitor the various hardwired sensors designed to alert them to any suspicious human presence on the grounds. Yes?”

  They all nodded in unison.

  “My old friend John over there on the floor is going to provide cover for your approach. John has a lovely family living right here on the estate, not five miles distant. So John is going to make an announcement to the on-duty security officers. When you arrive on station, you will look like an electrician and you’ll be expected. In that satchel over there are dark green Balmoral electrical engineering jumpsuits and caps to be worn low over your faces.”

  “One question,” Hurri said.

  “Yes?”

  “The glass in those forest stations? Bulletproof?”

  “Good question. Should have been covered in training. Yes, it is. You will need to get the security officer inside to admit you. Big smile as you rap on the window. Remember, they are armed too. Anything else? No? Good. As soon as John’s announcement is made, move out. John? We’re ready for you now.”

  Two of the young terrorists dragged the bound chief of security over to the console and placed him in a chair in front of a microphone. Then they removed his cuffs.

  Smith sat on the edge of the console looking down at the chief of security, now in a state of shock.

  “Do exactly as I say, John. Should you deviate from the script, I assure you, two of these men will go directly to your home and kill your entire family. The children first. You know that I will do it, don’t you, John?”

  He nodded, tears in his eyes, a broken man.

  “First, John, I want you to shut off all the power to every single motion, heat, audio, and thermal sensor within the perimeter. Do it now.”

  Like an automaton, John reached forward and pulled back on four bright red levers. All of the sensor readouts above were suddenly extinguished. “Good. Now do exactly the same with all the security cameras. Power them all down.”