She was leading Faraj now, across the yard and down to the narrow drainage cut. Their rucksacks were on their backs and their waterproofs zipped to the chin. The biscuit tin containing the moulded and wax-sealed C4 explosive was at the top of Faraj’s pack.
The water in the cut was agonisingly cold as it crept up past her crotch to her waist, but Jean’s heart was still racing with the relief that killing, when all was said and done, had proved to be such a simple thing. She hadn’t given the corpse more than a flicker of a glance; the impact of the shot had told her all that she needed to know and she heard it again now, like the sound of a boot stamping on a rotten marrow.
Reborn, remade.
After a hundred yards they stopped, and peered through the dead foliage bordering the cut. Faraj passed her the binoculars. A flatbed truck was standing at the roadblock, and a policeman was clambering over its load of blue fertiliser sacks. Search on, thought Jean. The Malyah was zipped into her hood now.
“This nullah takes us close to them,” murmured Faraj, scanning the open fields before them. “But the hedges are dead and we will be seen if we try to go across country. We have to assume they have good optical equipment.”
“They’re local police, not soldiers,” said Jean, glancing at her watch. “My guess’d be that we’ve got another twenty minutes to half an hour. After that it’ll be helicopters, dogs, the Army, everything.”
“Go, then.”
They pressed forward through the waist-deep water, rain slashing at their faces and marsh gas erupting around them with each step. It was hard going. The mud sucked at their feet, and in places the rotting vegetation fringing the cut thinned so that they had to proceed at an agonising crouch. The lower half of Jean’s body was completely numb now, and at intervals the scene in the boot of the car replayed itself in her mind. Tiny details began to emerge: the curious sensation of the PSS’s damped internal detonation, and the tiny whipcrack as the armour-piercing round met adult bone. That quarter-second glance had been enough. The image was imprinted on her memory as if on high-speed film.
Ten minutes later—ten freezing, dogged minutes that felt more like an hour—they were at the closest point of the cut to the checkpoint. The watercourse was less than three feet wide in places, and the banks were slick with the muddy run-off from the fields. Jean’s back and hamstrings, meanwhile, were screaming with the dead weight of the rucksack and the stress and tension of their crouching progress. Carefully, as Faraj waited motionless beside her, she scanned the police post with the binoculars. She had kept well behind the bankside reeds so that no lens flash would betray her, and blurred images of this foliage and grey curtains of rain hung between her and the checkpoint. Indistinctly, she watched two officers in fluorescent yellow waterproofs checking a car. Several other vehicles were waiting in line, and the officers were moving in the constricted, hunch-shouldered way of men who were not enjoying their job. Three others, more shadowy figures, were waiting in a white Range Rover with police markings. There were no blue lights in evidence but Jean could hear a faint radio crackle on the wind.
She saw the helicopter before she heard it. It was a couple of miles to the east of them, moving in irregular patterns above the fields and coppices. At intervals, a thin white spotlight beam cut the rain-grey sky.
Soon, her forehead pressed into the mudslicked bank of the cut amongst the rotting bullrushes and flag-iris leaves and beneath the skeleton of an alder bush, Jean could hear the tiny flicker of rotor blades. Beside her, his face inches from hers, Faraj was similarly frozen. The helicopter drew nearer, its pencil beam nosing pensively at a patch of woodland half a mile away.
And then suddenly it was overhead, the heavy pulse of its rotors washing menacingly over the sodden fields. The beam played briefly over the farmyard that they had left ten minutes earlier, and Jean almost wept with relief that they had covered the car with the plastic sheet. It had been desperately close, and the reaction of the police in getting the helicopters up—she was under no illusion that there would only be one of them—had been very fast indeed. And this was just the beginning. There would be tracker dogs soon, and soldiers with rifles. They had to move on, or die.
But the helicopter pilot showed no inclination to depart, and Jean began to shake with the cold and the tension, and her teeth to chatter. Extending an arm around her waist, Faraj pressed her upper body against his chest in an attempt to warm her. The gesture, she could feel, was purely utilitarian; there was no affection in it.
“Be strong, Asimat,” he murmured into the streaming hood of her waterproof. “Remember who you are.”
“I’m not afraid,” she replied, “I’m just …”
Her words vanished in the clatter of the overhead helicopter. Prop-wash shivered the surface of the cut as the spotlight beam moved inexorably towards them. Closing her eyes tightly, willing herself into immobility, Jean began to pray. Over her head, as the hard white light pressed down on them, forcing its way between her eyelids, she could feel the shudder of the stunted alder bush. Were they using thermal imaging? she wondered. Because if so …
And then suddenly the helicopter was gone, banking away westwards as if bored with the whole process.
“Now move,” said Faraj urgently, backing off her. “That won’t be the last of them, and this rain won’t last for ever.”
Relief flooded through her. At the roadblock, she heard several cars drive through in close succession. The policemen, she guessed, had been watching the helicopter. They moved forwards, bodies bent against the sheeting rain and the drag of the muddy water, and soon found themselves a couple of hundred yards beyond the roadblock.
“Another mile, and we’ll hit the village,” said Jean breathlessly, crouching down against the bank. “Trouble is, if anyone who’s just been through the roadblock sees us climbing up on to the road, they’ll just go straight back to the police and report us. They’ll have descriptions by now, and probably pictures.”
Faraj considered for a moment, took the binoculars from her, and narrowing his eyes scanned the surrounding countryside.
“Right,” he said eventually. “This is what we do.”
T he repair hangar at the Swanley Heath Army Air Corps base was impressively vast, and considering its size, impressively warm. At 11 a.m. the Chief Constable of Norfolk had ordered that his deputy, Jim Dunstan, should take over what was now officially an anti-terrorist operation. Dunstan’s first act had been to request that the Swanley Heath base act as host to the inter-service operational team.
It was a good decision, thought Liz. Swanley Heath was halfway between Brancaster to the north and the Marwell, Mildenhall and Lakenheath USAF bases to the south. The operational team was now, hopefully, at the centre of the area through which their quarry was moving. The base was secure, and able to accommodate with ease both the two-dozen-odd personnel involved in the running of the operation and the considerable array of their technical and communications equipment.
By midday, after a scramble of activity and a lot of hard driving with sirens blaring and lights flashing, this was almost all set up. The fifteen-strong police team, headed by Dunstan, and with Don Whitten and Steve Goss in attendance, occupied an area dominated by a nine-metre-square electronic map of the region, borrowed from their Army hosts, showing the deployment of roadblocks, helicopters and search teams. In front of each member of the team was an assortment of laptop computers, landlines and mobiles, most of them in use. In the case of Don Whitten there was also an ashtray.
Beyond them, parked in a ready-to-go line, were the three unmarked Range Rovers of the Norfolk Constabulary’s SO19 Tactical Firearms Unit. Its nine members, all men, lounged on benches in their dark blue overalls and boots, passing round a copy of the Sun, rechecking their Glock 17 pistols and MP5 carbines, and staring blankly up at the distant roof of the hangar. From outside, at intervals, came the distant beat of rotors as Army Air Corps Gazelle and Lynx helicopters lifted away from the tarmac.
The officia
l estimate, by default, was that the target of the two terrorists was either one of the USAF bases or the royal residence at Sandringham, where the Queen was now staying—as she did every Christmas. No one could quite envisage how the security net surrounding these establishments was supposed to be penetrated, but the worst had been assumed concerning the weaponry that the two were carrying. Neither chemical nor biological weapons had been ruled out. Nor, indeed, had a so-called “dirty” bomb, although the remains of the bungalow had shown no signs of radioactive material.
In his keenness to get the county’s two Squirrel helicopters launched and over the search area, Whitten had explained to Dunstan, he had sent them up without their thermal imaging activated. The helicopters had been scrambled from Norwich, but of the supposedly available system operators one was on compassionate leave and the other had broken his ankle in the course of a motivational weekend. So the Squirrels had gone up two-handed, with a pilot and a Night-Sun searchlight operator each. Visibility had been atrocious due to the rain, but the search area had been thoroughly covered with the help of the spotlights, and Whitten was confident that D’Aubigny and Mansoor were still confined to the seventy-mile square whose northern boundary was Brancaster Bay and whose western boundary was the Wash.
Liz was not so sure. Apart from their predilection for murder, the two hadn’t done too badly so far when it came to concealing themselves and moving across hostile terrain. The D’Aubigny woman clearly knew the lie of the land.
What was her connection with the area? Liz asked herself for the hundredth time. Why had she been chosen? Was it just because she was British, or did she have some specialised local knowledge? Investigations were checking every one of her known contacts, but the parents’ silence was desperately unhelpful. Couldn’t they see that there was only one chance of saving their daughter, and that was to catch her before it came to the final reckoning? Before it came to the killing time?
From the other side of the room she saw Don Whitten pointing in her direction. A neatly dressed young man in a green Barbour coat was walking towards the trestle table on which she had her own laptop set up. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’m told you can help me find Bruno Mackay.”
“And you are?”
He held out his hand. “Jamie Kersley, Captain, 22 SAS.”
She shook the proffered hand. “He’s due any time.”
“Are you from the Firm too?”
“I’m afraid not.”
He grinned warily. “Box, then?”
Short for Box 500, one of the Service’s former postal addresses, this was one of MI5’s many sobriquets. Traditionally, as Liz was keenly aware, the Army had always had a rather warmer relationship with MI6. As politely as she could, she ignored the question.
“Why don’t you take a seat, Captain Kersley? When Bruno Mackay shows up I’ll steer him in your direction.”
“Er … thanks. I’ve got two four-man teams unloading a Puma outside. Let me get them squared away and I’ll be back.”
She watched as he marched briskly away, and then turned to her laptop.
SAS here mob-handed, she typed out. But ITS target still unknown. Unusual, surely. Something I shd know???
Signing off with her identifying number, and encoding the message with a couple of swift key-strokes, she dispatched it to Wetherby.
The reply came back less than a minute later. Highlighting the text, she watched as the random-looking letters and numbers disappeared, to be replaced with legible text.
Agree unusual. Regiment present at request of G Fane. Essential ready deploy at short notice he told COBRA. Yr guess good as mine.
As she watched, the eight SAS soldiers passed the entrance to the hangar. Despite the rain, or perhaps because of it, they walked bare-headed and with studied casualness. They were dressed in black fireproof battledress and carrying a wide assortment of weapons including carbines and snipers’ rifles.
Altogether, a hellish volume of firepower was being brought to bear. Against what exactly? Liz wondered.
T he pub in Birdhoe was called the Plough, and the sign showed the seven stars of that constellation. By 12:30 the car park was almost full; Sunday lunch at the Plough was a popular fixture, and there wasn’t another pub for three or four miles in either direction.
Exiting the ladies’ toilet in the corner of the car park, where she had been waiting until the coast was clear, Jean D’Aubigny looked about her. Luckily, it was still raining. No one was hanging around in the car park to chat. The car she had identified as the easiest to steal, if not necessarily the most suitable, was an old racing-green MGB. It was probably a quarter of a century old, but without being a collector’s piece looked reasonably well cared for. Its great advantage was that due to its age it had no steering lock that had to be disabled. Jean was capable of breaking a steering lock—a length of piping braced beneath one of the struts of the wheel and forced downwards usually did the trick—but it was a hard operation to perform unobtrusively.
Arriving at a decision, she walked purposefully to the MGB, deftly slashed the wet vinyl top with her clasp knife, dipped in her hand, slipped the lock, and climbed into the driver’s seat. Next to her, in the passenger seat, was a man’s sheepskin jacket, which she laid over her sodden knees. Drawing back her booted foot, she smashed her right heel into the covering beneath the steering wheel. It was plastic, but old plastic, and half of it cracked away, revealing the white metal ignition barrel beneath.
Glancing quickly around her to make sure that she was still unobserved, she wrenched the four wires out of the bottom of the barrel, and stripped them back with the knife. Taking the red wire—the main ignition lead—she quickly touched it to the others in turn. With the third, a green wire, there was a brief lurch as the starter turned over. Isolating the green wire, she quickly connected the other two to the red one. The dashboard was now live. Depressing the clutch, she ran through the gears a couple of times before slipping the MGB back into neutral.
OK, she told herself. Here we go—Inshallah!
Carefully, avoiding the thumping electric shocks she’d suffered the first couple of times she’d tried it, outside a housing project in southeast Paris, she touched the green starter wire to the other three and depressed the accelerator an inch or two. The MGB howled, terrifyingly loud, and Jean jumped. But the weather must have dampened the noise, because no furious owner, beer glass in hand, appeared out of the pub. Instead, rainwater poured into Jean’s lap from the knife slash in the vinyl top.
With the engine turning over, she switched on the heater and windscreen-wipers, put the MGB into reverse, let off the handbrake, and backed out of the parking space. Even the gentlest manoeuvre seemed to engender an outraged snarl from the old sports car, and Jean’s heart was thumping painfully in her chest as she shifted to first gear, nosed towards the car park exit, and turned sharply southwards.
On the open road she felt no less self-conscious. This, surely, was a vehicle that local people would know and recognise. But the area seemed deserted. People were either at the pub, she guessed, or behind their locked front doors, watching TV sport or the Sunday soaps.
A mile beyond the village she came to the spot they had located on the map, where the cut they had walked along disappeared into a culvert under the road. She pulled up just beyond it, ensuring that the engine stayed running. Within moments, Faraj’s head and torso appeared, and he was hauling himself up through the sodden dead brambles. Jean leaned over to open the door and Faraj handed in the black rucksack, which she placed alongside her own in front of the passenger seat. Dripping copiously, he climbed into the seat, arranged the rucksacks beneath his knees, and pulled the door closed.
“Shabash!” murmured Faraj. “Congratulations!”
“It’s not perfect,” she admitted, as the windscreen-wipers thumped noisily back and forth, “but it was the easiest to steal.”
She pulled back on to the road. The petrol gauge read a quarter full, and her brief elation faded as she rea
lised that they weren’t going to be able to refill the tank, which almost certainly only ran on leaded fuel. Right now, though, she couldn’t face explaining this. Her senses felt simultaneously taut-wired and dulled to a kind of slow motion. She was running on empty herself. It was too complicated.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said.
B ut why this man?” asked Liz. “Why send this particular man? He’s never been here, he’s got no family here … As far as we know he’s got no connection to Britain whatsoever.”
“I can’t answer that question,” said Mackay. “I genuinely have no idea. He certainly never came to our attention in Pakistan. If he was a player out there, it was at much too low a level to show up on our radar. But then I’m afraid that’s how things were. There was a very high noise-to-signal ratio.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that while there were any number of overexcited guys on street corners who were happy to scream and shout and burn the Stars and Stripes—especially if there was a CNN crew around—there were rather fewer who translated their resentment into direct action. If Pakistani agents were clocking every garage hand that al Safa so much as looked at, then they were doing what every agent has done since time immemorial—padding their reports to make it look like they were worth their salaries.”
“But they were right about Mansoor. Right to have him on file, at least.”
“So it turns out. But I’d guess that that’s more coincidence than inside knowledge.”
They were driving in Mackay’s BMW to the Marwell USAF base. The MI6 man had returned from Mildenhall to Swanley Heath shortly after midday, and after swapping phone numbers with Jamie Kersley, the SAS captain (who, it turned out, was also an old Harrovian), and sitting down for a ten-minute sandwich lunch with Liz and the police team, had prepared to leave for the last, and nearest, of the three USAF bases. Mackay had asked Liz if she felt like coming too, and with both terrorists positively identified but with no other positive leads it had seemed as constructive a course of action as any other. Thanks in part to the atrocious weather, the search for D’Aubigny and Mansoor had stalled, despite the arrival of teams from the regular and Territorial Army.
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