by Andy McNab
The girls were looking vaguely frontwards – he guessed the pics were from the passport queue before the gunmen attacked. They couldn’t be more than seventeen. And in just over a month he would be nineteen – which meant that, at Markwell, they would have been twelve to his fourteen. And these guys thought he would have known them? Did they think he was into jailbait?
‘This is Zara Mann.’ The man tapped the dark-haired girl. ‘And this’ – tap, tap – ‘is Emma Booth.’
The other spook spoke for the first time. ‘Possibly.’
The older spook swung his head round and glared at his colleague. The younger spook just smiled blandly back, and Sean sensed the undercurrent of a much older, longer disagreement that still hadn’t been resolved. The older guy turned to face Sean again.
‘This is possibly Emma Booth. Mann has been positively identified by fingerprints from her seat on the plane – she has a minor record. Provisional identification of Booth is by facial recognition software, and that scarf and the glasses complicate matters. We know for sure that neither of them were travelling under their own names. They were working at the Sacred Cross Hospital in Lagos, using the stolen identities of a pair of genuine charity volunteers. And they are now missing.’
Sean frowned. ‘What, they did a bunk from the airport before you guys got to talk to them?’
The spook shook his head, and continued to scowl like it was all Sean’s fault. ‘They did a bunk from the airport with the surviving gunmen.’
‘What?’
‘Before the smoke bombs went off, they were with all you other hostages. When the smoke had cleared, they had gone. What does that tell you, Fusilier Harker?’
Sean looked at him carefully. No way was he answering a question like that. It was way too leading.
The spook obviously enjoyed the sound of his own voice. ‘It tells me that everything that happened this morning was a ruse to get them back into the country without any Customs and Immigration control checks. In the time it took us to realize they were missing they could be safely back in Littern Mills or anywhere else – and, of course, because Littern Mills wasn’t under surveillance until now, we have no way of showing that they ever left it. What do their time in Nigeria and Littern Mills have in common?’
He steepled his fingers and leaned forward. ‘One thing and one thing only, and I’m looking at him. Start talking, Fusilier Harker, because it will go very badly for you if you hold out on us.’
Sean just stared back at him, not even aware that his mouth was hanging open.
What the fuck?
That morning he had only gone and helped foil a terrorist raid on an airport, and lost his closest mate.
And now he was under suspicion?
Chapter 12
Wednesday 2 August, 17:15 BST
The door flew open.
‘What the hell is going on?’
Sean glanced over his shoulder at the newcomer, clocked him, and immediately shot to his feet. He stood to attention, heels together, eyes forward.
Lieutenant Colonel Levene stormed into the room, not even looking at Sean, his glare fixed on the spooks. ‘Dismissed, Fusilier.’
‘Sir!’ Sean started to salute, remembered he wasn’t in uniform, prepared to about-turn.
‘Stay where you are, Fusilier Harker,’ the older spook snapped. ‘Colonel Levene, I presume? We’re not finished with your soldier.’
‘You should not have even started with my soldier without my knowledge!’ But maybe Levene sensed this battle wouldn’t be straightforward. He glanced at Sean and modified his earlier order. ‘Wait outside, Fusilier.’
‘Sir!’ Sean about-turned and marched smartly out.
The two Redcaps were still outside, on either side of the door. Both parties looked warily at each other. The Redcaps looked a little less confident than the last time Sean had seen them. They had just seen a senior officer being extremely pissed off. Maybe they had been the first target for his anger, a practice run before he took it out on the spooks. Sean couldn’t really find it in his heart to feel sorry for them.
They stood at ease, but Sean had just been told to wait, so he took a chair. He sat upright and made himself look smarter than he had for the spooks.
Raised voices came through the door: ‘How dare you … without permission … completely out of order …’
That was Levene. Any replies were just a low buzz through the woodwork.
The colonel reappeared five minutes later, still with a thundercloud hanging over him. Everyone came to attention together.
First Levene snapped a look at the two Redcaps. ‘You’re dismissed.’
They marched gratefully away like a pair of synchronized robots, still with balls intact.
Then the colonel swung his attention onto Sean. ‘Fusilier Harker. Be in briefing room three at seventeen forty-five. Talk to no one about this.’
Sean was in the briefing room at seventeen thirty-five – bang on time.
The army didn’t do early or late. You were on time, and that was it.
So to guarantee that you were on time, you told yourself to be there five minutes before the designated time.
Which then meant that you had a new designated time, so you added five minutes to that. So now, even if you broke a leg as you stepped out of the front door and had to drag yourself along the ground, or ISIS launched a surprise attack on Andover, or aliens landed out on Salisbury Plain, you had ten minutes to make everything right before anyone could accuse you of not being on time.
The room followed the British Army’s usual pattern of providing its men with the best, most up-to-date fighting equipment … and the crappiest furniture it could find. The wooden table frame was scarred and chipped, the Formica top was battered and peeling, and there were cork boards on the walls that just smelled old.
The handle rattled, and as the door opened Sean jumped to attention. And then Wolston was standing there, looking as surprised to see Sean as Sean felt to see him.
‘Very kind of you, Stenders, but there’s no need,’ Wolston said as Sean pointedly came down from attention. He moved further in to let Mitra past. One more surprise.
‘What are you doing here, Kama Sutra?’
‘Beats me.’ Mitra shrugged. ‘You didn’t show for the shootfest, then we two get orders to be here—’
‘Excellent,’ said a voice. ‘Let’s get started.’
All three came to attention as Levene entered, followed by the younger of the two spooks that Sean had met earlier. He was carrying the older spook’s folder.
The colonel simply gestured for them to sit. Then he and the spook pulled out their own chairs.
Levene spoke. ‘Gentlemen. As Fusilier Harker will be able to tell you in his own time, there has been a breakdown in communication between this battalion and the Security Service.’
Sean felt his cheeks burning. He knew Mitra and Wolston would be interested to hear all the details about this later.
‘I am pleased to report that this has been ironed out with the removal of one individual and the involvement of the proper chain of command. That is, me. It’s a very short chain. What you are about to hear is top secret and not to be divulged to anyone not already in this room. Finally any plans you have for the next forty-eight hours have just been cancelled. I will now hand over to’ – he scowled at the spook – ‘this gentleman, whose orders you will follow as though they were my own.’
‘Call me Dave,’ the spook said, with a smart Home Counties accent and a friendly smile that still left his eyes sharp. ‘From now on we’re all on first-name terms. Dave, Sean, Ravi, Joe. No ranks, no nicknames. We’re all civilians. Everything you hear in this room comes under the Official Secrets Act, which already binds you as serving soldiers, and the Military Aid to the Civil Power Act, with which you might be less familiar. An operation under the MACP needs to be signed off by the Home Secretary, which this will be by the time it becomes relevant. Essentially it allows the armed forces to provide assista
nce to the civil power in keeping law and order, when the armed forces have specialist capabilities or equipment that the civil power doesn’t. And what the military currently has that the civil power doesn’t is manpower with local knowledge for a very specific operation. Now. What follows is exactly as explained to COBRA. You’re in exalted company, gentlemen …’
He leaned forward to open the folder, and began the briefing.
‘The TLDR version is: we suspect a terrorist plot with an imminent payoff, we don’t know what’s going on and we are invoking the MACP to find out.’ He let that sink in – Sean guessed he was giving them just enough time to think, So what the fuck does that have to do with me?
‘In more detail …’
At first Dave explained what Sean already knew, only without the accusations. At least he seemed to take the view that getting people’s cooperation involved treating them decently, which made a pleasant change from the other spook, who had obviously just wanted to scare or bully Sean into helping.
So. Two girls from Littern Mills – Zara Mann and possibly Emma Booth – had been in Nigeria under fake identities, they had returned on the same flight as Sean, and they had slipped back into the country under the cover of the airport siege and subsequently gone missing. The girl who was possibly Emma was to be referred to as Girl X.
Then came the new stuff, and it riveted Sean to his seat.
‘Yesterday, just as your flight was taking off, two masked gunmen burst into the home of one Joanna Harford of Fareham in Hampshire. They held her husband and two small children hostage, and ordered her to go to work as normal and follow a precise set of instructions.’ A beat. ‘Mrs Harford is an air traffic controller at the London Area Control Centre in Swanwick. Her instructions were to see that your flight from Lagos was specifically diverted to Southend. Not Manchester, not Edinburgh – Southend. She followed her instructions to the letter, and I’m pleased to report the Harfords have all been safely reunited.
‘Meanwhile the gunman taken down by Fusilier Harker’ – above the friendly smile Dave’s eyes were cold; Sean felt his face burning again – ‘has been identified.’ He held up another photo – a police mugshot of a white guy in his twenties. ‘Michael Joseph of Haringey, already a person of interest to us because of his involvement with certain extreme organizations. His face will be all over tomorrow’s front pages and is already trending on social media.’
The smile had gone.
‘Put all that together, with some precisely delivered security threats that led us to close some London airports but not others – and you find that someone went to a great deal of trouble to get those girls into the country, at Southend, without their having to go through passport control. You see, when the girls left the country, a new biometric security system was being installed at all UK airports. Fingerprint and retina scanning – almost foolproof. When the girls left, it was still in beta testing, but it became operational while they were away, and on her return Zara would have immediately been flagged, despite her false passport. She has previous for possession with intent to supply, so she’s on the system, and it’s quite possible that no one had thought this might be a problem in terms of her returning to the UK until she was out there. Hence, to get her back in, they had to lay this on. Yes, Sean?’
The informal atmosphere had encouraged Sean to put a hand up. He had clocked this point earlier, just not been able to put it into words.
‘Sir—’ He caught Dave’s frown. ‘Dave. If they’re trying to keep it quiet so no one notices, it’s kind of backfired. All they’ve done is run up a big red flag saying, Look, we’re secretly smuggling these girls in. We wouldn’t be talking about this now if they’d done it different.’
‘Exactly.’ Dave’s mouth flattened as he tensed his jaw. ‘But the fact is, they did do it this way, which suggests there is some pressing need. Something time sensitive. And they probably didn’t have other options. If it weren’t for the whole security diversion thing, we might just assume that the girls are drug mules – smuggling white powder in condoms they previously swallowed abroad. It’s amazing how many glam celebrity users gloss over the fact that the stuff they put up their nose has been crapped out of the arse of a slightly dim girl. No, you don’t go to these lengths for drug smugglers – but you do if you’re radicalized jihadis planning a terrorist strike to a specific deadline, and you need key personnel on the ground to make it happen. So it has to be assumed that Zara Mann and Girl X are highly dangerous and might be with people who are even more so. Yes, Joe?’
It was Wolston’s turn to interrupt.
‘No easy way to say this. You say jihadis, but aren’t all the people we’ve talked about a little bit … white?’ He glanced sideways at Mitra. ‘No offence.’
‘None taken, but you’re coming back as a cockroach.’
Dave gave his flat smile again. ‘You’ve lived a sheltered life in Afghanistan, Joe. If you’d served in the Balkans you’d have encountered whole populations of white Muslims. The 9th Muslim Liberation Brigade during the Bosnian War were mostly white guys, ethnic Bosnians. And radicalization is colour blind. It suits certain sections of society, not to mention the media, to think that the only threat comes from people with al and abu in their names – it makes everyone feel better if they can just put a problem into a different pigeonhole to their own. Wrong. Michael Joseph converted to Islam last year, and as for the girls – have any of you heard of Samantha Lewthwaite?’
The name rang a bell. Sean frowned as he tried to remember.
‘Aka the White Widow,’ Dave continued. ‘Nice Protestant Ulster girl who married one of the London bombers – Germaine Lindsay, who blew up a train on the Piccadilly line on seventh July 2005. After that she went on the run – and is now thought to be behind over four hundred deaths, including attacks in Mombasa and Nairobi in which she personally took part, and the training of suicide bombers in Syria and Yemen. As white as they come, and her father was in the Lancers. So don’t be fooled by colour or background. In fact, don’t be fooled by anything you currently believe because it’s probably wrong.’
He held his arms out as far as they would go. ‘There is a huge gap between where someone like Lewthwaite starts out and where they are now. So you think something major must have happened to get them from here to there. Wrong. It’s small steps all the way.’ Dave made little chopping motions in the air with his left hand, bringing it closer bit by bit to his right. ‘Never big ones, because that might be too much to swallow. But every single little one makes perfect sense in the context of what’s gone before.’
They looked at him in silence.
‘It’s not brainwashing – that’s changing someone’s belief against their will. It’s more a problem of impaired decision-making. It begins with preconditioning through factors that are outside anyone’s control. Poverty, perhaps – feelings of helplessness or disassociation, which may be grounded in reality or may just be psychological. It’s often a simple background situation that is so massive, so crap, that there’s no way you can fix it on your own. With Lewthwaite, it’s thought to have begun when her parents split up. She was eleven. It gutted her and she found comfort with Muslim friends whose strong family network gave her strength. So far, so reasonable, right? This led to her formal conversion to Islam as a teenager. Still perfectly normal.
‘Then, if you fall in with the wrong people, the more you go in, the easier it gets. More and more you’re surrounded by like minds who identify as having the same belief but have a very different outlook to the one that first attracted you. Or, to be really clever – and the people who drive the radicalization are really clever – you get what appears to be debate, a carefully staged way of showing both sides of the argument. But they make sure you come to the conclusion they want. And because you’re surrounded by them, you get no disagreement, no argument. In social media and in real life, you just get approval, no criticism. You end up as they want you to: a long way from where you began. And, as I said, all in sm
all steps … Sean has something to say.’
Sean hadn’t realized his feelings were showing so plainly on his face. Maybe it was the sceptical way he was twisting his mouth.
‘Still sounds too easy, Dave. The way you say it, this Lewthwaite girl could have been me. We were stone broke, my childhood was pretty shitty. I didn’t get radicalized.’
‘Didn’t you? As I recall from your record, you loved your gang so much that you took one for the team so that your mates could escape, and ended up getting nicked. There’s a file the size of the Yellow Pages containing all the conversations you had with social workers, every time you got into trouble with the police, but you clearly just blew them off because someone else was filling your head with the rubbish you wanted to hear. If that doesn’t sound familiar, then you haven’t been paying attention.’
Sean’s face blazed, but he let it go. He couldn’t argue.
‘But you’re also right, Sean, that it’s not a universal rule. Not everyone takes such a course. The huge majority never will. In 2003 over a million people marched against UK involvement in the Iraq War, but no way did the war produce a million home-grown radicals. But you don’t need a million. Just a few, with a gun or a bomb, to make a real impact.’ Dave spread his hands like he had just performed a clever magic trick and was waiting for the applause. ‘And there you have it. Jihad.’
‘So much for “Thou shalt not kill”,’ Wolston muttered. Now he got the benefit of Dave’s bland, 9mm gaze.
‘“Thou shalt not kill”, or “Thou shalt not murder”? Not quite the same thing, are they?’ He waggled his hand. ‘Just enough of a difference to produce some really radical changes in behaviour.’
Sean thought of the deaths at the airport that morning. Clarkson had murdered Bright. He, Sean, had killed May. So, OK, yes, he thought, there was a difference.