by Nick Oldham
Even so he continued to open the door barely a centimetre at a time until it was fully open, at which moment he realized he had been holding his breath possibly longer than the world record.
He exhaled and said, ‘Ta-dah!’ for the benefit of the other two who both had terror-wracked expressions. From the way they both also exhaled at the same time, they were also in contention for the world breath-holding record.
‘I suggest looking with eyes only,’ Donaldson said, ‘and only move or open something when we’re certain it isn’t rigged or on a pressure pad of some sort.’
Rik patted the CSI’s back. ‘Careful as you go.’
Jake was on his PR to Jim Taylor, the traffic cop.
‘I’m thinking we should close the road,’ Jake said as he stumbled across pebbles and stones back down in the river about two hundred metres east and upstream of the accident scene where the river bed widened considerably and flattened out as well as parting company from the road which then cut away towards Lord Chalmers’ house. ‘Or at least until we’re happy with what’s going on. Is there a crash investigator on the way?’
‘Yes, but an hour away,’ Taylor said. ‘I will close the road, though. I’m not liking what I’m seeing.’
He was walking along the road in the direction of Chalmers’ house, looking for evidence.
‘Why?’ Jake asked, because he didn’t like anything about it at all.
‘There’s been some shunting going on.’ Taylor was taking photos with his phone. ‘Looks like debris from the Nissan and also from another car, the one doing the butting, which was black coloured and there’s some broken headlight glass, too.’
‘Ties in with what’s down here,’ Jake acknowledged.
‘Any joy?’
‘Not so far.’ Jake looked up and around. ‘Hang on a sec,’ he said and ended the transmission.
Donaldson squatted down on his haunches to look at the grenade strapped to the tree like a fruit of some sort. He was no great expert in explosives, but having worked regularly with Special Forces in both law enforcement and the military, he knew this was a standard anti-personnel fragmentation grenade filled with RDX explosive which, on detonation, bursts open and fragments outwards at high velocity. Had he tripped the wire he was in no doubt that at least one of his legs would have been blown off. He’d thrown a few himself in training exercises and had seen how lethal they could be.
‘Standard military kit,’ he said to Rik who had joined him. ‘You can mess with the fuse so it detonates instantly or give a three to four second delay, say.’
‘Is this guy still around, then?’ Rik asked.
‘Probably watching us right now.’
They had allowed their guard to slip.
The sniper watched the two men discussing the grenade whilst the CSI looked delicately in and around the VW as far as he could reach.
He realized there was far too much incriminating evidence in the van.
He wriggled backwards from his hiding position, moving as silently as a snake, until he eased himself onto his knees. The two detectives were still chatting some twenty metres to his right. The VW and the CSI were about ten metres to his left.
From inside his jacket he removed his second and last grenade, which had a three and a half second delay.
He extracted the pin, keeping his hand wrapped around the safety bar, and froze when the pin made the slightest metallic click as it came free.
Donaldson heard it.
In the same way he recognized the sound of a Browning automatic, he also knew the sound a pin made when being taken out of a grenade, especially set against the context of all the other noises in the woods.
He had last heard that noise in a hotel corridor in Istanbul when he and a team consisting of Delta Force, SAS and Turkish Special Forces were about to enter the room of a wanted, dead or alive, terrorist from Pakistan who was hiding in the city. It had been decided he would be delivered dead.
The team was silent against the background throb of Istanbul.
Way ahead of Donaldson, up the corridor, the second officer in the line removed the pin from a grenade.
Donaldson heard it.
As he had that day.
He twisted around, saw the running flash of a man emerging from the undergrowth, appearing very briefly by the VW behind the unsuspecting CSI. As he passed the CSI he lobbed a grenade into the vehicle through the passenger door, it seemed to arc in slow motion, and then he was gone.
Donaldson’s warning scream was lost in the blast.
Jake Niven ran across the shallow river towards the large boulder lodged against the bank, a huge chunk of stone that probably landed there ten million years previously. He was sure he’d seen someone’s feet sticking out behind the rock. He climbed over it and slithered off the other side next to the body lying face down under the overhang of the boulder.
‘Found him, found him,’ he transmitted excitedly over his PR in the second before turning Henry Christie on to his back.
He did not add, ‘But I think he may be dead.’
ELEVEN
As far as listening went, it had been a quiet night for Basil Wentrose, twenty-four-year-old graduate in media studies. He had got a good degree from Birmingham but jobs were scarce in that industry and Basil’s talent was only minimal. He had drifted more by luck than judgement and the promise of a half-decent pay packet into a role advertised as ‘corporate communications’ and which turned out, after a series of interviews by faceless panels, to be one of the most tedious jobs he could ever have imagined – literally listening to other people’s conversations.
Basil had become what was euphemistically termed an ‘eavesdropper’ based at GCHQ, the government’s secret communications centre at Cheltenham. It was a job he had acquired, it later transpired, because he had a smattering of Urdu and Arabic from his upbringing in the cosmos that was his home city of Birmingham. His language skills had been enhanced and much of his working day was spent listening to tapes of phone calls and also ‘live’ calls, delving for information and patterns which occasionally uncovered terrorist plots. He fed his findings upstairs and rarely heard anything back.
But it paid his bills. He wasn’t too far from his family home and his dull job often became nothing short of James Bond when he was trying to get his hands into some lovely lady’s panties. It usually worked.
His shifts therefore consisted mainly of intelligence-gathering and responding to the occasional ‘red light’, meaning something was happening somewhere in the here and now.
Basil worked in a small three-sided cubicle within a much larger office on the third floor and that night it was an actual red light flashing on his bank of computer monitors that made him shoot forwards and his heart beat a little quicker than normal. He placed his Big Mac down next to the Frederick Forsyth novel he’d been reading, wiped his mouth on his shirt sleeve and clicked the wireless mouse to open a little-used program linked to the light.
This was where he would find details of the reason for the alert.
He opened the message, the body of which was in code, but which also told him who he should inform immediately.
As ever Basil decoded the message in his brain and did not commit it to paper because he was not supposed to be able to read or understand the content, but he could, though would never admit it unless he was being water-boarded.
This one read simply, ‘Stiletto reactivated’, which meant nothing to him but there was a file attached to the message which he did not dare open because that would have meant instant dismissal and Basil wanted to keep his job at least until he found a job as a film director.
He redirected the message as instructed, erased it from his memory and picked up his paperback, which was all about tracking down terrorists.
The email Basil sent was instantly encrypted by the highest level of technology and landed a few moments later, having bashed its way through several firewalls, in two separate computers, one in London and one in Hereford.
The message in London would remain unopened until the morning, but the one in Hereford was read almost as soon as it arrived, just before midnight.
The man sitting at the cramped desk in the cramped office was called John Smith, an ideal name for a major in the Special Air Service, the SAS, a Special Forces unit of the British Army.
Smith had had a long day of physical exercise and tactical planning but found he could not sleep so he had dragged himself back over to his office at the SAS headquarters to tweak some operational orders he had been working on. Mostly they were run of the mill, but the ridiculous requirements of Health & Safety legislation that even applied to the SAS were quite complex, even for a training exercise, and he wanted to get them right before submitting them up the line for further scrutiny.
He had just finished one to his satisfaction and decided on a shot of Jura whisky from his desk-drawer stash when his email pinged.
He put up the inbox on his screen and saw the red flag on the one that had just landed from GCHQ.
It was entitled ‘Birthday Party’, as most of the sensitive ones were, just in case they did get into the wrong hands and the vague off-chance that some terrorist leader would not be interested in attending someone’s twenty-first and might delete it before opening. It was a pretty weak last line of defence.
Smith leaned back in his comfortable chair, one purchased out of his own pocket, and considered the message before actually opening it, because once open, he was committed.
He had no idea of its possible contents.
It could be anything from an urgent deployment request, in which case two SAS units were available immediately, to something as simple as a threat update, requiring no response.
He tapped the ‘enter’ key, opened it.
As he read the body of the email he tipped forwards in his chair, his insides tightened up as if he had terrible wind, and the only word he could think to say was, ‘Fuck.’
He downed the Jura in one.
The left side of Rik Dean’s face looked as though a bucket of hot ashes had been thrown against it. And it burned and stung like hell and wept with the antiseptic cream that had been applied cool but had soon melted.
It would have been much worse if Karl Donaldson had not seen the movement in the trees and reacted instantly by screaming a warning and hurling himself at Rik just as the grenade exploded. Purely by chance, Donaldson had been shielded by Rik’s body as he took him to the ground. Donaldson had received some searing burns to the backs of his hands but had avoided serious injury whilst Rik’s face had taken some of the blast.
Unlike the CSI, who had not been so fortunate.
He had been facing the open door of the VW when the grenade had been tossed in over his shoulder and rolled into the footwell, then exploded.
He had taken its full force from knee level to neck. The fragments had shredded the soft portion of his abdomen from lower stomach to chest and killed him almost instantly, launching him back into the bushes. He looked as though he had been the target of a flame-thrower.
And the offender had vanished.
Somehow Donaldson had maintained his mental clarity, whereas for at least ten minutes, Rik Dean had been disorientated, his eardrums pounding from the percussive blast.
After checking Rik was OK, Donaldson had risen slowly to see rising smoke and flame from the explosion and had approached to find the body of the CSI lying in a clump of bushes. His forensic suit and clothing underneath had effectively been blown off, revealing him naked and terribly injured.
Rik and Donaldson had been treated by paramedics and refused hospital treatment even though Rik’s ears were still ringing and he had to continually ask people to repeat things for him.
The rest of the day had been a haze of activity and decision-making for the detective who was certain this was the worst day he had ever had as a cop or an adult. The day after his wedding, the day he had cancelled his honeymoon.
It was almost midnight when he eventually sat down, breathed out and looked across at Donaldson, who had been truly amazing throughout and Rik was certain he could not have made it without the American by his side.
They were in the dining room of the Tawny Owl.
‘Hell,’ Rik said.
Donaldson nodded. ‘Yup.’
‘Thank you,’ Rik said simply.
‘Love to say it’s been a pleasure, but you’re welcome anyway.’
They looked at each other.
‘Have I missed anything?’
Donaldson sat back, pondering, then shrugged, ‘Dunno.’
As much as Rik Dean would like to have said he had quickly regained his bearings and senses after the explosion, in reality it was probably an hour before he really began to understand what had happened. He could never have imagined in his wildest nightmares how confusing it could have been and he had thought about front-line soldiers who somehow battled through shit like that every day in combat.
Being close to an explosion fucked your brain, no doubt about it.
So an hour after the blast, Rik was sitting in the back of an ambulance with Donaldson opposite. Rik was being attended by a burly paramedic called Matt whilst the American was treated by a pretty lady paramedic who, whilst delicately swabbing his hands, kept giving him big dopey come-to-bed eyes.
Also, by that time, a crime-scene van had trundled up, a fresh CSI and forensic team were at work and two pairs of authorized firearms officers were guarding the perimeter as the CSIs erected barriers, ran crime-scene tape from tree to tree, put up tents and started up emergency generators for the lighting that would be needed. This was going to be a long day and night and a lot of brews were also going to be needed.
All these resources, plus a growing number of detectives and uniformed personnel, plus the bomb squad, had been arranged by DS Jess Makin who had been constantly on the phone, battling an unreliable signal. But she had persisted and succeeded.
‘Really, you should let us take you to hospital,’ Rik’s male paramedic encouraged him.
‘Don’t think so,’ Rik grunted. The prospect of being over a dozen miles away did not appeal to him. He knew he had to stay on the scene and could not waste time. ‘Just plaster me up and let me get on with it.’
‘It’s possible you could have concussion,’ Matt warned as he shone a torch beam into Rik’s eyes. The intensity of the light gave him an instant headache. ‘Or worse.’
‘I’ll be fine.’
‘So should you,’ Donaldson’s paramedic said. Her name tag said Penny. ‘Go to hospital that is.’ Her eyes were really shining at him.
Rik witnessed this and it was at that moment he understood what Henry Christie had meant when describing Donaldson in very envious tones that ‘women all simply want to go to bed with the good-looking Yankee bastard.’
Rik even managed a wry smile. Henry had been right.
‘Boss?’
Rik turned to the voice. Jess Makin was at the ambulance steps with a notebook. She looked stressed but very much in control and Rik knew and appreciated what a brilliant job she had done so far.
‘Hi … Where are we up to?’ he asked.
‘The chief constable’s been informed but he’s away on a conference so the deputy chief has turned out. I’ve called out the local mountain-rescue team for advice about searching et cetera and HQ Ops are pulling together two search teams plus two firearms teams and a couple of PSU serials for the search itself.’
‘Good stuff.’
She continued, ‘The media are on to it, big style.’
‘Only to be expected.’
‘And the helicopter is on standby but they don’t want to turn out until they have a proper briefing, just in case they have to go straight back and fuel up again.’
Rik narrowed his eyes as something dawned on him. ‘I thought I’d heard a helicopter.’
‘You did, the air ambulance.’
‘For …?’
‘Ah … well,’ Makin said hesitantly and emit
ted a little emotional gasp.
‘What is it?’ Rik asked.
‘It’s Henry Christie, sir … not good news.’
Jake was glad he had the foresight to ensure the air ambulance was on standby. It arrived in less than ten minutes from its base at Warton and homed in on Jake’s position via the GPS application on his PR.
It was with relief he heard the whump of the rotor blades and then, miraculously, the helicopter was overhead. Fortunately where Jake had found Henry was at a point where the river valley widened and the very experienced pilot was able to touch down carefully on a slightly raised area of stones and pebbles.
Jake cowered as it edged tentatively down and then two paramedics leapt out just before the wheels touched. The pilot did land, but kept the rotors spinning to keep the full weight off the ground.
The paramedics quickly assembled a stretcher after a quick examination, lifted Henry on to it and made their way back to the copter and slid him on board. Almost instantly it began to rise out of the gulley, reached a height well above the hills, tilted and sped south.
Jake watched it disappear then began to trudge back down to the damaged car, wondering what he was going to say to Alison, a prospect that made him stop, wipe his brow and bend over to scoop up handfuls of fresh, cold, ultra-clean water and sluice his head with it.
Sitting in the back of the ambulance following the explosion, Rik knew nothing of these events. The last thing he’d known was that Jake had found Henry’s car and he wasn’t in it.
‘Jake radioed me just as the grenade went off,’ Makin explained. ‘Then I got a bit busy myself.’
‘Understandable.’ Rik paused. ‘So where are we?’ he asked again.
Makin briefed him and Donaldson on as much as she knew of the Henry Christie situation and concluded, ‘But the truth is, that’s all I know. We haven’t heard anything from the hospital.’