by John Macrae
THE VENGEANCE MAN
JOHN MACRAE
© John MacRae, 2012, all rights reserved
John MacRae has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published 2012 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John MacRae is the cover name of a former senior Intelligence Officer with a Special Forces background. He has written extensively on intelligence and military history, and has worked for BBC television and other TV companies as an advisor on military and intelligence subjects.
He saw active service in the Falkland Islands, Cyprus, Arabia, and Northern Ireland as well taking part in several bloody bureaucratic battles in the political jungles of Whitehall, NATO and Brussels.
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"The Vengeance Man is the best new action thriller this year"
Matt Lynn, author of the best-selling Death Force series.
"A heart-pumping ride, with more twists than a roller-coaster."
Tom Kasey, author of the best-selling Trade Off.
“This is so close to the real thing I found it impossible to put down…”
A serving SAS officer, currently in Afghanistan.
“Whoever MacRae is, he certainly understands the Special Forces world…”
A retired SAS non-commissioned officer.
“A super read…I loved it…Yes!”
An independent TV production company’s professional Reader
“A great read... Desmond Bagley meets John le Carré…”
A literary agent.
Contents
CHAPTER 1. Iran, Kurdistan
CHAPTER 2. On the Run. North Western Iran
CHAPTER 3. The Iran-Turkish Frontier
CHAPTER 4. London
CHAPTER 5. London
CHAPTER 6. Pesaro. North East Italy,
CHAPTER 7. London,
CHAPTER 8. Spring. London
CHAPTER 9. London
CHAPTER 10. London
CHAPTER 11. Whitehall's Revenge
CHAPTER 12. Specialist Insurance services
CHAPTER 13. A Nice Quiet Office Job in London.
CHAPTER 14. A London Suburb
CHAPTER 15. Prelude
CHAPTER 16. Kent
CHAPTER 17. London
CHAPTER 18. The Strand
CHAPTER 19. Brixton
CHAPTER 20. London
CHAPTER 21. Brixton
CHAPTER 22. A Marked Increase in Gun Crime
CHAPTER 23. A Little Relief
CHAPTER 24. An Invitation London
CHAPTER 25. Dinner in Hampstead
CHAPTER 26. The Arms of Venus, Warminster
CHAPTER 27. Trouble at t’ Mill
CHAPTER 28. The New South Bank Show
CHAPTER 29. A Pint with a Pal, Whitehall
CHAPTER 30. Nocturne in Mayfair
CHAPTER 31. The Diplomatic Quarter
CHAPTER 32. A Near Death Experience, The Flat
CHAPTER 33. Last Ride to Valhalla. London
CHAPTER 34. Even the Walls Have Ears. London
CHAPTER 35. A Downturn in Business. London
CHAPTER 36. Things are looking up? London
CHAPTER 37. The Combined Interrogation Team
CHAPTER 38. Trouble
CHAPTER 39. Confessional
CHAPTER 40. Something in the city
CHAPTER 41. A Stroll On The Embankment
CHAPTER 42. Surrounded?
CHAPTER 43. A Holiday Abroad
CHAPTER 44. Wapping: The Conscience of the Press
CHAPTER 45. Afghan Border; The Hindu Kush
CHAPTER 46. The People’s Republic of China
THE VENGEANCE MAN
PROLOGUE
‘A PUBLIC SERVICE’
The old black, left hand drive Mercedes swept down London’s Richmond Hill. The two occupants chatted amiably, lean men in their late twenties, maybe a little older. Both looked fit and hard despite the dark city suits. The car radio played a Bach Brandenburg concerto.
Neither paid much attention to the road. The Mercedes swung in and out, overtaking effortlessly, making progress through the early Saturday afternoon traffic. Almost too late the driver saw the stationary van turning right at the traffic lights ahead, indicator flashing.
Expertly he dropped a gear and pulled hard left, forcing a large Ford to brake sharply to let the Merc in. Both cars accelerated through the lights and continued down the hill. The Ford pulled out and, engine roaring, drew alongside the Mercedes while inside four youths screamed insults at the driver of the Merc, arms waving, fists and obscenities flying.
As if seeing them for the first time the Mercedes slowed, flashing a steady turn sign and slowly and deliberately pulled up at the kerb.
The Ford screeched to a halt behind it and the four occupants spilled into the road, bent on vengeance.
‘Who’d’joo fink you’re fucking cutting up, mate?’ bellowed the driver as he ran forward. His mates piled out behind. They wore Millwall football scarves and looked like football hooligans. Someone was going to get a good kicking.
The Mercedes driver got out of the left side of the car and straightened up. He walked slowly back to the Ford. He was about six feet tall, with sharp blue eyes and taut cheek bones. The leader of the youths hesitated, then jabbed an accusatory finger at the silent dark suited figure walking deliberately towards him.
‘What’s you’re fuckin’ gime, arse’ole . . .?’he began.
His words stopped abruptly as without warning the Mercedes driver punched him hard, full in the face. There was a scrunching noise as the yob’s hands went to the ruin of his nose and mouth, bright blood exploding scarlet in the autumn sun. The other yobboes stopped, shocked by the speed and ferocity of the violence. The broken teeth and nose were a red catastrophe. The leader collapsed by the Ford, a high wailing coming from the smashed face, blood pouring through his fingers.
The Mercedes driver began to advance on the others. A lock of dark hair had fallen over his forehead. The three backed off.
‘Anyone else want to make something of it? He enquired. The voice was low with a slight Scots tang to the edges. ‘Well?’ He rubbed his knuckles, taking a sudden step forward. The youths retreated scrambling over themselves to get back to the safety of their car.
The Mercedes driver stopped and eyed them with a look of contempt, then turned abruptly back to his own vehicle. At the now open passenger door his companion stood watching in the road, disbelief written on his face.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? They’ll crucify you for this.’
‘Ach, forget it,’ said the driver. ‘C’mon, let’s away. Get in.’
Both men swung into the Mercedes. The driver started up and pulled calmly away.
‘Look,’ he began reasonably, ‘they were looking for trouble and they found it. Let’s say they’ve just been introduced to the reality of violence.’
His companion pulled a face, ‘You could say that . . .’
‘Let’s face it,’ growled the driver, glancing in the mirror. ‘Those little dogsturds aren’t going to complain, eh?’
‘Even so,’ the fair haired one began, ‘you shouldn’t get involved like that. Not with civilians. C’mon Fritz, you know the rules.’
‘Fuck the rules’, said the driver succinctly, concentrating on the traffic ahead as the Mercedes swept towards Westminster. ‘Stop your fussing. They were the ones who went looking for trouble. Well they found it. I’ve just done a public service. Now stop blethering and let’s go and have a drink.’
The fair haired one looked out of his window of the speeding Mercedes and mouthed ‘a public service’ silently to himself. The Bach rose to a cre
scendo. Half smiling he shook his head in disbelief.
Far behind them the doors of the Ford cautiously re-opened as the three shaken youths got out to go to their leader’s aid.
The figure on the ground started to sob through the bloodstained ruin of his face. ‘Christ. Fuck. Oh, Christ. He hit me . . .’
CHAPTER 1
Iran – Kurdistan
I’ll bet you don’t even know where Kurdistan is. Well, let me tell you, it’s not exactly the place where you’d take your holidays. Especially since the ragheads drove those planes into the World Trade Centre a few years back.
But then, not many people know the little triangle of land that connects Turkey to Iraq and Iran. It's in the top right hand corner of Iraq. And the top left hand corner of Iran. It doesn’t often make the TV newsmaps, but when it does it’s trouble. It’s called Kurdistan.
Not by the Turks and Iraqis and Iranians. They hate the Kurds. They call the region Turkey; or Iraq or Iran. They feel strongly about that out there – especially when Saddam was lording it up in Iraq. At best, they all reckon that the Kurds are a bunch of nationalistic trouble makers with dreams of faded glory; at worst they know that they’re nothing but a bunch of cut throat thieves and terrorists, who need keeping down: hard. The late unlamented Saddam Hussein and his boys would agree, I’m sure. So would the Turks. They’d been killing Kurds for as long as I can remember. About the only thing that the Turks, Iraqis and Iranians can agree on is that Kurdistan’s oil was far too valuable to be left to the Kurds…
I know Kurdistan from my days as what the government called a ‘special advisory trainer’. The SAS 'Special Advisory and Training Team' based in Turkey had been a big secret. In those days SAAT had been trying to turn a wild bunch of Kurdish freedom fighters called the Pesh Merga into a disciplined fighting force and give the Iraqis and Saddam grief. Nothing to do with the British government, of course. That would really have pissed off our Turkish NATO allies.
After three weeks I went out on an ambush with them against an Iraqi army convoy to see how they made out. After that experience, I reckoned I should be learning from them. I learned that the Kurdish rebels were killers. Very professional and very nasty, if a bit wild. I also picked up enough of the strange mixture of Farsi, Arabic and Kurdmanji that passes for a language in the mountains.
This time round my role was the same, only different and with a different target: Iran and the Revolutionary Guards. I was a bit older, a bit wiser and a little more senior And the region was in Whitehall’s frame more than ever. The Yanks were agitating to destabilise Christ knows why. Left to their own devices the Ayatollahs would screw themselves, Fundamentalists against Reformers. With or without a nuclear bomb. Iran had had fuck all to do with the WTC attacks. Everyone in the business knew that. But not US Presidents apparently. So Iran was the target, with the Kurds supposedly leading the charge.
‘Operation Attorney’ they called it back in London. Very hush hush, according to Hereford and the briefers in the “Kremlin” building at SAS HQ. Destabilize the Ayatollah’s regime. Grab secret comms material. Part of some great American plan to make a better world, stop them building a bomb, or at least to make things better for everyone else by giving the Iranians grief.
Again, the deal was that this was nothing to do with the SAS or Her Majesty’s Government. That went without saying - officially. But I was still advising an irregular armed group of Kurds in dirty pyjama trousers and raggy turbans heading deep into Iranian territory - only this time they were not renegades in rebellion against Iraq and Turkey, but “gallant allies of the West”, trying to keep the Ayatollahs on the hop. That's what Sal reckoned it was all about.
Sal -- at least, that's what he said his name was -- was a New York American who had briefed me on Attorney at Varagoz in south east Turkey before they infiltrated me over the border. I like Americans, but I'm not a great CIA fan. And Sal screamed 'CIA Special Ops Division' to his finger nails. Sal had been in Kuwait the first time round and didn’t like anyone in the Middle East, from what I could make out. He never quite told me what he’d been doing there but he knew his stuff. No doubt about that. And he’d had been generous enough to provide me with a nice new special forces Land Rover, fully kitted out for action, and every bit of hardware I had asked for; the only notable exception was that he'd provided not one thing stamped 'made in USA'. He had also given me a phenomenal brief on nearly everything I had asked him. There was no doubt that Op Attorney had benefitted from some very good planning back home in the US of A. Nothing on paper, of course. “We don’t need any paperwork, old buddy”
As the two day briefing drew to a close, I found myself warming to the guy. We managed to put away a couple of glasses of some stuff called 'Old Patrero' that Sal claimed was real whiskey, "not that marketing faggots' crap in the Playboy ads with men in plaid skirts..." on the last night. It wasn't bad: for American whiskey. Obviously we were never going to swap life histories, but I did tell Sal, who had a great line in good jokes, that he was the best CIA spook I'd met, whatever his real name was.
Sal exploded. Then he pointed out forcefully that his name really was Sal, that it was short for Salvatore, and that "he didn't work for State or the CIA who were a bunch of slimy shifty creeps who were too gutless to come out to the real world and get their precious hands dirty instead of which they left it to real soldiers like the DIA area intelligence officers who had seen a little action..."
At this point Sal stopped for breath and I could see that he was serious. So I apologised, he called me a Limey sonofabitch, and we had a little more of the Old Patrero.
I turned in at midnight and at dawn we parted good friends, as he saw me off down an unmarked track heading south east into Iran to join my Kurdish gang. "You'll like them," were his parting words. “They're just your kind of people..."
Most of this particular gang were just renegades, the sweepings of the original Kurdish rebels who had been unable to settle after old Mustafa Barzarni died. They would do anything to get at the Iraqis, the Turks or the Iranians. And this time I was going further than I'd ever been, going deep to into the North West corner of Iran where the mountain passes point like fingers of an outstretched hand west back towards the oil wells of Irbil and Mosul in Iraq's northern oilfield, and the passes on the other side lead east, deep into northern Iran.
I won't bore you with all the details - my main task was to ensure that a stateless band of Kurdish gangsters carried out a particular task for HM Government. My main qualification was my previous experience and a smattering of the mix of languages that passes for the local patois. I wasn't going to win a Nobel prize for Kurdish literature, but I could understand most of what went on. When I said jump, they jumped; except, of course, when they claimed they couldn't understand my Kurmanji.
To further encourage the faithful I carried a bag of large and heavy Maria Theresa silver thalers and some gold Krugerrands. Everyone recognizes gold. With the promise of double that amount on completion, I was everyone's favorite uncle. For my own insurance I carried a money belt of sovereigns and stored them carefully.
Up country in the Muslim world everyone needs a little insurance. In the Zagros mountains, a little bit more .
For my further insurance, Sal had thoughtfully provided me with two cheerful Turkish renegade Kurds as bodyguards, courtesy of G2 [Special Operations], TGS, the Turkish General Staff, Ankara. Sal had liked that. "These guys are real trail scouts. TGS has hired themselves the meanest bunch of bastards since Cochise whipped Geronimo. Or was it the other way round? We didn’t get a lot of that kind of stuff back in Queens. Anyway, you're two of a kind. Well, three, if you see what I mean. You'll really like them. They’re cold hearted bastards – just like you…"
He was right. And with a gang of Kurdish rebels I needed those guys to watch my back.
The trouble with the gangs that wander in the mountains is that they are hard to find. They can roam anywhere in the hills. It took us a week out from Turkey to fin
d Jamal Faud and his gang, and another two weeks to encourage them to raid the isolated Iranian garrison and communications centre at Hasak . Nothing to do with HM Government, of course. And certainly not the CIA.
Jamal had had his eye on Hasak for some time. He was a tall grave individual, dark, where many of the Zagros Kurds are startlingly fair, with sombre eyes and a flashing grin that split the black beard like sunlight. If he smiled.
Jamal and his gang lived by a strange mixture of patriotism and piracy. Hasak combined the two nicely, just as Sal had said it would. For a wandering Kurdish land pirate with a hatred of the Iranians, there were rich pickings to be had at Hasak; and it housed a local Revolutionary Guard communications centre full of good things just for me. It was a perfect target, and it wasn't properly defended like the camps on the border. However, Jamal's little group of thirty had shrunk to twenty-six by the time we made the hit on the town; four of them had melted away to take their chances in the mountains rather than face the Iranian Army the hard way.
And it was the hard way. In order to avoid pursuit and hold off trouble as long as possible it was essential that Jamal's men took out the little airstrip near the town. But my real target was the Iranian Guards Command Post in the barracks. As Jamal wanted to loot everything that wasn't nailed down in the Iranian stores dump as well, we ended up by having to split our forces between the three targets. I argued hard against spreading ourselves too thinly, but Jamal had the guns, he wanted the loot and I was the only white face in the discussion, so I backed down, as much to save Jamal's pride as anything. Politically that was cute - militarily it was potentially disastrous.
We hit Hasak just before dawn. It was just like the satellite pictures had shown; a little straggle of white houses, goats, and corrugated roof barracks in the bottom of a scrubby green valley with steep mountain sides standing like walls about two miles out. I led my own group into the little barracks and it was sheer bloody murder.