Bolt Action

by Charlie Charters

  Female, single, officer accommodation.

  The gas fire Tristie shared with two other females was condemned the day after she moved in. In the next two months, nothing. No one came to sort it out. And the roof leaked. From the roof space daylight was visible between the tiles, the wind whistling constantly. She rang to report it and her complaint was routed to a call centre in Liverpool. They seemed to care less. Four weeks later an odd-job man with a ladder tried to patch it up, but complained the roofing team were ‘too overworked’ and ‘under-resourced’ to attend. The place was slick with damp. An infestation of black scum, a fungal tidemark, stained the walls at head height in all of the rooms. And, if it hadn’t been the depths of winter, you could have sworn there was moss growing underfoot, lifting the carpet off the cement underfloor. The saddest smells, of damp and decay. It was like being trapped within the pages of a Dickens novel.

  When are you going to stop pretending nothing’s wrong? That little voice droning away in Tristie’s head . . .

  Ticking away in the back of Tristie Merritt’s mind had been that constant tone of conscience. Maddening. She felt extreme guilt about this, hence the harping voice, but to begin with not enough guilt to do anything about it, to use the skills the army had taught her. Not yet anyway.

  There are so few things left that make this country great, as in Great Britain. But the quality of her soldiers positively is one of those. The sort of excellence you could stand up against the best anywhere in the world. Now, finally, Tristie Merritt had got her act together, ready to do something. A small tip of the hat to the can-do spirit of the army that had embraced her when she edged through the door of the local recruitment office, emaciated, washed out and almost feral, aged sixteen.

  When are you going to stop pretending there’s nothing you should be doing to help?

  So, one particularly wretched night of damp and draughty indignation, Tristie huddled into her borrowed greatcoat, gulped down her meds and decided she couldn’t wait to get out. Get that medical discharge. Get out of the whole damned show, and start up Ward 13.

  The combat injury that Tristie Merritt suffered in Afghanistan had made it unlikely she would ever return to the elite Special Reconnaisance Regiment, a special forces unit still commonly known by its former pseudonym as 14 Intelligence Company, or, more simply, ‘the Det’. She was posted back to the Adjutant General’s Corps. Truthfully it was make-work. The army didn’t know what to do with her. But it didn’t matter now. All the time she was fixed on setting up Ward 13.

  And her first recruit, Ferret, a sniper, would be the most important. Not least because she would want him to vouch for anybody else she might need from within the Parachute Regiment.

  The first thing Tristie had noticed about Ferret was his hands. Exquisite long fingers. Hairless. Not a tremor or shiver. Easy to imagine those gentle fingers laid over the dark metal breech of his sniper’s long-range rifle. Ferret’s army docket said he was one of the few using the L115A1. He could take out a target with an 8.59mm bullet almost a mile distant. It was all in those fingers.

  His fingers were about the only flesh on display as Ferret was lying in a civilian hospital bed, one leg raised and his face and head wrapped tight with bandages. About typical for what happens when you drive into a lamp-post at fifty miles an hour. The pink of his nose and little tufts of brown hair were the only contrast to the overall white of his dressings. With an IV plugged into his right arm and an ECG pulse bipping quietly on a monitor over his head, he looked a hell of a mess. There was a strong smell of alcohol sweating through his pores.

  He seemed sunken against his pillow, in the middle of his own little head-spinning world of guilt.

  Tristie sat down, took one of his hands. ‘You’re in a bit of a mess, Corporal.’

  No reply. His hand was cold and still. Not a twitch.

  ‘My name is Captain Merritt. I’m with Staff and Personnel Support. On attachment with your battalion at the moment.’

  She sensed him shuffle in his bed a little on hearing the rank. He was lying a little more straight. Then he took back his hand, to work a small gap between the bandages covering his lips. Just enough to speak.

  ‘Is that the same Merritt who was in 14 Company?’

  It made her smile. The infamous Tristie Merritt. ‘I don’t know of any others.’ 14 Company, or the Det, as it was variously known when Merritt joined, were the army’s elite undercover surveillance unit, sometimes referred to as the eyes and ears of the SAS. Unusually, given that close quarters battle is a speciality, 14 Company and its successor, the SRR, actively recruits females.

  ‘You still with the Det, Captain?’

  ‘No. I’m in a civilian hospital with you.’

  ‘How come . . . If you don’t mind me asking?’

  ‘Same problem as you.’

  ‘You a pisshead, Captain?’

  ‘No.’ She chuckled at that. ‘Not a pisshead. Injured.’

  Ferret took his time to think on that. ‘They say you can fight. Box, I mean.’ Sightless as he was, his voice sounded full of wonder.

  ‘They say you can shoot.’

  ‘Good enough to end up in here,’ and with that, and an uuunth sound that registered incredible pain, he turned away. Towards the light of the window.

  Army paperwork showed that Ferret had had an unblemished disciplinary record until about four years before. Then the slow downward spiral had started. The investigating Military Police had even been kind enough to transcribe the incident in Basra.

  One hundred and twenty degrees of heat. Battledress. Orders that required no movement. Minimal water. Plus that special jumpiness that operations in built-up areas always give you. One final factor to send a tremor through your bowels: the knowledge that in Iraq nothing is as it seems to be. Or as it should be. This was personified in the shape of the slouching Iraqi liaison officer whose real name everybody had long stopped using. He had aviator glasses, a droopy moustache and looked remarkably like Saddam himself. He was known simply as Shifty.

  Intelligence said the Jaish Al Mahdi would be sending through a big arms shipment made to look like a truckload of sheep, of all things. This would be their restock of the improvised explosive devices that had been decimating British convoys. The handover was to be at a crossroads.

  The file said the surveillance group had been in place for about three uncomfortable, fretful hours when a short, veiled woman appeared around a corner to the rear of the carefully hidden team. The heels of her open-toe sandals raising little dust clouds as she scurried up the street. Full plastic bag weighing down one arm.

  Almost as if a scent was in the air, the woman sensed something was wrong. Something that needed investigating. It had started innocuously enough: a quick burst of radio traffic, Someone get this woman away from here. Then the panic. A spotter from the Iraqi Army had seen her reaching under her veil; judged this to be a threatening posture, or so the inquiry afterwards had been told. There had been a surge of Arabic yammering on the radio. Back and forth. Louder and louder. Then came the translation. Shifty was now shouting in English at the top of his voice. She’s not a damned female. More desperation and confusion . . . Shifty panicking now, She’s JAM in a veil . . . Unsettled, the British commander made a thoughtful errrrr sound on the radio that seemed to take for ever to end. On my life, she’s a bomber, promised Shifty. Silence on the comms. Now, now, now, he shrieked. You must. You must. Then one very clear order from the officer in charge, as the veiled woman took a step into the shadows at the back of the surveillance post: Go lethal. Combatant.

  So. Ferret had taken his shot. From just over three hundred yards. Compensating for crosswind and bullet drop, he drilled his shot through the civilian’s skull. Just as he had been trained to do. Watched the faintest spray of brain fluid and blood in the tinted lens of his sight, and the whiplash jerk of the head and the tipping forward, followed by the graceless collapse. Readied himself for the next shot.

  It had been a woman. Ferret
had known that almost as soon as the round slugged into her, wrenching her head around and towards him. Unmistakably a woman. He had seen the dark eyelashes of a woman. Wide open. Fluttering in alarm and shock.

  Moments later, racing around a corner had scooted a seven-year-old boy. Unkempt. A little toughie. Clothes covered in dust. Trying to catch up, looking for Mum.

  Mum?

  With his scope, like the trained professional he was, Ferret had tracked the boy as he tugged hopefully on the hem of the veil. Mum? He was wearing a football strip made by Umbro, the last one sponsored by Sharp: home colours for the seasons 1998–2000. White collar, black zip-up and Umbro diamonds marked out in white and black against the red of the sleeves. Manchester United. His team.

  And Ferret felt his face flush with shame. That it had come to this.

  The unforgiving heat notched up yet more degrees of suffering. Remorseless. He could feel the spidery touch of cramp across the inside of his thighs. And that light. That blinding light. Even when you closed your eyes it was still there. Drilling down through your skull, sawing into the vertebrae. Like the world’s tightest neck brace.

  Just at that point beyond all pain, there was Shifty again. Screaming in Ferret’s earpiece. Babbling in Arabic, then barking in English, trying to insert himself into the chain of command: Take down the boy, he was bellowing. You pussies, kill the boy.

  And that was when his life started to spin out of control . . . landing up in the here and now.

  Ferret turned back to face Tristie. He put his hand in hers. Gently. Only later did she realise he was perhaps feeling to see whether she was wearing a wedding band. ‘You boxed a man once in the ring.’

  ‘A very small man. More like a boy really.’

  ‘But you beat him.’

  Small laugh. ‘He was an idiot. And I was seriously pissed off. No great skill to beating idiots.’

  Ferret’s voice was insistent. ‘But he was a male.’

  Like that would have made a difference. A flicker of memory stirs within Tristie; the standard army boxing ring: twenty-three foot by twenty-three in a cold, draughty gym in the middle of February. It was one of the hoops everybody had to jump through, to get into the Det. All the instructors were on one side looking up through the ropes at the recruits. The test wasn’t so much to find the best boxer. That was largely about technique. No. These guys wanted to test for killer instinct. So the contests were Male vs Female: was the male tough enough to punch a female. Really put her down. Conversely could the female give as good as she got.

  The test was known then, as it still is today, by the acronym GLF. Go Like Fuck.

  ‘He wouldn’t stop looking at my breasts. He was never going to win.’

  She thought she saw a smile ease across Ferret’s chapped lips. He reached for a water bottle and sucked on the plastic feed pipe.

  ‘Have they breathalysed you yet?’

  ‘They tried, Captain, but the nurse shooed them away. Said they would be back within the next half an hour.’

  Tristie looked at her watch.

  By the way he was holding himself, Tristie could tell that the policeman waiting to breathalyse Ferret was ex-military. A proud man, with a heavily lined face and broad shoulders. He had looked tired and tense that morning. Perhaps Ferret’s case mirrored something in his own life: the world biting you in the backside when you least deserve it.

  The two of them exchanged a few polite words after she had left Ferret’s bed. Then Tristie played her one card: Corporal, she said, my army-issue car seems to have been scratched up the side, and the tyres slashed. Who should I report this to? Her eyes had pleaded Can I buy this kid some time? She could say nothing more. It either happened, or it didn’t.

  The policeman sucked at the back of his teeth for a moment, but she sensed just the smallest glint of complicity. Thrilled to be personally putting a finger on the scales of injustice. He turned and walked away, tut-tutting as he strode down the corridor. He didn’t come back to Ferret for almost five hours while he fussed in the car park, tooled about with the CCTV images, poked around some broken fences and hassled some kids on bikes who should have been at school.

  That was how Ferret passed his test. But only by a tenth of a milligram. Sufficient for it not to affect the terms on which he had to leave the army.

  Nobody would say anything either about the matter with Shifty, back in Basra. Because instead of taking out the kid, from almost nine hundred yards, Ferret had drilled a shot through Shifty’s crotch. Bad news on so many levels.

  You’ve got to understand the politics most of all: the hopes and dreams of the Coalition lay in the new Iraqi Army, especially their officer corps. In many eyes Shifty was the future of the country. Indeed, he was who we were fighting for. But then real soldiers are notoriously poor at playing politics. Ferret had not only emasculated him, but worse. While Shifty was kicking around in the dust holding what was left of his reproductive organs, Ferret had taken out both knees as well. ‘Remarkable marksmanship,’ the line officer had noted in his file. ‘Sadly, not welcome back in this operational theatre.’

  Two months later, when Ferret left the army, he joined Tristie Merritt. Gladly becoming the first recruit into Ward 13. Obviously she had passed some basic test of his; some gut-check sense of whether this female, former army officer was on the level or not. And through Ferret they had linked up with Piglet, who would be the linguistic expert, as well. Others would come on board once they had their hands on some of Sir Dale Malham’s ill-gotten gains.

  The deed was fixed for a Friday. Late afternoon. In November. There was the usual darkness, blustery rain and endless gloom.

  Ferret was sat in the Concorde Lounge of British Airways Terminal 5, dressed as expensively as they could afford in a navy tuxedo suit. Playing the City gent. Tie already undone. Jacket and cufflinks off. Sleeves rolled up.

  Likewise Malham, who was on the couch opposite, un winding after a hectic week picking the pockets of the MoD. A double Scotch on the rocks rested on his stomach as he sprawled out, feeding himself cashews, and watching lazy-eyed the business of Heathrow through the towering height of windows before him. Malham was booked on the six o’clock flight up to Newcastle. There, the former MP would slide into his pale green Bentley and take off to his country house. This was the fifth Friday night that Ward 13 had followed him. They knew his movements.

  Tristie was in a poky hotel room almost three hundred miles away. Just a couple of hundred yards from Newcastle airport, in fact. Fretting. Thinking of all the things that could go wrong. And Piglet, recruit number two . . . he had the best gig. Waiting for a call in a distant beach bar on the north side of Grand Cayman. Probably looking out over a marina full of yachts and launches, and young, sleek women and old, grumpy men. Scrunching the warm sand through his toes, no doubt. Bastard.

  Getting the money was down to Ferret and Tristie. Simple as that. There was an open mobile link between them. Ferret was in her left ear, both of them wearing hands-free phones. She checked her watch. A couple of minutes before 5.30 p.m. The flight was on time. Within the next ten minutes they’d be nudging their VVIP clients to the gate. It was now or never. The tension was tight in Tristie’s chest. In fifteen minutes she was either going to look very smart or impossibly stupid, with the prospect of a lot of police forever on her tail.

  She thought about Sir Dale Malham in the pages of Horse & Hound, at a celebrity clay pigeon shoot with his brand-new, lovely little 20-bore Purdey over-and-under. How long can you pretend there’s nothing wrong with this situation? Then she thought about the appalling grot, the stench of that bathroom at Tidworth barracks. The contrast was just what Tristie needed to steel her nerves. When exactly are you going to stop turning the other cheek?

  ‘Ferret. What are you looking at?’

  ‘Biggest titties I ever saw.’ This is the downside of giving expensive surveillance equipment to former soldiers. Unsupervised.

  ‘Don’t go all horn-dog on me now.’

&
nbsp; ‘Hey.’ Sound of indignation from Ferret. ‘I’m just watching what Malham’s watching. Being as one with the target.’

  In the Heathrow lounge, Ferret was wearing a pair of wholly unremarkable glasses, except for the small button camera fitted into the frame just by the bridge of his nose. The image generated, the girl with big breasts, would be playing in the palm of his hand on a digital video recorder no bigger than a credit card. The same image was also being stored on a secure digital card.

  ‘You’re close enough to Malham?’ There was no zoom function on the spy camera; you only achieved that effect by physically getting closer to the target. ‘You’ve got him framed tight enough?’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Ferret’s voice was reassuringly breezy. ‘He looks plenty good from here. Distracted by them big bazoomers.’

  ‘That’s why God gave ‘em to us. To bewitch and befuddle.’

  ‘We’re going to get this guy. Turn him upside down and shake him for all he is worth.’

  Ferret was right. Focus. Get a grip, girl. Tristie looked down at the small, boxy worktable in her three-star hotel room near Newcastle airport. The files were all tidied away. The phones were ready. She had hands-free connections in both ears. The paperwork was laid out. She was in control. Was never going to be more ready . . .

  ‘OK. Sir Dale Malham. Come on down.’

  *

  Tristie Merritt dialled Malham’s mobile number from the hotel phone. And the first response was from Ferret, watching him in the lounge. Putting down his drink, spilling a few nuts on to the couch. Fumbling through his jacket pockets. ‘I hope that’s you calling, ‘cos he’s looking for his phone.’

  ‘Is me. Stand by.’

  ‘Got the phone in his hand. Looking at the number on his screen. Confused . . .’ Malham’s screen would show the number 0191-214 . . . enough for him to know the call came from north-east Newcastle. Somewhere within a triangle of land between Ponteland, Throckley and Kingston Park that also included the airport. A lot of housing estates. Next to his former constituency in fact. Several dozen millions of pounds ago.