Bolt Action

by Charlie Charters

  ‘He’s a prickly little sod, that pilot . . .’

  ‘Perhaps if you met under different circumstances. He’s a bit touchy about the plane being shot down.’

  ‘I guess I’ll have to give him the benefit of the doubt . . .’ Davane is working hard to get onside, the us-versus-them tactic.

  ‘I suppose you’re surprised I know so much about Jeddah Airport?’

  ‘It did sound like you were an expert.’

  ‘Just making it up.’ She can hear Davane grinning. ‘Going on my first haj this year. Got my bags packed. Can’t wait . . .’

  Us versus them. And Tristie’s just about to blow that right out of the water.

  ‘Tell me, who’s online with this call at the moment?’

  Davane has an ever-so chummy approximation of a best-girlfriend voice. ‘I’m really not certain, Tristie . . . the communications people have patched this through to Downing Street or Chequers, wherever the prime minister is, but who is listening right now, I couldn’t say.’

  ‘Is anybody on this call Stateside?’

  ‘No. Wouldn’t have thought so. Not yet. But it’ll get passed over almost as soon as we’re finished.’ She can almost hear Davane’s brain clicking: you go ahead, tell me all the little secrets, and we’ll parse them, and drip-feed them to Washington . . .

  ‘Good. Because this is what I want.’

  ‘I’m sorry, did you just . . .’

  ‘This is what I want, and I don’t have much time.’

  ‘For a second there . . .’ and Davane chuckles ‘. . . I thought I heard you say, This is what I want.’

  For the first time she raises her voice. Serious. ‘Noppy . . . shut up and pay attention, we don’t have much time.’ Button and Whiffler both wince. There’s a singular fierceness in her eyes that both men have seen before. Not to be trifled with.

  She gives Davane the backstory. Everything about Ward 13 and the long journey here. Starting with Sir Dale Malham, his missing £1.2 million, the Money for Old Rope access code he uses to control his fortune built up on the back of the armed forces. Dougal MacIntyre’s computer. The DRAM chip containing enough classified information to make redundant the Trident missile programme, and with it the four Vanguard submarines. The threat to the Ministry of Defence, the broken Military Covenant, the deadline which runs out tomorrow and the adverts in The Times . . . Everything. She also offers up the names of Button and Whiffler. They would have connected them to her by now anyway, from the passenger list, but at least it shows good faith.

  ‘Sure you haven’t forgotten anything?’ is Davane’s laconic reply. ‘Bullion heist perhaps?’

  ‘I think that’s about it.’

  ‘And so, apart from being able now to bring an end to a half-dozen police investigations, explain, if you will, what any of your crusading has to do with me or Her Majesty’s Government?’

  ‘Because, whatever happens on this plane . . . that DRAM chip and all the information on it survives. I’m not carrying it with me. And, without me to safeguard it, who knows where it might end up?’

  On her end, Davane makes a low soughing noise. Not quite reaching a moan, but stronger than a sigh. ‘If you know what’s good for you, you won’t . . .’

  Tristie cuts across her. ‘. . . I’ve seen reports that Trident is going to cost fifteen billion. But you know how these things work, long lunch here, couple of consultants there, and it’s suddenly twenty-five billion. You factor in maintenance costs over the next thirty years, and you’re looking at perhaps seventy-five or eighty billion . . . Jeez.’

  ‘Have you thought what would happen to this country if every Tom, Dick and Harry with a wee grudge did what you are doing?’

  You want to play philosophy? . . . ‘Noppy, if everybody was doing it then I’d be a fool to do any different.’

  ‘I was always taught that the path of Duty is the way to Glory. If you aren’t happy with something you keep it to yourself. Work through the problem. Or keep buggering on, to use Churchill’s words.’

  ‘Well, to paraphrase somebody cleverer than me, if everybody is thinking the same way then nobody’s actually doing any thinking.’

  Button’s knuckles are white, clutching tight on the seat, as he listens in. The other side of him, Whiffler is pacing nervously up and down the aisle. This is as much their future as it is hers. Tristie tries to ignore them. ‘. . . Now wouldn’t it be a hell of a thing to have all that money wasted, flushed down the toilet, because of a little DRAM chip that got lost and ended up, I don’t know, in unfriendly hands.’

  Noppy’s voice goes deathly cold. A whisper. ‘Girl. I don’t know you, but I think you must have heard of me. So let’s dispense with the air kisses. Take this piece of advice from someone with a ton of experience in these matters. Don’t. Focking. Well. Do. This.’

  That Antrim accent is ugly as all hell. But it’s the world’s greatest brogue for making threats. Good enough that Tristie bites her bottom lip, trying to work out whether she really is tough enough to make this all-in bet. Rien ne va plus . . .

  She’s saved from this indecision by a bubble of anger that just about overwhelms her. ‘Listen, Noppy. There’s a strong chance I’m going to die in the next couple of hours. What that means for you is this . . . I don’t care to be threatened. When you get hold of my files, you’ll see the life I’ve lived. For reasons of self-preservation my life is a small circle of just what I need. Just enough room for the very few things that matter to me. Now that I can see how this hijack is likely to play out, that circle is tightening. Getting real small. All the shit gets pushed outside. Your threats and indignation, for instance. And all I’ve got inside my little circle are the people who fought with me, my bloody soldiers, and protecting them from their government, our government, from what it was we thought we were fighting for.’

  Noppy clicks her tongue over her teeth. ‘That’s a nice little speech. So nice in fact that I’m sensing some wool being pulled over my eyes.’ Click, click with the teeth. ‘You see . . . I hear the shrillness and histrionics, and I guess I have to take what you say at face value. But then, something doesn’t make sense. If I were you, and I’d got myself so unhinged by injustices perpetrated against me . . .’Click, click. ‘. . . then my one little bargaining chip, well, I’d have kept that little DRAM chip as close as I could. No matter what I was up to.’

  Big grin. Trapdoor shuts. ‘Then you’d be making the same mistake everybody else does. Women like us. You and me. Nobody takes us seriously, do they? What can a female know? And that’s how we beat ’em. Don’t we, Noppy? Because they don’t take us seriously until it’s way too late.’

  Them and us.

  The hiss and whine of satellite static hides a lengthy stillness. Impasse. Dead air. Stand-off. The Ulsterwoman draws a breath to speak, not to succumb, but with a weary sense of resignation in her voice. ‘So tell me what you want . . .’

  Tristie tries to keep the relief out of her voice. ‘Thank you, Noppy. I promise, you’ll have no regrets . . .’ Button reaches across to muss with her hair, a big shit-eating grin on his broad, smiling face.

  ‘I’m just the water carrier here, remember. No promises.’

  And she spends the next couple of minutes going through what the Attorney General has to write in his letter. The names, Tristesse Merritt, Barry Ackwith, etc. The list of their ‘crimes’, and the AG’s irrevocable undertaking that, following a detailed Shawcross exercise, he had determined it would be against the national interests to prosecute the aforementioned for the incidents described. Both now and in the future. Please instruct cessation of any outstanding investigations, etc. Cc’d to the Director of Public Prosecutions, the Minister of Justice and the prime minister.

  ‘Shawcross?’ Noppy exclaims. ‘That’s legal textbook stuff. They don’t teach that at grenade-throwing school or wherever you went.’

  ‘No point picking a fight unless you’ve worked out how to finish the guy off.’

  Tristie looks at her watch. It�
��s still on London time. 1437. ‘By fifteen thirty hours I would like my people in the UK to tell me that the news about the three hundred and fifteen million is the Sun, the Daily Mail and the BBC websites. The sort of splash you can’t walk back. Dress it up how you like, but that three-fifteen-over-three-years goes out.’

  ‘What about the DRAM chip?’

  ‘Three forty-five p.m. Just under seventy-five minutes from now. We exchange the computer and the chip for the AG’s letter. Put the letter in a sealed, clear plastic file. And be waiting for my call on the steps of Thames House. Right on the junction of Horseferry Road and Millbank . . .’ She pictures the spot in her mind. A four-way roundabout with a tiny traffic island dwarfed by the eleven storeys of Thames House and its sister building, Imperial Chemical House. Two massive neoclassical structures of white Portland stone, looking imperiously across the north end of Lambeth Bridge towards the South Bank.

  ‘Listen. I don’t do drop-offs and walkabouts.’

  ‘Yes you do. Today, you have to. For good or for bad, Noppy, I’m trusting you.’

  ‘Well then, you should be trying harder to make me like you. Maybe I’m thinking in seventy-five minutes this might be over already . . . Ms Merritt go swim-swim with the fishes.’

  ‘If you think life’s hard now, dealing with your hook-handed preachers and bedsit terrorists, you just wait till a plane full of innocent Muslims has been shot out of the skies. Try to wrap your security services around that little problem.’ And Tristie finds herself thinking about Salahuddin. Not a radical by any stretch of the imagination, but a man with genuine indignation over Iraq. Presumably Afghanistan too. ‘There are at least twenty local authorities in Britain under whose jurisdiction the Muslim population is over ten per cent. MI5 got enough CCTV cameras to cover that? Enough of your spooks and snitches, and law courts and prisons?

  ‘Think about it, Noppy . . . think about what the world’s going to look like if this plane goes down.’ And on that cheery note, she hangs up. Let the old girl think a bit about the hell-storm everybody is flying towards.

  Then she turns to Whiffler. ‘Let’s sit down with the captain, go through in detail why we can’t get into that cockpit. We must be missing a trick. Somewhere.’

  But where? Where?

  MI5 Headquarters

  Thames House

  Noppy’s office is deathly quiet, has been for almost a minute, until the arrival of Pyjama-girl, who advances nervously across the carpeted room. Clutched to her chest, the files she’s been able to dig up on Captain Tristesse Merritt. From what she’d been able to casually glance over, the woman is pretty, stunning even. Determined. And deadly, if all the redacted and access-sensitive protocols are anything to go by.

  Sheila ‘Noppy’ Davane doesn’t use the office-standard fluorescent lighting. The only illumination of her brooding form is from a green-hooded brass lamp on the desk. Thus lit, she looks decidedly malevolent, her face lined with dark crevices. She’s still holding the phone in her hand.

  ‘Ms Davane?’ And Pyjama-girl inches forward. ‘The call was forwarded. Everybody’s in a COBRA meeting. They want you to join them in Downing Street . . .’

  COBRA stands for Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, the name for an emergency gathering of ministers and senior civil servants to chew over any breaking crisis. It meets perhaps four or five times a year. Fuel disruptions, flooding, whatever. Now a hijacking that is unleashing a wave of civil and racial disturbance in Britain that could make the Brixton and Toxteth riots look like a pre-school food fight.

  The Ulsterwoman snaps out of her trance and blinks at her assistant. ‘That woman is talking to someone, she has eyes and ears on the ground. Someone in London. Using a mobile. Must be. I want them found. Tell GCHQ they must be traced.’

  And as Davane takes the files from Pyjama-girl and then waves her off, the young woman is sure she hears her boss muttering, ‘Nobody focking well speaks to me like that.’

  The White House situation room

  Fifteen minutes after Merritt’s call

  0952 Washington time, 1452 London time, 1952 Islamabad time

  All presidents hide things from their electorate – wheelchairs, mistresses, drinking – but Charles Hannah has only one, rather pathetic, little secret. When nervous, really troubled, he picks his nose. Digs in. Not something the official photographer ever commits to posterity. It’s a nervous tic that cries out, I really wish I didn’t have to do this.

  Everybody in the room has their battle face switched on and the mood is grim because the basic decision has been taken. This plane has to be shot down. Not now, but soon, and by those two US Navy jets if need be, though preferably by forces from within the NORAD command structure. So the rest of the world can see the USA and Canada standing together. Mutual protection. Joint airspace sovereignty, and so on. But to get to soon – and when exactly is soon? – they need the Canadians. And everybody’s waiting for the Canadians to call back . . .

  According to the filed flight plan, PK412 will enter NORAD airspace in Canada, making land near the Inuit settlement of Nain in Newfoundland. That a flight to New York crosses into Canada first has injected an extra set of decision-makers, who have to be assembled and briefed, and then cajoled into confirming or at least acquiescing in the shoot-down.

  To ensure no time is lost, the NORTHCOM/NORAD commander, an American general, had scrambled four Canadian CF-18 Hornets from 5 Wing, based at the RCAF base at Goose Bay, only 250 miles from Nain. That action hadn’t needed Ottawa’s agreement. Each Hornet is carrying two wingtipmounted AMRAAM air-to-air missiles, as well as internal Gatling guns that fire 6,000 20mm shells a minute. The CF-18s will link up with the two US Navy Super Hornets, which are at this moment in the process of being refuelled in midair.

  Washington had presented its case to its Canadian counterparts by live video link from the situation room. Included in this had been excerpts from the rambling radio transmission from the 777’s cockpit . . .

  ‘. . . To enjoy the blessings of our Lord, Allah requires us to die and kill in his name. Read the Koran and you will find this truth, this absolute truth and never again can you deny this because the Koran says so . . .’

  . . . and lots of windy talk from a nervous President Charles Hannah about the time-tested structure and integrity of NORAD, the single military theatre concept, You Need Us And We Need You.

  But the tone has been set by Kent Jemison, the craggy country lawyer turned Canadian prime minister who had noted, rather suspiciously, that this was not a typical NORAD incursion. He said his own minister of national defence was telling him this was something neither his military nor politicians past or present had hypothesised. Moreover the premise of NORAD’s recent war-gaming, Jemison pointed out, had been to deal with sneak attacks, cruise missiles fired from offshore vessels being a favourite scenario. Not a lumbering jet that’s clearly signalled its intentions from out in the middle of the Atlantic.

  The distress of the passengers trapped on board, being broadcast round the world, had also given Jemison reason to pause. ‘It pains me. I tell you it pains me,’ and he had shaken his head with great sorrow, perhaps a little too theatrically. Already, he said, there had been reports from Ontario that the country’s modest Pakistani population were showing their feelings. Riot police deployed in the cities of Pickering and Guelph, and the districts of East York and Rexdale in Toronto. And his country’s shrill, America-phobic liberal left would be outraged once they worked out Canada’s role in the decision-making. Acting on this, as only a politician would, Jemison was as circumspect as possible in everything he said and did: Let the record show I never . . .

  Just before signing off from Ottawa, to huddle and come up with a decision, the prime minister had stroked his lumberjack beard, looking straight into the lens, and noted, in his homespun rural way, that, darn it, the simplest technical decisions can carry the most grievous political and strategic consequences. ‘I hope our friends in Washington understand what we’re going thro
ugh here. Few people in my country appreciate NORAD and why we keep signing up to being your junior partner . . .’ Grim shake of the head. ‘. . . For all our sakes, I gotta make sure we take the right decision here. Mr President, we’re aware of the time constraints so I’ll get back to you on this presently . . .’

  Presently? That had been twenty minutes ago . . . One of the aides in the communications room scuttles in to say they’re having technical difficulties re-establishing a secure and encrypted live link with Ottawa. As if confirming this, the plasma screen jumps from black to a picture filled with white noise . . . ominous.

  Inside a black Jaguar XJ 2.7

  En route to Downing Street

  Sheila ‘Noppy’ Davane, stuck in traffic behind a temporary police cordon, fumes. ‘Who the hell is protesting today?’ Pyjama-girl is by her side, on a call to one of the assistants coordinating the COBRA meeting.

  Davane’s driver cranes forward, slowly reads off a couple of the signs. ‘Hands Off Our Fishing Grounds . . . Hooked. Gutted. Fried By This Government.’

  The Ulsterwoman shakes her head irritably, puts the carphone that she’d been using over the top of her shoulder, telling the man to whom she’d been talking to hold. Gets back to reading through what she’d been able to access of the personnel file of Tristesse Merritt. One item of particular interest, a news story from the Observer dated less than four years ago.

  PIG SLURRY MYSTERY

  OF IRA MAN’S DEATH

  Carrickmacross, Ireland – The badly decomposed remains of Albert ‘Click’ Morris, former IRA crime boss turned Sinn Fein parliamentarian, are being examined today by specialist Garda forensic officers, after a skeleton was discovered earlier this week under more than a tonne of rotting pig slurry near remote farm buildings, about fifteen miles west of the market town of Dundalk.