‘I’m good.’ Thompson smiled.
‘And your little bundle of joy?’
‘Andrew’s fine, too.’
Ellis managed a smile of her own. ‘But really, how’s the little one?’
‘No damage, according to the doctor. I’ll be having regular scans over the coming weeks, but they told me it’s just for reassurance.’
‘That’s good to hear. I imagine Andrew has been trying to mollycoddle you all weekend. He’s only thinking of your well-being.’
‘He has, and he’s right. At first I didn’t think so, but after what happened, I’m happy to let him pamper me for the next year or so.’
Harvey emerged from the break room with two mugs. ‘Morning.’
‘Speak of the Devil, and he shall bring you a lemon green tea.’ Thompson beamed.
‘Stewed for exactly two minutes,’ Harvey said, ‘just as you ordered.’
‘I’ll leave you lovebirds to it. Maynard will be here in ten minutes, probably to discuss our actions over the last couple of weeks.’
‘We got a result,’ Thompson said. ‘What’s to discuss?’
‘With Maynard, there’s always something.’
Ellis entered her office, and had barely had time to boot up her computer when she saw the Home Secretary being escorted onto the main floor. She went to the door and held it open, hoping that one day the show of courtesy might rub off on him. The rotund Yorkshireman took a seat opposite her desk and placed his briefcase on the floor beside his chair, and she once again marvelled at how he could make a Savile Row suit look like a cloth sack. The only thing about him that looked vaguely stately was his £100 haircut.
‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’ Ellis asked amicably, knowing her civility would grate on Maynard. ‘I thought perhaps you might be here to commend my team on the tremendous job they did securing the X3.’
‘Cut the crap, Ellis. You may have prevented an attack, but you also blatantly disregarded orders given to you by one of Her Majesty’s cabinet ministers, namely me.’
‘Oh? And just how did I do that?’
‘I gave you clear instructions to keep me up to date with every aspect of the investigation, yet I didn’t hear about Iqbal al-Mubari until after his arrest. Are you going to tell me it was another spur-of-the-moment thing?’
‘On the contrary,’ Ellis said. ‘We knew about him eight hours before we managed to take him down.’
‘During which time you made no effort to contact me.’
‘And say what, exactly?’ Ellis sat back in her chair, enjoying the battle. ‘You would have had a name, nothing more. Unless you’re saying you would have been able to track him down quicker than my team did, because you’d need a lot of infrastructure and resources to do that, and I haven’t heard anything at the ISC meetings to suggest a rival agency is operating on British soil.’
‘Of course there isn’t,’ Maynard blustered. ‘But that’s no excuse for not passing on the information.’
Ellis adopted a puzzled look. ‘So you admit you wouldn’t have been able to do anything with the name, but you wanted my team to spend hours creating detailed reports for you rather than stopping him? What would that have achieved, I wonder? Oh, I know: the attack would have gone ahead, I would have failed, and you would have a legitimate excuse to get rid of me. Well, I’m sorry, John, but it’ll take more than that to prise me out of this chair.’
Maynard adjusted his tie. ‘It was never about that.’
‘Of course it was!’ Ellis said, going on the offensive. ‘You’re the fourth Home Secretary I’ve served under, and none of your predecessors ever tried to hamstring my department the way you have. They knew our capabilities and limitations but trusted us to do our job without it ever becoming personal. Sure, we had our differences, but we saw past them to get things done. With you, though, everything is geared towards hampering our efforts.’
‘If you’re so disgruntled, why don’t you just resign?’
Ellis looked him in the eye. ‘Because you’d enjoy it too much, and you’re the last man I’d give any pleasure to.’ She couldn’t resist the personal dig.
‘Well, regardless of how you feel, I’ll be submitting a report prior to the next Intelligence and Security Committee meeting, and it’ll be particularly scathing.’
‘Submit away,’ Ellis said, waving a dismissive hand. ‘Once they read it, they can ask you about E Squadron’s recent activities.’
‘They are mandated to aid and assist the security—’
‘Ya-da, ya-da, ya-da,’ Ellis interrupted. ‘I know the script, John, and it doesn’t mention actions against British passport holders on British soil. You overstepped the mark.’
‘I don’t believe I ever discussed them with you,’ Maynard said smugly. ‘You must be mistaken.’
‘Perhaps. Just to be sure, though, I’m going to request the personnel files of all active members on the date Imran al-Hosni was abducted. My team was there and got some very clear footage. It is currently sitting in a database with a false entry date and innocuous file name, so there’s no point doing a search for it. Needless to say, I have the usual backups as well. So, really, it’s up to you. Either tell the ISC why you had al-Hosni snatched – and subsequently killed, I might add – or claim the unit went rogue and hang them out to dry.’
Maynard looked concerned at having had the tables turned on him, and Ellis drove home her advantage. ‘A word of warning. If you make E Squadron take the fall, it’ll be on your own head. You’ll be deliberately ending their careers to protect your own, and some of them might take that personally.’
It wasn’t an idle threat. Ellis knew that to make E Squadron, you had to attain the rank of sergeant as well as be in the top 2 per cent in the regiment. Anyone who had spent many years to achieve such a distinguished role only to have it snatched from them to save a politician’s malodorous hide would naturally feel aggrieved. Whether or not they would seek retribution was another thing, but they would certainly have the motive and capability.
Maynard appeared to be coming to the same conclusion.
‘It seems we have a stalemate,’ he finally said.
Ellis considered it more of a win. She’d staved off another attempt to deprive her of her position, and with a cabinet reshuffle planned for early next year, there was a good chance he’d be shifted sideways and out of her hair.
‘It appears so,’ Ellis agreed. Still, no matter how neatly they’d sewn up the case, one loose thread dangled tantalisingly out of reach. ‘What about Nabil Karim? Did al-Hosni give you anything useful on him?’
‘We’re working on that. He gave up one of their communication methods, an encrypted phone app, and I’ve asked Six to look into it. Hopefully it’ll lead to the man behind all this.’
Ellis hoped so, too. Karim’s plan had been well thought out and, if it hadn’t been for Thompson’s intuition, might well have succeeded. As long as Karim lived, he would remain a danger, and they might not be so lucky next time.
‘I’ll liaise with Martin over at Six,’ she said. ‘We’ll help in any way we can.’
Another attempt to show that co-operation, not contention, was the best way to defeat the enemy, but it seemed lost on Maynard. He simply told her to have a detailed report ready by the end of the day, then picked up his briefcase and left without so much as a goodbye.
Ellis was grateful to see the back of him, and the moment he was gone, she called Harvey into her office to give him his assignment for the day.
EPILOGUE
Friday, 15 September 2017
Sergeant Dan Mitchell saw the plume of dust on the horizon and asked the sniper on the ridge above to confirm the numbers.
‘Two cars, both four up.’
Eight men in total, against the four men in his patrol. It was hardly a fair fight, but Mitchell didn’t mind having the advantage.
Especially today.
In his five years as an SAS sergeant, Mitchell had never been given such precise orders. Normally he’d be given
an objective and the type of mission – reconnaissance, destroy, capture, et cetera – with the method of execution left to him. Not this time. The orders had arrived with the latest resupply, a typed message hidden among their rations and ammunition. He’d thought it a joke at first, but after reading what the target had done to Mohammad Abdulrashid, he could understand why they wanted him to get up close and personal.
Still, Mitchell had wondered why he hadn’t been ordered to capture Karim for transport and interrogation. The terror leader sounded like the ideal candidate for rendition, but his superiors apparently thought otherwise.
‘Which one is Karim in?’ Mitchell asked.
‘Second vehicle, rear seat, right-hand side.’
‘Roger that.’
The small convoy drew nearer, now barely a kilometre away, and Mitchell scanned the area in front of him once more. Two of his men had spent the best part of the morning on their disguises, and for the last hour they’d been lying under the baking Syrian sun, waiting for the target to arrive.
‘Thirty seconds . . .’
Mitchell received bursts of static in reply, which told him his men were ready to go. Seconds ticked by, and Mitchell waited until the first vehicle reached its marker, then pressed down on the handheld detonator.
The 4×4 was thrown into the air and flipped nose over tail before crashing back down to earth on its roof. Fire already engulfed the interior, and the second SUV skidded to a halt behind it.
One of two things would now happen, and Mitchell had prepared for both eventualities. Either the passengers would get out to check on the people in the mangled wreck, or they’d run.
As he expected, it was the latter.
The driver had barely started backing up before a .50-calibre round from the sniper’s rifle hit him above the ear and removed most of his head. The remaining passengers piled out and took cover behind the vehicle, firing wildly into the hills.
With their attention focused on the threat from on high, none noticed the two men emerging from the ground behind them.
When Nabil Karim stopped to change magazines, four more shots rang out. The men either side of him collapsed, and Karim turned to see two heavily armed foreign soldiers standing feet away.
‘Drop it!’
Although shocked by the swift and brutal attack, Karim seemed to regain his composure and slammed a new magazine into his AK-47, but before he could chamber a round, two bullets thumped into him. His right shoulder exploded, quickly followed by his left shin, and the weapon slipped from his grasp as he fell to the sand. He scrambled towards the rifle, but a dusty boot kicked it out of range. Rough hands flipped him onto his back and searched him thoroughly. Finding nothing, the soldier turned him once more and secured his hands behind his back with FlexiCuffs, then pulled him to his knees.
Mitchell called the sniper down from the hill and jogged over to the other troopers, a collapsible camera tripod in his hand.
‘Get the battery,’ he ordered one of the men as he set up a small camcorder. A minute later, the man returned from working under the SUV’s hood. He unscrewed the plastic stoppers and carefully poured the contents of the battery into a wide-necked bottle. The other produced a plastic funnel, and Mitchell zoomed in so that Karim’s face filled the shot, then hit the ‘Record’ button.
‘Nabil Karim,’ he said, ‘this is for Mohammad Abdulrashid, who you knew as Abdul al-Aziz.’
He nodded to the soldiers, and one of them forced the funnel into Karim’s mouth while the other slowly emptied the bottle into it.
Karim bucked and choked, but was unable to prevent the sulphuric-acid-and-water solution from entering his body. Mitchell could only imagine the damage it was doing to the man’s throat and stomach, never mind his lungs, but it still wasn’t enough to make up for what Karim had done to Abdulrashid. People died in wars – a soldier accepted that – but there were certain boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed, and Karim had overstepped the mark.
He ordered the two men to stand aside, then panned out to show Karim convulsing on the ground. The acid might kill him, or it might not, but if he got to meet Allah, his final few minutes on the planet would be a real conversation piece.
Mitchell let the camera roll for another minute, then turned it off and dismantled the equipment. The recording would be sent by flash-burst message to the UK, where he had been assured it would be forwarded to MI6. It wouldn’t bring Abdulrashid back, but it just might give his handlers some needed closure.
Mitchell’s last act was to make a note of the location on his GPS before calling in the air strike.
If you enjoyed this novel and would like to know about Alan’s future releases, just send an email to [email protected] with Next Book in the subject line to be added to his mailing list. Alan picks five people on the list to receive a signed paperback a month before the official release date, and he only sends out a couple of emails a year, so you won’t be bombarded with spam. Alan replies to all emails, so check your spam folder if you don’t hear from him within twenty-four hours.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2013 Darlene McDermott
Alan McDermott is a husband and a father to beautiful twin girls, and currently lives in the south of England. Born in West Germany to Scottish parents, Alan spent his early years moving from town to town as his father was posted to different army units around the United Kingdom. Alan has had a number of jobs since leaving school, including working on a cruise ship in Hong Kong and Singapore, where he met his wife, and as a software developer creating clinical applications for the National Health Service. Alan gave up his day job in December 2014 to become a full-time author. Alan’s writing career began in 2011 with the action thriller Gray Justice, his first full-length novel.
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