Ambush

by Nick Oldham

  Eight million pounds’ worth of cocaine was seized, and maybe about one million in drug-tainted sterling and euros plus four Heckler & Koch machine pistols, two Glock handguns and several Russian-made pistols, with ammunition and lots of documents.

  The comms room, now known as the contact centre, was newly opened, and Alford’s manic dance and high-fives with some members of his team were the first to be enacted on the new carpet, around the consoles of several bemused, wide-eyed comms operators.

  None of this was of any interest to the man parked in a layby on the dual carriageway, the A59, that ran past the police headquarters campus, Preston to the north, Liverpool well to the south.

  The man had been sitting there patiently since four p.m., had brought a flask and sandwiches with him, knowing that Alford usually finished work around five thirty, though occasionally he left at five. Often he stayed in until seven or eight p.m.

  It was now just after eight p.m., but the man was certain Alford was still in work. He knew there was a pretty big police operation going on and had been expecting, but not assuming, that Alford would stay late.

  Although there was always the faint possibility of the detective using another route when he left, Alford had driven out of headquarters this way on every other occasion this man had watched and waited, and although he was working later than normal, the man in the car did not think Alford would change his route home that day. Alford lived in a nice house on the north side of Preston, but because there was no right turn out of HQ on to the dual carriageway he would have to turn left towards Liverpool, then exit about quarter of a mile up, loop under the carriageway and rejoin it to travel north towards Preston. It was a pain for all the staff working there. Many years before, it had been possible to turn right through a gap in the central barrier, but the A59 was a straight, fast road at that point, and because of the number of serious and fatal crashes and near misses the Highways Department had decided to close the gap.

  The man in the car had only been given a short brief: watch and report using a new pay-as-you-go mobile phone on each occasion. He had been instructed – over the phone, by someone he had never seen, did not know – to wait for Alford to drive past, then text the word ‘YES’ to a particular number and discard the phone carefully.

  That was all. He didn’t even need to follow the cop.

  A hundred pounds a shot.

  Ten shots so far.

  Easy money.

  So he sat back and waited, knowing this would be the last time of doing this, though he did not know why he was doing it. But he did not give a shit. A grand was a grand.

  The day had been long, intense, nerve-racking and tiring, requiring complete concentration, and by the end of it Alford was ready for home. Aquarius had been a resounding success. A dozen arrests and all the prisoners scattered around police cells in Lancashire to keep them separate, now being attended to by well-briefed, experienced interview teams. Alford knew the raids were actually only the beginning of a long process of interviews, house and business premises searches, forensic and financial checks, liaison with the Crown Prosecution Service and numerous court appearances. He had to be totally on the ball for the next two weeks but was confident everything was covered. These drug dealers would not set foot on the streets again for at least fifteen years. That was his ultimate aim: disruption and incarceration.

  As he pulled out of headquarters at eight fifteen p.m., then turned left on to the dual carriageway, Alford took a few moments to call home. His wife was also a detective, a DC based on a child protection unit. There was no response on either the home landline or her mobile phone, though this did not unduly trouble him. He knew she was busy with a particularly nasty case of child neglect and cruelty. At the moment their lives were not in synch, but everything always came back on line and they had plans for the weekend, staying at their favourite little pub in Arnside and doing some walking. Nor was he concerned that neither of the children answered the home phone. They were plagued by Payment Protection Insurance callers and the girls, now seventeen and nineteen, ignored the phone unless they happened to be standing by it and saw that the caller display showed a number they recognized.

  He flicked off the Bluetooth and his Jaguar sped up the road, turning left and then looping back under the bridge to come back down towards Preston. He never even noticed the car in the layby because, as soon as he ended his attempts to call home, his mind whirred with everything ‘Aquarius’ and with what needed sorting next day, which, he had already decided, would commence at six a.m.

  The man in the car sank low in his seat as Alford’s sleek black car zipped by. Then he sent the text – just a simple ‘YES’ – and immediately began to dismantle his phone.

  Alford’s house was on the A6 north of Preston, just beyond the village of Broughton. Detached and standing in its own grounds, it was hidden from the busy main road by high fencing and hedging and was not overlooked by any of the neighbouring houses.

  The hooded man heard the text drop on to his phone. He drew it out of his back pocket and read it, just that single word, ‘YES’, then slid the phone back in and smiled down at the three people lying in front of him, their hands bound with duct tape around their backs, ankles also bound and a J-cloth stuffed into each of their mouths and then taped over.

  ‘Not long now, ladies,’ he said. What he did next indicated that none of them would leave this scenario alive.

  He pinched the top of his hood firmly between his finger and thumb and slowly pulled it off, revealing his face.

  Now they had seen him.

  Now they would die.

  Alford’s route home took him around the western perimeter of Preston, using Tom Benson Way, an old railway line which was now an arterial road connecting with the A6 north of the city. Then he was under the motorway bridge at Broughton, through the crossroads, and about a couple of minutes later he slowed down, indicated right and turned into his curved driveway. His thoughts about Aquarius were now dismissed and he was eagerly looking forward to chilling and eating with his family, whom he adored.

  He did give a brief pout of puzzlement when he saw his wife’s car was on the wide drive, behind the two cars belonging to his daughters. He wondered why none of them had answered the phone.

  He shrugged and climbed out of the Jag. It was almost six years old but still a quietly magnificent car. He walked to the front door of the house which, twenty years earlier, when he’d been a detective constable and his wife had been in uniform, had almost crippled them with mortgage repayments, but which was now worth probably four times what they had initially paid for it. He was immensely proud of it and his family, and of what he and his wife had achieved over the years through hard graft and working at a brilliant marriage.

  He stopped abruptly at the front door, which he saw was ever so slightly open, just resting on the door frame.

  At first he wondered if it was a birthday or anniversary he had forgotten, or maybe there was a surprise waiting inside and they were all about to ambush him. Just a fleeting thought. He knew there was nothing pending, and he did not miss stuff like that anyway.

  But for some reason the open door was slightly unsettling, though he could not say why.

  It wasn’t a feeling based on evidence, just a cop’s instinct.

  His mouth went dry. He pushed the door open with the tip of his right forefinger.

  It swung noiselessly.

  There was no one in the tiled hallway.

  The kitchen door at the far end was open, lights on.

  The door to the lounge on the left was closed.

  The house was silent.

  Unusual. He frowned.

  Normally the place was throbbing with life and the aroma of good cooking because the ladies of this house were bubbly, exuberant people who always had food on and music blaring. They looked after him, he looked after them.

  He tried to shake off this weird feeling. It was nothing. Surely he had come home to this before? A quiet house.


  He stepped across the threshold and called tentatively, ‘Hello? I’m home. Is anyone else?’

  A tiny part of him still expected all three women in his life to leap out in camouflaged onesies and surround him because, surely, he must have forgotten something. Was it his own birthday?

  The dog’s birthday?

  Where the hell was the dog? The slavering Labrador that always greeted him and tried to knock him over and lick him clean.

  ‘Stuff this,’ he thought. Even the bloody dog was being held back for the big ta-dah!

  He took a few steps along the hallway and opened the lounge door.

  He had perhaps one second to take in the horrific tableau that greeted his shocked eyes: his wife, his daughters, trussed up, bound and gagged on the carpet between the settee and the armchairs. Their terrified eyes.

  The stunning blow to his head instantly dropped him where he stood, withering to his knees and tipping forward across his wife. And into complete blackness.

  THREE

  Santa Eulalia, Ibiza

  Steve Flynn looked twice at the young man hunched in the dark recess of the doorway, but didn’t make his second glance too obvious. The first was just the normal jerk of the head – what anyone might do while walking past and half-spotting a figure lurking in the shadows. Most people would probably just walk on and forget they had seen anything, and Flynn would have done so too except that at his first glance his sharp eyes, their vision honed by many years of hard use, noticed something as they pierced the darkness.

  They saw the outline of a hooded man, his face hidden by the shadow, but also the glint of something in the man’s right hand down by his thigh.

  That was what Flynn registered on the first look.

  The second look, just a flick of his eyes as he walked on, merely confirmed the fact.

  The man was armed.

  Flynn continued to stroll on because that was what he was doing, simply making his way through the resort of Santa Eulalia, enjoying a stroll, slowly but surely making his way down to the marina for a late dinner. He felt the arm of the woman walking alongside him looped into the crook of his right arm. A good feeling. Like an old married couple. He walked on as though he had not seen anything.

  But to the woman he hissed out of the corner of his mouth, ‘We need to call the cops.’

  ‘Sí … yes, we do,’ she agreed.

  Flynn could not help the shimmer of a smile on his lips.

  She too had seen the figure in the doorway and had probably done exactly the same subtle double-take as him.

  ‘You’re good,’ he complimented her.

  ‘Sí, muy bien,’ she purred.

  They stopped maybe fifty metres along from the doorway and backed into their own alcove, the doorway of a clothes shop recently closed for business that evening. From here, looking through the angle in the shop window, Flynn could see back along the narrow street, which was called Carrer de Sant Vicent. Flynn slid his left arm around the shoulders of his companion and she fumbled for and extracted her mobile phone from her shoulder bag.

  ‘He has a gun,’ she said.

  ‘An old-looking revolver,’ Flynn said, glancing back along the building line, able to see the darkness of the doorway but not the figure in it. Then he said, ‘Shit.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Two of them.’

  The second guy was in a doorway almost directly opposite the hooded man, the entrance to apartments above the shops. Flynn had seen movement in the gloom, then, briefly, a white face peeking out before disappearing quickly.

  ‘You are certain?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘What are they doing?’

  Flynn weighed it up.

  Further back along the street, on the corner of the next junction, was one of those small, ubiquitous Spar shops, a convenience store selling groceries, booze, water and other essentials. Flynn and his companion had walked past it a minute earlier. He had registered that the shop was in the process of closing for the night. The window shutters had already been pulled down and padlocked, but the shutter over the front door was only a quarter of the way down and a couple of customers were still at the till. The message was clear – we’re closing and no one else is coming in, gracias. Flynn had spotted just two members of staff, a young girl on the till, probably in her mid-teens, and another, slightly older woman hovering by the door, key and padlock in hand, discouraging would-be shoppers.

  It was one of several Spar shops in the resort. But they were dotted all over the island too, and Spain, and the world. Good, steady businesses mainly serving self-catering holiday makers and mostly taking cash.

  ‘The corner shop,’ he said. ‘Easy target.’

  Both lurking figures were still hidden in their respective doorways.

  ‘How are you doing?’ Flynn asked the woman he was with. Her name was Maria Santiago. Her smart phone was pressed to her right ear.

  ‘Calling,’ she answered.

  Flynn nodded. The last two customers, a man and a woman, ducked out of the shop under the partly lowered shutter, followed by the assistant with the padlock.

  ‘Still ringing,’ Santiago said.

  ‘Shit,’ Flynn mumbled.

  The woman in the shop said ‘Buenas noches’ to the customers and reached up to the metal door with a thin hooked rod, attached it and began to unravel the door to close it.

  Flynn removed his arm from Santiago’s shoulders.

  She glanced worriedly at him. ‘Still ringing.’

  ‘Anything like the cops in England, you’ll end up talking to some call centre in Madrid.’

  ‘I know.’

  If a robbery was on the cards – something quite rare in this resort, indeed on the island – it was going to have to start now, just as the shutter was being drawn down, because once it touched the ground it would become a whole lot more complicated.

  Flynn stepped out of the doorway at the exact moment the two figures emerged from theirs and started to sprint towards the shop. Each had a gun in his hand.

  ‘Flynn, no,’ Santiago blurted, knowing him all too well.

  He gave her a helpless shrug and began to move. He was no sprinter now, his heavily muscled frame ensured that, but he didn’t have far to run.

  The first hooded guy, the one Flynn had originally spotted, dashed diagonally across the narrow street and slammed his body into the shop assistant dealing with the door. His arms enfolded her and he bundled her roughly back through the decreasing gap as the shutter descended.

  Flynn saw the plan: first one through grabs whoever is locking up for the night; second one drags the shutter door down behind him, and then they have time to operate without interruption. Hold the hapless staff hostage at gunpoint, empty the tills, then force the women into the back office and empty any cash boxes kept there. Unless they’d banked earlier that day – which the robbers would know if they’d done their homework – Flynn guessed they could easily be looking at a haul in the region of 3,000 euros, give, take. Not a bad amount for about six minutes’ work, if they were organized, not drugged up to their eyeballs, and meant what they did. If they were a good duo they could be in and out, business done and away – with no one hurt. Which was the thought that almost slowed Flynn down. Let them go, let them get away with it. Unfortunately he was hard-wired to react and intervene. The best part of twenty years as a cop and a few years before that as a Royal Marine had mainlined something into him that still hadn’t quite evaporated, even all these years after leaving the cops behind.

  Drilled into him: a need to intervene.

  He pounded across the narrow street.

  Ahead, the first guy had done as expected and he and the woman (now stunned but terrified) were inside the shop. Guy number two was already starting to pull down the shutter door which, as Flynn rocked up, was about a metre from closing.

  The door was a medium security shutter of the type that allowed people to see through slats into the shop even when closed. It was made
of fairly strong aluminium and was controlled manually.

  The second guy, in the process of pulling it down from the inside, was surprised when Flynn appeared on the opposite side with his big fingers curled underneath the bottom edge of the door. The two men were both bent over, face to face, eyeball to eyeball, inches apart, glaring at each other through the holes in the horizontal slats and pushing in opposite directions.

  The man pressed down harder, panicking.

  Flynn took the weight easily, now with both hands holding the door. He started to heave up.

  In the shop beyond he saw at a glance that guy number one was holding the collar of the woman’s work blouse and was pointing his handgun at the girl sitting motionless at the checkout till, screaming at her, not aware of the tug of war at the door.

  He was shouting in English.

  The face of Flynn’s current opponent in the test of strength was stretched to bursting with the tension and effort of pushing down against Flynn. It was not a fair contest. The guy was thin, without any real muscle, whereas Flynn was pretty much the polar opposite: well built, muscled, strong.

  The door, inexorably, inevitably, started to rise.

  Flynn and the felon were virtually nose to nose, separated only by the thin door. Their eyes stayed in contact.

  Flynn gave him a lopsided grin and then a wink.

  Without warning, sensing he could not win this, the guy released the door and stepped away.

  The tactic caught Flynn slightly off balance. Suddenly there was no resistance and the door shot upwards on its rollers and clattered open. He teetered back a step and the man he’d been door-wrestling with had his small revolver – something similar to a two-inch-barrelled Smith & Wesson detective special – coming around hurriedly to aim at Flynn.

  He came back on balance almost instantaneously.

  Flynn’s life for the last ten years or so had revolved around keeping his footing on the sportfishing boat he skippered, so tripping up was not something he did and, despite his size, he moved around the boat with the grace of a ballet dancer. He was also accustomed to grabbing and dealing with fast-moving, thrashing, dangerous fish such as sharks with very sharp teeth and marlin with lethal swords, so he had no problem covering the distance between him and the guy with the gun in a micro-flash. He drove his right fist into the man’s face before the gun even came around. The face disintegrated as Flynn’s brick-like fist connected with the bridge of the nose. The guy dropped straight away as the impact closed down all brain function with an implosion like the formation of a black hole. His knees buckled, he fell as though he had stepped into an open manhole. The gun dropped out of his hand and clattered away across the tiled shop floor under a mobile shelf displaying suntan lotion.