A buzzer suddenly went off by the door to the ops room and then sounded continuously as whoever it was kept their finger jammed against it. Graham hit a button on the desk that electrically unbolted the door. Mike the boss hurried in chewing a mouthful of food, having covered the distance from the cookhouse on the other side of the compound in record time.
‘Talk to me,’ he barked as he went to the large map that covered a sloping desk beneath the operations wall. Under its glass skin, the map contained all data pertinent to operatives, vehicles and locations the det had anything to do with in the Province. He studied the movable markers and wax notations on the glass that gave details of the only operatives on the ground at that time. He was young, fresh-faced and his nickname when he was not in the room was ‘the head boy’, because physically he could probably still pass for a sixth former. However, the similarities stopped there and anyone not recognising that could find themselves in deep water.
‘Spinks’s car’s been lifted with him still in the boot. One three kilo is in pursuit. They think it’s two up. I’ve had no comms with Spinks for three minutes,’ Graham informed Mike, as he handed him the phone and headed for the door, adding, ‘The standby chopper chief’ll be on the end of that phone any second. Keep calling Spinks - four two Charlie.’
‘Where’s Stratton?’ Mike shouted as Graham left the room, apparently without hearing him. Mike hit an intercom button. ‘Steve?’
A few seconds later came an answer, ‘Boss?’
‘I need you in here right away.’
‘On my way,’ Steve replied.
‘You’ll need the rest of your cell.’
‘Roger,’ Steve said.
Mike hit another intercom button. ‘Jack?’
‘Yo.’ Jack’s voice sounded like he was at the far end of a room.
‘Get every available bod on the ground towards black seven. We’ve got a Kuttuc.’
‘Right away,’ replied Jack immediately and much closer to his intercom.
Mike released the button and paused to think of anything else he could do of greater priority before the dreaded call he had to make. There was nothing else. Then he realised a tiny voice was trying to break through his concentration. It was coming from the phone in his hand. He quickly put it to his ear.
‘Yes, this is Camelot. I need the standby chopper now, as in five minutes ago. We have an op Kuttuc . . . That’s right. One of our guys has been lifted.’
He pushed down the cradle, released it to get the dial tone, took a deep breath, and keyed a number he was hoping would not be answered. Mike was a captain in the Hussars, his parent unit, and had had to put up with comments about his baby-face his entire career. His looks may not have changed much since he left university but he had matured a great deal during the last three years in this job. When nothing exceptional was taking place he appeared introvert and retiring. None of those characteristics were remotely evident when work got suddenly serious. He had the arrogance one might expect to find in a captain of the Hussars and would go toe to toe with anyone, even superiors, when his blood was up. Two things were guaranteed to bring out the demon in him: incompetence, and anyone trying to screw with his detachment, enemy or otherwise. He had never had an op Kuttuc before. In fact there had only been one Special Forces kidnapping since Nairac, an SAS liaison officer who was lifted, beaten and killed in the mid-seventies. The only det operative ever kidnapped, a couple of years before Mike joined the unit, was from the North Province undercover detachment. He was rescued in the nick of time by sheer luck not long after he had been snatched by the Provos. The main lesson learned from both kidnappings was that every passing second increased the odds against Spinks being rescued.
‘Lisburn ops here,’ the upper-class voice on the other end of the phone muttered.
‘This is Mike at south det, sir. I need to speak to the chief right away.’
‘Sounds urgent, old boy,’ said the officer.
‘It’s very urgent,’ said Mike, this time adding the emphasis that was lacking in his initial delivery.
‘One second,’ said the officer, reading the urgency.
Mike kept the phone to his ear while his eyes moved to the map and looked at the international border, specifically where it turned closest to the marker that indicated the point where Spinks was kidnapped. The distance was not very great at all.
Graham jogged along the corridor. ‘Of course I’m going to get Stratton. Who else?’ he muttered to himself in answer to Mike’s question as he left the ops room.
Bleeps like Graham ruled the operations room. Naturally, all major decisions had to be made by the boss, but in reality, Graham could handle just about any emergency situation that might arise, and in most cases quicker and more efficiently. Not only was he very proficient, he was aided by a phenomenal memory.Apart from knowing practically every call-sign and frequency the British army used in Northern Ireland, he could remember details of players, their vehicles and number plates, addresses, names, associates . . . the kind of questions operatives asked the intelligence cell over the air all the time and needed quick answers to. It was usually faster to track Graham down and ask him the question first before wading through the database or calling the intelligence cell.
Graham’s footsteps echoed on the old tiled floor in the narrow, flaking plastered corridor of the former Second World War Royal Air Force administration building that would have been condemned had the secret unit not taken it over. He turned a corner, arrived at a door, and pushed it open. The room was just large enough to cram in twenty assorted grubby old armchairs all facing a television set on a table at one end, a sagging bookshelf stacked with well-thumbed paperbacks, and at the opposite end to the television, a table covered in a selection of current newspapers. Hunched over a broadsheet on strong, lean arms was a man with long, mousy, unwashed hair wearing an old rugby shirt, his neck sunk between sturdy shoulders.
‘Stratton?’ Graham said. There was no trace of the familiarity he used when talking to anyone else in the detachment, even Mike the boss, and some of the urgency had gone out of his voice despite the gravity of the situation. He could not help himself. Stratton had that effect on him.
Stratton looked around. He hadn’t shaved in several days, which softened his angular features, and his nose looked as if it had once been broken. His face was expressionless in the way a predatory animal watches humans from within its cage. It was the eyes that fascinated Graham and, for him at least, embodied the character of the man. They weren’t manic, nor even piercing. Uninviting, hollow but also penetrating was how Graham described them to his brother, his only confidant on the subject of this extraordinary job. Stratton was like no other man he had ever met. Unlike the rest of the undercover operators, Stratton’s parent unit was Special Forces. He knew nothing for certain about Stratton’s past, only the countless rumours: veteran of the Gulf War, the Balkans, the drug wars in Columbia, and then there were the rumours about Afghanistan. And that was all before his kills since he arrived at the detachment: four in a year and a half. That was high considering the majority of the operatives had none and only two other men currently serving in another detachment had one each. But Stratton always seemed to be in the right place at the right time, or so it seemed. His success was no doubt helped by the fact that he was always looking for a kill when most operatives were content to merely survive a day’s work.
The first kills, only a month after Stratton had joined the detachment, were two unfortunate robbers armed with pistols and threatening to use them on anyone who tried to stop them. Stratton happened to be getting out of his car as the bandits came running out of the betting shop they had just held up and were climbing on to their getaway motorbike. It was all over in a couple of seconds - the time it took Stratton to draw his pistol from his shoulder holster and put two rounds through each of their crash helmets from twenty-five feet away. The robbers were Protestants, not that that was an issue for Stratton. They were bad guys who played with guns and u
nfortunately for them they ran into someone who didn’t.
The other two official kills were the result of an attempted car jacking. Stratton was stuck in a traffic jam in a busy street when a young, inexperienced Provo tapped on his window with the tip of his gun and demanded Stratton get out. Stratton remained cool and noticed the gunman had a partner covering him with a rifle from across the street. As he took a moment to stare into the narrow eyes of his would-be assailant, he saw something else that gave him every confidence he could deal with the situation swiftly and surely.
Stratton climbed out with his arms by his sides and faced the young man, who kept just beyond arm’s reach, his pistol held much too tightly in his left hand and levelled at Stratton. The man asked Stratton to hold open both sides of his jacket. If the nervous young Republican soldier caught sight of the pistol in its holster under Stratton’s left arm he would ask him who he was. If Stratton didn’t answer he was dead. If Stratton answered in his English accent he was dead. It was near impossible to perfect a convincing Northern Irish accent if one was not from these parts and few operatives bothered to try. What Stratton had seen from inside the car, which spurred his confidence and sealed the young man’s fate, was that the unfortunate Provo had obviously forgotten that his Browning 9mm semi-automatic pistol was on half-cock. A characteristic of the weapon is that when the hammer is pulled back one click, only halfway back, it is impossible to pull the trigger. To fire the gun the hammer must be pulled back a second click to full cock. The Provo was left-handed - the safety-catch, which is on the left side of the gun, is hard to operate for left-handed shooters and so cack-handers often use the half-cock as a safety device.
Stratton calmly opened his jacket and drew out his pistol. The young Provo squeezed the trigger with all his might but by the time he realised why he could not fire it and moved his thumb to the hammer to pull it back to full cock it was too late. As he dropped to the ground with two bullets through his heart Stratton dropped to one knee to engage the cover man across the street, hitting him in the body with two shots to disrupt his aim, then closing in with an aimed shot to the head to finish him.
Then there were the two rumoured unofficial kills. Graham knew for certain about one of them. Well, pretty certain. He had been on duty that night.The team had been in Warrenpoint on the south-eastern corner of the province doing a surveillance task. When it ended the team made its way back to the detachment.The journey should have taken no more than an hour and a half at that time of night. Graham had asked for a radio check fifteen minutes after the team left the area to make sure everyone was okay. He could tell from the background noise that the operatives were in their cars travelling at speed, all except Stratton, who sounded like he was using his body comms. That suggested to Graham that Stratton was outside of his car and therefore not on his way back just yet. Graham did not dare to ask Stratton what he was doing. That would have required more courage than he possessed.
Twenty minutes after the rest of the team arrived Graham watched Stratton drive in through the main gates of the compound on the security monitor. The following morning the body of a man was found on the edge of the old market square in Warrenpoint. He had been choked unconscious then his neck had been broken. It was Matthew McGinnis, a RIRA sniper known to have shot three police officers and two soldiers and a suspected accomplice in four other killings.
Graham was aware that many of the rumours about Stratton were fiction, but he believed the operative was capable of taking the law into his own hands. Since McGinnis’s mysterious death Graham had paid closer attention to Stratton’s rare comments about the war against the IRA. There was often a suggestion, if only in his tone, of his contempt for the soft-handed way the judiciary treated the more hardcore terrorists.
‘We have a possible op Kuttuc,’ Graham said to him now.
Stratton moved quickly but without fuss or change in expression. He lifted a heavy, beaten-up leather jacket off a chair and pulled it on as Graham stepped back to let him pass.
‘It’s Spinks, four two Charlie,’ Graham continued. ‘We’ve lost comms and he’s mobile south at speed still in the boot.’
Graham wondered if Stratton ever panicked about anything. He had seen him angry, but never out of control. They headed down the corridor, Graham trotting behind.
‘Standby chopper?’ Stratton asked in his usual economic way as he turned the corner towards the ops room.
‘It should be waiting for you.’
Stratton stopped at a walk-in closet just before the ops room.A wooden framework built on to one wall was divided into compartments, like station baggage lockers without the doors, fifteen of them, one for each operative. He pulled a holdall, full and heavy, out of his compartment.
‘The church?’ Stratton asked.
‘Yes. One three kilo’s on the ground in pursuit.’
‘The dyke?’ he asked.
‘And Ed.’
‘Doesn’t matter which one’s driving then, does it?’ he said, suggesting Spinks had even less hope.
There was no hint of a joke in Stratton’s dry, monotone voice, but Graham knew him well enough to know it was there and forced a little laugh. Aggy’s nickname was generally used when referring to her in her absence, even though the men felt sure she was not, or at least hoped not. No one had gotten to first base with her but most wanted to, even some of those against women in the detachments. Graham did wonder about Stratton and her though. He had watched him staring at her one night in the bar during a piss-up while she was sat with several other operatives across the room.
Stratton took an old SLR 7.62mm semi-automatic high-velocity rifle from the top shelf and a couple of twenty-round magazines of ammunition. Attached to the rifle was a heavy metal object the size and shape of a grapefruit with a wire coming from it that had an electrical adapter on the end. It was a giro steady system designed to keep the weapon as still as possible inside a moving or heavily vibrating vehicle such as a helicopter. Attached to the ejection port of the weapon was a small canvas bag to catch spent shell cases and stop them bouncing around inside the cab. He headed down the corridor to a set of double doors and pushed through them. Graham watched him go then hit the buzzer outside the operations room door.
Aggy was driving beyond her capabilities along the narrow country road lined with stone walls and hedgerows, which she had already brushed against several times, losing a wing mirror on one occasion. An endless stream of comments came from Ed, most of them in the form of clipped or unfinished shouts: ‘Don’t . . . that!’ ‘Watch for . . .’ ‘Easy, EASY!’ If Ed were honest enough he would admit that even though they were driving to save Spinks’s life he wished she would just stop the car. It was mostly fields beyond the hedgerows on either side of the road. The occasional small wood, farm and row of homes streaked by.They had needed to pass only one car so far, an elderly couple behind the wheel. It had been a tight squeeze, but incredibly they had made it without touching it, although that was when she lost the wing mirror. Ed had raised himself out of his seat as Aggy slipped through the impossible gap between the car and a stone wall.
Spinks’s car was still far ahead. Aggy had glimpses of it but didn’t feel she was gaining any ground. She was starting to experience that frustrating, useless feeling again. The kind of useless they said she was during the selection course. She knew the constant digs from the instructors were all part of the selection process, designed to test and develop her self-control and ultimately get the best out of her, but she often wondered how true the comments really were. Fast driving had never been her forte. On the course she crashed three cars; in one of those accidents she had cracked a bone in her arm. She was warned that if she wrecked one more car she would be labelled an operational hazard and would fail the course. Her final exercise had involved a high-speed chase deliberately set up by the instructors to test her. She managed to get through it without a mishap but had come close a couple of times. This was the fastest she had driven since that day, perhaps e
ven faster, and she felt much less in control. She kept talking herself through the stages, echoing her fast driving instructor: ‘Brake on the straight before the bend, not in it. Hit the corner just a bit faster than you think you can. Balance the throttle through the turn; keep the tyres biting the road. Accelerate on the apex.’
‘Towards orange five,’ she shouted. Ed appeared not to have heard her, his eyes as wide as they could possibly stretch and locked on to the road ahead. She reached for the send button but he pushed her hand away.
‘Keep your ’ands on the wheel! I’ll do the bloody comms!’ Ed was the most sedate of all the operatives in the detachment in a dreary way - during relaxed working conditions, that is. But car chases held a special fear for him. He hated travelling fast in anything where the speed was beyond the normal design functions. Four-door cars were family vehicles intended for comfort driving, not screaming along narrow country lanes and especially not in the hands of a girl who clearly had no idea what she was doing. His last car chase had been ten years earlier. He had been the tail-end car in a line of four. It had got so hairy he pulled out letting the others go on without him. He admitted during the debriefing that he just could not keep up with the pace. Since then he was given nothing but ‘soft’ tasks. However, the problem with doing nothing but safe jobs for years was that complacency set in. The true dangers of the profession remained known, respected even, but with time there was a fogging of the grim realities. In the space of a few short minutes Ed was being fully reacquainted with one aspect of them, and that was risking one’s own life to try and save another.
Back at the operations room, Ed’s voice, the fear in it evident, boomed over the speaker. ‘One three kilo, towards orange five.’
The ops room was now a flurry of activity. The intelligence officer, and his two people were busy in the int cell that adjoined the ops room.Two off-duty bleeps had arrived in case they were needed, although if truth be known they were really hanging about to witness this unique event.
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