What had stopped Richter in his tracks was not what the two men were doing, but who they were. Because now he could clearly see that although they were not in uniform, both of them were wearing very obvious stab vests over dark clothes, and each vest had the word ‘POLICE’ stencilled on it in large white letters.
‘Watch them,’ he instructed, and both Carpenter and the driver levelled submachine-guns at the Volvo, each man stepping to the side as he did so to avoid placing Richter in danger if they had to open fire. Though that didn’t seem about to happen, as the two police officers had obviously seen the weapons and were now sitting motionless in the car with their hands – empty of any kind of threat – raised to shoulder level.
But still Richter kept his MP5 loosely aimed at them as he covered the short distance to where the estate car lay, the left side stuck in the ditch. It was clearly going to take a tow truck to haul it out, though it would probably still be driveable because all of the damage caused was at the rear of the vehicle.
He stopped about six feet away and motioned to the driver to lower his window. The police officer dropped his right arm out of sight and a couple of seconds later the window glass slid down.
‘We’re police officers,’ the driver said, ‘and you have no idea how much trouble you’re in.’
‘I know who you are,’ Richter replied, ‘and you’re the ones with the problems, not me. Now shut up and get out of the car.’
The left-hand side of the Volvo was pushed hard up against the hedge that bordered the ditch, and although the driver had no trouble leaving the vehicle, his passenger had to scramble over the centre console before he too could step onto the metalled surface of the road. They stood together beside their vehicle, their attention flicking between the three armed men who were confronting them.
‘All three of you can consider yourselves under arrest,’ the passenger said. ‘Just off the top of my head, we can get you for dangerous driving, possession of illegal firearms and potentially the attempted murder of two police officers.’
Carpenter laughed, and Richter briefly switched his attention from the driver to the passenger. ‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘When I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it.’
‘Or I’ll beat it out of you,’ Carpenter suggested.
‘You’re driving an unmarked car, obviously,’ Richter said. ‘I assume it’s an ARV?’
Armed Response Vehicles are usually marked with police livery, but many British forces also use unmarked gunships for covert or surveillance duties.
‘Yes.’ The driver had now clearly decided that the less he said the better.
‘Where are the weapons?’
‘Locked in the gun safe,’ the driver said.
‘Not the best place for them,’ Richter pointed out, ‘bearing in mind you were heading for a potential firefight.’
‘This was just a routine patrol,’ the passenger said. ‘We didn’t know anything about men with guns.’
‘It wasn’t, and you know it, otherwise you’d have been in either a marked or an unmarked car, but not any kind of ARV. Dave – he’s the white guy standing behind me and aiming a Heckler and Koch MP5 at your stomach – is our driver, and he spotted you just after we turned north on the M25, and that was a while ago. You were either following us or you were keeping tabs on the white BMW five series that was tailing us. That car, or rather the two men in it, was the whole reason we ended up way out here in the wilds of Hicksville, Hertfordshire.’
The police driver shrugged his ample shoulders. ‘Then maybe you should have stopped the beamer, not us,’ he said. ‘Nice PIT manoeuvre, though,’ he added, glancing at Dave.
‘I’ve had a lot of practice.’
‘We didn’t stop the beamer,’ Richter said, ‘because the last thing we wanted was to get caught between two carloads of bad guys toting Kalashnikovs. If we’d known that you were a brace of woodentops, we’d have done everything differently. I presume your instructions came from Chief Superintendent Evans?’
The passenger looked suddenly uncomfortable, but the driver nodded.
‘Down the usual chain of command,’ he confirmed, ‘but I think it was at the Chief Super’s instigation, yes.’
‘Well, if my boss has anything to do with it,’ Richter said, ‘then your boss will be looking for a new job by the end of the week. He was told what we were going to do and was very explicitly warned off. So this fuck-up is basically down to him.’
‘His problem, not mine,’ the driver said. ‘Now, as we seem to have established that we’re all on the same side, more or less, can you lower your weapons? Having submachine-guns pointed at me makes me feel really uncomfortable.’
Richter nodded and released his weapon. The tactical sling was already looped over his shoulder so that the weapon dangled comfortably across his chest, out of the way but ready for immediate use should the situation change.
Behind him, Carpenter and Dave mirrored his actions.
‘The bad guys are long gone,’ Dave said, ‘so I’ll turn the van round. According to the satnav, there are only narrow country lanes in front of us, so I reckon it’ll be quicker if we go back to the main road.’
He walked over to the Transit, climbed in and backed the vehicle over towards the abandoned Volvo, so that he could do a three-point turn to aim the Ford in the direction from which they’d come.
But as he braked the van to a stop, there was a sudden thump from the Volvo, followed by the unmistakable sound of breaking glass.
Richter’s stared at the car for barely half a second, taking in the shattered rear side window and the crazed circle of glass on the windscreen.
‘Sniper!’ he yelled. ‘Get in the van.’
Carpenter was way ahead of him, wrenching open the rear doors of the Transit and immediately climbing into it. Then he checked the view through the painted side window, trying to find out where the sniper had positioned himself.
The two police officers appeared stunned into immobility, alternating their gaze between the bullet hole in the Volvo’s windscreen and the open rear doors of the van.
‘You too,’ Carpenter shouted, when he realised they weren’t reacting. ‘Don’t fanny about. Just move it. Get in here.’
Richter was the last to climb into the vehicle, Carpenter and the police driver pulling the rear doors shut behind him. He dropped into one of the seats with a groan of pain and pulled the seatbelt around him.
The moment he sat down, Dave hit the accelerator and the van surged away down the narrow country lane, weaving from side to side as he did his best to make the vehicle a difficult moving target.
‘Are you okay?’ the police driver asked Richter.
‘Of course he’s not okay,’ Carpenter snapped. ‘He’s been shot.’
‘I don’t see any blood.’
‘Not now. Earlier today. He’s often getting shot. It’s part of his job description.’
Even through the metal engine cover with its layers of sound deadening material, the roar of the Jaguar engine, overlaid by the high-pitched scream of the turbocharger, was uncomfortably audible. The passenger from the police car stared for a few seconds at the engine cover and appeared to put two and two together.
‘This isn’t a standard Transit, is it?’ he asked.
‘Bravo,’ Carpenter said. ‘Think builder’s van with Lambo performance and you’ve more or less got it.’
‘Where was the sniper, Steve?’ Richter asked.
‘I can’t be certain, but there was a wood up to the north of us, maybe a thousand yards away, and I reckon that was the most likely spot. But I didn’t see anything to confirm that.’
‘If you’re right about his location, that was good shooting. It’s a windy day, which would cock up his aim, and that bullet only missed me by about six feet.’
At that instant, the van rocked with an impact and a hole appeared just below the roofline beside the rear door, with a corresponding exit hole on the opposite side.
Carpenter glanced up and n
odded.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Bloody good shooting. But that’s one bit of good news,’ he added. ‘At least they’re not using a Barrett or some other half inch monster. That looks to me like a 7.62, and if he is holed up in the wood, that means we’ll be out of range pretty soon.’
‘This vehicle isn’t armoured, then?’ the police driver asked.
‘Nope,’ Carpenter replied. ‘Armour adds weight, and that slows you down. It’s only the windows that are bullet-proof, and that was only to stop shards of glass flying around inside the van if they took a round. We decided speed was more important.’
They all felt centrifugal force pulling at them as Dave steered the Transit around a bend in the road and then it began to slow down quite perceptibly.
‘We’re clear,’ Dave said. ‘There’s a stand of trees between us and the sniper, and that’s better than any thickness of armour plating.’
With the distant threat of the unidentified sniper neutralised, both police officers, apparently for the first time, looked around the interior of the van, and their eyes settled on the racks of submachine-guns, pistols, extra magazines and boxes of ammunition.
‘Bloody hell,’ the driver said. ‘You’ve got more weapons in this van than we have in the armoury back at the station.’
‘When we build a gunship,’ Carpenter said, ‘we build a proper one and we don’t prat around with gun safes and stuff like that. This vehicle can seat ten people in total, so that’s one submachine-gun and one pistol each, plus a few spares and plenty of ammo. And we keep all the weapons loaded and in racks ready for immediate use, because you don’t always have time to stop the vehicle, find the keys, open the safe, take out the weapons and load them.’
‘Having a submachine-gun locked away in a gun safe in the back of the car is exactly the same as having no submachine-gun at all if it comes down to an unexpected firefight,’ Richter pointed out.
The police driver nodded.
‘So who owns this van?’ he asked. ‘I mean, who do you all work for?’
‘That’s need to know information,’ Richter replied, ‘and you definitely don’t need to know. We’re a kind of secret squirrel outfit loosely attached – very loosely, in fact – to the people who work in that strange building at Vauxhall Cross.’
‘You mean MI6?’
‘Strictly speaking, they prefer to be called the Secret Intelligence Service, but almost everyone in the trade calls them “Six”. The building is known as Legoland, for obvious reasons. I mean, just look at it.’
‘And there are a few less complimentary epithets than that,’ Carpenter said.
Richter stared out of the rear windows of the Transit for a few moments, then glanced back at the police driver.
‘We need to drop the two of you somewhere,’ he said, ‘because we’ve got stuff to do. I presume you can use your Airwave radio or a mobile phone to organise a pickup?’
Less than five minutes later, Dave braked the Transit to a stop near the crossroads in the village of Dagnall, not far from the Whipsnade Park Golf Course, and the two officers climbed out of the back of the vehicle to stand on the pavement and wait for their ride. Once the doors had closed behind them, he accelerated away, continuing along the A4146 in the general direction of Leighton Buzzard at an entirely legal speed.
‘So now what do we do?’ Carpenter asked. ‘Bearing in mind that Plan A turned into a complete Horlicks thanks to the Thin Blue Line sticking its nose in where it definitely wasn’t wanted.’
‘We revert to Plan B, obviously,’ Richter replied.
‘Which is?’
‘Right now, I’m buggered if I know, but I’m sure some bright idea will occur to one of us.’
Something did, though Richter was the first to admit that it wasn’t much of a plan. ‘What route do you normally take from here?’ he asked, a few minutes later, looking again at the mapping application on his phone.
‘I don’t,’ Dave replied. ‘It’s the first time I’ve been around these parts. That little diversion took us well off-route, so according to the satnav from here the fastest way to Winslow is the long way round. From Leighton Buzzard up to Bletchley and then go west towards Buckingham and south to Winslow. If you want to go the shorter route, we’ll be driving down country lanes that’ll make this road look like a German autobahn, and it’ll probably take us half as long again to get there. But you’re the boss. It’s up to you.’
Richter was silent for a minute or so, studying the electronic map on the five-inch screen of his Samsung, his fingertips moving across the screen as he zoomed in and out to look at different areas around their moving location.
‘What are you thinking, Paul?’ Carpenter asked.
‘I was trying to switch sides, to try to work out what I would do if I’d been one of the people in that beamer. To get inside the minds of the bad guys. They weren’t that far in front of the Volvo when Dave took it out, so they must have seen what happened. Then they stopped somewhere further up the road and a guy with a long rifle took a couple of shots at us. Or at me, to be exact. And we know that they must have seen us driving away because of this.’
He pointed towards the roof of the Transit van and the two very obvious bullet holes – the in and out – punched through it.
‘So?’
‘So I’m wondering why we didn’t see them in our mirrors again. I know Dave could have out-driven them, if that’s what we’d wanted to do, but I’m really surprised they didn’t try and follow us again. They would have had time to turn their car around and come back down the road, so why didn’t they?’
‘We left there in a bit of a hurry,’ Carpenter pointed out, ‘what with all the 7.62 encouragement. Maybe they did try and follow us, but never managed to catch up.’
‘Maybe. I know it would have taken them time to get out of the wood – and I think you’re right, and that’s where they took the shots from – and get back in the car. Don’t forget, we were already quite some distance down the road when they took that last shot. So I’m wondering if they looked at a map, saw the kind of spider’s web of narrow lanes around here, knew we had to be a long way ahead of them and guessed that we could take almost any route and they probably wouldn’t choose the same one.’
‘So do you think they just gave up?’ Carpenter asked. ‘Because I don’t.’
‘Nor do I. If I’d been coordinating their options, I’d have tried a bit of lateral thinking. They would certainly have been using their mobiles to update the guy pulling their strings, and if he had a brain he’d also be looking at a map. He’d guess then I was being taken to a safe house somewhere, and probably assume that it was here in this general area. So what I’d do, if I were him, would be to cover all the major roads I possibly could around here, probably with guys on motorbikes, and hope that one of them picked us up. Then they’d just follow at a distance, making no hostile moves, but keeping everyone informed, probably by a conference call on their mobiles or maybe some kind of personal radio network. And once they’d identified the safe house they could decide on their next move.’
Carpenter nodded. ‘That makes sense to me,’ he agreed. ‘So what do we do now?’
‘Exactly what we planned all along. We carry on to the safe house, taking whatever route Dave chooses and staying well below the legal speed limit. But all three of us keep checking every vehicle, and especially anyone riding a motorbike, who seems to be keeping pace with us. We keep a lookout like a tree full of owls, and if we spot anyone who could be a tail we do precisely nothing about it unless they start something. The next stage of this game is definitely down to the opposition.’
Chapter 13
‘I’ve got some news and I’ve been thinking,’ Simpson said, as soon as Richter answered his call.
Richter was sitting in a comfortable armchair in the lounge of the safe house, a compact and somewhat faded small detached country house located just off a lane outside Winslow, and holding a wired telephone to his ear. On the table b
eside him was a pink file marked ‘SECRET’ in black letters at the top and bottom. The title was ‘Hertfordshire Property 4 – Operating Orders and Procedures’. It was basically a manual for people using the house and had been handed to Richter by one of the house staff a few minutes after he’d arrived. He’d been browsing through it when the telephone rang.
One of the most basic precautions for establishing a secure telephone link is to make sure the entire route of the call is confined to wired connections, wireless links being far too susceptible to interception and eavesdropping. Additionally, scrambling units were fitted in both the unit’s headquarters in the back streets of Hammersmith, from which Simpson had made the call, and in the safe house, to minimise any possible compromise.
The unfortunate side-effect of the scrambling system was that Simpson’s voice had a faint, persistent and unnatural echo, and also made him sound as if he were talking from the bottom of a very deep well. But both men were used to the limitations of the system, and barely noticed the distortion any more.
‘I don’t like the sound of that,’ Richter said.
‘Don’t be impertinent,’ Simpson snapped. ‘We still have no idea why someone has decided that you’re a target, but with the amount of effort that the opposition are putting into blowing you away, clearly we’re missing something. I suppose you still don’t have any idea what’s going on yet?’
‘Other that it’s deliberate, and not a case of mistaken identity, no,’ Richter replied. ‘The only thing that seems to me to make sense is that it’s related to the killing of the African prince.’
‘I presume you mean indirectly?’
‘Obviously, bearing in mind I’d never even heard of the man until a bunch of killers comprehensively ventilated him. But I know I was followed when I drove away from the crime scene to interview Jacko King’s wife because I spotted the car behind me. To me that implies that the location was being watched in case I turned up, and once they’d identified me there – and don’t forget that all three of the gunmen had photographs of me on their mobile phones – the car and the motorbike stayed behind me until they mounted the ambush.’
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