by Andy McNab
I hadn’t even sparked it up before a voice said, ‘Stoner, you dickhead, I thought I’d told you to leave that fucking thing behind.’
8
Grwyne Fawr Dam, Powys
Wednesday, 25 January
14.00 hrs
The voice came from the shadow of the trees to my right.
I kept eyes on the screen, not on the place I thought Trev might be hidden. ‘I wouldn’t need it if I was tucked up somewhere nice instead of out here playing hide and seek. What’s all this about?’
He told me to make like I was checking out Google Maps for a minute or two, then keep walking uphill, around the western edge of the coppice, until I reached a clearing. He’d meet me there.
We finally met up twenty minutes later. Trev looked like he’d rewired his brain and gone feral. He was in full-on Rambo mode – field parka bristling with pockets and pouches, cam cream from the neck up, the lot. I felt like a shop-window dummy alongside him.
‘So, is this a change of plan, or was this always the plan?’
His brow rippled like corrugated iron. ‘As you may have noticed, Stoner, when you were mincing around on the parapet, the weather is closing in. And the more I thought about it, the less I fancied the idea of spending another night cuddling up to you in a snow hole.’
He clapped me between the shoulder-blades and guided me back, under cover of the canopy, to a hide that was so well concealed among the interwoven branches of a cluster of firs that you’d have needed an infrared camera to find him.
‘And this, ladies, is something I prepared earlier …’ He ushered me inside a cross between an A-frame shelter and a tepee. The braces were tied in place with twine and sheathed in cam netting. A mixture of twigs, pine fronds, leaves, undergrowth and moss gave it the kind of haphazard appearance that deceived the eye until you were almost standing on top of it. It must have taken him ages to construct.
‘Fuck, Trev, how many weeks have you been out here?’
‘I’m not staying anywhere long right now, Stoner. Must be the hedge monkey in me.’
I cracked a smile. ‘Join the club.’
He was doing his best to make light of it, but the strain showed if you knew where to look. Trev was a big, tousle-haired bear of a man with sideburns that were still stuck in the seventies and in no hurry to leave. He didn’t change his style for anyone. Never had done. But if things began to get to him, he’d rub the pad of his thumb rapidly across the stubble under his chin. It made him the world’s worst poker player. And he was doing it now.
‘Well, we’d better not hang around, then, eh? You can start by telling me why you’re up here playing Grizzly Adams.’
‘Mate … I could really use your help. I don’t know what you’ve heard on rumour control about what went down at Credenhill, but there’s been a drama …’
‘All I know is what God’s messenger told me: man found dead in Killing House.’
He gestured towards a couple of logs and we squatted in the gloom beside a neatly rolled bivvi bag and a Rocketpak Bergen. I could make out a selection of Meals Ready to Eat and their flameless ration heaters neatly stashed in one of its side pouches.
The glint in his startlingly blue eyes told me that the banter was over. ‘A kid took a round in the head during training.’
‘When?’
‘Two weeks ago. Eleventh of January.’
‘How?’
‘That’s the million-pound question. They’re claiming a negligent discharge. I don’t believe a word of it. If it was that simple, why the blackout? DSF has pulled the shutters down tighter than a duck’s arse. That’s one of the things that bothers me.’
‘What are the others?’
‘I could give you a list, but here’s the headline: the lad being blamed for it is under lock and key at Barford, and I’m certain he didn’t pull the trigger. It’s a stitch-up. And as soon as I stuck my nose in where it wasn’t wanted, they tried to fuck me up.’
‘Mate, you know I’ll always go the distance for you, but what’s this got to do with me?’
‘He could be facing a manslaughter rap. He needs us to get him off the hook, Nick. And you’ve been out of sight long enough not to be caught up in it.’
‘Caught up in what?’
He shifted position on his log, but his eyes never left mine. ‘Whatever shit is happening behind the wire. I don’t know what’s going down, but they’re killing their own because of it.’
There were a whole lot of things here that didn’t add up. ‘How can you be so sure he didn’t do it?’
‘Because I’ve known this lad since he was yay high.’ Trev placed the flat of his hand about six inches above the ground. ‘Virtually adopted him when we got back from Sweden in ’ninety-two.’
Now I knew where this was heading.
Trev nodded. ‘Yup. It’s Harry’s boy, Sam.’
I took a couple of deep breaths and watched them billow in the chill air as I exhaled. ‘We all fuck up from time to time, Trev.’
His eyes blazed and his thumb pad went into overtime. ‘Do me a favour, Nick. I know Harry lost the plot for a moment back in Swedeland. But this is twenty years later, and I haven’t.’ He gripped my arm. ‘OK, so I wasn’t absolutely sure from the word go that someone else pulled the trigger in the Killing House, but I am now. You want to know why I’ve gone native?’
He looked like he might start frothing at the mouth any minute now. I nodded.
‘Because some bastard left a claymore in my front hall. An MRUD, for fuck’s sake. If Icarus hadn’t gone ape-shit, I’d be history.’
‘Icarus?’
‘My dog.’
9
Unlike a conventional anti-personnel mine, the MRUD wasn’t disc-shaped and didn’t have to be buried underfoot. In its plastic convex casing, it looked like an iPod sound dock on legs, or a drab green scale model of the Grwyne Fawr Dam.
They could be mounted on the ground, in trees, or on your target’s hall table. Some of the American versions had ‘FRONT TOWARD ENEMY’ embossed on their face, so even the grunts knew which way to point them.
Trev, ever the linguist, had once told me that MRUD was the acronym for Mina Rasprskavajuća Usmenog Dejstva. When I’d scratched my head and looked stupid, he’d written it down and explained that it basically meant ‘directed fragmentation’ in Serbian. And from what I’d seen of them in Bosnia, they did exactly what it said on the tin. Triggered by a command wire, det cord, manual detonator, booby-trap fuse or bog-standard electrical power source, nine hundred grams of explosive blasted hundreds of steel balls in a sixty-degree arc, with a lethal range of about thirty-five metres.
I wasn’t surprised he looked miserable. ‘So you must have rattled the bars on somebody’s cage …’
He gave his thumb a rest and sucked his teeth instead. ‘I’ve got some ideas about that, but even the Old and Bold are keeping schtum, and I’ve been knocking pretty hard on every door I can think of. I paid Chastain a visit at Downton Abbey. Thought he might be able to shed some light on it, maybe push a few of the right buttons …’
‘And?’
‘Her ladyship gave me a brew and some homemade flapjacks, but he was away somewhere, putting the world to rights.’
Trev was silent for a moment. This scenario had really rocked his world. ‘You know what’s getting to me most, Nick? I’m not sure whose side anyone is on right now, top to bottom. And I don’t want to huff and puff about an Englishman’s home being his castle, but when your own semi becomes the battle space, what’s the world coming to? You, Father Mart and the dog are the only people I can trust.’
I gave him a grin. ‘I suppose there’s one consolation …’
‘Don’t tell me.’ He managed to give me half of one in return. ‘At least it can’t make yer pregnant?’
We repeated the old catchphrase in unison.
‘Is anyone else getting fucked over?’
He shrugged. ‘But I’ve tucked Sam’s girlfriend out of harm’s way, jus
t in case. With a babysitter, obviously.’
‘Does Sam have any ideas?’
Trev shook his head. ‘Haven’t seen him. I was planning a trip to Barford before someone took liberties with the message on my welcome mat. I reckon going there now would be the same as holding up a sign to whoever’s behind this drama saying, “Shoot him. And then shoot me as well.”’
We spent the next ten minutes or so sketching out some basic operating procedures – division of labour, where and how we were going to connect, the places we needed to go, the people we needed to see. There were some new names I’d heard about but never met, and some old ones from the past we hoped we could still rely on. Ken Marabula and his nephew Fred were on the list, and Al Gillespie.
I told him he was always welcome to stay with me if he didn’t have somewhere better to go.
He was impressed. ‘I didn’t know you had a UK base, Stoner. You’ve only been back from Moscow five minutes.’
‘It’s not a base, exactly. It’s the back seat of Mart’s wagon.’
That little gag earned me a clip across the ear. Some people are never grateful.
I didn’t ask where he’d hidden the girlfriend. I didn’t need to know right now. And I was starting to think about my journey back. I could still use the bothy as a stopover, but I fancied picking up the Defender ASAP and putting in some distance. Maybe Trev’s angst was contagious.
We unfolded ourselves and exited the shelter. I gave him a man-hug as soon as it was possible to stand fully upright, then turned to leave via the side of the wood by the dam, the point furthest from the clearing where I’d come in. I expected Trev to disappear from sight again, but he stayed with me.
‘I’ll kiss you goodbye at the treeline, Stoner. I’m getting a bit stir-crazy in there. I can’t even lose myself in a crossword.’
Snowflakes swirled above the reservoir in the strengthening wind, and had started to drift against the stone balustrade. We paused for a moment at the edge of the coppice, but a moment was all an experienced sniper needed.
10
I heard the weapon’s report a nanosecond after its round lifted off the top of Trev’s head, just above the eyeballs, like a soft-boiled egg.
I dived to my left, then wriggled back into the undergrowth on my elbows as a massive crater appeared in the trunk of a conifer a couple of feet above my head. I made like a snake and slithered deeper into the bracken, leaf-mould and shit beneath the canopy.
There was no need to check Trev’s pulse first.
Two more shots tore lumps of bark out of a beech two metres to my right. I only stopped and turned when I reckoned I had a good few trees between me and whoever was squeezing the trigger.
He’d have to assume I was switched on enough not to stick my head up out of cover any time soon, so that meant he’d have to come after me. He wouldn’t want to leave any loose ends. And I was now a loose end.
The snow was building, but we were a long way short of a blizzard, and the sky had that strange, special-effects type glow that you sometimes got before the light faded completely.
Did he have thermal-imaging kit?
I guessed I’d soon find out.
Right now I’d have to expect the worst and hope for the best. Either way, I figured that he’d stay where he was until nightfall, taking advantage of the height of his firing position.
Two more rounds confirmed it. He was putting them into the likely cover in case I was hiding there. It was a no-brainer. At worst I’d have to run for it and present him with a target. At best he’d get a kill. You always missed with the shots you never took.
Then all I could hear was the whistling of the wind.
I stayed where I was. I reckoned he would too. The snow had started to make it almost impossible for me to scan the far hillside with any confidence, but his options were limited. He had to stay below the mist that was now shrouding the ridge and above the treeline if he was going to maintain eyes on my escape routes.
When I was a kid in Bermondsey, one old granddad used to sit outside the corner shop on Tanner Street, letting the dandruff settle on the shoulders of his moth-eaten tweed overcoat. Every time I passed, he’d point at the hoarding around the hole in the ground between two terraced houses across the street and mutter, ‘Doodlebug …’
I had no idea what he was waffling about – until I stopped one day and he told me about Adolf Hitler’s V1 missiles raining down on London in 1944, and how you knew you were safe until the engine cut out. In the silence that followed you just prayed the thing wasn’t going to land on your head.
That was how I felt about the silence now.
11
The leaves and pine needles I was buried in were cold and damp and dank, but I didn’t much mind. Better to be here in the shit than back there in Trev’s blood.
I ran through my options.
I couldn’t go back across the dam, or along the west side of the reservoir. In both cases I might as well have painted a target on my forehead or between my shoulder-blades and shone a spotlight on it.
The fact was that whichever route I chose, running away was out of the question. He’d simply follow, and kill me. If not today, tomorrow. Or some time next week. He no longer had a choice.
I didn’t want to mess around. If this lad knew how to handle himself, I had to bring him towards me, channel him to a place of my choosing, my killing ground, and finish him.
I wouldn’t interrogate him first. That only happened in the movies. I might lose the fight to contain him. And I only picked fights I knew I could win. Besides, I didn’t expect him to be carrying a photographic driving licence with name, address and details of his recent speeding fines, or a wallet full of business cards and restaurant receipts. And even if he knew who’d sent him after Trev – which he wouldn’t – there was no way he’d reveal it with his dying gasp.
I burrowed further inside the coppice until I was in deep enough cover to stand, and made my way back to the hide. I stayed long enough to take a good look through Trev’s Bergen. I was pretty certain I wouldn’t find a weapon. He hadn’t had a pistol on his belt, and if he’d been in the mood to bring one along, he’d hardly have left it in his luggage.
I wasn’t wrong, but it would have been madness not to check.
Trev hadn’t wanted to load himself down any more than I did, so there was nothing much in the forty-litre compartment that I didn’t already have. In the side pouch I’d already spotted, he only had enough rations to keep him going for the next two or three days. Then I unstrapped the other pouch and hit the jackpot: lightweight AN/PVS-7 night-vision goggles complete with eye-cups, single-tube scope and head-strap.
I put the NVGs into my daysack, then added a couple of MRE packs and their flameless heaters. Who knew when I might need them? I wasn’t sure when I’d have my next chance to hydrate either, so I poured half the contents of his water flask down my neck.
I paused for a moment at the edge of Trev’s clearing, slipped off my right glove and sparked up Google Maps on the iPhone to set my bearings. It took a while to work out where it was, then told me pretty much what I already knew. I’d be in cover until I went past the south-western corner of the wood.
I didn’t have to stay close to the trees; despite the rate of incline, I wouldn’t be visible for about the first half of my journey between here and the ridge. Then I’d have to cross about forty metres of open ground, like a rat up a drainpipe, before I could duck below the crest and head right for the gully.
That forty-metre stretch was where things would get complicated. I wanted my sniper mate to spot me, because I needed him to know what path to follow, but I didn’t want to give him enough time to get a lead on me, then squeeze the trigger.
Judging by the mess it had made of his head, the round that had killed Trev had had a lead knocker in its base, or my new best mate on the other side of the valley was using polymer tips.
Stopping power and flatter trajectory, even in a high wind, meant that the polymer
option was fast becoming the good old boys’ favourite during the Midwestern hunting season: it could separate an elk from its antlers at three hundred metres. And they didn’t just make them in Nebraska: the Lucznik munitions factory in Radom, a hundred Ks south of Warsaw, kept the Eastern European market well supplied.
Wherever it came from, one of these fuckers wasn’t just going to give me a superficial flesh wound. It would either miss completely or take a big piece of me with it.
I put the iPhone back in my jacket, replaced my glove, visualized the next twenty minutes of my life, and stepped out from beneath the canopy.
By the time I’d got halfway towards the open ground I was beginning to regret having left my Russian tank commander’s hat in the Defender. The temperature had dropped big-time, partly because the day was drawing in and partly because of the wind-chill. My cheeks and the tips of my ears started to burn with cold.
The US Military Field Manual once spread the word that a human being lost between 45 and 50 per cent of his body heat through his head. In truth it was probably closer to 10, but anyone who took comfort from that had probably never been out on the Black Mountains in sub-zero temperatures. The fact remained that driving snow turned your hair rapidly into an iceberg and frostbite hurt like shit, then made bits of you drop off. And since the head was where most people’s brain was located, it messed with your cognitive functions, and thus with your reaction time. So, if I’d just been out on a ramble, I’d have zipped my ears as tightly as possible into the Gore-Tex hood folded beneath my jacket collar. But in a strong wind the fabric rippled as loudly as an America’s Cup jib sail every time you moved, and whenever someone big and ugly was creeping up behind me, I wanted as much warning as possible.