by Andy Maslen
Contents
A New Job
Airstrike
An Old Friend
Concentrate on the Road Ahead
Briefing
A Matter of Faith
Tipoff
Unwanted Attention
More Unwanted Attention
The Female of the Species …
Is More Deadly
Than the Male?
Marlborough Lines
Stitched Up
Fix Bayonets!
Call the Cops
Not Quite Our Class of Punter
Striking Sparks
Let's Get into Character
Meet the Family
Sibling Rivalry
Going too Fast
Briefing Room 17D
The Thin Blue Line
Never Discuss Religion or Politics
"Send the Missiles"
Fairbairn-Sykes
Max
You Can't Judge a Book
Just Another Day at the Office
The Jaws of Life
Room Service
One Out, All Out
Target Apprehended
Target Acquired
Target Captured
Searching in the Dark
By All the Prophets
Anatomy Lesson
Impersonating an Officer
Smudged Ink
Room at the Top
Recuperation
Crossing Off Names
Don's House
All Our Force, Pursuit and Policy
The Sands of Time
Bird's Eye View
Telephone Diplomacy
Shalom
Cargo Hold
Control Room
Countdown
A Little Ride Through the Desert
Initiate Strike Sequence
Drone Swarm
Mini-Spike
Melkh
Factory Visit
The Fire Goes Out
Where Is He?
Death of a Patriot
Two-Up
Set Target
Going Down
Initiate Arming Sequence
Spelunking
Open Hatch
Playing Dirty
Spear or Shield
To Life!
Disgrace
Blacksmith
A Final Blow of the Hammer
Debrief
House Guest
Gift Horses
A Tempering
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Also by Andy Maslen
About the Author
Afterword
No Further
A Gabriel Wolfe Thriller
Andy Maslen
For the real Sarah Hunt.
There the fire will consume you; the sword will cut you down — they will devour you like a swarm of locusts.
Book of Nahum, 3:15
A New Job
MARCH 2018
MOD ROTHFORD, ESSEX, ENGLAND
How do you kill a man?
It’s a simple enough question. And to a layperson – a school secretary, perhaps, or an accountant – it has a simple answer. Shoot him. Stab him. Push him off a building. Run him over with your lease-purchase Ford Focus that you optioned-up with the sports package including red racing stripes and leather upholstery. And, yes, these are all perfectly acceptable methods. But to a professional – a professional killer , that is – it merely leads to more questions.
Who is the man?
Where is the man?
How well protected is the man?
Do we mind leaving the man’s body?
Do we mind if the man’s friends or employers know who killed him?
Must we be silent when we kill the man or is a certain amount of noise permissible?
When these, and other, questions are answered to our satisfaction, then the process of choosing the method of killing can begin.
Gabriel Wolfe, professional assassin for Her Majesty’s Government, was working his way through the questions. Sitting opposite him in the sparsely furnished office in MOD Rothford, a British Army base in Essex, was his boss at The Department, Don Webster. Gabriel had served under Don in the SAS when the older man had been known as Colonel Webster. Now he worked for a security agency, allied with, but not a part of, MI6, MI5, Military Intelligence and Special Branch. His brief as an operator for The Department was to eliminate those of Britain’s enemies its sister agencies were unable, unwilling or unready to deal with. There might be questions of jurisdiction, international cooperation, secrecy, or simple logistics that created the operations The Department worked on. But whatever their genesis, he, and the other men and women who worked for Don, were kept busy.
“Who’s the target?” he asked now, before taking a sip of the whisky Don had poured for him on his arrival. In his head he added the supplementary question, Who am I supposed to be killing ? He chose to use that word, and not eliminating , liquidating or neutralising as some in the intelligence and security community, particularly the CIA, preferred to. If the order was legal, he’d follow it. That had been his creed in the Army, and it remained his creed now. If the order was to kill an enemy of the British state, fine. But let’s call a spade a spade.
Don pushed a buff folder across the desk to Gabriel, who slid it closer, spun it round and opened it to find himself looking at a ten-by-eight glossy colour photo of a middle-aged man wearing steel-rimmed glasses that magnified closely-spaced dark eyes above a long, straight nose. He sported a neatly trimmed, greyish-white beard. He was frowning, and his lips were compressed into a thin line. He might have been a headmaster, worrying over his school’s budget. Or a salesman, wondering if he’d make that month’s target. Don spoke, clarifying the situation.
“Meet Abbas Darbandi. Mr Darbandi is a scientist. A nuclear scientist, to be exact. In fact, to be absolutely, one hundred percent, specific, Mr Darbandi is an Iranian nuclear scientist in charge of a project codenamed Melkh .”
“Locust,” Gabriel said. “What is it?”
Don explained. Project Locust was the design and manufacture of a tactical nuclear weapon, to be carried as a warhead on a medium-range ballistic missile.
“So if it’s not a long-range missile, where’s the target? I’m guessing Israel.”
Don nodded. “That’s what our friends in Vauxhall think. Obviously we want to prevent the Iranians developing that sort of strike capability, not least because we don’t want a Middle East arms race developing. The Israelis know all about Darbandi’s work, and so far they’ve been content to maintain a watching brief. But now they want action.”
“Why haven’t they just gone off and done it themselves? They’re not exactly shy about that sort of thing.”
“I’ve been in contact with my oppo in Jerusalem. Believe it or not, it’s a manpower issue. They’re overstretched and they’ve asked us for help.”
“Where does Darbandi work?” Gabriel asked.
“Our Mr Darbandi works inside an Iranian nuclear research and development facility in Vareshabad. It’s a small town – village, really – an hour’s drive north of Tehran. It’s been classified by the Americans as civilian, not military, but its sole purpose is developing a bomb. As to his personal security, how about seventy-five highly trained, heavily armed, battle-hardened and utterly ruthless members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard?”
The rest of Gabriel’s questions Don answered with terse sentences carrying the maximum amount of information for the minimum amount of words.
No, we don’t mind leaving the body. Yes, we do mind if Mr Darbandi’s employers know who killed him. This is a highly secret, eyes-only classified mission from a deniable component of the British security apparatus. On balance, a silent approach is
preferred.
Gabriel visualised a sturdy wooden bench laden with an assortment of weapons, both traditional and improvised. Our school secretary or accountant would in all likelihood recognise some of them. Either from TV or the movies, or their own homes.
A cricket bat.
A pair of pliers.
A hammer.
A dining fork.
A darning needle.
A corkscrew.
A meat skewer.
A cook’s knife.
A bottle of bleach.
A lead-filled leather cosh.
A brass knuckleduster.
A piano-wire garotte.
A Böker tactical knife.
Other fighting knives, of the flick, double-edged and stiletto varieties.
A US Marine Corps tactical tomahawk.
A SIG Sauer P226 semi-automatic pistol.
A .44 Magnum Smith & Wesson Model 629 revolver.
A Mossberg 500 pump-action shotgun.
A Colt M16 assault rifle.
An Accuracy International AT-80 sniper rifle.
He rejected the firearms out of hand. Too noisy. Too hard to explain away if the shit hit the fan and he got caught. Shame.
The improvised weapons he also dismissed. Unnecessary.
That left the edged weapons.
Even in the age of drones, hyper-accurate sniper rifles and cyberwarfare, sometimes the only way to vanquish your enemy is up close and personal. When the ammunition runs out, you fix bayonets and get into it. If your enemy is closer than the length of a rifle barrel, you pull a knife.
“A blade,” Gabriel said. “Silent, and we could put the blame on a local.”
The older man nodded, letting his grey eyes close for a long moment. When he opened them again, he took a pull on his drink before speaking.
“Not much margin for error. You’d have to be standing next to him. Unless you threw it, of course.”
“Yeah, well, I never ran away to the circus so I’d probably miss him. It was always Daisy or Smudge who won the competitions. Whenever they were short of beer money they’d always challenge me.”
Daisy was Damon Cheaney, and Smudge was Mickey Smith, two members of Gabriel’s patrol in the SAS. Both men were dead. Smudge at the hands of militia fighters in Mozambique, Daisy from an assassin’s knife. More and more these days, Gabriel found that people close to him ended up dead. It made him wary of forming friendships, let alone intimate relationships.
“Fine. We’ll hook you up with Sam Flack at some point. Remember her?”
Gabriel thought back to his first encounter with the MI6 quartermaster. That time, Don had tricked him into thinking Sam must be a man. He and Don had horsed around, making lame 007 jokes before she’d taken them to the firing range. There, they’d blasted away with an array of ammunition that culminated in depleted uranium 9mm rounds that punched through half-inch, military-grade, steel armour as if it were cardboard.
“How could I forget?” he said, examining an old scar on the back of his right hand. A piece of shrapnel? A knife? A garden tool? He worried that he couldn’t remember.
Don smiled, grey eyes twinkling.
“Fool me once, eh? Now, let’s talk about your team.”
Gabriel looked up.
“What team? I thought this was a solo mission.”
“Come on, Old Sport. This is Department business, not one of your little freelance jaunts. You’ll need backup on the ground when you get to Tehran, not to mention an intelligence contact here in London. Or were you simply planning to waltz into Darbandi’s place of work dressed in a DHL uniform asking for Iran’s top nuclear scientist to sign for a parcel?”
Gabriel ran his fingers through his hair, which, he’d noticed with alarm, had become speckled with silver in the last few months.
“No, Boss. Sorry.”
Don smiled.
“Don’t be sorry. I think you’ll find the company pleasant enough.”
He reached over and pressed the intercom button on the hefty, slime-green phone on the corner of his desk. A tinny female voice buzzed from the speaker.
“Yes, Don?”
“Send her in, would you please, Pamela?”
Gabriel twisted round in his chair to see who this “her” was that Don had partnered with him. The door opened, and, as he took in the athletically-built young woman standing in the doorway, he smiled.
Airstrike
JULY 1999
PERSEPOLIS, IRAN
Squadron Leader Nick Avim had flown seventy-three combat missions as an Israeli Defence Forces pilot, some in hot wars, others as part of Israel’s continuing peacetime battle against its enemies. This mission fell into the latter category. He checked his instruments. One hundred miles to the target. Well inside Iranian airspace now, he and the other members of his squadron were flying at 50,000 feet at Mach 2 – 1,535 mph. The official designation for the American-made F-16 he was flying was “Fighting Falcon.” But the captain, like his fellow pilots in the IDF and the United States Air Force, called it the Viper.
The mission was simple, if risky. Mossad had received credible intelligence that a Hezbollah combat group were being trained by the Iranians in a deserted village outside the old city of Persepolis. Avim and his squadron were tasked with destroying the village and everyone in it. All were terrorists or terrorist trainers and, as such, legitimate targets.
The Vipers each carried a pair of AGM-65 Maverick air-to-ground missiles secured to hardpoints beneath their cropped-delta wings. Four Sidewinder air-to-air missiles apiece would cope with any threats from the Iranian air force. Keeping his radio communications to a minimum, Nick spoke for only the second time on the mission.
“Snakes – four minutes to run – confirm.”
In turn the other five pilots acknowledged the order.
“Two.”
“Three.”
“Four.”
“Five.”
“Snake Six.”
The six gleaming fighters dived from 50,000 to 5,000 feet, their wingtips leaving narrow threads of condensation behind them, the contrails white against the azure sky over Persepolis.
Avim could see the buildings of the village ahead in the distance, shimmering in the heat haze coming off the desert. He flicked the switch on the instrument panel to arm his Mavericks, confident that his squadron were doing the same.
With a minute to go – range 14 miles – he locked his targeting system onto two of the buildings and fired his Mavericks. He banked sharply to starboard and began a vertical climb, back to the jet’s operational ceiling. Behind and below him, the rest of the squadron followed him in, arming, locking on and firing their own Mavericks. Between them, they launched 12 missiles – three-quarters of a ton of high-explosive anti-tank warheads – that streaked towards the terrorist training camp at over 700 mph. The missiles hit their targets 55 seconds later. Their shaped charges detonated with a series of shattering explosions, propelling jets of molten metal and superheated gases into the buildings and the cellars beneath them.
Avim and his squadron, three men and two women, turned for home.
Seventy-four , Nick thought.
Though credible, the Israelis’ intelligence had been flawed. Badly. The people killed in the airstrike weren’t terrorists or terrorist trainers. They were archaeologists. British, American, and Iranian. There was a single survivor. A thirteen-year-old boy. At the time of the attack, he had been riding a dirt bike a few miles to the west of the dig, looking for new birds to write down in his notebook. Ornithology was his passion. His brown-skinned hand gripped the pencil with a true convert’s enthusiasm as he inscribed the genus, species and common name of each new bird he logged.
An Old Friend
MARCH 2018
MOD ROTHFORD, ESSEX, ENGLAND
The young woman who took the seat next to Gabriel was in her late twenties. Her dark, wavy, reddish-brown hair was loose around her jawline. Her large, grey-green eyes, rimmed with kohl, were twinkling with good
humour as she turned to him.
“Hello again, Gabriel,” she said with a smile. “How’ve you been keeping?”
“Hi, Eli. Not bad.”
Don had travelled to Israel a few years earlier to headhunt Eli Schochat. Her background in the IDF and Mossad made her a perfect candidate. Since then she’d helped Gabriel defeat the vengeful daughter of a billionaire who’d been planning a military coup in Britain. Lizzie Maitland, long thought dead by the UK’s security and intelligence services, had turned out to be alive and well, biding her time before striking back at Gabriel for ruining her chances of seizing power from her father after the coup. Since then Eli and Gabriel had worked a couple of missions together, most recently in Cambodia, where Don had tasked them with taking out an ex-Khmer Rouge warlord.
“Nobody been trying to kill you since we last hung out together?”
“Actually, they have. Repeatedly. But,” he spread his arms wide, “as you can see, they failed.”
Her smile widened further.
“Good for you!”
Don interrupted their banter.
“When you two have finished chuckling over Gabriel’s extraordinary ability to find trouble and then emerge unscathed, perhaps we could continue with this briefing?”
Eli straightened in her chair and pulled her hair behind her ears where she fastened it with an elastic band she took off her left wrist.
“Sorry, Boss. Won’t happen again.”
Don smiled.
“Yes, well, I’ll believe that when I see it. Now, Eli, you’ve had some time to ponder this operation, what’s your thinking on how best to get into Iran?”
Eli glanced sideways at Gabriel before returning her gaze to Don.
“There are a number of ways we could do it. I have contacts in Israeli security. The IDF as well as Mossad. We could fly into Tel Aviv or Jerusalem and then get a military transport to drop us near the Turkish-Iranian border and just walk in. Or we could go straight into Tehran on UK diplomatic passports. But I’m sure MOIS,” – she pronounced it moyce – “monitor all our diplomats. That’s the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, Gabriel.” He nodded his thanks. “Two new faces would trigger increased scrutiny, which we could do without.”