by Mark Dawson
Not bad, Pope thought.
He closed the crate, the lock automatically clicking back into place, and descended to the ground floor. The rear reception room was spacious enough for four or five people, and when the double doors that separated the large room into two halves were closed, it would be impossible to see in from the street. He opened his bag and took out the printouts he had made before he left the Cotswolds and the large-scale Ordnance Survey maps of Manchester that he had purchased. He had also bought a pack of Blu Tack and a container of drawing pins, and working quickly and efficiently, he stuck all of the material onto the walls, adjusting the order until it made sense to him. He spent an hour looking at it and making notes in a spiral-bound notebook that he would burn when he was finished. When he finally checked his watch, it was nine, and he was happy that he had the basis of a workable plan.
He slipped on his coat, locked the front door behind him, jogged down the steps and set off for the car. The others were due to arrive at Kings Cross, Euston and Liverpool Street, over the course of the next two hours. He needed to pick them up.
There was a lot to do.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Bloom had given Pope a free hand as to the composition of the team. Each of the twelve men and women who made up the operational strength of Group Fifteen would have been more than capable of carrying out the mission objectives. The infiltration of the mosque was little more than a simple Breaking & Entering job, and the kidnapping of Hussain, though more challenging, was nothing when compared to the tasks that they would more normally have been given to do. Group Fifteen’s current complement was a team of ten men and two women. The men were typically drawn from the ranks of British Special Forces: the Special Air Service, the Special Boat Service and 18 (UKSF) Signals Regiment. The women were both from the Special Forces Reconnaissance Regiment.
He had chosen four agents, plus himself. Group Fifteen operations were usually solo, but teams of two were deployed for more sensitive or difficult operations. These were not difficult jobs, but there was absolutely no room for error. Bloom had made that very clear. Pope was not prepared to take the risk that they would deploy below strength, but the five of them should be plenty to achieve their aims.
He had collected them earlier that evening. Hamish Munro, Number Four, had travelled down from Edinburgh. He had served in 22 SAS, A Squadron, for six years before Pope’s predecessor had selected him. He was a proud Scot, cantankerous to a fault, and one of the toughest soldiers that Pope had ever served alongside.
Number Twelve was Thomas Snow. Pope felt obligated to include him. He was already involved.
Next to Snow was Victor Stokes, Number Seven. He was in his early thirties and had been selected from the Z Squadron, SBS. He had been a Royal Marine commando before his special forces posting and had made his name during the evacuation of Western oil workers from remote Libyan desert facilities.
The final member of Pope’s team was Hannah Kelleher. She was Number Nine and the youngest of the four, having recently celebrated her thirty-second birthday. She had served with the Special Reconnaissance Unit in Iraq in the recent hunt for the British jihadis responsible for the murder of Western hostages. She was implacable and focused, rarely smiled and was a dead shot. Pope would not have wanted to be on her bad side.
There was a brew kit in the kitchen, and Pope had made tea for all of them. They were sitting in the rear reception room now. Munro and Snow were on the sofa, their feet on the low coffee table that stood between it and the fireplace. Kelleher was on the floor, her back propped up against the wall. Stokes, who was constitutionally cautious, was at the rear window, gazing into the dark garden below.
Pope took a sip of his tea and rested the cup on the mantelpiece. ‘Thanks for coming on short notice.’
‘This is unexpected,’ Stokes said. ‘I thought we were stood down.’
‘Officially, we are.’
‘Unofficially?’
‘Not so much.’
Pope went through the details of his conversation with Bloom yesterday. They had all seen Ibrahim Yusof’s martyrdom video and the subsequent ones that had been posted on behalf of Bilal Ismail and Aneel Mirza. Backlash was beginning to hit the security services, anger that they had been allowed to plot without challenge.
Pope explained that the imam of the Stockdale Mosque, Alam Hussain, was strongly suspected by MI5 of involvement in the operation.
‘How good is the intel this time?’ Munro asked. ‘I only ask, because, you know, it wasn’t great the last time we were in the field. Twelve got it in the neck.’
Snow sighed at the reference to Fèlix Rubió and looked away.
‘I’m just saying –’
‘We have orders. We have to assume it’s accurate.’
‘What do they want us to do?’
‘Two tasks. First, we get Hussain off the street for questioning. Second, we break in to the mosque and conduct a search for useful evidence or intel.’
‘Security on the target?’ Hannah Kelleher asked.
‘Some. More since Westminster. You’ve read the news the same as I have – there have already been retaliatory attacks. Everyone knows that those boys went to his mosque. Hussain has a reputation, and there are plenty of knuckle draggers out there who won’t believe he didn’t know anything about it.’
‘They might be knuckle draggers,’ she said, ‘but it sounds like they might be right.’
‘Whether he’s involved or not isn’t our problem. We need to get him and anything useful we can find.’
‘What’s the plan?’
‘Two teams.’ He pointed to Munro and Stokes. ‘Four and Seven – you get the mosque.’
‘Delightful,’ Munro said.
Pope directed their attention to the walls. He had arranged the intelligence that Vivian Bloom had provided. There were photographs and diagrams. There was a map of Central Manchester that he had ringed in red ink with the location of the mosque. It was standing on substantial grounds between Anson Road and Conyngham Road.
‘Here it is,’ he said. He pointed to the photographs around the map. ‘It’s a new building, purpose built, and they put it up at a time when they knew that making it as secure as they could was probably a decent idea. It’s surrounded on each side by a six-foot-tall brick wall, and there are railings on top of the walls. The main gates are the same height and covered by at least three CCTV cameras. Going in the front way isn’t going to work.’
‘And the back?’ Munro prompted.
Pope pointed to another of the photographs. It showed a five-foot gap in the wall that had been blocked with temporary fencing. ‘Turns out a car smashed into the wall last week, and they haven’t had it rebuilt yet. This is how you get into the grounds. There’s at least one camera with coverage, but take that out and you should be in and out without being seen.’
‘Easy enough.’
‘I think so too.’ He had enlarged the architect’s plans of the mosque, and it was to these that he turned next. ‘Two floors once you’re inside. The ground floor is the worship space. Ignore that. Take these stairs to the first floor. There are offices and classrooms up there. You’re looking for hard drives, documents – anything you think might be worth a second look.’
‘Alarms?’
‘Yes, and probably good ones. If you can’t find them and they get tripped, Bloom thinks you’ll have five minutes before the police arrive. I wouldn’t plan on staying any longer than that in any event, but the detail of how you structure things is down to you once you’ve had a look at the target.’
Munro and Stokes shared a glance and then turned back to Pope, nodding their agreement. ‘Piece of cake.’
Pope agreed with that. A simple breaking and entering, even against a well-secured building, offered no particular problems to operatives as well trained as Four and Seven. The second part of their orders was more challenging. He pointed to Hannah Kelleher and Thomas Snow. ‘Nine, Twelve and I will go and get Hussain.’
>
He took a quarter turn and nodded across to the other maps and photographs. Alam Hussain lived in Moss Side, a neighbourhood of Manchester that had earned the unfortunate sobriquet of ‘Gunchester’ over the course of thirty years of gang violence. Hussain’s address was a mid-terrace house on Roseberry Street, a road that ran horizontally from east to west among a tight grid of similar streets. The houses were dilapidated, plenty of them sealed with metal sheeting to keep squatters out. The doors opened straight onto the street. Each house had a ground-floor window next to the door, and there were two narrow windows on the first floor. Every house was disfigured by a satellite dish, a few of them of the larger variety that were powerful enough to pick up transmissions from Eastern Europe. There was a park opposite, including a children’s fenced-in play area, with a slide, swings and a roundabout. There were no trees, it was enclosed and there were no obvious spots for surveillance.
‘Lovely spot,’ Kelleher said with a wry smile.
An alleyway ran north to south, splitting the terrace in the middle, and Hussain’s house backed onto it. The narrow space was obstructed by bin bags that had been torn open by scavenging dogs and the remains of wheelie bins that had been set on fire. The alleys were known as ginnels by the locals, and, Pope thought, this one could be very useful.
‘Our man lives here,’ he said. ‘There’s what you could charitably call a park to the south. You’ve got vehicular access to the east and west, but the locals park on both sides of the road, so there’s only likely to be enough space for one car. We’ll need to plan for that. Once we have him, we’ll head for Princess Road, then the A57, M603, M61 and M6 up to Wick.’
Snow leaned back in his picnic chair and shook his head. ‘Wick? As in Wick in Scotland?’
‘We’re going to be handing him over to the CIA. They’ve been itching to speak to him. Now’s their chance. I’m allowing eight hours to get up there.’
‘Why can’t they do things like normal people?’ Munro grumbled. ‘Find me a lock-up. Give me a day alone with him, and I’ll have him saying whatever they want him to say.’
‘I’m happy to leave that to the CIA,’ Pope said. ‘We’re in it deep enough as it is.’
‘When do we go?’
‘We need to get up there and get eyes on. We don’t know anywhere near enough about him yet. I’ve got a hire car, and we’ll get another. We’ll go up tonight and get a better idea of the lay of the land. If we think we can get him tonight, we go tonight. If not, we’ll wait. We hit the mosque simultaneously.’
The five of them stood.
‘Let’s get to work,’ Munro said.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
They stopped to hire a second car. Munro and Stokes were in the first, a Renault Megane, and Snow, Kelleher and Pope were in Pope’s Volkswagen Passat. Snow was driving, and Kelleher and Pope were in the back. He spent the four hours it took to drive north to Manchester reviewing the information on Alam Hussain that had been provided on the USB stick.
Hussain had been born in Bethlehem in the West Bank in 1960, which at that time was under Jordan’s control. That gave him Jordanian nationality. In 1989, it was reported that he travelled to Peshawar in Pakistan, where he served as a professor of sharia sciences. There were unconfirmed reports that he had met Osama Bin Laden while in Peshawar. After the first Gulf War in 1991, Hussain was expelled from Kuwait, along with many other Palestinians. He returned to Jordan, but in September 1993 he fled with his wife and five children to the United Kingdom, using a forged UAE passport. He requested asylum on grounds of religious persecution, claiming he had been tortured in Jordan, and asylum was granted in June 1994. He had been in the country ever since.
Although Hussain publicly distanced himself from al-Qaeda, his MI5 file remarked that he was known to have extensive contacts with al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan. The analyst noted that Hussain had ‘impeccable traditional and modern Salafist credentials and has acted as the in-house alim to radical groups, particularly in Algeria, from his base in Manchester since 1994.’
According to the indictment of the Madrid al-Qaeda cell responsible for the bombing of a train in 2004, Hussain was ‘considered the spiritual leader’ of al-Qaeda in Europe and other groups, including the Armed Islamic Group, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, and the Tunisian Combat Group. He was considered to be a preacher or advisor to al-Qaeda terrorists Zacarias Moussaoui and Richard Reid. Videos of his sermons were found in the Hamburg apartment of Mohamed Atta when it was searched after the 11 September 2001 attacks. When questioned in the UK in February 2001, Hussain was in possession of £170,000 cash and £805 in an envelope labelled ‘for the Mujahedin in Chechnya.’
‘What’s the bottom line?’ Kelleher asked him.
Pope put the papers down. ‘He’s a bad man.’
It didn’t really matter what Pope thought, since he would have carried out his orders whatever conclusion he had formed, but he was quite clear about that. Hussain was a bad man.
And he was about to have a very bad night.
He read on. Hussain had been attacked by members of the English Defence League after one of his sermons had been posted on YouTube. His nose had been broken, and his wife’s burqa had been torn away. The police had provided him with protection, and the report noted that his detail had been strengthened in the light of threats to his life in the aftermath of the Westminster bombing.
That was going to make things a little more difficult.
Moss side was just as bad as advertised. The houses were typically in poor condition, many of them empty. The group drove along one street where all but one had been deserted, the remainder boarded up or secured behind bright orange anti-squatter panels and painted with red crosses to signify that they were to be demolished. A group of boys, their hoodies pulled up over their heads, walked by a house that had been allowed to collapse in on itself. Another pair of boys endlessly kicked a football against the wall of another blighted property. Rubbish blew on the gentle nocturnal breeze.
Pope was driving. Snow and Kelleher were in the back.
‘What a dump,’ Snow said.
Pope followed the satnav to the junction of Greame Street and Rosebery Street and then peeled it off the windscreen and dropped it into the footwell. This area was hardly a destination that anyone would want to find, and he did not want the glow of the unit to draw attention. He turned onto Rosebery Street and maintained a steady twenty miles per hour. He would allow a single pass of the address. He rolled west to east and passed ten feet from the red front door of number thirty. The others were quiet, both of them absorbing as much of the surrounding detail as they could.
The park to their right was small and unlit, and the pinpricks of red light before the faces of the three kids on the swings gave away the cigarettes that they were smoking. Cars were parked on both sides of the road, and there was only space for a single car at any one time. Pope was unhappy about that. It would make exfiltration more difficult.
Pope reached Claremont Road and parked in the empty courtyard in front of Mr McFresh Bakery. He turned and nodded at Kelleher. ‘We’ll go and take a look at it on foot. Snow – take the car, meet us at the junction of Rosebery Street and Great Western Street.’
They got out of the car, Snow going forward and sliding into the driver’s seat. He pulled away, leaving Pope and Kelleher behind.
‘Take the alley at the back of the house,’ he said to Kelleher.
She nodded, waited for a pair of cars to pass, crossed Claremont Street and then set off along Cowesby Street, the road that ran adjacent to Rosebery Street.
Pope waited for her to reach the corner. ‘Comms check,’ he said into the tiny microphone that was attached to his lapel.
‘All fine,’ Kelleher responded, her voice audible in his earpiece.
She turned the corner and passed out of view.
‘Loud and clear,’ Snow reported.
Pope crossed the road and walked north along Rosebery Street.
He paid much closer attention to the house this time. It had a plain red door, the paint peeling away at the bottom. The single ground-floor window and the two windows on the first floor were obscured with patterned net curtains. There was a burglar alarm fixed to the wall above the door and two satellite dishes – one bigger than the other – fixed above that. A batten that would at one time have supported an estate agency sign was still screwed into the bricks. The house was unremarkable and similar to all the others on the terrace. He stopped when he was almost upon it, ducking down behind a parked car to pretend to tie his shoelace.
‘There’s an alarm,’ he said into the mic. ‘We’ll need to disable it. There’s a junction box on the other side of the street. Shouldn’t be too hard to cut the power. Might not be a bad idea to put the lights out, too.’
‘Are they in?’
Pope waited as long as he dared, but he saw no sign of life inside the house. ‘Doesn’t look like it.’ He kept on. ‘Surveillance is going to be bloody difficult if we need to do it. There’s nowhere to park, and I can’t see any buildings that would work.’
Pope finished with the lace, got up and walked on another ten feet. The alleyway that bisected Rosebery Street had an exit here, and as he strolled slowly by the opening, he saw Kelleher walking down it from the other end.