Zero Option

by Chris Ryan

  So, after a soak in a hot bath, I took a few precautions before I went to bed. Ever since my bad experiences in Iraq I'd had a thing about the bedroom door, finding it impossible to sleep unless I locked it. I turned the key and stood a chair against the inside with two saucepans balanced on it, so that even if somebody did get through he couldn't come in without making a hell of a clatter.

  I put the phone on the floor beside the bed, laid the pistol on the bedside cabinet, and finally turned in.

  I must have laid awake for some time, because afterwards I remembered how our resident owl had tuned .up in the oak tree outside the window, but in spite of all my anxieties I eventually dropped off. Some time later I became aware of a scratching noise. I rolled over on my back and listened. There it was again: a scrape, followed by a click. I knew the sounds exactly because I'd made them myself, dozens of times - sounds of someone picking a lock.

  The noise was coming up from the front of the house and in through the open window. Without being able to see anything, I somehow knew that the men at the door were wearing black balactavas Jesus Christ! The PIRA were back. And this time they'd come for me! Moving my hand carefully I reached down, brought phone and receiver under the bedclothes, and dialled the incident room. All I got was Mac's recorded voice saying, 'Sorry, old boy, we can't deal with your call at the moment, we're rather busy.

  Call back in half an hour.'

  'Twats!' I muttered. 'Fucking useless!' Then I thought: the Sig. Of course, the Sig. What was best?

  Fire out the window at the intruders, maybe drop one and scare the rest off?. Or let them come in and hope to drop the lot?

  But it was too late to wonder; they were inside already. I heard a sound on the stairs, a low voice. The door handle of the room turned, and at the same moment there was a different noise outside, the faint clank of my aluminium ladder being stealthily placed in position. Then I became aware of movement at the window and saw a black figure loom up, blotting out '

  the starlight. I was trapped.

  I lay dead still on my back, holding my breath. The window was to my left, the door straight ahead. The door began to open. Faint light showed through the crack - a torch. The chair I'd propped against the door fell over and dropped its load with a crash. At that instant I sensed movement in the opposite corner of the room, over my right shoulder. Someone else had got in already, and was coming from that direction. There were men all round me.

  I reached for the Sig, felt, groped, snatched in the dark - but the pistol wasn't there. It had gone from the top of the cabinet. Panic. I went to roll out of bed, only to find I couldn't move. A tremendous weight was holding my legs down. I glanced to my left: the black figure was half-way in through the window. I looked

  straight ahead and saw the man with the torch coming at me from the doorway. Looming bigger and bigger, he was almost on top of me. In spite of the dark I could make out the shape of a pistol in his hand. Within seconds I could see the faint sheen on the muzzle, the ring of death. I was looking straight down the barrel at point-blank range.

  BANG! Instantly I was wide awake, shaking and soaked with sweat. The sheets were knotted up around me. Struggling free of them, I felt for the bedside lamp and switched it on. The Sig was still on the cabinet, the phone on the floor where I'd left it. The chair and saucepans stood unmoved against the door. The corner to my fight was empty.

  I lay back on the pillow, gasping. My watch said 2.45. For a few seconds I glared round the room in disbelief, llinking; then I turned the lamp offagain, got up and went to look Out of the window, standing well back. By now the moon had risen and the garden was brightly illuminated. I watched for a minute or two and saw that all was peaceful.

  I started shuddering. After the Gulf I'd been plagued by terrifying dreams very much like this one. It was those bad nights that started the trouble between me and Kath. My answer to this terror had been alcohol; I'd gone on the booze, and that had made everything far worse. Was all that crap about to start again? And would a Scotch or two be a good idea now?

  'No, for Christ's sake,' I told myself. 'The one thing you do not need is a drink.' So I went back to bed, sickened by the knowledge that a long, lonely war of nerves lay ahead. I'd just come through one nightmare, but another was beginning, and this one was going to be far worse.

  THREE

  Even though I was dog-tired I couldn't sleep. I'd got over my fear of an immediate attack, but there was no way I could stop thinking about Tim and Tracy. After a while I went to lie on Tim's bed, imagining the look of his head on the pillow when we came in to check him last thing at night, the way his flaxen hair lay softly on the back of his neck. Even at four and a bit he was still wedded to Billy, his teddy bear, and usually dropped offsucking one of the damn thing's ears. Now Billy sat forlornly on the window-sill, and I knew that Tim, wherever he was, would be all the more miserable because he hadn't got the little bugger with him. What heartless bastards the PIRA were, to lift a kid as young as that.

  In time I began to feel cold, and forced myself to accept that lying in his room wouldn't bring him back.

  So I returned to my own bed and tried to shut my mind down. I heard the clock in the hall strike three, then four - but that was all. I must eventually have nodded off, and the next time I came to it was seven o'clock.

  Since I was officially on leave I had no need to hurry into camp. So instead I called the incident room to make sure there had been no developments, then made myself breakfast and spent an hour going through Tracy's things. As usual, her desk was in perfect order: there were a couple of unpaid bills, but otherwise she had everything beautifully squared away. A school

  34 exercise book contained a record of her expenses, in her neat writing, and she'd collected the drawings Tim had done at school into a folder. Most of them seemed to have violent subjects - tanks exploding, planes being shot down - and it wouldn't have taken a psychologist long to work out where all that came from. But the tidy way in which Tracy operated nearly choked me, because it made me realise how much she'd done for me.

  At the time of Kath's death she'd been working as receptionist in the Camp Medical Centre. A week or two before I got posted to Northern Ireland she and her friend Susan had been thrown out of their lodgings in Hereford, so I had suggested they should occupy Keeper's Cottage while I was abroad. Events then speeded up in a direction I hadn't anticipated: Tracy and I fell i-or each other, and she had moved into the cottage for good, taking over Tim as though he were her own son. In a few months she had grown up with incredible speed and developed from a lively, knock about girl into a responsible foster mother. She'd kept on her job for a while, but then, when I went to Colombia, she'd given it up.

  Driving away from the cottage wrenched me back to the present. In camp again, I was heading for the Kremlin when I spotted Jimmy Wells, the int officer, coming towards me on a converging path. A scrawny fellow with a narrow face and lank, dark hair brushed sideways over the top of his head, he usually went about with a hunted look, as though he were permanently worried; but his harassed appearance belied him, because he was at heart a cheerful character, always inclined to make the best of things.

  'Hi, Geordie,' he called. 'No news yet?'

  'Nothing so far.'

  'Got time for a natter?'

  'Well… sure.'

  At the top of the stairs I followed him into his office and sat down in front of his desk. As I quickly found out, he was bang up to speed on the kidnap situation, and I realised that he'd invited me in purely to give some friendly support. He was like that; not being a badged officer - not a member of the SAS, but on attachment to us from Intelligence Corps - he had no hang-ups about regimental priorities or feuds and could afford to be himself with everyone, high or low.

  'By the way,' he said in a conspiratorial voice after a pause in the conversation, as though letting fall some tit-bit of local scandal, 'Farrell's on his way back to the UK.'

  'What?' I was taken aback. 'Already?'
/>   'Well, more or less - I'm jumping the gun a bit. But the Colombian authorities have agreed to extradite him.' He picked up a sheet of fax paper and scanned it briefly. 'It seems they don't want anything to do with him. Don't blame 'em. He'll be flown out by military transport later today. Apparently he's suffering from gun-shot wounds in the right arm and flank. Flesh only nothing serious. Who shot him? I wonder…'

  'No idea.'

  I saw Jim smiling. He knew what had happened, of course, because he'd covered the Colombian operation from this end.

  'If only I'd aimed a bit bloody straighter,' I said. 'But it was still only half light, and the bastard was running like the clappers.'

  I stopped, suddenly remembering something I'd read about a British weight lifter at the opening of the Berlin Olympics in 1936. 'I read once about this bloke who found himself standing right next to Hider in some parade,' I told Jim. 'He realised he could have topped the bugger there and then. And afterwards he said, “What a hell of a lot of time and trouble I would have saved.” I feel like that about Farrell. I could have saved the country millions. What'll they do with him here?'

  'Put him in the nick on remand while they sort out a case against him, I imagine.'

  'There's any amount of things they can get him for: drugs, kidnapping the rupert, murder…'

  We'd been chatting for several more minutes when my eye strayed to a photograph in the in-tray: a blown- up black-and-white mug-shot of a man with a moustache wearing a dark beret. Although the picture was upside-down I felt the hair on my neck crawling, because I was certain I recognised the subject.

  It wasn't long before Jim noticed my attention was distracted. 'What's the matter?' he asked, following the direction of my eyes. Then he shot out a hand to cover the 10hoto and said, 'Ah. That's strictly need-to- know…'

  'I know it's none of my business,' I said, 'but could I have a proper shufti?'

  'You're not supposed to. Why?'

  'I think I know the guy.'

  'You can't possibly…'

  'Let's have a look anyway.'

  'Well… I'm not showing it you. You haven't seen it.' Watching me curiously, Jim picked up the photo and flicked it across the desk. The moment I saw it

  straight, all doubt vanished.

  'It's him.'

  'Who?'

  'Shitface. I don't know his name. But this is the bastard that gave us a hard time in Baghdad. An Iraqi, isn't he?'

  'That's right.' Now Jim was looking at me in a yet more peculiar way, as if he was seeing a ghost. 'Geordie, are you certain?'

  'Absolutely. He came to the gaol three or four times to interrogate us. There was always a big palaver when he arrived - the guards shouting and saluting as though he was some high-ranking officer. It was this fucker who used to hit the plaster cast on my broken arm with his swagger-stick. That was bloody agonising. But it wasn't the pain that got to me, so much as his attitude.

  He started saying that if I didn't give him the information he wanted, he'd open up the plaster, infect my wounds with bugs, and plaster it over again, so that I'd get gangrene and lose my arm. Sadistic bugger! I'll not forget him in a hurry. Luckily for me, the war ended before he could carry out his threat.'

  'He sounds a sweetie,' said Jim.

  'He is.' I shuddered as I remembered the screams that came from other parts of the gaol. 'He likes to see prisoners jump. To be more specific, he likes to see them convulsed. He's a specialist at administering electric shocks, and favours giving them through wet sponges, so that the prisoner gets high charge but isn't left with tell-tale burns. We called him Shitface because he was always frowning, like here. What's his real name?'

  'I can't tell you that.'

  'So what's his picture doing on your desk?'

  'Classified, I'm afraid. But look: this identification's very important. Can you be absolutely sure you know the man?'

  'One hundred per cent.' I saw doubt in the in the officer's face. 'You don't believe me?'

  'Well, a lot may depend on it.'

  'I tell you what. There's another guy here in camp who was in that gaol with me: Tony Lopez, the American. He'll remember the sod as well as I do.'

  Suddenly Jim was all lit up. 'Where is he now?'

  'He's on leave, after Colombia. But he'll be around the Lines somewhere. I saw him last evening. If you like I'll go find him…'

  'No. I'll ring round and see where he is.'

  A flurry of telephone calls ran Tony to earth in the gym, and he said he'd come right up. As we waited, I saw that Jim was in a state of excitement. I realised why he hadn't let me go looking for the Yank myself.“ he wanted to confront him with the photograph before I'd had time to give any briefing.

  In came Tony, looking big and brawny in his ash- grey tracksuit, sweat still trickling down his temples.

  'Apologies for showing up like this,' he began. 'I was half-way through my weights, but this sounded urgent.'

  'No sweat,' said the int officer - and then, grinning at the unfortunate pun, Td just like you to answer a simple question.' He flipped over the mug-shot, which he had turned face-down. 'Do you recognize this man?'

  'Goddamn it!' Tony cried. 'It's Shitface, the son of a bitch who gave us third degree in Iraq.'

  'There you are!' I said. 'What did I tell you?'

  'Yeah!' Tony went on, his voice loud with indignation, jabbing a forefinger at the portrait. 'We used to think he looked like Saddam Hussein, with the moustache and the beret. But then, all Iraqi officers do.

  This one always seemed to be scowling. A big guy, shambling, a bit like a bear. Boy, what wouldn't I do to get my hands on that bastard!'

  Jim nodded. 'OK,' he conceded. 'That does it. Now you'd better forget I asked you.'

  'Wait a minute,' said Tony. 'What's he got to do with us now?'

  'Nothing.' Jim stared straight at me. 'As I say, forget it. And don't mention it outside this office. You never saw the picture, and I never asked you anything.'

  Of course we couldn't forget it. Tony and I obeyed orders and didn't mention the matter to anyone else, but we talked to each other about it at lunch that day, then again in the evening. Obviously the Iraqi was up to something that involved the SAS, but we couldn't figure out what it might be. We guessed Saddam Hussein might be using him to suppress the Kurds in the north of the country; but at that time the regiment had no presence in Iraq - at least, none that we knew of- and a couple of veiled enquiries drew blank. On the other hand, secret operations were our bread and butter, and when guys got involved in something really hot they were generally tight as gnats' arseholes about it.

  So it seemed quite possible that some operation was brewing and nobody was talking.

  Nor did the day produce any information about Tim and Tracy. Telephone engineers had re-routed the lines so that anyone calling my old number in the cottage went straight through to the incident room, where the phones were manned twenty-four hours a day, and the line was bugged, so any conversation on it would be “automatically recorded. Foxy Fraser of Special Branch, who was there in person for much of the time, decreed that the phone must be answered by men only, with instructions to be as non-committal as possible. That way, if the PltkA did come through, they might think it was me on the other end.

  For several hours I sat in on the control room, listening to the check calls that came through from Special Branch in London, Birmingham, Holyhead and other places, fervently hoping that one of them would bring news of a positive lead. At first I was on edge, jumping around whenever a phone rang; but after a while boredom began to kill hope and I settled into a resigned torpor, crushed by the realisation that we were probably in for a grinding marathon of a wait.

  Hanging around, flicking through old magazines, I couldn't help being aware of the Streisand look alike, Karen Terraine, with her swept-back blonde hair and big nose. There she sat, all neat and tidy in a pale blue blouse and grey skirt, taking the odd call, making notes, checking things, going through to the SB central computer
for specialised information, and bringing up one list of names after another on her screen. Most of the time she looked totally demure, but twice I caught her giving me the eyeball, and I began to get irritated by her presence.

  Fraser saw I was less than chuffed, but he naturally attributed my unease to the general situation and tried to cheer me up by saying, 'Don't worry, Geordie, the touts are out there. The touts are about. They're all hungry, and they're all listening. Our eyes and ears are open.' A search was on in Ulster as well, in case the party had-somehow managed to cross the water undetected; but the presumption still was that the hostages had been taken to London.