Hellfire

by Chris Ryan

  Mustafa nervously moistened his lips. ‘I’m sorry sir,’ he said. ‘I do not know anything about any Caliph.’

  An uncomfortable silence as Mustafa’s gaze flickered nervously in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Thank you, Mustafa,’ Ahmed said finally, and he raised the dividing window again. ‘Mustafa has children, you see,’ he told Buckingham. ‘Their safety is more important to him than anything else. But he would not have been able to tell you anything useful. Few people have ever seen the Caliph. Fewer still know who or where he is.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Perhaps he doesn’t really exist. Perhaps he is just a story, invented to scare people. Say your prayers, or the Caliph will come for you. Perhaps he is a high-ranking Qatari politician. Perhaps he is a desert wanderer. I do not know, but I have told you everything I can.’ Before Buckingham could interrupt, he held up one finger. ‘Do not ask me any more,’ he said. ‘I will help you up to a point, but if the rumours about the Caliph are true and he finds out that I have spoken to you about him, it will not be me whom he targets. It will be those closest to me, and I will not risk their safety for anything. Not even for your precious British Intelligence.’

  Ahmed turned to look out of the window again. ‘I will be returning to Qatar in the morning,’ he said, ‘and I have a lot to do before then. May I offer you the use of my driver to take you somewhere. The airport? The British Embassy? I would seriously recommend that you do not spend any more time than is necessary in this part of the world, if you insist upon making enquiries about that type of person.’ From a pocket in his robes he removed his sunglasses and put them on. ‘As you’ve just witnessed,’ he said, ‘dark things have a habit of happening here, even when the sun is out.’

  Sir Colin Seldon, Chief of MI6, had a glass of Laurent Perrier in one hand and a canapé in the other. Sometimes he felt he lived off canapés. He popped it in his mouth, took a sip of champagne, and smiled blandly at the woman in the sequinned dress who was wittering on at him. He could hardly hear what she was saying, here under the vaulted ceilings of Westminster Hall. It was packed with people chattering noisily, the men in dinner suits, even though it was only early evening, as they congregated to welcome the French president on a state visit. Their conversations almost drowned out the sound of the excellent string quartet in the far corner of the hall. He glanced at his watch. Another half hour before he could politely leave.

  Over the shoulder of the woman he saw a face he recognised. Smart suit, neat black hair – an SIS intelligence officer, though Seldon was damned if he could remember his name. He was trying to catch Seldon’s eye, and his face was serious.

  Seldon gave the woman his most winning smile. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said. ‘Would you excuse me for just one moment?’

  Without waiting for a reply, he walked over to where the intelligence officer was standing. ‘News?’ he breathed.

  ‘Bixby sent me, sir.’ And from the look on the officer’s face, Seldon could tell it was going to be bad. He was practised at absorbing information at events such as this without allowing his expression to register what was going on. But this tested his skills. He grew increasingly nauseous as listened to the intel.

  ‘Dead?’ he repeated, when the officer paused for breath. ‘Both of them?’

  The intelligence officer nodded.

  ‘How?’

  ‘The aide was just shot, Sir Colin. The High Commissioner, I’m afraid . . .’ He used his forefinger to make a slicing gesture at his throat.

  Seldon removed his glasses and pinched his nose. ‘Fucking animals,’ he breathed. ‘Boko Haram?’

  ‘Yes, Sir Colin. And I’m afraid there’s more.’

  Seldon stared at the intelligence officer as he reeled off more bad news than the chief had heard in a year. Not only was a British-born jihadi on the site, it seemed to be Jihadi Jim, last seen performing executions on the Iraq–Syria border. And that wasn’t the worst of it. There was the suggestion of a biological agent in the vicinity. One of the SAS team infected. The chief felt his blood chilling at this new intelligence.

  ‘We’ve protocols in place?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, Sir Colin. Porton Down are on standby. We can get them there overnight, on your say-so.’

  ‘Do it,’ Seldon said. ‘Is there any sign that the beheading was videoed?’

  ‘None,’ said the intelligence officer. ‘But I think we must assume that it was. There’s no real reason to do it otherwise. Could be an hour before they release it, could be a month. The median wait time is six days.’

  Seldon swore under his breath. ‘Keep this from the media until I’ve discussed it with Whitehall. Are the Nigerians aware?’

  ‘No sir.’

  ‘Keep it that way. They’ll only mess things up even more. Now get to work.’

  The intelligence officer nodded and left. Seldon scanned the room. It didn’t take long for him to pick out Tessa Gorman’s face. The Foreign Secretary was talking to a couple of minor dignitaries on the other side of the room. Their gazes locked, and she seemed immediately to understand that Seldon had something serious to say. She excused herself and crossed the chamber to talk to him.

  ‘Well?’

  He gave her the news. She was a lot worse at hiding her emotions than he was.

  ‘Is the bioagent being contained?’ she asked.

  Seldon nodded. ‘A Porton Down team are on their way. But in my opinion, if Boko Haram want to start spreading diseases round their country, that’s the Nigerians’ problem, not ours.’

  ‘Agreed. I need to tell the PM about the High Commissioner immediately,’ she said.

  ‘Wait,’ Seldon told her. ‘It’s more complicated than you think.’

  Gorman raised an eyebrow, clearly indicating that she didn’t appreciate being spoken to like that. But she kept quiet and allowed Seldon to continue. ‘Think about it, Tessa. Someone needs to take the fall for this. We can’t shift the blame to the Nigerians. It’ll mean military action against Boko Haram, and nobody’s got the stomach for that. Your lot aren’t going to take the blame. The way I see it, we’re only left with one option.’

  ‘The army?’

  Seldon nodded. ‘A catastrophic failure by the Regiment. I know these people – I can promise you they’ll have broken a few SOPs along the way which we can make stick. It’s by far the best way. The public hold them in high regard. They can take a hit far better than we can.’

  ‘You’re thinking along the lines of Gibraltar?’ Gorman asked. ‘I heard it was touch and go whether those SAS men got put away for excessive force.’

  ‘Exactly. Or even Northern Ireland – we’re pulling back Regiment personnel to be questioned about jobs in the Province as we speak. They can deal with it, and it gets us out of a hole.’

  The Foreign Secretary thought about that for a moment. ‘Let’s get the team out of Nigeria as quickly as we can,’ she said. ‘We can work out what to do with them when they’re back in the UK. Now excuse me, the PM’s over there, I need to catch him before he gets up to give his speech . . .’

  ‘Call sign Bravo Nine Delta, this is Zero Alpha.’

  The radio communication from Hereford was scratchy and indistinct. But welcome. It had been forty-five minutes since Danny had made the call. He’d explained in detail about what had happened: about the High Commissioner and his aide, about Jihadi Jim and the strange Chinese man, and of course about Ripley. The radio operator had listened in silence, then told them to stand by.

  ‘Go ahead, Zero Alpha,’ Danny said.

  ‘A team from Porton Down is en route to your location. ETA 05.00 hrs. Covert insertion – we’re keeping this quiet from the Nigerians.’

  ‘Roger that.’

  ‘Your instructions are to keep the patient isolated. You understand what that means?’

  Danny, Tony and Caitlin exchanged a look. ‘Yeah,’ Danny said, ‘we understand.’

  ‘What’s the status of your prisoner?’

  Danny looked over at Jihadi Jim. He was lyi
ng by the side of the road shivering, his eyes rolling, his pale face sweating. ‘Bad,’ he said.

  ‘Can you question him?’

  ‘He’s barely conscious.’

  ‘Do what you can to keep him alive until the medics get there.’

  ‘Are we being airlifted out?’

  ‘Not immediately. When the medics arrive, they’ll try to treat the patient in situ. You need to stay on the ground and provide close protection while they do that.’

  ‘Roger that.’ A pause. Danny glanced at Tony. ‘We need to track the Chinese guy down.’

  ‘That’s a negative. Your instructions are to remain where you are.’

  ‘We can locate him. The roads are bad, we can catch him up.’

  ‘Negative. Keep the patient isolated. Do not move from your position, repeat, do not move from your position.’

  Danny swallowed his frustration. ‘Do Ripley’s family know what’s happening?’

  ‘Negative. London want this kept quiet for now. Any more questions?’

  Danny had none. ‘Bravo Nine Delta out,’ he said, and the radio went quiet.

  But Danny’s head was noisy. Something wasn’t right. London were making a bad call. Why were they so insistent that all the unit stayed in situ, when some lunatic with a bioweapon was on the loose?

  Time check. 17.32. Caitlin moved over to where the prisoner was lying. She knelt down beside him and started examining the wound. Tony sidled up to Danny. ‘He’ll try to make a run for it, you know.’

  Danny glanced at the prisoner. ‘He’s not going anywhere.’

  ‘I’m not talking about this fucker. I’m talking about Ripley.’

  ‘Why would he do that? He isolated himself, didn’t he?’

  ‘He’s all fucking noble now, but there’ll come a point when he’s not thinking straight. He won’t want to just sit there and take what’s coming to him. Look, Black, all I’m saying is, nobody would know if we put Ripley out of his misery before he has a chance to spread the infection. I’ll do it if you don’t want to. We can say he tried to escape and we . . .’

  ‘Forget it, Tony. The medics are going to sort Ripley out.’

  Tony gave a dismissive snort. ‘Right,’ he said.

  ‘We’ve got other things to worry about, apart from Ripley,’ Danny said. It was true. He estimated that it was an hour till sunset. And just under twelve hours until the Porton Down team got here. In the meantime, they were exposed and in the open. Boko Haram militants could return at any minute.

  Danny turned to what remained of his team. ‘We need to get off the road,’ he said.

  ELEVEN

  ‘What you have to understand, is that the secret of effective counter-terrorism intelligence work lies in answering three simple questions: who, what and how.’

  Spud Glover stood by the door of a small office on the third floor of the MI6 building. It was getting late – almost seven – and he was pissed off. A petite woman with dark skin, a head scarf, fashionable thick-rimmed glasses and a smart navy trouser suit sat at a desk. She had a small pile of manilla folders in front of her. Her name was Eleanor. When they’d met for the first time that morning, she had taken Spud rather by surprise. It wasn’t just that this woman who was clearly a Muslim, with her rather plain hijab, was working for the security services. It was also this: Eleanor was a looker. She floated his boat.

  His first thought was one of relief that he’d kept his powder dry by not responding to the advances of Tony’s missus the previous afternoon, after the others had been hauled in to base. Don’t dip your pen in the company inkwell, he’d told himself. Or maybe he’d been giving himself an excuse not to reveal the network of scars and sores that now made up his abdomen. And maybe that was why he hadn’t found himself flirting with Eleanor quite as outrageously as he once might have done.

  As the day went on, however, she had started to irritate the hell out of him – not least because she was reading the folders at the same time as talking rather absent-mindedly to him, as if he was just an afterthought. And then, of course, there was the way she sounded like a teacher talking to an ignorant schoolboy.

  ‘Who do we think might represent a threat? What opportunity might such a person have for carrying out such a threat? And how might they do it? Does that make sense, Spud? You’ll tell me if I’m going too fast for you?’

  ‘Don’t you worry about it, love. I’m just about keeping up.’

  ‘Once you’ve answered those questions, you have a more important question to answer: what behaviour does your subject display when they’re preparing a strike? We call these behaviours “terrorist attack pre-incident indicators”, or “TAPIs” for short.’ She gave him a hard look when she saw he was staring into the middle distance above her head. ‘Can you tell me what TAPIs stands for?’ she asked.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to be reading those files?’

  Eleanor removed her glasses, laid them upside down on the files, and turned to look at him.

  ‘Spud,’ she said. ‘The idea of you shadowing me is that you learn something about what we do here. It’s going to be rather difficult for both of us if you’re going to take that attitude.’

  ‘Terrorist attack pre-incident indicators, TAPIs for short. Trust me, love, I’ve seen more terrorists than you’ve had hot dinners. The best indicator that they’re going to attack is when they pull out a gun and try to shoot you. And the best counter-attack is to shoot them first. Maybe they didn’t teach you that at spy school?’

  ‘There’s no such thing as spy school,’ Eleanor said primly.

  ‘Did they sit you down in a classroom and teach you this stuff?’

  ‘Well, yes, but . . .’

  ‘Then you’ve been to spy school. And it sounds to me like you never bunked off.’

  She gave him a withering look. ‘You’re impossible,’ she said. She replaced her glasses and turned back to her file. Spud continued to loiter by the door. It was true what she said. When it became clear that Spud was in no state for active service, the Ruperts and suits had given him a choice: honourable discharge with full army pension, or they’d try to find other work for him within the Regiment. That meant a desk job, pushing bits of paper from one side of a desk to another. But for Spud, paperwork was one down from scrubbing the toilets, and so some bright spark had come up with the idea of having him shadow an MI6 intelligence officer. The idea was that he would learn something about the intelligence trade, with a view to moving into that field.

  At least, that was the headline. The reality, Spud knew, was that everybody at the Firm saw him as a lump of muscle, only there to provide spooks like Eleanor with backup when they were out in the field. He was a glorified bodyguard, and his first day in the new job had been about as bad as he’d expected. He’d have given anything to be out in the field, even if it was just tagging along on the Nigerian job with Danny and the others. And at times he thought his body would be up to it. But then, he’d make an unexpected movement – not much, just a sudden turn or a twist of his head – and a sharp jolt of pain would shoot down his abdomen, or he’d be overcome with a fit of coughing that wouldn’t stop. A constant reminder that his last op had left him in a very bad state indeed – a state in which he was of no use to his Regiment mates.

  As these thoughts repeated themselves in his mind, Spud stood in silence as Eleanor continued reading through her files. He supposed she meant well, but her habit of talking like a text book didn’t half get on his wick. He’d like to put some of these spooks on the ground in a war zone, see how far their so-called expertise got them then.

  He noticed that Eleanor seemed to be reading a particular file for the second time. ‘Something interesting?’ he asked.

  ‘Maybe,’ she murmured.

  Spud knew what she was looking for. The order had come down from the head shed: there had been intelligence chatter about an extremist who called himself the Caliph. A selected batch of intelligence officers were now hunting down any reference to such a character
. It was a painstaking operation. Lots of police and other intelligence reports were computerised, but plenty had been written by hand. Hence the pile of manilla folders on Eleanor’s desk. And hence Spud’s reluctance to help her with the donkey work. Reading wasn’t his strong point.

  He stepped towards the table and glanced at the file. It was neatly packed with small type, and had a black and white picture of a Middle Eastern-looking man with a trim beard. ‘What is it?’ he said.

  ‘West Midlands Police report.’

  ‘And?’

  She scanned down the document again.

  ‘All these files have some sort of mention of a “caliph”, but they’re all very non-specific. A caliph is an Islamic ruler – that’s a historical fact. We can’t drag people in simply for talking about history. I’ve got files here on university professors, TV researchers, all sorts of people. They’ve all made public utterances about caliphs and caliphates, and they’re all entirely innocent, so far as I can tell. This one’s a little different. West Midlands Police pulled over this cab driver, name of Kalifa al-Meghrani, in Dudley, on the outskirts of Birmingham, about five weeks ago. Nothing serious – it seems he was just operating without a licence, but they took him into custody when he started losing his temper with them. Here’s the interesting bit – one of the police officers involved reported that he shouted words to the effect of “I’ll set the fucking Caliph on you.”’ She frowned. ‘It’s pretty thin,’ she said, half to herself.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Spud said. Finally, here was something he knew how to deal with. ‘We can be up the M1 in three hours. Let’s go ask this weirdo what he meant.’

  He was halfway to the door when Eleanor said, ‘Sit down, Spud, for goodness sake.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘We can’t just go barging in on this man. There are protocols we have to follow.’

  Spud blinked. ‘You think this piece of shit might know where the bad guys are, and you’re worried about protocol? Take my word for it, love – ten minutes with me and you won’t be able to stop him talking. He’ll be begging to talk.’