Red Notice (3 page)

He’d chosen the sort of outfit some upper-crust Englishmen wear when they’re trying – unsuccessfully – for a casual look, topped off on this occasion with an expensive leather satchel slung over the shoulder. Gavin had given it the serious thumbs-up as Tom had changed for the op that morning. ‘To the manor born, mate. You look like Prince Charles getting ready to head down to Highgrove for a chat with his plants.’

‘It’s just a matter of having the right gear for the occasion, Gav, you know that. Like when you slip into the velvet hot pants, nipple clamps and Spandex thong combo for a big night out.’

As he approached the blonde now, he brushed an imaginary speck of fluff from the sleeve of his tweed jacket and called, ‘Hello there!’ in his best Etonian drawl. He gave her a disarming smile. ‘You have
such
a lovely garden.’

The blonde smiled back. ‘Thank you, but—’

‘Did you design this yourself?’ He half turned away from her to admire one of the flowerbeds.

She gave a hesitant nod.

‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘And aren’t these daffodils magnificent?’ He gestured towards the display of red roses tumbling over the pergola beside her, still flowering in early autumn. ‘Absolutely stunning.’ He pulled out his iPhone and took a picture of them.

‘Excuse . . . please . . .’ The blonde looked nervous now. Her Eastern European accent was evident, and her hand pressed more tightly against her bump, as if shielding her unborn child from this stranger.

He continued talking, blithely failing to register her unease: ‘I’m a volunteer for the Garden History Society. We list one new garden every year in our official register . . . and I’d say yours would be a really strong candidate. Would you mind if I put it forward for selection?’

‘Is just hobby. Not for public . . .’ She searched for the right word. ‘Not for other people . . .’

Without a pause, he began speaking in Russian. ‘Would it be easier if we spoke in your mother tongue? I wrote my thesis on the Aptekarsky Ogorod Botanical Garden in Moscow. Have you ever been there?’

‘No.’ She showed real concern now, her eyes darting from side to side, scanning the garden behind him.

‘Where are you from?’ he said, once more affecting not to notice her discomfort.

She gestured towards her bump. ‘I’m sorry, you must . . . Excuse, please, I . . . I very tired. Perhaps one other day . . .’

He treated her to an even more disarming smile. ‘How wonderful! Many congratulations! You know what? My wife’s just given birth to our first – a little girl. Small world, eh? How many months pregnant are you?’

‘Seven . . .’

‘A boy or a girl?’

She hesitated. ‘I . . . I do not know. They can’t tell yet.’

The smile still lighting up his face, Tom shot out a hand, seized her wrist and twisted it back viciously, forcing her to the ground. She cursed and struggled as he whipped an autojet syringe from his satchel with his free hand and plunged the needle deep into her thigh. Screened from the house by the pergola, he kept his grip on her wrist as the sedative took effect.

‘You fucked up, I’m afraid.’ His tone was still calm and matter-of-fact. ‘They can tell the sex of a baby at three months. Oh, and daffodils are spring flowers, and yellow, not red.’

She slumped, unconscious. He zip-tied her hands, then pulled up her maternity dress, exposing her stomach. The pregnancy bump was an ‘empathy bulge’ that a certain sort of man might wear in a pathetic attempt to share his wife’s experience of pregnancy. Except that this one wasn’t warm and fuzzy. A light green substance the consistency of Play-Doh was jammed into the pouch.

Tom could smell the distinctive linseed aroma of the eastern-manufactured, low-quality plastic explosive. The precise make didn’t matter to him. He was more concerned about the thin steel detonator wires coming out of the PE and twisted around a red and blue two-flex. They disappeared into her clothing,
en route
to a battery pack. All she had to do was complete the circuit by pressing a button in her coat pocket. The killing area would extend about twenty metres. And Tom was smack in the middle of it.

Swiftly but carefully, he pulled the aluminium tube from the explosive and separated it from the two-flex, then twisted the two steel wires together to prevent an accidental detonation. Radio transmissions could arc across the two wires and complete the circuit. He pushed the tube down into the soft soil of the rose bed. He rolled the blonde on to her front, turning her head to keep her airway open.

Still crouching beside the pergola, he spoke into his lapel. ‘That’s the female contained.’

Gavin’s response was instantaneous. ‘And the baby?’

‘No baby. Just a belly-rig full of PE. Looks like the gas is back on.’

As Gavin called it to the others – ‘All stations, this is Alpha, the gas is back on. Out’ – Tom took a respirator from his satchel, fitted it to his face, then pulled out a fat-barrelled ARWEN 37 launcher. ‘Alpha. Come on.’ His words echoed across the net. ‘We’re compromised. We’ve got to go. We’ve got to go
now
.’

From a distance, the ARWEN's bulbous 37mm barrel and revolving five-round cylinder had the look of a kid’s Super Soaker – but delivered a whole lot more than a water jet. Its kinetic energy baton rounds were powerful enough to drop a small horse. Its ‘value’ impact rounds could not only drop the horse but envelop it in its own gas cloud. And its pure gas rounds – CN (chloroacetophenone) was the irritant of choice – could fuck up anyone’s day. Finally, if required, the weapon could fire pure smoke to cover the movement of assault teams.

Tom had pre-loaded five Barricade Penetrating Irritant Rounds intended for use against car windscreens, interior doors and plywood up to 13mm thick.

A disc of CN within the round ruptured as it penetrated the barricade, whereupon its combination of rapid deceleration and rotational spin dispersed a cloud of fine powder inside the target area. The spec described it as ‘non-lethal’ or – as Tom preferred – ‘compliance’. There was no CN ‘gas’ being used on this job, but everyone found it easier to call it that.

5

‘
ALPHA. WAIT OUT.
Wait out. I do not have control. All stations wait out.’ Gavin gave Woolf a quizzical look. He wanted to crack on as much as the rest of the team. ‘Well?’

The MI5 man, still with his mobile phone glued to his ear, avoided his gaze. ‘I’ve no decision from COBRA yet.’

Gavin gave a weary shake of his head and, not for the first time that day, exchanged a ‘What the fuck?’ look with Major Ashton. He shot a quick glance at the rolling news bulletin, hoping that the stock-market update wasn’t about to give way to hysteria in Hampstead. Ever since the Iranian Embassy siege fiasco, when the world had watched the SAS assault teams storm the building on live TV, the media had been kept well out of the way of Regiment operations. Had any of the terrorists been watching the TV coverage during the build-up to the assault, the hostages might all have been killed before the troopers could reach them. And these days, when every Tom, Dick and Harry had a camera phone, it was only a matter of time before an operation got prematurely exposed or totally fucked up.

Ashton saw Woolf’s free hand tug more vigorously at a strand of his thinning hair as he barked into his secure mobile. Old habits died hard under pressure. ‘The situation is now
critical
. I need COBRA’s authorization at once. Not in five minutes, but
now
.’

The Civil Contingencies Committee – incorrectly but universally known as ‘COBRA’ after the acronym for Cabinet Office Briefing Room ‘A’ in which it had once met – was tasked to deal with every emergency from fuel-transporter strikes to terrorist attacks. An excellent set-up in theory, as it brought together the supreme commanders and most highly qualified specialists to manage any crisis situation, but in practice, as he and Woolf already knew, and Gavin was discovering, the sheer weight of expertise often stood in the way of a speedy and coherent response.

Woolf was fuming, and with good reason. Ashton could picture the chaotic scenes that would be playing themselves out in the corridors beneath Whitehall.

6

THE SCREENS COVERING
the end wall of the conference chamber carried the same CCTV and satellite feeds as the command centre in Hampstead. The room was windowless; the ‘skylight’ in its ceiling merely concealed a bank of SAD illumination units.

A huge rectangular table filled most of the available floor space, the leather seats surrounding it occupied by ministers and civil servants from the Home and Foreign Offices and the MoD, together with the DSF (director of UKSF, United Kingdom Special Forces), and an assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who was in constant telephone contact with Woolf.

Many of them had just walked to the fortified cellar beneath Whitehall. Sited between the Houses of Parliament and Trafalgar Square, COBRA was linked by corridor to Downing Street, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Cabinet Office.

The murmur of conversation was barely audible above the hum of the air-conditioning as they waited for the home secretary, chairing the meeting as usual, to finish consulting with the senior civil servant at her elbow and call them back to order. Her grey hair testified to her long experience, but her
porcelain features and impeccable diction still led some people to make the mistake of underrating her. They were the same people who also mistook her kindness for weakness. It was a serious error. She was as tough as an old squaddie’s boot, with the language to match, and could be as ruthless with her subordinates as she was with her political adversaries. She was used to junior ministers jockeying for position and squabbling over their places at the table.

‘Shall we stop pissing about, then?’ she said at last, and though her voice was low, it cut through every other conver sation and focused attention on her. ‘Control will be handed over to the SAS for a hard arrest of Laszlo Antonov.’

There was a series of nods and murmurs of assent. But Edward Clements, a career FCO man in his mid-fifties, wearing the civil servant’s uniform of pinstriped suit, crisp white shirt and tie – no hot colours or strong patterns, of course – raised his hand. ‘Let’s just take a deep breath here, shall we, Minister?’ His voice was as smooth and mellow as the malt whisky he liked to drink in his London club. ‘That suicide vest won’t be the only weapon Antonov has procured.’

The home secretary gave him one of her steeliest glares. ‘Do I take it, then, that the Foreign Office has specific intelligence on that front?’

Clements gave a brisk nod. ‘Yes, Home Secretary.’

‘So we should proceed with extreme caution.’

He shook his head. ‘I couldn’t disagree more. There’s all the more reason to authorize immediate military action rather than a non-lethal arrest.’

‘If you want to achieve a bloodbath, perhaps,’ she said acidly. ‘The military and the police always tell us, “We can do it” – but why wouldn’t they? It’s money on their budgets, and a poke in the eye for their rivals in the Security Service and the SIS. But we can – and should – be rather more objective and measured in our response.

‘It’s very easy to be an armchair warrior, but which of you . . .’ she glanced around the room, making sure she still had everyone’s full attention ‘. . . is prepared to take
responsibility for that decision? Which of you would be willing to shoulder the blame if it all goes pear-shaped?’ She gave the DSF a look that left him in no doubt that she spoke his language. There would be no bullshit getting past
her
.

She glanced around the table once more. Most of the assembled officials and all of the politicians avoided her eye. ‘Precisely,’ she said. ‘Nobody. I’ll be the one in the firing line.’

Clements leaned forward. ‘Be that as it may, Home Secretary . . .’ He cleared his throat and waited until everyone was listening. ‘Make no mistake. If he’s cornered, Antonov has the commitment – and the full intention – to use his weapons.’

‘Which is precisely why there’s a Red Notice on this animal.’ The home secretary gave him another glare. She had no time for civil-service theatrics.

Laszlo Antonov had been officially charged with war crimes at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and a Red Notice had been issued by Interpol. Interpol did not have the authority to issue arrest warrants in the formal sense – that was the domain of the sovereign member states – but a Red Notice was the closest thing there was to an international arrest warrant.

Antonov was a South Ossetian, and had known war all his life. North Ossetia was part of Russia, but South Ossetia had always been the subject of dispute between Georgia and Russia. Most South Ossetians carried Russian passports and wanted to break away from Tbilisi. They had declared it a republic in 1990 and the Georgian government had sent in tanks. A series of conflicts followed.

Laszlo, by then a well-seasoned fighter and nationalist, had turned to the Russians for support. The Georgians were preparing to slaughter his people again, and he needed to defend himself. Happy to have a vicious and well-trained proxy, the Russians gave him the funding and the weaponry to raise a clandestine paramilitary unit from men he had fought with for years. Officially it was called the 22nd Black Bear Brigade, but the locals referred to them simply as the Black Bears. Laszlo was the unquestioned leader and his brother, Sambor, was second-in-command.

The Black Bears fought like a Special Forces unit: they lived covertly in the field for weeks, attacking Georgians in small numbers before fading into the night; destroying their line of supply and communication and killing as many high-ranking officers as they could until their army was incapable of making tactical decisions on the ground. Laszlo conducted his war with speed, aggression and surprise, in a way that even the SAS would have admired.

When Georgia launched an offensive in 2008 to retake the breakaway republic, about fourteen hundred locals had been slaughtered. In retaliation, Laszlo had led a massacre of more than six hundred innocent ethnic Georgian men, women and children in one night of carnage. He had then provided the Russians with vital information that helped Moscow make the decision to send troops and tanks over the border to ‘protect Russia’s citizens’.