Ferguson nodded in acknowledgement, leaving her to her thoughts.
He waited until she had finished her coffee before speaking again. “If it’s any help. I know what you’re going through.”
“You had nothing to do with this,” she answered. “There’s no reason for you to blame yourself.”
“Soldiers sometimes have guilt, too,” he said quietly.
“Over what?” she answered. “Isn’t it what you’re trained to do?” She saw the flicker in his eyes, and regretted it the moment she said it. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.”
He got up and refilled their mugs with coffee from the pot. “You’re right. Doing the job has never bothered me.”
“Then what?” she asked, her curiosity piqued
“You worked with the Increment?” he replied. “I saw it in your file.”
She had. It had been an amazing and terrifying experience.
When Her Majesty’s Government needed to put men onto the ground anywhere in the world for covert and deniable lethal violence, they turned to the Increment. It was a specially selected team of SAS and SBS troopers from Hereford and Poole who acted as MI6’s private shock troops. She had heard its name had been changed since she left, but the unit was still the same. They did not do high-profile embassy sieges and aircraft hijackings, or even sabotage behind enemy lines. The regular SAS was there for that. The Increment was the elite within the elite—for the operations only a handful of people ever knew about.
She had worked with them on the ground on a number of occasions—the last one being a strike against a Yemeni-backed arms franchise based in Mogadishu’s steamy Bakaara Market. The Increment had not arrived with the usual SAS fanfare of Agusta helicopters, black ops gear, respirators, and night vision goggles. They had merely sent in a small team with long hair and straggly beards, wearing grubby
ma’awis
and baggy shirts caked in a week’s worth of grime. The men had appeared from nowhere in the crowded market and taken out the merchants’ throats with overpowering ruthless force before merging back into the crowds.
Ferguson’s voice pulled her back to the present. “So you know that military operations are rarely a clean business. Engagements are chaotic, and it’s not only the bad guys who get hurt.”
Ava was listening. “So what happened?”
“Have you ever been to Afghanistan?” he asked, sitting down in the armchair opposite her.
She shook her head.
He glanced at the floor before looking over at her again. “It’s not like we didn’t know it was going to be tough.”
He leant forward, rubbing his hands slowly, his elbows resting on his knees. “It’s always been the same. The list of invaders who underestimated Afghanistan goes back all the way. Alexander the Great’s army got into serious trouble there. It was a graveyard for the Brits in the three Afghan wars of the 1800s. And the Soviets’ heavy tanks failed after a decade of brutal combat in the ’70s and ’80s. For as long as anyone can remember, Afghan farmers have proved again and again they can beat state-of-the-art military technology. So despite the politicians telling us we’d be home again with no bullets fired, some of us knew it wasn’t going to be that easy.”
“Where in Afghanistan were you?” Ava asked, picturing in her mind’s eye the silk roads that snaked crossed it, connecting Europe to Asia and the East Indies.
“Sangin.” He spoke the name with the familiarity of someone who knew it all too well.
She looked blank.
Catching her expression, he explained. “If you follow the river Helmand upstream from the lakes on the Iranian-Afghan border, you head east towards its source, seven hundred miles away in the Hindu Kush.”
He was staring into space thoughtfully. “On the way, you pass along mile after mile of fertile river valley—home to about half the world’s annual opium crop. Beyond the irrigated fields there’s nothing but dust and desolation. If you’re really unlucky, you’ll stop a quarter of the way along, about sixty miles from Lashkar Gah. That’s Sangin.”
Ava nodded. “I know where Lashkar Gah is.”
Ferguson continued. “Last year, some genius put a Forward Operating Base there, in an old farmer’s compound. And with a great sense of the absurd, he called it ‘Malta’.” He shook his head. “Even though the name made it sound like a sunny holiday destination, there definitely weren’t any balmy marinas, nightclubs, or cocktails by the pool. It was a rat hole, surrounded by people who really didn’t want us there.”
He took a sip of his coffee. “You would not believe the stuff that went on. Laughing children leading us into machinegun ambushes. Semi-permanent engagement with an invisible enemy, half of them whacked out on chemical cocktails to keep them going round the clock.”
“Our night vision meant we ruled the darkness, so we barely slept. Enemy snipers and dickers were everywhere. They may not have been very accurate with their AKs and old Enfields—but they only had to get lucky a few times.”
“When we weren’t dodging the snipers, we ran the gauntlet of the IEDs they planted along our patrol routes by night as quickly as we could mark or clear them by day. All the time, incessant 107 millimetre rocket attacks pulverized our flimsy base, while doped-up suicide bombers walked up to patrols and detonated themselves. We were being pinned down and butchered in a dozen ways. It was unrelenting.”
He paused. “I don’t know what the TV screens showed the world, but I can tell you—it was as close to Hell on earth as anything I’ve ever encountered.”
“I had heard it was bad.” Ava said softly.
“The pen-pushers in the Ministry of Defence have since admitted that losses at Malta were up there with casualty rates in the trenches of the First World War.” He pursed his lips.
Ava was watching him as he was talking. There was a fatalism about the way he was remembering. She realized they could not be easy memories for him to carry around. He could not have found it straightforward being back in the civilian world again, where few people had any real idea what went on in far-flung military conflicts.
He swirled the coffee around the mug. “Every now and then we got kitted-up and went out into the cornfields to try to flush them out. The crop grew over twelve feet high. You couldn’t see a thing.”
“Towards the end, I was leading a patrol through a nearby housing compound out in the corn. I’d done it a hundred times before. It was a typical set-up—a small cluster of shacks made of mud, brick, and straw, surrounded by a mud wall, all abandoned years earlier.”
“I had three men with me. They were experienced soldiers. Professionals. They’d all done it many times before, too. I don’t know what happened, but as we were leaving the compound, I turned round, and the rear two weren’t there. They were just gone.”
“There are standard operating procedures, and there are times when you throw away the rulebook. This was one of them. The remaining two of us immediately went back in, unsupported.”
“But we found the compound deserted. There was no sign of anyone. The locals were good at that—when they wanted to, they just melted into the corn and poppy fields, the sand, and the streams.”
“What happened?” Ava asked quietly.
“The bodies were dumped in the compound that evening,” he answered. “I’m not going to tell you what had been done to them.” He looked away. “I struggled for a long time over what to tell their parents and girlfriends.”
He took a deep breath. “Inevitably, the mood at the base turned. The company’s blood was up. We wanted to find whoever had done this. If we’d known where the enemy position was, the men would have fixed bayonets and gone after them. There would’ve been nothing I could do to stop them.”
“But we didn’t know where they were. They were invisible.”
“When some enemy were spotted coming and going from the derelict compound a few days later, the men asked to call in a B-52 and finish them off. As the commander, I agreed. It was a standard procedure.”
“We immediately sent out a patrol to laser paint the compound and radio in air support. We didn’t have to wait long before we heard the drone of the eight turbojets, and within minutes the mud compound and surrounding area was hidden by brown and black smoke, flattened by a pair of five hundred pounders.”
He paused, and wiped a hand across his face. “We found out later that there had been five enemy combatants holed up in the abandoned compound, but there had also been two families—mothers and their seven children—all sheltering in a pit dug out as a basement. God knows what they were doing there. One of the children was still just alive. They brought him to Malta where the medical officer fought to patch him up, but he died on the medevac helicopter to Camp Bastion.”
“Christ,” muttered Ava, almost inaudibly.
“Lying out in my tent that night, I couldn’t escape the recurring thought that it was all my fault. I should’ve kept my men safe—that was my job. And I should’ve ordered a proper observation on the housing compound to ensure there were no civilians before we bombed it back to the stone age. I should’ve insisted we spend the time to track who came and went. But I didn’t.”
“Something happened to me after that. No one in the unit blamed me—I’d just been doing my job. No one wept for the civilians either. These things happen in war. But I knew I’d let them all down. Whatever the army said, people were dead because of me, and they shouldn’t have been.”
“Over the coming days, the feeling did not fade away—it grew. Something inside me had changed. A leader with guilt and doubts is no kind of a leader in that environment. So I decommissioned, and left. All I knew was that my two men and those families were dead—all because of me. I had failed each of them.”
He looked up at her. “So you see. We all have our Anselm Drewitts.”
Ava was not sure how to respond. Hearing about more violent deaths was not making her feel any better.
“But what I’ve learned since then,” he continued, “and I don’t know if it’ll mean anything to you tonight—is that feeling guilty won’t change anything. But getting on with your life, doing something positive, will.”
He got up to leave. “It’s late. Thanks for the coffee. I’d better be going.”
Ava looked up at him, suddenly aware that for some reason she did not want him to leave quite yet. “You can stay in the spare room, if you like,” she offered. “We’ve got an early start tomorrow.”
“We have?” he asked, taken by surprise.
“Sure we have,” she got up, a new look of determination engraved into her face. “We need to solve the code on that medal, and then use it to find Malchus—before someone else ends up like Drewitt.”
——————— ◆ ———————
Dagenham
London RM10
England
The United Kingdom
Otto had explained to Uri that there was a bookshop run by an old man in Dagenham.
It was just off the high street, tucked away among the chain stores and bargain shops, opposite a run-down car park. But it was not a normal bookshop, as there were no novels, coffee-table books, children’s stories, or travel guides for sale.
Instead, it was a long-standing left-wing mecca—open since the ’60s, piled high with Marx, Engels, Trotsky, copies of
Socialist Worker
and
The Morning Star
, and other publications Otto lumped together as “degenerate”.
It acted as something of a clearing house for the East End’s left-wingers. They gathered in its few saggy armchairs around an old kettle, surrounded by notice boards advertising meetings, trips, trade unions, study groups, socials, and other liberal activities that clearly turned Otto’s stomach.
There had been no ambiguity in Otto’s meaning. If Uri wanted to meet the Skipper, he first needed to show what he could do.
The bookshop was his test.
Uri figured that Otto and the Skipper would probably be happy if he put a London brick through its window. Or sprayed the front with abusive graffiti. Or roughed up the owner, or perhaps even a customer or two.
But Uri knew he could do far better than that.
And he could do it well.
It was just the sort of thing he was good at.
He had needed to do some shopping first, though.
All the ingredients had been readily available—a square biscuit tin from a grocery shop, a dozen bottles of nail polish remover and hair bleach, some sulphuric acid, and finally a pot of nitrocellulose paint.
He had purchased the liquids at different pharmacies and hardware shops over the course of a day, not wanting to arouse suspicion. He had also bought a few other necessities, including a couple of pairs of chemical-resistant gloves and a cheap pager.
It had been a while since he had cooked up this particular recipe. But he had previously had plenty of training on it, and a quick refresher on the internet was all he needed.
When his instructors back in Israel had shown him how easy it was to buy the various ingredients, he had been amazed. But he had soon learned that assembling them safely was not such a simple task. Limbs and lives were regularly lost by those who were sloppy or cut corners.
As he had followed the instructions that first time, in the Institute’s underground science and technology laboratory by the West Glilot junction just north of Tel Aviv, he had been pleased to discover he was a natural bomb maker.
It just required patience and a cool head.
And he had both.
One problem he had quickly discovered back in the lab was that the chemical reactions gave off strong fumes—corrosive enough to strip the paper off walls.
But in Maze Hill the smell was hardly going to be a problem. It was not as if he had to make the device in a five-star hotel room.
It had been child’s play to break into a small unused building on a nearby industrial estate. The whole area stank with the all-pervasive smell of paint and chemical fumes—and no one had noticed a few more.
Now, approaching the bookshop with the volatile package safely in his rucksack, he checked his watch.
It was coming up to 3:00 a.m.
Alert, he looked about—scanning the area for anything out of the ordinary. But he need not have bothered. The streetlamp opposite the bookshop flickered on and off, illuminating empty pavements in front of a row of tatty shop fronts.
There was nobody about. Most pubs had kicked out their most loyal customers at 11:00 p.m., the late-night kebab shops were closed, and even the stragglers had finished weaving their drunken way home.
Uri did not pass another soul on the street.
That was good. Not only for security, but also because he did not want any innocent casualties. Sometimes they were unavoidable, but on this occasion he needed to avoid victims. He did not want the police turning their inevitable investigations into a murder hunt.
He had done a recce of the bookshop the day after meeting Otto in
The Lord Nelson
, and he had been pleased with what he found.
The shop was an old-fashioned design—a small two-storey Victorian building with a pair of large bay windows bulging out of a dark wooden frontage. The black gloss paintwork looked tired, but the bowed windows lent the shop an individual feel among the bland concrete shops on the street.
The entrance door was set back a little, in between the two windows, at the end of a short porchway decorated with attractive blue and white diagonal floor and wall tiles.
Uri had been less interested in the architectural features than the security. He had scanned the area carefully, gratified to see that neither the shop nor the street had any visible CCTV cameras.
Perfect.
He had not bothered with an elaborate disguise. In his experience they were more trouble than they were worth. A baggy shapeless anorak and a beanie hat were more than enough to make him unrecognizable on any blurry camera footage that might pick him up in the area.
Checking again there was no one about, he approached the bookshop swiftly, cutting across the car park to avoid the cameras on the roads at either end.
Arriving in front of it, he bent low by the half-height iron gate drawn across the front door, and quickly slipped the biscuit tin out of his rucksack.
It was wrapped in a padded brown envelope addressed to the bookshop. If anyone saw the package lying there, they would just figure it was a parcel of books.
Anyway, it would not be around for long.
Putting the package gently onto the ground, he pushed it up against the low iron gate so the blast would take down the door as well as the bay windows.
Standing up, he casually stepped away and back onto the street.
There was still nobody about.
Moving briskly, he made his way back into the car park and out over the low wall of
The Three Tuns
pub. As much as he would like to have stayed around to watch his handiwork, his priority now was to put as much distance between himself and the shop as possible.
As he walked quickly away, he passed a set of catering bins outside a Chinese restaurant. Pulling off his baggy beige coat, beanie, and rucksack, he dropped them into the bins and went on his way, now a different shape entirely thanks to the tight-fitting light-blue fleece he had been wearing underneath.
Heading past a closed garage, he found a night-bus stop, and hopped onto a half-empty bus. It did not matter where it was going. He was counting on changing buses several times anyway, to confuse any camera surveillance that might have picked him up.
As he looked out of the windows at the drizzle beginning to fleck the drab empty streets of the suburbs, he checked his watch periodically to see when ten minutes was up.
When the minute hand told him it was time, he pulled out his mobile phone, slipped in a pay-as-you-go SIM he had picked up from a charity shop, and called the pager. As he heard it connect, he hung up instantly.
Three miles away, the pager in the biscuit tin received the signal and lit up, sending an electrical impulse deep into its circuits.
It was enough.
The bomb exploded with a savage intensity.
As the ferocious blast wave rippled out, the front of the shop was vaporized. At the same time, a deep percussive boom tore through the night as neighbouring shop alarms and sprinkler systems began pointlessly to wail and sprinkle water.
In the comfort of the bus, Uri guessed the owner of the bookshop was going to have a serious shock when he received the inevitable phone call from the police. But it could not be helped. The building and stock were almost certainly insured, and anyway—the owner must have known the shop was a target. It was his choice.
Uri was home by 5:30 a.m. He got his head down immediately, and when he woke at 9:00, it was all over the local news, exactly as he had hoped.
That would give Otto and the Skipper something to think about over their breakfast.
It was by no means the first time his work had hit the headlines. He smiled as he recalled the sudden fatal outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease at the health club in Marrakesh. His superiors had learned the site was being hired for a convention by people whose interests lay very counter to their own. Uri had been proud of the Legionnaires’ disease idea. That had been one of his better ones.
He got up and took a shower, standing in the bath and spraying himself with lukewarm water from the cheap rubber hose attached to the bath’s taps.
After towelling himself dry, he put on a clean pair of jeans and a casual shirt, before settling down to wait for Otto’s call.