Bolt Action (29 page)

Inside a black Jaguar XJ 2.7

En route to Downing Street

S
heila ‘Noppy’ Davane, stuck in traffic behind a temporary police cordon, fumes. ‘Who the hell is protesting today?’ Pyjama-girl is by her side, on a call to one of the assistants coordinating the COBRA meeting.

Davane’s driver cranes forward, slowly reads off a couple of the signs. ‘Hands Off Our Fishing Grounds . . . Hooked. Gutted. Fried By This Government.’

The Ulsterwoman shakes her head irritably, puts the carphone that she’d been using over the top of her shoulder, telling the man to whom she’d been talking to hold. Gets back to reading through what she’d been able to access of the personnel file of Tristesse Merritt. One item of particular interest, a news story from the
Observer
dated less than four years ago.

PIG SLURRY MYSTERY

OF IRA MAN’S DEATH

Carrickmacross, Ireland – The badly decomposed remains of Albert ‘Click’ Morris, former IRA crime boss turned Sinn Fein parliamentarian, are being examined today by specialist Garda forensic officers, after a skeleton was discovered earlier this week under more than a tonne of rotting pig slurry near remote farm buildings, about fifteen miles west of the market town of Dundalk.

Mr Morris, a
Teachta Dala
for less than a year, went
missing in January 2006. He was last seen leaving a traditional ceilidh in Castleblaney with a mystery blonde, subsequently dubbed the Icepick Chick by local media.

‘That’s definitely “Click” in there,’ said a plainclothes member of the Garda’s Special Detectives Unit who was working the site and requested anonymity. ‘But who did it for “Click”, how and why . . . only the pigs know and they ain’t talking so much.’

Exactly a year after his disappearance, Norris – divorced with no children – was officially declared dead by the Monaghan coroner, after the minister of justice in Dublin waived the normal seven-year rule to facilitate a parliamentary by-election. Probate papers revealed Norris controlled a multimillion-pound empire of property, transport and farm holdings on both sides of the border.

Despite one of the largest investigations ever mounted in the Republic, the identity of the woman dubbed the Icepick Chick, after the Sharon Stone character in the movie Basic Instinct, has remained a mystery. The search was scaled back at the start of the year and, for their part, both the London and Dublin governments have denied any involvement in or knowledge of Norris’s disappearance.

‘It gives me a thrill, a real jolt in my old bones to know that bastard is definitely dead,’ said Mary Sweeney, a 68-year-old widow, whose husband and son, both Catholics, were killed in 1990 at Killeen, on the Belfast–Dublin border crossing. They had gone to help a Protestant businessman from Belfast strapped to a so-called proxy bomb in his car, when it was detonated by remote control.

Norris was widely reported to be the de facto commander of the South Armagh Brigade, the IRA’s most effective unit, from the mid-1980s until just before the Republican Army’s military council announced its decision to end active combat in 2005. He then reinvented himself as a parliamentarian, winning election to the Dail Eireann to represent the Cavan-Monaghan district immediately to the south of County Armagh.

The judicial ruling that he had died allowed Irish media to fully report on Norris’s murderous and criminal exploits and in the subsequent by-election a candidate from the rival Fianna Fail party was returned with a comfortable majority.

‘He let it be known he was to be called Click, because, if you crossed him, it would be the last thing you ever heard,’ said Sweeney, who said she has no doubt Norris was responsible for the blasts that killed her family . . .

Davane takes the phone off her shoulder and talks to the man who’s been waiting. ‘Max, are you telling me that Tristie Merritt is this . . . this Icepick Chick?’

‘I’m telling you no such thing,’ booms the voice down the telephone. Colonel Max Molloy’s initials are in the margin of the photocopied newspaper clipping, assigning it into Merritt’s file, which has a conspicuous number of UK EYES and SECRET stamps. Davane had reached Molloy at home. He was one of Merritt’s last commanding officers and an old Northern Ireland hand himself. She can picture him now: standing military-straight in front of a roaring fire, solid oak beams, blond corduroy trousers, golden retrievers flopping around his feet. Molloy’s next response is more nuanced. ‘Do I know it was Tristie who did that . . . officially, no. If you’re looking for a paper trail on this, forget it. Am I happy that Norris is dead . . . absolutely bloody delighted.’

‘B-b-but . . .’ Davane can’t fathom it. Those IRA volunteers and sympathisers, the ones who shape-shifted into grey-suited politicians, men like Norris, and Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, the security services had been trying to set up these people for years. And Merritt had done it
on her own? . . .
Davane, who had ended any involvement in Northern Ireland in early 2001, always assumed that some criminal connection had caught up with Norris. This completely blindsides her.

‘Sheila, I love you to death, but since you moved to London, you’ve become such an old softie. Rejoice. The guy’s dead.
A-hundred-and-sixty-plus dead soldiers and policemen avenged. A big result for those of us keeping score.’

‘But how did she get inside his . . .?’ These guys had a hundred goons watching over them. They were even known to use food tasters. She is genuinely bewildered, until an obvious puritanical thought slaps her in the face. ‘Was she sleeping with him?’

‘I can’t answer that.’

‘You can’t, or won’t?’

Police and fire brigade sirens roar past Davane, heading in the opposite direction. Molloy has paused. ‘Do you know her background?’

‘Kind of . . .’ With her thick fingers, Davane quickly reorders some of the pages in the file. Finds something that intrigues, from a consultant, based at the Duchess of Kent’s Psychiatric Hospital at the Catterick army garrison in North Yorkshire. She skim-reads aloud. ‘Merritt brought up in care homes, allegations of abuse and suchlike . . .’

Molloy’s voice softens, suddenly confidential. ‘Hundreds of boys and girls in care homes in North Wales were forced into a paedophile ring run by senior members of the local social services. It’s all fact, out there in the public domain, went on for more than thirty years. Before she could join us at 14 Company, Merritt had a thorough mental health check. I insisted. She made no bones about what had happened to her. She had the guts to square up to everything because she didn’t want it to defeat her. The psychiatrist did his thing, whatever it is they do, and came away saying she showed no obvious signs of impairment. None of the self-loathing or guilt or anger that can bedevil these poor people . . .’

‘She could’ve fooled you all . . .’

‘Then that would be a plus mark in her favour. Remember. Deception is the game we were playing and we needed the best to be any good at what we do. Anyway. I’m not saying she was unaffected. The psychiatrist pointed out two things. One, that abuse victims sometimes suffer from an underdevelopment of
the – have I got this right? – the hippocampus, something like that, part of the brain anyway. In moments of extreme stress, she can be surprisingly calm, logical, effective even, whereas of course you and I might be jumping up and down, losing our rag.

‘Second, and this was of particular interest to us, Tristie dissociates. Probably a defence mechanism that she learnt when she was very young. She creates different characters within herself, alternates to her own personality. I feel an absolute cur telling you this, but she can think herself into separating what happens to her body from what happens to her as a person. Like an actress, doing a love scene. The physical contact happens but it means nothing. In practical terms, she could be humping logs in a mud pit one minute, and the next looking stunning in an evening gown, drawing attention away from her surveillance partner. That’s what she does. She dissociates. As much as I know about this is that to get close to Click Norris, it was her idea to get a work attachment with a primary school in Dundalk. She turned herself into this blonde Aussie surf chick, with long-lost Irish connections. Watched a heap of episodes of
Hi-5
to get the character and the bouncy voice right, and off she went. Wearing these God-awful rainbow-coloured over-knee socks and her hair in pigtail bunches. Crazy really . . .’ And there’s a sound of a hard-as-nails army man sighing gently. Perhaps a little bit in love.

And you’re calling me soft
. . . Davane looks at her watch. 1503. Less than half an hour to the first of Merritt’s demands. The Jaguar is still boxed in by the traffic and she feels the tension coiling in her stomach. The COBRA meeting, come on, come on.

‘. . . but it was her way of keeping her head together. So, to answer your question, was she sleeping with him? I don’t know, but would she, if it would serve the mission, save lives, whatever . . . I suspect, yes.’

Davane turns over an A4 sheet with a printed picture of Merritt. A snatched shot, telephoto lens, taken outdoors, perhaps
on the sidelines of something like a regimental football match. She’s almost hidden by the arms and shoulders of her fellow soldiers. A small, pensive smile on her face. She’s wearing a beret, her camouflage-print combat jacket and trousers. Her stable belt (red-blue-red) and beret (green) in the colours of the Adjutant General’s Corp. Nothing in the picture to suggest she is
so
out of the ordinary . . . in fact, in uniform and away from the demands of 14 Coy., she looks diminutive, sparrow-like. ‘You miss her, don’t you?’

The regret is clear in Molloy’s voice. ‘I never came across an operative like Tristie. Before or since. Definitely one of the best females we’ve ever had. When challenged, there was an aggression there. Cunning. Resourceful. A hunger for survival, and a capacity for ruthlessness that, well, it made me glad that she was on our side.’

‘Exceptionally rude as well.’ The Jaguar puts on a spurt of speed to cut across traffic moving around St James’s Park.

‘Coming from the queen of courtesy herself, I find that a bit rich. Look, Sheila. She had issues. She was something of a loner, not one of the boys in that sense. And there was an underlying mistrust of, and hostility towards, authority. We all have a little bit of that, but she had an extra plateful, believe you me. To be fair, once she believed, in you, or the mission, she’d follow through. So, if Tristie’s on that plane, up there, she’s your ace in the hole. I can’t say more than that.’

The rear entrance to Downing Street is to the east of the park. Davane can see it zip by, lined up alongside the massive structures of the Treasury and Foreign Office. Taking the roundabout at speed, the Jaguar screeches and Davane jams up against the door, Pyjama-girl squishing into her. She speaks with great effort. ‘I don’t understand how she ended up serving in Iraq and Afghanistan? I didn’t think 14 Company deployed there. Too many dark faces.’

‘There were some issues with getting army females to do the pat-down checks on Iraqi women. The militants suddenly started using women, grandmothers, little girls, strapped up
with explosives. Multi-National Division South-East command in Basra asked us for our best female soldiers. Tristie was top of the list. Same cultural problems in Helmand too.’

‘Well, if she’s really
that
good, how come you let her go?’

‘You’ve read about the injury . . . shredded her insides. Meant that she wouldn’t be able to have children. She attended a Ministry of Defence tribunal to discuss compensation. One of the MoD lawyers, a civilian, a complete shit of a man who we’ve had problems with before, well, he thought he was out of earshot, so he made a joke about how expensive it is raising children these days, how Tristie should be thanking the MoD for saving her all that money. Ha bloody ha. He didn’t know that Tristie reads lips. She picked up a thick glass ashtray, threw it across the room. Crowned him. Knocked the silly arse on his bum. Unfortunately, by the time I could go into bat for her, she’d quit. Typical in a way that she didn’t reach out, try to cash in a favour or two. Just left, dropped out of sight.’

‘Bollocks to that, Max, she sounds like a crazy to me.’

‘Sheila, my love, my sweet, nobody who has any sanity would be doing the work we do.’ This from the soldier who, inevitably within army circles, is known as Mad Max. Followed by a warm, rich laugh of contentment. ‘Dammit all, you were the first person who made me understand that.’

The White House situation room

1009 Washington time, 1509 London time,

2009 Islamabad time

T
he equanimity shown by the Canadians has been galling. Frustrating. Ottawa is so far behind the decision-making curve. It adds to the disquiet in the room. More than thirty minutes since Prime Minister Jemison had said he would get back to them ‘presently’.

With PK412, they have been blessed in having an abundance of time on their hands, a luxury compared to the Operation Noble Eagle storylines that had been acted out. The assembled participants can check and cross-check every order and memo, scribble the perfect aide-memoires and make the paperwork clear and accurate for the inevitable inquiry to follow.

Yet having more than enough time has strangely undermined the simple decision to shoot the plane down. Too many people are in on the process, too many ums and ahs. The phone calls from on board the 777 are weighing on minds. And in the rioting shown on the newscasts from across the world they can clearly see the consequences of what they’re about to do. Anti-American sentiment on a massive scale (‘not anti-damn- Canadian sentiment, of course,’ the Homeland Security boss Salazar had grouched). Simple decisions are becoming harder and harder to make, as if time itself has become the enemy.

The most pressing logistical issue for Washington is to get Ottawa’s agreement on where exactly to shoot down the Boeing 777. This must happen sooner rather than later, within
Canadian airspace and over her territorial waters. Both parties had received from NORTHCOM/NORAD headquarters in Colorado a brief but powerful presentation about the AMRAAM’s kill probability, the missiles that both sets of Hornet fighters are carrying. The speed of the missiles (very fast), that of the target (modest), and how hard the target would be able to turn (probably hardly at all). Kill probability, excellent. Which is why AMRAAMs go by the nickname Slammer, the briefer had added. No need to elaborate on that point.

Then comes the proverbial devil in the details. Jemison, the Canadian PM, is back now, the satellite glitches sorted, glowering into the camera. He prefaces his remarks by saying they’ve not reached consensus and there’s an impolitic groan among the planners working in the background of the room. But Jemison, working his jaw from side to side, has one bit of meat to hold out: ‘Without prejudicing my cabinet’s final decision, and for the purposes of planning only, if this shoot-down is to take place, under no circumstance can the craft or any substantive piece of it land on Canadian soil.’ He is at pains to point out that his position is grounded in practical considerations. Look at Lockerbie, Scotland, he says, when Pan Am 103 exploded at 31,000 feet. Eleven people had died on the ground. Burning, fuel-soaked wreckage had fallen in a line over one nautical mile long, slammed to earth so hard, and left such gigantic craters, that the impact had registered as an actual seismic event.

The Canadian prime minister signs off again, says he must get back to try to force through some sort of cabinet agreement. So the situation room is left to consider how far a Boeing 777 would fly, having been hit, but possibly not destroyed, by an air-to-air missile.

Nobody in the room could be certain. The FAA administrator had tried to explain some likely parameters: the best case, assuming quick and total destruction, would be a freefall from a height of 36,000 feet, taking as long as two minutes or as little as forty-five seconds, depending on the drag coefficient
of the various plane pieces. The latter had been the Lockerbie scenario. One voice raised the 1983 example of Korean Air KAL007. That 747 had been attacked with cannon fire plus two air-to-air Soviet-era missiles, but had managed to stay airborne for twelve minutes before finally spiralling into the sea.

Worst case, said the administrator . . . under zero power most planes can glide horizontally ten times their vertical altitude. Thirty-six thousand feet is PK412’s altitude. Just over seven miles. Multiply by ten. So, let’s call it seventy miles of potential glide, Add another ten miles for margin of error . . . the American and Canadian senior military officers working at NORAD headquarters in Colorado and watching live agree they can take this as the outer limit of possibility. Far enough that the plane couldn’t make land, but close enough that the Canadian government could be ready with a mass of heli copters and search craft.

So. At least part of a decision had been made. Eighty miles off the Newfoundland coast will be the point of engagement. On the plasma screen showing the dotted-line projected track of the 777 somebody has made a computerised slash mark at the POE. Less than an hour’s time. More like forty-five minutes.

Around the situation room conference table, attention is now fixed on the six news channels, each showing a different version of the same thing. The Middle East and Islamic world in uproar. Jerky pictures of ambulance and fire crews wading into burning rubble. Soldiers sprinting for cover, cowering behind upturned cars, firing head height at unseen insurgents. Dateline Tel Aviv. Jerusalem. Cairo. Beirut. Damascus. Amman. Istanbul. Jeddah. Kuwait City. Dubai. Bahrain. Doha. Then comes Iraq . . . Baghdad. Basra. Mosul. Karbala. Najaf. Ramadi. Kirkuk . . . the Iraqi cities all blur into one after a while. Another trillion US dollars to put back together again. Just as disturbing are the reports coming out of Afghanistan . . . more fuel on the fire.

For the most part these are suicide bombings, but some are
mortar attacks, a few straightforward machine-gun assaults. All aimed at US embassies and consulates, or businesses with American-sounding names. Banks. Hotel chains. Car showrooms. Anything Yankee.

Hence the continuing violence of the president’s nose-picking.
Please make this nightmare stop . . .

Hannah’s chief of staff, Frank File, wears his perpetual harassed look, terribly put upon, and has asked a CIA briefer whether this explosive violence might have been coordinated. A conspiracy . . . why not? Some mysterious guiding hand would make the room feel more together, more resolute. ‘We’re looking pretty closely at these communications to see whether there’s any coordination to this,’ the briefer says by video from the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center in Langley, ‘but it looks too random. Too careless and stupid, dare I say. This is being driven by the Internet. People blogging and tweeting their outrage back and forth, whipping themselves into a frenzy. The TV have no pictures to show so they run the tweets as a news-crawl under their main feed, put up their correspondents to talk about what’s being blogged and how hot it is out there in cyberland. It’s really one lot of Muslim zealots trying to outdo another, but stretched out all round the world wherever there are Muslims . . . like a perfect storm really.’

From the background of advisers somebody mumbles a little too loudly, ‘Citizen journalism.’

At which the president snaps, ‘Today I have come to hate citizen journalism. Absolutely hate.’

The room solemnly turns to a different screen, of which the Secretary of State asks, ‘And what is the status of Pakistan?’

‘Burn, baby, burn,’ a hopelessly inappropriate, very Marine Corps response from the shaven-headed boss of the unit guarding the US embassy in Islamabad.

There is no Lamayette, and the rest of the CIA staffers are furiously shredding documents and demagnetising hard drives. Ambassador Nancy Zoh and the rest of the top staff have been helicoptered off to a US base in Afghanistan (The Defense
Secretary whispers to an aide on board his US Air Force VIP flight, ‘It’s quite a day when you make people safer by evacuating them
into
Afghanistan’). But the embassy flag still flies proudly, and the huge diplomatic enclave is in the hands of a core of battle-hardened veterans. Both the defence and army attachés are back to being real soldiers again, hollering along the embassy roofs, marshalling the defences.

The ‘Burn, baby, burn’ Marine Corps master sergeant is the only person available on the ground for a live briefing with the White House on a shaky video phone. The sergeant, his shiny face smudged with crud and soot, clearly relishes his role. He speaks in a lazy California drawl. ‘There are some guys popping grenades at us from a way back, beyond our field of fire . . . couple of mortar rounds every two or three minutes. Hopeless aiming . . . some dude in a pick-up truck tried to ram his way inside, quarter of an hour ago, but the bomb went off when he hit a pothole. We watched the whole thing on night vision. Made a big splash, what with all those gasoline drums in the back. Stupid douchebag . . . excuse me, Mr President.’ A little high with the adrenalin.

The sight of the Marine Corps soldier prompts the Secretary of State to share a reminiscence. He’d been serving as a political officer in the Islamabad embassy in November 1979 when it was overrun by a Pakistani mob. In the subsequent pitched battles a Marine corporal died and the embassy was wrecked, everybody scarpering into the fortified vault-like communications room on the third floor.

The Secretary of State’s voice is barely above a whisper. ‘Rumours had gone around that we’d captured the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Or bombed it, or some nonsense like that. Just a rumour, for God’s sake, and suddenly there were people arriving in buses, climbing over the fence, wrestling bare handed with the Marines. Like the end of the damned world.’

The Secretary of State immediately realises his choice of nostalgia could have been better. If Pakistan’s wildly volatile crowds would destroy an embassy based solely on rumour, what
would they do for something based on fact, played out live on television?

The president attacks his nose. The others can barely watch, anxious he might hit a blood vessel.

But those worries are swept aside when the man with the speaking-clock drone from the eavesdropping National Security Agency flashes on to one of the screens. He sounds agitated and looks decidedly nauseous. ‘We’ve . . . we’ve just had a chance to listen to a heck of an interesting call from the PIA flight . . . I’ll play it through for you presently . . .’

Gone is the monotone, replaced by a gasping quaver. ‘. . . but the synopsis is that British intelligence appears to have an asset actually on board the flight. A woman by the name of Merritt . . . and she’s blackmailing MI5 with secrets concerning our Trident missile programme. Communication protocols . . .’

It takes a second for the cogs to click and whirr into place. ‘. . . she’s demanding something like five hundred million dollars.’ Pandemonium follows. The whole room shrieks with one voice . . .

WWHHHHHAAAAAATTTT!

The president rises from his chair like a ghost, his hand trembling with rage, and points at one of the communications minions. ‘Get that Limey bastard prime minister on the phone, right now.’