Killing for the Company (30 page)

Luke had his own reasons. Reasons he kept to himself, and which he probably couldn’t have wholly explained even if he’d wanted to. A sense he owed something. Whenever that thought crossed his mind, he would see Chet’s face. Scarred. Stony. The knowledge that his best friend was dead, killed in a tragic accident from which he couldn’t escape on account of an injury that should have been Luke’s. How often had he relived that night in Serbia so long ago? How often had he seen the fragmentation grenade rolling towards him, only to be kicked out of the way by Chet in one moment of selfless bravery?

And what right did Luke have to give up fighting, when the man who had saved his life would never fight again?

To keep fighting meant ensuring his Blade skills were sharper than sharp, his body in peak condition. So when the others were in the Hereford boozers drinking for England, Luke was gymning it or pounding the streets. And when his younger colleagues gave him the sarky comments, they did so knowingly. There wasn’t a man in Hereford who didn’t think Luke Mercer was the equal of anyone in the Regiment.

With the aid of a joystick, Luke was practising manoeuvring the sight mounted above the truck. Its accuracy and range were remarkable. On the screen in front of him, he could make out individual trees miles away in the distance. The THOR was intended to take out low-flying aircraft, but it also had ground-to-ground capability, and it was this that they were testing today.

‘Extra points,’ a voice behind him said, ‘if you can take out one of those fucking ramblers.’

Luke looked over his shoulder and grinned at Nigel Foster. Fozzie was a good lad. Luke had even forgiven him for getting his team compromised all those years ago in Iraq, when he and Finn had been forced to make a break for the Jordanian border. At least they’d all got out in one piece, which was more than he could say for the Mossad agent they’d picked up on the way. SIS had been quick to bury that one. Thanks, lads, for your help, now be terribly good boys, would you, and don’t mention Amit’s little personal firework display to another soul. Six months after he and Finn had made it over the border back into Jordan, Luke had made a half-hearted and unsuccessful attempt to locate Amit’s sister like he said he would. He’d drawn a blank, though, and there was no way he was going to use his contacts to dig a little deeper. That would have had the Firm sniffing round him like dogs round a bitch’s arse.

Luke had sometimes wondered what had happened to Abu Famir, the pain in the neck of an Iraqi do-gooder the coalition had been so eager to get their hands on, and for whose safety Amit had sacrificed himself. He had never seen or heard of the guy again, and sometimes he wondered what the point of the whole fucking escapade had been. Still, it wasn’t the first time the Regiment had been sent out to risk their lives on the whim of some bright spark in Whitehall. Wouldn’t be the last either.

Luke moved the joystick and the sights panned left. The image on the screen – gridded, and with a set of cross hairs at the centre – was amazingly clear given its distance: 7.3 klicks, at a bearing of 183 degrees. The Pinzgauer stood on a piece of high ground, so the line of sight over the Beacons was uninterrupted.

‘You finished admiring the scenery yet, mucker?’ Fozzie asked.

Luke didn’t reply. He panned slowly east, and just a few seconds later something caught his eye. He adjusted the instruments on the weapon’s control panel and the scene came more clearly into view. It was an old house. At least, it had been once. Now it was just a burned-out shell. A memory. And to Luke’s eyes, a tomb.

He stared at it for a few seconds, before sensing his mate looking over his shoulder. ‘We should lock on to the target, mucker,’ Fozzie said quietly.

Luke nodded. ‘Roger that.’ His voice was emotionless. He panned further east and adjusted the range of the weapon. Within thirty seconds he was locked on to a very different scene. Luke knew the ranges on the Beacons well. Everyone in the Regiment did. They’d all spent more time than they cared to remember in these places on exercises – general weapons training, point of contact, even calling in air assets to drop ordnance. The ranges could be anything from a couple of hundred metres in length to the entire side of a hill. The one they were focusing on today had been decked out with a set of rails and a pulley system which could be used to drag vehicles along to simulate a moving target. The guys had set up an old Land Rover, and Luke had got it in the cross hairs.

As soon as the range came into view, the radio burst into life. ‘OK, fellas. We’re ready for you. Send.’

It was Fozzie who replied. ‘We have eyes on. Repeat, we have eyes on.’

A pause. On the screen they saw the Land Rover start moving.

‘Fire at will,’ came the voice on the radio.

Luke didn’t need to follow the target manually. The weapon system, once it was locked on, followed the Land Rover automatically. In a battle situation, the target – whether an aircraft, a vehicle or even a human – would be moving faster, but that didn’t matter. The THOR system could track just about anything. And once it was tracked . . .

Luke pressed a single button to fire. There was a whooshing sound from above the Pinzgauer and then, almost immediately, a loud crack from in front of them. The rocket’s main propulsion didn’t kick in until it was 400 metres from the firing point, in order to protect the user; then, at Mach 3.5, it would take only seconds to reach the target. The weapon sights kept track of its trajectory, and Luke just had time to see the three lethal darts shoot from the main body of the missile, staying in a circular formation to increase the likelihood of one of them hitting the target, before the Land Rover exploded. The sudden combustion was visible on the screen. There was a two-second delay, then a harsh, metallic sound reached their ears as the sound waves from the explosion crashed past them, echoing across the hills.

‘Efficient,’ Fozzie noted without much feeling.

Luke didn’t have a chance to reply before the radio came to life again: ‘Bullseye, fellas. Time to pack your bags. We’re heading back to base.’

Luke and Fozzie exchanged a look.

‘We’ve got three more of these bad boys to discharge,’ Fozzie said.

‘Going to have to wait. O’Donoghue’s called us in. Let’s get moving.’

‘Roger that,’ Fozzie replied. And then, to Luke: ‘Sounds like someone’s getting twitchy.’

It took just over an hour to get back to base, and another hour before the whole squadron had congregated. Four troops, sixteen guys per troop: there should have been sixty-four men, but as always the squadron was undermanned and in reality there were barely fifty. At 14.00 hrs they congregated in a lecture room in the heart of the Kremlin. It was a large room, big enough to seat them all. Up at the front was an OHP with a laptop attached, and next to it five plastic chairs. Three men in suits were sitting there, along with the Regiment’s ops officer, Major James O’Donoghue, and Major Julian Dawson, OC B Squadron. O’Donoghue came from a family that owned half of Wiltshire. Sandhurst, Guards, Regiment – classic headshed career path. He was an ugly fucker and well known for being as tight as a camel’s arse in a sandstorm. When it came to military planning, however, everyone knew the Regiment was lucky to have him. As for Julian Dawson, he had the respect of every man in the squadron. Two years previously he’d taken a Taliban round in Helmand, just south of Musa Qala, and he’d been on the ground again within three weeks. In his first twenty-four hours back in action, he’d nailed three Taliban digging in IEDs. Not a man to fuck with, and everyone in the room knew it.

There was a low murmur among the men. Tension. An op was imminent, and you could get addicted to it. The moment O’Donoghue stood up, it was as if someone had hit the mute switch. Everyone went silent, and all eyes were directed towards the ops officer. There were no formalities. No hellos and thank you for comings. Just a businesslike nod towards the three men in suits.

‘Edward Duncan, Foreign Office,’ O’Donoghue announced in his clipped voice. ‘Our two other guests are here from SIS.’ No names. It wasn’t that the Firm always kept their employees’ identities a secret, but if they didn’t have to say who they were, they wouldn’t. The three suits nodded in the general direction of the men, but the guys of B Squadron weren’t interested in them. It was O’Donoghue who would give them their brief.

‘All right then,’ he said. ‘Unless you’ve been living in a hole – which, looking at the state of some of you, wouldn’t surprise me – you’ll know what’s been happening. Coordinated terror attacks, London, Paris, Washington, Mumbai. Latest estimate, 486 dead.’ If the statistic appalled him, he didn’t show it, but you could have heard a pin drop in the room. ‘It seems the agencies have suspected a major hit like this for some time, but they’ve had their eyes firmly set towards AQ. Turns out they were looking the wrong way. Our combustible friends were Palestinian. Members of a militant group from the Gaza Strip called the UFP – the Union for Free Palestine. There are any number of these Mickey Mouse outfits along the Gaza Strip. Two or three disaffected Palestinian kids get together with a balaclava and a Kalashnikov and suddenly they think they’re a movement. The UFP is a little bigger than most.’

A voice from the back of the room. ‘Don’t these cunts normally just blow themselves up outside cafés in Jerusalem, boss?’

O’Donoghue nodded. ‘Normally. That or Tel Aviv. These attacks are out of character. More to the point, the terrorists were well equipped and well organised. SIS are trying to establish if anyone else is involved, but at the moment that’s secondary to the political instability in the region.’

The ops officer pressed a button on the laptop and a map of the Middle East appeared on the wall.

‘The political leadership in the Gaza Strip is Hamas. A former terrorist organisation and not internationally recognised, but popular in the Gaza Strip because they stand up to Israel. The UFP claim loyalty to them. The international community have called on Hamas to denounce the bombings. So far they’ve failed to do so.’

Luke raised a hand.

‘What is it, Luke?’

‘You said the bombers were well equipped, boss. Do we think Hamas actually supplied them, or were they working on their own?’

O’Donoghue looked over towards the SIS guys. One of them leaned forward slightly in his chair. ‘At the moment,’ he said, ‘it’s hard to say. We found the remains of a weapon in the wreckage of the UK train, an’ – he consulted some notes on his lap – ‘an AKS-74U. We checked its serial number and it seems consistent with a consignment of weapons handed in as part of an amnesty at the end of the Balkan conflict. The company given the contract to collect and destroy the weapons is a subsidiary of an American multinational, the Grosvenor Group. Looks like they fulfilled one half of the contract and not the other. We’ve passed this information on to the CIA. But it seems unlikely that the Grosvenor Group would have direct dealings with Hamas, so our working theory is that the bombers were acting independently.’ The spook settled back in his chair and looked back towards the ops officer.

‘It’s not yet public knowledge,’ O’Donoghue continued, ‘but the decision has been made to commit four British Army battalions to the region. The Yanks are going in heavy, and the government wants to be seen to be supporting them.’

‘Sounds familiar,’ someone murmured.

O’Donoghue’s eyes flickered towards the Foreign Office representative, and although he said nothing, it was clear Duncan felt as negative about tagging along with the Americans as everyone else in the room. They’d done that once before, and everyone there had mates who’d died in Iraq.

The FO man clearly realised that the mood in the room had changed, so he stood up and inclined his head towards the ops officer, as if to ask if he might say a few words. O’Donoghue nodded, and the suit cleared his throat. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said in a reedy voice, ‘let us not mince our words. If it transpires that Hamas are indeed behind the needless slaughter of innocent British citizens, it will be the obligation of this government to strike back. I can assure you that our allies in America and elsewhere feel the same. It is likely, of course, that a strike against Gaza will be viewed as an act of aggression by other Muslim nations in the region – I’m thinking principally of Iran, who have voiced support for Hamas before now – and I don’t believe you need to be instructed in the implications of that.’

He looked around the room, scanning each man in turn. The members of B Squadron stared at him stony-faced.

‘So,’ he continued briskly, ‘if any of you feel at all uncomfortable about operating in that part of the world, I would advise you to start getting used to it. History tells us that events such as this follow a critical path. Unless something is done to bring about a swift resolution, we could be on the brink.’

He turned back to O’Donoghue, nodded and retook his seat.

The ops officer looked slightly taken aback by the FO man’s interruption, but he continued in the same matter-of-fact voice as before.

‘Alistair Stratton,’ he announced, ‘is to travel to Gaza in his capacity as Middle East peace envoy.’

Muttering around the room. Stratton had been popular once, even among those members of the squadron who didn’t give a shit about politics. But you don’t need to see many dead soldiers on the battlefield of an illegal war before you learn to detest its architects.

‘All right,’ O’Donoghue warned, ‘all right. Obviously now’s a high-risk time for anyone to be venturing into the Gaza Strip. The Jewish festival of Hanukkah starts on the tenth. That’s three days from now.’