Remote Control Read online

  Alpha came back on the net. ‘Hello all call signs, all call signs – cancel, cancel, cancel! I do not have control! Cancel! Golf, acknowledge.’

  At once I heard Kev’s not-so-formal reply: ‘What the fuck’s going on? Tell me – what’s going on?’

  ‘Wait … wait …’ Alpha sounded under pressure. There were voices in the background. ‘All stations, all stations, the police need another ID, they need to be sure. Golf acknowledge.’

  What do they want, introductions? ‘Hi, I’m Danny, bomber and murderer, I enjoy travelling and working with children.’

  We were in danger of losing them if we didn’t act soon.

  Alpha came back: ‘All stations, ATO is moving to check the vehicle. Delta, we need that confirmation.’

  I acknowledged. There was obviously some flapping going on in the ops room. The boss was getting a hard time from the police and it sounded like a chimps’ tea party in there.

  The terrorist team would be crossing the border within minutes. Once they were on the other side, they could detonate the bomb with immunity.

  I was now on the other side of the road, and wanted at least to get parallel to them so that I could see their faces again. I had to reconfirm the players, then stick with them.

  More activity on the net. I could hear the tension in Alpha’s voice now, telephone lines ringing, people milling about.

  Kev cut in: ‘Fuck the ops room, let’s keep on top of them until someone somewhere makes a fucking decision. Lima and Zulu, can you get forward?’

  Zulu came on the net for himself and Lima, very much out of breath: ‘Zulu and Lima, we … we can do that.’

  ‘Roger that, move up, tell me when you’re there.’

  Kev wanted them beyond the health centre. They were running hard to get ahead of the targets; they didn’t care who saw them, as long as the players didn’t. But we still hadn’t got control.

  Kev came back on the net: ‘Alpha, this is Golf. You need to get your finger out now – we’re going to lose them. What do you want us to do?’

  ‘Golf, wait, wait …’

  I could still hear noise in the background; lots of talking, more telephones ringing, people shouting instructions.

  Everything went quiet.

  ‘Wait … wait …’

  All I could hear now was the background noise of Alpha on my radio, plus my pulse pounding in my head. Then, at last, the voice of Simmonds – very clear, a voice you wouldn’t argue with. I heard him say to Alpha, ‘Tell the ground commander he can continue.’

  ‘All call signs, this is Alpha. I have control. I have control. Golf acknowledge.’

  Kev got on the net, and instead of acknowledging, said, ‘Thank fuck for that. All call signs, if they get as far as the airport, we’ll lift them there. If not – on my word, on my word. Zulu and Lima, how’s it going?’

  They came back on the net. ‘That’s us static at the junction. We can take.’ They were at the intersection of Main Street and Smith Dorrien Avenue, the main approach road to the crossing into Spain. The players were moving towards them.

  I could lift off soon. I’d done the job I’d been brought here to do. I prepared myself for the hand-over.

  But then they stopped.

  Fuck. ‘Stop, stop, stop!’ I said. ‘That’s Bravo One, Two and Echo One static.’

  Everybody was closing in. Come on, let’s lift them here and now.

  Savage split from the other two and headed back the way they’d come, towards the town centre. It was all going to rat shit. We had two groups to control now and we didn’t know who had the initiation device.

  Kev arrived to back me. On the net, I could hear the other two players being followed towards the border by the rest of the team as I moved in to take Savage. He turned left down an alleyway.

  I was just about to get on the net when I heard a police siren, followed by gunfire behind me.

  At the same instant Euan came on the net: ‘Contact! Contact!’

  Then more shots.

  Kev and I looked at each other. What the fuck was going on? We ran round the corner. Savage had heard the shots too and turned back towards us. Even at this distance I could see his eyes, big as plates and jerking like he was having a seizure.

  There was a woman pedestrian between us. Kev shouted, ‘Stop, security forces! Stop!’

  With his left hand, he had to push the woman over to the side and bang her against the wall to keep her out of the way. She was going down, blood pouring from her head. At least she wouldn’t get up and become a target.

  She began screaming. We had Kev hollering and screaming at Savage and all the people in the area were starting to scream. It was turning into a gang fuck.

  Kev flicked back the right side of his sports jacket to reach the pancake holster over his kidneys. We always put a bit of weight in a pocket – a full mag is good – to help the jacket flick back out of the way.

  But I wasn’t really looking at Kev, I was looking at Savage. I could see his hand moving to the right side of his jacket. He wasn’t some knuckle-dragging moron from the back streets. The moment he saw us, he knew the score. It was decision time.

  Kev drew his pistol, brought it up and went to fire.

  Nothing.

  ‘Stoppage! Fuck, Nick, fuck, fuck!’

  Trying to clear his weapon, he dropped on one knee to make himself a smaller target.

  Now is when everything seems to go into slow motion.

  Savage and I had eye-to-eye. He knew what I was going to do; he could have stopped, he could have put his hands up.

  My bomber jacket was held together with velcro, so at times like this I could just pull it apart and draw my pistol.

  The only way a weapon can be drawn and used quickly is by breaking the whole movement into stages. Stage one, I kept looking at the target. With my left hand I grabbed a fistful of bomber jacket and pulled it as hard as I could towards my chest. The velcro ripped apart.

  At the same time I was sucking in my stomach and sticking out my chest to make the pistol grip easy to access. You only get one chance.

  We still had eye contact. He started to shout but I didn’t hear. There was too much other shouting going on, from everyone on the street and the earpiece in my head.

  Stage two, I pushed the web of my right hand down onto the pistol grip. If I got this wrong I wouldn’t be able to aim correctly: I would miss and die. As I felt my web push against the pistol grip my lower three fingers gripped hard around it. My index finger was outside the trigger guard, parallel with the barrel. I didn’t want to pull the trigger early and kill myself. Savage was still looking, still shouting.

  Savage’s hand was nearly at his pocket.

  Stage three, I drew my weapon, in the same movement taking the safety catch off with my thumb.

  Our eyes were still locked. I saw that Savage knew he had lost. There was just a curling of the lips. He knew he was going to die.

  As my pistol came out I flicked it parallel with the ground. No time to extend my arms and get into a stable firing position.

  Stage four, my left hand was still pulling my jacket out of the way and the pistol was now just by my belt buckle. There was no need to look at it, I knew where it was and what it was pointing at. I kept my eyes on the target and his never left mine. I pulled the trigger.

  The weapon report seemed to bring everything back into real time. The first round hit him. I didn’t know where, I didn’t need to. His eyes told me all I wanted to know.

  I kept on firing. There is no such thing as overkill. If he could move, he could detonate the bomb. If it took a whole magazine to be sure I’d stopped the threat, then that was what I’d fire. As Savage hit the ground I could no longer see his hands. He was curled up in a ball, holding his stomach. I moved forward and fired two aimed shots at the head. He was no longer a threat.

  Kev ran over and was searching inside Savage’s coat.

  ‘It’s not here,’ he said. ‘No weapon, no firing device.’

  I looked down at Kev as he wiped the blood off his hands onto Savage’s jeans.

  ‘One of the others must have had it,’ he said. ‘I didn’t hear the car go up, did you?’

  In all the confusion I couldn’t be sure.

  I stood over them both. Kev’s mother came from southern Spain and he looked like a local: jet black hair, about 5 feet 10 inches and the world’s bluest eyes. His wife reckoned he was a dead ringer for Mel Gibson, which he scoffed at but secretly liked. Right now his face was a picture; he knew he owed me one. I wanted to say, ‘It’s OK, these things happen,’ but it just didn’t seem like the time. Instead I said, ‘Fucking hell, Brown, what do you expect if you have a name the same colour as shit?’

  As I spoke we put our safety catches on, and Kev and I swapped weapons.

  ‘I’m glad I won’t be at any inquest.’ I grinned at Kev. ‘You’d better start getting your shit together.’

  He smiled as he got on the radio and started to send a sit rep. It was all right for him and the others, but Euan and I shouldn’t have been here. We had to vanish before the police arrived.

  The ops room was about fifteen minutes away on foot. I tucked Kev’s weapon inside my jeans and started walking fast.

  The mood was subdued aboard the C130 as it lifted from the tarmac at 11 p.m. that night.

  Spanish police found PIRA’s car bomb in an underground carpark in Marbella, thirty miles away; 145 pounds of Semtex high explosive and an unattached timing device preset at 11.20 a.m., the time the Gibraltar guard-changing ceremony ended and the soldiers dispersed in the square. The white Renault had been a blocking vehicle after all.

  When Simmonds came over, Pat said, ‘As far as we knew they had the means to detonate a bomb big enough to separate Gibraltar f
rom the mainland. All it would have taken was one press of a button. If there’s going to be an inquest, fuck it. Better to be tried by twelve, I say, than carried by six.’

  For Euan and me, there would be no guest appearances at any inquest. We were undercover in Northern Ireland with 14 Intelligence Group; it was illegal for its members to operate anywhere else. If either of us had been caught in Gibraltar there would have been a shit storm.

  Deafened suddenly by the roar of the C130’s engines, I glanced at Kev, Pat, Euan – and tried to forget what I was going back to. A house isn’t a home when there are no pictures on the walls.

  In the Gulf, Pat had a battle cry: ‘All for one and one for all.’ We’d laughed when he used it, but he was spot on. Any one of us would put his life on the line for the others. I cracked a smile; with these guys around me, who needed family? Without a doubt, I thought, this was as good as it was ever going to get.

  1997

  1

  IF YOU WORK for the British intelligence service and get formally summoned to a meeting at their headquarters building on the south bank of the Thames at Vauxhall, there are three levels of interview. First is the one with coffee and biscuits, which means they’re going to give you a pat on the head. Next down the food chain is the more businesslike coffee but no biscuits, which means they’re not asking but telling you to follow orders. And finally there’s no biscuits, and no coffee either, which basically means that you’re in the shit. Since leaving the Regiment in 1993 and working as a K on deniable operations I’d had a number of interviews at every level, and I wasn’t expecting a nice frothy cappuccino to be on the cards this particular Monday. In fact, I was flapping quite severely, because things hadn’t been going too well.

  As I emerged from the tube station at Vauxhall the omens weren’t exactly with me either. The March sky was dull and overcast, preparing itself for the Easter holiday; my path was blocked by roadworks, and a burst from a jackhammer sounded like the crack of a firing squad. Vauxhall Cross, home of what the press call MI6 but which is actually the Secret Intelligence Service, is about a mile upstream of the Houses of Parliament. Bizarrely shaped, like a beige and black pyramid that’s had its top cut off, with staged levels, large towers either side and a terrace bar overlooking the river, it only needs a few swirls of neon and you’d swear it was a casino. It wouldn’t look out of place in Las Vegas. I missed Century House, the old HQ building near Waterloo station. It might have been 1960s ugly, square, with loads of glass, net curtains and antennae, and not so handy for the tube, but it was much more homely.

  Opposite Vauxhall Cross, and about 200 metres across the wide arterial road, is an elevated section of railway line, and beneath that are arches that have been turned into shops, two of which have been knocked through to make a massive motorbike shop. I was early, so I popped in and fantasized about which Ducati I was going to buy when I got a pay rise – which wasn’t going to be today. What the hell, the way my luck was going I’d probably go and kill myself on it.

  I’d fucked up severely. I’d been sent to Saudi to encourage, then train, some Northern Iraqi Kurds to kill three leading members of the Ba’ath party. The hope was that the assassinations would spark everything up and help dismantle the regime in Baghdad.

  The first part of my task was to take delivery in Saudi of some former Eastern-bloc weapons that had been smuggled in: Russian Dragunov sniper weapons, a couple of Makharov pistols, and two AK assault rifles – the parachute version with a folding stock. All serial numbers had been erased to make them deniable.

  For maximum chaos, the plan was to get the Kurds to make three hits, at exactly the same time, in and around Baghdad. One was going to be a close-quarters shoot, using the Makharovs. The idea was for the two boys to walk up to the family house, knock on the door, take on whatever threat presented itself, make entry into the house, zap the target and run.

  The second was going to be a sniper option. The target saw himself as a big-time fitness freak; he’d come out and have a little jog round a running track, all of about 400 metres. He emerged from his house every day in a lime-green, fluffy velour shell suit, did one lap, and that was his training for the day. The boys were going to hit him just as he started to sweat and slow down – which, by the look of him, would be after about 100 metres. I would be on this one to co-ordinate the hit so that both fired at once.

  The third target was going to be taken out on his way to the ministry. Two bikes would pull up at traffic lights and give him the good news with their AK47s.

  I landed up in northern Iraq without any problems, and started the build-up training. At this stage not even the Kurds knew what their task was going to be. The Dragunov sniper rifles were a heap of shit. However, the weapon is never as important as the ammunition, which in this case was even worse, Indian 7.62mm. Given a free hand, I would have wanted to use Lapua, manufactured in Finland and the best in the world for sniping because of its consistency, but Western rounds would have given the game away.

  The Indian ammunition was hit and miss, mostly miss. On top of that the Dragunovs were semi-automatic rifles. Ideally, you need a bolt-action weapon, which is not only better for taking the hit, it also doesn’t leave an empty case behind because it stays in the weapon until you reload. However, it had to be Russian kit that they were zapped with and it had to be deniable.

  Once all three jobs went down, the weapons were dumped in a hide and should have been destroyed. They weren’t. On the AK there is a forward leaf sight, and underneath that is scratched a serial number. I had been told that all serial numbers had been removed at source and had taken the information at face value. I didn’t check – I fucked up.

  The only way to retrieve the situation as far as London was concerned was to kill the Kurd teams I’d been training. It was damage limitation on a drastic scale, but it had to be done. Detail counts. If the Iraqis could trace the weapons back, they might make the UK connection. If they then captured the Kurds, who just happened to mention the fact that they had been trained by a Westerner called Nick Stone, it wouldn’t take a mastermind to work out which country he came from. It actually pissed me off to have to kill them because I’d got to know these boys really well. To this day, I was still wearing the G Shock watch one of the snipers had given me. We’d had a bet when we were on the range, and he lost. I knew that I could beat him, but still cheated because I had to win. I’d really got to like him.

  Back in the UK there had been an inquiry and everybody was covering their arse. And, because I was a K, they could land it all on me. The armourers and technicians from the intelligence service said it was my fault for not checking. What could I say? I didn’t even exist. I was bracing myself to take the hit.

  I entered Vauxhall Cross via a single metal door that funnelled me towards reception. Inside, the building could be mistaken for any high-tech office block in any city: very clean, sleek and corporate. People who worked there were swiping their identity cards through electronic readers to get in, but I had to go over to the main reception desk. Two women sat behind thick bulletproof glass.

  Through the intercom system I said to one of them, ‘I’m here to see Mr Lynn.’

  ‘Can you fill this in, please?’ She passed a ledger through a slot under the glass.

  As I signed my name in two boxes she picked up a telephone. ‘Who shall I say is coming to see Mr Lynn?’

  ‘My name is Stamford.’

  The ledger held tear-off labels. One half was going to be ripped off and put in a plastic badge-container, which I would have to pin on. My badge was blue and said, ‘ESCORTED EVERYWHERE.’

  The woman came off the phone and said, ‘There’ll be somebody coming down to pick you up.’

  A young clerk appeared minutes later. ‘Mr Stamford?’

  I said, ‘All right, mate, how yer going?’

  He half smiled. ‘If you’d like to come with me.’ He pressed the lift button and said, ‘We’re going to the fifth floor.’

  The whole building is a maze. I just followed him; I didn’t have a clue where we were going. There was little noise coming from any of the offices apart from the hum of the air-conditioning ducts, just people bent over papers or working at PCs. At the far end of one corridor we turned left into a room. Old metal filing cabinets, a couple of 6-foot tables put together, and, as in any office anywhere, the kettle and cups, jars of coffee, packets of sugar and a milk rota. None of that for me, though – in free-fall talk, I’d just stand by and accept the landing.