Ultimatum (31 page)

And then the platoon commander, a good guy with a calm head called Mike Travers, got hit by a Taliban bullet. He was only ten feet away when he went down into the knee-deep, sludgy water clutching his shoulder, his face screwed up in pain. As some of the guys went to help him, he’d shouted for them to get back to the fight, which was typical of him. He didn’t want to be fussed over. But within a few minutes he’d gone very pale and, as the medic stripped off his body armour and examined the wound, things took a serious turn for the worse. The bullet had severed a major artery, and without a rapid blood transfusion there was no way he’d survive. The medic patched him up as best he could, but the commander kept bleeding, his blood turning the muddy water red as it dripped steadily out of him.

We had to make a decision. Stay put until either we got the radio working or FOB realized we were missing and sent reinforcements, or fight our way back to base, carrying the commander as we went. The sergeant, who was now in charge, chose the latter, and I’ll always remember those brutal twenty-five minutes as we made our way along the irrigation ditches, before finally breaking cover a hundred yards from the base and running along completely open ground, firing as we went, faint and exhausted in the murderous forty-five-degree heat, knowing that at any moment any one of us could be the next casualty. Two of our number had volunteered to carry the commander over that open ground, knowing that as the slowest group they’d make the biggest and easiest targets. One of those men was Cecil. The other was me. He had the front. I had the back. And we’d done it. As Cecil had pointed out afterwards, if the Taliban had been as good shots as we were we’d have been peppered with more holes than a cheese grater, but the fact was they weren’t, and because we’d had the guts and the determination, we’d made it against all the odds.

The commander didn’t make it, though. He died in the helicopter en route to Camp Bastion, having completely bled out.

I was going to bleed out too now unless help came, and it was a supreme irony that one of the men who’d put me in this position was Cecil, my fellow soldier and friend.

The war had fucked him up.

But then, I thought ruefully, it had fucked me up too.

Ten or so feet away the body of my neighbour, Rupert, lay motionless next to his car, a long dirty blood smear running down its paintwork where he’d slid down it after Cain had shot him. An innocent man, nothing to do with any of this, caught up in somebody else’s war. He was lying on his side facing me, eyes closed, a peaceful, almost bored expression on his face.

You never think it’s going to happen to you. Death. If you did, you’d make a crap soldier. And I would never have got involved in half the things I’d done – especially those I’d been involved in today – if I’d thought I was going to end up like this, dying alone in the cold.

I didn’t want to die. The thought came almost as a shock. I wanted to live. To watch my daughter grow up. To find a woman who’d love me for what I was: a flawed guy, but a decent one, I was sure. To settle down and have a steady job and a steady income. I no longer even wanted revenge against the people who’d murdered my cousin in the Stanhope Hotel.

I just wanted to be like everyone else.

My eyelids felt like lead weights. If I just closed them for a moment, maybe I’d be able to reserve my energy. Just a moment.

They began to flicker, then close ever so slowly, curtains shutting out the harshness of the outside world.

The sound of tyres on gravel followed almost immediately by the harsh glare of headlights startled me, and as I forced open my eyes, I saw a car come into the car park and pull up a few yards away.

I tried to call out but no words came. I tried to lift my arm but that didn’t work either, and I wondered grimly if it was already too late.

Sixty-eight

21.22

THE BACK OF
the police van was cramped, hot and airless, but when you’d spent over a year in a closed prison you were used to that kind of atmosphere, and Fox was visibly more relaxed than the four other men in there with him.

He was sitting between two of them – big guys in helmets with plenty of body armour – while two more sat opposite him, resting the MP5s on their laps, the barrels pointed at his gut. As well as the four cops in the back, there were two in the front, and a car at each end of the convoy, each one containing three officers. In all, twelve armed men surrounded him. It was an impressive number and emphasized his importance to the authorities, as well as the danger he still represented.

He caught the eye of the cop sitting directly opposite him, a young mixed-race guy with a ridiculously square jaw and the build and looks of a rugby player. His dark eyes were simmering as he stared at Fox.

Fox held his gaze, noticing with interest that the cop’s finger was instinctively tightening on the trigger.

‘Try anything,’ said the cop in a cockney growl. ‘Anything at all. Because all I need’s the slightest fucking excuse and I’ll put a bullet right through your skull. I’d love that.’

Fox shrugged. ‘You and a couple of million other people, I’m sure. The point is, most of them wouldn’t have the spine to pull the trigger. They might think they have, but when it comes down to it … I don’t think so.’

The cop’s lips formed an exaggerated sneer. ‘I could.’

‘Really?’ Fox couldn’t resist a small smile. ‘Ever killed anyone? Or do you get your kicks from firing that thing down on the range? Shooting paper targets that can’t shoot back.’

‘I get my accuracy from firing it down the range, so when it comes to it, I won’t miss.’

‘All right, shut it, you two,’ grunted one of the older cops, who was clearly in charge, which suited Fox just fine. He had no desire, or need, to get involved in slanging matches with slow-witted coppers over whether or not he deserved to take a bullet for what he’d done. Of course he did. He was a bad man. He’d committed terrible crimes. He deserved to die. At least he had the self-awareness to confront it, unlike a lot of people.

But of course he had no intention of dying any time soon, or even spending much more time in custody.

Tonight was the night he was going to demonstrate how easy it was to outwit the people holding him. They’d searched him thoroughly as he’d left the prison, put him through a metal detector, made sure there was no way he could be carrying anything that would help him escape.

And he wasn’t carrying anything. But only because he’d already swallowed it. A postage-stamp-sized GPS unit, made entirely of plastic. If it worked – and Fox was very confident that it would – it would give the people following its signal his location down to the nearest yard.

He settled back in the seat and stretched his shoulders.

Checkmate.

Sixty-nine

21.23

‘RIGHT,’ SAID CECIL,
‘they’ve just left the B158 heading east in the direction of a village called Epping Green.’

He was sitting with a Macbook Air on his lap watching the progress of Fox’s GPS unit, while Cain drove at a steady fifty miles an hour along the B157, three miles to the south of them.

Cain nodded, pleased with the way things were going. ‘Good. Then they’re definitely taking him to a safehouse, and it can’t be too far away.’

Cecil gave him a sideways glance. ‘How the hell are we going to do this, sir? Now that there are only two of us?’

‘The same way we’d have done it if there’d been three. By stealth. We get the location, we scope it out, and we move in. We’ll have the element of surprise on our side. They won’t be expecting a thing. If they were they’d never have taken him to a safehouse. And it’s not like we’re dealing with the SAS here. None of these coppers will have ever fired a gun in anger, I can guarantee you that.’

‘It’s still dangerous.’

Cain turned and glared at him. ‘This whole damn thing’s dangerous, Cecil. But that’s the way it has to be. We’re soldiers. It’s how we operate.’

Cecil sighed. ‘What if we haven’t killed him? Jones, I mean. He can testify against us.’

He can testify against you, you mean, thought Cain. ‘We shot him at least twice, and it’s freezing cold out there tonight. He won’t survive.’

‘We never saw his body, and he’s a tough bastard.’

‘Then we’ll take him out later if we have to. Accidents can be arranged, you know that.’

As he spoke, while still watching the road ahead, Cain could see that Cecil was looking at him suspiciously. Cecil had been in a difficult mood ever since he’d found out that Jones had to die, and Cain knew he had to keep his morale up while he still needed him.

‘Look, even if Jones survives, the good thing is that he’s in no position to talk to the police. He shot Dav in cold blood, remember? There’s no way he can spin himself out of that one. His best bet’s to keep his mouth shut, and he knows it.’

‘But that’s the thing,’ said Cecil, and Cain could hear the pain in his voice. ‘He shot the Albanian. He did the robbery this morning. He did everything asked of him. So I don’t understand why he’d betray us.’

‘Because he weakened, Cecil. Most men do. They take the easy option. We haven’t.’

‘Aye, and what good’s it done us?’

Cain glared at him. ‘Don’t give me that. You know why we’re doing this. And think of the money you’re going to make when we break out Fox.’

Cecil quietened a moment at the thought of the reward on offer. Like most of the people Cain had ever met, he was greedy.

‘And you reckon Fox has definitely got the money to pay us?’ he asked eventually.

Course he hasn’t, thought Cain. And if he did have it, he wouldn’t pay us anyway. But he didn’t say that. ‘I know for a fact that Fox has got two million dollars stashed away in various foreign bank accounts. We’re going to hold him until he pays us half of it. Us, Cecil. Me and you.’

In truth, Cain had already been paid by the man he reported directly to, Garth Crossman, to silence Fox once and for all. Cecil wasn’t going to make it out either. Like Fox, he knew too much. Tonight, Cain and Crossman were going to make a clean break from their previous strategy of launching violent terrorist attacks. The attacks had served their purpose. They’d wreaked havoc, harmed community relations, and made the government look weak. Now it was time for Crossman to go political.

Cecil stared at the screen. ‘OK. Targets have now turned right on to an unmarked road. The road leads down to a farm about half a mile north of us. It’s the only building on that road.’

Cain felt his adrenalin kicking in. ‘It’s the safehouse.’

‘OK, take the next right turn,’ said Cecil. ‘If we move fast enough we might be able to cut them off before they get there.’

Seventy

21.25

BOLT STUMBLED WHEN
he eventually got out of the car, and had to grab hold of the door for support. His headache had been getting worse, and every few minutes he was being hit by dizzy spells where his vision would blur and darken, each time for slightly longer. He took a couple of deep breaths, still waiting for this latest one to pass. He was going to have to get himself to a hospital soon, but he owed it to Jones to at least try and see if he was OK.

He blinked a couple of times as his vision returned to normal, immediately spotting Jones’s old black Renault Mégane parked in the corner. It was too cold a night to be out walking, which meant he was probably here. Bolt felt a smidgen of satisfaction that his hunch had paid off, and turned towards the house, stopping suddenly as he spotted the ground-floor window hanging open, only partially visible behind one of the cars.

Jones had a ground-floor flat. It was unlikely to be a coincidence.

Bolt walked towards the window, his pace slow and unsteady, but as he passed a parked BMW he saw a body lying on the ground.

Even in the darkness, he could see it was a white male in his thirties dressed in a suit, and he felt a guilty relief that it wasn’t Jones. The man was on his side, one arm outstretched towards a briefcase a few feet away. His shirt was heavily bloodstained, as was the car itself, and he had a large hole in the centre of his forehead, where he’d been shot at close range. It was also clear he was dead.

The sight didn’t make Bolt feel sick. He’d seen too many murder victims for that, but it did make him feel terribly sad. Here was someone who’d come home from a hard day at work and whose life had been ripped from him in what must have been a terrifying last few seconds. It reminded him far too much of his own mortality.

The moan was almost inaudible, but Bolt turned round immediately, causing his vision to blur again. As it cleared, he saw a second body poking a little way out of a thick leylandii bush that bordered the property, partially obscured by a parked car.

It was Jones.

Even as he reached him, Bolt could see he was in a bad way. He was only visible from the chest up, his face buried in the gravel, and he wasn’t moving. The blood was everywhere, drenching his clothes and spreading across the gravel beside him.

Crouching down, Bolt turned him over as gently as he could, and looked down at his pale bloodstained face.

Jones tried to focus but couldn’t seem to manage it, and his eyes flickered as he began to lose consciousness.

‘You’re going to be all right, Jones,’ Bolt told him, aware that his own voice sounded weak. ‘I promise. I’m going to get help right now.’ He fumbled in his pocket for his phone. ‘Stay with me, Jones. Come on, stay with me.’

Jones’s eyes closed as Bolt dialled 999, and Bolt slapped his face to make him stay awake, the effort making him nauseous.

‘I need an air ambulance right away,’ he said when his call was answered, and gave the address.

The operator said he couldn’t guarantee an air ambulance, that resources were severely stretched.

‘My name is Detective Inspector Mike Bolt of Counter Terrorism Command. This man’s a victim of today’s attack. And he’s the only person who can identify the terrorists. If he dies, you’re responsible.’

‘Are you all right, sir? You don’t sound well.’

Bolt took a deep breath, feeling like he was going to faint. ‘I’m fine. Just get here.’