Killing for the Company Read online

  Killing For The Company

  Chris Ryan

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Coronet

  An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  1

  Copyright © Chris Ryan, 2011

  The right of Chris Ryan to be identified as the Author of the Work

  has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

  means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be

  otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that

  in which it is published and without a similar condition being

  imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

  to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 444 71031 1

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Imprint Page

  Acknowledgements

  Quotations

  Part One

  One

  Two

  Three

  Part Two

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Part Three

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Part Four

  Thirty-three

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  To my agent Barbara Levy, publisher Mark Booth, Charlotte Haycock, Eleni Fostiropoulos and the rest of the team at Coronet.

  I believe that God wants everybody to be free. That’s what I believe. And that’s one part of my foreign policy.

  George W. Bush, 13 October 2004

  To the end there shall be war.

  The Book of Daniel, 9:26

  PART ONE

  Northern Serbia, December 1998

  ONE

  17.00 hrs.

  Chet Freeman didn’t know which smelled worse: himself or the bar he was sitting in.

  They’d taken up position by a table next to the toilets. From a surveillance point of view it was perfect: they could see every part of the bar, and there was a direct line to the exit in case of a clusterfuck. From a comfort point of view it was the pits, not least because of the reek of piss and stale cigarette smoke. Chet had been in some rough joints in his time, but this place made the Lamb and Flag in Hereford look like the fucking Ritz.

  At least it was warm. The snow had been falling for about an hour and was already a couple of inches thick on the ground. But warmth was the only thing this bar had going for it. A broken fruit machine in one corner. A picture of Milosevic on the nicotine-stained wall alongside it. Three strip lights on the ceiling, of which the middle one buzzed and flickered on and off. Other than that, a short bar with a grossly fat barman and only two optics fixed to the wall behind it – slivovitz and vodka – and ten plastic-topped tables screwed to the ground, each with a red Coca-Cola ashtray overflowing with butts. This was a place for drinking and smoking, nothing more. True, there was an old TV fixed to the concrete wall behind the bar itself. It was on loud enough to hear, but of the twenty-three men – no women – pulling on bottles of warm beer, no one even glanced at it.

  Chet looked at his watch. 17.03. Give it another three hours and he’d put money on most of these guys being dead drunk. Or, in one case, just dead.

  He scratched at his leg. An insect, probably drawn by his stinking clothes, had bitten him just above the knee. He could feel the bulge of the bite even through the coarse material of his trousers. He scratched it hard and took a small sip from his bottle of Zajecarsko, the local beer.

  ‘Jesus, buddy, if I didn’t know you better, I’d have said you actually just drank some of that piss.’

  Chet’s mate Luke Mercer had a shaved head, slightly crooked teeth and a south London accent. He spoke quietly and his voice was almost drowned out by the noise of Boyzone wailing from the TV. They didn’t want anybody to hear they were talking English.

  Luke looked as rough as Chet. Three days’ stubble, and another three days’ dirt beneath it. A black donkey jacket flecked with cement. Worker’s shoes, dirty and heavy. Luke so closely resembled a labourer that no one would give him a second look, not here where everybody was dressed in the same way. Their fellow drinkers might be surprised to learn, though, that the donkey jacket concealed a shoulder holster packing a Sig 9mm pistol and a mike for covert comms fitted under the lapel. The tiny pink radio earpieces each man had in one ear were invisible to anyone who wasn’t looking for them. They were linked to radio transmitters in the pockets of their tough, battered trousers. This would keep them in contact with the other two members of the unit, Sean Richards – a grizzled old-timer with flecks of grey in his beard, who was as much a fixture of B Squadron as the squadron hangar back in Hereford – and Marty Blakemore, fresh to the Regiment from 3 Para and keen to make a good impression on his first major op.

  Sean and Marty were parked in a nondescript white Skoda saloon outside the bar on the opposite side of the street. The boot of the car was filled with heavier weaponry: suppressed M16s, Maglite torch attachments with IR filters, med packs. All four of them knew that this could be a long night, and they needed to be properly equipped.

  Chet’s three years in the Regiment had taught him that his chosen career would sometimes mean carrying out operations you didn’t much like and just getting on with the job. Operations that you wouldn’t have thought existed before you walked into the compounds of Hereford HQ. Operations that you wouldn’t talk to anybody about, unless they were badged too. So sometimes, he thought to himself as he sat there, it was good to know you were out to nail a bona fide scumbag. Someone you wouldn’t think twice about sending to meet their maker – though fuck knows what kind of maker would come up with a piece of work like Stevan Ivanovic. As scumbags went, he was solid gold.

  Chet knew Ivanovic’s CV well. Four days previously at their forward operating base – a cordoned-off area of a busy UN military installation on the Bosnian border – the ops officer Andy Dell had given Chet’s four-man unit the low-down as he handed round the photograph of a balding, jowly individual with flared nostrils and a sour look.

  Andy Dell had the stuck-up tones of a Sandhurst officer, but as Ruperts went he was all right. ‘This is your man,’ he had announced. ‘Born 1957, made Chief of Police in Bosanski Samac, north-eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, April 1992. Lasted eight months in the job, during which time twelve men – all Bosnian Muslims – died in his custody: seven from beatings, five from causes unknown. Six Bosnian males have independently testified that he forced them to perform sex acts on each other just to humiliate them.’

  ‘Sex acts
?’ Chet had interrupted.

  ‘Blow jobs, since you ask. Three women have accused him of rape. One of them was fifteen years old; another ended up face down in the river after she spoke out.’

  ‘And we get to slot this cunt, right?’ Luke had asked.

  ‘Do me a favour, Luke, and shut the fuck up till I’ve finished.’ Luke, who had been brought up by his dad on a council estate in Lewisham, always had something to say, and it didn’t always endear him to the Ruperts. ‘Ivanovic is on the run. He left his post as Chief as Police in ’93, after which he was a leading figure in the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims. Our boys tried to get their hands on him during the siege of Sarajevo. Too slippery. He’s been underground since the end of the Bosnian war. Only he’s just stuck his head above the parapet. The Firm have definite intel on his location, and the war-crimes tribunal at the Hague want him in the dock for persecution on political, racial and religious grounds.’

  It all made sense. Chet had been around long enough to know that it wasn’t just the ragheads who could be religious nuts. When it came to ethnic cleansing, some of those Serbs were pure Domestos.

  Turning their attention to a map of the region, Dell had pointed at the FOB, situated just west of the Serb border. ‘You’re to insert into Serbia by vehicle in the guise of UN peacekeepers. They’re a common sight, so you shouldn’t attract too much attention. Our intel suggests that Ivanovic is hiding out in Prizkovo, a one-horse town twenty miles south of Belgrade. We have the imagery for you to study. When you get to the area you’ll need to ditch the UN gear. That part of Serbia is a nationalist hotbed. The peacekeepers know that the best way to preserve the peace is to keep away.’

  ‘Good job we’re not there to keep the peace, then,’ Luke had murmured.

  The ops officer had ignored him. ‘We have reports that Ivanovic is surrounded by at least four heavies,’ he continued. ‘They’re dispensable, but Ivanovic needs to be alive. You’ve been given temporary powers of arrest. These probably won’t stand up in an international court of law, and Ivanovic will most likely know that. He’s not going to come quietly.’

  Quiet. Noisy. It made no difference to Chet. He was just looking forward to getting his hands on this bastard. And it wouldn’t be long now.

  He picked up a dinar from the sticky table and flicked it in the air.

  ‘Tails,’ said Luke. He looked like he wanted a response, but he wasn’t going to get one from Chet, who just scowled and continued to flip the coin.

  Flick, catch.

  Flick, catch.

  ‘You going to do that all night, buddy?’ Luke asked. ‘’Cos I don’t mind telling you, it’s getting on my wick.’

  Flick, catch. Flick, catch.

  The TV behind the bar was grainy and flickered every few seconds. To Chet’s relief, the music came to an end and an image caught his attention. The British Prime Minister, Alistair Stratton, his boyish face earnest and open, his suit well cut and his red tie perfectly neat, was sitting in an anodyne studio being interviewed by some bird Chet recognised but couldn’t name. What the fuck Stratton was doing on Serbian TV, Chet didn’t know. Certainly the punters in the bar paid as little attention to him as they had to Boyzone.

  ‘Always the fucking way,’ Luke drawled. ‘You come on holiday to get away from it all . . .’

  Chet glanced back up at the screen. ‘Stratton’s all right,’ he said.

  ‘Stratton,’ Luke replied, ‘is a politician. Therefore Stratton is a wanker. End of.’

  Chet shrugged. He wasn’t going to argue. But he had enough friends in the regular green army to know that in the year since Stratton had come to power, things for them had improved. Better kit, better conditions. It was no secret in the military that the government was gearing up to move into Kosovo if Milosevic carried on giving the Albanians the Stalin treatment, but really Chet knew very little about the politics. That wasn’t his business. All he knew was that anyone who supplied his mates with the gear and the weapons they needed to do their jobs was OK by him. As Luke would say: end of.

  Still, it was odd to come across Stratton’s voice in this back end of nowhere, miles from home and translated into impenetrable Serbian by the subtitles at the bottom of the screen. The PM’s earnest tones reached Chet’s ears.

  ‘The trouble with talking about faith is that frankly people think you’re a nutter . . .’ Stratton smiled a boyish smile. ‘But yes, my faith is extremely important to me. You know, in this job, you’re asked to make some pretty tough decisions, and I’d like to think that my faith always puts me on the right path . . .’

  Chet heard Luke snort. Did Stratton know that at that moment a four-man SAS unit was preparing to make an illegal arrest on foreign soil, and most likely take out a number of foreign nationals as they did so? If so, had he consulted the big guy upstairs about the rights and wrongs of it? Chet didn’t much care either way. The only things he had faith in were his Sig and the PPK strapped to his left ankle. The disco gun, they called it back home, but there’d be no dancing tonight.

  Chet’s attention wandered from the blaring TV and he started to scan the other drinkers. They were hard-looking men. Flinty-eyed and rough-faced, their hands big and their skin chapped. One of them stood up from the bar and lurched towards the toilet. He noticed Chet and Luke sitting there. Newcomers. He stopped to give them a look that told them how unwelcome they were.

  The look Chet and Luke returned was cool. Unruffled. Perhaps the Serbian decided it wasn’t worth his while kicking it off with these two. Perhaps he’d never intended that in the first place. He found his way into the foul-smelling toilets, leaving the two SAS men to continue scanning the remainder of the clientele.

  One of them was their key to Ivanovic. And if everything went according to plan, they’d soon know which one.

  17.32 hrs.

  Stratton had been replaced by some incomprehensible game show. Chet and Luke’s beers were still full. It wouldn’t be long before someone clocked that they weren’t really drinking. Their contact was now seventeen minutes late. It was beginning to look like he’d bailed out, which would mean the last few days had been for nothing.

  A voice in the earpiece. Sean, outside in the Skoda. ‘OK, fellas. The preacher’s arrived. About fucking time too – it’s Baltic out here, so make him feel comfortable. He looks about twelve.’

  ‘The preacher’. Prearranged code for the tout they were awaiting.

  Ten seconds later the door opened. The icy air from outside disturbed the warm fug of the bar, and a young man walked in. Only three men clocked his arrival: the fat bartender and Chet and Luke. Unlike almost everyone else in the room, he was clean-shaven. He wore jeans, a thick lumberjack shirt, a hat that covered his ears and was tied under his chin, and a black rucksack over his shoulder. The rucksack was the sign by which the unit were to recognise him, but it made the kid look more like a student than a worker. Everything had a dusting of snow over it.

  As the door closed behind him, he looked round nervously, like a teenager not sure if his girlfriend had stood him up.

  Chet looked towards the frosted glass at the front of the bar. He could just make out two silhouettes, one on either side of the door. He knew what that meant: Sean and Marty, having clocked the kid, had moved from the Skoda and were now standing guard outside, ready to burst in if anything kicked off.

  The kid’s glance fell on Chet and Luke, and he nodded slightly.

  ‘Fuck’s sake.’ Chet cursed quietly and looked away. He could sense Luke doing the same. This dickhead might be here to help them, but as touts went he was clearly wet behind the ears, and if he stood there gawping at them much longer, he was going to screw the whole operation.

  Chet slid the dinar off the table once more.

  Flick, catch.

  Flick, catch.

  The tout was looking around now. His eyes narrowed, as if he had seen something – or someone – he’d been looking for. He slipped the rucksack off his shoulder, carrying it by his side
, and approached the bar. The tout chose his place carefully, selecting a stool next to one of the regular drinkers.

  That was the sign. The kid was too scared to meet with the unit. Too scared to point out their man in an overt way. So the spooks had got to work on him. It was local knowledge that Ivanovic was in the area. Nobody knew where, but they did know that one of his guys drank in this bar during his time off. The kid was to come in here at a given time and take a seat next to the target. If they wanted to find Ivanovic, all they had to do was follow Ivanovic’s man.

  Chet stopped flipping his coin and took another pretend pull on his beer as he scoped out the tout’s new drinking buddy. He could only see the guy’s back. He was broad-shouldered and had thick black hair, slightly greying. He sat hunched forward, his elbows on the bar. When the tout sat next to him, he made no attempt at conversation.

  The younger man pointed at one of the optics and ordered a slivovitz, which the fat bartender plonked in front of him. Then he settled down to drink it. Just another loser passing the time.

  17.46 hrs.

  Ivanovic’s man stood up.

  As he turned away from the bar, Chet could see he was unsteady on his feet. His face looked like it had been carved out of rock, with an immense flat nose – well reddened from booze – hooded eyes and deep frown lines on his forehead. He scowled at nobody in particular and walked uncertainly towards the street door. Chet pressed the button on the transmitter in his pocket. ‘Eyes on Target 1,’ he murmured. ‘He’s leaving now.’

  ‘Roger that,’ came Sean’s voice in his ear.

  Chet and Luke waited until their man was outside before scraping back their chairs and moving towards the exit. Chet could sense the tout watching them over his shoulder, but he gave no sign of recognition. That was for the kid’s safety.