Black Ops Read online

  The first killing took place on January 12, the second on February 3. Candace Sweeting had let herself into the spacious three-bedroomed pool home with breakfast nook, formal dining area and sunset views on March 6.

  On March 9, they called Danny Black.

  2

  Few things travel more quickly than gossip in the corridors and squadron hangars of SAS headquarters in Hereford. If that gossip concerns the suspicious death of a Regiment man, it has extra thrust.

  Danny Black heard the news about Ben Bullock, formerly of A Squadron, while he was on the range. There was a thin drizzle. It matted Danny’s dark hair to his scalp, soaked into his digital camo gear and made it more difficult to group the rounds from his Diemaco accurately on the target at the end of the range. He was minutely tweaking the sights when his companion Roscoe said, ‘You hear about this shitstorm in Dubai?’

  Roscoe was a funny one. He’d been badged for three years, and for most of that time Danny barely spoke to the guy. But in the couple of months since Danny returned from his last op, Roscoe had latched on to him. Danny knew he had a reputation in the Regiment and was used to the other guys quizzing him about previous ops. Roscoe took that to a different level and never seemed disheartened when Danny closed down every line of enquiry.

  ‘What shitstorm?’ Danny asked. He raised the Diemaco, lined the sights with the target, and released three rounds in quick succession. They clustered precisely around the target’s forehead.

  ‘They found Ben Bullock on some building site out there. Properly fucked up.’

  ‘Fucked up how?’ Danny remembered Bullock, and not that fondly. He’d been an old-timer when Danny first joined the Regiment. In Danny’s opinion, he gave the SAS a bad name.

  ‘Well, dead, obviously,’ Roscoe said. ‘But they took his ears off as well.’

  ‘Who’s they?’

  Roscoe shrugged. ‘Dunno. Could be anyone. Fella like Bullock probably wasn’t too fussy who he freelanced for.’

  That was true enough. Bullock had a reputation. Danny remembered the first time he met him. It was only a few weeks after he’d passed selection, and he’d settled into the Crown in Hereford for a few jars with some of the other lads. Bullock was with another group of Regiment boys. He’d gone out of his way to pick a fight with a couple of Asian men minding their own business at the bar. They’d ended up in A & E. Now Danny thought about it, did one of them end up in a wheelchair? It was all brushed under the carpet, of course. Bullock was too good a soldier. The Regiment couldn’t afford to lose him on account of one drunken night in the pub. He and Danny had crossed paths on a number of occasions since then. Danny soon worked out that the only offence those two men in the pub were guilty of was not having white skin. Bullock was a racist. Simple as that.

  A racist maybe, but he wouldn’t let that get in the way of earning himself a living once he left the Regiment. ‘Dubai, you said?’ Danny asked.

  ‘Right,’ said Roscoe.

  It figured. There were plenty of opportunities out in the Gulf for a man with Bullock’s skills. Oil-rich Arabs wanting the cachet of an ex-SAS man on their close-protection teams. Gun-runners needing some muscle and know-how. ‘Guess he stepped on the wrong toes,’ Danny said. ‘Simple enough to do out there, especially for a guy like Bullock.’

  ‘Sure. But to take his ears off? That’s a bit fucking keen, isn’t it?’

  ‘Dead’s dead,’ Danny said. He couldn’t find it in himself to mourn Ben Bullock. Not when so many of his real friends had died on ops.

  ‘Savage, mate,’ Roscoe grinned. ‘Nice one.’

  Danny raised his weapon and released three more rounds. They clustered in a triangle around the target’s heart.

  The story of Ben Bullock’s grisly end followed Danny around over the next three weeks. It seemed to have caught the imagination of some of the younger guys in camp. One kid, newly badged, spread a rumour that a serial killer was targeting SAS men, until the RSM pointed out that one murder didn’t make a serial killer, and would he kindly shut his fucking cakehole if he didn’t have anything useful to say. But each time Danny heard Bullock’s name, he remembered various other incidents that put the former SAS man in a less than favourable light. The time he’d made his presence felt to a Jewish guy in B Squadron by dumping a fistful of minced pork on his dinner tray. The rumour that he’d lit a target near Mosul knowing full well that it contained nothing more than two Iraqi children. The time he’d been photographed on the fringes of an EDF march, and had to persuade the CO that he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Ben Bullock had enemies, that was sure. Danny found himself trying to work out which of them had finally caught up with him.

  Not that it was Danny’s problem. Like he’d said to Roscoe, dead’s dead. And Danny had other things to occupy himself. Life in camp was busy, and he was glad of it. The little flat in Hereford that he called home held nothing for him. His daughter, a bright, beautiful toddler, lived with her mum, who wanted Danny to have as little contact as possible. His dad had succumbed to dementia in his old folks’ home. He hadn’t heard from his druggie brother for months, and a good thing too. The more he could throw himself into work, the better. He was eager to be sent out on ops, but the head shed seemed to be holding back. Perhaps the powers that be had decided Danny Black was in line for a little R and R.

  He was driving home from camp one evening when he heard the news on the radio. A former British Army soldier, Liam Armitage, has been found dead in Accra, the capital city of Ghana. It is thought that Mr Armitage was working in Ghana as a freelance bodyguard. The High Commission in Accra is helping local police with their enquiries, and Mr Armitage’s family have been informed.

  Danny pulled over and turned the radio up. But the announcer had moved on to the next item, leaving Danny to ponder what he’d just heard. He knew Liam Armitage better than he’d known Ben Bullock, though he liked him just as little. Armitage was like Bullock’s shadow. When Bullock was causing trouble, Armitage was never far away. No doubt they were a good team on ops, because the head shed invariably deployed them together. And for both men to turn up dead within a few weeks of each other? That was suspicious. Maybe the new recruit with thoughts of serial killers wasn’t so far from the truth.

  As usual, it was Roscoe who had the grisly details the following morning in camp. He sidled up as Danny was making coffee in the squadron hangar. ‘You hear what happened, buddy?’ He said it almost gleefully.

  ‘Armitage?’

  ‘Mate, he was . . .’

  ‘Fucked up?’

  ‘Right. Word is . . .’ Roscoe looked round, as if about to impart some great secret. ‘Word is, they blew his brains out and cut off his fingers.’ He held up his hands and wiggled his own fingers, as though explaining to Danny what they were.

  Danny spooned sugar into his coffee. ‘What about his ears?’ he asked.

  ‘Nah, the ears were fine. At least, that’s what I heard – which is more than you can say for Bullock, right?’ Roscoe saw another mate entering the hangar, and hurried over to tell him the news.

  Danny sipped his coffee, thinking hard. Bullock and Armitage, killed within a week of each other? It could be coincidence. It was in the nature of former Regiment guys to find themselves working in threatening environments. It wasn’t like they had the temperament to stack shelves at their local Asda. And maybe if their bodies hadn’t been mutilated, Danny would have been content to believe the two deaths weren’t linked. His instinct told him otherwise. He wondered who Bullock and Armitage could have antagonised so badly. Maybe it was nothing to do with their Regiment work. They’d been out of the game for a few years now, after all. But Bullock had died in Dubai, Armitage in Ghana. Different continents, thousands of miles apart. If they’d been working on something together, their operations were truly global.

  Either that, or their deaths related back to a time when they were work colleagues. Big fish in the Regiment pond.

  There was a pool tab
le on the other side of the hangar. Roscoe and a few others had spread a newspaper out on the baize. No doubt they were reading the reports of Armitage’s death. The ops officer, Ray Hammond, walked past them. He was clutching an armful of folders and he paused by the guys crowded round the newspaper. He looked like he was about to say something to them, but held back. His eyes met Danny’s across the hangar. Danny inclined his head inquisitively. Hammond shook his, then left the hangar.

  The Bullock–Armitage situation was none of Danny’s business. Over the next few days he had other matters to occupy himself. A three-day training excursion on Salisbury Plain. A HAHO training package for a bunch of guys from 1 Para that took him to RAF Lossiemouth in Scotland for a week. But in his quieter moments he found himself thinking about the two dead Regiment men, and all the times he’d seen them together. There was an operation in the Gulf of Aden, where the lads had teamed up with the SBS to go after a crowd of Somali pirates. Bullock and Armitage were first to board the ship and nailed three of the Somali kids before the rest of the team were even out of the water. They’d run a CP team for the Mayor of London on his trip to Pakistan – Bullock took delight in telling whoever would listen that if one of the locals put a bullet in the mayor, they’d be nailing one of their own. There was a training day in Belmarsh to keep their skills lively in the event of a prison riot – Danny remembered wondering if Bullock and Armitage were on the wrong side of the bars. But nothing he could recall gave any hint as to why somebody would have targeted them both, and in such a gruesome way. Bullock and Armitage may not have been Danny’s cup of tea, but when it came down to it they were good Regiment soldiers who got the job done and understood the importance of secrecy and personal security.

  Maybe their deaths were coincidental, after all.

  It snowed at the beginning of March. The grounds of RAF Credenhill looked bleaker than ever. The guys complained about having to do exercises in the white-out, of course, but they didn’t really mean it. A few inches of powder was nothing to a soldier for whom hiding out for days in an Arctic snow hole was an occupational hazard. Roscoe, though, was more vocal than the others. When Danny found himself taking a slash at the urinal next to him, he braced himself for a new barrage of complaints.

  ‘What about the latest, then?’ Roscoe said. There was something in his voice that caught Danny’s attention. Normally, when Roscoe was about to share some titbit, he was almost euphoric. Today he sounded, and looked, shaken.

  Danny finished his piss and walked over to the basin. ‘I’m sure you’re about to fill me in,’ he said as he started to wash his hands.

  ‘Ollie Moorhouse,’ Roscoe said. In the mirror, Danny saw his mate shake himself off dramatically before joining him at the basin. ‘Dead.’

  Danny turned off the tap. He was shocked. Ollie Moorhouse was a good mate of his, back in the day. When he left the army he moved to Florida. Danny had an open invitation to his place out there, which he’d never taken Ollie up on. ‘How do you know?’ he said.

  ‘Tom McKinnon, D Squadron. He’s got a friend in the Palm Beach Police Department. They’ve kept it out of the press but . . . Jesus, mate, it was fucking nasty.’ For once, Danny had the impression that Roscoe didn’t want to elaborate.

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘Whoever done it, they caught up with him at his house out there. They cut off his bollocks, mate. And his dick. Left them lying there on the carpet. This estate agent found them. Apparently he was trying to sell the place. Do you reckon he . . .’

  Danny had stopped listening. He walked out of the toilets while Roscoe was still talking. Ollie’s death had just triggered a memory. He’d forgotten it, but now it was completely clear. It was five years ago, maybe six. He was new to the Regiment, and the RSM had given him a job. He was to collect a flight case full of weapons and deliver them to a safe house on the edge of Dartmoor. No more information was volunteered,and Danny knew better than to ask. He’d collected the gear, stowed it in the back of a Regiment jeep, and driven to Dartmoor that afternoon.

  His destination was a disused guest house, miles from anywhere. It took hours to get there. He remembered stopping off at a village shop to buy a stash of chocolate bars and finding the jeep ticketed when he got back to it. By the time he arrived at the guest house it was dark. Four vehicles were parked outside. The ground-floor lights were on. On the first floor, darkness, with the exception of one window from which a pale light glowed. As Danny pulled up, he saw a figure at the front door. That was Ollie Moorhouse. He nodded a curt greeting as Danny stepped out of the jeep. ‘Where’s the stuff?’

  ‘In the back.’

  ‘Inside with it.’

  There was an unspoken hierarchy. Ollie was an established SAS operator. Danny was the new boy. It was his job to carry in the flight case. He followed Ollie along a dark hallway with a flagstone floor, into a kitchen where two more Regiment guys were sitting with cans of lager in front of them. Danny didn’t know them at the time. Maybe that was why the memory had remained submerged until now. But he was sure of it.

  The two guys in the kitchen were Bullock and Armitage.

  ‘Amazon delivery,’ Bullock observed. ‘Stick it by the door and fuck off back to Hereford, there’s a good boy.’

  Danny turned to Ollie. ‘Where do you want it?’ he said.

  Ollie smiled. ‘What he said,’ he replied. ‘And get yourself a beer from the fridge.’

  Danny dumped the flight case of weapons and grabbed himself a drink. ‘So what’s the deal?’ he said, indicating the house in general. ‘I’m guessing this isn’t a country break.’

  Bullock and Armitage remained stubbornly silent. It was left to Ollie to reply. ‘Training package,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a kid from the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, needs some schooling in the dark arts.’

  Bullock snorted.

  ‘Ignore him,’ Ollie said. ‘He’s prejudiced. Even you’ve got to admit, Bullock, the boy learns fast.’

  ‘He’d learn a fuck of a sight faster if he didn’t have to stop and pray four times a day.’

  ‘And he’d do that a fuck of a sight faster if you didn’t keep hiding his prayer mat.’ Bullock grinned. Ollie gave Danny an apologetic look. ‘Welcome to the kindergarten,’ he said.

  ‘You two should keep your mouth shut,’ Armitage said. ‘Hereford want this under wraps, remember?’

  ‘It’s alright,’ Ollie replied. ‘I know Danny. He’ll keep quiet, won’t you, Danny?’

  Danny shrugged. ‘About what?’ he said. He put his half-finished beer on the side. ‘I’m out of here,’ he said, and headed for the exit. Before he reached it, however, the door opened and a young man entered. He was in his early twenties, with a scraggly beard and dark skin. Danny remembered thinking he was possibly Iraqi or Afghan. He was tall and slim, but exuded a wiry strength and a fierce intelligence. He silently acknowledged Danny, then turned to the others. ‘I’m getting hungry,’ he said. ‘Shall we get some food on?’ He sounded English. If there was any accent, it was south London.

  ‘Bacon sarnies for dinner tonight, Abdul,’ Bullock said. He leaned back and took a swig from his beer without taking his eyes off the young man.

  ‘You want to be careful, Bullock,’ Ollie said. ‘Sniper training tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll take my chances,’ Bullock said. ‘So what do you fancy, Abdul? Streaky or back?’

  The question crackled in the silence. Finally the young man bowed his head. ‘I’ll see you all in the morning,’ he said. Strangely dignified, he turned and left.

  ‘Bacon for breakfast and all!’ Bullock called after him, sniggering at his own joke.

  The atmosphere had turned sour. Danny didn’t want to be here. ‘I’ll see myself out,’ he said. He left the kitchen and headed back down the flagstone hallway to the door. Before he left the house, however, he patted down his jacket. There were two Mars bars there, left over from the chocolate he’d bought at the village shop. He thought for a moment, then climbed the stai
rs at the other end of the hallway. It was dark on the landing, but he saw light leaking from the bottom of a door on the left. He approached it and knocked.

  ‘Come in.’

  Danny entered. The room was sparsely furnished, almost spartan. One single bed. One chair. A table and a rattling radiator. The young man was sitting on his bed reading a book. Danny chucked the Mars bars on to the bed. ‘We’re not all dickheads,’ he said.

  The young man lowered his book. ‘Thank you,’ he said. He frowned, as though deciding whether or not to accept the chocolate. ‘I am very hungry,’ he said. ‘They worked me hard today.’

  ‘You should ignore Bullock,’ Danny said.

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not. Sniper training tomorrow, after all.’

  The two men grinned. ‘You’d be doing us all a favour,’ Danny said. ‘I’m Danny, by the way. Danny Black.’

  ‘Nice to meet you, Danny Black. I’m . . .’

  And there, Danny’s memory failed him. He couldn’t remember the name of that polite young Muslim who had accepted the two Mars bars so gratefully. Maybe that was because, after leaving the room and the safe house, and driving all the way back to Hereford, he’d never thought about him again. Danny was embarking on the life of a Regiment soldier. A life where staying alive meant focusing on the present and not thinking too much about the past.

  But Danny thought about him now, as he left Roscoe in the toilets and marched down the corridors of SAS HQ. And he thought about him that evening, as he sat alone in his flat, a microwave lasagne uneaten on the plate in front of him, some shit on TV playing mutely in the corner of the room. He couldn’t stop thinking about him. That young Muslim man was a link between three SAS guys who had recently turned up dead and mutilated. Did he seem the type? Not really, Danny thought, but he checked himself. Bullock had been a right bastard to him that day. And knowing him as Danny did, there was little doubt that he’d been equally unpleasant in the days before and the days after. How much abuse could a guy take before deciding that some time, somewhere, he’d make things even?