Hunter Killer Read online

  Spud switched the radio off again. ‘Fucking sick of hearing about it,’ he said.

  Ripley indicated right. ‘Still,’ he said. ‘That’s one for the Princess Di nutjobs to get their teeth into.’

  ‘Hey,’ Spud said. ‘Enough of the nutjob.’

  Danny smiled. It sometimes seemed to him that there wasn’t a single member of the British public who didn’t think the SAS had killed Diana using some fiendishly elaborate plot cooked up by the establishment and sanctioned by the royal family. And there were even some guys in the Regiment itself who thought that way. Spud included. Where there was a conspiracy theory to believe in, Spud was always first on the bandwagon. Not Danny though. Those Diana rumours were entertaining, but in his opinion the world didn’t work that way. If somebody had wanted Diana dead, they’d have made the hit in a far more practical or covert way. Car chases under the Seine? Packs of paparazzi? Blinding flashes of light? No. There were too many variables. Too many things that could go wrong. Diana’s death was an accident, nothing more. And the same went for Orlando Whitby, whoever the hell he was: just one of the unlucky sods who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  ‘Put your foot down, mucker,’ Spud said to Ripley. ‘Too late for the headshed to call a debrief tonight. Floor it down the M4, I might get to Karen Macshane’s gaff before she opens up her muff for some other little turd.’

  ‘Thought you were seeing that bird from Warham.’

  ‘Nah, she dumped me. Said I was always exaggerating.’

  ‘What, you?’ Ripley said with a grin.

  ‘I know – I was so surprised I nearly tripped over my dick.’ Spud started whistling ‘Bat out of Hell’ again, then stopped suddenly and turned to Danny. ‘Want to come, mucker? Reckon you could use a few jars – you know, chillax. You went a bit OTT with that dumb-ass back there.’

  Danny stared out of the window again. ‘Don’t want to cramp your style, mate.’ He glanced sideways at Spud, who was giving him a piercing look. ‘Clara’s staying,’ he said. ‘Day off. I’d better . . .’

  ‘. . . get your rocks off with your posh bird. Yeah, yeah, ’nuff said, fella.’

  Danny had two phones. One for work, one personal, and at the moment he was only carrying the work one. It rang. He looked at the screen: number withheld. This was an encrypted phone, and nobody had the number – so far as Danny knew – except the ops room back at base. ‘This could be interesting,’ he said. He accepted the call and put the handset to his ear.

  Danny didn’t have the chance to say hello. The Regiment’s ops officer Ray Hammond was already barking down the phone at him. ‘Nice one, fellas. I send you down to the smoke to pick a lock, I end up with seven dead Cypriots, the worst case of suicide I’ve ever seen and half the fucking journalists in London trying to get past the police cordon.’

  ‘It went noisy,’ Danny said calmly.

  ‘You’re fucking telling me it went noisy!’ Hammond screamed so loudly that Danny had to move the handset a few inches from his ear. ‘The CO wants you and Spud in his office the second you get back.’

  Spud, who had clearly heard the conversation as he was sitting so close to Danny’s phone, started mouthing swear words silently next to Danny, who tried to block it out and keep his concentration.

  ‘What does the boss want?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ the ops officer said. ‘Perhaps he wants to know how one of your targets managed to accidentally shoot himself three times in the mouth. Get a fucking move on. You’re expected here in three hours.’

  The phone line went dead. Danny stared at the handset, then turned to Spud. ‘Sorry mate,’ he said. ‘Looks like I’m your date for the night. CO’s called us in.’

  Spud gave him a sick look. ‘You know what?’ he asked. ‘I’ve got millions of nerves in my body. How come that fucker Hammond manages to get on every single one of them?’

  Three

  The unit arrived back at RAF Credenhill at 03.30hrs. The car park was unusually full, the lights were on in all the squadron hangars and even the HQ building was lit up. Busy times. Danny was dog-tired. Even Spud had been nodding off on the motorway. As they pulled up in front of the main regimental HQ building, Danny elbowed him in the ribs. He pointed through the windscreen. The wipers were still flapping furiously, so they could make out the sight of Ray Hammond waiting for them just inside the main entrance.

  ‘Let’s get this over with,’ Danny said. Spud and Ripley grunted in agreement. They debussed, and ran across the courtyard up the steps to the HQ building.

  Hammond had dark rings round his eyes and an even darker frown on his forehead. ‘Not you, Ripley,’ he said. ‘You can get the hardware back to the armoury. You and you’ – he pointed at Danny and Spud in turn – ‘follow me.’

  They marched through the building. Company clerks were scurrying around in uniform, or sitting at computers taking phone calls. But they hardly saw any of the lads. There was barely a UK-based member of the Regiment that wasn’t out on the streets, fully tooled up and ready to assist the police in the event of a hard arrest being necessary. Half of B Squadron had been deployed to major shopping centres round the country. Only a few weeks previously, a bunch of Al-Shabaab militants had taken out a number of civilian targets in a Kenyan shopping mall. Word was that the security services were bricking themselves that there might be a repeat performance.

  They walked in silence towards the area at its centre known as the Kremlin. The warning signs were on Hammond’s face, and even Spud didn’t venture any sarky comments. The Kremlin was where Johnny Cartwright, CO of 22SAS, had his office, opposite the briefing rooms and just down the corridor from the main ops room. Hammond raised his fist to knock on the door, but at that moment the door opened and a clerk walked out carrying an empty coffee cup. Hammond stepped inside. ‘They’re here, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Send them in, Ray. You can go home now.’

  The ops officer looked a bit put out that he wasn’t invited into the meet. But he stood to one side and let Spud and Danny pass without a word. Seconds later, they were alone with the CO.

  Danny liked Cartwright. As ruperts went, he was one of the better ones. True, Danny suspected that his past few months of humdrum, UK-based ops was a hundred per cent down to his CO keeping him out of the firing line since everything that had happened on his last major overseas op, but he had his reasons. Cartwright seemed to have a genuine concern for his men’s welfare. Not that he was touchy-feely – far from it – but he was always prepared to stand up for the guys. When Danny and Spud had returned from Syria with their mate Greg Murray, he’d insisted on being present at every debrief the authorities could throw at him. Whenever questions came up that Danny didn’t feel like answering – and there were plenty of those – the CO pulled rank and stonewalled the fuckers. And when it was clear that Greg’s injuries at the hands of the Syrian mukhabarat spelled an end to his time in active service, Cartwright had made sure he kept a desk job in Hereford on full pay. Danny would always be grateful for that.

  Not that he’d ever say it to Cartwright. Nor would Cartwright want to hear it. Especially now. The CO had a face like thunder.

  ‘So what are we supposed to tell them?’ he demanded without any pleasantries.

  Danny kept a poker face. ‘It was very weird, boss,’ he said. ‘The guy obviously didn’t want to be captured alive. Took his own life before we could nail him.’

  ‘Three times in the back of the throat?’

  ‘Like I say, boss. It was weird.’

  Cartwright stared at each of them in turn, then shook his head as if he was dealing with a couple of particularly exhausting children. ‘Leave it to me,’ he said under his breath. ‘I’ll sort it out.’ He stood up from behind his desk. ‘You’re not here for a bollocking, anyway. Take a seat.’

  They did as they were told.

  ‘You’re both being assigned to E Squadron,’ Cartwright said. ‘Effective immediately.’

  Danny blinked, then
glanced at Spud.

  The existence of E Squadron was an open secret. You’d never find an SIS or Regiment representative acknowledging its existence. But it existed all right – a special, hand-picked cadre of operatives individually selected to carry out the more sensitive operations that the intelligence services deemed necessary. Back in the day they’d called it the Increment, or the RWW. Now, this covert unit took its pick from the cream of 22SAS, the SBS and the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. Danny knew they’d been active in Libya and North Africa, but even he had no firm knowledge of what they’d been up to. E Squadron was for the most experienced, the most comprehensibly vetted. The best.

  ‘For what it’s worth,’ Cartwright said, ‘I think it’s a fucking terrible idea. But you two were specifically requested by London about two and a half hours ago. Looks like your old mate Hugo Buckingham’s taken a shine to you.’

  Danny couldn’t stop the contempt showing on his face. He’d neither seen nor heard from Buckingham ever since they’d got back from Syria, and he was glad to keep it that way. He was loathsome. Cowardly. Danny couldn’t trust him one bit, which made this sudden summons all the more suspicious. E Squadron operations generally took the guys to the hottest spots in the world, often to protect MI6 personnel. Danny wasn’t sure he could stomach another op babysitting that piece of shit.

  Cartwright was talking again. ‘I don’t have a lot of details, but Buckingham’s part of a joint MI5/MI6/CIA task force following up the Paddington bomb. They need a covert team on the ground to help them. You’re it. You head to London tomorrow, meet with your police liaison. We’ve got a safe house being prepared for you as we speak. You stay in the capital for as long as they need you there. I don’t expect you’ll be back in Hereford for some time.’

  ‘Boss,’ Danny started to say, ‘this Buckingham guy, if he’d had his way Spud would be rotting at the bottom of a mass grave in Syria . . .’

  ‘Get over it, Black. I know your feelings about him, but the decision’s made. You can take it as read by me that there’s a ton of downward pressure from Whitehall at the moment. The security services will be feeling the heat and I guess you two must have impressed that little shit out in the Middle East. Take it as a compliment if it makes you feel better. Or not, as the mood takes you. A chopper will give you a quick lift to London at 08.00. You’ll have a vehicle waiting for you and you’re expected at Paddington Green Police station at twelve hundred. You’ll receive a further briefing then. Any questions?’

  Yeah, Danny thought. Like, a million. But none that his CO was likely to answer. And even Spud seemed lost for a clever remark.

  ‘In that case,’ Cartwright said, ‘go home and get some sleep. My feeling is you’re going to need it.’ He opened one of his desk drawers and produced a sealed brown envelope, which he handed to Danny. A London address was written on the front, and the envelope was heavy with what felt like keys.

  Danny was experienced enough to realise there was no use arguing with the headshed. He was a soldier, and he’d just been given his orders. The briefing was over.

  Like the CO had said: get over it.

  Home, for Danny, was little more than a place to store his personal possessions. The life he’d chosen didn’t lend itself to comforts, and if Clara hadn’t been waiting for him, he would probably have kipped down at base where he had a bunk and a change of clothes on hand. But Clara was waiting for him, despite the lateness of the hour. As he parked his motorbike on the kerb outside his small, ground-floor flat in the western part of Hereford, just south of Whitecross Road, he could see the front-room light burning. She’d obviously ignored his instruction not to wait up.

  He let himself in and stripped himself of his wet-weather gear in the narrow hallway. He could hear the TV, and as he stepped into the front room he saw Clara curled up on the sofa, fast asleep in front of some late-night discussion programme. An audience member with a neck thicker than a bulldog was getting very hot under his sizeable collar. ‘If this Abu Ra’id can’t live by our rules, he shouldn’t be allowed in our country.’ The audience clapped and the man folded his arms with obvious satisfaction. On a screen behind them was the familiar face of a bearded Islamic cleric – or ‘hate’ cleric as everyone liked to call him – whom the government had supposedly been trying to deport for more than a year now. Danny wasn’t the only one who couldn’t quite work out what the problem was with getting rid of the bastard, or quite why his wife was allowed a large, comfortable house in the suburbs that so far as he could tell they didn’t pay for. Ra’id’s face had been all over the place since the bombing, though whether he was involved or not nobody really seemed to know.

  Danny stepped across the room and switched the TV off. Clara was roused by the sudden silence. She sat up quickly, her blonde hair mussed and her tired face confused, as though she didn’t know where she was. But then she saw Danny, and her features softened.

  ‘You’re back,’ she said.

  ‘I told you not to wait up.’

  She gave a winsome little shrug. ‘Bed’s too big without you,’ she said.

  Danny sat next to her, a wave of tiredness crashing over him again.

  ‘Hard day at the office?’

  ‘Just the usual,’ Danny said evasively.

  ‘You can tell me, you know.’

  Clara had a habit of saying things like that. Of trying to find out what Danny had been up to. The nitty-gritty of his job. Deep down, he understood why. Clara had been through the mill out in Syria, where he’d found her deep in the rebel heartland. Most couples got together over a few pints down the local. Danny and Clara’s relationship had kicked off among the ordnance and flying rounds of a devastating civil war. She’d seen him at his work and she’d gone through things at the hands of the Syrians that nobody should have to experience. It had changed her, forever. The bed might be too big without Danny, but barely anything ever happened when they were in it. Again, Danny knew why. Intimacy was difficult for her after the abuse the mukhabarat had inflicted on her.

  But Syria had changed Danny, too. More than changed him – turned his life on its head. Maybe that was the reason he had these moments when he felt he hardly knew himself. Maybe that was the reason some piece-of-shit drug dealer had wound up with three 9mm rounds at the back of his throat that evening. And would Clara understand that? Of course she wouldn’t. Danny didn’t even understand it himself.

  ‘Just the usual,’ he repeated, in a tone that indicated that the conversation was over.

  They sat in silence for a moment. ‘Can I get you anything?’ Clara said finally.

  ‘I’m being moved to London,’ Danny said. ‘Starting tomorrow. I don’t know how long for. Could be a while.’

  ‘But . . . that’s great!’ A pause. ‘Isn’t it?’

  Danny shrugged. ‘It is what it is.’ He’d already decided he wasn’t going to mention Buckingham. If anything, Clara hated him more than Danny did. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to speculate with her about the nature of the op. Clara was a sweet girl. She wouldn’t even begin to understand or accept the kind of things he might be called upon to do.

  ‘Maybe you could stay with me?’

  ‘No, Clara,’ he said in an unintentionally withering voice. ‘I won’t be staying with you. It doesn’t work like that.’

  Her eyes widened, and Danny instantly regretted being so short with her. ‘We can see more of each other, though,’ he added.

  She smiled, relief obvious in her face. ‘What will you be doing?’ she asked. ‘In London, I mean.’

  ‘Just . . . general security,’ Danny said. ‘After the bombings and everything. All hands on deck.’ He knew it was an explanation Clara would understand. As a medic working out of St Mary’s Hospital, she and her colleagues had been inundated with casualties. She’d been at work at the time of the explosion and had by all accounts been one of the few doctors that had managed to keep their heads as the injured started arriving in their droves. Which kind of figured: Clara was used
to explosions, after all. But Danny didn’t feel like reminding her that the Regiment were only ever called in when a violent outcome could be expected.

  She started snuggling up to him. ‘You’re all tense,’ she said.

  ‘Long day,’ Danny replied. The image of the dealer he’d shot in the throat jumped back into his head. The thudding of his skull against the cobblestones. The liquid mixture of blood and rain spreading from his body.

  There was a sharp knock at the door.

  ‘What the . . .’ he muttered.

  ‘It’s four in the morning,’ Clara said.

  More knocking. Louder this time, as though someone was using the flat of their fist.

  Danny stood up. ‘Don’t move,’ he said quietly. And to himself, he said: When someone comes knocking at this hour, it’s never good news. He instantly thought of his dad, who was stuck in a wheelchair in a ground-floor flat not far from here. And then he thought once more of his recent briefing back at base: of Five and Buckingham, who would think nothing of sending someone round in the middle of the night if they needed to. He stepped down the corridor, noiselessly approaching the solid wooden front door. When he reached it, he peered through the spyhole.

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ he muttered when he saw who was on his doorstep.

  Danny’s brother Kyle looked worse every time he saw him – which was, admittedly, as infrequently as Danny could make it. He was a waster – a jailbird and an alcoholic. Danny seemed to have spent half his life digging him out of bad situations of his brother’s own making. Even through the spyhole Danny could see Kyle was in a bad way tonight. Dishevelled, several day’s growth on his face, dark rings under his eyes. Sunken cheeks, the left one badly swollen, several shades of purple and red and bisected by a thin line of steristrip. A professional job – Danny could tell his brother was fresh from A&E. He opened the door.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Mate!’ Kyle said with a forced smile. A sour waft of stale booze punched Danny in the face. Kyle was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. The T-shirt was soaking wet, and clung to his thin, bony body.