Adrian Magson - Red Station

The leader of the three-man team, a stocky Para Regiment veteran named Mike Wilson, lowered his binoculars and rubbed his eyes. Then he eased himself backwards a few inches off the brow of the hollow towards Jocko Wardle and ‘Hunt’ Wallis, his two colleagues, who were asleep. He nudged them awake with his foot without taking his eyes off the landscape before him, and waited while they stirred and opened their eyes, moving only to reach for their weapons.

‘Ten minutes to go,’ he told them quietly. ‘Clean up.’ It was something none of them needed telling, to check the ground where they had been lying, but repeated procedure was the way to do things right. Even the tiniest scrap of personal litter — a wrapping, a piece of foil, a button — would reveal their passage and tell anyone looking that they had been here. And in this relatively barren landscape, if that happened, they would be unlikely to survive for long.

Wilson checked his own kit. When he was satisfied everything was in its place and tied down tight, he slid to the front of the O.P. and began scanning the terrain in front of him for signs of movement.

There was nothing. But he felt uneasy all the same. It was too quiet.

He paused only to scratch at an itch in the top of his arm.

‘ We’ve got another job.’ Clare Jardine was waiting in the office next morning, nursing a cup of tea. She was dressed in what Harry thought of as her Lara Croft look, and looked as friendly as a pit-bull.

‘Oh, goody,’ he said dryly. ‘Another pick-up?’

She ignored his sarcasm. ‘We’re going to eyeball a convoy moving north. It looks like part of a much larger force. The satellite images are inconclusive, and London wants us to ID the unit and report back on numbers and density.’ Jardine meant seeing if the vehicles in the convoy were full or empty. Unless the convoy was obliging enough to reveal its load just as the satellite passed overhead, there was no way of telling, save for sending in someone on the ground to take a look.

Harry was surprised Mace hadn’t mentioned it, or that he hadn’t been brought in on the transmission from London. In a place this small, all hands should be aware of the general nature of things, in case someone dropped out through illness or accident. He wondered what else he wasn’t being told about.

They took the same Land Cruiser as before, this time with Jardine at the wheel. She drove with skill, using the right amount of aggression to compete with the local trucks and cars, and said nothing for twenty minutes until they were clear of the town. When they reached the fork in the road, she took the right one this time, the suspension protesting at the rougher surface. Harry noticed that theirs was the only vehicle.

‘This leads north into the hills,’ she explained. ‘Nothing much to see up here, so why bother with a decent road?’

Harry nodded. It was clearly not her first time on this road, so he sank back against the door pillar and closed his eyes. He’d had another restless night, haunted by images of Parrish charging along the bank of the inlet and the man in dreadlocks calmly shooting him with a wooden pole. The young couple had been standing in the glare of the Land Rover’s headlights, clothes torn and bloodied by gunshots, applauding the outcome. He had woken in a confusion of sweat and shivering, trying to figure out how the couple had penetrated the secure cordon without being seen.

‘Mace told you about me,’ Jardine interrupted his thoughts. It wasn’t a question.

Harry shook off the images from his dreams and shrugged. ‘Only that you’re with Six.’

‘Liar. Mace couldn’t keep a secret if his balls were on fire.’ There was no heat to her words, which made him even more certain that Mace had told her and the others why he was here.

‘You know him better than I do.’

‘Damn right.’

‘OK, so what brought you to this lovely spot?’

‘That’s none of your business. I didn’t stick to their stupid rulebook; let’s leave it at that.’

‘But you know all about me.’

‘Jesus, everyone knows about you.’ She touched the brakes, skimming uncomfortably close to a tractor parked on the side of the road. ‘Not many Fivers get tabbed for allowing two civilians and a cop to get killed.’

Harry stared, surprised by the brutality of her words. He wasn’t sure whether to be angry or not.

‘I didn’t-’ He stopped. She might not know all the grubby details, and he’d almost been lured into telling her. It was a reminder of her job prior to being sent here.

She looked disappointed. ‘Never mind; if you don’t want to tell, don’t. We hear rumours — and we get the newspapers here, and the internet, just like they do in SW1. You’d be famous, if only the public knew who you were.’ She glanced across. ‘I suppose there’s more to it than meets the eye?’

‘A lot more.’ He wondered how much to tell. But what could she do to him that hadn’t been done already? ‘It was a combined drugs bust. Five and the police. We had strong intel about a shipment of mixed narcotics. We were all ready to go, then the team was cut back hours before the operation on economic grounds. I decided it was too late to call it off, that the shipment was a big one and worth stopping.’

‘What happened?’

‘We were outgunned. Two civilians got in the way. I still don’t know how. They popped up out of nowhere.’ He didn’t elaborate; there was no need.

She drove in silence for a mile, then said, ‘So what made you come here? You could have refused.’

He shrugged. ‘I’ve always gone where they sent me. It seemed a good idea.’

‘And now?’

‘It was a mistake.’ It sounded resentful, even weak. Maybe that was the trouble; he had meekly done what Paulton had told him, rather than risk facing exposure and possible humiliation, even though both would have been inherently unfair.

It still didn’t answer the mystery of the young couple who had died. The other question bugging him was, why a Land Rover? It was hardly the best transport for a bloke on the pull. And why had the man held up his hand the way he did just before he was shot? Was he trying to be cool? Did he think that would be enough to protect him?

Or was it a signal?

Later, as they passed through a huddle of small houses and began a steady climb into the foothills, Jardine asked him to pass her a cigarette from the glove box. He hadn’t seen her smoke before. She opened the side window and turned up the air-blower, and when she had the cigarette going, said, ‘Sorry. Nasty habit I picked up recently. It keeps me sane. I’ll pull over and have a quick drag outside if you’d prefer.’

Harry shook his head, wondering what other surprises were waiting for him.

‘I was tabbed for letting the game get away from me,’ she announced suddenly. She sounded angry. ‘I overstepped the mark and broke the golden rule of the Whitehall gentlemen’s club: I screwed the enemy.’

Harry remained silent, which seemed to annoy her even more.

‘Christ, you men are so bloody two-faced! How many of you,’ she demanded hotly, ‘if you had to get close to a target, and found her to be — I don’t know, a twenty-three-year-old with a body to die for and who wanted you — would say no? Tell me that.’

‘Beats me,’ said Harry honestly. ‘I’ve never been in that position.’ She had a point. Would he be able to resist, given those circumstances? He didn’t know. Not that he was expecting it to happen anytime soon — not unless the enemy started fielding older Mata Haris with a weakness for out-of-condition British men on the downward slope of manhood. Anyway, playing down and dirty in the street was one thing — he’d done it for years and was good at it. Boudoir games weren’t part of his armoury. ‘Did you know Jimmy Gulliver?’