Chris Ryan - Osama

Remand prison. High security. South-east London. It could only be HMP Barfield.

He’d been there once before, a decade ago. The squadron had been on standby in Hereford when word had come through from the Home Office that the Barfield screws were predicting a riot. They were clearly expecting something big to go off, because the police had requested Regiment support. Sixteen men had travelled down from Hereford to Greenwich and remained in a state of readiness for twenty-four hours. Nothing had happened. Maybe the inmates had got wind that they might have more than a few plods to deal with. Good thing too. Joe and the guys were only ever called into situations that needed the precise and ruthless application of violence. Send a squadron into a Cat A institution – home to some nasty fuckers who made Ronnie and Reggie look like eccentric uncles – and you could be sure of one thing: prison numbers would fall.

The lights above Barfield’s high wire perimeter glowed brightly in the early morning darkness as they approached the entrance. Joe heard a babble of male voices outside, then felt the van move forward again, through the entrance and into an empty reception yard. He tried to estimate the distance they travelled from the gates before stopping. Fifty metres, perhaps. A long way to run, especially with his arms bound behind his back and bare feet. Maybe if he had the element of surprise? Unlikely. He could see flashing lights illuminating the yard. There was a reception party.

He didn’t see the face of the man who opened the back of the vehicle. All he saw were the four armed police, with flak jackets, visored helmets and MP5s, two kneeling five metres back from the van, two standing ten metres behind that. Between the two standing officers was a uniformed screw, tall and thin, carrying a clipboard. ‘Get him in!’ he shouted, his voice echoing in the night. As Joe stood at the vehicle’s exit, squinting against the sudden influx of light from a powerful beam behind the screw, he clocked a look of disgust on the man’s face.

Two more men appeared from the wings. They also wore prison officers’ uniforms, but were burlier than the guy with the clipboard. They pulled Joe roughly from the van, each man taking one of his elbows. Instinctively, Joe wrestled away from them. He was rewarded with a solid truncheon blow in the stomach that knocked the wind from his lungs and bent him double as he was dragged across the yard – his bare heels scraping painfully against the rough tarmac – and into a single-storey brick building, the armed police following some five metres behind.

This first building was little more than a waiting room: five lines of brown plastic chairs and an old vending machine in one corner. There was a door on the far wall, and Joe’s two guards pushed him through it.

In a weird way, the room he found himself in reminded him of the armoury back at Hereford. It wasn’t big – maybe eight metres by five – and there was a long counter with an open doorway into another room behind. There was a desktop computer on the counter, next to which Joe saw what looked like a webcam, and a small flatbed scanner. On the wall behind the counter was a laminated poster entitled ‘Coping with Prison’. At the far end of the room there was a third doorway, this one closed by a heavy metal door studded with bolts and with two keyholes. Apart from Joe and his two guards, the only other person in the room stood behind the counter. He wore a ginger moustache and the bored expression of a clock-watching official. He said three words: ‘Belt, shoelaces, watch.’ Then he looked over the counter and saw Joe’s bare feet and lack of belt. ‘Watch,’ he corrected himself.

Joe gave him a dark look and didn’t move. His hands were still tied behind his back. How the fuck was he supposed to do anything?

The thin screw with the clipboard entered. He took one look at the situation, then nodded at the man behind the counter, who produced a pair of wire cutters and handed them over. ‘We know who you are,’ the thin screw said to Joe in a reedy cockney accent. ‘Let’s not do anything stupid, eh?’

‘I want to see my son.’

‘Tough shit.’

With one squeeze of the cutters, Joe’s hands were free.

Distance to the exit, five metres. Two guards, thin screw, ginger moustache: he could put these four guys down with his bare hands, but he didn’t know what was waiting for him outside. He didn’t move.

‘Watch.’

Joe removed his watch, but kept his eyes on the jobsworth with the moustache. When he placed it on the counter, he saw the man’s face change. Joe looked down at his own hands. His right hand – his knife hand – was blood red, from the fingertips to an inch above the wrist. There was spatter all the way up his arm.

‘Empty your pockets,’ the man said, his lip curled with disgust.

Joe’s eyes flickered to the left. The two guards were standing three metres away, one with his arms folded, the other tapping his truncheon lightly against his right leg. To his right, the thin screw was scribbling something on the clipboard – Joe could hear the sound of his pencil on the paper.

‘Pockets!’ Joe could smell the tobacco on the breath of the man behind the counter. He noticed a signet ring on the little finger of his right hand, and dirt under the fingernails. ‘Come on, I haven’t got all fucking night!’

Joe pulled a five-pound note and a handful of change from the front pocket of his jeans. From the back pocket he removed a folded piece of paper. For a moment he didn’t know what it was, but then he remembered. Conor’s picture, the one his lad had given him in his bedroom back home.

‘You’re not having this,’ Joe muttered, making to put it back in his jeans.

The thug with the truncheon didn’t hesitate. The second blow was even more violent than the first, and Joe felt the paper being ripped from his hands even as he bent double with pain. It took five seconds to grab his breath. When he straightened up, he saw that the man with the moustache had unfolded the paper. With a malicious glint in his watery eyes, he tore it in two, then in two again.

Something snapped in Joe. He hurled himself at the counter, grabbing the officer by his greasy ginger hair and slamming his head down so that it smashed against the counter. The guy cried out. When he stood up again, blood was flowing from his nostrils and he had his hand pressed to his face. Vaguely aware that the thin screw with the clipboard had run from the room at the first sign of trouble, Joe turned to the two guards. They were edging away from him, the thug with the truncheon holding it forward threateningly like a sword. Joe was ready to jump them, but at that moment the armed police officers burst in. Total confusion. Four of them, MP5s dug into their shoulders, shouting at the tops of their voices: ‘ Hit the ground, hit the fucking ground! ’ Joe dropped to his knees, his hands raised, fully expecting the brutal kicks that his two guards now delivered to the side of his stomach with their heavy black boots. The thin screw reappeared behind the armed police, watched for thirty agonizing seconds, before saying ‘Stop!’

The two prison guards straightened up, leaving Joe in a pile on the floor.

The silence that followed was broken only by the pained swearing of the guy with the ginger moustache. As he tried to stem the flow of blood from his nose, he staggered backwards through the door behind the counter and out of sight. The thin screw gave a nod to one of the ARU. They lowered their weapons and withdrew to the entrance.

‘Stand up.’

Joe stood.

‘Look, pal,’ the screw said. ‘In twenty minutes’ time you’ll either be in a cell or in the hospital wing. The duty nurse is six foot three and called Albert. Lovely bloke. Family man. It’s a very funny thing, but last time he had a wife-beater in there, another inmate managed to stab the little shit with a dirty needle while Albert’s back was turned. Cunt got a nice case of Hep C off of it. Now I might be wrong, but I reckon someone who just killed his missus could find Albert’s got his back turned on him, too…’