Stephen Leather - Cold Kill

‘Which you couldn’t see from where you were.’

‘What are you getting at?’ said Shepherd.

‘Stay with me for a while, Dan,’ said Yokely. ‘My point is that you made the kill without seeing the imminent threat for yourself.’

‘Major Gannon had the area under observation through CCTV,’ said Shepherd. ‘He was in the British Transport Police observation centre.’

‘But even he wasn’t one hundred per cent sure,’ said the American.

‘Maybe. But all’s well that ends well.’

‘Absolutely,’ said Yokely, enthusiastically. ‘But tell me, how important was it to you that the Major was directing you?’

‘I trust him totally,’ said Shepherd.

‘And if it had been someone else? Suppose it had been a Transport Police chief inspector who had made the call? Would you have been as willing to shoot?’

Shepherd sat back in his chair and considered the question. To an SAS trooper, obeying orders came naturally: rank commanded respect, even if the man who held it didn’t. From time to time Shepherd had carried out orders he hadn’t agreed with, but not often. In the police the situation was nowhere near as cut and dried. Promotion had more to do with politics and point-scoring than it did with ability, and Shepherd constantly came across officers whose judge ment was questionable. Working for Superintendent Hargrove’s undercover unit insulated him from having to follow orders given by men he didn’t respect or trust, and that was the nub of the American’s question. Would Shepherd have shot the terrorist if anyone other than the Major had given the order? At the time Shepherd had been working under-cover in SO19, the armed-response unit of the Metropolitan Police and while the officers he’d worked with had all been first rate, he doubted that he would have trusted them as much as he trusted the Major. He took a sip of whiskey. ‘I might have hesitated if it had been anyone else,’ he said.

‘Nothing wrong with that,’ said the American. ‘You’re paid to use your judgement. If you weren’t you’d be in uniform handing out speeding tickets.’

‘But if the scenario was the same, with a terrorist about to kill dozens of innocent bystanders, I’d shoot. Face to face, back of the head, wherever, whenever.’

‘Okay. Let me run a different scenario by you. Suppose the terrorist had been on a train, heading to the station. You knew he didn’t plan to detonate until he reached the destination, but suppose the Major had ordered you to shoot him on the train. Would you have done that?’

‘Of course,’ said Shepherd, emphatically. ‘He could just as easily press the trigger on the train.’

‘Now suppose he was walking towards the station to board the train, wearing the vest, fingers on the trigger. You’d shoot?’

‘Yes.’

The American nodded thoughtfully. ‘And if the terrorist was in his safe-house, preparing to don the vest. You burst in through the door. He looks at the vest. The trigger is close by. You’d shoot?’

Now Shepherd could see where the conversation was going. ‘Yes,’ he said.

The American smiled. ‘Because your life was in imminent danger, or because he was a terrorist?’

‘It wouldn’t be an execution,’ said Shepherd. ‘The threat is that he would detonate the bomb. To use the phraseology of your guys, I would neutralise that threat.’

‘Now, the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question-’ said Yokely.

‘Would I shoot him a month before the operation?’ interrupted Shepherd. ‘Would I kill him if I knew he was planning a terrorist incident?’

‘Gannon said you were a sharp cookie.’

‘Can cookies be sharp?’ Shepherd smiled.

‘Would you?’ said the American, treating Shepherd’s question as rhetorical. ‘Would you shoot an unarmed man in anticipation of something he was going to do?’

‘You mean, if someone had smothered baby Hitler in his cradle, would millions of lives have been saved?’

The American shrugged. ‘If you want to think of it that way.’

‘You’re talking about assassinations,’ said Shepherd.

‘I’m just shooting the breeze with you, Dan.’

‘We tried it a few years ago,’ said Shepherd. ‘Gibraltar, 1988.’ The SAS had mown down three unarmed IRA terrorists who had been planning to detonate a massive car bomb. ‘Shit hit the fan with a vengeance. The media went for us. The European Court of Human Rights said our guys were wrong to shoot.’

‘Easy for them to say,’ said Yokely. ‘Last I heard, the court wasn’t anywhere near Gibraltar.’

‘They had a point,’ said Shepherd. ‘We could have arrested them.’

‘Lives were saved that day, Dan. A lot of lives. And we’re in the position to start saving a lot more.’

‘By killing people?’

‘The world has changed, post 9/11. We’ve become more pre-emptive with our effects-based operations.’ The American smiled thinly. ‘In other words, we plan to get our defence in first.’

‘Under whose authority?’

‘We don’t need anyone’s authority any more,’ said Yokely. ‘It’s like George W said. You’re either with us or you’re against us. We don’t care what the European Court of Human Rights says. We shit on Amnesty and the rest of the misguided do-gooders. We do what we have to do.’ He leaned closer to Shepherd. ‘Forgive my French, Dan, but the world has gone fucking crazy and it’s about time we brought some sanity to it.’ He sat back and smiled easily. ‘You’ve seen what’s happening. They’re hijacking planes full of women and children and flying them into buildings where decent people are doing nothing more than working to put food on their families’ tables. They’re cutting the heads off men and women who are begging for their lives. They’re blowing up trains full of commuters. They’re not fighting a war, these people, they’re fighting a Crusade – with a capital C. They want us dead, Dan. They want us off the face of this earth. There’s no draw being offered, no shaking hands and living together. They want us face down on a prayer mat five times a day or they want us dead. And it’s time for us to start fighting back.’

‘And who decides who shoots whom?’

‘That’ll come from the White House,’ said Yokely. ‘Decisions will be taken on the basis of all available intelligence. It’s not a sanction that will be applied lightly, but it will be applied, and in my opinion it’s about time. These people don’t fight fair, Dan, they fight to win. And up to now we’ve been hampered by the fact that we’ve always played by the rules. Look what happened a while back when Newsweek ran the story that some interrogator at Guantanamo Bay had flushed a copy of the Koran down the toilet. Muslims go crazy in Afghanistan, the president of Pakistan gets on his high horse, and our own national security adviser, God bless his little cotton socks, stands up and says they’ll investigate and take action. Excuse me, but it’s a book. They’re hacking the heads off charity workers in Baghdad, planning to poison our air with anthrax, doing everything they can to buy weapons of mass destruction, and we’re worrying about a book. I was at Guantanamo Bay, and I can tell you that the story was horseshit. Never happened. But if I thought it would help damage al-Qaeda in any way I’d be first in line to wipe my arse with the bloody thing.’ Yokely took a deep breath. ‘Anyway, that’s just me. I feel pretty strongly about what we’re doing, Dan. Our way of life is under attack and I’m stepping up to defend it. End of story.’

Shepherd sipped his drink, his mind racing. The Special Forces Club was a place that had heard more than its fair share of tall stories, but this one took some beating. He was being sounded out for a job as a hired killer. Under other circumstances he’d have been wired up in anticipation of arresting Yokely and locking him up for a long time. ‘You’re putting together an assassination team?’ he said, wanting the American to spell out exactly what he was planning.