Andy McNab - Brute force

They'd fucked up big-time. They'd thought the bombing would be hailed as a victory in their struggle against an occupying power, but all it had done was show them up for what they really were. It might be one thing to kill 'legitimate' targets like judges, policemen and members of the security forces – but murdering innocent civilians while they were honouring their dead at a Remembrance Day service?

PIRA's very existence was at stake, leaving the field wide open for the UDA and other Protestant paramilitaries to have the drugs rackets to themselves. There were no sectarian divides when it came to money – just normal competition and greed. PIRA and the UDA used to get together on a regular basis to carve up the drug, prostitution and extortion rackets, even to discuss demarcation lines for different taxi firms and sites for gaming machines. They had the infrastructure, the knowledge and the weapons to be major players in the world of crime. With cooperation from other terror organizations throughout the world, the possibilities were endless.

And that was why people like Richard Isham had taken a brisk pace forward and announced they were turning from the gun to the ballot box.

The boat was docking and I still had no definitive answers. No one had come for me or even checked the car. I'd been hoping they would; I'd been hoping I could jump someone and beat a few answers out of them.

As things stood, the only thing I knew more or less for certain was that it could be any one of three groups of people who were after me: PIRA, the Firm or the Mujahideen. They were the only people, as far as I knew, who used Chinese pigtails in their IEDs. The Muj could be ticked off the list straightaway. Even in mountainous Donegal, a carload of Bin Laden lookalikes would be just a little bit conspicuous.

The Firm have phenomenal electronic firepower at their beck and call. Using the Echelon system, GCHQ could capture radio and satellite communications, mobile phone calls, emails and other data streams nearly anywhere in the world. Was that how they'd tracked me to the house, by pinging my mobile phone? If so, it was lucky I spoke to Dom on the landline or they'd know where I was right now.

Would they have taken innocent lives just to get to me? Yes. They'd killed Pete to try and get to Dom. They wouldn't care; it would just look like an attempt by RIRA – the Real IRA, resurgent elements of PIRA hardliners who refused to buy into the peace process – to kill an ex-member of the SAS and put themselves on the map.

I had no contacts, let alone friends, on the inside at Vauxhall Cross. No official points of contact, no mates I could turn to. Even my old contacts in the RUC (now PSNI) or Irish Special Branch couldn't help me if the Firm was involved. The Firm trumped every other card in the pack.

This message from Leptis… Maybe it wasn't Lynn trying to help or 'having the answers'. Maybe he'd simply been roped in to channel me to his home, the next killing ground?

I would have to assume the worst – that Lynn was being coerced – and act accordingly. But first, I would have to find him.

It was ten years since I'd last seen him. An ex-spook like him would hardly be in the phone directory or have a Facebook page, and I didn't have him on speed dial.

I drove off the ferry and into Holyhead. I parked up near the first internet cafe I could find and paid for an hour.

If they were following me they'd soon find out where I was heading. I checked the windows and there was still nothing obvious to tell me anyone out there walking the streets, sitting in a parked car or just mincing about window-shopping had a trigger on me. Maybe they didn't have to now: they'd just lift me at Lynn's place, once I'd found out where it was.

My first port of call was obvious: I tried a site that searched the telephone directory. I didn't know Lynn's first name, but had to insert at least an initial. It was going to be a laborious process. I started with A Lynn and Norfolk as the location, and got over a hundred results straightaway – just for the site's free directory enquiries listings. There were many more listings on the electoral roll and birth, marriage and death records, but you had to pay to view them. This wasn't going to work. I could plough through a couple of thousand free listings, and still not have a result. He could be ex-directory.

The only clue I had to a more specific location came from our twenty-year-old conversation at the Tripoli docks, and what he had told me in his office ten years ago, when he was forced into early retirement after a deniable job he'd sent me to do in America had gone very wrong, and his head had rolled.

After the Tripoli job, Colonel Lynn came back to the UK and acted as liaison between the MoD and SIS. He'd sent me to Washington to deal with a renegade operator, and I had. But others, mostly Americans, got caught in the crossfire, and since this all happened inside the White House, I wasn't exactly flavour of the month. Since then he'd treated me as if he was a bank manager and I was asking for a bigger overdraft, trying hard to be nice but never quite managing to conceal his disdain. I didn't mind. I'd been used to that kind of shit since I was a kid. As long as he didn't expect me to look up to him with reverence.

I still remembered asking to be put on the fulltime payroll, permanent cadre as a K, a deniable operator. His words stung in my memory.

'After your total lack of judgement, do you really think that you would ever be considered for permanent cadre?' His face flushed. It was the first time I'd ever seen him angry. 'Think yourself lucky you are still on retainer. Do you really think that you would be considered for work after you -' his voice got louder and his right index finger stabbed the air more vigorously with every point – 'one, disobey my direct order to kill that damned woman. Two, actually believe her preposterous story and assist her assassination attempt in the White House. God, man, your judgement was no better than a love-struck schoolboy's. Do you really think a woman like that would be interested in you?'

He couldn't contain himself. It was as if I'd touched a raw nerve.

'And to put the tin lid on it, you used a member of the American Secret Service to get you in there… who then gets shot! Do you know the havoc you have caused, not only in the US but here? Careers have been ruined because of you. The answer is no. Not now, not ever.'

That was when I realized this wasn't just about me, and it wasn't early retirement at the end of his tour next year. He'd been given the push. He had been running the Ks, the deniable operators, at the time, and someone had had to pay. People like Lynn could be replaced; people like me were more difficult to blow out, if only for financial reasons. The government had invested several million in my training as a Special Air Service soldier. They wanted to get their money's worth out of me even after I got out. It must have killed him to know that I was the one who'd fucked up, but he was the one to carry the can – probably as part of the deal to appease the Americans.

I didn't feel sorry for him for long. The Intelligence Branch, the top tier in the Firm's food chain, looks after its own. Even if one of the IB has been given the sack for such gross misconduct as fiddling with kids and getting blackmailed for it, he or she goes into a feeder system where they get work somewhere in the City or in a sports organization. That ticks two boxes: it keeps tabs on them, but also it keeps them sweet, and, more importantly, quiet. Me? Once I was no longer useful, I wouldn't be so lucky. Maybe this really was my time.

At that last meeting he told me what his future held. He didn't need to become a share dealer or the chair of the Sack Race UK Committee. He had the family mushroom farm. He'd talked, too, about sailing and Norfolk, and opening your window and smelling the sea. His farm couldn't be more than a mile inland.