Gerald Seymour - Battle Sight Zero

The driver, Scorpion, repeated the procedure, the same manoeuvre. The stretch of motorway had been checked out on the road atlas. Few sections of the motorway had two service stations within a few miles of each other, and accessible on the southern route. A little chuckle from behind the wheel, and time enough for Krait to put his hands, defensively, on the dash, and the brake pedal was stamped on, the briefest use of an indicator light, and they crossed from the fast lane to the centre lane and over the slow lane and into a feeder.

Not expected by Zeinab, neither had bothered to warn her. She was thrown across the seat and her bag took her weight. She might have gasped, might even have sworn, and provoked fuller laugh. Then, a snapped instruction. Paper and pencil. She scrabbled for them and Krait turned round in his seat and grinned. The car slowed as it went up the feeder.

She knew what to do.

Easy enough, nothing interesting came after them. A long-distance haulage lorry with an address in Krakov, and an empty coach, and a tiny Italian car with the back stuffed with plastic bags and bedding. Zeinab did not need to be told… In the distance between the two service stations, they would not have had time to call up another vehicle, and a slow performance Fiat 500 had not the legs for following them on a motorway. She remembered the plumber’s transit and a number for an industrial estate outside Stafford, and remembered the BMW with two passengers. Neither came through. She said there was nothing. Krait had made the same decision and murmured it to Scorpion, and they did a brief punch of their fists and repeated the tactic from the first service station, but then took a different exit and crossed over the motorway by the bridge and went north.

She didn’t ask, but was told.

They would go north for two exits, then come off again, then use cross-country roads. Why? On the motorway and the main arteries there were police cameras for ANPR. Which meant? Automatic Number Plate Recognition. First, they had not been tailed, were not under surveillance. Second, they had thrown the system’s computers. Was that good? It was good. Both guys were laughing and punched closed fists, one against the other.

‘The transit and the BMW – could they have been?’

‘Could, but they would have to have followed into the second – simple.’

The headlights lit narrow roads and spray kicked up from rain puddles and the car shook from pot-hole impacts. Zeinab was a child of the urban sprawl: knew Savile Town across the Calder river, and the big stores round Dewsbury’s centre, and the high spires of the churches she had never been into, and the higher minaret of the Markazi Masjid, and knew the fast food places and the narrow streets of the old town, and the Town Hall that had been smartened up by the council, and the bus station and the train station, and the streets of terraced houses. On the train from Dewsbury to Manchester, she sometimes looked at the desolation of the moors through the grime-caked windows but usually she studied. Zeinab had been out of Manchester and up the coast with Andy; they had parked on the dunes walked at low tide miles along damp sand. It had been useful in the association with the boy: showing gratitude for what he had done, his rescue – then a closer intimacy, holding hands and sometimes kissing, and his arm around her back and against her hip, as she had built up to recruiting him; her driver, her cover when coming back into UK with the package stowed in his car. She did not know the countryside or wild coastal places, would have said she thought them hostile, and had seen in the headlights the badger’s corpse with its innards splayed where tyres had disembowelled it. Scorpion drove fast and Krait called the turnings which kept them on the minor routes.

Tiredness overwhelmed her, and the motion of the car was so soporific. She dozed.

The phone rang. Eyes still closed, Gough groped for it, could not locate it, flicked it over the table’s edge. On his hands and knees, and the call clamouring for him, and starting to swear. She was beside him, had found it, answered it.

‘Yes, the office, where else? Of course we are. You on the road, a target on the move, the only place we’d be.’

He thought she had done well. In the upper echelons of counter-terrorism, relationships with colleagues were frowned on: bonking, screwing, shafting, shagging – whether inside office hours or at the end of a day – was regarded as a quick route to a transfer out. He grimaced at her. He was half dressed and she was half naked, her pyjamas sagging open. He took the phone, cleared his throat.

‘Gough here.’

And he was told.

And answered, ‘No, I am not criticising, nor am I querying the decision.’

Was told some more. He assumed at the other end of the call was a night-duty staffer who would be poorly briefed on the implications of what he relayed.

Gough said, ‘So they aborted. Very good. I am sure it was for sound operational reasons. But they aborted.’

The manoeuvres were set out, what the target car had done. He listened.

Gough answered, ‘Had to abort, understood. Pulled back in the face of a tactic first used by the Provisionals, no doubt learned from them. To show out is a disaster, accepted… just repeat the end line for me, please.’

It was explained. Gough rang off. He had a sombre face, like death had come to the family. Pegs was no longer beside him, and he heard the shower start, and her splashing. He went to the bathroom door, opened it, saw her flesh pinking from the scalding level at which she always set the water.

‘Doesn’t get much worse, does it? An abort and a back-off, and they do a clever bit – we think – and go up the motorway in the wrong direction, north, then take an exit. Right now there is no ANPR on them. We’ve lost her. We are blundering,… which is worse than worse.’

He threw her the towel. One that they’d nicked from a Travel Lodge or a Holiday Inn, skimpy but adequate. He put on the kettle, would shave and wash after he had made coffee, strong coffee. Always a desperate time when a target was lost and an operation seemed to shudder to a halt, desperate and bad.

June 1971

A post had been sunk in a freshly dug hole that morning. The bone-hard ground at the edge of the camp had needed brute force and a swinging pickaxe to make the hole. The post inserted in it was not exactly vertical, but the best they could do, and the cavity had been filled and the excavated stones stamped down. The post stood alone and behind it was a clear view of gradually rising foothills on which sunlight shimmered. There were few trees and rare patches of shade on the slopes where goats grazed.

Watching the arrival of the firing squad was the intelligence officer of that section of that faction of the umbrella organisation, Fatah . They were late, usually were late on any schedule set them. It had been decided that the squad, of half a dozen, should wear uniform for the event. They did not have a common kit so some of the camouflage clothing was American, some was Soviet, and for the younger participants there were trousers and shirts in the dun colour that was close to that of the sand and scrub beyond the camp’s perimeter. They marched past the officer. Few had an understanding of drill and how to carry a rifle while moving in step. Some tried to copy those in front, but two had no comprehension and walked easily, briskly, and made no pretence at being part of a disciplined force. An older man, who once would have had a fine carriage, but now was paunchy, and had an exaggerated moustache, called the tempo of the march, and had been in the camp for 22 years, there since the first of the shanty town buildings had gone up. Everyone in the squad carried Kalashnikov rifles, held them across their chests, and strutted. They were formed into a line – at first ragged and then kicked into shape by the drill man – and commands were given as if that would increase their legitimacy. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and waved it towards the gate leading through the wire and into the alleys of the camp. He was ready, they could bring her.