Ryan, Chris - Zero 22

An hour passed and there was no sign of Poliakov or Rostropovic. The SAS men swapped positions, because to stay too long in one location would be a red flag for any counter-surveillance operatives. From his new position on the bench on the western side of the building, he maintained his high level of situational awareness. But something told him that their targets weren’t going to appear. He glanced skywards. Up close, perspective made the building dizzyingly tall. He wondered what was going on in the penthouse apartment. Who were these two Russian men Hereford was so interested in?

He snapped his attention back down to the exits. His curiosity would be satisfied soon enough. In the meantime, he needed to keep his focus.

He watched and waited.

As Hunter and his team staked out the ground floor of the Mansion House, a Dauphin 2 helicopter in civilian colours was already airborne from Hereford. Excluding the flight crew, four men were onboard: Dennis Cunningham, Johnny Moore, Rick Parsons, Ken Hobbs. They wore civvies and, as the chopper flew over the outskirts of the capital, were studying architectural plans of the Mansion House, as well as the same images of Dimitri Poliakov and Boris Rostropovic that the ops officer had sent the London team. ‘Service lift?’ Cunningham shouted at the others over the noise of the chopper, in his broad Scottish accent. His three unit mates nodded their agreement.

The chopper set down in the grounds of the Honourable Artillery Company in East London. A transit van was waiting for them here. It was marked with the Amazon logo, but there were no packages inside. Instead, there were three CO19 armed police officers and enough space for the SAS team and the two flight cases of gear that they carried off the chopper. The police officers – a woman and two men – had an anxious air about them. Cunningham recognised the woman from a previous job, but he couldn’t remember her name. She nodded at him in recognition. ‘Who’s dying tonight?’ she asked with a raised eyebrow.

‘Depends who’s been a wee scunner,’ Cunningham said.

‘Can’t you talk in fucking English?’ Parsons said, and Cunningham grinned at him.

‘What’s the plan?’ asked one of the policemen as the doors of the van slammed shut and it started to move.

‘We’ll go over it once we’re on site,’ Cunningham told him.

They drove on in silence.

Danny woke suddenly. He was still crouched on the ground, opposite the door to the safe house. His neck muscles ached, and he was sweating. The distant sound of a call to prayer had woken him and he spent a moment listening to the weirdly tinny chant. Danny had spent so much time operating in the Middle East that it was a familiar sound. But not comforting. It took him back to Damascus, and Oman, to Afghanistan and to Yemen. It forced him to recall moments of his life he would prefer to keep locked away. Amman was a thriving, modern city. Friendly, welcoming to tourists, relatively safe. He grimaced. Safe? Nowhere in this part of the world was truly safe for a Regiment man. Like Northern Ireland in the eighties, these countries were full of violent men who would give their lives for the opportunity to take out a member of the British SAS. He was certain that here, holed up in this grim safe house, he was a literal stone’s throw from an IS or Al-Qaeda sympathiser. He couldn’t relax for a minute.

The call to prayer fell silent. Danny was left with only the sound of his own breathing. And a new thought. His enemies were not crazed Jihadists or Middle Eastern terrorist sympathisers. They were Western, and Russian. It would be easy to lose track of that, here in this desert city surrounded by mosques and people whose skin colour soldiers like him had – wrongly – been conditioned to think of as the enemy. An American general was feeding sensitive military information to the Russians. A former MI6 officer and killer of SAS men was currently lying asleep on a stained mattress in the next room. Danny pushed himself up to his feet and quietly opened the door of the bedroom. She was still there. Lying in a fetal position, her blonde hair splayed over the mattress, her breathing slow and steady, her freckles glowing in the light spilling from the window. She didn’t look like an assassin. Did anybody? Danny thought about a conversation they had once had. Bethany had told him about her father, himself a former MI6 officer whose slippery moral code had skewed her view of the world. Danny had a moment of self-doubt. Who was he to talk about slippery moral codes when he was about to make an orphan of Bethany’s kid? He put that doubt out of his head, where it belonged. Do your job, Danny. Leave the thinking for those on a higher pay grade.

Bethany stirred. Her eyes opened and Danny could tell that she didn’t know where she was for a second. She smiled drowsily at him. Not a cynical smile, or a flirtatious one. She looked genuinely glad to see him. Danny closed himself off emotionally. He knew he had to keep his distance if he was to complete this op successfully. ‘We need to get ready,’ he said.

She sat up and ran one hand through her hair. ‘I’ll need the shower,’ she said. And then, looking Danny up and down: ‘So will you. Neither of us will get close to the General looking and smelling like this.’

‘It’s all yours,’ Danny said. He stepped back out of the bedroom and returned to his sentry position opposite the front door. He could hear voices in the corridor outside, and the creaking of floorboards somewhere in the building. But they faded soon enough, and now all he could hear was the sound of water against the shower curtain. The stream stopped. Bethany emerged into the hallway, body and hair wrapped in towels. ‘All yours,’ she said.

In the bathroom, Danny stripped and ran the water as hot as it would go. He stood under the shower and let the stinging hot torrent flood over him. He washed the grime from his scarred body and he let the water wash away his doubts as well. When he stepped out, dripping on to the bathroom floor, his head was back where he needed it to be. On the job.

He wrapped a towel round his waist and walked back into the bedroom. Bethany was dressed and was adding the finishing touches to her make-up. She looked incredible in her snugly fitting skirt and jacket, an inch of heel and her mouth just slightly plump with lipstick. Nobody would ever guess that in the last twenty-four hours she’d been incarcerated in a grim Portakabin, HALOed into the Jordanian desert and been at the sharp end of a firefight with heavily armed Palestinian smugglers.

‘You going to stand around half naked,’ she said, ‘or are you going to get dressed?’

She left the bedroom without waiting for a reply. Danny put on the suit that had been left for him. Normally he was a weddings- and funerals-only suit man. The jacket felt tight across his shoulders and it took him three attempts to get the knot of his tie right. Bethany entered again. She looked him up and down critically. Then she shook her head. ‘You’re supposed to be a journalist, not James Bond,’ she said. ‘Loosen your tie, undo that top button.’

Fair enough , Danny thought. Her attention to detail was good and fashion was hardly his strong point. He did as she said. She approached him, took his right hand and undid the button on his cuff. Up close she smelled good. Danny had to make a conscious effort not to allow her scent to put him off the rails.

‘You scrub up okay,’ she said, as she adjusted his collar.

‘I’ll take that as a compliment.

Bethany half smiled and Danny sensed that she was nervous. ‘You going to be alright?’ he asked.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Once we get going.’ She went to look out of the window. ‘I want to speak to my son,’ she said. ‘Before we leave. In case anything goes wrong.’