For Valor

by Andy McNab

Genres: Terrorism & Assassination Thrillers; Mystery

Synopsis

When a young trooper is shot in the head at the Regiment’s renowned Killing House, Nick Stone is perfectly qualified to investigate the mysterious circumstances more deeply.
Nick has just returned from Moscow – still trying to come to terms with the fact that his girlfriend and baby son are safer there without him – so combines an unrivalled understanding of the Special Forces landscape with a detachment that should allow him to remain in cover.
But less than forty-eight hours later, a second death catapults him back into the firing line – into the telescopic sights of an unknown assassin bent on protecting a secret that could strike at the heart of the establishment that Stone has, in his maverick fashion, spent most of his life fighting to protect.
And now the clock is ticking, Stone hurtles from the solitude of a remote Welsh confessional to Glencoe – whose shadows still whisper of murder and betrayal – and on to Southern Spain, in an increasingly desperate quest to uncover the truth about a chain of events that began in the darkness of an Afghan hillside, and left a young man haunted by the never-ending screams of a friend the Taliban skinned alive.
Nick Stone’s most heart-stopping adventure yet will force the reader to recognise the thinness of the line that separates sacrifice from suicide, to share the nightmares that walk hand in hand with heroism – and to count the real cost of actions taken in the name of loyalty.

Release date: January 26, 2021

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 512

Sample

1

Lake Sommen, Östergötland

Thursday, 7 May 1992

17.17 hrs

I eased open the front door with a little help from a couple of strips of steel wire and tapped the six-figure sequence into the panel beside it to disable the alarm system. Colonel Chastain had given us the code - he had friends in high places and I guessed serious cash would have changed hands somewhere along the line.

A scrubbed-pine kitchen, dining area, snug, and huge open- plan living space stretched across the ground floor. Then upstairs, four bedrooms, all with en-suite bath and shower, the master, with a big fuck-off four-poster, one for the kids and two for guests.

The half-sunk basement contained a gym packed with state-of- the-art equipment, a ping-pong table and a sauna, along with the working parts - gas and electricity supply, washing-machine, tumble-drier, all that sort of shit.

The windows down here were covered with high-tensile brushed-steel security mesh. I undid the latch on the one beneath the wooden steps that led up to the side entrance and left it for later. I reckoned that if we were going to turn the house into a fire-bomb, this was where we’d light the fuse.

Even in the engine room the owners had gone for the designer look. I found a well-stocked toolbox in a cupboard beneath the polished granite work surface, then took a close look at the jamb, rebate and frame of the door that led down from the house.

To start with, Harry worked quickly and silently alongside me. As the minutes ticked by, though, his muscles became tighter, his movements less fluid. He was well aware that we couldn’t leave any sign of making entry, but I could tell that all he really wanted to do was rip the place apart.

It was probably a mistake to take a last poke around the main living area. The furniture - stainless steel, glass, oiled wood and leather - was arranged with clinical precision. It felt like a showroom. Everything in its proper place.

The silver-framed family portrait was what tipped Harry over the edge. About two feet wide and eighteen inches high, it stood in pride of place between a pair of shiny candlesticks, beneath a window that looked out across the mirror-flat lake. The Saddam Hussein clone at the centre of the group was grinning from ear to ear. With a beautiful blonde Swedish wife and a couple of olive-skinned kids hugging him like their lives depended on it, he had a lot to be happy about.

But, close up, you couldn’t help noticing that Jahmir Koureh’s smile didn’t reach his eyes.

I’d only seen it happen once, very briefly, during our six-week stay in Baghdad’s Ba’ath Party HQ - when he’d leaned in to fasten his pliers around my one remaining wisdom tooth and wrenched it out of my gum to add to his trophy collection. He had never bothered with anaesthetic. It stopped him getting maximum satisfaction from his work.

There was a low growl to my left. ‘I swear it, Nick, I’m going to kill that fucker with my bare hands . . .’

Harry looked like he’d seen a ghost. His skin was stretched across his forehead and cheekbones like cling-film, and beads of sweat had started to bubble up at his hairline. His knuckles whitened beneath his clear polythene gloves as he gripped the chair-back beside me.

Fair one.

I’d thought I’d managed to bury the memory of our Gulf War captivity, but I couldn’t stop the metallic taste of blood and bile leaking onto my tongue again now. And whatever damage Koureh and his mates had done to me, it wasn’t a patch on what they’d done to Harry Callard.

2

I hadn’t expected tea and biscuits after we were captured by the Republican Guard in the north-western Iraqi desert a year ago. We’d made casualties of quite a few of their mates as we’d fought our way to the Syrian border. I could see they weren’t in carnival mood when they dragged me out of the storm drain where I’d been hiding since first light, and wasn’t surprised that they filled us in every chance they got en route to the interrogation centre.

Once they had stripped and blindfolded us in our cells, they banged our heads on the floor until they turned into over-inflated footballs. Then they climbed aboard us with their boots and lengths of four-by-four. They were kids, really, angry at the world, angry about the length of time it was taking to grow their bum fluff, and seriously pissed off with the enemy who had suddenly appeared in their backyard and ruined their day. I didn’t even mind when they made us eat our own shit - it was better than another beating.

But the cool dudes with the perfectly chiselled Saddam moustaches were something else again. They knew a thing or two about pain. They knew what really seared your bone marrow and broke your spirit, and they carried on dishing it out long after the usefulness of any information we might have carried had expired.

While we spent the whole interrogation period trying to conceal our true identities, Koureh seemed keen to boast about his. ‘Are you a Londoner, Nick? Of course you are. I can tell by your accent. When you and your friends were robbing corner shops in Catford, I was studying dentistry at your King’s College Hospital. My fellow students used to call me Jammy.’

I noticed then that he had shark eyes. Even when he was cracking a funny they never reflected the light.

I filed away every fragment of int I could lay my hands on. Who knew when I might need it? And the rest of the time I tried not to give them the satisfaction of knowing what they were doing to me hurt like fuck.

There was no foolproof recipe for survival. We all developed our own strategies. The lads with wives and kids tried not to think of home: it took their eye off the ball and made them vulnerable. Some did mathematical calculations in their head. Trev made up his own crossword clues; he might have looked like a Neanderthal, but he could do pretty much any puzzle - general knowledge or cryptic - in under fifteen minutes.

We all did our best to keep the banter going. Richie Roth well stumbled back from one of Koureh’s sessions, gobbed up a mouthful of blood and splintered enamel and rasped, ‘At least they can’t make yer pregnant.’ Whenever things went to rat shit I kept that gag alive in my head. It probably kept me alive too.

At first, Harry tried to join in the fun and games back in the cell, but we could all see that he was in shit state. He didn’t have any more crusted blood, pus and mucus on him than the rest of us, but you could see that they’d messed big-time with the inside of his head.

Some days, after Johnny Sawbridge died, he did nothing more than squat on the floor, barely making a sound, rocking backwards and forwards, like he was a small boat on a heavy swell.

3

I had hoped this Swedish job might help Harry draw a line under the whole Gulf nightmare, but I was already starting to regret bringing him along.

I reached out and touched his shoulder. He recoiled and skittered back across the uncluttered pine floor like I’d zapped him with a Taser. But this wasn’t the time or the place.

‘Mate, we’ve got to move . . .’ I gathered him up and aimed him towards the front door.

As we emerged, the evening sunshine glinted off the water beyond the crescent of firs that fringed the dentist’s lakeside spread. We’d come here via the slow road from Tranås, so knew his nearest neighbour was more than three Ks to the north of us, but I was still glad of the trees, especially now that Harry was starting to lose it.

We needed to conceal ourselves, to sort out what was going to happen next, and our scrape was just about perfect for the job. We had a juniper trunk and a big lateral branch at our backs and plenty of cover in front but a clear view of the house and the track that approached it through the forest. We could also see enough of the lake to our half-left to give us all the warning we needed of an imminent Viking attack.

I kept up a gentle monologue as I steered Harry back to the LUP (lying-up position). ‘Deep breaths, mate. We’re nearly there. Tea, sticky buns, evening paper . . .’ I thought it might help remove some of the tension from his shoulder muscles, maybe even bring a smile to his face. But he hardly reacted, just stared back in the direction we’d come, jaw clenched, the veins on his neck standing out like whipcord.

Koureh’s Stockholm practice obviously wasn’t short of business if his weekend place was anything to go by: steeply raked, slate-tiled roof; traditional dove-grey clapboard walls; bleached blue shutters standing to attention each side of massive picture windows that overlooked the water. His sundeck was the size of a tennis court, which left plenty of room to stretch out on the stainless-steel and cream canvas steamer chairs once you’d dragged yourself out of the hot tub. The nickel-plated hurricane lantern on the glass-topped dining table looked like the nose cone of a small space rocket.

I knew that all this five-star luxury was making things even worse for Harry. What kind of God let Koureh bring his designer family, and the occasional upwardly mobile receptionist, to this slice of Scandinavian Paradise when a lot of good lads still hadn’t recovered from his wartime dental treatment - and at least one we knew never would?

He blinked a couple of times and finally managed to tear his gaze away from the window where we’d been admiring Koureh’s happy snaps. The sweat was still pouring off him big-time, but his skin was looking better. He wiped a sleeve across his forehead. ‘Nick, I’m sorry. I lost it for a minute back there. I keep seeing Snakebite’s body lying in the corner of that interrogation room . . .’

‘I know. Not good.’ It was the smell that had got to me. They’d only taken him out and buried him a day or two before the maggots saved them the trouble. ‘But you’ve really got to try and cut away . . .’

It was easier said than done, of course.

Harry had taken his mate’s death hard. They’d been inseparable since Northern Ireland. They’d even been alongside each other when a toadhead pit viper had bitten Johnny on the knob in Colombia. We took the piss out of them both severely about that, of course. It was what friends were for.

4

We weren’t expecting our target to make an appearance for twenty-four hours or so. I hoped that would give Harry enough time to calm himself down and start thinking beautiful thoughts again.

Using the cover docs supplied by Chastain, Trev and I had flown in to Stockholm separately and spent the last eight days putting surveillance on the target until we reckoned we knew pretty much every detail of his routine. Apart from the practice, he basically had five regular stopping-off points: their apartment, St Erik’s Hospital, the kids’ school, Mrs K’s office and the local communal pool.

Harry had arrived via Copenhagen. He’d paid cash for a six- year-old Merc estate with Danish plates and brought it over on the Helsingør-Helsingborg ferry. I’d RVed with him at Tranås yesterday morning.

Trev was fluent enough in Swedish to be kept warm on long winter nights, so it made sense for him to stay with the target. His job was to keep the trigger on Koureh until he slid behind the wheel of his steel-grey Saab 900 convertible tomorrow night, then give us the standby as it headed south for the weekend. The wife and kids always came down in the Volvo estate after the Saturday-morning swimming lessons.

My only real worry - aside from Harry going into meltdown - was that our man in the white tunic might take advantage of the opportunity to show his latest receptionist the view from his super-king-size duvet before his nearest and dearest joined him. We weren’t in the business of killing real people.

Fuck it, we’d have to cross that bridge when we came to it.

Right now I wanted to get some calories down our necks, and visualize what we’d do when Koureh showed.

I dug into my daysack for water and scoff. Neither of us had fancied the idea of fermented herring, so our choice was a fairly simple one - Swedish meatballs or Swedish sausages. We didn’t bother heating them, just necked them straight out of the can. I left his pack of Camel Lights where they were. It was a disgusting habit, and we needed to keep the place sterile.

I glanced at Harry from time to time as we ate and drank. He’d got some colour back in his cheeks and was having a go at normal. And normal for Harry wasn’t all bad. Some of the girls around Hereford thought he was a dead ringer for the blond guy in Thelma & Louise - Brad somebody. I could never remember his name.

All was good - well, getting better - and soon we’d put our feet up, to lie back and enjoy the sunset. The mosquitoes weren’t due for another month in this part of the planet, so there was nothing to spoil our day.

That was when the radio sparked up and Trev came on the net.

5

Trev was one of the world’s great improvisers, but he really hated being taken by surprise. So I could always tell when he was feeling the pain, even over the net. And right now he was feeling it big-time.

‘Mate, I’ve fucked up. I do not have Bravo One . . .’

Our comms operated on a frequency-hopping system, so they were pretty secure unless you used the handset to call your mum and she kept you on the line, but it still made sense not to ID names.

‘The appointment diary was full to bursting until around now, and all day tomorrow, so I went for a brew. When I got back, the wagon wasn’t there.’

I didn’t ask him whether he’d zipped through a couple of crossword puzzles while he was waiting, but I would later.

Trev brought us up to speed. He’d rung the receptionist and asked for an emergency appointment; apparently he even knew the Swedish for ‘root canal’. She’d told him Mr K had left for the day, and wouldn’t be back until after the weekend. That was bad news for us, but probably good news for her. As the shadows lengthened, Stockholm was going to be a lot more comfortable than this bit of Östergötland.

Trev had checked out Koureh’s city apartment and the four other known locations, but he wasn’t at any of them. So we had to assume the target was heading in our direction. His drive was about three and a half hours from the capital, which meant we had to get our finger out.

I put the empty bottle and sausage cans back into my daysack and took out the alarm clock we’d bought at a Clas Ohlson hardware store in Tranås. Next out of the sack were the Swan Vestas. You could spark these things up on the zip of your Levi’s, but the coarse sandpaper striker that ran along the side of the box was what I needed. I cut the strikers off two boxes and tucked them into the left-hand pocket of my bomber jacket. The clock and a bunch of loose matches went into the right.

I told Harry to take up position behind the treeline. Good- looking or not, I still reckoned it would be a whole lot safer for both of us if he stayed out of sight while I went back inside and messed around with Koureh’s pipework. And if anyone came along the track that led to the house, I wanted to hear about it from Harry first.

I told him to do his owl call if he spotted any incoming threat. It was one of his favourite party tricks.

I could see he was chuffed, but a bit worried too. ‘What if you confuse it with a real owl?’

I gave him a big grin and clapped him on the cheek. ‘No chance of that, mate. It sounds more like the siren on a New York fire truck. That’s why I suggested it.’

I got to my feet and moved a few metres back for a piss before doglegging towards the lake to check for movement on the water. I didn’t want a summer cruise party or even a lone kayaker as an audience when I slipped into that basement. A pair of osprey circled lazily above the trees on one of the nearby islands, but nothing and no one else was invading their space.

I picked up a forked stick a couple of feet long on my way back through the trees and slipped on my gloves as I walked out onto the immaculately trimmed lawn.

Five minutes later I ducked beneath the slatted platform at the top of the steps up to the kitchen doorway. Dew had started to form, making the gravel pathway surrounding the house cold and slightly slippery to the touch. I could feel my shirt and jeans dampen as I got down onto my belt buckle.

The window I’d unclipped earlier was hinged at the top and wider than it was high - so big enough to allow a lad in Timberland boots and a bomber jacket to gain entry if he didn’t want to keep using the front door. The frame stood proud of the casing by about a centimetre where it met the sill. I gripped both sides of it with the tips of my polythene-covered fingers, prised it open and wedged the forked stick in one corner to keep it in place.

Then I turned and slid inside, feet first.

6

Harry and I were travelling light on this job. We always did. The Swedish police might routinely carry pistols and keep Heckler & Kochs locked down in their wagons, but they didn’t like anyone else doing it, especially if they were in-country without a formal invitation. The same went for slabs of high explosive and rolls of det cord. So when you were aiming to bring the rafters down on a guy who didn’t deserve to keep enjoying his Jacuzzi, you had to make do with whatever came to hand.

It was still light enough outside for me to see clearly without having to risk a torch beam blitzing a darkened window. First up, I pulled the toolbox out of its cupboard. Judging by its contents, none of the family wasted much of their time on DIY. Every gadget was in mint condition, even the pliers. Maybe Koureh was saving them for someone special.

I selected a small hand drill, a clear plastic packet of bits, a roll of double-sided tape and a very shiny adjustable spanner, then took a cloth from a neatly folded pile.

The boiler gave a sudden rumble as I placed the spanner and the cloth on the floor in front of it, then resumed its soft murmur. I put the roll of tape and the hand drill on the top step beneath the entrance from the house, and extracted the Swans, their ignition strips and the alarm clock from my bomber jacket. I lined them all up and screwed a drill bit the same diameter as a match- stick into the chuck.

I slowed my breathing and opened my mouth to quieten the roar of the blood-flow in my ears, then turned the door handle and pulled it back far enough to be able to listen for movement above me.

Nothing.

I wasn’t expecting any, but these routines always made me feel a bit more secure. Now I could just get on with the job.

The tape rasped as I peeled two or three inches off the roll and fastened both the ignition strips alongside each other on the bottom of the door. Leaving it ajar, I drilled five neat holes in the sill, as tight as possible to the point at which the leading edge of the strips would cross the threshold. I pushed it closed and tapped a Swan into each hole until only its little red head was visible, then checked that we’d be guaranteed a strike.

I blew the coil of wood off the bit, slid it into its packet, and put it and the roll of tape back in the toolbox before returning to the boiler.

Like pretty much everything else in the place, this bit of kit belonged on Planet Zanussi. Its gleaming aluminium casing was a world away from the rusty enamel monster I’d grown up with on our estate in Bermondsey, but it needed to be fed in much the same way. I spent a minute or two following the pattern of the pipework leading in and out of it, then took a couple of paces back, slowed my breathing, opened my mouth and listened some more.

Still no noise from the rooms overhead.

I moved back to my entry window and went through the same routine.

Again, nothing. No owl. No New York fire truck siren.

Then, in the distance, a sound like a squeaky wheel.

I slowed my breathing further. After a moment, I heard a soft, sad echo. So, not a wheel. The osprey was calling to its mate.

I went back to the boiler and wrapped the cloth around a pressure joint by a right-angle bend. If anybody was in the mood to examine it closely enough, I wanted this thing to look like it had sprung a slow leak, and that meant leaving no scratch marks on the brass. I tightened the jaws of the spanner over the freshly wrapped nut, gripped the moulded, rubber-sheathed handle and applied some gentle pressure. It was rock solid.

I tried again, with a bit more muscle. Same result.

The third time, it gave.

I loosened the spanner, removed the cloth, crouched down and leaned my ear right up close to the joint. There was a whisper of gas, like air leaving a radiator valve if you could be bothered to do the rounds with your little brass key when the cold weather arrived.

The digital time display read 19.57. There was probably a scientific formula for this, but I had no idea what it was. I just wanted Koureh’s basement to fill with enough gas to make a nice big bang the moment he opened that door.

Natural gas was lighter than air, and dissipated relatively easily. The house had been built in the thirties, so it wouldn’t take long for it to find its way up between the floorboards. The trick was to make sure the mixture was right - more than five per cent by volume but less than fifteen, or it wouldn’t ignite. I gave the nut an extra twist for luck, replaced the spanner and the cloth where I’d found them and shut the cupboard.

I wound the alarm clock, primed it to go off in a couple of hours, and left it on the slab of highly polished granite nearest to the doorway. It didn’t exactly go with the Georg Jensen gear in the rest of the house, but if Koureh hadn’t already lit himself a cigar upstairs or come down here to pop his boxers into the washing-machine or do a session on the treadmill, it would ring loudly enough for him to throw open the door to see what was going on.

At that point the strikers would brush the match heads and we’d have ourselves a serious bonfire. If all else failed I’d creep back onto the sundeck, light his Gucci hurricane lantern, lob it through the glass into his living room, then do a runner.

As I hauled myself out of the basement window and lowered it back into place, the silence of the pine forest was suddenly broken, and the cries I heard now had nothing to do with the ospreys.

7

Harry was sprinting across the lawn, brandishing the world’s biggest branch and shrieking like a banshee as the crunch of tyres on gravel announced the arrival of a wagon at the front of the house.

He’d obviously decided to bin Plan A. Plan B seemed to involve hurling himself straight at the target’s vehicle with the intention of clubbing him senseless.

Plan B wasn’t the best plan in the world. Then again, maybe it wasn’t the worst. When I’d slithered out from underneath the steps I could see that Koureh had his roof down. But he wasn’t about to sit there admiring the sunset while some crazed lunatic got up close and battered him around the head.

As Harry stormed onto the driveway, Koureh adjusted his steering, floored his accelerator pedal and rammed his attacker mid-thigh.

Harry cartwheeled off the front wing like a rag doll. He landed in a heap on the gravel, gave a low moan and scrabbled around with his fingernails, like a lobster trying to escape the cooking pot. He wasn’t going anywhere fast.

Koureh braked hard and threw the Saab into reverse. It took me a second to realize that he was more intent on finishing the job with Harry than getting out of my way. I caught up with him as the nearside rear tyre missed his victim’s head and bumped across his lower torso, and launched myself into the back seat as the front tyre followed suit.

Koureh spun the wheel to throw me off balance, but before his right hand could yank the gearstick into first I scrambled up and wrapped my right arm around his throat. I wrenched him out of the driving seat, away from the pedals and wheel. The wagon stalled and juddered to a halt, and I brought my left hand up to grip my right wrist and tightened my hold.

The only sounds now were the ticking of the engine and Koureh’s frantic snorts as I hauled his shoulders over the back of his seat. He shot out his legs, trying to jerk his head and body backwards to unbalance me.

His hands came up, flailing wildly, trying to loosen my grip, but it wasn’t happening. It took another couple of minutes for Plan C to achieve the result A and B had aimed for. I let Koureh’s body slide back into his seat and clambered out over the side of the wagon.

Harry wasn’t moving. I knelt beside him. There was no exterior bleeding. His legs were splayed and swelling. His pelvis was shot to pieces and both femurs were broken, but no bone fragments had pierced the skin.

I had no idea of the extent of his internal injuries, but I’d have been surprised if his spleen and kidneys had got off scot free. I shoved two fingers into his neck. His carotid told me some stuff inside him was still working. His heart was pounding like a jackhammer.

He opened his eyes, but not much. I could have blindfolded him with dental floss.

‘Is he dead?’

I eased his head towards the Saab to let him see what was slumped against the driver’s door.

‘Nice, Nick . . . nice . . .’

He groaned as he turned back to me and glanced down at his injuries. ‘Not brilliant, eh?’

‘Seen better.’ I switched into reassuring mode. ‘But I’ve heard some very good things about those Swedish doctors.’

He gave me a sort of smile. ‘I’ve heard some very good things about those Swedish nurses.’

‘Dream on, mate.’ I pulled a face. ‘They’ve got no time for ugly fucks like you.’

He knew as well as I did that going to a Swedish hospital was out of the question. Some things took too much explaining. I thought about claiming that it had been a hit-and-run; at least that was consistent with his injuries. But he’d be bedbound for weeks, so however quickly we extracted from this area, we’d still be i. . .