Killing for the Company

by Chris Ryan

Genres: War & Military; Action & Adventure; Thrillers

Synopsis

From the author of the bestselling Danny Black series and hit TV show Strikeback. Former SAS legend Chris Ryan brings you his 16th novel, and it is full of all his trademark action, thrills and inside knowledge.

2003. Invalided out of the SAS, Chet Freeman makes his living in high-end security, on a temporary contract for an American corporation called the Grosvenor Group. He catches a young woman, a peace campaigner, eavesdropping on a meeting the group is holding with the British Prime Minister. The group's interests include arms manufacture, and what Chet and the young woman overhear seems to imply that it is bribing the Prime Minister to take his country into an illegal war. Could this possibly be true? Somebody believes that this is a secret that needs covering up, because Chet and the girl are attacked. Hunted down, they go into hiding, and a deadly game of cat and mouse begins.

Nearly 10 years later, tension is reaching breaking point in Jerusalem. The now ex-Prime Minister is working as a Middle East peace envoy. As the city descends into anarchy and rival armies are poised to turn it into a battlefield, Chet's best buddy, Luke, is part of a team tasked by the Regiment with extracting the ex-Prime Minister.

At the height of the battle, Luke discovers a conspiracy far more devastating than any arms deal.

Release date: September 1, 2011

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 300

Sample

Eight

05.00 hrs.

Just under an hour till dawn. Luke and Finn could see the Bedouin village up ahead.

They’d approached slowly, keeping the engine noise to a minimum. In the distance they had seen the lights of what they assumed to be Iraqi border patrol vehicles. If they were discovered by one of these, things could get messy. But the desert was big and they were small. Nobody saw them.

Now they had left the car and were approaching on foot. They were on a dusty track that bore tyre marks but also animal footprints. On either side the terrain was dotted with boulders and low brush. Five minutes after they left the Toyota they passed a rusting car chassis. God knows how long it had been there. Years, probably.

Finn had changed out of his burka and into grubby gear much like Luke’s. They had both used the cover of darkness to double-check the gear packed away in their ops waistcoats that were hidden under their dishdashes: magazines for their pistols, grenades, Plasticuffs. Their disco guns were fitted to their ankles, but their main weapons were closer at hand. They had each looped a piece of bungee cord in a figure of eight around the butt of their carbine, then threaded this around their arms so the weapon itself was hanging underneath their armpits – well disguised by the dishdash but accessible in a split second. With luck, they’d be in and out, but they didn’t know what was waiting for them up ahead, so they had to be prepared. And that meant packing some heavy shit.

Within ten minutes of leaving the car, they could see the outskirts of the village. They checked it out through the kite sight. It was a poor place – a seemingly random agglomeration of about twenty breeze-block houses, each a single storey high and with a shallow-sloping corrugated-iron roof. About 200 metres from the outermost of the houses was the shell of an older dwelling. The blockwork had crumbled, there was no roof and an old acacia tree, heavy under its own weight, had grown through one of the walls. Luke pointed at it. ‘We’ll set up an OP there,’ he said.

Finn nodded and together they headed for the derelict house. They were ten metres away when there was a sudden movement. Both men instinctively went for their weapons, only to see a beady-eyed goat scramble to its feet and put a few metres between itself and them. The bell round its neck gave a repeated dull clunk as it moved, and its breath steamed as it watched them make their way into the OP. The ground was covered with rubbish – old tins, rusting jerrycans and sturdy branches from the acacia tree. A gap in one wall where a window used to be formed a perfect place from which they could observe the village, and Finn took up position here. He pulled an A4 photograph and a pencil-thin red-filtered torch from under his robe. It was a satellite image of the tiny village. Each house was easily identifiable – there were twenty-two in total, and they were mostly set in a rough circle around a central courtyard – and one of them had been circled in black marker. This, if their intelligence was correct, was where they would find Abu Famir.

The two Regiment men examined the image together. Within seconds they had identified their OP, which was on the southern edge of the village, just east of the track leading into it. Their target location was on the north-eastern edge of the village, backed by an area of low brush and with a solitary tree growing about ten metres behind. Finn handed the photo to Luke, before bending down with his kite sight and scanning the darkness.

‘I’ve got eyes on,’ he said after a minute. He stood back so that Luke could have a look.

It took Luke about thirty seconds to take everything in. The central courtyard was about forty metres wide and littered here and there with large objects that were difficult to make out from this distance. The shell of another abandoned car? A collection of disused oil drums? Wandering around these objects were a number of animals – more goats, Luke assumed. The tree that they had noted on the satellite image was easy to make out; just beyond it Luke could see the target house. It was no different to any of the others: just a poor, blockwork dwelling with no windows and an iron roof.

Luke stepped back from the kite sight. ‘We wait till first light,’ he said. ‘Then we move in.’

Finn nodded, and went back to surveying the village through the kite sight.

Within less than twenty minutes the cold, grey light of dawn was starting to push back the inky night sky. Luke and Finn were ready. This was the best time to lift their target. It was dark enough to give them a bit of cover if they needed it, early enough for nobody to be about, and sufficiently late that any noise they made wouldn’t cause alarm. As they’d been waiting, a couple more goats had wandered up to the OP. That could be to their advantage. Luke selected a thin, sturdy acacia branch, about a metre long. If he could use that to guide a few goats into the village, they would look like Bedouin wanderers.

They stepped out from the OP. Three goats had congregated about ten metres away. Luke approached slowly, making a clicking sound in the corner of his mouth. One of the goats bolted, its bell jangling noisily as it disappeared into the night; but the remaining two lingered. The musty smell of the beasts and their shit reached Luke’s nose; when he tapped one of them firmly on its haunch, it made a shuddering sound. Another tap and both animals started wandering in the direction of the village.

A thick silence surrounded them – a silence in which the clanking of the goats’ bells and their own footsteps sounded deafening. Luke brandished his acacia branch firmly, but he also kept his left arm loosely by his side, ready to access his carbine. But at the moment there was nobody around. The goats in the central courtyard gazed at them curiously as the two SAS men stood at the edge of the settlement and looked in. The object Luke had seen through the kite sight was indeed the deserted chassis of an old car; and as they ventured further in, he could feel some residual warmth from the oil drums. Clearly someone had lit a fire in them the previous night.

Thirty metres to the target. Luke tapped one of the goats, and the men walked side by side past the oil drums and towards the building where they hoped to find Abu Famir.

From the corner of his eye, Luke sensed movement.

Somebody had appeared from one of the houses at their ten o’clock, no more than twenty metres away. Luke looked closely at the figure. It was a boy, no more than twelve years old, though his face already bore the ravages of a hard life. His body did too. The bottom half of his left leg was missing and he was able to stand only with the aid of a sturdy stick nestled under his left armpit. He wore a heavy cloth robe and a brightly coloured hat, and in his right hand he was carrying a metal bucket. He stared at the two strangers with wide eyes full of mistrust.

‘You clocked the kid?’ Luke murmured.

‘Roger that,’ replied Finn.

As he spoke, there was more movement. The door of the target house – distance, twenty-five metres – was opening.

Then – fuck! Four figures emerged from the house. They were all wearing plain Arabic dress, though one was a lot older than the others. He had a short white beard and little round glasses, and Luke immediately recognised him from pictures he’d seen: Abu Famir. The man’s eyes darted around.

As they exited the building, the younger men surrounded the Iraqi academic. They were not quite so dark of skin, and they each carried an MP5 Kurz. They made no attempt to hide their weapons and held them like they knew how to use them. Abu Famir had good reason to seem on edge: it looked like Saddam’s men had already caught up with him.

Luke and Finn stopped dead in their tracks. Abu Famir’s entourage did the same.

The two groups of men stared at each other, nothing but three old oil drums and two goats between them.

And then there was a shout.

It came from the lame boy. He had dropped his bucket and was pointing furiously at Luke and Finn. His words were a little garbled, but Luke had enough Arabic to work out what he was saying.

‘They have stolen the goats!’

Abu Famir’s guards quickly looked at each other, as if deciding what to do; but the two goats had already made their decision. Clearly startled by the boy’s shouts, they turned and bolted. One of them collided with Finn, who was momentarily knocked back. His dishdash twisted, revealing the bottom couple of inches of his carbine’s barrel.

One of the men shouted. He had seen the weapon, and was raising his.

‘Get down!’ Luke yelled, and both men hit the ground just soon enough to avoid a burst from the MP5 thundering into them. It hit the oil drums in the middle of the courtyard, causing a harsh, metallic sound to ring out across the air, and puncturing entry and exit holes in the metal. By now, though, the SAS men had accessed their own weapons. And that was bad news for the ragheads.

The guy who’d just fired his MP5 was the first to get it: two rounds, one from Finn, one from Luke, both full in the face. His features seemed to explode, and he was thrown back violently against the front wall of the house, his blood soiling Abu Famir’s grey robe as he fell. The boy was stumbling back into his house, but Luke’s attention was already on their target’s remaining companions. One of them – the taller of the two – was taking aim at Finn; the other was just behind Abu Famir.

The taller man fired a burst in Finn’s direction, just as one of the goats bolted between them. The animal’s squealing was cut short as rounds from the MP5 hacked into its flesh, ripping a seam along its side and spewing its entrails. Finn wasn’t hit, but Luke knew his mate wouldn’t get a second chance. He fired, and delivered another headshot to this trigger-happy Arab, who spun down into the dust.

The man behind Abu Famir was short and stocky, with rumpled dark hair and sharp dark eyes. He raised his weapon to fire over the academic’s shoulder, but as he did so Abu Famir – his face full of fright and his glasses skewiff on his face – began to run.

‘Get him!’ Finn roared at Luke as he fired at the remaining companion, catching him not in his face, but at the top of his left shoulder. The guy went down like a sack of shit, and the two SAS men scrambled to their feet. Luke headed right, following Abu Famir the way he had run – fast for an old man – round the back of the house; Finn went in the opposite direction.

The back of the house was like a junkyard: rolls of barbed wire lay beside old tyres and metal troughs. There was a vehicle parked here – a modern black 4 x 4. They found the old Iraqi pinned against the far side of the vehicle, his eyes wild and his body shaking. He had the expression of a man who was sure he was about to die. He shook his head as he saw Finn and Luke advancing on him; and although he had opened his mouth to say something, no words came.

Finn grabbed Abu Famir by the collar of his robe while Luke checked the vehicle. The key was hanging in the ignition. ‘Get him in!’ he barked.

Finn opened up the back seat and bundled Abu Famir inside, then took a seat next to him, rolled down the window and propped his weapon through the opening while Luke took the driver’s seat and started the engine. As he put his foot down, Abu Famir started jabbering in Arabic. ‘Shut the fuck up!’ said Luke as the vehicle started to move.

But the Iraqi wouldn’t quieten down. ‘British?’ he asked anxiously in English.

‘Bullseye,’ Luke growled as the car accelerated round the corner of the house.

‘Where are you taking me?’

‘Jordan. All expenses paid.’

‘Jordan? But . . .’

He didn’t finish what he was saying. As Luke drove into the main courtyard, he checked over his shoulder. The two corpses hadn’t moved, of course, but the stocky third man – the one Finn had caught in his shoulder – was up on his knees, one hand pressed against his badly bleeding wound.

‘Down him!’ Luke shouted at Finn.

‘NO!’ Abu Famir’s voice was strangely high-pitched, and as Finn prepared to take the shot, the Iraqi threw his thin body against him. Finn fired, but the shot went awry and by the time he had pushed Abu Famir away, the vehicle was halfway across the courtyard: the angles were wrong and Finn’s face was stormy.

‘You must go back for him,’ Abu Famir shouted.

‘You’ve got a fucking death wish, mate,’ Luke said as he continued to burn the 4 x 4 across the courtyard.

‘They weren’t here to kill me. They are my brothers – Jordanians – here to help me. We were preparing to leave together and you killed them . . .’

Luke hit the brakes. ‘What are you talking about?’

Abu Famir’s frightened eyes darted from one man to the other. ‘They were here to help me.’ He twisted round to look out of the rear window. ‘But he . . . he is not Jordanian. He is Iraqi . . . my colleague, in hiding with me. You cannot leave him there to die . . .’

‘Fucking try me,’ Finn muttered. He turned to Luke. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here,’ he said.

But something stopped Luke from hitting the gas. Their orders were clear: get Abu Famir out of Iraq. Nothing more, nothing less. Even so, sometimes on the ground you had to adapt.

Abu Famir started up again. ‘If Saddam goes, my friend will be an important man. Yes, a very important man . . . my deputy . . . he must be saved . . .’

‘Finn,’ Luke instructed. ‘Shut him up.’

His mate held his weapon against Abu Famir’s body. ‘You heard him,’ he said. And then: ‘Jesus, Luke – what are you doing?’

Luke had gone into reverse and was now speeding back towards the house. He didn’t answer his friend, but when he was ten metres from where the wounded man was lying, he hit the brakes and the 4 x 4 screeched to a halt. He jumped out and ran round to where the guy was lying, keenly aware that seven or eight Bedouin men had come out of their homes and were looking towards the site of the firefight, though they kept their distance.

It was immediately obvious that the guy was in a mess. The blood from his wound had almost fully saturated the robe he was wearing; his face was pale, his lips slightly blue; his right hand was pressed against his left shoulder where the bullet had entered, and blood was oozing between his fingers.

Luke got out of the vehicle and strode towards him. The man, trembling violently, whispered, ‘Harah, harah, harah . . .’ Then he reached for his MP5, which was lying on the ground about three metres from where he had fallen, but Luke got there first, grabbed the weapon and stood over him.

The man’s eyes widened and he stopped muttering. He stared at the weapon in Luke’s hand. ‘Lo . . .’ he whispered. ‘Lo . . .’

Luke bent over, grabbed the injured man just under his good shoulder and pulled him roughly to his feet. He gasped in pain and it took all Luke’s strength to keep him upright. He yanked him towards the 4 x 4 and bundled him into the passenger seat, ignoring his hollers of pain. In the process the man’s blood smeared Luke’s own robe.

The Bedouin men watched impotently as this scene unfolded in front of them. Maybe they were used to such horrors; maybe they were just scared to get involved. Either way, Luke floored it out of the place, acutely aware that Finn didn’t agree with what he’d just done. Tough shit. He was calling the shots and he’d made his decision.

Within a couple of minutes they had reached the Toyota and come to a halt. As the two SAS men climbed out of the 4 x 4, Finn yelled, ‘For fuck’s sake, look at him. He’s going to compromise us.’

Luke opened the boot of the Toyota, took out a med pack and handed it to Finn. ‘Let’s get them into our vehicle. You can treat him on the go.’

‘Treat him? You’re fucking losing it, Luke. Let’s just nail the bastard now and get out of here.’

Luke ignored him. ‘We’re going to get right away from the village, then get on the radio to base, tell them what’s happening. If the order comes through to extract him too, that’s what we’ll do. If not, we waste him. Now stop fucking arguing and let’s move.’

He walked round to the other side of the 4 x 4, opened the door and dragged the wounded man back towards the Toyota.

Eighteen

Luke Mercer was in the back of a Pinzgauer 6 x 6. The canopy was closed against the rain, and his face was bathed in the monochrome light from a VDU about the size of a laptop screen.

The olive-drab vehicle had seen better days, but the modifications it had undergone were state-of-the-art. Mounted on the cab was a high-velocity missile launcher. Known as THOR, it was a four-missile variant of the Starstreak HVM, a high-velocity surface-to-air munition that had not yet seen combat. Top-speed Mach 3.5 – three and a half times the speed of sound – laser-guided and each missile containing three armour-piercing darts. These darts were each packed with a pound of explosive. The weapon’s sights – regular, thermal-imaging and night-sight – could pick up and track targets at a range of more than seven klicks, even fast-moving UAVs behind cloud cover. All in all, a pretty formidable bit of kit. Not the sort of thing you wanted to entrust to some wet-behind-the-ears crap-hat not long out of nappies.

Some of the younger guys in camp had a habit of taking the piss out of Luke these days. To them, he was the old boy, with a flash of grey round his temples and a body scarred by a long career in the Regiment. Top brass had given him the opportunity to slow down a bit on any number of occasions. Take a training role. Move over to L Detachment as a PSI. Luke had resisted, preferring to mix it with the kids. To keep active. Plenty of the younger troopers thought he was nuts. Why wouldn’t you take the same pay for less aggro? Why wouldn’t you grab the chance not to have some extremist fuck using your arse for target practice?

Luke had his own reasons. Reasons he kept to himself, and which he probably couldn’t have wholly explained even if he’d wanted to. A sense he owed something. Whenever that thought crossed his mind, he would see Chet’s face. Scarred. Stony. The knowledge that his best friend was dead, killed in a tragic accident from which he couldn’t escape on account of an injury that should have been Luke’s. How often had he relived that night in Serbia so long ago? How often had he seen the fragmentation grenade rolling towards him, only to be kicked out of the way by Chet in one moment of selfless bravery?

And what right did Luke have to give up fighting, when the man who had saved his life would never fight again?

To keep fighting meant ensuring his Blade skills were sharper than sharp, his body in peak condition. So when the others were in the Hereford boozers drinking for England, Luke was gymning it or pounding the streets. And when his younger colleagues gave him the sarky comments, they did so knowingly. There wasn’t a man in Hereford who didn’t think Luke Mercer was the equal of anyone in the Regiment.

With the aid of a joystick, Luke was practising manoeuvring the sight mounted above the truck. Its accuracy and range were remarkable. On the screen in front of him, he could make out individual trees miles away in the distance. The THOR was intended to take out low-flying aircraft, but it also had ground-to-ground capability, and it was this that they were testing today.

‘Extra points,’ a voice behind him said, ‘if you can take out one of those fucking ramblers.’

Luke looked over his shoulder and grinned at Nigel Foster. Fozzie was a good lad. Luke had even forgiven him for getting his team compromised all those years ago in Iraq, when he and Finn had been forced to make a break for the Jordanian border. At least they’d all got out in one piece, which was more than he could say for the Mossad agent they’d picked up on the way. SIS had been quick to bury that one. Thanks, lads, for your help, now be terribly good boys, would you, and don’t mention Amit’s little personal firework display to another soul. Six months after he and Finn had made it over the border back into Jordan, Luke had made a half-hearted and unsuccessful attempt to locate Amit’s sister like he said he would. He’d drawn a blank, though, and there was no way he was going to use his contacts to dig a little deeper. That would have had the Firm sniffing round him like dogs round a bitch’s arse.

Luke had sometimes wondered what had happened to Abu Famir, the pain in the neck of an Iraqi do-gooder the coalition had been so eager to get their hands on, and for whose safety Amit had sacrificed himself. He had never seen or heard of the guy again, and sometimes he wondered what the point of the whole fucking escapade had been. Still, it wasn’t the first time the Regiment had been sent out to risk their lives on the whim of some bright spark in Whitehall. Wouldn’t be the last either.

Luke moved the joystick and the sights panned left. The image on the screen – gridded, and with a set of cross hairs at the centre – was amazingly clear given its distance: 7.3 klicks, at a bearing of 183 degrees. The Pinzgauer stood on a piece of high ground, so the line of sight over the Beacons was uninterrupted.

‘You finished admiring the scenery yet, mucker?’ Fozzie asked.

Luke didn’t reply. He panned slowly east, and just a few seconds later something caught his eye. He adjusted the instruments on the weapon’s control panel and the scene came more clearly into view. It was an old house. At least, it had been once. Now it was just a burned-out shell. A memory. And to Luke’s eyes, a tomb.

He stared at it for a few seconds, before sensing his mate looking over his shoulder. ‘We should lock on to the target, mucker,’ Fozzie said quietly.

Luke nodded. ‘Roger that.’ His voice was emotionless. He panned further east and adjusted the range of the weapon. Within thirty seconds he was locked on to a very different scene. Luke knew the ranges on the Beacons well. Everyone in the Regiment did. They’d all spent more time than they cared to remember in these places on exercises – general weapons training, point of contact, even calling in air assets to drop ordnance. The ranges could be anything from a couple of hundred metres in length to the entire side of a hill. The one they were focusing on today had been decked out with a set of rails and a pulley system which could be used to drag vehicles along to simulate a moving target. The guys had set up an old Land Rover, and Luke had got it in the cross hairs.

As soon as the range came into view, the radio burst into life. ‘OK, fellas. We’re ready for you. Send.’

It was Fozzie who replied. ‘We have eyes on. Repeat, we have eyes on.’

A pause. On the screen they saw the Land Rover start moving.

‘Fire at will,’ came the voice on the radio.

Luke didn’t need to follow the target manually. The weapon system, once it was locked on, followed the Land Rover automatically. In a battle situation, the target – whether an aircraft, a vehicle or even a human – would be moving faster, but that didn’t matter. The THOR system could track just about anything. And once it was tracked . . .

Luke pressed a single button to fire. There was a whooshing sound from above the Pinzgauer and then, almost immediately, a loud crack from in front of them. The rocket’s main propulsion didn’t kick in until it was 400 metres from the firing point, in order to protect the user; then, at Mach 3.5, it would take only seconds to reach the target. The weapon sights kept track of its trajectory, and Luke just had time to see the three lethal darts shoot from the main body of the missile, staying in a circular formation to increase the likelihood of one of them hitting the target, before the Land Rover exploded. The sudden combustion was visible on the screen. There was a two-second delay, then a harsh, metallic sound reached their ears as the sound waves from the explosion crashed past them, echoing across the hills.

‘Efficient,’ Fozzie noted without much feeling.

Luke didn’t have a chance to reply before the radio came to life again: ‘Bullseye, fellas. Time to pack your bags. We’re heading back to base.’

Luke and Fozzie exchanged a look.

‘We’ve got three more of these bad boys to discharge,’ Fozzie said.

‘Going to have to wait. O’Donoghue’s called us in. Let’s get moving.’

‘Roger that,’ Fozzie replied. And then, to Luke: ‘Sounds like someone’s getting twitchy.’

It took just over an hour to get back to base, and another hour before the whole squadron had congregated. Four troops, sixteen guys per troop: there should have been sixty-four men, but as always the squadron was undermanned and in reality there were barely fifty. At 14.00 hrs they congregated in a lecture room in the heart of the Kremlin. It was a large room, big enough to seat them all. Up at the front was an OHP with a laptop attached, and next to it five plastic chairs. Three men in suits were sitting there, along with the Regiment’s ops officer, Major James O’Donoghue, and Major Julian Dawson, OC B Squadron. O’Donoghue came from a family that owned half of Wiltshire. Sandhurst, Guards, Regiment – classic headshed career path. He was an ugly fucker and well known for being as tight as a camel’s arse in a sandstorm. When it came to military planning, however, everyone knew the Regiment was lucky to have him. As for Julian Dawson, he had the respect of every man in the squadron. Two years previously he’d taken a Taliban round in Helmand, just south of Musa Qala, and he’d been on the ground again within three weeks. In his first twenty-four hours back in action, he’d nailed three Taliban digging in IEDs. Not a man to fuck with, and everyone in the room knew it.

There was a low murmur among the men. Tension. An op was imminent, and you could get addicted to it. The moment O’Donoghue stood up, it was as if someone had hit the mute switch. Everyone went silent, and all eyes were directed towards the ops officer. There were no formalities. No hellos and thank you for comings. Just a businesslike nod towards the three men in suits.

‘Edward Duncan, Foreign Office,’ O’Donoghue announced in his clipped voice. ‘Our two other guests are here from SIS.’ No names. It wasn’t that the Firm always kept their employees’ identities a secret, but if they didn’t have to say who they were, they wouldn’t. The three suits nodded in the general direction of the men, but the guys of B Squadron weren’t interested in them. It was O’Donoghue who would give them their brief.

‘All right then,’ he said. ‘Unless you’ve been living in a hole – which, looking at the state of some of you, wouldn’t surprise me – you’ll know what’s been happening. Coordinated terror attacks, London, Paris, Washington, Mumbai. Latest estimate, 486 dead.’ If the statistic appalled him, he didn’t show it, but you could have heard a pin drop in the room. ‘It seems the agencies have suspected a major hit like this for some time, but they’ve had their eyes firmly set towards AQ. Turns out they were looking the wrong way. Our combustible friends were Palestinian. Members of a militant group from the Gaza Strip called the UFP – the Union for Free Palestine. There are any number of these Mickey Mouse outfits along the Gaza Strip. Two or three disaffected Palestinian kids get together with a balaclava and a Kalashnikov and suddenly they think they’re a movement. The UFP is a little bigger than most.’

A voice from the back of the room. ‘Don’t these cunts normally just blow themselves up outside cafés in Jerusalem, boss?’

O’Donoghue nodded. ‘Normally. That or Tel Aviv. These attacks are out of character. More to the point, the terrorists were well equipped and well organised. SIS are trying to establish if anyone else is involved, but at the moment that’s secondary to the political instability in the region.’

The ops officer pressed a button on the laptop and a map of the Middle East appeared on the wall.

‘The political leadership in the Gaza Strip is Hamas. A former terrorist organisation and not internationally recognised, but popular in the Gaza Strip because they stand up to Israel. The UFP claim loyalty to them. The international community have called on Hamas to denounce the bombings. So far they’ve failed to do so.’

Luke raised a hand.

‘What is it, Luke?’

‘You said the bombers were well equipped, boss. Do we think Hamas actually supplied them, or were they working on their own?’

O’Donoghue looked over towards the SIS guys. One of them leaned forward slightly in his chair. ‘At the moment,’ he said, ‘it’s hard to say. We found the remains of a weapon in the wreckage of the UK train, an’ – he consulted some notes on his lap – ‘an AKS-74U. We checked its serial number and it seems consistent with a consignment of weapons handed in as part of an amnesty at the end of the Balkan conflict. The company given the contract to collect and destroy the weapons is a subsidiary of an American multinational, the Grosvenor Group. Looks like they fulfilled one half of the contract and not the other. We’ve passed this information on to the CIA. But it seems unlikely that the Grosvenor Group would have direct dealings with Hamas, so our working theory is that the bombers were acting independently.’ The spook settled back in his chair and looked back