MARCH 2018
MOD ROTHFORD, ESSEX, ENGLAND
How do you kill a man?
It’s a simple enough question. And to a layperson – a school secretary, perhaps, or an accountant – it has a simple answer. Shoot him. Stab him. Push him off a building. Run him over with your lease-purchase Ford Focus that you optioned-up with the sports package including red racing stripes and leather upholstery. And, yes, these are all perfectly acceptable methods. But to a professional – a professional killer, that is – it merely leads to more questions.
Who is the man?
Where is the man?
How well protected is the man?
Do we mind leaving the man’s body?
Do we mind if the man’s friends or employers know who killed him?
Must we be silent when we kill the man or is a certain amount of noise permissible?
When these, and other, questions are answered to our satisfaction, then the process of choosing the method of killing can begin.
Gabriel Wolfe, professional assassin for Her Majesty’s Government, was working his way through the questions. Sitting opposite him in the sparsely furnished office in MOD Rothford, a British Army base in Essex, was his boss at The Department, Don Webster. Gabriel had served under Don in the SAS when the older man had been known as Colonel Webster. Now he worked for a security agency, allied with, but not a part of, MI6, MI5, Military Intelligence and Special Branch. His brief as an operator for The Department was to eliminate those of Britain’s enemies its sister agencies were unable, unwilling or unready to deal with. There might be questions of jurisdiction, international cooperation, secrecy, or simple logistics that created the operations The Department worked on. But whatever their genesis, he, and the other men and women who worked for Don, were kept busy.
“Who’s the target?” he asked now, before taking a sip of the whisky Don had poured for him on his arrival. In his head he added the supplementary question, Who am I supposed to be killing? He chose to use that word, and not eliminating, liquidating or neutralising as some in the intelligence and security community, particularly the CIA, preferred to. If the order was legal, he’d follow it. That had been his creed in the Army, and it remained his creed now. If the order was to kill an enemy of the British state, fine. But let’s call a spade a spade.
Don pushed a buff folder across the desk to Gabriel, who slid it closer, spun it round and opened it to find himself looking at a ten by eight glossy colour photo of a middle-aged man wearing steel-rimmed glasses that magnified closely-spaced dark eyes above a long, straight nose. He sported a neatly trimmed, greyish-white beard. He was frowning, and his lips were compressed into a thin line. He might have been a headmaster, worrying over his school’s budget. Or a salesman, wondering if he’d make that month’s target. Don spoke, clarifying the situation.
“Meet Abbas Darbandi. Mr Darbandi is a scientist. A nuclear scientist, to be exact. In fact, to be absolutely, one hundred percent, specific, Mr Darbandi is an Iranian nuclear scientist in charge of a project codenamed Melkh.”
“Locust,” Gabriel said. “What is it?”
Don explained. Project Locust was the design and manufacture of a tactical nuclear weapon, to be carried as a warhead on a medium-range ballistic missile.
“So if it’s not a long-range missile, where’s the target? I’m guessing Israel.”
Don nodded. “That’s what our friends in Vauxhall think. Obviously we want to prevent the Iranians developing that sort of strike capability, not least because we don’t want a Middle East arms race developing. The Israelis know all about Darbandi’s work, and so far they’ve been content to maintain a watching brief. But now they want action.”
“Why haven’t they just gone off and done it themselves? They’re not exactly shy about that sort of thing.”
“I’ve been in contact with my oppo in Jerusalem. Believe it or not, it’s a manpower issue. They’re overstretched and they’ve asked us for help.”
“Where does Darbandi work?” Gabriel asked.
“Our Mr Darbandi works inside an Iranian nuclear research and development facility in Vareshabad. It’s a small town – village, really an hour’s drive north of Tehran. It’s been classified by the Americans as civilian, not military, but its sole purpose is developing a bomb. As to his personal security, how about seventy-five highly trained, heavily armed, battle-hardened and utterly ruthless members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard?”
The rest of Gabriel’s questions Don answered with terse sentences carrying the maximum amount of information for the minimum amount of words.
No, we don’t mind leaving the body. Yes, we do mind if Mr Darbandi’s employers know who killed him. This is a highly secret, eyes-only classified mission from a deniable component of the British security apparatus. On balance, a silent approach is preferred.
Gabriel visualised a sturdy wooden bench laden with an assortment of weapons, both traditional and improvised. Our school secretary or accountant would in all likelihood recognise some of them. Either from TV or the movies, or their own homes.
A cricket bat.
A pair of pliers.
A hammer.
A dining fork.
A darning needle.
A corkscrew.
A meat skewer.
A cook’s knife.
A bottle of bleach.
A lead-filled leather cosh.
A brass knuckleduster.
A piano wire garotte.
A Böker tactical knife.
Other fighting knives, of the flick, double-edged and stiletto varieties.
A US Marine Corps tactical tomahawk.
A SIG Sauer P226 semi-automatic pistol.
A .44 Magnum Smith & Wesson Model 629 revolver.
A Mossberg 500 pump-action shotgun.
A Colt M16 assault rifle.
An Accuracy International AT-80 sniper rifle.
He rejected the firearms out of hand. Too noisy.
Too hard to explain away if the shit hit the fan and he got caught. Shame.Unnecessary.
That left the edged weapons.
Even in the age of drones, hyper-accurate sniper rifles and cyberwarfare, sometimes the only way to vanquish your enemy is up close and personal. When the ammunition runs out, you fix bayonets and get into it. If your enemy is closer than the length of a rifle barrel, you pull a knife.
“A blade,” Gabriel said. “Silent, and we could put the blame on a local.”
The older man nodded, letting his grey eyes close for a long moment. When he opened them again, he took a pull on his drink before speaking.
“Not much margin for error. You’d have to be standing next to him. Unless you threw it, of course.”
“Yeah, well, I never ran away to the circus so I’d probably miss him. It was always Daisy or Smudge who won the competitions. Whenever they were short of beer money they’d always challenge me.”
Daisy was Damon Cheaney, and Smudge was Mickey Smith, two members of Gabriel’s patrol in the SAS. Both men were dead. Smudge at the hands of militia fighters in Mozambique, Daisy from an assassin’s knife. More and more these days, Gabriel found that people close to him ended up dead. It made him wary of forming friendships, let alone intimate relationships.
“Fine. We’ll hook you up with Sam Flack at some point. Remember her?”
Gabriel thought back to his first encounter with the MI6 quartermaster. That time, Don had tricked him into thinking Sam must be a man. He and Don had horsed around, making lame 007 jokes before she’d taken them to the firing range. There, they’d blasted away with an array of ammunition that culminated in depleted uranium 9mm rounds that punched through half-inch, military-grade, steel armour as if it were cardboard.
“How could I forget?” he said, examining an old scar on the back of his right hand. A piece of shrapnel? A knife? A garden tool? He worried that he couldn’t remember.
Don smiled, grey eyes twinkling.
“Fool me once, eh? Now, let’s talk about your team.”
Gabriel looked up.
“What team? I thought this was a solo mission.”
“Come on, Old Sport. This is Department business, not one of your little freelance jaunts. You’ll need backup on the ground when you get to Tehran, not to mention an intelligence contact here in London. Or were you simply planning to waltz into Darbandi’s place of work dressed in a DHL uniform asking for Iran’s top nuclear scientist to sign for a parcel?”
Gabriel ran his fingers through his hair, which, he’d noticed with alarm, had become speckled with silver in the last few months.
“No, Boss. Sorry.”
Don smiled.
“Don’t be sorry. I think you’ll find the company pleasant enough.”
He reached over and pressed the intercom button on the hefty, slime-green phone on the corner of his desk. A tinny female voice buzzed from the speaker.
“Yes, Don?”
“Send her in, would you please, Pamela?”
Gabriel twisted round in his chair to see who this “her” was that Don had partnered with him. The door opened, and, as he took in the athletically built young woman standing in the doorway, he smiled.
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