Standing Alone

Book 0: Matt Standing Thrillers

by Stephen Leather

Genres: Action & Adventure; Crime Fiction; Spy Thrillers

Synopsis

A Navy SEAL has gone rogue, selling his skills to the highest bidder as a professional assassin. Ryan French no longer cares who he kills so long as the price is right. His former bosses want him taken down, and SAS trooper Matt 'Lastman' Standing is tasked with the job. A lethal killing machine with experience in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, Standing is now hunting French in the lawless Wild West forests of Humboldt County, where the US produces most of its legal - and illegal - cannabis. But French isn't the only predator in the wilderness - there are Mexican cartels, Russian Mafia and Hungarian gangsters - and Standing has to overcome them all to get to his target.

Release date: January 6, 2022

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 320

Sample

The sniper had been in position for two days and two nights, lying on plastic sheeting, covered by a camouflage net. He had eaten nothing but protein bars and nuts, and drunk sparingly from a plastic bottle. He was dug into a slope next to a lake. On the far side of the clear blue water was a line of five cabins, luxury waterside homes that rarely came on the market and when they did it was with a seven-figure price tag. The Colorado sky was cloudless and as blue as the lake, and behind the cabins was a steep hillside covered with towering pines. The sniper was focusing on the cabin in the middle. The target had arrived the previous evening, just as the sun dipped down behind the hill. He had come with his mistress and her Chihuahua in a two-door Mercedes, and a team of four bodyguards had accompanied them in a black SUV with tinted windows.

Next to the sniper was the rifle that he would use to kill the target. When he had been in the military, he had been issued with a Knight’s Armament M110 Semi-Automatic Sniper System, which had a quick-change twenty-round magazine. It had been a superb weapon for taking out multiple targets at long range in a combat situation, but for the job in hand the Smith & Wesson M&P10 was a better bet. The magazine held ten rounds, which was more than enough, and it was chambered for the 6.5 Creedmoor round, which had originally been designed for target shooting but had quickly found favour with hunters – and professional assassins. The round was narrow and light and left the barrel at such a high velocity that, on a good day, the sniper could do a quick double-tap to the chest from 1,000 yards away. The M&P10 weighed just over nine pounds and was forty inches long, and the fact that it cost less than $2,000 meant it was pretty much disposable.

Once the job was done he planned to dig a hole and bury it in the woods, along with any cartridge cases expended. He’d keep the telescopic sight, though. That was too good – and expensive – to throw away. It was a Nightforce ATACR – Advanced Tactical Riflescope – and cost $1,000 more than the rifle. The US Marine Corps used it as part of their sniper system. It gave a crystal-clear view and was virtually indestructible. This would be the fourth time that the sniper had used it on a paying job and it had never let him down.

The security team had been professional. Two had remained with the Mercedes while the others had done a sweep of the house and the grounds down to the lake. The sniper had tracked them with his rifle, regulating his breathing as if he was preparing for a shot. Once they were satisfied that the house and grounds were clear, all four bodyguards went inside with the target. There was a terrace at the rear of the house but the target had remained inside all night. He had briefly appeared at the bedroom window at night, but the sniper wasn’t prepared to risk a shot through glass.

The target was a prospective congressman, but the sniper didn’t know – or care – which party he represented. He knew the man’s name and that he would be at the cabin, but that was all he knew. It was all he needed to know.

The rear door of the cabin opened and the target appeared. He was wearing an orange lifejacket over a grey sweatshirt and baggy shorts. Two of the bodyguards were with him, still wearing black suits and ties. The target pointed at a wooden shed and the bodyguards went inside and returned a minute later with a bright red kayak and a paddle.

The bodyguards carried the kayak to the water’s edge and held it steady as the prospective congressman climbed in. The girlfriend appeared on the terrace, the Chihuahua clutched to her chest.

The sniper sighted on the target’s chest, the stock of the rifle resting on the gunman’s shoulder. He had calibrated the sights three days earlier in the Flat Tops Wilderness area, 235,000 acres of land between the Routt and White River national forests. He had used Google Maps to calculate the distance between his hide and the cabin, and had paced it out in the wilderness, before aiming at two large watermelons. By the time he had finished, both watermelons were a pulpy mess and the sights were perfect.

One of the bodyguards handed the paddle to the prospective congressman and then stood back. The target opened his mouth to say something and the sniper squeezed the trigger. The stock kicked against his shoulder but he was already braced for the recoil and he easily absorbed the impact. The target’s chest turned red and the sniper pulled the trigger a second time. He’d aimed higher on the second shot and the man’s head exploded, spraying blood and brain matter across the legs of one of the bodyguards.

The sniper crawled out of his hide. He rolled up his camouflage net and plastic sheeting and thrust them into his backpack with his water bottle. He picked up the two cartridge cases and put them in his pocket, moving quickly but methodically. There was no way they could drive around to his side of the lake, so if they did come after him it would have to be on foot. It would take at least two hours to reach his position that way, by which time he would be long gone. The two other bodyguards had run out of the cabin and all four men had drawn their handguns. ‘Idiots,’ muttered the sniper. Did they think they could pick off a sniper a thousand yards away using their Glocks? The woman dropped her dog and began to scream.

The sniper slung his backpack over his shoulder and picked up his rifle, then began threading his way through the trees. He had parked his car close to a motel about five miles away. He had switched off his phone before he headed to the lake, and he wouldn’t be switching it on again until he was back at the motel. When he did get back, he’d check that the second payment had been made. He had been paid $50,000 as a deposit and he would receive the remaining $150,000 on completion. The money would be paid in bitcoin. He didn’t really trust cryptocurrency, but it was the best way of making anonymous transactions. As soon as the bitcoins were in his digital wallet he would cash them in and move the money to a bank account in the Cayman Islands.

He heard a twig snap off to his right and he froze. There was a second, quieter crack. The sniper peered around a tree and saw a white-tailed deer standing a hundred yards away. It was a female, two years old at most, her head up and her nose twitching. The sniper smiled. ‘Don’t worry, honey,’ he said. ‘I don’t shoot animals.’

A gun was just a tool of Matt Standing’s trade, but it always felt strange to be walking among hundreds of people knowing that tucked under his armpit was a weapon capable of ending dozens of lives. The Glock 19 held seventeen rounds in the extended clip and one in the chamber and he had two full clips in the pockets of his pea coat. He looked around as he walked through the crowds of shoppers. The Trafford Centre was five miles west of Manchester. Ten per cent of the UK’s population lived within a forty-five minute drive of the centre, and more than thirty-five million people visited every year. It had the largest food court in Europe and the biggest cinema in the United Kingdom. If you were setting out to kill a large number of people in the shortest possible time, the Trafford Centre was a good bet.

Standing wasn’t prowling the shopping centre for victims. He was an SAS trooper on the hunt for members of an Islamic cell, planning what the authorities referred to as an ‘MTA’, a marauding terrorist attack. An MTA could be with bladed weapons or firearms and there could be any number of assailants involved. But the end result of a successful MTA was always the same – a lot of dead and injured civilians.

MI5 had flagged the forthcoming MTA as a more-than-likely risk, based on an increase in chatter. Chatter was basically electronic gossip – emails, blog posts, texts and phone calls – that suggested an attack was coming. Unfortunately that was all MI5 had: chatter. There was no hard evidence or intelligence, and they had no idea who was involved or where they would attack. It was the equivalent of cows lying down before a thunderstorm. Sometimes the storm came, sometimes it didn’t. But more often than not the cows got it right.

The chatter picked up by the spooks had been vague, but shopping centres had been mentioned, so the decision had been taken to put men on the ground in the country’s main venues. The Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre had changed the UK terrorism threat level from ‘critical’ to ‘severe’, which meant that an attack was highly likely. 

There were ten troopers covering two London shopping centres – Westfield London and Westfield Stratford – and another four based in the Bluewater centre in Kent. Three more had been posted to the Birmingham Bullring. For some reason the second biggest shopping centre in the UK, the Metrocentre in Gateshead, wasn’t being protected, a fact that had been raised by one of the Geordie troopers during the briefing on the operation. The captain running the briefing had smiled and said that according to MI5, there were very few potential jihadists in Geordie-land, probably because the weather was so awful.

The captain had said that according to the chatter, knives were going to be used, but that the troopers should expect the worst. Again Standing had his misgivings – if they seriously thought that jihadists were going to be attacking shoppers with machetes, or guns, then why not put metal detectors at all the entrances? He decided against asking the question. The captain wasn’t the mastermind behind the operation; like the troopers, he was only following orders.

Standing stopped and looked into the window of a Ted Baker shop. He caught sight of his reflection. He was wearing a black pea jacket with the collar turned up, Diesel jeans and Timberland boots. Around his neck was a black bandana that could be pulled up to cover his face if necessary.

He alternated his attention between a display of shirts and the reflections of people walking behind him. It was Saturday afternoon and the centre was packed. Families walking together, mums and dads out with the grandparents and the kids. Teenagers hanging out. Boyfriends and girlfriends on the way to catch a movie.

A woman screamed behind him and Standing whirled around. His hand reached towards the gun under his arm, but then he saw a young woman in a headscarf running after her toddler, who was waddling at full speed towards the escalator. Standing relaxed as the mother scooped up the child. He turned back to the shirts.

The centre and all the individual shops and restaurants were covered by CCTV cameras, which were monitored in a control room on the second floor. It would have made things easier for the SAS to have a man in the control room monitoring the CCTV feeds, but the decision had been taken to keep the Regiment’s presence under wraps. If word were to get out that the SAS were working undercover in the Trafford Centre, then any jihadists planning to attack would switch to a different target.

Standing was all too aware of the difficulty they faced in protecting the tens of thousands of men, women and children thronging into the centre. There were two levels, with a total of two million square feet of shops and restaurants. The centre had almost 12,000 parking spaces, most of which were filled, and Standing’s best guess was that there were close to 25,000 people walking around. There were three undercover SAS troopers covering the whole place – two on the ground floor, with Standing alone on the upper floor. The chances of them picking out the jihadists from the thousands of regular shoppers was next to nil. That meant they were waiting for the attack, and would then have to react to it. Dozens could die within seconds, hundreds within minutes; a fact that Standing had made clear during their early morning briefing. It had been over Zoom, because the officer who was organising the patrols was in Wellington Barracks, a few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace. The captain said he understood Standing’s reservations, but that some cover was better than none. Standing hadn’t pressed the point, but in his mind it would have made more sense to put dozens of armed police in the malls, in uniform and with their guns on display. The jihadists wanted to attack unarmed civilians, so there was every likelihood they would pack up and go home if they knew they would be facing lethal force.

‘You should get the red one, it’ll go with your eyes,’ said Terry ‘Paddy’ Ireland in his right ear. Paddy had a rich Norfolk accent – the nickname had come from his surname rather than his country of birth. Standing looked over his shoulder and saw Ireland looking up at him from the ground floor, a big grin on his face. Ireland was tall and broad-shouldered, wearing a leather bomber jacket and impenetrable sunglasses. He was standing by a towering palm tree, one of many dotted around.

‘What’s he buying?’ asked Ricky ‘Mustard’ Coleman. Coleman was also on the ground floor but Standing couldn’t see him.

‘A Ted Baker shirt,’ said Ireland.

‘Only nonces wear Ted Baker,’ said Coleman. He joined Ireland and gave Standing the finger. He was in his mid-thirties but had only been in the Regiment for five years. His receding hair was covered with a Manchester United baseball cap. They both had multicoloured bandanas around their necks, ready to be pulled up if and when it kicked off. The last thing they wanted was to be filmed and put on Instagram or Facebook.

‘See now, that’s wrong on so many levels,’ said Standing. The earpiece picked up his voice and transmitted it through the radio tucked into the small of his back. Anyone who heard him talking would assume he was talking hands-free on his phone.

Coleman moved away from Ireland, heading towards the department store at the far end of the centre.

An Asian family walked past Standing, talking loudly in Pashto. There were two men, probably father and son, both dressed in the kameez-shalwar, the long tunic and baggy pants often worn by Muslims. With them was an old woman covered from head to foot in a black niqab, a woman in her twenties wearing a dark blue hijab and two little girls, who couldn’t have been more than six, with headscarves and long coats. They wouldn’t have looked out of place in an Afghan border town. Standing noticed that almost half the shoppers around him were Asian or black. As well as Pashto, he heard Arabic, Kurdish and Turkish, along with several African languages that he couldn’t identify.

Standing started strolling again, heading towards the main department store, which spanned both floors. He scanned left and right as he walked. Two youths with beards and skullcaps walked towards him, carrying backpacks – one Nike, the other North Face. There was no way of telling what the backpacks contained. They could have been filled with clothes, food or gym gear – or hunting knives, or explosives wired up to triggers. One of the youths realised that Standing was looking at him and he grinned. ‘All right, Bruv?’

Standing nodded. ‘Yeah, mate. All good.’

The youths walked by, arguing about who could bench press the most. Standing turned to watch them go. It was racial profiling, he knew. Two Asians carrying backpacks, so he was immediately on alert. But they were just a couple of regular guys, out shopping or on their way to the gym. That was what terrorism did; it made people suspect everyone. It made everything and everyone a threat. And it gave the government the excuse to mount more surveillance and restrict the freedoms that people once took for granted. Two guys, no threat to anyone, and Standing had been ready to pull his gun out within a split second. The youths stopped to greet a young girl in a headscarf, then the three of them continued to walk away.

Standing carried on walking alongside the shops, his hands in his pockets. He was constantly scanning the people around him, but avoiding eye contact as much as possible. It was tiring, physically and mentally, and he was on his fifth day. They started when the shopping centre opened and were there until it closed. They ate in the centre, used the bathrooms, and were on their feet pretty much all the time. The operation was open-ended, and the captain had said they would be in place until either something happened or the chatter died down.

‘You up for the pub tonight, Matt?’ asked Coleman in his ear.

‘Yeah, I don’t see why not,’ said Standing.

‘Definitely,’ said Ireland. ‘And can we have a steak tonight? I’m fed up with curry.’

‘Mate, Manchester has the best curries in the country,’ said Standing. The centre was just six miles from the Curry Mile, a stretch of Wilmslow Road in the south of the city, famous for its seventy-odd curry and kebab houses. They had been there the last three nights, and Standing would be happy to eat there every night they were in town.

‘Yeah, well I was on the toilet shitting fireballs this morning,’ said Ireland.

‘That’s the sign of a good curry,’ said Standing.

‘It’s a sign of salmonella, that’s what it is,’ said Coleman. ‘I’m with Paddy, let’s have steak tonight.’

‘I’ll go with the flow,’ said Standing.

A group of four Asian girls were walking towards him, so close together that he had to move to the side to walk around them.

‘Steak it is then,’ said Ireland.

‘Guys, I think I have a possible contact,’ said Coleman. ‘Two Asian males outside Boots. Oh shit.’

Almost immediately Standing heard shouts of ‘Allahu Akbar’ from down below.

‘On way,’ said Ireland in Standing’s ear.

There were more shouts from the ground floor, followed almost immediately by screams. Standing was already running full pelt. Boots was at the far end of the shopping centre, spread across both floors. It was opposite Marks and Spencer, which was also on both floors.

He heard two shots. A Glock. More screams. Then two more shots. Standing hoped that the rounds had hit their targets and there were two dead jihadists on the ground. People were turning to look at him as he ran, while others were looking over the guardrail trying to see what was happening on the ground floor.

The screams were louder now, and people were running towards the exits downstairs. There were more shots, further away this time.

‘Sitrep guys,’ said Standing as he ran.

‘Two tangoes down,’ said Coleman.

There were two more shots, again in the distance. ‘Two down here, I see two more just gone into a shop,’ said Ireland. ‘I’m following them in.’

There were more shots from down below.

Shoppers ahead of Standing were pushing towards the guardrail and peering down to the ground floor. He wanted to shout and warn them to stand back, but he knew it would be pointless. People always liked to look at violence, so long as it wasn’t happening to them.

Boots was ahead of him, to the left. Marks and Spencer to the right. Standing was still running, his feet slapping on the floor. More people were turning to look at him. Some were pointing their phones his way so he pulled his bandana up over his mouth and nose. Two women shrieked and backed away as he ran by.

The two guys with backpacks he’d looked at earlier had turned to look at him, and he saw the fear in their eyes.

As he ran by them he saw three Asian men ahead of him, gathered outside Marks and Spencer. They were standing around a red tennis bag. One of the men knelt down and unzipped the bag as the other two pulled off their jackets to reveal black sweatshirts with white Arabic writing on them. The kneeling man pulled out a machete and handed it to one of his companions. Then he pulled out two more machetes and they screamed ‘Allahu Akbar!’ in unison.

Standing slowed and pulled out his Glock. The three men fanned out, their machetes held high. Shoppers were screaming in panic, running in all directions. Some rushed inside Boots and Marks and Spencer, others ran by Standing. To his amazement, some teenagers were standing with their phones held up, filming what was happening.

An old man in a tweed jacket and flat cap was hobbling away with a walking stick. One of the attackers slashed at him with his blade, slicing between the man’s shoulder blades. ‘Allahu Akbar!’ the attacker screamed.

Standing fired twice in quick succession and both shots hit the jihadist in the chest. He staggered back, still holding his weapon, then slipped down against the Marks and Spencer window. The old man slumped to the floor, blood soaking into his jacket.

The other two attackers were running towards a group of girls in school uniform, shouting at the tops of their voices. They were side-on to Standing. He pulled the trigger and hit the first one in the head, so didn’t bother with a double-tap. He fired twice at the other man, one round hitting him in the shoulder and spinning him around, and the second hitting him in the throat. Bloody foam frothed around his neck and the machete clattered to the floor.

Dozens of people were screaming and running away from the bodies. Standing heard another two shots from the ground floor and headed into Boots. There was an escalator heading down. There were several people on the escalator coming up but the one going the other way was empty. Standing held his gun high as he took the stairs three at a time.

As he reached the bottom of the stairs a man in a grey suit staggered towards him, blood streaming from two slashes in his right arm. His mouth was working soundlessly and his eyes were blank. Standing moved around him and saw a teenager with a black-and-white scarf tied around his mouth, brandishing a samurai sword. Standing shot him twice in the chest.

He heard two shots off to his right and turned to see Coleman standing with his gun in both hands as a jihadist staggered back into a toothpaste display.

‘Where’s Paddy?’ asked Coleman.

Before Coleman could answer they heard two shots from outside. They sprinted out of the shop just as two masked men ran out of H&M waving blood-splattered machetes. Coleman took down the one on the right with a chest shot followed by a head shot, and Standing caught the one on the left with two shots to the heart.

Ireland emerged from the clothing store. He had his bandana pulled over his face. ‘All clear inside,’ he said. ‘What’s the story upstairs?’

‘Three tangoes down,’ said Standing. ‘Two civilians hurt.’

All three men were looking around, their guns at the ready. Shoppers were streaming away towards the far end of the centre, but there were still people filming on their phones.

‘What happened in H&M?’ asked Standing.

‘I took down two, plus the two you got,’ said Ireland.

‘You went in there after four of them?’ said Standing. ‘You after a medal?’

‘I followed two in, the other two came in after me. The two I got killed three people in there and injured another ten or so.’

‘Shit,’ said Standing. He looked around. There were no signs of the police or paramedics. He turned to a group of teenagers filming on their phones. ‘Will you stop filming and phone 999!’ he shouted. ‘Tell them we need ambulances now!’ He raised his free hand above his head and shouted at the shoppers still in the vicinity. ‘Are any of you nurses or doctors? We have people who need first aid, now! If you can help, please step forward.’. . .