Silent kill, p.4
Silent Kill, page 4
part #1 of Extreme Series
‘But they can’t have gone far,’ Jock countered. ‘We can hammer the road south. Keep up the chase. We’re getting close. We can’t throw in the towel. Not now.’
Foulbrood made a face like someone was removing a splinter from his anus. ‘It’s a lost cause, man. She’ll be dead in a matter of hours. That’s if she’s lucky. If not, the Nutting Squad will work on her for a few days. They’ll take her to a safehouse and torture the crap out of her, get her to give up what she knows. Then they’ll kill her. Either way, we’re too late.’
Jock shook his head for several seconds. He refused to accept defeat. ‘MI5 must have a list of known safehouses used by the Provos. There’s sod all around here but a few farms and villages. We can scour the terrain. Raid the safehouses.’
Foulbrood snorted. Shot him a cold look.
‘In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re on the Newry Road. There are just four kilometres of straight tarmac between us and Cullaville. If you’d bothered to study the map of the province, as you were supposed to do for your orientation course, then you’d know that the border is at Cullaville. That means Chance is now in the Republic. The situation is out of our hands.’
Jock simmered. He couldn’t leave an MI5 agent behind. That wasn’t what being an operator was about. He pushed away at Foulbrood, his anger mounting. ‘Why can’t we leg it across the border?’
Foulbrood stared at him with ill-concealed rage. ‘We can’t invade a sovereign country!’ he yelled, his eyes bulging. He looked ready to burst. Then he sighed, corked his anger and said, ‘I’m just as upset as you are about what’s happened. But what’s done is done. The best we can hope for is that Avery Chance suffers a quick death. Now get back in the car. That’s an order.’
But Jock stood his ground. ‘There’s an agent whose life is at risk, and you’re saying we have to turn around and piss off back to base? That’s all bollocks, if you ask me.’
‘Nobody asked you,’ Foulbrood replied sharply. ‘That’s why I’m the sergeant and you’re at the bottom of the food chain. Deal with it. This is the Regiment, for Christ’s sake. We have to play by the rules, man. If you’d studied the Regiment’s history you’d know about all the risks of active British servicemen crossing into Ireland.’
Manc glanced at Foulbrood admiringly. ‘You mean the Flagstaff Hill incident?’ he asked. ‘Were you there, Benson?’
That’s right, thought the driver. Suck-up!
‘Not personally,’ Foulbrood said, smiling. ‘But I knew the lads who were.’
‘What happened at Flagstaff Hill?’
The sergeant shot a withering look at Jock.
‘Flagstaff Hill was a diplomatic incident back in ’76. Eight Regiment lads were caught red-handed by the Garda sneaking across the border near Cornamucklagh. HMG had to pay a king’s ransom to release them. The incident caused huge embarrassment in Whitehall and very nearly trigged a full-blown political crisis. It put both the British and Irish governments in a tremendously difficult position – not that you seem to care about such things – and the last thing we need is another border incident.’
‘Then we’ll just have to make sure we don’t get nabbed.’
‘No. That’s a risk I cannot accept. Sorry. But we have no choice but to head back to base.’
‘I definitely agree with Benson,’ Manc chipped in. ‘It’s over, mate.’
‘But she’s one of ours.’
‘We’ve taken a big enough risk as it is, heading into Bandit Country. Many of the roads in Armagh are booby-trapped with Semtex, and the locals hate us like the Turks hate Christmas. We chased the signal here. We did everything we could.’
‘If it was one of us that’d been taken over the border, we wouldn’t just abandon them to some Provo wankers,’ Jock snarled at Manc, anger exploding in his chest. ‘Maybe you would. But you’re just a gutless, boot-licking prick.’
Manc was too stunned by Jock’s outburst to reply.
‘Back in the car, both of you,’ the sergeant thundered. ‘Now.’
Jock remained rooted to the spot for a few moments. Looking at the blood-spattered blouse and the transponder. He closed his eyes and remembered why he’d applied to try for the Regiment in the first place. Not to shack up with some girl whose dad owned a farm, or climb the greasy pole to a cosy promotion like Foulbrood. He’d joined because he had grown up on the wrong side of the tracks. His childhood had been spent watching his dad come home shit-faced after a day on the piss and beat the crap out of his mum. As a kid he’d trained hard daily. Boxing, swimming and lifting weights. Preparing for the day when he’d be tough enough to get even with him. The day he turned fourteen, he beat his dad to a bloody pulp. The old man never laid a hand on his mum again. Jock remembered the feeling of euphoria that had flooded through him that day. Of saving an innocent victim and putting down a tyrant. That was why he’d gone into Three Para. Why he’d trained hard to join the elite brotherhood of the Regiment.
And the way he saw it, a woman had been kidnapped and was in the hands of a gang of reckless sociopaths feared by every member of the Provos’ rank and file, with a reputation for torture and brutality that even veteran IRA men found hard to stomach. The thought of abandoning the young agent to them made his whole face twist in disgust.
It was only when he opened his eyes that he realized he’d clenched his hands into tight fists, his fingernails digging into his palms. He took a deep breath. Relaxed his face muscles. Nodded slowly at his mates.
‘Let’s go.’
Foulbrood breathed a sigh of relief. ‘We’ve finally knocked some sense into you.’
Jock sprinted past Foulbrood and Manc, towards the Audi. He dived behind the wheel, his pulse thumping in his neck. He twisted the key in the ignition and the engine roared into life. The two other Blades stood dumbly a couple of metres from the vehicle. They swapped a confused look as the driver reversed out of the lay-by into the road. He hit the brakes, the rear bumper lurching to a halt a cunt hair from one of the Sierras. He spotted Foulbrood foaming at the mouth, screaming at the top of his voice.
‘What the fuck are you doing? Stop right—’
Jock wrenched the steering wheel hard right so that the Audi was pointing south on the Newry Road, in the direction of Cullaville. Then he bulleted away from the rescue team. In the rear-view mirror the other men soon shrank to the size of cockroaches, though he could still make out the sergeant shaking his fist at the Audi.
Fuck him, thought Jock. Fuck ’em both.
He was heading for the border.
It took him seven and a half minutes to reach Cullaville. The village was two hundred metres from the border. He rocketed past the local army barracks, its dark observation towers shooting out of the ground to his left and right. The country road wound this way and that before it became a rough dirt track that snaked its way to the border. There was nowhere to cross, Jock realized grimly. Each side of the track was a wooden fence parallel to the track. Running off at right angles to this was a water-filled ditch some fifteen metres wide with a gently rising embankment on either side. Beyond that were fields. In the middle of the track itself stood steel bollards, blocking the way. Three Land Rovers were parked to the right of the track. To the left he noticed the white Ford Transit. The Nutting Squad had burned it. Coal-black smoke frothed out of the twisted metal carcass, oozing into a blacker night.
Fifty metres from the border, the comms unit sparked into life.
‘Two One Zulu, turn around immediately. Over,’ the signaller broadcast.
Jock said nothing. Thirty metres to the border. From the comms came a series of thuds and crackles, and then another voice blasted down the line.
‘Two One Zulu, this is the watchkeeper.’ The voice belonged to a fellow Scot. ‘You’re approaching the border. Turn around this minute before you land us all in the shit. Over.’
‘You’re a Scottish fella?’ Jock asked.
‘Aye, Adam Lockie, Falkirk born and bred,’ the watchkeeper replied proudly. ‘Joined the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders straight out of Falkirk High School. Started in the infantry, trained up to be a signaller.’
‘Why’d you join the army, Lockie?’
There was a pause as the watchkeeper thought for a moment. ‘I’m an army son. My ma worked in the canteen at Aldershot. She lost a leg when the Provos bombed the officers’ mess in ’72.’
‘Then you know what those wankers are capable of.’
Silence.
‘Listen carefully,’ Jock went on. ‘There’s an MI5 agent who’s about to get nutted and I’m not going to abandon her. Tell me to turn around all you want. You’re wasting your breath. Over.’
The watchkeeper went quiet for a moment. Twenty metres from the border now. Half a dozen green army squaddies debussed from the Landies and started waving at the driver, gesturing for him to pull over. Jock dropped down to a purring thirty, and that seemed to convince the squaddies that he was doing as he was told.
‘Carry over the border and the CO will RTU your arse. Over,’ said the watchkeeper.
‘Forget about the CO. The Provos got your own mother, now you want to pretend that you’re OK with leaving our agent to that scum? Come on, lad. One Scot to another. Help us out and tell me where I can find the target.’
Another blast of frustration crackled down the line. The watchkeeper wrestling with his conscience. Finally the noise died out, and Lockie came back on. ‘We had a confirmed sighting of a Mercedes-Benz T1 truck heading south on R179, registration O5-D-70866.’
‘Where it’s going?’
Ten metres to the border. The bollards loomed across the track.
The watchkeeper said, ‘There’s only one property anywhere near Cullaville. A farm owned by Tom Cleary. Guy’s a known Provo sympathizer. We’ve reason to believe the PIRA uses Cleary’s farm as a smuggling base. Shipping cut-price diesel and fags across the border. A quid gets ten says the Nutting Squad have taken the target there.’
‘Give us the coordinates.’
‘Seven-one-two-three-nine-two-five. Over.’
Jock repeated the coordinates to verify them.
‘Roger that.’ A pause. ‘Two One Zulu?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Good luck.’
‘Roger that. Over and out.’
‘Out,’ said the watchkeeper.
The radio went silent as the comms cut out. Jock felt his neck muscles stiffen as he approached the bollards. Steering to the right of them, he floored it towards the fence. Eight metres. Now six metres. Four. Two. One.
Bang!
The Audi rammed the fence at seventy, the wooden posts cracking as it burst through and pitched down into the ditch. The car shook like a raging bull. Jock felt his guts slam-dunk into the pit of his stomach. The Audi dipped down then levelled out, cutting across the shallow water, mud splattering the windscreen. The Audi had a five-cylinder engine delivering over 300 bhp, specially rigged for Regiment use. Jock’s forearms were trembling with the violent shuddering of the engine. He gripped the wheel tightly as the car ploughed through the water.
Six seconds later he was surging up the far embankment. The grinding and shuddering stopped, and the engine cleared its throat. The embankment levelled out to become a narrow track leading across the fields. Passing over a stone bridge, Jock joined a small metalled road. As he plunged deeper into the borderlands, signs pointed out villages with folklorish names: Blackstaff and Ardkirk, Drumgoose and Kilmurry. The signal on the secure comms unit died.
No going back now, he thought.
He raced towards the farmhouse.
Six
2229 hours.
Chance heard the cold splash of puddles and the crunching of gravel as the truck came to a halt. But she couldn’t see anything. She was crouched in the back, naked and cold, fear almost voiding her bowels. Kicker lay unconscious by her feet. Her anxiety had been increasing with every minute she’d been cooped up in the truck. She had asked Stilts where they were taking her. He’d told her to shut her dirty mouth. And the dread kept on piling on her chest, like rocks, until she couldn’t breathe. Not knowing where they were taking her – that was the worst part. She was almost relieved when Stilts said, ‘We’re here.’
Skinny pulled her up, then booted her out onto the ground. It was like tumbling into an abyss. She landed on all fours and caught her breath, wondering where they were. Chance was a city girl, unfamiliar with the impermeable darkness that shrouded the country at night, and she struggled to get her bearings. She was aware of something cold and wet beneath her, sticky against her bare knees and palms. She squinted at the ground. Mud glistened faintly, a sea of it all around her. The air was cold and still, like her flesh was being pressed against a plate of glass.
A thick stench of manure hung in the air. Stilts hauled Chance to her feet. Slowly she began to discern shapes around her. They had debussed from a Mercedes-Benz T1 truck with a logo on the side that read, ‘Cleary’s Wholesale Produce’. They had parked at the end of a track that led from the main road, through a battered wooden gate, to a sprawling old farmhouse. This was a crumbling red-brick building with a big chimney, set behind an area of overgrown grass.
‘This way,’ said Stilts, prodding her at gunpoint down the track.
They walked ten metres beyond the farmhouse. A small tractor was parked beside a gravel path leading from the back of the house, next to a row of farm buildings. Directly in front of Chance stood a barn with bales of hay to the left of it. To her nine o’clock she saw a slurry pit from which a foul stench emanated. A bright-yellow hazard sign warned off intruders.
Skinny broke the silence. ‘What if the peelers find something on the van, Bill?’
Stilts grunted. ‘Keep saying my name and they’ll find something all right. Your thick head on a fucking stake.’
‘But—’
‘We burned the van. They won’t find a thing. Once we’re through with this slag, there won’t be a thing left of her either. Now stop shitting bricks. Costello sees you acting like that, he’ll blow his bloody top.’
Skinny muttered as Stilts shoved Chance towards the barn with the tip of his AK-47. She stumbled along, a numb feeling in her limbs, Stilts’s words echoing in her head: ‘. . . there won’t be a thing left of her.’ She saw it then. The awful truth. They were going to kill her. She had known it deep down, but now Stilts had given it voice. Made it real. She neared the barn, the sodden ground squelching under her bare feet, her toes now purple from the cold. She glanced forlornly back at the truck. Pictured Kicker sprawled inside, not moving. A bundle of clothes and battered flesh. Hearing a loud creaking, she swung her eyes forward. Skinny was opening one of the barn’s double doors, and Stilts thrust her inside.
The floor was strewn with hay, warm and dry. Beneath the high, beamed roof she spotted a hay loft. The air smelled of soil, musty and rich. Like chewing on peat. Silos loaded with fermented grain to her left and to her right a tack room full of bridles and saddles. Then Chance looked straight ahead. Saw a figure standing beside an industrial meat-mincing machine and felt her breath constrict in her slender throat.
The man at the machine was wearing a Red Sox baseball cap.
Oh, shit, she thought.
It was the man from outside the social club in Andersonstown.
Stilts and Skinny elbowed Chance towards a chair opposite Red Sox. Pushed her down into the chair and used plasticuffs to secure her arms behind her back and her ankles to the chair’s legs. Chance felt her cheeks burning, sweat boiling on her forehead. She watched Red Sox carefully as he paced around the machine, the baseball cap shading his face from the glare of the lightbulb overhead. He turned to Chance, removed the cap and slicked an intricately tattooed hand through his hair. She got a good look at his face, and her heart did a somersault.
Victor Costello.
The chief of the Nutting Squad looked nothing like he did in the surveillance snaps Chance had seen, the ones circulated by Five in internal field reports. In those long-range black-and-white shots he was a slight and pale presence, like a ghost captured on camera in one of those supernatural magazines. But it was him all right. In the flesh he loomed much larger. He had an angular frame, and his skin was pulled tight across his cheekbones, making his features resemble a latex mask. His eyes were dead, not so much evil as simply not there. He wore a black T-shirt despite the cold. His green bomber jacket was slung over another chair.
Costello cocked his chin at Chance, a sly grin playing across his marbled face. All his teeth were golden, she noticed, the legacy of an ambush by UDA hitmen. The story came back to her now. How the UDA guys had kidnapped him and extracted his teeth one by one. Their fatal mistake had been to leave Costello still breathing. He had exacted a brutal revenge. A month later the hitmen were discovered in an industrial estate, their hands nailed to their arse cheeks and their penises sewn into their mouths.
Stilts and Skinny left the barn. Costello watched them go before turning back to Chance. He gazed at her naked figure from head to toe. The way he screwed up his face, she could tell he didn’t like the look of her. There was something in his eyes that made her bones shiver.
‘You know who I am, right?’ Costello asked. His voice was bare and flat. Like someone had stripped it for parts.
‘Victor Costello,’ the agent whispered. ‘The Man with the Golden Grin.’
That seemed to amuse Costello. That she knew his nickname. He snorted a laugh from his nostrils, then bent down beside Chance, placing his lips close to the smooth skin of her neck.
‘You smell something terrible, love. I bet your cunt smells shit and all.’
Chance turned away.
‘Look at me,’ Costello said.
She was going to die. She hated Costello for it and hurt him the only way she could. ‘I would, but the glare from your teeth is blinding me.’
