The angry sea, p.39
The Angry Sea, page 39
Not to mention, it amused him greatly to while away an hour or two in a street named for Guardian Angels, a slaughterman strolling among the unsuspecting kuffar sheep, who thought they were safe from men like him.
And the €20 set menu was very good.
Tonight he’d had cigales de mer and spaghetti alle vongole, served by a pretty young waitress who had flirted with him shamelessly.
Next week he would get her mobile phone number: a man had to have some entertainments, and it was permitted to misbehave in service of the greater cause. He hated these filthy Western whores, and taking them and ruining them was one of life’s great joys.
As he left the restaurant, and headed out into the narrow streets of the medieval Tuscan town, his mind was on a meeting he was due to have in Paris some time in the next month.
Three brothers from Syria were due to arrive, to plan and carry out an attack on the Louvre, and the tourists who filled it to gawp at its unholy pictures, and he was to serve as their armourer.
He had the contacts in Eastern Europe, so getting the weapons would be easy.
What had happened in Libya all those months ago had been unfortunate, but – what was the phrase the British used?
It was time to get back on the horse.
He paused at the junction with Via Sant’Andrea, lit a Marlboro Light, and watched two young women in short skirts and tight silk blouses wiggle towards him.
The taller of the two smiled at him, and he smiled back.
He felt nothing in his heart for her but hatred.
He pulled deep on the cigarette and turned down Via Sant’Andrea.
He walked slowly on into Via Buia, hemmed in by fading plaster walls dotted with jewellery stores, boutiques and opticians’ shops with windows full of €300 frames by Gucci and Ted Baker.
Limping slightly, he felt the familiar ache in his leg, where that shell fragment had taken a chunk out of his calf and broken his tibia and fibula at Mazar-e Sharif.
It was a wound from many years ago which served both to remind him of the past and to strengthen his commitment to the future.
He had driven all thought of his ignominious escape from the compound at Houn from his mind.
On still, into Piazza del Salvatore, where young drinkers sat under red parasols and stared at the marble statue of a bare-breasted woman, standing over a stone bathtub into which water spouted from a lion’s mouth.
Near the second table of drinkers, he finished his Marlboro Light.
‘Scusami,’ he said, flashing them his most charming smile, and leaning over to grind the butt out in an ashtray.
‘Prego,’ said one of them, a young woman.
He smiled again, and moved on, enjoying the warm evening air, down into Via Santa Giustina, where he had rented an apartment in an old townhouse.
Two policemen were wandering idly in the opposite direction, deep in conversation.
The dolts ignored him as he passed them, the wolf moving unseen amongst their flock.
A few steps on, he stopped, in front of a large brown door.
From habit more than anything, he paused and looked around himself, for signs that he had been noticed – men standing in the shadows, cars parked in odd places.
But he saw none of this, and he smiled to himself.
He took a small set of keys out of the pocket of his white Armani jeans, turned one of them in the lock, and pushed the door open.
Inside, the cool hallway smelled musty.
He climbed the grey marble steps to the first floor and unlocked the door to his apartment.
Whistling tunelessly to himself, he pushed open the door and paused for a moment.
He listened for any noise from within and then, happy that all was as it should be, he walked inside.
He walked to the little desk against one wall of the yellow-painted living room, put his iPhone and keys on the wooden top, and draped his burgundy Ermenegildo Zegna leather jacket over the back of the old chair.
Sat at the desk, flipped open his laptop, and entered his lengthy password.
And then…
Was that a noise?
He stopped, hands poised over the keyboard, head cocked to one side.
Listening.
No, nothing.
He turned.
No-one there.
Getting paranoid, Argun.
He opened an encrypted email account.
Just check for any update from the Syrians.
As he waited for the email to load, he walked into the kitchen for a drink of water.
The glass chinked, the tap hissed.
He raised it to his mouth, and then he froze.
Something, some ancient animal instinct, told him that he was not alone.
The hairs on the back of his neck vibrating, he turned.
In the doorway stood a man in dark clothes.
Big man, strongly built, scar on his chin.
Scar like an inverted crescent moon.
Latex gloves on his hands.
Pointing something at him.
Smiling.
Shishani realised what it was only as the 9mm round from the Welrod took him in the Adam’s apple.
The glass shattered as he fell to the floor, clutching his ruptured throat and drowning in his own hot blood.
He began thrashing around on the floor, his eyes wide and terrified.
John Carr closed the distance quickly, rechambering a round as he moved.
For a moment, he considered putting the Chechen down like an injured dog, but then an image came to him: children, murdered on a Spanish beach, on the orders of this fucker.
So instead he held the Welrod by his side and stood on the dying man’s ankles, to stop him kicking around and making a noise.
It took Argun Shishani ninety seconds to lapse into unconsciousness, and all the time he stared up in horror at John Carr, who smiled back down at him.
When the light had gone from the terrorist’s eyes, Carr recovered his daysack, took the Welrod apart and placed it inside.
Then he began what would, in his old life, have been called a Sensitive Site Exploitation, to provide Justin Nicholls with as much information as possible from the flat.
He quickly searched the bedside table and removed the three passports – British, French and Italian – and put them in the daysack.
In a bag under the bed he found two tight bundles of US dollars – twenty grand, easy, and all used notes.
Those went straight into his inside pocket: fuck handing that over, just so that the government could piss it up the wall.
Then he went back to the living room and looked at the laptop.
Standard Dell running MS Windows, which surprised him.
Still on, still connected.
The penny-sized black disc which he’d applied to the underside of the laptop earlier – a combined microprocessor and sensor – would have sucked up all Shishani’s keystrokes, so that his password was now known.
But to be on the safe side, he inserted a USB stick into one of the ports and followed Nicholls’ directions.
While he was downloading the contents of the computer, he opened up the Control Panel and – as a further countermeasure – switched the ‘Sleep’ option to ‘Never’.
The download finished, he ejected the USB stick and slipped it into the inside pocket of his black leather bomber jacket.
Then he placed the laptop in the daysack, fully opened out.
He spent the next ten minutes making as thorough a search of the apartment as he could, locating and bagging the router, a couple of other mobile phones, and numerous documents.
He couldn’t believe how sloppy the bastard had been.
‘All out in the open,’ he murmured, to the unhearing Shishani, as he went through the kitchen cupboards. ‘Too fucking comfortable, mate, and now look at you.’ He shook his head. ‘Let that be a lesson, you soft twat.’
Next he searched the dead man, and removed his wallet.
It contained cash, credit cards and receipts.
‘Excellent,’ said Carr.
He took a small vial from his pocket, and opened it. The cap had an integral swab-stick, which he used to collect a decent amount of Shishani’s blood, for DNA analysis.
He screwed the lid back on and chucked the vial into the daysack.
Then he took out the device Nicholls had given him and placed the Chechen’s fingers onto the screen, scanning them in turn.
Finally, Carr picked up Shishani’s iPhone.
It was locked, so he knelt down next to the dead man and pressed the lifeless, still-warm thumb of his left hand onto the unlock button.
It was a long-shot, but any man stupid – or arrogant – enough to eat in the same place every Friday night thought that he was bulletproof, metaphorically-speaking, so…
Nothing.
Carr did the same with the right thumb.
The phone woke up.
Carr chuckled and shook his head.
‘Seriously?’ he said, under his breath.
He checked the iPhone’s battery – 92%, more than enough that it wouldn’t die on the journey ahead of him – and went into Settings, where he switched the ‘Auto lock’ setting to ‘Never’, and pocketed it.
Carr took a final look around, his eyes sweeping everywhere, in every room.
Nothing.
It was a while since he’d performed an SSE, but he was confident he’d got everything there was to get.
Satisfied, he zipped up the bag, picked it up and walked to the flat door.
The spyhole told him that the hallway was empty, so he pulled on the motorcycle helmet, hefted the daysack onto his back, and left, unhurriedly, pulling his bike gloves on over the latex ones as he went.
In the street below, the warm night air on his face, he smiled.
‘We have your man with the dark eyes at an address in Tuscany,’ Nicholls had told him, twenty-four hours earlier. ‘Do you fancy it?’
There was only one answer to that question.
Carr was in deep now, deeper than he’d ever though he’d be.
But bringing men like Argun Shishani before the courts, so that expensive lawyers could argue about his punishment before the British taxpayer paid for a bed and three square meals a day for the rest of his life – the time for messing around with shit like that was over.
Carr turned left out of the exterior door, and walked along the centuries-old blue-grey cobbles, careful to keep his pace measured and his demeanour relaxed. There was almost no CCTV coverage in the old part of town – which was obviously why Shishani himself had chosen the location – but there was no sense in attracting any undue attention.
At the end of Via Santa Giustina he turned left into Via Burlamacchi, and twenty yards further on he came to his motorcycle, a red, five-year-old Honda CBR600RR, chosen because it was the most common colour of the most common bike in Italy.
Casually, like a guy heading home after a day at work, he swung a denim-clad leg over the seat, and fired it up.
Carefully sticking to the speed limit, he pottered his way out of Lucca, never looking back.
Even when he hit the Strada Statale 12, he fought the desire to open the throttle, and instead kept to a steady 130kph.
As he rode, he examined himself mentally: he felt cool, and good, and his heartbeat was only slightly elevated.
Less than forty-five minutes after he had put Argun Shishani out of the world’s misery, he arrived in the outskirts of Pisa.
Almost immediately, he turned left off the SS12 onto Via A. Paparelli.
He pulled off the road into a car-park and parked the Honda in the same motorcycle bay from which he had collected it earlier that day.
He’d been told to clip the helmet and gloves to the bike, but leaving his DNA attached to his getaway vehicle seemed to him like a very fucking stupid idea, however remote the chances of the Italian police putting two and two together, so he ignored that instruction and walked away from the bike without a backward glance.
A mile on, he stuffed the motorcycle helmet deep down under the garbage in a communal dumpster. A mile further, and he hit the Arno.
He walked onto the Ponte della Fortezza, and, halfway across he stopped, leaned on the railings, and admired the view for a moment or two.
Then, very casually, he dropped the bike gloves into the river.
It was flowing quickly, after a couple of days of unseasonal rain over the Apennines to the east, and they slid straight under the bubbling surface.
Without looking back, he walked on, turned right on the far bank, and strolled on for a few hundred yards, before crossing back over on the Ponte di Mezzo.
A minute or so later, he reached a restaurant with a red awning and a sign which said Il Dado del Lumière.
There were three grey-green tables outside. Two were occupied by young couples and singles. At the third, two men were drinking coffee – a stocky blond guy in his late twenties, and an older man, who had greying, thinning hair cropped very close, and a pair of Bollé shades pushed up over his forehead.
Carr pulled off the daysack and put it on the ground next to the only empty chair.
He unzipped his leather jacket, and sat down.
The guy with the cropped hair leaned forwards.
‘That seat is taken, I’m afraid,’ he said, in an upper-class English drawl that irritated Carr immediately.
‘Aye,’ said Carr. ‘By me, pal.’
The man smiled. ‘May I ask your name?’
‘You can ask it,’ said Carr, ‘but if you don’t know it already, you don’t need to know it. And, by the way, do Six deliberately train you fuckers to stand out like tits on a bull?’
‘You seem very much as described,’ said the man, with a faint smile. ‘My name is Miles Hanson. I’m based in Rome, but Justin Nicholls asked me to pop down here and see a man about a dog.’
‘Right,’ said Carr.
‘Job done?’ said Hanson. ‘Whatever it was.’
‘Job done,’ said Carr.
‘My instructions are to take that bag and get it back to the UK ASAP, so, if you don’t mind, my young colleague here…?’
‘Be my guest,’ said Carr. ‘You’ll want these, too.’
He took the USB stick and iPhone from the pocket of his jacket, and put them on the table.
‘Excellent,’ said Hanson.
The blond guy next to him immediately picked up the bag, the phone, and the memory stick, and walked away without speaking.
Miles Hanson finished his coffee.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘much as I’d like to sit here and chew the fat, my secondary instructions are to get you up to Rome, so that you can catch the first flight home tomorrow morning for a debrief.’
‘Is that so?’ said Carr.
He rubbed his scarred chin and smiled at a girl at the table behind Hanson’s head.
She was dark-haired, with full lips and a fuller figure, which was barely contained in a low-cut black dress, and now she smiled at him briefly before looking shyly away.
He turned to Miles Hanson.
‘Nah,’ he said. ‘I’m in no rush. You toddle off, pal. I’m going to stick around, have something to eat, and see the sights.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to my wife who keeps me on the straight and narrow, your counsel is invaluable.
Thanks also to my agent Jonathan Lloyd and all the team at Curtis Brown for their support and guidance, and to all at HarperCollins for their hard work and dedication.
Finally thanks to my friends and former comrades from the Parachute Regiment and 22nd Special Air Service who have helped me along the way, no names but you all know who you are. It’s not the critic who counts…
Read on for an extract from the first in the gripping John Carr series,
Once a Pilgrim
‘You couldn’t make it up. Brilliant’
Jeffery Archer
1.
SERGEANT MAJOR John Carr stood in the low light, fighting unfamiliar emotions and watching his blokes go through their final equipment checks.
Even at this hour, the air was brutally hot and humid, and it stank of open sewers, old garbage fires, and diesel fumes from the idling vehicles.
Foul in his nostrils as it was, he inhaled deeply: to Carr, it smelled like nothing on earth. He was going to miss it.
Tonight would see yet another operation against yet another high value target – this one a man codenamed ‘Joker’.
Joker: Sufyan bin Ahmed, a former colonel in Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard and now the leader of The Obedient Servants, a vicious Al Qaeda-in-Iraq cell responsible for multiple atrocities and deaths.
Another night, another nasty bastard.
The men of 22 SAS and Task Force Dagger had been at this for a long time now, year after year spent hunting and killing the murderous jihadists who had turned Iraq into a charnel house, slick with blood. Most of the action took place close enough to smell the other man’s breath, and sweat, and fear, in dark, dank rooms in backstreet houses and compounds, where the enemy holed up to make his stand.
With this tour drawing to its end, Carr’s Squadron had been lucky, with only a couple of soldiers wounded and none killed. They were facing a foe who prayed for his own, glorious death, and that presented a very particular challenge. But it was one which the men from Hereford were more than equipped to meet: their phenomenal skill at close-quarter battle, and their proficiency in the art of room combat, had changed the course of the campaign, and the flow of volunteers was drying up. The streets of the Iraqi capital might be teeming with those who loudly proclaimed their desire for martyrdom; few actually stepped up.
Squadron Quarter Master Sergeant Geordie Skelton wandered over, one giant fist wrapped around a hot brew, despite the thirty-five degree heat.
He and John Carr had passed Selection together, and had gone on to serve in every theatre to which the SAS had been committed during the nineteen years they had spent at the tip of the spear. Carr would have stepped through the gates of hell with Geordie by his side, and the feeling was mutual.
‘What’s on your mind, buddy?’ said Skelton, slurping tea.
‘Getting out,’ said Carr, quietly. Absent-mindedly, he rubbed his chin, rough with stubble, and felt the livid, crescent moon scar under his lower lip. A few yards away, a couple of young troopers cracked up at something a third had said. He envied them: they had years of service ahead of them. ‘Knowing I’ll never do this again,’ he said. ‘Knowing it’s all over.’
