Authors: James Barrington
The
souk
filled in an instant with the shattering blast, grotesquely magnified by the enclosed space it occupied. The detonation was followed immediately by a continuing cacophony as
timber, masonry, glass and stone tumbled to the ground. An explosion of dust and debris erupted out of the Bab Al-Nasr entrance, scattering the traders and shoppers gathered outside.
When the last sliver of glass had smashed on to the ground and the final pieces of wood and stone had bounced to a standstill, a blessed moment of silence fell. For the briefest of instants the
city seemed to hold its breath. Then the screams and wails began, the howls of agony from those who had survived the detonation but were lying, stunned and torn and bleeding, inside what was left
of the market.
And, as a counterpoint to the escalating volume of vocal agony from within the
souk
, the yelling and shouting of people outside rose steadily to a crescendo and, moments later, the first
of the sirens could be heard in the distance.
Standing in the airport car park, John Petrucci spun round when he heard the thump of the explosion and the atonic wailing of sirens a matter of seconds afterwards. He and
O’Hagan had furtively removed their
gellabbiyas
to reveal ordinary Western business suits, and were now hauling their carry-on bags from the back of the Toyota.
‘That sounded like our boy,’ Petrucci said, slamming the boot closed.
‘Sure did,’ Alex O’Hagan nodded. ‘Welcome to the world of the
shuhada
.’
Sunday
Northern slopes of Mynydd Eppynt, Powys
Paul Richter peered cautiously over the barrel of the Heckler & Koch MP5, and realized that this time they were going to find him.
In front of him the hillside sloped gently away from his observation point, but the target – a small whitewashed farmhouse on the far side of the field – was now virtually invisible
through grey curtains of drizzle. The same drizzle that had, Richter reflected with no undue sense of surprise, been falling without noticeable pause for the previous four days. And he knew that
for a fact because he had been lying in the same OP throughout the entire period.
He was cold, wet, stiff, aching, hungry, thirsty, tired and moderately pissed-off, and not for the first time he wondered just what the hell had possessed him to agree to Simpson’s
suggestion that he get out of London for a few days. Actually, leaving London itself hadn’t been that bad an idea, but going to Hereford to play war games with the SAS probably wasn’t
one of Richter’s better decisions.
The only good thing so far, from a professional point of view, was that his OP had remained undetected. The briefing had been vague enough to allow him considerable latitude in choosing its
location, so he’d avoided the obvious and picked a spot almost in the centre of the meadow itself, situated well away from the target. That had required a lot of extra spade-work, done
entirely under cover of darkness during the first night, to ensure that his OP remained as invisible as possible.
And it had succeeded, because eight times he’d seen patrols cover the ground in front of him, concentrating on areas closer to the farmhouse, and each time they’d failed to get
within fifty yards of where he lay hidden. On the last two occasions there’d been a clear sense of urgency in their searching, and he’d even heard shouting from the NCO in charge, the
words whipped away by the constant wind.
But finally it looked like his luck had changed, and only six hours before ENDEX – the end of the exercise. A team of eight SAS troopers had now begun a slow and thorough sweep of the
entire field, starting from the farmhouse itself and working their way, in line abreast, up the hill towards him. At least, he reflected, tucking the binoculars into a pocket on his DPM camouflage
jacket, colloquially known as a ‘you-can’t-see-me-suit’, he’d be able to get some hot food and drink inside him once he got back to Hereford, and take a crap somewhere other
than into a sheet of cling-film.
These troopers were shouting to each other, or at least that’s what it sounded like, which puzzled Richter, as it had done previously. Usually any group of soldiers, whether regular army
or special forces, will take extreme care to make as little sound as possible. Noise attracts attention, and that is the last thing any patrol wants.
It was only when the first of them got to within twenty yards of his OP that he finally realized what they were calling. It was a single four-word sentence, repeated over and over again –
‘Safeguard. Commander Richter. Safeguard.’
The moment he could hear the words clearly, Richter stood up, tossing aside the cam-netting and the greenery he’d painstakingly woven into it so that it would merge seamlessly with the
scrubby grass and stunted bushes dotted around him. ‘Safeguard’ is the over-ride code-word signalling the termination of any exercise or activity, for external or safety reasons or when
directed by a higher authority.
The moment he stood up, the approaching men stopped, swinging their weapons to cover him as they looked across the rutted ground. The corporal reached him first, glanced down at the hollow that
Richter had called home for the previous ninety-odd hours, and nodded a grudging approval. Officers – or ‘Ruperts’ as they were known within the Regiment – were generally
held in very low regard by the other ranks, and scruffy, insubordinate ex-Royal Navy officers like Richter didn’t rate at all. To have received any kind of an acknowledgement from the NCO was
high praise indeed.
‘Thank fuck for that,’ the corporal said, grinning at him. ‘We’ve been looking for you for two days, and you’re in deep shit. Your section called. They want you
back in London immediately, and that’s “immediately” as in just over forty-eight hours ago.’
Manama, Bahrain
He was neither the best nor most reliable of witnesses, because of the money, but the story the middle-aged Filipino told was so intriguing that Tariq Mazen immediately
decided to investigate it further.
His new informant worked as a cleaner in the hospital on Al-Sulmaniya Avenue. He’d introduced himself as ‘Karim’, though it was an obvious alias. Mazen understood his caution:
if word of what he was doing reached the wrong ears, his informant could find his life expectancy reduced to a matter of days or even hours. And there was no point in checking him out, anyway
– his value was the information he was offering, not his real identity.
The story he told was simple enough. Three days earlier a patient had arrived at Al-Sulmaniya, which was hardly news in itself, but this man had received somewhat unusual treatment. Karim
happened to be cleaning the corridor behind the admissions unit when this man and his entourage had appeared. The doctor leading the group had seen the Filipino as soon as he turned the corner and
had hurried forward, ordering Karim into a side room.
The storeroom door had a narrow vertical window, and most of his view was blocked by the doctor’s white coat but, as the surgeon finally stepped away from the door, for a bare second or
two Karim had an unobstructed view of the patient walking slowly past.
‘Are you sure it was him?’ Tariq Mazen asked, for the fourth time.
‘No, I’m not. I told you – I saw him for just a moment, and he was walking away from me.’
‘So you saw only his profile? Only the side of his face?’
‘Yes.’ The Filipino nodded. ‘And it was grey, like in all the pictures. And his beard has streaks, too. It’s very distinctive, and his face is well known.’
That was something of an understatement. Hardly a week went by without that man’s picture appearing somewhere, particularly in the Middle Eastern newspapers.
Karim had come to Mazen’s attention by a somewhat circuitous route. Mazen himself was a member of the Special Intelligence Service – equivalent to Bahrain’s secret police force
– and ran a string of informants in and around Manama. Two of them had heard whispers about a reclusive sheikh arriving in Bahrain for medical treatment. This interested Mazen because, like
all policemen, secret or otherwise, he was always keen to discover what was happening on his ‘patch’, and particularly the identity of any significant new arrival.
His open-source check showed that a certain ‘Sheikh Rashid’ and his advisers had recently flown to Bahrain in an executive jet. Having dealt with this air-charter company before,
Mazen knew that its management would never divulge the real identity of any of its clients without a court order, and possibly not even then. Predictably, his carefully phrased and recorded
telephone conversation with the Al-Sulmaniya Hospital administrator had proved fruitless.
But then one of his informants had overheard a Filipino talking in a restaurant in the Al-Adliya district about the man he’d seen, and had approached him. As a result, the following day
Karim had been waiting nervously outside the Al-Hilal bookshop on Tujjaar when Mazen drove up.
‘Remind me – how was he dressed?’ He’d asked this question before, but he would cover the same ground as often as he thought useful, until he was certain that he’d
extracted everything the witness could recall.
‘I already told you,’ Karim sighed, looking at the stocky Arab in the driving seat and wondering how many more times he would have to repeat himself. ‘A
gellabbiya
and
kaffiyeh
.’
‘Do you know where he is in the hospital now?’
Karim smiled with a kind of weary triumph. ‘Yes. One of the nurses told me. He’s on the third floor, where they send people with kidney trouble.’
The significance of the treatment the mysterious ‘sheikh’ might be receiving was not lost on Mazen, though he was still unconvinced. He would have to confirm the patient’s
identity, and maybe talk to one of the Western embassies – preferably the British. Despite the significant American influence in Bahrain – the US Navy has a major base at Al-Jufayr
– Mazen was not over-fond of the Yanks. The British, he thought, might handle things rather more discreetly.
‘And if it
is
him?’ Karim asked. ‘There’s a big reward?’
Mazen looked at the shabbily dressed Filipino and smiled. ‘If you
are
right, my friend,’ he replied, ‘then you’d better think about getting out of Bahrain and
finding yourself a new name and somewhere else to live, because people you
really
don’t want to meet will certainly come looking for you. But at least,’ he added,
‘you’ll have enough money to do so in comfort.’
Hammersmith, London
Paul Richter walked into Richard Simpson’s office and sat down, uninvited, in front of the desk. His boss – short, slim, pinkish, balding, generally
bad-tempered and fastidious in all things – was reading a red file.
Richter himself wasn’t in the best of tempers. Although the experience of lying in a damp hole for four days, clutching a sub-machine-gun loaded with blanks and watching a ramshackle Welsh
farm cottage that appeared to have been sensibly deserted by its owner, was hardly the stuff of dreams, he had been seriously looking forward to ENDEX. Though a lifelong teetotaller, Richter had
always enjoyed the camaraderie of a wardroom or officers’ mess, and Hereford was something special.
But instead of enjoying a long soak in a hot bath, a decent meal and then a pleasant evening in the mess, he’d been forced to dump all his gear, grab a quick shower, and drive straight
back to London.
The only redeeming feature of the day had been the drive, and only because it had finally stopped raining and Richter had gone up to Hereford in his favourite toy. His first love had always been
motorcycles, and he hadn’t even owned a car for three or four years, simply because it was so much easier to get around London on two wheels rather than four. So it was hardly surprising that
when he’d finally decided to buy a car, what he’d chosen was more or less a four-wheeled motorbike.
It was a jet-black Westfield Sport 2000, a spiritual descendant of the original Lotus 7. Two seats, four wheels, a long bonnet covering a two-litre engine, rudimentary weather-proofing and a
very basic interior, but with about the same power-to-weight ratio as a Saturn Five rocket. Or at least that was what it felt like to Richter. It was an animal. It could out-drag just about any
alleged ‘supercar’ on the road, irrespective of make, model and price, and it had cost him about the same as a cheap family box on wheels. He simply adored it.
The journey back to London had been quick – very quick, as the traffic police officer indignantly pointed out to Richter when he finally caught up with him at a set of road works on the
A5, south of Weedon Bec. Richter had listened politely, waited until the man had finished, then produced a small leather folder containing a laminated exemption card that he flipped open in front
of the officer’s face. It was basically a ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ permit issued to SIS – and by extension Foreign Operations Executive – operatives and agents.
Once he was certain the traffic officer had fully read and understood it, Richter closed the wallet, slipped it back into his pocket, waved a brisk two fingers under the officer’s nose,
then engaged first gear on the Westfield and dropped the clutch. The rear wheels spun for almost seventy yards, leaving two parallel black scars on the road surface. He hit sixty in a whisker under
four and a half seconds, and he didn’t see the policeman again.
‘I wanted you back here two days ago.’ Simpson closed the file and fired his opening salvo. ‘I called your mobile, but it was switched off.’
‘I was on an exercise. I was supposed to be carrying out covert surveillance, watching a target. I’d have looked a right prat if my bloody phone had started ringing in a hole in the
middle of some field. Of course it was switched off. In fact, I didn’t even have it with me.’
‘Well, your little holiday playing war games with the SAS has severely inconvenienced us.’
‘I’m very sorry to hear that,’ Richter replied smoothly.
‘Keep your sarcasm to yourself. And another thing. Next time you use your exemption card to avoid a prosecution for speeding, don’t wave two fingers at the Black Rat who’s
stopped you.’