Authors: Chris Ryan
‘Nothing happened in Iraq, silver girl,’ he said, slipping into the nickname he’d had for Sarah since she was a toddler.
He put his arm across her shoulder, but she shook it away.
‘Then why are we here?’
The move had been made just a few months after Nick had left the army. Nick and Mary had talked about opening a ski school for years. Both of them loved the mountains, and they had met on the French Alps twenty years earlier when he was doing his army ski training and Mary had been waitressing in one of the tourist bars. They’d taken Sarah from the moment she was born: she could practically ski before she could walk. They’d leased a small office, hired Heinz, a young German skier, to help out, and Nick had done most of the teaching while Mary took the bookings and looked after the accounts. But nothing had gone the way Nick had planned it. The first season was tough, and the clients were all idiots. Rich bankers from London who could barely stand up, let alone ski, and who thought it was Nick’s fault. They spoke to you like you were dirt. A couple of times he’d lost it, shouting at them. Couldn’t help myself, they were spastics, he said later. But word soon got around that he was difficult. Mary was furious with him, and the bookings were starting to dry up. They’d sunk all their savings into this school. They were arguing all the time.
We argued the night she died …
‘To do something different with our lives,’ said Nick.
‘I don’t want to,’ said Sarah, her voice suddenly icy with controlled anger. ‘I don’t want to be here.’ Tears were starting to stream down her face. ‘I just want my mum back.’
‘It’s going to be OK,’ said Nick, reaching out for her.
‘No, it’s not,’ screamed Sarah. ‘Nothing’s going to be OK, not now, not ever.’
She was running away from him now, her legs skidding across the frozen surface of the track. Her hair had come loose, and was now streaming in the wind behind her. Not ever, heard Nick, the words bouncing off the side of the mountain, and bouncing back towards him. Nothing’s going to be OK, not ever.
And the worst of it is, maybe she’s right.
Nick caught up with her, reaching out with his arms, hugging her tight to his body. Her breath was short, gasping. ‘I just want to hide from the world,’ said Sarah, wiping the tears away from her eyes.
Nick glanced up towards the brooding slopes of Les Houches. There was a dip on the left-hand side of the mountain, where the rock seemed to fade into the cloud to create a shape like a crescent. ‘You see that mountain,’ he said, cradling Sarah in his arms. ‘I hid in a mountain just like that when I was dropped into Kurdistan. Hiding isn’t as simple as you think it is when you’re fifteen. It’s hard, lonely work that cuts into a man’s soul. Hide for long enough and you forget who you even are.’
Sarah turned to look at him, her eyes fierce with anger. ‘Well, you should know, Dad. You’ve been hiding ever since you came back from that stupid war.’
10 February 2003.
Jed Bradley could feel the muscles in his neck tightening. His throat was dry, and the knuckles on his broad, strong fists were tapping against the surface of the wooden table. I don’t mind being dropped from a helicopter, he told himself. I don’t mind sleeping rough, tabbing fifty miles with a pack on my back, or escaping through hostile territory. I don’t even mind being shot at.
But I don’t like being sneered at by morons.
That’s not what I joined the Regiment for
.
‘I said it’s fucking bollocks,’ snapped Jim Muir. ‘We need proof. Proper proof. Not this fucking, poxy, vomit-inducing bollocks.’
Jed shot him a glance. Muir was a short man, with thinning brown hair, a pallid complexion, and a thick, glowing nose so red it could have won a prize in a tomato-growing competition. A former tabloid reporter, he’d joined the Prime Minister’s press office two years earlier, and had already earned himself a reputation as a bruiser. Should have stuck to the Page Three girls, mate, thought Jed.
‘Maybe
you’d
like to go into Iraq next time,’ said Jed.
His tone was polite, restrained. But the anger was still evident in the expression on his face.
‘None of your bloody lip, solider boy,’ spat Muir. ‘I thought the SAS was supposed to be tough.’ A mean cackle started to rise up from his chest. ‘Not just a bunch of bloody, bed-wetting pansy boys.’
Jed leant forward on the table, and was about to speak, when the woman sitting next to him put her fingers on his arm. ‘Let’s all calm down,’ Laura Strangar said, ‘and try to examine what we have.’
They were sitting in the Vauxhall headquarters of the Firm, just next to the Thames. For the last three years, all the important meetings had taken place in one of the secure rooms. There were no windows a terrorist could launch a missile through. You needed the highest possible security clearance to be allowed through the door, and even then you were searched and put through a metal detector. It was the safest place in London.
There were seven people sitting round the table. Muir was directly opposite Jed. At his side was Mike Weston, the government’s chief weapons scientist, plus his younger deputy, Miles Frith. On the other side sat David Wragg, the deputy director of the Firm, and the man feeding intelligence on Iraq into the system. There was an American intelligence officer who never gave his name, and never spoke; he just sat there, making notes on his Blackberry. And next to him, Laura Strangar, the intelligence officer assigned to directing Jed’s work. Plus me, thought Jed.
The only one of these intelligence experts
who might actually have set foot in the country they’re supposed to be experts on
.
Strangar intrigued Jed. He had first met her two weeks ago at his briefing for the mission. She was no more than thirty-five, he guessed, but like many young London career women, it was hard to tell her exact age. They spent so much time in the gym, and were so careful about their diets, the years never seemed to clock up on them in the usual way. Her muscles were toned like a man’s, and yet her skin was soft and white. Her elegant features were highlighted by a dusting of face powder, and the natural redness of her lips was enhanced by a thin film of lipstick.
Jed’s mission had been the most perilous he had undertaken in the four years since he had passed selection into the Regiment from the Paras. He’d been made to grow a beard, and kitted out with some old Arab clothes – one of the reasons he’d been chosen was because he had brown eyes that would help him to blend in with the locals. A chopper had dropped him into Iraq, into a patch of scrubland six miles to the west of Baghdad: the British and the Americans had total control of the skies, even though there was no war yet, but there were still only a few places a special forces soldier could land safely.
Next, he’d made his way by foot around the perimeter of the city, until he hit one of the roads running into its north-west corner. The suspected weapons laboratory was two miles from the dropping-off point, located at the centre of an industrial suburb.
It was a drab, prefabricated block that could have passed for an out-of-town retail shed back in Britain. The one advantage of Baghdad, Jed had reflected on the journey, was that the whole population was so terrified, nobody ever came out at night. It also reminded Jed of some of the care homes he’d spent the better part of his childhood in while his dad made regular trips to the local nick.
Once you got out, you didn’t ever want to go back in again.
The mission had sounded straightforward enough. Go in close to the lab, and lie up somewhere you can’t be seen. Then, using a high-powered digital camera, take as many pictures as you can of the facility. ‘Just make sure they’re nice and clear,’ Laura had told him as he’d left for Kuwait.
Easy for you to say, Jed could recall thinking as he lay behind a low wall, looking across at the facility through his night-vision goggles. A lot harder to do when you’re here. Maybe they’d like me to get a couple of palm trees and a nice sunset into the snaps as well.
Make it look like the Baghdad tourist brochure
.
He took a series of pictures of the perimeter of the facility, but that told you nothing. A grey concrete wall, that’s all. Above it there were several towers, something like a chemical plant, but even though Jed had studied engineering at Cambridge before joining the Paras, he couldn’t recognise them. Not at this distance, anyway. He took some more pictures, then tried to get closer. The gates were to his left. He inched forward, taking up a position in the doorway of a boarded-up shop about thirty yards from the entrance. It was two in the
morning, and the city was asleep. He could see a thin whisper of smoke escaping from one of the high chimneys, but that aside, the plant looked dead. The gates were secured with thick steel locks, and there were no guards on duty: Jed could only assume there were plenty inside, and he wasn’t about to risk finding out.
Not on a solo mission
.
By the time dawn rolled around, his legs were stiff and freezing: in February, the night-time temperatures in Baghdad dropped to zero. As the first light of morning started to break over the distant horizon, a truck pulled up at the entrance. It was a battered old Toyota, its back covered with thick black plastic sheeting. The gates swung open. Inside, Jed could see six guards hurrying forward, ushering the truck into the compound, then swinging the doors firmly shut after the truck drove inside. He managed to take a series of snaps with the digital camera, a dozen in total. By then the street had fallen quiet again, and a boy was looking at him. He was twenty yards away. Jed was dressed in a grubby white tunic and blue trousers. His skin was tanned, and with black hair there was nothing to distinguish him from an Iraqi. Still, the boy was staring right at him. He was no more than six, with huge brown eyes and a hungry look to him. There was no sign of his mother.
Jed scowled, then looked away. He could see the boy from the corner of his eye. Then he started walking towards him. He was saying something in Arabic, but Jed couldn’t understand it: back in Hereford they’d been running elementary Arabic classes – with an Iraqi
instructor giving them the right dialect – for the last six months, but most of the lads hadn’t signed up for them. The only Arabic I need to understand is the rattle of an AK-47, as one of his mates had put it. It’s not as if we’re planning on talking to the buggers. Jed paused, wishing he understood the language. Then he waved at the boy with his arms. Go, he mouthed silently.
Bloody well piss off
.
The boy pointed at Jed’s camera. He was just a dozen yards from him now. Jed was thinking fast. Any closer, the kid was going to realise he was a foreigner. Any kind of commotion right now and half the Republican Guard was going to be steaming towards him. His orders were ringing in his ears. ‘Any trouble, get the hell out of there. The last thing we need is for an SAS guy to get picked up in Baghdad while we’re still trying to get the bloody surrender monkeys at the UN to sign up to the war.’
In the end, there had been no choice but to evacuate. He had fifty snaps of the plant already on the compact digital camera, and that meant the mission was complete. Retracing his steps through the dark, quiet city, within an hour he’d been back at the drop-off point, collected by a chopper and back in Kuwait. In less than twelve hours, he was on home soil again. The pictures didn’t show much, but they were all he could get in the circumstances.
If they didn’t like them, they’d just have to go and get their own
.
‘Can you tell us exactly what you saw, Jed?’ said David Wragg. He coughed nervously. ‘As you know, we have
to examine every piece of evidence coming out of Iraq with minute care. It would be bloody embarrassing if we ended up invading the place, and then found out they didn’t have anything more dangerous than a couple of pea-shooters in their locker room.’
He was a thin man, with greying hair and green eyes that bore down into you as you spoke, like a drill cutting into rock. He was smartly but casually dressed: he wore chinos and an open-necked shirt, but still had cufflinks and black lace-up brogues. The Firm was edging its way into the dress-down era, noted Jed, but none of the senior guys looked really comfortable with it. Give them a chance, and they’d be back in their three-pieces and bowler hats.
‘It’s all in the pictures,’ said Jed.
‘Yes,’ said Wragg carefully. ‘The trouble is, the pictures don’t tell us that much.’
Muir leant forwards on the table. ‘We’re looking for what our friends in the porno business call a come shot, laddie,’ he said. ‘A nice big picture of Saddam cuddling up to a missile with the word anthrax written on the side.’
Jed noticed Wragg leaning into Muir’s ear, and whispering something. Cool it, maybe. If so, it was good advice. Any more lip from the Scotsman and he was going to get that bright red nose smacked.
‘Well, this is all we have. Like it or lump it.’
Laura smiled at him icily. ‘We all have to understand that there is a lot of pressure to come up with some convincing intelligence about Iraq’s WMD and come
up with it quickly. All our sources tell us that this is a very important facility. Whatever is going on in that lab, it matters a lot to the Iraqis. That’s why we sent you there.’
‘I got the best pictures I could, short of risking capture,’ said Jed coldly. ‘If you wanted me to go in, those should have been my orders.’
‘We appreciate that,’ said Wragg quickly. ‘And we appreciate your bravery. We just want to get a fuller description, that’s all.’
From the corner of his eye, Jed noticed that Muir was doodling a picture of a naked woman, with outsized breasts and a tiny miniskirt. Christ, he thought, when did they put this psycho in charge of the country?