TARGET BRITAIN: a political thriller Read online

  “You’ll be alone there” he’d said. “If anyone tries to escape that way you know what to do.” As he spoke he patted Jaz’s Kalashnikov. “You have enough ammunition?” Jaz nodded and without further comment started moving away to his right so as to give the house a wide berth. At a semi-trot he slipped silently over the barren earth, crouching and taking cover behind any slight undulations he could find in the ground.

  The important thing was that no one should get by him. The more he killed the higher his stock would rise and so as to give himself the best chance Jaz moved towards the house, eventually creeping towards the high back wall. He stood with his shoulder blades touching the wall and waited. There was no back gate and anyone escaping would either have to climb over the wall or more likely, Jaz thought, come from either side running into the desert. But in all three cases he reckoned he could bring them down. As he waited the nerves again began to take hold and he could feel his hand trembling slightly. His palm was moist as he tried to grip the butt of the Kalashnikov and he worried that if he had to fire the gun, it might slip and he might miss. He breathed deeply to steady himself.

  He could see no other houses for miles around. As he waited the breeze grew stronger until gusts were blowing grit and sand into his face. He turned round and bent over so that he was facing the wall but then, fearing he might make a fool of himself by missing something, he turned back and used his forearm to protect his face.

  Suddenly there was gunfire and, more alert than he had ever been, he looked left and right and over his shoulders to see if anyone was trying to get away. But no one came and more quickly than he expected the shooting quietened down and he heard his name being called. Running round to the front of the house Jaz could see three corpses by the gate of the building’s compound, each still holding weapons, lying on the ground and he guessed there would be more inside the house. All six of the Chamaki raiding party were alive and, unsure how he should be behaving, Jaz resisted the temptation to let out a victory scream and tried to look solemn.

  Then he saw the boy kneeling on the ground trembling as the girl’s father approached. “I’ll protect her with my own life. On my honour,” he sobbed. But he knew his fate, stopped pleading and instead lowered his head so as to make it easier for the father to place the barrel of his gun on the top of his skull.

  There were three shots in rapid succession and the boy slumped sideways to the ground, his cheek hitting the dirt and causing his head to make a final slight bounce before he was completely still.

  Hearing a muted defeated groan Jaz turned and noticed the girl. Away to the right, near the house, she writhed, trying to kick the legs of the uncle who was holding her arms behind her back. Then giving up the attempt to resist, she too slumped to the ground. Jaz wondered if the father would administer the traditional punishment and bury her alive there and then but in fact he signalled that he wanted everyone back in the truck. He’ll present her before a jirga, Jaz thought, and let the tribe as a whole decide what should be done with her. And with a surge of excitement he realised that having been one of the raiding party he would sit on that jirga.

  “Fuck me! Can’t you wait?” Jerked back to the present Jaz looked in the rear view mirror and saw his passenger lift his torso off the woman and slouch back, resting his head against the car window.

  Jaz realised he was coming up to Fawcett Street and slowed to turn into it. “What number?”

  “Seven. Number seven.”

  “Did you say fuck me?” the man said, laughing. She put her hand to her mouth to suppress a hiccup. “If I must!” He won an appreciative grunt in response.

  “Here’s fine. Just stop,” the man said.

  Jaz put on the indicator, steered the car towards the curb, pulled the handbrake and leant back. All done. Even without the tip it was another 10 quid. And he’d be home soon. Home alone. He started to think about the football the next morning and wondered whether Mahmud would want to play too. Either way, it would be great to have his brother in London.

  As the passengers groped each other with increasing urgency, Jaz opened his window and watched them stagger out of the car.

  The man leant through the window proffering a ten-pound note.

  “Have a good one mate,” Jaz said.

  The man’s face hardened. “What you saying you cheeky fucker?” He was about to open the door when he looked at Jaz’s muscular arms and thought better of it. Instead he crumpled the note and put it in his pocket and moved away. “Paki bastard.”

  Jaz looked at him and tried to slow his breathing. “But I didn’t …”

  But he knew there was no point. As he felt the energy drained from his body he shook his head, felt for the indicator and looking in the side mirror, pursed his lips in frustration.

  *****

  They were playing poker. Four of them in a tent, killing time, waiting for the bleep. Major Biagio, Flight Lieutenant Enriquez and Sergeants Stein and Scott. A joint Delta Force and Navy Seals team. Together they were a formidable ethnic cocktail united by lukewarm, tasteless food, runs, flushes and the occasional full house. They were on a forward base well away from Kandahar where the troops had TV piped into their tents and a Burger King complete with underpaid Asian staff to remind them what they were fighting for. They were deep in bandit country. They had to be, because of their job. And since they travelled light, when it came to kicking back, they had only a deck of cards.

  They covered an area of around 500 square miles, living day and night within a few feet of the choppers, which being impossible to conceal, made them vulnerable. So they and the Marine unit protecting them had to move every few days to a new location. Never settle; never relax.

  The Grims was a nickname, albeit one they quite liked. But then they had become specialists in black humour. Once the Reaper in the sky had released its payload, the Grims followed up. First, confirm death. Their commanding officer left little to the imagination on this point: “No stragglers,” he’d said. Second, using helmet cameras, record an image of the face of the deceased. Third, unclip the iris scanner and holding open the lids put it on one eye and then the next. Fourth, check as much of the body as possible for tattoos and finally, so as to obtain a fingerprint as well as the DNA, remove the right forefinger of the deceased, failing which the left forefinger - failing which any fingers or any toes, or for that matter any damn body part. So after the Reaper, the grim reapers.

  As well as strong stomachs they needed agility. Bomb scenes soon became crowded, hostile places. Which is why they laid on their own miniature version of shock and awe. A combination of nimble footwork and a big clunking boot. Experience had taught them the best method was to come in two helicopters: a Chinook for the Marines and a Blackhawk for the Grims. While the Chinook landed and, rotors still turning, disgorged men who formed a protective perimeter, the Blackhawk would swoop low, dropping smoke flares and sound charges. After the firework display it descended to within six feet of the ground allowing Biagio, Stein and Scott to jump out, helmet cams already rolling. Enriquez then had to take the chopper back up so that he had an overview of what was happening and could provide illumination and infrared coverage as needed. And, should the occasion so demand, fire on any hostiles. On the ground it was a race against time. The Taliban had seen it all before and were never going to be put off by a sound and light show. Pliers out and start snipping. Fuck the forefingers. Anything will do. Bag it, look for any computers and phones, tell Enriquez to come back down, jump back on board and out of there. On a good day it could all be done in less than four minutes.

  Back at base Enriquez dealt with the chopper, making it ready for next time. Major Biagio did the paperwork. Time, place, description of body parts, helmet cam numbers and so on. Stein fetched the iceboxes and ensured the body parts were safely stored and sealed. It was left to Scott to clean the pliers in a purpose-built, battery-powered microwave device so that there was no risk of the next customers being contaminated with the DNA of the last.
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br />   Biagio was the only one of the four who’d seen the place the iceboxes would end up. He’d had a tour of the DNA bank before being deployed to Afghanistan. Located in an anonymous suburb of Chicago as a result of a backroom deal between the local congressman and the White House, it looked like any other office block. But the filing cabinets contained, not company records, but dead Islamists’ body parts.

  “We need to work out who we’re killing,” the colonel running the facility told Biagio as he walked past the stainless steel drawers which contained some of the frozen remains. “Any big names, top leaders? Were they once in Guantanamo? Anyone the press may have heard of? Till now we just haven’t known.”

  The colonel slid open one of the drawers revealing a blue-tinted, mutilated and bearded face covered in frost. “Back in 2001 there was a rumour that Osama bin Laden himself had died of injuries at Tora Bora. There was a shallow grave nearby and some Delta Force guys disinterred the body and brought it back to Washington. They thought it was medals all round. But then they couldn’t work out who the John Doe was. After all, how could they tell if a decomposed body belonged to Mr bin Laden? So they came up with this. A system for IDing the dead-”

  “So how did they tell?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “When they did get him.”

  “Strapped him to a chair, took a cheek swab, ran it against some the DNA we got hold of from one of bin Laden’s brothers which we’d loaded onto a hand-held scanner, five minutes later it came up positive. Goodnight Vienna. That, by the way, is highly classified.”

  “Have you seen the picture? Of his dead body.”

  “No. But I know people who have.”

  “And?”

  The colonel hesitated. “It was a neat job,” he said. “Single shot to the forehead.”

  “Which would explain why we have never seen it.”

  “I guess.”

  “You should see the place,” Biagio later told Enriquez, Scott and Stein. “They got thousands of samples already. All the unexploded bombs go there too. They can work out which fucker made each one.”

  “Reckon they can find the gene that makes these fuckers crazy?” asked Scott.

  “That’s one ugly gene,” Biagio said laughing.

  “Couldn’t we chip them?” Scott suggested, on a roll. “You know, whenever we have them in Guantanamo, Bagram, wherever, chip them – and then the drones could watch them.”

  “Chip and drone,” Biagio chuckled. And then with a southern drawl: “Chip, drone and dustify.”

  “You’re a warped son of a bitch,” said Stein. “But, hell, three chips join up and just send in a hellfire. Now that would make the world a safer place.”

  It was then that the bleep went off.

  “Let’s roll!” Biagio yelled and the four men dropped their cards and burst into life.

  Enriquez ran, put on his helmet and leapt up the Blackhawk’s cockpit ladder. The others were climbing on board as the rotors heaved against the gearing. They were airborne in under a minute.

  “So where we headed?” Enriquez shouted into his mouthpiece.

  The reply came from Nevada. “Give me access and I’ll upload the coordinates now.” It was Palmer.

  “Copy that!” And then, “I got them!”

  “How long that going to be?” Palmer asked.

  “That’ll be eight minutes,” Enriquez replied. “You hit the target yet?”

  “Any moment now.”

  Chapter Two

  “Egypt’s former intelligence chief offered to send America an arm belonging to the brother of al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to provide DNA evidence.” -- Daily Telegraph, 8 May 2011

  04:15, 1st October, Dera Chamak, Baluchistan

  Mahmud stood up, placed the Kalashnikov against the arm of his chair, arched his back and stretched his muscles. What I need now, he was thinking, is a cup of tea. From the other side of the village, the mullah chanted the call to prayer through a tinny loudspeaker: “Prayer is better than sleep.”

  Mahmud didn’t even think of going down there. It wasn’t just that he had the Uzbeks to deal with. He hardly ever went to prayers unless it was Friday: there’d be plenty of time to talk to Allah when he was older.

  He saw the first rays of the sun, too low yet to take the chill from the air. Thin streaks of feeble light lifted the darkness and made the sky grainy.

  The village consisted of 20 or so houses, each surrounded by a courtyard enclosed by roughly crenelated mud walls, some topped with straggling strands of barbed wire. The homes, plain square structures, were all two stories high and perforated with gun slits and tiny windows. The walls were covered in discs of dung drying out to be used as fuel. Each home had large, brightly painted sheet metal gates, just too high for people at street level to see over.

  From his watchtower Mahmud could see the goats, sheep and cattle that lived in his neighbours’ courtyards, in some cases moving in and out of the ground floor rooms. In one enclosure towards the edge of the village there were three camels preparing for the heat of the day by tugging on their leather tethers and bending their long twisted necks towards a wooden water trough.

  The roads between the houses consisted of compacted sand. Beside them were open sewers with a trickle of fluid insufficient to move the plastic bags, broken glass, Seven Up cans and other debris that gathered there.

  The smell of burnt wood floated towards him.

  A farmer’s dark-skinned wife, too poor to observe proper purdah, her hair covered by a dirty yellow shawl, was walking barefoot out of the village.

  Off to fetch firewood, Mahmud thought. He wondered how hot it would be later on, reflexively taking a sip of water from a plastic bottle and reaching for the wraparound sunglasses that his brother Jaz had sent from London. He lifted his turban from his ears so that he could slip them on.

  It was then he saw something flick over his foot. An ant, he thought at first, a young one with a still shiny shell catching the early sunlight. But there it was again; too quick, too erratic for an ant. A red dot was flicking about the watchtower and sometimes over the edge, down out of sight to the courtyard below. He stood motionless trying to absorb what he had seen. And then it clicked.

  “What the…”

  He looked up into the sky and saw nothing. But that didn’t mean anything. He looked down taking his sunglasses off for a clearer view and the dot disappeared. He put them back on and it came back. “Thank you Jaz,” he said to himself, “great shades.”

  Certain now, he yelled: “Out! Out!”

  The old woman tending the fire looked up confused. “In there!” Mahmud bellowed, pointing at the room the Uzbeks were sleeping in. “Wake them!” She hesitated afraid she might see strangers in semi-dress. “Now!”

  As she scurried towards the Uzbek’s door, Mahmud scrambled down the old wooden ladder that gave access to the watchtower and ran into the courtyard bellowing: “GET OUT!” and as he did so flung open the metal gate and ran as fast as his legs would allow.

  *****

  Tate saw the figure leave the compound. “What the fuck happened? We got a runner.”

  “Did he hear us?” Neilson asked.

  “Nope, way too high.”

  “See us?”

  “Nope”

  “What then?”

  “Fuck knows.”

  “What about the other five? They still in there?”

  “Sure are.”

  Nielson turned to Palmer. “We good to go?”

  “There’s someone in the courtyard,” he said, “a woman I think.”

  “Well she keeps bad company,” Nielson shrugged.

  Palmer was tapping hard on his keyboard now, superimposing the Pakistan-Afghan border on the image.

  “Hold it! These bastards may just be in Pakistan!” He studied the line. “370 metres inside Pakistan. Off limits. It’s a CIA job.” As he vocalised the words he also typed: “Any CIA assets near location ...” But then a message came throug
h from the person in the Pentagon represented by the coat of arms.

  The typing was slow. A two-finger man like me, Nielson thought to himself. But the letters spelt a clear message: “J- U- S- T -D-O- I- T,” he wrote. And then “M-Y- C-A- L- L.”

  “Who is that guy?” Palmer asked.

  “No idea,” responded Nielson, “but if he types that slowly and sits in the Pentagon then sure as hell, he’s above my pay grade. Let’s go.”

  His body tensed. “Hit the building, not the watchtower.”

  “Copy that,” said Tate

  As he spoke the screens showed the door of the house opening and some figures emerging. They were moving slowly and with jerks.

  “They’re trying to dress,” Tate said. “Putting their shoes on.”

  “Sandals more like,” Palmer said.

  “Is there enough light to switch from infrared?” Nelson asked.

  “Copy that.” As Tate attacked his keyboard the black and white images sharpened up.

  “And now in glorious Technicolor,” Palmer whispered under his breath.

  They were zoomed in close enough now to see the woman’s fire in the middle of the compound.

  Nelson knew he had limited time. From the moment he fired it would take 1.7 seconds for his instruction to be encrypted, reach the Reaper and be decrypted. The weapons would then take another 30 seconds to reach their targets. He tried to think ahead.

  “Give me a 500 pounder,” he ordered, “and give me control.”

  “Copy that!”

  Tate flicked at the keyboard and a set of cross hairs disappeared from his screen, instantly appearing on Nielson’s.

  “Tell the Grims where we’re at.”

  “Copy that.”

  As Palmer talked into his microphone, Nielson aimed at the gate, thinking that they would probably pause there to see if the coast was clear. However many times these attacks came from the sky people never seemed to realise what they were up against.

  “Three, two, one, fire!”

  He squeezed his thumb and forefinger together on the joystick simultaneously depressing two buttons. Five miles above the sky of Afghanistan, the levers holding the bomb loosened their grip. As the explosives screamed towards the ground Neilson still had the ability to change the bomb’s direction by moving the cross hairs. But he reckoned he had it just right.