EIGHTEEN

‘SO,’ SAID GEORGE Widdowes. ‘You’re really sure about this? You’re sure that you’ll be able to tackle Meehan when he comes?’

‘Yes,’ said Alex. ‘I am. So far he’s had everything his own way. He’s been able to pick the time and the place. Now we’re going to force his hand.’

The MI5 desk officer and the SAS captain were sitting in the ante-room to Angela Fenwick’s office in Thames House.

‘Tell me,’ said Widdowes.

‘Basically,’ explained Alex, ‘we bait a trap. As you know, there’s a For Sale sign outside your house. What’s going to happen is that you’re going to move back there for a few days and in three days’ time you’re going to supervise the loading of all your stuff into a removals van. Is the place very full?’

Widdowes shook his head tiredly. ‘Not very. This is strictly necessary, is it, all this house-moving routine?’

‘We’ve got to do it properly. And it’ll make sense to Meehan. You’re afraid and you feel isolated out there by yourself, so you’re moving back to London. Maybe you’ve even been ordered to move back to London. Whichever, you’re going to miss the place and, given that there are a couple of armed policemen patrolling the property, you decide it’ll be safe to stay there for the last few nights.’

‘You reckon that’ll bounce him into having a go?’

Alex nodded. ‘I reckon it will. And if he doesn’t come in the next forty-eight hours he certainly will after he sees the furniture van being filled. He’ll know that this is his last chance – that if he doesn’t take you now all his surveillance has gone to waste and he’ll have to start from scratch again.’

‘You think we can set the whole thing up without spooking him?’

‘Well, that’s the question. Anything smells funny and he won’t come – he’s PIRA-trained, after all. If you just moved back into the place without any security, for example, he’d be very suspicious indeed and let the whole thing go. My guess, though, is that when he sees those armed cops he’ll think that you reckon you’re safe.’

‘The armed police won’t put him off?’

Alex smiled and shook his head.

‘So why won’t he just wait until that evening and follow the furniture van? Follow it to my supposed new house or flat?’

‘Because it won’t be going anywhere. The loading’ll finish about six, and then the van will be driven a couple of hundred yards down the road and parked up in a lay-by to wait for the next morning. Local removal firms often do that so that they don’t have to pay their crews overtime.’

‘Why not wait until the next day and then follow the van?’

‘Because it might go anywhere – a storage facility, for example – and then he’ll have to start searching for your new place from scratch. Besides, he’ll know that wherever you go will be ultra secure in comparison with your present place. He’ll know that the Hampshire house offers by far the best chance he’s likely to get.’

‘And you’ll be waiting for him?’ said Widdowes doubtfully.

‘Basically, yes. I’ll hide up by the river and when he comes I’ll shoot him at short range with a silenced weapon.’

‘How will you make sure he doesn’t know you’re there waiting for him?’

‘He won’t know,’ said Alex quietly. ‘Count on that. I’ve set up ambushes before.’

In the car park beneath Thames House, a little over twenty-four hours later, Alex squeezed into the boot of the car that was to masquerade as Widdowes’. The BMW saloon had been customised with a boot-fitted surveillance lens and bullet-proof windows.

‘Are you going to be all right in there?’ Widdowes asked.

‘Yeah, I’ll be OK. Hand us in my kit, could you, and put your own stuff on the back seat.’

The drive took an hour and a half in total and by the end of it Alex was feeling light-headed and nauseated from the exhaust fumes. When Widdowes finally sprang the boot open, it was in the near darkness of the garage at Longwater Lodge. Illuminating his watch, Alex saw that it was a few minutes before 5 p.m. ‘Right,’ he said, when he had stretched his legs for a moment or two. ‘This door leads directly into the house?’

‘Yes.’

‘And is there a room without any windows?’

‘There’s a cellar, yes.’

‘Perfect. I’ll set up my stuff down there. Can you get me there without leading me past too many windows?’

Widdowes nodded and opened the door to the house. Alex, feeling slightly ridiculous, followed the tall Barbour-coated figure on his hands and knees. They reached a door, which Widdowes opened. Alex swung himself on to a descending staircase and took his bag from the older man, who then flicked a light switch and followed him down into the cellar.

It was a decent-sized place, and not too damp. In front of him was a large Potterton boiler, switched off. Against the other walls stood a wine-rack, a carpentry workbench, several bundles of magazines bound with baler twine, a case of Eley shotgun cartridges and a battered travelling trunk.

‘I’ve got a camp bed,’ said Widdowes. ‘I’ll bring it down for you.’

While he was upstairs, Alex unpacked his case. He left the clothes inside, and arranged the weaponry and kit on the carpentry workbench. There was the Glock 34, its silencer, the laser dot-marker sight on its factory-fitted slide, a spare lithium battery for the laser sight, two boxes of twenty-five hollow-point 9mm rounds and the Recon knife. There were also a sleeping bag and a tin of black waterproof cam-cream from a survival shop in Euston, a pair of fisherman’s felt-soled boots from Farlow’s of Pall Mall, and an all-black Rip Curl wetsuit, weight belt and jet fins from a diving equipment store in Fulham. For Alex, not usually an enthusiastic shopper, the knowledge that he’d been spending MI5’s money had made for a pleasant morning.

When he reappeared with the camp bed Widdowes appeared disconcerted by this array. In fact, he looked badly scared. His features were flushed and his eyes flickered uneasily about him. Hardly surprising, thought Alex. It couldn’t be anything but terrifying to know that you were next on the list of a proven psycho like Meehan.

‘Are you OK?’ Alex asked.

Widdowes nodded. ‘Yes, I’m OK.’ He laughed nervously. ‘You’ve certainly brought the full armoury with you.’

‘I’m not taking any chances with this bastard,’ said Alex. ‘He’s going straight in the fucking ground. Have you got your own weapon?’

Widdowes reached inside his jacket, withdrew a Colt .38 revolver, spun the chamber and returned it to the shoulder holster.

Alex nodded. Privately he thought that if it ever came to a one-on-one between Widdowes and Meehan the MI5 man was as good as dead, but he guessed that the heft and weight of the Colt were a good confidence booster. He turned to Widdowes. ‘Look, I know you’re an experienced field agent and I don’t want to get your back up, but a handful of rules for the duration, yeah?’

Widdowes nodded.

‘Avoid windows. I doubt he’d try and shoot you but better to be safe than sorry, so if you must go past a window keep moving. Whether inside or outside the house, don’t ever present a static target and don’t whatever you do speak or shout out to me – don’t worry about warnings, if he comes anywhere near here I’ll see him before you do. I’ll have him covered. Behave at all times as if you were alone in the house. Have you met up with the two police guys?’

‘Yes. They’re MI5 people, in fact, in police uniforms.’

‘That’s fine. Basically what we need them to do is mooch around the front of the house. Just wander about between there and the road, and stick their necks into the back garden every so often. They should stay together most of the time, smoke the odd fag, that sort of thing. They’ve got to look like lazy and incompetent jobsworths: out to grass and no threat to anyone. Can you make sure they understand that?’

Widdowes nodded again.

‘Otherwise, just observe your usual routine. It might help if you put an empty bottle or two out each night – give the impression you’re hitting the old vino. That’ll encourage him to think …’

‘Yeah, I know what you’re saying. Nerves shot, soft target …’

Alex looked at Widdowes. His darting glances, uneven colour and paper-dry lips confirmed that he was very frightened indeed. He put a hand on the older man’s shoulder. ‘George, mate, we’re in this together and I’m fully aware that your part is the harder one. Honestly. If you can think of a better way of nailing this fucker I’m on for it, believe me.’

Widdowes pursed his lips and nodded.

‘I’m also sorry to put you through a non-existent house move, but again …’

‘That’s OK,’ said Widdowes, forcing an unconvincing smile. ‘I’ve been meaning to sort through all this junk. Get my life into some sort of order. What do you want to do about eating?’

‘Well, it gets dark at about eight o’clock and I want to get into position about then. So if we have a feed at seven-ish?’

‘I’ll knock something up. You’re going to wait for him in the river, aren’t you?’

‘That’s the idea.’

‘Have you considered how you’re going to get into position without him seeing you? I mean, we have to assume he’s watching the area around the house. Quite possibly from close up.’

‘You’re going to have to drive me downstream to somewhere I can get into the river and work my way back here. Somewhere he won’t see me get out of the car.’

‘That’s no problem. I can take you up to the next road bridge and you can get back through the grounds of Longwater House. There’s no one there at the moment, the place is closed up.’ Widdowes frowned. ‘But how do you know Meehan won’t be down there? How do you know you won’t run into him?’

‘Because he won’t want to go in blind. He’ll come from the direction he can watch the house and the guards from, which is upstream. You can’t see anything at all from where I’m going, except trees.’

Widdowes slowly nodded. ‘Right. Got you.’

‘Is there a pub in the downstream direction? Some reason you might be going that way?’

‘There’s an off-licence in Martyr Worthy. If I come back ten minutes later with a Thresher’s bag …’

‘Good enough. Now I’d suggest you get upstairs. Maybe take a cup of tea to the two cops – give you an excuse to brief them about looking useless.’

‘What will you do?’

‘I’ll be OK, don’t worry. See you at seven.’

Widdowes nodded and smiled wryly. ‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ he said. ‘If this guy Meehan succeeds in taking me out there are going to be some long faces at Thames House.’

Alex looked at him.

‘Angela Fenwick, for a start,’ continued Widdowes. ‘She’s in line for the directorship, that’s why the deaths of Fenn and Gidley have pissed her off so royally. If she loses any more of her desk officers it’s going to start looking very much like carelessness. Her star and that of her familiar could well start to decline.’

‘Her familiar?’ asked Alex, surprised by the bitterness and vehemence of his tone.

‘Dawn Bloody Harding. Zulu Dawn. Dawn of the Living Dead. From the moment she joined the service she hitched her wagon to Angela’s – that’s why her progress has been so meteoric. For as long as Angela’s riding high, Dawn’s up there with her. But if Angela falls, then Dawn goes down too. Don’t overlook the political side of all this, chum. You’ve been brought in to safeguard the upward mobility of a political cabal.’

‘I’m here to safeguard you, George. The rest doesn’t interest me.’

Widdowes nodded philosophically and shrugged. ‘I’m sorry. You’re right – it’s not your worry. Getting cynical in my old age, that’s all.’

When he had gone Alex unrolled his sleeping bag on the camp bed, lay down and stared at the cellar’s plasterboard ceiling. Eventually he closed his eyes. It was going to be a long night and he would do well to get some rest. In his pocket, his mobile throbbed.

‘Yeah?’

‘It’s Dawn Harding.’

‘Zulu Dawn!’

There was a silence. ‘Where did you get that name?’ she asked accusingly. ‘Have you been …’

‘It’s one of my favourite films,’ said Alex breezily. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine,’ she said curtly. ‘Is everything OK down there?’

‘So far, yes.’

‘How’s George holding up?’

‘He’s under a bit of stress but he’s keeping it all together.’

‘You think Meehan will come tonight?’

‘Might. Bird in the hand and so on.’

There was a pause.

‘Are you … OK?’ she enquired.

‘Do I detect a note of concern?’ asked Alex, unable to keep the smile from his voice.

‘No, you don’t!’ she snapped. ‘I simply need to know you’re in good shape. I don’t want any more corpses on the pathologist’s slab.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Alex, the vision of Dawn suspended high above the ground in her scarlet underwear flashing past his eyes. ‘I’ll keep myself in good shape for you.’

She disconnected. Alex returned his gaze to the ceiling and his smile faded. He had ninety minutes in which to rest up. He closed his eyes.

Shortly after seven Widdowes woke him. The MI5 officer was carrying a plateful of cheese and ham sandwiches, a Granny Smith apple, a Mars bar and a two-litre bottle of still mineral water. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s not quite up to Gordon Ramsay standard. I assumed you’d want mustard on the ham?’

‘Yeah. Great.’

‘I meant to ask. What do you want to do about washing?’

‘I don’t,’ said Alex. ‘You can smell toothpaste and soap on the air. I won’t be using either until Meehan’s dead. And hopefully I won’t be needing a crap till then, either. As far as pissing’s concerned, well, from time to time you’ll find this Evian bottle on the stairs.’

‘Got you,’ said Widdowes without enthusiasm.

Alex ate and drank for five minutes in silence, then loaded the Glock’s magazine with nineteen rounds and slapped it into the butt. Pointing the handgun at the wall, he pressed the button activating the laser sight. A small red dot appeared on the wall, scribbling fine lines of light as Alex moved the weapon. Satisfied, he thumbed the system off again. Then he stripped, pulled on the wetsuit and buckled the sheathed Recon knife round his calf. The Glock went into a plastic thigh holster on a lanyard. Blackening his face and hands with the cam-cream, he pulled up the neoprene hood of the wetsuit. The clothes that he had just been wearing went into the waterproof stuff sack that had previously held the wetsuit. The boots and fins went into a carrier bag. ‘OK,’ said Alex. ‘Let’s do it. What’s the light like outside?’

‘Going fast,’ said Widdowes.

They made their way back to the garage, Alex climbed into the boot and Widdowes drove off, stopping briefly to converse with the uniformed men at the gate. The ensuing drive took no more than three minutes, but took them well out of the sight of anyone who had been observing the house. Quickly, watching out for other cars, Widdowes let Alex out of the boot, handed him the stuff sack and drove on. The whole operation had taken no more than ten seconds.

Crouching in the cow-parsley on the river bank, Alex peered around him in the fading evening light. Above him was the road, which was narrow and unlikely to see too much traffic between now and tomorrow morning. To his left was the road bridge. He could just make out a narrow walkway beneath this, but access to it was largely obscured by nettles, elder and other roadside vegetation. Sliding down the bank, Alex pushed through undergrowth into the darkness beneath the bridge and cached the stuff sack of clothing there. Attaching the weight belt round his waist, he undid the Farlow’s boots and tied them to the belt by the laces, then pulled on the jet fins and lowered himself into the water.

The carrier stream was about six feet deep at the edge and deeper, he guessed, in the middle. Despite its smooth surface, the current was considerable. Cautiously, he began to move forward. The boots at his waist dragged a little, but this was more than compensated for by the powerful jet fins, just as the buoyancy of the wetsuit was compensated for by the weight belt. With it he was able to move silently with only his head above the surface, without it he would have been wallowing about on the surface, leaving a wake like a speedboat.

Tucking in to the side of the river, trailing his arms at his side, he concentrated on moving with absolute silence and the minimum of water disturbance. After fifty yards he passed a high fence, which he guessed was the boundary of the Longwater estate. A few hundred yards, Widdowes had said. He swam silently on. At one point the river shallowed, running over a broken bottom no more than a couple of feet deep and Alex was forced to leopard-crawl six inches at a time against the weight of the tumbling water. With relief, however, he soon felt the river bed falling away beneath him.

After a hundred yards, he grabbed on to an overhanging root, swung himself into the bank and took stock. Soon he would be coming into the area that he had to assume was under night sight surveillance. Meehan might be several hundred yards away, scoping out the property from a concealed hide, or he might be much closer. He could be lying up in the river as little as fifty yards upstream. From now on Alex would have to move with extreme caution.

A couple of yards ahead there was a faint splash. A small sound, but enough to set Alex’s heart racing. Something had been thrown or dropped into the water. Was Meehan waiting on the bank above him? Had he seen him? Shrinking into the knotted roots beneath the river’s mud and chalk banks, Alex froze, his heart pounding. Slowly, an inch at a time, he reached for the knife, withdrew the razor-sharp blade from the scabbard, held it inches beneath the surface. And then, against a faint patch of light, he saw the questing head of the otter, cutting an arrowhead wake through the water. Going hunting, he guessed with dizzying relief.

When he had caught his breath he moved on, keeping hard in to the bank, driving against the current with the fins. Through the trees to his left he could see the vast dim bulk of Longwater House, now, and ahead of him the lights of the Lodge. What was Widdowes up to? he wondered. In the short time they had spent together he had developed a sympathy for the man. Not much in Widdowes’ manner suggested it now, but he’d probably been a competent enough operative in his time. Box’s Belfast agent handlers were not fools, for the most part (although one or two of them were and Michael Bettany had been a traitor too, jailed for spying for the Soviets), nor were they cowards. No one who had seen what had happened to Fenn and Gidley, though, would be anything but afraid.

Alex was suddenly filled with a loathing of Meehan. They all moved in a dirty world, that much was accepted, but to do what he had done, well, that was something else. Chopping bits of people’s faces off, hammering nails into them … What the last hours of those two poor bastards from the FRU must have been like was beyond imagining.

Alex moved silently upriver in the deep black shadows beneath the bank. He was invisible now, a creature of the night. He came to a halt beneath the slender curving trunk of a willow, a place he had noted when he visited the house with Dawn. Above him was the yellowish haze of the lights from the Lodge, five to six yards ahead of him was the silhouette of the reed-bed and the bushes through which he had calculated that Meehan would make his exit.

Feeling beneath the water, Alex found a sturdy root and, quickly exchanging his fins for the Farlow’s boots, attached the fins to the root by their straps so that they hung in the current a foot beneath the surface. Could he find them again? Yes, they were just below this willow root. Should he take the weight belt off? He tried it, felt himself rising in the water and hastily reattached it. Where to go? Inching forward, his feet found a shelf that would take his weight. Gratefully he sensed the thick felt soles of the fishing boots grip the slippery chalk. If he’d settled for commando-soled boots, as he’d originally considered, he would have had a hard night ahead of him. His right arm found a corresponding elbow of willow root to hook through. He was now facing the current and the direction that Meehan would come. Between him and Meehan’s projected exit point was a clump of sedge and the outer skirt of the willow’s foliage. As long as he kept still, he would be invisible, even if Meehan was using night sights.

For his part, Alex had decided against night sights. Partly because of their unwieldiness in the water, partly because the intensified green images would compromise his night vision. He knew what he was looking for and he knew where to look. Even when the lights went off in the house there would be a close to full moon. And it would be when the lights went off that Meehan would come.

For an hour Alex remained there, unmoving, his eyes scanning the river ahead of him. In low light conditions, he knew, you saw better with your peripheral than your direct vision. Very slowly, a limb at a time, he kept himself moving underwater, gently contracting and relaxing his muscles. Partly to stave off cold and avoid cramping, which despite the wetsuit was a very real threat, and partly in order to remain alert.

Of all the ambushes that Alex had ever set up, this was by far the least satisfactory, in that he was operating alone and without back-up. He would go for a heart shot as Meehan pulled himself out of the water, he decided, when both his hands were occupied. The silenced double tap would punch the life out of the former agent before his brain had had a chance to take in what was happening. He’d be dead before his knees bent and the Watchman’s rule of terror would be over.

The first man Alex had killed had been during the Gulf War in 1991.

He had been part of a four-man Sabre team tasked to knock out a Scud missile dump at al-Anbar, west of Baghdad. Under the command of an NCO named Neil Slater they’d been choppered in by night and left to forage for cover. The cold had been extreme – they’d been sent in wearing little more than lightweight ‘chocolate chip’ battledress and shirts – and there had been no cover of any kind. Within the hour they were frozen to the bone. The four of them – Alex, Neil Slater, Don Hammond and Andreas van Rijn – had made a quick recce and Slater had made the decision to lie up for the rest of the night in a disused berm a couple of hundred yards from the dump. None of them had slept; instead they had huddled together against the cold and the wind-borne snow that whipped mercilessly about them.

The next morning, half-frozen, they had seen a convoy of Iraqi T-55 tanks rumbling towards them – the most terrifying sight Alex or indeed any of them had ever witnessed. Desperate, they had buried themselves in the detritus at the bottom of the berm – Iraqi ration tins, ammunition boxes, rubble, old tyres, discarded cam-netting and the decaying corpse of a goat – and prayed. The Iraqi tank crews, anxious to relieve themselves after several hours in their T-55s, had surrounded the berm. The Sabre team were pissed on, they were shat on and Alex’s thigh was agonisingly burnt by a discarded cigarette end, but they were not discovered. And eventually, after four ghastly hours, the tanks had rumbled away into the desert.

As soon as the SAS team had judged it safe to move Slater had radioed in the tanks’ position and direction of travel, and called in the air strike on al-Anbar. Its purpose was twofold: to destroy the missiles grouped there for transportation to mobile missile launchers and to kill a man known as Marwan.

‘Marwan’, to the Allied intelligence forces based in Saudi Arabia, had for several weeks been little more than an occasionally occurring code name in the welter of enemy radio traffic. It was thought from the contexts in which he was mentioned that he might be a senior technician of some sort. Then an intercepted transmission between the al-Anbar base and Baghdad command had suggested that ‘Marwan’ might be a man known to the Allies as ‘Guppy’ – an Iranian scientist who had changed sides during the Iran-Iraq war and now ran the missile research plant at Sa’d 16, in north Iraq. It was the Sa’d 16 team who had developed the al-Husayn – the long-range version of the Russian Scud that could be fitted with chemical and biological warheads. According to the transmission, ‘Marwan’ was due at the al-Anbar base that evening, suggesting that the missiles might be about to be checked over and dispersed.

If ‘Marwan’ was indeed ‘Guppy’, then it was essential that he be killed, just as it was essential that the missiles should be destroyed while they were all in one place. Neil Slater’s instructions were to call in the air strike, assess the subsequent damage and ensure that there were no Iraqi survivors.

The air strike was at the same time the most dramatic and the most appalling event Alex had ever witnessed. The Tornados had screamed in, their missiles drawing a deceptively faint diagonal trail, and the Scud jet-propellant had gone up in an eyeball-searing roar of light and heat, hurling vehicles, machinery, weapons and human body parts in all directions. The explosions had been followed by a terrible screaming and by the sight of disjointed figures writhing on the charred ground. And by the smell, the meaty stench of burning human flesh.

‘Go!’ Neil Slater had screamed. ‘Go, go, go!’

And they had gone. Above them the sky was black with smoke, as if a solar eclipse were taking place. Initially Alex had thought that they would encounter little or no resistance, that the entire Iraqi strength had been killed or maimed in the air strike. But this was not the case, as rapidly became clear. As the team advanced, moving in skirmish order across the twilit noon landscape, they came under sustained fire from a slit trench. A group of Iraqis must have been lying up in a bunker and escaped the firestorm unleashed by the Tornados.

The four SAS men hurled themselves into cover behind a Panhard Landcruiser which had been blown on to its side by the blast. From directly in front of them the Iraqi fire team immediately brought a withering hail of 7.62 rounds to bear on the vehicle from their Kalashnikovs. Between the two sides lay the charred, twisted and smoking bodies of the missile support crew, the lingering screams of those who had not yet died cutting through the stinking air. Thirty yards in front of them was an anti-aircraft gun emplacement, surrounded by the bodies of the men who had manned it. To twenty-six-year-old Corporal Alex Temple, who had never been on a full-scale battlefield before, it was a scene straight from hell.

‘What range do you reckon?’ Neil Slater asked him calmly, as Kalashnikov rounds screamed and ricocheted against the Landcruiser’s blackened and twisted flank.

‘I’d say fifty metres,’ said Alex, struggling to keep his voice steady.

Slater nodded and removed a grenade from his bandolier. The grenade’s gold top told Alex that it was the high-explosive type, rather than anti-personnel or white phosphorus.

From the other side of the Landcruiser came the whoomfing crack of a Russian grenade. Hand-thrown, guessed Alex, but not quite far enough.

Calmly Slater checked the sextant sight on his weapon’s carrying handle and slid the HE grenade into the 203 launcher tube beneath the barrel of his M16. ‘Fifty metres it is,’ he said. ‘Cover please, lads. Time for a delivery of Gold Top.’

‘Pasteurise the fuckers,’ whispered Andreas van Rijn, Slater’s second-in-command.

As the three of them poured aimed shots from their M16s at the Iraqi position, Slater leaned coolly from cover, glanced down once at the sextant sight and fired.

The egg-shaped grenade hit the ground a few feet beyond the trench, bounced once and exploded noisily but harmlessly on the desert floor, shredding a thorn bush.

Quickly, Slater reloaded. This time the grenade fell short, but close enough to blow a half-hundredweight of sand and scrub into the trench.

The fire from the Iraqi trench intensified, and it was at that moment that the SAS team guessed they were facing elite troops and ‘Marwan’ was in the enemy trench. This was the only possible explanation for the Iraqi team’s failure to surrender, given that they faced almost certain obliteration: they had been ordered to defend the missile scientist with their lives.

A second Russian pineapple grenade bumped laboriously towards the Landcruiser, exploding deafeningly up against it. A spatter of Kalashnikov fire followed.

‘Our turn, I think,’ said Slater grimly, shaking his head against the blast. This time the gold-top 203 grenade fell straight into the enemy trench and Alex watched as a shattered assault rifle flew into the air alongside the severed arm that, until a moment earlier, had held it.

‘Full fat!’ murmured Andreas van Rijn appreciatively. ‘Full fucking fat!’

The firing did not cease. At least three Iraqi soldiers were still capable of manning a weapon and were bravely continuing to do so, forcing the SAS team to remain flattened behind the wrecked vehicle. At intervals Alex and the others were able to squeeze off a few rounds, but not to great effect. In small-arms terms it was a stalemate. But the SAS had their 203 grenade launchers.

Inexorably Slater reloaded. He had the range now, and dropped a fourth HE grenade into the Iraqi trench. This time the explosion was followed by silence and then a low groaning sound.

With his hand, Slater ordered absolute stillness. The SAS team froze. Nothing, just that long-drawn-out groaning. All of them were uncomfortably aware that sooner or later more Iraqi troops would converge on the place. Probably sooner. The destruction of al-Anbar would certainly not have passed unnoticed.

Quickly, Alex switched magazines and as he did so his eye caught a blurred movement behind the anti-aircraft emplacement to their left. A fraction of a second later a tall khaki figure was sprinting towards the Landcruiser, holding a Kalashnikov and – Alex noted in something like slow motion – a pale-green Russian cylinder grenade.

From a kneeling position Alex pulled the heavy M16 203 to his shoulder. The moment seemed to go on and on. He saw the courage and the blazing intention in the Iraqi’s eyes, heard his sawing breath and the desperate driving of his feet, dropped his foresight to the oncoming man’s chest, saw his upper body half turn to accommodate the grenade throw – only twenty-five yards to go now – aimed, smoothly exhaled and punched six high-velocity 5.56mm rounds through his sternum.

For a moment, as a little over a pound of bone, muscle and lung tissue leapt from the Iraqi soldier’s back, his eyes met Alex’s. There was surprise there and perhaps a measure of disappointment, but not much more.

Is that all, Alex asked himself wonderingly? Is that all it is to kill a man?

The volley pitched the Iraqi backwards on to his own grenade, from which he had withdrawn the pin before starting his run. Untypically of the item in question and of exported Russian grenades in general, it worked perfectly, shredding the soldier’s heart through his ribs after a delay of exactly four seconds.

A frisson passed through Alex as he clenched and unclenched his toes in the Farlow’s boots. He had been in the river outside Widdowes’ house for nearly three hours now, his dark-accustomed eyes endlessly quartering and scanning the space ahead of him, his senses pricked for any noise or smell that was in any way foreign to the place. He was cold, but not critically so – a layer of body-temperature water lay between his skin and the wetsuit’s neoprene lining. The stiller he kept, in fact, the warmer he was.

The MI5 men had played their parts perfectly, pacing loudly around the grounds with cigarettes and torches, announcing their flat-footed presence to any who might be observing. You certainly wouldn’t need night sights to know that the Thompson Twins were in town.

But of the Watchman there had been no sign. A heron, broad-winged and graceful, had lowered itself from the sky a little after nine o’clock and taken up residence among the reeds close to where Alex expected the Watchman to exit the river. The perfect early warning system, thought Alex. Not even Joseph Meehan could shimmy past a heron without disturbing it.

He’d felt nothing at the Iraqi’s death. And nothing afterwards, when they’d killed all of those still alive. In most cases the double taps that they had delivered had represented a merciful release from the terrible burns caused by the Tornado’s incendiary missiles and the exploding Scud propellant.

They’d found a man who might or might not have been ‘Marwan’ in the trench, dead from shrapnel wounds to the head and blast injuries. He’d been unarmed and wearing khaki overalls of a different design from the others. In his pockets they had found a Tandy calculator, an ID card and a wallet containing pictures of his family. All these, along with a half-melted Toshiba laptop computer found near the anti-aircraft emplacement, had been bagged and returned to base. The operation had been judged a one hundred per cent success.

Alex had felt nothing and thought he’d got away unscathed.