For Valour
ABOUT THE BOOK
When a young trooper is shot in the head at the Regiment’s renowned Killing House at the SAS’s base in Hereford, Nick Stone is perfectly qualified to investigate the mysterious circumstances more deeply. But less than forty-eight hours later, a second death catapults him into the telescopic sights of an unknown assassin bent on protecting a secret that will strike at the heart of the establishment that Stone has spent most of his life fighting to protect.
And now with the clock ticking, Stone hurtles from the solitude of a remote Welsh confessional to southern Spain, in an increasingly desperate quest to uncover the truth about a chain of events that began in the darkness of an Afghan hillside, and left a young man haunted by the never-ending screams of a dying friend.
Nick Stone’s most heart-stopping adventure forces you to recognize the thinness of the line that separates sacrifice from suicide, to share the nightmares that walk hand in hand with heroism – and to count the real cost of actions taken in the name of loyalty.
Contents
FOR VALOUR
Andy McNab
1
Lake Sommen, Östergötland
Thursday, 7 May 1992
I eased open the front door with a little help from a couple of strips of steel wire and tapped the six-figure sequence into the panel beside it to disable the alarm system. Colonel Chastain had given us the code – he had friends in high places and I guessed serious cash would have changed hands somewhere along the line.
A scrubbed-pine kitchen, dining area, snug, and huge open-plan living space stretched across the ground floor. Then upstairs, four bedrooms, all with en-suite bath and shower, the master, with a big fuck-off four-poster, one for the kids and two for guests.
The half-sunk basement contained a gym packed with state-of-the-art equipment, a ping-pong table and a sauna, along with the working parts – gas and electricity supply, washing-machine, tumble-drier, all that sort of shit.
The windows down here were covered with high-tensile brushed-steel security mesh. I undid the latch on the one beneath the wooden steps that led up to the side entrance and left it for later. I reckoned that if we were going to turn the house into a fire-bomb, this was where we’d light the fuse.
Even in the engine room the owners had gone for the designer look. I found a well-stocked toolbox in a cupboard beneath the polished granite work surface, then took a close look at the jamb, rebate and frame of the door that led down from the house.
To start with, Harry worked quickly and silently alongside me. As the minutes ticked by, though, his muscles became tighter, his movements less fluid. He was well aware that we couldn’t leave any sign of making entry, but I could tell that all he really wanted to do was rip the place apart.
It was probably a mistake to take a last poke around the main living area. The furniture – stainless steel, glass, oiled wood and leather – was arranged with clinical precision. It felt like a showroom. Everything in its proper place.
The silver-framed family portrait was what tipped Harry over the edge. About two feet wide and eighteen inches high, it stood in pride of place between a pair of shiny candlesticks, beneath a window that looked out across the mirror-flat lake. The Saddam Hussein clone at the centre of the group was grinning from ear to ear. With a beautiful blonde Swedish wife and a couple of olive-skinned kids hugging him like their lives depended on it, he had a lot to be happy about.
But, close up, you couldn’t help noticing that Jahmir Koureh’s smile didn’t reach his eyes.
I’d only seen it happen once, very briefly, during our six-week stay in Baghdad’s Ba’ath Party HQ – when he’d leaned in to fasten his pliers around my one remaining wisdom tooth and wrenched it out of my gum to add to his trophy collection. He had never bothered with anaesthetic. It stopped him getting maximum satisfaction from his work.
There was a low growl to my left. ‘I swear it, Nick, I’m going to kill that fucker with my bare hands …’
Harry looked like he’d seen a ghost. His skin was stretched across his forehead and cheekbones like cling-film, and beads of sweat had started to bubble up at his hairline. His knuckles whitened beneath his clear polythene gloves as he gripped the chair-back beside me.
Fair one.
I’d thought I’d managed to bury the memory of our Gulf War captivity, but I couldn’t stop the metallic taste of blood and bile leaking onto my tongue again now. And whatever damage Koureh and his mates had done to me, it wasn’t a patch on what they’d done to Harry Callard.
2
I hadn’t expected tea and biscuits after we were captured by the Republican Guard in the north-western Iraqi desert a year ago. We’d made casualties of quite a few of their mates as we’d fought our way to the Syrian border. I could see they weren’t in carnival mood when they dragged me out of the storm drain where I’d been hiding since first light, and wasn’t surprised that they filled us in every chance they got en route to the interrogation centre.
Once they had stripped and blindfolded us in our cells, they banged our heads on the floor until they turned into over-inflated footballs. Then they climbed aboard us with their boots and lengths of four-by-four. They were kids, really, angry at the world, angry about the length of time it was taking to grow their bum fluff, and seriously pissed off with the enemy who had suddenly appeared in their backyard and ruined their day. I didn’t even mind when they made us eat our own shit – it was better than another beating.
But the cool dudes with the perfectly chiselled Saddam moustaches were something else again. They knew a thing or two about pain. They knew what really seared your bone marrow and broke your spirit, and they carried on dishing it out long after the usefulness of any information we might have carried had expired.
While we spent the whole interrogation period trying to conceal our true identities, Koureh seemed keen to boast about his. ‘Are you a Londoner, Nick? Of course you are. I can tell by your accent. When you and your friends were robbing corner shops in Catford, I was studying dentistry at your King’s College Hospital. My fellow students used to call me Jammy.’
I noticed then that he had shark eyes. Even when he was cracking a funny they never reflected the light.
I filed away every fragment of int I could lay my hands on. Who knew when I might need it? And the rest of the time I tried not to give them the satisfaction of knowing what they were doing to me hurt like fuck.
There was no foolproof recipe for survival. We all developed our own strategies. The lads with wives and kids tried not to think of home: it took their eye off the ball and made them vulnerable. Some did mathematical calculations in their head. Trev made up his own crossword clues; he might have looked like a Neanderthal, but he could do pretty much any puzzle – general knowledge or cryptic – in under fifteen minutes.
We all did our best to keep the banter going. Richie Rothwell stumbled back from one of Koureh’s sessions, gobbed up a mouthful of blood and splintered enamel and rasped, ‘At least they can’t make yer pregnant.’ Whenever things went to rat shit I kept that gag alive in my head. It probably kept me alive too.
At first, Harry tried to join in the fun and games back in the cell, but we could all see that he was in shit state. He didn’t have any more crusted blood, pus and mucus on him than the rest of us, but you could see that they’d messed big-time with the inside of his head.
Some days, after Johnny Sawbridge died, he did nothing more than squat on the floor, barely making a sound, rocking backwards and forwards, like he was a small boat on a heavy swell.
3
I had hoped this Swedish job might help Harry draw a line under the whole Gulf nightmare, but I was already starting to regret bringing him along.
I reached out and touched his shoulder. He recoiled and skittered back across the uncluttered pine floor like I’d zapped him with a Taser. But this wasn’t the time or the place.
‘Mate, we’ve got to move …’ I gathered him up and aimed him towards the front door.
As we emerged, the evening sunshine glinted off the water beyond the crescent of firs that fringed the dentist’s lakeside spread. We’d come here via the slow road from Tranås, so knew his nearest neighbour was more than three Ks to the north of us, but I was still glad of the trees, especially now that Harry was starting to lose it.
We needed to conceal ourselves, to sort out what was going to happen next, and our scrape was just about perfect for the job. We had a juniper trunk and a big lateral branch at our backs and plenty of cover in front but a clear view of the house and the track that approached it through the forest. We could also see enough of the lake to our half-left to give us all the warning we needed of an imminent Viking attack.