For Valour (38 page)

Treading lightly, I angled right, towards the two suites whose lights I’d seen from below. I wasn’t assuming that the dark ones were unoccupied, but I’d clear them later if necessary. I ignored the first door I came to. The second opened with a turn of the handle.

Everything inside looked like it had done when I’d camped there. The half-unpacked Bergen beside the bed and the kit strewn across the sofa and floor told me all I needed to know. This was a BG’s accommodation. And that meant a VIP close by. Or a prisoner.

I listened for movement in the en-suite bathroom. There was none. I eased the door shut again and took another slow, deep breath.

The last door before the fire escape was five metres away. I moved soundlessly towards it and tilted my left ear towards the upper panel. This time I heard muffled but urgent voices. I gripped the shiny brass knob with my left hand, keeping the Taser at the ready in my right. It didn’t shift more than a millimetre.

The latch was designed for privacy, not confinement, and I didn’t have time to mince around. I took two steps back and slammed the sole of my Timberland against the point where it met the frame.

8

It burst inwards, wrenching the strike plate from its housing.

This room was bigger than the one I’d just left, and a whole lot tidier. Even the handcuffs attached to the metal bedstead had been neatly arranged.

Ella was sitting opposite me, behind a low, granite-topped table, in a freshly laundered blue dress that fitted OK but didn’t look like it belonged to her. She didn’t say hello. Most of her attention was focused on the Glock against her temple.

The guy holding it was sitting behind her. He leaned into view, taking care not to make himself an easy target.

I could see cold eyes and thin lips through his balaclava, but I concentrated on his weapon too. I took a step towards them and saw his index finger curl as he applied first pressure on the trigger.

‘Move another inch and this won’t end well.’ The voice was level, with a hint of Jock.

This lad wasn’t flapping.

But he
was
bluffing. If he killed Ella, Chastain no longer had a hold on Sam.

The barrel swung in my direction, and stopped when it was pointed at my centre mass.

‘Before you do anything stupid, you need to know I won’t hurt her. But I don’t give a fuck how many rounds I have to put into you.’

The muzzle of the Glock moved fractionally in the direction of the X26 and the lips moved again. ‘Drop it.’

When Chastain’s Serbian heavies had delivered the girl to the Astra crew, they obviously hadn’t warned them about her. He was too busy reading my mind to pay her the attention she deserved. Ella’s right arm shot up and smacked his weapon out of his hand.

He tried to get to his feet as she dived to her left and I brought up the Taser. The red dot from its laser pointer zeroed in on his fleece and, before he could count to one, fifty thousand volts surged along the command wires to the barbs that had buried themselves in his chest and leg.

He hit the deck like a felled pine. Nineteen pulses a second had hijacked his muscle control. He couldn’t even throw out his hands to stop himself head-butting the granite-topped table between us.

I handed the X26 to Ella and told her to keep her finger on the trigger. While she kept feeding him more current I hauled him across the room and gaffer-taped his wrists and ankles.

Once I’d cuffed him to the bedframe, I grabbed the top of his mask and pulled it off. I’d assumed he was wearing it to prevent Ella from recognizing him, but now wondered if he’d got self-conscious about his hair. It was a peroxide blond mat on the top of an otherwise shaven skull.

He’d severely malleted his nose, and blood and snot bubbled down his chin as he opened his eyes and tried to get some air into his lungs. I wound more tape over his mouth and round the back of his neck. It wasn’t going to help his breathing, but I didn’t give a shit about that.

I unclipped his UHF radio from his belt and pulled out his earpiece, then sparked up the one I’d borrowed from his mate down by the boathouse. Alpha was on the net, still pissed off with Delta, but ordering Bravo, Charlie and Echo to spread out and trawl through the trees along the southern boundary, all the way to the lake. Echo must have been the smoker on the jetty, which probably made the lad with the stupid hair Foxtrot.

Fucking brilliant. I thought they’d already be on their way back, but now reckoned we’d have a clear half-hour to hotwire the Defender in the yard and get the hell out of here. Things were finally going our way.

To celebrate, I handed Ella a bottle of designer mineral water from the bedside cabinet and treated myself to one too. We rehydrated and I gave Foxtrot another five-second burst through the barbs while she fetched her Puffa jacket. Then we legged it left to the fire escape.

I led. Ella followed.

9

Back in the day, Harry had disabled the motion sensor beside the steel door because he didn’t like being dazzled during his cigarette breaks, but some fucker had fixed it. The LED security lights snapped on before we were halfway to the ground.

Chastain and his crew were lined up in the walled garden below us like a firing squad. Alpha, Bravo and Charlie weren’t still bumbling around in the woods. They were right here, Glock 17s in the aim.

Before we could even think of scrambling back the way we’d come, Echo appeared on the grating above us. He was in Billy the Kid mode, a Glock in his right hand and an X26 in his left. His job was to encourage us down.

Chastain couldn’t bring himself to look me in the eye as we stepped out into the First World War battlefield, but the guy standing beside him didn’t even try to camouflage his grin. He had the buttoned-down shirt and buttoned-down hair of an ex-Rupert, so I assumed he was Alpha. He was pretty pleased with himself – and why not? I’d played the bogus radio callout card, and he’d trumped it.

Echo plasticuffed my wrists behind my back and took far longer than necessary to frisk me. I wasn’t sure what was on his mind, but he managed to make the whole process intensely personal. Maybe the lad I’d launched into the tree was his brother. He finally unzipped my bomber and reclaimed Delta’s radio, then removed Sam’s Browning from my waistband and the extra mag from my pocket and handed them both to Chastain.

After frisking Ella, he waved us through the archway and into the courtyard.

10

We were shepherded through the main entrance of the stable block. Echo was sent upstairs to see whether Foxtrot was ready to join the party.

Chastain led the way towards the conference room. I didn’t know what version of events he’d given his team, but he instructed them to stay outside in the foyer with Ella while he caught up with me.

He closed the door behind us and steered me towards a seat at the head of the oak table. I’d been right about the flapjacks. They were nowhere to be seen.

He didn’t draw down the blinds on the double-glazed panels that now separated us from Ella and the call signs. He obviously didn’t want me to forget they were there. Charlie disappeared as Echo and Foxtrot joined the group. The lad with the stupid hair had shed the gaffer tape, but he still wasn’t a pretty sight. He glanced in my direction and gave me the strong impression that he’d be rearranging my face too, if he got half a chance.

Chastain thumbed on the Browning’s safety catch and put it in the pocket of his Barbour. He remained standing.

One of us had to kick this whole thing off, so I thought it might as well be me.

‘I know what happened at the compound in Koshtay. Blackwood has all the details in an envelope. Unless I tell him not to, he’ll open it in court …’ I glanced up at the row of clocks on the far wall that told me what time it was in London, New York, Bogotá, Baghdad, Beijing and three or four other places, ‘… in under thirty-six hours.

‘And in case you think you might find a way to stop that happening, I have a geeky mate who’ll go the Wikileaks route if he doesn’t hear from me.’ I was talking bollocks, but he wasn’t to know that.

He went very still, then sighed deeply. I recognized the signs. Whenever he’d delivered a bollocking back at the Lines he’d liked us to feel it was more in sorrow than in anger.

This time it was a combo of both.

‘Have you
any
idea how much damage that will do?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t give a shit. All I care about is a lad who doesn’t deserve to take the rap for the murder of his best mate.’

‘None of this would have happened if those two idiots had managed to button their lips …’

His knuckles whitened as he gripped the chair back in front of him. I could see that he was trying to stop himself vibrating with rage.

‘I’m pretty sure it was only Scott who forgot to press the mute button, first at the Palace, then when everything got too much for him one Saturday night. And that made Jack Grant think your son’s VC was about to go down the plughole. Was the CQB plan your idea?’

Chastain clenched his jaw, then shook his head. ‘It was never a plan. Jack was an old friend. He called me when he left the Green Dragon. I told him to watch and wait. The CQB solution was a spur-of-the-moment thing. He thought the world of those boys. But he believed – as I do – that the institution is more important than the individual.’

‘The Regiment or the medal?’

‘Both. They stand for something bigger than all of us. Something worth defending. To the death. Imagine the shame for our nation if a VC has to be forfeited now, for the first time in over a century. It won’t happen on my watch.

‘Don’t mistake this for personal vanity. I want to protect my son’s reputation, of course. It’s all his mother and I have left of him. But in the current climate, now that every single hiccup in the battle space comes under the scrutiny of damned Islington lawyers who don’t know one end of an RPG from the other, we must champion greater causes.

‘Above all, Queen Victoria’s tribute to extreme valour in the face of the enemy must remain unblemished because we can’t continue to fight today’s dirty little wars if we lose our grip on the moral high ground.’

‘Your Serbian mates wouldn’t recognize the moral high ground if it bit them on the arse. And what about killing Trev and kidnapping Ella? How the fuck do you defend that?’

‘Both those things are extremely regrettable. But, as I’m sure you’re now aware, we need the girl to ensure Callard’s continuing compliance. Trevor was uncomfortably close to establishing the connection between the Killing House, the events that led up to Guy’s VC action, and my attempts to keep the whole situation under some kind of control. He even came up here to confront me.’

‘No, he didn’t! He came up here to ask for your help! Like me, he wasted a whole lot of time thinking that DSF was the Prince of Darkness, and that you’re still the man who was always there for us when everything goes to rat shit.’

‘I’m glad you’ve brought that up, Sergeant bloody perfect Stone, because quite high on that particular list is a certain Swedish task that was
all
about revenge.’

‘Shit happens. We all know that. And Grant might have fired the first shot on his own initiative. But Trev was killed on
your
orders, and you only kept me alive so that I could lead Sam into an ambush that would shut us both up permanently.

‘And what happens to Ella now? She’s pinged the lot of you. You’re not going to be able to just wave her goodbye. No matter how you try to dress this up, you’re guilty of betrayal, you’re guilty of abduction and you’re guilty of murder.’

If our eyeballs had been lasers at that moment, we’d both have gone up in smoke. For the first time since I’d known him, he didn’t seem to have an immediate answer.

‘And
you
may have found a way of justifying all this shit, but what about your wife?’

Chastain erupted big-time. ‘
Leave her out of this, you little shit. I’m defending the things she holds sacred as well
.’

He thundered down the room towards me. Fuck knows what he would have done if Alpha hadn’t thrown open the door when he was still a couple of metres away.

‘Boss, you’re needed down at the boathouse. It’s urgent.’

He wasn’t smiling now.

11

Alpha guided Chastain down the corridor, grabbing Ella as they went. Bravo followed, leaving Echo and Foxtrot to look after me. I guessed that Delta still had his head down in the woods beside the boathouse. Maybe they’d trip over him on the way.

I planted my Timberlands on the carpet and slid back my chair, but didn’t get up.

You could have cut through the tension in the air with a knife. And it wasn’t just because these two lads hadn’t taken a liking to me. Something was happening down by the lakeshore, and I was pretty sure I knew what it was.

Echo stayed by the doorway, Glock in the aim.

Foxtrot circled the table, so that he’d stay out of Echo’s line of fire. I kept eyes on him as he came for me. Someone had removed the Taser barbs from his chest and leg and slapped a dressing on his very flat nose, but it hadn’t improved his mood.

I filled my lungs, flexed my leg muscles, eased my feet back another eighteen inches so that they were planted beneath my arse, and braced myself for what was about to happen.

He bunched his right fist and drove it into my gut, but he’d wanted so badly to crack it into the middle of my face that he didn’t give the blow a hundred per cent. I doubled over to look like I was taking the pain then sprang off my launch pad before he had time to step back. Uncurling as I went, I slammed the back of my skull at warp speed into his chin.

I felt Foxtrot’s jaw crack before I heard it and straightened in time to see him stagger backwards, taking out chairs like dominoes. He crumpled beside the table, spat out a couple of blood-stained teeth, brought both hands up to his face and lay there moaning.

He was having the mother of all bad-hair days. And the carpet was going to need some attention too.

I turned slowly back towards the door. I figured that Echo wouldn’t kill me until Chastain had decided what to do about the Wikileak challenge, but I thought I might get a round in the thigh for my trouble. I controlled my breathing and kept my weight on my toes. Maybe he’d make the mistake of coming closer as well.