Chance fell silent. Steadied her breathing. Filling her lungs with precious oxygen. She hoped she looked suitably terrified. She watched as Stilts turned away to peer through the grille at the road ahead. Then she took a deep breath and slid her right hand down to her waist. Her movements were subtle and measured. Delicate. Keeping one eye on Stilts and the other on Skinny, she slipped her hand inside her blouse, feeling for the shiny black, matchbox-sized device strapped around her body. Every MI5 agent operating in the field wore one. The black box was the sole reason Chance wasn’t completely shitting herself at being abducted by the Nutting Squad. It was her safety net.

  Now Chance pressed the panic button on the transponder. In an instant the device transmitted a distress signal on an Ultra-High Frequency back to Thiepval Barracks. It did this by jumping on the REBRO radio-rebroadcast network established across Northern Ireland, transmitting across multiple frequencies and nets to reach its destination. Within seconds the agent’s superiors would receive the signal and set a rescue plan in motion. Relief flushing through her system, she let her hand fall away from her blouse just as Stilts spun around.

  Chance wore her best frightened face. Smiling on the inside.

  Now all she had to do was wait.

  Four

  2144 hours.

  The Transit sped out of Andersonstown. Chance, squatting, couldn’t see where they were taking her. But she was aware of Stilts’s lustful gaze. With the noise of the engine juddering through her skull, she closed her eyes and repeated a few words to herself, intoning them inwardly like a prayer.

  ‘Everything is going to be OK.’

  She had relayed the distress signal. Five had probably already dispatched a rescue unit. They would get to her in time.

  ‘Everything’s going to be OK.’

  The van stopped shaking. The road smoothed out. There was a buzz of traffic around them. Chance figured they were joining the slipstream of traffic heading out of Belfast. It was a reasonable guess. The Nutting Squad wouldn’t want to stick around the North for a moment longer than they had to. Not with a pair of kidnap victims in the back of the van. Too risky. The RUC had stop-and-search powers and enthusiastically employed them. Chance pulled herself upright. Just hang on for a few more minutes, she told herself. She drew comfort from the fact that as soon as the alert was sounded at Lisburn, an RAF Westland Lynx would immediately deploy over Northern Ireland. The helicopter had an electronic listening device programmed to pick up the signal transmitted by her black box. Flying at a height of six hundred metres, staying above cloud cover to avoid being sighted by the Nutting Squad, the Lynx would quickly narrow down the radius of the blip to an area roughly the size of a small street. A signaller based at Lisburn would relay the int on the location over a secure comms line to the ground-based retrieval unit. Then it was simply a matter of waiting for the boots on the ground to establish a Mark One eyeball on the coordinates and locate their target.

  Chance decided to try to engage with Stilts. Partly because she remembered her training, and how vital it was to try to humanize herself in the eyes of her abductors. But also because she wanted to tease details out of the guy.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’ she asked.

  ‘Don’t you worry, darling.’ Stilts’s voice was trembling with excitement. The guy couldn’t wait to get stuck into her. ‘Where you’re going, none of your Brit mates will ever find you.’

  Stilts knelt down beside the agent and slithered a hand between her legs. He grabbed her crotch and squeezed. Chance winced with agony as he whispered into her ear. ‘Costello’s gonna make you scream. By the time he’s done with you, you’ll be begging for a quick shot to the head.’

  He drew his hand away. ‘But you won’t get it. No, love. We’ve got the mother of all tortures planned for you.’

  Chance stayed very still. Sweat leaked out of her anus. Stilts glanced away from her, nodded at Skinny.

  ‘Pay attention now, son. This here is an important lesson. When you’re dealing with the Brits, you’ll have to bear in mind that they’re sneaky pricks. Can’t be too fucking careful. You hear me?’

  Skinny nodded vigorously. ‘Gotcha, Bill.’

  Stilts shot him a look. Then he turned back to Chance. His eyes were wide, gleaming and hungry. ‘Take this slag. A real piece of work. Playing the old sympathy card. Don’t believe a word of it. The first thing you do with a bitch like this is take her dignity away.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Take her clothes off.’

  Chance began to panic. If Stilts stripped her naked, he’d discover the transponder. ‘You don’t have to do this,’ she said. ‘I can cut you a deal.’ She glanced at Skinny. ‘Both of you.’

  Stilts balled his hand and punched her in the guts. She doubled up in vicious pain, her breath needling her throat, her brain feeling like it was swelling, as if her skull might split open. Tears nudged at the corners of her eyes. She tried backing away and curling herself up into a ball. Stilts merely slugged her again.

  ‘Time to earn your spurs, lad,’ he barked at Skinny. ‘Strip her.’

  Stilts grunted approvingly as the younger man tore off Chance’s high-heeled shoes. She thrashed and kicked out wildly, but she knew she was just delaying the inevitable. For her efforts she got a boot to her chest from Stilts and went limp. Now Skinny ripped off her trousers, laughing as he did so, filled with excitement and adrenalin, goaded on by Stilts. He tossed them aside. Stilts gave Chance another couple of swift digs to the head, dazing her. She was dimly conscious of Skinny removing her jacket. Then he tore open her blouse, the buttons scattering across the floor. Suddenly she was down to her knickers and bra.

  Then Skinny stopped cold.

  There was a terrible silence.

  ‘Hey,’ Skinny said at last, his voice a nervous whisper. ‘There’s something strapped to her waist.’

  Stilts dropped to one knee and leaned towards Chance. She flicked her eyes up at him. He stared at the transponder. Didn’t move for several seconds. Skinny backed off. Then Stilts reached down and ripped off the device, snorting angrily behind his balaclava.

  ‘What is it, Bill?’ Skinny asked in a whisper.

  ‘Fucking tracking device. This bitch is hot.’

  ‘Maybe we should keep it, Bill? Give it to the engineers, like.’

  ‘Should we bollocks,’ Stilts hissed. ‘The wankers have probably got a tail on us as we speak. No, I’ve got a much better idea. Here, get out of my way.’

  He tugged open the van door. It was only then – when he tossed the transponder into the tar-black landscape screaming past, along with her trousers and jacket, blouse and shoes – that Chance understood she was in big trouble.

  Five

  2201 hours.

  Four kilometres to the north a sleek black Audi Quattro tore through the filmy night as it hunted down the Transit. Belfast was bright in the rear-view mirror, lighting up the sky in oranges and purples, singeing the undersides of the tightly packed clouds. Ahead was a still, perfect blackness, with nothing visible but the faint outlines of trees and a couple of lonely lights on the horizon. The Quattro’s headlights raked the narrow road. The three SAS operators in the car hadn’t passed another vehicle since turning onto the New Road. They were officially in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by warped fields that resembled swells in a vast black sea.

  ‘Shit,’ said the sergeant in the front passenger seat. ‘The signal’s stopped.’ Sergeant Benson Foulbrood glanced at the driver. ‘Step on it, man. Before we lose them.’

  ‘Where’d the van stop?’ the driver asked, his Scottish accent thick as frozen mud.

  ‘Eight hundred metres west of Silverbridge, on the Newry Road,’ Foulbrood grunted back. ‘If we pull this one off, I might order the other lads to stop taking the piss and calling you a Jock bastard.’

  ‘Pity,’ Jock replied. ‘I’ve grown attached to the name.’

  He meant it, too. He was a Dundee lad, and like every kid who’d grown up in that coastal pit, living in the shadow of Edinburgh and Glasgow, he’d learned not to take shit from anyone, to never back down in a fight. If that’s what the other guys in the Regiment considered a bastard, then he was proud to be one. Now Jock upped the speed to a hundred and twenty. In the rear-view mirror a cluster of lights cracked and popped. There were six vehicles in the rescue team: four Regimental Audi Quattros, souped up to the max and kitted out with secure comms units, and two Ford Sierra surveillance cars manned by officers from Special Branch. The vehicles were spread out behind Jock on the single-lane road, with from fifteen to thirty metres between them.

  The Audi shuddered as he pushed the turbocharged 2.1-litre engine all the way. The third Blade stewed in the back, clinging on for dear life as they gunned south, on the trail of the Transit.

  The three men crammed into the Audi were decked out in civvies, the standard dress code for SAS operators in Northern Ireland: denim jeans, T-shirts and black fleece jackets with roomy pockets on the sleeves. Stashed in their jacket pockets were baseball caps with ‘ARMY’ emblazoned on the front in case things got noisy. Heckler & Koch HK53 semi-automatic rifles stashed beside the car doors.

  They had hit 130k per hour.

  ‘I put us a hundred metres north of Silverbridge,’ said Foulbrood. ‘Five clicks from the border. Not far now.’

  Jock grunted, gripping the wheel hard, like he was trying to choke it to death. ‘We can nail the bastards before they move.’

  ‘The signal stopping is bad news,’ the Blade in the back seat put in. His voice had the hoarse drone that is unmistakably Mancunian. ‘They might have already slotted the agent, mate.’

  Jock glowered at him in the rear-view mirror. ‘What are you talking about? The Paddy bastards have pulled over to the side of the road. This is our big chance to catch them. Mate.’

  Foulbrood nodded his agreement with the Manc and sucked his gums. ‘I’m afraid so,’ he said. ‘The Nutting Squad have a reputation for executing their victims and dumping their bodies in ditches. It’s very likely they’re about to give Chance the double-tap treatment.’

  Manc looked pleased with the mental pat on the back from Foulbrood and smiled, his lips barely visible beneath his beard. He got on well with the sergeant, Jock knew. But then again, he reckoned Manc was the kind of guy who got on well with anyone higher up the food chain. They were both new recruits to the Regiment, but only one of them had a first-class degree in arse-kissing.

  ‘Let’s hope you’re wrong,’ said Jock.

  ‘“Hope” is the right word, mate. The blokes in the Nutting Squad are sick bastards. If you’d done your research, you’d know that the odds of the agent surviving are pretty fucking slim.’

  ‘Well put, man,’ said Foulbrood.

  Jock banged a fist on the wheel in frustration. He was twenty-one, with a permanent frown etched across his brow and a coiled sort of physique, his muscles tight, his veins twisting up from his forearms to his neck like lengths of taut rope. His eyes gleamed like polished silver as he focused on the road ahead.

  They were passing through Silverbridge now.

  Jock felt his guts tighten into a knot. He was the youngest Blade in the history of the Regiment, but he figured that already he knew more about being an operator than the other two pricks with him. An hour ago he’d been on the Shankhill Road doing his orientation training, the Regiment equivalent of the Knowledge, trying to memorize the layout of every street and every short-cut until he knew the city better than the back of his hand. Then the distress call had come over the comms. A minute later the Blades were slingshotting west on the B38 out of Belfast, through Upper Springfield and Hannahstown, touching 130k per southbound along the Moira Road section of the A26. They had taken the third exit at the roundabout, headed south on the B3 towards Bleary, sweeping through the mixed Catholic and Protestant enclaves of Gilford and Scarva before racing towards Newry.

  Following the directions relayed from the Lynx, the rescue team were pursuing the Nutting Squad metre by metre. Minute by minute.

  But they had been playing catch-up since heading out of Belfast and the van was always one step ahead of them, the captured agent tantalizingly out of reach. By the time the Audi had rushed through Poyntzpass and Goragh and then west on Camlough Road, which led onto the Newry Road stretch of the A25, they were still four kilometres behind the signal.

  Jock hated to admit it, but Manc was right. The agent was probably shafted.

  The driver hated everything about the guy in the back seat. He’d known him since they took Selection together. Jock had finished first in the hill run, but Manc had stolen the honours on the advanced driving course. The two recruits were polar opposites in just about every way. Jock liked to unwind with a bottle of Johnnie Walker and a flirt with a cheap tart. Manc preferred his pale ales and talking endless bullshit with the ruperts. He didn’t rub anyone up the wrong way or pick fights just for the hell of it. And now he was beginning to royally piss the Scot off.

  ‘Take the right,’ Foulbrood said as he consulted the map laid out on his lap.

  The 1:20,000 laminated map was almost identical to the standard AA map found in petrol stations, with one major difference. This map was divided into colour-coded sections, with numbered red, yellow, green, blue and black sticker dots arranged within each section to identify features of the terrain, like road junctions, or the point where a wooded area met a country road. The comms signaller relayed colour-referenced coordinates to Foulbrood. In the remote event that the Provos were listening in on the chat, they wouldn’t have a clue where the Blades were headed.

  ‘Five hundred metres along and we’re there,’ said Foulbrood.

  They were now deep in County Armagh, Bandit Country. The landscape contracted into a knotted mass of trees and grass and bushes, the occasional farm jutting out of the guts of the earth, the horizon gleaming like a knife blade under the brooding sky. The road narrowed, contorted. Took the Audi deeper into the tangled terrain. They were now pissing distance from the border.

  Four hundred metres to the signal now.

  Darkness swept over the landscape like a cloud of ash. Foulbrood and Manc simultaneously craned their necks as they drew close to the location transmitted by the transponder. They scanned the landscape for any sign of the white Transit van.

  Nothing.

  Jock felt the dead weight of his secondary weapon, a Browning Hi-Power single-action semi-automatic pistol in a holster on his belt. He had twelve rounds of 9x19mm Parabellum in the ammo clip, plus the round primed in the chamber. He also had an extra thirteen-round clip. The three men’s primaries were the HK53s. The cut-down variant of the longer HK33 semi-automatic assault rifle, the HK53 had a barrel 22.2 inches long with the stock collapsed, twelve inches shorter than the HK33’s. Although the guns were chambered for the 5.56mm round, they felt and handled more like submachine guns. The HK53 was ideal for close-quarters battle, but less effective at hammering targets from longer range. The team also had grab bags in the boot loaded with flashbangs and supplies: food, including energy snacks, water, para cord, a torch, a box of matches, a Swiss army knife and a first-aid kit.

  A hundred metres to the signal now. A clutch of lights from the nearby village of Creggan flickered dimly on the horizon. The middle of nowhere, a land of die-hard Republicans, and they were fifty metres from the target. Jock gritted his teeth, his blood pumping, flesh crawling with a strange thrill. His first proper op in the Regiment since passing Selection. Please, God, I don’t want to end up on the losing team.

  ‘Stop the car,’ Foulbrood ordered. ‘We’ve reached the signal.’

  They steered into the lay-by.

  Jock killed the engine and climbed out of the Audi. Bursting out ahead of Manc and Foulbrood, he was scanning the area immediately to the west of the lay-by, the cold scratching at his cheeks, picking at his flesh. Visibility was low and it took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the leaden gloom. There was no sign of the Transit. No sign of the Nutting Squad or the MI5 agent. He spied a hedge running along the back of the lay-by. Behind it was a ditch running parallel with the road, the water in it shimmering in the moonlight. Beyond that was a thicket of trees with dense undergrowth below them.

  Chance must be in there, he thought.

  He steeled his muscles. The ditch was too wide to jump. He would have to wade across it. The cold turned his breath to ice in his throat. Spotting a red light blinking in the undergrowth, he unholstered his Browning HP, gripping it tightly as he jumped down into the ditch.

  The water was only ankle-deep. Jock felt the cold through his trainers, instantly chilling the bones in his feet. He made for the red light, seven metres away. He heard movement at his five o’clock, glanced back, saw Manc storming across the lay-by, then lights behind him as the five other pursuit vehicles screeched to a halt alongside the Audi, the headlamps washing the thicket with pale light.

  Jock could now see the source of the flashing red light. A small black box, flecked with mud. He’d seen a transponder before, during briefings. His blood ran cold as he caught sight of something else. A woman’s two-piece suit, black and crumpled, on the ground and nearby a pair of high-heeled shoes. A white blouse caught up in a low branch on the far bank of the ditch, the buttons all ripped off the front, the collar and sleeves smeared with blood.

  A sick feeling ran through him as he pocketed the transponder, scooped up the clothes and hurried back across the ditch. Foulbrood and Manc were waiting at the lay-by. Manc clocked the bloody blouse and a quizzical look creased his features.

  ‘They must have taken her south,’ Jock said to Foulbrood. ‘Can’t be far. We can still catch them.’

  The sergeant squinted at the road ahead and chewed his lip.

  ‘I’m afraid we’re too late,’ he said, bitterness in his voice. ‘I just got off the comms with the watchkeeper. The green army lads were supposed to establish a roadblock at Cullaville. But the reports coming through are stating that our chaps didn’t get there in time. They found a burned-out Transit by the side of the road. Plates match the vehicle we’ve been chasing. Looks like they’ve already escaped. Sorry, lads. But we’re too late. Agent Chance is gone.’

 

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