Danger Close Read online

  Danger Close

  Charlie Flowers

  © Charlie Flowers 2013

  Charlie Flowers has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published by Black Dove Books 2012

  This edition published 2013 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  ‘And they plotted and planned, and Allah too planned,

  and the best of planners is Allah.’

  Al-Quran

  Surah l 'Imran 3:54

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  Glossary

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Extract from Friends and Enemies by Humphrey Hawksley

  Prologue

  September 17th

  Home Office

  2 Marsham Street

  London

  SW1P 4DF

  Home Secretary;

  I am writing to express my association’s unease with the continuous inaction over the racist murders of Iqeel Latif and of our association member PC Kerim Shah, the stonewalling over the events at Westfield, and the unexplained death of our patron, the Labour peer Lord Khalil. Our association remains convinced that an Army unit is being allowed to run amok within our Muslim community, and that agents provocateurs are operating to discredit us.

  I have also raised my concern with the ACPO lead on terrorism and allied matters.

  Yours sincerely

  Ali Masood

  Chair

  Muslim Police Association

  Home SecretaryMetropolitan Police

  Home OfficeNew Scotland Yard

  2 Marsham Street Broadway

  London SW1P 4DF Westminster London SW1 0BG

  18th September 2012

  Dear Home Secretary

  I am writing to inform you that the Director of Public Prosecutions has instructed me to open an investigation into Colonel David Mahoney, CO of Kinetic Training Solutions, on suspicion of obstructing an active police investigation. I shall be briefing all relevant ACPO leads on this enquiry at the earliest possible opportunity, and I would be grateful for a meeting in person as soon as possible. I understand your schedule is rather busy at the moment due to the inquests but I would be grateful if you and your Prevent team could spare me an hour or so this week?

  Kind Regards

  Benjamin Howells QPM

  Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis

  Civilian Gallantry List

  Wednesday 19 September 2012

  The names of the individuals who have received The George Medal, The Queen’s Gallantry Medal and The Queen’s Commendation for Bravery, have been published. The Queen has been graciously pleased to approve the following awards of The George Medal and The Queen’s Gallantry Medal and for publication in The London Gazette of the names of those shown below as having received an expression of Commendation for Bravery.

  Queen’s Gallantry Medal

  Holly Kirpachi (deceased), Civilian

  For helping to prevent an attack by terrorists at Stratford.

  On 13th September 2012 Holly Kirpachi and her colleagues were present at Westfield Stratford during the al-Qaeda terrorist attack. Between them they managed to rout several groups of terrorists and pass information to the security services enabling a successful counter-attack to be staged. During the counter-attack, Miss Kirpachi went forward to clear an al-Qaeda cell from the shopping centre and accounted for many enemy combatants with a captured rifle. She was fatally wounded during the firefight. Without her intervention it is certain that many more lives would have been lost. Her body was not recovered. She was thought to have been twenty-one years old.

  1

  20th September

  The engine roared and the sirens howled. Roadrunner grinned at me as she hit the gears. I was trying to get my head round the fact that we’d actually just stolen a Volvo fire appliance and were barrelling it out down the side streets towards the Venezuelan Embassy. The emergency lights strobed the outside in blue staccato bursts.

  Roadrunner yelled over the squall of the sirens. ‘Good times! Where d’you want me to park this thing, akhi?’

  She was a short, buxom Desi girl with wild curly black hair, and the London Fire Brigade helmet really didn’t fit her. It hung off her head at a crazy angle. In the seat to my left was her dog, Bullet. Bullet was panting away happily. Well, I thought it was a dog, it may well have been a bear. Bullet was a Caucasian mountain shepherd and liked to bite people.

  My Blackberry pinged. A text message. ‘Fire on, moving now’. That was Maryam and Duckie in the loft of the Embassy.

  I texted back - ‘30 secs’

  We hit the corner of Cromwell Place and I clung on for dear life. We were going the wrong way down a one-way street. Bit late to worry about that. I got my respirator and my one CS gas grenade ready. I checked my Walther 88 Compact was sitting nice and easy in the small of my back. It wasn’t. It never did on nights out.

  We had about three minutes to do our stuff before the real fire brigade turned up and it all went south. I hoped Duckie and Maryam had stopped arguing long enough to unplug the computers we needed from the first floor and bring them out.

  ‘Roadrunner. Right outside the front. Why on earth are them two up there? They can’t stand each other.’

  She shrugged: ‘Cause they’re the smallest.’

  Roadrunner screeched the fire truck to a halt directly outside the embassy. The blue lights lit the front up like a rave from hell.

  ‘GO, akhi!’

  I pulled on my respirator and jumped down from the cab and ran for the main door, readying the pin on the grenade. Three, two, one…

  Smoke and chaos met me. The street door was open and people were stumbling out. Here was a concierge trying to stop me getting in. I elbow-smashed him down and ran in. Pin pulled. Grenade thrown. We were go.

  Computers. Servers. This was part of Fuzz Shaheen’s mad plan to get the links from the SOAP SUD investigation and everyone involved in talking to the late Lord Khaleel and his al-Qaeda teams. We wanted to know where their fake Venezuelan passports had come from and to what extent the Socialist Workers Party had been involved. Hey guys, we won’t hack them, we’ll just bust into their premises and take their computers. I guessed she was angry at the loss of Bang-Bang. We all were. The reprisals were spreading and were bloody. Dead bodies of UK jihadis, cousins, colleagues, you name it, were turning up everywhere. And every IP address involved in the backtracking from the investigation was getting hit, and hit hard. And the Venezuelan Embassy, naturally, had come up. So we were hitting them. With extreme prejudice.

  I ran forward up the staircase, pulling my Walther 88. Above me there was screaming, and as I reached the first floor landing down came Duckie and Maryam, each carrying a PC tower and both yelling at each other through their respirators.
I couldn’t understand them, they couldn’t understand each other, and this had the makings of a clusterfuck. I gripped their shoulders.

  ‘You two! Downstairs! On the fire engine! Right hand side, GO!’

  They stopped bickering and went.

  I followed them down into the haze. From my right a security man stepped out, spluttering in the smoke and teargas, and brought up an MP5 submachine gun. I cannoned into his body, folding the weapon into my grasp and punched him to the floor as I kicked his legs from under him. And he pulled the trigger. It was on full auto. Rounds went spanging all up and down the stairs and a stray shot hit Maryam in the hip and she went down in a cloud of dust and dropped the PC with a bang. I yanked the weapon clean from the man’s grasp and smashed it into his jaw with its buttstock. His head bounced off the carpet like a stunned cow. I hit him with it again, three more times as training dictated, and teeth and blood flew everywhere.

  I pointed my 88 at his head. His jaw was broken. I cocked the hammer. One flight below me on the ground floor the staff started screaming and coughing as the teargas hit them. I looked back. The man was now out cold on the floor. Nope. Couldn’t do it. I hung his weapon by its strap over my shoulder and picked up the dropped PC terminal.

  I looked behind me. Duckie was dragging Maryam to her feet in a comet smear of blood. I ran and got Maryam’s other arm and we hustled her down the stairs. Blood was spraying everywhere and she was going deathly pale and stumbling.

  We ran down the last flight of stairs. We hit the street door to a festival of blue flashing lights. I tore Maryam’s respirator off and she gasped the night air in. Roadrunner was standing there with Bullet on his leash.

  She grinned. ‘Ey, chicas. Want me to release ‘im?’

  Of course we did. ‘Roadrunner. On my command unleash Hell! And get a trauma pack!’

  She let the leash slip, and off Bullet went like a furry missile, straight into the posse of firefighters running up the street from Cromwell Road. Within seconds he was hanging off a Fire Inspector’s arse and we were all running for Mishy’s estate car at the other end of Cromwell Place. As we ran I loosed off the MP5 on full auto back up the street to keep their heads down. Brass cases flew and the flash and roar of the machinegun lit up the street.

  We regrouped between the fire engine and Mishy’s estate car and flung Maryam onto the back seats of the fire truck. I got the MP5 into the shoulder and slowly swept the way we’d arrived. I’d lost count of rounds expended so I was hoping for the best. No movement. Good. They were showing sense. No heroes.

  The PC terminals went into the back of the car. Roadrunner got the trauma pack out of the rear compartment of the fire engine and began working on Maryam. Maryam kept trying to sit up, swearing like a sailor, and Roadrunner kept forcing her down. By now there was blood everywhere, on seats, windows, and everything we’d touched. Roadrunner looked at us in the blue strobing lights. She spoke as she flicked blood and gore off of her hands. ‘Don’t worry. I just got my NVQ in first aid.’

  I kept covering the road behind us. Duckie kept one hand on my shoulder, waiting for the signal to move. After a minute, Roadrunner nodded at me, threw a used syringe into the cab, and said ‘Go! It didn’t hit an artery. She’ll be fine. I’ll take care of this.’

  We went for the doors of Mishy’s car, and left the chaos and sirens behind us in the dark.

  2

  21st September

  “An imperfect plan violently executed now is far better than a perfect plan executed a week too late” said the Colonel as we both stood with our backs to his house, making the most of the last of the autumn sun.

  ‘Patton, right?’

  He nodded. ‘Correct, young man. And I feel an imperfect, violent plan coming on right about now. The Home Secretary wants to see both of us tomorrow, 0800 hours Zulu. Straight after that, I want you to get down to Hendon and start gripping them for CCTV footage.’

  Colonel Mahoney’s family house was just outside Yately. From where we stood, his grounds swept down to the lakes. We weren’t too far from Sandhurst. Maybe that was why he’d bought this particular pile, maybe not, who knew.

  ‘Riz, I’ve had enough of this crap with the Met, the CIA, and God knows what else. I’m going to reactivate RPOC.’

  RPOC. The Resistance and Psychological Operations Committee, which was a fancy name for the UK’s secret underground army. The original RPOC had been created within the Reserve Forces Association in 1970, which was the last time the powers that be had thought the wheels were really going to come off. It encompassed elements of MI5, M16, SAS and SAS reserves and any other useful MOD and ex-military people. As far as I was aware it had been disbanded in the late Seventies and forgotten, and any hope of a revival had died along with the bomb that had killed Airey Neave.

  ‘You can do that, boss?’

  He smiled. ‘Of course. I’m the last surviving member. Listen, Riz. Post the attacks, the country is teetering on a knife-edge. The communities are at the point of boiling over, we’ve got the EDL trying to march on every Muslim city centre going, there are guaranteed to be orchestrated riots very soon…that’s bad enough. You’ve heard about what the Infidels are talking about?’

  I had. The Infidels were the people who thought the EDL weren’t hard enough. They’d split and teamed up with a resurgent Combat 18.

  ‘Yep boss. The chatter is that they want a spectacular. A revenge attack on a Muslim target.’

  ‘Riz, that is not going to happen on my watch. Which is why I want my two favourite kids and my favourite gang of Blackeyed lunatics on the case. Job two for your intray. By the way, we raided the CIA Station chief’s house last night.’

  I turned in shock. ‘You did WHAT?’

  ‘What I said. Of course, he has immunity, but we took his computers. Couldn’t find anything yet.’

  Up near the house, the Colonel’s wife Sandra was fussing about with some garden chair covers.

  I spoke. ‘Reckon we can find who took Holly still?’

  His shoulders twitched. ‘That area has more camera coverage than most conurbations, and straight after the attacks we got our surveillance planes up. There’s bound to be something. We should be able to track them. If it’s the Septics, they’ll leave a trail.’

  He looked at me. ‘How are you bearing up?’

  ‘I’m OK, boss, honestly I am. Ready to go.’

  ‘Riz, let me read your tealeaves son. Your head is, at this moment in time, a mess. You may think you’re functioning but you’re not. You’re not sleeping. You’re having nightmares.’

  He cast me a glance. ‘Am I right?’

  The breath went out of me and I nodded.

  ‘You’re missing her. You have, what is called, a “Man Down”. Want to know about Man Down? I’ll tell you.’

  The Colonel looked out over his wife’s beautifully manicured lawns.

  ‘Have you got a cigarette on you?’

  In all the time I’d known Colonel Mahoney, I’d never seen him smoke even so much as a cheroot. I did have some on me. I handed him a Silk Cut and a lighter, and he lit it, and took a long drag. Finally he spoke.

  ‘Listen in. Provinces, 1986. We had an operator in Divis Flats. She hit her beacon. She’d been spotted. Her name was Stella and she was one of my best operators. When we finally got to her she’d shot three of the opposition but it was too late, they’d run her over with a car, and then dragged her to some lockups nearby. They’d kneecapped her with an electric drill and then bludgeoned her to death with a sledgehammer. I was first to find her.’

  Jesus Christ. If this was his way of bolstering my morale…

  He wasn’t listening. ‘I thought I was coping at first, but then the nightmares started. Then the waking nightmares. Then-’

  His monologue was interrupted by Sandra, storming across the lawn towards us. She didn’t look happy.

  ‘David! Leave the poor boy be, the last thing he needs right now is your war stories!’

  She took my shoul
der. ‘Look at him, David, he’s in a state. And WHAT are you doing smoking?’

  The Colonel dropped the cigarette like a hot rock and stubbed it out. Then he looked even more guilty and picked up the butt.

  Sandra glanced at me and clucked at the bruises on the side of my face. ‘Come back inside, Rizwan. You need some tea.’

  All the life had gone out of me.

  ‘Colonel…the only woman I have ever loved…the only woman who ever had any time for me is dead, shot dead. Or dead in the hands of the Americans.’

  The Colonel barked an order.

  ‘Rizwan Sabir!’

  Christ. I raised myself to an assemblance of attention.

  ‘If you loved her, you would damn well find her, alive or dead. And I’ll help you all the way. Tomorrow you will get to it.’

  ‘Sir.’

  It had grown chilly and rain was coming. We went back inside. I suppose you could have called that shock therapy.

  3

  22nd September

  8am the next morning at 2 Marsham Street, headquarters of the Home Office. It was a Saturday, so there was hardly anyone in the building apart from some Technical Group people sweeping our meeting place for bugs and checking the microphones had been disabled on all the PCs and telephone speakers. We could tell where they’d been by the trail of red stickers they’d left on everything.

  I was slightly hungover from the testimonial revue at the Windmill Club last night so I was making the most of the very strong tea I’d gotten the canteen lady to make me.

  In the corner of the room a television was tuned to Sky News. A ticker tape was saying that the youth wing of the Venezuelan Movimiento Primero Justicia was claiming responsibility for shooting up and setting fire to the London embassy. I raised an eyebrow at the Colonel. He grinned back. Oh, our office could be creative when needed. That was good. The news then went to a piece on French embassies on high alert worldwide because some idiot had made a film disrespecting the Prophet Mohammed. I muttered a short prayer under my breath as I watched the riots. Back in the studio someone from government was trying to explain why the Chief Whip had been swearing at the Downing Street coppers.