Locked and Loaded: A Riz Sabir Thriller Omnibus Read online

  It was as we drove slowly past Madame Tussaud’s that it hit me and I started laughing.

  ‘Share the hilarity?’ said Teacher.

  ‘Teach, did either of us look on the roof of the response car?’

  Teacher gazed at me blankly for several seconds, then started laughing with me. Shit. What a pair of doofuses. LAS vehicles all had letter codes on their roofs.

  ‘You live and you learn - or not’ said Teacher, and we settled back and enjoyed the ride.

  I dropped Teacher off at the McDonalds on the junction of the A40 and A312, and then carefully drove to the next exit, went round the roundabout, and up to the brightly-lit splash that was the entrance to RAF Northolt. I wound down the window and in came the faint smell of kerosene and the whine of engines from across the airfield. From my inside jacket pocket I pulled out the Ministry of Defence Guard Service pass that I’d been using here for the last year, as the MPGS gate guard ambled over, his SA80 held at Bored. He flicked an even more bored eyebrow at the car, me, then the pass.

  ‘Evening sir, here to see anyone?’

  ‘Evening mate, here to meet the Premier Executive flight.’

  Recognition crossed the old boy’s face.

  ‘OK sir that’s no problem, and thankyou.’

  From where I was, I could see across the apron to the parked Gulfstream V. Its taxi lights were on and its engines were idling. Rahman Miah’s ride for the evening. Job done.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Yes mate.’

  ‘D’you mind if I have a quick look in the boot?’

  2

  I suppose you could say that my trajectory into Jihadism, Salafism, “radicalisation”, call it what you will, was the same as many other young British Muslims.

  My upbringing and early years were pretty anonymous - Forest Gate, single child born to parents who ran a shop. Born in 1983, to a Pakistani family, with everything that entails. Aunties who all had some sort of neurosis. Dodgy uncles from Mirpur who could get bucketshop air tickets. The expectation that you’d marry a cousin. And boring, stuffy old Sufi Naqshabandi Islam. I went to a local comprehensive, chased girls, smoked ganja, partied, got no exam passes worth mentioning, and slowly but surely, fell in with a bad crowd.

  By 1998 I was playing truant every day and was the best car thief in East London. There wasn’t a car me or my gang couldn’t break into and deliver to a moody garage or a middleman. We used everything - centrepunches, coathangers, blank keys, sparkplugs, laptops running bespoke software. When the in-car security got really heavy we just used a fishing rod and took the car keys from the owners’ hall, straight through their letterbox.

  At the same time as I was falling in with a bad crowd and then embarking on a life of crime, Wahaabism was gaining currency in the area, riding on the back of disaffection with the old rituals and growing awareness that there was a genocide in Europe. A genocide of white, blue-eyed Muslims in Bosnia. We’d all seen the videos of Bosnia and then later, Chechnya. If you were a young local Muslim you could not escape them. Like some warped version of Top 40 chart cassettes, the atrocity videos spread within the Muslim community, and it was difficult to remain unaffected. My rootless anger had found a fertile seedbed. I began to see my one-man crimewave as a rebellion against the authorities, the Islamophobes, the Zionist media. Not that I was particularly religious, I just saw myself as some sort of Forest Gate Mujahid. I ran red lights, I drove a BMW 5 Series with no road tax. I was on first-name terms with every clubowner in East London. I got into cocaine. In a year I probably stole eighty vehicles and burned my way through £100,000 pounds worth of champagne, drugs and fast women.

  And by 1999, when my run of luck ran out and I got arrested, charged and sentenced to three years starting in Feltham Juvenile Prison, I fell straight into the waiting arms of the Brothers. The Brothers of al-Muhajiroun.

  What I hadn’t known is that in their infinite wisdom my family had set me up for marriage with a slightly cross-eyed cousin I’d never met called Holly Kirpachi.

  Anyway, back to my predicament and the Brothers.

  For those of you that haven’t been, Juvenile Prison is not a nice place and it’s not meant to be. I’d encountered these kinds of guys before in East London, when I was on my car-theft jihad. Every now and then we’d come across these dudes in suits, with nice cars, talking about some Khilafa and how to implement it. Back then I paid it little mind, but now I was detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure and obviously, time was stretching in front of me. I looked them up. Actually, they found me first.

  Al-Muj and the Hizb. How to explain them? From 1986 to 1996, under the leadership of Syrian-born Omar Bakri Muhammad, Hizb ut-Tahrir grew from a very small organization in Britain to a one of the most active Islamist organizations in the country. Hizb ut-Tahrir’s aim was the unification of all Muslim nations over time in a caliphate, headed by an elected caliph. This was a religious duty, “an obligation that Allah has decreed for the Muslims and commanded them to fulfill.” These guys weren’t messing around, they meant it. They had cells in every country from here to Pakistan and they were doing it. In 1996 Bakri had split with Hizb ut-Tahrir over disagreements on policy and methods, and started a new organization, al-Muhajiroun. Al-Muj were even more hardcore, if you can envisage that. Their young men in Feltham found me, they zoned in on me in my room, and they looked after me. Within two weeks I had gone from a scrote to one of the Brothers On The Inside. While all this was going on I was hitting the prison library and reading; Chomsky, Marx, Trotsky, Goebbels, Sayyid Qutb, Hitler, and Maududi. The brothers told me what was good to read and I read it. I devoured it. I even got a job in the library so I could order stuff in for them.

  Although by now I was meant to be on the road to rehabilitation, I’d committed to the new team. I left the prison system on license in August 2000, with a beard, an electronic tag and a full-blown membership of the al-Muhajiroun jihadi brotherhood.

  My first meeting with al-Muhajiroun’s leader was at a strange little place in Surrey. Omar Bakri Muhammed was holding court, asking for brothers to go to fight in Afghanistan. It was two weeks after 9/11 and the atmosphere was fervid. Like a lunatic, I stuck my hand up and volunteered to train.

  Within two months I was in a safe house in Peshawar, waiting for the nod to move up-country to a camp in Waziristan. Apparently I’d been earmarked as promising. And a week after arriving in the Peshawar safe house, I was in an al-Qaeda training base in the town of Mir Ali. They started me off on the easy stuff - the AK, how to strip it, clean it, and reassemble it. Then the RPG-7 and RPG-16, 18 and 22. The M16. The PKM. Then pistols. Then explosives. How to make them from household items around you. Al-Qaeda were the best in the business at making bombs; Aspirin, Petrol, Soap flakes, Pepper, Hydrogen peroxide from hairdresser supply stores, Ammonium nitrate from agricultural suppliers, Aluminium powder, 9 volt batteries, Pagers, and how to set them. Then close-quarter combat, ambushes …

  In the space of twelve weeks I had become a full-on soldier of Allah. Every morning after salat we also had two hours of my old friends Maududi and Qutb banged into us. Just to keep us on-message. By week twelve I was ready to return to Dar al-Harb, the House of War, and do some damage.

  But…not so fast. The leadership had spotted some potential in me and I was enrolled in another course, at another camp. This was the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence course, which al-Qaeda had been schooled in. For the next year, I was briefed and trained on agent-handling, reconnaissance, dead drops, secure communications, you name it. My Urdu also improved considerably. As 2003 began, the “uncles” pronounced me ready to return to England.

  On 3rd March 2003 I arrived at Stansted on al-Qaeda’s best ever forged passport, cleared customs, and went to work. Straight into the arms of what would be known to the world as the Crevice Plot. I was nineteen years old.

  The Brothers had been busy while I’d been away - networking, researching, planning, pooling their resources. They wanted a spectacular, something
that would strike fear into the hearts of the British and their allies. Something that would blow a symbolic piece of real estate sky-high and send iconic imagery around the world, à la 9/11. We were going to blow a hole in the world. Blood and fire.

  Unfortunately for the group, the plot was doomed from the start, mainly because they’d left a 600 kilo bag of ammonium nitrate fertiliser in a storage facility and not bothered to obscure the “oxidising agent” warning symbol on the bag. Worse still, the main facilitator of the al-Qaeda cells in the plot, a man called Mohammed Quayyum Khan from Luton, had been an MI5 double agent since at least 2001. Blissfully unaware of this, we carried on with our preparations for a massive VBIED – Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Device. The target our group settled on was the Bluewater shopping centre. My job was to get hold of aluminium powder to mix with the ammonium nitrate. I imported it from paint shops in Lahore without any problems, and the bags of powder sat innocuously in my rented lockup.

  I couldn’t really express what my motives were during this period. I suppose I was at war with society in general. My parents wrote to me. They were very disappointed in me and were hoping that me being married off to Holly would set me straight. The last time I’d seen a photo of her was in 1996, when she was about seven and she had all this snot coming out of her nose; it was not going to happen. Cousins? No way. Meanwhile the groups in various towns - Luton, Crawley, London, Bradford - met and finessed their plans. This planning would take a year and we had to get it right. In the meantime we all got on with our lives, acting normal. We even met and had jihadi barbecues.

  At 6.40am on the morning of 30th March 2004, SO15 smashed my door in and dragged me out of bed at gunpoint. They’d found the lockup and the powder. There were so many arrests that morning that Paddington Green police station, the nick they normally take terrorists to, was full, and I ended up in Belgravia police station. I was interviewed for nine hours straight. The canteen tea at Belgravia is enough to make anyone crack. My duty solicitor happened to be from the famous De Ternant and Partners, who you may well have seen in the news campaigning for various human rights abuses.

  He was absolutely useless. I was charged under Section 57 of the Terrorism Act 2000, and remanded in custody to Belmarsh.

  And there I languished for the next sixteen months.

  It was here in Belmarsh that my journey back to the light started. The visiting imam was a Salafi with a proper prayer-bump, but he was a squat, jolly bear of a man, and he really knew his Quran and Hadith. He took me under his wing, and, one-on-one, he told me his story. It turned out he’d been exactly like me but his jihad trajectory had begun in the late Seventies. He’d even fought the Soviets in Afghanistan, and that was where he started to question whether this was the right path. As he patiently took me through the right texts and how to really read the Quran, I began to realise that maybe these al-Muj guys had sold me a pup. In fact, not maybe…definitely. I started to feel like I’d been traduced. Damn! And look where it had got me. Remand and then a twenty-stretch if I was lucky.

  While all this was unravelling in my head, I heard a very strange story from a brother on another wing. Apparently some mad bird called Bang-Bang Kirpachi had gone into Finsbury Park Mosque and emptied a pistol into the ceiling, scattering Abu Hamza’s crew to every exit. Hence the nickname Bang-Bang.

  No. It couldn’t be. Surely not.

  Four months later I got a VO (Visiting Order) request from Holly Kirpachi. Could she come and see me? Ah heck. I assented to the visit. So there I sat like a nugget in the visiting room in my Adidas tracksuit, and in walks little snot-nosed Holly, except now she was about sixteen and she wasn’t a snot-nosed kid anymore. Hell no. She had knee-length boots and a yay-high denim skirt on, and a bounce in her step. She sat down across from me with the biggest, whitest grin, flicked a handful of long hennaed hair away from her brow, and said ‘Salaams, cuz.’

  I couldn’t really remember much of what we talked about as I was so shocked by the transformation. Family news, I suppose. Probably all that stuff about how our families had set us up for marriage while she was shooting up mosques and I was being arrested. All I remember was that yes, she still had a slightly wonky eye, a bloody great ring through her nose that is known as a “nose key”, she’d joined a girl gang called the Blackeyes, and that she charmed the pants off me. She said to look her up if I ever got out of there. She was still my cousin though. Blech.

  On July 7th 2005, all hell broke loose. The bombings started. We crowded round the telly and watched, aghast. I felt like Chief Brody in Jaws, sitting helplessly on the beach. I was watching my old cells blaze into action. Two weeks later, on July 21st, it started up again. The cells on the fringes were activating. Chaos and shootings spread across London. Fortunately, the second wave cells had got the explosive recipe wrong and the bombs fizzled. And here I was, stuck on remand, watching helplessly.

  On July 28th 2005 I had another visit, of a slightly different timbre. This time round I was told to attend the now-empty visiting room, and after five minutes, in walked a large, thickset middle-aged man with grey close-cropped hair and a nose that had been boxed to the left. He sat down opposite me and we eyeballed each other for a good few moments. I broke the silence.

  ‘You don’t look like you’re from De Ternant and Partners.’

  ‘Well spotted, young man.’

  He replied in a flat, maybe Lancashire accent. ‘How’s the global jihad going?’

  ‘After much thought, I have come to the conclusion that it’s a bag of bollocks.’

  ‘Good.’

  He slid a single sheet of A4 paper towards me. There was a lot of legalese but the one phrase that leapt out from the page at me was “full immunity from prosecution”.

  ‘Sign this and you’re out of here today and with us. You game?’

  What do you think? Of course I was.

  And that was how I came to work for Colonel Mahoney, Int Corps Specialist Intelligence Wing (Retired).

  3

  ‘He’s saying your feet in his in-tray ten minutes, Riz. Hit the buzzer.’

  I leant on the buzzer and the latch clicked open, and I pushed on the heavy, reinforced street-door. The London office of Kinetic Training Solutions Ltd was at the racy end of Wardour Street, just opposite Italian Graffiti and Imli. The brass plate on the wall said “Kinetic Training Solutions and Tri-Service Employment Bureau”. The buzzer was a bit sticky, you had to press it hard.

  I walked in and turned right, into the domain of KTS’s personal assistant, Toots Khani. Toots was a funny one. We’d headhunted her from an activist group called the AEA. They’d made several YouTube videos countering al-Muhajiroun and their ilk right the way across to the English Defence League, and they’d attracted so much flak we’d decided they were obviously doing something right. We’d made her an offer. Toots had a smile on her face as I walked in, but then, Toots always either had a smile or a shocked expression of dismay on her face. I used to delight in telling her the latest item of wrongness I had discovered, just for that look.

  I glanced left, to the front office’s Interest Wall. The interest wall was a hangover from the Army background of this firm. Basically you stuck any old mad crap on it, and pride of place at the moment was the inter-office competition to get the stupidest name on a Metropolitan Police Centre’s visitors’ sticker. I’d been in the lead with “G Davis” for a long time, but it looked like Toots had now edged into pole position with “A al-Zawahiri”. Gotta love KTS.

  ‘Moneypenny; what givesh?’ I purred.

  ‘Riz - you haven’t got a hat, there’s no hatstand, and you’re not Connery. Get up to the top floor, and be sure to take your own mug.’

  ‘Right. Why’s he pissed off with me this time?’

  Toots arched one eyebrow and waited one beat.

  ‘Because you and Teacher blew up half of Whitechapel last night, I would imagine.’

  ‘Received and understood.’

  I grabbed my mug from the offic
e tray. The mug thing was the other office running joke and it had to be honoured at all times. Forward. This jihadi was getting good at this Brit Army stuff.

  ‘Riz?’ Toots called. I turned back.

  ‘You know that requisition form that you’ve filled out here - the one requesting a long greatcoat and a Webley .38 (with lanyard), so that you can, and I quote, “run down the street shouting stop in the name of the King”?’

  ‘Ah. Not happening?’

  ‘In our lifetimes. Up to see the boss, please.’

  I took the lift to the top floor, with Des - an IT weenie from the third floor.‘Riz. Been a long time. How is H-wing?’

  ‘Great, Infidel.’

  Des laughed. ‘Riz you do know your t-shirt’s inside out, right?’

  Up we went. Floor One: Tri-Service Employment Bureau. That covered all the ex-military people going in and out. Floor Two: KTS International. Red Cell testing, black hat hacking and cracking exercises to a select group of contractors. This also explained the rash of really big satellite dishes on the buildings’ roof.

  Floor Three: Milsim plc. Here they trained private and government people in specially-designed training sites in Dorset. You wanted to learn to be a soldier, this was your floor.

  Floor Four: The Head Shed. Ping.

  Colonel David Mahoney, British Army Intelligence Corps, Specialist Intelligence Wing (Retired), was hovering over his desk like a large grey cloud. I walked in and placed my mug on the desk, right next to his. Colonel Mahoney’s mug read “Keep calm and carry on”. Mine read “Keep calm and read Quran”.