Locked and Loaded: A Riz Sabir Thriller Omnibus Page 4

  Something came back from my degree studies, like the ghost of Julius Caesar scolding me -

  “ The modern process of intelligence gathering has four elements : direction or targeting , collection of data , analysis of data , and dissemination to the users of the information . Good intelligence analysts know that not all information is 'intelligence . ' Intelligence is restricted to crucial information about the target or enemy – his strength , location , likely intentions , and capabilities . Also , good intelligence has a time factor ; it must be quickly collected , analyzed , and delivered in time for the user to act upon it . The last step is dissemination . Even if intelligence is collected and analyzed correctly , it will be of no value if the product is not conveyed to the end user in sufficient time for him to act upon …”

  Eight hours later, the IMVU screen pinged and woke me with a start. I’d nodded off. An avatar was standing there and tapping the screen. It sort of looked like Bang-Bang but with a massive set of black angel wings. The bubble caption said “ Wassup , faggot ?”

  That’d be Holly then.

  I typed back.

  ‘Wednesday, 3pm, Special Forces Club, 8 Herbert Crescent SW1X 0EZ, Col. Mahoney wants to meet you. And DON’T embarrass me!”

  The avatar grinned and winked out.

  7

  Behind Harrods department store is a small, quiet mews crescent. Herbert Crescent. I pressed the buzzer at number eight and gave my name and company. The big black door clicked open to the reception of the Special Forces Club. I walked up the staircase past the portraits on my right of members now departed. Impossibly glamorous photos of SOE people from World War Two smiled into the distance, and made me feel like a right chav. I stopped to admire the photo of Charlotte Gray and then went up into the main bar.

  The Colonel was waiting for me at his table, and he had his ironic look preloaded. I fetched two halves of Guinness from the bar and credited it to the KTS tab.

  ‘Your cousin is joining us?’

  ‘She sure is, boss.’

  ‘Best behaviour?’

  ‘Boss, you haven’t met Bang-Bang.’

  We talked for a bit about office politics and Toots’ fiancé and were we going to the wedding. The Colonel was a bit exercised about some invoices and disputes from the third floor. There was something rumbling about a botched police raid on some Salafis in East London. The usual. As in the usual suspects weren’t happy about it and had started to make waves. Some big cheese in the Labour Party called Lord Khalil was threatening all sorts of consequences. We agreed to check in on our contacts in the week. In the corner, some old Artists Rifles guys were laughing about something that had happened a long time ago and far away.

  There was a crash of glass from downstairs. Ah fuck, that was her. Bang-Bang Kirpachi ascended the stairs with a click-clack of white high heels and, whilst noisily chewing gum, made her way to our table. She was wearing internet glasses and a pair of daft cat ears which seemed to be rotating on a whim. If there had been a hole in the floor ready to swallow me up, I would have jumped into it there and then. To his credit the Colonel kept his composure, stood, and extended his hand.

  ‘David Mahoney, KTS. Charmed I’m sure Miss.’

  Bang-Bang’s cat ears perked up, and inside, I cringed.

  Bang-Bang curtsied.

  ‘Colonel Maaaaarney …. we meet at last. I’m Holly, from the internet. And it’s my round, babes.’

  Bloody hell, she’d done it again. She’d looked him in the eye, charmed him, and that was it. Was it really that easy?

  Bang-Bang returned from the bar in a teetering fashion, gingerly carrying two more halves and a gin and tonic. She sat and stared at the Colonel in a proprietary way.

  ‘So. Miss Holly Kirpachi. Do you represent the Blackeyes?’ said the Colonel.

  ‘I sure do, Colonel Sir.’ Bang-Bang said it while snapping that chewing gum at one hundred miles per hour. I don’t know whether it was the wonky hazel eyes, the hair, or the nose-ring, something seemed to have got a hold on the old man.

  ‘What can you give us?’

  ‘Chinese burns. Dead legs. Fucking shit urrrrrrrrrrrrrp.’

  The bubblegum she was chewing suddenly turned into a great big pink bubble and popped all over her face. Holly gave a large grin, wiped the gum off her visage and then sank her gin and tonic in one go.

  ‘And you can help this young man here find Iqeel al-Afghani for us?’

  Bang-Bang’s eyes wandered up and to the left. The cat ears rotated down. She was consulting the internet via her glasses.

  ‘Iqeel al-Afghani… now there’s a name from the distant past. Wow, like the MySpace distant past. Has he reappeared then?’

  ‘He has. I’ll let Riz fill in the details for you.’

  Bang-Bang regarded us both for one second and scratched her Hur al-Ayn arm tattoo absently. That tattoo looked old, and nasty. It had a sailor-style cartoon of a middle-eastern looking girl and the Arabic script for “Hur al-Ayn.” The Black-Eyed Maidens. Above it read another motto - “Get Dead or Die Trying”. There was another tattoo on the back of her hand, a small blueish star. That was an Essex thing. To those who knew, it meant “You fuck with me, I’ll kill your dog”.

  ‘Sure. I’d love to and so would my girls. Cost ya though!’

  I raised an eyebrow. “Your” girls, Holly? You’re not in charge, you only control one faction.’

  ‘Yes luv, but they’re the harder faction of the two.’

  I raised both eyebrows.

  The Colonel turned to me.

  ‘I like this cousin of yours, Riz. Work with her and we’ll provide what they need.’

  Bang-Bang leapt across the table and planted a large smacker on Colonel Mahoney’s cheek.

  ‘You’re on! OK guys, gotta go. I’m on stage in an hour.’

  ‘On stage?’

  ‘Yep. Secrets, King’s Cross.’ She mimed unbuttoning a long glove.

  ‘See ya!’

  She left, still popping gum. But not before ditty-bopping to the left and whispering ‘See you at yours, retard, same time tomorrow’.

  And she’d kissed my cheek too, fleetingly.

  Colonel Mahoney was sitting there with a large smeared lipstick on his face, which he began to wipe at with a napkin.

  ‘Riz. Two things. Firstly, I wasn’t aware your family came from Mars…’

  ‘She’s from Essex…’

  ‘Ah. I see. Secondly, tell me again about the Blackeyes and how you know them.’

  ‘Oho Rakesh, that’ll take an hour. Get ‘em in.’

  8

  I waited for the Colonel to bring the second round back, stared at the ceiling for a while, and then I spoke.

  ‘The Blackeyes … boss, you’re familiar with the abbreviation LGOPs?’

  He nodded. ‘Little Groups of Paratroopers.’

  I recited.

  ‘After the demise of the best Airborne plan, a most terrifying effect occurs on the battlefield. This effect is known as the rule of the LGOPs. A bunch of nineteen year olds, poorly supervised, pissed off, armed to the teeth, and only vaguely recalling their orders as "shoot anyone who is dressed differently."

  ‘Personally the Blackeyes have, collectively, always reminded me of the weasel gang from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but… the little group of paratroopers analogy will do.’

  The Colonel sipped his Guinness.

  ‘So how did we come to have a hacked-off gang of Muslim girls tearing up the place?’

  ‘It’s a northern thing. The original girls came from towns like Derby, Manchester, Bolton… places like that. What I heard was, one too many of their boyfriends and brothers went the Wahaabi way and the sisters went on the warpath.’

  ‘Right. Our kind of people, then. Form?’

  ‘OK here’s just a few from memory. Stabbing up Hassan Butt-‘

  He interrupted me with a raised hand.

  ‘He maintains he stabbed himself.’

  I laughed. ‘Right. And Brian Harvey ran himself
over with his own car.’

  ‘Continue.’

  ‘Online attacks taking out Islamic Awakening, Ummahpulse, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan… Muslim Affairs Committee, Progressive Islamism, and the EDL forum. The shooting of Jamaal Uddin. Blowing up the Cody One depot in Canning Town and the al-Maktabah bookshop in Spark Hill. The giant bouncy castle in Anjem Choudary’s drive. That video where they beheaded Saleem Brown and then played football with his head. The MI6 spy-in-the-holdall case, and don’t ask me why they did that as I haven’t got a clue.’

  ‘Main leaders?’

  ‘One you just met. Holly is in charge of the Shooter Faction, named after a dead leader. Then you have Fuzz Shaheen, she’s leader of the Princess Faction. Named after another dead leader. Fuzz is short for Farzana. I’ve met her once, she looks a bit like Sridevi and believe it or not, she flies helicopters.’

  I tailed off. Colonel Mahoney was looking at me in disbelief.

  ‘Helicopters?’

  ‘Yes, Jetrangers, Gazelles, for wealthy and famous clients.’

  ‘What is a “Sridevi”?’

  ‘Oh. Sorry. Sridevi is a famous Bollywood actress. Ahem. Anyway. There’s also Lady Calamity, but no-one knows if she’s actually real or just an avatar on Facebook.’

  ‘Two factions?’

  ‘Correct. Shooter Faction believes in just killing everyone and blowing everything up, and Princess Faction believes in talking to people in the community. After they’ve killed everyone and blown everything up.’

  ‘And two dead original leaders.’

  ‘They might not even be dead. I heard a rumour one of them had moved to Dubai with her husband to hack into banks.’

  ‘OK. VDMs?’

  That stood for Visual Distinguishing Marks.

  ‘Ah. That bit’s easier. You saw the tattoos?’

  He nodded again.

  ‘They’re standard. That motto “Get Dead Or Die Trying” is a running theme. Also look for a small pom-pom lapel badge, or red-dyed hair.’

  ‘OK. Do they have access to weapons?’

  ‘Oh yeah, enough pistols. It’s said that they also go for training in camps abroad … maybe Libya, maybe Lebanon. I don’t know.’

  The Colonel was silent for a good long while.

  I valued that silence. Part of my job was to remember the ORBAT - Order of Battle - of every fringe, terrorist, or extremist group going in the United Kingdom. I had to be able to call the details up out of my mental Rolodex in an instant, or woe betide me, the Colonel would have me doing pressups or doubling around an imaginary drill square holding a rifle over my head.

  My mind wandered off of that, and back to the Saleem Brown beheading video. It had surfaced a year ago on Liveleak, and showed a bunch of masked people- the Blackeyes- booting his severed head against a wall, over and over again. The clip music was the theme from Match Of The Day. I had to confess I’d laughed hysterically and the 87,157 people who’d watched it online probably had too. Saleem Brown had been a thoroughly nasty man, an extremist Wahaabi preacher of hate for years. Well, he had been until the Blackeyes had cornered him in his flat. Ten minutes later he’d become goal of the month.

  The Colonel took a little sip of the black stuff and thought for a bit - I knew him to be a man that actually stepped back and assessed things rather than jumping in.

  ‘Riz, I’ve spent almost my entire career in special forces and military intelligence, as you know, and in every theatre, in every Op, we worked with groups like this. In East Berlin it was the UfJ. In Northern Ireland it was the Ulster Volunteer Force. In Iraq it was the Awakening Councils. Quite frankly I’m glad they’re there to talk to, because true counter-insurgency can’t be done without them. And I have the feeling we are about to need them. You’ll have read your Kitson.’

  He was referring to one of the Bibles of counter-insurgency, Brigadier Frank Kitson’s Low Intensity Operations. The Colonel had sworn by it in Northern Ireland.

  ‘I re-read it every year.’

  ‘It’s still relevant.’

  ‘They’re difficult to handle, chief. In fact scratch that. They can’t be handled. You’ll just have to point them at the area of interest and hope for the best.’

  Colonel Mahoney shrugged.

  ‘T’was ever thus, young man.’

  It was about time to tell him.

  ‘Boss. Toots is one of them too.’

  The Colonel coughed a large measure of Guinness across the table.

  9

  Thursday night. Bang-Bang and I stood staring at the Post-It montage on my wall. The photo of Iqeel al-Afghani sat there like the unwelcome guest at a wedding. Above it I’d pasted a motto from E.M. Forster- “only connect”.

  Unfortunately there wasn’t a lot to connect at the moment.

  Bang-Bang broke the silence.

  ‘Cuz. Here are our options for starting. Last location, ex-wife, mosque, social media. You cool with that?’

  ‘Sure I’m cool with that. Shall we divvy it up? You do last location and ex-wife, I’ll take mosque and internet.’

  Bang-Bang rocked back on her heels and laughed. ‘Leaving you with the internet bit? Not likely mate. C’mon, get the beers in and let’s do a trawl.’

  I went downstairs and out onto the street and a short turn left to the all-night Turkish convenience store under my flat. I got some original Guinness for me and some Carling for Bang-Bang. Derin, the shop owner, was watching me with wary eyes. Obviously Holly had been in here before ringing my bell.

  ‘Riz, you have the crazy women in your flat again. Often they are in here dropping beer and asking whether the jelly sweets are halal.’

  There wasn’t a lot I could say to that.

  Back in my flat Bang-Bang had managed to get a Touchgraph app working on my Facebook profile, and on my right-hand screen, she was doing a Dogpile search for “Iqeel al-Afghani”. She had that glazed look that people like her got when they were in internet search mode.

  ‘Riz darling … When you knew Iqeel, what website did you lot use to meet up?’

  ‘Easy. Islambase. Is it still there?’

  She tapped for a bit. ‘…Yep. Here you go. Fancy logging in?’

  ‘You’re so funny Holly, not hardly. I’ll create a new account.’

  One beer later while we were watching Die Hard 4, my Gmail blooped. I now had new account at Islambase.

  We crowded each other to the chair. Now it was time to think rapidly. I was going to take a risk. It was unlikely that any of the regulars here knew that Rahman Miah had been rendered by yours truly, so if I used his handle … I went for it. I was RahmanMiah , and I’d never been away. Hopefully the subterfuge would hold up long enough.

  Holly’s eyes had that zealous shine. ‘Tell me the names you used to know Iqeel by, back in the day’. She was in the group members search function.

  ‘Hmmph. Lemme think … OK. Al-Abed. Abu Ali. Hamza. Tarbiya. Akhi One.’

  Bang-Bang’s fingers rattled over the keys. She was good at this, so I stepped back and went to fetch a beer from the kitchen.

  “Yes!”

  I jumped. Holly turned with a triumphant look.

  ‘ Hamza . He’s an admin. He’s still there, cuz!’

  ‘Holly, let’s be professional here. Do a whois search and find where Islambase is now registered to and where its server is.’

  ‘Still ahead of ya. I ran it on Domaintools. It’s registered on a server in Malaysia, so way out of our park.’

  ‘Shit.’

  I thought about it for a second.

  ‘OK. We’re going to have to do some social engineering. Let’s look at everything Hamza has posted to date and see if we can make contact with him on the forum.’

  Bang-Bang got up and put on her jacket, scooped up my car keys, and kissed me on the cheek.

  ‘Your manhaj. I’m going out to talk to his ex-wife. Got her address?’

  I dug into my BlackBerry and accessed KTS’s secure database. We kept a list of everyone relevant to us who�
�d been put in witness protection schemes, or safehouses. Here it was. I showed her the address.

  She nodded.

  ‘Cool. I like Wood Green. Love you, cousin, I’ll call’.

  And she was gone.

  And there was me, in front of my 21-inch flat screen, inside Islambase for the first time in eight years. I clicked the button for “forum search” and clicked in “search user’s posts.” 5516 posts came back for Hamza. This was going to be a long night. I took a swig of Guinness and got started. There was no magic shortcut to this, sometimes you had to put the hours in and trawl through everything. I got the pens and Post-It notes, and started writing down anything that piqued my interest. While that was going on, I posted a hello message on the main forum, with a link to a nice nasheed for the regular posters. I had five responses within as many minutes.

  ‘ Akhi ! Where ya been man ? ’

  I smiled to myself. It was working.

  I woke with a fuzzy head. Dawn sunlight was streaming in through the lounge window. I’d fallen asleep on the sofa with the keyboard on my lap. Subhan'Allah. I stretched and looked out onto the East London skyline. The usual. The Olympic park, the regeneration. In the distance, the Thames glinted.

  Someone was reciting in the kitchen. It was Holly, she was praying. I waited and felt bad. I should have joined her. She came back into the lounge and sat on the sofa. She had a tight smile on. I knew that face. It meant trouble.

  ‘You spoke to his ex-wife?’

  She nodded. Bang-Bang had obviously been told the full story. One thing was inevitable. When we finally caught up with Iqeel al-Afghani, he was going to die. And Bang-Bang was going to kill him.

  10

  On Tuesday we had a command post exercise at Canary Wharf. It was part of the Metropolitan Police’s annual Operation Hanover, where everyone got together to wargame different scenarios. I took Bang-Bang. KTS seemed to have accepted the fact that there would be many strangely-styled girls showing up from now on.