The Fourth Protocol (51 page)

“Foreign agent?” asked the man. “Jim Ross? He’s not a foreigner.”

“We think he may be. Could I use the phone?”

“Well, yes. I suppose so.” He turned toward his family. “Come on, all back in the kitchen.”

Preston rang Charles Street and was put through to Sir Bernard Hemmings, who was still at Cork. Burkinshaw had already used the police radio net to inform Cork in guarded language that the “client” was at his home in Ipswich and that the “taxis” were in the neighborhood and “on call.”

“Preston?” said the Director-General when he came on the line. “John? Where are you, exactly?”

“A small residential cul-de-sac in Ipswich, called Cherryhayes Close,” said Preston. “We’ve run Chummy to earth. I’m certain this time it’s his base.”

“Do you think it’s time we moved in?”

“Yes, sir, I do. I fear he may be armed. I think you know what I mean. I don’t think it’s one for Special Branch or the local force.” He told his DG what he wanted, then replaced the receiver and put in a call to Sir Nigel at Sentinel House.

“Yes, John, I agree,” said C when he had been given the same information. “If he’s got with him what we think, it had better be as you ask. The
SAS.”

To call in the Special Air Service, Britain’s elite and multirole regiment of experts at deep penetration, observation, and (occasionally) urban assault, is not so easy as the more adventurous television dramas might suggest.

The
SAS
never operates on its own initiative. Under the Constitution it can, like any part of the armed forces, operate inside the United Kingdom only in support of the civil authority—that is, the police. Thus, ostensibly the local police remain in overall command of the operation. In reality, once the
SAS
men have been given the “go” order, the local police are well advised to step smartly back.

Under the law, it is the chief constable of a county in which an emergency has arisen—an emergency that the local police are deemed not to be able to handle unassisted—who must make a formal request to the Home Office for the
SAS
to be brought in. It may be that the chief constable is “advised” to make the request, and it is a bold man indeed who refuses to do so if the “advice” comes from high enough.

When the chief constable has made his formal request to the Permanent Under Secretary at the Home Office, the latter passes the request to his opposite number in Defense, who in turn apprises the director of military operations of the request, and the DMO alerts the
SAS
at its Hereford base camp.

That the procedure can work within minutes is due in part to the fact that it has been rehearsed over and over again and honed to a fine art, and partly to the fact that the British establishment, when required to move fast, contains enough interpersonal relationships to permit a great deal of procedure to be kept at verbal level, with the inevitable paperwork left to catch up later. British bureaucracy may appear slow and cumbersome to the British, but it is greased lightning compared to its European and American counterparts. In any case, most British chief constables have been to Hereford to meet the unit known simply as “the Regiment” and to be shown exactly what kinds of assistance can be put at their disposal if requested. Few have emerged unimpressed.

That morning the chief constable of Suffolk was told from London of the crisis that had been visited on him in the form of a suspected foreign agent, believed to be armed and perhaps with a bomb, who was holed up in Cherryhayes Close, Ipswich. The chief constable contacted Sir Hubert Villiers in Whitehall, where his call was expected. Sir Hubert briefed his minister and his colleague the Cabinet Secretary, who informed the Prime Minister. Downing Street’s assent having been obtained, Sir Hubert passed the by now politically cleared request to Sir Peregrine Jones at Defense, who knew it all, anyway, because he had had a chat with Sir Martin Flannery. Within sixty minutes of the first contact between the head of the Suffolk constabulary and the Home Office, the director of military operations was talking on a scrambled line to the commanding officer of the
SAS
at Hereford.

The fighting arm of the
SAS
is based on units of four. Four men make up a patrol, four patrols a troop, and four troops a squadron. The four “saber” squadrons are A, B, D, and G. They rotate through the various
SAS
commitments: Northern Ireland, the Middle East, jungle training, and special projects, apart from the continuing NATO tasks and the maintenance of one squadron on standby at Hereford.

The commitments tend to last from six to nine months, and that month it was
B
Squadron that was based at Hereford. As usual there was one troop on half-hour standby and another at two-hour readiness. The four troops in each squadron are always the air troop (free-fallers), the boat troop (marines trained in canoe and underwater expertise), the mountain troop (climbers), and the mobile troop (in armed Land-Rovers).

When Brigadier Jeremy Cripps finished his call from London, it was to Seven Troop, the free-fall parachute men of
B
Squadron, that the task fell of going to Ipswich.

“What is your normal routine at this hour?” asked Preston of the Cherryhayes Close householder, whose name was Adrian. The young executive had just finished a phone conversation with the ACC for Suffolk, who was in his office at Ipswich police headquarters. If there had been any lingering doubt in Adrian’s mind as to the authenticity of his unexpected guest of half an hour earlier, it had been dispelled. Preston had suggested that Adrian make the call himself, and the young man was now rightly convinced that the Suffolk police were backing the
MI
5 officer in his sitting room. He had also been told that the man across the street might be armed and dangerous, and that an arrest would have to be made later in the day.

“Well, I drive to work at about quarter to nine—that’s in ten minutes. At about ten,
Lucinda
takes Samantha to playschool. She usually does her shopping, picks up Samantha at midday, and returns home. On foot. I get back from work around six-thirty—by car, of course.”

“I’d like you to take the day off work,” said Preston. “Ring your office now and say you are not well. But leave the house at the usual time. You will be met at the top of the road, where Belstead Road joins the access to The Hayes, by a police car.”

“What about my wife and child?”

“I’d like Mrs. Adrian to wait here until the usual hour, then leave with Samantha and shopping basket, walk up there, and join you. Is there any place you can go for the day?”

“There’s my mother at Felixstowe,” said
Lucinda
Adrian nervously.

“Could you spend the day with her? Perhaps even tonight?”

“What about our house?”

“I assure you, Mr. Adrian, nothing will happen to it,” said Preston optimistically. He might have added it would either be unharmed or, if things went wrong, vaporized. “I must ask you to let me and my colleagues use it as an observation post to watch the man across the way. We will come and go via the back. We will do absolutely no damage.”

“What do you think, darling?” Adrian asked his wife.

She nodded. “I just want to get Samantha out of here,” she said.

“In one hour, I promise you,” said Preston. “We know that Mr. Ross has been up all night because we have been tailing him. He’s probably asleep, and in any case no police move against the house will take place before the afternoon, maybe the early evening.”

“All right,” said Adrian, “we’ll do it.”

He made his call to the office to excuse himself for the day, and drove off at eight-forty-five. From his upstairs bedroom window, Valeri Petrofsky saw him go. The Russian was preparing to catch a few hours’ sleep. There was nothing unusual going on in the street. Adrian always left for work at this hour.

Preston noted that there was an empty lot behind the Adrians’ house. He radioed Harry Burkinshaw and Barney, who came in through the back, nodded to a startled
Lucinda
Adrian, and went upstairs to adopt again their profession in life—watching. Ginger had found a patch of high ground a quarter of a mile away from which he could see both the estuary of the Orwell, with the docks on its banks, and the small housing development spread out below. With binoculars he could monitor the rear of 12 Cherryhayes Close.

“It backs onto the rear garden of another house, on Brackenhayes,” Ginger told Preston on his radio. “No sign of movement in house or garden. All windows closed— that’s odd in this weather.”

“Keep watching,” said Preston. “I’ll be here. If I have to go, Harry will take over.”

An hour later,
Lucinda
and Samantha walked calmly out of the house and away.

In
the town itself another operation was moving up through the gears. The chief constable, who had risen through the uniformed branch, had handed the details of the pending operation to his assistant, Chief Superintendent Peter Low.

Low had dispatched two detectives to the town hall, where they had elicited the information that the target house was owned by a certain Mr. Johnson but that bills were to be sent to Oxborrows, the real-estate agents. A call to Oxborrows revealed that Mr. Johnson was away in Saudi Arabia and the house had been rented to a Mr. James Duncan Ross. A second picture of Ross, alias Timothy Donnelly of the streets of Damascus, was telexed to Ipswich and shown to the agent at Oxborrows, who identified the tenant.

The town hall housing department also came up with the names of the architects who had designed the development called The Hayes, and from this partnership were obtained detailed floor plans of the property at 12 Cherryhayes Close. The architects were even more helpful; other houses, identical in design to the last detail, had been built elsewhere in Ipswich, and one was found to be standing empty. It would be useful for the
SAS
assault team; they would know the exact geography of the house when they went in.

The other part of Peter Low’s duties was to find a “holding area” for the
SAS
men to use when they arrived. A holding area has to be private, enclosed, and quickly available, with access for vehicles and telephone communication. An empty warehouse down on Eagle Wharf was traced, and the owner agreed to let the police borrow it for a “training exercise.”

The warehouse had big sliding doors that could open to admit the vehicle convoy and close to keep out prying eyes, a floor area ample enough to accommodate a mock-up of the house in The Hayes, and a small glass-sided office to use as an operations room.

Just before noon an Army Scout helicopter swished into the far side of Ipswich municipal airport and disgorged three men. One was the commanding officer of the
SAS
Regiment, Brigadier Cripps; one was the operations officer, a staff major with the Regiment; and the third was the team commander, Captain Julian Lyndhurst. They were all in plainclothes, carried suitcases with their uniforms inside, and were met by an unmarked police car that took them straight to the holding area, where the police were establishing their operational center.

Chief Superintendent Low briefed the three officers to the best of his ability, which was to the limit of what he had been told by London. He had spoken to Preston on the telephone but had not yet met him.

“There’s a John Preston, I understand,” said Brigadier Cripps, “who is the field controller from MI5. Is he about?”

“I believe he’s still up at the observation post,” said Low, “the house he has taken over opposite the target dwelling. I can call him and ask him to leave by the back and come here to join us.”

“I wonder, sir,” said Captain Lyndhurst to his CO, “whether I might not go up there right away. Give me a chance to have a first look at the ‘stronghold,’ and then I could come back with this Preston chap.”

“All right, since a car has to go up, anyway,” said the CO.

Fifteen minutes later, the police stationed on the hillside across the estuary from Eagle Wharf pointed out the rear door of No. 9 to Lyndhurst. Still in civilian clothes, the twenty-nine-year-old captain walked across the rough ground, hopped over the garden fence, and went in through the back door. He met Barney in the kitchen, where the watcher was brewing a cup of tea on Mrs. Adrian’s stove.

“Lyndhurst,” said the officer, “from the Regiment. Is Mr. Preston here?”

“John,” Barney called up the stairs in a hoarse whisper, as the house was supposed to be empty, “brown job here to see you.”

Lyndhurst mounted to the upstairs bedroom, where he found John Preston and introduced himself. Harry Burkinshaw muttered something about a cup of tea and left. The captain stared across the road at No. 12.

“There still seem to be some gaps in our information,” drawled Lyndhurst. “Who exactly do you think is in there?”

“I believe it’s a Soviet agent,” said Preston, “an illegal, living here under the cover of James Duncan Ross. Mid-thirties, medium height and build, probably very fit, a top pro.”

He handed Lyndhurst the photograph taken on the Damascus street. The captain studied it with interest.

“Anyone else in there?”

“Possibly. We don’t know. Ross himself, certainly. He might have a helper. We can’t talk to the neighbors. In this kind of area we could never stop them gawping. Before they left, the people who live here said they were sure he was living alone. But we can’t prove that.”

“And according to our briefing, you think he’s armed, maybe dangerous. But too much for the local lads, even with handguns, mmmm?”

“Yes, we believe he has a bomb in there with him. He would have to be stopped before he could get to it.”

“Bomb, eh?” said Lyndhurst with apparent lack of interest. (He had done two tours in Northern Ireland.) “Big enough to make a mess of the house, or the entire street?”

“A bit bigger than that,” said Preston. “If we’re right, it’s a small nuke.”

The tall officer turned his entire gaze from the house across the street, and his pale blue eyes held Preston’s. “Bloody hell,” he said. “I’m impressed.”