The Hostage (3 page)

She looked at the back of Ed, who was taking his sweet time. ‘Come on, wally,’ she muttered to herself.

 

Spinks could now positively identify a sliding metallic noise against the body of the car. A sudden ‘clunk’ made him jerk. His breathing became shallow and rapid. Adrenaline pumped through his veins. His hand moved to his gun and he swallowed as he gripped it. His mouth was open to improve his hearing, analysing every sound as his thumb found the safety-catch.

 

Ed finished his pee, did up his fly with a flex of his knees, and headed back to the car. ‘I ’ope Spinsky doesn’t think I’m going to stop up the road and let ’im out of the boot and in the front. He can stay where he is, the smelly bugga.’

As Ed climbed in Aggy pulled smartly away, throwing him back into his seat and causing his flask to fall off the dash and on to his lap.

‘Steady,’ he complained. ‘Where’s the bloody race?’

In retaliation he produced a tin of tobacco, removed a pre-made roll-up, lit it and puffed on it without inhaling until the car was filled with smoke. She rolled down her window, biting her lip and counting the minutes she had left with him.

‘That’s tactically unsound, driving with your window open,’ he said dryly.

She wondered what she had done to deserve this.

 

Spinks heard another, louder clink.The car definitely moved. Then one of the doors opened. The car dipped a little on one side as if someone had climbed in. Another door opened the other side and the car sunk a little the other way. He knew it wasn’t Ed. Ed would never have gotten into the car or even approached it without warning him over the radio first. Spinks was trying to evaluate precisely what was happening and what he could do about it. His fingers felt the prestel sticking from his sleeve. He realised his hands were shaking. He pushed the button and was about to say something then stopped himself. Whoever was in the car might hear him. He prayed it was just a pair of thugs looking to steal something from it. They would get a shock if they managed to open the boot. He would arrest them even if the mission was blown and it would not be his fault. The bosses would understand that. He held the prestel in one hand and gun in the other, preparing himself to kick the seat in.

The engine suddenly roared to life, two doors slammed shut and Spinks was thrown back as the car screeched away. It must have driven on the grass verge for several yards because it bounced horrendously, tossing Spinks around inside as if he was shooting rapids in a barrel. The gears changed quickly as the car built up speed, returned to the road and swerved as it accelerated hard along it. Spinks lost his prestel and weapon in the turmoil. He searched around for the gun and had just put his hand on it when the car took a sharp corner, bounced over the verge, and slammed him into the roof of the boot. If the lid opened he would be thrown out for sure. He gave up on the gun and found his prestel by following the wire from his sleeve.

‘Four two Charlie . . .’ he managed to say before being flattened once again into the roof as the car hit another bump. ‘Four two Charlie, I’m mobile! The car’s been nicked! I repeat, I am mobile and the car’s been fuckin’ stooooleeeen!’

 

Ed and Aggy, driving down the road, were momentarily stunned by the transmission. Both reached to press the send button but were stopped by a voice breaking in ahead of them. It was the duty signaller on watch back in the operations room thirty-five miles away.

‘Four two Charlie, this is zero alpha, confirm your car is mobile.’

‘I’m mobile awright,’ Spinks managed to say between severely winding bumps. ‘We’re goin’ like the bleedin’ clappers! ’

‘Zero alpha, roger that,’ said the signaller, or bleep as they were affectionately called, and continued as if commentating on a bowls match. ‘One three kilo, this is zero alpha.’

Aggy went for the send button but Ed pushed her hand aside and hit it himself. ‘One three kilo here. We’re still toward four two Charlie’s static location, or previous static location. That’s not me driving.’ The way Ed spoke in his slow, laborious manner, trying to be calm and stating the obvious at such a tense moment added to Aggy’s list of Ed’s irritating habits.

‘There it is!’ she suddenly shouted as she recognised Ed’s car heading towards them on the other side of the road. As it tore past at speed they could see only one person in front and possibly another in the back seat.

Aggy pushed the send button. ‘One three kilo, four two Charlie just passed us from red four to blue seven doing about eighty, possibly two up. I’m in pursuit.’

She hit the brakes slowing the car just enough to throw it into a ‘J’ turn, which was messy. The driver’s side rear wheel spun mud in the verge as she dropped the gear and put her foot down. The engine roared. The car inched forward, finally made traction and screeched up the road. Ed held on tightly throughout the manoeuvre, one hand gripping the bottom of his seat, the other outstretched against the dashboard. His roll-up dropped out of his mouth as his foot pressed firmly into the floor, trying to push down a brake pedal that was not there.

 

Spinks pushed out with his arms and legs in an effort to stop being thrown around but the heavier bumps did whatever they wanted to him. The MPK5 hit him hard on the head as it made its way around the boot. He made another effort to get a hold of his pistol but it was like trying to grab a leaping fish.There was a wrenching sound and Spinks was almost blinded by the sudden light as the back seat was ripped down. A powerful arm reached in, grabbed him by his hair, and brutally dragged him halfway into the car as they drove at top speed.

‘Come on, me little Pink,’ the man said in an Irish accent.

The man moved his hand to Spinks’ throat and leaned his full weight on to it. Spinks’s face swelled as he choked and his eyes filled with liquid and went out of focus as the man kept the weight on him while he searched him. He found the small, flat radio in its harness inside Spinks’s jacket and ripped it away, pulling the wires from it. He stuck a large finger into Spinks’s ear, dug around and pulled out the tiny wireless earpiece. The man seemed to know exactly what he was looking for and where to find it. He ripped open Spinks’s shirt and felt under his armpits and around his body; he undid Spinks’s trouser belt, pulled it out as if trying to start a boat engine, and tossed it to one side; he yanked open Spinks’s trousers, tearing apart the zipper as he pulled them down to his knees.

‘Where is it?’ the man shouted as he quickly checked Spinks’s bare legs. He brutally turned Spinks on to his front and ripped up his shirt to expose his back, pushing his hand under it to feel his skin up and over his shoulders. He pulled Spinks’s underpants down far enough to expose his arse then felt around Spinks’s hips. ‘Where is it, Pink?’ he repeated threateningly. He pulled up one foot after the other and ripped Spinks’s shoes and socks off, inspecting each shoe quickly before tossing it away.

He pulled Spinks over on to his back again and gripped his throat, pressing down hard on it. ‘You know what I’m looking for, Pink, don’t you? Where is it?’

Spinks gripped the man’s wrist to try and take some pressure off his throat and shook his head in ignorance of the demand. The man shoved the end of a pistol so hard into Spinks’s cheek he shattered a molar. ‘Where is it?’ he said again. Then as an afterthought, he lifted up Spinks’s underpants with the end of his pistol to expose his balls and penis.

‘If I focken’ find it on you I’ll blow your focken dick off,’ the man said sticking the gun back in Spinks’s face. ‘Is that clear, boyo?’

Spinks blinked hard as his eyes came back into focus. It was the stranger who had been outside the church with O’Farroll.

In the ops room Graham the bleep was in top gear. He was short, hyper, anal and had a mind like a razor. His generation of signallers had to be above average intelligence, not only to operate the latest complex communications systems used by the detachment but also to wire them and several other devices such as trackers and cameras into a covert car from scratch in less than twenty-four hours. Above all they had to be calm under pressure. A good duty bleep in a crisis could mean the difference between life and death for a team on the ground. Graham reached for a row of intercom buttons on a wall and pushed one.

‘Boss!’ he called out.

While waiting for an answer he talked into the handset on its coiled flex long enough to reach across the room. ‘Four two Charlie, this is zero alpha?

The large speakers on the wall remained silent.There was no answer on the intercom either. He hit another button. ‘Boss?’Then into the handset once again, ‘Four two Charlie, zero alpha?’

The wall speakers remained silent but a refined English accent came over the tinny intercom. ‘Boss here.’

‘We have a possible Kuttuc.’

There was no reply from the boss and Graham never expected or waited for one. The boss would be running at full speed to the ops room. Kuttuc was the codename for the most feared event in an undercover operations room in Northern Ireland. It meant an operative had been kidnapped. Every operation that operative was involved in would have to be cancelled. It also had to be assumed everything that person knew about the unit and its operating procedures was compromised.The political mess would then follow. But that was much later. For the operative it meant something more immediate and much more horrific.

Graham grabbed up the phone and held it under his chin while he punched in a number. ‘Four two Charlie, zero alpha?’ he repeated into the radio handset at the same time. The phone rang in his ear. No answer came over the speakers. Someone picked up the phone the other end and a yawning voice said hello.

‘This is Camelot. We have an op Kuttuc in progress. Do you understand what I’m talking about?’

The army clerk in the Army Air Corps headquarters office half a mile up the road had no idea what Graham was talking about, but he could detect the urgency in Graham’s voice. ‘I don’t think I do,’ he said, adding ‘sir’ just to be on the safe side.

Graham instantly went up several notches towards ballistic. ‘Then go and get someone who does, preferably your boss, and each second you take is a second off a man’s life and if he dies I am going to come down there and personally rip your fucking throat out!’

Graham heard the clunk of the phone hitting the desk, then the clerk’s feet as they hurried across the office and out of the door. Graham would do no such thing, of course. He was only a junior non-commission officer, a corporal, but he had learned to sound like he was a Gorgon on the other end of a phone when he needed to.Years of being a signaller, especially in this mystery-shrouded unit, had taught him the power of the anonymous voice shouting down the other end of a communications device. Graham had used the ploy many times and if the person the other end ever asked him to identify himself he would either impersonate his boss, which he could do very well, or simply put down the phone. It was almost impossible to trace a call back to the unit.

A buzzer suddenly went off by the door to the ops room and then sounded continuously as whoever it was kept their finger jammed against it. Graham hit a button on the desk that electrically unbolted the door. Mike the boss hurried in chewing a mouthful of food, having covered the distance from the cookhouse on the other side of the compound in record time.

‘Talk to me,’ he barked as he went to the large map that covered a sloping desk beneath the operations wall. Under its glass skin, the map contained all data pertinent to operatives, vehicles and locations the det had anything to do with in the Province. He studied the movable markers and wax notations on the glass that gave details of the only operatives on the ground at that time. He was young, fresh-faced and his nickname when he was not in the room was ‘the head boy’, because physically he could probably still pass for a sixth former. However, the similarities stopped there and anyone not recognising that could find themselves in deep water.

‘Spinks’s car’s been lifted with him still in the boot. One three kilo is in pursuit. They think it’s two up. I’ve had no comms with Spinks for three minutes,’ Graham informed Mike, as he handed him the phone and headed for the door, adding, ‘The standby chopper chief’ll be on the end of that phone any second. Keep calling Spinks - four two Charlie.’

‘Where’s Stratton?’ Mike shouted as Graham left the room, apparently without hearing him. Mike hit an intercom button. ‘Steve?’

A few seconds later came an answer, ‘Boss?’

‘I need you in here right away.’

‘On my way,’ Steve replied.

‘You’ll need the rest of your cell.’

‘Roger,’ Steve said.

Mike hit another intercom button. ‘Jack?’

‘Yo.’ Jack’s voice sounded like he was at the far end of a room.

‘Get every available bod on the ground towards black seven. We’ve got a Kuttuc.’

‘Right away,’ replied Jack immediately and much closer to his intercom.

Mike released the button and paused to think of anything else he could do of greater priority before the dreaded call he had to make. There was nothing else. Then he realised a tiny voice was trying to break through his concentration. It was coming from the phone in his hand. He quickly put it to his ear.

‘Yes, this is Camelot. I need the standby chopper now, as in five minutes ago. We have an op Kuttuc . . . That’s right. One of our guys has been lifted.’

He pushed down the cradle, released it to get the dial tone, took a deep breath, and keyed a number he was hoping would not be answered. Mike was a captain in the Hussars, his parent unit, and had had to put up with comments about his baby-face his entire career. His looks may not have changed much since he left university but he had matured a great deal during the last three years in this job. When nothing exceptional was taking place he appeared introvert and retiring. None of those characteristics were remotely evident when work got suddenly serious. He had the arrogance one might expect to find in a captain of the Hussars and would go toe to toe with anyone, even superiors, when his blood was up. Two things were guaranteed to bring out the demon in him: incompetence, and anyone trying to screw with his detachment, enemy or otherwise. He had never had an op Kuttuc before. In fact there had only been one Special Forces kidnapping since Nairac, an SAS liaison officer who was lifted, beaten and killed in the mid-seventies. The only det operative ever kidnapped, a couple of years before Mike joined the unit, was from the North Province undercover detachment. He was rescued in the nick of time by sheer luck not long after he had been snatched by the Provos. The main lesson learned from both kidnappings was that every passing second increased the odds against Spinks being rescued.