Red Notice

5

‘Alpha. Wait out. Wait out. I do not have control. All stations wait out.’ Gavin gave Woolf a quizzical look. He wanted to crack on as much as the rest of the team. ‘Well?’

The MI5 man, still with his mobile phone glued to his ear, avoided his gaze. ‘I’ve no decision from COBRA yet.’

Gavin gave a weary shake of his head and, not for the first time that day, exchanged a ‘What the fuck?’ look with Major Ashton. He shot a quick glance at the rolling news bulletin, hoping that the stock-market update wasn’t about to give way to hysteria in Hampstead. Ever since the Iranian Embassy siege fiasco, when the world had watched the SAS assault teams storm the building on live TV, the media had been kept well out of the way of Regiment operations. Had any of the terrorists been watching the TV coverage during the build-up to the assault, the hostages might all have been killed before the troopers could reach them. And these days, when every Tom, Dick and Harry had a camera phone, it was only a matter of time before an operation got prematurely exposed or totally fucked up.

Ashton saw Woolf’s free hand tug more vigorously at a strand of his thinning hair as he barked into his secure mobile. Old habits died hard under pressure. ‘The situation is now critical. I need COBRA’s authorization at once. Not in five minutes, but now.’

The Civil Contingencies Committee — incorrectly but universally known as ‘COBRA’ after the acronym for Cabinet Office Briefing Room ‘A’ in which it had once met — was tasked to deal with every emergency from fuel-transporter strikes to terrorist attacks. An excellent set-up in theory, as it brought together the supreme commanders and most highly qualified specialists to manage any crisis situation, but in practice, as he and Woolf already knew, and Gavin was discovering, the sheer weight of expertise often stood in the way of a speedy and coherent response.

Woolf was fuming, and with good reason. Ashton could picture the chaotic scenes that would be playing themselves out in the corridors beneath Whitehall.