The Hawk Is Dead

35

Wednesday 22 November 2023

‘God help us if you are wrong.’

The King’s voice was loud and clear through Jon Smoke’s headphones. Just as The Queen’s voice had been a short while earlier. And the voices of the detectives.

He would collect the tiny radio mics later after the bosses had departed the Palace for the day. The mic in the royal sitting room was concealed behind one of the 160 volumes of Prince Albert’s books on French history — in French — on the bookcase shelves. The one in the former Queen’s sitting room, now The King’s office, was inside the grate of the fireplace, which was never lit.

What he had heard made him angry. So angry.

That clever dick detective. Convincing first Camilla and then Charles that Her Maj had not been the target. How the hell had that happened? Well, he knew, he’d listened to the explanations — hypotheses — the detectives had given. He’d not considered this, not seriously. He — they — all had made the assumption that with the Royal Train derailed, and a Private Secretary shot dead as they emerged from the tunnel, the shooter had missed his target, panicked and fled. Surely that was blindingly obvious. Blindingly obvious The Queen had been the target. Blindingly obvious to everyone.

Everyone except one stubborn detective.

And Camilla seemed to have swallowed it. Charles, too — perhaps a little less so, but he’d accepted the detective’s very persuasive argument.

And what he had just heard underpinned the detective’s comments in his press conference yesterday. About not jumping to conclusions, or whatever the phrase he used.

The police investigation was no longer going to be the hunt for a gunman and his Not-My-King cohorts, which they’d prepared for and laid the trail for.

Instead it would be a far deeper and more dangerous dig into Why Sir Peregrine Greaves?

And just how far would they have to delve?

It was a dangerously shallow grave. There was a lot that needed to be taken care of, and very fast.

‘Sod it!’ he said aloud. It came out as a rasp of anger, he thought to himself, appropriate, since he actually was a RaSP officer. A trusted member of the team who guarded the cluster of Royal Palaces, including Buckingham Palace itself as well as Clarence House and St James’s Palace, where the bosses and all the senior royals, including the Prince and Princess of Wales and the Princess Royal, had London residential bases.

Not that Jon Smoke had anything against the members of the Royal Family he was paid to protect. Good luck to them, he thought. Make the most of whatever privilege you’d been born into, because he was born into a shit life that just kept on getting more shit.

His dad was a drunk and a wifebeater who, when Jon was seven, hit his mother too hard one night, and she died. His dad was put away for a long sentence and Jon was taken into care, never seeing his father again — he died in a prison brawl. He moved away from his Newcastle birthplace and, for the next nine years, went from crap foster home to even crapper foster home. When he was sixteen, he walked out of the last one, in south London, and past a shabby-looking theatre, with a sign in the window advertising for stagehands. He didn’t know what a stagehand was but went in, and got taken on.

A stagehand in this theatre was basically a skivvy and he was fine with that, and with the wage he got. He was less fine with the lecherous old wardrobe master trying to snog him in the pub around the corner, after the last night of a particularly weird and not well-attended play.

A year on, attracted by a TV commercial recruiting for the Army, he applied, and was accepted. After enlisting, for the first time in his life, he discovered he was actually good at something.

Shooting.

He had a real talent — or aptitude, as they called it — for target shooting.

Within two years he was on the Army shooting squad, competing — and winning silver — at the National Shooting Centre at Bisley.

Two weeks after, just turning nineteen, he was invited to an interview where he was told he had been selected to train for the elite sniper course, provided he passed the psychological evaluation. He passed and was elated that he had an ability — talent, whatever it was called — that meant he was actually valued. He spent five months at the Infantry Battle School in Brecon, in Wales, undergoing rigorous training under the British Army’s Sniper Wing. He learned precision shooting accuracy at long range, camouflage and fieldcraft.

The most important thing he took away was how to remain stationary in a concealed position for, if necessary, days on end. This was to stand him in good stead after he joined the Paras — and save his life. And bring him to where he was now, facing a very golden future.