The Watchman

The Watchman by Chris Ryan

Copyright (c) Chris Ryan 2001

Elizabeth (Here's to a dance so many years ago).

He kitenga kanohi, He hokinga whakaaro.

(To see a face is to stir the memory.)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To my agent Barbara Levy, editor Mark Booth, Assistant editor Hannah Black and the rest of the team at Century.

PROLOGUE

Sunday, 11 February 1996

Northern Ireland

There was a moment when Ray Bledsoe might have escaped with his life. If he had trusted his instincts at that moment if he had reached for the Walther PPK and emptied the magazine through the side windows of the black taxi as it pulled into the parking bay alongside him he might just have made it. He'd been an undercover soldier for three and a half years now, quite long enough to know bad trouble when he saw it, and a glance at the skinheads in the taxi had told him that this was the worst trouble of all. As he looked away he could feel their eyes lock on to him in icy, murderous anticipation.

But he had done nothing. The voice that whispered danger was drowned out by the voice screaming Yellow Card. If he opened fire on these men preemptively and without delivering the warnings specified on the Yellow Card he could find himself pension less dishonourably discharged and on trial for murder. The Rules of Engagement were bollocks, of course, and dangerous bollocks at that, but seventeen years in the Royal Military Police and a couple of well-published sed trials of British servicemen had instilled in Ray Bledsoe a deep-seated anxiety concerning the procedures of contact.

And so he had done nothing. Instead of reducing the taxi's in tenor to a horror show of shattered glass, jetting blood and brain~ sprayed upholstery he had sat tight and reached for the packet of Embassy and the lighter on the passenger seat. Then, lighting up, he had wound down his window an inch or two and allowed the cold February air to draw out the smoke. Played it innocent. You don't gun down carloads of total strangers for no reason, Ray Bledsoe told himself, whatever your instincts. Whatever your misgivings.

But as the sharp air lanced at his face and the Embassy smoke hit his lungs he knew that emptying his Walther into the taxi was exactly what he should have done and that the moment in which he might have acted had passed. He sensed the purposeful exit of bodies from the taxi, saw his side window implode in a terrif~ring shower of sledge hammered glass, felt a gun barrel jammed cold to his head, smelt vinegared breath and knew himself as good as dead.

"Out, soldier." The voice low, a Fermanagh accent, smooth as the cocking of a heavy automatic.

"And don't even think about... Talk, Bledsoe ordered himself, conscious that fear was freezing him, locking down his thought processes. Blag. Use your bloody gob. He turned to the glassless window but didn't know what words he used. Might have shouted, might have whispered.

Couldn't hear himself "I said out, yer focker. Now!"

The door opening, the honeycombed sheet of safety glass sagging inwards, a blur of shaved heads and tattooed arms, and the gulls screaming and wheeling above them. For all the chance of Bledsoe's reaching the Walther PPK at that moment it might as well have been back in the armoury at Lisburn.

Think. Think SOPs. Think your self past the fear.

Think.

And then, as he indecisively half rose, came the smashing blow to the forehead a 9mm Browning butt, full magazine -and the blood in his eyes and the cold air and the arms dragging him and what must have been the carpeted floor of the taxi's boot rising to meet his face. He never saw the weapon's second chopping descent.

After an hour he began to come to. He did not immediately understand that he was in a moving car, and did not at once connect the pain at the front and back of his head with a dimly remembered sequence of events involving a PIRA snatch squad.

Then he did remember and prayed hard for unconsciousness to return, and when it wouldn't return he lay there for the best part or the worst part of another hour. His hands were cuffed, he discovered, and he had been stripped naked. There was a smell of vomit, rubberised carpet and lubricating oil.

Please God, he thought, don't let them take me over the border and out of the Crown jurisdiction. If they get me past the roadblocks and the border posts I'm a dead man.

At the time of his kidnap Ray Bledsoe had been preparing to drop off payment for a tout named Proinsas Deavey in a car park. It was a standard dead-letter drop the routine being that Bledsoe stuffed /200 in used notes in the Embassy packet and dropped it into the left-hand of the two bins by the parking bays, and Deavey swung by a short time later with a soft-drink can to dispose of, surreptitiously pocketed the Embassy packet and made himself scarce. It wasn't an arrangement that either party actively enjoyed, but it had worked well enough up to now.

Deavey was an associate of known Republican players, but a self-destructive mixture of greed and stupidity had put him in the pay of the British security services. Things had started going wrong for Deavey when he set up a small-scale business selling pills and blow in Central Belfast's "Holy Lands'. Named after its principal arteries Damascus Street, Jerusalem Street and Canterbury Street the Holy Lands was the bed sitter enclave serving Queen's University, and students from both sides of the political divide washed their socks, heated their beans and drank their beer there. It was Deavey's bad fortune to have approached a group of ultra-nationalist eighteen-year olds who had shopped him the moment he left the bar. Later that evening he had been given a severe beating behind a Falls Road betting office. The punishment squad had identified themselves as members of Direct Action Against Drugs, a known cover organisation for the IRA.

Resentful, half-crippled and robbed of a useful source of income, Deavey had been a comparatively easy touch for the

FRU, or Forces Research Unit. The FRU was a small and highly secretive unit set up by the British army for the purpose of cultivating and running touts. It was staffed by soldiers who didn't look like soldiers.

Most of them were middle-aged men like Bledsoe long-serving ex-NCOs with pub bellies, thinning hair and anonymous faces.

Proinsas Deavey was one of half a dozen smalltime players that Bledsoe and his colleagues were handling. The former dope dealer had never made contact with any really important players, but the scraps he provided meeting places, unfaithful husbands, who drank with whom all assisted in the piecing together of the Intelligence jigsaw. Deavey had sold his Republican soul to Ray Bledsoe in a fish and chip shop outside Carrickfergus for a down payment of/175.

Touts were the bane of the PIRA's existence and their work with touts made FRU members highly desirable to terrorist snatch squads. When it came to his interrogation, Bledsoe knew, the first thing they would demand would be the identity of the touts he was running. The second would be the identity of the special forces personnel he was in contact with the other FRU members, the Det (or Detachment) soldiers who made up the undercover surveillance teams, the Box (or MI-5) teams and, of course, the SAS. Then they would want the radio codes and the rest of the intelligence baggage that he carried in his head.

The PIRA, Bledsoe thought, had almost certainly had him marked down as an FRU member for months. Lifting him now was partly expediency they badly needed to know the answers he could give them and partly the desire to raise two fingers to the British government. The larger symbol of that contempt had been the bombing, two days earlier, of South Quay in the Docklands area of London. Like everyone else at the barracks, Bledsoe had seen the pictures on TV, had stared open-mouthed at the devastated City landscape, at shattered office blocks, at streets inches deep in a glittering slush of broken glass. The lorry bomb had killed two people, injured many more and caused millions of pounds' worth of damage. A statement had been issued by the IRA an hour before the explosion revoking the official cease fire that had lasted for seventeen months and nine days.

It hadn't felt like a cease fire to Ray Bledsoe. More like business as usual and some of his colleagues said a fucking sight worse. But the bomb signalled a change. The bomb meant that the gloves were off publicly as well as privately. The FRU and the other special forces had been warned to exercise extra caution, to double-check sources, to watch their backs.

But there was only so much, finally, that you could do. Bledsoe's reaction to the warnings had been to request back-up for his drop-off. At his previous meeting with Deavey, Bledsoe had found the tout so jumpy that he had begun to wonder if the little bastard was playing a double game. It wasn't impossible that he'd decided despite everything that he was safer in PIRA's pockets than the army's and had bought his life by promising them an FRU agent on a plate. Or perhaps, even more extremely, Deavey had been PIRA's man all along and had been feeding them false information from the start.

Bledsoe had considered both scenarios highly unlikely the tout seemed just too solid between the ears to run a sophisticated intelligence scam but just in case of any funny business he had requested that a second FRU member attend the drop-off in a separate car. Connor Wheen, Bledsoe knew, had parked his Mondeo three hundred yards away near the car park entrance and with any luck he would have witnessed the snatch.

Assuming that he had done so, Wheen would have put out an alert. Perhaps even now there was an SAS pursuit vehicle a mile behind them, showing no lights.

As he bumped and rolled on the floor of the taxi, however, Bledsoe found it difficult to think coherently. He had never thought of himself as a courageous man. If the car he was in broke through the cordon and escaped over the border there would be... what? The interrogation, the stomping kicks to the teeth and balls, the burning cigarettes to the eyeballs and.. . Stop it, he ordered himself. Get afucking grip. You're a soldier. Act like one. And, more importantly, think like one.

Think of the details. Think of the SAS team bomb bursting out of the camp at Lisburn within seconds of the alert, all with kit and weapons packed for action. Think of them hammering out on to the roads in their big Beamers and Quattros.

The ground grew steadily rougher, severely testing the big vehicle's suspension, and Bledsoe prayed for the grinding, rubber-flapping lurch that would signal that the car had punctured itself on an army spike chain. But there was no such lurch and then suddenly there was no movement at all. From far away came the heavy, squealing scrape of a sliding door. The car rumbled forward for a further few seconds and the sliding door rasped once more. A moment s stillness, then the boot sprang open to reveal the hard white glare of strip lights and Bledsoe was hauled, blinking, on to a flattened earth floor. The floor was cold and damp beneath his bare feet, the cuffs cut into his wrists and he could feel his hair stiff with blood.

There were voices all around him.

Things took shape before his dark-accustomed eyes. He was in a large, iron-sided rectangular barn, surrounded by expectant-looking men in dark-blue boiler suits. Vapour rose from their mouths, and the excited, contemptuous sound of their voices. In the corner to his left, mockingly normal, stood a John Deere tractor and an ordered pile of plastic fertiliser sacks. At the centre of the wall was a workshop area with pulleys and chains, and at the far end a stud partitioned office. Ahead of him, parked along the right-hand wall, was an unloaded trailer.

He half-turned, still blinking. The entrance through which the car had come was barred by a pair of tall cormgated-iron doors hung from greased rails, in front of which waited two boiler-suited guards. One was fingering an automatic handgun, the other was pissing a steaming puddle on to the ground. Both were smirking at him with hate-filled, delinquent eyes.

Bledsoe stood there for a moment, swaying. Two thoughts hit him immediately. Where were the Regiment lads going to hit the place from? This was bad, but the other realisation was worse, so much worse that his chest began heaving involuntarily and he thought for a moment that he was going to pass out.

They were going to kill him and probably to blood some of the younger foot soldiers in the process. They were going to make it messy, to see who could do the business without flinching and who couldn't.

The nearest man, a burly red-haired figure, sniggered.

Puck you, Bledsoe thought, shaking badly now but attempting to rally himself PIRA cunt. When the Regiment lads get here and get here they will, blowing the doors off ~f they have to I hope they blow your fucking head from your shoulders.

For a moment things seemed to coalesce in the icy air. Bledsoe was in pain, concussed and very frightened indeed, but he knew what he was going to do. Breathe, he told himself. Clear your head. Ignore the pain. Think.

And then a dark-blue figure came from one side, slammed a fist into Bledsoe's stomach and brought his knee up hard into the FRU agent's nose, splintering the bone. Blinded by the flash of his breaking nose, gagging for air, Bledsoe went down.

They're going to hit me again, he thought absently.

He was right. A steel toecap to the balls that froze his mouth into a silent scream followed by a crunching boot to the lower ribs. At least two of the ribs fractured now. His grasp on consciousness wavering, Bledsoe closed his eyes.

Hands took him under the arm, dragged him across to the trailer, slammed him against the iron tailgate and cuffed him to it, arms spread. His legs gave way for a moment and they let him hang there, drooling and half-suffocated, blood pouring down his face from his nose.

Finally he found his feet. Dragged icy farmyard air through his mouth. Opened his eyes a crack. Counted eight of them. Nine there was one he hadn't seen before, a pale-faced figure with depthless eyes who could have been any age between twenty-five and forty, and unlike the rest was not smiling.

"Name?" The speaker was the one who'd kicked him, a thin, broken-nosed guy.

Bledsoe dragged his head up. Spat blood. Cleared his throat.

"I don't know who the hell you think I am," he began blearily, 'but..."

"I'll tell ye who ye are," the thin man said.

"Ye're Sergeant Raymond Bledsoe, formerly of the Royal Military Police, presently seconded to the so-called Forces Research Unit. There's not a deal we don't know about ye, cuntie, ye can thank yer Regimental magazine for that, sae don't go gi'in us any crap.

Silence. The older man from the car regarded him levelly.

"Ye know what we want," the older man said, zipping himself into a pair of overalls with fastidious and terrifying care.

"Radio codes, SAS names, tout names everything. We can start with yer man Deavey if you like, though as ye've probably guessed by now he's not quite the tick Paddy you took him for."

Bledsoe said nothing. Stared up at the strip light, tried to distance himself from the pain of his nose and ribs.

The other man smiled.

"Ye see, unlike yer occupying army, we'll always be here. Deavey had the wit to realise that."

Bledsoe struggled to keep his expression neutral, not to rise to the bait. Here we go, he thought. As rehearsed.

"I'll talk," he said.

"But not to you. I'll talk to Adams or McGuinness or any of the executive level officers of Sinn Fein and I'll give them everything they want to know. Or Padraig Byrne."

Byrne, ostensibly a Sinn Fein councillor, was known to the security services as the chief of the PIRA's Belfast Brigade. There was purpose and calculation in Bledsoe's insistence on talking face to face with senior players: they were watched round the clock and in the event of a British agent being lifted, as Bledsoe had been lifted, this surveillance would be doubled. His trust in Connor Wheen was Bledsoe's only hope of survival. One or other would come through for him. The alternative was quite literally unthinkable.

"Ye'll talk to Byrne?"

"I will."

His interrogator looked round the room. Everyone smiled.

"Yer word on that, then, ye'll talk to Byrne?"

Bledsoe hesitated, sensing a trap. Was it really going to be this easy?

The interrogator took a step closer.

"Well?"

He nodded.

"I'll talk to Byrne. No one junior to him."

The other man nodded and glanced round the assembled faces. The smiles were wider now, displaying contempt, amusement and bad dentistry in equal measure. The man from the car shook his head, pulled a cellophane pouch of Drum tobacco from his trouser pocket and began to roll a cigarette. As he licked the paper the thin, broken-nosed man turned away, took a 9mm Browning automatic from the pocket of his boiler suit, considered it for a moment, then swung the butt backhanded and with full force into Bledsoe's broken ribs.

The pain was indescribable, an explosion of liquid fire in his chest that seemed, once again, to drain the FRU man of all coherent thought. He fell forward, hanging from the tailgate by his cuffed wrists, and for a moment saw himself as the young Provos surrounding him saw him a pallid, bloody faced flabby-arsed forty-fags-a-day chancer, close to his pension and closer to tears. As an agent handler Bledsoe's world had become that of his informers a world of beer and bar-stools and clapped-out cars.

He had fitted in well, but at the cost of his health and fitness.

"There's no disguise like a fat gut!" the instructors had told them at Tregaron, and Bledsoe had laughed along with the others.

Now look at him. Pathetic.

Something still beat in his chest, however, even as he hung there wheezing and gagging. Some ghost of the bloodyminded squaddie he'd once been still hung grimly on. There'll be afuck of a bang when the lads blow that door. Afuck of a bang. And the killing spree of all time.

None of these Provie cunts would live to .

A hand grabbed Bledsoe's hair and pulled his head level. Through a film of pain he saw a short, square figure walking out of the office area, a figure whose reddened and bony features, slicked-back hair and carefully buttoned Aran cardigan he recognised instantly.

"Would ye be knowing this gentleman?"

It was the gun-butt man again.

"Yeah," said Bledsoe, attempting to sneer.

"Val Doonican."

That earned him another kick in the balls and this time, as a lurching despair became one with the pain, Bledsoe kept his eyes shut.

The man in the Aran cardigan was Padraig Byrne.

No Det unit was about to follow the fucker anywhere.

He was already here wherever here was and he had probably been here for days. When Bledsoe finally reopened his eyes it was to see Byrne pulling on a boiler suit.

"Pleased to see me, Sergeant Bledsoe? You will be, that I promise." The voice was light and cultured, and somehow horribly at odds with the raw-boned features. The considered view in Lisburn barracks, Bledsoe remembered, was that Padraig Byrne took it up the arse.

"You see, Sergeant, we've got something for you."

A book hit the ground with a thump next to the FRU man's feet. What the fuck?

"Raymond John Bledsoe," Byrne continued in his soft wheedling brogue, 'this is your Death!"

There was snigger of sycophantic laughter from the young Provo foot soldiers. Opening his eyes a fraction, Bledsoe saw that the book was a Yellow Pages directory for the Newry and Mourne area. He hadn't crossed the border, then. There was still hope.

Please God, he thought, let Wheen have hooked afollow car on to that taxi. Let there be a Regiment team out there right now, taking out the sentries.

He hung on desperately to that hope. He suspected that the interrogation was about to start and he didn't know if he had any courage left to bullshit them with.

It was going to be very bad he was certain of that from the number of young guys they'd assembled, and from the hunger and expectancy on their faces.

And then, with a blast of cold air, the sliding doors opened again and a mud-spattered white van drove into the barn, shuddered for a moment in a haze of exhaust and was still. The barn doors were quickly dragged shut, then a terrible high-pitched screaming issued from inside the van. The screaming seemed to go on and on, and ended in a sound that was haW way between a retch and a whimper.

"Do you recognise that voice, Bledsoe?" asked Byrne, continuing his Eamonn Andrews impersonation.

"Yes, all the way from Lisburn barracks, Belfast, it's your old friend ..

A second naked and plasticuffed figure was dragged from the back of the van by two more boiler suited Provo foot soldiers. He had been severely beaten around the head and upper body, dirt and vomit smeared his chest and legs, and his face was a shapeless blood-smeared mask. In the middle of the room the foot soldiers kicked the new arrival's feet from under him and he fell heavily to the ground.

Byrne looked on, enjoying the moment.

"Good evening," he addressed the man on the ground.

"And thank you for joining us on this special occasion.

"Fuck you!" said the fallen man. At least that's what Bledsoe guessed that he was trying to say, but something horrible had happened to his mouth and teeth, and all that came out was a bubbling, gutter al rasp.

Bledsoe stared. Tried to beat back the worst of the fear.

With an immense effort the battered figure squinted around him, found Bledsoe, and winked one blackened and swollen eyelid. As he did so his face took momentary shape and with a sullen jolt of recognition all hope died in Ray Bledsoe.

"That's right," crowed Byrne exultantly, resuming.

"It's your old mate Connor Wheen!"

I'm dead, Bledsoe thought dully. We're both dead.

Byrne watched them, delighted with his coup. A chair was brought from the office and the two men hauled Wheen into it, forcing his cuffed hands behind the backrest.

"I know what you're wondering," said Byrne to Bledsoe with vast good humour.

"You're wondering if you're still north of the border, so that your SAS pals can drop in on us. Well, you know something .. ." Byrne shook his head at the sheer hilarious ness of the situation.

"You're not!"

Bledsoe felt his sanity slipping away. All that remained now was terror, pain and death. His unhinged gaze found the pale aced man, who stared back at him with ageless, unsmiling intensity. You are in hell, that gaze told him. Welcome.

Byrne turned to the pale-faced man.

"Joseph, as we agreed earlier, I'd like it to be you that does the killing." His tone was casual, conversational.

"Please," whispered Bledsoe.

"I'll tell you everything." His lips were papery and his voice was a submissive monotone.

"You can have the Det list, the SAS list, the tout list, the codes ..

Padraig Byrne frowned and looked at him intently for a moment or two as if wrestling with some complex moral or intellectual issue. Then he smiled again and turned back to the pale-faced man he called Joseph.

ONE.

Sierra Leone.

After an hour's march, Captain Alex Temple held up his hand and the patrol came to a cautious halt.

Above them the waning moon was obscured by lurid bruise-coloured rain clouds. In the forest to either side of them insects drilled and screamed. It was fifteen minutes after midnight and all six men were soaked to the skin. They were sweating too, as their dark-accustomed eyes scanned the clearing.

Alex had been right. Above the distant booming of thunder, just audible, was a faint staccato crackle.

Gunfire, surely. To his side, all but invisible in the dank shadows, Don Hammond nodded in agreement, showed two fingers two clicks ahead -and pointed up the trail. Yes, thought Alex with fierce joy. Yes! This is what I joined the Regiment for. This is what I'll do for as long as they'll let me.

He grinned at the wiry sergeant and glanced round at the four other members of Zulu Three Six patrol as they melted into the dank foliage. Immediately behind him was a sharp-faced trooper named Ricky Sutton, the patrol signaller. At twenty-three, Sutton was the youngest and least experienced member of the team. Covering Sutton's back as he worked was Stan Clayton, a long-serving and famously mouthy cockney corporal, and on the other side of the clearing, shadowy in the dimness, crouched Lance Wilford and Jimmy "Dog' Kenilworth, a corporal and a lance-corporal respectively. Like Alex, they were dressed in sodden jungle kit and webbing, and carrying M16 203 rifles and a sheathed parang.

Beneath the frayed rims of their bush-hats their faces were blackened with cam-stick. All had compasses attached to their wrists and rifles.

At Don Hammond's sign, the patrol members quietly lowered their heavy Bergan rucksacks and began to cache them. Mosquitoes whined around them, settling greedily on their hands and faces. A couple of the men had leeches visible at their necks and wrists, and Alex guessed that they all had at least half a dozen sucking away beneath their wet shirts and combat trousers.

Crouching in the dank foliage, Hammond unfurled the aerial of the sat-coin radio, and reported the patrol's position and the direction of the small-arms fire to the SAS base in Freetown. When Hammond had completed the report Alex resumed the lead scout position. Signing for the rest of the patrol to follow, he set off towards the distant gunfire.

This was it, he thought this had to be it and breathed a silent prayer of thanks to the gods of war.

He was thirty-five years old and a commissioned officer, and both facts militated against him. SAS officers, or "Ruperts' as they were known, were usually directed into planning roles, while the 'chopping' was done by the troopers and NCOs. As a Rupert, Alex was lucky to be here at all. Somehow, against all the odds, it seemed that he had been granted one last adventure.

Zulu Three Six patrol was searching for a missing ITN news crew.

The journalists reporter Sally Roberts, cameraman Ben Mills and sound recordist Gary Burge had been missing for more than thirty-six hours now. They had last been seen in the town of Masiaka, thirty-five miles inland from the capital, Freetown. Masiaka was a strategically important staging post, and its mildewed and flyblown bungalows had been much fought over in the dirty war between the Sierra Leone army and the Revolutionary United Front. At present it was in the hands of pro-government forces and so considered more or less safe for Western media teams.

According to the Agence France Presse people who'd been showing them around, Sally Roberts and her team had arrived in Masiaka intending to interview members of a notoriously volatile pro-government militia known as the West Side Boys. The ITN team had hoped to find the militia's commanders at the mildewed and bullet pocked bungalow that served as their HQ, but on arriving there had discovered that the occupants had decamped eastwards in pursuit of an RUF raiding party.

Undeterred, and against the advice of the other Western press agencies, the ITN team had decided to follow the West Side Boys into the RUF-held badlands and at dawn the next day had set off on the Kissuna Road in a hired car. No one in Masiaka knew what had happened to Roberts, Mills and Burge after that. No one had seen them and no one had heard from them, despite the fact that all three were carrying sat-phones.

From evidence later provided by militia members it seemed that the West Side Boys had followed the raiding party far into RUF territory and that a vicious but inconclusive firefight had taken place near Kissuna, after which the militia had withdrawn back towards Masiaka. During the battle, as usual, most of the combatants had been blind drunk; the RUF on palm wine, the West Side Boys on the plastic bags of raw gin that they habitually carried. A dozen or so fighters, several of them children, had been killed on both sides.

When the ITN team neither returned that night, nor contacted anyone in Masiaka, people began to wonder. At noon the following day, fearing the worst, a BBC news crew filmed an interview with a West Side Boys militia leader called "Colonel Self Loading. Within two hours of the interview, and following a swift triangular exchange of secure calls between Freetown, Whitehall and Hereford, an unedited video copy of the film was running at SAS HQ, Freetown. The HQ was a former security complex on the edge of Lungi airport -a scruffily anonymous cluster of tents, low Nissen-style huts and radio masts. Watching the video clip were Major David Ross, OC of the forty-strong detachment from "D' Squadron, and Captain Alex Temple of the Regiment's Revolutionary Warfare Wing.

The twenty-minute clip made for grim viewing.

Colonel Self-Loading's eyes were red with fatigue, ganja and trail dust but he was certain of his facts: no Western correspondent had spoken to any member of the West Side Boys since their departure from Masiaka two days earlier. And certainly no Western woman.

If the team had been anywhere near the Kissuna battle zone, the colonel told the BBC interviewer, then they had probably been lifted by the RUF. Even now, he said, the woman was probably being asked if she wanted 'long sleeves' or 'short sleeves' amputation above or below the elbow. Hacking off arms was the RUF's calling-card. Recently, they had extended the practice to genitals. Once mutilated, victims were made to sit in bowls of caustic soda.

"And maybe they eat them, you know." The young colonel shrugged, reaching under his Tupac Shakur Tshirt to scratch his belly.

"Food is short."

Colonel Self-Loading was in a position to know about the RUF's dietary habits. A year earlier the West Side Boys had sided with the rebels, sweeping down to occupy Freetown on a manic tide of blood and slaughter, and to the thumping beat of the RUF anthem "No Living Thing'. The conversion of the West Side Boys to the government's way of seeing things a conversion which was rewarded by British mercenaries with a thirty-five-ton sanctions-busting consignment of Bulgarian weaponry was comparatively recent. If Colonel Self-Loading said that the RUF ate human flesh, then they did.

"You see, this is a bad war," he declared to the camera with all the authority of his nineteen years.

"A

very bad war."

Excusing himself, he explained to the interviewer that he was off to find a 'popsicle' an iced lolly made of neat gin -and a woman.

"Doesn't look good," said Alex levelly, when the footage came to a close.

"Nor it does," said David Ross.

"And I've got a feeling it might be coming our way."

Alex nodded.

"I'll put my lads on standby."

"Do that," agreed Ross.

The Revolutionary Warfare Wing, from which Alex twelve-strong team had been drawn, is the most secretive element of the SAS and the unit's existence has never been officially admitted. Its purpose is the execution of officially deniable tasks and contracts, including the covert training of overseas 'friendlies'. These last have included the Mujahedin of Afghanistan and the Cambodian Khmer Rouge.

On this occasion, rather less controversially, Alex Temple's team were in Freetown as part of a training package for the Sierra Leone army. They found it uninspiring work and between exercises were glad to return to the temporary base they shared with the forty men of "D' Squadron.

At twenty minutes after 5 p.m. Alex was summoned to the OC's hut for the second time that afternoon. In a few succinct sentences David Ross put him in the picture concerning the kidnap of the ITN team. The squadron would be mounting a search operation that night, Ross informed Alex, and the RWW team would remain on standby at the base to help with the planning of a rescue.

Alex heard Ross out and proposed an alternative plan. The RWW team would mount the search, he suggested, while "D' Squadron would stand by to effect the rescue.

Ross politely but firmly turned Alex's plan down. The RWW team were separate from his command, their presence in Sierra Leone was being paid for by that country's government and there would be an awkward convergence of responsibilities.

Alex countered that for the purposes of the operation he would be happy to place himself and his men under the direct command of Ross. If he led the search team "D' Squadron could be kept intact for the rescue.

"If we find them," he pleaded with the OC, 'it'll be a "D" Squadron success. If we don't, it'll be an RWW fuck-up." What Alex didn't need to add was that he had several years' more experience than Ross and was undoubtedly the best man to lead the search.

Ross considered Alex's suggestion. The two men liked and respected each other, and the lean-faced ex-Signals officer was aware that this would probably be Alex's last chance of leading his men into hostile territory. In the end, he gave Alex the nod. Intelligence reports from RUF informers suggested that the hostages had been taken to one of two possible camps. Alex was to divide his men into two six-man patrols and prepare for insertion under cover of darkness.

As he listened to the briefing an hour later and pored over the map table with his men, Alex felt the first fluttering crawl of anticipation. This, he knew from experience, would build to the taut excitement which always preceded action. When the time came, the excitement would give way to an icy, analytical calm. Then, for better or worse, he would do his job.

And on this one, he reckoned, it might well be for worse. Looking at the aerial reconnaissance photographs at the drab, swampy vastness of the jungle, the tiny gnat-bite settlements and the sullen clay-coloured waterways it seemed almost unimaginable that they would locate the ITN team.

How the hell could they find three people in all of that? And even if one of the patrols did locate the journalists, would they still be alive? Would there be time to scope the place out, accurately assess the enemy's strength and firepower, insert a rescue team and lift the hostages from under the noses of the notably well-armed

RUF?

"We have to think positive, gentlemen," said Ross briskly, as if reading his thoughts.

"The intelligence people have established a link with RUF commanders in the interior. We're assured that if they want to negotiate, the infrastructure exists. Having said that, of course, we can't count on any such thing. We've got to find the hostages and prepare a hard extraction."

He swept his hand over the maps.

"Now, it looks like a huge search area, but the probability is that if our hostages are still in one piece they're being held at one of a pair of jungle camps in the Kissuna sector.

These are located as follows' he overlaid the assembly of aerial photographs with a clear sheet marked up in china graph pencil 'and I've coded them Arsenal and Chelsea. Both, as you can see, are on the Rokel river, and neither is more than ten clicks from our LZ here on the ridge line, which we will call Millwall."

Carefully, Alex scanned the aerial phot graphs. The camps were just about visible if you knew exactly what you were looking for. They were surrounded by a hell of a lot of jungle though.

"Search teams will be dropped off at Millwall at 2330 hours tonight," Ross continued.

"By the time they reach their recce points, judging by past experience, the bulk of the RUF soldiery will be off their heads on dope and palm wine, and security around the camps will be piss-poor. We could approach earlier but the risk of the patrols being discovered would be much greater, with concomitant increase of risk to the hostages." He steepled his fingers and regarded them levelly.

"As it is you're going to have to go bloody carefully, and remember that just because these buggers are part-time cannibals who like dressing up in weird costumes and chopping toddlers' arms off with machetes, it doesn't mean they aren't at home with sophisticated weaponry. They've got RPGs and all sorts in those camps, thanks to their income from those bloody diamond mines they control, and I don't repeat don't want to lose any men. You will not, under any circumstances, risk a contact, is that understood?"

Everyone nodded. Alex glanced at the other patrol members. He was the only officer.

"From Millwall," Ross continued, 'patrols will tab in to their respective targets. Whether or not there's any sign of any hostages, we're going to need full reports concerning numbers, weaponry, fields of fire, disposition of buildings and all the rest of it, OK? By 0230 hours tomorrow, if we haven't located the TV people, I want both patrols back at Millwall for evacuation by Puma. If we have found them I want both patrols to converge on the camp in question and remain eyes-on. Alex, you and one other will then tab back to Miillwall and be choppered back to Freetown to brief the Squadron. Any questions so far?"

Along with the others, Alex shook his head.

"The timing of the assault will depend on the intelligence you get back to us and the outcome of any negotiations that take place," Ross continued.

"It's still perfectly possible that the RUF can be persuaded to return the hostages Roberts and Co. are an international press team, after all, and the RUF aren't completely indifferent to world opinion."

Oh no? thought Alex, who had seen the school-age amputees on the streets of Freetown and Masiaka. You could have fuckin' fooled me.

"Assuming the negotiations fail, the "D" Squadron assault team will go in between twenty-four hours and a week from tonight. Again, any questions?"

And again there were none.

At 11 p.m." the two RWW search patrols boarded a Puma. Showing no lights, fitted with low-noise rotor blades and flown by a pilot in night-vision goggles, the helicopter slipped silently inland, overflew Masiaka and swung eastwards into RUF territory. At 1130, precisely on schedule, the twelve soldiers de bussed crouching in the rotor wash as the Puma lifted away from the ridge line and turned back towards Freetown.

Thirty minutes after caching the Bergans the patrol halted for a scheduled comms burst from base. As Ricky Sutton looped a plastic-coated aerial wire over a tree branch, a damp, overbearing heat pressed around them. The sporadic bursts of rifle fire were clearly audible now and over the smell of decomposing vegetation the air carried a faint drift of woodsmoke.

Were the ITN team being held at the camp ahead of them? As always in the presence of danger, Alex felt tautly, intensely alive.

Checking his watch, he joined Don Hammond and Ricky Sutton who were huddled over the 319 patrol radio, waiting for the burst to decrypt. In silence, the three men stared at the miniature green-lit VDU screen.

Black letters leapt into view. Ricky Sutton wiped away the rain.

"HOSTAGES TO BE EXECUTED 14th 1200.

INFORM WHEN LOCATED. SEARCH PATROLS

TO SUPPORT D SQN ASSAULT AT 1ST LIGHT.

ROSS'

"Fuck me!" breathed Alex, his heart pounding.

"The fourteenth is today. First light's in about four hours.

And we haven't even found them yet."

He'd wanted an adventure.

He'd got one.

TWO.

Assault at first light.

That turned everything everything on its head. The RUF must have issued some impossible ultimatum the freeing of all prisoners taken by the Sierra Leone army, for example.

The patrol had moved through the remaining jungle as fast as humanly possible. They were very close to the camp now and Alex recognised the random discharges as being those of British-issued SLRs. The sound was a good sign. Unless the RUF were fighting among themselves it meant that they were in party mood, emptying their 7.62 rounds into the river and the surrounding jungle out of a kind of stoned machismo. And perhaps, Alex thought, in anticipation of the killing of the news crew at midday.

"Left a bit," murmured Don Hammond behind him.

Alex raised a hand in thanks. As lead scout, he was the only member of the team not responsible for navigation all his concentration went into watching and listening: for the unexplained movement, the shadow that wasn't a shadow, the tiny suck of a boot in clay, the oily straining of a cocking lever.

Listening was becoming harder. In addition to the rifle fire, there was the faint thump and whisper of music. Straining his ears, Alex recognised one of Sierra Leone's big summer tunes -a favourite of the RUF, the SLA and the militias alike called "Titti Shaggah'.

Had they posted sentries, he wondered, stilling the five men behind him with a hand gesture. For two minutes the patrol crouched unmoving in the animal track, but there was no sound that shouldn't have been there. They moved on and the ridge line began its gradual descent towards the Rokel river.

Step by silent step, Alex negotiated the gradient. The rain was still holding off, but splashing rivulets streaked the treacherous clay incline. They were five hundred yards away from the camp now and through the dense foliage below them Alex could see the yellowish flickering of electric lights. Surely, he thought, they must at least have some bloke on stag.

They had and Alex almost missed him. All he saw, in fact, was the tiny swing of a cigarette coal at the side of the track twenty yards ahead. Stilling the patrol again and deliberately steadying his breathing as the adrenalin flooded his system, Alex moved silently down the skiddy clay, feeling with his feet for the rocks and tree roots that would noiselessly support his weight. One squelch, he thought one snapped branch or kicked stone and we're buggered.

Ten yards now and he could see in the moonlight that the sentry was leaning against the other side of a tree trunk. A tree trunk whose thickness was approximately that of a man's chest. Once again, the arm swung sideways. The hand held a ganja spliff, not a cigarette.

Quietly, Alex drew a short Mauser stabbing knife from his belt webbing. It took him three agonised heart-thudding minutes to cover the last sodden yards of the descent and then finally he was behind the trunk, his nose and eyes full of drifting ganja smoke but his feet secure on the slippery twisting tree roots.

Like a striking snake, as his right hand reached across with the knife, Alex's left hand clapped across the sentry's mouth. At the last moment, though, with a desperate outrush of breath, the SAS officer checked his blade. The face beneath his hands was smooth, the neck slender, the struggling body pitifully small. The sentry was a kid might even have been a girl couldn't have been more than ten, and almost immediately went limp with terror in his arms. The spliff fell to the ground and went out with a tiny hiss.

Keeping a hand firmly across his captive's mouth, Alex gestured to Don Hammond to join him. The sergeant quickly gagged the child with a sweat rag, tied the slender wrists and ankles with a length of para cord from his belt kit, and concealed the immobiised figure beneath a dense bush in the darkness to one side of the track.

The patrol proceeded warily with the descent. They encountered no more sentries and, as they neared the lights and the music, the ground began to level out until they found themselves close to the edge of the tree line. In front of them a parapet of knotted roots supported a thick tangle of rotting vegetation, beneath which was a drop of about six feet. Beneath this, either drunk or stoned but unquestionably asleep, lay two RUF soldiers. One was wearing a white nylon wedding dress, the other threadbare tracksuit trousers and a combat smock hung with plastic dolls' heads.

Ricky Sutton, keen as ever, drew his commando knife.

"Shall I do 'em?" he mouthed, but Alex shook his head. If the bodies were found the whole camp would go to a state of alert, jeopardising any potential rescue mission. As Ricky sheathed his blade, Alex scanned the area with his binoculars.

Below them, contained within the dark curving sweep of the Rokel river, lay the camp. Roughly ovalshaped, it occupied an area slightly greater than a football pitch. At the nearer, lower end was a large bonfire on to which, at intervals, silhouetted figures heaped wet branches and tree roots, encouraging a thick column of grey-brown smoke. On the higher ground to the east, lit by strings of low-wattage bulbs, two windowless cinder-block huts stood at right angles to the river. Beyond them was a cluster of mud-walled outhouses. On the far side of the river the jungle rose steeply for a hundred metres or so to the ridge line.

Of the hundred and fifty-odd figures visible in the camp, perhaps a score were dancing and drinking around the bonfire, while at least twice that number were milling around the far end, near the huts. The remainder staggered about, singly and in large drunken groups, at the river's edge. Most carried SLR 7.62 rifles, but there were a few AK 47s and RPGs in evidence too. Several of the men appeared to be so attached to their weapons that they were dancing with them.

The sheer numbers of the RUF made any assault of less than company strength hazardous. The cinder-block huts would provide cover for anything up to fifty soldiers each and if the hostages were in this camp they were probably situated close to or inside the huts. Bringing fire to bear on the RUF without injuring them would be difficult. The most positive factor, in Alex's view, was the topography of the camp. Surrounded as they were on three sides by the vast grey-green bulk of the river, the RUF were like rats in a bag. If all of the SAS firepower was positioned along a single front in the tree line, the bag could be drawn shut. The difficult part was going to be finding, and then extracting, the hostages.

Another plus point was that despite the recent incursion into the Kissuna area by the West Side Boys militia, no serious attempt had been made to implement any form of camp security. The noise, for a start, was considerable. The crack of random discharges tore the air, as did the answering, echoing smack as these impacted in the surrounding jungle.

No wonder no one wants to go out on stag, thought Alex, with all this random shooting you'd take your bloody life in your hands. From beneath the sound system, which continued to belt out "Titti Shaggali' and other local hits, came the steady thump of a generator.

"If I'd known it was a party," muttered Stan Clayton, "I'd 'ave worn my dancin' trousers!"

Alex smiled and beckoned the men around him.

"No sign of our people so far," he whispered, 'but I want to take a closer look. Those huts up the end look promising for a start. Don, I want you to stay here with three of the guys and count heads and weapons.

Stan, I want you to come with me. We're going for a swim."

The cockney grinned, grasping the plan immediately. Quickly the two men stripped off their webbing, leaving their kit in two neat piles. Then, creeping past the unconscious RUF soldiers, they lowered themselves down the tree roots to ground level.

In front of them, bordered by the river, was the camp. To their right were the black-shadowed margins of the jungle.

Ahead of them, and falling away behind them into the jungle, was a rough, mud-churned road. Swiftly the two men turned right, paced off twenty yards into the swampy foliage, turned through ninety degrees, took bearings from their wrist compasses and set off through the darkness on a fast-paced eastbound course parallel to the road. Ten minutes later they exited the jungle. The dark sweep of the river was now at their feet and they were well upstream of the camp.

"We'll 'ave to tuck in tight," murmured Clayton thoughtfully. Alex nodded. Close up, the Rokel was a vast and terrifying force of nature. The flash floods that accompanied the early days of the rainy season had torn its winter banks away and the normally placid river was now an angry torrent hundreds of yards wide. If Alex and Stan strayed out of the side eddies they could be hurtled miles downstream or drowned outright. Hard in to the bank, however, the risk of detection was much greater. The whole undertaking was very much more dangerous than it had first appeared, but it represented the SAS team's only chance of locating the hostages.

"Let's find ourselves a raft," whispered Alex.

Soundlessly, they waded into the warm, soupy water, where a regular procession of tree limbs, bushes and other vegetation uprooted by the floods was washing past them in the current.

Within a couple of minutes they had secured the perfect vehicle - a twenty-foot branch hung with decomposing foliage.

"Ready?" asked Alex.

"Sure." Clayton nodded.

"I can always use a few dozen more leeches round my bollocks!"

Carefully they steered the branch a short distance away from the bank and began the smooth, inexorable drift towards the camp. Only their heads showed above water and behind the festoon of rotting weeds they were effectively invisible to the guards on the riverside. Slowly they rounded the bend past the camp's first outposts. It was shallower here and Alex could feel his feet dragging on the river's muddy bed.

Close up, the scene was very much more threatening than at a distance. On the bank, less than ten yards away, a crowd of drunken soldiery staggered around, clutching rifles, machetes and beakers of palm wine. Even over the muddy tang of the river the SAS men could smell the cloying reek of the homemade spirit. From the speakers the RUF anthem "No Living Thing' punched out, bouncing from the cliffs opposite with a thudding reverberation. Along the shore the glazed-eyed soldiers screamed the choruses.

His face inches from the corporal's, Alex was conscious of Stan Clayton's attempts to still his breathing, to remain absolutely motionless behind the branch. If they see us, thought Alex ~f the branch catches on something and swings around we're dead.

They'll hack us to pieces in seconds. Stan's wife will be a widow, his son will be without a dad and it will all be my fault. My fault for turning an important search mission into a juvenile, hairy-arsed, straight to-video personal fucking adventure.

The random shooting continued. One man, standing on the bank no more than eight feet from them, casually loosed off a couple of rounds from his SLR as he urinated into the river, and the SAS men flickered an expressionless glance at each other as the 7.62 rounds passed inches over their heads and tore into the far bank. A few yards further on a woman with her dress pulled up over her back crouched listlessly in the mud as a bearded soldier drove into her from behind. Around her, a surly and impatient knot of men watched and waited, and masturbated to make themselves hard for when their own turns came.

This hellish scene was repeated at intervals along the bank and more than once Alex caught himself or so it seemed staring mesmerised into the eyes of an RUF warrior. His heart appeared to be beating hard enough to disturb the greasy surface of the water. It seemed impossible that he had not been seen.

But the soldiers, it turned out, were less interested in driftwood than in the slopping palm wine buckets from which, at intervals, they refilled their half gourds and plastic beakers. Those and the half-dozen wretchedly prostrate women on the shore refugees, Alex guessed, displaced by the fighting.

The current, perceptibly faster now, swept them past the outhouses. The first, Alex guessed from the rhythmic chugging sound, housed the generator. In a second, from which the buckets were being carried, he supposed that they had some kind of distillery. The third, a mud-walled dwelling whose palm-frond roof had collapsed inwards, was anyone's guess, but as they drifted past it the palm wine stink was joined by that of slit.

And then, for no more than five seconds, Alex saw them:

three pale-skinned figures, their heads bowed, their hands tied behind them, kneeling in the narrow passage between the two cinder-block huts. They were being guarded by a single uniformed soldier carrying an SLR, smoking a joint and wearing a pink bubble cut wig.

Alex's eyes widened and he turned to Stan Clayton, saw that the other man had clocked the guard and the captives too. Then they were passing the speakers, and taking the full thumping force and screaming distortion of "No Living Thing'.

"I think I prefer the Martine McCutcheon version," murmured Clayton thoughtfully, as an RUF man heaved a wet tree root on to the bonfire and a shower of bright-orange sparks whirled skywards. They were only eight or nine yards from the nearest whooping, rifle-waving soldiers now, but the amplification from the sound system was such that the corporal could probably have yelled at the top of his voice without being heard.

And then, as the firelight dimmed and a column of dense brown smoke replaced the flames, Alex felt the current take sudden hold, swinging the branch and themselves into deeper water. The two men silently struggled to remain concealed and to keep the branch parallel to the shore. They were clearing the camp fast now the bonfire was already well behind them but they were moving inexorably towards the Rokel's racing central channel.

"We're going to have to let go," gasped Alex and heard Clayton's grunt of agreement beside him.

"On three, underwater and kick for the side. One, two .

Alex released the branch, dived, and felt himself lifted by the current and swung with doll-like helplessness through the dark, churning water. There was a roar at his ears, a sense of vast and indifferent force, then a rock or a boot exploded in a vicious flash of light against the side of his head.

Somehow, even as he briefly lost consciousness, he managed to keep his mouth shut. Hours or maybe seconds later, desperate to breathe, he clawed his way to what he thought was the surface, struck mud and felt himself dragged downwards again by a hand at his collar. For some reason, there seemed to be air at the bottom of the river. He tried to inhale, gagged and found that a mud-tasting hand was clamped over his mouth. Water streamed from his nose. He could breathe again. He opened his eyes.

Clayton's worried grin was inches away.

"You all right, Alex?" They were in deep, eddying water beneath the bank. The music and din of the camp were still loud, but no longer deafening. Stan Clayton had one elbow under Alex's chin, the other anchored to a solid-looking mangrove root.

"Are you OK?" The whisper more urgent now.

Alex tried to nod and then, retching, vomited foul tasting water. There was blood in his eyes and his head hurt like hell. Somehow he found a root of his own and passed an unsteady hand over his face.

"Yeah . thanks, Stan. Lost it there for a moment. Thanks."

I was seconds away from drowning there, he told himself Seconds away from death.

"I think we're more or less clear of the camp," continued Clayton.

"The other blokes can't be far, but I'm a bit worried about them fuckers we 'ad to duck round on our way here. Bride of Frankenstein an' his mate.

"Let me have a look," said Alex and with Clayton's help hauled himself up so that his eyes were level with the bank. They were less than twenty yards from where they had descended the tree roots, but of the sleeping RUF soldiers there was no sign. Instead, Don Hammond was leopard-crawling towards him through the shadows, grabbing him under the arms, dragging him by sheer brute force up the slick clay face of the bank.

"I reckoned it was either you guys or a hippo wallowing around out there," said the sergeant.

"Come on, Stan, grab hold." When Clayton was on the bank too the three of them moved back from the river and into cover, and Alex swiftly brought the sergeant up to date concerning the ITN team.

"How did they look?" asked Hammond.

"Alive," replied Clayton tersely.

"Where are the other guys?" asked Alex.

The sergeant inclined his head towards the bush.

"Just moving the two guards that were here away from the path. We reckoned you'd be coming out about here."

"Did you kill them?"

"Yeah, course we did." He looked at Alex doubtfully.

"Are you OK? You look as if you've got some kind of head wound."

"Took a whack in the river on something. Stan dragged me in by the collar."

"Well, that'll have saved us all some paperwork.

Dead officers we don't need. Are you OK to tab back to Millwall, or do you want me to go?"

"I'm fine to go, Don."

"You sure? What's eight nines?"

Alex hesitated. The question seemed strangely unanswerable.

"And the motto of the Parachute Regiment?"

Again, Alex was silent. He'd begun his military career with the Paras but couldn't for the life of him .

Hammond nodded and glanced at Clayton.

"I'd say you're a bit concussed. I'll tab back to Millwall with Lance and pick up the home-bound chopper. You stay here and set up the assault."

Alex nodded. The sergeant was right. A single navigation error between here and Millwall more than an hour's night march through thick jungle could cost the captives their lives.

"Put it this way, Alex." Stan Clayton grinned.

"At least if you stay 'ere you're guaranteed to be here for the fireworks. Go back wiv a leakin' 'cad and Ross'll just send some other fucker."

"OK, guys, OK. I hear you," said Alex, raising his hands in mock surrender.

"Don, have you managed to draw a map of the camp?"

Hammond nodded, and pulled out a sheet of waterproof paper marked up with outlines and co-ordinates.

"Right," said Alex.

"The ITN people, when I saw them, were being held in the passage between these two cinder-block buildings here, which you've called Hut One and Hut Two. Was that how you saw it, Stan?"

"Yeah, it was."

"And from what I could see they looked very tired.

Their morale was poor. Each or any of them might be hurt, possibly badly. But I'd say that all three were definitely alive."

"Guarded?"

"One guy. Pink curly wig."

Hammond looked at Clayton, who nodded in confirmation.

"Weapons?" asked Hammond, still looking at Clayton.

"My guess would be that there are about a hundred and fifty SLRs in the camp one for each man. I saw a few AKs and RPGs, too, and there could be anything in those huts."

"Fields of fire?"

For five minutes Hammond submitted the two men to a detailed debrief Evidently suspicious of the accuracy of Alex's recall, given the captain's recent knock on the head, he made a point of verifying every fact with Clayton.

With the map filled in with as much detail as Alex and Stan Clayton could provide, Don Hammond radioed Zulu Three Five patrol who were observing the Arsenal camp ten kilo-metres away and reported that the hostages had been located. The patrol leader, a sergeant named Andy Maddocks, replied that he was pulling out immediately and estimated that he would reach Chelsea in about ninety minutes.

Alex then set off with Zulu Three Six patrol back up the track towards the Bergan cache. En route they checked the captive child-sentry, who was frightened but otherwise unharmed. Before the fighting started, Alex decided, he would release the poor little bugger into the jungle. Would that help him, or even save his life? Quite possibly not, he admitted to himself, but he couldn't play God.

When they reached the clearing where the Bergans were cached, Don Hammond radioed in a sat-coin report to David

Ross and then kept on going. It was 0145, and he and Lance Wilford had three-quarters of an hour in which to reach the Puma landing zone at Millwall. All things being equal he would be back in Freetown by 0300.

The assault the killing time -would come an hour later at first light when, with a bit of luck, the RUF forces would be sunk in drunken, exhausted sleep.

It wouldn't be a pushover, thought Alex, remembering the red-eyed fury with which the soldiers had roared out the words of "No Living Thing'. For all their gross in discipline for all their raping, mutilating, torture and murder the RUF were well-armed and they were certainly no cowards. They would fight and they would fight hard. Many of them believed themselves to be impervious to pain, and given the volume of ganja and palm wine they got through of an evening, they were probably right.

What did they intend to do to Sally Roberts and her crew if their demands were not met? Impossible to say, although given the cruelty and contempt with which the soldiers treated the African women at their disposal gang rape being the least of it he could hazard a guess at the female reporter's probable fate. The men would most likely be shot and dumped in the river.

But this, mused Alex, glancing at his wristwatch, was not going to happen. Instead, in just under two hours, Sally Roberts, Ben Mills and Gary Burge would be flown out of the camp code-named Chelsea in a Puma helicopter. And with any luck, they would be alive when it happened.

At the bottom of the slope, behind the tree roots, Zulu Three Six patrol sat tight. This time, as well as the sat-coin and the 319 patrol radio, they'd brought their individual Motorola UHF sets with them from the Bergan cache. Precisely coordinated operations like this one tended to be very comms-heavy. There was a worrying amount of movement near the hostages, Alex noticed, and he found himself straining to watch as the distant figures came and went beneath the strings of yellow light bulbs.

Cool it, he told himself. For the moment -for just afew hours more until the deadline the RUF need the news team alive.

At precisely 0230 Ricky Sutton set up the sat-coin to receive

Ross's scheduled transmission from Freetown. The incoming message was brief and to the point: Don Hammond and Lance Wilford had been ex filtrated from Millwall and were on their way back to base.

Assault time was estimated at 0400.

As the twenty-three-year-old trooper folded away the sat-coin aerial, Alex divided his team in half and disposed them in the jungle line in positions commanding broad arcs of fire over the camp. He himself took the western position with Sutton; Stan Clayton and Dog Kenilworth moved to the east.

Attaching the earpieces and throat mikes of their UHF sets, the patrol worked out their individual targets. When the time came, the impression given to the RUF had to be one of devastating force that they were under sustained attack from all sides. In truth, of course, the rebels would be heavily outgunning the SAS, but they must never be allowed to know this.

The camp's situation, Alex knew, would work against the rescue team. With the looping river at their backs the RUF had nowhere to flee to, and in the event of attack they would have no option but to face the jungle and the opposing fire team and shoot it out.

Desperation would make them very dangerous, there would be a huge volume of fire directed towards the two RWW patrols and once the helicopters were on the ground it was going to be very difficult to return that fire. The hostages and the assault and rescue teams would be right in the thick of it. They'd agreed over the radio that the incoming "D' Squadron soldiers would wear their bush-hats inside out with the orange band showing and not have any cam-cream on their faces, but it was still going to be very tricky knowing who was who first light or no first light.

The insects were silent, now, and the temperature finally falling. Around the shallow dugout that was Alex's firing position hovered the scent of the Sierra Leone night a pungent blend of wet clay, woodsmoke and rotting mangoes. To his left, manning the sat-coin and the patrol's 319 set, lay Ricky Sutton.

Alex had agreed with Don Hammond that the patrol would try a second swim past between 2.30 and 3 a.m.

to determine whether the hostages had been moved inside for the night. Stan Clayton had volunteered to go again, knowing as he did where the currents were most treacherous, and at 2.45 his narrow form slipped away eastwards, upstream of the camp. As he did so, Dog Kenilworth made his shadowy way to the downstream exit point to drag him up the river's sheer clay bank.

The next fifteen minutes passed slowly for Alex. The RUF posed no great danger to Stan they were unlikely to be awake, sober and staring into the river at this hour but Alex had felt the massive and wilful power of the Rokel river at first hand and hoped that the outspoken cockney would play it safe. Eventually, thankfully, the two loomed out of the darkness -Stan Clayton once again dripping with river water. The news was that the ITN team were still in the same place and still tied up, but apparently asleep. As was their guard, still wearing the Barbara Windsor wig.

Ricky Sutton unfurled the sat-coin's aerial and called up Freetown. The news that the hostages had not been moved would come as a relief to the "D' Squadron team, who wouldn't have to waste time searching for them while under fire the camp would be a hornet's nest by the time the team de-bussed from the Puma. No one had so far put it into words, but it was possible that the Regiment would take casualties. It was possible that the story would end, as so often before, at the modest graveyard of St. Martin's church outside Hereford.

A few minutes before 3 a.m. Andy Maddocks called Alex on his UHF set to report that he had arrived with Zulu Three Five patrol and was in position at the bottom of the approach slope. On Alex's instructions the six newcomers worked their way into the tree line above and behind Alex's patrol, and silently took up firing positions in pairs. As soon as they were established Alex briefed them by radio as to the location of the hostages.

One hour to go. In Freetown the "D' Squadron assault and rescue team would be boarding the Pumas, loading magazines and checking kit. There would be nerves they would be aware that they were hitting a hot landing zone.

How would it go, Alex wondered? Was there any way he could further ensure his men's safety? Not really, he decided. The thing was risky, but it had to be done. There wasn't a man here or at the squadron base who would rather be somewhere else somewhere where there weren't any bull-leeches, malarial mosquitoes or trigger-happy rebels. Without exception the men under his command subscribed to Don Hammond's philosophy, that life was too short to spend it buying magnolia emulsion and wan king over Gail Porter'.

Which was pretty much how Alex felt himself.

Would this, as he had assumed, be his last taste of active service? As an officer he was bloody lucky to be dug in here with a bandolier of grenades across his chest and ten fully loaded magazines in his pouch rather than sweating it out on others' behalf in the briefing hut.

Not that he hadn't been pleased to be sent to Sandhurst. Only two or three Regiment NCOs received a commission each year and it had been very gratifying to be singled out. In his ten previous years of SAS service he'd seen Ireland a lot of Ireland the Gulf, Columbia, Liberia, Bosnia (where they'd given him the Military Medal), Kosovo and now Sierra Leone. And the list was even longer if you included the deniables and the 'black bag' jobs like Somalia and Sri Lanka.

Why had he been chosen? Alex wondered. Because he'd watched his mouth over the years? Because he'd managed to survive a decade of SAS service without actually decking a superior? Something like that, probably. Whatever it had made it worthwhile staying in the army for a full term of service. With a bit of luck he'd make major before too long. After that, if he played his cards right there was Staff College... But what the hell. All that lay in the future.

It had been weird, though, hanging out at Sandhurst aged thirty-four with all the teenaged officers-to-be with their sports cars and their nightclubs and their weekends in the country. There had been admin classes, report-writing classes and even an etiquette or 'knife and fork' course. Never in his life had Alex felt more like a fish out of water.

The others hadn't all been rich, but plenty of them had been, especially the ones destined for the Brigade of Guards and the other outfits where an expensive social life came with the regimental silver. Alex, whose father ran a small garage and body-repair shop in Clacton-on-Sea, and who had joined the Paras as a private to impress a girlfriend (who had immediately dumped him thanks, Stella!) found it impossible to imagine what it must be like to have money to spend on Savile Row suits and Curzon Street restaurants and Caribbean sailing holidays at that age.

For Alex, at eighteen, it had been rockfish and chips, Kestrel lager and a brown leather jacket ('sixty-five quid mate, fully lined') from the Pakistani guy who had the stall at the Saturday market. There hadn't been any foreign holidays.

"Why pay to go to the Seychelles," his father would ask, nodding towards Marine Parade with its icy spray and mournful winter winds, 'when the sea's right here on our bloody doorstep?"

It wasn't meanness, it was just that Ray Temple didn't hold with what he called 'all that pina co lada bollocks'. What he did hold with was motor sport and lots of it. Formula One at Brands Hatch, drag races at Santa Pod, stock cars at Belle Vue, bangers at King's Lynn, night races at Snetterton any occasion involving cigarette advertising, petrol vapour and deafening noise. The Temple family attended pretty much every event in the Castrol motor sport calendar. And went first class all the way, with enclosure tickets, steak dinners at the motel if it was an overnighter, souvenir T-shirts and the rest.

The old man had been broken-hearted when, inspired by a TV documentary series, Alex had gone for the Parachute Regiment rather than one of the mechanised units.

"Don't be a tosser, son," Ray Temple had begged him.

"If God had meant us to walk, he wouldn't have created fuel injection."

But Alex had been adamant and stuck to his guns throughout the tough Para-selection course known as "P' Company. He wasn't particularly big and he certainly wasn't the archetypal tattooed, scarred knuckled Tom, but when it came to the speciali sed skills of the airborne infantryman he was a natural.

He was a fast learner, excellent with weapons and always switched on in the field. His superiors marked him down as potential NCO material and posted him to his battalion's Patrol Company.

Unexpectedly, like many a town-raised soldier before him, the young paratrooper developed a passion for the wild, remote terrain in which he and his unit trained.

He enjoyed downing pints and trapping WRAC girls with his Patrol Company mates, but found that after only a few days in barracks he missed the freedom and the solitude offered by the mountains and the moors.

Shortly after his twenty-third birthday he was made up to lance-corporal, but by then a part of him had begun to wonder if there might be more to army life than the culture of the Aldershot brotherhood, with its relentless cycles of drinking, brawling, mooning, curry-swilling, shagging and vomiting.

On impulse, he applied for SAS selection. By then, perhaps jealous of his promotion, some of his colleagues were beginning to regard him coolly. No one made any specific accusations but the word got around that he was a bit of a loner. There was an unconfirmed rumour that he had turned down the chance to join in a game of 'freckle' - a ritual in which a fresh turd was hammered between two beer mats on a pub table and the least bespattered paratrooper got to buy the next round.

If he had failed SAS selection, Alex would have had a very hard time living it down. But he didn't fail.

Along with Don Hammond, then a Royal Fusiliers corporal, and a dozen others of the forty or so who applied, he passed. Badged into the Regiment, he discovered a different sort of soldier tough, self sufficient young blokes like himself who knew how to have a good time but didn't need to strike macho attitudes. The best friend he'd made in the Regiment was probably Hammond. As unmarried troopers they'd shared quarters in Hereford, along with a couple of clapped-out cars and for three ill-tempered months a Royal Army Dental Corps nurse named "Floss' Docherty When it was announced that Alex was to be commissioned, no one could have been more pleased than Don Hammond.

The two had an instinctive sympathy in the field and neither saw any reason why this should be affected by their differing ranks.

And here he was, a dozen years and a dozen dirty wars after signing up, a bloody officer! His father had laid down his plug spanner and laughed fit to piss himself when Alex had told him that he was going to Sandhurst.

"You always were a canny bugger," he told Alex, shaking his head in disbelief 'but this beats the bloody bank." His mother, seeing him in his full-dress uniform for the first time alongside the public-school boys, had wept.

Well, he reflected wryly, flipping up the backsight on his M16 and taking a sip of tepid water from his canteen, he might as well enjoy it while it lasted. The system gave, but the system also took away, and took away faster than slit off a hot chrome shovel. At heart, Alex knew, he was not an Establishment man.

THREE.

Shortly after 3.30 there was movement in the camp. A tall soldier carrying some kind of hooked knife was walking amongst the prostrate soldiers, stepping over outflung arms and legs. As he reached the camp perimeter he paused to kick one of the sleeping figures.

It was one of the women, Alex saw through his binoculars. With infinite slowness, the woman began to get to her feet, only for the soldier to take her by the hair, wave his bill-hook, and start violently pulling her towards the jungle. Hastily, fearfully, she matched her pace to his. This looks tricky, thought Alex. This looks very tricky indeed. They're making straight for us.

"Coming our way, Alex," murmured Ricky Sutton beside him.

"Seen," replied Alex. For the second time that night he drew his Mauser knife. The pair were no more than fifty yards from him now. Whatever you're going to do to her, Alex pleaded silently with the soldier, do it right there. Don't come any closer.

But the man kept on coming. Whatever it was that he intended the curved knife almost certainly had something to do with it it was going to make a lot of noise. There were going to be screams. So he was taking the woman into the bush where her evil-spirit howling wouldn't wake the camp up.

Twenty-five yards now, and Alex could hear the woman s terrified keening and the soldier's muttering as he forced her forward. If they tried to evade, to crawl sideways out of their way, the soldier would see them.

And if they stayed put... When it came to the moment, instinct took over.

Tripping the soldier with his rifle, avoiding the scything blade as both the man and the woman fell, Alex leapt on top of him. For a critical moment the soldier must have thought that a tree root was to blame for the confusion, and that the melee consisted only of himself and the woman, for he made no noise beyond an stifled curse. And then the butt of Alex's M16 met the back of his head with bone-smashing force, and he was still.

Ricky Sutton, meanwhile, had grabbed the woman.

Behind his hand she was still keening, the sound a tiny sustained ribbon of anguish. Deliberately, Sutton moved his face into a shaft of moonlight, so that she could see at a glance that despite the black cain-cream he was European, and urgently shushed her. Their eyes met his taut and pale, hers tear-rimmed and terrified and she nodded once. She was wearing a thin cotton dress and plastic sandals.

The soldier had to be dealt with and Alex had no choice but to do it in front of the woman. Lifting the unconscious man's head by the hair, he chopped inwards and dragged the blade of the Mauser knife hard through the front of his throat. There was a rushing wet heat from the jugular, a clicking gasp from the severed windpipe, and a brief shivering dance of the legs.

Within half a minute exsanguination was complete. The sticky blackness was everywhere Sutton, meanwhile, gagged the shocked, unresisting Woman with a sweat-rag. Wrists and ankles trussed with para cord she lay against a shallow incline behind them. Six feet away, the corpse of her late admirer stiffened in the cooling tar of his blood. The SAS officer and the trooper settled back to wait.

At 0350, Alex noticed a tiny shift in the quality of the darkness at the head of the Rokel valley to the east. If he looked a little to one side he could make out a ridge, a tree line, where previously there had been nothing.

The minutes passed, the cyclorama paled a further degree, and the misted, dew-charged vastness of the jungle began to reveal itself. There was nothing on earth, thought Alex, to beat the grandeur of the African dawn.

Not even the front at Clacton

He raised his binoculars. There was the command post there were the huts, there were the embers of the bonfire. And there everywhere were the sleeping soldiers and their weapons.

Quickly the men re-checked the sightings on their M16 203s. As well as a conventionally calibrated rifle-sights, which they had set to two hundred yards, their weapons had sextant-sights screwed to their carrying handles.

0355, and the pilot of Hotel Alpha, the lead Puma, was now audible on the patrol's UHF sets. His voice was relaxed.

"Coming in on schedule, Zero Three Six.

You should see us in three or four minutes. Over."

"We hear you, Hotel Alpha. Ready when you are.

Over."

Raising his rifle, Alex took up aim on the door of the left-hand of the two barracks-huts. Hut One.

0358. The pilot's voice again.

"Touch-down in two minutes, Zulu Three Six. Repeat, touch-down in two minutes."

"Everyone ready?" Alex whispered. It was unlikely that anyone had fallen asleep, but it had been known to happen.

They all heard it at the same time. At first it was just a pulse, distant and low. Could have been a heartbeat.

And then, with shocking suddenness, the lead Puma was racing towards them over the grey jungle canopy.

A sentry holding a Kalashnikov was the first to stir, and Alex dropped him with a single high-velocity round to the chest.

"Boyakasha!" breathed Ricky Sutton to his left and opened up with a long stream of tracer at the guards around the bonfire. The other sentries ran for the cover of the huts, but met a series of lethally aimed bursts from Stan and Dog. As they fell, Alex saw Don Hammond lean coolly out of the side of the helicopter and heard the distinctive boom boom of the heavy 5.5" gun. Chunks of masonry seemed to leap from the walls of Hut One and, as the RUF soldiers poured out like angry ants, Alex snapped off a fast series of shots into the doorway. The area between the huts also held armed men, but these he left alone for fear of hitting the hostages.

Fire was being returned now and with interest.

Volleys of 7.62 SLR rounds were snapping through the tree line,

shredding the foliage around them and kicking up great gouts of earth. Unpeturbed, Stan Clayton and Dog Kenilworth kept up a lethal assault with their Mi6s. Behind them Andy Maddocks' patrol put down steady fire.

Lowering his rifle so that he was cradling it in his arms, Alex slipped one of the small, egg-like grenades from his bandolier into the launcher tube below the main barrel and swung the weapon towards the eastern-most point of the camp. A glance at the sextant and he fired. The grenade dropped some two hundred and fifty yards away and burst with a fierce crack amongst a group of soldiers who were attempting to bring fire to bear on the helicopter.

Returning the rifle to his shoulder, Alex stilled the survivors with a series of single shots.

Working the slide to discharge the used shell-case, he loaded a second grenade into the tube, and aimed it in the direction of the generator-hut. Another miniature schrapnel storm, sending several men running from cover into the open, where Ricky Sutton's unhurried shooting dropped them in fast succession. The camp was in chaos now. The Puma had landed, its rotors still turning, and the 12-man SAS team was pouring out of it, diving for cover and snapping aimed bursts at the RUF rebels who surrounded them.

In response several of the rebels dropped their SLRs and ran. A handful threw themselves on the uncertain mercy of the river. Most, however, making up in aggression and outrage what they lacked in preparedness and training, determined to make a fight of it and attempted to fall back on the cover of the two cinder-block barracks huts. Lacking any coherent command-and-control system, however, they found themselves retreating into their own side's defensive arcs of fire. Several of them only managed to make it into cover because their colleagues' long uncleaned SLRs had jammed.

For a moment, Alex held his fire. As he watched, the incoming SAS team split up. Half raced for the hostages, disappearing behind the huts, half assaulted Hut One. The whooinf of a grenade, a long burst of fire, a staccato flurry of single shots and the building was theirs. A moment later the rescue team reappeared at the sprint, ducking through the rebel fire towards the helicopter. Three of them had limp, half-dressed figures slung over their shoulders.

"Go!" prayed Alex.

"Get them on the chopper and out of here. Go!"

The Puma, as if alive to the urgency of the situation, seemed to dance with impatience on her struts as enemy rounds snapped about her. At the controls, Alex could see the helmeted pilot, motionless a brave man, he thought and the silhouetted figure of Don Hammond poised at the open door, waiting to haul up the hostages.

The RPG must have been fired somewhere behind the generator. It whooshed a couple of feet over the heads of the rescue team, impacted against the Puma's slanting plexiglas windshield and vapourised the cockpit and the pilot in an orange-white bloom of flame. The blast threw the oncoming rescue team and the hostages to the ground and, as they lay there, the SAS men instinctively covering the journalists with their bodies, a second missile struck the rear of the Puma's cargo compartment. The buckled and burning remains of the helicopter canted sideways and Don Hammond pitched face forwards from the doorway his clothes, his head and his remaining arm aflame.

Powerless to help from two hundred yards distance, his mind a stunned blank, Alex watched as Hammond tried unsuccessfully to get to his feet. The two members of the rescue team who had not been carrying hostages rose from the ground, raced forward and between them attempted to stifle the flames on the burning sergeant and drag him into cover.

But the RUF were beginning to rally. And while the hostages and the rescuers were covered from fire by the bulk of Hut One, Hammond and the men who had run out to help him were far enough forward to be exposed. Shots snapped around them and Alex heard a lethal-sounding double smack. One of the SAS men staggered and fell. Somehow, supporting his wounded mate with one arm and half-dragging the sergeant's blackened remains with? the other, the third man made it to the cover of Hut One, where the hostages were being scrambled through the doorway over the sprawled corpses of dead RUF soldiers.

The SAS team had barely vanished inside the hut when the Puma's fuel tanks went up in a third roaring explosion, and oily black smoke began to twist into the grey dawn sky.

"Zulu Three Six, this is Hotel Bravo, what is the situation?"

It was the pilot of the support Puma.

"Hotel Alpha is down, Hotel Bravo. Repeat, Hotel Alpha is down. Stay back until my signal."

"Will do, Zulu Three Six." The pilot's voice was expressionless. There was a brief hiatus and, forcing himself to postpone all thoughts concerning Don Hammond, Alex undertook a swift assessment.

At least twenty rebels lay out in the open, dead, while a dozen more twitched and gaped and bled amongst them. A further dozen RUF casualties were almost certainly concealed amongst the outbuildings to the east of the camp. Even allowing for a few runners and swimmers that still left a hundred-odd rebels in good combat order.

"Dog," Alex murmured into his UHF mouthpiece.

"I

want you and Stan to cut through the jungle to the point where we got into the river and work your way back towards the camp from the east. We've got to take out that grenade-launcher before the support helicopter arrives.

"Heard."

"On our way."

Still on his UHF set, Alex then called up the assault and rescue team, requested the sergeant in charge and explained that he had sent in two men from the eastern end of the camp to try and force the RUF soldiers to keep their heads down.

"Understood," came the reply.

"I'll put another four in from this end. If you keep laying down fire from the bush we should be able to keep 'em busy enough to get the chopper in and out.

A moment later, however, a long volley of 7.62 SLR and Kalashnikov rounds smacked into Alex's position. Heady with the destruction of Puma Alpha, the defending RUF troops had decided to take the battle back to their tormentors in the jungle.

As the firestorm swept their position, spattering himself and Sutton with bark and falling leaf fragments, Alex pressed his face and body into the damp coffee-ground soil. Beside him he heard the unmistakeable whip crack of physical impact and a shocked gasp.

"Ricky?" he said, fearing the worst.

"I'm hit," muttered Sutton through clenched teeth, 'in the fuckin' arse.

Alex's heart sank. How many bloody more, he thought. If I run into Sally Roberts, the bitch'll wish she'd never been born.

Another volley raked the tree line. Somewhere behind him, the bound woman keened with fear.

Reaching for the shell-dressing pack in Sutton's smock pocket and the clasp-knife in his own, Alex cut through the young signaller's blood-sodden DPM trousers, slapped on the dressing, and ordered him to sit tight. To his right Stan and Dog returned fire, pouring a steady stream of armour-piercing rounds on to the RUF positions around Hut Two.

A moment later Alex saw four SAS men slip out of the door of Hut One and disappear around the far side.

From the generator area he heard the crack of 203 grenades launched by Dog and Stan and a moment later the familiar stutter of Mi6s on rapid fire as the assaulters completed the movement. The RUF were now under sustained assault from three directions, trapped in a lethal cage of noise and shrapnel. No RUF man was going to risk standing up for long enough to aim and correctly discharge an RPG in all of that, Alex reckoned. Quickly, he called in the reserve Puma.

The pilot acknowledged the signal and sixty seconds later the big snout-nosed chopper swung in fast and steep, dropping down next to the twisted and still burning wreck of the first. It had hardly touched the ground when the rescue team sprinted out of the barracks-block with the ITN crew over their shoulders. Hurling the journalists through the open doorway like so many sacks of coal and dragging themselves in afterwards, they were away within seconds, dipping and swaying across the grey-green jungle canopy to safety.

On the sat-com, Alex called up Ross.

"Hostages airborne," he told the GO, 'but we've taken casualties." Quickly, he brought him up to speed with events.

"Keep me posted," said Ross tersely, and broke the connection.

Silence now from the RUF all of their remaining strength pinned down in and around Hut Two. Above them, the sky seemed to be darkening again. Stalemate.

Alex slotted a fresh 30-round magazine into the belly of his weapon.

Does the fight have to be to the death, he wondered. The fierce anticipation of the night before was entirely spent. The camp was a butcher's shop now and one or two of the RUF corpses looked horrifjingly young. All that he felt now was revulsion a desperate longing for the whole thing to be over.

And then Dog Kenilworth's Brummie tones were in his earpiece.

"They're jacking it in. Slinging their rifles out."

Alex exhaled, permitted himself a moment of relief "Any men followed the rifles?"

"No, not so far. Yeah, hang on, one's just shouting to Stan now.

"What's he saying?"

"Dunno. Something meaning "No shooting!", I'd guess. He's coming out."

"Watch yourselves, OK?"

"Don't worry, Alex."

One by one the RUF soldiers processed out of Hut Two and the other outbuildings at the eastern end of the camp. From the tree line Alex saw the line of disarmed men, hands raised, shuffling towards the smoking wreck of the first Puma. There, under the watchful eye and trained Mi6s of the assault team, they waited in disconsolate ranks.

"Andy," Alex ordered, 'cut across and join Stan and Dog. When it looks as if all the prisoners are under guard, I want the three of you to do a quick house-to-house, check for stay behinds

"Understood," said Maddocks.

Alex turned back to Ricky Sutton. The trooper was pale and clearly in shock, but managed a wry grin. An SLR round had torn a furrow over the hamstring muscle at the back of his thigh, and despite the two shell-dressings blood was still welling hotly through the gauze.

"Right," murmured Alex briskly.

"Who had the patrol med pack

"I'm lying on it."

Carefully, Alex eased the pack from beneath the trooper's chest, found a morphine stick, and angled it into Sutton's thigh. Within seconds, the taut, fearful strain in the young trooper's eyes was replaced with a dreamy vagueness.

Reaching for his UHF set, Alex pressed the transmit button.

"How's it going, lads?" he asked.

"Fine," came Andy Maddocks' voice.

"No stay-behinds, all bad boys disarmed. What shall we do with the weapons? We've got a hundred-odd SLRs, few AKs, RPGs, odds and sods."

Alex removed a saline drip assembly from the med-pack.

"All weapons, amino, and comms kit goes into the river." He thought of the women and children who, raped, traumatised and with one or both arms hacked off by men such as these, were still arriving daily in Freetown.

"And that includes all pan gas machetes, bilihooks, whatever. Anything with a blade."

"Understood."

Turning to the bound woman, whom he now saw was probably no more than 16 or 17, he fingered the gag from her mouth and tied it round Sutton's thigh to reinforce the shell-dressing. Then finding a vein at the trooper's wrist, he worked in the IV needle. Beside him, crooning distractedly to herself as if to comfort a child, the girl sat blank-eyed.

Within minutes the secured camp had taken on an ordered and familiar aspect, with sentries posted, SAS casualties stretchered and ammunition checks underway. The mood was sombre even the irrepressible Ricky Sutton lay in morphined silence on his stretcher. Where the bonfire had raged the night before, the captured RUF soldiers sat in subdued lines with their hands plasticuffed behind their backs. Others, moving with dreamlike slowness, stacked the bodies of their dead comrades.

Beyond them the rain hissed and steamed as it met the smoking shell of the Puma.

On the sat-coin, Alex arranged the details of the return to base with David Ross. It would probably be a question of two Chinooks, they decided one for the SAS team, one to deliver the RUF dead to the government forces HQ. A few yards away, Stan Clayton and Dog Kenilworth manoeuvred Don Hammond into a black body-bag.

Four.

At breakfast the mood was sombre.

They'd de-bussed at SAS HQ shortly after 6 a.m. and, calling for hot coffee in his hut, Ross had debriefed Alex immediately. Alex's account had been detailed but unemotional and Ross had heard him out in near silence, only occasionally interjecting a brief question. When they were done, an hour or so later, Ross had nodded, his lean features expressionless, and sat for a moment in silence. Alex knew he had liked Don Hammond as much as any of them.

"You did well, Alex. Bloody well. All of you. Another few hours and we would have had three dead UK nationals on our hands, not to mention egg all over our faces. Bearing in mind that we were hitting a hot DZ, it was always going to be a very high-risk operation."

Alex nodded. At times like these, as both men knew, there was not a great deal to be said. Violent death was the everyday currency of their profession and there was no sense pretending otherwise.

"Just remind me of the daughter's name, Alex."

"Cathy. I think she was seven last birthday."

Ross looked tiredly down at his notes.

"Right. Thank you.

Would I like that job? Alex wondered. Would I enjoy sitting up and watching the clock as my men risked their lives? Would I be able to write the letters of condolence that David Ross always made a point of writing?

The phone at the OC's right hand buzzed. He listened for a moment, then covered the mouthpiece and turned to Alex.

"It's Hugh Gudgeon at Para HQ. The TV people are all in one piece, apparently. They want to thank the leader of the rescue team personally."

"I haven't got much to say to them, David, to be honest."

Ross nodded and looked away.

"I'm afraid that won't be possible, Hugh, nor do I want any mention made of the Regiment in connection with this business. Would your chaps very much mind taking the credit? No? Excellent. All right, then.

"Bye."

Alex had left the CO's hut to shower, shave and clear himself of leeches. This was a rather simpler process than that shown in films like Bridge Over the River Kwai. One touch of army-issue insect repellent and the fat, purple-black bloodsuckers fell off. The repellent was useless for anything else it positively attracted mosquitoes but it did have this one killer application. Stripping to the skin in the makeshift outside shower area, Alex managed to rid himself of twelve bull-leeches a personal best.

In the mess tent he joined the rest of the patrol, who had got a head start on the NAAFI baked beans, pale yolked local eggs and monkey-bananas. And beer, of course. It may only have been seven in the morning, but after a mission it was understood that you popped a few cans.

Alex helped himself to a plate of beans, one of the doughy, locally baked bread rolls and a can of Carling.

The food looked none too appetising in the tent's greenish light, but at that moment Alex could have eaten practically anything.

"Cheers, lads," he said, thumbing back the tab.

"Here's to a daring rescue!"

"Who was responsible for that, then?" asked Lance Wilford.

"The Paras," said Alex.

"Ah." Dog Kenilworth smiled.

"Fine body of men."

There was silence for a moment.

"Any news on Ricky Sutton?" asked one of the troopers from Zulu Three One patrol, who had been tasked to recce the Arsenal camp.

"Should be OK, is my guess, barring a very sore arse," said Alex.

"And Steve Dowson?" Dowson was the "D' Squadron corporal who had been hit while attempting to rescue Hammond.

"Shoulder's a mess but he'll live."

There were relieved nods, followed by another protracted silence, then Stan Clayton raised a fridge frosted beer can.

"To Don Hammond," he said loudly.

"Bloody good soldier, bloody good mate."

The others raised their own drinks and then everyone started talking at once and the mood lifted.

There was no shortage of good Don Hammond stories and it had been one hell of a successful mission.

As Alex drank and listened in silence, the elation of the successful mission faded, to be replaced by the sombre reality of his friend's death. After the third can his mood had not improved and, unwilling to spoil the others' celebrations, he slipped from the mess tent, collaring a bottle of rum as he went.

In his own tent he raised the mosquito net overhanging his camp bed, sat down and took a deep hit of rum straight from the bottle. He would say goodbye to Don alone and in his own way.

He was about to neck a second swallow when a trooper ducked through the tent flap.

"Sorry, but the Boss wants you.

Again? thought Alex, pulling himself unsteadily to his feet. Bollocks. Glancing regretfully at the ruin bottle, he followed the trooper from the tent.

In the hour since their last conversation, David Ross had clearly suffered a change of mood. Irritation now etched the spare features.

"You're going home," he told Alex abruptly.

"Don't ask me why because I don't know. All I've been told is that you're wanted in London as soon as you can get there."

Alex stared at him, mystified. What the fuck was going down? Whatever, he'd had enough of this sweaty shithole.

"Can I take a couple of the lads back with me? We can jump a Hercules."

"No on both counts," said Ross testily.

"They want you quicker than that. You're being choppered to Banjul and boarded on to aBA civilian flight to Heathrow. For that reason you're taking civilian clothes and cabin luggage only."

"I didn't bring any..." Alex began.

"One of the liaison blokes is picking some stuff up now. Should be back any minute."

"Is this to do with last night's operation?" Alex ventured.

"Not unless there's some element to the whole thing that I haven't been told about."

That such a possibility even existed, Alex saw, clearly rankled bitterly with the CO.

"I'll get packing," he said.

Ross nodded.

Fifteen minutes later, dressed in a flowered bush shirt, over-tight slacks and plastic sandals from Freetown market all that the liaison guy had been able to rustle up at ten minutes' notice Alex was watching from the passenger seat of a Lynx helicopter as Kroo Bay and the curving northern sweep of Freetown fell away beneath him. The rain of the early morning had given way to sunshine and now the whole country seemed to be steaming in the heat.

Beside him, the khaki T-shirt of the special forces pilot was dark with sweat beneath the arms and where it was in contact with the plastic seat cover.

"Another hot one," said the pilot laconically over the intercom.

"Looks like it," Alex replied, settling himself back into his seat. They had the best part of two hours' flying time ahead of them. In twenty minutes they would be in Guinea airspace and in half an hour would be overflying the capital, Conakry. Thereafter they would follow the coastline northwards through Guinea-Bissau and touch down at Banjul at 9.30.

He determined to enjoy the view.

At Banjul he was the last one on to the British Airways flight.

"You must be important," said the stewardess who met him at the door of the 777.

"They've held this plane for fifteen minutes!" She looked down at his plastic sandals with a lemon sucking smile.

"Ready to walk the gauntlet?"

His appearance prompted a slow hand clap. Around him, the sea of faces was hostile. They had been waiting for him, one angry woman informed him, for over twenty-five minutes. Perhaps next time he travelled he might bring an alarm clock with him?

His seat, needless to say, was right at the back of the aircraft. Toilet class. He was shown there by the lemon-sucking stewardess, and had to endure the eye-rolling and barely disguised impatience of an almost entirely female complement of economy class passengers.

The stewardess directed him to a seat next to an amply proportioned woman, some fifty years old, who smelt strongly of coconut tanning oil.

She looked him up and down.

"Well," she murmured purposefully, noting the uncomfortable tightness of his trousers.

"Aren't I the lucky one!"

Alex's spirits sank. How long was this fucking flight? Eight hours?

"Are you all.. . together?" he asked, indicating the other passengers.

"Well, it'd probably be true to say that we're all here for much the same reason," the woman said with a small smile.

"Which is?"

"To meet Gambian boys, of course. Bit of the old Shirley Valentine."

"Ah," said Alex.

"Right."

"Africans are properly appreciative of the fuller figure, you see. And they know how to woo a girl without ever mentioning DIY or football."

"Or their jobs?" ventured Alex.

"Or their jobs she agreed.

"Quite right. I'm Maureen, by the way.

"Alex."

"So what brings you to the Gambia, Alex?"

"Oh, I never talk about my job. Too boring."

"You came here for .. . work?"

Mistake. Serves me right for being a sinartarse, he thought.

"I'm in, er, travel," he explained.

"So you.. . get around a bit?"

"Here and there." He shrugged.

She nodded. Taxiing into the oncoming breeze, the big 777 started its long race to take-off.

"And do you like big girls, Alex?"

Blimey, he thought. Talk about cutting to the chase.

"Did you have a good holiday, Maureen?" he asked her, with what he hoped was professional-sounding interest.

In answer she fished a polaroid photograph from her purse. It showed a young Gambian man, nude except for a pair of sunglasses. He was about seventeen, slender and leaning backwards to counterbalance his evident enthusiasm. The plane hurtled into the air, pressing them back into their seats.

"There s my answer, Alex. Now can I please have yours? Do you like big girls?"

He turned to her, took in the painfully sunburnt flesh, the hennaed hair, the small hopeful eyes.

"Maureen," he said.

"I do like them. But I've got one waiting for me at home."

"Hm," she said, unconvinced.

An hour or so after take-off, breakfast was served.

Uncertain of what was waiting for him at Heathrow, Alex ate the lot. With a bit of luck there'd be some lunch, too. Trouble, as every soldier knew, was best faced on a full stomach. And with a well-rested mind.

The adrenalin rush that accompanied violent action was invariably followed by exhaustion and Alex slipped gratefully into sleep. One of the few advantages of his present situation perhaps the only advantage was that he would be able to see Sophie again and he didn't want to appear completely knackered when he did.

For a long while, scenes from the previous night replayed themselves before his eyes. The smell of rotting mangoes and the river, the clicking of that severed windpipe, tracer scorching across the clearing, the screams of the maimed RUF men, the stillness of the Puma pilot as his aircraft danced beneath him, the Puma enfolded in flame against the sodden grey of the jungle, Don Hammond pitching forward, the smack of SLR rounds impacting into Steve Dowson's shoulder and Ricky Sutton's thigh... The images faded. They were not ready to join the longer established nightmares in the vault of Alex's memory it would be weeks and perhaps months before that happened but they had been faced. He had always tried to make horror his friend.

It showed, Sophie told him, on his face.

FIVE.

Sophie Wells was the sister of Jamie Wells, who had been an officer cadet at Sandhurst with Alex and was now a Coldstream Guards lieutenant.

Jamie and Alex had met towards the end of the course. It had been a Friday night and with his ten year-old Kaman-Ghia out of commission, Alex had been looking for a lift into London, where he had arranged to meet a mate for a few beers.

Jamie had not only been driving to London but to Chelsea, which suited Alex perfectly. Dave Constantine, the colleague in question, had recently been posted as Permanent Staff Instructor to 21 SAS and Alex had arranged to meet him at the bar in the territorial battalion's King's Road HQ. Jamie, meanwhile, was going to a party in Cadogan Mansions, behind Sloane Square.

On their arrival in London Alex stood Jamie a drink at the bar at the Duke of York's HQ, where Alex was handed a note. Dave Constantine, he discovered, had been called away at the last moment to replace one of the other PSIs on an escape and evasion exercise on the Brecon Beacons.

Jamie had suggested that the SAS man come with him to the party, which was being given by his sister.

Alex hadn't been keen; to spend the evening with a hundred braying Sloanes was very low on his wish list

"What does your sister do?" he asked doubtfully.

"You'll have to ask her." Jamie grinned.

"Right." Alex smiled grimly.

"I get it. It's a survival exercise. You've had to survive the beatings and the bollockings, so now I've got to survive the Taras and Tamaras."

Jamie returned his gaze.

"Think of it that way if you like," he said equably.

"But you might also enjoy yourself."

"Yeah, right."

"What have you got to lose?"

Alex conceded defeat.

The party was on the third floor of a nineteenth century mansion block, and seemed to be taking place on the stairs and in the lift as well. Alex had expected an uncomfortable roomful of red-faced young men in corduroys and tractor-tyre shoes; what he actually encountered was the best part of an acre of dizzyingly beautiful women.

He had also expected to look out of place; in fact, although some of the handful of men present were expensively dressed, most looked as if they had bought their gear off an Isle of Dogs market trader.

The look was as fake as their cockney accents and movie-gangster rhyming slang, but Alex reckoned that his cropped military haircut, Essex Stock Cars T-shirt and old Levis would probably pass muster among them.

Alex's first hint of Sophie Wells's existence was when a gold and turquoise whirlwind blew past him trailing scent, silk and male admirers. She came to rest briefly in front of Jamie for just long enough, in fact, to present her brother with a kiss and an introduction to a dewy-faced teenager in a chiffon micro-skirt 'she's the new "face" of Prada, so I want you to make absolutely sure she's in bed by 10.30!" then was suddenly right there in front of him.

"So." She smiled.

"It's Alex, isn't it? A friend of Jamie's from Sandhurst? How lovely of you to come!"

For a moment Alex gazed at her, taking in the short chestnut crop, the cool grey-green eyes, the Italian silks, the flimsy and very visible lingerie beneath.

Where did you begin with a creature like this?

"I'm Sophie," she continued encouragingly, swiping a couple of glasses of champagne from a passing waiter's tray and handing one to Alex.

"And these dreadful people' she gestured vaguely around her 'are my friends. Aren't they ghastly?"

Alex managed a smile.

"You should see mine," he said.

"Is this party to celebrate anything?"

"My twenty-sixth birthday," said Sophie.

"My entry into middle age."

"You look well on it," said Alex, wishing he could have found something cleverer to say.

"Do I? God, I don't deserve to. You look.. ." She hesitated.

"How old are you?"

"Thirty-four."

"I was going to say that you look older than this lot' she waved vaguely at the people around them 'but you don't. You just look... different.~ She held his gaze, Alex noticed, rather than darting her eyes about the room in search of the next flirtation, the next conversational fix. So steady was her regard so intimate, somehow that they might have been alone together.

"Well, there probably aren't too many other soldiers here."

She laughed.

"That's certainly true. But I've met a few soldiers in my time and they didn't have what you've got that sort of wary look behind the eyes."

She dropped her voice to an enquiring murmur.

"How did that get there?"

Alex looked away, momentarily uncomfortable, breaking the cocoon that they had briefly spun about themselves. Sophie watched him patiently.

"Jamie wouldn't tell me what you do," he said eventually.

"I'm supposed to ask you in person."

She shrugged.

"Oh, I'm a fashion PR. I get column inches in the glossies for designers."

"I bet some of those designers are grateful for a few inches," said Alex.

"Alex!" shrieked Sophie in mock outrage. She turned to a man in a canary-yellow biker's outfit and Alex, taking his cue, drifted away. By one of the windows he saw Jamie, glass in hand, talking to the Prada girl. Alex caught his eye and winked, and Jamie flushed a slightly deeper shade of pink than usual.

These are nice enough people, thought Alex, but what the fuck am I doing here, precisely?

He wandered into a large kitchen, fitted out with tiny laser-like spotlights and vast brushed-aluminium units and appliances.

The placed looked like a safe depository he'd once guarded. Opening the walk-in fridge, he found himself a cold Mexican beer. The champagne went down the sink.

At one end of the room was a large picture window, looking out over Sloane Street. For several minutes Alex stood there in unmoving silence, watching the northward crawl of red taillights towards Knightsbridge. At that moment, it seemed that he was disconnected from everything and everyone that he knew. His SAS career had separated him from his family, promotion had lifted him out of the orbit of his fellow NCOs, and he guessed that both age and background would set him apart from most of his brother officers. He didn't particularly regret any of this except possibly the distance that had grown between himself and his family. This was as much a matter of logistics as anything else: Hereford was a long way away from the Essex coast and London stood between them. He just didn't make it down there often enough.

Nor had he ever been married. He'd had lots of girlfriends over the years but had always held back from proposing to them. There was plenty of time for family life, he'd always reckoned, when he wasn't being yo-yoed around the world by the Regiment.

Ireland had discouraged him, too. He'd seen brave soldiers fall apart when their wives and children were threatened. What would it be like, Alex wondered, planning a future with someone? And what sort of person would that someone have to be if they weren't going to end up at each other's throats?

Far below, in Sloane Street, an articulated lorry straddled the traffic where it had jackknifed while attempting to turn into a side street. Long lines of cars had built up on both sides of the road and the faint blare of their protest was audible through the heavy plate glass. Behind him Alex heard the suck of the opening fridge.

"You must be Jamie's friend. Sophie thought you'd done a runner."

He turned to find a pretty fair-haired girl in jeans and a floaty top jacking open one of the Mexican beers.

"Still here, I'm afraid." He extended his hand.

"I'm Alex."

"I'm Stella." She looked at him appraisingly and grinned.

"She'll be really glad you're still here. She was like oh no, he's gone, we've completely freaked him out. Not that I'm supposed to tell you that, of course.

"I can keep a secret," said Alex.

"Yeah, I'll bet you can," said Stella, drawing alongside him.

"Interesting view down there?"

They peered down through the summer twilight.

"Fashion's not really one of my special subjects," Alex told her. Stella nodded.

"Unlike most fashion ista babes, there's a lot more to Sophie than her job."

"I'm sure," said Alex.

"Are you a PR too?"

"Nah. Sophie does the London PR for my company.

I'm a designer."

Behind them there was a sudden overexcited hubbub. Alex glanced over his shoulder to discover a tall, anxious-looking girl chopping lines of white powder on one of the polished aluminium draining boards. A half-dozen other modelly looking boys and girls crowded impatiently round her. Banknotes were produced and small hoovering sounds ensued. One evenly tanned young man whom Alex vaguely recognised had a violent sneezing fit into a paper kitchen towel. There was nervous laughter from the others, but by the sixth sneeze the blood spatters were clearly visible.

"You don't disapprove?" asked Stella, watching him watching them.

"Me? No." Alex held up his beer and squinted at the label.

"Personally I'd rather go this way than that way, but .. ." He shrugged.

"Each to his own?"

Alex looked over at the powder-nosed models.

"Or her own.

The kitchen was filling up. Stella introduced Alex to a film director named Danny Biggs, for whose latest project she was designing costumes.

"What's the picture going to be about?" Alex asked.

"Bunch of geezers turning over a bank," said Danny.

"Working title "Hair of the Dog"."

"Why do you need a fashion designer to dress bank robbers?" Alex asked him.

"Most villains I've come across are fat, middle-aged white men in dodgy gold jewellery and knocked-off sports gear the sort of stuff you can pick up in any high street."

"Well, we 'ave to improve on reality," explained Danny.

"Dress 'em in ruffled shirts an' Gucci whistles."

At that moment Jamie appeared with the Prada girl and touched fists with Stella.

"You'd better watch out," he told her, indicating Alex.

"This man gave us a lecture, yesterday on ambushes and surprise attacks.

Keep him in view at all times!"

Stella raised an eyebrow.

"I thought you were one of the... what do you call them, students? Cadets?"

"I am," said Alex.

"But I came up through the ranks for ten years first, hence my advanced age. From time to time us old lags get called on to address the Ruperts that's Jamie and his friends and pass on a few dirty tricks."

"Dirty tricks, eh?" mused Stella.

"Sounds interesting." As Jamie and the Prada girl exited with their drinks, Sophie reappeared.

Alex's heart thumped in his chest. She was beautiful, he realised, and beautiful in a much more interesting way than the models, with their stick-thin limbs and their dim, drug-dazed faces.

"Hey, girlfriend!" Stella greeted Sophie.

"Look who's still here!"

As Sophie met Alex's eye, the beginnings of a smile touched the corners of her mouth.

"Well! I thought we'd shocked you into flight."

Alex attempted an answering smile.

"I don't scare quite as easily as you think," he said.

At the draining board the anxious-looking model was rubbing the last of the cocaine into her gums.

Stella rolled her eyes at the girl.

"Tash, you should cool it with that stuff. I don't want you falling off the catwalk tomorrow."

"I know, Stell. I've just been like, so busy, yeah? I got this option for the new Virginity campaign and everyone at the agency's like hey, you really gotta do this, they're like really big clients and I'm like whoa, cool it, yeah? I just want to, like, chill out, y'know?"

"I know," said Stella gently. She turned to Sophie.

"Dad was asking how you were.

"Tell him fine," said Sophie.

"What does your dad do?" Alex asked Stella on impulse.

"He's a musician," said Stella.

"He used to play bass guitar with a band in the Sixties. And he still does a bit of song writing

Alex nodded.

"My dad's into cars. That's his thing."

He turned to Sophie.

"What about you? How's your old man fill his time?"

"He sells what he calls area-denial systems and the rest of the world calls land mines said Sophie.

"Mostly to third-world dictators. That's his thing."

Alex nodded again. This was clearly sensitive territory.

"And is business, er, good?" he ventured.

"Booming," said Sophie drily.

They looked at each other for a moment.

"Before you disappear," said Stella, "I've just had a thought. Why don't you and this nice young man come to dinner at my place tomorrow night?"

Sophie gazed into Alex's eyes. Her grey-green gaze poured over him like a wave.

"That would be lovely," she said quietly.

"Are you free?"

"Yes," said Alex.

"Good." Sophie kissed him softly but firmly on the mouth.

"See you there."

Alex watched her go. Stella watched him watch her.

"Smitten, I'd say." She smiled.

"Definitely smitten."

"Who?" asked Alex, smiling like an idiot.

"You tell me." Stella bent and rummaged in her bag.

"Here, I'll give you the address for tomorrow night."

She wrote it on the back of an invitation to a film premiere.

"Be there," she told him sternly.

"I'm counting on you, OK?"

"I promise," said Alex.

Ten minutes later he was walking down Sloane Street with Jamie who after a promising start had seen the Prada girl stolen away from him by the film director Danny Biggs.

"He told her he grew up hanging around the dog tracks and nicking cars," protested the disconsolate Jamie.

"The truth is that he went to Eton with me and his father's the Lord-Lieutenant of Shropshire.

Bastard."

"I'm afraid all's fair in love and war, mate," Alex told him.

"No prizes for second place."

"I guess not," Jamie agreed gloomily.

They walked on in silence for a few paces.

"By the way," said Alex, a little self-consciously, 'it looks like I'm seeing your sister tomorrow night' he checked his watch - "I mean tonight. Forum dinner."

"Oh, yeah?" said Jamie, amused at Alex's embarrassment.

"Glad you came, then?"

"I guess I am."

The next day Alex spent the afternoon at the Duke of York's Headquarters in the King's Road, test-firing revolvers with Dave Constantine. Wondering if he should dress smartly for dinner at Stella's perhaps even buy some new clothes he had eventually ditched the idea and stuck to his jeans and a T-shirt.

In the evening he took the tube to Notting Hill Gate and walked northwards up Ladbroke Grove. Stella's flat was on the first floor of a vast white wedding cake of a Victorian house and overlooked a private garden.

From a dark staircase he walked into a huge room flooded with pale evening light. Several floor-to ceiling windows had been opened outwards on to an ironwork balcony, in front of which Stella and a guy with dark hair and a lazy smile were sitting at a table drinking champagne.

"Alex," said Stella.

"Hey. You made it!"

"I did," agreed Alex.

Trying to recall the event afterwards, he discovered there were gaps in his memory. He couldn't remember what Stella's boyfriend did it might have been something to do with the music industry, or possibly with TV, but then again it could have been advertising or PR and he couldn't remember anything that they ate or drank or talked about at the long table in front of the balcony. For Alex, this was one hell of a lot of information to forget in a short space of time but he didn't really give a damn because everything to do with Sophie her skin, her hair, her smell, the way she moved etched itself deeply and permanently into his consciousness.

She amazed him. There were her clothes, for a start electric blue and, presumably, vastly expensive which lent her the sheen of an exotic bird. And then there was her slender, delicately rounded body, and the limitless candour of her wave-green eyes. But more than her appearance there was her manner, her almost reckless confidence. Most women Alex had met up to that moment had seemed to watch themselves, to monitor their appearance and the impression that they were making minute by minute.

Not Sophie. Sophie didn't seem to give a damn. There was a huge mirror on one wall of the twilit room and though she passed it a score of times Alex never saw her glance into it once. She was just there, beautiful if you chose to think so and if not, well, who cared?

Alex chose to think so. He was entranced and the thing that really got him the thing that really ducked under his guard -was that she seemed to be as entranced as he was. She just stared at him, quite openly, fascinated.

"What's that smell?" she asked him as soon as she walked into the room. Walking over to Alex she sniffed at him.

"It's on your hands," she stated.

"A

kind of burnt..." She pressed his fingers to her nose and then touched her face to his hair.

"But you don't smoke, do you?" she murmured from behind his ear.

"It's gunpowder residue," said Alex, realising what she was referring to.

"Cordite. You get it from using firearms in an enclosed space.

"You've been killing people again," said Stella disapprovingly.

"Honestly, you boys!"

Alex smiled.

"Just trying out some new toys on the range."

"As one does," said Stella's boyfriend.

"What sort?"

"Moorsyth .50 super-magnum," said Alex.

"Ah." The boyfriend was clearly none the wiser.

"Right."

"Let's eat," said Stella.

After dinner they split up. Spooning the sugar crystals from the bottom of her coffee cup, Sophie announced her desire that Alex take her for a walk. It was a warm evening, the streets, the caf&s and the pavements were crowded, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world that she should take his arm so as to avoid their becoming separated. At one moment, outside a noisy Portobello Road pub, she stopped in her tracks and turned to face him, placing her hands on his shoulders. When he met her gaze, however, she smiled enigmatically and moved on.

Ten minutes later she suddenly dived into a bar. It was tiny, the walls were yellowed with cigarette smoke and hung with ancient photographs of boxers and foot ballers

"Quick!" she told the barman.

"We need some malt whisky. Hurry, it's an emergency.

"Do you always get what you want?" asked Alex as the waiter placed two tumblers of Laphroaig in front of them.

She frowned. The whisky made its smoky way down their throats.

"I think .. . pretty much always," she admitted.

"What about you?"

"It's a long time since I've wanted anything as badly as ..

She reached for his thigh under the table.

"Do you want me ... badly?"

"Yes," said Alex.

Her eyes shone and she compressed her lips with pleasure.

They had finished their drinks and crossed Notting Hill Gate into Kensington Church Street. There, as if at a prearranged signal, both had raised their arms to the same cruising taxi.

In the back, ignoring the seat belts, he put his arm round her shoulders and she kissed his neck before moulding herself warmly against him. Taking his other hand, she placed it on her breast and he felt the nipple harden beneath his probing fingers.

"Mmm!" she murmured.

Laughing, but their movements urgent now, they ran up the stairs to her flat. They had kissed as soon as the door had closed behind them a long kiss, but one which swiftly proved to be less than either of them wanted or needed.

She led him inside, somehow managing to un belt him and to remove her blue silk top as she went. An antique velvet-covered sofa offered itself, and by then she was unzipping and stepping out of her skirt. His hand moved to the damp triangle between her legs, hers to the zip of his trousers. He sat back and she lowered herself gratefully on to him, gasping as she felt him thrust hard inside her. Her back arched and her hair fell away from the pale oval of her face.

"I

can still smell the gunpowder," she gasped and drove herself against him, hot and wet, clenching and releasing, rising and falling.

SIX.

Sleepily, Alex reached for her. Eyes closed, he allowed his fingers a lazy exploration of her body, felt the desire stir inside him once more.

But Sophie seemed to have changed. Her breasts, for a start, were very much larger and heavier than he remembered, and were now suspended in a loose nylon bra and resting against several warm rolls of flesh. The smell in his nostrils was not that of Guerlain perfume and expensive hairdressing but of sweat, airline cooking and recycled air.

Cautiously he opened an eye. The face that lay inches from his and the breast that he was fondling belonged to his fellow passenger from Banjul, Maureen. And it was Maureen's hand which was firmly cupping his crotch.

"You certainly do like big girls, don't you," she whispered hungrily. Her fingers tightened round him.

"In fact you're quite a big boy yourselfl' Alex stared at her. The whites of her eyes had a yellowish cast to them, as did her teeth. A centimetre of grey showed at the roots of her hennaed hair. In the opposite aisle, one of the few other male passengers on the flight caught his eye and gave him a leery wink.

"A little bird tells me that you and I are about to join the mile-high club," she whispered.

Alex struggled upright.

"That little bird is wrong," he said, searching his memory for the woman s name.

I'm sorry, I've I've been asleep."

She looked at him quizzically.

"You seemed so ..

"I was dreaming," he said firmly.

"Of my girlfriend."

"Ah," she said, drawing herself upright and pulling an in-flight magazine from the back of the seat in front.

"I see."

Every detail of her deportment spelt hurt and disappointment emotions to which Alex guessed she was no stranger.

He glanced at his watch: 2.45 p.m. London time.

Three bloody hours to go. He felt stale and overtired.

Whatever was waiting for him at the other end had to be an improvement on this.

Three men were waiting for him.

They were standing with one of the Customs officers at the EU citizens' immigration desk. One, in a shiny blazer and slacks, looked like a run-to-seed bodybuilder. Salaried muscle, thought Alex. Exsquaddie, 18K and a clothing allowance. The second, a florid-faced figure in a Barbour coat, had the tired, tolerant gaze of the time-serving civil servant. The third, a younger and more military-looking figure in a Brigade of Guards tie and a velvet-collared coat, Alex vaguely recognised. Box, he thought.

MIS.

"Captain Temple," asked the younger man.

"Could you step this way, sir?"

They hurried him into the Customs offices, down a flight of stone stairs and out into a car park where they convened round a nearly new Ford Mondeo.

"Alex, isn't it?" said the man in the velvet-collared coat.

"Gerald Farmilow. We met at Thames House.

I'm Five's liaison officer with the Regiment."

It came back to him now. He'd been introduced to a bunch of Security Services suits when he'd first taken over the RWW team. This Farmilow character had been one of them.

"I remember, Gerald," he said.

"I'm sorry it's been a bit of a long night."

"Congratulations, by the way," said Farmilow.

"An excellent result."

Alex nodded. He felt dry-throated and in need of a shower. And some halfway sensible clothes.

Farmilow glanced at his watch, a wafer-thin sliver of gold and enamel, and nodded towards the red-faced man in the Barbour.

"Alex, George will tell you what this is all about."

He held out his hand.

"I've got to push off back to Millbank."

A brief handshake and he was gone. Identification effected. Mission completed.

"I'm George Widdowes," said the man in the Barbour, opening one of the Mondeo's rear doors, 'and this is Tom Ritchie."

The driver mutely raised his hand.

"I'd also like to add my congratulations to Gerald's," Widdowes continued.

"I understand you had a major success last night."

Alex looked at him noncommittally and climbed into the car. He wasn't about to discuss Regiment business with these people.

Widdowes nodded approvingly.

"Lips sealed. Quite right. Look, Captain Temple, we've got a good hour's drive ahead of us we're going out to Goring, in Berkshire so I'll put you in the picture as we go. Do you smoke?"

Alex shook his head.

The younger man drove, Widdowes sat in the back with Alex. Alex's overnight bag joined a laptop computer that was lying on the front seat. No one spoke until they were crawling along the exit road towards the M4 with the rest of the evening rush-hour traffic, but finally Widdowes half turned in his seat.

"I'm sure I don't need to say this, but it's essential that you don't repeat a word of what I'm about to tell you to anyone. Colleagues, senior officers, other security services people ..

Alex didn't bother to reply. Leaning against the back seat of the Mondeo with his eyes half closed, he felt a little of the tension leaving his shoulders.

"Good. Right, then. Had to say that. You know how it is."

Alex nodded.

"Right .. . Well, here goes. A fortnight ago there was a murder committed in Chertsey, just inside the M25 in Surrey. Know it?"

"Isn't there an MOD arms sales place there?"

"That's right. Which is why the victim one of our fairly senior people, a man named Barry Fenn happened to be staying in the area."

Alex nodded. He was suddenly and acutely aware of his appearance in his flowered shirt and flip-flops he looked and felt ridiculous. Typical of Box to get you at a disadvantage.

"Go on," he said levelly.

"You weren't here, obviously, but even if you had been you wouldn't have heard or seen anything about it. We found him, we cleaned him up, we disappeared the body. Officially Barry Fenn died of heart failure in an ambulance en route to St. Peter's Hospital, Chertsey. In fact, he was killed in the early hours of the morning in a third-floor bedroom at the White Rose Lodge by a person or persons unknown. The killer I'm assuming it's one person disabled the exterior floodlight warning system, scaled the back of the building, climbed in through a window, eliminated our man, returned the way he came and vanished."

"How did he kill him?" asked Alex.

"Horribly," said Widdowes, closing his eyes.

"Barry Fenn was a good friend of mine. Had been for twenty years odd."

Alex waited. Widdowes steepled his fingers again.

"The killer tied his wrists and drove a six-inch nail through the side of his head. When he'd done that he cut his tongue out.

Alex said nothing. Widdowes' words had fired off a number of warning flares in his mind, but he showed no outward sign of this. The SAS were deeply wary of the other security services, whose human resource management they considered fatally flawed. David Shayler had gone a long way towards making monkeys of Five by public ising their involvement in the Muammar Gaddafi assassination plot and Richard Tomlinson had performed much the same service for Six when he outlined plans to whack Slobodan Milosevic with the help of the RWW. In general it was not a good time to be sharing a sleeping bag with Military Intelligence.

"I'm sorry," Alex said neutrally.

"I'm sure he was a good man.

"He was," said Widdowes.

Alex glanced at his plastic flip-flops and sunburnt toes, and thought of Africa and Don Hammond and the screams of the wounded RUF men. Although the leech marks were still fresh on his arms and legs and groin, the bloody events of the night before already seemed a world away.

"Let's cut to the chase, Widdowes," he said.

"What do you want from me?"

The MI-5 man turned to him.

"We're going to the site of a second murder. Another of our desk officers, a man named Craig Gidley. Exactly the same modus operandi, except that this time the killer gouged his eyes out."

A moment's silence.

"Go on?" said Alex.

"And we've got reason to think the killer's one of our guys. Or to be precise, one of your guys. An SAStrained undercover agent."

Alex stared out of the window. They passed a flooded gravel pit, a coppice, fields.

"We need this man found, Captain Temple, and soon."

The dead man's house stood a short distance outside the Thames-side town of Goring. A high flint wall surrounded the property; inside, a converted Georgian farmhouse was fronted by a neat lawn, yews and a lime tree. On the gravel led drive in front of the main entrance several cars were drawn up.

Ritchie found a space for the Mondeo, opened Widdowes' door for him and returned to the driver's seat, patting his pockets for cigarettes. Widdowes led Alex round to the back of the house, where two men and two women were sitting at an ironwork garden table. They looked as if they had been there for some time.

Widdowes led Alex round the table, first to the older and obviously senior of the two women, whom he introduced as 'our deputy director', then to the two men, who were respectively a service pathologist and a forensics officer. The final introduction was to an anonymous-looking younger woman whose name was Dawn Harding.

With these formalities complete the pathologist and the forensics man excused themselves and returned to the house. In response to a gesture by the deputy director, Alex and Widdowes took their vacated chairs.

"Thank you for coming at such short notice, Captain Temple," said the deputy director. She was an austerely handsome woman in her fifties, grey-haired.

Alex nodded cautiously.

"I believe George has brought you up to date with events?"

"In general terms, yes.

"And with what we want you to do."

"He's given me a fair idea."

"And?"

"And my answer to him was the same as my answer is to you:

that I'm a soldier, not a policeman. I can track a man through the jungle or over mountains, but not through criminal record databases and security services computer files. You've brought in the wrong person.

The deputy director looked at her two colleagues and back at Alex.

"You won't need files or records," she said quietly.

"We know who murdered Fenn and Gidley."

Alex stared.

"You know who.

"Yes. At least we've got a pretty good idea. And finding him is something we've got well in hand ourselves. What we need from you is more in the nature of disposal. Before we go into that, though, I'd like you to look at the body and see what it suggests to you. George?"

Widdowes stood and led Alex into the house through the back door. Inside, a flag-stoned corridor gave on to an oak-floored front hall, and the hall on to a small, book-lined study. To Alex, as he flip-flopped through, the set-up looked like an expensive one. The furniture was old and dark, and the gilt-framed portraits which hung on the walls looked like originals.

Disposal. Typical Box bullshit. They meant execution.

The owner of the house was lying face down on the study carpet. Although not tall he was a bulky man, and his dinner jacket and trousers looked a size too tight. His hands, blackened and swollen, had been tied behind his back with yellowish cord and it was clear from the severely chafed wrists that he had struggled violently against his bonds. Beneath his face a congealed pool of blood had blackened the worn Persian rug. The coppery smell of the blood hung in the air.

From the doorway Widdowes signalled for Alex to approach the body.

"We've taken the photos and run all the technical stuff. You can move him around if you want."

There was nothing that Alex wanted to do less, but he put his hands to the body and pushed, and the corpse rolled heavily over on to its back. In this position the full horror of the assault was revealed.

The face was an unrecognisable mask of caked blood.

Where the eyes had been were now clotted black holes. At the victim's right temple the head of a six inch flat-head nail showed a couple of millimetres proud of the skin surface. On close inspection the nail head proved to be flecked with rust. For the best part of a minute Alex stared at the body. It seemed to be expected of him.

"OK?" asked Widdowes.

Alex shrugged.

"Just fill me in again on what happened. The Gidleys were having a party, yeah?"

"A dinner party," said Widdowes.

"A dinner party for four Service colleagues and their partners. They would have arrived at about the same time that you left Freetown to keep your appointment with the RUF."

"And you weren't there?" asked Alex.

"No," said Widdowes, a small note of annoyance creeping into his voice.

"I wasn't, as it happens."

"And the deputy director?"

"The DD was there, yes. In all including Craig and Letitia Gidley ten people sat down to eat. By half past midnight the guests had all left, and Craig Gidley locked the front gate and let the dogs out."

"They were Dobermanns, right? Attack dogs?"

"That's right. They'd been shut up in their kennels while the guests were around. Normally they had the run of the grounds - a couple of acres in all. Better than any alarm, as you can imagine."

"Not on this occasion," said Alex soberly.

"Well, no, as it happened. Not on this occasion." Widdowes rubbed his eyes. It occurred to Alex that the MI-5 man had probably had as shitty a day as he had.

"Shortly afterwards Letitia Gidley saw her husband lock the front door.

She went up to bed they had separate bedrooms -and he went into the study announcing that he was going to have a finger of Scotch and spend half an hour on the computer. That was the last time she saw him alive. She found him here at 9.30 this morning and called the DD."

"Where's what's her name Letitia Gidley now?"

"At a colleague's in London. In a fairly bad way, as you can imagine. Let's go outside."

Gratefully, Alex followed him into the hall and thence to the porch. The front door was of heavy steel-backed oak.

"This how he got access?" asked Alex.

"Yes. Picked the lock. Very expertly. Come through." Widdowes led him the fifty yards or so past the parked cars to the front gate, where he pointed to a telegraph pole.

"See that little box on the line running to the house?" Alex recognised it at a glance.

"It's a sonic deactivator. Sends a false "secure" signal to the alarm monitoring station.

"That's right. Have you ever used one?"

Alex chose to ignore the question.

"And it was just the house that was alarmed?"

Widdowes looked at him thoughtfully for a moment before nodding.

"Just the house. These two little charmers kept an eye on the garden.

He led Alex along the lawn. In the herbaceous border, doubled up among the lupins and delphinia, were the stiffened bodies of two Dobermann pinschers.

Alex whistled appreciatively.

"He's good, this guy. And the wife heard nothing?"

"Nothing."

Alex nodded. At the front door the two men he had met earlier were loading a body bag into the boot of one of the cars. Ritchie, cigarette in mouth, was giving them a hand.

"How would you have taken out Gidley?" asked Widdowes.

"I'd have done pretty much as this guy did," Alex answered.

"Wait until everyone's inside and the party's under way, then climb the telegraph pole and disable the alarm. He wouldn't have gone inside the grounds at that stage because of the dogs."

"How would he have known about the dogs?" asked Widdowes.

"He would have seen them," said Alex.

"He'd have had this place under surveillance for days, maybe even weeks. He'd have known the dogs' names, when they were fed, everything."

"So then?"

"Then he would have pulled back from the target and positioned himself somewhere he could count the cars out at the end of the evening. Field, maybe, or a tree. He probably had binoculars. Soon as he was sure the Gidleys were alone, he'd have returned and gone over the wall."

"What about the dogs?"

"See the way they're lying?" asked Alex, pointing to the twisted bodies.

"I'd put money on his having used poison, meat laced with strychnine. You whistle the dogs over, throw down the meat and then assume a submissive posture face down on the ground. Instead of going straight for your throat the dogs just piss on you. Once they've symbolically dominated you, you see, you're no longer a threat and they can get on with the meat."

"Big mistake," murmured Widdowes drily.

"Very big," agreed Alex.

"They're dead in seconds. Then our man takes a quick trot to the front door, boosts the lock and..." He shrugged.

"That's the how of it, anyway. As regards the why, you tell me."

"Let's go back to the DD," said Widdowes.

They returned to the back of the house, where the deputy director was making notes in a small ring-binder. The two men sat down. It was several seconds before she looked up.

"So, Captain Temple, give us your assessment of the perpetrator of this murder."

Alex hesitated.

"Why me?" he asked her.

"Why pull me out of the Sierra Leone jungle when you could have had Hereford chopper a bloke down this morning? Why waste the best part of a day?"

The deputy director gave the faintest of smiles.

"Because I wanted you, Captain Temple, not just some "bloke". I've been led to understand that you're the best."

Alex looked away.

"Who told you that?" he asked sardonically.

"Commissioned from the ranks at thirty-four after a decade's exemplary service. RW~[ team leader while still a captain .

The facts speak for themselves."

Alex shrugged. He guessed that, one way or another, he'd managed to keep his nose clean over the years. And managed it without brown-nosing the brass, which he privately considered to be his real achievement.

"Let me get this right," he said.

"You're in the process of trying to locate the man who murdered Feun and Gidley. Assuming that you do locate him, you want me to move in and eliminate him.

"That's about the shape and size of it."

Alex nodded.

"If I'm going to do that, I'm going to need to know everything you've got on him."

"That's not a problem.

"And I'm going to need to ask you some pretty sensitive questions."

"And I'll do my best to answer them, Captain Temple.

There'll be no secrets between us. We want this man taken off the streets, and fast. For reasons I'm sure I don't have to go into, I want the whole thing tied up before the police get wind of it.

Or, God help us, the press. That means days, Captain Temple.

Not weeks. All of this is urgent."

Nodding his assent, Alex looked out across the evening stillness of the garden. Midges whirled in the scented air. Was it his imagination or had she emphasised the word 'captain', as if to suggest that promotion would accompany success. Or that demotion would follow refusal, perhaps .. . Not that he had a hope in hell of getting out of this.

"OK." He nodded.

The deputy director swept her papers together.

"Good," she said briskly.

"I'll see you in my office at 9 p.m.

tomorrow. By then we'll have photographs and the bulk of the forensic information, and I can give you some of the background to all of this. Meanwhile you'll be liaising with Dawn, who'll take you back to London. Anything you need, just ask her." With that she got up, briefly extended her hand to Alex he pressed it, perhaps more gingerly than was strictly polite and swept into the house.

"I'll wrap up here, Dawn," said George Widdowes.

"Why don't you and the captain make a move? Unless of course' he turned to Alex 'there's anything else you need to see?"

"I don't think so," said Alex and turned his attention for the first time to the woman who had been sitting in silence at the far end of the table.

SEVEN.

Alex's first impression was of toughness: tough grey eyes, tough posture and tough attitude. She had nondescript blonde hair, hadn't bothered with make-up and was wearing a black short-sleeved sweater, black trousers and flat-heeled elastic-sided boots.

The impression didn't last. The clothes, if plain, were clearly expensive and accentuated rather than concealed the smooth curves beneath. If she was wearing no make-up it was because she knew she looked fine without it. And she certainly wasn't tough in the way that the 14th Int women he'd known in Belfast had been tough. Women like Carol Denny or Denise Foley who would match the Regiment guys drink for drink after a good terrorist kill and would have been perfectly happy lying up in a freezing hide with a Heckler and Koch snipers' rifle and doing the job themselves. Denise, he remembered, used to bake a cross-shaped cake every time the Det or the Regiment took a player out.

Nor was Dawn Harding much like the Box girls he'd met over the water. For the most part they had been bright, ordinary-looking types, much more deskbound and secretarial than their Det colleagues. Most of them, according to Don Hammond who'd always had a bit of a way with words were 'gagging for a bit of Regimental pipe'.

But not this one. This one was decidedly unimpressed and it wasn't just because he happened to be dressed like a West African pimp. It was because she wanted to impress on him from the start that there was a distinct difference in status between some Johnny-come-lately ex-squaddie and a fast-track MI-5 desk officer to be. When she turned to him it was with the polite but very slightly patronising look that all executive-stream Box personnel seemed to acquire sooner or later.

"So," she said.

"Back to London. Have you got anywhere to stay?"

It was a good question. Since clearing Customs at Heathrow, Alex had not had a moment to himself and he certainly wasn't about to ring Sophie with all these wan ky spooks hanging around. He didn't even want to call her from his mobile until he was well clear of them mobile phones were a pushover in surveillance terms and although it was unlikely that a scanner was being operated from the cars at the front of the house, he didn't want to take the chance.

There was one call he could and would make, though. Tersely excusing himself and deliberately marching a good twenty yards away from Harding, he put a call through to Lieutenant-Colonel Bill Leonard, the CO of 22 SAS. This, Alex knew, was in direct contravention of Widdowes' request, but bollocks to that.

Howard was still at his desk at the Regimental base at Credenhill, near Hereford.

"Well done last night," he said quietly.

"Overall, a bloody good show. You're in Berkshire I gather, with friends."

On insecure lines the Regiment used the minimum of military jargon. There would be no 'sirs' or 'bosses' or departments named.

"That's right. They have some... cleaning they want me to do."

There was a brief silence. Finally Howard spoke.

"I

want you to lend them a hand on this one, Alex.

Accepting an upgrade like you did last year means eating a shit sandwich from time to time and this is one of those times."

"Yeah, but ..

"No buts, Alex. This problem of theirs has got to be dealt with and I can't think of a better man than you to do it. I'm sorry, Alex, but that's a must. What I can promise is choice of posting when you're done.

You've got my word on that."

Alex said nothing. By the time he was done, he reflected if he was ever done things would have changed. The 'choice' would dissolve, as it always did.

"How's Karen?" he asked. Karen was Don Hammond's widow.

"Bearing up, as is Sue. They've both got people round with them. I'll have someone call you about the funerals."

Sue, Alex guessed, must have been the wife of the dead Special Forces pilot.

"Help our friends out, Alex. There's no room for manoeuvre on this one."

The phone went dead.

Dawn Harding drove a two-year-old Honda Accord and drove it with an almost aggressive respect for the speed limit. When she was cut up at traffic lights outside Reading she merely slowed to let the other driver get away, while on the M4, where the prevailing speed was around 80, she seemed happy to roll along in the high 60s.

"Saving the engine?" Alex ventured at one point.

"No. Hanging on to a clean licence," answered Dawn. She gestured towards the traffic pouring past them.

"And I've nothing to prove to a bunch of stressed-out commuters. Where is it you want to go exactly?"

Alex had tried Sophie earlier but got her voice-mail.

He got it again now. For a reason that he couldn't quite put his finger on something to do with wanting to hear her reaction to the news of his return he didn't want to leave a message.

"Sloane Square," he answered.

"Anywhere around there."

"Late-night shopping in the King's Road?" Dawn archly flicked a glance at his shirt.

"No, I've got some friends at the barracks," said Alex. And sod you too, he thought.

"OK. Sloane Square it is. And I'd be grateful if you didn't go chatting to all your Territorial Army mates about this afternoon's events, if that's all right with you."

He stared at her.

"It's not my habit to "go chatting", as you put it, to my mates or to anyone else. I was a badged SAS soldier before you .. ." He faltered to silence. How old was she?

Twenty-five? Twenty-six?"... Before you sat your GCSEs," he finished weakly.

She smiled.

"So, have you ever killed anyone, Captain?"

"I've hurt a few people's feelings!"

Dawn nodded sagely.

"And are you very conscious of your age? Is that a problem for you? After all, most captains must be ten years younger than you. My sort of age, in fact."

"Listen," said Alex, 'if you think your superiors' he stressed the word 'have got the wrong man for the job, I'd be very happy to step down. Just stop the car and I'll fuck off."

"You'll... fuck off?"

Alex reached over to the back seat for his bag.

"Yes," he said.

"I'll fuck off." He looked at her meaningfully.

"There is no aspect of this project that I'm looking forward to, none whatsoever. I've had dealings with Thames House before and regretted it every time. For my money you jokers can dig yourselves out of your own shit."

"I see. Well, that's certainly telling it like it is. Did it ever occur to you, Captain Temple, that we might all actually be on the same side? Pursuing the same objectives?"

Alex said nothing. At that moment he was at least as angry with himself as he was with her. She'd wound him up and he'd gone off like a fucking clockwork mouse. You're a dickhead, Temple, he told himself.

Get a gr~p.

She slowed to negotiate the lights at Barons Court.

As she pulled on the hand brake Alex watched the muscles in her forearm tauten. She had long fingers and short, square-cut nails.

"You're saying," she went on, 'that it's really of no concern to you that some .. . some maniac is torturing and murdering our people?"

"I was only wondering why you couldn't deal with the whole thing in-house."

"The decision has been made to do otherwise," said Dawn curtly.

Which pretty much brought the argument to a close.

She gave him her mobile and office numbers, and asked him to ring her as soon as he knew where he was staying.

Mentally Alex determined not to do this.

"Do you know your way to Thames House?" she asked.

"Millbank, last time I visited."

"Tomorrow at 9 a.m." then. I'll meet you at the front desk."

"It's a date."

Unsurprisingly, she didn't smile. A few minutes later, as she brought the Honda to a halt outside the Duke of York's Headquarters in the King's Road, he nodded his thanks and grabbed his bag.

"Tomorrow," she repeated, flipping a long brown envelope on to the passenger seat.

Alex hesitated before reaching for it.

"Expenses," she said.

"According to our records, you don't have a London address. And unless you've left some clothes at Miss Wells's and my guess is that you're not really the type for that cosy domestic scene - I'd say that you're going to need to add to your wardrobe some time between now and tomorrow.

Keep it simple, would be my advice, and dress your age. Harrods is still open for a couple of hours. See you." She didn't even leave at speed, just drew gently away from the kerb.

He watched after her for a moment, shaking his head with intense dislike. The reference to Sophie had had its intended effect: to let him know that Dawn Harding and her organisation could jerk his chain any bloody time they felt like it.

"Not if I see you first," he murmured, but knew that his words had no meaning.

He and Dawn Harding were locked together for the duration, like it or loathe it. He punched the recall button on his Nokia.

Five minutes later a silver Audi TT convertible pulled to a swerving halt at the kerb.

"Hey, sexy!

Looking for business?"

For the first time that day Alex smiled. Sophie was wearing a screamingly loud Italian print shirt and, despite the lateness of the day, sunglasses. The sight of her made his heart dance.

"Jump in," she ordered.

From that moment, things picked up. Alex explained his clothing predicament, Sophie made a rapid series of phone calls and five minutes later a willowy young man in leather trousers was unlocking a warehouse in Chelsea Harbour. Lights flickered on to reveal at least a dozen rails of men's clothes and several shoulder high pyramids of shoeboxes.