“Do they get specific training in security and counter-surveillance?” asked Liz. “I mean, supposing I decided to follow a couple of them back from the pub or the local cinema to wherever they lived…”
“You’d last about five minutes, I’d guess, before encountering a hostile response involving security vehicles, and quite possibly helicopters. Put it this way, if you tried that, and we didn’t know who you were, you certainly wouldn’t try twice. We always tell our people not to go to bars that are too local. If they want to have a few beers, they go somewhere that’s at least seven or eight miles away, so that they’ve got plenty of time to spot any vehicle that might be following them home.”
“And what about yourself, Colonel?” asked Liz.
“I live on base.”
“Wing-Commander?”
Colin Delves frowned. “I live with my family more than a dozen miles away, in one of the villages. I never leave this establishment in uniform, and I doubt there are half a dozen people in the village who have the first idea what I do. The house I live in, in fact, is a Grade II listed property, owned by the MOD. I’m very lucky-it’s the last place you’d expect to find a serving RAF officer.”
“And is it under police surveillance?”
“Broadly speaking, yes. But not in such a way that would draw attention to the place.”
He fell silent as they approached a long line of jet fighters. Still in their matte green and brown desert livery, they seemed to crouch back on their tailplanes, rear-weighted by the massive twin engines above their fuselages. Ground-staff members worked at half a dozen of the aircraft, and several of the cockpit canopies were back-tilted open. From each nose a seven-barrelled cannon pointed skywards. Beneath the wings hung empty missile carriages.
“Here we are,” said Greeley, unable to keep a quaver of pride from his voice. “The Hog-Pen!”
“These are A-10s?” asked Mackay.
“A-10 Thunderbolt attack jets,” confirmed Greeley, “known to one and all as Warthogs. They’re attack and close support aircraft, and they featured heavily in the combat operations against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The amazing thing about them, apart from the missile systems that they mount, is just how much punishment they can survive. Our pilots were taking armour-piercing rounds, rocket-propelled grenade strikes… you name it, they were throwing it at us.”
Liz nodded, but as he began to use phrases like “loiter capability,” “emphasised payloads,” and “redundant primary structures,” she found herself drifting into a semi-hypnotic trance. With an effort, she pulled herself back from the edge.
“At night?” she said. “Really?”
“Absolutely,” said Greeley. “The pilots have to wear light-intensifying goggles but otherwise these aircraft are operational twenty-four hours out of twenty-four. And with the Gatling in the nose and the missile payload beneath the wings…”
“Uzgen must have been weird,” said Mackay. “It’s a long way from home.”
Greeley shrugged. “Marwell’s a long way from home. But sure, Uzgen was what we call an austere base.”
“Did you come under attack?” asked Liz.
“Not there. Over Afghanistan, like I said, we encountered small groups with RPGs and armour-piercing rounds, and we had a couple of Stinger alarms, but nothing that put any of our aircraft at serious risk.”
“And how far are we from the perimeter road here?” asked Mackay, gazing at the matt fuselage of the nearest of the A-10s.
“A mile, perhaps. I’ll show you the fatboys.”
The driver performed a sharp turn, and they drove for a further five minutes. Southeast, Liz told herself, struggling to keep her bearings in the flat grass-and-tarmac landscape.
The half-dozen AC-130s were huge, even from a distance. Great lumbering, deep-bellied things with down-pointing armaments like undersea feelers. Essentially, Delves told them, they were Hercules transport planes. With the addition of heavy cannons and fire-control systems, however, they became ground-attack aircraft capable of pulverising an enemy position.
“That’s assuming that your enemy has no aerial capability, presumably,” volunteered Mackay. “These things must make pretty easy targets for fighter planes and surface-to-air missiles.”
The colonel grinned. “The USAF is not interested in what you Brits call a level playing field. If the enemy’s still got an air force, the fatboys stay in the hangar.”
He hesitated, and the smile faded. “These two terrorists. The man and the girl.”
“Yes,” said Liz.
“We can protect our people and we can protect our aircraft. I took three hundred and seventy-six people and twenty-four aircraft out to the Central Asian theatre, we worked our tour, and I brought them all back. Every person, every aircraft. I’m proud of that record and I’m not going to see it tarnished by a pair of psychos who like shooting up old women. Trust us, OK?” He indicated Delves, who nodded confidently. “We’re on top of this thing.”
49
Twenty minutes later Liz and Mackay were driving back towards Swanley Heath in the BMW. They were sitting in silence. Mackay had started to play a CD of Bach’s Goldberg Variations but Liz had asked him to turn it off again. Something was worrying at her subconscious.
“That man Greeley,” she said eventually.
“Go on.”
“What did he mean when he was talking about Mansoor and D’Aubigny’s ‘grievance’?”
“How do you mean?”
“He said something about ‘this trigger-happy duo and their grievance.’ Why did he say that? What grievance?”
“I’m assuming he meant the same grievance that’s led the ITS to bomb, shoot and incinerate innocent civilians all over the world.”
“No, I don’t buy that. You wouldn’t use that word about members of a professional terror cell. They didn’t kill Ray Gunter and Elsie Hogan out of a sense of grievance. Why did he use that word, Bruno?”
“Grievance schmievance, Liz, how do I know? I never met the guy before in my life.”
“I didn’t say you had.”
He braked. The BMW came to an untroubled halt. He turned to her, solicitous. “Liz, you have to cool it. You’ve done brilliantly, and I’m genuinely in awe of the way you’ve moved this thing forwards, but you have to cool it. You can’t carry the entire case on your shoulders or it will break you, OK? I’m sure you think me the worst kind of cowboy operator, but please-I am not the enemy here.”
She blinked. The sky was steel-grey over the long, level horizon. The temporary energy burst provided by Greeley and Delves’s coffee had worn off. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re right. I’m letting it all get to me.”
But he might well have met Greeley, she thought. Central Asia, when all was said and done, was not such a large theatre. We deployed on the Afghan border… Why did she feel as if she was in free-fall? Exhaustion? Lack of sleep? What didn’t she know? What didn’t she know?
They proceeded in silence towards Swanley Heath, and were five minutes away from the Army Air Corps base when a squawk from her mobile alerted Liz to a text message. It read CALL JUDE. They pulled up at a roadside telephone box, Mackay tipped his seat into the recline position, and Liz climbed out on to the wet verge and rang Investigations. Distantly, several fields away, she could see a police search team in fluorescent yellow jackets moving through the scrubland. The light was fading fast.
“OK,” began Judith Spratt, “here’s where we are. We’ve got from the parents that from the age of thirteen Jean D’Aubigny attended a boarding school near Tregaron in Wales named Garth House. Small co-ed establishment, progressive in character, run by a former Jesuit priest named Anthony Price-Lascelles. School has a reputation for accommodating troubled children and those unresponsive to conventional discipline. Classroom attendance optional, no organised sport, pupils encouraged to undertake free-form artistic projects, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We’ve had people visit the school but the place is locked up for the Christmas holidays and Price-Lascelles is in Morocco, at a place called Azemmour, where he has a flat. Six have sent a man round to the flat this morning but learned from the house-boy that Price-Lascelles has gone into Casablanca for the day, destination and time of return unknown. So they’ve got a bloke sitting outside the flat waiting for him.”