‘Are we going soon?’ Ally said. ‘This music’s giving me a headache. Or maybe it was that shitty cigarette.’
Ben shrugged. The next act up was a jazz-rock fusion guitar trio, and that wasn’t so much his thing anyway. ‘Fine,’ he said, and they walked away from the crowd towards the car. The blue BMW Alpina came courtesy of the regiment. Perks of his rank.
Beyond the festival enclosure, the enhanced police and security presence was as noticeable as at any other large-scale event in Britain that summer. Ever since the Selfridges bombing in June, the whole country had been in a state of red alert. And as Ben drove back through the outskirts of Brecon towards Ally’s place, it was no surprise that the news programme that came on the radio headlined with the breaking story that, after a frenzied manhunt, Scotland Yard had finally detained a suspect.
‘… early reports suggest he may have been part of the same extremist Jihadist terror group responsible for the Lisbon Embassy bombing in February, in which seven people died.’
Ben grunted. The antiterrorist boys had had their hands full the last few weeks. And the odds were it wasn’t over yet. Every city in Britain was braced for another attack, security services stretched to breaking point. The tension everywhere was palpable.
‘In another breaking story,’ the presenter went on, ‘Cayman Islands authorities fear that today’s air crash off the island of Little Cayman may have claimed the lives of all twelve passengers and three crew members. It has emerged in the last few minutes that the aircraft’s British pilot and owner of Cayman Islands Charter, Nick Chapman, is thought to have ditched into the sea in a deliberate act of suicide …’
Ben hit the brakes. The BMW slewed to a halt in the middle of the empty road.
‘Hey! Watch it!’ Ally yelped, nursing her shoulder where she’d jolted against her seatbelt.
‘Shush.’ Ben turned up the radio volume.
‘… a Home Office source has revealed that Chapman, a former member of the British armed forces, may have served with the SAS during the 1990s. Police and rescue divers continue to comb a large area of sea, but as yet no survivors have been found in what appears to be the worst air tragedy ever to hit the British territory …’
Ben said nothing more as he drove Ally the rest of the way back to her place on the edge of Brecon.
‘Don’t you want to come in, then?’ she smiled at the door.
‘I have to get back,’ Ben said.
‘When will we see each other again?’ she asked.
Ben hadn’t even heard the question. ‘Thanks, Ally. I had a lovely time,’ he said, and drove away.
CHAPTER THREE
The place Ben had rented during his leave was a little ivied stone cottage right on the River Usk, in wooded countryside a few miles outside the Welsh market town of Brecon. Low ceilings, exposed beams, thatched roof, old-fashioned leaded windows that peeked out through ivy and climbing roses. The stone fireplace was adorned with brass ornaments, and in a nod to tradition a pair of crossed cricket bats hung over the mantelpiece.
Ben didn’t care too much for cricket, but he did care for the peace and quiet of the place, as far as you could get from the boiling white heat and madness of the desert war front line. He could have spent these few weeks at his house near Galway Bay on the western Irish coast, but they didn’t hold annual international jazz festivals there and the gunman who’d almost managed to kill him had kindly done so at just the right time to allow him to catch some acts he’d long wanted to check out.
Jazz was the last thing on his mind that night as he burst inside the cottage and went straight over to flip on the TV. Scanning through the channels in search of a news programme he grabbed a fresh bottle of Laphroaig from the cardboard box that served as his temporary drinks cabinet, ripped off the cap and poured himself out a triple measure.
When he found a news programme he wasn’t surprised to see that the Cayman Islands air crash was one of the headline items. He listened and watched intently: interviews with shocked island airport authorities; grim-faced mourners; aerial footage of Royal Cayman Island Police and Navy rescue craft pulling wreckage from the water. From the air it was clear that the inter-island shuttle aircraft must have come down on a bar of exposed coral reef in the middle of the sea while on a routine crossing from the tiny island of Little Cayman to Grand Cayman, its larger sister seventy-five miles south-west. The plane appeared to have detonated on impact. Judging by the charred state of the bodies so far recovered, nobody had stood a chance of escaping a horrible fiery death.
Ben gulped whisky and went on watching. The three-engined Britten-Norman Trislander being too small a plane to carry a ‘black box’ flight data or cockpit voice recorder, the primary witness on whose testimony the suicide theory hung was the air traffic controller reported to have been in radio contact with the pilot shortly before the crash, struggling to talk him out of bringing the plane down. In the aftermath of the crash, the controller was unavailable for comment.
Four of the dozen passengers aboard the CIC inter-island flight had been British: a holiday couple, their son, and a retired dentist. But the main focus was on the man the media were already branding ‘kamikaze pilot’ and ‘suicide killer’, Nick Chapman. His final words to the air traffic controller, captured on tape moments before the crash, were a distorted, muffled yell over the chaos of the screaming passengers and the roar of the propeller engines. ‘I’m taking her down! I’m taking her down!’
As the dramatic audio clip played, the TV screen flashed up a photo of the man who’d said those words and plunged fourteen people to their deaths along with him. A tanned, lean-faced man of forty-six, smiling warmly for the camera. His hair was greyer than Ben remembered it.
But there was no doubt about it. He was the same Nick Chapman that Ben had served with in 22 SAS, not so many years ago.
CHAPTER FOUR
Five days later, Ben was standing on the edge of the family burial plot in a little churchyard near Bath, where Nick Chapman — or what remains of him the Cayman Islands salvage teams had managed to retrieve from the sea and flown to the UK — was being laid to rest.
Other than the few reporters and photographers who’d tried to get in and been turned away at the gate, only a smattering of people had turned up to pay their last respects to the deceased. Ben looked around for Chapman’s ex-wife, Joan, but there was no sign of her. The only face he recognised was that of Hilary, their daughter. Last time he’d seen her had been a few years earlier, when he’d been one of the twenty or so regimental guys invited to her engagement party. Then, she’d been the happy fiancée, bubbly and full of laughter. Now, even with her face half hidden behind oversized sunglasses and her straggly blond hair, she looked pinched and haggard and aged way beyond her twenty-four years.
It was warm under the sun. The minister read a few words. His manner was somewhat forbidding, somewhat disapproving, a distant echo of the days when suicides hadn’t been allowed church burials. Ben quickly tuned out and stood there watching the coffin being lowered into the grave, lost in his own thoughts and memories of the man inside it. Nick Chapman had done a lot of brave and worthy things in his time. None of them would be remembered now. It was a miserable, deeply saddening end to what should have been an honourable life.