Intercept Page 18

  “Less than five hours. They arrived from Pakistan that morning. Which means that my four clients were seized by the British police almost immediately after they moved into their residence. That they were handcuffed, thrown in jail, never questioned nor spoken to, and held without charge, all under an entirely false time of arrest?”

  “What do you mean false time of arrest?”

  Dr. Kamil took a chance. “Your record shows they were booked in here at 7 p.m., and therefore you are entitled to hold them for forty-eight hours, until 7 p.m. tonight. I am saying they were held in police custody from 6 p.m. not 7.”

  “It was 7 p.m. when we checked them in,” replied Len Martin.

  “But it was only 6 p.m. when you arrested them, handcuffed them, and subsequently ordered them into the police van, thus depriving them of their lawful liberties.”

  “That’s not the way it works,” replied Martin. “Their time of entry into police custody is the time they arrive here. 7 p.m.”

  “Then you dispute that to handcuff a man, and imprison him in the back of a police holding van with barred windows, under armed guard, is to deprive him of his liberty?. You think he’s still free to go about his lawful business?”

  “Well, not exactly . . . ”

  “I am afraid the law is an exact business, superintendent,” replied Dr. Kamil. “And I challenge your right to hold my clients for one moment after 6 p.m. this evening without charge.”

  “And where do you propose to make this challenge?” said Martin.

  “Oh, I have already requested a magistrate and a hearing, subject to an unsatisfactory conclusion to our meeting. Mr. Martin, I am afraid you must either charge them or release them at precisely six today.”

  “You may assume we will charge them.”

  “That’s your right. But I hope for your sake, you are able to reconcile the alleged bombmaking materials with the presence of my clients. Because I believe the previous residents of 289 Darsfield Street were convicted of bombmaking offenses after they were arrested in London.

  “My clients will deny vigorously they even knew the stuff, or anything else, was in the house. They’d only just arrived, and you most certainly will find none of their fingerprints on anything except a few mugs of coffee.

  “I think you’ll be very lucky to locate any judge or jury to find them guilty of anything. At which point, of course, I will have you charged with making wrongful arrests, and deliberately failing to grant my clients their legal right to a lawyer for more than forty hours. Our legal team will demand substantial damages.”

  From a police point of view, this was going stupendously badly. Every aspect of the operation had swerved in the wrong direction. There was the threat of publicity, damage to police reputation, and a couple of criminal charges that could not possibly hold up. Not to mention the oncoming fury of the Ministry of Defense, Scotland Yard’s Antiterrorist Squad, the CIA, SAS and God knows who else. One word in the media could bring the bloody roof down on his head. Len Martin stood. “Dr. Kamil, I think we understand each other. Allow me to consult with my colleagues, and perhaps we can reconvene later.”

  “I would appreciate that,” said Dr. Kamil. “Perhaps around 5:45 this afternoon?”

  When he saw the Rolls pull out of the parking lot, DS Martin opened up his line to Lt. Colonel Makin, who wished to consult with the Americans. It was well after 5:30 p.m.(local), when the parties were all agreed that the operation would have to be put on hold, temporarily.

  And at three minutes before 6 p.m. the al-Qaeda killers, Ibrahim Sharif, Yousaf Mohammed, Ben al-Turabi and Abu Hassan Akbar, for the second time in three months, walked free from police custody with no further stain on their character.

  More importantly, they would not face Mack Bedford, who was already surveying his own personal killing field, up there on windswept Ilkley Moor.

  Dr. Ahmed Kamil had, once more, earned his fee.

  6

  BY 6:30 THAT EVENING, the weather on these high Yorkshire plains had deteriorated rapidly. The moors were famous for sudden storms, high winds, and fog, but in autumn, they were at their most capricious, with both the temperatures and the wind direction subject to swift, almost hourly, changes.

  Mack Bedford, like all combat members of the Special Forces, especially SEALs and SAS, required about four times more reconnaissance than anyone else. All through the late afternoon, he had stood at his hotel window watching the light grow darker, and the winds begin to rise.

  The rain set in, right after he had watched the BBC’s six o’clock news, at which point Mack decided to leave and begin his recce down by the two rocks, which he could now see, stark against the lowering sky. He wore his rainproof, camouflage trousers and over a polo-neck sweater, his cammy top. He pulled on waterproof combat boots, black leather gloves, and black balaclava hood. He loaded a magazine into his SIG-Sauer 9mm service revolver and jammed it into his leather belt, on the opposite side of his sheathed combat knife.

  In the specially tailored inside pocket he placed a hand grenade sufficiently powerful to blow up the Cow and Calf Hotel. This was courtesy of Lt. Colonel Makin, “In case of a minor emergency.” He also carried a slim SEAL night glass telescope, but nothing to identify him in the event of his death.

  Unavoidably attired as Public Enemy Number One, Mack Bedford opened the window of his ground-level room and stepped through it, out onto the rapidly darkening Ilkley Moor. He missed Len Martin’s call, postponing the operation, by twelve minutes.

  Swiftly he ran clear of the light-field caused by the hotel, and moved into the wild country, where he was still able to pick out the distant outline of the stone cattle. He’d been in several creepy places in his life as a combat SEAL. But none more so than this.

  The wind made a faint moaning sound, rising and falling, and the light rain beat on his outer clothes. He sensed the air should have been clear, but the altitude and the low cloud created mist, and the feeling of bleakness enveloped everything. Also it was goddamned cold.

  So far as Mack could tell there was almost no chance of cover or shelter. Although he could rapidly become invisible by lying prostrate in the wet heather, he did not look forward to that. But SEALs like to claim their territory, becoming experts on the terrain, its feel and its sounds, long before their enemy arrives.

  It was well after 7 p.m. when Mack reached the rocks, and he was amazed at their size. They towered above him, black satanic walls of stone, the largest one, an outcrop from the land, was not climbable without proper mountaineering kit. And it was surrounded by flat, rocky terrain, with just a little mountain grass. He walked around and then moved to the smaller boulder, about forty-five feet high, jutting out across the heather.

  The road was a hundred yards away. From the enormous main outcrop, the Cow, to the nearest stretch of high heather was thirty-eight yards, a five-second sprint in an emergency. Mack was not thrilled about that—not on this wet, slippery terrain in the dark.

  He continued to pace out distances. Checking visibility, watching for more deterioration. And within twenty minutes he noticed it was growing appreciably darker. The cloud was right over the moor. There would be no stars and no moon. For an attack, this was darn near perfect. For defense, it was not so good. If he had an enemy out here, that enemy could, in SEAL parlance, “walk up on him.” In his long experience not many people could achieve that, the one exception being those friggin’ mountain men in Afghanistan. Those Afghan bastards could really nail you, creep right up on you, and never even snap a twig, or slip on the stony escarpment. Like goddamned goats they were, same sure-footedness, same goddamned smell, the only thing that might give ’em away. Mack Bedford chuckled in the darkness.

  So far as he knew, he was waiting for his four “targets,” who were being delivered by the police and then walking up to the rocks for their rendezvous. As far as he was concerned, there would be no predictable enemy. The coast would be permanently clear for him to strike as and when he wished.

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p; And yet, no SEAL or SAS man has ever settled for that mindset. They are so often in overseas territory, so often surrounded by enemies, they assume instinctively that every man’s hand is turned against them. Out here on the pitch black moor, danger could lurk anywhere. Every sense, every ounce of intuition, every nerve in his body was urging Mack to be goddamned careful.

  Once more he walked back across the ground, pacing out distances, listening, searching for the one spot in which he could hide, and watch for the arrival of his targets, or, alternatively, his enemy. It was almost eight o’clock when he finally made his decision.

  He did not want to be too high, but certainly not at ground level. His SEAL telescope gave him fabulous vision no matter how dark. But he needed elevation; just sufficient to allow him to leap to the ground, and to provide an all-around view of the dark, wet moorland.

  On one side of the biggest rock, there was a “shoulder” jutting out, probably fifty feet up. But below that, there were cuts and hollows and breaks in the stone. Mack could see a crevasse, almost like a crow’s nest in a ship. It was maybe fifteen feet above ground level. But there was a rocky platform maybe six feet wide about halfway up to it. If he had to, Mack could hit the ground in two bounds from there, one onto the platform, one onto the grass.

  Mack climbed the rock, and hunkered down, right in the lee of the wind. He aimed his glass down at the road and scanned the area. There was not a movement anywhere, just the rain sweeping across Ilkley Moor on a stiff, rising northwester.

  SHEIKH ABDULLAH’S three cutthroats left the mosque armed to the teeth. They slipped out of a side window and crept down a long wall to a narrow side street, where a black car and a Bangladeshi driver awaited them. Out of view of the police, they piled through a rear door, and set off for the moor.

  Theirs was a difficult task. They had no idea who they were looking for, no idea where he would be, and no idea how they would nail him. Also they had no idea how dangerous he might be; though Sheikh Abdullah had warned that if the assassin worked for the U.S. Government, he was likely to be lethal.

  They had one advantage, the element of surprise. The assassin would not be expecting them. Aside from that, all three of them—Mustapha, Jamal, and Sachin—were scared stiff, even though the latter two were carrying fully loaded Kalashnikovs, inaccurate, but fast, powerful, high-speed weapons.

  Also, they understood that if they were caught, the Brits would throw the book at them, probably demanding they face re-trial for their role in the seven-jetliner plot in 2006. In the end they all knew the consequences of apprehension by the British authorities. Only their terror of the Sheikh, and their lifelong belief that Allah loved his martyrs, and that they would be welcomed into paradise should they die on this mission, had kept them going.

  They had been provided with top-class weaponry, including combat knives and service revolvers, recently stolen by an associate from a nearby police department. But they lacked night-sight and training—and they were going up against a master.

  Mustapha, their leader, had a very pessimistic feeling, but they only had to kill one guy, after all. And they were sufficiently armed to take on a small platoon.

  Back in police HQ, Len Martin had no knowledge of the leak from his office, no clue that his station harbored a mole, and thus considered that VBB, whoever and wherever he was, would just give up and return to his hotel when no one showed up for the assassinations on the moor. No harm done.

  Twenty minutes after Mack took up position in the crevasse, Mustapha’s driver arrived. Mack had seen several cars drive by, but this was the first one that had stopped. One by one, he watched the al-Qaeda men disembark, counting them, uncertain whether the driver was one of the four he was expecting.

  But then the driver stepped back into his vehicle and left, driving a short distance further on, turning around and heading right back toward the city. Mack froze. That left only three, and that was all wrong. He wanted Ibrahim, Yousaf, Ben, and Abu. SEALs hate variation in commands, loathe inaccuracy, detest even the slightest deviation to a plan.

  Mack’s hair-trigger brain told him these were different guys. And why had they not arrived in a police cruiser as arranged? There should have been blue lights flashing, the final signal that these were his “targets.” Mack did not like what he was seeing, and he sensed screw-up.

  The three men were walking toward him, but then they fanned out, one running to the smaller rock, one heading around to the north side of the large one, and the other positioning himself against the wall of his crevasse, fifteen feet below. He could see two of the men carried light machine guns, but not the guy right below him. And he could see them taking up obvious battle stations, rifles raised to waist level, peering into the darkness.

  Mack didn’t know for sure who they were awaiting, but he had an uncanny feeling it was probably him. He surmised that there had been a leak somewhere. That the police had been unable to deliver the Chosen Ones. Even through his glass, he could see plainly that these were not the right guys.

  It occurred to Mack that they had come to kill him, and that meant he might have to kill them instead. Or at least take them out of the game. Then one of them spoke, in a half-whisper, across the sloping, wet ground. The words were muffled by the rain, but they were still intelligible: “What this terrible bastard look like?”

  The language was unmistakable to Mack’s trained ear. It was Pashto, the official language of Afghanistan, the language of the mountain men. “Fuck,” said Mack under his breath. “Those goddamned little creeps, all over again.”

  He knew he could not stage a gun battle up here. Sounds, especially gunfire, carry in wide open places like this, rain or no rain. If they really were after him, he must take them out silently. He waited for a reply to the first question.

  “No information,” someone called, “except he might be American, and that means very big and very horrible.”

  “Well, where is he, Jamal?” asked the third man, in English.

  “Not here yet,” came the reply. “English police say he meets our brothers at 9:30. It’s not even 8:30.”

  So there had been a leak. The Chosen Ones weren’t coming. And this crowd was up here specifically to get him.

  “Better get the ole’ ass in gear,” muttered Mack to himself. “Starting with this little sonofabitch right below me.” Through the glass, he could see the long, curved tribal knife, in the man’s right hand. Quietly and carefully he climbed to the rocky platform. Then he debated whether to jump and attack, or to climb slowly down and kill in total silence.

  Mack chose the second option because he did not want one sound from his first victim. The man below Jamal had his dagger drawn. Mack could see the glint even in the rain. He slowly inched down the rock until his left foot felt the wet ground at the base of the Cow.

  Now he was four feet from Jamal, who was busy trying to light a cigarette. As his match flared he caught sight of the masked giant just as Mack rammed his left fist across his mouth like a manhole cover. He tried to yell, tried to bite the hand that gagged him, all in the hundredth of a second before Mack slit his throat from end to end, and the tribal knife slipped onto the soft ground beneath the giant rock.

  Mack lowered the body softly, and then straightened up to spot his next target. Through the glass, he could see Mustapha leaning against the smaller rock, trying to make himself an impossible target. He heard the man call out, “Jamal! Jamal! Can you hear me?”

  Mack needed to get behind him, fast, and that required a run across the open ground, thirty-eight yards and into the heather, the bit he had slightly dreaded. He tried to mimic the man he had just killed, “Jamal, Jamal here!”

  He took off into the darkness. He tried to keep quiet but the pounding of his boots betrayed him. But it also confused his two enemies.

  Mustapha now yelled out, “Jamal, where you going, man? You can’t run out on us now.”

  By this time Mack Bedford had dived headlong into the high heather, and was lying comple
tely still as he made an infinitesimal adjustment on his glass, just so he could see Mustapha with total clarity in the soft green glow of all night-vision equipment.

  The silence of Jamal completely unnerved his leader, who opened fire in blind panic—just one burst aimed toward the biggest rock. The third man standing in total shadow on the far side of The Cow suddenly yelled, “What’s going on? Mustapha, where’s Jamal? Is anyone here?”

  That yell betrayed him. Mack swiveled the glass and focused on Sachin. He drew his pistol and shot him dead at forty yards range, four SIG-Sauer 9mm bullets fired right into his upper chest.

  Mustapha still had no idea who was doing the shooting. He screamed out, almost hysterically, and all the while Mack Bedford was coming through the heather, in the grim terrifying elbow crawl of the trained Navy SEAL sniper.

  “Where are you? JAMAL! SACHIN! ANSWER ME!”

  Mustapha had no clue who was alive or dead, or if there was an intruder. Were they still alone? Why was Jamal no longer answering? Again, in a kind of fiendish desperation, he opened fire into the darkness, three volleys, echoing over the moors. But now there was only silence. Mustapha was petrified.

  And he did not have long to wait. He slumped back against the rock, his rifle held loosely by his side. At which precise moment Mack Bedford came out of the night.

  Mack grabbed the barrel of the rifle from Mustapha’s astonished grip, leaned back like a baseball slugger, and swung the butt with home-run force straight into the Afghani’s face, obliterating the nose, both cheek-bones, the jawbone, and the front area of his skull. Mustapha, his head caved in, died as he slithered backward down the Calf. Mack’s unscheduled night’s work was almost done.

  He dragged Mustapha’s body over to the big rock, retrieved Jamal’s dagger, and placed it in the leader’s right hand. Then he jogged over to Sachin, dragged him over to the other two, and placed that rifle firmly into Mustapha’s grasp. Now they were just three immigrants from a primitive tribal culture, who’d had a somewhat nasty row.