Remote Control

Ex-SAS soldier Nick Stone is working in the USA as a "K" - an underground agent - when he sees a newscast about the Canary Wharf bombing. Tipped off by old friend Kev, Nick flies down to see him, only to find him brutally murdered. With unanswered questions about the murder, he must go on the run.

NINE YEARS LATER

If you work for the British intelligence service (also known as the Firm) and get formally summoned to a meeting at their headquarters building on the south bank of the River Thames at Vauxhall, there are three levels of interview. First is the one with coffee and cookies, which means they're going to give you a pat on the head. Next down the food chain is the more businesslike coffee but no cookies, which means they're not asking but telling you to follow orders. And finally there's no cookies, and no coffee, either, which basically means that you're in deep shit. Since leaving the SAS in 1993 and working on deniable operations, I'd had a number at every level, and I wasn't expecting a nice frothy cappuccino this particular Monday. In fact I was quite worried, because things hadn't been going too well.

As I emerged from the subway station at Vauxhall the omens weren't exactly with me, either. The March sky was dull and overcast, preparing itself for the Easter holiday; my path was blocked by roadworks, and a burst from a jackhammer sounded like the crack of a firing squad. Vauxhall Cross, home of what the press call MI6 but which is actually the Secret Intelligence Service, is about a mile upstream from the Houses of Parliament. Bizarrely shaped like a beige and black pyramid that's had its top cut off, with staged levels, large towers on either side, and a terrace bar overlooking the river, it needs only a few swirls of neon and you'd swear it was a casino. It wouldn't look out of place in Las Vegas. I missed Century House, the old HQ building near Waterloo station. It might have been 1960s ugly, square with loads of glass, net curtains, and antennae, and not so handy to the subway, but it was much less pretentious.

Opposite Vauxhall Cross and about two hundred yards across the wide arterial road is an elevated section of railway line, and beneath that are arches that have been turned into shops, two of which have been knocked through to make a massive motorcycle shop. I was early, so I popped in and fantasized about which Ducati I was going to buy when I got a pay raise--which wasn't going to be today. What the hell, the way my luck was going I'd probably go and kill myself on it.

I'd fucked up severely. I'd been sent to Saudi to encourage, then train, some Northern Iraqi Kurds to kill three leading members of the Ba'ath party; the hope was that the assassinations would heat everything up and help dismantle the regime in Baghdad.

The first part of my task was to take delivery in Saudi of some former Eastern bloc weapons that had been smuggled in--Russian Draganov sniper weapons, a couple of Makharov pistols, and two AK assault rifles, the parachute version with a folding stock. All serial numbers had been erased to make them deniable.

For maximum chaos, the plan was to get the Kurds to make three hits at exactly the same time in and around Baghdad. One was going to be a close-quarters shoot, using the Makharovs. The idea was for the two boys to walk up to the
family house, knock on the door, take on whatever threat presented itself, make entry into the house, zap the target, and run.

The second was going to be a sniper option. The target saw himself as a big-time fitness freak; he'd come out and have a little jog around a track, all of about four hundred yards. He emerged from his house every day in a lime green, fluffy velour tracksuit, did one lap, and that was his training for the day. The boys were going to hit him just as he started to sweat and slow down--which by the look of him would be after about a hundred yards. I would be on this one to coordinate the hit so that both fired at once.

The third target was going to be taken out on his way to the ministry. Two bikes would pull up at stoplights and give him the good news with their AK-47s.

I landed up in Northern Iraq without any problems and started the buildup training. At this stage not even the Kurds knew what their task was going to be. The Draganov sniper rifles were a heap of shit. However, the weapon is never
as important as the ammunition, which in this case was
even worse, Indian 7.62mm. Given a free hand I would have wanted to use Lapier, manufactured in Finland and the best in the world for sniping because of its consistency, but Western rounds would have given the game away.

The Indian ammunition was hit and miss--mostly miss. On top of that the Draganovs were semiautomatic rifles. Ideally, you need a bolt-action weapon, which is not only better for taking the hit, it also doesn't leave an empty case behind because it stays in the weapon until you reload. However, it had to be Russian shit that they were zapped with, and it had to be deniable.

Once all three jobs went down, the weapons were to be dumped and destroyed. They weren't. On the AK there is a forward leaf sight, with a serial number scratched underneath it. I had been told that all serial numbers had been removed at the source, and had taken the information at face value. I didn't check--I fucked up.

The only way to save the situation as far as London was concerned was to kill the Kurd teams I'd been training. It was damage control on a drastic scale, but it had to be done. Detail counts. If the Iraqis could trace the weapons, they might make the UK connection. If they then captured the Kurds, who just happened to mention that they had been trained by a Westerner called Nick, it wouldn't take a mastermind to figure out which country he came from. It actually pissed me off to have to kill them, because I'd gotten to know these guys really well. I was still wearing the G Shock watch one of the snipers had given me. We'd had a bet when we were on the range, and he lost. I knew that I could beat him, but still cheated because I had to win. I'd really gotten to like him.