December. James Steel

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СКАЧАТЬ the car, please, sir,’ he said in a terse Geordie accent. It was an instruction, not a request.

      Alex crossed the road and got into the back of the Range Rover with the trooper. The other man got in the front seat and muttered into a radio in his coat collar.

      ‘Alpha, this is Charlie. ETA three minutes.’

      The car drove slowly down the quiet road and then turned right and started winding its way around the backstreets of Fulham. Alex was thinking that they wouldn’t be able to go far in the mass of traffic jamming the main roads, but then he saw that they were driving down the lane approaching the back gates of the Hurlingham Club.

       What the hell are we doing here?

      The Hurlingham was an exclusive sports club with huge grounds: cricket pitch, croquet lawns, tennis courts and pools. It was an old Victorian place with beautiful colonnaded buildings; Alex’s family had been members for generations, but he hadn’t actually paid his fees for a year now.

      A security guard saw them approaching and muttered into his radio. The large back gate swung open. They were expected. Someone had obviously been pulling a lot of strings. They drove into the area used by the groundsmen, past the snow-covered rubbish bins and mowing machines, under the boughs of a huge cedar tree and round the back of the main club buildings to the cricket pitch.

      A Sikorsky S-76 executive helicopter was winding up its rotors, blowing a cloud of snow out towards them. It was painted an anonymous white with no company markings.

      ‘Follow me, please, sir,’ growled the Millwall fan in the front seat. He and the other trooper got out of the car with Alex and, bent double against the rotor-wash, ran over to the helicopter.

      They clambered in, slammed the door shut and instantly lifted off in a cloud of snow.

      They rose up across the river, southwest from the Hurlingham. Alex tried to work out where they were going. After a couple of minutes he couldn’t tell anything as all power had been shut off so there were no lights on the ground and everything disappeared in the pitch-black and swirling snow outside.

      The pilot muttered a few times into his headset, getting course alterations from someone, but over the noise of the engines Alex couldn’t hear where to. He checked his watch to track their flight time; after fifteen minutes they began to descend.

      The beam of the landing light showed glimpses of snow-clad pinewoods as they swung round to land. The aircraft veered and tilted in the wind but the pilot rode out the gusts expertly and brought them down with a slight bump on a football pitch, Alex could see some sagging wooden goalposts in front of them with a high chain-link perimeter fence behind it, topped by razor wire.

      ‘OK, sir, this way.’ The drug-dealer opened the door. They both pulled their coat collars around their faces, huddled against the white fury whipped up by the rotors, and stumbled through the knee-deep snow. The snow got into Alex’s black Oxfords and melted into his insteps.

      Once he was able to stop squinting against the blizzard, he looked up and saw from the aircraft lights that the field was surrounded by dark trees on three sides but that they were heading towards a cluster of low buildings.

      The man pulled a large yellow torch from his coat pocket and shone it along the side of the building: brick single-storey offices of the cheapest possible construction. The windows were dark, the place looked completely deserted.

      He headed towards a door. Alex glanced at a plastic plaque screwed into the brick next to it: ‘MoD Training Centre RG—8894’.

      The man unlocked the door and shone the powerful beam inside, illuminating a corridor with cheap brown pine doors leading off it, each with a little Civil Service number plate. The musty smell of bureaucracy filled the place.

      ‘If you just go down the corridor to that door at the far end, sir…’ He pointed to a closed door about forty feet from them with a faint rim of light around the edge of it. He handed Alex the torch and turned to go back to the helicopter.

      ‘Well, who?’ Alex blurted at him urgently. The darkened building and mysterious behaviour was beginning to get to him.

      ‘I don’t know, sir. Need-to-know only.’ The man shrugged with indifference. ‘If you just go down there…’ he repeated more insistently, pointing.

      Alex bridled. He didn’t like taking orders. He glared at him, took the torch and stalked off down the corridor. The man shut the door. He was on his own.

       What the fuck is all this creeping around?

      He was now seriously alarmed. The operation had come from the top—the SAS and MoD connections seemed to bear that out—but the rushed nature of the contact, pulling him off the street and dumping him in this weird location, felt wrong.

      Why was the Establishment being so secretive, so rushed? They were supposed to be the ones in charge.

      He stood in the corridor for a moment, listening. Absolute silence. The building was stone cold, his breath smoked in the reflected light from the torch. He flashed it around to get some bearings: worn brown carpet and scuffed beige walls.

      He brushed the snow off his hair, stamped it from his feet, straightened his overcoat and walked down the corridor, the torch pushing a circle of light out in front of him. The anonymous-looking door at the end had a little blue plastic nameplate with ‘C-492’ on it. He paused, put his ear next to it and listened. Nothing.

      He knocked and then opened it.

      Inside was a windowless rectangular meeting room as bare and functional as the rest of the building, dimly lit by a battery-powered camping lantern on a brown veneer table. The lamp lit the table but the corners of the room were shadowy. A laptop lay open on the far side of it.

      A tall man in a smart coat, worn over a dark pinstriped suit, was pacing back and forth across the far end of the room with his hands clasped behind him, his white hair scraped into a severe short-back-and-sides.

      He flicked a tense look round as Alex came in.

      Alex recognised his large, red, leathery face instantly: General Sir Nigel Harrington was a well-known military figure. Alex had served under him when the Blues and Royals had been in 5 Airborne Brigade, based at Aldershot. A former paratrooper and ex-head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, he had retired three years ago. He was now in his late sixties but still kept his back ramrod straight and had a characteristic combative jut to his jaw.

      A tough, no-bullshit commander, he had been respected by his men but definitely not liked. All officers understood that command meant taking unpopular decisions, but Harrington had implemented them with an abrasive delight that bordered on the sadistic. ‘Wanker’ was his most frequent moniker amongst his HQ staff.

      Alex realised the fact that the general was in the room raised the significance of what was going on by another order of magnitude. The government didn’t drag major figures like him out of retirement for nothing. Alex involuntarily straightened his back.

      ‘Ah, Devereux, glad you could make it. Take a seat.’ The words were barked out as an instruction.

      ‘Thank you,’ Alex muttered, and sat down at the opposite end of the table. He managed to stop himself adding ‘sir’; he wasn’t in the army any more and neither was Harrington, at least officially.

      ‘Now СКАЧАТЬ