Читать книгу War on the Streets - Peter Cave, Peter Cave - Страница 5

Lieutenant-Colonel Barney Davies, 22 SAS Training Wing, cruised slowly down the Strand and the Mall, then turned into Horse Guards Road. It was not the first time he had been summoned to a Downing Street conference, and he’d learned a few of the wrinkles over the years. Finding a parking space was the first trick. You had to know where to look.

Finding his objective, he slid the BMW into a parking bay, climbed out and loaded the meter to its maximum. These things had a nasty habit of stretching out for much longer than anticipated. What might start as a preliminary briefing session could well develop into a protracted discussion, or even a full-scale planning operation. Failing to take precautions could prove expensive.

He turned away from the parking meter and, glancing up to where he knew the nearest security video camera was hidden, treated it to a lingering smile. Every little helped. If they knew he was coming it might just cut down the number of security checks he’d have to be stopped for. Picking his way between the buildings, he ducked into the little labyrinth of covered walkways which would bring him to the back of Downing Street and ultimately to the rear security entrance of Number 10.

In fact Davies was stopped only twice, although he suspected he had identified at least two other plain-clothes men, who had allowed him to pass unchallenged. He preferred to assume that this was due to his face having become familiar, rather than security becoming sloppy. There could be no let-up in London’s fight against terrorism.

The final checkpoint, however, was very thorough. Davies waited patiently as the doorman checked his security pass, radioed in his details and paused to await clearance. Finally, he was inside the building and climbing the stairs to Conference Room B.

He pushed open the panelled double doors and stepped into the room, casting his eyes about for any familiar faces. It was always a psychological advantage to re-establish any personal links, however tenuous, Davies had always found. It gave you that little extra clout, should you find yourself out on a limb.

Of the five people already in the room, Davies recognized only two: Michael Wynne-Tilsley, one of the top-echelon parliamentary secretaries, and David Grieves from the ‘green slime’. Davies decided not to bother with Wynne-Tilsley, other than to give him a brief nod. On the single occasion he had had any dealings with the man before, Davies had found him to be a close-lipped, somewhat arrogant little bastard, and far too protective of his job to give out any useful information. He would be better off having a preliminary word with Grieves. The man might be MI6, but he would probably respect Davies’s grade five security clearance enough to give him at least an inkling of what the meeting was about. And forewarned was forearmed. Davies hated going into things blinkered, let alone blind.

He sauntered over to the man, smiling and holding out his hand. ‘David, how are you?’

Grieves accepted the proffered hand a trifle warily. ‘Don’t even ask,’ he warned, though there was the ghost of a smile on his lips.

Davies grinned sheepishly. ‘Come on, David, you’re here and I’m here, so somebody’s got to be thinking of a joint operation.’

Grieves conceded the point with a vague shrug.

Davies pushed his tactical advantage. ‘So where in this benighted little world are we going to get our feet wet now?’ he asked. ‘First guess: central Africa.’

Grieves smiled. ‘Wrong,’ he said curtly. ‘A bit closer to home and that’s all I’m telling you until the Home Secretary opens the briefing.’

It was scant information, but it was enough to tell Davies two things. First, if the Home Secretary rather than the Foreign Secretary was involved, then it was a sure bet that it was a purely internal matter. Second, Grieves’s guardedness suggested that he had been called to another one of those ‘This Meeting Never Happened’ meetings. It was useful information to have. Briefings conducted on a strictly need-to-know basis were invariably the stickiest.

Wisely, Davies decided not to press the military intelligence man any further. He looked around the room, trying to guess at the identities of the other three occupants. The youngest man looked pretty bland and faceless, and Davies took him to be a minor civil servant of some kind. The other two were a different breed. Both in their late forties or early fifties, they had the unmistakable stamp of those used to exercising authority. The senior of the pair was tantalizingly familiar. Davies felt sure that he ought to recognize the man, quite possibly from exposure in the media. But for the moment, it just would not come.

Grieves followed the direction of his gaze. ‘I take it you recognize McMillan,’ he muttered.

It clicked, finally. Alistair McMillan, Commissioner, Metropolitan Police. Davies must have seen the man’s picture a dozen times over the past few years. Seeing him out of uniform had thrown him off track.

‘And his colleague?’ he asked.

‘Commander John Franks, Drugs Squad,’ Grieves volunteered. ‘Now you know almost as much as I do.’

‘But not for much longer, I hope,’ Davies observed. The Home Secretary had just entered the conference room, flanked by two more parliamentary secretaries. Davies recognized Adrian Bendle from the Foreign Office, and wondered what his presence signified.

The Home Secretary wasted little time. He moved to the octagonal walnut conference table, laying down his papers, and nodding around the room in general greeting. ‘Well, gentlemen, shall we get down to business?’ he suggested as soon as he was seated. He glanced over at Wynne-Tilsley as everyone took their seats. ‘Perhaps you’d like to make the formal introductions and we can get started.’

Introductions over, the Home Secretary looked at them all gravely. ‘I suppose I don’t really need to remind you that this meeting is strictly confidential and unofficial?’

Davies smiled to himself, momentarily. Just as he had suspected, it was one of those. That accounted for the absence of an official recorder in the room. Pulling his face straight again, he joined in the general nods of assent around the table.

‘Good,’ the Home Secretary said, and nodded with satisfaction. He glanced aside at the young parliamentary secretary who had accompanied him. ‘Perhaps if you could close the curtains, we can take a look at what we’re up against.’

The young man rose, crossed the conference room and pulled the thick velvet curtains. Pressing a remote-control panel he held in his hand, he switched on the large-screen video monitor in the far corner of the room.

As the screen flickered into life, the Home Secretary continued. ‘Most of you will probably have seen most of these items on the news over the past few months. However, it will be useful to view them all again in context, so that we can all see the exact nature of the enemy.’

He fell silent as the first of a series of European news reports began.

Davies recognized the first one at once. It was the abduction of the Italian wine millionaire Salvo Frescatini in Milan, some three months previously. The report, cobbled together from amateur video footage, police reconstructions and television news clips, covered the kidnapping, in broad daylight, the subsequent ransom demands of the abductors and the final shoot-out when the Italian police tracked the gang down. It was a bloody encounter which had left eight police officers dead and a score of innocent bystanders wounded. The film ended with a shot of the hostage as the police had finally found him – his trussed body cut to shreds by over two dozen 9mm armour-piercing slugs from Franchi submachine-guns. The kidnappers had been armed like a combat assault team, and were both remarkably professional in their methods and utterly ruthless.

The sequence ended, the venue switching to Germany and more scenes of murderous violence. Angry right-wing mobs razing the hostels of immigrant workers to the ground, desecrated Jewish cemeteries and clips of half a dozen racist murders.

A student riot at the Sorbonne in Paris came next, with graphic images of French riot police lying in pools of their own blood after protest placards had given way to clubs, machetes and handguns.

The screen suddenly went blank. Daylight flooded into the conference room once more as the curtains were drawn back. The Home Secretary studied everyone at the table for a few seconds.

‘France…Italy…Germany,’ he muttered finally. ‘The whole of Europe seems to be suddenly exploding into extremes of violence. Our fears, gentlemen, are that it may be about to happen here.’

There was a long, somewhat shocked silence in the room, finally broken by Adrian Bendle. ‘Perhaps I could take up the story from here, Home Secretary?’ the Foreign Office man suggested.

The Home Secretary agreed with a curt nod, sitting back in his chair. Bendle took centre stage, standing and leaning over the table.

‘As you’re probably aware, gentlemen, we now work in fairly close co-operation with most of the EC authorities,’ he announced. ‘Quite apart from our strengthened links with Interpol, we also liaise with government departments, undercover operations and security organizations. Through these and other channels, we have pieced together some highly unpleasant conclusions over the past few months.’ He paused for a while, taking a breath. ‘Now the violent scenes you have just witnessed would appear, at face value, to be isolated incidents, in different countries and for different reasons – but not, apparently, connected. Unfortunately, there is a connection, and it is disquieting, to say the least.’ There was another, much longer pause before Bendle took up the story again.

‘In every single one of the preceding incidents, there is a common factor,’ he went on. ‘In those few cases where the authorities were able to arrest survivors – but more commonly from post-mortems carried out on the corpses – all the participants in these violent clashes were found to have high concentrations of a new drug in their systems. It is our belief, and one echoed by our European counterparts, that this is highly significant.’

Commissioner McMillan interrupted. ‘When you say a new drug, what exactly are we talking about?’

Bendle glanced over at Grieves. ‘Perhaps you’re better briefed to explain to the commissioner,’ he suggested.

Grieves climbed to his feet. ‘What we appear to be dealing with here is a synthetic “designer” drug of a type previously unknown to us,’ he explained. ‘Whilst it is similar in many ways to the currently popular Ecstasy, it also seems to incorporate some of the characteristics, and the effects, of certain of the opiate narcotics and some hallucinogens. A deliberately created chemical cocktail, in fact, which is tailor-made and targeted at the youth market. Initial tests suggest that it is cheap and fairly simple to manufacture in massive quantities, and its limited distribution thus far could only be a sampling operation. If our theories are correct, this stuff could be due to literally flood on to the streets of Europe – and this country is unlikely to prove an exception.’

‘And the connection with extremes of violence?’ Commander Franks put in.

‘At present, circumstantial,’ Grieves admitted. ‘But from what we know already, one of the main effects of this drug is to make the user feel invulnerable, free from all normal moral restraints and totally unafraid of the consequences of illegal or immoral action. Whether it actually raises natural aggression levels, we’re not sure, because we’re still conducting tests. But what our boffins say quite categorically is that the use of this drug most definitely gives the user an excuse for violence – and for a lot of these young thugs today, that’s all they need.’

The Home Secretary took over again. ‘There are other, and equally disquieting factors,’ he pointed out. ‘Not the least of which is the appalling growth of radical right-wing movements and factions which seem to be popping up all over Europe at the moment. Many, if not all, of the incidents you have just seen would appear to be inspired by such ethology. The obvious conclusion is both inescapable and terrifying.’ He broke off, glancing back to Grieves again. ‘Perhaps you could explain our current thinking on this, Mr Grieves.’

Grieves nodded. ‘In everything we have seen so far, two particularly alarming factors stand out. One is the degree of organization involved, and the second is the degree and sophistication of the weaponry these people are getting hold of. We’re not talking about kids with Stanley knives and the odd handgun here, gentlemen. We’re dealing with machine-pistols, sub-machine-guns, pump-action shotguns – even grenades.’

Commissioner McMillan interrupted. He sounded dubious. ‘You make it sound as though we’re dealing with terrorists, not tearaways.’

Grieves’s face was set and grim as he responded. ‘That may well be the case, sir,’ he said flatly. ‘We have reasonable grounds for suspecting that a new type of terrorist organization is building in Europe, perhaps loosely allied to the radical right. If we’re right, they are creating a structure of small, highly mobile and active cells which may or may not have a single overriding control organization at this time.’

Commissioner McMillan was silently thoughtful for a few moments, digesting this information and its implications. Finally he sighed deeply. ‘So what you’re telling us, in effect, is that a unified structure could come into being at any time? That we face the possibility of an entirely new terrorist force on the rampage in our towns and cities?’

The Home Secretary took it up from there. ‘That is exactly what we fear,’ he said sombrely. ‘And we believe that conventional police forces may be totally inadequate and ill-prepared to deal with such a threat.’ He paused, eyeing everyone around the table in turn. ‘Which is why I invited Lieutenant-Colonel Davies of the SAS to this briefing today,’ he added, quietly.

There was a stunned silence as the implications of this statement sank in. Of the group, no one was more surprised than Barney Davies, but it was he who found his voice first.

‘Excuse me, Home Secretary, but are you saying you want to put the SAS out there on the streets? In our own towns and cities?’ he asked somewhat incredulously.

The man gave a faint shrug. ‘We did it in Belfast, when it became necessary,’ he pointed out. He looked at Davies with a faint smile. ‘And it’s not as if your chaps were complete strangers to urban operations.’

Davies conceded the point, but with reservations. ‘With respect, sir, an embassy siege is one thing. Putting a full anti-terrorist unit into day-to-day operation is quite another.’ He paused briefly. ‘I assume that’s the sort of thing you had in mind?’

The Home Secretary shrugged again. ‘Yes and no,’ he muttered, rather evasively. ‘Although personally I had seen it more in terms of a collaboration between the SAS and the conventional police forces. A joint operation, as it were.’

Davies held back, thinking about his response. Finally he looked directly at the Home Secretary, shaking his head doubtfully. ‘Again with respect, sir, but you are aware of the rules. The SAS does not work with civilians.’

The Home Secretary met his eyes with a cool, even gaze. ‘I think you’re rather stretching a point there, Lieutenant-Colonel Davies. I would hardly call the police civilians.’ He thought for a second, digging for further ammunition. ‘Besides, the SAS Training Wing works with various types of civil as well as military groups all over the world, so why not on home ground? Think of it more in those terms if it makes you feel better. A training exercise, helping to create a new counter-terrorist force.’

The man was on dicey ground, and he knew it, Davies thought. Nevertheless, his own position was not exactly crystal-clear, either. They were both dealing with a very grey area indeed. For the moment, he decided to play along with things as they stood.

‘And how would the police feel about such a combined operation?’ he asked.

McMillan spoke up. ‘We have discussed similar ideas in principle, in the past, of course. But obviously, this has come as just as much of a surprise to me as it has to you.’ He paused for thought. ‘But at this moment, my gut feeling is that we could probably work something out.’

The Home Secretary rose to his feet. He looked rather relieved, Davies thought. ‘Well, gentlemen, I’ll leave you all to think it through and come up with some concrete proposals,’ he said, collecting up his papers from the table.

‘Just one more thing, Home Secretary,’ Davies called out, unwilling to let the man escape quite so easily. ‘We’ll have full approval from the relevant departments on this one, I take it?’

The man smiled cannily. He was not going to be tempted to stick his head directly into the noose. ‘Grudging approval, yes,’ he conceded. ‘But of course you won’t be able to count on anyone with any real authority to bail you out if you come unstuck.’

It was more or less what Davies had expected. He returned the knowing smile. ‘So we’re on our own,’ he said. It was a statement, not a question.

‘Aren’t you always?’ the Home Secretary shot back.

It wasn’t a question that Davies had any answer for. He was silent as the politician left the conference room, followed by his aides. There was only himself, Commissioner McMillan, Commander Franks and David Grieves left around the table. No one said anything for a long time.

Finally, Franks cleared his throat. ‘Well, it would seem to me that the first thing you are going to need is a good, straight cop who knows the drug scene at street level,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘No disrespect intended, but it really is foreign territory out there.’

It made sense, Davies thought, taking no offence. Franks was right – the theatre of operations would be something completely new and unfamiliar to his men, and they didn’t have any maps. They would need a guide.

‘Someone with a bit of initiative, who can think for himself,’ Davies insisted. ‘I don’t want some order-taker.’

Franks nodded understandingly. ‘I’ll find you such a man,’ he promised.