Payback Read online
Table of Contents
Cover
Copyright
Also by Andy McNab and Robert Rigby
Classified - Secret : Ultra - Classified
Payback
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Epilogue
Glossary
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Epub ISBN: 9781407046952
Version 1.0
www.randomhouse.co.uk
PAYBACK
A CORGI BOOK 978 0 552 55222 6 (from January 2007)
0 552 55222 4
First published in Great Britain by Doubleday, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books
Doubleday edition published 2005
Corgi edition published 2006
3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © Andy McNab and Robert Rigby, 2005
The right of Andy McNab and Robert Rigby to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Papers used by Random House Children’s Books are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
Corgi Books are published by Random House Children’s Books, 61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA, a division of The Random House Group Ltd, in Australia by Random House Australia (Pty) Ltd, 20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney, NSW 2061, Australia, in New Zealand by Random House New Zealand Ltd, 18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland 10, New Zealand, in South Africa by Random House (Pty) Ltd, Isle of Houghton, Corner Boundary Road & Carse O’Gowrie, Houghton 2198, South Africa, and in India by Random House India Pvt Ltd, 301 World Trade Tower, Hotel Intercontinental Grand Complex, Barakhamba Lane, New Delhi 110001, India
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bookmarque Ltd, Croydon, Surrey
Fergus heard the metallic scraping noise and turned to see Danny squatting with both hands on the lip of the shutter. Instantly he knew it had been opened since locking up the previous night.
‘No!’ he yelled, and as Danny started to straighten and the shutter began to rise, his grandfather dived at him. He crashed into Danny’s thighs and they both went sprawling to the ground.
Danny lay on the pavement, gasping and winded, as Fergus crawled on top of him, pinning him to the ground, waiting for the explosion.
It didn’t come.
As Fergus looked at the shutter, now raised to just below knee height, Danny turned his head and saw the fishing line fixed to the steel hoop. He’d learned enough over the past few months to know it meant mortal danger.
‘Get to the ERV,’ hissed Fergus. ‘Now!’
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The official tie-in novelization of the movie
CLASSIFIED – SECRET: ULTRA – CLASSIFIED
SIT REP 1
FERGUS WATTS
AGE: 53
HEIGHT: Five feet, eleven inches
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: Hair – grey; eyes – blue; build – lean, wiry; distinguishing physical marks – noticeable limp due to bullet wound in right thigh BACKGROUND: Infantry. SAS, Warrant Officer, special skills – explosives. Tours of duty include – Northern Ireland (decorated), first Gulf conflict (decorated), Colombia. Recruited as a Deniable Operator (‘K’) to infiltrate FARC, Colombia. Cover story – traitor, ‘gone over’ to rebels for money. Watts’s cover was deliberately blown by our PRIMARY TARGET. Watts wounded and captured after gun battle with Colombian anti-narcotics police. Imprisoned by Colombian authorities. Subsequently led mass jail break. Returned to Britain, route and date unknown. Traced through grandson, Danny (see below). Captured but escaped from safe house with help from grandson and Elena Omolodon. Note: Information on Omolodon’s involvement unknown to Secret Intelligence Service. Two operators and one civilian (Eddie Moyes, freelance reporter) killed during escape. Watts on run for past six months.
DANNY WATTS
AGE: 17
HEIGHT: Five feet, ten inches
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: Hair – brown; eyes – blue; build – slim; distinguishing physical marks – none known
BACKGROUND: Orphaned at six, parents died in car crash. Various foster families until moved to Foxcroft, south London, residential home for teenagers, where he met Elena Omolodon. Applied for army officer training bursary. Rejected after interview with PRIMARY TARGET. Had never met grandfather but fed ‘traitor’ story and located (method unknown). Assisted in escape of Fergus Watts. On run for past six months. Note: Elena Omolodon still resident at Foxcroft.
INTERIM OBJECTIVE: Still need to confirm who, if anyone outside the FIRM, knew Fergus Watts was working as a K. Watts also remains potentially useful in operation to expose PRIMARY TARGET.
PAYBACK Andy McNaband Robert RigbyCORGI BOOKS
1
Big Ben struck midday as he walked through Parliament Square. The spring sun was warm, almost hot, but he kept his brand-new puffa jacket zipped up to the neck. A police car siren sounded, and he turned to watch the driver skilfully manoeuvre his vehicle through the snarl of traffi
c and on towards Westminster Bridge.
He was feeling slightly apprehensive, but at the same time elated. At last he was about to do something meaningful, something significant. Waiting at the pedestrian crossing, he smiled and gently squeezed the few twists of green garden twine nestling in the palm of his right hand. For comfort.
As the traffic lights turned to red and the green man flashed on, he crossed with the rest of the crowd waiting at the kerbside. Japanese tourists walked with their camcorders at arm’s length, watching their screens while filming the imposing, magnificent buildings. Motorbike couriers revved their engines, impatient for the lights to change.
He joined the queue outside St Stephen’s Entrance, the public access point to the Houses of Parliament. Armed police watched impassively as the line of visitors slowly shuffled towards the wide entrance doors leading to the X-ray machine and the metal detector blocking the corridor about fifteen metres inside the building.
Ahead of him was a small group of young women, some with babies in carriers strapped to their fronts, brandishing leaflets warning of the health hazards created by a newly opened landfill site and chatting animatedly about the imminent meeting with their local MP.
The queue was in a suntrap, and tiny beads of sweat dotted his upper lip, but still he kept his chunky Gap jacket zipped up. He looked smart: his hair was neatly combed, his trousers were immaculately pressed and his black shoes still shone with newness.
A thin trickle of sweat ran down the side of his head as he turned and smiled politely at a group of pensioners who were beginning to line up behind him. The women wore their best dresses and light coats and the men were in blazers, their old regimental insignias sewn onto the breast pocket and their highly polished medals hanging proudly above.
‘You here for the tour too?’ asked one of the men, fishing out a letter of invitation from his blazer pocket and unfolding it to reveal the embossed letterhead reading: HOUSE OF COMMONS.
‘No,’ he answered softly.
‘How old are you, son?’ said the man.
‘Seventeen.’
The man nodded his admiration. ‘Well, it’s good to see a youngster with an interest in politics,’ he said. ‘Makes a nice change these days.’
‘Oh, yes,’ he replied, his fingers caressing the twine in his hand. ‘I’m very interested in politics.’
He turned back as the queue moved closer to the large doors opening onto the grand corridor, where statues of statesmen through the ages lined both sides. Reporters and visitors were showing their credentials for entering the public areas before placing briefcases and bags on the X-ray machine and then stepping through the detector.
The group of young women was stopped by a whiteshirted security guard and asked about the purpose of their visit. They named their MP and showed their letter of invitation and were allowed to move into the corridor towards the security checks.
The new shoes were pinching slightly, chafing his heels, but nothing could stop his joy as he stepped over the ancient threshold of Parliament, where a security guard was waiting to question him. ‘And what business do you have here today, sir?’
He smiled at the security guard and whispered a single word: ‘Martyrdom.’
The guard leaned closer. ‘Sorry, sir, what name was that?’
He didn’t reply, but pulled sharply at the twine that ran up his arm. St Stephen’s Entrance erupted in a hail of flying glass, shattered statues and broken bodies.
2
BLOODY CARNAGE
The two-word headline was plastered across a photograph filling the entire front and back pages of the Sun.
The graphic picture showed a bewildered and blood-soaked female survivor being helped away from the dust and debris of the shattered St Stephen’s Entrance by an ashen-faced government minister. They were stepping over the twisted body of one of the victims. The minister’s eyes bulged in disbelief; his jacket hung in shreds; one end of the bloodied bandage wrapped around his head dangled down to his shoulder.
Eight further pages were devoted solely to what the newspaper was calling ‘the Parliament Bomb Outrage’.
There were photos of fallen masonry, shattered glass, buckled ironwork, the decapitated head of a stone statue, a single shiny black shoe. Heavily armed police officers were pictured manning hastily erected barriers, paramedics rushed towards ambulances with laden stretchers, an exhausted firefighter leaned against a wall with tears streaming down his face, white-suited scene-of-crime officers searched for forensic evidence amidst the chaos and confusion.
There were photos of survivors and photos of the dead. Bodies lying in the dust. Rows of zipped-up body bags.
In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, television and radio news bulletins had suggested the death toll could reach between a hundred and fifty and two hundred, but in the hours that followed, the number of confirmed dead was put at sixty-four. More were still listed as missing and many more were fighting for their lives in hospital.
The suicide bomber had been quickly identified: his student railcard was found five metres from the spot where the bomb had exploded. But the discovery of the railcard, far from explaining the outrage, just added to the mystery. For Zeenan Khan had been no international terrorist or ‘sleeper’ smuggled in from a terrorist hotbed like Afghanistan or the Middle East to await the order to strike from his masters.
Zeenan had been a seventeen-year-old A-level student from north London, and although he was of Pakistani origin and a Muslim, he had been born and bred in England. He was English. An Arsenal scarf hung over his bed and on the bedroom walls were posters torn from Loaded magazine.
His devastated family were said to be too distressed to speak to the press and had gone into hiding, but they were described by neighbours as being ‘not political’ and ‘proud to be British’.
There were photos of Zeenan in his school uniform. His headmaster was quoted as being ‘shocked and struggling to believe that the bomber could really have been the level-headed student who obtained eight excellent GCSEs and had been working hard for his A levels’.
Somehow all the newspapers had managed to find a family portrait: mum, dad, three kids – Zeenan the eldest – all smiling, happy, proud.
He was ‘just a normal boy’, said a neighbour who refused to be named. ‘A quiet lad,’ said another. ‘Kept himself to himself, but very polite and never in any trouble.’
Politicians, community and religious leaders were quoted. Everyone appealed for calm.
But for all the background information, comments and quotes, two vital questions remained unanswered: how had a seventeen-year-old schoolboy made, or obtained, an explosive device reckoned to be identical to those used by extremists in places like Jerusalem and Baghdad? And why had Zeenan Khan, a boy with everything to live for, chosen to step willingly into oblivion?
News of the bombing was dominating newspaper headlines and television news reports around the world. At a roadside between Badajoz and Huelva in southern Spain two builders, Londoners in their twenties, were drinking tea and reading a copy of the Sun printed in Madrid that morning.
‘It’s unbelievable,’ said Paul as he scanned the pages. ‘It says here he had at least seven kilos of explosives strapped to him. What’s the world coming to when kids no older than young Dean there are blowing themselves to pieces?’
‘But they’re not like Dean, are they?’ boomed his mate Benny, who sounded as though he should be selling fruit and veg off an East End barrow. ‘They’re different, these Muslims. It’s a different mentality, a different attitude to life and death. We’ll never understand it.’
The two builders were customers at a tea bar by the side of the sun-baked road. It was not quite like the mobile cafés and burger bars seen at roadsides back in Britain. This was a more casual set-up. A canvas awning sheltered a couple of trestle tables from the blistering Spanish sun. On the tables were propane gas-powered griddles, hotplates and an urn. Two Union flags drooped limply from extensions
to the poles holding up the awning.
Paul and Benny, and anyone else who asked, knew the owner by the name of Frankie, a fifty-something Englishman. Frankie was helped out at the tea bar by his young nephew Dean, who was on his gap year.
That was the story. It was far from the truth.
Every evening, when business was over, Frankie and Dean would load the mobile tea bar into the back of their second-hand Toyota pick-up truck and carry out routine anti-surveillance drills as they drove back to their small rented house in the town of Valverde del Camino. The route back to the house was quiet and little used, but Frankie stuck to all speed limits and regularly checked his mirrors, taking a mental note of vehicles following for any length of time. A few kilometres before the town he would pull over to the side of the road so that following vehicles were committed to passing. Once they got back to town, they would make a further check to see if any such vehicle was still being driven around or parked up anywhere near the house.
Accommodation had been easy to find: they had cash, the landlord wanted tenants and he wasn’t bothered about inconveniences like references. Only when they had returned to the security of the white-walled house could Frankie and Dean revert to their true identities – Fergus Watts and his grandson Danny.
It was six months since they had last seen England, a long six months, especially for Danny. Six months in which answering to his assumed name had become second nature; six months in which the constant fear of ambush or attack had gradually subsided; six months in which he had got used to living an anonymous life; six months in which he had dreamed of returning home every single day.
But that was impossible – for now, at least.
For now, they had to wait. And watch. And take the same precautions Fergus had learned during his years in the SAS. For now, they would live a lie as Frankie and Dean. They would cook and make endless mugs of tea and coffee while listening to other people’s conversations. About football. About the weather. About terrorist attacks in the heart of London.