The Major grinned. ‘They’re not exactly fans of you, either.’
Shepherd’s eyes narrowed. ‘They were telling tales out of school, were they?’
‘What happens in Stirling Lines, stays in Stirling Lines,’ said the Major. ‘They were among friends; plus, they can’t hold their liquor. Not like our lads.’
‘And what did they say?’
‘Just that you were on the Bin Laden operation. Not that they knew who you were, not by name. Just that there was a Brit there and he was none too happy about the way it went down.’
‘They must have been well pissed if they talked to you about the Pakistan operation.’
‘What can I say? Part of the Sass initiation is to have your drinks spiked, you know that.’
‘Yeah, well, careless talk costs lives.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘I did give them a piece of my mind, that’s true. No one told me that we were going out there to kill him. And I certainly wasn’t there to shoot women and kids.’
‘It was messy?’
‘It was a cock-up from start to finish,’ said Shepherd. ‘One of the choppers crashed. You know why?’
The Major shook his head. ‘But they do have a habit of crashing their choppers. The Iranian hostages. Somalia. All over Iraq and Afghanistan.’
‘This wasn’t just pilot error, this was plain bloody incompetence. The compound was surrounded by a concrete wall, eighteen feet high. We were supposed to land inside the wall and that’s the way they’d rehearsed it. For weeks. They’d built a mock-up of the compound in Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. The plan was to fly over the compound and drop down on to the building. They’d rehearsed it a hundred times. But they screwed up. For the rehearsals they’d replaced the wall with a wire fence. I guess some prick decided that so long as it was the right size, all well and good. Except, of course, the downdraught could escape through the wire fence when they practised the manoeuvre. But as soon as we started descending towards the walls the downdraught blew straight back up and the pilot lost control. So they crashed because some idiot couldn’t be bothered to build a wall.’
The Major nodded. ‘Yeah, for the want of a nail. That’s the big problem with the Yanks: everything’s done for the lowest price. I wouldn’t use an American weapon if you paid me.’
‘Yeah, well, let’s make sure that this operation goes as it should.’
‘No problem,’ said the Major.’ He patted the crate. ‘I’ve put six clips in there, fully loaded.’
‘Excellent,’ said Shepherd. ‘And the suppressors?’
The Major nodded at a black holdall. ‘In there too. Do you want to check them?’
‘No need,’ said Shepherd. ‘When do you need them back?’
‘Whenever,’ said the Major. ‘They’re off the books and the serial numbers won’t cause us any trouble.’ He opened the ammunition box. It was filled with large polystyrene beads and the Major shoved in his hand and pulled out a spherical grenade. He brushed off a few stray beads and then gave it to Shepherd. It was painted a deep green with a thin yellow band across the top just below where the safety clip and fly-off lever were attached to the casing. Stencilled on the side were the yellow letters spelling out GREN HAND HE L109A1 and a lot number.
‘You ever thrown one?’ asked the Major.
Shepherd shook his head. ‘They were still using the L2A2 in my day.’
‘This is pretty much the same,’ said the Major. ‘Based on the Swiss HG85 but the boffins played around with the design so that the fragments can penetrate the latest body armour.’
‘Nice,’ said Shepherd.
‘Yeah, funny the way that so much money is put into coming up with better ways of killing people,’ said the Major. ‘You’d think a grenade would just be a grenade, but someone somewhere thought it worth spending a few million quid on coming up with a better one.’ He took it back from Shepherd. ‘Bog-standard percussion fuse with a delay of three to four seconds. Effective killing radius is sixty feet unprotected, fifteen feet if you’re wearing body armour and a Kevlar helmet, but frankly there wouldn’t be much left of your arms and legs. Explosion produces about eighteen hundred fragments, any one of which could ruin your day.’
‘And you don’t want it back?’
The Major put it back into the box. ‘It’s non-traceable,’ he said. ‘The lot number won’t lead anywhere, so if you do get caught with it just say you found it.’
Shepherd laughed. ‘Yeah, that should do it.’
‘And you’ve no idea what these clowns want with grenades?’
‘We’ve just got a shopping list, that’s all. They’re not very chatty about their motives but they’re talking about forty Yugos and a stack of ammunition. Charlie reckons that they’re tied in with the Norwegian mass murderer.’
‘White supremacists, then?’
‘They didn’t come over at all Ku Klux Klan when we met them,’ said Shepherd. ‘But they might have been on their best behaviour.’
‘So what do you think? They’re going to start shooting blacks and Asians?’
‘The Norwegian didn’t, did he?’ said Shepherd. ‘Most of his victims were white kids. He did what he did to draw attention to his manifesto. The only thing that made them targets was that they were at a left-wing camp. So, if anything, his target was political rather than racial.’
‘With any luck they’ll head for Westminster and get all Guy Fawkes on the Houses of Parliament,’ said the Major.
‘Chance’d be a fine thing,’ said Shepherd. ‘But that’s not how it works with terrorists, is it? They always choose the weakest targets. And the guys we’re dealing with are from the Midlands; there’s no evidence they’ll be heading down to London.’
‘So what’s Charlie’s plan? Nip them in the bud or let them run?’
‘She’s not letting me in on the bigger picture,’ said Shepherd. ‘She pinched the case from the Brummie cops, that much I do know.’
‘You think she’s after the glory?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Shepherd. ‘But at the moment she’s got me in the middle playing both ends. I’m reporting to Sam Hargrove, who reports to the top brass in Birmingham, then I get debriefed by Charlie. The shit’s going to hit the fan if Charlie moves in over the heads of the cops.’
‘Hopefully none of the shit’s going to head your way.’
Shepherd shrugged. ‘I’m hoping that Sam will take the flak,’ he said.
‘He’s the guy you worked for when you were a cop, right?’
‘Yeah, he’s a straight shooter. One of the best. So I don’t see that he’ll hang me out to dry. But the Brummie cops are going to be spitting feathers when they find out that all the work they’ve done has been pinched by Five.’
‘It’s a mucky business at best, isn’t it?’ said the Major. ‘It’s so much more black and white in the military. Both sides wear uniforms and carry weapons and the best side wins.’
‘And the losers end up dead,’ said Shepherd. ‘Unlike the world of terrorism, where the losers end up as MPs.’
The Major laughed. ‘Yeah, funny how the world changes,’ he said. ‘There’s a whole generation already who’ve no real idea what a threat the IRA were. You ask most teenagers about the Brighton bombing and they wouldn’t have a clue what you were talking about. But say what you want about the IRA, at least you knew what they wanted: the Brits out and a united Ireland. You might not agree with their methods, but you could understand what they wanted and why they did what they did.’
‘They murdered plenty of civilians,’ said Shepherd sourly.
The Major held up his hands. ‘Hey, you won’t ever hear me defending the IRA,’ he said. ‘They killed enough of my friends over the years. What I’m saying is that at least you knew what was driving them. But this new lot of terrorists? Who the hell knows what their motivation is?’
‘A life in paradise with seventy-two coal-eyed virgins if they kill the infidel,’ said Shepherd.
‘Yeah, but they can’t really believe that, can they?’ said the Major. ‘Even if you believe in God you can’t possibly believe that God, any god, would want to see innocents maimed and killed. Those guys who crashed the planes into the Twin Towers — what did they hope to achieve? And the British Muslims who blew up the tube. Does anyone know what they wanted?’ He shook his head sorrowfully. ‘The world’s going crazy, Spider. And an old fart like me just can’t make any sense of it any more.’