And Camilla seemed to have swallowed it. Charles, too — perhaps a little less so, but he’d accepted the detective’s very persuasive argument.
And what he had just heard underpinned the detective’s comments in his press conference yesterday. About not jumping to conclusions, or whatever the phrase he used.
The police investigation was no longer going to be the hunt for a gunman and his Not-My-King cohorts, which they’d prepared for and laid the trail for.
Instead it would be a far deeper and more dangerous dig into Why Sir Peregrine Greaves?
And just how far would they have to delve?
It was a dangerously shallow grave. There was a lot that needed to be taken care of, and very fast.
‘Sod it!’ he said aloud. It came out as a rasp of anger, he thought to himself, appropriate, since he actually was a RaSP officer. A trusted member of the team who guarded the cluster of Royal Palaces, including Buckingham Palace itself as well as Clarence House and St James’s Palace, where the bosses and all the senior royals, including the Prince and Princess of Wales and the Princess Royal, had London residential bases.
Not that Jon Smoke had anything against the members of the Royal Family he was paid to protect. Good luck to them, he thought. Make the most of whatever privilege you’d been born into, because he was born into a shit life that just kept on getting more shit.
His dad was a drunk and a wifebeater who, when Jon was seven, hit his mother too hard one night, and she died. His dad was put away for a long sentence and Jon was taken into care, never seeing his father again — he died in a prison brawl. He moved away from his Newcastle birthplace and, for the next nine years, went from crap foster home to even crapper foster home. When he was sixteen, he walked out of the last one, in south London, and past a shabby-looking theatre, with a sign in the window advertising for stagehands. He didn’t know what a stagehand was but went in, and got taken on.
A stagehand in this theatre was basically a skivvy and he was fine with that, and with the wage he got. He was less fine with the lecherous old wardrobe master trying to snog him in the pub around the corner, after the last night of a particularly weird and not well-attended play.
A year on, attracted by a TV commercial recruiting for the Army, he applied, and was accepted. After enlisting, for the first time in his life, he discovered he was actually good at something.
Shooting.
He had a real talent — or aptitude, as they called it — for target shooting.
Within two years he was on the Army shooting squad, competing — and winning silver — at the National Shooting Centre at Bisley.
Two weeks after, just turning nineteen, he was invited to an interview where he was told he had been selected to train for the elite sniper course, provided he passed the psychological evaluation. He passed and was elated that he had an ability — talent, whatever it was called — that meant he was actually valued. He spent five months at the Infantry Battle School in Brecon, in Wales, undergoing rigorous training under the British Army’s Sniper Wing. He learned precision shooting accuracy at long range, camouflage and fieldcraft.
The most important thing he took away was how to remain stationary in a concealed position for, if necessary, days on end. This was to stand him in good stead after he joined the Paras — and save his life. And bring him to where he was now, facing a very golden future.
36
Helmand Province, Afghanistan, 2007
Three miles north-east from Camp Bastion, with its 20-mile-long perimeter wall and 2.2-mile runway. It was late afternoon going into early evening, and the searing sun was starting to power down. Jon Smoke had read that Australia has more creatures that can kill you than any other country. That might well be the case, he thought, but nowhere on earth had more creatures that could bite you than right here.
He’d spent two solitary days perched twenty feet up this dense tree, uncomfortably hot in his ghillie suit, but glad of the camouflage the gear afforded him — as well as grateful for the shade of the leaves. He might be concealed from the Taliban but not from the damned critter population of Afghanistan. No one ever told you that you had to fight two different enemies and that the Taliban was the lesser of the two. His camouflage concealed him from them. But not from the plague of vicious and eerily translucent camel spiders the size of saucers, which could and did regularly jump four feet straight at him, scaring the hell out of him. Until Scottie told him to relax, they weren’t attacking him, they just liked the shade that humans provided and wanted to be in it before anything else got there.
There were equally large and gross centipedes with a vicious and painful bite, as well as scorpions, sandflies, mosquitoes and ticks, all of which alternated between viewing him as Public Enemy Number One — and plat du jour.
‘The theatre of war’, he reflected. It was a weird description. Or perhaps not. There was no proscenium arch to define the stage. It was simply everything he could see that stretched out ahead into the far distance. The set was an arid desert landscape, with steep escarpments, patches of scrub and occasional clusters of trees like the ones he and Scottie were concealed in now. If you removed some props and just added a few cacti, Clint Eastwood might have ridden by on horseback with a cigar in his mouth, to the soundtrack of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
The set was decorated — dressed, they called it in the theatre world — with props: a burnt-out tank, a half-track detonated by a landmine, lying on its side. Skeletal vehicles from both sides haphazardly scattered by the roadside and away into the distance. Along with clouds of flies and other scavengers of the desert feasting on the corpses and scattered limbs and entrails of fallen fighters. Not fake props these, any more than the rotting cadavers inside the vehicles were, either. Certainly, not the kind you’d rent from a theatrical costumier, to take to a fancy-dress party.
Every few minutes, when what passed for a breeze wafted in their direction, he could smell it. The stench of death. It was like no other smell on earth. Heavy, rancid, cloying. Cigarette smoke masked it. He craved one now, but his supply of fags was running low. He’d had to ration himself to one every six hours. Three hours and ten minutes to go.
Breathing just through your mouth worked, also.
The light was definitely starting to fail now. Maybe the offensive would begin tonight. He had his night vision scope ready.
‘Curtain up in ten minutes,’ he whispered to himself and smiled. His mind went to strange places when he spent hours in solitude. He let it create scenarios. It especially helped get him through the long hours of darkness — which would be here imminently.
Occasionally he exchanged words — friendly insults mostly — with his fellow sniper and buddy Stuart Macdonald, Scottie, who was ensconced in another tree a short distance away. The banter helped keep up their spirits.
‘How you doing, wanker?’ Macdonald shouted in his thick accent.
‘Better than you, tosser! I’m in the jacuzzi with three naked ladies and a bottle of Champers!’ he retaliated.
Macdonald was a gung-ho, instantly likeable, Scotsman from Aberdeen. They’d passed out of the sniper course together, and two weeks later, seconded to the elite Parachute Regiment, found themselves both on the same military transport plane bound for Kabul, Afghanistan. And still together, helicoptered into the hotspot, Helmand Province.
Scottie ribbed Smoke incessantly about what wankers all Sassenachs were. Jon didn’t mind, he didn’t feel any loyalty to England. Being English — British — meant nothing to him. Scottie also told irreverent jokes, many of which crossed the line, which Jon Smoke liked, and they helped take his mind off what might lie ahead.