The Marching Season (19 page)

Early the following morning, Rebecca Wells stood on the beach at Ardnacross Bay on the western coast of Scotland. It was misting, bitterly cold, and still quite dark, even though it was an hour after sunrise. She walked along the narrow rocky beach, smoking a cigarette, drinking the last of the Nescafe she had made more than twelve hours earlier. She was exhausted, running on nerves and adrenaline. The morning was windless, the water flat and calm. Beyond the bay lay Kilbrannan Sound. To the southwest, across the North Channel, was the Antrim coast of Northern Ireland.

Twenty more minutes passed. Rebecca was beginning to grow nervous about whether the boat would come. It would be a Zodiac, Kyle Blake had said, lowered from the side of a Protestant-owned freighter bound from Londonderry. On board would be a member of the Brigade with a duffel bag of guns for the assault on Hartley Hall.

Another ten minutes passed, while Rebecca considered whether she should abort. The sky had lightened, and the first morning traffic was moving on the road behind the beach. Only then did she hear the put-put of a small engine echoing across the flat water. A moment later, a tiny Zodiac broke through the fog on the bay.

As the boat drew closer to shore, Rebecca studied the man seated in the stern, tiller in hand. It was Gavin Spencer. He raised the propeller, and the Zodiac grounded itself on the beach. Rebecca rushed forward and pulled on the bowline.

“What in God’s name are you doing here?” she asked.

“I wanted to be a part of it.”

“Does Kyle know?”

“He’ll know soon enough, won’t he?” Spencer stepped out of the Zodiac and lifted the duffel from the prow. “Help me get this thing off the beach.”

Together, they dragged the Zodiac off the beach and hid it in the gorse-covered dunes. Spencer walked back to the beach and shouldered the duffel bag. Rebecca led him to the Vauxhall.

He studied her face. “When’s the last time you slept?”

“I can’t remember.”

“I’ll drive.”

She tossed Spencer the keys. He placed the duffel in the trunk, then climbed behind the wheel and started the engine; he was shuddering with the cold. He switched the heater on full, and a moment later the inside of the Vauxhall felt like a sauna. They stopped in the village of Ballochgair and bought tea and bacon sandwiches from a roadside cafe. Spencer devoured three of the sandwiches and slowly savored the tea.

“Tell me about it,” he said, and for fifteen minutes Rebecca described the topography of the Norfolk Coast and the layout of Hartley Hall. She was exhausted. She spoke automatically, as if reciting from memory without conscious thought. It was silly for Gavin Spencer to be here—he was a strategist, not a gunman—but she was glad he had come.

Rebecca closed her eyes as he asked more questions. She did her best to answer, but she felt her voice growing weaker as the car sped through desolate moorland and the Carradale Forest. The stifling warmth from the heater sapped the last of her strength. She fell asleep—the deepest sleep she had had in a very long time—and didn’t wake again until they were racing along the Norfolk Coast.

CHAPTER 28

HARTLEY HALL, NORFOLK

By all appearances it was a typical winter’s day at Hartley Hall. The weather was clear and bright, the air fresh with the scent of the sea. After lunch they drove to Cley in Douglas Cannon’s official car and walked the sands of Blakeney Point, bundled in their overcoats and wool hats. The North Sea sparkled in the brilliant sunlight. The Special Branch bodyguards walked quietly behind them while Nicholas Hartley’s retrievers terrorized the terns and brent geese. Rain moved over the Norfolk Coast at dusk. By the time the dinner guests began arriving, the storm had matured into a full-fledged North Sea winter gale.

It was just after 10 P.M. when Gavin Spencer slipped from the blind in the North Wood and hurried through the trees back to the beach. He opened the trunk of the Vauxhall and removed the canvas duffel. He carried the bag across the campsite and rapped on the door of the caravan.

Rebecca Wells parted the curtains in the window next to the door and peered out. She opened the door, and Spencer climbed into the caravan. The wind blew the door shut behind him. The tiny space was crowded with the members of his unit. Spencer had personally selected the team; and he knew each of the men well: James Fletcher, Alex Craig, Lennie West, and Edward Mills.

The air was thick with cigarette smoke and the smell of nervous men who had been sleeping in tents for two days. Fletcher and Craig sat at the small galley table, West and Mills on the edge of the bed, faces unshaven, hair disheveled. Rebecca was making tea.

Spencer placed the duffel on the floor and ripped open the zipper. He removed the Uzi submachine guns one by one and passed them to the men, followed by ammunition clips. A moment later the caravan was filled with the sound of metal on metal as the team shoved the clips into their Uzis and worked the sliders. Spencer took the last weapon and tossed the empty duffel onto the bed.

“Where’s mine?” Rebecca said.

“What are you talking about?”

“My gun,” she said. “Where is it?”

“You’ve no training for this sort of thing, Rebecca,” Spencer said softly. “Your work is done.”

She slammed the teapot onto the table. “You can make your own bloody tea then, can’t you.”

Spencer moved forward and put a hand on her shoulder. “Now’s not the time for this,” he said softly. “I put our chances of success at one in two at best. A couple of these lads might not make it home again. Don’t you think you owe it to them to keep your head in the game?”

She nodded.

“All right, then. Let’s get down to business, shall we?”

Rebecca opened the cabinet above the stove and took down a large folded piece of paper. She spread it on the table, revealing a detailed map of Hartley Hall and the surrounding grounds. Spencer let Rebecca handle the briefing.

“There are several entrances to the manor house,” she said. “The main entrance, of course, is here”—she tapped the diagram with her fingertip—”at the south porch. There are also entrances here in the orangery, here and here on the east wing, and the main service entrance here. Each night I circled the house and took note of where lights were burning. The night of the ambassador’s arrival, I noticed a light burning in a bedroom for the first time here, on the first floor. I suspect Cannon is sleeping there.”

Spencer stepped forward and took over. “I want to overwhelm them. I want to create confusion. We approach separately and enter the house simultaneously at four A.M. I’ll go in the front. James will enter through the orangery. Alex and Lennie will enter through the east wing, and Edward will go through the service entrance. Some of us will meet resistance. Some of us won’t. As soon as you’re inside, head straight upstairs to the guest bedroom. And the first one to arrive puts a bullet in the ambassador. Any questions?”

The dinner guests began leaving just after midnight, though they were not dinner guests at all but a collection of MI 5 watchers and desk officers, actors in the illusion of Operation Kettledrum. When the last had gone, the two Special Branch bodyguards went off duty and two new officers came on. One made a cursory tour of the grounds, dressed in foul-weather gear like a North Sea fisherman. The light burned in the Chinese bedroom until 1 A.M., when Michael slipped into the chamber and doused it.

The members of the SAS team had slowly filtered into position outside the house. One lay in wait in the walled garden, another in the deer park. A third lay in the parterre, and a fourth in the cemetery next to St. Margaret’s Church. The rest took up positions throughout the ground floor of the house.

Each soldier wore infrared night-vision glasses and a miniature radio with an earpiece that would allow him to communicate with the nerve center inside the mansion. Each carried the standard-issue SAS compact submachine gun, the HK MP5, as well as a Herstal 5.7-millimeter handgun for backup. The Herstal is regarded as one of the world’s most powerful handguns. It fires two-gram bullets at a muzzle speed of 650 meters per second and is capable of penetrating forty-eight layers of laminated Kevlar, the substance used in protective body armor, from two hundred meters away. Michael carried the CIA’s standard-issue handgun, a high-powered Browning 9-millimeter with a fifteen-shot clip. Graham Seymour was unarmed.

The two men waited in the control room, upstairs in the first-floor guest bedroom. The weather was playing havoc with the electronic sensing equipment. The motion detectors were sounding constantly because of the twisting of the trees and shrubbery. The high-powered directional microphones were overwhelmed with the roar of the wind and the hammering of the rain. Only the infrared video cameras were functioning properly.

At 3:30 A.M., MI5 field agents stationed in the campgrounds around Hartley reported movement by the members of the assassination squad. The field agents did not follow the terrorists. Instead, they allowed them to proceed unhindered toward the estate.

At 3:55 A.M., camera operators on the top floor of Hartley briefly spotted two gunmen moving into position, one in the trees bordering the deer park, a second creeping across the ruins of the village toward St. Margaret’s Church.

At precisely 3:58 A.M., James Fletcher rose from his hiding place in the parterre and moved quickly along a gravel footpath toward the orangery. Before joining the Brigade, Fletcher had been a member of the Ulster Defense Association, a violent Protestant paramilitary organization. Indeed, he had been one of the group’s most prolific assassins, with a half-dozen confirmed kills of IRA gunmen. He had broken with the UDA when it agreed to a cease-fire during the peace negotiations. When Gavin Spencer approached him about joining a new group, the Ulster Freedom Brigade, he had accepted without hesitation. Fletcher was virulently anti-Catholic and believed Ulster should be a Protestant province for Protestant people. He also desperately wanted to be the one to murder the ambassador, so he went into action two minutes early, disobeying Spencer’s order to wait until four o’clock.

Fletcher wore a balaclava, a black jumpsuit, and rubber-soled black athletic shoes. As he padded along the footpath, the gravel crunched softly beneath his feet. He reached the French doors and tried the latch; it was locked. He took a half step back and rammed the butt of the Uzi through the pane nearest the latch. Shards of glass rained down on the stone floor.

He was reaching through the empty pane when he heard footfalls on the gravel behind him. He removed his hand and placed it on the Uzi. He was about to spin around and fire when an English-accented voice said, “Drop the gun and put your hands on your head. There’s a good lad.”

Fletcher quickly calculated the odds of winning the encounter with the man standing behind him. If he was Special Branch, Fletcher almost certainly possessed more firepower, though the Special Branch protective officers were notoriously good marksmen. He was wearing body armor beneath his jumpsuit and he could survive almost anything but a head shot. He also knew that if he was arrested he would probably spend his remaining years in an English jail.

James Fletcher dropped suddenly into a crouch and pivoted, raising his gun to the firing position. He saw the man only for an instant, but he realized at once that he was not Special Branch. He was SAS, which meant they had all walked straight into a trap, the same trap the IRA had walked into several times with disastrous results.

Fletcher also realized he had just made a fatal miscalculation.

The soldier’s gun made no sound other than a dull clicking. He knew it had fired, though, because he could see the muzzle flash. The rounds shredded his jumpsuit and pierced his body armor, shattering his spine and ripping a gaping hole in the muscle of his heart. He fell backward, crashing through the French doors, and collapsed onto the floor of the orangery.

The SAS man appeared before him a few seconds later. He bent over Fletcher and brusquely grabbed this throat, searching for a pulse. Then he snatched up the Uzi and moved away as James Fletcher died.

Edward Mills heard the sound of shattering glass as he raced across the ruins surrounding St. Margaret’s Church. He still had the lean, lightly muscled physique that had made him a champion cross-country runner at school, and he scampered easily across the piles of stones and low walls of the ruins. Like Fletcher he wore a black jumpsuit and a balaclava. Ahead stood St. Margaret’s, looming over the graveyard. Mills raced along an ancient footpath leading from the village to the back of the church.

He had never done anything like this in his life, yet he felt surprisingly calm. He was a member of the Orange Order—his father had been the standard-bearer for his lodge in Portadown, and so had his grandfather—but he had avoided the paramilitaries until the previous summer. It was then that the army and the RUC had prevented the Orange Order from marching along the Catholic Garvaghy Road in Portadown. Like most Orangemen, Mills believed he had an absolute right to march along the Queen’s highway any time he pleased, regardless of what the Catholics might think. To protest the blockade he had remained in the fields around Drumcree church for six weeks. Gavin Spencer approached Mills there, in the sloppy makeshift campground at Drumcree, and asked him to join the Ulster Freedom Brigade.

Now he sprinted across the old graveyard, picking his way through headstones and crosses. He was nearing the lych-gate, running effortlessly, when he felt a sharp pain in his left shin. His legs became entangled, and he crashed heavily to the ground, facedown. He tried to regain his footing, but a second later a man leaped onto his back, hit him twice on the back of the head, and clasped a gloved hand over his mouth. Mills felt himself losing consciousness.

“If you so much as twitch or grunt, I’ll put a bullet in the back of your head,” the man said, and by the calm tone of voice Edward Mills knew the threat was not idle. He also felt the sickening realization that they had walked straight into a trap. The man tried to pull the Uzi from his grasp. Foolishly, Mills resisted. The man drove an elbow into the back of his head, and a second later Edward Mills blacked out.

Alex Craig and Lennie West raced across the flat, open grass of the deer park toward the east wing of Hartley Hall. The two men were veterans of the UVF, and they had worked together many times before. They moved silently, side by side, guns at the ready. They reached the end of the deer park and arrived at the gravel approach to the east wing. Behind them, a male voice called out, “Stop, drop your weapons, and place your hands on your heads!”

Craig and West froze, but their hands remained wrapped around their Uzis.

“Drop the guns, now!” the voice repeated.

Camping on the beach near Blakeney before the operation, Craig and West had decided that if there was trouble they would rather fight than be taken into custody. They looked at each other.

“Looks like we’ve been set up,” Craig whispered. “For God and Ulster, eh, Lennie?”

West nodded and said, “I’ll take the one behind us.”

“Right.”

West fell to the ground, rolled over, and started firing blindly in the darkness. Alex Craig fell to his stomach and fired wildly at the east wing, shattering glass. A second later he saw the reply in one of the shattered windows, the muzzle flash of a silenced submachine gun.

West saw the same thing, low in the deep grass of the deer park, but it was too late. A burst of rounds obliterated his head in a flash of blood and brain tissue.

Craig had no idea what had happened to his comrade. He turned his fire on the gunman in the window, but a second appeared, and then a third. He realized that West’s gun had fallen silent. He turned and saw a headless corpse lying next to him on the gravel.

He emptied the first clip, shoved another into the Uzi, and started firing again. A few seconds later the gunman inside the mansion found his mark, as did the man behind him in the deer park. Craig’s body was torn apart by gunfire. His final shots, fired by a spasm in his dying hands, shattered the magnificent clock in the cupola of the east wing, freezing the hands at 4:01.

Gavin Spencer, sprinting across the gravel drive toward the south porch, heard the intense firefight in the deer park. For an instant he considered turning away and heading back to the sanctuary of the North Wood. He had no idea what had just happened to any of his men. Had they penetrated the mansion? Had the Special Branch bodyguards stopped them?

He paused for a moment, mind racing, breath ragged. He listened for more gunfire but heard nothing except wind and rain. He started running again. He passed between the ornate columns of the south porch and leaned against the door.

Again, Spencer paused to listen. The gunfire seemed to have stopped for good. The door was locked. He took a step back and opened fire, closing his eyes against the shower of splintered wood. He drove his foot against the door, and it crashed open. Spencer stepped into the entrance hall and paused, Uzi at the ready.

A figure appeared in the doorway to the great hall: tall, broad shoulders, helmet, and night-vision glasses. SAS, Spencer thought, no question. He spun around and took aim with the Uzi. The SAS man tried to fire his own weapon, but it jammed.