‘Boss!’ he called out.

While waiting for an answer he talked into the handset on its coiled flex long enough to reach across the room. ‘Four two Charlie, this is zero alpha?

The large speakers on the wall remained silent.There was no answer on the intercom either. He hit another button. ‘Boss?’Then into the handset once again, ‘Four two Charlie, zero alpha?’

The wall speakers remained silent but a refined English accent came over the tinny intercom. ‘Boss here.’

‘We have a possible Kuttuc.’

There was no reply from the boss and Graham never expected or waited for one. The boss would be running at full speed to the ops room. Kuttuc was the codename for the most feared event in an undercover operations room in Northern Ireland. It meant an operative had been kidnapped. Every operation that operative was involved in would have to be cancelled. It also had to be assumed everything that person knew about the unit and its operating procedures was compromised.The political mess would then follow. But that was much later. For the operative it meant something more immediate and much more horrific.

Graham grabbed up the phone and held it under his chin while he punched in a number. ‘Four two Charlie, zero alpha?’ he repeated into the radio handset at the same time. The phone rang in his ear. No answer came over the speakers. Someone picked up the phone the other end and a yawning voice said hello.

‘This is Camelot. We have an op Kuttuc in progress. Do you understand what I’m talking about?’

The army clerk in the Army Air Corps headquarters office half a mile up the road had no idea what Graham was talking about, but he could detect the urgency in Graham’s voice. ‘I don’t think I do,’ he said, adding ‘sir’ just to be on the safe side.

Graham instantly went up several notches towards ballistic. ‘Then go and get someone who does, preferably your boss, and each second you take is a second off a man’s life and if he dies I am going to come down there and personally rip your fucking throat out!’

Graham heard the clunk of the phone hitting the desk, then the clerk’s feet as they hurried across the office and out of the door. Graham would do no such thing, of course. He was only a junior non-commission officer, a corporal, but he had learned to sound like he was a Gorgon on the other end of a phone when he needed to.Years of being a signaller, especially in this mystery-shrouded unit, had taught him the power of the anonymous voice shouting down the other end of a communications device. Graham had used the ploy many times and if the person the other end ever asked him to identify himself he would either impersonate his boss, which he could do very well, or simply put down the phone. It was almost impossible to trace a call back to the unit.

A buzzer suddenly went off by the door to the ops room and then sounded continuously as whoever it was kept their finger jammed against it. Graham hit a button on the desk that electrically unbolted the door. Mike the boss hurried in chewing a mouthful of food, having covered the distance from the cookhouse on the other side of the compound in record time.

‘Talk to me,’ he barked as he went to the large map that covered a sloping desk beneath the operations wall. Under its glass skin, the map contained all data pertinent to operatives, vehicles and locations the det had anything to do with in the Province. He studied the movable markers and wax notations on the glass that gave details of the only operatives on the ground at that time. He was young, fresh-faced and his nickname when he was not in the room was ‘the head boy’, because physically he could probably still pass for a sixth former. However, the similarities stopped there and anyone not recognising that could find themselves in deep water.

‘Spinks’s car’s been lifted with him still in the boot. One three kilo is in pursuit. They think it’s two up. I’ve had no comms with Spinks for three minutes,’ Graham informed Mike, as he handed him the phone and headed for the door, adding, ‘The standby chopper chief’ll be on the end of that phone any second. Keep calling Spinks - four two Charlie.’

‘Where’s Stratton?’ Mike shouted as Graham left the room, apparently without hearing him. Mike hit an intercom button. ‘Steve?’

A few seconds later came an answer, ‘Boss?’

‘I need you in here right away.’

‘On my way,’ Steve replied.

‘You’ll need the rest of your cell.’

‘Roger,’ Steve said.

Mike hit another intercom button. ‘Jack?’

‘Yo.’ Jack’s voice sounded like he was at the far end of a room.

‘Get every available bod on the ground towards black seven. We’ve got a Kuttuc.’

‘Right away,’ replied Jack immediately and much closer to his intercom.

Mike released the button and paused to think of anything else he could do of greater priority before the dreaded call he had to make. There was nothing else. Then he realised a tiny voice was trying to break through his concentration. It was coming from the phone in his hand. He quickly put it to his ear.

‘Yes, this is Camelot. I need the standby chopper now, as in five minutes ago. We have an op Kuttuc . . . That’s right. One of our guys has been lifted.’

He pushed down the cradle, released it to get the dial tone, took a deep breath, and keyed a number he was hoping would not be answered. Mike was a captain in the Hussars, his parent unit, and had had to put up with comments about his baby-face his entire career. His looks may not have changed much since he left university but he had matured a great deal during the last three years in this job. When nothing exceptional was taking place he appeared introvert and retiring. None of those characteristics were remotely evident when work got suddenly serious. He had the arrogance one might expect to find in a captain of the Hussars and would go toe to toe with anyone, even superiors, when his blood was up. Two things were guaranteed to bring out the demon in him: incompetence, and anyone trying to screw with his detachment, enemy or otherwise. He had never had an op Kuttuc before. In fact there had only been one Special Forces kidnapping since Nairac, an SAS liaison officer who was lifted, beaten and killed in the mid-seventies. The only det operative ever kidnapped, a couple of years before Mike joined the unit, was from the North Province undercover detachment. He was rescued in the nick of time by sheer luck not long after he had been snatched by the Provos. The main lesson learned from both kidnappings was that every passing second increased the odds against Spinks being rescued.

‘Lisburn ops here,’ the upper-class voice on the other end of the phone muttered.

‘This is Mike at south det, sir. I need to speak to the chief right away.’

‘Sounds urgent, old boy,’ said the officer.

‘It’s very urgent,’ said Mike, this time adding the emphasis that was lacking in his initial delivery.

‘One second,’ said the officer, reading the urgency.

Mike kept the phone to his ear while his eyes moved to the map and looked at the international border, specifically where it turned closest to the marker that indicated the point where Spinks was kidnapped. The distance was not very great at all.

Bleeps like Graham ruled the operations room. Naturally, all major decisions had to be made by the boss, but in reality, Graham could handle just about any emergency situation that might arise, and in most cases quicker and more efficiently. Not only was he very proficient, he was aided by a phenomenal memory.Apart from knowing practically every call-sign and frequency the British army used in Northern Ireland, he could remember details of players, their vehicles and number plates, addresses, names, associates . . . the kind of questions operatives asked the intelligence cell over the air all the time and needed quick answers to. It was usually faster to track Graham down and ask him the question first before wading through the database or calling the intelligence cell.

Graham’s footsteps echoed on the old tiled floor in the narrow, flaking plastered corridor of the former Second World War Royal Air Force administration building that would have been condemned had the secret unit not taken it over. He turned a corner, arrived at a door, and pushed it open. The room was just large enough to cram in twenty assorted grubby old armchairs all facing a television set on a table at one end, a sagging bookshelf stacked with well-thumbed paperbacks, and at the opposite end to the television, a table covered in a selection of current newspapers. Hunched over a broadsheet on strong, lean arms was a man with long, mousy, unwashed hair wearing an old rugby shirt, his neck sunk between sturdy shoulders.

‘Stratton?’ Graham said. There was no trace of the familiarity he used when talking to anyone else in the detachment, even Mike the boss, and some of the urgency had gone out of his voice despite the gravity of the situation. He could not help himself. Stratton had that effect on him.

Stratton looked around. He hadn’t shaved in several days, which softened his angular features, and his nose looked as if it had once been broken. His face was expressionless in the way a predatory animal watches humans from within its cage. It was the eyes that fascinated Graham and, for him at least, embodied the character of the man. They weren’t manic, nor even piercing. Uninviting, hollow but also penetrating was how Graham described them to his brother, his only confidant on the subject of this extraordinary job. Stratton was like no other man he had ever met. Unlike the rest of the undercover operators, Stratton’s parent unit was Special Forces. He knew nothing for certain about Stratton’s past, only the countless rumours: veteran of the Gulf War, the Balkans, the drug wars in Columbia, and then there were the rumours about Afghanistan. And that was all before his kills since he arrived at the detachment: four in a year and a half. That was high considering the majority of the operatives had none and only two other men currently serving in another detachment had one each. But Stratton always seemed to be in the right place at the right time, or so it seemed. His success was no doubt helped by the fact that he was always looking for a kill when most operatives were content to merely survive a day’s work.

The first kills, only a month after Stratton had joined the detachment, were two unfortunate robbers armed with pistols and threatening to use them on anyone who tried to stop them. Stratton happened to be getting out of his car as the bandits came running out of the betting shop they had just held up and were climbing on to their getaway motorbike. It was all over in a couple of seconds - the time it took Stratton to draw his pistol from his shoulder holster and put two rounds through each of their crash helmets from twenty-five feet away. The robbers were Protestants, not that that was an issue for Stratton. They were bad guys who played with guns and unfortunately for them they ran into someone who didn’t.

The other two official kills were the result of an attempted car jacking. Stratton was stuck in a traffic jam in a busy street when a young, inexperienced Provo tapped on his window with the tip of his gun and demanded Stratton get out. Stratton remained cool and noticed the gunman had a partner covering him with a rifle from across the street. As he took a moment to stare into the narrow eyes of his would-be assailant, he saw something else that gave him every confidence he could deal with the situation swiftly and surely.

Stratton climbed out with his arms by his sides and faced the young man, who kept just beyond arm’s reach, his pistol held much too tightly in his left hand and levelled at Stratton. The man asked Stratton to hold open both sides of his jacket. If the nervous young Republican soldier caught sight of the pistol in its holster under Stratton’s left arm he would ask him who he was. If Stratton didn’t answer he was dead. If Stratton answered in his English accent he was dead. It was near impossible to perfect a convincing Northern Irish accent if one was not from these parts and few operatives bothered to try. What Stratton had seen from inside the car, which spurred his confidence and sealed the young man’s fate, was that the unfortunate Provo had obviously forgotten that his Browning 9mm semi-automatic pistol was on half-cock. A characteristic of the weapon is that when the hammer is pulled back one click, only halfway back, it is impossible to pull the trigger. To fire the gun the hammer must be pulled back a second click to full cock. The Provo was left-handed - the safety-catch, which is on the left side of the gun, is hard to operate for left-handed shooters and so cack-handers often use the half-cock as a safety device.

Stratton calmly opened his jacket and drew out his pistol. The young Provo squeezed the trigger with all his might but by the time he realised why he could not fire it and moved his thumb to the hammer to pull it back to full cock it was too late. As he dropped to the ground with two bullets through his heart Stratton dropped to one knee to engage the cover man across the street, hitting him in the body with two shots to disrupt his aim, then closing in with an aimed shot to the head to finish him.

Then there were the two rumoured unofficial kills. Graham knew for certain about one of them. Well, pretty certain. He had been on duty that night.The team had been in Warrenpoint on the south-eastern corner of the province doing a surveillance task. When it ended the team made its way back to the detachment.The journey should have taken no more than an hour and a half at that time of night. Graham had asked for a radio check fifteen minutes after the team left the area to make sure everyone was okay. He could tell from the background noise that the operatives were in their cars travelling at speed, all except Stratton, who sounded like he was using his body comms. That suggested to Graham that Stratton was outside of his car and therefore not on his way back just yet. Graham did not dare to ask Stratton what he was doing. That would have required more courage than he possessed.

Twenty minutes after the rest of the team arrived Graham watched Stratton drive in through the main gates of the compound on the security monitor. The following morning the body of a man was found on the edge of the old market square in Warrenpoint. He had been choked unconscious then his neck had been broken. It was Matthew McGinnis, a RIRA sniper known to have shot three police officers and two soldiers and a suspected accomplice in four other killings.

Graham was aware that many of the rumours about Stratton were fiction, but he believed the operative was capable of taking the law into his own hands. Since McGinnis’s mysterious death Graham had paid closer attention to Stratton’s rare comments about the war against the IRA. There was often a suggestion, if only in his tone, of his contempt for the soft-handed way the judiciary treated the more hardcore terrorists.

‘We have a possible op Kuttuc,’ Graham said to him now.

Stratton moved quickly but without fuss or change in expression. He lifted a heavy, beaten-up leather jacket off a chair and pulled it on as Graham stepped back to let him pass.

‘It’s Spinks, four two Charlie,’ Graham continued. ‘We’ve lost comms and he’s mobile south at speed still in the boot.’

Graham wondered if Stratton ever panicked about anything. He had seen him angry, but never out of control. They headed down the corridor, Graham trotting behind.

‘Standby chopper?’ Stratton asked in his usual economic way as he turned the corner towards the ops room.

‘It should be waiting for you.’

Stratton stopped at a walk-in closet just before the ops room.A wooden framework built on to one wall was divided into compartments, like station baggage lockers without the doors, fifteen of them, one for each operative. He pulled a holdall, full and heavy, out of his compartment.

‘The church?’ Stratton asked.

‘Yes. One three kilo’s on the ground in pursuit.’

‘The dyke?’ he asked.

‘And Ed.’

‘Doesn’t matter which one’s driving then, does it?’ he said, suggesting Spinks had even less hope.

There was no hint of a joke in Stratton’s dry, monotone voice, but Graham knew him well enough to know it was there and forced a little laugh. Aggy’s nickname was generally used when referring to her in her absence, even though the men felt sure she was not, or at least hoped not. No one had gotten to first base with her but most wanted to, even some of those against women in the detachments. Graham did wonder about Stratton and her though. He had watched him staring at her one night in the bar during a piss-up while she was sat with several other operatives across the room.

Stratton took an old SLR 7.62mm semi-automatic high-velocity rifle from the top shelf and a couple of twenty-round magazines of ammunition. Attached to the rifle was a heavy metal object the size and shape of a grapefruit with a wire coming from it that had an electrical adapter on the end. It was a giro steady system designed to keep the weapon as still as possible inside a moving or heavily vibrating vehicle such as a helicopter. Attached to the ejection port of the weapon was a small canvas bag to catch spent shell cases and stop them bouncing around inside the cab. He headed down the corridor to a set of double doors and pushed through them. Graham watched him go then hit the buzzer outside the operations room door.

Spinks’s car was still far ahead. Aggy had glimpses of it but didn’t feel she was gaining any ground. She was starting to experience that frustrating, useless feeling again. The kind of useless they said she was during the selection course. She knew the constant digs from the instructors were all part of the selection process, designed to test and develop her self-control and ultimately get the best out of her, but she often wondered how true the comments really were. Fast driving had never been her forte. On the course she crashed three cars; in one of those accidents she had cracked a bone in her arm. She was warned that if she wrecked one more car she would be labelled an operational hazard and would fail the course. Her final exercise had involved a high-speed chase deliberately set up by the instructors to test her. She managed to get through it without a mishap but had come close a couple of times. This was the fastest she had driven since that day, perhaps even faster, and she felt much less in control. She kept talking herself through the stages, echoing her fast driving instructor: ‘Brake on the straight before the bend, not in it. Hit the corner just a bit faster than you think you can. Balance the throttle through the turn; keep the tyres biting the road. Accelerate on the apex.’

‘Towards orange five,’ she shouted. Ed appeared not to have heard her, his eyes as wide as they could possibly stretch and locked on to the road ahead. She reached for the send button but he pushed her hand away.

‘Keep your ’ands on the wheel! I’ll do the bloody comms!’ Ed was the most sedate of all the operatives in the detachment in a dreary way - during relaxed working conditions, that is. But car chases held a special fear for him. He hated travelling fast in anything where the speed was beyond the normal design functions. Four-door cars were family vehicles intended for comfort driving, not screaming along narrow country lanes and especially not in the hands of a girl who clearly had no idea what she was doing. His last car chase had been ten years earlier. He had been the tail-end car in a line of four. It had got so hairy he pulled out letting the others go on without him. He admitted during the debriefing that he just could not keep up with the pace. Since then he was given nothing but ‘soft’ tasks. However, the problem with doing nothing but safe jobs for years was that complacency set in. The true dangers of the profession remained known, respected even, but with time there was a fogging of the grim realities. In the space of a few short minutes Ed was being fully reacquainted with one aspect of them, and that was risking one’s own life to try and save another.

The ops room was now a flurry of activity. The intelligence officer, and his two people were busy in the int cell that adjoined the ops room.Two off-duty bleeps had arrived in case they were needed, although if truth be known they were really hanging about to witness this unique event.

‘Toward orange five, roger that,’ Mike replied into the handset as Graham walked back in.

‘Stratton’s on his way,’ Graham said.

Mike nodded as he pored over the map. The entire province was coded at the major junctions and landmarks, all committed to memory by the operatives even though they had secure communications, just in case that system ever went down and they had to revert back to open comms as in the old days. Graham grabbed a bar cloth off its hook, wiped away the previous chinagraph pencil marks and circled orange five.

‘They’re heading for Dungannon,’ Graham said.

‘Probably, but where will they cross the border?’

‘If they do.’

‘We must assume it for now,’ Mike said, scrutinising the thick yellow demarcation line that ran from the top left to the bottom right corner of the map.

‘Where’s Bill Lawton?’ Mike asked referring to the detachment’s liaison officer.

Graham snatched up a phone. ‘He’s at a special branch meeting in Belfast,’ he said as he punched in a number.

‘Get hold of him. We need at least a dozen checkpoints covered.Tell him to call the Garda before he talks to anyone else. He’s to tell them we’re concentrating on an area five miles either side of Aughnacloy.’

‘Bill Lawton?’ Graham asked into the phone.

‘He’s to call them before he talks to anyone in Whitehall. I don’t want to hear from London until this is over . . . How soon can Stratton be at the border?’ Mike asked, well aware Graham could handle half a dozen different tasks at once and give them equal attention.

‘Twenty, twenty-five minutes,’ then into the phone, ‘Tell him it’s urgent, life and death,’ then to Mike, ‘Bill’s gone tramp around in the building somewhere. Someone’s gone off to look for him.’

Mike looked worried, as if trying to see the actual ground on the map beyond the two-dimensional topographical information. ‘If he’s in a bloody pub I’ll have his arse in a sling. The checkpoints will never be set up in time. The army and RUC are too bloody slow.’

Everyone in the room was thinking the same thing. Poor old Spinksy.

Brennan was his name. He was from Dundalk in County Louth. His primary livelihood was armed robbery, cash targets mostly, such as banks, post offices and building societies. He preferred to work during business hours for two reasons: he felt it was the safest time of the day to rob a high street business, and he enjoyed seeing the terrified faces of the people when he burst in wearing his balaclava and armed with a pump-action shotgun or sub-machine-gun. Working for the Real IRA was more of a sideline for Brennan, although he would never admit that to anyone. In fact he described his criminal activities as ‘fundraising’ to maintain his war effort. He was a Republican to be sure but ultimately he was a mercenary - unless there was glory to be had; enough glory might well tip the scales in favour of doing a job for very little money, although a freebie would have to be exceptionally glorious. Brennan had not done a job for free for the Republicans since his early sectarian executions where he gained the reputation that allowed him to start charging a nice fee. This kidnapping offered both cash and glory. Brennan had been provided with the weaponry and given three thousand pounds, which included expenses, to carry out the assignment. It was well below his normal rate, but the glory of getting a Brit spy more than made up the difference.

The War Council discouraged him from telling anyone about the money he received for his work. Most soldiers were volunteers and worked for a basic upkeep that usually had to be supplemented by a regular job or crime. Some, especially the new, younger members were not paid a penny. If a soldier was sent on a long-term operation, such as a member of a bomb team in England, then the pay was not too bad. But Brennan was given special pay because he was known to get the job done. It was not always pretty, and often a little too brutal for some tastes, but he had a knack for success.

Murder was Brennan’s main choice of work. He discovered his penchant for it after he started working for the Provos in his late teens. He liked to do it up close and personal, and the slower the better. If he had the time to get acquainted with his victim, even better. He had no idea if he was to eventually kill Spinks. If it looked like they weren’t going to get him across the border then his orders were to execute him. That was his call to make. Ultimately Spinks was to be interrogated. Brennan hoped he would be the one selected to finish him.

‘If all your mates smelled as bad as you we’d have no trouble finding them,’ Brennan said to Spinks. He reached over into the boot and pulled out the MPK5 and pistol and threw them into the passenger foot-well.As he leaned further in to check for anything else the car went over a bump and he bashed the back of his head hard on the lid. He steamed a look at his young driver Sean as he rubbed the bump, snarled and finished his search. He found nothing else but the empty water bottle. The car then took a corner hard, sending Brennan crashing into the side window.

‘You roll this focken car and I’ll focken shoot you!’ Brennan shouted.

Sean was a cool character and didn’t flinch, but he had been warned not to fuck with Brennan. They had never met before the previous evening, when the team was called in for orders and, for security reasons, they had remained in the same house for the rest of the night. All Sean knew about Brennan was what the others had told him before Brennan arrived. One rumour had it that he had once killed one of his own people on a job for incompetence. Sean had long since decided that if they did crash, and if he was able to, he would keep running until he was all the way to America, which was about the only place he could think of where Brennan would not find him.

Whatever the truth about Brennan Sean couldn’t give a shite. He had his own job to do and he’d do it how he saw fit. He checked his rear-view mirror. No worries about the car behind; whoever was at the wheel was never going to catch him. Sean slipped down a gear as they approached another tight corner. He decided to be a bit flash and take the tight inside line rather than simply cut the corner. He hooked his front nearside tyre into the small ditch on the inside bend to hold the car tight in the turn and let the back end slip out a little, allowing a faster entry and exit. The trick was to jerk the steering wheel and flick the tyre out of the ditch after the apex. If the tyre didn’t eject the car would spin out of the turn and then Brennan would likely shoot him if they crashed.

Sean went through the turn easily and bombed on down the road. He had been selected for this task because he had a reputation for out-driving police cars. In fact his record was one hundred per cent. He often did it just for fun, bombing past a stationary police car in a small town or village and then leading a chase through the countryside until he lost it.

The road straightened out like a rail for at least a mile, with a small humped bridge halfway along it. Sean smiled to himself as he red lined it. His plan this time was to go airborne.