‘You saved a lot of lives,’ said Yokely.
‘I killed a man,’ said Shepherd.
‘Yes, you did,’ said the American. ‘You shot him in the back of the head. And some. Would you care to run it by me?’
Shepherd looked at Yokely for several seconds, then nodded slowly. That Gannon had arranged the meeting meant that Yokely could be trusted. Shepherd just wished he knew what the meeting was about. ‘I was working undercover, infiltrating an armed-response unit,’ he said. ‘As part of that operation I was on the Underground. Armed. There were four suicide-bombers primed to detonate at the same time. One was killed above ground – by muggers, as it happened. One went off above ground. One detonated on a platform at Liverpool Street station. I killed the fourth.’
Yokely grinned.
‘What’s funny?’ asked Shepherd, quickly. Too quickly. He’d sounded defensive.
‘Your terminology is much more forthright than I’m used to,’ said the American. ‘The guys I work with would never be so up-front. They’d refer to it as “terminating the objective” or “managing the situation” or something equally banal.’
‘I killed him,’ said Shepherd flatly. ‘Shot him seven times.’
‘You didn’t think that was overkill?’
‘The two bombs that went off killed forty-seven people and injured more than a hundred others,’ said Shepherd. ‘You can’t take any chances with suicide-bombers. Even mortally wounded, they can still press the trigger. You have to keep firing until you’re sure, absolutely sure, they’re dead. Or in a non-living situation, as your guys would probably say.’
‘You shot him from behind,’ said Yokely.
‘Yes, I did.’
‘So you couldn’t see if he was holding the trigger?’
‘It was a fair assumption.’
‘In fact,’ said Yokely, slowly, ‘you couldn’t even be sure that he was a suicide-bomber. Not from what you could see.’
‘He was wearing a vest packed with explosives,’ said Shepherd. ‘There was a timing device too, so that if he was incapacitated, the device would still explode.’
Yokely held up a hand. ‘Please don’t get me wrong, Dan. I’m not suggesting it wasn’t a totally righteous kill. You deserve a medal for what you did, no doubt about it. I’m just interested in the mechanics of what happened.’
‘I identified the target. I killed him before he could detonate the bomb. End of story.’
‘I suppose it would be trite to ask if you had any regrets.’
‘Regrets?’
‘About killing a man in cold blood.’
‘No one kills in cold blood,’ said Shepherd. ‘That’s a fallacy. The adrenaline courses through the system, the heart races, the hands shake. You can train to suppress the body’s natural reactions, but no one kills coldly.’
‘You’ve killed before, right?’
‘In combat. Under fire.’
‘So what happened on the Tube, that was the first time you’d shot an unarmed man?’
‘Like I said, he wasn’t exactly unarmed,’ said Shepherd. ‘He was wired up with a dozen pounds of high explosive.’
‘Which you couldn’t see from where you were.’
‘What are you getting at?’ said Shepherd.
‘Stay with me for a while, Dan,’ said Yokely. ‘My point is that you made the kill without seeing the imminent threat for yourself.’
‘Major Gannon had the area under observation through CCTV,’ said Shepherd. ‘He was in the British Transport Police observation centre.’
‘But even he wasn’t one hundred per cent sure,’ said the American.
‘Maybe. But all’s well that ends well.’
‘Absolutely,’ said Yokely, enthusiastically. ‘But tell me, how important was it to you that the Major was directing you?’
‘I trust him totally,’ said Shepherd.
‘And if it had been someone else? Suppose it had been a Transport Police chief inspector who had made the call? Would you have been as willing to shoot?’
Shepherd sat back in his chair and considered the question. To an SAS trooper, obeying orders came naturally: rank commanded respect, even if the man who held it didn’t. From time to time Shepherd had carried out orders he hadn’t agreed with, but not often. In the police the situation was nowhere near as cut and dried. Promotion had more to do with politics and point-scoring than it did with ability, and Shepherd constantly came across officers whose judge ment was questionable. Working for Superintendent Hargrove’s undercover unit insulated him from having to follow orders given by men he didn’t respect or trust, and that was the nub of the American’s question. Would Shepherd have shot the terrorist if anyone other than the Major had given the order? At the time Shepherd had been working under-cover in SO19, the armed-response unit of the Metropolitan Police and while the officers he’d worked with had all been first rate, he doubted that he would have trusted them as much as he trusted the Major. He took a sip of whiskey. ‘I might have hesitated if it had been anyone else,’ he said.
‘Nothing wrong with that,’ said the American. ‘You’re paid to use your judgement. If you weren’t you’d be in uniform handing out speeding tickets.’
‘But if the scenario was the same, with a terrorist about to kill dozens of innocent bystanders, I’d shoot. Face to face, back of the head, wherever, whenever.’
‘Okay. Let me run a different scenario by you. Suppose the terrorist had been on a train, heading to the station. You knew he didn’t plan to detonate until he reached the destination, but suppose the Major had ordered you to shoot him on the train. Would you have done that?’
‘Of course,’ said Shepherd, emphatically. ‘He could just as easily press the trigger on the train.’
‘Now suppose he was walking towards the station to board the train, wearing the vest, fingers on the trigger. You’d shoot?’
‘Yes.’
The American nodded thoughtfully. ‘And if the terrorist was in his safe-house, preparing to don the vest. You burst in through the door. He looks at the vest. The trigger is close by. You’d shoot?’
Now Shepherd could see where the conversation was going. ‘Yes,’ he said.
The American smiled. ‘Because your life was in imminent danger, or because he was a terrorist?’
‘It wouldn’t be an execution,’ said Shepherd. ‘The threat is that he would detonate the bomb. To use the phraseology of your guys, I would neutralise that threat.’
‘Now, the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question-’ said Yokely.
‘Would I shoot him a month before the operation?’ interrupted Shepherd. ‘Would I kill him if I knew he was planning a terrorist incident?’
‘Gannon said you were a sharp cookie.’
‘Can cookies be sharp?’ Shepherd smiled.
‘Would you?’ said the American, treating Shepherd’s question as rhetorical. ‘Would you shoot an unarmed man in anticipation of something he was going to do?’
‘You mean, if someone had smothered baby Hitler in his cradle, would millions of lives have been saved?’
The American shrugged. ‘If you want to think of it that way.’
‘You’re talking about assassinations,’ said Shepherd.
‘I’m just shooting the breeze with you, Dan.’
‘We tried it a few years ago,’ said Shepherd. ‘Gibraltar, 1988.’ The SAS had mown down three unarmed IRA terrorists who had been planning to detonate a massive car bomb. ‘Shit hit the fan with a vengeance. The media went for us. The European Court of Human Rights said our guys were wrong to shoot.’
‘Easy for them to say,’ said Yokely. ‘Last I heard, the court wasn’t anywhere near Gibraltar.’
