through a gaping hole in the walls of a roofless old barn. As the van entered the barn, moving at little more than a crawl, Smethurst was looking at a GPS location finder, about the size of a stopwatch.
‘Forward about five metres,’ he said, his eyes fixed to the flickering digits on the readout. ‘Left a bit… stop… wait a second.’
Smethurst took another look at the GPS, which also doubled as a compass.
‘Right, we’re on the right spot,’ he said. ‘But we need to line the van up three more degrees to the north- west. Just reverse a fraction, then go forward again, right hand down.’
Gryffud did as he was told.
‘Bollocks!’ Smethurst hissed to himself. ‘That was one degree too much. Try it again, but this time left hand down. Only a fraction, though. That’s all we need.’
The van shifted. Smethurst cursed again, and delivered an even more precise set of instructions. Gryffud did his best to follow them to the last millimetre. Finally Smethurst was satisfied. ‘That’ll do,’ he said. He set the timer to go off in four hours. When that was done he turned to Brynmor Gryffud and said, ‘Right, Taff, time to go.’ It was now 6.41 a.m.
The two men walked out of the farmyard and turned right, back up the lane towards the Angle Road, a distance of about one and a half miles. They walked at a good, hard pace, aiming to arrive at seven o’clock exactly. They had been standing by the roadside for less than a minute when a BMW pulled up next to them. The driver’s window lowered to reveal Uschi Kremer’s smiling face.
‘Hello, boys! Fancy meeting you here!’ she said.
38
Cardiff Gate Services, M4, Wales
At that exact same moment, Carver, too, was hitching a ride. He’d woken at 6.15 a.m. and pulled open the window to see a grey, but dry morning. He’d showered, dressed and had a full English breakfast before heading out into the car park a minute before seven. The Audi was waiting for him. He tapped on the passenger window and it slid down to reveal the lightly tanned face of a man in his early thirties, whose cheerful smile and upper-class accent were in sharp contrast to the steely look in his eyes. Carver knew that look. He saw it in the mirror on a regular basis. The only difference was that his eyes were green and his stare — when he chose to use it — was, if anything, even steelier and colder than the one now appraising him.
‘You Tyrrell?’ Carver asked.
‘Ah, you must be Jenkins.’
‘That’s right, Andy Jenkins.’
‘Then you’d better climb aboard.’
Carver got in the back of the car. He was dimly aware of suppressed laughter from the massive, shadowy figure in the driver’s seat.
‘Something amusing you?’ Tyrrell asked.
‘Bollocks he’s called Andy Jenkins, boss,’ the driver replied in a South London voice. ‘His name is Pablo Jackson… isn’t it?’
Carver laughed. ‘Not for a while… How are you, Snoopy?’
‘That’ll be Company Sergeant Major Schultz to you, boss. I’m a warrant officer these days. Gone up in the world.’
‘You know each other?’ Tyrrell asked, his curiosity piqued in particular by Schultz calling the newcomer ‘boss’, the special forces equivalent to ‘sir’.
‘You could say that,’ Carver replied. ‘We served together, a long time ago.’
‘He’s one of us, boss,’ Schultz told Tyrrell. ‘And one of the best, too.’
39
Carn Drum Farm
DEIRDRE BULL WAS not dead. Not quite. She opened her eyes, emerging from unconscious oblivion to a skull-splitting headache and an overwhelming desire to be sick. It took a second or two to register further sources of agony from her shoulder, her left arm, her ribs and her right leg. Neither the arm nor the leg would move. She propped herself up on her right arm, gasping with the pain that this simple movement sent shooting through her body, and saw jagged fragments of bone poking through the bright nylon arm of her cagoule and the dark-stained denim of her jeans. She almost fainted, slumping back to the ground again. Then she remembered: her phone. She fumbled in her pocket for the little handset, lost her grip on it as she pulled it out of the cagoule, and felt the panic rise in her as her hand fumbled blindly across the ground before touching the phone again. She held it up to her face so that she could see what she was doing, and then with her one working thumb tapped out the three digits 9… 9… 9.
‘Help me,’ she whimpered. ‘Please help me. I’ve been shot. I’m hurt really badly. And the others… I think… I think…’ But before she could complete the sentence she had fallen unconscious again.
It took a combined force of police and volunteers from the Brecon Mountain Rescue Team the best part of three hours to locate Deirdre Bull. By that time the carnage at Carn Drum farmhouse had been discovered. Deirdre herself was in a critical condition. She had multiple fractures, and although the bullets that had hit her had miraculously avoided doing any damage to her heart or lungs, there was a strong chance of internal organ damage caused by her fall. She had lost a great deal of blood, and was slipping in and out of consciousness. Just as she was loaded into the rescue helicopter that was going to take her away to hospital she gripped the arm of the paramedic nearest to her, stared him right in the eye and hissed, ‘The attack… You’ve got to stop the attack!’
40
RAF Northolt, Hillingdon, West London
At 8.30 A.M. a dozen individuals began to assemble for a flight that would carry them some two hundred and forty miles due west and last an hour and forty minutes.
The PM had banned any Cabinet members from the conference, for the simple reason that he did not want any possible pretenders to his position attracting the publicity it would bring. Nevertheless, there was still an impressive Whitehall turnout. The Home Office, Ministry of Defence and Department of Energy and Climate Change each sent a minister. The Director of Special Forces, who was overall commander of the SAS and SBS, attended, as did senior officers from MI5 and Scotland Yard. As keen as ever to maintain its green credentials, the government had also reserved VIP seats for a representative from Greenpeace and a professor from Imperial College, London, whose special subject was the long-term effects of man-made environmental disasters. Last, but by no means least in their own minds, came Nicholas Orwell, the EU Energy Minister Manuela Pedrosa, and Kurt Mynholt, the second most senior diplomat at the US Embassy in London, whose Senior Foreign Service rank was equivalent to that of a three-star general.
That made eleven passengers. The twelfth was Nikki Wilkins, a twenty-nine-year-old Cabinet Office representative, selected on the grounds of competence, intelligence, people skills and — though no one dared suggest this openly — fresh-faced good looks that made any man, no matter how powerful, just that bit more eager to please her. Wilkins’s job was very simple: she had to corral her high-powered passengers on to the choppers, and make sure they had been given all the tea, coffee and biscuits they required and were happy with their seats. Then she had to get them all off again at the far end, in the gaze of the cameras, looking like confident, purposeful men and women who were ready to protect the nation against terrorist threats to its fuel and power supplies.
In short, Nikki Wilkins was both a hostess and a minder. Or as her boss had told her, ‘You’ll be matron.’
