stretched out his long legs.
Gannon looked at his Rolex Submariner. Only one member of the group was absent but he wasn't surprised: Jimbo Shortt was a notoriously bad timekeeper. He knew more about tele-and radio communications than anyone else Gannon had met so he would be invaluable for what he had planned. All four knew Shepherd well and had agreed to drop everything when Gannon had told them of his predicament. Shortt had the furthest to come: he was teaching close-quarter combat techniques to Ukrainian SWAT teams but had promised to get on the next flight to the UK.
Armstrong drained his cup and stood up to help himself to more. Gannon knew the men would have preferred mugs, but room service in the hotel just off Piccadilly had supplied cups and saucers more suitable for a lady's knitting circle than a group of military men brought together for a tactical briefing.
'Two sugars in mine, Billy,' said Shortt, as he strode in. He was a stocky five feet nine with a sweeping Mexican moustache. He shook hands with Gannon. 'Sorry I'm late, boss. Traffic.'
Gannon smiled, but said nothing. Shortt always had an excuse, but considering that just twenty-four hours earlier he had been in the Ukraine, Gannon reckoned he had nothing to complain about.
Armstrong handed Shortt some coffee and the two men took their seats. Gannon dimmed the lights and switched on the projector. He hadn't bothered with a screen: the wall above the television set was pristine white. A satellite shot of four cross-shaped buildings surrounded by a wall came into focus as he fiddled with the lens. 'Her Majesty's Prison Shelton,' he said. 'Same design as the better-known Belmarsh in south London. You all know why we're here, and you all know what we've got to do, so there's no need for a sit-rep. The fact that you're all here means you're up for it, so I'm going to run through the operation from start to finish.'
'Who else is in on this?' asked Armstrong.
'Just you,' said Gannon. 'After this briefing I'll have no further involvement, not because I wouldn't give my eye-teeth to be with you but we can't afford to have any official connection to whatever happens. You guys are all--'
'Expendable?' said O'Brien, with a grin. He tore open a Mars bar and took a bite.
'No longer on the Regimental payroll, is what I was going to say, Martin. But, in your case, expendable will do.'
'I don't want to sound negative,' said Mitchell, 'but even I can count, and I make it four of us. That's one brick against a maximum security prison containing how many guards?'
'A full complement of a hundred and sixty during daytime hours. About fifty at night. But none are armed.'
Mitchell frowned apologetically. 'And again, without raining on anyone's parade, aren't these places designed to withstand pretty much anything?'
Gannon smiled. 'That's the whole point, Geordie. Prisons are designed to keep people in. And they make a bloody good job of it. But there's one thing they're not designed for, and that's what we're going to take advantage of.'
The four men exchanged confused looks, wondering what the major wanted them to do.
Gannon grinned. He pressed the switch in his hand and another slide flashed on to the wall: a photograph of the main entrance of the prison taken through a long lens. 'Now, if you ladies would allow me to continue with the briefing, I'll take questions later.'
The four men settled back in their chairs and listened as Gannon outlined what he wanted them to do.
Martin O'Brien and Geordie Mitchell arrived in Belfast on the afternoon ferry but they waited until it was dark before driving their green Range Rover out of the city and to the west on the M1. O'Brien drove slowly, then left the M1 at Lisburn, checked that he wasn't being followed and headed for Armagh.
The churchyard was exactly as he remembered it, bordered by a shoulder-high stone wall festooned with ivy, the grass well tended and the gravestones weathered by centuries of Irish wind and rain. There was a noticeboard at the entrance, detailing times of services and a phone number on which the priest could be reached, twenty-four hours a day. O'Brien smiled when he saw it was a mobile number: there was something amusing about a priest using new technology to keep in touch with his flock.
There was a half-moon overhead and a relatively clear sky: enough light to see by. O'Brien nodded at Mitchell and pushed open the wooden gate. It creaked like a rheumatic joint. The church was in darkness, the nearest house a hundred yards down the road. The two men had sat in the Range Rover for thirty minutes until they were satisfied that no one was in the vicinity, no late-night lovers or insomniac dog-walkers to stumble across them as they moved aside the two-hundred-year-old gravestone and dug into the hard earth with their spades.
They worked in silence and were both breathing heavily when they uncovered the first package. It was wrapped in polythene and O'Brien slowly peeled it back to reveal an oily cloth package. Inside he found a Chinese automatic pistol, with rust on the handgrips. He showed it to Mitchell, then put it aside and picked up a bigger package, almost three feet long, handed it to Mitchell and pulled out another. Both contained Hungarian 7.62mm AKM-63 automatic rifles, copies of the Soviet AK-47, with plastic socks and handgrips. 'These'll do,' said Mitchell. The weapons were serviceable but, more importantly, they looked the part.
O'Brien used his spade to lever more polythene-wrapped parcels out of the soil. One contained ammunition for the AKM-63s. Another contained half a dozen Second World War revolvers. He wouldn't want to risk live firing those.
The arms cache had been put together by the Real IRA in the late nineties. The organisation was poorly funded in comparison with the Provisionals and they had a tendency to buy whatever weaponry was offered to them. Most of the consignment buried in the graveyard had come from a Bosnian gangster, who had travelled from Sarajevo to Belfast to arrange the shipment. Special Branch had the man under surveillance from the moment he'd landed on British soil and MI6 had followed the shipment from a warehouse outside Sarajevo to a beach on the south coast of Ireland, from where it had been driven up to Belfast. Unbelievably, MI6 had lost the truck in Belfast and the consignment had vanished.
O'Brien had been working undercover in West Belfast and had penetrated a Real IRA cell that had been authorised to withdraw a number of weapons from the cache to use in a building-society robbery. He and three terrorists had removed several handguns. O'Brien hadn't passed on details of the cache to his handler. It had been a flagrant breach of procedure, but he had seen too many cock-ups to put his life on the line by revealing what he'd seen. If his bosses had decided to go in and neutralise the arms, it wouldn't have taken the Real IRA high command long to work out where the information had come from.
O'Brien was supposed to have driven the getaway car for the three robbers, but there'd been a change of plan at the last minute and he had been told that his services wouldn't be required. The raid had ended in disaster - not through action by the security services but a road accident. The replacement driver had gone through a red light on the way to the building society and a bus had side-swiped the car. The petrol tank had exploded and all four were killed. The following day the Real IRA executive who had organised the purchase of the arms had been assassinated by a Unionist death squad, and O'Brien realised that he was the only man left who knew the location of the arms. It was a secret he'd kept even after leaving the army. The only person he'd ever told was Gannon, and the major had recommended he kept the information to himself. Until now.
O'Brien unwrapped another package: a Polish Onyx short assault rifle with a folding stock and two curved thirty-round magazines. The gun was a copy of the Russian-made AKS-74U submachine-gun, capable of firing 725 rounds a minute. An excellent bit of kit. 'I'll have this,' he said.
Mitchell picked up a small package and opened it: a Polish Radom, a heavy 9mm pistol. 'Why would they buy this crap?' he asked.
'Beggars can't be choosers,' said O'Brien. He pulled apart another small package, and whistled softly. It was a brand new SIG-Sauer P-228, a compact Swiss pistol with a thirteen-round magazine.
'I'll have that,' said Mitchell, reaching for it.
'My arse you will,' said O'Brien. 'Finders keepers. Anyway, you and Billy are using the AKMs.'
They worked through the cache. The prize was at the bottom: a wooden box the size of a small suitcase that had been wrapped in a dozen black rubbish bags. O'Brien grinned. 'Bullseye,' he said.
Jimbo Shortt paid off his black cab, then headed west along the King's Road, checking reflections in shop windows before crossing the street and heading back the way he'd come, checking for tails. When he was sure he wasn't being followed he crossed the road and headed for a black door between an antiques shop and a hairdresser's. To the right was a small brass plaque inscribed 'Alex Knight Security', a bell button and a speaker
