The Sanction Read online

  The Sanction

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on.

  The Art of War by Sun Tzu, fifth century BC

  Prologue

  Kabul, Afghanistan. Thirty-five degrees centigrade in the shade. The buzzing of flies and an acrid smell in the air. Something burning. Something bad.

  That’ll be the truck, she thinks, the burning. The bloody remains of the people in it, the bad. Men and women and children and goats and chickens. Passengers and goods on the way to the market. Talking and laughing and bleating and clucking until the truck rolled past a roadside bomb. An IED. An improvised explosive device. But there was nothing improvised about it. The attack was carefully planned, the bomb meticulously prepared. And the word improvised does a disservice to those who died. As if killing can be a spur-of-the-moment decision, as if it has no consequence and leaves no mark. She knows from personal experience that’s not true. Killing is a calculated business. In her profession there’s nothing improvised about it.

  In truth she shouldn’t be here in Afghanistan. None of them should. The campaign ended years ago. A homecoming with no fanfare and no celebration because these days wars don’t end with parades and tickertape and shiny medals pinned on proud heroes. They don’t actually end at all. And that’s why she’s back on a second tour of duty. Supposedly she’s a military adviser, a trainer, somebody providing support services, but that’s crap, a sham fashioned for political expediency. The reality is that without foreign troops the thin veneer of normality would peel aside and the entire country collapse into anarchy once more.

  Right now she’s lying prone on a rooftop five storeys up. Behind her a rusty air conditioning unit stands idle. The unit casts a shadow which shields her from the afternoon sun. The sun is the enemy out here. The heat saps energy and drains water bottles, but it’s the light which bothers her. One glint off a buckle or a flash from an eyelet on a boot and you’re made. And once you’re made then you’d better move fast if you want to live because the insurgents have the ability to rise from the ruins of the city like a miasma. As quickly as they come they can dissipate in the same way, slinking back into doorways, morphing into innocent civilians, returning to their hidey-holes until the night comes. But she won’t be outside the base after dark. That would be nothing short of idiotic.

  Beside her is her spotter, Richard Smith. Known variously as Ricky or Smithy or Itchy. Itchy because he can’t stop moving. He’s always fidgeting and fussing and at this particular moment she wishes he’d keep still because she can’t concentrate while he’s constantly in motion.

  ‘Pack it in, Itchy,’ she says. Her words are friendly, half in jest. Itchy’s been like an older brother since they’ve been paired together. Always there for her, nothing too much trouble. ‘Tell me what’s out there.’

  Itchy has a pair of binoculars and a spotting scope. Good eyes. An innate sense for picking out the tiniest of anomalies in a scene that would look normal to most people. Itchy is thirty-three, more experienced than she is, battle-scarred, world wise. This is his third tour and it shows in the handful of grey wisps sprouting among his dark hair. An old man’s brain in a young man’s body. He’s seen too many things that can’t be forgotten, although he never brags. You can always tell the true veterans by the number of stories they tell: the fewer stories, the more they’ve seen. Eventually they stop saying anything at all.

  Itchy moves his eyes from his scope to the binoculars and pans from left to right. Like her, he’s lying beneath a camouflage net of tan and grey. He’s the lookout, there so she can keep her head down and her eye fixed to the telescopic sight on her rifle. In a sniper team the spotter is the most important component. Anyone can pull a trigger and fire off a shot, although not many with the accuracy she can achieve.

  ‘Nothing,’ Itchy says after he’s completed his sweep. ‘We’re good.’

  ‘Keep looking.’ She adjusts her position slightly and blinks, refocusing the image in her right eye. Eight hundred metres away a patrol is heading up to an intersection. Some unlucky bugger on point, the others following. The patrol’s radio chatter crackles in her earpiece. Cautious. Nervous. She can’t blame them for being nervous though. Not with the high buildings looming over the rubble-filled streets. This place is a maze with a dozen wrong turnings. A dozen ways to die.

  If she and Itchy were the enemy, half the patrol would already be dead. Luckily they’re on the same side. The closest thing the grunts have to a pair of guardian angels. From this decrepit building they can see a good portion of the locality. They can take out a target at a thousand metres and the first thing the hostile will know about it will be when the bullet hits them.

  ‘Smith?’ a voice in her ear says as the patrol checks in. ‘Sit rep.’

  ‘Nothing moving,’ Itchy says in response. ‘All clear ahead.’

  ‘Taking five,’ the voice says. ‘A breather.’

  The patrol back up to a wall. The point man hunkers in a doorway twenty metres away. Through her scope she can see water bottles being passed round, straps on helmets loosened. She reaches for her own bottle and takes a gulp without moving her right eye from the scope. Through her left eye she sees the world close to. Empty streets. A stray dog with three legs scrabbling in a patch of dirt five storeys below. A blur of helicopter fuzzing the air on the horizon.

  She refocuses on the cross street near the patrol and something catches her eye. A low dwelling with washing on a line. She didn’t realise anyone still lived in this part of the city. But it isn’t the clothes flapping on the line that have caught her attention. Something just slipped beneath the washing line. Someone.

  He’s small. Not a combatant. A boy perhaps thirteen or fourteen years old. His clothes aren’t much more than rags, but he’s got a smile on his face as he leaves the little walled area and steps onto the street, heading for the intersection.

  ‘Itchy?’ she says, but he’s already on it.

  ‘Charlie,’ he says, clicking the radio. ‘Got a kid to your three o’clock. Just a kid, no drama, copy?’

  Nothing but static in her earpiece.

  She adjusts her position so she can see the patrol again. They’re still in the shadow of the building. Against regulations, helmets have been removed. Three of the patrol are sitting on the ground. She sees one man laughing. Somebody is eating from a ration pack. They hav
en’t heard Itchy. She tries her own headset in case Itchy’s radio is down.

  ‘Charlie, do you copy, over?’

  Still nothing.

  ‘Shit,’ Itchy says. ‘He’s carrying something.’

  She looks back at the kid. Itchy’s right. The boy is holding an object in his hands. A metal ammunition box. And, come to think of it, perhaps his smile is more of a grimace than an expression of happiness.

  ‘Bloody hell, I can see a wire. It’s an IED.’ Itchy is moving now. Out from under the camouflage net and standing as if he could wave or shout even though the patrol is nearly half a mile away.

  ‘Get down, you idiot,’ she says.

  Itchy could call control and try to route a message through them, but there’s no time. The kid will reach the intersection in ten seconds. When he turns left he’ll be within a couple of metres of the men. If the box contains a bomb then the patrol are dead. What remains of them will have to be scraped off the street and sent home in a tub.

  ‘Charlie, do you copy, over?’

  Five seconds.

  ‘Charlie, come in, over.’

  Three.

  Two.

  ‘Take him,’ says Itchy.

  One.

  ‘What’s up?’ comes the answer, the radio net working once more. But the response is too late. It’s now or never.

  Her finger touches the trigger. There’s a crack from her rifle and time freezes. The bullet will take nearly a second to reach the target and will drop as it arcs in flight. There’s a left to right breeze. She’s had to compensate for the height of the building she’s on, the drop and the windage, but all that comes easy to her. She’s one of the best snipers in the British army and on this tour has already notched up more than half a dozen kills. Missing the target is unlikely.

  In the fragment of his life remaining, the boy half turns. He knows nothing of the bullet approaching him at over nine hundred metres per second, which explains why he’s still smiling. He knows nothing until the bullet strikes him just below his right ear, passing through the lower half of his skull and destroying the brainstem. He collapses to the ground.

  The sound arrives at the intersection a full two seconds after the bullet, and the patrol leap up in response.

  ‘Hostile eliminated,’ she says as the men take cover. ‘Your three o’clock. Five metres.’

  There’s a chaotic buzz. Point is on the wrong side of the street but he realises what’s happened. He runs from the doorway and widens the angle so he can see down the intersection. He ducks behind a wall and makes a hand signal. One member of the patrol skirts back the way they’ve come and watches the rear, while another covers the forward position. The rest stand motionless while the patrol leader approaches the boy.

  ‘Shot,’ says Itchy. He pats her on the back. It’s what he always does when she hits the target, whether it’s on the practice range or in the field. Whether the bullet has hit a bullseye or a human being.

  ‘There’s an ammunition box,’ she hears the patrol leader say over the radio. ‘I can see a wire near the top.’

  Careful, she thinks. There could be a delay on the device or perhaps there might be a hidden operator ready to punch a remote button when someone gets close enough.

  The patrol leader is within a couple of metres now. He lowers himself to the ground to minimise the possible blast effect and crawls forward.

  ‘Oh God,’ he says. ‘Oh shit, shit, shit.’

  She wants to scream at him to get out of there, but she lets someone else do the talking.

  ‘What is it?’ Point says.

  ‘Sweets,’ comes the reply. ‘The box is full of sweets. The wire was a tie holding the lid shut.’

  She stares down the scope. The patrol leader is obscuring the ammunition container, but then he stands and she can see he’s right. The contents of the box have spilled over the ground. Sweets and chocolate and cakes. Something catches her eye and she swings the rifle to cover the movement. The washing balloons out as a woman pushes under the line. Her hands are to her mouth and then she’s on her knees in the dirt, screaming, crying, begging. One of the other soldiers comes forward. He speaks to her and translates.

  ‘She’s the boy’s mother,’ she hears across the airwaves. ‘He was bringing us a present to say “thank you” for being here.’

  ‘And we shot him,’ someone else says. ‘We shot him in the fucking head.’

  Chapter One

  Two years later

  In her dreams the boy sometimes lives. Not often, but enough times to suggest there may be an alternate reality. A place where her life turns out differently. A place where the boy’s story doesn’t end with a headline and a blurred picture of a smiling face. Each night she wakes in a cold sweat and stares into the dark and clenches her fists so her nails dig into her palms. She prays to whatever God is listening, to whatever demonic force might be willing to make a pact with her. A straight swap. Her life for his. She listens for an answer but there’s only the sounds of a car passing by outside, a siren blaring somewhere in the distance, the rain spattering against the window. At some point she falls into another fitful slumber, tossing and turning until the alarm bleeps and her hand reaches out to silence the unwelcome intrusion.

  She struggles out of bed, washes, dresses, eats. She sets off for work but the morning sun doesn’t warm her. Instead she remembers the cold of a mountain pass thick with snow. The sounds of gunfire. The thud of a heavy retort as an explosion rips through a crowded market. The stench of charred flesh and the streets echoing with the screams of men and women and children. The never-ending racket of helicopters. The eerie silence that descends at sunset and the sleep which doesn’t come easily after witnessing so much death. She remembers the joshing and the horseplay and reading dog-eared paperbacks while lying on a bunk in the daytime heat. The boredom. The fear. And the screams again. Always the screams.

  In her dreams the boy sometimes lives. But mostly he dies.

  * * *

  Plymouth’s main shopping street measured five hundred metres, give or take a couple of strides. The street sloped gently upwards and ran west to east as straight as an arrow. If you had an eye for such a thing you could find several good hide sites, but the standout one was at the top of the multistorey car park down at the western end. You could lie there with your weapon poking through the metal guardrail or alternatively place yourself in a vehicle, open the front passenger window, and sit in the back seat. With a small gel bag on the sill the window would provide the perfect rest. The trajectory of the bullet over a range of five hundred metres meant there’d be a drop to account for but the buildings rose, chasm like, either side of the street, so crosswinds were minimal. If the target was walking to the west, towards the car park, you’d have plenty of time to make the shot. If they went into a shop you could simply wait until they emerged. No doubt about it, the car park was a standout position.

  Rebecca da Silva stared up at the multistorey. She didn’t have to think about such things any more, but she’d been in the army for eight years and situational awareness was in her blood. Quite literally, since her father had served in the army too. Back in the nineties he’d been with the special forces in the Gulf War. ‘You thought Afghanistan was tough?’ he’d sneer, as if patrolling the streets of Kabul was akin to taking a stroll in the English countryside. ‘You should have tried SCUD hunting in southern Iraq. That was tough.’ She would nod and pretend to listen, all the while wondering if it was genes or upbringing that had led to her following in his footsteps. Perhaps it was serendipity or divine intervention. Perhaps it was plain rotten luck.

  Silva was twenty-eight years old. Her father was British through and through, but her mother was born of Portuguese immigrants. Her parents had divorced when she was ten and at some point in her teens she’d adopted her mother’s maiden name. Partly it had been an act of solidarity with her mother, partly a rejection of her father. Her Portuguese side was evident in her light coffee-coloured skin and her dark-b
rown hair. Her eyes were a mixture of her father’s and mother’s, a grey-green that was the shade of the sea after a fierce storm. She was small, but lithe, strong and agile. In Basic Training, her instructors had been surprised she’d come in the top ten per cent on the loaded march. Her heart, she knew, carried a good portion of her mother’s easy-going southern European attitude, combined with a dash of the fiery temper which had undoubtedly hastened her parents’ separation. What was inside her head came from her father: a calm, stubborn orderliness that she’d done resisting and now used to her advantage. In the army both sides of her character had been invaluable.

  Nowadays it was all she could do to remind herself that the military part of her life had ended when the judge advocate had sentenced her to twelve months in prison and dismissal from the service. The charge was negligence and, as her lawyer had been keen to explain, her situation could have been very much worse since initially there’d been talk of manslaughter or even murder.

  She blinked as something moved against the brightness of the sky. Someone. There was a kid up there in the car park, held up by his father so he could look down on the street. The boy wasn’t much older than a toddler and he pointed at Silva and waved. For a second she wondered if she knew the kid, but then she realised it was the uniform he was interested in. Silva forced herself to give a half smile and waved back. As the boy laughed with delight, emotion welled up in her stomach. Sadness, regret, self-disgust.

  * * *

  Stephen Holm wasn’t usually asleep at four in the afternoon, but then he didn’t often work a twenty-four-hour shift. When he’d stumbled back to his flat at seven that morning he’d tried to remain awake by fortifying himself with a cup of extra-strong coffee, but despite the caffeine boost he’d found his eyelids heavy. The long hours in the windowless situation room at MI5’s headquarters in Thames House had led to something akin to jet lag, and eventually he’d given up and gone to bed. For a few minutes he’d lain in the dark and tried to calm his mind and then he was out like a light bulb. Hours later he awoke in an instant as his phone blared out. He grabbed the phone and thumbed to answer.