Light Touch: The 14th Spider Shepherd Thriller (The Spider Shepherd Thrillers) Read online

  Contents

  Also by Stephen Leather

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Matt Standing wasn’t …

  Also by Stephen Leather

  Pay Off

  The Fireman

  Hungry Ghost

  The Chinaman

  The Vets

  The Long Shot

  The Birthday Girl

  The Double Tap

  The Solitary Man

  The Tunnel Rats

  The Bombmaker

  The Stretch

  Tango One

  The Eyewitness

  First Response

  Takedown

  Spider Shepherd thrillers

  Hard Landing

  Soft Target

  Cold Kill

  Hot Blood

  Dead Men

  Live Fire

  Rough Justice

  Fair Game

  False Friends

  True Colours

  White Lies

  Black Ops

  Dark Forces

  Jack Nightingale supernatural thrillers

  Nightfall

  Midnight

  Nightmare

  Nightshade

  Lastnight

  If you’d like to find out more about these and future titles, go to www.stephenleather.com.

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Stephen Leather 2017

  The right of Stephen Leather to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 473 60411 7

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For Sharan

  Matt Standing wasn’t a great fan of defecating into plastic bags, but when you were five days into an operation that would hopefully lead to the death of one of the world’s most wanted terrorists, there wasn’t much choice.

  Sergeant Standing was on the top floor of a half-destroyed building on the outskirts of a town called Idlib in the north-west of Syria. The house had been hit by a missile a year earlier and all the occupants had been killed. Satellite surveillance photographs had identified it as being the ideal choice for the mission – it was on a hill overlooking the town and had easy access from the rear. The nearest neighbour was several hundred yards away and, other than the occasional browsing goat, no one went near the place. And it had a perfect view of the target house, almost a mile away.

  There was no mains water and no electricity. They had brought water in plastic bottles and used night-vision goggles when they needed to see in the dark. Food consisted mainly of dry rations, though they had some fruit and hard-boiled eggs too.

  There were three SAS troopers with Standing. Karl Williams was the group’s medic, a strapping six-footer from Bristol, a farmer’s son who had decided that a military career might be more fulfilling than milking cows. Grant Parker was an explosive expert. As a kid he’d loved blowing things up – everything from tree stumps to live frogs – and the SAS had turned him into the demolition expert he’d always wanted to be. He was also a trained sniper and a black belt in Shotokan karate. The third member of the unit was John Cox, the oldest of the group with two decades of SAS service under his belt. Cox was a big man with thinning red hair, a linguist, fluent in Arabic and near-fluent in Kurdish, with a smattering of European languages. He was also a signals specialist, in charge of the unit’s radio and satphone.

  They had set up the observation point in the bedroom overlooking the target house. The staircase had been made of wood and had pretty much been destroyed. They had piled rubble against a wall so that they could reach the upper floor. They slept in the rear bedroom, where most of the ceiling had been destroyed, and used the roof to carry out their bodily functions. At night they peed off the terrace and onto the rear garden. They stored the faeces-filled bags in a pile against the wall and would take them away when the operation was over.

  They had reached the house on quad bikes that they had hidden in a ravine some ten miles away, then walked under cover of darkness wearing night-vision goggles to find their way. Nowhere in Syria was safe, but Idlib was under the control of Islamic State and one of the most dangerous places in the world for Westerners. When Syria’s civil uprising had burst into life in 2011, Idlib had been a focal point of the protests and fighting, and ownership of the city kept passing between the rebels and the Syrian Army. The area had once been a source of olives, cotton and wheat, and the cherries produced there were said to be the best in the region. Small factories pressed the olives and the oil was sold around the country. No longer. In recent years the main export had been refugees, and families from the area could now be found scattered across Europe in their thousands. The town’s most successful football club was Omaya Sport but in 2015 it had had to withdraw from the Syrian professional league after an airstrike had destroyed its headquarters. Normal life had stopped in Idlib and there were no signs of it returning in the near future. Life meant survival, day-to-day getting by in a war zone.

  Standing went back into the front room and took up his position again, lying prone and studying the building in the distance. The house they were watching was a simple two-storey sandstone building, no different from hundreds of others in the town and a match to the one they were holed up in: small windows, a roof terrace from which laundry fluttered, metal bars on the ground-floor windows. The building wasn’t the least bit special, but its occupants were. Specifically one occupant, a man of seventy-nine, who was, that very day, turning eighty. Like most Muslims, Houman Ahmadi did not celebrate his birthday, the birthdays of his children or of their children. Birthdays were haram. Forbidden. Like bacon and alcohol.

  Houman lived quietly in the house. He was still active, despite his years, and each evening would sit on the roof terrace smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and drinking hot mint tea prepared by one of the two women who took care of him. One was his daughter-in-law, the widow of his third son, the other a distant cousin, whose family had died in a suicide bombing in the town’s market: a young man had detonated a truck full of fertiliser explosives as a convoy of police vehicles drove by. Eight police officers and two dozen civilians had died that day and dozens more were injured. Houman’s cousin had lost her husband and two children, most of her left arm and the sight in her left eye.

  Houman had six children, fifteen grandchildren and twenty great-grandchildren. Most of his family had left the town soon after the fighting had started but he had refused to go. Three of his children had crossed the border to the north with their families and were in the main refugee camp in the south-eastern border town of Suruç. More than forty thousand refugees lived in the sprawling tent city with two hosp
itals, a dozen clinics and classrooms for more than ten thousand children. Two of his sons had taken their families to the Kilis Öncüpınar Accommodation Facility, a hundred miles to the west of Suruç, a makeshift town built from more than twenty thousand shipping containers where more than fifteen thousand refugees had sought sanctuary. Ten of Houman’s grandchildren – all fit young men – had set out on the long walk to Europe in the hope of getting asylum there. The families had given them whatever they had, knowing they were a lifeline. If one was granted the Holy Grail of citizenship in a European country, they would all be able to follow.

  Houman had one more son, his youngest, soon to turn forty. His name was Abdul-Karim and he was one of the most wanted terrorists in the world. He was why Standing and his colleagues were defecating into plastic bags and eating ration packs that tasted of cardboard. Abdul-Karim Ahmadi – known by the men hunting him as AKA – was one of the top bombmakers and strategists for the Khorasan group, made up of hardline al-Qaeda terrorists who were determined to take the fight to the United States and Europe. He had been in America’s Top 10 Most Wanted list for more than a year, and there had been several failed attempts to assassinate him. The CIA had kept Houman Ahmadi under observation for more than a year, hoping that Abdul-Karim would get in touch. Houman had no phone or internet connection, and the only visitors he had were an imam from his local mosque and a shopkeeper who delivered provisions several times a week. He was just an old man getting to the end of his life. But in recent weeks his watchers had noticed a change in him. During his evening visits to the roof terrace, he was clearly finding it difficult to walk and needed the assistance of one of his carers to get up the stairs. Then one evening he was connected to a drip and both carers were needed to get him onto the roof so that he could smoke his cigarettes and drink his tea. Houman was dying, the CIA analysts at Langley, Virginia, had decided. And before he died, there was a good chance that his son, Abdul-Karim, would visit to pay his respects.

  The equipment they would use to bring about the demise of Abdul-Karim, should he ever turn up at his father’s house, was at Standing’s side. It was about the same size and shape as an old-fashioned slide projector but it had nothing to do with entertainment and everything to do with destruction. It was a laser target designator, manufactured by US defence giant Northrop Grumman. Those who used it referred to it as a SOFLAM, which stood for Special Operations Forces Laser Acquisition Marker. The technique of using lasers to guide in missiles had been used to great effect in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Americans were determined to make full use of it in Syria. The SOFLAM that Standing had been given was the PEQ-1C, which used only one battery rather than the five that were needed to power the earlier versions: the new model had replaced the flashlamp-pumped laser with a diode-pumped laser, using passive cooling. The P meant man-portable. The E designated it as equipment that used a laser. And the Q meant special. That was what Standing had been told by the Navy SEAL who had given it to him. Standing didn’t know the technical details but he did know that if he pointed it at a building less than ten kilometres away and pressed the magic button, the target would be bathed in a pulsing laser that was invisible to the naked eye but could clearly be seen by a drone fifty thousand feet in the air. The drone would release a Hellfire missile, and sensors in its nose would take it to the target with pinpoint accuracy.

  Dan ‘Spider’ Shepherd was not a fan of defecating into plastic bags, though he had done his fair share of it during his years with the SAS. But working long hours on surveillance operations for MI5 meant that toilet breaks couldn’t be pre-planned. Among the equipment packed into the back of the Openreach van, there was a pack of self-sealing plastic sandwich bags. The van was the perfect choice for a surveillance vehicle: it was fairly roomy in the back and there were hundreds on the streets of London every day, many parked by the roadside as their technicians went about their business, maintaining the fibres, wires and cables that kept the country connected. On the off-chance that a member of the public got a look inside, the racks of surveillance and recording equipment wouldn’t seem out of place.

  Shepherd was in his early forties and his two colleagues were almost a decade younger, but he was clearly the fittest of the three. MI5 generally wasn’t concerned about fitness levels: the organisation regarded the fight against terrorism as a cerebral one and brought in physical expertise when it was needed. There were three Armed-Response Vehicles close by, each with three highly trained firearms officers on board. It was a big operation: the intel supplied by Shepherd’s boss – Jeremy Willoughby-Brown, presently ensconced in an operation room in Thames House – was that the object of the surveillance was planning to carry out a major terrorist incident, sooner rather than later.

  Janet Rayner, a pretty no-nonsense brunette, her shoulder-length hair tied up with a scrunchie, was manning the comms. She had a cut-glass accent but had grown up on a rough council estate in north Manchester and had spent three years as an electrical engineer on cargo ships, running back and forth to the Far East, before joining MI5. She was in her early thirties but was still asked for ID in pubs and bars.

  The youngest member of the surveillance team was handling the video feeds. Perversely, Paul Brennan looked a good ten years older than his true age, mainly because of his receding hair and bad posture, which he blamed on a childhood spent bent over a laptop. Brennan had a personalhygiene problem, but that hadn’t become apparent until they’d been stuck in the back of the van. Body odour was always a problem on stakeouts, but the van had little in the way of ventilation and Brennan clearly wasn’t a fan of antiperspirants.

  All three of the team were wearing Openreach overalls and headsets. Shepherd was the only one who had drawn a firearm – a SIG-Sauer P226, the 9mm model and, in Shepherd’s opinion, one of the best-balanced handguns available. It had no external safety but had three safety controls – the slide stop, the magazine release and the de-cocker – which meant that it could safely be carried with ten rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber. It nestled under his left armpit in a nylon holster.

  Further along the road a black cab was parked with its light off and two passengers in the back. The driver was a middle-aged MI5 surveillance officer. His passengers were Counter-terrorist Specialist Firearms Officers. They had replaced their wolf-grey fire-proof uniforms with plainclothes jackets and jeans, and while they usually went about their business with AR-15 CQB carbines, for this operation they were carrying Glock 17 handguns in underarm holsters. If more firearms support was needed, the three ARVs would be on the scene in seconds, BMW SUVs each with three uniformed officers on board.

  At either end of the street MI5 surveillance experts were kitted out as motorbike couriers, and Shepherd had another surveillance vehicle – a driving instructor’s car in British School of Motoring livery. The driver was an MI5 surveillance officer, and his female passenger, holding a clipboard, was a CTSFO. She had a Glock in the door compartment next to her.

  ‘Tango One is on the move,’ said Brennan.

  Tango One was a second-generation Somalian, who had spent his whole life in north London. His parents had fled war-torn Somalia in the early nineties, selling all their belongings to pay for their passage to the UK. The father was a doctor, the mother a teacher, and they had made new lives for themselves in their adopted country, raising four children. Dr and Mrs Daar did everything they could do to fit in. Mrs Daar always wore a traditional Somalian shash headscarf when she went out, but she teamed it with Western clothing. Dr Daar wore a suit most of the time, even when he wasn’t working at the local hospital. They had given their children Western names and didn’t object when their two daughters opted not to cover their hair. The girls had both gone on to study medicine, one at Edinburgh University, the other in Manchester. Their elder son was a computer programmer, working for Sony in their video-games division. The younger was the only member of the Daar family who had not integrated into British life. In fact, he held his parents and siblings in contem
pt and had moved out of the family home when he was sixteen. He had rejected the name his parents had given him – Alan – and now called himself Ali Mohammed. He had also rejected Western clothing in favour of the ankle-length dress known as a kameez, had grown a long, bushy beard, and had moved into a shared house with half a dozen young Muslim men in Stoke Newington.

  Ali Mohammed did not have a driving licence. He either travelled by public transport or had a friend drive him. Over the last week it had been the same man who had picked him up, a British-born Pakistani by the name of Tariq Tareen, designated as Tango Two, who attended the same mosque as Daar. Tareen had been placed on MI5’s watch list not long after he had returned from a six-month visit to Pakistan three years earlier, ostensibly to attend a cousin’s wedding but almost certainly because he had been invited to an ISIS training camp on the Pakistan–Afghanistan border. At the time Tareen had slipped in and out of the country without anyone noticing, but an informer at the mosque had supplied a list of young men he claimed had attended the training camp. As a result, Five had put Tareen under surveillance. He ran a pro-jihadist website from his bedroom in his parents’ terraced house in Southall, and was a regular at anti-Israel demonstrations in the city.

  Like Daar, Tareen had an unkempt beard, but he favoured more Western clothes, usually a quilted jacket with baggy trousers and a black-and-white checked scarf tied loosely around his neck. He drove a red Nissan Juke. During the month that Shepherd and his team had been watching the two men, they had made frequent visits to a storage facility in Hammersmith. Daar had rented a large storage unit and, over the past two weeks, had been stocking it with everything he would need to construct small but powerful bombs. After his second visit to the storage facility, MI5 technicians had installed a tiny CCTV camera in the ceiling and had kept the unit under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Daar and Tareen had visited several electronics supply firms, purchasing wiring and soldering irons, and chemicals that could be used to produce explosives, including acetone, hydrogen peroxide, sulphuric acid and more than a dozen bags of ammonium nitrate fertiliser. Twice the men had driven up north and parked at the London Gateway service station between junctions two and four on the M1. There they had been met by two British-born Pakistanis from Leeds and transferred a number of bags to the Nissan. Shepherd’s team had identified the men from Leeds – both were on MI5 watch lists.