Carver - By Tom Cain Page 0,33

given instructions to maintain the closest possible watch on Carver, but not to take any further action until ordered to do so. In the meantime, however, he was to prepare detailed plans for Carver’s elimination. So far as both Choi and his masters were concerned, this was just a postponement: the fundamental need to kill Samuel Carver before he killed Malachi Zorn remained as pressing as ever.

18

* * *

Carn Drum Farm, the Cambrian Mountains, Ceredigion, Wales

DAVE SMETHURST PLUNGED his hand into a large plastic bin filled with icing sugar. He lifted it up again, letting the bright white grains slide through his fingers. ‘Almost any kind of weapon you can think of can be improvised if you know how,’ he mused as he looked at his now empty palm. ‘That’s why that whole demilitarization process in Northern Ireland was such bollocks. PIRA were laughing their heads off.’

‘PIRA?’ asked Brynmor Gryffud.

‘Provisional IRA. They knew, and we knew, they could make everything again for themselves the next day. Take this icing sugar. Bags of energy in it, and exceptionally small particles, see? That means it actually coats that stuff over there, the ammonium nitrate,’ he nodded at a pile of garden fertilizer bags, ‘in a very fine powder. That aids the reaction between the two of them. If we mix this properly, you’re going to end up with an explosive more powerful than military-grade TNT.’

Smethurst was not an idealist. This was just another job to him, a means to make a few bob from the skills he had acquired as an ammunition technician, Class 1. That was the unassuming name given to any soldier who was qualified to test and maintain all forms of army ordnance – from rifle clips to anti-aircraft missiles – and, more importantly, to deal with all types of explosives. After six months of initial training at the Army School of Ammunition, followed by an upgrading course two or three years later, an AT Class 1 knew everything worth knowing about all the various ways of making things go bang. He was equally qualified to make a bomb of his own, or dispose of someone else’s. In a twenty-year career in the forces Dave Smethurst had done his time in the streets of Belfast and Basra before spending his last six months in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, disarming Taliban bombs with the sweat streaming down his back and bullets smacking into the dirt tracks and stone walls all around him. The way he saw it, he’d given his country everything he owed it, and then some. From now on he was looking after number one.

He and Gryffud were standing in an old hay barn on Carn Drum Farm, thirteen hundred acres of bleak but spectacularly beautiful Welsh uplands about ten miles south-east of Tregaron, in the county of Ceredigion, that had been in the Gryffud family for generations. The land hereabouts was traditionally used for sheep farming, forestry and field sports. There were black and red grouse nesting on the hillsides, and salmon, sea trout and brown trout in the rivers and pools that watered the valleys between them. More than one local businessman had told Gryffud that he could double his income if he opened the farm up for corporate shooting and fishing parties.

Gryffud had always refused. He was adamantly opposed to blood sports, and would not even keep sheep, preferring to let the grazing land revert from grass to the heather that naturally flourished there. He funded the estate with a combination of environmental grants, holiday lets of the old farmworkers’ cottages, and guided walking tours for ramblers and birdwatchers: the red kites that soared above the landscape with their beautiful russet, black and white plumage always had the twitchers purring with delight.

The recent arrival of a party of eight guests had caused no comment from any of the locals who had happened to see them driving towards Carn Drum. They were only too happy if Big Bryn could make some money from his farm. Better it stay in the hands of a local boy, even if he did spend far too much of his time in London, than be bought by a foreigner. They might have felt rather differently, however, had they known what was going on there on this particular weekend.

The group’s three female members were hard at work, mixing the sugar and fertilizer with which Dave Smethurst had been toying. They were following two different recipes, each involving slightly different proportions of the two