Carver - By Tom Cain Page 0,58

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,