Code Zulu

By Chester Stern

An ingenious code, devised from the ancient African myths, legends, and superstitions of the Zulu nation, holds the key to this intriguing terror plot. Nothing is what it seems. Murder, blackmail, kidnap, betrayal and treachery all form part of the fast-moving story as the action switches from London to South Africa, Malaysia, the Middle East, and back again. April McIntyre, bright young Deputy Director-General of MI5, activates a sleeper agent and infiltrates him into a cell which plans a spectacular terrorist outrage against an iconic British institution. She thinks she is in control but even she is shocked and amazed by the final outcome.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chester Stern
• Release date: Dec 10, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301360895

Chester Stern

CHESTER STERN has been a writer and broadcaster on crime and police matters for more than forty-five years. A former head of the Press Bureau at Scotland Yard, he has lectured extensively on terrorism and the media in Britain, Europe and the USA. He was Chief Crime Correspondent for The Mail on Sunday for nineteen years and is past President of the Crime Reporters' Association. In 2001 he became Corporate Affairs Director for Fulham Football Club and Controller of Public Affairs for Harrods, acting as media adviser to Mohamed Al Fayed and advising on the investigation into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. He has published two true crime books: Dr Iain West's Casebook – the investigations of Britain's leading forensic pathologist, and The Black Widow – the story of Linda Calvey, the UK's most notorious female gangster, (written in collaboration with Kate Kray, widow of Ronnie Kray). He has also written three works of fiction – a faction thriller about the death of Princess Diana called The Decoy, a terrorism thriller based in South Africa called Code Zulu, and a murder mystery detective novel based in the newspaper world of Fleet Street called The Green-Inker. Since the early seventies, he has also been a sportswriter and broadcaster on football, rugby and golf for the BBC, The Sunday Telegraph, The Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Mirror.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

London

It was the Harrods bag they remembered. The witnesses. The next morning.

Most of them didn’t realise they’d even seen him until they watched the news.

Their descriptions of the assassin, typically, varied. Vague. Conflicting. Contradictory. But one thing they all recalled. It stood out in their minds’ eye. The distinctive olive-green carrier bag with the iconic gold lettering – the familiar brand name of London’s best known department store.

It hadn’t registered at the time but there was something incongruous about the bag. And the young man. And the way he held it. They couldn’t put their finger on it.

He would have made an excellent case study for a criminal psychologist. No one noticed him. No one paid him any attention. But, to a trained eye, his body language spoke volumes.

He was on station a full thirty minutes before the appointed time. Not pacing. Standing stock still, his eyes fixed on the glass frontage of the Royal Garden Hotel.

It was a hot, sticky, August day. Oppressively hot. As always the traffic was backed-up along Kensington Road from the lights at the junction of Kensington Church Street and High Street Kensington. The end of the jam reached past the front of the hotel and tailed off towards the Royal Albert Hall - an uneasy assortment of throbbing motors, inching forward, belching toxic fumes into the already fetid atmosphere.

The young man stood on the north pavement with his back to the traffic. He wore a plain white T-shirt - which most of the witnesses later remembered - faded denim jeans, and a pair of Nike trainers. He expected to be running at some point during the operation.

He clutched the Harrods bag to his chest, arms folded tightly across it, in the kind of protective posture a woman might adopt on a crowded train to prevent thieves or pickpockets from stealing her handbag.

He positioned himself at the foot of the ramp which taxis use to reach the hotel’s front entrance. To his right a throng of people – shoppers, tourists, office workers – stood waiting for buses. He did not glance in their direction.

He also seemed totally oblivious to the presence, just yards to his left, of a policeman wearing a flak jacket and cradling a sub-machine gun. The officer had emerged from his sentry box and was guarding the wrought-iron gates, which give access to Kensington Palace Gardens, an exclusive tree-lined avenue where the Israeli Embassy is located. Neither man looked at the other.

The young man spotted his target without difficulty. Heads turned as she sashayed across the foyer of the hotel with the loose-limbed walk of a fashion model - chin up, shoulders back, and each foot crossing in front of the other so as to accentuate the swivel of her hips. Through the plate glass the young man could not hear the mesmeric click of her stiletto heels on the marble floor but in his head he imagined it.

She was tall and slender with the kind of naturally glowing complexion, which only comes to those who never have to lie out in the sun to affect a tan. Her jet-black hair was sleek and shiny and fell, over her shoulders, straight down to the small of her back. She wore a cream-coloured wrap-over dress trimmed in navy blue to match her shoes and accessories. Her jewellery was understated but obviously expensive. A large pair of sunglasses perched on the top of her head. She carried a crocodile-skin attaché case.

Obligingly she came to sit in one of the royal blue velour armchairs in the window alongside the revolving doors, crossing shapely ankles as she did so.

The young man knew he would not have long to wait. He threw back his head and fixed his eyes on a bulbous yellow light fixed to the corner of the hotel wall directly above him. Within minutes it began to flash – the signal to passing taxi drivers that a cab was required. For the first time in his vigil he turned to face the traffic in the street. A small convoy of three black cabs approached from the West with their orange ‘For Hire’ signs illuminated. A winking indicator soon suggested that the driver of the first one had noticed the hotel summons and was turning in. The taxi passed within feet of the young man. The driver was a cheerful-looking bespectacled fellow with a ruddy complexion and a beer gut but the young man hardly saw him. He was focussing intently on his target.

He saw the concierge, resplendent in his top hat with gold trim, red waistcoat and tailcoat with red and gold lapel tabs, enter the hotel and speak briefly to the young woman. As she got to her feet he was already on the move. Gliding stealthily up the pavement alongside the taxi ramp, his right hand thrust inside the carrier bag. By the time the doorman had opened the taxi door he was on them.

The young woman bent her head forward to enter the cab and as she did so a bullet smashed into the right side of her face from close range. She slumped forward on to the back seat and the nose of a Glock semi-automatic pistol was pressed against the base of her skull at the junction where the spinal column enters the brain. A second squeeze of the trigger and her life was obliterated in a messy explosion of brain tissue, splintered bone, blood, skin and gore.

The hit had been so swift and clinical, so professional, that only the doorman witnessed it. The gun was fitted with a silencer, of course, and the two muffled ‘Pop, Pop’, sounds it made were swallowed up in the interior of the taxi and lost in the hubbub of traffic rumbling by in the street.

The taxi driver was facing forward listening to the radio with the engine running. The glass partition between himself and the passenger compartment prevented him from hearing anything. He was only alerted by a bellow from the doorman.

The doorman, a bulky man in his fifties, had been a paratrooper in his youth and was still a man of action.

‘Get an ambulance, someone’s been shot’, he yelled in the direction of the revolving door behind him. ‘And the police’, he added, turning the victim over and realising that summoning an ambulance would be futile. Scrambling to his feet he screamed ‘Stop that man’, at the departing figure of the killer as he charged into the hotel foyer shouting at the receptionist, ‘dial 999 and get the Old Bill here, quick, quick, quick’.

The killer sprinted back down the taxi ramp in the direction from which he had come. The armed policeman was still in position, yawning as he idly admired two young women, a blonde and a brunette, tottering past, laden with shopping bags and giggling over some girly gossip.

He had not heard the doorman’s shout and caught sight of the gunman for the first time as he raced into the roadway causing a motorcyclist to swerve and forcing an angry blast on the horn of a passing taxi. The police officer also noticed the Harrods bag, by now screwed up into a cylindrical shape and clutched in the young man’s right hand.

The officer watched as the fleeing figure dodged between stationary vehicles in the opposite carriageway and disappeared through the narrow entrance to the alleyway linking the main thoroughfare with the quiet residential square of Kensington Court. ‘Crazy these kids’, the policeman said to himself, ‘they’ve all got a death wish these days.’

The fugitive ran on, over the cobblestones past the afternoon drinkers sipping chilled Sancerre outside the Arcadia restaurant, now jogging and slowing as he entered Kensington Court proper. He looked around. There was no pursuit. The plan had worked. He had banked on the element of surprise. It would be several minutes before the hotel staff and the emergency services got their act together. He knew that.

He looked to his left and froze. A police car was just rolling into the square. He took two gulps of air and tried to steady his breathing as he walked quickly back into the alley and paused outside the Prezzo wine bar pretending to study the menu card on the wall.

The police car came around the one-way system and stopped outside the Iranian Embassy. A routine visit. Of course. No need to panic. It was far too soon for the alarm to have been raised. The young man cursed himself. He should have simply strolled on. Now he had lost vital minutes.

He had worked out a route through the maze of back streets to the south of High Street Kensington, which would take him to the Underground station where he could mingle comfortably with the throng of shoppers and tourists crowding on and off the trains. He looked sufficiently anonymous to get away with it. The streets were largely deserted so he need not draw attention to himself by running. He could stroll and still be at the station within minutes – long before the police had even begun to mobilise.

The radio dispatcher at Scotland Yard’s Command and Control centre read details of the shooting on the computer screen in front of him line by line as the operator talking to the doorman on the hotel reception telephone entered it. He leant forward and pressed the Open Carrier button on his console. ‘All units, all units’, he said calmly into the mouthpiece of his headset. ‘Firearms incident at the Royal Garden Hotel, Kensington Road. Bravo Delta section. One possible fatality. Male suspect, still armed, decamped on foot. Any ARV respond?’

There was a crackle of static and an urgent voice said: ‘MP. MP, from Foxtrot Delta 51. We’ll take it.’

‘Five One, your location and ETA?’ asked the dispatcher.

‘MP from Five One, we’re in Holland Park Avenue, ETA two minutes, repeat two minutes’, replied the radio operator on the armed response vehicle.

‘Received’, said the dispatcher. He could hear the two-tone siren of the police car in his earpiece as the radio operator signed off. He opened his carrier once again. ‘All units, all units, keep listening’, he said adopting a less formal but nonetheless businesslike tone. ‘We have an ongoing shooting incident. Any units One District able to respond give me your call signs and I will direct’. Half a dozen patrol cars announced themselves as available and were given orders.

The armed officer stationed at the gates of Kensington Palace Gardens pressed his radio earpiece into his left ear with his finger so that he could hear the exchanges better. The young man who had sprinted past him just minutes earlier had to be the killer. He was sure of it.

He tilted his head towards his left shoulder where his radio was clipped to the top of his flak jacket, pressed the open carrier button and spoke. ‘MP. MP, from Delta Papa six zero’, he said.

‘Go ahead six zero’ came the curt reply.

‘MP, Bravo Delta shooting suspect is IC one male, five foot ten, stocky build, black spiky hair, wearing a white T-shirt, blue jeans, white trainers and carrying a green plastic bag which may contain the weapon. Last seen Kensington Court direction south’.

‘Received six zero’ said the dispatcher. ‘All units copy. Suspect on foot Kensington Court direction south. White male, t-shirt, jeans, trainers, carrying a green plastic bag’.

A quarter of a mile from the scene of the shooting the killer casually turned the corner of Thackeray Place and came face to face with a beat policeman. It was a shock for both of them. The young man had walked this route half a dozen times on reconnaissance and never seen a beat bobby. He knew they were as rare as hen’s teeth in this part of London. How unlucky could he get? First a patrol car and now a beat bobby in a backwater where the representatives of the law were virtual strangers to the populace.

The officer had removed his pointed helmet to mop the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief. He was in shirtsleeve order because of the heat of the day but his radio was clipped to his epaulette and it was squawking urgently.

The policeman’s eyes fell on the Harrods bag.

‘Hey, you’, he yelled, lunging forward.

The young man took off with the policeman in hot pursuit. His planned escape route was now abandoned. Anywhere would do. He turned left into Ansdell Street. He could hear the policeman yelling into his radio as he ran. Right into South End. The policeman was losing ground but the young man had no idea where he was going. Clattering over the cobblestones. The road was heading for a dead end. In front of him he spotted a red-painted metal bar across the road with a 5 mph sign in a circle in the middle of it. He dashed around it and heard a yell from the security guard in a pillbox alongside the gate. In front of him he saw a sign reading Dyslexia Teaching Centre. A caring establishment. The young man felt a momentary sense of relief. Here was sanctuary. But the distant sound of a siren and two-tone horn brought him back to reality. In front of him was a grassy quadrangle surrounded by low buildings with an enormous beech tree in the centre. To his right he noticed more trees behind a low wall. The garden of an adjoining property.

His pursuer was giving Scotland Yard a running radio commentary and the dispatcher was letting it flow without interruption so that other police units in the area could pinpoint the zone they needed to close in on. He broke in just once to summon aerial support from the Metropolitan Police helicopter which was ten miles away and would take several minutes to arrive over the dramatic scene which was unfolding on the ground.

‘Suspect now in the grounds of the Special Learning Centre, South End’, panted the constable. ‘I’ve lost him…no I’ve got him again. He’s going over the wall into adjacent premises. I think it is the garden of St Catherine’s House in the corner of Kensington Square but it might be the Convent of Assumpta or that Heythorp College building’.

‘Received. All units copy’, said the dispatcher.

The fugitive dropped to the ground into the relative tranquillity of a spacious garden. He paused to catch his breath and looked around him. He was in a walled area packed with trees and edged by well cared for flowerbeds. He could see no obvious way out.

Then he heard a rumbling sound and the unmistakable rattle of a London Underground train passing over junction points. He must be very close to the station…and safety.

He scuttled towards the direction from which the train sounds had come. A high brick wall ran the full length of the garden in front of him. He stood against it, his arms reaching high above his head. The wall was fully twelve feet high. He realised he could not jump high enough to pull himself up on to the wall as he had done moments before to enter the garden. At the far end of the flowerbed in which he stood a solitary tree caught his eye. It was an apple tree and one slender branch reached out to within a few inches of the wall. He raced towards it, thrusting himself up the trunk with his legs and using one arm to swing from the branch while hauling himself onto the wall with the other.

He sat, breathing heavily, astride the top of the wall. He was facing at least a twenty-foot drop the other side but a pile of gravel left by railway maintenance crews would help to break his fall if he took the risk. He looked back just in time to see his pursuer scrambling over the wall into the garden behind him. Swinging one leg over the wall he dangled by his fingertips for a moment and then let go, landing in a heap on the gravel.

Picking himself up and dusting himself off he noticed that the front end of the southbound platform at High Street Kensington station was just fifty yards away. A train had pulled in and was disgorging passengers as he jogged on to the platform. The driver was concentrating on the mirror suspended from the roof of the platform above his cab to ensure that the doors were clear before he closed them. He vaguely noticed a figure passing him from the wrong direction but paid no attention. The young man jumped into the first carriage as the doors slid to a close.

The chasing police constable had managed to make it to the top of the wall just in time to see his prey climbing on board the train. He bent forward to read the destination on the headboard of the first carriage. It read: Wimbledon. First stop would be Earl’s Court.

‘MP, MP’, shouted the officer into his radio. The adrenalin was really pumping now. ‘Suspect has boarded a Westbound District Line tube for Wimbledon. The train has left High Street Kensington on way Earl’s Court. Over’.

‘Received’, said the dispatcher.

The fugitive, now strap hanging and sandwiched between a fat man sweating heavily and an Asian woman in a sari, looked up at the constable’s legs dangling over the wall as the train passed beneath him, and allowed himself a smirk of satisfaction. Home free. Or so he thought.

His job done, the police constable levered himself up until he was able to stand upright on the top of the wall, reached out to the nearest bough of the apple tree, and swung himself into its branches. As he clambered down the trunk he spotted something green and shiny protruding from beneath a lobelia bush. It was a Harrods carrier bag and inside was a Glock pistol.

Once again the officer spoke into his radio. ‘MP, MP’, he said more calmly this time. ‘I have recovered a weapon discarded by the suspect. I believe the suspect now to be unarmed. Repeat, the suspect may no longer be carrying a firearm’.

The underground train waited for what seemed like an eternity at the signals outside Earl’s Court station. For regular commuters this was routine but the fugitive became more and more edgy as the minutes ticked by. Being in the front carriage he could hear the driver in his cab engaged in muffled conversation with his control room. But through the thickness of the adjoining door he could not make out what was being said.

Eventually the train crept into the station and came to a halt. The sliding carriage doors remained shut. A gaggle of officials led by a British Transport Police inspector with silver braid around the peak of his cap gathered around the front of the train and began to engage the driver in animated conversation. A policewoman walked slowly past the window peering intently at the passengers inside. The fugitive slumped to the floor and concealed himself behind the skirts of the woman in the sari. A well-dressed lady sitting opposite noticed his move and began to knock on the window with the engraved silver end of a walking stick. She obviously wanted to attract the attention of the police but those on the platform ignored her, assuming that she wished to complain about the delay to her journey.

‘Ladies and Gentlemen’, came a tinny voice over the intercom. ‘This is your driver speaking. I apologise for the delay to your journey. The police are currently dealing with an incident so we are being held here at Earl’s Court for a few moments. I expect to be able to open the doors very shortly and we will be on our way again as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience’.

The young man got to his feet and peered back along the train. Through the window in the connecting door between his carriage and the second car he could see two men, wearing bulletproof vests and baseball caps with the word Police emblazoned on the peaks, pushing their way past the standing passengers as they made their way forward through the train. To his horror he noted that they were both carrying guns. He was trapped.

He dived at the heavy door, which separated the passengers from the driver’s compartment and wrenched the large metal handle downwards. To his immense relief it was not locked. The driver was standing on the platform chatting to the police inspector. His hatch door stood ajar.

The young man was through it in a flash brushing past the officials and making for the staircase leading to the Exhibition Hall exit of the station.

One of the marksmen on the platform dropped to one knee and took aim at the departing figure. ‘Stop, armed police’, he yelled, but, seeing a group of Japanese tourists making their way down the staircase and knowing that the fugitive was unarmed, he withheld his fire. The consequence of an unprovoked police shooting in these circumstances could be