Deniable Assets (Exocet)

By Terence Gibbons

April 1st: Argentina has invaded the Falkland Islands. As the government struggles to form the British Task Force to recover them they are also desperately worried that the Argentines have Exocet missiles with aircraft to deliver them. Groups mission is to eliminate this threat and Forrester is promoted to colonel to take command of a force made up of Groups Alpha, Bravo and Charlie. The SAS thought it would be suicide. Colonel Forrester leads Group Alpha over the Andes from Chile, who have given a lot of aid against their natural enemy. Group Alpha perform surveillance on the naval airfield at Rio Grande for ten days -- the time it takes for a submarine to deliver Groups Bravo and Charlie from Ascension Island. When the three Groups tie up the airfield is totally destroyed. They are all extracted by the same submarine but there are further orders for Group Alpha. They must ambush a convoy carrying Exocet missiles to Argentina from friendly Peru. Throughout the mission it is made clear that no one should be taken prisoner; that wounded or dead must be brought out leaving no evidence that it was a British assault. The threat lay in the Rio Pact which is similar to NATO in that if one country is invaded or subjected to a bombing raid then the other members take up arms against the aggressor. The USA is a part of that treaty and not one to have in opposition. Forrester leads his people valiently to destroy the airfield at Rio Grande then on into Bolivia to destroy the convoy but things are not complete enough for him. He follows his gut instinct to fall upon another five aircraft loaded with Exocet missiles. His actions demand questions between Margaret Thatcher and the French President whose country make both the aircraft and the Exocet missile. Everything is stacked against Group Alpha. Do they succeed?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Terence Gibbons
• Release date: Dec 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310360923

Terence Gibbons

I have been writing seriously for many years having some success with BBC Radio Humberside who broadcast some of my short stories. I have lived a very complete life having done many things others don't have a chance to do. This, together with my avid reading habit, have served to provide me with knowledge of the world which is a great tool to a writer. Having said this, I still maintain that a writer worth his salt should do thorough research and not try to rely on his own experiences alone. I am rapidly approaching pension age now but my hunger to write has if anything increased. Who knows what the future has in store for me?

Book preview

Book # 3 in the Series

Deniable Assets.

(Exocet)

by

Terence Gibbons

Copyright © Terence Gibbons 2013.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Introduction

Within the United Kingdom there has always existed a secret organisation, answerable only to the residing Prime Minister. It has no official budget because nothing it does can be recorded in any archive. Its intelligence sources are MI6 and MI5 but it is part of neither.

It is England's oldest secret service and, because it is unknown, it is above and beyond the laws of the land. Its mandate is to provide solutions to problems that cannot be resolved by political means or through the law of the land.

The organisation is run by only one man, usually a former army officer of high rank. Its agents are recruited – hand-picked for their specialist talents – from various arms of the military. Some come from the ranks of the SAS, others from the Parachute battalions while others are from the Royal Marine Commando's elite SBS. All are volunteers and dedicated to the ‘Group’ they are assigned to.

For identification purposes the units are known as Groups. There are a number of such Groups but none know the identities of members of the other Groups for security reasons. If a member of a Group is killed then he or she is replaced from outside but never from another group. If they are killed on foreign soil efforts are made to bring them back to Britain – if possible – if not they are left behind in unmarked graves. Their existence is always denied and their actions deniable.

Groups have been known to assassinate foreign leaders both in this country and abroad, organise rebellions to bring down unfriendly regimes, support chosen foreign governments. A Group is a deadly force made up of ordinary people who are prepared to forfeit their lives in the interests of their country.

All work to one rule: Do not get caught! They are Deniable Assets!

Chapter One

Major David Forrester looked deeply into the earnest eyes of Stella Berringer. They were bluer than he thought possible in anything of the flesh. He had known Stella since they were children but had not been in her company for so long that he was having difficulty distinguishing between the girl and the beautiful women he was now sharing a tête-à-tête with after the large dinner party hosted by his parents. They had wandered through the grounds until they had arrived at the small hexagonal timber-built pavilion beside the man-made lake. She had been gently quizzing him about his profession and he had been tactfully answering without giving away any secrets.

So no one knows, outside your circle of colleagues, what you do. Is that right?

Up to a point, I suppose. There are, of course our opponents. They get the picture eventually.

And you are not a spy or a secret agent? Those deep blue eyes, now with hints of violet due to the shadows of the pavilion, were very searching, flitting from one of his eyes to the other in order to assess the depths of him. He found it disconcerting, intriguing and worrying at the same time.

What I do is highly classified. The Official Secrets Act forbids me to discuss it, Stella.

But you do have occasion to kill people?

He looked away. It was one question that no man who had been in the position of serving his government wanted to hear or answer. Stella Berringer was a leading barrister and was therefore skilled in asking questions in an order from which she would extract the information she sought. The conversation was far from what Forrester wanted. He was certainly attracted to her but was beginning to feel very uncomfortable with her line of questioning.

Stella, I must say that the way this conversation is not at all what two people, who are obviously attracted to each other, should be pursuing.

I’m sorry, David. You are obviously some part of a special services organisation and yet you do not fit in with my idea of any member of an SAS team I could imagine.

And what sort of image do they conjure up in your imagination?

At that she giggled appealingly. Oh, very macho. I suppose knuckle scrapers with upper bodies so muscularly developed that they can barely move. Forrester chuckled. The description was far from any SAS men he had served with. To the best of his knowledge they were, generally speaking, of a much higher intelligence than the average soldier. Fit and muscular with very little excess fat and a great deal more grey matter than the average squaddie had between his ears.

Well, I will admit that I was at one time an officer in the SAS. And I do assure you that, neither I, nor my subordinates scraped our knuckles on the ground. While they were all well-proportioned none of them were cavemen. In fact the majority of them were very intelligent. I have been an officer within their ranks and am very proud of it.

She arched her well-defined eyebrow. Then I must assume that you have progressed beyond that?

Stella, if we are to progress further in any kind of relationship then the subject of my profession must remain taboo. As he said it he was not sure if it would forever end any relationship he had in mind and watched her face for her reaction. Those intriguing eyes searched his and her face shifted through a range of emotions finishing with a smile.

Then, David, I suppose you ought to kiss me.

His arm, which had been stretched along the back of the seat on which they found themselves, moved down to her shoulder and gently pulled her towards him. He thrilled as their bodies touched and he kissed her in a way he had longed to kiss her for many years. Eventually they drew apart, mostly at he instigation. She held him at arm’s length and studied him closely. David, I really do believe we have clicked. Her eyebrows leapt high as her eyes dilated.

My Darling, I think you have it in one, he laughed.

Well please don’t think me naughty, or forward, but I have a little place down at Lymington. It is not as palatial as here but I wonder if you would care to come down for a few days? If the government can spare you that is?

Oh, I am sure they can. But you must understand that I have to notify them where I am.

Oh how dreadfully boring! Must you?

Yes, Stella. I am afraid I must. You wouldn’t have me shot as a deserter now would you?

Oh perish the thought. Are they really so harsh? I thought the modern army was more – well, modern.

Not a bit of it. They own me body and soul.

Well we shall see about that. I know the Prime Minister rather well and can assure you that she will come around to my way of thinking. The government are welcome to your soul, you understand? Forrester drew her into his arms again and realised immediately, as her body pressed against him, that he was falling in love with her. The chemistry was undeniable. As she drew his head towards her he felt a surge of something course through him so that he was forced to gasp. They lingered in their kiss and he promised he would drive down the next day as soon as he had notified his superior of his new location.

<>

Sergeant Adèle Tennyson and Sergeant-major Archie Douglas had been working undercover in and around Dublin for the past three weeks. General Callahan had received intelligence that members of the official IRA were about to become active and were organising cells to take up the armed struggle once again. The two members of Group Alpha Had worked hard to locate and identify the small handful of men who were the main movers. There were five of them, all sons of former IRA members, all brought up from the cradle to eschew the goal of a united Ireland. Following the signing of the Good Friday Agreement on April 10th 1998, despite being approved by voters across the island of Ireland in two referendums held on 22 May 1998, the official IRA decided that ‘the vague wording of some of the provisions, described as constructive ambiguity, helped ensure acceptance of the agreement and served to postpone debate on some of the more contentious issues. The IRA would have a united Ireland and on this the decision was taken to re-arm. Both the British and the Irish governments would not allow anything to happen to break this agreement. Five men were identified by the intelligence services of both countries. Patrick O’Brian, Sean Mahoney, Michael Banner, Kiefer O’Rourke and Daniel Devlin.

O’Brian had taken on the mantle of contacting the ‘sleeper cells’ in London and Ulster. Adèle had shadowed him on the ferry and successfully eliminated him during a storm in the Irish Sea. He had never arrived and his remains were drifting unseen in that often turbulent stretch of water between Dublin and Holyhead. The only ballast his body had was a 9mm in the head. Adèle had also jettisoned the weapon into the depths.

Mahoney had booked on to a flight for New York but had mysteriously missed his flight. Archie Douglas had shot him dead in his hotel room and his body had disappeared when Colonel Charles Darnley’s team of ‘cleaners’ had serviced the place. New York had been a rich source of income for both the official and the Provisional IRA for decades. Even fast-food chains had collection boxes on their table for ‘voluntary donations’ towards the ‘liberation of the Irish’.

Michael Banner had made his flight to Algeria but before he could meet with his contact in a large arms deal he failed to turn up at the desert location. His body has never been found though it is thought that his bones lie out here somewhere bleached and polished by the desert wings. Douglas had eliminated him as he strolled along the beach which was a part of the property loaned for the purpose by Gaddafi himself. The briefcase he had perpetually fastened to his wrist has not been found either but Adèle had ensured that the contents eventually arrived, by devious routes, in General Callahan’s office where it would be utilised to provide funding for many missions. Group activities must be funded somehow and sequestration of terrorist funds was too big a temptation to resist.

Sean Mahoney died in a freak explosion at a farm in Roscommon together with three of his associates while inspecting an arms and explosives cache that somehow detonated as they dug away the turf covering. Archie Douglas had been quietly content with that job. The intelligence had been somewhat understated as to the quantity of explosives as the site but his charge was ample to do the damage that had occurred. Identification of the bodies was not an easy task for the Garda but Archie had been certain that his main target had died in the explosion. That small piece of land had risen two hundred feet into the air with a massive column of burning materiel beneath it. There was no chance that any of the four could survive, Archie had made sure of that too with Adèle’s support. They checked with each body before slipping away before the Gardaí arrived to take official possession of the crime scene. The dour Scotsman rated it his best hit ever.

Kiefer O’Rourke had the sole task of uniting the dormant cells in Belfast. Douglas shadowed him day and night until the actual method of the hit was resolved. Adèle sat at a corner table in a depressing pub just off the Falls Road. She was made up to look every year of her age and more. The careful application of make-up added lines to her face as evidence of the hard life that Catholic women are cursed with in Belfast. The strain of everyday living was apparent in the blue-grey shadows beneath her eyes and in the bruising she carried from an abusive husband. Her legend was that she was visiting her ailing sister who was close to death, (God be merciful to her). A wig of long greasy locks completed her overall appearance of a member of the downtrodden minority of Belfast. She glanced around the pub with haunted eyes. Oh how they screamed the inner agonies of the soul of the woman she pretended to be. A drunk staggered over to her with the blarney rolling off his whiskey-numbed tongue.

Away with you, she cursed. And don’t I have a man such as yourself waiting at home. Away with you!

The drunk bowed his head low as he grinned and doffed his tweed cap, all the time backing away from the harridan. Sure she wasn’t as sweet as he had imagined her from his seat at the other side of the smoky room. She stared down into her glass of stout seeking some imagined solace. Looking up she recognised Archie as he staggered in looking the very image of an unemployed labourer. She watched casually as he rolled along behind the men seated at the bar until he nudged one who complained volubly. That’s my mark, she said to herself. That’s Kiefer O’Rourke. She immediately rose from her place and s taggered towards the door leading out on to the street. It was raining. When does it not in Belfast? The soot-encrusted walls of the houses shone like they were coated with tar. The cobbled road gleamed like someone had laid the surface with smooth lumps of coal. She pulled her woollen shawl around her shoulders and over her head to shield her from the elements. A cold wind had sprung up while she was in the pub. It bit mercilessly through he worn linen dress. She stepped into a narrow dark alley as she and Archie had agreed. O’Rourke would come by the entrance shortly. She slipped her hand into the hand sewn bag that hung from her shoulder. Her gloved hand closed around the butt of the Smith and Wesson .38 revolver and turned it inside the bag so that she could clear it quickly. She stepped deep into the shadows against the wall to shield herself from the rain that seemed to have increased in its torrent. Patiently she waited. These things often took time.

Her sharp hearing caught the sound of the pub door swinging closed with a bang and she began to count. It would take about thirty seconds for O’Rourke to reach the end of the alley. When she had reached twenty she began to move towards the street her hearing trying to judge O’Rourke’s position by his heavy footfall. She timed it just right.

As she exited the alley she almost collided with him and cursed his clumsiness as she swung the revolver up to aim at the man who was barely two feet away from her. The first shot entered his mouth and he fell against her, crumpling to the ground as the life-force drained speedily from him. She nimbly stepped to one side and allowed her aim to follow him down to the oozing flagstones. Her second shot bored a neat hole in his forehead. Blood was flowing from the exit wounds and mixing with the rain on the flag stones and flowing into the gutter. As she looked up a taxi swung into the curb and its door opened. She ran and dived into the back seat as it accelerated away. Now both she and Archie could return to the UK for some well-earned rest.

<>

Captain Calvin Balfour, RAMC, the medical officer for Group Alpha, was busy in the surgery of the Cambridge Military Hospital in Aldershot. On the operating table was a soldier flown straight in from Newry in Northern Ireland with a bad bullet wound to his right leg. Though sectarian violence had almost ended in the province since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, and even though the greater part of the British Army’s presence had been greatly reduced, still a few remained in areas where trouble could flare up. The town of Newry was one such place. Corporal John Whicker had come under fire as he walked toward his Land Rover in the market square. As he dived for cover a following shot had hit him in the lower leg, just above the Achilles tendon and spun in a spiral around his shinbone before exiting at the front below the patella. A part of this bone had been shot away and the rest torn away from its position in the knee. The steel-jacketed round, which had been found in the front seat of the Land Rover was of 5.56mm calibre thought to have been fired from an M16 rifle, commonly called an ArmaLite after the company who first produced the weapon. That the round was jacketed was in some respects fortunate for the wounded man as a plain lead round would not have left such a relative clean wound. Lead would have been lodged in the shinbone creating further complications. The surgical procedure was to reset the patella bone after smoothing the part chipped by the bullet. This required surgery though a dislocated patella can be relocated without. Dislocation of the patella is quite common, especially in athletes, and involves the patella sliding out of its position on the knee, most often laterally. It can be tracked back into the groove with an extension of the leg, and therefore sometimes returns into the proper position on its own.

Captain Balfour made an incision below the knee and his assistant prepared to ease the skin back to expose the damaged area. Balfour’s second incision was down the knee to meet his first lateral cut. Now the skin could easily be eased out of the way and the medical officer expose the patella which is the largest sesamoid bone in the human body. A sesamoid bone is a bone embedded within a tendon. In the patient’s case the bullet had torn away the lower tendon and this had to be re-joined to the patella after some judicious tidying up of the damage. Balfour worked quickly and efficiently. His experience of bullet trauma gained by his years with Group Alpha made him one of few with the relevant skills in this field. A nurse operated a spray and suction tool to take away the bone fragments and blood as Balfour worked on the roughened edge of the bone. He tested the result by feeling with a fingertip and when satisfied began the more complicated procedure of attaching the torn tendon. Finally satisfied with his work he stepped back and left it to his assistant to finish off with some sutures to close the wound up. The entry wound had already been sewn. The patient would now be confined to bed until Balfour was certain that the injury had healed then careful physiotherapy would follow. With care the corporal would be fit again for duty in a couple of months.

<>

Sergeant Andrew Walters stood in front of a classroom of soldiers beginning their jungle warfare and survival course in the army’s jungle warfare school in Brunei. All were in uniform so it did not take him long to identify the paras among them.

Gentlemen. My name is Sergeant Andrew Walters and it is my job today to make sure that your induction to this course is as boring as possible. As the class hesitated to understand if he had cracked a joke or if he was serious he walked between them distributing some reading material that had been prepared for him. Having done so he returned to the front of the room and turned to face them.

"I strongly advise you to read these hand-outs until you can recite them like parrots. There is not one thing in there that will not help you survive this course. Learn it all by the end of this week before you go off into the jungle. It is too dark there for reading and besides the paper will rot in a matter of days in there.

"Now the course you are to work your way through is of four weeks duration of which your first week is in this classroom with me or another instructor. In this first week you will be taught about all the nasty surprises waiting for you out there. I am talking about your greatest enemy which is Mother Nature. Why we call her Mother Nature I have no idea because the things out there no mother would expose her children to. We often think that we are at the top of the food chain. Well forget it! We’re not! Almost everything out there wants to either kill you or make a meal of you.

"There is a large range of deadly insects and other creatures that live in the jungle, most notably the leech. Leeches will get to your skin no matter how well you protect yourself. They can to squeeze through the eye holes of your boots, then through your socks and feast on your blood skin. They drop down your neck. They can even find their way through your flies. After you have crossed a river or a swamp time must be taken to remove leeches from the body, sometimes up to 30 leaches at one time. And you can’t simply pull the leeches off because the leeches teeth and head will still be rooted to the skin which could lead to a deadly blood infection. Remember that! Going up in size there are pythons the size of telegraph poles and scorpions the size of lobsters! Before you settle down at night it must become a ritual to check that you have no unwanted company.

In that paperwork I gave you will be found a fairly comprehensive list of the dangerous creatures you will encounter but it does not include the enemy you will face. Part of the resident garrison here at BGB is the Second Battalion Royal Ghurkha Rifles. When you have learned a bit of jungle craft a group of them will attack you! Now I don’t think there is a professional soldier in the world who would not agree with me when I say that the Ghurkhas are unparalleled when it comes to jungle warfare. They are brave and loyal and a great asset to the British Army. It is a pity that after their demob they are mostly forgotten and have nothing but their pride to live on. No pensions for them! He clapped his hands and grinned.

"Right! That’s it for this morning. We will break for lunch during which I hope you will study those papers I gave you. After lunch I shall bore your arses with a slide show