Retribution

By Alex Hunter

'No one saw who threw the fire-bomb. It arched over the crowd, hit the lights on the top of the police car, broke and sent burning fuel over the vehicle. A deep collective sigh went up from those at the front of the crowd, but no one moved as the police driver and his partner scrambled to safety.'

In the oppressive heat of summer, Luc Hansen, a senior agent in the European Union's security and intelligence directorate, uncovers a covert CIA operation in which a neo-con group of ageing Americans are fomenting ethnic unrest in Europe, and are willing to use Predator drones and nerve gas against Syrian civilians in an attempt to force their Iranian nemesis to Europe so that they can kill him. In a shadowy world in which different versions of the truth exist, all communications are compromised and no one is quite who they seem, Hansen has to use all his skills just to stay alive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: White & MacLean Publishing
• Release date: Feb 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9782930583310

Alex Hunter

Alex Hunter is the 'nom-de-plume' of a well-known business school academic and author based in Brussels. He is married with two grown-up children and a dog. Alex Hunter has written four bestselling management books under his 'real name' and 'Shadows', his first thriller, was published in 2009. His second, 'Retribution' was published in February 2014.

Book preview

Retribution

Alex Hunter

Alex Hunter is the nom-de-plume of a well-known business school academic and author based in Brussels. He is married with two grown-up children and a dog. Alex Hunter has written four bestselling management books under his ‘real name’ and Shadows, his first thriller, was published in 2009.

First published as a PDF / eBook original in 2014

by White & MacLean Publishing

Copyright © Alex Hunter, 2014

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.

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

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Thank you for respecting the hard work of

this author.

Published by White & MacLean Publishing at Smashwords

Smashwords edition: ISBN 978-2-930583-31-0

Cover design: Arati Devasher

www.aratidevasher.com

White & MacLean Publishing

Albert Biesmanslaan 11 / 32

B-1560 Hoeilaart

Belgium

www.whiteandmaclean.eu

To Fiona, as always

Once again, I am indebted to a number of people who have been instrumental in the creation of this book. I would particularly like to thank Antony Lawson-Smith for plot ideas and for patiently reading multiple drafts, and Riba Stevens and Mike Burrowes for their feedback on the story. Thanks also to Arati Devasher for yet another brilliant cover, and to Fiona White of White & MacLean Publishing for her copy-editing and overseeing of the production process. There are, of course, many others to whom I am grateful and you all know who you are. Any errors or omissions are, of course, entirely mine.

Alex Hunter

Belgium

As this book is a work of fiction, the characters, incidents and dialogue are all drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Prologue

No one saw who threw the fire-bomb. It arched over the crowd, hit the lights on the top of the police car, broke and sent burning fuel over the vehicle. A deep collective sigh went up from those at the front of the crowd, but no one moved as the police driver and his partner scrambled to safety.

The crowd remained still as a group of CRS, the riot squad of the Police Nationale, in full protective gear entered the street and took station a safe distance from the burning vehicle. Mixed in amongst the blue uniforms of the CRS, a small number of black uniformed Gendarmerie Mobile stood ready with riot control weapons.

Six hundred metres down the street a second crowd was outside the Lycée Communale. The school gates were open and students drifted in under the watchful eyes of five members of the CRS, one a female. Inside the grounds, school staff checked that each student was correctly dressed in the uniform of blue blazer and grey trousers for the boys, and blazer and tartan skirt for the girls. The arriving students remained in the playground.

Everyone was waiting. Everyone knew that today this predominantly Muslim community would challenge the six-year-old law banning the hijab headscarf in schools.

The crowd shifted restlessly. Men in jeans and black leather jackets, stubble-faced and dark skinned, speaking Darija, the Algerian Arabic, into mobile phones stood next to bearded men in long robes marking them out as religious leaders. Women in hijabs and gandouras, the long loose robe of North Africa, stood next to others wearing the niqab.

It was time.

Three girls walked arm-in-arm down the street between the two crowds. Dressed in the blue blazer and dark tartan skirt of the Lycée Communale uniform, each wore a hijab that covered her hair, neck and shoulders but framed her face.

Behind the girls, the crowd moved forward, obscuring the still burning police car and the CRS detachment. There was almost complete silence. At the school, the waiting crowd fell silent and moved back to give the assembled journalists and cameramen a better view. The group of CRS at the gate had grown to around thirty.

The three girls walked steadily and without haste towards the school where the Director of the Lycée met them at the gate.

Good morning, girls. The Director spoke clearly and in a friendly tone. In the silence, every word was heard by the now thousand-strong crowd.

"Good morning, Monsieur le Directeur," the girls responded politely.

Girls, as you know, I must ask you to remove your hijabs if you wish to attend class.

A low murmur erupted from the crowd. The tension was almost palpable. The CRS officers looked for potential flash points.

One of the girls, a seventeen-year-old final year student, stepped forward and spoke for them all.

"Monsieur le Directeur, we know you must but we are Muslim and our faith requires us to be veiled. We do not want to be disrespectful to you, but the law is wrong."

The crowd murmured their agreement. The journalists noted every word, the courteous tone and the deferential demeanour, while cameras recorded the encounter.

Ariana, said the Director, you may feel the law is wrong, but it is the law and I cannot let you attend class unless you remove your hijab.

"I am sorry, Monsieur le Directeur, but we cannot do that and if you do not let us attend class, then you are denying us our legal right to a state education."

The Director and the girl looked steadily at each other; they both knew an impasse had been reached. They had discussed this many times over the last year, always with total respect but always knowing that it could not be resolved. The French law was inflexible: the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols in French public schools was forbidden and even the hijab was banned. Now, with only three school days left in the academic year, the law was being formally but respectfully challenged.

An angry shouting erupted, the CRS tensed and then a man stepped into the open and turned to the crowd.

In the name of Allah, are these girls to be denied their legal rights?

NO, came the response.

Are we going to see these girls denied an education because of their faith?

NO, came the even stronger response.

A senior CRS officer moved forward to stop the speaker, but it was too late. The crowd was shouting and moving forward.

Suddenly there was tear-gas in the air. A fire-bomb hit the school wall. The CRS moved in with well-practised force to disperse the crowd and within minutes an angry but controlled crowd had become a mob. It was all captured by the cameras.

A television journalist and her cameraman inched their way round the mob, avoided the batons of the CRS riot control police and located the three girls who had precipitated the street battle now raging. The Director had retreated inside the school grounds and closed the gates, but the three girls still stood there, their hijabs in place and a glow of triumph on their faces.

We’re from the Network News Group, the journalist shouted to make herself heard. Would you like to tell your story?

The leader of the girls turned, smiled at the camera and started to speak. My name is Ariana, I am seventeen, I’m a Muslim and I wear the hijab.

Ariana spoke for ten minutes and the unedited interview was aired on all the major networks around the world where it was analysed, discussed, interpreted and debated. But one conclusion was agreed by all: the Parisian hijab protest was likely to be the trigger for a summer of ethnic and religious rioting.

Chapter One

The mosque was packed. Young men dressed in jeans, black T-shirts and trainers talked loudly and authoritatively, trying to dominate discussions and attract others to their groups. Older men, many in the burnous, the long hooded robe of the Maghreb, sat sipping sweet mint tea and discussing daily events. Women and small children were crowding towards the exit.

At the back of the main prayer hall, a muscular man in his late thirties with an olive-brown complexion and short-cropped black hair stood listening to the young men with their strident voices. The words were those of the radicalised youth across the western world: ill-informed, misunderstood but passionately delivered … but why use French, could they not speak Arabic? The man turned and saw the mosque Imam approaching.

"As-Salmu `Alaykum." The Imam’s greeting was accompanied by a smile.

"Wa `alaykumu s-salmu," the man replied and they embraced.

And how is the world, my friend? The Imam clapped the man on the shoulder and linked arms with him. Let’s take some tea.

The world is not as Allah planned and tea would be welcome. After the formal greetings, the two men had switched to French, the language of their shared childhood.

Private or public conversation, my friend? asked the Imam.

The man smiled. A little of both, I think. But tea first.

The Imam steered his friend to a small office and, after leaving him alone for a few minutes, returned with tea.

Are you here to join the righteous or to track down the bad guys? The Imam smiled at his friend.

Always the bad guys, Mo, always the bad guys.

The Imam laughed. Luc Hansen, I hardly expected you to be joining the faithful, so what’s on your mind?

Hansen studied the Imam for a few moments. They had known each other since childhood and were firm friends. The Muslim and the Christian, each had protected the other at school, shared their food, their friends, their escapades and their punishments. Their homes had been refuges for each other.

Mo, I’m hearing rumours about increasing radicalism amongst the young men and students.

There are always fundamentalists, but radicalisation of the young could be an issue. I’ll become interested in the discussion groups and let you know.

Thanks, Mo. Hansen sensed that the Imam knew more but was unwilling to reveal it.

Is this anything to do with yesterday in Paris? The Imam looked steadily at his friend.

In what way, Mo?

Well, Ariana was all over the news yesterday evening after the start of the riots.

Hansen rapidly reviewed what he had heard about the events in the Paris banlieue – something about a girl challenging the hijab ban at a school there. Was it possible that had been Ariana? He closed his eyes and let his mind drift back to the Balkans three years earlier.

The sun’s rays cleared the edge of the ridge and caught the roof of the building on the other side of the valley, exposing the array of aerials and satellite dishes and the outline of a figure carrying a weapon. A blackbird sang in the large chestnut tree to the west and slightly above the house. The woodland beyond was just catching the sun’s rays, but deep shadows still hid the road leading to the house with its complex of low structures on the northern side.

Deep in the shadows of a thicket of mature hazel and alder 250 metres to the east of the building, Hansen stretched and eased himself into a comfortable prone position beneath the camouflage netting that hid him from the people in the house below. He had been in the woods for three days and, through powerful binoculars, had studied everything around him in minute detail: he knew every undulation of the land, every granite boulder, every dry-stone wall and, most importantly, every route to and from the building.

Hansen studied the man on the roof, mentally tagging him as sentry-two. He had been there the previous morning as well and the day before that, and Hansen knew that in a moment the sun would strike the satellite dish and the man would use that as his signal to step behind the aerials to urinate before moving to the west side of the building for a cigarette, which, once finished, he would flick over the side into the orchard that stood to the north west.

Twenty minutes would then pass before anyone else emerged from the building onto the sunlit southern terrace.

In the strengthening light he could pick out the details of the building. Made of pre-stressed concrete and painted in a lime wash, it had a flat roof, and the south wall had a heavy wooden door in the middle with two windows on either side – none of which were curtained or shuttered. From his position, Hansen could not see into the rooms but the plans he had seen suggested they were large, the one nearest him being the kitchen and the other a sitting room or dining room. The plans also showed that the north side was similar and there were six bedrooms upstairs. It was not a pretty house, and it looked peculiarly militaristic with its array of aerials.

Eighteen minutes before the next person would be seen.

The men, and it was only men who occupied the house and its outbuildings, were creatures of habit and their routine had been the same on each of the three days that Hansen had observed them. He slid the small, lightweight almost indestructible computer to where he could see the screen and tapped the mouse pad. All the inputs were working correctly, and a satellite link was being established to the operations centre. Hansen checked the output of the infrared camera that had been trained on the building all night: nocturnal animals and then just before midnight, the arrival of two 4x4 vehicles bringing in a total of nine new bodies. Hansen studied the images: four seemed to be smaller than the others suggesting that they were either younger or perhaps females.

His headphones clicked once, and an image appeared in the corner of the screen. The camera was 400 metres to the north along the valley and slightly closer to the road – the only road in and out of the building complex.

"Good morning, Gregor," Hansen sub-vocalised, making so little sound that a rabbit grazing less that ten metres away didn’t even twitch.

"Morning, Luc, replied Gregor Szabo, the Hungarian accent giving away his origins. Nothing more than the guy on the roof."

"Did you get a look at the new arrivals?" Hansen knew that Szabo would have had powerful night glasses trained on the vehicles as they made their way up the road.

"I think there were four females."

A movement near the house caught Hansen’s attention; someone had opened the door but there was nothing more to be seen.

There were twelve minutes to go.

He checked the feed from his camera – a clear view of the south-facing terrace and the back of the house. Another small image appeared on the computer screen indicating that the DER operations room was online. They could also see the feed from the cameras.

"Nice day," said a female voice over the headphones and Hansen smiled as the light Irish accent told him that Joanna Donnelly, the team’s communications and computer expert for the last four years, was on duty, despite the fact it was still only 05h20.

Ten minutes to go.

Hansen picked up the M110 sniper’s rifle, locked down the bipod, and carefully set it so that the suppressor protruded just beyond the netting. The ten-round magazine, loaded with NATO-standard M118 long-range ammunition, slid home silently and Hansen settled into his shooting position having set the Leupold scope at 5x40 to give a reasonably wide field of view.

Six minutes to go.

The objective was simple: to close down a people trafficking operation. The target was Bekim Petrela, a forty-two-year-old Albanian, who described himself as a businessman but his business was, according to Hansen’s investigation over the previous two years, trading teenage girls into the European sex trade. The Kosovar and Albanian police refused to get involved, Interpol was next to useless without their cooperation, and the European Commission, the EU’s administrative body, had no leverage with either the Kosovars or the Albanians, leaving Hansen and his colleagues with no way of bringing Petrela to justice and closing down his operation. Once the reality of the Albanian’s activities and the problems of dealing with them was understood, it had not taken Hansen much effort to persuade his boss, Alan Radcliffe, to seek authorisation for the current plan.

Radcliffe was the director of the DER, or, more correctly, the Département de Enquête et Recherche, the European Union’s intelligence and security directorate, the very existence of which was denied in public, unacknowledged in private, and funded though a discretionary budget line that was tacitly ignored by the Court of Auditors. A politically sensitive department for which no one wanted to take responsibility openly, it was now controlled by an oversight committee comprising a judge in the European Court of Justice, the EU’s High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, and James Ashley, an ex-policeman and nominally part of the Court of Auditors but in reality the director-general of the DER and Radcliffe’s boss. This august body had taken the final decision on the Petrela operation.

Three minutes to go.

Petrela would exit the building through the large wooden door, walk to the edge of the terrace and light a cigarette. The plan, as presented and authorised, was to ambush Petrela as he left the complex and then spirit him out of Albania to where the European police could deal with him, but there was too much that could go wrong and Hansen and Radcliffe had no intention of attempting such an operation. Their plan was very simple: Hansen was going for a kill. There would be no clear shot as Petrela emerged from the door due to the angle and the shadows but as soon as he moved away from the building into the morning sun, Hansen would take him.

One minute to go.

The routine was broken and Hansen, studying the target zone through the scope, suddenly found himself with a target-rich environment. Petrela came into view followed by two men dragging a young girl whose clothes were torn and dishevelled.

"Merde!" said Hansen into his throat-mic knowing that Szabo and Donnelly would be listening and watching. He increased the magnification of the scope.

"Activity at the back – four men leaving in one vehicle said Szabo. No sign of the other girls."

"So that’s all the men but only one of the females," responded Hansen as he continued to watch the group in the target zone. There was something very odd about their behaviour; it was as though they were arguing about the girl.

Suddenly, the dynamics of the situation changed. One of the men forced the girl to her knees, a second drew a handgun and Petrela lit a cigarette. Hansen selected the gunman as target one and, as the man started to lift the gun to the girl’s head, he squeezed the trigger. The 175-grain hollow point bullet, travelling at around 800 metres per second, hit the gunman’s temple less than 300 milliseconds later, the hollow point expanding rapidly to destroy the brain before exiting in a small cloud of bone, brain and blood.

The dead gunman was still falling as Hansen selected Petrela as the second target. It would have to be a headshot but that was not an issue; he squeezed the trigger a second time. The third man had now reacted by dropping to the ground but as he had no idea where the shots were coming from, this was of no benefit to him. Hansen’s third bullet severed his spinal cord before exiting through his face.

The girl had remained kneeling during the shooting, but now she slowly looked round at the three dead men. Hansen watched her through the scope – she was clearly and understandably bewildered: one moment facing death and the next surrounded by dead men and not a sound except birdsong. She looked young, in her early teens, and there were signs of bruising to the side of her face.

"Good shooting, Luc," said Donnelly, who had seen the complete twenty-second sequence through the camera feed and recorded it for later analysis.

The sound of a vehicle caught Hansen’s attention and then, a little over thirty seconds later, the sound of an explosion told him that Gregor Szabo had completed his part of the mission. He glanced at the feed from the second camera, registering the upturned vehicle, its wheels gently turning, the dust cloud and the enormous crater where