Retribution

By James Barrington

  An oil and gold deal gone disastrously wrong puts England—and British secret agent Paul Richter—on the wrong side of violent, genocidal dictator.
 
An African prince is gunned down outside a London restaurant. But this is no ordinary assassination. Who is the third killer? Why was there no threat warning? And why did the killers kidnap one of the bodyguards, a former SAS soldier?
 
Paul Richter is sent on the case. Before long he is in a deadly game of cat and mouse, wounded and chased through the English countryside. Richter will have to rely on all his combat skills and luck to avoid retribution . . .
 
A standalone novella in the Paul Richter series, Retribution shows James Barrington at his best: fast, action-packed and giving absolutely no quarter.
 
Praise for the writing of James Barrington
 
“More action than three James Bond films rolled into one.” —Evening Telegraph
 
“A rip-roaring thriller.” —The Guardian

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9781911420484

James Barrington

James Barrington is a trained military pilot who has worked in covert operations and espionage. He has subsequently built a reputation as a writer of high-class, authentic and action-packed thrillers. He lives in Andorra, but travels widely. He also writes conspiracy thrillers under the pseudonym James Becker.

Book preview

Prologue

It should have been routine, and when they looked back on it afterwards, it pretty much was. Right up until the moment when routine went straight out of the window and the quiet London street echoed with the sound of gunshots.

They called it fact finding, but nobody with an IQ that needed three figures to express it would have failed to realise that it was just a junket. The principal was a minor member of a shiny new royal family from an African country that half the population of Britain had never even heard of, and those that had heard the name before would – just like George W Bush looking for somewhere like France – have needed prior notice and maybe some tuition to find it on a map.

He was a prince – allegedly – with an instantly forgettable and largely unpronounceable name that contained a mass of Os and Ms and Ts, accompanied by wives numbered three, nine and eleven, so presumably he was working his way through the odd numbers that week. They were there for the shopping, and he was there for the high-stakes gambling at the expensive private casinos in the West End and, predictably enough, the almost equally expensive hookers who were a permanent fixture in most of those same casinos.

Normally, nobody would have given a toss about some bigwig with more money than sense hitting the bright lights of London, but there were a couple things about Prince Whatever-the-hell-his-name-was that made him different. And important. But not for what he was, but because of what his country had.

A couple of exploration wells off the coast of the nation – which was about the size of France and Spain combined – suggested potential yields measured in the trillions of barrels of crude, not the usual paltry few billion. That was important to Britain, just like any new and largely untapped reservoir of black gold.

Another factor was real gold. Tons of it, in rich seams buried in the hillsides around the capital city. That was another obvious tick in the right box. In exchange for mineral prospecting rights and permission to drill a series of wells off the coast, the British government was prepared to overlook the fact that the prince’s father, a murderously violent and bigoted local tribal chief who’d massacred his way to the top of the local greasy pole and then proclaimed royal status for himself and his family, was using slave labour to dig out the gold-bearing ore. After all, the workers who were being beaten and whipped and murdered on a daily basis to encourage them to dig faster were just faceless and nameless natives, not the kind of people that anyone outside the continent, and precious few in Africa, actually cared about. In fact, nobody really knew what was happening in that nation, because foreign correspondents weren’t allowed there and a local news blackout meant the only thing the local papers published was good news, most of it entirely fictitious, about the royal family.

But oil and gold were important to Britain, and so when the prince and his wives and his entourage and his hangers-on flew into Heathrow in a chartered 747, he was met by a small flock of black limousines and an armed team from the Diplomatic Protection Group. Perish the thought that anything should happen to this unpleasant specimen of humanity whilst he was abusing the hospitality of Great Britain. The DPG people had been briefed to guard the prince and his wives, while the rest of his team were provided with cars and drivers but no guards, and largely left to their own devices.

And for the five days that the African group had been in London, the routine had been pretty much unchanged. The prince rarely surfaced before noon, by which time his wives were up, dressed, breakfasted and already chauffeured to Harrods or Regent Street or Oxford Street or whichever part of London was going to benefit from an assault by them and their unlimited platinum credit cards. Back at the hotel, once he was awake and largely recovered from the triple excesses of the night before – unfailingly financial, sexual and alcoholic – the prince would demand breakfast from room service.

The West London hotel had found it difficult to cope with the man’s demand for goat, this not being a food item commonly found on their extensive room service and restaurant menus, and a small farmer in Wiltshire had unexpectedly benefited when the hotel’s catering manager, desperate to find a source of supply, had purchased his entire herd of four males. There was no way that the prince could actually consume four entire goats in a single week, but he had indicated that he might well stay longer in London if he enjoyed himself, and so a ready supply of goat’s meat seemed like a good idea.

Once he had consumed three or four thick slices of prime rib of goat covered in a kind of grey sauce – he had supplied the recipe for this, which contained a number of other unexpected ingredients, two of them technically illegal as food items, to the head chef on arrival – the prince would dress with the assistance of his personal valet and then descend to the lobby where one of the armoured Jaguar limousines would be waiting, along with the driver and two armed DPG bodyguards wearing plain clothes. And then he would be conveyed, in almost complete silence, to his casino of choice for that day.

Once he had left the hotel, the housekeeping staff would enter his suite and remove the debris left from the night before, which normally included at least one and sometimes as many as three bleary eyed call girls, their bodies still fizzing with a combination of alcohol and chemical kicks that they frankly needed to survive the prince’s unusual – and that was the polite way of putting it – sexual demands. The hotel manager would ensure that they were at least able to walk in a more or less straight line and were fully and properly dressed before he allowed them to leave the suite and the hotel: the establishment had a reputation to maintain, obviously.

Promptly at eight in the evening, the limousine would reappear outside the casino and convey the prince and whichever shade or shades of hooker he had selected for the evening – he had an especial fondness for girls with white blonde hair and redheads – to an upmarket restaurant nearby that suited him. The kitchens didn’t serve goat ribs, or indeed any other part of that particular animal, but other items on the menu apparently satisfied his hunger. Once the meal was over, the Jaguar would return the prince and his companions to the casino, where he would spend another couple of hours losing impressive amounts of money at the blackjack and roulette tables before being conveyed back to his hotel, often with a woman on each side and another sitting on his lap.

It was all just routine. Not too difficult, and not too enjoyable, at least for the DPG men, but just routine. Until the evening that it wasn’t.

There’s a well-established procedure for handling a high-value target – using the expression in its loosest possible sense – which the prince probably was, at least in the eyes of some British politicians who had clearly seen the imminent arrival of the gravy train and had already booked tickets in the first class section of it.

While the target is inside the armoured car, he or she is essentially invulnerable, the bullet-proof windows and armour plating in the doors and around the bodywork of the vehicle proof against anything less powerful than a rocket propelled grenade. And people tend to notice somebody walking down the street, even in London, touting a four-foot-long anti-tank missile.

But the moment the target steps out of the vehicle, he is at risk, just like any other pedestrian. To try to minimise the danger, the bodyguards check everything before they open the car doors, and in an ideal world there will be a corresponding team at the destination who will run similar checks before the vehicle arrives. When the bodyguards are happy that there is no visible danger, then they will get out of the car, before the target is allowed to move.

In the prince’s Jaguar, one bodyguard occupied the front passenger seat while the second man was squeezed into the rear compartment of the car, usually with the thigh and surgically enhanced mammary gland of one of the call girls pressing firmly up against him. The front seat man would get out first, stand beside the open door of the car and scan all around him, the armour plating on the door providing an impressive layer of protection should someone open fire at him, while allowing him to get back into the car in an instant if he felt it necessary.

Assuming that the coast was clear, he would then gesture to the bodyguard in the back seat, who would open his door and repeat the procedure. Only when both men were satisfied that there was no risk would the target be allowed to step out of the vehicle and then be walked quickly, one bodyguard on each side of him, into whatever venue he was visiting.

Simple and routine.

That evening, the Jaguar stopped outside the restaurant as usual, the bodyguards making their checks in sequence, and a few seconds later the back seat DPG man stepped out of the vehicle. He carried out a final check and then nodded to the prince and held the door wide open so that he could climb out of the car, the two women selected for the evening’s entertainment following him.

And at that moment everything went wrong.

A white Ford Transit van, probably the second most common vehicle on London streets after a black cab, screeched to a halt right beside the Jaguar, blocking the road. Three seconds later a maroon Vauxhall saloon going the other way, the driver apparently travelling too fast to stop and unable to drive around the Transit, slammed into the front of the Jaguar. The Vauxhall came off worst, but the limousine wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry after that.

The noise of the collision was almost deafening, an amalgam of metal smashing into metal, tearing steel, squealing tyres and shattering glass, and was immediately followed by an instant of almost complete silence, broken only by the hiss of escaping steam from the Vauxhall’s ruptured radiator, the tinkling of fragments of broken glass falling onto the road, and the faint steady dripping sound of some fluid from the site of the impact.

Heads turned in the restaurant as the diners seated beside the windows fronting the street stared out at the scene, and the handful of pedestrians in the road who were close enough to have heard the impact all turned to look. In fact, the noise of the crash was so loud that it would have taken a superhuman application of will not to have turned to look at it.

And that, really, was the point.

Bodyguards are a long way from being superhuman. They are trained to make their principal their number one priority, but sometimes even the best, most competent and most highly trained individuals can make a mistake and allow their attention to shift.

And what had just happened was quite enough to shift anyone’s attention.

The bodyguard closest to the car spun around immediately, his hand reaching for the Glock 17 nine-millimetre pistol he was carrying in a shoulder holster under his left arm. Then he dropped his hand and relaxed, because what he was looking at was a nasty traffic accident, nothing more, and clearly nothing to do with him. The