THE FOLLOWER: SAS hero turns Manchester hitman (A Rick Fuller Thriller Book 4) Read online

  Biography

  Robert White is an Amazon best selling crime fiction author. His novels regularly appear in the top ten downloads in the Crime and Action and Adventure genres. Robert is an ex cop, who captures the brutality of northern British streets in his work. He combines believable characters, slick plots and vivid dialogue to immerse the reader in his fast paced story-lines. He was born in Leeds, England, the illegitimate son of a jazz musician and a factory girl.

  He hated school, leaving at age sixteen. After joining Lancashire Constabulary in 1980, he served for fifteen years, his specialism being Tactical Firearms. Robert then spent four years in the Middle East before returning to the UK in 2000. He now lives in Lancashire with his wife Nicola, and his two terrible terriers Flash and Tia.

  Novels by Robert White

  Rick Fuller Thrillers:

  THE FIX

  THE FIRE

  THE FALL

  THE FOLLOWER

  Det Sgt Striker Thrillers:

  UNREST

  Stand alone novels:

  DIRTY

  BREAKING BONES

  THE FOLLOWER

  A Rick Fuller Thriller

  Book Four

  (The CIA Diaries Pt1)

  By

  Robert White

  www.robertwhiteauthor.co.uk

  First published in the UK 22/12/2017 by Robert White

  Copyright @ Robert White 2017

  Robert White has asserted his rights under the Copyright and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction and, except for the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  The opinions expressed in this work are fictional and do not represent the views of the author.

  ISBN-10: 1973538989

  ISBN-13: 978-1973538981

  For my wife Nicola

  Acknowledgements

  I spent fifteen years of my life as a police officer, five as a member of a tactical firearms team. After leaving the Service I spent four years working in the Middle East and during that time I had the pleasure of meeting and working with several retired members of Her Majesty’s Special Forces.

  One evening, sitting in an Abu Dhabi bar, I was having a quiet beer with two such ex-servicemen I had grown to know quite well.

  Casually, one broached the subject of a job offer. They needed a third man to complete a team who were to collect a guy from Afghanistan and deliver him across the border to Pakistan. The job was worth several thousand pounds each and would last three days.

  I was extremely flattered to be asked.

  I knew my two friends would be soldiers until they took their last breath. Even then, in their mid-forties, they missed the adrenalin rush only that level of danger could bring.

  Personally, I didn’t feel qualified enough to join them and turned down the offer, something incidentally, I have regretted ever since.

  I would like to say a big thank-you to those two men, who, with their many late night tales of war and adventure, inspired me to write this work.

  “I decided that if the police couldn’t catch the gangsters, I’d create a fellow who could.”

  (Chester Gould)

  Remembrance Day 8th November 1987

  Rick Fuller’s Story:

  I remember it as if it were yesterday.

  Des Cogan and I had been attending the parade at Leominster, Hereford. We’d got there around half past ten and stood around on the corner of Broad Street and Church Street, ahead of the eleven o’clock service at the Priory Church. Des smoking his pipe and me moaning about it.

  I’d first met with the dour smoking Scot, back in the late seventies. Just two skinny, angry young men with too much testosterone for our own good, we completed the Pre-Parachute Selection (P Company) course at Depot PARA in Aldershot together. That allowed us the honour of wearing the maroon beret of the 2nd Battalion Parachute Regiment. From there it was over to Northern Ireland for what seemed like one endless war of deceit, death and destruction. Due to us both completing selection for 22 SAS together, we were spared the Battles for Goose Green, Wireless Ridge and the capture of Port Stanley where the ‘Shiny Two’ acquitted themselves so valiantly.

  The Falklands aside, Des and I had fought alongside each other, for almost ten years.

  He was my closest friend.

  Once the church service was over, we watched the wreath-laying at the War Memorial, ahead of a return march to the Royal British Legion and a few beers with the old boys.

  For me, it was a day of sadness, yet a day of celebration. Remembering the dead was one thing, but being alive to tell the tale was quite another, and deserved a beer or two.

  The Legion was a big single storey affair on South Street, and although it boasted a large concert room, we squeezed ourselves into the lounge. It was packed, and we had to shove to the bar every round. This journey, to and from each refill, also involved some serious slagging off of any crap hats enroute. I drank a little more back in those days, before Cathy came along and reined me in, and although this banter may have looked serious to some onlookers, it was all good friendly repartee really and I always enjoyed the day.

  We ended up sitting in a corner with two old RAF boys, who revelled in their tales of bombing raids over Hamburg and Dresden.

  Love it, hate it, agree with it, or not. It’s a tradition, a thanksgiving, one I personally think should be upheld forever.

  With no smartphones or internet, news didn’t travel quite so fast in those days, and it was just after one o’clock that the first reports of a bomb going off across the water in Ireland, started to seep through.

  When a newsflash finally showed the first pictures of the Cenotaph at Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, the whole bar fell silent.

  Des gave me a look I knew only too well. We dropped our pints on the table, eased ourselves out of the club, found our car, and set off for Sterling Lines.

  As the day progressed, we all sat around the TV or listened in to the radio for news. As you could imagine, none of it was good.

  Eleven people dead, many, old age pensioners who had survived all the Nazis could throw at them. Dozens of onlookers, terribly maimed and wounded.

  The PIRA later admitted that its target had been the British soldiers parading to the memorial.

  History went on to tell us that the Enniskillen bomb did indeed explode as a group of UDR soldiers made their way to the cenotaph. But it missed them, and instead, buried innocent people under rubble and hurled masonry towards the gathered crowd.

  Of the eleven people killed that day, three were married couples. One guy, Gordon Wilson, whose daughter Marie died in the blast and who was himself wounded, went on to become a peace campaigner. Fair play to the bloke.

  Of the seriously injured, thirteen were children.

  We knew there had been trouble in the Province the week before and expected some form of backlash.

  Tensions between the RUC and the Provo’s had been running high after the police clashed with mourners at the funeral of two PIRA volunteers. When a gunman fired a three-volley salute over the coffins, the cops went in all heavy handed, and fired plastic bullets into the crowd. One of the coffins was knocked to the ground. It was a mess, but no one quite expected the level of retaliation seen at Enniskillen.

  Des and I had been on ‘strip duty’
, part of a CT (Counter Terrorism) troop of sixteen blokes. The lads were split into four patrols. I, as a Corporal, led one of them.

  Des was my number two, alongside Dave ‘The Butcher’ Stanley, and Frankie Green, my explosives man.

  We were all a similar age, between twenty-five and thirty and got on like a house on fire. When we weren’t away, or on standby, we socialised together. Des and Frankie were married, but somehow still managed a good few nights on the lash. I knew Des’ missus Anne didn’t like me too much. I put that down to the fact that every time I brought him home, he was legless.

  The bomb remained the talking point all week. All our team had completed at least two tours over the water and knew the script, but we were all getting tired of listening to the same old rhetoric on both sides. Something needed to change, and after the carnage of Enniskillen, thankfully, it seemed that even the most fervent Sinn Féin supporters were calling for an end to the violence and were demanding a political settlement.

  On the Friday after the bombing, as we trudged from a killing house carrying hundreds of pounds of kit, piss wet through and freezing our tits off. We were met by one of the senior CRW trainers, Pat Evans.

  The Counter Revolutionary Warfare Wing, was set up in the seventies to train other squadrons in CT work. Pat was a top bloke and really knew his stuff. He trained us in advanced pistol work, explosive entries, room clearing and the like.

  It seemed, our patrol had been summoned to the Head Shed.

  “You lucky bastards,” he said, lighting a fag. “You’re off to get some fuckin’ sunshine… do anythin’ to get out of the rain some fuckers.”

  He wandered off in a cloud of smoke, and I felt the tell-tale rumblings of excitement that only a mission could provide.

  We cleaned and stowed our kit, showered and changed out of our sodden clothes and got a brew on. By the time we’d finished the first pot, we were joined by the OC and a fresh faced suit.

  “Right lads,” said the OC, grabbing a cup for himself. “Listen up, you’re off on a jolly.”

  The suit was of similar age to our patrol, lanky with a white-blonde side-shed hairstyle. He didn’t introduce himself. He simply perched his backside on the edge of the table we sat around, all casual as you like, and ploughed on in an accent right out of his Oxbridge upbringing.

  “The Enniskillen bomb was made up of 18 kgs of Semtex…40lbs in old money,” he began. “It was hidden in a sports bag and left against the gable wall inside the town’s Reading Rooms. It had a crude timer that was set to explode at 1043hrs, just before the ceremony was to start. Who made the bomb and who planted it, is not your concern. However, the Semtex it was constructed from, was provided to the PIRA by the Libyans… by Gaddafi himself… and that is very much your baby.”

  I pricked my ears up at that. I’d never fought in the desert or against the Arabs. My old man served in Aden… the Yemen, and that hadn’t ended well.

  The suit lifted an expensive looking briefcase from between his feet and pulled out a sheaf of papers.

  “Now, we all know that our pal Muammar Gaddafi began to supply weapons to the Irish back in the early seventies. However, it appeared his interest in interfering in the Troubles had waned. That was until the Yanks killed his adopted daughter last year in a bombing raid. As those aircraft were launched from UK bases, old Muammar decided to teach us a lesson and start supplying the Paddies again. Now then, a couple of months back, the French kindly intercepted a ship…” He checked his papers, “The Eksund… in their waters, bound for Ireland. It had 1000 AK47’s and two tons of Semtex on board.”

  Frankie Green whistled at that snippet.

  “Exactly,” countered the suit. “Now, we are not suggesting for a moment that you nip over to Libya and dispose of our pet despot, as he does have his other uses. However, we do believe we know the identity of the chap who is the ‘go between,’ the facilitator of these transactions, between Gaddafi and the PIRA.”

  He turned some pages, found a grainy black and white photograph and dropped it on the desk.

  “Abdallah Al-Mufti gentleman. He’s thirty-two years old and an Egyptian by birth. He is a Muslim, but he is not a fanatic or freedom fighter. He doesn’t care who receives his guns and explosives, so long as he gets paid. He is a dealer, pure and simple. He will trade in anything from slaves to socket sets. Obtaining this picture, and the intel on his whereabouts has cost the lives of two very good chaps. We want the blighter gone… pronto.”

  The OC put down his cup and addressed us. “So lads, this bloke Al-Mufti is holed up in a place called Tiji, a small town in the municipality of Nalut in the north-west of Libya. It’s located about 240k southwest of Tripoli in the Nafusa Mountains, at the northern edge of a major oil field. It’s also home to a Libyan Forces barracks.

  Our initial idea was to drop you chaps in HALO, light up this bugger’s quarters with a beacon and let the RAF do the rest. However, Downing Street don’t agree. The house is close to a mosque and a hospital, and that kind of collateral damage isn’t acceptable.

  Therefore, as you will need quite a bit of kit, we’ll get you to the Tunisian coast by sea, then it will be up to you from there. Once you get eyes on this Al-Mufti chap, do the business, and piss off quick sharp.”

  I looked at the guy’s picture. He had the weathered face of a man who had spent many months in the desert sun, with sharp light eyes that just had to be blue in the flesh. He wore a full beard and the standard Arabic chequered headgear, known as the keffiyeh or kufiyah. The shot had been taken from a distance and Al-Mufti was watching something or someone intently.

  He looked a mean fucker.

  “How much support will this guy have?” I asked. “I mean, with the Libyan army holed up in the town, can we expect them to protect him?”

  The suit began to put his papers back in his briefcase.

  “Al-Mufti has his own protection group. Our intel says they number between twenty and thirty. They are battle hardened and well trained. Taken from all over the Muslim world. Men who have grown tired of war and have been tempted away from their various conflicts by the handsome wages he pays. However, Al-Mufti is also a close personal friend of Gaddafi, and the soldiers in Tiji are loyal to Gaddafi’s regime. What can I say? This is a job that needs to be done quickly and quietly Fuller. Don’t wake the sleeping dog… if you know what I mean?”

  I knew exactly what he meant.

  Sterling Lines Friday 13th November 1987

  Des Cogan’s Story:

  I was gutted about the Enniskillen business. All my family were descendants of Irish Catholics. My old man had been born across the water and he knew what it had been like to grow up in the sectarian hotbed that was Belfast. He’d quickly learned how the Provo’s worked and what kind of influence they had over the local community. Strangely, he never questioned my motives when I joined up. ‘There’s good and bad everywhere,’ he’d say. ‘Just make sure you are on the right side of that, son.’

  He was rarely wrong my old Dad.

  That said, the bombing had opened up many of the old wounds, and some of the more vocal lads were gagging for a bit of revenge on the Paddies.

  I kept my head down and my mouth shut. I didn’t need a fat lip, just because I kicked with the wrong foot.

  We’d only been back home ten days ourselves. Our troop had been over the water since May 9th. Ringing my wife, Anne, with the news that I was off again, didnea go too well, I’ll tell yer.

  The minute the suit had left, the OC dropped a thick file on the table and we all sat around the table poring over maps of Tiji and aerial shots of the target premises. We drank pints of tea, offered different opinions on how best to tackle the job, and took the piss mercilessly.

  A couple of sweaty hours later, we had a plan we considered would work.

  The Head Shed had organised our transport. First, we would fly to Malta, a friendly face in that
part of the world where no-one would ask questions. Then it was a nine-hour boat ride to the Tunisian port of Jarjis, located at the southern end of the eastern peninsula named, the Délégation. We chose Jarjis as it was both a major port and a popular tourist destination where foreigners didn’t stand out like a sore thumb.

  The boys from Whitehall had a contact there, who would provide a jeep, fresh rations and get our ‘equipment’ past the port authorities.

  Then, it was a two and half hour drive along the P19 to the Libyan border, dump the vehicle before the checkpoint and a tab to Tiji.

  Piece of piss.

  Abdallah Al-Mufti’s house was a single storey, square block of a place, flat roofed and well fortified. It was situated on a narrow street of similar buildings that we had to presume would be occupied by civilians.

  As the OC had said, within five hundred yards was a fair sized mosque and a small medical centre. Even with modern weaponry, the RAF would have wiped out half the community. The boss was right, an air strike was a none starter.

  Rick had asked me to act as quartermaster for the job, something I enjoyed and had done before. With the prospect of meeting up to thirty well armed and trained fighters, we needed some big stuff to go with our personal kit.

  I found us an AW50F, a folding stock variant of Accuracy International’s AW50, which fires the multi-purpose Raufoss Mk 211 cartridge. The round combines a penetrator, high explosive and incendiary effect all in one tidy package. They make a fucking mess, I’ll tell you.

  Our model was also fitted with a Hensoldt NSV 80 night-vision sight as we figured we may end up fighting in the pitch black.

  At 15 kilograms, the AW50F is four times the weight of a typical assault rifle, and the .50 calibre ammunition weighs a fucking ton, but I reckoned it would be worth the extra effort as it would take on a light armoured vehicle or punch through a concrete wall.