Prologue

Abbottabad, Pakistan

He looked down at his most treasured possession and couldn’t quite believe how something so small could be so deadly.  The atomic cone of death was only four inches wide and eight long, but it enabled a Pakistani Army NASR Vengeance 4 battlefield tactical missile to deliver a nuclear strike of 0.5 to 5.0 kilotons.  He took the device, cradled it in both hands, and closed his eyes as he tried to envisage its awesome power. It made him feel reverential as if he were handling something sacred. The denseness of the nuclear material made it unusually heavy, but that was truly outweighed by the awesome responsibility of being chosen by God to use it.  The radiation did not worry him, as the explosion would kill him along with thousands of the infidels, and he was dying anyway.  He smiled; I am going to take the war to the Yankee unbelievers’ doorstep. 

Chapter One

Canada, two months earlier

 It was always the same dream. The man who had tried to kill her was staring into her eyes like a lover at climax, but it was the polar opposite of love. She held his gaze and felt pure hate reflected back at her, felt his evil slowly start to seep into her soul. It was like swallowing an ice cube that was slipping frostily towards her heart. The hate was hard, cold, and unyielding. Her fear seemed to swirl, solidify, and take form. It was as if she had become its ideal host; the shadow had found the room and made itself comfortable inside her. And then the evil shadow became apparent, like a flickering ancient movie image projected onto the bedroom wall. Her fear fed it and gifted it an amorphous translucent shape made up of the faces of the dead – her own personal body count.  The shape darkened and solidified as its claw-like tendrils reached out to claim her.

There was the white-bearded old man from Helmand dispatched with a double tap. There was the boy with the petrol blue eyes and the AK 47 whom she had tagged with a three-round burst, centre mass, and dropped into the choking dust of Helmand.  And there was the Satan-eyed murderer with the combat knife. She had killed him with a head shot as he had attempted to decapitate Connor Cameron in Mosul.

       An over-pressure of fear broke over her and she panicked, turned and fled, terrified and alone. She ran from the wraith-like vapour that chased her; her fear fed the shadow that grew and gained strength until she could feel it reach inside her.

“FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, NO!”

 Sam screamed herself awake and instantly knew:

The ghosts of the past are back, and they have just kicked and clawed their way back into my soul.

          She was awake now, pulse racing, breathless, with wide eyes still seeing the faces of all the dead she had sent to Hell. Her past haunted her, especially that last mission.

           It had now been a year since the ‘Weeping Willows’ ambush, when the team had substituted a bullet-riddled and anonymous corpse for a living terrorist whom they had snatched for interrogation. The dead man was simply known in intelligence circles as an SNU FNU, or surname unknown, forename unknown, and he had died a year earlier than the Weeping Willows incident, in unrecorded circumstances that had a similar profile to the man that they were beginning to hunt. The CIA had supplied the body, of the same approximate age, weight, and ethnicity of the man it was meant to replace, a Tier One target known as ‘Objective Cyclone’. The team had finally managed to untangle the living terrorist mastermind from the bloody mixture of him, his weapons, and his comrades, and he had been snatched in a ‘rendition operation,’ an Americanism for the arrest of an active terrorist for the purposes of interrogation.

         It had been organised by MI6 and the CIA, using Sam and her team of ‘Spartan Operatives’ consisting of former British Special Forces soldiers. Nobody would mourn the loss of Objective Cyclone, or miss him, because this particular terrorist had twice been reported dead. First, in a US airstrike in a dusty little village in Syria, and more recently in what the British and international press had come to call ‘The Spean Bridge Massacre’, when the SAS had ambushed an Islamist terrorist ASU (Active Service Unit) near Sam’s cottage in the highlands of Scotland.

       But the operation had forced Sam and her husband Nigel from their beloved croft cottage and into permanent exile. They were now under a death threat, or ‘fatwa’, and therefore had been incorporated into an intergovernmental resettlement package usually used for blown MI6 agents. The press had ensured that they couldn’t safely stay in Britain. They had been ‘outed’ in several papers and news channels when directly linked to the killings in what the locals at Spean Bridge called ‘The Weeping Willows’. The official inquest into the deaths had exonerated the SAS and concluded with a verdict of ‘Lawful Killing.’

        DNA samples, harvested from a backstreet garage containing the target’s car that had identified Objective Cyclone, had then been recycled for use by the Scottish coroner’s office.  The name of Jassim Emwazi had thus been officially recorded as one of those killed in the ambush, and EMNI (ISIS’s security service) therefore thought that their future plans were safe, as Cyclone had taken their operational secrets to the grave with him. The small highland croft and the ‘Weeping Willows’ were now the scene of an annual all-night vigil, organised by London-based political activists and Islam4UK, to commemorate the four terrorists they called Martyrs, accompanied by the inevitable counter-protests.

The operation’s objectives had been brutal, and its violent conclusion still deeply disturbed her.  It was the most unethical job that she and the team had ever been involved in; they had snatched a British-born terrorist from mainland Britain for interrogation by the CIA. It was a job Sam and the team had been given because they provided the ultimate firewall for the security services. It had been a deniable operation.

Canada had been kind to them; they lived in a beautiful rambling house, and the resettlement package had been generous.  Nigel worked teaching surveillance techniques to a Canadian Special Forces unit known as JTF2 or the Joint Task Force Two, based in Ottawa. Everything had seemed blissful to begin with, but things had now started to unravel.  The pressures of just living apart for a lot of the time had started to take their toll, and Samantha spent long periods with only her traumatic memories for company. The covert nature of their existence was also problematic. The small rural community in which they lived was curious about the newcomers, and that curiosity brought an element of resentment when it could not be satisfied.

Last year’s global lockdown because of the Coronavirus had brought further problems. Her feeling of isolation was exacerbated by her husband’s increasingly long trips away; she felt both isolated and homesick. They had also tried for a baby and failed; that was the one thing that they both desired and it was still just tantalisingly out of reach. Sam had been five weeks pregnant when she had lost the baby and it had broken her heart.  But she hadn’t told Taff; she felt that the burden was her own to bear, as she rationalised that this seemed to be the payback for all the lives she had taken on behalf of her country.

Maybe there was a God?  Some all-powerful omnipresent being that thought that human life was too precious to be reproduced inside a killer?

 Her moods had started to spiral into depression, with each day increasing her unhappiness. But maybe she didn’t deserve happiness; perhaps the terrorist with the hateful eyes had cursed her?

The last operation had been a time-bomb on a very slow fuse. The truth about an Anglo-American operation of such complexity, with such a wide circle of knowledge, could not remain a secret forever. The team had known this at the very beginning and had only agreed to get involved because they accepted that it was the only way that the future carnage planned by ‘Objective Cyclone’ could be stopped, while also knowing from bitter experience that former soldiers could very easily be sacrificed on the altar of political expediency in the future.

She closed her eyes, and for one fleeting moment wondered what was happening to the man they had snatched. She tried to recall his face, but all she could remember was the terrified look in his eyes.