Blood and Roses (A Beatrix Rose Thriller Book 3) Read online

  ALSO BY MARK DAWSON

  IN THE SOHO NOIR SERIES

  Gaslight

  The Black Mile

  The Imposter

  IN THE JOHN MILTON SERIES

  One Thousand Yards

  The Cleaner

  Saint Death

  The Driver

  Ghosts

  The Sword of God

  Salvation Row

  IN THE BEATRIX ROSE SERIES

  In Cold Blood

  Blood Moon Rising

  Blood and Roses

  HONG KONG STORIES VOL. 1

  White Devil

  Nine Dragons

  Dragon Head

  STANDALONE NOVELS

  The Art of Falling Apart

  Subpoena Colada

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2015 Mark Dawson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 978-1503944398

  ISBN-10: 1503944395

  Cover design by Lisa Horton

  To Mrs D, FD and SD

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Connor English sat in the open doorway of Falcon One, his legs hanging outside the cabin. He was wearing night vision goggles, and the arid and desolate desert below was washed with a ghostly green, the scrubby trees and lonely hamlets passing beneath the hull as the chopper maintained a steady pace of a hundred knots. The pilot hugged the contours of the landscape, the chopper’s altitude never rising above fifty feet, keeping it beneath the line of the hills.

  The pilot came over the troop net. “Falcon One to Zero. We just crossed the border. Now entering Morocco. Morocco comms, no chatter.”

  “Zero to Falcon One,” responded mission control on the ship off the coast. “Copy that. Green to proceed.”

  Everything was taking place as they had planned: they had evaded Moroccan radar coming in, and now they had a clear run to the target. English leaned forward a little, the hot wind tugging greedily at the desert scarf he wore around his neck, and looked aft. He had a good visual of the trailing helicopter, Falcon Two. It was a hundred yards to starboard, maintaining the same careful altitude, head down and tail up, racing though the night.

  Both birds were painted black and carried no markings or running lights. The two Black Hawks had been modified at the Manage Risk shop at The Lodge so that their radar cross-section was minimised. Stealth panels, similar to those used on the B-2 Spirits, had been fitted. The rotors had been modified with decibel mufflers. There were engine shields, a retractable undercarriage and refuelling probe, rotor covers, an extra rotor blade and a totally redesigned and enclosed tail boom. The Navy had done something similar with the birds that had been used on the mission to take out bin Laden, but one of those had crashed. The Pakistanis had sold the wreckage to an anonymous subsidiary of Manage Risk for twenty million dollars. The R&D shop had reverse-engineered the modifications and perfected them. The cost was significant, more millions, but the company would eventually sell it back to the American government, and in the meantime, it was going to prove very useful.

  Especially tonight.

  The price of all the extra work was that they flew more slowly than a standard MH-60 and packed less punch, but they had excellent radar defeat, and stealth was the most important thing tonight. English had been with the rest of the team when the hangar had been opened to the North Carolina sunlight and the birds revealed. The R&D guy responsible for the program admitted that he had been tempted to kill it more than once and that although the birds had been tested, they had never been tested with a full combat load, and had certainly never been tested on something like this.

  This illicit trip into Moroccan airspace was their maiden outing.

  The men inside the Stealth Hawk bore no identification.

  The two helos and their complement of men were anonymous.

  Deniable.

  Unsanctioned.

  Criminal, even, when you came down to it.

  If anything went wrong, if the birds crashed or got shot down, if they compromised the mission in any way, they would be on their own.

  English scanned the hills and valleys, looking for landmarks that he might recognise. He had studied the satellite intel that they had bought from the CIA. That had been helpful, but not nearly as profitable as the week that he had spent in the city itself. They had picked Beatrix Rose up at Casablanca airport and followed her to Marrakech. English himself had followed on the next available flight out of Basra.

  He had taken advantage of the week to acclimatise himself to the target and the surrounding neighbourhood. They had considered several ways of achieving the mission objective. They could have assaulted the riad from the ground, but it was buried deep within the medina with very poor access. Some of the alleyways that they would need to negotiate were barely wide enough for travel in single file, especially true for the big men in the chopper with their hefty packs. The alleys were potential choke points, and that made English nervous.

  So he had proposed this alternative.

  They would fly in and attack from above.

  The initial plan had been to take the target out when she was outside the riad, but in the time that English had spent in the city he hadn’t seen her once. She was holed up. That wasn’t really a surprise. She had received the same training as he had and she would have known, without question, that what she had already done demanded a response.

  Oliver Spenser.

  Joshua Joyce.

  Lydia Chisholm.

  Bryan Duffy.

  The four of them had been assassinated, and they hadn’t managed to lay a glove on her.

  She had a list, and there could only be another two names on it.

  Control.

  Him.

  They had to strike first.

  The roar of the chopper’s twin General Electric T700 turboshaft engines filled English’s ears. Little else was audible beyond that and the beating of the rotors. He leaned back in the cabin and pressed the wax plugs deeper into his ears. He
could just make out the shape of the crew chief holding up five fingers.

  Five minutes.

  He looked back. Falcon Two flared and started to descend to the desert floor. There was an additional team aboard the chopper, which would serve as an emergency backup should they need it.

  They had been aloft for eighty minutes already. The two Black Hawks had taken off from their Forward Operating Position on the Algerian side of the border. Their course took them northwest, just a short trip before they crossed into Moroccan airspace. Marrakech was two hundred miles from there. They had not cleared their passage with the Moroccan authorities, and if they were detected, they knew that fighters would be scrambled to intercept them. Being shot down was just one of many risks that they faced.

  The cabin was dark, with a residual glow spilling back from the instrumentation in the cockpit. The bird had been stripped of its seats to save weight, and so the passengers were sitting on the floor, leaning against the side of the cabin, all of them silent. Four of the men had served as Navy SEALs from the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU. Three had been Rangers, and the others were ex-SAS.

  He glanced around. Each member of the team had years of experience, and each had a different way of dealing with the lead-up to a job. Some listened to music; others closed their eyes and visualised the operation. English was relaxed enough. They had prepared for the job, and every man knew what he was expected to do. They were all good, too. Manage Risk didn’t employ second-rate operators, and these were excellent soldiers. The plan was sound. If they executed it as well as they had done in training, then everything would be fine.

  The pilot of Falcon One came over the troop net again: “Two minutes. Stand by.”

  The men came alive. Those who were not already wearing their helmets and goggles settled them into place. Throat mics were positioned and radios checked. They reached around for their firearms and, barrels down, ensured that they were functioning properly. They were armed with an assortment of weapons: M4 rifles fitted with suppressors, MP-5s. Banner, the team’s sniper, slid into the space next to English, with one leg hanging outside and the other braced against the doorway. He raised the barrel of his long rifle and squinted down through the optics.

  The pilot’s voice came through the fuzz of static: “Should be coming up just off our nose, eleven o’clock.”

  English turned back to the open door and the myriad lights outside. They had just passed over the fringes of the city.

  The pitch of the turbines altered as the pilot powered down.

  “Eyes on target. Stay tight.”

  The helicopter flared out and started to hover near the insertion point.

  “See anything?” English shouted into Banner’s ear.

  Banner gazed through the scope. “Negative.”

  English stood up and heaved the fast-rope in its canvas bag to the open door. The free end had already been fastened to the mooring. He leaned out of the open door, still thirty feet above the rooftops, and looked down: they were directly above the riad, the downdraft kicking up eddies of dust and whipping the laundry that had been strung out across a clothesline. Rugs hung out to dry were buffeted by dirt.

  He matched the riad’s layout against the satellite imagery and the video that the surveillance drones and satellite had shot last week. Everything was just as it should be. Moroccan riads were four-sided habitations, usually three or four storeys high and built around a central shaft that was open to the sky. This one was no different. Each of the rooms looked out onto the shaft, and a courtyard at the bottom was furnished with a plunge pool that helped to cool the hot air. There were trees and plants down there, too. The only way in from the street level was a thick wooden door that had been reinforced by iron bands. It would have been possible to breach it with detcord, but they would have the same problems with access. It wouldn’t be a sure thing.

  Banner shuffled ahead into the doorway, the rifle held in steady hands. His job was to cover the men as they fast-roped down.

  English pulled the thick welder’s gloves over his combat gloves.

  “Falcon One to Zero,” the pilot spoke into his mic. “We’re in position. Confirm we are ready to proceed.”

  “You’re green to go, Falcon One.”

  The pilot clicked across to the troop channel. “Green light. Go, go, go!”

  English shoved the bag out the door, and the thick rope unspooled as it fell to the ground below. The other men were up now, crowding the doorway behind him. Banner was alongside, and another man called Mason was directly behind, gripping onto the nylon safety loop that was fitted to his body armour.

  English felt a moment of peace. All the preparation, all the planning—it had all led to this point.

  This was what he did.

  It was what he had been born to do.

  He felt his mind transition into a different kind of mode, a calm that was born of repetition and confidence. He had visualised the operation for days, and now it was just a question of putting it into practice.

  Time to move.

  Beatrix Rose found it difficult to sleep these days. The pain from the cancer in her bones was constant now, and she was loath to take the morphine that she needed to quieten it. She needed a lot of morphine now to do what a single tablet had used to do, and one of the side effects was to render her torpid and drowsy.

  She couldn’t afford that.

  And so she was still awake at three in the morning, sitting in a chair in her large room. She had been reading a book, her eyes barely focussing on the words. She heard the helicopter as it approached. She knew, from long experience, that it was coming in low and fast.

  Too low.

  Too fast.

  She pushed herself out of the chair, blinking back the sudden blare of pain, and limped across the room to the door. She opened it, moved to the balcony that gave out onto the central shaft.

  “Mohammed!” she yelled. “Isabella!”

  She looked up into the night.

  The black helicopter slid into sight, flaring as the pilot fought the backwash rising up from the roof. It was a Black Hawk, but it had been adapted with baffles and panels that resembled the stealth fighters that the USAF flew. The side door in the fuselage was open, and she saw a flash of motion from the man holding himself steady in the space.

  Shit.

  Two long, thick ropes were thrown out of both side doors. They unspooled as they fell down into the riad. One of them fell all the way down the central shaft, the end slapping as it hit the floor of the courtyard below her.

  “Mohammed!”

  She forgot the pain as she darted back into the bedroom. She took the rubber tourniquet from the side table and quickly looped it around her arm, biting one end and pulling the other, tightening it. She took the syringe and punched the needle into a vein, depressing the plunger and injecting herself with the amphetamines that she had prepared. She removed the tourniquet and tossed it aside.

  The rush was immediate and powerful. She felt tingling in her head, her fingers and her toes, and her heart beat a little faster.

  She had an M14 chambered for .308 rounds propped against the wall. There were six full magazines next to it. The bandoliers with her throwing knives were hung over the hook that bore her dressing gown. She grabbed the rifle and the knives. She had a pair of night vision goggles, and she grabbed them, too, and went back outside.

  Connor English held onto the fast-rope and kicked out and away from the fuselage of the chopper. The rope passed quickly through his gloved hands, heat building up in his palms as he slid down, descending rapidly through the aperture of the shaft and into the enclosed space beyond. He hit the floor of the courtyard and rolled away so that he was against the wall, covering himself from attack from at least two sides. He took his MP-5 and performed a snap reconnoitre of his surroundings: the shaft was twenty feet ac
ross, symmetrical, encircled by a balcony on each of its four sides; doors and windows visible behind the balustrades; no lights on in any of the windows; no sign of life.

  The team had been split into two details of five. The men in Alpha Team rappelled to the bottom, and the men in Bravo started from the top. Alpha would clear up and Bravo would clear down until they met in the middle.

  Beatrix Rose would be caught between them.

  There would be nowhere for her to go.

  English looked up. The chopper had inserted the top team and was pulling up. The plan was for it to move away from the insertion point, circle within easy reach and then return to collect the men when they were done. The plan allowed it to remain on station for five minutes. It would be too dangerous to stay longer than that. If they overran, they would exfiltrate through the city and rendezvous with Falcon Two on the outskirts.

  He checked the courtyard. The other four members of Alpha Team were pressed against the walls, waiting his mark.

  He raised his hand, ready to give the signal, when four powerful detonations boomed out from the roof, one right after the other.

  He looked up.

  White smoke obscured the moon.

  A shower of tiny objects pattered off the walls and onto the tiles of the courtyard.

  Ball bearings.

  Shit.

  Claymores.

  He swore again.

  A booby trap.

  “Alpha to Bravo, come in.”

  No response.

  How many of Bravo Team were left alive? Four Claymores. If it were him, he would have set them in the four corners of the roof, each with a sixty-degree arc, and set them to blow with motion detectors or acoustic sensors. The killing zone could be as wide as the whole damn roof.

  “Alpha to Bravo, come in.”

  Nothing.

  The voice of one of the other men in Alpha Team buzzed out of his earbud. “What do we do, sir?”

  “Execute!”

  Beatrix peeled out of the doorway and crouched low, finding cover behind the balustrade. The adrenaline and the amphetamines coursed through her veins, and for a moment, she forgot the pain and the debilitation of her illness.