container. If you had to do the other, you carried it with you in a bag inside your pack for the duration of the mission.
Another piece of equipment he’d fielded was a decidedly non-standard item. During the Malayan jungle campaign in the 1950s, one of the tricks employed by Communist guerrillas to evade British Army Ghurkha trackers had been to shoot a poor unsuspecting tiger and use one or more of its severed paws to print pugmarks over their own tracks in soft ground. Ben had obtained the deer’s foot a few days earlier, and was using it in the same painstaking fashion, step by step, to obliterate any tracks he left in the dirt. A true deer spoor couldn’t be replicated exactly that way, but by the time the trackers came, the prints would have been weathered enough by morning dew, rain and even sunlight to confuse them.
Hours passed. Inch by inch, mile by mile, pausing frequently to look and listen, he worked his way around the objective until, eventually, he reached the north-east point overlooking it from the high ground. There he used the cover of thick bushes to lie flat and scan the surrounding area with his night-vision binoculars, examining it in overlapping strips to study every detail.
The old stone house was all in darkness, except for a single light in a window on the first floor. It was a large and imposing property, all the more so for its remoteness, standing completely alone in the midst of the wilderness.
Based on Ben’s knowledge of his target, he didn’t expect the man to have company. That of the female variety, at any rate, could be ruled out with almost complete certainty. He was vociferous in his staunch dislike of women generally, partially resulting from, and partially the cause of, the unhappy endings of his four marriages. As for male company, he had no close friends of his own sex either. He was famously independent, curmudgeonly and unsociable, preferring his own solitary company to that of even a dog, let alone the family he’d never had, and was exactly the sort of person who would be inclined to spend Christmas alone up here in the big, rambling house in the middle of nowhere.
Nor did Ben expect the target to be expecting him. Seven years was a long time. Plenty long enough for guards to be dropped, and for guilty men to convince themselves they’d got away with it.
But Ben was being prudent nonetheless. This wasn’t a man to be taken lightly, not by him, not by anyone.
The target’s name was Liam Falconer. He was fifty-six years old, a career officer with three and a half decades of service. The last time Ben had seen him, six years earlier at his retirement ceremony in Hereford, he’d been slender and fit, sandy hair just beginning to turn silver at the temples. There was no reason to suppose he had changed a great deal physically from that day, when Ben had shaken his hand and thanked him sincerely for all he’d done for him. Soon after that, Falconer had moved to Scotland to live in peace and seclusion on his hundred-acre Highland estate and pursue his interests of grouse shooting and salmon fishing. His nearest neighbours, if indeed they had ever spoken to him, would have no idea of his real identity. Even less of an idea of what his job had been until March 1998, or the secret military world he had presided over for almost sixteen years – a world whose scope and true nature most ordinary people could barely begin to understand.
The reality was that men like Falconer never really retired; they just became more deeply, subtly embedded in the system that had formed them. There were always jobs for those kinds of men. Falconer belonged to that rare breed, possessed of a certain skill set and a certain mentality, who were far too precious to be allowed to spend the final decades of their lives gardening or vegetating in front of television sports. Their minds were their real asset, not their ability to jump out of helicopters and run up a mountain in full pack, or engage
Another piece of equipment he’d fielded was a decidedly non-standard item. During the Malayan jungle campaign in the 1950s, one of the tricks employed by Communist guerrillas to evade British Army Ghurkha trackers had been to shoot a poor unsuspecting tiger and use one or more of its severed paws to print pugmarks over their own tracks in soft ground. Ben had obtained the deer’s foot a few days earlier, and was using it in the same painstaking fashion, step by step, to obliterate any tracks he left in the dirt. A true deer spoor couldn’t be replicated exactly that way, but by the time the trackers came, the prints would have been weathered enough by morning dew, rain and even sunlight to confuse them.
Hours passed. Inch by inch, mile by mile, pausing frequently to look and listen, he worked his way around the objective until, eventually, he reached the north-east point overlooking it from the high ground. There he used the cover of thick bushes to lie flat and scan the surrounding area with his night-vision binoculars, examining it in overlapping strips to study every detail.
The old stone house was all in darkness, except for a single light in a window on the first floor. It was a large and imposing property, all the more so for its remoteness, standing completely alone in the midst of the wilderness.
Based on Ben’s knowledge of his target, he didn’t expect the man to have company. That of the female variety, at any rate, could be ruled out with almost complete certainty. He was vociferous in his staunch dislike of women generally, partially resulting from, and partially the cause of, the unhappy endings of his four marriages. As for male company, he had no close friends of his own sex either. He was famously independent, curmudgeonly and unsociable, preferring his own solitary company to that of even a dog, let alone the family he’d never had, and was exactly the sort of person who would be inclined to spend Christmas alone up here in the big, rambling house in the middle of nowhere.
Nor did Ben expect the target to be expecting him. Seven years was a long time. Plenty long enough for guards to be dropped, and for guilty men to convince themselves they’d got away with it.
But Ben was being prudent nonetheless. This wasn’t a man to be taken lightly, not by him, not by anyone.
The target’s name was Liam Falconer. He was fifty-six years old, a career officer with three and a half decades of service. The last time Ben had seen him, six years earlier at his retirement ceremony in Hereford, he’d been slender and fit, sandy hair just beginning to turn silver at the temples. There was no reason to suppose he had changed a great deal physically from that day, when Ben had shaken his hand and thanked him sincerely for all he’d done for him. Soon after that, Falconer had moved to Scotland to live in peace and seclusion on his hundred-acre Highland estate and pursue his interests of grouse shooting and salmon fishing. His nearest neighbours, if indeed they had ever spoken to him, would have no idea of his real identity. Even less of an idea of what his job had been until March 1998, or the secret military world he had presided over for almost sixteen years – a world whose scope and true nature most ordinary people could barely begin to understand.
The reality was that men like Falconer never really retired; they just became more deeply, subtly embedded in the system that had formed them. There were always jobs for those kinds of men. Falconer belonged to that rare breed, possessed of a certain skill set and a certain mentality, who were far too precious to be allowed to spend the final decades of their lives gardening or vegetating in front of television sports. Their minds were their real asset, not their ability to jump out of helicopters and run up a mountain in full pack, or engage
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