Kashmir Rescue

Kashmir Rescue
Doug Armstrong

Ultimate soldier. Ultimate mission. But will the SAS be able to storm a terrorist stronghold in the mountains of Pakistan?For Captain Don Headley of the SAS, the police anti-terrorist exercise on the outskirts of Heathrow Airport was to have been just another training job. But in the grey suburban sprawl on the edge of London another, far more sinister plot is about to unfold, a plot that sees him dispatched on a hostage-rescue mission to the Indian subcontinent.Under the patronage of inscrutable Intelligence chief Sir Anthony Briggs, the operation reunites him with some of the hardest troopers from Hereford, for only such a hand-picked team is capable of storming a terrorist stronghold in the mountains of Pakistan. And only the very best will have a chance of coming back alive.Central to the mission is the mysterious Mr Sanji. It is at the cost of precious lives that Don and his men will learn the horrific secret of this world-weary old man – and understand that the roots of the kidnap plot lie buried in the dying days of the British Raj.

Kashmir Rescue

DOUG ARMSTRONG

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

First published in Great Britain as Operation Takeaway by 22 Books/Bloomsbury Publishing plc 1996

Copyright © Bloomsbury Publishing plc 1996

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Cover photographs © Nik Keevil/Arcangel Images (soldiers); Shutterstock.com (textures)

Doug Armstrong asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008155483

Ebook Edition © December 2015 ISBN: 9780008155490

Version: 2015-11-02

Contents

Cover (#ud832530b-0dcb-5f8f-ae78-45e7fa988373)

Title Page (#ua4077df6-edd3-57af-b393-1fade9148690)

Copyright (#u32b0577c-9b75-57e0-bec8-9de15e5e35f2)

Chapter 1 (#u7221a700-9488-53d6-b6b1-071e8042998d)

Chapter 2 (#u2e9a893a-8d98-5212-ab49-9a62c719a64f)

Chapter 3 (#u6574062f-c303-5775-9187-572bda6e9cff)

Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)

OTHER TITLES IN THE SAS OPERATION SERIES (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

1 (#u58748eb0-1eab-5ca3-b26f-222421e3de55)

There were many kinds of exile. The old man realized that now. In fact, he wondered whether he had been unfortunate enough to experience them all in the course of his long life. As he ambled along the pavement bordering the busy road, the surface glistening with drizzle, he hunched his shoulders into the motionless cold and found himself thinking of his boyhood. That had been the first one. When he had been very small he had never been able to work out why he was exiled from the company of the other boys in his neighbourhood. Of course, he had heard the rumours of his parents, uncles and aunts, all speaking of Hindus and Muslims, and on holy days he saw how his own family went to pray at a different temple from the one attended by the other people in their street.

A passing lorry sprayed him with a fine film of muddy water as it shot by, heading south for the junction of the M4, which would already be thickening with traffic, even at such an early hour. By 9 a.m. it would have ground to a virtual standstill, clogged like an artery, the flow gradually stiffening to a halt in the moments before his death.

He hated his new country. He still thought of it as new, even though he had left the land of his birth nearly fifty years before. That had been another exile, more obvious than his boyhood solitude but stifling and bitter nonetheless. He looked around at the grey, sullen landscape of concrete, tarmac and red brick. It was barely light, and every house was closed as tight as a fist. Their owners had made pitiful attempts to differentiate their property from the one next door: a glass panel, the colour of woodwork, a cursory stab at flamboyance with a winding pathway. More noticeable, however, were the similarities, apart from the most obvious one of the houses’ identical design: a front garden concreted over to provide parking for a clutch of cars; burglar alarms to keep at bay the increasing number of have-nots; and the satellite dish clinging under the miserly eaves like an extraterrestrial orchid, its brainwashing duties long completed but still reflexively cleansing the occupants of original thought.

The bench he usually rested on had been vandalized in the night. He stood before it, surveying the efforts of the mental giant who had spray-painted a swastika and racist slogans across the seat.

‘If only I could go home,’ he muttered to himself as he read the misspelt words. ‘If only I could.’

He tested the paint with one cautious fingertip, and finding it dry, eased himself down, feeling a stab of satisfaction as his buttocks pressed into the swastika. He wondered briefly if the youth had been aware of the symbol’s Indian origins. He smiled at the irony and took out a cigarette.

Against the background noise from the motorway he could hear the car alarms starting to go off around the district, each one welcoming its owner with the faithfulness of a dog, bleating an answering toot as a keyring was fired at it. Soon their drivers would be sitting in traffic jams and feeling the tension knot in the solar plexus at the prospect of being late for work.

The old man sat back and drew on his cigarette, glad to be out of it all, yet unable to resist the slightest twinge of regret that his own participation in the conduct of life was at an end. He had never become used to retirement, another one of the many exiles. Had his wife still been alive there might have been some solace in the spread of empty hours that extended from dawn to dusk. But she was dead – yet one more exile that he mentally ticked off on the tally he kept.

A growing roar overhead heralded the approach of the first morning flight into Heathrow. Moments later the fat silver fuselage broke through the low, swirling clouds like a bloated fly, sinking down to settle on a new-found corpse. The old man smiled grimly. He had seen plenty of those in his time. Too many. But that was all such a long time ago. He wondered sometimes if it had been a dream. Nightmare might be a better description.