Tested by Fire by David Costa (the little red hen read aloud TXT) 📗

When Reece left the hotel, the morning air was fresh with a slight autumn breeze, the sun shining brightly and reflecting off the glass windows of the buildings as he passed by.

Turning right at the junction with the Edgeware Road he walked at a steady pace in the direction of Hyde Park and Oxford Street a mile away. Reece had tried to avoid the London underground since the July seventh bombings.

The nearest Tube station was where one of the suicide bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan, had set off his bomb as the train pulled out of the station, killing six people and injuring many more.

He only used the Tube when it rained or if he needed to get across the city quickly. He never used a car in London, traffic congestion and road works made it a nightmare to travel the roads of the city in that mode of transport. It was quicker and more enjoyable to walk getting rid of the kind of stress he would have if driving. Taxi drivers knew the short-cuts and where the roadworks where, so a taxi was OK on those occasions when no other way was possible. For now, he would walk using the tradecraft surveillance skills he was taught on these very streets by MI5 many years ago.

As he walked, he thought about how the training had developed and how it had saved his life on more than one occasion. Because of the continuing terrorist campaign in Northern Ireland during the early eighties, Special Branch officers were sent on training courses in England with the SAS and MI5. Reece had attended a Surveillance and Agent Handling course in London with MI5. The instructors taught all the tradecraft of running agents in a dangerous and hostile environment and the skills of how to watch and avoid being watched through surveillance and anti-surveillance. He’d learnt how to follow someone on foot and in vehicles. The instructors always kept the trainees away from the underground for two main reasons, the difficulty of following someone in the crowded Tube stations, but, more importantly, there was no underground in Northern Ireland so that would have been a waste of valuable course time.

Walking, you could see much more going on around you. Then there were the smells, the noise, and the air that cleared his mind, helping him make better use of the senses God had gifted him.

Today is a good day to walk, Reece thought.

Before leaving the hotel, he’d strapped the holster to his belt, inserting the Smith and Wesson with a fully loaded 9 mm clip. SG9 operators were given permission from the highest level of the Prime Minister’s office to carry firearms on operational duties.

The one thing Reece would tell anyone who asked him about his undercover work was that the only person you could really trust was yourself. When he’d returned from the course in London, he’d gone to Newry on one of his rare days off. He’d taken his second wife because she’d badgered him to go to the town’s market. The market itself was inside a square walled area with an entrance at each end from the street. While his wife inspected the stalls for a bargain, he put into practice the skills he’d been taught in London. Within a few minutes, he noticed two young men standing at the exit opposite the one he’d used to enter. He saw how they were talking while discreetly trying to look at him without drawing attention to themselves. One spoke to the other, nodded, then, taking one final look towards Reece, turned and left the market. It was that final look that confirmed his suspicions. Reece knew he was about to be set up as a target. The man leaving was the final confirmation that he was on his way to get a gun or a hit team to do the job. The other man stayed to keep an eye on Reece and point him out to the gunmen when they arrived.

Reece didn’t hang about to find out for sure. His instinct, backed by the training, told him to get out of there. He quickly found his wife and whispered in her ear that they had to go now. He could see she wasn’t happy about having to cut her shopping short, but she knew something was wrong by the way he took her arm and led her back to the car. Soon they were leaving the town far behind.

He’d trusted his instincts, and, on this occasion, he found out later, he was right to do so. Later, agents within PIRA brought in reports that the PIRA unit in Newry came close to killing an off-duty police officer they’d spotted in the town’s market. They didn’t know his name, but because he’d been spotted entering and leaving the town’s police station, his face was known to them.

On his walk through the city he was moving faster than the traffic. On at least three occasions he’d passed the same car stuck at traffic lights on red. He came to the end of Edgeware Road and turned left towards Oxford Street with Hyde Park Corner on his right.

This part of the city was always busy with people moving at different speeds for different reasons. Tourists, workers, shoppers, always the shoppers. This was Oxford Street, this was what it was famous for, people and plenty of them.

When you walked, it had to be with your head up dodging the many people coming your way. Not counting the stupid ones with their heads down looking at screens oblivious to all going on around them, not caring, making others dodge around them to avoid a collision. Reece remembered a senior intelligence spokesman once saying the biggest danger from terrorism was the fact too many people walked about with their heads down looking at screens rather than noticing what was going on in the world around them. This