4

      Maybe it wasn’t such a crazy idea after all, Davies thought, on the drive back to Hereford. He’d spent the remainder of the previous day and most of the evening hammering out the bones of a workable scheme with Commander Franks and Commissioner McMillan, and they had made surprising progress.

      What had particularly impressed him had been both men’s total commitment to the job, and their willingness to be flexible. While he had not been given a total carte blanche, most of his ideas and suggestions had been listened to and given serious consideration. By the end of the day, they were all more or less in agreement as to the general size and structure of the unit they would create, and had a good idea of the sort of personnel who would make it up.

      This factor alone had allowed Davies to take some vital first steps. After leaving the two policemen, he had checked into the Intercontinental Hotel and spent the rest of the night making a series of telephone calls. Most of the key personnel who would help set up the new force were already either on recall to active duty, or about to receive transfer orders. For obvious reasons, SAS officers with experience on the streets of Northern Ireland had been high on the list, along with individuals with particular skills or interests which might be required for such an unusual operation.

      Now he was on his way back to Stirling Lines to start the tricky process of recruiting his foot soldiers, leaving Commander Franks to fulfil his promise to provide a nucleus of hand-picked police officers. It now seemed more than feasible that together they could merge the two interests and peculiar skills into a single, if somewhat hybrid, task force which could transpose the disciplines and tactics of a military force into a civil environment.

      Only one thing had changed from the Home Secretary’s initial briefing. For try as he might, Davies had been unable to share the man’s conviction that the job could be seen as an operation for the SAS Training Wing. It had become increasingly clear to him that the task was in fact almost tailor-made for the Counter Revolutionary Warfare Wing. In many respects, the CRW team had already been doing that very job for a number of years. Davies intended to place the day-to-day operations of the new unit under their jurisdiction at the earliest opportunity and then duck out, remaining available solely as a liaison officer between SAS commanders and the Home Office should such contact prove necessary. That was the theory, anyway. But first came the people, for a unit was only a collection of individuals moulded to a common purpose. And finding the right individuals was crucial.

      It would take a very special kind of young man to do the job properly, Davies was well aware. And young they would have to be, if Grieves’s theories were correct and their enemy was deliberately targeting the youth culture. Infiltration might well prove their best weapon, at least in the early days, which effectively ruled out anybody over the age of twenty-five. But they would also need to be sufficiently mature and stable enough to cope with the pressures and possibly the temptations they might be exposed to. They needed to be resourceful as well as tough, disciplined yet independent thinkers.

      Davies nodded to himself thoughtfully as he pulled off the M4 at the junction which would bring him into the north-east suburbs of Hereford. Yes indeed – a very special breed of young man, for sure!

      The white Escort shot through the red light and came screaming out of the side road into the main flow of traffic along Oxford Street. A collision was inevitable. The driver of the mail van stamped on his brakes and attempted to swerve, but was unable to avoid clipping the offside front wing of the Escort and spinning it round in a half-circle. The car bounced up the kerb, scattering terrified pedestrians in all directions, glanced off a bus stop and finally came to a halt half on and half off the pavement, facing the oncoming traffic. The squeal of brakes and the heavy thumps of a multi-vehicle pile-up continued for a full fifteen seconds. It was a nasty one. The shunts finally stopped, and there was a blessed few moments of silence before a concerto of angry car horns began to blare out.

      Constable John Beavis slapped his forehead with the flat of his hand and let out a weary groan. It was only his second week of traffic duty and something like this had to happen. Even worse, he’d been due to go off duty in less than fifteen minutes and his daughter’s school sports day started at twelve-thirty. He’d promised to be there to cheer her on in the three-legged race. He began to walk towards the long snake of crashed vehicles, counting them gloomily. This little mess looked like it would take a couple of hours to sort out.

      He hurried past the line of irate drivers, ignoring the dozens of shouted complaints and curses which were hurled in his direction. The sight of a uniform seemed to give them all a scapegoat, someone to blame. Finally reaching the end of the line, he approached the white Escort which had started it all and peered in through the closed passenger window.

      There were two occupants, both young. A male driver and a blonde female. Both sat rigidly in their seats, gazing fixedly straight ahead of them through the windscreen.

      Constable Beavis rapped on the passenger door with his knuckles. There was no reaction from inside the car. The couple continued to stare blankly ahead, ignoring him. He banged the window again, more angrily. Neither occupant even glanced sideways. It was as if they were both totally oblivious of what was going on around them.

      Beavis felt his anger rising. They were probably both dead-drunk, he thought, and it made his blood boil. It was a miracle that no one had been seriously injured, let alone killed. As he wrenched open the car door the girl turned to face him slowly, like a video replayed in slow motion. Her face was blank, utterly devoid of expression. Beavis felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle slightly as he stared into her eyes. They were wide open, but vacuous, almost dead. Like two small green mirrors, they seemed to reflect back at him. Beavis noted the dilated pupils, the strange facial immobility, and came to a revised decision. Not drunk, worse than that. They were both stoned on drugs, blasted out of their minds, the pair of them.

      His anger reached a peak and he thrust his hand into the car, grasping the girl by the arm. He wanted to pull her out, shake her, slap some life and some sense into her pretty, but stupid little face.

      The girl’s lips curled slowly into a scornful smile, which was almost a snarl. ‘Fuck off, pig,’ she hissed, with sudden and surprising vehemence. Then, sucking up phlegm from her throat, she spat full in his face.

      The young man also came to life. As Beavis staggered