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Operation Rhombus
Operation Rhombus
Operation Rhombus
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Operation Rhombus

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A cunning suspense novel, OPERATION RHOMBUS spans almost three decades and tells the story of a determined attempt to bring down the British establishment...and Diana Princess of Wales is identified as the possible catalyst.

OPERATION RHOMBUS focuses on the men who would risk an attempt to assassinate Diana Princess of Wales, detailing the perceived transgressions of the instigators and the skills of the men who would dare carry it out. Interspersing characters real and imagined, mixing theory and fact, describing methods in authentic detail and blurring all lines of plausibility, just who is JD? And who are the men behind him?
LanguageEnglish
PublisherBookBaby
Release dateDec 24, 2015
ISBN9781682228371
Operation Rhombus

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    Operation Rhombus - John Duggan

    ISBN: 978-1-6822283-7-1

    This book is a work of fiction. The names of any real persons used, living or dead, or any real institutions mentioned, are merely to provide context to the story, consequently their portrayal, actions and circumstances are based purely on the author’s imagination to depict fictional scenarios, including fictional versions of actual events. All other names, characters, places and incidents are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons living or dead, are entirely coincidental.

    OPERATION RHOMBUS

    John Duggan

    Having been given very few details Karl Steiner is tasked with a mission to foil a plot to assassinate Diana Princess of Wales. His employer, Sir Gerald Ainsley, suspects who the instigators are and discovers that Diana is simply a convenient pawn, being used in an exceptionally long game to challenge the British Establishment. With his meticulous skill and knowledge Steiner spends a year preparing for a premeditated attempt planned for 1995, but where he initially succeeds, conflicting forces thwart his efforts and a further attempt is realised in 1997.

    A cunning suspense novel, OPERATION RHOMBUS spans almost three decades and tells the story of a determined attempt to bring down the British monarchy, focusing on the men who would dare risk it, their perceived transgressions, and the men with the skills to carry it out. Interspersing characters real and imagined, mixing theory and fact, describing methods in authentic detail and blurring all lines of plausibility. But just who is JD? And who are the men behind him and his kind?

    CONTENTS

    BOOK ONE

    IN THE SHADOWS

    BOOK TWO

    OPERATION RHOMBUS

    BOOK THREE

    AFTERMATH

    EPILOGUE

    BOOK ONE

    IN THE SHADOWS

    ONE

    2008

    In the south west of England lies the county of Wiltshire. Home to both Stonehenge and Avebury, two world heritage sites from the Stone Age, the county is crisscrossed by paths dating back to the same period. Its undulating terrain with far reaching views, considerably gentler than the wilder rolling hills of its cousin Devon, is noticeably set apart by its well maintained topography. An impeccably neat county, some would say refined, Wiltshire is a beautiful place. Sadly though, it has changed a great deal in the last thirty years or so. It is no longer as rural as it was, most of the farms now are single crop affairs and despite the many thatched cottages there are few rural tradesmen. Though the villages retain some of their rustic charm the towns now seem like satellites of London. Despite that there are patches where a man can live a quiet life, where, so long as he is friendly, his neighbours will respect his privacy. But none of that means a man can stay hidden. There is always a chance of bumping into someone from the past; there is always a chance that, someone looking hard enough, will find who they are looking for. Obviously the longer a man remains undetected the more careless he is likely to become which makes it easier for anyone who may be waiting.

    Dave Parkes had been living quietly in the county for five years now. He had moved about quite a lot in the preceding six years, including two years fighting abroad. He had used a couple of false identities and so had been hopeful that his move to the countryside would work. Not that he had immediately realised the danger his last real job had put him in. When he had been recruited back in 1997 he had been assured that the hit was sanctioned, that there would be no comeback. Other members of the team had realised immediately that they had been duped and had talked of heading for the hills as fast as they possibly could, they had even talked about handing their employers over but, as usual, they hadn’t actually known who their employers had been. Everything had been done, as always, through front men so they didn’t have the kind of information which could buy them redemption. So they had run as fast and as far as their pay could get them, signed up for wars here and there, and hoped that everything would work out. For a while it seemed they had been successful in that and Dave had started to ease his guard. If he kept his head down he should be fine, surely nobody would expect him to risk coming back to England anyway. Accordingly Dave had slowly grown more confident, more relaxed. His neighbours had no reason to doubt that he was exactly what he told them, a man living on his army pension in his little cottage, the last in the street of his small village. Considered the army county, encompassing Salisbury Plain, utilised by the British Army for over a hundred years, and various garrison towns such as Tidworth, there was an abundance of former squaddies living in the area, so there were plenty of people like Dave. He took to going for long walks along the ancient paths, enjoying it just as much as he had when he was a teenager. He spent time in the many teashops and small pubs and when at home he read more and more about the county he now called his own. He learned about the old religions and the traditions and so on. He actually found a kind of peace which, all things considered, was far more than he deserved.

    Not everyone was fooled though. The bloodstained papers he had left on a badly mutilated corpse had struck certain people as too convenient. They were not squeamish, his pursuers, they had simply cut off the hands and sent them back for confirmation. It had not been long coming. They were the wrong blood group, the wrong fingerprints, the wrong hands. A simple error but then Dave hadn’t really expected anyone to go to that amount of trouble and he hadn’t had the time or opportunity to check such details. Part of him still believed the assurances he had been given and in any case, who the hell would have anticipated a team being sent all the way to the Caucasus just to check on a rumour about him. Dave had been a good soldier of course but he had never really understood just how dangerous the mercenary world is. He had worried about the enemy in front of him and, even after such a high profile job as the one he had been involved in, he had not realised that a mercs employers were often more dangerous than anyone. Certainly if they had as much to lose as his employers had. They were not likely to accept being assassinated because he could one day be found. Nor did he fully realise just how displeased that others would be, others who were far more powerful than his employer had been. So slowly but surely Dave was closed down while all the time thinking he had outsmarted everyone.

    For the last ten days four men had been dug in less than two hundred yards from his cottage watching not just Dave but also his neighbours. Perfectly concealed they were able, under cover of darkness only, to make the necessary shift changes, leaving their positions for long enough only to answer the calls of nature and to send brief, encrypted messages back to the team leader. Others had been able to observe Dave whenever he left the village though, obviously, they had not been able to follow him everywhere for fear of being spotted. They were confident however that Dave would not be difficult when the time came. They didn’t always go to such cautious lengths but Dave was the last target and they wanted everything to go smoothly as soon as the go ahead was given. After ten days the job had been planned to the finest detail, the hit, the removal and disposal of the body and the dispersal of the team. The four entry men of the now reinforced team had all the information they needed and it was now just a matter of waiting. Dave was to be executed at 0220 hours.

    The two entry men at the front of the building, JD and his mate Lee, were lying in the cover of some bushes eighty yards away, watching the cottage and watching the village close down for the night. There was a happy quiet in the air. Lee stirred slightly I’m bloody starving he said quietly.

    You greedy git, you had the biggest kebab I’ve ever seen only a couple of hours ago. JD grinned. The two had been friends for years and worked well together. Mind you, I could murder a brew and a smoke.

    One flask of posh coffee coming up, none of that instant crap you keep drinking Lee chuckled Since starting this job I’ve developed a taste for the refined things in life.

    Bollocks came the response as JD, head tucked into his chest, used his battered old trench lighter to get his cigarette going. There was no flame from such a lighter, nothing to betray the presence of the user. Sometimes the older technologies are the best. The glowing tip of the cigarette would never leave the small hole dug especially for the purpose of hiding such things, and the thin piece of cardboard ensured there was no reflection on the smoker’s face. JD smiled his thanks when Lee passed him the coffee. Only an hour to go now and the two men would move in and relieve Dave of the burden of life. There were another two men at the rear of the cottage who were also ready to enter, but each man always assumed he would get the first shot in. There was nothing personal about it, although JD knew the man slightly from years before.

    They had gotten on okay and Dave had a good reputation in the mercenary industry though there were rumours that he had been drinking too much on his last couple of jobs. JD was hoping that was true, certainly from what his team had observed Dave showed all the signs of a man who enjoyed a drink. Dave Parkes was the last of the men JD had to account for though and he would be happy to finally finish with this contract and retire. It had taken ten years to get to this point, mainly because they had been involved in other operations and of course it had taken a long time to track the sod down but it was telling that even after all these years, their employer was still determined to let none of the team Dave had been a part of, get away with that one fateful job. The long wait, and the other missions, had made up JD’s mind. The mercenary industry had changed since he had first entered it and he felt it was time to disappear and try to live out the rest of his life with no need for violence of any kind. Unless anybody decided to take him out for any reason but there was no point in worrying about that. There was no reason why he shouldn’t be left alone to retire and the money he had stashed away over the years would give him a good start and this job should go quite smoothly.

    The best laid plans of mice and men, as it were, often get fucked up in the most ridiculous of fashions. At one thirty am a tomcat and two females, who had behaved impeccably for months, decided to have a set to in Dave’s back garden. As usual when cats fight they made a terrible bloody noise and, just for good measure, knocked a small metal bucket off a low wall onto the patio. Dave Parkes who, following his usual practise, had fallen asleep on his sofa, woke up terrified. For some time he had been having nightmares about someone coming for him and the noise in the back garden had come right in the middle of just such a nightmare. He was instantly awake, and scared shitless to boot. He shoved his feet into his trainers, opened the front door and ran as fast as his legs could carry him, through the village, which was a dumb thing to do really, and straight down the track into the woods where the road curved as it exited the village.

    Oh fuck it all JD groaned, as he watched the man running away, now we’ll have to chase the silly bastard through the woods. He turned his head to look sourly at his friend, Lee, who was due to be the second entry man.

    Lee grinned at him I knew there was a reason I hated cats.

    I’ll skin the fuckers if I get the chance. Slight change of plan then Lee, I’ll pick up the two guys from the rear and the blocking pair and go after the silly git. I’ll take Otto with me too. You grab Chris and pick the two cars up. We’ll have to use you two to corral the fucker. Me and the other lads will do the legwork through the woods. Remember the drill and make sure comms don’t drop out, you know what a crappy area this is. Having taken part in plenty of exercises on the Salisbury Plain Training Area they all knew just how unreliable comms were in that location and there were no military units in the field at the moment so they would have to rely on their experience as much as their phones and radios.

    JD met up with the others at the end of the village and the six of them moved straight into the woods. Parkes was in too much of a hurry to cover his trail and his pursuers were all competent trackers. He had a five minute start but that gap would soon close. He would have to stop to clear his head and get his bearings. He might even kick himself for being scared and start to walk back towards his cottage. JD was kind of hoping he would. It would make things quicker and at the same time he was glad that he had assembled the whole crew for this job even though others might have tried to do it with fewer men.

    Now Dave had chosen a good area to hide in. The Chutes is an area where Wiltshire borders Hampshire and is not far from Berkshire either. The area has a lot of woods where a man can cover quite a distance without being seen, at least during daylight hours. Trying to move through those woods at night though invariably meant making some noise and Dave was trying to move at speed, which was making a hell of a racket and causing too much damage to hope his pursuers would lose him. Being experienced enough to comprehend his situation Dave soon realised he was being hunted down. The trick when fleeing is to gain as much time and distance as is possible. Sooner or later a lucky break will come, or at least, that is what the instructors always advise, but then, sometimes they lie, that’s their job. The problem Dave seemed to have tonight though, was that every time he came to a road or track there seemed to be a bloody car on it or voices so close that he couldn’t cross it. He was in danger of running round in circles and that was no good at all. He needed to get to an area his pursuers could not enter. He was hoping to reach Tidworth where a large army presence would mean he would not just be gunned down on sight but he wasn’t being allowed to move in that direction otherwise he could have frustrated his pursuers by simply making it to any of the barracks or the police station and at least buy time until daylight. At the moment he was moving in the wrong direction and pretty soon would have to either double back or take the suicidal option of crossing open fields. He was being shepherded to an area where the team were hoping to take him with no chance of discovery and Dave was smart enough to know it. JD was using Chris and Lee in the two cars well, the two of them constantly changing position to pen Dave in while the foot soldiers slowly closed him down.

    The six pursuers were actually having an easier time of it than Dave. They knew the area just as well and knew how to disorientate their prey and besides that, they knew they had some more people to help them out if needed. They still had, probably, three hours before anyone was likely to be stirring and they had gone through this kind of drill in far thicker woodland than this area. They were also much fitter than Dave; they had never stopped fighting or training. He was running out of options and they knew it. Dave was shattered. Fit as a fiddle a few years ago but suffering tonight. Maybe it was the impending sense of hopelessness growing on him, maybe it was the couple of beers he had drunk earlier in the village pub or maybe the large scotches while sitting at home in his armchair. He would soon start shivering and the mist, comforting initially; was now starting to weigh on him. He was only wearing a pair of jogging pants, trainers with no socks and a thin T-shirt, white of all colours. The sheen on his skin would be seen long before he would see his pursuers and he knew it

    He had been running for forty minutes now. He had been running bloody hard. Now, he had to lie on the damp ground and that was just as dangerous as moving. The mist, beloved of horror movies and fully expectant on the moors, was rare in this part of Wiltshire and should have helped to keep him hidden from his pursuers but these guys were pros just as much as he was. Difference was, they were armed and he wasn’t. They had been prepared for tonight and he, like an idiot, just hadn’t been. He spent a lot of time cursing himself for his stupidity while he was running, all of which never helped in a situation like his.

    On the small road in front of him sat the car again. It was static with the engine running, headlights on but empty. That car was a problem. He couldn’t cross in front of it, he would never make it, but he couldn’t move to the left and get behind it either. There would be at least one guy in that direction and he would have the advantage of being hidden rather than moving. It was the same set-up every time he had seen the cars tonight, the driver was obviously in position to take a shot if Dave tried to cross the road and, although a running man is a bloody hard target to hit, Dave didn’t fancy taking his chances like that. The car also meant that the team behind him could close the distance; it wouldn’t be long before they caught him if things carried on like this. He had to move back from the road and change direction again.

    His pursuers weren’t far behind him, he knew that even though he couldn’t hear or see them. The way he was being boxed in told him all he needed to know. He didn’t need to know them personally, he knew what training they had had, how experienced they were and he knew they could keep this up for far longer than he could. They would also be experienced trackers and as Dave had had to run like hell to get some kind of distance he had had no chance to cover his tracks. To an experienced tracker the trail he had left would be as broad as the road he was now unable to cross so the cover of night was really no help at all. He had to try something else.

    Once again Dave cursed himself. He really should have known something like this was going to happen. He should have known that sooner or later somebody was bound to come after him; the target had just been too high profile. Not that anybody had told him who the target was going to be at first and when they had, they were adamant that this was a job sanctioned by the government itself. He had worked for governments a few times before and so he had believed it, they all had, they had all spent hours discussing why the government would be more than pleased to see the back of this target, and why they would have been happy to use a mercenary team to carry out the job. They would all have refused to do it if they hadn’t been convinced, precisely because they would have to be killed.

    The job had been organised exactly as if it were a government job. They had rehearsed it time and again. There hadn’t been any trouble when they had picked up the second part of their fee, once the job had been completed. They had been sure to arm themselves to the teeth when they had gone to collect it though, expecting an ambush that never came. The paymaster had smiled at their distrust but then, he wasn’t in a hurry to hunt them down; he had another team closing in already. It was when they were on the plane that the doubts had first surfaced, when guys began making plans. Dave had found himself some dirty work in the Caucasus, making sure people knew he was there. When the chance had come to use a corpse to throw people off his scent he had taken it, too bloody right, and he had hidden in England ever since. Always in a rural area, living on cash only, trying to fade away rather than end up in a shallow grave. A prospect which was looking increasingly likely by the minute, but at least his head was clearing now. England had been a mistake. With the benefit of hindsight it had been a bloody stupid place to run to but it had taken them a hell of a long time to find him. Maybe these guys who were hunting him were good but they sure weren’t working for the government and that gave Dave some hope.

    Dave slowly crawled back into the slightly deeper cover of the trees. His progress was slow, inch by painful inch he crawled as they had taught him years before. He couldn’t afford to make any noise now, so it was a slow crawl, the kind that can wear anyone out quickly if they aren’t used to it, and most soldiers don’t practise it much now. The accountants who ran the army nowadays deemed such things pointless, not understanding the many occasions it might be needed. Dave remembered a time when he had practised such methods of moving time and time again. Sentry killing was the usual reason for it and boy did he need to make a good job of it now. He moved slightly quicker to his left hoping to catch the guy at the end of the line approaching him. If the kill was quiet enough he could buy some time and recover a weapon. If all went well his pursuers would pass him by, and take just long enough to realise what had happened, for Dave to hope to get at least a hundred yards distance. That was all he would need, he told himself. If he fucked it up he would be dead within minutes. A scary idea but this was not the time to get scared.

    Three minutes and twenty yards later and he thought he could just make out their approach. There couldn’t be many of them, even experienced troops made a noise when moving through the woods at night and he wasn’t hearing enough noise to convince him there were too many. He guessed there were no more than ten and they would have to leave a reasonable gap between them to cover a decent frontage, so if he could get to the end guy, he had a good chance the kill might not even be heard by the others. He really needed them to make just a little bit more noise right now so that he could be sure of the gaps between them. A cough would have been a godsend but none came. He crawled into a darker patch and waited. Then he heard it. Someone kicked a small tree stump and began cursing under his breath. Now he had his target.

    The man moved quietly to his right, seemingly to pass the other side of the tree. Dave had to time this exactly. He tensed, ready to move quick and quiet to break the guy’s neck. There was nothing personal about it, yet. He needed the man’s weapon, just as he needed the slight gap that would allow him to slip through. Neither of those would guarantee his life but they were the only things that might lengthen it a little.

    If Dave could get away tonight he was fairly sure he could disappear just long enough to get a new identity. He really should have had more of those organised after all his years in the industry but he would make it, he was confident of that.

    The guy took another step. Dave sprang up, fast, his left hand ready to chop down on the man’s neck. Dave had just enough time to register that he had been played. The guy had crouched down just enough to make Dave’s move pointless, there wouldn’t be enough power in the blow as Dave would be over-reaching. Dave felt a pain like no other as an iron fist slammed into one of his testicles. He vomited as he doubled up, consciously aware of the stiff fingers perfectly placed to crush his windpipe. He felt hands the size of shovels around his head and then it was his neck that was broken. He hadn’t even heard the second guy. It was all over so fast and silent that at least Dave didn’t have time to dwell on his death. It was only a small mercy but he could hardly complain, it was all part of the life he had led. He could have become a regular Joe, working in a dead-end job somewhere, taken up fishing, maybe found a wife he could have treated better than he had treated the first. Dave had loved the idea of the money though, and if a man is daft enough to fight for just that then he deserves everything he gets.

    The guys who had tracked him down were mercenaries too of course, but they had been taught by one of the real old fashioned pros. One of the legends in fact, and of the many lessons they been taught, the most important was to sustain the premise to never trust one’s employers; the ability to be able to appoint a merc in the first place indicating that an employer is too bloody treacherous to deserve the honour of trust. They all had spare identity papers hidden away, all had enough cash to be able to run at short notice and most importantly, all had a network of friends they could rely on. Dave hadn’t organised any of that, he had always relied too much on his employers and now he had paid the price.

    How the bloody hell can a guy your size move so fast in the woods? Bloody gorilla, I didn’t even hear you. Like most people who knew him, JD had a sneaking admiration for the way Uwe could move his vast frame so quickly and silently.

    We banana eaters are light on our feet the German laughed in reply. At six feet four inches he was built like the proverbial shithouse and was strong to boot.

    OK twinkle-toes, give me a hand to shove this sod in the car. The sooner we get rid of him the sooner we can get some beers.

    JD and Uwe picked up Dave’s corpse and threw it into the boot of the waiting car on the lane. They had prepared a grave for the body a few days earlier and found it quite easily, even in the dark. In an unremarkable spot in the woods Parkes still lies, his grave consisting of plenty of stones and logs to ensure that any dogs would be unsuccessful in digging him up. The area was not particularly popular with dog walkers anyway but it wasn’t a risk worth taking. It would also make it easier to recover the body if they were ever asked to do that. Normally JD and his team left no traces of a body for anyone to find, they never actually buried a body just in case someone should accidently discover it but they had been told not to do that on this job. The bodies were to be concealed but not destroyed, something they didn’t really like but weren’t prepared to argue about. On this occasion their employer at least knew what he was doing and the money was good so they went along with it.

    JD and his team didn’t live in the area so they didn’t know that Parkes was lying within a mile or so of where kids from the local primary schools were sometimes taken for woodland excursions, otherwise they would have planted him somewhere else, but the body has never been found and the kids enjoy their lessons so all’s well that ends well. Let’s just hope that none of those kids is daft enough to ever get involved in the shady wars of the mercenary, and if they do, that they make a better job of it than Dave Parkes.

    TWO

    1989

    Sir Gerald had always considered himself to be a very fortunate man, not lucky, because luck would suggest a lack of effort on his part, and Sir Gerald was a man who always put a tremendous amount of effort into everything he did. As a hereditary peer he possessed the advantages that came from being born into a wealthy family and he had always appreciated that and taken full advantage of it. His family had been aristocrats for centuries but had not simply depended on the wealth of their estates lasting forever. They had been far too astute for that and so had not gone into decline as so many other families had. They had become prominent in the banking field when that was unfashionable to the point where it had been a good idea to hide one’s involvement. They had also been extremely good traders whose abilities in that area had been instrumental, in an indirect way, in the establishment of the Empire itself. With such a pedigree, with such a history behind him, Sir Gerald always felt himself under a certain pressure.

    He felt that he must always, no matter how difficult personally, ensure that his family maintained its wealth and position. That meant sacrifice, obviously, but it also meant that he had to offer his talents whenever they were needed to ensure the preservation of the Establishment of the nation. As a personal friend to some of the monarchy he found some of those duties easy to reconcile but he still, occasionally, found himself having to defend some members of the Establishment he would have been happy to see the back of. Sometimes, when he found himself having to do that, he needed to retreat to his estate to settle himself. Not that anyone need feel sorry for him by any means and he never felt sorry for himself when that happened but it should be understood that, no matter how dependable someone is seen to be, people all fall short sometimes.

    Not that he had fallen short by the time of his introduction here. In the summer of 1989 he was acknowledged as being reliable and loyal, having earned that acknowledgement over long years. Almost since he had first started walking he had been schooled in preparation of his role in life. He had been taught about his estate, the management of it and the historical importance of it, and the reason why the estate had to

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