THE FOLLOWER: SAS hero turns Manchester hitman (A Rick Fuller Thriller Book 4)

THE FOLLOWER: SAS hero turns Manchester hitman (A Rick Fuller Thriller Book 4)

Robert White



For my wife Nicola





Acknowledgements


I spent fifteen years of my life as a police officer, five as a member of a tactical firearms team. After leaving the Service I spent four years working in the Middle East and during that time I had the pleasure of meeting and working with several retired members of Her Majesty’s Special Forces.

One evening, sitting in an Abu Dhabi bar, I was having a quiet beer with two such ex-servicemen I had grown to know quite well.

Casually, one broached the subject of a job offer. They needed a third man to complete a team who were to collect a guy from Afghanistan and deliver him across the border to Pakistan. The job was worth several thousand pounds each and would last three days.

I was extremely flattered to be asked.

I knew my two friends would be soldiers until they took their last breath. Even then, in their mid-forties, they missed the adrenalin rush only that level of danger could bring.

Personally, I didn’t feel qualified enough to join them and turned down the offer, something incidentally, I have regretted ever since.

I would like to say a big thank-you to those two men, who, with their many late night tales of war and adventure, inspired me to write this work.





“I decided that if the police couldn’t catch the gangsters, I’d create a fellow who could.”

   (Chester Gould)





Remembrance Day 8th November 1987


Rick Fuller’s Story:

I remember it as if it were yesterday.

Des Cogan and I had been attending the parade at Leominster, Hereford. We’d got there around half past ten and stood around on the corner of Broad Street and Church Street, ahead of the eleven o’clock service at the Priory Church. Des smoking his pipe and me moaning about it.

I’d first met with the dour smoking Scot, back in the late seventies. Just two skinny, angry young men with too much testosterone for our own good, we completed the Pre-Parachute Selection (P Company) course at Depot PARA in Aldershot together. That allowed us the honour of wearing the maroon beret of the 2nd Battalion Parachute Regiment. From there it was over to Northern Ireland for what seemed like one endless war of deceit, death and destruction. Due to us both completing selection for 22 SAS together, we were spared the Battles for Goose Green, Wireless Ridge and the capture of Port Stanley where the ‘Shiny Two’ acquitted themselves so valiantly.

The Falklands aside, Des and I had fought alongside each other, for almost ten years.

He was my closest friend.

Once the church service was over, we watched the wreath-laying at the War Memorial, ahead of a return march to the Royal British Legion and a few beers with the old boys.

For me, it was a day of sadness, yet a day of celebration. Remembering the dead was one thing, but being alive to tell the tale was quite another, and deserved a beer or two.

The Legion was a big single storey affair on South Street, and although it boasted a large concert room, we squeezed ourselves into the lounge. It was packed, and we had to shove to the bar every round. This journey, to and from each refill, also involved some serious slagging off of any crap hats enroute. I drank a little more back in those days, before Cathy came along and reined me in, and although this banter may have looked serious to some onlookers, it was all good friendly repartee really and I always enjoyed the day.

We ended up sitting in a corner with two old RAF boys, who revelled in their tales of bombing raids over Hamburg and Dresden.

Love it, hate it, agree with it, or not. It’s a tradition, a thanksgiving, one I personally think should be upheld forever.

With no smartphones or internet, news didn’t travel quite so fast in those days, and it was just after one o’clock that the first reports of a bomb going off across the water in Ireland, started to seep through.

When a newsflash finally showed the first pictures of the Cenotaph at Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, the whole bar fell silent.

Des gave me a look I knew only too well. We dropped our pints on the table, eased ourselves out of the club, found our car, and set off for Sterling Lines.

As the day progressed, we all sat around the TV or listened in to the radio for news. As you could imagine, none of it was good.

Eleven people dead, many, old age pensioners who had survived all the Nazis could throw at them. Dozens of onlookers, terribly maimed and wounded.

The PIRA later admitted that its target had been the British soldiers parading to the memorial.

History went on to tell us that the Enniskillen bomb did indeed explode as a group of UDR soldiers made their way to the cenotaph. But it missed them, and instead, buried innocent people under rubble and hurled masonry towards the gathered crowd.

Of the eleven people killed that day, three were married couples. One guy, Gordon Wilson, whose daughter Marie died in the blast and who was himself wounded, went on to become a peace campaigner. Fair play to the bloke.

Of the seriously injured, thirteen were children.

We knew there had been trouble in the Province the week before and expected some form of backlash.

Tensions between the RUC and the Provo’s had been running high after the police clashed with mourners at the funeral of two PIRA volunteers. When a gunman fired a three-volley salute over the coffins, the cops went in all heavy handed, and fired plastic bullets into the crowd. One of the coffins was knocked to the ground. It was a mess, but no one quite expected the level of retaliation seen at Enniskillen.