Sleeping Soldiers: (Tom Marlowe Book 1), page 1
Copyright © 2022 by Jack Gatland / Tony Lee
All rights reserved.
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This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems without written permission from the author, unless for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, places of learning, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Published by Hooded Man Media.
Cover design by L1graphics
There’s a new Detective Inspector in town…
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Before Tom Marlowe, there was DI Declan Walsh!
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Also by Jack Gatland
DI DECLAN WALSH BOOKS
LIQUIDATE THE PROFITS
LETTER FROM THE DEAD
MURDER OF ANGELS
HUNTER HUNTED
WHISPER FOR THE REAPER
TO HUNT A MAGPIE
A RITUAL FOR THE DYING
KILLING THE MUSIC
A DINNER TO DIE FOR
BEHIND THE WIRE
HEAVY IS THE CROWN
STALKING THE RIPPER
A QUIVER OF SORROWS
MURDER BY MISTLETOE
* * *
DAMIAN LUCAS BOOKS
THE LIONHEART CURSE
* * *
ELLIE RECKLESS BOOKS
PAINT THE DEAD
STEAL THE GOLD
* * *
TOM MARLOWE BOOKS
SLEEPING SOLDIERS
TARGET LOCKED
For Mum, who inspired me to write.
* * *
For Tracy, who inspires me to write.
CONTENTS
Prologue
1. Ink Blots
2. Ashes To Ashes
3. Quick Change
4. Pub Lunch
5. De-Brief
6. Tunnel Rats
7. Saved House
8. Underground, Overground
9. Gallows Hill
10. Grasshopper
11. Close Pursuit
12. The Cleaner
13. Long Term Parking
14. Seagulls
15. Shopping List
16. Late Night / Early Morning
17. Breakfast Meetings
18. Waiting Room
19. Rescue Strangers
20. Palace Halls
21. Extraction
22. Burke And Hare
23. Group Therapy
24. Retribution
25. Addressed Rehearsal
26. Countdrown
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
PROLOGUE
THEN.
‘Put the gun down!’
‘She said that? Really?’
‘Damn right she did. “Put the gun down”. As if saying it would make me do the bloody thing.’
‘And did you?’
Marshall Kirk smiled at the question, placing the binoculars down for a moment as he considered this.
‘You know? I did put the bloody gun down,’ he said with complete conviction.
Tom Marlowe leaned back in the chair, staring at his companion with an expression of severe mistrust. ‘You bloody didn’t,’ he muttered.
Kirk nodded. ‘I did, and it was the best thing I ever did. Sure, I was arrested and placed in a Gulag for three months, but the day the wall came down we met up for a drink. A year later we got married.’
Marlowe shook his head. ‘Nowadays you could just find someone on the internet,’ he smiled.
‘Aye?’ Kirk raised an eyebrow at this. ‘And you’ve done that, have you?’
‘Do you honestly think I have time?’ Marlowe laughed. ‘They’ve got me running around all over the place right now.’
Marshall Kirk considered this, nodding slowly, reaching for a packet of crisps and opening them. ‘Working for Box does that,’ he said, using the name people who worked in the Secret Service used for it. ‘You should have stayed in the SAS.’
‘I wasn’t in the SAS,’ Marlowe replied with a hint of professional insult. ‘I was a Royal Marine Commando.’
‘But we met on an SAS reconnaissance,’ Kirk frowned as he poured a couple of crisps into his hand and threw them into his mouth. ‘Were you AWOL or something?’
‘I wasn’t in the SAS when we did that, in the same way that you weren’t either,’ Marlowe held a hand out for a crisp.
Kirk considered this, and then gave a single, small crisp to him.
‘Wow, thanks,’ Marlowe replied, unimpressed, but eating it anyway, wincing as he realised it was prawn cocktail flavoured. He should have realised this error well in advance, of course, as the only crisps Marshall Kirk seemed to eat were bloody prawn cocktail flavour.
Chuckling, Kirk raised the binoculars to his eyes once more with one hand, mainly to avoid looking at Marlowe.
‘I might have been in the SAS,’ he crunched, using his free hand to shovel more crisps into his mouth. ‘I could have been in the SAS, doing all that SAS stuff they do. We do.’
‘Yes,’ Marlowe smiled. ‘I can definitely see that.’
They’d been teamed up on this stakeout for around three days now; sitting in an abandoned apartment on a cheap and brutal East London housing estate, using one of the back windows to spy on a mosque next door. It wasn’t a Muslim hunt, but rather the opposite; a far-right organisation had been rumoured to be targeting the mosque in a coordinated bombing campaign and, as Frank Robertson, the public face and leader of the organisation, had links to far-right groups in both Hungary and Greece, it’d been decided that MI5 should monitor the building, threats from outside the country, even if it was through a British National, being their remit.
And, as it wasn’t deemed that high a problem, they’d stuck the weeks-from-retirement Marshall Kirk there with the wet-behind-the-ears recruit Thomas Marlowe, probably to keep him out of the way until they could work out what to do with him next.
The crisps finished, Kirk made a ring with his index finger and thumb, pushing the middle of the flattened pack of prawn cocktail crisps into it, making a hollow. Then, with as much attention to detail as he’d given the op, Marshall pushed the rest of the packet into it, folding them over, making a solid ball of a crisp packet that didn’t unravel.
‘I don’t understand why you do that,’ Marlowe muttered. ‘All goes in the same bin.’
‘Yes, but mine takes up less space,’ Kirk replied smugly, returning to the binoculars. ‘It’s more efficient.’
‘Whatever. I’m getting some lunch,’ Marlowe said as he rose from the chair he’d been sitting in for the last four hours. ‘Saveloy and chips?’
‘Have I ever deviated?’ Kirk still watched through the glasses. ‘Pick what you like and never deviate. Change is dangerous. Change leads to chaos.’
‘This from the guy who fell in love across the Berlin Wall,’ Marlowe chuckled, grabbing his jacket and wallet. ‘Back in a minute.’
Marshall Kirk grinned.
‘A minute was all it took,’ he said wistfully. ‘That, a commanding tone, and a cracking pair of legs.’
It was raining as Marlowe left the apartment, hurrying down the battered, urine-tainted stairs from the third floor to the car park. The two of them were situated to the east of the building, which was good, because he didn’t have to smell that sickening, ammonia-like smell for longer than he had to; only on food trips or snack hunts so far. There was a small selection of shops just outside and across the car park: an off-licence with strengthened Perspex around the till, a betting shop, and a fish and chip shop that also doubled as a Chinese takeaway.
Marlowe had tried the Chinese takeaway on the first day they’d been stationed there.
They’d stuck to the fish and chips after that.
As he walked across the car park, nodding at the group of hooded teenagers that hung around outside the off license, Marlowe considered the conversation he’d just had. He hadn’t lied to Marshall Kirk; he had been a Commando. In fact, he’d been a teenager himself and on his Commando training course during the seventh of July 2005, when terrorists had attacked London.
His own mother, a high-level operative in Military Intelligence at the time, was killed that day. Because of intelligence given by one of her assets, she hadn’t had the time to delegate a mission to one of her team, and instead had shadowed one bomber onto a train, intending to eradicate him silently before he could do anything. Unfortunately, she reached him just after they left King’s Cross Station, and pretty much at the exact moment he detonated his bomb, killing her and twenty-six others.
They didn’t add her to the victim list because she wasn’t officially there, but everyone important knew. Even Marlowe knew, eventually. And her best friend in the department, Emilia Wintergreen, a woman who was practically Marlowe’s aunt in all but blood since he was a kid, had replaced her in the role, bringing Tom into the Secret Service from the Royal Marines as soon as she could.
He’d gone because it was an opportunity to gain revenge for his mother’s death, but he soon realised that it
was far more than that. It was a sacrifice. Not only did you hide your true identity away, but for long periods you had to pretend to be someone else. There were people undercover for years who’d gotten married, had families, still waiting for the call.
Sleeping soldiers, waiting to be awakened.
He’d commented about this. Maybe even complained about it, while on the aforementioned mission with the SAS a few months back. And now, most likely this comment had been passed up the pole, and because people in high-level offices probably believed Tom Marlowe was a complainer, he was stuck on babysitting duty in a shit-hole East London council apartment, on an estate which had somehow missed the boat of development money that was being flashed out in the months leading up to the 2012 Olympics.
The only highlight had been Marshall Kirk and his stories. A man who, according to his own tales, had single-handedly kept the British Empire safe during the Cold War.
You know, James Bond, if he’d been from the Black Country.
The tales were mostly bollocks, but Marlowe had seen Kirk in action once, on that reconnaissance in Kosovo, and he knew that even though Kirk’s tales were fanciful, they most likely had a nugget of truth held within. And, more importantly, Kirk could probably back up every single claim he’d made over the last three days, in that way that someone offering a “pub bet” could always manage the impossible act they were challenging, for the cost of a pint, when the mark invariably lost.
Or, in Marlowe’s case, a week of saveloy and chip lunches.
The girl behind the counter was called Vas; he knew this because he’d said hello to her every time he’d come in to buy dinner. She’d nodded at him as he walked into the fish bar.
‘Saveloy and chips, cod and chips, curry sauce,’ she said, as if reading from a script.
‘Please.’ Marlowe passed a ten-pound note across to her. ‘Feel free to give me the most burned saveloy you have.’
‘Can’t burn saveloys,’ Vas said as she turned away from Marlowe, already shovelling chips onto some white paper wrapping. ‘Well, unless the wrapping splits.’
‘Find one like that, then.’
‘You want vinegar?’
‘Yeah, please.’ Marlowe looked out of the window as he waited, glancing back at the estate. Two SUVs had pulled up in the street outside the main stairway, and, emerging from the front of the two, was a familiar face. A middle-aged, stocky Caucasian with the features and build of a fighter.
Because he was.
Frank Robertson looked around the estate disdainfully as, from the SUV behind him, three more track-suited men emerged. The driver of the second SUV, a tall, lanky man in jeans and a black bomber jacket, his hair buzz-cut as short as Frank’s was, pointed up at a window on the estate.
And, as he did so, Marlowe felt his stomach flip-flop.
That was their apartment window.
Someone had informed on them.
Looking back at Vas, he saw her pass across the bag filled with his wrapped chip lunches, unable to look him in the face. Either she knew what was going on, or she’d been the one to grass on him.
So much for never sodding deviating.
‘Here,’ she said, turning away and refusing the note. ‘No charge.’
Marlowe looked back outside; the group of track-suited men and Robertson had already left the SUVs by now, walking to the stairway and the stakeout apartment.
‘If I find out it was you that told them, I’ll kill you,’ he said conversationally to Vas as he watched through the window, not looking at her or caring about her likely horrified reaction as he considered his next actions. His weapons were in a bag in the apartment, and even with Kirk beside him in there, it would still be five against two. ‘I suggest you leave, never look back and keep running for the rest of your life.’
This stated, Marlowe threw the hoodie’s hood up over his head, grabbed the money and the bag of takeaway food, and left the fish and chip shop.
To the left of him, watching the SUVs with the look of kids who were weighing up the risk of trying to steal one, the hooded teenagers had blazed up a joint, and were sharing it as they considered their own next actions. Veering towards them, Marlowe offered the ten-pound note.
‘Got another?’ he asked, nodding at the joint.
The first of the three smiled, pulling one out from behind his ear. ‘You got a light?’ he asked.
Marlowe shook his head, passing the note across, as the teenager lit the end of the bought-and-paid-for blunt, inhaling deep.
‘Good shit,’ he said, passing it across. ‘You want more, bring chips as well next time.’
Marlowe nodded, smiling, taking the joint and continuing to walk towards the block in front of him, taking the steps of the stairs two at a time. He took a deep breath of the joint, blowing it all back out so that he didn’t inhale too much, walking through it, letting the smell and the smoke seep into his hooded top. Then, walking to the front door of the apartment they’d been staying in, he listened.
There was a faint shout; a yelp of pain, a noise suddenly stopped. Someone was being hurt, and Marlowe knew who it was. Banging on the door, he took another deep toke of the joint, blowing it out the moment the door opened, and one of the track-suited goons stared at him, coughing as the smoke hit him.
‘What the hell do you want?’ he snapped, coughing, reaching with a hand to the back of his joggers, before pausing and thinking better of whatever action he was about to perform.
Marlowe knew what action he was about to perform.
Marlowe had counted on it.
‘Delivery,’ he kept his head down, muttering the word with the sullen arrogance of the teenagers down the stairs, hiding his face under the hood. ‘Fish shop.’
‘Give it here,’ the doorman held out a hand. ‘I’ll take it.’
‘Needs payment.’ Marlowe looked down at the bag, as if checking something on the side. ‘Eight-fifty.’
‘Come back later.’ The doorman, distracted by a crash behind him, went to close the door.
Marlowe took another drag of the joint and slammed the now burning tip of the cigarette into the doorman’s right eye as he moved forward quickly, pushing past the doorman and into the corridor. As the man screamed loudly, clutching at his burned and destroyed eye, a second guard came out of the kitchen, directly into Marlowe’s line of sight. Marlowe was already prepared though, and hurled the bag of chips at him, the guard instinctively raising his hands to catch it, momentarily taking him from the games board as Marlowe spun the half-blinded man around.
Hearing the screams, a third guard entered the hallway, a Glock 17 in his hand, raised and aimed already at the hooded intruder.
Instinctively, Marlowe pulled up the back of the half-blind doorman’s tracksuit top, pulling out a similar weapon, one that had been tucked into the waistband of his hostage’s joggers, as the third guard instinctively fired at him, accidentally hitting the doorman in the chest and neck. Marlowe had guessed the gun would be there when the doorman had reached for it, and he was grateful to have it in his hand as he fired back, taking out the shooter with a single headshot.
With his second shot, though, the gun clicked empty.
‘One bullet?’ Marlowe threw the gun at the guard who’d caught the chips; it bounced off his forehead as Marlowe, using the momentum to let the now dead, blinded doorman drop to the floor as he charged into the now-shouting-in-outrage guard. ‘Who only puts one bullet in a gun?’
The track-suited guard now pulled a knife from his pocket; a box-cutter Stanley blade, it was a slashing rather than stabbing weapon, and as the guard slashed wildly with it, Marlowe used his forearm to block the guard’s wrist while driving a vicious punch into the windpipe, the track-suited guard dropping the box-cutter and grabbing at his throat as Marlowe moved on, kicking out, sending the guard tumbling into the empty kitchen. Marlowe didn’t need to worry about him finding a kitchen knife in there; the reason he’d bought lunch from a takeaway was because there was a distinct lack of utensils.
