Dead Footballers

Chris Page

Description

The England and Spurs goalkeeper is assassinated in central London. Others will follow as the vengeance of an international betting group on professional football cheats continues to take effect. As Albie loses his wife to a lethal bomb blast meant for him, and his boss is killed by a female suicide bomber while dropping his kids off at school, he is joined by a former SAS Major.There is a highly placed mole in Scotland Yard who must be caught before the Yard itself is destroyed by a former Provo bomber. As the members and families of the betting organisation gather in a Regents Park mansion to celebrate the destruction of the Yard, Albie Cork is knocked out by his SAS mate.Just who are the killers?

Sujets

• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 10 juillet 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785382079
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
DEAD FOOTBALLERS
By
Chris Page



Publisher Information
Dead Footballers
Published in 2015
by Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happening.
Copyright © 2015 Chris Page
The right of Chris Page to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.



Quote
Terror universal, the crows, the ravens in silent glide, the raven perched on the white nag’s rump, black and white forever...
Don DeLillo, Underworld



Albie Cork - The Life So Far
Name: Albert Cork. It would have been Albert Finney Cork because his mother liked the actor but his father was jealous and they had a row in the maternity hospital and compromised on plain Albert. He didn’t mind, nobody called him that anyway, apart from his mum when she was mad at him, which was all the time before his parents moved to Australia.
Born: 31 October 1973. A Halloween baby and a Scorpio.
Education: Left school at sixteen a frustrated virgin with bugger-all qualifications and a love of football.
Family: One younger sister, Debbie, and his parents, all of whom moved to Australia when he was seventeen. He stayed in a bedsit in Tottenham, chased girls and drank a lot of beer. Now lives in Ealing, London.
Work record: From age sixteen to twenty-three many menial jobs, all poorly paid. Then he joined the army.
Married: Once, aged twenty-three. No kids. It was a disaster, divorced after two years.
Military career: A disposal bombhead with fourteen years in an EODC (Explosive Ordnance Disposal Company). Double row of pips and associated gongs including the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross, gained in Iraq. Was a WO1 (Warrant Officer Class 1) when he was invalided out.
Income: Meagre army pension and monthly salary from current job with SO13 in bomb-based counter-terrorism.
Languages spoken: Epithet-laden laconic English laced with military banality.
Hobbies: Sex, a small motor cruiser moored in Poole, sex, Tottenham Hotspur FC, more sex.
Pet hates: Sexual abstinence after long periods in war zones without any female contact.
Manner: Detached, cool, unless watching Spurs play at home.
Physical disability: Only has one leg ‒ a distinct disadvantage with his main hobby.
Height: 5ft 11in/1.83m.
Weight: 176lb/80kg (without prosthetic)
Profile: If it takes losing a leg above the knee to an IED in Afghanistan, having no luck with long-term girlfriends and being hunted by sinister, unknown professional killers to become a modern hero, then Albert ‘Albie’ Cork is one. If it doesn’t, then he’s just another flawed ex-soldier in counter-terrorism with a vigilante approach and an over-abundance of lustful genes who attracts a great deal of unwanted attention from the bad guys.
And he certainly didn’t consider himself disabled; embarrassed and inconvenienced perhaps at having to remove his prosthetic for sex with a new lover for the first time...
But that never held him back.
You choose ‒ he’s too intent on getting his good leg over, seeking those who would place bombs in and around London and staying alive to waste any time thinking about it.



Prologue
Early August 2012, London
Ralf ‘Stonewall’ Sellars finished his pre-season interview for the BBC’s Sports Personalities ‒ the first of a six-episode radio series ‘dedicated to finding out more about the lives of our sporting heroes’ ‒ then left the building with Jimmy Candle, the programme’s voluble presenter. Living in the same part of North London, Sellars had offered Candle a lift home. On the lower ground floor of the multi-storey car park behind the BBC’s West London studios, Sellars flicked the button on his key ring to unlock the doors on his top-of-the-range Mercedes ‘S’ Class with AMG tuning. After the two men had climbed in, Sellars clicked in his seatbelt, slid the electronic key into the ignition slot and pressed the starter button.
It was the last thing the Tottenham Hotspur and England goalkeeper ever did.
Instead of the deep-throated rumble of a thoroughbred V12 German engine firing up, there was an enormous explosion as the Mercedes and the two men in it were blasted into a spray of bloody spume and charred bone fragments. In the confines of the concrete car park the explosion was so concentrated that a further eight cars were also instantly transformed into molten scrap and blackened steel.
Luckily, the Metropolitan Police in the form of SO13, the counter-terrorism unit based at Scotland Yard, had a witness who had followed the two men into the car park and could confirm the identities of the victims. The producer of Sports Personalities programme was at least sixty metres behind them and descending the stairs to the basement level when the Mercedes exploded, the hot blast smashing him to the concrete floor.
Less than fifteen minutes after Sellars turned the key and ended two lives, Albie Cork, SO13’s explosives expert and former Explosive Ordnance Disposal Company (EODC) operative was sifting through what was left of the foot-balling legend and radio presenter. Albie had lost a leg in Afghanistan but gained the expertise that made him SO13’s expert on explosives.
While the uniforms taped off the car park level and kept people out, he sniffed and prodded among the blackened and smashed car debris before getting out his Mini XD-2 explosives detector. He’d spoken briefly to the producer of the radio show who was having his right leg bandaged and who had confirmed the identity of the two men in the obliterated Mercedes. Now his sniffing told him the burn-off was from a Semtex explosion and his detector confirmed it as C4, the military and stronger equivalent.
‘Fuck it,’ he muttered to himself. ‘I’ve just renewed my bloody season ticket and now Spurs have lost the best keeper we’ve had for years.’



One
A Gathering of Russian Virgins
Moscow, 2 July 1992
In a large room under an onion-shaped dome on the western edge of the main Kremlin building in Red Square, seventeen nervous young men and women sat expectantly at a semi-circle of brightly polished mahogany tables. Having been told only by letter that their presence there was mandatory and that they would find the experience ‘uplifting and patriotically stimulating’, they waited in bated silence for something to happen. After twenty minutes the door suddenly burst open and in walked none other than Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, accompanied by two other men.
The President of the Russian Federation, walked slowly past the tables, fixing each invitee in turn with a slightly arrogant but piercing pale-eyed stare for five very long seconds. The mouths of the seven women and ten men present gaped in stupefaction; then some looked away from their great leader, some affected a study in neutrality, and some boldly held his stare.
As if continuing a previous conversation broken perhaps by a coffee break, Yeltsin began to speak.
‘When I completed my studies at the Ural Polytechnic Institute in Sverdlovsk in 1955, where I majored in Construction, there was little else for me to do other than join a construction trust and actually put that education to a practical use.’
He paused to make sure he had their undivided attention.
‘Before that, I was a tearaway.’
He held up his left hand so they could clearly see his missing two fingers. He and a few teenage friends had broken into a Red Army supply depot and stolen some grenades. When, later, they tried to take them to pieces one exploded, blinding one of his companions for life and removing two of Yeltsin’s digits.
‘My salvation, comrades, came in two forms without which I could so easily have become just another drunken street bum. The first of these was my education. The second was joining the Communist Party in 1961.
‘Both of these distinguished gentlemen have a similar story to tell. Education and the Party loom large in the development of their successful careers. You will hear more from them later.’
He took a bright blue handkerchief from his trouser pocket and loudly blew his nose. His audience knew this as a tactic Yeltsin used to allow him to collect his thoughts. Once he’d done so, he carefully replaced the handkerchief.
‘The future of this great country of ours does not lie in the pursuit of conflict. Lessons have been learned the hard way, comrades, in Hungary, Poland and Afghanistan. Regrettably, we will soon repeat the mistake again in Chechnya, and there is nothing I can do to prevent my predecessor’s folly.’
Some of the young men and women glanced at one another, aware of how hot that particular topic was, and unsure of which side of the argument each of them fell.
‘When we finally wake up to the fact that conflict solves nothing,’ the President continued, pounding a fist into a palm, ‘we’ll leave that sort of stuff to others. Comrades, the future of this great country lies in a more subtle direction and that... ’
Yeltsin paused for dramatic effect as he completed his slow walk around the back of the tables.
‘That, my young friends, is why you are all here.’
He placed a heavy hand on the shoulder of a nervous-looking young man with a small, sparse black moustache who stared rigidly forwar