The Exit Club: Book 1: The Originals Read online

  The monumental story of the SAS in war and peace…

  Marty Butler is a conscript soldier who has his baptism of fire with the Long Range Desert Group in North Africa in 1941, where his fearlessness and love of action set him apart from even the best soldiers. It is therefore not long before he is singled out to become part of the newly formed SAS.

  During the next five decades Marty fights bloody wars and engages in highly dangerous counter-terrorist activities in Malaysia, the Middle East, Northern Ireland and the Falkland Islands, rising high in the ranks because of his skill and commitment.

  But against a growing tide of political corruption and international terrorism, Marty begins to use his deadly skills for his own personal mission, with shocking implications – for himself, for those who love him, and especially for those who have crossed him.

  Epic in its scope, meticulous in its detail, and highly controversial, The Exit Club is the ultimate novel about the SAS– riveting fiction rooted in dramatic fact.

  The Exit Club

  The Ultimate Novel of the SAS

  Shaun Clarke

  All five parts of The Exit Club were first published in a single volume in Great Britain in 1996 as a Coronet paperback by Simon & Schuster Ltd

  Copyright © Shaun Clarke, 1996

  ISBN 0-671-85478-X

  This ebook edition published in 2014 by Shaun Clarke The right of Shaun Clarke to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any

  form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the Author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this ebook publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Designed in the Isle of Wight, Great Britain, by www.inkdigital.org

  The Exit Club

  We are the pilgrims, master, we shall go Always a little farther; it may be Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow Across that angry or that glimmering sea…

  From Hassan by James Elroy Flecker

  Book One

  The Originals

  31 January 1991

  The Browning 9mm High Power handgun was resting on the table, well oiled and polished, gleaming in the pearly grey light of the early morning. Gazing down upon it, the old man was filled with memories, other times, other places: the sun blazing over the deserts of North Africa; the dark, steaming jungles of Malaya and Borneo; the parched mountains of Oman; the mean streets of troubled Belfast; the frozen seas and rocks of the Falkland Islands; even the Iranian Embassy in London. The well-used weapon on the table reminded him of all that– and of what it was he now had to do, whether or not wanted to.

  He was a very old man but looked younger than he felt. Though his face was lined by age and the heat of tropical suns, concealing all manner of horrors and unimaginable brutality, it was surprisingly unscarred and imbued with integrity. Though time had taken its toll, withering once healthy skin, his green eyes remained uncommonly bright and his shoulders were straight.

  Sighing, he picked up the weapon, ensured that the thirteen-round magazine was securely in place, checked that the safety catch was on, then slipped it into the Len Dixon holster that was positioned slightly to the rear of his waist in the cross-draw position. He then buttoned up the jacket of his pinstripe suit and turned away from the table, instinctively glancing around the living room of his apartment for what would be the last time.

  It was a rectangular room with magnolia-painted walls and french windows overlooking a lush garden in Highgate, North London. The furniture, though contemporary, had been chosen with great care to match the Georgian elegance of the room and give it a countrified appearance. Some silver-framed photographs, browning slightly with age, were propped up on the welsh dresser near the doorway to the kitchen

  – family pictures obviously taken before World War II– but the walls were liberally covered with a mass of other photos that showed most of his life to the present day. It had been an eventful life.

  Studying the photos, he saw himself as an impossibly skinny student at Cambridge, then as a nervous young man in a dark suit, arm in arm with an attractive brunette in a white wedding dress. There he was, too, as a grinning subaltern in a British Army uniform, posing with folded arms in a Nissen hut somewhere in England. The same young man, now an unshaven lieutenant, wearing a black woollen agal, Arab shemagh, army shorts and sandals, but with a winged-dagger badge on the shirt, seated in a jeep armed with twin Vickers K machine guns. Clean-shaven again, though still a lieutenant, shaking hands with an L Detachment trooper (You looked so young then, Marty) against a backdrop of British Matilda tanks and featureless desert. Then photographed beaming joyfully outside the walls of Colditz Castle at the end of the war. The really good times had ended then.

  (Why, Marty? Why?) Drawn to the photographs, knowing that he was seeing them for the last time, the old man stepped closer to them and let his disappointed gaze roam over the years as he saw himself ageing. There he was, back in uniform, this time as a captain in jungle greens, with a machete stripped to his waist and a Bergen rucksack on his back, posing with an Owen submachine gun beside a tent in a base camp in Malaya in 1957.

  Another wedding – not his own. A young man, impishly grinning, embracing a radiantly beautiful, shyly smiling Anglo-Chinese girl in the days when neither of them could possibly have imagined what would happen to them.

  ( Mouldering bones in the graveyard of your broken heart. You never recovered from that death.)

  That other young man again, now a sergeant in a woollen hat and Denison smock, with a Bren light machine gun strapped across his body, smiling cockily at the camera in the blazing sunlight of the Jebel Akhdar in Oman in 1958.

  (You should have stayed that way, Marty.)

  Virtually the same uniform, but slightly older, a sergeant in the Radfan, no longer smiling. Next, in another photo, tinted and dressed up to pass as an Arab in a crowded souk of Aden. Finally, back in Oman as a sergeant major with more flesh on his bones, the best years behind him.

  (That was the start of it, Marty: the loss of your youth. That, plus your growing disillusionment. The rot set in then.)

  More photographs. A large leap across the years. Himself in a pinstripe suit and tie, well fed and clearly prosperous, standing with his hand on Marty’s shoulder, the latter not so prosperous, though also well fed, wearing a plain grey suit and roll neck jumper, both at a reunion of the ‘Originals’ in Bradbury Lines, Hereford. Then Marty and Taff Hughes, the latter blond-haired, blue-eyed, quiet and deadly, at a meeting of the Association in London, just a few years ago.

  (Why, Marty? Why? At last I think I know. So now I’ll put an end to it. It all ends today, old friend.)

  Nodding, as if speaking to himself, the old man had a final glance around the lounge, reconciling himself to the fact that he would never see it again, then he picked up his morning newspaper and walked out, leaving the apartment by the front door. After locking the door, he dropped the key through the letterbox, then took the lift down to the ground floor and walked out to the parking area at the rear of the building, where the garages were shadowed by the overhanging trees of Highgate Wood.

  Parked in his garage was a gleaming Mercedes Benz, which had been rented for this very important day. Opening the front door, he placed his newsp
aper beside the driver’s seat. At the back of the garage, he unlocked the toolbox and withdrew a rectangular block of wood fixed to a torpedo-shaped package wrapped in black plastic. Electric wires dangled from it.

  It was a simple home-made bomb consisting of Semtex plastic explosive, an electric initiator and a blasting cap with bridge wire.

  Resting the bomb on an upturned orange crate, he spread an oil-smeared bed sheet on the ground, dropped to his knees beside it, then carefully fixed the bomb to the underside of the car by attaching the wooden block to clamps put in place the previous evening. Groping blindly with his free hand, he found the end of the detonating cord, also inserted the previous evening, running up through the engine and into the glove compartment in the dashboard, where it had been wired to a ‘button job’ – a remote-control firing device.

  When the end of the detonating cord had been connected to the bomb, the old man stood up, took a deep breath and exhaled as he slipped into the driver’s seat. Without further ado, he drove the car out of the garage and turned into the road leading to Hampstead.

  Once past the customary traffic jam at the Spaniard’s Inn, he drove through Hampstead Village, down to Swiss Cottage and then into the rich environs of St. John’s Wood. He parked the car halfway along one of those leafy streets, near an elegant mansion house that had CCTV cameras overlooking the darksuited security guards in its grounds. In the driveway was an immaculately polished Rolls Royce with tintedglass windows, but as the old man was parked in a gleaming Mercedes Benz, his presence in the road would not be viewed by the security men as unduly suspicious. This was an area for posh cars.

  He studied the house carefully, checked his wristwatch, then opened the newspaper and read the front-page article. Dated 14 January 1991, it was a report on a recent series of mysterious, bizarre ‘suicides’ of scientists working on highly secret projects.

  In fact, as the old man knew full well, all of those men had been murdered.

  He was, however, particularly interested in the case of a ‘signals expert and former SAS man’ who had died when his BMW went over a cliff in Cornwall shortly after he had taken two men on a fishing trip. According to the man’s wife, he had not planned to go fishing, but had been collected by the two men, both of whom were unknown to her. Those two men had not been found at the scene of the ‘accident’ or ‘possible suicide’.

  Another assassination, the old man thought. They’re well beyond the pale now.

  Clipped to the article was a shorter piece from a different newspaper, detailing the British government’s embarrassment over widespread revelations that it had been using the SAS to train the notorious Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. This training, as the old man knew, had been successfully hidden for a time behind Whitehall’s shield of ‘plausible deniability’. Whitehall used that a lot these days.

  Shaking his head from side to side in disgust, or possibly despair, the old man put the newspaper down, then slid his right hand around his waist, automatically checking that his Browning 9mm High Power handgun was still in the cross-draw position in its leather holster. Satisfied, he gazed across the road, studying the front door of the guarded mansion house, realizing with grim amusement that the Browning High Power, the 9-Milly, was the most appropriate weapon to use for this particular job – for more reasons than one.

  (A double tap. It used to be two bullets straight to the heart, but now it’s thirteen shots in quick succession. That will surely be plenty.)

  He then brooded on the fact that he was about to assassinate one of the finest men he had ever known.

  That man was his best friend.

  Chapter One

  ‘The Land of the four S’s,’ Private Martin (Marty) Butler, 9th Rifle Brigade, said as he stepped out of his tent in the Almazur camp, glanced briefly at the desert, then gazed at the lights of nocturnal Cairo, visible beyond the shivering palm trees. Even from here he could discern the sound of distant Arab music borne on the evening breeze, ethereal, exotic, a siren call to his senses, as he inhaled the rich, seductive aroma of jasmine, sycamore and lemon. ‘Sun, Sand, Sin and Syphilis!’

  ‘So speaks the newly married man,’ his friend, Private Anthony (Tone) Williams responded. Tall and rake-thin, his face pock-marked with acne, he was standing beside Marty and staring out over the starcovered desert with disbelieving, virgin eyes. ‘Glad to be back, are you, Marty? So soon after your honeymoon and all.’

  Reminded by that sardonic comment that he was now a married man and should not be harbouring sinful thoughts, Marty hid behind a show of jocularity, his standard defence.

  ‘Don’t come it with me, sunshine,’ he said, grinning and lighting a Player’s cigarette, his hands cupped against the wind. ‘I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy my night of bliss – more than you’re likely to get. I’m just saying that once you’ve been here, you can never forget the place.’

  Nevertheless, he felt slightly guilty at the realization that, though married only four weeks ago, he was undeniably pleased to be back in Egypt.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with my missus,’ he tried explaining to Tone while breathing in the humid air of the desert. ‘It’s just that I love being here. I mean, how often do blokes like you and me, both working-class wankers, get to come to a country like this?’

  ‘Not often,’ Tone replied affably, his dark eyes blinking excitedly under jetblack hair. ‘But don’t try telling that to your missus.I don’t think she’d wear it.’

  ‘No, she wouldn’t,’ Marty agreed. We only had one night for our honeymoon, he thought, and even that wasn’t too good.

  ‘Known her long?’ Tone asked.

  ‘Off and on since schooldays,’ Marty told him, suddenly seeing Lesley’s face in his mind and filling up with troubled affection for her. ‘We went to the same school in Crouch End.’

  ‘North London.’

  ‘Right. Where I was born.’

  ‘Childhood sweethearts,’ Tone said.

  ‘Not really,’ Marty responded, clearly recalling the day he had first seen Lesley in the school yard and instantly been stricken by her short-cropped auburn hair, large brown eyes and milky-white matchstick legs. Both being thirteen at the time, neither had much to say. ‘I always carried a torch for her, but she was sort of middle-class, her dad an accountant, her mum prominent in local church activities, both Tories. My dad, on the other hand, was a local builder with his own construction business, and he and my mum both liked to have a good time and didn’t give a damn who knew it. Good people, both, but working-class, which is what Lesley saw me as.’

  ‘Common muck,’ Tone said.

  ‘Not quite muck, but certainly common.’

  ‘So when did you get together?’

  ‘Not until after leaving school. We both left at fourteen and went our separate ways, but we met up again a few years later when I was working in my dad’s construction business. I went to a Mecca dance hall with some mates and found her there with some girlfriends.’ And looking a lot different, he recalled, from what she had been at school. Romantic brown eyes, lips filled out to become luscious, and a figure that was, though slight, almost perfectly formed. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. ‘We danced together a few times, trying not to touch bellies, then I asked her for a date and she agreed. That was the start of it.’

  ‘You became engaged.’

  ‘Right. The day I was called up.’

  ‘A lot of blokes became engaged when they were called up,’ Tone reminded him while gazing at that city of army tents stretched across the barren floor of the desert under a velvet, star-studded sky, illuminated by the light of a great moon. ‘That’s a fact of life, mate.’

  ‘It sure is,’ Marty said. Only twenty years old and I’m married already. I should have my bleedin’ head examined. Though I love her… I’m sure I do.

  He and Lesley had both turned eighteen when the war began. By then, Marty was working for his father’s construction company, learning the practical side of the business before going on to become
an architectural draughtsman. His parents were known locally as a mutually supportive couple whose strong socialist principles were combined with great generosity when it came to entertaining family and friends, which they did a lot. Marty, who loved both of them and had taken his radical streak from them, had a reputation as a goodnatured young man whose restless energy and impulsiveness often landed him in hot water, usually with the local constabulary, invariably for some minor form of drunken mischief. Lesley, on the other hand, had blossomed into a quietly attractive young woman with a steadfast personality and a reticence picked up from her conservative parents. It was therefore no accident that, when she and Marty met up again, after a few years apart, what they felt was the attraction of opposites. Now, in the starlit desert outside Cairo, Marty was finally accepting this disturbing truth.

  ‘Being married is one thing,’ he said, ‘but being in the army is another. I love my missus, but being here is something else and she wouldn’t understand that. You know what I mean, Tone?’

  ‘I think so,’ Tone replied.

  ‘I mean, I know I’m only a conscript, but I feel like a regular soldier, that I belongin the army, that I’ve found a way of life that suits me a lot more than my work in my dad’s construction business. I’ve felt that from Day One.’

  This was true. Excited by his rookie training, which had driven others to despair, he had been thrilled beyond measure when posted to the 9th Rifle Brigade and sent in February to take part in the defence of Tobruk in North Africa. After briefly enjoying the fleshpots of Cairo, he had been transferred to the Allied camp just outside Mersa Brega, in the vast Western Desert of Cyrenaica and was still there, albeit briefly, when General Rommel’s Afrika Corps relentlessly pushed the Allies back to the sea and surrounded Tobruk. In the middle of that violent, spectacular battle, Marty was concussed by the explosion of a shell from the German big guns and flown back via Alexandria to an army hospital in Anglia. There, as he recuperated, he realized that he wanted to go back to Egypt and rejoin the fight. This realization had startled him.