Shadow Soul: this summer's must-read crime thriller Read online

  Shadow Soul

  A DI Tudor Manx Novel

  Dylan H. Jones

  Copyright © 2020 Dylan H. Jones

  The right of Dylan H. Jones to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in 2020 by Bloodhound Books.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

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

  www.bloodhoundbooks.com

  Print ISBN 978-1-913419-73-8

  Contents

  Love crime, thriller and mystery books?

  Also by Dylan H. Jones

  I. Kill Strike

  Prologue

  Isle Of Anglesy, Wales

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  II. Kill the messenger

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  III. Kill Shot

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Acknowledgements

  A note from the publisher

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  Also by Dylan H. Jones

  DI Tudor Manx Series

  Anglesey Blue (Book 1)

  Doll Face (Book 2)

  First to read. First to comment. First to say he was proud.

  This book is dedicated to Hugh John Jones; avid crime thriller reader, ex-RAF serviceman, devoted father. 1936-2018

  “How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole.” — Carl Jung

  Part I

  Kill Strike

  Prologue

  RAF Waddington, Lincolnshire, UK.

  Flight Lieutenant Bobbie Matthews wasn’t the kind of woman who scared easily. But that morning, as she walked across the parade ground, she was hit by a sensation of impending dread that shook her to the bone. To her west, the ground control station appeared to take the shape of an oversized metallic coffin, the flat light of dawn falling across its brutal angular shape like a shroud. The image struck her with such force she imagined the earth would swallow the structure whole; ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

  The ‘Box’, as it had become known to the Royal Air Force’s Thirteen Squadron, was a former shipping container. Stripped to the bones, it now housed four banks of high-definition monitors, several rows of back-lit switches, and a pair of joysticks that sometimes in her sleep Bobbie would imagine her fingers were still coiled around, as if for those eight hours she missed their satisfying feel in her hand.

  The Box, however, required no sleep. All it required was a constant feed of electricity and the low hum of air conditioning to cool the racks of hard drives and communication systems. It was staffed 24/7 to accommodate the demands of the United States Joint Special Operations Command at Creech Air Force Base, located in the Nevada desert. Waddington was eight hours ahead and served as an extension of the US Air Force, helping to facilitate round-the-clock surveillance with handovers between Creech and Waddington every twelve hours. The demands of the war on terror, Bobbie had come to learn, were as ceaseless as the war itself.

  The day had cast its typical soupiness over Lincolnshire, the sky undecided as to its true intentions, shifting from peaks of blue to murky greyness depending on the wind. To Bobbie’s left, the Air Seeker Annex jutted out sharply from the ground, as if the building were constructed in italic to make some kind of point. To her right, the hangars housing the Sentry, Sentinel, and Shadow aircraft loomed wide, and beyond the hangars, the wide expanse of the airfield butted against the outskirts of the RAF families’ accommodations from where Bobbie had just driven.

  She drew her jacket tight over her flying suit as a regiment of cadets jogged past. “Squintos” – a new batch of intelligence officers in basic training. They’d need the exercise, Bobbie thought, as the dull march of their boots faded to silence. Squintos were expected to stare into computer screens for hours, analysing the constant data flow streaming into the command centre. Bobbie herself had spent twelve months as a squinto. She’d left after a year and enrolled in the RAF’s Unmanned Aircraft Training programme, which had just opened its doors to non-commissioned pilots. She completed her officer training at RAF Cranwell, then was posted to USAF Creech to
compete her formal drone training, graduating with the clunky title of remote piloted aircraft systems (pilot). Six months later she found herself in command of a MQ-9 Reaper Drone as a flight lieutenant. She may still have been sitting behind a desk, but that desk connected her to £20 million of weaponry capable of striking a target with surgical accuracy from 50,000 feet. Bobbie had never felt more alive than when she took control of the drone, 700 pounds of explosive racked in the rails, her finger poised to rain a Hellfire missile on a convoy of insurgents.

  As she pulled open the station door, a blast of cold air brushed over her face. Typically, she would have begun visualising the day’s mission – slipping herself into the zone – but the same feeling of dread she’d had minutes ago arced through her. She shrugged it off as pre-mission jitters.

  “You’re late,” Officer Cadet Cole Dawson said, smiling.

  Bobbie stood by the doorway and took a deep, meditative breath. The sense of something not being quite right lay heavy on her chest. Settling herself into her chair, she glanced at her watch. “Twenty-three seconds late, Dawson. Seriously?”

  “Nah,” he said, adjusting his neck. “Just pulling your leg, blame it on the boredom.”

  Bobbie checked her monitors. “If I’d known I was here for your entertainment, I’d have prepared some suitable material.”

  Dawson chuckled. Thirty-one years old, with a sickly complexion in need of a long holiday someplace sun drenched, Dawson was a sensor operator in command of the Reaper’s high-definition camera and tasked with ensuring they had constant eyes on the high value target (HVT). He also controlled the Reaper’s laser, which was required to be pinpoint accurate before Bobbie pulled the trigger. If the laser was one degree off azimuth when the missile left the rails, it could mean the difference between striking a HVT right between the eyes or obliterating the convoy of families travelling with him – a mistake he wasn’t keen to repeat.

  “Don’t you know the party doesn’t start until I get here?” Bobbie said, adjusting the chair to accommodate her slender, five-feet-nine-inch frame, though in her flying suit she looked shorter, more vulnerable than she wanted to appear.

  “They didn’t mention that in the mission briefing.”

  “You don’t have it tattooed on your arse by now?”

  He smiled and tilted the camera, revealing miles of dirt-brown desert fifty-thousand feet below. “Bobbie’s way, or the highway?”

  “I respect a man who knows his place.” Bobbie secured her headset and adjusted her comms. The voice of the 89th Attack Squadron Reaper pilot broke through the static – Lieutenant Colonel Benton Lowell. She’d trained with Benton back at Creech.

  “All’s good in the free world, Dazzle’s in the Box,” Benton said, his voice oozing an easy American confidence. Bobbie had earned the moniker Dazzle when she began customising her headset with imitation gems she bought at a cheap craft store off the Las Vegas strip. At the time, she imagined the gems were some nod to her femininity, but later she began to wonder if she were just trying to infuse a jolt of colour to the drab sandy beige of war.

  “Are we clear to match eyes?” Bobbie said, studying the barren desert topography.

  “Straight down to it, huh?” Benton said. “You see what I’m seeing?”

  Dawson gave Bobbie the thumbs up and rotated the camera. “Brown terrain. Lots of it.”

  “Yeah, different day, same shit.”

  “Recon details?”

  Dawson slid her a document. “Red card holder approved,” he confirmed, pointing at the Base Commander’s signature – the final word in authorising kill strikes.

  Benton spoke. “We’ve been tracking a convoy of technicals driving south from Mosul since zero hundred hours, but we’ve had bugs on the windshield for the past ninety minutes.”

  “Sandstorm?”

  “The goddam mother of. Visibility’s returning to situation normal, but the weather geeks predict an encore by sundown.”

  “Roger that,” Bobbie said, scribbling on her notepad. “Any additional intel you lot need to brief us on?”

  “You lot?” Benton laughed. “You mean the guys who trained your sorry asses?”

  “Correct.” If Bobbie had eyes on Benton, he’d no doubt be making a gesture that included lifting one, or both, of his middle fingers to the screen.

  “Yeah, we got your intel. Technicals are axle-heavy with metal. Check out the trailer we made earlier.” Benton chuckled as he replayed the footage of a convoy of trucks reversing into a narrow entrance to the right of a high-walled compound. “That’s some real Mister Bean parking shit, right there,” he said, as the trucks took several attempts to reverse into position. “Now, watch this,” he added, as a group of men jumped from the trucks and stood in a chain formation at the entrance.

  “Anti-aircraft?” Bobbie asked, as the men passed large items of weaponry to each other and onto the truck’s flatbeds.

  “Fifty-millimetre, standard Russian Army issue, captured from their shitshow in Afghanistan. We counted six weapons stacked like they were heading to holy freakin’ war.”

  “Why didn’t you strike before they left the compound?”

  “CIVACS,” Benton confirmed. “Women and children in the vicinity. We began tracking as soon as they stepped on the gas.”

  “Copy that,” Bobbie said.

  “FYI, we’re keeping safety eyes on another convoy travelling three kilometres behind,” Benton said.

  “Friendlies?”

  “Unconfirmed, but we scrambled an F15 to keep eyes on them.”

  “Can you patch me into their comms?”

  “Negative. We’ve got signal blockers along the route. If they’re friendlies, let’s hope they’ve got enough smarts to keep their distance when you rain down the shit-parade. If they’re with the HVT, then send the other Hellfire their way, compliments of the US of A.”

  “Roger that. Assuming control of Reaper in fifteen,” she said, folding her fingers gently around the joystick.

  “You ready to save the world?”

  “Always. Assuming control in ten.”

  “Don’t fuck up our good work now, ya’ hear?”

  “Good pep talk, Benton.”

  Dawson nodded at Bobbie. “It’s all yours.”

  “Confirm. I have control of Reaper Craft.”

  “Have a nice day blowing shit up, Dazzle. Out.”

  With the Reaper under her command, Bobbie rested the joystick in her palm, her muscle memory kicking in. She sensed herself falling into the zone – the critical mind-space where her mind bonded with the pitch and roll of the Reaper – as it cleaved through the atmosphere 3000 miles away. Lost in the motion, she barely heard her overseer, Flight Commander James Flynt, step in and take position at the rear of the Box. Flynt had a reputation for making swift decisions concerning kill strikes – the more the merrier, seemed to be his default setting.

  “Ready to show those Johnny Jihadis some of our Yorkshire mettle, Flight Lieutenant Matthews?”

  “I’m from Wales, sir, but yes, I’m briefed and strike-prepared.”

  “Christ, not the sentimental Welsh type, are you? Cry at the sight of a leek or a bloody daffodil?”

  “No, no sentiment at all, sir, just here to do my job,” she confirmed, keeping her focus steely-eyed; unblinking.

  Flynt swiped the 9-line approval document from the desk. “Estimated strike time?”

  Bobbie confirmed the convoy’s co-ordinates. “Two miles south there’s an open stretch of road, should be a safe strike zone.”

  “Visibility?”

  Dawson checked his instruments. “Significant cloud cover, I could lose altitude, but the HVT might spot the craft.”

  “Drop thirty angels,” Flynt said, as the convoy throttled fast over the dust-ridden road. “At this speed, they’ve got one eye on the road the other on those seventy-two virgin maidens they’ve been promised.”

  Bobbie pushed forward on the joystick, felt herself sinking into the chair as the drone drop
ped 22,000 feet in seconds.

  Flynt jabbed Dawson in the shoulder. “Keep that laser clear of the windows. If they see that little red dot, they’re squirting out of there faster than ten pints and a vindaloo.”

  “Nice image, sir,” Dawson said, tracking the laser as it traced past the trucks and to the roadside to avoid any reflections.