Free Solo (Aka the Cretan Lover) (v5) by Jack Higgins

Scotland Yard and asked to be put through to Assistant Commissioner Joe Harvey, Head of the Special Branch, whom, he knew, had already installed himself there for the night with a camp bed in his office.
    'Harry Baker here, sir,' he said when Harvey answered. 'I'm at the mortuary. The girl whom our friend ran down in the Paddington tunnel while making his escape - her mother's just left after making a formal identification. A Mrs Helen Wood.'
    'I thought the kid's name was Morgan?'
    'Her mother's divorced, sir. Remarried to a vicar, of all things.' Baker hesitated. 'Look, sir, you're not going to like this one little bit. Her father...'
    He hesitated again. Harvey said, 'Spit it out, Harry, for Christ's sake.'
    'Is Asa Morgan.'
    'There was a moment of silence then Harvey said, Dear God in heaven, that's all we needed.'
    'Last I heard he was in Trucial Oman with the Special Air Service. Know what they are, George?'
    Baker was standing at the window of his office. It was a little after midnight and rain drummed against the glass.
    Stewart passed him a cup of tea. 'Can't say I do, sir.'
    'What the military refer to as an elite unit. The army likes to keep as quiet about this one as they possibly can. Any serving soldier can volunteer. A three-year tour is the rule, I believe.'
    'And what exactly do they do?'
    'Anything too rough for anyone else to handle. The nearest thing to the SS we've got in the British Army. At the moment, they're in Oman on loan to the Sultan, knocking merry hell out of his Marxist rebels in the mountains. They also served in Malaya during the Emergency. That's where I first came across them.'
    'I didn't know you were out there, sir.'
    'On secondment. They weren't doing too well with the Chinese Communist underground so they decided to see if some real coppers could help. That's where I met Morgan.'
    'What about him, sir?' Stewart asked. 'What's so special?'
    'The right word you've chosen, that's for sure.' Baker filled his pipe slowly. 'He must be damn near fifty now, Asa. A Welsh miner's son from the Rhondda. I don't know what happened to him earlier in the war, but I know he was one of those poor sods they dropped in at Arnhem. He was a sergeant then. Got a field commission as a second lieutenant afterwards.'
    'Then what?'
    'Palestine. His first taste of urban guerrillas, he used to say. Then he was seconded to the Ulster Rifles when they went to Korea. Captured by the Chinese. They had him for a year, those bastards. I know some people thought all that brainwashing stuff they used on our lads out there had really gone to his head.'
    'What do you mean, sir?'
    'When he came back, he wrote this treatise about what he called a new concept of revolutionary warfare. Kept quoting Mao Tse-tung as if he was the Bible. I suppose the General Staff decided he'd either turned Communist or knew what he was talking about, so they sent him to Malaya which is where I met him. We worked together for quite a time.'
    'Did you do any good?'
    'We won, didn't we? The only Communist insurrection since the Second World War to be successfully crushed, was Malaya.'
    'I saw him again for a while in Nicosia during the Cyprus thing when I was seconded out there on the same sort of deal. Come to think of it, he'd just got married before leaving the UK, I remember that now, so the kid's age would fit. I remember hearing he was in Aden in nineteen sixty-seven because he got a DSO for saving the necks of a bunch of Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders who got ambushed in the Crater district.'
    'He sounds quite a man.'
    'Oh, yes, you could say that. The original soldier monk. The Army's everything to him. Family and home rolled into one. I'm not surprised his wife left him.'
    'I wonder what he'll do, sir, when he hears about his daughter.'
    'God knows, George, but I can imagine.'
    The wind rattled the window and, outside, rain drifted across the rooftops from the Thames.

3
    But in Belfast that day, extraordinary things had been happening