Charlie Owen - Foxtrot Oscar

This book is dedicated to my children: Lucy, Elizabeth, Hannah, Oliver, Poppy and Maisie, who have seen the best and worst of me and have always forgiven me. Their lives were inexorably shaped by my years as a police officer, not always for the best, and the least I can do by way of apology is to say, This book is for you - you little buggers. I'm sorry and I love you. Dad xxxxxx

Acknowledgements

I'd like to say a huge thank you to the amazing team at Headline who have guided me through the trauma of writing a second book to a deadline. My editor, Martin Fletcher, was his usual quiet and thoughtful tower of strength who, whilst always encouraging me, never failed to rein me in when appropriate.

Kerr MacRae has been a constant supporter throughout the writing of this book, whilst Jo Matthews, James Horobin, Jo Liddiard and Emily Furniss have been unstinting in their efforts to bring both this and Horse's Arse into the public eye.

My very old friend (old in that I have known him a long time!) and agent, Richard Tucker, has proved invaluable to me with his wealth of knowledge of the publishing industry. I had accumulated the usual pile of rejection letters from agents and publishers before Richard introduced me to Headline and ensured that first Horse's Arse, and now Foxtrot

Oscar were published. This is an opportune moment to apologise publicly to him and his long-suffering wife Judy for vomiting on their bedroom carpet during cricket week at Welwyn Garden City Cricket Club. We have remained good friends despite that, and his involvement in the writing of these two books is a source of gratification to me.

Finally, I could not have written this book without the continued encouragement and support of my wife Karen. She told me to write that or else there'd be trouble.

Chapter One

The two petrol bombs arced away from the fifteenth-floor balcony of the Grant Flowers flats, their fiery tails flowing behind them in the. night sky, briefly illuminating a group of masked youths on the balcony, before falling towards the three liveried police vans parked below. By the early summer of 1976, Handstead New Town, which lay fifteen miles north of Manchester, was a simmering cauldron of discontent. It had long been used by Manchester City Council as a social dustbin for its more troublesome tenants, and as a penal colony by the local police, who staffed it with their own malcontents. Such was the loathing they felt for the town that they had bastardised its phonetic code - Hotel Alpha - and now referred to it by the more appropriate name of Horses Arse.

Of all Handstead's dismal estates, the worst without question was the Park Royal. Built on the former rolling acres of a long-disappeared Tudor royal residence, the majority of its rodent-like residents spent their waking hours engaged in every kind of criminal enterprise. They regularly went head to head with the local police, who quite unwittingly had embraced the ancient doctrine of the Stoics and resolved to make a difference in a place they hated. The biggest problems in the town as a whole were posed by a gang based on the estate, the self-styled Park Royal Mafia. They were a group of young, lawless hoodlums who regularly ran amok and had become quite dangerous. Even more so when, in January, one of their number had murdered PC Dave Baines. Since his murder, and the subsequent roll-up of the Mafias hierarchy, Handstead had seen virtually nonstop outbreaks of disorder, but particularly on the Park Royal.

The knot of police officers standing around the vans moved away swiftly, watching dispassionately as the bombs crashed with loud explosions on to the roof of one of the vehicles, blazing petrol enveloping it and lighting up the surrounding area. Loud raucous cheers went up from dozens of unseen people gathered on the darkened balconies of the flats, and were quickly echoed by the police officers as they noticed that one of the throwers on the fifteenth floor was himself ablaze. Making a petrol bomb was extremely simple, but throwing one required a little care. The two milk bottles had been half filled with petrol, and rags sodden with fuel had been stuffed into the necks before being lit. It was important that the bottle was thrown with the wick upright, but one of the bombers had tipped his upside down, and petrol had gushed over his arm and upper body and ignited as he threw it. As he thrashed about on the balcony, desperately trying to extinguish himself, his mate left him to it.

Down below, a police officer stepped forward and used an extinguisher to kill the flames engulfing the police van. It was a well-practised routine. All three vans bore the scars of past petrol bombings and stonings. The patrol group to whom the vans belonged, the county's elite rapid response unit, had spent the last eight days on the Park Royal estate dealing with sporadic outbreaks of violence as the local hooligans flexed their muscles in a show of defiance ahead of the impending trials of the hard-core Park Royal Mafia. The estate was simmering in the early summer heat and the local police were hard pushed to keep it under control. Hence the presence of the patrol group, with a simple brief to deal with the problem in any way they saw fit.

'Delta Hotel, this is Ranger One,' reported the group's senior sergeant. 'We've just taken two petrol bombs from the Grant Flowers flats. We're redeploying in the vicinity.' As he spoke, the three vans were being moved to the far side of the road, adjacent to some waste ground.

The operator in the main control room looked anxiously over to her young, recently promoted inspector, who was hovering nervously at her shoulder, listening to the transmission over the speaker. Whilst the patrol group were under attack at the Grant Flowers flats, other local units were also being subjected to random ambushes around the estate. Hands trembling, the inspector leafed quickly through the well-thumbed operation order detailing police operations on the estate, then glanced at the large situation board at the front of the room that showed the locations of units deployed in Handstead. The situation had recently become so serious that resources from around the county were being deployed into Horses Arse to deal with it. The county's fire-breathing shit-kicker, Chief Constable Daniels, was determined that the town would not go up in smoke without a fight. The control room inspector, however, was a spineless jellyfish with no confidence in himself, and little street experience, and deciding that discretion was the better part of valour, he resolved to withdraw the patrol group.

'Get the patrol group out of there,' he commanded in a shaky voice. 'Deploy back to Hotel Alpha and we'll reconsider.'