by Chris Ryan
Danny chose a set of body armour and tried on three Kevlar helmets before selecting one that fitted right. Rollett chucked him an ops vest. It was empty to start with, but Guererro threw him a med pack and some waterproof matches. ‘We’ll fill you up with ammo when we get to the cache,’ he said.
‘Where’s your vehicle?’ Danny said.
‘There’s a basement parking lot here,’ Guerrero said. ‘We’ve been loading up while you’ve been seeing to your little lady. She’s quite a babe. Maybe you can give me her number when we get back.’
‘Join the fucking queue,’ Rollett said. ‘I reckon I was in there.’
‘Not sure you’re her type,’ Danny said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘One dick too many.’
Rollett’s eyes widened. ‘You fucking kidding me?’ The others started laughing. Rollett shook his head in disbelief. He was almost blushing. ‘I could fucking turn her,’ he said belligerently.
‘Have you spoken to Barak?’ Danny asked Guerrero.
‘Sure. He’s ready to RV with us at 19.00.’
‘Where?’
‘There’s an old Palestinian training camp about ten klicks from the border. Saw a lot of activity back in the eighties, and it’s on the edge of Hezbollah territory.’
‘What’s the risk of contact?’
‘It’s possible, but nobody goes to this training camp now. Barak will meet us there. Even if Hezbollah come nosing around, the bigger threat is when we cross the border. Syrian government patrols, Russians – there’s even a risk of Spetsnaz units helping out the Syrians.’
‘I want to avoid firefights,’ Danny said. ‘We don’t want to leave a trace of where we’re heading.’
‘Agreed,’ Guerrero said. ‘Take your body armour and ops vest off. We’ll stow it in the back of the Hilux and put it on when we’re nearer the border.’
They headed down the concrete stairwell of the building two abreast. Danny found himself next to Ludlow as they descended. ‘So what’s the craic from Hereford?’ he said. ‘I heard something on the grapevine that my old mucker Ollie Moorhouse came to a sticky end.’
‘You knew Moorhouse?’ Danny asked carefully.
‘Course. We did selection together. Last time I spoke to him he’d just bought his gaff in Florida. Fuck knows where he got the money. So what happened to him?’
‘I dunno,’ Danny said. ‘I heard he’d died, that’s all.’ It didn’t sit well, keeping facts from his team. But Danny felt he knew Ludlow’s type well. He was a blunt instrument, and while he felt he could trust him and Rollett to operate skilfully in enemy territory, he wasn’t sure he could trust them to keep their mouths shut. So for now, at least, the less they knew the better.
The Hilux was parked in a corner of the underground parking lot. It looked like it had been well driven. The chassis was dented here and there, the paintwork covered with a thick layer of dust. But the tyres looked new and sturdy, with deep treads. That told Danny it was in decent nick. The word PRESS was written along the side, the back and on the roof. The rear of the Hilux, where all their gear was stashed, was covered with a sturdy green tarp. Guerrero rolled it back a little so Danny could dump his body armour and ops waistcoat, then tied it
up again.
They got into the vehicle. Guerrero took the wheel, Danny the passenger seat. Ludlow and Rollett took the back. Minutes later, they were negotiating the streets of Beirut. There was a rugged military GPS unit on the dashboard, with an LCD display that gave lat/long coordinates and altitude statistics. Danny could tell, though, that for now Guerrero wasn’t using it. He clearly knew this city as intimately as Bethany. He avoided the traffic jams that clogged up the main roads by a series of shortcuts, and soon they were free of the centre and heading towards the outskirts. The press vehicle drew the occasional glance from passers-by, but that was to be expected. Once they were closer to the border, this would surely be a less infrequent sight.
The team drove in silence as their urban surroundings became rural. Guerrero navigated up into the hills surrounding Beirut, along winding roads lined with olive trees and fruit groves. There were far fewer vehicles up here in the hills, and any houses they passed were old at best, tumbledown at worst. It felt as if they were leaving the modern world behind.
Their first destination was the weapons cache. They were two hours out of Beirut when Guerrero pulled up by the side of the road to allow a vehicle behind to pass, then turned unseen down a rough track that led downhill into an area of waist-high gorse bushes. Hidden from the main road, they pulled up. Rollett took up position at the back of the Hilux, keeping watch back up the track. Danny, Guerrero and Ludlow removed entrenching tools from under the tarp. Guerrero and Ludlow pulled out a scuffed aluminium camera case with the CNN logo painted on the side in black. Danny carried the entrenching tools and his companions the case as they followed a rough animal trail through the gorse bushes. A hundred metres from the vehicle was a patch of bare earth dotted with large flat stones. An observant eye might have noticed that the dusty ground had been disturbed – there was a slight mound by three of the stones – but this location was so remote, and the mound so small, that no passer-by would think of examining it. The three SF men got to work with their entrenching tools, digging out the hard earth in small chunks. Danny’s entrenching tool was the first to hit something hard and unyielding, about a foot beneath the surface. The guys continued to scrape around it. Ten minutes later, they revealed the lid of a large flight case. Guerrero loosened the lid, pulled it away and laid it to the side of the hole. ‘Howdy, sweethearts,’ he said as they looked down.
The flight case was a perfect little armoury. Four AK-47s with IR sights – ‘We always keep a spare, so you’re in luck, friend,’ Guerrero said as they pulled them from the earth. The AK was hardly Danny’s weapon of choice, but these had clearly been locally acquired, and it was better than nothing. Ludlow removed a general purpose machine gun with bipod, which he lay on the ground before leaning in and extracting a Minimi and its attendant box magazine. ‘Belt of two hundred,’ he said to nobody in particular, tapping the box magazine like it was an old friend and laying it by the Minimi. These two pieces of hardware were a reassuring sight. Danny especially favoured the Minimi. Belt-fed or magazine-fed, it was a halfway house between the Gimpy and an assault rifle. It came with a bipod but could be carried and fired like a rifle, with extra range and a higher degree of accuracy.
The bottom of the flight case was covered with brown boxes of ammunition: a couple of belts of 7.62 NATO rounds for the Gimpy, boxes of 7.62x39mm for the AK-47s and a couple of M16 5.56 magazines for the Minimi.
‘You keep yourself well kitted out,’ Danny said.
‘It’s Syria, friend,’ Guerrero said, as if that explained everything, which it did.
They transferred weaponry to the camera case, closed up the empty flight case and infilled the hole. Ludlow cut a few branches of gorse and used them to swipe away their footprints. They carried the full camera case and entrenching tools back to the Hilux, where Rollett was still keeping watch.
‘Anything?’ Guerrero asked.
‘Fuck all,’ said Rollett. He peeled back the tarp and helped them load the camera case back on to the Hilux.
Within minutes they were back on the road. Danny was hotter than before and covered in a thin film of dust, but he felt more secure now. It was reassuring to have the necessary hardware stowed in the back. ‘How far to the RV point?’ he asked Guerrero.
‘Thirty minutes,’ the American said. Danny checked the time: 15.30 hrs. The RV was at 19.00. They’d have time to kill.
Ten klicks further on, their route took them off the main road again. The track Guerrero followed this time was a lot rougher than the one that led to the cache. Danny had the impression it was seldom used. The Hilux’s engine complained as Guerrero forced it in first gear across the rough earth and over heavy ruts in the terrain. Only after twenty minutes of this did their destination come int
o view.
The former Palestinian training camp to which Guerrero had driven them was a mismatched collection of single-storey buildings. Each building was individually painted in a bright colour – blue, green, red, yellow – strangely lending them the aura of a child’s nursery. That aura was punctured somewhat by the bullet holes sprayed up against the walls of each building, and by the fact that the training camp had evidently received a bomb strike, long ago, with the evidence still plain to see. There was a crater at the centre of the camp, a good ten metres in diameter and a couple of metres deep. Some buildings were reduced to rubble, now reclaimed by hardy foliage. On the far side of the camp was what looked to Danny like a former firing range. The rusted frames of metal targets were still lined up at one end, although the once-open ground in front of them was now strewn with debris and weeds. Danny imagined that thirty years ago, this place would have been buzzing with the activity of Palestinian militants, their heads and necks wrapped in red and white keffiyehs as they gave instruction to idealistic civilians from all over the region. Now it reeked of disuse, a relic of Lebanon’s violent past.
It was a perfect rendezvous point for a team wishing to stay under the radar: it was out of the way and afforded cover if they needed it. It was surrounded by hilly ground covered with wild trees and foliage. If they needed to disappear for any reason, they could do so in a matter of seconds.
Guerrero parked the Hilux on the far side of a green-painted building, out of view of the track they’d used to approach. They unloaded the aluminium camera case, opened it up and withdrew the AK-47s. Each man took a rifle, stripped it down and checked the moving parts. Satisfied that his rifle was fully operational, Danny loaded the weapon. ‘We good to put a few rounds down?’ he asked Guerrero.
‘Be my guest, friend,’ Guerrero said. ‘Nobody for miles around here.’ The Yank gave him a night sight with IR capability, which Danny fitted to his AK. He stepped away from the building. To his eleven o’clock was a gnarled old olive tree, its trunk thick and its branches heavy. Danny raised his weapon and trained the sights on a knot almost in the middle of the trunk. He released three rounds in quick succession. He could tell they had landed in a close group, but the group itself was a couple of inches to the right of the knot. He made a fractional adjustment to the sights and released another three rounds. They landed precisely, splintering the knot and throwing shards of bark into the air. Satisfied that he was properly zeroed in, Danny turned back to the other guys. They had completely removed the tarp, and were now pulling out their body armour and ops vests. Danny did the same. He pulled on the protective gear and stashed more ammo into the pouches of his ops vest.
Guerrero was busying himself with a personal comms system for the four men. He assigned the correct frequency to each radio pack, then handed each of the guys their own set, along with earpiece and boom mike. Danny fitted his mike to the helmet he’d chosen back in the Beirut flat. They performed a comms check, then powered down the radio sets to preserve their battery life. ‘You got satellite comms?’ Danny asked. Guerrero tapped his ops vest. ‘Iridium sat phone,’ he said. ‘Never leave home without it. Stays with me, though, friend. My toy.’
Danny didn’t argue. As long as he knew they had some means of contacting the outside world, that was okay by him.
The others zeroed in their weapons while Danny performed a quick recce of their location. He heard the occasional scurry of wild animals as he entered the multicoloured buildings. Their interiors were dilapidated, filled with old furniture and junk that was slowly rotting away. He wondered how many terrorists this place had spat out in its day, and how many of them had been brought to book by one of the special forces organisations his new team represented. A good number, he imagined.
Back at the vehicle, Guerrero handed him an MRE – sausage and beans – and a canteen of water. ‘It’s no Big Mac,’ he said in his American drawl, ‘but it keeps us going.’ It was the food, even more than the weapons and personnel, that made Danny feel he was with a regular military unit rather than a group of freelancers. He ate the unappetising cold sludge gratefully, then hunkered down by the nearest wall and waited for the RV time.
Danny was anxious to get moving but the hours passed slowly. Guerrero was keeping watch on the track in. Rollett had the bonnet of the Hilux up and was tinkering with the engine. Ludlow spent a good hour sharpening a knife. The dull, regular scrape of the blade against a stone rang out metronomically as the sun started to set. It only stopped when Guerrero called: ‘We got company!’
Danny, Rollett and Ludlow moved at once, engaging their weapons and taking up positions that faced towards the access track. Danny knelt in the firing position by the corner of one of the buildings, aware of Guerrero doing the same behind a pile of old oil drums to his right. A Land Rover was approaching, kicking up a cloud of dust that looked red in the setting sun. It came to a juddering halt fifty metres from their position. There were several seconds of silence, then a figure emerged.
He was a curious-looking man. He was thin and even taller than Danny, with a shock of silver hair. At first Danny assumed he was old, but his gait and movements were young, and his face, though tanned, was not lined. He was probably no older than thirty, and had friendly, sparkling eyes. He held his hands up in the air. ‘My friends!’ he shouted with only the hint of an accent. ‘Will you put down your weapons? I have good things for you!’
Guerrero was the first to show himself. He stood up from his position behind the oil drums and approached the newcomer, his weapon now slung across his chest. The two men embraced. Guerrero turned and indicated to the others that they should approach. Danny did so with care. Guerrero and the others might trust this guy. It didn’t mean Danny had to. Truth was, he’d seldom met a fixer he did trust. As he drew near, both the Yank and the newcomer seemed to sense Danny’s wariness. ‘This is Barak,’ Guerrero said. ‘Barak, this is our client we told you about. The one who has business over the border.’
Barak’s smiling face became a little more serious. He held out one hand. ‘I am pleased to meet you,’ he said. ‘A friend of these gentlemen is a friend of mine!’
Danny nodded wordlessly. Barak turned back to the Land Rover and fetched something from the front passenger seat. He returned with a plastic carrier bag full of rolled-up flatbreads, which we handed out among the men. ‘First we eat,’ he announced. ‘Then we travel.’
The flatbreads were filled with a spicy meat paste and tasted a hell of a sight better than the MRE Danny had wolfed down a couple of hours previously. The team tore into them. Barak ate his more slowly, watching Danny thoughtfully as he chewed. There was something unsettling about the way he didn’t stop staring at Danny, even when Guerrero started pumping him for intel. ‘Have you recce’d the crossing points?’
‘Of course, my friend,’ Barak said, running one hand through his silver hair.
‘Where’s the nearest?’
‘Beyond the village of Massak.’ He frowned. ‘We would do well to avoid that place. There are tensions there, between Hezbollah and the Christians. We do not want to become involved in that.’
‘You know a route around the village?’ Danny asked.
‘Certainly,’ said Barak. ‘It will not be a problem. It will add maybe one hour to the journey. Did you enjoy your food?’
Danny didn’t like the way Barak was trying to change the subject. He looked over towards the Land Rover. ‘Did anybody see you coming?’
‘Nobody. I am very careful.’
Danny stepped up to him. ‘Not so careful that you didn’t stop off on the way to buy flatbreads. I’ll ask you again: did anybody see you coming?’
The question hung there between them. ’You do not trust me, my friend?’ Barak said, his voice suddenly much quieter. ‘That is alright.’ He bowed slightly to the others. ‘I will leave you to find someone else who you do trust.’ Without another word he turned his back on them and started walking back to his vehicle.
‘Barak!’ Guerrer
o called. ‘Wait up, buddy, just one minute!’ Barak stopped, but didn’t turn. Guerrero looked at Danny. ‘Listen to me, friend.’ There was a sudden edge to his voice. ‘You want to cross the border by yourself, be my fucking guest. But Barak there is part of my team, and without him we don’t have a business out here. Do you have any idea what kind of grief those Hezbollah crazies would give him if they thought he was helping us? Say the word and we’ll leave you here by yourself. You can fucking walk to Syria. But if you want our help, you go and make it right with him.’
Guerrero’s reprimand crackled between them. Danny looked around. The setting sun cast long shadows across the disused training camp. Barak had almost reached his vehicle. The other guys were all looking at Danny intently. Their body language told him they were right behind Guerrero. Danny realised he’d messed up, questioning Barak’s loyalty. And he’d messed up even more by getting on the wrong side of Guerrero. The American knew what he was about. While Danny might not fully trust the fixer, it was clear Guerrero did. For now, that would have to be good enough.
He walked over to Barak. ‘That bread thing was pretty good,’ he said. Barak inclined his head, a silent, reluctant thank you. Danny offered his hand. ‘I just need to make sure this operation goes right. No hard feelings?’
Barak flared his nostrils, but then smiled. ‘No hard feelings, my friend.’ He shook Danny’s hand. His palm was limp and rather sweaty. He turned and raised his arms in a friendly gesture, as if nothing had happened. ‘It will be dark in one hour,’ he announced to the others. ‘We should wait until then.’
‘At least,’ Ludlow said. ‘I say we don’t move until 23.00. Fewer people about.’
‘Agreed,’ Guerrero said, a note of finality in his voice. ‘Barak, get your Land Rover out of sight. One vehicle’s easier to smuggle over than two. We’ll bring you here to pick it up once we’re back in Lebanon.’
