by Dan Fox
‘Okay, what are your thoughts?’
Jean said ‘One of us should go north and check out that building, someone else should go east and check the one Marcel talked about. I think we should convert those two to ‘no risk’ before we move on the big one.’ Marcel and Jackson nodded their agreement.
‘Okay then, Jean would you take the northern one and Marcel the one to the east. Please keep up a running commentary. Jackson and me will split the distance between you both and the main building so we’re always in visual contact just in case.’ With that they set off leaving the RPGs and the C4 behind as those items would slow them down if they had to make a run for it. They were pretty sure that they would need that cache for the big building anyway. It was now about two-thirty in the morning with dawn expected about seven or eight depending on which time zone you were in. They might just make it.
Jean and Marcel ran at a crouch towards their targets and covered the ground quickly and silently. Steve and Jackson took their time and surveyed the area around the larger bunker first. There were no lights anywhere, no vehicles hidden away either, and there was no noise. Very strange.
The single guard who was supposedly looking after the main bunker was either asleep or dead as he made no movement at all. It looked like he had ear buds and was probably listening to his iPod. Nevertheless Steve and Jackson were very careful not to disturb him yet. At least he would be oblivious to a few distant battle noises.
Marcel was the first to comment having travelled a shorter distance. ‘This one’s not in use. There’s no-one here and the doors are slightly open. I’ve checked inside and it’s completely empty if you forget the wheelbarrow, a bass broom and an old compressor.’
‘Okay’ said Steve.
Jean then came through, ‘There’s nothing around the rear or sides of this one. There’s a little light seeping at the front but there’s no noise from within. There are no hidden vehicles.’
This lack of vehicles disturbed them all. If there were people about or guards how did they get around or go home?
Jean continued, slightly alarmed ‘Steve, there’s a foot patrol of three approaching me now, about three hundred yards, walking quite slowly but alert. It looks like they have come from the area of the third building from the direction they’re coming from. They are armed with assault rifles, AKs I think, and having a good look around as they progress. My guess is that they are looking for something specific like us.’
‘Did you see exactly where they came from?’ said Steve.
‘No.’
Marcel then chipped in, ‘I didn’t see anyone around here either. Do you think there’s another building or perhaps a Mess they operate from?
Jackson came in, ‘Hang on a minute I think I can smell wood smoke.’ There was a slight breeze coming from the east now and Jackson took out his binoculars and studied the area in that direction for a few moments. ‘Got it. I can see a very thin plume of smoke from about midway between buildings two and three, but maybe a couple of hundred yards or so further away. That’s why Jean’s only just noticed the patrol. They weren’t around before.’
‘Great work’ said Steve, ‘Jean, take the patrol out as silently as you can please before they get any closer to your building. Check for any communications equipment.’
Jean was carrying one of the lighter subsonic sniper rifles and quickly set it up on the crest of a sand dune so that only the barrel and the suppressor would be visible over the top. The three patrol men were walking line astern and Jean smiled to herself, thinking for a fleeting moment that she might get all three with one bullet. However, she’d have no real choice but to take them front to back which meant she would have the knock out the second and third men before they had chance to react to their leader going down. She carefully and quietly pushed the five shot magazine home and took careful aim as she slowed her breathing and heart rate. This was no time to miss.
She squeezed the trigger and took the leader out with a shot in the forehead. The second shot a split second later took the next one cleanly in mid face. By this time the third guy was reacting and moving to the side and beginning to crouch. Jean adjusted her aim and took him in the shoulder with the first shot and adjusted again to put a bullet in the back of his head from where he had fallen over. The sniper rifle was suppressed but by no means silent. The suppressor quietened the noise a little but its main purpose was to hide the muzzle flash.
The whole team held their breath while they waited for any reaction. The guard outside the main bunker continued to listen to his iPod which must have been quite loud as he didn’t react to the suppressed noise of the shots.
After a couple of minutes there was still no reaction. Jean approached the fallen patrol and checked them. All were stone dead and had no special communications equipment. She breathed a sigh of relief and told Steve.
‘Okay then, Marcel and Jackson can you guys concentrate on the Mess building or whatever it is and deal with anyone in there and any communications equipment. Give me a sit rep ASAP.
Jean can you now check the front of your building and let me know what you think. I’ll come over if you need me but I’d be best staying here to make sure nothing cracks off at this main building.’
‘No problema’ said Jean as she went about her work.
Jackson and Marcel spread out a hundred yards or so in order to approach the Mess building from an angle rather than head on. As they got closer the smell of wood smoke became stronger and there was the faint sound of music. Jackson said, ‘Marcel, we need to sort this before the patrol is missed. It seems like whoever else is in there is on a break.’
‘Right with you’ said Marcel ‘I’ll use the Listener to see if it explains anything.’
Marcel carefully approached the side of the small building which was mostly buried in sand. It was no bigger than a large family caravan or mobile home and appeared to be constructed of breeze blocks at the bottom with a rounded corrugated carbonate roof. It would never have been spotted from the air.
He held the Listener device to an air brick and pressed the earpiece home. He listened for about thirty seconds and then backed away.
‘Jackson, there are about six people in there. I can hear some snoring, but there are maybe three or four playing cards. There’s no TV, but there is a tinny radio which is quite loud and will mask a lot of noise.’
‘Can you use your mirror to look through the window?’
‘Okay, but cover me’, said Jackson as he crawled up to a small window at the side of the entrance door, raised himself on his haunches and picked a small mirror attached to a bendy rod from his jacket pocket. He moved the mirror into position slowly and raised himself a little further to see the reflection. He moved the mirror around carefully and then retreated.
‘Marcel’ he said, ‘you were about bang on. There’s a small table not too far from the door and some bunk beds further back. I think there are two sets of two beds. For sure the bottom ones are occupied and there are three people playing cards. There looks to be a toilet or shower room right at the back. I don’t know if there’s anyone in there.’
Marcel thought for a moment, ‘What do you say to a couple of flash bangs in through the window? That should give us enough time to sort them out. What do you think?’
‘Yeh, let’s do that’, said Jackson ‘I’ll break the window and you throw a couple in, okay?’
With that they approached the window carefully from either side. Jackson turned his silenced MP5 around and on Marcel’s count of three he smashed the butt into the single pane of glass. No more than a second later Marcel had thrown two flash bangs through the opening and they both dropped to the floor with their hands over their ears. No sooner than they had hit the ground, the devices exploded.
Jackson kicked the door open with a heavy boot and then backed off to the side and he and Marcel sprayed a full MP5 magazine each from side to side at waist level. They stepped back and waited. Nothing, no moans, no screams, no gunfire. Jack
son peered in and saw movement from one of the bunk beds just as a burst came through the open door. Jackson set his MP5 for bursts of three and angled his weapon round the door frame and fired in the direction of the bunk bed. On the second burst he heard a cry, then silence. Jackson used his mirror again and counted five prone bodies. There was no other movement.
They carefully entered the Mess hut looking and listening intently for movement. The radio was still playing as Jackson moved silently towards the shower room at the back giving Marcel the ‘ssssh’ sign. There was a little light coming from under the door but no sound. Jackson aimed his MP5 at mid door level and gave it two bursts of three. No-one cried out but he did hear something heavy fall to the floor.
Before he moved any further Marcel checked around inside and under the bunks and then peered outside and checked all around. When he was satisfied he re-joined Jackson and covered him whilst he kicked the shower room door open. Lying in the shower tray with the curtain wrapped around him was a very dead guard.
Steve had picked up most of what had happened but was grateful for confirmation that they’d have no problems from the Mess hut. Marcel elected to join Jean at the northern building and Jackson trekked back to join Steve.
Jean had already peered inside the building through a gap between the breeze blocks and the roof. There was one big central light and a room full of plastic barrels without lids. In the far corner she could see a tractor and a flat-bed trailer. It didn’t take much imagination to picture empty barrels being transported to the main building for filling and shipment.
As Marcel approached, Jean opened the side door carefully and peeked inside. There was no-one in there, just the tractor with its flat-bed trailer and loads of empty barrels. She told Steve immediately who asked her and Marcel to return quickly so they could sort out an action plan for the main building.
Steve Black and Jackson Leonard got into position. The guard had unplugged his iPod and was starting to look around holding his machine pistol at the ready.
Chapter 4
Iraq - continued
The guard had to go and Steve waited for a moment then held his gloved fingers out and silently counted them down, three, two, one. A slight cough from Jackson’s silenced pistol to his right and the guard near the bunker entrance toppled to the sand. Dead before he’d fallen halfway. It was poor security to have only one sentry anyway. Perhaps they thought no-one could ever find the place.
Steve nodded at Marcel who approached the side wall of the building. He took the Listener out and held it against the side. It was deathly quiet. He could hear absolutely nothing. There was no single door on the front of the building just some very high and tough looking blast doors that were rebated together where they joined. Fortunately they were not fitted very well and there was a small but sufficient gap to exploit.
Steve said, ‘Marcel, time for the C4 then?’ Marcel nodded and picked up a block from the stash and selected a couple of detonators. As he approached the blast doors he was rolling the plasticine like C4 into a long thin rope. He reached up as high as he could and started to press the string of C4 into the crack of the join working his way down to the bottom. He’d selected two thirty second detonators and rammed them into the C4 about three feet apart and simultaneously cracked them both. He then ran to where the others had taken cover and waited for the bang.
The bunker was thirty miles almost due south of Rutba in the far west of Iraq and only about two hundred feet long and seventy feet wide. It must have been well lined and insulated because it had never been picked by the satellites or thermal imaging cameras on the planes that flew over every now and again. Even the considerable length of link road to the main highway was covered in sand with tiny markers to guide anyone in and out. However, it was well off the beaten track many miles from any main road and unlikely to be found by accident.
Boom. The blast doors on the camouflaged bunker came ajar a few feet and Steve raced through the gap with MP5 at the ready searching for life inside through his night vision goggles. The place was pitch black inside with no power since the blast.
At first there didn’t appear to be anyone in there, but something white caught Steve’s eye about fifteen yards away on the other side of a partition. He went for it and the rest of the team, with Jean as lookout, spread out and followed a little more cautiously.
The white coat moved away as if in shock but Steve had him pinned to the wall in just a few seconds. It was him, the guy they’d been looking for, yes it was. Three years it had taken to catch this bastard. Heinrick Smerkel, Chemical Weapons expert extraordinaire. Believed to be the son of a Nazi chemist, Steve and the team had spent three years chasing their own arses looking for him. Mis-information, tip offs and just plain screw ups had all contributed to their nightmare.
There was no-one else in the bunker. It looked like Smerkel had some sort of quarters in there so he could work around the clock.
Nobody expected any remnant chemical weapons facility this far west in Iraq. It was camel country. How had this place been missed by the WMD searches? That was easy. This site was so completely off the radar it could have been on Mars. If they hadn’t been tipped off no-one would ever have found it. Now they’d find out what Smerkel was making and more importantly who he was selling it to. But none of that was Steve’s concern. He just had two very important jobs to do. One blow the place and its significant load of probably full barrels, and two get Heinrick Smerkel to Tel Aviv and the CIA.
Steve needed to get all of them out of Iraq pronto. Jordan to the west had always been their best bet so that was the plan. Good contacts there for an ex-filtrate operation. They would get all the right papers courtesy of some CIA moonlighter and then give Smerkel a quick jab to subdue him before the short flight from Amman, Jordan to Tel Aviv, Israel. Then with Mossad’s help, and a very grateful CIA’s, Smerkel would be on a rendition flight to somewhere most unsavoury. The team might even get a bonus.
Marcel searched around inside the building looking for good places to deploy the C4. They needed to flatten the building and severely destroy anything in it.
‘Steve, I can smell Acetone’, said Marcel.
‘Great’ said Steve, ‘maybe it’s used in the process. If there’s a lot of it this place will really go up.’
Marcel placed several pounds of C4 at strategic points and when satisfied inserted a five minute timer into each block in turn. He then ran like hell. Steve helped him push the wrecked blast doors a little closer together, anything for a better bang. With that they ran up the sand slope and over the top. A few seconds longer to wait with hands over their ears and mouths open.
The series of explosions was terrific. The building disintegrated and there must have been a fair quantity of Acetone in there as the huge fireball was nothing short of spectacular.
The call for the chopper was made as soon as the Steve had caught Smerkel. Quite soon the ‘whup, whup’ of the approaching bird became audible. However, the silenced chopper engine did not mask the sound of unsuppressed assault rifle fire from behind them. From a few hundred yards away shots were pounding into the sand and rock too close to them for comfort.
Without comments or orders Jean and Marcel rolled away from Steve, Jackson and Smerkel, and laid down a hail of return fire towards the rapidly approaching armed patrol. As Marcel flipped in a new magazine and took up the main covering fire, Jean switched to single shot and took the three man patrol down in four telling shots. Steve shook his head in dismay at his own clumsy decision not to have someone on lookout, but was impressed again with Jean’s uncanny accuracy under pressure.
Within a few more seconds they were on board the chopper with the spare equipment, heading towards Jordan. Smerkel had been initially subdued with a sharp pistol tap to the head, but was now becoming a nuisance. With Jackson’s favourite H&K shoved in his mouth he seemed to quieten down a little. They didn’t want to kill him. The flight to their rendezvous point to meet with the truck would only take just
over an hour so they would just have to frighten him enough to keep him quiet for the journey.
Their escape truck was hidden in a rocky outcrop about thirty miles east of the Jordanian border with Iraq. No lights, no engine noise. The chopper landed on the edge of the outcrop and everyone and their equipment was off it and running towards the truck in next to no time.
Their flight on the chopper had taken them close to the Syrian border with Iraq, and as close as it dared to the Jordanian border. The team had had their fingers crossed most of the way at the most precocious and exhilarating low flying they had ever encountered.
Whilst Steve didn’t know the truck driver, he looked Israeli and was probably from Mossad, but you could never be certain. He could even be one of the bad guys, or one of those who only sides with the winners. The Israelis had fingers in so many pies over so much territory it was hard to believe that such a small country had sufficient resources to do it.
Nevertheless as soon as they were loaded up, the driver started the engine and slowly rolled the truck back onto what constituted a main road in the direction of Jordan to the west. Smerkel had since ceased to be a nuisance and had probably realised that living was better than dying. He couldn’t have had a clue about what was going to happen to him. Probably the imagination wasn’t there to consider the methods that would be employed to tempt his tongue to divulge all of the WMD details. God help him.
Steve thought that they might do the whole of the road journey in a little under two hours provided they encountered no road blocks or inquisitive armed patrols. It would have been good to fly out of Iraq but that was just out of the question. There was far too much border activity, too much radar, too many missiles, too many questions and by now they would be fugitives on the run. If they were caught no-one would come to their aid. As always they were on their own. Just like the old Mission Impossible. ‘The Secretary will disavow……’
