‘Shit!’ Marc tapped in a three-keystroke code, setting off a small explosive charge inside the little drone, enough to destroy the throwbot and likely take off the fingers of the fighter who had grabbed it. The tablet screen blinked the words SIGNAL LOST, and he was jamming the device back into his pack as Lucy reached out to grab his shoulder, leaning close to him.
‘We need to get –’ Lucy was shouting to be heard over the drone of the Osprey’s engines, but she never got the chance to finish. Muzzle flashes blinked behind her and she was suddenly thrown forward against Marc, collapsing onto him.
Over her shoulder, he saw men in green fatigues running up the driveway toward them, firing from the hip.
*
Saito’s ingrained sixth sense, the kind of instinct that only came from years of soldiering, was ringing a wrong note from the moment his boots touched the sun deck on the mansion’s top floor. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled and an ill-defined tension blossomed in his chest. It felt wrong.
The deployment from the V-22 was clean and fast, as he expected from the team, and as they kicked open the doors and rushed inside, he shot a quick look at the VTOL aircraft as it turned in place and side-slipped away from the building. The hurricane force from the rotors battered at the ground and the loose grasses of the ruined lawns, kicking up a wall of dust that billowed out in a rolling wave. Makeshift tents around the rear of the main house were blown down as the Osprey dropped in to land on Welldone Amadayo’s seldom-used tennis court, several hundred metres away. The rotor pitch thrummed at idle, and he knew the aircraft would be ready to exfiltrate them at a moment’s notice.
Satisfied that their escape route was secure, Saito unlimbered the Vector CRB carbine strapped across his chest and thumbed the weapon’s fire-select lever to burst mode. The three other operatives with him were already moving through the sun gallery and rooftop lounge in a staggered line, their movements quick and economical. His misgivings ebbed but did not entirely fade.
As they reached the open stairwell leading down into the building proper, two men in faded surplus camos came sprinting up to meet them, leading with the AKM rifles in their sweating hands.
Saito’s point man and the second operative in the line gunned them down with chugs of fire across the face and neck. They had to shove the bodies back over the banister to get past, sending the corpses spinning back down to the ground floor.
The third operative was a man named Byrd, who carried a wide-mouthed pistol-design launcher capable of firing 40mm grenade shells. Saito beckoned him to the top to the stairs, and Byrd took the lead. He sent three rounds down the stairwell, each one with a shock-and-stun warhead. A thunderous roar echoed through the building, but as they descended to the second floor, the tempo of return fire coming back at the team was still fierce.
Sustained barrages from Kalashnikov rifles tore into the walls and ceiling, shredding what little of the mansion’s interior decor was still intact. The enemy fire was wild and uncontrolled, but the sheer force of it was impeding any chance to progress. Byrd lurched forward to unleash another salvo of grenades, but the floorboards beneath his feet burst apart in ragged splinters as someone below directed their fire through the ceiling. He fell down in a bloody heap, and Saito reeled away, his mind snapping back to a conversation held hours earlier.
As the Combine team staged for the attack on the far side of the Kenyan border, Saito had underlined his misgivings about launching an infiltration into Mogadishu without current reconnaissance data . . . and he had been overruled. Hours of low-level flight along the coastline, skimming the crests of waves in the darkness, had given him more than enough time to know that he was right and his paymasters were mistaken.
But Saito was a servant, and he did not call the shots. They were here now, and their mission remained the same. Locate and terminate the pirate warlord, find the weapon the Serbs gave him. Everything else was irrelevant.
He erased the doubts in his mind and pulled the pins on fragmentation grenades still clipped to Byrd’s body, and then tossed the smaller man over the ledge and into the melee below. Saito fell back as more explosions rumbled through the house.
‘This is a hornet’s nest,’ snapped the point man, a grim Spaniard named Ruiz. ‘We were told to expect minimal resistance!’ He shot a look at Mayer, the other member of the team. ‘I’m not getting paid enough to die here!’
Saito ignored them both, listening to the shouts from below. The shooters on the ground floor were regrouping, and he could hear them calling to one another and shouting battle cries in the name of their holy war. These were not Ramaas’s brigands, then. He gave a nod. A clever manoeuvre. The pirate had allowed his jihadist militant allies to occupy this estate and unknowingly become a trap for anyone tracking him back to this location.
‘They’re coming up,’ snapped Mayer. ‘I hear them, must be another stairwell.’
‘We kill our way through,’ Saito ordered, as a door further along the corridor slammed open and more armed men boiled out onto the landing. ‘Advance and fire!’ He called out the command as he followed it himself, striding forward to meet the new attackers with his carbine spitting flame.
*
Lucy howled with pain and Marc reacted without thinking. He pulled her aside with one hand, his other gripping his MP7 as he swung it up toward the advancing shooters. He had no time to aim and be cautious about it; Marc squeezed the submachine gun’s trigger and fired off a snarling discharge of rounds on full-auto, cutting down the first rifleman with hits across his torso and belly. The second shooter dove into cover behind a stone planter, spraying bullets from his AKM high into the walls and missing by a wide margin.
Lucy let out a bone-deep groan and her knees bent. Marc took her weight and they both dropped. His free hand touched her back and he dreaded the prospect of feeling blood seeping through her tactical vest – but instead his fingers touched hot, burned fibres around the ragged impact points.
She swore violently and pushed him away. ‘I’m okay.’ Lucy ground out the words through gritted teeth. ‘Plates in the body armour took the rounds. Fuck me, that burns . . .’
‘Incoming!’ Marc saw movement as more of the jihadis spilled out of the front of Amadayo’s mansion. Lucy brought up her own SMG as Marc did the same and they both let off bursts of fire toward the new surge of attackers. ‘We can’t stay here,’ he said. ‘We’ve got no good cover!’
‘Yeah,’ Lucy nodded, shaking off the pain. ‘Hell, what did we step in? The mission just got blown wide open, we need to get gone!’ She fired off another three-round salvo. ‘Open to suggestions, smart guy.’
‘What about that VTOL?’ He jerked a thumb toward the roof. ‘Like it or not, someone else has just gatecrashed this thing.’
‘And good luck to them,’ Lucy retorted. ‘But unless you wanna stick around and find out who kills who, we need to extract and regroup!’
The original plan had been to get a location for Ramaas from someone in the Amadayo mansion and then appropriate some local transport to reach his location. Now that had tuned into get away or get dead.
‘Garage!’ Marc stabbed a finger in the direction of an outbuilding across the drive from the main house. ‘We need wheels, as long as you’re happy letting me drive again.’
‘Drag me on a goddamn skateboard for all I care,’ she snapped back at him. ‘Go, go!’ Lucy put down a wave of cover fire and Marc sprinted across the gap between the wall of the house and another raised flower bed.
He skidded behind shelter and then returned the favour, shooting at a cluster of riflemen behind the bullet-pocked fake marble columns of the entrance portico. He heard a scream and saw someone fall in a spurt of blood.
Marc didn’t let his mind even start to process the grim facts of what he was doing. He drew on his training, concentrating on navigating through the moment-to-moment havoc of the firefight.
Enemies. Targets. Objectives. Survival. He reduced his actions to those terms and s
hut out everything else.
The slide locked open on his MP7 and he ducked back into cover to reload, exchanging the spent magazine for a full one. Lucy slapped him on the shoulder as she slid in behind him and nodded toward the outbuilding. She didn’t need to remind Marc that there was easily fifty metres of open space between the flower bed and the garage. ‘I’m gonna pop smoke,’ she told him. ‘We’ll both go on my word.’
‘Got it.’ Adrenaline was pumping through him now, and he rocked on the balls of his feet, anxious to get moving again.
Lucy pulled the pin on a smoke grenade and lobbed it out toward the house, drawing a fresh fusillade of fire from the shooters. As white vapour jetted from the metal cylinder, explosions sounded from inside the mansion and glass shattered.
‘Looks like those dicks from the Osprey are getting into it,’ she offered.
‘Why would the US risk sending a team here, after that video from New York?’ said Marc, taking a deep breath. The smoke was thickening into a bank of white fog.
‘I don’t think they did,’ Lucy replied, then she slapped him on the arm. ‘Now!’
The two of them sprinted out from behind the flower bed and Marc followed Lucy’s lead by firing suppressive bursts toward the front of the building. Heavy 7.62mm rounds hummed through the air around them and cracked at the flagstones by their feet, but the shooters were firing blindly. Crossing the distance to the garage seemed to take for ever, as the smoke turned everything into a whiteout – and then suddenly the heavy wooden doors rose out of the haze. Marc shouldered one of them open, shoving Lucy through before pulling it closed behind him.
Inside, the garage was pitch dark. The still air within was hot and stale with the smell of engine oil. Lucy’s tactical flashlight snapped on and a broad beam illuminated the interior of the outbuilding, washing this way and that across the floor and the racks of tools against the walls. ‘Oh, hell no,’ she muttered.
The garage was empty.
*
The jihadists kept coming, drawing fire from Saito’s team down the corridor and the stairwell, splitting their focus as new fighters mantled the bodies of their dead brethren and attempted to box in the Combine mercenaries.
If we remain here, we die. Saito made the calculation and knew that no other outcome was possible. Byrd was already gone, and Mayer had taken a glancing hit to the leg that was bleeding badly. The numbers of the Al Shabaab fighters were overwhelmingly in the enemy’s favour, even with the skill and experience of the Combine team on Saito’s side. It will be a retreat, then, he decided, and gave the order. Laying down the last of their grenades, Mayer and Ruiz moved back up to the top floor and Saito served as rearguard, gunning down the men who tried to come after them.
Reaching the sun deck, he stepped aside as his men tipped over lounge chairs and a massive glass-fronted refrigerator to block the path of anyone trying to follow. Saito pressed a hand to the throat mike around his neck. ‘Aerial? Mission abort. I say again, mission abort. Extract us from the roof . . .’
He looked in the direction of the Osprey and his heart sank. A squad of men in fatigues were trying to approach the aircraft. They were moving and firing in poor order but as with those inside the mansion, there were more than enough of them to pose a serious threat. At the rear of the tiltrotor’s fuselage, he could see a crumpled figure in black sprawled on the cargo ramp, apparently dead. Saito looked to the cockpit and glimpsed movement inside.
‘Copy that!’ The pilot’s voice was tight and urgent. ‘They’re closing in, I’ll try to –’
Yellow light flashed out under the wing and Saito winced as a cry came over the radio bead in his ear. When he called out to the pilot again, the man did not reply and the Osprey remained where it was, rotors a blur as it sat unmoving on the tennis court.
‘We have lost the aircrew,’ he announced dispassionately. ‘We have to get away from this building . . . Follow me!’ Saito slipped his carbine over his shoulder and used a chair to boost him to the apex of the mansion’s angled roof.
Gripping the red tiles, he hauled himself up and then bent down to assist Mayer, who endured the pain from his wound with quiet gasps. The material of the other man’s trouser leg was now dark and wet with blood. Ruiz came up last, swinging himself onto the roof in a single motion.
Their boots clattered on the tiles as they ran along the length of the mansion, careful to distribute their weight as they moved. The steady drone of the Osprey’s idling engines was like an endless peal of thunder, but beneath the noise Saito could hear the excited shouts of the jihadist soldiers and the crackle of more gunfire. White smoke billowed up from the courtyard outside the house and he hunched forward to minimise his visible outline. It was dark up here, and anyone down on the ground might not see them at first glance – but all it would take was one observant man with a rifle and they would be picked off to plummet to their deaths.
Ahead, the east wing of Amadayo’s mansion house came to an abrupt end, but a high wall extended away toward the outbuildings and the edge of the estate beyond those. Saito jabbed a finger in the direction of the wall and dropped down onto it in a cat-fall.
He saw movement below him as a gunman came around the corner of the mansion, but then there was a buzz of suppressed fire from Ruiz’s Vector and the man dropped. Mayer and the Spaniard followed him down.
They were almost at the roof of the lower outbuilding when a fresh salvo of gunfire erupted all around them. Mayer reflexively put his weight on his wounded leg and it folded under him.
Saito had one foot on the low roof as Mayer toppled straight into the terracotta tiles and smashed right through them. He disappeared into the gloom below, but the damage was already done. The tiles came apart in a clattering rush and the roof unzipped as it caved in on its supports.
Silently cursing their luck, Saito went down and Ruiz came with him, mercifully out of the firing line but into the black, oil-stinking darkness. He hit a concrete floor hard and rolled over, ignoring the pain, grabbing for his carbine.
Thread-thin red targeting lasers stabbed out from their guns, meeting a pair of green beams that aimed back toward the Combine team. A dot of emerald light wavered on Saito’s sternum and finally a white man with sandy hair and a smoke-dirty face came out of the shadows. He had an MP7 aimed and ready, and at his side was a black woman wearing the same tactical gear.
‘And who might you be?’ the gunman asked, his British accent laced with tension.
NINETEEN
‘Hello, gatecrashers,’ said Lucy, her tone dangerous and mocking all at once.
One second there had been gunfire cracking off outside the garage, and the next the sky caved in and brought with it these men with their guns and their injuries and their hard-eyed glares. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that this was the team from the Osprey, but they bore no resemblance to any American military unit that Marc was familiar with.
‘PMC?’ he prompted. Their loadout and equipment were more high-end than the hardware used by the Aleph mercenaries Marc had traded fire with in Poland. ‘Who sent you?’
The slender oriental man with a Vector carbine over his shoulder shot a look at the other two new arrivals, and Marc knew that he was the one in charge. ‘I could ask you the same question.’
A spray of automatic fire cut through the air overhead, across the thrumming rumble of idling aircraft engines. Lucy reacted, panning up her SMG toward the hole in the roof, hunting for more threats. ‘This is really not a good time for small talk,’ she snapped.
One of the other mercs moved to the double doors and peeked through a crack in the frame. ‘She’s right. Movement out there. They’re bringing that technical around, probably going to use the fifty to hose us all in here. We have to go.’ He glanced around, finding the single rear door leading out toward the gardens. ‘That way.’
‘Be our guest,’ offered Lucy. ‘Can’t be more than two dozen of those assholes dug in out there.’
The oriental man’s
eyes never left Marc’s. ‘I imagine we came to this place looking for the same person. Bad timing that we were all ensnared in the trap he left us.’ He held up his hands. ‘But we could work together.’
The merc by the door crouched by his injured comrade and helped him up, shaking his head angrily. ‘Unless one of these two has a tank in their pocket, how is that going to help us?’ He jutted his chin in the direction of the door. ‘We go for the VTOL, we’ll be cut down, same as the crew.’
Marc caught the man’s meaning and seized on it. ‘You lost your aircrew?’ The oriental man gave an irritated nod, and off that Marc let his MP7 drop. ‘I can fly that thing.’
‘You can?’ Lucy raised an eyebrow.
‘I’ve read the manual,’ he muttered.
‘Damn it, Saito,’ snapped the other mercenary. ‘Say yes, and then we can all get out of this shithole!’
After a moment, the oriental man nodded. ‘But there is the small matter of getting to the aircraft.’
Marc held out his hand to Lucy. ‘How many grenades you got left?’
‘Couple of frags . . .’
‘Perfect.’ He glanced around. ‘I need wire, or cord or something . . .’
The injured man clutched at something on his belt. ‘Will this do?’ He handed Marc a clutch of plastic zip-ties with his bloody fingers.
‘Good enough.’ Marc dropped his pack on the concrete floor and fished out a second throwbot drone.
*
The fighters grouped in the rear gardens were looking in every direction at once, convinced that the arrival of the black helicopter-plane was the opening shot in the great war their demagogue leaders had long promised. Afraid to venture out of cover across the clear ground between the ornamental planters and the tennis court, for fear that more troops might come charging out of the aircraft, some of them warily kept their rifles trained on it. Others pointed their weapons at the sky, ready to shoot at the next invader. The Osprey did not move, its rotors still spinning in humming blurs, the whole aircraft crouching low to the ground like some giant, angry insect.
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