by Chris Ryan
Now it was time to debus. It didn’t take more than a few minutes for them to carry the crates which held the squadron’s weapons and ammunition up into the C-17 and secure them inside the webbing. The ops sergeant took a headcount and, once he was satisfied everyone had boarded, he gave the word to the loadie. The aft door closed up and the engines started to rumble.
It stank in the aircraft. Aviation gas wasn’t the worst of it. Luke could detect a vague whiff of rotten meat. The C-17 was a versatile beast. It wasn’t just suited to the wholesale movement of troops and equipment. As it could operate on short runways, and even had capability on those that were unpaved, it was suitable for use close to the battlefield. That meant it was a good choice for casevac, and for its evil twin: the repatriation of the dead. Impossible to say how many corpses this machine had ferried since it had been in service. Impossible, too, to say whether the stench inside the plane was related, but there was something sobering about being strapped into an aircraft which doubled as a hearse – two lines of men, facing each other, silent not only because the increasing noise of the engine made talking difficult.
Flight time to Ben Gurion International Airport, fifteen klicks south-east of Tel Aviv: four hours. Four more hours for Luke to try to make sense of things. But in the end, he tried to put it from his mind by running over the details of this morning’s briefing. The next twenty-four hours were going to be full-on and he needed a clear head.
It was a relief when he sensed the C-17 losing height, the wheels finally hitting the ground. The aircraft taxied for a full ten minutes after touchdown as the pilot manoeuvred it to a secluded part of the airfield. The aft door opened to reveal night-time and allow a blast of cool but humid air into the aircraft. A Mediterranean rainstorm was on its way.
A small convoy of unmarked black transit vehicles, covered with a thick layer of sandy dust, were waiting immediately behind the plane, and standing outside them were a handful of people. Luke immediately recognised the OC, Julian Dawson, and Sergeant Major Bill Thomas, who’d gone out as an advance party. The others were also in civvies but making no attempt to hide the assault rifles strapped round their bodies. They were clearly members of some branch of the Israeli Defence Forces, ostensibly there to help the squadron load up and escort them to their operational base, but nobody was under any illusion that they were there to control more than to assist.
Luke had never been to Ben Gurion before. His operations in the region had always taken him further east, into Jordan, Iraq and the Stan. He knew, though, that the Israelis had good reason to be paranoid. Their principal airport had long been a target for terror attacks, dating back to the early seventies when Black September – the same Palestinian terrorist group that later orchestrated the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics – landed a hijacked 707 on the runway. The Israeli Government had called in their elite special forces, Sayeret Matkal, more commonly known as the Unit. The Unit was based on the SAS, even down to sharing the same regimental motto, ‘Who Dares Wins’. They had stormed the 707, taking control in less than ten minutes and nailing two of the four hijackers as well as one passenger. Since that day, Ben Gurion had been one of the most highly defended airports in the world, with both uniformed and covert police and the IDF operating round the clock.
Luke eyed up the Israeli soldiers as he unstrapped himself from his seat in the C-17. To a man they had shaved heads and tanned skin. Some of them were so dark as to look Arabic. Were these guys members of the Unit? Maybe. No way they’d tell him and he wasn’t going to ask. One of them shouted something in Hebrew as a passenger jet thundered overhead, and the others opened up the back of the transits while the Regiment men unloaded their gear from the aircraft and packed it into the waiting vehicles. Ten minutes later they were speeding across the airfield. At the perimeter they passed a checkpoint that made Heathrow look like a Center Parc. It was guarded not only by armed personnel, but by three open-topped technicals with .50-cal machine guns mounted on the top, each one manned by a cold-eyed Israeli soldier. A regular level of security, or laid on in response to the volatile international situation? Luke didn’t know.
‘Hope no one’s over their booze allowance,’ Fozzie announced as the plainclothes IDF lads negotiated their way out of the airport. A couple of minutes later they were speeding away from the airport towards a wide, well-maintained main road.
They travelled for forty-five minutes before pulling off the main road. Five minutes after that they slowed down some more, coming to a halt at the edge of a high fence with rolls of barbed wire perched on top. There was a huge yellow sign – ‘Hebrew for “Fuck off”,’ Fozzie suggested – and at a break in the fence was a barrier, manned by two armed soldiers in olive drab. They were clearly expecting the convoy: one look and they opened the barrier and waved them on.
It was pitch-black outside. At first Luke couldn’t see much of the immediate surroundings. In the distance, though, he caught sight of the red lights of control and communications towers, and they were not far inside the perimeter when a chopper flew overhead. He had the impression of an immense military installation, and that impression was confirmed a couple of minutes later when the central hub of the base came into view.
It was a sprawling mess of low, single-storey buildings, aircraft hangars and equipment warehouses. Each building looked like it had been stuck there without much thought, as if the whole place had grown up randomly over a long period of time. Even though it was late, there was plenty going on. Military trucks were swarming round. As they drove past a hangar, Luke caught sight of an F-16, brightly lit and surrounded by engineers. There was even a missile of some description, mounted on the back of a mobile launcher and being moved from one side of the base to another, where there was a small forest of signalling gear – masts, satellites, the works. Men in olive drab were everywhere, illuminated by bright floodlights that wouldn’t have looked out of place at Old Trafford. No one seemed to pay any attention to the convoy. Hardly surprising, Luke thought to himself. The whole base had the air of being in readiness for war, so a couple of busloads of extra soldiers was hardly enough to get tongues wagging.
The convoy trundled through the base for another couple of minutes until it came to a small group of buildings set apart from the main body of the base. They were low and functional, constructed from bare breeze-blocks, and unlike the rest of the camp, there were no military personnel milling about here, nor any military vehicles. B Squadron debussed outside these buildings and filed into the largest of them.
An ops room had been set up here. Nothing fancy. Didn’t need to be. A few tables and chairs, with laptops and comms equipment dotted around. One wall was plastered with mapping of the region – both satellite and topographical – and the windows had all been covered up from the inside using simple black bin liners. The Regiment might be on friendly territory, their presence might not be a secret to the Israeli authorities, but what happened inside these buildings was covert, and nobody would welcome prying eyes.
Once they were all inside, the OC called them to attention. He pointed to a door at the far end of the ops room. ‘Briefing room through there. Bunks in the adjacent building, weapons store beyond that. There’s a cookhouse in the main base – you can get some scoff after you’ve unloaded the gear.’
‘I could murder a bacon sarnie, boss,’ Fozzie called out from the back.
Dawson smiled. ‘You might be in for a bit of wait. All right, fellas. Get moving.’ He picked out Luke and the other three members of the four-man unit carrying out the op into Gaza. ‘You four, get some kip, and no bashing the bishop. You need to be out of here by 06.00 hrs, and it would be a crying fucking shame to keep Hamas waiting, right?’
Truth was, Luke wasn’t even thinking about Hamas. He was thinking about Chet’s boy.
‘Right, Luke?’ the OC repeated himself.
‘Right, boss,’ Luke replied. ‘06.00.’
He picked up his Bergen and left the ops room. Tomorrow was go
ing to be a long day. Fuck knows what it would bring, but he needed to be ready.
TWENTY-THREE
9 December.
05.00 hrs.
Luke was the first of the unit into the briefing room, but O’Donoghue was already there. His tired eyes were bloodshot and he reeked of sweat. Luke could tell at a glance he’d been up all night. He was sitting staring intently at a laptop. When he saw that Luke had entered, he nodded. ‘Seen this?’ he asked.
Luke went over to his desk. The screen, which refreshed every five seconds, displayed an outline of the eastern Mediterranean. He could make out the shape of Israel, with the Gaza Strip on its western edge. To the north, Lebanon; south, Egypt; east, Jordan. A hundred and fifty klicks into the Med he saw the island of Cyprus, where he’d been on decompression more times than he could count. But there was more than just the geography to look at. Fifty clicks south-east of Cyprus were two flashing red dots, and in the flat terrain north-west of Jerusalem, three triangles.
O’Donoghue poked the dots with a thick, calloused finger. ‘Yanks,’ he said. ‘Marines. Ground attack aircraft.’ His finger moved to the triangles. ‘British Army, IDF, Canadians and Ozzies in from Germany. Five thousand men mobilised already and they’re still coming. We’ve got half the fucking RAF sitting on the tarmac in Cyprus.’ He sniffed. ‘I’m telling you, if Stratton doesn’t get the right noises out of Hamas, they’re going to do a Dresden on the Gaza Strip. And I wouldn’t put it past Israel to send a few over into Lebanon and the West Bank either. Every raghead east of Bradford’s going to be signing up. The Yanks have sent over satellite imagery. There’s troop movement along Iran’s western border and we’re getting reports of Yemeni activity in the Gulf of Aden. Even the fucking Iraqis are making the wrong noises.’
The two men continued to watch the screen in silence until, a minute later, the rest of the unit walked in, accompanied by the squadron ops sergeant carrying a computer printout. ‘Foreign Office report just in, lads,’ he announced. ‘Anti-Western demonstration in Gaza City last evening. Unrest overnight and unconfirmed accounts of small-arms fire across the border. We’re changing your route to avoid the trouble spots. Orders are to get Stratton to Hamas, but if things get hairy, turn around. Stratton won’t like it, but those are your instructions. Nobody wants any casualties. Especially not him, especially not today. Got it?’
Luke gave a curt nod.
‘Call sign Tango 17. You’ve got an hour.’
The unit made their way to the weapons store. The SQM was already there, ready to check out the gear they’d need. Plate hangers first. Luke made sure his body armour was strapped up tightly, then pulled on his ops waistcoat. Each man was issued with an HK53 – a good weapon for close-protection jobs, especially in urban areas because of its shorter barrel. The 5.56 NATO rounds came in thirty-round magazines, which they stashed in their waistcoats along with two fragmentation grenades each, before drawing their Sig 9mm handguns from the store. To their arms they fitted satellite markers which would transmit their location back to the ops centre, then attached their patrol comms to their chests – MBITR radios with earpieces and boom mikes, plus Iridium sat phones for comms with base.
The vehicle waiting for them was a black Land Cruiser. A plush interior – leather seats and all the trimmings. From the exterior it looked just like any other 4 x 4 of its type, but Luke knew the tinted windows were 40mm bullet-resistant polycarbonate; the bodywork was of hardened ballistic steel; the hinges, shock absorbers and springs were reinforced; and the tyres had special inserts to allow them to run when flat. There weren’t many small-arms rounds that could penetrate a vehicle like this. Short of driving a tank into hostile territory, it was the closest they’d get to maximum protection.
The ops sergeant was waiting for them by the Land Cruiser. He handed detailed maps to Russ covering Tel Aviv, the route from the capital to the border crossing with Gaza and substantial imagery of Gaza itself. Russ accepted them quietly. He did everything quietly. He was the tallest of the four of them, with a close-shaved head, a Barry Manilow nose and the navigation skills of a homing pigeon.
Fozzie took the wheel. As a member of mobility troop he was the best qualified to drive if things went noisy; Russ was in the passenger seat, GPS and mapping at the ready; Luke and Finn sat at the back. A nod from the OC and they hit the road.
They drove in near silence, the only words being spoken by Russ as he navigated Fozzie away from the military base and towards Tel Aviv proper. Luke was glad of the silence. He was about to come face to face with Alistair Stratton. If that poor woman who had been slaughtered in St Paul’s was right, he was up to something. But what could he do? Nothing. All he could do was go with it. Stick close to the bastard.
It was early enough for the streets of Tel Aviv to be almost deserted. As they headed towards the centre, Luke had the impression of a modern, thriving city, a far cry from some of the shitholes he’d seen in the Middle East. The sun had not yet risen, but a clear moon glinted off shining tower blocks and street lamps lit up stylish shops and pavement cafés. They headed west through the city, and soon the Mediterranean coast came into view. Easy to forget, Luke thought, as the tower of the Sheraton Hotel came into view, that Israel bordered the fucked-up wasteland of Lebanon, with Hamas knocking on its gate and the network of Arabic allegiances just a missile’s flight away. Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt – countries like these didn’t always see eye to eye, but they were united in one thing: a hatred of Israel. There was no doubt that the shining towers of Tel Aviv, the restaurants and nightspots, didn’t tell the whole story. Not by a long way.
It was 06.30 hrs by the time they pulled up outside the Sheraton. Quite why Stratton wasn’t staying at the British Embassy was anyone’s guess. Certainly if Luke had been in charge of his security, he wouldn’t be staying somewhere that any Tom, Dick or Harry could walk straight into. The Sheraton was situated right on the beachfront, and the sun was now lighting up the sky. Luke didn’t have to examine the concourse in front of the hotel for more than a few seconds before he clocked the two plainclothes Israeli operators standing on either side of the revolving doors, their shoulders a little too broad for their dark suits and open-neck shirts. These two men had clearly clocked the Land Cruiser too. One of them put his sleeve to his mouth and spoke into a concealed mike.
Part of the concourse was covered by a solid canopy with the name ‘Sheraton’ in solid red letters. There was only one other vehicle parked there – a black Mercedes. Its rear door was being held open by a chauffeur. A suited businessman climbed in and the Merc slid away. Fozzie manoeuvred the 4 x 4 into its place.
‘OK, fellas,’ Luke muttered, ‘me and Finn’ll go and make contact with the Cardinal.’
‘Roger that,’ Fozzie replied. ‘Mind your p’s and q’s, boys. Very important man, that Alistair Stratton. Doesn’t want to be bothered by a couple of plebs like you.’
The security men gave them only the most cursory of nods as they entered the hotel. They weren’t leaving their posts for anyone. Inside, the foyer was deeply carpeted and there were plush leather sofas and armchairs dotted around, but Luke was more interested in the four security cameras he spotted hanging from the ceiling. Two of them were pointing at him and Finn. A handful of guests were milling around – no more than six – and the three receptionists behind the faux-mahogany counter were chatting idly. Their day had not yet begun in earnest. As Luke scanned the foyer, he was aware of one of them – a heavily made-up woman in a blue uniform – tugging on her male colleague’s sleeve and pointing in Luke’s direction. Luke ignored them and continued to scan. He was looking for their point man and he picked him out five seconds later. The guy was sitting in a comfortable armchair in the far left-hand corner of the foyer, a Washington Post that he wasn’t reading spread out in front of him. He put one hand to his ear, then looked directly at Luke and Finn. Someone had just alerted him to their arrival. He stood up and walked in their direction.
‘Gentlemen,’ he greete
d them in a thick Israeli accent. Luke immediately noticed the covert earpiece in his right ear, and a tiny microphone clipped to the lapel of his suit.
Luke and Finn nodded at him.
‘I’ll need you to surrender your weapons while you’re in the building, gentlemen.’
They’d left their 53s in the Land Cruiser, but were still carrying their Sigs, and as far as Luke was concerned, it was going to stay that way. ‘Sorry, buddy,’ he told him. ‘No can do.’ He gave the Israeli intelligence officer a flat stare and there were a few seconds of impasse. The officer turned and walked about ten metres away from them, and Luke could see him talking quietly into his mike. A minute later he returned, an unfriendly look on his face.
‘All right,’ he told them. ‘Follow me.’
He led them behind the reception counter where two lifts were already waiting at the ground floor. The three men stepped inside the left-hand one, the Israeli pressed the button for the twenty-third floor and the doors hissed shut.
‘He’s a handful, your man,’ he commented as the lift lurched upwards.
‘Not my man, buddy,’ Luke replied.
‘Are you taking him into Gaza?’
Luke said nothing.
‘Rather you than me.’
But Luke wasn’t in the mood for small talk. The lift came to a halt, the doors opened and the men filed out.
It was clear which suite was Stratton’s: it was at the far end of the corridor, manned by another two guards in pale khaki uniforms. A lot of muscle for a peace envoy, Luke thought to himself as they approached. A nod from the Israeli intelligence man and one of the guards knocked on the door.
‘Come,’ a voice called from inside. The guard opened the door. Luke and Finn exchanged a look, then the three men walked inside.
As he entered the room, Luke squinted. The far wall was a floor-to-ceiling window, looking out over the Mediterranean, where the early morning sun was by now blindingly bright. A figure was standing with his back to the window, silhouetted by the sun, so it was impossible to see his face or even the full shape of his body. But Luke knew who it had to be and his skin prickled.
