by Chris Ryan
He lowered the scope, returned to the 4 x 4 and reported his finding.
‘Nothing like a warm welcome,’ Finn muttered as they disembarked from the vehicle, 53s slung round their necks.
‘I’d rather have a potato gun than a Blowpipe,’ said Fozzie.
Luke wasn’t so sure. The Blowpipe might be old, but because it was neither heat-seeking nor laser-guided, it wasn’t susceptible to modern countermeasures. The chances of the raghead on the other side of the fence bringing down the heli if it infringed Hamas airspace were small. But he might get lucky and no doubt there were plenty more of his type waiting to do the mopping up should the first line of Palestinian defence fail. He remembered someone telling him once that the Muj in Afghanistan had taken to using them not as anti-aircraft weapons, but anti-vehicle. It wasn’t lost on him that they’d soon be driving within its range.
The chopper was the only thing that made a noise out here. Otherwise this crossing was silent. Like the personnel on both sides of the border were holding their breath. Luke opened the back door of the Merc and leaned in to look at Stratton. ‘We’ll transfer you to the Land Cruiser now, sir,’ he said.
Stratton didn’t answer for a moment. He was staring out of the other window, lost in thought. Suddenly he snapped out of it.
‘What?’
‘Get out. It’s time to cross.’
Stratton nodded and shuffled awkwardly along the back seat of the Merc. Once he was out of the car, he looked around, but Luke immediately grabbed him by the right arm and manoeuvred him towards the armoured vehicle. Stratton looked like he was going to protest, but a harsh glance from Luke ensured he kept quiet.
As Luke was leading Stratton into the back of the Land Cruiser, one of the Israeli military guys approached. He had a shaved head, tanned skin and deep, dark bags under his eyes. ‘You ready?’ he asked.
Luke nodded.
The man pointed to the chopper. ‘The pilot’s reported some kind of presence on the other side of the buffer zone. Three vehicles. Armed. Be careful over there.’
Luke looked over at the anti-aircraft gunner on the other side. ‘Seems pretty tense,’ he said.
The soldier shrugged. ‘Half the citizens of Gaza would be happy to live side by side with us. Same goes for the Israelis. But it’s not the moderate ones you have to worry about. It’s the extremists, and there’s plenty of those. And those Hamas mamzer. Wouldn’t surprise me if they tried to pick you off the moment you get over there.’
‘They’re welcome to try,’ Luke said.
The soldier inclined his head. ‘Rather you than me, my friend. I’ll instruct my men to open our barrier. Once you go through that, you’re on your own.’
He turned on his heel and headed back towards the terminal buildings. Luke climbed into the back of the Land Cruiser with the rest of the unit. Stratton was sitting in the middle, eyeing the Regiment men’s weapons nervously. ‘I hope those things are safe,’ he said.
Luke scowled at the stupid question. ‘Depends which end’s pointing at you,’ he muttered. He caught sight of Fozzie in the rear-view mirror. ‘They’re opening up the barrier,’ he said, before activating his sat phone. ‘Zero, this is Tango 17.’
‘Go ahead, Tango 17. Send.’
‘We have the Cardinal on board. Crossing the border in figures two.’
‘Roger that, Tango 17. We have your position marked.’ A crackly pause. ‘It’s hotting up in the capital, Luke. Reports coming in of militants taking to the streets. Don’t come home in a box, yeah?’
Luke took a big breath and his eyes flickered towards Stratton.
‘Roger that, Zero.’ He disconnected the sat phone and nodded at Fozzie. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.
Fozzie drove the Land Cruiser slowly. The barrier, when they came to it, was a sheet of solid steel. It took two armed IDF men to slide it to one side before waving the Regiment unit through. Russ, Finn and Luke adjusted the position of their weapons so they were facing towards the window. They couldn’t fire them from this position, of course – not through the bullet-resistant glass of their vehicle – but it meant that if the worst came to the worst, they could kick open the doors and their guns would be ready. With a bit of luck it wouldn’t get to that. Even the stupidest Palestinian squaddie would know that a high-value target like Stratton would only venture on to Gazan soil at a time like this with a special forces team. And a special forces team meant special force.
Beyond the barrier there was the buffer zone, a bare patch of no-man’s-land extending from the wire border fence to another, lower fence on the Gazan side. The zone was even more scarred by artillery fire than the Israeli territory they had just left, and the ground was littered with twisted pieces of shrapnel. The road across the buffer zone, such as it was, ended with another steel barrier. The Land Cruiser trundled towards it and, when it was about ten metres away, the barrier opened seemingly of its own accord, a gateway into Gazan territory.
The terrain beyond the barrier was as featureless as the Israeli side, the grey December sky and the dusty ground a mirror of each other. But the Land Cruiser was still five metres from Gazan soil. Luke saw that a very different welcome awaited them. A second technical, mounted with what looked like an old Russian DShK machine gun, stood directly in their path, the weapon pointing straight towards Stratton and the unit. Flanking it on either side were two Land Rovers, their doors open to protect a team of keffiyeh-wearing soldiers armed with assault rifles.
Fozzie ground the Land Cruiser to a halt and the vehicles faced each other.
For thirty seconds, nothing moved. It was silent in the Land Cruiser too, until Stratton spoke quietly. ‘They won’t fire,’ he said. ‘Not with me on board.’
‘Shut up,’ Luke told him. He saw Fozzie look at him in the rear-view mirror. ‘Sir,’ he added under his breath.
Stratton looked like he was going to respond, but at that very moment the technical started to reverse. It steered round the back of the left-hand Land Rover, leaving the road ahead clear.
‘Guess that means a green light,’ Fozzie said. He knocked the Land Cruiser into first gear and moved slowly through the barrier.
It hardly mattered that the vehicle was armoured. A burst from the DShK and a barrage of rounds from the assault rifle would be enough to make things difficult: a pitched battle on what was effectively enemy territory was exactly what they needed to avoid. So, as they approached their hostile receiving line, the tension among the men was palpable. They passed a jumble of corrugated-iron storage buildings and concrete watchtowers, many of them little more than piles of rubble, others plastered with graffiti. The Arabic lettering was meaningless to Luke, but he did notice a five-pointed star of David with a crude image of an assault rifle stamped on it. A picture telling a thousand words. On one side of the road was the burned-out shell of an old VW van, and beyond that a cargo lorry from which the wheels had been removed and whose chassis was rusting away.
They drove on in silence. As they passed the Land Rovers, they felt the eyes of the Palestinian gunmen. Once they’d cleared them, Stratton let out a huge breath.
‘Don’t start relaxing,’ Luke said, looking over his shoulder. He saw that the DShK on top of the technical had rotated like an anti-aircraft gunner and still had them in their sights. But Fozzie accelerated, and within two minutes the welcoming committee had faded into the distance.
The Gaza Strip was a tiny territory. It was about twelve klicks from the crossing to the centre of Gaza City, where they were headed. Difficult to say how long it would take, because it depended what they met up ahead. Anything between twenty minutes and an hour, Luke estimated. The road was about ten metres wide and had clearly once been in good condition. Now, though, the tarmac was crumbling and the way ahead was littered with potholes, forcing Fozzie to keep his speed down to about 30mph and to swerve now and then to avoid the dips in the road. The terrain on either side was flat and bland: fields of patchy grass and bare earth, the shell of an occasional building
long since deserted. The whole place was like a fucking ghost town.
‘Where is everyone?’ Russ asked after they’d been driving for another minute or so. It was a good question. The road was strangely deserted for a main thoroughfare – the shortest route from the border to Gaza City, the outskirts of which were only a couple of miles away. Luke looked out of his window. On the side of the road, about ten metres from the edge, he saw the rotten carcass of an animal. A horse? Difficult to say. Its ribs were exposed, its skin was dried and shrivelled and its insides had at some point been plundered by a hungry scavenger.
A hundred metres further on they passed a little group of what were once buildings. They’d been destroyed by artillery fire, long enough ago for the rubble to be covered with hardy weeds. And as that ruined scene retreated, the view up ahead began to change as the bleak nothingness of their surroundings morphed into a rising sea of concrete buildings in the distance.
‘Gaza City,’ Russ said.
Nobody replied.
Fozzie had started to slow down. Fifty metres ahead there was a crossroad, and as they drew near it became clear why the road from the Karni crossing had been deserted. There were six military Jeeps here, and twice as many armed soldiers. Luke knew a roadblock when he saw one. Sometimes, in zones like this, they were unofficial, having been erected by enterprising locals attempting to make a buck. That didn’t appear to be the case here. One of the Jeeps had a green flag flying from its bonnet, with white Arabic writing; the vehicles themselves had green lettering on their sides; and two of the soldiers were standing by a radio set up on the bonnet of the other Jeep.
‘Hamas,’ Fozzie murmured when they were thirty metres distant. ‘Looks like they’ve been waiting for us.’
‘Is that good or bad?’ Finn asked.
‘I guess we’re going to find out.’
‘Stop the vehicle,’ said Luke. Fozzie hit the brakes fifteen metres between them and the roadblock. Luke activated his sat phone. ‘Zero, this is Tango 17.’
‘Tango 17, this is Zero. Send.’
‘We’ve got ourselves a roadblock. Looks official. Can you sort it?’
‘Wilco, Tango 17.’
The comms went dead.
Silence in the Land Cruiser as it sat motionless in the middle of the road. The soldiers up ahead looked at it warily. When a few of them exchanged words, they did so without taking their eyes off the Regiment’s vehicle. And while no one had their weapons pointing directly at them, the soldiers all had both hands on their assault rifles and looked like they knew what they were doing.
A minute passed.
Two minutes.
Suddenly Stratton, seemingly unable to restrain himself, snapped. ‘Just talk to them,’ he instructed. ‘It’s obvious they’ve been waiting for us. Just roll down the bloody window and talk to them.’
‘Nobody’s rolling down the windows,’ Luke said calmly. ‘They’re there for a reason.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Stratton snorted. ‘Nobody’s going to attack me . . .’
He cut himself off short as each of the four SAS men turned to look at him with cool expressions on their faces.
‘Nobody’s rolling down the windows,’ Luke repeated, and silence fell once more inside the 4 x 4.
They had to wait another three minutes for anything to happen. One of the radio operators up ahead started talking into his handset; moments later they saw him bark some kind of instruction to the others. A couple of them jumped up behind the wheels of two of the Jeeps and reversed them out of the way. The remainder continued to stare at the Land Cruiser. They made no indication that the Regiment unit was permitted to cross, but Fozzie didn’t wait for that. He moved the vehicle forward and through the roadblock. Luke could sense Stratton fuming. The guy clearly didn’t like being told what to do. Fine. As long as Luke was in charge of the safety of the men in this vehicle, Stratton could like it or fucking lump it.
Luke had seen his share of battlegrounds. He’d walked the deserted streets of Musa Qala and dodged sniper fire in Sangin. He’d been involved in pitched battles in Basra and seen the brutal effects of many wars in central and eastern Africa. Gaza City, he knew, wasn’t a war zone like Afghanistan. It wasn’t Darfur or Somalia. Every conflict, however, was different in its own way. Despite everything, Gaza still functioned as a state. But it was a state on the edge. Its people were poor. Many desperate. Even more were angry. As the Land Cruiser approached the capital, Luke felt he could taste the tension in the air.
The outskirts of Gaza City were a mishmash of tall apartment blocks, single-storey warehouses, the occasional mosque. Almost everything appeared to be built from concrete, or rendered in bland grey or yellow plaster that was cracking and falling away. Suddenly there were more vehicles too. Not many of them looked roadworthy, at least by British standards, and there were fewer than might have been expected for a city the size of Gaza. Even if the inhabitants could afford a car, petrol was hard to come by. There were rather more pedestrians – thin, ragged and with weather-beaten faces – than there were drivers.
The black Land Cruiser, with its tinted glass and shining chrome, attracted attention and Luke didn’t like that. A CAT team would normally take one of two options. They would either follow the principal in an unmarked vehicle – an old baker’s van or a utility truck, something that would merge into the background – if they didn’t want to be seen. If the situation required a more overt, threatening presence, the unmarked van would be replaced with a Jeep mounted with a .50-cal or a Gimpy – something to make people think twice about engaging them. But Hamas’s insistence that only a single vehicle could cross had chucked the SOPs out of the window. The Land Cruiser was an unsatisfactory halfway house and Luke felt that every Palestinian citizen they passed – most of them dressed in shabby Western-style clothing, though a few wore more traditional robes and headdresses – was staring at them with ill will.
Fozzie followed Russ’s directions and they continued to head north-west through this run-down suburb. They were now no more than four klicks from the Karni crossing and already they could see the effects of years of Israeli bombardment of the territory. More than half the buildings they passed bore scars of some sort – perhaps just a boarded-up window or a spray of bullet marks across the façade. Plenty, though, were reduced to a shell, or even to a pile of rubble and steel. One thing was clear: these crumbling structures on the outskirts were not administrative buildings or military targets; they were apartment blocks and people’s houses. As the Land Cruiser passed one of these demolished buildings, Luke saw a small makeshift tent, constructed from bleached canvas and metal poles bound together with string. The front side of the tent, about a metre wide and two metres high, was open to the road and it had been erected to house not people, but a large photograph of a man. Garlands of flowers were strewn around the photograph, but they were withered and dried out. It was plainly a shrine of some sort, there to commemorate a life lost when the building that had stood there was destroyed.
‘Two o’clock,’ Finn said suddenly, his voice tense. ‘Someone’s got eyes on.’ Luke looked in the direction his mate was indicating.
‘Got him.’
The man Finn had pointed out was on a street corner, standing by the grubby awning of a meat shop that had the carcasses of a few animals hanging in the window. His head was wrapped in a keffiyeh, and he made no attempt to hide the AK-47 that was slung across his front. He had a mobile phone pressed to his ear and he was clearly watching the Land Cruiser as it passed. An official pair of eyes, or something else? Impossible to say. The unit passed him in silence.
A couple of hundred metres on they drove by a building site where attempts had been made to reconstruct one of the bombed-out edifices. A single storey of grey breeze-blocks was completed, but it was clear from the faded Arabic lettering graffitied over the blocks, and from the broken pallets littered around the site, that no work had been done here for many months. A thin man sat on the pavement outside it. Spre
ad out in front of him were a few pairs of shoes and a couple of handbags. He had a rather hopeless demeanour, and behind him two kids were crouched, hugging their knees with their hands. It didn’t seem likely that this man would be selling much today. His eyes followed the Land Cruiser as it passed, just like everyone else’s.
The Regiment men’s faces were grim as they ventured deeper into the city. ‘What happens to the poor bastards who get bombed out of their homes?’ Fozzie asked out loud.
It was Stratton who answered. ‘There are a number of refugee camps dotted around the Strip,’ he said. ‘Two in Gaza City itself.’ He sounded matter-of-fact about it.
‘Nice,’ Fozzie muttered.
Stratton’s jaw was set.
‘If things go to shit today,’ Luke said quietly, ‘they might need a few more of those IDP camps.’
‘Absolutely,’ Stratton replied, a bit too quickly and with very little emotion.
‘Absolutely,’ he repeated, a little quieter this time.
‘You don’t sound very concerned?’
‘I’m very concerned,’ Stratton replied, still looking straight ahead. ‘I can assure you of that.’
It was a sudden thing. For a split second Luke was back in St Paul’s, listening to urgent warnings. A wild conspiracy theory that he would never have believed if it hadn’t been confirmed by the dull thud of four fatal rounds just a couple of minutes later. Now he was in Gaza City, war-torn and fucked up . . .
I’m very concerned. I can assure you of that.
The mist in Luke’s mind was starting to burn away.
Back in Jerusalem, Stratton had asked Maya Bloom if she wanted to be part of history. Quite what that meant, Luke couldn’t imagine. But Stratton was planning something. And whatever he was planning, one thing was suddenly clear to Luke.
This was part of it.
Don’t you see? Doesn’t anybody see? First the Balkans, then Iraq, now this . . . Stratton and the woman were planning some sort of terrorist atrocity in Jerusalem on Hanukkah. Sticking close to him wasn’t enough. Luke had to prevent him from reaching Hamas. He had to abort the mission.
