by Chris Ryan
‘Go!’ Luke roared at Stratton over the deafening noise. He kept his 53 aimed towards the skylight.
Stratton didn’t move. He was looking from the chopper to Luke as if he couldn’t decide what best to do.
‘GO!’ Luke pushed Stratton in the direction of the aircraft door. The crew member grabbed Stratton by the arm and pulled him into the helicopter. Luke followed, throwing himself into the hard, metallic interior of the chopper. The instant he was on board, the Puma lifted off the roof with a lurch. Luke looked back out of the opening to see the bloodied bodies he’d nailed on the roof below; as they grew higher, he could see the remnants of the mob still rioting in the street; and for a brief moment he saw the Land Cruiser.
The image of Fozzie’s blood spattering over the inside of the vehicle replayed itself in Luke’s mind; he remembered the way Finn’s body had twitched and jolted, and the sickening thud of AK rounds slamming into Russ. It went against every one of Luke’s Regiment instincts to leave the bodies of his mates down there on enemy territory, but he knew he’d had no other option.
And so far as he could tell, all this had happened because of one man.
He turned and saw Stratton huddled on the floor of the Puma, a dark frown on his face. Luke felt as if some other force was controlling his body. He threw himself at the older man and whacked him with a heavy fist. Stratton was like a rag doll. He didn’t even try to resist as Luke laid into him; and by the time two of the aircrew had pulled him away, he’d managed to thump his fist three times against the former PM’s face, hearing the nose joint crack each time and seeing blood smear over the lower part of the guy’s face.
Luke didn’t struggle as he was restrained. He knew there was no point. His squadron comrades were holding him and shouting something at him, but he didn’t even register what it was. Just white noise. Interference in his head. He slumped on to the floor of the Puma, suddenly exhausted, his mind ablaze.
His stomach churned.
It wasn’t the bloodshed that made him feel nauseous.
It wasn’t even the brutal and sudden death of his mates.
It was Stratton.
It wasn’t over yet. Alistair Stratton. Maya Bloom. The Grosvenor Group. Together they’d caused death on an unimaginable scale. And from what Stratton had said, there was more to come . . .
He felt the man’s eyes on him and he looked across the body of the Puma to see a battered face staring at him, blood streaming from his badly broken nose.
To the end there shall be war.
Stratton’s voice rang in Luke’s head as the fields and rooftops of Gaza slipped away underneath him and the aircraft sped out of Hamas territory, back over the border into Israel.
TWENTY-SIX
15.00 hrs.
There was a queue outside the security gates leading to the Western Wall, but not as long as usual. Ordinarily there would be swarms of tourists in this part of Jerusalem, waiting patiently to gain access to the ancient site. Not today. Even if the governments of the West hadn’t issued travel warnings, the mobilisation of troops in the area would have put people off. Not to mention the increased activity in Israeli airspace, and the military presence that was high, even for Jerusalem. There were some visitors to the city, with their cameras and baseball caps and rucksacks, but nothing like the usual number.
A young man who had just joined the queue to clear security before approaching the wall counted twenty people ahead of him, all men as the women were obliged to use an adjacent entrance. Eight of these men were dressed in traditional clothes: black suits, white shirts and wide-brimmed black hats. The remainder had their heads covered with skullcaps or ordinary hats. They were not tourists; they were here to pray at their holy site and they knew the regulations. The young man knew the regulations too. He had been coming here every day for the past two weeks, though before that he wouldn’t have been seen dead in such a place. His skin was perhaps slightly darker than the others’, but not so dark that he looked out of place in a traditional Hassidic suit. As the queue moved, he shuffled patiently along. And by the time he reached the security gate he had already recognised one of the guards from his regular visits. He nodded in greeting at the soldier, dressed in his olive uniform and with an M16 slung across his front. The guard nodded back and handed him a small tray.
The young man put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a bunch of keys and a handful of coins – a mixture of one-, two- and five-shekel pieces. He dumped these metallic objects in the tray, before passing through the airport-style metal detector. It made no sound. With another nod to the guard, he recouped his keys and his loose change, returned them to his pocket and continued on his way.
A flight of stone steps led down to the Western Wall plaza – a large, flagstoned square about seventy-five metres square, populated this morning by about a hundred people, twenty or thirty of whom were close to the wall, facing it and praying. The young man ignored all these people, as he always did, and headed straight for the far corner of the plaza, which adjoined the left-hand side of the wall. There he passed through a small archway to find himself in a room that gave access to Jerusalem’s ancient tunnels. There were more men in here, praying against the covered section of the Western Wall, which continued along to his right. Beyond them, a passageway led straight on. They paid him no attention as he continued in this direction.
The Western Wall tunnel, he knew, extended about 400 metres – well into the Muslim Quarter of the city. He wouldn’t go that far. He shuffled along, with the ancient stones of the wall to his right atmospherically lit by yellow lamps embedded in the floor, past the occasional visitor looking up at the wall and at the information plaques that explained its history. But he wasn’t interested in history. His mind was firmly on the future.
After about a hundred metres, he arrived at his destination. In the wall to the left there was a metal grille, about a metre square, its bars creating gaps roughly ten centimetres by fifteen. Beyond the grille it was dark, and the air around it was slightly colder. It was impossible to see how far back or down the space extended, but he knew it was enough for his purposes. The young man looked around to check nobody was watching. The immediate vicinity was deserted.
From the inside pocket of his jacket he pulled a resealable transparent plastic freezer bag with a thirty-centimetre length of fishing line attached to it. He removed the coins from his pocket and placed them in the bag, which he sealed and – checking once more that nobody was watching – pushed through one of the lowest row of holes in the grille. He kept hold of the fishing line as the bag dropped below floor level, before tying the other end securely round one of the vertical bars.
He knew that anyone looking very closely would see that there were eleven other bits of fishing line attached to the bottom of the grille. Further investigation would reveal that each line suspended a similar bag of coins. But as he stood up, he felt quite sure that nobody would notice this little cache. The coins were safe. They could wait there until they were needed.
Which wouldn’t be long, he thought to himself, as he shuffled out of the tunnel, back into the plaza and away from the Western Wall. Five minutes later he was walking around the Old Town, back towards East Jerusalem, his job complete.
For now.
The Regiment ops room back at the Israeli military base had been emptied, the entire squadron confined to quarters.
The Puma had touched down three and a half hours ago, but that meant nothing to Luke. He was suffering from a kind of numbness. As he’d been escorted off the Puma by the flight crew, he’d been only half aware of the Foreign Office reps who had crowded round Alistair Stratton. Luke had barely registered the looks of incredulity that the Ruperts had given him when the flight crew explained how he’d laid into Stratton on the chopper, breaking his nose; and he’d been entirely submissive as he was escorted to a holding area on the edge of the Regiment’s operations base.
It was a small room with nothing but a wooden chair in it. Luke hadn’t
bothered opening the door to check whether it was guarded. Of course it was fucking guarded. He’d collapsed into a corner and closed his eyes. He could just hear Stratton’s voice; just imagine what bullshit he was saying about what had occurred on the ground.
Time slowed down. Luke felt like he’d relived a thousand times the moment the RPG hit the Land Cruiser. But, sickening though the memory was, it was not nearly so sickening as the thought of Stratton’s rantings. In his head he replayed the desperate conversation on the Gazan rooftop. He remembered someone telling him once that psychopaths were often to be found in the corridors of power, but it was more than that. He’d been quoting the fucking Bible at Luke, at least that was what it had sounded like – the sort of shit you’d expect from some nutter with a sandwich board walking down Oxford Street predicting the end of the world.
To the end there shall be war.
The memory of Stratton’s words chilled him, but he couldn’t get the bastard out of his head.
The Book of Daniel. It tells us it is here that the End Times will start.
Was he really saying that? Was he really saying that the end of the world was coming and that he had something to do with it? Had he really tipped over the edge into genuine insanity?
But then Luke recalled the few moments he’d spent that morning looking at his ops officer’s laptop. The US naval fleet advancing across the Med; the coalition forces grouping in the plains of northern Israel; troop movement along the Iranian border; even Yemen was mobilising. When it came to orchestrating wars, Stratton had form. Just look at Iraq. And so far as Luke could tell, he was orchestrating this one like a fucking maestro, with Maya Bloom – ruthless and without pity – as his accomplice. If Stratton wanted the world to burn, all it needed was a spark. And if everything Luke had heard was right, that spark would be lit in Jerusalem.
Hanukkah. The first day of the celebrations. One hour before midday.
He thought back to the briefing they’d had at Hereford. The ops officer had mentioned Hanukkah. What had he said? Three days from now. Luke did the maths. The first day of Hanukkah was tomorrow. And at 11.00 hrs something big would be going down . . .
Nobody would believe him, of course. Not once Stratton had filled everyone’s ears with shit. Nobody would believe a simple Regiment sergeant over the former Prime Minister. Which narrowed his options. He had to get to Jerusalem. Catch up with Stratton. Catch up with Maya Bloom. Stop them, somehow . . .
17.00 hrs. The guards who burst into the holding area and took him to the ops room were less than gentle. There were just two people in there: B Squadron’s ops officer, O’Donoghue, and the OC, Dawson. They were standing in front of O’Donoghue’s laptop as Luke entered.
‘You –’ the ops officer indicated the guards ‘– out. You –’ he pointed at Luke ‘– here.’
The guards left quickly and Luke approached the computer. The three men were silent while a piece of black and white camera footage played on the screen. There was no sound. At the bottom right-hand corner was a time code, and the footage had clearly been taken by the camera of the Apache that had chaperoned the Puma towards Luke and Stratton’s position on the rooftop in Gaza City. Although the helicopter was moving quickly, its height gave the impression that the city was slipping away slowly underneath. After a minute or so, however, it started to descend. The rooftops became sharper and twenty seconds later the camera was focusing in from a distance on one in particular.
At first it was difficult to make out what was happening, but it took only a few more seconds to become clear. A man was face down on the roof. A second figure had his knee pressed into the man’s back, and a weapon pointing directly at his head.
O’Donoghue turned to Luke, his face a mixture of fury and astonishment. ‘What in the name of . . . ?’ He was so angry he couldn’t even finish the question. ‘Jesus!’ he spat finally, shaking his head. ‘We’d better hope this never gets into the wrong hands. It would be the fucking money shot for Wikileaks.’
‘It’s not what it looks like,’ Luke muttered.
‘Really? So what were you doing there? Offering to clean the fucking wax out of his ears with an HK53? Christ, Luke, Stratton’s on the warpath.’
‘You can say that again.’
The ops officer ignored the comment. ‘He says you lost it on the ground. Says you opened up on a crowd of locals and that’s why I’ve got three dead men on my hands and God knows how many Palestinians. Have you got any fucking idea what a shit storm this is going to cause? Stratton says . . .’
‘I don’t give a toss what Stratton says.’ Luke’s outburst silenced the ops officer immediately. ‘He was going nuts out there.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Totally nuts. He was spouting scripture at me . . .’
‘I’m not fucking surprised, Luke. He was in the middle of a riot and you were sticking a weapon to his head. He probably was praying . . .’
‘How long have you known me, boss? Do you really think I lost it down there? Do you really think I put the lives of my unit at risk? Do you really think that?’
‘What I really want you to do, Luke, is explain why I’ve just been looking at footage that shows you . . .’
Suddenly the door burst open. A short, tanned man around sixty, with thick white hair, an expensive but crumpled suit and bags under his eyes, stormed in.
‘Who the fuck is he?’ O’Donoghue demanded of Julian Dawson.
‘I,’ the man said, ‘am the British ambassador to Tel Aviv. You’ – he waved his right hand at the three men in general – ‘are in ten tons of shit.’ He looked from one to the other before his eyes settled on Luke. ‘Is this the man? I want him transferred to Tel Aviv. There’s a high-security unit there with an SIS presence. We need to make sure nobody can look back on our decisions and say we . . .’
‘He’s not going anywhere.’ The ops officer’s voice was firm.
A pause.
‘I hardly need to remind you,’ the ambassador said, dangerously quietly, ‘that I am the representative of Her Majesty’s . . .’
‘He’s under my command. He’s not going anywhere.’
‘Don’t be a bloody idiot . . .’
O’Donoghue had turned away from the ambassador in mid-sentence. He walked up to Luke and stared at him for a full thirty seconds. He looked like he was deciding on the best course of action.
At last he spoke. And if Luke had been encouraged by the way he’d stood up for him in front of the ambassador, now was the time to change his mind. O’Donoghue sounded fucking livid. ‘I don’t know what the hell you were thinking of, Luke,’ he said. ‘Frankly, there hasn’t been a fuck-up like this since Libya. I’m putting you in solitary.’
‘Boss, you’ve got to . . .’
‘Forget it, Luke. I haven’t got a choice. Wait here.’
The ops officer marched out of the room, leaving Luke alone with the OC and the ambassador. ‘This isn’t the end of it,’ the ambassador announced. ‘I won’t be steamrollered like this.’
Dawson ignored him. All his attention was on Luke and the look he gave him was bitter. The look of an officer who’d just lost men and was taking it hard. ‘Hope you didn’t have anything planned for the next ten years, Mercer,’ he muttered. ‘You’re doing time for this.’
Luke didn’t reply. There was no point, not with the footage from the Apache.
He eyed the door. His 53 had been taken off him while he was in the Puma, but his Sig was still strapped to his ankle. That at least was something.
At that moment O’Donoghue returned, along with four members of B Squadron that Luke recognised but didn’t know well. It only took one glance at them to realise word had spread that Luke had lost it – that everyone in that room thought they had a madman in their midst.
‘On your feet, Mercer,’ Dawson instructed, before turning to the four Regiment men. ‘Get him out of my sight.’
One of the guys – a short man who had shaved his head to hide his encroachin
g baldness – stepped forward. ‘I’ll need your weapon,’ he said.
Luke cursed inwardly. He looked towards Dawson. ‘Boss, I . . .’
‘Do it,’ the OC told him, like a stern schoolmaster with an unruly kid.
A pause. ‘Right, boss,’ Luke said quietly.
He bent down to loosen the disco gun in its ankle holster. And as he did so, he checked out each of the other men in the room. Only the four new arrivals were armed, but their rifles were slung casually across their fronts – clearly no one expected to be using them. Two guys were standing by the door; the other two were about five metres from Luke’s position. Closest to him were Dawson and O’Donoghue – who were behind a desk – and the ambassador, who stood just a couple of metres from Luke, surveying the situation with a bleak expression.
‘Get a move on, Mercer,’ Dawson said impatiently.
‘Yes, boss,’ he murmured. He removed the gun.
Luke knew he had to move hard and fast. The ambassador might have been a soft target, but the other men in the room were as highly trained as he was and just as strong. What they didn’t have, though, was the element of surprise.
He did it all in a single movement: pulling the gun from the holster, stepping towards the ambassador, hooking his left arm around the man’s neck and pressing the handgun against the side of his head. The ambassador breathed in sharply and Luke could feel his body suddenly shaking.
