Killing for the Company

by Chris Ryan

  Luke kept his head down as he skirted east round the city walls. In just a couple of minutes he arrived at another gate. His mental map told him that this was the Dung Gate, the closest access point to the wall. It formed a lower entrance than the Zion Gate – about three metres – but at five metres was a little wider. To its left was an olive tree; to its right, three palms. There were no bullet marks here. But more people were walking in and out. Cars. Pedestrians. It was late, but still busy.

  He stood for a moment and stared at the gate. If he was right, any bomber heading for the Western Wall would be likely to pass through here.

  If he was right.

  From somewhere nearby, the smell of cooking food reached his nose. A couple of old men passed him, speaking loudly and clearly arguing. A kid went by with a pile of postcards that concertinaed out into a long strip.

  Just ordinary life and it made him pause. He remembered the way his Regiment colleagues had looked at him back at the base. Like he’d lost it. Luke closed his eyes for a moment. He couldn’t be imagining all this, could he? He couldn’t be mad? Was he on the wrong track? About Stratton? About the bombers?

  But then he remembered Chet and Suze and the troops mobilising around the Middle East. He remembered the ruthlessness of Maya Bloom and the madness in Stratton’s eyes.

  A church bell rang somewhere in the distance. He counted the chimes. They were sombre. Stately. Twelve of them.

  Midnight.

  Hanukkah had arrived. In eleven hours, he would know.

  In the meantime, he couldn’t loiter here. With the military presence so high he’d soon be observed. But he needed to set up surveillance on the Dung Gate, and quickly.

  And that meant finding a workable OP.

  TWENTY-NINE

  10 December.

  07.00 hrs.

  On the eastern outskirts of Tel Aviv, in a well-to-do suburb where the roads were gated and the houses large, the previous evening’s storm was just an unpleasant memory. The sky was clear and crisp, and a white bus was waiting outside the Scheiber Elementary School for Girls, its engine running. The front door of the bus was open and a pretty young woman with dark, curly hair and almond eyes stood just next to it with a clipboard in her hand. On the pavement in front of her was a well-behaved line of little ladies, all aged either seven or eight. They wore home clothes, and little backpacks over their shoulders which contained lunches that would no doubt be eaten before they’d gone a few kilometres.

  Today was a holiday, of course. The first day of the Festival of Lights. The teachers were glad to sacrifice one of their precious holiday days to give the girls the chance to travel to Jerusalem, to see the celebrations in that holy place for themselves. A visit to the Western Wall and then back to their families, to light the first of the eight candles of Hanukkah, eat a special meal and sing festive songs. No wonder they’d all looked excited as they said goodbye to their mums before joining their schoolmates in the queue and filing into the bus. There were thirty-five girls in all, with four teachers to look after them. Miss Leibovitz ticked each child’s name on her clipboard as they boarded the bus and then, when she was sure everybody was there, she climbed up into the long vehicle herself.

  The driver was a man in his forties with a small paunch and an open-necked shirt. He pressed a button and the door closed.

  ‘All ready?’ he asked above the children’s babble.

  ‘All ready,’ the teacher replied with a smile. And as she strapped herself into her seat at the front – her three female colleagues having already installed themselves among the party – the bus moved off.

  ‘How long till we get there, Miss Leibovitz?’ a voice asked from behind her.

  She looked round to see the face of one of her favourites – an earnest little girl called Natasha, who wore red ribbons in her beautifully plaited pigtails.

  ‘Two hours, Natasha darling. Just two hours. We’ll be there before you know it.’

  Natasha smiled, then sat back down in her seat and gazed out of the window just as they passed a green sign with a white arrow and a single word in Hebrew.

  , it read.

  Jerusalem.

  Jerusalem.

  A city divided. A Jewish Quarter. A Christian Quarter. An Islamic Quarter. An Armenian Quarter. A place for everyone and no one.

  And then there was East Jerusalem. Occupied by the Arabs and governed by the Palestinian Authority. Adjoining the Old Town and the West Bank, a symbol of the city’s warlike past and fractured present.

  It was in East Jerusalem that four people found themselves now, in the basement of a poor and unassuming house. Three men, one woman. The men were naked apart from their underpants; the woman had covered herself with a long white T-shirt that did little to hide the swelling of her five-month-pregnant belly. Their semi-nakedness didn’t embarrass them. They had more important things to think of.

  A single, bare bulb hung from a ceiling which bowed under the weight of the building above; and beneath the bulb, a table. They stood in silence, staring at the table’s contents.

  There was a kitchen rolling pin, a roll of heavy-duty electrical tape and next to it a wooden box, its lid beside it. Inside the box were tightly packed blocks of what looked like brown modelling clay.

  One of the men stepped forward. He was just seventeen. But he had been waiting for this moment for as long as he could remember. Certainly since he was a boy, playing war games with decommissioned rifles on the streets of Gaza City. He gingerly removed a block – ten centimetres by ten centimetres by five centimetres – from the box and laid it on the table. He was breathing heavily as he picked up the rolling pin and he closed his eyes when he pushed it down on to the block of C4 plastic explosive. He didn’t fear an explosion – none of them did – but they wanted it to occur at the right place and the right time.

  As the young man continued to roll out the explosive, it became more malleable, until eventually he had a sheet just a couple of millimetres thick and the size of a piece of A4 paper. He carefully picked it up, then turned and nodded to one of his male companions before pressing the C4 against his torso. His companion took the tape, removed a long piece and stuck the explosive to the young man’s skin, repeating this another three times for each edge of the sheet.

  Ten minutes later the young man had a second sheet taped to his back, with the two sheets joined by a flat strip of the explosive, and a second strip running down the inside of his right arm. He moved to the other end of the room, where some clothes were hanging. First he put on a white cotton vest which had a pouch sewn into the front. After that, a white shirt, then black trousers, black jacket, a wide-brimmed black hat and black slip-on shoes. His companion then picked up a black electrical wire and pipe detector of the kind that could be bought in any hardware store. He switched it on and carefully brushed it up and down the young man’s body to check nothing caused it to beep.

  Nothing did.

  He put the detector down on the table, nodded at his friend and started to frisk him like an airport security guard. He paid special attention to the torso, back and right arm, but came away clearly satisfied that the sheets of explosive were contoured so closely to the young man’s body as to be undetectable.

  The young man stepped back. He knew he was wearing enough plastic explosive to take many people with him. Without a detonator to deliver a charge, however, the C4 was inert and useless. There were no detonators in the room and he didn’t know how they’d be supplied. Or where. Or when. He’d find out soon enough, though. They all would. In the meantime, the other two men and the pregnant woman needed to undergo the same process. They did so in solemn silence, in the full and certain knowledge that soon they would be four walking weapons. Unrecognisable. Untraceable.

  And, inshallah, unstoppable.

  08.00 hrs.

  Luke’s OP was far from perfect, but it was his only real option.

  He’d been here since just after midnight, staking out the Dung Gate from the top of a thre
e-storey concrete building on the other side of the perimeter road and approximately 100 metres from the gate itself. The building was a detached office block. On approaching it he’d peered into the main entrance – a pair of wide, smoked-glass doors that looked into a bland reception area with a shiny tiled floor and pot plants. A security guy sat at a desk in front of a bank of CCTVs, but he was listening to an iPod and his nose was in a book. Luke hadn’t entered the building, but skirted round the back to where there was a parking lot and a line of empty metal bins. More doors, too, all locked. But Luke saw that a metal ladder was fixed to the back of the building and ran all the way up to the roof. It echoed as he climbed up it.

  The rooftop, was about twenty metres square, and it suited his purposes well enough. The perimeter of the roof was surrounded by walls a couple of metres high. The roof itself, sealed with pitch, was covered with bird shit, and in the centre there was a glass skylight measuring about two metres each way. On the western side of the roof was a small corrugated-iron hut, similar in size to the one he’d taken cover behind in Gaza City. A quick examination told him that it contained the guts of the building’s power supply.

  He’d taken up position on the northern edge of the roof. His first move was to wolf down the two MREs in his stolen Bergen – kosher meals of beef and pasta that tasted like shit but at least replaced some calories. The energy and warmth were sapping from his body and he needed all the help he could get to stay alert.

  Once he’d eaten he removed the scope and the Sig from his bag and staked out the view in front of him, lying on his front with the handgun by his side. From here he could see right across the rooftops of the Old Town and, beyond, the lights of the rest of Jerusalem. His angle of view allowed him to see over the top of the perimeter wall and further to the entrance gates of the Western Wall plaza; and of course the golden cupola of the Dome of the Rock, glowing in the darkness.

  To the left of the gate itself he could see the olive tree; to the right, the three palms and a souvenir stall that had closed down for the night. Even though it was late, there were still people walking in and out of the gate and the perimeter road was reasonably busy.

  Also busy was the airspace. He counted four helicopters hovering over Jerusalem with searchlights angled down at the ground. Training his scope on one of them, he could make out the outline of a Minigun. If ever there was a city on high alert, this was it. He knew that if any of these choppers flew over his position and spotted him, he’d be fucked. But they didn’t come closer than about 200 metres.

  It grew light just after 06.00 hrs. By 07.00 the traffic on the perimeter road was heavy – civilian vehicles, police cars, the occasional tourist bus – and there were more pedestrians. Luke trained his scope on individual faces, committing every minute detail of the scene below to memory. He clocked a military Jeep driving past the gate. Exactly eighteen minutes later it passed again. And eighteen minutes after that. It was clearly doing a circuit and Luke would have bet his bollocks it wasn’t the only one. With the troop mobilisation occurring in the north-western part of Israel and the eyes of the world on this troubled city, Luke didn’t doubt that every soldier and every policeman was on standby.

  As was Luke. He didn’t take his eyes off the area between himself and the Old Town. And even though he didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, he knew he had to trust his judgement.

  Trust his surveillance skills.

  Trust that he’d made the right call, and that whatever was about to happen, he’d know it when he saw it.

  08.59 hrs.

  The queue to pass through security into the Western Wall plaza had been growing steadily since first light. Reuben Sharon, a nineteen-year-old IDF recruit, had been here since 06.00 hrs and if he looked pissed off, it was because he was. Not only was he working on Hanukkah, but he had the shittiest job imaginable: watching the crowds flock through security into the plaza for a full eight-hour shift. Like this was what he joined the army to do . . .

  So far, most of the visitors had been old-timer Hassidim. Fucking weirdos as far as he was concerned, with their strange clothes and their constant worshipping and lamenting. Some of these guys turned up at the Western Wall twice a day to mutter at the stones. Reuben didn’t get it. Any free time he had was spent chasing tail in the bars of downtown Jerusalem. Then again, he wondered how much pussy worth having was one of these misugena likely to get, dressed like that?

  As that thought went through his mind, there was a sudden beeping of the metal detector. The young Hassid stopped and his eyes flickered towards Reuben’s M16 as the soldier immediately stepped in his way. He jerked a finger to indicate that the visitor should step to one side.

  ‘Arms outstretched,’ he ordered. He didn’t really feel much pressure to be polite.

  The visitor did as he was told. He looked straight ahead as Reuben brushed a hand-held detector up and down his arms, legs, torso and back. And he stood as still as the stones that made up the Western Wall as the soldier put down the detector and started frisking him with his hands. Fuck, Reuben thought as he padded down the guy’s body. He was bonier than a Gazan orphan. Hung like a horse, though, he realised as his hands strayed too far up the inside trouser leg. Shame he wasn’t likely to get a shag.

  ‘All right,’ he said once he was satisfied the visitor was clear. ‘On you go.’

  It was another five minutes before the alarm went off again. The guy who triggered it couldn’t have been more different to the last. He was also young, younger maybe than Reuben. His features were Arabic, but unlike most of the Muslims normally to be seen around the Temple Mount, this guy didn’t look the type to hang around the mosque. His hair was cut short and he had a good couple of days’ worth of stubble. He wore baggy jeans and a hooded top with earphones resting round his neck. As he chewed on a piece of gum, he looked arrogantly at Reuben, who was now barring his way.

  Reuben didn’t let his feelings show, but they were strong. The Western Wall plaza was open to anyone, regardless of their religion – Jewish, Christian, Muslim. And though Reuben was hardly devout, he certainly had his opinions.

  He pointed at the long table where he kept the detector.

  ‘Hands on the table,’ he instructed.

  The youngster gave him a lazy look filled with contempt. For a few seconds he didn’t do anything, but then he shrugged, moved over to the table and bent over slightly so that his hands were flat down on it.

  ‘Legs apart,’ Reuben told him.

  Another pause. Then, making an obvious meal of it, the kid moved each leg in turn a few inches outwards.

  Reuben was meticulous with the detector, scanning every square centimetre of the kid’s body. It didn’t take long for the device to start beeping.

  ‘What have you got in your pocket?’ he demanded.

  Very slowly, the kid stood up straight and turned round. He didn’t take his eyes off Reuben and as he slowly put his fist underneath his hooded jumper, the soldier moved his own hands to his assault rifle, ready to use it.

  ‘What’s going on?’ the next person in the queue called. ‘There’s people waiting here . . .’

  Reuben ignored the complaint and watched carefully as the kid removed his hand. He didn’t quite know what he expected to see; in the event, the object was a relief. A mobile phone, connected to the kid’s earphones.

  ‘Give it here,’ Reuben said. He was being awkward and the kid knew it; he rolled his eyes as he pulled out the jack and handed over the phone.

  Reuben made a great show of examining the device. It looked brand new, with no scuffs on the shiny black back or the screen. There was, however, something that caught Reuben’s sharp eye. Along the left-hand edge of the phone, there was a tiny indentation, as if the device had been forced open with a small screwdriver or tampered with in some other way.

  Reuben looked more carefully at the phone, then back at the kid, whose arrogant expression hadn’t changed.

  ‘Get a move on!’ A few other muttered voic
es echoed the next visitor’s impatience.

  With a sigh, Reuben handed the phone back. ‘No mobile phone usage on feast days,’ he grunted before turning back to the queue and waving the next visitor through. He did see, from the corner of his eye, the kid’s sarcastic little nod, but he chose not to respond. It was too early for arguments, the queue was increasing in size, and he had a long day ahead.

  Miss Leibovitz was flustered.

  The journey from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was taking much longer than they had expected. One of the girls in the back of the bus had puked, which had delayed them for half an hour. And then, on the main road between the two cities, they had hit a temporary roadblock. Two armed soldiers had entered the bus and walked up and down the aisle, their weapons on display. It was not the first time any of these children had seen men with guns, of course. But really, the teacher wondered to herself, was it necessary for them to perform this ridiculous charade? It was only a busload of kids on a day out. She had followed them up the aisle, saying so. The soldiers had been stern and silent. They were going to do their job, no matter what.

  Already it was ten o’clock and they were only just approaching the outskirts of Jerusalem. Miss Leibovitz leaned forwards in her seat and asked the driver, ‘How much longer now, do you think?’

  The driver was a lot less jolly now than when they’d set off. ‘Depends if any of your girls are going to be sick in the back of my bus again.’

  ‘I’m sure they’ll be fine,’ Miss Leibovitz replied quietly.

  The driver said nothing more. He just kept his eye on the road as they made their way into Jerusalem.