by Chris Ryan
‘It’s bandit country,’ he said.
‘I think we’ll need a little more to go on than that,’ Victoria said primly.
Buckingham inclined his head. ‘The intelligence we’ve . . . you’ve . . . gleaned from Al-Sikriti certainly makes sense,’ he said. ‘Yemen is by far the poorest country on the Arabian Peninsular, and a fertile training ground for Islamist militants – Al-Qaeda, historically, but in recent months Al-Shabaab groups have crossed over from Somalia, and their training camps have been appearing in remote areas to the north of the country – especially in the Sa’ada Governate. It’s a rigorously Islamic region, mostly of the Zaydi Shi’ite persuasion. Al-Qaeda and Al-Shabaab are Sunni, or course, but they’re attracted to this area because of its lawlessness. It’s quite out of the control of the Yemeni central government – almost like a breakaway state in many ways.’ Buckingham cleared his throat, then gathered his thoughts for a moment before continuing. ‘The Yemeni government makes all the right noises about stamping down on these camps, and have in the past liaised with the United States military as well as the Saudis to launch missile attacks on them. But they’re in a jolly difficult situation. These Islamist groups are well funded. They don’t just appeal to the religious sensibilities of their recruits, they pay them, which is something the Yemeni government simply can’t compete with. The government knows that if it removes this source of income from the very poorest parts of the population, it risks having an uprising on its hands.’
‘Typical Middle Eastern politics,’ Chamberlain butted in.
‘In fact,’ Buckingham said, ‘Yemen has more in common with Afghanistan than with its Arabic neighbours. Equally tribal, and the local elders often have more influence over their armed civilians than the government itself. The bottom line is that these training camps can turn up almost anywhere, often without the knowledge of the central government.’
‘We have people on the ground in Yemen, of course’ – Victoria took up the briefing – ‘as do our friends in Langley.’ She looked over at Maddox, who didn’t respond. ‘They’re putting the feelers out as we speak, trying to establish exactly where this training camp might be.’
‘Problem solved,’ Spud said with a shrug. He looked at Harrison Maddox. ‘You Yanks will have some drones in the area. Doesn’t sound like anything a couple of Hellfires won’t sort out.’
That thin-lipped look again from the spooks. A moment of silence. Danny could tell that they had a different strategy in mind.
‘Bloody important,’ Chamberlain said, ‘that Abu Ra’id gets what’s coming to him. Hard to be sure you’ve got the right fellow when you make an indiscriminate strike from the air. Could have nuked Abottabad at the drop of a hat, but who’d have been able to confirm we’d got Bin Laden?’ He chortled slightly, as though the idea of nuking an entire Pakistani city was an amusing one.
‘What I think Piers is trying to say,’ Harrison Maddox continued in his slow American drawl, ‘is that we need men on the ground to identify Abu Ra’id and eliminate him. It’s then up to the Yemeni administration whether they want to take out the whole training camp or not.’
Danny looked at each of the Hammerstone quartet in turn. They were staring implacably at him and Spud. He walked over to the window and looked out. The headlamps of the four cars were no longer burning, but the sky was a fraction lighter now. A steel grey.
‘You’ll need sixteen men,’ he said. ‘Minimum. And that’s assuming your intelligence guys can find out the exact location of the camp.’ He turned. ‘But I’m guessing that you haven’t dragged us here if you were thinking of a major operation like that.’
Another silence.
‘It’s out of the question,’ said Buckingham finally. ‘The footprint of this operation needs to be small. Instructions from on high.’
Danny walked up to him. ‘Oh yeah? Just who on high?’
Buckingham sniffed. He maintained steady eye contact with Danny. ‘Important people,’ he said.
Suddenly Chamberlain was there, standing between them. He gave Buckingham a warning look, then turned to Danny. ‘You’ll report to Heathrow at 08.00,’ he said, easily falling back into the role of a rupert issuing orders. ‘Both of you. There’ll be Regiment representatives there to brief you further.’
‘Just like that?’ Spud murmured.
Chamberlain gave a bland smile. ‘Happy landings, gentlemen. We’ve every faith in you.’ He looked over at the others. ‘England’s finest, eh? Couldn’t be in safer hands.’
If they were encouraged, the Hammerstone quartet didn’t show it as they exited the chilly room. Outside the house, Danny and Spud watched them wordlessly climb into the back of their chauffeur-driven vehicles, then file slowly down the driveway before turning out of sight.
‘Small footprint?’ Spud said. ‘Important people? You believe all that shit?’
Danny shook his head. ‘No,’ he said.
‘Maybe this is just what E squadron’s like.’
Maybe. But it wasn’t the first time he didn’t know the whole story. Wouldn’t be the last either. Occupational hazard. They had their orders, and unless they wanted to find themselves up in front of a military tribunal, they had to follow them.
‘Let’s go,’ Danny said, and together they climbed back into the Discovery and drove away.
08.00hrs
There were parts of Heathrow to which the public had access. There were parts for which only members of the aviation services were authorised. And there were parts that few people ever got to see. This Portakabin, a restricted area in the shadow of Terminal Two, was one of them. A white Transit van was parked up alongside it, next to which was Danny and Spud’s Discovery. A member of D squadron – Danny recognised the face but couldn’t put a name to it – stood at the entrance, his assault rifle slung across his body. He gave Danny and Spud a nod of greeting, but remained rooted to the spot. It wouldn’t do for any unauthorised personnel to enter this Portakabin, not least because its contents made a mockery of the security procedures thousands of holidaymakers were undergoing at that very moment.
Danny and Spud were there. So too was their ops officer Ray Hammond. He watched unsmilingly as the two Regiment men dealt with the hardware laid out on a table in front of them.
There were two rifles: HK416s. Danny and Spud stripped one of them down each, until each weapon was no more than a tight bundle of grey metal, wrapped in grey rags to stop the moving parts rubbing against each other. The guys each had a sturdy North Face holdall, about three foot in length. They each stowed their bundle and returned their attention to the rest of the gear. Their Regiment-issue Sig P266s were laid out – these too they wrapped up and stowed. Ammuntion for both weapons: 5.56s for the rifles, 9mm for the handguns, neatly packed in small cardboard boxes. Lengths of bungee cord to strap the rifles to their bodies. Fragmentation grenades, two each. Flashbangs, same number. A single Claymore mine – Spud took it in his holdall. Sand-coloured hessian backed with strands of wire so that it could be shaped into whatever form they needed for desert camouflage, but now folded into a neat square. A trenching tool. A pack of silvery thermal sheeting – the only thing that could hide an OP from thermal imaging devices.
‘What’s with that?’ Danny asked.
‘We’ve had trouble with the Yemeni government in the past,’ Hammond said. ‘They have their own spy planes. Wouldn’t put it past them to shop your location to the bad guys if they see you. Chances are you’ll have to put in an OP. Use that if you want to stay totally hidden.’
Danny continued to work his way through the gear. There was worn paper mapping of the area they were heading for. Radio packs. A GPS handset, a Leica NV spotting scope, and two sets of night-vision goggles. Empty ops waistcoats, ready to be filled once they were on the ground. A sat phone each, of course, and a compass. A fistful of MRE packs. A thin wad of American dollars – $2,000 each. Ridiculously, this was the only thing Hammond made them sign for. Like the kind of people they were likely to encounter
would want to issue receipts.
Once the holdalls were full, Danny and Spud zipped them up. Hammond handed them each a white sack. The sacks were printed with diplomatic stamps. The guys placed their holdalls in the sacks, then tightened the cords at the top and secured each one with a padlock. From now on, these diplomatic bags couldn’t leave their sides.
Hammond handed each of them their passports. These too included full diplomatic stamps that would get them across the UK and Omani borders with no questions asked. ‘The BA flight to Muscat leaves at 09.00,’ Hammond said. ‘You clear on your movements when you get there?’
The guys nodded.
‘We’ve cleared a flight path with the Saudis along the Saudi-Yemen border. You’ll RV with one of the Sultan’s Chinooks when you get there.’
‘Who’s going to fly it?’ Danny demanded. Because, orders or no orders, if they thought he was going to let some unpractised Omani pilot fly them the length of the Yemen for a covert insertion, they could fuck off.
‘We’ve got an SF flight crew coming in from Iraq,’ Hammond said. ‘You’ll RV with them on the Oman-Yemen border at midnight. They’ll airlift you into Saada.’
Hammond moved over to another of the tables, where several piles of documents were neatly laid out. ‘The main town in the Saada Governate is Ha’dah. Population, about fifty-thousand, but that’s just a guess. There are thousands of IDPs in the area because of the conflict over the past few years. The town itself is situated on a mountain plateau, about 1,800 metres high. Where they drop you depends on how deserted or otherwise the road that leads up to it is. The town itself is occupied by Houthi militia. They’ve pretty much declared independence from the rest of Yemen. Officially there’s a truce between them and the government. In practice, they’re as bad as the fucking Taliban. Funded by the Iranians and Hezbollah. Trigger-happy. Give them a wide berth. Once you reach the town, you’ll have to make contact with a local schoolteacher, name of Hamza. He’s on the Yanks’ payroll and so far as we can tell he’s just about the only guy in the vicinity who speaks English.’
‘Does this Hamza know where the training camp is?’
‘Claims to. The CIA say his credentials are good. He’s been feeding them accurate information for the past three years, and gave them a lead on a Somali terror suspect who was hiding out in the area. SEAL unit went in to nail him, confirmed that his intel was good. But he’s getting greedy now. Wants a cash payment before he spills any more beans about Abu Ra’id. Five hundred US – quite a lot of moolah out there, and if he’s asking for it, chances are he’s confident of his intel.’
‘Either that,’ Spud said, ‘or he’s trying to rake it in while he’s in the Yanks’ good books.’
‘That’s a possibility. I certainly wouldn’t trust him too far. He might be a CIA tout, but he’s still Yemeni, still very devout. So far as we can tell, his motivation for supplying us with this intelligence is complex.’
‘Sounds to me like he just wants a payday,’ Spud said.
‘There’s a bit more to it than that. He’s a Shi’ite muslim, unlike AQAP.’
‘AQAP?’ Danny asked.
‘Al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula. Al-Qaeda and Al-Shabaab are Sunni Muslims. The Sunnis and the Shi’ites have major theological and political differences. You’re heading to a principally Shi’ite area. A lot of the population in the north don’t like the idea of AQAP and Al-Shabaab operating in what they see as Shi’ite territory, so they seem happy to screw them over.’
Hammond directed their attention to a sheet of aerial mapping. With his finger he traced a built-up area set on top of a mountain plateau – clearly Ha’dah. He followed a line eastward where the terrain fell down sharply on to a flat desert region. ‘This is the area where the camp is most likely to be situated,’ Hammond said. ‘Very wild, very dangerous – Bedouin, bandits and not much else. Terrible roads. Hardly anyone goes there. Hardly anyone dares.’
‘Looking forward to it already,’ Spud muttered.
Hammond handed them each a pale blue armband with the letters UN emblazoned in white. ‘Your cover story, if it comes to it, is that you’re a couple of UN medics and you’ve heard there’s a Western couple in the area who need medical aid. But for fuck’s sake don’t leave those things lying around. If the UN find out you’ve got them, there’ll be hell on earth.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s madness,’ he said. ‘Two guys. The CO’s already appealed to the Director Special Forces. Hit a brick wall. It’s . . .’
Danny could tell he was about to say the word ‘suicide’ but held back at the last minute.
‘The CIA seem pretty keen on this Hamza fella,’ Hammond continued, ‘so you need to make sure he stays intact. We don’t know where he lives, but he’ll meet you outside the central mosque in Ha’dah when the call to prayer starts at dawn tomorrow – which will be just after 05.00. It’ll be up to you to get the information from him.’ A dark, uncomfortable look crossed Hammond’s face. ‘When you locate Abu Ra’id,’ he continued, ‘take him out immediately. As soon as he’s dead, you need to phone in confirmation – before you leave the camp or anything. I’m sorry, lads, but London’s adamant about this. They can’t risk you being taken out before they know for sure that the bastard’s dead.’
‘Good to hear our welfare is the first thing on their minds,’ Spud said.
Hammond pointed at their diplomatic bags. ‘You’ve got GPS beacons fitted to your radios,’ he said. ‘We’ll track you every step of the way. We’ll know where you are at every moment in real time. If you send us a distress signal, we can be in-country from the Gulf of Aden in a few hours, and fuck the fallout. But assuming everything goes to plan, you’ll need to find a secure location to lie up, and we’ll get you picked up as quickly as we can.’ He looked at his watch. ‘You’ll need to board any minute.’
As Hammond spoke, Danny’s personal mobile vibrated in his pocket. He took it out: number withheld. He was on the point of dismissing the call when he caught a lairy look from the ops officer – a look that said now’s not the time for taking calls. Danny found himself accepting it just to make his point.
‘Yeah?’ he said.
A pause.
‘Decided to pick up, did you?’
Danny felt himself grow tense. He stormed out of the Portakabin, past the Regiment guard and out onto the tarmac. A passenger aircraft roared overhead as it took off. Danny just caught a flash of Aer Lingus green on its tail.
‘What is it, Kyle?’ he shouted over the noise.
He heard his brother sniffing, then a coarse cough that sounded like he was bringing something up.
‘Kyle?’
‘Saw that bird of yours on Wednesday.’
Now it was Danny’s turn to fall silent. He’d been doing everything he could to keep Clara from his mind. Now he almost felt as if she was standing next to him.
‘Stay the fuck away from her,’ he said. ‘I mean it, Kyle. You lay a fucking finger on her, I’ll . . .’
‘Take it easy, take it easy, nothing happened, we just bumped into each other.’ Danny saw the guard staring at him, and flashed him an aggressive look. Kyle coughed again. His voice changed. ‘I’m in trouble, bro,’ he said. He sounded like he meant it. ‘These Poles, they don’t take no for an answer. I’m in deep.’
‘How deep?’
‘Five large.’
‘Fuck’s sake, Kyle,’ Danny breathed.
‘They’ve done me over once already. Couple of broken teeth. Think my nose might be bust and all.’ He coughed for a third time. ‘I need some help, bro . . .’
Another plane roared overhead. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said I need some help. They’re not fucking around!’
Danny wanted to throw the phone to the floor. It was typical of Kyle to put him in a position like this. To beg for money that Danny knew would be spent as soon as it landed in his brother’s wallet. He paced the tarmac for a moment, ignoring the sight of Spud appearing at the door of the Portakabin, watching him
carefully. For a moment he felt himself wavering. He thought about their father, who lived alone and disabled in a small Hereford flat, and who would always beg Danny to help his brother. If he was here now, he’d beg the same as usual. But then he remembered how Kyle, drunk and high on a cocktail of drugs, had attacked their father before ending up in prison for a stretch. As it always did, that memory sent every ounce of sympathy he might have had out the window.
‘Forget it, Kyle. You got yourself into this mess, you get yourself out again.’
Silence.
‘You’re a piece of shit, Danny. You know that? Always were, always will be.’
Danny made to hang up. But before he did, he said one more thing. ‘Stay away from Clara, Kyle. If you don’t, trust me, the Poles will be the least of your worries.’
Kyle was snorting contemptuously as Danny hung up. He spun round and looked aggressively at Spud. ‘What?’ he demanded across the seven or eight metres’ distance between them.
‘Nothing, mucker,’ Spud said calmly. ‘We just had word. They want us to board. Let’s get moving, eh?’
Part Three
Desert Warriors
Fifteen
When the Regiment moves, it moves quickly.
A member of the BA staff – a young guy with a pimply face and clearly no idea who his charges were or what they were carrying – collected Danny and Spud, along with their diplomatic bags, from the Portakabin. He asked no questions as he ushered them through security as members of the diplomatic service. Their security teams barely looked at their bags, let alone screen them. Danny and Spud spent five minutes in a comfortable lounge set aside for their use before a pretty air stewardess with a brown bob, a bit too much make-up and a good tan let them on to a waiting 747. They were the first to board and as they entered the aircraft they turned left to the business-class cabin. Danny and Spud were each given a double booth – one seat for them, one for their bags. As the regular passengers filed on to the plane, a few cast an envious glance at these two guys who seemed to have been afforded special treatment. But once the aircraft was airborne, they were too busy with their menus, glasses of champagne and re-runs of Top Gear to pay them any mind.
