by Chris Ryan
The flight crew had done their job. Danny and Spud were on their own now.
Sixteen
Danny looked ahead.
He only had ten metres of visibility before the road veered sharply upwards and to the right. To their left, a sheer drop. To their immediate right, a craggy rock cliff face. He eased the Toyota forward, hugging the cliff face as he went. The noise of the Chinook died away. He caught a glimpse of it from his left-hand side, curling away in the air as it headed back to the wadi. The flight crew would remain in the vicinity for 20 minutes in case they had a distress call from the guys as a result of a hot insertion. But then it would be gone.
‘There,’ Spud said. Danny looked ahead to his right. There was a fissure in the cliff face, a cave in the shape of an inverted V, just wide enough for their vehicle. Danny edged past it, then locked the steering wheel down to the right and reversed off the road and into the cave. The Toyota’s rear-view camera illuminated the back of the cave on a dashboard screen. Danny backed up as close to it as he could. It meant the front of the Toyota was set back about three metres from the mouth of the cave. He killed the engine. Wordlessly, Danny and Spud exited the vehicle. They extracted their rifles and both bent down on one knee in the firing position, two metres apart, their weapons pointing out of the cave.
No sound of the Chinook now. No sound of anything. A dark, ominous stillness. Danny felt the warmth of the Toyota’s engine against his back and he realised he was sweating as heavily as if it was midday. There was even sweat between his finger and the trigger of his HK, but he kept it lightly resting there as they waited to see if their arrival had disturbed anybody in the vicinity. And if it had, to deal with them.
They stayed in that position for a full ten minutes. Danny used the time to get his thoughts straight. This was very hostile territory. A lawless region where nobody would feel bound by any kind of rules of engagement. If Danny and Spud were caught in the town of Ha’dah, they would do everything in their power to stick to their cover story that they were UN medics who’d been told that there was a Western couple in the town who needed medical aid. But it was hard to explain away a covert assault rifle, and their captors would get the truth out of them eventually. When that happened, it would be bullet-in-head time. Yemeni bullets, Regiment heads.
Ha’dah would not be massively populated. Newcomers would stand out. Newcomers with white skin even more. Danny pulled his shemagh further up his face as he ran over their objectives once more. Sneak quietly into town under cover of night. Locate Hamza and get from him the information he claimed to have about the training camp where Abu Ra’id was located. Then get the hell out of there, just as quietly. If everything went according to plan, they’d be on the road out of Ha’dah not much past dawn, unnoticed and hopefully unfollowed.
Danny’s eyes picked out the scene ahead of him: the dark frame of the cave mouth, the road no more than five metres wide, the star-filled sky and, extending into the distance, the flat lowlands beyond the mountain. The plough was low in the sky, and he used it to calculate their orientation: they were facing south. In that direction were the pirate-filled waters of the Gulf of Aden, and beyond that, the war-torn land of Somalia. It was weird to think that less than 24 hours ago, they were in the damp air of Hammerstone House. Nothing damp about the terrain round here. This was tough, craggy desert territory. And it was populated by tough, craggy desert dwellers. A large proportion of whom would be armed, because weapons were more common than toothbrushes in this part of the world . . .
‘Shall we go?’ Spud said.
Almost immediately he spoke there was a buzzing sound off to the right. Twenty seconds later, a figure on a small motorbike whizzed past. Danny held his breath, waiting for more bikes. More potential threats. But the threats didn’t come, and after another five minutes the guys got back into their vehicle. They eased out of the cave and turned right. Danny switched his headlamps on: they lit up a pot-holed, stony road. They moved on, keeping a careful, steady 20 mph, Spud still clutching his rifle – cocked and locked, with the barrel pointing down into the vehicle’s footwell.
The road didn’t deviate. There were no junctions or forks. It simply wound and snaked up the mountain. They saw no other traffic, and no pedestrians. Down on the flats, however, many miles distant, were the occasional glows of fires dotted around, and other lights that moved.
‘Bedouin trucks?’ Spud suggested.
‘Maybe,’ Danny replied. He checked his watch. 03.00hrs. He didn’t reckon there were many people moving around down there on honest business. The vehicles they could see might be Bedouin, but they might just as easily be government forces, or militants. He wondered if one of the fires indicated the location of Abu Rai’d’s training camp.
They drove for a further 20 minutes and passed nobody. Then, as Danny turned another steep corner, he saw an old mud-walled hut on the side of the road. It was barely bigger than the Portakabin back at Heathrow where just a few hours ago their ops officer had been briefing them, but as the Toyota’s headlamps landed on it, they saw that it was deserted and dilapidated, with one end totally crumbled away into nothing, the remnants of the rubble covered with rough green and brown scrub. It was a perfect place to hide the vehicle, since driving into the hostile town of Ha’dah in an unfamiliar four-by-four was a sure-fire way to alert the locals to their presence.
Danny pulled the vehicle off the road and slowly manoeuvred it over the rubble and into the old hut. He killed the lights, then he and Spud debussed. They exited the hut and stood on the road, checking that the vehicle was sufficiently hidden. When they were satisfied that nobody could see it from the road, Spud pulled his GPS unit from his bag. They waited 30 seconds while it triangulated. ‘We’re about three clicks from the edge of the town,’ he said. He pointed along the road to indicate the direction they needed to walk, though he needn’t have: it was either up, or down.
They trekked in silence. A high cliff still loomed on the right-hand side of the road. They hugged this for cover. The temperature had dropped now that they’d gained height, but their brisk pace kept them warm. At 03.45hrs they turned another curve in the road, still hugging the cliff face, and suddenly saw the imposing outline of Ha’dah silhouetted against the stars up ahead, the bulk of it perhaps a kilometre away from their position. Danny removed his NV kite sight, and used it to scan the scene ahead.
Despite the green haze of the NV view, there was something medieval about the shape of the buildings that comprised the outskirts of Ha’dah. They stood on the rocky outcrop like a collection of minor fortresses from another century, and it struck Danny that they probably had remained unchanged for hundreds of years. They were perched on a rocky plateau, with weathered rocky banks leading up to it. An ancient stone staircase carved into the mountainside curled up towards them, while the road itself wound round to its right. It would be far safer to cover the final kilometre to the town by road, Danny decided. Here they would be camouflaged against the high cliff walls, whereas if they took the stone stairs they would be exposed in open ground.
The buildings themselves, those that he could see, all had flat roofs, and numerous holes for windows evenly distributed. They were tall, unusually tall, four or five storeys high, which added to their somewhat wobbly, precarious appearance. Along the edges of each roof was evenly spaced, fussy detailing, and at the foot of the buildings were plenty of trees, a reminder that despite the endless sands of the deserts over which they’d just flown, this was a more fertile region. The town was not big – certainly less than a kilometre from edge to edge. Danny could take it all in with a single sweep of his night sight. And from here he could see no movement, nor even any light. Ha’dah was sleeping.
A sound pierced the air. It was a howling dog, coming from the direction of Ha’dah. A second dog barked in response, then both fell quiet.
Movement. It was just on the edge of the kite sight’s field of vision. About halfway up the old stone staircase was a man. He was sitting down
, but had what looked like a rifle at right angles across his lap. Some kind of lookout. Distance: 100 to 120 metres.
Danny passed Spud the sight. ‘Eleven o’clock, on the stairs,’ he said. Spud took it in, then handed back the sight with a grim expression.
‘Shall we take him?’ Spud breathed.
Danny thought it through for a moment. He judged the conditions. A little over 100 metres between them. No wind. The shot was do-able. But the noise of even a suppressed weapon would echo off the mountainsides and might alert more armed men to their presence.
Perhaps they should go for the silent kill. One of them could approach with a concealed blade, while the other took a covert position and covered with his firearm. But there was a chance that the guard would be missed. They had no idea what time he was due to finish his stag. Perhaps he had a family waiting for him back home who would raise the alarm if he didn’t return.
No. Killing him was the wrong call. They would just have to sneak past him. Danny looked at the guard through the sight again. The man didn’t have his eyes on the road, but was picking at his fingernails, not watching carefully. If they continued to hug the cliff, he reckoned they could pass him without being seen.
‘Keep going,’ he told Spud. ‘If he sees us, we’ll deal with him.’
They crept forward. Danny stopped every ten metres to check on the guard through his kite sight. The guy just sat there with his weapon and didn’t move. Three minutes later they had advanced 50 metres and passed his field of vision, and the Yemeni guard didn’t know how lucky he was to still be alive.
Danny checked the time. 04.32. Dawn – the hour of their RV – would arrive just after 05.00. ‘We need to move,’ he said. Spud nodded, and they continued their approach.
04.47hrs
They had covered the final kilometre to the edge of Ha’dah in ten minutes.
Ha’dah had a distinctive odour about it, a mixture of wood smoke, dirt and rotting food that Danny could smell even through the thick, musty material of their shemaghs. This was not a 21st-century town. Danny knew that hardly any of the houses up ahead would have proper plumbing. As for electricity, forget it. They stood now beneath the low branches of a sprawling tree. To their left were four small, squat dwellings with white domed roofs. Towering above them, no more than 20 metres from their position, was one of the large square buildings Danny had examined from a distance. Its walls were made of hard-baked mud bricks, and the windows were little more than black openings. Light now glowed from two of them – faint, yellow and flickering, almost certainly from a candle or an oil lamp. To the left of the building, a road led up at a slight gradient. It was the only road that they could see that led into the town.
Movement up ahead. Danny caught his breath. He scanned the road through his night sight. An animal stared back at him. Too gangly for a dog. Lean and hungry-looking. It suddenly turned and scampered away.
‘Hyena,’ Danny breathed.
As he spoke, the stillness in the air was broken. From within the small town came a strong voice, the low chanting of a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. It seemed to curl and echo round the buildings with its familiar words. Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Ash-haddu an-la ilaha illa llah . . . That sound meant that dawn was almost upon them. Their RV needed to take place in the next ten to fifteen minutes. Then they could get away from the town as quickly as possible, pick up their vehicle and get off the mountainside. The Regiment men stepped out from under the camouflage of the tree, their shemaghs and robes covering their features, and started walking purposefully up the street.
At first they followed the sound of the voice as it wailed above the top of the buildings. One moment, however, it sounded like it was coming from the north, the next from the south. After five minutes of pacing the narrow roads of Ha’dah, another way of locating the mosque presented itself. Men were appearing in the streets – only a handful at first, but after a few more minutes Danny had counted more than thirty. Some wore full-length, loose-fitting robes, with a jacket on their upper half. Others wore a kind of wraparound kilt with a shirt. Some of them had their heads wrapped in turbans, others with shemaghs not unlike Danny and Spud – though the Regiment men put their heads down and scrupulously kept their distance rather than rely just on their ability to blend in, and occasionally took cover in dark doorways to avoid passing groups of more than two or three men. Most of the locals wore the scabbards around their waists that Roberts had warned them about back at the Goat Farm. They were all hurrying in the same direction. Danny and Spud kept to the shadows, and followed.
The central square of Ha’dah was not large. Perhaps 35 metres by 35. As they entered it from the south-west corner and lurked in the shadow of a deep, overhanging balcony, they saw the mosque on the far side. Night was becoming dawn now, and in the steel grey light Danny saw that the mosque’s tower – a good 20 metres higher than the surrounding buildings – resembled nothing so much as a small lighthouse. The sound of the muezzin, his reedy drone still calling the faithful, rang out from the tower. At ground level, a large wooden door was open and an inviting glow emanated from inside. Men were hurrying into the mosque, paying little attention to each other at this early hour and not even seeing Danny and Spud, who had melted into the shadows and were staying very still and unassuming. The rest of the square was unwelcoming. There was nothing that resembled a shop, or even a dwelling. Just randomly spaced and rather rickety-looking wooden doors a little higher than a man leading into the buildings on four sides, all of them closed. The ground was strewn with dust and chunks of stone the size of Danny’s fist.
Danny recalled Hammond’s words at the briefing back at Heathrow, about Hamzah, their contact. He’ll meet you outside the central mosque in Ha’dah when the call to prayer starts at dawn tomorrow. He looked around for their contact, but saw nobody who looked like they were waiting for an RV. Perhaps they were too late? If so, they were fucked. They didn’t know what this Hamza character looked like, or where he lived. And even if Hamza was his real name, the chances of the locals responding well to the enquiries of two British men – or even understanding them – were vanishingly small. They would have no option but to abort the mission: leave town, hide up and call for a pick-up.
The wailing voice of the muezzin suddenly stopped. Two stragglers hurried inside the mosque and the doors creaked shut. The glow from inside the mosque escaped through the gaps round the door, and almost immediately a muffled chanting came from behind it. Danny and Spud continued to survey the square. It was deserted. Their contact was a no-show.
Danny felt a spike of suspicion. Had they been lured here? Was it a trap? He tucked one hand into his dishdash and pulled his Sig. Spud, next to him, did the same. Danny peered up to the windows of the buildings looking over the square. He saw nothing, but it was, he realised, very easy for anyone to hide in those gloomy holes. Walking across the square would make him too exposed. If they were going to search the vicinity, they’d need to stick to the edge of the square. To the shadows. One of them needed to go alone, while the other kept watch, weapon ready, alert for any threats.
‘Cover me,’ Danny breathed.
A gentle click as Spud quietly cocked his weapon.
Danny trod very quietly, moving lightly on the balls of his feet as he traversed the side of the square opposite the mosque. At the far corner he looked back. Spud was only just visible in the shadows, but he was there and that was all Danny needed to know. Still gripping his weapon he turned 90 degrees and started heading up along the eastern side of the square towards the mosque.
Danny had covered ten metres when he saw a man. He was directly diagonal from Danny’s position, hiding in the north-western corner of the square about five metres from the entrance to the mosque, a dark figure in the shadows pacing nervously. He’d been invisible from their original positions.
Danny was almost definite that the guy hadn’t seen him. He remained absolutely motionless for a second, then made a quick gesture to Spud, pointin
g first to his eyes and then in the direction of the figure. Then he continued to skirt around the edge of the square.
When he reached the front wall of the mosque he didn’t turn left towards the contact. Instead he took a right, his plan being to edge round the back of the mosque and approach him from the other side. As soon as he was clear of the square he sprinted, intent on getting to his target before he wandered off. Twenty metres north, before taking a left and boxing round the back of the mosque. There was a dog here – a lean, dark-haired mongrel with a white patch round its left eye, ribs visible under its meagre body. It chased him for a few metres before losing interest and scampering back towards where it had been. Danny took another left and hurried down the western side of the mosque. When he reached the front corner he stopped and listened.
The contact was still pacing. Nervous footsteps, up and down, just a few metres away by the sound of it. Fucking amateur should keep still if he’s on edge, Danny thought to himself. But the man’s footsteps crunched on the rough ground. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and . . .
In an instant Danny swung round, his weapon raised. He saw a young man with a short wispy beard and thick, glistening lips. White dishdash. Red shemagh tied with a cord around the forehead. Colourful sheath hanging in front of his groin. Danny’s sudden, unexpected appearance clearly terrified him. He looked like he was going to shout out. But before he could, Danny had wrapped one arm around his head, covered his mouth with his free hand, and pressed his Sig against his skull.
Hammond had said their contact’s English was good. So if this was Hamza, he’d understand what Danny was about to say.
‘Make a sound and I’ll kill you.’
The man was trembling. He nodded his head vigorously. Danny noticed with satisfaction that he clearly understood English. The chances of him being their contact were good.
