Cobra 405

by Damien Lewis

  Sally ‘pointed’ with her nose up ahead, and Kilbride tried to focus in among the rocky shadows, searching for the human form of an enemy. As he watched and listened, he noticed a thin streak of silver glistening in the moonlight. It was suspended at ankle height, just above the path, and was barely inches in front of them. In a flash Kilbride realised what Sally was trying to tell him. The danger wasn’t up there in the kopje – it was two feet in front of her nose. A tripwire had been strung between the two baobab trunks, each end attached to a grenade. The tripwire was there to serve a double purpose: it would kill anyone approaching the kopje, and warn those hidden there of any such approach. Kilbride and his dog had been one step away from death. It seemed that he had underestimated the enemy.

  Kilbride backtracked down the path, being careful to place his steps within the footprints of the enemy. In that way he covered his tracks, as they would find no prints in the morning other than their own. Having put some distance between himself and the kopje, he looped around to the far side and made a beeline for the dirt road. Here there was a well-used path, which the kids from the nearby village used to come and play on Kilbride’s land. At the junction with the dirt road Kilbride found a pair of fresh tyre tracks, sharp in the night-dew dampness of the sand. These led him to the enemy’s vehicle.

  Half-hidden in the forest was a Toyota Corolla saloon car, with a hire company’s sticker on the driver’s door. It was locked, but Kilbride soon got around that. Leaving Sally to guard his back, he rifled the glove compartment. There were three items of interest: one, a Koran; the second, an SAS Jungle Survival Handbook written by an ex-member of The Regiment; the third, the used stub of an airline ticket issued in Damascus. More parts of the puzzle fell into place: the enemy were clearly Muslim; they had been doing a crash course in jungle warfare; and they had started their journey in Syria.

  For a second Kilbride considered disabling the car, but time was getting on and he had to get back to The Homestead. As he retraced his steps he reflected on what he’d discovered. The kopje was close to his home, barely three hundred yards away, which made it a risky hiding place. As you couldn’t actually see his house from there, he could only conclude that the enemy had to be using some specialist eavesdropping gear and that three hundred yards was about the limit of its range. The kopje was a favourite playground for the village kids, so whoever the enemy were they had done little to check out the viability of their hideout. That was all the more reason to hit them soon and hit them hard. The last thing Kilbride wanted was some local kids surprising the gunmen in the morning – and getting themselves blown away as a result.

  Back at The Homestead Kilbride headed straight for his office. He grabbed a black marker pen and a sheet of A4 paper. He scribbled in large letters: SOMEONE’S LISTENING. HEADS-UP ON THE BEACH IN FIVE. He made his way to Berger’s cabin and let himself in quietly. But as Kilbride went to part Berger’s mosquito net, he realised that the big American was far from alone. Curled up beside him was the lithe form of Tashana, the maid. Kilbride groaned inwardly. The crafty Yank bastard. Still, it was no time to deal with that now. He shook Berger awake and held up the sign.

  Five minutes later Kilbride was joined on the beach by Berger, Smithy and Boerke. He had left Sally at The Homestead, very much on guard. The men walked in silence away from the house, until Kilbride was satisfied they were well out of range of any listening gear. They spoke in hushed tones, down where the inrush of the sea would better mask their voices. As quickly as he could Kilbride outlined the events of the last hour. Then he proposed his plan of attack. It was approaching 5 a.m. and he wanted to hit the enemy before dawn.

  He would send Sally into the kopje first. In the close, dark confines of the rocks Sally’s sudden assault would be terrifying. The shock alone would drive the enemy out, let alone the raw animal fear. Sally would account for one or two of them, and the rest would be up to Kilbride and his men. Kilbride scratched a quick diagram in the sand showing the positions of The Homestead, the kopje, the enemy vehicle and the dirt road. He figured that the enemy would flee in the direction of their car, and that was where Kilbride and his men would set their ambush.

  ‘Any questions?’ he asked.

  ‘What about weapons?’ said Smithy.

  ‘We’ve got the one shotgun. Plus we’ve got Sally and the element of surprise.’

  Smithy snorted. ‘What, four wrinkly fifty-somethings with one shotgun and a dog against how many tooled-up terrorists …?’

  ‘Four. Maximum five. You wouldn’t get more than that in their vehicle.’

  ‘Still, it’d be nice to have something to even up the odds a little …’

  ‘How’s about we dismantle their booby trap and reset it on their escape route?’ Bill Berger suggested. ‘Those two grenades – that’d fuck ’em up some.’

  ‘We don’t have time,’ Kilbride countered. ‘Dawn’s, what, half an hour away. And anyway, it’s too risky.’

  ‘I’ve an idea, man,’ said Boerke.

  Kilbride glanced at him. ‘Go on.’

  ‘You have some traps hanging on your office wall. They look to me like mantraps, from the slaving days. Are they still working, man?’

  Kilbride nodded. ‘You know how to use them?’

  Boerke smiled an evil reply.

  ‘Right, this is what we do. Smithy, Berger, go and fetch three pickaxe handles from the boathouse. Boerke and I will get the mantraps. We set the traps first, then move back thirty yards or so. They flee from Sally, hit the traps, I mallet the rest with the Remington and then the three of you move in and club any of the fuckers left standing.’

  ‘One more thing – you gotta stop their car,’ Berger added. ‘If they get past the geriatric brigade with their gardening implements, then that’s their getaway vehicle. How about you get the big Mercedes jeep parked up on the dirt track, broadside on to the road. They make contact with that girl, they ain’t gonna be none too happy about it.’

  ‘There’s only one fucker making unwelcome contact with a girl around here,’ Kilbride retorted. Having discovered Bill Berger in bed with Tashana, he couldn’t resist having the dig. ‘But you’re right, mate. I’ll get Nixon to take the Merc G-wagon up there, quietly and slowly as he can …’

  Some twenty minutes later and a low, ghostly form approached the location of the tripwire booby trap. Sally knew exactly where it was this time, and she carefully stepped over it. Kilbride followed her. They stopped near the entry point to the kopje. It was barely first light, but Sally could fight as well in the dark as at any other time.

  Kilbride crouched down and ruffled the fur of her neck. ‘Go get ’em, girl,’ he mouthed in her ear. ‘Go get ’em.’ He pushed her gently forwards.

  Sally knew that she was on her own now. She padded ahead to where the soft forest floor ended in a grey wall of boulders. A narrow twisting channel ran up into the centre of the kopje, which was just wide enough for a man – or a dog – to pass through. At the entrance to the passageway Sally stiffened. Her ultra-sensitive powers of smell could detect the individual chemicals that combine to make explosives, and she had been trained to recognise danger when she did so. The smell of the human enemy was also strong here, and to Sally the combination of the two meant that another booby trap had been set.

  Sure enough, a thin three-foot-long tripwire was strung across from one boulder to the other, at just above ground level. Sally stepped over it and crept ahead into the black rocks. Her mind was focused on her hearing now, and she could already detect the noise of her prey up ahead. Two men were snoring. Another was talking. To one side of her she heard a snake’s scaly uncoiling as it sensed a danger far greater than itself and slid into the rocks. And she could smell the faint drift of tobacco smoke on the damp forest air.

  Sally reached the last corner of the passageway, where it opened out into a central clearing at the top of the kopje. The enemy were just feet away from her now. She dropped to a belly crawl, so that her body shape blended in better with t
he darkness, and inched her head around the rock wall. She could make out the forms of three men. One was smoking, one was talking, and the third was cleaning his weapon. Sally had learned to recognise the long silhouette of a gun and know that it spelled maximum danger. She sensed that there were two sleeping figures out of sight to her left, which was where the snoring was coming from.

  A yard in front of her muzzle there was a further tripwire, although this one was attached to some empty tin cans as opposed to grenades. It was designed to provide a last warning rather than to kill – a grenade detonated in this enclosed space could finish off everyone, those who had set the booby trap included. Sally calculated the distance to the nearest figure. It was some ten feet, which was an easy leap for a dog her size. She tensed her muscles and gathered herself for an explosion of animal power and aggression. These were the men who had intruded on her territory and were threatening her survival and that of her human ‘family’. She would gladly kill them all.

  The first they knew of Sally’s presence was a black wolf-like form flying through the air, teeth bared in a terrifying snarl. The nearest enemy figure went down under ninety pounds of pure muscle and canine fury, Sally’s jaws tearing at his throat. The victim tried to scream, but her bite stifled his cries. For a split second the others were frozen in pure terror and disbelief. None of these men had been to Africa before, and it had crossed each of their minds already that evening that they were in the midst of the untamed bush. In the raw horror of the moment each man now feared the worst. Hyenas? Leopards? Lions, even? It could be anything attacking them.

  One of the figures opened fire, a long burst from his AK47 passing over the heads of the tangle of bodies that marked Sally’s attack. Bullets slammed into the surrounding forest, the kopje ringing with the smack of lead into wood and the splitting of branches. Sally barely flinched. She had been trained to show zero fear towards the sounds of war: weapons firing, explosions, human screams. She wrenched her jaws away from her first victim and launched herself at the second. She sank her teeth into his weapon arm and he let out a horrible cry as her fangs pierced it to the bone. He tumbled over backwards, his AK47 clattering onto the bare rocks. The three remaining enemy fighters turned and fled in terror, their Arabic curses ringing out across the forest.

  One hundred and fifty yards away, Kilbride and his men crouched in the dark undergrowth. Each handler was supposed to be taught never to identify too closely with his dog, in case he or she were killed. But it never worked that way. The bond between man and canine was unshakeable, and Kilbride felt sick with worry for Sally. He heard the thumping feet of the approaching enemy, fleeing in headlong panic along the path. He readied his Remington, setting it to gas as opposed to pump-action mode. Utilising its automatic feed the weapon could fire off its magazine of eight shotgun shells in one continuous burst, throwing out a wall of lead that would stop just about anything.

  As the sound of the enemy drew closer there was a sharp metallic snap, followed by a terrifying, unearthly screaming. Boerke grinned. A mantrap had found a victim. Feet pounded onwards, and a figure rounded a bend in the path. Kilbride held his fire until the enemy fighter was almost upon him, hoping to catch them all in the one burst. He squeezed the trigger gently and the quiet of the forest erupted in a deafening explosion, fire spitting from the shotgun in a long, continuous tongue of flame. Three shotgun rounds blasted into the man’s chest, lifting him up and throwing him backwards into the undergrowth. There was a short, piercing cry, and his bloodied torso hit the forest floor.

  Kilbride kept his weapon in the aim and waited: he had five rounds left, and there were still an unknown number of enemy out there. Suddenly there was a burst of return gunfire. Bullets chewed into the canopy of vegetation, the noise of the weapon magnified in the confined space of the forest. Kilbride dived into some cover. From his prone position he nosed his weapon forward in the general direction of the enemy’s muzzle flash. The main advantage of the shotgun was the wide arc of devastation that blasted forth from its barrel. Even if you couldn’t locate the enemy exactly, the Remington still had an odds-on chance of hitting him.

  Kilbride fired again, five shotgun rounds pumping into the darkness. This time he could almost hear the hollow whack-thump as the shot impacted with a human body, and sense its falling. There was a long, low agonised wail, followed by the frenzied jerking of branches, as an enemy figure tried to crawl away. Kilbride glanced over at Boerke and Smithy, and nodded in the wounded man’s direction. In an instant the two of them had disappeared into the gloom, pickaxe handles held at the ready.

  Kilbride and Berger waited, trying to sense the direction from which the next threat would come. Kilbride was out of ammunition now, so it was all down to hand-to-hand combat. That, and their cunning and guile. From the direction of the mantrap came a long, crazed burst of gunfire. Rounds went ripping through the branches above Kilbride as the enemy figure loosed off a whole magazine into the trees. The firing stopped and the forest went deathly quiet again. The smoke of battle hung in the air, and a sharp slick of cordite caught in Kilbride’s throat. Berger signalled that he was going forward to deal with the mantrap victim. He melted into the forest. Kilbride gripped the barrel of his shotgun: if any of the fuckers came down that path he would club them to death with his weapon.

  The big American crept up unnoticed on the fallen enemy figure. He had one leg caught at ankle level in the serrated jaws of the mantrap. His trousers were ripped and torn around the vicious metal teeth, revealing the pink-red of his shredded calf muscle. He had fought long and hard to free himself from the vice-like grip of the trap, but all he had succeeded in doing was driving the jagged iron deeper into his flesh.

  The young fighter’s fingers shook uncontrollably as he tried to slot the curved steel shape of a fresh magazine into his weapon. For a split second Berger sensed the man’s all-consuming terror. Then he raised the pickaxe handle and brought it down hard on the back of his skull. There was a crunch of wood on bone, the victim’s eyes rolled up into his head and he fell unconscious. As Berger straightened his shoulders, the forest fell silent. He sensed, instinctively, that the battle was finally over. But as for the war, the big American figured that it had only just begun.

  The sun had barely risen by the time Kilbride and his men recovered the bodies and took them and the two survivors to The Homestead. He threw a rough bandage around the mauled neck of Sally’s second victim, the only one of the enemy who was still conscious. Smithy and Berger went off to search the kopje and discovered a satphone, several sets of night-vision goggles, a rifle microphone and some headphones. They also found a bag containing passports, airline tickets and several thousand dollars in cash.

  From the tyre tracks alone, Kilbride knew that the enemy had arrived at the kopje late the previous night – so even with their listening gear they would have overheard precious little of any import. What worried Kilbride more was who had sent them and why, and how they had managed to find him. Outside of family and close friends, Kilbride didn’t advertise his place of abode widely. Everything – the dive business, The Homestead – was registered under his wife’s name. The enemy had to be linked to the Black Assassins, that much was clear: but it was chilling that they had tracked him down to his own home.

  Kilbride took the one conscious prisoner across to the patio at the rear of his office. It was a little separated from the main house and about as private as he could make things. As far as he could tell, his wife and kids were still asleep and he didn’t want to disturb them, or the staff, any more than he had to. He got the prisoner seated on the ground, his back against the office wall, his hands and feet tightly bound. Sally was shadowing her master’s every move, and the prisoner was watching the big dog with a dark terror in his eyes.

  Kilbride and his men started questioning the prisoner. At first he feigned no understanding of English, so Kilbride got Nixon to translate. The big, muscular Tanzanian spoke passable Arabic, which was a common enough language al
ong the coastline. Who had sent him, how had he found The Homestead and what was his mission? Kilbride asked. But to each question the prisoner spat out the same bitterly defiant answer: he would not talk. They could kill him if they wished. He didn’t fear death. He would be a martyr in a glorious cause. But he doubted if they had the will to kill him in cold blood, as they were Western infidel pigs …

  Before that last phrase was finished Nixon belted the prisoner in the mouth. He growled a few words of warning at him. The prisoner spat out some blood and a chipped tooth, followed by a vitriolic burst of Arabic. Nixon reacted by punching him again, this time in the face and with all the force he could muster.

  Kilbride placed a restraining arm on the big Tanzanian’s shoulder. ‘Don’t kill him just yet … What’s he saying, Nixon?’

  ‘I told him to show you some respect, Mr Kilbride. He told me to go to hell. He said that I was a stinking black dog and a slave to the white man.’

  Kilbride grinned. ‘You should’ve punched him harder.’ He stroked Sally’s thick neck. ‘Ask him the same questions again. Tell him if he won’t talk I’ll make him the dog’s dinner.’

  Nixon did as Kilbride had asked, but again the prisoner refused to talk. He refused to believe that Kilbride would set the dog on him in cold blood. And, in truth, Kilbride was loath to do so. Apart from the disturbance of the man’s screaming, he didn’t like the idea of using Sally in this way. She was trained to track and attack a dangerous enemy, not a defenceless prisoner whose arms and legs were bound.