by Chris Ryan
Tony took his seat. Two of the air stewards were standing right by him. They were glancing uncertainly at each other, as if this was a situation they’d never encountered, and they didn’t know quite what to do.
Tony grabbed his drink, raised it to them in a toast, then downed it in one. He belched loudly. ‘Wake me up when we get to raghead land,’ he said, before reclining in his seat and closing his eyes. He knew the air stewards were still standing over him, and probably would be for the rest of the flight.
That was their problem, he thought. Tony had some booze to sleep off.
‘Why the hell aren’t we on a plane back home?’ Spud demanded.
It was midday. The Italians at Sigonella base had given them a large Portakabin for their personal use, but it was hardly the lap of luxury: four chairs, no table, and a TV in one corner with an Italian football game, sound turned down low.
‘You know as much as I do,’ Danny said. ‘We’re heading east. Hammond’s on his way. He’ll brief us when he’s here.’ He kept his voice level, but he was just as peeved as Spud. And he found Hammond’s insistence that they stay in situ just as mysterious. Surely the operation was over. He wanted to get back home. See the kid. Buy her a Christmas present. Not that he’d have admitted that to his unit-mates.
At least they’d had a chance to clean up and put on the dry camouflage gear supplied by the Italians. Apart from that, they’d stayed hidden in the Portakabin, out of sight of anyone else on the base, eating rations from their saturated packs. Grabbing what sleep they could, sitting on the hard chairs. And waiting.
There was a constant sound from the base of aircraft leaving and arriving. It was so regular that Danny barely noticed it as he stared unseeingly at the footie. It was 1230 hours precisely, however, when a sound shook him out of his trance. He’d heard a Hercules coming in to land often enough to recognise the distinctive roar of its engines. He walked to the window of the Portakabin, lifted the metal shutters and peered out. He just had line of sight towards the runway. Sure enough a C-130K was descending shakily towards the base. It could even have been the same aircraft that had dropped them at the base the previous night. Whatever, it was definitely a special forces flight, no doubt flown by the guys from 47 Squadron.
He let the blind fall and turned to the others. ‘He’s here,’ he said.
Sure enough, ten minutes later the door to the Portakabin opened. Ray Hammond appeared.
It was a joke among the lads in the Regiment that the more stressed-out Ray Hammond was, the darker the rings under his eyes. Right now, he looked like he hadn’t slept in days. He was a tough, grizzled soldier, a veteran of both Gulf Wars. Danny didn’t think he’d ever seen him smile. He had a relentlessly hangdog expression that normally seemed to hide any emotion, whether positive or negative. Today, however, his frown was more pronounced than usual. It matched those rings under his eyes. There were no greetings. Just a curt: ‘This way.’ Danny, Spud and Caitlin grabbed their packs. ‘Face like a dropped pie,’ Caitlin muttered as they followed Hammond out on to the tarmac.
The rain had finally stopped, but the ground was still wet and the sky still boiled overhead. The peak of Mount Etna was still covered in cloud. The Hercules had come to a halt on the tarmac, and its tailgate was open. The team jogged towards it, led by Hammond. They ran up into its belly, their footsteps echoing against the tailgate’s iron floor. The familiar stench of grease and aviation gas hit Danny’s senses. Up ahead, dull strip-lighting illuminated the front end of the aircraft. He saw an RAF loadie and a couple of signallers moving about up there, but they showed no sign that they’d even noticed the team come aboard. There was also a woman – black hair cut into a bob, mid-thirties. She looked totally out of place, in what were obviously office clothes. Danny immediately knew she was a spook.
‘We stay in here from now until it’s time to leave,’ Hammond told them over his shoulder as they continued up to the front of the aircraft.
‘How long will that be?’ Danny asked.
‘As long as it takes to get permission from the Turkish authorities to fly a military aircraft through their airspace towards Armenia.’
‘We’re going to Armenia?’ Caitlin said.
The woman with a black bob gave her a withering look. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re not going to Armenia. We’re going to Armenia, but we’re dropping you off on the way.’ She sniffed. ‘Literally.’
Caitlin gave her a look. ‘Who’s the wombat?’ she asked.
‘Alice Cracknell, MI6,’ Hammond unenthusiastically introduced the bristling spook. ‘Danny Black, Spud Glover, Caitlin Wallace.’ Caitlin gave the woman a faux-friendly smile. Danny left them to it. He looked to his right. There were a number of large, scuffed flight cases here. One of them had already been opened, revealing some of its contents. Danny immediately recognised freefall equipment, and the matt curve of a HALO helmet, with its glossy black visor attached. He knew what that meant: wherever they were headed, they could expect an airborne insertion. He turned to Caitlin. ‘You OK jumping?’ She didn’t reply, but Danny thought he saw a flicker of anxiety in her face. He reminded himself that, good as she was, their Aussie colleague was not Regiment trained.
‘Alright, listen up,’ Hammond said. They had congregated around a single row of airline seats bolted to the floor. In front of them was a long metal table, also bolted, with signalling equipment, a couple of laptops and their attendant wires snaking all over the place. There was an unfolded military map of the Middle East, and several unopened files. It was clear that, for Hammond, this had been a working flight. ‘It seems the target you picked up in the Med confirmed certain intelligence that the Firm have been collating over the past few weeks about a Christmas Day strike at Westminster Abbey. It goes without saying that if they manage it, it’ll be the Islamists’ biggest PR coup since 9/11. We’re mobilising all our personnel into the capital, throwing everything we’ve got at it. But we’ve got no handle on the identity of the bombers. That’s where you guys come in.’
All of a sudden, any tiredness Danny might have been feeling simply fell away. His mind was tuned in exactly, ready to receive every word Hammond had to say.
‘I’m not going to bullshit you. This is one of the most sensitive ops I’ve been involved with. Perhaps the most dangerous, too. You know what the stakes are if things go tits up.’ He paused. ‘Your target Rudolph mentioned an IS commander by the name of Dhul Faqar. We already knew that this attack was being planned in Syria or northern Iraq, and we think he’s the mastermind behind the operation. So we’re going straight to the source. We think he’s holed up in a compound to the north-west of Mosul. We also believe that he’s expecting the arrival of four Turkish oil dealers at midnight tomorrow, that’s the night of the twenty-second into the twenty-third. These are the guys who broker oil from IS-controlled oilfields on to the open market. Your principal objective is to lift Dhul Faqar, and get some names out of him. Your secondary objective is to eliminate the four oil dealers.’
‘I thought the Yanks were supposed to be bombing these fuckers to kingdom come,’ Spud cut in.
‘Don’t ask me about the politics,’ Hammond said. ‘All I know is the Americans are holding back from attacking certain targets. And as you know, GCHQ are hacking into certain American intelligence communications, and the Firm are paranoid about them finding that out.’
‘It’s not paranoia,’ said Alice Cracknell. ‘It’s operational security.’
‘You call it that if you want,’ Hammond said. ‘The bottom line is that we don’t know the full story, so this whole op is strictly covert, strictly deniable. The Yanks must not find out what we’re doing. What’s the matter Spud?’
‘I’m just trying to decide,’ Spud muttered, ‘if I’d rather go straight back on ops into northern Iraq, or drape my wet bollocks over an electric fence.’
‘You want to be back in a desk job, just say the word.’
Spud’s expression darkened as Hammond turned to the mapping tha
t was spread out on the comms table. He traced his forefinger along the southern Turkish border, where it met Syria on the west and Iraq on the south. ‘We can’t fly in over Syrian or Iraqi airspace – the Yanks and the Russians are monitoring it too closely. They’d pick us up within minutes and start asking questions. That’s why we’re seeking permission from the Turkish authorities to enter their airspace. We’ll drop you at a prearranged location close to the northern Iraqi border. Once you’ve inserted, we head north on a dummy errand into Armenia.’
‘What’s the plan for crossing into Iraq, boss?’ Spud asked. ‘That area’s crawling with IS.’
‘It is,’ Hammond replied. ‘But it’s also crawling with Kurdish fighters – peshmerga – whose hobby is basically to kill as many IS militants as they can.’
‘Good hobby,’ Caitlin said.
‘You might not like the way they play it,’ Hammond said. ‘They’re easily as brutal as IS – beheadings, crucifixions, all the usual shit. MI6 have an open line of communication with them, but it’s impossible to say where their real loyalties lie.’
‘With themselves,’ Danny muttered.
‘We’ve made contact with one of these Kurdish groups in the past couple of hours,’ Alice Cracknell said. ‘They’re expecting you at midnight tonight. They’re very well acquainted with the border crossings. They’ll get you into northern Iraq, and drive you to Dhul Faqar’s expected location.’
Danny frowned. ‘We make contact at midnight tonight, these oil middlemen arrive at midnight tomorrow. How far is it from the border to the contact point?’
‘About seventy-five miles,’ Cracknell said.
‘That gives us hardly any time to put in an OP or conduct surveillance on the target.’ Danny turned to Hammond. ‘We need twenty-four hours’ surveillance, minimum.’
‘It is what it is,’ Hammond said. ‘If we give you another twenty-four hours, you won’t lift Dhul Faqar until Christmas Eve itself. That’s too late – it won’t give us time to act on any intel you uncover. In any case, we’re in the hands of these Kurds.’
‘And are you seriously telling me that we’re to expect a bunch of Kurdish militants to smuggle us over a heavily defended international border in a war zone out of the goodness of their hearts—’
‘Of course not,’ Hammond interrupted. He walked over to where all the flight cases were piled and banged his hand on the top of a cylindrical metal drum. ‘Do the Kurds have Christmas?’ he said. ‘Well, you’re taking them a present anyway.’
The unit walked over to Hammond and the drum. Danny twisted the top open and looked inside. It was tightly packed with five long items of weaponry. Danny instantly recognised them as surface to air missile launchers. ‘Stingers?’ he said.
‘And up-to-date radio equipment,’ Alice Cracknell said. ‘Western governments have been trying to supply the Kurds with small arms ever since the ISIS offensive began. Hardly any of them get where they’re supposed to – most go AWOL in Baghdad. They’ve been trying to get us and the Americans to put these sort of assets directly in their hands. They’ll be very pleased to have them.’
These were big-boy toys – the sort of gear a loose band of badly funded Kurdish militants would go out of their way to get their hands on. They could cause a whole load of damage. But that still didn’t make the Kurds trustworthy. Danny rapped on the side of the drum. ‘So that ensures that they turn up. What makes us think they’ll carry on helping us once we’ve handed over the hardware?’
‘You’ll just have to charm them, Black,’ Hammond said, sarcasm dripping from his voice. Charm was seldom the first weapon in an SAS operative’s arsenal.
‘What about extraction?’ Danny asked. ‘How do we get out of the country when the op’s complete?’
‘As soon as you’ve gleaned any intel from Dhul Faqar, you radio it through to us. If possible, you extract Dhul Faqar himself, but his information is your primary priority. The Kurds will wait for you, then take you back across the Turkish border to a prearranged pick-up point. You’ll have to dig in there until we can get transport to you. It could take a few days, so it’s critical that you get that intel radioed through to us the moment you have it. You’ll have a satphone for that purpose, but you need to keep all other transmissions to a minimum. The Yanks will be scanning the airways constantly. The Russkies too.’
The loadmaster stepped up to Hammond. ‘We’ve just had word from the MoD,’ he said. ‘The Turkish authorities have given permission for us to enter their airspace. We can have wheels up whenever you give the word.’
Hammond nodded and turned back to the team. ‘Your RV with the Kurds is at midnight,’ he said. ‘You need to be in position at least two hours before that, but you need night cover to HALO in. We’re about three hours’ flight time from the insertion point, so we’ll leave here at 1800 hours. Everyone agreed?’
The team nodded.
‘Operation call sign Delta Three Tango,’ he said. ‘We’ll continue the briefing here while we wait for wheels up. We’ve got details of your Kurdish contacts, mapping of Dhul Faqar’s compound – you’ll need to commit it to memory by this evening. Dhul Faqar’s a real piece of work, by the sound of it. Got a thing about people looking him in the eye. Anyone who does it gets strung up. Tosser. Intelligence suggests that he lets his men rape whichever captured women take their fancy, so long as they leave the choicest specimens for him. You can expect some pretty brutalised sex slaves in the stronghold. Don’t start getting chivalrous. Nothing’s more important than getting Dhul Faqar alive, and pumping him for intel.’ Hammond looked over at Alice Cracknell, who was busying herself with piles of paper to continue the briefing. ‘We’re not going to stop this attack in London, we’re going to stop it at source. You’re going to stop it at source.’
He turned back to the briefing table. Danny, Spud and Caitlin exchanged a long glance, then joined him.
Tony had a splitting hangover as the Alitalia flight touched down at Dubai International airport.
He had woken up half an hour previously to see one of the pretty-boy air stewards still loitering in the aisle, eyeing him uncomfortably. He’d sneered unpleasantly at him, but now that the booze had worn off he’d decided not to give him any more aggro. There’d be enough of that when they landed. Instead, he stared out of the window, watching the scorched desert landscape become the glittering sea of buildings that was Dubai.
As the aircraft reached the end of the runway, and turned left on to the taxi route towards the terminal, he saw the flashing lights of two police cars waiting on the tarmac. He touched his hand to his forehead. There was still dried blood there, from where he’d headbutted the old guy. He didn’t bother to wipe it off. The whole cabin had seen it happen, so there would be no point denying it.
As soon as the plane came to a halt, three members of the Dubai police force boarded. They had tan-coloured short-sleeved shirts, and aviator shades. Two were clean-shaven. One had a short-cropped beard. An air steward led them to Tony’s seat and pointed him out. The stern Emirate cops didn’t need to say a word. Their holstered guns were on full display, and it was obvious that they weren’t going to take any shit. Tony, raised his hands to show that he wasn’t going to cause any trouble, then stood up and allowed them to lead him off the aircraft.
He squinted as he emerged into the bright sunlight. It was warm enough to make him start sweating immediately.
He didn’t speak until he was on the tarmac, being led towards the police cars. ‘Speak any English, fellas?’ he asked, keeping his voice calm and reasonable.
‘You keep quiet,’ said the police officer with the beard.
‘You know you’re dragging the wrong guy off the plane?’
‘I said keep quiet.’
‘That old guy they saw me go for, you want to know what he did?’
No reply. But the police officers glanced at each other. Tony could tell he had their interest. He stopped walking and they did the same. ‘Touched my dick,’ he said. ‘Fucking
faggot tried to feel me up. You should be leading him off the plane, not me.’
He watched the officers carefully. He could already see the disgust in their faces. Tony knew this was a country where such activities were harshly punished.
‘Get to the car,’ said the officer who had already spoken. But he sounded less aggressive now.
Tony nodded and started walking again. ‘Seriously, fellas,’ he said. ‘You don’t want dirty old guys like that wandering around Dubai, do you?’
‘Do you know his name?’ the officer asked.
‘Didn’t ask, mate. Didn’t want to stay too close.’ From the corner of his eye, he saw a black Mercedes screeching across the tarmac towards him.
Here comes the fucking cavalry, he thought to himself.
By the time they reached the police cars, the black Merc had screeched up alongside them. A Western man in his late fifties, wearing a charcoal-grey business suit, jumped out of the back. He looked very harassed as he strode up towards the three Emirate police officers, holding up an ID card. ‘Dominic Copeland,’ he wheezed. ‘British Embassy. We have permission to accompany this gentleman off the premises.’
The officers looked warily at him. One of them got into his car. Tony saw him speaking into his radio while the rest of them stood awkwardly on the tarmac. He could sense that the cops didn’t like this sudden change of authority, but their hostility was directed more towards the guy in the suit than to Tony himself. Their colleague emerged from the car a minute later and spoke a few short words in Arabic to them. They inclined their heads, then turned to Tony. ‘You’re free to go,’ said the police officer with the beard.
Tony saw him glance back towards the plane. He leaned in towards him. ‘You want to take that guy in,’ he said. ‘Ask him a few questions. Give him the old . . .’ He made a gesture with his right hand to indicate someone being slapped around. And he could tell, by the stony expression on the officer’s face, that he intended to do just that.
