Masters of War

by Chris Ryan

  ‘Where the fuck are the others?’ Jack said.

  They’d been waiting for ten minutes. Spud and Greg hadn’t arrived.

  An uneasy sensation crept down Danny’s spine. ‘Give me a kite sight,’ he said. But Jack was already on it. He’d opened the boot again and was fishing a small optic out of one of the packs. Jack directed it to the west.

  ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘They’ve got company.’

  Jack handed him the kite sight. Danny focused in on the brow of the dune one kilometre away. He felt bile rising in his throat.

  Greg and Spud’s outlines were clear. They were back to back, maybe five metres apart, their weapons pointing outwards. On either side of them were people. Danny performed a quick headcount. Fourteen. Were they armed? Danny couldn’t tell. If not, Spud and Greg could put them down in seconds.

  And leave fourteen corpses as a calling card. Maybe the Syrian authorities would put that down as just another random massacre. Or maybe they wouldn’t, and a contact now would have troops on their tail from here to Homs. Not acceptable.

  ‘They’re keeping the heat off us,’ said Jack.

  ‘Either that or they’re holding off a contact.’

  ‘That little bastard Muhammad must have shopped us.’

  ‘We should go,’ Buckingham said. ‘Get in the car and go . . .’

  Danny lowered the sight. He and Jack turned to look at Buckingham. Their expressions told him exactly what they thought of that suggestion. Danny strode quickly to the Renault and removed his and Jack’s M4s from the boot. He turned to Buckingham and handed him his Sig. ‘I . . . I don’t know how to . . .’ said the MI6 man.

  ‘Point it at the person you want to kill, and squeeze the trigger. Stay here.’

  ‘Can’t I come with you?’

  ‘Don’t take it personally, mate, but you’d just get in the way. If everything turns pear-shaped, get on the sat phone. It’s in one of the packs. Vanguard’s still in the vicinity. They can help you extract.’

  ‘But . . . but we can’t do this. We need to get to Homs.’

  Danny ignored him. His mind was turning over. Whoever it was up ahead, they had to be holding the guys at gunpoint. Otherwise Spud and Greg would have nailed them. No question. It was a stand-off. Their SOP was clear. Draw the fire of these newcomers so the Regiment guys could do what needed to be done.

  ‘What the bloody hell are you thinking of doing?’ Buckingham demanded. He was clearly panicking. ‘We should just get in the car—’

  ‘Stay there,’ Danny repeated. He handed Jack his weapon.

  ‘This goes pear-shaped, it’ll be front page of the fucking Sun,’ Jack said, cocking his M4 as he spoke.

  Danny kept calm. ‘They don’t need much. A diversion. Stay fifty metres apart. We’ll get to within 500 metres and go to ground. Alternate bursts of fire. I’ll go first. Wait for my signal.’

  Without another word, he started to run across open ground towards the sand dune.

  Five hundred metres. Over the crunching of his footsteps Danny thought he could hear voices up ahead. He stopped to listen.

  Shouting. Arabic voices, he reckoned. Whatever was happening up there, it sounded ugly. They were probably nobodies, but this wouldn’t be the first time some bolshie locals had screwed things up for a patrol. He silently cursed Spud and Greg for allowing them to creep up on them. Jack was right. Another bunch of farmers compromising an operation and the Regiment would be a laughing stock.

  Danny went to ground and switched his M4 to automatic. He didn’t want to kill any of them, but his restraint was tactical, not emotional. If one of their number went down, it would only shock them into nailing his two colleagues. He aimed his rifle a couple of metres to the left of the group.

  He was on the point of firing when he heard it: the low, rhythmic thudding of a chopper, approaching from inland to his six o’clock.

  When Danny looked back on it, he would identify that moment of hesitation as his mistake. There was no doubt in his mind that the chopper was unfriendly. Had Muhammad shopped them? Whatever the truth, he should have fired immediately, diverted the attention of the locals and given Spud and Greg the opportunity to escape. Because two men down within minutes of insertion meant the op was a no-go. But he didn’t fire. Instead he rolled on to his back to confirm with his eyes what his ears had just told him.

  The chopper was flying low and fast. Tail up, nose down, twenty feet from the ground, max. Expert flying, no question. Estimated distance: two klicks. But it would cover that ground in thirty seconds, maybe less.

  Danny rolled over again, ready to fire. Through the scope of his M4, however, he saw that the situation had changed. Spud, Greg and their captors had just gone over the rim of the dune. He was in time to see their heads disappear.

  The chopper was getting louder. Closer. Danny hugged the earth as it thundered past him, about thirty metres to his left. The searchlight swept over the surrounding ground. Danny felt its bright beam sweep just a metre from where he was lying, tensed up, perfectly still. Only once the chopper had passed did he risk looking up again to see a side-gunner with a Minigun, scanning the ground. He wasn’t firing. Danny supposed this meant he hadn’t spotted him or Jack, but he knew he couldn’t risk getting to his feet until the threat had passed.

  Ten seconds. The chopper passed over the dune. Danny jumped up. To his right he saw Jack sprinting towards the dune, and he did the same. His legs burned as he forced them to cover the ground as quickly as possible. He listened hard. The sound of the chopper’s rotors was constant. It had landed.

  The brow of the dune was ten metres away. Danny hit the ground again. Twenty seconds later Jack joined him. They didn’t speak, but crawled to the brow of the dune to check out what was happening beyond.

  Danny felt his guts loosen.

  The chopper had landed on the beach, maybe twenty metres from the water’s edge, pretty much exactly where they’d landed. Six armed men had emerged. Danny couldn’t quite make out their clothes but it was definitely military camouflage of some description. The crowd who had compromised Spud and Greg had congregated about thirty metres to Danny’s ten o’clock. They were dressed in civilian clothes, though Danny counted nine of them carrying AK-47s.

  But it was Spud and Greg who demanded the lion’s share of Danny’s attention. They were sprawled on the ground. Face down. Not moving.

  ‘Are they . . . ’ said Jack.

  No. One of the enemy troops pulled Greg to his feet and kneed him in the bollocks. Greg doubled over. His assailant pushed him towards the chopper, while another soldier yanked Spud from the ground and hustled him in the same direction, a handgun pressed firmly to his head.

  ‘We can take them,’ Danny said. He had the Minigunner in his sights. One shot would put him down. In the confusion, the remaining soldiers would be easy prey, and the civilians weren’t sufficiently close to be an immediate threat.

  ‘Hold your fire!’ Jack hissed. And then, when Danny failed to lower his weapon, ‘Hold your fucking fire! Open up on these bastards, Spud and Greg are dead in a second.’

  ‘We can take them,’ Danny insisted. But Jack’s warning stayed his trigger finger.

  The moment was lost. The guys were already in the helicopter. The enemy soldiers were bundling in. Ten seconds later the chopper was in the air, its searchlight scanning the ground in long, random sweeps. Danny felt the thunder of its rotors vibrate through him. By the time the chopper was twenty metres high, it had rotated ninety degrees clockwise. Its nose dipped and it sped away, following the coastline, disappearing into the darkness.

  Silence.

  One of the locals, who were still standing on the beach, said something. The others laughed. Danny shifted his weapon in their direction. A couple of bursts would do it. Put them all down.

  His trigger finger caressed the cold metal of his weapon.

  ‘Easy, mucker,’ Jack said softly. ‘Nail the fu
ckers and you’ll just flag up that we’re here.’

  Danny kept the group in his sights. Sweat trickled into his eyes.

  The locals started to move. South, along the beach, away from Danny and Jack’s position. Danny was breathing heavily. He wanted to take them out. But Jack was right. It was the wrong call. He moved his eye away from the sight.

  ‘We couldn’t have stopped it,’ Jack said. Was it Danny’s imagination, or did he sound like he was trying to persuade himself? Anger was pumping through him. They hadn’t been in-country for more than an hour and already he was presiding over a clusterfuck of epic proportions. He slammed his fist against the ground, then sucked in a massive intake of breath.

  ‘What now?’ Jack asked.

  They were compromised. Two men captured. What would Taff say? ‘You play the hand you’re dealt, kiddo.’ They’d been dealt a bad one. Or maybe they’d just made the wrong play. Either way it didn’t matter. This was a hot insertion. They needed to extract.

  ‘Let’s get back to the vehicles. We’ll call for a pick-up, dig in till someone can get us.’

  ‘Roger that,’ Jack agreed.

  They crawled backwards ten metres, distancing themselves from the brow of the dune, before rolling on to their backs and looking back towards the road.

  ‘What the fuck?’ said Jack.

  ‘What?’ said Danny.

  Jack pointed across the klick of open ground to the vehicles. Before their eyes, one of them – Danny thought it was the brown Renault – pulled out from where it was parked, its headlamps on full, and started to move down the road.

  ‘RUN!’ Danny barked. ‘GET TO THE OTHER VEHICLE!’ Jack was already on his feet. Together they sprinted across the open ground.

  Different possibilities whirred through Danny’s mind. Different scenarios. Had someone crept up on Buckingham while their backs were turned? Did they have him in the car now? Maybe they were opportunists and had put him down before stealing the vehicle. The sleazy face of Muhammad the fixer rose in his mind. Either way, this dog of an operation had just taken a turn for the worse, if that was possible.

  There was no point chasing the moving vehicle on foot. They had to get to the stationary VW and work out their next move from there. They reached it in minutes. A cursory examination of the area told them that Buckingham wasn’t there, so without a word they climbed into the car. Danny took the wheel. Their fixer had left the keys in the ignition and, despite looking like a pile of crap, the vehicle started first time. The rear wheels spun noisily in the dusty road as Danny, driving with the headlamps off and only by the light of the moon, accelerated through the gears as quickly as the tired old engine would allow.

  The car rumbled and shook on the uneven road surface. Danny kept the accelerator pressed to the floor, his eyes fixed on the vehicle ahead. There was a gap between them of about a klick. A klick, and closing.

  The Renault wasn’t moving fast. It didn’t take more than three minutes on this deserted road for Danny to close the distance to about 100 metres.

  Fifty metres.

  Twenty-five.

  ‘There’s only one driver,’ Jack said, his voice tense.

  Buckingham.

  Danny slammed his palm against the steering wheel as he drove. Fifteen seconds later he was overtaking the Renault. As they passed, Danny looked over his shoulder into the other car. Sure enough, Buckingham was behind the wheel. Danny overtook, then manoeuvred the car so it was directly in front of the Renault. Gradually he slowed down, taking care to stay just in front of Buckingham. Only when they were down to 20 kph did he accelerate again, before yanking the wheel a half-turn clockwise and screeching to a halt twenty metres in front of the other car.

  The moment they stopped, Jack jumped out and stalked towards the Renault. He yanked open the driver’s door, pulled Buckingham out from behind the wheel as though he was made of feathers, and thumped him up against the side of the car. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he roared.

  As Danny approached, he saw Buckingham’s eyes wide with terror.

  ‘Answer him,’ he said.

  ‘What the bloody hell do you think I’m doing? I saw that helicopter go overhead. I thought they’d caught you.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what? I’ve got to get to Homs, of course.’

  The two Regiment men blinked at him.

  ‘You were trying to do it without us?’

  A vein was swelling in Buckingham’s neck. He stared them down. Slowly, Jack released his grip on him. ‘No offence, mate,’ he said, ‘but these Syrian bastards will have you for fucking breakfast before you get within sniffing distance.’

  Buckingham appeared to ignore the warning. He patted down the front of his clothes rather prissily. ‘Where are the others?’ he asked.

  ‘Right now, halfway to sodding Damascus,’ said Jack.

  Danny turned to his mate. ‘Get on the blower to base. Update them. Tell them we need a pick-up.’

  Jack nodded, then opened the back of the Renault and fished a sat phone out of his pack. Danny looked up and down the road. No sign of anybody in the vicinity, but they couldn’t leave the cars parked across the road like this. He turned to Buckingham. ‘Get to the side of the road,’ he said.

  Buckingham didn’t move. ‘We can’t go back.’

  ‘That’s not your call, pal. Get to the side of the road.’

  ‘You’re annoyed with me. I understand that. But I didn’t think you were coming back, and I have a job to do.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Danny. ‘Keeping you alive, and you’re not helping. So get to the side of the road.’

  ‘They won’t send you a pick-up, old sport,’ Buckingham said quietly. ‘You’d probably better prepare yourself for that.’

  Calmly, Danny walked up to him. From the corner of his vision, twenty metres west, he was aware of Jack hunkering down by the side of the road, the sat phone pressed to his ear. He drew himself up face to face with Buckingham, the two of them less than half a metre apart. ‘Here’s the thing, old sport,’ he said. ‘I’ve got two men missing in action. I’ve got a fixer I don’t trust and a chopper crew who knew we were here. This is a hot insertion, and unless you fancy a two-week crash course in escape and evasion, we’re getting out.’

  Buckingham inclined his head, but didn’t reply. He wiped a strand of hair from his forehead, then turned and walked back towards the side of the road, where he sat down, clutching his knees with his arms and staring intently in Danny’s direction. Danny felt a twinge of suspicion. Did the guy know something he wasn’t letting on about?

  But then he saw Jack walking back towards him. He was clutching the sat phone in his left hand, his M4 in his right. His expression was dark.

  ‘What is it?’ Danny said, though in his gut he knew what Jack was about to say.

  ‘No pick-up,’ he said, keeping his voice low so only Danny could hear. ‘The op’s still a green light. We continue into Homs.’

  Danny glanced over at Buckingham and saw his gaze was fixed on the two Regiment men.

  ‘Spud and Greg?’ Danny said to Jack.

  ‘They spun me some bullshit about diplomatic channels.’

  Danny couldn’t stop himself sneering. The Firm had made it quite clear this was deniable. Spud and Greg were on their own, at least for now.

  ‘This stinks, mucker,’ Jack said. ‘They’ll get Spud and Greg talking soon enough. We’ll have half the fucking Syrian army on our tail. Plus the Russkies if they’re in-country.’

  He was right. The guys might hold out for a few hours, but it wouldn’t be long before their captors started squeezing useful information out of them. Maybe Max Saunders had been right in holding back the details of his guys on the ground. What Spud and Greg didn’t know, they couldn’t reveal.

  ‘We’d better get moving,’ Danny said. ‘Saunders’ team are expecting us in Homs at dawn. I’m fucked if I’m going to be late for a bunch of mercenaries.’ He nodded at the Renault. ‘Take that one,’ he told Jack
. ‘I’ll look after our man. Hold back about half a klick. If we get into trouble . . .’ He left it hanging.

  Jack nodded his agreement. Then he squinted over Danny’s shoulder down the road.

  ‘What is it?’ Danny asked. But as he turned round, he saw what Jack was looking at. Headlamps approaching down the straight road. A couple of klicks, if that.

  ‘Move,’ he said. Then he ran over to Buckingham, grabbed his arm and yanked him to his feet.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘You’ve got your wish, pal,’ Danny said, one eye on the approaching headlamps. Fifteen hundred metres away? Certainly no more.

  Buckingham stared anxiously at them too, even as Jack started the Renault. ‘Who’s that?’ he said, his voice suddenly flat with dread.

  ‘Let’s not find out. Move.’

  Buckingham didn’t. He stared at the vehicle coming towards them.

  Danny tugged hard on his arm. ‘In the car!’ he hissed. ‘Now!’

  ELEVEN

  Danny was a good driver. He’d passed his advanced test before he even went up for selection, and since joining the Regiment he’d absorbed every last bit of know-how the members of mobility troop had fed him. He’d been up to the test tracks at MIRA, near Birmingham, where rally drivers had taught him how to handle different vehicles in icy and wet terrain. The ever-present instructors at Hereford had taught him J-turns and handbrake turns, and how to drive aggressively, using your car not just as a mode of transport but as a weapon. Right now, though, he wasn’t interested in speed or technique behind the wheel. He needed to keep things steady. Unobtrusive. He was an ordinary guy driving an ordinary left-hand-drive car on ordinary business. At least, that was how he needed to appear. He accelerated to 50 kph and kept the needle there, hugging the side of the road.

  Occasionally his eyes darted from left to right. The area seemed largely unpopulated, with the exception of an isolated farmhouse perhaps a klick to his right. Jack was hanging back 500 metres, just like Danny had told him to. Buckingham mercifully kept his trap shut, leaving Danny to concentrate on his driving.