Masters of War

by Chris Ryan

  Here it was different. The area looked slightly more prosperous. The buildings were not unscathed – many of them were riddled with bullet holes – but on the other side of the road there was a woman with two dozen eggs on display. A few metres beyond her, a man cradled what seemed to be a bowl of hummus. And, a little farther on, two sheep’s carcasses hung from metal hooks outside a concrete building. A man stood guard over them and Clara couldn’t help noticing that he carried a gun. The meat he had for sale was his livelihood, so he clearly wasn’t going to take any chances. The women and children looked with undisguised hunger at the food on display, and Clara herself felt her stomach groaning for sustenance. She hadn’t eaten or drunk for, what, twenty-four hours? But none of them had any money, so she tried to think of other things. Should she find this change in their surroundings reassuring or unsettling? Did it mean this was a district more heavily populated by those loyal to the government? Certainly none of the men they passed had quite the same look of animal fear. Suspicion, yes, but that was different.

  When the soldiers appeared in the street twenty metres ahead of Clara, she stopped.

  There were eight of them, all armed. The young bearded soldier from yesterday was among them, and he stared at Clara with an arrogant sneer. The two groups faced each other for ten seconds, before the soldiers strode towards the women and children, their step oozing self-importance and aggression.

  Clara felt her hands shaking, but her instinct, instilled in her from years of medical training, was to look after her patients. She walked forwards to confront the soldiers, not quite knowing what she would say even if they spoke English. The soldiers came to a halt two metres away, headed by a tall, thin guy with pockmarks and a pointed nose.

  Suddenly Clara found herself being nudged out of the way by Miriam, who started babbling at these younger men like the matriarch she was, wagging her finger. Only the ones at the back seemed to be paying attention. Their leader, however, had no time for Miriam’s remonstrations. Even before she had finished speaking, he had raised the stock of his rifle. With a sudden, solid blow, he cracked it down on the side of Miriam’s head. She fell to the ground, clutching her head and rolling around in pain.

  The soldier ignored her, but he didn’t ignore Clara. He grabbed her by the front of her top and looked over his shoulder at the young bearded man, whom he asked a question. The young man nodded.

  To Clara’s surprise, her new captor spoke English to her. Broken and heavily accented, but English all the same. ‘You are spy,’ he said.

  Clara shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m a doctor. I’m just trying to help these people.’

  Her captor spoke in Arabic over his shoulder again, and the others laughed. When he turned back to Clara, though, he was not smiling.

  ‘You will come with us.’

  ‘No! These people need help. Medical attention. Do you understand?’

  She tried to wriggle from his grasp. It earned her a stinging slap across the face and she sensed the women and children edging back.

  ‘Please,’ Clara said, speaking softly now. ‘I’m a doctor, that’s all.’

  ‘Identification?’ the soldier demanded.

  Clara looked at him helplessly. She had lost her ID the previous day. The bearded soldier had discarded it himself, but he would never admit that.

  ‘You will be questioned in Damascus,’ the soldiers’ leader told Clara. Then he barked at Miriam, who, still holding her head, shuffled over to join the other women and children.

  It was sheer frustration that made Clara do it. She swiped her free hand against the soldier’s face, clawing at his eyes with what remained of her dirty, brittle nails. His response was to throw her to the ground and kick her hard in her side. She felt his boot connect harshly with her bottom rib and was aware of the women and children scattering. The soldier delivered another instruction in Arabic. His young, bearded colleague bent down, yanked Clara’s arms behind her back and bound her wrists so tightly with plasticuffs that she cried out in pain. He grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled her, screaming, to her feet. The women and children had disappeared – all except the little boy Hassam with the cigarette burns on his face. He ran towards the soldiers and in his feeble way started kicking at the shins of Clara’s bearded tormentor. The soldier spat in the kid’s face, then pushed him away so harshly that the child was lifted off his feet before falling hard on the ground two or three metres away. Clara tried to run to him, but the soldier grabbed her hair again and yanked her in the opposite direction.

  Over the next two minutes, Clara screamed three times. The first two screams earned her two brutal punches in the stomach, the third an agonising blow to her left breast. The pain was so bad that she couldn’t bring herself to scream any more in case they did it again.

  The soldiers dragged her roughly through the streets, where to she had no idea.

  17.30 hrs.

  Danny’s muscles ached. His mind was drifting. He kept seeing the look on Jack’s face before he delivered the round that finished him off. He knew he had to keep sentiment out of it while he was still effectively behind enemy lines. But he did wonder if he’d ever forget that face.

  He was tugged back to reality by the sound of a helicopter. He listened carefully. It was circling overhead, and lingered in the area for three or four minutes before heading off to the west.

  Coincidence?

  He didn’t think so.

  ‘How much longer till it gets dark?’ Buckingham asked.

  ‘Two hours. Maybe a little more.’

  ‘Where the bloody hell are they?’

  ‘Waiting for nightfall, most likely.’

  ‘What if they’ve been delayed?’

  ‘Then they’ve been delayed.’

  ‘What if . . . ?’

  ‘I could do without the “what ifs”, pal.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Quiet!’ Danny had heard a rustling at his end of the culvert. Slowly he lowered himself down to his M4.

  Then he froze.

  A snake was coiled half a metre from the culvert. About 150 centimetres long. Yellow, with brown cross bands. Difficult to tell from a distance but Danny had it down as an Egyptian cobra. Highly neurotoxic. Aggressive if provoked. Its head swung lazily towards the pipe, its tongue flicking.

  Danny kept very still.

  The snake moved very suddenly. Something – Danny couldn’t tell what – had caught its attention outside the culvert, and it slithered away.

  Danny exhaled slowly.

  ‘What is it?’ Buckingham whispered.

  ‘Nothing,’ Danny said. ‘Just keep watching.’

  The building to which the soldiers took Clara had once been a school. At first glance it looked to her like just another bombed, looted, trashed building. There were no tables or chairs, no blackboards or computers. But there were, among the rubble of masonry that covered the floor, hundreds of loose-leaf papers and exercise books. And even, hanging by one corner from a wall, an old, laminated map of the world. Clara found herself staring longingly at the tiny outline of Great Britain. What would she give to be back home?

  This former school had been turned into a kind of holding area. A temporary prison for anybody who the government forces patrolling this part of town thought was a threat. There were six other prisoners aside from Clara. Two of the prisoners were women, each with a beaten face and a split lip. Both wept quietly in the corner. One of them was clutching her lower belly. Clara suspected that whatever torment they’d endured had been sexual as well as physical. The four male prisoners were cuffed in the same way as Clara. Three appeared too exhausted even to lift their chins from their chests. The fourth had more life in him. Even though he was missing several teeth, and had a cut across his left cheek that looked almost gangrenous, he was yelling non-stop at the guards, a ferocious babble of Arabic that pounded in Clara’s aching head. At first the guards seemed to find him amusing. About twenty minutes after Clara’s arrival, however, the novelt
y wore off.

  Clara could scarcely bring herself to watch the beating he endured. It even crossed her mind that it would have been kinder of the guards simply to shoot him dead. Two of them grabbed him by the arms while the third kicked him repeatedly in the genitals. After five minutes of this, he was in too much pain even to shout. The guards let him drop. He lay on his back and one of the soldiers stamped on his face, grinding the heel of his boot into his broken nose. Clara found herself shouting at them to stop, but they ignored her.

  The silence that followed the beating was terrible. The three soldiers lit cigarettes and stood around chatting as if nothing had happened. Their victim was unconscious on the ground. It was only the faint rise and fall of his chest that told Clara he was still alive.

  She tried to guess what time it was. Mid-afternoon? She’d been here for at least two hours. And try though she might to protest her innocence, to explain who she was, her words had gone unheard. She was hungry and bursting to use the lavatory. She was in anguish for the women and children she’d led from the basement. But more than that, she was desperately afraid.

  The sporadic gunfire outside only intensified that fear.

  As soon as she heard the first burst she felt her body shrink back, like a badly treated dog shown a raised hand. Nobody else in the room even appeared to flinch. Clearly it was a noise they were used to. Even the soldiers barely glanced in the direction of the street as they finished their cigarettes and stubbed the butts with their heels.

  It was only when they heard shouting in the corridors outside that they looked at each other with first bewilderment and then alarm. By the time the door burst inwards they had started to raise their weapons, but it was too late.

  The men who entered – five of them – had their faces covered. Four had swathed their heads in keffiyehs, while the fifth had a black balaclava with two holes cut out for his eyes. They all wore camouflage trousers, military vests and webbing. They had a military air to them, but it was obvious that they were not military. All five men were shouting hoarsely – Clara had no idea what they were saying, but it was aggressive enough to shock the soldiers into a moment of hesitation. One of the soldiers dropped his weapon and seemed to be about to raise his arms in surrender, evidently overawed by these new arrivals. But the gunmen were not in the business of dispensing mercy. Only bullets.

  Clara had no love for her captors, but the ruthlessness with which these newcomers dispatched them sickened her. All five men fired bursts of rounds and, in the ten seconds that followed, the schoolroom became a maelstrom of gore. The bullets knocked all three soldiers back a good four metres, ripping seams in their bellies, which spurted fountains of blood as they fell. One of them hit the ground just a metre from where Clara was crouched, and she felt a disgustingly warm spatter cover her, and nearly vomited when she saw the state of the dead man. Two bursts of fire had hit him. The first had practically split him up the middle and a reservoir of blood oozed out of his chest, pooling quickly on the ground around him. The second had hit him in the face. His features were now just a mash of raw meat, and one round had exited through the top of his head, bringing with it a shard of skull and a gush of blood. Always surprising, how much blood a human body contains.

  The other two soldiers were in a similar condition, but their killers stepped over them as if they weren’t even there. Two of them pulled knives and cut the plasticuffs that bound the male prisoners’ hands. A third went to help the two women – the ones Clara assumed had been raped – to their feet. It was the man in the balaclava who turned to Clara. He inclined his head, obviously mystified to see a Western woman here. He spoke harshly to her in Arabic.

  ‘Do you speak any English?’ Clara whispered.

  A pause.

  ‘Who are you?’ the man said, his voice muffled through the balaclava.

  ‘Oh, thank God. I’m just a doctor . . . they wanted to take me to Damascus . . . I need to get back to the Médecins Sans Frontières camp . . . Please can you help me?’

  The man hesitated. Clara was aware of her fellow prisoners being hustled out of the room to freedom. But nobody had cut her plasticuffs yet, and the man with the balaclava didn’t appear in any hurry to do it. He bent down, grabbed her by the top of her arm and pulled her to her feet. One of his feet slapped in the pool of blood oozing from one of the murdered men as he dragged Clara towards the door.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she demanded. ‘Where are you taking me?’

  ‘To see Sorgen,’ said the man. ‘He can decide what to do with you.’

  18.45 hrs.

  A milky moon was rising in the west. They only had another half-hour of daylight. Even though they needed to stay put, Danny would feel safer when it got dark.

  Buckingham was dozing fitfully, and Danny could feel him jolt each time he woke up. He decided to talk to him, just to keep his eyes open.

  ‘You got family back home?’ he asked.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Just making conversation, pal.’

  ‘Right, I see. Actually, no. Only child, you know. Parents gone on. You?’

  ‘My dad’s still around,’ Danny said. ‘Not my mum.’

  ‘Ah, yes. I remember from your file. Tragic.’

  Danny didn’t reply.

  ‘Must have been very hard for your brother,’ Buckingham added, ‘to see your mother shot like that.’

  A pause.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Danny growled.

  There was an awkward silence.

  ‘My mum died in childbirth,’ said Danny. ‘My dad was shot in Northern Ireland.’

  ‘Of course. My mistake. I must have misremembered.’

  ‘Damn right you must have done.’

  But Danny was not convinced. He twisted round to face Buckingham. The man looked alarmed, as though he was desperately trying to think of a way out of this conversation. ‘What else did my file say?’ Danny asked, his voice deceptively level.

  But almost as soon as he’d spoken, he held up one hand to stop Buckingham answering.

  ‘You hear that?’ he whispered.

  Buckingham shook his head. ‘No. Hear what? I can’t hear anything.’

  ‘Exactly. No cars.’

  It was true. The sound of vehicles overhead, which had been constant since early morning, had stopped.

  ‘Maybe it’s just because it’s getting dark . . .’

  Danny shook his head, then jabbed one finger towards the other end of the culvert, indicating that Buckingham should keep stag on it. He twisted back to face his end, pushing himself prone into the firing position, M4 at the ready, and surveying the opening through the scope on his rifle. The terrain outside came into sharp focus, the atmosphere wavering in the heat. Danny noticed himself holding his breath as his forefinger lay lightly on the trigger of his M4.

  Suddenly his field of view was filled with a pair of boots. He moved his eye away from the lens. A man was standing no more than five metres from the end of the culvert – eight metres in all from Danny’s position. Above a boot, he could see about a foot of trouser leg. Military khaki. The tip of a rifle barrel came into view for about a second, then disappeared.

  A voice shouted something in the distance. It sounded like it came from the road above, but not close – thirty or forty metres. The man near the culvert called back in Arabic. He sounded bored. He muttered something and shuffled his feet.

  Walk away quietly, pal – that’ll be best for both of us, was Danny’s first thought. His forefinger remained in firm contact with the trigger.

  But the soldier was walking the five metres towards the culvert. He stopped just by it and there was a gushing sound. It lasted for a good thirty seconds, not including the ten seconds he took to shake himself off and fasten his zip.

  Then he bent down.

  The soldier had a round face and fat lips. He peered into the culvert, squinting slightly. Then he crouched, spat on the ground and lit a cigarette. The smell of the tobacco drifted into
the pipe, but he was clearly an enthusiastic smoker and he finished the cigarette in three drags, before peering into the culvert again.

  His eyes narrowed. Had he seen something?

  The soldier stood. When his face reappeared a couple of seconds later, he had a torch, which he shone along the length of the pipe.

  His eyes narrowed once more.

  He crouched lower and wormed his way into the culvert.

  The guy was an amateur. He didn’t even have his personal weapon engaged as he crawled two metres inside the pipe. Had he even thought what might happen to him if he actually found what he was looking for?

  Slowly, Danny loosened his grip on the M4. Firing it to take out this particular target would immediately alert the other guy, and any others in the area, to their location. If the enemy was effectively unarmed, however, there was no need to discharge a round. Not when he had a silent weapon: his hands.

  The soldier stopped a metre from the foliage.

  He held the torch a little higher. Directly at Danny’s face. Five seconds passed before the intruder realised what he was looking at. His eyes widened. He dropped the torch and started scrambling for his weapon.

  Danny thrust himself forwards, bursting through the camouflage like it wasn’t there, ignoring the thorns on the branches that scraped his skin. He swiped one big hand on to the back of the soldier’s head, grinding his face hard into the curved bottom of the culvert. There was a crack as the nose shattered, and a muffled grunt from the intruder. Already Danny had scrambled on to his back. He twisted himself around so that he was facing in the same direction as his prone victim, then he gripped his throat and squeezed with a brutal, relentless strength. As he strangled the soldier, he shifted his body weight on to the man’s upper back, expelling any remnants of oxygen from his lungs and compressing his chest so he was unable to inhale even the slightest breath of air.