Masters of War

by Chris Ryan

  It was quick. The man’s legs flailed, but only weakly, kicking the bottom of the culvert with a dull thud. Danny maintained his stranglehold for thirty seconds after the kicking had stopped – he didn’t want the corpse doing a Lazarus on him – then gently rested the limp head on the concrete.

  The struggle hadn’t lasted more than a minute. Buckingham gaped at the sudden burst of brutality and its fatal aftermath. But Danny had already eased himself off the dead man. Picking up the M4, he said, ‘We have to leave.’

  ‘What? I thought they were meeting us here.’

  ‘Change of plan. This fella’s cronies are going to come looking for him. I don’t reckon they’re more than about forty metres away. They’ll be swarming round this place like flies before you know it.’

  ‘But if we leave, they’ll see us.’

  ‘We’ll have to risk it. I can’t defend this position against more than one person, two at the most.’

  ‘What if—?’

  ‘Quiet!’ Danny had stopped to listen. He could faintly hear a helicopter again. Somewhere off to the north – impossible to tell how far from this underground location, but close enough if they knew what they were looking for. They needed to leave by the south end of the culvert, which meant climbing over the body. Danny scrambled over the still-warm corpse on all fours – he felt the kneecap dislocate as he pressed his palm against it – then hissed at Buckingham to follow.

  They emerged into a dwindling twilight. There were not yet any stars in the darkening sky, but the moon was rising. Danny took five seconds to check their situation. From the roadside the ground ran downhill, forming a steep bank about two metres high. If they kept to the line of the road, they could follow the bank without being skylined. Climb too high and they would present a silhouette; wander too far into open ground to the south and they’d be visible from the road.

  ‘You still got the Sig?’ Danny asked.

  Buckingham held it up.

  ‘Good. Keep down. I’m going to recce.’

  Keeping his head low and moving as silently as possible, Danny crawled up the bank until he was level with the road and he was quickly able to evaluate the situation. All the activity was off to the west in the direction of the coast: a roadblock, fifty metres from the culvert, with four civilian cars waiting to pass. A chopper with a searchlight was circling about 500 metres north of the road – an indication that whoever was searching for them had swallowed their false trail.

  To the east, nothing except the single-storey house and outbuildings he’d already seen about a kilometre up the road, which he’d dismissed as an LUP before deciding on the culvert. A couple of cars heading in their direction, and the twinkling lights of settlements in the hills up ahead. They were beyond the enemy troops’ cordon. But as soon as someone found the body in the culvert, that advantage would be lost.

  Danny turned his attention back to the house. The situation had changed. They needed somewhere nearby to wait for the PMCs. The house was out of the current search area, it gave a view on to the road and it was defensible. He decided quickly. Sliding back down the bank, he didn’t waste time explaining his thinking to Buckingham. He just jabbed one finger in an easterly direction. ‘Make for the house. Keep low, don’t stop running. I’ll be ten metres behind you at all times.’

  ‘I thought you said the house was—’

  ‘Go!’

  The difficult thing was moving slowly enough to keep a safe distance from Buckingham. In the end, Danny resorted to allowing him to move ahead by twenty metres while he checked the ground behind them for threats through the sights on his M4, before catching up, stopping and checking again. Moving like this, it took some ten minutes to come within fifty metres of the house. Danny caught up with Buckingham and hissed at him to stop. They went to ground, and while Buckingham regained his breath, Danny withdrew his night-sight and examined the location. Single-storey. Flat roof. Two outbuildings, both tumbledown. The building looked old – as though it had been there before the highway was constructed – but it was definitely occupied. Light shone from a window on the facing side, and a motorbike was propped up against a wooden barn about twenty metres from the house.

  It was fully dark. Danny judged that they could risk a sprint across open ground to the barn. They reached it in thirty seconds, by which time Buckingham was completely out of breath again. The barn had an open front and a quick look inside told Danny it was empty apart from a few old tools shrouded in cobwebs. ‘Wait in here,’ he said.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I need to keep an eye on the road.’

  ‘What if someone comes?’

  ‘I’ll be keeping an eye on you too.’ Danny pointed to a dark corner. ‘Crouch down there. Don’t move and don’t put the gun down.’

  ‘I don’t bloody like it.’

  ‘You don’t bloody have to.’

  Danny left the barn. Crouching low, he ran twenty-five metres west before going to ground. From here he had a clear view of the entrance of the barn, but also of the road. If the PMCs approached the culvert, he’d have eyes on. If the owner of the house, which appeared to be occupied, looked like he might discover Buckingham, Danny could be there in seconds.

  He hugged the ground, covered by a blanket of darkness, and kept watch.

  Fifteen minutes passed.

  Half an hour.

  To the west, a glow in the night sky told him that the search was still on. Every thirty seconds he checked the area around the culvert. So far nobody had approached it.

  Maybe their luck would hold.

  It didn’t.

  The vehicles came in convoy from the east: two standard military trucks, not unlike the technical Danny had encountered in Libya, only the rears were covered with tied-down webbing rather than displaying .50-cals. Danny estimated that they were travelling at a steady 50 kph. For a tense moment he thought they were slowing down as they passed the house and its outbuildings – which put them just fifty metres away – but they carried on in the direction of the roadblock, clearly reinforcement troops on the way to either relieve or bolster those already in situ. A hundred metres from the roadblock and fifty from the culvert, they slowed down.

  They stopped almost exactly above the pipe containing the dead soldier.

  Danny remained absolutely still, barely breathing, his night-sight magnifying the two trucks.

  Doors opened. Men emerged. Eight in total. No, nine – a final figure appeared between the two trucks. He was bearded and dark-skinned. He wore the standard camouflage gear of the Syrian military. Assault rifle slung across his chest.

  Danny focused in on the rest of the men. They were all dressed the same.

  ‘Shit!’

  The soldiers conferred for a moment. Danny tried to zero in on their faces but they were moving around and blurry. It soon became clear, though, that they’d decided to investigate the culvert. Three of them slid down the bank. One disappeared from Danny’s line of sight.

  Sixty seconds later he reappeared, dragging something from the culvert.

  The three men rejoined the others on the road. Danny couldn’t make out the corpse, which meant they’d probably left it outside the pipe. They started looking round. West towards the roadblock. North and south across open ground.

  East, towards the house.

  Danny wasn’t sure which of these nine Syrian soldiers gave the order. All he knew was that the order was given. Within thirty seconds, they had all returned to their vehicles. The trucks U-turned across the road and started heading back the opposite way, their headlamps flooding the road in front of them.

  Danny’s veins had turned hot with adrenalin. He sprinted back to the barn. Buckingham was where he had left him, crouching in the dark corner, clutching the Sig.

  ‘We’ve got company,’ he whispered.

  Buckingham’s frightened eyes glinted in the darkness. ‘Where?’

  ‘On their way. We’ve got about three minutes.’

  ‘What do we do
?’

  ‘Fight,’ Danny said.

  Buckingham said nothing.

  ‘The house has a flat roof. If we can get up there, we’re likely to have the advantage of height. I can lay down rounds from above and we can withdraw to avoid incoming fire. Whatever happens when we get up there, keep down. The moment you raise your head, you become a target. Understood?’

  Buckingham nodded.

  ‘Follow me. Stay close.’

  Distance to the main house: twenty metres. An exterior staircase led up the back wall. Danny sent Buckingham up first, covering him until he reached the penultimate step, at which point he himself raced up. Once they were both on the flat roof – it was fifteen metres square and made of rough concrete – Danny dragged Buckingham to the centre and in one swift movement pushed him down on to his belly.

  ‘Don’t move,’ he said.

  Distance to the edge of the roof: five metres. Danny crawled it. By the time he had a vista on the road, fifty metres away, the two-vehicle convoy had already turned off it and was heading for the house.

  Why? Had they been spotted?

  Danny removed the two fragmentation grenades he had stashed in his chest rig and laid them next to him. Then he allowed the barrel of his M4 to protrude a couple of metres proud of the roof, set the weapon to automatic, closed his left eye and followed them with his right through the scope.

  Use the element of surprise, he said to himself. Hit them hard and fast as soon as they stop. Put them down before they even know what’s happening, let alone have a chance to fire back.

  Forty metres.

  Thirty.

  The convoy stopped.

  The headlamps stayed on. Danny waited for the doors to open and the passengers to disembark.

  They didn’t.

  Instead the convoy moved on. Faster than before.

  Twenty metres.

  Ten.

  For a moment Danny thought they were going to smash into the house. At the last second, however, the vehicles skidded through ninety degrees, coming to a halt parallel with the front of the house and so close to it that his advantage of height had suddenly been neutralised. Now he couldn’t see the vehicles, far less fire on them.

  He looked briefly over his shoulder. Buckingham was where he had left him, face down with his hands covering the back of his head. Voices and the slamming of doors returned Danny’s attention to the front of the house. Activity. The soldiers were barking instructions at each other in Arabic. Danny made a quick call. A frag grenade – maybe two – would kill or wound a good number of them, and certainly confuse the others.

  Suddenly Buckingham was beside him, tugging at his sleeve. ‘What the hell’s happening? We can’t stay here . . .’ He’d crawled over but looked like he was about to stand up.

  ‘Get down!’ Danny hissed, pulling him down again.

  Twenty seconds passed before Danny looked up again and prepared to throw the frag. His location would be blown, but right now that was the lesser of two evils.

  He was just stretching out his left hand to pick up one of the grenades when it happened.

  A boot appeared to his left. With a deft tap worthy of Lionel Messi, it nudged both frags away before Danny could get his hand on one.

  More than anything else, he felt a surge of anger with himself. Buckingham had made him take his eye off the ball. Somebody had crept up on them. But, lying prone as he was, there was nothing Danny could do. A strong arm reached down and yanked him to his feet as though he weighed nothing. He started to struggle, ready to use brute force to overcome this surprise assailant.

  In the seconds that followed Danny noticed three things.

  Buckingham, still pressed against the concrete, with a burly soldier in Syrian military camouflage hulking over him.

  The military camouflage of his assailant’s uniform.

  The elaborate tattoo on the man’s powerful forearm.

  And nothing else. Because, right then, he felt a stunning blow to the back of his head. There was just time for him to feel his legs turn to water before the world turned black.

  Danny awoke a minute later, or an hour, or even a day – he had no way of knowing. The back of his head was throbbing. His gut ached with nausea. It was dark. He was lying on a metal floor that was vibrating. His confused mind picked out the sound of an engine. He resisted the urge to sit up, preferring to pretend for a few more moments that he was still unconscious while he accumulated more information about his situation.

  He was in the back of a truck. He could vaguely distinguish the outline of other figures crouched on the floor with him. Two? Maybe three? They were moving at a constant speed and it was only by chance that he managed to establish their direction. There was a small gap between the canvas covering of the truck and its tailgate. Just an inch or so, but enough for him to catch a glimpse of the moon. It had been rising in the west, he remembered. That meant they were heading east.

  Danny still had his personal weapon. He couldn’t believe that his captors had been so stupid as not to confiscate it. That said, firing inside a moving vehicle was a risk. Rounds could ricochet. It was easy to lose control.

  Movement. One of the figures was crouching over him. Broad-shouldered. Tall, even by Danny’s standards. Danny closed his eyes again to feign unconsciousness, but almost immediately felt a rough thumb yank his left eye open.

  He was able, just vaguely, to make out a face in the darkness.

  The man spoke.

  ‘You did almost everything right, kiddo,’ he said. ‘You hid. When you couldn’t hide, you ran. When you couldn’t run, you fought. Just like I always taught you.’

  Danny’s grogginess fell away. He scrambled up into a sitting position, dumbstruck. The man didn’t stop him.

  ‘There was just one thing you did wrong. You didn’t put yourself in the mind of your enemy. You didn’t realise I’d know exactly what you were thinking, and how you were going to react. But I suppose we can forgive that.’

  Danny stared. The man grinned.

  ‘After all, you didn’t know it was me who was coming to get you,’ said Taff.

  FOURTEEN

  Danny wondered for a moment if he was suffering concussion from the blow to his head. He closed his eyes and tested himself. Seventy-three plus twenty-six: ninety-nine. Capital of the DRC: Kinshasa. Last known location: a hundred klicks west of Homs, Syria. His mental faculties seemed to be in order, even if he did feel like puking his stomach out.

  Even so, maybe he’d been mistaken. It was dark. Faces were easy to confuse. Perhaps he was still in the mental no-man’s-land between consciousness and unconsciousness.

  ‘Looks like our boy soldier’s woken up,’ said an unfriendly voice.

  ‘Shut the fuck up, Skinner.’ A pause. ‘I told him to go easy on you. No reason to knock you out.’

  It was Taff’s voice, no doubt about it. Danny would know it anywhere. It was as familiar to him as his father’s or his brother’s.

  ‘Boyo lets things run away with him a bit sometimes. Him and Hector sometimes think they’re still in the French Foreign Legion. Isn’t that right, Skinner?’

  ‘Right,’ Skinner snorted. ‘I’m very, very sorry, boy soldier. Next time I’ll be more gentle.’

  ‘What are you doing here, Taff ?’ Danny groaned. But he was already putting a few things together in his thumping head. He’d always known that Taff freelanced the military skills he’d learned in Regiment before Danny was even born. It made some kind of sense that he’d be getting work from Saunders.

  ‘Earning a crust, kiddo,’ Taff said. ‘Same as you. What the hell’s been happening? We were expecting four of you, plus the spook.’

  ‘Compromised,’ Danny said. ‘Two of our guys got captured. Taken away in a chopper.’ He clenched his eyes as the full magnitude of how fucked up this operation had become hit him afresh. ‘We need to track them down,’ he said, his voice hoarse.

  ‘Forget it. The Syrians will have taken them to Damascus. If they’re
not dead already, they’re probably wishing they were.’

  ‘We spoke to base. They said they’d go through diplomatic channels—’

  One look from Taff cut him short. A look that said: you know better than that, kiddo.

  ‘What about your third guy?’ Taff asked.

  ‘KIA.’

  Taff didn’t look remotely surprised. ‘How?’ he asked.

  Danny paused for just a fraction of a second but it was long enough for Taff, who knew him so well, to notice and throw him a sharp look. ‘Enemy fire,’ Danny said. Taff made no play of disbelieving him. ‘Where’s Buckingham?’ Danny asked suddenly.

  ‘In the other truck,’ Taff said. ‘Don’t want to put all our eggs in the same basket, do we, kiddo?’ he added, answering a question Danny hadn’t asked. ‘Not now our Syrian friends have smashed most of them.’

  Danny forced himself to sit up. He peered through the darkness at his old friend. It always surprised Danny that Taff no longer looked the way he did in his memory. The moustache he’d always worn with a certain pride had been replaced by a face full of scratchy stubble; the hair was no longer long, dark and scraggly, but short and gunmetal grey. His leathery skin had more lines around the eyes than Danny remembered. He was dressed in the standard camouflage of the Syrian military.

  ‘Let’s us move around more freely,’ Taff explained, almost as if he’d been reading Danny’s mind. He had a habit of doing that. ‘We’ve paid a few disgruntled squaddies to drive us. They should be able to get us through any roadblocks between here and Homs.’

  ‘How long have I been out?’

  ‘Ten minutes. It’ll take us a couple of hours to get there, assuming we don’t run into any trouble.’

  ‘Where, exactly?’

  ‘Our digs. Not much, but keeps the rain out. If there was any rain, that is.’

  ‘You sure you can trust the drivers?’

  ‘As much as we can trust anyone around here, kiddo. But on balance, yes. Money talks out here.’