by Chris Ryan
It was then that the bomb hit.
The noise of the strike was like a thunderclap, and they were right inside it. Danny was thrown to the floor, rubble and dust all around him, obscuring his vision. He could rely only on his hearing, which told him that chunks of the ceiling were dropping down. He covered his head and lay curled up for ten seconds until the noise subsided.
When he looked up, a fog of dust still obscured everything more than a metre away. But at the far side of the room, five or six metres from him, a shaft of sunlight cut through the dust where the ceiling and the exterior wall above had collapsed. Danny saw two silhouettes in the light: a woman and a boy. He could see that both the kid’s arms were intact. There was no sign of his brother.
Coughing – almost choking on the dust – Danny got to his feet and picked his way across the rubble-strewn floor. ‘Get to the Land Rover!’ he barked at Buckingham, but he kept his eyes on the silhouettes. As he came within a couple of metres of them, he saw their faces. Dirty, tear-stained, anguished. The woman pointed at the floor and Danny immediately saw what was wrong.
The son with one arm was in a bad way. Terminally bad. A piece of concrete the size of a football had fallen from the ceiling and landed on him. Jagged, rusting iron bars were sticking out of it, and one of these had pierced the kid’s chest. Blood was gushing from his thoracic cavity, smearing the stump of his arm and pooling on the floor. His eyes were open and wild and although he was not screaming – Danny assumed he no longer had the lung capacity – the pain he was enduring was written all over his face. For a split second Danny’s mind conjured up the gruesome image of Jack, pierced and bleeding, in the wrecked Renault. The kid had the same look of agony.
Agony on the brink of death.
A piercing scream brought Danny back to the present. The boy’s mother, Basheba, was clutching her hair in horror as she stared down at his brutalised body. She collapsed heavily to her knees, into the puddle of blood from her son’s body. Her desperate wailing and horrid shrieks were far worse than the noise of the shelling minutes before. They made the sinister silence that hung over the rest of the building even more intense. Danny looked around. Taff was a couple of metres away. Behind him, Buckingham, staring down at the injured boy, his face unreadable. ‘Get in the Land Rover,’ Danny said again, but less forcefully this time. He wasn’t really surprised when Buckingham ignored him.
Danny crouched down to give the kid a closer look. The boy was a goner, for sure. If the shock didn’t kill him, the loss of blood would. Even if there were such luxuries as doctors or hospitals in the middle of this war zone, it would have been a waste of everyone’s time trying to move this dying child. His legs and head were shaking from the pain. But Christ, he was a tough little kid, clinging to life even as it oozed from him. At the same time, like Jack before him, his expression seemed to beg Danny to put him out of his agony.
Unlike Jack, he had an audience.
Danny quickly assessed his options. Leave the child there to die a horrifically painful death. Or help him on his way. Put like that, the choice made itself. No point explaining to anybody what he was about to do. Now wasn’t the time to discuss the rights and wrongs of the situation. Sure, what he was about to do was illegal by any rules of engagement. But sometimes on the ground you had to make your own rules. Every soldier knew that.
He pulled his med pack from his chest rig. ‘Move the woman,’ he barked at Taff. ‘I can’t do anything while she’s screaming in my ear.’
There was a scuffle as Taff pulled Basheba to her feet and dragged her, screaming, several metres from where her son lay bleeding.
Danny took out a shot of morphine from his med pack. It was in a brown, rectangular box, one end red, the other yellow. There was also a black marker pen in the med pack. Normally he would mark ‘M’ on the forehead of anybody he’d just given morphine, along with the dose and the time of administration. No need for that now. Without hesitation, he stabbed the red end of the injection through the coarse material of the kid’s trousers and into his bony left thigh. He felt the needle puncture the skin. It took a few seconds for the drug to spread through the boy’s bloodstream, but it hardly seemed to have any effect. He was still shaking. His eyes were still bulging.
Danny threw away the spent shot and pulled out another. He punctured the kid’s trousers again. As the morphine eased into the boy, Danny looked over his shoulder. Taff was five metres behind him, holding back the child’s mother. She was still screaming, and Danny tried to block out the noise. Taff had an intense look on his face. The mother seemed like a minor irritation as his strong arms held her back. All his focus was on Danny. His old friend knew what he was doing, and he wasn’t about to stop him. Behind Taff, Danny could just make out Buckingham’s dust-covered outline. He appeared to be holding something up, but Danny couldn’t make out what.
A groan from the dying boy. Danny took another shot from the med pack.
This third injection seemed to have some effect. The trembling didn’t stop, but it began to subside as the opiate did its work smothering the pain. Three shots. More than you’d ever normally administer on the battlefield. But not enough for what Danny had in mind. He felt inside his med pack for the fourth and final shot that he carried with him. The shot that would put the kid out of his misery once and for all.
‘That’s a lethal dose, kiddo,’ he heard Taff say behind him. ‘You sure you know what you’re doing?’ No attempt to talk him out of it. Just a warning.
‘He’s dead anyway,’ Danny said between gritted teeth as he prepared to administer the fatal injection. ‘This just makes it easier for—’
He didn’t finish the sentence. Perhaps the boy’s mother understood what he and Taff were saying and had found new reserves of strength. Perhaps Taff had just taken his eye off the ball. Whatever the reason, Basheba had managed to escape his grasp. Now she hurled her whole body at Danny, knocking him sideways from his crouching position beside her son. ‘You not kill him!’ she screeched. ‘You not kill him!’
The morphine injection had dropped from Danny’s hand, and lay propped up against a pile of rubble. Danny grabbed it. The boy’s mother was hugging him now, but in doing so she had knocked the concrete chunk and its deadly shard. The boy gasped, his white face once more a mask of agony. It was pitiful to see. Danny lunged forwards and, as the weeping mother clutched her child, drove the fourth injection into the boy’s arm. Basheba let out one more desperate, piercing scream as he exhaled whatever breath was left in his dying lungs. He shuddered a final time, then lay still.
There was a moment of silence. The woman was staring at Danny in shocked disbelief. Looking round, he saw Taff and Buckingham standing five metres away. Taff was expressionless. Buckingham looked almost as shocked as the mother. Danny was vaguely aware that he had something in his hand and he thrust it into his pocket. The woman was shouting again, yelling at him in a frenzied mixture of Arabic and English. Those words Danny could understand left no room for doubt. ‘You killed my son . . . you killed my son! Murderer!’
She threw herself at him, pounding his face with her fists, which were smeared with her dead son’s blood. Danny grabbed her wrists. ‘He was dead anyway,’ he tried to explain. ‘All I did was take away the pain.’ But his words had no effect. She was screaming even louder.
And then Taff was there, pulling her away, manhandling her out of the room. Danny bent down and pulled the lump of concrete from the boy’s chest. It made a wet, sucking sound as it started to come away. He felt the metal rod catching on one of the boy’s ribs and had to reinsert it a couple of inches into his chest before he could remove it properly. Casting the blood-spattered concrete to one side, he lifted the corpse. Somewhere above him, he heard a sinister creaking: the building’s death throes. Basheba’s other son had the presence of mind to scurry after his mother and Taff, but Buckingham was still in the doorway, staring horrified at Danny.
‘Move!’ Danny’s bark seemed to snap Buckingham out of his
trance. He ran from the room, along the corridor and out into the compound. Danny followed, the boy’s limp, bleeding body in his arms.
He sized up the situation immediately. The murder holes had been abandoned, the gates opened, and the other occupants of the building had flooded out on to the streets beyond. The doors of the two Land Rovers were open, the engines running. Danny couldn’t see Hector, Skinner or De Fries, but assumed two of them were behind the wheels, ready to move. Chances were that their Syrian drivers had fled. Asu himself was standing at the gates, looking into the sky, holding up his rifle in a gesture of defiance and shouting aggressively. His two bodyguards were standing on either side of him, but their expressions made clear that they wanted to get out of there, and quick. Danny looked up. No sign of fast air or choppers. That didn’t mean the bombardment had stopped. They’d been lucky so far, but they needed to exfiltrate immediately.
He carried the body to the middle of the compound and laid it down gently. Only then did Taff release the mother. She shot towards Danny, a projectile from a catapult, and once more pummelled him in her grief and fury.
Asu hadn’t seen Danny bring out the body. He began shouting at the woman in Arabic. She stopped beating Danny and turned to face her father-in-law. A torrent of rage spewed from her mouth. As she spoke, Asu listened, and his face grew darker with each word.
He strode over to Danny. ‘Is it true,’ he demanded, ‘what she says? You killed Nadim? You killed my grandson?’
Danny shook his head. ‘No.’ He pointed at the building. ‘The bombardment killed your grandson. And if we don’t get out of here soon, it’ll kill you too. They know you’re here.’
In a sudden movement, Asu pointed his rifle at Danny. He wasn’t fast enough. Danny knocked the barrel to one side with his left arm, and pulled his Sig from his chest rig with the right. The barrel of the pistol was no more than ten inches from the rebel leader’s face. His two guards raised their weapons and pointed them at Danny. This seemed to give Asu more confidence, but then he couldn’t see, as Danny could, that Hector and Skinner had silently exited the Land Rovers and were ready to shoot if it went noisy.
A tense silence fell. ‘Basheba tells me young Nadim was alive,’ Asu whispered.
‘Barely,’ Danny said.
‘He is murderer!’ the mother shrieked. ‘Murderer of my son!’
Asu didn’t take his eyes from Danny. They were calculating. Danny sensed that he didn’t mourn the loss of his grandson one bit. To lose face, though, was agony for him. ‘Why shouldn’t my men kill you right now?’ he said.
Danny almost gave him an answer, but then Taff was beside them. Keeping his eyes on the rebel leader, he stretched out a hand and gently moved Danny’s Sig to one side. There was nobody else on earth that Danny would allow to do that.
‘Don’t kill your friends, boyo,’ he told Asu quietly. ‘Concentrate on your enemies. Danny’s a good lad and Basheba’s mistaken. I saw it all. He tried to administer first aid. Look at the boy’s body. You know he couldn’t have survived that.’
Asu glanced for the first time at the dead child. His chest was a bleeding mass of flesh and bone.
‘He’s right,’ Buckingham said. ‘Best to think this through.’
Asu bowed his head. His guards lowered their guns.
Basheba’s reaction was heart-wrenching. She staggered back, tears streaming down her face. Whispering in Arabic, she gestured to her other son, who was watching from the doorway of the building. He started towards her, but stopped suddenly as Asu snarled an instruction. The boy was clearly terrified of his grandfather.
Basheba, realising she could not influence her son, turned her anguished face first to Danny, giving him a look of hatred like he’d never seen before, and then to Asu. She spoke again, now in English. ‘Will you punish him?’ she asked, pointing at Danny.
‘No,’ Asu replied. ‘I will not.’
A strange whimper left Basheba’s lips. With a final, imploring look at her surviving son, she ran, weeping, through the gates and disappeared into the street.
A long silence followed.
‘She is a stupid woman,’ Asu said.
‘Stupid enough to let the enemy know your location?’ Taff asked, a world of violence implicit in his question.
Asu waved his hand dismissively. ‘I have people patrolling the streets,’ he said. ‘They will find her.’ He looked, without pity or any other discernible emotion, down at the body of his grandson, then prodded it with his foot. ‘He must be buried before the setting of the sun. Government forces will be here soon. We must move on from this place.’
Buckingham jostled past Taff and Danny. ‘My condolences,’ he said.
‘He had one arm and was of no use anyway.’
If Buckingham found this distasteful, he didn’t let on.
‘Do we have an agreement, sir?’ he pressed.
Asu nodded his head slowly. ‘We have an agreement,’ he said. ‘Tonight I meet with my commanders in my safe house near the central mosque. Taff knows the place. I will explain everything to them.’
‘You must tell us where we can find Sorgen if we are to progress,’ Buckingham said.
Asu looked away. ‘I only hear rumours.’
‘What rumours do you hear, sir?’
‘He and his people stay away from the city. Like me, he keeps his commanders separate from each other. They occupy tents in the desert south-west of Homs. They are easy to move, and from the air look like simple Bedouin.’
‘But where is Sorgen himself ?’
‘Follow the road to Al Qusayr. After thirty kilometres you will see a track leading off to the right into the hills. Follow this. If my information is correct, you will find my brother.’ He spat out the word ‘brother’ as if he was swearing. He looked at Buckingham and Taff. Something seemed to pass between him and them. Then he turned and barked a single word at his bodyguards. He walked with them to the waiting people carrier, they climbed in and the vehicle drove off.
Taff looked down at the dead body, then at Buckingham. ‘Get in the Land Rover,’ he said.
‘What about—?’
‘Just fucking get in.’
Buckingham did as he was told, and as soon as he was out of earshot Taff grabbed Danny by the arm. ‘You’re not one of us, kiddo,’ he said. ‘You’re still serving and you just killed a child in front of a fucking spook.’
‘He was—’
‘I don’t care why you did it, lad. Just don’t give that twat the rope to hang you with. You can’t trust a fucking spook.’
‘What did you talk about in there, Taff ? When Buckingham sent me out of the room?’
For a moment, Taff looked like he was going to give Danny a straight answer. But then he shook his head. ‘Business, kiddo,’ he said. ‘Just business. Come on, let’s get the fuck out of it before those government cunts come back and dish out second helpings.’
EIGHTEEN
17.00 hrs.
‘What the bloody hell do you mean, you didn’t plant the device?’
Back at Taff’s base, Danny and Buckingham were alone in the bleak first-floor room that had been set aside for their use. Danny was peering through the gap in the wooden planks reinforcing the windows. In the street below, fifteen metres to his eleven o’clock, he could see a group of five young men huddled by a pile of garbage the size of a small car. He spotted a couple of rats among the waste, but they didn’t seem to worry the men. They were talking intently. Maybe they were making plans to cause, or avoid, violence. Maybe they just wanted to know where their next meal was coming from. In any case, they didn’t immediately appear to be armed. Danny looked back into the room, where Buckingham was standing with his arms folded. His face was grimy and covered in dust. He looked a lot less suave than when they’d first met.
‘I said, what the bloody hell do you mean, Black, you didn’t—?’
‘I had my hands full. Maybe you noticed?’
‘Oh, I noticed. I bloody noticed. Risking everything fo
r some kid who was going to die anyway.’
‘I’ll remember that, next time you need my help.’
‘A fat lot of use you’ll be.’
‘You’re alive, aren’t you?’
‘Just!’ Buckingham was raging now. ‘Which is more than can be said for Jack and . . .’
‘Go ahead and say it, mucker.’
For a moment, Danny thought Buckingham was going to finish by laying at Danny’s feet the death of his mates. Perhaps he thought better of it. Perhaps Taff’s appearance in the doorway quietened him. Buckingham seemed very wary of these PMCs. Deep down, Danny didn’t blame him.
Taff’s frame filled the doorway. He didn’t need to say anything. ‘All friends?’ he asked delicately.
‘Oh yes,’ said Buckingham. ‘I’d say it was all going absolutely swimmingly, wouldn’t you, Black?’
‘Danny?’ said Taff.
‘Hunky fucking dory. When do we go and see Sorgen?’
‘First light tomorrow.’
‘That’s too late. I want to get this over and done with.’
‘No can do, kiddo,’ Taff said. ‘If we start moving around after dark, chances are we’ll be stopped by government troops. Or even worse, followed. Better to leave it till the morning.’
‘In any case,’ Buckingham put in, ‘Eid al-Fitr starts tomorrow. Sorgen will be more receptive to our offer then.’
