by Chris Ryan
‘So we just sit around here and wait for a MiG to dump its payload on us?’
‘Relax, kiddo, we’re in a safe part of town.’
‘That’s what Asu thought.’
‘Yeah, well, I’m smarter than Asu. Why don’t you head downstairs? De Fries’s cooking – some disgusting Dutch shit, but it fills a hole and there isn’t much else to do till dawn.’
Taff nodded at them and disappeared along the hallway.
03.20 hrs.
Sleep was impossible. Not with the sound of a midnight bombardment raging all around. Taff had been right: the air strikes were avoiding this part of town. But when ordnance is dropping from the sky, any part of town is close. Lying on the hard floor in the darkness, the recumbent form of Buckingham just a couple of metres to the right, Danny could see him jerk every time a bomb hit. And, truth to tell, Danny was on edge too. This wasn’t his idea of a secure LUP. But Taff was calling the shots and he didn’t have Regiment SOPs to adhere to. Not any more. If he said this was where they were staying, then this was where they were staying.
Buckingham sat up suddenly as a particularly loud explosion somewhere in the distance hit their ears. He cursed under his breath before lying down again. Danny got to his feet.
‘Where are you going?’ Buckingham whispered, unable to keep the nervousness from his voice.
‘I need a slash. Come if you want. Just don’t expect me to hold yours like Nanny used to.’
He didn’t need a slash, but his companion’s constant twitching was getting on his nerves and he wanted some air. Treading silently, he left the room and padded along the corridor. The generator was still grinding in the room next door, and Danny could see the outlines of Taff’s local workforce lying on the floor, and the silhouette of the gimpy by the window. He peered in for a moment, wondering if Taff was in there, asleep. Difficult to say, but he couldn’t make him out. Perhaps he was keeping stag outside. Danny decided to go and have a look.
The compound was still. There was a full moon overhead, and the fire pit that De Fries had used to grill fatty hunks of some meat Danny didn’t recognise – camel maybe? – was still glowing near the left-hand wall. The vehicles were parked in a row about five metres from the rear wall, all facing the gate in case they needed to evacuate quickly. And beyond them, right by the gate, were two figures. Danny couldn’t see their faces, but he could tell they were Skinner and Hector from their outlines. He could also see that they were tooled up. Heavily. Not only a rifle each, but Skinner held some other tool which Danny couldn’t quite make out.
It was instinct that made Danny hold back in the doorway of the house. He didn’t want these two to see him and there was something about their body language that suggested they didn’t want to be seen. Hector looked furtively over his shoulder before quietly unlocking the gate and sliding it open just wide enough for the two of them to slip outside. It closed without the slightest noise.
Something wasn’t right. Where were these two going? Why the secrecy?
Looking back into the house, Danny thought about returning to his position by Buckingham’s side. But Taff was around somewhere, and he could trust him to make sure Buckingham was OK if anything went wrong. Danny had an itch that needed scratching. What were those two up to? Something they didn’t want Taff – or anyone – to know about? There was only one way to find out. Danny felt his fingers move to his chest rig, which he hadn’t removed since arriving in Syria. The Sig was there.
He crept round the compound’s perimeter wall, keeping out of the moonlight and staying in the shadows. The gate was still unlocked. He slid it open and crept out. As soon as he had shut the gate behind him, he pressed himself back against it. He could hear a chopper approaching from the north. Twenty seconds later it was passing overhead, its searchlight beaming down on the compound and the street outside. But then it veered westward and the sound of its rotors disappeared. Danny breathed again.
The street was deserted, the outlines of the concrete buildings strangely ghostly in the moonlight. Eerie, too, to be in a city with no one on the streets. The only trace of movement was thirty-five metres to his right. Two figures, also keeping to the shadows, turning left into a side street and disappearing.
Danny made next to no noise as he ran lightly on the balls of his feet. He could move through jungle undergrowth without making a sound, so remaining the grey man, invisible and inaudible, presented no problems here in the chaotic darkness. When he reached the corner of the street, he waited and peered ahead in each direction. He saw Hector and Skinner walking along with the swagger of men who didn’t think they were being followed, or didn’t care if they were. If it hadn’t been for the signs of battle all around them – two burned-out vehicles, one behind the other fifteen metres from Danny’s position, the dark bullet holes on moonlit buildings, the total absence of civilians – they could have passed for a couple of blokes sauntering home from the pub. Except that blokes sauntering home from the pub didn’t normally have Colt Commandos strapped to them, and God only knew what other hardware these two were packing.
Danny followed the pair for fifteen minutes, staying thirty metres behind them – far enough that they wouldn’t recognise him even if they noticed they had a trail. What were they after? What diversions could this fucked-up town offer them? Hookers, maybe. It seemed unlikely. Would they really risk venturing out just to lose their load in some rancid Homs brothel, full of clapped-out prostitutes servicing the needs of government forces and rebels alike? It occurred to Danny once more that perhaps they simply wanted to keep what they were doing below Taff’s radar.
He kept careful track of his route, ticking off landmarks in his head: a small mosque on his left, one of whose minarets was crumbling and dilapidated, a school with elephants and zebras painted on the perimeter wall. Finally, Hector and Skinner stopped in a side street. From his vantage point on the corner, Danny could see that this little road had avoided the worst of the fighting. It was deserted, of course, and there was the ever-present smell of rubbish decaying as fast as Homs’s failing infrastructure. But the buildings – modern, two-storey structures on either side – looked largely untouched. The pair stopped outside one of these buildings, twenty-five metres from where Danny stood watching in the shadows.
What Skinner was carrying, Danny could now see, was a set of bolt-cutters. Hector kept watch while Skinner got to work on what looked like a shopfront. Whatever he was cutting gave way in about twenty seconds. He bent down and effortlessly raised a metal shutter – Danny heard it rattle. The two checked their surroundings once more, their gaze passing over Danny like he wasn’t there. A short tinkle of glass breaking, then they disappeared into the building.
Danny gave it forty-five seconds before stepping from the shadows. He pulled out his Sig and unlocked the safety switch as he moved stealthily up the street. From nowhere, an aircraft roared overhead. He threw himself against the wall and steeled himself for another explosion, but none came. It was a strafing run, he decided, intended to put the shits up the local populace. Not that that was at all necessary.
He took up a position opposite the building Hector and Skinner had entered. Although he couldn’t read the Arabic sign on the window of the building, the image of a golden loaf of bread told him it was a bakery. A broken padlock lay on the ground in front of the shop. The metal shutters were up. The glass door was smashed in.
The place had been locked from the outside. That meant either there was nobody inside or there was another entrance. For a moment Danny considered trying to find it, but then decided to stay where he was. Just watch, he told himself. He might have been trained to go in hard and fast when the situation required it, but he also knew the benefits of patient surveillance. He remembered Taff’s story of his mates in Northern Ireland. Yeah, he thought. Nothing to be gained from going in blind.
A minute passed. Everything remained dark and still. If he hadn’t seen the evidence of Hector and Skinner’s forced entry, he wouldn’t have kn
own they were inside. But then he saw a light – not on the ground floor, but in a window on the level above. The light was dim and directional. It moved. Somebody was using a torch up there.
As Danny watched, something clicked into place. He remembered being back in London, face to face with Max Saunders in his comfortable office in St James’s. What had he said? ‘There’s always the chance to earn a little extra while you’re out there.’ And, just a few hours ago, these two cunts had been counting out a hefty wad of cash. Where do you get money like that in a place like this? A place where the only holes in the wall were made by ballistics, not Barclays. Danny was no bleeding heart – a few months in the squadron hangar at Hereford would soon knock that out of you – but thieving from some poor bastards whose own government was bombing the shit out of them struck him as low.
It took Hector and Skinner longer than Danny expected to ransack the bakery. Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. The torch told the story of their movements. The bulk of that time was clearly spent on the first floor – this seemed to be where they expected to find the richest pickings. There was a lot of moving about: the place was being thoroughly ransacked. When the torchlight disappeared, however, there was a pause of only about a minute before the two men reappeared.
The money was in Hector’s fist – a disorganised wad of notes, rather thin. His face showed his disappointment. ‘Hardly fucking worth it,’ he grunted. ‘Should have stayed back at base, yanked myself off.’
Skinner shrugged. The flat expression of menace he normally wore was even more aggressive than usual.
Hector was tucking the crumpled notes into a pouch on the ammo vest he was wearing when Danny stepped out of the shadows. His left forearm was just below eye level, his right hand holding the Sig, resting on it. Hector and Skinner, alerted not by sound but by movement, spun round. Their hands reached for their weapons, but they were experienced enough soldiers to know at once that Danny had beaten them to it. They slowly dropped their hands, peering towards him as they tried to work out who he was.
Distance between them: six or seven metres, no more. Danny stepped into the moonlight. ‘Looting, fellas?’ he said. ‘What’s wrong? Taff not paying you enough?’
Almost identical looks of disgust tinged with relief fell across their faces. ‘Fuck you, kid,’ Skinner said. He turned to Hector. ‘Let’s go.’
‘You take a single step, Skinner, I’ll plug you without even thinking about it.’
Skinner froze momentarily. Then he turned back to Danny, a dangerous look in his eyes.
‘We’re going back in there,’ Danny said. ‘You’re going to show me what you’ve been up to.’
Skinner’s eyes tightened. ‘In your dreams.’
‘I already warned you, Skinner. Don’t tell me anyone’s going to shed a tear over your carcass rotting in the gutter. I’m happy to do the world a favour and stick one in you.’
Skinner sneered. ‘Bullshit,’ he said. He moved, not away down the street but towards Danny. He made no attempt to step out of his line of fire, and stopped only when his face was half a metre from the Sig’s barrel. ‘You’re stupid,’ he said quietly. ‘Even Taff knows that. But you’re not that stupid.’
Danny didn’t move. He just kept the gun pointing resolutely at Skinner’s forehead. Somewhere in the distance, a bomb fell.
‘What’s the matter, kid?’ Skinner taunted. ‘Trigger finger not working? Or are you just scared that Uncle Taff will give you a bollocking when you get home?’ His sneer grew even more pronounced. ‘You think you’re the dog’s bollocks, you Regiment cunts. You wouldn’t last two weeks in the Legion.’ For the first time ever, Danny saw Skinner smile – a mirthless expression. He noticed something else too. A small smear, just above his left eyebrow. Blood? There was no sign of a cut. If it was blood, it was somebody else’s. He glanced towards the bakery, an uneasy feeling rising in his gut, then looked back at Skinner.
‘Get out of my sight,’ Danny said. He glanced over at Hector, who, like his friend, was grinning unpleasantly. ‘You too.’
Tilting his head sardonically, Skinner turned and started to walk away. He began to whistle. It was a tuneless sound, but Danny recognised it and remembered the words of the nursery rhyme it went with. The insult was perfectly clear. Skinner was right. He was never going to pull the trigger. Like it or not, they were on the same side, even if Danny was having trouble establishing just which side that was. He kept his weapon at the ready, however, as Hector and Skinner sauntered back along the street, neither man looking back until they reached the nearest corner. They disappeared from sight.
The looted building beckoned to Danny. He crossed the street and stepped inside. The ground floor, as he expected, had hardly been touched. There was a counter, and behind it some racks on the wall. Beyond a door in the back wall a staircase led up to the right. Danny stood holding his breath, listening. There was total silence.
Ominous silence.
He made for the stairs. The treads were wooden and rickety. Impossible to climb without announcing your presence. His weapon still engaged, he stopped halfway up and listened again.
Nothing.
He pulled a thin torch from his chest rig and held it parallel to the side of his head so it lit up the sight at the end of his Sig as well as the stairs ahead. He could see a half-open door at the top. Slowly, he ascended. He gently kicked the door open and panned the torch around.
It took every ounce of self-control to suppress his nausea.
This one room, about ten metres square, took up the entire first floor of the building. To his right, Danny saw the window through which he had watched Hector and Skinner’s torch moving around. He lit up the middle of the room. A single glance told him that it served as a living area and bedroom for a family. He counted them – two adults, two children – dead in their beds and on the floor.
The kids’ faces looked like they were sleeping. It was their bodies that told the full story of their horrific death. They were lying in a small double bed, covered by a single sheet so heavily saturated with blood that thick red gobbets dropped, mucus-like, from its edge on to the floor. Hard to believe that such small bodies could produce such quantities of fluid. Each child lay beneath a knife hole in the sheet. Danny figured they had been murdered in their sleep. Certainly they appeared calm – unaware of how the last few seconds of their short lives had passed. But he couldn’t tell, at first, if he was looking at two boys, two girls, or one of each. Then he noticed that in one of the children’s hair was a clip. Cheap, plastic and pink. The girl had probably been very proud of it.
The father lay on his back, naked on the floor. He was a stout man, and his belly spread out on either side like a jelly that was not stiff enough to hold its shape. His skin was smeared with blood. Its source was a deep, dreadful gash across his throat. Blood was no longer pumping from the wound, but the puddle that surrounded his head – a gruesome red halo – continued to spread slowly outwards. As he passed the torch over him, Danny thought he caught a glimpse of the man’s severed, glistening trachea. His dead eyes were wide open, his mouth locked in a rictus grimace of agony.
But it was the sight of the mother that turned Danny’s stomach.
He was no stranger to death. He had dished it out on more occasions than he could count, and the human anatomy held few secrets for him. But some sights should never be seen. This was one.
The woman was – had been – pregnant. Heavily. She lay, naked and exposed, on a second double bed. Her swollen belly had been cut: a long incision from an inch above her pubic hair, along her navel, bisecting her ribs and stopping just shy of her swollen breasts. A catastrophic amount of blood had spilled on either side of the incision. But although the woman was clearly dead, there was movement inside her stomach, a faint, slimy quivering. Danny stared at it, awed by the foulness of this atrocity, for perhaps twenty seconds. Then the movement stopped. The woman’s belly was still. The final, youngest member of this little family had expired.
&
nbsp; Sickened to his core, Danny switched off the torch and stood for a moment in darkness. In his mind he saw Hector greedily rummaging through his handful of worn notes. ‘It was hardly fucking worth it,’ he had said.
What would have been worth it? Danny wondered. A hundred dollars? A thousand? What price the medieval butchery of an innocent family?
And what kind of people had Taff surrounded himself with? His old friend needed to know. To understand.
It needed to happen now.
It took Danny fifteen minutes to get back to the base. This time he kept to the shadows more from habit than necessity, following the landmarks carefully as he tried to expel the image of the murdered family from his mind. Easier said than done.
As soon as he turned into the street where the base was located, he saw that there were lights on in the compound. By the time he was fifteen metres away he could hear the sound of a vehicle’s engine turning over. He glanced at his watch. 04.39 hrs. The guys must be getting ready to leave. The gate was shut and locked from the inside. He pounded his fist against it and waited about thirty seconds before anyone answered. ‘Who?’ one of the Syrian kids shouted.
‘Tell Taff it’s Danny,’ he called back.
There was a pause of about fifteen seconds before the gate slid open. Taff was there. He looked furious. ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ he demanded. ‘Buckingham’s spitting blood and I don’t blame him.’
‘We need to talk,’ Danny said as he stepped into the compound.
‘Damn right we need to talk,’ Taff retorted. There was a clang as he slammed the gate shut and secured it. Danny looked around. One of the Land Rovers had its bonnet up, while the other’s engine was running. Skinner sat behind the wheel, slowly revving the engine. The headlamps were shining straight at Danny, so he could only make out the outline of Skinner’s head. Hector appeared in front of the bonnet of the second Land Rover. He didn’t acknowledge Danny, but went about his business of topping up the vehicle’s oil.
