Masters of War

by Chris Ryan

  ‘You’ve got a problem,’ Danny told Taff. ‘Two problems.’ He pointed at Hector and Skinner. ‘One, two.’

  Immediately he spoke, the engine of Skinner’s Land Rover cut out. The headlamps died, leaving spots of colour dancing in front of Danny’s eyes. A door slammed. Skinner was approaching. And now Hector. With his back to the gate, Danny found himself hemmed in: Taff two metres directly in front of him, Hector to his right, Skinner to his left.

  ‘What’s going on?’ said Taff.

  ‘Ask Skinner,’ replied Danny. And then, when Skinner didn’t comment, he continued. ‘Your two boys here have just had a little night-time walkabout.’

  Taff seemed to relax. ‘They’re big boys, kiddo. They’re allowed out after midnight.’

  ‘Not to break into houses and steal from the local population.’

  A strange thing happened then. A flicker of annoyance crossed Taff’s brow, but his lips also displayed the ghost of a smile. He looked left and right at the two men. ‘This true, fellas?’ he asked.

  Skinner stepped forwards. ‘You know what the trouble is dealing with kids?’ he said. ‘You have to put up with their fucking stupidity.’ He looked at Taff. ‘He’s going to tell you next that we murdered a family and stole all their money.’

  Taff’s smile grew a little more pronounced. ‘Is that what you’re going to tell me, kiddo?’

  ‘Not so much murdered as butchered. They’re out of control, Taff. Both of them. You need to stand them down. They’re a liability.’

  ‘You hear that, boyos? You’re a liability.’

  ‘I saw what they did—’ Danny started to say, but he was interrupted by Hector.

  ‘For fuck’s sake. There’s a baker’s shop a few blocks away, all right? One of the kids back at Asu’s told us there was a rumour the family had been killed by government forces. Happens all the bloody time, right? We went to investigate and yeah, they were properly fucked up. Some cunt had taken a knife to them. Taken anything of value too. We found a few lousy notes hidden under a mattress so we took them. It’s not like they were going to spend it on anything, and trust me, the place will be looted within twenty-four hours anyway.’

  ‘They’re lying,’ Danny said. ‘I saw the bodies, they were—’

  ‘Tell you what, fellas,’ Taff addressed Hector and Skinner. ‘How about you both get ready? We leave in ten minutes. Me and Danny’ll sort this out.’

  ‘Fine,’ Hector said. ‘I could do with a dump anyway.’ He wandered back into the house. Skinner gave a look of triumph that only Danny caught, before joining De Fries back by the vehicles. Taff manoeuvred Danny away from the gate and across the compound. ‘You want to be careful, kiddo,’ he said, as the engines of both Land Rovers coughed into life. ‘Hector and Skinner are good soldiers, but you don’t want them pissed with you.’

  ‘They’re not soldiers at all,’ Danny snapped. ‘What they did was—’

  ‘What they did was totally normal, kiddo.’ Taff’s voice was full of authority. ‘They’re not here because they like Middle Eastern skirt. They’re here for the money. They’re mercenaries, for fuck’s sake, and there isn’t a mercenary in the world who doesn’t go out of their way to earn a little extra if they see the chance.’

  ‘And killing those people? What was that, a bit of fun?’

  Taff shook his head. ‘They didn’t kill anyone, Danny. Didn’t you hear what Hector said? You think that sort of atrocity is rare out here? It’s two a penny. Why do you think your paymasters are helping the rebels? Because they think Asu’s St Francis of fucking Assisi? Or because he’s the best of a bad bunch? These government forces can do what the hell they want. There’s no one to stop them. Plugging a local shopkeeper and his family isn’t the half of it . . .’

  ‘They used a knife.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They didn’t plug them. They used a knife. And they did it recently.’

  ‘Danny!’ Taff’s voice was sharp. Almost like a schoolteacher. Or an irritated parent. He stretched out one arm to indicate the city around them. ‘You’re in the middle of a fucking war zone. Do yourself a favour and remember who your friends are.’

  They stared at each other.

  ‘I expected more of you, lad,’ Taff went on. ‘You’re losing your grip out here. You’re seeing things that aren’t there. If you can’t stand the fucking heat, you know what to do.’

  He turned away and strode back to the Land Rovers, where he struck up a conversation with Skinner and De Fries. Danny watched them for a moment, then stormed over to the house. He paused outside the door that led to the fire-damaged part. He drew a couple of deep breaths and tried to calm himself. To clear his head and get things straight. Was Taff right? Was he losing it? He’d heard of such things happening. Maybe the loss of his three mates had affected him more than he knew. It wouldn’t be the first time, he realised with a sick feeling, that a Regiment guy had lost the plot in the middle of an op. He thought back to the bakery. Had he really seen what he thought he’d seen? It had been dark, and he’d been expecting the worst. Maybe Hector’s explanation added up. If so, stealing a handful of notes was of a different order to massacring an entire family. There were plenty of guys back at Hereford who’d have done the same. It didn’t make them monsters, did it?

  But then the memory of the pregnant woman’s quivering stomach returned. Those people were freshly dead. There was no doubt about it. Taff was being blind. He was a stubborn bastard – always had been, if Danny was honest with himself – and he clearly wasn’t going to accept Danny’s word for it that he’d teamed up with a couple of psychos. So what would it take? How could Danny convince him? What kind of evidence could he find that Taff couldn’t dismiss so easily?

  The idea came to him in an instant. Danny slipped his hand into his pocket. The small, magnetic infinity device that he was supposed to have planted on Asu was still there.

  He flipped it around in his fingers for a few seconds as he looked up the stairs.

  He checked over his shoulder to see if anyone was watching him from the doorway. Nobody was.

  He went up.

  At the top of the stairs, he listened. The sound of Hector straining on the throne emerged from the filthy bathroom. Danny stepped quietly away and into the generator room. As usual, Hector’s M16 was propped up against the chintzy armchair. Danny bent down and pressed the magazine-release button on the side of the weapon. The mag clicked easily out.

  He had to work quickly. Hector could walk back in at any moment. The mag was packed with 5.56s. Danny tipped them out and laid them on the armchair before turning back to the magazine itself. At the closed end of the mag was a detachable slide. He opened it to reveal the bottom of the spring action that fed the rounds up from the mag into the chamber of the weapon. He looked around the room. He needed something to push the bottom of the spring upwards. A splint of wood would do it. Removing his knife, the one Taff had given him all those years ago, he sliced off what he needed from the corner of the window frame. Nobody would notice, and even if they did they’d never guess why the wood had been cut. He stuffed the splint into the mag, raising the spring mechanism by about half an inch. Then he carefully placed the infinity device in the newly created cavity and refitted the slide on to the bottom of the mag.

  A noise from next door: the sluicing of water down the pan.

  Danny fumbled for the rounds on the armchair and started plugging them, one by one, into the doctored magazine. He’d reduced the capacity of the mag. By the time it was full, he still had five rounds left over. He shoved these in his pocket as he heard the bathroom door open and close.

  Footsteps along the corridor.

  He clicked the magazine back into place.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

  Danny spun round to see Hector standing in the doorway, looking darkly from Danny to the M16 by his side.

  ‘Looking for you,’ Danny replied. He picked up the M16 and carried it to Hector, who warily accepted it. H
e didn’t move from the doorway, though.

  ‘If it wasn’t for Taff, knobwad,’ he whispered, ‘I’d stick one in you right now. Or even let Skinner do it. He’d love to get to work on you.’

  ‘You could even nick my wallet while you’re at it,’ Danny replied. ‘Or maybe – what was it you said? – maybe it would be hardly fucking worth it.’

  They stood, half a metre apart, eye to eye.

  ‘I need to get past,’ Danny said.

  Hector’s face oozed menace, but he stepped aside. Danny waited until Taff’s colleague had headed back down the stairs before he continued along the corridor and into the room he shared with Buckingham. The MI6 man was standing waiting for him, obviously ready to go, obviously pissed off. ‘Where the bloody hell?. . . ?’

  ‘Leave it, pal,’ Danny said, grabbing him by the arm and pushing him out of the door. ‘We’ve got an RV to make and I’m really, really not in the mood.’

  NINETEEN

  Clara had no idea where she was.

  The soldiers who had rescued her from the awful makeshift prison had been less brutal than the government forces who had kept her there, but only slightly. They had blindfolded her and tied her hands behind her back. Clara had managed to stay composed as they’d bundled her into the back of a van, but when the doors slammed shut and it started to move off, panic had taken over. Her screams were piercing, and the effort of making them tore at her throat. An unseen companion had stuffed a rag into her mouth to shut her up. It had made her want to gag, and she’d had no option but to try to remain calm in order to avoid choking on her own vomit.

  They had travelled for an hour, perhaps a little more, before stopping. The door had slammed again, and there had been the noise of voices and movement outside. Clara had been left, frightened and alone, for another hour, too scared to move and not even knowing what to do if she could.

  When the door had opened again, she’d felt strong arms pull her out and drag her perhaps fifty paces. She had tried to work out where she was from the sounds and smell of the place. It was much quieter here, and the unpleasant mixture of odours in Homs – dust, rotting waste, sewage – had given way to something more wholesome but which she could not quite identify. She had stumbled a couple of times, but her captor had kept her upright, and then she sensed the air around her change. It grew warmer and she recognised the faintly musty smell of being under canvas.

  Her captor had said something in Arabic. Another man had replied. He had a deep, resonant voice. On his command, she had felt the blindfold being ripped from her face. She’d blinked heavily as the sudden flood of light stung her eyes. Then she’d looked around.

  She was indeed in a tent, but it was very different to those in which she had endured miserable childhood holidays. It was much bigger, circular and about twenty-five metres in diameter. A pole in the middle extended five or six metres into the air to prop up the roof, which spread down in billowing folds. The sand-coloured canvas was tough, utilitarian, and there was no hint of ornament inside the tent. Simply tables with maps and portable communications systems on them, guns, boxes of ammunition, and, Clara had immediately noticed, two flight cases marked with a red cross – medical supplies.

  And men. Six, not including Clara’s captor. Five of them were almost indistinguishable from each other: camouflage trousers, khaki T-shirts, ammo vests and black keffiyehs. They’d appeared hard at work, studying maps and issuing instructions into crackling radios, and barely bothered to notice her arrival. The sixth man, however, had stood out. He was huge, and wore a white dishdash with embroidered hems. His skin was dark, his hair – of which there was plenty – brilliant white. He had an enormous, bushy moustache, also white, which he’d stroked proudly as he stood in the centre of the tent, his small brown eyes twinkling.

  He had looked at Clara for a moment before extending his arms. ‘Welcome to our home,’ he had announced in immaculate English. ‘It’s not much of a home, and I can’t guarantee we will not have to strike camp at any minute and move elsewhere. But you are welcome to it anyway.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Clara had whispered, confused by his politeness and not entirely trusting it.

  ‘My name is Sorgen.’ The man had slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand in a strangely melodramatic gesture. ‘Forgive me.’ He’d clicked his fingers and barked a quick instruction in Arabic. Clara’s captor had removed a flick knife from his pocket and opened it to reveal a wickedly sharp blade. Clara had stepped backwards, but he’d grabbed her arm. She’d opened her mouth to scream, but the scream had died on her lips as he cut the tape binding her wrists, releasing her arms.

  ‘Excellent!’ Sorgen had announced. ‘And I have the pleasure to be addressing . . . ?’

  It had occurred to Clara that she should lie, but her tired brain wasn’t quick enough. She’d mumbled her real name.

  ‘And what brings you to our poor, divided country, Miss Clara?’ Sorgen’s voice had been friendly, but his eyes were suddenly searching.

  ‘I’m a doctor with Médecins Sans Frontières. I got separated from my friend . . . they killed him . . . I was trying to get back to my colleagues . . .’ Amazing how she could mention Bradley’s death without crying. Had she really become numb to it already?

  ‘A doctor?’ Sorgen had sounded impressed. ‘Doctors are as rare as diamonds here. These days we have one doctor for fifty thousand people.’ He’d nodded, to emphasise his statistic. ‘That is what our government has done to us. It is not enough, especially in a time of war.’

  ‘That’s why we came,’ Clara had whispered. She was on the edge of tears again.

  ‘You said that you were trying to get back to your colleagues. Where is that?’

  ‘A camp on the east side of Homs.’ Sorgen had nodded, but Clara could tell he was deciding whether or not to believe her story. ‘I’m afraid I don’t quite know the exact location,’ she’d added weakly.

  Sorgen had raised his hand. He seemed to have come to a decision. ‘That doesn’t matter,’ he’d said. ‘We will find it. You are, of course, free to go. I will ask one of my men to accompany you. You will not be offended if I ask you to wear a blindfold? It is for your own safety. We move around a great deal, and the government would dearly love to know our current location. What you don’t know, they can’t torture out of you.’

  ‘Torture? Why—?’

  Sorgen had smiled a rueful smile. ‘There are places in Damascus, Miss Clara,’ he said quietly, ‘that a young lady like you wouldn’t want to see. Like I said, you are free to go. But I have injured men, women and children here, and my troops are fighters, not medics. Perhaps I could ask you to look at them?’

  Clara had never declined to help someone who needed her expertise. It was not in her nature. But on this occasion she had hesitated. All she wanted to do was get back to safety. This place and these people, wherever it was and whoever they were, were not safe. Would it be so bad, she had wondered, to think of herself for once?

  She’d been on the point of asking to be taken away when something had stopped her. What was she thinking? Did she really intend to climb, willingly blindfolded, into a strange car with a strange man? Had her experience taught her that men like this could be trusted? The familiar hot, sick feeling of anxiety had crashed over her. She had found herself nodding her agreement and being led out of the tent, this enormous, strangely jovial man by her side.

  Clara had seen, immediately, the advantage of the tent’s colour. They were in the middle of the desert. The sand was hard and stony – not the rolling, Lawrence of Arabia waves she had always pictured as a child, but a harsh, weather-beaten landscape of crags and ditches. The tent was pitched against a sandstone cliff face about fifteen metres high. In the minutes after Clara’s arrival, the sun had started to set and the cliff had cast a shadow over the tent. She had worked out that she must be facing roughly east. A track wound off in a roughly easterly direction, disappearing over the brow of a small hill perhaps a couple of kilometres away. Clara
had found her gaze fixed on that track as she wondered if she dared walk it alone.

  Around the tent, at a distance of about ten metres and fanned out in a semicircle, were armed men. They were lying on their fronts, rifles engaged, scanning the surrounding desert. Clara noticed that their clothes, headdresses and even weapons were the same colour as the tents. From a distance – or from above – they would blend easily into the landscape. Four trucks were parked at the camp. These too were camouflaged. Two were open-topped. One carried a satellite dish, from which long cables led into the tent. The other had a large machine gun of some kind mounted on the back. Clara knew nothing of guns, but she had observed that it was pointed skywards, and she’d had to suppress a shudder as she remembered the bombardments in Homs. Five metres ahead of them, she noticed the remains of a fire smouldering in a pit. A man had been busy shovelling sand on to it. ‘We allow ourselves a fire during the day,’ Sorgen had explained, ‘but we must put it out at night.’

  ‘Why?’ Clara had asked.

  ‘So we cannot be seen from the sky.’

  Clara had nodded.

  Immediately to the right of the round tent was a second one, half the size and set up as a field hospital. But basic. Very basic. Thin mattresses on the floor for beds. Nothing but a dim, red-filtered torch to see by once the light failed – and that, Sorgen had explained, was to be used sparingly. A beaten-up 4x4 parked by the entrance served as a medical supply store, but its stocks had dwindled to two boxes of clean dressings, a box of painkillers and some sterile wipes. Hardly enough to treat the four women with shrapnel wounds, the two men with suppurating gunshot wounds and the little boy with no physical symptoms but an alarmingly high temperature and acute delirium. No antibiotics. No saline. Scarce clean water that had to be taken from a large plastic drum outside. It was only a quarter full.

  Clara had been here for two nights now, unable to practise medicine as such. All she could do was keep her patients comfortable, their wounds clean. They had been long nights. She’d hardly dared to use the red torch, fearful that she would make her own little tent ‘visible from the air’ as Sorgen had put it. She did not dare leave the tent, unless it was to use the camp toilet twenty metres away, which was little more than a hole in the ground and a bucket of sand to cover whatever waste ended in there. Food was brought to her before sunrise and after sunset – bland fare that she ate ravenously. Between periods of fitful sleep and tending to the sick as best she could, Clara had sat in the darkness, trying to work out who these people were that she’d fallen in with. Clearly they were not on the side of the Syrian government forces. She could only assume that Sorgen led one of the rebel groups the government were so keen on obliterating. It seemed such a ludicrously basic set-up from which to run a rebellion, but then she had witnessed at first hand the brute force with which the government was attempting to crush those who opposed it. There was very little activity here, but she sensed that everyone was on constant high alert. She figured that it was some sort of centre of operations, but one that could be easily dismantled and moved elsewhere if word of it reached the wrong ears.