The Kill Zone

by Chris Ryan

  ‘The fuck’s that?’

  ‘That, Kieran, could be your ticket out of the clink.’ She winked at him. ‘It’s a listening device. You hide this somewhere your dear uncle spends a lot of time and I’ll be able to listen in on him. I’m thinking somewhere in the Horse and Three Feathers. I’d do it myself, but I don’t think someone like me would be all that welcome there. Do you think you could manage that now, Kieran?’

  The tout took the box and weighed it in his hand. ‘How does it work?’ he asked.

  ‘There’s a magnetic backing which means it’ll stick to anything made of metal. Down the back of a radiator is good. Just avoid anything electrical that could interfere with the signal. And I suppose I don’t need to tell you to keep it well out of sight.’

  Kieran examined the box, turning it round in his fingers and holding it up to the light like it was a glass of wine. Then, with another aggrieved look at his handler, he shook his head. ‘Too dangerous,’ he said. ‘I’d be busted in minutes.’

  Siobhan bent down so that their eyes were only a few inches away from each other. ‘Listen to me, you little piece of shit. I want to see Cormac O’Callaghan in prison for the rest of his life, but believe me, putting you away will come a very close second, so you’d better start playing ball. We’re going to meet every two days, here, at midday.’ She pulled a bit of paper from a pocket in her leather jacket. It had an email address scribbled on it. ‘You can’t make it, you leave a message at this email address and turn up at midday the following day. Stand me up more than twice, I pull you in. And let me tell you, Kieran: you’ll be working a damn sight harder for me than you ever did for your uncle – unless you want to spend the next fifteen years sharing a room with the sort of fella little Jackie’s not supposed to accept sweeties from. Have I made myself absolutely clear?’

  The two of them stared at each other – a look of mutual contempt.

  ‘Yeah,’ Kieran O’Callaghan said finally.

  ‘Good. Then get out of my sight. I don’t want to spend any more time with you than I have to.’

  Kieran stood up and walked to the door, then turned. He looked as though he was about to say something, but then thought better of it and slipped out of the house, closing the door quietly behind him.

  26 JUNE

  4

  Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew it was a dream. But that didn’t make it any less real. He saw a child. His child. She was small – six years old – with mousy, curly hair that tumbled over her forehead. She was looking at him.

  ‘Daddy?’ she asked.

  He tried to answer, but couldn’t.

  She looked at him sadly. Accusingly, almost. And then she started to fade away. He tried to reach out for her, to stop her from disappearing. But he couldn’t. She melted away, leaving nothing but an agonising emptiness . . .

  Jack woke up.

  He didn’t know where he was. Ropes still bound his wrists and legs, and he felt like he was spinning – a mixture of pain, hunger, acute dehydration and the uncomfortable remnants of his dream. It was a relief that he was lying on the floor; if he had been standing up, he’d have just fallen over anyway.

  He wanted to vomit, but there was nothing to retch up, so he lay there, shivering for a while despite the heat. He didn’t want to fall asleep again but he couldn’t fight it. It was only a matter of minutes before he passed out again.

  This time, he dreamed of fire – Red’s burning body staggering from the blaze of the Black Hawk – and of water. Cool and thirst-quenching.

  It was water that woke him. Not icy cold, but cold enough for it to be a shock as someone threw a bucketful over his body. And it wasn’t just the water that hit him, but the bucket too. Jack breathed in sharply and looked up. There was light in the room, streaming in from the open door. Two figures advanced.

  A dull thump as one of them threw something on the floor.

  Jack’s vision was blurred, but he could see they wore grey dishdashas and full beards and had dark, ugly looks on their thickset faces. They were not muscular, but naturally big. One of them carried a gun, which he pointed at Jack’s head while the other pulled a long, wicked-looking knife.

  The blade twinkled in the light coming from the doorway as its owner bent down and held it towards Jack’s body. He grinned horribly, circling the point of the blade in the region of Jack’s face.

  Jack did what he could to prepare himself for the sensation of the blade slicing skin.

  Instead, his tormentor shuffled down to Jack’s wrists. With a single swipe, the sharp blade cut through the ropes binding them. The knife man stood up quickly, leaving Jack’s legs bound tight. He and his colleague walked backwards out of the door, closing it in front of them and locking it from the outside.

  Enough light seeped in from around the door and from a small opening high in the opposite wall for Jack to be able to see. He sat up painfully, rubbing his sore wrists. The bucket they had thrown at him was about a metre from where he was sitting. It was rusty, and touching his face where it had hit him, Jack felt a small stream of blood. He pressed hard on its source to stem the bleeding while looking around the rest of the room.

  It was a square space, about five metres on each side. Although it was largely empty, Jack had the impression that it was used as a storeroom. The walls were made of hard-baked mud – the sort of material the inhabitants of Helmand had used for centuries to build the square, high-walled compounds in which they lived. These walls were thick and unbelievably sturdy, often able to withstand the impact of artillery fire. There was a stale smell of animal shit in the air, and along one of the walls was some kind of dried crop and a small pile of firewood. Jack was sitting almost up against the back wall. Between him and the door he saw whatever his two visitors had dumped on the ground when they arrived. Shuffling up towards it, he realised what it was. Food – a large piece of flatbread – and a plastic bottle of what he hoped was water. His mouth was drier than the dust on the ground.

  He ate the bread in big, ravenous mouthfuls, ignoring the bits of grit that clung to its underside. The water was warm and stale, but as he gulped it down, Jack felt his body absorbing it like a sponge. When he had finished, he looked around a little desperately to see if they had left him anything else to eat or drink. In the bottom of the rusty bucket there was still a bit of water, so he carefully decanted this into his bottle, then screwed the top back on. He’d leave that for an emergency.

  Fuck, he told himself. Like it isn’t an emergency already.

  Jack felt a surge of fear. He knew he had to master it. His priority was survival, and fear was his worst enemy. If he let it, it would affect his ability to think, to make intelligent decisions.

  He needed to keep a cool head. Not easy. Not very fucking easy at all.

  He took a deep breath and tried to work out what the hell was going on.

  The first thing was this: he was alive. There had to be a reason for that, because his captors could have killed him at any moment. What was more, they had just given him food and water, which meant they had plans for him. And Jack could guess what those plans were. He was an enemy combatant, and you didn’t have to be a military fucking genius to work out he was SF – they’d already have examined his digital camouflage and his SF helmet cut away round the ears. That meant he was a good prize, and potentially a good source of intelligence. Jack looked down at the bottle of water. He’d conducted enough field interrogations of his own to realise that you didn’t want your subject to be halfway to Hades before you started on him. You wanted him conscious and alert. No point torturing a comatose man.

  He got up on tiptoes and looked through the opening. The sun was high. It was past noon. The first three hours after capture were critical – that was the time frame in which you were most likely to be rescued. But that three-hour limit was long gone. To make matters worse, he estimated that there were still another four or five hours until sundown. If he escaped now, that was four or five hours when he would be runnin
g in daylight . . .

  He held on to the last glimmers of hope. Maybe a backup squadron was out trying to find him. Even that thought had its worries: if the Taliban heard the noise of vehicles approaching, chances were they’d come in and execute him immediately, just to be rid of him. And he’d seen enough video clips on the Internet of Taliban executions to know how brutal that would be.

  Fear again. He did what he could to control it. He didn’t know how long it would be before they got to work on him. Maybe their strategy was to make him sweat it out. Once they started, it would only be a matter of time before he cracked. He knew any information he had now would be useless. The guys back at base would have recovered the bodies from the wreckage of the bird. They would know Jack was missing. They’d have changed any operational details he was privy to.

  During training they always told you that if you were captured, you had to last twenty-four hours. Easy for some instructor in the safety of Hereford to say but once your balls were in that vice all fucking bets were off. Might take an hour, might take a day, might take a week. But sooner or later he’d be singing like a canary on speed.

  That meant Jack’s only loyalty was to himself. His only focus: to get out of there. If that meant pretending to be compliant, if it meant making them think he was a soft touch, so be it. Jack would tell these bastards whatever they wanted to hear. Humanise himself. Appease them. If it bought him a little time to cook something up, anything was acceptable.

  And then, when he got the chance – if he got the chance – he’d kill as many of them as he could.

  Time passed. Two hours, he estimated. The sun was lower now and shooting a beam through the tiny opening.

  Jack sat in the corner of the room, sweating in the afternoon heat, having untied the ropes round his ankles. He was sitting still, conserving his energy. At one point he pulled down his trousers, crouched on the bucket and took a shit. The smell that leached into the air of his prison was foul, but he knew from experience that during a ‘tactical questioning’, the bowels were often the first to go. Better to evacuate himself at a moment of his own choosing.

  He made a mental list of everything he had at his disposal, and it wasn’t a long one. They’d confiscated all his weapons, of course, along with the spare ammo and fragmentation grenades that he’d stashed in his ops waistcoat with his now missing escape and evasion kit. The shoelaces had been removed from his boots to make walking more difficult. In fact, the only thing they’d left him with was his Silva compass, because that was no good to anyone. The body of the compass had cracked and the needle had detached itself from its spindle. His compass wouldn’t get him out of this room, let alone back to base. And apart from that, they’d left him with nothing other than the clothes on his back. Even his belt had gone . . . But his captors had missed the pliable saw blade that all the guys wore sewn into the elasticated cord round the top of their trousers. He loosened the blade, ready to pull it out when he needed it.

  The door opened. Jack looked up slowly from his sitting position. Four men walked in. They all had assault rifles, but only two of them had their weapons pointing at Jack. A third clutched a small video camera, and the fourth had the swagger of a leader. He was the only one that still wore combat camo. Bin Laden chic. Jack thought he recognised his face, and his eyes flickered towards the man’s left hand.

  Four fingers. It was the same guy he’d seen out on the ground earlier.

  The armed men stood by the door while their leader approached Jack, who remained still in the corner. He was tall – almost as tall as Jack – and he towered above him, looking down impassively at his prisoner. He stank of sweat.

  And then he spoke. His voice was heavily accented, but his English was surprisingly good. ‘You will speak into the camera,’ he said. ‘You will give your name and tell the world that you are being well treated, for now, but that you will die a painful death unless the President of the United States announces the immediate withdrawal of his troops from Afghanistan. If you attempt to say anything different, you will be dead before you finish the sentence.’

  Jack took a deep, slow breath.

  Control your fear. Keep your mind calm.

  He had to do what they said for now – try anything macho and they’d be forced to assert their authority. And if Jack wanted to have any chance of escaping, he needed his body to be in as good a shape as possible. He nodded at the man, doing what he could to look as unprovocative as possible, then waited while the cameraman took up his position in front of him. A little red light shone at the front of the camera.

  ‘Speak now,’ said the leader.

  ‘My name is Jack Harker,’ he said. ‘Royal Regiment of Fusiliers.’ Then he licked his lips, kept his eyes on the camera and repeated the message his captor had given him.

  The cameraman lowered the machine. He stepped back while the leader approached Jack once more. He crouched down so that their faces were at the same level. Jack could see the pores on his dark skin, and the sweat on his brow.

  ‘Jack Harker,’ he rasped, fixing Jack with a passionless stare. Then, quite unexpectedly, his lips moulded into a smile. ‘You are lying, of course.’

  Jack shook his head. His captor’s smile grew broader.

  ‘You will deny it now. But given time, you will tell us everything we want to know. You will be begging to tell me things, because you will understand that I will only let you die once I am satisfied. And believe me, infidel, you will want to die very soon.’

  ‘Please,’ Jack insisted, his voice croaking as he did his best to sound deceptively weak. ‘I’ll do what you ask. I’ll tell you anything you want to know. My name is Jack Harker. Royal Regiment of—’

  ‘Quiet!’

  His four-fingered captor raised his good hand. Immediately the cameraman handed over the camera.

  ‘You are not the first soldier we have captured in recent days,’ the Talib continued. ‘We caught a younger man than you. An American. I will show you what happened to him.’

  He opened up the viewing screen of the camera, fiddled with the controls for a few seconds, then turned it round for Jack to see. The screen glowed bright in the dimness of the room, and the sound from the camera, even though it was quiet, seemed to echo off the walls.

  It was a scream. It sounded like an animal being slaughtered, but Jack knew it was a human. The image was blurred and shaky, and it wasn’t until the camera panned out a little that he realised what he was seeing.

  The kid was being filmed from behind. His body had been bound, using rope, to a cross, which his tormentors had leaned at an angle against one wall. He was fully clothed. At least, Jack thought he was. His arms were covered, and so was the bottom half of his body; but his back was such a bloodied pulp of devastated flesh that it wasn’t fully clear whether it was clad or not. The victim was struck from behind by some kind of lash; liquid spattered from his mashed-up back and he screamed again . . .

  Jack’s captor closed the camera. ‘That was the first day,’ he said. ‘The infidel did not die until the third day. We are looking forward to sending the tapes to his family, so they can see how their son died, squealing like a goat. Do you have a family, Jack Harker?’

  Jack nodded, and he could feel the skin round his eyes tightening.

  ‘We will find out soon enough,’ the man continued, his voice calm. He scratched his beard with his four-fingered hand. ‘You Westerners, you are so stupid. Your white-faced British soldiers crawl around this land like ants, and you cannot defeat us. With all your weapons you still cannot hold the ground.’ He took a few steps closer to Jack and his lip curled. ‘You are more stupid even than your grandfathers. They at least could not look to history when they came here only to be slaughtered by the thousand. You should know better, but you don’t.’

  He was warming to his theme now. Jack hung his head and let him say his piece. ‘Your women are worse than you,’ the man continued. ‘Not only stupid, but loose. They prostitute themselves for so little and you do n
ot have the brains to see it. You should use your violence on them, not on us.’

  He leaned in closer.

  ‘When I was very small, my grandfather told me something. I have never forgotten it.’ His voice grew quiet. ‘It is with your weapons that you win the battle, but with your mind that you win the war. And that is why this war, for you, is already lost.’

  The man’s eyes shone in the gloom as he tapped on his own head with two fingers.

  ‘You do not believe us, perhaps. But our ambush easily destroyed your helicopter in the desert. Oh, we filmed that too, and soon the world will see that your instruments of war are no match for our cleverness.’

  Jack felt his nostrils flaring, but he remained quiet. Let him say his piece. Don’t get him angry. Buy yourself some time . . .

  The man stood up. ‘I will leave you to think about what happened to the last soldier we interrogated. Expect the same treatment when the sun goes down.’

  And without another word, he turned and left the room along with the other three. Jack heard the door being locked firmly behind them.

  Jack felt heavy with tiredness. He did what he could to fight it. Tiredness led to lethargy, and lethargy would be fatal. He had to fight to survive. And to do that he needed to be obstinate. Stubborn. He knew in his heart that by now the guys back at base would most likely have him down as dead. Even if they didn’t, there was no way he could expect a rescue operation. Nobody knew where he was. No one was going to provide help, except himself.

  Think positive. Think what you have. Value your own life. Fight for it.

  He put his ear to the door and listened for voices. Nothing. Just a goat bleating. He couldn’t draw any conclusions from that, though. Just because nobody was speaking, it didn’t mean they weren’t there.

  He drew strength from the certain knowledge that his captors had already made their first mistake. Rule number one of field interrogation: let the bastards know you’re serious. Had he been in the Taliban’s position, he’d have started as he meant to go on. Cut off a digit, break a limb – make them think about what was for the main course, if that was just the starter. His captors had obviously thought that showing him footage of that fucked-up squaddie would mess with his mind. He could deal with psychological stress; a broken leg, however, and he’d be out of the game.