The Kill Zone

by Chris Ryan

  Jack memorised the address, then dropped the paper back on the floor and started searching the flat again. It didn’t take long to locate Siobhan’s car keys; and knowing her as he did, he realised that if he looked hard enough he’d find a set of picks and a tension wrench. They were in the cabinet from which Siobhan had brought out the papers on Habib Khan. He found something else there, too – something that almost made him smile. A thin torch with a piece of red lighting filter taped to the front. Jack pocketed his discoveries, then helped himself to Siobhan’s M66 from under the bath. He noticed something else in the bathroom – an open packet of coloured contact lenses with one of the sachets missing. He had to hand it to Siobhan: she still knew what she was doing . . .

  He left the flat by more conventional means. Outside, the old woman had her fist round a bottle of Thunderbird. She gave Jack a hard, unapologetic stare. He found Siobhan’s car, kicked it into life and hit the road. Fifteen minutes later he was parked up a dark side street of a West Belfast estate.

  Jack searched for the lock-up with a confidence bolstered by the weapon in his jacket. Once he had the place in his sights, he stopped and loitered in a dark corner. A couple of kids were playing footy, kicking the ball against the iron doors of the lock-ups so that they boomed with tinny thunder. Luckily they got bored after ten minutes and moved on, giving Jack a clear run at it.

  He picked the lock in less than a minute.

  Inside it was pitch-black. Jack was glad of Siobhan’s torch. The red filter lit up the place without wrecking his night vision and he found what he wanted in no time at all. A pile of cash and enough drugs to put a hundred girls like Lily in the ground. That was what Siobhan had said he’d find and she wasn’t wrong. To Jack it had all the hallmarks of an emergency stash, a place O’Callaghan could go when the shit hit the fan to supply himself with weaponry, cash and a means of making more. Jack ignored the guns and the drugs. All he wanted was the cash. He helped himself to two bundles of money – three or four G, he reckoned – and stuffed it in his pocket.

  In Jack’s experience, no one did anything for nothing. On overt or covert ops, he could expect to be given whatever funds he needed to grease whichever palms came his way. But this was different. Personal. Nobody was going to give him cash for such a trip, so it seemed only right that O’Callaghan should foot the bill.

  Jack clutched the M66 as he stepped outside and locked the garage again.

  A moment of doubt. Perhaps he should just alert the authorities, tell them about Siobhan. But what would they do? She’d travelled to Djibouti. That wasn’t a crime. And start feeding them her fears about Habib Khan and he’d be laughed out of town.

  No. This was his call. He ran back to Siobhan’s car and headed towards the airport. As he neared the perimeter, he dialled Lew Miller again. His American friend was curt as he read out a number with a Kenyan prefix. ‘You didn’t get it from me, Jack. You got that?’

  ‘Yeah, I got it.’

  Once Lew was off the line, Jack thought of the furrowed face again, and heard his laid-back, southern American accent almost as clearly as if the guy was standing next to him. Markus Heller. Formerly of A Squadron, Delta Force, now plying his trade in Africa. Would he help? Jack snorted. For a price, Markus Heller would help anyone.

  Jack dialled the number. A low African voice answered. ‘Rainbow Safaris.’

  ‘Listen to me carefully,’ Jack said. ‘I need to speak to Markus Heller. Tell him it’s Jack Harker and I need a favour.’

  And he continued to drive towards the airport as he waited for his old friend to come on the line.

  Habib Khan was not a fool.

  He would not be making this phone call from his flat; he wouldn’t even be making it from the vicinity of his flat, preferring instead to take the pay-as-you-go mobile phone that he had bought under an assumed name to a quiet car park in the east of London, well away from any masts that would track the location of the call to his house. As he travelled there, he thought of O’Callaghan, who was similarly distrustful of telephones. Khan didn’t like the man, didn’t like his avarice. Everything O’Callaghan did, he did for money. Still, at least it meant he was loyal to something. Cormac O’Callaghan might be loathsome, but he had his uses. In the days to come, Khan knew he would prove to be invaluable, even though Cormac himself didn’t realise it.

  Other people were invaluable too, like the person he was about to call. It pleased him that this person was not a slave to money. That their loyalties to his cause had more reliable, solid foundations. That they believed.

  The voice was curt when it answered the phone. ‘Yes?’ It was a woman’s voice.

  ‘Is everything ready?’ Khan asked.

  A pause. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You don’t sound sure.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  Khan nodded in the darkness of his vehicle. ‘Good. I fly to Paris tonight. The United Nations plane will drop me in Mogadishu tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘I don’t see why I can’t be on the same flight. It would be safer.’

  ‘If you think about it,’ Khan replied, ‘as I’m sure you have, you will understand why. I will have to spend time with journalists when I arrive. If they see you there, they will want to know why. It is much better that you join me later.’

  ‘And a lot more dangerous.’

  ‘You will have security. It is already arranged. And besides, our objective is important. If we must endure hardship, it is of no importance. You understand that?’

  A pause.

  ‘Yes,’ the voice replied. ‘I understand that. You’re sure nobody knows what you’re doing?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Khan replied mildly. ‘I know how people think. The bigger the lie you tell them, the more they are likely to believe it. I will be waiting for you in two nights’ time at the Trust Hotel in Mogadishu. Until then, Allahu Akbar.’

  ‘Allahu Akbar,’ came the reply.

  Khan smiled, hung up the phone and drove away. He needed to be at the airport in a couple of hours, and there were still preparations to make.

  3 JULY

  14

  07.30 hrs, local time.

  The sun was already fierce and Siobhan Byrne was wet with sweat.

  She had arrived in Djibouti just after nine the previous evening. On the plane from Paris she had locked herself in the toilet the moment the seatbelt lights had gone off. There she had inserted her brown contact lenses and smeared her face with fake tan that she’d bought at Charles de Gaulle and decanted into a small pot to get round the safety restrictions. By the time she’d got to Djibouti her eyes and skin were dark.

  The airport was practically deserted, and the first thing she’d done was walk up to the Daallo Airlines counter. She knew from her research that this was the only airline operating to Somalia. The man at the desk was elderly, his curly hair short and grey. He wore thick spectacles and, to Siobhan’s surprise, a Manchester United football shirt. He spoke no English, but they managed to converse using Siobhan’s schoolgirl French. ‘Le vol prochain à Mogadishu?’

  The man had raised an eyebrow at her. ‘Vous y allez toute seule?’

  She nodded. ‘Oui.’

  ‘Ça n’est pas une bonne idée.’ Not a good idea? Siobhan was getting tired of people telling her that. ‘Le vol prochain?’ she repeated.

  It was with apparent reluctance that the man had sold her a ticket on the flight that left the following day, and his reaction had given Siobhan an uneasy feeling that lasted long after she had checked into a hotel in the European quarter of Djibouti City. Not one of the big-name places. If someone came looking for her, they’d try the Sheraton first, then work their way downwards. The place she had researched while she waited for her connecting flight back in Paris was something more modest. Unassuming. The building looked faintly colonial, with balconies and colonnades. It had the air of a place that was once desirable, but its splendour had faded. The beige exterior paint was peeling away and the arched wooden window frames we
re rotten. Siobhan wasn’t used to Africa. She wasn’t used to the shanties and the run-down vehicles and the strange looks, not all of them friendly. She wasn’t used to the heat or the smells – a strange mixture of sewers festering in the heat, exhaust fumes and grilled meat from roadside stalls. And although the inside of her hotel was clean enough, the streets outside were filthy and rubbish-strewn.

  As her taxi driver had driven her through some poor-looking places on the way to the European quarter, she found herself wishing that her handgun was in her jacket, not hidden behind the panels of her bath thousands of miles away.

  Siobhan spent the night recovering from her journey on an uncomfortable bed underneath a circular ceiling fan that did little to keep her cool. Sleep had been impossible. Her mind had whirred as incessantly as the fans, and the recklessness of her actions surprised even her. In Belfast, this journey had seemed her only serious option; Jack’s objections had sounded like the words of a coward. But she’d had time to reflect. Jack had his faults, but cowardice wasn’t one of them. Perhaps she should have listened.

  But listened and done what? Sit around impotently and wait for Lily to show up – or not – when her only lead was slipping through her fingers? Doing nothing wasn’t her style. As daylight arrived and the tinny sound of the call to prayer curled above the rooftops of the city, she managed to sideline her tiredness and her fear and concentrate on what she had to do. After an unappetising breakfast consisting of some kind of highly spiced meat stew, she headed out of the European quarter and found herself in a street of ramshackle market stalls. Everything was on sale here: bleating livestock allowed to roam the streets; unfamiliar vegetables; hunks of meat plastered in crawling flies; bunches of what she assumed was khat, the mildly hallucinogenic herb that practically everyone here chewed. Large, dirty umbrellas marked with logos for familiar drinks – Coca-Cola, Schweppes Indian Tonic Water – covered the market stalls to protect them from the sun’s rays, and the air was thick with the smell of animal shit. People shouted in Arabic and French. Beggars – even they were chewing khat – lined the walls and the whole place was made more unpleasant by the ever-increasing heat.

  Siobhan walked with as much confidence as she could. Although she had darkened her skin and her eyes, she was still wearing Western clothes, so she had to rely on her well-practised ability to disappear in a crowd. It was a state of mind – the moment you looked unsure of yourself, you’d stick out. And if that happened, she’d be surrounded by kids and beggars in an instant.

  Siobhan needed clothes. She might not feel entirely safe here in Djibouti, but she knew how much less safe she would be dressed like this over the border. So it was a relief when she saw what she wanted: a stall, presided over by a dark-skinned man so hunched up and wrinkled that he looked almost like a different species. He didn’t have much to sell – a few brightly coloured shirts, some underpants, shoes that looked as if they’d already had several not-so-careful owners. And, at one end of his rickety old rail, what looked like a big sheet of black material, and a veil.

  Siobhan pointed at them and nodded at the old man. He mumbled something she couldn’t understand, so she just handed over a few notes. From the toothless grin he gave her, she assumed she’d overpaid, but that didn’t matter. She took the material from the rack, folded it over her arm, then turned and hurried back to her hotel.

  She locked herself in her room, then spread the black clothing out on her bed. Siobhan had never worn a burka, of course. In fact she’d never really seen one, and it took a while to work out how to put it on. It was too big, and she had to tie it in places to make it fit properly. Even in the supposedly air-conditioned hotel room, the extra layer of heavy clothing was almost unbearably hot and heavy. But at the very least the grille of the veil covered her face. Siobhan removed the headdress for now, then killed time in her room for a couple of hours before preparing to leave.

  When she asked the guy at reception if he could organise a taxi back to the airport, he looked faintly amused before disappearing out into the street and coming back in with a thin-looking man chewing the ever-present khat. The taxi driver looked spaced out, but Siobhan wasn’t in a position to argue. She climbed into the back of his cab and wasn’t entirely surprised to see a hole in the floor that displayed the road below. The taxi driver jabbered away in Arabic all the way to the airport. It didn’t seem to worry him that Siobhan said nothing.

  The aircraft was already waiting to depart when she got to the airport, an Ilyushin Il-18 turboprop looking like something that might have flown behind the Iron Curtain thirty years previously. She put on her headdress before checking in, then walked to the departure gate.

  There weren’t many people waiting to take that trip to Mogadishu. Siobhan was one of only two women; the remaining men, about twenty of them, were without exception dark-skinned and lean – the kind of tough thinness that comes from hardship. A few carried briefcases – God only knew what business they were up to. Some of them had gathered into little groups, and within those groups a few men talked with animation. But the different groups eyed each other with suspicion, and Siobhan, despite her burka, or maybe because of it, drew some curious and hostile glances. These men clearly didn’t trust strangers.

  A flight attendant called them forwards. Siobhan allowed all the others to board first. That way she could be sure of getting a seat by herself. She didn’t want people asking her questions, and not just because of the language barrier. It would be stupidity, she knew, to let anyone realise just how vulnerable she was. It was going to be difficult enough on the ground without letting her travelling companions know that she was a white woman travelling on her own to the most dangerous country in the world.

  Siobhan handed her ticket to the woman at the gate. She glanced at it, glanced at Siobhan, and then spoke. ‘Attendez-vous, s’il-vousplait.’ The woman took the ticket and the passport, then disappeared while Siobhan stood at the gate, feeling a hot surge of panic in her veins. What the hell was going on?

  When the woman returned, she had two other men with her. Siobhan recognised one of them immediately – the grey hair and the Manchester United shirt of the man from the Daallo Airlines counter. The second stood out because he was white, and Siobhan immediately noticed a tattoo creeping below his sleeve on to his right hand. He had the physique of a rugby player, and the sweat on his brow made him look like he was in the middle of a match. As he walked right up to her, she noticed that his nose was squashed flat and he didn’t smell too fresh.

  He jerked his thumb towards the Man U fan. ‘Bibi tells us you’re getting on this flight by yourself.’ He had a South African accent.

  Siobhan surveyed them through the grille of her burka. ‘Bibi talks too much,’ she said.

  The South African moved quickly. He grabbed one sleeve of Siobhan’s robes and tugged it up, revealing a flash of white skin where she hadn’t applied the fake tan. Her reaction was immediate. She grabbed his wrist in a fierce grip and pushed it away.

  The man grinned. It wasn’t a very nice look. ‘I wouldn’t mind betting, love,’ he said, ‘that there’s a lot more beautiful white skin under those robes.’ He looked around. ‘A lot of Kaffirs round here. Unless you’re planning to get it together with one of them, I might be a better bet.’

  He raised his hand again and made to lift her headdress.

  ‘You even think about it,’ Siobhan hissed, ‘and I’ll break your fingers.’

  He paused. And then, clearly realising that she meant what she said, he lowered his hand again. ‘Break my fingers,’ he said, ‘and I might not be able to pleasure you the way I’d like. You really thinking of getting on that plane?’

  ‘I really am.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  All of a sudden, the lasciviousness had fallen from his face.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter who I am, love. Let’s just say I’ve made the trip a few times. Don’t get on that plane.’

  ‘Thanks for th
e advice.’ Siobhan turned to the woman and held out one hand for her passport. She reluctantly handed it over.

  A moment of silence. The South African leaned in even closer. ‘You got American dollars?’ he asked.

  Siobhan nodded.

  ‘When you land, don’t even think of handing over your passport without a fifty-dollar bill. They won’t let you in without a bribe, and it’s not something you want to discuss with them, all right? Keep the rest of your money hidden in your shoe. At least that way they’re less likely to take it off you while you’re still alive.’

  ‘Who’s they?’

  The man shook his head. ‘Anyone, love. Anyone. Have you ever handled a weapon?’

  Siobhan sniffed. ‘Now and then.’

  ‘Buy one at the airport.’

  ‘Who from?’

  ‘Anybody. If you can, hire someone to look after you. Better still, hire several people. I don’t move around the country without at least six guards. Make sure they’re armed.’

  ‘How do I know I can trust them?’ Siobhan asked.

  ‘You don’t. But without them you’ll be dead the moment you enter the capital. Before, probably. Keep the burka on. It won’t stop you being robbed, but it might stop you being kidnapped, or shot on sight. There’s only one safe place to stay in Mogadishu. It’s called the Trust Hotel. It’s where foreign journalists stay, and it has electricity and running water. If you’ve got any sense, you’ll go straight there and not leave until you need to get out of the country. If you get there, make sure you get a room on the ground floor.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if the place gets hit by an artillery shell, you might escape.’

  Siobhan nodded again. Despite herself, she felt a surge of gratitude towards this ugly man.