The Kill Zone

by Chris Ryan

  ‘What about a vehicle?’

  ‘I’ll make some calls now. I can arrange for someone to be at the airfield when you land. Can’t promise what they’ll bring you, but it’ll hopefully be enough to get you into the town. You’ll need to pay them with American dollars. You got any?’

  Jack shook his head, so Markus pulled a briefcase from the cabinet. He clicked it open to reveal a stash of perfect, new US notes. He peeled off a wodge and handed them to Jack.’

  ‘Not like you to throw your money about, Markus.’

  ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be, Jack. Anyways, ain’t my money.’ He winked at him. ‘The Company understands that I occasionally need to spread the love, you understand me? And let me tell you: the greenback’s the only thing out there that speaks louder than a 5.56.’

  ‘Do you think your employers might come good with a bit of intel?’

  ‘Depends what.’

  ‘There’s a guy called Habib Khan. He’s some kind of peace activist, pulling a publicity stunt by going to Mogadishu. I need to know where I can find him.’

  Markus gave him a sharp look. ‘Thought you said it was woman trouble, Jack.’

  ‘Where Khan goes, the woman won’t be far behind.’ His eyes darkened. ‘It’s complicated.’

  Markus shrugged. ‘I’ll make the call, see what I can find out. Hope you’re makin’ yourself a buck or two going in there, Jack. And while we’re on the subject of payment . . .’

  ‘How much?’ Jack demanded.

  Markus squinted one eye and downed the rest of his beer, before smacking his lips with great satisfaction. ‘Tell you what, buddy, I owe you one and I’m a man who likes to pay his debts. So here’s what I suggest. That pile of UK banknotes you pulled out of your pocket, you leave them here. If you make it back from Mogadishu, they’re all yours and I’ve returned that little favour I owe you. If not . . .’ He inclined his head.

  Jack stared at him. The implication of what he was saying wasn’t lost on him. Markus was a gambling man.

  ‘How do I know you’re not setting me up?’

  Markus cast him a serious glance. ‘Because I’m a man of my word, Jack. And because the good Lord above judges me by the choices I make.’

  ‘I’ve seen good men be tempted by money before, Markus. Hope you don’t mind if I feel a bit funny about leaving you here with the cash.’

  ‘Leavin’ me here? I don’t think so, Jack. Ain’t no one else round this place knows how to fly that bird but me. I’m going to put you on the ground. How long you need to do what you got to do?’

  ‘I’m in and out. Twelve hours, max.’

  ‘You got it. I’ll put you on the ground in the morning, then wait at the airstrip. I’ll give you till midnight. You back in that time, I fly you home. You a minute late, your goddamn carriage turns into a pumpkin. I’ll know you’re dead and I’m the hell out of there. We got a deal?’

  Jack sniffed. Could he trust Markus? Truth was he didn’t have a choice. He thought of Siobhan. God knows where she was now. Had she made it over the border from Djibouti? If so, was she safe? He felt a chill.

  ‘We’ve got a deal,’ he said.

  ‘Hallelujah.’ Heller stood aside and allowed Jack to approach the cabinet and start selecting his weapons.

  ‘You good protecting yourself on the runway while I’m on the ground?’ Jack asked.

  For a moment, Markus didn’t reply. Jack looked over his shoulder at him. The American’s face was grim and serious. ‘Destruction cometh,’ he said in a low voice. ‘And they shall seek peace, and there shall be none. Ezekiel, chapter 7, verse 25. Just don’t be late, huh?’

  They stared at each other. Then Jack turned back to the cabinet and continued to select his tools.

  Siobhan’s plane came in to land just as the sun was setting. From her window, she could see the Somali coastline. It was stunning – holiday-brochure stuff with blue seas and golden sand. But beyond the beaches of Mogadishu lay the town itself. Even from the air, Siobhan could see how devastated it was – a mass graveyard of buildings as far as she could see, almost entirely demolished. A vast network of destruction. As she came in to land she saw the burnt-out wreckage of a Russian cargo plane at the end of the runway.

  The Ilyushin Il-18 in which Siobhan was travelling wouldn’t be staying on the ground for very long – just enough time to deposit its passengers and their luggage before taking to the air again. Back to safety.

  The plane doors opened and the passengers spilled out.

  The heat was the first thing Siobhan noticed as she stepped out of the air-conditioned cocoon of the aircraft. The second was the smell, a mixture of sea air and rotting debris, blown over from the fetid streets and sewers of the city.

  And then she saw that this had clearly once been a big airfield, but now the terminal buildings and airport hangars were practically falling to the ground, surrounded by the kind of rubble that can only be caused by weaponry.

  The passengers walked quickly – ran, almost – and Siobhan did the same, not towards one of these destroyed airport buildings, but to an area that was little more than a slab of concrete resting on eight metal pillars. Beneath the concrete roof were a collection of chairs and a single table. A man was sitting there. He had an assault rifle by his side on the table and a bandolier of ammo strapped round his chest. The passengers queued up in front of the table, with Siobhan at the end of the line. Up at the front there was much arguing, but Siobhan couldn’t understand the language. Whatever the problems, they were all resolved in the same way: by handing over a few notes to the man at the desk.

  Siobhan’s turn came. The official – if that’s what he was – looked her up and down with a sour smile that displayed yellow, tombstone teeth. The smile grew broader when he saw her UK passport with a fifty-dollar bill peeping out of the top. He slid the money out, pocketed it, but didn’t return the passport immediately. He flicked through it with his fingers, not reading, but teasing.

  Suddenly he barked a single word. From somewhere in the almost darkness around them, another man emerged. He was of a similar age to the official – perhaps in his twenties – and he wore a military jacket and a black and white keffiyeh round his neck. His rifle was strapped round his back, but in his fist there was a handgun. Siobhan recognised it instantly as a Makarov 9 mm semi-automatic, standard Soviet issue until the early nineties. She pointed at it. ‘For me,’ she said.

  The two men looked at each other and started to laugh. An ugly sound. They stopped laughing, though, when Siobhan pulled out $200. The newcomer raised an eyebrow; moments later, the trade was complete. Siobhan had her weapon, the guy had his money. The loss of the handgun didn’t worry him, however. He still had his assault rifle, after all.

  In the distance there was a low rumbling. Something going down in the city. An explosion.

  ‘You speak English?’ Siobhan demanded of the two men.

  It was the official who spoke. ‘Maybe,’ he said. His voice sounded too low for his thin body.

  ‘I need someone to protect me. You understand?’ Siobhan did what she could to stop her voice shaking.

  The grin didn’t leave the official’s face. ‘Protection, yes.’

  ‘I can pay. I need to get into the city. The Trust Hotel. You know it?’

  But all the official did was laugh again. A long, low laugh that had nothing to do with humour.

  ‘Fine,’ Siobhan said as she tucked the Makarov under her robes. ‘You don’t want my money . . .’ She started to walk away.

  When she thought about it afterwards, Siobhan realised that turning her back on them had been her first mistake. She heard a shuffling from behind and quickly spun round. The man from whom she had bought the gun had slung his assault rifle around from the back to the front, and even now he was flicking the safety switch and pointing it at Siobhan.

  Her hand quickly dived under her robes for the Makarov, but the material – heavy and flowing – got in her way. Her stomach twisted with the realisati
on that the guy had her in his sights now, and there was no doubting what he was about to do.

  The burst of automatic fire rang across the airfield.

  But it wasn’t Siobhan who hit the ground. The seated official hadn’t even bothered to lift up his gun. It was still lying on its side on the table, pointing at the other man, when he squeezed the trigger. The burst of rounds caused the rifle to rotate a few degrees as they slammed into the guy’s belly, making his hands fly up from his own gun and his body jolt violently, like he was having a brief but intense seizure. An explosion of blood and he hit the ground, his left foot twitching and a deathly gurgling sound coming from his throat. Siobhan was glad she was wearing a veil. It meant the look of horror on her face was hidden.

  A moment of silence. The official slid the weapon round on the table so that it was pointing at Siobhan. ‘Maybe I kill you now,’ he said.

  Siobhan stood very still. ‘If you were going to kill me, you’d have done it by now.’

  She felt her clothes sucking up sweat from her body.

  The man grinned again. ‘I have four men. You pay them a hundred dollars each. Me, you pay two hundred. We take you where you want to go.’

  On the ground, the wounded man breathed his last breath. It sounded like a ghost was escaping from his mouth.

  ‘The Trust Hotel,’ Siobhan repeated. ‘You know it?’

  The man shrugged. ‘Of course.’ From his pocket he pulled a mobile phone – a surprisingly modern one. He dialled a number, gave a few short instructions and only seconds later Siobhan saw a pair of headlights approaching them at speed. An open-top truck screeched up to them. What type of vehicle it was, Siobhan couldn’t tell. Sheets of steel had been welded to the side, into which small holes had been cut away, like peepholes. They weren’t for anyone to look in, however. They were for guns to poke out.

  Four men jumped out of the vehicle. They were all dressed much like the corpse on the ground: military camouflage jackets of varying degrees of disrepair and keffiyehs round their necks. They were very heavily armed: two of them carried assault rifles and ammo belts; one had a pistol in his hand and another on his belt; the driver carried nothing, but Siobhan could see the tip of an RPG pointing from the back of the truck. If it came down to it, there were more than enough weapons to go around.

  The men glanced at the corpse by their feet. Their reaction shocked Siobhan even more than the killing: they wore expressions of casual boredom. These were clearly men for whom death was an everyday occurrence.

  In the distance, another booming sound; and behind Siobhan, the noise of the Ilyushin taxiing to the end of the airstrip. She felt a moment of weakness as she realised that there really was no way out of here now.

  The official started talking to his men and it wasn’t long before they were arguing. It was the driver who was the most aggressive. He started waving his arms in the air, pointing at Siobhan and, as the sound of the aircraft speeding down the runway began to deafen them, shouting at the top of his voice.

  The official let him have his say. The driver was still shouting by the time the aircraft had taken off, clearly barking his objection to having anything to do with Siobhan. The others seemed torn, not knowing which side of the fence to fall on, and this only enraged the driver more. There was a wildness in his eyes that alarmed Siobhan, and she felt her right hand creeping into her robes almost as a matter of reflex, her fingers gripping the holster of her newly acquired Makarov.

  And it was a good thing too.

  The driver suddenly couldn’t contain his anger. He strode towards Siobhan, his fists in the air and a snarl on his face. Siobhan didn’t hesitate. She drew the Makarov from her robes and held it straight at the man’s head.

  He stopped. The anger didn’t disappear from his expression, but at least he knew when he was staring death in the face.

  ‘Tell him to step back,’ Siobhan said.

  The official translated her instruction, and the driver withdrew.

  ‘I’ve made you my offer,’ she continued. ‘Do you want to take it, or shall I find someone else to do business with?’

  The official grinned at her. He wasn’t the only one to find this robed woman entertaining. All the others were smiling too. Except for the driver, of course. His eyes were firmly focused on the barrel of her handgun.

  ‘We take you,’ he announced. ‘Get into the car.’

  Siobhan shook her head. ‘You first. All of you. I’ll sit behind the driver. And you might as well tell him that I’ll have the gun pointed at the back of his seat. If I start to get nervous, I’ll fire, and the bullet will go through his seat, through his back and probably through the steering column as well.’

  ‘You must pay us our money first,’ the official said.

  ‘No way. I get to the hotel, then you get your money. And believe me, my friend, I know how to use this weapon. You can try to rob me if you want, but if you do, at least one of you will end up dead.’

  She twitched her gun towards the armoured car. ‘Move,’ she said. ‘Now.’

  The roads outside the airport were not designed for speed. That didn’t stop the driver from putting his foot down. Siobhan knew why: fast-moving targets were more difficult to hit than slow ones.

  There were no road markings. No signs. Just a network of dusty, well-travelled thoroughfares that bore all the scars of Somalia’s embattled past. They barely passed a building that wasn’t bombed out or burned down; piles of rubble outnumbered dwelling places a hundred to one; and she saw any number of small fires by the roadside, around which ragged people were clustered. More than once, Siobhan heard a loud bang, like a car engine backfiring. But she knew those sounds didn’t come from engines. They came from guns.

  Her companions had lost their smiles and their arrogance. They were sweating, concentrating, and their weapons were ready, poking through the cut-out holes of the armoured car. Only the driver was unarmed, and he sat low in his seat so that as much of his body as possible was shielded by the chassis of the vehicle. Siobhan still didn’t trust him and kept the Makarov firmly poked into his back.

  The roadside buildings became more numerous, but no less devastated. Those buildings that were still intact were covered in graffiti. As the outskirts gave way to the city, Siobhan saw more and more people. They were all young men, dressed in an assortment of poor clothes and headgear. But what these people had failed to spend on their garments, they more than made up for on their weapons. As she peered round the back of the driver’s seat, Siobhan couldn’t see a single person not openly carrying a gun, and plenty of people carrying more than one. The men stood in groups, each group eyeing the others with suspicion.

  The rotten smell grew stronger. The streets were littered with debris – rotting food, paper, hunks of metal and tyres. The outskirts of Mogadishu were behind them now; they were nearing the centre. It meant they couldn’t travel so fast because the streets were smaller and more crowded. The number of fires didn’t decrease – people just lit them seemingly at random by the road – and as Siobhan moved deeper into the city, she heard music blaring from unknown places. It was loud, Arabic in idiom, and somehow very threatening.

  Not as threatening, though, as the looks they were attracting. Siobhan wouldn’t have gone alone into those terrifying streets for any money in the world; but the presence of the armoured car drew a lot of attention. Hungry-looking eyes watched them pass, and Siobhan knew what thoughts were behind them: what is that vehicle carrying that is worthy of such protection?

  The driver slammed on the breaks. ‘What is it?’ Siobhan demanded, her voice quavering.

  Nobody answered. They didn’t need to. Up ahead, maybe fifty metres away, there was a mob. They were moving up the road towards them, blocking the way. Siobhan could hear their shouts. Angry.

  A weapon fired. The shouts swelled and the crowd continued to press towards them.

  The driver didn’t hesitate. He knocked the truck into reverse and hit the accelerator. The vehicle screamed b
ackwards, and people in the street had to run out of its way because the driver sure as hell wasn’t going to avoid them. ‘What’s going on?’ Siobhan screamed, but nobody answered because at that moment two rounds flew over her head. Instantly the air was alive with the sound of gunfire as her escorts opened up on the crowd. The mob faltered momentarily as two of their number fell to the ground, but they soon regrouped. By that time, however, the driver had put some more distance between them. They were at a crossroads now. The driver spun the wheel sharply to the left and the truck turned 180 degrees, kicking up a cloud of dust before they sped back in the opposite direction.

  ‘What was that? What the hell was that?’

  It was the official who spoke. From his position in the passenger seat he looked over his shoulder at her. ‘That,’ he said with a nasty leer, ‘is Muqdisho.’

  Siobhan’s heart was pumping as they continued through the confusing network of streets that made up the capital. She was lost and terrified, not knowing if these men truly were taking her where she wanted to go, or if they were just heading for some out-of-the-way place where they could rob and either kill her or leave her alone on these streets, which would end up being the same thing. The gun felt sweaty in her palm, but she clutched it firmly anyway.

  They continued to drive.

  When they stopped again, it was outside a set of steel gates embedded in a thick, high wall marked with bullet holes. There were four guards, clearly Somali, wearing body armour and helmets, and they stood not outside the gates, but inside. Beyond them was a compound of white buildings. Unlike all the others Siobhan had seen so far, it was relatively unscarred. The main entrance was a dark archway, and all the windows were covered with steel bars. Anywhere else in the world this place would look forbidding, but here it looked like paradise, even if the guards did warily raise their weapons at the truck.

  The official turned to look at her again. ‘You pay us before you get out,’ he instructed.

  Siobhan narrowed her eyes. ‘This is it?’ she asked.