But that wasn’t in the cards—couldn’t be, given the circumstances. You never tried a surveillance op with one vehicle the way they so often did it in the movies, it just wasn’t done.
Three cars—that was a minimum. Even that was risky, going up against someone with training.
And the driver of the Ford had training, of that much he was certain. He’d been running the long leg of a surveillance detection route ever since picking up Tarik. That was the type of training you didn’t pick up just anywhere, not even in the military.
It only served to further his caution as the Kawasaki thundered out into the English countryside. He was treading on a tightrope out here.
Don’t look down…
5:37 P.M.
The moor
North Rigton, England
It was a strange feeling, walking to one’s death. Tarik stepped out of the car—the door swinging shut under his hand.
He’d felt it first as a teenager, only days after his capture by the Americans. Being marched down a long corridor—or that’s what it had felt like—a hood over his head, arms shackled behind his back. But back then, he had not known this peace. Only sheer terror.
A smile crossed his lips as he looked up toward the rough outcropping of rock known among the locals as Almscliffe Crag. His destination.
And they’d called him a terrorist.
The sun was already fading in the western sky as he walked away from the road, its fading rays casting long shadows across the moor.
He didn’t spare a glance backward at his driver…he had seen that look in the Englishman’s eyes. That look of barely veiled hatred—an attack dog straining at his leash.
He was somewhere there behind him—perhaps with a gun trained on his back.
No matter.
5:53 P.M.
The crag. That had to be his destination, Harry thought, watching the moving figure from afar, the man walking out across the moor.
He’d hidden the Kawasaki a few hundred meters back—off the road in a rain-washed gully just out of the village, sheltered from view of the road by bushes.
Reaching into the pocket of his jacket, he pulled out a compact pair of binoculars, squinting as he adjusted them to his eye. Focusing on the Pakistani.
And it was there. A moment of blinding clarity and he could see it—a firing reticle holding steady on Tarik’s head, just above the ear. His finger gently curving back, the hair trigger breaking beneath the pressure.
Not this time.
When he lowered the binoculars, his hands were trembling uncontrollably. The memories flooding back, the lust for revenge so strong he could taste it.
He collapsed behind the wall of old fieldstone, leaning back against rocks worn smooth by the wind, the rain—the passage of time.
Control. He closed his eyes, fighting against the sensation. Had to stay in control. Or it was going to kill him.
He rose up once again, leaning forward against the stone—glassing the top of the crag with the binoculars, jagged rocks glowing in the light of the setting sun—jutting out from the surrounding terrain like some sort of pagan memorial from a bygone age. Old as time itself.
There. He caught movement, something there among the rocks. The figure of a man, silhouetted against the sky for so brief a moment, he might have thought he had imagined it.
But he hadn’t, he knew that. Someone was up there, someone that Tarik was going to meet.
Naked ground, he realized—looking out over the moor between his position and the wooded path that led toward the summit of the crag. Nearly two hundred meters of open terrain, not so much as a rock for cover.
Time to get moving.
6:05 P.M.
It felt like home. Tarik pulled himself up on the rocks, for a moment envisioning himself back in the mountains of his native Pakistan. The land of his birth. Of his love.
The land he had abandoned…to walk among this house of war.
He looked out over the moor, the English countryside spreading out before him—the village through which they had passed off in the distance, a farm across the road.
He felt eyes on the back of his head and turned to find a man just standing there. Watching him.
There was nothing remarkable about the man, nothing imposing. He couldn’t have been more than 5’ 8”, his form cloaked in a long overcoat. Late fifties, perhaps slightly older.
Brown eyes smiling from a face that could have only been described as placid.
He walked quietly out to join Tarik on the edge of the rocks, gazing westward into the setting sun.
“A few ground rules,” he said finally, breaking the silence. “When we are done, you are free to leave, should you wish to do so. We need never speak again. But don’t think of playing me. My bodyguards are within the sound of my voice…and your driver?”
He gestured down to the moors below. “He’s down there—with a sniper rifle aimed at your chest.”
Despite his external calm, Tarik felt a chill run through his body. “Who are you?”
The man turned toward him. Smiled, the quiet, confident smile of a man who knew exactly what he was about to do.
“My name is Arthur Colville, and I believe we can be of help to each other. You have something I want, and I have something you need.”
Chapter 6
6:19 P.M.
The gathering twilight was Harry’s only cover as he worked his way across the moorland, his tall frame bent nearly double.
He knew there’d been at least one man at the top of the crag with Tarik Abdul Muhammad. One man—and possibly more.
The driver.
The half-frozen muck of the moor came rushing up to meet him as he threw himself flat, cursing himself for the oversight.
Tarik’s driver was out there, somewhere in the darkness. He’d known that. How could he have been so stupid?
He lay there in the mud, eyes searching the growing darkness as he looked back toward the road—the lights of a farm glowing in the distance. Nothing.
All it would take was one good man with a rifle, he thought, rolling over on his side—feeling the bulge of the Sig-Sauer beneath his arm. A single shot.
He had made such a good target.
And still nothing—no gunshots. No shouts of alarm. But he’d allowed emotion to blind him, allowed himself to forget a threat he’d known all too well.
Walk away, a voice inside admonished him, the voice of caution. Of reason. Turn back.
He rolled up onto his elbow, glancing back along the path by which he had come, footprints in the slush.
Shook his head and began to pull himself forward by his elbows. It was farther back than forward to the treeline. Not that turning back had ever been an option anyway.
Not for him.
6:25 P.M.
“You know what I’m saying to be true,” Colville continued, his voice lowering as he circled Tarik. “You see it all around you, in the faces of your own people. They are becoming complacent. Adapting, assimilating more by the day. You still try to rally the youth with your stories of Afghanistan, of Syria—of faraway Muslims butchered by the Western ‘imperialists,’ but those tales of atrocity grow more stale by the day.”
He paused, meeting the Pakistani’s eyes. “When the last Americans leave Afghanistan—when the Taliban retakes power in Kabul—when the Ayatollah dictates terms to his puppet government in Baghdad…how will you rally your people then?”
It was a long moment before Tarik responded, knowing that the words the Englishman spoke were the truth. He had seen it, both in the United States and here. Apostasy…
“The Lord of worlds will show us the way, as He has ever in the past,” he replied evenly. “The faithful will not desert His struggle.”
“Struggle?” Colville demanded, a derisive edge to his tone as he began to circle the top of the rock once more. “You think your ‘struggle,’ your faith, can compete against the allure of the West—all the ads promising fame, power? Wealth? The tempta
tion of an English tart in a short skirt?”
Tarik turned to face him. “And why is it that you care what becomes of my faith?”
The English publisher shook his head. “I don’t. The devil with you and your Prophet, for all I care. But you see…I have a similar problem.”
6:27 P.M.
Voices. Faint and indistinct above him. Harry raised himself up from behind the boulder, glancing up the rocky face of Almscliffe.
There was one easy path up the side nearly to the top, but they would be watching that one—if they possessed half the professionalism they had displayed at the station.
He glanced back down toward the abandoned car there by the side of the road, his eyes once more scanning the darkness for any sign of the driver.
Still nothing. His eyes returned to the cliff, looking for handholds among the rocks. A way up…
There was something there. Movement. Conor Hale wrapped his hand around the scarred walnut stock of the L42A1 sniper rifle, his eye adjusting to the scope as he lay there, looking across the road toward the crag.
The rifle had been British Army issue up until the mid-‘80s, back in the days when his father had carried one into Northern Ireland. Long time gone.
The face of the crag was picked out in stark relief in the night-vision scope he had mounted onto the old rifle, every rock visible. Every shadow. Could it have been his imagination?
He would have happily shot the Pakistani in the back as he crossed the field, Hale thought. He’d seen his kind before, fought against them in Afghanistan. Saw what they did to their own, let alone those they counted khaffir. Infidels.
To trust him was folly, despite Colville’s assurance that he had no intention of doing anything of the kind.
There.
He sucked his breath in, a low sound in the stillness. There it was, a man’s forearm stretched out along the rock face, as though to pull himself up.
And then a head, the profile of a face—a beard masking his features.
Who? Had their information been flawed? Had the Security Service managed to follow them out here?
The questions shot through his mind in the split-second before he rejected them angrily. It didn’t matter.
All that mattered was what was to be done. He took his eyes off the scope, reaching for the mobile phone in his breast pocket.
6:31 P.M.
“England has gone soft,” Colville said, gazing out through the darkness toward the few, flickering lights of North Rigton. The last faint rays of the sun were slipping beyond the horizon—the stars emerging in the sky above them. “We were a proud people once. The sun never set on the Union Jack and an Englishman bowed his knee only to his Queen and his God. Now?”
He shook his head. “The leaders of this country take their marching orders from Brussels, bow down before every sodding immigrant that washes ashore. Grovel in the dirt for fear of offending them or their precious beliefs, styling themselves ‘multiculturalist’ in so doing. They need to be shocked from their comforts—awakened to the danger of what they have embraced.”
The hatred in the man’s voice was so clear, so real, that it was all Tarik could do not to react. The embodiment of everything to be despised of the West. And yet…
“And this is what you would have me do? Provide your ‘shock’?”
The Englishman nodded, his face sober in the darkness. It was impossible to doubt his sincerity, mad as it seemed. Was this it—the path pre-ordained of Allah—the answer he had sought?
“You would ask me to use my people to provide ammunition for your newspaper? For all the rest of the Zionist propaganda coming out of the media?”
“Not just that,” Colville replied, shaking his head impatiently. “What I am offering us is a chance at destiny. We both know all too—”
Whatever he had been about to say was lost as one of the publisher’s bodyguards called out, appearing for the first time from around a tall chimney of rock. There was a mobile phone extended in his left hand…and a drawn Beretta in his right.
“What are you playing at?” Colville demanded, gesturing for Tarik to remain where he was.
The Pakistani took a step back, but he could see the surprise in the Englishman’s eyes. If this was a trap, it wasn’t the way they had planned it.
“It’s Conor,” the bodyguard explained, barely glancing at Tarik as he handed the phone over. “We’ve got company.”
Colville took the phone, his eyes meeting Tarik’s as he listened for the space of a few moments. When he spoke, his voice seemed to tremble with emotion.
“Take the shot.”
6:35 P.M.
He reached up, his fingers finding no purchase on the stone. His body weight shifting as he reached over, clawing for another handhold.
It saved his life.
The bullet came in over Harry’s shoulder, smashing into the stone where his head had been only seconds before, blasting rock outward into his face.
He felt his fingers give way, felt himself falling—backward off the rock.
The impact pummeled the air from his lungs, his left leg twisting underneath him as he slammed into the hard ground. Shock.
It felt as if he were in a daze, the world seeming to shift around him. He could hear voices—shouts from above.
They were coming.
He rolled over onto his stomach, biting his tongue to keep from crying out as another stab of pain shot through his ankle. It didn’t feel like a break, perhaps a sprain—but none of that was going to matter in a few minutes.
Not once they had his location.
Wincing as he began to put pressure on the ankle, he pulled himself behind a nearby boulder, leaning up against it. Keeping himself low as a second bullet whined overhead.
They’d keep the sniper in place, using him to provide suppressing fire while the people on the top of the crag moved in for the kill.
It’s what he would have done.
And he hadn’t a prayer of taking on the sniper himself—not even if he’d been completely mobile, he thought, digging the Sig-Sauer from its holster within his jacket.
A single pistol—a pair of magazines. Twenty-seven rounds. Little enough…
6:38 P.M.
Impossible to tell whether his target was dead, Hale thought, his left hand thrust out past the small sandbag as his cheek pressed against the rifle’s buttstock.
The target had fallen, but that wasn’t the same as a kill. Or even a hit.
He’d seen a friend make that mistake once. Iraq, his days before the Regiment. They’d kicked in a door in a small Iraqi village near Basra, his partner had moved inside—shot a hajji once and the man had gone down. Next target.
It had fallen to Hale, coming through the door behind him, to shoot the man again as he came back to life, a pistol in his hand.
“Murphy, get the principal out of there,” he barked into his phone, never taking his eyes off the scope.
Protecting Colville—that took priority, getting him out of the area. Then, “Booth—I need you down in those rocks. Find him!”
He could walk, Harry determined, gritting his teeth against the pain. It wasn’t a break, but he could feel the swelling—the flesh of the ankle already warm and inflamed.
Blood dripped into his eye from a gash on his forehead and he grimaced, reaching up to wipe it away. Any moment now.
They wouldn’t be sure whether he had been hit—perhaps even killed—and he was counting on that uncertainty.
It was just about all he had.
And there was a noise, the sound of a foot kicking against a stone. Above him, maybe fifteen feet to the front. Close.
Moving silently through rocks in the dark was a feat few ever mastered, and the man stalking him clearly wasn’t one of them.
Balancing himself against the boulder, Harry leaned forward, the Sig coming up in both hands, the tritium of the nightsights glowing before his eyes.
Three dots, all in a row.
Off in the distance, h
e heard a car door slam shut—his head turning toward the sound for but a moment.
A fatal reflex.
The sharp report of a pistol filled the night, a round ricocheting off the rocks near his hand.
He glimpsed a dark figure among the rocks maybe eight feet away as he hurled himself to the side, squeezing the Sig’s trigger as he went down. Once, twice—the shots going wild into the night.
Close enough to make the man take cover.
The stones cut and scraped his outflung hand, but he ignored the pain, moving back into the shadows of the overhanging crag—straining to listen for movement, for anything that might offer him a clue to his opponent’s position.
Their position, he corrected himself, only too aware that there might be more than one.
6:41 P.M.
“Who was it?” Colville demanded, turning on Tarik almost as soon as the doors of the Suburban had closed on them. “Who did you bring with you?”
The Pakistani’s eyes blazed, gesturing up toward the driver. “No one—how could I have? Your man was with me all the way here.”
It was impossible to tell whether they believed him or not. Even more impossible to know who it could have been. The Englishman glanced back through the tinted windows, swearing under his breath as gunshots rang out over the moor. Three shots, almost all together. Then silence.
“We need to get back to Leeds.”
They had his position, Harry thought, listening as another heavy rifle bullet smashed into the rock above, shards of millstone showering down upon him.
He glanced down at the glowing screen of the mobile in his hand, the number he had tapped into the small keypad: 999.
It was the emergency call number for the United Kingdom, their equivalent of 911.
His finger moved to press Send, but he hesitated. It was one thing to take a life when it was necessary—another to place good men in danger.
The local constables wouldn’t be prepared for the type of firepower his opponents had at their disposal. They’d be unarmed, most likely. Little more than targets, in the truth of it.
Embrace the Fire (Shadow Warriors Book 3) Page 12
