by Chris Ryan
A pause. Then Naza’s panicked voice drifted over the reeds towards the pickup. The male Kurdish voice barked again.
‘He says OK,’ Caitlin translated. ‘He recognises Naza’s voice.’
Danny loosened his pistol in its holster. ‘On three,’ he said. ‘One, two, three . . .’
He pushed himself up from the ground, one hand above his head, the other slightly lower – closer to his pistol – carefully scanning the ground between himself and the pickup.
He saw it immediately – movement in the reeds fifteen metres from his position. He went for his pistol, but Spud, three metres to Danny’s left, was already there, pumping three rounds directly into the enemy target’s body. The movement stopped.
The Kurd yelled something.
Caitlin’s voice: ‘Spud, drop your gun!’
Spud had already done it.
They stood there, not moving. The Kurd at the machine gun shouted again. This time Naza called back. A short conversation followed. Two men emerged from the pickup. That made three guys in all. One had a mobile phone to his ear and was talking into it. He was young – early twenties – and even though it was still dark he had a pair of aviator shades propped on his forehead. The other was older. Early fifties, maybe. He carried an assault rifle and he strode straight up to them. Scraggly goatee beard flecked with grey. Camouflage fatigues. Black and white shemagh round his neck. Sturdy, muddy boots. Dark, weathered skin. He looked tough and battle-hardened. ‘Where’s Rojan?’ he asked, in a very good English accent.
Danny nodded towards the burned-out Hilux.
‘You killed him?’ the Kurd asked aggressively.
‘He killed himself,’ Danny replied. ‘He insisted on driving over. We were trying to cover him.’ He nodded at the dead soldier on the ground. ‘These guys booby-trapped the crossing. Don’t ask me why.’
The Kurd looked suspicious.
‘Tell him, Naza,’ Danny said. ‘Tell him how brave your brother was.’
Naza looked terrible, like her eyes were burning. She spoke quickly and in Kurdish. A gabbling child. The man’s face was expressionless as he listened. Danny held his breath and kept his eyes on the three Kurds in front of him, ready for any sudden sign of danger.
Naza stopped talking. There was a momentary silence. Then the Kurd lowered his assault rifle. He nodded at the unit to indicate they could lower their hands. Then he turned his attention to the dead soldier on the ground. The corpse was lying on its front. The Kurd rolled him on to his back. Danny approached. Close up, it was almost like looking in the mirror. The dead guy wore a Kevlar helmet with a boom mike attached. No NV, but an ops waistcoat over his camouflage gear. ‘Special forces,’ he muttered.
‘Yeah,’ said Spud, who was standing alongside him. ‘But whose?’
The older Kurd had seen something. He bent over the body and pulled up the corpse’s right sleeve. There was a tattoo on his forearm. A double-headed eagle and, surrounding it, seven red dots.
‘Russian double-headed eagle,’ Caitlin said. She was clutching her right arm, and blood was seeping between her fingers.
‘What are those dots?’ Danny asked.
‘They represent drops of blood. Russian criminals use them to represent how many murders they’ve committed,’ Caitlin said.
‘This isn’t some Russian inmate,’ Danny said.
Caitlin shook her head. ‘The habit’s overflowed into the Russian military. He’s a Russian soldier, and he’s proud of his seven kills.’
‘Spetznaz?’ Spud suggested.
‘Maybe,’ Danny said.
‘Fuck,’ Spud muttered. He looked around nervously, as though half-expecting another SF force to be on the point of attack.
Danny looked towards the Russians’ vehicle, parked next to the burned-out Hilux. ‘What would they be doing here?’
‘They’ve been patrolling the area ever since Turkey shot down that Russian jet,’ the Kurd said. ‘They know Turkish forces are crossing the border into Iraq and Syria. They want to kill as many as possible. Revenge.’ He sniffed. ‘You brought us weapons?’
Danny nodded, then pointed to the Hilux. ‘They’ve gone the same way as your mate.’
A shadow crossed the Kurd’s face. ‘Unfortunate for you,’ he said. ‘Driving into IS territory is dangerous. We don’t work for nothing. The deal’s off.’ He looked over at Naza and spoke to her in Kurdish again. Danny knew he was telling her it was time to leave.
‘Wait,’ Danny said.
The tough, battle-hardened Kurd turned to look at him. ‘What?’
‘You hate Daesh, right?’
‘Of course.’
‘We’re going to hit them hard. And we’re going to take out one of their main commanders. Trust me, we’re going to get them where it hurts.’
The Kurd’s eyes narrowed. He was clearly tempted. But then he shook his head. ‘We have our own ways of fighting,’ he said. He started to turn away from Danny. ‘I recommend you get back across the river.’
‘You still want weapons?’
The Kurd stopped turning. He nodded.
‘We’re taking out one of their camps. We’ll bring you every damn gun in the place, if you get us there in one piece.’
This time the Kurd did not turn away.
‘How do we trust you?’
Danny looked towards Caitlin. She was sweating badly and her face was pale. The wound was still seeping blood. ‘See that injury? She got it protecting Naza.’
The Kurd considered that for a moment. Then he walked up to Naza herself. He spoke to her in Kurdish. The conversation lasted for thirty seconds, and involved a lot of nodding from the kid.
Finally, the Kurdish leader sniffed again and walked back to Danny. His body language was suddenly less aggressive. ‘Every weapon?’ he said.
‘And every last bullet.’
The Kurd nodded. ‘The place you want to get to is a day’s drive. Very dangerous.’
‘What’s your name?’ Danny asked.
‘Pallav,’ the older, battle-hardened man said. Danny looked him up and down.
‘Do your friends speak English?’ Danny indicated the other two Kurds.
Pallav shook his head. ‘Only me and Naza.’ He sniffed again. ‘And Rojan,’ he added. He looked around. ‘It is getting light,’ he said. ‘We must only travel at night. We must find somewhere to hide during the day.’
Danny shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We move now.’
‘Mucker, they’re right,’ Spud said. ‘We can’t travel during the day.’
‘We don’t have a choice.’ He walked over to the dead Russian soldier and prodded him with his foot. ‘You know what the Russians are like. When they realise their guys have been hit, they’ll be all over this place like a rash. Give it an hour, we’ll have satellites, drones, the works. We need to get the hell out of this area. And anyway, our middlemen arrive at midnight. Much easier to hit them before they get inside the IS stronghold.’ He turned to the Kurds. ‘You know where we’re going,’ he said. ‘Can you get us there without using any main supply routes?’
The Kurds exchanged an anxious look.
‘If you want those weapons,’ Danny said, ‘you’ve got to do this my way.’
‘It will be slow,’ Pallav said. ‘We will have to go off-road. There will be villages to avoid, maybe water we have to cross.’ He looked over at the wounded Caitlin. ‘And her—’
‘Don’t worry about her. Can you do it?’
The Kurd nodded. ‘We have Daesh flags. It would be best to put them on our vehicle. That way, if Daesh see us from a distance, we have a chance of getting through.’
‘No,’ Danny told him. ‘If the Russians are putting in surveillance, they might go for IS targets. We only put the flags out at the very last minute. If IS stop us before then, we can deal with it.’
The Kurd’s eyes narrowed. ‘We’ll take the Russians’ vehicle as well. Two vehicles are harder to hit than one.’
Danny liked the strategy. An
d he liked Pallav. He thought like a proper soldier. He turned to Spud. ‘Get over there,’ he said. ‘Check it over. They probably picked the vehicle up in country, but I want to be sure there are no tracking devices on the engine block or the undercarriage. Dump all their packs out of the vehicle too.’
Spud nodded and started jogging over to the grey Hilux. Danny turned to the Kurds. ‘You can help yourself to their weapons, ammo, clothes and any rations in their packs. Nothing else.’
‘What about their radio equipment?’ Pallav said.
‘Absolutely not. It might be fitted with tracking devices. Don’t take anything electrical, and tell your mate to switch his mobile phone off and remove the battery. Now get everything together. We leave in ten minutes. People might have heard the noise from that contact. We don’t want to be here if they come looking.’
‘I agree,’ Pallav said. He turned his back on them and started giving orders to his men in Kurdish.
Danny looked at Caitlin. ‘Let me see it,’ he said.
She looked for a moment like she was going to argue. But then she lowered the shoulder of her camo jacket, wincing as she did so and looking down at the bare skin of her upper arm.
It was very clear where the attack dog had sunk its teeth into her flesh. There were three v-shaped punctures on the top side of her arm, and two on the underside. The skin around them was swollen and bloodied, and the wounds themselves were still oozing blood. It looked bad.
Caitlin covered it up before Danny could say anything. ‘I’ll bandage it as we’re travelling,’ she said, jutting out her chin defiantly. ‘I’ll give myself an antibiotic jab. It’ll be fine.’
Danny glanced back across the river. He had a call to make. Allow Caitlin to stick with them, and run the risk that if the wound got infected, or deteriorated badly, she would be more of a hindrance to the operation than a help. Or force her to dig in somewhere, self-medicate the wound and wait it out until such a point that they could scoop her up and get the hell out of there.
‘You need me,’ Caitlin said. ‘You’re already undermanned.’ She turned and went to retrieve her pack from next to the dead body of the attack dog. But Danny noticed that her eyes flickered in the direction of Naza too.
‘Caitlin,’ Danny said.
She looked at him.
‘If it starts getting bad, you tell me. No heroics. Not if you want to stay on the op.’
They locked stares. ‘No heroics,’ Caitlin said quietly.
The two of them grabbed their soaking packs and their weapons. Ten seconds later, they were jogging towards the vehicles.
Fourteen
Joe woke up.
At first, he didn’t know where he was. It didn’t worry him. He’d been sleeping on the floor, which was hard and a bit uncomfortable. But he was warm and dry, which was more than he normally hoped for these days.
Then he remembered. The interview with the asylum official. The way she’d locked him in the room when he had told her his story. He sat up and wondered how long he had been asleep. An hour or two? He stood up, walked to the edge of the room and looked through the glass window towards the open-plan office beyond. When he’d last looked, it had been full of people. Now there were only a few. One guy, obviously a security guard, was sitting on a chair just outside the room. When he saw Joe at the window, he sat up a bit straighter, but didn’t make eye contact. Joe saw that the screensaver on one of the computers had been set to tell the time in large digits. 0615. He realised he’d been asleep all night.
He was about to sit down when he saw two men striding across the office in his direction. Their eyes were fixed on the interview room. They were a mismatched pair – one very tall, with a bushy moustache and thinning hair, the other short and dumpy, with a very full head of black hair and a crumpled suit and tie. Joe could tell these were the people he’d been waiting for.
The security guard obviously had the same intuition. Either that, Joe thought, or he’d seen them before. He stood up, almost to attention, and when the tall man gave him a nod, he unlocked the door to the room. The two guys entered and closed the door behind them. During his time with Daesh, Joe had grown sensitive to the presence of weapons. He immediately noticed the bulges under these guys’ jackets. He knew they were carrying.
‘Good morning,’ he said, as politely as he could.
The short man stepped forward and offered his hand. ‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘Robin Galbraith. This is my colleague Owen Sharples. Very good of you to wait for us.’
Joe shook his hand and smiled. He decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to point out that it wasn’t really a question of waiting. He’d been imprisoned in this room all night long. Galbraith smiled back. Sharples, on the other hand, didn’t. Joe had the impression that his face was rarely troubled by a smile.
‘Sounds like you’ve been through the mill, old thing,’ Galbraith said. ‘Wonder if you’d like to talk about it some more.’ He looked around. ‘We’ve got somewhere more comfortable we can go. Would you like that?’
‘Who are you, exactly?’ Joe said. ‘If you don’t mind me asking?’
‘You probably wouldn’t mind something to eat, eh? Here . . .’ He removed a chocolate bar from his jacket. ‘That should tide you over. Till we get there.’
Joe accepted the chocolate bar and read the wrapper, which said ‘Snickers’. He was very hungry, but experience had taught him not to gobble food down when it came his way. Much better to ration it properly. He put the chocolate bar in his pocket. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Where is this place?’
‘Oh, not far, not far. Shall we go?’
The tall man, Sharples, stepped forward. He grabbed Joe by the arm and Joe understood immediately that although Galbraith’s question had sounded like a polite offer, it was anything but. ‘I should get that chocolate down you, old thing,’ said Galbraith. ‘Give you some energy. You never know – you might need it.’
He turned and walked out of the room. Joe followed, with Sharples holding his arm firmly. He thought about pointing out that the man was hurting him, but something told him that would be the wrong thing to do.
Regiment man Duncan Barker stood by a large Christmas tree, its fairy lights twinkling in the grey morning light, in the centre of Parliament Square. He listened to Big Ben striking. 0800 hours. Traffic crawled through the rush hour all around him. From somewhere out of sight, he could hear the ripe tones of a brass band playing Christmas carols. But the constant beeping of car horns told him that not many of the drivers were feeling the festive spirit. And Barker was pretty certain that, in their hurry to get to their destinations, none of them would be noticing anything different about Parliament Square this morning. It took a trained eye to realise that all was not well.
The most obvious sign that a security operation was under way was the lamp posts. At the base of each one was a small lockable panel – a little door that gave access to the interior of the lamp post. These were obvious places to stash explosives. But now, every one of these panels was wrapped round with a strip of sturdy tape. It would be immediately obvious if anyone tried to tamper with them. A simple preventative measure, but an effective one.
Then there were the down-and-outs. There were at least fifteen of them, dotted around the square, their hair long, their clothes shabby and their faces dirty. Some of them sat begging on the pavement. Others staggered around with tins of Special Brew in their fists. They would be totally invisible to the average man in the street. But Duncan Barker wasn’t average. He was Regiment. He’d noticed how the police were not moving the beggars on, and how the Special Brew winos – despite their supposed drunkenness – were circling the square with a clockwork-like regularity. Because they weren’t really down-and-outs – they were security service personnel, fifteen pairs of highly trained eyes keeping careful watch on the vicinity.
Barker knew for sure that none of the pedestrians entering Parliament Square from Millbank to the south would have noticed, as they passed the imposing building
s that lined the side opposite the river, that a series of four ground-floor windows were obscured from the inside by blackout blinds. They’d have no reason to suspect that the Regiment had set up a local operations room at that location, that at this moment it was a hive of urgent activity. And of course, only a trained eye would notice the slight bulge under Barker’s black North Face jacket that indicated that he – like every other Regiment man currently on the streets of London – was carrying.
He looked up. Something had caught his eye, high in the towers of the Houses of Parliament. Movement. He kept his gaze fixed on the same location for ten seconds, then saw it again – a distant flash of black. Maybe it was a sniper overlooking the square. Maybe it was a member of the security services checking the tower for any sign of suspicious activity.
To his ten o’clock, taking pride of place in the square, was a statue of Winston Churchill. Barker, who liked a bit of history, couldn’t help a grim smile. Your worst nightmare, mate, he thought to himself. Britain’s defences are down. The bad guys are already among us. It’s not a question of if they hit us, it’s a question of when . . .
More movement up above. Two helicopters, one hovering above Parliament Square, one above the river. The sound of their rotors was only just audible above the buzz of the traffic. Choppers were common enough in the London skyline for most people to ignore them. But these choppers didn’t contain chirpy radio traffic DJs, or wealthy businessmen getting from A to B. They were military. Merlins. No doubt stuffed full of army personnel. Watching. Waiting.
It was as if there were two versions of London. The normal one, the London of busy pedestrians and impatient drivers. Of wide-eyed tourists and Christmas parties. And then there was the hidden one, the London inhabited by spooks and military personnel – men like Barker, hidden in plain sight. One version of London was carrying on with its life as though nothing was wrong. The other seemed to be holding its breath. It was not a good place to be. Barker was glad he’d warned Danny Black’s missus to stay home. He wished he’d told a few more people to do the same.
