by Chris Ryan
Danny felt Spud’s eyes on him as he accepted and donned the headset. ‘Go ahead,’ he said.
‘Give me the names, Black.’ Ray Hammond, sounding angrier than Danny had ever heard him.
Danny caught Spud’s anxious glance. ‘You get the names when Caitlin’s on British soil, boss,’ he said.
‘For Christ’s sake, Black, we haven’t got time for this.’
‘Then get us home quick.’
He ripped off the headphones, handed them back to the loadie and looked out of the dark window at the mountains of northern Iraq, a fast-moving, moonlit blur below.
December 24
Twenty-one
Joe didn’t think of it as stealing. He thought of it as survival.
He was slowly chewing a chicken sandwich that he had taken from a branch of Pret A Manger during the morning rush hour. Even though he had a little money, courtesy of Galbraith’s wallet, he knew it had to last. The less he spent, the better. He had waited until now – nearly midnight – when his hunger pangs were unbearable, to eat the sandwich. He had no way of knowing where his next meal was coming from, and it had been risky taking it. He had thought, as he left the shop, that one of the staff had shouted out after him. He’d run away without looking back.
The expensive laptop whose screen he was staring at had, ironically, been easier to steal than the sandwich. He’d walked into a public library, found someone working at a machine that would suit his purpose, and waited for the owner to go and find a book from a nearby shelf. It took five silent seconds to close the laptop and swipe it. Nobody had even looked at him as he left the library. Outside, he had checked the battery charge. Thirty-eight per cent. Not good, and he had no charger, so he had to work fast.
Which was what he was now doing. He sat in an all-night cafe somewhere in the middle of London – he didn’t know where he was exactly. There were a few feeble lengths of silver tinsel along the counter, and the radio softly played the same Christmas songs that Joe had heard relentlessly since his escape from Galbraith and Sharples. The guy behind the counter was whistling along tunelessly.
Earlier that day, Joe had overheard someone say that they didn’t feel all that ‘Christmassy’. He wasn’t quite sure what they meant. But he had decided that whatever ‘Christmassy’ did mean, it wasn’t a good description for how Joe himself was feeling. He felt like there was a policeman on every corner. As though Galbraith – or even worse, Sharples – would put one hand on his shoulder at any moment. Galbraith’s handgun felt heavy and leaden in the inside pocket of his coat. He didn’t like carrying it. He couldn’t shake the feeling that everyone knew it was there, and was staring at him. But he had decided it was necessary to hold on to it.
He had bought himself a small coffee using Galbraith’s money, not because he wanted the drink but because he needed to use the cafe’s Internet connection. It would have been possible to hack in to a random Wi-Fi network elsewhere, of course, but that would have taken time. And with only thirty-eight per cent battery, he didn’t have the time.
‘Did you buy that here?’
Joe looked up. The guy from the counter was standing by his table, pointing at his Pret A Manger sandwich. ‘You can’t eat what you didn’t buy here, son.’
Joe frowned and nodded. He carefully packed up the remains of his sandwich and put it in the pocket of his red hooded top, then took a sip from his coffee.
‘What you doing here this late anyway?’ the man said. ‘You’re not one of them immigrants, are you?’
The real reason for the lateness of the hour was that the emptier the cafe, the more bandwidth on the Wi-Fi. But Joe didn’t say that. He just muttered, ‘College work.’ It seemed to satisfy the man, who returned to his place behind the counter.
Joe had several windows open on the laptop. Two of them had black backgrounds and were running lines of the code that Joe was using to hack into certain servers by brute force. He could see his face reflected in them. A third window had open what looked like a Facebook page, filled with Arabic. It was in fact a dark-web equivalent of Facebook, open in the Tor browser. Highly encrypted. Available only to those who knew the relevant ciphers and passwords. It lurked on a corner of the dark net that was almost impossible to access if you didn’t know how. Inaccessible to security services and curious individuals alike. Joe knew all this because he’d put it there for his Daesh controllers. The fourth window showed a Google map of the UK. A blue dot pulsed on Joe’s position in central London.
He scanned the Arabic text on the Facebook clone, his jaw set as he did so. He was reading a conversation between a person he knew, and that person’s boss. Nobody would be so foolish as to put a picture of themselves on this site, nor to use their real name. But having been forced, on pain of death or worse, to set up these networks and modes of communication, Joe knew quite well that the real name of the user who had given himself the handle that translated roughly as ‘God’s Truth’ was Mujahid. That he had a scar that spanned the full width of his neck like a gruesome smile. That this was the same man who had stripped his father naked, hooded him and hung him from a tree. That he had raped Joe’s mother in front of him, before killing her.
A memory flashed in his mind. He had just got off the train that had smuggled him into the UK. An aggressive soldier had said, Here for the handouts, are you?
A grim look crossed Joe’s face. If only the soldier had known how far off the mark he was. Joe wasn’t here for the handouts. He hadn’t made that journey, and risked so much, for a few pounds a week.
Mujahid’s messages were obscure. Joe knew that his correspondent, who styled himself ‘Warrior King’, was an IS commander by the name of Dhul Faqar. They always gave themselves names like that. Joe had never met this guy – he had been based over the border from Syria in northern Iraq – but it had been Mujahid’s habit to use that name as a threat. Do as we say, or you will have Dhul Faqar to answer to.
As Joe scanned hurriedly through their conversation, he tried to piece together what they were talking about. There was talk of an event. It was to take place on 25 December. Christmas Day. His eyes passed over a string of numbers that meant nothing to him. And there was talk of a man named Black. A soldier. The conversation suggested that Dhul Faqar would be sending details of this man to Mujahid on a separate private network. One sentence caught his eye and made his stomach turn. He read it slowly. ‘Take the child,’ Dhul Faqar had instructed Mujahid. ‘Keep her safe, for now.’
He was still wondering what those words could mean when the lines of code running on the windows with black backgrounds suddenly stopped scrolling: an indication that his brute-force hacking was complete. Joe’s eyes flicked away from the conversation and became fixed on the Google map. The laptop’s hard drive whirred. A few seconds later a number of red pins appeared on the map.
Joe experienced a moment of great satisfaction. This was the information he really wanted.
He knew, of course, that most smartphones tracked the location data of the user on a continuous basis. And he knew that Daesh used this facility to keep track of their agents abroad. What he had not been so sure of was his ability to access that data on a stolen computer in the scant time he had available.
He needn’t have worried.
Mujahid had been busy. There were several pins dotted around London. As Joe hovered the cursor over them, a date and time popped up on each. The Daesh militant had been moving constantly around the capital during the past week. Joe’s eyes were drawn to a lone pin a good distance to the north-west of London – a town called Hereford. It appeared that Mujahid had been there that very morning. From Hereford, it appeared he had moved north-east, to a city called Birmingham, where he had been at 1 p.m. After Birmingham, he had moved a few miles south . . .
But then the trail died away. Joe experienced a moment of bitter disappointment. Perhaps Mujahid had destroyed his phone, or removed the battery in case he was being tracked. He wondered what could have happened to make him suddenly nerv
ous. But it didn’t matter. The trail had gone cold.
Joe glanced at the battery indicator. It had diminished quickly to six per cent. His eyes returned to the Tor browser, and the conversation between Mujahid and Dhul Faqar. He scanned the conversation again, searching for anything that might be of use to him. He googled ‘Soldier Black’, but that returned nothing of any interest. Then his eyes fell on the seemingly meaningless string of numbers that he had all but ignored so far. Hardly expecting much, he keyed those numbers into his web browser. And he took an involuntary intake of breath when he realised that they were not meaningless at all. They were very specific. They were coordinates.
His search had returned a link to a new Google map. Joe clicked it. Another pin appeared on the map of the UK. It was superimposed on the symbol of a cross, which Joe understood to represent a place of worship.
The laptop screen went black. The battery had died. But Joe continued to stare at it. He knew, with absolute clarity, where Mujahid – the man he hated more than any other in the world – would be on Christmas Day. And he had a pretty good idea what he intended to do when he got there.
Should he tell someone? Alert the authorities? His mind turned to the memory of Galbraith and Sharples. After his encounter with them, it was more likely that Joe would be locked up than listened to. His fingers edged towards the heavy handgun in his inside pocket. They traced its outline. Suddenly, the weapon did not feel so cumbersome.
He closed the laptop and slid it into his shoulder bag. His coffee was still full, and slightly warm. He gulped it down, because it was a cold night out there. As he drank, another customer entered the cafe. He took off his heavy Puffa jacket and draped it over a seat near the entrance, before putting his phone and keys on the table. He then walked up to the counter and started to talk to the guy.
Joe was almost on autopilot now. He stood up and headed to the exit. As he passed the newcomer’s table, he swiped the phone and dropped it in his pocket. Then he left.
You sleep only when it’s safe. That was a lesson Danny had learned well over his years of active service. He was as safe as could be expected in the confines of the stealth Black Hawk. He forced himself to rest as it hummed quietly along the Turkish–Syrian border towards the eastern Mediterranean coast. Not easy. The footage of Clara and Rose kept replaying itself in his head. Constantly repeating, until he fell into a disturbed sleep, haunted by a nightmare of a little girl with a tiny tear of blood.
He woke as they hit the Med. The medic was no longer fussing over Caitlin, who was laid out on a stretcher bed with a saline drip above her, its surface tension vibrating with the movement of the aircraft. Twenty-five minutes later, they were touching down at the British military base in Cyprus.
The unit weren’t on the ground for more than five minutes. A Hercules was waiting for them as they landed. The Paras on the Black Hawk carried Caitlin off the chopper and up the tailgate into the belly of the plane. Danny and Spud followed, carrying packs and weapons. They didn’t speak. Danny could tell Spud didn’t like what they were doing. That he was worried about the reception they’d get when they touched down in Blighty.
Flight time to RAF Brize Norton: three hours fifteen minutes. Danny found it harder to rest on this leg of the journey. He was burning with adrenaline and anxiety. What if he was wrong? What if he was making a bad call? What if, by going it alone, he failed to save Clara and his daughter? What if Mujahid, the man with the evil scar on his throat, had already killed them?
He pushed those thoughts from his head. They had no place there. He would not consider the possibility of failure.
0900 hours. The aircraft had been losing height for at least ten minutes. Danny looked through the window. It was light. England looked as vividly green as it always did on his return from an overseas job. Three minutes later they were touching down. As the aircraft screeched along the tarmac, Danny caught a glimpse of flashing lights. An ambulance, but also several police cars, waiting for them.
And Ray Hammond. As Danny and Spud followed Caitlin’s stretcher bed down the tailgate into the cold morning air, he was standing there, arms crossed, his face more thunderously angry than Danny had ever seen it. The black rings under his eyes looked like they’d been painted on. A few metres beyond him, six police officers in hi-vis. Armed. Hammond glanced momentarily at Caitlin and nodded to the soldiers carrying her. They hurried her towards the ambulance, which was waiting with its rear doors open. Hammond turned to Danny.
‘You don’t make it easy for me to stick up for you, Black,’ he said. ‘Give me the names, now.’
A beat.
‘There are no names,’ Danny told him. ‘Dhul Faqar died before we could get anything out of him.’
Hammond said nothing. A vein pumped in his neck.
‘Once we realised the mission was a dud,’ Danny said, ‘my first priority was the safety of my team. Caitlin needed a medic.’
‘You’ve had medical training, damn it,’ Hammond spat.
‘She wouldn’t have made it,’ Danny persisted.
‘Have you got any fucking idea, the risks we ran getting you out of there?’ Hammond turned to the police officers standing behind them. ‘Relieve these gentlemen of their weapons,’ he instructed. And as they approached, he turned back to Danny. ‘I’d have some Regiment personnel here to deal with you, but every fucking man jack of them is in London, working on this job, standing by to pick up these people whose names we thought you were going to give us. These police officers are going to escort you back to Hereford. You’ll be debriefed there. You’d better hope to hell I can call off the MoD’s lawyers between now and then.’ He started to walk away, but then turned back almost immediately. He pointed at the armed officers, then at Danny and Spud. ‘Don’t even fucking think about it,’ he told them.
Danny understood what he meant.
They were in the back of a white Transit van, sitting on benches along either side, facing each other. Their packs and personal weapons were being transported in a separate vehicle. Two of the armed police officers sat by the rear door. The remaining four sat either side of Danny and Spud. Danny estimated their speed at 95 kph. At this rate, it would take them another two hours to reach Hereford.
The police officers had been tense at first. Like they were escorting two dangerous weapons. Which, in a way, they were. But Spud and Danny had offered no resistance, and now the officers seemed more relaxed. They’d stopped staring curiously at their bruised, beaten, dirty faces. One of them even had his head leaning back against the side of the van and was staring aimlessly at the ceiling.
Spud gave Danny a questioning look – a raised eyebrow, a slight incline of the head. He glanced towards the rear door, then back at Danny.
Almost imperceptibly, Danny shook his head. Sure, they could overpower these police officers in a matter of seconds. But then they’d be wanted men. Hunted men.
No. Hereford first.
Hammond was waiting for them in the yard at RAF Credenhill. One look told Danny that he’d regained none of his good humour. Danny felt disorientated. It was midday. Twenty-four hours previously, he’d been at the mercy of Dhul Faqar’s men, being badly beaten in that dark cell. Now he was in the familiar surroundings of SAS headquarters.
Danny strode up to Hammond and jabbed his thumb back to indicate the armed police, who were following him uncertainly. ‘You can lose them, boss,’ Danny said. ‘Me and Spud aren’t going anywhere. We’re not stupid.’
Hammond seemed to consider that for a moment. Then he looked towards the police officers. ‘Get back to London,’ he said. ‘You’re needed there.’ He pointed at Danny and Spud. ‘You two, with me.’
Credenhill was clearly being manned only by support staff. Danny, Spud and Hammond’s footsteps echoed down the empty corridor as their ops officer led them towards his office. Once there, he silently pointed at two chairs on the other side of his desk. He sat down, pressed his fingers together and looked severely over them at his two soldiers. ‘Ca
itlin will be fine,’ he said. And then, rather grudgingly: ‘It looks like you might have had a point. The medics said it was touch and go.’ He sniffed. ‘You two look like shit. Especially you, Black.’
Danny inclined his head.
‘Talk,’ Hammond told them.
Danny drew a deep breath, willing Spud to keep quiet. He reckoned he had his story sorted. With the practised skill of an operative who had been in more debriefs than he could count, he explained the events of the past forty-eight hours. The HALO insertion. The border crossing with the Kurds. The Spetznaz contact. The assault on Dhul Faqar’s compound. Malinka. The Yazidi girl. Their capture and escape. Hammond listened quietly and intently. Only when Danny explained the CIA’s involvement with Dhul Faqar, and the arrival of American special forces to extract their mole, did he ask Danny to repeat himself. Danny understood why. For the security services, intel like this was solid gold. And it might just buy him and Spud out of a court martial.
‘The CIA were brokering a deal with IS,’ Danny said. ‘It’s why they were holding back on supplying any information on the London hit. The Americans wanted to persuade him to move his forces out of northern Iraq and into Syria, to help destabilise the Syrian regime. If the Firm want more intel on Westminster Abbey, they should turn the screw on the Americans. They know more than they’re letting on.’
Hammond nodded. ‘What else?’ he said.
‘That’s all,’ Danny said. He sensed Spud give him an anxious look. Hammond looked from one man to the other. It seemed that he was trying to decide whether or not to believe them. Danny stayed silent. There was certain information he wasn’t prepared to share. His daughter’s abduction. His belief that the London strike was a red herring. Because he knew that as soon as he offered up that intelligence, the one man who could lead him to his daughter would have the cross hairs of 22 SAS aimed firmly at his skull. And that story was only going to end one way.
