by Mark Dawson
The heater was warm now. He collected it and dropped the MRE inside.
Of course, Pope knew that his route was determined by his ability to find transport. There was another way. He traced his finger in a straight line from where he was to where he wanted to go. There was a distance of thirty-four miles between Termanin and al-Bab as the crow flew. He knew that he would be able to manage a consistent pace of four miles an hour if he walked. It would take him between eight and nine hours, perhaps ten or eleven if the conditions required more stealth. It was just after six now. The sun would rise at around five tomorrow morning. He had eleven hours. It was possible to pull it off, and the more he considered it, the more it promised to be the safest and most reliable way to get to Isabella’s position.
He took out the first MRE and replaced it with a second. The first contained chilli with beans. He tore the packet open and, using the spoon attachment on his multi-purpose eating utensil, scooped it from the packet and put it into his mouth. The meals were far from haute cuisine, but Pope had always, rather perversely, enjoyed them. He finished quickly, took the meatloaf with gravy from the heater, and ate that, too. Each MRE contained around twelve hundred calories. He wouldn’t stop for another meal until he reached his destination. That would have to be enough.
Pope collected his trash, went outside and dug a hole. He relieved himself in the hole, dropped in the empty MRE packets and the spent heater and filled in the hole. It was getting dark by the time he was satisfied he had left no trace that he had been here. Dark enough to start out, in any event. He collected his backpack and worked his arms into the straps, settling the pack on his back until it was comfortable so that the chance of developing sores was minimised. He fetched his rifle, checked that it was made ready and started to walk.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Pope walked through the plantation to the northeast. It was uninhabited. He passed storehouses and a building that had once been a house, but there was no one here now. He passed a water tower, a plump bulb that sat atop four tall concrete struts, and used the water to top up his flask. The land was still tended and irrigated, and the olives were being harvested, but the farmer had moved somewhere else. Perhaps he had decided that it was unsafe.
The sky was perfectly clear, and without any light to pollute the clarity of the view, he could see the millions of stars scattered overhead. It was beautiful, but also very isolating, and Pope felt alone. It was also very dark, despite the starlight, and Pope moved a little more carefully to begin with so that his eyes were able to adjust to the conditions. He knew that it would take half an hour for his night vision to establish itself, and he didn’t want to run into anything because he hadn’t been able to see it until it was too late. The ground was bleak and open, with little to distinguish it. The surface underfoot was a mixture of loose sand and stones set upon a hard granite bedrock that occasionally revealed itself in sharp outcrops that cut jagged shapes in the distance.
He moved at a cautious pace, pausing regularly to listen to the noises around him. The temperature quickly dropped several degrees, and as he reached the boundary of the olive grove, it was cold enough for him to see his breath before his face. His pack was heavy and he was working hard enough to draw a sweat; the moisture was quickly cold on his skin and he started to shiver. He ignored the compulsion to hurry. He knew that he had enough time to reach his destination, and even if he did not, he would be able to find somewhere suitable to lay up and wait for the following night. Hurrying would do him no favours. Movement and noise were two of the easiest ways to give yourself away, and a slow onward patrol would minimise those risks while increasing the chances that he would see a threat before he was compromised by it. There was also the more practical reason for caution: the desert was treacherous underfoot, and he would be no good to anyone if he tripped and sprained an ankle.
He headed northeast. The terrain was flat and barren, as featureless as the surface of the moon. It was difficult to find suitable waypoints to navigate with, so Pope was left with no choice but to take out his Magellan to find his position and then cross-check with his map. It wasn’t ideal: the display produced a glow of artificial light that would be visible for some distance, and every time he looked down at it—even when he squinted—his eyes were temporarily a little less effective in the dark. Better that, though, than getting lost.
He crossed a dusty track after the first two miles, pausing within the cover of a clutch of scrubby brush until he was sure that the way ahead was clear. It took him another fifteen minutes to cover the next two miles that brought him to the first major road. It was Route 62, the two-lane highway that ran between Termanin and Aleppo. Both cities were held by the government, and Pope knew that although the various forces ranged against the regime would make incursions here, it was still likely to be reasonably secure. Nevertheless, he did not want to be found. The terrain was flat, with occasional outcrops of rock amid the seemingly limitless sand. The highway was in terrible condition. Sand had blown across it, slowly reclaiming it for the desert, and there was the wreck of a civilian vehicle two hundred yards to the east. Just ahead of him was a road sign painted in blue, with white text that stood out even in the darkness. The destination indicated by an arrow, written in Arabic and English, was Aleppo.
Pope dropped to a crouch and used his binoculars to observe the approach in both directions. He couldn’t see anything that gave him any reason for concern. He moved forward, stepping carefully, with his eyes to the ground. IEDs and mines were a possibility. He hurried across the pitted asphalt, across the narrow rocky verge and then onto the sand again. He continued to the northeast.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Pope walked on. He made regular stops for rest and to check his position and was pleased with the pace he was keeping and the progress he was making. He decided that he had enough time to make a short detour to the north so that he crossed Route 214, one of the main arteries that fed into Aleppo, two miles farther up the road than the crossing he would have made if he had continued on his previous path. The city was one of the regime’s redoubts, and he knew that it would be populous, meaning a greater likelihood of his running into a patrol. He boxed around the hamlets of Babis and Anadan and reached the highway south of Bayanoun. He saw two cars, one coming from the south and the other from the north. He took off his backpack and dropped to his belly, pressing himself behind a large boulder as the cars crossed and went on their ways. He waited there for another minute until the lights of both cars had disappeared, listening to the barking of a dog from somewhere to the north, and then collected his gear. He swallowed a mouthful of water from his canteen to wash the dust out of his mouth and throat and then crossed the highway. He cut back onto a bearing that led to the northeast once more.
Once he was away from the more immediate risk of detection upon the road, he allowed his thoughts to wander back to the events of the last few days. He thought of Snow and Kelleher and the ambush outside Geneva that had left them dead and had almost accounted for him, too. Their assailants had been professional and utterly ruthless. He had no idea who they were, how they had known to target them or, indeed, why they had been targeted. Was it something to do with al-Khawari? Or was it something else, the revealing of another layer that was, as yet, hidden to him? There was no way for him to know.
Pope saw al-Bab just as the sun was beginning to modulate the darkness on the horizon to a gentle mauve. He had climbed a reasonably steep hill, and as he crested it, the town was laid out below him. It was a large sprawl of over sixty thousand people, yet there were only a few lights that prickled against the cowled gloom. The electricity supply to most of Syria was intermittent, and Pope guessed that it was switched off at night so that it could be conserved for the day. He saw the shape of tower blocks, some of them abbreviated where they had been demolished by bombs, a confused grid of streets with gaps where buildings had been flattened. He saw the onion-shaped cupola of a mosque and sharply pointed minarets.
/> The slope that led down from the hill to the town was heavily wooded with an orchard of almond trees. They had been planted closely together, in uniform lines, and Pope assessed that they would provide a reasonable level of cover within which he would be able to hide. The orchard would be the extent of his progress today; he was a mile from the first buildings and he only had another fifteen minutes or so before the sun came up. He didn’t have time to make it down the slope, cover the approach and then find somewhere to hide. Pope turned back and looked across the crest of the hill. The ground behind him was barren and sparse. He had been anxious as he had surmounted and then descended it, and now that anxiety was sharpened. There was nowhere for him to hide back there. He gave thought to going back the way he had arrived and finding a spot to lay up, but he hadn’t seen anything that had offered an obvious spot for miles.
The first rays of the sun’s light arrowed up from beneath the horizon, turning the blacks to greys. The light bleached out the darkness and opened up more of the terrain for inspection. Pope took his binoculars and scanned ahead of him more carefully. Route 212 led into the southern districts of the town, passing two hundred metres away from the foot of the hill. As he followed the road with the glasses, he saw a small building and a collection of vehicles. He focussed on it more closely. The building was a small shack. There was light emanating from an open door, and as Pope watched, a shadow passed across an open window. There was a pickup truck parked next to the shack, with a machine gun in the flatbed. He focussed on the road itself. A large concrete block had been placed in the centre of the highway. The top half had been painted white and the bottom half was painted red, and it had been draped with a large black flag with a white circle and white calligraphy. A single man stood in front of the block; he was toting a large rifle and his face was covered with a chequered keffiyeh. Beyond the concrete block was an armoured Humvee. It was parked across the road at such an angle that anyone who wanted to pass into or out of the city would have to slalom around it and then the block before proceeding. The black flag was flying from the radio mast and there were two other men, their faces similarly covered, also toting large rifles.
It was a checkpoint.
Pope had the beginning of an idea.
He collected his backpack and set off carefully down the slope, very conscious now that a fall and an injury would be a catastrophe. The descent was steeper than it looked, and the footing was treacherous, with whole stretches that were little more than scree. Pope dug his boot into the scree to slow his momentum and a tiny avalanche of stones tumbled ahead of him, a soft susurration that nevertheless sounded terribly loud. He continued down, aiming for the spots where the bedrock jutted out and offered more secure footholds, and eventually made it to the first rows of almond trees. He was sweating and out of breath, and he crouched down with his weapon aimed ahead of him and acclimatised himself again. A few dislodged pebbles continued to trickle down the slope, rattling as they did so, but there was no indication that he had been seen or heard.
He was close to the guard hut now, but the trees were planted close together and there was a lot of scrub that had grown up between the trunks. Pope was well concealed here. He wouldn’t be able to sleep, but he was happy that it would be safe to hunker down and wait until nightfall. He would use the time to plan exactly how to make his attack.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The optimal times of day to make an assault were just before sunup and just after sundown. Pope had kept a close watch on the comings and goings at the checkpoint all day. The soldiers had an impressive aura with their black flags, the sinister uniforms and their ostentatious weaponry, but they were lazy and unprofessional. There were four of them at the checkpoint at any one time, two manning the blockade and two in the hut. The checkpoint itself was well designed. It would be difficult to bypass it without coming under sustained fire, and the additional concrete blocks that Pope had noticed as he closed on it would have made it very difficult for a suicide bomber to drive within range before he could be shot. But that was the extent of the cautious planning. If Pope had been the officer in charge, he would have tasked the two unoccupied men in the hut with burning down the trees that were much too close to the building. They had been planted close together, and, having been left untended, vines had been allowed to wind their way between the trunks until an almost impenetrable curtain had grown. There was a cleared border of ten metres between the trees and the hut, but to leave no more than that was sloppy. It was obvious that the soldiers considered that their main threat would approach along the road, most likely from the south. But that was short-sighted. Pope had been able to creep right up to the margin and assess the soldiers from close range.
A technical had been parked next to the guardhouse. It was a Ford Ranger with a .50-calibre machine gun mounted in the back. This one, though, had been adapted even more thoroughly than was usual. It had been fitted with crude armour: a large plate had been welded to the front of the vehicle and there was a steel box in the truck bed to protect the gunner. The vehicle was sunk down on its suspension from all the additional weight.
Pope glanced up at the horizon. The sun was dipping down. Dusk was falling.
Dusk became night.
Pope took his chance.
He left his backpack in the orchard, taking only his rifle, two extra magazines, his knife and his silenced handgun. He reached down into the dirt, took a handful and scrubbed it across his face, darkening his skin, and then used his knife to slice an opening in the curtain of vines. He slipped through, and staying low to the ground, he approached the hut. The guards on the checkpoint were looking north and south, and once he had passed across the first three metres, he was shielded by the concrete block and the Humvee.
He reached the hut. It was little more than a shed formed by planks of wood and shingles for a roof. It was not substantial, and the light from inside leaked out between the gaps in the planks. One of the gaps was wider than the others, and Pope was able to kneel down, press his face to the panels that had been baked in the sun all day and look inside. The two guards who were off duty were inside. One of them was sitting on a chair, his legs resting on a table and his hands crossed over his chest. The other was on the floor, lying on a bedroll, his knees pushed up to his chest in the foetal position.
Pope waited and listened. He heard the sound of heavy breathing. Both men were asleep. He heard the sound of an engine, and as he peeked around the edge of the building to check, he saw a car approaching from the south. It couldn’t have been better timing. The two guards came to attention, their rifles raised, and signalled for the car to stop. Their attention was distracted, and not willing to squander such a fortuitous advantage, Pope crept around the hut, following it in a clockwise direction so that it would provide additional cover to obscure him from the road. The door was open. The guard by the Humvee would have been able to see him, but he was out of sight now, dealing with the car.
Pope carefully moved inside.
The interior was lit by a hurricane lamp. The men had eaten, and their dirty plates and utensils had been left on the desk. Their AK-47s were propped in the corner of the small room, and there was a shortwave radio next to the recumbent guard’s crossed feet. Pope reached down to his scabbard and took out his knife. He addressed the man in the chair first of all: he was young, with a straggled beard and a scar on his cheek. Pope laid the edge of the knife to his throat and sliced from left to right, hard and fast. The man’s eyes opened, bulging with terror, but Pope had cut through his trachea, so the only noise he could make was a strangled gasp. Pope had wrapped an arm around his legs and held him steady as he tried to kick, the only noise coming from the clatter of the chair legs as he jerked forward and back. His strength drained away quickly and he fell still.
The guard on the floor had not even stirred. Pope knelt down and straddled him, pinning his arms, and as he woke, Pope sliced his throat, too. The guard jerked like a beached fish as he gasped for a breath of a
ir that would never come, and then he, too, lay still.
Pope wiped the knife on the robe of the dead man and waited, listening.
He heard the sound of a car driving away, and when that had passed out of earshot, a jovial conversation from the two guards outside.
Pope gathered his rifle and went to the open doorway. The sentries were talking together, next to one another. There was waist-high cover on the ground outside, and that meant that a prone shooting position was impractical, so Pope lowered himself to a kneeling position. His right knee was at the rear, and he laid it against the ground. His left leg supported the elbow of his left, forward arm. Pope rested his elbow on the quadriceps, knowing from hours of range shooting that to rest it on his kneecap would cause him to wobble.
