by Mark Dawson
The next cell was empty, but the one after that—the final one along the wall—was locked. She opened the peephole and looked straight into Aqil’s face. He was standing close to the door and must, she guessed, have heard her whispered conversation with Salim.
“Daisy?”
“Yes,” she said.
“What are you doing?”
She had no time to indulge him. She took the keys from her pocket, checked the lock and selected the one that looked most likely. It didn’t fit. She picked another, and then another, and then another. She was beginning to think that the key that she needed wasn’t on the ring, but as she tried the fifth key, the lock opened with a rusty click. She turned the handle and pushed the door open.
Aqil took a step forward and then paused in the doorway. He was frightened.
“I’m going to get you out,” she said. “You and the other two from tonight. But I’m going to need your help. Is that okay?”
“To do what?” he said tremulously.
“Keep an eye on them. Warn me if they look like they are about to do something stupid. It’s not for long—just until we get outside. There’s help waiting.”
“What help?”
“Later. Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
She thought about not asking the second question but asked it anyway. “What about the woman they brought here? The wife?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “All the cells were empty when we came back. They must have taken her somewhere else.”
Isabella nodded. Fair enough. She would have brought Jasmin out, too, but it appeared that she had been separated from the men. Shame. Bad luck for her.
“How are we going to get out?”
“I’m going to persuade the guard to let us out. We’ll need to be quick. Now,” she said, gesturing to the closed doors and handing the bunch of keys to Aqil, “let them out. And tell them to be quiet or I’ll shoot them.”
Aqil unlocked Khalil’s door first, disappearing inside to wake him up. Aqil came out again and headed down the line to Salim’s cell just as Khalil followed him outside. Isabella glared over at him, the gun held out in front of her so that he could see it. Khalil looked dazed, a mixture of fright and confusion running riot across his blandly good-looking face. Aqil opened Salim’s cell and Khalil’s father peeked out, his head turning to the left and then the right, his terror very evident.
Isabella went over to them.
“Daisy?” Khalil said, his confusion deepening.
“I’m going to get you out. But you have to do everything that I tell you. If you don’t, I can’t promise that I won’t shoot you. All clear?”
“How are you going to do that?”
“We’ll go out the front door.”
“The guard?”
“I’ll take care of him.”
“How? You’re just a girl.”
She held up the pistol. “It’s up to you, Salim. You can come with me or make a go of it yourself. I know what I’d rather do.”
He looked dubious, and his lack of confidence lent additional edge to his fright. “And then?”
“We’ll drive to the border.”
Chapter Fifty
Getting out was easier than Isabella had expected. The guard was in the hut, looking out at the storm that was lashing the street. He didn’t see her leave the building. He didn’t see her as she approached the hut, pulled the door open and pressed the barrel of the Beretta against the back of his head.
“You’re going to do exactly as I tell you,” she said in Arabic. “Nod if you understand.”
He nodded.
She told him that she wanted him to open the gate, and when he held up the key and nodded again that he understood, she led him at gunpoint out into the storm, past the concrete bollards and up to the mesh fence.
“Mr Pope,” she called out.
He appeared out of the storm, his M4 cradled in his arms.
The guard unlocked the gate and dragged it open. Isabella indicated that he should lead the way outside, and he did.
“Who’s this?”
“The guard,” she said.
“Do we need him?”
“No,” she said.
Pope reversed the M4 and drove the buttstock into the man’s face. He crumpled to the ground.
Pope turned the gun around again and aimed at Salim, Khalil and Aqil as they came through the gate. All three men raised their hands.
“Mr al-Khawari,” Pope said, “straight ahead, please.”
Isabella led the way back to where they had parked the Ranger. Pope followed at the rear, covering Salim.
Pope arranged them so that Aqil was up front, with him, while Salim and Khalil were in the back with Isabella. She was sitting behind the passenger seat, with Khalil next to her in the middle of the bench and his father on the other side of the truck. She had the Beretta out, holding it across her chest so that it could be trained on them both.
Pope floored the pedal and the pickup surged ahead. The storm seemed to have grown even more ferocious in the time it had taken Isabella to free the three men, and the gusts were blowing with enough strength to buffet the truck as they headed to the north. Pope had switched on the headlamps, and she could see the storm of sand and grit in the glow that reached out ahead of them.
“You were supposed to let me in,” he chided her.
“I changed the plan,” she replied. “There was an opportunity and I took it.”
“Never mind. The checkpoint—can you remember where it was?”
“The main road out of the city,” she said. “We’ll run into it. I don’t think it’s far from here.”
“Can you describe it?”
“There were two cars blocking the road,” she said. “And concrete blocks.”
“Number of men?”
“Two.”
Pope nodded.
“A checkpoint?” Salim exclaimed. “They’ll shoot us.”
“Not if we shoot them first,” Pope said. “Isabella—can you drive?”
Salim was about to protest but stopped at the sound of her name. “Isabella? What?”
“That’s my name,” she said curtly.
“Not Daisy . . . ?”
She ignored him and turned to Pope. “Yes,” she said. “I can drive.”
“I’m going to pull over in a minute, and you and Aqil are going to change places. Mr al-Khawari—you and your son need to stay in the back. I’d like to get you out in one piece, but if I think you’re going to be a nuisance, I’ll put bullets in you both and leave you at the side of the road. Understand?”
“Yes,” Salim said.
“What about you, Khalil? Is that going to be something you can do?”
The boy didn’t answer.
“Don’t worry about him,” Salim said.
“Good,” Pope said.
They turned through a maze of roads, and eventually Isabella realised that she knew where they were. She remembered the road from yesterday: the street became a slip road that fed into the main road that led out of the city.
“It’s ahead,” she said.
Pope slowed and pulled over at the side of the road. He collected his M4 and got out. So did Isabella. They met at the front of the truck.
He rapped his knuckles against the side of the pickup. “It’s an automatic,” he said over the wailing of the wind. “You driven one before?”
“Yes. That’s fine.”
“The steering is a little heavy. And it pulls to the right.”
“It’s fine. I’ve got it.”
“Don’t stop. You might have to go off-road to get around them, but don’t stop. Not for anything. I’m going to be in the back with that,” he said, gesturing up at the big .50-calibre machine gun behind its own armoured screen. “I’ll knock on the roof when I’m ready.”
She went around to the driver’s side and got in. Pope slammed the door, nodded at her through the window, then went to the side of the truck. She watched in t
he mirror as he grabbed the lip of the flatbed and hauled himself up and over it. She heard the sound of his boots reverberating against the metal of the bed, and then she heard three taps against the roof.
She looked ahead, only just tall enough to see over the armoured panel that had been welded to the front of the truck.
She put the transmission into drive and pulled away.
Chapter Fifty-One
The checkpoint had been reinforced since Isabella’s last visit to it. The same two vehicles were in place, blocking the way ahead, and additional concrete blocks had been placed on either side of them. There were two guards standing in front of the blocks, both armed, both wearing headscarves to protect their faces from the scouring sand. There was no other traffic out that night. The two sentries faced out, toward the city, their AKs hanging from straps that they wore around their shoulders.
Isabella didn’t stop. She knew what Pope had in mind, and she knew that their best chance of success was to attack without giving the sentries a chance to realise the danger that they were in. She pressed down on the accelerator and the armoured pickup gathered pace. It bumped over the uneven surface of the road, bouncing through the potholes and then crashing over the small rocks that littered it. The suspension was already flattened almost to the ground by the additional weight of the sheet metal that cocooned the pickup like the plates of an armadillo, and it offered no give at all. She hoped that Pope had secured himself.
The engine roared, announcing their approach from half a mile away. The two insurgents on this side of the checkpoint couldn’t help but notice them. They took shelter behind the concrete blocks, one aiming his AK around the side of the block to the left while the other rested his atop the one to the right. They started to fire when the pickup was a hundred metres away. They sprayed rounds in the general direction of the vehicle, most passing harmlessly overhead or to the side, a few clanging against the armoured plate, sparks flashing back onto the windscreen.
Isabella pushed the truck to fifty and kept the speed constant. She would have to slow before she swerved around the blocks, using the scrub on the side of the road to skirt them, but she would delay braking until it was absolutely necessary.
Two more men appeared from the other side of the barricade. One of them had an AK. The other was cradling a different weapon. It looked like an RPG. Isabella had never fired one, but her mother had explained how they worked in the event that one day she found herself in need of extra firepower. It was a shoulder-fired, single-shot smooth-bore recoilless launcher, the grenade loaded into the front and the backblast vented out of a nozzle at the rear. The Russians had popularised them, and now they were everywhere. There must have been thousands floating around in Syria. The insurgent lowered himself into a launch position, his right knee bent and his left knee flat to the ground.
Fifty metres.
There came a deafening roar as Pope opened up with the machine gun. A corona of fire flamed out right above the windshield and spent brass casings cascaded down onto the hood, bouncing away to either side of the onrushing pickup or gathering in the groove where the armoured panel met the hood.
Isabella tried to keep the wheel steady, fighting the unbalanced weight of the truck and the uneven surface of the road. She wanted to give Pope the best chance possible of disabling the threat ahead of them. Firing the big gun from the flatbed of a light pickup with a civilian suspension was not a recipe for outstanding accuracy, but perhaps accuracy was unnecessary here. What they needed was fear, the fear of God, enough to scatter the sentries for long enough that they were able to get through the checkpoint and away into the desert.
Twenty-five metres.
The gun roared and the roof shook. Isabella peered over the lip of the armoured plate just in time to see one of the vehicles that was parked behind the concrete blocks propelled into the air by the tremendous detonation that unfurled beneath it. The explosion lifted the vehicle up and then dropped it back down onto its side, tendrils of jet black smoke criss-crossing the sudden glare of red and orange light.
Isabella hit the brakes, slowing them down just enough before she swung the wheel to the left and directed the truck off the road. The front wheels crashed down into a shallow ditch and the springs groaned as the impact pushed the heavy armour down onto them. She heard the squeal as metal tore, and then a grinding crunch from the direction of the front axle. The rear wheels bounced out of the ditch and Isabella spun the wheel to the right, stamping down on the accelerator again so that the truck rushed by the checkpoint doing forty miles an hour.
The road was to their right, and ten metres to the left, the desert floor descended into a shallow channel. It was too dark to make out how deep the channel was, or whether there was any water running through it. One of the sentries fired as they flew past, his automatic volley jagging into the flimsy unarmoured wing and the door panel. Isabella looked down and saw ragged inward-facing petals where the rounds had punctured through the door; she didn’t think that she had been struck, but she reflexively reached down and felt her torso and leg. Nothing.
“Khalil!”
She glanced up in the rear-view mirror. Salim was turned to one side, his arm reaching across his son.
“Khalil! He has been hit!”
There was certainly no time to stop, and Isabella cared very little for the spoiled brat in any case. She was more concerned with the fact that the machine gun on the roof had fallen silent. She didn’t know whether the big gun could pivot so that it could be aimed to the side; if it couldn’t, that might explain the silence. But she couldn’t discount the possibility that Pope had been hit or thrown from the roof by the impact as they left the road.
She pressed down on the pedal. She had to keep going. She had to get them away from what was left of the checkpoint.
She glanced into the wing mirror. She saw the jagged line of bullet holes all the way down the rear door and the rear wing, the plume of sand that was being thrown into the air by the rear wheel and a sudden spurt of bright white light through the darkness of the storm.
They had fired the RPG.
Isabella yanked the wheel to the left, the wheels lifting for a moment before the huge weight of the pickup pushed them down again. The truck shot forward, launching off the raised lip of rock that preceded the drop into the channel and then arcing down into it. She glimpsed the streak of light as the grenade shot overhead, but her attention was focussed on the floor of the watercourse that was rushing up at her. The armour struck first with a tremendous crash. It detached from its mounts and crumpled back into the hood. The top edge slammed into the windshield, slicing through the glass and bisecting the left and right front window pillars. Isabella was thrown forward by the impact as the sharp edge of the welded iron sheet jutted out beyond the line of the dash. The seat belt bit and held her in her seat as the metal came to rest just a scant few inches from her face.
The pickup had landed at an angle of forty-five degrees, and now the back wheels fell back and pounded against the ground. More glass was detached from the windshield, falling into Isabella’s lap.
She unclipped the seat belt, opened the door and stumbled out into the watercourse. There came a muffled crump from overhead and far away: the grenade had flown on and detonated against the ground.
Isabella looked around: the watercourse was dry, rocks strewn across the dusty riverbed. She grabbed the Beretta and scrambled to the sloping sides of the wadi, digging her hands and feet into the loose sand and earth and working her way back up to the top. She reached it, dug in her feet and anchored herself so that her head was just above the lip of the watercourse.
She looked back at the checkpoint.
The vehicle that had exploded was still burning, and as she watched, a secondary blast sent another spout of flame into the night sky. The blaze lit up the desert, bright enough to cast the figures who were approaching her in silhouette.
Two figures, both running toward her.
The first was ten m
etres in front of the second. It was a man. He was wearing a headscarf, the loose end bouncing up and down. She saw the shape of the long gun that he held out ahead of him, the muzzle swinging left and right with the cadence of his strides.
He saw her, slowed, and raised the rifle.
Isabella raised the Beretta and aimed.
She pulled the trigger. Nothing. She tried to rack the slide, but it was almost impossible and wouldn’t go back without being forced. She had cleaned the gun after Pope had given it to her. It had been fine then, but the pistol had an exposed barrel and she must have got sand into it when she climbed out of the wadi. The obstruction was in the slide now, and the gun was jammed.
The first man aimed his long gun. She could identify it now: an AK-47.
The second man was five metres behind the first man. He stopped running.
The first man fired. The bullet landed short, spraying sand in her face. He was close, and it would have been easier to hit her. It was just a warning shot.
He barked out something in Arabic. The wind was too loud for Isabella to understand what he was saying.
She raised her hands, the Beretta in her right, and slowly and carefully tossed the pistol away.
The man approached. He jerked the rifle up. He wanted her to stand.
She put her hands on the rocks and pushed, bringing her knees up.
The man shouldered the rifle and aimed. She could see he was going to shoot her. She realised that she wasn’t frightened. She was furious with herself for allowing her weapon to jam.
The man’s body jerked as if someone had punched him, hard, behind his right shoulder. He took a step forward, and then another, and then his body jerked again, his arms flung out wide as the rifle fell to the desert floor. Isabella heard the report of the third shot a fraction of a moment before his body spasmed again; he stumbled for another step, tripped and fell face first into the sand.
Isabella got her feet beneath her, and fighting a wind that wanted to send her tumbling back down the slope, she stood. The second man was on his feet, too, and was approaching again. He held his weapon expertly, angled down at the ground. She couldn’t see him through the swirl of sand in the air, but as he drew near, he raised his left hand, palm up, and called out.
