New Guard

by Robert Muchamore

The next stage was to try on their kit. Combat boots, tight-fitting stab-proof undershorts and vests, then lightweight bullet-stopping body armour. They didn’t want to appear too militarised, so the men got waterproof jackets, plaid shirts, cargo pants with lots of zip-up pockets for storing equipment. There were also combat helmets, only to be worn at the dangerous end of the mission.

  Since they were entering Islamic State territory, Lauren and Tovah would have to wear double veils, full sleeves and gloves for their road journey.

  ‘Why did I just dye my hair?’ Lauren asked, as she peered out through the tiny slit in her veil. ‘You can’t even bloody see it. And I can barely see where I’m going.’

  ‘You need to practise walking around in it,’ Tovah said seriously. ‘You’ll stand out if you keep tripping over.’

  James couldn’t resist a wolf whistle as Lauren walked up and down the concrete floor. ‘Man, you so sexy, sistah!’

  Lauren snapped her head around. ‘Shut up or I’ll break your legs, asshole.’

  ‘Not very ladylike,’ James teased.

  Lauren stripped back down to socks and undies as Bruce found the weapons crate. Since UK- or NATO-issue weapons were off limits, James had sourced East European and Russian weaponry, while Tovah had ordered up a selection from Israeli intelligence’s arsenal.

  ‘There’s like thirty guns here,’ Bruce noted. ‘This is my kind of shopping. Oh man, there’s Galils in here! I love these babies.’

  Bruce pulled the Israeli-made, ultra-compact assault rifle out of its foam packaging, aligned the sight and played around with it for a few seconds to familiarise himself. He then added two pistols, a silenced large-calibre and a tiny .22 that fitted in his shirt pocket. Bruce then clipped on grenades, smoke bombs, an extendable baton, a Taser, several knives and a half-metre-long machete.

  ‘Let’s go kill bad guys!’ Bruce shouted, as he expertly twirled the machete from hand to hand.

  James laughed, but Tovah looked furious and faced Bruce off. ‘I was in the Israeli Defence Force,’ she said angrily. ‘Saw a lot of shit, and it was always boys who liked guns too much who’d end up getting killed. More importantly, some of ’em almost got me killed.’

  Bruce was startled as Tovah wordlessly stripped his arsenal down and reminded everyone that it was best if they each used the same kind of rifle and handgun, to minimise the amount of ammunition and spares they’d need to carry.

  The atmosphere stayed tense as everyone packed up with spare underwear, rations, first-aid gear, and distributed the various electronic items they’d need for the rescue operation. When everything was packed, the final stage was depersonalisation.

  Jewellery, mobile phones, wallets and anything else that would enable their identities to be ascertained had to be abandoned. After that, James broke the seal on cheap Casio watches, Chinese in-ear radio equipment and bulky phones with combined cellular and satellite coverage.

  ‘Ten-day battery life, military-rugged, fully encrypted, for emergency use only,’ James explained. ‘Once you leave this room, you’re anonymous. You don’t call your girlfriend, check your e-mail or Facebook. And since this is a black mission, there’s nobody to call but each other. As far as the British and Israeli governments are concerned, they don’t know we’re here and this mission does not exist. There’s will be no SAS rescue team. No Apache helicopters dropping by to pluck us out of danger. If we die, we’re just six unidentifiable bodies in a desert. And if we live …’

  James dramatically pulled a rack of pills from his pocket. ‘This is old-skool spy stuff,’ he announced. ‘Cyanide pill. Pop one in your mouth, bite it between your back teeth and you’ll be dead inside two minutes. It’s not pleasant, but neither is being captured, tortured and beheaded by Islamic State.’

  Tovah shook her head firmly. Ryan looked anxiously at Kyle and Lauren. Bruce picked up the packet, but put it down without breaking off a pill.

  ‘You’re sure?’ James asked.

  Bruce cracked a big smile. ‘Not dying, not getting caught,’ he said firmly. ‘Don’t need suicide pills. We’re all gonna be fine.’

  35. BORDER

  James picked up a final electronic chatter report just after 1400 hours. There were plenty of phone calls, e-mails and texts from workers at the damaged well, indicating that someone was coming to repair the damaged pump controllers within a day or two.

  The bad news was that no signal had been received from the two listening devices placed on top of the well control room and the assumption was that they’d been damaged by the unexpectedly powerful EMP generator, or heat from the fire.

  The team’s ride south was a thirty-seat passenger coach, whose owner/driver used it for an irregular bus service into Syria. It arrived empty and they spent a quarter hour loading packs, microlight planes and partially dismantled dirt bikes into the luggage hold.

  They set off with an exhaust plume some way behind the latest emission standards. Rather than head straight for the border, the coach stopped on the edge of town, collecting four bearded men. A second stop brought a single Arab passenger, dressed in amber-tint sunglasses.

  The first stretch south was through smallholdings and recently harvested cotton fields. As they got closer to the border with Syria, shelters made from scrap wood and plastic sheeting began to appear in fields along the roadside. These were occupied by some of the two million refugees who’d fled Syria during the civil war. The closer they got, the more refugees they found, along with wafts from their refuse heaps coming through the air conditioning.

  The last stop in Turkey was at a properly organised refugee camp, with lines of identical white shelters marked with the Red Crescent logo. An Arab TV crew boarded the coach, followed by five smartly attired men. They filled most of the remaining seats as a group of porters rammed the cargo area with pallets of food and medical supplies, leaving the driver with a fight to lock down the luggage doors.

  The border crossing was heavily manned on the Turkish side. Two dozen troops backed up the customs officers, with tanks parked on either side of the road in case of trouble. The queues of vehicles trying to enter from Syria stretched to the point where the road disappeared into haze, and the land on the Syrian side was a mass of human tragedies. People who’d been refused crossing and had nowhere else to go.

  The Turks had less appetite to stop people from leaving. The four-hundred-kilometre land border had eighty legal crossing points and many hundreds of illegal ones, making it almost impossible to police. James watched a pregnant woman scream at an entry guard as the coach got filtered into a single lane, with high wire mesh on either side. Signs in Turkish, Arabic and English told people to stay in their vehicles, while further along the awkward face of Syria’s former dictator had been shot out of a Welcome to Syria billboard.

  The bus got waved through the Turkish gate. The bearded men on the Syrian side had Kalashnikov assault rifles and tatty camouflage jackets from which Syrian Army insignia had been picked off. The two cars up ahead made no attempt to hide the Turkish lira notes they handed across with their passports.

  Expecting the guards to board and inspect, Ryan pulled his green, fake, Turkish passport from his pocket and felt sweat bead on the back of his neck. But the guard gave the driver a friendly smile, then tipped his head respectfully at someone. The journalist? Or perhaps the well-dressed men who’d boarded with the medical supplies?

  ‘Apparently we’re in the right company,’ Ryan whispered to Tovah, in Arabic.

  The coach’s hydraulic door hissed shut. The exhaust threw out another plume and they were inside Islamic State-controlled Syria, heading south on a highway built with oil money. Beyond the traffic queuing to get into Turkey, the countryside was deserted. Advertisements had all been ripped up or blacked out. This was Islamic State territory now, but buildings showed scars from months of fighting and burned-out cars left black trails where they’d been pushed off to the side of the road.

  Speeding fines clearly weren’t on the Islamic State priori
ty list. The coach’s plastic trim rattled and squealed as they topped a hundred kilometres per hour. Cars skimmed past, going much faster than that.

  A shambolic roadblock caused brief delay, but fifty euros and some banter from the driver did the trick. Shortly after, they left the highway, taking another modern road. A scary interlude came with a tunnel cut through a rock formation. There was no speed enforcement and no electricity to power the lights inside. The coach had to swerve as it rounded a bend and encountered two cars that had crashed head on and been abandoned in the dark.

  Over the space of two hours, passengers came and went, the food and medical supplies got unloaded outside of a large hospital and the sun was failing as James pulled out a little GPS unit which calculated that they were now less than five kilometres from the sabotaged well at Tall Tamar.

  The driver pulled into a village that had seen some heavy fighting. Modern concrete houses were sprayed with bullet holes and every metal roof had collapsed.

  ‘This was a Kurdish area,’ their driver explained. ‘Anyone who wasn’t killed would have fled north, and the battle damage means nobody has resettled the area.’

  ‘So we’ll be safe?’

  ‘Stay out of sight, keep a man on watch. But you’ll be safer here than anywhere else nearby. And most importantly, you have this.’

  He gestured out of the window as the coach turned off-road, in front of a strip mall. The layout was like hundreds James had seen when he’d been at uni in America. A medium-sized supermarket, a gas station, a run of smaller shops and a pair of fast-food restaurants at the far edge of a two-hundred-car lot.

  Unlike the ones James had seen before, the gas station had exploded, leaving a burned-out canopy and a crater with the exposed remains of underground fuel tanks. The supermarket had lost all its glass and been looted bare. There was a hole where a tank had driven in one side and out the other. The smaller shops had fared even worse, with three completely collapsed. The remaining cars were either burned out, or crushed so thoroughly that a tank crew appeared to have decided to have a little fun driving over them.

  ‘It’s perfect,’ Tovah told the driver, seeing more than enough uncratered tarmac for the microlights to take off, while the shell of the supermarket made a decent overnight shelter.

  Bruce, Kyle, Lauren and Ryan started diving into the cargo bay and dragging out the gear.

  ‘Outstanding,’ James agreed, as he shook the driver’s hand and gave him five thousand euros. ‘The other five will be paid through to your bank in Turkey when we get back.’

  ‘What if you all get killed?’ he asked, half joking.

  ‘You’ll get paid,’ Tovah said. ‘My people will see to that.’

  As the coach headed off, everyone dragged the equipment inside the corner of the supermarket, to the annoyance of birds roosting in the framework beneath the twisted metal roof. Then James gave out orders.

  ‘Tovah, Lauren, erect a canopy in case it rains. Then start assembling the bikes and planes. Bruce, Kyle, I want you to secure the area. Take guns. Find the motion alarms and spread them around. Also, when you’re on the prowl keep your eyes out for a working tap. We’ve brought drinking water, but it would be nice if we can wash and flush a toilet. Ryan, how’s your head for heights?’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘Great,’ James nodded. ‘There’s a satellite dish I need rigged up so I can download chatter reports. There’s also a UHF aerial, so I can have a go at picking up a signal from the listening devices on the control centre roof.’

  ‘And what are you planning to do, boss?’ Lauren asked, sarcastically. ‘Put your feet up?’

  ‘I’m going to get the generator running,’ James said. ‘Then if you’re extremely lucky, I’ll plug in the mini boiler and make you all a nice cup of tea.’

  36. PUSSY

  It was 5 a.m. and Bruce sat on a stack of plastic bread crates, beneath the bird-limed frame of what had once been a supermarket roof. Five screens glowed in the dark, reporting info from night-vision cameras, motion sensors, the unboosted UHF signal James had successfully retrieved from the well control room and a web browser, set to automatically receive chatter reports and any other info British or Israeli intelligence sent their way.

  Bruce wasn’t the kind of person who could spend long periods with his thoughts, and after checking all screens and refreshing the browser, he stood. The supermarket’s floor remained intact, so Lauren and Tovah had created a waterproof shelter by stretching a tarp between two lines of looted metal shelving.

  Kyle snored inside a sleeping bag as Bruce stepped over, using a little black torch to show the way. Lauren clearly liked to be cosy, and Bruce smiled when he saw her snuggled on a bottom shelf with knees almost up to her chin. He crouched in front of their water boiler and rummaged through a box of dehydrated food packets. The writing on the packs was in Russian, so Bruce had to guess based on dodgy photos and feeling the hard lumps inside.

  In the end, he tore a pack at random, removed the plastic spork inside and two-thirds filled it using the tap on their water boiler. The steaming packet burned fingertips as he stepped back to his position. He took an experimental sniff when he was back on the bread boxes and was pleasantly surprised by the aroma of chocolate and banana custard.

  After a good stir and a few sickly-sweet mouthfuls, he was alarmed by a scraping sound in the next aisle. In theory, nothing human could get past the motion sensors without setting an alert, but something was going on because the birds up on the I-beams were chirping restlessly.

  Bruce flipped down a set of night-vision glasses and ripped a silenced pistol out of a holster. He considered waking the others, but the sound wasn’t far away, so he figured it was better to act alone.

  Another crowd of birds flew up as Bruce rounded a corner. A black object moved just to his right. A powerful shoulder, reaching out to grab. Bruce swung and shot, the gun’s muzzle silenced, but a bullet tore bone and flesh before splinters clanked noisily off the metal shelving. James and Ryan woke as hundreds of birds spewed into the air.

  ‘Who’s on guard?’ Tovah asked, as she shot up and reached for her rifle.

  ‘Bruce?’ James hissed.

  ‘I’m round here, I think I shot someone.’

  Tovah was first to join Bruce in the next aisle. She shone a torch, lighting up Bruce’s back and the body of a wildcat. Similar to a domestic cat, but half as big again, the shoulder Bruce had seen had actually been the back of a creature that had strolled in looking to catch an unwary bird.

  ‘Great smell,’ Tovah noted, as she looked at strands of brown and pink goo splattered up the back of the shelf. ‘Bullet must have ruptured the bowel.’

  ‘Nice shooting, buddy,’ Kyle noted, pulling down the front of his trousers as he walked towards a bucket to take a pee. ‘Everybody back to bed.’

  ‘No,’ James said firmly. ‘Hopefully nobody was close enough to hear the shot, but we’ll need at least a couple of extra people on alert just in case.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Tovah said, as she glanced at her watch. ‘I’m game. I’ll not get back to sleep now anyway.’

  ‘Too tense to sleep much in the first place,’ James noted, as he checked their cameras and motion sensor readouts. First light had just breached the horizon. ‘I have to say I envy Sleeping Beauty here.’

  There were a few smiles as James shone his torch on Ryan, who remained blissfully unaware, with his head buried deep inside quilted nylon.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Tovah moaned, as she joined James looking at the screens. ‘Bruce got the last chocolate and banana.’

  ‘Tea or coffee?’ Kyle asked, as he came back from peeing and wiped hands with a disinfectant wipe.

  Lauren nodded as she wriggled off her shelf and sat up, rubbing her eyes. ‘Who shot who?’

  ‘Bruce murdered a cat,’ Kyle explained. ‘Easily mistaken for an armed assassin.’

  ‘Explains the smell of cat mess,’ Lauren noted, as she stood up.

  James nodded in agre
ement. ‘Bruce, you’d better throw that thing outside, before it turns all our stomachs.’

  As Kyle made instant coffee, Lauren cooked up porridge and a big powdered egg omelette on a two-burner butane stove. Ryan kept snoozing as the others propped on bread crates and ate breakfast.

  ‘UHF pick-up,’ James noted, as he crouched over a screen. ‘Sounds like someone’s in the office.’

  The laptop was set to record any voices picked up in the control room. Since the bugs were only producing a crackly backup signal and in Arabic, Tovah shuffled across and replaced the tinny laptop speaker with a set of headphones.

  ‘Two guys bitching about their wives,’ Tovah explained. ‘Their accents are rough.’

  ‘Meaning what?’ Kyle asked.

  ‘Workers, I’d guess,’ Tovah replied. ‘Waiting for their boss to arrive and give instructions … They’re bitching about how they were told to be here super early, but there’s nobody else there yet.’

  ‘So something’s happening today,’ James said brightly.

  Ryan opened one eye, then sat up when he saw Lauren, Bruce and Kyle looking at him. ‘What?’ he said, stifling a yawn. ‘What I do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ James said, smirking. ‘As someone who tossed and turned all night, worrying about this shit, I envy your ability to switch off and sleep for ten hours.’

  ‘It’s called being a teenager,’ Ryan said, giving up on the stifling and going full yawn. ‘Besides, what’s to worry about? We’re just camped out eighty kilometres inside the territory of a dangerous terrorist group who’ll torture and chop our heads off if they capture us. Have all the eggs gone?’

  Ryan felt pampered as Lauren dished him eggs and Kyle brought coffee. Tovah made him jump by slapping her thighs and yelling, ‘We got tha shit, dudes!’

  ‘What you got?’ James asked.

  ‘Boss man just arrived. Told the workers to get all the burned control consoles out of the hut, because they have to be cleared out before replacements arrive.’

  ‘When?’