Black Ops

by Chris Ryan

  She double-checked her fake passports and her anonymous phone. Then she shouldered the rucksack again and directed herself to the nearest main road.

  Ten minutes later she was in a taxi, heading to the airport.

  17

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  Danny had lifted Abadi to his feet. The old man had started to giggle again. He was definitely either stoned or insane. He was grinning, his eyes gleaming. Danny pressed his handgun hard into Abadi’s skull to focus his attention. ‘How do you know all this?’ he repeated. ‘How do you know how Khan was killed?’ A suspicion was growing in Danny’s mind that Abadi was leading him on after all. Maybe he’d heard about Bullock, Armitage and Moorhouse. Maybe he was trying to lay a false trail.

  ‘I saw it happen,’ Abadi whispered.

  ‘You were there?’

  ‘No. They recorded it. I’ve seen the film.’

  A beat.

  ‘Do you still have it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Show me. Now.’

  ‘You’re too weak. You won’t be able to watch.’

  ‘Listen to me, buddy. You’re one wrong word away from getting the full treatment. Show me the fucking footage or you’ll be the next one to get your bollocks ripped off.’ He saw Abadi’s gaze flicker towards the computer on the other side of the room. ‘Is it on that laptop?’

  Abadi nodded.

  ‘Put it on.’ He threw Abadi in the direction of the laptop. The old man staggered towards it. Danny watched as he navigated to a folder of Quicktimes and clicked on one of them. Dark, juddery video imagery appeared on the screen. Danny forced Abadi to the ground and kept his weapon pointing at him as he watched the footage unfold on the screen.

  He recognised Khan immediately, even though the quiet, unassuming young man whom he’d last seen sitting on his bed in a remote farmhouse looked very different. He wore a beard, for a start, and his hair was long, almost shoulder-length. He was dirty and he was naked. He was also, as Abadi said he would be, sitting in a padlocked cage, not much bigger than a large dog crate – in fact, it might have been a dog crate. He was crouched and cramped and gripping the bars. His skin was smeared brown with his own excrement. He looked spaced out, as if he’d been drugged.

  There was a cut in the footage. The crate was open and Khan was outside it, still naked and kneeling. A figure dressed in black and wearing a balaclava was next to him. He had an evil-looking hooked knife and was chanting a prayer in Arabic. Khan was shaking, but seemed unable to move. The figure stopped chanting. He grabbed Khan by the head, yanked it to one side and, with a swift and sudden movement, sliced off his right ear.

  It didn’t bleed as much as Danny expected, and Ibrahim Khan didn’t scream. Maybe he was too pumped full of drugs for either outcome. His eyes rolled, however, and he looked like he might collapse if the hooded figure hadn’t grabbed him by the other ear and, with the bloodied knife, quickly whipped it off.

  Another cut in the footage. Ibrahim Khan was tied to the crate, kneeling in the doorway, his arms spread out as though crucified, his wrists bound to the bars. His ears were bandaged. A black-clad figure – it might have been the same person as before, or another one, Danny couldn’t tell – stood by his right hand with a long-handled chain cutter. There was no preamble. He took Ibrahim Khan’s little finger in the blades of the cutter and lopped it off as easily as a gardener pruning a rose bush.

  There was no doubt Khan felt it. His body started and he appeared to inhale sharply. But again, there was no scream. Danny felt a seed of respect germinating for this man. And although he knew what was coming, Danny could not take his eyes from the atrocity as it unfolded. The removal of Khan’s remaining fingers took less than a minute. Only the thumbs were troublesome. The black-clad figure failed to cut them at the joints, so the bones audibly splintered and it took a couple of goes to remove them. Blood seeped from the wounds, slow and viscous as it dripped on to the floor. Khan stared ahead, his face etched with horror and pain, but with an apparent determination not to beg or crumble.

  Cut.

  Khan’s butchered arms were still strung to the cage but he was no longer kneeling. His legs were spread open in front of him. His head was leaning back so his face was out of view. The black-clad figure was kneeling between his legs. Thankfully, it was impossible to see what the figure was doing, but Danny didn’t need to. Khan was struggling with his restraints now, but weakly. There was life in him, but it was draining fast.

  Cut.

  Khan was in the same position, bound to the cage. His body was fully visible now: the bandaged head, the stumps where his fingers should have been, the excoriated genitals. His skin was smeared with his own blood and his head hung back. The black-clad figure reappeared. He had a different knife this time, not curved but long and straight with a hooked, serrated edge. With one hand he grabbed Khan’s hair and straightened his head. Then, with not even a moment’s hesitation, he stabbed the knife into his left eye. Khan’s body shuddered, as if electrocuted, as the figure twisted the knife a quarter turn then pulled it out, bringing with it a gelatinous trail of gore. He wiped the gore on Khan’s shoulder, then repeated the operation on his other eye.

  Cut.

  Khan was back inside the cage. He was on his back and not moving. It was impossible to say if he was dead or not, but it seemed likely. The figure had a jerrycan of fuel which he was sloshing through the bars of the cage on to Khan’s body. There was at least a gallon of fuel. Danny could almost smell it. Sickened by what had gone before, he felt something like relief when the figure disappeared from shot and a burning rag was thrown into the cage. The fuel ignited immediately and it was only then, when Khan’s body writhed for a few seconds, that Danny realised he had still been alive before they burned his body.

  Not now though. What remained of him did not burn well, but quickly became charred and smouldering.

  The footage finished.

  There was silence in the room. Danny, no stranger to atrocity, felt nauseous nonetheless. A single question was foremost in his mind: if Khan was dead, who had been killing the SAS men in the MISFIT team? He looked down at Abadi and had to suppress the urge to nail him there and then. The old man was huddled on the floor, clutching his knees, almost childlike. Danny felt a rising sense of panic. He was alone in the wilds of Syria, and everything he thought he knew had just turned out to be wrong. What was his next move? Should he confiscate this laptop and get back to Beirut to show Bethany? Should he contact Hereford, or MI6?

  He cocked his head. MI6. With the extent of their intelligence networks, how come they hadn’t even heard a rumour of this grisly snuff video? That thought led to another. Nobody made footage like this just for the hell of it. It was an act of terror and politics. These home movies served a purpose: to appal, to publicise, to terrify. They were made to be disseminated, and when that happened the intelligence services of every major power would be all over them.

  But not this one. Why?

  Abadi wasn’t telling him everything.

  He looked coldly at his prisoner. ‘Why did they do this?’

  ‘Because he was a traitor.’

  ‘I don’t mean why did they kill him. Why did they film it? Nobody in the West has seen this footage. What’s the point of it?’

  Abadi’s glasses had slipped down his nose. He looked above the lenses up at Danny. ‘What makes you think nobody has seen it?’ he said. ‘The most important person has seen it. The person it was made for.’

  ‘Who?’ Danny said.

  ‘His wife.’

  Danny stared at him. ‘You’re wrong,’ he said. ‘Ibrahim Khan didn’t have a wife.’

  ‘No. You are wrong. Before Khan was sacrificed, he confessed. He had a wife and he had a child. This film was made to send to her. To torment her, because his greatest betrayal was marrying an infidel Western woman, and spawning a son with her.’ Abadi sneered. ‘He deserved every moment of his
punishment. Every second of pain. Every . . .’

  But Danny had stopped listening. A nightmarish thought was growing in his mind. And that thought had a face. It was the face of Bethany White.

  For an instant, he was back in the Brecon Beacons. The lights had just failed and Danny had left Bethany and Christina in the kitchen while he went to search the exterior of the safe house. He’d told the woman to block the entrance to the kitchen and get down on the ground, away from the window. Bethany had been scared, or so it seemed, and for good reason: they had all been thinking the same thing, that Ibrahim Khan had found them. But Bethany hadn’t done as Danny said. She had located the trip switch in the kitchen cabinet and turned the electricity back on. They had argued. The house is safe, Danny. Nobody knows we’re here, except Sturrock. But how could she have been so certain Khan wasn’t on site? Why would she take such a risk, especially with her boy in the house?

  Unless, of course, she knew the power outage couldn’t have indicated Khan’s presence, because she knew Khan was long dead.

  He remembered Baker, the assistant to the ambassador, rooting through Bethany’s bedside drawer. Was it really, as Danny had assumed, because he was a sad old bloke in a suit, because he had some pathetic sexual fascination with her? Or was it because he mistrusted her in some way?

  And then he saw Bethany in Beirut, stylish and confident, walking from Al-Farouk’s office building towards the IS chauffeur in the X5. Danny’s entire strategy that day had been centred around a single assumption: that the chauffeur would be so blinded by his own prejudice that he wouldn’t see a woman as a threat. And with a cold sensation in the pit of his stomach, he found himself wondering if he himself had fallen into the same trap. He heard Bethany’s flirtatious words. Look but don’t touch, Danny . . . Maybe I made a mistake last night . . . Had she manipulated him so thoroughly? Had she flirted with him as a means of keeping his eye off the ball?

  He swore under his breath. This was paranoia, nothing more. He was inventing a conspiracy theory to fit the facts. Could he really believe that Bethany was married to Ibrahim Khan? That her little boy, Danny Jr, was Khan’s kid? Danny Jr’s face rose in his mind: the unruly mop of brown hair, the olive tinge to his skin. He realised, with an icy certainty, that the kid’s features were not unlike Khan’s. He hadn’t noticed it before, but why would he? Bethany had been evasive about the boy’s parentage. Now he thought about it, did he really believe a woman so in control of herself as Bethany would not know who the father of her child was?

  And then it hit him.

  The ambush.

  There was no doubt about it: Abadi’s men had known they were coming. It was a set-up. Textbook. Apart from Guerrero, Ludlow and Rollett, only two people in the world knew they’d be approaching that location at that time: Barak the fixer, and Bethany. Danny had assumed it was Barak who’d betrayed them, but what if . . .

  He had one more question for Adnan Abadi. It was perhaps the most important question of all. He bent down, pulled him to his feet again, and threatened him once more with his handgun. ‘Someone told you we were coming,’ he said. ‘Who was it?’

  At first it looked like Abadi wasn’t going to answer, and Danny would have to become more persuasive. He moved the barrel of the weapon from Abadi’s cheekbone to his eye socket. ‘I don’t know,’ he whispered. ‘I received a call from my contact in Damascus.’

  ‘When?’ Danny said. ‘Exactly when?’

  Abadi hesitated.

  ‘When?’ Danny hissed.

  ‘Midday, or perhaps a little later. Not yesterday, but the day before.’

  Danny hurled him to the floor as the confirmation took hold. Abadi and his men had been tipped off just after Danny left Bethany in the anonymous Beirut hotel room, but well before Barak knew he wouldn’t be accompanying the rest of the unit all the way to Abadi’s compound. So it couldn’t have been Barak: why would he set up an ambush on a vehicle in which he knew he would be a passenger? It would be suicidal.

  Bethany White knew where they were going and when. Everything fitted. She knew Danny was on the trail of Ibrahim Khan, and she knew where that trail would lead. And so she’d set him up. She’d sent him to his death, so the trail would die with him.

  But Danny wasn’t dead, and the trail had just taken an unexpected fork. He didn’t know what Bethany was up to, but he was determined to find out.

  He thought of Bullock, Armitage and Moorhouse, and their grisly deaths. Would Bethany have been capable of that? She’d certainly been unmoved when Danny nailed the chauffeur, and although she’d argued that they should spare Al-Farouk’s life, and feigned concern for his family, she hadn’t been traumatised by the sight. No, she was accustomed to death. Both witnessing it and, Danny was fast concluding, administering it. All the time he’d been hunting for the killer of the three SAS men, she’d been right by his side.

  And now what was she doing? Lying low in Beirut? No way. She had a job to finish. The death of Ibrahim Khan, her secret husband and the father of her son, was being avenged in kind. She’d been inflicting the same torments Khan had received on those people who, for whatever reason, she blamed for his death. The colonel and Christina were the only two remaining people who’d been indoctrinated into operation MISFIT from the start, and Bethany White was one of the few people who could approach them without suspicion. Now she assumed Danny was dead, he calculated she’d certainly be making plans to do just that . . .

  A noise, outside. It sounded like a door closing. Danny cursed under his breath. He’d let his guard drop while interrogating Adnan Abadi. ‘Who is it?’ he hissed.

  Abadi grinned. ‘Reinforcements,’ he said. ‘Put your gun down now and maybe I’ll tell them to be kind.’

  The threat failed to hit its mark. Danny yanked the power lead from the laptop, tucked the computer under one arm, then lifted Abadi to his feet with the other. He dragged him roughly across the room to the main door. ‘Goodnight,’ he said, before opening the door and pushing Abadi from the dim interior into the outside.

  The gunfire was immediate. It was so dim the gunmen couldn’t have known who they were hitting at first. Three single shots, each from a different weapon, slammed into Abadi, knocking him on to his back over the threshold of the door, keeping it open. From the sound, Danny estimated the shooters were approximately ten metres from the entrance to the room. He took up position behind the door, placed the laptop on the floor, and waited.

  The first enemy target to enter had the swaggering confidence of an untrained man. He was plainly not expecting Danny’s sudden attack. Danny grabbed the IS attacker from behind, one arm round his throat, the other staying his trigger finger. He pulled him silently back behind the door and strong-armed the life out of him. The attacker went limp and collapsed silently to the floor. Outside, somebody shouted a question in Arabic and received no response. Danny saw a figure approaching through the crack between the door and the wall, and he knew he couldn’t pull the same trick twice. He raised his handgun and, as the target appeared, dispatched a single shot into the back of his head. The attacker collapsed in a dull heap.

  Silence.

  Danny knew there was at least one more gunman, and he remained calm as a burst of rounds entered the room from just outside the door, ricocheting off the far wall. There was a pause of a few seconds, before a second burst split the air. Only then, when he clearly felt his adversary was subdued, did the third attacker approach. Danny saw his body pass the crack in the door, but didn’t wait for him to fully appear. Instead, he fired a burst of his own, straight through the door, when he knew the target was on the other side. The wood splintered violently and there was a thud as the third attacker collapsed on top of Abadi’s dead body.

  Silence again.

  Were there more hostile targets? Danny didn’t know, but he couldn’t hear anything. Abadi was dead. He had no reason to remain in this compound a second longer, and every reason to leave: more reinforcements could arrive at any time. Stepping out of the ro
om was a risk – there was only this exit – but it was one he’d have to take . . .

  He grabbed the laptop with one hand and hauled the first gunman – the one he’d throttled – up from the ground with the other. He manoeuvred him into the doorway. He stood there in the dim room, behind the two other fallen bodies, for a full thirty seconds, protected by the corpse. There was no attack. He decided he’d have to risk it, and was about to let the corpse fall, when a single round was discharged from outside. It penetrated the corpse’s right arm and slammed straight into the body of the laptop Danny was still holding, shattering it completely. At the moment the round was fired, Danny saw a muzzle flash in the compound outside, directly to his eleven o’clock. He moved instinctively and lightning-fast, letting the corpse fall at the same time as he engaged his assault rifle and fired a burst in the direction of the shooter. He knew he was on target because of the screams, wild and almost inhuman, that echoed around the compound. Danny crouched down behind the pile of bodies on the threshold and waited for the screams to fade into a death rattle, which they did in about half a minute. And once more there was silence.

  Danny cursed. The laptop was fucked. He couldn’t allow that to slow him down. He had to get out of here. He left the computer on the ground and, scanning the area outside the room, stepped into the compound. There was no sign of movement. He sprinted to the old tractor parked up outside the two adjoining buildings and used it for cover while he surveyed the path to the exit. The main gates were open. The two men he’d shot on his arrival were prostrate in front of them. The three trucks were still parked up along the inside of the perimeter wall. Danny sprinted up to them. None was locked, but nor did they have keys in the ignition or anywhere to be found. He located a jerrycan of fuel in the back of one of them. Other than that, they had nothing to offer except that they were old – old enough to be hot-wired if necessary.

  Breathless, Danny assessed his options. More IS militants could arrive at any moment. There had been two firefights that could have been heard from miles around. He might only have minutes to get away. He certainly couldn’t stay here. Perhaps he could drive back in the direction of the Lebanese border. He could try to find Barak. Unlikely. He had no satnav and no maps. He could be stopped at any time. Barak would have to fend for himself. Danny had Guerrero’s sat phone, which meant he could call in to Hereford, tell them what he’d learned, and request an exfiltration. He was surrounded by olive groves that extended several klicks in either direction. He could get to their perimeter, well clear of the compound, and lie low while waiting for a pick-up.