Locked and Loaded: A Riz Sabir Thriller Omnibus

by Charlie Flowers

  ‘Yes. He’s the English guy.’

  ‘Welcome!’

  I was enveloped in a bear hug. It was a bearded security man, with a prominent ID pass round his neck on a lanyard.

  ‘I’m Shawkeh. Not much English. Sorry. Imshi. I take you to Syria side.’

  The girls both kissed me on the cheek and walked back the way we’d come, fading into the darkness. Me and my new friend Shawkeh got into his pickup and rattled away past huge carparks filled with vehicles, and then lines of warehouses. This industrial area looked to be massive, at least a mile square, lit by harsh yellow lamps that gave everything a flat quality.

  Shawkeh tapped my arm as we emerged from the warehouses onto metalled road. ‘Syria.’

  I took a deep breath. We drove another several hundred metres and here we were at the northern perimeter fence. Shawkeh stopped the vehicle, and this time, turned the engine off. We got out and he walked me down an incline to another gate. Once more he got out a big chain of keys and unlocked the gate. It swung open and ahead of me was enemy territory. Shawkeh tapped his watch.

  ‘Here please. Same time bukra.’

  That meant tomorrow- possibly. I checked my watch. He patted my shoulder and left, swinging the gate shut behind me.

  I walked along the fence line for bit until it turned into a concrete wall and then stopped and sat down.

  Now what?

  Once again, I waited. The noise of Shawkeh’s vehicle faded. The night began to get as dark as only a Middle Eastern night could get, and the temperature began to drop slightly. I huddled into my jacket and wrapped my shemagh tighter.

  I tried to keep my mind occupied. I wondered what Bang-Bang was up to. I wondered if she was OK. I tried to make out star constellations. I craned my neck and could make out the Plough… so, from there I could draw a curved line to the North Star. At least I now knew north was the way I was facing.

  A light flickered ahead of me. Two lights. Sets of lights. Headlights, bouncing, fading, coming back. I stood up. This was it. It was either the Abdullah Azzam Brigades or the security services. Or the shabiha. I tried to look non-threatening. I could now hear engines. Louder.

  Two Toyota Landcruisers slewed to a halt in front of me in a cloud of dust and there was a rattle as the occupants clambered out and surrounded me.

  A flashlight was shone in my face.

  ‘Welcome to Syria, Mr Imran.’

  The relief flooded out of me and I silently thanked the girls for their attention to detail. They’d put my false passport name, Imran Mian, into the disinformation. These things counted. The tiniest slip-up could get you killed.

  ‘We’re Abdullah Azzam Brigades, Daraa sections. Come ! We attack at dawn. Let’s go.’

  They helped me into the back of one of the Landcruisers and we tore away into the darkness in a cloud of dust.

  26

  I clung on in the back of the rear Landcruiser as we bounced along the dirt road. The headlights were now on half-beam, and what I guessed to be the bossman was talking quietly into a walkie-talkie. A man with a Petzl flashlight on his head passed me some dates and baklava. I took them gratefully. Then the man next to me passed me an AK and indicated by sign language that it was loaded and made safe. I checked the safety anyway. Old drills came back. This was a turn-up. At least they trusted me enough to hand me an automatic weapon.

  ‘Hey. Johnny English.’ The bossman was speaking at me.

  The rest of the pickup’s occupants laughed. I laughed along. I wasn’t about to tell them all I was tired of this shtick.

  ‘Yeah. That’s me. Great films, don’t ya think?’

  They all laughed harder. Hey, I was there all week.

  The bossman spoke again. ‘Johnny. You were al-Qaeda original, yes?’

  I nodded. ‘Original, yes.’

  ‘Pakistan camps?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That’s good. You know how to use…’

  He pointed to the cab floor, to two RPG launchers. I nodded.

  ‘Good then, Johnny. We’re going to need you.’

  We suddenly bounced up and on to a metalled road and past a massive brightly-lit truck stop or park of some sort. I gestured at this to the leader.

  ‘Emir. Aren’t you worried about being spotted?’

  He shook his head and waggled the radio. ‘No. Spotters ride ahead on motorbikes. They clear each junction. If we see shabiha we use these…’

  He pointed at some small explosive charges.

  ‘Set them off at the wrong junctions, shabiha go looking… you see Johnny?’

  I saw. Good drills.

  ‘By the way, you can call me Ziad Abul Naaj. Or Ziad. Less of this emir rubbish.’

  Ahead was another floodlit junction, a cloverleaf. Three trailbikes stood ahead and raced away as we hit the junction.

  ‘M5 route, Johnny’ said the man with the Petzl. ‘Maybe eleven kilometres to Daraa. Nothing good round here Johnny. You know? One town you drive through is regime, next Free Syrian Army, next… you know about Daraa, Johnny?’

  ‘I know it’s where this started.’

  ‘Good. Then you know. The children made protest and graffiti. The regime arrests them. For painting on a school. Then it starts.’

  He spat out of the cruiser.

  The convoy began to slow as we neared the lying-up point, and soon enough we came to some olive groves and a lake that glittered under the stars. Our vehicles spread out, the trailbikes came back from wherever they had been, and we all pulled into a tree line until we were well back from the road and covered by the tree canopies. Ahead we had an uninterrupted view into the scattered lights of Daraa. The engines ticked as they cooled. There was little movement from within the city. Here and there were slowly moving vehicle lights. We stood in the Landcruiser bays and handed round fieldglasses. Ziad pointed out landmarks and main roads, and then indicated a lit area directly north of us. His hand chopped left to right.

  ‘Johnny. Watch. From left. In the city. Police and law house; railway station; museum; Oriant Hospital. Tomorrow at dawn we drive to the hospital and try to get refugees and Red Crescent out. Good?’

  I nodded. ‘Good.’

  ‘We must be quick to avoid shabiha, army, and…’

  He pointed up. I understood. Gunships.

  Half an hour later Ziad’s radio squawked and shortly after that, two more two-ship convoys joined us from the same route we’d come in on. They rolled into the treeline at a prudent distance from us, and we began to spread camo netting over the fronts of the pickups. We worked quietly for an hour and then hunkered down and waited for the dawn. The guy with the Petzl, which was now turned off, handed round a Russian starlight scope and we took turns standing guard with it. A dog barked in a distant compound. I took the 3am shift and took the opportunity to walk our perimeter and check the lake behind us. It was beautiful. I idly wondered what it was called. I snapped out of it, readied my AK and went to check our front with the starlight scope. Vehicles camoed-up, no noise. These guys were reasonably good. Only two RPGs, though… this might be difficult.

  At dawn we placed the mats out and prayed. Ziad led the prayers. Shortly afterwards, an old man emerged from a compound on the left and brought kettles of tea for us. We sat on the mats as the sun heated the earth and we drank the sweetened mint tea. Ziad had maps of the area, which we looked over and tried to commit to memory. The plan was simple. The whole convoy would just tear north into town like gangbusters, straight round the big roundabout at the museum, pull up outside the Orient Hospital in the ambulance bays, and hustle the trapped people out. The trailbike guys would watch the junctions and the machinegunners and RPG people would cover our withdrawal. Intel from inside the city said there were only ten people trapped there in the office reception. With any luck, we’d be heading straight back out before any government forces could roll from the west of the city.

  Petzl guy came over and introduced himself as Farid. He shook my hand and gestured at the RPGs. ‘You can sh
oot?’

  ‘Yeah. Rusty, but… yeah.’

  ‘Rusty?’

  ‘Never mind, Farid. Wanna help me?’

  He grinned. ‘Loader? Sure.’

  Cool. We had ourselves an anti-armour team. We checked the warheads, the booster charges, and the launchers themselves. Standard RPG-7 launchers, but the projectiles were the PG-7VL variant. They were slightly larger in diameter and would really ruin a tank crew’s day out.

  Behind us, each vehicle’s crews were taking the cam nets off and placing their PKM squad machine guns on the cab roofs. They were calling for everyone to saddle up. We were go.

  Ziad was impatient.

  ‘One hour before the gunships are up, Johnny. Yallah.’

  The trailbike riders revved their engines and tore off into the city ahead of us, into the heat haze of a new day.

  27

  We went straight up Route One, past stragglers and a few taxicabs. My own ride was at the back as I was heading RPG crew two, and we were to watch for armour coming from the centre of the city. We screamed into a wide left junction and then right. Dead ahead was a massive roundabout with a statue of God-knew-who in the middle, probably Hafez Assad, and then we were round it on the right and slewing to a halt in the parking bays of the Orient Hospital. It looked like an absolute dump. It had been shelled and there was a line of wrecked ambulances outside. The Landcruiser crews disembarked with much shouting and brandishing of AKs.

  Outside the hospital entrance there was chaos. Half the staff had run for their lives on seeing us crazy dudes drive up and the other half were waving their hands in the air. Ziad had got among them to reassure them and he looked swamped. There were dozens of them. I thought he’d said only ten. Well, the intel had been bollocks. One of our guys was brandishing a very professional-looking camcorder. Great. I patted Farid’s shoulder and we jumped down and ran back to keep an eye on the roundabout. I swung my AK onto my back and shouldered a launcher. Farid jogged after me with his haversack of assembled PG-7 rounds.

  ‘Johnny English? How far to roundabout?’

  I shrugged. ‘Dunno mate, eighty metres?’

  We looked at the vista. No traffic. A stalled bus. Heat haze. Suddenly there was a roar of a diesel engine and a squeaking of roadwheels. An automatic cannon fired. The two trailbike crews on the roundabout disappeared in a zipping cloud of tracer fire and smoke.

  ‘Tank!’

  A Syrian Army T62 came barreling in from the right of the roundabout, jerked to a stop on the remains of one of our trailbikes, and slewed its turret left, directly towards us.

  I yelled back up the road. 'Ziaaad! Taaa-'

  In front of the hospital, RPG crew one had also just vanished in a cloud of smoke and shrapnel. I grabbed Farid and we ran right for the alleys. Behind us the PKM crews opened up on the tank with a futile display of tracer. I turned to Farid.

  ‘Farid. Akhi. We have one chance at this. We catch that tank on its flank or rear, and you’d better have those rounds ready.’

  He nodded as we ran past some scrubby trees and a block of flats.

  ‘Come on! Round the block!’

  We kept running. All we could hear were screams, machine gun fire and the roar of an engine. And now more engines. Where the fuck had they all come from?

  We hugged the wall of the apartment block and there was the main road, and there was the tank, raking the hospital car park with coaxial machinegun fire. It was firing into a pall of white smoke. Green tracer rounds went wild and zinged off the hospital front into the morning air. We were less than fifty metres from the tank. I readied the launcher.

  On the roundabout behind us, some vehicles had turned up and started laying down suppressive fire. Farid turned to look and went pale. ‘Shabiha. Shabiha.’

  ‘I don’t care if they’re Charlie bloody Sheen and the Navy Seals, Farid, keep their heads down!’

  He nodded and started firing his AK in their direction wildly on full auto. Cartridge cases flew all over.

  Ahead of me, the T62’s turret started to swing away from the hospital and towards us. I dropped onto one knee on the hot tarmac and brought the optical sight up. All the lessons came back to me, but there was no time for any of the ranging or windeage. You’d need to be Stephen Hawking to work it out in this space of time. Bullets zipped and spattered onto the road around me. I cut it out. The gun barrel was nearly on us.

  I took a deep breath, laid the grid crosshairs on the engine deck of the tank, pressed the safety off, and pulled the trigger. BANG. The booster charge cracked off and then ten metres in front of us the main sustainer rocket kicked in and sent the projectile whooshing right into the engine deck. The tank shuddered. Then the turret hatch popped away in a volcanic geyser of flame and the onboard ammo went up. It was like a thousand-pound bomb going off. The turret went flying into the air like a football and landed a hundred metres away in a plume of greasy black smoke. The shockwave hit us and I howled in delight. Farid jumped up and yelled an Allahu Akbar too, and then had the presence of mind to hand me the next round as bits of dirt and fragments started to patter around us. I checked to see that he’d removed the fuze cap. He had. I slotted it into the launcher, checked safety, cocked hammer. I turned around. South, at the roundabout, the shabiha vehicles sat like lemmings. Their occupants were stood around them. They looked paralysed. Good. I looked through the magnifying sights at a bunch of fat thugs in tracksuits. As I scanned for a target, they started to snap out of it and began firing their AKs and scrambling for cover.

  I took aim on a vehicle. Reticle dead-centre. The launcher kicked. The car blew up in a cloud of fragments. The nearest truck took some red-hot shrapnel and its fuel tank ignited in a spectacular mushroom cloud. Men dropped. The shabiha scattered.

  I looked at Farid. ‘RUN!’

  We ran back to the hospital.

  Ziad clapped my arm. ‘Let’s go. North. Quick.’

  I was out of breath.

  ‘Have we got them all?’

  Ziad nodded. ‘All. Hey. Johnny. Tank guy. We filmed that.’

  We piled the people we’d come for into the remaining vehicles and barreled east down Route 109, leaving the smoke between us and the enemy. I sprawled in the back of an overloaded Cruiser and gratefully accepted a bottle of water. We had been really lucky.

  On the way out of town as we reached Elnaymah, all hell erupted behind us and the city disappeared in sheafs of incoming artillery fire. Our units’ radios were beeping with news. Ziad listened to his own radio for a few minutes, and turned to us as we went off the highway into the lemon orchards and Daraa vanished from our view.

  ‘Mashallah. That was Free Syrian Army units driving into town from the north. Right into shabiha and Government armour. Wrong place, wrong time…’

  At dusk we reached the fence of the Trade Zone. Ziad unplugged a memory stick from a laptop in the rear compartment. ‘Your trophy video.’

  I embraced Ziad and Farid. Behind us the refugees were being loaded off the pickups onto a bus and taken through the gate. Money was changing hands with some motheaten-looking security guards. Not my guy - he wasn’t due yet. The men stepped back and looked at me. I handed back my AK. Ziad smiled.

  ‘Goodbye, Johnny Tank-Killer.’

  The al-Qaeda men saluted and left the way they’d arrived, in a haze of dust. I sat down by the gate and waited.

  Night fell into black. At the allotted time, Shawkeh met me at the gate and escorted me back through the trade zone complex. Asma and Bambi were waiting for me with hugs and kisses. At the edge of the fallow ground, Uncle Jameel picked us up in his taxi. We drove back to Asma’s house where another party was in full swing. Apparently I was the toast of the neighbourhood. Asma and I took the time to get a laptop going and we emailed the video clips to Bang-Bang.

  The next day we went shopping in town and I got some souvenirs and some postcards. I spent the afternoon writing them and mailing them out. One for Toots and the Colonel, one for Teacher … one for Holly.
/>   In the late evening I got back on Asma’s laptop and logged into IMVU. I had to check how the girls were getting on with my video. And a cursory Google search indicated they’d done good- they’d put it on Liveleak. From there it had spread to jihadi sites and newsfeeds all over the world. The audience was loving it. And hence, my targets would have picked up on it.

  While I waited for IMVU to activate I checked the BBC London news. Apparently there’d been a fire and explosion in a scrapyard in West Ham. Some silly bastard had been storing aluminium powder and icing sugar and the place had gone up like the Blitz. There was other news. The chairlady of the Conservative Party had been forced to stand down over the hoohah over her business links and strange Hizb ut-Tahrir mates… and the IPCC were rumbling on with their investigation of those firearms police. There had been a demo outside Downing Street about those guys and some other men that were facing extradition to the US.

  IMVU unfolded and its virtual environment came to life. I was in mine and Bang-Bang’s hacienda. And there she was, grinning. Bang-Bang’s avatar now had fox ears and had grown not one, but several fox tails. I had no idea what was going on there. I typed.

  ‘All good back home?’

  After a minutes’ lag, a speech bubble popped up.

  ‘ All good , cuz . They bought it . You’re the new AQ poster boy . They want to see you tomorrow night at Derby train station . One hundred metres north from the station exit . They’ll be waiting , they said .’

  I was in. No going back now.

  ‘Thankyou luv. Oh and Holly? I miss your dirty laugh.’

  Her avatar touched the screen and smiled.

  Next day I made my goodbyes to Bambi and Asma and her family, all of which took a good while, and caught a ride with Uncle Jameel to the airport. I gave him the rest of my Jordanian dinars, and after much protesting, he took them and promised to look after me when I was next here.