Desert Claw

by Damien Lewis

  Jock changed position now, then scanned all around him. Kiwi Jim vaulted out beside him. He was quickly followed by Mick and Eddie. Jock and Kiwi Jim took the right side of the roof, Mick and Eddie the left. As Jock advanced he kept his eyes on the oil drums up ahead. There were more of the enemy behind them, he just knew it. Suddenly, a figure broke cover and made a run for it. Instantly, Jock had him in his sights. It was a young Iraqi, no more than sixteen years old. He had an AK47 clutched in one hand.

  ‘Drop the fucking gun, laddie,’ Jock yelled. His words were muffled and distorted through the gas mask. ‘Drop the gun!’

  Within seconds, the young Iraqi was cornered on the edge of the roof. Jock advanced slowly towards him, keeping him covered as he did so. The Iraqi took a fearful step backwards. Jock’s bulky suit, gloves and mask made him look twice as large as normal and he towered over the young man. The Iraqi jerked his head from Kiwi to Jock and back again. He took another step backwards, his AK47 dangling in his hand. The edge of the roof was now right behind him. He had nowhere to retreat to.

  ‘Drop the gun!’ Jock growled.

  Suddenly, there was a horrible cry. The terrified Iraqi had taken another step backwards and disappeared from view. Jock took a quick stride to the edge of the roof and peered over. Spread-eagled below him was the young Iraqi’s body. He’d fallen onto the back of one of the pick-ups parked below. He was lying perfectly still, but at an odd, unnatural angle. It looked to Jock as if he had broken his neck. No doubt about it, he was dead.

  ‘Thank fuck for that,’ Jock muttered, as he turned away. The Major had ordered that they take no prisoners. At least it meant that Jock didn’t have to shoot him.

  ‘All clear on the roof, I reckon,’ Kiwi announced via the radio net.

  ‘You got it,’ Mick replied.

  ‘Let’s go find the effing painting,’ Eddie added.

  Together with Kiwi Jim, Jock strode back across the roof to join Mick and Eddie. But as he did so he caught a shadowy shape out of the corner of his eye. There, hidden among the washing, an Iraqi was raising his weapon. They had missed one of the bastards. Jock swivelled with his gun and squeezed the trigger. But the noise of his silenced weapon was drowned out by the bark of the Iraqi’s AK47. There was a flash of muzzle flame as the enemy fired off a wild burst. Then he keeled over, his weapon still firing on automatic. Jock followed him down with his gun sight. The Iraqi lay still on the roof, his body tangled in the washing. Jock could see a pool of blood staining the sheets a deep red.

  As Jock allowed himself to relax a little he felt a sharp pain in his jaw. He must have been hit. He lifted his hand to check, but could feel nothing through his heavy gloves. He shone his torch beam on his glove. There was a small patch of blood. It couldn’t be anything serious, Jock told himself. Most likely a flesh wound from one of the stray AK47 rounds. He’d deal with it later, once the mission was over. It had to be nearing its end.

  Jock turned to the others and the four men headed back towards the trapdoor. As they hurried down Jock was the last to leave. He checked the roof one last time, just to be sure. Then he took a few steps down into the gas-filled interior. As he did so, the Sarin swirled around his knees. It was still thick like a fog in there. A second later the gas was over his head.

  Suddenly, Jock took a choking, burning gasp. He felt his windpipe clamp shut, as he was hit by a wave of searing pain. He couldn’t breathe! He couldn’t breathe! He clutched in panic at his throat, unable to comprehend what was happening. Then the nausea swept over him. He collapsed and his body went crashing down the metal steps.

  Jock landed in a heap on the floor. With the last of his energy he punched the send button of his radio. But he was incapable of speaking. All that came out was a choking, rasping series of gasps. ‘Aaahhh … Aaahhh … Aaahhh …’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘WHAT THE FUCK?!’ said Mick, responding to Jock’s radio cry. The noise had sounded ghostly and horrific. ‘What the fuck was that?!’

  Mick turned to check behind him. With a shock he caught sight of Jock slumped on the floor.

  ‘FUCKING JOCK’S DOWN!’ Mick yelled. ‘JOCK’S DOWN!’

  In one swift move he dived back to the foot of the metal steps. Eddie and Kiwi were right on his heels. Mick grabbed Jock and rolled him over on his back. His torch beam showed a slick of blood and shattered rubber at the big man’s neck. And a scum of vomit on the inside of his gas mask. In a flash Mick realised what must have happened. Jock had been hit in the face. The round must have punctured his gas mask. He had been hit by the gas. He needed the Sarin antidote and fast.

  Mick began scrabbling desperately in his chest pouch. The thick gloves made it all but impossible to find it. But suddenly he had the syringe in his hand. He raised it above his head and then plunged the big needle downwards. It penetrated Jock’s thick suit and his combats. And then Mick punched the syringe of drugs into Jock’s arm muscle.

  Mick was small for an SAS soldier. But his body was as thick as a tree trunk and he was as strong as an ox. In one swift move he bent down and hauled the big Scot up onto his shoulders.

  ‘Find the bloody painting!’ Mick yelled to Eddie and Kiwi ‘I’ve got to get him out of here.’

  With that Mick turned and headed down the stairs. He was deeply worried about his big mate Jock. But he’d had only a few seconds exposure to the Sarin. Then Mick had got the antidote into him. It was crucial now to get him outside and into the fresh air. From his medical experience Mick reckoned that Jock stood a good chance. Or so he hoped.

  He reached the bottom of the stairs where the room was still wreathed in gas. At Mick’s feet there were figures twitching and convulsing in their death throes. Mick’s torch beam probed the darkness. Everywhere his men were checking the enemy dead. The light caught in a slurry of vomit. An Iraqi body lay next to it. Mick could see that the Iraqi had shit and pissed himself too. The nerve gas had wrecked his bodily functions. The stench would have been sickening, but nothing made it through Mick’s gas mask.

  Mick hurried on. He ran right past Bill and charged through the back door of the building. He dumped Jock down on the ground. Then he grabbed the knife off his chest harness and sliced through the rubber straps on Jock’s gas mask, then ripped the mask off his face. He used his glove to wipe the worst of the vomit away. Then he gave orders to Guy and the Team Three lads to patch up the flesh wound to Jock’s jaw. As soon as Jock was able to drink, they were to get as much water down him as possible.

  Mick turned and hurried back into the target building.

  ‘What’s up with big Jock, buddy?’ Bill yelled.

  ‘Took some Sarin,’ Mick yelled back. ‘Got the antidote into him. He’ll be OK.’

  Bill gave him a double thumbs up. Then he jabbed a gloved finger at his watch.

  ‘Time we was leaving buddy!’ Bill yelled into Mick’s ear.

  Mick nodded. ‘Still checking the dead,’ he yelled back. ‘Plus searching for the painting.’

  ‘You what?’ Bill yelled. ‘It ain’t up there?’

  ‘It’s got to be. Can’t see much though. Gas like pea fucking soup up there.’

  Mick glanced around the room. He started doing a body count. There were five dead in here. Maybe ten on this floor all together. Another twenty above. Thirty enemy dead and still counting. But the weird thing was how so few Iraqis were on the top floor. If that was where the painting was, why weren’t there more men guarding it? Mick wondered. He was jerked out of his thoughts by the sudden arrival of Eddie at his side.

  ‘There ain’t no fucking painting!’ Eddie yelled through his gas mask.

  ‘What?!’ Mick shouted back.

  ‘No painting!’ Eddie yelled. ‘On the top floor. It ain’t fucking here!’

  ‘It fucking has to be!’ Mick shouted back. ‘What else were all these fuckers guarding?’

  ‘Well it ain’t! You want us to tear the fucking place apart? We don’t have the fucking time.’

  ‘Listen, are there
any of them fuckers left alive up there?’ Mick asked.

  ‘On floor two should be. They were hit last by the gas.’

  ‘Right. Get me one. We’ve got some questions to ask him.’

  Twenty seconds later Eddie came staggering back down the stairs. He had an Iraqi draped across his shoulders. A spare gas mask was clamped on the dying man’s face. Eddie dumped the man at Mick’s feet. The Iraqi was in a bad way. His trousers were soaked with urine. He foamed at the mouth and shook like an electric current was tearing through his veins.

  But he was alive. Mick whipped a syringe out of his breast pouch and then held it up so that the dying man could see it. Then he grabbed Omar, their Iraqi guide, by the arm.

  ‘Right, Omar. You tell him this is the Sarin antidote,’ Mick said. He held up the syringe of atropine. ‘Tell him he gets an injection in exchange for the painting. If not, he’ll be dead in three minutes.’

  Omar knelt down and spoke into the Iraqi’s ear. The man’s body began to shake and twitch violently. He was gasping for breath. Saliva dribbled out of his mouth and nose. His eyes rolled and he spewed a stream of vomit into the front of the gas mask. Yet, somehow, the dying man managed to raise a shaking hand. He pointed to a section of the floor at Mick’s feet and mouthed a couple of words in Arabic.

  ‘Trapdoor. Under the carpet,’ Omar said. ‘It’s in there.’

  ‘Right, Eddie, give him the fucking antidote,’ Mick ordered. He handed Eddie the needle.

  For a second Eddie hesitated. Their orders had been to leave no man alive.

  ‘Don’t fuck around, mate!’ Mick yelled. ‘We’ve got to keep him alive till we find the fucking painting.’

  Eddie gave Mick the thumbs up, then plunged the needle into the Iraqi’s arm. Mick turned and kicked back the carpet. His torch revealed a crude wooden trapdoor. There had to be a cellar beneath the floor. Mick heaved on the handle. But it was locked. From the inside. Which meant there had to be more of the enemy down there. Mick had no idea if they were alive or dead. But he wasn’t taking any chances. Quick as he could he whipped out a shaped charge from his chest pouch. He peeled off the protective strip. Then he chose a spot on the floor several feet back from the trapdoor. He taped the charge to the floor in a crude square. Then stepped back to set the fuse.

  ‘Listen,’ he said to Eddie, Kiwi Jim and the others. ‘I ain’t blowing the trapdoor. That’s the way they’ll expect us to come in. Plus I might blow the painting. So I’m blowing a mouse hole through the floor. Soon as the charge goes we go in. Got it?’

  The men nodded. They took several steps back as Mick set the fuse. Seconds later there was a sharp crack. A section of the floor had caved in and was now a smoking hole. Quickly Eddie lowered his powerful frame through the floor. He dropped, hit the deck, and crouched with his gun at the shoulder. He scanned the room with his torch beam. There were thick wisps of gas in the air. And three enemy, all face down on the floor. They looked pretty dead to Eddie.

  Mick and Kiwi Jim dropped in next to him.

  ‘Check them,’ Mick yelled, pointing at the enemy with his gloved hand.

  Eddie moved forward as Kiwi Jim covered him. Mick slid around the wall towards the rear of the cellar. At the back there was an old wardrobe. He stuck out his gloved hand and grabbed the door handle. He pulled, but the door was locked. Fuck searching for the key, Mick told himself. He grabbed the door handle with both hands and yanked with all his might. With a tearing of wood the door came away from its hinges. Mick threw it to one side.

  He shone his torch inside. There in the back of the wardrobe was a shapeless bundle. Whatever it was it was wrapped in an old curtain. Mick grabbed it and pulled it towards himself excitedly. Then he ripped down a corner of the curtain. The edge of a golden picture frame was glinting in the torchlight. Mick knew this had to be it. At last. They’d found it. The painting.

  Behind him Eddie rolled over the third body, just to make sure he was dead. But as he did so, his torch glinted on something lying on the floor. Something round, metallic, about the size of an apple. GRENADE! Eddie didn’t need to check. He knew that the dying Iraqi had set a trap. He’d pulled the pin and then lain on the grenade, to booby-trap his own body. In a split second Eddie rolled the Iraqi back over. Then he slammed his own body down on top of him. As he did so, there was a massive explosion. He felt himself lifted off the floor and thrown clear of the corpse. And then his world went black.

  Some time later Eddie came to, groggy and confused. The whole of the space in front of him was filled with smoke. He had lights shining in his eyes. And he could barely see. He tried wiping the circular glass eye-pieces of his gas mask. As he did so he glanced at his gloved hand and realised that it was covered in human gore. He glanced down at his suit. It was spattered with thick gouts of blood and flesh. He couldn’t work out whose blood it was. His own? Or someone else’s?

  Then it all came back to him. The Iraqi corpse. The booby-trap. The explosion. Eddie looked up from his blood-spattered suit. Across the other side of the cellar Mick and Kiwi Jim were staring at Eddie as if he was a ghost or something.

  ‘What? What are you fuckers staring at?’ Eddie yelled. ‘So I dived on the grenade. So what? It wasn’t you I was worried about. It was the fucking painting!’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE CONVOY OF land Rovers sped along the dark road, wheels humming on the tarmac. Spaced well apart, fifty metres between each vehicle, they made less of an easy target for an ambush. They had been on the road for four hours now and the target building was many miles behind them. Mick’s vehicle was in lead position and he had Bill at his side. Behind Bill was Omar. The painting was safely stowed in the rear. Big Jock was sitting next to it, recovering from his dose of Sarin gas. And Eddie was all bandaged up beside him. The dead Iraqi’s body had taken the brunt of the grenade blast and Eddie had suffered nothing more than a few minor flesh wounds. And the painting had been left unharmed.

  Bill’s Land Rovers were fitted with the latest security gadgets. Most useful of all were the tracking devices. Powerful computers based in Bill’s villa HQ kept track of the Land Rovers. An electronic map in the villa’s operations room showed each vehicle’s progress. And there was a hotline from the villa to the main US military commanders. Bill used it to keep a track on the US military checkpoints. All of them were marked on the electronic map. And if a location was changed, Summit Security would be the first to know.

  As the convoy ploughed ahead one of Bill’s men was in constant radio contact with him. He was watching their progress on the map and then warning Bill of each US checkpoint up ahead. Anyone else on that road they would treat as potentially hostile. Several US checkpoints had already been passed in this way. At each, Bill had done the same routine. US flag out of the window. A grin and a ‘You’re doin’ swell, boys. We’re proud of ya.’ Then a flash of his Summit Security credentials, and the convoy would be waved through. It was all going like clockwork, just like Bill had said it would.

  Mick glanced at the luminous dial of his watch. It was 3.00 a.m. At this rate, they would be back in Baghdad by sun-up. He settled into the driver’s seat and wrapped himself closer in his combat jacket trying to concentrate on the road ahead. But the temptation was to doze off, as the hum of the tyres lulled him towards sleep.

  For a moment, Mick thought he’d seen some lights up ahead. He strained his eyes. And then he was certain. There they were, a few hundred yards in front. It looked as if it was another checkpoint. Bloody hell. Just how many were there, Mick wondered?

  He jabbed Bill in the ribs and jerked him awake.

  ‘Sorry, mate, but it’s another bloody checkpoint,’ Mick announced.

  ‘What goddamn checkpoint?’ Bill muttered. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes. ‘We ain’t had no radio call from HQ. So there ain’t supposed to be no checkpoint.’

  ‘Well take a look, mate,’ said Mick. ‘Looks like a checkpoint to me.’

  Bill eyed the road up ahead suspiciously.

&nbs
p; ‘Slow your vehicle to a crawl, buddy,’ Bill said. ‘Hold back as long as you can without arousing suspicion.’

  Bill got on his radio and put an urgent call through to his HQ. He got an instant reply. There wasn’t supposed to be a US checkpoint at this position in the road.

  ‘I don’t like this, buddy,’ Bill announced. ‘Get ready for fuckin’ anything. See how many of ’em there are? I count a dozen, not including the ones I can’t see. And they’re all tooled up. I ain’t sure yet. But I don’t reckon this is one of ours.’

  ‘Then who the fuck is it?’ Mick asked.

  ‘No idea, buddy,’ Bill growled. ‘Just be ready to put your boot on the gas.’

  He eyed the checkpoint as it drew closer. ‘Look, buddy. There’s three different uniforms there. There’s Marine Corps, there’s 10th Mountain, there’s even an MP. You don’t never have mixed unit checkpoints. An’ you see that guy out front? Holding his hand out palm towards us? That ain’t the way US soldiers do a stop sign. They do a fist held forwards in the air. Always, buddy. Fist held forwards in the air.’

  Bill turned to Mick. ‘This ain’t no US checkpoint, buddy,’ Bill announced. ‘It’s a fuckin’ ambush. We stop and we’re dead. Get as close as you can. Then give her everything you got. Use the weight of the vehicle to force a way through.’

  Mick nodded, keeping his eyes on the checkpoint up ahead. If Bill said it was an ambush, Mick believed him.

  ‘Alpha One,’ Mick whispered into his throat mic. ‘Hostile checkpoint ahead. Prepare to run the roadblock. Follow my vehicle.’

  Every man on Mick’s team was on the radio net. So he knew that each soldier would have heard his warning. There was a faint grating of metal from the rear of the Land Rover. Jock and Eddie were still suffering too much to be doing much fighting. But Kiwi Jim was readying his weapons. Up front Bill had an MP5 machine-gun held between his knees. Gently as he could, he flicked the safety to off. He didn’t want the lead man on the checkpoint to notice anything. Mick eased the Land Rover closer and closer to the wooden barrier. Four spotlights were flooding the area in front with light. They were blinding Mick’s eyes. The soldiers up ahead were just black shapes against the white glare. But he had no doubt now that they were the enemy.