Wilkinson and Judge were both asleep, in their hides within a few metres of this one. Ben had slept for a couple of hours during the forenoon and he’d rest again before dusk if nothing happened before then. He didn’t think they’d come in daylight. Probably wouldn’t show up all that promptly at dusk, either; because if they’d been close enough to be able to move in here as soon as the light went, they’d surely have made the small extra effort to have made it before dawn. Anyone would have. Also, he was sure they’d have taken about twice as long as his own team had, to make the transit. OK, reduce that difference by about two hours, the time taken up in reconnaissance and settling in this morning, but it still left them several hours’ yomp away. The estimate was based on common sense, not conceit; all Royal Marines were commandos and kept themselves fit, but the SBS made a point of being ultra-fit. It was hardly likely that some scratch lot of terrorists with a reputedly drink–sodden ex-SAS man in tow would come anywhere near keeping pace with them.
Two Syrians on bicycles were pedalling south on the Homs road. Ben took a look at them through binoculars, then examined the refugee camp again, for about the hundredth time…
Helicopter.
The faint beginnings of the sound had been in the back of his consciousness for a couple of seconds before he’d woken up to it. Coming from the southeast, the Homs direction. He looked over to where the others were holed up: checking they were in cover, and no weapons or other articles out where they’d reflect sunlight and catch a pilot’s eye. He pushed himself well back under the rock. Listening to the hammering beat as the volume of sound increased. Close, now, he guessed it would be about to pass over. Very loud — a biggish helo, he guessed, although he couldn’t quite identify it yet. Although he’d heard one of these before… The thought triggered recognition about a second before the machine entered his field of view: it was a Hind, a Soviet-built Mi-24 gunship.
Big, all right. Fully equipped, it would have a turret-mounted Gatling, rocket pods and most likely bombs as well. The Russians used them in Afghanistan a lot. He couldn’t see its nose, from this angle, where the Gatling turret would be, but that gun would blast out something like 4000 rounds a minute and each of the four launcher pods would hold thirty-two 57-mm rockets.
Chalky Judge slid into the hide on Ben’s right. ‘Looks like it’s going to land, Ben.’
It was lowering itself over the village, Ayn Al-Dariqhah. The mountainside above that road looked too steep to land on, but it was a matter of perspective; the village was there, there had to be some level ground.
Ray Wilkinson crawled in. Reaching for his water-bottle, and crowding Chalky on the other side. ‘Visitors…’
Its noise was bouncing off the mountain: then it was passing out of sight, behind a ridge which also hid part of the village. Abruptly, then, the sound cut out. Wilkinson, who’d picked up some Arabic on a Gulf deployment, said, ‘Landed in the saha, I dare say.’
‘Yeah.’ Chalky nodded. ‘Never land any place else, meself.’
‘Village square. Open space among the hovels. Multi-purpose, including stoning adulteresses to death, in some parts.’
The helo’s arrival would have some connection with the Swale business, Ben thought, but it didn’t have to be performing in the role of gunship. The Mi-24 had started life as a support helicopter, commando-carrier.
‘Nutty?’ Wilkinson broke a chocolate bar into three parts and handed out two of them.
‘Thanks, Ray.’
‘I’ll scoff all yours later… Hey, they’re off again.’
The Hind had started up. Half a minute later it lifted into view above the village, swept away across the valley and more or less over the top of Kelso’s position on that south-facing rock slope, before straightening on course for Homs. But forty minutes later it came back again. Wilkinson reached for his Nikon as soon as they heard it; the camera already had a telescopic lens on it, for taking shots of the refugee camp and the stone cabin earlier on, and he snapped the Hind as it flew over towards the village.
‘What’s that for?’
‘I don’t really know, Chalky.’ Wilkinson shrugged. ‘Something to do. Guess I’m a dedicated snapper.’ He asked Ben, ‘Saw the gun on its snout, did you?’
Shuttle service. Flying troops in, presumably. The obvious guess was they might be staking the place out in advance of Swale’s arrival. They watched it clatter down behind that same ridge, and Wilkinson said, putting his camera away, ‘Fourteen guys with full equipment, those thing take.’
14
Soft whistle from the right, as recognizable as a signature. Ben answered it, and murmured, ‘Chalky…’ Judge slipped away into the darkness. Having announced his presence, Kelso would be staying put, allowing them to contact him. He and whoever was with him knew roughly where they’d be, and precisely where they had been, but also that they weren’t nailed down, would very likely have shifted their position after the light had gone.
It had gone now, all right. The night was as black as tar.
Engine-noise, road transport, down on the left. And lights — northbound traffic, the first since dusk. It sounded like heavy trucks — more than one, therefore a convoy, could therefore be military: and paranoia was an essential attribute… Risking a look straight at it — bad for night vision; he saw headlights on the first, dipped lights on a second, third and fourth. He thought it probably was a military convoy.
‘Hi, Ben.’
Kelso, and there was one other with him, as well as Chalky. He’d have left either Ducky Teal or Doc Laker up at or near the qal’at. Ben said, ‘Hang on, Sticks. Need to see if this lot’s stopping.’ Watching the convoy on the mountain road as it approached the suddenly popular mountain resort of Ayn Al-Dariqhah. The big Soviet helo was still on the ground there; and a Citroën saloon had come just before sundown from the direction of Homs, joined the mountain road across the valley and turned back into the village. It was still there.
OK, so some villager had a large Citroën saloon…
The convoy was not about to stop. The leading truck was passing on through the village, grinding on in low gear with its lights licking the wall of rock on its left. The others also coming into sight again: all four, heading for Masyaf or points north. Growl of heavy engines fading, but above it the thinner, high-pitched snarl of a moped; he saw the single light like a bouncing torchbeam southbound on the Homs road.
‘All right, Sticks?’
‘Ducky filled the bottles again.’
‘Good for him.’
‘Got sugar-beet too. One here, anyone wants it. Revolting, but edible.’
Doc Laker — squatting, facing out into the night, medical bag strapped on his back, nursing his SA80, had said that. Chalky was covering the other side. It was quiet again, now the moped had snarled away.
‘Two points, Sticks.’ Addressing Kelso, but it was for the others to hear as well. ‘One is I still think they’ll come from the west or south, most likely west as we did. And it’d be neat to do the job right there — the junction, where Geoff and Romeo are. Seeing as there must be troops in the village now — we’d be the right side of them, ready to skin out on completion.’
‘Unless they’ve deployed that way themselves.’
‘If they have, Geoff’ll know it. But point two, we can’t count on them coming that way, or on them not sneaking by somehow if they do, but we do know the camp’s their target.’
So that was where you’d hit them if you couldn’t do it farther west. Specifically not just the camp but the stone cabin which still had a guard sitting outside its door but which no one had even looked into, handed a cup of water or a crust of bread into, let alone entered or exited from, all day.
‘They wouldn’t be maintaining it for no purpose. Only thing it can be for is to draw Swale. Fits what the CO told us, doesn’t it. So look — three guys, adding one to Geoff and Romeo — you’ll do. Doc — above that road junction.’
Three would easily handle Swale’s group of four,
and Geoff could use one as a runner if he needed to contact the rest of them. If those troops did deploy in that direction, for instance.
‘Rest of us’ll stake out the camp. You and Ducky up on the north end, Sticks. You know your way around that cliff now, don’t you. Ray and Chalky’s side — here, and right down to the road it needs be, Ray. I’ll just move around.’
‘What d’you make of the helo?’
‘Part of the Swale trap, surely. Once he’s wherever they want him, they can deploy fast, can’t they.’
‘Couldn’t’ve got the buzz we were around, you reckon?’
‘No, I don’t. And OK, it has a Gatling in its nose turret but that doesn’t mean it’s in the gunship role, it’s brought some pongoes to the village that’s all. At least. I hope…’
*
Ten metres apart and in single file: Charlie was second in line, tailing Bob, who’d made a ballsup of the navigation and only come to realise it at dawn this morning when they’d seen the shape of the mountain facing them.
Mountains, plural. Shoulder to shoulder and reaching up three thousand feet, across what they’d expected to be their route eastward where the gorge they’d been following was supposed to have extended right through and brought them out close to their destination.
If they’d been where they’d reckoned to be, they’d have had only a couple of hours’ march after the coming sunset — instead of about eight. The road whose line they’d been following swung ninety degrees left, short of that mountain barrier, just beyond the point where they’d stopped to lie-up for the day. Bob had tried to disguise his shock, fumbling to get his map out… And there it was: two roads roughly parallel, only five kilometres apart but separated by mountains as steep and rugged as those barring the way east. Coming south from where the gulet had landed them, Charlie saw — looking over Bob’s arm, Tait and Denham crowding in too — Bob must have thought he was on his originally planned route to the interior when in fact he should have continued down to the next road. Should have crossed this one, carried on south.
‘But we did cross it. Remember that convoy of tankers we had to wait for?’
‘Well, in that case—’ Charlie saw the answer, stabbed a finger at the map… They’d started inland on the right road, had to leave it to skirt round a settlement on a crossroads, and that was where Bob had led them astray. He’d thought they were rejoining the highway when in fact they’d been slanting off to the northwest.
He’d felt embarrassed for him. SBS, team leader?
‘Damn that woman…’
Knox meant Leila: he was blaming her for having landed them in the wrong place. Then, intercepting an exchange of expressionless glances between Charlie and Tait, he’d retracted… ‘I know. My fault, nobody else’s… But look, all we have to do when we move on tonight is detour to the north a bit — stick to this road, then pass over the hump south of Masyaf — here, right? OK, so we’ll lose a couple of hours …’
They’d lost at least four, maybe six, Charlie reckoned. They’d got moving again soon after sunset, Bob leading them beside the road at first but then right on it — needing to make up time, so having to leave it to take cover whenever headlights appeared ahead or behind. Once near a bend an Arab on a bicycle had swept by close enough to touch, uttering a loud shriek as he passed, speeding on down.
The road had led them north for about ten kilometres before it began curving right, wavering a bit but generally tending eastward. Finally they’d left it; in the last few kilometres there’d been an uncomfortable amount of traffic on it, and Charlie had reckoned they were getting too close to Masyaf; after another scrutiny of the map Bob had found a track leading off to the right, a steep and winding mountain road, leading to a village which they’d had to by-pass, with some difficulty. Then, when it had begun to seem they were getting nowhere rather slowly, they’d come down at right-angles on to a tarred road cut out of the east flank of the mountains. On its far side was a black void — space, and a steep drop to a plain spreading into unseen distances.
Staring out into the dark, seeing scatterings of lights out there seemingly as distant as constellations in the night sky, Charlie put a map together in his mind. To the southeast would be the town of Homs, while northeast must lie Hama. Sixty k’s to one, maybe forty to the other. A motorway linked them, running south to Damascus and north to Halab — better known in bygone days as Aleppo. If you’d taken off from this escarpment in a hang-glider, passing over that road between Homs and Hama and continuing east, you’d have flown over something like four hundred kilometres of desert, camel country, before the sight of the Euphrates warned you that after another fifty you’d be crash-landing in Iraq.
Headlights; a warning flash, car or lorry rounding a bend farther along the mountainside. Charlie led them feet-first over the edge and into undergrowth — thorn, he discovered — which lined the lower edge of the road, rock and earth from the road’s excavation having formed a crumbly sort of shelf down there.
Bob, then the other two, had followed his lead. He’d acted instinctively, and the team leader had followed a second or two later. Then the car rushed by, its lights scything through dusty bushes over their heads. Charlie recording another thought: that he’d taken it for granted they would follow his lead.
Bob used the cover they’d landed in, getting his torch out to study the map again. You’d have thought he’d have had it in his mind by this time.
‘Have to stick to this road now. Only way there is, until we get to this turn here.’
South for a couple of hours, it looked like. To a left fork that would take them down into a valley pushing into the mountains from the open plain. That was the road to Homs, he saw. It led down to cross the valley from northwest to southeast, then passed over more high ground — the eastern enclosure of the valley, a ridge protruding northward. Bob pointed at a qal’at on its extremity.
‘That’s where I should’ve been at midnight. Come on…’
Scrambling back up to the road, Charlie muttered, ‘Saab iktir…’
‘Right. Lucky there was that ledge to land on.’
His comment had been on the steepness of the slope, the sheer drop to the plain hundreds of feet below. But it hadn’t been luck, he’d seen those bushes, they’d had to be rooted in something.
He wondered why the SBS had been so keen to have a fluent Arabic speaker with them. A second Arabic speaker, at that. Nobody, as yet, was talking to any Arabs.
South now, in single file, ten metres apart and ready to slide own over the edge again when more traffic appeared. Thinking — with the map in mind — that the moon might become a problem, might be risen by the time they got down there and had to cross the valley. Being so late already they’d have to chance it, run the gauntlet…
In fact they’d been surprisingly relaxed, he thought, about taking cover. If he’d been leading, he’d have taken a lot more care.
OK, so they’d got away with it. So far… But he’d have steered them right, too, not in bloody circles. And he’d have got them here in two nights instead of three. He’d have done the job a lot better than Bob Knox had, in fact. A follow-up to this was that right from the start he hadn’t given a thought to alcohol. On board the gulet he’d been tempted, certainly, there’d been nothing to do for long periods, and the litre of single malt which he’d brought from Heathrow had come into his mind a few times; but he’d put it out of mind. And here, liquor might as well not have existed.
He wondered if Anne would have been impressed. Because she was the real reason he was here. That was another thing: he was seeing straight, thinking straight, and one of the things that had become clear was that the drink had been a refuge from his misery over losing her. Not for his wrecked career, but for Anne. Much the same applied to this expedition: he’d instinctively wanted it, but at least half the motivation had been his desire to prove something to her. And questioning now whether she’d have been impressed, he couldn’t see any answer but a straight no, she woul
d not have been. Certainly not enough for it to have made any difference. She’d arrived at her decision, she’d spotted Charlie Swale’s feet of clay and that was it, she didn’t want him.
That speech she’d made, the last time he’d seen her and pleaded his case — making a fool of himself, as usual — she’d turned him down with something like I haven’t gone through it just to start again. Might as well face it, Charlie, I don’t intend to put my head on the block again…
She’d decided what was safest for Anne, and she was sticking to it. Not what might be streets better because it could turn out to be heaven-on-earth for Anne and Charlie. She was concerned only with the risk Anne wasn’t going to take with herself.
Maybe for her it had never been quite the heaven it had been for him. Although she’d spent a lot of days and nights talking and acting as if it had been.
So there you were — for better or for worse. It had been infinitely better, but also a hell of a lot worse, than it felt now.
*
Getting towards midnight. All in their places, overlooking the approaches and the camp, Ben on the move between them and around generally, and still not a thing happening. The only interruption to the night’s peace and quiet came from a transistor at the camp, probably that sentry’s.
There’d been no deployment of troops from the village. When he’d visited Geoff and Romeo — leaving Doc Laker with them — Geoff had only just returned from a recce of the area around that road junction, and he’d found the hillsides empty, roads unwatched, unguarded. Whatever troops those were, if they were supposed to be looking out for Swale they weren’t making much of a job of it. But it was good that they hadn’t deployed, that the withdrawal route to the west was still open; obviously they couldn’t have any suspicion that there might be intruders here.
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