Who Dares Wins

by Chris Ryan

  They split up. Davenport and Andrews were despatched to reclaim Craven’s body. Webb and Tyler went to retrieve the freefall rigs. Cullen was sent to the road. This was where the Hercules would come in to land, but they needed to ensure that no civilian vehicles would be on that stretch when the plane touched down. Perhaps the dope farmers who inhabited this part of the world would put their hallucinations down to overenthusiastic consumption of their own crop. But perhaps not. The tough little Scot took a supply of stinger spikes with him, sharp metal road blocks that would deflate the tyres of any car that went over them. He would use the spikes to cut off a stretch of road at both ends, while they waited to extract. The dope farmers would no doubt be distinctly miffed by the shredding of their tyres, but it was better than being crushed by the undercarriage of a Hercules.

  Sam and Mac remained at the camp. Mac called the air team with instructions to prepare to extract, while Sam went through the buildings yet again with a small but powerful digital camera, taking a visual record of the deceased.

  It was a grisly job. During the hit, Sam had not been aware of the rank smell of all these men living together with little in the way of facilities. Now that his senses had more time to absorb such things, he realised just how bad the stink was. But of course, there was another smell for his senses to deal with now. The smell of death. They had not been long dead, but already that familiar stench was leaching pungently into the air.

  In all he counted eighteen of them. Eighteen young, British corpses, assassinated by their own government. Many of them had been hit in the face. Their faces had caved inwards from the impact of the round, noses sunk in, mouths collapsed. It was like someone had taken a giant hammer to their skulls. Sam took their pictures anyway. Some of them had been rolled onto their fronts by the force of the rounds. More than once, as he turned their still-warm bodies over, blood gushed out of their wounds like a fizzy drink foaming from a bottle. As they had been expecting, all the faces were Caucasian. White by race, white by death and white by the bleaching effect of the camera’s flash as he systematically recorded the gruesome evidence of their night’s work. In some corner of his mind he wondered if the dead men really were British, as they’d been led to believe. Why were they being protected by a Spetsnaz unit if that was the case? But on the wall by one of the men he came across a centrefold from a pornographic magazine. The model had her legs wide open and by her head there was some writing. He read enough of it to see that it was English before moving on, quickly, racing from bed to bed like some demonic paparazzo desperate to get to his next subject.

  When all the photos were taken, Sam slipped away – checking first to make sure he hadn’t been observed – up to the shed. The dead dog lay outside in a pool of blood. Sam ignored it. He took a deep breath, opened the door and stepped inside.

  It was a tiny space, just enough for a low camp bed and a few square metres of standing room. Although the bed was unmade, showing all the signs of having been abandoned in a tearing hurry, the rest of the bunk area displayed a military neatness, the few belongings tidily and precisely squared away. Sam looked over his shoulder to check that nobody had entered, then opened a small cabinet by the bed and rummaged inside.

  There was very little there. A few clothes – it was difficult to tell what in the gloom – some chocolate and a bottle of water. He found what felt like a small piece of card; pulling it out, he realised it was a photograph. An old one. With a pang he recognised his mother and father in the early years of their marriage. It was surreal, seeing that image of his father out here, miles from home, when in fact he was wasting away in a Hereford hospital. He stuffed it in a pocket. Back in the locker, his fingertips came across something else. Something hard. Rectangular. He pulled it out and examined it. It was a laptop computer. Sam reached into his backpack and pulled out his torch so that he could look closer at it. The thing was well-worn and scuffed, though the case was hard and durable. He gave half a moment’s thought to opening it up and seeing what was inside, but he quickly decided against it. If any of the guys found him doing that, they’d start asking questions; and he wasn’t sure he wanted to answer them…

  Sam stuffed the torch and the laptop into his pack, before hurriedly returning to the centre of the camp.

  As he jogged back outside, to his surprise, he found himself thinking of Clare Corbett’s words. ‘Those people at the training camp. Are you really going to kill them, Sam?’ It crossed his mind that he should feel some sort of sympathy for these dead men. Pawns in some game they didn’t understand. But he didn’t. Or rather, he couldn’t. His mind was too preoccupied. There were too many things racing through it. The adrenaline rush of the mission. Craven, dead. The need to extract quickly.

  And Jacob. Above all, Jacob. His brother’s perplexed, frightened face. His mysterious words. Sam pictured him even now racing away from the camp, not knowing if he was being followed or why the Regiment had been sent to kill him. Not knowing what the future held. It seemed wrong that Jacob should be so close to him and yet so far from Sam’s help now. What had Jacob meant? Things aren’t what they seem…

  ‘Damn it,’ he whispered to himself as he hurried back to the centre of the courtyard. ‘You can say that again.’

  Mac was waiting for him, alone. He switched off his comms and indicated that Sam should do the same. ‘Well?’ he said finally when they knew none of the others could hear them.

  ‘Well what?’

  His friend raised an eyebrow. ‘Did you find him?’

  Sam avoided his eye. ‘No,’ he lied. He didn’t know why. It just felt like the right thing to do.

  Mac cast him a level gaze that did nothing to hide his suspicion.

  ‘What?’ Sam demanded. He felt himself jutting out his chin, a sudden heat running through his veins. ‘Fucking what?’

  ‘Sounded like you went dark for a couple of minutes back there, Sam. Sure you didn’t see anything?’

  He started squaring up to Mac. ‘What the hell are you saying?’

  They had barely ever argued before, let alone fought; but Sam was seeing red and for a heated moment he didn’t know how long that record would last. If Mac felt threatened, though, he didn’t show it. On the contrary. He drew himself up to his full height and stared Sam out.

  ‘I’m not saying anything, Sam. Just remember how much I’m risking staying quiet about this, hey? Just remember that.’

  Sam didn’t reply. His eyes continued to be locked with Sam’s for a few further uncomfortable seconds, then he turned and walked away.

  Davenport and Andrews were the first to return. They carried Craven’s corpse with them in a field stretcher – little more than a body bag with poles along the side for ease of transport. Davenport had Craven’s weapon; Andrews his backpack. Moving quickly to the side of the truck where Sam and Mac were waiting, they gently eased Craven’s body down to the ground, then straightened themselves back up with the heaviness of men who had been carrying a mental load as well as a physical one.

  ‘It was a clean kill,’ Matt Andrews said quietly, the troop medic’s black skin shining with sweat in the moonlight. ‘He wouldn’t even have known what hit him.’

  ‘Suppressed AK-47 round, that’s what,’ Sam said. With everything else that had happened, he realised he hadn’t shared with the others his information about the welcoming party. ‘The shooters were Russian. One of the guys I nailed was packing a GM- 90.’

  Davenport gave a low whistle. ‘Serious bit of kit for a stroll through the woods.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Andrews added. ‘Bit much for shooting pigeons.’

  ‘Spetsnaz?’ Mac suggested. He avoided Sam’s eye and it was clear that the tension between them had far from dissipated.

  ‘That’s my guess.’

  An unsettling silence descended upon the four of them as they grappled with the implications, a silence made only deeper by the presence of their dead colleague. When Tyler and Webb returned with the freefall rigs, Mac brought them up to speed. Tyle
r listened to the news with an expression of increasing bitterness. ‘Fucking Russki bastards!’ he spat, walking away from them before suddenly and violently kicking the body of the pick-up truck. Craven had been his friend, and no amount of training could teach a man how to deal with losing his mate.

  There was no time to stand around consoling him, though. 03.45. Dawn was approaching. ‘Get to the road,’ Mac ordered. ‘The bird’s on stand-by. Let’s get out of here.’

  Nobody argued with that. They gathered up their gear and their fallen colleague and hurried away from the camp, towards the road which was about fifty metres to the north. Cullen was waiting for them, a solitary figure, short and squat. ‘You took your fucking time,’ he observed, before looking up and down the road and indicating the somewhat rickety-looking telegraph poles that lined both sides. If the Hercules tried to land along this stretch of road, its wings would be damaged by the poles and they’d be walking home. They would have to come down.

  ‘Det cord?’ Mac announced. ‘Who’s got it?’

  It was Tyler. From his pack he pulled two reels of what looked for all the world like white washing line. Hang your clothes on this, though, and you’d get a nasty surprise. Tyler threw one of the reels to Sam, who quickly started to unfurl it. On the far side of the road he ran to the closest pole, wound the det cord five times around the wood, then trailed it on to the next pole and repeated the process. Tyler did the same on the other side of the road. They each had enough cord to wrap it around eight telegraph poles; they were widely spaced, however. It would give the Hercules enough space to land.

  Sam and Tyler ran back to where the others were waiting for them. Tyler removed two detonators from his pack – small silver tubes, each about the size of a pencil – and a roll of tape. Expertly taping the detonators to the cord, he then fished out his clacker – a small, handheld electrical generator – and a roll of wire. He connected the clacker to the detonator, then turned round and nodded at the rest of them.

  The team jogged back to a safe twenty-metre distance. Tyler held up one hand and they prepared themselves for the bang.

  The det cord exploded with a ferocious, deafening crack, like a hundred rounds all being fired at the same time. It echoed in the air, an immense clap of thunder, and would have been heard, Sam reckoned, for miles around.

  By Jacob, no doubt, wherever he was.

  The very instant the noise of the exploding det cord slammed into their eardrums, the telegraph poles toppled, falling away from the road and turning it into a perfectly serviceable runway. Instantly Mac was on the radio, reading out their exact coordinates from his small GPS device and requesting immediate extraction. Then he turned to the men. ‘Five minutes!’ he shouted. ‘Get in position.’

  Sam checked his watch. 03.56. Only minutes till dawn. It had been a long, dark night. One of the longest Sam could remember. The blackness, though, was just starting to give way to a faint glimmer of morning. It was only the vaguest hint of daylight, but it was enough to remind Sam of everything that had happened during the preceding hours of darkness. He suddenly felt exhausted, mentally and physically. But flagging now wasn’t an option. They were still on the ground and the operation was not yet completed. Not until they were safely back in the belly of the Hercules could he even think of letting the pace drop.

  The unit divided into two, three on one side of the road, four on the other. The bird might have their coordinates, and they might have a clear landing space. But there was still something they could do to help guide it safely to earth. Each man removed his torch from his pack. They then lay on the ground, spaced out at regular intervals along either side of the road, and shone the torches upwards. From the air, it would mark their positions as clearly as the lights along an ordinary runway.

  Sam lay there uncomfortably in the almost-darkness. They would get scant warning, he knew, about the plane’s arrival: the roar of its engines would only be audible to them when the Hercules had emerged from the dark sky and its wings were practically above them.

  He waited. Waiting was always the worst. It somehow felt as though you weren’t in control. Five minutes ticked by, excruciatingly slowly.

  Sure enough, the boom of the engines was sudden and thunderous. It seemed to come from nowhere. As the dark shadow of the wings passed over them, Sam felt his whole body tremble with the proximity of the aircraft. The landing wheels screeched as they hit firm ground. Sam heard an immediate change in the timbre of the engines as they were thrust into reverse to bring the bird to a sudden, abrupt halt. He pushed himself to his feet, as did the others. Half a mile down the road, the Hercules was already turning. They raced around and gathered up their gear and Craven’s body bag, waited for the aircraft to come to a standstill and then rushed towards it. The tailgate was lowered and, with the loadmaster ushering them on with urgent sweeps of his arms, they hurried up into the plane.

  Craven’s body was strapped to a stretcher bed attached to the side of the plane; the rest of the gear was stowed underneath. As the men prepared for take-off, the tailgate was already closing. The aircraft had barely been on the ground a couple of minutes before it started to retrace its steps, accelerating quickly up the road. Once it was airborne, it started a sudden, steep incline, ferrying the unit speedily away from the location of their op and back to the relative safety – if safety it was – of the base back in Bagram.

  And as the Hercules soared into the air, Sam’s mind was concentrated on only one thing. It was not the op – that was past history now, water under the bridge; it wasn’t the grisly collection of assassinated corpses they’d left in the training camp and on the twiggy floor of the surrounding woods; it wasn’t even Craven’s death, though he carried with him the same nagging sense of loss and anger that he knew they were all experiencing.

  It was this: the image of one man, bearded and dark-eyed, running with fierce desperation through the unfamiliar surroundings of Kazakhstan. His blood would be pumping. Most likely he would be more than a little scared. His mind would be focussed on the road ahead; on surviving; but equally he would be keeping one eye behind him.

  Because once somebody has been sent to kill you, you never stop looking over your shoulder.

  PART TWO

  TWELVE

  Run.

  Jacob Redman kept that one thought in his mind. It was difficult, because other thoughts were jostling for attention. The Regiment, out there to kill him. To kill all of them. Sam. Jesus, Sam. When his brother had appeared, Jacob had thought he was seeing a ghost. What other explanation could there have been for Sam randomly turning up in one of the most obscure corners of central Asia? He didn’t know what the noise was that had woken him up; he did know that if he was in charge of a Regiment unit like that, nobody would have been allowed to stir until the job was well and truly underway. And they wouldn’t be stirring afterwards. No, somebody had made a noise to warn him. It must have been his brother.

  He put that thought from his head. Just keep running. It’s all you can do.

  He followed the course of the road, but kept away from it, choosing instead to run along the edge of the high hemp fields where his khaki jacket at least would give him some manner of protection. What he would have given for one of the digital camouflage suits Sam had been wearing. But that wasn’t an option. He just had to make do with what he had.

  A deafening bang.

  Jacob threw himself to the floor, his hands instinctively reaching for his weapon. What the hell was that? Explosives of some kind, back towards the camp. The thunderclap echoed across the skies. What were they doing? Blowing the buildings? He shook his head. Why would they do that? They’d just want to be in and out. He was breathing heavily. There was dew on the hemp fields and it soaked his skin.

  He pushed himself back up and continued running. He must have put a good mile between himself and the camp. A little slower now: he needed to conserve his energy and by the sound of it he wasn’t being followed, at least not closely. After another five-
minute run he even allowed himself to stop and catch his breath again. It was as he was standing there, his back to the hemp field that he saw it. It seemed to come from nowhere, appearing in the sky like a UFO. And as it passed, perhaps thirty metres above Jacob’s head, the animal roared, a huge, mechanical, whining roar that filled his ears and the skies. Jacob watched it pass, his face impassive. He knew what it was, of course. He’d flown in enough C-130s in his time. Who knows, maybe he’d even flown in that one. A curious mixture of emotions washed over him as he stood there, looking in the direction the plane had been heading. He couldn’t see it any more, but he could imagine it turning, its tailgate opening and the men bundling inside. And he knew it would be back. Three minutes? Four?

  He was right. The Hercules had barely passed him the first time before its great shadow appeared overhead once more. Jacob looked up as it rose steeply into the sky, ignoring the battering his ears were taking.

  ‘Well done, Sam,’ he muttered quietly to himself as once more it disappeared from view. ‘Good lad.’

  The Regiment had extracted. It meant Jacob was safe. Or at least safer. He certainly didn’t want to be anywhere near the buildings when it was discovered that they contained a couple of dozen murdered corpses. People all over the world were adept at putting two and two together to make five; but in these rural backwaters even more so. The hemp farmers who brought them their supplies in return for fistfuls of notes knew his face. He needed to put as much distance between himself and the camp as possible; and he needed to make sure nobody saw him do it. He continued to run.

  Night was beginning to turn into morning. He cursed the arrival of daylight. It made it more difficult to stay hidden. The road was badly kept and potholed; on either side, the endless hemp fields, deep green.

  The half light became full light. Still he ran. Early morning became mid-morning. Still he ran. Seven miles, he estimated. Eight. The sun started to become hot. Jacob’s clothes, which had been damp with the dew, were now soaked with sweat. He needed water, but it was almost midday before he came across the thin trickle of a stream. Every ounce of his being shrieked at him take a few mouthfuls, but he held back. Instead, he followed the trickle upstream for several metres, checking there was nothing in its path to foul the water, before finally, hungrily, swallowing mouthfuls of it down his parched throat. His body gratefully accepted the liquid and he felt revived, like a wilted plant that had just been watered.