Hunter Killer

by Chris Ryan

  ‘Reckon they’re looking for someone?’ Spud asked sarcastically. The buzzing of their bikes died away. Spud’s face was like thunder. ‘How far to the vehicle?’ he said.

  ‘Ten minutes. If we leg it.’

  They made it in seven. As they approached the Toyota’s impromptu hideout they slowed their pace and drew their weapons. Their camouflage was good, though. A couple of minutes later Danny was behind the wheel again, easing the Toyota out of the tumbledown hut and on to the road. He realised they’d barely seen any vehicles in Ha’dah. Certainly none like this. They were going to stick out on the road if anyone was following them. He turned right and, carefully manoeuvring the vehicle inches away from the sheer drop at the edge of the road, started winding their way down the mountain. By his side, Spud was checking over his Sig. There was a deep frown on his forehead. He looked like he expected to have to use it. With one hand on the wheel, Danny pulled his own handgun and stowed it in an open compartment just by his knee.

  The road twisted and turned as they passed the location where the Chinook had set them down the previous night. Once more Danny was aware of lights moving around on the desert floor far below them, but the bulk of his attention was on the road, every sense alert as his eyes flickered between what was ahead, and the rear-view mirror.

  Ten silent minutes passed.

  Suddenly the road straightened out, and Danny slammed his foot on the brake. Glaring at them from the darkness ahead were five individual headlamps: a row of three, then a row of two, evenly spaced across the five-metre-wide road.

  Motorbikes. Distance to the first row: fifteen metres.

  An ordinary roadblock? If so, perhaps they could avoid a firefight by paying their way through.

  The light of the Toyota’s headlamps battled with those of the bikes. In the resulting glare, Danny could only see the outlines of the riders. But he could make out the shape of their robes, and the angular silhouettes of the weapons slung across their chests. He realised that one of the bikes had two riders. They climbed off, and the driver pushed his passenger forwards into the no-man’s-land between the bikes and the Toyota, before getting back on his bike.

  Spud swore under his breath when they saw his face. Hamza. He peered towards the Toyota, clearly dazzled by its headlamps. He was obviously trying to identify the drivers, but couldn’t because of the glare. He turned round and made a gesture with his arms that said: I don’t know if it’s them.

  The Toyota’s engine purred. Danny revved it once. Thoughts flicked through Danny’s mind. Had Hamza taken exception to their brutal treatment of Ahmed? Or had he been planning to rat on them all along?

  ‘Still think we should have left that fucker alive back there?’ Spud murmured.

  Danny didn’t answer. The situation was what it was. There was no right or wrong decision: only what they had done and what they hadn’t. But they both knew what to do now.

  Two of the front row of riders stepped off their bikes, leaving their vehicles propped up at an angle, the headlamps still burning. They stepped past Hamza towards the Toyota. Hamza himself scurried back behind the second line of motorbikes, but all Danny’s attention was on the approaching men. Even their silhouettes had that self-assured gait Danny recognised from up in the village. His hand felt for the Sig in the compartment by his knee. He gripped the handle and with the press of a button wound down his side window. He heard Spud doing the same. The night air – warmer now that they were lower down the mountain – hit his face.

  The figures continued to approach. They were seven metres away now, side by side directly in front of the Toyota. Danny could make out their features. They were young, no older than twenty, and their black beards looked barely grown. Their faces were pictures of suspicion and contempt, but they had a confidence about them that comes with a loaded weapon.

  Three metres from the front of the vehicle, the figures peeled off to either side, one towards Danny’s window, one towards Spud’s. Like policemen on an American highway, they each placed a hand on the top of the vehicle, then leant in to look through the open window.

  They didn’t even have time to speak.

  There was a fraction of a second between the firing of the two handguns: Spud’s first, then Danny’s. They shot each of the Yemeni bikers full in the face. Because of the proximity of the target, Danny felt a blowback from the shot, and a flat slap of wetness against his fist as blood spattered from his target’s face. The impact of the rounds forced the two targets to fall back a couple of metres, clearing the Toyota sufficiently that Danny and Spud could swing the doors open and throw themselves out of their seats before the remaining three targets even had time to get their weapons ready to fire.

  Immediately, there was shouting from the direction of the enemy targets. One of the bikes fell to its side as the driver jumped off it. Danny’s foot crunched down on the shin of the man he’d killed as he took cover behind the open door, dragging his HK out of the car with him. The pistol was fine in confined space, and even over the 15-metre distance between them and the bikes. But the rifle would be more accurate over distance if the enemy tried to flee, and a harder-hitting round was always preferable if you wanted to be sure of putting your man down.

  Chaos in the enemy ranks. Shouting. Two shots rang out. One of them flew over the top of the Toyota. The other slammed into the side door protecting Danny. He felt the car shuddering violently, but noted that the bullet hadn’t fully pierced the door. That didn’t mean the next one wouldn’t, though.

  Two more loose rounds. No doubt that these were amateurs but they were still well armed, even if they were firing randomly. They needed to be put down, quickly.

  It was Spud who took the third one out. Unlike the enemy’s loose fire, his was a single, well-aimed shot from his rifle as he peered round his open door and fired on the remaining target in the front row. There was a clatter as both the man and his bike fell to the ground. They heard more alarmed shouting, and a revving of bikes. Clearly the remaining two guys were preparing to flee.

  Danny pushed himself up so he was looking through the window of the open door, the butt of his rifle pressed hard into his shoulder, safety switched to semi-automatic. Both bikes were facing in on each other as their riders attempted to turn. Distance: 20 metres, and he thought he could just make out Hamza five metres beyond that. Each of the two targets on motorbikes was lit up now – by each other and also by the Toyota. They weren’t even firing back.

  ‘Go left!’ Danny shouted the instruction to Spud. The only words either of them had spoken since the firefight had begun. Then he gave himself a couple of seconds to aim at the guy on the right.

  The two SAS men fired once in perfect unison. Their rounds found their targets unerringly. Both men slumped to the ground, their bikes falling on top of them.

  Which left Hamza. His silhouette had turned and was running away from them, down the road.

  Danny felt a sudden flash of anger. He jumped out from behind his door, his rifle in the firing position. He covered the 15 metres between the Toyota and the bikes in seconds, avoiding the corpses as he sprinted after the tout.

  Hamza was 20 metres down the road and sprinting like his life depended on it, which it did. Danny calmly got down on one knee, gave himself a second to line up the sights, then took the shot. It echoed off the mountainside, and Hamza crumpled to the ground.

  A pause. Then the sound of screaming. The tout was down and wounded, but still alive. Danny stood up and found Spud next to him.

  ‘You were right, I was wrong,’ he said. Then he sprinted the 20 metres to Hamza, whose screaming had grown less intense. He’d hit the tout in the lower back and he was bleeding out fast. Hamza took a sharp intake of breath as he looked up at Danny, the whites of his eyes glowing in the darkness. He managed to shake his head as Danny raised his weapon, but the Regiment man wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice.

  He fired a fourth single shot at Hamza’s head. The body juddered and was still.

>   No time to hesitate. Danny bent down and grabbed Hamza’s body by its legs. He was aware of Spud killing the engines on the motorbikes as he dragged the corpse towards the steep incline at the edge of the road. He rolled him down the mountainside, out of sight.

  Jogging back up to Spud’s position, he saw that his mate had already done the same thing to two more of the Yemeni dead. Together then cleared up the rest, before sending their bikes plunging off the road after them.

  They were grim-faced as they got back into their vehicle. There was no guarantee that there weren’t more of these fuckers coming, or that Hamza hadn’t told anyone of their destination. And they sure as hell didn’t want company when they were trying to creep up on Abu Ra’id.

  They needed to get off this road quickly. Without another word, they continued the journey down the mountain.

  Time check: 22.05hrs

  The winding road had evened out. They were at the foot of the mountain. The headlamps of the Toyota revealed fast-moving, parched scrubland on either side. Danny had Ahmed’s words in his head. Where the road forks, you go left. But so far there had been no sign of the road forking. It just kept on going straight.

  Twenty minutes passed. Half an hour. Danny pulled over and killed the lights. Then he took a look round with his night sight. The terrain was perfectly flat for as far as he could see. The occasional boulder. Patches of low scrub. The gnarled tree 200 metres to the north. In the distance, glowing like fireflies in the green haze of the night vision, he could see the headlamps of other vehicles moving around. But with no point of reference, it was impossible to tell how far away they were. He climbed back into the car. He could tell Spud was still pissed off with him, but at least he was calm.

  ‘Anyone following?’ he asked.

  ‘Not that I can see.’

  They continued along the road for another ten minutes.

  Twenty.

  The fork in the road suddenly appeared out of the darkness. The right-hand fork was by far the better kept. Off to the left, the terrain appeared pot-holed and undulating. At the apex between the two forks there lay the skeleton of some animal, its bones dry and pitted. There were no signposts, of course, or any indication that this was the way they needed to go. The two SAS men merely looked at each other and nodded their mutual consent that this was the right path. Danny stepped out of the car again. He looked down at the ground and saw fresh tyre prints. ‘Someone’s passed this way recently,’ he said. ‘A four-by-four.’

  ‘Abu Ra’id?’ Spud asked.

  Danny shrugged. He performed another sweep with his kite sight. Nothing. But they should still take precautions.

  ‘I’m going to go blind.’

  Spud grunted his agreement. Danny immediately killed all the lights on the Toyota. From his kit bag, he removed his set of NV goggles and fitted them over his head. Spud did the same. The darkness dissolved and the world turned a shade of green. The goggles illuminated everything. The stars were riotous overhead, the stony ground of the desert terrain almost more detailed than it would have been in daylight with the naked eye. Danny took the left fork, and eased the Toyota on to this new road. The tyres trundled and crunched noisily over the imperfect surface.

  Danny couldn’t do more than 20 mph. Not on this road surface and wearing NV. In any case, it was desirable to keep the engine noise as quiet as possible, since they didn’t know what was waiting up ahead. Danny concentrated on keeping the revs low and steady, while Spud kept looking all around, scouring the terrain for possible threats, and checking that nobody was following them.

  Nobody was. At least, not so far as they could tell.

  Time check: 23.25hrs. They had been going along this stony road for more than an hour. The diesel tank was half full. Danny concentrated on remembering Ahmed’s instructions: There is a track that heads north by a grove of acacia trees. Follow that track into the valley. That is where you will find them. So far, there had been fuck-all. Just flat, featureless terrain.

  ‘Up there,’ Spud said suddenly.

  Danny stopped the vehicle and looked. Sure enough, about 100 metres up ahead, there was a break in the featureless expanse. A collection of low trees. They moved forward again, and as they grew closer Danny saw the trees in more detail: gnarled and squat. They drew up alongside this acacia grove, and stopped again. Just beyond the grove, a smaller track bore off to the left. Danny climbed out of the car and removed his compass from his ops vest. He stepped ten metres from the vehicle so the metal wouldn’t compromise the compass reading, then took a bearing. Sure enough, this smaller road headed north. Just like Ahmed had said.

  They moved even more slowly now: a steady, quiet ten mph. The terrain changed. It was no longer as flat as it had been since they left the mountain. It undulated, and Danny realised that they were heading downhill again, with terrain sloping up on either side. They continued like this for another half hour before it became quite clear that they were heading down into a valley.

  ‘Stop,’ Spud said.

  Danny braked. He had seen it too. An orange glow low in the night sky, seen through a V shape in the terrain to their left. A distant fire. He pulled off to the side of the road and killed the engine. The two men emerged from the vehicle. They didn’t need to speak. They both understood that now was the time to approach on foot.

  It took them five minutes to prepare themselves: to repack their bags and check over their weapons. There was no cover for the vehicle – it would have to stay where it was, ready for them to pick up when the time came to extract. If all went well, they would put some miles between themselves and the camp, find somewhere to lie up, and call for a pick-up. For now, they kept their NV goggles on their heads, slung their bags over their shoulders and started to hike, following the road but keeping 20 metres to its left-hand side so they could easily go to ground if another vehicle came their way.

  The terrain was empty. The air silent. The only sound was the light crunch of their footsteps on the dry ground. They continued in single file, Spud first, Danny second, spaced ten metres apart to avoid presenting a bunched-up target to any unseen threat. The valley shape became increasingly pronounced, though after 15 minutes’ walking the road started to incline upwards. They followed it to the brow for 200 metres. Before he reached it, Spud got down on all fours and crawled the final 10 metres. Danny did the same, because to present oneself on the brow of a hill was a surefire way to reveal yourself. When he was alongside Spud, they peered over the brow to the terrain beyond.

  ‘Bingo,’ Spud breathed.

  Yeah, Danny thought. Bingo.

  They were looking at the training camp. There was very little doubt about that.

  Danny had been expecting something ragged and temporary. Amateurish. What he saw came as something of a surprise. It was nestled about 100 metres to the left of the track, and perhaps half a click from their current position. It comprised perhaps a hundred tents, spaced out in a neat square, ten columns of ten, with a walkway of five or six metres between the columns. Regimented. Orderly. In the centre of the camp was a large fire and Danny could just make out the silhouettes of people milling around it, though from this distance it was hard to say how many, and of course impossible to see their faces.

  He counted eight technicals dotted around the camp. One of them was circling it, its headlamps beaming brightly. Danny could make out the outlines of top-mounted weapons on the vehicles, and instinctively knew from their shape that these were .50-cal machine guns. There wasn’t much in the way of a ground assault that hardware like that couldn’t defend the camp from. On the far side, a stretch of very flat ground – ideal, he realised, for markmanship and demolitions practice. But there were no such things going on at this time of night. Everything was quiet and, aside from those few people around the fire, everything was still. On the south side of the camp, which was the edge closest to them, a herd of goats seemed to be tethered to a post.

  ‘Fucker could be in any one of those tents,’ Spud whispered. ‘Don
’t know why they won’t just send in a drone and bomb the whole lot.’

  But Danny understood why: because wiping out the training camp like that would give the Firm no assurance that Abu Ra’id was dead. And they really wanted him dead.

  ‘We need to lie up,’ Danny said. ‘Get a visual on Abu Ra’id when it’s light. See which tent is his.’

  ‘That could take days.’

  ‘Got anything better to do?’

  Spud gave him a sour look, then scanned the surrounding area. ‘Over there,’ he said, pointing to the terrain on the western edge of the camp. Here the ground sloped up sharply from the plateau of the camp. It was dotted with the occasional tree and small collections of boulders. The incline lasted about 100 metres, before flattening out slightly at the top. They could dig themselves in up there and have a good view of the camp. Whether they’d be near enough to get a positive visual ID on Abu Ra’id was a different question, but it was about as close as they could safely get and remain covert.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ Danny said.

  The truck circling the perimeter of the camp was facing away from them as they crawled over the brow of the hill. They descended another ten metres so that when they stood up they wouldn’t be visible against the skyline. When the truck turned in their direction the guys went to ground, lying perfectly still on the stony incline. The headlamp beams didn’t hit them directly – there was just a slight lessening of the darkness – but they knew that as long as they stayed motionless, they’d remain unobserved. When the circling truck turned again, they skirted along the incline that surrounded the camp until they reached their position. From this angle, they could see that there was a second pathway bisecting the camp at right angles to the first. It meant they had a decent view of all the open spaces of the camp from here.

  They selected a space to the side of three boulders well out of range of the pick-up’s headlamps. It gave them something to crouch behind while they prepared to dig in. Spud removed his trenching tool from his pack and started hacking at the hard, stony desert floor. In 15 minutes he had sweat dripping from his face, and had dug out a hole a couple of metres long, 30 cm deep and a metre wide – large enough for them both to lie in side by side, along with their bags. Danny unwrapped the foil thermal sheeting – Hammond’s words of warning about Yemeni spy drones ringing in his ears – and then unfolded the wire-backed hessian. The two men settled down in the hole, with the thermal sheeting sandwiched between their backs and the hessian camouflage. They got some scoff inside them, then Danny extracted the kite sight from his bag and trained it on the camp.