by Chris Ryan
Two dull thuds. Barely audible over the rain. The guard collapsed. In the same instant that he fell, Spud and Caitlin opened their doors in unison. Danny was already advancing on the open door of the hut. He could sense Caitlin just over his left shoulder.
A figure appeared in the doorway. He probably never even saw the advancing unit. Danny put him down with a single headshot. If the guard at the first checkpoint was to be believed, that meant there was one more target left. They needed to put him down before he had the opportunity to raise the alarm.
Distance to the entrance: five metres. Caitlin drew up alongside him. Both of them had their weapons pointing directly in front of them. As they surged forward, side by side, they alternated rounds, every three seconds, effectively covering the way ahead. At the threshold of the hut, they stepped over the bleeding body of the second guard.
Danny saw his remaining colleague immediately. He was crouched down in the far right-hand corner of the dark hut, the pale glow of a mobile phone in his hand illuminating his frightened face, as he desperately tried to key in a number.
Half a second later, two rounds slammed into his body – one from Danny, one from Caitlin.
Danny rushed forward to check the mobile that had fallen from the dead man’s hand. A quick glance told him he hadn’t managed to make the call. Which meant he hadn’t managed to raise the alarm. The unit’s approach on the compound was still covert.
Spud entered. He had the body of the first guard slung over his shoulder. He dumped it on the floor. ‘The convoy’s come through the first checkpoint,’ he said. ‘The Kurds are following it. We’ve got less than a minute.’
Danny started pulling the body in the doorway back into the concrete hut. ‘There are three enemy vehicles in the convoy,’ he said. ‘When they come to a halt, I’ll deal with the first, Caitlin with the second, Spud with the third. They’ll be sandwiched between our vehicle and the Kurds. Take out the drivers first in case they try to get the vehicles off the road. Then deal with the others.’ Danny reloaded his Sig as he spoke. They didn’t know how many targets there were in each vehicle. He needed a full clip.
He headed back to the doorway and looked out. The convoy was much closer. Seventy-five metres max. He checked that his shemagh was still properly wrapped round his head. When the convoy was thirty metres out, he gave the instruction. ‘Go.’
The three members of the unit stepped outside. They walked with a brisk confidence. If the Kurds at the first checkpoint had done their job, nobody in the convoy would know they were driving into a trap. Danny, Spud and Caitlin stood in the road, a metre apart from each other, blocking the way. The air was thick with rain, and the approaching headlamps elongated their shadows behind them. Danny hid his handgun behind the rifle slung across his chest. He only wanted to reveal it when the time came to use it.
The convoy came to a halt. The headlamps burned hard. Nobody emerged from the vehicles. Danny noted that the car in front was a Mercedes. Black. A rich guy’s car.
‘Go,’ he said.
They moved swiftly. Danny waited a few seconds until Spud and Caitlin were alongside the drivers’ windows of their vehicles. Through the rain-streaked panes of the Merc he saw the shadows of four passengers – two in the front, two in the back. He rapped three times, hard, on the driver’s window.
A pause.
Then the window slid down.
Danny didn’t even look at the face of the guy he was about to nail. He simply thrust his handgun in through the open window, up against the driver’s head, and squeezed the trigger. There was an immediate spatter of blood, not only over his gun hand but also against the inside of the windscreen. The driver slumped heavily towards the passenger in the front seat. Danny leaned a little lower to get line of sight. It all happened so quickly, the passenger didn’t even seem to know what was occurring. He looked towards Danny with an almost comically bemused expression. Middle Eastern. Grey suit. Tie. A fraction of a second later, he was slumped in his seat just like the driver, his face a bleeding mess.
The car started to shake. Panic from the rear passengers as they tried to get the hell out. Danny took a couple of paces along the car so he was alongside the rear passenger door. He fired at the window. It shattered. Shards fell to the ground. He aimed his weapon at the person sitting by it, then hesitated for a moment. It was a woman. He hadn’t expected that. She wore a richly embroidered headscarf and heavy make-up. He could tell she was about to scream, and he couldn’t risk the noise alerting anyone in the compound. So he didn’t hesitate any more. He made the kill with a single shot to the head. The woman slumped forward, her embroidered headscarf blood-spattered. And no scream.
One more guy to go on the other side of the back seat. He was leaving the vehicle. The door on the far side was opening, a figure emerging. In his panic, he didn’t even have the sense to keep low as he exited the vehicle. His head was visible above the line of the Mercedes. Danny raised his Sig relentlessly and fired a fifth round. It flew over the top of the Merc and blasted a chunk from the target’s skull.
Danny was already looking back towards the others. Caitlin appeared to have killed everyone in the second vehicle. But one of the guys in the third car – Spud’s – had escaped from the back seat. He was sprinting from the vehicle. Danny raised his weapon, getting ready to take a shot. No need. Pallav had jumped out from his pickup behind the convoy. He chased the guy for a few seconds, then grabbed him round the neck with one strong arm. They were out of the main beam of the headlamps, but there was enough residual light for Danny to see what happened next. The target was struggling and screaming. The screams were quickly cut short as Pallav brought a knife to the guy’s throat. He didn’t slice. He simply pulled the broad edge of the blade hard into the target’s Adam’s apple. The screaming stopped immediately. There was a catastrophic fountain of blood, which subsided after a second and merged with the rain as it drained down the target’s soaked business suit. Pallav let him fall.
Objective one achieved: the middlemen were dead.
A sinister, hushed hum filled the air – the sound of the convoy’s engines ticking over, coupled with the rain hammering on the car roofs. Caitlin was jogging over to the Hilux. Danny knew she was going to grab Naza and deliver her back to the Kurds. Danny and Spud strode up to Pallav, who was still standing over the butchered corpse of the guy he’d killed. ‘You know what to do?’ he said.
Pallav nodded. ‘We’ll give you three minutes to get up to the compound. Then we’ll start firing on it to draw them out.’
‘Don’t fire for more than a minute or so. It’s just a diversion, but they’ll probably send guys out to chase you. Give yourself the chance to get away in one piece.’
Pallav gave a rare grin, then offered Danny his hand. ‘Kill some more Daesh for me?’
‘I’ll make a point of it.’
Caitlin joined them. She was holding Naza by one arm. Naza was struggling a little. ‘I want to stay with you,’ she whispered, looking up at Caitlin.
Caitlin thrust the girl towards Pallav. ‘Make sure she stays safe,’ she said. It sounded like a threat.
Pallav nodded. He grabbed Naza. ‘Good luck,’ he said, before dragging the girl back towards the Hilux. ‘I think you’re going to need it.’ He thrust her into the back seat, then climbed up to man the fifty-cal as one of his men took the wheel. ‘We will meet you at your RV point off the main supply route. If you are not there by dawn, we assume you’re dead and we—’
‘Quiet,’ Danny interrupted him. He cocked his head. He could hear barking in the distance.
‘Dogs,’ he said. He turned to the others. He was already unwrapping the shemagh from round his head so that he could engage his NV. ‘We’ve got three minutes to get to the compound,’ he said. ‘Our only priority is Dhul Faqar. Once we have him, we can use him as a human shield to fight our way out. Let’s move.’
December 23
Sixteen
Once more, Danny saw the world through the gree
n haze of his NV googles. Hyper-aware of their surroundings, he, Spud and Caitlin passed through the checkpoint in single file. They were now inside the perimeter fence. They skirted clockwise around it for thirty metres, through the heavy rain, so that they were alongside the first cherry picker with its gruesome swinging corpse. He got a whiff of rotten flesh, but from here they could approach the compound to the left of the main track in. But he saw no sign of any militants outside the compound. The rain was doing its job and keeping them inside. He was grateful for it. The elements were keeping them invisible.
Distance to the closest compound building: 200 metres. From his surveillance of the compound earlier that evening, Danny knew that block 3, where he believed Dhul Faqar was most likely to be holed up, was to their eleven o’clock. It was obscured, however, by another long, low building – block 2 – to the right of which was a passageway formed by the left-hand wall of what Danny had dubbed block 4. It was this passageway that they needed to head for. Danny estimated they could make it in forty-five seconds, if they remained unobserved.
He jabbed one finger forward. Spud started running. In his peripheral vision, Danny could see the Kurds’ vehicle. They’d killed the headlamps and were moving off the road, heading anticlockwise around the perimeter.
‘Go,’ he whispered at Caitlin. She followed Spud, ten metres between them, hands on her rifle, ready to engage it if necessary.
A couple of seconds later, Danny followed.
The NV goggles gave him extra peripheral vision. It meant he could track the movement of the Kurds’ vehicle as it drove into position without moving his head. By the time he was halfway across the open ground to the compound, it had come to a halt, having turned to face the compound from its north-westerly position, seventy-five metres from the perimeter fence. Danny estimated they had another minute before the Kurds opened up on the compound. He increased his pace. Spud and Caitlin did the same.
Twenty seconds. He reached the back wall of block 2. It was scrawled with black Arabic graffiti. Spud and Caitlin were in position, both on one knee on either side of the passageway, their rifles pointing down it. Danny positioned himself with his back to the building, and waited.
Ten seconds.
Twenty seconds.
A barking sound. Close. He turned to see the green, hazy forms of two dogs running towards them from across the open ground. He got one of them in his cross hairs. He didn’t want to fire until the Kurds had opened up. But the dog was getting closer. Twenty metres. Ten . . .
Thirty seconds.
Gunfire.
The burst from the fifty-cal cut through the noise of the pouring rain, rebounding off the whitewashed walls of the compound buildings. It lasted a full five seconds, and Danny could hear the secondary noise of shrapnel and debris bursting into the air as the heavy-gauge rounds slammed into the buildings on the northern edge of the compound – the short base of the L-shape he’d seen from their vantage position up in the hills.
Danny used the noise camouflage to release a single round on the dog. It was just five metres away, and foaming at the mouth. The suppressed knock of his rifle round put the animal straight down, and he heard Spud releasing a round too, killing the second animal.
Danny forced himself to breathe slowly as he waited for a response to the Kurds’ gunfire.
It came almost immediately.
The rain made it difficult to establish exactly where the shouts came from. Numerous locations, Danny sensed, from all around the compound. About ten voices, maybe more. All male. The closest maybe twenty metres away on the other side of the buildings. They died down after a few seconds, but then a second burst from the Kurds reignited them. Danny could tell that the shouting men were moving towards the northern end of the compound. It made perfect sense. They knew they would be protected by the base of the L-shape if they wanted to fire back. What they didn’t know was that this would clear the centre of the compound for the unit to make their approach on target.
Danny raised his rifle, and jabbed the butt into his shoulder. He and the weapon were a single entity. Where Danny turned, the weapon would turn. And if a threat appeared in front of him, he would put them down without hesitation.
He swung round from his protected position, into the mouth of the passageway. Distance to the far end, thirty metres. He advanced at pace, past Spud and Caitlin. A flicker in his peripheral vision told him that they’d got to their feet as soon as he’d cleared their position. He knew that as he advanced, one of them would follow, slightly to his left or right. The other would be walking in the same direction, but facing backwards, to keep them covered from both angles.
He had covered ten metres when he heard a third burst of fifty-cal fire from the Kurds. This time it was met not only with shouts, but also with the stuttering, barking noise of return Kalashnikov fire. It sounded relatively puny in comparison to the machine gun. Danny estimated eight weapons, all at the northern edge of the compound. He suddenly found himself thinking of the young girl Naza. Hoping she’d be OK . . .
Twenty metres down the passageway. A figure ran across the far end. Danny halted. He had the impression that the man had seen him.
Five seconds passed. The figure reappeared at the end of the passageway. He stepped squarely into Danny’s line of fire. Thin. Short beard. Rifle. Danny saw the guy peer in his direction.
No hesitation. Danny squeezed the trigger on his rifle. The single suppressed round flew from the barrel, its dull thud masked by the rain and the continued barking of Kalashnikov fire to the north. It nailed the target full in the chest. He went down without a sound.
The next few seconds were critical. If anyone saw the dead body lying in the mouth of that passageway, they’d realise that a secondary threat was coming in from that direction. He extended his left arm and made a forward jabbing motion with his thumb. Then he fell to one knee, carefully covering the mouth of the passageway, as Spud overtook him at a run. His mate reached the corpse, then bent down to grab its ankles and drag the body into the dark passageway, out of sight of anyone up ahead.
Danny looked behind him. Caitlin was five metres back, also on one knee, covering the passageway behind them. ‘Caitlin, keep your position,’ he said quietly into his radio. Then he got to his feet and ran to the far end of the passage, his weapon still fixed rigidly in the firing position.
Another burst of fire from the Kurds. The noise had a slightly different quality. Looser. It sounded to Danny as though their vehicle was moving while the machine gun fired. He cursed silently. It was too soon. They hadn’t given the unit enough time to penetrate the compound. He surveyed the area beyond the passageway. He was looking out on to a rough triangle of open ground, bounded on the far side by the shore of the reservoir. Distance to the water: twenty-five metres. Precisely to his left was block 3, where he expected to find Dhul Faqar. There were no enemy targets on the open ground, but on the shore of the reservoir were the two observation towers Danny had spotted when recceing the compound from a distance. Twenty metres apart, each one was about five metres high, with corrugated iron cover, and contained a single gunman. It was clear to Danny that the gunmen were positioned to check for anyone trying to approach by water. But of course, with the Kurds’ distraction, they were currently looking north. They hadn’t seen Danny’s unit yet. Their lack of observation was about to prove fatal.
‘See them?’ Danny breathed to Spud, who had rejoined him at the mouth of the passageway.
‘See them,’ Spud breathed.
No need to speak any more. Both men knew what to do. Spud was to Danny’s left, so he would take the guard in the left-hand observation post. But they needed to take the shots at the same time, and the shots had to be accurate. If only one guy went down, it would give the other a chance to protect himself, or raise the alarm.
Danny aligned his rifle. The thirty-metre shot was not a difficult one, but it needed to be right. He slowed his breathing down, and tried to put the constant barks of gunfire from the north
out of his mind.
Five seconds passed.
‘Take the shot,’ he said.
Danny and Spud fired in unison. He knew instantly that his shot was good, and instantly moved his line of fire towards Spud’s guy, in case his mate had made an error. But Spud hadn’t. Both observation post guards were down.
‘Move towards us,’ he told Caitlin over the radio. As she ran down the passageway, Danny tuned his hearing back in to the noises around them. More men were shouting. He heard a couple of vehicle engines start up. This was good. The Kurds’ distraction had worked. The IS guards were making chase, taking the heat off Danny and his unit.
But it was impossible to know how long the distraction would last. They had to move quickly.
The door to block 3 – wooden, painted blood red – was five metres to their left. With Spud and Caitlin covering him, Danny moved towards it. He stood by the door, his back to the wall. The noise of the gunfire was a little more distant. He could hear tyres screeching off to the east. The IS guards were definitely chasing the Kurds. Closer by, things were quieter. A strange, unnatural calm covering the centre of the compound, like a thick blanket. Danny could hear his own heartbeat.
It was an inward-opening door. Danny kicked it gently. It creaked as it swung open. A pale, flickering light from inside the room. Firelight. He flicked up his NV goggles. A thick, sweet stench of incense hit him.
He considered utilising a flashbang. It would disorientate anybody waiting for him inside. But the noise could alert others to their presence. He decided against it. Instead, he slowly directed his weapon in through the open door, carefully panning left and right, his finger light on the trigger, ready to eliminate any threats in an instant.
At first, it seemed like there was nobody in there. It was a richly furnished room. Sofas. Embroidered cushions. Expensive rugs on the floor. He’d been right about the firelight – candles were dotted all over the place, filling the room with an attractive, comfortable glow. A closed door at the right-hand end, painted blue.