by Chris Ryan
He knew that if he didn’t put some distance between them – and fast – one of them would hit the vehicle.
Blinding wind rushed into his face through the shattered window. Through his half-open eyes he could see the hill up ahead, from the ridge line on which Friedman had been watching the settlement. If he could just get over that ridge, he could set up a defensive position – not to mention that Triggs’s less-damaged vehicle was waiting for him there.
Distance between their position and the start of the slope: 200 metres. Danny kept the accelerator floored, and the Land Rover sped and juddered over the stony desert earth. A glance in the rear-view mirror told Danny that Spud had collapsed on the back seat, clearly exhausted from the effort of making it to the vehicle. His mate was in a shit state, but Danny had to hand it to him: when the moment came, he’d managed to gather his strength and . . .
There was a sudden, ear-splitting bang. A split second later, Danny realised the vehicle was completely out of his control. The steering wheel spun of its own accord, and so did the Land Rover itself. It turned a full 180 degrees until it was back facing the settlement, and for a moment Danny thought it was going to upturn. He knew what had happened from the stench of burning rubber that had just filled the air. A loose round had hit one of their rear tyres. The vehicle was fucked.
There was a deep ominous silence. Then, a few seconds later, more gunfire from the direction of the settlement. Danny peered ahead. In the darkness he couldn’t tell how many militants were advancing, but he could make out the outline of a mob: at least fifteen. He knew he no longer had the firepower to defend himself and Spud against them.
Decision time. Danny remembered the words of Ray Hammond over the radio earlier that night. If you can’t get him out of there, think carefully. Sometimes a quick way out is better than what those animals subject their prisoners to.
He looked over his shoulder. Through the rear window he could just make out the incline of the hill. There was no way Spud could climb it. His face was wracked with pain while he was simply lying in the back of the car.
Gunfire. Muzzle flashes in the distance. None of the rounds hit the vehicle, but it was only a matter of time.
Danny caught Spud’s gaze. He knew, instantly, that his mate understood the situation. Spud opened his mouth to speak, but Danny interrupted: ‘Don’t fucking say it.’
He glared fiercely toward the approaching mob, then lifted up his Diemaco, resting it on the dashboard so its muzzle was protruding through the windscreen cavity. He flicked the safety switch to fully automatic.
‘How many bursts you got left, mucker?’ Spud breathed from the back. ‘One? Two?’
Danny refrained from articulating the unspoken truth: they didn’t have enough ammunition left to win the firefight.
More gunfire. A round ricocheted off the front of the vehicle.
Distance from the mob: 250 metres. Distance to the ridge line: 500 metres, uphill. Danny could make it alone.
Or he could stay and fight.
He blinked heavily. Somewhere, on the edge of his perception, there was a sound. A mechanical grinding. He looked around, trying to see the source. Nothing. Then he realised: he was still wearing Triggs’s in-ear audio device. The noise, whatever it was, was coming from that.
He checked his watch. 21.57hrs.
Then he looked back at Spud, pale-faced and shaking in the back.
‘I’m sorry, mate,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to leave you.’
15
‘I’m sorry mate.’ Danny’s voice was flat. ‘I’ve got to leave you.’
Spud received no further explanation. Danny just left. Collapsed in the back seat, he watched weakly as his mate slipped out from behind the steering wheel, leaving his assault rifle resting on the dashboard, pointing out. From the corner of his eye, he saw the flash of a black figure sprinting away from the vehicle and the settlement, into the darkness.
‘Mate . . . mate!’
Spud closed his eyes. He didn’t blame Danny for leaving. Maybe Spud would have done the same in his situation.
No point them both dying, if it wasn’t necessary.
Silence.
It didn’t last.
Two more rounds ricocheted off the vehicle. Spud knew they were closing in. The pain down his chest was excruciating. Simply breathing sent agonising shocks through his body.
But he felt himself frowning. There was no way he was going down without a fight.
If he was going to die on this bleak patch of East African desert, he was going to take a few of these bastards with him.
With a gargantuan effort, and pain that set white patches dancing in front of his eyes, he hauled himself up into a sitting position. He glanced through the rear window and thought he could see, maybe a hundred metres distant, a figure scrambling up the slope of a hill. Danny. He looked the other way and, through the smashed open windscreen, about 150 metres in the distance, saw a line of figures advancing. He could hear their shouts. They sounded confident. They’d be on him in less than a minute . . .
Spud felt for the release clip on the driver’s seat. He pushed the back of the seat forward so that it angled toward the steering wheel. Then he forced himself forward, leaned face-down on the back of the seat and took hold of the assault rifle. He gripped it with all the strength he had, clipped the safety switch to semi, and peered through the optic.
He cursed his trembling hands and bleeding wrists. There was no way he could hold the weapon steady, or aim with his usual accuracy.
He released a round. The weapon recoiled badly, and he barely had the strength to hold on to it. Nor could he tell if he’d hit anyone. He could only hope, now that the enemy knew he was armed, that they would slow down their approach. It might give Danny the time he needed to escape.
And delay the inevitable for Spud, if only for a few minutes.
He was wheezing heavily. His hands were so sweaty that his forefinger slid around the trigger. He gave it another twenty seconds before firing again. Once more the recoil almost took the weapon from his grasp, and sent a shock of pain from his shoulder down his abdomen. He felt dizzy from it. He knew that if he had any food in his gut, he’d want to vomit.
He peered through the optic again. The enemy were still advancing. There couldn’t be fewer than fifteen men, and they were about a hundred metres distant. Spud’s pathetic, badly aimed sniper shots were doing nothing to slow their advance.
He was grinding his teeth as he tried to stay focused. The enemy were something of a blur in his pain-raddled mind. He tried to grip the weapon again . . . prepared to take a shot . . . squeezed the trigger . . .
Nothing. The clip was empty. The assault rifle was out of ammo.
He realised he was very cold. His body was shutting down. A picture flashed in his mind. He saw, as if from the outside looking in, the vehicle surrounded by sneering militants, pumping rounds into his body as he slumped, dead, over the steering wheel.
It would almost be a relief if he didn’t have to deal with the pain any more.
His body jolted. A round had just flown inches from his face and slammed into the rear window. He heard the sound of glass shattering.
Damn it, Spud. Move!
Leaning back off that front seat was one of the hardest things Spud had ever done. He slumped heavily back, then felt on the seat next to him for the handgun he’d stolen from his tormentor. With his free hand, he opened the passenger door and practically fell out of the vehicle. Kneeling behind the open door he discharged a random round from the side of it with his handgun. He knew the round would be loose, that his chances of hitting a target were tiny, but it was the best he could do. He turned, and crawled slowly to the back of the vehicle, where he rested for a few seconds, inhaling huge, noisy gulps of air into his burning lungs.
A flurry of bullets flew toward the vehicle from the direction of the advancing militants. Several pinged off the chassis of the vehicle. Several more flew over Spud’s head. The cold continued t
o seep into his limbs, and that strange lassitude took hold again. He closed his eyes. The picture in his mind changed. Now the militants were surrounding the back of the car, laughing as they fired bursts of rounds into his already-dead body.
He sucked in another lungful of air. His eyes pinged open. There was an annoying buzzing in his ears. He shook his head groggily to get rid of it, but it wouldn’t go. To his horror, he realised he’d dropped his weapon. He tried to grab it, but his hands wouldn’t do what they were told, and the tips of his fingers merely scrabbled around in the dirt.
More gunfire. Shouts. Thirty metres.
This is it.
The buzzing in his ears had grown louder. Somewhere, in the core of his confused mind, he realised that it wasn’t internal.
It was an actual sound.
A sound he recognised.
A wild hope gave him a surge of adrenaline. He looked up. The slope of the hill started twenty metres or so in front of him. After that, five hundred metres to the ridge line.
And it was from there that the noise was coming.
Spud blinked. He saw a light emerging from behind the brow of the hill. The noise – regular and mechanical – increased. The light grew brighter. It back-lit the ridge line itself, throwing its outline into sharp relief. Spud could make out the shape of individual bushes and boulders along the ridge. And among them, directly to Spud’s twelve o’clock, was the silhouette of a man. He was facing toward Spud and the settlement. Even from this distance, Spud knew who it was.
Danny.
Spud found himself squinting. The light behind Danny was growing even brighter. So bright that it partially obscured Danny’s silhouette.
And then they appeared. Two choppers, emerging over the ridge line, their rotors thundering and their lights shining. They hung a couple of feet above the ridge line for a moment. Spud thought he could make out the shape of Danny climbing aboard the leftmost chopper.
It only took a couple of seconds for him to alight. Then both choppers surged forward, flying twenty metres apart, their engines screaming with the sudden burst of speed and their black, moonlit shadows rushing across the slope of the hill toward him.
16
‘You’re late!’ Danny roared across the noise of the Black Hawk’s engine.
‘Hereford lost their track on the sat phone as we were approaching,’ the loadie shouted.
Both side doors were open. A Regiment gunner sat at a minigun, his eyes lined up with the sights, ready to fire. Wind rushed into the aircraft, blowing Danny’s hair back and forcing him to shout even louder – unlike the other six men in the chopper, he wasn’t wearing a headset. The chopper wobbled slightly as it rose into the air. Through one of the open doors, Danny caught a momentary glimpse of the settlement, and the desert beyond. With the advantage of a little extra height, he saw a trail of red lights – as he’d suspected, the strike had failed to take out Abu Bakr and his convoy. They were now leaving, at speed.
He snapped his attention back to the job in hand. ‘There’s a Land Rover at the bottom of the hill!’ he shouted. ‘That’s where Spud is. Don’t fire on it. Slot everyone else.’
The loadie nodded, then started issuing instructions into his headset.
Almost immediately, there was a dramatic loss of height. Danny clutched on to a section of rough webbing on the side of the aircraft to stop himself tumbling. As the chopper lowered itself to the ground, it performed a ninety-degree turn, so the minigunner was now facing directly toward the settlement.
It touched down. Danny looked through both side doors. He saw that they were positioned about ten metres in front of the Land Rover. The advancing militants were about twenty metres away on the other side of the chopper. The second Black Hawk was hanging in the air above them, about thirty metres high, hovering ominously.
The militants didn’t stand a chance.
The side gunners on both aircraft opened up at precisely the same time. Two sets of 7.62mm rounds thundered toward them, from different directions, at a rate of three thousand rounds a minute. It was carnage. Danny estimated that there were fifteen men. They were all dead in less than twenty seconds, their bodies reduced to a scattered pile of brutalised flesh. But the miniguns continued to fire, just in case . . .
Danny watched it happen with grim satisfaction. Then he turned the opposite way and jumped out the other side of the chopper, which was facing toward the Land Rover. Head bowed against the downdraught, he ran toward the vehicle. And he felt a horrific twisting in his gut as he saw, from five metres, that the front seat was leaning forward. That the glass of the rear window had shattered.
That there was no sign of Spud in the back.
Behind him, he was aware of the second Black Hawk – the one that had been hanging in the air – speeding toward the settlement. But all his focus was on the Land Rover, and running toward it. The rear passenger door was open, though blistered with gunshot. He ran round it, and relief crashed over him like a bucket of cold water.
Spud was there. He looked like death warmed up, but he was there.
He was sitting, slumped, against the back of the Land Rover. His eyes were rolling and every limb seemed to shake violently. But when he saw Danny appear, the beginnings of a grin creased the edge of his mouth.
‘Thought you were bailing out on me,’ Spud whispered. His voice was so quiet and dry and cracked that Danny could barely hear it. He knelt back down beside his mate.
‘Can you walk?’
Spud shook his head. ‘Final answer?’ he said.
Danny nodded. Without hesitating, he lifted Spud’s body from underneath the armpits, then slung his right arm round his neck. He was a heavy bastard, even in his thin, weakened state, but Danny was strong enough to take the weight, even if Spud’s feet did drag across the ground as Danny carried him through the dust cloud toward the chopper.
‘Fucking owe you one, mucker,’ Spud said as they staggered across the open ground.
‘We’re not out of here yet,’ Danny said. He had a deeply uncomfortable feeling in the pit of his stomach. The Israelis’ plans had been thwarted. The drone strike had failed to take out their target, the terrorists were leaving, and the Regiment were clearly on to their little game.
Something told him this was a situation Tel Aviv was unlikely to accept.
There were two guys waiting at the side door of the Black Hawk. It took both of them, and Danny too, to haul Spud into the body of the chopper. The guys immediately took him to the back. One of them fitted an oxygen mask over his face. The other took his pulse. They worked with the calm, unflappable professionalism of trained medics, and Danny knew his mate was in good hands.
The chopper rose. It turned in mid-air so that it was once more facing the settlement. Danny moved up to the front, where he stood at the shoulders of the pilot and navigator. The bewildering array of instruments glowed in front of him.
‘We’ve got a problem,’ the pilot said. He was right. Through the front window Danny could see the second Black Hawk hovering twenty metres from the settlement. And beyond the settlement itself, about five hundred metres from the position of Danny’s Black Hawk, a third helicopter hung in the night sky, facing them.
Danny recognised its shape immediately. It was narrower than the Black Hawks. Sleeker. The unmistakable outline of an Apache attack helicopter. Danny couldn’t make out the detail of the Hellfire missiles attached to its body, but he knew they – or something similar – were there. And he knew they would make short work of workhorse utility choppers like the Black Hawks.
The Apache hung in the air, facing the two Regiment helicopters, its nose slightly dipped.
‘Eritrean?’ the pilot said.
‘No,’ Danny said flatly. ‘Israeli.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I just know. Are you missiled up?’
‘Negative. We’re principally crewed for medical evacuation.’
Which meant the Apache could make mincemeat of them.
F
rom behind, the loadie handed Danny a headset. He put it on. Instantly there was a hiss, and then a crackly voice came over the earphone.
‘Identify yourself.’
The pilot and his navigator exchanged a nervous glance.
Danny spoke into this headset. ‘Hereford, are you getting this?’
A pause, then a British voice in his ear. ‘Roger that.’
The crackly voice repeated itself. ‘Identify yourself, or we will engage you air to air.’
‘This is Danny Black. Can the Apache hear me?’
Another pause. And then, from Hereford: ‘You don’t have authority to make this negotiation, Black.’
Danny suppressed the surge of anger that drilled through him. ‘Listen to me, you’re seconds away from a blue on blue. The Israelis were behind Spud’s capture, and it would be the easiest thing out for them to down us and claim they believed we were enemy forces, if it meant they could cover up what they’d been doing. Trust me, they’re having that conversation right now. I’m the only person that can talk them out of it. Put me through, now.’
Silence. Five seconds. Ten.
Then: ‘You have the go-ahead from London. You’re patched in.’
Danny nodded to nobody in particular. He frowned as he collected his thoughts for a moment. Then he spoke, clearly and without emotion. ‘Here’s what I know. Mossad engaged a former IDF mercenary, name of Gilad Friedman, to kidnap a wounded British soldier in Eritrea. He delivered him to a military faction at this location, so they could put him up for sale on the open market. Their plan was to use the British soldier as bait to draw out a high-value Islamist target by the name of Abu Bakr, then take out him and the Brit at the same time.’
He paused for ten seconds to let that soak in. The Apache didn’t move, but its nose remained aggressively tilted.
‘I know I’m patched in to Tel Aviv,’ Danny continued. He could almost see a roomful of suits sitting round a table at Mossad headquarters, paying rapt attention to his voice from a battlefield half a world away. ‘So listen carefully, fellas. If you give your Apache the instruction to fire on us, that’s your call. This communication is being recorded by Hereford. British Intelligence now know exactly what you’ve been doing. I’m thinking you’ll want to sweep this whole clusterfuck under the carpet. Much easier to do that if you don’t have two downed choppers full of dead Regiment soldiers. Wars have been started over less than this, so you’d better be damn sure you’re up for a fight.’