by Chris Ryan
Two.
One.
Boydie threw the flashbang into the building. Danny steeled himself for the explosion. It came within a split second – a burst of light and a deafening crack that would disorientate anybody in there. Boydie entered first, NV in place, weapon engaged. Danny did the same.
The building comprised a single room some ten metres by fifteen. Beds along one side, otherwise empty of furniture. It was full of smoke from the flashbang, but through his NV Danny counted three militants, all of them crouched on the ground, hands over their ears. They were in a neat little row, three metres apart and about eight metres from Danny’s position. ‘Go left!’ Boydie shouted, and Danny knew what he meant. He directed his weapon at the crouching figure on the left and delivered a second burst of fire. The figure shuddered with the impact of the rounds, then fell still. Boydie had gone right, nailing a second militant just as quickly. Which left only one.
Boydie strode towards him, his weapon aimed directly at his head.
‘Kam antun?’ he asked. How many men are you?
The militant didn’t answer. There was a harsh, arrogant look on his face.
‘Kam antun?’
Still no reply.
Danny loosened the ivory-handled knife in his belt.
A man always has need of a good knife, kiddo.
He strode towards the militant, whose attention was all on Boydie, and grabbed his right hand. With a sudden, brutal thrust, he slammed the exquisitely sharp point of the knife between the tendons that led to the man’s third and fourth fingers. At first the militant only gasped. When Danny twisted the knife forty-five degrees, hitting the nerve endings, the man screamed.
‘Kam antun?’ Danny hissed.
‘Hamastash . . .’ the man squealed. Fifteen.
That was all they needed. Boydie fired a single shot into the militant’s head and he slumped to the floor. Then he turned to Danny, saying, ‘Those MREs did their job. Quite the fucking psycho tonight, aren’t we?’
‘We didn’t seem to be getting very far. That’s eight men down by my count.’
Boydie spoke over the radio. ‘Seven men still standing,’ he reported to Tommo and Five Bellies.
From outside the building came four more bursts of fire. ‘Make that three,’ Tommo reported.
‘Any sign of the hostages?’
‘Negative.’
Boydie and Danny stepped outside, panning their weapons left and right. A terrible silence had fallen on the encampment, broken only by the crackle of the burning Land Rover. Boydie jabbed one finger eastwards, indicating that Danny should take that side of the building. Danny followed the patrol leader’s instruction, feeling the heat from the vehicle just ten metres to his left. He covered the five metres to the corner of the building. To his right there was a passageway, two metres wide, formed by the wall of the building and a smaller outhouse. Danny swung round, his weapon aimed down the passageway, his trigger finger ready. The passageway extended eight or nine metres, but it was empty.
Suddenly, to Danny’s eight o’clock, somewhere behind him on the other side of the outhouse, he heard the coughing of a car engine. He heard Five Bellies’ voice in his ear: ‘They’re doing a runner!’
The sound of the car moved south, towards the burning Land Rover. ‘I got it,’ Danny said. He spun round 180 degrees and, using the wall of the outhouse for cover, looked out towards the conflagration. He was just in time to see the open-topped technical speed away from the eastern side of the village. High acceleration – he had just two seconds before it disappeared behind the cover of the Land Rover. Four figures in the back. Silhouettes only. Insufficient time to verify, if he was about to open fire on the hostages. He lowered his rifle and discharged a long burst towards the technical’s rear left tyre. The vehicle skidded badly on the desert earth, then came to a halt.
Danny threw himself back into the passageway. Just in time. The response from the .50-cal was thunderous, the rounds blasting a chunk from the corner of the building he and Boydie had just left. Sweating profusely, Danny pressed his back to the wall. ‘Tyre’s out,’ he reported into his boom mike. His voice sounded high-pitched. Wired.
‘Tommo, Five, draw their fire,’ Boydie ordered.
Almost immediately Danny heard a burst of rifle fire from the other side of the encampment. He didn’t need to ask what Boydie had in mind. It was obvious. He ran along the passageway to find himself on the edge of the central square. It was still surrounded by canvas tents. Boydie was running towards Danny from the right. He nodded at him and they headed east, past a particularly threadbare tent and ten metres out into the open desert. Another burst from the .50-cal confirmed that Tommo and Five Bellies’ decoy fire was taking all the militants’ attention. Which gave Danny and Boydie the opportunity to approach the technical unseen. It was twenty metres away, a distinct black shadow against the burning Land Rover just a few metres beyond it. The headlamps were off – clearly the driver had calculated they were a less easy target that way – but the result was that the Regiment men had the cover of darkness with which to approach.
Another burst of rifle fire. The .50-cal replied in kind. Danny saw the silhouette of a figure being hustled down from the back of the technical by a single armed figure and taken round to the far side of the vehicle, leaving two other figures in the back. The driver had his door open and was climbing out, rifle in hand. The militants’ attention was fully on Tommo and Five Bellies’ incoming fire. None of them noticed Boydie and Danny until it was too late.
The driver was Danny’s. The burst from his M4, from a distance of five metres, coincided with the roar of the .50-cal, rendering it barely audible but no less deadly for that. The driver had just put his feet on the ground when the rounds hit his torso, throwing him violently against the cab of the pick-up. Boydie ran towards the rear of the vehicle, firing on the militant manning the .50-cal when he was five metres distant. A new silhouette of blood and brain matter showered down in front of the burning Land Rover.
The firing ceased. There was whimpering from the back of the pick-up. At least one of the hostages was still alive.
By Danny’s calculation there was a single militant remaining: the one who had taken the other hostage round to the far side of the technical. Now the Libyan started shouting – desperate words, threats, in Arabic that Danny couldn’t make out, but their meaning was clear enough. He had only one play to make: I’ve got the hostage. Come any closer and he dies.
Danny and Boydie were up against the technical now, crouching low to stay out of the sight of the surviving militant. ‘Hold his attention,’ Danny said. Boydie nodded and they separated, creeping around opposite ends of the vehicle. Peering round by the headlamps, Danny took in the scene. The militant and his hostage were standing five metres away. They were facing the opposite direction, the militant standing behind the hostage, left arm around his neck and a pistol in his right, pressed up against the captive’s head. Danny couldn’t risk a shot. A round from the M4 or even the Sig could go straight through the militant’s body and into the hostage.
Boydie appeared from the far side of the technical. He had his weapon engaged and trained directly on the two figures. The militant started screaming incomprehensible threats again. His whole body was shaking, his weapon aimed at the hostage’s head. Boydie didn’t move. He just stood there, relentless, threatening, maintaining the stalemate.
Keeping the militant’s attention very firmly on him, while Danny emerged from the cover of the Land Rover.
As silent as smoke.
Danny stood very still, his sights lined up with the back of the target’s head. He was aware that the blazing Land Rover made his shadow unnaturally huge on the technical. He ignored it. All attention on the target. There was no scope for error. The bastard had to be put down before he fired out of nerves.
Slowly, Boydie lowered his weapon. He let it hang by its halyard while he raised his hands, palms outward in a gesture of surrender.
The militant swallowed
it. In a single movement he threw the hostage to one side and aimed his gun at Boydie. He barely had time to straighten his arm. Danny fired a single shot. The round slammed into the back of the Libyan’s head and he flew forwards, landing face down on the hard-baked earth with a dull slam.
‘Nice shot,’ Boydie said.
There is a special kind of silence that falls in the wake of a contact. The silence of the dead. Danny was only half aware of the man he’d just killed, half his skull blown away, hair matted over what remained of it, blood oozing thickly from the wound like a tiny oil slick. His attention had already moved on. Were all the enemy down? Were there any more threats? The hostage staggered back, clearly struck dumb by the sudden brutality he had just witnessed. Danny pulled him roughly to the ground while Boydie kept his weapon engaged and started scanning the area, looking out for any more enemy targets. The other hostage was still whimpering in the back of the pick-up, but at least he was keeping out of sight.
Five minutes passed before Tommo’s posh voice came over the headset.
‘All enemy down,’ he said. ‘We’re clear.’
The militants were dead, but there was still work to do.
It was Boydie’s decision to round up the bodies. ‘Too many news crews crawling round this country, sniffing for a story,’ he said. ‘They’ll fucking find one too if they stumble over these stiffs with rounds in their heads.’ He was right. If a story started with fourteen dead insurgents and a NATO hit squad nowhere to be seen, there was no way of telling how it would end up once the Chinese whispers had finished. Danny recalled a story he’d heard about A Squadron during the First Gulf War. A few of the lads had got into a contact and captured a handful of Iraqis. The red mist was down, and one of the SAS lads had executed them. The guys didn’t know what to do with the bodies, so they piled them into one of the Iraqis’ vehicles and took them out into the desert, where they placed a couple of anti-tank mines on a timer under the vehicle. The A Squadron boys had driven off into the night and let the fearsome mines do their work. They’d all known that what they were doing was on the edge, but, at the end of the day, if there were no bodies there was no story. End of story.
Boydie was clearly thinking along the same lines. After a brief radio conversation with the headshed, he announced their next move. ‘We’ll relight the target,’ he said. ‘Do the original job. There’ll be fuck all left of them if anyone decides to come nosing around.’
Tommo and Five Bellies were given the job of looking after the hostages. Once Tommo had changed the wheel that Danny had shot out on the technical, he and Five Bellies loaded the quivering UN personnel into the cab. The hostages couldn’t even speak: they just trembled and stared into the middle distance. ‘Get them out of here,’ Boydie said. ‘Their nerves are shot already. They don’t need to see this. Four klicks should do it. We’ll meet you back at the LUP once you’ve heard the strike.’ Danny and Boydie watched the technical disappear, then got to work.
It took about twenty minutes to locate all of the dead bodies and carry them into the main building at the front of the village. The corpses were already starting to stiffen, and it was grisly work: the fatal wounds the Regiment’s rounds had inflicted were diabolical. As soon as a body was moved just an inch, blood oozed from the entrance and exit wounds. By the time they had unceremoniously dumped them all in a pile in the centre of the room, both Danny and Boydie looked like they’d been bathing in gore. It was sticky on Danny’s face, and filled his nostrils with an unpleasant, iron-like smell. He wasn’t sorry to leave the village and start trekking back towards the wadi.
They moved quickly. Fifteen minutes to cross the open ground. Once they had regained their gear from the LUP, they reinserted themselves into the narrow trench, where Danny set up the LTD once more. He directed the device’s cross hairs directly at the building in which they’d piled the militants, then Boydie made the call for fast air for the second time in twenty-four hours.
And this time there was no reason to abort the air strike.
The Tornado arrived twenty minutes later. The boom of its jet engines was enough to make Danny’s body rattle as he lay in the trench. But it was nothing compared to the force of the bomb as it hit. Guided by the laser, it slammed directly into the militants’ makeshift tomb. Danny saw a flash of light. A fraction of a second later the shock wave rolled out across the desert and vibrated in their ears, knocking the LTD from its little tripod. For a horrible, irrational moment, Danny wondered if he’d lit the target badly and the bomb had landed too close. He needn’t have worried. Through a sudden mushroom of smoke, and amid the shock wave, he saw flames licking up to the sky. By now the bodies would have been blasted to pieces, and anything that remained of them would be consumed by the fire.
They stayed in the OP, scanning the desert night, watching for anybody coming to investigate the site of the air strike. But the only vehicle they saw was the technical, driven by Tommo with Five Bellies beside him, headlamps off, trundling towards them from the west.
Boydie got on the radio. ‘Zero, this is Charlie Alpha Five,’ he said. ‘Target destroyed. Hostages safe. Request pick-up. Repeat, request pick-up.’
FIVE
The two hostages were in a bad way. Physically weak, mentally fucked.
One of them was in his mid-thirties, a tall, rather ungainly man with cracked round glasses. He had been badly beaten on one side of his head. His skin was bruised and his cheekbone had a slight indentation which suggested to Danny that it had been smashed. The other man was older, probably in his fifties. He had three teeth missing: two canines and a molar. It looked like each tooth had been individually removed. There was dried blood on his chin as a souvenir of that little dental surgery. The two men could barely walk. They certainly still couldn’t speak, so although Danny knew they were British, there was no way of confirming this. It was as if the terror of the previous few days had wiped everything from their minds. They could do nothing but stare ahead and tremble. If any of the guys tried to talk to them, they would flinch as if someone had prodded an open wound. It didn’t seem to register that they’d been rescued by British Army personnel who were going to get them home safely.
They left the hostages to Tommo’s care. As patrol medic, he dealt with their superficial injuries, though there was little he could do other than get fluids inside them, bandage their cuts and feed them some DF118 painkillers. The remaining three members of the patrol took up defensive positions and scanned the surrounding desert for suspicious movement. The burning village was like a massive beacon in the middle of this vast expanse of open ground. Smoke drifted low across the desert towards the wadi, compromising their vision. Not good. It wasn’t a matter of if someone approached the conflagration, but when. Their luck held, however. Their location was sufficiently remote for them to remain unobserved for now.
The Sea Knight arrived just before midnight. The dust halos were no less bright out here in the open desert, but they were less of a threat than they had been the previous night. Tommo and Five Bellies helped the hostages up the tailgate. Danny and Boydie followed immediately after with their packs. The chopper rose from the ground before they’d even sat down. A couple of US Army medics were waiting to take care of the hostages. As Danny took a seat and plugged himself once more into the aircraft’s comms, he was happy that someone else had taken delivery of them. A sudden wave of exhaustion crashed over him, and he could sense the same of the other members of the patrol. They’d only been airborne a couple of minutes before he felt his eyes closing despite the thunderous grind of the chopper and the occasional status report over the cans.
It was neither of these sounds that woke him suddenly, but a sudden lurch by the Sea Knight. Danny’s eyes pinged open. His hands automatically felt for his weapon, and he could see similar signs of readiness in the other guys. The aircraft immediately steadied itself, but Danny could tell they had shifted direction slightly. He looked out of the window. They were over water. One patch of sea looked the
same as another. It took a communication from the pilot thirty seconds later to explain what was happening. ‘OK, gentlemen, we’ve had an instruction to re-route.’
‘Where to?’ Boydie demanded.
No answer. And equally, no more chance of sleep. Danny’s senses were on high alert again. Where were they going? What was happening? The Sea Knight gained height. Looking out of the window, Danny caught sight of the George Bush several hundred feet below. He used its position and the movement of the aircraft to calculate their direction. North-west. He relaxed a little. Everything suggested they were heading back to their staging post in Malta.
He was right. An hour later the Sea Knight made ground again. This time the rotors powered down. The grinding of the engine came to a halt. A reception party of four green army lads ran up the tailgate carrying stretchers. Their eyes flickered over towards the special forces unit, but they were professional enough not to let their curiosity interfere with the more important business of ferrying the hostages off the aircraft. His body once more heavy with fatigue, Danny disconnected himself from the comms system. Thirty seconds later he and the rest of his patrol were walking down the tailgate into the heavy, humid air of Malta International Airport.
An ambulance was waiting on the airfield, thirty metres from the Sea Knight, its neon light flashing. The green army boys were loading up the second of the two hostages. A hundred metres beyond it, Danny saw the familiar hulking outline of a Hercules. On the runway to his two o’clock, a Ryanair flight was coming in to land. Holidaymakers arriving in the Med for sun, sand and sex. As though reading his thoughts, Boydie said, ‘I wouldn’t mind a bit of that myself.’ Danny didn’t have a chance to answer. Just as his feet hit the tarmac, his attention snapped back to the area between the Sea Knight and the ambulance. An unmarked van had pulled up ten metres in front of them. Two men climbed out. Danny recognised them at once. Eddie Anderson, OC B Squadron, and ops sergeant Ben Powell. Anderson nodded briefly at the advancing patrol. ‘Fucking good work,’ he said gruffly. ‘Sorry, lads, but we’ll need a debrief for government in twenty minutes over the satcom. Danny, you’re needed back at HQ asap. Don’t worry, son. Nothing to worry about. Ben will sort you out with anything you need.’