by Chris Ryan
His hands were out of action, and so he used his head, jabbing it forwards as hard as possible so that his forehead cracked into Taff’s nose. He felt the bone shatter and flatten. The barrel of Taff’s gun slipped from Danny’s head. The fist wrapped round his grenade hand loosened. Danny jabbed his Sig hand sharply upwards into Taff’s ribcage, knocking the air from his lungs. Taff staggered backwards, but Danny was already focused on other threats.
There was panic in the tent. Basheba, her slashed face still bleeding, was screaming and Buckingham had already scurried for the exit. Sorgen was edging backwards, towards the rear of the tent, and a couple of his commanders were flanking him. Only one of the guys, however, had raised his weapon. He was standing seven metres to Danny’s ten o’clock. Calmly, Danny fired a single round at his scarf-swathed face, instantly transforming the only part of his skin on view into a bloody mash of flesh before he fell backwards.
By now, however, Hector had regained his balance. If he hadn’t hesitated for half a second, unable to decide whether he wanted to kill the British woman first or Danny, then Danny would have been dead on the ground. As it was, that moment of indecision gave Clara time to hurl herself at him, knocking him to the ground as once more he discharged a shot, this time harmlessly. She scrambled to her feet again.
Holding his grenade above his head again – a renewed warning to everyone else inside the tent what would happen if they slotted him – Danny turned to the two women. ‘Get out of the tent!’ he roared. ‘Now!’
Clara grabbed Basheba and pulled her towards the flap. Danny, edging backwards, addressed Sorgen. ‘Tell your men,’ he said, ‘that I’ll shoot anyone I see outside the tent.’ Sorgen hesitated, so Danny fired a single round in the air to concentrate his mind. ‘Do it!’
Sorgen issued his instructions in Arabic as Danny continued to step backwards. Three metres to the exit. Two metres. He glanced at Taff, who was crouched on the ground, blood streaming from his broken nose.
And then Danny was outside.
He turned sharply to his right and dashed along the front of the tent. Just as he expected, a flurry of gunfire burst through the canvas, but none of it in his direction. And nobody appeared bold enough to come after him. At least, not yet. Danny gave himself a couple of seconds to take stock.
Buckingham and the women were crouching by one of the seven open-topped technicals parked about twenty metres east of the main tent. These pick-ups were facing the desert, for a quick getaway if the situation required. That gave Danny to believe that the keys would be in the ignition of each of them. The beaten-up VW that he’d hot-wired in a street near the compound in Homs stood abandoned a kilometre from the rebel camp. He and Buckingham had silently covered that final stretch on foot. In any case, if they wanted a chance of getting out of here alive, they needed an upgrade.
Danny sprinted at a forty-five-degree angle to join Buckingham and the women. He was only a few strides from them, and maybe twenty metres from the main tent, when an armed, headscarfed figure stepped out of the tent. Danny was ready for him. He hurled the primed grenade in the man’s direction. It landed a metre from the target and exploded a fraction of a second later. The noise filled the air, to be followed a moment later by the screams of the wounded rebel. Danny was happy for him to scream away. It meant the others were less likely to stick their noses out.
Danny forced Buckingham and the women to the comparative safety of the far side of the technical. To his relief, he saw that the key was in the ignition.
‘We’re taking this,’ he said in a tone of voice that offered no possibility of argument. ‘I’ll man the weapon on the back and give us covering fire.’ He looked at the British woman. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Clara,’ she replied. ‘Look, I’m sorry I—’
‘You can drive?’
She nodded.
‘Take the wheel then.’
‘Don’t be so bloody ridiculous,’ Buckingham cut in. ‘I’m perfectly capable of—’
‘You,’ Danny said forcefully, ‘are in the back with me where I can keep an eye on you.’ He ignored the protests that followed and turned back to Clara. ‘Don’t stop at all unless I knock three times on the cab. Got it?’
Clara nodded. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Away from here.’ That was as far as he’d got. He could work out a strategy once they’d found a place of safety.
‘They are going to kill Asu?’ Basheba asked.
Danny glanced towards the tent. Was that plan likely to be abandoned? He doubted it. There was money involved, and Danny now understood that, for Taff, money was everything. He nodded briefly at Basheba and prepared to mount the vehicle. But she grabbed his arm with surprising strength. ‘My son is with Asu,’ she said. ‘They will kill him too.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I have already lost one son,’ she whispered. ‘You have to help me find the other. You have to.’
‘Don’t be so stupid,’ Buckingham hissed. ‘Black, I forbid you to do any such damn-fool thing. We need to get to the Czech Embassy in Damascus. It’s the only safe place for us.’
Danny looked anxiously at the tent. They needed to move. Any second now, either Sorgen’s men or Taff’s were going to get brave.
Clara spoke. ‘If you’re going to abandon Basheba,’ she said, ‘abandon me too.’ And her eyes challenged him: what kind of man would you be if you did that?
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ Buckingham said.
‘Shut up, Buckingham.’ The women had made Danny’s mind up – he was damned if he was going to land on Buckingham’s side of the fence. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Asu’s surrounded by child soldiers.’ He nodded at Basheba. ‘Including her son. If Sorgen and Taff get their way, they’ll be butchered. We’re going to find him and warn him.’
‘I forbid it!’ Buckingham yelled.
Gunfire. A round ricocheted off the pick-up. Danny pulled his only remaining frag from his chest rig, readied it and lobbed it towards the four rebel fighters who had ventured outside and spread out.
A warning shout, then the explosion, followed by the agonised screams of two of the rebels.
‘Go! Now!’ Danny hissed. He grabbed Buckingham and dragged him round to the tailgate of the technical, which he opened, and then pushed him up on to the floor before climbing on board himself. ‘Get down,’ he said. Buckingham needed no more encouragement and lay flat and still as Danny took up position at the machine gun. A chain link of .50-cal rounds hung from the chamber, ready to fire. As the engine started, Danny swung the weapon round on its tripod and fired a thunderous burst at the rebels. The surviving two shuddered violently from the impact of the rounds, before dropping to the ground. ‘Jesus!’ Buckingham cried out. The pick-up edged forwards.
Ideally, Danny would have disabled the other technicals before moving off, but the situation was far from ideal. His only option was to take them out on the run. Clara had barely driven ten metres before he trained the machine gun on each of the pick-ups in turn, concentrating his fire on the wheelbase. None of them would get far with blown-out tyres and a crumpled axle. In the event, the weapon did a lot more work than that. By the time they were forty metres east of the encampment, two of the vehicles were in flames. The remainder were a mess of bullet holes, shredded rubber and shattered glass.
Their own vehicle accelerated. Sixty metres. Eighty. More figures appeared in front of the tent and started to fire, but the rounds fell harmlessly some twenty metres short of them. It occurred to Danny that if Taff had been firing, there was no way he’d have missed them. Had he just allowed Danny to escape for a second time? With the thunder of the .50-cal ringing in his ears, Danny pulled his night-sight from his chest rig, put it to his eye and trained it on the camp. Men were swarming around the big tent, and when Sorgen appeared he looked faintly ridiculous in his white dishdash, shouting instructions while flapping his arms around. But Danny was only interested in picking out one man. Taff. He stood at the tent’s entrance, seemingly u
nconcerned by his broken nose, his eyes following the pick-up as it headed off into the night. It could have been a trick of his imagination, but to Danny it seemed as if Taff was staring straight down the barrel of the night-sight, and into his mind.
Then he turned, stepped back into the tent and was gone.
TWENTY-FOUR
It was his prostate that caused it, Max Saunders had decided. Back in his army days he’d been able to piss thunderously before bed and again when he woke up. Now he was a three-times-a-nighter, squeezing out the remains of his St Émilion or Chivas Regal against the porcelain in his marble-clad en suite with all the vigour of a coffee percolator. He should get the old chap looked at, only he didn’t like the idea of some turban-clad Indian doctor examining his dick, or worse still sticking a latex-clad finger up his arse. He put that thought from his mind with a shudder.
This was his second piss of the night, which meant it must be about midnight. All the more curious, therefore, that he should be disturbed by the sound of his mobile phone buzzing on the bedside table. He swore under his breath, shook himself off, and then padded naked back into the bedroom where his wife was asleep, or at least pretending to be. His mobile was still ringing – the vibrations had shifted it to the edge of his bedside table. He caught it just as it was falling to the floor, and accepted the call.
‘Who the . . . ?’
‘It’s me. We’ve got a problem.’
Taff Davies. The line was bad, but that figured. Saunders stepped out of the bedroom and on to the dark landing.
‘Is this line secure?’ Taff asked.
‘Of course it’s fucking secure,’ Saunders snapped. ‘What’s so important you need to get me out of bed?’
A pause. Saunders could feel Taff’s own irritation coming down the line, but chose to ignore it.
‘Skinner’s dead,’ Taff said.
‘Well, boo-fucking-hoo, stick him in a hole. Seriously, Davies, this line’s for emergencies, not gossip.’
‘Buckingham walked in on our RV with Sorgen. He knows everything.’
Now it was Saunders’ turn to fall silent.
‘I thought Buckingham was dead,’ he said eventually. ‘Along with that fucking Regiment kid.’
‘They got away.’
‘Away from where? Jesus Christ, they shouldn’t have been anywhere near your meet with Sorgen. Do I have to do everything myself ? I tipped off the Syrians and the bastard Russians so they could thin down Buckingham’s babysitters. All you had to do was take care of two guys, and you couldn’t even do that?’
‘You should haul your arse over here for a few days, Saunders. We’d give you a warm welcome.’
‘Spare me,’ Saunders spat, the officer in him coming to the fore. ‘I pay you a lot of money to be out there. If you don’t like it, fuck off and I’ll find someone else. Cunts like you, Davies, are two a penny. Is Sorgen still alive?’
‘Roger that.’
‘Do you have the French money?’
‘It’s here.’
‘I said, do you have it?’
‘Sorgen will release the money when he knows Asu is dead. Not before.’
‘Fuck it! Can’t you just take it?’
‘We’re outnumbered, Saunders. Heavily.’ An awkward, almost embarrassed pause. ‘They’ve taken out our vehicles. I can’t get to Asu to finish the job, not before morning. You’re going to have to come up with something else.’
Saunders could no longer contain his fury. He paced up and down the landing, slapping the wall with his free hand. ‘And Asu’s current location? Tell me you know that, at least.’
‘He has a safe house near the central mosque. Number 35, Fares Al Khaldoun. That’s where he’s meeting with his commanders.’ Another pause. ‘I think there’s a good chance that Buckingham and Black are on their way there to warn him.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ Saunders muttered to himself. Taff Davies, normally so reliable, was presiding over this crowning glory of a clusterfuck. Saunders realised he was going to have to get involved directly if he was going to sort out this situation. ‘Stay by your phone,’ he instructed. ‘And don’t take your eyes off that fucking money!’
He hung up, then stormed back into the bedroom and pulled on his kimono dressing gown, before hurrying downstairs to his basement office, where he locked the door behind him. He tried to straighten this all out in his head. He was taking money from the British government to provide a training package to Asu and to eliminate Sorgen. He was taking a larger sum of money from the French government to have Asu and his commanders assassinated. So long as everything went according to plan, he could be the servant of two masters. With Asu dead and Sorgen alive, he’d be the apple of the French government’s eye, whereas the British would have to continue paying him anyway because they simply couldn’t function abroad without the help of International Solutions and companies like it. But the strategy depended not only on Asu’s death, but now also on the deaths of Hugo Buckingham and Danny Black. Nobody who had contact with the British authorities could know what Taff – and by extension Saunders – had been up to.
But he smiled to himself as he realised that if he moved quickly, and if it was true that Buckingham and Black were at this moment heading to Asu’s safe house, he had a chance – not only to eliminate everybody who needed to be eliminated, but to earn himself a third paycheck too.
Contacts were everything in this business, and Saunders had them all. Sadiq Dahlamal ran a business importing Middle Eastern artefacts from his warehouse in Lots Road. He also happened to be a direct conduit to the Syrian administration. Dahlamal had been in the same boarding house – Fircroft – as Saunders at Uppingham. He’d been delighted to receive the tip-off that a British SAS unit had breached the Syrian border. Saunders was almost certain Dahlamal would take his call again, whatever the time of day or night.
He was right.
‘Sadiq, old boy,’ he said smoothly to the groggy-sounding Syrian merchant once he had him on the phone. ‘Hope I didn’t wake you. Probably worth your while if I did.’
‘What the bloody hell you want, Saunders? I busy man.’ They never had liked each other much.
‘I’d like to give you the exact location for the next few hours of your government’s good friend Asu and all his rebel commanders,’ Saunders purred. ‘For a small consideration, of course.’
That got Sadiq’s attention. The grogginess left his voice. ‘Where you come by this information?’
‘Ways and means, old boy. Ways and means.’
‘Where is he?’
Saunders found himself smiling. ‘I hate to be vulgar, Sadiq, but let’s get the money conversation out of the way first. Shall we say 750,000 dollars, cash?’
‘Half a million.’
‘I don’t think so, Sadiq. Seven hundred and fifty thousand.’
A pause.
‘Agreed. But we pay you only when Asu is dead.’
‘Naturally. And I can’t tell you what a relief it is to know that I trust you. It would be such a shame – and such an embarrassment – if word of your homosexual schoolboy dalliances leaked out, wouldn’t it? And the pictures, Sadiq. Enough to make a grown man faint. They cost me a considerable sum, but I’d like you to rest assured they’re safe and sound, for the moment.’
Another pause.
‘Where is he?’ Sadiq said.
‘Number 35, Fares Al Khaldoun.’ Saunders repeated the location Taff had given him.
‘That is heavily populated area,’ Sadiq observed.
‘Not my problem, old boy. Anyway, do a few more dead really make much difference?’
But Sadiq had already hung up.
Saunders put the phone down on his desk and inhaled deeply. He congratulated himself that this was turning out rather well. There was a certain pleasure to be drawn from dealing with regimes who feared that the end was close. They could be relied upon to act decisively.
The citizens of Homs, and anyone damn fool enough to join them, were in for a brutal f
ew hours. Max Saunders consoled himself with that thought as he climbed back upstairs to the marital bed.
23.57 hrs.
Warm and muggy, considering it was nearly midnight. The stars were very bright overhead. Danny rapped three times on the cab of the pick-up. Clara pulled in at the side of the road.
They’d been travelling for fifteen minutes, and Danny estimated that they were just over thirty kilometres from Sorgen’s encampment. He’d been scanning the darkness constantly through his night-sight, but had seen no sign of any tail. Another eight klicks, he reckoned, and they’d hit the outskirts of Homs. When that happened, a fucking great .50-cal on the back of the truck would draw more attention than he was comfortable with. He started to disassemble it.
‘What are you doing?’ Buckingham asked.
‘Keeping a low profile,’ Danny replied, lowering the machine gun from its tripod.
‘Look,’ Buckingham said, standing up awkwardly. ‘I should have listened to you before, when you said we should extract. Hands held high, and all that. But really, is this necessary? If the women want to go on this ill-advised errand, let them. You and I can . . .’ He jabbed one thumb over his shoulder.
Danny stared at him in disgust but Buckingham didn’t seem to understand the look. ‘Get me out of here,’ he said, ‘and I’ll see to it that they’ll be singing your name from the rooftops of the MoD. I can do that, you understand? I know people.’
‘You’re a piece of shit, Buckingham. If I leave anyone to fend for themselves, it’ll be you.’
‘Damn it, man . . .’
But Danny didn’t want to hear it. He pushed Buckingham back down to the floor of the pick-up. ‘Don’t fucking move,’ he said, before jumping down and walking round to the cab. He opened the driver’s door. Clara was gripping the wheel and staring straight ahead. She looked like she didn’t want to think about what she was doing. ‘Less than ten kilometres, we’ll be in the city,’ he said. He looked over at Basheba. ‘Can you direct Clara to Asu’s safe house?’
The cuts on the Syrian woman’s face were beginning to congeal. She nodded.