by Chris Ryan
A burst of rounds slammed into the front of the technical – the enemy hadn’t realized he’d moved the gimpy from the vehicle. Jack returned fire then looked over his shoulder. Siobhan and Caroline were in the aircraft now, and there was a high-pitched screaming from the engines – Markus was clearly revving the plane to fuck with the brakes on, ready to accelerate down the road . . .
A voice over the sat phone. Markus. ‘Get in, Jack! If they hit the plane, we’re—’
Jack didn’t hear the rest of the sentence. It was drowned out as he fired the final few rounds of his ammo belt towards the convoy. One of the headlamps faded, and he thought he saw the windscreen of the same vehicle shattering. No time to check whether he’d nailed anyone: he pushed himself up and sprinted towards the aircraft.
Jack jumped into the cabin. He slammed the door behind and was immediately thrown to the ground again as Markus suddenly released the brakes and the aircraft shot down the road like a stone from a catapult. He pushed himself up. There was the sound of gunfire over the noise of the engines, and through the window he could just make out the faded lines of burning diesel speeding past.
Nothing more he could do now. Just hope and pray Markus could get the bird into the air before their attackers managed to land a round anywhere on the aircraft.
A deafening roar from the engines.
The bird jolted and bumped on the makeshift runway.
And then, suddenly, everything went smooth. Weightless. The bird kept low – no more than five metres from the ground.
And then: ‘Hold the fuck on!’
The aircraft banked hard and to the left. The engines continued to scream as they suddenly – and steeply – gained height.
The sound of the enemy’s guns had receded. Now there was just the continuing noise of the engines, and Markus’s tense voice shouting above it.
‘Jack, old buddy!’ he screamed, even as he concentrated on controlling the aircraft. ‘I always thought you were a fucking psychopath. I don’t want you to think I ain’t grateful for what you did back in Iraq, but I think we can safely say my debt to you is paid in fucking full! Agreed?’
Yeah, Jack thought to himself, sweat pouring from his body and his heart thumping with adrenaline and exertion. Fucking agreed.
The engines were quieter now. A steady, even throb. As the plane hummed its way back towards the Kenyan border, Jack sat up front next to Markus, who concentrated intently on the instruments in front of him while Siobhan tended to Caroline in the back. Not that there was much for her to do. The professor was unconscious and needed a surgeon. Proper medical care. ‘I know a guy,’ Markus had said. ‘There’s morphine and antibiotics back at the camp. We just need to get her on the ground.’
‘How long?’ Jack asked him.
‘Two hours, minimum.’ Time was running out.
It was running out in other ways too. Khan had his device, and he had Lily. Jack thumped the side of the plane in anger and frustration. Where and when he intended to detonate his dirty bomb was anyone’s guess. Whatever happened, Jack had to get his hands on Khan. But he was a clever bastard. The world saw him as a peacemaker. A force for good. Like he had a bulletproof jacket of respectability. Without proof, nobody would believe what Jack and Siobhan knew about him.
The proof they had was Caroline Stenton. Jack tried to get everything he’d learned about her straight in his head. She advised Five on radiological weapons but she was in Khan’s pocket. A fundamentalist convert. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. She was complicit in the intelligence that a dirty bomb was being manufactured in Helmand and that it had been destroyed. But now the real thing had been made in Somalia.
And what about Farzad Haq? Was his ambush anything to do with this? Had Caroline been feeding him information about where and when the unit would be going in? Jack scowled. Whatever the truth, she was implicated. It felt wrong that they should be hurrying to save her life, but they needed to get crucial info out of her just as soon as she was stable enough to talk.
To be persuaded.
To be—
‘Jack.’ It was Siobhan’s voice. Tired, but something else too. He looked over his shoulder to see her gazing back at him. Her face was white.
‘What is it?’
Siobhan looked down at the professor. Her body was perfectly still and Jack knew exactly what Siobhan was going to tell him.
‘She’s dead,’ she said.
5 JULY
21
The vehicle carrying Habib Khan moved swiftly.
Khan himself sat in the back seat with the silver flight case next to it. One hand was resting lightly on the case, the other held a mobile phone to his ear. He listened to the voice at the other end.
‘They got away.’
‘All of them?’
‘All of them. They had an aircraft.’
His eyes narrowed and he hung up without another word. This news angered him, but as he turned it round in his mind he realised he should not be unduly worried. They were idiots. They had stumbled upon him in an attempt to find the girl. And as he thought about the girl, his cheek twitched. He wondered what Harker and the woman wanted with her. Not that it really mattered. He hadn’t been lying when he said she was probably dead by now. Dead or driven to madness by withdrawal symptoms from the drugs she needed to function. He thought of the things she had let him do to her for those drugs – things no Muslim woman would ever allow. And he wasn’t the only one who had taken advantage of her. There were British men who had helped Khan, men whose allegiance could not be assured on account of their faith. They had to be rewarded in other ways – some with money, others with the filthy, broken body of a drug addict who would let them do anything as long as she knew where her next hit was coming from. In Khan’s preparations for the events of the next three days, young Lily Byrne had been more useful than she would ever know . . .
He snapped his mind back to the events of two hours ago. Stenton knew very little of his plans; and he could easily put out the word that she and this Jack Harker should be eliminated as soon as they set foot back in the UK. There was really no way anybody could prevent what was going to happen.
They continued to drive westwards through the night.
When they finally stopped, Khan alighted from the truck, then gave a quiet instruction to one of his entourage to remove the case. Once outside the vehicle, it was with a certain satisfaction that he saw the aircraft waiting for him, its engines already whirring and its lights glowing in the night air.
‘Load the case, please,’ he said. His man carried out the instruction while Khan looked around. They had driven for two hours through the night to get to this airfield. His heavily armed entourage would easily have dealt with anything they might have come across before they reached this deserted, desolate spot, but Allah had been with them and they had avoided any trouble.
And now? Now it was time to leave Somalia. But there was still much to do. Still many preparations to make.
He approached the aircraft. It was a small machine, propeller-driven with just a single pilot – a former commercial pilot from the Middle East whose services and discretion could now be acquired for a price. Money, of course, was immaterial to Khan. He took his cut of O’Callaghan’s drugs funds in Belfast in order to keep the man professional, to make sure that he didn’t get sloppy, but his real finances came from elsewhere.
He climbed into the plane and took a seat next to where the flight case had been carefully strapped in. ‘I am ready,’ he told the pilot, who nodded, then knocked the plane into motion. It sped down the runway before rising effortlessly into the air.
Khan gazed out of the window, staring at the occasional lights below him. And as time passed and the sun lit up the African plains, he gazed at these too and smiled. Africa was vast. You could hide anything there. Do anything. Africa had always been a playground for the Arabs. The preparations that had been made here on his account had gone well. Very well.
The next phase, though, was co
mplicated. It needed a great deal of care. Everything had to go smoothly. But Khan was confident that all would run as it should.
He looked at his watch, an inexpensive Seiko that he had bought in London. 05.30 hrs, East Africa time. In West Africa, where he was headed, it would be only 02.30. It would take them a few hours to cross the continent, however. A few hours of relative peace before his operations began again.
Habib Khan sat back in his seat and closed his eyes. Now, he decided, would be a very good time to sleep.
Salim Jamali could not sleep. He was too excited for that.
Since leaving London he felt as though his eyes had been opened. As though he had passed through a gateway into a magical new world. His flight from Heathrow had taken him directly to Islamabad where a young man called Mahmood of approximately his own age, and who reminded him very much of Aamir back at the mosque, had met him at the airport. Mahmood had embraced him like a brother, then taken him to a house in the heart of that beautiful and verdant city. The heat was intense, even at night-time; but the house in question offered a cool courtyard where his hosts – men of faith whose eyes shone with enthusiastic welcome – had given him water to drink and fruit to eat, and answered all his questions. No, they told him with indulgent smiles, he could not expect the training camp to be nearly so comfortable as this. They would expect him to work hard. To learn fast. But he would be among like-minded men. People willing – eager – to fight for what they believed in. Yes, they would give him weapons training, but more than that. By the end of his time in the camp he would be proficient in bomb-making and surveillance. All the skills of the successful jihadi. And when the time had come for him to sleep, they had shown him to a mattress with clean white sheets. ‘Sleep well,’ they had said. ‘Tomorrow will be a long journey.’
It had, indeed, been long. At dawn Salim, Mahmood and two others had loaded their things into a Land Rover and headed out of Islamabad and into the country beyond. It hadn’t taken long for the heat to start punishing them, and Salim sweated profusely in that moving oven, which jolted his body around on a road that displayed an increasing level of disrepair as their journey wore on. When his companions shared water from a plastic bottle, he would have liked some too, but they declined to pass him any. It was important, Mahmood told him, that he learn how to endure certain hardships. This was the beginning of his training.
Aamir had warned him that it wouldn’t be easy, and Salim was eager to do well. He nodded, closed his mouth and weathered the heat.
The scenery around him changed. First the busy outskirts of the city melted away, then came the countryside and finally, after many hours of travelling, the mountains up ahead. The sight of them gave Salim a thrill, because he knew that was where they were headed.
They spent that night in the foothills, camping under the stars by an open fire that Salim himself had built, hoping to impress the others. And the following day they had continued their journey, up the winding roads that led deep into the mountains, then down confusing networks of paths that were barely suitable for their vehicle, until that evening they came to a little village. It consisted of a few simple dwellings whose walls were constructed of mud baked hard in the fierce sun. A thin dog roamed outside, and a couple of men in robes appeared in doorways. Salim could see no women, and certainly no children.
‘Is this the place?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Mahmood nodded. ‘This is the place.’
‘Where do I go?’
They led him to one of the huts. It was dark inside, and it didn’t smell too good. Unlike the bed in which he’d slept in Islamabad, the mattress here was dusty and stained, with no sheets. There was nothing else in there.
‘Sleep here tonight,’ Mahmood told him. ‘At dawn, someone is coming to see you.’
‘Who?’ Salim asked.
But Mahmood had just smiled. ‘You will see, my friend,’ he said. ‘Sleep well. Tomorrow is an important day.’
But Salim didn’t sleep. He lay on that filthy mattress, wearing nothing but his jeans in the heat, listening to the sounds outside: men talking in low voices; animals snuffling. Occasionally there was the noise of an aircraft overhead. He remembered reading that the Americans patrolled this area with drones and occasionally launched attacks on Taliban and Al Qaeda bases. In the corner of his mind it occurred to him that as he was in one of those places now, perhaps he should be scared.
But he wasn’t scared. He was excited. Excited to be part of something. Excited by the challenges to come.
It was just before dawn that he heard the sound of a vehicle arriving. Voices outside. Salim sat up on his mattress, excited like a child. More voices. And then a light creeping under the thin wooden door to his hut.
The door opened, and a figure stood there. In his hand was an electric lantern, which lit up the hut but meant that Salim could see only the newcomer’s silhouette. For a moment he felt scared of the sinister figure. But then he reminded himself why he was here. That he had been looking forward to this moment. He stood up and took a step forward.
‘My name is Salim,’ he said.
The figure stepped inside. ‘Salim Jamali?’ he asked in a thin, slightly reedy voice as he put the lantern on the ground in the middle of the room. Salim could see him better now, could make out his black beard flecked with grey, his dark brown eyes. It was not, he had to admit, a friendly face.
‘Yes,’ he replied.
‘From London?’
‘That’s right.’
The newcomer nodded. ‘I am pleased to see you here,’ he said, and Salim felt a sense of relief. ‘Come closer.’
Salim approached his new friend, his eyes bright.
He didn’t see the knife, so he had no way of knowing that the blade was five inches long and with cruel hooks jutting back towards the handle. As it punctured his skin and slid with ease into his belly, he didn’t fully realise what was happening. It felt rather as if he had been punched in the stomach, and because he couldn’t understand why this man would do that, he gave him a perplexed look.
The real pain only kicked in as the man slid the blade upwards, butchering the centre of his torso with one easy slice. Salim tried to cry out, but there was no breath in his lungs; he tried to struggle, but the strength in his arms deserted him. As his attacker removed the blade, the jagged edge started to bring with it his minced internal organs. One of the hooks caught on the underside of his ribcage, and the man was obliged to free it with a particularly robust yank.
But by that time, Salim Jamali’s life was ebbing fast. He collapsed to the floor, his fingers weakly splayed round the guts that had spilled out of his fresh wound. As he looked up, he could just make out the figure of the man standing over him. He was still holding up the knife. A gobbet of Salim’s internal flesh hung from one of the hooks, and the blade was covered in blood that dripped down on to the man’s hand.
And it was that hand, in the final moments of Salim’s life, that he focused upon. Even as the dim light grew dimmer and the awful pain started to dissolve into an overwhelming tiredness, he realised that there was something strange about it.
Something different.
He tried to speak again, but all that came was a mouthful of blood, foaming over his lips and down his chin.
The man wasn’t looking at him; he was gazing at the bloodied knife, turning it round in his hand. And as the hand turned, Salim saw what was different. The fingers. He counted them precisely, like a child counting sheep at bedtime. One. Two. Three. Four.
His eyes closed. His hands fell to his side. Blood continued to ooze from the gaping wound in his stomach. But by now Salim Jamali was dead.
Farzad Haq wiped his knife on the corpse’s jeans, then stepped over it towards the mattress. There was a small holdall here, and he started rummaging around in it. He found nothing of any real interest – just a few clothes – and it didn’t take more than a few seconds for him to locate what he was really after: the return section of the young man’s ticket an
d a UK passport, its thick red binding shiny and new.
Haq flicked through the passport, pausing only to look briefly at the photograph, which seemed to highlight Jamali’s cleft lip. Then, without a second look at his victim’s bleeding body, he stepped outside.
The men were waiting for him near the hut around a small fire, on which they had set an old kettle. In the half-light of the dawn the flames flickered around the metal. One of the men – about the same age as Salim Jamali – approached him. ‘My name is Mahmood,’ he said.
Haq handed him the passport. ‘You know what to do?’
Mahmood nodded and walked away with the document. Haq sat quietly by the fire.
Forty-five minutes later, Mahmood returned. He handed over the passport and Haq flicked through it, checking the details.
The name: Salim Jamali.
Nationality: British Citizen.
The biometric data: all intact.
There were just two differences. The date of birth had been subtly changed and the photograph on the final page showed not the young man who was even now being embraced by the arms of God. It showed the features of his murderer, Farzad Haq, a man who knew he was high up on the so-called Terrorist Screening Database no-fly list, but who now had everything he needed to enter the UK.
Habib Khan’s plane followed the dawn as it headed west over the African continent.
Beneath him, Ethiopia came and went, then Sudan. They passed over Chad, where the extended dawn became morning, then over Niger and Mali before losing height over the featureless desert of Mauritania and coming in to land on the coast of Western Sahara. It was 10.30 hrs local time when they hit the tarmac and as the aircraft decelerated on the runway and Khan looked out of the window, he could hardly believe that they had crossed an entire continent, so similar was this abandoned airstrip to the one from which they’d departed eight hours earlier.
The state of Western Sahara was not so lawless as Somalia, of course, but it was still a disputed state and vast swathes of this desert land were devoid of anything approaching order or authority. It meant that crossing its border and landing without interference were straightforward.