by Chris Ryan
Abbottabad, Pakistan. 0030 hours.
‘I’m telling you, brudder: if he doesn’t stop squealing, I’m gonna frickin’ do him.’
Joe Mansfield looked over his shoulder. In the shadows five metres behind him, tied to a rickety wooden chair and with several layers of packing tape stuck over his mouth and eyes, was a thin, terrified Pakistani man. He was the owner of this small house. Nobody important. Just in the wrong place at the wrong time. His body was shaking and the sound escaping his taped mouth was high-pitched. He shifted in his chair and its legs made a scraping sound against the wooden floor. Standing between Joe and the prisoner was Joe’s best mate Ricky Singh. Ricky had murder in his eyes.
‘Take it easy, big guy,’ Joe said. ‘No rounds if we don’t have to.’
Ricky was a couple of inches shorter than Joe, but broader about the shoulders and torso. Second-generation Indian, with an accent that was more Leicester than Lahore, he was the only currently serving member of the Regiment who could blend into the background in Pakistan without darkening his skin. Useful back in the Stan, where they’d spent the past three months erasing insurgents from the badlands where the green army wouldn’t set foot; and it made him a shoo-in for a job like this. His hair was shoulder-length, and like Joe – like all SF personnel currently operating in this part of the world – he wore a full beard. Ricky called everyone in the Regiment ‘brudder’, like he had the biggest family in the world.
‘I’ve got my blade,’ he muttered. But he walked back to the OP. Their captive fell silent – maybe he realized his noises were making Ricky feel like doing something about them – while Joe continued to scan the area outside.
They were holed up on the first floor of a very basic building. The room – which they had reached by means of a rickety wooden staircase that emerged from a ground floor that housed nothing but an unflushed toilet and an old bicycle – was about six metres by four, and almost bare. There was one window, slung open. As soon as darkness had fallen, Joe and Ricky had fixed up a three-metre length of net curtain from the bottom of the window to the ceiling, at an angle of forty-five degrees. This would hide movement inside the room from anyone looking in. Joe had cut a rectangular hole, the size of a letterbox, in the centre of the netting, and erected a tripod behind it. He had three sets of optics to fit on the tripod: a pair of high-powered Canon binoculars, a Spyglass thermal-imaging device and a night sight.
The rest of the room was a lot less hi-tech. The ceiling, bowed and cracked, looked as if it might collapse at any moment. There was a mattress in one corner, covered by a single, dirty sheet and the two sets of robes Joe and Ricky had been wearing over their gear. A ceramic hookah stood next to it. On the opposite wall, hanging at a slight angle, was a yellowed, grease-spotted piece of parchment with some Arabic script – something from the Koran, probably. Beneath it was a small cooking area with a tiny stove. The place stank in the heat – a musty smell of decay mixed with the spicy aroma of whatever the occupant had last eaten, its remnants still in a battered saucepan on the stove. The air buzzed with the sound of a single fly, as it had done all day. All in all, it was a dump. But a dump that had one advantage, even though its owner didn’t realize it. Outside the window was a single-tracked road. Beyond that, the five-metre-high walls of an enclosed compound.
And in the compound, if the Yanks were right, the slippery fucker who’d evaded capture ever since 9/11. In the endless briefings that had preceded this op, the CIA operatives had insisted on calling him ‘Geronimo’, or ‘the Pacer’, or even by one of his Arabic nicknames, if they were feeling cocksure and sarcastic: ‘the Director’, ‘the Lion’, ‘the Sheikh al-Mujahid’.
The rest of the world, of course, knew him by his real name.
Joe, Ricky and the rest of their eight-man unit had been in Abbottabad for twenty-one hours, but they’d been studying the imagery of the town and its surrounding areas for a week before that at their base in Bagram, over the border in Afghanistan. Twenty-four hours previously, a Chinook had lifted them over the mountains and in-country, along with a battered white utility van with Pakistani plates and a tape deck full of shite Arabic music. Their operational movements were covert even to the regular members of the Regiment. Joe, Ricky and the others were part of a specialist cell from the newly formed E Squadron – the highest-vetted and best trained the SAS had to offer, and even among E Squadron the expertise of these eight men in the field of covert surveillance had no equal.
The American SF flight crew that had put them on the ground in Pakistan at 0100 hours didn’t know what they were up to either. Fuck-ups aside, nobody would ever know they were here. No acknowledgements. No back-slaps. That suited them just fine. The Yanks needed men on the ground to pull this thing off, and they needed the best, even if they did intend to write them out of history at the end of the day. And of course, as far as Joe was concerned, there was more to it than that. There always was. If they were compromised and the op went to shit before it had even begun, it could be spun as a British cluster-fuck, not an American one.
Ricky had driven the van cross-country to Abbottabad, every inch the Pakistani peasant, down to the stench of farm animals on his rough clothes. The rest of them had been secreted in the back, hidden behind a false panel that guys from the REME had welded on in case of a stop and search. But nobody stopped and nobody searched. By 0300 they had hit the north–south N35 Mankerai Road, just another vehicle entering the surprisingly busy little town.
There had been no need for them to speak when the van came to a halt, the engine cut out and Ricky tapped three times on the back of the cab to indicate that they’d reached their destination. They’d emerged silently into a dark, breeze-block garage alongside a shit-encrusted farm vehicle, before leaving in pairs at irregular intervals to get themselves into position.
The first two to leave, their weapons hidden under their robes, had been Raz and JJ. After Ricky, JJ was Joe’s closest Regiment mucker – a sarky, tough little Glaswegian whose house in the wilds of the countryside round Berwick-upon-Tweed had been the location of Joe’s holidays with his family for the past five years. JJ and Raz had drawn the short straw, but you wouldn’t have known it from their steely demeanours. By now they’d have spent almost twenty-four hours on the far edge of a field abutting the compound, dug into an irrigation ditch, covered with mud, shit and foliage. Watching and waiting, they were invisible even to any locals who might wander within a couple of metres of their stinking hideout. Stevie and Rhys had been next, hiding out in a disused outbuilding at the western end of the single-track road on which the compound stood. Joe and Ricky had followed, waking up their reluctant host with the suppressed butt of an M4 and a roll of packing tape. That left Diz and Jacko to go and babysit ‘the Doctor’ and his family.
In Joe’s opinion, the Doctor was the weak link in the chain. The photograph of him that Joe had studied was burned into his brain: a thin man with a goatee beard, a protruding Adam’s apple and round, steel-rimmed glasses. The Doctor was a long-time resident of Abbottabad who had been dishing out free vaccinations to the population over the past several months. The jabs were just a cover. Every time the Doctor administered a vaccination, he took a swab of the patient’s cheek. Routine, he’d told them – failing to mention that each of these hundreds of swabs eventually made their way to some lab in North America where the DNA on it was analysed. Nobody seriously expected Geronimo himself to take advantage of the medicine on offer; but if he had family members around him, there was a chance of some of their DNA making it onto one of the swabs and giving the CIA confirmation of their suspicions.
The confirmation had never turned up. Maybe this meant that the occupants of the compound were too cute for the CIA’s ruse. But there was a small possibility that the Doctor was not all he seemed to be, and that possibility had increased over the past hour. Jacko’s voice over the comms had been tense.
‘I’m with the missus. She expected him back at 1100 hours. He’s a no-show.’
‘Roger that.’ Of course Jacko was sure. He’d have used all his powers of persuasion to find out.
Their instructions were clear. If tonight’s operation was successful – and even if it wasn’t – they were to evacuate the Doctor and his family. But if there was any evidence of him trying to send word to the compound of what was going down, their orders were more straightforward: take the fucker out.
Evacuate or execute. Difficult to do either, if nobody knew where the hell he was.
Silence. Joe checked his watch. 0037. Ricky was standing three metres to his left. His M4 was slung across his front and Joe was almost certain he saw his mate’s left hand tremble.
No, that couldn’t be right.
‘We should have frickin’ heard by now,’ Ricky said.
Joe returned his attention to the optics. He felt sweat trickle down his back, and his mouth was dry. He scanned the five-metre-high wall that surrounded the compound at a distance of ten metres from the house. Running alongside the wall was a single-track road, stony and baked hard. There was only one entrance to the compound: a pair of heavy metal gates in that wall, twenty-five metres south-west of Joe’s position. From this location, he could see anyone approaching the compound’s entrance, from either east or west.
But so far there was nobody.
And no word from base that the operation had begun. Maybe it was a no-go. Wouldn’t be the first time they’d …
A crackling sound in his earpiece. He found himself holding his breath.
Nothing. For a few seconds, he thought it was just interference. Then, a voice.
‘Sierra Foxtrot Five, this is Zero. Operation Geronimo is go. Repeat, Operation Geronimo is go.’
Joe and Ricky exchanged a look, before Joe twice tapped the pressel on the comms unit strapped to his ops vest, wordlessly acknowledging this latest communication.
They knew what it meant.
The still night air was about to be broken.
War on terror?
Damn right.
1433 hours EST.
‘We’ve breached Pakistani airspace, Mr President. ETA twenty-seven minutes.’
The President looks across the table. For a moment, Todd thinks he’s looking at him, but then he realizes he’s turned his attention to the small, jowly man in an elegant brown suit who is sitting just behind Todd and to his left. He has blond hair that is neatly parted to one side, and horn-rimmed glasses. Whereas most of the other men in the room have either loosened or removed their ties, this man still wears a neatly tied dicky bow. Todd knows that his name is Mason Delaney, but doesn’t know his title, or even if he has one. He’s high up in the complicated hierarchy of the CIA, however, and he’s sitting behind the photographer because he doesn’t want his face to be recorded on any official photograph. During his time in this job, Todd has learned that there are certain men and woman who do not consider photographers to be their friends, even though the looks Delaney has given him before now are enough to make Todd believe the rumours that he prefers the company of young men.
For the first time since they all filed into this room, the President manages something like a smile.
‘Feeling confident, Mason?’ he asks.
‘I feel eighty-seven per cent confident, Mr President.’ Delaney’s voice is high-pitched and nasal. Almost girly. Todd notices Sagan’s face darken as he speaks. This military man clearly has very little time for such an effete individual, and when Delaney catches Sagan’s expression he widens his eyes provocatively. ‘What is your estimate of success, Herb?’
Sagan’s annoyance visibly increases. But this operation is Mason Delaney’s baby, and everybody in the room knows it. He takes a deep breath and appears to calm himself.
‘ETA twenty-six minutes, Mr President,’ he says. ‘Twenty-six minutes and counting.’
Abbottabad. 0053 hours.
Joe had eyes on the two metal security gates that formed the compound’s only entrance. Distance, twenty-five metres to the south-west, across the single-track road.
‘Anything?’ Ricky sounded as tense as Joe felt.
‘Fuck all,’ he murmured. Through the grainy-green view of his night sight, he had seen the occasional flashing eyes of a wild dog, or the bright light of a commercial flight drifting overhead. In his mind he pictured the bat-winged shape of the RQ170 stealth drone he knew was circling up there too, its camera trained directly on the 3500 square metres of the compound. An impressive piece of kit, sure, but not a substitute for men on the ground alert to the arrival of a lookout with an anxious expression, or the frown of a guard in a state of heightened awareness. Joe saw neither. He didn’t doubt that the compound was guarded, but the guards were well hidden behind its high walls. At the moment, the exterior was deserted.
Jesus, it was hot. Joe’s skin was soaked. There wasn’t even the hint of a breeze, but the sound of traffic from the centre of Abbottabad, just under a kilometre away, still drifted towards them. Like everyone else, Joe had always assumed that their target would be holed up in some remote village on the Afghanistan–Pakistan border, or living in a cave with a heavily armed entourage. He’d even heard rumours that the guy was in Africa, living under the protection of some scumbag warlord. The fact that he was here, in pissing distance of the Pakistan Military Academy and right under the nose of the Pakistani government, had been as much of a surprise to him as he knew it would be to the world at large when it learned that the Americans had finally caught up with him.
If the Americans finally caught up with him. The rabbit wasn’t in the bag yet.
‘You think he’s in there?’ Ricky breathed in the darkness.
Joe kept the night sight to his eyes. It could only take a second for somebody to slip in and out of that place, and he didn’t intend to miss that if it happened. A bead of sweat dripped down into one eye. He blinked hard, but kept his position. ‘The Yanks must be pretty sure.’ He half smiled. ‘Be a laugh if they send in a squadron to find some farmer banging his wife, though …’
He was interrupted by more squeaking from the man bound to the chair. Joe felt himself start. When he looked over his shoulder, his mate was already storming over to their prisoner.
‘ Ricky …’
Ricky was drawing his knife.
‘Fucking hell, mate! What’s the matter with you?’
No answer. Ricky picked up the roll of packing tape that was lying by the chair, and wrapped even more of it round the man’s head, so that now it covered his nose as well as his eyes and mouth. The noise stopped, but now the man clearly couldn’t breathe. His body started shaking more violently. Ricky gave it ten seconds, then carefully punctured the tape covering the nostrils with the point of his blade. Just enough for the guy to get some air in his lungs. The loose tape under his nostrils flapped in and out like a fish’s gills.
As Ricky walked back to the OP, he didn’t meet Joe’s eyes. Joe didn’t push it.
A minute passed in tense silence.
‘Hotter than a hooker’s noo-noo,’ Ricky muttered finally. ‘Flight crews need to be careful.’
He was right. High temperatures like this could thin the air and reduce the lifting capability of a chopper’s rotors. No point worrying about that, though. Let the Yanks do their job while Joe and Ricky did theirs: keep the cordon, and if anyone tried to come in or out, deal with them.
Movement.
Joe held up one hand to indicate that he’d seen something. Two figures had just wandered into Joe’s field of view. The sound of giggling reached his ears and through the open window he saw a young woman in Western clothes running ahead of a young man. She allowed herself to be caught and pressed up against the high wall of the compound. The giggling became muffled and the man’s hands started to wander.
‘What is it?’ Ricky asked, his voice almost silent.
‘Couple of kids. We’re on for a live show if Romeo gets his way.’
Joe checked the time: 0
059.
‘You OK, mucker?’ Joe asked quietly, not taking his eyes away from the optics.
‘Fine and frickin’ dand—’
He stopped mid-sentence and looked towards the window. So did Joe. They could suddenly hear the sound of a couple of choppers.
They were approaching fast. Joe could tell by the way the volume of the rotors increased quickly. He moved his eyes from the night sight and squinted through the net curtain and into the dark sky. At first there was nothing to see – the flight crews would be seeing their way with the aid of night-vision units, all lights on their aircraft extinguished. Twenty seconds later, however, the roar of their engines reached a peak, and Joe could see two great, black silhouettes, one of them hovering twenty metres above the compound, the second thirty metres above that, and maybe ten metres beyond it. In the corner of his vision, he saw the young Pakistani woman wriggle away from her suitor and look up. It crossed Joe’s mind that she could be in a lot of trouble if her indiscretions were made public.
Joe bent down at the night sight again and redirected it towards the nearer helicopter. Suddenly the black shadow was converted to green-tinted detail. Joe could instantly tell that he was looking at a modified chopper, one that few people would ever get the chance to see. The familiar shape of the Black Hawk was subtly different. The tail was smoother and more rounded. The nose was sleeker. Joe could tell at a glance that it had been engineered for stealth capability, which meant that the Pakistani authorities wouldn’t even suspect its presence here in their back yard.
The door on one side of the Black Hawk was open, and Joe counted six men at the aperture, not including the Minigun operator who had his weapon trained on the compound. He knew there would be another six preparing to drop down from the other side door. He could make out the head cams and goggles fitted to their helmets, the boom mikes to the side of their mouths, the assault rifles strapped to their bodies. Something fell from the chopper – long and snake-like. Joe had travelled in, and fast-roped out of, enough helicopters to realize something was wrong.