by Chris Ryan
‘We got a problem,’ he said.
Instantly, Ricky was beside him, peering through the netting. ‘What’s happening?’ he demanded tersely.
‘Bird’s skittering …’
As he spoke, the chopper spun through ninety degrees, wobbling. The pilot was obviously struggling to control it in the heat-thinned air, and the fast-rope was spinning with the momentum of the helicopter. Now the Black Hawk was listing alarmingly. It spun back ninety degrees to its original angle, and although he couldn’t hear the voices of the SEALs inside over the screaming of the engines, he could see they were shouting at each other as they started to lose height. A couple of seconds later the chopper had lurched ten metres down. Its main body was now hidden from Joe behind the high wall of the compound, but he could just see the tail peeping up above the rim of the wall.
‘What’s happening?’ Ricky shouted.
Joe was about to answer when he heard the noise: an ominous, sharp, crunching sound as the Black Hawk’s modified tail caught the top of the wall and a shower of sparks, glowing brightly in his night-vision scope, needled his eyeballs.
‘Black Hawk down,’ he muttered.
‘That’s getting to be a frickin’ habit …’
Joe turned his sight to the second chopper. It too was descending and wobbling as it disappeared behind the compound’s wall. Hardly reassuring. The SEALs were supposed to fast-rope into the compound, leaving the choppers to fly away out of earshot so as not to attract unnecessary attention until they were needed to extract. Now they’d both set down inside the compound, and half of Abbottabad must have heard them.
The op was turning pear-shaped before it had even started.
Joe kept eyes on. Stuck in here, he felt about as much use as Anne Frank’s drum kit. ‘We’re going to get a fucking audience any minute,’ he muttered. As he spoke, though, he heard a solid clicking sound behind him. He looked round. ‘What you doing, big guy?’ he asked, his voice dangerously level.
For a moment Ricky didn’t answer. He was too busy checking the magazine in his suppressed Sig before replacing it high on his chest rig. ‘I’m going in,’ he said.
Joe straightened up. ‘We’re not going anywhere, mucker. We keep the cordon, no matter what happens.’
‘Fuck the cordon. They’ve crashed. They need help.’
‘There’s two choppers full of SEALs, Ricky. They can take care of themselves.’ As he spoke, he edged towards the door, ready to block Ricky’s exit.
‘Get out of the way, brudder.’ Ricky’s voice was level, but very quiet.
The air vibrated with the roar of the choppers on the ground nearby. The fly that had been buzzing around the stove landed on Ricky’s cheek. He didn’t seem to notice.
‘SOPs, mucker,’ Joe breathed. ‘The Yanks don’t want us in that compound.’
Joe was in front of the door now. Ricky stopped advancing.
Standoff.
Ricky scowled. ‘Fine,’ he said. He turned on his heel, walked back over to the observation post and laid his M4 back on the ground.
Joe joined him. He leaned down over the tripod and looked through the night sight again.
And that was when he saw him.
A man was running along the front wall of the compound. He was keeping close to it and was almost directly in front of the OP, about fifteen metres from their position, across the single-track road. The young couple, who were looking alarmed, were in front of him. He just skirted them, without appearing to acknowledge them, and continued along the wall, clearly uninterested in what they were up to. He was evidently intent on getting to the compound entrance, just twenty metres away.
Joe’s eyes were sharp, but it was difficult to make out his features exactly. He was dressed like a local, though – white dishdash, sandals – and he had round spectacles and a goatee.
‘Shit,’ Joe hissed.
‘What?’
But Joe was already speaking into his comms. ‘Jacko,’ he barked. ‘Is the Doctor home yet?’
‘Negative,’ Jacko replied tersely, his voice masked with distortion. ‘Why?’
‘I think we’ve found him,’ Joe replied. He was already moving towards the door.
‘You sure it’s him?’ Ricky demanded. ‘Where did he come from?’
Joe wasn’t sure. Maybe if he hadn’t been keeping Ricky on the straight and fucking narrow, he’d have seen the man arrive, got a better look. But whether it was the Doctor or not, if he was approaching the main entrance of the compound with the aim of reinforcing its occupants or helping them in any way, he had to be stopped.
They were at the top of the rickety set of wooden stairs, the stench of the ground-floor toilet wafting up towards them and no trace of their previous argument in their voices. They needed to get to ground level, because to fire from their OP would immediately give away its location. Seconds later they were hurtling towards the front door. Opening it, Joe stepped out into the darkness beyond, his M4 fully engaged. Ricky was with him.
Joe took in the situation at a glance. The Doctor – if it was the Doctor – was fifteen metres away, at Joe’s two o’clock. The courting couple had separated. The boy was edging away eastwards along the perimeter wall. Distance, twenty metres, eleven o’clock. He’d left the girl crouching on the ground, yelling her head off at the sight of two men with weapons. They were both in the wrong place at the wrong time: Joe and Ricky couldn’t let Romeo go off and alert anyone to their presence. Same went for Juliet.
‘Take them out,’ he instructed Ricky, and turned his attention back to the new arrival.
The guy was seventeen metres away now. Eighteen.
A single head shot would put him down, but Joe made the split-second decision to aim for the body. If this was the Doctor, they needed to identify him, and it was hard to identify a body with only half a head.
He fired. The suppressed M4 made a dull knocking noise and the man went down.
To his left he heard the discharge of Ricky’s weapon as he fired on Romeo.
Joe kept his own target in his sight, checking for movement. After five seconds, though, the girl was still screaming. He looked to the left. Ricky had his weapon pointed at Juliet, who was still crouched on the ground ten metres away, to their twelve o’clock. The red dot of his laser marker danced on her throat.
But Ricky didn’t fire. His hand was shaking again.
‘Fuck’s sake!’ Joe hissed. He turned his own weapon in the girl’s direction. The red dot from his gun joined Ricky’s.
One round. A flash of blood and the girl fell backwards.
There was no time for Joe to lay into Ricky for his moment of indecision. An explosion from inside the compound ripped through the air. Both men pressed themselves against the exterior wall of the house. Joe engaged his comms. ‘Zero,’ he shouted, ‘this is Sierra Foxtrot Five. What the hell’s going on in there?’
A crackle of interference, then a voice. ‘Entry team breaching the internal walls to reach target Geronimo. Hold the cordon. Repeat, hold the cordon.’
‘Roger that.’
Joe immediately consulted his mental map of the compound. It was triangular in shape. The main building, situated opposite the triangle’s apex, was connected to the main entrance gates by a pair of high interior walls that formed a thirty-metre-long, open-topped passageway. The Black Hawk had crashed in the western segment of the compound, where, intelligence reports suggested, the occupants burned their rubbish. The explosion must have been the SEALs breaking their way through the walls of the roofless corridor that led from the entrance gates – the same gates Joe’s target had been trying to reach. The man had fallen into a ditch along the bottom of the compound wall eighteen metres from Joe’s position and to his two o’clock. Joe needed to get over there, identify him and finish him off if necessary.
‘Cover me,’ he said.
Ricky nodded, dropped to one knee and pressed the butt of his M4 into his shoulder, ready to provide covering fire should Joe need it.
Joe ran. The distance between the house and the enemy wall was ten metres, but he had to run double that on the diagonal in a south-westerly direction to reach the man. He’d gone down barely a couple of metres from the security gates. He was clutching with one hand the wound Joe had inflicted on the side of his right leg. It was pissing blood through his fingers, and the man was shaking violently. Joe flicked on the Maglite attached to the body of his M4. It lit up the alarmed, sweating face of the wounded man, whose dishdash was soaked with blood.
Joe saw immediately that he was not the Doctor. He was about twenty years too young.
He was also feeling for a weapon with his spare hand.
He didn’t get very far.
The barrel of Joe’s cylindrical silencer was no more than six inches from the target’s head when he fired. The round made as much noise entering the man’s skull as it did leaving the weapon. Blood spattered over the pale rendered wall of the compound as the shooter slumped back into the ditch, his face no longer a face. But Joe’s attention was already elsewhere. There was a second explosion from inside the compound – louder than the first, or maybe Joe was just nearer. He turned to look at the main gates. He was standing just two metres from them. They were metal, about five metres high – the same height as the wall – and each a couple of metres wide. A thick roll of barbed wire covered the top. They hummed and vibrated on account of the mechanism inside.
And they were opening.
A figure emerged – just a shadow in the darkness.
SEAL or enemy? Impossible to tell, but if it was the second, they couldn’t be allowed to breach the cordon and fetch reinforcements.
Joe held his fire for a briefest of moments. The figure hurried out into the moonlight. It was a man. Tall. Thin. He wore a dirty white smock and his bearded face was full of wild, sweaty panic. He was clearly not an American, and he was clearly trying to escape. Which meant he was dead.
Joe fired once more. The suppressed round, hardly audible above the sound of the raid, entered the man’s right eye, blasting a chunk from that side of his head. He dropped immediately. As his body fell against it, the gate boomed like an oil drum and creaked open a few more inches.
Joe sensed movement over his shoulder. He turned quickly. A figure was approaching, halfway between his position and the observation house. He was only a fraction of a second short of dropping him when he realized it was Ricky. Joe cursed. What the fuck was wrong with him? Couldn’t he follow the simplest SOP – stay where he was and cover his mate?
Ricky had his personal weapon engaged and was alternating the direction of its aim – first one way along the track, then the other – with every step he took.
Joe no longer heard the roar of the choppers in the compound. He just saw Ricky, and now that he was only five metres away, he could see the sweat on his brow.
Ricky said nothing. He strode past Joe, stepped over the dead body and disappeared into the darkness beyond the partially open gate. Three seconds later the corpse slid into the compound as Ricky dragged him back inside. What the hell was he doing?
Joe felt the acrid taste of bile rising in the back of his throat. Ricky was about to fuck things up good and proper. He cursed under his breath and scanned the area. There was no sign of any movement along the road. Inside the compound, the air was filled with the roar of the choppers.
He had to make a decision. Ricky was alone in there. If one thing had been drilled into him from the very first minute of his very first selection weekend, it was this: never try to do anything by yourself. Either he was with his mate, or he was against him. Put like that, the decision was made for him.
Joe stepped over the threshold and pulled the gates shut. They closed with a rattling clang, then he became aware of the sounds of battle: the choppers turning and burning and the occasional burst of precise, targeted gunfire.
His first thought was for Ricky. Joe could make out his silent silhouette five metres ahead, weapon in the firing position as he hugged the left-hand wall. They were standing in the shadows, but he could just make out Ricky’s eyes as his mate looked at him over his shoulder.
They were in a corridor open to the sky, some three metres wide and lined by two five-metre-tall walls. Twenty metres ahead, Joe could see where the SEALs had blasted through these walls: there was a cloud of smoke and dust, illuminated by a beam from the right that he assumed emanated from the downed Black Hawk. Silhouetted figures passed from right to left, obscured by the dust. He counted six men. Seven. He saw the outline of a sniffer dog, then another two human forms. Nobody was heading towards them. They were moving swiftly into position from the LZ to the compound’s accommodation area.
The thunder of the Black Hawks’ rotors took on a different quality – a slightly higher pitch. The undamaged chopper was rising. Then it appeared above the right-hand wall, huge and threatening, and continued to rise until it was about fifteen metres in the air. Looking up, Joe could see that the Yanks had decided, now that everything had gone noisy, to use the helicopter as a weapons platform. He could see a door-gunner aiming a Minigun down into the compound, plus three other soldiers with their assault rifles pointing downwards. The guys in the Black Hawk showed no sign of being able to see him or Ricky. If he could just persuade his mate to get back to the entrance …
The dust was settling up ahead. Peering in the darkness, Joe could make out two piles of rubble, each a good couple of metres high, by the blast site. There were no longer any SEALs moving towards the house. He could hear evidence of their activity, though. There were screams: not the constant, bloodcurdling screams of a massacre, but the occasional shouts of women and children, obviously very frightened. And, punctuating the screams, the dull knock of suppressed weapons. Joe counted them. One. Two. Three. The clinical sound of individuals being deliberately picked off. There were more people screaming than being shot, which meant the SEALs were being selective. They knew who they were after. But even though the Yanks might not be greasing everyone, Joe knew exactly what he would do in their shoes if he unexpectedly came across two men as heavily armed as him and Ricky.
‘We’re surplus to fucking requirements, mucker,’ Joe whispered. ‘Let’s get the hell out …’
Ricky’s only response was to go on another five metres. He was halfway towards the rubble now, and still advancing. Joe ran after him.
A shout from the other side of the wall. An American voice, clearly a SEAL commander, instructing two of his men: ‘Guard the main entrance. No one enters, no one leaves.’
Joe froze.
He looked back towards the gate. Fifteen metres. To get there, re-open the gates and extract? Fifteen seconds. Too long. But the piles of rubble were only five metres away. The light shining from the choppers through the gap in the wall meant the vision of anyone passing through there would be compromised.
He could sense Ricky making the same calculations.
They sprinted towards the rubble. A rectangular block of concrete – about two metres long by a metre high and with a crack running its entire height – was resting at forty-five degrees against what remained of the left-hand wall, with other chunks of debris littered around it. Joe wormed his way into the gap, fully aware that Ricky, with his back against a metre-high boulder of concrete alongside the wall on the right, was less well hidden.
They’d found cover just in time.
Two SEALs ran from the courtyard into the corridor, heading for the security gates. Joe didn’t move. His mouth was filled with the dry taste of dust, and the sharp edge of the concrete was digging into his right arm. Through a foot-wide crack in the otherwise undamaged part of the wall, he could see into the central courtyard. It was about twenty metres by twenty. The main house – two storeys with a two-metre-high privacy wall around the first-floor balcony – showed no signs of occupation. The lights were off, the windows shut.
Joe counted six SEALs in the courtyard, the nearest of them about twelve metres away, kneeling down in the firing position, their we
apons trained on the house. They all had thick beards like his, and were wearing JPCs in the latest Crye Precision multicam. This was the same get-up Joe and Ricky would have been wearing if they hadn’t been in civvies, with the exception of the small Velcro patch on the Americans’ body armour bearing the stars and stripes insignia.
Lying on the ground, no more than four metres from Joe’s position, was a dead body, clearly an enemy combatant. He was wearing underpants and a vest, and had taken a round to the chest – the vest was dark and saturated. The corpse’s head was twisted so that it was looking almost directly at Joe.
A flash of phosphorescent light filled one of the windows, followed by a sharp crack.
Another scream, almost lost under the thunder of the choppers.
The retort of a rifle. It sounded like it came from the first floor of the house.
And, stuck in that cramped, uncomfortable space, barely daring to breathe and cursing his friend for getting them into this situation, Joe Mansfield couldn’t help wondering if that was the gunshot the world had been waiting for.
The White House Situation Room. 1510 hours EST.
‘What the hell’s happening?’
The National Security Adviser is the first to ask the question Todd sees on everyone’s face. The room has been silent for ten minutes, its occupants’ eyes fixed on the screen.
Only there’s nothing to see. Just darkness. The occasional shadow. Every minute or so, the picture crackles – a reminder that these images are being transmitted halfway around the world. It’s quiet as well as dark. The occasional shout, a barked instruction, the sharp rapping of a firearm. There’s no way the watchers can know whether this is American fire or enemy fire.
Todd senses movement behind him. He looks over his shoulder and sees Mason Delaney pull a silk handkerchief from his top pocket. He dabs a bead of perspiration from the area of his forehead just under his parting, before neatly replacing the handkerchief. When he sees that Todd has been watching him, he gives the photographer a little smile. ‘We should sell this footage on a DVD in Wal-Mart, Mr President,’ he announces in his piping voice. ‘Pay off the deficit.’ Delaney smiles. Nobody else does.