by Gary Haynes
A terrorist attack on an American general in Turkey sparks a worldwide manhunt for the most dangerous man alive – a jihadist called Ibrahim. For Special Agent Tom Dupree the race against time to stop the jihadist’s new and devastating plot against the US is not only a desire to protect the homeland, it’s also personal. But Ibrahim is planning an attack the likes of which has not be seen before, one that doesn’t use suicide bombers or conventional weapons.
The second in Gary Haynes’ ‘Tom Dupree’ series, State of Attack is a fast-paced, action-packed thrill ride across four continents. Mixing politics and espionage, State of Attack appears to be lifted from the pages of today’s news. Thrillers don’t get any more realistic or gripping than this.
Also by Gary Haynes
State of Honour
State of Attack
Gary Haynes
www.CarinaUK.com
GARY HAYNES
studied law at Warwick University and completed his postgraduate training at the College of Law. As a lawyer, he specializes in commercial dispute resolution. Outside of work, he is active on social media, comments upon Middle East politics and keeps fit at his local boxing gym. You can find him on Goodreads at https://www.goodreads.com/GaryHaynes
Writing is a lonely pastime, but to get a book into shape for publication, it becomes a collaborative process. I would like to thank Helen Williams at Harlequin for spotting my potential and for her encouragement and enthusiasm, and my excellent editors Dean Martin, Victoria Oundjian and Lucy Gilmour for their attention to detail and helpful suggestions.
For my three wonderful children, Charlie, Grace and Josh.
Contents
Cover
Blurb
Book List
Title Page
Author Bio
Acknowledgement
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Epilogue
Endpages
Copyright
Chapter 1
Western Syria
The dry air stank of the dead.
Basilios Nassar knew they would come soon, and when they did, many more would die. Perhaps all those who remained here would die, he thought.
Basilios was clean-shaven, with curly black hair cut tight to his head. He’d put on weight in the last few years, his muscle definition hidden by an extra layer of fat. He was squatting behind one of his Christian town’s hastily erected defences – a makeshift barricade made of burnt-out cars, sand-filled oil drums, charred beams and scorched wooden doors. It was strewn across the main access way, which was in truth little more than a truck-wide dirt track.
On his right stood a skinny old man, the baker, his face hollow and blood-caked. On the left, the young goat herder, dishevelled and trembling. The white sun burned their bare heads, and sweat stains peppered their dusty clothes.
A ground-based barrage of rockets had all but decimated the town. Houses had become burning shells, the heat so intense that it had singed the earth in parts. The mute animals, an assortment of dogs, sheep, chickens and donkeys, lay bloodied and savaged amid the desolate ruins, as if the town had morphed into an open-air slaughterhouse.
He and his fellow survivors had done their best for the dead. They’d wrapped the corpses in white sheets and had placed them in what little shade remained, beneath a blackened wall that abutted the cracked slabs of the small plaza. Hours before, the old women, plagued by flies, had held aloft sacred wooden icons and had wailed for their loss. Now it was 14.25, and the stench from the bloating bodies was overpowering.
Basilios’s brother and father had been badly injured during the airborne assault. Their twisted, pain-racked bodies were slumped against what was left of the outer sandstone wall of the Greek Orthodox church of Antioch, like grotesque effigies. He’d tried to put their suffering out of his mind, and in the past half an hour they’d calmed down a little. When they’d first become wounded, their screams had filled the air and his eyes had filled with tears. But he knew their injuries were fatal. Whether or not he’d join them in Heaven would be left to the will of God. He had some maiming and killing of his own to do.
Syrian Christians had lived in relative peace with their Muslim countrymen for decades. But everyone knew the men they faced were different. Basilios’s people called them Salafists, heavily-armed Sunni fanatics from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Pakistan; many other countries, too. There was even talk of red-bearded Chechens.
They’d already destroyed a Christian village to the north of Damascus, less than twenty miles away in Wadi al-Nasara, the so-called “Valley of the Christians”. Basilios’s town, close to the Lebanese border, was next on their list.
It would have been unforgiving odds even if the townsmen had been a trained force. For a bunch of farmers and artisans armed with a few ancient AK-47s, hunting rifles a
nd shotguns, together with a few US hand grenades that Basilios had bought off a Lebanese Christian, making a stand was suicidal. But the women and children, those who could still walk or crawl, were heading for the nearby hills, and the men and older boys had decided to give them the best chance of survival: a little more time.
In the eerie silence, Basilios sensed movement above. He glanced up and saw a flock of cranes flying south, their long necks outstretched. Even the birds are leaving, he thought.
Moments later he felt the goat herder tug at his sleeve before pointing ahead. Basilios peered through the intentional gap in the barricade, seeing the telltale plumes of sand dust in the distance. They are coming, he thought. They are coming now.
He did his best to stop his chest from heaving. The men and teenage boys around him were relying on him to be strong. He was the only professional fighter among them, having spent ten years in the Syrian army before returning home. Fingering his gold cross, given to him by his grandmother when he was a child, he calmed himself as best he could. He knew that if he freaked out, they’d be overrun in a few minutes.
With that, he heard the sound of fast-approaching vehicles. Thirty seconds later the loud cracks from a heavy machine gun sent those around him into a petrified inertia, as if they were desert leverets caught in headlamps.
He wiped the sweat from his brow. “No shooting until I say,” he said, his tone ostensibly controlled. It was all he could do to attempt to quell the rising sense of fear, as palpable now as the dust at his feet.
He brought up his AK-47 to chest level. It had an extra curved magazine, affixed with black masking tape, jutting down a couple of inches from the one wedged into the well. The gas-operated assault rifle could pump out forty rounds a minute in semi mode, and over double that on fully auto. But he reckoned they would be up against at least fifty fighters. He checked the AK’s magazine before jabbing it back into the well, and clipped the gun’s short sling to his webbed belt.
Letting the weapon hang down, he shoved his hand into a cargo pocket. Pulling out an M67 fragmentation grenade, he held the spherical steel to his blistered lips. He willed it to detonate with devastating effect, rather than make a dull phut as much of the cheap ordnance he had used in his army days had done. His thoughts were focussed on killing his enemies; only that.
Hearing the trucks’ roaring engines clearly now, he gritted his teeth and gestured to the others to raise their assortment of weapons. Six ounces of composition B explosives, he thought, capable of causing casualties within a range of fifteen yards. Due to its weight, he could throw it three times that distance, which meant that he might be able to take out at least half of the men in the first truck before they had a chance to disembark. If they managed to evade the blast, he knew it would be over quickly.
He guessed the Salafists were Jabhat al-Nusra Front rebels, or terrorists from the Islamic State group, formerly known as ISIS, the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which referred to a desired caliphate from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean to southern Turkey. The latter had joined forces with al-Qaeda, although after their rampant brutality, even that organization had disowned them.
They were well-equipped with M60 recoilless assault rifles and M79 Osa anti-tank rocket launchers procured from Croatia, as well as tanks and Humvees left behind by the retreating Iraqi army. But these weapons, state-of-the-art as they were, had been almost useless against the Syrian army’s cluster and barrel bombs. That had brought about a stalemate in the Syrian civil war, but a stalemate that had turned ninety per cent of the country into an anarchic killing field.
Not that they’d be dropping out of the cloudless sky to shatter the Salafists’ bones anytime soon. Basilios knew the nearest detachment of President Bashar al-Assad’s defenders was miles away. Truth was, he didn’t trust them either, especially after they’d teamed up with Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon and Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Like their Sunni enemies in this sectarian civil war, Shia Muslims weren’t exactly fond of Middle East Christians. As for the politically-motivated Free Syrian Army, they were busy fighting against Assad’s men in the far north and the jihadists in the south. Syria was a maelstrom of violence, and he was resigned to his fate.
Peering through the gap in the barrier, he saw the lead truck entering the decimated narrow street, the heavy Browning .50 cal M2 machine gun mounted on the deck randomly spitting out high-calibre rounds at a rate of over five hundred per minute.
Within a few seconds one of the bullets hit the goat herder in the neck as it passed through a paint tin with the ease of a fine blade through gossamer. The boy fell instantly, blood oozing out of the entry wound as he twitched in the dirt. The old baker bent down to the boy, cradling the floppy head. Basilios watched as the boy’s eyes bulged and watered like those of a stranded catfish. But as the old man started to pray in Aramaic, their mother tongue and the ancient language of Christ, he knew it was a shot to the carotid artery and was lethal.
Feeling wretched, Basilios spread his feet and held the grenade in his abdomen. He removed the safety clip and placed his left index finger in the grenade’s pin. Keeping a firm grasp on both the grenade proper and the safety lever, he pulled the bent pin, straightening the soft metal as it was released.
He jumped up and heaved it towards the truck. Bobbing back down, he jerked up the AK that was hanging over his thigh and, peering through the gap in the barrier again, braced himself. He hoped the searing fragments from the grenade would pierce organs, shred muscle and sever arteries, that his enemies’ bodies would resemble the wreckage about him.
The grenade exploded in a bright orange-white flash, the sound oddly muted. But the shrieks that followed soon afterwards could have woken a coma patient.
Once he’d recovered from the disorientating effects of the shockwave, Basilios motioned to his comrades to stay low, and ensured they’d clicked off the safeties on their weapons. Then he scaled the haphazard wall, his movements so frenzied that he gashed his leg on the edge of an iron girder, and sucked up air like a sprint swimmer. He reached the top in less than three seconds, using a couple of wedged-in planks of wood that he’d positioned when the barricade had been built.
Ignoring the searing pain, he dropped down onto the hard-packed dirt on the other side of the barrier and launched himself at the paralyzed truck, firing from the hip in automatic mode. Slaloming to avoid the cratered earth, jagged masonry and smouldering timbers, he felt no fear. He felt nothing, in fact, but a crazed desire to kill.
Chapter 2
A mackerel sky is a harbinger of a storm, Tom Dupree’s long-dead mother used to say when he was a kid. As he turned his gaze back to the redbrick facade of a high-end shoe store on M Street, Georgetown, Washington, DC, he just hoped it would be confined to a change in the weather. He was wearing a charcoal-grey, loose-fitting suit, a matching silk tie and aviator shades. It was early morning, seven hours behind Syrian time, the half-hidden sun appearing to linger above the outskirts of the great cityscape.
Georgetown was an historic neighbourhood situated in the north-west of the capital along the banks of the Potomac. The street was clear of the majority of commuters and tourists who’d clog it up in an hour’s time. Tom was standing on the sidewalk after exiting an adapted black SUV.
He pushed his clear earpiece in a little deeper with his left forefinger and spoke briefly to his team via his push-to-talk, or PTT, radio. Adjusting his plastic hip holster, which held his standard-issue SIG Sauer P229 handgun, with his right hand, he felt edgy. He always felt edgy protecting the offspring of a foreign dignitary in DC, but today’s charge was special, at least as far as the suits on Capitol Hill were concerned.
The Russian president’s daughter stepped from an up-armoured stretched limo parked five yards away with the gracefulness of a ballerina, her slim legs sheathed in silk pantyhose. The Russians had brought their own cars, flown in on Tupolev Tu-330 transport planes. The cars had dual foot-pedal controls, just in case the driver
had a heart attack or got hit in the head by a high-velocity projectile from an anti-material rifle. The hoods were reinforced for ramming, the tyres of the run-flat variety. They always had at least three with blacked-out, bulletproof glass, the other two acting as decoys.
But despite the impressiveness of the vehicles, it was the president’s daughter who caught everyone’s eye. Before Tom had seen her photo, one of his team had said that she was hotter than the Mojave Desert come midsummer. He’d told him to hush his mouth and show a little respect. But he hadn’t lied, he thought.
She walked like she knew it, too. Hips swinging, her mouth a half-petulant, half-seductive pout, as the handles of her Gucci bag rested in the V of her slender arm. The three Russian agents, who Tom took for Presidential Security Service men, or maybe FSB, the successor organization to the KGB, walked around her in a triangular formation.
They were bulky, with close-cropped hair, like Tom’s buzz cut; their faces as hard and expressionless as concrete busts. Despite his normal rising sense of paranoia in such circumstances, Tom could think of a lot worse assignments than helping to guard Pouter, as she’d been nicknamed by one of his protective detail. He’d let that one pass, but only when they weren’t in radio contact. The DS command centre had given her the pro-name the Fabergé, a form of codename, and that was just too damn clumsy.
His Bureau of Diplomatic Security team – four men and two women – flashed their blue-and-gold badges to the few rather bemused-looking pedestrians on the sidewalk before cordoning it off with their outstretched arms. There was no need for PD tape here, although a couple of counter snipers from the Support Unit of the Uniformed Division of the Secret Service were on the flat roof of a three-storey brownstone row house opposite. A few million bucks’ worth of realty, for sure, Tom thought. Two more armed agents in black fatigues were positioned at the back of the store, and two more in front. There was an emergency response team sitting in two SUVs a hundred yards away, monitoring the scene on secure laptops. The president’s daughter was in a multi-layered security bubble; one that would take a platoon of hardened US Marines to burst through, and Tom reckoned she knew this, too.