by Chris Ryan
‘Bad news for you if we are, boss,’ Tony muttered.
Danny ignored the comment, but he couldn’t help remembering what Hammond had said about this being his last chance.
‘We need to get out of our civvies,’ Ripley said. ‘We’re getting too far into the interior. These clothes are no good if we need to camouflage ourselves.’
Danny nodded. ‘When we can,’ he said. ‘But we’re entering enemy territory now. When the rain stops, we’re vulnerable. The kid said that Boko Haram militants stopped them in the road and did that to her father. We can expect another road block up ahead.’
‘And if those bastards have got a taste for cutting things off,’ Ripley said, ‘we want to get to them before they go to work on the hostages . . .’
Not even Tony had an argument with that.
Eyes forward. Senses on high alert. They started to eat up the miles once again.
SIX
As they continued north, the terrain on either side of the rough road became more jungle-like. Ripley was right: they were going to need their Crye Precision camouflage gear. At 08.00, they took advantage of a break in the rain to change. Danny was the first to strip quickly out of his wet civvies, shielded by the Range Rover, while the other three formed a defensive semicircle, their weapons engaged. He fitted his kevlar helmet, along with his boom mike and earpiece. There was no hiding the fact that they were soldiers now.
Once he was changed, he swapped positions with Ripley, keeping stag on the road to the north while his mate changed clothes. He could only see about twenty metres ahead before the road curved out of sight. The sun was burning through the clouds and the whole area seemed to hiss as the water evaporated from the verdant terrain.
As he scanned the area, something caught his eye. He had to squint to persuade himself that his eyes weren’t playing tricks. They weren’t. Nailed to a roadside tree, just ten metres away, was a human hand, palm outwards, fingers pointing up. ‘Looks like we found where our road block was,’ he said, pointing at it.
‘Fucking animals,’ Ripley said.
‘They might still be here,’ Tony said, his voice suddenly tense.
‘I don’t think so. That’s a warning. Somebody doesn’t want people heading north.’
Tony was the next to change – quicker than Danny and Ripley had been – and finally Caitlin. As she changed, Danny’s eyes flickered towards the vehicle’s side mirror. He caught sight of her grey base layer, tightly enclosing the curve of her breasts. She suddenly caught his glance in the mirror, and smiled. Danny looked away. He noticed Tony watching him. The men’s eyes met. ‘She was married to a black dude, fella,’ Tony murmured. ‘Won’t be interested in what you’re packing.’
Danny let it pass.
Time check: 08.10. Fifty minutes till the revised ETA of Target Red and Target Blue in Chikunda. Danny reckoned the unit was still four hours out. No time to waste. They dumped their wet civvies in a pile by the side of the road.
‘I’ll take the wheel,’ he told Caitlin. She nodded.
At 09.00 they passed through a rough village. Broad swathes of brutal deforestation marked the outskirts. The interior was a shit sandwich without the bread. Breeze-block buildings on either side of the road had fallen into disrepair, and the only vehicles they saw had rusty side panels and missing tyres. It was strangely deserted, too. No kids or pedestrians. Always a bad sign. Just a few curious locals peering from doorways, but not bold enough to step out into the street. On the right-hand side, Danny saw a woman sitting at the threshold of her poor-looking residence. Both eyes were covered with dirty cotton swabs, slightly bloodstained. Even though she couldn’t see, her gaze followed the sound of the Range Rover as it passed.
Danny kept his foot on the pedal. Every second that passed was borrowed time. Their vehicle splashed through puddles and sprayed dirt across the road as it cut through the village. As they left the last building behind, he looked in the rear-view mirror. Perhaps thirty metres behind them, a solitary figure stood in the middle of the road. Danny thought he could make out the shape of a rifle slung across his chest, and he seemed to be holding something to his ear. A phone, maybe.
Eyes back on the road.
At 10.00 hrs they stopped to refuel. By now, the heat and the humidity were immense. Danny felt wetter than he had been after his impromptu swim. The Range Rover was caked in mud and dust, and so were its occupants. Over the next hour, the jungle terrain thinned out a little, but it was still forested on either side as the Range Rover mounted the brow of a hill.
To the north-west, perhaps two kilometres in the distance, a plume of black smoke rose from the centre of a small settlement. Once they’d passed the brow of a hill and no longer made an obvious target, Danny allowed himself to hit the brakes. It was worth sacrificing a minute’s travelling time to get some decent reconnaissance. He jumped out of the car and retrieved a spotting scope from his pack. He focused in on the settlement. He couldn’t make out much – a single road leading away to the east, and three guys on motorbikes heading out that way.
‘Boko Haram?’ Ripley asked.
Danny couldn’t tell for sure, but it seemed likely.
‘I reckon we’re forty-five minutes out of Chikunda,’ Caitlin said. ‘If it’s a Boko Haram stronghold, we’re going to hit resistance sooner or later.’
‘Which will hold us up,’ Ripley said tersely.
‘We can only play what’s in front of us,’ Danny said. But Ripley was right. Every minute they delayed was a minute in which the kidnappers could execute their targets.
As the road continued, the vegetation on either side grew higher. Easy to hide in, but it meant that their vision ahead was compromised every time there was a bend in the road. Ten minutes after they’d started up again, the road curved and they were suddenly faced with another road block. Four men. Like the Nigerian soldiers at the previous block, they wore camouflage gear. But even from fifty metres away, Danny could tell that these were not soldiers. Their heads were wrapped in black and white shamaghs, and they wore bandoliers of ammo around their torsos like medals of honour. The universal uniform of the guerrilla fighter. Four motorbikes lay on their side next to the road. Three of the men carried assault rifles. A fourth was clutching an RPG launcher, though it wasn’t aimed at the Range Rover, yet.
Danny slowed to a crawl. ‘Tell me you’re not going to try to pay your way through this one,’ Tony said.
Not a chance. These weren’t corrupt, lazy soldiers on the take. These were militants with heavy weapons, just looking for a chance to use them. At least, that was Danny’s instinct. They needed to get through as quickly as possible. But if these men raised the alarm, they would be behind enemy lines with the potential for thousands of Boko Haram militants tracking them down. Which meant they really only had one option.
He said a single word: ‘Contact.’
Tony, Ripley and Caitlin removed their side arms from their holsters, checked they all had one up the spout, and laid them carefully in their laps.
The Range Rover edged forward. Danny half wondered if these were the same people who had cut off the hand of the villager they’d met. Probably not – the Nigerian family could never have travelled that distance on foot. But he didn’t doubt that these militants were cut from the same cloth. They deserved what was coming to them.
Distance to the road block: twenty metres. One of the militants stepped forward. He held up one hand to make a stop sign. In the other he held his rifle, inexpertly, but aiming in their general direction. He’d never be able to fire accurately like that, but a spray burst could be as dangerous as a well-aimed one. Danny hit the brake.
He wound down his window. The others did the same.
The militant had an arrogant swagger as he walked towards the car. Danny saw that he was wearing a necklace threaded with the teeth of wild animals. When he was ten metres away, Danny could see his bloodshot eyes through the gap in his shamagh.
He gripped his handgun firmly.
‘Ripley,’ he breathed, ‘take the RPG. Caitlin, go left. Tony, right.’
No arguments.
The militant drew up alongside the car. He rapped one hand on the top of the vehicle wing, then bent over to look through the open window. Danny caught the musty smell of his shamagh, and the rank stench of several days’ unwashed sweat.
He didn’t even wait for the militant to speak. He just raised his Sig and fired a single shot into the rough cloth covering his face.
The shamagh absorbed any spatter. The militant hit the ground in a millisecond. At the same time, Caitlin, Ripley and Tony swung their doors open. Danny heard shouting from the remaining three militants: a moment of confusion that bought the unit the fraction of a second they needed to do their work.
Three rounds was all it took. The guy with the RPG was raising it to his shoulder as the unit discharged their weapons practically in unison. The three remaining militants collapsed in a silent heap, and the grenade launcher crashed uselessly to the ground.
Danny had to shove his door hard to open it, because it was lodged in by the body of the guy he’d shot. Once he was out, he discharged a second round into the corpse’s head, just to be sure. Tony and Ripley had grabbed their rifles and were panning round the area, checking for threats.
Caitlin and Danny ran up to the remaining three corpses and delivered three more safety shots. The bodies juddered slightly as the rounds entered, but then remained still, blood pooling all around them.
A harsh crackling sound. On the side of the road, just by the four motorbikes, Danny saw a battery-powered radio pack. A voice came through, speaking a language he didn’t recognise. He and Caitlin exchanged a look. ‘Someone’s going to come looking for these stiffs,’ Caitlin said. ‘Do we hide the bodies?’
‘No point,’ Danny said tersely. ‘If someone’s searching for them, they’ll know they’re missing whether they find the bodies or not.’ He pointed to the radio. ‘Sounds to me like they’ll come looking any second. We need to get off this road as quickly as possible.’
They sprinted back to the Range Rover. By the time they reached it, Tony and Ripley were already in the back. ‘We’ll drive for another ten minutes,’ he announced. ‘Then we’ll hide the car and continue on foot.’
‘We should ditch the car right now,’ Tony said. His voice was tense. ‘Hide it in the roadside vegetation. Make a covert approach on foot from a distance.’
Danny considered it for a moment. Time wasn’t on their side. They needed to advance to target as quickly as possible. God knows what was happening to the hostages right now. The longer they could stay with their vehicle, the better. He estimated Chikunda was approximately twenty-five minutes away. If Boko Haram were to dispatch guys immediately from there, ten minutes would give the unit a decent buffer to get off the road.
‘We drive for ten,’ Danny said.
‘You’re going to get us fucking killed,’ Tony scowled.
‘Keep your mouth shut,’ Ripley said.
Danny ignored the tension in the back as he turned the engine over and hit the gas. The wheels bumped heavily over the bodies in the road as he pushed the Range Rover as hard as it would go.
They passed through a couple of klicks of desolate terrain, where the trees in the forested area on either side of the road had either been cut down or burned, leaving stumps or black, charred patches of earth. Occasionally they passed single-storey buildings – one of concrete, others of mud and corrugated iron. They were all dilapidated and destroyed, all uninhabited. It was as if a tornado of destruction had whipped its way through the terrain. They saw nobody.
The sky was blue. The sun fierce. There was no longer any sign in the surrounding terrain of the rainstorm that had caused them so much trouble. On the contrary, Danny’s eyes hurt from the glare as, three klicks on, the forested area on either side of the rough road returned.
‘That’s ten minutes,’ Tony stated. ‘Get off the fucking road.’
Danny pushed it for another thirty seconds.
They came to a solitary concrete structure embedded among the trees on the left-hand side, half covered with creeping vegetation. Perhaps it had once been a barn. Whatever, it was about five times the length of the Range Rover. The roof was partially collapsed, and a section of wall had buckled inwards. But it offered a hiding place for the vehicle. Danny yanked the steering wheel sharp left. They trundled heavily off-road and up to the barn. Ripley jumped out and quickly opened a set of rickety wooden doors. Danny drove inside.
There was only just enough room, because a pile of rubble had fallen into the centre of the barn, stopping them from moving any further forward. Several shards of sunlight pierced the broken roof. They illuminated nothing but dusty earth and broken blocks of concrete.
Danny killed the engine. The unit de-bussed.
‘Quiet,’ Ripley hissed.
The unit halted by the vehicle, stock still. There was a buzzing sound in the distance, growing louder. Twenty seconds later came the unmistakeable sound of motorbikes speeding past the barn. Fifty cc, Danny reckoned from the tinny sound of the engines. He counted five of them. As the engine noise died away, the unit edged towards the entrance of the barn – just in time to see the final motorcyclist before he disappeared over the brow of a hill, seventy-five metres away. He had a rifle slung over his back.
‘That was too . . . fucking . . . close . . .’ Tony said. He turned to Danny. ‘You’ve got a death wish, pal. No wonder your mate Spud came back looking like Stephen fucking Hawking.’
Something snapped in Danny’s head. He felt himself ready to burst with anger, to go for Tony, put him down. But then he remembered something his unit companion had said back in Hereford. You’ve probably heard a few rumours about old Danny . . . Bit of a short fuse, mind. Flies off the handle now and then. Not the best combo for a man with a 9-milly in his back pocket, but there we have it . . .
He got a hold of his temper and went to grab his pack from the boot of the car.
‘What now?’ Ripley asked.
Danny withdrew the black-and-white satellite map of Chikunda that the military attaché had supplied back in Lagos and laid it open on the bonnet of the Range Rover. The attaché had been as good as his word: a legend at the bottom of the map told them it had only been taken three days ago. And it showed, very clearly, the signs of war.
Chikunda was a small place, less than a kilometre end to end, surrounded by forest. A single main road ran through its centre. To the north-west, the terrain was much darker – almost black. He circled it with his forefinger. ‘There’s been a fire here,’ he said. ‘Or lots of fires. You can still see the smoke rising there.’
Ripley pointed out a few remnants of rectangular shapes in this north-western area. ‘Buildings,’ he said. ‘Or what’s left of them. Like your man back in Lagos said, they’ve burned most of the village down.’
‘And killed most of the locals, no doubt,’ Caitlin said.
There are bad things that way . . .
Danny turned his attention to the eastern side of the main road. Here the terrain was more intact. There was a large open area, surrounded by three rectangular buildings, each set at the vertex of a triangle and facing in towards each other. A quick look at the scale told Danny they were each about twenty-five metres long, and about half as deep. Thirty metres to the north of them, still on the eastern side of the road, was a walled-off compound containing three circular huts.
He pointed to the northernmost of the three rectangular buildings. ‘Block North,’ he said. Then he labelled the building nearest the road and roughly south-west of the central open ground ‘Block West’, and the third building, furthest from the road and closest to the vegetation on the eastern side of the village, ‘Block East’.‘I think we can expect a concentration of militants at these blocks North, West and East,’ Danny said. ‘The enclosed space to the north, the one with the circular huts, is defensible, but there doesn’t appear to be any escape route. I don’t think they’d
enclose themselves there. Everyone agreed?’
There was a consenting murmur.
Ripley examined the smaller-scale map, his forefinger tracing the contour lines around Chikunda. ‘According to this map, there’s high ground to the south-east,’ he said. ‘We can get a visual from there.’
Danny nodded. ‘We’ll approach from the eastern side of the road,’ he said. He checked his watch. 10.35 hrs. If the hostages had been taken to Chikunda, he reckoned they would have been in situ for ninety minutes already. They needed to get moving.
‘Order of march: Ripley, me, Caitlin, Tony,’ Danny said. ‘We’ll follow the road line as closely as possible. Hit the ground if anyone passes.’
They each sprinted across the road separately, three of them covering whoever was running. Once they’d reached the eastern side, they picked their way about fifteen feet past the road, then headed north in patrol formation, keeping parallel to the road with a distance of about ten feet between them. The vegetation on either side of the road was fairly thick where the wooded area had been cut into and sunlight allowed to hit the ground. It was more than a metre high in places, and offered good camouflage.
They moved with full pack and weapons. The heat was intense. They’d have sweated heavily even if they hadn’t been laden down and in full camo gear. There were times, back in Hereford, when every member of the Regiment bitched about being beasted up and down the Brecon Beacons. And there were times, in the field, when you were glad of your fitness. This was one of those times. None of the unit faltered as they moved quickly through the vegetation, their footfall silent, their breath slow and measured. The only noise they made was the gentle shake of vegetation as they passed through it. When, five minutes into their forced march, Ripley hissed ‘Down’, they all hit the ground in unison. With his face pressed hard against some tough, reedy plant, Danny heard the regular pounding of his own heart, and then the distant sound of the motorbikes returning from the south. The noise made a sharp crescendo as they buzzed quickly past, then disappeared as the motorbikes sped north, back towards Chikunda. There was no point stating it out loud: they would have found the dead bodies at the road block. They would know something was up, even if they didn’t know exactly what. And they would suspect that someone was coming. The unit had definitely lost any element of surprise.