Hellfire

by Chris Ryan

  He closed his eyes. In his mind he saw a faceless terrorist preparing for an attack on London, knowing he was impossible to find. Danny shoved away the negative thoughts. There was no place for them. He needed to focus on finding his man.

  And he needed to forget that it was a billion-to-one shot.

  His name was James Bailey, but he preferred to be called by just his surname.

  He had a shaved head, a sleek, thin nose and a protruding Adam’s apple. He lived alone in a comfortable house – two bedrooms and a garage – on the south side of St Albans. He liked it here. The countryside was just a five-minute drive away, but he could get into London when he needed to, as he often did. At first glance, there was very little to distinguish his house from any other. In the front room where he now stood there was a slightly tatty three-piece suite, an Ikea rug on the floor and an Ikea coffee table in front of the electric fire, which had both bars on. An old, out-of-tune upright piano that the previous occupants of the house had left here, and which Bailey had never bothered to get rid of. A laptop sat on top of the piano. On the wall was a black and white picture of the Eiffel Tower, and next to the flat-screen Samsung TV was an ageing CD player, with a Cat Stevens CD box open on top of it.

  There were two sets of unusual objects in the room. The first was the camera equipment. It was piled in one corner by the front door that led directly out on to the street. A steadicam rig was packed up in a set of flight cases. A couple of tripods were leaning up against them. On top, open, were two smaller cases – one of lenses, the other of gels. There was a light meter, and of course a camera – a Canon 7d DSLR. A sturdy, well-worn North Face jacket was draped next to it.

  The second unusual object was the prayer mat. It was neatly rolled up and wrapped in a cotton drawstring bag to protect it from becoming unclean.

  Bailey was preparing for his second prayer of the day. He had not taken any food or drink since dawn, but had carefully washed and dried his hands several times. He did so again now, before moving directly from his bathroom to the front room, where the thick curtains were still shut, the morning light peeping in around the edges. He carefully removed the prayer mat from its drawstring bag, and rolled it out on the ground, facing east. He knelt reverently, then bowed his head to the floor with his arms stretched out in front of him.

  He prayed. He spoke the takbir in little more than a murmur, and his voice didn’t get any louder as he performed the rackat and recited the Quran, before finishing with the takbir once more.

  When his prayer was over, he rolled up the prayer mat again and replaced it in the cotton bag. Then he picked up his laptop, sat down in his favourite armchair, and opened up the computer.

  The folder to which he navigated contained five quicktime files. He hovered the mouse over them, before selecting the third file on the list. He double-clicked and the video appeared in a window that filled half the screen. Too big. The image was massively pixellated. He reduced the window to the size of a matchbox – much better – then pressed ‘play’.

  A white room. Five masked men. A sixth man, Western – he didn’t look much different from Bailey himself – kneeling down with his ankles and wrists trussed. The picture jumped to scenes of the same man talking about his family in a slurred voice, how much he loved them, missed them and was looking forward to seeing them again. Then back to the white room. One of the masked men started reciting something in Arabic – Bailey didn’t know what it meant, but he liked hearing it anyway.

  A pause. The masked man made a shout of Allahu Akbar, then he and his companion rushed towards the trussed man, forced him face down on to the ground and pinned him to the floor. The hostage was weirdly silent – drugged, Bailey assumed, to make him more compliant. One of the masked men had a short hand saw, with deep, jagged teeth. He went to work immediately on the back of their victim’s neck.

  Suddenly there were screams from the hostage, but they stopped as soon as the spine was sliced. Bailey counted the thrusts: one, two, three, four, five swipes. The blade was halfway through his neck before the twitching stopped. He had read somewhere that the brain of a decapitated man remains conscious for fifteen seconds while it burns off its remaining oxygen. He found himself counting to fifteen as the masked men completed their grisly work, before holding up the severed head by its hair for the camera, blood slicking from the body that still lay on the ground.

  The video stopped. Bailey played it again. Of the five quicktimes, this was the most graphic. He watched it repeatedly after prayers every day, to desensitise himself to what was to come. And as he watched it this morning, he felt his eyes wandering occasionally over to his own camera equipment, piled up in the corner of the room.

  A knock on the door. Bailey started and quickly slammed down the lid of his laptop.

  He kept very still, barely daring to breathe, staring over at the front door.

  Who was it?

  Silence.

  A clattering sound. The person at the door was pushing something through the letterbox. A magazine. He saw the name ‘Watchtower’ on the front. Jehovah’s Witnesses. He felt himself frown.

  After five seconds, he heard footsteps walking away. A bead of anxious sweat was trickling down the side of his face. He stood up gingerly and laid the laptop on the coffee table. He stood for a moment in the front room, anxiously wondering how to fill his time. Then he moved through the house into the kitchen. There was a locked door at the far end that led into the garage. There was only one key to that door in existence. Bailey now removed it from his pocket, unlocked the door and stepped into the dark, chilly garage.

  There was an old white van in here. It had been reversed in, and its nose was very close up against the garage door to make room for what was behind it. Two metallic canisters, each about a metre high and half a metre in diameter. They looked a bit like beer barrels, Bailey thought, but it would be a bad move to take a sip from their contents. On the side of the barrels was some Chinese lettering. He had no idea what it said, but it was identical on both.

  Bailey stared at them for a good long while. Then he turned his back on the garage, returned to the kitchen and started to fix himself some coffee and a late breakfast. No bacon, of course, but eggs, toast and tomatoes.

  It wouldn’t be long now. James Bailey really needed to keep his strength up.

  Midday

  The pub in which Spud found himself was a bleak, spit-and-sawdust establishment. The kind of place a man goes to drink, not to socialise. There were no women among the few punters. Just old guys, their faces raddled and reddened from years of daytime drinking. Thrash metal played softly over the pub loudspeakers, and the only brightness inside the dim interior came from the flashing of a fruit machine in one corner. The floor was sticky to walk on, and the air smelled stale.

  The barman had a shaved head and tattoos, and as Spud approached he looked at him like he was a piece of shit. Spud didn’t care. He sat on a stool, plonked his bike helmet on the bar and pointed at the Carling tap. ‘Pint,’ he said.

  The barman wordlessly poured the drink. Spud fished around in his pocket for a ten-pound note. As he passed it over to the surly barman, he noticed that his hand was trembling. He stared at it, trying – unsuccessfully – to control the shaking. Only when he noticed that the barman had grabbed the note from his grasp did he clench his fist and put it down out of sight. When the barman plonked his change back on the counter, Spud left it there. He’d be needing it in a minute.

  He took hold of his pint. His trembling hand spilled a little as he brought it up to his lips and drank deeply.

  Danny slept over Nigeria and Chad. A troubled sleep, filled with visions of plague-ridden bodies. He woke as the sun followed them east over the arid plains of Sudan. He stared out over that war-torn country, which just looked like featureless desert from this height. In Danny’s line of work, there was always something safe about being in the air. Out of reach.

  But then he thought about flight BA33489. The uncomfortable trut
h was this: nowhere was safe any more.

  The sun turned blood-red as they saw the Red Sea, and the sky deepened in colour as they travelled over Saudi Arabia, with the burning torches of the oil fields glowing constantly below them. As the 737 began to lose height over the UAE, dusk was upon them. Danny caught glimpses of the impressive, metropolitan lights of Dubai glowing in the distance, a beacon of extreme wealth in the desert, the Burj Khalifa sprouting up, higher than any other building in the world, from its centre. The sight of this desert city made Danny’s pulse race. He wasn’t fooled by its glowing swimming pools and high-rise hotels, by its extravagance or its desperate attempt to look modern and Western. He knew that the money required to keep bastards like Isis and Boko Haram in business came directly from oil-rich cities like this. From the businessmen who paid lip service to the West in public, and funded its downfall in private. There were guerrillas and militants along this coast just as surely as there were in Chikunda. They just wore finer clothes, and got other people to do their killing for them.

  Wheels down 21.05 Arabic Standard Time. Their connecting flight to Bahrain was already on the tarmac when they landed, and their one-hour window was soon eaten up at passport control. At 22.10 AST they were in the air again. But as they walked out on to the tarmac at Bahrain International Airport at 23.35 hrs, their short stint as ordinary civvies came to an end. A military vehicle was waiting for them by the steps. Ignoring the curious looks from the other passengers, Danny, Tony, Caitlin and Buckingham, accompanied by a young British army soldier with bad acne, got into the vehicle. They were out of the airport in a couple of minutes, and hurtling down a broad motorway.

  ‘Mina Salman Port.’ Buckingham broke the silence in the car with his maddeningly smug voice.

  ‘What about it?’ Tony said.

  ‘It’s where we’re headed. The British government is setting up a permanent military base here. Protests from the bloody lefties, of course, but what they don’t understand is . . .’ His voice trailed off as he realised that Danny, Tony and Caitlin were looking out of their windows, not listening.

  It took twenty minutes to reach the military base. The warm air smelled strongly of the sea, and Danny heard the distinctive sound of a ship’s horn, though he couldn’t yet see the water or the vessel itself. Their driver handed a plastic ID card to the uniformed guard at the gate, who waved them through a checkpoint in the three-metre-high wire boundary fence. They drove immediately to a large hangar, about five hundred metres from the boundary line. It stood on its own, fifty metres from any other building or vehicle – a sure sign that this was the area of the base reserved for SF operations. The green army guys would know to keep their distance unless they’d received a specific instruction to the contrary.

  They alighted bang on midnight. Danny was instantly aware of the familiar bustle of a forward mounting base. A chopper flew overhead. In the distance, he saw the headlamps of a number of vehicles driving round the base. Piercingly bright floodlights illuminated a hotchpotch of hangars, Portakabins and signalling aerials. A second helicopter was sitting on an LZ thirty metres to the left of the hangar, a refuelling truck right next to it. Another three military trucks were parked up outside the hangar, the entrance to which was guarded by two green army guys in camo gear and carrying standard-issue L86s. As the team slammed their doors shut, another guy exited the hangar and strode directly up to them.

  ‘Major Anderson,’ he introduced himself.

  Buckingham pushed his way to the front of the group. ‘Hugo Buckingham.’ He held out his hand. ‘Bloody good to meet you.’

  Anderson glanced at the outstretched hand. ‘This way,’ he said.

  He led them into the hangar. It was fifty metres long, thirty metres wide. Halfway down, and to the left-hand side, was another grey Portakabin. Its windows were blacked out, and several wires crossed the hangar floor and led into the Portakabin – internet and secure comms connections. At the far end, eight men congregated around a TV screen holding polystyrene coffee cups.

  ‘SBS?’ Danny asked, nodding towards the unit.

  Anderson nodded. ‘They’re on standby. I’ll introduce you in a minute. First I’ll run through your itinerary.’ His voice was slightly drowned out by the scream of an aircraft taking off somewhere on the base. He led them up to the Portakabin and unlocked it with one of several keys on a small keychain. There were three more guys sitting inside, laptops in front of them, cans and boom mikes on their heads. The walls were covered in maps of the area, and there was a briefing table at one end. An A4-sized black and white photograph was lying loose on this table. Anderson handed it to Danny. It showed a man in his fifties, streaks of white hair at his temples, a strong jawline and a nose that had obviously been broken in a couple of places.

  ‘His name’s Jimmy Morgan. Ex-Regiment, currently chief training officer for the Qatari special forces. But he’s also double-dipping for the UK government. He’ll RV with you at your dropping-off area on the Qatari coast and get you into Doha.’

  Clipped to the photograph was a separate sheet containing certain items of personal information relating to their man. Danny committed them to memory as he asked, ‘Does he know who we are?’

  Anderson shook his head. ‘He’s just expecting four guys . . .’ He glanced at Caitlin. ‘. . . I mean, four personnel, at 02.30 hrs. His instructions are to transport you to an RV with . . .’ He checked some notes written on another piece of paper on the table, ‘with Ahmed bin Ali al-Essa. London have confirmed that Al-Essa will be waiting for you in his offices in central Doha.’

  Danny looked at the maps on the wall. ‘Where’s the drop-off point?’ he asked.

  Anderson approached a map that showed the Qatari coastline. He pointed to a patch of coast approximately eighty klicks north of Doha. ‘This beach is an underpopulated area,’ he said. ‘The nearest road is about a kilometre away. We’ll put you down there. You’ll need to head directly west to find the road. Your man will be waiting for you there. He knows the score, he won’t ask you any questions and he’s expecting the four of you.’ He handed Danny a piece of paper. ‘Here are your ident instructions.’

  Danny committed the few lines on the piece of paper to memory. ‘We need to get kitted out,’ he said.

  Anderson nodded. ‘Your timing’s good. We get one supply plane a week from the UK. It arrived an hour ago. Hereford managed to get a couple of laycorn boxes on board.’ He pointed to the corner of the Portakabin. There, piled up, were three scuffed, grey, heavy military storage boxes. ‘I don’t know what they’ve got you doing,’ Anderson said, ‘but they’re pulling the fucking stops out, that’s for sure.’

  If Anderson was angling for information, he was going to be disappointed. Danny, Tony and Caitlin walked up to the laycorn boxes, separated them out and opened them up. They contained a mobile armoury. Pistols – three Smith & Wesson M&P bodyguard handguns. Short machine guns – KH-9 close-quarter battle rifles, compact enough to carry under your jacket or in a small rucksack. Well suited for urban conflict, and since they were heading into the centre of Doha city, that suited them well. These weapons were not regular Regiment issue. The KH-9s were Russian-made and Danny knew that their serial numbers would have been scratched out, making it practically impossible to link them back to the British army. This was non-attributable hardware. There were boxes of flashbangs and ammunition tucked into one of the laycorn boxes – nine mills for the handguns, 5.56s for the KH-9s. Radio packs with concealed earpieces and clothes – including tactical vests – in another. The same garb for Caitlin as for the men: jeans, white trainers and a selection of tracksuit tops – baggy enough to conceal a weapon, easy enough to unzip should you need to get at it. There were four sports bags and, incongruously, a couple of squash rackets.

  They quickly changed into their jeans and tracksuit tops. Caitlin seemed to have no qualms about getting undressed in front of this roomful of men, but Danny noticed all their eyes wandering. Tony looked calmly appreciative. Buckingham cou
ldn’t stop his eyes bulging at the sight of Caitlin’s curves as she strapped her handgun to her abdomen before covering herself up with her tracksuit. Once they were changed, Danny, Tony and Caitlin started packing ammunition under the flap at the bottom of the sports bags, followed by their radio packs and a flashbang each, before secreting their KH-9s and tactical vests on top and covering them with more loose clothing.

  Buckingham watched the soldiers pack their kit with obvious impatience. His tracksuit top looked a bit oversized on him. ‘Why the bloody hell have they sent us squash rackets?’ he demanded.

  Danny and Tony gave him a frosty look. Then they each took a racket and placed them head first into their bags, so just the handle was protruding. They held their bags over their shoulders. To look at them, Danny knew, you’d never guess that they weren’t simply on the way to the gym. They’d look no different from any other Westerners in Doha.

  ‘Well, what the hell am I going to put in my sports bag?’ Buckingham said. Caitlin leaned into one of the laycorn boxes and pulled out a small box, which she lobbed across the Portakabin to Buckingham. He clearly panicked at the thought that she’d chucked some dangerous weaponry at him. He didn’t so much try to catch the box as swat it away before it hit him. It burst open in mid-air, and three squash balls flew out across the Portakabin. Buckingham’s face reddened, and it wasn’t helped by the smirks of the military men in the Portakabin.

  Danny chucked him a few loose pieces of clothing. ‘Fill it with these.’