by Chris Ryan
Danny turned to Caitlin. ‘Get the others,’ he said. ‘The pilots too. We can’t trust anyone. We’ll find a safe place to secure them first, then get on the line to Hereford. We need to know if they have any surveillance intel. Leave the money in the chopper for now.’
A minute later, Caitlin had herded Mustafa, Ahmed and the two pilots on to the LZ.
‘Where’s the bridge?’ Danny shouted at Ahmed.
Ahmed pointed towards the centre of the rig. ‘On the far side of that tall scaffolding tower,’ he said. ‘You see the rectangular structure painted green? Is that where we’re going?’
Danny shook his head. ‘Not you,’ he said. ‘It’s the first place anybody will look. What about the accommodation quarters?’
‘Around the northern leg!’ Ahmed shouted. ‘They’re very cramped. If you want somewhere safe to put us, I suggest the medical room. It’s between our current position and the centre of the platform. I think we could lock ourselves in there.’
Danny gave that a moment’s thought. Ahmed’s suggestion made sense. If things went noisy, if and when the Caliph showed his face, it would be good to have them in the vicinity of medical supplies. He nodded. ‘Lead the way!’ he shouted.
A metal staircase led from the LZ to the platform itself. Ahmed trotted towards it, Danny at his shoulder scanning the way ahead for unexpected movement. The others followed, with Tony and Caitlin taking up the rear. Their footsteps clattered as they descended the metal stairs. Once they were down on the platform, Ahmed kept looking back at them nervously, obviously checking they were still with him, as he led the small group through a network of storage containers, scaffolding rigs and engineering platforms whose purpose Danny could only guess. The surroundings were hyper-industrial and factory-like, like being in the heart of a complex, deserted, metal maze. There were fire extinguishers every fifteen feet, regular signage pointing to emergency exits and muster stations, and bright strip lighting that made the deck almost as bright as daytime.
After a couple of minutes, they reached what looked like a grey Portakabin adjacent to the huge central scaffold that Danny had seen from the air. Three metal steps, painted a vibrant yellow, led up to the door. Ahmed was about to walk up them, when Danny pulled him back. He approached the door himself, his rifle engaged, and thrust the door open. He stepped inside, aiming towards the four corners of the room, before shouting: ‘Clear. Get inside, everyone, now!’
It was a standard med room: a stretcher bed in one corner, sterile-looking cabinets along the walls, a poster detailing how to perform CPR, and a faint smell of antiseptic. Ahmed, Mustafa, Buckingham and the two pilots huddled automatically against the far wall while Tony and Caitlin kept watch outside. Danny looked round for a key. He found it within seconds, hanging on a hook by the door. Buckingham stepped forward to take the key, but Danny gave him a sharp look and closed his fingers around it.
‘For God’s sake, man,’ Buckingham breathed.
Danny ignored him and looked at the others. ‘I’m going to lock you in from the outside. We’ll be back in ten minutes. Don’t make any noise. When and if the Caliph and his people arrive, it’s best they can’t locate you. You’ll be safe here.’
He didn’t wait for any response, but left the med room and locked the door behind him. Tony gave him an enquiring look. ‘They’re scared,’ Danny explained. ‘I don’t trust them not to split up if they get spooked, and I don’t want to be searching this whole platform for them.’
‘You don’t trust the pilots?’
‘Right now, I don’t trust anyone.’ He checked his watch. 04.45 hrs. Two hours and fifteen till the Caliph’s RV time. ‘Let’s get to the control room, make contact with Hereford, then move back to the chopper and unload the money.’
‘You think this fucker’s really going to show?’ Tony said. ‘You really think he doesn’t know we’ve just pitched up with all our weapons?’
Danny had no answer for that.
They moved stealthily, rifles engaged, in a leapfrog formation along the metal deck. Distance to the main scaffolding tower: thirty metres. There were storage containers on either side, mostly blocking their view, but with narrow, shadowy corridors between them.
They’d covered fifteen metres. Danny had his back against one of the storage containers, covering Tony and Caitlin as they moved silently past. Something flickered on the edge of his vision, down one of the shadowy corridors.
‘Movement,’ he hissed.
Tony and Caitlin stopped stock-still. Tony set his weapon in the direction of the scaffolding tower. Caitlin set hers back towards the med room.
The platform wasn’t deserted.
Danny aimed down the narrow corridor between the storage boxes.
His finger rested lightly on the trigger. His eyes narrowed.
There was a sudden flap of wings as a sea bird flew out of the corridor. Danny felt his body relaxing. He turned to the others and gave them a nod that meant: go.
They continued to leapfrog towards the scaffolding tower, which Danny now saw housed the immense drill at the centre of the platform, surrounded by clusters of huge, vertical metal pipes. He figured that ordinarily, this would be the noisiest, busiest part of the rig, but now it was deserted and quiet. The green walls of the control-room unit were just visible through the far side of the scaffolding. They needed to get there, open up a line to Hereford and then set up offensive positions for when the Caliph arrived. They edged clockwise round it, weapons still engaged. Once they were on its far side, they were just another fifteen metres from the bridge. They moved forward and approached.
The metal box that housed the control room was four times the size of the med unit, and the five metal steps leading up to it were three times as broad. A couple of metres to its right was a signalling aerial, pointing west at a steep azimuth. As before, Tony and Caitlin took up positions on either side of the door, while Danny engaged his rifle, knocked the door handle down and pushed it quietly open with his foot.
Silence. A quick check to the four corners of the control room told Danny the room was empty.
He scanned round the bridge. There was a bank of computer screens against the far wall. They showed a bewildering display of spreadsheets and technical diagrams. There was a water cooler against the left-hand wall, and a large, square table in the middle of the room. Some of the chairs round the table still had thick hi-vis jackets slung over the backs, and the table itself had a couple of white hard hats upturned on it. Danny continued to scan round, looking for the platform’s radio equipment. He quickly located it against the right-hand wall.
‘Shit,’ he breathed. He activated his personal comms so that Tony and Caitlin could hear his voice. ‘We’ve got a problem.’
The radio unit was about the same size as one of Ahmed’s suitcases of money. It had a digital dashboard with a number of LEDs. All dead. The unit itself had been pulled away from the wall. Danny could see, even from this distance of ten metres, that the mess of multi-coloured wires had been roughly cut. He knew there was no point even trying to use it.
‘The radio’s down,’ he said tersely into his comms unit. ‘Someone’s taken it out.’
‘The regular platform crew wouldn’t have done that before they left,’ Tony said. ‘We’ve got company.’
Danny quickly turned and made to exit the control room, his KH-9 engaged. As he stepped through the door, he saw Tony and Caitlin down on one knee in the firing position, a ninety-degree angle between the trajectories of their two weapons.
There was no warning. Like the last groan of a dying man, the background hum of the electrical generator on the platform slurred and died. All the lights on the platform faded with it.
Danny hit the ground as his vision suddenly blackened. He heard Tony hiss: ‘What the hell’s going on?’
It was totally dark – Danny reckoned they had another twenty-five minutes until sunrise. He clenched his eyes closed to force his pupils to relax more quickly. When he opened his eyes, t
he oil platform looked totally different – an impenetrable jumble of dark shapes and shadows, lit only by the light of the moon.
He issued a sharp instruction: ‘We need to get back to the others . . .’
But his words were cut short by an unmistakeable sound.
Gunfire.
Three shots.
They echoed across the rig, but there was no doubt from which direction they came.
‘The med room,’ Danny stated. ‘Get there now!’
They ran with weapons engaged, retracing their footsteps back towards – and past – the centre of the rig. With every step, Danny’s eyes panned left and right, searching for threats, or even the faintest movement in the dark. There was none. But as they approached the med room, and from a distance of twenty metres, he could just make out that the door was swinging open.
‘Shit,’ he breathed. With his weapon fully engaged, he approached, aware that Tony and Caitlin had his back.
Five metres out from the open door of the med room he paused. He could make out no sign of forced entry on the door, which meant that whoever had opened it up had a key.
There could also easily be shooters still inside there.
And although there was no light inside the Portakabin or out, anyone inside would have the advantage, because if he approached, the moon would light Danny up, and the door opening would frame him.
He reached into his ops vest and pulled out his flashbang. He silently held it up to Tony and Caitlin to indicate what he had in mind. Caitlin got down in the firing position, pointing away from the med room and at an angle. Tony ran quietly to the far side of the steps, continued for five metres and did the same. Only when they were in place did Danny approach the steps. He knelt two metres from the bottom step and looked up through the open door.
Just blackness. No sound.
He pulled the pin from his grenade and quickly lobbed it into the med room.
Three seconds. Danny looked away just in time to stop his vision being compromised by the blinding white flash that emerged from the doorway. He was, of course, expecting the deafening bang. When it arrived, he hurried up the steps, weapon still engaged, and slipped through the doorway. He switched on his Surefire torch, trusting that any shooters in the med room would be too disorientated to fire on him if he made himself a target. He conducted a broad sweep of the room with his weapon.
No movement. No armed personnel.
But three bodies, slumped on the floor just by the stretcher bed.
With a sick feeling in his stomach, Danny approached swiftly. The Surefire shone brightly on the faces. Each man had been shot point-blank in the forehead. The entry wounds were catastrophic. Each forehead had splintered open and spattered blood over the stretcher bed and the walls. It was as much from their clothes as their damaged features that Danny identified the bodies.
‘Mustafa and the two pilots are down,’ he said into his comms. Danny realised he hadn’t even known the pilots’ names.
There was no point wasting time on the dead. Danny spun round and continued his sweep of the med room. There was no sign of Ahmed or Buckingham.
He returned to the door frame and scuttled back down the stairs before hitting the ground in the same position as Tony and Caitlin.
‘Some fucker was waiting for us,’ he said tensely. ‘They took out the radio comms and now they’ve got Ahmed and Buckingham.’ He realised he was sweating profusely.
‘How?’ Caitlin demanded. ‘The head shed’s had the place under surveillance since we made contact with the Caliph. How did somebody get here before us?’
‘I don’t know,’ Danny stated. ‘Maybe they were already here.’
‘What now?’
Tough call. There were just three of them on a large oil platform against an armed threat of unknown size.
‘We stay together as a unit,’ Tony said. ‘That way we have a better chance of defending ourselves if we come under fire.’
‘And no chance of finding Buckingham or Ahmed,’ Danny said.
‘Who gives a fuck about Buckingham?’ Tony spat.
‘Not me. But Ahmed’s the only reason we’re here. If we lose control of him, we’ve no chance of getting close to the Caliph.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Black, have you taken a knock to the head? Isn’t it obvious we called him wrong? He’s sprung a trap and I’ll bet he’s not within a hundred miles of this place.’
‘I say we get back to the chopper,’ Caitlin hissed. ‘Use the aircraft’s VHF to get a Mayday signal out . . .’
It was a good call. But even as Caitlin was making the suggestion . . .
‘What the fuck!’ Tony shouted.
A massive explosion had just ripped the skies from the direction of the chopper. They didn’t have a direct line of sight, but they could see the top of a huge cloud of orange flame licking towards the sky, which glowed for a full ten seconds before the explosion subsided. A stench of acrid burning hit their senses.
Nobody needed to say it: someone had taken the chopper – and the money – out.
‘What the hell do we do?’ Tony hissed, an edge of panic in his voice. He and Caitlin were both looking at Danny. ‘This was your fucking idea, Black. What now?’
Danny kept his breathing steady. Things had turned to shit, but losing your head wasn’t going to help.
‘We split up and find Ahmed,’ he said tersely. ‘Any enemy targets, we shoot to wound. We still need that information. We’ll start on the west side of the platform and sweep east. Caitlin take the north end, Tony take the south, I’ll take the middle. Keep in contact.’
They nodded. Then each of them melted into the darkness.
Hereford. 03.27 GMT.
The noise coming from the boot of Spud’s car – a frenzied beating – had subsided halfway round the M25. Now, as Spud pulled up in front of the barrier at RAF Credenhill, there was total silence from the back.
The MoD policeman at the barrier walked up to Spud’s open window. Spud didn’t know his name, but they recognised each other. As the policeman leant down to Spud’s height, he frowned. ‘Fuck me, buddy, you okay? You look like shit.’
‘You going to let me in,’ Spud said, ‘or are we going to shoot the shit for another ten minutes?’
The policeman shrugged, walked back to his post and opened the barrier. Spud pulled into camp, but immediately parked up outside the guard room next to the barrier. He killed the engine, walked round to the boot and, under the watchful eye of the MoD policeman, prepared himself for an onslaught – physical or verbal – from al-Meghrani.
It didn’t come. He opened the boot on a broken man. His split nose was a mess. His face was smeared with dried blood. He stank of stale urine. But it was the look in his face that told Spud he’d get no trouble from this man. Spud had seen it before on the battlefield – the thousand-yard stare of a terrified, traumatised soldier.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ the MoD guy demanded. Spud ignored him. Al-Meghrani’s body was almost limp as he yanked him from the boot and dragged him into the guard room.
It was a bland room with a couple of desks, a TV blaring in one corner and a door that led to the camp’s holding cells, which served to isolate anyone who caused trouble on site. Spud himself had even spent a few nights acting as duty sergeant in the guard room. It was a total pain in the arse and the short straw for anyone in camp. But he was relieved to see that tonight, the short straw had been drawn by Bob Pickford, a mate of his from A Squadron, sitting behind a desk with a bored look as he stared at the telly.
The bored look fell away as he saw Spud, and the state of his bruised, beaten companion. ‘Spud, what the—’
‘Do me a favour, Bob,’ Spud interrupted. ‘Put this cunt in the holding cell.’
Bob nodded, grabbed the glazed al-Meghrani by one arm and dragged him roughly through the door into the cell. When he returned a minute later, Spud said, ‘Is he secure?’
‘Roger that.’
Spud pointed in the direction
of the main Regiment building. ‘Who’s in charge?’ he said.
‘Hammond. Something’s going down, I don’t know what.’
‘Give me the phone, mucker, I need to speak to him.’
The look on Bob’s face made it clear he didn’t think this was a good idea, but he passed Spud the cordless handset. Spud consulted a sheet of numbers pinned to the wall. When he found Hammond’s internal line, he dialled it.
Three rings.
Four.
‘Hammond.’ The ops officer’s voice was taught and stressed.
‘Boss, it’s me. Spud.’
A momentary silence that spoke volumes.
‘Glover, I’m right in the middle of a fucking . . .’
‘Listen to me, boss. Just listen to me, okay? You need to come to the guard room. There’s someone you have to see.’
‘Glover, I’m on my way to the ops room, and you’re on your way out of camp. If I see you—’
‘It’s about someone called the Caliph.’
Silence.
‘Seriously, boss. Come by the guard room on your way to the ops office. It’ll take one minute, then I’ll be off your back.’
The phone clicked silent.
Spud’s palms were sweating. He laid the handset on the table and felt Bob’s eyes boring into him. He was grateful to his friend for not asking any questions. They stood there in silence. Spud didn’t know if he’d persuaded Hammond to come, and wondered if he could somehow drag al-Meghrani directly over to the ops room. Impossible. Security was too high. They’d never let him in . . .
The door suddenly burst open. Hammond was there, dark rings around his eyes. He slammed the door shut behind him, but seemed almost too angry to speak. He had a thick manilla folder under his arms.
Spud turned to Bob. ‘Give me the keys to the holding cell,’ he said.
Bob handed them over.
‘This way, boss,’ Spud said.
The holding cell had a steel door with thick rivets. Spud opened it up and led Hammond inside. Al-Meghrani was crouching in the corner, hugging his knees.
‘The Firm are putting all their resources into finding this geezer called the Caliph,’ Spud said. ‘They won’t listen to me, you won’t listen to me, but I’m telling you: this guy has met him face to—’