by Chris Ryan
There was a sudden flurry of movement from the corner of the cell. Al-Meghrani had pushed himself to his feet and hurled himself towards the two Regiment men in an attempt to get through the open cell door.
It was the act of an optimist, or an idiot.
He slammed hard into Hammond himself, who dropped his manilla folder but barely moved from the impact. Al-Meghrani staggered back as the contents of the folder scattered all over the floor.
Spud was about to speak again, to explain his investigations to Hammond, when something stopped him. The cab driver’s expression had changed. The thousand-yard stare had morphed into something else.
Dread.
He was staring at one of the pieces of paper that had scattered from Hammond’s folder. Spud looked to the floor. He saw photographs. One of them was of his mate Danny, and for a moment Spud thought he was staring at that. But it made no sense. Al-Meghrani didn’t even know Danny . . .
‘What is it?’ he hissed. ‘What have you seen?’
He suddenly realised that there was another photograph lying face up on the ground, just inches from the one of Danny. A Middle Eastern face. Reading upside down, Spud saw a name printed at the bottom of the photograph: Ahmed bin Ali al-Essa.
‘What?’ Spud said. And when his prisoner didn’t reply, he pulled him to his feet and raised one fist as if he was about to crash it down on his hostage’s already broken nose. ‘Fucking what?’
Al-Meghrani flinched backwards. There was a deep silence in the cell. ‘That’s him,’ al-Meghrani whispered. ‘That’s the Caliph.’
TWENTY-EIGHT
Hammond blinked.
‘What did you say?’ he breathed.
Al-Meghrani was in no state to repeat himself. His whole body was shaking. It didn’t matter. Spud threw his prisoner back into the corner of the room as the Regiment ops officer turned to him. ‘Follow me.’
Hammond ran back into the guard room, shouted at Bob to secure the prisoner again and burst out of the door. It was an effort for Spud to keep up with him as he sprinted towards the main Regiment building, along stark corridors and past surprised-looking Regiment guards as they headed deeper into the Kremlin – the centre of the camp where the ops room was situated.
The ops room itself was guarded by two armed Regiment guys. Hammond burst past them and into the room, Spud following close behind.
Whatever was going down, it was something big. There were fifteen personnel inside the ops room, all in camouflage gear, many of them wearing headsets and studying laptop screens. A larger screen on the far wall showed a map of the Persian Gulf, where a flashing triangle indicated a location halfway between the Qatari and Iranian coasts.
‘Get the support units on to the oil platform!’ Hammond bellowed. ‘Black and the others are walking into a fucking ambush! Give the order! NOW!’
Danny’s heart pumped two beats to every step.
He had reached the western side of the platform and had his back against a storage container, facing out to sea. The perimeter of the platform – delineated by a solid yellow railing a head-height shorter than Danny himself – was a scant five metres from his position. The night sky was beginning to lighten, just faintly.
A quiet voice in his earpiece. Caitlin: ‘In position.’
‘Tony?’
‘In position.’
‘Keep the lines open. Remember, the enemy might have NV. Check in every sixty seconds . . .’
He was about to order them to commence their sweep of the platform when something stopped him. Through the mesh perimeter fencing, he could just make out some dark shapes moving across the ocean towards the platform.
‘Wait out,’ he breathed.
He checked left and right. No movement in the darkness, so he moved closer to the perimeter and looked out to sea.
RIBs. Eight of them. They were approximately seventy-five metres out and had positioned themselves in a straight line, perhaps twenty metres apart from each other. From this distance, and in this light, Danny couldn’t see how many personnel were in each boat. But he knew one thing for sure: they were in formation.
‘Shit,’ he breathed.
There was something else. More movement. But not in the water this time.
To Danny they were just shadows in the almost-night sky, but he knew what they were. Choppers. And only SF pilots were skilful enough to fly that low over the water, with their lights out. It had to be their air support units. It was impossible to judge distances with any accuracy, but he estimated they were five hundred metres out, perhaps a little more, but moving towards the platform at high speed.
Why the hell were they approaching? Danny hadn’t requested air support.
His eyes flickered towards the RIBs in formation, and one word rang in his head: ‘Ambush!’
The RIBs knew the choppers were coming.
‘No!’ he hissed. ‘No!’
He wanted to scream at them. To get a message to their flight crew that they were flying straight into a trap. But he was impotent. He had no radio. No flares. No means of communication.
There was nothing he could do except watch the horror that unfolded.
The surface-to-air missiles that erupted from the RIBs glowed like tracer fire in the dark sky. There were eight. One from each boat. Danny didn’t know what type they were, but they were heat-seeking and deadly accurate. They made a screaming sound as they cut through the air.
The SAS and SBS choppers didn’t stand a chance.
It took no more than five seconds for the impact to occur. Danny saw it before he heard it: two colossal fireballs filled the sky as the choppers combusted instantly and exploded.
A second later, the sound hit his ears: two deep sonic booms that brought with them a sinister wave of heat. Like the after-effects of a crackling firework, there were several lesser explosions as the remaining missiles detonated among the fireballs, which hung, seemingly weightless, in the air, before fading to a dark, ugly cloud of debris that fell heavily towards the ocean.
The RIBs peeled away and started heading back towards the platform.
‘Boss, we’ve lost contact.’
‘What do you mean?’ Hammond shouted.
‘Comms are down with both aircraft. I can’t get a fix on either of them. It’s like they’ve disappeared.’
‘What the hell’s going on out there?’ Hammond roared. ‘Why haven’t we heard from Black? Where are those fucking choppers?’
Nobody had an answer.
‘Boss,’ Spud said.
Hammond looked like he was about to rip Spud a new arsehole, but then he seemed to remember himself and his expression became slightly less dangerous. ‘What?’
‘Is Danny out there?’
‘If he’s still alive.’
‘Boss, I owe him one. Don’t make me sit this out.’
‘Spud, Jesus, some fucker’s about to release a bioweapon at the London Marathon. I haven’t got time for—’
‘Put me there,’ Spud said.
Hammond blinked. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Boss, I’m not a fucking pencil-pusher. The Regiment’s short of men. Put me in London.’
They locked gazes. Something passed between them. Finally Hammond gave a curt nod. ‘Standby squadron is deploying to the capital by chopper in ten minutes. Join them.’
It was all Spud needed to hear. He turned his back on the ops room and left, as Hammond shouted to the room in general: ‘Someone confirm GCHQ are monitoring all available frequencies!’ And as he hurried down the corridor, the full impact of Hammond’s words hit him.
A bioweapon at the marathon. He pulled out his phone and dialled Frances’s number.
It rang out. No voicemail.
He cursed under his breath, then continued to run along the corridor.
You’ll have a sixteen-man SAS team and eight SBS guys circling ten klicks to the north of the platform, out of sight, Hammond had said. Which meant twenty-four SF guys, plus flight crews, had just lost their lives.
Danny saw red. He raised his personal weapon, fully intending to open up on the eight RIBs that even now were speeding towards the platform.
Then he stopped.
Two pieces of a jigsaw had just clicked together in his mind.
And not just in Danny’s. Tony’s whispered, urgent voice came over his headset. ‘The fuckers in those RIBs knew the choppers were coming!’
‘They knew more than that,’ Danny breathed. ‘They knew which direction they were coming from too.’
He made a quick mental calculation. Who had been party to that information except the three of them: Mustafa? He had a bullet in his head. Buckingham? Why would he want to scupper his own support units?
Which left Ahmed. Back at the apartment, Danny’s conversations with the head shed had been on speakerphone so Tony and Caitlin could listen in. But that meant Ahmed also knew where the support units were coming from.
Danny’s eyes narrowed.
His peripheral vision sensed movement on both sides.
He looked at his right arm. A red laser dot traced its way up his shoulder. He sensed it coming to rest on the side of his head.
Danny knew he had a fraction of a second to save himself. He hurled himself back from the edge of the rig, crashing heavily against the storage container behind him, which boomed and echoed like a drum. As he prepared to swing round and fire in the direction of the laser sight, he saw four more dots dancing on his chest.
This is it, he thought. I’m fucked.
He expected the shots to come any second.
They didn’t.
Instead, a voice called from the darkness to his right. He recognised Ahmed immediately, but the voice of the Qatari businessman had a different edge to it. ‘If you lower your weapon, I will instruct my men to hold their fire. If not . . .’ He let the threat hang there.
‘I’m compromised,’ Danny breathed into his radio. As he lowered his weapon and let it hang by its sling, he waited for a response from Tony or Caitlin. There was none. He raised his arms into the air.
The red laser dots didn’t falter from his chest. From both directions along the deck, figures approached out of the darkness. The shooters emerged first, two from either side, weapons engaged in a professional manner. Twenty metres in. Ten metres. Behind the shooters to the right, Danny saw Ahmed himself.
‘Remove your weapons,’ Ahmed said. ‘Do it very slowly.’
The shooters were five metres out on either side. Black clothes, black balaclavas, black M16s with laser sights. They stopped and kept their weapons trained on Danny. He gave himself a moment to calculate his probability of nailing them. Non-existent. Even if he managed to down two of them, their colleagues on the other side would shoot him in a split second. He had no choice. He slowly unclipped his weapon from its strap, then laid it on the floor.
‘And the handgun,’ Ahmed instructed. Danny removed his S&W from his ops waistcoat and laid that on the floor too. ‘Remove your earpiece,’ Ahmed told him. Danny obeyed, dropping it on the floor with his weapon. He glanced to his left, past the two shooters. Where the hell were the others? Had they been compromised? Or were they still operational? Danny had no way to tell.
He looked towards Ahmed. ‘I guess I’m talking to the Caliph,’ he said.
‘I won’t lie,’ Ahmed said smoothly. ‘I expected you to join the dots a little sooner.’ He glanced towards the sky, where the two choppers had just been taken out.
‘Those pictures of your parents,’ Danny said. ‘You did that?’
Ahmed’s blank expression didn’t change. ‘They were old,’ he said, ‘and more use to me dead than alive. I feared Mr Buckingham was getting a little close to the truth. Perhaps I mistook his abilities. You are probably wondering about your companions. Please don’t imagine that they are in a position to help you. My men have them. You will be kept separate.’ He addressed the guys holding Danny at gunpoint. ‘Take him to the drillers’ cabin,’ he said. ‘I will deal with him there.’
Two of the guys lowered their weapons and roughly grabbed Danny’s arms. He didn’t fight it. He knew that one squeeze of the remaining two M16s would drop him. As they dragged him past Ahmed, the two men exchanged a look. It was almost as though Danny was looking at a different person. Ahmed’s eyes were dead and dark. There was no humanity in them. Not even any hatred. Just an empty pit.
The balaclava’d men dragged Danny through the dark, industrial maze of the oil platform. He tried to quell the fear that was rising in his chest, and to keep his senses alert. Every thirty seconds or so, he saw movement at the edges of his vision, down dark external corridors or on the other side of distant scaffolding rigs. His captors must have seen them too, but it didn’t seem to worry them, which was bad news: it meant the rig was crawling with the Caliph’s men. Maybe they were the same guys who he’d just seen in the RIB – there would have been time by now for them to climb up the platform legs and board the platform. Maybe they’d been here, in hiding, all along.
They reached a large cabin on the southern side of the rig, about twenty-five metres in length and painted the same yellow as the railings round the platform. A sign on the door said ‘Drillers’ Cabin’. The door was unlocked. Danny felt himself being shoved inside. There were blackout blinds against the windows, so it was entirely dark. He staggered halfway across the dark cabin before hitting a long wooden table set in the middle. He spun round to look back at the door, and saw the red laser dots still dancing on his chest.
‘Black!’ A voice hissed from the darkness. Danny immediately recognised Buckingham, his tone dripping with fear. ‘What the hell’s happening . . . ?’
There was no chance to respond. The gunmen were on him again, dragging him to one end of the room. As his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he could just make Buckingham out. The spook was on his knees. His hands seemed to be bound behind his back, and tied to a metal post, approximately eight feet high, connecting the floor to the ceiling of the cabin. As one of the gunmen dragged Danny to an identical post, about six feet to the left of Buckingham’s, another withdrew a torch and shone it directly in Buckingham’s face. Danny saw pale skin and bloodshot eyes. Buckingham’s handsome features were so drawn that he was hardly recognisable.
They forced Danny to his knees in the same position as Buckingham. Two laser spots were still on his chest as one of the masked men cable-tied his wrists and ankles together behind his back, then tied both to the spare post. Danny knew there was no point expending energy by struggling. If he put up a fight, they’d just shoot him. It was an uncomfortable stress position that forced him to stay kneeling with his arms tight behind his back.
Only when he was fully secure did the laser spots leave his body. The gunman extinguished his torch. Without another word, all four men left the cabin. Danny heard them locking the door.
‘This is your fault,’ Buckingham breathed. ‘This is your fucking fault, Black. Everything you touch turns to shit, and now I’m going to . . .’
Danny zoned out. He was trying to peer through the gloom to get his bearings, his eyes still adjusting to the renewed darkness. There was a gap of about five metres between himself and the table. Beyond that, he couldn’t see anything. He strained to tug his arms away from the post behind him, but it just made the cable ties dig sharply into his skin, and he knew that was a no-go.
He had no weapons and no comms. No means of defending himself, or raising the alarm.
The Caliph had played them like a fucking instrument.
He zoned back in to Buckingham’s voice. ‘How long until the SAS and SBS support units get here?’
‘You heard that big bang five minutes ago? That was them taking a swim.’ Scowling, Danny looked to his left. He could just see Buckingham’s pale face.
‘What?’ Buckingham’s voice had raised an octave. ‘What? You mean they’re . . .’
‘Not coming,’ Danny said.
‘But . . . but Hereford will know what’s happened?’
‘
All they’ll know is that they’ve lost contact.’
‘So they’ll send someone else?’
‘Sure,’ Danny said. ‘It shouldn’t take more than five or six hours.’
‘What? Oh, Jesus . . .’ Suddenly, and without warning, Danny heard retching.
‘Listen to me,’ he said over the noise. ‘When they come back, be compliant. You saw what Ahmed’s men did to his own parents. You know what he’s capable of, so don’t antagonise them. It’s your best chance of survival.’
‘What do you fucking well know, Black?’ There was the sound of more retching, and then of the door being unlocked. A faint light as it opened. Several figures – probably six, maybe seven – filed into the room.
Three of them had torches, which they shone directly at the prisoners, dazzling Danny and removing whatever night vision he’d acquired. There was activity in the space between them and the table. For a full thirty seconds, Danny squinted into the light, trying to work out what the figures were doing. Only when they stepped back a couple of metres did he realise. His stomach turned to ice when he saw that they had erected a camera on a tripod between him and Buckingham, three metres out. He remembered something Tony had said the day they’d left for Nigeria. Remember the good old days when the time to shit yourself was when someone shoved a gun in your face? Now you know you’re in for a much worse time when they get their fucking iPhones out and press record . . .
The figures melted away towards the back of the room, but they kept their torches shining towards Danny and Buckingham. Danny caught a whiff of urine, and he knew Buckingham had pissed himself. He didn’t fully blame him.
Another figure entered the room. Danny knew from the slow walk and the shape of his silhouette that it was Ahmed. He positioned himself just in front of the camera. The torchlight from behind made his outline very pronounced, and cast a long, thin shadow towards them. Danny couldn’t see his face.