by Chris Ryan
Physical pain, however, he knew he could deal with. Psychological suffering was by far his greater enemy. Buckingham’s butchered body, limply slumped at a gruesome angle with its wrists still tied to the post, was a sickening warning of what was to come. He was grateful that the spook’s head, which lay between them, was facing away from Danny. A freshly dead body has a unique smell – halfway between a butcher’s shop and a public lavatory – and that horrific odour filled Danny’s nostrils now. He tried to play tricks on his brain: to remind himself how much he hated Buckingham, and how loathsome he had been during his final moments. But it was no good. He couldn’t take his mind off what was to come: he was as focused on the camera on its tripod as he was on the severed head by its body . . .
Think positive. What would Hereford do, having lost contact with them? Scramble another rescue team? But the nearest suitable SF unit could still be hours out. He hadn’t been joking when he’d told Buckingham that . . .
The door opened. Daylight flooded in. Danny squinted towards it and realised his vision was blurred. He felt a surge of adrenaline.
Tony!
He was mistaken. The man that entered had a similar physique, but it wasn’t Tony. He had black clothes and a balaclava. Even more ominously, he had a shoulder bag. Danny didn’t want to know what was in it. But he found out soon enough.
The man walked up to the camera and switched it on. Without a word he put the shoulder bag on the ground. Then he stepped towards Danny and pulled a smartphone from his pocket. He swiped the screen, tapped it, and then held it front of Danny’s face.
He saw shaky video footage of a dark room. He couldn’t make out much detail, but he could see a figure lying on his front on the floor. Two black-clad men each had one of their feet pressed into his back, and had rifles pointed at the back of his head. The camera panned down to the prisoner’s face. It was bruised and bloodied. The nose was broken, the eyes swollen. But Danny recognised it as Tony. Ahmed hadn’t been lying.
The juddery, dark camera footage panned upwards again. It swiped round the room. More figures: three clad in black, plus Caitlin. She was unarmed and her face was largely intact apart from a swelling around the right eye. One of the guys held her at gunpoint. The other two stepped forward. One of them grabbed her between the legs. When she struggled, the other one tore at her hair and, with his free hand, smashed her again against the bruised eye. As the camera panned away, Danny just caught sight of Caitlin being bent roughly over by her two attackers.
Danny’s blood burned in his veins. Don’t show your anger, he told himself. They’re just trying to fuck with your head. Stay calm . . . stay compliant . . .
The camera moved back to Tony. It zoomed in on his face. It was still pressed against the floor, and the wound on his cheek had started to weep. But despite his fucked-up features, there was a look of deadly concentration in his eyes.
Tony was down, but he wasn’t out. Danny clung to that one fact. He had nothing else. He ignored the voice in his head that told him Tony was unpredictable and crooked. That there was no love lost between them. That there was a chance, even if Tony could help Danny, that he wouldn’t . . .
The video clip died. Danny’s new companion put it back in his pocket. Then he pulled out a sturdy piece of wood from his shoulder bag, the same heft and length as a baseball bat.
Danny clenched his jaw and prepared himself for the beating he knew was coming.
The man stood a metre in front of him, raised the cudgel over his shoulder, and struck. It connected brutally with the pit of Danny’s stomach. Danny coughed harshly as the wind rushed from his stomach, then desperately tried to force his winded lungs to inhale, while the man raised his cudgel again.
The second blow cracked against the right-hand side of his ribcage. He felt a couple of ribs go instantly. His instinct was to shout out in pain, but he couldn’t because there was still no air in his lungs.
The man leaned down so their eyes were at the same level. He examined Danny’s face carefully, almost like a doctor, holding his chin gently in his free hand. Danny wanted to spit in his face, but he forced himself to remain compliant. That was his only chance of survival.
The third blow was to the face. It came from the opposite direction and cracked against Danny’s left cheekbone. He felt the bone itself splinter as a spray of blood and mucus showered from his nose. He was breathing again now, and gulped at the air in an effort to handle the pain. He told himself that maybe – just maybe – that third blow had been a fraction softer than the two that preceded it. He allowed himself to believe that this was a good thing: maybe his attacker had been told to ensure that Danny survived this beating.
But survived it for what? Danny glanced down at Buckingham’s severed head as his tormentor circled him menacingly. He felt him wipe the bloody cudgel on the sleeve of Danny’s right arm. The pain was unspeakable. He could tell that his face was a mess of shattered bone and splintered wood. His broken ribs sent white-hot shards of intense agony through his body. It drained all the strength from him, and it was all he could do to keep his head upright in at least a semblance of dignity.
He closed his eyes, and told himself that he would withstand whatever else this bastard threw at him. But then he sensed movement again. When he opened his eyes, he saw that his attacker had repositioned himself in front of Danny again, and just to his right. He was holding the broad side of the cudgel just inches from Danny’s face.
Danny looked up. He could see a ferocious intensity in his attacker’s eyes. The bastard’s hands were trembling with a barely contained thrill as he prepared to slam the cudgel flat and square into the front of Danny’s face.
Danny set his jaw. Protect your eyes, he told himself.
He closed them. Which meant he didn’t fully see what happened next.
There was the sound of the door being kicked open. It was followed, almost instantly, by the harsh bark of a round being discharged from a rifle. Danny opened his eyes just in time to see his black-clad tormentor tumble towards him as his cudgel dropped to the ground. His body fell heavily against Danny’s face, then slumped to the floor, by which time two figures were halfway towards him: Tony facing Danny’s way, Caitlin aiming her weapon towards the door.
Tony Wiseman was in an even worse state than he had been on the smartphone screen. He looked like his nose had been broken in two places, his face was smeared with blood, and there was a chunk missing from the lobe of his left ear. He had to be in a lot of pain, but there was no sign of it. Whatever had happened, at least some of the Caliph’s men had clearly come off even worse.
Tony and Caitlin were carrying AK-47s that they must have stolen from Ahmed’s men. He saw that Tony also had a knife. Brandishing it, he moved behind Danny.
‘What’s this?’ he drawled, his voice dry and gravelly. ‘He been playing with you? Fifty fucking shades of grey?’ With one clean cut, he slit the cable ties. Danny lurched forward, almost falling face-down on the ground as he dissolved into a fit of uncontrolled coughing. The very act of coughing was agony, and he knew he’d definitely broken a rib or two. But Tony grabbed the back of his shirt and held him up. ‘Don’t do a Spud on me now,’ he said.
‘Ahmed’s the Caliph,’ Danny breathed.
‘Tell us something we don’t know.’
Danny regained control of himself. He pushed himself uneasily to his feet, wincing with the pain in his ribcage, then grabbed the post to which he’d been tied while Tony kicked the severed head on to its back to see who it was. He snorted. ‘Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bloke,’ he said, before kicking the head out of the way. He turned to Danny. ‘Get moving, Black,’ he said.
‘Wait,’ Danny breathed. ‘What happened? How did you get free?’
‘One of Ahmed’s men wanted to break my arm, so he untied me. Bit of a mistake, that.’
‘How many men did you put down?’ Danny asked. They needed to pool their information, and fast.
‘Eight,’ Tony said.
Danny felt weak with pain, but forced himself to stay sharp. ‘They’ll know you’ve escaped,’ he stated. ‘They’ll be all over us like flies.’
‘Maybe not,’ Tony said. ‘We questioned one of Ahmed’s guys before we nailed him. He told us there are seven more men on the rig, plus Ahmed.’ He pointed at the dead body. ‘Make that six. They’re all heading for the LZ, waiting for a chopper to arrive and get him to the Saudi coast.’
‘He might have been lying,’ Danny countered.
Tony gave him a look, and for a moment Danny no longer saw the slightly pissed-off soldier who didn’t like taking orders from him, or even the dodgy crook with interests in organised crime. He saw an SAS soldier, professionalism and aggression written on his face. ‘Trust me,’ Tony said quietly, ‘he was telling the truth.’
Danny nodded. His wooziness was subsiding, even if the pain on his face and abdomen wasn’t. He looked over at Caitlin. Her face was also smeared in blood and mud. ‘Did they hurt you?’ he demanded.
‘Not as much as I hurt them,’ Caitlin said. He saw that she had a second AK strapped across her back. She brought it over her head and handed it to Danny. He strapped it on and cocked it.
‘The chopper could arrive any time,’ Danny said. ‘We need to get to the LZ before it does.’
‘Remember,’ Tony said. ‘We want Ahmed alive.’
‘The radio’s out,’ Caitlin reminded them. ‘We’ve got no way of contacting anyone, even if we do get this fucker and squeeze some intel out of him.’
‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’ Danny knew he was slurring his words slightly. He told himself to snap back to fitness. ‘Everyone ready?’
‘Roger that,’ Tony and Caitlin said in unison.
‘Don’t assume all six militants are with Ahmed. There could still be shooters out there and they might engage us.’
Time check: 09.35 hrs. That made it 07.35 in London. There would be crowds. The hit could happen at any moment. It could already have happened.
They pressed the butts of their weapons into their shoulders, and advanced towards the door.
THIRTY
There was a deep silence on the platform. It was as if even the sea was holding its breath.
They all understood you don’t just pick up an enemy weapon and expect it to be your best friend. Before they moved towards the LZ, they had a call to make. These stolen AKs were un-zeroed firearms. Whoever Tony and Caitlin had taken them from hadn’t had the benefit of laser sights – they just had the standard AK-47 iron sight – which meant Danny had no idea how the rounds would fall if he fired this weapon. There was only one way to find out, and that was to fire the weapons. To do that could give away their location, but it was a risk they were prepared to take for the sake of accuracy.
Outside the drillers’ cabin and to the left, at a distance of twenty metres, there was a fire exit sign two metres from the ground, with a green arrow pointing to the right. While Tony and Caitlin covered him, Danny lined up his sights with the centre of the sign and took a shot. The sound echoed across the quiet platform, and he saw that the shot had landed a foot and a half to the right of his intended target zone. It meant he would need to aim left to ensure accuracy of fire.
‘7.62 shorts,’ Danny muttered dismissively. Enough to put a man on the ground, but not as hard-hitting as the NATO rounds he’d have chosen for himself.
It took another thirty seconds for Tony and Caitlin to get the measure of their weapons – two more shots that rang out over the platform, and two more very good reasons to get the hell away from their current position as quickly as possible.
‘Ready?’ Danny demanded as Caitlin lowered her rifle.
A short nod confirmed that she was.
This time, they didn’t split up. Order of march: Tony, Danny, Caitlin.
The sun was bright and already hot. It cast clear, sharp shadows. They moved carefully, with their stolen weapons engaged, in a leapfrog formation, through the industrial maze of the oil rig. Every time they turned, their weapons turned with them. Danny pushed the pain in his ribs and on his face to the back of his mind. His every sense was on the highest alert. Every time he turned a corner, he half expected to see the telltale red dot on his chest. But this time his trigger finger would be ready.
Caitlin moved to the front of the line while Danny and Tony covered her. They encountered nobody. From the heart of the platform, Danny caught the occasional glimpse of the sea, calm and still with a clear blue sky above. A couple of commercial airliners high overhead, but no sign of any other aircraft – or indeed anything else – in the vicinity.
None of them wanted to discharge another round. Unsuppressed, the sound of these AK-47s would pinpoint their position very precisely to anybody hunting them. But there seemed to be no personnel remaining on the platform, unless they were lying very fucking low.
Danny moved to the front, Tony and Caitlin covering.
As they stealthily passed the med room where Mustafa and the two pilots had been murdered, Danny saw that the door was still open, and there were bloody footprints on the floor outside. He spent a couple of seconds examining them, trying to read the movement of any personnel who’d passed by recently. But the blood stains were dry. They moved inexorably onward, towards the LZ.
Tony moved front, Danny and Caitlin covering. He held up one hand, palm outwards. They came to a halt.
Tony was alongside a yellow storage container. He got down on one knee, then indicated that Danny and Caitlin should join him. Danny approached carefully, aware that Caitlin was covering them from the rear. He got down on one knee next to Tony.
They could see the LZ from here. Distance: thirty metres. It was raised about ten metres high off the platform, almost as though floating over it. No sign of the remnants of Ahmed’s chopper that had exploded an hour previously. The ground between them and it was a jumble of low machinery and scaffolding, but essentially open: anyone on the LZ would see them approaching, and would have a clean shot at them. Sure enough, kneeling on the circular edge of it were three of Ahmed’s men, dressed in black, weapons engaged and pointing outwards, each man about seven metres apart. They were facing into the sun, no doubt squinting, which explained why they hadn’t noticed the unit.
‘They’re guarding the LZ,’ Tony breathed.
‘The only person they’d be guarding is Ahmed,’ said Danny. ‘He must be up there.’
‘We can take them.’
Danny sniffed. They were using unfamiliar weapons, none of them zeroed in for their user. But they didn’t have a choice. The only way to get to Ahmed was through his guards. They didn’t appear to have seen the unit so far, but that would probably change if they tried to move any closer.
Danny signalled Caitlin to join them. They knelt in a row, a metre apart from each other, and aimed their rifles, upward at a thirty-degree angle towards the ten-metre-high raised platform that was the LZ, each of them sighting the black-clad figure that corresponded to their own position.
Danny breathed slowly. This was high-risk. If one of them missed their mark, they’d come under immediate gunfire. All three guys had to be taken out at the same instant. He focused in on his man, very aware that the beating he’d received had left him woozy, maybe slightly concussed. He couldn’t let that affect him.
His finger rested lightly on the trigger. Very deliberately he edged his line of fire a couple of inches to the left.
‘Aim for the body mass,’ he breathed. And then a second later: ‘Ready?’
‘Ready,’ Tony and Caitlin said in unison.
A five-second pause.
‘Take the shot.’
The three rounds sounded like a single discharge. Danny kept his position for a second – long enough to see Tony and Caitlin’s guys collapse instantly. His own was hit, but not fatally: a shoulder wound, maybe, but enough to make the bastard scream at the top of his head.
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The unit fell back behind the protection of the storage container.
‘You missed,’ Tony growled.
‘Thanks for pointing it out,’ Danny said. ‘We need to—’
‘Quiet!’ Caitlin hissed.
They fell silent. Caitlin had cocked her head, and Danny could tell why. There was a distant sound of a helicopter approaching.
‘Ahmed’s transport,’ Danny breathed. ‘We haven’t got more than a minute. We need to advance to contact.’
‘They know our position,’ Caitlin said. ‘We should advance from a different direction.’
‘We haven’t got time,’ Danny overruled her. ‘Give me cover.’
‘Forget it, Black,’ Tony said. ‘You’re not on the ball. I’m going.’
For the briefest moment, Danny felt his head spinning. A picture flashed across his eyes: Ripley, in a makeshift field hospital in Nigeria, rotting in front of his eyes. And he heard his mate’s voice: Find the fucker who did this to me, Danny . . . just find the fucker who did this.
The fucker who did it was thirty metres away, about to get into a helicopter. He was Danny’s. No one else’s.
Danny’s head cleared. ‘You’re staying there,’ he said. And before anyone could argue any further: ‘In three, two, one, go!’
Danny stepped out from the protection of the storage container.
He could still see his wounded target, writhing in agony on the edge of the raised LZ. And in the clear sky beyond, he could see a dot approaching: Ahmed’s helicopter, arriving to ferry him to the safety of Saudi Arabia.
Gunfire behind him: two rounds in quick succession from Tony and Caitlin, a warning to any militants remaining on the LZ of what they could expect if they approached its edge. Danny sprinted forward, skirting round the machinery and the scaffolding units as he made the most direct approach possible towards the LZ. He closed the distance to twenty metres, then to fifteen. The closer he grew, the steeper the angle between him and the LZ, the higher he had to raise his weapon and the less he could see who was approaching the edge. It meant he was totally reliant on his unit colleagues . . .