Bad Soldier: Danny Black Thriller 4 (40 page)

Danny stopped. He was breathing heavily. Sweating.

Spud was right. He needed to get a grip. To control himself—

‘
NO!
’

Spud shouted so loudly that Danny was momentarily taken aback. His mate was raising his gun, and Danny suddenly realised that he’d made an unforgivably basic error and turned his back on his opponent. He spun round, fully expecting to see Dhul Faqar coming for him with his knife.

He saw something very different.

The Yazidi girl, naked, bleeding and battered, had a look of animal desperation on her face. She also had Dhul Faqar’s knife in her fist. She was crouching to one side of Dhul Faqar, holding it low, the blade pointing upwards, just inches from his midriff.

Danny lunged towards her. But too late. She stabbed the blade hard into the side of her abuser’s body, deep into his ribcage. It slid in with atrocious ease – and out again as she stabbed him for a second time before Spud could release his round.

Deafening gunshot resonated round the room. Spud’s round slammed into the side of the Yazidi girl’s head. She collapsed immediately, leaving the knife buried deep in Dhul Faqar’s guts. His white robe was wet with blood. It was pissing from the wound. Dhul Faqar was staring down at himself with a look of mingled horror and astonishment.

Then he tried to breathe.

It was immediately clear to Danny that the long blade had punctured one lung, maybe both. There was a dreadful gurgling, gasping sound as Dhul Faqar collapsed to his knees, trying unsuccessfully to get breath into his damaged lungs. Neither of them looked at the body of the poor Yazidi girl, her head bleeding and shattered. All Danny’s attention was on Dhul Faqar as he surged towards his enemy.

Spud was with him. They wordlessly got the IS commander on to his right-hand side in the recovery position, so the wound was facing upwards. Danny pressed his hand hard on to the punctured skin, trying to stem the flow of blood, but it was useless. Thick and sticky, it oozed relentlessly out between his fingers. Danny tried to picture the route the knife had taken through Dhul Faqar’s body. It wasn’t just the lungs that would be damaged. Stomach. Kidney. Liver. Major organ failure. Without a full med team on hand, there was zero chance of him surviving.

He grabbed Dhul Faqar by the face and twisted his head so they were looking at each other, eye to eye. ‘Where’s my daughter?’ he hissed. ‘Who’s got her?’

Dhul Faqar didn’t reply. A couple of seconds passed. Then a fountain of blood and foam erupted from his mouth as his body went into spasm. Danny rolled him on to his back and started pumping his chest vigorously, one compression per second. The ribcage sank two inches with each pump, and Danny thought he felt the breastbone breaking. But as he tried in vain to keep Dhul Faqar alive, he knew that each chest compression was pushing him closer to the grave as it forced more blood from his wound, each wave less copious than the last.

After ten seconds, he knew he was pumping the chest of a dead man.

‘Mucker, he’s gone,’ Spud said from behind him.

Danny stopped pumping. He stood up and stared at the corpse at his feet, then at his own hands, which were covered in blood, sweat and dirt. The firelight flickered in the room. Danny and Spud were breathing heavily. Danny’s anger erupted again. He started kicking the body and head of Dhul Faqar’s fresh corpse. Pointless, but the only way he could think of to release his frustration.

He dealt the dead man six solid blows to the head, and only stopped there because Spud dragged him away.

Twenty

‘Did you have to kill the girl?’ Danny said bitterly. ‘She could have told us something.’

He instantly regretted saying it. Spud had a sickened, haunted look on his face. He had taken the course of action the situation demanded. He’d refused to let emotion get in the way. A bad soldier would have hesitated. That didn’t mean he had to like it. And he obviously didn’t.

In any case, this was a mess of Danny’s making. He’d taken his eye off the ball. He’d done what Spud hadn’t, and let emotion cloud his judgement.

‘Go check on Caitlin,’ Danny said, by way of unspoken apology.

Spud nodded wordlessly, leaving Danny alone in the bloodbath that was Dhul Faqar’s quarters. He knew that he, Spud and Caitlin were the only people alive in the compound now. How long for, he couldn’t tell. People up on the main supply route could have heard gunshots. Dhul Faqar might have called for reinforcements. Bottom line: they couldn’t stay here. It wasn’t safe. They needed to extract.

But not yet. Not before Danny had searched Dhul Faqar’s quarters.

He looked around and picked out their packs and gear, which had been stashed along the wall. He had to step over the Yazidi girl’s body to reach them. He selected his own rifle, which was propped up against the wall, and detached the Surefire torch from its rack. He switched it on and turned back towards the centre of the room. Spud entered, carrying the unconscious Caitlin. ‘Get some meds inside her,’ he said, nodding back towards the packs.

‘We need to get out of here,’ Spud said, laying Caitlin carefully on the ground.

‘In a minute.’

‘Mucker, we could be overrun by more of these twats any time.’

‘I said, in a minute.’

There was a table in the centre of the room. It was littered with books and papers, all in Arabic. Danny shone his torch on it, and shuffled impatiently through the contents, looking for the iPad that Dhul Faqar had used to show him the footage of Clara and Rose. There was no sign of it. He took a step back from the table, and his torch illuminated something on the floor. Black. Rectangular. He bent down to pick it up. It was Dhul Faqar’s iPad, but the screen was smashed, like a window with a bullet hole. Danny tried to switch it on, but the device was dead.

He cursed, but kept hold of the iPad. Something else had caught his eye on the table, half hidden under some other documents. It looked like a British Ordnance Survey map. Danny pulled it towards him, and shone his torch at it. The map had been opened up, then refolded to expose four rectangles of terrain. It had clearly been well used, because the mapping was worn away at each crease. Even without examining the place names, Danny recognised London by the shape of the River Thames. One place name in particular, however, had been circled in black marker pen: Westminster Abbey. But there was nothing else that gave Danny any more information about the hit.

Then he remembered the fire. It had been burning brightly, but now the flames had died down. Danny cursed. He should have checked before to see what Dhul Faqar had been so keen to burn.

There was a pile of crisp, black embers on the coals, which Danny realised had been a sheaf of papers. One piece of paper, however, had fallen to the front of the fire and was only half burned. Danny removed it, then examined it carefully.

‘Spud,’ he breathed. ‘Look at this.’

Spud joined him. He was carrying a med pack, ready to minister to Caitlin. He looked at the paper.

It was a printout from a UK weather website. A forecast. Temperature. Cloud cover. And, circled in black pen, and translated into Arabic lettering beneath, wind speed.

Danny double-checked the location for the forecast.

Sandringham, Norfolk
.

He glanced back at the map of London on the table. His mind was working quickly, picking out various moments from the past few hours and days. He remembered talking to Malinka, just before Caitlin had killed her, asking her about the strike on London:
Westminster
, she had said.
Christmas Day
.

But as Dhul Faqar had suspected Malinka of being an American agent, he would
never
have let her have that information in the first place, unless it was inaccurate.

And why had he been so eager to burn this slip of paper, while leaving untouched the map of London with Westminster Abbey so clearly marked?

‘That’s where the Christmas Day strike is,’ Danny said quietly. ‘He’s targeting the royals. It’s where they spend Christmas.’ He paused. ‘Maybe that’s why Tony was dispatched to pick up Yellow Seven. Maybe Five heard some whispers and wanted him back in the country.’

A pause. Spud was eyeing him uncertainly. ‘I’m hearing a lot of maybes, Danny.’

Danny jabbed the weather report with his forefinger. It left a smear of blood on the paper. ‘Wind speed and wind direction, translated into Arabic. What would we use that information for, you and me?’

‘Taking sniper shots,’ Spud said immediately.

Danny gave him a look that said: got it in one.

‘You don’t know any of that for sure, mucker,’ Spud said carefully.

‘Yes I do,’ Danny said. Because something else had just clicked in his mind. Something Dhul Faqar had said when they were being held at gunpoint.
Our friend Mujahid . . . He will be very happy to be distracted from his Christmas Day plans to travel west and put an end to your child’s life.
‘He told us his guy Mujahid would travel west. You’d only say that if you were somewhere east. Sandringham’s in Norfolk.’

‘I dunno, mate. What about the IS guys on the migrant boats?’

‘Patsys,’ Danny said. ‘Put right into our path to feed us false information. That’s how Dhul Faqar operates. He sacrificed one of his people to flush out Malinka. He sacrificed Santa and Rudolph to make us think the strike was going to be in London. But it’s not. Think about it. You see it on TV every year – the royals going to church on Christmas morning. And with every military resource focussed on London, it’ll be the easiest hit in the world.’ He stared at Spud. ‘The British royal family, massacred by IS. I can’t think of anything those bastards would like better.’

Spud looked unconvinced. ‘Hereford are waiting for our communication,’ he said. ‘Phone all this through. Tell them what you think. Then they can make the call.’ He turned his back on Danny and returned to their gear, clearly about to get their satphone from one of the packs.

‘No,’ Danny said.

Spud stopped. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Don’t make the call,’ Danny said. ‘Not until we’ve worked out what we’re going to say.’

‘I told you, we just—’

‘They’ve got my daughter, Spud. And Clara too. I’ve got no leads. No way of finding them.’

‘Mate, we—’

‘Except one,’ Danny said.

A pause.

‘What?’ Spud asked.

‘This guy Mujahid. He knows where they are. And we know where
he’s
going to be on Christmas morning. If we let the Regiment know, their first priority will be to shoot him on sight. I can’t let that happen.’

Spud’s eyes widened slightly as it dawned on him what Danny was suggesting. ‘You want to
keep
it from them? Mate, they find out, they’ll chuck us in prison and throw away the fucking key.’

Danny stayed silent.

‘Just tell them everything you know. Tell them this Mujahid guy has to be taken alive.’

‘Right,’ Danny said. ‘Because we all know what happens to people who need to stay alive, if they get in the way of a Regiment mission objective.’ And he looked meaningfully over at the Yazidi girl Spud had shot just minutes previously.

‘Jesus,’ Spud breathed. He shook his head. ‘You haven’t got a chance of catching this guy, Danny. If there really is going to be a hit at Sandringham, you’ve got no way of predicting how it’s going to happen, because you don’t know what the royals’ movements are.’

‘Maybe not,’ Danny said quietly. ‘But we know a guy who does.’

For a moment, Spud looked confused. Then his eyes widened. ‘Tony? You’ve got to be fucking joking. He
hates
you. The cunt wouldn’t give you the steam off his piss.’

‘We’ll see,’ Danny said. ‘But we’ve got to get out of here first.’ He nodded towards Caitlin. ‘If we tell them we got no intel out of Dhul Faqar, Caitlin’s a goner. We know how nervous the Firm is about breaching Iraqi airspace at the moment. They won’t risk it just for a medical evacuation of a single soldier.’

‘It could take us weeks to get to the border,’ Spud said.

‘Well, we’ve got hours, not weeks. We need to dangle a carrot. Make them think it’s worthwhile getting us picked up.’

Spud pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘What have you got in mind, Danny?’

‘Are you with me?’

Spud bowed his head. He obviously didn’t like any of this. But Spud owed Danny. Big time. Now that it was Danny’s turn to call in the favour, he could hardly refuse.

‘What do you want me to do?’ he said.

‘Find us a vehicle we can use. I’m going to make a call. We leave in two minutes, and we’ll be home tomorrow. I guarantee it.’

Spud oozed reluctance. But he didn’t argue. Danny moved over to the packs, selected his and hurried to the exit. Spud hauled Caitlin over his shoulder again and followed.

Outside, everything was still. Danny strode up to the edge of the reservoir. It was fully dark again, and a cloudy moon reflected on the dark water. Danny removed the satphone from his pack, inserted the battery, switched it on, waited a few moments while it powered up, then speed-dialled their contact number.