Bad Soldier: Danny Black Thriller 4 (41 page)

It was answered within a single ring. A male voice, very clear. ‘
Go ahead.
’

‘This is Delta Three Tango.’

‘
Wait out, Delta Three Tango.
’

A crackly pause of twenty seconds. Then a new voice. ‘
What do you know?
’ Danny recognised the voice immediately – Ray Hammond. He wondered if their ops officer had made it back to the UK.

‘Target acquired and eliminated. We have three names.’

‘
Please transmit
.’

Danny paused. The success of his plan depended on Hammond not knowing that Clara had been abducted. He couldn’t ask him outright – not if he wanted to track down his daughter on his own. So he kept it obscure. ‘Do you have anything to tell me?’

Now it was Hammond’s turn to pause. ‘
What are you talking about?
’ He sounded genuinely bewildered. That was enough for Danny. ‘
Transmit the names.
’

‘Negative,’ Danny said.

Silence. ‘
Transmit names
,’ Hammond repeated.

‘You want names, you need to send a pick-up to extract us.’

‘
You know that’s not possible
—’

‘
Make
it possible. We have wounded personnel. They won’t survive without a medical evacuation.’

‘
Negative, Delta Three Tango. Transmit names immediately.
’

‘Take down the following location,’ Danny said, and recited the GPS reading that he’d intended to be their RV point with the Kurds. ‘We’ll be there in one hour.’

He switched off the satphone and pulled out the battery. He knew he’d just dropped a bombshell on the headshed. He knew they’d make him pay for it back in the UK. They’d talk about RTUs. There’d probably even be court martials. Danny didn’t care. If the Ruperts thought they’d failed to extract any intelligence out of Dhul Faqar, they’d leave them to find their own way out of Iraq. Danny hadn’t been lying when he said Caitlin wouldn’t make it. Nor would his daughter . . .

He sensed Spud behind him. His mate had returned to retrieve his and Caitlin’s packs.

‘You got a vehicle?’

Spud nodded. But suddenly he wasn’t looking at Danny. He was staring into the distance, across the reservoir. He pointed. ‘What the hell’s that?’ he breathed.

Danny looked. He immediately saw what Spud was pointing at. Several black shadows, flying low over the water, only visible because they blocked out the stars, and because their downdraught formed white horses on the water, illuminated by the clear half moon.

For a sickening moment, he looked at the satphone in his hands. Had someone been listening in to his conversation? Had the encryption been so easily hacked? Impossible, he told himself. He’d only finished talking a few seconds ago. Nobody could mobilise that quickly . . .

Then he heard the banging sound from the incarceration unit, and he understood.

‘Americans,’ he hissed. ‘Malinka must have not clocked in with her handlers. They know something’s gone wrong. They’re here to extract her. They’re not going to let us leave, knowing what we know.’ He turned to Spud. ‘
Run!
’ he hissed.

Spud hoisted the two packs over his shoulders and sprinted. Danny followed him, across the open ground and past the incarceration unit. They could hear the chopper now, the low thrum of its engine and the regular beating of the rotor blades. The Hilux that Spud had selected was parked at an angle on the far side of the incarceration unit. There were several bullet holes in the side, but it was turning over. The left-hand rear passenger door was open, and Danny glimpsed Caitlin lying there, unconscious. The rear window had been shattered, probably by gunfire. Danny and Spud hauled their packs into the back.

Spud sprinted to the driver’s seat, Danny to the passenger side, slamming Caitlin’s door as he passed. Seconds later, they were moving. No headlamps, so they didn’t draw attention to themselves. Spud floored it, the engine screaming as he made his way up the gears, the poorly suspended chassis juddering and bumping over the rough ground. Danny leaned out of the side window, his weapon engaged. Looking back towards the buildings, he could see the threatening form of one of the choppers hovering over the open ground by the side of the reservoir while two others held back over the water, their downdraught kicking up clouds of spray. Figures were fast-roping out of the belly of the chopper that had made landfall.

‘American SF!’ Danny shouted. ‘
Faster!
’

The vehicle juddered badly as Spud spun it off the rough ground and on to the narrow road that led to the perimeter fence, past the two checkpoints and up to the main supply route. From the corner of his eye he could see, in silhouette, the corpses still hanging from the cherry pickers along the perimeter fence. Up ahead, the vehicles belonging to the middlemen were still positioned in the road, and nobody had bothered moving the corpses of the men the unit had eliminated on the way in. Ten metres from the perimeter fence checkpoint, a flock of birds rose suddenly from the corpses on which they had obviously been scavenging. Spud didn’t slow down. As they hit the checkpoint, there was a bump and a crunch as the wheels of the Hilux steamrollered over one of the bodies in the road. Spud yanked the steering wheel left and swerved sharply out of the way of the middlemen’s vehicles, before directing the Hilux back on to the road.

Up ahead, there were the lights of headlamps on the main supply route. It wasn’t busy, but they would only be safe once they reached it and could merge into the traffic heading north. He kept the speed up as Danny looked back towards the compound again. The chopper was still hovering. It had been there for about a minute. The troops would have found Malinka’s body by now. They’d be expecting to find Danny. What would they do when they discovered he was missing? Danny didn’t know the answer to that question. All he knew was that they couldn’t hang around to find out.

Fifteen seconds later, they reached the checkpoint nearest the main supply route. Spud burst through it. Distance to the road: 500 metres. The speedometer was tipping 120 kph. It would take fifteen seconds to cover it. Looking back, Danny saw the chopper rising. The flight crew had switched on a searchlight.

‘I got it,’ Spud breathed, before Danny could point it out.

The searchlight was panning across the compound, obviously looking for something.

Obviously looking for them . . .

Two hundred metres. The chopper was rising higher. Danny’s gut went cold. The higher it was, the greater its field of view, and the better its chance of seeing them.

A hundred metres.

Fifty.

There was a groaning sound from the back. Caitlin stirred, but then closed her eyes again.

Spud didn’t slow down until they were twenty metres from the main supply route. Nor did he switch on the headlamps. Danny gripped his seat hard. An articulated lorry was trundling along the main road at a stately 60 kph. For a horrific moment, he thought they were going to collide. There was a loud klaxon sound – the lorry driver was clearly thinking the same thing. But Spud’s skills were good. At the last moment, he hit the brake. The Hilux decelerated just in time for them to swing on to the road, less than two metres behind the lorry. Spud quickly switched on the headlamps and allowed the Hilux to fall back. Suddenly, they were just another vehicle on the road.

Danny looked back towards the compound. The chopper had killed its lights. It obviously hadn’t found what it was looking for, and seemed to be banking back towards the reservoir. He allowed himself a moment of relief as the Hilux headed north.

‘I told them to pick us up at the RV point we identified with the Kurds,’ Danny said.

Spud nodded. ‘It could take a long time for them to get a pick-up to us, mucker. You know that, right? They were jumpy as fuck about breaching Iraqi airspace when we inserted.’

‘They’ve got stealth choppers. And they think we’ve got the key to stopping a major hit on the capital. Something tells me they’ll work it out pretty quick.’

He looked straight ahead. The tarmac of the main supply route flew past as Spud headed towards the RV point.

Danny was right.

It took them just shy of an hour to make their way up the rough track into the mountains that the Kurds had shown them, to the RV location. When they stopped, Danny double-checked that their GPS coordinates matched those he’d given over the satphone. They did. Now they just had to wait. They drove the Hilux off the track, hiding it behind a rounded, weathered boulder that was twice the size of the vehicle. There was a freshwater stream about thirty paces to the west. Danny and Spud carefully carried the unconscious Caitlin to it. Danny removed her top and did his best to wash the wound. It was in a very bad state. The flesh was mushy and bloodied, and it oozed with the telltale white pus of infection. Her body temperature was high, her breathing shallow. They tried to make her comfortable and safe by lying her back in the vehicle. But she needed serious medicine, and fast.

Danny and Spud took up covert defensive positions: Danny in the shadow of the same boulder that hid Caitlin and the Hilux, Spud on the other side of the track, belly-down amid some thick gorse bush. Danny was bone tired, and sore from the beatings he had endured at the compound. Covered in blood and sweat and dirt. Maybe a couple of broken ribs. It certainly hurt to breathe.

He put the pain from his mind. The call he’d made on the satphone hadn’t lasted longer than thirty seconds, but he’d been obliged to transmit the coordinates of their RV location. It was unlikely that the Americans had intercepted that call, but if they had, he and Spud needed to be prepared for company.

But their only company, as two hours passed and then three, was the occasional scratching of unseen wild animals in the vicinity and, just before midnight, the ominous thunder of a fighter jet somewhere off to the south.

The noise they were waiting for – hoping for – arrived twenty minutes after that. It seemed to come from nowhere. One minute there was silence, the next there was a subdued hum, close yet somehow distant, like the ghost of a chopper. The ghost itself appeared in the sky moments after that. It was not the first time Danny had seen the sleek, angular contours of a stealth Black Hawk. The very existence of this aircraft was routinely denied by the MoD, but the sight of it, with its downward-pointing rotors designed to reduce noise and radar splash, was like a balm to Danny. He didn’t move, however, or make any attempt to show himself, as the bird touched down. Spud lay low, too. It was only when the side door opened and a figure in camouflage fatigues appeared, whose top clearly displayed a 1Para flash, that Spud emerged from his gorse bush and ran, with full pack and rifle, towards the soldier.

Danny started to extract Caitlin from the Hilux, and within twenty seconds he had help – Spud and two others were there. Together they carried Caitlin and all their remaining gear from the vehicle towards the strangely quiet chopper. A medic was waiting for them inside, saline drip at the ready. He instantly took over Caitlin’s care, while the loadie – a severe-looking man with a shock of ginger hair – closed up the door and gave the all-clear to the pilot. As the Black Hawk rose effortlessly from the ground, the loadie turned to Danny holding a headset and boom mike. ‘Hereford HQ,’ he said.

Danny felt Spud’s eyes on him as he accepted and donned the headset. ‘Go ahead,’ he said.

‘
Give me the names, Black.
’ Ray Hammond, sounding angrier than Danny had ever heard him.

Danny caught Spud’s anxious glance. ‘You get the names when Caitlin’s on British soil, boss,’ he said.

‘
For Christ’s sake, Black, we haven’t got time for this.
’

‘Then get us home quick.’

He ripped off the headphones, handed them back to the loadie and looked out of the dark window at the mountains of northern Iraq, a fast-moving, moonlit blur below.

December 24

Twenty-one

Joe didn’t think of it as stealing. He thought of it as survival.

He was slowly chewing a chicken sandwich that he had taken from a branch of Pret A Manger during the morning rush hour. Even though he had a little money, courtesy of Galbraith’s wallet, he knew it had to last. The less he spent, the better. He had waited until now – nearly midnight – when his hunger pangs were unbearable, to eat the sandwich. He had no way of knowing where his next meal was coming from, and it had been risky taking it. He had thought, as he left the shop, that one of the staff had shouted out after him. He’d run away without looking back.

The expensive laptop whose screen he was staring at had, ironically, been easier to steal than the sandwich. He’d walked into a public library, found someone working at a machine that would suit his purpose, and waited for the owner to go and find a book from a nearby shelf. It took five silent seconds to close the laptop and swipe it. Nobody had even looked at him as he left the library. Outside, he had checked the battery charge. Thirty-eight per cent. Not good, and he had no charger, so he had to work fast.

Which was what he was now doing. He sat in an all-night cafe somewhere in the middle of London – he didn’t know where he was exactly. There were a few feeble lengths of silver tinsel along the counter, and the radio softly played the same Christmas songs that Joe had heard relentlessly since his escape from Galbraith and Sharples. The guy behind the counter was whistling along tunelessly.