Luke got to his feet and yanked Stratton up from the ground, dragging him behind the shed, where he threw him down again. ‘Don’t fucking move,’ he said as he removed the empty mag and inserted a fresh one. He’d been at it long enough, though, for the guy he’d just seen to be on the roof, and maybe more of them.
A round pinged past the shed, a couple of feet from Luke’s position – close enough for him to feel the air displacement. Sweat poured off him and as he tried to work out his next move, he was aware of Stratton’s voice. The man had fallen to his knees again. ‘I know that my rewards will be in heaven,’ he said. ‘Yours, no doubt, will be in a different place.’
Luke delved once more into his ops waistcoat and brought out a fragmentation grenade as the sound of the approaching air support grew louder. He squeezed the detonation lever, pulled out the pin and hurled the grenade over the shed.
One second passed.
Two seconds.
Three.
The frag exploded with a sudden sharp crack, which was followed by the sound of screaming. Luke pressed his back against the corner of the shed, pointed his weapon around the corner and fired a random burst, before peering round to take stock of the situation.
The frag had done its work well. Three militants were on their backs. Two of them were motionless; the third had blood pumping from his leg and was rolling about so frantically he was painting the area around him red. Luke aimed the 53 in the wounded man’s direction and with a quick double tap put him out of his misery.
And then he looked up.
Two helis, both coming in sharp and from a great height. One looked like a Puma; the other, smaller and hovering just above and behind in a chaperone position, was clearly an Apache. Luke pulled his second and final fragmentation grenade from his waistcoat, yanked away the pin and lobbed it into the opening of the skylight. The muffled crack of its explosion was followed by more screaming. Luke blocked that from his senses, and pulled Stratton round to the front of the shed. He waved at the descending chopper, but the pilot clearly already had a trace on his position and was coming in to land, while the attack helicopter stayed about thirty metres clear, hovering at an angle so that its formidable arsenal was pointing directly at the roof. The roar of the two sets of rotary blades was immense; as the Puma touched down it was like a force-nine wind had blown over the building. The side door opened and Luke recognised B Squadron’s Sergeant Major Bill Thomas shouting at them to run on board.
‘
Go!
’ Luke roared at Stratton over the deafening noise. He kept his 53 aimed towards the skylight.
Stratton didn’t move. He was looking from the chopper to Luke as if he couldn’t decide what best to do.
‘
GO!
’ Luke pushed Stratton in the direction of the aircraft door. The crew member grabbed Stratton by the arm and pulled him into the helicopter. Luke followed, throwing himself into the hard, metallic interior of the chopper. The instant he was on board, the Puma lifted off the roof with a lurch. Luke looked back out of the opening to see the bloodied bodies he’d nailed on the roof below; as they grew higher, he could see the remnants of the mob still rioting in the street; and for a brief moment he saw the Land Cruiser.
The image of Fozzie’s blood spattering over the inside of the vehicle replayed itself in Luke’s mind; he remembered the way Finn’s body had twitched and jolted, and the sickening thud of AK rounds slamming into Russ. It went against every one of Luke’s Regiment instincts to leave the bodies of his mates down there on enemy territory, but he knew he’d had no other option.
And so far as he could tell, all this had happened because of one man.
He turned and saw Stratton huddled on the floor of the Puma, a dark frown on his face. Luke felt as if some other force was controlling his body. He threw himself at the older man and whacked him with a heavy fist. Stratton was like a rag doll. He didn’t even try to resist as Luke laid into him; and by the time two of the aircrew had pulled him away, he’d managed to thump his fist three times against the former PM’s face, hearing the nose joint crack each time and seeing blood smear over the lower part of the guy’s face.
Luke didn’t struggle as he was restrained. He knew there was no point. His squadron comrades were holding him and shouting something at him, but he didn’t even register what it was. Just white noise. Interference in his head. He slumped on to the floor of the Puma, suddenly exhausted, his mind ablaze.
His stomach churned.
It wasn’t the bloodshed that made him feel nauseous.
It wasn’t even the brutal and sudden death of his mates.
It was Stratton.
It wasn’t over yet. Alistair Stratton. Maya Bloom. The Grosvenor Group. Together they’d caused death on an unimaginable scale. And from what Stratton had said, there was more to come . . .
He felt the man’s eyes on him and he looked across the body of the Puma to see a battered face staring at him, blood streaming from his badly broken nose.
To the end there shall be war.
Stratton’s voice rang in Luke’s head as the fields and rooftops of Gaza slipped away underneath him and the aircraft sped out of Hamas territory, back over the border into Israel.
TWENTY-SIX
15.00 hrs.
There was a queue outside the security gates leading to the Western Wall, but not as long as usual. Ordinarily there would be swarms of tourists in this part of Jerusalem, waiting patiently to gain access to the ancient site. Not today. Even if the governments of the West hadn’t issued travel warnings, the mobilisation of troops in the area would have put people off. Not to mention the increased activity in Israeli airspace, and the military presence that was high, even for Jerusalem. There were some visitors to the city, with their cameras and baseball caps and rucksacks, but nothing like the usual number.
A young man who had just joined the queue to clear security before approaching the wall counted twenty people ahead of him, all men as the women were obliged to use an adjacent entrance. Eight of these men were dressed in traditional clothes: black suits, white shirts and wide-brimmed black hats. The remainder had their heads covered with skullcaps or ordinary hats. They were not tourists; they were here to pray at their holy site and they knew the regulations. The young man knew the regulations too. He had been coming here every day for the past two weeks, though before that he wouldn’t have been seen dead in such a place. His skin was perhaps slightly darker than the others’, but not so dark that he looked out of place in a traditional Hassidic suit. As the queue moved, he shuffled patiently along. And by the time he reached the security gate he had already recognised one of the guards from his regular visits. He nodded in greeting at the soldier, dressed in his olive uniform and with an M16 slung across his front. The guard nodded back and handed him a small tray.
The young man put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a bunch of keys and a handful of coins – a mixture of one-, two- and five-shekel pieces. He dumped these metallic objects in the tray, before passing through the airport-style metal detector. It made no sound. With another nod to the guard, he recouped his keys and his loose change, returned them to his pocket and continued on his way.
A flight of stone steps led down to the Western Wall plaza – a large, flagstoned square about seventy-five metres square, populated this morning by about a hundred people, twenty or thirty of whom were close to the wall, facing it and praying. The young man ignored all these people, as he always did, and headed straight for the far corner of the plaza, which adjoined the left-hand side of the wall. There he passed through a small archway to find himself in a room that gave access to Jerusalem’s ancient tunnels. There were more men in here, praying against the covered section of the Western Wall, which continued along to his right. Beyond them, a passageway led straight on. They paid him no attention as he continued in this direction.
The Western Wall tunnel, he knew, extended about 400 metres – well into the Muslim Quarter of the city. He wouldn’t go that far. He shuffled along, with the ancient stones of the wall to his right atmospherically lit by yellow lamps embedded in the floor, past the occasional visitor looking up at the wall and at the information plaques that explained its history. But he wasn’t interested in history. His mind was firmly on the future.
After about a hundred metres, he arrived at his destination. In the wall to the left there was a metal grille, about a metre square, its bars creating gaps roughly ten centimetres by fifteen. Beyond the grille it was dark, and the air around it was slightly colder. It was impossible to see how far back or down the space extended, but he knew it was enough for his purposes. The young man looked around to check nobody was watching. The immediate vicinity was deserted.
From the inside pocket of his jacket he pulled a resealable transparent plastic freezer bag with a thirty-centimetre length of fishing line attached to it. He removed the coins from his pocket and placed them in the bag, which he sealed and – checking once more that nobody was watching – pushed through one of the lowest row of holes in the grille. He kept hold of the fishing line as the bag dropped below floor level, before tying the other end securely round one of the vertical bars.
He knew that anyone looking very closely would see that there were eleven other bits of fishing line attached to the bottom of the grille. Further investigation would reveal that each line suspended a similar bag of coins. But as he stood up, he felt quite sure that nobody would notice this little cache. The coins were safe. They could wait there until they were needed.
Which wouldn’t be long, he thought to himself, as he shuffled out of the tunnel, back into the plaza and away from the Western Wall. Five minutes later he was walking around the Old Town, back towards East Jerusalem, his job complete.
For now.
The Regiment ops room back at the Israeli military base had been emptied, the entire squadron confined to quarters.
The Puma had touched down three and a half hours ago, but that meant nothing to Luke. He was suffering from a kind of numbness. As he’d been escorted off the Puma by the flight crew, he’d been only half aware of the Foreign Office reps who had crowded round Alistair Stratton. Luke had barely registered the looks of incredulity that the Ruperts had given him when the flight crew explained how he’d laid into Stratton on the chopper, breaking his nose; and he’d been entirely submissive as he was escorted to a holding area on the edge of the Regiment’s operations base.
It was a small room with nothing but a wooden chair in it. Luke hadn’t bothered opening the door to check whether it was guarded. Of
course
it was fucking guarded. He’d collapsed into a corner and closed his eyes. He could just hear Stratton’s voice; just imagine what bullshit he was saying about what had occurred on the ground.
Time slowed down. Luke felt like he’d relived a thousand times the moment the RPG hit the Land Cruiser. But, sickening though the memory was, it was not nearly so sickening as the thought of Stratton’s rantings. In his head he replayed the desperate conversation on the Gazan rooftop. He remembered someone telling him once that psychopaths were often to be found in the corridors of power, but it was more than that. He’d been quoting the fucking Bible at Luke, at least that was what it had sounded like – the sort of shit you’d expect from some nutter with a sandwich board walking down Oxford Street predicting the end of the world.
To the end there shall be war.
The memory of Stratton’s words chilled him, but he couldn’t get the bastard out of his head.
The Book of Daniel. It tells us it is here that the End Times will start.
Was he really saying that? Was he really saying that the end of the world was coming and that he had something to do with it? Had he really tipped over the edge into genuine insanity?
But then Luke recalled the few moments he’d spent that morning looking at his ops officer’s laptop. The US naval fleet advancing across the Med; the coalition forces grouping in the plains of northern Israel; troop movement along the Iranian border; even Yemen was mobilising. When it came to orchestrating wars, Stratton had form. Just look at Iraq. And so far as Luke could tell, he was orchestrating this one like a fucking maestro, with Maya Bloom – ruthless and without pity – as his accomplice. If Stratton wanted the world to burn, all it needed was a spark. And if everything Luke had heard was right, that spark would be lit in Jerusalem.
Hanukkah. The first day of the celebrations. One hour before midday.
He thought back to the briefing they’d had at Hereford. The ops officer had mentioned Hanukkah. What had he said?
Three days from now.
Luke did the maths. The first day of Hanukkah was tomorrow. And at 11.00 hrs something big would be going down . . .
Nobody would believe him, of course. Not once Stratton had filled everyone’s ears with shit. Nobody would believe a simple Regiment sergeant over the former Prime Minister. Which narrowed his options. He had to get to Jerusalem. Catch up with Stratton. Catch up with Maya Bloom. Stop them, somehow . . .
17.00 hrs. The guards who burst into the holding area and took him to the ops room were less than gentle. There were just two people in there: B Squadron’s ops officer, O’Donoghue, and the OC, Dawson. They were standing in front of O’Donoghue’s laptop as Luke entered.