Authors: Chris Ryan
Five minutes passed before Tommo’s posh voice came over the headset.
‘All enemy down,’ he said. ‘We’re clear.’
The militants were dead, but there was still work to do.
It was Boydie’s decision to round up the bodies. ‘Too many news crews crawling round this country, sniffing for a story,’ he said. ‘They’ll fucking find one too if they stumble over these stiffs with rounds in their heads.’ He was right. If a story started with fourteen dead insurgents and a NATO hit squad nowhere to be seen, there was no way of telling how it would end up once the Chinese whispers had finished. Danny recalled a story he’d heard about A Squadron during the First Gulf War. A few of the lads had got into a contact and captured a handful of Iraqis. The red mist was down, and one of the SAS lads had executed them. The guys didn’t know what to do with the bodies, so they piled them into one of the Iraqis’ vehicles and took them out into the desert, where they placed a couple of anti-tank mines on a timer under the vehicle. The A Squadron boys had driven off into the night and let the fearsome mines do their work. They’d all known that what they were doing was on the edge, but, at the end of the day, if there were no bodies there was no story.
End
of story
.
Boydie was clearly thinking along the same lines. After a brief radio conversation with the headshed, he announced their next move. ‘We’ll relight the target,’ he said. ‘Do the original job. There’ll be fuck all left of them if anyone decides to come nosing around.’
Tommo and Five Bellies were given the job of looking after the hostages. Once Tommo had changed the wheel that Danny had shot out on the technical, he and Five Bellies loaded the quivering UN personnel into the cab. The hostages couldn’t even speak: they just trembled and stared into the middle distance. ‘Get them out of here,’ Boydie said. ‘Their nerves are shot already. They don’t need to see this. Four klicks should do it. We’ll meet you back at the LUP once you’ve heard the strike.’ Danny and Boydie watched the technical disappear, then got to work.
It took about twenty minutes to locate all of the dead bodies and carry them into the main building at the front of the village. The corpses were already starting to stiffen, and it was grisly work: the fatal wounds the Regiment’s rounds had inflicted were diabolical. As soon as a body was moved just an inch, blood oozed from the entrance and exit wounds. By the time they had unceremoniously dumped them all in a pile in the centre of the room, both Danny and Boydie looked like they’d been bathing in gore. It was sticky on Danny’s face, and filled his nostrils with an unpleasant, iron-like smell. He wasn’t sorry to leave the village and start trekking back towards the wadi.
They moved quickly. Fifteen minutes to cross the open ground. Once they had regained their gear from the LUP, they reinserted themselves into the narrow trench, where Danny set up the LTD once more. He directed the device’s cross hairs directly at the building in which they’d piled the militants, then Boydie made the call for fast air for the second time in twenty-four hours.
And this time there was no reason to abort the air strike.
The Tornado arrived twenty minutes later. The boom of its jet engines was enough to make Danny’s body rattle as he lay in the trench. But it was nothing compared to the force of the bomb as it hit. Guided by the laser, it slammed directly into the militants’ makeshift tomb. Danny saw a flash of light. A fraction of a second later the shock wave rolled out across the desert and vibrated in their ears, knocking the LTD from its little tripod. For a horrible, irrational moment, Danny wondered if he’d lit the target badly and the bomb had landed too close. He needn’t have worried. Through a sudden mushroom of smoke, and amid the shock wave, he saw flames licking up to the sky. By now the bodies would have been blasted to pieces, and anything that remained of them would be consumed by the fire.
They stayed in the OP, scanning the desert night, watching for anybody coming to investigate the site of the air strike. But the only vehicle they saw was the technical, driven by Tommo with Five Bellies beside him, headlamps off, trundling towards them from the west.
Boydie got on the radio. ‘Zero, this is Charlie Alpha Five,’ he said. ‘Target destroyed. Hostages safe. Request pick-up. Repeat, request pick-up.’
FIVE
The two hostages were in a bad way. Physically weak, mentally fucked.
One of them was in his mid-thirties, a tall, rather ungainly man with cracked round glasses. He had been badly beaten on one side of his head. His skin was bruised and his cheekbone had a slight indentation which suggested to Danny that it had been smashed. The other man was older, probably in his fifties. He had three teeth missing: two canines and a molar. It looked like each tooth had been individually removed. There was dried blood on his chin as a souvenir of that little dental surgery. The two men could barely walk. They certainly still couldn’t speak, so although Danny knew they were British, there was no way of confirming this. It was as if the terror of the previous few days had wiped everything from their minds. They could do nothing but stare ahead and tremble. If any of the guys tried to talk to them, they would flinch as if someone had prodded an open wound. It didn’t seem to register that they’d been rescued by British Army personnel who were going to get them home safely.
They left the hostages to Tommo’s care. As patrol medic, he dealt with their superficial injuries, though there was little he could do other than get fluids inside them, bandage their cuts and feed them some DF118 painkillers. The remaining three members of the patrol took up defensive positions and scanned the surrounding desert for suspicious movement. The burning village was like a massive beacon in the middle of this vast expanse of open ground. Smoke drifted low across the desert towards the wadi, compromising their vision. Not good. It wasn’t a matter of if someone approached the conflagration, but when. Their luck held, however. Their location was sufficiently remote for them to remain unobserved for now.
The Sea Knight arrived just before midnight. The dust halos were no less bright out here in the open desert, but they were less of a threat than they had been the previous night. Tommo and Five Bellies helped the hostages up the tailgate. Danny and Boydie followed immediately after with their packs. The chopper rose from the ground before they’d even sat down. A couple of US Army medics were waiting to take care of the hostages. As Danny took a seat and plugged himself once more into the aircraft’s comms, he was happy that someone else had taken delivery of them. A sudden wave of exhaustion crashed over him, and he could sense the same of the other members of the patrol. They’d only been airborne a couple of minutes before he felt his eyes closing despite the thunderous grind of the chopper and the occasional status report over the cans.
It was neither of these sounds that woke him suddenly, but a sudden lurch by the Sea Knight. Danny’s eyes pinged open. His hands automatically felt for his weapon, and he could see similar signs of readiness in the other guys. The aircraft immediately steadied itself, but Danny could tell they had shifted direction slightly. He looked out of the window. They were over water. One patch of sea looked the same as another. It took a communication from the pilot thirty seconds later to explain what was happening. ‘OK, gentlemen, we’ve had an instruction to re-route.’
‘Where to?’ Boydie demanded.
No answer. And equally, no more chance of sleep. Danny’s senses were on high alert again. Where were they going? What was happening? The Sea Knight gained height. Looking out of the window, Danny caught sight of the
George Bush
several hundred feet below. He used its position and the movement of the aircraft to calculate their direction. North-west. He relaxed a little. Everything suggested they were heading back to their staging post in Malta.
He was right. An hour later the Sea Knight made ground again. This time the rotors powered down. The grinding of the engine came to a halt. A reception party of four green army lads ran up the tailgate carrying stretchers. Their eyes flickered over towards the special forces unit, but they were professional enough not to let their curiosity interfere with the more important business of ferrying the hostages off the aircraft. His body once more heavy with fatigue, Danny disconnected himself from the comms system. Thirty seconds later he and the rest of his patrol were walking down the tailgate into the heavy, humid air of Malta International Airport.
An ambulance was waiting on the airfield, thirty metres from the Sea Knight, its neon light flashing. The green army boys were loading up the second of the two hostages. A hundred metres beyond it, Danny saw the familiar hulking outline of a Hercules. On the runway to his two o’clock, a Ryanair flight was coming in to land. Holidaymakers arriving in the Med for sun, sand and sex. As though reading his thoughts, Boydie said, ‘I wouldn’t mind a bit of that myself.’ Danny didn’t have a chance to answer. Just as his feet hit the tarmac, his attention snapped back to the area between the Sea Knight and the ambulance. An unmarked van had pulled up ten metres in front of them. Two men climbed out. Danny recognised them at once. Eddie Anderson, OC B Squadron, and ops sergeant Ben Powell. Anderson nodded briefly at the advancing patrol. ‘Fucking good work,’ he said gruffly. ‘Sorry, lads, but we’ll need a debrief for government in twenty minutes over the satcom. Danny, you’re needed back at HQ asap. Don’t worry, son. Nothing to worry about. Ben will sort you out with anything you need.’
Danny’s stomach felt leaden. Ben Powell had the blank expression of a man about to deliver bad news. Danny strode over to the ops sergeant, who immediately started walking away from the Sea Knight in the direction of the Hercules. Danny fell in beside him. ‘What’s wrong?’ And before Powell could answer, he fired more questions. ‘My dad all right? Something happen to my brother?’
‘Relax, Danny,’ Powell said. ‘As far as I know it’s nothing personal.’
A wave of relief. ‘Then what?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine. All I know is they want you back in the UK. This morning.’
Regiment guys being plucked out of theatre like this was seldom good news. He quickly made a mental list of anything he might have done wrong. Were the MoD about to screw him over? ‘What the hell’s going on, Ben?’ he demanded.
‘I told you,’ the ops sergeant replied. ‘I don’t know.’ Powell seemed slightly annoyed by his own ignorance. ‘All I know is it must be important.’ He held up an airline boarding card. ‘BA flight to Heathrow. Supposed to leave two hours ago. They’ve delayed it for you, but you need to get cleaned up first – you smell like a dog’s arse. Fucking look like one too, so shake a leg, mate. Somebody clearly doesn’t want to be kept waiting.’
The hours that followed were a blur. Powell led Danny to a small shower room, where his North Face drop bag was waiting for him. He showered off the dirt, using the tub of Swarfega that he always packed for this purpose to strip off the blood smeared over his head, face and hands. Then he got dressed into blue jeans, black Converse, white shirt and leather jacket. As he walked out of the shower room there was not a hint of his profession, or the way he’d spent the past twenty-four hours.
The BA jet was sitting on the tarmac, fully loaded. Nobody asked Danny for any ID as a refuelling vehicle drove him directly to the front, where a mobile stairway was waiting for him. As he boarded, an attractive air hostess with a little upturned nose escorted him to his seat in business class. Danny wondered what bullshit the airport authorities had fed the other passengers to explain the delay of their flight. As he took his seat he felt eyes on him that suggested some of them had twigged from his late arrival and damp hair that they hadn’t been told the whole truth.
The plane was a hell of a sight more comfortable than the Sea Knight. Once they were airborne, the pretty air hostess offered him champagne. She looked almost disappointed when he asked for coffee instead, and he noticed the way her hand brushed against his as she handed it to him. ‘Let me know if you need anything at all,’ she almost purred at him. Danny just nodded. Ordinarily he’d have played the game, but he was too dog-tired even to think about that. He was asleep before the aircraft reached its cruising altitude.
He dozed fitfully. Even though Powell had assured him that everything was OK back home, in some corner of his exhausted mind he couldn’t shake the suspicion that something was wrong. He saw his dad, limp in his wheelchair, a look of fear on the face that had grown fat through lack of exercise. He’d been stuck in that damn thing in a tiny bungalow in Hereford for the past thirty years, stubbornly rearing his children and refusing any help that was offered to him. Danny had never once heard him complain about his lot. Even when Danny’s brother Kyle had started getting into trouble with the police – just as all his teachers had predicted he would – their dad had been philosophical. You can only shit with the arse you’ve got, he always said – one of Taff’s favourite sayings – and Danny privately knew that his disappointment with Kyle’s behaviour was more than balanced by his pride when Danny had passed selection. Even so, the thought of life throwing anything more at his father made Danny nauseous.
The plane touched down at Heathrow at 06.00 hrs GMT. Dawn had broken, but although the sky was clear the air had a bite to it that Danny had not experienced farther south. Even with his eyes shut, he’d have known this was the UK. The desert just smelled different. Waiting on the tarmac for him was an anonymous black Land Cruiser. The driver – he wore jeans, a sports jacket and brown leather driving gloves – opened the rear door for him. Ignoring the bleary-eyed and suspicious looks from the other passengers on the tarmac, Danny climbed into the back. Without a word, the chauffeur drove off the airfield.