Authors: Chris Ryan
Danny raised his Sig once more, holding the end of the barrel an inch from Jack’s forehead. His mate’s eyes flicked open. He nodded, very faintly, then more foam spewed from his mouth.
‘Goodnight, mucker,’ Danny whispered.
And then he fired.
Danny’s hands and the front of his clothes were covered in blood. Buckingham looked ill as he stared at him.
‘I heard shots.’
They were standing by the VW. Danny said nothing. He was scanning up and down the road, checking for lights, movement. All clear for now, but that wouldn’t last.
Time check: 02.10 hrs. Less than three hours till dawn, but the night sky was very clear, the moon bright.
‘What about Jack?’ Buckingham asked.
‘Dead.’
‘What?
How?
’
‘Leaking head,’ Danny said flatly. No point telling him any more. He strode to the boot of the VW and opened it. His pack was inside, his M4 beside it. He removed both items, shouldered the bergen and slung the assault rifle across his body.
‘Who were the men in the other vehicle?’ said Buckingham.
Danny didn’t reply. He closed the boot quietly, to avoid attracting attention.
He needn’t have bothered, because suddenly Buckingham slammed his fist noisily on the roof of the car. Danny felt his nerves snapping, and he turned to give him a bollocking. The expression on Buckingham’s face stopped him. There was fury in his eyes, and his diffident expression had gone, to be replaced by a contemptuous sneer.
‘Who,’ he repeated, his voice much quieter, ‘were the men in the other vehicle?’
Danny squared up to him. ‘Bad guys.’
‘I will
not
,’ Buckingham said, ‘be patronised by a
bloody
soldier. Is that understood?’
Silence. The two men stared at each other. Danny could see a vein pulsing in Buckingham’s neck.
‘Fine,’ Danny said eventually. Now was not the time or place. ‘Russian. Spetznaz would be my guess. Russian special forces. They were wearing body armour and Kevlar, and they were using Saiga-12s.’
‘What the hell’s a Saiga-12?’
‘A very big gun,’ Danny said, as though talking to a child. ‘My guess is that our fixer is behind it,’ he continued with a shrug. ‘But that’s only a guess.’
‘How many were there?’ Buckingham asked. His face and voice had softened a little.
‘Four.’
‘I heard five shots.’
‘Then there’s nothing wrong with your hearing. We need to get away from here, and we need to do it quickly. Understand?’
Buckingham drew a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry about your friend.’
But there was no time to kiss and make up. Danny was already scanning the surrounding country. He knew, from his previous study of the terrain, that this road continued in a straight line for 100 kilometres east towards Homs. It cut through a mountain range on its way – the Homs Gap. Whatever their next move – whether they continued inland or retreated back to the coast – they needed to stay close to the road because it led directly to both destinations. He tried to think calmly. Tactically. If he was being tracked, what would his pursuers
expect
him to do? Retreat? Or get as far from the road as possible? One of the two.
Would they expect him to continue after losing three men? Probably not.
He looked east. He reckoned he could just make out, in the distance, the craggy outline of the mountain range. He had no intention of climbing it with Buckingham in tow. If they were to continue, the road was their only option. As options went, it stank.
Danny nodded in a northerly direction. ‘Follow me,’ he said.
The two men ran twenty metres off the road. At a word from Danny, they stopped. He turned and aimed his rifle back at the vehicles, discharging five rounds at the Land Cruiser. The spent cartridges fell at his feet.
‘What are you doing?’ Buckingham asked.
Danny lowered his weapon. ‘They’ll see gunfire came from this direction and assume we made our escape this way.’
‘Who’s “they”?’
‘I don’t know.’
He ran north for another twenty metres, then fired three more rounds. That was enough. He’d laid their false trail. They had to get out of there. They ran back to the road and over to the other side, passing five metres to the east of the crash. Danny sensed Buckingham slowing down as he caught sight of Jack’s butchered head. But he didn’t stop or speak.
Danny checked the time. 02.58 hrs. They had roughly two hours of night cover left. On his own and at a push, he could cover a good ten klicks in that time, but he knew Buckingham had nothing like his fitness and he wasn’t sure he could beast him that far. Already the MI6 man was ten metres behind him, and they’d barely tabbed fifty metres from the road. They’d be lucky to cover seven klicks before the sun came up. He lessened his pace. Ten seconds later Buckingham caught up with him. ‘We’ll head south, staying a couple of kilometres from the road,’ Danny said. ‘After that we turn east again. They won’t expect us to be heading to Homs, not after all that.’
‘What happens when it gets light?’
‘We find a lying-up point.’ Danny didn’t elaborate on where that might be. The terrain all around them was sparse, flat and open. At sunrise they’d be visible to anyone with binoculars. And Spetznaz, if it really was them they were dodging, would have a lot more than that. ‘And then we make some decisions.’
‘There’s no decision to make,’ Buckingham said quietly. ‘We have to get to Homs. We’ve a job to do.’
Danny didn’t reply. He was looking east along the main road. About three kilometres away, he could see the lights of a chopper, flying low along the direction of the highway. And on the road itself, more lights, perhaps three pairs.
‘The Syrians might have something to say about that,’ Danny said at last. ‘Or the Russians.’
‘Just tell me what to do.’
‘Move.’
Buckingham didn’t need telling twice.
TWELVE
06.00 hrs.
Clara Macleod’s plans, such as they were, had failed to take one thing into consideration.
Her fear.
Huddled in the corner of the looted shop, she had just one objective in mind: to get to the Médecins Sans Frontières camp on the eastern side of the city. She didn’t know where she was, or which way was east. She had no phone and no money. Her French was passable, her Arabic non-existent.
Her plan had been to wait until nightfall before leaving her hideout. Perhaps then she might keep to the shadows and have a chance of avoiding the violent government forces who had already killed both her boyfriend and the little girl she’d been tending. The thought of running into them made her limbs feel empty with dread. That plan had been a mistake.
As soon as night had fallen, the bombing had started again. So she had crouched in a dark corner of the shop, weeping with terror and indecision: was she safer inside, out of sight and mind, or on the street, where the building couldn’t collapse on her? The impossible choice had paralysed her. As the city shook around her, the rumbling artillery punctuated by snatches of sniper fire, she’d remained where she was, wishing with a furious intensity that she could turn back time and not make the reckless, stupid decision to travel from the MSF base into Homs. She even prayed, and she hadn’t done that since she was a child of eight.
The bombing had subsided an hour or so before dawn. The silence was almost soothing and, curled up on the hard floor, Clara had drowsed for perhaps forty-five minutes before waking with a sudden, horrible jolt as she realised where she was, shivering with cold, her throat rough with thirst. It was slowly growing lighter outside, and the new day brought her a new sense of determination. She could
not
suffer another night like that. She
had
to leave this place. She
had
to get back to the camp. Today.
Clara urinated in the corner of the shop and, ignoring the stabs of hunger in her belly, ventured outside.
The stars were still out, burning brightly in the indigo sky. A strange thought crossed Clara’s mind: that her parents might be looking at the same stars from the window of their comfortable Wiltshire home, while she was surrounded by the rubble and shattered ruins of a bombed city. One look across the road told her how close she’d come to dying last night. A three-storey building that had been largely intact looked on the point of caving in. The render had fallen from its façade to reveal the shoddy brickwork underneath, and a lightning-shaped crack ran the entire height of the building. Clara couldn’t tell if there was anybody inside. The street itself was almost deserted. A cat stood guard over the bags of rubbish fifteen metres away, its eyes glinting in the darkness. Twenty metres to the right, a man was loading a grey van with personal belongings. He had a furtive, hunted expression as he tried to stuff the end of a rolled-up carpet into the already crammed vehicle. A local inhabitant, collecting his gatherings and deserting his home. Clara ran to him. ‘
S’il-vous plait, vous pouvez m’aider
?
’ she said.
The man shook his head and slammed the rear doors of the van shut. Clara desperately grabbed hold of him, but he shook her off. Seconds later he was driving away, the tyres screeching on the rough road as he left Clara staring after him.
The familiar feeling of paralysis gripped her. She knew she had to move, she
had
to get back to the camp, but she didn’t know which direction to go. It felt like an impossible choice, as if one direction led to freedom, the other to death. How could she know which one to choose? For a full thirty seconds she remained as motionless as the cat, but then the curious stillness around her was broken by a piercing, wailing voice.
‘
Allahu Akbar
. . .
Allahu Akbar
. . .
Ash-hadu an-la ilaha illa illa
. . .
’
The call to prayer.
The feral cat, disturbed by the noise, scampered away. Clara blinked. She turned left, in the direction of the voice, and an idea came to her. All mosques faced towards Mecca in Saudi Arabia. All Muslims prayed in that direction. She scrunched up her eyes and pieced together a hazy mental map of the Middle East. Mecca was almost directly south of Homs, she was sure of it. That meant she need only find the mosque if she wanted to orientate herself.
Suddenly released from her paralysis, she ran, her footsteps echoing against the shell-damaged buildings that lined this empty street. She didn’t try to keep track of her location, but followed the muezzin’s voice calling the faithful to prayer. As she turned right at the end of the street, she found herself in a wider one. Like everywhere else it bore the scars of the bombing. In front of a building on the far side was a pile of debris, three metres high and ten long. It contained old boilers and white goods, tyres and pieces of broken furniture, the accumulated detritus of homes that no longer existed. The street itself, although far from busy, was not deserted. Here and there, local people – all men, Clara noticed – hurried with their heads down and their collars up, in the direction of the voice. Nobody spoke. They didn’t even look at each other, although Clara did feel the occasional curious glance as she joined these men on their way to the mosque.
Three minutes passed. The muezzin had fallen silent but Clara was now able to follow the little crowd. At a corner of this main street she saw a boy no more than ten years old sitting in a purple plastic chair. He had short black hair and a stripy jumper. On one side of him, sitting on the pavement, was his little brother. On the other side, propped up on a stool, a tray of cigarettes and lighters for sale. The eyes of both little boys followed the curious sight of this Western woman hurrying to the mosque with the men.
The men turned left off the main street into a smaller one that led to a large, open square about sixty metres by sixty, lined with trees and with an area of greenery that seemed quite out of place in this war-torn town. On the far side of the square was the mosque, low, sprawling and ornate, with a minaret on either side. The sun was just rising behind the mosque and its beams stabbed Clara’s eyes, which had seen only darkness for nearly twenty-four hours. Her hands remained over her face for ten seconds as the dazzle subsided. Then, keeping her head down – as much to avoid attracting attention as to protect her vision – she moved forwards. For the first time since the horrific events of yesterday, she felt a twinge of hope. The sun was rising from the east, the direction in which the mosque was pointing. She knew which way to go. She had a chance of getting back to the camp. To safety, or something like it.
She stopped.
Fifteen metres to her right, a woman was crying. Clara turned to look at her. She was dressed in a black robe and looked poor. She had a child in her arms, little more than a toddler – Clara couldn’t say whether male or female. The reason for the woman’s distress was obvious: the child’s face was covered with blood. He or she was conscious, but clearly in shock, silently trembling in the woman’s arms. She kept approaching men on the way to the mosque, babbling at them through her tears, clearly asking them for help. None of them stopped. None of them even looked at her. Her distress grew worse.