Authors: Chris Ryan
The terrain – flat, dry grassland – afforded no camouflage. On foot, the hills were a good two hours away. Danny’s trained eye, however, was picking out other options. Roughly a kilometre away, between his two and three o’clock and set back about fifty metres from the road, was a single-storey house with a couple of outbuildings. Danny didn’t doubt that he could find a place there to hide, but it wasn’t a good option. Too obvious. If enemy troops performed a search of this area, they
would
come knocking on that door. No question about it. He continued to pan around, looking for an alternative. Twenty seconds later he found one.
It would have been easy to miss it, which made it ideal as a lying-up point. To his one o’clock, the road started to slope gently upwards. Zooming in with his night-sight, and keeping his hand very steady because of the dramatically reduced field of view, he picked out the upper rim of a small, circular opening, perhaps a metre and a half in diameter. The rest of the opening was covered with foliage. It was a culvert, and would give them somewhere to wait out the day.
‘Can you move?’ he asked Buckingham.
‘If I need to.’
‘You need to.’
Danny helped Buckingham to his feet.
‘Listen carefully. We’re going to approach the road again.’
‘Is that wise?’
‘Wise doesn’t come into it. It’s the only option I can see. If you’ve got a better idea, spit it out.’
Buckingham looked around. His eyes fell on the house and its outbuildings. ‘Over there,’ he said. ‘We could ask them for shelter.’
Danny gave him a look. Buckingham blushed.
‘The closer we get to the road,’ Danny continued, ‘the more chance we have of being seen. I want you to walk ten metres behind me.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the closer we are together, the easier it is for a gunman to put us down with a single burst. This way, if one of us gets hit, the other can go to ground.’
Buckingham looked sick.
‘I’ve spotted a culvert.’
‘A what?’
‘It’s a big pipe that directs water under the road. It’ll keep us out of sight while the sun’s up.’
‘You want to us to stay there all day?’
‘We can’t just thumb a lift, mate. Someone knows we’re out here. They’ll be looking for us. We’ve only got a few minutes of darkness left. Come on.’
Without waiting for any more questions, Danny headed for the road.
They reached it in approximately twelve minutes, and not before time. The sun hadn’t yet broken above the horizon, but the sky was already a shade lighter. Thirty metres from the road, Danny went to ground, looking back over his shoulder to verify that Buckingham had done the same. A military truck covered in cam netting trundled west. Danny waited until it was fifty metres from their position before raising his left hand and jumping up to run forwards, with Buckingham close behind.
The culvert did not look like an inviting place to spend a day, but it sure as hell beat trying to stay inconspicuous on open ground. The winter rains had filled it with silt, through which thorny plants Danny didn’t recognise crept towards the light at either end. The concrete inside was covered in lichen, patches of which were still damp, and there was a stench of animal shit, though the tiny droppings at the opening of the culvert told Jamie that they’d only need to worry about rodents rather than anything bigger disturbing them – unless the occasional snake found its way in there. Danny left the rough scrub at the opening undisturbed: messing with natural vegetation was a sure-fire way of making a hideout more obvious to anyone who knew what they were looking for. ‘Get inside,’ he told Buckingham. ‘Halfway in. I’m leaving my bergen with you. I’ll be back in five.’
Buckingham crawled awkwardly along the pipe while Danny pushed his pack after him, before reversing out. Keeping low, he ran fifty metres eastwards along the road to where there was a thicket of low brush. He cut an armful of this, taking just a little from various spots to reduce the visual impact of his plundering, and carried it back to the culvert. Pulling out his bergen, he whispered to Buckingham to come back out. The MI6 man did as he was told. ‘Push this stuff in,’ Danny said, giving him half of the brush. ‘It will hide you from anyone looking in at the other end.’
Once Buckingham had inserted himself, Danny pushed the bergen back into the pipe, then pulled the remaining foliage in behind him and joined Buckingham. Passing him his Sig, he said, ‘We’ll sit back to back. If you see anything that looks like a face at the end of the culvert, don’t shoot. If you see someone crawling inside, open up.’ He knew that Buckingham was unlikely to score a hit, but it might buy them a crucial few seconds if they were discovered.
Danny removed his water bottle from his pack, offered Buckingham a mouthful and took some himself. Then he shook a little on to the dry silt that covered the floor of the culvert, mixing water into it to form a muddy paste. ‘Face me,’ he said. Using his second and third fingers, he pasted stripes and patches of mud over the other man’s face.
‘What are you doing?’ Buckingham asked.
‘Making you invisible. The markings break up the natural shape of your face, make you less conspicuous.’ When he’d finished with Buckingham, he repeated the process on himself. Then he poked the barrel of his M4 through the foliage on his side and arranged it to give him an unobstructed view through his sight. ‘Hope you’re comfy,’ he said.
‘Not really,’ Buckingham said.
‘Well, we’re here for the duration. Get used to it.’
Danny pulled a couple of foil-packed MREs from his pack. He handed one to Buckingham with a single word – ‘Breakfast’ – before wolfing down his cold meal and then settling down back to back with his companion.
It was pretty dark in the culvert, but the daylight filtering in was increasing all the time. Danny tried to clear his head, to decide on the best course of action. He’d been shocked when Jack had been denied a pick-up, but he’d had barely a moment to think through the implications. Now he did.
‘You want to tell me what’s really going on?’ he asked.
His back felt Buckingham stiffen. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Normally we’d have been extracted as it was clear we’d been bumped. Standard operating procedure. What’s so important about a few Syrian rebels that—?’
‘Can you still get us to Homs?’ Buckingham cut in, his voice very soft.
A moment of silence.
‘It’s too far on foot,’ Danny said. ‘We’d have to cross the mountain range with Russian SF and Syrian military searching for us. No offence, mate, but you’re not cut out for it.’
‘None taken,’ Buckingham murmured.
Another pause.
‘I need to get in touch with base again. Persuade them to let us extract.’
‘Well, they won’t allow that. You – we – have our orders. There must be a way for us to get to Homs.’
Danny hesitated. He didn’t want to suggest it. It was like an admission of failure. But he told himself to remove his wounded pride from the equation. ‘Saunders gave me a number for his private-sector guys,’ he said. ‘They’ll know the state of the ground much better than I do. I could get in touch . . .’
‘Do it.’
Though he bristled at Buckingham’s instruction, Danny had to admit to himself that it was the right call. If he was alone, he could go to ground for days, even weeks. But Buckingham wasn’t up to it. He just didn’t have the fitness, the endurance or the skills. They needed reinforcements. They needed to call in the cavalry.
Danny rummaged in his pack for his Iridium sat phone, his GPS unit and the scrap of paper on which Saunders had written the contact number. For the sat phone and the GPS to work, he needed line of sight with the sky, so he shuffled to the end of the culvert, pushed the camouflage out and poked the handset’s antenna into the open air. He switched on the sat phone, waited for a connection, then dialled the number.
A ringing tone: a one-second pulse followed by two seconds of silence.
It repeated. Eight times.
Nine.
A click.
A pause.
A voice. Dry. Unfriendly. Cockney accent.
‘Who the fuck is this?’
Danny felt his jaw set. Everything about this voice raised his hackles. He tried not to let it sound in his response.
‘Call sign Kilo Alpha Six Four.’ Danny kept it terse.
There was no acknowledgement from the other end.
‘Repeat, call sign Kilo Alpha Six Four. Identify yourself.’
Again, a long pause.
‘
Identify yourself
,’ Danny hissed. Was it his imagination, or had he just heard a snort from the man at the other end of the phone?
Something was wrong. If this was one of Saunders’ men, why was he being so damn shady? Or maybe he was being shady
because
he was one of Saunders’ men. Freelance. Cynical. Out for what he could get.
‘
Identify yourself
,’ Danny said for a third time. He was on the point of hanging up when the other guy spoke.
‘I’m Skinner,’ he said. ‘Where the
fuck
are you?’
THIRTEEN
‘We’ve been bumped,’ Danny explained. ‘I’m three men down.’
‘Is the spook still alive?’
‘Roger that.’
‘Pity.’
Another long silence.
‘We’ve got eyes searching for us. I need backup.’
Skinner, whoever he was, once more let his silence do the talking.
‘Do you copy?’ Danny asked.
‘Loud and fucking clear, sunshine. What’s your location?’
Danny consulted his GPS and relayed his precise lat and long. ‘You want to read that back to me?’ he asked.
But the voice at the other end had gone.
Danny stared at the phone. ‘Nice talking with you, pal,’ he muttered, before shuffling back to the centre of the culvert, dragging the foliage with him, to where Buckingham was resting against the side of the pipe, his eyes closed.
‘Wake up,’ Danny said, poking him in the ribs with the phone’s antenna. Buckingham’s eyes shot open. ‘You can sleep when we’re safe.’
‘Did you get through?’
Danny nodded.
‘And?’
‘And we wait. They know where we are.’
‘How long?’
Danny rearranged his M4 among the camouflage.
‘As long as it takes.’
‘How do you know nobody else will find us first?’
‘I don’t.’
Clara walked nervously through the streets of Homs. With every step she felt an earthquake might hit. Or a shake of some kind, perhaps caused by ordnance from above. Like a terrified Pied Piper, she led the ragged band of women and children, if not to safety, then at least away from their horrific, self-imposed imprisonment.
Miriam walked by her side. She had a slight limp, Clara noticed, and winced every time she put pressure on her right leg. But she didn’t complain. None of this sorry little group complained, and they had been walking for less than ten minutes when Clara understood why. They came upon a building so utterly destroyed that its foundations appeared to have been ripped from the earth. Miriam looked at it sadly. ‘We are the lucky ones,’ she said.
They attracted stares. Some of them were from other children. She saw one little boy proudly displaying the metal casing of a spent shell to his mates, who crowded round and tried to grab it. Almost all the adults on foot were male. They looked at these women and children, and especially at Clara with her pale Western skin, with suspicion. Nobody asked if they were OK, let alone offered help. Weirdly – uncharacteristically – Clara didn’t blame them. She understood that they had their own problems. And most likely their own families.
Whereas Clara had nobody.
When they reached the mosque, she saw that the open area in front of it was more crowded, despite early-morning prayers having finished. Perhaps a hundred men had gathered. They stood in little groups, some of them smoking, most of them casting occasional nervous looks around them and up into the sky. Clara and Miriam stood at the edge of the square, the women and children huddled behind them.
‘We should avoid this place,’ Miriam said.
‘Why? It’s a mosque. Isn’t it safer . . . ?’
Miriam shook her head. ‘People who defy the government meet here. They think they are safe, that the soldiers will not kill them in front of the mosque. But look.’ She pointed to a far corner of the square. A small group of five or six soldiers, all armed, were loitering there, just watching. ‘When these people leave the square, many of them will be questioned.’
‘We don’t have anything to hide,’ Clara said, the old defiance rising up in her.
Miriam smiled weakly. ‘In Syria,’ she said, ‘
everybody
has something to hide. At least, that is how the government treats us. Come, I know a way round the square. We can continue east once we have passed the mosque.’
Clara nodded. As Miriam explained to the others what they were doing, Clara found her eyes lingering on the soldiers. She remembered Bradley, and the brutal way that the soldier had kicked the little girl. And was it her imagination, or did one of the troops – a young, bearded man with a sour expression on his face – look very like one of the soldiers who had assaulted her the previous day, then run away when their little game had turned sour?