Authors: Chris Ryan
Danny grabbed each of them by one arm and dragged them five metres from the corner. ‘Stay away from the wall!’ he barked, just as a second explosion ripped through the air. He looked up. One of the tower blocks had been hit. The top three storeys were shrouded in a vast balloon of smoke. Orange flames were just visible halfway up it. As Danny sprinted towards the rebels’ house, his face stung from the impact of the dust and debris. Chunks of rubble slammed into the ground around him. He upped his speed and covered the final ten metres to the entrance without being seriously hit.
The ground floor was in total confusion. The screams of women. The bark of male voices. The kids looked the most frightened, but that didn’t stop them standing and strapping their weapons to their chests. Danny fought his way through the chaos and stormed up the stairs.
Taff had already evacuated Asu and Buckingham as far as the antechamber. When the shock waves of a third explosion blasted through the air, Buckingham jolted as though he’d been hit. Asu pushed past him and hurried down the stairs. Buckingham stood by the door of the room they’d just left, his eyes wide.
‘Get him out!’ Taff roared, not that he needed to. Danny didn’t pussyfoot around. A seam had appeared in the ceiling and fine dust was showering down into the antechamber. Danny grabbed Buckingham by the arm and dragged him across the room and down the stairs, with Taff following close behind. The rooms on the ground floor were empty, although the sound of kitsch Arabic pop still drifted bizarrely around the deserted building.
‘Do they know Asu’s here?’ Danny shouted over his shoulder at Taff.
‘Who knows? Might just be a random strike. Happens all the time.’ He looked up at the ceiling. ‘Let’s not stick around.’
‘Roger that,’ Danny muttered. He turned to Buckingham. ‘When we get outside, head straight for the Land Rover. We’re out of here before we take a direct hit.’
Buckingham was whispering to himself, ‘Oh my God . . . Oh my God . . .’
‘
Move!
’ Danny roared. They ran along the corridor. The exit was ten metres ahead, and the door was open, but visibility beyond it was poor because the air was thick with a choking cloud of dust from the stricken tower block. Danny thought he could hear the sound of Asu’s voice, shouting words of defiance, but all of a sudden his attention was grabbed by what he saw in a room off to the left. Unlike the other rooms they had passed, this one was not empty. The woman Taff had pointed out – Asu’s daughter-in-law Basheba, with the long, black hair with the single white streak – was in the far corner. Crouched on the floor was the son whose head she had been stroking. The boy was clearly terrified and his mother was trying to persuade him to leave the building. Her other son, the amputee, was by her side. He saw Danny and looked over at him, clearly wanting help to get his brother outside. Danny hesitated, torn between the need to evacuate Buckingham and the kid’s unspoken request. After a couple of seconds he nodded at the boy and stepped inside the room.
It was then that the bomb hit.
The noise of the strike was like a thunderclap, and they were right inside it. Danny was thrown to the floor, rubble and dust all around him, obscuring his vision. He could rely only on his hearing, which told him that chunks of the ceiling were dropping down. He covered his head and lay curled up for ten seconds until the noise subsided.
When he looked up, a fog of dust still obscured everything more than a metre away. But at the far side of the room, five or six metres from him, a shaft of sunlight cut through the dust where the ceiling and the exterior wall above had collapsed. Danny saw two silhouettes in the light: a woman and a boy. He could see that both the kid’s arms were intact. There was no sign of his brother.
Coughing – almost choking on the dust – Danny got to his feet and picked his way across the rubble-strewn floor. ‘Get to the Land Rover!’ he barked at Buckingham, but he kept his eyes on the silhouettes. As he came within a couple of metres of them, he saw their faces. Dirty, tear-stained, anguished. The woman pointed at the floor and Danny immediately saw what was wrong.
The son with one arm was in a bad way. Terminally bad. A piece of concrete the size of a football had fallen from the ceiling and landed on him. Jagged, rusting iron bars were sticking out of it, and one of these had pierced the kid’s chest. Blood was gushing from his thoracic cavity, smearing the stump of his arm and pooling on the floor. His eyes were open and wild and although he was not screaming – Danny assumed he no longer had the lung capacity – the pain he was enduring was written all over his face. For a split second Danny’s mind conjured up the gruesome image of Jack, pierced and bleeding, in the wrecked Renault. The kid had the same look of agony.
Agony on the brink of death.
A piercing scream brought Danny back to the present. The boy’s mother, Basheba, was clutching her hair in horror as she stared down at his brutalised body. She collapsed heavily to her knees, into the puddle of blood from her son’s body. Her desperate wailing and horrid shrieks were far worse than the noise of the shelling minutes before. They made the sinister silence that hung over the rest of the building even more intense. Danny looked around. Taff was a couple of metres away. Behind him, Buckingham, staring down at the injured boy, his face unreadable. ‘Get in the Land Rover,’ Danny said again, but less forcefully this time. He wasn’t really surprised when Buckingham ignored him.
Danny crouched down to give the kid a closer look. The boy was a goner, for sure. If the shock didn’t kill him, the loss of blood would. Even if there were such luxuries as doctors or hospitals in the middle of this war zone, it would have been a waste of everyone’s time trying to move this dying child. His legs and head were shaking from the pain. But Christ, he was a tough little kid, clinging to life even as it oozed from him. At the same time, like Jack before him, his expression seemed to beg Danny to put him out of his agony.
Unlike Jack, he had an audience.
Danny quickly assessed his options. Leave the child there to die a horrifically painful death. Or help him on his way. Put like that, the choice made itself. No point explaining to anybody what he was about to do. Now wasn’t the time to discuss the rights and wrongs of the situation. Sure, what he was about to do was illegal by any rules of engagement. But sometimes on the ground you had to make your own rules. Every soldier knew that.
He pulled his med pack from his chest rig. ‘Move the woman,’ he barked at Taff. ‘I can’t do anything while she’s screaming in my ear.’
There was a scuffle as Taff pulled Basheba to her feet and dragged her, screaming, several metres from where her son lay bleeding.
Danny took out a shot of morphine from his med pack. It was in a brown, rectangular box, one end red, the other yellow. There was also a black marker pen in the med pack. Normally he would mark ‘M’ on the forehead of anybody he’d just given morphine, along with the dose and the time of administration. No need for that now. Without hesitation, he stabbed the red end of the injection through the coarse material of the kid’s trousers and into his bony left thigh. He felt the needle puncture the skin. It took a few seconds for the drug to spread through the boy’s bloodstream, but it hardly seemed to have any effect. He was still shaking. His eyes were still bulging.
Danny threw away the spent shot and pulled out another. He punctured the kid’s trousers again. As the morphine eased into the boy, Danny looked over his shoulder. Taff was five metres behind him, holding back the child’s mother. She was still screaming, and Danny tried to block out the noise. Taff had an intense look on his face. The mother seemed like a minor irritation as his strong arms held her back. All his focus was on Danny. His old friend knew what he was doing, and he wasn’t about to stop him. Behind Taff, Danny could just make out Buckingham’s dust-covered outline. He appeared to be holding something up, but Danny couldn’t make out what.
A groan from the dying boy. Danny took another shot from the med pack.
This third injection seemed to have some effect. The trembling didn’t stop, but it began to subside as the opiate did its work smothering the pain. Three shots. More than you’d ever normally administer on the battlefield. But not enough for what Danny had in mind. He felt inside his med pack for the fourth and final shot that he carried with him. The shot that would put the kid out of his misery once and for all.
‘That’s a lethal dose, kiddo,’ he heard Taff say behind him. ‘You sure you know what you’re doing?’ No attempt to talk him out of it. Just a warning.
‘He’s dead anyway,’ Danny said between gritted teeth as he prepared to administer the fatal injection. ‘This just makes it easier for—’
He didn’t finish the sentence. Perhaps the boy’s mother understood what he and Taff were saying and had found new reserves of strength. Perhaps Taff had just taken his eye off the ball. Whatever the reason, Basheba had managed to escape his grasp. Now she hurled her whole body at Danny, knocking him sideways from his crouching position beside her son. ‘
You not kill him!
’ she screeched. ‘
You not kill him!
’
The morphine injection had dropped from Danny’s hand, and lay propped up against a pile of rubble. Danny grabbed it. The boy’s mother was hugging him now, but in doing so she had knocked the concrete chunk and its deadly shard. The boy gasped, his white face once more a mask of agony. It was pitiful to see. Danny lunged forwards and, as the weeping mother clutched her child, drove the fourth injection into the boy’s arm. Basheba let out one more desperate, piercing scream as he exhaled whatever breath was left in his dying lungs. He shuddered a final time, then lay still.
There was a moment of silence. The woman was staring at Danny in shocked disbelief. Looking round, he saw Taff and Buckingham standing five metres away. Taff was expressionless. Buckingham looked almost as shocked as the mother. Danny was vaguely aware that he had something in his hand and he thrust it into his pocket. The woman was shouting again, yelling at him in a frenzied mixture of Arabic and English. Those words Danny could understand left no room for doubt. ‘
You killed my son . . . you killed my son!
Murderer!
’
She threw herself at him, pounding his face with her fists, which were smeared with her dead son’s blood. Danny grabbed her wrists. ‘He was dead anyway,’ he tried to explain. ‘All I did was take away the pain.’ But his words had no effect. She was screaming even louder.
And then Taff was there, pulling her away, manhandling her out of the room. Danny bent down and pulled the lump of concrete from the boy’s chest. It made a wet, sucking sound as it started to come away. He felt the metal rod catching on one of the boy’s ribs and had to reinsert it a couple of inches into his chest before he could remove it properly. Casting the blood-spattered concrete to one side, he lifted the corpse. Somewhere above him, he heard a sinister creaking: the building’s death throes. Basheba’s other son had the presence of mind to scurry after his mother and Taff, but Buckingham was still in the doorway, staring horrified at Danny.
‘
Move!
’ Danny’s bark seemed to snap Buckingham out of his trance. He ran from the room, along the corridor and out into the compound. Danny followed, the boy’s limp, bleeding body in his arms.
He sized up the situation immediately. The murder holes had been abandoned, the gates opened, and the other occupants of the building had flooded out on to the streets beyond. The doors of the two Land Rovers were open, the engines running. Danny couldn’t see Hector, Skinner or De Fries, but assumed two of them were behind the wheels, ready to move. Chances were that their Syrian drivers had fled. Asu himself was standing at the gates, looking into the sky, holding up his rifle in a gesture of defiance and shouting aggressively. His two bodyguards were standing on either side of him, but their expressions made clear that they wanted to get out of there, and quick. Danny looked up. No sign of fast air or choppers. That didn’t mean the bombardment had stopped. They’d been lucky so far, but they needed to exfiltrate immediately.
He carried the body to the middle of the compound and laid it down gently. Only then did Taff release the mother. She shot towards Danny, a projectile from a catapult, and once more pummelled him in her grief and fury.
Asu hadn’t seen Danny bring out the body. He began shouting at the woman in Arabic. She stopped beating Danny and turned to face her father-in-law. A torrent of rage spewed from her mouth. As she spoke, Asu listened, and his face grew darker with each word.
He strode over to Danny. ‘Is it true,’ he demanded, ‘what she says? You killed Nadim? You killed my grandson?’
Danny shook his head. ‘No.’ He pointed at the building. ‘The bombardment killed your grandson. And if we don’t get out of here soon, it’ll kill you too. They know you’re here.’
In a sudden movement, Asu pointed his rifle at Danny. He wasn’t fast enough. Danny knocked the barrel to one side with his left arm, and pulled his Sig from his chest rig with the right. The barrel of the pistol was no more than ten inches from the rebel leader’s face. His two guards raised their weapons and pointed them at Danny. This seemed to give Asu more confidence, but then he couldn’t see, as Danny could, that Hector and Skinner had silently exited the Land Rovers and were ready to shoot if it went noisy.
A tense silence fell. ‘Basheba tells me young Nadim was alive,’ Asu whispered.
‘Barely,’ Danny said.