False Friends

Also by Stephen Leather

Title Page

Copyright

Seal Alpha stood . . .

Also by Stephen Leather

Pay Off

The Fireman

Hungry Ghost

The Chinaman

The Vets

The Long Shot

The Birthday Girl

The Double Tap

The Solitary Man

The Tunnel Rats

The Bombmaker

The Stretch

Tango One

The Eyewitness

Spider Shepherd Thrillers

Hard Landing

Soft Target

Cold Kil

Hot Blood

Dead Men

Live Fire

Rough Justice

Fair Game

Jack Nightingale Supernatural Thrillers

Nightfal

Midnight

Nightmare

To find out about these and future titles, visit

www.stephenleather.com.

FALSE FRIENDS

Stephen Leather

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Stephen Leather 2012

The right of Stephen Leather to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Al rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Al characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Ebook ISBN 978 1 444 70835 6

Hardback ISBN 978 0 340 92499 0

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

338 Euston Road

London NW1 3BH

www.hodder.co.uk

For Sam

Seal Alpha stood up, bracing himself against the fuselage. ‘Lock and load!’ he shouted. ‘Five minutes and counting.’ His name was Adam Croft and he was the ranking non-commissioned officer and leader of the mission, a ten-year veteran of the Navy Seals who had spent half of those years serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. There were thirteen Navy Seals sitting on the floor of the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter. Al the seats had been stripped out to keep the payload to a minimum. The Seals weren’t in any way superstitious and thirteen was the maximum number that could be squeezed into the bel y of the helicopter. Al thirteen had been hand-picked by Croft.

The Seals started chambering rounds as Croft and the Black Hawk crew chief readied the four ropes that they would be using to abseil down into the courtyard close to the main house. They were al dressed in the same desert camouflage fatigues and bul etproof vests but their headwear varied. Some favoured Kevlar helmets, others wore scarves or floppy hats. Their weapons varied too. Most cradled M4 rifles fitted with noise suppressors but there were several Heckler & Koch MP7 carbines and one pump-action shotgun. They al wore noise-cancel ing headsets to neutralise the roar of the Black Hawk’s two General Electric T700 turboshaft engines.

The co-pilot waved again. Three fingers. ‘Three minutes, guys!’ shouted Croft. He peered through a window. They were flying over houses and roads, but there were no street lights and almost al the homes were in darkness. Abbottabad didn’t have much in the way of nightlife and it was now almost one o’clock in the morning. He couldn’t see the second helicopter but he knew it would be close by, somewhere to starboard.

The helicopters were in ful stealth mode, their engines quietened, their bodies covered with a radar-dampening fabric coating, their tail sections modified, including extra blades on the tail rotors. Pakistan was supposedly America’s al y in the war against terrorism, but no one in the White House took that al iance seriously and the Pakistani authorities had not been informed of the mission.

The turbines powered down and the nose pitched up as the helicopter transitioned into a hover.

‘This is it, guys – go to night vision!’ shouted Croft.

The men removed their noise-cancel ing headsets and pul ed on their night-vision goggles, pressing the button on the right-hand side that activated them. Croft pul ed on his own and blinked as they flicked on, casting everything in a green hue. The Seals were from the Naval Special Warfare Development Group but everyone knew them as Team Six. So far as US special forces went, they were the best of the best. They had been training for the mission for more than six weeks in North Carolina fol owed by another three weeks at Camp Alpha, a highly secure area of Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

The Black Hawk hovered about a hundred feet above the building. It was a manoeuvre the pilot had practised a hundred times over a mock-up of the compound at Camp Alpha. Contractors had built a replica of the compound and the three-storey building, complete with contents. He eased back on the power and the helicopter began to descend. He scanned the instruments but he was flying by feel, as if the helicopter was an extension of his own body.

‘One hundred feet,’ said his co-pilot.

The helicopter slowly dropped, the backwash kicking up dust in the compound below.

‘Ninety feet,’ said the co-pilot.

The pilot smiled to himself. He didn’t need the verbal reminder of how high they were; he could do this bit with his eyes closed.

‘Eighty feet,’ said the co-pilot. ‘Al good.’

The pilot grinned. He knew it was al good. Compared to some of the missions he’d been on in Iraq this was a piece of cake. At least no one was firing missiles at him.

The helicopter began to shudder and he had to fight the pedals to keep it from swinging around.

‘What’s the problem?’ asked the co-pilot.

The nose pitched down and then just as quickly reared up. Both men scanned the instruments, trying to see if there was a technical problem, but everything seemed to be working perfectly; it was just that the helicopter was refusing to respond. It began to spin to the left as it continued to descend, faster now.

‘Seventy feet,’ said the co-pilot.

The juddering intensified and the pilot felt the rudder pedals banging up and down, beating a rapid tattoo on the soles of his feet. ‘I’m losing it,’ he said. ‘We’re going to have to abort.’

The helicopter continued to spin and the pilot pul ed on the col ective to increase power, then pushed the cyclic forward trying to get the helicopter moving forward.

‘We’re going down!’ shouted the co-pilot.

The pilot gritted his teeth as he fought to regain control of the helicopter but nothing seemed to be working. It bucked and tossed like a living thing and his hands were aching from the strain of gripping the controls. ‘Help me with the cyclic!’ he shouted. ‘I’m losing it.’

The co-pilot grabbed at the cyclic between his legs but it was too late: the helicopter was spinning out of control and losing height rapidly.

The pilot twisted round in his seat. ‘We’re going down!’ he shouted. ‘Brace, brace, brace!’

His words were lost in the roar of the turbines but the Seals knew that they were in trouble and they grabbed on to whatever support they could find.

The pilot turned back to the instruments but realised immediately that there was no point: if they were going to survive he’d have to fly by instinct alone. The helicopter was spinning in an anticlockwise direction so he pushed the cyclic to the right to try to counteract it and pul ed the col ective up to ful power. They were going to hit the ground, he was sure of that, so al he could do was try to lessen the impact.

Out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of the other Black Hawk. It was hovering just outside the north-east corner of the compound. He yanked the cyclic, trying to push the spinning helicopter away to the west. If he col ided with the other helicopter it would al be over.

‘Thirty feet!’ shouted the co-pilot.

They were stil over the compound, spinning crazily. The perimeter wal was eighteen feet high.

‘Brace for impact!’ the pilot screamed, though he knew that no one would hear him over the noise of the engines.

He saw the house flash by and realised that he was too far away to hit it but he stil had to worry about the wal . The power was on ful and the turbines were screaming but the rotor blades just didn’t seem to be generating any lift.

‘Twenty feet!’

Below him was the wal and then they were over it, but as he struggled to stop the spinning there was the sound of tortured metal and the helicopter lurched to the left. The tail rotor had slammed into the wal and almost certainly disintegrated in the impact.

The pilot reacted instantly, thrusting the cyclic forward so that the Black Hawk would hit the ground nose first. If they hit side on the main rotor would slam into the ground and the resulting crash would destroy the rotor blades and send lethal shrapnel through the cabin. He saw the ground rushing up at him and then they hit, hard, the cockpit shattering and the harness biting into his shoulders with such force that his right col arbone snapped. He could hear panicked shouts from behind him and then everything went black.

‘Go left, left, left!’ shouted the co-pilot of Helo Two but the pilot was already pushing the cyclic to the left to get it away from Helo One. He was also pul ing the col ective up so that they gained height. He concentrated on the instrument panel, which meant that he lost sight of the other helicopter, but the way that it had been spinning left him in no doubt that it had crashed.

A Seal appeared behind him. ‘What’s happening?’ screamed the Seal but the pilot ignored him and concentrated on flying the helicopter. The crew chief grabbed the Seal’s arm and pushed him down to the floor, then pointed a warning finger at the man. While they were in the air the aircrew were in charge and the last thing they needed was soldiers in ful combat gear moving about when they weren’t supposed to.

The Black Hawk gained altitude and the pilot put it into a hover outside the compound, then turned it round so that he could see what was happening to Helo One.

‘They’re piling out,’ said the co-pilot.

‘Any sign of fire?’ asked the pilot.

‘They look okay. The rear rotor is smashed and the tail’s broken but that’s it. The main rotor isn’t even damaged. They were lucky.’

‘If they were lucky they wouldn’t have crashed in the first place. You have control.’

The co-pilot gripped the cyclic and tested the rudders. ‘I have control,’ he said and he took over the flying while the pilot clicked on his mic so that he could speak to the Seal in command behind him. ‘Helo One is down,’ he said. ‘What do you want to do?’

Chief Petty Officer Guy Henderson cursed under his breath. He peered out of one of the side windows but couldn’t see the downed helicopter.

‘They okay?’

‘There’s no fire and they’re getting out. But they’re outside the compound.’

‘Can you patch me through to Seal Alpha?’

‘I can talk to the pilot and co-pilot but they look like they’re busy right now. It has to be your cal , unless you want to talk to command centre.’

‘Negative that,’ said Henderson. His mind raced. In al the rehearsals they’d carried out in North Carolina and Afghanistan they hadn’t once considered that one of the helicopters would crash. There was no contingency plan for what had just happened and he knew that if the decision as to what to do next was left up to the top brass then the mission would probably be aborted. There were simply too many chiefs: the President was in ultimate control in the White House but he wasn’t a soldier, so it would be up to his military advisors to make the cal . That meant taking the views of the command centres in CIA headquarters at Langley Virginia, the Navy Seals’ command centre in Afghanistan and the command centre in the American Embassy in Islamabad. By the time a consensus had been reached Pakistani jets would have been scrambled and be on their way.