Hellfire (14 page)

‘Hugh Deakin?’ Danny shouted.

There was just a pained whimper from the hostage.

‘We should fucking go after him!’ Tony urged.

‘Is your name Hugh Deakin?’ Danny shouted. The blood loss was heavy – he needed to keep his guy talking.

The hostage nodded, his breath coming in short, shaky gasps. Danny ripped his bloodied shirt in two to reveal the gun wound. Bad. The round had entered his upper arm about three inches below the shoulder blade. Two-inch entry wound, exit wound not much smaller. The humerus would be entirely shattered. But the leg shot was even more of a worry: if the femoral artery had been severed, the blood loss would be catastrophic.

‘Give him a morphine shot!’ Danny shouted. ‘I’m going to apply tourniquets.’

Tony was staring south along the road, his face full of frustration. ‘I can fucking get him, Black!’

‘No!’ Danny shouted. ‘We deal with the hostage first.’ And with his hands covered in the young man’s blood, Danny pulled two tourniquets from his med pack. He had to stop the blood loss, no matter what. He wrapped one a couple of inches above the leg wound, the other above the arm wound, and pulled them both very tight, blood pissing between his fingers and all over the hostage.

As he worked, a clearly reluctant Tony activated his radio. ‘We have Target Blue, repeat we have Target Blue. Ripley, Caitlin, report your status, repeat, report your status . . .’

Now that the buzz of Danny and Tony’s motorbikes had faded, the centre of Chikunda was ominously silent. Ripley went about the quick, efficient business of checking that Blocks North, West and East were empty. Block East contained an impressive arms cache – four grenade launchers, a rack of AK-47s and several wooden boxes of ammunition. But no militants. Block West had clearly been an accommodation block: ten thin, dirty mattresses were dotted around the floor, with tangled piles of clothes next to them. Still no militants. And Block North contained nothing but Target Red, his head resting grotesquely on his torso. The sight left a dry, bitter taste in Ripley’s mouth, but he knew there was no point wasting time on a dead man. Boko Haram could still be hiding out in the village. His job was to hunt them down.

He edged carefully towards the central road, sweat trickling from his forehead into his eyes. From the protection of Block West, he looked north then south. The road seemed to shimmer into the distance with the heat haze. Through the sight on his rifle he studied the burned-out area to the north-west. The only sign of movement was a bird that flew in and rested on the partially demolished wall of what must have once been a house, approximately two hundred metres away.

Ripley’s earpiece crackled. Tony’s voice: ‘
We have Target Blue, repeat we have Target Blue. Ripley, Caitlin, report your status, repeat, report your status.
’

Caitlin: ‘
Keeping eyes on the route into Chikunda from the north
.’

Ripley clocked in. ‘I’m going to clear that enclosed compound with the three huts.’

The radio voices fell silent.

Ripley edged north, twenty-five metres along the road, until he came alongside the wall of the enclosed compound. It was made of solid breeze blocks, and was a good five metres high. Unscalable without any extra apparatus. He followed the wall for forty metres, then stopped behind a wooden gate, three metres high, two wide, cut into the blocks. A sturdy, well-fitting door which was, weirdly, locked from the outside with a large padlock.

Ripley considered that for a moment. It didn’t make much sense. If Boko Haram had established a secure compound like this, why had they been keeping their hostages in the relatively insecure confines of Block North? Maybe they had been keeping the prisoners in here originally, and had only moved them out to conduct the execution. Or maybe they were hiding something else in the compound. Another arms cache, maybe? Ripley wanted to find out.

It would be an easy lock to force. Ripley found a rock on the ground the size of a large orange. He struck it hard, several times, against the bolt that the padlock was holding. The wood behind it splintered, and the soft metal dented and warped. Ripley had it off in thirty seconds. He engaged his rifle again and carefully kicked. The door’s hinges creaked as it swung open.

‘Keeping eyes on the route into Chikunda from the north.’

‘
I’m going to clear that enclosed compound with the three huts.
’

Caitlin was lying on her front, on a patch of raised terrain thirty metres from the road, camouflaged by a patch of low brush. The heat was like a hammer on the back of her head. The biting frustration of hearing Target Red was dead was only slightly softened by the news that Danny and Tony had located Target Blue, albeit badly wounded. She had to suppress her desire to make someone pay for what they’d done. An itchy trigger finger wouldn’t do anybody any favours. Her job was simple. Watch the road. If reinforcements came in from the north, inform her unit mates.

She got back to scanning the road with her handheld scope. Her position was directly opposite the burned-down part of the village, and she couldn’t stop herself from focusing in on those ravaged, demolished houses. She found herself picturing what it must have been like for the villagers when these Boko Haram bastards arrived. She saw smoke rising from houses that had stood there for years. Kids and women screaming. Men trying to defend their families, only to be mown down by assault rifles. She focused on what remained of one of those buildings. It was just a dilapidated wall, black with smoke scars.

She drew a sharp intake of breath. Lying at the bottom of that wall was a figure. A body. And something about it wasn’t right. She zoomed in a little closer. The body was lying on its back. She had to keep her hands very still to keep it within her magnified field of view, but after examining it for a few more seconds, she was certain of something: this wasn’t a Nigerian casualty. This corpse’s skin was white.

An uneasy feeling grew in her chest. Who the hell was this?

She double-checked her surroundings. There was no sign of anyone. She spoke into her radio. ‘I’m crossing the road to the western side. I’ve just seen something I want to check out.’

‘
Roger that
,’ came Danny’s reply.

Caitlin pushed herself to her feet and started jogging towards the burned-out area and the unexpected corpse.

The tourniquet was in place. Tony had injected morphine into the casualty’s leg. It seemed to have helped, but only a bit. Target Blue was in a shit state. Fresh wet blood all down the wounded arm. It had dried on his right hand and coagulated under the fingertips.

‘We’re British Army,’ Danny told the young man. ‘We’re going to get you out of here.’ He stood up and spoke to Tony. ‘Go get our vehicle,’ he said. ‘We need to get on the radio back to base, call in a casualty evacuation, even if it means getting the Nigerians on board. He’s not going to make it otherwise.’

Tony nodded, but the frown on his face told Danny he was fuming that Danny had overruled him about going after the Chinese guy. Without another word, he turned and started jogging back along the road.

Danny crouched down again. ‘Listen carefully,’ he said. ‘You and me, we’re going to keep talking. You got that? We’re going to keep on talking . . .’

Because Danny knew that if the kid allowed himself to fall asleep, chances were he’d never wake up again . . .

‘
I’m crossing the road to the western side. I’ve just seen something I want to check out.
’

‘
Roger that
.’

Ripley was only half aware of the conversation going on in his earpiece as he edged into the compound, his senses attuned for the slightest sound or movement. He didn’t know why, but the extraordinary stillness of the village was unnerving him.

Inside the enclosed compound, his brain registered everything before him in a fraction of a second. The ground was unusually free of rubble or any other random junk, as if it had been cleared out on purpose. As they’d seen from the satellite imagery and from the high ground, there were three circular huts here, each of them about seven metres in diameter. They had roughly thatched conical roofs, mud walls and wooden doors. Like the compound itself, each door was locked from the outside.

No movement. No sound. The compound still seemed empty. But Ripley could smell something. Just faintly. Something rotten.

His rifle, the butt dug into his shoulder, followed his line of sight precisely as he crossed ten metres of open ground to the first hut. This time he didn’t bother with a rock. He just kicked the door in with a sturdy strike of his heel.

The hut was empty, with the exception of a pile of white overalls against the wall to Ripley’s two o’clock.

He stepped outside, his rifle still following his line of sight, crossed to the second hut and kicked the door open.

In the centre of the hut was a wooden crate, with Chinese lettering imprinted on one side. The lid was lying to one side. The crate itself was empty. Ripley left the second hut, and approached the third.

Caitlin picked her way across the rubble, assault rifle engaged. This whole area still stank of burning. She moved, sickened, past the bodies of two Nigerian children, face down in the earth. She didn’t know if they’d been killed by bullets or by fire, and she didn’t really want to find out. She tried to put them from her mind as she focused on her objective: the white body. It was fifteen metres ahead of her, its back slumped against a wall, facing out towards the road. She now saw that the body had a gunshot wound to its chest. It was wearing a lightweight sports jacket and pale trousers, although both of them were now spattered with mud and blood. Short blond hair, fairly clean-shaven. She had the impression that he had died much more recently than those Nigerian kids.

She crossed the intervening fifteen metres nervously. Up close, she let her rifle hang by its cord and put her free hand inside his sports jacket. She didn’t hold out any hope that there would be a wallet here – the Boko Haram militants would certainly have robbed him. But her fingers touched something: the same size and shape as a credit card. Caitlin withdrew it, and saw that it was an international driving licence.

She read the name on the licence.

Hugh Deakin.

Her blood turned to ice. She double-checked the photo. It matched the face of the corpse.

She immediately spoke into her boom mike. ‘Danny, it’s Caitlin.’

‘
Go ahead.
’

‘I don’t know who you’ve got there, but it’s not Target Blue.’

‘
What the fuck are you talking about?
’

‘I said, it’s not Target Blue. I’m with Hugh Deakin now. He’s dead.’

Danny looked at the bleeding man whose life he had just saved. He was lying on the ground, his pale face wracked with pain, despite the morphine shot Tony had given him. A dreadful suspicion washed over him.

His eyes traced down the length of his patient’s arm and took in the blood that had dried on his hand and congealed under his nails. It wasn’t fresh.

Slowly, Danny removed his side arm. He cocked it, then pressed the barrel against the wounded man’s head.

‘What’s your name?’ he said.

The young man gave him a glazed stare.

‘What’s your fucking name?’

The man closed his eyes. ‘Fuck you, army bitch,’ he whispered.

Danny withdrew the gun for a moment and carefully examined the face. Suddenly he was back at Tony’s house in Hereford, standing in his garden and looking at the front page of the
Mirror
.

Jihadi Jim: First Picture.

The wispy stubble. The broken nose.

It was him.

Danny cursed himself for not having joined the dots before. Not that it mattered, because now he was in a position to carry out the one job every member of the Regiment would have lined up to do.

He put the gun up against Jihadi Jim’s forehead, and prepared to pull the trigger.

‘You don’t want to do that, army bitch,’ Jihadi Jim whispered. His body was shaking with pain, but he still managed to look and sound as offensive as anyone Danny had ever met.

‘Wrong,’ said Danny Black, his voice deadly quiet. ‘I
really
do. I saw what you did to that guy down in the village.’

‘He squeaked like a pig. Normally they get some Valium. Not this time.’

Just killing this bastard wasn’t enough. Danny wanted to hurt him. He raised his hand and thumped down hard on the gun wound. Jihadi Jim’s whole body shuddered, and he hissed in agony.

‘Go ahead, army bitch,’ he breathed. ‘Kill me now, unless you want to know what’s going on in that shitty little village.’

‘Nothing’s going on there. Everyone’s dead.’

Jihadi Jim managed a nasty smile. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘But what of?’

The rotten smell was worse here. Not bad enough to make Ripley gag, but a clear indication that this final hut contained more than a few old clothes or an empty box. He listened carefully at the door. Nothing. So he kicked the door open and, weapon engaged, entered.