Hellfire (32 page)

Danny felt for his Sig. Before, that hunk of metal slung close to his body had made him feel secure. Not any more. Guns were for a different kind of war. Danny couldn’t shake the feeling that in the past few days, war had changed. He thought of what he’d left back home. Clara. The baby. What kind of world was his kid about to be born into?

He turned. Thirty metres further along the deck he saw Tony and Caitlin. They were facing each other, and standing very close – closer than ordinary colleagues. Danny felt a bit of a pang. Tony suddenly looked over in his direction – he clearly knew his Regiment colleague was looking. Danny didn’t feel he wanted to see any more. He turned his back on them and walked back towards the flight deck. He was looking forward to getting back to Hereford.

He squinted. In the distance, maybe half a klick away, he saw the lights of a chopper approaching. The flight deck itself had been cleared, and one of the frigate’s loadmasters stood in the centre of the deck carrying two glowing, handheld beacons. Thirty seconds later he was waving them above his head to bring the chopper safely in to land.

The side door opened. A man exited and started running almost directly towards Danny to escape the downdraught. He wore slacks, an open-necked shirt and a lightweight jacket. His tousled hair blew in the wind, but Danny recognised him immediately. Hugo Buckingham.

He felt his face go craggy. What the hell was Buckingham doing here? Just when he’d thought this shitstorm of an op couldn’t get any worse, the person he loathed more than any other had just landed on the frigate. He stood very still as Buckingham ran with his head bowed towards him. He was only ten metres away when Buckingham finally looked where he was going and saw Danny standing there.

The MI6 man stopped in his tracks. He made a futile attempt to smooth down his hair, then shook the dust from the lapels of his jacket. ‘Black, old sport,’ he said finally.

‘Buckingham.’

‘Presiding over what I understand you fellows like to call a clusterfuck?’

‘What are you doing here? Has the captain got some filing that needs doing?’

‘Actually,
actually
, I made the decision to come straight here from Saudi. Following up a lead. Not to mention that the Firm want somebody to take
you
in hand.’ He strode up to Danny, jutting out his absurdly handsome chin. ‘They’re baying for your blood in London, Danny. The bad news for you is that I’m the best friend you’ve got.’ He smiled.

The last time Danny had seen Buckingham, the MI6 man had ended up wincing in the gutter after Danny had laid into him. It took every ounce of self-control to stop himself from doing the same thing now.

‘Take me to the ops room,’ Buckingham said. ‘I require a full debrief. Get a move on, Black. I haven’t got all bloody night, you know.’

Randolph stared in horror at the blood.

He was almost unaware of the commotion in the cabin. Almost, but not quite. The silence after the emergency landing had lasted no more than a few seconds before it dissolved into renewed panic. Several people were crying – including, Randolph realised, the little girl in the seat ahead. The aisles were full of people surging to the emergency exits. Randolph stood up and saw the nice air hostess standing with her back to one of the side doors while three angry customers shouted at her to get out of the way and let them open up and escape the plane.

‘
Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.
’ He sounded rattled. Not nearly so suave and calm as he had when they took off. ‘
For your own safety, please return to your seats. The exterior temperature is below freezing and we have very little information about our surrounding terrain. The aircraft is the safest place for us to remain while we wait for . . .’

The captain’s voice dissolved into a sudden fit of coughing. The loudspeaker went dead. For a moment, the volume in the cabin reduced too. But only for a moment. The three men started yelling at the air stewardess again. Two more came to help her, standing in front of the door with their arms folded.

Randolph realised that the little girl in the seat in front was looking at him. He stared at her. A thin patch of blood had stained the area under her nostrils. And maybe Randolph was imagining it, but there was also a swelling on her left cheek.

He collapsed heavily into his seat. His body was aching. His skin was burning up. He stared at the back of his rough, calloused, fisherman’s hands, and saw that there were swellings appearing there, too.

Daniel Bixby wheeled his way across the floor of the operations room deep beneath the MI6 building, his head immobile against the padded headrest. One of his assistants walked briskly alongside him. ‘Flight BA33489 is on the ground. The pilots have been instructed to keep the passengers contained. The African air traffic control agency is already going nuts. It looks to them like the aircraft disappeared into thin air over Niger . . .’

If Bixby had the strength to shake his head, he would have done. Nothing good could come of this. But the decision was above his pay grade, and it was already made.

Another of his assistant analysts came striding up towards him. His eyes were alight.

‘What is it?’ Bixby asked.

‘GCHQ have picked something up. A satellite call from the
Golden Coral
, made approximately thirty-five minutes before the ship went down. The call lasted just over ten seconds.’

‘Can we listen to it?’

The analyst shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said. ‘But we have a rough location of the sat phone that received the call.’

‘Go on.’

The analyst pointed to a large VT screen on the wall which showed a map of the world. He momentarily tapped a keyboard just below it. A dot appeared on the screen, surrounded by a wider circle. The dot itself was centred on the ocean in the middle of the Persian Gulf. The circle covered a large patch of sea, but also the northern coast of the United Arab Emirates, the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia, and almost all of Qatar.

Bixby stared at the screen for a moment.

‘Get me the Chief,’ he said.

Flight BA33489 had been on the ground for a full hour. The lights were off to preserve power. It was almost pitch black.

Randolph was sweating even more than usual. His limbs were weak, his chest hoarse. Two more swellings had appeared on the back of his hand, and he could feel others elsewhere on his body. They hurt, badly, but he was too scared to look at them. His head was spinning, and it was hard to keep track of what was going on. Every time he closed his eyes he saw his children as they had been in that awful video. And every time he opened them, he was presented with a scene that was almost as chilling.

To his left, on the other side of the aisle, three passengers were wheezing badly. In front of him, he heard the sound of the little girl retching. Nobody was trying to leave the plane any more, and he understood why: they felt too ill. Randolph himself was desperate to use the lavatory, but he didn’t have the strength to get up. And when, two minutes later, he soiled himself, it was with a strange mixture of disgust and relief. The stench in the cabin told him he was not the first person to do this.

His head fell listlessly to the right. He stared out into the darkness and shivered. The temperature in the cabin was dropping. He wondered if he should tell someone about the deodorants, but he knew he never would. Not while he knew those monsters had his daughters.

He winced. A sharp pain cracked through his head. Lights, outside. They were descending from the sky, and great clouds of sand were billowing up and surrounding them, no more than ten metres from the tip of the aircraft’s wing. There was noise. The noise of engines.

Helicopters.

A murmur in the cabin. Had help arrived?

Randolph felt dizzy as he watched three helicopters land. Their lights shone through the tiny cabin windows and cast strange, terrifying shadows inside the plane. He wanted to vomit, but managed to control himself as he watched the side doors of the helicopters open, and silhouettes spill out from inside. He didn’t know how many. Fifteen or twenty, maybe. Backlit by the lights of the helicopters, their shadows extended, long and thin, in the direction of the plane, the helicopters’ headlamps gleaming blindingly between them.

The figures advanced on the aeroplane. As they reached the wing tip, Randolph caught a better view of one of them. He – or she – was wearing some kind of all-in-one body suit, white, or maybe yellow. His head was completely covered by a mask, and his hands by tight rubber gloves that covered the sleeve of the suit.

Panic surged through him. And through the cabin as well. A man three seats in front of Randolph stood up and pushed his way into the aisle. He looked back. Randolph saw terror in his eyes and a swelling to the left of his nose. He was sweating almost as badly as Randolph himself. He looked wild. Like he was about to do something crazy.

Randolph stood up to watch him. The man ran along the aisle to the emergency exit door. The air stewardess feebly tried to stop him, but he pushed her away and yanked the red opening lever 90 degrees anticlockwise. The door hissed a few inches inward, then swung upward. Light flooded into the cabin, illuminating the man’s face and casting a long shadow to the far side of the cabin. He shouted something in French, but it was garbled and Randolph couldn’t understand what he was saying. But he knew this: the man was about to jump out of the aircraft.

He didn’t get the chance.

From outside, there was the sound of gunfire. Just one round, and from the corner of his eye Randolph thought he saw a muzzle flash through the cabin window. The man at the door staggered backwards. He looked down at himself in shock, held his hand to his chest and raised it to see that his palm was coated in blood. He collapsed out of Randolph’s sight.

Randolph collapsed too. There was a moment of shocked silence. It lasted no more than five seconds, before several people started to scream.

Randolph wanted to scream with them. But he couldn’t. He was too busy vomiting into the seat next to him: a horrific mixture of blood, mucus and semi-digested salted pretzels.

‘What’s happening?’ someone screamed from further along the cabin. ‘
What the hell’s happening?
’

I know what’s happening
, Randolph thought.
I’m going to die. We’re
all
going to die.

He hoped it would happen soon.

Twenty

05.00 AST, Doha, Qatar.

In the prominent, wealthy district of West Bay in the Qatari capital of Doha, a young man stood at the entrance of an enormous skyscraper. His name was Saad, and he had a black rucksack over his shoulder. Even though it was four in the morning, it was still very warm. Saad wore Western clothes: dark trousers, and a pale short-sleeved shirt. In a few hours’ time he would have to change into his uniform – Saad was a low-ranking member of the Qatari police force. But for now, the only evidence that he was a police officer was the ID card in his back pocket. Saad was here very much under the radar. In Qatar, under the radar was a dangerous place to be.

He had been in the police force for eighteen months now. In that time he had seen a dark side to the law enforcement in his country that he had never known existed when he was a naive recruit. He had seen his superiors brush away reports of unlawful deaths among the Indian construction workers upon whose sweat the magnificent buildings in Doha were built. He had seen a Muslim man condemned to forty lashes for the illegal consumption of alcohol. When two young extremists had beaten and raped a woman for listening to Western music in public, he had seen a highly religious police commander bury the report. Saad believed in freedom for everyone. And although, like most Qataris, he knew there was a dark side to the shining buildings and ostentatious wealth of his country, he had never dreamed it was as bad as that.

Saad had taken the address of this skyscraper from the police files. The penthouse was the home of a rich oil magnate called Ahmed bin Ali al-Essa. Saad walked into the reception of the building. It was cool and air-conditioned in here. The floor was covered with shining marble, and there were magnificent indoor palm trees dotted around. He stepped up to the concierge desk – burnished wood and brass – and spoke to the man behind the counter, who was wearing full robes and headdress.

‘
Salaam
,’ said the young man.

‘
Salaam
,’ the concierge replied.

‘I am here to see Ahmed bin Ali al-Essa.’

The concierge gave a barely sympathetic smile, as if many people would like to do such a thing, but few would have the honour. He was clearly about to turn Saad away when the young policeman presented his official identification. ‘I am sure he will thank you for keeping this discreet,’ he said.

The man gave him one of those wary looks that seemed to be reserved for policemen, then bowed his head slightly. ‘If you will excuse me for a moment, I will see if he is available.’

Saad stepped back from the concierge desk so that he could make the call. A moment later, the man nodded at him and led the policeman towards an elevator at the far side of the desk. He pressed a key card to a sensor on the right-hand side, then stepped back as the doors slid open. ‘This only goes to the penthouse,’ the man said. Saad stepped inside, pressed the top of two buttons and within seconds was hurtling up to the top of the building.