Hellfire (49 page)

Only when he was fully secure did the laser spots leave his body. The gunman extinguished his torch. Without another word, all four men left the cabin. Danny heard them locking the door.

‘This is your fault,’ Buckingham breathed. ‘This is
your fucking fault
, Black. Everything you touch turns to shit, and now
I’m
going to . . .’

Danny zoned out. He was trying to peer through the gloom to get his bearings, his eyes still adjusting to the renewed darkness. There was a gap of about five metres between himself and the table. Beyond that, he couldn’t see anything. He strained to tug his arms away from the post behind him, but it just made the cable ties dig sharply into his skin, and he knew that was a no-go.

He had no weapons and no comms. No means of defending himself, or raising the alarm.

The Caliph had played them like a fucking instrument.

He zoned back in to Buckingham’s voice. ‘How long until the SAS and SBS support units get here?’

‘You heard that big bang five minutes ago? That was them taking a swim.’ Scowling, Danny looked to his left. He could just see Buckingham’s pale face.

‘What?’ Buckingham’s voice had raised an octave. ‘
What?
You mean they’re . . .’

‘Not coming,’ Danny said.

‘But . . . but Hereford will know what’s happened?’

‘All they’ll know is that they’ve lost contact.’

‘So they’ll send someone else?’

‘Sure,’ Danny said. ‘It shouldn’t take more than five or six hours.’

‘
What? Oh, Jesus . . .
’ Suddenly, and without warning, Danny heard retching.

‘Listen to me,’ he said over the noise. ‘When they come back, be compliant. You saw what Ahmed’s men did to his own parents. You know what he’s capable of, so don’t antagonise them. It’s your best chance of survival.’

‘What do
you
fucking well know, Black?’ There was the sound of more retching, and then of the door being unlocked. A faint light as it opened. Several figures – probably six, maybe seven – filed into the room.

Three of them had torches, which they shone directly at the prisoners, dazzling Danny and removing whatever night vision he’d acquired. There was activity in the space between them and the table. For a full thirty seconds, Danny squinted into the light, trying to work out what the figures were doing. Only when they stepped back a couple of metres did he realise. His stomach turned to ice when he saw that they had erected a camera on a tripod between him and Buckingham, three metres out. He remembered something Tony had said the day they’d left for Nigeria.
Remember the good old days when the time to shit yourself was when someone shoved a gun in your face? Now you know you’re in for a much worse time when they get their fucking iPhones out and press record . . .

The figures melted away towards the back of the room, but they kept their torches shining towards Danny and Buckingham. Danny caught a whiff of urine, and he knew Buckingham had pissed himself. He didn’t fully blame him.

Another figure entered the room. Danny knew from the slow walk and the shape of his silhouette that it was Ahmed. He positioned himself just in front of the camera. The torchlight from behind made his outline very pronounced, and cast a long, thin shadow towards them. Danny couldn’t see his face.

‘Listen to me!
Listen . . . Ahmed . . .
’ It was Buckingham talking, and he had a quaver of total panic in his voice.

‘You will call me Caliph,’ Ahmed said.

Hesitation. Then . . . ‘Please, Caliph . . . You don’t
need
to kill me. The other three are special forces. Imagine the publicity you’ll get, putting them in front of the camera. But you haven’t
got
the other two. You’ve only got
him
. Let me go and you can use me to draw the other two out.’

Silence.

‘For God’s sake, man, I’m more use to you alive than dead . . .’

His words degenerated into a kind of nervous gasping.

There was silence in the room. Danny had the impression that Ahmed was letting Buckingham dig himself a deeper hole. Buckingham clearly didn’t realise this, because after a few seconds he continued on the same tack.

‘Think of it,’ he whispered. ‘One of them’s a girl. A
white
girl. You can give her to your men.’ Danny glanced in disgust towards Buckingham, who gave him a sidelong look, licked his lips nervously, and then continued with a quiet intensity in his voice. ‘I bet they haven’t had a woman for weeks. They’ll
thank
you for it.’

Silence.

Ahmed crouched down so that his head was on a level with Danny’s and Buckingham’s. He looked from one to the other. Danny could just about discern that he had a grim smile on his face.

‘You are so weak,’ he whispered.

He stood up again, and this time he spoke more clearly. ‘For your information, we have secured the other two. Who knows, I
might
let my men do what they want to the woman, but that is not your concern. I understand you killed one of my most promising young executioners, Danny Black.’

Danny shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, trying to keep his voice level. ‘It was the Chinese guy.’

Ahmed almost smiled. ‘The Chinese,’ he said. ‘They’ll do almost anything for oil. They have weaponised plague, smallpox and other weapons you’ve never even heard of. They don’t even want payment for their troubles. Just think how it will benefit them when the caliphate has spread and the West no longer has access to our natural resources.’

He held something up in front of Danny’s face: a small vial of clear liquid. Danny didn’t need to ask what it was.

‘In London,’ Ahmed whispered, ‘we are beheading your soldiers in the street. In France, we are executing them in their offices. After today, thanks to this, your people will look back on those times as the good old days.’

Danny kept quiet. Any attempt to antagonise this lunatic would be counter-productive. To his left, though, he could hear Buckingham shivering with terror.

‘But I see no reason,’ Ahmed said, ‘to dispense with the old ways just yet.’ He pocketed the vial of liquid, before walking back behind the camera. He raised one hand and clicked his fingers. The three men with torches moved forward, coming to a halt a metre behind the tripod and shining their beams at Danny and Buckingham so that they were quite brightly lit up. There was a shuffling sound behind the camera. Danny, squinting again in the light, could tell that Ahmed was wrapping a shamagh around his head.

When he returned to the front of the camera, he was carrying something that made Danny’s skin turn clammy. It was a knife. The blade itself was a foot long, and Danny could see that it had jagged, serrated teeth. Someone switched on the camera. A little red light glowed.

Ahmed paced in front of the camera, his long shadow moving erratically in the unstable torchlight. Buckingham was retching again. Great, heaving sounds from the pit of his stomach. ‘Ordinarily,’ Ahmed said, ‘we would sedate you. It makes things easier. But a British special forces soldier and a British intelligence office demand special treatment. You are not our usual quarry of aid workers and do-gooders. The only question is, who first?’

He looked from one to the other. Then he stepped towards Danny.

With his free hand, Ahmed grabbed a clump of Danny’s hair, then rested the blade on the back of his neck. Danny could feel the individual teeth pricking his skin. The serrations were clearly razor-sharp, because although there was barely any pressure, he felt spots of blood oozing over his skin.

‘You’ve learned,’ Ahmed said, ‘that people fear me. You have learned that they fear to speak the name of the Caliph. I am going to show you – and everyone who watches this tape – why.’

Danny closed his eyes. His body was starting to tremble, and he focused on stopping it. He wasn’t going to give this bastard the satisfaction of letting the camera see just how scared he was, now, in the seconds before his death.

The blade didn’t move. Ten seconds passed. He wasn’t sure, but he thought that maybe Ahmed was laughing softly. Unwillingly, he opened his eyes. Nothing had changed. The torches were still shining towards them. The light of the camera was still on. Buckingham was still whimpering to his side. But as he stared straight ahead, Ahmed released his hair and lifted the blade. Danny felt a strange surge of relief.

Ahmed was walking towards Buckingham. Danny watched grimly as he stood on Buckingham’s far side, grabbed his hair and laid the knife on his neck.

‘The girl,’ Buckingham whispered desperately in a strangled voice. ‘Let me . . . let me get the
girl
for you . . .’

‘Do you remember our excursion in Riyadh, Mr Buckingham?’ Ahmed said. ‘Do you remember how the crowd pushed you to the front so that the last person the prisoner saw would be an infidel, so that she would burn in the hellfire?’

Ahmed forced Buckingham’s head to the side, so that he was looking directly at Danny. ‘Look at the infidel, Mr Buckingham,’ he said.

Then he started speaking in Arabic, a dull, monotone chanting that Danny couldn’t understand. But it seemed to echo meaningfully around the room.

‘I can be of
use
to you . . .’ Buckingham tried to say over the chanting. He was crying. His voice was broken. ‘I
know
things . . .
secrets
 . . .
please
 . . .
Caliph
 . . .’

Ahmed continued chanting above Buckingham’s panicked sobs.

Twenty seconds later, he stopped.

There was a pregnant silence, as if everybody in the room was holding his breath.

‘
For pity’s sake, Black!
’ Buckingham suddenly screamed. ‘
DO SOMETHING!
’

But there was nothing Danny could do. He could tell that the Caliph had already made his decision.

He didn’t want to watch, but somehow he had to.

It wasn’t the first swipe that was the worst. That went with the grain of the hooked blade and sliced easily into the back of Buckingham’s neck. Buckingham took a sharp intake of breath, and Danny sensed that the blade was so sharp he hadn’t even felt the first cut yet.

The second swipe was a different matter. Ahmed pulled the hooks of the blade towards him. Danny could hear the resistance exerted by the tendons in the back of Buckingham’s neck. Ahmed had to yank hard to pull the blade through the sinew. By the shaky torchlight, Danny could just make out lumps of internal flesh hanging from the exposed teeth.

Buckingham’s scream was inhuman: a loud, high-pitched, gurgling wail. Danny heard blood dripping from his neck and spattering on to the floor. As Ahmed made the third slice, the wailing suddenly cut out, and was replaced by the sound of Buckingham’s body going into spasm. Danny could only assume that the blade had cut into the spinal cord. Seconds later, the body slumped still.

It took another minute for the job to be done. Danny turned his head away, but couldn’t avoid listening to the wet, coarse slapping sound as Ahmed hacked his way through the remainder of the neck. Only when he heard a heavy thudding sound did he know it was over.

There was a hushed, church-like silence in the room. Danny glanced to his left. Buckingham – what remained of him – was still kneeling, and the torchlight illuminated the brutal wound. His internal organs looked like they were trying to escape from his neck, and fresh blood was sopping from its remnants.

Ahmed bent down and retrieved the head from the floor, then held it up for the benefit of the cameras. Strings of flesh trailed down from the neck as he continued his Arabic chanting for another thirty seconds. Then he dropped the head again and turned to Danny, while one of his men switched off the camera.

‘Please don’t imagine, Danny Black, that anyone is coming to help you,’ Ahmed said. ‘I have enough people in the Qatari government to stop any rescue mission or armed response. We could stay here for days, and nobody would come. I will make you beg for your life before I kill you. A scared soldier makes better TV than a quiet one. I’ll leave you with your friend. We’ll see how calm you are when
your
time comes.’

Twenty-nine

07.30 GMT.

Dawn had already broken over the Thames as Bailey’s white Transit van pulled up at the vehicle entrance to the London Heliport.

He had arrived at the Battersea area from St Albans a full hour ago, where he’d pulled up in a side street off Battersea Park and waited. He hadn’t wanted to be late, but neither did he want to show up at the helipad too early. It would be suspicious if he and his accomplice took to the skies before sunrise, but now was the perfect time to make his way to the entrance of the heliport.

There was a security checkpoint at the vehicular entrance. Bailey approached it slowly. A uniformed security guard walked up to his window. Bailey wound it down and handed him his press accreditation pass. The guard studied it carefully. ‘Lovely morning for it,’ he said.