Hunter Killer (35 page)

They reached the main road that headed back down the mountain in about twenty minutes. They saw a single vehicle go past – a beaten-up old pick-up much like the one that they’d seen in the square earlier. Curious eyes looked out of the windows at them as they trekked along the cliff-face side of the road. Danny estimated that they could make their vehicle in about half an hour if they weren’t held up. He checked over to his right. From here, he could see the outline of the stone staircase where they had crept past the guard the previous night. At that exact spot, he could just make out the outlines of two animals – he couldn’t tell if they were dogs or hyenas – sniffing the air. No humans tonight. At least none that they could see.

Spud looked anxiously over his shoulder, then cast Danny a dark look. There was unspoken tension between them. ‘We should have nailed him.’

Danny didn’t reply. He’d just heard, from somewhere up behind them, the sudden buzzing of motorbikes. The two men shared a glance. Then they upped their pace. Danny couldn’t shake the feeling he might have just screwed up. Badly.

Twenty metres further along the road they found another crevice in the cliff, smaller than the one into which they’d driven the Toyota, but big enough for the two of them. At Spud’s insistence they ducked inside. Forty-five seconds later, the buzzing of the motorbikes became suddenly louder. A convoy shot past the opening of the crevice. Danny counted five of them. It was impossible as they whizzed past to discern their features accurately, but they all wore rifles across their backs.

‘Reckon they’re looking for someone?’ Spud asked sarcastically. The buzzing of their bikes died away. Spud’s face was like thunder. ‘How far to the vehicle?’ he said.

‘Ten minutes. If we leg it.’

They made it in seven. As they approached the Toyota’s impromptu hideout they slowed their pace and drew their weapons. Their camouflage was good, though. A couple of minutes later Danny was behind the wheel again, easing the Toyota out of the tumbledown hut and on to the road. He realised they’d barely seen any vehicles in Ha’dah. Certainly none like this. They were going to stick out on the road if anyone was following them. He turned right and, carefully manoeuvring the vehicle inches away from the sheer drop at the edge of the road, started winding their way down the mountain. By his side, Spud was checking over his Sig. There was a deep frown on his forehead. He looked like he expected to have to use it. With one hand on the wheel, Danny pulled his own handgun and stowed it in an open compartment just by his knee.

The road twisted and turned as they passed the location where the Chinook had set them down the previous night. Once more Danny was aware of lights moving around on the desert floor far below them, but the bulk of his attention was on the road, every sense alert as his eyes flickered between what was ahead, and the rear-view mirror.

Ten silent minutes passed.

Suddenly the road straightened out, and Danny slammed his foot on the brake. Glaring at them from the darkness ahead were five individual headlamps: a row of three, then a row of two, evenly spaced across the five-metre-wide road.

Motorbikes. Distance to the first row: fifteen metres.

An ordinary roadblock? If so, perhaps they could avoid a firefight by paying their way through.

The light of the Toyota’s headlamps battled with those of the bikes. In the resulting glare, Danny could only see the outlines of the riders. But he could make out the shape of their robes, and the angular silhouettes of the weapons slung across their chests. He realised that one of the bikes had two riders. They climbed off, and the driver pushed his passenger forwards into the no-man’s-land between the bikes and the Toyota, before getting back on his bike.

Spud swore under his breath when they saw his face. Hamza. He peered towards the Toyota, clearly dazzled by its headlamps. He was obviously trying to identify the drivers, but couldn’t because of the glare. He turned round and made a gesture with his arms that said: I don’t know if it’s them.

The Toyota’s engine purred. Danny revved it once. Thoughts flicked through Danny’s mind. Had Hamza taken exception to their brutal treatment of Ahmed? Or had he been planning to rat on them all along?

‘Still think we should have left that fucker alive back there?’ Spud murmured.

Danny didn’t answer. The situation was what it was. There was no right or wrong decision: only what they
had
done and what they
hadn’t
. But they both knew what to do now.

Two of the front row of riders stepped off their bikes, leaving their vehicles propped up at an angle, the headlamps still burning. They stepped past Hamza towards the Toyota. Hamza himself scurried back behind the second line of motorbikes, but all Danny’s attention was on the approaching men. Even their silhouettes had that self-assured gait Danny recognised from up in the village. His hand felt for the Sig in the compartment by his knee. He gripped the handle and with the press of a button wound down his side window. He heard Spud doing the same. The night air – warmer now that they were lower down the mountain – hit his face.

The figures continued to approach. They were seven metres away now, side by side directly in front of the Toyota. Danny could make out their features. They were young, no older than twenty, and their black beards looked barely grown. Their faces were pictures of suspicion and contempt, but they had a confidence about them that comes with a loaded weapon.

Three metres from the front of the vehicle, the figures peeled off to either side, one towards Danny’s window, one towards Spud’s. Like policemen on an American highway, they each placed a hand on the top of the vehicle, then leant in to look through the open window.

They didn’t even have time to speak.

There was a fraction of a second between the firing of the two handguns: Spud’s first, then Danny’s. They shot each of the Yemeni bikers full in the face. Because of the proximity of the target, Danny felt a blowback from the shot, and a flat slap of wetness against his fist as blood spattered from his target’s face. The impact of the rounds forced the two targets to fall back a couple of metres, clearing the Toyota sufficiently that Danny and Spud could swing the doors open and throw themselves out of their seats before the remaining three targets even had time to get their weapons ready to fire.

Immediately, there was shouting from the direction of the enemy targets. One of the bikes fell to its side as the driver jumped off it. Danny’s foot crunched down on the shin of the man he’d killed as he took cover behind the open door, dragging his HK out of the car with him. The pistol was fine in confined space, and even over the 15-metre distance between them and the bikes. But the rifle would be more accurate over distance if the enemy tried to flee, and a harder-hitting round was always preferable if you wanted to be sure of putting your man down.

Chaos in the enemy ranks. Shouting. Two shots rang out. One of them flew over the top of the Toyota. The other slammed into the side door protecting Danny. He felt the car shuddering violently, but noted that the bullet hadn’t fully pierced the door. That didn’t mean the next one wouldn’t, though.

Two more loose rounds. No doubt that these were amateurs but they were still well armed, even if they were firing randomly. They needed to be put down, quickly.

It was Spud who took the third one out. Unlike the enemy’s loose fire, his was a single, well-aimed shot from his rifle as he peered round his open door and fired on the remaining target in the front row. There was a clatter as both the man and his bike fell to the ground. They heard more alarmed shouting, and a revving of bikes. Clearly the remaining two guys were preparing to flee.

Danny pushed himself up so he was looking through the window of the open door, the butt of his rifle pressed hard into his shoulder, safety switched to semi-automatic. Both bikes were facing in on each other as their riders attempted to turn. Distance: 20 metres, and he thought he could just make out Hamza five metres beyond that. Each of the two targets on motorbikes was lit up now – by each other and also by the Toyota. They weren’t even firing back.

‘
Go left!
’ Danny shouted the instruction to Spud. The only words either of them had spoken since the firefight had begun. Then he gave himself a couple of seconds to aim at the guy on the right.

The two SAS men fired once in perfect unison. Their rounds found their targets unerringly. Both men slumped to the ground, their bikes falling on top of them.

Which left Hamza. His silhouette had turned and was running away from them, down the road.

Danny felt a sudden flash of anger. He jumped out from behind his door, his rifle in the firing position. He covered the 15 metres between the Toyota and the bikes in seconds, avoiding the corpses as he sprinted after the tout.

Hamza was 20 metres down the road and sprinting like his life depended on it, which it did. Danny calmly got down on one knee, gave himself a second to line up the sights, then took the shot. It echoed off the mountainside, and Hamza crumpled to the ground.

A pause. Then the sound of screaming. The tout was down and wounded, but still alive. Danny stood up and found Spud next to him.

‘You were right, I was wrong,’ he said. Then he sprinted the 20 metres to Hamza, whose screaming had grown less intense. He’d hit the tout in the lower back and he was bleeding out fast. Hamza took a sharp intake of breath as he looked up at Danny, the whites of his eyes glowing in the darkness. He managed to shake his head as Danny raised his weapon, but the Regiment man wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice.

He fired a fourth single shot at Hamza’s head. The body juddered and was still.

No time to hesitate. Danny bent down and grabbed Hamza’s body by its legs. He was aware of Spud killing the engines on the motorbikes as he dragged the corpse towards the steep incline at the edge of the road. He rolled him down the mountainside, out of sight.

Jogging back up to Spud’s position, he saw that his mate had already done the same thing to two more of the Yemeni dead. Together then cleared up the rest, before sending their bikes plunging off the road after them.

They were grim-faced as they got back into their vehicle. There was no guarantee that there weren’t more of these fuckers coming, or that Hamza hadn’t told anyone of their destination. And they sure as hell didn’t want company when they were trying to creep up on Abu Ra’id.

They needed to get off this road quickly. Without another word, they continued the journey down the mountain.

Time check: 22.05hrs

The winding road had evened out. They were at the foot of the mountain. The headlamps of the Toyota revealed fast-moving, parched scrubland on either side. Danny had Ahmed’s words in his head.
Where the road forks, you go left.
But so far there had been no sign of the road forking. It just kept on going straight.

Twenty minutes passed. Half an hour. Danny pulled over and killed the lights. Then he took a look round with his night sight. The terrain was perfectly flat for as far as he could see. The occasional boulder. Patches of low scrub. The gnarled tree 200 metres to the north. In the distance, glowing like fireflies in the green haze of the night vision, he could see the headlamps of other vehicles moving around. But with no point of reference, it was impossible to tell how far away they were. He climbed back into the car. He could tell Spud was still pissed off with him, but at least he was calm.

‘Anyone following?’ he asked.

‘Not that I can see.’

They continued along the road for another ten minutes.

Twenty.

The fork in the road suddenly appeared out of the darkness. The right-hand fork was by far the better kept. Off to the left, the terrain appeared pot-holed and undulating. At the apex between the two forks there lay the skeleton of some animal, its bones dry and pitted. There were no signposts, of course, or any indication that this was the way they needed to go. The two SAS men merely looked at each other and nodded their mutual consent that this was the right path. Danny stepped out of the car again. He looked down at the ground and saw fresh tyre prints. ‘Someone’s passed this way recently,’ he said. ‘A four-by-four.’

‘Abu Ra’id?’ Spud asked.

Danny shrugged. He performed another sweep with his kite sight. Nothing. But they should still take precautions.

‘I’m going to go blind.’

Spud grunted his agreement. Danny immediately killed all the lights on the Toyota. From his kit bag, he removed his set of NV goggles and fitted them over his head. Spud did the same. The darkness dissolved and the world turned a shade of green. The goggles illuminated everything. The stars were riotous overhead, the stony ground of the desert terrain almost more detailed than it would have been in daylight with the naked eye. Danny took the left fork, and eased the Toyota on to this new road. The tyres trundled and crunched noisily over the imperfect surface.

Danny couldn’t do more than 20 mph. Not on this road surface and wearing NV. In any case, it was desirable to keep the engine noise as quiet as possible, since they didn’t know what was waiting up ahead. Danny concentrated on keeping the revs low and steady, while Spud kept looking all around, scouring the terrain for possible threats, and checking that nobody was following them.

Nobody was. At least, not so far as they could tell.