Killing for the Company (45 page)

‘You –’ the ops officer indicated the guards ‘– out. You –’ he pointed at Luke ‘– here.’

The guards left quickly and Luke approached the computer. The three men were silent while a piece of black and white camera footage played on the screen. There was no sound. At the bottom right-hand corner was a time code, and the footage had clearly been taken by the camera of the Apache that had chaperoned the Puma towards Luke and Stratton’s position on the rooftop in Gaza City. Although the helicopter was moving quickly, its height gave the impression that the city was slipping away slowly underneath. After a minute or so, however, it started to descend. The rooftops became sharper and twenty seconds later the camera was focusing in from a distance on one in particular.

At first it was difficult to make out what was happening, but it took only a few more seconds to become clear. A man was face down on the roof. A second figure had his knee pressed into the man’s back, and a weapon pointing directly at his head.

O’Donoghue turned to Luke, his face a mixture of fury and astonishment. ‘What in the name of . . . ?’ He was so angry he couldn’t even finish the question. ‘Jesus!’ he spat finally, shaking his head. ‘We’d better hope this never gets into the wrong hands. It would be the fucking money shot for Wikileaks.’

‘It’s not what it looks like,’ Luke muttered.

‘Really? So what were you
doing
there? Offering to clean the fucking wax out of his ears with an HK53? Christ, Luke, Stratton’s on the warpath.’

‘You can say that again.’

The ops officer ignored the comment. ‘He says you lost it on the ground. Says you opened up on a crowd of locals and that’s why I’ve got three dead men on my hands and God knows how many Palestinians. Have you got any
fucking
idea what a shit storm this is going to cause? Stratton says . . .’

‘I don’t give a
toss
what Stratton says.’ Luke’s outburst silenced the ops officer immediately. ‘He was going nuts out there.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘
Totally
nuts. He was spouting scripture at me . . .’

‘I’m not fucking surprised, Luke. He was in the middle of a riot and you were sticking a weapon to his head. He probably
was
praying . . .’

‘How long have you known me, boss? Do you really think I lost it down there? Do you really think I put the lives of my unit at risk? Do you
really
think that?’

‘What I
really
want you to do, Luke, is explain why I’ve just been looking at footage that shows you . . .’

Suddenly the door burst open. A short, tanned man around sixty, with thick white hair, an expensive but crumpled suit and bags under his eyes, stormed in.

‘Who the fuck is he?’ O’Donoghue demanded of Julian Dawson.

‘I,’ the man said, ‘am the British ambassador to Tel Aviv.
You
’ – he waved his right hand at the three men in general – ‘are in ten tons of shit.’ He looked from one to the other before his eyes settled on Luke. ‘Is this the man? I want him transferred to Tel Aviv. There’s a high-security unit there with an SIS presence. We need to make sure nobody can look back on our decisions and say we . . .’

‘He’s not going anywhere.’ The ops officer’s voice was firm.

A pause.

‘I hardly need to remind you,’ the ambassador said, dangerously quietly, ‘that I am the representative of Her Majesty’s . . .’

‘He’s under my command. He’s not going anywhere.’

‘Don’t be a bloody idiot . . .’

O’Donoghue had turned away from the ambassador in mid-sentence. He walked up to Luke and stared at him for a full thirty seconds. He looked like he was deciding on the best course of action.

At last he spoke. And if Luke had been encouraged by the way he’d stood up for him in front of the ambassador, now was the time to change his mind. O’Donoghue sounded fucking livid. ‘I don’t know what the
hell
you were thinking of, Luke,’ he said. ‘Frankly, there hasn’t been a fuck-up like this since Libya. I’m putting you in solitary.’

‘Boss, you’ve got to . . .’

‘Forget it, Luke. I haven’t got a choice. Wait here.’

The ops officer marched out of the room, leaving Luke alone with the OC and the ambassador. ‘This isn’t the end of it,’ the ambassador announced. ‘I won’t be steamrollered like this.’

Dawson ignored him. All his attention was on Luke and the look he gave him was bitter. The look of an officer who’d just lost men and was taking it hard. ‘Hope you didn’t have anything planned for the next ten years, Mercer,’ he muttered. ‘You’re doing time for this.’

Luke didn’t reply. There was no point, not with the footage from the Apache.

He eyed the door. His 53 had been taken off him while he was in the Puma, but his Sig was still strapped to his ankle. That at least was something.

At that moment O’Donoghue returned, along with four members of B Squadron that Luke recognised but didn’t know well. It only took one glance at them to realise word had spread that Luke had lost it – that everyone in that room thought they had a madman in their midst.

‘On your feet, Mercer,’ Dawson instructed, before turning to the four Regiment men. ‘Get him out of my sight.’

One of the guys – a short man who had shaved his head to hide his encroaching baldness – stepped forward. ‘I’ll need your weapon,’ he said.

Luke cursed inwardly. He looked towards Dawson. ‘Boss, I . . .’

‘
Do it
,’ the OC told him, like a stern schoolmaster with an unruly kid.

A pause. ‘Right, boss,’ Luke said quietly.

He bent down to loosen the disco gun in its ankle holster. And as he did so, he checked out each of the other men in the room. Only the four new arrivals were armed, but their rifles were slung casually across their fronts – clearly no one expected to be using them. Two guys were standing by the door; the other two were about five metres from Luke’s position. Closest to him were Dawson and O’Donoghue – who were behind a desk – and the ambassador, who stood just a couple of metres from Luke, surveying the situation with a bleak expression.

‘Get a move on, Mercer,’ Dawson said impatiently.

‘Yes, boss,’ he murmured. He removed the gun.

Luke knew he had to move hard and fast. The ambassador might have been a soft target, but the other men in the room were as highly trained as he was and just as strong. What they didn’t have, though, was the element of surprise.

He did it all in a single movement: pulling the gun from the holster, stepping towards the ambassador, hooking his left arm around the man’s neck and pressing the handgun against the side of his head. The ambassador breathed in sharply and Luke could feel his body suddenly shaking.

‘Get away from the door,’ Luke instructed.

No movement.

‘
Get away from the fucking door!
’

The two Regiment men on either side of the door looked towards Dawson, who nodded. They stepped aside.

‘Hands on heads and get to the back of the room, all of you,’ Luke ordered.

‘Do it,’ O’Donoghue said. And then, as the men moved: ‘Put the gun down, Luke. Your career’s already over. Don’t make it even worse.’

‘Where’s Stratton?’

‘You know I can’t tell you that . . .’

‘You think I’ve lost it? You think I’m mad? I’ll fucking show you when I nail this piece of shit.
Where’s Stratton?
’

It was the ambassador who replied, his words tumbling over themselves. ‘Airlifted to Ben Gurion. He’s taking a UN flight back to London tonight.’

‘Put the fucking gun down, Luke,’ O’Donoghue warned.

But Luke was doing nothing of the sort. The ambassador was still trembling, and wheezing now on account of the firm neck lock he was in. Luke pictured the area outside the ops centre. It was open ground, at least 100 metres before he could get to any cover in the main part of the camp. As soon as he stepped out of that door, he’d be a sitting duck. Unless . . .

He looked over at O’Donoghue. ‘Where’s the key to that door?’

The ops officer remained stony-faced, so Luke tightened his arm lock on the ambassador, who started to whimper like a kid.

‘
Where’s the fucking key?
’

O’Donoghue moved slowly, clearly worried that his actions would be misinterpreted. He pulled a bunch of keys from his pocket, selected one and then held it up.

‘I want to know it’s the right one. Lock the door.’

O’Donoghue’s face hardened. He examined the keys again, selected a different one and moved over the door. He inserted it into the lock and twisted it back and forth. Luke heard the lock click shut and open again.

‘Leave it there and get back to where you were.’ O’Donoghue did as he was told. Luke forced the ambassador towards the exit. ‘I’m taking him outside. If I see the door open, I’ll kill him.’ He released the man, then grabbed the keys, opened the door and pushed him through it. Two seconds later he had locked his Regiment mates in the ops room.

It was twilight now. The floodlights were already lit, bathing the camp – which was as busy as ever – in their fluorescent glow. Luke immediately saw three choppers coming in to land. An open-topped truck with at least thirty IDF troops in the back was trundling past the Regiment buildings.

‘This is an outrage,’ the ambassador spat.

Luke didn’t reply. He just raised his Sig and brought it crashing down on the ambassador’s neck. The man fell, unconscious, to the ground.

And then Luke ran.

He didn’t have more than a minute, he estimated, before O’Donoghue and the others broke their way out of the ops office; and they’d be on the blower, raising the alarm right now. He ran into the crowded central area of the base and tried to get the geography of the whole place straight in his head. To get to the exit meant going through the main centre of operations, back past the F-16 hangar and then north. It was a couple of klicks, though, across open ground, and from memory there were two armed Israeli soldiers at the barrier. If he was going to stand a chance of getting out of the base before the whole place was locked down, he needed a vehicle. But first he needed something to keep all the soldiers crawling around the base occupied, otherwise O’Donoghue and Dawson would have every last fucker looking for him.

The canteen was twenty-five metres to his right, a low prefab building with wide double doors that were currently shut. There was nobody immediately outside – it was too early to scran up yet – and Luke sprinted over to it and tried the door. It was unlocked, so he disappeared inside.

The dining area of the canteen was about twenty metres by twenty, with rows of long tables and benches. Although Luke could smell cooking, the dining area was empty. At the far end was a serving hatch about four metres wide, and to its right was a closed door. Luke headed towards the door, which turned out to be locked and couldn’t be opened from this side without a key. But the serving hatch had a metal roller blind in front of it and this had been left partly open. He climbed through the hatch into the kitchen before pulling the blind down behind him and checking the door. From the inside, it opened fine.

The kitchen was about half the size of the dining area. Along the far wall there was a bank of catering ovens with huge stainless steel pots of food bubbling away; on either side of the room there were long metal worktops with hot-water urns, racks of knives and large toasters; and in the middle of the room there was a large food preparation island. In the far left-hand corner was an open door. There was nobody else in the kitchen, but Luke could hear voices from outside.

He grabbed a seven-inch boning knife – sharp and flexible – from the worktop and headed for the door. There were two men standing out the back, five metres from the door, dressed in food-stained white overalls, each of them smoking a cigarette as they chatted quietly. They didn’t see Luke approach until he was pulling the door shut. One of them shouted out, but by then the Yale-type door lock had fastened shut. Luke rammed the tip of the boning knife into the lock, then yanked the handle down at a ninety-degree angle. The tempered-steel blade snapped, leaving the tip in the lock. Nobody would be opening that door in a hurry.

He ran back to the ovens and extinguished the hobs before looking around. He knew what he wanted to achieve. All he needed was the tools to do it. A gas pipe entered in the middle of the back wall at a height of about 1.5 metres and ran down the wall to the rear of the ovens. Good. Looking back to the central island, he saw a heavy cleaver. He grabbed it, then scanned the kitchen for a final piece of equipment.

He saw a copy of the
Jerusalem Post
sitting on a metal trolley. He picked it up before taking the meat cleaver and slamming it into the gas pipe.

The pipe dented, but didn’t break. Luke whacked it again and the dent grew bigger. It was the third strike that split it, and a sudden rush of gas hissed loudly into the kitchen.