Murder Team (9 page)

Danny was outnumbered. He had a rifle, a handgun and a single fragmentation grenade. So it was all going to come down to tactics. He’d better hope his were best.

He knocked the vehicle into gear. At 21.42 hrs exactly, he crossed over the brow of the hill.

Things were about to go noisy.

12

The Land Rover trundled over the rough desert road. It stank of fuel and a dead man’s sweat. Danny kept his eyes firmly on the target. He fervently hoped that his information was correct and Spud really was somewhere down there. Otherwise, he was about to pick a bad fight with bad people, and for no good reason.

His was not the only vehicle advancing on the settlement. While he still had the advantage of height, Danny carefully observed the convoy approaching from the opposite direction. The five sets of headlamps were a lot closer now. Maybe 500 metres from the other side of the settlement. They’d reach it at exactly the same time as Danny himself.

Two minutes out. Danny was ten metres from the bottom of the slope. He could no longer see the convoy approaching from the other direction. There was 400 metres of flat, open ground between him and the settlement. He knew, without question, that whoever had Spud would have clocked him approaching by now. He just hoped that he was right and they were mistaking him for Gilad Friedman, their Israeli business partner, and thought that he was returning to the settlement for some unsuspicious reason. His fingers touched Friedman’s hat. In silhouette, maybe it would help Danny look like him.

It was a big hope. Sweat trickled down his brow at the thought of what was to come.

Ninety seconds out. Two hundred metres. Several figures had gathered outside the nearest building. They were moving around. Swarming. Hard to tell how many. Ten, perhaps? He could see they were armed. Their body language suggested they were arguing. Not a good combo.

One minute. A hundred metres. Danny’s eyes picked out more details of the settlement. His trajectory would take him exactly between two of the fire pits that surrounded the settlement. They were about twenty metres apart and beyond them, set back perhaps another twenty metres, were what looked like four ramshackle sheds. Flat roofs – they appeared to be corrugated iron – and open frontages. Like nativity stables, gone very wrong. In the middle of these four buildings was a circular hut with a conical roof and a green door. Three armed personnel were guarding it. Armed guards meant something valuable was behind that door. Was it Spud? Danny couldn’t be sure, but he reckoned the probability was high.

Beyond the circular hut, Danny couldn’t see, but he knew from his observations from the ridge line that the settlement extended no more than 150 metres from the two firepits.

Thirty seconds. Fifty metres.

The figures up ahead were clearer. He readjusted his estimate: approximately twelve  to fifteen men. Definitely armed. ‘
Shit!
’ Danny hissed. One of them had raised their rifle. He was aiming in Danny’s direction. Danny hit the brakes sharply. The vehicle skidded on the dry, loose ground. As it came to a halt, he threw himself down so he was lying across the front seats.

Not a moment too soon.

The retort of a single round rang out, and there was a sudden, earsplitting crack as the bullet slammed into the Land Rover’s windscreen. Danny looked up. The round had hit squarely in front of the driver’s seat, and a cobweb of splinters had spread out from that central point.

He’d obviously made a grave error in thinking Friedman would be warmly received here.

He checked his watch. Twenty seconds. Should he shoot back, or wait for the ordnance to hit?

A burst of fire from the settlement. Danny started as a single round ricocheted off the chassis somewhere to the front, grating his ears, the impact sending a sudden shock through his body. He couldn’t show himself. Not under heavy fire. He had no option but to wait for his diversion.

Fifteen seconds. He could hear voices. Shouting. Getting closer. The enemy targets were advancing on the Land Rover. He had insufficient room to manoeuvre the Diemaco from underneath him, so he pulled the Browning instead and lay with it pointing out toward the driver’s side window.

Ten seconds. Another burst. Louder and closer. He estimated that the shooter was no more than twenty metres away. And this time the aim was better. The windscreen shattered completely. Thousands of tiny shards rained over him. He managed to close his eyes just in time to stop the glass getting in his eye, but as it hit his face it felt like a hundred pinpricks all at once. He was sure he was bleeding badly.

Five seconds. The voices were very close. A handful of metres.

Impact.

Danny steeled himself for the explosion, knowing it would be close enough to send very strong shockwaves in his direction.

It didn’t happen.

What the fuck . . .

The pit of his stomach became leaden. His strategy hadn’t worked.

A second later, a figure appeared alongside the vehicle. Danny could see the militant’s head through the side window.

He didn’t hesitate. Two rounds in quick succession. The first successfully shattered the window. The second slammed into the militant’s head. A flash of red in the darkness, and he hit the ground.

Where was the fucking drone strike?

The shouting outside grew more frenzied. Danny couldn’t stay in this position. He had to take the fight to them, and that meant showing himself.

He took a deep breath, then stretched out his arm and, twisting his hand at a right angle, fired two rounds through the shattered windscreen. The shouting stopped momentarily. Danny hurled himself up, opened the side door and grabbed his Diemaco. In a single, sudden move, he hurled himself and his weapon out of the car and threw himself behind the protection of the open door. As he moved, he briefly caught sight of the situation outside the vehicle. Six or seven armed militants, about ten metres from the car, spread apart at two-metre intervals, all of them one knee down in the firing position. Impossible to take out with a single burst. But if he presented himself as a target for longer than that, he was fucked.

There was a dead, ominous silence all around. Danny’s breath was shaking, the sweat pouring off him. He cursed himself for thinking he’d been able to trick the Israelis into launching their strike off-target. He must have unwittingly alerted them to the fact that something wasn’t right. Perhaps he’d failed to transmit some kind of security code. Maybe they just didn’t like that he’d marked a location other than the one they were expecting.

Whatever, everything was turning south.

His fingers felt for the stolen fragmentation grenade. He yanked it out of his ops waistcoat, squeezed the detonation lever and ripped the pin. With a swift swing of his right arm, he lobbed it toward the enemy targets. Alarmed shouts from the militants as he hunkered down and waited for the explosion.

It didn’t come. The grenade was a dud.

Danny cursed viciously under his breath. The militants were still shouting, but they had clearly realised the grenade wasn’t going to blow. A couple of loose rounds flew over Danny’s head. He gripped the Diemaco firmly, ready to swing round and open up.

But something stopped him.

It was a sound. Like a sudden, high-pitched wind, very fast, coming from the skies on the far side of the settlement. Air displacement. It lasted only a couple of seconds, but it was enough time for Danny to brace himself. The Israelis’ ordnance was finally arriving.

The strike, when it came, seemed to move the whole earth. The Land Rover shifted several inches across the ground, and Danny’s bones seemed to shake within his body. The noise was so thunderous that, for a moment, he worried that he’d marked the target incorrectly and the strike had occurred much closer to the settlement than he wanted. For a few seconds the air lit up, as bright as day, hot and orange. And when the blast subsided, the heat was still there as a cloud of hot, sharp dust saturated the vicinity.

Danny grabbed his moment. He stood up, assault rifle engaged, its butt pressed hard into his shoulder. He could tell at a glance that the nearby militants were in a state of confusion. Four of them had fallen to the ground. The other three were looking back toward the settlement in sudden anxiety, obviously unsure whether they were under attack. Danny went for these three first. With his weapon switched to semi-automatic, he discharged three quick-fire rounds. Each bullet hit his man square in the back – the broadest target area, and the easiest to hit. Before they’d even finished falling he’d turned to the four men on the ground. Another four rounds and they were down.

Everything in this remote desert location was suddenly different. A thick, dense cloud hung above it. Dust was still drifting over from the far side of the settlement, and the sound of the debris against the chassis of the Land Rover was like a mess of white noise. There was panicked shouting coming from the settlement – screaming, even.

Good. The Israelis didn’t know it, but they had just given Danny the mother of all diversions. Whether they’d hit the convoy was a different matter – the strike had been late, so Danny’s speed and distance calculation would be out. He had to assume that Abu Bakr and people were still alive.

But so, he hoped, was Spud. With one arm he swiped the few shards of shattered windscreen glass from the driver’s seat,  jumped back behind the wheel and hit the throttle. Wind and dust slammed against his sweat-soaked face as he advanced at speed toward his objective.

13

The earth shook underneath Spud’s feet. The dog, still chained up close to him, whimpered, then howled. The body of the butchered kid jolted on the ground. And the manacles that bound Spud’s wrists dug harshly into his wrists. The skin there felt damp – Spud knew he was probably bleeding from the contact – and the muscles in his arms shrieked from the unnatural stress position in which they’d positioned him.

The noise of the nearby explosion was immense. Seconds later, the acrid smell of burning arrived at his nostrils. There were shouts of panic outside the hut, and the ugly barking of instructions. But Spud, the only living human still in the hut, felt a surge of hope. He didn’t know what the explosion was, or how close, or who had caused it. But he knew this: a strike of that magnitude was beyond the capabilities of the militants who were holding him captive at the moment. Which meant someone else know of their position. Eritrean authorities? A foreign power? Hell, could an SAS squadron even be on its way?

He put that thought from his head. If the Regiment had arrived, the militants would be dead before they even knew of the soldiers’ presence. Spud’s colleagues wouldn’t announce themselves like that. But one thing was for sure: his captors hadn’t expected this sudden turn of events. He didn’t know what that meant, but something told him that he had a last roll of the dice.

Gunfire in the distance. It was too muffled to estimate accurately how far away, but he counted three shots in quick succession. They definitely came from a single assault rifle. But if it wasn’t the Regiment, who was it?

A pause. Four more shots.

Spud grimaced. He licked his dry, parched lips and mustered the very last of his strength. He had a feeling he was going to need it.

The chaotic shouting outside grew more intense. It was mixed with the sound of fine rubble falling on the conical roof of the hut. At the same time, he heard the screaming sound of a vehicle’s engine being pushed to the very limit, and growing closer. Spud tried to picture what was happening out there. The vehicle sounded like it had come to a halt maybe twenty metres from the hut – it was hard to be sure just from the sound. The engine died. Ferocious gunfire followed immediately: Spud easily identified the bursts of an assault rifle set to fully automatic. The bursts were short and well-targeted. It was the unmistakeable sound of a weapon being handled by a professional.

The shouting grew more frenzied. There was the occasional scream of pain as burst failed to kill its target outright. For a few seconds the gunfire fell silent – Spud found he was holding his breath, wondering if the shooter had been hit. But then the bursts started up again, a little closer this time.

The shooter was getting nearer.

The rubble rain had subsided, but the acrid smell of the atmosphere had grown stronger. It burned the back of Spud’s throat and made his eyes water. As he was unable to wipe them clear, the dim interior of the hut – lit only by the fading fire in the centre – became dim and blurred. He sensed a commotion just outside the door, and squinted hard in that direction, trying to make everything clear.

The door rattled and started to open. Outside, the shooting had subsided. Someone was about to enter. Wildly, Spud found himself praying that the next person to enter his prison would have the kevlar helmet, boom mike, plate hangers and Crye Precision digital camo of an SF soldier.

A figure entered, and closed the door behind him. Blinded by his watering eyes and the dim room, Spud couldn’t make out his features. But he could see that he was tall and broad, that his shoulders were hunched, and he could sense the urgency emanating from him.

‘Who . . .’ Spud croaked.

But then the figure passed the fire pit in the centre of the room, and Spud saw him more clearly. It was his tormentor. The militant in the black bandana who had murdered the kid before Spud’s eyes, and who now, surely, had arrived to do the same to him.