Authors: Duncan Falconer
Tags: #Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Thrillers, #Suspense
The Protector
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 - Mallory’s Treasure
Chapter 3 - Abdul’s Miscalculation
Chapter 11 - Plans Within Plans
Duncan Falconer is a former member of Britain’s elite Special Boat Service and 14 Int., Northern Ireland’s top-secret SAS undercover detachment. After more than a decade of operational service he left the SBS and went into the private security ‘circuit’. His first book, the best-seller
First Into Action,
documented the real-life exploits of the SBS. His three subsequent books,
The Hostage
,
The Hijack
and
The Operative,
follow the fictional exploits of SBS operative Stratton.
The Protector
is his fourth novel.
In the last few years Falconer has operated at length and often alone in places such as Afghanistan, Palestine, Liberia and throughout Iraq. He now lives anywhere between his three bases in England, North America and South Africa.
‘A gripping and authentic view of life and death in the dangerous world of private protection by someone who has been there and worn the T-shirt’
Soldier Magazine
Also by Duncan Falconer
The Hostage
The Hijack
The Operative
Non-fiction
First Into Action
Published by Hachette Digital 2010
Copyright © Duncan Falconer 2007
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All characters and events in this publication, other than those
clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance
to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
eISBN : 978 0 7481 2228 8
This ebook produced by JOUVE, FRANCE
Hachette Digital
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Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DY
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To Ricky
1
Mallory’s Treasure
The Royal Navy Search and Rescue Sea King helicopter flew low and fast over the flat grubby desert, all eyes in the cockpit focused on a thin trail of black smoke half a mile ahead. Beyond it was a blurred collection of dilapidated dwellings on the other side of a road that marked the northern edge of the town of Fallujah that was a short flight west of Baghdad. Visibility was poor in every direction, a fine dust filling the air like smog and with more trails of carbon smoke dotting the hazy landscape like plumes from the stacks of distant steamships, columns of dark vapour bending gently on a south-easterly breeze.The pilot was tracking a signal that had its focus point a little to the left of the closer, finer plume. It was on an emergency bandwidth emitted by a radio in the hands of a British Tornado pilot whose aircraft had been shot down in the last twenty minutes.
Royal Marine Corporal Bernard Mallory stood beside his Royal Navy partner, Petty Officer Mac Davids, in the narrow doorway that connected the cabin to the cockpit. At thirty, Mac was a couple of years older than Mallory, a head taller and not as strongly built but a hundred yards faster in a mile race. Mallory pushed the inside of his helmet against his ear as he strained to listen to the weak, intermittent radio message from the Tornado pilot who was answering the co-pilot’s request for his situation report.
‘All I want to know, for Christ’s sake, is if the area is hot or not,’ the pilot said, a little tense, more to himself than to anyone else. His eyes darted back and forth across the range of his vision, looking for any sign of a threat that he knew was out there somewhere. It would not have been this crew’s normal responsibility to carry out the rescue of a downed pilot in hostile territory.That task usually went to Special Forces flights and the rescue crews were normally made up of SAS and SBS operatives. But when the distress call came in none were immediately available and Samuels, the Sea King pilot, a gung-ho type who had missed the first Gulf War by only a couple of months, elected to at least check the level of hostility. The duty watch officer running the operations desk had allowed him to give it a go but only if there was zero enemy ground activity.
Mac and Mallory had exchanged glances when they’d first heard their boss’s request to do a recce, knowing his hankering for a bit of the excitement whose lack he had been complaining of. His appetite was more urgent now that the war was fast coming to an end.
The tension in the helicopter increased perceptibly as Samuels took some lift out of the rotors and dropped the heavy beast to a couple of hundred feet above the ground.They were now exposed not only to anti-aircraft guns and rockets but also to small-arms fire.
In the back of everyone’s mind was the questionable logic of risking the lives of four men to save just one but that was a danger they had accepted before joining the search-and-rescue service.This was the wrong time to dwell on it anyway but the arithmetical reasoning was more acute at this stage of an operation.
Mallory stepped back from the cockpit doorway, pulled his black-tinted sunshade visor down, gripped the heavy handle of the large side door and yanked it across on its runners until it engaged the catch that locked it open. The wind charged in aggressively, ravaging every inch of the cabin and tossing around anything that could not hold firm against it. He held on to the winch above to lean out and get a better look to starboard while Mac went to a port-side window.
Mallory looked down at the arid ground a hundred feet below as it shot past: dirty gold sand with a sprinkling of black giving way to sparsely cultivated patches of bracken-like vegetation, a track with a battered pick-up trundling along it, a line of parched, dust-coated eucalyptus trees, a herd of scattering goats with the shepherd boy twisting in their midst to look up at him. What sounded like far-off explosions were barely discernible above the noise of the engines and rotors chopping the air and except for the handful of distant smoke columns he could see little evidence of the heavy air assault taking place in the southern part of the town.
The Sea King had originally been on its way to an American base - confidently named ‘Camp Victory’ - at Baghdad International Airport on the west side of the city when they’d picked up the downed pilot’s distress call. Soon after diverting from their course and picking up the location of the emergency beacon they heard the Tornado pilot’s voice confirming that he was alive. The level of Iraqi resistance in the area was unknown since there were no coalition troops close enough to make that assessment. But it was believed to be light since the main ground-fighting in the sector was concentrated further south on the Baghdad side of Fallujah. The Iraqi military had for the most part disintegrated. Isolated groups of Republican Guard were putting up a token resistance in places but the back of the enemy had been broken and the majority of the army had abandoned their weapons and uniforms. However, a lone helicopter close to the ground was an irresistible target to any Iraqi who still had a gun. One lucky shot could turn the rescue mission into a fight for survival. That danger would only increase when the moment came to hover close to the ground and pick up the downed pilot.
A loud
thwack
, like the noise of a stone striking the helicopter’s thin metal fuselage, made everyone start. The pilot banked the lumbering whale of a craft as sharply as it could go, the rotors complaining loudly as he put excessive torque on the engines.
‘What was that?!’ he shouted.
Mallory instinctively ducked back into the cabin, suspecting that it had been a bullet. Then, gritting his teeth, he leaned back outside to inspect the helicopter’s body and saw a small hole only a couple of feet from him, towards the tail. ‘Got a strike low on the cabin skin below the numbers,’ he shouted into his mike against the wind. He looked inside for the corresponding hole but could not see anything: wrinkled padding and a row of folded hammock seats obscured the inside wall. ‘From what I can see we’re fine,’ he said, guessing while looking at the other side of the cabin for an exit hole. He didn’t find one. Mac scanned the roof for any sign of damage, then went back to the port-side window.
The immediate question on everyone’s mind was if the attack constituted a high enough level of danger to abort the mission.They all knew that as far as operational procedures were concerned the answer was affirmative - but the important issue was whether Samuels agreed.
Any indecision the Sea King pilot might have had evaporated when the Tornado pilot’s voice broke through to say that he could hear them. Samuels reacted by pulling the chopper’s nose back around and on track towards the emergency beacon.
Mallory spotted several puffs of smoke above a low wall, giving away the firing position of a machine gun that he could not hear above the helicopter’s engine noise.‘Contact starboard! Four o’clock! Four hundred!’ he shouted. Samuels responded with another violent turn as a bright-orange tracer flew across the front of his windshield, heading skyward.
Mallory checked the outside of the craft again as best he could, hanging on tightly against the torque, then looked inside for signs of damage before stepping back and going to the cockpit door to see how his crew were doing. ‘Everything looks OK,’ he said, seeing that they were fine. But Samuels ignored him as he gripped his steerage and power controls while the co-pilot’s hands whipped from one instrument button to the next, flicking switches and turning dials.
‘Systems functional,’ the co-pilot said as he turned off an engine alarm that had been triggered by the violent manoeuvring and tapped a gauge that had gone into the red: he did not seem overly concerned about it. He threw Samuels a couple of anxious glances in between his checks, wondering if his boss still intended to press on. But with no response from the pilot other than a fixed expression of concentration the answer for the moment appeared to remain affirmative.
Mallory was confident in his crew, having been with them for more than three months, and he went back to the external cabin door to maintain his surveillance. He had no say over their actions anyway and he had his own responsibilities. Being the only soldier on board, and a Royal Marine no less, he felt an inherent duty to be the cool-headed bulwark of the team. That was not to say that the others weren’t up to the task. But as a Marine he was expected to be a stalwart. There was no doubt in Mallory’s heart that he would uphold the pride of the Corps as well as his own if called upon. But this was the first time he had been under direct enemy fire and as the adrenalin coursed through his veins anxiety accompanied it. He was on his guard as he ventured into this level of fear for the first time, not truly knowing how he would react. Crouched in the open doorway of such a large, lumbering and attractive target he felt vulnerable as well as helpless to defend himself. His SA-80 assault rifle was secured in a bracket on the bulkhead behind him but grabbing it to engage an enemy he could not accurately see was pointless. More importantly, his crew would not appreciate him turning the rescue craft into a gunship unless there were clearly no other options.
Mallory had been a bootneck for six years and since graduating from Lympstone Commando Training Centre had spent most of that time in a fighting company of 42 Commando based in Plymouth. But six months after a long-awaited transfer to Recce Troop (42 Commando’s reconnaissance team), the most expert fighting group in a commando unit, he tore a ligament in his knee playing rugby. To add to his disappointment he was transferred to the Regimental Sergeant Major’s staff in the Company Headquarters to keep him employed during his rehabilitation, not an uncommon post for the walking - or hobbling - wounded. Then, at the outbreak of war, shortly before he was declared fit for duty, his boss read out an e-mail to the office from Naval Command requesting search-and-rescue volunteers. Mallory knew that he would not be able to slip back into his Recce Troop slot within the immediate future. His position had been filled and all he could hope for was to get back on the standby list. Therefore, when he heard the request for search-and-rescue volunteers, a somewhat specialised position, he asked immediately to be considered for the post. Mallory had never previously had aspirations of that nature. Being a part of a helicopter crew had not entered his head before that day. But his decision to volunteer was encouraged by rumours that few if any members of 42 Commando, including the Recce Troop, would join the war, at least the planned early stages of it. Having missed out on the fight in Afghanistan he desperately wanted the opportunity to see action.
The RSM agreed to put Mallory’s name forward and within a week he received his acceptance notice. But by the time he had finished the training he had come to doubt the course he had chosen. Rumours abounded that the navy search-and-rescue squadron he was being attached to had little chance of seeing action since only Special Forces rescue teams would be permitted to operate in hostile areas. And for the early stages of the war that had been how it had panned out.
But now that Mallory was heading into the thick of it, having taken a bullet strike already, the old adage ‘Be careful what you wish for’ sprang to mind.
The Sea King pilot swung the heavy craft in a wide arc away from the source of the gunfire. But once again, as the downed Tornado pilot’s voice came over the speakers sounding increasingly desperate as he claimed to have the helicopter in sight, Samuels brought the nose back around.
‘I’m showing green smoke,’ the downed pilot said, the quality of the communication suddenly better than it had been.
It was now obvious to all that short of a seriously damaging strike against the Sea King they would not abandon the desperate stranger. The man had fully committed himself by igniting a smoke grenade and would stay close to it, well aware that it could also attract the enemy.
Mallory strained to look through the haze and saw the puff of dark green that was quickly billowing into a substantial cloud in front of a collection of huts several hundred metres from the black smoke that marked the Tornado pilot’s crash site. It indicated that the pilot was at least able to move.
Before Mallory could report the sighting he heard Samuels confirm to the downed pilot that he had the smoke visual. They were going in.
Mac joined Mallory in the doorway and both men checked that they had their 9mm pistols in holsters at their sides. The pair contemplated their next move. They glanced at each other, looking for signs of weakness, any talk unnecessary. Mallory forced a grin from which Mac appeared to take little reassurance.
Mac pushed his mike aside and moved his mouth closer to Mallory’s ear. ‘You ever read “Rendezvous with Death”?’ he shouted above the noise.
‘What?’ Mallory shouted, having heard Mac’s question but then unsure if he had done so correctly.
‘“Rendezvous with Death.” You ever read it?’
‘No, but I think I saw the film,’ Mallory replied.
Mac rolled his eyes. ‘It’s a poem.’
‘I must’ve missed that one,’ Mallory replied sarcastically. He had never read a poem in his life and suddenly felt a tinge of inferiority. It was not an uncommon feeling for him. Mallory envied servicemen who’d had a good education. It made him want to improve himself in that regard but he had never made the effort. His excuse was the company he kept: fellow bootnecks. A commando unit was not the ideal environment in which to cultivate culture. ‘Sounds a bit dramatic,’ Mallory shouted, regretting his initial sarcasm.
‘First World War,’ Mac shouted. ‘You should read it.’
Mallory didn’t dwell on the matter and concentrated on catching a glimpse of the Tornado pilot.
‘Stand by,’ Samuels warned over the radio as they drew closer and dropped lower towards the green smoke that was moving along the ground in the breeze before rising and spreading out. Mallory eyeballed the medical pack strapped to the bulkhead near the door as he adjusted his bulletproof jacket. The plates that covered his chest and back were heavy but he had worn them for so long now that they felt like a part of him. He went over the procedure and his responsibilities that they had rehearsed endlessly back in the UK as well as when they’d arrived in Iraq. This was the second live rescue he had taken part in but the other one had not taken place under fire. Although Samuels was bringing the helicopter in as fast as he could it felt as if they were moving through the air like a barrage balloon.
