Hellfire

Also by Chris Ryan

Non-fiction

The One That Got Away

Chris Ryan’s SAS Fitness Book

Chris Ryan’s Ultimate Survival Guide

Fight to Win

Fiction

Stand By, Stand By

Zero Option

The Kremlin Device

Tenth Man Down

Hit List

The Watchman

Land of Fire

Greed

The Increment

Blackout

Ultimate Weapon

Strike Back

Firefight

Who Dares Wins

The Kill Zone

Killing for the Company

Osama

Masters of
War

Hunter Killer

Chris Ryan Extreme

Hard Target

Night Strike

Most Wanted

Silent Kill

In the Alpha Force Series

Survival

Rat-Catcher

Desert Pursuit

Hostage

Red Centre

Hunted

Blood Money

Fault Line

Black Gold

Untouchable

In the Code Red Series

Flash Flood

Wildfire

Outbreak

Vortex

Twister

Battleground

In the Agent 21 Series

Agent 21

Reloaded

Codebreaker

The Wire

Deadfall

Under Cover

Hellfire

Chris Ryan

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Coronet

An
imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Chris Ryan 2015

The right of Chris Ryan to be identified as the Author of the

Work has been asserted by him in accordance with

the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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 written permission 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 being

imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 444 78331 5

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.hodder.co.uk

Contents

Glossary

Epigraph

Prologue

Part One

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Part Two

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Part Three

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

Twenty-nine

Thirty

Thirty-one

Thirty-two

Author’s Note

Glossary

‘I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.’

— Albert Einstein

Prologue

The Iraq–Syria border. Sunset.

It was a featureless patch of desert, but surrounded at a distance by scenes of war.

Six kilometres to the north there was an Islamic State command and control centre, reduced to rubble by American air strikes. But local command and control really took place in a small Bedouin encampment that the infidel didn’t know about, and which they would never bomb, because it was a civilian target. They were weak about such matters.

Three kilometres to the west, a laser-guided Brimstone missile had blasted a crater in the sand thirty metres wide. Two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of ordnance had taken out a single Land Rover, unoccupied.

Ten kilometres to the south, there was a border town that had fallen to the brutal troops of the Islamic State. It had taken the mass execution of three hundred civilians to subdue the malcontents, but now it was overrun with insurgents, completely unopposed by the terrified locals.

Here, however, the undulating sand and rough, dusty scrub under a clear sky looked just as it had done for hundreds, even thousands, of years. And a lone vehicle containing two men trundled through the twilight. For one of these men, who had a crooked nose, lank, greasy hair and wispy stubble on his chin, this was the most exciting journey of his life.

The air was hot and dry. He was sweating and dirty. But he didn’t mind. Twenty-four hours ago he had been stuck in the grey drizzle of an early Peckham morning. Now he was watching a blood-red sun set over the dunes. For years he had longed to swap his old life for this.

His name was James Wilson. He hated it. It was so British. He couldn’t understand why his parents, who had moved to England from Pakistan when they were seventeen – just a year older than James was now – couldn’t have given him a better, Islamic, name. He was always trying to change it. On his unsuccessful YouTube music channel, where he chanted self-penned Jihadist lyrics of which he was very proud, he called himself Dubz-Manuva. And out here, on the fluid border between Iraq and Syria, he was Hassan. He much preferred that name. It sounded more noble, and he had enjoyed tearing up his British passport once he had cleared immigration at Hatay airport in southern Turkey. Out here, nobody would call him a dirty Paki bastard ever again.

Now he was looking forward to meeting with his comrades, learning how to become an ISIS fighter. He had spent many hours daydreaming about the heroic things he would do. And now those daydreams were becoming a reality.