Masters of War (18 page)

‘What’s happening?’ Buckingham asked.

Danny said nothing. He was too busy concentrating. Moving about ten metres apart, Greg and Jack crouched low as they approached the brow of the dune, then adopted the firing position as they reached it.

They lay there, perfectly still.

The low hum of the RIB’s motor had faded. The only noise was the gentle crash and hiss of waves against the shingle.

Jack raised his right hand: the signal to advance. ‘Stick close to me,’ Danny whispered. He jumped up and pulled Buckingham to his feet. Then, covered by Jack and Greg up ahead and with Spud ten metres to the left, they advanced. The sand of the dune was soft. Buckingham stumbled twice and Danny had to help him up. He was already panting by the time they reached the top. Danny scanned ahead. The terrain sloped gently downward for a kilometre before it reached a road running north–south, parallel to the coastline. He could make out the distant outlines of trees and bushes, a reminder that the climate on the Mediterranean side of Syria was a good deal less harsh than the desert on the eastern side and the border with Iraq. Approximately to their two o’clock was the T-junction. Here, parked in a line facing south, were three vehicles. The lead vehicle had its headlamps on, lighting up the road.

Danny removed a night-sight from his pack. Focusing in on the lead vehicle, he could just discern the outline of a figure at the steering wheel. ‘Bingo,’ he said. ‘We got one guy up front. I’m guessing there’s at least two more as they’re in three vehicles.’ He lowered the sight. ‘OK, everything looks as it should, but let’s not take any chances. I wouldn’t put it past this Muhammad bloke to do the dirty on us and set up an ambush. Spud, Greg, stay here. Keep eyes on. We’ll make contact and check over the vehicles, then send Muhammad and his boys packing. If it looks like we’re having any trouble, you know what to do. Jack, Buckingham, come with me.’

Jack gave him a troubled look. ‘You sure about this?’ he said with a glance at their companion.

Danny nodded. ‘I don’t want this guy to know for sure how many of us there are. If we leave Buckingham behind, they’ll know we’ve got at least one more guy looking after him. Let’s keep Muhammad in the dark if we can.’

Jack inclined his head. ‘Roger that,’ he said, then looked at Buckingham. ‘I don’t want to get your back up, mate, but when we get down there, do what we say and keep your mouth shut. We’ll do the talking.’

The vehicles were at their two o’clock. Danny, Jack and Buckingham headed out to their eleven o’clock. Danny estimated that this would allow them to hit the road approximately 250 metres from the convoy. They could then approach from behind and their fixer would be none the wiser about which direction they’d really come from. Running with full pack and hindered by Buckingham’s lack of fitness, it took them the best part of seven minutes to cross the open ground and reach the road. It was a good eight or nine metres wide, but its surface was potholed and stony. They walked in single file – Jack first, then Buckingham, then Danny, each man ten metres from the next. When they were twenty metres from the T-junction and the convoy, they stopped and lay on the dusty ground, surveying the site.

A car door slammed. A figure emerged from the front vehicle and walked on to the rough ground east of the road. He stood ten metres from the car, and it was perhaps five seconds before Danny realised he was taking a slash.

‘Wait here,’ he hissed.

Silently and in less than five seconds, Danny covered most of the twenty metres to the pissing man. The guy wasn’t even aware of his presence until Danny was three metres away. He was shaking himself off as Danny wrapped his left arm around his neck and covered his mouth with his right hand. The guy tried to shout, but all that came out was a muffled whimper. Looking over his shoulder, Danny saw Jack sprinting towards the lead vehicle. Moments later he had ripped the door open and was aiming his M4 directly into the front. A babble of Arabic emerged. Jack pulled two men roughly out of the car and threw them on to the ground. Aware that Buckingham was nervously approaching, Danny pushed his man over to where the others were crouching, then beckoned to him to hurry towards them.

Danny looked at each of the three Syrian men in turn. ‘Muhammad?’ he asked.

One of the pair that Jack had pulled from the car looked up sharply. He looked unpleasant – the photo they’d seen back at base had massively flattered him. A big, fat, bald bastard with rotten yellow teeth and bags under his eyes. His eyes darted angrily to Jack’s gun. ‘What you do?’ he said in broken English. ‘I your friend. Put the gun down. I have cars for you. Very
good
cars. Put the gun
down
, please.’

Danny gave Jack an almost imperceptible nod. Jack lowered the M4, though Danny noticed that he kept it firmly in his grip.

Instantly, the fixer’s face softened. He stood up and his two friends did the same. Muhammad opened his arms and gave them a grin that displayed his rotten teeth even more clearly. And then, in a voice that bore no trace of his previous anger, he said: ‘Welcome to our poor country, my friends. Welcome to Syria!’

TEN

He was a fixer through and through. Glib, talkative, slightly nervous, slippery as a fish. He presented the two vehicles with the aplomb of a car salesman flogging a Bentley. In fact, the cars looked knackered: a dull-brown Renault and a red VW, both covered with scrapes and dents and rust. Each was decorated inside with religious icons and coloured beads, was the custom in that part of the world, and they smelled faintly of petrol and hashish.

‘Very good cars!’ Muhammad said.

‘Yeah,’ Jack muttered as he checked the vehicles over. ‘Enough to give Jeremy Clarkson a lazy lob-on.’

‘Jeremy?’ Muhammad asked enthusiastically. ‘Who is this Jeremy? A friend of yours? You have more friends coming?’

‘No,’ Danny stated. ‘No friends coming. Just us.’

It happened in a split second. Buckingham said nothing, but his gaze darted briefly to the west, where they’d left Spud and Greg. Had the fixer noticed? Danny couldn’t tell.

Jack was checking one of the cars, and got it started. Danny looked at Muhammad’s two companions. ‘OK, fellas,’ he said. ‘Time to move.’

The fixer turned to Buckingham and smiled his gruesome smile. ‘Where do you travel to in our poor country?’

Danny wasn’t fast enough. Before he could stop him, Buckingham had already answered. ‘Aleppo,’ he said.

Muhammad’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Aleppo. Very good—’

‘You heard what the man said, guys,’ Jack interrupted, deftly steering the conversation away. ‘Time to make tracks.’

The fixer ignored Jack, turning back to Danny instead. ‘You pay me now!’ he said.

‘Nice try, pal. You’ve had your payday. Time to go.’

An outraged expression crossed Muhammad’s face. He was obviously about to escalate this argument. Danny pulled his Sig from his chest rig and pressed it against the fixer’s head.

‘Go,’ he said quietly.

Muhammad’s whole demeanour changed. He stepped back, barked a single word in Arabic to his two companions, then gave Danny an obsequious little half bow, his eyes still searching and suspicious. Moments later the three men were all in the car. The engine coughed a few times, but then the car moved off into the night.

Danny and Jack watched it disappear. Then they turned back to Buckingham. Jack’s face was a storm cloud. ‘I told you to leave the talking to us,’ he said.

Buckingham’s eyes widened in surprise. ‘I said we were going to Aleppo,’ he said. He looked to Danny for support. ‘I thought you were trying to put him off our track.’

Danny glanced over at the departing vehicle. ‘Aleppo’s a hundred klicks from the Turkish border,’ he said. ‘If that’s where we were headed, we’d never start our journey from here. Muhammad, or whatever his name is, knew you were lying.’ He did everything he could to keep his voice level, even though he was as angry as Jack.

‘Well, what the bloody hell was I supposed to say?’ Buckingham said.

‘Nothing,’ Jack told him.

‘We can’t do anything about it now,’ Danny said. ‘We’ll just need to keep alert.’

‘Roger that,’ Jack muttered. His eyes followed the lights of the fixer’s vehicle. It was about 1.5 kilometres away when it turned to the left and out of sight. He removed a thin torch from his pack and pointed it back towards the coast in Greg and Spud’s direction. Two quick flashes. A signal for the guys to join them.

Danny kept stag with his Sig while Jack loaded their gear into the boot of the brown Renault. He lay their M4s along the outside edge of the boot and covered them loosely with a grey travelling blanket that he’d found in the rear seat. Their packs fitted behind it. He shut the boot very quietly. Sounds could travel a long way over open ground.

‘Where the fuck are the others?’ Jack said.

They’d been waiting for ten minutes. Spud and Greg hadn’t arrived.

An uneasy sensation crept down Danny’s spine. ‘Give me a kite sight,’ he said. But Jack was already on it. He’d opened the boot again and was fishing a small optic out of one of the packs. Jack directed it to the west.

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Shit, shit,
shit!
’

‘What is it?’

‘They’ve got company.’

Jack handed him the kite sight. Danny focused in on the brow of the dune one kilometre away. He felt bile rising in his throat.

Greg and Spud’s outlines were clear. They were back to back, maybe five metres apart, their weapons pointing outwards. On either side of them were people. Danny performed a quick headcount. Fourteen. Were they armed? Danny couldn’t tell. If not, Spud and Greg could put them down in seconds.

And leave fourteen corpses as a calling card. Maybe the Syrian authorities would put that down as just another random massacre. Or maybe they wouldn’t, and a contact now would have troops on their tail from here to Homs. Not acceptable.

‘They’re keeping the heat off us,’ said Jack.

‘Either that or they’re holding off a contact.’

‘That little bastard Muhammad must have shopped us.’

‘We should go,’ Buckingham said. ‘Get in the car and go . . .’

Danny lowered the sight. He and Jack turned to look at Buckingham. Their expressions told him exactly what they thought of
that
suggestion. Danny strode quickly to the Renault and removed his and Jack’s M4s from the boot. He turned to Buckingham and handed him his Sig. ‘I . . . I don’t know how to . . .’ said the MI6 man.

‘Point it at the person you want to kill, and squeeze the trigger. Stay here.’

‘Can’t I come with you?’

‘Don’t take it personally, mate, but you’d just get in the way. If everything turns pear-shaped, get on the sat phone. It’s in one of the packs.
Vanguard
’s
still in the vicinity. They can help you extract.’

‘But . . . but we can’t
do
this. We need to get to Homs.’

Danny ignored him. His mind was turning over. Whoever it was up ahead, they had to be holding the guys at gunpoint. Otherwise Spud and Greg would have nailed them. No question. It was a stand-off. Their SOP was clear. Draw the fire of these newcomers so the Regiment guys could do what needed to be done.

‘What the bloody hell are you thinking of doing?’ Buckingham demanded. He was clearly panicking. ‘We should just get in the car—’

‘Stay there,’ Danny repeated. He handed Jack his weapon.

‘This goes pear-shaped, it’ll be front page of the fucking
Sun
,’ Jack said, cocking his M4 as he spoke.

Danny kept calm. ‘They don’t need much. A diversion. Stay fifty metres apart. We’ll get to within 500 metres and go to ground. Alternate bursts of fire. I’ll go first. Wait for my signal.’

Without another word, he started to run across open ground towards the sand dune.

Five hundred metres. Over the crunching of his footsteps
Danny thought he could hear voices up ahead. He stopped to
listen.

Shouting. Arabic voices, he reckoned. Whatever was happening up there, it sounded ugly. They were probably nobodies, but this wouldn’t be the first time some bolshie locals had screwed things up for a patrol. He silently cursed Spud and Greg for allowing them to creep up on them. Jack was right. Another bunch of farmers compromising an operation and the Regiment would be a laughing stock.

Danny went to ground and switched his M4 to automatic. He didn’t want to kill any of them, but his restraint was tactical, not emotional. If one of their number went down, it would only shock them into nailing his two colleagues. He aimed his rifle a couple of metres to the left of the group.

He was on the point of firing when he heard it: the low, rhythmic thudding of a chopper, approaching from inland to his six o’clock.

When Danny looked back on it, he would identify that moment of hesitation as his mistake. There was no doubt in his mind that the chopper was unfriendly. Had Muhammad shopped them? Whatever the truth, he should have fired immediately, diverted the attention of the locals and given Spud and Greg the opportunity to escape. Because two men down within minutes of insertion meant the op was a no-go. But he didn’t fire. Instead he rolled on to his back to confirm with his eyes what his ears had just told him.