Masters of War (47 page)

The torch moved down to the floor. Here were piles of excrement – while they were alive, the prisoners had clearly been forced to defecate where they hung – but there was something else too. Hunks of flesh were draped over the faeces, and encrusted with dried blood. The organs that had been ripped from the two bodies were not individually identifiable, but it was clear that they’d been left to rot where they fell. The flesh and faecal matter were likewise covered in maggots and appeared to move.

The torch hadn’t been on for more than ten seconds, but it was ten seconds Clara wished she had never experienced. Now her tormenter turned it off. Darkness returned.

‘I don’t want you to think,’ said the man, ‘that I or any of my assistants would perform such surgery on you. Not at first, at least. You’re female, after all, and Western, which is a great novelty for them. I’m not that way inclined myself, but I can’t deny them
their
entertainment.’

‘You’ve got it wrong,’ Clara pleaded. ‘I’m not a spy. I’m a—’

‘Yes, yes, a doctor. A doctor who just
happened
to be hiding with the most wanted man in Syria. I think, my dear, I shall leave you for a while to contemplate just how preposterous your story is. Please don’t worry your pretty head too much about the rats. They’re much more likely to feed on the dead than the living. By the time they get to you, you won’t be in a position to feel their sharp little teeth. In any case, there’s really no point in screaming again. I’ll come when I’m ready for you, and not before.’

The man turned and opened the door, locking it firmly behind him.

09.00 hrs.

To Danny’s left, the rising sun had streamed into the car that the boy had led him to – a light-grey Peugeot with battered bodywork and torn upholstery. It was old – the windows had manual winders – and the kid had even looked a little apologetic about the state of it. It was fine by Danny. Old models were a lot easier to hot-wire. Beneath the steering wheel, the wires spilled out like spaghetti. The engine was noisy as it turned over, but it worked.

There was not much traffic. Danny doubted he’d seen more than a hundred vehicles in the fifty-odd klicks between Homs and his current location. But about a quarter of them had been military, and each of those made him tense up. He couldn’t get to Damascus quickly
and
stealthily. If anyone stopped him, his only possible response was violence. His M4 was on the passenger seat beside him, his Sig on his lap. The first soldier to tap on his window and ask him to wind it down wouldn’t have time to regret it.

Danny couldn’t decipher the Arabic road signs. He’d studied his mapping, however. Homs to Damascus: 160 kilometres. If nobody hindered him, he’d be there by midday.

But that was too much to hope for.

Thirty klicks from the Syrian capital, he saw a roadblock fifty metres ahead: barriers across the road, and a low concrete hut on the left-hand side. Three vehicles queuing to head north, four on Danny’s side of the road heading south. Four armed guards, two at each barrier. And more inside the hut, Danny reckoned. Another two, maybe three.

One thing was certain: he couldn’t talk his way through. The soldiers would search him as soon as they realised he was a foreign national. And when they found his assault rifle, pistol and ammo, he’d have no chance.

It only left him one option.

He checked his rear-view mirror. Two vehicles behind him, the first five metres away, the second about ten behind that. Then nothing for as far back as he could see, perhaps two kilometres. Current speed: 50 kph. He slammed on the brakes and the driver behind him sounded his horn before overtaking. Then he reduced his speed until the second car was forced to overtake, leaving him at the back of the little convoy as they approached the checkpoint, now only twenty metres away.

Ten metres. Five.

All three cars came to a halt.

There was only one car on the opposite side of the road now, and as the barrier rose for it, Danny briefly considered swinging over to the other side and breaking through. If he did that, he’d have half the Syrian army on his tail. No. If he was going to force his way through this checkpoint, he needed to make sure there were no witnesses left behind. He leaned over the passenger seat and wound down the window, before propping his M4 barrel downwards, the butt resting against the door just below the glass.

The barrier in front of him rose, and the first car moved through. Danny and the next car edged forwards.

Of the two guards on Danny’s side of the road, one walked over to the driver’s window of the car in front and rapped on it with the butt of his AK-47. The second walked round to the back of the car, eyeing it suspiciously. Fifteen metres to Danny’s ten-thirty, the soldiers on the opposite side stood on the edge of the road, talking together.

The driver in front lowered his window. The guard bent down to talk to him. Forty-five seconds later the barrier opened and the car passed through.

Which left just Danny and the guards. He looked in the rear-view mirror. A vehicle was approaching about a klick back, shimmering in the heat. He’d have to work fast.

He edged forwards and stopped in front of the barrier.

The guards’ routine was the same. One of them walked to the rear of the Peugeot. The other knocked on the window with his AK. Danny raised the Sig and lowered the window.

The guard bent down. His face appeared.

Danny fired.

There was blood, of course. But the force of the round as it pierced the guard’s forehead knocked him backwards before Danny could see the full damage. He thrust the door open – its bottom edge scraped across the dead soldier – pushed the man’s body aside and climbed out. It had all happened so quickly that the second guard, just two metres away, barely had time to register what was going on. Danny nailed him with a single chest shot, and the man slumped to the ground.

He had to keep up the momentum if he was going to retain the element of surprise. Using the Peugeot to shield him, he turned and rested his gun arm on its roof, the two soldiers on the other side of the road firmly in his sights. One of them was looking around for somewhere to run, the other was raising his rifle. Danny took out the potential gunman first, sending a round from the Sig straight in his stomach. The second guy was now sprinting away from the checkpoint. Danny aimed his shot fractionally in front of the fleeing guard. By the time bullet met flesh, it was on target. The soldier hit the ground.

The oncoming vehicle – Danny could now see it was a car – was 500 metres away. He looked over to the concrete hut. Were there more targets in there? Did they know what was happening? Reholstering his Sig, he hurried round the back of the Peugeot and then along its length, grabbing his M4 from the open passenger window as he passed. He released the safety switch as he strode towards the hut.

Distance to the door: fifteen metres. It began to open inwards. Danny didn’t wait for an enemy target to show himself. He simply fired at the door itself – two short bursts that kicked up a flurry of splintered wood. Distance: ten metres. Despite the ferocity of the burst from the M4, the door was still only a few inches ajar. That told Danny something was blocking it on the other side. A corpse. Nobody was going to risk exiting from that direction now. He swerved to the left and upped his pace, dashing round to the back of the hut. Sure enough, he saw two figures emerging. Five seconds later they lay dead on the ground.

The approaching car was 250 metres from the checkpoint. Whoever was driving, Danny didn’t want him to be able to give a detailed description of himself or the Peugeot. He hit the ground and trained the rifle to a position twenty metres in front of the car. He fired a final burst and the car headed straight into the stream of rounds. Its tyres exploded and it skidded round 180 degrees before coming to a noisy halt. By that time Danny was already running back to the Peugeot. Seconds later he was pressing down on the counterweight that raised the barrier. And seconds after that, he was away.

The door of Clara’s prison opened again. In one way this was good: it allowed a small breath of less putrid air to circulate in the dark room. In another way it was bad: the short silhouette of her tormentor reappeared in the door frame.

‘Mr Buckingham,’ said the voice, ‘is a gentleman.’

A pause.

‘Yes, we know his name. He told us immediately. And yours too, Clara. Touchingly, he insists on sticking to the fiction that you and he have agreed. It won’t last, of course – self-interest always prevails over honour – but I thought it might be instructive for you to watch how we do it.’

‘He’s telling the
truth
,’ said Clara, sobbing.

The man didn’t reply. He stepped aside to allow two others, much taller and broader than him, to enter the room. Clara cried out as they crossed the room, stepping around the corpses hanging from the ceiling before dragging her out into the corridor. Through her tears she could see that these men were Syrian. As for her tormentor, she saw him only from the back. He was a dumpy little man, wearing plain chinos and a beige shirt. He opened a door on the right. Clara was forced to follow.

She found herself in a room measuring about six metres by three. In the far wall was a large window, about three metres wide and two high, that looked on to another room roughly three times as big as this one. On the wall to the right of the window was a grey box with a speaker grille and a switch. The second room was brightly lit by ceiling-mounted spotlights that stung Clara’s eyes as they had become used to constant darkness. A lean, naked man was hanging by his arms from a rope attached to a hook in the ceiling. It took perhaps thirty seconds for Clara’s eyesight to adjust and confirm what she already suspected: it was Buckingham.

Her tormentor stood inches from the window, next to the grille, his back still to her. She could just make out the reflection of his face. Jowly. Sweaty. The eyes bright with expectation.

Buckingham was shouting. Clara knew this because his mouth was moving, but she couldn’t hear his voice.

Another man entered the room beyond the glass. He was in his late thirties and had straggly, shoulder-length hair and thick-rimmed glasses. He was holding something that looked like a riding whip but consisted of several thin strips of leather about half a metre long. In his other hand he had a small, white plastic spray bottle, the sort of thing an old lady might use to water her houseplants.

The short man flicked the switch beneath the grille. Buckingham’s voice flooded into the observation room, screaming and hoarse. ‘
Let me down . . . let me down!
’ He was clearly in great pain. Another flick of the switch and his voice was silenced, though Clara could tell he was still shrieking.

And then his new companion got to work.

He was clearly well practised with the whip. He flicked lightly, and the leather strips licked against Buckingham’s flat belly and his genitals. A number of thin red welts immediately appeared where the leather had struck, vertically up his belly and on his penis, as though the leather had been doused in red paint.

‘I’ve always found this a very effective way of loosening a man’s tongue,’ the short man said quietly as Buckingham’s jaw stretched open in a silent scream.

‘I swear he’s telling you the truth,’ said Clara. ‘I am a doctor. Médecins Sans Frontières will confirm it.’

Inside the room, Buckingham’s torturer had raised the spray bottle.

‘Salt water,’ said the small man. ‘Nothing more. I’ve found that the simplest methods are often the best. I think this might be worth listening to, don’t you?’

He flicked the switch again as the torturer sprayed Buckingham’s wounds. The sound that came from the grille was almost inhuman. More like an animal in pain. Clara felt her knees buckle. She wanted to beg this dreadful man beside her to make it stop, but she found that her terror had robbed her of the power even to speak.

Her tormentor turned, and for the first time she saw his face in the light. Piggy little eyes. Flared nostrils. Moist, sensuous lips.

‘And now, my dear, I think it’s time for us to start on you. Unless you’d like to stop your fiction and start telling us the truth?’

11.37 hrs.

Damascus. The capital city and nerve centre of the Syrian administration.

Danny had been briefed that there was no British embassy here. Like most states, the Brits had abandoned Damascus. But his intel was that the Czech Embassy was still active. As an EU member it was obliged to offer assistance to other member nations. Danny had noted its location on his map before leaving the UK.

The Czech Embassy was a plain, dark-brown building, situated at the intersection of two roads in a quiet part of the Abou Roumaneh district. It was surrounded by two-metre-high green metal railings, the top quarter bent outwards to make them more difficult to scale. Each of the three floors had a balcony – these were also protected by railings – and all the windows were barred. Danny hadn’t spotted a trail in the time it had taken to get here, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one, and he had no intention of staying out in the open any longer than was necessary. Two wheels of his vehicle were on the pavement as he jumped out. He fully expected there to be an armed presence in the building. Embassy protection in a war zone was bread and butter work for any country’s special forces. Danny had done it himself, escorting the British ambassador in Kabul to
shuras
with warlords in the Afghan badlands. He let his rifle hang around his neck before entering, and walked through the main door with his hands clasped above his head.