Hellfire (13 page)

Another random, useless burst of fire from the militants. As a group, they moved forward a metre.

‘One . . .’

Suddenly one of the militants shouted out. Danny realised it was the leader with the red bandana. He’d seen one of the Claymores, and his eyes were following the firing wire back towards the treeline. He started screaming a frenzied instruction – whether to retreat or to fire, Danny didn’t know.

And it didn’t matter either way. They were all in the kill zone.

‘Go,’ he said, and with a sharp yank of his wrist he engaged his clacker at exactly the same time as Tony.

The sudden crack of the double explosion sent a shock through Danny’s body as he immediately covered his head with his hands to shield his skull from any stray shrapnel that might back-blast from the Claymores, and pierce the protection of the trees. His position meant he didn’t witness the immediate effect of the blast.

But he sure as hell heard it.

Two Claymores at point-blank range would have been enough to clear a football pitch. The screams that suddenly came from their direction immediately told Danny that the munitions had done their work effectively. He looked up. All nine guys were on the ground. Five were motionless, clearly already dead. One was sitting up – Danny recognised him as the leader with the red bandana. He was clutching his head as blood pissed out from behind his clenched hands. The remaining three were squirming on the ground, clutching legs and arms, inhuman wails echoing from their damaged throats.

The three Regiment men rose quickly from the undergrowth. Weapons engaged, they advanced. They burst through the treeline and covered the open ground in less than ten seconds. When he was ten metres from the guy sitting up, and with his weapon still switched to semi-automatic, Danny released a single suppressed round to the wide open target of the man’s chest. He hit the ground with a heavy slump, but Danny was already firing a shot at one of the remaining three militants, eight metres to his ten o’clock, while Tony and Ripley took out one more man apiece.

The Claymore had only detonated ten seconds ago. Already the battlefield was strewn with dead.

Danny ran to the cover of Block East, back pressed against the wall next to the right-hand corner. Tony went left and took up a similar position at the other end of the building, while Ripley went down on to one knee in the firing position, covering their backs. Carefully, Danny looked round the corner.

Of the three rectangular buildings surrounding the open area they had identified on the satellite map, Danny now had line of sight on Block North, in which he reckoned Targets Red and Blue were being held. The two guards were still there, but they looked terrified. Their backs were up against the wooden door in the centre of the building, and they were waving their rifles around like a couple of kids with sticks.

Distance to the targets: forty-five metres. Danny lined up his first shot – the nearest of the two guards – and squeezed the trigger of his assault rifle.

Target down.

The second guard fired a burst. It was poorly aimed, but Danny withdrew behind the protection of the building to avoid any stray rounds. Three seconds later he looked round again. The door to Block North was open ninety degrees. The guard was ineptly hiding behind it: Danny could see the barrel of his raised weapon peeping out from the leading edge of the door.

With his own rifle engaged, Danny stepped out from behind the protection of Block East. As he paced forward, he fired five shots directly into the solid wood door. The wood splintered harshly as the armour-piercing rounds penetrated it. The militant tumbled forward, the whole side of his body pierced by Danny’s rounds.

Danny had full line of sight on the central area now. It was deserted. Two motorbikes were lying on their side in the dirt, and there was a circle of ash in the centre where they had clearly lit a fire the night before. Apart from that, nothing and no one. Tony emerged from the other side of Block East, carefully panning the area with his weapon. Ripley appeared fifteen metres behind Danny, his weapon also engaged.

‘Ten guys down,’ Danny said into his mike. ‘We still have at least two hostiles remaining. Caitlin, what’s your status?’

‘
I’ve got eyes on the road heading north
,’ she replied through the headset.

‘Stay put. Lay down fire on any vehicle you see trying to head that way.’

‘
Roger that.
’

‘I’m heading into Block North,’ Danny told Tony and Ripley. ‘Keep me covered.’

Danny ran towards the building. The door was still half-open, the two dead and bleeding militants stopping it from opening fully or swinging shut. Danny didn’t lower his weapon as he approached. Inside the building was an unknown quantity. He needed to be fully prepared for anything.

Two metres from the open door, his senses were hit by a musty smell. There was a chilling silence. If the High Commissioner and his aide were inside, they were keeping very still. Danny found himself holding his breath as he stepped over one of the dead bodies and used the door to shield himself from the entrance.

There was a good chance of enemy shooters inside the block. Danny couldn’t present himself as a target in the doorway. Not without a distraction. He pulled a flashbang from his ops waistcoat. It would put the shits up the hostages, but they’d get over it. More importantly, it would give Danny the crucial seconds he needed to take out any enemy targets.

He switched on the Surefire torch fitted to his rifle’s rack. Then he pulled the pin on his grenade, stretched out his arm and chucked the flashbang inside.

A two-second pause, then an ear-cracking explosion split the air.

Danny swung round, his huge form filling the door frame. The light from his torch pierced the smoke that had billowed into the dark room. Danny scanned the length of it, searching for figures, his finger resting lightly on the trigger.

There were no militants. No gunmen. No threats.

But there was something at the far end of the building, to Danny’s right. A strange, shapeless mass lying on the ground. It filled him with apprehension, even though he didn’t quite know what it was.

Danny stepped towards it, the beam of his torch cutting through the gloom and the curling tendrils of smoke, lighting up this unknown object at the end of the room.

When he was ten metres away, he stopped. He had suddenly realised what he was looking at.

He was sickened by what he saw.

Eight

It was a body, and it was in two pieces.

The legs and torso were naked, apart from a pair of soiled underpants. The head was resting, on its side, on the corpse’s bare torso. The tendons of its severed neck glistened. The wooden floor around the victim oozed with fresh blood. The victim was, quite clearly, newly dead.

Danny took another five paces towards the grisly scene. He tilted his head so it was aligned with the victim’s, and shone his torch directly at it. The eyes were open, the grey hair bloody and matted. But there was no mistaking the features: Danny recognised them immediately from the photograph he’d seen of the High Commissioner back in Lagos.

‘I’ve located Target Red,’ he said into the radio. ‘He’s dead. Beheaded.’

Tony’s voice: ‘
Any sign of Target Blue?
’

‘Negative. Target Blue still missing. The op is still a go. We need to find him.’

A moment’s pause, then Tony’s voice cracked like a whip. ‘
We’ve got movement! A car engine’s just started up. Get out here!
’

Danny turned his back on the dead body and sprinted out of Block North. Tony and Ripley were already running east, past Block West towards the road. He could hear the high-pitched screeching of a car engine accelerating fast.

Tony and Ripley disappeared from view behind Block West. It took five seconds for Danny to catch up with them, by which time they were on their knees in the firing position, ten metres apart at the side of the road. The open-topped Land Rover that they’d seen from the high ground was already a hundred metres from their position, past the sandbag blockade, surrounded by a cloud of dust as it sped up the incline to the south of Chikunda, back in the direction from which the unit had arrived. Whoever was driving the vehicle knew what they were doing. Its trajectory veered slightly from left to right: an erratically moving target that was harder to fire on.

Ripley and Tony both discharged a couple of rounds in quick succession. Danny saw three of them ricochet off the Land Rover’s chassis, but none found their intended mark in the vehicle’s tyres. The Land Rover was 130 metres away now. The terrain dipped slightly, hiding the lower half of the vehicle from view.

‘We’ll never hit it!’ Danny shouted. ‘Ripley, find Caitlin. Finish your sweep of the village. Tony, follow me.’

Without waiting for a response, Danny sprinted back to the open area between the three rectangular buildings. The two discarded motorbikes were still lying there. He and Tony reached them at exactly the same time, and there was no need for them to discuss their next move.

The bikes had obviously been left in a hurry: their keys still hung from the ignition. Danny and Tony flicked their safetys on, slung their rifles across their backs then took a bike each, hauled them upwards and started the engines. In less than two seconds they were screeching back to the road, where they swerved sharply to the south, following the Land Rover.

Danny opened the throttle fully. Dust and small stones stung his face as he surged south, swerving to avoid the barricades that the Boko Haram militants had left in the road. In his side mirror he saw that Tony was just a couple of metres behind him, skilfully maintaining single file so they didn’t present a broad, easy target for any shooters. The bike shook violently as Danny negotiated the road, whose shitty state was much more of a problem now they didn’t have the good suspension and all-terrain tyres of the Range Rover.

The vegetation on either side of the road was a blur of green in Danny’s peripheral vision. He kept his eyes forward, but the Land Rover had disappeared from sight. All he could do was burn up the road as fast as he could.

As the road started to undulate, Danny almost came off the bike. But his balance was good as he flew over the dips in the terrain. The road continued at an upward incline for thirty metres. Danny flew over a sharp brow. The bike skidded as it hit the ground again. But now Danny slammed the brakes on. The bike spun ninety degrees as it came to a sharp halt, and Danny heard – but did not see – Tony doing the same thing behind him. He let the bike fall, then quickly knelt down into the firing position, every sense tuned in to the scene that had unfolded in front of him.

The road ahead was perfectly straight. At first it dipped. Then, after about fifty metres, the gradient turned sharply upwards, leading to the brow of yet another hill approximately 110 metres from their position. On the brow of the hill were two figures, one directly in front of the other. Danny zoomed in through the sight on his rifle, then described what he saw out loud for Tony’s benefit.

‘I’ve got eyes on the Chinese guy. He’s armed with a pistol, and he has his weapon aimed at the head of a guy I don’t recognise.’

By now, Tony was next to him in the firing position, also viewing the scene. ‘Target Blue?’ he asked.

‘Almost certainly.’

‘Can we drop him?’

Danny gave it a moment’s thought. There was no wind, but the Chinese guy was too well shielded by his hostage to present a big enough target at this distance. ‘Negative,’ he said.

Five seconds passed. Standoff.

‘You’re the boss,’ Tony breathed. Danny thought he detected a slightly malicious edge to his voice. ‘What the fuck do we do now?’

Two seconds later, the decision was made for them.

The retort of gunfire echoed from the brow of the hill. Two shots. Through his sight, Danny saw the momentary muzzle flashes. Target Blue hit the floor. Pure instinct kicked in. Danny realigned his weapon just a fraction, hoping to take a shot at the Chinese militant. The retort from his own rifle filled the air, but the round flew uselessly as his target dived, then rolled back over the brow of the hill.

‘Fucker shot our guy,’ Tony shouted. ‘Shoulder and leg. He’s probably still alive.’

‘Get to him!’ Danny barked.

It was obviously a tactic to delay the two soldiers, but it was a good one. They’d lost Target Red, and Danny was fucked if they were going to lose Target Blue as well. The two Regiment guys jumped back on to their motorbikes. They floored it south, across the open ground, and accelerated up the sharp incline to where the hostage was lying on the ground. Fifteen metres from the brow of the hill, Danny could hear the hostage shouting in pain, even above the manic scream of the motorbikes’ engines. They skidded to a second halt alongside him. Danny immediately let his bike fall again and knelt down beside the patient. He had scruffy, shoulder-length hair and a several days’ worth of stubble. His face was caked in dirt. He was wearing blue jeans and a dirty check shirt, and blood was seeping dramatically all down his right sleeve, and even worse over his right trouser leg. He had a wonky nose – it looked like the Boko Haram fuckers had broken it at some point.

‘We’ve lost the Chink!’ Tony shouted, but all Danny’s attention was now on the hostage.