Hunter Killer (39 page)

More thoughts spun through Danny’s head as he hunkered down again. If Hammerstone was running Abu Ra’id, if it was an
official
thing, would it
matter
if Danny and Spud knew about it? They were buttoned up with the Official Secrets Act anyway. But if it was only one of them, maybe two, and they were keeping their little game secret from the others . . .

He left the thought hanging, as a sinister, rattling sound came from Spud’s chest. He peered out again.

The drone had gone, and he knew none of the militants could have survived that hit. Danny’s focus now was his friend. He pushed away the thermal sheeting and the hessian cover, then gently rolled Spud on to his side so he could see his back. His clothes were wet with blood. Danny took his knife and sliced the clothes open to get access to the entry wound. But as one half of his brain concentrated on Spud, the other was working away in the backround.

If one of the Hammerstone group was cosy with Abu Ra’id, they might have been behind the London bombings . . .

Concentrate
. Danny knew it had been an AK-47 that had hit Spud. That meant that the entry wound the size of his fingernail had come from a .762 short. The bleeding wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but there was a more serious issue. The position of the entry wound in the lower back and Spud’s struggled gasping suggested that the round had become lodged in his left lung. And it sounded like the lung was collapsing.

‘Agony . . .’ Spud managed to say. Then, more quietly, ‘Morphine . . .’

‘No can do, mate.’ Morphine was a respiratory depressant. It would slow Spud’s breathing down, which was the last thing he needed.

Danny rummaged in his bag for his med pack. He needed to keep his focus on Spud, but he coudn’t help the faces of the four Hammerstone spooks appearing in his mind. The clearest of all of them, with his absurdly handsome features and cold, calculating stare, was the man Danny hated more than anyone else in the world: Buckingham.

If one of them was worried we might learn they were involved in the bombing, no wonder they want us dead.

First things first. Stop the air escaping from the lung.

He removed a waterproof adhesive patch and stuck it carefully over the entry wound. Spud’s body jolted when the patch made contact, but he didn’t shout out. Danny knew he was barely conscious. And if he didn’t stop the lung collapsing, his mate only had minutes to live.

But it was going to hurt.

There were two cannulas in his med pack. Hollow, wide-bore needles, four or five inches long, with a soft plastic casing and a valve at one end. Danny took one of the cannulas, then rolled Spud on to his back and ripped open his clothes to gain access to his rib cage. Spud’s thorax was rising and falling in short, sharp bursts as he tried to breathe. But with only one working lung, he was struggling badly. Danny’s fingers traced the left-hand side of his rib cage. The lower rib felt broken, but it was the gap between the ribs that Danny was interested in. He held the point of the cannula against the ridge between the two lower ribs.

‘Sorry, buddy,’ he breathed. ‘This will be bad.’

With a single, firm movement, he pushed.

The needle slid easily through the skin and into the centre of Spud’s left lung. Spud’s back arched slightly and his limbs shook with the sudden pain. No shouts, though. Spud just didn’t have the breath for it. Danny felt sweat dripping into his eyes. He wiped it away, then turned his attention back to the cannula. Slowly, carefully, he eased the needle out of Spud’s abdomen, leaving only a couple of inches of the plastic coating sticking out of the body.

Spud’s face was pale and screwed-up with agony, but his breathing eased slightly, which told Danny he had stopped the bad lung from collapsing completely. But there was still a .762 in there, and the lung cavity could fill with blood any moment. This was a serious wound. It needed proper medical care. But there was no one around to give it. Except Danny.

Danny realised his hands were covered with Spud’s blood. He looked over towards the smoking wreckage of the training camp, then back down at his injured mate. He tried to assess his options. Spud was in a shit state. He needed a medic. But Danny couldn’t call for one because their radios would have been destroyed in the drone strike.

The drone strike. Even if they
could
call in their position, it would simply invite another attack. Because someone had just used the GPS signal beaming from their radios as a marker for a Hellfire missile. Someone had just tried to kill Danny and Spud after they’d confirmed Abu Ra’id was dead. Then a drone had hovered over the impact site to make sure nobody was escaping. But Danny and Spud had managed to hide from the drone. Which meant that whoever had just tried to kill them most likely thought that they’d succeeded.

Danny looked at his blood-soaked hands again. For someone supposedly dead in the hostile wilds of the Yemeni desert, he at least was very much alive.

Unlike Spud. Danny felt his blood temperature rising. Thanks to Hammerstone, they were stuck in the middle of nowhere, and his mate was on the brink.

Nineteen

MI5 Headquarters. 22.00hrs GMT

There were five of them in the room.

Tessa Gorman, Home Secretary, looked at each of the other four in turn. With the exception of Hugo Buckingham, who was as well presented as always, they looked tired. Victoria Atkinson had dark bags under her eyes and, unless Gorman was mistaken, dried milk on the lapel of her tweed jacket. Piers Chamberlain’s usually immaculate comb-over was ruffled. Harrison Maddox wasn’t even wearing a suit, but had arrived in a plum-coloured jumper with leather elbow pads, almost as though he was making a point about the lateness of the hour.

‘Well?’ Gorman asked briskly. ‘Let’s hear it.’

Atkinson cleared her throat. ‘Abu Ra’id is dead, Home Secretary,’ she said.

Silence. Gorman closed her eyes and inhaled slowly.

‘You’re sure?’

‘Quite sure.’

‘Where?’ she asked.

‘Yemen, Home Secretary. Two operatives from 22SAS were in-country.’

‘You’ve had confirmation from them?’

Atkinson nodded. ‘Yes, but they unfortunately didn’t make it out alive. Abu Ra’id was hiding in an Al-Shabaab training camp. The Yemeni administration clearly got wind of it at the same time as us. They launched a drone strike while our people were on the ground.’

The Home Secretary looked at Harrison Maddox. ‘Your people should never have sold them those things.’

‘Impossible to predict an event like this, Home Secretary,’ Maddox said.

‘We can keep those details from the press, of course, depending on how you want to present it,’ Atkinson said.

Keep it from the press? And let Yemen take the credit? Out of the question. She was sick of opening up the newspapers and reading a barrage of criticism regarding
her
failure to extradite this hate-spouting cleric. If she could intimate that the British government was involved, it could be worth another term in office, and all thanks to her. You never know, she might even get a crack at the Exchequer. ‘I think the public deserves to know when a soldier dies defending our liberty,’ she said.

‘Can’t mention 22, of course,’ Chamberlain said. ‘We can name-check their parent regiments. That’s the way we do things.’

Gorman was barely listening. She felt as though a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. ‘This is excellent news,’ she said. ‘
Excellent
news. There’s no doubt that he was behind the bombings?’

‘None at all, Home Secretary,’ Buckingham said.

‘So I can tell the PM that we have our man?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Good.
Good.
’ She looked around the room. ‘There’ll be honours for this, ladies and gentelemen. I’ll see to it myself.’ She stood up and headed briskly for the door. But before exiting, she stopped and turned. She picked out Hugo Buckingham. ‘These two soldiers,’ she said. ‘Friends of yours, weren’t they?’

Buckingham bowed his head slightly. ‘In a manner of speaking, Home Secretary,’ he said.

‘I’m very sorry for your loss.’

‘Thank you, Home Secretary,’ said Buckingham. ‘They were good men. I know they’d appreciate the sentiment.’

Gorman nodded. Then she turned and left the room. It had been a hell of a couple of weeks, but things were looking up and she couldn’t wait to get on the phone to the PM and tell him the good news.

00.00hrs GMT

Clara was woken by the wind. It howled bitterly as the rain thudded against her bedroom window. She sat up quickly in the darkness, sweating.

It was a relief to be awake. Her dreams had been troubled. She had seen herself by the bedside of dying children, both here and in a faraway country. She had seen Danny too, his face dirty and his clothes torn. She couldn’t shake the feeling that he was in some kind of trouble.

She felt for the glass of water by her bed. But before her fingers touched the glass, there was a noise. A single bang. It sounded like a door slamming shut.

She froze, clutching the bedclothes. Her eyes turned towards her bedroom door. Had the sound come from her own flat? The thought made the fine hairs on her arm stand up.

It’s just the wind, she told herself. Nothing more. She reached for her water again and took a sip.

The second bang came as she was settling down on her pillow. She clenched her eyes shut and didn’t move, dread creeping through her limbs. But then the wind howled again. That’s all it was, she reminded herself. The wind.

She forced herself out of bed. She was naked, so she groped in the darkness for the dressing gown on the back of her bedroom door. The cord was missing – she’d used it to hold up her hair while she was having a bath – so she held the front of the dressing gown together with one hand while she crept out of the bedroom to check the rest of her flat.

It was the kitchen door that had been banging, she soon realised. She’d left the kitchen window open after burning the toast she’d grabbed for supper. As she shut the window, she saw her hand was shaking slightly with relief. She poured some milk into a cup and warmed it in the microwave. Then she moved into the front room, cup in one hand, hem of her dressing gown in the other.

She hadn’t closed the curtains before going to bed. Rain was lashing against the window. She stepped up to it, her eyes fixed on the blurred glare of the yellow street lamp on the other side of the road. Her breath misted the window as she looked out, barely able to see across the road for the rain sluicing down the window pane.

She blinked.

At first she thought her eyes were deceiving her. Visibility was poor, and after all, who would be standing out in
this
weather? But as she stepped to the left, away from the misted area, she saw it clearly: a figure, standing in the rain under the street lamp. He – or she – had on a heavy coat with a hood. Rain dripped from the front of the hood, and the figure’s features were hidden. But he was looking towards Clara’s house. Motionless. Untroubled by the elements.

For ten seconds, neither Clara nor the watcher moved. Then Clara stepped backwards. She was barely able to control her limbs. The dread had seeped back into them and she found herself short of breath.

She put her milk down on a coffee table, then hurried back into her bedroom. Under the bedclothes, she considered calling the police, but quickly rejected that idea. They’d tell her she was over-reacting. That the person she had seen had every right to be where he was.
Don’t be so stupid
,
she told herself
. You’re over-reacting. Look again and he’ll have moved on. He wasn’t watching you. Of
course
he wasn’t.

Why would he be watching you?

04.00hrs AST

A tight knot of panic hung in Danny’s stomach. Spud was flitting in and out of consciousness. Right now, his eyes were rolling. His breathing sounded a little better, but it was impossible to tell what was going on inside his lung cavity. Danny kept him in the recovery position while he desperately tried to work out his next move.

Moving Spud was almost impossible. A tab across desert terrain on hard rations and scant water was tough enough for an able-bodied soldier. For Spud it was out of the question.

But they
had
to move. Whoever had sent that drone in thought they were dead. If they found out otherwise, they’d want to finish the job off, and it wouldn’t take long to locate them, especially with Spud in this state. And the chances of them surviving another hit were zero.

He’d considered going to see if one of the technicals from the training camp was still operational. But a single glance at the burning, twisted hunks of metal dotted around the camp told him that was a no-go, and any fuel down there would have burned up in the strike, no question.

Maybe he should leave Spud. His chances of survival were slim, in any case. But Danny quickly rejected that idea. You stuck by your mates. No matter what.

His mind turned to the abandoned Toyota. It was almost out of juice, but at least he could use it to get them away from the blast site before working out his next move. He didn’t like the idea. Firstly it would mean leaving Spud alone while he went to fetch it. Secondly, if the Toyota wasn’t found in the vicinity, it might suggest to someone that they’d escaped. But it seemed like his only choice.