Hunter Killer (40 page)

04.10. The flames had subsided in the burning, devastated camp. Danny prepared to trek towards the Toyota. He took his spotting scope and scanned the surrounding area. As he did so, he saw movement to the north-west. Distance, about a kilometre, maybe slightly less. Headlamps approaching.

Danny re-evaluated. He knew dead bodies always attract parasites. Sometimes those parasites take human form. He re-camouflaged himself and Spud in the OP, and carefully watched this new arrival through his scope. The vehicle stopped 30 metres from the edge of the camp. Two men emerged. They wore traditional Arab robes and headdresses. One of them carried a long-barrelled rifle. From here it looked rather like an old-fashioned musket. The vehicle, so far as Danny could tell from this distance, looked in pretty poor shape – an old Land Rover, dented and rickety.

‘Bedouin,’ he breathed. Here to scavenge over the bomb site.

More options had suddenly opened out. He could nail these two newcomers and nick their vehicle. Head north over the Saudi border, a journey of about 100 kilometres. Danny gave that a moment’s thought. He had mapping of the area and could easily find their route. But he was a stranger in a hostile land. His mate was badly wounded. What if they ran out of fuel, or needed water, or medical supplies? Much better, he decided, to have some locals on the payroll.

Option two: for a price, Danny reckoned these two could be persuaded to offer a taxi service. Maybe they knew somewhere Danny could get medical help. Failing that, perhaps they could find someone with an aircraft. That way Danny could get them out of the area and stand a fighting chance of getting Spud some proper medical attention. He made a quick calculation in his head. They had $2000 each, minus the 500 Danny had given their tout. Hardly a fortune. But enough, perhaps.

Decision made.

He needed to move quickly. It was 15 minutes since the Hellfire had hit. These two were the first on the scene, but there would be others, and soon. Not to mention that two Regiment guys presumed dead in action would raise alarm bells in Hereford and Whitehall. There was a good chance of a unit being airlifted in to destroy any evidence of Danny and Spud ever having been in-country. If they found them here, alive and well, whoever had just tried to kill them would surely be tempted to give it a second shot. No. For now staying ‘dead’ was their best – their only – option.

Spud groaned. ‘I’ll be back in a minute, mucker,’ Danny said.

He emerged slowly from the OP. It was still thickly covered with sand from the explosion. He engaged his rifle, pressing the butt deep into his shoulder and aiming it at the two locals who were now treading carefully towards one of the burning tents. Distance: 60 metres. Danny was clearly unobserved. These two men seemed to have nothing on their minds except looting – though what they thought they could extract from this smouldering wreckage was anyone’s guess. They stood by the gently flapping remnants of a tent, silhouetted against the glowing ash. Even when Danny was ten metres away, his weapon trained directly on the two men, they failed to notice him.

‘
Salam
,’ Danny called.

The two men spun round instantly. The guy with the musket started to raise his weapon, but instantly lowered it again when he saw that Danny had them at gunpoint. He was an elderly guy with a grizzled beard and hard, suspicious eyes. His companion was younger, but had similar features. They looked like father and son.

‘Drop the gun,’ Danny said. And then, when it became clear that the old guy hadn’t understood him, he repeated himself slowly. ‘Drop . . . the . . . gun.’

Unsmiling, the old guy laid his weapon at his feet.

‘Bedouin?’ he asked.

The old man nodded without expression.

Good. The Bedouin were wanderers. They travelled across the desert with no respect for boundaries or borders. In the books Danny had read as a kid he had learned that they traditionally travelled on foot or by camel, but times had changed and so had the Bedouin. Some of them had cars now. Danny pointed at the Bedouin’s rickety old vehicle. ‘Medicine,’ he said. ‘My friend needs medicine.’

The Bedouin looked blankly at him.

Danny cursed under his breath, then tried again. ‘Saudi?’ he suggested. ‘You take me and my friend to Saudi?’ He risked lowering his gun, then spread out his arms to indicate an aircraft. ‘I need to find someone with a plane. You understand that? A plane?’ He removed some of the cash he had stashed away and waved a hundred-dollar bill under the old guy’s nose. That got his interest. ‘Saudi,’ he repeated.

The two Bedouin conferred for a moment. But only a moment. The older guy turned back to them, pointed at the note and then held up two fingers.

‘No way, buddy,’ Danny said. Right now, their cash was more valuable to him than his weapons. Much easier to buy their way out of the desert, than shoot their way out. ‘That’s all you get.’

The Bedouin shook his finger. ‘
Itneyn
,’ he said.
Two.

Danny swore again and removed another note. It did the trick. A smile spread across the older guy’s face to reveal a mouthful of missing teeth, hitting Danny with a blast of halitosis that almost knocked him down. ‘Saudi,’ the man said in a croaky, lizardy voice. ‘
Asdiqa.
’

It was an Arabic word Danny understood. It meant ‘friends’.

The Bedouins’ smiles had quickly disappeared when they saw Spud. Having driven their vehicle up to the OP, they watched uncertainly as Danny pulled his mate up to his feet, taking care not to dislodge the cannula sticking out of his rib cage, then put Spud’s arm round his neck and held him upright. Spud was having a moment of lucidity. ‘Don’t . . . don’t leave me,’ he whispered.

‘You’ve got to walk ten metres. Can you do it?’

It took a full minute, with Danny supporting Spud as he made micro-steps towards the vehicle. It took another two minutes to get him laid out on the back seat, lying on his side. Danny fetched their bags and weapons, shoved them into the Land Rover, then perched uncomfortably on the edge of the seat and held his mate in place.

‘Let’s go,’ he told the Bedouin.

The vehicle stank of animal shit and petrol. The back seats were hard, uncomfortable. The young guy drove. Spud lost consciousness again as they headed north. Danny’s thoughts turned to Abu Ra’id. He checked his pockets for the black data stick. It was still intact, and Danny realised he
had
to find out what was on it. Then he saw the young Bedouin man eyeing him in the rear-view mirror. He tucked the data stick back in his pocket and gave his new companion a cool look.

They travelled in silence. Danny wished he could discuss their situation with Spud. His thoughts were so half-formed. Could it
really
be the case that Abu Ra’id was in league with Hammerstone? What would any of the four members of the security services plausibly have to gain from terror hits of such grotesque magnitude in the middle of London?

London. It seemed like half a world away as Danny looked through the window of the bleak, parched, night-time desert terrain. It
was
half a world away. He found he missed its panicked, rain-hammered streets. A picture popped into his head of himself and Clara, walking down one of those streets a few nights previously.

Clara.

A sickness twisted in his gut, like he’d been punched. He swore at himself for not thinking about her earlier. Because if they – whoever they were – had tried to kill him, Clara’s life was surely in danger too. He knew how these people worked. How they
thought
. Danny hadn’t mentioned splitting up with Clara to anyone. They would automatically assume that he might have mentioned something to her – spilled the beans about the nature of his trip to Yemen, expressed some kind of suspicion.

And these were suspicions that somebody, somewhere
really
didn’t want to be common knowledge. They would go to any ends to keep them quiet.

As the Land Rover trundled over the bumpy desert ground, he realised he had to do the one thing you must
never
do when you’re trying to stay off the grid: make contact with someone.

And he realised something else. He
had
to get back to the UK. Quickly. There was no way Spud would be able to make that journey. At some point, no matter how badly Spud begged him not to go, Danny would have to leave him.

‘How far to the Saudi border?’ Spud directed his question at the old Bedouin man. But he just gave one of his toothless grins, nodded foolishly and repeated the word ‘Saudi’.

The unease in Danny’s gut doubled. He hoped to God this old boy knew where he was going.

05.45hrs AST

Sunrise.

The desert seemed to glow in orange and pink. There was a settlement of some kind about 500 metres up ahead. The Bedouin were clearly heading for it.

‘Hold it right there,’ Danny said. And when the younger man driving failed to take his foot off the gas, he raised his handgun. ‘Stop!’

The vehicle came to a sudden halt. Danny pointed through the windscreen. ‘Where are we going?’

The Bedouin man grinned. ‘
Asdiqa
,’ he said.
Friends.

Danny looked down at Spud. His breathing was a little more regular, though his face was still creased with pain. Danny stepped out of the car and scanned the area ahead through his scope. The buildings were low, single-storey, and made of mud-baked walls. He counted six of them, though there could have been more hidden from his view. There were also three tents made of a dark, brown canvas. Two meagre camels were tied to a post, and in the centre of the settlement was what appeared to be a well. A bent old woman in black robes was pumping water from it into a plastic container.

He got back in the car and nodded at Spud to indicate that he thought it looked okay. The driver set off again. Danny noticed that the old boy kept glancing at him in the rear-view mirror with his stony eyes. ‘
Asdiqa
,’ he repeated, quite unnecessarily.
Friends.

‘I get the message, pal,’ Danny muttered. He wasn’t at all convinced by his claims of friendship – not least because he’d paid this fucker two hundred bucks to get them to an airfield, and this was a piece-of-shit village in the middle of nowhere.

By the time they reached the settlement, more people had emerged from the nearest building: three men, who stood in a line, staring at the new arrivals with undisguised suspicion. Danny examined each one. They didn’t appear to be armed. True, they could have concealed weapons beneath their robes, but there were no bulges or awkward stances. He looked around. Featureless desert terrain as far as he could see. Open ground that made exit strategies limited. The Land Rover came to a halt ten metres from where the three men were standing.

Danny climbed out of the vehicle again. The sight of this armed SAS man – his boots visible under his robes, NV goggles still on his forehead and a bag slung over his shoulders – had a marked effect on the men. Their stony faces suddenly changed to expressions of alarm, even anger. They started shouting questions in Arabic at Danny and Spud’s companions. Danny held back as the old Bedouin man walked towards the trio, arms held up in a calming gesture. He started talking quickly while Danny remained by the Land Rover, clutching his rifle.

A couple of minutes of animated conversation followed. Danny became aware of more people emerging from the various buildings of this settlement – women and children mostly, clearly curious about these unexpected arrivals. They hung back in the heart of the settlement, watching quietly.

The old Bedouin man turned and walked back towards them. He was accompanied by one of the three men, an unsavoury-looking guy with one eye that pointed off in the wrong direction. He pointed to himself. ‘Yasser,’ he said by way of introduction.

Danny nodded, but didn’t offer his own name.

‘American?’ asked Yasser.

‘Yes,’ Danny replied. ‘American.’

‘I know man with airplane,’ Yasser said. ‘Three hours from here. We go tonight.’

‘Not tonight,’ Danny said. ‘Now.’

Yasser grinned at this hilarious suggestion. ‘Not now,’ he said, waving his index finger. ‘Too dangerous. Tonight. You pay me.’

‘I already paid him.’ Danny pointed at the old Bedouin guy.

Yasser gave an apologetic tilt of his head. But he clearly wasn’t going to yield.

‘How much?’

Yasser’s eyes narrowed. He pointed at the NV goggles that Danny still had resting on his head. ‘You give me those,’ he said.

Danny gave that a moment’s thought. Truth was that their gear was worth less to them than their money. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But not till we get there. And any funny business . . .’ He held up his rifle meaningfully.

Yasser smiled again and his wonky eye seemed to roll. ‘No funny business,’ he said, chuckling. ‘No funny business . . .’

12.00hrs AST

They had offered Danny and Spud an outbuilding by way of shelter from the sun while they waited for nightfall. But there was no way Danny was going to enclose themselves among these people they hardly knew and trusted even less. Instead, he laid Spud down in the scant shade of the Land Rover, his weapon close at hand, accepting water in a wooden bowl on an hourly basis from the old woman they’d seen drawing it from the well, and doing what he could to get some down Spud’s neck. The brutal midday heat drew the liquid out of their bodies as fast as they replenished it, but at least here they had a full view of the settlement, and of any threats that might emerge. The old woman had looked at Spud with a critically maternal eye. Minutes later she had brought him a wet cloth to place across his forehead. It wouldn’t make any difference, of course, but Danny gave her a nod of thanks. And Spud stayed remarkably stable, given his circumstances.