Killing for the Company (41 page)

Fozzie followed Russ’s directions and they continued to head north-west through this run-down suburb. They were now no more than four klicks from the Karni crossing and already they could see the effects of years of Israeli bombardment of the territory. More than half the buildings they passed bore scars of some sort – perhaps just a boarded-up window or a spray of bullet marks across the façade. Plenty, though, were reduced to a shell, or even to a pile of rubble and steel. One thing was clear: these crumbling structures on the outskirts were not administrative buildings or military targets; they were apartment blocks and people’s houses. As the Land Cruiser passed one of these demolished buildings, Luke saw a small makeshift tent, constructed from bleached canvas and metal poles bound together with string. The front side of the tent, about a metre wide and two metres high, was open to the road and it had been erected to house not people, but a large photograph of a man. Garlands of flowers were strewn around the photograph, but they were withered and dried out. It was plainly a shrine of some sort, there to commemorate a life lost when the building that had stood there was destroyed.

‘Two o’clock,’ Finn said suddenly, his voice tense. ‘Someone’s got eyes on.’ Luke looked in the direction his mate was indicating.

‘Got him.’

The man Finn had pointed out was on a street corner, standing by the grubby awning of a meat shop that had the carcasses of a few animals hanging in the window. His head was wrapped in a keffiyeh, and he made no attempt to hide the AK-47 that was slung across his front. He had a mobile phone pressed to his ear and he was clearly watching the Land Cruiser as it passed. An official pair of eyes, or something else? Impossible to say. The unit passed him in silence.

A couple of hundred metres on they drove by a building site where attempts had been made to reconstruct one of the bombed-out edifices. A single storey of grey breeze-blocks was completed, but it was clear from the faded Arabic lettering graffitied over the blocks, and from the broken pallets littered around the site, that no work had been done here for many months. A thin man sat on the pavement outside it. Spread out in front of him were a few pairs of shoes and a couple of handbags. He had a rather hopeless demeanour, and behind him two kids were crouched, hugging their knees with their hands. It didn’t seem likely that this man would be selling much today. His eyes followed the Land Cruiser as it passed, just like everyone else’s.

The Regiment men’s faces were grim as they ventured deeper into the city. ‘What happens to the poor bastards who get bombed out of their homes?’ Fozzie asked out loud.

It was Stratton who answered. ‘There are a number of refugee camps dotted around the Strip,’ he said. ‘Two in Gaza City itself.’ He sounded matter-of-fact about it.

‘Nice,’ Fozzie muttered.

Stratton’s jaw was set.

‘If things go to shit today,’ Luke said quietly, ‘they might need a few more of those IDP camps.’

‘Absolutely,’ Stratton replied, a bit too quickly and with very little emotion.

‘Absolutely,’ he repeated, a little quieter this time.

‘You don’t sound very concerned?’

‘I’m
very
concerned,’ Stratton replied, still looking straight ahead. ‘I can assure you of that.’

It was a sudden thing. For a split second Luke was back in St Paul’s, listening to urgent warnings. A wild conspiracy theory that he would never have believed if it hadn’t been confirmed by the dull thud of four fatal rounds just a couple of minutes later. Now he was in Gaza City, war-torn and fucked up . . .

I’m
very
concerned. I can assure you of that.

The mist in Luke’s mind was starting to burn away.

Back in Jerusalem, Stratton had asked Maya Bloom if she wanted to be part of history. Quite what that meant, Luke couldn’t imagine. But Stratton was planning something. And whatever he was planning, one thing was suddenly clear to Luke.

This was part of it.

Don’t you see? Doesn’t
anybody
see? First the Balkans, then Iraq, now this . . .
Stratton and the woman were planning some sort of terrorist atrocity in Jerusalem on Hanukkah. Sticking close to him wasn’t enough.
Luke had to prevent him from reaching Hamas. He had to abort the mission.

Somehow.

He fingers felt for his radio as he started formulating a communication in his head.

He felt Stratton’s eyes. Somehow he knew the bastard was on to him.

They had to turn back. Luke opened his mouth to give the command.

But too late.

On Russ’s instruction, Fozzie had taken a sharp right-hand turn at a crossroad and started heading north-east up a busy commercial street. With no warning, he hit the brakes and the Land Cruiser came to a screaming halt.

‘Er, Houston,’ he said. ‘We have a problem.’

Luke leaned over and stared out of the front windscreen.

Then he looked out the rear.

Fozzie was right. They had a problem. Big time.

TWENTY-FIVE

It took Luke just a few seconds to size up the situation.

It was a busy street. The concrete buildings along either side were mostly four storeys high. One of them, fifty metres ahead, had a flagpole sticking out at an angle, with the bright green flag of Hamas hanging limply from it. Many had balconies on the upper floors, and although some of these were dilapidated and clearly not suitable for anybody to stand on, others were occupied.

At ground level there was a smattering of parked cars on either side of the road. The street was lined with shops, most with metal grilles closed over them, and the grilles themselves were covered in graffiti. Behind the Land Cruiser and to the right, twenty-five metres from their position, was a particularly run-down building. There was no glass in the windows, and the concrete façade was streaked with black marks which suggested a fire had raged through it at some point in the past.

But it was something else that told the unit things were turning to shit.

About 150 metres ahead, the road was blocked – not by vehicles this time, but by a mob of people, maybe a hundred of them. They were advancing chaotically, but even at this distance and through the bullet-resistant glass of the Land Cruiser, the voices of the crowd were audible. They were shouting some slogan – a dull, rhythmic sound, like the beating of drums – and at least twenty of them were waving rifles in the air.

Behind the vehicle the same story – a crowd had appeared from nowhere and closed off the access to the street. The mob to their rear was perhaps half the size of the one in front, but it was closer – 100 metres maybe. Luke looked left and right, searching for side streets from which they could exit the position. Nothing.

He was aware of Finn raising his weapon to his closed window. ‘Let’s not go the way of those Signallers in the Province,’ his mate said. Luke knew what he was talking about. During the Troubles two green army boys were driving round Northern Ireland when they came across a Republican funeral, heavy with IRA marshals. The Provos mistook them first for a Protestant hit team. A crowd developed round the car and some of them dragged the Signallers out and examined their ID. One of the soldiers had been stationed in Herford, Germany. The IRA misread that as Hereford and the moment they thought their captives were SAS, their fate was sealed: they were stripped naked, dragged over some wrought-iron fencing, where one of them had his calf ripped off, and then they were executed with their own pistols.

If the Signallers really had been Regiment, it might have been different. The SOP would have been quite clear – start shooting before the mob managed to drag you out of the car. Finn was preparing to do just that.

Fozzie put the Land Cruiser into reverse. He hit the accelerator and the tyres screeched as he sped backwards, moving faster and faster towards the smaller crowd.

‘What’s going on?’ Stratton demanded.

‘You tell me,’ Luke retorted. Through the rear windscreen he saw a few members of the crowd run to either side of the road as the Land Cruiser approached, but the bulk of them – about thirty men – stayed where they were, chanting and thrusting their fists in the air.

‘Hamas?’ Finn demanded.

‘They wouldn’t dare,’ spat Stratton.

Luke was still looking through the rear windscreen. ‘
Incoming!
’ he shouted. He had picked out the shooters when they were about seventy-five metres from the crowd: two men in jeans and T-shirts and carrying old AKs. The age of the weapons made no difference: they pumped several bursts of 7.62s at the Land Cruiser.

Moving instantly, Luke pushed the back of Stratton’s head violently down so that he was bending at the waist and out of view of the rear window. As he did this there was a sudden drilling sound at the back of the vehicle. Although 7.62s, especially from that range, weren’t nearly enough to penetrate the armoured Land Cruiser, they still made an ear-splitting noise as they hammered into the black metal. Several rounds had hit the rear windscreen. They had failed to shatter it, but three sudden spider webs with bullet-hole centres splintered their way across the toughened polycarbonate.

‘
Stay down!
’ Luke roared at Stratton, who was wriggling under his fierce grip like a petulant child. ‘
Fozzie, fucking get out of here . . .
’

Fozzie spun the steering wheel as the rhythmic shouting of the advancing mob grew more frenzied. He swerved the vehicle round 180 degrees so they were facing the smaller crowd, which had fired on them, then shoved the gear lever into first and revved the engine to screaming point. When he let his foot off the clutch, the 4 x 4 lurched forward violently, jolting all the passengers as it shot towards the crowd like a stone from a catapult. Fozzie accelerated, his face set. It would have been obvious to anyone who saw him that he had no intention of stopping for anything – or anyone – in his way.

He did stop, though. He had no choice.

It was Russ who noticed it first. ‘
RPG!
’ he yelled when they had gone barely thirty metres.

‘What the
fuck
?’ said Luke. This was a street mob, not an insurgency. How the hell did they get themselves a piece of kit like that? But then he too caught sight of a thin Palestinian man at the front of the smaller crowd with a rocket launcher on his shoulder. The crowd had parted behind him to avoid the back blast, and as soon as Luke clapped eyes on him the grenade left the tube.

If Fozzie had waited half a second more to yank his left hand down on the steering wheel, they’d have been mincemeat. As it was, the Land Cruiser swerved to the side of the road as the RPG thumped into the tarmac. The impact and explosion sent a shockwave right through them, and the blast caused the right-hand rear wheel of the vehicle to raise what felt like a good metre into the air. When it hit the ground again – to the accompaniment of shrapnel from the RPG showering down on the roof – there was an ominous crunching sound from the undercarriage.

Fozzie tried to reverse again, but as his foot left the clutch there was a terrible grinding noise and a smell of burning.

‘Fucking axle’s twisted!’ he shouted. He looked over his shoulder at Luke. ‘We’re not going anywhere in this piece of crap, mate.’

Luke removed his hand from the back of Stratton’s neck and recced the situation. It looked bleak. The two groups were closing in on them, the smaller one twenty metres away, the larger about fifty. There was a crater in the road where the RPG had hit, and although the shooter had disappeared along with the immediate threat of a second grenade, Luke knew it only took a couple of seconds to reload a launcher. The shouting from the approaching crowds was growing louder.

They had to make a decision. And fast.

‘Finn, you and me are going to lay down warning fire. We need to disperse these crowds. And no stiffs. We start nailing people, we’re going to be in the middle of a riot . . .’

‘We are already,’ Finn shot back. ‘A few rounds in the air won’t do fuck all . . .’

‘What the hell’s going on?’ Stratton butted in. His face was moist with sweat.

‘You,’ Luke frowned at him, ‘shut up. Warning fire, Finn. I fucking mean it.’

His mate looked uncomfortable with the order, but nodded his agreement.

‘Exit in three, two, one,
go!
’

The two men opened the rear doors of the Land Cruiser and kicked them wide with their feet. In the same movement, Luke raised his 53 so that it was aimed well above the heads of the larger crowd and fired two quick bursts. He heard Finn doing the same and the harsh, mechanical noise of the discharged rounds ripped through the air. Stratton shouted in alarm, but Luke ignored him and, semi-protected like Finn by his half-open rear passenger door, kept his weapon aimed firmly towards the mob.

At first the sound of the rounds had the desired effect. About half the crowd hit the ground, their hands covering their heads. The thought crossed Luke’s mind that these were people used to the sights and sounds of combat. Perhaps that was a good thing. Perhaps it meant they would take a burst of counter-fire seriously. From the edges of the larger crowd he saw perhaps ten people run to the side of the road and take cover in doorways or behind parked cars. There was still a hard core, though, some thirty or forty who weren’t deterred by the warning fire. Most of them were wearing black and white keffiyehs and waving their assault rifles in the air. It crossed Luke’s mind that the threat of death didn’t seem to worry some of them. He’d encountered enemy like that before, in the Stan. It was a dangerous man who wasn’t scared of dying.