Masters of War (25 page)

The other two soldiers were in a similar condition, but their killers stepped over them as if they weren’t even there. Two of them pulled knives and cut the plasticuffs that bound the male prisoners’ hands. A third went to help the two women – the ones Clara assumed had been raped – to their feet. It was the man in the balaclava who turned to Clara. He inclined his head, obviously mystified to see a Western woman here. He spoke harshly to her in Arabic.

‘Do you speak any English?’ Clara whispered.

A pause.

‘Who are you?’ the man said, his voice muffled through the balaclava.

‘Oh, thank God. I’m just a doctor . . . they wanted to take me to Damascus . . . I need to get back to the Médecins Sans Frontières camp . . .
Please
can you help me?’

The man hesitated. Clara was aware of her fellow prisoners being hustled out of the room to freedom. But nobody had cut her plasticuffs yet, and the man with the balaclava didn’t appear in any hurry to do it. He bent down, grabbed her by the top of her arm and pulled her to her feet. One of his feet slapped in the pool of blood oozing from one of the murdered men as he dragged Clara towards the door.

‘Where are we going?’ she demanded. ‘Where are you taking me?’

‘To see Sorgen,’ said the man. ‘He can decide what to do with you.’

18.45 hrs.

A milky moon was rising in the west. They only had another half-hour of daylight. Even though they needed to stay put, Danny would feel safer when it got dark.

Buckingham was dozing fitfully, and Danny could feel him jolt each time he woke up. He decided to talk to him, just to keep his eyes open.

‘You got family back home?’ he asked.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Just making conversation, pal.’

‘Right, I see. Actually, no. Only child, you know. Parents gone on. You?’

‘My dad’s still around,’ Danny said. ‘Not my mum.’

‘Ah, yes. I remember from your file. Tragic.’

Danny didn’t reply.

‘Must have been very hard for your brother,’ Buckingham added, ‘to see your mother shot like that.’

A pause.

‘What are you talking about?’ Danny growled.

There was an awkward silence.

‘My mum died in childbirth,’ said Danny. ‘My dad was shot in Northern Ireland.’

‘Of course. My mistake. I must have misremembered.’

‘Damn right you must have done.’

But Danny was not convinced. He twisted round to face Buckingham. The man looked alarmed, as though he was desperately trying to think of a way out of this conversation. ‘What else did my file say?’ Danny asked, his voice deceptively level.

But almost as soon as he’d spoken, he held up one hand to stop Buckingham answering.

‘You hear that?’ he whispered.

Buckingham shook his head. ‘No. Hear what? I can’t hear anything.’

‘Exactly. No cars.’

It was true. The sound of vehicles overhead, which had been constant since early morning, had stopped.

‘Maybe it’s just because it’s getting dark . . .’

Danny shook his head, then jabbed one finger towards the other end of the culvert, indicating that Buckingham should keep stag on it. He twisted back to face his end, pushing himself prone into the firing position, M4 at the ready, and surveying the opening through the scope on his rifle. The terrain outside came into sharp focus, the atmosphere wavering in the heat. Danny noticed himself holding his breath as his forefinger lay lightly on the trigger of his M4.

Suddenly his field of view was filled with a pair of boots. He moved his eye away from the lens. A man was standing no more than five metres from the end of the culvert – eight metres in all from Danny’s position. Above a boot, he could see about a foot of trouser leg. Military khaki. The tip of a rifle barrel came into view for about a second, then disappeared.

A voice shouted something in the distance. It sounded like it came from the road above, but not close – thirty or forty metres. The man near the culvert called back in Arabic. He sounded bored. He muttered something and shuffled his feet.

Walk away quietly, pal – that’ll be best for both of us,
was Danny’s first thought. His forefinger remained in firm contact with the trigger.

But the soldier was walking the five metres towards the culvert. He stopped just by it and there was a gushing sound. It lasted for a good thirty seconds, not including the ten seconds he took to shake himself off and fasten his zip.

Then he bent down.

The soldier had a round face and fat lips. He peered into the culvert, squinting slightly. Then he crouched, spat on the ground and lit a cigarette. The smell of the tobacco drifted into the pipe, but he was clearly an enthusiastic smoker and he finished the cigarette in three drags, before peering into the culvert again.

His eyes narrowed. Had he seen something?

The soldier stood. When his face reappeared a couple of seconds later, he had a torch, which he shone along the length of the pipe.

His eyes narrowed once more.

He crouched lower and wormed his way into the culvert.

The guy was an amateur. He didn’t even have his personal weapon engaged as he crawled two metres inside the pipe. Had he even thought what might happen to him if he actually found what he was looking for?

Slowly, Danny loosened his grip on the M4. Firing it to take out this particular target would immediately alert the other guy, and any others in the area, to their location. If the enemy was effectively unarmed, however, there was no need to discharge a round. Not when he had a silent weapon: his hands.

The soldier stopped a metre from the foliage.

He held the torch a little higher. Directly at Danny’s face. Five seconds passed before the intruder realised what he was looking at. His eyes widened. He dropped the torch and started scrambling for his weapon.

Danny thrust himself forwards, bursting through the camouflage like it wasn’t there, ignoring the thorns on the branches that scraped his skin. He swiped one big hand on to the back of the soldier’s head, grinding his face hard into the curved bottom of the culvert. There was a crack as the nose shattered, and a muffled grunt from the intruder. Already Danny had scrambled on to his back. He twisted himself around so that he was facing in the same direction as his prone victim, then he gripped his throat and squeezed with a brutal, relentless strength. As he strangled the soldier, he shifted his body weight on to the man’s upper back, expelling any remnants of oxygen from his lungs and compressing his chest so he was unable to inhale even the slightest breath of air.

It was quick. The man’s legs flailed, but only weakly, kicking the bottom of the culvert with a dull thud. Danny maintained his stranglehold for thirty seconds after the kicking had stopped – he didn’t want the corpse doing a Lazarus on him – then gently rested the limp head on the concrete.

The struggle hadn’t lasted more than a minute. Buckingham gaped at the sudden burst of brutality and its fatal aftermath. But Danny had already eased himself off the dead man. Picking up the M4, he said, ‘We have to leave.’

‘What? I thought they were meeting us here.’

‘Change of plan. This fella’s cronies are going to come looking for him. I don’t reckon they’re more than about forty metres away. They’ll be swarming round this place like flies before you know it.’

‘But if we leave, they’ll see us.’

‘We’ll have to risk it. I can’t defend this position against more than one person, two at the most.’

‘What if—?’

‘Quiet!’ Danny had stopped to listen. He could faintly hear a helicopter again. Somewhere off to the north – impossible to tell how far from this underground location, but close enough if they knew what they were looking for. They needed to leave by the south end of the culvert, which meant climbing over the body. Danny scrambled over the still-warm corpse on all fours – he felt the kneecap dislocate as he pressed his palm against it – then hissed at Buckingham to follow.

They emerged into a dwindling twilight. There were not yet any stars in the darkening sky, but the moon was rising. Danny took five seconds to check their situation. From the roadside the ground ran downhill, forming a steep bank about two metres high. If they kept to the line of the road, they could follow the bank without being skylined. Climb too high and they would present a silhouette; wander too far into open ground to the south and they’d be visible from the road.

‘You still got the Sig?’ Danny asked.

Buckingham held it up.

‘Good. Keep down. I’m going to recce.’

Keeping his head low and moving as silently as possible, Danny crawled up the bank until he was level with the road and he was quickly able to evaluate the situation. All the activity was off to the west in the direction of the coast: a roadblock, fifty metres from the culvert, with four civilian cars waiting to pass. A chopper with a searchlight was circling about 500 metres north of the road – an indication that whoever was searching for them had swallowed their false trail.

To the east, nothing except the single-storey house and outbuildings he’d already seen about a kilometre up the road, which he’d dismissed as an LUP before deciding on the culvert. A couple of cars heading in their direction, and the twinkling lights of settlements in the hills up ahead. They were beyond the enemy troops’ cordon. But as soon as someone found the body in the culvert, that advantage would be lost.

Danny turned his attention back to the house. The situation had changed. They needed somewhere nearby to wait for the PMCs. The house was out of the current search area, it gave a view on to the road and it was defensible. He decided quickly. Sliding back down the bank, he didn’t waste time explaining his thinking to Buckingham. He just jabbed one finger in an easterly direction. ‘Make for the house. Keep low, don’t stop running. I’ll be ten metres behind you at all times.’

‘I thought you said the house was—’

‘
Go!
’

The difficult thing was moving slowly enough to keep a safe distance from Buckingham. In the end, Danny resorted to allowing him to move ahead by twenty metres while he checked the ground behind them for threats through the sights on his M4, before catching up, stopping and checking again. Moving like this, it took some ten minutes to come within fifty metres of the house. Danny caught up with Buckingham and hissed at him to stop. They went to ground, and while Buckingham regained his breath, Danny withdrew his night-sight and examined the location. Single-storey. Flat roof. Two outbuildings, both tumbledown. The building looked old – as though it had been there before the highway was constructed – but it was definitely occupied. Light shone from a window on the facing side, and a motorbike was propped up against a wooden barn about twenty metres from the house.

It was fully dark. Danny judged that they could risk a sprint across open ground to the barn. They reached it in thirty seconds, by which time Buckingham was completely out of breath again. The barn had an open front and a quick look inside told Danny it was empty apart from a few old tools shrouded in cobwebs. ‘Wait in here,’ he said.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I need to keep an eye on the road.’

‘What if someone comes?’

‘I’ll be keeping an eye on you too.’ Danny pointed to a dark corner. ‘Crouch down there. Don’t move and don’t put the gun down.’

‘I don’t bloody like it.’

‘You don’t bloody have to.’

Danny left the barn. Crouching low, he ran twenty-five metres west before going to ground. From here he had a clear view of the entrance of the barn, but also of the road. If the PMCs approached the culvert, he’d have eyes on. If the owner of the house, which appeared to be occupied, looked like he might discover Buckingham, Danny could be there in seconds.

He hugged the ground, covered by a blanket of darkness, and kept watch.

Fifteen minutes passed.

Half an hour.

To the west, a glow in the night sky told him that the search was still on. Every thirty seconds he checked the area around the culvert. So far nobody had approached it.

Maybe their luck would hold.

It didn’t.

The vehicles came in convoy from the east: two standard military trucks, not unlike the technical Danny had encountered in Libya, only the rears were covered with tied-down webbing rather than displaying .50-cals. Danny estimated that they were travelling at a steady 50 kph. For a tense moment he thought they were slowing down as they passed the house and its outbuildings – which put them just fifty metres away – but they carried on in the direction of the roadblock, clearly reinforcement troops on the way to either relieve or bolster those already in situ. A hundred metres from the roadblock and fifty from the culvert, they slowed down.

They stopped almost exactly above the pipe containing the dead soldier.

Danny remained absolutely still, barely breathing, his night-sight magnifying the two trucks.

Doors opened. Men emerged. Eight in total. No, nine – a final figure appeared between the two trucks. He was bearded and dark-skinned. He wore the standard camouflage gear of the Syrian military. Assault rifle slung across his chest.