The Kill Zone (38 page)

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Authors: Chris Ryan

BOOK: The Kill Zone
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Siobhan nodded. ‘But what about you. What about
them
?’
Jack narrowed his eyes. ‘I’ll be on the plane as quickly as I can. Just concentrate on yourself, OK?’ And with that he ran back along the road to where the Claymore clacker was resting, then he hunkered down by the detonator so that his profile was out of sight.
A sound. Engines. Up in the air. Jack couldn’t see Markus approaching, but he could hear him. The same couldn’t be said for the trucks. They were close now. Five hundred metres, maybe less. Jack and the enemy were now well within range of each other. He counted their headlamps. Five sets. Five vehicles. If each one was tooled up with a gimpy, it was a lot of firepower.
He fixed his eyes on the Claymore and the jerrycan. In the darkness, they were small enough not to be seen until the convoy was upon them. He hoped.
The sound of the trucks’ engines merged with the buzzing of the aircraft. Jack estimated that they were 300 metres away now, and 100 from the booby trap.
Fifty metres.
A dark shadow overhead. The plane’s engines were roaring and Jack could see its silhouette fifty feet above the convoy, coming in to land.
Twenty-five metres to the booby trap.
Fifteen.
Ten.
The front truck was about a metre from the Claymore when Jack activated the clacker. There was a loud clap as the mine detonated, followed immediately by a second booming noise and a flash that was the jerrycan igniting and exploding. The lead vehicle slammed to a halt, one of its front wheels raised slightly in the air. Jack could tell it was an open-top truck, and he watched with grim satisfaction as the oil he had mixed in with the fuel sprayed on to the passengers. Thick and burning, it would stick to their skin and set fire to their clothes.
The convoy stopped. Jack couldn’t hear screams above the sound of Markus’s aircraft, which was just now hitting the ground, but he could see panicked, burning figures moving around, jumping out of the lead truck and rolling on the ground to extinguish the flames. He got to his feet and sprinted back to the technical, accompanied by the whining sound of Markus decelerating down the road some seventy-five metres away. He pulled the sat phone from his pocket. ‘
Hurry up!
’ he yelled. ‘
Fucking hurry up!
’
Jack took up position behind the machine gun. With limited ammo, he needed to choose his moment carefully. The convoy, if they had any sense, would advance gingerly in case the road ahead had been mined further. They didn’t know Jack only had a single Claymore.
A hundred metres away the plane was turning. It started to trundle back in their direction.
‘
Get ready to load!
’ Jack shouted at Siobhan. He didn’t need to: she already had Caroline over her shoulder and was still standing behind the technical for protection. Up ahead, the convoy was still stalled, but that wouldn’t last for long.
The plane was practically alongside them when the first bullets landed. They came from one of the convoy, and landed five metres short of the aircraft. Jack didn’t hesitate. He fired a short burst from the machine gun that battered his ears like deafening thunder. Up ahead, he thought he saw sparks as the rounds made contact with one of the vehicles, just as he heard the sound of empty shells clattering to the ground. His instinct was to follow it up with a second burst, but his ammo was limited: he had to pace himself.
The aircraft made a tight turning circle so that it was facing back into the wind. A door swung open.
‘Go!’ Jack shouted. ‘
Go!
’
He released another burst to cover Siobhan as she ran to the plane with Caroline still over her shoulder.
This time, though, the enemy fought back.
A burst of rounds slammed into the front of the technical – the enemy hadn’t realized he’d moved the gimpy from the vehicle. Jack returned fire then looked over his shoulder. Siobhan and Caroline were in the aircraft now, and there was a high-pitched screaming from the engines – Markus was clearly revving the plane to fuck with the brakes on, ready to accelerate down the road . . .
A voice over the sat phone. Markus. ‘
Get in, Jack! If they hit the plane, we’re—
’
Jack didn’t hear the rest of the sentence. It was drowned out as he fired the final few rounds of his ammo belt towards the convoy. One of the headlamps faded, and he thought he saw the windscreen of the same vehicle shattering. No time to check whether he’d nailed anyone: he pushed himself up and sprinted towards the aircraft.
Jack jumped into the cabin. He slammed the door behind and was immediately thrown to the ground again as Markus suddenly released the brakes and the aircraft shot down the road like a stone from a catapult. He pushed himself up. There was the sound of gunfire over the noise of the engines, and through the window he could just make out the faded lines of burning diesel speeding past.
Nothing more he could do now. Just hope and pray Markus could get the bird into the air before their attackers managed to land a round anywhere on the aircraft.
A deafening roar from the engines.
The bird jolted and bumped on the makeshift runway.
And then, suddenly, everything went smooth. Weightless. The bird kept low – no more than five metres from the ground.
And then: ‘
Hold the fuck on!
’
The aircraft banked hard and to the left. The engines continued to scream as they suddenly – and steeply – gained height.
The sound of the enemy’s guns had receded. Now there was just the continuing noise of the engines, and Markus’s tense voice shouting above it.
‘
Jack, old buddy!
’ he screamed, even as he concentrated on controlling the aircraft. ‘
I always thought you were a fucking psychopath. I don’t want you to think I ain’t grateful for what you did back in Iraq, but I think we can safely say my debt to you is paid in fucking full! Agreed?
’
Yeah, Jack thought to himself, sweat pouring from his body and his heart thumping with adrenaline and exertion. Fucking agreed.
The engines were quieter now. A steady, even throb. As the plane hummed its way back towards the Kenyan border, Jack sat up front next to Markus, who concentrated intently on the instruments in front of him while Siobhan tended to Caroline in the back. Not that there was much for her to do. The professor was unconscious and needed a surgeon. Proper medical care. ‘I know a guy,’ Markus had said. ‘There’s morphine and antibiotics back at the camp. We just need to get her on the ground.’
‘How long?’ Jack asked him.
‘Two hours, minimum.’ Time was running out.
It was running out in other ways too. Khan had his device, and he had Lily. Jack thumped the side of the plane in anger and frustration. Where and when he intended to detonate his dirty bomb was anyone’s guess. Whatever happened, Jack
had
to get his hands on Khan. But he was a clever bastard. The world saw him as a peacemaker. A force for good. Like he had a bulletproof jacket of respectability. Without proof, nobody would believe what Jack and Siobhan knew about him.
The proof they had was Caroline Stenton. Jack tried to get everything he’d learned about her straight in his head. She advised Five on radiological weapons but she was in Khan’s pocket. A fundamentalist convert. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. She was complicit in the intelligence that a dirty bomb was being manufactured in Helmand and that it had been destroyed. But now the real thing had been made in Somalia.
And what about Farzad Haq? Was his ambush anything to do with this? Had Caroline been feeding him information about where and when the unit would be going in? Jack scowled. Whatever the truth, she was implicated. It felt wrong that they should be hurrying to save her life, but they needed to get crucial info out of her just as soon as she was stable enough to talk.
To be persuaded.
To be—
‘Jack.’ It was Siobhan’s voice. Tired, but something else too. He looked over his shoulder to see her gazing back at him. Her face was white.
‘What is it?’
Siobhan looked down at the professor. Her body was perfectly still and Jack knew exactly what Siobhan was going to tell him.
‘She’s dead,’ she said.
5 JULY
21
The vehicle carrying Habib Khan moved swiftly.
Khan himself sat in the back seat with the silver flight case next to it. One hand was resting lightly on the case, the other held a mobile phone to his ear. He listened to the voice at the other end.
‘They got away.’
‘All of them?’
‘All of them. They had an aircraft.’
His eyes narrowed and he hung up without another word. This news angered him, but as he turned it round in his mind he realised he should not be unduly worried. They were idiots. They had stumbled upon him in an attempt to find the girl. And as he thought about the girl, his cheek twitched. He wondered what Harker and the woman wanted with her. Not that it really mattered. He hadn’t been lying when he said she was probably dead by now. Dead or driven to madness by withdrawal symptoms from the drugs she needed to function. He thought of the things she had let him do to her for those drugs – things no Muslim woman would ever allow. And he wasn’t the only one who had taken advantage of her. There were British men who had helped Khan, men whose allegiance could not be assured on account of their faith. They had to be rewarded in other ways – some with money, others with the filthy, broken body of a drug addict who would let them do anything as long as she knew where her next hit was coming from. In Khan’s preparations for the events of the next three days, young Lily Byrne had been more useful than she would ever know . . .
He snapped his mind back to the events of two hours ago. Stenton knew very little of his plans; and he could easily put out the word that she and this Jack Harker should be eliminated as soon as they set foot back in the UK. There was really no way anybody could prevent what was going to happen.
They continued to drive westwards through the night.
When they finally stopped, Khan alighted from the truck, then gave a quiet instruction to one of his entourage to remove the case. Once outside the vehicle, it was with a certain satisfaction that he saw the aircraft waiting for him, its engines already whirring and its lights glowing in the night air.
‘Load the case, please,’ he said. His man carried out the instruction while Khan looked around. They had driven for two hours through the night to get to this airfield. His heavily armed entourage would easily have dealt with anything they might have come across before they reached this deserted, desolate spot, but Allah had been with them and they had avoided any trouble.
And now? Now it was time to leave Somalia. But there was still much to do. Still many preparations to make.
He approached the aircraft. It was a small machine, propeller-driven with just a single pilot – a former commercial pilot from the Middle East whose services and discretion could now be acquired for a price. Money, of course, was immaterial to Khan. He took his cut of O’Callaghan’s drugs funds in Belfast in order to keep the man professional, to make sure that he didn’t get sloppy, but his real finances came from elsewhere.
He climbed into the plane and took a seat next to where the flight case had been carefully strapped in. ‘I am ready,’ he told the pilot, who nodded, then knocked the plane into motion. It sped down the runway before rising effortlessly into the air.
Khan gazed out of the window, staring at the occasional lights below him. And as time passed and the sun lit up the African plains, he gazed at these too and smiled. Africa was vast. You could hide anything there.
Do
anything. Africa had always been a playground for the Arabs. The preparations that had been made here on his account had gone well. Very well.
The next phase, though, was complicated. It needed a great deal of care. Everything had to go smoothly. But Khan was confident that all would run as it should.
He looked at his watch, an inexpensive Seiko that he had bought in London. 05.30 hrs, East Africa time. In West Africa, where he was headed, it would be only 02.30. It would take them a few hours to cross the continent, however. A few hours of relative peace before his operations began again.
Habib Khan sat back in his seat and closed his eyes. Now, he decided, would be a very good time to sleep.
Salim Jamali could
not
sleep. He was too excited for that.
Since leaving London he felt as though his eyes had been opened. As though he had passed through a gateway into a magical new world. His flight from Heathrow had taken him directly to Islamabad where a young man called Mahmood of approximately his own age, and who reminded him very much of Aamir back at the mosque, had met him at the airport. Mahmood had embraced him like a brother, then taken him to a house in the heart of that beautiful and verdant city. The heat was intense, even at night-time; but the house in question offered a cool courtyard where his hosts – men of faith whose eyes shone with enthusiastic welcome – had given him water to drink and fruit to eat, and answered all his questions. No, they told him with indulgent smiles, he could not expect the training camp to be nearly so comfortable as this. They would expect him to work hard. To learn fast. But he would be among like-minded men. People willing – eager – to fight for what they believed in. Yes, they would give him weapons training, but more than that. By the end of his time in the camp he would be proficient in bomb-making and surveillance. All the skills of the successful jihadi. And when the time had come for him to sleep, they had shown him to a mattress with clean white sheets. ‘Sleep well,’ they had said. ‘Tomorrow will be a long journey.’

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