Hunter Killer (36 page)

Time check: 23.25hrs. They had been going along this stony road for more than an hour. The diesel tank was half full. Danny concentrated on remembering Ahmed’s instructions:
There is a track that heads north by a grove of acacia trees. Follow that track into the valley. That is where you will find them.
So far, there had been fuck-all. Just flat, featureless terrain.

‘Up there,’ Spud said suddenly.

Danny stopped the vehicle and looked. Sure enough, about 100 metres up ahead, there was a break in the featureless expanse. A collection of low trees. They moved forward again, and as they grew closer Danny saw the trees in more detail: gnarled and squat. They drew up alongside this acacia grove, and stopped again. Just beyond the grove, a smaller track bore off to the left. Danny climbed out of the car and removed his compass from his ops vest. He stepped ten metres from the vehicle so the metal wouldn’t compromise the compass reading, then took a bearing. Sure enough, this smaller road headed north. Just like Ahmed had said.

They moved even more slowly now: a steady, quiet ten mph. The terrain changed. It was no longer as flat as it had been since they left the mountain. It undulated, and Danny realised that they were heading downhill again, with terrain sloping up on either side. They continued like this for another half hour before it became quite clear that they were heading down into a valley.

‘Stop,’ Spud said.

Danny braked. He had seen it too. An orange glow low in the night sky, seen through a V shape in the terrain to their left. A distant fire. He pulled off to the side of the road and killed the engine. The two men emerged from the vehicle. They didn’t need to speak. They both understood that now was the time to approach on foot.

It took them five minutes to prepare themselves: to repack their bags and check over their weapons. There was no cover for the vehicle – it would have to stay where it was, ready for them to pick up when the time came to extract. If all went well, they would put some miles between themselves and the camp, find somewhere to lie up, and call for a pick-up. For now, they kept their NV goggles on their heads, slung their bags over their shoulders and started to hike, following the road but keeping 20 metres to its left-hand side so they could easily go to ground if another vehicle came their way.

The terrain was empty. The air silent. The only sound was the light crunch of their footsteps on the dry ground. They continued in single file, Spud first, Danny second, spaced ten metres apart to avoid presenting a bunched-up target to any unseen threat. The valley shape became increasingly pronounced, though after 15 minutes’ walking the road started to incline upwards. They followed it to the brow for 200 metres. Before he reached it, Spud got down on all fours and crawled the final 10 metres. Danny did the same, because to present oneself on the brow of a hill was a surefire way to reveal yourself. When he was alongside Spud, they peered over the brow to the terrain beyond.

‘Bingo,’ Spud breathed.

Yeah, Danny thought. Bingo.

They were looking at the training camp. There was very little doubt about that.

Danny had been expecting something ragged and temporary. Amateurish. What he saw came as something of a surprise. It was nestled about 100 metres to the left of the track, and perhaps half a click from their current position. It comprised perhaps a hundred tents, spaced out in a neat square, ten columns of ten, with a walkway of five or six metres between the columns. Regimented. Orderly. In the centre of the camp was a large fire and Danny could just make out the silhouettes of people milling around it, though from this distance it was hard to say how many, and of course impossible to see their faces.

He counted eight technicals dotted around the camp. One of them was circling it, its headlamps beaming brightly. Danny could make out the outlines of top-mounted weapons on the vehicles, and instinctively knew from their shape that these were .50-cal machine guns. There wasn’t much in the way of a ground assault that hardware like that couldn’t defend the camp from. On the far side, a stretch of very flat ground – ideal, he realised, for markmanship and demolitions practice. But there were no such things going on at this time of night. Everything was quiet and, aside from those few people around the fire, everything was still. On the south side of the camp, which was the edge closest to them, a herd of goats seemed to be tethered to a post.

‘Fucker could be in any one of those tents,’ Spud whispered. ‘Don’t know why they won’t just send in a drone and bomb the whole lot.’

But Danny understood why: because wiping out the training camp like that would give the Firm no assurance that Abu Ra’id was dead. And they
really
wanted him dead.

‘We need to lie up,’ Danny said. ‘Get a visual on Abu Ra’id when it’s light. See which tent is his.’

‘That could take days.’

‘Got anything better to do?’

Spud gave him a sour look, then scanned the surrounding area. ‘Over there,’ he said, pointing to the terrain on the western edge of the camp. Here the ground sloped up sharply from the plateau of the camp. It was dotted with the occasional tree and small collections of boulders. The incline lasted about 100 metres, before flattening out slightly at the top. They could dig themselves in up there and have a good view of the camp. Whether they’d be near enough to get a positive visual ID on Abu Ra’id was a different question, but it was about as close as they could safely get and remain covert.

‘Let’s do it,’ Danny said.

The truck circling the perimeter of the camp was facing away from them as they crawled over the brow of the hill. They descended another ten metres so that when they stood up they wouldn’t be visible against the skyline. When the truck turned in their direction the guys went to ground, lying perfectly still on the stony incline. The headlamp beams didn’t hit them directly – there was just a slight lessening of the darkness – but they knew that as long as they stayed motionless, they’d remain unobserved. When the circling truck turned again, they skirted along the incline that surrounded the camp until they reached their position. From this angle, they could see that there was a second pathway bisecting the camp at right angles to the first. It meant they had a decent view of all the open spaces of the camp from here.

They selected a space to the side of three boulders well out of range of the pick-up’s headlamps. It gave them something to crouch behind while they prepared to dig in. Spud removed his trenching tool from his pack and started hacking at the hard, stony desert floor. In 15 minutes he had sweat dripping from his face, and had dug out a hole a couple of metres long, 30 cm deep and a metre wide – large enough for them both to lie in side by side, along with their bags. Danny unwrapped the foil thermal sheeting – Hammond’s words of warning about Yemeni spy drones ringing in his ears – and then unfolded the wire-backed hessian. The two men settled down in the hole, with the thermal sheeting sandwiched between their backs and the hessian camouflage. They got some scoff inside them, then Danny extracted the kite sight from his bag and trained it on the camp.

He had a direct line of sight to the fire. It was burning low now, and there seemed to be fewer silhouettes around it. He lowered the sight, and checked the time: 00.45. They wouldn’t get a positive ID on anyone till daylight. Until then, they needed to rest up.

‘I’ll take the first stag,’ he suggested to Spud.

Spud grunted his agreement. Seconds later he was fast asleep. Danny lay motionless in the pit, his ears on high alert, his brain turning over. If everything had gone according to plan, Abu Ra’id would be resting up just a couple of hundred metres from their position. Danny couldn’t wait to get a bullet in him and extract. It would be tough locating a place to lie up in this featureless terrain while they waited to be collected, but he figured they’d find a wadi nearby where they could hide, make a call for a pick-up and sit it out for however long it took for them to be airlifted out of here.

He realised he’d been thinking about Clara. Funny, he thought, how you think about home the most when you’re furthest from it. With Abu Ra’id, the last man on his hit-list, dead, and the threat to London eliminated, maybe he could get back with her again when he returned.

Would she take him back? He knew, in his gut, that she would.

He comforted himself with that thought as he waited for morning to come.

05.03hrs

Danny felt a sharp nudge in his ribs. He knew from the musty warmth under the camo that the sun was rising. His eyes flickered open.

Spud was eyeing the training camp through the spotting scope. He was lying very still.

‘What is it?’ Danny breathed.

Very gently, Spud passed the scope over to Danny. ‘Eleven o’clock,’ he breathed. ‘About seven metres north of where the fire was.’

Danny put one eye to the optic and pointed it in the direction Spud had indicated. He saw three blurry figures. He carefully focused the scope and they eased into sharp focus.

Two of them were facing him, cross-legged on the ground, while the third stood in front of them, his back to the OP. He had his right arm raised, his finger pointing to the sky. And although Danny didn’t recognise the faces on the two cross-legged men, he felt a strange, prickling sensation down his back as he held his breath and focused in on the third. He was tall, with a plain robe and a white headdress. He looked as though he was preaching.

He stayed standing for a minute. Two minutes. Three.

Then the cross-legged men stood up. They shook hands with the third man, before wandering away towards a nearby tent.

At which point the third man turned.

For a heartstopping moment, Danny thought the man was looking directly towards them. But then it became clear that in fact he was gazing up at the beauty of the desert sky at dawn. He smiled.

Danny recognised him, of course. The black beard that reached down to his chest. The neat, perfectly proportioned, handsome features.

‘Abu Ra’id,’ he breathed.

‘Damn right,’ Spud replied. ‘Abu fucking Ra’id.’

Eighteen

The hit on Abu Ra’id couldn’t happen during the day. They needed to enter the camp covertly, carry out the hit covertly, and leave covertly. That required the cover of night. That didn’t mean Danny or Spud liked the idea of waiting. If Hamza had told anyone else of their destination, they could expect company. Either that, or someone might arrive from Ha’dah to tip Abu Ra’id off. Danny silently cursed himself for not listening to Spud. Not knowing who might arrive to blow their cover made every minute feel like an hour. A sick, anxious feeling gnawed at Danny’s gut.

‘Wish we could just snipe the fucker from here,’ Spud said. But that wasn’t an option. They didn’t have the right hardware to take such a shot, it would only give away their position and anyway, their orders were very precise: make the kill at close quarters so you can be sure the bastard’s dead. But there was no question about it: they had to make the hit the following night. The longer they delayed, the higher their chance of being compromised.

Their target remained outside until an hour after sunrise. Various people from around the camp approached him. The militants seemed to be taking their turns in receiving an audience from the cleric. They were like clones: bandoliers of ammo, black and white
shemaghs
covering their heads. ‘Might as well have a sign round their necks saying “terrorist cunts”,’ Spud said. Danny welcomed his sarcastic asides. Spud was his old self, which meant that Danny’s fuck-up of the previous night was forgiven, if not forgotten.

By 07.00hrs the desert sun was already very hot. As Danny watched carefully through the spotting scope, he saw Abu Ra’id disappearing into one of the tents, presumably to protect himself from the fierce glare of the rising sun. Danny made a mental note of which tent it was: the sixth of ten rows, six columns along from the right. He reported that location to Spud, then kept the scope trained precisely on it, in case Abu Ra’id emerged and repositioned himself.

He didn’t, but as the morning wore on there was a great deal of other activity around the camp. Each tent seemed to house three or four men. They queued up at the fire – which was smoking heavily – to be given some food, before congregating on the flat ground at the northern end of the camp. Even from their OP, which was a good 400 metres away from this training area, Danny could hear the barking of instructors, followed by the retorts of weapon fire. There were wooden structures here – scrambling ropes and precarious-looking climbing frames. Take away the dry desert heat and the fact that these were jihadi insurgents in the making, and it could have been a British army training exercise on Salisbury Plain. Four of the technicals circled the camp with their .50 cals mounted on the back, but it was clear nobody really expected any intruders. Why would they? Who would be crazy enough to hunt them out in this bleak, unforgiving pocket of desert? It seemed significant to Danny that the machine guns were aimed upwards. These militants clearly expected any threat to come from the sky, not the surrounding area. Not for the first time, he remembered Hammond’s warnings about Yemeni drones.

Midday. The heat had massively increased. Danny found himself lying in a clammy puddle of his own sweat. He and Spud drank sparingly from their bottles, but they were losing water far more quickly than they were drinking it. Danny ignored his parched throat and the sore itchiness as his skin chafed against his sweat-soaked clothes, and kept his full attention on Abu Ra’id’s tent. Even when Spud took over on the scope, Danny watched with his naked eye, to the accompanying retorts of gunfire that echoed over the dry desert terrain. The pounding midday sun made him feel slightly dizzy, but he still kept eyes-on. Abu Ra’id didn’t emerge. Several other men entered the tent at intervals throughout the day, but they always walked out alone. Abu Ra’id himself stayed put.