Zero 22, p.24
Zero 22, page 24
part #8 of Danny Black Series
‘This is fucking insane,’ the General growled. ‘You were one of my guys, I’d have you court-martialled.’
Danny said nothing.
‘You should throw that goddamn tracker out of the window,’ the General said. ‘Any one of these vehicles.’ He pointed vaguely out of the Nissan’s windows to indicate the other cars on the motorway. ‘Any of them could be one of these Wagner Group nut jobs. You want them to try to take us off the goddamn road again?’
‘They can try,’ Danny said.
Bethany kept quiet. Danny guessed she was conflicted. Like the General, she no doubt wanted to get to the pick-up point as quickly and as safely as possible. She was surely thinking about her kid, and getting home to him as quickly as she could. But at the same time, if anybody understood the desire for revenge, it was her. She had killed for it in the past. Risked everything for it. Bethany White most certainly understood how Danny was feeling.
The traffic was thinning out. They were heading west, back towards the Israeli border. Desert terrain faded into the night on either side of them. Danny had reset the GPS unit to guide them back to the Roman ruins where they’d met their fixer and left the smuggler’s lorry. It would mean, any minute now, going off road and heading across the desert. The Nissan was hardly the ideal vehicle for such a journey. Danny didn’t care. It would do. He would make it work.
‘It’s insane!’ the General said again.
‘You want me to leave you by the side of the road, say the word.’
Silence. Danny could tell the General was considering a different line of argument. ‘You any idea how important it is I get out of here in one piece? You think your goddamn side show is more important than the security of the United States of America?’
‘You’ll get out of here in one piece.’
‘It’s a war crime, you know that? It’s a bona fide, black and white, cut and dried war crime. Jesus, I’m trying to expose a conspiracy at the highest level, and you’re off on some personal vendetta?’
‘It’s not a personal vendetta,’ Danny said.
‘I’ll tell you what it is – it’s a disaster in the making. You got any idea what will happen to me if it’s discovered that I’ve been involved in this madness.’
‘Nobody’s going to discover anything.’
‘How do you know that? How can you possible say that?’
‘Because the Russians won’t want anybody asking questions about why they were trying to assassinate a five-star general, an SAS man and a former MI6 officer. In any case, we don’t have a choice. We have to deal with these Wagner Group guys. It’s an operational necessity.’
‘The hell it is,’ the General said.
‘We’re heading to a covert RV with a British chopper in the Jordanian desert close to the Israeli border. If we don’t deal with these guys, we’ll lead them straight to it. They’re serious players. I’ve seen them in action. I’m not going to compromise the guys coming in to pick us up. I’m not going to risk another massacre.’
‘You’re finding excuses,’ the General said.
‘The guy with the mohawk is called Alexander Turgenev,’ Danny said. ‘He’s smart enough to orchestrate an ambush on an SAS unit. He’s smart enough to track us this far. You really think we should underestimate him? Not to mention that you just watched him shoot two of your men in the back of the head. Are you seriously telling me you don’t want to see him dead?’
‘Of course I want to see him dead,’ the General said. ‘But there are more important things at stake.’
‘They’re not more important to me,’ Danny said. ‘And anyway, we’ll make the RV. Trust me.’
The General fell silent.
‘The ruins are ten miles due south,’ Bethany said quietly. She was holding the GPS unit and reading the screen. Danny nodded. Despite everything, he appreciated her implied approval. He slowed gradually and pulled up on the side of the road. Cars were passing now at a rate of about one every thirty seconds. He couldn’t risk anyone seeing them take the Nissan off-road. He waited a full two minutes before there was a suitable gap in the traffic. Then he killed the headlamps and eased the vehicle off into the darkness.
Luckily the moon was bright enough for him to see his way. The lights of the motorway receded behind him. The desert stretched out in front. He drove at a steady speed. Not so fast that the weak chassis of the Nissan would be damaged by the pitted terrain. Not so slow that the Wagner Group would catch them up before he had a chance to welcome them. The hard-baked earth crunched monotonously beneath the tyres. Sure, the quad bike they dropped in with had been by far the better vehicle for terrain like this, but Danny had been trained to adapt to circumstances.
He had been trained, too, to maintain his observational skills at all time, and he did that now. He was being tracked. He knew that, beyond question. But there were unknowns. How many guys were tracking him? What vehicles were they using? How were they armed? Would they realise that Danny was leading them into a trap? What kind of countermeasures would they deploy? As Danny drove, he maintained an acute awareness of his surroundings. At the same time, he put himself into the heads of his enemies. They would know that he was off road now. They’d be following him, but they’d also be wary of a guy who’d already dealt with two carloads of their men. They would be persistent and uncompromising, but they would plan their approach and their attack a little more carefully. That would give Danny the time he needed. He hoped.
They cruised across the desert, the silence only broken by Bethany’s occasional suggestion that Danny alter his trajectory to keep on track. It took the best part of an hour for their destination to come into view: the stone remnants of the Roman ruins protruding from the ground, the copse that hid the smugglers’ lorry, the rough road leading away from the ruins back towards Amman. Danny stopped the car fifty metres from the edge of the ruins, took his night sight from his shoulder bag and exited the vehicle. The ancient stones glowed a pale grey in the moonlight, which was bright enough now to cast stubby shadows on to the ground. It was absolutely silent. There was no breeze. No sound of desert animals. The whole area was as still as a photograph. He scanned a full 360, searching minutely for movement, threats, anything that indicated the Wagner Group was close. Nothing. He got back in the car and drove further into the ruins.
He needed to choose his position carefully. Somewhere in the centre of the ruins, because he wanted the low stone walls and protruding columns to act as a kind of camouflage. The busier and more broken up the area looked from a distance, the easier it would be to hide the objects Danny had in mind. He also wanted to be close enough to the stone walls that he could make tactical advantage of them. So he parked up in a circular open area with a diameter of about fifteen metres, a section of wall forming the perimeter, but broken up here and there to allow access. He parked the car to one side of the circle, blocking a gap in the perimeter. Then he turned to the others. ‘This is going to take me half an hour to set up,’ he said. ‘Maybe forty-five minutes. You need to position yourself at the edge of the copse and keep stag. I need to know the moment you see anybody approaching. You can do that?’
The silent stares he received from Bethany and the General told him exactly what they thought of the suggestion that this task might be beyond their abilities. ‘If we’re going to do this,’ the General said, ‘let’s get it done.’
Danny left the tracking device in his footwell. Then they left the car and ran towards the copse. Bethany took up a position behind the treeline facing the road, the exact position from which they’d watched the fixers approaching the previous night. The General moved across the copse, checking the view from various positions. Danny noted that his footfall was soundless. He might be top brass, but he still had a soldier’s stealth when he needed it. Danny himself headed to the smugglers’ lorry. It was exactly where they’d left it, on the far side of the copse from the road. He recovered the keys from where he’d buried them beneath the tree with the distinctive knot and shook them clean. He opened up the back, climbed up into the lorry and allowed his eyes to adjust to the darkness inside. He saw a long-handled torch and closed the door of the lorry before switching it on. The light was filtered red and it gave the interior of the truck a fiery glow. Danny took stock.
His memory of the contents of the lorry hadn’t failed him. There were Claymore mines and huge spools of wire and heavy-duty sets of wire cutters. There were blocks of C-4 plastic explosive. There were detonators. There were two Dragunov sniper rifles. There were Kalashnikovs with underslung grenade launchers. There were pistols. There were wooden crates filled with RPG warheads. With a grim smile, he saw that the crates were wrapped in old woollen blankets to protect them. There were boxes and boxes of ammunition. It was a heavy-duty arsenal. Enough gear to cause death and destruction on a massive scale. Danny wondered about its original destination. Had he stumbled across hardware intended for some gruesome, sickening act of terror? Was it intended for the people of the West Bank to be able to defend themselves? It was impossible to know for sure. But one thing was certain. This gear was about to be repurposed. It belonged to Danny Black now.
Before he made use of it, however, he needed a fire.
It was the work of a couple of minutes to gather an armful of deadfall from the floor of the copse, and a pocketful of dried leaves that crumbled almost to dust at his touch. He carried it to the centre of the circular clearing and made a wigwam of smaller twigs. He stuffed the dried leaves at the bottom of the wigwam. He patted down his pockets and found the wallet of hotel-branded matches he’d taken from the bar. He struck one, lit his tinder and gently blew on it until the wigwam caught.
During jungle training, it had been instilled in him that the most important ingredient for a good fire, after fuel, oxygen and heat, was patience. Look after a fire when it’s young, it’ll look after you when it’s old. It wasn’t always easy to be patient. As the twigs smouldered, he looked out across the desert, checking for a sign of anybody approaching. Nothing yet. He knew it was a matter of time. He added larger bits of firewood perhaps a little earlier than he should, but he got away with it. The wood was desert-dry and burned readily. In four or five minutes it was burning well enough to leave.
He hurried back to the lorry, climbed inside and turned on the torch. He took the longest, heaviest spool of wire. There was several hundred metres of it, at a guess. Certainly sufficient for his purposes. He hauled it over his shoulder, grabbed a set of wire cutters and killed the torch. Then he exited the vehicle, locking it behind him to make sure nobody else got a chance to raid the sweet shop. He ran with it to the part of the treeline that was closest to the Nissan and the circular clearing. Distance: about thirty metres. He started rolling out the wire towards the clearing. The wire was very fine and, once it was on the ground, almost invisible if you didn’t know it was there. When he reached the clearing, he looped the wire around the low stone perimeter wall. Where it crossed the gaps in the wall, he camouflaged it further by covering it with loose grit. Once he’d made a full circle, he rolled the wire back towards the copse, laid the spool next to the beginning of the wire and made a cut. He stripped the ends. Now he had two terminals, ready to deliver an electric charge to his hastily constructed ring main.
Danny ran through the copse to check with Bethany and the General that they hadn’t spotted anybody approaching. Negative from them both. He returned to the lorry and opened it up again. Switched on the torch. Red glow. He helped himself to an armful of detonators and plastic explosives. Closed up the lorry. Sprinted back to where he’d left the spool of wire. Slung it over his shoulder, pocketed the wire cutters and took his armful of gear to the circular clearing.
Danny’s hands were large, his fingers thick. But he worked with the deft skill of a seamstress. He moved round the loop of wire and made a cut every couple of metres. At each break in the wire, he spliced in two more lengths of several metres. Some of these he laid outside the perimeter of the circle, some inside, so now there were ten branches of wire leading in and out of the circle, each ending in a double terminal. One of the interior branches snaked to the underside of the Nissan. He connected a detonator to each of these terminals, then sunk the blasting fuse of each detonator deep into a block of C-4 plastic explosive.
He was sweating heavily now and breathing deeply. A good fifteen minutes had passed since he had started laying his trap. The fire was burning well. He laid some more fuel on the flames, then took another moment to check his surroundings through his night sight. Nothing. Just the still, silent, wide expanse of the desert. He turned his attention back to the primed explosives. He needed to hide them better. He quickly moved the C-4 nearest the Nissan to underneath the vehicle’s fuel tank. The remainder he either dug into the ground, or positioned close to the stone perimeter wall, on the inside of the circle. The wall would force the blast to focus in one direction, doubling its efficacy.
But that wasn’t enough for Danny. He was a Regiment man, and he had the Regiment’s approach. When he attacked, he wanted that attack to be sudden, brutal and instantly deadly. He didn’t want a fair fight. He wanted to dominate the field of conflict utterly. So he ran back to the lorry, opened up, shone the torch and went to work on the wooden crates containing the RPG warheads.
He loosened the blankets wrapped round the crates – he’d need those in a bit – then turned his attention to the boxes themselves. Normally they would require a tool to jemmy them open. Danny didn’t bother with that. The wooden cases were dry and brittle. Their lids came off with a vigorous tug, splintering as they came away from their bases. He carefully lifted out the warheads. They were solid and heavy, their metal casings strangely cool in the warm night. Danny carried them two at a time back to the ring main. The air smelled of smoke and the fire was burning brightly. He placed a warhead next to each block of plastic explosive. When the C-4 exploded, the warheads would detonate. Anybody in the vicinity would know about it. For a few seconds, at least.
‘We’ve got company.’
Danny looked up from where he was placing the last warhead. He hadn’t heard Bethany approach and he didn’t like that she’d managed to creep up on him like that. She pointed across the desert and Danny followed her hand. He immediately saw the lights.
They were distant, probably a couple of miles off, and they disappeared as soon as Danny saw them. He knew what they were, though. Headlamps. A single set. One vehicle, which had driven into a dip so that the headlamps were no longer visible from Danny’s position.
‘Get back in position,’ Danny said. ‘Keep watching.’
‘If I didn’t know better, I’d think you wanted me out of the way. You don’t need me keeping stag. You know they’re coming.’
‘Fine,’ Danny said. ‘You still have your pistol?’
‘Of course.’
‘Few minutes’ time, we’re going to have a lot of dead Russians on our hands. Your job is to make sure they really are dead, when the time comes. You can do that?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then get back behind the treeline.’ He pointed towards the copse, to a position about twenty metres from where he was setting himself up. ‘Make sure you’re out of sight. There might be shooting and I want you out of the line of fire.’
‘How chivalrous.’
‘That’s got nothing to do with it. You’re no use to us with a bullet in the head. Go.’
Bethany headed back into the copse. Danny checked the time: 00.29 hrs. Three and a half hours till they needed to be at the pick-up point. Danny still had items to set up. He ran to the Nissan and found the lever by the driver’s seat to open up the bonnet. The battery was at the right-hand side of the engine block. He carefully removed both terminals, then lifted the battery out of the engine and closed it up again. He ran with this back into the copse and left it by the two loose ends of the ring main. Back to the lorry. He gathered up the blankets that had been cushioning the RPG crates. There were ten in all. He only needed nine.
He carried the blankets back to the clearing and arranged them carefully around the fire. The flames had subsided now. The embers glowed and crackled. He kept a distance of a couple of metres between the fire and the material. He made three piles of three blankets. One blanket rolled lengthwise to mimic a body. One blanket bundled to mimic a head. The third blanket draped over the two to make the whole ensemble look like a sleeping person. It was a crude pretence, but Danny knew that people would tend to see what they expected to see. A campfire in a deserted location would likely be surrounded by sleeping people. Nobody would think it remotely unusual.
Yeah. Any luck, they’d see what they wanted to see.
He returned through the copse to the lorry. He took a Kalashnikov, grenade launcher, ammo and box of tubular grenades, then delivered them back to the car battery and the ring main terminals. He loaded the Kalashnikov with a full magazine of 7.62s and a grenade. Back to the lorry, where he grabbed the Dragunov sniper rifle and a box of rounds. Back at the car battery and in the shelter of the trees he took another look through the night sight. And he allowed himself another grim smile as he saw what was happening.
Now there was more than a single vehicle approaching. He counted four. No, five – one more had appeared. They had turned off their headlamps and were advancing on the Roman ruins from Danny’s ten, eleven, twelve, one and two o’clock. A formation advance, centred on the tracking device that was currently broadcasting its position from the driver’s footwell of the Nissan. Danny looked around. No sign of Bethany. She was well hidden. He ran through the copse and found the General, who was keeping stag in the opposite direction. ‘Any vehicles from your direction?’ he asked.
‘Zip,’ the General said. Danny could tell he was still pissed off, but he was taking his lookout duties seriously.
‘You know your way around a sniper rifle?’
‘You kidding? I was US Army champion three years running.’
