Call to kill, p.4
Call to Kill, page 4
‘All call signs, courtyard clear.’ Pommy’s voice came over the radio. If he said the area was clear, then you could be bloody sure it was. The hairy bastard had never let Mason down once in ten years.
Mason gave the signal for all three teams to advance on to the main building. Everyone went to work. Mason waited behind Jack as he laid door charges on the main entrance, Andy and Craig scurried down a ladder to a basement window, while Briggs pushed the clacker on a charge that sent the metal side door flying clean off its hinges. Mason heard two more explosions almost in unison. Boom, boom, boom. Three clear points of entry. Alpha, Bravo and Charlie teams were inside just as they had planned.
Mason stuck close to Jack’s considerable mass as they ran into the building and Jack launched a flashbang through an interior door, setting off a series of explosions on the other side. Above and below them, he could hear gunfire and then another huge explosion. The support team from the helicopter must be on the roof, making their entry from above.
Jack led them into the room he’d just filled with fire and smoke, guns raised, clearing left and right. Right away Mason noticed the flag hanging on the wall, covered in Arabic text. Next to it lay a sword, a broken video camera, a widescreen TV and a Playstation. The walls were covered in A4 sheets of Arabic script and DVDs sellotaped into plastic wallets.
He saw a young Houthi man lying stunned on the floor, blood already oozing from his nose, soaking into his beard. Jack kicked away the guy’s rifle and flipped him over, plastic-cuffing his hands behind his back.
‘Clear!’ Jack shouted, ready for Mason to give the okay to move through the door to the next room.
But Mason paused and instead moved to the man cuffed on the floor. He scanned his face, mentally running through the pictures he had seen of targets of interest. This was one he recognised, Tango Four, Ibrahim Manar Al-Bajazi, a junior Houthi soldier, no one important. Mason had an idea. He took hold of Manar by the throat and squeezed firmly as he asked, ‘Where is the hostage? The Christian?’
Manar spluttered and spat a mouthful of blood on to his chest before he shook his head defiantly. Fucking kid had some balls, Mason thought, right before he hit him hard in the centre of his face, sending his head bouncing off the stone floor. He repeated the question, only this time Manar either thought better of his defiance or just couldn’t maintain it any longer. His eyes flicked towards the door on the other side of the room.
‘Okay, let’s see,’ Mason said as he yanked Manar to his feet, lifted him clean up off the ground and held him out in front of his body like a shield. He stopped momentarily, checking that Jack was ready, and then on his signal, the big lad from Walsall launched a boot at the door, busting it open so that Mason could run through, still holding Manar aloft, his feet six inches off the floor.
Mason was standing at the foot of a steep, narrow staircase and Manar lifted his chin to show that it led to the place he was looking for. Still holding the young Houthi man aloft, he ran full speed up the stairs, using Manar’s body as a battering ram to break open the door at the top, charging inside behind his human shield.
The room was full of dust, and dark save for a little sunlight that crept in through a small opening in the ceiling, otherwise blocked by rebar. Mason figured the helicopter team must have made a failed entry and moved on, but whatever explosives they’d used had done a lot of damage. He dropped Manar on to the floor and lifted his rifle to scan the room, looking through the gloom for bodies. He saw nothing to his right but as he turned to the left, he saw something in the shadows. Sitting on the floor, looking up at him through the dust was a young, bearded Houthi smiling from ear to ear, pointing an AK-47 rifle right at Mason’s head.
For the rest of his life, Matt Mason would remember that smile. He would never shake the memory of the man beaming at him the instant before he fired a volley of 7.62 short rounds, at six hundred rounds per minute, straight at Mason, from six feet away.
But he would get the chance to remember it because every one of those bullets flew harmlessly past him except for the one which cascaded into the laser sight mounted on his Diemaco rifle. That bullet smashed into the Laser Light Module Mk3 at over seven hundred metres per second, showering glass fragments in every direction. One shard glanced off the centre of Mason’s forehead, opening up a gash in its path, while a second sunk itself into his left shoulder. Not that Matt Mason noticed, as his adrenal gland had already released half a milligram of adrenaline into his bloodstream, rendering him numb to the pain. Instead, Mason stood frozen, rooted to the spot, still looking down at the man smiling back at him.
Suddenly, from behind, Mason heard a familiar muffled sound, de-dum, de-dum. Almost instantly, the smiling man’s head exploded and his body recoiled back with the force of the double headshot, coolly administered by Mad Jack. Mason turned and looked back at the spray of bullet holes that had peppered the wall behind him. At least thirty bullets had somehow missed their intended target.
‘That’s another one of your nine gone, Mace,’ said Jack, kicking away the dead man’s rifle.
Mason reckoned he’d used up all his nine lives a long time ago; someone must have given him a bonus one. The evidence was right there on the wall. Seeing as how he was still alive, he thought, he might as well get on with things, so he stepped over the fallen body, raised his rifle again and kicked in the next door, crashing inside, this time making no mistake as he cleared left and right.
The room was darker but Mason could see a figure curled up in the corner lying on the floor, hands bound, chained to a concrete slab. He walked towards it and reached down to remove a cloth bag that had been pulled over the figure’s head. Underneath was a heavily bearded man, struggling to see, squinting up at him through the dim light.
‘British SAS,’ Mason said, crouching to take a closer look at the man’s face. ‘You’re safe, you’re safe.’
The man began to weep, shaking with small, weary sobs as Mason put a steadying hand on him, only now noticing the blood running down his own arm. He looked at the photo he’d placed behind the plastic wallet strapped to his uniform. He’d studied that photo many times before and thought he knew the face as well as his own, but when he looked back to the crying man, he realised that something was wrong.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ he said, ‘Cos you ain’t Drake.’
Six
Sana’a, Yemen
Agent Redford resented being made to wait outside of the compound with the support team. Demolition and evacuation were areas she was highly experienced in and she could hold her own with arrogant assholes like Matt Mason any day of the week. If this mission hadn’t been beyond her jurisdiction, then she’d have gladly pulled rank on him, but as it was, she bit her tongue and decided to enjoy being there at the discretion of Her Majesty.
Redford had been recruited by the CIA after graduating from Harvard. Her application had stood out due to a rare mix of language skills acquired during her time growing up in the Middle East. The Agency sent her straight to the Directorate of Operations, where she trained as a covert operative at ‘The Farm’ and placed top of her year. Her first deployment was, by her own request, to Somalia, where, under the cover of being a US diplomat, her primary role was to recruit foreigners willing to sell secrets to the US. After that and a brief but arduous stint in Djibouti, she’d finally landed in Yemen, building an impressive network of agents and informants across the whole region. If the US ever woke up and realised the magnitude of threat that this place posed, then Redford was primed and ready with the intel her country would require.
However, the sad truth was that few people back home knew where Yemen was, let alone how important its politics were to the balance of power in the world. There was no doubt in Redford’s mind that a war was brewing in the Muslim world, and when it came, the shockwaves would be felt from the shores of Bar Harbour to Key West. Instead, the country for which she put her life on the line was more interested in fighting with itself, one side of the political divide constantly looking for ways to catch out the other, tripping themselves up, wasting time exposing hypocrisy or untruths about matters of triviality. Her countrymen were so intent on finding the enemy within that they’d entirely overlooked the real enemy; the forces that would destroy them in a heartbeat.
‘All call signs, clear.’ She recognised Mason’s voice coming over the comms in her earpiece, giving them the signal that it was safe to enter. She watched Hopkins check along the line, ensuring that the rest of the support team were ready, and then followed him into the same hole that Mad Jack had made four minutes before. Behind Redford, the sergeant major, medic and a couple of younger British guys followed close, double-timing into the compound and across to the main building, where Briggs was waiting for them.
‘Two out here, another on the roof, two more inside, Dave,’ Briggs addressed the sergeant major, counting out the dead for him to see.
‘Tango Seven?’ Redford asked. Shahlai was her only concern.
‘Unseen, Ma’am,’ Briggs said before he turned and led them in the main door and through the room where they’d found Manar.
Redford took it all in—the flag, the sword, the video camera—figuring that in another hour or so someone would have lost his head on livestream. She saw Andy Roberts bagging up the camera along with some photographs and DVDs taped to the wall. No doubt they contained footage of previous rocket attacks, operations, maybe even executions. These idiots always, seemed to want to film themselves, despite the fact that it would provide their enemies with vital intel.
And Redford was their enemy. She despised the threat that maniacs like Shahlai posed to everyone’s security in the name of Islam. She’d studied the Koran at Harvard, translating from some of the oldest surviving texts in dialectic Arabic, and produced an interpretation in Aramaic for her master’s thesis. She had concluded that many ‘insights’ made by male scholars were actually linguistic errors, such as the assertion that countless houris or virgins were awaiting martyrs in heaven. She contended that the word hur was not intended to mean virgins at all, but white grapes. Redford knew that book as well as anyone who claimed to fight in its name and despised those who deliberately misinterpreted it in ways that suited their own ends. She knew that Shahlai was not a holy but an evil man, and she’d made it her life’s work thus far to ensure that he was stopped.
As she climbed the stairs, Redford heard shouting from the room above and through her earpiece, Hopkins was already calling the helicopter to the LZ. By the time she reached the top, Ibrahim Manar was on his knees, wrists cuffed behind his back, bruised and bleeding, while Craig Bell pressed him aggressively for locations of boobytraps and the whereabouts of his missing comrades. She scanned the room, wondering only where Shahlai was. There was no sign of him. Her next thought was, ‘Where’s Mason?’
Redford stepped over the broken glass fragments of Mason’s smashed scope and moved into the last room. The party was well and truly over, and the team looked like they were preparing to get the hell out of there. Mason was pressing a makeshift dressing on to what looked like a wound in his shoulder, another trickle of blood running down the side of his face. Hopkins and the sergeant major were standing around him, relaying immediate, need-to-know intel, all the while glancing over towards a skinny, bearded man on the floor. Redford turned her attention to the hostage getting checked over by the medic. Something was missing. She still couldn’t see him. Where was he? Where was Shahlai?
Redford crouched down next to the hostage. She took out a photograph of Shahlai and pushed it under the wretched man’s nose, forcing him to focus on it. ‘Did you see this man? Look closely.’
The man recoiled and tried to cower behind the medic but again Redford forced the photograph on him. She didn’t care about his pain right now, this might be the only chance she got. The jungle drums were already beating and in another couple of minutes they would be out of this place and her chance would be gone. If Shahlai had ever been here, in this room, then she wanted to know it.
‘Enough.’ She heard Mason’s voice behind her. ‘Take it back to HQ.’
‘It’s a little late for your help now, don’t you think?’ Redford could barely conceal the anger in her voice. If he’d listened to her, if he’d put a detail on the back gate like she’d told him to, then they’d have Shahlai in custody now.
‘Now, wait a fucking minute,’ said Mason, taking another step towards her.
‘Wait for what, Staff Sergeant? For him to come back?’ Redford fired back, jumping quickly to her feet.
They stood toe to toe, the American spook eyeballing the British soldier, her fury searing right through him. Redford was aware that Hopkins was now standing next to them, trying to pull them apart, saying something about how they should calm down, but she couldn’t concentrate enough to hear exactly. She had spent four years tracking Shahlai, this was as close as she’d ever come to apprehending him and she wanted to hear Mason at least admit it to her that he’d fucked up.
The helicopter pilot’s voice came over her comms confirming pickup in two minutes, as Hopkins finally forced his body between them and began reminding Mason that he had a team to evacuate before the situation became problematic. Mason snarled at her and turned away, ordering his men to move.
‘Roger. Confirmed. Figures two.’ She could hear him speaking into his comms, moving quickly back down the stairs. ‘All call signs to the LZ, we’re done here.’
Redford watched the medic help the hostage to his feet and follow behind Mason and Hopkins, leaving her alone in the room. She used her last seconds to scan for a clue, anything, some physical evidence that Shahlai had been in that room, but of course there were none. She’d studied the Iranian for years and felt that she understood him as well as his best friend. Shahlai was no amateur, he knew the game as well as she did. She could feel his presence but nothing real. She followed the team outside, noting that every single piece of furniture had been turned over, ripped open, broken apart in the search for evidence. These British boys were thorough, she’d give them that.
They left the compound by the rear gate and the RAF Chinook landed in a small carpark two hundred metres to the south. The helicopter’s twin engines roared as its sixty-foot rotors spewed dust in every direction. The sergeant major stepped up into its open rear, checking off the teams as they boarded behind him. Bravo team, the support team, Mason’s team with Manar and the rescued hostage in tow, followed by Hopkins and Redford. With everyone confirmed on board, the helicopter rose up, nearly two thousand feet per minute, high into the sky above Sana’a. A lone gunner scanned the roofs below with his M60, ready to pick off any hostiles who considered firing a parting shot in their direction.
Redford loosened her body armour and removed her helmet, shaking out her hair and taking a lungful of air, cleaner up there than it was down in the Sana’a dust. She blew it out, trying to let go of her anger with it. She watched the city pass underneath. She knew that Shahlai was down there somewhere, on the streets below, now full of cars and carts, or in the market thick with crowds of people buying food. It infuriated her to listen to the same sounds that he must be able to hear too; horns beeping, children shouting, normal life resuming. She had made the Yemeni people the centre of her universe, even though none of them would ever know hers. The vast majority of them would never even visit a Western country, fewer still the USA. Yet she cared about their freedom, she wanted them to enjoy a quality of life that people in the West took for granted, free of the oppressive control of men like Shahlai.
Redford had to refocus. She told herself that she still had a job to do, even if the Brits had just made it considerably harder than it should have been. She couldn’t afford to dwell on what might have happened or what should have happened. She needed to stay on point and play the politics of what happened next. She felt the muscles in her neck relax as she found renewed purpose, formulating a plan, taking control again. She knew herself well enough to know that life was easier when she could understand the task she had to complete.
She looked down the length of the Chinook, deliberately avoiding eye contact with Mason and instead looking for the man they had apprehended. Manar was flanked by Jack and Andy, cuffed and bagged, sitting upright and still. She would take a run at him the first chance she got. She sank back into her seat, feeling the tension inside of her subsiding. There was nothing more she could have done back there, she had simply prioritised the target she’d been assigned to.
The chopper began its descent on to the secure LZ at the HQ and Redford felt calmer again. She had a potential lead, so the sooner the interrogation began, the sooner she could get on with bringing the Iranian general into US custody. Today had been a setback, nothing more. She was still on top of this and in the end, she would prevail.
Seven
Sana’a, Yemen
Racing up the hill on the back of a motorbike, already three miles to the north of the abandoned compound, Ruak Shahlai tapped the shoulder of the driver and waved for him to stop. He climbed down off the bike and took a deep gulp of water as he watched the Chinook helicopter fly southeast. From its bearing, he calculated that it was headed to the west of the Sayyan hills. He pulled a phone from his pocket and Called one of his spies who operated near there.
‘You see it?’ he asked. ‘Good. Follow where it lands.’ Wherever that chopper landed, the British HQ would be close. He wiped the water from his beard and climbed back on to the bike. Immediately, they sped off again along the old town road as fast as they could.
He knew the narrow streets of Sana’a well, having visited the city many times before. When he was a boy, a young Houthi named Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, a direct descendent of the Prophet Mohammed, had come with his family to live in Qom. Hussein and Shahlai attended the same Shi’ah seminary school in Qom and became close friends, playing together every day after class by the river, imagining that they were soldiers fighting against the Shah or sharing sticky sohan toffee from the market. Finally, his friend returned to his home in the Houthi tribal lands of Yemen, but they had remained in contact, exchanging letters, maintaining their bond and strengthening their friendship.
