Stephen Leather: False Friends

Seal Bravo took a step back. Shepherd’s MP5 was hanging on its sling and he’d taken his Glock out of its nylon holster and it was now pointing at the soldier’s groin. Shepherd’s finger was tightening on the trigger.

‘Stand down!’ shouted Henderson. ‘Both of you.’

‘Tell him to take his gun away from my neck or I will shoot him,’ said Shepherd.

‘Eddie, stand down,’ said Henderson.

Seal Bravo snarled at Shepherd, but he took another step back and lowered his weapon.

‘Shepherd, if you’ve got a problem with what happened, you take it up with your bosses,’ said Croft. ‘You’ve no jurisdiction here. You’re an observer, you observed, now get back to the chopper or so help me God I’ll leave you here for the Pakistanis to find.’

Shepherd holstered his Glock and walked out of the room.

Henderson followed him. ‘Dan, you’ve got to watch it with these guys. In a war zone they’re a law unto themselves.’

‘So they can get away with murder? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘I’m saying this is their mission; you’re a passenger. If you’ve got a problem with anything you’d better stow it until you’re back home.’

‘What’s his fucking problem?’ growled Seal Bravo. ‘I thought the SAS were special forces, but he’s behaving like a crybaby.’

‘He’s an observer, that’s all,’ said Croft. ‘The Brits insisted he was on the team because they supplied the intel. I told them it would be like mixing oil and water but the top brass said he was in so he’s in. Doesn’t mean we have to like it.’ He looked at his watch. It had been just thirty-four minutes since they had entered the compound. In all the rehearsals they’d done in North Carolina and Afghanistan they’d been in the air and on their way home within thirty minutes.

Seal Echo rolled Bin Laden’s body into the body bag and zipped it up.

‘Take it down to the helo,’ said Croft. Seal Echo and Seal Charlie picked up the body and carried it out.

The Seals by the television had stashed the laptop and the DVDs in their backpacks and were working their way through a stack of magazines and newspapers they’d found in the wooden cupboard.

‘Take it all,’ said Croft. ‘They’ll want to know what he was reading; it’ll give a clue to what he was planning.’ He nodded at Seal Bravo. ‘Five more minutes and we’re out of here,’ he said, then hurried down the stairs.

More Seals were searching the bedrooms. The walls were all concrete and the floors were tiled, which cut down the number of possible hiding places, but they tapped everything with the stocks of the M4s to be sure. They smashed cupboards and tables and used their knives to rip open mattresses.

‘Come on guys, the clock is ticking, mover it!’ he shouted before hurrying down the stairs to the ground floor, with Seal Bravo hard on his heels.

Shepherd stood and watched as four Seals brought half a dozen children out of the compound. They were all barefoot and wearing shabby nightgowns and their hands had been tied behind their backs with flex cuffs. Two of the children were girls who couldn’t have been more than six years old and they were crying uncontrollably. ‘They’re just kids,’ said Shepherd.

‘Kids are as dangerous as adults in this part of the world,’ said Henderson. ‘We have to make sure they’re not a threat.’

The Seals pushed the kids along the perimeter wall to where a group of women and children were sitting. One of the women tried to get up but a Seal pushed her back down with the barrel of his weapon. ‘Stay on the ground!’ he yelled.

The woman screamed at him in Arabic and the Seal prodded her again.

The children ran towards her and sat down around her. The younger ones were crying but one of the boys, barely a teenager, glared sullenly at the Seals. Even though he was standing fifty feet away Shepherd could feel the hatred pouring out of the boy.

Off in the distance, to the west, Shepherd heard the twin rotors of a Chinook helicopter. ‘Cavalry’s on the way,’ he said.

He pulled his night-vision goggles back over his eyes and scanned the night sky. The Chinook was half a mile away, flying low. It was a much bigger helicopter than the Black Hawk and able to carry four times as many troops. It was only slightly slower than the Black Hawk but it didn’t have the Black Hawk’s stealth capabilities and was an easy target, hence the pilot’s decision to fly as low as possible.

The Chinook transitioned into a hover and came in to land about a hundred feet away from the compound. Immediately six Seals jumped out and took up position around the helicopter, guns at the ready.

Four Seals came out of the compound, carrying a white body bag. They were jogging and breathing heavily from the exertion, their faces glistening with sweat.

As they headed towards the Chinook, Croft appeared, followed by half a dozen of his men. They were all carrying black bags stuffed with whatever they’d taken from the building.

The Seals with the body bag dumped it on the ground at the rear of the Chinook as the ramp slowly descended and banged on to the ground.

A medic ran down the ramp and hurried over to the body bag. He unzipped it and then took out a medical kit from a pouch on his belt. He rolled the body over and pulled up the shirt, then stabbed a hypodermic into the base of the spine and carefully extracted more than fifty centilitres of spinal fluid. He put the hypodermic into a plastic case and handed it to a Seal, who jogged over to the Chinook and climbed on board.

Croft and his men hurried up the ramp with their black bags as the medic took another hypodermic and withdrew a second sample of bone marrow, which he put into a plastic case before hurrying back into the rear of the helicopter. The two Seals zipped up the body bag and carried it up the ramp after him. Croft came out of the Chinook and headed back to the entrance of the compound, looking at his watch.

‘Why the two samples?’ asked Shepherd.

‘We’re not home and dry yet,’ said Henderson. ‘Taking two samples gives us twice the chance of getting the DNA back home.’

‘Did you know this was a kill mission, Guy?’ asked Shepherd. Henderson ignored him. ‘What, are you deaf as well as blind?’ said Shepherd.

Henderson shook his head and sighed. ‘You just won’t let it go, will you?’

‘Let it go? We’ve just assassinated five people, and from what I’ve seen only one of them was holding a gun and that gun wasn’t fired. We killed an unarmed woman and shot another in the leg.’

‘You’re just an observer, remember? No one here wanted you to come in the first place.’

‘Yeah, well, if my bosses had known this was going to be a kill mission I don’t see that they’d have sent me,’ said Shepherd. ‘So I’m asking you again, did you know they were going to kill him?’

Henderson turned to look at him. ‘We rehearsed dozens of scenarios. We tried it with booby traps, with return fire, with grenades — they ran us through anything that we might come across, and yes, in a lot of scenarios the targets ended up dead.’

‘And what about rehearsing what just happened? Where not a single shot is fired and Bin Laden is standing unarmed with his hands up?’

‘There was an AK-47 in the bedroom. You saw it.’

‘He wasn’t holding it, Guy. And he didn’t even make a move towards it. He wasn’t resisting. And he was shot twice. A double tap. One in the chest, one in the head. You only do that when you want to be sure of a kill. If Croft was worried about return fire one shot to the arm or leg would have done the trick.’

‘Dan, with the greatest of respect, you weren’t in the room. It was dark, there was a lot going on, they had no reason to know that they weren’t under fire. Plus, you had those screaming women, who could easily have been hiding bombs under their clothes.’