Chris Ryan - Killing for the Company

This was still Jordanian territory, though. They needed to find somewhere to cross into Iraq.

The driver of the pick-up joined them. Nigel Foster — Fozzie — was a tall man with a nose that had been broken in two places and a balding head. He was wearing civvies — ripped jeans and an AC/DC T-shirt — and he grinned at Finn. ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’

Finn ignored him and removed a kite sight from the boot of the Toyota. The unit had studied the imagery and the intelligence long enough to know that the border was marked by a berm — a low ridge of earth constructed to stop vehicles crossing — as well as, in places, a barbed-wire fence. But they also knew that there were places where the border could be breached. Black-marketeers smuggled their goods into Iraq at these locations. Every border was porous, if you knew where to look.

The night air was still, but suddenly an unsettling noise reached their ears, like a baby screeching. Luke knew that wild dogs roamed the area in packs, lean and hungry. Impossible to tell how close they were — sound travels in strange ways in the desert. But Luke had the distinct impression that they were looking for dinner.

Which wasn’t a bad idea. Fozzie returned to the pick-up. Luke got back into the Toyota and got some food down him — a foil pouch of sausage and beans, cold and stodgy — while Finn scanned the border with the kite sight. Every twenty minutes they swapped. The temperature dropped and a chill wind started to whip around the car.

‘Nothing,’ Finn said after an hour. ‘Looks like Abu Dune Coon might be spending another night with the goats before we get to him. Hope he likes the smell of shit.’ He handed the kite sight to Luke. ‘I hate the fucking desert.’

Luke shrugged. ‘There’s worse places than this.’ He started scanning the border again, running through their objectives in his mind. Abu Famir was an Iraqi academic who had been educated in the West and was an outspoken anti-Baathist. Given Saddam’s penchant for disappearing anyone who disagreed with him, Abu Famir had done well to survive this long. Plenty of men with similar politics had ended up rotting away in Abu Ghraib prison or at the bottom of a mass grave.

It was clear the Americans were closing in on Saddam. Nothing to do with his human rights abuses, of course. He’d been happily torturing and killing people even back in the day when the Yanks considered him an ally. No, the politicians had reasons of their own for an invasion. If and when Saddam was deposed, they’d need a new government in place — a government they’d be able to control.

Which was where Abu Famir came in.

War was only weeks away. That was an open secret. The UN weapons inspectors currently combing the country for WMDs weren’t looking for evidence; they were looking for excuses — excuses for a war that was going to happen anyway. Half the Regiment was already behind enemy lines, scouting, gathering intelligence, paving the way for an invasion. Luke’s unit had a more specific objective: locate Abu Famir, currently in hiding in the Al-Anbar region of western Iraq, and smuggle him back across the Jordanian border. When Saddam and his psychotic sons had gone the way of the dodo, the invaders could bring in Abu Famir and men like him to construct a new administration. The Regiment’s target was the man the coalition had earmarked as the new prime minister of Iraq once the regime had been changed.

That was the theory. But first they had to find him.

Local intelligence reports suggested that Abu Famir was hiding out in the village of a Bedouin tribe about 100 miles from the border. The Bedouin were nomadic, herding cattle, sheep and goats, as they had done for hundreds of years. It was accepted even by the Iraqi government that they could wander across the borders into Jordan and Syria. In another time that would have been a good way to smuggle Abu Famir out of the country, but not now. The Iraqi government knew war was around the corner. They’d upped their border controls and even the Bedouin were no longer allowed to cross.

So if they wanted to get Abu Famir back into Jordan, someone had to go and get him. That was where the Regiment came in. Luke and Finn were to infiltrate the border and snatch Abu Famir; Fozzie and the boys in the pick-up were to stay on the Jordanian side, ready to be called in if anything went wrong. And the chances of that happening were higher than normal. They weren’t the only people who wanted Abu Famir. It was impossible to say who they might run into.

‘I’ve got something.’

Luke spoke quietly. Through his kite sight he’d located exactly what they’d been looking for. Two vehicles, headlamps switched off to avoid detection, cutting across country, eastwards towards the border. He zoomed in and focused on them. Two klicks away. Here was their passport into Iraq.

He turned to Finn. ‘Let’s move.’

The light of the moon was bright enough for Luke and Fozzie to operate without headlamps. If the vehicles they’d seen were smugglers, they’d get spooked if they clocked a tail. So Luke kept his distance, while Finn maintained eye contact with the vehicles through the kite sight.

‘They’re slowing down,’ he said after they’d been trundling along for half an hour. ‘Reckon they’re crossing?’

‘Could be, buddy,’ Luke said. ‘Could be.’

They went static again and watched. The vehicles were still, but there was movement around them. ‘That’s the border,’ Luke said. ‘Got to be.’ Finn climbed out of the car with a Silva compass, already set to adjust for the magnetic variation of the area. He stepped a few paces away so the metal of the vehicle wouldn’t affect the needle and quickly took a bearing so that they would be able to locate the crossing point — the smugglers, after all, were unlikely to hang around once they’d penetrated the border.

‘Bearing 272 mils,’ he mumbled to Luke when he was back at the car, before pulling out his GPS unit and taking a precise fix of their location. Once he knew their lat and long, he opened up his map on the bonnet of the Toyota. The border was clearly marked in red and it was only a moment’s work to locate their current position and draw the bearing from it. Where the bearing hit the border, that was their crossing point. He punched the coordinates into his GPS as a separate waypoint before folding the map, giving a quick thumbs up to the guys in the pick-up and getting back into the Toyota.

‘Got it?’ Luke asked.

‘Got it.’

Two minutes later they watched as the vehicles in the distance headed north.

Luke took the Toyota offroad and, following Finn’s direction, struggled over the stony desert. Fifteen minutes later they approached the border.

The berm that marked the boundary between Jordan and Iraq was about two metres high, but here there was a small indentation, just wide enough for a vehicle to pass through. On the other side of the berm, however, was a ditch about a metre deep, and beyond that a barbed-wire fence. While it was possible to drive through the berm, it wasn’t immediately obvious how the smugglers had crossed the ditch or got through the barbed wire.

As Luke got out to investigate with three of the guys from the pick-up, the cold desert wind blew sand into their eyes. It took them no time to locate two long planks of wood abandoned in the trench. These they used to bridge the gap, then examined the barbed-wire fence. Someone had cut and unfurled it, before closing it back up again so it didn’t attract attention. Luke curled the cut wire back and returned to the car. Fozzie had left the pick-up, and now all six Regiment men were standing round the Toyota.

‘You’ll radio check with base, let them know we’ve crossed over?’ Luke asked.