Chris Ryan - Killing for the Company

Fozzie nodded. ‘Take care, fellas,’ he said. He grinned. ‘Hope it’s not a one-way ticket.’

‘Next time there’s an opportunity for one of us to get his bollocks shot off by a raghead,’ Luke retorted, ‘the job’s yours.’

‘Deal,’ said Fozzie. ‘We’ll RV in twenty-four hours.’

Luke and Finn got back into the car, and a moment later they were trundling over the planks and through the breach in the fence. In the mirror Luke saw the guys returning everything to normal. He looked at the clock on the Toyota. 22.18. They’d gone from safety to danger in a matter of seconds.

‘Welcome to Disneyland,’ he muttered, and started driving.

It was two minutes past midnight when they joined the arterial road that ran west back to the border and east through the desert and eventually to Baghdad. Luke and Finn wouldn’t be travelling that far. According to their intel, the Bedouin village they were heading for was approximately eighty miles east of this location. Not far in ordinary circumstances; but behind what were effectively enemy lines, it was a very long way. The road wasn’t busy, but occasional vehicles passed in either direction.

They drove in silence. As they passed a large Arabic road sign, Finn turned the radio up slightly and the wailing of an Arabic singer filled the air. ‘Voice of a fucking angel,’ Luke muttered. Finn said nothing.

They’d been driving for no more than an hour when Luke saw lights up ahead. ‘Checkpoint,’ he said tersely. It wasn’t a surprise. They knew there was one permanent checkpoint between the border and the place where they were intending to turn off into the desert. This was it. ‘Hope you’ve got the lingo, mate,’ said Finn.

Luke’s Arabic was good, but it wasn’t perfect. Not for the first time in the past six years he found himself wishing that his partner on this op was an old friend.

‘Guy I know called Chet Freeman,’ he murmured. ‘We could use him here.’

‘The pegleg who caught a frag out in Serbia?’

Luke kept his eyes firmly on the road ahead. ‘You call him that again,’ he said bluntly, ‘I’ll waste you here and now. Roadblock or no fucking roadblock.’

Yeah, Chet was a good man in a tight spot. At least he had been once. His days of adventure were at an end. But with a bit of luck, Luke’s own language skills would be sufficient to get them across this roadblock.

Finn switched off the radio, removed his Sig from its holster strap, slipped the headdress on again and tucked the weapon into the folds of the burka. Luke pulled over on to the stony ground beside the highway. He removed his own handgun and placed it beside him in the door, before keeping his eyes fixed on the rear-view mirror.

They stayed like that for five minutes, until Luke saw three sets of headlamps approaching from behind. It was better to hit the checkpoint as part of a convoy rather than on their own, as it meant they had less chance of being stopped. A reasonable strategy, but reasonable strategies sometimes have a way of going pear-shaped. As the third vehicle passed — a pick-up not unlike the one the guys were in back at the border — he pulled out into the road and drove towards the checkpoint.

Two hundred metres to go.

A hundred metres. Luke saw another vehicle approaching from behind and gaining on them quickly.

Fifty.

As the vehicle twenty metres ahead started to slow down, Luke did the same. Only now could he make out the details of the checkpoint up ahead. There was a concrete bunker on the side of the road, presumably there to protect the soldiers manning the checkpoint from the sun. The rest of it looked makeshift: two barriers, one for each side of the road; a light-armoured military truck parked up on one side, its headlamps lighting up the road; and — Luke counted them — seven Iraqi soldiers in shabby olive-drab uniforms and black berets. Three of them stood in a group beside the truck, smoking cigarettes, their breath billowing around them in the cold night air; the remaining four were in pairs, each pair manning a barrier.

The vehicle ahead crawled almost to a halt. As it did so, one of the guards raised the barrier and waved it through with a bored expression. He was young, probably just a teenager. Luke checked his mirror. The vehicle that had been approaching them from behind was now only about ten metres away and coming to a halt. Its headlamps dazzled him, but even so he could just make out the shape of a military truck.

Not good. ‘We’ve got company.’

Finn looked over his shoulder. ‘Personnel carrier.’ His muffled voice was curt. ‘But there’s a fucking top-gunner…’

Luke accelerated slightly to follow the car ahead through the checkpoint while the barrier was still open.

No such luck. The barrier lowered and the soldier raised a palm to stop him.

Finn was looking in the side mirror at the vehicle behind them. ‘Republican Guard,’ he said, his voice tense. Luke felt his blood pounding in his veins. This was the last thing they needed. The Republican Guard with their red berets were the elite of the Iraqi Army. Better trained and better equipped than the shitkicking squaddies who were probably manning the checkpoint as part of their national service. Ordinary citizens referred to the Republican Guard as zanabeer — wasps — on account of the way they swarmed around the country. If things went noisy now, the SAS men would have a truckload of the fuckers — maybe twenty of them — swarming around the Toyota, and that was a scrap Luke didn’t fancy. He checked his own mirror. Sure enough, he could see the driver of the truck leaning out of his window, his red beret fully on display. Luke sensed Finn gripping his pistol. ‘Looks like we might be calling Fozzie in earlier than we thought,’ Finn said, his lips hardly moving.

Luke couldn’t answer. A second young soldier had approached the driver’s side, so he wound down the window. There was no greeting. The soldier shone a torch into the car while his colleague walked round to the back.

‘ Salam, ’ Luke muttered as the light fell on his face.

The soldier gave him a sharp look. Had he noticed a chink in Luke’s accent? The cold night air bit his skin, but Luke still felt sweat soaking his back as he glanced in the rear-view mirror. The figure of the first guard was silhouetted against the lights of the Republican Guard truck.

He was right by the boot of the Toyota.

If he opened it, they’d have no choice: Luke moved his arm down to his side, inches from his gun.

There was a shout, and both soldiers looked round. The Republican Guard driver from behind was yelling something at them. Luke couldn’t tell what he was saying, but he understood the tone of voice as this higher-ranking soldier bellowed orders at the two Iraqi squaddies like they were a piece of shit on his shoe. Fear crossed their faces as they hurried back to the barrier and started to raise it, all thoughts of Luke and his dodgy accent apparently gone.

Luke didn’t fuck about. He sped through the barrier the moment it was high enough to pass. As he reached the other side he saw that the military truck was flashing its lights at him. Moments later it overtook and stormed down the road ahead.

Finn let out an explosive breath. ‘Thought I was going to have to waste a round on that fucker,’ he said, his voice muffled behind the burka, as they continued to drive into the darkness.

‘Would have been a shame to get your glad rags all bloody.’ Luke checked his mirror. Nobody from the checkpoint was following. And up ahead, the truck was out of sight.

The road was poor — potholed and broken down by the countless heavy military vehicles that had passed along it over the previous two decades. At 01.00 they passed some buildings by the side of the road — a filling station and a mosque next to each other, where several cars had stopped. Luke and Finn had no need of prayer or fuel — there were canisters of petrol in the boot, along with their more specialised gear — so they just pressed on.