Chris Ryan - Killing for the Company

Two minutes later the kid was out of sight, the noise and stench of his beasts had disappeared and everything was silent.

Luke lowered his weapon and moved over to Finn. ‘Remind me not to shake Abdul by the hand if we bump into him again.’

Finn ignored the comment. ‘There could be more where he came from,’ he said.

Luke nodded, then looked back into the cave. Should he tell Finn his suspicions about Amit? He decided not. His mate was bordering on insubordination as it was, and feeling mutinous. Give him a whisper of an excuse and he’d plug Amit on the spot. Luke didn’t want that to happen until he knew exactly what he was dealing with.

He checked the time. 12.28. Five hours till sunset. When darkness came, they’d need to get on to the road and hope their luck held. And in the absence of luck, they’d have to use force.

He couldn’t really decide if he was looking forward to nightfall, or dreading it.

21.32 hrs.

They were ready to go. The cave was pitch-dark, and Luke and Finn operated by means of NV. Each set had an infrared torch which lit up the cave for them but was invisible to Amit and Abu Famir, both in the back of the Toyota. The Iraqi’s frightened eyes stared blindly in the darkness and glinted in the haze of the night vision, whereas Amit’s were covered by the burka headdress that he was wearing again. A fresh saline drip was hanging from the plastic handle above the passenger door, covered with a spare hanging dishdash by way of disguise.

Amit was shaking feverishly, his wound almost as bad as any Luke had ever seen. The flesh looked like liquidised liver, and the blood had started to congeal around it, crispy in places, thick and wobbly in others. As well as shaking, Amit was talking to himself. Through the burka it was difficult to make out what he was saying, and most of it was in a language Luke didn’t understand anyway. But he caught the name ‘Maya’ more than once, and occasionally a confused reference to Abu Famir; otherwise Amit’s words just sounded like slurred ramblings.

Luke recced outside. Since the goatherd had gone on his way, three choppers had flown over their position. Now the night sky was mercifully cloudy: no starlight, no moon. The temperature was already dropping and there was a slight wind, which once more brought with it the distant howling of the wild desert animals. If there were any patrol vehicles in the vicinity, Luke couldn’t see them. He returned to the cave, where Finn was standing five metres from the car.

‘Ready?’ he asked quietly.

‘Yeah.’

Luke paused. ‘Look, mate,’ he said. ‘I know you don’t agree with my decisions, but the one thing that’s going to screw this up is if we’re not singing from the same hymn sheet.’

Silence. And then Finn asked: ‘What’s the plan?’

‘We’ve got eighty miles of main road to cover before we can turn off. I reckon we’re looking at two hours. We only passed one static checkpoint on the way through, and that was about an hour in, so we should reach it about 11.00. Fifty-fifty they’ll just wave us through, but if not we’ll have to use force then floor it to the border. Maybe swap vehicles if we can hijack another one. You still have the crossing we used marked as a waypoint on the GPS?’

‘Of course.’ Finn paused. ‘We need a Plan B. If we have to get off the road and take Abu Famir across country by foot, we can’t leave his bum chum to tell anyone what we’re up to or where we’re headed. We’ll have to do him.’

‘All right then. Agreed. Keep your weapon at the ready. Let’s move.’

They climbed into the Toyota, where their carbines were stashed by the front seats, and Luke started the engine. It echoed around the cave as he carefully manoeuvred out into the desert night and back along the dirt track to the road.

They drove slowly by the light of their NV. They saw no one. After about twenty minutes on undulating ground, the main highway came into view again, vehicles passing at the rate of about one every thirty seconds. Luke pulled into the side of the road. They removed their NV and Luke double-checked his Sig, which now had a black silencer fitted to the barrel. As he manipulated the gun, he spoke to Abu Famir. ‘If anyone stops us, I’ll do the talking. Right?’

In his rear-view mirror he saw the Iraqi’s spectacles glint in the darkness. ‘No violence,’ he said.

‘No fucking talking,’ Luke retorted.

They pulled out into the main road. Like the previous night, it wasn’t very busy. About one vehicle in twenty was military, but there were sufficient civilian cars for the Toyota to be quite unremarkable.

Luke kept a steady speed. Sixty klicks an hour. Not too fast, not too slow. As he drove, his mind turned over. He remembered the three heli flypasts while they were in the cave. Was that just a coincidence — a standard military manoeuvre in this time of heightened security? Or were they looking for someone specific? Had word of the firefight in the village sixteen hours earlier reached the authorities? They had to assume it was known that somewhere out there was a vehicle with four occupants, one of them injured. They had to assume that the checkpoint guards had been alerted.

They’d been travelling along the main road in tense silence for some fifty minutes when Finn reached out and tuned in the car radio. Arabic music filled the car.

‘Fuck’s sake, Finn,’ Luke snapped. ‘Turn that shit off.’ He reached out and switched it off himself, ignoring the look Finn gave him.

Amit groaned in the back. In the mirror Luke could see that his head had slumped and Abu Famir was looking at his burka-clad neighbour with a worried expression. ‘How far until we…?’

‘Shut it.’

There were lights up ahead. The checkpoint. Vehicles in front of them were slowing down.

A blanket of silence fell over the car, ruffled only by the short, sharp breaths coming from beneath Amit’s headdress. Luke felt for his handgun and sensed Finn doing the same. He looked ahead. On the other side of the road the barrier was down and a long line of vehicles — eight or nine in total, their headlamps dazzling in the darkness — were queuing behind it. The soldiers on duty surrounded around the frontrunner.

‘I’ve got three men on the other side,’ Finn reported. ‘Could be more behind the oncoming headlights.’

Luke nodded and turned his attention to their side of the road. Here the barrier was pointing upwards, and because they weren’t dazzled by the lights of the oncoming traffic, he was able to count the troops more precisely: four guards were manning their side of the road, but they were talking and laughing.

There were five cars between them and the checkpoint, spaced about twenty metres apart and all travelling at a respectful crawl. Directly ahead was a chunky old grey Mercedes, one of its brake lights not working. ‘Put your fucking foot down,’ Luke murmured. But none of the cars increased speed. If anything, they slowed down as they approached the checkpoint. It made sense: nobody wanted to attract any more attention to themselves than they needed to, even if they didn’t have enough gear to start a small war stashed in the boot.

The Merc was just passing through the open barrier when Luke caught the eye of one of the guards. He looked a bit older than the others, and his expression was a little flintier. His AK was hanging diagonally across his body, but he had one hand firmly resting on the handle. He had set himself apart from his three colleagues and was paying more attention to the checkpoint.

Luke looked away, concentrating on the road and doing what he could to appear unassuming; but his peripheral vision was focused on the guard, who was moving towards the barrier. Luke felt his blood chill. ‘Stand by,’ he muttered to Finn.