Chris Ryan - Killing for the Company

‘ Tango 17, this is Zero. Send. ’

‘We’ve got ourselves a roadblock. Looks official. Can you sort it?’

‘ Wilco, Tango 17. ’

The comms went dead.

Silence in the Land Cruiser as it sat motionless in the middle of the road. The soldiers up ahead looked at it warily. When a few of them exchanged words, they did so without taking their eyes off the Regiment’s vehicle. And while no one had their weapons pointing directly at them, the soldiers all had both hands on their assault rifles and looked like they knew what they were doing.

A minute passed.

Two minutes.

Suddenly Stratton, seemingly unable to restrain himself, snapped. ‘Just talk to them,’ he instructed. ‘It’s obvious they’ve been waiting for us. Just roll down the bloody window and talk to them.’

‘Nobody’s rolling down the windows,’ Luke said calmly. ‘They’re there for a reason.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Stratton snorted. ‘Nobody’s going to attack me…’

He cut himself off short as each of the four SAS men turned to look at him with cool expressions on their faces.

‘Nobody’s rolling down the windows,’ Luke repeated, and silence fell once more inside the 4 x 4.

They had to wait another three minutes for anything to happen. One of the radio operators up ahead started talking into his handset; moments later they saw him bark some kind of instruction to the others. A couple of them jumped up behind the wheels of two of the Jeeps and reversed them out of the way. The remainder continued to stare at the Land Cruiser. They made no indication that the Regiment unit was permitted to cross, but Fozzie didn’t wait for that. He moved the vehicle forward and through the roadblock. Luke could sense Stratton fuming. The guy clearly didn’t like being told what to do. Fine. As long as Luke was in charge of the safety of the men in this vehicle, Stratton could like it or fucking lump it.

Luke had seen his share of battlegrounds. He’d walked the deserted streets of Musa Qala and dodged sniper fire in Sangin. He’d been involved in pitched battles in Basra and seen the brutal effects of many wars in central and eastern Africa. Gaza City, he knew, wasn’t a war zone like Afghanistan. It wasn’t Darfur or Somalia. Every conflict, however, was different in its own way. Despite everything, Gaza still functioned as a state. But it was a state on the edge. Its people were poor. Many desperate. Even more were angry. As the Land Cruiser approached the capital, Luke felt he could taste the tension in the air.

The outskirts of Gaza City were a mishmash of tall apartment blocks, single-storey warehouses, the occasional mosque. Almost everything appeared to be built from concrete, or rendered in bland grey or yellow plaster that was cracking and falling away. Suddenly there were more vehicles too. Not many of them looked roadworthy, at least by British standards, and there were fewer than might have been expected for a city the size of Gaza. Even if the inhabitants could afford a car, petrol was hard to come by. There were rather more pedestrians — thin, ragged and with weather-beaten faces — than there were drivers.

The black Land Cruiser, with its tinted glass and shining chrome, attracted attention and Luke didn’t like that. A CAT team would normally take one of two options. They would either follow the principal in an unmarked vehicle — an old baker’s van or a utility truck, something that would merge into the background — if they didn’t want to be seen. If the situation required a more overt, threatening presence, the unmarked van would be replaced with a Jeep mounted with a. 50-cal or a Gimpy — something to make people think twice about engaging them. But Hamas’s insistence that only a single vehicle could cross had chucked the SOPs out of the window. The Land Cruiser was an unsatisfactory halfway house and Luke felt that every Palestinian citizen they passed — most of them dressed in shabby Western-style clothing, though a few wore more traditional robes and headdresses — was staring at them with ill will.

Fozzie followed Russ’s directions and they continued to head north-west through this run-down suburb. They were now no more than four klicks from the Karni crossing and already they could see the effects of years of Israeli bombardment of the territory. More than half the buildings they passed bore scars of some sort — perhaps just a boarded-up window or a spray of bullet marks across the facade. Plenty, though, were reduced to a shell, or even to a pile of rubble and steel. One thing was clear: these crumbling structures on the outskirts were not administrative buildings or military targets; they were apartment blocks and people’s houses. As the Land Cruiser passed one of these demolished buildings, Luke saw a small makeshift tent, constructed from bleached canvas and metal poles bound together with string. The front side of the tent, about a metre wide and two metres high, was open to the road and it had been erected to house not people, but a large photograph of a man. Garlands of flowers were strewn around the photograph, but they were withered and dried out. It was plainly a shrine of some sort, there to commemorate a life lost when the building that had stood there was destroyed.

‘Two o’clock,’ Finn said suddenly, his voice tense. ‘Someone’s got eyes on.’ Luke looked in the direction his mate was indicating.

‘Got him.’

The man Finn had pointed out was on a street corner, standing by the grubby awning of a meat shop that had the carcasses of a few animals hanging in the window. His head was wrapped in a keffiyeh, and he made no attempt to hide the AK-47 that was slung across his front. He had a mobile phone pressed to his ear and he was clearly watching the Land Cruiser as it passed. An official pair of eyes, or something else? Impossible to say. The unit passed him in silence.

A couple of hundred metres on they drove by a building site where attempts had been made to reconstruct one of the bombed-out edifices. A single storey of grey breeze-blocks was completed, but it was clear from the faded Arabic lettering graffitied over the blocks, and from the broken pallets littered around the site, that no work had been done here for many months. A thin man sat on the pavement outside it. Spread out in front of him were a few pairs of shoes and a couple of handbags. He had a rather hopeless demeanour, and behind him two kids were crouched, hugging their knees with their hands. It didn’t seem likely that this man would be selling much today. His eyes followed the Land Cruiser as it passed, just like everyone else’s.

The Regiment men’s faces were grim as they ventured deeper into the city. ‘What happens to the poor bastards who get bombed out of their homes?’ Fozzie asked out loud.

It was Stratton who answered. ‘There are a number of refugee camps dotted around the Strip,’ he said. ‘Two in Gaza City itself.’ He sounded matter-of-fact about it.

‘Nice,’ Fozzie muttered.

Stratton’s jaw was set.

‘If things go to shit today,’ Luke said quietly, ‘they might need a few more of those IDP camps.’

‘Absolutely,’ Stratton replied, a bit too quickly and with very little emotion.

‘Absolutely,’ he repeated, a little quieter this time.

‘You don’t sound very concerned?’

‘I’m very concerned,’ Stratton replied, still looking straight ahead. ‘I can assure you of that.’

It was a sudden thing. For a split second Luke was back in St Paul’s, listening to urgent warnings. A wild conspiracy theory that he would never have believed if it hadn’t been confirmed by the dull thud of four fatal rounds just a couple of minutes later. Now he was in Gaza City, war-torn and fucked up…

I’m very concerned. I can assure you of that.