Chris Ryan - Who Dares Wins

There was movement in the dormitory. Nothing much – just a few bodies drowsily stirring. Through the NV goggles, Sam could see a couple of the occupants sitting up in their simple beds, staring blindly into the darkness and groping sleepily. These were the targets he’d have to eliminate first, before they had the chance to start a panic. Sam raised his Diemaco and aimed directly at the head of one of the sluggish figures.

As he prepared to squeeze the trigger, however, an image flashed cross his mind. It was Clare Corbett, sitting at her kitchen table, her face stained with tears of terror as she recounted what she knew. The red-light runners. These young men, targeted and groomed by MI5.

Sam set his jaw. He wasn’t paid to think about the rights and wrongs of his orders. He was just paid to carry them out. What was more, if he was to cover his tracks, he had to do so without hesitation. Already he had heard the thump from Cullen’s weapon as he eliminated one of the targets.

He fired. The round slammed straight into his target’s neck. The young man was thrown back against the wall, by the force of the round. The bullet exited, tearing a huge hole in the flesh through which a neat, sickly pool of blood slowly poured out. He had slipped to the floor and was on his way over to the dark side. By that time, however, Sam’s sights were elsewhere. He strode down the room without moving his weapon from the firing position. His second target was also sitting upright before the round hit. Not for long. Numbers three and four were just lying there, asleep. They would never have known what hit them.

He turned and looked at Cullen who was already striding towards the door. ‘Then there were none,’ he announced into the comms.

Mac’s voice came crackling back. ‘And the same here,’ he stated grimly. ‘Job done, gentlemen. Let’s do the housekeeping and get the hell out of here.’

The unit retraced their footsteps around that silent training camp, checking that the targets were indeed dead – Sigs in hand in case they needed to administer a final, fatal headshot. They went about their work in a kind of grim silence – not out of respect for the guys they had just killed, but out of professional efficiency and because now that the operation was nearing its end, the reality of Craven’s death was beginning to sink in. It had happened so quickly. So randomly. It could easily have been any of them. It just happened to be Jack Craven who would be returning home in a body bag. It just happened to be his family who would be mourning their loss with scant knowledge about the circumstances of his death. Part of Sam thought, Fuck it, there’s no room for sentimental bullshit here . People died on ops. They all knew that. They all knew the risk. That didn’t make it any easier, though.

Despite all this, Sam couldn’t help feeling a faint surge of exhilaration. Jacob had escaped. He’d done what he came here to do. Nobody spoke as they briskly conducted their business, other than to give or acknowledge instructions. Certainly they didn’t discuss who had been waiting for them, or why. They just knew they had to get out quickly.

They split up. Davenport and Andrews were despatched to reclaim Craven’s body. Webb and Tyler went to retrieve the freefall rigs. Cullen was sent to the road. This was where the Hercules would come in to land, but they needed to ensure that no civilian vehicles would be on that stretch when the plane touched down. Perhaps the dope farmers who inhabited this part of the world would put their hallucinations down to overenthusiastic consumption of their own crop. But perhaps not. The tough little Scot took a supply of stinger spikes with him, sharp metal road blocks that would deflate the tyres of any car that went over them. He would use the spikes to cut off a stretch of road at both ends, while they waited to extract. The dope farmers would no doubt be distinctly miffed by the shredding of their tyres, but it was better than being crushed by the undercarriage of a Hercules.

Sam and Mac remained at the camp. Mac called the air team with instructions to prepare to extract, while Sam went through the buildings yet again with a small but powerful digital camera, taking a visual record of the deceased.

It was a grisly job. During the hit, Sam had not been aware of the rank smell of all these men living together with little in the way of facilities. Now that his senses had more time to absorb such things, he realised just how bad the stink was. But of course, there was another smell for his senses to deal with now. The smell of death. They had not been long dead, but already that familiar stench was leaching pungently into the air.

In all he counted eighteen of them. Eighteen young, British corpses, assassinated by their own government. Many of them had been hit in the face. Their faces had caved inwards from the impact of the round, noses sunk in, mouths collapsed. It was like someone had taken a giant hammer to their skulls. Sam took their pictures anyway. Some of them had been rolled onto their fronts by the force of the rounds. More than once, as he turned their still-warm bodies over, blood gushed out of their wounds like a fizzy drink foaming from a bottle. As they had been expecting, all the faces were Caucasian. White by race, white by death and white by the bleaching effect of the camera’s flash as he systematically recorded the gruesome evidence of their night’s work. In some corner of his mind he wondered if the dead men really were British, as they’d been led to believe. Why were they being protected by a Spetsnaz unit if that was the case? But on the wall by one of the men he came across a centrefold from a pornographic magazine. The model had her legs wide open and by her head there was some writing. He read enough of it to see that it was English before moving on, quickly, racing from bed to bed like some demonic paparazzo desperate to get to his next subject.

When all the photos were taken, Sam slipped away – checking first to make sure he hadn’t been observed – up to the shed. The dead dog lay outside in a pool of blood. Sam ignored it. He took a deep breath, opened the door and stepped inside.

It was a tiny space, just enough for a low camp bed and a few square metres of standing room. Although the bed was unmade, showing all the signs of having been abandoned in a tearing hurry, the rest of the bunk area displayed a military neatness, the few belongings tidily and precisely squared away. Sam looked over his shoulder to check that nobody had entered, then opened a small cabinet by the bed and rummaged inside.

There was very little there. A few clothes – it was difficult to tell what in the gloom – some chocolate and a bottle of water. He found what felt like a small piece of card; pulling it out, he realised it was a photograph. An old one. With a pang he recognised his mother and father in the early years of their marriage. It was surreal, seeing that image of his father out here, miles from home, when in fact he was wasting away in a Hereford hospital. He stuffed it in a pocket. Back in the locker, his fingertips came across something else. Something hard. Rectangular. He pulled it out and examined it. It was a laptop computer. Sam reached into his backpack and pulled out his torch so that he could look closer at it. The thing was well-worn and scuffed, though the case was hard and durable. He gave half a moment’s thought to opening it up and seeing what was inside, but he quickly decided against it. If any of the guys found him doing that, they’d start asking questions; and he wasn’t sure he wanted to answer them…

Sam stuffed the torch and the laptop into his pack, before hurriedly returning to the centre of the camp.

As he jogged back outside, to his surprise, he found himself thinking of Clare Corbett’s words. ‘ Those people at the training camp. Are you really going to kill them, Sam? ’ It crossed his mind that he should feel some sort of sympathy for these dead men. Pawns in some game they didn’t understand. But he didn’t. Or rather, he couldn’t. His mind was too preoccupied. There were too many things racing through it. The adrenaline rush of the mission. Craven, dead. The need to extract quickly.