Chris Ryan - Who Dares Wins

And Jacob. Above all, Jacob. His brother’s perplexed, frightened face. His mysterious words. Sam pictured him even now racing away from the camp, not knowing if he was being followed or why the Regiment had been sent to kill him. Not knowing what the future held. It seemed wrong that Jacob should be so close to him and yet so far from Sam’s help now. What had Jacob meant? Things aren’t what they seem …

‘Damn it,’ he whispered to himself as he hurried back to the centre of the courtyard. ‘You can say that again.’

Mac was waiting for him, alone. He switched off his comms and indicated that Sam should do the same. ‘Well?’ he said finally when they knew none of the others could hear them.

‘Well what?’

His friend raised an eyebrow. ‘Did you find him?’

Sam avoided his eye. ‘No,’ he lied. He didn’t know why. It just felt like the right thing to do.

Mac cast him a level gaze that did nothing to hide his suspicion.

‘What?’ Sam demanded. He felt himself jutting out his chin, a sudden heat running through his veins. ‘Fucking what?’

‘Sounded like you went dark for a couple of minutes back there, Sam. Sure you didn’t see anything?’

He started squaring up to Mac. ‘What the hell are you saying?’

They had barely ever argued before, let alone fought; but Sam was seeing red and for a heated moment he didn’t know how long that record would last. If Mac felt threatened, though, he didn’t show it. On the contrary. He drew himself up to his full height and stared Sam out.

‘I’m not saying anything, Sam. Just remember how much I’m risking staying quiet about this, hey? Just remember that.’

Sam didn’t reply. His eyes continued to be locked with Sam’s for a few further uncomfortable seconds, then he turned and walked away.

Davenport and Andrews were the first to return. They carried Craven’s corpse with them in a field stretcher – little more than a body bag with poles along the side for ease of transport. Davenport had Craven’s weapon; Andrews his backpack. Moving quickly to the side of the truck where Sam and Mac were waiting, they gently eased Craven’s body down to the ground, then straightened themselves back up with the heaviness of men who had been carrying a mental load as well as a physical one.

‘It was a clean kill,’ Matt Andrews said quietly, the troop medic’s black skin shining with sweat in the moonlight. ‘He wouldn’t even have known what hit him.’

‘Suppressed AK-47 round, that’s what,’ Sam said. With everything else that had happened, he realised he hadn’t shared with the others his information about the welcoming party. ‘The shooters were Russian. One of the guys I nailed was packing a GM- 90.’

Davenport gave a low whistle. ‘Serious bit of kit for a stroll through the woods.’

‘Yeah,’ Andrews added. ‘Bit much for shooting pigeons.’

‘Spetsnaz?’ Mac suggested. He avoided Sam’s eye and it was clear that the tension between them had far from dissipated.

‘That’s my guess.’

An unsettling silence descended upon the four of them as they grappled with the implications, a silence made only deeper by the presence of their dead colleague. When Tyler and Webb returned with the freefall rigs, Mac brought them up to speed. Tyler listened to the news with an expression of increasing bitterness. ‘Fucking Russki bastards! ’ he spat, walking away from them before suddenly and violently kicking the body of the pick-up truck. Craven had been his friend, and no amount of training could teach a man how to deal with losing his mate.

There was no time to stand around consoling him, though. 03.45. Dawn was approaching. ‘Get to the road,’ Mac ordered. ‘The bird’s on stand-by. Let’s get out of here.’

Nobody argued with that. They gathered up their gear and their fallen colleague and hurried away from the camp, towards the road which was about fifty metres to the north. Cullen was waiting for them, a solitary figure, short and squat. ‘You took your fucking time,’ he observed, before looking up and down the road and indicating the somewhat rickety-looking telegraph poles that lined both sides. If the Hercules tried to land along this stretch of road, its wings would be damaged by the poles and they’d be walking home. They would have to come down.

‘Det cord?’ Mac announced. ‘Who’s got it?’

It was Tyler. From his pack he pulled two reels of what looked for all the world like white washing line. Hang your clothes on this, though, and you’d get a nasty surprise. Tyler threw one of the reels to Sam, who quickly started to unfurl it. On the far side of the road he ran to the closest pole, wound the det cord five times around the wood, then trailed it on to the next pole and repeated the process. Tyler did the same on the other side of the road. They each had enough cord to wrap it around eight telegraph poles; they were widely spaced, however. It would give the Hercules enough space to land.

Sam and Tyler ran back to where the others were waiting for them. Tyler removed two detonators from his pack – small silver tubes, each about the size of a pencil – and a roll of tape. Expertly taping the detonators to the cord, he then fished out his clacker – a small, handheld electrical generator – and a roll of wire. He connected the clacker to the detonator, then turned round and nodded at the rest of them.

The team jogged back to a safe twenty-metre distance. Tyler held up one hand and they prepared themselves for the bang.

The det cord exploded with a ferocious, deafening crack, like a hundred rounds all being fired at the same time. It echoed in the air, an immense clap of thunder, and would have been heard, Sam reckoned, for miles around.

By Jacob, no doubt, wherever he was.

The very instant the noise of the exploding det cord slammed into their eardrums, the telegraph poles toppled, falling away from the road and turning it into a perfectly serviceable runway. Instantly Mac was on the radio, reading out their exact coordinates from his small GPS device and requesting immediate extraction. Then he turned to the men. ‘Five minutes!’ he shouted. ‘Get in position.’

Sam checked his watch. 03.56. Only minutes till dawn. It had been a long, dark night. One of the longest Sam could remember. The blackness, though, was just starting to give way to a faint glimmer of morning. It was only the vaguest hint of daylight, but it was enough to remind Sam of everything that had happened during the preceding hours of darkness. He suddenly felt exhausted, mentally and physically. But flagging now wasn’t an option. They were still on the ground and the operation was not yet completed. Not until they were safely back in the belly of the Hercules could he even think of letting the pace drop.

The unit divided into two, three on one side of the road, four on the other. The bird might have their coordinates, and they might have a clear landing space. But there was still something they could do to help guide it safely to earth. Each man removed his torch from his pack. They then lay on the ground, spaced out at regular intervals along either side of the road, and shone the torches upwards. From the air, it would mark their positions as clearly as the lights along an ordinary runway.

Sam lay there uncomfortably in the almost-darkness. They would get scant warning, he knew, about the plane’s arrival: the roar of its engines would only be audible to them when the Hercules had emerged from the dark sky and its wings were practically above them.

He waited. Waiting was always the worst. It somehow felt as though you weren’t in control. Five minutes ticked by, excruciatingly slowly.

Sure enough, the boom of the engines was sudden and thunderous. It seemed to come from nowhere. As the dark shadow of the wings passed over them, Sam felt his whole body tremble with the proximity of the aircraft. The landing wheels screeched as they hit firm ground. Sam heard an immediate change in the timbre of the engines as they were thrust into reverse to bring the bird to a sudden, abrupt halt. He pushed himself to his feet, as did the others. Half a mile down the road, the Hercules was already turning. They raced around and gathered up their gear and Craven’s body bag, waited for the aircraft to come to a standstill and then rushed towards it. The tailgate was lowered and, with the loadmaster ushering them on with urgent sweeps of his arms, they hurried up into the plane.