Ryan, Chris - Zero 22

He evaluated his options. Jackal Two was the only remaining vehicle. He had to get back to it.

No chance.

Less than a second later, a missile hit the Jackal. The shock wave physically threw him several metres away from the vehicle and on to Chinese Mike’s gruesome remains. There was a sudden wave of intense heat as the thermobaric warhead did its work. Danny thought he was on fire. He roared with pain, but somehow had the presence of mind to push himself back to his feet and sprint away from the conflagration. A secondary explosion from the Bushmaster threw him to the ground again. Danny was horribly aware of the stench of his scorched clothes and the constant barrage of tracer fire devouring the remains of the convoy. He was gasping, gulping for air. Still pressed into the ground, he fumbled for his radio and switched frequencies again. ‘Thirteen men down!’ he shouted. ‘Where’s that fucking fast air?’

‘ Incoming from Northern Iraq . ETA five minutes. ’

Danny swore and looked around. He saw four individual fires: the four vehicles, still burning, spewing black smoke. Jackal Two had fallen into the drainage ditch that led from the road. The air wavered with the heat haze and the prison was barely visible beyond the glare, although he could make out gobbets of fire rising from the perimeter fence. The incoming had subsided. There was an ominous silence. It was only when he raised his night sight, which was still hanging by a lanyard round his neck, that he could discern the movement of personnel near the prison. Enemy advancing. Was it the Kurds? Had this been a catastrophic blue on blue? Or an elaborate trick? He didn’t think so. Why would they have ditched the safe-approach signal if they wanted to ambush the troop? Would they have access to that kind of firepower? No. This was someone else. Islamic State? Perhaps. They’d have gladly butchered the Kurds that had once guarded this facility, and might have forced the intel of the SAS’s imminent arrival out of them. But even that didn’t quite ring true. Those anti-tank missiles were serious bits of kit, and the shock and awe tactics they’d used to get the better of an SAS troop smacked to Danny of special forces operators.

SF operators who had, without question, been expecting them.

He had no rifle. He’d left it in the Jackal. His Glock 17 was holstered, but it was a poor replacement, useless for long-range firing. The terrain was flat and featureless. If he ran, the enemy would see him, no question. His only hope of finding cover, he realised, was in the drainage ditch where Jackal Two had ended up. He crawled towards it, grimacing against the heat radiating from the burning Jackal. His body hurt and he moved slowly. It took twenty seconds to cover the ten metres to the ditch. He rolled down into it. It was a little cooler here, below the level of the burning Jackal. He saw the circular opening of a culvert, an underground drainage pipe perhaps a metre in diameter. It would do as a hiding place, but as he prepared to climb in, a voice came over his earpiece. ‘ Zero 22, this is Alpha, patching you through to fast air. ’

‘Go ahead,’ Danny said. His own voice surprised him: raw, dry and hoarse.

A new voice. ‘ We’re one minute from target. Repeat, one minute from target. What is your location? ’

‘Forget my location,’ Danny barked. ‘Drop everything you’ve got on the prison!’

‘ Blast area’s going to be big. Are you in a position of safety? ’

‘Thirteen men down and I’m next. Drop the fucking payload!’

‘ Roger that. Out. ’

He could hear the fast air approaching, very quiet at first, very distant, but the noise of its engines increasing by the second. He scrambled a few feet into the culvert and screwed his body up into a ball, his arms protecting his face and covering the hard kevlar of his helmet. His only hope was that the culvert, the kevlar and the burning bulk of the Jackal would protect him from the payload. It wasn’t much of a hope, but it was something.

The crescendo of the fast air became more intense. Danny screwed up his eyes as the deafening roar of the aircraft passed overhead and the vibration thrummed even here under the ground.

And then the bombs hit.

The noise was unreal. Five explosions so loud that they caused stabbing pains in Danny’s ears. But the noise was not the worst thing. The overpressures, so close to the blast site, were like nothing he had ever experienced. His mouth, his head, his lungs all felt as though they’d had the air sucked out of them. The ground shook and his body shook with it. There was a cracking sound and he knew that the concrete culvert was collapsing around him. He felt dust in his mouth and could hear, outside his hiding place, the brutal, relentless rain of shrapnel pelting the ground. There was another enormous, metallic crash and crunch nearby and several afterblasts, each of them sending a vibrating shock through Danny’s body.

And then, suddenly, silence.

Danny gasped noisily, his lungs suddenly working again. His mouth filled with grit and dust. He opened his eyes. Everything was spinning. It was dark, and he realised that the air was still so full of dust it was completely obscuring his vision. He crawled out of the culvert. As he moved, he heard the concrete collapse behind him. Out in the ditch, he coughed and retched as the thick, polluted air seemed to suck its way into his nose, mouth and ears. His right ear, where his earpiece was fitted, felt clogged. There was moistness on his left earlobe. He realised that his eardrums were bleeding.

It took a minute for the dust to settle sufficiently that it was worth Danny re-engaging his NV goggles. Astonishingly they were still working. He recced the surrounding area and immediately saw the source of the nearby metallic crash. The force of the blast had thrown the nearby Jackal into the air and out of the ditch. It lay on its back, crunched and smouldering, ten metres away. Danny raised his goggles, fumbled with trembling fingers for his night sight, and looked back towards the prison.

It barely existed. Two minutes ago there had been a strong, secure edifice. Now it was rubble. Several individual fires glowed where the prison had once been and the perimeter fence, still standing in places, was aflame. Danny knew how lucky he was to be alive. It was obvious to him that the air strike must have taken out any other person in the immediate vicinity.

‘ Zero 22, this is Alpha. Do you copy? Over. ’ The voice in Danny’s ear was muffled because of the blood. He removed the earpiece and tried to clear out the earhole with a thick, dirty forefinger. When he replaced the earpiece, the guy back at base was repeating his communication. ‘ Zero 22, this is Alpha. Do you copy? Over. ’

‘They’re gone . . .’ Danny muttered. His voice was slurred. Slow. He could barely understand himself.

‘ What is your status? Over? ’

‘Everyone’s gone . . .’

Danny surveyed the bleak scene again. The guys were dead. All of them. Ambushed by a force with superior fire power who had known – Danny was certain of this – that they were coming. Thirteen good guys. Thirteen friends. He felt a surge of anger boil through him. ‘ Zero 22. Danny? Activate your personal tracking device. Over. ’

He stared into the distance for a full ten seconds before the instruction registered. His tracking device resembled a smartphone in a tough, rugged case. He fumbled for it, his attention still on the blazing bomb site. He swiped and tapped the screen to transmit his distress beacon back to base.

‘ Listen up, Danny. We need to get you out of there. Your nearest patrol is a day’s drive away, so we’re going to despatch a chopper. That blast site’s going to attract attention, so you need to get the hell away from it. Keep walking east. Don’t stop walking. Get away from that place as quickly as possible. Do you copy? ’