Ryan, Chris - Zero 22

So far, nothing. Maybe sandy-hair and Tom Selleck were the only Wagner Group operatives on site.

They burst into the main foyer where the exhibition boards were still erected. It was much busier than before. Guests were pouring in from the outside. American soldiers, the guys tasked to guard the entrance, were freaking out, shouting orders and trying to herd people into groups so they could be searched. Hotel staff were patiently trying to encourage people back to their rooms now the fire alarm had stopped. Incongruously, the cocktail piano music had started up again. The General’s guys yelled at everyone in their path to make way. The piano player stopped playing. Receptionists retreated from their desks. Somewhere there was the sound of a baby wailing. The other soldiers, when they saw the General surrounded by three of his guys being manoeuvred towards the exit, started shouting at the other guests to get out of their way. Danny moved and scanned, moved and scanned. He had noticed something. An anomaly. His instinct was telling him something wasn’t right, but his brain hadn’t caught up yet.

Then he saw it. Twenty metres away, at his eleven o’clock, standing by a marble statuette on a burnished wooden plinth, was a man. White skin, deep-set features, greasy slicked-back dark hair, stubble. Russian? Possibly. Ordinarily Danny wouldn’t have looked twice at him. But now he did, because unlike almost everybody else in this large, chaotic reception area, he looked entirely calm. And that made him stand out. He wasn’t looking at the General, or his guys, or at Danny and Bethany with their handguns. He was looking across at the main entrance, where another man – blonde hair in a severe parting, shirt and tie but no jacket – was standing equally calmly.

Danny knew a set-up when he saw one. They were waiting for the General to get close to them so they could make a hit. He sprinted and put himself in front of the General’s guys. One of them shouted at him to move, but he stood firm and pointed over to his three o’clock where, at the far side of the reception, there was a green emergency exit sign. ‘That way,’ he said.

The General’s guys looked like they were going to argue, but O’Brien cut them short. ‘Do what he says,’ he instructed.

The soldiers probably didn’t like the order, but they carried it out. They immediately altered their trajectory and headed towards the second exit. Danny watched the reaction of the two guys he’d clocked. They didn’t look so relaxed all of a sudden. The blonde guy with the tie caught Danny’s gaze. Something passed between them. The dead-eyed look of two pros acknowledging each other, respecting each other and warning each other. Danny knew he’d just looked at the face of his enemy. He lost sight of him as a crowd of hotel guests obscured his line of sight. He cut his gaze away and, still scanning the room for anomalies and threats, followed the General and his guys to the side exit. Here there were members of the hotel staff: a bell boy, two waiters, a female member of housekeeping. They receded as the General’s guys kept yelling at them to move. Two American soldiers in camo were guarding the exit. One look at the situation and they opened the doors, letting in the night air. The General, his three guys, Danny and Bethany burst out of the hotel and into the street. The hot, humid night air hit Danny, a furnace wave after the air-conditioned atmosphere of the hotel. He quickly took in his surroundings. A busy urban street. Solid traffic. Fumes. A blur of light from cafes on the opposite side. People passing along the pavement, unaware of what was going on in the hotel. As soon as they saw the American soldiers, however, they kept their distance or crossed the road.

Danny turned to the General. ‘You need to come with us. We’ll extract you. Leave your men here.’

‘They’re good guys,’ the General said.

‘That’s why we need them here.’ He turned to the soldiers. ‘Twenty seconds time, two men are going to walk through that door. Blonde guy with a tie, dark-haired guy with stubble. They’ll probably be Russian and they want to nail the General. They most likely have accomplices. Don’t let them get anywhere near us.’

The soldiers looked uncertain. ‘Do as he says,’ the General told them again. He nodded at Danny.

Danny, Bethany and the General moved away from the hotel’s side entrance and crossed the road. Night had fallen. Car headlamps glowed in the dark. Cars honked angrily when the trio cut in front of them. Danny knew that the sound of the car horns would highlight their position, but it couldn’t be helped. If anybody were to fire on them from the hotel exit, the vehicles would act to some extent as a ballistic shield. Plus, they would slow the shooters down.

They reached the opposite side of the road. There were cafes here spilling out on to the pavement. Late-night fruit stalls. A guy selling dates. A few shops boarded up with metal grates. Two Jordanian men, seeing the handguns in Danny and Bethany’s fists, shouted out in alarm and fled. Their reaction caused a stir among the other pedestrians, then a panic. Danny blocked it out. He needed to focus on getting the General to their vehicle. The crossroads was a hundred metres up ahead. When they reached it, they needed to turn left to get on to the road where their vehicle was parked. Total distance to the car: about eight hundred metres. He directed Bethany towards the crossroads. As they moved, he looked back across the road at the hotel.

So he saw it all happen.

The two men Danny had clocked in the reception area had emerged from the hotel exit on to the street. The General’s three guys had surrounded them, displaying the body language of a hard arrest: weapons raised, standing round the targets in a close semicircle. There was no sign of the other two soldiers inside the hotel who had opened the door for them. The targets had their hands up. They showed no sign of alarm. Their body language was relaxed. The blonde-haired guy was almost smiling as he looked beyond his closest soldier. Danny followed his line of sight and saw two Western men weaving their way across the road towards the hotel, casually dressed in jeans and T-shirts. One of them was much taller and broader than the other. He had a black, buzz-cut mohawk – it looked particularly odd against the civvies – and pronounced scarring on his scalp. His nose looked like it had been recently broken. Pedestrians moved out of his way as he walked.

SAS scum. I killed two of your comrades with my hands. You will be an easy third.

‘Turgenev,’ Danny whispered. He felt a twinge in his shoulder.

He stopped. Calculated the distances. He was forty metres from the hotel exit. Much too far for an accurate handgun shot. Turgenev and his mate were fifteen metres from the soldiers. Too close for Danny to get to them before it happened. The street was noisy with traffic sounds. The soldiers wouldn’t hear him if he shouted.

There was nothing he could do. He found himself momentarily frozen as he watched.

The three American soldiers had their backs to Turgenev and his accomplice. It meant that two of them never knew what happened. Turgenev and his companion only revealed their handguns when they were a metre away from the Americans. They raised them so each was pointing at the back of a soldier’s head. They fired in unison.

Danny didn’t hear the sound of the suppressed weapons above the noise of the street, but he saw the guys go down. They slumped mundanely to the pavement. The remaining soldier started to turn. Did he know what had happened? It hardly mattered. Turgenev nailed him in less than a second.

‘Mother fuckers! ’ the General shouted. Danny saw that he and Bethany had stopped and seen the shooting too. He sensed that the General wanted to join the fray. That made two of them. The urge to sprint back across the road to the hotel and deal with the man responsible for so many Regiment deaths was almost overpowering. But he mastered it. He grabbed the General’s arm and held him back. The shooting had taken place in full view of pedestrians. They scattered, creating several metres of open ground in the vicinity of the gunmen. The two Russian guys from the hotel pointed across the road directly at Danny and the others. Turgenev turned. He saw Danny immediately and he grinned. Again, Danny fought the urge to return. He saw Turgenev’s mate put one sleeve to his mouth. He was obviously speaking on a covert radio. And that meant only one thing: he was communicating with other hostiles.