Ryan, Chris - Zero 22

‘Of course I want to see him dead,’ the General said. ‘But there are more important things at stake.’

‘They’re not more important to me,’ Danny said. ‘And anyway, we’ll make the RV. Trust me.’

The General fell silent.

‘The ruins are ten miles due south,’ Bethany said quietly. She was holding the GPS unit and reading the screen. Danny nodded. Despite everything, he appreciated her implied approval. He slowed gradually and pulled up on the side of the road. Cars were passing now at a rate of about one every thirty seconds. He couldn’t risk anyone seeing them take the Nissan off-road. He waited a full two minutes before there was a suitable gap in the traffic. Then he killed the headlamps and eased the vehicle off into the darkness.

Luckily the moon was bright enough for him to see his way. The lights of the motorway receded behind him. The desert stretched out in front. He drove at a steady speed. Not so fast that the weak chassis of the Nissan would be damaged by the pitted terrain. Not so slow that the Wagner Group would catch them up before he had a chance to welcome them. The hard-baked earth crunched monotonously beneath the tyres. Sure, the quad bike they dropped in with had been by far the better vehicle for terrain like this, but Danny had been trained to adapt to circumstances.

He had been trained, too, to maintain his observational skills at all time, and he did that now. He was being tracked. He knew that, beyond question. But there were unknowns. How many guys were tracking him? What vehicles were they using? How were they armed? Would they realise that Danny was leading them into a trap? What kind of countermeasures would they deploy? As Danny drove, he maintained an acute awareness of his surroundings. At the same time, he put himself into the heads of his enemies. They would know that he was off road now. They’d be following him, but they’d also be wary of a guy who’d already dealt with two carloads of their men. They would be persistent and uncompromising, but they would plan their approach and their attack a little more carefully. That would give Danny the time he needed. He hoped.

They cruised across the desert, the silence only broken by Bethany’s occasional suggestion that Danny alter his trajectory to keep on track. It took the best part of an hour for their destination to come into view: the stone remnants of the Roman ruins protruding from the ground, the copse that hid the smugglers’ lorry, the rough road leading away from the ruins back towards Amman. Danny stopped the car fifty metres from the edge of the ruins, took his night sight from his shoulder bag and exited the vehicle. The ancient stones glowed a pale grey in the moonlight, which was bright enough now to cast stubby shadows on to the ground. It was absolutely silent. There was no breeze. No sound of desert animals. The whole area was as still as a photograph. He scanned a full 360, searching minutely for movement, threats, anything that indicated the Wagner Group was close. Nothing. He got back in the car and drove further into the ruins.

He needed to choose his position carefully. Somewhere in the centre of the ruins, because he wanted the low stone walls and protruding columns to act as a kind of camouflage. The busier and more broken up the area looked from a distance, the easier it would be to hide the objects Danny had in mind. He also wanted to be close enough to the stone walls that he could make tactical advantage of them. So he parked up in a circular open area with a diameter of about fifteen metres, a section of wall forming the perimeter, but broken up here and there to allow access. He parked the car to one side of the circle, blocking a gap in the perimeter. Then he turned to the others. ‘This is going to take me half an hour to set up,’ he said. ‘Maybe forty-five minutes. You need to position yourself at the edge of the copse and keep stag. I need to know the moment you see anybody approaching. You can do that?’

The silent stares he received from Bethany and the General told him exactly what they thought of the suggestion that this task might be beyond their abilities. ‘If we’re going to do this,’ the General said, ‘let’s get it done.’

Danny left the tracking device in his footwell. Then they left the car and ran towards the copse. Bethany took up a position behind the treeline facing the road, the exact position from which they’d watched the fixers approaching the previous night. The General moved across the copse, checking the view from various positions. Danny noted that his footfall was soundless. He might be top brass, but he still had a soldier’s stealth when he needed it. Danny himself headed to the smugglers’ lorry. It was exactly where they’d left it, on the far side of the copse from the road. He recovered the keys from where he’d buried them beneath the tree with the distinctive knot and shook them clean. He opened up the back, climbed up into the lorry and allowed his eyes to adjust to the darkness inside. He saw a long-handled torch and closed the door of the lorry before switching it on. The light was filtered red and it gave the interior of the truck a fiery glow. Danny took stock.

His memory of the contents of the lorry hadn’t failed him. There were Claymore mines and huge spools of wire and heavy-duty sets of wire cutters. There were blocks of C-4 plastic explosive. There were detonators. There were two Dragunov sniper rifles. There were Kalashnikovs with underslung grenade launchers. There were pistols. There were wooden crates filled with RPG warheads. With a grim smile, he saw that the crates were wrapped in old woollen blankets to protect them. There were boxes and boxes of ammunition. It was a heavy-duty arsenal. Enough gear to cause death and destruction on a massive scale. Danny wondered about its original destination. Had he stumbled across hardware intended for some gruesome, sickening act of terror? Was it intended for the people of the West Bank to be able to defend themselves? It was impossible to know for sure. But one thing was certain. This gear was about to be repurposed. It belonged to Danny Black now.

Before he made use of it, however, he needed a fire.

It was the work of a couple of minutes to gather an armful of deadfall from the floor of the copse, and a pocketful of dried leaves that crumbled almost to dust at his touch. He carried it to the centre of the circular clearing and made a wigwam of smaller twigs. He stuffed the dried leaves at the bottom of the wigwam. He patted down his pockets and found the wallet of hotel-branded matches he’d taken from the bar. He struck one, lit his tinder and gently blew on it until the wigwam caught.

During jungle training, it had been instilled in him that the most important ingredient for a good fire, after fuel, oxygen and heat, was patience. Look after a fire when it’s young, it’ll look after you when it’s old. It wasn’t always easy to be patient. As the twigs smouldered, he looked out across the desert, checking for a sign of anybody approaching. Nothing yet. He knew it was a matter of time. He added larger bits of firewood perhaps a little earlier than he should, but he got away with it. The wood was desert-dry and burned readily. In four or five minutes it was burning well enough to leave.

He hurried back to the lorry, climbed inside and turned on the torch. He took the longest, heaviest spool of wire. There was several hundred metres of it, at a guess. Certainly sufficient for his purposes. He hauled it over his shoulder, grabbed a set of wire cutters and killed the torch. Then he exited the vehicle, locking it behind him to make sure nobody else got a chance to raid the sweet shop. He ran with it to the part of the treeline that was closest to the Nissan and the circular clearing. Distance: about thirty metres. He started rolling out the wire towards the clearing. The wire was very fine and, once it was on the ground, almost invisible if you didn’t know it was there. When he reached the clearing, he looped the wire around the low stone perimeter wall. Where it crossed the gaps in the wall, he camouflaged it further by covering it with loose grit. Once he’d made a full circle, he rolled the wire back towards the copse, laid the spool next to the beginning of the wire and made a cut. He stripped the ends. Now he had two terminals, ready to deliver an electric charge to his hastily constructed ring main.