Ryan, Chris - Zero 22

‘In case you’re coming down with a bad case of ethics,’ Danny said quietly, ‘might be worth remembering that those ten guys think they’re about to kill you. We don’t put them down – all of them – that’s what they’ll do.’

The General still didn’t pick up the Dragunov. Danny felt a grudging respect for him. The guy obviously wanted to do the right thing. He clearly took the view that they should have escaped these Wagner Group operatives, rather than massacre them. But he hadn’t been on the ground when Zero 22 walked into the Russian ambush. He hadn’t seen his mates butchered and mangled. He hadn’t fought Turgenev. Danny glanced sidelong at the General. In that moment, he didn’t see a powerful man who had a seat at the table with the most influential people in the world. He saw a soldier, in the dark, on ops, and he knew what he had to say. ‘You saw them kill your men outside the hotel, right? You watched them do it? And you don’t want them to answer for that?’

Danny didn’t need to watch for the General’s response. He knew what it would be. As he remained crouched down by the battery, looking out across the Roman ruins, he heard the General load and prime the sniper rifle before putting himself down in the firing position.

There was total silence. The fire glowed a burnt orange, occasionally spitting sparks into the air like fireflies. The figures approached slowly. Moving with stealth. Distance: fifty-five metres. Danny could see now that they had their weapons raised, the butts pressed into their shoulders. They looked like pros: a good amount of space between each man so that they didn’t present a bunched-up target, approaching on foot from a distance to avoid disturbing their own targets with the sound of their vehicles. But Danny could tell they were making a big mistake. Their weapons were all pointing in the direction of the clearing, at the fire and the dummy bodies. They had fallen for his staging. They were seeing what they wanted to see, without expecting the unexpected.

‘Who actually is the broad, anyway?’ the General said very quietly. ‘Not one of yours, that’s for certain, knowing how you SF guys are about chicks in your ranks.’

Danny didn’t answer. He kept his focus on the approaching men. Distance from the kill zone: fifty metres.

‘Where is she?’ the General asked.

Danny tensed up. ‘Close.’

‘I’m going to level with you,’ the General said. ‘If she didn’t make it through this ambush, I wouldn’t be weeping at her graveside.’

‘Keep your mind on the fucking job,’ Danny said. The truth was, it had occurred to him that now was a good time to take Bethany out. She wouldn’t be expecting an attack, not when they were working together like this. And one more body in the massacre that he was planning would cause fewer questions to be asked. Like hiding a branch on a log pile.

Why, then, was he resisting the idea? Why was he persuading himself that, in the light of the mission change, he needed direct confirmation from Hereford before taking Bethany out of the picture? He couldn’t answer that question and now he put it from his mind.

‘Your silence speaks volumes,’ the General said. ‘I gotta tell you, I don’t like her being in possession of that pistol she took in the hotel. You should have seen the look in her eyes when she was in my hotel room . . .’

‘Just shut the fuck up and don’t move,’ Danny said. ‘They see movement behind the treeline, they’ll know it’s a trap.’

The targets were still approaching very steadily. There was a sudden breath of wind. The fire embers flared. A cloud of sparks drifted towards the copse, and with them a warm smell of wood smoke. Danny held the ring main wires close to the battery terminals, ready to make the connection when the moment was right. His hands were completely steady. Unlike the General, he had no compunction about what he was about to do.

Distance from the kill zone: thirty metres.

Twenty.

They were among the Roman ruins now. The moon cast their shadows over the standing stones and dilapidated walls and columns. As a unit, they were breaking up a little. Five guys were moving ahead to the clearing. The remainder lagged behind, covering their mates, but still advancing once there was a gap of about seven metres between them. They continued their advance in two lines. Danny was pleased he’d placed his explosives both inside the ring main and outside it.

The first two guys were inside the clearing now. Their weapons were pointing down at the dummy blankets and they glowed slightly in the light of the embers. Danny touched one end of the ring main to the negative battery terminal. Three more guys entered the clearing. The remaining five were just outside it, almost in a semicircle, covering their unit mates.

A shout. Russian. It rang out across the desert. One of the guys in the semicircle had lowered his weapon. He was pointing at something on the ground. It was clear he knew something was wrong. He’d seen Danny’s trap.

It was too late.

Danny touched the loose wire to the positive terminal.

The explosion was instantaneous and immense. The detonation of ten blocks of C-4 was enough to send a shock wave through the air and emitted a crack so thunderous that it momentarily numbed Danny’s ears. It was nothing, however, to the harsh, brutal clatter of the RPGs. They detonated in such quick succession that the individual explosions almost became one. Danny’s view of the clearing became completely obscured by the vast geyser of dry earth and shrapnel that spat violently up from the ground, scorching and impenetrable. The sound of raining shrapnel followed the noise of the detonations, like nuts and bolts hammering on a steel roof. But this too was quickly drowned out by a third explosion. Danny had laid one RPG under the fuel tank of the Nissan. It did its work. A black and orange flash flowered deep in the cloud of dust and shrapnel. There was a deafening crack of combusting fuel, a thick plume of black smoke and a crunch as the Nissan itself shifted position and its chassis crumpled.

Then the screaming started.

Danny couldn’t see the men. The cloud of smoke and grit was still impenetrable. He had to rely on his ears to tell him how many were dead and how many – unfortunately for them – were still alive. He could make out four individual screams. They were the mindless, desperate screams of men in such agony that it blocked out all other thought. They were shrill. They were hoarse. They oozed panic and pain. When, after twenty seconds, the cloud started to dissipate, Danny saw why.

One guy was on his knees. The skin on his face was shredded and burned. He no longer had features. Just a red mask of blood and bone. As he screamed, he brought his fingertips up to his face, but he plainly couldn’t bear to touch the wounded flesh.

A second guy was staggering by a low wall. He had a jagged piece of shrapnel embedded in his chest. The shrapnel was too large to have come from the RPGs. It must have flown off the Nissan, which Danny could now see lying on its side, shrouded in hot flames and burning smoke.

A third guy was on fire. He must have been close to the Nissan when the fuel tank exploded. His hair was ablaze. His clothes too. He was running around in a circle like a demented dog. His screams were the most hoarse, but no quieter for it.

A fourth guy had lost his arm just above the elbow. His screams were more of a whimper, breathless and staccato like the individual rounds of a semi-automatic. He was holding the stump with his good arm, staring at it with a burned, blistered face. There was no blood. Danny assumed that the heat of the blast had instantly cauterised the wound.

The dead were the lucky ones. Killed instantly, they didn’t have to endure these agonising final moments before the inevitable came. Their bodies were strewn around the ruins, some of them partially dismembered. One guy was half covered by the dummy blankets. Another was slumped against the burning Nissan, his body smouldering as the flames began to eat it. Danny watched, listening to the agonised shouts and the crackle of the flames and he remembered the bomb site in Syria and the state of his dead mates and he couldn’t help feel a surge of satisfaction.