Bad Soldier: Danny Black Thriller 4 (3 page)

Romano felt an embarrassed frown cross his forehead. ‘No . . . I mean, I
could
 . . .’ He jabbed his thumb towards the vehicle.

‘Forget it, shit-for-brains.’ The man looked over his shoulder. ‘Danny and Spud could use the workout, right lads? Especially Spud. Need to get him match fit. He’s spent the last six months in hand to gland contact.’

Romano didn’t know what he was talking about. The blond man pushed past him and started walking towards the Land Rover. The woman looked at the two guys – Danny and Spud, had he called them? – then she jogged after the blond man.

This really wasn’t going the way Romano had wanted. He turned to Danny and Spud. ‘I could maybe help you . . .’ he said. Neither man even glanced at him. They were watching the unit leader, with murder in their eyes. Romano jogged alongside them as they followed after the woman and the blond man. ‘So guys,’ he said, ‘where are you headed?’

No response. Just dark scowls. As they approached the Land Rover, Romano saw that the blond man had already taken the front passenger seat. The woman was opening up the back of the vehicle ready to receive the flight case. The rain was falling more heavily now. Everyone was soaked.

Danny and Spud loaded up. Romano meekly took his place behind the wheel. When the others were installed in the back seat, he turned the ignition. The windscreen wipers flapped noisily as the vehicle trundled across the airfield.

‘Fuckin’ Sicily,’ the blond man said. ‘I thought it was meant to be all sunshine and sardines.’

‘And organised crime,’ Phil Collins said darkly. ‘Right up your street, eh, Tony?’

Tony – that was obviously the blond man’s name – looked in the rear-view mirror. ‘Do us a solid, Caitlin love, stick a .762 in that bald cunt’s skull, save me messing up my hands.’

Caitlin, the woman, smiled. ‘Mind if I do it later?’ she said in a very pronounced Australian accent. ‘Don’t want to mess up the upholstery for this two-pot screamer.’ She jabbed Romano on the shoulder.

‘Caitlin, Tony, cut it out,’ said the man with dark hair.

‘What’s that?’ Tony said in an exaggeratedly loud voice. ‘Did Danny Black say something?’ He smiled nastily. ‘Last time I checked, Black,
I
was unit commander. So do us all a favour and keep your cakehole shut, eh?’

Romano looked in the rear-view mirror. If Danny Black looked annoyed, it was nothing compared to the expression on Spud’s face, which was filled with undisguised hate. Tony looked over his shoulder at the same time. ‘Spud, mate, relax. You should learn to enjoy yourself.’ He sniffed and faced forward again. ‘You could get run over by a bus tomorrow.’ As he said this, he pulled a handgun from his ops waistcoat and ostentatiously started checking it over.

All of a sudden, Romano could barely breathe with the tension. He’d given up wanting to find out what these people were here for. He just wanted them out of his vehicle before the pot boiled over. He even twitched nervously when Tony said, ‘How far to the chopper, Manuel?’

Romano pointed to his ten o’clock. The LZ was visible 100 metres away through the rainy twilight. A steel-grey RAF chopper – a Wildcat – was there, surrounded by three more military vehicles, the beams from their headlamps cutting through the rain.

‘How about dropping us a little closer than half a mile to the LZ?’ Tony said. ‘Unlike you, we’ve got a bit more to do than chauffeur people round an airfield all night.’ He frowned. ‘Rear-echelon motherfucker,’ he muttered under his breath.

It was a blowy night for a chopper ride. The Med was as rough as Danny had ever seen it. But it wasn’t nearly as rough as the atmosphere inside the Wildcat.

Danny wanted to be anywhere else but here. Back home, his three-month-old daughter was waiting for him. Danny had wanted to name her Susan after his own mother. But the child’s mother, Clara, had vetoed it and they’d named her Rose. Danny and Clara were together, but things were not good between them. It didn’t seem to affect the baby, though. She was a good-natured kid, with a shock of black hair just like his own. Clara told Danny that babies were supposed to look like their dads because it stopped them from leaving mother and child after the birth. It had led to an argument, of course, with Danny trying to explain that his was not the kind of job that kept him safely behind a desk, and back home for bath time.

No. Danny’s job was the kind that meant that on a blustery December night, five days before Christmas, he had to be cruising high above the choppy waves on his way to RV with HMS
Enterprise
, a Royal Navy Echo-class survey vessel, currently on Mediterranean rescue deployment. The waters of the Med were awash with migrant boats, crammed full of frightened, impoverished refugees fleeing the battle zones of the Middle East. It was
Enterprise
’s job to help these people when their barely seaworthy boats fell apart in the middle of their crossing, as they almost inevitably would.

Danny glanced at Tony. The bastard had been insufferable since their OC had taken him to one side in Hereford and given him unit command. It was an obvious snub for Danny, who’d been i/c last time they’d done a job together. Since then, it had been no secret around RAF Credenhill that Danny and Tony were at each other’s throats. The way Danny saw it, giving Tony the nod was a clear indication of which side of that particular fence the Ruperts had come down on.

But the bad blood between Danny and Tony wasn’t the worst of it. It was an open secret that Tony was having a fling with Caitlin, the Aussie military intelligence operator currently sitting to his right. She’d more than proved her worth, but Danny didn’t like it. It wasn’t the fact that Tony was a married man that bugged him – what Tony did on his own time was none of Danny’s concern. But having two members of the unit shagging each other was a liability. Their minds would be on something else, when they
should
be on the job in hand.

And then there was Spud. He and Tony had hated each other since the day they met. While Spud had been temporarily invalided out of the Regiment in the wake of a disastrous foray into the deserts of northern Yemen, it hadn’t been a problem. But Spud had, against all the odds, regained his fitness and shown his mettle. Now he was under the command of the man he loathed the most.

Spud had his eyes closed as he sat against the webbing-clad side wall of the Wildcat. Tony was staring at him with a cold expression, like he was sizing him up. Danny had seen that look on Tony’s face before. He had a bad feeling about the next few hours.

Danny had warned their ops officer, Ray Hammond, before they’d left base. ‘It’s a bad call, boss. Tony doesn’t have the respect.’ Danny wasn’t about to grass anybody up, but surely Hammond had heard enough of the whispers about Tony Wiseman – that his loyalty to the Regiment came a distant second to his lucrative contacts in organised crime. Spud’s jibe had been bang on. And everyone had seen Tony’s wife Frances around Hereford, with a split lip and a shiner on her left eye that she insisted had come from falling down the stairs.

‘Just do your job, Black,’ Hammond had said. ‘And be thankful you’ve got one. There’s more than one spook in Whitehall gunning for you. They look after their own. Take my advice and keep your head down.’

So Danny was doing just that.

It was grimy and noisy in the Wildcat. The flight crew had given them headsets but none of the unit were wearing them. Caitlin pulled out some A4 photographs from her bergen and handed them around, two for each person. Danny studied the pictures for what felt like the hundredth time in the last twenty-four hours.

The two photographs showed two different individuals. Danny knew that they were both Iraqi, although one of them had much darker skin than the other. The photograph showed this guy walking out from behind an open-topped technical, with the rubble of a demolished city building in the background. He was obviously very tall – maybe six foot six – and he had an AK-47 strapped to his chest.

The man in the second photograph looked very different. Shorter, for a start, and with a piebald white patch on his face, as though he had been burned as a kid. He also carried a rifle, but his surroundings were not urban. He was standing in front of an ancient desert ruin. Danny didn’t know what it was, but he did know it was unlikely still to be standing, given IS’s liking for blowing up anything of cultural importance in the badlands of Syria and Iraq.

‘Fucking muppet,’ Tony shouted over the noise of the chopper, holding his picture of the piebald militant in the air. ‘Face like a robber’s dog, too. They might as well send us a link to their fucking Facebook page.’

Danny didn’t allow himself to show that he agreed with Tony. He examined the pictures again, ensuring that he’d committed them to memory. Because in approximately three hours, he’d need to identify these men in the flesh.

‘Their names are Mahmod and Kasim,’ the ops officer had told them in the briefing room back in Hereford. ‘Codenamed Santa and Rudolph. Monsters of our own making.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Danny.

‘They both lost their parents during the Allied invasion of Iraq. Prime recruits for IS, but unknown to MI6 until the last couple of days. The Firm intercepted an NSA intelligence briefing about them which the Yanks have forgotten to share with us.’

‘Friends like that,’ muttered Spud, ‘who needs enemies?’

‘Quite. Seems like the CIA have evidence these two cunts are on their way to the UK. They’re using a migrant boat as cover. It means they can get into Europe without the need for a passport. Just two more faces out of thousands. Nobody’s going to ask any questions. The Yanks seem to think Santa and Rudolph might have terrorist intentions on UK soil, so why they haven’t shared this with us is anyone’s guess. Bottom line is, the Americans mustn’t know that we’re going after these suspects, because then they’ll realise we’re intercepting their intel. You’ll forward-mount from the Italian section of Sigonella base, not the American section, and the ship’s captain of HMS
Enterprise
has instructions to keep all non-essential crew below decks when the time comes – we don’t want any loose tongues. We have local eyes on the ground in Libya that tell us the migrant boat is called the
Ocean Star
, and it will be setting sail from the north African coast at approximately midday tomorrow, heading for the southern tip of Greece. You can expect to RV with the ship approximately 200 nautical miles from the Sicilian coast. You’re looking at about 100 personnel on the
Ocean Star
, all told. We’ll be monitoring the currents and the sea state, so HMS
Enterprise
should have no trouble intercepting it. We’re aiming for a midnight boarding. There’s a Marine unit on board the ship. They’ll surround the
Ocean Star
and offer fire support if you need it. You need to board the
Ocean Star
, bring it alongside HMS
Enterprise
, cross-deck the migrants, identify the targets, get the migrants back on board and transport Santa and Rudolph to an interrogation centre for questioning.’

‘Why not just drop us into Libya?’ Spud had interrupted. ‘We can pick the fuckers up before they set sail, instead of mucking around in the dark on a moving platform.’ Danny had wanted to ask the same question. Was there was something about these instructions that didn’t add up?

‘Why not just keep your mouth shut and listen to your orders? Once you’ve isolated the targets, you’ll await further instructions on the ship regarding transporting them to the interrogation centre. OK, you’re dismissed. Tony, hang back a second. I need a word.’

None of the others had heard what Hammond had told Tony. Maybe he’d been warning the unit leader not to be an asshole. If so, he’d be wasting his breath.

‘Fifteen minutes out!’ the co-pilot shouted from the cockpit.

Spud opened his eyes. Danny leaned forward and unfastened the flight case that they’d carried on to the Wildcat. It contained their hardware: HK416s for the guys, and Caitlin’s signature, harder-hitting HK417. Sig 225s, holstered up, for each of them. Their extra rounds were already stashed in their black ops waistcoats, along with their flashbang grenades and med kits. This was apparently a straightforward op – they were unlikely to put down a single round – but as Danny clipped on his Kevlar helmet and boom mike, he started mentally preparing himself for the job anyway. If he’d learned one thing during his time in the Regiment, it was that things often failed to go exactly as you planned. Now was the time to put aside any tension between them. They needed to work as a single unit, not as a collection of egos.

Danny sensed the others putting their heads in a similar place as they checked over their weapons and strapped them to their bodies. The Wildcat banked sharply. From the side window, Danny saw the lights of a naval ship glowing below them in the night. He felt a little surge in his stomach. He might be hundreds of miles from his baby daughter, the unit might be at each other’s throats – but there was a buzz of excitement that preceded every op, and it was almost impossible to stamp it out. It was why you did the job in the first place.

The chopper lost height. A minute later, it was setting down on the landing deck of the ship. Proximity to the LZ made Danny realise how hard the wind was blowing – the helicopter was shaking badly as the landing gear connected with the ship. As soon as they had the thumbs-up from the co-pilot, however, the unit jumped out on to the deck and ran, shoulders bowed, away from the fierce downdraught of the rotors. Danny’s ears were filled with the roar of the sea and the vast hum of the ship’s engines. He felt salty spray stinging his face. The rough seas weren’t a problem for the
Enterprise
, but anyone out there on a smaller vessel would be having a difficult time of it.