Dark Forces
Also by Stephen Leather
Pay Off
The Fireman
Hungry Ghost
The Chinaman
The Vets
The Long Shot
The Birthday Girl
The Double Tap
The Solitary Man
The Tunnel Rats
The Bombmaker
The Stretch
Tango One
The Eyewitness
First Response
Spider Shepherd thrillers
Hard Landing
Soft Target
Cold Kill
Hot Blood
Dead Men
Live Fire
Rough Justice
Fair Game
False Friends
True Colours
White Lies
Black Ops
Jack Nightingale supernatural thrillers
Nightfall
Midnight
Nightmare
Nightshade
Lastnight
Stephen Leather is one of the UK’s most successful thriller writers. He was previously a journalist on newspapers including
The Times
and the
South China Morning Post
and his bestsellers have been translated into fifteen languages.
Find out more at
www.stephenleather.com
.
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Stephen Leather, 2016
The right of Stephen Leather to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 473 60408 7
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
For Sam
Contents
T
he man’s name was Mohammed al-Hussain, a common enough name in Syria. But the Mohammed al-Hussain lying prone on the roof of the two-storey building was no ordinary man. He was a sniper, one of the best in the world. He had 256 kills to his credit, each one meticulously recorded in the small cloth-bound notebook he kept in his back pocket. Each entry detailed the nature of the target, the location and the distance. Almost all of his kills were Syrian government soldiers.
He was twenty-two years old, his skin the colour of weak coffee with plenty of milk. He had soft brown eyes that belonged more to a lovesick spaniel than the tried and tested assassin he was. His beard was long and bushy but his nails were neatly clipped and glistened as if they had been varnished. Around his head was a knotted black scarf with the white insignia of Islamic State, the caliphate that claimed authority over all Muslims around the world. His weapon was lying on a sandbag.
When he had first started sniping, he had used a Russian-made Dragunov SVD rifle, accurate up to six hundred metres. It was a lightweight and reliable weapon, capable of semi-automatic fire and equipped with a ten-round magazine. Most of his kills back then had been at around two hundred metres. His commander had spotted his skill with the weapon and had recommended him for specialist training. He was pulled off the front line and spent four weeks in the desert at a remote training camp.
There, he was introduced to the British L115A3 sniper rifle. It was the weapon of choice for snipers in the British SAS and the American Delta Force, and it hadn’t taken al-Hussain long to appreciate its advantages. It had been designed by Olympic target shooters and fired an 8.59mm round, the extra weight resulting in less deflection over long ranges. In fact, in the right hands the L115A3 could hit a human-sized target at 1,400 metres, and even at that distance the round would do more damage than a magnum bullet at close range.
The L115A3 was fitted with a suppressor to cut down the flash and noise it made. No one killed by a bullet from his L115A3 ever heard it coming. It was the perfect rifle for carrying around – it weighed less than seven kilograms and had a folding stock so it could easily be slid into a backpack.
It had an adjustable cheek-piece so that the marksman’s eye could be comfortably aligned with the Schmidt & Bender 25 × magnification scope. Al-Hussain put his eye to it now and made a slight adjustment to the focus. His target was a house just over a thousand metres away. It was home to the mother of a colonel in the Syrian Army, and today was her birthday. The colonel was a good son and, at just after eight o’clock, had arrived at the house to have breakfast with his mother. Fifteen minutes later, al-Hussain had taken up position on the roof. The colonel was a prime target and had been for the best part of a year.
The L115A3 cost thirty-five thousand dollars in the United States but more than double that in the Middle East. The Islamic State was careful who it gave the weapons to, but al-Hussain was an obvious choice. His notepad confirmed the benefits of using the British rifle. His kills went from an average of close to two hundred metres with the Dragunov to more than eight hundred. His kill rate increased too. With the Dragunov he averaged three kills a day on active service. With the L115A3, more often than not he recorded at least five. The magazine held only five shells but that was enough. Firing more than two shots in succession was likely to lead to his location being pinpointed. One was best. One shot, one kill. Then wait at least a few minutes before firing again. But al-Hussain wasn’t planning on shooting more than once. There were two SUVs outside the mother’s house and the soldiers had formed a perimeter around the building but the only target the sniper was interested in was the colonel.
‘Are we good to go?’ asked the man to the sniper’s right. He was Asian, bearded, with a crooked hooked nose, and spoke with an English accent. He was one of thousands of foreign jihadists who had crossed the border into Syria to fight alongside Islamic State. The other man, the one to the sniper’s left, was an Iraqi, darker-skinned and wearing glasses.
Al-Hussain spoke good English. His parents had sent him to one of the best schools in Damascus, the International School of Choueifat. The school had an indoor heated pool, a gymnasium, a grass football pitch, a 400-metre athletics track, basketball and tennis courts. Al-Hussain had been an able pupil and had made full use of the school’s sporting facilities.
Everything had changed when he had turned seventeen. Teenagers who had painted revolutionary slogans on a school wall had been arrested and tortured in the southern city of Deraa and thousands of people took to the streets to protest. The Syrian Army reacted by shooting the unarmed protesters, and by the summer of 2011 the protests had spread across the country. Al-Hussain had seen, first hand, the brutality of the government response. He saw his fellow students take up arms to defend themselves and at first he resisted, believing that peaceful protests would succeed eventually. He was wrong. The protests escalated and the country descended into civil war. What had been touted as an Arab Spring became a violent struggle as rebel brigades laid siege to government-controlled cities and towns, determined to end the reign of President Assad.
By the summer of 2013 more than a hundred thousand people had been killed and fighting had reached the capital, Damascus. In August of that year the Syrian government had killed hundreds of people on the outskirts of Damascus when they launched rockets filled with the nerve gas Sarin.
Al-Hussain’s parents decided they had had enough. They closed their house in Mezze and fled to Lebanon with their two daughters, begging Mohammed to go with them. He refused, telling them he had to stay and fight for his country. As his family fled, al-Hussain began killing with a vengeance. He knew that the struggle was no longer just about removing President Assad. It was a full-blown war in which there could be only one victor.
Syria had been run by the president’s Shia Alawite sect, but the country’s Sunni majority had been the underdogs for a long time and wanted nothing less than complete control. Russia and Iran wanted President Assad to continue running the country, as did Lebanon. Together they poured billions of dollars into supporting the regime, while the US, the UK and France, along with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the rest of the Arab states, supported the Sunni-dominated opposition.
After the nerve gas attack, al-Hussain’s unit switched their allegiance to Islamic State, which had been formed from the rump of al-Qaeda’s operations in Iraq. Led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Islamic State had attracted thousands of foreign jihadists, lured by its promise to create an Islamic emirate from large chunks of Syria and Iraq. Islamic State grew quickly, funded in part by captured oilfields, taking first the provincial Syrian city of Raqqa and the Sunni city of Fallujah, in the western Iraqi province of Anbar.
As Islamic State grew, Mohammed al-Hussain was given ever more strategic targets. He was known as the sniper who never missed, and his notebook was filled with the names of high-ranking Syrian officers and politicians.
‘He’s coming out,’ said the Brit, but al-Hussain had already seen the front door open. The soldiers outside started moving, scanning the area for potential threats. Al-Hussain put his eye to the scope and began to control his breathing. Slow and even. There was ten feet between the door and the colonel’s SUV. A couple of seconds. More than enough time for an expert sniper like al-Hussain.
A figure appeared at the doorway and al-Hussain held his breath. His finger tightened on the trigger. It was important to squeeze, not pull. He saw a headscarf. The mother. He started breathing again, but slowly and tidally. She had her head against the colonel’s chest. He was hugging her. The door opened wider. She stepped back. He saw the green of the colonel’s uniform. He held his breath. Tightened his finger.
The phone in the breast pocket of his jacket buzzed. Al-Hussain leapt to his feet, clasped the rifle to his chest and headed across the roof. The two spotters looked up at him, their mouths open. ‘Run!’ he shouted, but they stayed where they were. He didn’t shout again. He concentrated on running at full speed to the stairwell. He reached the top and hurtled down the stone stairs. Just as he reached the ground floor a 45-kilogram Hellfire missile hit the roof at just under a thousand miles an hour.
Dan ‘Spider’ Shepherd stared at the screen. All he could see was whirling brown dust where once there had been a two-storey building. ‘Did we get them all?’ he asked.
Two airmen were sitting in front of him in high-backed beige leather chairs. They had control panels and joysticks in front of them and between them was a panel with two white telephones.