Hellfire (19 page)

Jesus, Spud thought. Was she flirting with him? He almost replied. He
almost
told her that if he could withstand a 36-hour resistance-to-interrogation training session, or dig in to a jungle ditch for a week on hard rations and nothing but a plastic bag to shit in, or endure the worst excess of the Syrian
mukhabarat
, a night in a warm London office sifting through dry old intelligence papers was unlikely to tax him unduly. But he didn’t. What would be the point? Eleanor had made her decision about him, and that wasn’t going to change in a hurry.

‘I’ll fetch us some coffee, shall I,’ she said brightly, ‘and then I’ll order up the relevant information. Make yourself comfortable, Spud. I think you’ll learn a lot tonight, about the way the world
really
works.’

She smiled at him, scraped her chair back and left the room. Spud walked over to the table and looked again at the picture on the file. Kalifa al-Meghrani looked back. Was she right, he wondered. Was Spud just assuming the worst about this guy because of the way he looked?

He didn’t think so. Spud didn’t care about his nationality or the colour of his skin. He didn’t care if he was white, black, brown or fucking purple. Experience had taught him that it was a very good idea to mistrust everyone.

And he knew this: a man who hurled abuse like that at a copper needed a few questions asking of him, and Spud would be more than happy to be the question master.

Twelve

21.00 hrs, African Standard Time.

Nightfall. The air was heavy again. More rain was on its way.

Danny was alone, lying on his front, on the western side of the road that ran through Chikunda. The ETA for their pick-up was 05.00 hrs. Eight hours from now. Ordinarily they would have moved away from the village and hidden elsewhere, in case more militants turned up. But Ripley couldn’t be moved, and Danny sure as hell wasn’t going to leave him.

He was facing the compound where his mate was holed up, and was positioned about thirty metres from the entrance, camouflaged by a patch of scrubby vegetation. His weapon was engaged, and he was surveying the entrance through the sight clipped to the top of his rifle. Caitlin had headed off to watch the road to the north. Tony was i/c the vehicle, along with the prisoner. Jihadi Jim was in a shit state. He’d lost a lot of blood and it looked like infection was setting in to the wound. He was barely conscious. He needed medical treatment before they could interrogate him any further. No point asking a question of a man who can’t understand you. So Tony had taken him with him to the south of the village, where he could stay in the relative protection of the car. Tony himself had opened up the back of the vehicle, put the rear seats down and set up the .50 sniper rifle, so it was pointing out of the boot towards the road. That meant he could warn the unit of any movement into the village from that direction, and deal with it if necessary.

So far there was nothing. It seemed like everyone was avoiding this tiny, out-of-the-way village. Maybe this part of the world was always this quiet. Or maybe people were scared to come here.

A voice came over Danny’s earpiece. Ripley. Or at least, a washed-out version of him. His voice was thin and weak, but strangely matter-of-fact: ‘
I’ve got shivers . . . cramp in my lower abdomen.
’

There had been no movement from Ripley’s compound, at least not for the past three hours. At about 18.00 he had appeared at the open gate. Danny had watched him carefully through his viewfinder. His mate looked terrible. He had removed the hazmat hood. There were streaks where sweat had run down his dirty face. His eyes looked bloodshot. His lips were dry and cracked. As he stood there, looking out, there was a kind of desperation in his expression. Danny remembered what Tony had said.
He’ll try to make a run for it, you know . . . He’s all fucking noble now, but there’ll come a point when he’s not thinking straight. He won’t want to just sit there and take what’s coming to him . . .
For a moment, Danny thought Ripley was going to prove Tony right, and with a tight ball of heat in his chest he was ready to squeeze his trigger finger if that happened. But it didn’t. Ripley had replaced the hood and disappeared back into the compound.

Danny hadn’t seen him since. But he’d heard him. Irregular updates, dispassionately reported over his headset, like he was a doctor reporting objectively on a patient.

‘
My eyes are burning . . .
’

‘
My temperature’s rising . . .
’

‘
I can feel fluid on my chest . . .
’

Danny knew what his friend was doing: trying to give them as much information as possible for the medics when they arrived. Frustration bubbled under his skin. Somewhere, not far away, a Chinese man knew something about a weaponised strain of plague. Danny recalled learning about plague in school. The Black Death – contagious, virulent, responsible for the death of millions. Whoever it was who thought playing with this virus was a good idea needed to be stopped. But all Danny and the unit could do was hole up, hunker down and wait.

And wait.

21.45. The rain arrived, heavy and brutal. Danny was soaked in seconds, but he didn’t change his position. Just after 22.00 hrs Ripley appeared again. It was hard to make him out in any detail through the darkness and the rain, but Danny could tell he had deteriorated. He collapsed to his knees in the gateway to the compound, clutched his head in his hands.

His voice came over the radio, cracked and indistinct. ‘
I fucking shat myself . . .
’

Danny himself felt sick. As Ripley staggered back into the compound, he felt anger burning in his stomach. He wanted to get to the vehicle, slap their prisoner into consciousness and pump him for information, to find out who was behind this. But they had their orders from Hereford. Stay in position. Keep Ripley isolated. Wait for the team from Porton Down.

05.00 hrs seemed a very long way off. Danny wondered how the team from the government’s high-security military science park would get here. His money was on a military aircraft taking the team as far as an aircraft carrier somewhere in the Atlantic, then a long-range stealth chopper bringing them into Nigerian airspace. He told himself that if anyone could sort Ripley out, it was them. But they needed to get here quickly. His mate was going downhill, fast.

The rain seemed to seep into his bones as his earpiece crackled. Caitlin’s voice: ‘
Vehicle heading in from the north.
’

Danny gave it moment’s thought. ‘Let it pass through,’ he said. ‘If it stops in the village, I’ll deal with it.’

‘Roger that.’

Sixty seconds later, bright headlights burned through the rain along the road to Danny’s left. Distance, three hundred metres, but approaching fast. Twenty seconds later, a beat-up old saloon car sped just ten metres past Danny’s covert position in a cloud of spray. Muddy water sluiced over the SAS man, but the car didn’t stop. White headlamps turned to red rear lights. Danny spoke into his radio. ‘All clear from my position. Let us know when it’s passed to the south.’

Two minutes later, Tony’s voice: ‘
All clear.
’

Chikunda was dark again, and the only sound was the hammering of the rain. Danny shivered. He realised his temperature must be dropping, but he couldn’t move or get protection from the rain. He needed to keep eyes on the compound.

Sudden movement. Ripley’s dark silhouette appeared at the compound gateway. His shoulders seemed hunched, and his head looked from left to right. He took several steps forward. He was limping.

‘Shit,’ Danny breathed. His trigger finger suddenly felt very heavy. Ripley was five metres out of the compound, and he was looking round, clumsily. It was clear to Danny that his mate’s head wasn’t in the right place. No Regiment man’s movement was as leaden as that.

I’ll do it if you don’t want to. We can say he tried to escape . . .

Danny stood up. Rain dripped from his clothes and hair. ‘Ripley!’ he shouted.

Ripley stopped. There was twenty-five metres between them. Danny raised his weapon and eyed his mate through the scope. He switched on his Surefire torch.

Jesus.

Ripley had winced sharply, but was now looking directly towards the light. He’d removed his hazmat hood again. Danny could see why: there was dark staining round his mouth where he’d been coughing up blood, and maybe vomit. There were sores over his face. He was clutching his chest, as though worried his lungs might spill out. He was shivering badly, and Danny could tell he was in pain.

‘There’s medics on their way, mucker. They’ll sort you out . . .’

As he said these words, he heard his voice falter. At the rate Ripley was going downhill, God only knew what state he’d be in by the time the Porton Down contingent arrived. And it was suddenly clear to Danny that Ripley knew this too. He spoke into the radio in a weak voice that was all but drowned out by the persistent rain.

‘
Make me a promise
,’ he said. He didn’t wait for a reply. ‘
Find the fucker who did this to me, Danny . . . just find the fucker who did this.
’

Danny nodded. Then he shouted, ‘You’re going to beat it!’ But Ripley had already turned. He was limping back to the compound. A metre from the door he suddenly bent double and Danny could hear the sound of a barking cough. It lasted for thirty seconds, before Ripley made it back through the gate.

Danny stood alone in the bleak rain of the Nigerian night. He asked himself how much longer Ripley had. It couldn’t be more than a few hours. He returned to his OP, trained his weapon on the compound once more, and continued his miserable surveillance.

There was no let-up in the rain. And so, when the chopper arrived at 04.38 the following morning, it was camouflaged by the darkness and the noise. Only when it was hovering twenty metres above the main road, about fifty feet north of Danny’s position, did he see or hear it: a black shadow in the sky, flying blind without any lights.

Danny got on the radio. ‘The bird’s coming in to land. Hold your positions until you hear from me.’

Two sets of double pressel clicks told Danny his message had been understood. Nothing from Ripley. There had been no sound from him since 22.00.

Danny rose from his lying position. His joints ached, and he had to force them into movement. He kept one eye on the compound gate as the heli touched down in the middle of the road. He’d been right. He could tell by the pointed, angular shape of the aircraft’s chassis that it was a stealth Black Hawk, designed to be almost silent and to cause minimal radar splash. The rotors continued to spin as the aircraft touched down. Only when it was on the ground did the chopper’s side door open – it needed to remain closed during flight for full stealth capability. From his vantage point Danny saw shadows spilling out of the aircraft. Hard to say how many – somewhere between five and ten, some of them carrying what looked like heavy flight cases. They were out of the aircraft in less than a minute. The helicopter immediately rose into the air again, banked steeply and silently, and then flew off to the west.

Danny crouched down again and examined the figures through his scope, hoping to make some kind of positive ID before he approached them. They were standing in a huddle by the side of the road. It took a moment to get his vision straight through the rain haze. There were four people in white hazmat suits, their heads and bodies completely enclosed. Accompanying them were four soldiers in desert camo gear. Danny saw the red flash of 1 Para on one of their arms, and recognised an M16 assault rifle that the Paras would certainly be carrying.

That was enough. He pushed himself up to his feet and ran towards the newcomers. No time or need for introductions. When he was fifteen metres away from them, Danny pointed towards the compound. ‘He’s in there,’ he shouted. ‘He’s in a bad way. Move!’

It started to get light at 05.10 hrs. On Danny’s instruction, the Para unit had already headed off to take up positions around the village to relieve Tony and Caitlin. Their orders: to stop anyone entering the village by road. The situation was highly volatile. Boko Haram militants could return at any moment. Random civilians could stray into the village. Whatever happened, they had to keep anyone and everyone away from the isolation zone. Now Caitlin was crouched down in the firing position by the external wall of the compound, ready to target anyone who tried to approach. Tony was guarding their prisoner in the Range Rover, which he’d parked up in the shadow of Block West. Danny was twenty metres from the compound entrance, keeping eyes on the Porton Down team’s activities.

The lab team had been on the ground for thirty minutes. They hadn’t wasted a second. Fully protected by their hazmat suits, they had entered the compound where Ripley had been isolated. From his vantage point, Danny could now see that they had erected a tent just inside the compound. He understood that it would serve as a makeshift field hospital, and also as a lab.

The rain had stopped, and as the sun rose steam hissed from the vegetation, and also from Danny’s wet clothes. One of the white-suited medics appeared at the gate. He was carrying a package, which he laid on the ground, before gesturing at Danny to approach. He did so. The package was a sterile hazmat suit. Danny ripped it open and pulled the white suit – which included integrated rubber boot fittings – over his damp gear. He covered his hands with elasticated gloves. He lowered the rebreathing mask over his head and strapped the small air canister to his back. Only when he was fully protected did he move into the compound, his breath heavy and hot inside the confines of his rebreather.