Masters of War
Authors: Chris Ryan
Also by Chris Ryan
Non-fiction
The One That Got Away
Chris Ryan’s SAS Fitness Book
Chris Ryan’s Ultimate Survival Guide
Fight to Win
Fiction
Stand By, Stand By
Zero Option
The Kremlin Device
Tenth Man Down
Hit List
The Watchman
Land of Fire
Greed
The Increment
Blackout
Ultimate Weapon
Strike Back
Firefight
Who Dares Wins
The Kill Zone
Killing for the Company
Osama
Chris Ryan Extreme: Hard Target
Mission 1: Redeemer
Mission 2: The Rock
Mission 3: Die Trying
Mission 4: Fallout
Chris Ryan Extreme: Night Strike
Mission 1: Avenger
Mission 2: Armed and Dangerous
Mission 3: The Enemy
Mission 4: Lone Wolf
Chris Ryan Extreme: Most Wanted
Mission 1: Protector
Mission 2: The Specialist
Mission 3: Hard to Kill
Mission 4: The Feared
Masters of War
Chris Ryan
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Coronet
An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
4
Copyright © Chris Ryan 2013
The right of Chris Ryan 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 1 444 70993 3
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
Author’s note
On Thursday, 31 January 1991, a week after the ill-fated Bravo Two Zero patrol had been compromised, I crossed the Iraqi border into Syria. I was the only member of the unit to escape capture alive, but I was in a bad way. I’d been on the run for seven days and nights. I hadn’t eaten for six days, or drunk any water for three. My toenails had fallen off and my blistered feet had become infected and were oozing pus. I’d been exposed to nuclear waste and I was hallucinating. But at least, here in Syria, I was safe.
Or so I thought.
The first Syrian people I encountered were villagers living so simply that they were cooking breakfast on a fire outside their little house of whitewashed stone. They gave me cool water. Without their kindness I doubt I could have survived much longer.
We did not speak each other’s language, but I managed to make them understand that I needed to get to the nearest town. A young man helped me get there, but in the hours that followed I saw a very different side to life in Syria. I had to escape an angry mob who seemed determined to kill me. I found myself in the custody of three low-ranking Syrian police officers who performed a mock execution on me. Having covered about two hundred miles on foot in Iraq, I crossed most of Syria by car before reaching the capital, Damascus. There I ended up in the headquarters of the feared
Mukhabarat
secret police. The very name was enough to terrify the ordinary citizens of Syria, as the
Mukhabarat
’s tortures were notoriously cruel and they had a nasty habit of ‘disappearing’ anyone who displeased them.
Syria was a complex, dangerous place for me back in 1991. But now, more than twenty years on, one thing strikes me: it was not nearly so dangerous then as it is now. I got out alive. Tens of thousands of victims of the present Syrian civil war haven’t been so lucky.
The story that follows is drawn from experience, and from first-hand knowledge of a country which, as I write these words, has become one of the most dangerous and war-torn places on earth. Some of it might make uncomfortable reading. I make no apology for that. Conflict is not a glamorous business. It’s ugly and violent, and those who suffer the worst are not the politicians, for whom death tolls are little more than statistics. They are the ordinary people, stuck in the middle, and the soldiers sent to do the bidding of the masters of war.
Chris Ryan
London, 2013
In time of war, when truth is so precious, it must be attended by a bodyguard of lies.
Winston Churchill
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
The maternity ward, the Ulster Hospital, Dundonald, Northern Ireland. 1989.
If Susan Black had not been quite so brave, she might have got away with it. But bravery is always a gamble. You never know how it will turn out.
She lay in a hospital bed, propped up by pillows, her pale face exhausted. It was a plain room, about ten metres by ten, basic but not unpleasant. There was a blood-pressure machine to Susan’s right and, on the wall behind the bedside table on her left, a laminated poster. It showed a suckling baby and stated: ‘Breast is Best.’ At the end of the bed was an empty cot. Susan softly hummed ‘Rock-a-bye Baby’ as she cradled her warmly wrapped newborn in the crook of her right arm. The little boy’s few wisps of hair were matted with dried amniotic fluid. It was a bright spring morning, and the smell of newly mown grass wafted in through the open ground-floor window, where a lazy bee buzzed a counterpoint to Susan’s humming. She looked over to the corner of the hospital room. Her husband Simon was there, cross-legged on the floor with their eldest, Kyle. The five-year-old was colouring – the excitement of his baby brother’s arrival had already worn off, and Simon was doing what he could to keep the boy occupied.
Susan loved looking at her family. It gave her hope. Kyle had inherited her reddish-blond hair and his father’s grey eyes. A perfect mixture of Irish and British. She had no time for the sectarian rubbish that had surrounded her all her life. Never had, and nor had her family. She’d met Simon at New Forge rugby club, where he’d played for the RUC, and hadn’t thought twice about making eyes at him. The Troubles were for other people. Sure, if she walked along the wrong side of the Falls Road she could, having married a member of the British Army, expect some insults she wouldn’t want her children to hear. But living in Aldershot, as she now did, that stuff was just a memory. She had only come back to the Province for a quick visit with her parents – and of course with Simon himself, in the middle of his second six-month tour of duty with the Parachute Regiment – before the baby arrived. But the baby had decided to put in an early appearance.
Susan had expected to give birth in England, without the support of her husband. But sometimes, she thought to herself, things work out for the best. She hugged the bundle in her arms a little harder as Kyle bossily told his dad which crayon to use to colour in his He-Man and Skeletor picture. There weren’t many people who could boss Simon Black around, but their lad was one of them.
Simon seemed distracted, though. Worried. There were frown lines on his face and he was absent-mindedly sparking the Zippo lighter carved with his initials that she’d bought him for Christmas – a clear sign that he was on edge. In a corner of her mind Susan supposed that she should be anxious about this. Why was he not more excited about the arrival of their baby? But the pethidine the doctors had given her hadn’t yet worn off, and she had other things to occupy her, like the precious, fragile beauty of the child in her arms.
She caught her husband looking at her. ‘You want some water?’ he asked.
Susan gave him a smile and nodded. She wasn’t really thirsty, but she knew how Simon hated having nothing to do. He walked over to her bedside table, where there was a jug of water and a glass. As he stretched out his right arm to lift the jug she watched his muscles flex and caught sight of the tattoo on the underside of his forearm. The motto of the Parachute Regiment, in Gothic letters:
Utrinque Paratus
. Ready for Anything. She always joked that he needed to be, having got together with a good Catholic girl like her.
He
always joked back that there was nothing Catholic about her once the lights were out.
A clinking sound as jug touched glass. Scribbling from the corner of the room. And, as Simon handed her the water and took the baby from her so she could drink, the sound of the door opening.
‘Nurses can’t keep away, can they?’ Simon said, his Newcastle accent very soft. ‘It’s because he’s got his ma’s good looks, eh? Better hope he’s got her brains, and all.’
He flashed a smile at Susan, but then frowned as he saw the look on her face. Still holding the baby, he spun round.
He’d been expecting to see a nurse or a midwife. They’d been in and out of the room ever since the baby had been born. This newcomer was dressed in the standard green scrubs of a hospital orderly. Unlike a hospital orderly, however, he wore a black balaclava and tan leather gloves and brandished an evil-looking handgun with a cylindrical suppressor fitted to the barrel.