Bad Soldier

Book 4: Danny Black

by Chris Ryan

Genres: War & Military; Spy Thrillers

Synopsis

A migrant boat battles through the rough Mediterranean. Its passengers are desperate, starving and scared.

They are also being ruthlessly targeted by the SAS.

Islamic State militants are smuggling themselves into Europe using these boats. Only by locating such men before they make it into the UK can the Regiment stop them committing their acts of terror on British soil.

When one of these migrants reveals plans for a sickening Christmas Day atrocity in London, SAS operative Danny Black is tasked with infiltrating the most dangerous theatre of war in the world: Islamic State heartland. There, he and his team must lift a brutal IS commander - the only man who knows all the details of the London attack. The commander surrounds himself with vicious militants and a harem of sex slaves whom he treats in the most sadistic ways imaginable. And his jihadi wife is, if possible, even more abominable than him.

As Danny pits himself against the violent thugs of the Islamic State, he learns that it is not just the UK that is under threat. His very presence on the mission has put at risk the safety of those closest to him. And he discovers that there are greater forces at work here, who do not care if the innocent live or die.

Now there is nothing Danny will not do, no line he will not cross, to protect his family. Whether that makes him a good soldier or a bad soldier he neither knows nor cares. Because as he is fast learning, it is sometimes impossible to tell the difference between the two.

And as every SAS soldier is trained to understand, the worst threats often come from the most unexpected places...

Release date: August 25, 2016

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 400

Sample

Prologue

Her people called themselves the Yazidi. Her captors called her a devil-worshipper. But really she was just a young girl.

Baba was sixteen and she had forgotten what it felt like not to be scared.

When the news had come that the fighters from Islamic State had surrounded her village in the shadow of Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq, the women started to scream, because they knew what it meant for their daughters. Baba’s own mother did not survive the attack. Nor did her father. But they lived long enough to see what happened to their girls. In the one main room of their tiny house, the fighters had forced Baba’s parents to their knees at gunpoint, then made the old couple watch as they beat and raped Baba’s two younger sisters. They were twelve and fourteen.

The details of that afternoon would haunt Baba as long as she lived. She would remember the pitiful screaming of her mother and father, which the fighters turned into a muted whimpering by thrashing them hard round the side of their heads with the butts of their assault rifles, until they bled profusely. She would always remember her mother begging them to take her instead of the girls, and the way the fighters laughed and said they would rather plant themselves in a pig than in her wrinkled old body. She would remember one of them calmly explaining that, since Baba’s family practised a religion other than Islam, the Qu’ran allowed true believers to rape them. It would draw the fighters, he said, closer to God.

But most of all, Baba would remember her sisters. They were too frightened to scream, and too young to understand what was happening as the men bound their arms and gagged them, before prostrating themselves in prayer and then . . .

Baba tried not to picture what they had done to them next.

Several times a night, Baba’s troubled sleep would be broken by the memory of the two gunshots that had killed her parents in front of their daughters. Each time she relived it, it felt as if the bullets had gone through Baba herself. And the image of her sisters being dragged, semi-clothed, out of the house with one last, tearful, uncomprehending look at Baba, was fixed in her mind.

‘Please . . .’ she had begged the one fighter who remained in the room with her. ‘Please don’t take my sisters from me. They are only babies . . .’

The man had surveyed her calmly. He wore black clothes and had a bandolier of ammunition over his shoulder. His open shirt revealed a horrific scar across the width of his neck. It was the same shape as a smile. He stood close enough to Baba that she could smell the sweat on his body. He traced that scar with his forefinger.

‘You see this, devil girl?’ he had whispered. ‘This was given to me by an American soldier. He tried to cut my throat. I bled like a slaughtered goat, but I did not die. Allah protects those who do his work. Remember that, if you are thinking of doing anything stupid.’

‘Please,’ Baba had whispered in reply. ‘My sisters . . .’

‘Your sisters are to be given to my men,’ the fighter had replied. ‘They deserve it.’

‘They are only children.’

‘Infidel children. Each time my men have them, it will be ibadah . . . worship.’ He stretched out one hand and caressed Baba’s cheek. ‘But for you, my pretty thing, greater honours await.’

The man with the throat scar had bound Baba’s wrists behind her back and shoved a rag into her mouth to keep her quiet. Then he had forced her, at gunpoint, out of the house. Baba had looked desperately around, trying to find her younger sisters. They were nowhere to be seen. About twenty other men and women had been lined up in the shade of the acacia tree in the middle of the village, blindfolded and forced to their knees. Five fighters brandishing weapons were walking up and down the line, barking harsh obscenities at these people Baba had known all her life. Her best friend Parsa was there, and her uncle Labib. Baba had to avert her eyes when one of the fighters put his gun to Labib’s head. She didn’t see the gunshot that killed him, but she heard it.

The man with the throat scar threw her into the back of a vehicle. There were two other IS men in there. Before she knew what was happening, they were driving her out of the village where she had spent her entire life. Baba was numb. Too shocked to cry, too frightened to speak.

She didn’t know how long they drove for. Perhaps four hours. It was dark by the time they pulled off the main highway and stopped. Her throat burned with thirst and her eyes stung. The driver killed the engine. Silence. The car’s headlamps lit up the rough road ahead, but it seemed to Baba that they were in the middle of nowhere. She started to panic. Why had they stopped? Did these men want to do something so terrible to her that they needed to come far from civilisation to do it?

It was with a mixture of relief and dread that Baba saw a sudden burst of light. They were at some kind of checkpoint. The man with the throat scar opened the window. The guards clearly recognised him. They lowered their weapons and waved them on.

They came to a second checkpoint. It was in a high fence, with rolls of razor wire along the top. Again they were waved through. A minute later they stopped at a compound of buildings. They were by a body of water – maybe a reservoir.

The man with the throat scar pulled Baba from the car. She was dazzled by moving beams of torchlight, but still aware of there being many men in the compound – at least fifteen, all of them armed. Four or five of them had dogs on leashes: muscular, snarling beasts, straining to get at her. There was the occasional bark. Ferocious.

But not as ferocious as the men. They leered nastily at her. Baba could tell what they wanted.

‘She belongs to Dhul Faqar,’ the man with the throat scar shouted. That was enough to make them all step back, and disappear into the darkness, dragging their straining dogs with them.

Baba registered a little more about her surroundings. This was clearly a big compound. There were several buildings that she could see, and peeking up from behind one of them was the rim of a large white satellite dish. There were vehicles – open-topped trucks – all dusty and dented. Some of the buildings were covered with black graffiti, and there were a couple of flags hanging from them, showing the insignia of Islamic State.

Baba’s captor pulled her towards the nearest building. There were two more armed men guarding this door, and they grinned as Baba was dragged towards them.

Her captor stopped. ‘You are about to meet Dhul Faqar,’ he said. ‘If you look him straight in the eye, he will kill you.’

He didn’t explain any further, but just knocked three times on the door. It opened. He pushed Baba across the threshold.

The room was warm, dimly lit and smelled of cinnamon. It was richly furnished, with sofas, embroidered cushions and patterned rugs on the floor. A fire was burning. There were two people in here, a man and a woman. The man was short and stout, with a long black beard greying at the tips. He wore white robes and white socks with leather sandals. His head was covered with a red and white shemagh. He was sitting on a comfortable low chair, and was nursing a glass of mint tea. His face was expressionless as he turned to look at Baba. She quickly averted her eyes.

The woman sat at the back of the room, next to another door, which was painted blue. She was very beautiful, with long dark hair and almond eyes. But she looked out of place, because she was dressed in Western clothes. A laptop computer sat on a small, ornate table next to her, and her face glowed in the light from its screen. She was applying nail varnish and she glanced up at Baba as she entered. There was something in her expression that chilled Baba to the core.

‘Dhul Faqar,’ Baba’s captor said, bowing his head slightly. He was also avoiding eye contact.

‘Mujahid,’ the man replied. ‘What is this you’ve brought us?’

‘A gift. One of the Yazidi. I gave her sisters to my men, but I thought this one would please you.’

Dogs barked somewhere outside.

The woman walked up to Baba. Baba could smell her perfume, heavy and musky. It made her want to gag.

‘We can’t see her face properly,’ she whispered. With a rough yank, she pulled the rag from Baba’s mouth. Her long nails, glistened. Baba inhaled deeply, then tried to swallow, but her mouth was too dry and it hurt her throat.

The woman reached out her hand and brushed it against Baba’s cheek, in almost exactly the same way that the man called Mujahid had done back in the village. Baba noticed that she wore several large rings on her fingers. ‘She’s a pretty one,’ the woman purred. And when Baba yanked her face away from that horrible touch, she smiled. ‘Are you a virgin?’

The question caught Baba by surprise. She nodded warily.

‘You’ll enjoy breaking this one in, my love,’ the woman said. And she muttered, ‘To the glory of Allah.’

‘Get her cleaned up,’ Dhul Faqar said. ‘She stinks worse than a horse. Mujahid, you stay here. We have things to discuss.’

The woman turned. ‘Follow me,’ she said as she stepped towards the blue door at the far side of the room.

Mujahid pushed Baba in the same direction. She stumbled. The woman stopped and turned. When she saw that Baba had hesitated, she stepped back up to her again. Her eyes narrowed – she looked like she was sizing Baba up. With a sudden, brutal swipe, she hit Baba hard across her face. Baba gasped. The woman’s long nails were viciously sharp. Baba felt blood trickling down her stinging cheek, but could not wipe it away because her hands were still tied behind her back. The woman stepped close to her again. She touched Baba’s bleeding cheek, then showed her her fingertips. They were smeared with a mixture of deep-red blood and slightly lighter nail varnish. ‘You are nothing,’ she whispered. ‘You are less important to me than an insect. I wouldn’t think twice about treading on an insect, and I wouldn’t think twice about treading on you. Every second that you stay alive, it is only because Dhul Faqar allows it. You are his to do with as he wants. If you deny him anything, you’ll have me to answer to, and I’d rather see you dead. Do you understand?’

Baba managed to nod. When the woman continued across the room, she followed, only looking back over her shoulder when she heard the main door open again. She caught a quick glimpse of two more men. They were both unusually tall. One had very dark skin – he almost looked African, not Middle Eastern. The other had a milky patch of discoloured skin on the left-hand side of his face, as if he had been badly burned as a child. They were both averting their eyes from Dhul Faqar.

Baba didn’t dare look at these newcomers any longer. The woman had opened the blue door and was disappearing through it. Baba followed. She found herself in a much less comfortable room. It had a stone floor, bare brick walls and a further door on the far wall. There was no furniture. Just a dim light bulb hanging from a single cord in the low ceiling. Baba had a sudden vision of herself hanging from that cord.

The woman closed and locked the door behind them. ‘You will stay here,’ she told Baba. ‘You will be completely silent. If you disturb Dhul Faqar with your whimpering, I will cut out your tongue. If you don’t believe me, I invite you to put me to the test. Do you understand?’

Baba nodded.

The woman left the room. Baba heard the sound of a lock clicking, and knew that there was no way she could escape.

Her knees would not support her. She collapsed, a shivering, bleeding, sobbing, terrified mess. As she lay crouched on the floor, she relived the monstrous events of that day – her parents, and her poor, poor sisters. She longed to be close to them. To hug them. To tell them everything would be alright, and hear the same reassurance in return. But deep down, she knew it would not be alright. Nothing would be alright ever again . . .

She heard dogs sniffing and growling by the far door. They terrified her, so she crawled to the opposite end of the room, collapsing again right outside Dhul Faqar’s door.

Baba didn’t know how long she lay there, lost in that awful, waking nightmare. But gradually she became aware of voices on the other side of the door. She recognised Dhul Faqar, and Mujahid who had the scar on his throat. And although she couldn’t work out what they were saying, she could hear certain words.

‘Attack . . .’

She remembered how the IS fighters had attacked her own village that day. How they had killed people without seeming to think about it.

‘Terror . . .’

She remembered the terror in her sisters’ eyes. The way they had begged their rapists to stop, because it hurt so much.

‘Jihad . . .’

It was a word all the Yazidi knew well. She knew the story of how, when she was just three years old, four suicide bombers had killed nearly 800 Yazidis. People said it was the second deadliest jihadi attack after the planes that had flown into tall buildings in America.

The room started to spin. Baba’s exhaustion was catching up with her. She was desperate for a drink, but she dreaded asking that awful woman with the almond eyes.

‘British . . .’

She had heard that word before. She knew there was a country called Britain, far away. Or was it part of America? Baba wasn’t quite sure. Her face was throbbing badly. A curiously hopeful thought crossed her mind. Maybe, if the cut made her look ugly, Dhul Faqar would not touch her. But another thought followed quickly. It’s not your face he wants you for . . .

‘Westminster . . .’

The word meant nothing to Baba. She was hardly listening anyway. She started violently as she heard a key turn on the other side of the far door. Terrified, she lifted her head. The far door opened. The woman appeared. She looked calm, but somehow all the more terrifying for it.

‘What do you think you’re doing, devil girl?’ she demanded. ‘Eavesdropping?’

Baba shook her head. ‘No . . .’ she whispered. ‘I promise . . . I was just—’

But the woman was storming towards her. She bent down, grabbed a clump of Baba’s hair and pulled her harshly to her feet.

‘I wasn’t listening . . .’ Baba wailed. ‘I didn’t hear anything . . .’

But she was silenced by another hard slap across her cheek. ‘If you ever listen to things that do not concern you,’ the woman breathed, ‘I will throw you to the common soldiers, like your whore sisters. Do you understand?’

It was all Baba could do to nod.

The woman yanked her towards the open door. Baba didn’t – couldn’t – resist. But before she was dragged across the floor, she heard one more word from the adjoining room. Again, she had heard it before, but it meant very little to her.

The word was ‘Christmas’.

One

Sigonella NATO base, Sicily. Dusk.

The snow-capped peak of Mount Etna was lost in the dark clouds that boiled over the island of Sicily. Chief airman Romano Messi watched them through the windscreen of his olive-green Land Rover, whose wiper blades were clearing a thin drizzle from the glass. Romano was a young recruit to the Italian airforce, and had lived on the island all his life. He remembered his grandmother saying that when the sky went dark over Etna, trouble was round the corner. But she was just a superstitious old lady. In Sicily, with its gangs and its undercurrent of violence, trouble was always round the corner.

A fork of lightning split the sky, but the only thunder that followed it was artificial. It came from the four engines of a British Hercules C4 turboprop, as grey as the clouds from which it now emerged as it made its descent towards the runway. Romano had been waiting for this aircraft. They had all been waiting for it.

The runway was brightly lit. There was only another thirty minutes until sunset, but it was already half dark. Ground crew staff sat in stationary service vehicles, well clear of the runway itself, but with their engines ticking over. The word had come through two hours previously: this aircraft, and its four passengers, were high priority. The ATC operators knew to get the Hercules on the ground as quickly as possible – any other military aircraft wanting to land at the same time would have to circle. The passengers were to be ushered as quickly as possible to the nearby helicopter LZ. That was Romano’s job. Get them to the chopper, and don’t ask any questions. He knew that instructions like this could only mean one thing: a special forces unit was on its way.

It was an unusual situation. This was a British military plane. They often stopped here to refuel, but the passengers were generally not allowed to disembark. When they did, SF units were normally housed in the American sector of the NATO base. Italian squaddies like Romano were kept well away.

Romano blew a lock of his black hair off his forehead, then absent-mindedly brushed down his khaki camouflage gear. One day, he thought to himself, he would put himself up for selection to the Stormo Incursori. He and the guys he was about to meet were made from the same stuff. His eyes wandered to the tiny length of Christmas tinsel wrapped round the stem of the rear-view mirror. Deciding it didn’t make him look hard enough, he tore it away and shoved it in the glove compartment.

The Hercules’ engines screamed as the landing gear hit the runway in a cloud of spray. Romano knocked the Land Rover into first gear and screeched in the direction of the Hercules before it had even turned off the runway. Through the drizzle, he saw the aircraft come to a complete standstill. The tailgate opened immediately. By the time it was down, Romano had come to a halt twenty metres away. He saw four figures emerging from the dark belly of the aircraft. Two of them led the way. The other two, a few metres behind, were carrying a flight case between them. Romano squinted as he tried to make out their faces, but he couldn’t, quite. All he could see was that they were all shouldering bergens, and one of them was slightly narrower about the shoulders than the others. He congratulated himself on his powers of observation – surveillance, he knew, would be an important skill when he became a special forces operator.

Romano got out of the car and jogged towards the aircraft, whose engines were still powering down. As he grew closer, the four figures became more distinct. Halfway towards them, he stopped for a moment. Was one of them a woman?

Romano wiped the rain from his face and looked again. He hadn’t made a mistake. The figure with a slimmer frame was a stunning brunette, with grey eyes and clear, pale skin. Her hair was a tangled, rain-soaked mess, but to Romano’s eyes that only made her look more attractive.

He started jogging towards them again, taking in the others. Standing next to the woman was a broad-shouldered man with thick blond hair and tanned, leathery skin. He was looking disdainfully across the airfield. Romano could immediately tell he had a bit of an attitude about him. The two guys carrying the flight case were both scowling. One of them was a little shorter than the others, with thinning hair, and the sight of him made Romano smile briefly. His dad had a penchant for Phil Collins, and the little guy looked just like him. Broader, stockier and a hell of a sight grumpier-looking, but otherwise the spitting image. His companion didn’t look much more cheerful. With hair as dark as Romano’s own, and a handsome face with several days’ stubble, he looked like a statue, holding the flight case as the rain pelted against him.

Romano was a little out of breath when he reached them, but he did his best to hide it. ‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ he said in his very best English. The blond guy looked him up and down, and Romano could tell from his body language that he was in charge of this four-man unit. ‘I am taking you to your helicopter.’

The unit leader looked over Romano’s shoulder towards the distant Land Rover. ‘Fuck’s sake, Manuel,’ he said with an unpleasant sneer. ‘I know the I-tais are shit drivers, but couldn’t you park a bit closer?’

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.’

‘Wh