Hunter Killer

Book 2: Danny Black

by Chris Ryan

Genres: Thrillers; Spy Thrillers

Synopsis

Their operations are deniable. Their skill is deadly. SAS hero Danny Black is recruited to an assassination squad directed to hunt down and kill terrorist cells in a gripping thriller from the man who knows what it's like at the front line.

The suicide bomb strikes central London. The trail leads first to a hate cleric in a North London mosque, and his connections to a devout Saudi prince with a taste for hookers, drugs and booze. But it's not only when Danny tracks down his target to a training camp in the Yemen that he finds there may be a connection a hell of a lot closer to home.

(P)2014 Hodder & Stoughton

Release date: August 28, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 400

Sample

Eight

 

Danny turned to Spud. ‘Follow him,’ he said.

Spud looked unsure. ‘What you got in mind, mucker?’ he said. It was clear that he didn’t fully trust Danny to do the right thing.

‘I’ll recce the flat. But you need to keep on him, so I know when he’s coming back.’

Spud looked through the net curtain again. The kid was walking up to the iron gate at the end of the short front path. ‘Roger that,’ he breathed. Without another word he jogged from the room and down the stairs. Danny heard the door open and shut, and a moment later saw Spud following the target down Dalewood Mews, walking on the other side of the street with his head down.

A strange calm descended on Danny as he picked up his prepared snap gun and shouldered his heavy rucksack. Spud’s voice crackled in his ear: ‘Heading up towards Hammersmith Broadway.’

Danny tapped the pressel switch on his radio twice: universal code for ‘Roger that’.

He headed downstairs and out into the street. He could hear traffic nearby, much louder than it had been during the night. The rain had stopped, but the morning sky was threatening. He reckoned a storm was coming. As he closed the door behind him, he saw a woman emerge from a separate entrance to the first-floor flat above number 27. Her hair was tied back in an Alice band and she was eating a muesli bar. Late for work. She didn’t give Danny a second glance. He waited for her to hurry down the road, then headed across the street right up to the door of number 27.

With a single, swift movement, he inserted the snap gun into the lock. A few squeezes of the trigger and a tweak from the tension rod, and the door was open. Danny stepped inside and closed the door quietly behind him. The latch clicked shut.

The front door had opened directly on to the front room of the flat. A smallish room, eight metres by eight. Thick floral curtains, closed. A sofa bed against one wall, opened up but without any bedclothes. A strange smell: dirt, with a tinge of cordite. Danny instinctively knew he was going to find something here.

He didn’t step any further into the room. Not yet. His presence here needed to be totally deniable. That meant no fingerprints and no DNA traces. He fished in his rucksack for one of the two vacuum-packed SOCO suits he had stowed inside, and bit into the stiff plastic wrapping. The pack expanded like an inflating lung. He carefully tore it open and removed a pair of latex gloves, which he pulled on to each hand, covering his cuffs with the latex to make a tight seal. Next up, he donned a polythene hairnet and a paper mask that gave him the air of a surgeon. All that was left in the kit now was the paper suit, which he pulled over his clothes and shoes to avoid contaminating the scene with any stray fibres that might contain his DNA. Once he was properly suited up, the only weak point was his rucksack, but he’d just have to take a risk with that. He shouldered it again and, holding his cocked weapon in his right hand, stepped forward.

The front room led directly to a second reception, exactly the same size and just as scantly furnished. A window on the right-hand side of the far wall was covered with an almost opaque blind, but he could see through it into a badly kept garden. Next to the window was an opening into a small galley kitchen. Just like in the flat across the road that they’d been using as an OP, there was another door at the far end of the kitchen that Danny assumed led to the bathroom.

But of much more interest was another door in the corner of the room to his left. The geography of the place meant it could only lead down to a basement. Danny stepped towards the door and opened it up.

Sure enough, he found a flight of stone steps leading downwards.

He spoke into his radio. ‘Do you copy?’

‘Roger that.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Tesco Metro, two blocks away. So far he’s bought a carton of soya milk and a four-pack of Andrex. Looks like he’s in for a great morning.’

Danny looked down the stone steps. ‘How long have I got?’

A pause.

‘What you doing, mucker? I thought this was just a recce. If there’s any bomb-making gear, we’ll go back later.’

‘Just a recce,’ Danny agreed. ‘But can you distract him?’

More silence.

‘What do you mean, distract him?’

‘I don’t know, ask him directions or something. Just keep him out of here as long as you can while I search for explosives.’

‘Okay,’ Spud said with obvious suspicion. ‘But it’s not going to be long. He’s queueing up with his bog roll right now. Get the hell out of there as quick as you can.’

‘Keep radio contact,’ Danny said.

He pulled a thin, bright Maglite from his bag and shone it down the stairs. He heard interference over his earpiece. The signal was bad down here. There was a large room, the size of both ground-floor receptions put together, with a long trestle table set up in the middle.

Weapon primed, Danny descended. His breath was hot behind the paper mask and he could feel his own pulse: not fast, but pumping hard …

He shone the torch towards the four corners of the cellar. Nobody there. He directed the beam at the trestle table. It illuminated what Danny immediately recognised as two old artillery shells. They looked like bullets, rounded at one end, pointed at the other. But larger: a good couple of feet in length. He wondered where they originated from. Eastern Europe, maybe? These things were two a penny after the Bosnia conflict. Either that or the Middle East. Not that it mattered much. What was important was that someone had carefully cut away the base of each shell and started to scoop out the contents – military-grade high explosive. It was accumulated in three small piles between the shells. It didn’t look like a lot, but no doubt the process of evacuating the shells wasn’t yet complete. And even that small amount of explosive could do a lot of damage in the wrong hands.

Danny paused for a moment, and gave serious thought to hiding out in the flat, waiting for the target to come home and simply killing him. But that wouldn’t do. Hammerstone had been very clear: it had to look like an accident.

Danny touched nothing. He moved back out of the cellar and up the stairs, extinguishing his torch but keeping his weapon at the ready. Back up on the ground floor he pushed the cellar door closed with one latexed hand, then headed towards the gloomy, unlit kitchen. There were dirty plates in the sink and crumbs on the worktops. The tiles on the floor were scuffed and sticky. A door to his right looking out on to the scruffy garden. There was a key on the side – presumably to open the back door. And there was a second door at the far end, which he thought led to the bathroom. It was slightly ajar.

Danny stepped up to the door and slowly pushed it open. It creaked. He stepped inside.

He needed his torch again. There was only one window in here, overlooking the unkempt garden. But it was covered with a blackout blind that completely blocked the daylight. It didn’t take Danny long to work out why. Galaid needed privacy. The bath was stained with rings of limescale. It contained three plastic bottles filled with a clear liquid. He undid each one of them in turn and smelled the contents. They each gave off the unmistakable aroma of nail varnish. Acetone. Danny felt sure that if he nosed around the flat a bit more, he’d find bottles of hydrogen peroxide. Acetone peroxide wasn’t as explosive as the military-grade gear in the basement, but it was a hell of a sight easier to make, with a couple of easily bought chemicals and some instructions from the internet.

The Hammerstone quartet were right. There didn’t seem much doubt that this bastard was planning another spectacular.

A crackle in his ear. Spud. ‘We’ve left Tesco. I think he’s heading back.’

‘Keep on him.’

‘Fuck’s sake, Danny, what are you doing? Did you find any bomb-making gear?’

‘You could say that.’

‘Then get out. We’ll wait until he leaves the house again, then set something up.’

‘Keep on him!’

Danny turned his attention back to the contents of the bathroom.

There were enough explosives in this place to kill a hundred extremists. But Danny knew better than to use any of Sarim Galaid’s gear. If he came back and noticed anything out of place, he’d be gone. Hammerstone had lucked out knowing this kid’s exact location. If Danny gave him any sense that the authorities were on to him, he’d go immediately underground.

Maybe he should leave now.

Or maybe he should grab this opportunity while he had it. Galaid might not leave the house again for another two days, or longer. Spud would be pissed off, but he’d get over it.

Whatever Danny did, it had to be subtle. Covert. Something the terrorist would never expect until it was too late.

He turned his attention to the toilet.

If Galaid was buying bog roll, that was likely to be his first port of call when he got back.

He spoke into the radio. ‘What’s your status?’

‘We’re three minutes away.’

‘I need five minutes minimum. Keep the radio open. I need to know what’s happening.’

A pause.

Under his breath, Spud whispered: ‘Jesus Christ.’ But then, over the open radio, Danny heard him call, ‘Hey, you, mate! You got a ciggie?’

Danny’s paper SOCO suit whispered as he bent over and removed the heavy ceramic lid from the top of the cistern. He laid it gently on the tiled floor, then shone his torch into the cistern and examined the flush mechanism. It was caked with limescale, but looked to be in working order. He lowered his rucksack on to the toilet seat and felt inside. The constituent parts of his MOE kit were exactly where he’d stowed them. He withdrew the shaped charge, the silver detonator, the roll of coated wire and the battery pack.

Spud’s voice: ‘What’s your fucking problem, mate? I just asked for a ciggie!’

A faint reply: ‘I ain’t got no ciggies. Leave me alone.’

Spud: ‘Touchy bastard. I was only asking. What are you anyway, a fucking Paki?’

Danny gave a grim smile. If the best way to delay a target was often to pick a fight with them, Spud was extremely good at it.

Quickly, he went to work.

 

He looked at her half-eaten Egg McMuffin, sitting unappetisingly in its wrapper. She obviously didn’t want to finish it, and now he’d spent most of his money so he couldn’t offer her anything else. Even worse, he was panicking that he didn’t have enough cash to buy her a tube ticket back to his house. He’d forgotten all about that. This wasn’t going anything like as well as he’d hoped.

But then she put her hand on his and smiled at him again.

‘Shall we go for a walk?’ she asked.

He nodded.

They stood up and headed to the exit. Lots of people stared at them. He knew why: such a beautiful woman with such a strange-looking man. But he was used to people staring, and she had, after all, gone out of her way to find him. That made him feel very special.

Outside McDonald’s he noticed that the sky had turned black. He half wished it would rain, because that would be more romantic. He looked at her suitcase. ‘Allow me,’ he said very politely, and he took the handle.

‘Thank you,’ she said. She took hold of his free hand. Her skin was so soft. His own hand was sweaty and clammy. He hoped she didn’t mind. He wanted to squeeze her hand affectionately, but felt shy of doing it. So he kept it limp as they sauntered up Lower Regent Street, the suitcase trundling along behind them.

 

The charge itself was a block of plastic explosive backed with a strong adhesive: he had to peel back a strip of waxed paper to reveal it. You could stick one of these to the hull of a boat in high seas and be confident that it wouldn’t shift, so there would be no problem fitting it to the inside wall of the cistern. He inserted the detonator into the charge. He cut two pieces of wire, each about ten inches in length, then stripped an inch of plastic coating from each of the four ends. He attached the end of one piece of wire to the detonator, the end of another to the battery pack. When the two free ends touched, the charge would explode.

Voices in his earphone: muffled curses. Danny zoned it out. Spud was giving Galaid some proper aggro. That was all he needed to know.

He turned his attention back to the cistern. With a single finger he flushed the chain. The water was noisily sucked down into the pan, but he lifted the dark blue float ball to stop it refilling. With his free hand, he picked up the charge and stuck it to the wall of the cistern. The front wall – not the back. The presence of water behind the charge would encourage it to blast forwards. The ceramic of the cistern would explode violently. He was, in effect, creating an enormous, static Claymore mine.

A mine that he hoped the victim would detonate with his own hand.

The charge held fast to the front wall of the cistern, even though it was damp. Danny carefully coiled the free end of the wire round the flushing mechanism. Still holding the float ball to stop the cistern from refilling, he picked up the battery pack. It was waterproof, so he knew there was no problem getting it wet. He tied the adjoining wire round the flush mechanism, making sure that – for now, at least – there was no risk of the two bare ends touching.

‘He’s running away,’ Spud said in his ear. ‘You’ve got two minutes, no longer. I’ve got some have-a-go hero eyeing me from the other side of the road. If I go at him again, I’ll cause more of a distraction than I want.’

‘Roger that.’

‘What are you doing in there, mucker?’

Danny didn’t reply. He released the float ball and the cistern started to refill.

It was painfully slow. The water pressure was bad. A full minute passed before the cistern was full again.

Danny felt a prickle of urgency down his spine. But he couldn’t rush. Carefully, gingerly, concentrating on keeping his hands steady, he bent the two bare ends of the wires so that they were above the water line, but just millimetres apart. He gently let go. They shook somewhat, but didn’t touch. But as soon as someone pressed the flush …

‘Are you still in there? Fuck’s sake, buddy, he’s thirty seconds away …’

The most dangerous part: Danny lifted the cistern lid and replaced it incredibly gently. He was, he realised, holding his breath, and when ceramic met ceramic he winced, knowing that too much force would shake the wires into contact. But they remained separate. Danny carefully lifted his gear from the toilet seat and stuffed it into the rucksack.

Time to get out. IEDs had a habit of going wrong. Danny didn’t want to be in the vicinity when it exploded. He stepped out of the bathroom and hurried to the kitchen door, grabbing the key that he’d noticed on the side. He needed to get out into the garden.

He put the key in the lock. It didn’t fit. He looked round for another one. Nothing.

‘He’s turning into Dalewood Mews,’ Spud reported.

Danny suppressed a moment of panic. He edged out of the kitchen … into the reception … the front room …

Shit! He realised he’d left the bathroom door open, wider than it had been. But he couldn’t go back, because there was a scuffling sound at the front door. Galaid was back. He had his key in the lock.

Danny’s pulse was racing. There was no place to hide, other than under the extended sofa bed. He quickly chucked his rucksack underneath it.

The door started to open.

He fell to the ground and, his paper suit rustling against the grimy carpet, rolled under the bed. He held his breath. Any movement would make a noise, and if this bastard found him here it would be a clusterfuck of epic proportions.

And even if he didn’t, Danny was about to find himself trapped in a flat he’d just booby-trapped.

Footsteps. A slamming door.

‘Fucking … fucker!’ Sarim Galaid’s feet appeared to Danny’s left. They were heading into the second reception room, but he suddenly turned round to face the door again. ‘Fucking FUCKER!’ he screamed. Danny realised he was yelling at an imaginary Spud. ‘You’re the worst of them! I hope you get fucking done over next time. I’ll put a bomb in your mother’s house! I’ll put a bomb in your fucking mama’s crib!’

Galaid switched from English to Arabic and continued spewing a stream of obscenities at the front door. Danny breathed out very slowly, feeling his breath hot and wet under the paper mask. Stay still. Stay calm. Trust that you’ve set the charge correctly. The blast won’t reach you in here …

After thirty seconds, his target fell silent. The feet changed direction again. Danny saw the bottom of a plastic supermarket bag swinging as Galaid finally walked out of the room.

Danny’s body grew even tenser. From the kitchen, he heard the sound of units being opened and slammed shut. Galaid barked another word, again in Arabic.

Silence.

What was he doing? Pouring himself a glass of fucking soya milk? Or was he moving into the bathroom? Danny pictured the bare wires of the device in the cistern. There was a chance that he’d detonate the whole thing simply by sitting down.

Or perhaps he was staring at the bathroom door, wondering why it was now open when he had left it closed.

He gripped his weapon a little harder. If it came down to it, and Galaid twigged that something was up, Danny would have to deal with this the old-fashioned way.

Hammerstone wouldn’t like it, but Hammerstone weren’t on the ground …

A noise. Liquid. Gushing. It took a couple of seconds for Danny to understand what he was hearing. It was the sound of Sarim Galaid pissing thunderously against the porcelain.

Danny silently cursed. From the sound of it he was taking a piss, not a shit as he’d expected. There was always a chance that the filthy fucker wouldn’t flush.

A burst in Danny’s ear. Spud. Pissed off. ‘Mucker, what the hell’s going down?’

Danny didn’t reply.

The gushing stopped.

Five seconds passed.

‘Mucker, you need to respond or I’m coming in.’

Ten.

What was happening?

Danny felt his breath trembling. He tried to picture the scene in the bathroom. Was Galaid still in there? Maybe Danny should just burst through and throw him against the toilet, let the impact do its work …

It would put him in the line of the blast, but Galaid would surely absorb the shrapnel …

He started to move.

The paper suit rustled again.

He emerged from under the bed, and for a moment saw a silhouette pass in front of the floral curtains.

Spud?

‘Stay away,’ Danny hissed. ‘It’s under control …’

No reply.

‘Stay away!’

And then, without warning, it happened.

The explosion was a short sharp crack. Loud, certainly, but there was no boom or echo. Danny felt the floorboards beneath him vibrate with the detonation. He heard a shower of shrapnel pelting the walls of the bathroom. A shock wave almost topped him and a lump of plaster fell from the ceiling a metre to his right.

Then silence.

Danny felt for his rucksack. If everything had gone according to plan, he didn’t want to trail bloody footprints back across the flat. He pushed himself to his feet, shouldered the rucksack and held his gun firmly with two hands. Just because the device had exploded, it didn’t mean Galaid was there when it happened. There was a thick cloud of dust in the second reception, and Danny could hear a high-pitched hissing sound. He could still see the door frame of the kitchen, but inside was dark and obscured. He edged forward. The hissing sound grew louder. In the kitchen, the floor was damp. The paper shoes of his SOCO suit crunched over shards of porcelain. The glass pane in the kitchen door had shattered outwards. The bathroom door was open. Danny lit his torch again and looked inside.

His makeshift Claymore had worked like a dream. Through the darkness and the smoke, Danny saw that the cistern itself was completely destroyed. The hissing noise came from the twisted inlet pipe that was spurting a tight jet of water up on to the ceiling. But the real devastation was on the floor.

Sarim Galaid had clearly been facing the cistern when it blew. Now he was on his back, feet at the toilet end, head at the door end. At least, what was left of him was.

The exploding cistern had ripped out the core of the bomber’s groin and abdomen. Where there was once a stomach, there was now just a bleeding cavity. A thick, jagged shard of ceramic jutted out of where the corpse’s bollocks once were, and although the heart had clearly already stopped, a thick slurry of blood, gastric juices and semi-digested food oozed from the catastrophic wound. Water from the spraying inlet pipe caused rivulets of pink to smear over the tiled floor.

Galaid’s face was unrecognisable. Shrapnel had peppered it, and proximity to the explosive charge had burned away the skin. The eye sockets were weeping blood. His hair had been burned away. He was nothing more than a smouldering, bleeding piece of meat.

Danny stared at him for a moment. For some reason he found himself thinking about Clara. About finishing with her because he knew that in the days that followed, death would be his constant companion. Looked like he’d been right.

He’d seen enough. He trod carefully back into the kitchen where he started to remove his SOCO suit, though for the moment he kept the gloves, mask and hairnet on. As he shoved the paper suit back into the bag, he heard a thumping noise from the front door – neighbours, probably, wanting to find out what had happened. He spoke into the radio. ‘Spud, is that you?’

‘Negative,’ Spud replied tersely. ‘I’m at the end of the street. You’ve got two coppers and a neighbour banging on the door. You need to get out of there, mucker.’

The thumping on the front door grew louder.

‘RV at the car,’ Danny said.

He trod over to the kitchen door, checking over his shoulder that he hadn’t left footprints. All clear. He clambered through the shattered pane of the kitchen door and jumped outside into the garden. Only then did he remove the remainder of his SOCO gear. He stuffed it in his rucksack, then ran down the overgrown garden.

There was a rickety, two-metre-high wooden fence at the end of the garden. Several panels damaged. Danny scaled it with ease and landed with a thump in a weed-strewn, litter-strewn alleyway. He looked both ways. Deserted. He ran north. Thirty-five metres to the end of the alleyway. Thunder cracked overhead. Heavy droplets of rain started to fall.

He reached the end of the alleyway and found himself in the road where, several hours previously, he’d collected pizza flyers from the parked cars. He caught sight of Spud, standing on the opposite side of the street, his expression darker than the sky. Danny nodded. From the direction they needed to go came the sound of sirens. Instinctively, Danny and Spud walked the opposite way. After thirty seconds, Danny crossed the road and fell in beside his mate.

‘Been busy?’ Spud asked from between gritted teeth.

‘Spotted an opportunity,’ Danny said. ‘Grabbed it.’

‘Feel like telling me what happened?’

Danny sniffed. ‘Put it this way,’ he said. ‘If that Abu Ra’id cunt wants to blow up London again, he’ll need to find another bomber.’

 

Her name wasn’t really Nicki, of course. The lustrous curly hair was false and she would never normally wear so much lipstick or eyeliner that it made her look like a Western whore. And it went without saying that she did not find her gullible victim remotely attractive. Quite the opposite. He made her flesh creep with his strange features and lecherous glances. But as Abu Ra’id had said: in war, sacrifices have to be made. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, and across the Muslim world, the British and American monsters had targeted the weak and the helpless. So why shouldn’t they use the weak and helpless in their retaliations?

She looked up ahead. Police officers at the corner of Lower Regent Street and Piccadilly Circus. Four of them, in high-visibility jackets. After Paddington, the sight of an Arabic woman, a Down’s syndrome man and a suitcase would surely arouse suspicion.

‘Let’s cross here,’ she suggested.

He looked a bit confused, but of course he agreed.

Hand in hand, they crossed the road and stepped into Norris Street, a quieter back street just south of Piccadilly Circus.

‘I like the arcade machines,’ she said once they were away from the busy main streets. ‘Shall we go and play them?’ And then, when he looked suddenly worried: ‘My treat!’

He grinned at her. They turned a corner. Another main road was up ahead and she saw two more police officers, a man and a woman, walking towards them. Her pulse raced. She had hoped she wouldn’t have to do this, but now there was no choice. She stopped, pinned him against the wall and pressed her lips to his. She felt his tongue, wet and warm, twitching in her mouth. An unpleasant bulge in his trousers.

The police officers passed. She pulled away and saw his foolishly grinning face.

‘That was nice,’ she said.

Two minutes later, still hand in hand, they entered the Trocadero. It was very crowded, even at this hour. They walked past outlets selling brightly coloured sweeties, royal-family plates and tacky models of red London buses. They stood close to each other on the escalator as it carried them down into the basement. Here, the air was filled with the pinging and beeping and roaring of the arcades. Kids stood shooting light guns at imaginary foes. Others sat in arcade cars, speeding round imaginary racetracks. She pointed at an empty car and tugged at his sleeve. ‘Let’s go on that,’ she said.

Dragging the suitcase behind him, he followed her to the car.

‘You go first,’ she said.

Obediently, he propped the suitcase up next to the car and climbed inside. She fed a pound coin into the machine and watched his pitifully malcoordinated attempt at playing the game, which was over in 45 seconds.

Dude, you caused a pile-up, said the machine in a robotic voice.

‘You’re really good,’ she cooed, and she inserted another pound coin. She was aware of a couple of kids loitering nearby, coiled up with suppressed laughter at his strange looks and ineptitude on the arcade.

‘Thank you,’ he said. And then, after a moment’s thought, he blurted out the word: ‘Darling.’

She cringed, and smiled.

When his second go was over, she whispered in his ear, allowing her lips to brush lightly against him. ‘I need to get some more change.’ That look of panic again. She whispered in his ear: ‘We’ll spend a bit more time here, then go back to your place.’

And, of course, he nodded.

‘Will you look after my overnight bag?’ she asked.

He nodded again. Disgusted, she wondered if he might actually start drooling.

‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ she said. ‘Darling.’

She walked towards the escalator. Only when she was at the top did she look back down. The lairy kids had surrounded his car. They were pointing at him and laughing, no doubt as much at his strange looks as at his hopelessness on the arcade. More fool them. She turned her back on them and hurried out of the Trocadero, past the buses and tea towels and sweets, and out into the street. The sky was very dark. Thunder was in the air. She crossed the road and pulled a mobile phone from her coat. She walked briskly as she pressed speed dial number one.

There was no point listening for the ringtone, because she knew there wouldn’t be one. There would just be the explosion, and she braced herself for that.

She was at least thirty metres from the Trocadero’s entrance when it came, but it nearly knocked her from her feet nonetheless. The ground seemed to shake, and the boom seemed to reverberate against the high walls of Shaftesbury Avenue. She fell against another pedestrian – a woman in a blue raincoat, whose expression changed in an instant from annoyance to terror.

As the boom subsided, there was a moment of almost-silence. As though London was holding its breath.

And then a thunderclap cracked overhead. Like an echo of the explosion. Huge droplets of rain spattered on to the pavement. She hurried south, a faceless figure in the faceless crowds, as the desperate screams from the direction of the Trocadero reached her ears.

Eighteen

 

The hit on Abu Ra’id couldn’t happen during the day. They needed to enter the camp covertly, carry out the hit covertly, and leave covertly. That required the cover of night. That didn’t mean Danny or Spud liked the idea of waiting. If Hamza had told anyone else of their destination, they could expect company. Either that, or someone might arrive from Ha’dah to tip Abu Ra’id off. Danny silently cursed himself for not listening to Spud. Not knowing who might arrive to blow their cover made every minute feel like an hour. A sick, anxious feeling gnawed at Danny’s gut.

‘Wish we could just snipe the fucker from here,’ Spud said. But that wasn’t an option. They didn’t have the right hardware to take such a shot, it would only give away their position and anyway, their orders were very precise: make the kill at close quarters so you can be sure the bastard’s dead. But there was no question about it: they had to make the hit the following night. The longer they delayed, the higher their chance of being compromised.

Their target remained outside until an hour after sunrise. Various people from around the camp approached him. The militants seemed to be taking their tu