Chris Ryan Extreme: Hard Target: Mission Four: Fallout Read online

  Chris Ryan Extreme: Hard Target

  Mission Four: Fallout

  Also by Chris Ryan

  Chris Ryan Extreme: Hard Target

  Mission One: Redeemer

  Mission Two: The Rock

  Mission Three: Die Trying

  Mission Four: Fallout

  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

  Chris Ryan Extreme: Hard Target

  Mission Four: Fallout

  Chris Ryan

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Coronet

  An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  1

  Copyright © Chris Ryan 2010

  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

  Enhanched ebook ISBN 9781444726657

  Ebook ISBN 9781444708561

  Hodder & Stoughton policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products and made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Contents

  Also by Chris Ryan

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  ‘Before you embark on a journey of revenge, you should first dig two graves.’

  Confucius

  1

  Istanbul, Turkey. 2111 hours.

  Colonel Deniz Sahin looked on as the medics zipped up the last of the body bags. The black plastic sheet consumed the bullet-riddled body of Mahmoud Reza like a snake devouring its victim. Eight bodies. They were running out of body bags and had squeezed two of the five Iranians into a single bag. The death toll also included a single Turkish civilian. The other two, his own men.

  There was still a lot of blood on the road, still a swirl of gun smoke that stung his eyes. Still a ringing in his ears. The sound amplified when he closed his eyes. But Sahin didn’t want to leave the scene of the shootout. At the security cordon perimeter a clutch of politicians were lapping up the attention. Sahin had never been one for the limelight. He preferred to stay in the shadows.

  Besides, the deaths of two of his men gnawed at him. Sahin, commanding officer of the Ozel Jandarma Komando, ran a tight ship and he felt their loss keenly. The feeling was familiar yet cold, like gathered dust.

  Lieutenant Colonel Umit Bulent, Sahin’s 2iC, drew up alongside him. Bulent’s face was locked in a permanently blank expression. Never happy, never sad. Except today. Except now. He wore a smile so wide it that could outrun the Bosporus. He lit a cigarette. The brand, Sahin noted, was Russian. Sobranie.

  ‘That was close, boss,’ Bulent said.

  ‘I thought you gave up.’

  Bulent made a big-deal gesture. ‘I’m celebrating. We’re allowed to celebrate, boss. We just stopped the fucking city from being blown to pieces.’ He sighed smoke. ‘Something on your mind?’

  Sahin shook his head. ‘Look at these idiots,’ he growled, nodding at the politicians. ‘Acting as if they saved the day.’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘Someone will pay for this,’ Sahin said.

  Bulent tilted his head at the departing ambulance. ‘Someone already did, boss.’

  The 2iC stubbed out his cigarette and left to join in the revelry with the rest of the soldiers. A group of them shook hands and slapped each other on the back. Sahin wished he could share their happiness. That sense of satisfaction. Of a job well done.

  Sahin spat on the ground and turned away. Found himself staring at the van containing the nuke fifty metres away, framed by the smooth expanse of the Bosporus Bridge and the blackness of the Strait beneath. Lights crackled and popped on the banks of the Asian side of Istanbul.

  Half a dozen forensic experts were scouring the van. Sahin stood still for a moment, then decided he would have a look at this suitcase bomb for himself. After all, it wasn’t every day a man got to see a nuclear weapon and lived to tell the story.

  Helicopters zipped overhead as he approached. In the distance he could make out the damp blare of car horns. Istanbul was already itching to get moving again. Sahin liked that resilience. He was looking forward to going home to Izmir. To his wife and his two surviving sons.

  That was his last-but-one thought.

  He was twenty-five metres away when the van seemed to rock. White heat gushed out of the rear doors in an angry torrent. Something rumbled. In a split second the heat was overwhelming Sahin. And his last thought, as the heat peeled off his skin and burned his hair and nails, was simply: God, no.

  2

  Sea of Marmara. 2115 hours.

  The cabin shuddered. At first Gardner thought it was turbulence. Then he remembered that the Black Hawk was cruising at 6000 feet – well below its service ceiling of 19,000. Too high up to be affected by wind turbulence from the ground. Too low for mountain turbulence to come into play. Gardner looked out of the open fuselage door and clocked a rinsed-blue basin. Cloudless, which ruled out storm turbulence.

  Then Gardner saw something in the distance. Ballooning up from the ground, like a bubble rising to the surface of a body of water.

  The bubble burst over the Istanbul skyline fifty miles away. Opaque rings rippled out from the bubble’s nucleus and spread across the Bosporus Strait. The rings broke free from the Strait and hit the Sea of Marmara.

  The rings kept coming. The waves kept rising. Then the centre of the bubble erupted. Blinding light. Gardner screwed his eyes up. The other guys in the helicopter, the support team of seven MI6 field agents who’d travelled to Istanbul, shielded their faces. Then came a powerful high-pitched note that pealed like a hummingbird inside his skull.


  First a fireball rose from the bubble like a gas flare on a giant oil rig, its surface swirling violently as it soared. A stem of smoke pushed the fireball higher into the sky until it hit 3000 feet. At that point the fireball seemed to pause. Then it pulsed a wave of white-hot energy. Gardner braced himself for impact.

  The wave moved at a supersonic pace. It blasted everything on the horizon: planes, helicopters, birds – all were blown aside like snowflakes in a blizzard.

  Shit. It’s coming right this way, Gardner thought. He felt as if he was rocketing towards the belly of an angry volcano. The wave was less than ten miles away. Another second and a half and it would be on top of them. If it hits, he was thinking, it’s going to put the chopper into a deadly spin.

  The other guys on board should have been burying their heads between their thighs and holding onto their straps for dear life. But every man was transfixed.

  A mile away now and the wave turned almost translucent. It was burning up, rapidly losing more energy. He figured that since the wave was dying, maybe the contact wouldn’t be so bad.

  Then the wave hit, and he knew he’d figured wrong.

  Christ, the heat. It blazed his facial hair, seared his eyelids.

  The Black Hawk shook violently, lurching this way and that. Gardner felt the G-force of 7000 kg of out-of-control melted steel yank his head from side to side. He could feel the pilot wrestling with the controls, trying to keep the chopper on an even keel. It didn’t seem to be fucking working. The Black Hawk spun into a swift descent. Gardner heard the chopper’s engine grunt. The extra power and pitch the pilot was applying only forced them down faster. The chopper descended through its downwash. The view out of the fuselage door was sky and sea. Then it was just sea. Charred black water.

  Gardner felt his stomach jump, his kidney and liver and bowels playing musical chairs. They were at 3000 feet. Now 2000. Now 1000. The sea became a grid of surging waves. The Black Hawk was so close that Gardner could make out individual dead birds, white petals on the surface.

  Less than 500 feet from the sea, and the descent slowed. At 300 Gardner reckoned it was touch and go. At 200 he thought it was just go. One of the agents leaned forward, puked up milky white shit. Around the 150-feet mark the Black Hawk snarled, wobbled and – a breakthrough. It began to lurch forward rather than down. The pilot was fighting hard against the downwash. The chopper bounced like a truck racing over speed bumps.

  The engine stopped screaming. Meaning, Gardner knew, the pilot had regained control. Sure enough they began a slow ascent, the men silent, not even able to look each other in the eye. Lost in their thoughts. Only one guy gave the thoughts a voice.

  ‘That was fucking close,’ he said.

  And then Gardner looked out of the door as the Black Hawk climbed to 2000 feet, and he saw Istanbul. Or rather, what was left of it. Which wasn’t much – a shredded landscape. As far as Gardner could see, not a single building was left standing.

  ‘No,’ Gardner replied. ‘That was fucking close.’

  He watched the mushroom cloud frozen in the sky. He’d seen a lot of shit in his time. A lot. Seen men maimed, others tortured, still others shot so many times there was literally nothing left but rags and bones. But nothing prepared him for the sight of a nuke totalling a fucking city. He closed his eyes. It must be fucking hell on earth down there, he thought.

  ‘Get us out of here,’ he told the pilot. ‘Before that big fuck-off radiation cloud starts blowing in our direction.’

  The pilot banked right, and right was west. West was Canakkale, and the Strait feeding into the Aegean Sea. West was away from the nuclear holocaust currently taking place in downtown Istanbul. West sounded fucking good to Gardner.

  They left the Sea of Marmara behind them. The mushroom cloud shrank. The agents stared back at it. Gardner realized he was actually fucking praying.

  They skated south down the Aegean, breezing low past the island of Kos. A signal finally kicked in on Gardner’s mobile. He figured the nuke’s radioactive rays had interfered with nearby comms systems. He put a call in to Land.

  ‘Jesus, did you see that?’ Land’s voice was stripped and raw like he had never heard it.

  ‘See? We had fucking front-row seats.’

  ‘It’s chaos here, Joe…’ – the line fizzed with static – ‘. . . absolute pandemonium.’

  ‘Suitcase nukes were designed for remote detonation,’ Gardner replied. Land said nothing, so he went on: ‘One guy plants the nuke on foot. Then he retreats to a safe distance and activates it. The idea is they can work even without timers. Think of it as an override. Even after the timer’s been disabled, the right person, with access to the right equipment, can still trigger the bomb.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know all this. What’s your point?’

  ‘So who pushed the red button?’

  He heard Land scratching something, then say, ‘Most likely the Israelis. Publicly they’re pinning the blame on the Iranians.’

  Gardner took a deep breath. The air circulated around the cave of his chest. ‘How many?’

  Land was quiet for a beat. Gardner wondered if he’d lost his signal.

  ‘I asked, how many?’

  ‘Heard you the first time, old boy. Best-case scenario is ten thousand dead, twice that number wounded. Factor in those affected by radiation in the medium term and God knows.’

  Gardner felt the cold air rise in his chest. He found it difficult to speak. ‘And the worst?’

  ‘Fifty thousand. Two hundred thousand wounded.’ Land sniffed. ‘There was no way you, or I, or anyone could know that someone else was waiting to activate the bomb.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Land was right. But Gardner knew the nightmares would be waiting for him all the same. The women with no legs, the kids burned to charcoal skeletons. He already saw their accusing stares. Asking him why he didn’t save them.

  Gardner gripped the overhead rails as the Black Hawk pitched to the left. The waves on the Aegean glinted like a million knife edges in the sun. He refocused his mind.

  ‘Where’s Aimée?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘We had a deal,’ Gardner said.

  Land laughed bitterly. ‘In case you didn’t notice, Joe, a bomb has just gone off. A nuclear bomb. If you’re asking me to commit valuable men and resources to picking her up, forget it.’

  ‘But you know where she is?’

  ‘I really don’t have time for this,’ fumed Land. ‘Of course I bloody well know. Thanks to your chum Shai Golan.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what, Joe? The base is an old meat-packing factory in the industrial part of Athens. That city’s a stinking mess. Worse than bloody Naples.’

  Gardner had never been to Naples, or Athens. But he’d operated in some of the most dangerous corners of the earth and ignored Land’s bitching. The MI6 man struck Gardner as the kind of guy who’d have a panic attack if he flew economy class.

  All Gardner wanted to do was find Aimée and give Land and the Firm his middle finger. He was of a mind to tell Land to shove his job offer up his fucking arsehole. Then again, he figured it was already pretty crammed up there.

  ‘The factory’s on Sissi Street in the Votanikos neighbourhood,’ Land continued. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me. Half of Istanbul’s blown to smithereens.’

  Land hung up.

  Gardner was left looking out of the fuselage door. Greece rolled out to the west, parched and rocky. Seven days since I flew to Rio. Feels like a lifetime ago.

  3

  Athens, Greece. 2231 hours.

  The corn-yellow taxi was stuck in a seemingly endless traffic jam. Sweat on Gardner’s palms. Not the sweat of perspiration, but of anticipation. He looked at his palms and realized he was looking forward to seeing Aimée again more than he’d thought. Her face had taken root in his mind. Her voice too. Once we’re out of Athens, he decided, we’ll go travelling. Mauritius maybe. Or Bali.

  Land was right, Gardner reflected a
s the taxi coughed him up on the corner of Patsi Street and Aigaleo. Athens was a dump. The bits that were old were falling apart, and the bits that were new were falling apart. Gardner had the sense of being caught in a Greenpeacenik’s worst nightmare. Every building was crumbling, every street lined with rubbish. A thin, greasy smog wafted through the city. It covered cars, window sills and pavements in soot.

  He took €40 from a roll of €700 he’d withdrawn on the Firm’s credit card, pressed the notes into the driver’s wrinkled palm. Twenty for the fare and twenty for forgetting his face. The driver grunted his agreement.

  To the east worn-down neo-classical houses were squeezed between peeling apartment blocks. Stray cats and dogs knocked about the streets, sniffing at bins overflowing with rubbish. Two hundred metres to his north stood the Agricultural University of Athens. Its blocks, white and flat as cake icing, stared out at the Iera Odos road jammed with restless traffic. Westwards the houses were replaced by a sweeping industrial landscape of creaking factories and warehouses.

  Gardner took the left from Patsi Street and walked up Aigaleo for a hundred and forty metres, then hit Agiou Polykarpou Street and paced north-west for five hundred metres. He passed milk-processing plants. It was dark – a few dim streetlamps seemed to have been added as an afterthought.

  Sissi Street was a left midway down Agiou Polykarpou. The factories carried some security deterrents. Fat padlocks wrapped around the gates, CCTV cameras mounted to the fence posts and Rottweilers snarling and yapping the other side of the chain-link. He found the meat-packing factory; hanging from the gates was an old metal sign with a jokey image of a pig giving a thumbs-up painted on it.

  Gardner inspected the gates. No padlock. The place must have been disused for a while, he figured. Then he prised them apart, the metal frame scraping against the tarmac. He made his way across the empty car park towards the factory doors fifty metres away. The windows revealed a neon-blue light humming inside, radiating like a fly trap.