Ultimate Weapon Read online

  CHRIS

  RYAN

  ULTIMATE

  WEAPON

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Also available by Chris Ryan

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Epilogue

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781407069920

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published in the United Kingdom by Arrow Books in 2007

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Chris Ryan, 2006

  Chris Ryan has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2006 by Century First published in paperback in 2007 by Arrow Books

  Arrow Books The Random House Group Limited 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA

  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 0 09 949214 6

  The Random House Group Limited makes every effort to ensure that the papers used in its books are made from trees that have been legally sourced from well-managed and credibly certified forests. Our paper procurement policy can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/paper.htm

  Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Grangemouth, Stirlingshire Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bookmarque Ltd, Croydon, Surrey

  ULTIMATE

  WEAPON

  Chris Ryan was born near Newcastle in 1961. He joined the SAS in 1984. During his ten years he was involved in overt and covert operations and was also Sniper team commander of the anti-terrorist team. During the Gulf War, Chris was the only member of an eight-man team to escape from Iraq, of which three colleagues were killed and four captured. It was the longest escape and evasion in the history of the SAS. For this he was awarded the Military Medal. For his last two years he was selecting and training potential recruits for the SAS.

  He wrote about his experiences in the bestseller The One That Got Away which was also adapted for screen. He is also the author of the bestsellers, Stand By, Stand By, Zero Option, The Kremlin Device, Tenth Man Down, The Hit List, The Watchman, Land of Fire, Greed, The Increment and Blackout. Chris Ryan’s SAS Fitness Book and Chris Ryan’s Ultimate Survival Guide are published by Century.

  He lectures in business motivation and security and is currently working as a bodyguard in America.

  Also available by CHRIS RYAN

  Fiction

  The One That Got Away

  Stand By, Stand By

  Zero Option

  The Kremlin Device

  Tenth Man Down

  The Hit List

  The Watchman

  Land of Fire

  Greed

  The Increment

  Blackout

  In the Alpha Force Series

  Survival

  Rat-Catcher

  Desert Pursuit

  Hostage

  Red Centre

  Hunted

  Black Gold

  Blood Money

  Fault Line

  Untouchable

  Non-fiction

  Chris Ryan’s SAS Fitness Book

  Chris Ryan’s Ultimate Survival Guide

  Acknowledgements

  To my agent Barbara Levy, editor Mark Booth, Charlotte Haycock, Charlotte Bush and all the rest of the team at Century.

  PROLOGUE

  16 November 1994.

  Nick Scott walked in silence. He could feel the cold air blowing down from the side of the mountain, brushing across his raw skin. A thin sweater was all that was covering his chest, and a light dusting of snow was filling the morning air. It made no difference, thought Nick sullenly. A man who has lost his wife doesn’t feel the cold. He doesn’t feel heat, pain or pleasure, or any other sensation. Just a frozen emptiness inside.

  Particularly when the man knows he has only himself to blame.

  He glanced up towards the mountains. The heights of Les Houches, the smaller of the two mountains that dominated the Chamonix valley, were right ahead of him. A shaft of sunlight suddenly broke through the clouds, illuminating its lustrous white surface, while on the other side of the ravine the larger Mont Blanc was still shrouded in mist and cloud. It was a week now since Mary had died. Three days since they had buried her, here among the mountains she loved, and where they had hoped to make their new life together. A life that didn’t involve war, fighting, endurance or survival. A life that had nothing to do with the Regiment. Just the two of them, their ski school and their daughter. A small, happy family, just the way it always should have been.

  And now it’s gone, buried along with Mary, and every other dream I’ve ever had.

  ‘You OK?’ he said, looking towards Sarah.

  ‘I’m scared,’ she replied flatly.

  She was walking at his side, the buttons of her ski jacket done up tight against her thin neck. Just fifteen, thought Nick. Christ, she was young. Sometimes he had to pinch himself to remind himself that although she was starting to look like a woman she was still just a kid. Ever since she was born, she’d constantly surprised him with how fast she’d developed. Sarah was always ahead of the other kids, able to talk at two, count at three and read before she was four: it was as if she was rushing through life, getting her childhood out of the way, crashing forwards towards a rendezvous with her own destiny. When your d
ad’s as rubbish as I am, maybe you have to grow up fast, he reflected bitterly. With no one to look after you, you learn to look after yourself.

  ‘I’m scared of what’s going to become of us now that Mum’s not around any more.’

  She stopped in the snow, and turned to face him. Her expression was worried, frightened. Sarah had long brown hair, and blue eyes that shone out of her thin, freckled face like the headlamps on a car. Her features were delicate, finely painted like her mother’s, but in her forehead and across her cheekbones there were traces of her father’s brute, ox-like strength. ‘You can say what you like, but I just know,’ she continued. ‘We’re not going to be OK.’

  ‘Of course we are,’ snapped Nick. ‘I’ll look after you.’

  ‘What happened to you in Iraq, Dad?’

  The words struck Nick harder than any of the bullets he had ever taken. A bullet was just a lump of cold steel. It could tear through your flesh, and fracture your bones, but so long as you were still alive it left your spirit intact. This was worse. This hurt in a way that no bullet ever could.

  ‘I’m all right,’ he said quickly.

  She walked two paces ahead of him, twisting into one of the pathways that started to lead up the side of the mountain. They had lived here for just over a year now, but she had adjusted to the place much better than he had. Sarah spoke French like a local, and had adapted to the school. As for me, thought Nick, I have hardly got to know a soul. I came here to escape. But you can’t escape from yourself.

  ‘I’m fifteen,’ she said, not turning to look at him. ‘I can handle the truth.’

  The truth, thought Nick. Maybe she can handle it, and maybe I can’t. The bald outlines of the story were clear enough. He was a Regiment man, had been for a decade. He’d just missed the Falklands War but had been involved in every action the SAS had fought in since then, and fought with distinction as well. He had the medals and the scars to prove he was as good as any man in the Regiment. Then, in the lead-up to the Iraq War, he’d been dropped into enemy country. First into Kurdistan, then travelling south in a small unit of four men until they hit Baghdad. Two of his mates had been killed on the way. Two of them had been captured. What happened to Ken, Nick had no idea. The last memory he had of him was the grimace of defiance on his face as the Iraqi soldiers smashed the butts of the rifles into his ribs as they led him away. Probably rotting in a shallow, unmarked grave by now. Nick had been taken into the prison cells below Saddam’s Republican Palace, and tortured. What the hell they’d been trying to get out of him, he never knew. Perhaps it was just sadism. Their army was getting whipped, and they needed someone to take it out on. He just happened to be there. It was nothing personal. It just felt like that when they were plugging electrodes into your balls.

  It was only after the war had ended, as part of the ceasefire agreement, that Nick had been released. He had had no idea the war had even ended, and when they came to haul him out of the dark, dank cell in which he had been living for the past few weeks, he’d assumed it was a firing squad he was about to meet, not a helicopter to ferry him home. It had taken two months in hospital to patch up his wounds, but the mental damage had been far worse than the physical impact. After he returned to the Regiment, it was impossible to get back to soldiering again. The orders didn’t make any sense. The training had no purpose. The missions seemed stupid. After a year, he quit, disgusted with both himself and the army.

  ‘Nothing happened in Iraq, silver girl,’ he said, slipping into the nickname he’d had for Sarah since she was a toddler.

  He put his arm across her shoulder, but she shook it away.

  ‘Then why are we here?’

  The move had been made just a few months after Nick had left the army. Nick and Mary had talked about opening a ski school for years. Both of them loved the mountains, and they had met on the French Alps twenty years earlier when he was doing his army ski training and Mary had been waitressing in one of the tourist bars. They’d taken Sarah from the moment she was born: she could practically ski before she could walk. They’d leased a small office, hired Heinz, a young German skier, to help out, and Nick had done most of the teaching while Mary took the bookings and looked after the accounts. But nothing had gone the way Nick had planned it. The first season was tough, and the clients were all idiots. Rich bankers from London who could barely stand up, let alone ski, and who thought it was Nick’s fault. They spoke to you like you were dirt. A couple of times he’d lost it, shouting at them. Couldn’t help myself, they were spastics, he said later. But word soon got around that he was difficult. Mary was furious with him, and the bookings were starting to dry up. They’d sunk all their savings into this school. They were arguing all the time.

  We argued the night she died …

  ‘To do something different with our lives,’ said Nick.

  ‘I don’t want to,’ said Sarah, her voice suddenly icy with controlled anger. ‘I don’t want to be here.’ Tears were starting to stream down her face. ‘I just want my mum back.’

  ‘It’s going to be OK,’ said Nick, reaching out for her.

  ‘No, it’s not,’ screamed Sarah. ‘Nothing’s going to be OK, not now, not ever.’

  She was running away from him now, her legs skidding across the frozen surface of the track. Her hair had come loose, and was now streaming in the wind behind her. Not ever, heard Nick, the words bouncing off the side of the mountain, and bouncing back towards him. Nothing’s going to be OK, not ever.

  And the worst of it is, maybe she’s right.

  Nick caught up with her, reaching out with his arms, hugging her tight to his body. Her breath was short, gasping. ‘I just want to hide from the world,’ said Sarah, wiping the tears away from her eyes.

  Nick glanced up towards the brooding slopes of Les Houches. There was a dip on the left-hand side of the mountain, where the rock seemed to fade into the cloud to create a shape like a crescent. ‘You see that mountain,’ he said, cradling Sarah in his arms. ‘I hid in a mountain just like that when I was dropped into Kurdistan. Hiding isn’t as simple as you think it is when you’re fifteen. It’s hard, lonely work that cuts into a man’s soul. Hide for long enough and you forget who you even are.’

  Sarah turned to look at him, her eyes fierce with anger. ‘Well, you should know, Dad. You’ve been hiding ever since you came back from that stupid war.’

  ONE

  10 February 2003.

  Jed Bradley could feel the muscles in his neck tightening. His throat was dry, and the knuckles on his broad, strong fists were tapping against the surface of the wooden table. I don’t mind being dropped from a helicopter, he told himself. I don’t mind sleeping rough, tabbing fifty miles with a pack on my back, or escaping through hostile territory. I don’t even mind being shot at.

  But I don’t like being sneered at by morons. That’s not what I joined the Regiment for.

  ‘I said it’s fucking bollocks,’ snapped Jim Muir. ‘We need proof. Proper proof. Not this fucking, poxy, vomit-inducing bollocks.’

  Jed shot him a glance. Muir was a short man, with thinning brown hair, a pallid complexion, and a thick, glowing nose so red it could have won a prize in a tomato-growing competition. A former tabloid reporter, he’d joined the Prime Minister’s press office two years earlier, and had already earned himself a reputation as a bruiser. Should have stuck to the Page Three girls, mate, thought Jed.

  ‘Maybe you’d like to go into Iraq next time,’ said Jed.

  His tone was polite, restrained. But the anger was still evident in the expression on his face.

  ‘None of your bloody lip, solider boy,’ spat Muir. ‘I thought the SAS was supposed to be tough.’ A mean cackle started to rise up from his chest. ‘Not just a bunch of bloody, bed-wetting pansy boys.’

  Jed leant forward on the table, and was about to speak, when the woman sitting next to him put her fingers on his arm. ‘Let’s all calm down,’ Laura Strangar said, ‘and try to examine what we have.’

 
They were sitting in the Vauxhall headquarters of the Firm, just next to the Thames. For the last three years, all the important meetings had taken place in one of the secure rooms. There were no windows a terrorist could launch a missile through. You needed the highest possible security clearance to be allowed through the door, and even then you were searched and put through a metal detector. It was the safest place in London.

  There were seven people sitting round the table. Muir was directly opposite Jed. At his side was Mike Weston, the government’s chief weapons scientist, plus his younger deputy, Miles Frith. On the other side sat David Wragg, the deputy director of the Firm, and the man feeding intelligence on Iraq into the system. There was an American intelligence officer who never gave his name, and never spoke; he just sat there, making notes on his Blackberry. And next to him, Laura Strangar, the intelligence officer assigned to directing Jed’s work. Plus me, thought Jed. The only one of these intelligence experts who might actually have set foot in the country they’re supposed to be experts on.

  Strangar intrigued Jed. He had first met her two weeks ago at his briefing for the mission. She was no more than thirty-five, he guessed, but like many young London career women, it was hard to tell her exact age. They spent so much time in the gym, and were so careful about their diets, the years never seemed to clock up on them in the usual way. Her muscles were toned like a man’s, and yet her skin was soft and white. Her elegant features were highlighted by a dusting of face powder, and the natural redness of her lips was enhanced by a thin film of lipstick.

  Jed’s mission had been the most perilous he had undertaken in the four years since he had passed selection into the Regiment from the Paras. He’d been made to grow a beard, and kitted out with some old Arab clothes – one of the reasons he’d been chosen was because he had brown eyes that would help him to blend in with the locals. A chopper had dropped him into Iraq, into a patch of scrubland six miles to the west of Baghdad: the British and the Americans had total control of the skies, even though there was no war yet, but there were still only a few places a special forces soldier could land safely.