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  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’.

  December 20

  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.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Danny.

  ‘They both lost their parents during the Allied invasion of Iraq. Prime recruits for IS, but unknown to MI6 until the last couple of days. The Firm intercepted an NSA intelligence briefing about them which the Yanks have forgotten to share with us.’

  ‘Friends like that,’ muttered Spud, ‘who needs enemies?’

  ‘Quite. Seems like the CIA have evidence these two cunts are on their way to the UK. They’re using a migrant boat as cover. It means they can get into Europe without the need for a passport. Just two more faces out of thousands. Nobody’s going to ask any questions. The Yanks seem to think Santa and Rudolph might have terrorist intentions on UK soil, so why they haven’t shared this with us is anyone’s guess. Bottom line is, the Americans mustn’t know that we’re going after these suspects, because then they’ll realise we’re intercepting their intel. You’ll forward-mount from the Italian section of Sigonella base, not the American section, and the ship’s captain of HMS Enterprise has instructions to keep all non-essential crew below decks when the time comes – we don’t want any loose tongues. We have local eyes on the ground in Libya that tell us the migrant boat is called the Ocean Star, and it will be setting sail from the north African coast at approximately midday tomorrow, heading for the southern tip of Greece. You can expect to RV with the ship approximately 200 nautical miles from the Sicilian coast. You’re looking at about 100 personnel on the Ocean Star, all told. We’ll be monitoring the currents and the sea state, so HMS Enterprise should have no trouble intercepting it. We’re aiming for a mid
night boarding. There’s a Marine unit on board the ship. They’ll surround the Ocean Star and offer fire support if you need it. You need to board the Ocean Star, bring it alongside HMS Enterprise, cross-deck the migrants, identify the targets, get the migrants back on board and transport Santa and Rudolph to an interrogation centre for questioning.’

  ‘Why not just drop us into Libya?’ Spud had interrupted. ‘We can pick the fuckers up before they set sail, instead of mucking around in the dark on a moving platform.’ Danny had wanted to ask the same question. Was there was something about these instructions that didn’t add up?

  ‘Why not just keep your mouth shut and listen to your orders? Once you’ve isolated the targets, you’ll await further instructions on the ship regarding transporting them to the interrogation centre. OK, you’re dismissed. Tony, hang back a second. I need a word.’

  None of the others had heard what Hammond had told Tony. Maybe he’d been warning the unit leader not to be an asshole. If so, he’d be wasting his breath.

  ‘Fifteen minutes out!’ the co-pilot shouted from the cockpit.

  Spud opened his eyes. Danny leaned forward and unfastened the flight case that they’d carried on to the Wildcat. It contained their hardware: HK416s for the guys, and Caitlin’s signature, harder-hitting HK417. Sig 225s, holstered up, for each of them. Their extra rounds were already stashed in their black ops waistcoats, along with their flashbang grenades and med kits. This was apparently a straightforward op – they were unlikely to put down a single round – but as Danny clipped on his Kevlar helmet and boom mike, he started mentally preparing himself for the job anyway. If he’d learned one thing during his time in the Regiment, it was that things often failed to go exactly as you planned. Now was the time to put aside any tension between them. They needed to work as a single unit, not as a collection of egos.

  Danny sensed the others putting their heads in a similar place as they checked over their weapons and strapped them to their bodies. The Wildcat banked sharply. From the side window, Danny saw the lights of a naval ship glowing below them in the night. He felt a little surge in his stomach. He might be hundreds of miles from his baby daughter, the unit might be at each other’s throats – but there was a buzz of excitement that preceded every op, and it was almost impossible to stamp it out. It was why you did the job in the first place.