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  Joe and Ricky exchanged a look, before Joe twice tapped the pressel on the comms unit strapped to his ops vest, wordlessly acknowledging this latest communication.

  They knew what it meant.

  The still night air was about to be broken.

  War on terror?

  Damn right.

  1433 hours EST.

  ‘We’ve breached Pakistani airspace, Mr President. ETA twenty-seven minutes.’

  The President looks across the table. For a moment, Todd thinks he’s looking at him, but then he realizes he’s turned his attention to the small, jowly man in an elegant brown suit who is sitting just behind Todd and to his left. He has blond hair that is neatly parted to one side, and horn-rimmed glasses. Whereas most of the other men in the room have either loosened or removed their ties, this man still wears a neatly tied dicky bow. Todd knows that his name is Mason Delaney, but doesn’t know his title, or even if he has one. He’s high up in the complicated hierarchy of the CIA, however, and he’s sitting behind the photographer because he doesn’t want his face to be recorded on any official photograph. During his time in this job, Todd has learned that there are certain men and woman who do not consider photographers to be their friends, even though the looks Delaney has given him before now are enough to make Todd believe the rumours that he prefers the company of young men.

  For the first time since they all filed into this room, the President manages something like a smile.

  ‘Feeling confident, Mason?’ he asks.

  ‘I feel eighty-seven per cent confident, Mr President.’ Delaney’s voice is high-pitched and nasal. Almost girly. Todd notices Sagan’s face darken as he speaks. This military man clearly has very little time for such an effete individual, and when Delaney catches Sagan’s expression he widens his eyes provocatively. ‘What is your estimate of success, Herb?’

  Sagan’s annoyance visibly increases. But this operation is Mason Delaney’s baby, and everybody in the room knows it. He takes a deep breath and appears to calm himself.

  ‘ETA twenty-six minutes, Mr President,’ he says. ‘Twenty-six minutes and counting.’

  Abbottabad. 0053 hours.

  Joe had eyes on the two metal security gates that formed the compound’s only entrance. Distance, twenty-five metres to the south-west, across the single-track road.

  ‘Anything?’ Ricky sounded as tense as Joe felt.

  ‘Fuck all,’ he murmured. Through the grainy-green view of his night sight, he had seen the occasional flashing eyes of a wild dog, or the bright light of a commercial flight drifting overhead. In his mind he pictured the bat-winged shape of the RQ170 stealth drone he knew was circling up there too, its camera trained directly on the 3500 square metres of the compound. An impressive piece of kit, sure, but not a substitute for men on the ground alert to the arrival of a lookout with an anxious expression, or the frown of a guard in a state of heightened awareness. Joe saw neither. He didn’t doubt that the compound was guarded, but the guards were well hidden behind its high walls. At the moment, the exterior was deserted.

  Jesus, it was hot. Joe’s skin was soaked. There wasn’t even the hint of a breeze, but the sound of traffic from the centre of Abbottabad, just under a kilometre away, still drifted towards them. Like everyone else, Joe had always assumed that their target would be holed up in some remote village on the Afghanistan–Pakistan border, or living in a cave with a heavily armed entourage. He’d even heard rumours that the guy was in Africa, living under the protection of some scumbag warlord. The fact that he was here, in pissing distance of the Pakistan Military Academy and right under the nose of the Pakistani government, had been as much of a surprise to him as he knew it would be to the world at large when it learned that the Americans had finally caught up with him.

  If the Americans finally caught up with him. The rabbit wasn’t in the bag yet.

  ‘You think he’s in there?’ Ricky breathed in the darkness.

  Joe kept the night sight to his eyes. It could only take a second for somebody to slip in and out of that place, and he didn’t intend to miss that if it happened. A bead of sweat dripped down into one eye. He blinked hard, but kept his position. ‘The Yanks must be pretty sure.’ He half smiled. ‘Be a laugh if they send in a squadron to find some farmer banging his wife, though . . .’

  He was interrupted by more squeaking from the man bound to the chair. Joe felt himself start. When he looked over his shoulder, his mate was already storming over to their prisoner.

  ‘Ricky . . .’

  Ricky was drawing his knife.

  ‘Fucking hell, mate! What’s the matter with you?’

  No answer. Ricky picked up the roll of packing tape that was lying by the chair, and wrapped even more of it round the man’s head, so that now it covered his nose as well as his eyes and mouth. The noise stopped, but now the man clearly couldn’t breathe. His body started shaking more violently. Ricky gave it ten seconds, then carefully punctured the tape covering the nostrils with the point of his blade. Just enough for the guy to get some air in his lungs. The loose tape under his nostrils flapped in and out like a fish’s gills.

  As Ricky walked back to the OP, he didn’t meet Joe’s eyes. Joe didn’t push it.

  A minute passed in tense silence.

  ‘Hotter than a hooker’s noo-noo,’ Ricky muttered finally. ‘Flight crews need to be careful.’

  He was right. High temperatures like this could thin the air and reduce the lifting capability of a chopper’s rotors. No point worrying about that, though. Let the Yanks do their job while Joe and Ricky did theirs: keep the cordon, and if anyone tried to come in or out, deal with them.

  Movement.

  Joe held up one hand to indicate that he’d seen something. Two figures had just wandered into Joe’s field of view. The sound of giggling reached his ears and through the open window he saw a young woman in Western clothes running ahead of a young man. She allowed herself to be caught and pressed up against the high wall of the compound. The giggling became muffled and the man’s hands started to wander.

  ‘What is it?’ Ricky asked, his voice almost silent.

  ‘Couple of kids. We’re on for a live show if Romeo gets his way.’

  Joe checked the time: 0059.

  ‘You OK, mucker?’ Joe asked quietly, not taking his eyes away from the optics.

  ‘Fine and frickin’ dand—’

  He stopped mid-sentence and looked towards the window. So did Joe. They could suddenly hear the sound of a couple of choppers.

  They were approaching fast. Joe could tell by the way the volume of the rotors increased quickly. He moved his eyes from the night sight and squinted through the net curtain and into the dark sky. At first there was nothing to see – the flight crews would be seeing their way with the aid of night-vision units, all lights on their aircraft extinguished. Twenty seconds later, however, the roar of their engines reached a peak, and Joe could see two great, black silhouettes, one of them hovering twenty metres above the compound, the second thirty metres above that, and maybe ten metres beyond it. In the corner of his vision, he saw the young Pakistani woman wriggle away from her suitor and look up. It crossed Joe’s mind that she could be in a lot of trouble if her indiscretions were made public.

  Joe bent down at the night sight again and redirected it towards the nearer helicopter. Suddenly the black shadow was converted to green-tinted detail. Joe could instantly tell that he was looking at a modified chopper, one that few people would ever get the chance to see. The familiar shape of the Black Hawk was subtly different. The tail was smoother and more rounded. The nose was sleeker. Joe could tell at a glance that it had been engineered for stealth capability, which meant that the Pakistani authorities wouldn’t even suspect its presence here in their back yard.

  The door on one side of the Black Hawk was open, and Joe counted six men at the aperture, not including the Minigun operator who had his weapon trained on the compound. He knew there would be another six preparing to drop down
from the other side door. He could make out the head cams and goggles fitted to their helmets, the boom mikes to the side of their mouths, the assault rifles strapped to their bodies. Something fell from the chopper – long and snake-like. Joe had travelled in, and fast-roped out of, enough helicopters to realize something was wrong.

  ‘We got a problem,’ he said.

  Instantly, Ricky was beside him, peering through the netting. ‘What’s happening?’ he demanded tersely.

  ‘Bird’s skittering . . .’

  As he spoke, the chopper spun through ninety degrees, wobbling. The pilot was obviously struggling to control it in the heat-thinned air, and the fast-rope was spinning with the momentum of the helicopter. Now the Black Hawk was listing alarmingly. It spun back ninety degrees to its original angle, and although he couldn’t hear the voices of the SEALs inside over the screaming of the engines, he could see they were shouting at each other as they started to lose height. A couple of seconds later the chopper had lurched ten metres down. Its main body was now hidden from Joe behind the high wall of the compound, but he could just see the tail peeping up above the rim of the wall.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Ricky shouted.

  Joe was about to answer when he heard the noise: an ominous, sharp, crunching sound as the Black Hawk’s modified tail caught the top of the wall and a shower of sparks, glowing brightly in his night-vision scope, needled his eyeballs.

  ‘Black Hawk down,’ he muttered.

  ‘That’s getting to be a frickin’ habit . . .’

  Joe turned his sight to the second chopper. It too was descending and wobbling as it disappeared behind the compound’s wall. Hardly reassuring. The SEALs were supposed to fast-rope into the compound, leaving the choppers to fly away out of earshot so as not to attract unnecessary attention until they were needed to extract. Now they’d both set down inside the compound, and half of Abbottabad must have heard them.

  The op was turning pear-shaped before it had even started.

  Joe kept eyes on. Stuck in here, he felt about as much use as Anne Frank’s drum kit. ‘We’re going to get a fucking audience any minute,’ he muttered. As he spoke, though, he heard a solid clicking sound behind him. He looked round. ‘What you doing, big guy?’ he asked, his voice dangerously level.

  For a moment Ricky didn’t answer. He was too busy checking the magazine in his suppressed Sig before replacing it high on his chest rig. ‘I’m going in,’ he said.

  Joe straightened up. ‘We’re not going anywhere, mucker. We keep the cordon, no matter what happens.’

  ‘Fuck the cordon. They’ve crashed. They need help.’

  ‘There’s two choppers full of SEALs, Ricky. They can take care of themselves.’ As he spoke, he edged towards the door, ready to block Ricky’s exit.

  ‘Get out of the way, brudder.’ Ricky’s voice was level, but very quiet.

  The air vibrated with the roar of the choppers on the ground nearby. The fly that had been buzzing around the stove landed on Ricky’s cheek. He didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘SOPs, mucker,’ Joe breathed. ‘The Yanks don’t want us in that compound.’

  Joe was in front of the door now. Ricky stopped advancing.

  Standoff.

  Ricky scowled. ‘Fine,’ he said. He turned on his heel, walked back over to the observation post and laid his M4 back on the ground.

  Joe joined him. He leaned down over the tripod and looked through the night sight again.

  And that was when he saw him.

  A man was running along the front wall of the compound. He was keeping close to it and was almost directly in front of the OP, about fifteen metres from their position, across the single-track road. The young couple, who were looking alarmed, were in front of him. He just skirted them, without appearing to acknowledge them, and continued along the wall, clearly uninterested in what they were up to. He was evidently intent on getting to the compound entrance, just twenty metres away.

  Joe’s eyes were sharp, but it was difficult to make out his features exactly. He was dressed like a local, though – white dishdash, sandals – and he had round spectacles and a goatee.

  ‘Shit,’ Joe hissed.

  ‘What?’

  But Joe was already speaking into his comms. ‘Jacko,’ he barked. ‘Is the Doctor home yet?’

  ‘Negative,’ Jacko replied tersely, his voice masked with distortion. ‘Why?’

  ‘I think we’ve found him,’ Joe replied. He was already moving towards the door.

  ‘You sure it’s him?’ Ricky demanded. ‘Where did he come from?’

  Joe wasn’t sure. Maybe if he hadn’t been keeping Ricky on the straight and fucking narrow, he’d have seen the man arrive, got a better look. But whether it was the Doctor or not, if he was approaching the main entrance of the compound with the aim of reinforcing its occupants or helping them in any way, he had to be stopped.

  They were at the top of the rickety set of wooden stairs, the stench of the ground-floor toilet wafting up towards them and no trace of their previous argument in their voices. They needed to get to ground level, because to fire from their OP would immediately give away its location. Seconds later they were hurtling towards the front door. Opening it, Joe stepped out into the darkness beyond, his M4 fully engaged. Ricky was with him.

  Joe took in the situation at a glance. The Doctor – if it was the Doctor – was fifteen metres away, at Joe’s two o’clock. The courting couple had separated. The boy was edging away eastwards along the perimeter wall. Distance, twenty metres, eleven o’clock. He’d left the girl crouching on the ground, yelling her head off at the sight of two men with weapons. They were both in the wrong place at the wrong time: Joe and Ricky couldn’t let Romeo go off and alert anyone to their presence. Same went for Juliet.

  ‘Take them out,’ he instructed Ricky, and turned his attention back to the new arrival.

  The guy was seventeen metres away now. Eighteen.

  A single head shot would put him down, but Joe made the split-second decision to aim for the body. If this was the Doctor, they needed to identify him, and it was hard to identify a body with only half a head.

  He fired. The suppressed M4 made a dull knocking noise and the man went down.

  To his left he heard the discharge of Ricky’s weapon as he fired on Romeo.

  Joe kept his own target in his sight, checking for movement. After five seconds, though, the girl was still screaming. He looked to the left. Ricky had his weapon pointed at Juliet, who was still crouched on the ground ten metres away, to their twelve o’clock. The red dot of his laser marker danced on her throat.

  But Ricky didn’t fire. His hand was shaking again.

  ‘Fuck’s sake!’ Joe hissed. He turned his own weapon in the girl’s direction. The red dot from his gun joined Ricky’s.

  One round. A flash of blood and the girl fell backwards.

  There was no time for Joe to lay into Ricky for his moment of indecision. An explosion from inside the compound ripped through the air. Both men pressed themselves against the exterior wall of the house. Joe engaged his comms. ‘Zero,’ he shouted, ‘this is Sierra Foxtrot Five. What the hell’s going on in there?’

  A crackle of interference, then a voice. ‘Entry team breaching the internal walls to reach target Geronimo. Hold the cordon. Repeat, hold the cordon.’

  ‘Roger that.’

  Joe immediately consulted his mental map of the compound. It was triangular in shape. The main building, situated opposite the triangle’s apex, was connected to the main entrance gates by a pair of high interior walls that formed a thirty-metre-long, open-topped passageway. The Black Hawk had crashed in the western segment of the compound, where, intelligence reports suggested, the occupants burned their rubbish. The explosion must have been the SEALs breaking their way through the walls of the roofless corridor that led from the entrance gates – the same gates Joe’s target had been trying to reach. The man had fallen into a ditch along the bottom of the compound wall eighteen
metres from Joe’s position and to his two o’clock. Joe needed to get over there, identify him and finish him off if necessary.

  ‘Cover me,’ he said.

  Ricky nodded, dropped to one knee and pressed the butt of his M4 into his shoulder, ready to provide covering fire should Joe need it.

  Joe ran. The distance between the house and the enemy wall was ten metres, but he had to run double that on the diagonal in a south-westerly direction to reach the man. He’d gone down barely a couple of metres from the security gates. He was clutching with one hand the wound Joe had inflicted on the side of his right leg. It was pissing blood through his fingers, and the man was shaking violently. Joe flicked on the Maglite attached to the body of his M4. It lit up the alarmed, sweating face of the wounded man, whose dishdash was soaked with blood.

  Joe saw immediately that he was not the Doctor. He was about twenty years too young.

  He was also feeling for a weapon with his spare hand.

  He didn’t get very far.

  The barrel of Joe’s cylindrical silencer was no more than six inches from the target’s head when he fired. The round made as much noise entering the man’s skull as it did leaving the weapon. Blood spattered over the pale rendered wall of the compound as the shooter slumped back into the ditch, his face no longer a face. But Joe’s attention was already elsewhere. There was a second explosion from inside the compound – louder than the first, or maybe Joe was just nearer. He turned to look at the main gates. He was standing just two metres from them. They were metal, about five metres high – the same height as the wall – and each a couple of metres wide. A thick roll of barbed wire covered the top. They hummed and vibrated on account of the mechanism inside.

  And they were opening.

  A figure emerged – just a shadow in the darkness.

  SEAL or enemy? Impossible to tell, but if it was the second, they couldn’t be allowed to breach the cordon and fetch reinforcements.

  Joe held his fire for a briefest of moments. The figure hurried out into the moonlight. It was a man. Tall. Thin. He wore a dirty white smock and his bearded face was full of wild, sweaty panic. He was clearly not an American, and he was clearly trying to escape. Which meant he was dead.