Osama Read online

  ‘Sit down!’

  Joe looked over his shoulder to see Fletcher enter, along with the three strangers. Joe and his mates took seats next to Raz. None of the Americans moved; not until the three strangers had reached the front of the briefing area and the uniformed man had nodded at them. At his signal they silently occupied the front two rows, while Fletcher and the three others remained standing at the front.

  It was Fletcher who spoke first. He neither welcomed nor introduced anyone. Not his style. ‘OK gentlemen,’ he instructed. ‘Here’s what you need to know. Intelligence wires are buzzing. I don’t have to tell you why. We’ve got every AQ cell from Kabul to Kidderminster planning a revenge attack.’

  ‘Surprise surprise,’ Raz muttered.

  ‘Village of Nawaz, thirty-five klicks south-east of here. Our American friends’ – he indicated his three companions – ‘have been monitoring ICOM chatter radiating from a known Taliban communications centre based in an old school building. It seems to suggest that—’

  The uniformed Yank stood forward. ‘Why don’t I take it from there?’ he said in a lazy drawl.

  Fletcher nodded, but Joe noticed a slight tightness around his eyes.

  ‘The name Anwar Zahari won’t mean anything to any of you gentlemen,’ the Yank said. ‘No reason why it should. He’s a Taliban grunt, but he’s a very skilled explosives engineer. Last known location was an AQ sanctuary in Eritrea. We weren’t aware of his presence in this part of the world until just a few hours ago when his name started coming over the ICOM. If he’s in the area and active, he’s only doing one thing. We need to stop him from doing it. From what we can establish, he’s only going to be in Nawaz for a few hours. We can’t wait till nightfall.

  ‘Intel suggests all the roads in are being watched, so you’ll have to approach cross-country by foot. We have two Black Hawks online for Bagram. They’ll be on the ground in thirty minutes. I want two teams: one to enter Nawaz from the west, one from the east. You’ll have drone support, but don’t rely on it. It’s a heavily populated area, and we need to keep civilian casualties to a minimum.’

  ‘So why the drone support?’ JJ butted in.

  ‘Tell you what, soldier, why don’t you let your superiors do what they’re good at, and you can do what the fuck we tell you? Hernandez’ – he indicated one of the US soldiers, and Joe saw that it was his man with the scarred lip – ‘will lead team Alpha from the west, McGregor’ – he pointed at one of the men with baseball caps, the back of whose neck was so tanned it was almost black – ‘team Bravo from the east. ISAF directives, this is a joint operation. Each team will take two Regiment scouts.’

  The American turned to Fletcher, who was ready with his instructions: ‘Joe, Ricky, team Alpha. JJ, Raz, team Bravo.’

  ‘You have’ – the American checked his watch – ‘twenty-five minutes to familiarize yourself with the imagery. Departure 0645. We have support groups preparing your gear. Let’s move, gentlemen. We’ve caught the big fish; now let’s hose up the tiddlers. You find our man, and remember he’s notched up a fair few American names on his bedpost. You have my express permission to fuck him up pretty good.’

  He looked directly at Hernandez and nodded. The Americans stood up as a single man as their commander left the room.

  FIVE

  0715 hours.

  The sun, low in the sky, streamed into the dirty interior of the Black Hawk. A thick, oily stench of aviation fuel clung to everything and the surfaces were covered in sand. Joe couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten a mouthful of food that didn’t contain grit, or wiped his arse without it feeling like he was sandpapering it.

  Joe sat next to Ricky on the dull, hard, black seats that lined the chopper. No attempts to disguise themselves as locals today. Kevlar helmets cut away around the ears. Body armour and multicam. Ops vests stashed with extra ammo and grenades. If – when – they caught up with the bomb-maker, they’d need to go in hard and fast. A Camelbak full of fresh water was strapped to each man’s back, with a little plastic tube emerging around his neck. Rehydration was almost as important as ammo in theatres like this. Stopping to drink from a bottle could mean wasting time they didn’t have.

  Every man wore the Skye Precision gear common to the Regiment, the SEALs and Delta, the only differences being that the Yanks had their kneepads sewn into their trousers, whereas Joe and Ricky had had to fix theirs around the outside. The Yanks had Velcro patches with the stars and stripes fixed to their body armour; Joe and Ricky had Union Jacks with a difference. In common with some of the other old sweats in the Regiment, their badges were embroidered with Arabic lettering which translated, very precisely, as ‘Fuck Al-Qaeda’. The Yanks were all bigger than both Joe and Ricky, and they carried a bit more shite on them: there were more knives tucked into their rigs, and Joe saw that Hernandez had a pair of surgical scissors to snip Plasticuffs with.

  He felt eyes on him. Why was Hernandez looking at him like that? He shook off the paranoia. He’d seen enough men go off on missions to realize that different people prepared themselves in different ways. There was seldom a party atmosphere while you were waiting to be inserted. When the loadie shouted ‘Five minutes in!’ above the noisy grind of the aircraft, and held up five fingers in the direction of the Americans but ignored Joe and Ricky, he told himself it was a US chopper and a US flight crew. Of course they were going to pay more attention to their countrymen than to the Brits. Joe had been on enough joint ops to realize it was always that way.

  He closed his eyes and cleared his head. He wished he’d slept last night.

  They started losing height, suddenly and sharply. Standard flight practice: keep high, out of the range of the type of rockets the Taliban were expected to have, then swoop down at a steep gradient when you’re almost at your insertion point. They didn’t touch down immediately, but skirted just a couple of metres above the desert. Joe knew why this was – their final insertion point was camouflaged by undulating ground and this manoeuvre would decrease the chance of their being spotted by Taliban scouts. But it was dangerous. The pilots’ vision would be compromised by dust from the downdraft, and the aircraft could easily lose that couple of metres of height. This was something only a special forces flight crew would attempt.

  Final checks: weapons locked and loaded, ops vests tightly strapped. The Black Hawk finally touched down, and within seconds the eight men were exiting from the side, forming a semicircle around the back of the chopper and kneeling down in the firing position. Once more, Joe found himself surrounded by a cloud of dust which only started to settle as the chopper lifted up into the air.

  The blur of brown-out all around faded and their location eased into view. They were in a patch of bare desert. The area around Bagram was a featureless dustbowl, a harsh environment even for the locals, and the earth was baked hard even this early on in the year, but with a fine, silty covering of dust that accepted footprints. Here and there, some hardy foliage was trying to force its way out of the cracks in the ground. To Joe’s left, two metres away, was the long, craggy branch of a mulberry tree. But there were no other trees in the vicinity. Either it had been blown here in a winter storm, dragged here by a wild animal, or a person had placed it here: a reminder that even deserted places were never deserted for long. The mountain ranges of the Afghanistan–Pakistan border were at Joe’s six o’clock. Ahead of him, the terrain sloped uphill. Gradient, one in five, peaking in the brow of the hill about half a klick on and 100 metres high, curling round to the south. To the north: horizon.

  Joe’s earpiece crackled into life. Hernandez’s voice was clearer through the comms than in person, even though he was only five metres to Joe’s right. ‘Team Alpha in position,’ he said. Only when he had relayed this information back to their ops centre at Bagram did he raise his arm again and jab his forefinger north in the direction of the brow of the hill.

  Joe and Ricky stood up. Their role was well defined. You could have all the intel in the world, but until re
al men with real eyes had scoped the place out, you never quite knew what was waiting. They bent low as they ran uphill, knowing that the Americans had them covered. They ran fifteen metres apart – that way, if they did get into contact, they weren’t bunched up as a single target – and it took approximately three minutes to cover the ground.

  Fifteen metres from the top of the hill they hit the dirt. Joe looked to his right and caught Ricky’s eye. They both nodded at the same time and started to crawl, edging closer to the brow and keeping low. Stand here on the summit and you’d be observable for miles around.

  The terrain beyond the downhill slope of the hill was an open plain. A deep wadi – one of the dried-up river beds that characterized this part of the world – ran from the bottom of the hill, across the wide expanse of open ground and into the heart of Nawaz, two kilometres away. The town itself was a sprawling hotchpotch of compounds around the edges and low concrete buildings surrounding a tall, thin minaret in the centre, all wavering in the heat haze. A road ran into it from the north-east, and even with his naked eye Joe could make out the metallic glint of three vehicles heading into the town. Their plan was to approach Nawaz using this wadi with high, craggy sides as cover, knowing that it would take them within 100 metres of their target’s suspected hideout.

  Joe edged forward another couple of metres, keeping his body pressed flat against the ground, and moving slowly. His pixellated digicam would help him blend into the scenery from a distance; but it was movement, more than anything else, that caused people to be seen. Before leaving camp, he had carefully removed his wristwatch. Rule number one of daytime surveillance: remove anything reflective.

  Now he carefully took a small, handheld scope from his ops vest. It was coated with non-reflective black paint to prevent sunlight glinting off it; the lens was hooded for the same reason. Joe draped a camo-net over the end of the lens to make triple sure that the sun didn’t reflect off it, then put it to his eye and started to scan.

  It was immediately obvious that they would not be able to approach Nawaz from this direction.

  There was no sign of activity within the wadi itself, but the open ground surrounding it was crawling with militia. Joe counted six motorbikes – the Taliban grunt’s vehicle of choice – as well as four open-topped Land Rovers each carrying a minimum of three armed men. They were all moving, none of them following any particular pattern – just exerting their presence.

  An insect landed on Joe’s left eyelid. He didn’t move to swat it. And when he spoke into his comms, he barely moved his lips. ‘We’ve got company.’

  A pause. Twenty seconds. Then a crackle in the earpiece. ‘Roger that,’ came the voice of Hernandez. ‘Get back down here, both of you.’

  Joe and Ricky edged backwards, then slid ten metres down the hill on their backs before standing and running back to the unit. They were still in a circular formation, each of them kneeling and with their guns pointing out into the desert. Joe approached Hernandez directly. ‘It’s a no-go,’ he said. ‘The wadi that leads into the town is fine, but the open ground around it is crawling. They’ll spot us when we go over the hill, no question.’

  The American considered it for a moment. ‘OK, listen up. We’re going to re-route. Cut round, enter the town from the south.’ A bead of sweat was running down his face. It collected on his upper lip just where the scar was. ‘We move in pairs—’

  ‘Hang on,’ Ricky interrupted.

  Hernandez stopped talking and looked at Ricky as though he’d only just noticed he was there. ‘You got a problem with that?’

  ‘You’ve seen the mapping, brudder. The area south of Nawaz is shit?ful of legacy mines and IEDs. That’s why we’re supposed to be heading in from the west . . .’

  Hernandez took a step closer. ‘Well, here’s the thing, brother. You want to go back up there, get your head full of holes, you be my guest.’

  ‘I’m not walking into a fucking minefield.’

  ‘You’ll walk where I damn well tell you to walk.’

  An ominous pause. In an uncomfortable instant, Joe realized there were three Colts pointing at him and Ricky.

  It was Hernandez who broke the silence. ‘As you’ve studied the maps so damn carefully,’ he said, ‘you’ll know that bomb disposal teams have marked safe passage through the area. You’ll see the chalk lines on the fucking ground. Even you Brits aren’t so dumb you can’t follow the white line.’

  Joe breathed deeply. It was true that he’d seen pathways through the minefield marked on the mapping. ‘He’s right, Ricky,’ he murmured.

  ‘What is it, friend?’ Hernandez interrupted. ‘Lost your nerve?’

  ‘Fuck you.’ Ricky looked in contempt at the others. ‘You can tell your homeys to point their rifles at the bad guys, Hernandez,’ he hissed, before turning back to Joe. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘If we’re going, let’s go.’

  0742 hours.

  The desert was already a furnace, and Joe’s clothes clung to him. He took a pull of warm water from his Camelbak and surveyed his position. To his nine o’clock was the incline of the hill, a little gentler now that he and Ricky had covered 500 metres east from their insertion point. At their three o’clock, open, empty ground and the mountains in the distance. At six o’clock, two of the Yanks 400 metres back, indistinct in the heat haze. And at twelve o’clock, a fucking wasteland.

  There were three derelict breeze-block buildings approximately 500 metres ahead. They delineated the edge of the town – about 200 metres beyond them were more buildings, though it was clear that this area was seldom visited. There was no sign of any human activity; just a thin, lame cat that limped towards them from the direction of the breeze-block huts, and stopped, 100 metres from their position, when it saw Joe and Ricky. It stood still for five seconds, before limping away in the opposite direction.

  ‘How many lives do you reckon Tiddles has used up?’ Ricky murmured.

  More than nine, Joe thought to himself. The 500 metres of ground between them and the breeze-block hut was like a junk yard. The burned-out shells of cars littered the whole place. With his scope, Joe could make out the ravaged corpse of some unidentifiable animal, the size of a large dog, but headless. And, a few metres to its left, what looked like the remnants of a kite, knotted and tangled round a twisted chunk of metal, drooping in the windless air.

  Five metres from where they were standing, the hard-baked earth was stained white. A straight line – it was only a couple of inches wide – extended twenty metres in the direction of the shacks, before veering left at forty-five degrees and straightening up again after another five metres.

  ‘Follow the yellow brick road?’ Ricky said.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ Joe replied, his voice low. ‘Maybe we should skirt round the whole area.’

  Ricky shook his head. ‘We don’t know how far the frickin’ things extend. The Russkis mined this place to hell, you know. If the Yanks’ minesweepers have done the hard work, we should follow their line.’

  Ricky was right. Thank fuck it hadn’t rained for six weeks, and the chalk line was still mostly intact, although it was scuffed out in places. The chalk lines marking safe passage through a minefield weren’t just good for soldiers. Local people and enemy militia used them too.

  ‘I’ll go first,’ Joe said.

  ‘Hey, brudder . . .’

  ‘Forget it, Ricky. We’re good now, OK?’

  Ricky grinned. ‘OK.’ If he suspected that Joe didn’t want him taking the lead for any other reason, he didn’t show it.

  ‘Keep a twenty-five-metre distance,’ Joe said. Ricky didn’t have to ask why: that was the buffer he had to keep to stay out of the kill zone, should Joe end up stepping on a pressure plate.

  ‘Roger that, brudder. See you on the other side.’

  They clapped palms, then Joe stepped onto the white line.

  He wouldn’t have walked more carefully if he’d been treading a high wire. He took each footstep very slowly, placing his toes down first an
d feeling for anything unusual before allowing himself to release his whole weight on to his foot and take the next step. The dry earth crunched slightly beneath him, sounding almost as though there was a dusting of snow. No fucking chance. It was already pushing forty degrees and the sky was an intense blue. Sweat continued to ooze from Joe’s pores, and he had only gone ten metres before he had to stop and wipe the salt from his eyes so that he could see the way ahead.

  Fifteen metres.

  Twenty.

  He reached the apex of the line where it angled off, forcing him to change direction. He allowed himself another sip of water to ease the burning dryness in his mouth and throat. All his attention was on the line ahead and it was only out of the corner of his eye that he saw Ricky starting out on it.

  The shell of a Toyota on its side – it still had a few tiny patches of peeling red paint here and there – lay ten metres to his right. Joe’s skin prickled as he passed the shattered glass that lay all around, and spotted the rough hessian bag twisted around the remains of the front seat that had perhaps once belonged to the driver. He looked up to see that he hadn’t covered more than a tenth of the distance to the breeze-block huts.