Murder Team Read online

  Silence on the line.

  Danny’s throat was dry. He’d run out of things to say.

  Thirty seconds passed. Were frenzied communications taking place between Tel Aviv and London? Were the Apache flight crew preparing to fire, or retreat? Was that sight, of the choppers hanging over a rough desert settlement, the last Danny would ever see?

  The situation was out of his hands.

  Movement from the Apache. It dipped its nose a little further, almost as though it was nodding. Then it straightened up.

  The pilot let out a hiss of relief as the Apache turned to face away from the Black Hawks.

  Danny could still see the red lights of the vehicle convoy moving away from the settlement. From this distance, they seemed to be going at a crawl, but in reality he was sure they were flooring it.

  Maybe they knew what was coming. Maybe they didn’t. It hardly mattered either way.

  Danny didn’t see the air-to-surface missiles shoot through the air. But he sure as hell saw their impact as they hit the convoy. Four missiles hit the ground in quick succession. One would have been enough to take out the convoy. Each strike exploded in a massive burst of flame. Even from this distance of a couple of klicks, the noise of the explosions echoed inside the Black Hawk, and lit its interior with a dull orange light.

  The flame subsided as quickly as it had burst into life. The moon illuminated a heavy cloud of silvery smoke at the blast site. There was no sign of the convoy. Nobody could have survived a strike like that. The Somali terrorists were unquestionably dead.

  Twenty-four hours from now, Danny realised, the TV news would report the death of a suspected terrorist cell. There would be honours for somebody. But only a handful of people would know the full details of what had really occurred in this empty part of the world. Or how the supposed friendship between two allies had been exposed for what it was: tentative, fragile and liable to break. When the Israeli and British PMs next appeared together, they would be all smiles. Danny would expect nothing less of politicians for whom the life of his mate Spud, who’d served them so fearlessly, meant so little.

  ‘Everyone’s a fucking winner,’ he muttered bitterly.

  The Black Hawk turned 180 degrees. Danny turned too, and saw Spud lying on a stretcher bed fastened to the side of the chopper. He was still wearing the oxygen mask, but his eyes were open again and he was staring at Danny.

  Danny nodded at his mate. Then he took a seat by the open side door, and watched the moonlit shadow of the Black Hawk speeding across the desert floor, over the ridge where two dead bodies – one British and one Israeli – were still lying, and into the blackness beyond.

  Danny and Spud will return in the new Chris Ryan adventure:

  Hellfire.

  27.8.15