The Angry Sea, page 23
Geordie Skelton grunted. ‘Be glad to get in them fucking vehicles,’ he said, quietly.
Carr nodded: moving across open terrain like this in the dark was one thing, but on foot, in the blinding daylight of the North African desert, they’d stick out like a bulldog’s bollocks unless they could find good cover. They needed the sanctuary of the trucks.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s go. Stay switched on.’
Kev stood up and the team followed him, picking their way slowly south-east.
They made excellent time, and were at the final FRV by 02:45hrs, a good two hours before first light.
It was a few hundred metres short of the actual vehicle handover point, to allow them to overwatch the area.
John Carr and Kevin McMullen left Skelton and West behind and moved cautiously forward from the FRV to get eyes-on the vehicles.
They were back a few minutes later.
‘Nothing there,’ said Carr, quietly.
‘Definitely the right spot, John?’ said Fred West.
‘Hundred per cent,’ said Carr.
‘Fucking raghead cunts,’ hissed Geordie. ‘Where the fuck are they?’
Carr looked at him. ‘Stop flapping,’ he said. ‘They’ll be here. We’ll just have to wait.’
‘Don’t call me a flapper, John,’ said Geordie. Feeling slightly embarrassed, he turned his back and checked their six.
Carr shook his head. ‘Okay, guys,’ he said. ‘Let’s take this opportunity to grab an hour’s kip till the vehicles show. Two on, two off, and everyone awake at 05:00. Kev, Fred, you get your heads down first.’
He waited until McMullen and West had gone – it only took a minute, maybe two – and tapped Geordie on the shoulder.
‘Stay positive, mate,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t let me hear any more negativity from you. We’ve been in worse situations than this, and we aren’t even in a situation yet.’
‘Sorry, John,’ whispered the big northerner, over his shoulder. ‘Just the thought of going back over that route if the vehicles don’t turn up…’
‘I know. But they will turn up. Listen, I need to let spooks know we’re at the FRV.’
He took out a satellite phone and watched the screen search for satellites.
When it locked on, he sent a pre-set SMS message reading ‘ARNHEM’ to a phone in an office in Vauxhall.
The reply came back almost instantly: ‘Confirm ARNHEM.’
Carr powered it back down and placed it back in its pouch.
It was a lifeline, but he would be happier once they had the military satellite radio on the vehicles for comms: this whole area was covered with friendly and unfriendly communications surveillance, and, while that very brief burst of SMS data was safe enough, he didn’t want to risk the satphone for voice calls unless he had to.
Back in London, the phone on Justin Nicholls’ bedside table bleeped, waking him.
‘They’re across the border,’ said a voice.
Five minutes after that, the Prime Minister replaced her own mobile on the bedside table in the master bedroom at Chequers and lay there, staring at the ceiling.
She was still staring at it as the grey light turned pale blue in the early morning dawn: sleep had not come easily to her since her daughter had been taken, and she could not stop thinking about the four men on hostile ground, risking everything for Charlotte.
At just after 5:30 a.m., she gave up the battle and slipped wearily out of bed and down the grand staircase to her study.
She watched a pair of blackbirds squabbling on the lawn, until they flew off as two armed police officers patrolled slowly past.
When this was all over, thought Penelope Morgan, she would like to meet those four men.
At that precise moment, the men in question were sitting in a shallow depression on a Saharan hillside, a few miles from the Libyan border settlement of Wazin.
The first fingers of the sun were just starting to lift over the eastern horizon, and they were already feeling very exposed.
John Carr had just come back from another look at the vehicle handover location.
Still nothing.
‘I’m confident they’ll be here, boys,’ he said. ‘You know how these things go. There’s always some fuck-up. We’ll take turns stagging-on and watching the area of the meet, and just take it from there. Okay?’
Three nods.
‘Geordie, you’re on stag first. Thirty minutes apiece.’
‘Okay, mate,’ said Geordie. ‘No probs.’
Taking his Diemaco in one hand and a set of binos in the other, he moved forwards in a crouch to a position which gave him a good view.
‘Might as well get a brew on, then,’ said Fred West.
‘Fucking right, Fred,’ said Kev. ‘Good man.’
Carr smiled: just like the old days, Fred and his brews.
West took out a small gas cooker and teabags from his ration pack, and filled his metal mug with water.
Five minutes later, they were all sharing a hot brew.
‘Fucking excellent,’ said Kevin McMullen. ‘What a morale booster, eh.’
Carr drank his share, and then looked east. ‘I’ll take this last bit to Geordie,’ he said.
He moved over to where Geordie lay in the sand, scanning the area.
‘Here you go, mate,’ he said, handing over the brew.
‘Cheers, John,’ said Skelton, swigging back the remnants. ‘Just what I needed.’ He went back to his binoculars. ‘Not being negative,’ he said, ‘but what do you reckon if…’ Then he stopped. ‘Wait one,’ he said. ‘We’ve got company.’
Carr took his own binos and followed Geordie’s gaze.
Four or five klicks south he could see a column of dust, picked out against the pale blue early dawn sky.
‘Take Fred back his mug and tell the guys to stand-to,’ said Carr.
Geordie quickly moved back and Carr kept his binos trained on the dust column.
It grew slowly, until at about two kilometres he could make out four vehicles, moving across the open plain.
At a thousand metres, he saw that they were pickups: Toyota Hiluxes, two camouflaged, two white.
He relaxed slightly.
About fucking time, he thought.
79.
THE VEHICLE HANDOVER went smoothly, and they left the RV at a little after 07:00hrs, driving in the direction of a small desert settlement called Tabaqah.
A one-horse town where the horse was a long-dead bag of bones buried in a fifty-foot sand dune, it lay alongside a dry wadi roughly halfway to their target, though well to the south and away from populated areas.
The days of navigating using time and distance bearings had long gone, but it made a useful reference point on the map – not that John Carr was going anywhere near the place. He would turn north and skirt round it thirty kilometres out.
Their route took them across country, just under the Jebel Nafusa mountains, and over the Al-Hamada al-Hamra plateau, a wide, elevated stretch of stony emptiness, blackish with desert varnish on the lower reaches and turning red-brown as they climbed.
It was a barren and unpopulated place, and the latest intelligence they had received from Justin Nicholls helped them to avoid suspect locations.
Still, several times they saw fast-moving vehicles in the distance. They might have been Islamists, or tribal militia, or people traffickers – or they might have been innocent traders, themselves desperate to avoid all three – but Carr worked on the basis that every other living soul out here was a bad guy; each time, Kev changed his direction and moved away.
Fred maintained a distance of some 150 metres, slightly offset, so as to avoid the inevitable dust cloud thrown up on the desert tracks.
The vehicles were laden high and the cab rear-view was useless, so Carr glanced at his wing-mirror regularly, making sure that Fred was still there. If something happened to Geordie’s Hilux at 45kph and Carr wasn’t concentrating, it would be easy to be a couple of klicks separated, maybe a lot more.
Behind him, Geordie Skelton was doing the same, to make sure that nothing was coming up to the rear, and, every now and then they had a quick comms check, just for confidence, and always initiated by Carr.
To minimise the time on air, they had agreed that Geordie would only come up if absolutely necessary; it was unlikely that they would be intercepted over UHF, but being cautious kept you alive.
Being armed to the fucking teeth did the same thing.
Carr had his pistol on his waist, his Diemaco – 40mm grenade launcher attached – between his legs, and a small bag over his shoulder containing an extra four magazines and half-a-dozen 40mm HE.
The remainder of his kit – and the day’s water and food – was neatly placed on the rear seat behind him, next to Kev’s.
In the rear footwell lay a Minimi, fully loaded and ready to go, with a belt of 200 7.62mm rounds, a mix of ball, tracer and AP, and a couple of 66mm LAWs.
Carr was confident that they could deal with most threats, but hoping that they didn’t have to find out.
It was monotonous, mind-numbing work driving through this empty, beige land, so they broke it up every hour with a stop, to stretch their legs, have a chat and a piss – and a fag, in the case of Kev McMullen – and do a map check.
At mid-morning, the sun high and bright and roasting overhead, they stopped for breakfast in the bottom of a wadi, in the shade of a rare wild pistachio tree.
Fred made the brews and handed them over.
‘Weird, ain’t it?’ he said quietly, as he sipped his own. ‘It must be near enough forty degrees out here, and I’d still rather drink this than anything.’
‘What’s that cider shit you like?’ said Kev, with a grin. ‘Cornish Rattler? How about a pint of that?’
Fred smiled. ‘Ice cold in Alex? Yeah, fair one.’
Carr smiled, went to dunk a biscuit into his tea – and then stopped, his hand in mid-air.
A few metres away, on stag in a slightly elevated position, Geordie Skelton had raised his own hand.
‘What’s that?’ he hissed.
All four of them held their breath and cocked their heads.
‘I can’t hear fuck all,’ whispered Carr.
‘Someone coming,’ said Geordie.
Carr crammed the rest of the biscuit into his mouth, and grabbed his weapon.
In a matter of seconds, each man was facing towards the threat.
And then Carr heard it: an almost musical jingling noise, carried on the southern breeze.
A moment later, an old man came into view out of a depression, two hundred metres or so away, slowly leading a handful of moth-eaten camels.
‘Bedou,’ said Carr.
‘Jesus,’ said Fred West, turning south and looking through his scope. ‘He must be about a hundred and twenty.’
‘Probably half that,’ said Carr, watching the man approaching slowly. ‘Sun dries you up like a prune. Ask Geordie’s ex-missus.’
West chuckled.
‘Can’t see anyone else,’ said Skelton, scanning north.
‘Maybe he’ll miss us,’ said Kevin McMullen, hoping that he was right: being compromised out here, only three or four hours into the job, was definitely not in their plan.
‘Nah,’ said Carr. ‘He’s not seen us yet, but he’s walking straight into the wadi.’
‘Fuck,’ spat McMullen.
‘Want me to put him away, John?’ said West, his sights on the centre mass of the old boy.
Carr turned to look at his friend.
Fred’s finger was on the trigger, and the barrel of his rifle was steady as a rock.
He turned back to look at the bedouin herdsman, weighing the guy’s life in the balance.
And made his decision.
‘No,’ he said. ‘We aren’t here to kill old men.’ A half-minute later, the man wandered into their little camp.
Carr had no option but to stand up and confront him.
‘As salaam aleikum,’ he said, rifle pointing down, a smile on his face.
The man stopped in his tracks, a look of surprise on his face.
‘Wa aleikum as salaam,’ he said, quietly.
‘Are you well?’ said Carr, in Arabic. ‘May I ask, what is your name?’
‘Qamar,’ said the man, his voice and expression wary.
‘I invite you to sit with us, Qamar. Would you like some water? Some tea?’
The old man spoke a western desert dialect, but he understood fine, despite Carr’s accent.
Fred West made the man a hot, sweet, black tea, and he sat cross-legged in the sand to drink it.
As he sipped, he said nothing, but just observed the four white men through eyes as black as the night sea.
When he had finished the brew, he carefully handed the mug back to Fred, and nodded his thanks.
Then he turned to Carr.
‘Scottish?’ he said, in English.
Carr was by nature ready for most things life could throw at him, but this knocked him back a little.
‘What?’ he said, his eyebrows raised. ‘Did you say “Scottish”?’
‘Yes,’ said Qamar, back to Arabic. ‘You look Scottish. Good men. I remember them from many years ago. The fighting in the north, against the men with yellow hair.’
‘The Germans?’ said Carr.
‘Yes, Germans. And the others. Italians. I was a young boy. They were good men, the Scottish. Kind men.’
Carr nodded. ‘Do you need anything from us?’ he said.
Qamar looked at his small group of mangy camels, and then back at Carr.
‘My life,’ he said, simply.
Carr was suddenly guilty, and ashamed that he hadn’t seen the fear in the old man’s eyes.
He leaned forward and gripped his shoulder. ‘You have nothing to fear from us, Qamar,’ he said, with an open smile. ‘There is no harm here.’
‘You look like men who would do harm.’
Carr shook his head. ‘Only to our enemies,’ he said. ‘And you are a friend.’ He looked at Kev McMullen. ‘Kev, get this old boy a bottle of water and a packet of biscuits.’
McMullen was back in a moment or two, and handed them to Qamar.
The old man took them, uttered a low shukran, and stared at Carr for some time.
Then he looked around the other men, nodding his head slowly. Then he stood up, in an easy motion which belied his years, and started walking away.
A few paces off, he turned and looked at Carr.
‘I see many things in the desert, Scottish man,’ he said. ‘I do not speak of them. Peace be upon you, my brother.’
‘And upon you,’ said Carr.
Geordie broke the silence as the old man disappeared on up the wadi with his camels.
‘Hard bugger, man,’ he said. ‘Fancy spending your life tabbing across this bastard.’
‘You reckon he’ll tell anyone he saw us?’ said Kev McMullen. ‘It’s bad news if he does.’
‘I doubt it,’ said Carr – though he was wondering, as he spoke, if he was correct. ‘But if he does, he does. Let’s mount up and get out of here.’
They got into the vehicles and continued on their way.
80.
TWO KILOMETRES ON, Carr reached into the back and grabbed a fresh litre of water, glancing to his left as he did so.
Kev McMullen was scanning the horizon methodically, his jaw tightly clenched.
He looked to be concentrating too much, his thumb drumming out a staccato rhythm on the steering wheel.
‘You okay, pal?’ said Carr, casually, taking a long swig of water and grimacing at the heat of it.
In fact, Kevin McMullen wasn’t okay: he was worried. He’d always been a superstitious sort of bloke – probably a relic of his Roman Catholic upbringing – despite the fact he’d survived fourteen years on ops with the SAS. He had hidden it during that time behind the black humour that soldiers often use as a defence mechanism.
But he’d had a bad feeling about this job, right from that day at Geordie Skelton’s place when they’d all met up to talk the whole thing through.
He couldn’t explain it, or even name it – it was just a sense of unease, over and beyond that which you’d expect to feel, deep into a desert teeming with ten different sorts of maniac.
And now the old Bedouin… That was a bad fucking omen, thought McMullen. He knew that John Carr was right, as he usually was – shooting the old geezer would have been wrong – but it was still major bad karma that someone knew they were here.
An image kept intruding into his mind: himself, lying bleeding out in the sand.
He knew he was being irrational; but he also knew that if he hadn’t needed the money he would have fucked this one off.
Not that he was going to admit any of this to John Carr, a man in whose eyes he had never seen so much as a hint of fear.
‘Yeah, I’m good, mate,’ he said, glancing over, with a smile that he was sure looked strained. ‘Never better.’
‘We’re all thinking the same thing, Kev,’ said Carr. ‘But worrying’s for women and children. You were at the top of my list. You wouldn’t have been if I didn’t think you were a good hand.’
He meant it, too: Kevin McMullen was a warrior of the highest order, brave to a fault, and as game as they came.
‘We’ll be in and out,’ said Carr, ‘and they’ll never see us coming or going.’
McMullen nodded and grinned, but, not for the first time, he wondered at his old squadron sergeant major’s apparent ability to read minds.
If anything, it spooked him even further.
‘I’m okay, John,’ he said, more firmly. ‘Seriously. I’m fine.’
Carr slapped an insect on his arm and dropped it out of the window.
‘How’s the family?’ he said. ‘Must be about time you knocked the missus up again?’
‘Four’s plenty,’ said McMullen. ‘Trish would have liked more, but we can’t fucking afford it, so I had the snip.’ He laughed. ‘She’ll be on at me to have a reversal when I bank the cash from this.’
‘Is your oldest still going in the Mob?’
‘He’s talking about it,’ said McMullen, staring out to his left. ‘His mum’s against it, obviously. Says if he’s going to join up, he needs to go to uni first, then Sandhurst, and go in as a rupert.’
