to happen anyway. Half the Regiment was already behind enemy lines, scouting, gathering intelligence, paving the way for an invasion. Luke’s unit had a more specific objective: locate Abu Famir, currently in hiding in the Al-Anbar region of western Iraq, and smuggle him back across the Jordanian border. When Saddam and his psychotic sons had gone the way of the dodo, the invaders could bring in Abu Famir and men like him to construct a new administration. The Regiment’s target was the man the coalition had earmarked as the new prime minister of Iraq once the regime had been changed.
That was the theory. But first they had to find him.
Local intelligence reports suggested that Abu Famir was hiding out in the village of a Bedouin tribe about 100 miles from the border. The Bedouin were nomadic, herding cattle, sheep and goats, as they had done for hundreds of years. It was accepted even by the Iraqi government that they could wander across the borders into Jordan and Syria. In another time that would have been a good way to smuggle Abu Famir out of the country, but not now. The Iraqi government knew war was around the corner. They’d upped their border controls and even the Bedouin were no longer allowed to cross.
So if they wanted to get Abu Famir back into Jordan, someone had to go and get him. That was where the Regiment came in. Luke and Finn were to infiltrate the border and snatch Abu Famir; Fozzie and the boys in the pick-up were to stay on the Jordanian side, ready to be called in if anything went wrong. And the chances of that happening were higher than normal. They weren’t the only people who wanted Abu Famir. It was impossible to say who they might run into.
‘I’ve got something.’
Luke spoke quietly. Through his kite sight he’d located exactly what they’d been looking for. Two vehicles, headlamps switched off to avoid detection, cutting across country, eastwards towards the border. He zoomed in and focused on them. Two klicks away. Here was their passport into Iraq.
He turned to Finn. ‘Let’s move.’
The light of the moon was bright enough for Luke and Fozzie to operate without headlamps. If the vehicles they’d seen were smugglers, they’d get spooked if they clocked a tail. So Luke kept his distance, while Finn maintained eye contact with the vehicles through the kite sight.
‘They’re slowing down,’ he said after they’d been trundling along for half an hour. ‘Reckon they’re crossing?’
‘Could be, buddy,’ Luke said. ‘Could be.’
They went static again and watched. The vehicles were still, but there was movement around them. ‘That’s the border,’ Luke said. ‘Got to be.’ Finn climbed out of the car with a Silva compass, already set to adjust for the magnetic variation of the area. He stepped a few paces away so the metal of the vehicle wouldn’t affect the needle and quickly took a bearing so that they would be able to locate the crossing point — the smugglers, after all, were unlikely to hang around once they’d penetrated the border.
‘Bearing 272 mils,’ he mumbled to Luke when he was back at the car, before pulling out his GPS unit and taking a precise fix of their location. Once he knew their lat and long, he opened up his map on the bonnet of the Toyota. The border was clearly marked in red and it was only a moment’s work to locate their current position and draw the bearing from it. Where the bearing hit the border, that was their crossing point. He punched the coordinates into his GPS as a separate waypoint before folding the map, giving a quick thumbs up to the guys in the pick-up and getting back into the Toyota.
‘Got it?’ Luke asked.
‘Got it.’
Two minutes later they watched as the vehicles in the distance headed north.
Luke took the Toyota offroad and, following Finn’s direction, struggled over the stony desert. Fifteen minutes later they approached the border.
The berm that marked the boundary between Jordan and Iraq was about two metres high, but here there was a small indentation, just wide enough for a vehicle to pass through. On the other side of the berm, however, was a ditch about a metre deep, and beyond that a barbed-wire fence. While it was possible to drive through the berm, it wasn’t immediately obvious how the smugglers had crossed the ditch or got through the barbed wire.
As Luke got out to investigate with three of the guys from the pick-up, the cold desert wind blew sand into their eyes. It took them no time to locate two long planks of wood abandoned in the trench. These they used to bridge the gap, then examined the barbed-wire fence. Someone had cut and unfurled it, before closing it back up again so it didn’t attract attention. Luke curled the cut wire back and returned to the car. Fozzie had left the pick- up, and now all six Regiment men were standing round the Toyota.
‘You’ll radio check with base, let them know we’ve crossed over?’ Luke asked.
Fozzie nodded. ‘Take care, fellas,’ he said. He grinned. ‘Hope it’s not a one-way ticket.’
‘Next time there’s an opportunity for one of us to get his bollocks shot off by a raghead,’ Luke retorted, ‘the job’s yours.’
‘Deal,’ said Fozzie. ‘We’ll RV in twenty-four hours.’
Luke and Finn got back into the car, and a moment later they were trundling over the planks and through the breach in the fence. In the mirror Luke saw the guys returning everything to normal. He looked at the clock on the Toyota. 22.18. They’d gone from safety to danger in a matter of seconds.
‘Welcome to Disneyland,’ he muttered, and started driving.
It was two minutes past midnight when they joined the arterial road that ran west back to the border and east through the desert and eventually to Baghdad. Luke and Finn wouldn’t be travelling that far. According to their intel, the Bedouin village they were heading for was approximately eighty miles east of this location. Not far in ordinary circumstances; but behind what were effectively enemy lines, it was a very long way. The road wasn’t busy, but occasional vehicles passed in either direction.
They drove in silence. As they passed a large Arabic road sign, Finn turned the radio up slightly and the wailing of an Arabic singer filled the air. ‘Voice of a fucking angel,’ Luke muttered. Finn said nothing.
They’d been driving for no more than an hour when Luke saw lights up ahead. ‘Checkpoint,’ he said tersely. It wasn’t a surprise. They knew there was one permanent checkpoint between the border and the place where they were intending to turn off into the desert. This was it. ‘Hope you’ve got the lingo, mate,’ said Finn.
Luke’s Arabic was good, but it wasn’t perfect. Not for the first time in the past six years he found himself wishing that his partner on this op was an old friend.
‘Guy I know called Chet Freeman,’ he murmured. ‘We could use him here.’
‘The pegleg who caught a frag out in Serbia?’
Luke kept his eyes firmly on the road ahead. ‘You call him that again,’ he said bluntly, ‘I’ll waste you here and now. Roadblock or no fucking roadblock.’
Yeah, Chet was a good man in a tight spot. At least he had been once. His days of adventure were at an end. But with a bit of luck, Luke’s own language skills would be sufficient to get them across this roadblock.
Finn switched off the radio, removed his Sig from its holster strap, slipped the headdress on again and tucked the weapon into the folds of the burka. Luke pulled over on to the stony ground beside the highway. He removed his own handgun and placed it beside him in the door, before keeping his eyes fixed on the rear-view mirror.
They stayed like that for five minutes, until Luke saw three sets of headlamps approaching from behind. It was better to hit the checkpoint as part of a convoy rather than on their own, as it meant they had less chance of being stopped. A reasonable strategy, but reasonable strategies sometimes have a way of going pear-shaped. As the third vehicle passed — a pick-up not unlike the one the guys were in back at the border — he pulled out into the road and drove towards the checkpoint.
Two hundred metres to go.
A hundred metres. Luke saw another vehicle approaching from behind and gaining on them quickly.
Fifty.
As the vehicle twenty metres ahead started to slow down, Luke did the same. Only now could he make out the details of the checkpoint up ahead. There was a concrete bunker on the side of the road, presumably there to protect the soldiers manning the checkpoint from the sun. The rest of it looked makeshift: two barriers, one for each side of the road; a light-armoured military truck parked up on one side, its headlamps lighting up the road; and — Luke counted them — seven Iraqi soldiers in shabby olive-drab uniforms and black berets. Three of them
