imaging device and a night sight.
The rest of the room was a lot less hi-tech. The ceiling, bowed and cracked, looked as if it might collapse at any moment. There was a mattress in one corner, covered by a single, dirty sheet and the two sets of robes Joe and Ricky had been wearing over their gear. A ceramic hookah stood next to it. On the opposite wall, hanging at a slight angle, was a yellowed, grease-spotted piece of parchment with some Arabic script – something from the Koran, probably. Beneath it was a small cooking area with a tiny stove. The place stank in the heat – a musty smell of decay mixed with the spicy aroma of whatever the occupant had last eaten, its remnants still in a battered saucepan on the stove. The air buzzed with the sound of a single fly, as it had done all day. All in all, it was a dump. But a dump that had one advantage, even though its owner didn’t realize it. Outside the window was a single-tracked road. Beyond that, the five-metre-high walls of an enclosed compound.
And in the compound, if the Yanks were right, the slippery fucker who’d evaded capture ever since 9/11. In the endless briefings that had preceded this op, the CIA operatives had insisted on calling him ‘Geronimo’, or ‘the Pacer’, or even by one of his Arabic nicknames, if they were feeling cocksure and sarcastic: ‘the Director’, ‘the Lion’, ‘the Sheikh al-Mujahid’.
The rest of the world, of course, knew him by his real name.
Joe, Ricky and the rest of their eight-man unit had been in Abbottabad for twenty-one hours, but they’d been studying the imagery of the town and its surrounding areas for a week before that at their base in Bagram, over the border in Afghanistan. Twenty-four hours previously, a Chinook had lifted them over the mountains and in- country, along with a battered white utility van with Pakistani plates and a tape deck full of shite Arabic music. Their operational movements were covert even to the regular members of the Regiment. Joe, Ricky and the others were part of a specialist cell from the newly formed E Squadron – the highest-vetted and best trained the SAS had to offer, and even among E Squadron the expertise of these eight men in the field of covert surveillance had no equal.
The American SF flight crew that had put them on the ground in Pakistan at 0100 hours didn’t know what they were up to either. Fuck-ups aside, nobody would ever know they were here. No acknowledgements. No back-slaps. That suited them just fine. The Yanks needed men on the ground to pull this thing off, and they needed the best, even if they did intend to write them out of history at the end of the day. And of course, as far as Joe was concerned, there was more to it than that. There always was. If they were compromised and the op went to shit before it had even begun, it could be spun as a British clusterfuck, not an American one.
Ricky had driven the van cross-country to Abbottabad, every inch the Pakistani peasant, down to the stench of farm animals on his rough clothes. The rest of them had been secreted in the back, hidden behind a false panel that guys from the REME had welded on in case of a stop and search. But nobody stopped and nobody searched. By 0300 they had hit the north–south N35 Mankerai Road, just another vehicle entering the surprisingly busy little town.
There had been no need for them to speak when the van came to a halt, the engine cut out and Ricky tapped three times on the back of the cab to indicate that they’d reached their destination. They’d emerged silently into a dark, breeze-block garage alongside a shit-encrusted farm vehicle, before leaving in pairs at irregular intervals to get themselves into position.
The first two to leave, their weapons hidden under their robes, had been Raz and JJ. After Ricky, JJ was Joe’s closest Regiment mucker – a sarky, tough little Glaswegian whose house in the wilds of the countryside round Berwick-upon-Tweed had been the location of Joe’s holidays with his family for the past five years. JJ and Raz had drawn the short straw, but you wouldn’t have known it from their steely demeanours. By now they’d have spent almost twenty-four hours on the far edge of a field abutting the compound, dug into an irrigation ditch, covered with mud, shit and foliage. Watching and waiting, they were invisible even to any locals who might wander within a couple of metres of their stinking hideout. Stevie and Rhys had been next, hiding out in a disused outbuilding at the western end of the single-track road on which the compound stood. Joe and Ricky had followed, waking up their reluctant host with the suppressed butt of an M4 and a roll of packing tape. That left Diz and Jacko to go and babysit ‘the Doctor’ and his family.
In Joe’s opinion, the Doctor was the weak link in the chain. The photograph of him that Joe had studied was burned into his brain: a thin man with a goatee beard, a protruding Adam’s apple and round, steel-rimmed glasses. The Doctor was a long-time resident of Abbottabad who had been dishing out free vaccinations to the population over the past several months. The jabs were just a cover. Every time the Doctor administered a vaccination, he took a swab of the patient’s cheek. Routine, he’d told them – failing to mention that each of these hundreds of swabs eventually made their way to some lab in North America where the DNA on it was analysed. Nobody seriously expected Geronimo himself to take advantage of the medicine on offer; but if he had family members around him, there was a chance of some of their DNA making it onto one of the swabs and giving the CIA confirmation of their suspicions.
The confirmation had never turned up. Maybe this meant that the occupants of the compound were too cute for the CIA’s ruse. But there was a small possibility that the Doctor was not all he seemed to be, and that possibility had increased over the past hour. Jacko’s voice over the comms had been tense.
‘I’m with the missus. She expected him back at 1100 hours. He’s a no-show.’
‘You sure she doesn’t know where he is?’
‘Roger that.’ Of course Jacko was sure. He’d have used all his powers of persuasion to find out.
Their instructions were clear. If tonight’s operation was successful – and even if it wasn’t – they were to evacuate the Doctor and his family. But if there was any evidence of him trying to send word to the compound of what was going down, their orders were more straightforward: take the fucker out.
Evacuate or execute. Difficult to do either, if nobody knew where the hell he was.
Silence. Joe checked his watch. 0037. Ricky was standing three metres to his left. His M4 was slung across his front and Joe was almost certain he saw his mate’s left hand tremble.
No, that couldn’t be right.
‘We should have frickin’ heard by now,’ Ricky said.
Joe returned his attention to the optics. He felt sweat trickle down his back, and his mouth was dry. He scanned the five-metre-high wall that surrounded the compound at a distance of ten metres from the house. Running alongside the wall was a single-track road, stony and baked hard. There was only one entrance to the compound: a pair of heavy metal gates in that wall, twenty-five metres south-west of Joe’s position. From this location, he could see anyone approaching the compound’s entrance, from either east or west.
But so far there was nobody.
And no word from base that the operation had begun. Maybe it was a no-go. Wouldn’t be the first time they’d…
A crackling sound in his earpiece. He found himself holding his breath.
Nothing. For a few seconds, he thought it was just interference. Then, a voice.
‘Sierra Foxtrot Five, this is Zero. Operation Geronimo is go. Repeat, Operation Geronimo is go.’
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.
‘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
