before now are enough to make Todd believe the rumours that he prefers the company of young men.
For the first time since they all filed into this room, the President manages something like a smile.
‘Feeling confident, Mason?’ he asks.
‘I feel eighty-seven per cent confident, Mr President.’ Delaney’s voice is high-pitched and nasal. Almost girly. Todd notices Sagan’s face darken as he speaks. This military man clearly has very little time for such an effete individual, and when Delaney catches Sagan’s expression he widens his eyes provocatively. ‘What is
Sagan’s annoyance visibly increases. But this operation is Mason Delaney’s baby, and everybody in the room knows it. He takes a deep breath and appears to calm himself.
‘ETA twenty-six minutes, Mr President,’ he says. ‘Twenty-six minutes and counting.’
Joe had eyes on the two metal security gates that formed the compound’s only entrance. Distance, twenty- five metres to the south-west, across the single-track road.
‘Anything?’ Ricky sounded as tense as Joe felt.
‘Fuck all,’ he murmured. Through the grainy-green view of his night sight, he had seen the occasional flashing eyes of a wild dog, or the bright light of a commercial flight drifting overhead. In his mind he pictured the bat-winged shape of the RQ170 stealth drone he knew was circling up there too, its camera trained directly on the 3500 square metres of the compound. An impressive piece of kit, sure, but not a substitute for men on the ground alert to the arrival of a lookout with an anxious expression, or the frown of a guard in a state of heightened awareness. Joe saw neither. He didn’t doubt that the compound was guarded, but the guards were well hidden behind its high walls. At the moment, the exterior was deserted.
Jesus, it was hot. Joe’s skin was soaked. There wasn’t even the hint of a breeze, but the sound of traffic from the centre of Abbottabad, just under a kilometre away, still drifted towards them. Like everyone else, Joe had always assumed that their target would be holed up in some remote village on the Afghanistan–Pakistan border, or living in a cave with a heavily armed entourage. He’d even heard rumours that the guy was in Africa, living under the protection of some scumbag warlord. The fact that he was here, in pissing distance of the Pakistan Military Academy and right under the nose of the Pakistani government, had been as much of a surprise to him as he knew it would be to the world at large when it learned that the Americans had finally caught up with him.
‘You think he’s in there?’ Ricky breathed in the darkness.
Joe kept the night sight to his eyes. It could only take a second for somebody to slip in and out of that place, and he didn’t intend to miss that if it happened. A bead of sweat dripped down into one eye. He blinked hard, but kept his position. ‘The Yanks must be pretty sure.’ He half smiled. ‘Be a laugh if they send in a squadron to find some farmer banging his wife, though…’
He was interrupted by more squeaking from the man bound to the chair. Joe felt himself start. When he looked over his shoulder, his mate was already storming over to their prisoner.
‘Ricky…’
Ricky was drawing his knife.
‘Fucking hell, mate! What’s the matter with you?’
No answer. Ricky picked up the roll of packing tape that was lying by the chair, and wrapped even more of it round the man’s head, so that now it covered his nose as well as his eyes and mouth. The noise stopped, but now the man clearly couldn’t breathe. His body started shaking more violently. Ricky gave it ten seconds, then carefully punctured the tape covering the nostrils with the point of his blade. Just enough for the guy to get some air in his lungs. The loose tape under his nostrils flapped in and out like a fish’s gills.
As Ricky walked back to the OP, he didn’t meet Joe’s eyes. Joe didn’t push it.
A minute passed in tense silence.
‘Hotter than a hooker’s noo-noo,’ Ricky muttered finally. ‘Flight crews need to be careful.’
He was right. High temperatures like this could thin the air and reduce the lifting capability of a chopper’s rotors. No point worrying about that, though. Let the Yanks do their job while Joe and Ricky did theirs: keep the cordon, and if anyone tried to come in or out, deal with them.
Movement.
Joe held up one hand to indicate that he’d seen something. Two figures had just wandered into Joe’s field of view. The sound of giggling reached his ears and through the open window he saw a young woman in Western clothes running ahead of a young man. She allowed herself to be caught and pressed up against the high wall of the compound. The giggling became muffled and the man’s hands started to wander.
‘What is it?’ Ricky asked, his voice almost silent.
‘Couple of kids. We’re on for a live show if Romeo gets his way.’
Joe checked the time: 0059.
‘You OK, mucker?’ Joe asked quietly, not taking his eyes away from the optics.
‘Fine and frickin’ dand—’
He stopped mid-sentence and looked towards the window. So did Joe. They could suddenly hear the sound of a couple of choppers.
They were approaching fast. Joe could tell by the way the volume of the rotors increased quickly. He moved his eyes from the night sight and squinted through the net curtain and into the dark sky. At first there was nothing to see – the flight crews would be seeing their way with the aid of night-vision units, all lights on their aircraft extinguished. Twenty seconds later, however, the roar of their engines reached a peak, and Joe could see two great, black silhouettes, one of them hovering twenty metres above the compound, the second thirty metres above that, and maybe ten metres beyond it. In the corner of his vision, he saw the young Pakistani woman wriggle away from her suitor and look up. It crossed Joe’s mind that she could be in a lot of trouble if her indiscretions were made public.
Joe bent down at the night sight again and redirected it towards the nearer helicopter. Suddenly the black shadow was converted to green-tinted detail. Joe could instantly tell that he was looking at a modified chopper, one that few people would ever get the chance to see. The familiar shape of the Black Hawk was subtly different. The tail was smoother and more rounded. The nose was sleeker. Joe could tell at a glance that it had been engineered for stealth capability, which meant that the Pakistani authorities wouldn’t even suspect its presence here in their back yard.
The door on one side of the Black Hawk was open, and Joe counted six men at the aperture, not including the Minigun operator who had his weapon trained on the compound. He knew there would be another six preparing to drop down from the other side door. He could make out the head cams and goggles fitted to their helmets, the boom mikes to the side of their mouths, the assault rifles strapped to their bodies. Something fell from the chopper – long and snake-like. Joe had travelled in, and fast-roped out of, enough helicopters to realize something was wrong.
‘We got a problem,’ he said.
Instantly, Ricky was beside him, peering through the netting. ‘What’s happening?’ he demanded tersely.
‘Bird’s skittering…’
As he spoke, the chopper spun through ninety degrees, wobbling. The pilot was obviously struggling to control it in the heat-thinned air, and the fast-rope was spinning with the momentum of the helicopter. Now the Black Hawk was listing alarmingly. It spun back ninety degrees to its original angle, and although he couldn’t hear the voices of the SEALs inside over the screaming of the engines, he could see they were shouting at each other as they started to lose height. A couple of seconds later the chopper had lurched ten metres down. Its main body was now hidden from Joe behind the high wall of the compound, but he could just see the tail peeping up above the rim of the wall.
‘What’s happening?’ Ricky shouted.
Joe was about to answer when he heard the noise: an ominous, sharp, crunching sound as the Black Hawk’s modified tail caught the top of the wall and a shower of sparks, glowing brightly in his night-vision scope, needled his eyeballs.
‘Black Hawk down,’ he muttered.
