whether this is American fire or enemy fire.
Todd senses movement behind him. He looks over his shoulder and sees Mason Delaney pull a silk handkerchief from his top pocket. He dabs a bead of perspiration from the area of his forehead just under his parting, before neatly replacing the handkerchief. When he sees that Todd has been watching him, he gives the photographer a little smile. ‘We should sell this footage on a DVD in Wal-Mart, Mr President,’ he announces in his piping voice. ‘Pay off the deficit.’ Delaney smiles. Nobody else does.
There’s movement. The head-cam footage on the screen judders as the soldier whose view is being transmitted to the White House runs along a short, dark corridor, two other SEALs in front of him. The corridor ends in a flight of stairs, which they start to mount. They are halfway up when Sagan stands. He has one hand to his ear and an expression of concentration – or is it alarm? Todd wonders – as he listens to his information feed.
Suddenly all eyes are no longer on the screen, but on Sagan.
Sagan’s eyes widen. A smile spreads across his face. ‘Geronimo EKIA… enemy killed in action…’ He turns to look at his commander in chief. ‘We got him, Mr President. We got the son of a bitch.’
A few seconds of silence. The President closes his eyes. His face visibly relaxes as he kicks back in his chair and punches his palm in a gesture of triumph. It’s as if the whole room has exhaled after minutes of holding its collective breath.
A quiet buzz of excited conversation. The President shakes hands with his deputy, before inclining his head appreciatively at Mason Delaney at the other end of the table. When Todd looks back at Delaney, he is put in mind of a cat preening himself. The CIA man’s lips glisten with barely suppressed delight and he straightens the bow tie that doesn’t need straightening.
The President then turns to congratulate his chief military adviser. But Sagan doesn’t appear interested in congratulations. As he sits down at the table again, he urgently directs the President’s attention to the footage with a sharp jab of his forefinger.
There is a hallway at the top of the stairs. A number of people are there, kneeling, their backs against a dirty wall and with an armed SEAL standing over them. It’s impossible to say how many, because they only appear on the screen for a fraction of a second. Five? Maybe six? They are all women and children, their hands secured behind their backs with cable ties and their mouths covered with packing tape. Their lives are being spared, but not their dignity.
The head cam turns away as its wearer jogs along another corridor, stopping after five metres at an open door to his right.
‘This could be ugly, Mr President…’ murmurs Sagan. But he doesn’t suggest that anybody looks away.
The head cam looks into the room. For ten seconds the soldier wearing it is as still as the politicians observing him, as they all stare at the scene it reveals.
It is a bedroom – shabby, untidy. There are two beds – a small double, and what looks like a single camp bed to one side. On the opposite wall there is a window with frayed blue curtains, and along the right-hand side of the room a wardrobe that is little more than a rail holding a collection of white robes. The floor is covered with a patterned rug. The whole place has an air of neglect, as though it is an unloved room in the cheapest and most neglected of temporary accommodation.
But nobody is really looking at the wardrobe or the curtains or the rug. They are looking at the body lying on the double bed.
The face is instantly recognizable, despite the devastating gun wound the man’s head has sustained. The gaunt cheeks, the beard flecked with grey and, now, red. His left eye is closed. His right eye is no longer there. It’s just a bleeding, gaping abscess, around which a flash of skull is visible. The untidy sheets of the bed itself are saturated with blood in the area around the head. There is spatter elsewhere, and a streak of scarlet on the garish rug.
The women in the Situation Room, and some of the men, avert their eyes. At the same time, the head cam turns to the right. The corner of the room becomes visible. There are two Navy SEALs. They have boom mikes at the edge of their mouths, goggles perched on the top of their helmets and head cams attached to the fronts. They hold their weapons with the light confidence of professionals. But the figure at which they are aiming them is not a threat. It’s a little girl. She is wearing a nightgown and is crouched in the corner, her head in her hands, weeping.
‘Surely they’re not going to—?’ says a female voice in the Situation Room.
But Sagan interrupts her. ‘His daughter,’ he states, having been briefed by his information feed.
Several of the people sitting round the table recoil as one of the SEALs steps towards the girl. He doesn’t hurt her, but neither is he gentle. He pulls the kid to her feet and for the first time the occupants of the room see her face. The image might be blurred and scratchy, but the look of terror it conveys is almost as distressing as the grisly vision of the girl’s dead father.
‘Get the kid out of here,’ instructs the second SEAL. His companion drags the girl towards the door. As she passes her father, though, she wriggles free and runs to him, ignoring the bloodied rug she’s treading on, and flinging herself at his corpse. She manages to hold on to his thin leg for a fraction of a second before the soldiers pull her away. The head cam steps back and the body disappears from view, to be replaced by the landing once again. The SEALs bind the girl’s wrists behind her back and throw her in the direction of the other women and children. She wails as she stumbles to the ground, and shouts something in Arabic. But her distress doesn’t seem to affect the soldiers. ‘Get him bagged up,’ one of them instructs.
‘I don’t think we need to see any more,’ interrupts the President. Sagan nods and presses a switch in front of him. The images disappear from the screen. Silence falls in the room.
Todd raises his camera.
Snap.
Joe’s heart hammered in his ribcage as he kept watch on the courtyard from the darkness of the pile of rubble. How the hell had they got themselves into this situation? What was going on with Ricky? How was Joe going to get them both out unseen?
Five minutes passed.
There were still six SEALs in the courtyard, kneeling in the firing position, clearly waiting to bring down anybody attempting to flee the building. They didn’t flinch when the front door of the house opened and a line of people emerged. They were women and children. Joe counted seven, all of them cuffed and blindfolded. Two SEALs followed, and they directed the captives to the right-hand side of the house before making them lie on the ground face down.
More movement at the doorway. Another two SEALs emerged. They were carrying a body bag, one man at either end. Joe had seen enough body bags in his time for it to be an unremarkable sight. Somehow, though, he couldn’t keep his eyes off this one. He knew he was watching the SEALs extract the corpse of the most wanted man in the world.
The two SEALs were about five metres out of the house when he saw yet more movement at the doorway. Another two appeared, carrying a second body bag. Both pairs of soldiers were moving with grim purpose across the courtyard. They stepped over the underwear-clad corpse four metres from Joe’s position, each body bag scraping over the dead man’s bloodied vest as the SEALs carried them past the pile of rubble – less than a metre from Joe’s position – through the demolished walls of the open-topped corridor and into the rubbish-burning area that doubled as an LZ.
The movement of the body bags was like a signal. US troops spilled out of the house. Two men were carrying crates – Joe assumed that these contained materials they were confiscating from the compound – and they were preceded by a tracker dog whose silhouette Joe had already seen. Joe recognized it immediately as a Malinois, a variety of Belgian shepherd – intelligent and highly aggressive – that the Regiment’s own dog handlers used as both sniffer and attack dogs. It was wearing a harness that suggested the troops had been intending to winch it down to the ground from the chopper, and had a small IR camera, the size and shape of a Smarties tube, fixed to its side. It scampered ahead of them, clearly unfazed by the noise and stopping only when it came to the dead body near Joe, which it sniffed, paying particular attention to the area around the bullet wound.
The dog looked up. With a sensation like cold ice sliding down his spine, Joe realized the animal was looking
