Luke kept a steady speed. Sixty klicks an hour. Not too fast, not too slow. As he drove, his mind turned over. He remembered the three heli flypasts while they were in the cave. Was that just a coincidence — a standard military manoeuvre in this time of heightened security? Or were they looking for someone specific? Had word of the firefight in the village sixteen hours earlier reached the authorities? They had to assume it was known that somewhere out there was a vehicle with four occupants, one of them injured. They had to assume that the checkpoint guards had been alerted.
They’d been travelling along the main road in tense silence for some fifty minutes when Finn reached out and tuned in the car radio. Arabic music filled the car.
‘Fuck’s sake, Finn,’ Luke snapped. ‘Turn that shit off.’ He reached out and switched it off himself, ignoring the look Finn gave him.
Amit groaned in the back. In the mirror Luke could see that his head had slumped and Abu Famir was looking at his burka-clad neighbour with a worried expression. ‘How far until we…?’
‘Shut it.’
There were lights up ahead. The checkpoint. Vehicles in front of them were slowing down.
A blanket of silence fell over the car, ruffled only by the short, sharp breaths coming from beneath Amit’s headdress. Luke felt for his handgun and sensed Finn doing the same. He looked ahead. On the other side of the road the barrier was down and a long line of vehicles — eight or nine in total, their headlamps dazzling in the darkness — were queuing behind it. The soldiers on duty surrounded around the frontrunner.
‘I’ve got three men on the other side,’ Finn reported. ‘Could be more behind the oncoming headlights.’
Luke nodded and turned his attention to their side of the road. Here the barrier was pointing upwards, and because they weren’t dazzled by the lights of the oncoming traffic, he was able to count the troops more precisely: four guards were manning their side of the road, but they were talking and laughing.
There were five cars between them and the checkpoint, spaced about twenty metres apart and all travelling at a respectful crawl. Directly ahead was a chunky old grey Mercedes, one of its brake lights not working. ‘Put your fucking foot down,’ Luke murmured. But none of the cars increased speed. If anything, they slowed down as they approached the checkpoint. It made sense: nobody wanted to attract any more attention to themselves than they needed to, even if they didn’t have enough gear to start a small war stashed in the boot.
The Merc was just passing through the open barrier when Luke caught the eye of one of the guards. He looked a bit older than the others, and his expression was a little flintier. His AK was hanging diagonally across his body, but he had one hand firmly resting on the handle. He had set himself apart from his three colleagues and was paying more attention to the checkpoint.
Luke looked away, concentrating on the road and doing what he could to appear unassuming; but his peripheral vision was focused on the guard, who was moving towards the barrier. Luke felt his blood chill. ‘Stand by,’ he muttered to Finn.
His mate was already wielding his Sig.
‘Burn it,’ said Finn, his lips barely moving. ‘Just get through..’
Luke accelerated slightly — not fast enough to make him look suspicious. All the while, his mind was calculating. What if the barrier went down before they reached it? Could he crash through? Probably not: the impact would take out their windscreen at the very least. They’d be blinded by glass fragments…
‘Luke, if this goes noisy we’ll have these fuckers on our tail from here to…’
‘Thanks, buddy,’ replied Luke. He trod down a bit more.
The guard was just making to close the checkpoint when they crossed. In the mirror, Luke saw the barrier slam down and the car behind them come to a halt. The guards swarmed, but now Luke was able to speed up, and the checkpoint soon vanished into the darkness.
Finn exhaled hard. ‘Jesus. I thought it was all about to go Tora Bora for a minute back then.’
Luke allowed himself no such expression of relief. In the sky up ahead he could see lights. They were several klicks in the distance and they were circling.
‘We’re not out of the woods yet,’ he murmured.
22.17 hrs. Distance to the border: thirty klicks.
There was a fit of coughing from the back of the car that morphed into a strangled kind of sound. Amit slumped across the seat, falling on Abu Famir and yanking the drip down from its hanging place. Luke pulled over and opened up the bonnet as cover while Finn opened Amit’s door and pulled him up to a sitting position. He removed the burka. The wounded man’s face was deathly white; his eyes were rolling and an awful smell was coming off his body. Finn reattached the drip and slipped the headdress back on. Then he turned to Luke. ‘Trauma. Massive blood loss. The guy hasn’t got long.’
‘If he dies, he dies,’ Luke said flatly. ‘We can dump the body.’ He looked down the road. ‘It can’t be more than ten klicks till we turn off down towards the smugglers’ route. Bit of luck, we’ll be out of this shitty country by…’
He looked up, suddenly aware of a chopper approaching from a couple of klicks away. The two men exchanged a glance.
‘Let’s keep moving,’ Finn said.
‘Roger that.’
They took their seats again, and continued down the road.
22.31 hrs. Distance to the border: twenty-two klicks.
Finn had his GPS unit on his lap. ‘Two klicks till we turn…’
He stopped.
‘What the…?’ Luke groaned.
Two hundred metres ahead, he could see a line of red brake lights; thirty seconds later they too were part of the queue. Two light-armoured military vehicles were parked up on either side of the road, and Luke counted seven armed Red Berets, three of them standing in the middle of the highway forming a temporary roadblock — newly established since the previous night — while the remaining four were searching each vehicle that passed. Not a cursory glance, either: all the occupants of each car were outside; the bonnets and the boots were raised. And as the Red Berets allowed each searched vehicle through the roadblock, only to repeat the operation on the next car, it became clear that they were stopping everyone.
‘What… what are you going to…?’ Abu Famir’s voice trailed off.
Luke and Finn didn’t reply. They just glanced at each other, nodded once and subtly readied their pistols. Luke felt for his carbine.
Four cars to go before it was their turn to be searched.
Three.
From the back came a murmur. Abu Famir had closed his eyes and was muttering as if in prayer. Luke looked at the fuel gauge. Half a tank. Enough to get them across the border again? It would have to be, because once he put his foot on the accelerator, there’d be no time to stop.
Two cars ahead of them in the queue. Ten metres between them and the nearest guard.
The Regiment men didn’t need to speak. They knew what they had to do. Luke pulled the hammer back on his suppressed Sig and checked the mirrors. Six cars were waiting behind them: all — so far as he could tell — civilian. Each man scrambled to get his M4 ready, poised down by his leg.
‘No violence,’ Abu Famir repeated, but even he sounded unconvinced, as though he knew there was only one way this was going.
One car.
The Merc’s occupants — two elderly men — stood obediently by the vehicle while the Red Berets searched it. It took about two minutes, after which the guards nodded to the driver to get back into the car. They were walking towards the Toyota even before the car in front started moving.
Luke wound down his window. Finn did the same.
Strike hard, strike fast. It was the only way. If they drove through the roadblock without taking out the guards, they’d be showered from behind by a torrent of AK rounds and they wouldn’t be out of range for 400 metres. Not an option.
Now the guards were alongside them, one on Luke’s side, one on Finn’s. They bent down at the same time
