Downs quickly checked his GPS and turned hard up and over a treeless slope. Several other gliders did the same and moved in behind him, all of the craft much more manoeuvrable since ditching their payloads.
‘All stations, this is Downs, check!’ Downs shouted into his radio.
The crews began to answer right away. There was a long pause after the last report. Two gliders were missing. It was an acceptable loss for that stage of the mission but only as a statistic. Downs could only pray that just the gliders were gone and not the men. The trackers would let the ops room know if the missing men were moving or not. But the tracker couldn’t tell them if the men were still alive or that their bodies were being looted.
Downs would have to worry about them later. The teams still had work to do.
As the gliders crested a rise, they saw two straight lines of tiny white lights stretching away either side of them. A red line of lights at the far end indicated the limit of the landing strip. The pathfinders had done their job after being dropped off by the Lynx.
Downs didn’t hang about and immediately lost height. He touched down hard and they bounced back up until he took the power out of the engine and the glider dropped back to the ground with another thump.
‘Sorry about that,’ Downs said as he steered the craft away from the middle of the landing strip to make room for the others.
They quickly climbed out, ditched their life-jackets and prepared their equipment for the next phase.
‘I think I’d like the rain to stop now,’ Downs said.
One of the pathfinders arrived from the darkness. ‘All right, Downsy?’
‘Thanks, Smudge. There’s only nine left in this serial.’
‘I ’eard. Get going. I’ll clean up,’ Smudge said. ‘Got everything?’
‘Yep,’ said Stratton, pulling on his backpack.
‘Go ahead,’ Downs said.
Smudge tossed an incendiary into the glider and as Downs and Stratton walked away it burst into flames. Smudge ran off to help the next crews who had landed.
‘We live in a very disposable world, don’t we,’ Downs said as he watched the glider go up in flames.
Stratton didn’t answer, going to the edge of the small plateau to look down the slope at the glowing wood.
‘I wish I’d gone for the black outfit myself,’ Downs said, comparing Stratton’s fatigues with his own. ‘You’re anxious to get down there, aren’t you?’
‘Sabarak will be on the run.’
‘That’s the idea. Our job is to take out the missiles. Someone else’ll get Sabarak, one day if not today.’
Stratton wasn’t interested in another day. Only in this one. He looked back to see if the others were ready to go.
‘But that’s the bit that pisses you off, hey, Stratton. You want to be the one who does him in.’
‘I owe him.’
‘We all owe him. Hopper was my friend as well.’
‘You didn’t have to kill him!’ Stratton said angrily, immediately regretting the outburst.
Downs couldn’t remember ever seeing Stratton that upset about something. He decided to leave it alone. He also decided to keep an eye on his friend. He wasn’t himself and they were about to step into a very hostile location.
Stratton stepped off the edge of the plateau and began down the slope that had turned into sludge in the rain.
Downs looked back for the rest of his men. ‘Come on, you lot!’ he shouted. ‘There’s a war on, you know!’
The men hurried over to the team leader as another glider burst into flames.
‘We’ll see you in the wood, Smudge,’ Downs shouted.
‘Roger that,’ Smudge called back, dumping an incendiary into another glider and hurrying off to the next one.
The rain continued to fall in buckets. Stratton felt soaked to the skin but it meant nothing to him. He carried his Colt at the ready as he passed the redoubt he and the girl had hidden behind only two days before.
When he walked into the clearing on the edge of the wood, he stopped to look down at the spot where Hopper had knelt when he shot him. The ground was muddy with water pooling everywhere.
He heard Downs and the others coming up behind him. They spread out as they approached the trees. Fires still burned within the wood. They could see no movement. It was like all who had survived had scattered.
Milton, one of the non-pilots, stepped beside Downs with a video camera attached to a head cage that allowed him to look through the lens but keep his hands on his weapon.
‘Oscar Zero, that’s Tango One Foxtrot at Sierra Two,’ Downs said into his radio.
‘Roger, that’s Tango One at Sierra Two,’ came a reply.
Downs looked at the others either side of him to see if they were ready to move in but Stratton set off without waiting for the command.
‘So used to working on your own, ain’t you,’ Downs quipped as he walked off after him.
They didn’t have to walk far into the wood before they came across the first dead fighter. A fresh depression in the ground a few metres away and his missing leg suggested he had been killed by a mortar.
Milton stood over the body to film it for a few seconds. Downs and the others set off deeper into the trees.
By the time they reached a group of huts that appeared to be the centre of the camp, they had seen only a dozen or so dead. If there was a similar ratio throughout, Stratton estimated there could be no more than forty all told. Which was a small portion of the total numbers encamped in the location. It reminded all of them that they needed to do what they had come to do quickly and get out of there. If the jihadists regrouped and pressed a counter-attack, things could quickly go wrong for the teams.
They heard a moan from within a clump of bushes. A fighter lay on the wet ground, the rain dropping on to him from the branches above, his leg badly mangled. He stared pathetically at the faces looking down on him, as much in shock to see them as from his wound. He had no weapons and looked harmless enough. The operatives walked away, just left him. They didn’t have the time or the equipment to be humane. The truth was, after so many years fighting the jihadists, the men didn’t have much humanity left either. It wasn’t something to be proud of, and if asked, most would have admitted that. But it was an easy fault to live with, or at least justify to a degree. If the jihadists caught a Western soldier, they wouldn’t give him the finest medical treatment available and three square meals a day or leave him with the hope of one day seeing his family again.
The men understood why they had to be humane but they couldn’t always maintain it.
Stratton walked to one of the wooden huts and pushed in the door. A fighter lay inside on the floor, killed by a piece of shrapnel that had blown through the thin plywood wall and hit him in the chest. A ceiling-high stack of long green boxes took up half the room.
Stratton knew instantly what they were. He unclipped the lid of one and opened it up. Inside he saw a brand-new HN series Chinese ground-to-air missile.
Downs stepped in behind him. ‘Are these what it’s all been about?’ he asked.
‘Most of them,’ Stratton replied. ‘Not all.’
‘I wonder how many of the ones they’ve already shipped have been offloaded.’
‘I expect London is trying to figure that out right now.’
Downs exhaled heavily. ‘Right. Milton! In here. Film this lot before we burn it.’
The cameraman stepped inside along with a couple of other men.
‘Make sure you get as many serial numbers as you can,’ Downs ordered. ‘Smudge, when he’s done I want this lot done to a crisp.’
‘We’ll certainly take care of that,’ Smudge said.
Stratton walked outside and looked around, unsatisfied. He stepped to the next hut. Nothing but dead bodies. The same with the one after. He stalked through the camp inspecting any dead he saw. The odds were against any being the Saudi but he had to check. He couldn’t bear the thought of that low-life escaping. If the man did manage to get out of Somalia, London had only a slim chance of ever finding him. You only had to look at bin Laden. If that guy could stay hidden, then Sabarak surely could for a fraction of the price.
