The Sanction
Table of Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Epilogue
Copyright
It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on.
The Art of War by Sun Tzu, fifth century BC
Prologue
Kabul, Afghanistan. Thirty-five degrees centigrade in the shade. The buzzing of flies and an acrid smell in the air. Something burning. Something bad.
That’ll be the truck, she thinks, the burning. The bloody remains of the people in it, the bad. Men and women and children and goats and chickens. Passengers and goods on the way to the market. Talking and laughing and bleating and clucking until the truck rolled past a roadside bomb. An IED. An improvised explosive device. But there was nothing improvised about it. The attack was carefully planned, the bomb meticulously prepared. And the word improvised does a disservice to those who died. As if killing can be a spur-of-the-moment decision, as if it has no consequence and leaves no mark. She knows from personal experience that’s not true. Killing is a calculated business. In her profession there’s nothing improvised about it.
In truth she shouldn’t be here in Afghanistan. None of them should. The campaign ended years ago. A homecoming with no fanfare and no celebration because these days wars don’t end with parades and tickertape and shiny medals pinned on proud heroes. They don’t actually end at all. And that’s why she’s back on a second tour of duty. Supposedly she’s a military adviser, a trainer, somebody providing support services, but that’s crap, a sham fashioned for political expediency. The reality is that without foreign troops the thin veneer of normality would peel aside and the entire country collapse into anarchy once more.
Right now she’s lying prone on a rooftop five storeys up. Behind her a rusty air conditioning unit stands idle. The unit casts a shadow which shields her from the afternoon sun. The sun is the enemy out here. The heat saps energy and drains water bottles, but it’s the light which bothers her. One glint off a buckle or a flash from an eyelet on a boot and you’re made. And once you’re made then you’d better move fast if you want to live because the insurgents have the ability to rise from the ruins of the city like a miasma. As quickly as they come they can dissipate in the same way, slinking back into doorways, morphing into innocent civilians, returning to their hidey-holes until the night comes. But she won’t be outside the base after dark. That would be nothing short of idiotic.
Beside her is her spotter, Richard Smith. Known variously as Ricky or Smithy or Itchy. Itchy because he can’t stop moving. He’s always fidgeting and fussing and at this particular moment she wishes he’d keep still because she can’t concentrate while he’s constantly in motion.
‘Pack it in, Itchy,’ she says. Her words are friendly, half in jest. Itchy’s been like an older brother since they’ve been paired together. Always there for her, nothing too much trouble. ‘Tell me what’s out there.’
Itchy has a pair of binoculars and a spotting scope. Good eyes. An innate sense for picking out the tiniest of anomalies in a scene that would look normal to most people. Itchy is thirty-three, more experienced than she is, battle-scarred, world wise. This is his third tour and it shows in the handful of grey wisps sprouting among his dark hair. An old man’s brain in a young man’s body. He’s seen too many things that can’t be forgotten, although he never brags. You can always tell the true veterans by the number of stories they tell: the fewer stories, the more they’ve seen. Eventually they stop saying anything at all.
Itchy moves his eyes from his scope to the binoculars and pans from left to right. Like her, he’s lying beneath a camouflage net of tan and grey. He’s the lookout, there so she can keep her head down and her eye fixed to the telescopic sight on her rifle. In a sniper team the spotter is the most important component. Anyone can pull a trigger and fire off a shot, although not many with the accuracy she can achieve.
‘Nothing,’ Itchy says after he’s completed his sweep. ‘We’re good.’
‘Keep looking.’ She adjusts her position slightly and blinks, refocusing the image in her right eye. Eight hundred metres away a patrol is heading up to an intersection. Some unlucky bugger on point, the others following. The patrol’s radio chatter crackles in her earpiece. Cautious. Nervous. She can’t blame them for being nervous though. Not with the high buildings looming over the rubble-filled streets. This place is a maze with a dozen wrong turnings. A dozen ways to die.
If she and Itchy were the enemy, half the patrol would already be dead. Luckily they’re on the same side. The closest thing the grunts have to a pair of guardian angels. From this decrepit building they can see a good portion of the locality. They can take out a target at a thousand metres and the first thing the hostile will know about it will be when the bullet hits them.
‘Smith?’ a voice in her ear says as the patrol checks in. ‘Sit rep.’
‘Nothing moving,’ Itchy says in response. ‘All clear ahead.’
‘Taking five,’ the voice says. ‘A breather.’
The patrol back up to a wall. The point man hunkers in a doorway twenty metres away. Through her scope she can see water bottles being passed round, straps on helmets loosened. She reaches for her own bottle and takes a gulp without moving her right eye from the scope. Through her left eye she sees the world close to. Empty streets. A stray dog with three legs scrabbling in a patch of dirt five storeys
