Zero 22, page 28
part #8 of Danny Black Series
‘Hang on,’ said Bethany. ‘How do we get from the plane to the boat?’
‘We freefall in,’ Danny said.
‘Onto the boat?’
‘No. Into the water.’
She gave him a slightly sick look.
‘Don’t worry about it. You did fine last time.’
‘It’s only the last inch that kills you,’ the General said with a grim smile. The old joke was received about as well as it had been when Danny had told it before they dropped into Jordan. ‘A long time since I did a freefall into the ocean,’ the General added.
‘We have a four-man Special Boat Service team on standby to freefall in with you,’ Forshaw said. ‘SBS headquarters in Poole are making a request to the Americans to allow a training drop in the vicinity of the frigate. Story is that it’s an anti-terrorist training exercise to recreate a similar scenario to the QE2 incident back in the seventies, when the Regiment dropped some guys in to the Atlantic to deal with a bomb scare on the ship. The aircraft has permission to land in the USA, refuel and take the four SBS guys back home. You’ll actually be seven, of course, but with three sets of tandem jumpers, it’ll look like four guys on the radar splash. If the Yanks want to make any enquiries, the four SBS guys will be on-site to answer their questions. They’ll tell them they dropped in solo. The frigate will have a RIB in the water to load you up. That’s a rigid inflatable boat,’ he added, for Bethany’s benefit. ‘Once you’ve docked, you can pose as Royal Navy, and you’ll be able to get off the naval station quickly.’
‘I thought you said it was home to the US Atlantic Fleet,’ Bethany said.
‘Right,’ said the General.
‘So won’t security be off the scale?’
‘Sure, if you want to get on to the base. Getting off’s much more straightforward.’
‘There’s going to be hundreds of crew members on that frigate that want to get straight off the base and into the nearest town to start drinking,’ Danny said. ‘Men and women. They’ll be bussing coachloads of them off site. We’ll be able to lose ourselves in among them.’
‘But there’ll be cameras, right?’
‘I’ll deal with that.’
‘Once you’re away from the naval station,’ Forshaw said, ‘you’ll have a vehicle waiting for you. Then it’s over to you.’
‘What’s the journey time from Norfolk to DC?’ Danny asked. He was working out timings in his head.
‘Three to four hours,’ the General said. They had reached the Land Rover. The driver had opened all the doors and was waiting behind the wheel to drive them off.
‘How long till the C-17 gets here?’
Forshaw didn’t immediately answer. He looked at the sky for a few seconds, then pointed to the west. Danny saw the lights of an aircraft in the distance. ‘That’s your ride,’ said Forshaw. ‘Let’s get going.’
They climbed into the Land Rover and drove across the tarmac.
It was midnight in Florida and Hamoud’s family were asleep. If he lay very still, he could hear his children breathing in the next room. Hamoud and Rabia had carried them, half asleep, back to the hotel from the nightly firework display at Magic Kingdom. They’d seemed to grow heavier the sleepier they became. Hamoud felt ashamed that he’d appeared to find it more difficult to carry Malick than Rabia did Melissa. He reminded himself that he was not, even now, back to his full strength, but it didn’t really help.
To cheer himself up, he thought back over their evening as he lay next to his sleeping wife. The wonder on the children’s faces as they walked through the park, absorbing the sights and the sounds. Their sweet patience as they stood in line for the rides, and their screams of excitement for the few minutes that each ride lasted. The way they craned their necks and widened their eyes during the firework display. The way they begged to be allowed to come back and see it again the following night.
The fireworks! Hamoud had never seen anything like it. It was astonishing to him that such an extravagant display could take place every night. He remembered reading somewhere that gun crime always increased in the vicinity of Walt Disney World during the firework display, because the sound of the fireworks masked the gunfire. He didn’t know if that was true or not, but he did know that somebody could have exploded a small bomb this evening and the sound would have been quite well camouflaged. The thought unnerved him. He pictured his family standing in that enormous, cooing crowd, eyes aloft, unable to defend themselves against an explosive device . . .
He shook his head against his pillow. He was not in control of his thoughts. Sometimes it was as if a person with a remote control was switching the channel in his head. Why would he want to imagine such catastrophes when they were almost certain not to happen? He was torturing himself, and he’d had quite enough of that from other people.
Hamoud was naked, but still very hot. He climbed out of bed – quietly, so that he didn’t wake Rabia – and put on the Mickey Mouse robe that he had found hanging in the wardrobe. He crept into the adjoining room and looked at his children. Moonlight was shining on them through the window and they looked very peaceful. He took his key card and tiptoed out into the corridor.
The lights were dim, but still brighter than the dark room, so he couldn’t see very well as he made his way to the ice machine. It buzzed noisily ten metres along the corridor. There was a tube that dispensed plastic cups. Hamoud took one and half filled it with ice. He was about to take it back to the room, where he would fill it with water from the bathroom tap, when he stopped. His eyes had grown used to the dim light now, and he saw a man standing at one end of the corridor. Was he of Middle Eastern ethnicity? He didn’t seem to be looking at Hamoud, or even to have noticed him. But it was strange. Even stranger when he turned and saw another brown-skinned man at the other end of the corridor. Why would they be standing there, as though guarding the place?
Hamoud felt an urge to be back under the covers next to his wife. He shuffled hurriedly back to his room, head down, clutching the plastic cup, avoiding eye contact with the man he was facing. He reached the door to his room and tapped the key card to the sensor. A red light turned green and he was about to open up when he glanced both ways along the corridor. The men were still there, still ignoring him, but he noticed something else. The room opposite, number 297, had a strip of light leaking out where the door met the floor. Two dark shadows interrupted it, the width of feet. Hamoud imagined somebody standing on the other side, listening. His spine froze, as cold as the ice in his cup. He hurried back into his room. He could sense Rabia sitting up in bed. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked. ‘Where have you been?’
‘Ice,’ he said. ‘I was hot.’
He didn’t fill the cup with water. He climbed straight back into bed, still wearing the dressing gown.
They lay there, each of them aware that the other was wide awake, but neither of them wanting to break the silence.
Inside Room 297, a man stood listening.
He had brown skin. He wore a grey T-shirt and jeans. He heard the door of the room opposite open and close. Then a voice in his earpiece said: ‘Clear.’
He turned and walked back into the room and nodded at the other man sitting cross-legged on the floor.
He was a weird-looking guy. It wasn’t something you could easily put your finger on, but the man in the grey T-shirt had spent a long time with him, encouraging his crazy jihadist tendencies, and so he’d had plenty of time to work out that it was something to do with the shape of his face. It was unusually long and thin. When he’d had a beard, the face had seemed even longer and thinner. Like a cartoon character. It had worried the man in the grey T-shirt because the face was so distinctive. It was hard to go unnoticed in a crowd when you looked like that. Now, though, he had a smart new haircut and was clean shaven. He still looked a bit odd, but not totally peculiar. Without the face fungus, he at least wouldn’t turn heads. The only problem was the way he kept touching his chin, clearly not used to the unfamiliar absence of a beard. Read any of the counter-terrorism manuals and you’d learn that was a classic indicator. Tonight, however, nobody in the crowds would be observing the tics of the people around them. They’d be too busy looking at the sky.
The guy had apparatus spread out on the thin hotel carpet in front of him. Orange blocks of plastic explosive. A detonator. A coil of thin cable. A small battery pack. A knife. Several transparent bags of nails. A needle and thread. And a baseball jacket, a few sizes too big for him. It had white arms and a black body and, on the back, a cheerful picture of Donald Duck and his cheeky nephews. As the man in the grey T-shirt watched, he turned the baseball jacket over and started to cut neatly into the lining.
‘You know what you’re doing, brother?’ the man in the grey T-shirt said. He took pains to disguise his American accent.
The man on the floor didn’t look up. But he nodded as he reached for one of the packets of plastic explosive. ‘I have done it many times before,’ he said, before adding, more quietly: ‘But never for myself.’
‘You’ll be a martyr,’ said the man in the grey T-shirt. ‘Inshallah, people will say your name for a hundred years.’
‘My rewards will not be in this world,’ said the man on the floor. ‘They will be in the next.’
‘Your place in paradise is assured,’ said the man in the grey T-shirt. He watched him for a moment, then quietly left the room. He walked along the corridor towards one of the men standing watch.
‘Is he doing it?’ said the man quietly.
‘You bet,’ said the man in the grey T-shirt. No need to drop his American accent now.
‘You think he suspects?’
‘He thinks we’re his best buddies. It’s like he’s blind to everything except . . . you know, the thing.’
‘The thing?’ His companion was clearly amused by the euphemism. ‘He shaved his body yet?’
‘Just his face.’
‘He’ll shave his body. Tonight probably. Ritual thing, you know? Chest, arms, legs.’ His companion pointed to his groin to indicate another area that would be shaved. ‘So you’re in for a treat, watching him do all that.’
‘We could always swap.’
‘Not a chance, my friend.’
They stood in silence for a moment.
‘This is a crummy hotel.’
‘I’ve seen worse.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Sure. But it doesn’t matter. We’ll be out of here tonight. Nine fifteen tonight, we’ll have earned ourselves enough dough to get the presidential suite in the Grand Hyatt.’
‘I guess. Going to be quite the firework display, huh?’
‘Couple of extra bangs. That’s what the tourists come for, right? Bangs.’
‘Right.’ A beat. ‘I’d better get back to him.’
‘Sure. Bit of luck he’ll be getting lathered up already. Allahu Akbar, huh?’
‘Yeah. Allahu frickin’ Akbar.’
The man left his companion and walked back down the corridor towards Room 297. He stopped just outside it and drew a deep breath. Put himself back into character. The white jihadist. Sympathetic to the bomber’s cause. His friend. His brother.
He touched his key card to the sensor and re-entered the room. His ‘brother’ was packing plastic explosives into the baseball jacket. He stood and watched.
07.00 hrs. It was a bright, sunny morning but Danny felt anything but. His body ached with tiredness. He realised he was losing track of the days, as well as running out of time. The hit could happen in a matter of hours, and they were still on the wrong side of the Atlantic.
The C-17 was on the ground. Surrounded by vehicles. Engineers called to each other across the tarmac, checking the landing gear, moving up and down the open tailgate. Nobody paid Danny, Bethany or the General much attention as they made their way up into the dimly lit aircraft. ‘Home from home,’ Bethany said, looking around at the interior which was just as stark and utilitarian as the Hercules they’d used for their insertion into Jordan. There was a triple line of uncomfortable-looking seating up front, and a number of hammocks fixed to the sides. A few wooden storage crates. Danny didn’t know what they contained. Otherwise, this personnel carrier was close to empty.
‘Don’t get too comfortable,’ Danny said. ‘An insertion into water is a little different.’
‘How so?’
Danny was about to explain when he saw four figures in Crye Precision camo gear walking up the tailgate, slightly silhouetted by the morning light outside. Their clothes, and the huge waterproof bags they were lugging, told Danny that these were the SBS guys who’d be accompanying them. He left Bethany and the General and strode forwards to meet them. As he drew closer, he recognised one of the guys: Damien Parker had been on a few training exercises with Danny in the past. He had a ruddy face and looked a hell of a sight younger than he was, but he was a good man. Danny held out his hand. ‘How you doing, mate?’
‘Fucking busy times, Danny,’ Parker said. He introduced the rest of his team: Alex Lewis, Rob Emerson, Dave Gordon. Danny shook hands with each of them in turn. ‘Did you come straight from the office?’ Emerson asked, indicating Danny’s suit.
‘Something like that,’ Danny said.
Parker peered into the aircraft. ‘I don’t want to know what you’re up to,’ he said, ‘but do you mind if I do the briefing once we’re up and running?’
‘We’re in your hands getting into the water and on to the ship,’ Danny said. ‘However you want to play it.’
‘Let’s get up in the air first,’ Parker said.
Danny led them back up into the body of the C-17. Once they were inside, he could tell that the SBS guys recognised the General’s face, even if they couldn’t quite identify him. But they said nothing about it. Their gazes lingered on Bethany. It wasn’t often that someone as beautiful as her found their way on to a mission like this. Their appreciation went unremarked upon, however. They were too professional for that.
A loadie approached them. ‘We’ll be refuelling twice in mid-air,’ he told them. ‘Once over UK airspace, once mid-Atlantic. Wheels up when you’re ready.’
‘Have you jumped before?’ Parker asked Bethany and the General. They nodded
‘So here’s what you need to know about landing in water.’ Parker pointed at Lewis, Emerson and Gordon. ‘These three guys are going to jump first, Lewis and Emerson in tandem, Gordon solo. I’ll be in tandem with you.’ He indicated the General. ‘We’ll follow Lewis and Emerson. Danny and the lady will follow Gordon. We get into any kind of trouble, they’ll be waiting for us in the water to help out. We’ll be jumping from about fourteen thousand feet, and we’ll cut away our chutes when our feet hit the water. You need to expect to go straight under the water. We’re expecting the sea state to be calm, but don’t let that fool you. The water will be cold and your natural instinct will be to breathe in. Unless you want a lungful of salt water, and you don’t, you need to clamp your mouth shut and concentrate hard on not inhaling. You’ll be wearing a life vest. As soon as you’re submerged, you need to inflate it. It should bring you to the surface in a few seconds. Once we’re above the water, Lewis and Emerson will help us unclip our tandem harnesses. We’ll then wait in the water until a RIB from the frigate picks us up. Bit of luck, it’ll only be a couple of minutes, but it might be longer. The most important thing is that you keep away from the cut-away chutes and avoid getting tangled in the lines. Is that all clear?’
Bethany and the General nodded again.
Parker pointed at one of the waterproof bags they’d brought aboard. ‘We have the dry suits and rigs here. We’ll get changed when we’re about an hour out. Questions?’
There were none. They all strapped themselves in for take-off. As the C-17 accelerated along the runway, Danny realised that for the first time in days he felt a sense of calm. There was something reassuring about being in transit. Here, in the belly of an RAF flight, surrounded by military personnel, he could be sure of one thing: for a few hours at least, nobody would be trying to kill him. That thought made him glance at Bethany. They were separated by a couple of empty seats. She was sitting upright, staring straight ahead. She displayed no emotion. Danny couldn’t read her. He wondered if she seemed even more brittle than usual. He felt a moment of respect for her. She’d pushed on through this mission and kept her head. Very few people could manage that. He felt a pang of guilt for what was to come.
They gained altitude. Danny unclipped himself from his seat and made his way to one of the hammocks. He lay on it and succumbed to the weariness that had been pressing in on him. He was asleep in seconds.
Parker woke him. It felt like only minutes had passed, but Danny could tell from the SBS man’s demeanour that they were closing in on the drop zone. ‘We’re an hour out,’ he said over the noise of the jets. ‘Time to brief and prep.’ He checked his watch. It read 16.46 hrs. He put it back the requisite seven hours. 09.46 hrs, local time.
Parker handed round dry suits. There was nowhere for Bethany to have any privacy as she changed. She took herself up to the front of the aircraft where there was an area less illuminated by the dim interior lighting. It didn’t stop the men all glancing over as she undressed in the shadow and awkwardly pulled on the tight dry suit. Even the General watched, which surprised Danny. He’d have thought the old boy would have wanted to forget about the sight of Bethany semi-naked. Danny kept her in his peripheral vision. She still had the pistol she’d taken from the Wagner Group guy back at the hotel in Amman. He saw her stow it in a waterproof pouch in the dry suit. He did the same with his Sig as he changed. His phone was dead. He found an external power pack in Parker’s rucksack and plugged it in to recharge.
The SBS team were already rigged up: life vests, fins hooked to the front of their dry suits, freefall rigs for Parker, Emerson and Gordon, tandem harnesses for Parker and Emerson, helmets. Parker was talking intently to the General, clearly repeating the details of the jump. Gordon handed Danny a tandem harness, a helmet and a freefall rig. ‘It’s been checked,’ he shouted.
