Killing for the Company

She could fire another round in seconds. Chet had to get out of there.

He didn’t give her time to re-aim, but burst out of the kitchen and hurtled back along the hallway, all traces of his previous inebriation a memory. When he got to the front door, he could hear the woman coming out of the kitchen. He could almost sense her raising the weapon again.

As he stepped over the threshold and pulled the door closed behind him, a second round splintered the wood from the inside. Chet limped down the pathway and round to the far side of his dented Mondeo, where he ducked out of sight.

He froze, his heart pumping furiously, and he listened carefully.

At first there was nothing. Then, after about ten seconds, footsteps. The shooter had turned left out of his house and was heading off down the street fast. Chet pulled the keys from his pocket, unlocked the driver’s door and entered. He threw the rucksack of gear on to the passenger seat, turned the key in the ignition and the engine jumped into life. The tyres screeched as he pulled out into the road and sped away. Chet glanced in the rear-view mirror as he accelerated. He could just see her, standing on the pavement, lit up by a street lamp, looking in his direction: black clothes, wavy black hair down below her shoulders, full lips, a beautiful, angry face.

And as Chet turned left out of his road, his mind was ablaze with questions. Who was she? How did she get into his flat? And why the hell had she just tried to kill him?

EIGHT

05.00 hrs.

Just under an hour till dawn. Luke and Finn could see the Bedouin village up ahead.

They’d approached slowly, keeping the engine noise to a minimum. In the distance they had seen the lights of what they assumed to be Iraqi border patrol vehicles. If they were discovered by one of these, things could get messy. But the desert was big and they were small. Nobody saw them.

Now they had left the car and were approaching on foot. They were on a dusty track that bore tyre marks but also animal footprints. On either side the terrain was dotted with boulders and low brush. Five minutes after they left the Toyota they passed a rusting car chassis. God knows how long it had been there. Years, probably.

Finn had changed out of his burka and into grubby gear much like Luke’s. They had both used the cover of darkness to double-check the gear packed away in their ops waistcoats that were hidden under their dishdashes: magazines for their pistols, grenades, Plasticuffs. Their disco guns were fitted to their ankles, but their main weapons were closer at hand. They had each looped a piece of bungee cord in a figure of eight around the butt of their carbine, then threaded this around their arms so the weapon itself was hanging underneath their armpits — well disguised by the dishdash but accessible in a split second. With luck, they’d be in and out, but they didn’t know what was waiting for them up ahead, so they had to be prepared. And that meant packing some heavy shit.

Within ten minutes of leaving the car, they could see the outskirts of the village. They checked it out through the kite sight. It was a poor place — a seemingly random agglomeration of about twenty breeze-block houses, each a single storey high and with a shallow-sloping corrugated-iron roof. About 200 metres from the outermost of the houses was the shell of an older dwelling. The blockwork had crumbled, there was no roof and an old acacia tree, heavy under its own weight, had grown through one of the walls. Luke pointed at it. ‘We’ll set up an OP there,’ he said.

Finn nodded and together they headed for the derelict house. They were ten metres away when there was a sudden movement. Both men instinctively went for their weapons, only to see a beady-eyed goat scramble to its feet and put a few metres between itself and them. The bell round its neck gave a repeated dull clunk as it moved, and its breath steamed as it watched them make their way into the OP. The ground was covered with rubbish — old tins, rusting jerrycans and sturdy branches from the acacia tree. A gap in one wall where a window used to be formed a perfect place from which they could observe the village, and Finn took up position here. He pulled an A4 photograph and a pencil-thin red-filtered torch from under his robe. It was a satellite image of the tiny village. Each house was easily identifiable — there were twenty-two in total, and they were mostly set in a rough circle around a central courtyard — and one of them had been circled in black marker. This, if their intelligence was correct, was where they would find Abu Famir.