Zero 22, p.25
Zero 22, page 25
part #8 of Danny Black Series
Danny checked the terrain from this direction through his night sight. He had a good view and there was no sign of any approaching vehicle. ‘This way,’ he said.
He led the General back to where the battery, the ring main terminals and the weaponry were stashed. He pointed to the Dragunov. The General eyed it hesitantly. Danny crouched down by the battery and gripped the two terminals of the ring main. He looked out from the treeline. Even without the benefit of the night sight he could see figures approaching. Ten guys, silhouetted in the moonlight. He could see the outlines of their bodies, and of the weapons that were slung across their chests. He tried to pick out Turgenev’s distinctive height and physique. He couldn’t, and he felt a dig of disappointment. He told himself to focus on what was ahead of them. The men were advancing carefully on the clearing. Current distance from the kill zone: sixty metres.
‘In case you’re coming down with a bad case of ethics,’ Danny said quietly, ‘might be worth remembering that those ten guys think they’re about to kill you. We don’t put them down – all of them – that’s what they’ll do.’
The General still didn’t pick up the Dragunov. Danny felt a grudging respect for him. The guy obviously wanted to do the right thing. He clearly took the view that they should have escaped these Wagner Group operatives, rather than massacre them. But he hadn’t been on the ground when Zero 22 walked into the Russian ambush. He hadn’t seen his mates butchered and mangled. He hadn’t fought Turgenev. Danny glanced sidelong at the General. In that moment, he didn’t see a powerful man who had a seat at the table with the most influential people in the world. He saw a soldier, in the dark, on ops, and he knew what he had to say. ‘You saw them kill your men outside the hotel, right? You watched them do it? And you don’t want them to answer for that?’
Danny didn’t need to watch for the General’s response. He knew what it would be. As he remained crouched down by the battery, looking out across the Roman ruins, he heard the General load and prime the sniper rifle before putting himself down in the firing position.
There was total silence. The fire glowed a burnt orange, occasionally spitting sparks into the air like fireflies. The figures approached slowly. Moving with stealth. Distance: fifty-five metres. Danny could see now that they had their weapons raised, the butts pressed into their shoulders. They looked like pros: a good amount of space between each man so that they didn’t present a bunched-up target, approaching on foot from a distance to avoid disturbing their own targets with the sound of their vehicles. But Danny could tell they were making a big mistake. Their weapons were all pointing in the direction of the clearing, at the fire and the dummy bodies. They had fallen for his staging. They were seeing what they wanted to see, without expecting the unexpected.
‘Who actually is the broad, anyway?’ the General said very quietly. ‘Not one of yours, that’s for certain, knowing how you SF guys are about chicks in your ranks.’
Danny didn’t answer. He kept his focus on the approaching men. Distance from the kill zone: fifty metres.
‘Where is she?’ the General asked.
Danny tensed up. ‘Close.’
‘I’m going to level with you,’ the General said. ‘If she didn’t make it through this ambush, I wouldn’t be weeping at her graveside.’
‘Keep your mind on the fucking job,’ Danny said. The truth was, it had occurred to him that now was a good time to take Bethany out. She wouldn’t be expecting an attack, not when they were working together like this. And one more body in the massacre that he was planning would cause fewer questions to be asked. Like hiding a branch on a log pile.
Why, then, was he resisting the idea? Why was he persuading himself that, in the light of the mission change, he needed direct confirmation from Hereford before taking Bethany out of the picture? He couldn’t answer that question and now he put it from his mind.
‘Your silence speaks volumes,’ the General said. ‘I gotta tell you, I don’t like her being in possession of that pistol she took in the hotel. You should have seen the look in her eyes when she was in my hotel room . . .’
‘Just shut the fuck up and don’t move,’ Danny said. ‘They see movement behind the treeline, they’ll know it’s a trap.’
The targets were still approaching very steadily. There was a sudden breath of wind. The fire embers flared. A cloud of sparks drifted towards the copse, and with them a warm smell of wood smoke. Danny held the ring main wires close to the battery terminals, ready to make the connection when the moment was right. His hands were completely steady. Unlike the General, he had no compunction about what he was about to do.
Distance from the kill zone: thirty metres.
Twenty.
They were among the Roman ruins now. The moon cast their shadows over the standing stones and dilapidated walls and columns. As a unit, they were breaking up a little. Five guys were moving ahead to the clearing. The remainder lagged behind, covering their mates, but still advancing once there was a gap of about seven metres between them. They continued their advance in two lines. Danny was pleased he’d placed his explosives both inside the ring main and outside it.
The first two guys were inside the clearing now. Their weapons were pointing down at the dummy blankets and they glowed slightly in the light of the embers. Danny touched one end of the ring main to the negative battery terminal. Three more guys entered the clearing. The remaining five were just outside it, almost in a semicircle, covering their unit mates.
A shout. Russian. It rang out across the desert. One of the guys in the semicircle had lowered his weapon. He was pointing at something on the ground. It was clear he knew something was wrong. He’d seen Danny’s trap.
It was too late.
Danny touched the loose wire to the positive terminal.
The explosion was instantaneous and immense. The detonation of ten blocks of C-4 was enough to send a shock wave through the air and emitted a crack so thunderous that it momentarily numbed Danny’s ears. It was nothing, however, to the harsh, brutal clatter of the RPGs. They detonated in such quick succession that the individual explosions almost became one. Danny’s view of the clearing became completely obscured by the vast geyser of dry earth and shrapnel that spat violently up from the ground, scorching and impenetrable. The sound of raining shrapnel followed the noise of the detonations, like nuts and bolts hammering on a steel roof. But this too was quickly drowned out by a third explosion. Danny had laid one RPG under the fuel tank of the Nissan. It did its work. A black and orange flash flowered deep in the cloud of dust and shrapnel. There was a deafening crack of combusting fuel, a thick plume of black smoke and a crunch as the Nissan itself shifted position and its chassis crumpled.
Then the screaming started.
Danny couldn’t see the men. The cloud of smoke and grit was still impenetrable. He had to rely on his ears to tell him how many were dead and how many – unfortunately for them – were still alive. He could make out four individual screams. They were the mindless, desperate screams of men in such agony that it blocked out all other thought. They were shrill. They were hoarse. They oozed panic and pain. When, after twenty seconds, the cloud started to dissipate, Danny saw why.
One guy was on his knees. The skin on his face was shredded and burned. He no longer had features. Just a red mask of blood and bone. As he screamed, he brought his fingertips up to his face, but he plainly couldn’t bear to touch the wounded flesh.
A second guy was staggering by a low wall. He had a jagged piece of shrapnel embedded in his chest. The shrapnel was too large to have come from the RPGs. It must have flown off the Nissan, which Danny could now see lying on its side, shrouded in hot flames and burning smoke.
A third guy was on fire. He must have been close to the Nissan when the fuel tank exploded. His hair was ablaze. His clothes too. He was running around in a circle like a demented dog. His screams were the most hoarse, but no quieter for it.
A fourth guy had lost his arm just above the elbow. His screams were more of a whimper, breathless and staccato like the individual rounds of a semi-automatic. He was holding the stump with his good arm, staring at it with a burned, blistered face. There was no blood. Danny assumed that the heat of the blast had instantly cauterised the wound.
The dead were the lucky ones. Killed instantly, they didn’t have to endure these agonising final moments before the inevitable came. Their bodies were strewn around the ruins, some of them partially dismembered. One guy was half covered by the dummy blankets. Another was slumped against the burning Nissan, his body smouldering as the flames began to eat it. Danny watched, listening to the agonised shouts and the crackle of the flames and he remembered the bomb site in Syria and the state of his dead mates and he couldn’t help feel a surge of satisfaction.
The General was shifting position. Danny could tell he was about to take a shot, most likely to put one of the screaming men out of his misery. ‘Hold your fire!’ he hissed.
‘These guys need finishing off. It’s inhumane.’
‘Not yet,’ Danny said. ‘I mean it. Not yet!’ He was looking past the kill zone now, at the line of vehicles in which the Wagner Group had arrived. These guys might be mercenaries, but they were also soldiers, and among soldiers there was a code. You help your mates when they’re in trouble. If there were any further targets still in the vehicles, these screams would most likely bring them running. But if they thought there were shooters behind the treeline, they would have no choice but to retreat. Danny’s job would only be half done.
It happened after a minute. A long minute, filled with the diminishing screams of the men and the greasy stench of burning fuel. Three car doors opened. Five more guys appeared. Danny felt his stomach lurch. One of them was substantially taller than the others. Danny could just discern the outline of his buzz-cut mohawk.
Turgenev was here.
Like the others, he was armed with a rifle. Danny guessed they’d been waiting to check if any enemy personnel showed themselves. But they didn’t have Danny’s patience, and the sound of their companions screaming was too much for them. Turgenev’s four mates sprinted towards the kill zone, but Turgenev was smarter and held back a little. As they ran, Danny picked up his Kalashnikov. He aimed so that the dull grey tubular underslung launcher would fire a grenade between the two left-most guys. When they were ten metres from the clearing, he fired. The launcher made a hollow, echoing pop as it spat its contents, and the stubby grenade flew visibly through the air. When it exploded, its effects were as devastating as Danny intended. Shrapnel peppered the two guys in a sudden, shocking burst. They went down, their screams adding to the bitter yells of their mates. They writhed on the ground, entirely out of action, minutes or even seconds from death.
Now, however, the remaining three Wagner Group guys knew they were going to come under fire. They hit the ground, Turgenev about ten metres behind the other two, and crawled to cover behind bits of protruding ruins: Turgenev behind a column, the other two behind a low wall about twenty metres away. They were out of sight, but Danny knew their counterattack would come at any moment. He threw himself to the ground, Kalashnikov by his side, and pressed himself into the earth alongside the prostrate general. They were hidden in the darkness behind the treeline. Danny also knew that the gunfire, when it came, would be the random spray of shooters hoping for the best . . .
The wounded men stopped screaming almost at the same time. A dense silence settled. Then the gunfire came. It was the harsh cough of two automatic weapons releasing short bursts towards the copse. Danny was aware of bullets slamming into the trees above him, of bark splintering and falling to the ground. He saw two muzzle flashes from the shooters’ firing points behind the low wall to his one o’clock, about metre from each other. A bullet ricocheted from a nearby tree. He felt a vibrating thud pass through his arms and for a moment he thought he’d been hit.
But he hadn’t. The gunfire stopped. Silence returned. The muzzle flashes had given Danny their precise location. Bad mistake. They were close enough for Danny to take them out with a single burst once they showed themselves again.
He moved, very slowly and quietly, up into the firing position. Aimed his Kalashnikov, set to automatic, and rested his finger lightly on the trigger. Kept his breathing shallow. Waited.
Thirty seconds passed.
Forty-five.
The shooters popped up like jack-in-the-boxes. Danny fired.
There was nothing. Just an impotent click. His rifle had a stoppage. He swore silently, and went through the motions of clearing the stoppage, a process so familiar he could do it in seconds. He tried to fire again. Nothing. He realised that the vibrating thud must have been a stray round hitting the weapon. It was fucked. The targets started firing again. Danny slammed himself back down to the ground. The incoming was more on point this time. Was it luck? Had they seen him? Danny didn’t know, but now Turgenev’s two mates had emerged from their hiding position. They were firing in turn, short bursts towards the copse as they approached. Danny was pinned down. Unable to move. Unable to defend himself.
Distance: twenty metres. They closer they came, the more danger he was in because they would spot him if he moved. His rifle was out of action, but the grenade launcher could still be okay. The grenades were stashed several metres to his left. Could he risk rolling to them, reloading and firing? How long would that take? Several seconds, by which time the advancing guys would only be ten metres away and they would see him for certain.
Rounds landed left and right of him. Too close. Much too close . . .
‘Put them down!’ he hissed to the General.
From somewhere to his right a shot rang out. The single dead thump of a sniper rifle. He saw one of the guys fall, and even before he hit the ground, there was a second shot. A bullet hit the head of the second guy, causing a grotesque fountain of blood and brain matter to spurt from the shattered skull as the man slumped heavily to the ground.
Which left Turgenev himself.
He appeared from behind thirty column thirty metres distant, his weapon engaged. He had clearly made an accurate judgement of the General’s position and he fired a burst. For a sickening moment, Danny thought the bullets had hit their mark, but then he heard a third shot from the sniper rifle. The General wasn’t hit, but his third round went awry, and Turgenev was still standing, huge and hulking, and about to fire again.
What he didn’t know was that his hesitation had given Danny the time he needed.
He rolled over towards the stash of grenades. Grabbed one and loaded it quickly into the underslung launcher on his Kalashnikov. In a single deft movement, he pushed himself upright and aimed at Turgenev. There was another almost silent click as he launched the grenade. It fizzed towards the target and hit him directly in the upper leg before he was able to fire on the General. The grenade exploded, knocking him on to his back. Danny couldn’t see the extent of the wounds, but he didn’t need to. He could hear the screams, worse than any of the others. Even Turgenev was in no position to fight back with an injury like that.
Neither Danny nor the General moved. Together they’d put down fifteen men. There was no guarantee, however, that there were no more enemy personnel waiting in the vehicles. The Nissan was still burning, still pumping out black smoke. There was a second, smaller explosion. The burning corpse that was slumped against the side of the car fell forwards. Danny waited a minute, ignoring Turgenev’s screams, then lowered his Kalashnikov and grabbed his night sight. He focused in on the cars. The glow of the burning Nissan compromised the NV capability a little, but he was able to check each vehicle for the sign of occupants. There was none.
‘We’re good,’ he said.
Both men stood up. Danny saw something in the General’s face that he recognised. The wired, bright-eyed excitement, tinged with relief, that routinely followed a successful firefight. ‘Nice shooting,’ Danny said.
‘You looked like you could use a hand,’ the General replied. He grinned. ‘Been a while since an old timer like me was allowed on the front line.’ He nodded towards the clearing. ‘That was quite a trap you laid.’
‘If a job’s worth doing . . .’ Danny started to say. He peered at the screaming Turgenev. ‘We should talk to him,’ he said. ‘See if he has any intel we can use.’
The General nodded. Danny lowered his Kalashnikov – it was useless now – and drew his Sig. He kept it raised, two handed, as he approached the screaming man, then stowed it as he stood above him. The burning Nissan was just five metres away. It radiated immense heat. Enough heat for it to scorch Danny’s skin. Turgenev was lying between him and the fire. The network of scars on his scalp almost glowed red in the night and the mohawk was crisping up in the heat and giving off the acrid stench of burning hair. It didn’t seem to bother Turgenev. What bothered Turgenev was his leg. The grenade had exploded against his quad. His trouser leg had burned away and the leg had split open. The meat of the muscle was fully on display and Danny could see a narrow shard of bone extending from thigh to knee. There was not much blood. The skin, and what remained of the trouser leg, was smouldering. Danny reckoned he had a bit of life in him yet. He knelt down by his side, aware of the General looking over them. He put one hand over the man’s mouth to muffle his screams. ‘Hello, Turgenev.’
Turgenev’s pained eyes widened. Perhaps he was surprised that Danny knew his name.
‘I’ve got medical supplies,’ Danny continued, ‘and a way out of here. You do what I say, you’ll live. You don’t, I’ll throw you on that fire while you’re still alive. Up to you. You understand what I’m saying?’
Danny removed his hand from Turgenev’s mouth. Turgenev took a large intake of breath. Danny thought he was about to spit at him, but he didn’t.
‘Name your target,’ Danny said.
Turgenev panted some fast, shallow breaths. An attempt to start speaking. ‘O’Brien,’ he whispered finally.
‘Who gave the order?’
‘You think they tell us that?’ He closed his eyes and shuddered.
