Last Survivor

Chapter 3-1

Chapter 3 Mali, West AfricaThe woman in the burqa, clutching a tattered hessian sack to her chest with her left arm, passed all but unnoticed down a dusty street flanked by an open drain whose smell ripened in the afternoon heat.

A bored jihadi in a black turban picked his nose as he leaned on the receiver of his Russian-made 12.7-millimetre DShK heavy machine gun on the back of a battered Toyota HiLux technical. The gun’s nickname was Dushka, beloved one, but the woman knew from personal experience there was nothing to like about that thing unless you were firing it.

A dog paused, looking up from his foraging in the gutter to see if the woman had a scrap for him, but she carried on. She quickened her pace when she heard the call to Asr, the afternoon prayer, blare out, scratchy and tinny from a speaker atop the mud-walled mosque at the end of the street. The fighters behind her would be climbing down from the armoured vehicle, unrolling their prayer mats.

She turned right down a narrow alleyway and, away from the vehicles and machine guns, back into the Middle Ages, save for the single-use plastic bags that littered the way. There were no signs for Pepsi or Coca-Cola, no radios blaring, no satellite TV dishes, no vestiges of the twenty-first century. That wasn’t all bad, she thought to herself, but the pile of rocks she passed was sticky with blood and hair and the ground around it was stained, all that remained of a woman who had been caught having s*x with a married jihadi. The man had been flogged, apparently, but after the stoning the woman had been dragged into the desert, tied by the ankles with a rope fixed to the back of a technical. If she was still alive after being pounded by rocks the last ride of shame would have finished her off.

‘Waqf.’

She stopped, not daring to look behind her at the man who had just told her to stop. She heard the scuff of his sandals in the dusty street and controlled her breathing.

‘Salaam aleikum,’ he muttered as he came up to her.

Through the gauze covering her eyes she answered, ‘Aleikum salaam.’

He reached for the sack she held and she clutched it tighter. She leaned forward and a couple of dates spilled out of the top. The man laughed and his foul breath penetrated her veil. She looked at the rifle on his back as he bent to pick up the dates. The AK-47 was rusted and dirty, slung so as not to be readily accessible. It would take him seconds to bring it to bear if he needed to use it.

Amateur, she thought.

He stood straight, popping one date in his mouth with dirty fingers and pocketing the other. She stood there and revised her opinion of the man, slightly, when she saw how he looked down at her one foot that was visible beneath the hem of her robe. Her sandal was locally made, simple, grubby, yet her foot, darkened with several coatings of spray tan, was ornately decorated with henna. Maybe he was just a lecherous young man, she thought, or maybe he was making sure there was a woman under the burqa. Either way, the little touch of painting her feet had worked.

He waved her on. She gave a deferential little nod and carried on down the alleyway.

Two more men, both also armed with AKs, walked by her, not sparing the woman in black a second glance. This was why she was here. In this town she could move almost unseen, right up to the ornately carved door set into the deep recess in the mud-brick wall. The guard, who had been given dispensation from praying but nonetheless was reading from a well-thumbed pocket edition of the Qur’an, looked up from the holy book when he realised she had stopped in front of him.

This time she proffered the bag to him, showing him the pile of remaining dates.

‘Shukran.’ He took one and smiled.

Pity, she thought. He had nice eyes. She wondered if he had been one of the men who had raped the girl. She dropped the sack and as the young fighter bent to retrieve it she pulled her right hand from under the folds of her robe and drove the point of the vintage Fairbairn–Sykes commando fighting knife up under the man’s ribcage and into his heart. She clamped her free hand over his mouth and pushed him deep into the shadowed vestibule, against the heavy door, and held him, still, until he died a few seconds later. Her black robe absorbed and hid the blood that flowed down over her hand.

She spoke softly, the throat microphone transmitting her voice to the US Navy Seahawk helicopter orbiting out of sight and sound over the desert ten kilometres away. ‘One tango down, breaching now.’

‘Roger,’ came the disembodied voice in her ear. It was Jed Banks, one of the CIA’s top men in Africa. Jed was an ex–Green Beret, a combat veteran who had served in Afghanistan, and she felt better knowing he had her back.

She knew the door was locked and bolted from the inside so there was no point in looking for keys on the dead guard. She reached under her robe for the breaching charge she had already prepared in advance. From around her neck she slid forty-five centimetres of detonating cord, with a further length of shock tube attached to a blasting cap on one end and a primer on the other. She peeled the cover off the double-sided tape attached to the det cord and stuck the explosives-packed snake to the door. She backed along the wall and initiated the primer by slapping a metal initiator punch into the primer tube.

The door was shattered, splinters and dust shooting out into the alley. She took a stun grenade from a pouch under her robe and pulled the pin. Before the smoke had begun to clear she was through the door. She had modified her burqa with velcro fasteners and it came apart as she raised the Heckler & Koch MP5 machine pistol, slung around her neck in front of her, with her right hand. On top of the MP5 was a camera, which she switched on. She followed the map of the building in her mind and down the stone-flagged corridor was a door on her right. She tossed the stun grenade inside and as it went off she entered the room, searching for targets.

The eyepiece of her veil, which was still in place, shielded her vision from the bright flash of the grenade, and she saw a jihadi crawling across the floor from his prayer mat towards his rifle. She fired a double tap, two shots in quick succession, into his back, and he fell flat and motionless.

She carried on through to a door on the other side, which she kicked open. She fired into the room, catching one of the two men inside in the shoulder and spinning him around. The second man had his rifle up and was searching for her when she fired again.

Tap-tap. The man fell. She dispatched him with a third shot, between the eyes.

‘In,’ she said into the mouthpiece, voice calm, heart pounding. ‘Three more tangos down. Bring it.’

‘Roger,’ Jed said. ‘On our way.’

There was a door on her right that was not on the plan she had committed to memory. She tested the handle and found it was unlocked. She kicked it open and raised her weapon. It was a storeroom, uninhabited but stacked high with stuff she instantly recognised as being valuable. There were elephant tusks, maybe thirty of them, the ends of the ivory still bloodstained; a dozen rhinoceros horns stacked in a corner; an open sack of m*******a, and a stack of what looked like a dozen small fuzzy tree trunks, each no bigger than a round side table. One trunk was bigger than the others, about a metre tall, and its plastic covering had been partially undone, revealing its rough, diagonal-patterned surface. The camera on top of her H&K would record it all. She carried on.

She had another explosive breaching charge in a pouch on her combat vest. She placed the charge against the locked door that faced her and blew it open.

She knew this would be the hardest target, the final guard who would be standing over the package, a twenty-four-year-old American aid worker, the daughter of a US senator, who had been held hostage for the past six weeks. The man would be ready to kill his captive and die for his cause rather than let her be rescued. She knew she might be too late.

She paused deliberately. The guard would be expecting a force of SEALs to come rushing through the door. She let the H&K dangle from her neck again and closed the folds of her burqa, reattaching the velcro. She drew the Glock 19 from her belt and held it behind her back.

‘Allah-u-Akbar!’ she screamed, then went through the door.

Through the smoke from the charge she saw the guard as well as the woman lying on the filthy bed, her mouth covered with duct tape. The man had his AK-47 up but when he saw the black-clad woman enter he hesitated, as she hoped he would, and lowered his rifle a fraction.

It was enough. She brought her pistol up and fired twice, hitting the man in the chest. She put a third round into his head for good measure, and because of the state of the woman she had come to rescue.

The woman was handcuffed, her exposed skin scored with cuts and pocked with what looked like festering burns, each the size of the end of a lit cigarette. She brought the Glock up again and fired through the chain joining the cuffs. She reached down and ripped the tape from the aid worker’s mouth.

The young woman blinked and cowered on the bed. ‘Who … who are you?’

‘My name is Sonja Kurtz. Don’t let the accent fool you – I’m CIA. I’m here to rescue you and kill as many of these fuckers as I can.’

The hostage began to cry, but there was no time for a hug. Sonja grabbed the woman’s wrist and pulled her gently but firmly off the bed to the door.

‘Come with me.’

Sonja led the aid worker through the rooms, stepping over dead bodies. She had the H&K at the ready again and passed the Glock to the young woman. ‘No safety catch. Just point and pull the trigger.’

The young woman nodded dumbly. At the entrance Sonja peeked out into the street and a hail of heavy-calibre bullets raked the walls either side of her. She had glimpsed the vehicle at the end of the alleyway.

‘Technical, blocking the exit,’ Sonja said, so the throat mic would pick it up.

‘Got it,’ Banks replied. ‘UAV’s on it. Clear to launch?’

‘Unleash hell,’ Sonja said.

Orbiting above them, out of sight, was a Global Hawk Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, what the media liked to call a ‘drone’, but in reality a sophisticated jet-powered platform of destruction. At Jed’s order a Hellfire missile was launched.

Sonja watched the streak of smoke come out of the sky and the next second the HiLux erupted in a ball of flame and smoke and the machine gun stopped firing.

‘We’re inbound,’ Jed said into her earpiece.

‘Copy,’ she said.

From the other end of the alley she heard shouting and a mob of armed jihadis rounded the corner. She raised the MP5 and killed the first two. She turned to the woman, just in time to see her faint.

‘Shit.’

‘Say again,’ Jed said.

She bent over and hoisted the woman onto her shoulders. She was malnourished and weighed next to nothing after her period of captivity. ‘Package is unconscious and I’ve got a shitload more tangos than I was briefed. I’m heading to the roof for extraction.’

‘Roger,’ Jed said. ‘We’re five mikes out.’

‘Copy.’ Five minutes could seem like a hell of a long time when people were shooting at you.

Sonja retraced her steps into the house, but followed the corridor to the end where a staircase led to the roof. She held the MP5’s pistol grip with her right hand and, at the top of the stairs, shot off a rusted padlock and kicked open the rotting door. The flat rooftop was clear and she laid the young woman down and slapped her face. ‘Wake up. Get back in the game.’

The woman blinked once, twice. ‘I … be …’

‘What?’