Raj aimed his carbine at the closest of two jihadists who were firing at Kershaw but Malone beat him to it, putting three shots in the man’s chest. Cross got the second man, two rounds from his Glock hitting the fighter in the stomach. Then there was silence, broken only by the hissing of the radiator of the overturned truck.

  Raj, McKee and Malone walked around the Mastiff, keeping their guns at the ready. Kershaw joined them from the rear. The two Marines who had taken cover behind the police vehicles stepped out, carbines at the ready. Ahmad climbed up to check on Belcher, though there was no doubt he was dead. Cross put his Glock back in his holster. ‘We were set up,’ said Cross. ‘They knew we were coming.’

  ‘It could be they were attacking the police station,’ said Raj. ‘We might just have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

  ‘Lieutenant’s right,’ said Kershaw. ‘They would have come mob-handed if they’d known we were here.’ He looked down at the dead cops. ‘They panicked,’ he said. ‘Fucking Darwinian selection at work.’

  The cop who had sought sanctuary in the police station appeared in the doorway. He was covered in dust but didn’t seem to be harmed. Kershaw sneered at him in disgust.

  ‘Call this in, Dave,’ Raj said to the Mastiff driver. ‘Everybody okay? Anybody hurt?’

  ‘Only Jimmy,’ said Kershaw.

  Raj walked over to look at the dead jihadists. Two bullets thudded into the ground close to his feet. ‘Contact!’ shouted Kershaw.

  A jihadist had appeared from behind the overturned truck and was running towards them, his gun blazing. Bullets thwacked into the Mastiff and Raj ducked. Kershaw brought up his carbine and put two shots in the jihadist’s chest. The man fell face first to the ground.

  ‘Cross, McKee – go and check there are no more surprises in store!’ shouted the sergeant. Kershaw looked over at Raj and nodded and Raj smiled thinly. He should have given the order and the sergeant knew it.

  He walked over to the jihadists who had run from the middle of the three trucks. The first two were clearly dead but the third one was still alive, blood pouring from a leg wound and a hole in his shoulder. Raj reached for his medical pack and pulled out a technical tourniquet, emergency trauma bandages and wound-packing gauze. He pulled his knife from its scabbard and cut away the man’s shirt and the material around the injured leg.

  ‘What are you doing, Lieutenant?’

  Raj looked up to see Kershaw standing over at him.

  ‘This one’s not dead,’ said Raj. ‘I need to get a tourniquet on the leg and pack the wound. Can you call for a medevac?’

  ‘Are you shitting me? Are you fucking shitting me?’

  ‘We need to get this man to a hospital, now,’ said Raj. He ripped open a pack of gauze and slapped it onto the shoulder wound. ‘And I mean now.’

  ‘Raj! RAJ!’

  Raj frowned. Who was calling him?

  ‘RAJ!’

  Raj woke up, his face bathed in sweat. Sid was looking down at him, a look of concern on his face. ‘You all right, bruv?’ he asked.

  Raj wiped his mouth with his hand and sat up. ‘Yeah. I’m good.’

  Sid bent down and patted him on the shoulder. ‘Sounded like you were having a nightmare.’

  Raj looked at his watch. He had only been asleep for eight or nine minutes. He got to his feet and blinked his eyes. ‘Did you get any berries?’

  Sid nodded. ‘Found what looks like hazelnuts, too.’ He held out his hand to reveal a dozen or so nuts.

  ‘Nice,’ said Raj.

  ‘Take a few,’ said Sid.

  Raj took four of the nuts, peeled one and chewed on it.

  ‘There’s plenty more, I wasn’t sure how long we should stay here.’

  ‘Let’s gather some more, we can eat them on the move,’ said Raj.

  CHAPTER 43

  Van der Sandt stopped and looked around, taking everything in. There were footprints everywhere, moving in every direction, many of them overlapping. They had thrown the remains of their shelters into the undergrowth but that wasn’t a serious attempt to cover their tracks. It was the man in the boots who had destroyed the shelters, and Van der Sandt was fairly sure that he was the one who had built them in the first place. Boots had established himself as the alpha male and he spent most of the time leading the group as they moved through the forest. Some distance away from where the shelters had been was an area where four of the men, including the two who were injured, had knelt. They had prayed, Van der Sandt realised. Prayed to their god. Van der Sandt smiled to himself. God wasn’t going to help them. That’s not what gods did. In the whole history of human conflict, praying never stopped anything bad from happening. They could kneel and bow to Allah as many times as they wanted, it wouldn’t change the end result.

  What interested Van der Sandt was that Boots hadn’t prayed. Why would that be? They were jihadists, they killed for their sick twisted religion, so why hadn’t Boots prayed with the others? If he had time, at the end, Van der Sandt would ask him the answer to that riddle.

  Van der Sandt found the tracks of the men leaving the campsite and followed them for a while. Boots was leading the way again. The one with the crutch was walking alone and the others were supporting the one with an injured leg. After three kilometres, they had changed direction and begun to head due south. They had been walking due east, and Van der Sandt had wondered if they had chosen the direction at random. But the change of direction, and the fact that they had changed to due south, suggested they had a compass. If they carried on walking due south they would miss the house, so at some point they would probably move west.

  After following the tracks for another few kilometres, Van der Sandt took off his backpack and switched on his GPS. Once he had established his position he switched it off and ripped open one of his energy bars. He chewed it as he looked around. The men had rested in a small clearing. Boots had walked into the forest and cut branches off a Scouler’s willow tree. The man clearly knew his trees. The inner bark of all willow varieties was a natural painkiller. That meant at least one of the injured men was having trouble.

  He finished his energy bar and shoved the wrapper in his trouser pocket. Boots clearly had first-class survival skills. The shelter, the willow, the ability to navigate without GPS – it all suggested he had been very well trained, training that went above and beyond what Van der Sandt would have expected from an ISIS terrorist. They lived and fought in the desert, a totally different environment to the redwood forest.

  He took his water bottle from his belt and took a couple of sips. The men hadn’t been born in Syria, of course. They were Europeans, so who knew what they had done before joining ISIS in Syria. He could never understand the ease with which Muslims born in the West could so easily turn against their home countries. It seemed to happen across Europe – the UK, Germany, Spain, France – countries that had opened their borders to asylum seekers were then betrayed by the children of the people they had rescued. It was something that Van der Sandt had struggled to understand ever since he had buried his wife and children. The killers who had taken the lives of his family hadn’t lived in poverty or hardship, they hadn’t had to struggle against oppression or fight for their homelands. They had lived in safe countries with first-class education and health systems, countries where they were free to grow and develop their interests, to become productive citizens. Instead they had chosen to join a group of terrorists who thought it acceptable to throw homosexuals off rooftops and to burn their enemies alive. What they had done in Cyprus was unforgivable. Van der Sandt could understand if they had attacked military or police targets, if they had assassinated government officials or politicians, but these animals had attacked holidaymakers, shooting dead men, women and children who were absolutely no threat to them.

  Van der Sandt had often faced criticism for his hunting, but when he had killed he had never killed juveniles. Every animal he had ever killed had been an adult. And when he had killed, he had killed a single animal. A trophy animal. He had never, ever, killed indiscriminately.

  A hunting friend of his, an English lord who was related to the Queen, had once asked Van der Sandt to go pheasant shooting with him. He had an estate in Scotland – a fraction of the size of Van der Sandt’s land – where birds were raised to be shot. Van der Sandt liked the man but he had always turned the invitations down. Shooting animals indiscriminately wasn’t sport; it wasn’t even hunting. There was no skill in shooting birds that could barely fly, birds that had to be startled by beaters to even get them into the air. Bird hunters used the excuse that they always ate what they shot, but that wasn’t true. On a single day’s shoot hundreds of birds would be shot and most of them were given away to the people in the nearby village. Maybe they ate the birds, maybe they didn’t, but they weren’t being shot for food, they were being shot because the shooters got a thrill from mass killing.

  What had happened in Cyprus was like a bird shoot. The men had turned up with big guns and had shot everything that moved. Men, women, and children. Like the birds they would have been startled and tried to flee for their lives. But it wasn’t possible to outrun a bullet. One by one the holidaymakers would have been shot, most of them in the back. What sort of person would do that? They had killed without caring who they were killing. For all they knew, there could have been Muslims on the beach and in the hotel. They would have been killing their own. Van der Sandt shuddered. He tried not to think about the last moments of his wife and children. How scared they would have been. How the children would have called out to their mother for help. Maybe they had called out for him. He felt tears prick his eyes and he blinked them away. He put his water bottle back on his belt and started walking again. It wouldn’t be long now.

  CHAPTER 44

  Raj looked up through the branches of the redwoods around him. The trees were less dense than they had been and he was able to get a good view of the sky. There were clouds high overhead but they were white and wispy and didn’t appear to be threatening rain. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. He really wanted a drink but there had been neither sight nor sound of running water since the stream they had found a few hours ago.

  ‘Can we forage for food for a while?’ asked Sid.

  Raj wanted them to keep up the pace, but he knew that the lack of nutrition was sapping their energy. ‘Okay, but let’s not take too long.’

  Raj took Sid into the undergrowth. Jaffar followed them. Raj scanned the smaller trees that were managing to grow among the redwoods and pointed at one. ‘There you go,’ he said. ‘Hazelnuts.’ The two men went over to the tree. It was a good size and the branches were dotted with clumps of nuts. Jaffar reached and pulled away a handful. He peeled one, chewed on it, and nodded. ‘Good,’ he said. He began ripping nuts off the tree.

  Raj and Sid pushed their way through the bushes, looking for berries. They came across a redwood that had rotted and died, and fallen on its side. The bark was dotted with large snails. Raj picked one off and showed it to Sid, but Sid backed away, his hands up. ‘No way,’ he said. ‘I’m not that hungry.’

  Raj laughed. ‘It’s okay, you wouldn’t want to eat one raw,’ he said. ‘But boil them for a few minutes in some wild garlic and they’re quite tasty.’ He put the snail back. ‘The woods are full of beetles and worms and termites that you can eat.’

  ‘Thanks Raj but I’m gonna stick to berries and nuts,’ said Sid.

  Raj grinned. ‘If you’re hungry enough you’ll eat anything,’ he said.

  Sid looked up through the tree canopy. The sky was a pale blue with only a few wisps of cloud. He sighed. ‘What the fuck is going to happen to us, Raj?’

  ‘We’re going to get out of here and get back to our lives,’ said Raj.

  ‘But that bastard wants to kill us. He’s out there somewhere with that fucking gun.’

  ‘I know. But we’ve got guns, too. He hadn’t planned that. He didn’t expect us to be able to fight back.’

  ‘Do you think he might have changed his plan? Do you think he might leave us alone?’

  Raj shook his head. ‘You killed his family. He’s not going to forgive you for that. I wouldn’t. Would you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If someone killed your family, you’d want revenge. Anyone would. It’s the most natural reaction in the world.’

  ‘I didn’t kill his family.’

  ‘Yeah, you said that back at the house. I didn’t get what you meant. You were at the beach, right?’

  Sid sighed. ‘Yes, I was at the fucking beach. And yes I was shooting. But I wasn’t shooting women and kids. I just couldn’t.’

  ‘Sid, that makes no sense at all.’

  ‘I joined ISIS because I wanted to fight for Islam. I wanted to be a warrior. I thought I’d be fighting troops. Shooting at soldiers. I thought it would be war.’

  ‘You must have known what they were planning.’

  ‘I don’t know what I thought. But when I got off the jet ski all I could see was women and kids. I fired high, I shot men, but I didn’t shoot any of the women or kids.’

  ‘You took part in a terrorist attack.’

  ‘I know, I know. I’m not saying I’m not a fucking terrorist, I’m just saying I didn’t kill his family.’

  ‘And he says he’s holding you all responsible.’ Raj wiped his forehead with his sleeve. ‘You weren’t born a Muslim, right?’

  ‘Nah. My dad’s Church of England. My mum’s a lapsed Catholic.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  Sid laughed harshly. ‘What happened? I guess skunk happened.’

  ‘Skunk?’

  ‘Cannabis. Ganja. My dealers were a couple of Pakistani guys. At first I was just a customer and then eventually I started hanging out with them. They took me to their mosque and that was pretty much it.’

  ‘It’s a bloody big jump from buying cannabis to massacring tourists,’ said Raj.

  ‘They opened my eyes to the way the world is,’ said Sid. ‘Their imam is a really smart guy. He explained things to me. I did classes in the Koran and started to learn Arabic.’

  ‘And he’s the one who arranged for you to get trained?’

  ‘Yeah, he explained that all good Muslims have to fight for Islam. It’s our duty.’

  ‘You were groomed, mate,’ said Raj. ‘They spotted you and they groomed you. You’re the perfect weapon for them because of your colour.’

  ‘Nah, that’s bollocks. Islam isn’t about race, it’s about faith.’

  ‘And you believe? In Islam?’

  Sid frowned. ‘Of course.’

  ‘But now you’re having doubts, obviously. Or reservations.’

  ‘I’m starting to think that maybe Allah’s word is being polluted. I tried raising it with the imams at the camp but …’ He shrugged. ‘They didn’t want to discuss it. They said that it would be best if I just listened to what they said and didn’t start trying to interpret the Koran myself.’ He sighed. ‘And now I’m fucked. Well fucked.’

  ‘Yeah. True that.’

  ‘This guy’s a fucking nutter,’ said Sid.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ said Raj. ‘You can’t fault his logic. You murdered his family and he wants revenge. What he’s doing makes more sense than what you did.’

  ‘Yeah, well we’re going to have to agree to differ on that,’ said Sid. ‘But I’m sorry you got dragged into this. It’s not your fault.’

  ‘You can say that again.’ Despite the precariousness of his position, Raj couldn’t help but smile. ‘But at the end of the day I’m a kafir, right? Of less value than a dog.’

  ‘Bruv, you might be a kafir but you’re the best chance I’ve got of getting out of here in one piece. Seriously, bruv, you’ve nothing to fear from me. We’re on the same side.’

  Raj stared at him for several seconds and then nodded. ‘We need each other,’ he said. ‘No doubt about that.’

  ‘So we put our differences aside?’

  Raj nodded. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Thank fuck for that,’ said Sid. He began to scratch his stomach vigorously. ‘You’ve done survival stuff like this before? With the Marines?’

  ‘Not exactly like this, no. But then this is a one-off, isn’t it?’

  Sid smiled ruefully. ‘Yeah, I guess. But you’ve been trained with weapons and stuff, obviously.’

  ‘Sure. I’m a doctor but I’m a commando, too. Or I was, anyway.’

  ‘So you shoot people and then you patch them up? How fucked up is that?’

  ‘That isn’t how it works,’ said Raj. ‘My job was to take care of our guys. I wasn’t usually used in an attacking role, I was there to take care of our casualties, and to deal with medical issues on base.’

  ‘And all this jungle stuff? You learnt it from the Rangers?’

  Raj smiled thinly. ‘This isn’t jungle, mate. This is forest. But yeah, I did several survival courses in different parts of the world as part of my training.’

  ‘So why did you pack it in?’

  ‘Long story,’ said Raj. He pointed off to the left where there was a collection of shrubs, more than two metres tall. ‘There you go,’ he said. ‘Thimbleberries.’

  ‘You’re making that up,’ said Sid.

  ‘Nah, mate, they’re similar to raspberries.’ He went over and picked a bright red berry and tossed it to Sid, then picked a couple more and ate them.

  Sid chewed his and flashed him a thumbs up. ‘Sweet,’ he said.

  Raj pulled out his shirt and used it to hold the berries he picked. Sid copied him and after ten minutes of quick picking they each had more than a pound of berries. They carried them back to Jaffar who had gathered several handfuls of hazelnuts and placed them on a large leaf. They took the fruit and berries back to the others and divided them up. The men wolfed them down, but Raj ate his slowly, chewing each berry thoroughly before swallowing.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26