Killing for the Company

ONE

Chet Freeman didn’t know which smelled worse: himself or the bar he was sitting in.

They’d taken up position by a table next to the toilets. From a surveillance point of view it was perfect: they could see every part of the bar, and there was a direct line to the exit in case of a clusterfuck. From a comfort point of view it was the pits, not least because of the reek of piss and stale cigarette smoke. Chet had been in some rough joints in his time, but this place made the Lamb and Flag in Hereford look like the fucking Ritz.

At least it was warm. The snow had been falling for about an hour and was already a couple of inches thick on the ground. But warmth was the only thing this bar had going for it. A broken fruit machine in one corner. A picture of Milosevic on the nicotine-stained wall alongside it. Three strip lights on the ceiling, of which the middle one buzzed and flickered on and off. Other than that, a short bar with a grossly fat barman and only two optics fixed to the wall behind it — slivovitz and vodka — and ten plastic-topped tables screwed to the ground, each with a red Coca-Cola ashtray overflowing with butts. This was a place for drinking and smoking, nothing more. True, there was an old TV fixed to the concrete wall behind the bar itself. It was on loud enough to hear, but of the twenty-three men — no women — pulling on bottles of warm beer, no one even glanced at it.

Chet looked at his watch. 17.03. Give it another three hours and he’d put money on most of these guys being dead drunk. Or, in one case, just dead.

He scratched at his leg. An insect, probably drawn by his stinking clothes, had bitten him just above the knee. He could feel the bulge of the bite even through the coarse material of his trousers. He scratched it hard and took a small sip from his bottle of Zajecarsko, the local beer.

‘Jesus, buddy, if I didn’t know you better, I’d have said you actually just drank some of that piss.’

Chet’s mate Luke Mercer had a shaved head, slightly crooked teeth and a south London accent. He spoke quietly and his voice was almost drowned out by the noise of Boyzone wailing from the TV. They didn’t want anybody to hear they were talking English.

Luke looked as rough as Chet. Three days’ stubble, and another three days’ dirt beneath it. A black donkey jacket flecked with cement. Worker’s shoes, dirty and heavy. Luke so closely resembled a labourer that no one would give him a second look, not here where everybody was dressed in the same way. Their fellow drinkers might be surprised to learn, though, that the donkey jacket concealed a shoulder holster packing a Sig 9mm pistol and a mike for covert comms fitted under the lapel. The tiny pink radio earpieces each man had in one ear were invisible to anyone who wasn’t looking for them. They were linked to radio transmitters in the pockets of their tough, battered trousers. This would keep them in contact with the other two members of the unit, Sean Richards — a grizzled old-timer with flecks of grey in his beard, who was as much a fixture of B Squadron as the squadron hangar back in Hereford — and Marty Blakemore, fresh to the Regiment from 3 Para and keen to make a good impression on his first major op.

Sean and Marty were parked in a nondescript white Skoda saloon outside the bar on the opposite side of the street. The boot of the car was filled with heavier weaponry: suppressed M16s, Maglite torch attachments with IR filters, med packs. All four of them knew that this could be a long night, and they needed to be properly equipped.

Chet’s three years in the Regiment had taught him that his chosen career would sometimes mean carrying out operations you didn’t much like and just getting on with the job. Operations that you wouldn’t have thought existed before you walked into the compounds of Hereford HQ. Operations that you wouldn’t talk to anybody about, unless they were badged too. So sometimes, he thought to himself as he sat there, it was good to know you were out to nail a bona fide scumbag. Someone you wouldn’t think twice about sending to meet their maker — though fuck knows what kind of maker would come up with a piece of work like Stevan Ivanovic. As scumbags went, he was solid gold.

Chet knew Ivanovic’s CV well. Four days previously at their forward operating base — a cordoned-off area of a busy UN military installation on the Bosnian border — the ops officer Andy Dell had given Chet’s four-man unit the low-down as he handed round the photograph of a balding, jowly individual with flared nostrils and a sour look.

Andy Dell had the stuck-up tones of a Sandhurst officer, but as Ruperts went he was all right. ‘This is your man,’ he had announced. ‘Born 1957, made Chief of Police in Bosanski Samac, north-eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, April 1992. Lasted eight months in the job, during which time twelve men — all Bosnian Muslims — died in his custody: seven from beatings, five from causes unknown. Six Bosnian males have independently testified that he forced them to perform sex acts on each other just to humiliate them.’

‘Sex acts?’ Chet had interrupted.

‘Blow jobs, since you ask. Three women have accused him of rape. One of them was fifteen years old; another ended up face down in the river after she spoke out.’

‘And we get to slot this cunt, right?’ Luke had asked.

‘Do me a favour, Luke, and shut the fuck up till I’ve finished.’ Luke, who had been brought up by his dad on a council estate in Lewisham, always had something to say, and it didn’t always endear him to the Ruperts. ‘Ivanovic is on the run. He left his post as Chief as Police in ’93, after which he was a leading figure in the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims. Our boys tried to get their hands on him during the siege of Sarajevo. Too slippery. He’s been underground since the end of the Bosnian war. Only he’s just stuck his head above the parapet. The Firm have definite intel on his location, and the war-crimes tribunal at the Hague want him in the dock for persecution on political, racial and religious grounds.’

It all made sense. Chet had been around long enough to know that it wasn’t just the ragheads who could be religious nuts. When it came to ethnic cleansing, some of those Serbs were pure Domestos.

Turning their attention to a map of the region, Dell had pointed at the FOB, situated just west of the Serb border. ‘You’re to insert into Serbia by vehicle in the guise of UN peacekeepers. They’re a common sight, so you shouldn’t attract too much attention. Our intel suggests that Ivanovic is hiding out in Prizkovo, a one-horse town twenty miles south of Belgrade. We have the imagery for you to study. When you get to the area you’ll need to ditch the UN gear. That part of Serbia is a nationalist hotbed. The peacekeepers know that the best way to preserve the peace is to keep away.’

‘Good job we’re not there to keep the peace, then,’ Luke had murmured.

The ops officer had ignored him. ‘We have reports that Ivanovic is surrounded by at least four heavies,’ he continued. ‘They’re dispensable, but Ivanovic needs to be alive. You’ve been given temporary powers of arrest. These probably won’t stand up in an international court of law, and Ivanovic will most likely know that. He’s not going to come quietly.’

Quiet. Noisy. It made no difference to Chet. He was just looking forward to getting his hands on this bastard. And it wouldn’t be long now.

He picked up a dinar from the sticky table and flicked it in the air.

‘Tails,’ said Luke. He looked like he wanted a response, but he wasn’t going to get one from Chet, who just scowled and continued to flip the coin.

Flick, catch.

Flick, catch.

‘You going to do that all night, buddy?’ Luke asked. ‘’Cos I don’t mind telling you, it’s getting on my wick.’

Flick, catch. Flick, catch.

The TV behind the bar was grainy and flickered every few seconds. To Chet’s relief, the music came to an end and an image caught his attention. The British Prime Minister, Alistair Stratton, his boyish face earnest and open, his suit well cut and his red tie perfectly neat, was sitting in an anodyne studio being interviewed by some bird Chet recognised but couldn’t name. What the fuck Stratton was doing on Serbian TV, Chet didn’t know. Certainly the punters in the bar paid as little attention to him as they had to Boyzone.

‘Always the fucking way,’ Luke drawled. ‘You come on holiday to get away from it all…’

Chet glanced back up at the screen. ‘Stratton’s all right,’ he said.

‘Stratton,’ Luke replied, ‘is a politician. Therefore Stratton is a wanker. End of.’

Chet shrugged. He wasn’t going to argue. But he had enough friends in the regular green army to know that in the year since Stratton had come to power, things for them had improved. Better kit, better conditions. It was no secret in the military that the government was gearing up to move into Kosovo if Milosevic carried on giving the Albanians the Stalin treatment, but really Chet knew very little about the politics. That wasn’t his business. All he knew was that anyone who supplied his mates with the gear and the weapons they needed to do their jobs was OK by him. As Luke would say: end of.

Still, it was odd to come across Stratton’s voice in this back end of nowhere, miles from home and translated into impenetrable Serbian by the subtitles at the bottom of the screen. The PM’s earnest tones reached Chet’s ears.

‘The trouble with talking about faith is that frankly people think you’re a nutter…’ Stratton smiled a boyish smile. ‘But yes, my faith is extremely important to me. You know, in this job, you’re asked to make some pretty tough decisions, and I’d like to think that my faith always puts me on the right path…’

Chet heard Luke snort. Did Stratton know that at that moment a four-man SAS unit was preparing to make an illegal arrest on foreign soil, and most likely take out a number of foreign nationals as they did so? If so, had he consulted the big guy upstairs about the rights and wrongs of it? Chet didn’t much care either way. The only things he had faith in were his Sig and the PPK strapped to his left ankle. The disco gun, they called it back home, but there’d be no dancing tonight.

Chet’s attention wandered from the blaring TV and he started to scan the other drinkers. They were hard-looking men. Flinty-eyed and rough-faced, their hands big and their skin chapped. One of them stood up from the bar and lurched towards the toilet. He noticed Chet and Luke sitting there. Newcomers. He stopped to give them a look that told them how unwelcome they were.

The look Chet and Luke returned was cool. Unruffled. Perhaps the Serbian decided it wasn’t worth his while kicking it off with these two. Perhaps he’d never intended that in the first place. He found his way into the foul-smelling toilets, leaving the two SAS men to continue scanning the remainder of the clientele.

One of them was their key to Ivanovic. And if everything went according to plan, they’d soon know which one.

Stratton had been replaced by some incomprehensible game show. Chet and Luke’s beers were still full. It wouldn’t be long before someone clocked that they weren’t really drinking. Their contact was now seventeen minutes late. It was beginning to look like he’d bailed out, which would mean the last few days had been for nothing.

A voice in the earpiece. Sean, outside in the Skoda. ‘OK, fellas. The preacher’s arrived. About fucking time too — it’s Baltic out here, so make him feel comfortable. He looks about twelve.’

‘The preacher’. Prearranged code for the tout they were awaiting.

Ten seconds later the door opened. The icy air from outside disturbed the warm fug of the bar, and a young man walked in. Only three men clocked his arrival: the fat bartender and Chet and Luke. Unlike almost everyone else in the room, he was clean-shaven. He wore jeans, a thick lumberjack shirt, a hat that covered his ears and was tied under his chin, and a black rucksack over his shoulder. The rucksack was the sign by which the unit were to recognise him, but it made the kid look more like a student than a worker. Everything had a dusting of snow over it.

As the door closed behind him, he looked round nervously, like a teenager not sure if his girlfriend had stood him up.

Chet looked towards the frosted glass at the front of the bar. He could just make out two silhouettes, one on either side of the door. He knew what that meant: Sean and Marty, having clocked the kid, had moved from the Skoda and were now standing guard outside, ready to burst in if anything kicked off.

The kid’s glance fell on Chet and Luke, and he nodded slightly.

‘Fuck’s sake.’ Chet cursed quietly and looked away. He could sense Luke doing the same. This dickhead might be here to help them, but as touts went he was clearly wet behind the ears, and if he stood there gawping at them much longer, he was going to screw the whole operation.

Chet slid the dinar off the table once more.

Flick, catch.

Flick, catch.

The tout was looking around now. His eyes narrowed, as if he had seen something — or someone — he’d been looking for. He slipped the rucksack off his shoulder, carrying it by his side, and approached the bar. The tout chose his place carefully, selecting a stool next to one of the regular drinkers.

That was the sign. The kid was too scared to meet with the unit. Too scared to point out their man in an overt way. So the spooks had got to work on him. It was local knowledge that Ivanovic was in the area. Nobody knew where, but they did know that one of his guys drank in this bar during his time off. The kid was to come in here at a given time and take a seat next to the target. If they wanted to find Ivanovic, all they had to do was follow Ivanovic’s man.

Chet stopped flipping his coin and took another pretend pull on his beer as he scoped out the tout’s new drinking buddy. He could only see the guy’s back. He was broad-shouldered and had thick black hair, slightly greying. He sat hunched forward, his elbows on the bar. When the tout sat next to him, he made no attempt at conversation.

The younger man pointed at one of the optics and ordered a slivovitz, which the fat bartender plonked in front of him. Then he settled down to drink it. Just another loser passing the time.

Ivanovic’s man stood up.

As he turned away from the bar, Chet could see he was unsteady on his feet. His face looked like it had been carved out of rock, with an immense flat nose — well reddened from booze — hooded eyes and deep frown lines on his forehead. He scowled at nobody in particular and walked uncertainly towards the street door. Chet pressed the button on the transmitter in his pocket. ‘Eyes on Target 1,’ he murmured. ‘He’s leaving now.’

‘Roger that,’ came Sean’s voice in his ear.

Chet and Luke waited until their man was outside before scraping back their chairs and moving towards the exit. Chet could sense the tout watching them over his shoulder, but he gave no sign of recognition. That was for the kid’s safety.

They stepped out into the cold night air. It had been dark for no more than half an hour, but already it must have been two below. Chet gave himself a moment to take everything in. The street was lined with Communist-era concrete buildings — ‘Makes Peckham look like Belgrave fucking Square,’ Luke had noted when they first arrived — and while the falling snow softened everything a little, Priskovo was still as bleak as the bar they’d just walked out of. The road itself wasn’t busy. A half-empty blue and white bus trundled past, then a couple of vans with tarpaulin over the back. A few locals hurried past on the pavement, huddled against the snow and concentrating on nothing other than getting home. Certainly they paid no attention to Chet or Luke.

Ivanovic’s man had turned left out of the bar. He’d gone about twenty metres and was weaving his drunken way towards a white Ford Transit with a dent in the back. Sean and Marty had crossed the road and returned to the Skoda — just two more faceless figures in the snow — and were opening the doors to climb back in. Chet and Luke had another Skoda, but theirs was brown. They got in and Chet switched on the engine. The wipers cleared the snow from the windscreen to reveal Ivanovic’s man getting into the Transit. Seconds later he moved off. Chet followed, and in his rear-view mirror could see the white Skoda pull out as well.

The Transit drove quickly, swerving slightly as it went. Luke shook his head. ‘Dumber than a box of rocks…’

Chet didn’t answer. The snow was hurtling against the windscreen and the road was treacherous. He kept his eye firmly on the target and drove on.

The thin young man whose black rucksack was now lying at the foot of his bar stool was called Anton. He had been cold when he walked into the bar. Now the blood in his veins was running hot. The heat of excitement. It had gone well. He had earned his 50,000 dinars. Now all he wanted to do was get out of this horrible place and back to his small apartment, where his girlfriend was waiting for him. He would buy her flowers. And if he bought her flowers, perhaps she would give him something in return.

The slivovitz made his eyes water and his throat burn. But he supposed he’d better finish it. He caught the barman’s eyes and nodded — a friendly gesture that wasn’t returned. Anton shrugged, then watched as the guy wiped the bar with a frayed, grey rag and picked up the bottle that Ivanovic’s man had left.

A confused look crossed the barman’s face. He held up the bottle, and Anton immediately saw what was puzzling him. The bottle was full.

The heat in Anton’s veins turned to ice. He dismounted from the bar stool, grabbed his rucksack, then ran to the door and out into the street.

They were waiting for him there.

Two men, each twice as broad as Anton, and twice as strong. They grabbed him, one man to each of his thin arms.

‘Pogmati!’ he yelled in Serbian. ‘Help me!’

But none of the passers-by was going to do that.

The two men pulled Anton along the pavement for about thirty metres, then turned into an alleyway. It was dark here, and the snow was drifting against the wall on one side. The tips of Anton’s feet left two lines in the powder as the men dragged him along the alley and out into a courtyard surrounded by the high walls of deserted buildings. Breeze-blocks were piled in one corner and an old cement mixer stood nearby, but it was clear from the virgin snow that nobody had been here recently.

Again Anton shouted for help. But there was no one to hear, and his voice just echoed off the walls.

The first blow was not the hardest, but it was the one that shocked him most: a sudden and brutal knee to the groin that bent him double with pain. From that moment on, Anton was unable to distinguish between the two men. One of them struck him on the side of his head with a wooden cosh. As Anton collapsed to the ground, the other man started kicking him in the stomach and the face. Thirty seconds later blood was oozing from his nose and spewing from his mouth. His teeth were smeared crimson and he was vaguely aware of the way the blood first stained, then melted the snow around him.

He tried to shout again, but the wind had been knocked from his lungs and he couldn’t so much as croak. He didn’t see the knife — smooth on one side, jagged and cruel on the other — until its point was pressed against his neck.

For the first time, one of the men spoke. His voice was heavy and rasping. ‘Sisadzijo! Cocksucker! That pretty little bint of yours waiting back in your flat. My friends are fucking her right now. When we’ve finished with you, we’ll go join them. Let her know what it’s like to feel real men inside her.’

Anton forced himself to speak. ‘Molim te… Please… please leave her alone. I’ll tell you everything…’ They laughed. It wasn’t a nice sound.

‘Tell us everything?’ the man with the knife said. ‘Don’t be stupid. We know everything. You think your little game in the bar was a secret?’ Another boot to the stomach. ‘We’re not torturing you, sisadzijo. We’re killing you.’

Anton shook his head just as he felt a warm sensation spread across his trousers. The men laughed again. ‘Pissed himself. What a joke.’

Anton closed his eyes and started to pray, murmuring words he hadn’t uttered since he was a reluctant child taken to the Orthodox church his mother attended. ‘Our father in heaven, hallowed be your name…’

When he opened his eyes again, he wondered for a moment if his prayer had been answered. The man was no longer pressing the knife against his neck, but was standing, looking down at him.

Pushing himself up into a sitting position, Anton looked, through his blood-bleary eyes, towards the two men. The knife man still had the blade in his hand; but his accomplice had something else. It was a thin loop of plastic, about fifty centimetres long, the ends fastened with a small notch. Only when the man holding it started to approach him did Anton work out what it was: a cable tie.

A fresh wave of dread crashed over him. He had heard of these people and what they did with this simple, everyday item. If he didn’t get away now, he never would. He scrabbled around, but a final kick in the chest was enough for the man with the knife to floor him again; seconds later the other one was forcing the loop of plastic over his head.

Anton’s hands went to his neck, as though he was strangling himself. In truth he was protecting it. The knife man was having none of it: with a flick of his wrist he slashed the back of Anton’s hand so deeply that he felt the blade hit bone. The pain was searing, and the blood smeared all over the back of his hands and down his shirt. So much blood. But he kept a hold of his neck because to let go would be suicide.

The knife man dropped the bloodied blade in the snow. Then he grabbed Anton’s hands and pulled them down to his side.

‘Ne… No… I’m begging you…’ Anton’s desperate plea was cut short by the sudden tightening of the cable tie around his neck — a sharp yank that forced the plastic to squeeze his skin and severely restrict the flow of air into his lungs.

The two men stood back to watch as Anton desperately tried to loosen the cable tie. To get his fingers in between the plastic and the skin. It was impossible.

His lungs started to burn as his body silently screamed for air. He fell to his knees again, his panic matched only by the agony of his breathlessness. The knife was still there on the ground, no more than two metres away. Anton reached for it with his damaged, bleeding hand.

If he could just cut through…

But as he stretched for the knife, one of the men was there, stamping on the back of his hand with such force that Anton would have screamed like an animal if he’d only had the breath.

He collapsed.

Everything was spinning now. Confused. He saw the snow falling in slow motion. He saw the blood pumping from his hands. He saw the two men standing over him, the bright light of cruelty in their eyes.

And there was a moment, before Anton passed into unconsciousness and then death, when the pain disappeared and the lack of oxygen in his blood left him with only a sleepy, doped-up feeling.

The two men didn’t wait to check that he was dead. They knew the cable tie would do its work, and anyway they still had to get their rocks off with Anton’s girlfriend.

The little town soon melted away into deserted outskirts, then came empty countryside. After following the Transit for ten minutes, Chet pulled over and allowed the white Skoda to overtake. Ivanovic’s man was probably too drunk to clock a tail, but they still had to follow SOPs. Once Sean and Marty were trailing the van, Chet caught up with them and followed at a distance.

Luke was studying a small map of the area, following their route carefully by the light of a thin, red-filtered torch. On his lap was a bulky GPS unit, blinking their position at him.

The snow fell harder, making the going slow, and the number of other cars was reducing. The white Skoda had been leading for about five minutes when Chet’s earpiece burst into life. It was Sean. ‘No one else on the roads. We should kill the lights.’

‘Roger that.’ Chet pulled up and turned off the headlamps; up ahead he could see the white Skoda had done the same. Beyond that, only just visible through the blizzard, were the red rear lights of the Transit. Chet reached behind the driver’s seat and located his night-vision headset, which he put on and engaged. The world became bathed in green light, and the tail lights of the Transit were perfectly bright. So long as they had line of sight, they could follow a couple of klicks behind and Ivanovic’s man would be none the wiser.

They drove in silence, Luke keeping any wisecracks to himself. After another five minutes, Luke — who was still consulting the map — spoke into the comms. ‘This road ends at the edge of a large lake,’ he said so that both Chet and the others could hear. ‘Unless our man fancies a swim, that’s where we’ll be stopping. There’s no other roads off this one.’

‘How far to the water’s edge?’ Sean asked.

‘Two klicks, buddy. No more.’

‘We’ll stop a klick away and approach on foot,’ Chet said. ‘Our man might be pissed up, but that doesn’t mean his friends are. Any closer than that and they’ll be able to hear our vehicles even if they can’t see them.’

Silence over the radio meant everyone agreed.

Five minutes later they pulled up in a rough lay-by — more like a ditch — where tractors could pass, though there would be no tractors at this time and in this weather.

Chet turned to Luke and asked, ‘You got a fix?’

Luke took a moment to double-check their position, on both the map and the GPS unit. He nodded. ‘I’ll call it in.’

The secure comms system that allowed them to communicate with base back over the border was installed in the glove compartment. Luke spoke into the bulky handset. ‘Zero, this is Delta Three Tango. Over.’

A moment of silence, then the comms crackled. ‘Delta Three Tango, this is Zero.’

‘Advancing now on the Alpha. Stand by to record our position.’

‘Standing by, Delta Three Tango.’

Luke checked the GPS unit, before reading out their grid reference slowly and clearly. He waited for it to be repeated over the comms before disconnecting and climbing out of the car.

Sean, who had been driving and also had his NV goggles fitted, opened up the boot of the white Skoda to reveal the men’s gear. They took off their donkey jackets and ops waistcoats, fitted their body armour and replaced the waistcoats. Each man put on a helmet, cut away around the ears.

‘UN badges?’ Marty asked. He meant the armbands, powder blue with large white writing. By rights, if they were about to make an arrest under the auspices of the UN, they should be wearing them.

‘Fuck that,’ Sean growled. ‘We’ll be spotted with that shit on.’ The voice of experience and he was right. The white lettering would be a beacon in the darkness.

Each man removed his M16, fully loaded and with Maglites attached; Luke and Marty also mounted their NV on their helmets.

Chet took a kite sight from the boot and used it to scope out the environment: the surrounding countryside was flat and sparse, no less bleak and industrial than the town they’d just left. In the distance he could make out the red lights of the Transit, still ploughing through the snow. Beyond that, perhaps there was another, more distant light; in this visibility it was hard to be sure.

‘I hope our lad in the bar wasn’t bullshitting us,’ Luke said as he slung his assault rifle across his chest. ‘I fucking hate the snow. If we get down to the water and find Mr White Van Man’s just been looking for somewhere quiet to take a leak, I’m heading straight back up there to shove his rucksack up his arse.’ No one replied. ‘Come back Brecon Beacons,’ he grumbled to himself. ‘All is forgiven…’ He cocked his rifle and set it to the lock position.

The unit headed up the road single file, in the tracks left by the Transit so their footprints didn’t show up, each man five metres from the next. The blanket of snow deadened all sound — even their footsteps — and the air was filled with the frosty clouds of their breath.

As unit leader Chet was second in line. He held up one hand. Everyone stopped — including Luke, who was at the front as lead scout but checked the men behind him every twenty seconds. Chet looked through the kite sight to scope out what lay ahead. As he recced the place in his mind, he spoke out loud so that the others could tell what he’d seen.

‘The Transit’s come to a halt approximately 100 metres away, directly to the north,’ he said, his voice barely louder than the settling snow. ‘No other vehicles, no sign of enemy targets. A small copse of trees on its west side, a large building on its east. More trees eastwards of that. Looks like some kind of deserted farmhouse. I can see one, two, three outhouses, but there may be more. Two rooms on the western side of the house have lights on; everything else I can see is in darkness. Luke, I think I can see your lake just beyond the house, but it’s difficult to make out.’

He lowered the sight to see Sean examining the ground in front of them, snow gathering on his beard. ‘One set of vehicle tracks, freshly laid. That’s the Transit. Snow could have covered any others, but I can’t see any indentation. I’d say fuck all else has come up here in the past four or five hours.’

‘Footprints?’ Chet asked.

‘Yeah. A deer. Maybe a wild boar. No sign of humans.’

Chet nodded and turned to Luke and Marty. Their faces were intent. Alert. ‘When we get down there, two groups. Sean, Marty, head to the east side of the house and secure any exits there. If Ivanovic knows we’re coming for him, he’ll most likely try to escape that way. You grab him if he does.’

‘It’ll be a pleasure,’ said Sean.

‘Luke, we’ll take the front. Identify the main power supply and kill the lights. Then house clearance room by room. I want any guards dead before they have the chance to shout out. We’ll flush the fucker out that way.’

Luke nodded.

Each man performed a final check on his weapons, engaged his NV and turned to Chet, waiting for the word.

‘OK,’ he breathed. ‘Let’s move.’

TWO

The road to the lake went gently downhill, but in the snow it still took ten minutes to travel it. They were fifty metres from the house when Sean and Marty veered off to the east so they could get round to the back.

Chet and Luke continued to follow the line of the Transit’s tracks. When they reached the van — parked about fifteen metres from the front entrance of the house, its exhaust still warm from its journey — Chet spoke.

‘Cover the door,’ he said. ‘I’ll find the power.’

Luke nodded, then settled down on one knee in the firing position while Chet silently approached towards the house.

Now he was closer, he could make more sense of the structure. It was an old place, timber-clad. The paint — he couldn’t tell what colour it was in the dark — was peeling and the window frames rotten. Of the two lights that were on, one was on the ground floor and the other on the first. Chet kept away from those parts of the snowy ground where the windows cast light.

There was no electricity pylon leading to the house, which meant there must be some other power source. As Chet crept round to the northern side, his ears began to tell him what it was: the low hum of a petrol generator. He found it in a small outbuilding. The warmth of the generator had melted the snow for a metre around the building; inside, the air was filled with the greasy stench of fuel. It took Chet only a few seconds to locate the pump, with a plastic isolating valve at one end. He turned this. The engine spluttered, and the buzz of the generator died away immediately, to be replaced by total silence.

He made his way back to Luke, who hadn’t moved from the firing position, his rifle aimed firmly at the front door of the house. ‘Anything?’ Chet whispered.

Luke shook his head.

They gave it a minute. A minute for raised voices or someone inside to walk out and check the genny. A minute for them to walk into a flying bullet from Luke’s suppressed M16.

No one came.

Why was no one coming?

Chet spoke into the radio. ‘Sean, Marty?’

‘Roger that,’ Sean’s voice filled his earpiece.

‘Any movement your side?’

‘Negative.’

Chet and Luke looked at each other. ‘If Ivanovic and his numpties are just hiding out here, they probably don’t know how the house works,’ Luke suggested.

Again Chet peered towards the house, then spoke into his radio. ‘We’re moving in.’

Chet’s voice rang clearly in Sean’s earpiece. Situated near the eastern wing of the house, Sean was about twenty metres from the back door, just behind a metre-high wall that marked the end of a back yard. His right knee was pressed firmly into the snow, the butt of his rifle was tight into his shoulder and the weapon was trained on the exit. Marty was in the same position, another ten metres along the wall. Fifteen metres behind them both was a line of tall spruce trees, heavy with snow. Both men had their NV goggles engaged, and the IR-filtered Maglites on their weapons lit up the area in a ghostly green haze, for them but for no one else. Not that there was anyone else. The whole place was as silent as a graveyard.

Something nagged at Sean. It was so quiet here. He knew these fuckers were in hiding, but still…

He spoke into his mike. ‘Go careful, fellas.’

‘Roger that, buddy,’ Luke’s voice came over the radio.

Sean suppressed a shiver. Chet and Luke were good, but the anxiety still gnawed at him. This op should be like shooting fish in a barrel. Marty looked over at Sean briefly before returning his gaze to the house. He couldn’t see the younger soldier’s eyes but he could sense that the kid was anxious too.

Sean thought back through the events of the past hour. He had seen Ivanovic’s man staggering out of the bar. From the white Skoda he had watched the guy weave along the pavement, pissed as a parrot. Once in the Transit van, he’d pulled carelessly out into the traffic and sped off.

Sped off.

Sean remembered the few times he’d been drunk behind the wheel, back when he was a teenager in Salisbury. He’d never driven quickly. A drunk man drives slowly, he thought. He doesn’t want to get caught..

And once they’d dumped their vehicles and approached the location on foot, the Transit van’s tracks had been perfectly straight. It was not the haphazard route of a drunk man. Not like a drunk man at all..

An icy chill clenched Sean’s stomach. It was a set-up. They had to abort. Now. He moved his hand down to his pocket, ready to activate the comms and hiss the warning into his mike.

He never got the chance.

He heard it at the same time as he saw it: a distant thud from behind, like someone knocking once on a wooden door. And the moment of impact, as a round slammed with fatal precision into the back of Marty’s neck, just below the helmet. There was a small explosion of gore, not only at the entry point but also at the exit wound at the front of the throat, and Marty’s body slumped dead.

Sean spun round. The Maglite lit up the area between him and the spruces behind, and he scanned the line of trees, desperately trying to make out the shooter. As the IR torch moved from left to right, it illuminated a face in the darkness. Sean only saw it for a fraction of a second, but he knew it well enough: the hooded eyes, the huge flat nose. The man from the bar. Only now he had a rifle, and it was pointing straight at Sean.

The SAS man’s movements were lightning fast as he swung his M16 back to where he’d seen the image, ready to take him out the moment he got the fucker in his sights.

That moment never came.

The second bullet entered just below Sean’s forehead with the same accuracy as the first, mincing the upper half of his face. He fell to the ground.

He’d had no chance to warn Chet and Luke that they were walking into an ambush.

The front door was open. Chet and Luke slipped quietly into the house.

It was as silent inside as out. They found themselves in a hallway about six metres long, with an old wooden floor, a door on either side and one at the far end. Chet pointed at the left-hand door first. Luke covered him while he tried the handle. Locked. The same went for the right-hand door. They crept towards the far door.

Chet opened it and Luke entered, scanning the place with the IR beam from his Maglite.

It was a big room. Seven or eight metres square. It smelt of neglect and there was no furniture — Luke sensed that the house had long since been abandoned — but at the far end there were two open staircases, one leading up to the first floor, the other leading into the basement. In that far wall, under the upper staircase, was a further door. Chet pointed at the door to indicate to Luke that they would clear the adjoining room before investigating the rest of the house, then stepped towards it.

Movement.

Luke swung round to his left but at first saw nothing. A couple of seconds later, though, his sight fell on a fat rat, close against the left-hand wall and looking up at them with eyes that glowed in the NV. Luke cursed silently to himself, then continued towards the door.

The adjoining room was bigger than the one with the stairs. On the left-hand wall was a large fireplace, and as Chet and Luke stepped further into the room, they saw a child’s cot standing against the far wall and a hobby horse to its right.

But no people.

Nothing.

‘FRAG!’

Chet’s voice shattered the silence. Luke saw an object, the size of a spray paint can, falling towards him.

Two metres away.

One.

It all happened so quickly. Seconds later Luke felt the full force of Chet’s bulky body smash into him, knocking him towards the edge of the room and forcing him off balance. As he fell to one side, he saw his mate try to kick the fragmentation grenade back out of the door, towards whoever had thrown it at them. It exploded just at the moment his boot touched the canister.

The explosion echoed round the room, and Luke’s reflex action was to hit the ground and clasp his hands at the back of his neck to stop the falling shrapnel from embedding itself in his flesh. He felt something shower on to his helmet, but by some miracle none of the shrapnel pierced his body.

He also heard Chet’s scream. It sounded all the louder since they had spent the last forty-five minutes in near silence.

Luke pushed himself to his knees and instinctively let a couple of rounds from his rifle fly towards the open door. Then he turned his attention to Chet.

No casualty simulation exercise could ever have prepared Luke for the state of his friend. Chet’s right leg had taken the brunt of the detonation. The grenade had burned the material of his trouser leg away, but that was not all. Flesh had been blasted away from the leg in chunks, and through the grainy haze of his NV, Luke could see splinters of bone and torn flesh. Chet’s body armour had absorbed the force of some of the blast, but the fragments had peppered his face — the skin was punctured, mangled and bleeding.

He was writhing in agony, flailing like a landed fish, and was crying out so loudly that he was already hoarse.

Luke fired another two rounds through the open door, then screamed into his radio: ‘I need backup. Now!’

No response.

‘Sean, Marty?’

Nothing.

‘Shit!’

Either the comms were down, or the rest of his unit were.

Voices outside. Several men, shouting instructions at each other in Serbian. They were mobilising themselves. They were coming.

Chet needed morphine, and he needed it now. Luke had two shots, safely in their plastic casing, attached to a cord round his neck. He grabbed one of them, then slammed it through his mate’s clothing and into the top of his left thigh. He could feel the needle piercing the skin, and for a moment he wondered whether he should go for a second shot. Chet was fucked, but at least the drugs would make him more comfortable until… Until what?

Luke was just reaching for the second jab when the first round flew over his head and splintered the hobby horse behind him. He felt the rush of displaced air and threw himself down on the ground. Suddenly the enemy were there. In the darkness and confusion, it was difficult to tell how many. Three, maybe four, and armed — Luke thought he caught sight of an MP5 Kurz. They were shouting at him, a harsh, guttural sound. Luke made to spray a burst of rounds into them, but a heavy boot hit his rifle and knocked it from his hands. The Serbians started to pile in. They kicked Luke in the face and groin; the NV goggles cracked and were then ripped off him. One of the men grabbed the rifle. Two others seized him by the arms and hauled him to his feet. Luke felt one of them cut his ops waistcoat away from his body, before he was pushed, roughly and at gunpoint, towards the door.

‘Get down the stairs!’

The instruction came in harshly accented English, and Luke felt a gun barrel in the back of his neck. Chet’s screaming had stopped. Bad sign.

Luke twisted his head to see what was going on behind him, but that just earned him another push. ‘Get down the fucking stairs or I kill you now…’

Luke stumbled in the darkness. In the adjoining room he bore left towards the lower staircase. At the top he looked towards his captors, but they were just shapes in the darkness. Shapes with MP5s, and Luke didn’t doubt for a moment that they were willing to use them. What he didn’t understand was why they hadn’t killed him yet.

Another bad sign.

One more push and Luke stumbled down the stairs. He tried to work out his options. His rifle was gone, and so was his waistcoat. The only weapon he had was the disco gun strapped to his ankle. The Serbians hadn’t found that yet, but if he went for it now, chances were they’d nail him before he even stood up again. He was just going to have to bide his time.

He reached the bottom of the stairs. ‘Keep going!’ the voice behind him ordered. He found himself in a damp-smelling cellar room. Candles were burning — perhaps half a dozen of them — but they weren’t bright enough to light up the walls, so Luke couldn’t tell how big this place was.

But what he could tell was that somebody was waiting for him.

Even in the dim candlelight, Luke recognised the man from the photo the ops officer had shown them back at base. The almost-bald head, a few strands combed from one side to the other. The flared nostrils. The sour look. Stevan Ivanovic stared at Luke with something approaching satisfaction.

Suddenly there was silence again. Shadows from the candles danced on Ivanovic’s face.

‘Get on the ground,’ he whispered as one of his men threw something on the floor. For a moment Luke thought it was just his waistcoat, but then he realised it was Chet’s gear. They’d removed it all. He didn’t even want to think what they’d done to his mate.

His mind turned somersaults as he let his head fall to his chest.

Let the fucker think he’s the big man, he thought. Let him think I’m beaten. He refused to admit to himself that he probably was.

It was only as Luke lowered himself down to his knees that he noticed what Ivanovic had in his hands. A loop of thin plastic. The former police chief was running it through his fingers. Caressing it, almost.

‘You British,’ Ivanovic said, his voice very soft. ‘You think you can interfere in everybody’s affairs. You think you still boss the whole world, like you used to.’

Luke kept silent. His head hung. Here, in the kneeling position, his hand was nearer his PPK, but he knew he had to choose his moment carefully.

Ivanovic smiled. It was a cold, humourless expression. ‘That… that pantomime in the bar. It was very clumsy. The young man is dead now. And his girlfriend.’ Another smile. ‘Well, almost. Oh, and your two friends.’ He nodded, his eyes suddenly bright. ‘Mrtav. Dead.’

Ivanovic turned his back on Luke and appeared to address the empty rear portion of the room. ‘I am lucky to have such loyal men. But you know, really it seems not fair that they should have all the fun.’

To Luke’s right stood two men with MP5s pointed directly at him. They handled their weapons like pros. Beyond them he counted three others. He tried to identify the guy from the bar, but he couldn’t. That meant he was still out there somewhere.

One of him, six of them — and that was just down here. Not good odds.

Ivanovic turned to face him again. Luke noticed his hands trembling, as if in excitement. As he took a step nearer, Luke saw he held a cable tie — exactly what he himself had stashed in his waistcoat for use as Plasticuffs. He knew what these Eastern European fucks did with them. The skin round his neck tingled.

Ivanovic said something that made his men laugh. Luke closed his eyes. The moment he went for his PPK, the guards would shoot. But if he didn’t, Ivanovic would throttle him. Maybe he should let that happen. Once the cable tie was on, Ivanovic and his guys would be off their guard. He could nail them and then hunt for a knife, but he wouldn’t have much more than a minute to find one…

‘I can give you information…’ he said hoarsely. It was bullshit, but it might buy him some time.

Ivanovic appeared to find this very funny. ‘Information? I knew already you were coming. What information could you…?’

His gloating was cut short.

Gunshot, coming from the staircase. And then a thump.

The men with MP5s turned to see what it was, and in their moment of distraction, Luke moved.

He rolled away from Ivanovic and, as he did do, pulled the PPK from his ankle holster. By the time the two armed guards knew what he was doing, Luke had discharged two rounds, one into the first guy’s neck, the other into his mate’s head. As the men crumpled, spattering Luke’s face with blood, he had a direct line of fire to the other three. They were scrabbling for their guns, but they didn’t scrabble fast enough: Luke had all three down in less than two seconds, and it was as they dropped to the ground that he saw what the disturbance was.

Something had fallen down the stairs. Some one to be precise. He was now lying face down at the foot of the steps, the back of his head blown away. He might have lost half his brains, but it was unmistakably the man they’d followed back from the bar.

Luke had hesitated too long. Ivanovic was launching himself at him, the plastic loop gripped tight. Luke pushed himself to his feet just as the Serb came within range. With all the force he could summon, he brought the edge of his hand up against the underside of Ivanovic’s nose. There was a definite crack, and Luke felt his hand was wet. Ivanovic roared in pain, but the blow didn’t floor him. With blood gushing down his chin, he came at Luke again.

Luke’s orders had been to take him alive. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t hurt the bastard.

He discharged two rounds from the PPK: one into each of Ivanovic’s shins. From two metres, the 9mm rounds would all but destroy each bone. Certainly the guy would never walk again. For a moment, the Serb’s roaring stopped. But only for a moment. As he fell backwards, his damaged legs no longer able to support the weight of his body, his shrieks echoed off the concrete walls.

But Luke was barely paying attention to that. Because, in the few seconds after Ivanovic’s man had come crashing down the stairs, he had become aware of something else.

A figure was standing at the top of the steps.

Luke pointed his PPK in that direction. ‘Chet?’ he called out. Surely he wasn’t on his feet. But who else would have nailed Ivanovic’s man?

No reply from the top of the stairs. Blood and sweat dripped down Luke’s face.

‘Fucking hell, Chet,’ he shouted over the noise of Ivanovic’s screaming. ‘If that’s you, say so.’

The sound that followed was not a voice. It was the noise of a body falling. The figure at the top of the stairs toppled. It hit the steps face downwards, then tumbled heavily into the basement.

It was Chet all right. The side of his face was mashed. His leg was a mess. How the hell he’d even got to his feet with the injuries he’d sustained, Luke couldn’t guess. He was like some fucked-up Lazarus, his chest moving, but only just. Even Ivanovic stared at the monstrous sight of Chet’s damaged body with a look of horror, his screaming now subsided into a series of desperate gasps and groans.

But Luke didn’t care about the Serb and his injuries. Or about the bodies all around them. All he cared about was his Regiment mate, collapsed and close to death, on the ground.

THREE

For a moment, everything was silent.

Luke looked around. Six corpses; two gravely injured men. Pools of blood everywhere, and a strange cocktail of smells: the dampness of the basement, the cordite of the gunshots, a faint smell of shit from where one of the men had taken a round in the guts.

He tried to get his head straight. Chet was his priority now. Ivanovic wasn’t going anywhere. If he died of his wounds, so be it. The Ruperts and the spooks would see red, but they weren’t on the ground, making the decisions. Luke could only look after one of these two casualties.

But the first thing was to secure Ivanovic. He dragged him towards one of his dead and bloodied men, then pulled some cable ties from his ops waistcoat, cuffed Ivanovic’s wrists behind his back and tied each of his ankles to the corresponding leg of the corpse, before moving any remaining weapons well out of his grasp.

‘If I see you trying to move, I’ll kill you,’ he told him.

Had he understood? Luke didn’t know: the guy just lay there groaning, sweating and shaking.

He turned his attention to his mate. Chet was totally still. Luke put two fingers to his jugular. There was the slowest, the faintest of pulses. If Chet had any chance of making it, he needed a casevac. Luke’s priority now was to stabilise him and get on the radio back to base. He didn’t want to leave him, but he had no choice. The unit’s med pack was back with the vehicles. So was the secure comms unit. Luke needed both.

He’d never run so fast. The snow was falling heavier than ever. Visibility, ten metres max. He stumbled and fell three times, but just got up and carried on running.

Snow had drifted against the vehicles. Breathlessly, Luke dug it away from the brown Skoda, scrambled into the front seat and grabbed the radio.

‘Zero, this Delta Three Tango. We have two men down and one injured. I need a casevac.’

A pause.

‘Zero, this is Delta Three Tango. I need a goddamn casevac.’

More silence. And then:

‘Delta Three Tango, this is Zero. Is the target acquired? Repeat, is the target acquired?’

Luke felt like crushing the handset in his fist. ‘Fuck the target! I’ve got a man dying. Get a chopper here — now!’

He threw the handset down and hurried from the car towards the white one. Twenty seconds later he had the med pack in his hands and was sprinting back towards the house. Quicker to run than try to dig out the car.

He burst back into the house and down into the basement. Neither man had moved. He checked Chet’s vital signs again. Weaker. Luke split open the med pack and pulled out a saline drip and intravenous cannula. He ripped open the material of Chet’s left sleeve and slid the cannula into a vein. He needed to raise the level of the saline pouch above Chet’s arm, so he pulled two of the corpses towards him, lay one on top of the other, and rested the transparent pouch on top of that.

Luke checked his vital signs again.

Shit. He’s stopped breathing.

He knelt to one side of Chet’s body, put the heel of his right hand on his ribcage and laid his left hand over it. He pressed down sharply on the ribcage so that it sank five centimetres, then let it rise again without taking his hands away. He performed another twenty-nine chest compressions before placing his mouth on Chet’s and administering two rescue breaths. Blood from his mate’s face smeared his lips.

Thirty chest compressions, two rescue breaths.

Luke repeated the CPR routine that had been drilled into him countless times. Once he’d done five sequences, he checked Chet’s vitals for a third time.

He was breathing.

Luke turned his attention to Chet’s leg. Jesus, what a mess. Amazingly, the bleeding wasn’t too bad, but he grabbed a bandage anyway from the med pack and quickly applied a makeshift tourniquet to the top of his thigh, tying it as tight as possible to constrict the blood flow. He started to wind a second bandage around the damaged leg. Chet groaned when the material touched the wound. Clearly it hurt like hell, but that wasn’t such a bad thing. At least it meant he was sentient.

Luke was panting heavily by now. He tried to clear his mind, to think through his medical training and work out if there was anything else he could do. There was nothing. Monitor his vital signs, perform CPR if necessary and wait. He pictured the map of Serbia in his mind and tried to estimate the distance between here and the FOB. A hundred miles perhaps. In normal conditions a QRF chopper should be able to cover that distance in forty-five minutes. But in this kind of snow, it was impossible to say.

He relived the moment Chet had kicked the grenade away. The wounded man lying here on the ground had saved his life that night, no question, and the chances were high that he’d pay for it with his own. Luke felt a surge of anger at the Serbian bastard lying in the cellar with him. It was all he could do to stop himself from slotting him now.

Chet muttered something. It was gibberish. ‘Hold on, buddy,’ Luke said through gritted teeth. ‘We’re going to get you out of here soon.’

Luke didn’t know how long it was before he heard the noise. It crept up on him gradually: the faint but steady beating of rotor blades. He ran up the steps and outside.

Two Pumas were coming in to land. They appeared to wobble in the air as they tried to set down, their lights glowing through the white-out of snow that surrounded them as they touched down. Luke knew that it was no picnic for the RAF pilots, flying a heli in this kind of weather. If it wasn’t life and death, they wouldn’t have ventured out at all.

The moment after the first Puma touched down, seven men jumped out, all carrying bright torches. They wore DPMs and hard hats and Luke instantly recognised the maroon flash of 1 Para on the arms of six of them. The seventh man had no hard hat and a regular uniform: Chris Andersen, OC B Squadron, and a man who had just gone up several notches in Luke’s estimation for making the journey out here.

‘Follow me!’ Luke roared at the Para QRF over the noise of the helicopters, and he sprinted back into the house.

There were two medics among the Paras. One look at Chet and their faces turned grim. But they were in charge now, and Luke knew to leave them to it.

The OC walked down the stairs. ‘Ivanovic?’ he asked.

Luke pointed at the Serb lying on the floor. ‘All yours, boss,’ he said. And then: ‘Sean and Marty are dead.’

A dark look crossed Andersen’s face, and Luke could tell he was feeling equally murderous. They had their orders, though. Ivanovic was to stay alive. The Hague wanted their trophy conviction, no matter what had happened here tonight.

Minutes later Luke was back outside in the snow. He watched Chet being stretchered into one of the waiting Pumas, then stood with a frown as the Paras carried the two bodies up into the chopper.

Ivanovic came next, held under the arms by a couple of Paras who made no attempt to spare him any of the agony caused by dragging his splintered shins across the ground. Amid his shouts of pain, he took a second to cast a hateful look at Luke, who returned it. The bastard didn’t know how lucky he was Luke hadn’t given him one behind the ear.

And then Andersen was there again. ‘Let’s go,’ he ordered, and the two of them boarded the Puma that was carrying Chet and their fallen comrades.

As the heli lifted up into the air, Luke crouched down by Chet’s stretcher, steadying himself by gripping the webbing that covered the inside of the aircraft. His mate’s face was covered with an oxygen mask and he had a new drip in each arm. A blood pressure and pulse monitor beeped next to him. His face looked as white as death.

Luke stared at the man who’d saved his life.

Suddenly Chet’s eyes flickered open.

‘Fuck me, buddy,’ Luke burst out. ‘What does it take to put you down?’

‘Don’t… bullshit… me…’ Chet could barely get the words out, and Luke struggled to hear them over the roar of the chopper. ‘Am I going to make it?’

Luke looked him up and down. He saw the damaged leg and the tubes sticking out of his body. He saw the medics, their faces severe.

He fixed his expression in what he hoped looked like reassurance.

‘Course you are, mate,’ he said, as he felt the Puma struggling against the elements. ‘Course you are. That’s a promise.’

He turned away so that Chet couldn’t see his face any more.

Luke Mercer wasn’t a religious man, but as the Puma struggled through the blizzard and the dark night of Eastern Europe, he found himself muttering a silent prayer — to God and all the fucking angels on high — that this was a promise he’d be able to keep.